There are very real cases where people have got their whole lives nearly destroyed after being falsely suspected of paedophilia and being found innocent. (Attacked, lost jobs, shot, forced to relocate, etc).
Once such suspicion gets to the ears of the neighbourhood, it's "guilty, whatever the proof".
'Elizabeth Boukis, spokeswoman for Sony Electronics, says the work is speculative. "There were not any experiments done," she says. "This particular patent was a prophetic invention. It was based on an inspiration that this may someday be the direction that technology will take us." '
Hey - so it basically means that they do NOT have made an invention, but have a patent to get all the profit, when some real inventor makes it real 10 years later ?
This is ridiculous. Patents should be granted for novel implementations, not for ideas that someone might implement in future. The scientists that find a working solution should get the patent, not some lawyer who is just speculating on where technology might go.
In the banks that I know, the PIN hashes are stored in a sealed high-security module, that basically no bank's employee has access.
The idea is that brute-force attacks to get customer PIN's are impossible even if tried by a high-level manager of the bank. (The freezing for multiple false requests is done inside, logging is done inside, and anything can be accessed only by using multiple electronic keys which are carried by separate people).
Security in banks is not done by obscurity, simply because they need to protect from the very real threat of their own employees being tempted to get rich quick.
Repeated crimes should be treated completely differently than first-time offenders.
People who have already been given four or five chances to reform, but still commit violent crimes have shown that they will NOT reform.
Such criminals can screw up the lives of a hundred other people, and then they are let go and go on and hurt a dozen more before they get caught - is this acceptable ?
There is a need to protect the innocent from them - so they must be permanently isolated from society. The only options are life inprisonment (in jail or psychiatric clinic), death penalty, and exile (as was done earlier, them being sent to Australia, for example). Anything else, and more people get hurt.
In my area a while ago a woman was brutally raped and murdered. Soon after that the murderer was caught - he had been convicted six times already - once for theft, four times for robberies, and once for rape.
I cannot help but think that those who pass laws, allowing such light penalties to hardened criminals, must take responsibility for this woman's death.
Well, then the main political objective would be to get them to join Kyoto.
And if the world's richest country is holding back, then it will be hard to make a reasonable case for China and India to join.
The USA has the politic and economic clout neccessary to make sure that (in the long run, say 10+ years) either all the major players do join Kyoto, or Kyoto fails because of non-members polluting too much.
Looking at the question of 'will USA gain a relative economical advantage' is missing the point - it IS clear that there are certain economic disadvantages - ensuring that our children have a decent world left will have some costs.
There are very valid situations where an algorithm needs a lot of comments to describe. For example, I was involved an about 200 line algorithm for the core of a specific physics modelling problem, that cut the processing time from o(n*n*n*n) for a naive algorythm to o(n*n*n), involving some heavy magic that is rather impossible to explain in the comments - the explanation/description is a 30 page university paper.
In the enterprise, for example, financial companies, is quite common to be writing and maintaining additions/modifications to some huge software package that your company has bought - you write routines that run together with their code, there are facilities for such modifications/additions.
However, you can't *really* know how *their* code works - you must interoperate with this code, but their code has (a lot of) bugs and is poorly documented - there is a lot of documentation, but it mostly covers the trivial parts, and if you *need* to know the exact behaviour in some tricky situation, then trial-and-error is the only way. And of course, you have no access to their source code. You may pay a huge sum of money and get that access, but the amounts involved are ridiculously huge. You may request a change from them - but again, the costs are huge - for a trivial change they charge so much that you can fund a programmer man-year in-house - so in-house workarounds are the way to go.
It's not like this is some kind of kiddy rape, these are consentual activities by young adults having fun.
The girl, while punished by her parents, has accused the attackers of hypocrisy, saying "who doesn't do it? Don't you have sex?"
In many countries they both would be considered not minors, as 16-17 years is a perfectly good age of consent, and they could get married against the will of parents, have sex without repercussions, etc.
I understand that child porn laws might apply to some pervert uncle seducing his 12 year old relative, but it is clear that 16 year old having consentual sex with a 17 year old is NOT what these laws should apply to. Same thing with a 19 year old with a 17 year old 'minor'.
In many countries they both would be considered not minors, as 16 years is a perfectly good age of consent, and they could get married against the will of parents, have sex without repercussions, etc.
It's not like this is some kind of kiddy rape, these are consentual activities by young adults having fun.
Strange... I am working in the Banking industry in Baltics. Here web intra-bank payments are instant, inter-bank payments cannot take longer than 3 working days by law, and usually have arrived after a full working day. International payments do take longer (if they aren't marked as urgent and sent via SWIFT for a fee) but there are regulations in place that will require banks to do 3-day transfers to any account within EU after something like two years.
I make an online transfer payment to another customer's account.
As soon as I enter the transaction, the customer can see online his account balance update and the transaction that I added - how is it different ?
Transactions usually involve different users, and they must be added realtime, and the volumes of an international bank with tens of million customers are very much comparable eith paypal.
A bank's datastore is always fully ACID, and relational - even the old systems that use database 'engines' from the 1970'ies have that full functionality in the banking system, because, well, they are the ones that needed it before anyone else in the information industry.
All the stuff that banking systems use to optimise things and do it effectively can be used by Paypal - I see no real, reasonable excuses.
Websystem of any major retail bank does this without any problems. Millions of users - check; Transactional integrity - check; Real-time access with ability to post transactions - check; Everything always needing to be 100% correct - check.
Slashdot Mirror
There are very real cases where people have got their whole lives nearly destroyed after being falsely suspected of paedophilia and being found innocent. (Attacked, lost jobs, shot, forced to relocate, etc).
Once such suspicion gets to the ears of the neighbourhood, it's "guilty, whatever the proof".
'Elizabeth Boukis, spokeswoman for Sony Electronics, says the work is speculative. "There were not any experiments done," she says. "This particular patent was a prophetic invention. It was based on an inspiration that this may someday be the direction that technology will take us." '
Hey - so it basically means that they do NOT have made an invention, but have a patent to get all the profit, when some real inventor makes it real 10 years later ?
This is ridiculous. Patents should be granted for novel implementations, not for ideas that someone might implement in future. The scientists that find a working solution should get the patent, not some lawyer who is just speculating on where technology might go.
If it reflects twice less light, then you simply need twice as much men with mirrors..
In the banks that I know, the PIN hashes are stored in a sealed high-security module, that basically no bank's employee has access.
The idea is that brute-force attacks to get customer PIN's are impossible even if tried by a high-level manager of the bank. (The freezing for multiple false requests is done inside, logging is done inside, and anything can be accessed only by using multiple electronic keys which are carried by separate people).
Security in banks is not done by obscurity, simply because they need to protect from the very real threat of their own employees being tempted to get rich quick.
Repeated crimes should be treated completely differently than first-time offenders.
People who have already been given four or five chances to reform, but still commit violent crimes have shown that they will NOT reform.
Such criminals can screw up the lives of a hundred other people, and then they are let go and go on and hurt a dozen more before they get caught - is this acceptable ?
There is a need to protect the innocent from them - so they must be permanently isolated from society. The only options are life inprisonment (in jail or psychiatric clinic), death penalty, and exile (as was done earlier, them being sent to Australia, for example). Anything else, and more people get hurt.
In my area a while ago a woman was brutally raped and murdered. Soon after that the murderer was caught - he had been convicted six times already - once for theft, four times for robberies, and once for rape.
I cannot help but think that those who pass laws, allowing such light penalties to hardened criminals, must take responsibility for this woman's death.
Microsoft, as a convicted monopolist, is absolutely not allowed to tie Office and Windows.
If this restriction continues, it is firm basis for a much harsher suit that the web-browser case.
It's just the same idea of 'compatibility' for Microsoft - changes are intended to break competitor's products.
Well, then the main political objective would be to get them to join Kyoto.
And if the world's richest country is holding back, then it will be hard to make a reasonable case for China and India to join.
The USA has the politic and economic clout neccessary to make sure that (in the long run, say 10+ years) either all the major players do join Kyoto, or Kyoto fails because of non-members polluting too much.
Looking at the question of 'will USA gain a relative economical advantage' is missing the point - it IS clear that there are certain economic disadvantages - ensuring that our children have a decent world left will have some costs.
There are very valid situations where an algorithm needs a lot of comments to describe.
For example, I was involved an about 200 line algorithm for the core of a specific physics modelling problem, that cut the processing time from o(n*n*n*n) for a naive algorythm to o(n*n*n), involving some heavy magic that is rather impossible to explain in the comments - the explanation/description is a 30 page university paper.
In the enterprise, for example, financial companies, is quite common to be writing and maintaining additions/modifications to some huge software package that your company has bought - you write routines that run together with their code, there are facilities for such modifications/additions.
However, you can't *really* know how *their* code works - you must interoperate with this code, but their code has (a lot of) bugs and is poorly documented - there is a lot of documentation, but it mostly covers the trivial parts, and if you *need* to know the exact behaviour in some tricky situation, then trial-and-error is the only way.
And of course, you have no access to their source code.
You may pay a huge sum of money and get that access, but the amounts involved are ridiculously huge.
You may request a change from them - but again, the costs are huge - for a trivial change they charge so much that you can fund a programmer man-year in-house - so in-house workarounds are the way to go.
Well, but you're wrong - in India, the age of consent is 16 years, so their sex is completely legal.
Honestly, I can't see what the hassle is about?
It's not like this is some kind of kiddy rape, these are consentual activities by young adults having fun.
The girl, while punished by her parents, has accused the attackers of hypocrisy, saying "who doesn't do it? Don't you have sex?"
In many countries they both would be considered not minors, as 16-17 years is a perfectly good age of consent, and they could get married against the will of parents, have sex without repercussions, etc.
I understand that child porn laws might apply to some pervert uncle seducing his 12 year old relative, but it is clear that 16 year old having consentual sex with a 17 year old is NOT what these laws should apply to. Same thing with a 19 year old with a 17 year old 'minor'.
In many countries they both would be considered not minors, as 16 years is a perfectly good age of consent, and they could get married against the will of parents, have sex without repercussions, etc.
It's not like this is some kind of kiddy rape, these are consentual activities by young adults having fun.
Strange...
I am working in the Banking industry in Baltics.
Here web intra-bank payments are instant, inter-bank payments cannot take longer than 3 working days by law, and usually have arrived after a full working day.
International payments do take longer (if they aren't marked as urgent and sent via SWIFT for a fee) but there are regulations in place that will require banks to do 3-day transfers to any account within EU after something like two years.
I make an online transfer payment to another customer's account. As soon as I enter the transaction, the customer can see online his account balance update and the transaction that I added - how is it different ? Transactions usually involve different users, and they must be added realtime, and the volumes of an international bank with tens of million customers are very much comparable eith paypal. A bank's datastore is always fully ACID, and relational - even the old systems that use database 'engines' from the 1970'ies have that full functionality in the banking system, because, well, they are the ones that needed it before anyone else in the information industry. All the stuff that banking systems use to optimise things and do it effectively can be used by Paypal - I see no real, reasonable excuses.
Websystem of any major retail bank does this without any problems.
Millions of users - check;
Transactional integrity - check;
Real-time access with ability to post transactions - check;
Everything always needing to be 100% correct - check.