That means spending lots of money on R&D, and you don't want to make a discovery, get a product to market and then find that your largest competitor copying your work. That, i think, would cause the death of innovation in so many industries.
What about the situation where you've spent a huge amount of money doing R&D, then discover that some other company thinks your spiffy new product violates an obscure claim of one of their patents? Personally, I think that if you can prove that you did all the R&D, you should be able to reap the benefits of that work regardless of whether some other bozo beat you to the patent office first.
Actually, the controversial patents don't seem to be the ones costing billions of dollars in R&D - the ones that people get pissed off about are the ones where a dozen people with limited imaginations get together, brainstorm some totally obvious variations on existing technology, play "footsie" with the patent office to get them in the records, then try and make money by intimidating people into paying w/o any real intent to develop the idea themselves.
Hmmm...there's an interesting idea. Maybe the viability of the patent could somehow be tied to the amount of documented resources that it took to put the patent together? On second thought, I'm sure that some companies would be able to figure out how to waste millions of dollars pursuing really obvious ideas.
By thunder, I'm going to my precinct caucuses this year, come hell or high water. If we all did the same the system would change literally overnight. The popular will cannot be overwhelmed by all the money and power in the world because IT IS OUR POWER. They do, at the end of the day, need the votes.
And who will you vote for? A Democrat or Republican? If you elect either, do you think anything will change? And if you don't vote for either, do you think it likely that your choice will win?
The only way that power will be taken away from Democrats & Republicans is by ORGANIZING voters - the simple act of voting ain't going to do squat w/o some way of pointing it in the right direction.
I think that nightmare vision of America is here and real. But I don't have to accept it. Nihilistic despair has no room in my life. I choose to live deliberately. I'm going to my precinct caucus and I'm going to fight for a new software patent law and I'll probably fail. Where were you when I needed you?
Looking for somebody to support who I think will be effective at changing the system (I don't include myself as this type of person).
Sounded very inspirational...but I think the problems are more systemic than you are portraying.
I don't think that anything short of a major restructuring (probably considered something like a peaceful revolution) is going to fix problems like these.
Just getting people to the voting booth isn't going to do squat. It's a well-known phenomenon that many people don't feel that the problem is with "their guy", it's with the "other guys" - and we can't do anything about the "other guys". So, everybody keeps ending up voting in the same old bastards into office, complaining about the whole government all the time.
Part of this "blindness" is ignorance - people aren't taught "systems analysis" skills & serious critical thinking as a way of life, so they can't figure out WHY their system is broken & what they can do to fix it - all they can do is figure out which bastard is making the right noises & hope said bastard will do something useful. Personally, I think it's in the best interests of the parties in power to make sure the "population" stays dumb (e.g., make sure they don't get too edicat'd & uppity) so that the population doesn't start thinking for themselves.
You can write to your congresscritter all you want - but if you don't have a million people like you writing the same thing, I don't believe your congresscritter is going to think your message is more important than the $10,000 that the industrial PAC just gave him for "looking the other way" when a license-to-pollute bill just went by.
I also think there is a seriously embarrassing lack of idea churn in the Congress. The Republicans & Democrats have the election laws for all the states tied up so completely (and even without Constitutional support!), any third party needs a billionaire supporter to have a CHANCE to get in the door. It's a positive feedback loop - because people don't think anybody but D&R candidates have a chance, nobody will support anybody except for D&R candidates.
If it were possible for other parties besides the D&R to hold seats proportional to their support in the elections, then I bet you'd see lots of interesting discussion going on. Unfortunately, since the D&R have basically rigged every state election so that you end up only getting a choice between D&R candidates, you end up with an almost wholly D&R Congress, even though other parties might have a decent representation as a fraction of the nation as a whole.
Anyway, I wandered off a bit there - I just get a little bit upset when I see a "All it takes is effort" kind of message - when you have a systemic problem, you can work until you kill yourself, but if you're not applying that to changing the system, then you're just spinning your wheels. And when the system is set up to PREVENT you from changing it, then you're going to have to figure out some way to apply your effort in a way that the system can't stop you to be successful.
Ahah! I sent this question in as a Ask Slashdot, but apparently it wasn't worthy - but now that you've brought it up, I get a chance to ask it...
Exactly *WHY* are cellphones & electronic devices banned on airplanes? I cannot possibly think of an engineer (or engineers) who would build a communications & avionics system which would be resistant to the EMP effects of bolts of lightning, but wouldn't be able to handle 2 watts worth of EM radiation from a cell phone (even lots of them at the same time!).
From what I understand, the airplanes systems don't even operate at the same frequencies that the cell phones use. So how could a lot of cell phones & electronics devices affect an airplane's systems?
Somebody told me that they thought the only reason that it was made a law was because the cell phone companies didn't want people to be able to reach "home base" cell towers from up in the air, and make those $6/minute phones on the seatbacks worthless.
>Good or bad is a value judgement. Value judgements are morals, morals are religion, and church and state are supposed to be seperate I was going to write "religion is a load of crap" but I'm feeling nice today.)
>The government has no place saying whether anything is "good" or "bad". Period. Otherwise, they are practicing organized religion.
This isn't correct - governments are perfectly w/in their rights to (and you could probably argue that they MUST) make value judgements about whether something is "good or bad for the society" - and decide what they have to do to "protect" society.
"morals" are just a suggested code of conduct which help individuals fit into a society w/o causing a lot of trouble. Both government & religion have a vested interest in teaching individuals "morals" for the purpose of preserving their respective social structures.
The main difference between government & religion is that government primarily relies on enforcement, whereas religion primarily relies on brainwashing.:)
This is a "matter-of-degree" comment. "Consequences" could include shooting people for criticizing the president - you'd probably want freedom from THOSE kinds of consequences! But who draws the line & where is the line drawn?
Expressing "unpopular" views is an attempt to "perturb the system", whereas expressing popular views maintains the status quo. Therefore, expressing unpopular views is a riskier undertaking & deserves to be held in higher regard. (Of course, abject stupidity can nullify any effects of this "higher regard":)
IMHO, it is good to have some kind of systemic freedom-of-speech protection from the moderate disapproval of the majority - this allows the regular, low-level perturbations which keep a social system healthy & dynamic.
What I found interesting was a tiny little sentence at the end, where it said that Monsanto was trying to figure out how to turn "on and off" gene sequences by spraying a chemical on the plant. I guess if you don't pay your seed license, they cropdust your fields & your plants become "normal".
Aside from the ethics, doesn't this strike anybody as pretty cool? It's like having controls on a protein-manufacturing machine, turning on & off different proteins by squirting it with different environmental cues.
I wonder if you could have an "all-in-1" common protein plant, where the plant is genetically programmed for lots of different kinds of useful proteins, but you turn "on" & "off" the proteins according to currently desired uses...
This might be more a symptom of the high student-to-teacher ratio. The teacher is so overloaded by paperwork, he or she looks for technological assistance just to stay afloat - and when the students realize that they're not getting "human" treatment, figures that fair is fair...
This is kind of funny in a twisted sort of way - I wonder if things were allowed to continue, would there come a mass academic realization that nobody human has been generating or grading papers for years...
I would hazard a guess that we'll end up coming full circle to oral tests (or at least some kind of test involving interaction between the instructor & each student). Of course, this would require more teachers per student - but at least the teacher wouldn't be "required" to take work home with them.
:rant mode on:
I'm really angry about the current state of the US educational system. (Bias warning: my mother teaches learning-disabled kids from grades 2-5).
Both the top-level decision makers & US society seem to be more interested in paying lip-service to education than supporting it as an opportunity equalizer. I've seem _individuals_ worried about the US education system, but there seems to be a system-wide lack of respect for the importance of education for a healthy society.
The amount of work & training that "good" teachers put themselves through is easily the equal of anything I've ever done in my professional career (and I'm a 10-hour/day workaholic), but after 30+ years of service, they get paid 1/2 of what I"m getting now. As far as I'm concerned, these "good" teachers ought to be getting at least 6-figure salaries & the equivalent respect of any other professional. And they don't just have to work hard - they have to be _SKILLED_ (anybody who doesn't think this, I invite to try and "debug" a class full of 7 year-olds like they debug a set of programs or a piece of hardware)...
There ARE "bad" teachers, but I see this as more of a symptom of the lack of respect that educators get in the US society - with the proper compensation & respect, you'd get top-quality professionals, just like any other field.
Unfortunately, all I see now-a-days is how to make teachers work harder with less money, complaints about how teachers aren't "doing their job" (usually associated with people who want to make their kids aren't "contaminated" by the hoipolloi in the public education system), complaints about too-high taxes (which are lower than just about any other 1st-World country), and skyrocketing corporate subsidies (with skyrocketing corporate profits).
From what I can tell by reading the description, the date on the user's PC isn't important - the key which is used to decrypt the messages is located on the servers at Disappearing Inc., and when the key "expires", it is erased from Disappearing Inc.'s servers.
So, unless you know how to change the date on Disappearing Inc.'s servers (which they might notice after a while), it doesn't really matter what the date on _YOUR_ pc is.
Dunno if they really need to work hard to stop people from saving their own copies - since the scenario they're talking about is having copies left around which can be legally used as evidence against the recipient, I'm sure that the recipient (if intelligent) isn't going to go out of their way to defeat the security.
I'm more interested in some of the other points.
As I understand it, the message is encrypted in its saved form & is decrypted on-the-fly when the user wants to view it. The key is stored on the Disappearing Inc.'s servers, and is supposedly deleted when the message "expires". (I'll make a leap of faith & assume that they either scramble or don't store anything plaintext on non-volatile storage, even in the swap files).
Is the whole reason for this just to make messages "expire"?
It doesn't seem very useful to actually protect the messages from unauthorized viewing w/in the expiration window, other than the "normal" ways of authenticating who's using a PC (is there anyone who feels confident about these)? And you need to be able to connect to DInc.'s servers to retrieve keys.
How strong is their encryption & authentication (for both the messages & the protocol with their servers)? Do they make these details publicly available so that people can audit them?
For their stated application, it still sounds like it would be better to have a setup where everything is encrypted by default, and a defendent would either take the 5th or suffer a convenient "memory lapse" when someone is trying to force them to produce the documents.
(Of course, if everything was encrypted for each individual, then companies wouldn't be able to read their e-mail - aaawwww...)
All this is just pointing out the inadequacy of the way DNS is currently being used to categorize different types of names. There needs to be some kind of way to distinguish between the Real Names of legal entities, as well as "trademarks" that entities might "own".
BTW, does it seem wrong to anybody else that a entities which have no corporeal existence (corporations, for example) have more rights than real individuals?
Mmm...150 gigs, and able to read 1-gig per second?! I can imagine at-least-movie-quality video (could we hit as-good-as-being-there-resolution, or do we need terabytes for that?), incredible soundscapes, multiple languages & channels (can you imagine a movie where you could CHOOSE viewpoints attached to characters or physical locations)?
Actually, with the ability to select viewpoints, it might make viewing movies at home even more pleasurable than going to the theater - and you'd have a justification for watching the same movie over and over, from different viewpoints! (I can't even imagine what kind of headaches this would cause for the movie production logistics though.)
How much storage would you need for a full visual & aural virtual reality though?
This article is quite easy to read, and contains a detailed enough description of the juicy details to hold a geek's interest.
I wonder how much information he would have been able to clean from the system if he hadn't been able to look at the source code for the "photoad" package?
I think _everybody_ on this form _understands_ that the GPL means "free" as in: nobody is supposed to make the software it is applied to "non-free", whereas the BSD license means that you can do any damn thing you feel like to the license.
We _UNDERSTAND_ already - STOP FLOGGING THE HORSE!
How biodegradable & more ways to create plastic?
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Grow Your Own Plastic
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Do we really need more ways to create plastic? Exactly how biodegradable is this stuff? (I'm assuming that it has a different molecular structure than the "usual" stuff produced by refining oil, since that isn't very biodegradable at all.)
Is it edible?:) Actually, it would be interesting if an INSECT found that it was edible, and then acquired a "taste" for regular plastic - would our civilization collapse?
Is IS pretty cool that the plant is actually using carbon from the atmosphere to create the plastic. Could a plant be created which would create "fuel" (like ethanol or methanol or other hydrocarbon) in liquid form (rather than having to harvest the plant & go through some kind of refining process)? That would be cool - little "fuel bulbs" hanging from a tree like fruit. Just imagine what would happen if the tree caught fire though...
What would also be cool is if somebody came up with a plant which ATE plastic and turned it into some other useful form, or maybe back into a tree. You could plant a forest on top of each landfill, and harvest it on a regular basis.
I dunno about what this Warwick fellow did - it seems like to me that implanting something as simple as a small RF loop to identify to your computer (and other devices) is kind of silly. You might as well use an adhesive to attach it to your skin someplace & not worry about rejection problems (except maybe for the adhesive:)
I guess working out the issues involved about actually implanting a foreign device in the body is important. It would've been neat if there had been some more functionality involved though.
Here's an idea that I thought might be kind of interesting:
If researchers can pinpoint some nexus points in the brain where a lot of thought processes go through (not motor actions, although that might be interesting too:), they might be able to hook those points up to a small radio transmitter/receiver (perhaps using some of those brain electrodes which have neurotrophic chemicals causing nerve cells to grow new connections INTO the electrodes).
Get two people with those things installed, configure the transmitter/receivers to BRIDGE the signals between the two brains (but not in a really strong way), then would the two people become aware of each other's thoughts/emotions/memories)?
I firmly believe that large software companies will inevitably gravitate toward a software-service model as the global Internet keeps increasing bandwidth & reducing latency. There are just too many control advantages over such a setup - they don't have to give out any source code, they can upgrade everyone all at once, they can charge by usage, collect lots of statistics on their customers, etc.
I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with the NC concept, either. By keeping the NCs simple (& provide for very limited upgrade capabilities), you can make them cheap & very robust, even for a "man on the street".
If Microsoft is content to provide an NC which anybody can use to access ANY company, then more power to them. I believe this is called "following a standard". I suspect, and probably a lot of people on this forum suspect, that those Microsoft NCs will pretty much mainly work with whatever services that *Microsoft* sets up (big surprise?).
Most of these things sounded pretty serious, except for the last stuff:)
To behave similarly to the Guide (using current technology), I think you'd have to have a wireless connection to access humongo databases from a central server.
The good part would be this: allow anybody who has a Guide to write new entries for the Guide. New entries will be saved in said previously-mentioned humongo databases.
There might be a human staff to review new entries to see if they are informative/funny, replace an existing entry if the new one is better, or perhaps put them both in so that you get a choice or a random selection of entries when you ask.
Each Guide could probably cache an index & whatever entry contents were asked for.
Would it be computationally feasible/cost effective to have the Guide read the entry in a British accent?
Re:too much misinformation...
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CNN On IPv6
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" Wrong, a firewall is the means to do that. You're relying on obscurity to protect you, which, as we all know, is no security at all. "
It appears that I'm misusing the terminology - I usually lump NAT/firewall functionality together - being able to ignore or transform packets based on selection/rejection criteria and knowledge of protocols. In my following comments, when I talk about a NAT server, I also mean firewall functionality.
This has nothing to do with obscurity (and I'm not even sure how you managed to bring that up w/respect to my previous reply!) - the whole point is that the owner of the "gateway" has total control of the flow of information through it.
" You're relying on the upper layer protocols to make assumptions about the lower levels of network. This isn't proper. The network should be the network. The applications shouldn't have to know and shouldn't have to care what boxes they travel through to get to the end station. NAT breaks that. "
I don't see why this is so. As I stated before, properly implemented, on the outside the NAT server looks like a single host. Any applications running on the outside won't be able to tell the difference (logically, although performance-wise might be another issue). Applications on the inside will think they're talking directly to the network through a gateway.
The only problem you have is when you try and use a protocol which requires active participation by the NAT server. *You* think this is a problem - *I* think this is a good way to control who is talking to what, and what they're saying, from my subnet.
" NAT, most frequently, tends to break low traffic datagram protocols. I'm pretty sure what you envision is a network using nothing but TCP, and proxy upon proxy upon proxy to pick up the slack. Sorry, but I find that a bit shortsighted. It may be great for you, but your situation is just that... yours. "
NAT only breaks low traffic datagram protocols which it doesn't understand. I do *not* envision a network with nothing but TCP - I envision a network where I have control over which protocols are allowed through my gateway to the net.
Being able to upgrade a NAT server to understand new protocols is a technical issue which I am not addressing, but which doesn't (to me) seem to be a big deal to solve.
" Just as an example, a local ADSL provider in my area used to do just that... running their entire ISP behind a single NAT-overloaded IPv4 address. It was a dismal failure. Users couldn't play games like Diablo. One person would piss off an IRCOp, and the k-line would ban EVERYBODY. The NAT box would get overloaded and crash, and suddenly nobody had connectivity. "
This points out the stupidity of that ISP provider rather than anything particularly wrong with a NAT implementation. An ISP is supposedly to provide relatively uncontrolled access to the net - a NAT server is going to, because of its nature, "filter" out any protocols it doesn't understand.
ISP service provided by the IT department of a corporation might find a NAT server arrangement quite desirable, since they might not want people to easily play games like Diablo or access IRC. Without the NAT server, they would have a difficult time blocking attempts by people to do these things.
As far as overloading & crashing is concerned, that's just a matter of systems-analysis & load-distribution - the fact that the ISP couldn't handle that just indicates their incompetence.
" A NAT'd IP can never provide the full, unrestricted functionality of a real IP address. End of story. "
A NAT'd IP provides ENHANCED functionality over a "real IP address" - the ability to control how any packets are accepted/rejected/transformed. Your "end of story" is not very final.
Re:too much misinformation...
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CNN On IPv6
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" Seeing some discussion of IPv4/v6 in this forum is starting to scare me, so I thought I'd try and clear up some major misunderstandings. "
I didn't understand your fear, and I didn't really agree with some of the comments you've stated in your article. See my comments below.
" The last point is that people don't think that their toasters need IP addresses. This is also not so! Yes, in the next 10 years your toaster will need an IP address. Why? Because ToasterCompany will want you to do a firmware upgrade on your toaster because their have been field problems (like toasters burning operators). You will go across the wire, flash your firmware, and now your microprocessor-controlled toaster has CrispyToaster(tm) v1.16b firmware. We've already seen web servers implemented in ~4mm PIC processors, so expect them to become popular in the near future in your favorite household appliance. "
While it might be nice for a lot of people to receive automatic upgrades to the firmware in their appliances, a lot of other people are going to want some pretty strict control over what their appliances are talking to & why.
For one thing, allowing an outside entity to control an appliance which you have purchased sounds like a potential privacy issue to me - without some really strict regulations on what a company can do with the information, do I really want a company to know when & how much toast I make? (Slightly more seriously, think DIVX...)
On another note, just imagine if somebody figures out how to hack the authentication protocol for such a firmware download. "Let's just download a little program to their new digital water heater which turns it on full blast & disables the emergency blowout valve..."
In any case, I see NAT as a highly desirable way for me to control what is talking on my subnet to stuff outside the subnet, regardless of whether you're talking IPv4 or IPv6.
" To do this, you need an IP address (to speak IP of course). Please don't tell me how great NAT is... yes, I also run a Linux ipMasq box which works fine, but NAT fundamentally breaks many of the underlying IPv4 mechanisms. We can't keep dumping more patches to the NAT engine every time someone wants to NAT some new protocol; eventually we are going to reach a limit of effort. "
I don't completely understand this - properly implemented, a net running through a NAT server should just look like one really busy server. Routers OUTSIDE the NAT server should only have to treat it as such - they don't need massive routing tables to describe the machines BEHIND the NAT server.
INSIDE the subnet is another matter - I understand the problems with protocols like active FTP, but with regards to my concerns that I described above, I don't really WANT a protocol which I haven't "approved" going through my gateway to the net.
Why is there some limit of effort @ opening NAT walls to different protocols? If the protocol is simple, then you can communicate through a single connection, and the owner of the NAT box can open that single port & attach it to the proper machine.
If the protocol is more complex, then if there's some sort of standard on how to describe the protocol to a NAT engine, then each person who develops the protocol can generate a formal spec. which can be used to tell the NAT how to handle that protocol - if the owner of the NAT box so desires.
" Also note that using ports as a means of "IP expansion" is also a Very Bad Idea. A port is specifically designed (in TCP/IP spec) to represent a different service on a given host, not across different hosts. Yes, you can use this technique in NAT, but it tends to make performance/utilization metrics used by ISP's blatantly wrong, which leads to Bad Things. "
Maybe I'm not quite understanding what you mean by "IP expansion" using ports, but as far as I'm concerned NAT is _supposed_ to make your subnet look like a big server on a single IP address, and I can't think of any performance/utilization metrics used by ISPs where this paradigm would cause "Bad Things" to happen.
Re:The Great Telephone Number Explosion...
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CNN On IPv6
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In Oregon, they're going to be requiring soon that people dial the area codes for local phone calls. This is so they can start using phone numbers with a different area code in the same geographic area - in essence, they will be forcing people to use 10-digit phone numbers to make calls.
Ack - three more digits to remember for every phone number - I wonder if my brain buffer is large enough to deal with the issue, or will it "overflow" and cause memory corruption?
What *I* found interesting in this article was the mention that the same types of diodes could be used to generate many different wavelengths of light very efficiently, and that they were being used for such purposes in Japan as billboards already.
Does anybody have any guesses/info about how what kind of resolution (both spatial & for color) you can generate using these types of diodes, and for how much?
I thought that "filling in the gaps" was a long-standing Hollywood tradition for coming up with "new" stories?
The way I understood it, this was a result of the "corporatization"(sp?) of Hollywood - if a certain type of story is shown to do very well in the marketplace, then the businesspeople who run the corporations figure that they'll be able to make more money with that plot using reusing resources while paying very little extra for new creative input.
Kinda evolutionary in a way (anybody remember memes?) - we keep getting the same kinds of well-worn stories until somebody truly creative throws a mutation in somewhere - but the mutation must survive in the environment of the marketplace for it to become part of the entertainment "ecosystem".
Slashdot Mirror
What about the situation where you've spent a huge amount of money doing R&D, then discover that some other company thinks your spiffy new product violates an obscure claim of one of their patents? Personally, I think that if you can prove that you did all the R&D, you should be able to reap the benefits of that work regardless of whether some other bozo beat you to the patent office first.
Actually, the controversial patents don't seem to be the ones costing billions of dollars in R&D - the ones that people get pissed off about are the ones where a dozen people with limited imaginations get together, brainstorm some totally obvious variations on existing technology, play "footsie" with the patent office to get them in the records, then try and make money by intimidating people into paying w/o any real intent to develop the idea themselves.
Hmmm...there's an interesting idea. Maybe the viability of the patent could somehow be tied to the amount of documented resources that it took to put the patent together? On second thought, I'm sure that some companies would be able to figure out how to waste millions of dollars pursuing really obvious ideas.
And who will you vote for? A Democrat or Republican? If you elect either, do you think anything will change? And if you don't vote for either, do you think it likely that your choice will win?
The only way that power will be taken away from Democrats & Republicans is by ORGANIZING voters - the simple act of voting ain't going to do squat w/o some way of pointing it in the right direction.
Looking for somebody to support who I think will be effective at changing the system (I don't include myself as this type of person).
Sounded very inspirational...but I think the problems are more systemic than you are portraying.
I don't think that anything short of a major restructuring (probably considered something like a peaceful revolution) is going to fix problems like these.
Just getting people to the voting booth isn't going to do squat. It's a well-known phenomenon that many people don't feel that the problem is with "their guy", it's with the "other guys" - and we can't do anything about the "other guys". So, everybody keeps ending up voting in the same old bastards into office, complaining about the whole government all the time.
Part of this "blindness" is ignorance - people aren't taught "systems analysis" skills & serious critical thinking as a way of life, so they can't figure out WHY their system is broken & what they can do to fix it - all they can do is figure out which bastard is making the right noises & hope said bastard will do something useful. Personally, I think it's in the best interests of the parties in power to make sure the "population" stays dumb (e.g., make sure they don't get too edicat'd & uppity) so that the population doesn't start thinking for themselves.
You can write to your congresscritter all you want - but if you don't have a million people like you writing the same thing, I don't believe your congresscritter is going to think your message is more important than the $10,000 that the industrial PAC just gave him for "looking the other way" when a license-to-pollute bill just went by.
I also think there is a seriously embarrassing lack of idea churn in the Congress. The Republicans & Democrats have the election laws for all the states tied up so completely (and even without Constitutional support!), any third party needs a billionaire supporter to have a CHANCE to get in the door. It's a positive feedback loop - because people don't think anybody but D&R candidates have a chance, nobody will support anybody except for D&R candidates.
If it were possible for other parties besides the D&R to hold seats proportional to their support in the elections, then I bet you'd see lots of interesting discussion going on. Unfortunately, since the D&R have basically rigged every state election so that you end up only getting a choice between D&R candidates, you end up with an almost wholly D&R Congress, even though other parties might have a decent representation as a fraction of the nation as a whole.
Anyway, I wandered off a bit there - I just get a little bit upset when I see a "All it takes is effort" kind of message - when you have a systemic problem, you can work until you kill yourself, but if you're not applying that to changing the system, then you're just spinning your wheels. And when the system is set up to PREVENT you from changing it, then you're going to have to figure out some way to apply your effort in a way that the system can't stop you to be successful.
Ahah! I sent this question in as a Ask Slashdot, but apparently it wasn't worthy - but now that you've brought it up, I get a chance to ask it...
Exactly *WHY* are cellphones & electronic devices banned on airplanes? I cannot possibly think of an engineer (or engineers) who would build a communications & avionics system which would be resistant to the EMP effects of bolts of lightning, but wouldn't be able to handle 2 watts worth of EM radiation from a cell phone (even lots of them at the same time!).
From what I understand, the airplanes systems don't even operate at the same frequencies that the cell phones use. So how could a lot of cell phones & electronics devices affect an airplane's systems?
Somebody told me that they thought the only reason that it was made a law was because the cell phone companies didn't want people to be able to reach "home base" cell towers from up in the air, and make those $6/minute phones on the seatbacks worthless.
>Good or bad is a value judgement. Value judgements are morals, morals are religion, and church and state are supposed to be seperate I was going to write "religion is a load of crap" but I'm feeling nice today.)
:)
>The government has no place saying whether anything is "good" or "bad". Period. Otherwise, they are practicing organized religion.
This isn't correct - governments are perfectly w/in their rights to (and you could probably argue that they MUST) make value judgements about whether something is "good or bad for the society" - and decide what they have to do to "protect" society.
"morals" are just a suggested code of conduct which help individuals fit into a society w/o causing a lot of trouble. Both government & religion have a vested interest in teaching individuals "morals" for the purpose of preserving their respective social structures.
The main difference between government & religion is that government primarily relies on enforcement, whereas religion primarily relies on brainwashing.
> Sure! Or do you want Freedom From Consequences?
:)
This is a "matter-of-degree" comment. "Consequences" could include shooting people for criticizing the president - you'd probably want freedom from THOSE kinds of consequences! But who draws the line & where is the line drawn?
Expressing "unpopular" views is an attempt to "perturb the system", whereas expressing popular views maintains the status quo. Therefore, expressing unpopular views is a riskier undertaking & deserves to be held in higher regard. (Of course, abject stupidity can nullify any effects of this "higher regard"
IMHO, it is good to have some kind of systemic freedom-of-speech protection from the moderate disapproval of the majority - this allows the regular, low-level perturbations which keep a social system healthy & dynamic.
What I found interesting was a tiny little sentence at the end, where it said that Monsanto was trying to figure out how to turn "on and off" gene sequences by spraying a chemical on the plant. I guess if you don't pay your seed license, they cropdust your fields & your plants become "normal".
Aside from the ethics, doesn't this strike anybody as pretty cool? It's like having controls on a protein-manufacturing machine, turning on & off different proteins by squirting it with different environmental cues.
I wonder if you could have an "all-in-1" common protein plant, where the plant is genetically programmed for lots of different kinds of useful proteins, but you turn "on" & "off" the proteins according to currently desired uses...
Just imagine what the poor linguists who have to find the "common constructs" in the various languages will have to go through...
I wonder if eventually, people will just "skip" the language translations & learn the meta-language directly - will they teach it in school?
Of course, this could all go the way of Esperanto...
This might be more a symptom of the high student-to-teacher ratio. The teacher is so overloaded by paperwork, he or she looks for technological assistance just to stay afloat - and when the students realize that they're not getting "human" treatment, figures that fair is fair...
This is kind of funny in a twisted sort of way - I wonder if things were allowed to continue, would there come a mass academic realization that nobody human has been generating or grading papers for years...
I would hazard a guess that we'll end up coming full circle to oral tests (or at least some kind of test involving interaction between the instructor & each student). Of course, this would require more teachers per student - but at least the teacher wouldn't be "required" to take work home with them.
:rant mode on:
I'm really angry about the current state of the US educational system. (Bias warning: my mother teaches learning-disabled kids from grades 2-5).
Both the top-level decision makers & US society seem to be more interested in paying lip-service to education than supporting it as an opportunity equalizer. I've seem _individuals_ worried about the US education system, but there seems to be a system-wide lack of respect for the importance of education for a healthy society.
The amount of work & training that "good" teachers put themselves through is easily the equal of anything I've ever done in my professional career (and I'm a 10-hour/day workaholic), but after 30+ years of service, they get paid 1/2 of what I"m getting now. As far as I'm concerned, these "good" teachers ought to be getting at least 6-figure salaries & the equivalent respect of any other professional. And they don't just have to work hard - they have to be _SKILLED_ (anybody who doesn't think this, I invite to try and "debug" a class full of 7 year-olds like they debug a set of programs or a piece of hardware)...
There ARE "bad" teachers, but I see this as more of a symptom of the lack of respect that educators get in the US society - with the proper compensation & respect, you'd get top-quality professionals, just like any other field.
Unfortunately, all I see now-a-days is how to make teachers work harder with less money, complaints about how teachers aren't "doing their job" (usually associated with people who want to make their kids aren't "contaminated" by the hoipolloi in the public education system), complaints about too-high taxes (which are lower than just about any other 1st-World country), and skyrocketing corporate subsidies (with skyrocketing corporate profits).
:rant mode off:
From what I can tell by reading the description, the date on the user's PC isn't important - the key which is used to decrypt the messages is located on the servers at Disappearing Inc., and when the key "expires", it is erased from Disappearing Inc.'s servers.
So, unless you know how to change the date on Disappearing Inc.'s servers (which they might notice after a while), it doesn't really matter what the date on _YOUR_ pc is.
Dunno if they really need to work hard to stop people from saving their own copies - since the scenario they're talking about is having copies left around which can be legally used as evidence against the recipient, I'm sure that the recipient (if intelligent) isn't going to go out of their way to defeat the security.
I'm more interested in some of the other points.
As I understand it, the message is encrypted in its saved form & is decrypted on-the-fly when the user wants to view it. The key is stored on the Disappearing Inc.'s servers, and is supposedly deleted when the message "expires". (I'll make a leap of faith & assume that they either scramble or don't store anything plaintext on non-volatile storage, even in the swap files).
Is the whole reason for this just to make messages "expire"?
It doesn't seem very useful to actually protect the messages from unauthorized viewing w/in the expiration window, other than the "normal" ways of authenticating who's using a PC (is there anyone who feels confident about these)? And you need to be able to connect to DInc.'s servers to retrieve keys.
How strong is their encryption & authentication (for both the messages & the protocol with their servers)? Do they make these details publicly available so that people can audit them?
For their stated application, it still sounds like it would be better to have a setup where everything is encrypted by default, and a defendent would either take the 5th or suffer a convenient "memory lapse" when someone is trying to force them to produce the documents.
(Of course, if everything was encrypted for each individual, then companies wouldn't be able to read their e-mail - aaawwww...)
All this is just pointing out the inadequacy of the way DNS is currently being used to categorize different types of names. There needs to be some kind of way to distinguish between the Real Names of legal entities, as well as "trademarks" that entities might "own".
BTW, does it seem wrong to anybody else that a entities which have no corporeal existence (corporations, for example) have more rights than real individuals?
Mmm...150 gigs, and able to read 1-gig per second?! I can imagine at-least-movie-quality video (could we hit as-good-as-being-there-resolution, or do we need terabytes for that?), incredible soundscapes, multiple languages & channels (can you imagine a movie where you could CHOOSE viewpoints attached to characters or physical locations)?
Actually, with the ability to select viewpoints, it might make viewing movies at home even more pleasurable than going to the theater - and you'd have a justification for watching the same movie over and over, from different viewpoints! (I can't even imagine what kind of headaches this would cause for the movie production logistics though.)
How much storage would you need for a full visual & aural virtual reality though?
This article is quite easy to read, and contains a detailed enough description of the juicy details to hold a geek's interest.
I wonder how much information he would have been able to clean from the system if he hadn't been able to look at the source code for the "photoad" package?
By playing with the optics, they can make it appear like you are focusing on a "virtual display" at a distance from your eye.
AAAARGH!!!! Not again...
I think _everybody_ on this form _understands_ that the GPL means "free" as in: nobody is supposed to make the software it is applied to "non-free", whereas the BSD license means that you can do any damn thing you feel like to the license.
We _UNDERSTAND_ already - STOP FLOGGING THE HORSE!
Do we really need more ways to create plastic? Exactly how biodegradable is this stuff? (I'm assuming that it has a different molecular structure than the "usual" stuff produced by refining oil, since that isn't very biodegradable at all.)
:) Actually, it would be interesting if an INSECT found that it was edible, and then acquired a "taste" for regular plastic - would our civilization collapse?
Is it edible?
Is IS pretty cool that the plant is actually using carbon from the atmosphere to create the plastic. Could a plant be created which would create "fuel" (like ethanol or methanol or other hydrocarbon) in liquid form (rather than having to harvest the plant & go through some kind of refining process)? That would be cool - little "fuel bulbs" hanging from a tree like fruit. Just imagine what would happen if the tree caught fire though...
What would also be cool is if somebody came up with a plant which ATE plastic and turned it into some other useful form, or maybe back into a tree. You could plant a forest on top of each landfill, and harvest it on a regular basis.
I dunno about what this Warwick fellow did - it seems like to me that implanting something as simple as a small RF loop to identify to your computer (and other devices) is kind of silly. You might as well use an adhesive to attach it to your skin someplace & not worry about rejection problems (except maybe for the adhesive :)
:), they might be able to hook those points up to a small radio transmitter/receiver (perhaps using some of those brain electrodes which have neurotrophic chemicals causing nerve cells to grow new connections INTO the electrodes).
I guess working out the issues involved about actually implanting a foreign device in the body is important. It would've been neat if there had been some more functionality involved though.
Here's an idea that I thought might be kind of interesting:
If researchers can pinpoint some nexus points in the brain where a lot of thought processes go through (not motor actions, although that might be interesting too
Get two people with those things installed, configure the transmitter/receivers to BRIDGE the signals between the two brains (but not in a really strong way), then would the two people become aware of each other's thoughts/emotions/memories)?
I firmly believe that large software companies will inevitably gravitate toward a software-service model as the global Internet keeps increasing bandwidth & reducing latency. There are just too many control advantages over such a setup - they don't have to give out any source code, they can upgrade everyone all at once, they can charge by usage, collect lots of statistics on their customers, etc.
I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with the NC concept, either. By keeping the NCs simple (& provide for very limited upgrade capabilities), you can make them cheap & very robust, even for a "man on the street".
If Microsoft is content to provide an NC which anybody can use to access ANY company, then more power to them. I believe this is called "following a standard". I suspect, and probably a lot of people on this forum suspect, that those Microsoft NCs will pretty much mainly work with whatever services that *Microsoft* sets up (big surprise?).
Most of these things sounded pretty serious, except for the last stuff :)
To behave similarly to the Guide (using current technology), I think you'd have to have a wireless connection to access humongo databases from a central server.
The good part would be this: allow anybody who has a Guide to write new entries for the Guide. New entries will be saved in said previously-mentioned humongo databases.
There might be a human staff to review new entries to see if they are informative/funny, replace an existing entry if the new one is better, or perhaps put them both in so that you get a choice or a random selection of entries when you ask.
Each Guide could probably cache an index & whatever entry contents were asked for.
Would it be computationally feasible/cost effective to have the Guide read the entry in a British accent?
" Wrong, a firewall is the means to do that. You're relying on obscurity to protect you, which, as we all know, is no security at all. "
It appears that I'm misusing the terminology - I usually lump NAT/firewall functionality together - being able to ignore or transform packets based on selection/rejection criteria and knowledge of protocols. In my following comments, when I talk about a NAT server, I also mean firewall functionality.
This has nothing to do with obscurity (and I'm not even sure how you managed to bring that up w/respect to my previous reply!) - the whole point is that the owner of the "gateway" has total control of the flow of information through it.
" You're relying on the upper layer protocols to make assumptions about the lower levels of network. This isn't proper. The network should be the network. The applications shouldn't have to know and shouldn't have to care what boxes they travel through to get to the end station. NAT breaks that. "
I don't see why this is so. As I stated before, properly implemented, on the outside the NAT server looks like a single host. Any applications running on the outside won't be able to tell the difference (logically, although performance-wise might be another issue). Applications on the inside will think they're talking directly to the network through a gateway.
The only problem you have is when you try and use a protocol which requires active participation by the NAT server. *You* think this is a problem - *I* think this is a good way to control who is talking to what, and what they're saying, from my subnet.
" NAT, most frequently, tends to break low traffic datagram protocols. I'm pretty sure what you envision is a network using nothing but TCP, and proxy upon proxy upon proxy to pick up the slack. Sorry, but I find that a bit shortsighted. It may be great for you, but your situation is just that... yours. "
NAT only breaks low traffic datagram protocols which it doesn't understand. I do *not* envision a network with nothing but TCP - I envision a network where I have control over which protocols are allowed through my gateway to the net.
Being able to upgrade a NAT server to understand new protocols is a technical issue which I am not addressing, but which doesn't (to me) seem to be a big deal to solve.
" Just as an example, a local ADSL provider in my area used to do just that... running their entire ISP behind a single NAT-overloaded IPv4 address. It was a dismal failure. Users couldn't play games like Diablo. One person would piss off an IRCOp, and the k-line would ban EVERYBODY. The NAT box would get overloaded and crash, and suddenly nobody had connectivity. "
This points out the stupidity of that ISP provider rather than anything particularly wrong with a NAT implementation. An ISP is supposedly to provide relatively uncontrolled access to the net - a NAT server is going to, because of its nature, "filter" out any protocols it doesn't understand.
ISP service provided by the IT department of a corporation might find a NAT server arrangement quite desirable, since they might not want people to easily play games like Diablo or access IRC. Without the NAT server, they would have a difficult time blocking attempts by people to do these things.
As far as overloading & crashing is concerned, that's just a matter of systems-analysis & load-distribution - the fact that the ISP couldn't handle that just indicates their incompetence.
" A NAT'd IP can never provide the full, unrestricted functionality of a real IP address. End of story. "
A NAT'd IP provides ENHANCED functionality over a "real IP address" - the ability to control how any packets are accepted/rejected/transformed. Your "end of story" is not very final.
" Seeing some discussion of IPv4/v6 in this forum is starting to scare me, so I thought I'd try and clear up some major misunderstandings. "
I didn't understand your fear, and I didn't really agree with some of the comments you've stated in your article. See my comments below.
" The last point is that people don't think that their toasters need IP addresses. This is also not so! Yes, in the next 10 years your toaster will need an IP address. Why? Because ToasterCompany will want you to do a firmware upgrade on your toaster because their have been field problems (like toasters burning operators). You will go across the wire, flash your firmware, and now your microprocessor-controlled toaster has CrispyToaster(tm) v1.16b firmware. We've already seen web servers implemented in ~4mm PIC processors, so expect them to become popular in the near future in your favorite household appliance. "
While it might be nice for a lot of people to receive automatic upgrades to the firmware in their appliances, a lot of other people are going to want some pretty strict control over what their appliances are talking to & why.
For one thing, allowing an outside entity to control an appliance which you have purchased sounds like a potential privacy issue to me - without some really strict regulations on what a company can do with the information, do I really want a company to know when & how much toast I make? (Slightly more seriously, think DIVX...)
On another note, just imagine if somebody figures out how to hack the authentication protocol for such a firmware download. "Let's just download a little program to their new digital water heater which turns it on full blast & disables the emergency blowout valve..."
In any case, I see NAT as a highly desirable way for me to control what is talking on my subnet to stuff outside the subnet, regardless of whether you're talking IPv4 or IPv6.
" To do this, you need an IP address (to speak IP of course). Please don't tell me how great NAT is... yes, I also run a Linux ipMasq box which works fine, but NAT fundamentally breaks many of the underlying IPv4 mechanisms. We can't keep dumping more patches to the NAT engine every time someone wants to NAT some new protocol; eventually we are going to reach a limit of effort. "
I don't completely understand this - properly implemented, a net running through a NAT server should just look like one really busy server. Routers OUTSIDE the NAT server should only have to treat it as such - they don't need massive routing tables to describe the machines BEHIND the NAT server.
INSIDE the subnet is another matter - I understand the problems with protocols like active FTP, but with regards to my concerns that I described above, I don't really WANT a protocol which I haven't "approved" going through my gateway to the net.
Why is there some limit of effort @ opening NAT walls to different protocols? If the protocol is simple, then you can communicate through a single connection, and the owner of the NAT box can open that single port & attach it to the proper machine.
If the protocol is more complex, then if there's some sort of standard on how to describe the protocol to a NAT engine, then each person who develops the protocol can generate a formal spec. which can be used to tell the NAT how to handle that protocol - if the owner of the NAT box so desires.
" Also note that using ports as a means of "IP expansion" is also a Very Bad Idea. A port is specifically designed (in TCP/IP spec) to represent a different service on a given host, not across different hosts. Yes, you can use this technique in NAT, but it tends to make performance/utilization metrics used by ISP's blatantly wrong, which leads to Bad Things. "
Maybe I'm not quite understanding what you mean by "IP expansion" using ports, but as far as I'm concerned NAT is _supposed_ to make your subnet look like a big server on a single IP address, and I can't think of any performance/utilization metrics used by ISPs where this paradigm would cause "Bad Things" to happen.
In Oregon, they're going to be requiring soon that people dial the area codes for local phone calls. This is so they can start using phone numbers with a different area code in the same geographic area - in essence, they will be forcing people to use 10-digit phone numbers to make calls.
Ack - three more digits to remember for every phone number - I wonder if my brain buffer is large enough to deal with the issue, or will it "overflow" and cause memory corruption?
What *I* found interesting in this article was the mention that the same types of diodes could be used to generate many different wavelengths of light very efficiently, and that they were being used for such purposes in Japan as billboards already.
Does anybody have any guesses/info about how what kind of resolution (both spatial & for color) you can generate using these types of diodes, and for how much?
I thought that "filling in the gaps" was a long-standing Hollywood tradition for coming up with "new" stories?
The way I understood it, this was a result of the "corporatization"(sp?) of Hollywood - if a certain type of story is shown to do very well in the marketplace, then the businesspeople who run the corporations figure that they'll be able to make more money with that plot using reusing resources while paying very little extra for new creative input.
Kinda evolutionary in a way (anybody remember memes?) - we keep getting the same kinds of well-worn stories until somebody truly creative throws a mutation in somewhere - but the mutation must survive in the environment of the marketplace for it to become part of the entertainment "ecosystem".