Yeah, that's the truth. In fact, that's exactly the reason (well part, anyhow) I've been so hesitant to invest in a digital camera. Most of the 'consumer'-priced digicams (I can't afford $1000+ for a camera. Maybe $200-300 at most) seem to me to have kind of cheap, low quality lenses. I've been waiting for the market to mature enough that there are affordable digicams with decent optics at reasonable prices. That, and I've been waiting for some standardization in the memory storage that the camera uses, and the resultant mass production and drop in price of 512M storage cards. I was looking at some stuff awhile ago that makes it look like, for the most part, the camera makers are starting to standardize on one storage solution, at least.
Well, perhaps it's more urban that most of us realize, but I still think it's probably not the most favorable test market lol. I mean, I could say that northeast Ohio (where I live) is fairly urban, yet I doubt it would be a very good test market for something like this.
Ok, even with the possibility for extra revenue streams you mention (and let's not forget concession scams - $5 hot dogs and pizza slices, and $4 cokes - after all they have a captive audience who aren't going to leave the premises while they play), I *still* don't see this as being a hugely profitable enterprise. Sure, there might be other opportunities for some *modest* revenue streams, but personally, I don't see that there is a large risk/reward ratio hear. There's a fairly sizeable risk, with the promise of seemingly modest profits, as far as I can tell.
Course, maybe I'm just underestimating the potential side revenue, but I just don't see it being that great, considering all the expenses that others have pointed out.
Although, it may be that the $5/hour is just an 'intro' price to try to get people to start coming to the place. Perhaps they'll ratchet that up to $10/hr over time, which would go a great way towards making the 'primary' revenue stream break even (if the costs the grandparent post lists are assumed to be reasonable figures), so that secondary revenue streams can be mostly profit.
Yeah, now that's my idea of a great place for a test market. Baltimore I can see. It's urban. But can you get more rural than New Hampshire? Maybe they can do a test site in Montana somewhere, or Kansas. I'm sure that will encourage investors. . .
I believe that RPM packages contain info about what packages they depend on, and have for years. The few times I've tried installing stuff on rpm-based distros, I've seen dependency errors. So the question is, if the RPM packages provide dependency info already, how come the RPM utils don't *already* provide automatic dependency installation like apt-get? Seems like something that could have been added to rpm years ago. ..
I don't use Redhat much, so maybe there is already a tool to do this, I dunno. . .
Well, I think you've got a few different problems confused, which is easy to understand.
Let me start with the first. The reason people care about which installer is on their system is that some are more intelligent than others. You know how you said it's a major pain in the ass to chase down dependencies? I fully agree. That's why some people like the Debian-based installers. They intelligently figure out all dependencies for you (including the dependencies of dependencies of dependencies. ..) and attempt to find a source of the dependencies and install them.
Theoretically, there's no reason the same simplicity can't be applied to almost any package system, at least if the package system records the dependencies of a package somewhere. And that is where this Smart Package Manager comes in. It at least claims that it will give you simple package management regardless of what distro you use. Will be interesting to see if it actually lives up to what it says.
The other issue you were talking about, is the many many different libraries available, many of which do similar things. Well, if your package manager is smart enough, and packages are available to meet the dependencies (*usually* this is the case, because if a package that comes with the distro depends on something, it's dependency is also part of the distro you are using; however, with third-party packages, you might have to find the packages you need yourself), you really *don't* have to care about all the different libraries. Developers get the choice of which libs to use, and you get smart installation/uninstallation of required libs.
In the Windows world there are just as many different libraries. Probably more. You just usually don't 'see' them as a user. You run setup.exe, and the libraries come bundled with the program on CD or in the installation archive. The only reason I mention this isn't to say the windows way is superior, but just to show that as long as users don't have to be bothered with worrying about the libraries, they don't really care if they have 3 different libraries that do similar things.
It's the same way with Linux. I use Debian. If I want to install something, either I use dselect, or apt-get, to install it, and everything it depends upon gets installed to. So, I don't really care about the libs getting installed, because it's so easy. The only thing I haven't yet figured out (though it might be possible), is to get Debian to automatically remove dependencies that are no longer required by any currently installed, or about to be installed, applications.
Possibly, Smart Package Manager will also take care of that.
They work it out by having RPM installable as a Debian package. apt-get install rpm. Also, they have a program (and this has been part of Debian like forever) called 'alien' that will actually read an RPM file and generate a DEB file from it. Just because Debian is based on dpkg, doens't mean that you can't use rpm to install rpm packages. They just don't actually package the stuff that is *part* of debian as RPMs because they have a better format.
Are you smoking crack? Deb won't support LSB? They ALREADY DO. In the 'stable' distro they support LSB 1.1, and 'testing' has LSB 2.0 support, as demonstrated by the link above. Do a little research before you post.
In fact, the Debian developers track the standards almost religiously, and have for a long time. Filesystem Hierarchy Standard and LSB support have been part of Debian for a long time now. That's why I personally use Debian. It is a completely free, relatively easy to use and administer (once you are past the initial learning curve), standards compliant distro with almost every open-source/free package out there already packaged for installation from the Debian distro mirrors.
Seems like if you are going to report on science, the reporting shouldn't be about who has the most scientists backing a theory, but reporting on the *science* behind why more scientists believe one theory than the other.
That is to say, science isn't democratic. In some rare cases, the majority of scientists can be dead wrong about a theory. It's highly unusual, it's true, but not without precedent. So, if you are going to report about science, report on the experiments and studies that have been done, along with meaningfully explanatory commentary, to show *why* the majority of scientists feel a theory does, or in this case, does not, have validity.
This appears to just be a matter of communication between registrars. If you go to godaddy, and try to transfer a domain to godaddy from another registrar, what will most likely happen is godaddy will contact the other registrar. If the other registrar doesn't hear from the legitimate domain holder in 4 days, they will send a "NO" response back to godaddy. Godaddy has to then give up on the transfer.
However, if your registrar, for some reason, doesn't respond to godaddy in 5 days, then the domain transfer goes through. I still don't think that's ideal, because a registrar could just screw up and not send the response in time. But, it's not quite as bad as the slashdot article indicates, I think.
Or, umm, hijack the domain, and then get arrested by the FBI (or law_enforcement_agency_of_choice) because you now own the domain from which fraudulant emails were sent from, so it must have been you that sent them. ..
OMG, too funny. The parent post was modded down as off-topic after the troll it was responding to disappeared from the message listing when it became -1 Troll. Either that, or whoever modded this message as off-topic just can't connect the dots to see the relationship. I feel bad you got modded down man, but it's still funny.
Well, you got it half-right anyhow. The problem isn't the guy modifying and distributing ReactOS - the problem is that he removed all attribution so that he could try to claim the work as his own, and attempted to distribute the software under a license other than the GPL.
Even in the Free Software world, that is violating copyright law, and stealing.
ignorant (From dictionary.com) adj. Lacking education or knowledge. Showing or arising from a lack of education or knowledge: an ignorant mistake. Unaware or uninformed.
People who say that the Clinton impeachment was *just* about sex/personal indescretions, are, simply, ignorant. Uninformed.
The Clinton Impeachment came about because there was evidence that indicated Clinton *might* have committed the *felony* of perjury. You might say "it never should have been in court." Where else, pray tell, would you address charges of sexual harrassment?
In the US, we believe the President is not above the law. So, when former female subordinates of Clinton made allegations of sexual harrassment, which *is* a crime, it had to be tried in a court of law. Now, granted, charges aren't the same thing as being guilty. I'm not convinced Clinton harrassed those women. But, the point is, it ended up in court, as such charges will, and Clinton came very close to lieing to the court. I believe the Senate found that, on a technicality, he didn't meet the standard for perjury, even though he didn't exactly tell the whole truth. But, that is why we had the impeachment. So that Congress could determine if the President had committed perjury.
Ultimately, the Senate acquitted him, so stop whining, and stop spreading reductio ad absurdum by reducing the Clinton impeachment to 'just personal demerits'.
The question of the Clinton impeachment, was, fundamentally, did Clinton lie in a court of law. It's one thing to just lie to someone on the street, maybe even to lie to the press. But lieing to a court is an attempt to subvert justice, and is a FELONY offense. Any president that commits a felony *should* be impeached. The question came down to, did Clinton actually commit purjory. There wasn't quite enough evidence to really convict him on that, so the impeachment died.
That is not just 'lie{ing} about a private matter.'
The sad thing is, 5 years later, there's still so many ignorant people like you running around telling people that the impeachment proceedings were just because Clinton "lied about a private matter."
Yeah, hemming is skilled labor. But, as the article pointed out, it only takes like 2 people per shift to cover the entire store. The cost, per customer, can be reduced down to a reasonable level with enough customers, to the point where you don't have to buy a $150 shirt just to offset the cost (from the store's perspective) of having that person or 2 there hemming.
Well, that's true. But I don't think you have to give up freedom to get some of the things on the list. The in-store hemming of clothes to get the length just right seems like a kind of no-brainer why don't our stores do that kind of idea. It's just customer service, and doesn't require a totalitarian regime to implement it.
Truth is, a lot of the ideas in that article are fairly cheap, and things I've wondered about before. Why *don't* traffic lights give you an indication of how much longer you have, either to go or to stop? (Well, that might be because public safety officials fear that will just encourage people to gun their engines the second the light turns green lol).
As far as cell phone coverage, well that's a much more difficult issue. US is a very large landmass, and has, on average, fewer people per-square mile than China. Couple that with the fact that cell phone technologies are still evolving and changing all the time, it makes it very economically infeasible to get the kind of coverage that China has, right off the bat. Maybe someday, once the technology has matured to the point where major new cell phone transmission technologies aren't being implemented every few years, we might get there.
A lot of the other ideas will probably soon be coming to the US and Canada, because they aren't incredibly expensive or difficult. If it's good customer service, and fairly cheap to implement, *some* company will probably do it sooner or later. And, if it's appreciated by consumers, pretty soon they will all do it (unless, of course, it's patented lol).
Hello,
I applaud IBM for OpenSourcing Cloudscape. Always good to have different alternatives, that are suited to different needs. For people looking for Java embedded databases, in addition to Derby, there is also Berkeley DB Java Edition that you might be interested in. I don't work for sleepycat or have any connection to them or their products. I just remembered seeing this product awhile back and it came to mind when I read about Derby.
Anyhow, thought I'd toss that out for those interested in embedded DBs in Java. There might be very valid reasons for picking Derby over BDbJE, like some have mentioned that Derby and DB2 use the same client libs so it's easy to scale from one to the other. There may also be compelling reasons to pick BDbJE in some circumstances. Haven't used either so I can't, personally, offer an informed opinion.
Hello,
I agree that even if you are going to have patents, 17 or 20 years is ridiculously long. However, that said, if you are going to have patents, you need them longer than 2 years. Why? Because it's very easy for a product or company to get tied up in litigation, or be delayed with coming to the market with their product for whatever reason, for 2 years, and then you have the situation where a patent can expire before a company could sell one licensed unit of the patented invention.
But, software patents are just a bad idea anyhow. The nature of software lends itself much better to copyrighting than to patenting. And, copyrights are way too long. In the software world, copyrights should only last for 5-7 years, IMHO.
And, in order to register the copyright, you should be required to submit the *entire* source code to US Copyright office (so that the source can eventually enter the public domain: currently we offer copyright protection to developers without requiring that the source for the software *EVER* enters the public domain, which is just assinine; often by the time the code would enter the public domain, it has long been lost). Currently, you only have to submit a portion, like 50 pages of code - which is itself a fungible kind of thing: If I put an excessive amount of comments and whitespace in the code, I could turn 25 pages into 50 pages, and avoid sumbitting hardly anything to the copyright office.
Ok, I can understand the concept of 6 to 4. Sounds good, but unless I and everyone I want to interact with are running 6 to 4, I still have to fall back to IPv4, I suppose. Or, in more concrete terms. If I want to setup a teamspeak or roger wilco server, anyone who wants to connect is gonna have to setup 6to4. If I want to run a game server, likewise. This does present some problems, as not everyone I interact with is enough of a geek to get it working.
But, I am interested still. I assume to use 6to4, you have to have some sort of upstream IPv6 ISP to connect to. That is, if I'm tunnelling IPv6 over the internet, I've got to be tunnelling TO an IPv6 gateway/router somewhere. Are there any free gateways? Is there a list somewhere of free gateways?
Dude, did you read the policy page? It specifically mentioned that most of the 'problem' AP's were connected to Cable Modem, DSL, or other providers, not part of the University network. And it didn't say that you couldn't attach an AP to their network. It said you could only use 5Ghz APs in the building at all.
But, it still is worth pointing out to people that the uses of this collision finding technique is still *very* limited. Someone can't take a digitally signed contract, make arbitrary changes to it, and still have the signature valid. In most cases, the change would be non beneficial (to the attacker that is), like maybe changing 3 characters in the document (this statement is made based upon the fact that, in the collision examples given by the author of the paper, the two messages differed only by like 4 bits or something like that), and the odds are slim that the 3 characters would end up being in the right place in the text, and have an appropriate value, to make it useful. For example, what *would* be useful, but unlikely, would be to change the string '$1995' to '$2995', but as likely as not, to get it to hash right, you'd end up with like '$#g95' or some other rubbish, even if you managed to get the changed bits to line up with the critical bit of data (in this case a dollar amount). It's more likely that you'd end up changing some word like 'benefactor' to '2knefactor'.
However, for the example you gave, of firmware code, where you want it to be exactly right, or else it will cause problems (even 4 bits of difference in bios code can make a computer inoperable), you are right that the hash collision can be a much bigger, much harder to detect, problem.
This idea of a 'suspended' disk that is spun with close to 0 friction, might not be so far fetched. Might still be a ways into the future. But, I seem to recall a popular-sciece type article once upon a time that was talking about levitation and superconductors. The jist of it was a layman's introduction to the principle that it's almost impossible to magnetically suspend something and have it be stable. . . UNLESS you use superconductor's.
Apparently you can get very stable suspension using superconductors. The only problem currently is, all known superconductors have to be kept very cold (like hundreds of degree's below 0F). But, I think there are materials researchers out there searching for 'high-temperature' superconductors. If they ever find any, then it might become practical to have a suspended disk with very high rotational velocity.
Slashdot Mirror
Great. I've always wanted my own full size Sear's Tower on my desktop. . .
Yeah, that's the truth. In fact, that's exactly the reason (well part, anyhow) I've been so hesitant to invest in a digital camera. Most of the 'consumer'-priced digicams (I can't afford $1000+ for a camera. Maybe $200-300 at most) seem to me to have kind of cheap, low quality lenses. I've been waiting for the market to mature enough that there are affordable digicams with decent optics at reasonable prices. That, and I've been waiting for some standardization in the memory storage that the camera uses, and the resultant mass production and drop in price of 512M storage cards. I was looking at some stuff awhile ago that makes it look like, for the most part, the camera makers are starting to standardize on one storage solution, at least.
Well, perhaps it's more urban that most of us realize, but I still think it's probably not the most favorable test market lol. I mean, I could say that northeast Ohio (where I live) is fairly urban, yet I doubt it would be a very good test market for something like this.
Ok, even with the possibility for extra revenue streams you mention (and let's not forget concession scams - $5 hot dogs and pizza slices, and $4 cokes - after all they have a captive audience who aren't going to leave the premises while they play), I *still* don't see this as being a hugely profitable enterprise. Sure, there might be other opportunities for some *modest* revenue streams, but personally, I don't see that there is a large risk/reward ratio hear. There's a fairly sizeable risk, with the promise of seemingly modest profits, as far as I can tell.
Course, maybe I'm just underestimating the potential side revenue, but I just don't see it being that great, considering all the expenses that others have pointed out.
Although, it may be that the $5/hour is just an 'intro' price to try to get people to start coming to the place. Perhaps they'll ratchet that up to $10/hr over time, which would go a great way towards making the 'primary' revenue stream break even (if the costs the grandparent post lists are assumed to be reasonable figures), so that secondary revenue streams can be mostly profit.
Yeah, now that's my idea of a great place for a test market. Baltimore I can see. It's urban. But can you get more rural than New Hampshire? Maybe they can do a test site in Montana somewhere, or Kansas. I'm sure that will encourage investors. . .
I believe that RPM packages contain info about what packages they depend on, and have for years. The few times I've tried installing stuff on rpm-based distros, I've seen dependency errors. So the question is, if the RPM packages provide dependency info already, how come the RPM utils don't *already* provide automatic dependency installation like apt-get? Seems like something that could have been added to rpm years ago. . .
I don't use Redhat much, so maybe there is already a tool to do this, I dunno. . .
Well, I think you've got a few different problems confused, which is easy to understand.
.) and attempt to find a source of the dependencies and install them.
Let me start with the first. The reason people care about which installer is on their system is that some are more intelligent than others. You know how you said it's a major pain in the ass to chase down dependencies? I fully agree. That's why some people like the Debian-based installers. They intelligently figure out all dependencies for you (including the dependencies of dependencies of dependencies. .
Theoretically, there's no reason the same simplicity can't be applied to almost any package system, at least if the package system records the dependencies of a package somewhere. And that is where this Smart Package Manager comes in. It at least claims that it will give you simple package management regardless of what distro you use. Will be interesting to see if it actually lives up to what it says.
The other issue you were talking about, is the many many different libraries available, many of which do similar things. Well, if your package manager is smart enough, and packages are available to meet the dependencies (*usually* this is the case, because if a package that comes with the distro depends on something, it's dependency is also part of the distro you are using; however, with third-party packages, you might have to find the packages you need yourself), you really *don't* have to care about all the different libraries. Developers get the choice of which libs to use, and you get smart installation/uninstallation of required libs.
In the Windows world there are just as many different libraries. Probably more. You just usually don't 'see' them as a user. You run setup.exe, and the libraries come bundled with the program on CD or in the installation archive. The only reason I mention this isn't to say the windows way is superior, but just to show that as long as users don't have to be bothered with worrying about the libraries, they don't really care if they have 3 different libraries that do similar things.
It's the same way with Linux. I use Debian. If I want to install something, either I use dselect, or apt-get, to install it, and everything it depends upon gets installed to. So, I don't really care about the libs getting installed, because it's so easy. The only thing I haven't yet figured out (though it might be possible), is to get Debian to automatically remove dependencies that are no longer required by any currently installed, or about to be installed, applications.
Possibly, Smart Package Manager will also take care of that.
Isn't it sad that a post that is so totally wrong as the grandparent, can get modded +2 on slashdot? lol
They work it out by having RPM installable as a Debian package. apt-get install rpm. Also, they have a program (and this has been part of Debian like forever) called 'alien' that will actually read an RPM file and generate a DEB file from it. Just because Debian is based on dpkg, doens't mean that you can't use rpm to install rpm packages. They just don't actually package the stuff that is *part* of debian as RPMs because they have a better format.
Are you smoking crack? Deb won't support LSB? They ALREADY DO. In the 'stable' distro they support LSB 1.1, and 'testing' has LSB 2.0 support, as demonstrated by the link above. Do a little research before you post.
In fact, the Debian developers track the standards almost religiously, and have for a long time. Filesystem Hierarchy Standard and LSB support have been part of Debian for a long time now. That's why I personally use Debian. It is a completely free, relatively easy to use and administer (once you are past the initial learning curve), standards compliant distro with almost every open-source/free package out there already packaged for installation from the Debian distro mirrors.
Seems like if you are going to report on science, the reporting shouldn't be about who has the most scientists backing a theory, but reporting on the *science* behind why more scientists believe one theory than the other.
That is to say, science isn't democratic. In some rare cases, the majority of scientists can be dead wrong about a theory. It's highly unusual, it's true, but not without precedent. So, if you are going to report about science, report on the experiments and studies that have been done, along with meaningfully explanatory commentary, to show *why* the majority of scientists feel a theory does, or in this case, does not, have validity.
This appears to just be a matter of communication between registrars. If you go to godaddy, and try to transfer a domain to godaddy from another registrar, what will most likely happen is godaddy will contact the other registrar. If the other registrar doesn't hear from the legitimate domain holder in 4 days, they will send a "NO" response back to godaddy. Godaddy has to then give up on the transfer.
However, if your registrar, for some reason, doesn't respond to godaddy in 5 days, then the domain transfer goes through. I still don't think that's ideal, because a registrar could just screw up and not send the response in time. But, it's not quite as bad as the slashdot article indicates, I think.
Or, umm, hijack the domain, and then get arrested by the FBI (or law_enforcement_agency_of_choice) because you now own the domain from which fraudulant emails were sent from, so it must have been you that sent them. . .
That'd really teach them a lesson.
OMG, too funny. The parent post was modded down as off-topic after the troll it was responding to disappeared from the message listing when it became -1 Troll. Either that, or whoever modded this message as off-topic just can't connect the dots to see the relationship. I feel bad you got modded down man, but it's still funny.
Well, you got it half-right anyhow. The problem isn't the guy modifying and distributing ReactOS - the problem is that he removed all attribution so that he could try to claim the work as his own, and attempted to distribute the software under a license other than the GPL.
Even in the Free Software world, that is violating copyright law, and stealing.
ignorant (From dictionary.com)
adj.
Lacking education or knowledge.
Showing or arising from a lack of education or knowledge: an ignorant mistake.
Unaware or uninformed.
People who say that the Clinton impeachment was *just* about sex/personal indescretions, are, simply, ignorant. Uninformed.
The Clinton Impeachment came about because there was evidence that indicated Clinton *might* have committed the *felony* of perjury. You might say "it never should have been in court." Where else, pray tell, would you address charges of sexual harrassment?
In the US, we believe the President is not above the law. So, when former female subordinates of Clinton made allegations of sexual harrassment, which *is* a crime, it had to be tried in a court of law. Now, granted, charges aren't the same thing as being guilty. I'm not convinced Clinton harrassed those women. But, the point is, it ended up in court, as such charges will, and Clinton came very close to lieing to the court. I believe the Senate found that, on a technicality, he didn't meet the standard for perjury, even though he didn't exactly tell the whole truth. But, that is why we had the impeachment. So that Congress could determine if the President had committed perjury.
Ultimately, the Senate acquitted him, so stop whining, and stop spreading reductio ad absurdum by reducing the Clinton impeachment to 'just personal demerits'.
The question of the Clinton impeachment, was, fundamentally, did Clinton lie in a court of law. It's one thing to just lie to someone on the street, maybe even to lie to the press. But lieing to a court is an attempt to subvert justice, and is a FELONY offense. Any president that commits a felony *should* be impeached. The question came down to, did Clinton actually commit purjory. There wasn't quite enough evidence to really convict him on that, so the impeachment died.
That is not just 'lie{ing} about a private matter.'
The sad thing is, 5 years later, there's still so many ignorant people like you running around telling people that the impeachment proceedings were just because Clinton "lied about a private matter."
Yeah, hemming is skilled labor. But, as the article pointed out, it only takes like 2 people per shift to cover the entire store. The cost, per customer, can be reduced down to a reasonable level with enough customers, to the point where you don't have to buy a $150 shirt just to offset the cost (from the store's perspective) of having that person or 2 there hemming.
Well, that's true. But I don't think you have to give up freedom to get some of the things on the list. The in-store hemming of clothes to get the length just right seems like a kind of no-brainer why don't our stores do that kind of idea. It's just customer service, and doesn't require a totalitarian regime to implement it.
Truth is, a lot of the ideas in that article are fairly cheap, and things I've wondered about before. Why *don't* traffic lights give you an indication of how much longer you have, either to go or to stop? (Well, that might be because public safety officials fear that will just encourage people to gun their engines the second the light turns green lol).
As far as cell phone coverage, well that's a much more difficult issue. US is a very large landmass, and has, on average, fewer people per-square mile than China. Couple that with the fact that cell phone technologies are still evolving and changing all the time, it makes it very economically infeasible to get the kind of coverage that China has, right off the bat. Maybe someday, once the technology has matured to the point where major new cell phone transmission technologies aren't being implemented every few years, we might get there.
A lot of the other ideas will probably soon be coming to the US and Canada, because they aren't incredibly expensive or difficult. If it's good customer service, and fairly cheap to implement, *some* company will probably do it sooner or later. And, if it's appreciated by consumers, pretty soon they will all do it (unless, of course, it's patented lol).
Hello,
I applaud IBM for OpenSourcing Cloudscape. Always good to have different alternatives, that are suited to different needs. For people looking for Java embedded databases, in addition to Derby, there is also Berkeley DB Java Edition that you might be interested in. I don't work for sleepycat or have any connection to them or their products. I just remembered seeing this product awhile back and it came to mind when I read about Derby.
Anyhow, thought I'd toss that out for those interested in embedded DBs in Java. There might be very valid reasons for picking Derby over BDbJE, like some have mentioned that Derby and DB2 use the same client libs so it's easy to scale from one to the other. There may also be compelling reasons to pick BDbJE in some circumstances. Haven't used either so I can't, personally, offer an informed opinion.
Hello,
I agree that even if you are going to have patents, 17 or 20 years is ridiculously long. However, that said, if you are going to have patents, you need them longer than 2 years. Why? Because it's very easy for a product or company to get tied up in litigation, or be delayed with coming to the market with their product for whatever reason, for 2 years, and then you have the situation where a patent can expire before a company could sell one licensed unit of the patented invention.
But, software patents are just a bad idea anyhow. The nature of software lends itself much better to copyrighting than to patenting. And, copyrights are way too long. In the software world, copyrights should only last for 5-7 years, IMHO.
And, in order to register the copyright, you should be required to submit the *entire* source code to US Copyright office (so that the source can eventually enter the public domain: currently we offer copyright protection to developers without requiring that the source for the software *EVER* enters the public domain, which is just assinine; often by the time the code would enter the public domain, it has long been lost). Currently, you only have to submit a portion, like 50 pages of code - which is itself a fungible kind of thing: If I put an excessive amount of comments and whitespace in the code, I could turn 25 pages into 50 pages, and avoid sumbitting hardly anything to the copyright office.
Ok, I can understand the concept of 6 to 4. Sounds good, but unless I and everyone I want to interact with are running 6 to 4, I still have to fall back to IPv4, I suppose. Or, in more concrete terms. If I want to setup a teamspeak or roger wilco server, anyone who wants to connect is gonna have to setup 6to4. If I want to run a game server, likewise. This does present some problems, as not everyone I interact with is enough of a geek to get it working.
But, I am interested still. I assume to use 6to4, you have to have some sort of upstream IPv6 ISP to connect to. That is, if I'm tunnelling IPv6 over the internet, I've got to be tunnelling TO an IPv6 gateway/router somewhere. Are there any free gateways? Is there a list somewhere of free gateways?
Dude, did you read the policy page? It specifically mentioned that most of the 'problem' AP's were connected to Cable Modem, DSL, or other providers, not part of the University network. And it didn't say that you couldn't attach an AP to their network. It said you could only use 5Ghz APs in the building at all.
But, it still is worth pointing out to people that the uses of this collision finding technique is still *very* limited. Someone can't take a digitally signed contract, make arbitrary changes to it, and still have the signature valid. In most cases, the change would be non beneficial (to the attacker that is), like maybe changing 3 characters in the document (this statement is made based upon the fact that, in the collision examples given by the author of the paper, the two messages differed only by like 4 bits or something like that), and the odds are slim that the 3 characters would end up being in the right place in the text, and have an appropriate value, to make it useful. For example, what *would* be useful, but unlikely, would be to change the string '$1995' to '$2995', but as likely as not, to get it to hash right, you'd end up with like '$#g95' or some other rubbish, even if you managed to get the changed bits to line up with the critical bit of data (in this case a dollar amount). It's more likely that you'd end up changing some word like 'benefactor' to '2knefactor'.
However, for the example you gave, of firmware code, where you want it to be exactly right, or else it will cause problems (even 4 bits of difference in bios code can make a computer inoperable), you are right that the hash collision can be a much bigger, much harder to detect, problem.
This idea of a 'suspended' disk that is spun with close to 0 friction, might not be so far fetched. Might still be a ways into the future. But, I seem to recall a popular-sciece type article once upon a time that was talking about levitation and superconductors. The jist of it was a layman's introduction to the principle that it's almost impossible to magnetically suspend something and have it be stable. . . UNLESS you use superconductor's.
Apparently you can get very stable suspension using superconductors. The only problem currently is, all known superconductors have to be kept very cold (like hundreds of degree's below 0F). But, I think there are materials researchers out there searching for 'high-temperature' superconductors. If they ever find any, then it might become practical to have a suspended disk with very high rotational velocity.