A system for verifying identity across a number of web sites has some value. I don't know if Passport as part of MS is the best way to implement that however.
Personally, I think that the open source, non-profit, privacy contract system, put together by http://xns.org/ is the way to go.
Old Dutch makes produces in Western Canada and the Northern Midwest and West. In the USA they seem to just make potato chips. Bob will ship you some from Minnesota at http://www.bobsproduce.com/mn_products.htm
Nobody however seems to be able to supply me here in Eastern Canada with Taco chips from Old Dutch! Old Dutch doesn't seem to have a web site anywhere - USA or Canada! I have been looking for a source outside of Western Canada for "Old Dutch Taco Flavoured Tortia Chips", which might now have the name "Zesty" or "Ariba".
They seem to be widely available from Vancouver, BC to Thunder Bay, ON, but I can't seem to find a source online.
Spelling has never been my strong point - I probably should have run it through a spell checker. Heck, I probably should not have even posted in the first place - as other's have noted, few people like grammar corrections.
For some reason the "their/there/they're" and the "your/you're" confusion causes me to go nuts. It probably has to do with the way I read things - those errors are so obviously wrong to me I can't understand how they can be made by people. I suppose that my spelling errors cause the same reactions in some other readers.
How I managed to put a space in "upon" is beyond me. I have no idea why someone would think that "their country" is a bad example. When talking about "those four Germans" one might also want to talk about "their country".
Apple's last big public announcement was that they were including CD-burning in with the OS
I must have missed that. I have never seen any such statements that such functionality is part of the OS. Granted with the release of iTunes and iDVD it isn't much of a stretch to think of them being part of the OS, but I never heard anyone at Apple actually claim that. They have always been a seperate download.
"Funny" is not usually something thought of as being posessed. Usually you need a noun for possessives: "his shirt", "her car", "their country".
Now if the intent was to talk about "people who think that they are funny", one might want to use a contraction (which generally is frowned up on in written communications) to say something like "people who think that they're funny". Dropping the "that" is probably fine for an informal forum such as this.
One benifit of avoiding contractions (and their apostrophies) is that you can avoid the confusion between "it's" (contraction of "it is") and "its" (possessive of "it").
I seem to recal that in bulk, liquid nitrogen is cheaper than milk. More expensive than beer, but not by a lot.
My understanding is that in bulk quantities, beer is cheaper than milk - there are milk marketing boards that set prices on the white stuff. Nobody is doing that for tanker trucks of beer.
Hilbert acknowledged that the important conceptual leaps were Einstein's, however.
My understanding is that while it is true that the math Einstein did wasn't anything truely unique, he was pretty much the only person with the vision that this type of math had applications to the area of gravity. I gather that nobody in that timeframe was likely to make the conceptual leaps that he did in GR, whereas those in SR were very close to a number of investigators in the field.
I am not a huge science historian, but it does seem fairly clear that the ideas in SR were floating around and would have been put together relativley (no pun intended) quickly by others without Einstein.
My understanding was that nobody else at the time seems to have been doing much with gravity, and certainly nobody else was doing anything in the area of applying these geometrical methods and ideas to it. It was/is a tough bit of math and without the "vision" that gave Einstein the confidence to push though that, few would have kept at it.
Then again, my admiditly small history of science knowledge in general is warped by my perceptions coming from a HE background with only a little bit of GR coursework. Since gravity is not given much consideration in HE work, I may have a wrong impression.
What always amazes me when studying the sciences is how transparent so many of these revolutionary ideas are after they have had a few decades to get the kinks worked out of them and the teaching techniques to incorporate them. Heck, we teach GR in a pretty sophisitcated form to undergrads! The photo-electric effect got Einstein the Nobel Prize and I've explained that to my mom!
...General Relativity followed Special Relativity, which followed Lorenz and others work on invariant transforms of the Maxwell equations....
If Einstein hadn't been around, someone else would have put together the stuff that is Special Relativty within a few years, certainly by 1920. A number of people were working on similar formalisms and would have put it together. General Relativity however is a whole other story. Most historians of the field doubt it would have been developed for quite some time, possibly as late as the 1970's or maybe even later. To be sure, advances in other directions would have started to crowd in on the same areas, but really, GR was quite a leap.
I don't know how much of an effect the employee situation impacts on this type of thing, but there is a world-wide shortage of technicians for cable installation, testing, repair, etc. There is a shortage of PhD's, Masters, and undergraduate degreed people in the photonics industry, but there is a major major shortange of the techs who support them and everyone else using optical fibre.
There are less than a dozen schools offering tech training in photonics in North America, and not a lot in the rest of the world - see here for some of them.
I think you are correct. They type of thing will allow you to run LinuxPPC binaries on your NetBSD/PPC box, but the huge numbers of Linux/intel binaries are still incompatable, just as they are incompatible with the LinuxPPC distributions.
GPL is no more invasive than standard copyright protection, at least in regards to worries about reading code and accidentaly re-using it in your own works. The GPL (and any copyright liscence for that matter) actually EXTENDS the reader's rights, not limits them. Without an specific liscence, a person has specific (and quite limited) rights to access and use the copyrighted works of another - any liscence can only serve to expand those rights
If I publish my source code and protect it "only" with standard copyright - you have the same problem that you might have with the GPL - you can't read it for fear of incorporating it in your own work unconsiously and later having me sue your pants off. Only if I liscence you to re-use it in your code can you do so. The GPL specifically is not what is causing the "problem", but rather copyright laws in general.
Personally, while I agree that "unconsious" plagarism of this nature is a potential problem, I do not see any way of avoiding the problem while still giving reasonable protection under copyrights.
Linus can't up & relicense the kernel, b/c there are hundreds/thousands who contributed; each licensing their own snippets of code under the GPL. How did CDDB get relicensed without consent of all the contributers?
That is a good point. I suppose if anyone sent code to the CDDB people under the terms of the GPL, and that code was used for the software that was reliscenced then those coders could have cause for action, assuming that the code was used improperly.
However, I don't really know what the situation is for the CDDB people. Are they not releasing their code as they are required to do? If not, they should be called to task. But even if they released all of their code, there is nothing that requires them to continue to make available the database, is there? If you write or use an open source web site that doesn't mean that you have to serve up useful content, or serve anything for that matter.
I have no idea what sort of liscence was explicitly stated when people submitted data to the database, so I can't comment on that aspect. However in my mind it is a bit sneaky, and their liscencing terms prohibitting liscencees from also supporting alternatives such as http://freedb.org/ are pretty nasty too.
I always go to freedb first (with a resedited copy of iTunes) and only use CDDB if that comes up blank. And I send in my corrections to freedb. Feels better that way.
No, only the versions that you put under GPL remain so. If you create a new version, you don't have to put it
under the GPL as well.
Only if they are either outside the US or create a completly new piece of software. Otherwise the draconian
"derived work" part of US copyright law would appear to apply.
Actually, the owner of the work is not bound by any liscence he/she has released the code under, since he retains full access to the work unless he/she explicitly gives it up - and the GPL does not do this. Thus he/she can sell closed source versions of the work while still releasing it under GPL.
For the author, derrivative works need not be released under GPL because the author was not bound by GPL, only the people who accepted the work under GPL are bound by it.
Once out as GPL you cannot revoke it for that work, but the author need not release anything futhre under GPL.
Re:Next barrier in sight!
on
Silicon LED
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· Score: 1
Basically, the phone company could push more speed through the phone line
by increasing the maximum allowed voltage.
Increasing the allowed voltage would allow some modem designs to get closer to the maximum set by the bandwidth set up for voice transmission - it would only be a small gain. A voice channel in the voice network is less than 60K of information and without changing the design of that voice network, you can't get past that. You cannot use a voice channel at anything greater than the voice channel's capacity - the pipe is only so big.
This limitation is not a theoretical one, it is a designed one. As I understand things, the system was designed to take the voice noises, encoded them digitally at less than 60K, transmit them through those fancy new digital thingies that the phone companies installed in the 1970's (or earlier? or later? I don't know) and route them to the other phone location. Transfer the data back into analogue and pump it out the recipient's phone.
Thus, since the sound is encoded at about 60K, there ain't no way possible to take your data and encoded it into a sound to send through your phone such that you can push more than 60K through the equipment the phone company has. Unless, as is done with the DSL stuff, you do not use that equipment with those limitations.
At least that's the model working in my mind - I could be totally wrong.
There are also a number of books about the modern practices and history of Hubbard and Scientology. Generally unflattering.
Re:Next barrier in sight!
on
Silicon LED
·
· Score: 2
I remember when 56K modems came out and we were told they would virtually rip a hole in the space-time continuum. Suddenly we've got 2mb ASDL sockets in the wall, that can do simultaneous voice & data. What da f????
The 56K modems push up against the limits of the telephone voice network which has a maximum bandwidth designed to carry voice transmissions. There is no way to push more information through the voice telephone system than this bandwidth limitation of the system itself. (ok, there are ways of using multiple lines/circuits, but that is cheating...)
The various "DL" technologies do not use the telephone voice system in this way, and thus are not limited by this bottleneck. In fact, most of the "DL" systems have enough room to provide the bandwidth necessary for voice in addition to the larger amount provided for data - which is why you can talk on the phone and use your internet connection at the same time with only one line.
In some situations, this is not actually a scam. I have brought broken items back to Sears without the receipt (particularly for "lifetime warantee" items like Craftman tools) and rather than deal with the problems of working without the receipt, the sales rep just had me buy an identical item, put the broken one in that box, then return that broken item (with the receipt) for a refund.
A similar technique can of course be unethically used for returning items outside of the warantee period, obviously not needing the help of a staffmember.
In any case, Sears needs to be careful to properly dispose of such returned broken items otherwise people can dig through the trash and return them again for a working replacement.
The act of observation changes that which is being observed. Sounds a lot like the Heisenberg principle, applied more broadly, doesn't it?
Sounds more like an inproper understanding of the Heisenberg principle.
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is NOT the result of the observer effecting the observation (though it is often incorrectly characterized that way). Rather the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is a statement about relationships between particular measured quantities. It is a mathematical result of the treatment of wave functions, and does not have to apeal to the ideas of the act of taking measurements having an effect on the measurement itself.
Assuming that the quantum theory is a correct description of the universe, the uncertainties in certain measurements are a fundamental feature of the way the universe is put together, not a result of any particular measurement method.
Nobody has (to my knowledge) ever claimed that the routing of internet signals has such fundamental uncertainties. Data packets may well follow multiple paths through the internet, but they do not experience the intereference effects that are necessary to require something like the uncertainty principle to be invoked.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I think that the open source, non-profit, privacy contract system, put together by http://xns.org/ is the way to go.
Nobody however seems to be able to supply me here in Eastern Canada with Taco chips from Old Dutch! Old Dutch doesn't seem to have a web site anywhere - USA or Canada! I have been looking for a source outside of Western Canada for "Old Dutch Taco Flavoured Tortia Chips", which might now have the name "Zesty" or "Ariba".
They seem to be widely available from Vancouver, BC to Thunder Bay, ON, but I can't seem to find a source online.
Help me please!
For some reason the "their/there/they're" and the "your/you're" confusion causes me to go nuts. It probably has to do with the way I read things - those errors are so obviously wrong to me I can't understand how they can be made by people. I suppose that my spelling errors cause the same reactions in some other readers.
How I managed to put a space in "upon" is beyond me. I have no idea why someone would think that "their country" is a bad example. When talking about "those four Germans" one might also want to talk about "their country".
A good read.
I must have missed that. I have never seen any such statements that such functionality is part of the OS. Granted with the release of iTunes and iDVD it isn't much of a stretch to think of them being part of the OS, but I never heard anyone at Apple actually claim that. They have always been a seperate download.
"Funny" is not usually something thought of as being posessed. Usually you need a noun for possessives: "his shirt", "her car", "their country".
Now if the intent was to talk about "people who think that they are funny", one might want to use a contraction (which generally is frowned up on in written communications) to say something like "people who think that they're funny". Dropping the "that" is probably fine for an informal forum such as this.
One benifit of avoiding contractions (and their apostrophies) is that you can avoid the confusion between "it's" (contraction of "it is") and "its" (possessive of "it").
Of course none of this is on topic...
My understanding is that in bulk quantities, beer is cheaper than milk - there are milk marketing boards that set prices on the white stuff. Nobody is doing that for tanker trucks of beer.
I don't know if they keep a database available for others though.
My understanding is that while it is true that the math Einstein did wasn't anything truely unique, he was pretty much the only person with the vision that this type of math had applications to the area of gravity. I gather that nobody in that timeframe was likely to make the conceptual leaps that he did in GR, whereas those in SR were very close to a number of investigators in the field.
I am not a huge science historian, but it does seem fairly clear that the ideas in SR were floating around and would have been put together relativley (no pun intended) quickly by others without Einstein.
My understanding was that nobody else at the time seems to have been doing much with gravity, and certainly nobody else was doing anything in the area of applying these geometrical methods and ideas to it. It was/is a tough bit of math and without the "vision" that gave Einstein the confidence to push though that, few would have kept at it.
Then again, my admiditly small history of science knowledge in general is warped by my perceptions coming from a HE background with only a little bit of GR coursework. Since gravity is not given much consideration in HE work, I may have a wrong impression.
What always amazes me when studying the sciences is how transparent so many of these revolutionary ideas are after they have had a few decades to get the kinks worked out of them and the teaching techniques to incorporate them. Heck, we teach GR in a pretty sophisitcated form to undergrads! The photo-electric effect got Einstein the Nobel Prize and I've explained that to my mom!
If Einstein hadn't been around, someone else would have put together the stuff that is Special Relativty within a few years, certainly by 1920. A number of people were working on similar formalisms and would have put it together. General Relativity however is a whole other story. Most historians of the field doubt it would have been developed for quite some time, possibly as late as the 1970's or maybe even later. To be sure, advances in other directions would have started to crowd in on the same areas, but really, GR was quite a leap.
There are less than a dozen schools offering tech training in photonics in North America, and not a lot in the rest of the world - see here for some of them.
Anyhow, no workers, no broadband.
Unfortuante, but not too suprising.
If I publish my source code and protect it "only" with standard copyright - you have the same problem that you might have with the GPL - you can't read it for fear of incorporating it in your own work unconsiously and later having me sue your pants off. Only if I liscence you to re-use it in your code can you do so. The GPL specifically is not what is causing the "problem", but rather copyright laws in general.
Personally, while I agree that "unconsious" plagarism of this nature is a potential problem, I do not see any way of avoiding the problem while still giving reasonable protection under copyrights.
However, I don't really know what the situation is for the CDDB people. Are they not releasing their code as they are required to do? If not, they should be called to task. But even if they released all of their code, there is nothing that requires them to continue to make available the database, is there? If you write or use an open source web site that doesn't mean that you have to serve up useful content, or serve anything for that matter.
I have no idea what sort of liscence was explicitly stated when people submitted data to the database, so I can't comment on that aspect. However in my mind it is a bit sneaky, and their liscencing terms prohibitting liscencees from also supporting alternatives such as http://freedb.org/ are pretty nasty too.
I always go to freedb first (with a resedited copy of iTunes) and only use CDDB if that comes up blank. And I send in my corrections to freedb. Feels better that way.
Actually, the owner of the work is not bound by any liscence he/she has released the code under, since he retains full access to the work unless he/she explicitly gives it up - and the GPL does not do this. Thus he/she can sell closed source versions of the work while still releasing it under GPL.
For the author, derrivative works need not be released under GPL because the author was not bound by GPL, only the people who accepted the work under GPL are bound by it.
Once out as GPL you cannot revoke it for that work, but the author need not release anything futhre under GPL.
This limitation is not a theoretical one, it is a designed one. As I understand things, the system was designed to take the voice noises, encoded them digitally at less than 60K, transmit them through those fancy new digital thingies that the phone companies installed in the 1970's (or earlier? or later? I don't know) and route them to the other phone location. Transfer the data back into analogue and pump it out the recipient's phone.
Thus, since the sound is encoded at about 60K, there ain't no way possible to take your data and encoded it into a sound to send through your phone such that you can push more than 60K through the equipment the phone company has. Unless, as is done with the DSL stuff, you do not use that equipment with those limitations.
At least that's the model working in my mind - I could be totally wrong.
There are also a number of books about the modern practices and history of Hubbard and Scientology. Generally unflattering.
The 56K modems push up against the limits of the telephone voice network which has a maximum bandwidth designed to carry voice transmissions. There is no way to push more information through the voice telephone system than this bandwidth limitation of the system itself. (ok, there are ways of using multiple lines/circuits, but that is cheating...)
The various "DL" technologies do not use the telephone voice system in this way, and thus are not limited by this bottleneck. In fact, most of the "DL" systems have enough room to provide the bandwidth necessary for voice in addition to the larger amount provided for data - which is why you can talk on the phone and use your internet connection at the same time with only one line.
In some situations, this is not actually a scam. I have brought broken items back to Sears without the receipt (particularly for "lifetime warantee" items like Craftman tools) and rather than deal with the problems of working without the receipt, the sales rep just had me buy an identical item, put the broken one in that box, then return that broken item (with the receipt) for a refund. A similar technique can of course be unethically used for returning items outside of the warantee period, obviously not needing the help of a staffmember. In any case, Sears needs to be careful to properly dispose of such returned broken items otherwise people can dig through the trash and return them again for a working replacement.
Maybe I will paypal them a few bucks. One buck from each of us would make for a pretty big bunch of bucks...
mailto:hart@pobox.com
or to make donations directly, see:
http://promo.net/pg/donation.html
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is NOT the result of the observer effecting the observation (though it is often incorrectly characterized that way). Rather the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is a statement about relationships between particular measured quantities. It is a mathematical result of the treatment of wave functions, and does not have to apeal to the ideas of the act of taking measurements having an effect on the measurement itself.
Assuming that the quantum theory is a correct description of the universe, the uncertainties in certain measurements are a fundamental feature of the way the universe is put together, not a result of any particular measurement method.
Nobody has (to my knowledge) ever claimed that the routing of internet signals has such fundamental uncertainties. Data packets may well follow multiple paths through the internet, but they do not experience the intereference effects that are necessary to require something like the uncertainty principle to be invoked.