Sure the U.S. Federal government spends large amounts of money on some mind-boggling things, but this isn't one of them. They can make far far more than that selling the freed-up spectrum. At some point the foregone 'interest' (read debt avoidance) makes this buyout worth it, rather than just waiting for analog TV to die on it's own.
The crazy thing is that they could just end analog TV and force everyone to buy one of these boxes, but there would be a huge outcry, so instead they give everyone a check that came from their tax dollars anyway, adding inefficiency but avoiding (irrational) political backlash.
A completely uninformed vote is no better than no vote if only because any two uninformed votes should, statistically, cancel each other out.
However even as someone who doesn't 'follow politics' at all, you are aware enough of your world to find, read, and post a question to slashdot, you should be able to determine which candidate or party, writ large, would further your interests or shares your basic assumptions about how humans behave and what motivates them. None of us has a 'secret formula' for processing all possible information available to evaluate candidates. Of course the more information you have the better your decision will be, but that shouldn't prevent you from making a decision with the (little) information you have.
If nothing else I would think you would know broadly where the two parties stand on the issues on which they disagree most clearly. i.e. do you think abortion is murder? do you think homosexuals should be allowed to marry? Are there other important issues where you need more information? Of course, but that doesn't mean you can't use the issues you understand and have an opinion on to make a decision. Heck, posting the question to slashdot and reading the answers will take more effort than doing some basic boning up on the candidates.
This exact issue was the focus of discussion in the first episode of the This Week in Law Podcast.
The panelists seemed to agree that is is an issue which the DMCA handles well. These letters are just a system of notice; failing to comply with the letter requesting that you take down the contested content doesn't have any bearing on a subsequent legal dispute over that content. It provides a mechanism to correct copyright problems without litigation.
/.ers love to complain about these letters as a tool of oppression, and certainly there's some chilling effect because most small operations are likely to take down the contested content, however there was at least a good intention behind this system.
TFA is a press release and is pretty confusing, but it seems that the product is a skype-like client for Wi-Fi enabled mobile devices. You can make free "in-network" calls and cheap "out-of-network calls" over Wi-Fi.
More importantly, if you can't (or won't) write a press release that clearly conveys what your product does, what is the chance I want to use it?
Well, in answering my own question I found a contradictory opinion. About.com seems to think this is grey area. It may or may not be illegal, and the lender may be able to demand the funds be returned.
I am going back to school and am planning to open an high-interest checking account to hold my (Stafford & private) loan disbursements while I spend them. I would assume that even interest-bearing checking accounts are okay so long as they are FDIC-insured. Does anything that's "at risk" constitute investing?
Otherwise it looks like I will be stuffing my matteress...
It's not a "typo". According the wired article, Sanborn decided to leave out a single charater (an "x" serving as a "period") for asthetic reasons and this led to a faulty decryption of one phrase of the message.
QC is unbreakable in the mathematical sense. It's a souped-up OTP, which cannot be broken by an outside party, period.
It's not "souped-up OTP" it's just regular old OTP with a wrapper that prevents a man-in-the-middle attack. As stated in TFA:
The NIST quantum key distribution (QKD) system uses single photons, the smallest particles of light, in different orientations to produce a continuous binary code, or "key," for encrypting information.
This is just a system for transmitting an arbitrary-length string of bits with absolute integrity. This is both non-revolutionary and non-trivial.
All together now: "this has nothing to do with quantum computing".
This system exploits quantum mechanics to detect if someone is interecepting and retransmitting the signal. That's why it's called Quantum KEY Distribution. There's nothing "quantum" about the encryption itself. It is also of limited use since it requires an unbroken fiber-optic connection between the two devices.
The claim wasn't that the system was unbreakable, only the encryption.
However, the far more important weakness in this system is that it only works over a direct fiber-optic link between the two devices (no routers, no repeaters).
Even if you assume that this system will help fight terrorism, how exactly is this a meaningful compromise?
Don't the concerns of British civil libertarians (and presumably Liberal opposition to this bill), center around the giant national database, not the cards themselves? I know mine would. Not having to carry the card might hinder identity theft via wallet-theft and privacy invasions by anyone with brief access to your ID card scanning/swiping it, but this doesn't address potential abuse of the database, which is the far greater evil.
The article made no mention of the rationale behind the compromise, does anyone have more information? This looks like the Liberals needed to be able to point to something and say "See, we voted for your rights, before we voted against them."
TFA mentions a new technology which sounds like it "forces" ISP's to do this by breaking video content into small files that are formatted just like ordinary Web pages. When they're downloaded by a user, these individual pieces--Itiva calls them "quanta"--are stored in ISPs' Web caches, which are already distributed in every network.
That's certainly a clever idea, however existing P2P is already a pretty good solution. This part of the article makes no sense:
The problem with P2P is that it relies on ordinary computer users' goodwill. To work well, everyone must donate a share of his or her upstream bandwidth, sharing content with others. In the underground world of music or movie-trading, this regularly happens, but it has been less widely used for commercial applications.
Bittorrent punish leachers automatically. But more to the point, less tech-savvy users are going to be less likely to care about (or even notice) clogging their upload bandwidth, especially if everything is wrapped in to a media player app. If the next iTunes upgrade had P2P distribution, would most users even notice, much less be upset?
I know this is/., but if you had bothered to R the first paragraph of TF, (or even the text of the first link) you would see that they were discussing giving things away for free as a business model. You know, a specific mechanism for solving the class of problems that includes feeding and clothing the owners, employees and their immediate dependants in an efficent manner.
Esther's upcoming PC Forum focuses on how users are transforming the internet and placing new demands on businesses. From Open Source to Open Content, new forms of organization, production and distribution are emerging. But how can these ventures produce a revenue and sustain themselves? For how long can we give content away for free?
I love fair use as much as the next guy, but unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off his back
and in typical slashdot fashion, anything that bashes paying for content get's +5 Insightful.
Just to be clear, the robotic lifters didn't make it to the top. From TFA:
The robotic lifters measured five feet, six inches and climbed to a height of more than 1500 feet, surpassing its last test record by more than 500 feet.
New Scientist reports that the robots were supposed to climb all the way up but failed.
It may be true that Moore's law became the industry expectation, but given the winner-take-all nature of semiconductor manufacturing I have a hard time believing that IBM/AMD/Intel etc are simplying "developing to the timeline".
the submitter is just parroting the article. The use stems from the fact that while Moore's Law has been surprisingly accurate in predicting the miniaturization of silicon-based circuits, certain inescapable physical limits for the miniaturization of this technology are now on the horizon, and threaten to "break" Moore's law.
I'm sorry if my post gave the impression that I don't think talking on a cell phone isn't generally acceptable in public. I certainly enjoy being able to talk during my commute to and from work, and I think that's fine. I also understand that many calls are important and override what a person is doing at the time. I would hope however that your bf excuses himself from situations where his conversation is distracting (say dinner with another couple, or during a movie) to take the call. The importance of his job does not give him permission to detract from everyone else's enjoyment of a public space from which he can easily remove himself.
Also, there are a few situations where the same conversation that would be acceptable in person but not on a cell because the person on the cell phone can't pick up on the same ques that someone in person can. For example, I find it extremely rude when people people talk on a cell while conducting retail transactions because the person checking out is frequently distracted and slows the process down. It also gives the impression that the person waiting on you is not worthy of your attention. However two phsyically present people talking during the same transaction can easily pause when necessary because both are aware of what is happening. I'm sure an anthropologist can give a better description of what I'm talking about, but there are clearly situations in which cell conversations are not equivalent to two physically present people having the same conversation in the same setting.
Re:Why can't the movie theatre _tell_ the phone
on
Polite Cell Phones
·
· Score: 1
I've been wondering for years why cell phones don't allow you to program ring schedules. TFA mentions this feature in passing as something that's already out there, but I've never seen a phone with it. Is it only in top-end phones, or has it trickled down in the 18 months since I bought my last phone? I should say that I've always purchased mid-range cell phones, I only upgrade when my contract is up or the phone breaks, so I never have the latest and greatest.
With that one exception, the features described in TFA seem virtually worthless. Is it really worth feeding my cell phone speed and breaking information from my car so that it doesn't ring for the 15 seconds out of the day that I'm breaking hard? Yes maybe some day when my phone already connects to my car and it's trivial to pass this information along, but such a small percentage of cars and phones interact with eachother now that it seems ridiculous.
Certainly there are some features that could prevent phones from ringing at impolite times, for example, Wired article from like 1998 talked about how this emerging standard called 'bluetooth' would allow theaters and other areas to set up "quiet zones" which you could set your phone to automatically respect and switch to silent or vibrate. There's no need for my phone to have a set of expensive sensors to help it guess what I'm doing at the moment. KISS.
The real problem with cell phone politness is the user. If people could just remember that answering a cell phone implies that the conversation is more important than what they're doing at the moment, and then stop and decide if it actually is, 90% of cell phone annoyance would disappear. Also, learn to love vibrate mode./rant.
You can't can't expect actors in a capitalist system not to maximize their rewards. Any system design/reform has to assume that actors will do everything allowed to maximize their rewards, even things which are viewed as "evil" by everyone else.
The point of the author was pointing out that patent trolls illustrate a explotable flaw in the system, and that villifying them does nothing to solve the problem. There will always be plenty of people willing to do lucrative, legal things that others view as evil, ie gambling, pornography, prostitution etc.
This confuses the issue. Bandwidth is the resource in question, not some nebulous "internet resource", and yes bandwidth is a time-sensitive resource, but it's still finite. I've got a few botkits I'd like you to install for me to take advantage of your machine's "renewable" bandwidth and cpu resources.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure the U.S. Federal government spends large amounts of money on some mind-boggling things, but this isn't one of them. They can make far far more than that selling the freed-up spectrum. At some point the foregone 'interest' (read debt avoidance) makes this buyout worth it, rather than just waiting for analog TV to die on it's own.
The crazy thing is that they could just end analog TV and force everyone to buy one of these boxes, but there would be a huge outcry, so instead they give everyone a check that came from their tax dollars anyway, adding inefficiency but avoiding (irrational) political backlash.
A completely uninformed vote is no better than no vote if only because any two uninformed votes should, statistically, cancel each other out.
However even as someone who doesn't 'follow politics' at all, you are aware enough of your world to find, read, and post a question to slashdot, you should be able to determine which candidate or party, writ large, would further your interests or shares your basic assumptions about how humans behave and what motivates them. None of us has a 'secret formula' for processing all possible information available to evaluate candidates. Of course the more information you have the better your decision will be, but that shouldn't prevent you from making a decision with the (little) information you have.
If nothing else I would think you would know broadly where the two parties stand on the issues on which they disagree most clearly. i.e. do you think abortion is murder? do you think homosexuals should be allowed to marry? Are there other important issues where you need more information? Of course, but that doesn't mean you can't use the issues you understand and have an opinion on to make a decision. Heck, posting the question to slashdot and reading the answers will take more effort than doing some basic boning up on the candidates.
This exact issue was the focus of discussion in the first episode of the This Week in Law Podcast.
The panelists seemed to agree that is is an issue which the DMCA handles well. These letters are just a system of notice; failing to comply with the letter requesting that you take down the contested content doesn't have any bearing on a subsequent legal dispute over that content. It provides a mechanism to correct copyright problems without litigation.
/.ers love to complain about these letters as a tool of oppression, and certainly there's some chilling effect because most small operations are likely to take down the contested content, however there was at least a good intention behind this system.
TFA is a press release and is pretty confusing, but it seems that the product is a skype-like client for Wi-Fi enabled mobile devices. You can make free "in-network" calls and cheap "out-of-network calls" over Wi-Fi.
More importantly, if you can't (or won't) write a press release that clearly conveys what your product does, what is the chance I want to use it?
Well, in answering my own question I found a contradictory opinion. About.com seems to think this is grey area. It may or may not be illegal, and the lender may be able to demand the funds be returned.
I am going back to school and am planning to open an high-interest checking account to hold my (Stafford & private) loan disbursements while I spend them. I would assume that even interest-bearing checking accounts are okay so long as they are FDIC-insured. Does anything that's "at risk" constitute investing?
Otherwise it looks like I will be stuffing my matteress...
Vermont is not one of the poorer states in the union. It's median household income is above average.
Of course per household heating costs are probably also above average...
It's not a "typo". According the wired article, Sanborn decided to leave out a single charater (an "x" serving as a "period") for asthetic reasons and this led to a faulty decryption of one phrase of the message.
It's not "souped-up OTP" it's just regular old OTP with a wrapper that prevents a man-in-the-middle attack. As stated in TFA: This is just a system for transmitting an arbitrary-length string of bits with absolute integrity. This is both non-revolutionary and non-trivial.
All together now: "this has nothing to do with quantum computing".
This system exploits quantum mechanics to detect if someone is interecepting and retransmitting the signal. That's why it's called Quantum KEY Distribution. There's nothing "quantum" about the encryption itself. It is also of limited use since it requires an unbroken fiber-optic connection between the two devices.
The claim wasn't that the system was unbreakable, only the encryption.
However, the far more important weakness in this system is that it only works over a direct fiber-optic link between the two devices (no routers, no repeaters).
Even if you assume that this system will help fight terrorism, how exactly is this a meaningful compromise?
Don't the concerns of British civil libertarians (and presumably Liberal opposition to this bill), center around the giant national database, not the cards themselves? I know mine would. Not having to carry the card might hinder identity theft via wallet-theft and privacy invasions by anyone with brief access to your ID card scanning/swiping it, but this doesn't address potential abuse of the database, which is the far greater evil.
The article made no mention of the rationale behind the compromise, does anyone have more information? This looks like the Liberals needed to be able to point to something and say "See, we voted for your rights, before we voted against them."
...hello nano-copper hairspray in stylish punk green.
That's certainly a clever idea, however existing P2P is already a pretty good solution. This part of the article makes no sense: Bittorrent punish leachers automatically. But more to the point, less tech-savvy users are going to be less likely to care about (or even notice) clogging their upload bandwidth, especially if everything is wrapped in to a media player app. If the next iTunes upgrade had P2P distribution, would most users even notice, much less be upset?
and in typical slashdot fashion, anything that bashes paying for content get's +5 Insightful.
wow, I stand corrected. Thanks for the link!
It may be true that Moore's law became the industry expectation, but given the winner-take-all nature of semiconductor manufacturing I have a hard time believing that IBM/AMD/Intel etc are simplying "developing to the timeline".
the submitter is just parroting the article. The use stems from the fact that while Moore's Law has been surprisingly accurate in predicting the miniaturization of silicon-based circuits, certain inescapable physical limits for the miniaturization of this technology are now on the horizon, and threaten to "break" Moore's law.
I'm sorry if my post gave the impression that I don't think talking on a cell phone isn't generally acceptable in public. I certainly enjoy being able to talk during my commute to and from work, and I think that's fine. I also understand that many calls are important and override what a person is doing at the time. I would hope however that your bf excuses himself from situations where his conversation is distracting (say dinner with another couple, or during a movie) to take the call. The importance of his job does not give him permission to detract from everyone else's enjoyment of a public space from which he can easily remove himself.
Also, there are a few situations where the same conversation that would be acceptable in person but not on a cell because the person on the cell phone can't pick up on the same ques that someone in person can. For example, I find it extremely rude when people people talk on a cell while conducting retail transactions because the person checking out is frequently distracted and slows the process down. It also gives the impression that the person waiting on you is not worthy of your attention. However two phsyically present people talking during the same transaction can easily pause when necessary because both are aware of what is happening. I'm sure an anthropologist can give a better description of what I'm talking about, but there are clearly situations in which cell conversations are not equivalent to two physically present people having the same conversation in the same setting.
Yes, if only someone would develop a standard for devices to discover and communicate with other nearby devices, then integrate this technology into cellular phones. Perhaps some future generation of brilliant engineers will finally solve this problem.
I've been wondering for years why cell phones don't allow you to program ring schedules. TFA mentions this feature in passing as something that's already out there, but I've never seen a phone with it. Is it only in top-end phones, or has it trickled down in the 18 months since I bought my last phone? I should say that I've always purchased mid-range cell phones, I only upgrade when my contract is up or the phone breaks, so I never have the latest and greatest.
/rant.
With that one exception, the features described in TFA seem virtually worthless. Is it really worth feeding my cell phone speed and breaking information from my car so that it doesn't ring for the 15 seconds out of the day that I'm breaking hard? Yes maybe some day when my phone already connects to my car and it's trivial to pass this information along, but such a small percentage of cars and phones interact with eachother now that it seems ridiculous.
Certainly there are some features that could prevent phones from ringing at impolite times, for example, Wired article from like 1998 talked about how this emerging standard called 'bluetooth' would allow theaters and other areas to set up "quiet zones" which you could set your phone to automatically respect and switch to silent or vibrate. There's no need for my phone to have a set of expensive sensors to help it guess what I'm doing at the moment. KISS.
The real problem with cell phone politness is the user. If people could just remember that answering a cell phone implies that the conversation is more important than what they're doing at the moment, and then stop and decide if it actually is, 90% of cell phone annoyance would disappear. Also, learn to love vibrate mode.
You can't can't expect actors in a capitalist system not to maximize their rewards. Any system design/reform has to assume that actors will do everything allowed to maximize their rewards, even things which are viewed as "evil" by everyone else.
The point of the author was pointing out that patent trolls illustrate a explotable flaw in the system, and that villifying them does nothing to solve the problem. There will always be plenty of people willing to do lucrative, legal things that others view as evil, ie gambling, pornography, prostitution etc.
It's the definition that reflects how and why people actually use the internet. If bandwidth doesn't matter, why aren't we all browsing via modem?
This confuses the issue. Bandwidth is the resource in question, not some nebulous "internet resource", and yes bandwidth is a time-sensitive resource, but it's still finite. I've got a few botkits I'd like you to install for me to take advantage of your machine's "renewable" bandwidth and cpu resources.