Not necessarily. You're getting into the regions of moral relativism. What one person sees as evil, another sees as good.
What ever action you take, or choose not to take, has social ramifications. Depending on the scale of your (in)action, multiple societies will cast their opinion on it. And each will see your act differently.
In a "good" person, we see someone who cares more for the good of the society, and society's opinion of them, then they do for their own desires.
In a typical person, we see a balance of personal desires against societal needs and social expectations.
In an "evil" person, we see someone who cares more for their own personal desires than societal needs and social expectations.
For a pure evil person, we would need someone who not only cares more for their own personal desires, but finds achieving their personal desires at the expense of society to be fulfilling. For the most part, see Heath Ledger's rendition of the Joker.
So I would argue that it requires less personal energy and resources to be evil than it does to be good. The trade off though, is that most western societies have ways of dealing with evil people.
CLIN 001: Development, from date of award to Jan 31, 2010 $7.76M
CLIN 010: (Optional) Operations and Maintenance from end of CLIN 001 to 1 year after. $1.35M
CLIN 020: (Optional) Operations and Maintenance from end of CLIN 010 to 1 year after. $1.40M
CLIN 030: (Optional) Operations and Maintenance from end of CLIN 020 to 1 year after. $1.44M
CLIN 040: (Optional) Operations and Maintenance from end of CLIN 030 to 1 year after. $1.49M
CLIN 050: (Optional) System Improvement and Enhancements. From date exercised to 1 year. $1M Ceiling
CLIN 060: (Optional) System Improvement and Enhancements. From date exercised to 1 year. $1M Ceiling
CLIN 070: (Optional) System Improvement and Enhancements. From date exercised to 1 year. $1M Ceiling
CLIN 080: (Optional) Continuation of Operations Site $1.76M
There's your $18M at work. The $7M for development seems a bit odd given the Jan 2010 dead line, but if you look at the proposal, it becomes immediately clear that they have already sunk a significant amount of effort into the development and are probably billing for a substantial amount of work already completed.
All in all, given the content, up-time requirements, bandwidth usage, and high profile nature of the site, I'm not surprised, nor all that skeptical of their costs.
Some of it is understandable. They aren't going to publish individual's names or pay rates.
But if you look on Page 102 you can see the cost break down by CLIN #. And on page 145 you can see the tasks associated with each CLIN.
Some of the black out is clearly for individual's privacy. You can see the company name, but not the specific individuals assigned to the job. Other parts, yeah, it looks way over board. But the pricing is there.
So its hype and a bogus test meant to exaggerate the car in best possible situations.
Or, for people who live in an optimal situation, say 20 miles from work with mostly in-city driving, it is as great as advertised.
I drive a TDI Golf. I get 45 MPG. But it's all high way, 80 miles a day. If I were driving stop light to stop light, my mileage would plummet. Diesels with a nice short final drive are the kings of the highway, but full electrics dominate on surface roads with lots of stop and go action.
Also, not sure on the Volt, but I believe Toyota offers a battery recycling plan that dramatically drops the cost of replacement, and I think the more recent generations of batteries are shooting for 10 year service windows.
If I had a 20 mile or less commute in a town of more temperate weather, I would definitely look at the Volt as a serious contender for my next vehicle.
Except in this case, they aren't subscribers. They are the folks that buy a copy from a reseller before hopping on the L to head to work. And Murdoc has never had the names, addresses, or any other information about those people.
It all matters on what is on the RF chip. In the case of passports, it is far far more than just a random identifier that ties back to a database.
Also, in combination is a camera, you can make a strong connection between a specific random ID and a person. Even though the ID is random, you can still attribute every reading of that ID to that person. So if you do know more about the person, you can immediately pull up a history of their recorded locations.
"...Senator, according to our research, your security badge was detected at the 5th Street Brothel 26 times in the summer of 2009..."
What are you talking about? Bing answered my question about why windows are so expensive, especially the vinyl ones. Google didn't give me any useful information at all. Just a bunch of gobbly-gook about some new fangled computer stuff.
So all Comcast employees will get read, Verizon employees, etc... making a very high signal to noise ratio that is approaching that of just taking everyone's photo.
And you can't come up with a way to develop a value to the data of who, regardless of affiliation, attended a black hat hacker convention? Or any non-mainstream group event for that matter.
What if instead of jamming phones, the school put up their own cell antena. They could work with the other local providers to tweek the handoff rules such that phones in side the school are significantly more likely to stay on the school's tower.
Once you have all of those phones on the school's tower it would be simple to shut down texting and internet access while still allowing access to 911 and emergency numbers listed in the student's records.
Sure, it'll cost more than $5000 to get up and maintain, but it is much more likely to pass muster.
Personally though, I'm all for the confiscate and return rule. It's cheaper AND it reinforces lessons in personal responsibility.
I didn't have such a fine grasp of it previously, but I knew that the validation for communication usage was entirely independent of the Exclusive chip. From the text of the statement though, I was under the impression that Apple, or more likely AT&T was using the Exclusive chip in their communications with the phone to be able to identify a specific iPhone and tie it to the initial purchaser. So that even if you jail break a phone, if your call hits an AT&T tower, they know who you are independent of any carrier data.
That's silly. If a tower network is not configured to prevent unauthorized access, it is hardly a jail breaker's fault.
More to the actual point, the issue isn't that the phone would be annonymous, it is that the phone controller could exploit the Exclusive Chip Identification number, to make calls using credentials for a valid and paid phone service while not telling AT&T who the actual user was. So that when AT&T sees what they believe to be jail-broken calls coming over their towers to external providers, they can't look at the ECI to identify the user making the call.
Everyone still gets their money for the call, but AT&T is screwed out of the phone contract due to the jail break.
The right of first sale, The purchaser bought the book in good faith. The seller, who sold illegally can turn over the list of people they sold that book to, and the police can track down all those people and confiscate their kindles while an expert deletes the book from each of them. If the consumers had purchased dead tree copies of the book that Amazon had sold illegally, Amazon would not be allowed to trespass into each person's house and remove the book. So why is it that they are allowed to trespass into our digital property and steal (as in I paid and had it, now I don't) from us?
Unfortunately, that would be costly and expensive, so instead they just overstep their bounds and deleted the files themselves. While claiming that the customers had only purchased a revocable license to read the content of the book.
Personally, I'd really like to see some of these cases of license to view content vs sale of property get into a court. Because as it stands now, consumers are on the significantly shorter end of the stick. Heck I'd love to see Congress be proactive, but the odds of that happening are about slim to nil.
Of course if you really were unable to find the prior art and did the required level of due diligence in looking for it then they won't be able to prove you knew about it, so you won't get convicted and hence won't get fined.
Again, as an independent developer with little to no knowledge of patent law, patent searching resources, or what exactly meets the requirements of "due diligence", I'm see this as a horrible idea.
Just the phrase "due diligence" screams "SUE ME!" as we let lawyers hash out exactly what due diligence is as I the independent inventor foot the bill.
And how exactly is someone going to prove that they DON'T know something? You are talking about criminal charges for a thought crime.
And if I am criminally liable for my submissions, what the hell do we have the USPTO clerks for? If I'm going to be assuming 100% of the liability, I sure as hell don't want to be paying taxes for them to repeat what I've just done.
The system as it is now, is flawed. But the idea of applying criminal charges to people who file erroneous patents would be horrendous if applied resulting in the exclusion of the independent inventors and allowing only large organizations with substantial coffers and legal representations on hand to apply for patents. Which is the exact same problem we're dealing with now with the patent trolls.
There needs to be tougher (and by tougher I mean "some") penalties to stop patent nonsense like this. If a patent is applied for and prior art exists there should be criminal convictions (huge, EU-like fines) as a result.
So you're saying that as an independent inventor, I should assume a huge criminal liability by filing for a patent that may or may not have prior art that I was unable to find?
Yeah... that's a great idea. I'm sure it won't stifle innovation or the open dissemination of knowledge at all.
Primarily on the fact that while a 1994 Honda Civic exists, the MIT Electric car that the page describes doesn't even exist yet. Not even in the "We're heading to the track to start testing" phase. Hell, not even to the "Lets turn the key and make sure the lights work" phase.
They just finished tearing apart the donor car a week ago. So far all they have is an over weight drive train, a single power cell package prototype, and a whole lot of pipe dreams.
This story is something that belongs in The Onion...
"Local Farm Boy Dreams Up Revolutionary New Automobile" While no details on how he is going to overcome any of the significant obstacles in his way, we are excited that he has in fact been dreaming and has some ideas. Local organizations have donated some amount of parts for him to start working with, and his father has loaned him a welder.
Oh, I almost forgot... My Diesel revs well over 3k and makes peek power just shy of 4k. My understanding is that the limitations on revving Diesels say to 6K has more to due with the increased mass of the reciprocating mass.
Then again, if you are talking about pushing a gas engine up to 20:1 compression, you're going to need a significantly more massive reciprocating mass. If you try to run high compression (or high boost) on a crank, connecting rods, and pistons designed for a naturally aspirated 8.5:1 compression, you'll blow the whole thing to pieces in no time and the heat from the combustion will melt a hole in those light weight pistons.
This makes it better at igniting a leaner mixture.
Leaner mixtures mean more NOX exhaust.
this could make gas engines get the same compression ratio as a diesel while still reving over 3k.
You are talking about taking a typical combustion ratio of 8.5:1 - 9.5:1 and pushing into the 18:1-22:1 range... not likely. At those pressures, direct injection becomes a requirement because you wouldn't need an ignition, spark or laser. The fuel would immediately ignite, and you would likely wind up with some really screwy performance and exhaust.
Why not just save the trouble and go to Diesel from the get go. You're already running a high compression engine with direct injection and no ignition system. You can run it on full bio fuels to get carbon neutral instead of a theoretical 20% improvement.
In the studies, the potential to actually cause cancer is being investigated. In testing so far, it hasn't happened.
To someone with Stage 4 cancer and an aggressive chemo schedule, I would take a guess that the odds of the medicine causing a new cancer while allowing them to be healthy and destroy the existing cancer is of minimal concern.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't that a bit like the dairy farmer complaining about the smell of cow shit?
-Rick
So to summarize...nobody is the villain in their own story.
Not just that, but sometimes an "evil" person could be viewed as a hero of society if the goals of that person demanded such actions.
And then you get into the fun aspect of hind sight and historical justification.
-Rick
Not necessarily. You're getting into the regions of moral relativism. What one person sees as evil, another sees as good.
What ever action you take, or choose not to take, has social ramifications. Depending on the scale of your (in)action, multiple societies will cast their opinion on it. And each will see your act differently.
In a "good" person, we see someone who cares more for the good of the society, and society's opinion of them, then they do for their own desires.
In a typical person, we see a balance of personal desires against societal needs and social expectations.
In an "evil" person, we see someone who cares more for their own personal desires than societal needs and social expectations.
For a pure evil person, we would need someone who not only cares more for their own personal desires, but finds achieving their personal desires at the expense of society to be fulfilling. For the most part, see Heath Ledger's rendition of the Joker.
So I would argue that it requires less personal energy and resources to be evil than it does to be good. The trade off though, is that most western societies have ways of dealing with evil people.
-Rick
CLIN 001: Development, from date of award to Jan 31, 2010
$7.76M
CLIN 010: (Optional) Operations and Maintenance from end of CLIN 001 to 1 year after.
$1.35M
CLIN 020: (Optional) Operations and Maintenance from end of CLIN 010 to 1 year after.
$1.40M
CLIN 030: (Optional) Operations and Maintenance from end of CLIN 020 to 1 year after.
$1.44M
CLIN 040: (Optional) Operations and Maintenance from end of CLIN 030 to 1 year after.
$1.49M
CLIN 050: (Optional) System Improvement and Enhancements. From date exercised to 1 year.
$1M Ceiling
CLIN 060: (Optional) System Improvement and Enhancements. From date exercised to 1 year.
$1M Ceiling
CLIN 070: (Optional) System Improvement and Enhancements. From date exercised to 1 year.
$1M Ceiling
CLIN 080: (Optional) Continuation of Operations Site
$1.76M
There's your $18M at work. The $7M for development seems a bit odd given the Jan 2010 dead line, but if you look at the proposal, it becomes immediately clear that they have already sunk a significant amount of effort into the development and are probably billing for a substantial amount of work already completed.
All in all, given the content, up-time requirements, bandwidth usage, and high profile nature of the site, I'm not surprised, nor all that skeptical of their costs.
-Rick
Some of it is understandable. They aren't going to publish individual's names or pay rates.
But if you look on Page 102 you can see the cost break down by CLIN #. And on page 145 you can see the tasks associated with each CLIN.
Some of the black out is clearly for individual's privacy. You can see the company name, but not the specific individuals assigned to the job. Other parts, yeah, it looks way over board. But the pricing is there.
-Rick
Slight correction:
Judges swear an oath to the Constitution. Not to the nation, president, states, God, nor anything else.
-Rick
So its hype and a bogus test meant to exaggerate the car in best possible situations.
Or, for people who live in an optimal situation, say 20 miles from work with mostly in-city driving, it is as great as advertised.
I drive a TDI Golf. I get 45 MPG. But it's all high way, 80 miles a day. If I were driving stop light to stop light, my mileage would plummet. Diesels with a nice short final drive are the kings of the highway, but full electrics dominate on surface roads with lots of stop and go action.
Also, not sure on the Volt, but I believe Toyota offers a battery recycling plan that dramatically drops the cost of replacement, and I think the more recent generations of batteries are shooting for 10 year service windows.
If I had a 20 mile or less commute in a town of more temperate weather, I would definitely look at the Volt as a serious contender for my next vehicle.
-Rick
Except in this case, they aren't subscribers. They are the folks that buy a copy from a reseller before hopping on the L to head to work. And Murdoc has never had the names, addresses, or any other information about those people.
-Rick
It all matters on what is on the RF chip. In the case of passports, it is far far more than just a random identifier that ties back to a database.
Also, in combination is a camera, you can make a strong connection between a specific random ID and a person. Even though the ID is random, you can still attribute every reading of that ID to that person. So if you do know more about the person, you can immediately pull up a history of their recorded locations.
"...Senator, according to our research, your security badge was detected at the 5th Street Brothel 26 times in the summer of 2009..."
-Rick
What are you talking about? Bing answered my question about why windows are so expensive, especially the vinyl ones. Google didn't give me any useful information at all. Just a bunch of gobbly-gook about some new fangled computer stuff.
-Rick
So all Comcast employees will get read, Verizon employees, etc... making a very high signal to noise ratio that is approaching that of just taking everyone's photo.
And you can't come up with a way to develop a value to the data of who, regardless of affiliation, attended a black hat hacker convention? Or any non-mainstream group event for that matter.
-Rick
What if instead of jamming phones, the school put up their own cell antena. They could work with the other local providers to tweek the handoff rules such that phones in side the school are significantly more likely to stay on the school's tower.
Once you have all of those phones on the school's tower it would be simple to shut down texting and internet access while still allowing access to 911 and emergency numbers listed in the student's records.
Sure, it'll cost more than $5000 to get up and maintain, but it is much more likely to pass muster.
Personally though, I'm all for the confiscate and return rule. It's cheaper AND it reinforces lessons in personal responsibility.
-Rick
I didn't have such a fine grasp of it previously, but I knew that the validation for communication usage was entirely independent of the Exclusive chip. From the text of the statement though, I was under the impression that Apple, or more likely AT&T was using the Exclusive chip in their communications with the phone to be able to identify a specific iPhone and tie it to the initial purchaser. So that even if you jail break a phone, if your call hits an AT&T tower, they know who you are independent of any carrier data.
-Rick
That's silly. If a tower network is not configured to prevent unauthorized access, it is hardly a jail breaker's fault.
More to the actual point, the issue isn't that the phone would be annonymous, it is that the phone controller could exploit the Exclusive Chip Identification number, to make calls using credentials for a valid and paid phone service while not telling AT&T who the actual user was. So that when AT&T sees what they believe to be jail-broken calls coming over their towers to external providers, they can't look at the ECI to identify the user making the call.
Everyone still gets their money for the call, but AT&T is screwed out of the phone contract due to the jail break.
-Rick
If I had the points, I'd do it myself.
-Rick
The right of first sale, The purchaser bought the book in good faith. The seller, who sold illegally can turn over the list of people they sold that book to, and the police can track down all those people and confiscate their kindles while an expert deletes the book from each of them. If the consumers had purchased dead tree copies of the book that Amazon had sold illegally, Amazon would not be allowed to trespass into each person's house and remove the book. So why is it that they are allowed to trespass into our digital property and steal (as in I paid and had it, now I don't) from us?
Unfortunately, that would be costly and expensive, so instead they just overstep their bounds and deleted the files themselves. While claiming that the customers had only purchased a revocable license to read the content of the book.
Personally, I'd really like to see some of these cases of license to view content vs sale of property get into a court. Because as it stands now, consumers are on the significantly shorter end of the stick. Heck I'd love to see Congress be proactive, but the odds of that happening are about slim to nil.
-Rick
Of course if you really were unable to find the prior art and did the required level of due diligence in looking for it then they won't be able to prove you knew about it, so you won't get convicted and hence won't get fined.
Again, as an independent developer with little to no knowledge of patent law, patent searching resources, or what exactly meets the requirements of "due diligence", I'm see this as a horrible idea.
Just the phrase "due diligence" screams "SUE ME!" as we let lawyers hash out exactly what due diligence is as I the independent inventor foot the bill.
And how exactly is someone going to prove that they DON'T know something? You are talking about criminal charges for a thought crime.
And if I am criminally liable for my submissions, what the hell do we have the USPTO clerks for? If I'm going to be assuming 100% of the liability, I sure as hell don't want to be paying taxes for them to repeat what I've just done.
The system as it is now, is flawed. But the idea of applying criminal charges to people who file erroneous patents would be horrendous if applied resulting in the exclusion of the independent inventors and allowing only large organizations with substantial coffers and legal representations on hand to apply for patents. Which is the exact same problem we're dealing with now with the patent trolls.
-Rick
There needs to be tougher (and by tougher I mean "some") penalties to stop patent nonsense like this. If a patent is applied for and prior art exists there should be criminal convictions (huge, EU-like fines) as a result.
So you're saying that as an independent inventor, I should assume a huge criminal liability by filing for a patent that may or may not have prior art that I was unable to find?
Yeah... that's a great idea. I'm sure it won't stifle innovation or the open dissemination of knowledge at all.
-Rick
Primarily on the fact that while a 1994 Honda Civic exists, the MIT Electric car that the page describes doesn't even exist yet. Not even in the "We're heading to the track to start testing" phase. Hell, not even to the "Lets turn the key and make sure the lights work" phase.
They just finished tearing apart the donor car a week ago. So far all they have is an over weight drive train, a single power cell package prototype, and a whole lot of pipe dreams.
This story is something that belongs in The Onion...
"Local Farm Boy Dreams Up Revolutionary New Automobile"
While no details on how he is going to overcome any of the significant obstacles in his way, we are excited that he has in fact been dreaming and has some ideas. Local organizations have donated some amount of parts for him to start working with, and his father has loaned him a welder.
That's about what we have here.
-Rick
Oh, I almost forgot... My Diesel revs well over 3k and makes peek power just shy of 4k. My understanding is that the limitations on revving Diesels say to 6K has more to due with the increased mass of the reciprocating mass.
Then again, if you are talking about pushing a gas engine up to 20:1 compression, you're going to need a significantly more massive reciprocating mass. If you try to run high compression (or high boost) on a crank, connecting rods, and pistons designed for a naturally aspirated 8.5:1 compression, you'll blow the whole thing to pieces in no time and the heat from the combustion will melt a hole in those light weight pistons.
-Rick
This makes it better at igniting a leaner mixture.
Leaner mixtures mean more NOX exhaust.
this could make gas engines get the same compression ratio as a diesel while still reving over 3k.
You are talking about taking a typical combustion ratio of 8.5:1 - 9.5:1 and pushing into the 18:1-22:1 range... not likely. At those pressures, direct injection becomes a requirement because you wouldn't need an ignition, spark or laser. The fuel would immediately ignite, and you would likely wind up with some really screwy performance and exhaust.
Why not just save the trouble and go to Diesel from the get go. You're already running a high compression engine with direct injection and no ignition system. You can run it on full bio fuels to get carbon neutral instead of a theoretical 20% improvement.
-Rick
Good to know. So with a properly color coded 48V system, a person should be fine licking the Blue wire, but not the Grey?
-Rick
Thanks for that, now I feel kinda like an idiot. At least I am now a smarter idiot than I was half an hour ago.
-Rick
http://www.digi.no/504306/her-kjores-egentlig-opera-mini&bid=5
Notice anything odd about the large 48v DC power cables? Like the '+' and '-'... on the wrong lines...
Forget a javascript issue, that there is a pretty huge installation issue.
-Rick
In the studies, the potential to actually cause cancer is being investigated. In testing so far, it hasn't happened.
To someone with Stage 4 cancer and an aggressive chemo schedule, I would take a guess that the odds of the medicine causing a new cancer while allowing them to be healthy and destroy the existing cancer is of minimal concern.
-Rick