Does anybody know why the gyroscopes failed, or what plans are being made to avoid the same problem when they are serviced?
Will there be any problems with the telescope while it's in safe mode? I assume it's all closed up to protect itself - can operators still send it commands to control its orbit & possibly protect itself from solar flares? How will the lack of any gyroscopes affect operator's control of it?
Given the emphasis on redundancy, it's pretty amazing that FOUR gyroscopes ended up failing. Are the four gyroscopes all of the same type? I wonder if they all failed the same way. Does this point out the typical "RISKS" failure where somebody has provided redundancy but using identical equipment with the exact same weaknesses (i.e., redundant in number but not in character)?
If so, do they have any plans to try and avoid the same problem?
Sometimes I wish taxpayers had the right to tell the government to stop wasting their money.
The irony of this statement floored me, and I hope you were being sarcastic. Ideally, the government _is_ the taxpayers, and we have every right to do so.
What scares me is that I didn't find that statement sarcastic at all - until you mentioned it. I've pretty much concluded that the US government as a whole doesn't really care about the needs of "average" individual citizens, except maybe for Public Relations purposes - their focus is on large organizations, companies & people with lots of money. The system has been set up to be very resistant to efforts to change it.
This really sounds like game consoles are going to evolve into home terminals (or "display servesr", if you want to use the X paradigm:) for Internet-enabled applications (probably mostly games for the early applications).
If Sun gets their vision of NCs in the corporate workplace, I can see a gradual convergence between work & home of networked client/server applications.
Actually, since they DID extract a comment & edit it, does this count as "Fair Use"? If they had reproduced the comment in its entirety, then they might have been violating copyright, but since they didn't...
Does "Fair Use" also mean that you have to "maintain" the original meaning of the information which you extracted?
Hiding the keyboard signals seem to be reasonably easy to solve - I dunno about the signals coming off buses & disk drives (the only practical way to hide these might be to use a shielded case).
As far as the monitor information is concerned, what if the display was generating by modulating a "white noise" signal? In other words, you start out with a white noise signal, & direct it preferentially toward different parts of the screen to vary intensity (I'm assuming you could deal w/color issues in this somehow).
I guess this would be like the old vector-tracing scopes, except the phosphors would probably decay a lot more rapidly, allowing the pictures to be to be changed more quickly. The random nature of the base signal might make the picture a little more "fuzzy" (depending on the precision of the modulation electronics). As a good benefit, you wouldn't have any problems with refresh rates - since a "refresh signal" wouldn't really exist.
I was predicting that this was going to happen years ago - there are too many control advantages for the companies who are providing these services (controlling piracy, access, upgrades, etc). Assuming a reliable network with reasonable latency & bandwidth (yeah, I know, a huge assumption:), it's the only way to go in today's business climate. Frankly, for most people's purposes, I don't really think it's a bad thing (except maybe for privacy).
I expect that "operating systems" will probaby become platforms for those client applications, and the little "utilities" which would be too wasteful to run on the servers. (Which might include simple viewers & stuff like word processors, etc.) This is actually not necessarily a bad thing either, since it will keep the operating systems relatively simple instead of continually adding "features" to the operating system to try and make specific applications "better".
An interesting concept would be whether the companies giving you these "client" applications would try and use their client applications to send you "distributed work", in effect trying to use your client's resources to perform the company's activities. From the company's side, this would be great - from the consumer's side, there should probably be a way to control this kind of thing.
No, I am NOT thinking of DIVX - part of my major criticism about lack of convenience is having to deal with the physical media. I want my movies downloaded (possibly streamed) or sent through something like a cable connection, where I don't have to deal with any physical media.
I'm thinking of something like those "Digital Jukebox" services being offered by quite a few cable companies, where you pick any song you want to listen to which is being offered by the cable company & it is played through your cable connection.
The setup is nice, but I don't use it because it's too expensive, and the libraries hosted by the cable companies often don't have the songs I'm interested in hearing.
I'd like a really cheap pay-per-play (like $0.25 per play) so that you'd have to be a real nut to spend the time, effort & money to pirate the show, and I'd like to be able to select, at any time, from ALL of the movies or audio records that have been compiled by the companies that were responsible for producing them (although perhaps other companies could be responsible for compiling these libraries).
Once you have a huge selection of titles available for really cheap, there's no motivation for piracy - and many people will probably be more likely to explore some of the often-overlooked material that clutters these huge archives. Witness how many people "wander" through the MP3 archives, just because it's so easy to check out different songs and you don't have to pay anything for it.
Stallman wasn't saying that you can't stop someone from releasing your GPLed code as proprietary - he was saying that you can't stop THEM from releasing THEIR code outside of the GPL.
They, however, do not have the "right" to release YOUR code outside of the GPL, and if you catch them, you (if it holds up) have the legal right under the GPL to force them to take your code out.
I don't think the emotion control is really all that different from "better living through chemistry", i.e., drugs, except that the precision & potential effect will be much stronger. I can easily see people becoming "wireheads". I'd be REALLY scared in the situation where governments/organizations wouldn't think twice about torturing people - I doubt there's a human alive that could stand being broken when their brain's pain centers, depression, etc., are being directly stimulated.
As far as helping disabled people are concerned, this would probably be true for missing limbs/prosthetic situations - in the case of nerve damage, like with Reeve, I suspect they'd be happier if the scientists just figure out how to regenerate that damaged nerve tissue.
What might really be interesting for controlling your own muscles via computer, if the control is complete & precise enough, is the possibility for muscle training - slap in a two-month training program for your favorite martial art & be absolutely SURE that you are performing the katas & drills correctly because they were recorded from a master's movements (although I suspect there will have to be some tweaking by the playback mechanism for differences in body-type).
If we had on-demand access to the full collections of movies produced by these studios, for something as cheap as $0.25-$1.00 per play, then very few people would really find it practical to copy them, much less store them.
Not sure how much money the studios would be able to make - the major cost savings would be getting rid of the physical distribution of media (which might upset the manufacturers of that physical media), but the overhead of producing the programs & doing the marketing & advertising for the programs is still there.
Can anyone else think of a distribution model which will allow the people who produce these programs to make a buck? Or will there be a trend toward finding ways to make producing the programs cheaper, so that companies WILL be able to make a buck, even if they can't charge much?
You raise some good points. Indeed, reviewers for journals are generally not paid for reviewing submissions. However, this is generally considered part of a researcher's duties. That sense of obligation is not in place for reviewing patents; how do we generate it de novo?
I don't have all the answers (you'd have to bow down & worship me if I did:), but we can probably continue with this train of thought. Too bad this subject is so old & our moderated scores so low that hardly anybody else is going to look at this conversation. Ah well - it will at least provide an opportunity to clarify the thoughts in my own head.
To start the whole process, we can probably look to professional organizations, like IEEE & ACM - they already perform similar services for the scientific research, they might be able to extend the concept to "innovative" inventions in the same fields, as well as providing a starting point for the "pool" of peers for reviewing the patents in the first place
As I thought might be occurring in science, perhaps could be made reality for patent applications - journals could pay some "respected" professionals to perform the initial patent reviews. It might only be necessary to "prime the pump" - once people's names start appearing in the patent journals, then you might get more people interested as reviewers (esp. if they are die-hard "what's coming up next" people like me:)
I suspect that with a system like this, there will be a great deal of self-censorship involved - since the invention will have to be innovative _in_the_eyes_of_your_peers_, and not just on a tiny legal technicality, it won't be useful to submit large numbers of variations of already-existing inventions.
There's also the issue of secrecy. Patent applications are not published in the U.S.; only granted patents are. Naturally, inventors do not want details of their inventions getting out any earlier than they have to. Most countries do publish applications, but only 18 months after they are filed. (Note: I'm not saying this is right or wrong, but you would find a lot of resistance to the giving up of some measure of secrecy that switching to a peer review system would entail.)
I don't doubt this - I've heard insane stories of paranoia about patent-pending ideas. I suspect that similar worries occur for scientific research which might have extremely potentially lucrative applications. For anything that a company REALLY doesn't want available for public review, they might as well go the trade secret route & keep it locked away from anyone. (Of course, a company might try and conceal that it is violating somebody else's patent this way...)
In a way, the act of publishing in the peer review system provides a very solid "notarization" function in the eyes of the field, so that it will be fairly obvious who was "first" with the idea, and since the invention are reviewed more on fundamentals than legalities, it will be harder to challenge.
Finally, there's the legal knowledge that's needed as well. Patent examiners not only have subject knowledge, but a considerable understanding of patent law as well. Peer reviewers don't generally have this knowledge--nothing beyond the subject knowledge is necessary for reviewing journal submissions, after all. Granted, you could provide the training in patent law that reviewers needed, but the time involved is yet another obstacle which some people will not want to deal with, especially if they are not being compensated for it.
My impression of patent law is that most of it, excluding the aspects of registering & enforcing patents, is related to criteria designed to make the identification of an "innovative" invention more objective. This actually puts patent examiners into quite a straightjacket - all you have to do is satisfy the LEGAL definition of "innovation", which apparently has little to do with whether or not other practitioners in your field would agree that your invention was "innovative". Thus, the art of getting a patent becomes more the field of lawyers rather than "innovators".
There could probably be a reasonable argument that the reviewers SHOULDN'T have to know much "patent law" - since the purpose of the patent system is to register "innovative" inventions, if the reviewers (hopefully representative of the field) find the invention innovative, then the patent system has performed its function successfully.
I doubt that blindly following the scientific peer review process would work - there's simply too much money involved with patents for businesses to be satisfied with such an informal process. I'm daydreaming that some variation on it, however, might be more "fair" and robust than the current incarnation of the patent system (not that I expect any changes to occur because of MY musings:)
This kind of violation will occur over & over (and most people will never know it's happening) until operating systems provide a foolproof filesystem & network "sandbox"/jail where "untrusted" software is executed by default, and any attempts to escape the jail or either intercepted or decoyed.
Then, when you catch a process trying to access something it shouldn't need, you'll at least have a clue as to where to start asking questions, before you let everything leak. This should also handle a lot of common Trojan horses.
W/o such a capability, everybody will pretty much have to rely on the diligence & reports of hackers (used in the context of people who have a great deal of curiousity about their systems) to find out that something is up - and that it's already too late.
How is the current scientific review system set up?
The peers in that system aren't necessarily being paid directly to review papers - they're being paid to be professors & researchers (some inside corporations, I might add) and they cooperate to review the scientific research because of the benefit (for themselves & to the system). (Perhaps I'm wrong about this - do the journals pay people to do the reviews for them?)
In either case, the government shouldn't have to pay for examiners - the only real part that the government should have is the registration & enforcement of a patent once it has been awarded. It should be up to the peers in a field to decide whether an invention is really innovative or not.
This is probably a fairly Libertarian concept - I wouldn't really know, since I don't really pay too much attention to the Libertarian party.
BTW, your message directly addresses a couple of problems with the current system.
1. The patent office's resources are fixed by whatever can be begged from Congress, which will probably have more to do with budget battles than the actual work load of the patent office. A peer review system will probably be more flexible & responsive to the demands of the system.
2. Examiners may be "up to date" when they enter the patent office, but given the overload which they are subjected to, how long will they stay up to date? You have to spend time either reading patents or keeping up to date, and it's a little difficult doing both at the same time (you could probably argue that reading the patents will keep you up to date, but I suspect that there is a gradual divergence w/o a constant effort to stay up to date). The only real solution to this is for the "reviewer" to be selected from a pool from the field which is subject to constant churn of new experience - which definitely doesn't happen in the Patent Office.
Operating systems really need to put any "untrusted" process into a filesystem & network "sandbox"/jail, where any attempt by the process to reach "outside" of its jail has to be certified by the user (or perhaps by a trusted privacy group?).
How 'bout if the patent system was structured similarly to the scientific review system?
Every submission would get reviewed by an anonymous group of peers who would get picked from a "qualified pool", and then published in whatever journal(s) were appropriate for that sort of invention. The peers would be responsible for determining whether the invention was "novel" for that field. This would take care of the problem where examiners who don't have any real knowledge of a field are making decisions about the inventions in that field.
First, the very idea that Intel could prevent every single one of the 150+ motherboard manufacturers from building an Athlon board is silly. A good portion of these motherboard manufacturers don't even use Intel parts (other than the CPU) on their boards making them completely independent from Intel. The high costs and lack of availability have more to do with demand and costs of building and producing the motherboards.
I don't find it all that silly. Those motherboard manufacturers need cooperation from Intel to easily build motherboards which will WORK with the chips (esp. w/RAMBUS issues). Based on my experience as an engineer, I really doubt that it is possible to build a superior-performance motherboard just from the CPU specifications.
All it would take is to spread a little rumor to those 150+ motherboard manufacturers that their support won't be quite up-to-snuff if they work with AMD, and they'll be REALLY reluctant to compete against the other manufacturer's without Intel's help.
Re:Hard science fiction is soft
on
Darwin's Radio
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· Score: 1
Take Ringworld for example. As an abtract idea, it's brilliant! An artifical ecosystem that offers the benefits of a planet on a huge scale. The first novel however, left glaring holes in it's implemenation. (The ring world is unstable! The ring world is unstable!) Erosion, instability, and numerous other snafus were detected and addressed in the next novel (which also contained it's share of snafus)
From what I vaguely remember from the novels, I thought that the "Ringworld" was a bunch of free-floating trees with "orbital correction" capabilities. I know that a static "ring" around the sun is unstable, but given that the "ring" in those novels is actually dynamic, doesn't that make it theoretically possible for it to hold itself together?
Any test put together by a human being (or human being(s)) can be fooled by a sufficiently intelligent/perceptive human being.
A fair number of adolescents, who are quite often hyper-sensitive to hypocrisy & being manipulated, are going to figure out the best "profile" to answer the questions on the test with. And they'll probably tell their friends.
And the best liars are those people who can "become" someone else, or truly BELIEVE their lie; who can so completely act as if the lie were truth, that if the lie is anything about bald physical facts, there is no test in the world which will be able to figure out what that person REALLY feels.
I thought I heard that you were "helping" ZeroKnowledge systems with their "Freedom" project. Is this true (or am I thinking of somebody else, or was it just marketing)?
If true, what do you think about the potential of a system like Freedom to protect people's privacy? Will it have to expand out of proprietary control before it becomes ubiquitous?
I'm amused - I put my comment out as a joke (like the article), but it looks like at least a couple people took it seriously, at least enough to moderate it as Insightful.
Still, the fact that the "joke" article evoked so many strong emotions seems to indicate a great deal of resentment built up among the people who identify with the geek/nerd stereotype.
This is just another link in the chain of evidence showing that society discriminates socially against geeks, even as they provide significant benefits to that society.
I think there should be some kind of anti-discrimination law disallowing the use of "geekiness" as a criteria when deciding whether to go out on a date with a geek.
This ties into a story I remember seeing on/. earlier, about work to allow paying from small computing devices like cell phones & palmtops.
I can imagine it being very convenient - you step up to a vending machine (or some other service-providing device), it sends you a small signed contract via an infrared link, you review the contract (which might include details like transferring $x from your bank account to theirs), you sign it by putting your finger on a finger-print reader built into your device (which is used to unlock a possibly longer, randomly-generated private key) and then both parties can transmit the contract to their respective banks (or maybe the vending machine will take care of that, since it's more important for the machine to make sure that payment is taken care of before delivering the goods...)
There's probably lots of variations on this kind of thing - having a biometric sensor installed on your "personal electronic device" which allows you to unlock keys sounds like a very convenient method of authentication & encryption. And if somebody steals your "PED", they'd have to steal your fingers too, for it to do them any good.
It might make an interesting test bed for a fault-tolerant system. If your monster/process can survive in the middle of Quake or Doom deathmatch, it'll survive anything!
I'm inclined to think that this will be shot down due to the sheer influence of upscale voters getting off on cheap access to the Internet, but it's hard to underestimate the stupidity of a federal bureaucracy, esp. when large companies are throwing vast amounts of money at legislators.
I guess it kind of depends on how the ISPs would pass the charge onto the customers - if they passed the charge directly to the customers, then the heavy users would get dinged really big (and might end up going to a always-on connection), whereas the casual user might just note a little rise in the cost. The ISPs might spread the cost out among all their users, in which case everybody would notice the price of the service had gone up a bit. In either case, would there really be all that much of a difference in cost to the average user?
In either case, I would expect even more pressure for people to move to always-on net connections. What would cause the most PR damage is that the people who don't have such connections available (rural, ghettos, etc) would be forced to pay the extra - and they're exactly the people who can't afford such "regressive taxes".
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Does anybody know why the gyroscopes failed, or what plans are being made to avoid the same problem when they are serviced?
Will there be any problems with the telescope while it's in safe mode? I assume it's all closed up to protect itself - can operators still send it commands to control its orbit & possibly protect itself from solar flares? How will the lack of any gyroscopes affect operator's control of it?
Given the emphasis on redundancy, it's pretty amazing that FOUR gyroscopes ended up failing. Are the four gyroscopes all of the same type? I wonder if they all failed the same way. Does this point out the typical "RISKS" failure where somebody has provided redundancy but using identical equipment with the exact same weaknesses (i.e., redundant in number but not in character)?
If so, do they have any plans to try and avoid the same problem?
What scares me is that I didn't find that statement sarcastic at all - until you mentioned it. I've pretty much concluded that the US government as a whole doesn't really care about the needs of "average" individual citizens, except maybe for Public Relations purposes - their focus is on large organizations, companies & people with lots of money. The system has been set up to be very resistant to efforts to change it.
This really sounds like game consoles are going to evolve into home terminals (or "display servesr", if you want to use the X paradigm :) for Internet-enabled applications (probably mostly games for the early applications).
If Sun gets their vision of NCs in the corporate workplace, I can see a gradual convergence between work & home of networked client/server applications.
Will there be a market for PCI cards which provide a "virtual" ISA bus to support legacy ISA cards?
Actually, since they DID extract a comment & edit it, does this count as "Fair Use"? If they had reproduced the comment in its entirety, then they might have been violating copyright, but since they didn't...
Does "Fair Use" also mean that you have to "maintain" the original meaning of the information which you extracted?
Hiding the keyboard signals seem to be reasonably easy to solve - I dunno about the signals coming off buses & disk drives (the only practical way to hide these might be to use a shielded case).
As far as the monitor information is concerned, what if the display was generating by modulating a "white noise" signal? In other words, you start out with a white noise signal, & direct it preferentially toward different parts of the screen to vary intensity (I'm assuming you could deal w/color issues in this somehow).
I guess this would be like the old vector-tracing scopes, except the phosphors would probably decay a lot more rapidly, allowing the pictures to be to be changed more quickly. The random nature of the base signal might make the picture a little more "fuzzy" (depending on the precision of the modulation electronics). As a good benefit, you wouldn't have any problems with refresh rates - since a "refresh signal" wouldn't really exist.
I was predicting that this was going to happen years ago - there are too many control advantages for the companies who are providing these services (controlling piracy, access, upgrades, etc). Assuming a reliable network with reasonable latency & bandwidth (yeah, I know, a huge assumption :), it's the only way to go in today's business climate. Frankly, for most people's purposes, I don't really think it's a bad thing (except maybe for privacy).
I expect that "operating systems" will probaby become platforms for those client applications, and the little "utilities" which would be too wasteful to run on the servers. (Which might include simple viewers & stuff like word processors, etc.) This is actually not necessarily a bad thing either, since it will keep the operating systems relatively simple instead of continually adding "features" to the operating system to try and make specific applications "better".
An interesting concept would be whether the companies giving you these "client" applications would try and use their client applications to send you "distributed work", in effect trying to use your client's resources to perform the company's activities. From the company's side, this would be great - from the consumer's side, there should probably be a way to control this kind of thing.
No, I am NOT thinking of DIVX - part of my major criticism about lack of convenience is having to deal with the physical media. I want my movies downloaded (possibly streamed) or sent through something like a cable connection, where I don't have to deal with any physical media.
I'm thinking of something like those "Digital Jukebox" services being offered by quite a few cable companies, where you pick any song you want to listen to which is being offered by the cable company & it is played through your cable connection.
The setup is nice, but I don't use it because it's too expensive, and the libraries hosted by the cable companies often don't have the songs I'm interested in hearing.
I'd like a really cheap pay-per-play (like $0.25 per play) so that you'd have to be a real nut to spend the time, effort & money to pirate the show, and I'd like to be able to select, at any time, from ALL of the movies or audio records that have been compiled by the companies that were responsible for producing them (although perhaps other companies could be responsible for compiling these libraries).
Once you have a huge selection of titles available for really cheap, there's no motivation for piracy - and many people will probably be more likely to explore some of the often-overlooked material that clutters these huge archives. Witness how many people "wander" through the MP3 archives, just because it's so easy to check out different songs and you don't have to pay anything for it.
Stallman wasn't saying that you can't stop someone from releasing your GPLed code as proprietary - he was saying that you can't stop THEM from releasing THEIR code outside of the GPL.
They, however, do not have the "right" to release YOUR code outside of the GPL, and if you catch them, you (if it holds up) have the legal right under the GPL to force them to take your code out.
I don't think the emotion control is really all that different from "better living through chemistry", i.e., drugs, except that the precision & potential effect will be much stronger. I can easily see people becoming "wireheads". I'd be REALLY scared in the situation where governments/organizations wouldn't think twice about torturing people - I doubt there's a human alive that could stand being broken when their brain's pain centers, depression, etc., are being directly stimulated.
As far as helping disabled people are concerned, this would probably be true for missing limbs/prosthetic situations - in the case of nerve damage, like with Reeve, I suspect they'd be happier if the scientists just figure out how to regenerate that damaged nerve tissue.
What might really be interesting for controlling your own muscles via computer, if the control is complete & precise enough, is the possibility for muscle training - slap in a two-month training program for your favorite martial art & be absolutely SURE that you are performing the katas & drills correctly because they were recorded from a master's movements (although I suspect there will have to be some tweaking by the playback mechanism for differences in body-type).
If we had on-demand access to the full collections of movies produced by these studios, for something as cheap as $0.25-$1.00 per play, then very few people would really find it practical to copy them, much less store them.
Not sure how much money the studios would be able to make - the major cost savings would be getting rid of the physical distribution of media (which might upset the manufacturers of that physical media), but the overhead of producing the programs & doing the marketing & advertising for the programs is still there.
Can anyone else think of a distribution model which will allow the people who produce these programs to make a buck? Or will there be a trend toward finding ways to make producing the programs cheaper, so that companies WILL be able to make a buck, even if they can't charge much?
I don't have all the answers (you'd have to bow down & worship me if I did :), but we can probably continue with this train of thought. Too bad this subject is so old & our moderated scores so low that hardly anybody else is going to look at this conversation. Ah well - it will at least provide an opportunity to clarify the thoughts in my own head.
To start the whole process, we can probably look to professional organizations, like IEEE & ACM - they already perform similar services for the scientific research, they might be able to extend the concept to "innovative" inventions in the same fields, as well as providing a starting point for the "pool" of peers for reviewing the patents in the first place
As I thought might be occurring in science, perhaps could be made reality for patent applications - journals could pay some "respected" professionals to perform the initial patent reviews. It might only be necessary to "prime the pump" - once people's names start appearing in the patent journals, then you might get more people interested as reviewers (esp. if they are die-hard "what's coming up next" people like me :)
I suspect that with a system like this, there will be a great deal of self-censorship involved - since the invention will have to be innovative _in_the_eyes_of_your_peers_, and not just on a tiny legal technicality, it won't be useful to submit large numbers of variations of already-existing inventions.
I don't doubt this - I've heard insane stories of paranoia about patent-pending ideas. I suspect that similar worries occur for scientific research which might have extremely potentially lucrative applications. For anything that a company REALLY doesn't want available for public review, they might as well go the trade secret route & keep it locked away from anyone. (Of course, a company might try and conceal that it is violating somebody else's patent this way...)
In a way, the act of publishing in the peer review system provides a very solid "notarization" function in the eyes of the field, so that it will be fairly obvious who was "first" with the idea, and since the invention are reviewed more on fundamentals than legalities, it will be harder to challenge.
My impression of patent law is that most of it, excluding the aspects of registering & enforcing patents, is related to criteria designed to make the identification of an "innovative" invention more objective. This actually puts patent examiners into quite a straightjacket - all you have to do is satisfy the LEGAL definition of "innovation", which apparently has little to do with whether or not other practitioners in your field would agree that your invention was "innovative". Thus, the art of getting a patent becomes more the field of lawyers rather than "innovators".
There could probably be a reasonable argument that the reviewers SHOULDN'T have to know much "patent law" - since the purpose of the patent system is to register "innovative" inventions, if the reviewers (hopefully representative of the field) find the invention innovative, then the patent system has performed its function successfully.
I doubt that blindly following the scientific peer review process would work - there's simply too much money involved with patents for businesses to be satisfied with such an informal process. I'm daydreaming that some variation on it, however, might be more "fair" and robust than the current incarnation of the patent system (not that I expect any changes to occur because of MY musings :)
This kind of violation will occur over & over (and most people will never know it's happening) until operating systems provide a foolproof filesystem & network "sandbox"/jail where "untrusted" software is executed by default, and any attempts to escape the jail or either intercepted or decoyed.
Then, when you catch a process trying to access something it shouldn't need, you'll at least have a clue as to where to start asking questions, before you let everything leak. This should also handle a lot of common Trojan horses.
W/o such a capability, everybody will pretty much have to rely on the diligence & reports of hackers (used in the context of people who have a great deal of curiousity about their systems) to find out that something is up - and that it's already too late.
How is the current scientific review system set up?
The peers in that system aren't necessarily being paid directly to review papers - they're being paid to be professors & researchers (some inside corporations, I might add) and they cooperate to review the scientific research because of the benefit (for themselves & to the system). (Perhaps I'm wrong about this - do the journals pay people to do the reviews for them?)
In either case, the government shouldn't have to pay for examiners - the only real part that the government should have is the registration & enforcement of a patent once it has been awarded. It should be up to the peers in a field to decide whether an invention is really innovative or not.
This is probably a fairly Libertarian concept - I wouldn't really know, since I don't really pay too much attention to the Libertarian party.
BTW, your message directly addresses a couple of problems with the current system.
1. The patent office's resources are fixed by whatever can be begged from Congress, which will probably have more to do with budget battles than the actual work load of the patent office. A peer review system will probably be more flexible & responsive to the demands of the system.
2. Examiners may be "up to date" when they enter the patent office, but given the overload which they are subjected to, how long will they stay up to date? You have to spend time either reading patents or keeping up to date, and it's a little difficult doing both at the same time (you could probably argue that reading the patents will keep you up to date, but I suspect that there is a gradual divergence w/o a constant effort to stay up to date). The only real solution to this is for the "reviewer" to be selected from a pool from the field which is subject to constant churn of new experience - which definitely doesn't happen in the Patent Office.
Operating systems really need to put any "untrusted" process into a filesystem & network "sandbox"/jail, where any attempt by the process to reach "outside" of its jail has to be certified by the user (or perhaps by a trusted privacy group?).
How 'bout if the patent system was structured similarly to the scientific review system?
Every submission would get reviewed by an anonymous group of peers who would get picked from a "qualified pool", and then published in whatever journal(s) were appropriate for that sort of invention. The peers would be responsible for determining whether the invention was "novel" for that field. This would take care of the problem where examiners who don't have any real knowledge of a field are making decisions about the inventions in that field.
I don't find it all that silly. Those motherboard manufacturers need cooperation from Intel to easily build motherboards which will WORK with the chips (esp. w/RAMBUS issues). Based on my experience as an engineer, I really doubt that it is possible to build a superior-performance motherboard just from the CPU specifications.
All it would take is to spread a little rumor to those 150+ motherboard manufacturers that their support won't be quite up-to-snuff if they work with AMD, and they'll be REALLY reluctant to compete against the other manufacturer's without Intel's help.
From what I vaguely remember from the novels, I thought that the "Ringworld" was a bunch of free-floating trees with "orbital correction" capabilities. I know that a static "ring" around the sun is unstable, but given that the "ring" in those novels is actually dynamic, doesn't that make it theoretically possible for it to hold itself together?
Any test put together by a human being (or human being(s)) can be fooled by a sufficiently intelligent/perceptive human being.
A fair number of adolescents, who are quite often hyper-sensitive to hypocrisy & being manipulated, are going to figure out the best "profile" to answer the questions on the test with. And they'll probably tell their friends.
And the best liars are those people who can "become" someone else, or truly BELIEVE their lie; who can so completely act as if the lie were truth, that if the lie is anything about bald physical facts, there is no test in the world which will be able to figure out what that person REALLY feels.
I thought I heard that you were "helping" ZeroKnowledge systems with their "Freedom" project. Is this true (or am I thinking of somebody else, or was it just marketing)?
If true, what do you think about the potential of a system like Freedom to protect people's privacy? Will it have to expand out of proprietary control before it becomes ubiquitous?
I'm amused - I put my comment out as a joke (like the article), but it looks like at least a couple people took it seriously, at least enough to moderate it as Insightful.
Still, the fact that the "joke" article evoked so many strong emotions seems to indicate a great deal of resentment built up among the people who identify with the geek/nerd stereotype.
This is just another link in the chain of evidence showing that society discriminates socially against geeks, even as they provide significant benefits to that society.
I think there should be some kind of anti-discrimination law disallowing the use of "geekiness" as a criteria when deciding whether to go out on a date with a geek.
This ties into a story I remember seeing on /. earlier, about work to allow paying from small computing devices like cell phones & palmtops.
I can imagine it being very convenient - you step up to a vending machine (or some other service-providing device), it sends you a small signed contract via an infrared link, you review the contract (which might include details like transferring $x from your bank account to theirs), you sign it by putting your finger on a finger-print reader built into your device (which is used to unlock a possibly longer, randomly-generated private key) and then both parties can transmit the contract to their respective banks (or maybe the vending machine will take care of that, since it's more important for the machine to make sure that payment is taken care of before delivering the goods...)
There's probably lots of variations on this kind of thing - having a biometric sensor installed on your "personal electronic device" which allows you to unlock keys sounds like a very convenient method of authentication & encryption. And if somebody steals your "PED", they'd have to steal your fingers too, for it to do them any good.
It might make an interesting test bed for a fault-tolerant system. If your monster/process can survive in the middle of Quake or Doom deathmatch, it'll survive anything!
I'm inclined to think that this will be shot down due to the sheer influence of upscale voters getting off on cheap access to the Internet, but it's hard to underestimate the stupidity of a federal bureaucracy, esp. when large companies are throwing vast amounts of money at legislators.
I guess it kind of depends on how the ISPs would pass the charge onto the customers - if they passed the charge directly to the customers, then the heavy users would get dinged really big (and might end up going to a always-on connection), whereas the casual user might just note a little rise in the cost. The ISPs might spread the cost out among all their users, in which case everybody would notice the price of the service had gone up a bit. In either case, would there really be all that much of a difference in cost to the average user?
In either case, I would expect even more pressure for people to move to always-on net connections. What would cause the most PR damage is that the people who don't have such connections available (rural, ghettos, etc) would be forced to pay the extra - and they're exactly the people who can't afford such "regressive taxes".