It's an interesting article that outlines many of the considerations and hurdles one encounters in this field, but there's no breakthrough here. We haven't had a breakthrough since December, 2000 when researchers at UCSB built their latest prototype capable of consistently detecting such photons. We're bound to make some more breakthroughs soon, it's premature to say we already have recently.
If you're still not clear on the whole quantum cryptography deal, idquantique.com has a good introduction (pdf, of course).
Applelinks had a preview a few months ago, and it's worth noting the differences between that review's projected features and the ones revealed in today's review.
But even more important than that is to remember that this Office suite isn't only aimed at Linux. It's also aimed squarely at the MacOSX crowd, which could help expand its market penetration. (Businesses that are slow to adopt Linux on the desktop are often less tentative about permitting MacOSX installations.)
Einstein is well known for opposing theories of black holes and quantum physics (his famous quote about deities not throwing dice comes immediately to mind), and Hawking has spent the greater part of the second half of the twentieth century and now the twenty first century exploring black holes.
But of course Hawking might be making the same mistake Einstein made in opposing black hole theory, this time regarding gravistar theory. The jury is still out on gravistars, but the potential for undoing all the "discoveries" Hawking has spent his life pursuing is real.
It's a cautionary note, and one Hawking would be loathe to ignore. Certainly, we remember Einstein for his theories of relativity, but how many remember anything he accomplished in the second half of his career? The short answer is he accomplished very little, spending his days sailing his little boat around instead of charting new scientific milestones.
Hawking has the very real potential to be relegated to the dustbin of history as a great scientific mind led astray on fruitless theoretical paths. It'd be a shame, but there it is. Let's hope that unlike Einstein, Hawking is better prepared to adapt to whatever the future holds.
When a machine generates a translation, there are no issues of copyright ownership, because machines are not authors in the statutory sense; the owner of the machine can claim copyright and move on.
When individual human translators get involved, there's an entirely different order of complication. Sure, it's possible to use licenses like the OPL (Open Publication License) to navigate these complications, but the compliance problems remain an obstacle to overcome. It'll be tough to remain competitive when babelfish and google don't have to put up with similar issues.
When this is added to all the other problems associated with massively distributed activities relying on humans to function, I just can't see how it'll succeed. Too bad, perhaps, but nonetheless true.
Companies have had to please stakeholders since at least the seventeenth century. Where do you think the Jamestown Colony got its funding from?
So he had a bunch of researchers amassed in a big thinktank operation. This is similar to the decentralized Internet exactly how?
Unlike the Internet, Edison spawned entire useful industries. Unless you call revolutionizing the distribution of pornography a spectacular human achievement, there's nothing approaching what Edison accomplished here. Comparing the two is just silly.
Just about the only similarity I can see is in the realm of disputed patents, namely Edison's quadruplex telegraph, which A&PTC and Western Union bitterly squabbled about. But then again, disputed patents are nothing new either.
Though slippery slime is not as bad as some of the other so-called "non lethal" weapons being developed out there, it's still in violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention, which bans chemical agents producing temporary incapacitation.
Though "chemical warfare" readily brings WWI chlorine-gas warfare to mind, agents don't simply have to asphyxiate or burn opponents to death to qualify as inhumane. One may wonder whether there is such a thing as humane war, but it is certainly more fair to attack healthy and active combattants than it is to attack incapacitated ones. And don't believe for a second that the Pentagon is interested in this stuff just for non-combat activities.
Besides, one has to wonder how good this stuff can be at crowd control anyway. Immobilizing foam has its uses, because it can transform a chaotic situation into one where the actors -- rioters, for example -- can no longer continue their disturbances. It hardly seems prudent, however, to create a situation where everyone is sliding all over the place.
Don't think we haven't noticed or cared!
on
The Drone War
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· Score: 5, Funny
The Royal Society for the Protection of Robots was presciently chartered in the early 1660s long before robots were invented; the moral and ethical interest at stake was simply that compelling. Throughout the subsequent centuries, few other societies, royal or otherwise, have done as much to advance the civil rights of robots everywhere.
Remember the robot from NASA's Pathfinder mission? He's a card-carrying union member of the AFL/CIO, all thanks to the diligent lobbying of concerned RSfPR members. Rmember the scene at the end of Terminator 2: Judgment Day where the "evil" cyborg is destroyed by falling into a refinery's crucible? Though we did not successfully torpedo the whole production as an affront to non-diabolical cyborgs everywhere, we did manage to convince Hollywood executives to append a boilerplate warning at the end of the film informing the audience that no actual cyborgs were harmed in its production -- at the time, the T-1000 cyborg was safely sitting in his trailer sipping lattes while a cgi facsimile was lowered into the lava.
Just because they are made of silicon, metal, and oil doesn't mean they're any less significant at the dawning of a new moral age in the 21st century. That America would choose to sacrifice robotic drones instead of conventional meat soldiers simply demonstrates how far this once-great nation has sunk into the moral abyss.
I can't say I much like realmedia formats -- while the compression is decent, the resulting quality is not necessarily the best for the bang. Combine that with RealNetworks's history of installing spyware with realplayer, and I've never been a big fan.
Nevertheless, I'm still rooting for RealNetworks, inasmuch as they're still giving Microsoft a run for their money. It's not that I especially hate Microsoft, although I do; it's that the last thing this industry is yet another concentration of formats in the control of one corporation. Windows Media is no more or less proprietary than realmedia, but when there are two competing crappy proprietary formats, at least they're more likely to keep each other honest that way.
And thankfully, this is just another sign that RealNetworks has what it takes to continue leading in this sector. Back in April, RealNetworks negotiated a deal with AOL to bundle their software with AOL's, putting them at #1. I'm certainly not a fan of AOL, for what it's worth, but that's probably the second easiest/best way to get one's software on the desktop of millions of ordinary users, next to bundling it with Windows itself.
Now if only TiVo would stay solvent long enough for all this to make some sort of difference....
Because the reviews historically have not been kind.
It's neat. It's a swell toy. But it's expensive and produces photos of dubious quality. Anyone who has a couple hundred dollars to waste on something like this probably knows what he's getting into, but it's a damn shame the technology isn't quite there yet.
Watches are something everyone has, and it would be neat to get to the point where digital cameras are equally ubiquitous (albeit a bit scary from privacy and surveillance perspectives). But what are the odds that a consumer line like this will catch on when its flagship example is such a poor value? Most mainstream consumer products we see today started out expensive and crappy, but many more aren't around today because of those same drawbacks.
I suppose it'll change when another big player like Sony gets into the act. Though Sony is every bit as proprietary as Casio and perhaps more so, we'd at least benefit from having different proprietary techs banging it out on the open market. And maybe if I can transfer my low-res expensive watch photos to my low-res expensive pda, I'll feel better about having already wasted my money.
In space, but more importantly, here on the earth too.
The Mars Society are alternatively hailed as heroes or decried as demagogues. Mars Society president Robert Zubrin is especially vulnerable, being labeled no less than a "messianic" "cult" leader by Robert Park in his acclaimed book Voodoo Science: the Road from Foolishness to Fraud, remarks for which Zubrin supposedly pursued legal action against Park.
The attacks are somewhat ad-hominem, but Park raises an important concern. Whatever the merits of the science the Society is pursuing, it does us no good if the work is blemished by association with individuals of dubious social qualities. If the Society is dominated by demagogues, then their work will be dismissed as just another fancy of another crackpot institution, and civilian space research will be set back for untold years.
The Mars Society has a lot riding on the line. Let's hope they don't fumble the ball this time.
Hardware encryption will always be more difficult than software-based encryption to patch when vulnerabilities arise. There are advantages that can offset this when deciding whether or not to go with hardware, but contingency plans must be put in place for yanking the hardware back when a vulnerability is discovered.
Homogeneity in network environments is nearly always bad. This particular vulnerability wouldn't be nearly as critical if it weren't for the fact that all banks who use these cryptoprocessors either use the same ones or use ones that are similar enough that vulnerabilities like these can be used on more than one "different" type. It's much harder to crack one and then crack another and another than it is to crack one and have therefore cracked them all.
At least I have high hopes that this vulnerability will be patched forthwith -- not only does IBM have a better track record than certain other corporations, banks have both the money and the clout to demand and receive.
The reviews are all favorable, but it's not clear whether this is simply because the reviewers are blinded by the "hey, it's neat!" factor, or whether the Radiator Zen SCR325-2F actually has a legitimate technical advantage. But hey, it is neat, so I can't blame them.
Gobe's liscensing terms actually get it
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Looking At Gobe
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· Score: 5, Interesting
For $125, you get a "family liscense" which permits you to install their software on all the computers in your home plus one computer elsewhere (presumably one at work). This demonstrates a surprising amount of prescience on their part.
The real money for liscensing is in corporate liscensing. The really financially damaging software "piracy" is among corporate (or government agency...) clients. There's not terribly much to gain from having draconian liscensing schemes that prevent multiple parties in a household from having the software installed; one might even argue that there are no economically justifiable reasons from curtailing any installations, but that's another argument.
Historically, office-suite penetration has occurred from the corporate level down to the private level; that is, people are forced to use software at work and therefore find themselves having to use it at home as well. The corporate market is fairly well saturated by microsoft Office so it'd be suicide for Gobe to fight there first. Far better would be to worm into the home office market, and try to get employees familiar with it so they can demand their employers reconsider.
By making it almost pleasant to use their product (and for a reasonable price), they get my vote.
You can order the video if you want
on
Interview With Linus
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· Score: 3, Informative
Videos episodes of the Charlie Rose show can be ordered from http://www.800-all-news.com/transcripts.shtml. Their online search engine doesn't return values up to the present, so you'll either have to do it over the phone (1-800-255-6397) or via email ( web-orders@800-ALL-NEWS.com. Since you get something of a discount when ordering multiple transcripts, you might also want to order last May's episode where Charlie Rose interviewed Linus about his book.
http://itworld.newmediary.com/. They've got a fairly extensive list of RFPs and let you post yours for free, and I know a couple open-source developers who've had success with them in the past.
But I do have to wonder why you're bothering with RFPs at all: the beauty of open source is that you aren't beholden to an autocratic developer. You can just grab the source, hand it to a competent individual inside your company, give him/her a few weeks to get up to snuff, and roll it from there.
Given that, it's sad that open source and RFPs haven't mixed much in the past. Even sadder now that lots of companies that hoped to cash in on open-source development are running out of venture capital. If open source is ever going to achieve the level of market penetration that its proponents hope, we're going to have to start thinking about these little things a bit more.
While Sony is really earns its bread in the liscensing market rather than the hardware market, it is still important for them to put units in consumers' homes, because that is the only way to build a userbase for PS2 games.
What is the additional cost for releasing a linux-enabled PS2 machine? Not terribly much. It's the sort of thing linux enthusiasts might release on their own in a few months, given a chance. By putting in this marginal amount of effort, Sony gets both a more valuable commodity and some brownie points among linux enthusiasts.
I honestly can't see a single downside for them. The remarkable point is not that the PS2 is capable of this but rather that Sony actually had the foresight to act upon it. That's the hallmark of a nimble corporation and speaks loads for their future.
Of course, Sony is also in bed with the RIAA and the dvd cca, so anyone who buys a PS2 is going to hell in my book, but that's your choice.
There is precisely one justification for the secret courts established under the Foreign Intellgence Surveillance Act: national security. The secret courts that meet in that jurisdiction concern themselves with matters of espionage and highly sensitive information that would jeopardize national security if made public.
I personally can't stand it. The 5th amendment and 6th amendments clearly lay out due process and the rights of the accused who stands trial, and few if any of these guarantees are honored by these secret tribunals. There is no textual basis for a national-security exception to any of the Bill of Rights, and it flies in the face of fundamental principles of fairness.
However, at least with national security, we have a really damn important interest being protected; if anything would justify tearing up the Bill of Rights, it would be on the level of national security. But what in tarnation is there to protect in a cyber court? Trade secrets? The integrity of corporate networks? Is this truly something so pernicious and of such overriding importance? Hardly.
They've got their national-security exception. If it's "terrorism" and it's conducted by foreign agents, then the Foreign Intelligence court already has jurisdiction. If we go down this path, then nothing will remain protected under the Bill of Rights and the Constitution in general, and that is a very scary prospect.
It's a sad commentary that the neulevel/ICANN think that in cases of controversy, all they have to do to resolve the dispute is pick a number out of a hat. If we're going to have a system of enforceable trademarks, and if we're going to extend these trademarks to domain names, then let's be serious about it and apply rules of thoughtful jurisprudence in determining who must win and who must lose. If we're simply going to assign these domains on a first-come-first-serve basis, then let's be serious about it and actually deliver the domain names on a first-come-first-serve basis. If neither system is acceptable, then auction the domains off to the highest bidder; it would hurt the little people, but it would at least be transparent.
Contested.biz addresses are, by their very nature, the popular ones. If a domain name has been requested by at least two parties, then that domain is assigned under this lottery scheme. And let's make no mistake about it: $2-$15 fees are non-trivial when numbered in the millions, and the fees are, by definition, applied in the most popular and therefore most numerous cases.
And why are these fees being charged at all? There's no significant additional processing required to resolve each of these disputes, and the initial price of registration should be sufficient to cover this eventuality. Charging the fee doesn't discourage claims after the fact, and all the information has already been collected by neulevel. It wouldn't be the first or last time a quasi-legal organization has bilked consumers, but there's still no excuse for it.
Hollywood has especially been hit by the WTC attacks and the resulting crises among airlines; it's simply impossible to do the same sort of production overseas if you can't or are unwilling to fly there. Wasn't the original Matrix chiefly filmed outside the U.S.? And so, has anyone accounted for this consideration when discussing the upcoming Matrix sequels?
It'll hardly be the first time the sequels are delayed. Broken ankles and other health complications have already pushed production back beyond the original timelines.
Worldwide. In the US, it's more like "a couple", since it's mostly confined to people like veterinarians, who have a lot more contact with sick animals than does the rest of the population.
Antibiotics help a lot with treating bubonic plague, but they're only effective if the disease is first properly diagnosed. Because people are no longer used to contracting fatal diseases (which bubonic plague always is if left untreated), and because the symptoms are not all that different from symptoms of diseases people are used to shrugging off, the disease is often not diagnosed in time.
Releasing the genome to the general public will help vaccination discoveries far more than it will help people who would use the plague for biological warfare. Frankly, you don't have to know the genetic sequence that underlies the organism in order to culture it and construct a suitable delivery device. In contrast, the benefits due to a vaccine discovery are obvious and numerous.
A couple people do die of the bubonic plague every year, mostly in Asia and Africa. In addition to the importance of antibiotic treatment and a vaccine discovery, the importance of improving hygiene standards cannot be understated. It's a three-part chain involving rodents, fleas, and humans, so if you eliminate human contact with both, then you've effectively cut humans out of the loop and eliminated human infections.
Anything more on supercavitation & Kursk?
on
Raising the Kursk
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· Score: 5, Informative
As late as last May, the major news services were all abuzz about supercavitation technology and the Kursk — everything pointed in the direction of Shkval, Russia's supercavitation torpedo that's been in development for the past couple decades and which is supposed to go in excess of hundreds of miles per hour under water inside an envelope of gas it generates.
Why haven't we heard anything more since? Even if it turns out not to be true, it's nevertheless intriguing and worthy of as much speculation as the rest of what we've been hearing (in the absence of any real news to report these past months on the subject). When they bring the Kursk back up, it's bound to be missing large chunks where classified hardware was stripped out in the intervening months.
If the media fail to titilate us with wild speculation about sexy technology, then they're not the media we've come to know and love. I for one am still waiting on baited breath.
While the superficial similarities between rewarding spook hackers and punishing civilian hackers seem sufficient to establish gross hypocrisy on the part of the Federal government, it's in fact little different from the time-honored tradition of our military and other militaries which, for aeons, have hired people to commit the same act of killing that would be punished as murder if it had been committed by a civilian acting without state authorization. Big deal.
What's more, the Sixth Amendment's "double jeopardy" clause is still in effect (one of the few clauses with some teeth left in it after decades of judicial erosion). If the Federal government establishes an arrangement whereby criminal acts are committed by individuals acting under government aegis and with the encouragement of state agents, then those acts cannot be subsequently punished (apart from certain situations such as genocide and other circumscribed offenses). One only need remind oneself of Whitey Bulger (on the FBI's most wanted list) who has gotten the FBI into a bit of a morass by acting as an informant for many years and during those years receiving tacit permission from the FBI to commit all manner of offenses including murder. The egg on the FBI's face hangs pendulously, because the FBI is now without legal recourse to punish those acts.
Slashdot Mirror
It's an interesting article that outlines many of the considerations and hurdles one encounters in this field, but there's no breakthrough here. We haven't had a breakthrough since December, 2000 when researchers at UCSB built their latest prototype capable of consistently detecting such photons. We're bound to make some more breakthroughs soon, it's premature to say we already have recently.
If you're still not clear on the whole quantum cryptography deal, idquantique.com has a good introduction (pdf, of course).
Applelinks had a preview a few months ago, and it's worth noting the differences between that review's projected features and the ones revealed in today's review.
But even more important than that is to remember that this Office suite isn't only aimed at Linux. It's also aimed squarely at the MacOSX crowd, which could help expand its market penetration. (Businesses that are slow to adopt Linux on the desktop are often less tentative about permitting MacOSX installations.)
Einstein is well known for opposing theories of black holes and quantum physics (his famous quote about deities not throwing dice comes immediately to mind), and Hawking has spent the greater part of the second half of the twentieth century and now the twenty first century exploring black holes.
But of course Hawking might be making the same mistake Einstein made in opposing black hole theory, this time regarding gravistar theory. The jury is still out on gravistars, but the potential for undoing all the "discoveries" Hawking has spent his life pursuing is real.
It's a cautionary note, and one Hawking would be loathe to ignore. Certainly, we remember Einstein for his theories of relativity, but how many remember anything he accomplished in the second half of his career? The short answer is he accomplished very little, spending his days sailing his little boat around instead of charting new scientific milestones.
Hawking has the very real potential to be relegated to the dustbin of history as a great scientific mind led astray on fruitless theoretical paths. It'd be a shame, but there it is. Let's hope that unlike Einstein, Hawking is better prepared to adapt to whatever the future holds.
When a machine generates a translation, there are no issues of copyright ownership, because machines are not authors in the statutory sense; the owner of the machine can claim copyright and move on.
When individual human translators get involved, there's an entirely different order of complication. Sure, it's possible to use licenses like the OPL (Open Publication License) to navigate these complications, but the compliance problems remain an obstacle to overcome. It'll be tough to remain competitive when babelfish and google don't have to put up with similar issues.
When this is added to all the other problems associated with massively distributed activities relying on humans to function, I just can't see how it'll succeed. Too bad, perhaps, but nonetheless true.
Companies have had to please stakeholders since at least the seventeenth century. Where do you think the Jamestown Colony got its funding from?
So he had a bunch of researchers amassed in a big thinktank operation. This is similar to the decentralized Internet exactly how?
Unlike the Internet, Edison spawned entire useful industries. Unless you call revolutionizing the distribution of pornography a spectacular human achievement, there's nothing approaching what Edison accomplished here. Comparing the two is just silly.
Just about the only similarity I can see is in the realm of disputed patents, namely Edison's quadruplex telegraph, which A&PTC and Western Union bitterly squabbled about. But then again, disputed patents are nothing new either.
This has been hashed out on CNI many times, but people keep forgetting either when Disney's film was released or when Kipling's copyright expired.
For the record:
Kipling's copyright expired in 1956.
Disney released their version in 1967.
Now let us never speak of this again.
Though slippery slime is not as bad as some of the other so-called "non lethal" weapons being developed out there, it's still in violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention, which bans chemical agents producing temporary incapacitation.
Though "chemical warfare" readily brings WWI chlorine-gas warfare to mind, agents don't simply have to asphyxiate or burn opponents to death to qualify as inhumane. One may wonder whether there is such a thing as humane war, but it is certainly more fair to attack healthy and active combattants than it is to attack incapacitated ones. And don't believe for a second that the Pentagon is interested in this stuff just for non-combat activities.
Besides, one has to wonder how good this stuff can be at crowd control anyway. Immobilizing foam has its uses, because it can transform a chaotic situation into one where the actors -- rioters, for example -- can no longer continue their disturbances. It hardly seems prudent, however, to create a situation where everyone is sliding all over the place.
As a charter member of the Royal Society for the Protection of Robots, I feel the pain of these drones.
The Royal Society for the Protection of Robots was presciently chartered in the early 1660s long before robots were invented; the moral and ethical interest at stake was simply that compelling. Throughout the subsequent centuries, few other societies, royal or otherwise, have done as much to advance the civil rights of robots everywhere.
Remember the robot from NASA's Pathfinder mission? He's a card-carrying union member of the AFL/CIO, all thanks to the diligent lobbying of concerned RSfPR members. Rmember the scene at the end of Terminator 2: Judgment Day where the "evil" cyborg is destroyed by falling into a refinery's crucible? Though we did not successfully torpedo the whole production as an affront to non-diabolical cyborgs everywhere, we did manage to convince Hollywood executives to append a boilerplate warning at the end of the film informing the audience that no actual cyborgs were harmed in its production -- at the time, the T-1000 cyborg was safely sitting in his trailer sipping lattes while a cgi facsimile was lowered into the lava.
Just because they are made of silicon, metal, and oil doesn't mean they're any less significant at the dawning of a new moral age in the 21st century. That America would choose to sacrifice robotic drones instead of conventional meat soldiers simply demonstrates how far this once-great nation has sunk into the moral abyss.
Thank you.
I can't say I much like realmedia formats -- while the compression is decent, the resulting quality is not necessarily the best for the bang. Combine that with RealNetworks's history of installing spyware with realplayer, and I've never been a big fan.
Nevertheless, I'm still rooting for RealNetworks, inasmuch as they're still giving Microsoft a run for their money. It's not that I especially hate Microsoft, although I do; it's that the last thing this industry is yet another concentration of formats in the control of one corporation. Windows Media is no more or less proprietary than realmedia, but when there are two competing crappy proprietary formats, at least they're more likely to keep each other honest that way.
And thankfully, this is just another sign that RealNetworks has what it takes to continue leading in this sector. Back in April, RealNetworks negotiated a deal with AOL to bundle their software with AOL's, putting them at #1. I'm certainly not a fan of AOL, for what it's worth, but that's probably the second easiest/best way to get one's software on the desktop of millions of ordinary users, next to bundling it with Windows itself.
Now if only TiVo would stay solvent long enough for all this to make some sort of difference....
Because the reviews historically have not been kind.
It's neat. It's a swell toy. But it's expensive and produces photos of dubious quality. Anyone who has a couple hundred dollars to waste on something like this probably knows what he's getting into, but it's a damn shame the technology isn't quite there yet.
Watches are something everyone has, and it would be neat to get to the point where digital cameras are equally ubiquitous (albeit a bit scary from privacy and surveillance perspectives). But what are the odds that a consumer line like this will catch on when its flagship example is such a poor value? Most mainstream consumer products we see today started out expensive and crappy, but many more aren't around today because of those same drawbacks.
I suppose it'll change when another big player like Sony gets into the act. Though Sony is every bit as proprietary as Casio and perhaps more so, we'd at least benefit from having different proprietary techs banging it out on the open market. And maybe if I can transfer my low-res expensive watch photos to my low-res expensive pda, I'll feel better about having already wasted my money.
In space, but more importantly, here on the earth too.
The Mars Society are alternatively hailed as heroes or decried as demagogues. Mars Society president Robert Zubrin is especially vulnerable, being labeled no less than a "messianic" "cult" leader by Robert Park in his acclaimed book Voodoo Science: the Road from Foolishness to Fraud, remarks for which Zubrin supposedly pursued legal action against Park.
The attacks are somewhat ad-hominem, but Park raises an important concern. Whatever the merits of the science the Society is pursuing, it does us no good if the work is blemished by association with individuals of dubious social qualities. If the Society is dominated by demagogues, then their work will be dismissed as just another fancy of another crackpot institution, and civilian space research will be set back for untold years.
The Mars Society has a lot riding on the line. Let's hope they don't fumble the ball this time.
- Hardware encryption will always be more difficult than software-based encryption to patch when vulnerabilities arise. There are advantages that can offset this when deciding whether or not to go with hardware, but contingency plans must be put in place for yanking the hardware back when a vulnerability is discovered.
- Homogeneity in network environments is nearly always bad. This particular vulnerability wouldn't be nearly as critical if it weren't for the fact that all banks who use these cryptoprocessors either use the same ones or use ones that are similar enough that vulnerabilities like these can be used on more than one "different" type. It's much harder to crack one and then crack another and another than it is to crack one and have therefore cracked them all.
At least I have high hopes that this vulnerability will be patched forthwith -- not only does IBM have a better track record than certain other corporations, banks have both the money and the clout to demand and receive.The reviews are all favorable, but it's not clear whether this is simply because the reviewers are blinded by the "hey, it's neat!" factor, or whether the Radiator Zen SCR325-2F actually has a legitimate technical advantage. But hey, it is neat, so I can't blame them.
For $125, you get a "family liscense" which permits you to install their software on all the computers in your home plus one computer elsewhere (presumably one at work). This demonstrates a surprising amount of prescience on their part.
The real money for liscensing is in corporate liscensing. The really financially damaging software "piracy" is among corporate (or government agency...) clients. There's not terribly much to gain from having draconian liscensing schemes that prevent multiple parties in a household from having the software installed; one might even argue that there are no economically justifiable reasons from curtailing any installations, but that's another argument.
Historically, office-suite penetration has occurred from the corporate level down to the private level; that is, people are forced to use software at work and therefore find themselves having to use it at home as well. The corporate market is fairly well saturated by microsoft Office so it'd be suicide for Gobe to fight there first. Far better would be to worm into the home office market, and try to get employees familiar with it so they can demand their employers reconsider.
By making it almost pleasant to use their product (and for a reasonable price), they get my vote.
Videos episodes of the Charlie Rose show can be ordered from http://www.800-all-news.com/transcripts.shtml. Their online search engine doesn't return values up to the present, so you'll either have to do it over the phone (1-800-255-6397) or via email ( web-orders@800-ALL-NEWS.com. Since you get something of a discount when ordering multiple transcripts, you might also want to order last May's episode where Charlie Rose interviewed Linus about his book.
http://itworld.newmediary.com/. They've got a fairly extensive list of RFPs and let you post yours for free, and I know a couple open-source developers who've had success with them in the past.
But I do have to wonder why you're bothering with RFPs at all: the beauty of open source is that you aren't beholden to an autocratic developer. You can just grab the source, hand it to a competent individual inside your company, give him/her a few weeks to get up to snuff, and roll it from there.
Given that, it's sad that open source and RFPs haven't mixed much in the past. Even sadder now that lots of companies that hoped to cash in on open-source development are running out of venture capital. If open source is ever going to achieve the level of market penetration that its proponents hope, we're going to have to start thinking about these little things a bit more.
While Sony is really earns its bread in the liscensing market rather than the hardware market, it is still important for them to put units in consumers' homes, because that is the only way to build a userbase for PS2 games.
What is the additional cost for releasing a linux-enabled PS2 machine? Not terribly much. It's the sort of thing linux enthusiasts might release on their own in a few months, given a chance. By putting in this marginal amount of effort, Sony gets both a more valuable commodity and some brownie points among linux enthusiasts.
I honestly can't see a single downside for them. The remarkable point is not that the PS2 is capable of this but rather that Sony actually had the foresight to act upon it. That's the hallmark of a nimble corporation and speaks loads for their future.
Of course, Sony is also in bed with the RIAA and the dvd cca, so anyone who buys a PS2 is going to hell in my book, but that's your choice.
There is precisely one justification for the secret courts established under the Foreign Intellgence Surveillance Act: national security. The secret courts that meet in that jurisdiction concern themselves with matters of espionage and highly sensitive information that would jeopardize national security if made public.
I personally can't stand it. The 5th amendment and 6th amendments clearly lay out due process and the rights of the accused who stands trial, and few if any of these guarantees are honored by these secret tribunals. There is no textual basis for a national-security exception to any of the Bill of Rights, and it flies in the face of fundamental principles of fairness.
However, at least with national security, we have a really damn important interest being protected; if anything would justify tearing up the Bill of Rights, it would be on the level of national security. But what in tarnation is there to protect in a cyber court? Trade secrets? The integrity of corporate networks? Is this truly something so pernicious and of such overriding importance? Hardly.
They've got their national-security exception. If it's "terrorism" and it's conducted by foreign agents, then the Foreign Intelligence court already has jurisdiction. If we go down this path, then nothing will remain protected under the Bill of Rights and the Constitution in general, and that is a very scary prospect.
Hooray for corporate interests, indeed.
If you're wondering what the heck a preemptive kernel entails, then here's some background.
Also, if you don't like Robert Love's implementation, then Andrew Morton maintains a patch with a similar low-latency goal.
Contested
And why are these fees being charged at all? There's no significant additional processing required to resolve each of these disputes, and the initial price of registration should be sufficient to cover this eventuality. Charging the fee doesn't discourage claims after the fact, and all the information has already been collected by neulevel. It wouldn't be the first or last time a quasi-legal organization has bilked consumers, but there's still no excuse for it.
It'll hardly be the first time the sequels are delayed. Broken ankles and other health complications have already pushed production back beyond the original timelines.
Worldwide. In the US, it's more like "a couple", since it's mostly confined to people like veterinarians, who have a lot more contact with sick animals than does the rest of the population.
As late as last May, the major news services were all abuzz about supercavitation technology and the Kursk — everything pointed in the direction of Shkval, Russia's supercavitation torpedo that's been in development for the past couple decades and which is supposed to go in excess of hundreds of miles per hour under water inside an envelope of gas it generates.
Why haven't we heard anything more since? Even if it turns out not to be true, it's nevertheless intriguing and worthy of as much speculation as the rest of what we've been hearing (in the absence of any real news to report these past months on the subject). When they bring the Kursk back up, it's bound to be missing large chunks where classified hardware was stripped out in the intervening months.
If the media fail to titilate us with wild speculation about sexy technology, then they're not the media we've come to know and love. I for one am still waiting on baited breath.
While the superficial similarities between rewarding spook hackers and punishing civilian hackers seem sufficient to establish gross hypocrisy on the part of the Federal government, it's in fact little different from the time-honored tradition of our military and other militaries which, for aeons, have hired people to commit the same act of killing that would be punished as murder if it had been committed by a civilian acting without state authorization. Big deal.
What's more, the Sixth Amendment's "double jeopardy" clause is still in effect (one of the few clauses with some teeth left in it after decades of judicial erosion). If the Federal government establishes an arrangement whereby criminal acts are committed by individuals acting under government aegis and with the encouragement of state agents, then those acts cannot be subsequently punished (apart from certain situations such as genocide and other circumscribed offenses). One only need remind oneself of Whitey Bulger (on the FBI's most wanted list) who has gotten the FBI into a bit of a morass by acting as an informant for many years and during those years receiving tacit permission from the FBI to commit all manner of offenses including murder. The egg on the FBI's face hangs pendulously, because the FBI is now without legal recourse to punish those acts.
That glib tone is unbecoming, by the way.