Does the fact that this will be an open-source application compensate for the fact that this introduces yet another method of surveillance into society?
This is a rather odd argument to come from a physicist. WTF are you doing studying the low-level working of the universe? You don't need to understand the universe. You just need to use it as a tool. Let some nerdy fellow of in some lab worry about the universe; go live your life in ignorance of such things.
I mean, consider that we're talking about the UK's school system here. The whole purpose of a school system is to teach their students about stuff. Arguing that "students don't need to understand anything, they just need to use it" is arguing against the very reason that school systems exist.
There is some merit to your argument (and similar arguments from several others), but as you point out, we're talking about the UK school system. My post was originally a response to someone arguing that just having the schools teach basic computer skills was a disservice to the students, and that they would be much better served by learning PHP, Perl and Server Administration so that at least they could be entry-level sysadmins at a small company.
I think that this is a great disservice to students. We want schools to train children to be useful and productive members of society, not just train a new generation of computer professionals. Does a journalist need to use PHP (or vi to write stories)? Does an accountant need to know about server administration? Does a carpenter need to program Perl? No, and spending a lot of time teaching high-level computer skills to these people instead of teaching good grammar and numeracy doesn't help them all that much.
As I said, I'm a physicist, and most of my time is spent studying semiconductor processing technology rather than the low-level workings of the universe. Do I use a computer? Of course. But I don't do very much programming any more except as a hobby. I use a computer for data collection and analysis, examining trends in time series. I also use it to connect to electronic journals and to sent email to colleagues and collaborators. In other words, I use the computer as a tool, replacing the postal system and the slide rule of 50 years ago. For the physicists that do need computers for serious stuff, they learn in university rather than having it as core curriculum in elementary school.
Training children to use computers is certainly a good thing. We need them to operate in the modern world. But I'll state again that computers are just fancy tools. We should remember that just as schools are not in the basis of training carpenters, they also aren't solely in the business of training programmers. The skills they teach have to be relevant to everyone, and putting a deep focus on computer skills is no better than leaving computers off the curriculum completely.
Why haven't schools switched to all Linux? Linux teaches students about computers Windows teaches students how to use Windows If someone learned UNIX 10 years ago, they could pick up a modern Linux distro and have little trouble with it, if you take someone who learned Windows 98 and put them on a Vista system, they would be confused and have no clue how to do the most basic things. Same thing with Office, if a UNIX student learned on vi, they could edit text files with ease on a Linux system, take someone who learned on Word 97 and put them on a Word 2007 machine and they would be confused. Not to mention practically anyone knows how to check e-mail, surf the web and get around an operating system, that doesn't get you ahead, now if someone knows PHP, Perl and Server Administration, they could be an entry-level sysadmin for a small company, while the other student would be more or less a data entry clerk, Windows leads to more dependence on MS products, Linux leads to more solutions and more opportunities.
I must take exception to this. Yes, if someone knows PHP, Perl and Server Administration they could be an entry level sysadmin. Or they could not know anything about them (well PHP and Server stuff) and become a physicist like me. This is a school setting we're talking about, and they have to train more than just computer users. Students shouldn't have to learn vi in order to type out a book report, nor should they need to know about server administration in order to use a web browser to research said report. The computer is a tool, something to make things easier, not an end unto itself. I think we forget that on Slashdot sometimes.
Speaking from experience, a person who can use Word 97 will have little difficulty adapting to Word 2007, nor will they have much difficulty using OpenOffice for all of the basic stuff that 95% of us use it for. You are correct that Windows teaches someone how to use Windows, much as *nix teaches someone how to use another *nix flavour. The person who picked up Windows 95 is not going to have trouble with WinXP, and the person who learned Unix ten years ago will pick up Ubuntu just fine today.
Much like we don't need to understand how a car works to use it, we can be perfectly productive computer users without knowing about the nitty gritty details. Would it help? Sure, sometimes, but we have to weigh the time spent learning those details against the time that could be spent learning other useful things (physics, perhaps?). Switching to *nix just to expose people to the internals of a computer OS isn't necessarily doing them any favours.
There are enough problems with arguments about whether a vote should be counted or not as it is, in any system. With optical scanning of a ballot paper, surely there will be arguments about whether what the scanner counts as a vote or not is actually the correct definition of what is a vote or not? The voting system is likely to be attacked by people who disagree with its definitions whatever it is.
The main advantage of the optical scanning system is it leaves a paper trail. If there is a dispute at the end of the election, it is possible to manually recount the ballots. Compare with the touch-screen voting, where no independent verification is possible. The ballots are also plain pieces of paper, so there's no issue of hanging chads or dislodging chads during a recount as in certain elections in the past.
One thing you point out is paramount. Since this was a civil case, the fine should be only enough to promote equity rather than be punitive in nature.
Another interesting thing is that, averaged out, this adds up to $9250 per infringement. At that price the defendant could have physically stolen about 600 copies of each work (assuming around $15 per work). So it pays to remember that the fines for physically stealing copyrighted works are much less than infringing on them.
This was actually addressed in the Ars Technica writeup of the case. Normally the damages for copyright infringement are a few hundred dollars ($300 max rings a bell). In the case of willful infringement, however, damages can increase up to $150,000 per incident. The jury found that the defendant had engaged in such willful infringement, and could have awarded up to $3.6 million ($150,000 for each of 24 songs being distributed).
Maybe you just haven't noticed yet, but that's exactly how it already works. If I am running a web-site, I can pay to have a faster connection to be able to better serve up my content to the demand. If I am a joe user, I can pay for a dial up connection (56k) isdn (112k) dsl/cable (1.5+ Mbps). DSL and cable even have scalable service offerings with many providers.
This isn't the result of my previous suggestion. Right now, a DSL connection has the ability to send data to the ISP more rapidly than a dial-up, but once the data packets hit the ISP they're all routed with the same priority further upstream.
Realtime applications need the ability to send priority packets, so that my Skype conversation will be pushed ahead of my web surfing on Slashdot, which in turn might be placed ahead of bulk data like reading a newgroup. My comment was that it's not unreasonable to have the sender pay to have data routed at a higher priority, but that charging for that service must be done on a non-discriminatory basis. Just like the post-office delivers first class mail faster than second class mail, first-class data on the Internet must be transferred without regard to who the originator of the data is. Google, a VoIP startup and Verizon should all get the same service for the same fee.
To avoid having the lowest priority data lost into a black hole, it would be useful to have mandatory quality of service provisions between the priority levels. For example, it might be a requirement that one packet of low priority data be sent out for every two packets of high priority data, ensuring that even the unpaid stuff gets there in a reasonable fashion. Or an ISP could be forbidden from transmitting high priority packet when the queue of low-priority data gets to be a certain size. You get the idea.
The idea of network neutrality is good, but it seems to me that prioritizing data isn't the problem as much as the potential for discriminating based on *who* sent the data.
We always want the ISPs to be treated like other common carriers, but people seem to have differing notions of what they really want. With other common carriers like transportation, it is possible to pay higher rates to receive faster delivery. The post office is a fairly standard common carrier, but it has had various classes of postage for ages. Companies shipping food know that canned soup can take a couple of weeks to get from California to New York, but the fresh produce needs to move now. Can something like this be implemented on the Internet?
The Internet was really designed to move data around reliably rather than quickly. In the past, it was more important to get the data around a bombed-out relay than to provide real-time delivery. The Internet has moved beyond that and now applications, VoIP or Starcraft for example, really do need fast delivery or else the application is useless. So much of the discussion of network neutrality seems to treat it as all or nothing: either every packet is treated with the same priority or else the ISPs get to gouge the senders and/or receivers for priority.
It seems to me that something similar to the postal system might be a viable compromise. One could imagine the ISPs operating on several tiers, where they could charge different prices according to the speed of data transmission. On the flip side, they would have to charge in a non-discriminatory manner, with rates based only on the volume and priority of data (perhaps with discounts on high volumes). First class data from Google, EBay and a tiny VoIP startup would all move at the same rate, but would move faster than low-priority transmissions such as web browsing. One could also imagine mandating that ISPs allocate bandwidth to the various tiers in a fixed ratio as well, so as to avoid them ignoring the lowest tier stuff. Class 1/2/3/4 bandwidth, for example, might have to be transmitted in a fixed 10%/20%/30%/40% of total available bandwidth.
I am a big fan of the Motley Fool website, but these guys are an "investment website", which really means they're simultaneous trying to attract readers to entertain them and hopefully sell their various investment newsletters. Generally I think they have a fair bit of credibility, focusing on things like investing over a decade-long time horizon, not piling into the "next big thing" and watching things like mutual fund expenses.
That being said, I'm not sure why we particularly care about this particular article, other than the fact that it parrots the party line here at Slashdot. These guys aren't lawyers, and don't spend a lot of time examining the recording industry. In fact, over the 7 years that I've been reading their articles, this is the *only* one I can recall that discusses the music industry at all. It strikes me very much as an op-ed piece rather than a serious legal or business study of an industry, and I don't give it any more credibility than some guy ranting on his blog.
To be sure, the RIAA has suffered legal defeats and setbacks, but just because a financial news and opinion site happens to pick up on it does not mean that the industry is going to collapse, nor does it mean that those who are being/will be sued should stop worrying.
Not quite, according to wikipedia "the second is currently defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom."
Your quote must be from an outdated wikipedia article. The current article gives the correct definition (the distance travelled by light in a vaccum in 1/299 792 458 of a second), which has been in place since 1983.
The submitter writes that most people in the Working Group were against the OOXML, then 20 new companies show up and vote yes for a final vote tally of 25-6-3 in favour. Even without those 20 votes, the tally would still be 5-6-3. I know this is slashdot, but in what way would leading by a single vote qualify as "most people" being against OOXML?
For all its bluster, SoundExchange is an organization with about 30 employees. They are set up to collect and administer royalty payments, not engage in large-scale litigation. Even if the broadcasters completely stonewalled, I doubt SoundExchange is in a practical position to do much.
As I've said before, the music industry and the broadcast industry are engaged in a standard contract negotiation, albeit one that is receiving a good deal more press than would be usual. Strictly from an economic perspective, the broadcasters would like to receive broadcast rights with no royalties or restrictions of any kind. The music industry would like to have a massive royalty payment and perfect and absolute DRM. Eventually they'll meet at somewhere in the middle where they both figure they can make a buck. It will all work out...
This solves a nondeterministic-polynomial algorithm by using a very large number of parallel computations to simulate nondeterminism.
This was proposed some years ago for DNA computers as well, until somebody figured out that it would take a mass of DNA the size of the earth to figure out a non-trivial problem. So this is NOT the first time somebody has proposed a method for reducing NP problems to polynomial time, though this mechanism is novel as far as I know.
I'm not sure this comparison is correct. The use of DNA just increased the computational power available to the problem, but didn't change the fundamental methods of calculation (i.e. one step at a time). The DNA computer didn't make the NP problem go away, it just threw more power at it.
This uses the interference of the light within an optical network to perform the calculation. The "operation", such as it is, relates to physically constructing the network rather than the number of photons required. In a very tenuous way, this is similar to a quantum computer, where multiple calculations are performed simultaneously. Of course it's not a quantum computer, but it does appear to be a polynomial algorithm.
I browsed through the article, and here is my understanding of what they are doing.
The experimenters are constructing the map of the various cities using optical fibres. Each city represents a junction in the optical fibre network, and each fibre has a length proportional to the weight of the edge joining two cities in the abstract problem.
Once the fibre network is constructed, they shine a white light source into the network. As the light propagates through the system, it splits at each junction (i.e. city). As a consequence, the optical signal is able to sample all possible paths through the network simultaneously. The entire optical network is put on one arm of an interferometer, and the length of the other arm (the reference arm) is adjusted. Starting from a known lower bound on the city length, the length of the reference arm is increased until the reference signal interferes with the output signal from the optical network. At that point, they have the length of the shortest path, and apparently can do some kind of reconstruction to get the actual path from there (didn't quite follow how that happened).
The claimed reduction of an NP problem to quadratic comes from the setup of the experimental apparatus. An "operation" consists of connecting one of the N cities to another of the N cities. For an average collection of cities, there will be a number of roads/connections proportional to N^2. Of course the operation is awfully slow, but it's a thought experiment more than anything.
...how big is the school in question? I've been wondering recently whether the RIAA has ever gone after schools with big legal programs. Have they been avoiding a fight with students who might have a large number of friends training to be lawyers? I have visions of some professor who gets sufficiently aggravated that he assigns his entire class to bury the RIAA in legal briefs.
I didn't read Scientific American in the 60's, but I do remember an article about "Core Wars", which dates back to 1984. Page images of the article can now be found at http://www.corewars.org/sciam/. There are actually Core Wars leagues online still.
I must confess I watch this issue with all the interest of grass growing.
This whole thing boils down to two interacting business groups, each of whom wants to maximize their profits. The music industry would like to be paid a massive amount of money in royalties. Clearly that isn't going to happen. The broadcasters would like to have zero royalties, or better yet be paid by the RIAA for playing the music. That's not going to happen either.
While the RIAA has temporary gotten a high royalty rate, the broadcasters are not going to be able to pay it, and the RIAA's profits will go down as a result. After a few quarter they'll wake up to this fact and get down to bargaining seriously on a reduced rate. Eventually they'll hammer out a rate somewhere in the middle that both sides can live with. Then they can get back to the more profitable business of screwing the consumer.
In the meantime, squawking and complaining don't cost anything so we get the joys of listening to both sides play for public sympathy in the hope that it will improve their bargaining position.
Let my lay this out for you: When George Bush takes away your freedoms to protect you from terrorists that is bad, and George Bush is evil and wants power. Environmentalists want to take away your freedoms to 'save the earth' and that is good because they have no motives whatsoever to get power.
George Bush is stripping the freedom from unreasonable search and seizure and the right to habeus corpus, amongst others. The right to drive an SUV is not in the Constitution. Don't ever think the two are equivalent.
X-ray machines, Jet engines, and more all report operating conditions and usage information back to the manufacturer. Microsoft is doing this anonymously to improve the products. I have no problem with this. They aren't sending back any "personal information" like credit card numbers or even identification information.
There are plenty of reasons you still don't want this happening. Consider...the war on terror continues and somebody gets caught up in the Feds dragnet. They press charges, but don't quite have the evidence they need. The defendant's lawyer (and the ACLU) is probably going to get him to walk unless they can find something. Little known to all, the President (or these days, the VP) issues a secret Executive Order that strips "terror suspects" of the right to attorney-client privilege. The Feds show up at Microsoft's door with several court orders. They order the tracking of the suspect, and they provide the IP addresses of computer in the offices of the defendant's attorney and the ACLU and demand that Microsoft install a backdoor patch to download documents off that computer. Of course the download will be indiscriminate...maybe this lawyer will also have you as a client, and your files will go to the Feds also.
Far-fetched? Perhaps, but certainly plausible. Suppose it's not the American government, but the Chinese looking for a few journalists or Falun Gong members. Still far-fetched? Which way do you think Microsoft will go when the choice is a few journalists in prison or losing access to the Chinese market?
I come from the generation who can actually do math without a calculator. We used slide rules and log tables. We could interpolate.
All due respect, but every generation makes this kind of argument about their kids. My grandfather was a blacksmith, making horseshoes and metal tools. He knew how to pluck chicken and how to gut and clean a deer. He knew how to treat a turkey's wing so that it was rough enough to use as a scouring pad. My parents don't know how to do this, and I don't either.
My father knows how to take apart a car engine, at least the older mechanical systems. He knows how to do tool-and-die work and carpentry, although he doesn't know about log tables.
Do I know how to do any of this? No way, and I don't need to. I can go to the store and pick up a plucked chicken, the hardware store has plenty of tools made by other people and I would hire a mechanic to do car work. While I know all about log tables, they are an archaic tool, and I'd be a tool as well if I relied upon them in today's world.
Instead I can program a computer in several languages, operate million-dollar plasma-etching and lithography systems, and calculate the hyperfine-structure of a hydrogen emission spectrum. Every generation (and person) acquires skills useful and relevant to the society they live in, and dropping irrelevant skills is just a part of technological advancement.
The cosmic radiation in question has enough energy to travel across the galaxy, blast through several kilometres of atmosphere, penetrate your building's roof and walls and then punch through the box holding your film before actually interacting with the film. Seems unlikely that you'll be able to do much more to keep the film fresh.
My comment was poorly worded, and I failed to make the point that although the current DNA database was perfectly capable of getting sibling matches, it was illegal to disclose that information. Only perfect matches are released to police investigators, even when they find out, for example, that the subject in question was a sibling to someone already in the system.
Here's the worry, I think: law enforcement agencies could take a crime scene sample, run it against the entire Ancestry.com database, and decide that whoever comes up with the closest match must have done it.
The police can't even do this with their own database yet. The administrators of the DNA database only provide names for exact DNA matches. One of the network news shows (Dateline, 60 Minutes, etc) had a piece not too long ago where the police submitted DNA from crime scenes and found the database had matches to relatives of the unknown sources, but couldn't get those names because it wasn't a perfect match.
I thought this whole business was remarkably clever of the Canadian government. They managed to sidestep a messy showdown with Hollywood by outlawing something that isn't a problem. Seriously, our movie theatres are not giant igloos, and pirating movies on a camcorder hasn't been an issue for a decade or more (has it ever been?). These days pirated movies usually come from stolen or "borrowed" cinema masters.
Given the choice between having Hollywood lobbying against something stupid, like a camcorder ban, or something more serious, like a DMCA equivalent, I'd much rather pacify them with the stupid stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong. Canadians DO pay for it, via a levy on recording materials (blank CDs, etc) that goes back to the recording industry, so its not even "fraud."
Quite so, although it should be said that the copyright levy only covers copying of music. Copying video etc is still a problem.
Does the fact that this will be an open-source application compensate for the fact that this introduces yet another method of surveillance into society?
This is a rather odd argument to come from a physicist. WTF are you doing studying the low-level working of the universe? You don't need to understand the universe. You just need to use it as a tool. Let some nerdy fellow of in some lab worry about the universe; go live your life in ignorance of such things.
I mean, consider that we're talking about the UK's school system here. The whole purpose of a school system is to teach their students about stuff. Arguing that "students don't need to understand anything, they just need to use it" is arguing against the very reason that school systems exist.
There is some merit to your argument (and similar arguments from several others), but as you point out, we're talking about the UK school system. My post was originally a response to someone arguing that just having the schools teach basic computer skills was a disservice to the students, and that they would be much better served by learning PHP, Perl and Server Administration so that at least they could be entry-level sysadmins at a small company.
I think that this is a great disservice to students. We want schools to train children to be useful and productive members of society, not just train a new generation of computer professionals. Does a journalist need to use PHP (or vi to write stories)? Does an accountant need to know about server administration? Does a carpenter need to program Perl? No, and spending a lot of time teaching high-level computer skills to these people instead of teaching good grammar and numeracy doesn't help them all that much.
As I said, I'm a physicist, and most of my time is spent studying semiconductor processing technology rather than the low-level workings of the universe. Do I use a computer? Of course. But I don't do very much programming any more except as a hobby. I use a computer for data collection and analysis, examining trends in time series. I also use it to connect to electronic journals and to sent email to colleagues and collaborators. In other words, I use the computer as a tool, replacing the postal system and the slide rule of 50 years ago. For the physicists that do need computers for serious stuff, they learn in university rather than having it as core curriculum in elementary school.
Training children to use computers is certainly a good thing. We need them to operate in the modern world. But I'll state again that computers are just fancy tools. We should remember that just as schools are not in the basis of training carpenters, they also aren't solely in the business of training programmers. The skills they teach have to be relevant to everyone, and putting a deep focus on computer skills is no better than leaving computers off the curriculum completely.
Why haven't schools switched to all Linux? Linux teaches students about computers Windows teaches students how to use Windows If someone learned UNIX 10 years ago, they could pick up a modern Linux distro and have little trouble with it, if you take someone who learned Windows 98 and put them on a Vista system, they would be confused and have no clue how to do the most basic things. Same thing with Office, if a UNIX student learned on vi, they could edit text files with ease on a Linux system, take someone who learned on Word 97 and put them on a Word 2007 machine and they would be confused. Not to mention practically anyone knows how to check e-mail, surf the web and get around an operating system, that doesn't get you ahead, now if someone knows PHP, Perl and Server Administration, they could be an entry-level sysadmin for a small company, while the other student would be more or less a data entry clerk, Windows leads to more dependence on MS products, Linux leads to more solutions and more opportunities.
I must take exception to this. Yes, if someone knows PHP, Perl and Server Administration they could be an entry level sysadmin. Or they could not know anything about them (well PHP and Server stuff) and become a physicist like me. This is a school setting we're talking about, and they have to train more than just computer users. Students shouldn't have to learn vi in order to type out a book report, nor should they need to know about server administration in order to use a web browser to research said report. The computer is a tool, something to make things easier, not an end unto itself. I think we forget that on Slashdot sometimes.
Speaking from experience, a person who can use Word 97 will have little difficulty adapting to Word 2007, nor will they have much difficulty using OpenOffice for all of the basic stuff that 95% of us use it for. You are correct that Windows teaches someone how to use Windows, much as *nix teaches someone how to use another *nix flavour. The person who picked up Windows 95 is not going to have trouble with WinXP, and the person who learned Unix ten years ago will pick up Ubuntu just fine today.
Much like we don't need to understand how a car works to use it, we can be perfectly productive computer users without knowing about the nitty gritty details. Would it help? Sure, sometimes, but we have to weigh the time spent learning those details against the time that could be spent learning other useful things (physics, perhaps?). Switching to *nix just to expose people to the internals of a computer OS isn't necessarily doing them any favours.
There are enough problems with arguments about whether a vote should be counted or not as it is, in any system. With optical scanning of a ballot paper, surely there will be arguments about whether what the scanner counts as a vote or not is actually the correct definition of what is a vote or not? The voting system is likely to be attacked by people who disagree with its definitions whatever it is.
The main advantage of the optical scanning system is it leaves a paper trail. If there is a dispute at the end of the election, it is possible to manually recount the ballots. Compare with the touch-screen voting, where no independent verification is possible. The ballots are also plain pieces of paper, so there's no issue of hanging chads or dislodging chads during a recount as in certain elections in the past.
One thing you point out is paramount. Since this was a civil case, the fine should be only enough to promote equity rather than be punitive in nature.
Another interesting thing is that, averaged out, this adds up to $9250 per infringement. At that price the defendant could have physically stolen about 600 copies of each work (assuming around $15 per work). So it pays to remember that the fines for physically stealing copyrighted works are much less than infringing on them.
This was actually addressed in the Ars Technica writeup of the case. Normally the damages for copyright infringement are a few hundred dollars ($300 max rings a bell). In the case of willful infringement, however, damages can increase up to $150,000 per incident. The jury found that the defendant had engaged in such willful infringement, and could have awarded up to $3.6 million ($150,000 for each of 24 songs being distributed).
Maybe you just haven't noticed yet, but that's exactly how it already works. If I am running a web-site, I can pay to have a faster connection to be able to better serve up my content to the demand. If I am a joe user, I can pay for a dial up connection (56k) isdn (112k) dsl/cable (1.5+ Mbps). DSL and cable even have scalable service offerings with many providers.
This isn't the result of my previous suggestion. Right now, a DSL connection has the ability to send data to the ISP more rapidly than a dial-up, but once the data packets hit the ISP they're all routed with the same priority further upstream. Realtime applications need the ability to send priority packets, so that my Skype conversation will be pushed ahead of my web surfing on Slashdot, which in turn might be placed ahead of bulk data like reading a newgroup. My comment was that it's not unreasonable to have the sender pay to have data routed at a higher priority, but that charging for that service must be done on a non-discriminatory basis. Just like the post-office delivers first class mail faster than second class mail, first-class data on the Internet must be transferred without regard to who the originator of the data is. Google, a VoIP startup and Verizon should all get the same service for the same fee.
To avoid having the lowest priority data lost into a black hole, it would be useful to have mandatory quality of service provisions between the priority levels. For example, it might be a requirement that one packet of low priority data be sent out for every two packets of high priority data, ensuring that even the unpaid stuff gets there in a reasonable fashion. Or an ISP could be forbidden from transmitting high priority packet when the queue of low-priority data gets to be a certain size. You get the idea.
The idea of network neutrality is good, but it seems to me that prioritizing data isn't the problem as much as the potential for discriminating based on *who* sent the data.
We always want the ISPs to be treated like other common carriers, but people seem to have differing notions of what they really want. With other common carriers like transportation, it is possible to pay higher rates to receive faster delivery. The post office is a fairly standard common carrier, but it has had various classes of postage for ages. Companies shipping food know that canned soup can take a couple of weeks to get from California to New York, but the fresh produce needs to move now. Can something like this be implemented on the Internet?
The Internet was really designed to move data around reliably rather than quickly. In the past, it was more important to get the data around a bombed-out relay than to provide real-time delivery. The Internet has moved beyond that and now applications, VoIP or Starcraft for example, really do need fast delivery or else the application is useless. So much of the discussion of network neutrality seems to treat it as all or nothing: either every packet is treated with the same priority or else the ISPs get to gouge the senders and/or receivers for priority.
It seems to me that something similar to the postal system might be a viable compromise. One could imagine the ISPs operating on several tiers, where they could charge different prices according to the speed of data transmission. On the flip side, they would have to charge in a non-discriminatory manner, with rates based only on the volume and priority of data (perhaps with discounts on high volumes). First class data from Google, EBay and a tiny VoIP startup would all move at the same rate, but would move faster than low-priority transmissions such as web browsing. One could also imagine mandating that ISPs allocate bandwidth to the various tiers in a fixed ratio as well, so as to avoid them ignoring the lowest tier stuff. Class 1/2/3/4 bandwidth, for example, might have to be transmitted in a fixed 10%/20%/30%/40% of total available bandwidth.
I am a big fan of the Motley Fool website, but these guys are an "investment website", which really means they're simultaneous trying to attract readers to entertain them and hopefully sell their various investment newsletters. Generally I think they have a fair bit of credibility, focusing on things like investing over a decade-long time horizon, not piling into the "next big thing" and watching things like mutual fund expenses.
That being said, I'm not sure why we particularly care about this particular article, other than the fact that it parrots the party line here at Slashdot. These guys aren't lawyers, and don't spend a lot of time examining the recording industry. In fact, over the 7 years that I've been reading their articles, this is the *only* one I can recall that discusses the music industry at all. It strikes me very much as an op-ed piece rather than a serious legal or business study of an industry, and I don't give it any more credibility than some guy ranting on his blog.
To be sure, the RIAA has suffered legal defeats and setbacks, but just because a financial news and opinion site happens to pick up on it does not mean that the industry is going to collapse, nor does it mean that those who are being/will be sued should stop worrying.
Not quite, according to wikipedia "the second is currently defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom."
Your quote must be from an outdated wikipedia article. The current article gives the correct definition (the distance travelled by light in a vaccum in 1/299 792 458 of a second), which has been in place since 1983.
The submitter writes that most people in the Working Group were against the OOXML, then 20 new companies show up and vote yes for a final vote tally of 25-6-3 in favour. Even without those 20 votes, the tally would still be 5-6-3. I know this is slashdot, but in what way would leading by a single vote qualify as "most people" being against OOXML?
For all its bluster, SoundExchange is an organization with about 30 employees. They are set up to collect and administer royalty payments, not engage in large-scale litigation. Even if the broadcasters completely stonewalled, I doubt SoundExchange is in a practical position to do much.
As I've said before, the music industry and the broadcast industry are engaged in a standard contract negotiation, albeit one that is receiving a good deal more press than would be usual. Strictly from an economic perspective, the broadcasters would like to receive broadcast rights with no royalties or restrictions of any kind. The music industry would like to have a massive royalty payment and perfect and absolute DRM. Eventually they'll meet at somewhere in the middle where they both figure they can make a buck. It will all work out...
This solves a nondeterministic-polynomial algorithm by using a very large number of parallel computations to simulate nondeterminism.
This was proposed some years ago for DNA computers as well, until somebody figured out that it would take a mass of DNA the size of the earth to figure out a non-trivial problem. So this is NOT the first time somebody has proposed a method for reducing NP problems to polynomial time, though this mechanism is novel as far as I know.
I'm not sure this comparison is correct. The use of DNA just increased the computational power available to the problem, but didn't change the fundamental methods of calculation (i.e. one step at a time). The DNA computer didn't make the NP problem go away, it just threw more power at it.
This uses the interference of the light within an optical network to perform the calculation. The "operation", such as it is, relates to physically constructing the network rather than the number of photons required. In a very tenuous way, this is similar to a quantum computer, where multiple calculations are performed simultaneously. Of course it's not a quantum computer, but it does appear to be a polynomial algorithm.
I browsed through the article, and here is my understanding of what they are doing.
The experimenters are constructing the map of the various cities using optical fibres. Each city represents a junction in the optical fibre network, and each fibre has a length proportional to the weight of the edge joining two cities in the abstract problem.
Once the fibre network is constructed, they shine a white light source into the network. As the light propagates through the system, it splits at each junction (i.e. city). As a consequence, the optical signal is able to sample all possible paths through the network simultaneously. The entire optical network is put on one arm of an interferometer, and the length of the other arm (the reference arm) is adjusted. Starting from a known lower bound on the city length, the length of the reference arm is increased until the reference signal interferes with the output signal from the optical network. At that point, they have the length of the shortest path, and apparently can do some kind of reconstruction to get the actual path from there (didn't quite follow how that happened).
The claimed reduction of an NP problem to quadratic comes from the setup of the experimental apparatus. An "operation" consists of connecting one of the N cities to another of the N cities. For an average collection of cities, there will be a number of roads/connections proportional to N^2. Of course the operation is awfully slow, but it's a thought experiment more than anything.
...how big is the school in question? I've been wondering recently whether the RIAA has ever gone after schools with big legal programs. Have they been avoiding a fight with students who might have a large number of friends training to be lawyers? I have visions of some professor who gets sufficiently aggravated that he assigns his entire class to bury the RIAA in legal briefs.
I didn't read Scientific American in the 60's, but I do remember an article about "Core Wars", which dates back to 1984. Page images of the article can now be found at http://www.corewars.org/sciam/. There are actually Core Wars leagues online still.
I must confess I watch this issue with all the interest of grass growing.
This whole thing boils down to two interacting business groups, each of whom wants to maximize their profits. The music industry would like to be paid a massive amount of money in royalties. Clearly that isn't going to happen. The broadcasters would like to have zero royalties, or better yet be paid by the RIAA for playing the music. That's not going to happen either.
While the RIAA has temporary gotten a high royalty rate, the broadcasters are not going to be able to pay it, and the RIAA's profits will go down as a result. After a few quarter they'll wake up to this fact and get down to bargaining seriously on a reduced rate. Eventually they'll hammer out a rate somewhere in the middle that both sides can live with. Then they can get back to the more profitable business of screwing the consumer.
In the meantime, squawking and complaining don't cost anything so we get the joys of listening to both sides play for public sympathy in the hope that it will improve their bargaining position.
Let my lay this out for you: When George Bush takes away your freedoms to protect you from terrorists that is bad, and George Bush is evil and wants power. Environmentalists want to take away your freedoms to 'save the earth' and that is good because they have no motives whatsoever to get power. George Bush is stripping the freedom from unreasonable search and seizure and the right to habeus corpus, amongst others. The right to drive an SUV is not in the Constitution. Don't ever think the two are equivalent.
X-ray machines, Jet engines, and more all report operating conditions and usage information back to the manufacturer. Microsoft is doing this anonymously to improve the products. I have no problem with this. They aren't sending back any "personal information" like credit card numbers or even identification information.
There are plenty of reasons you still don't want this happening. Consider...the war on terror continues and somebody gets caught up in the Feds dragnet. They press charges, but don't quite have the evidence they need. The defendant's lawyer (and the ACLU) is probably going to get him to walk unless they can find something. Little known to all, the President (or these days, the VP) issues a secret Executive Order that strips "terror suspects" of the right to attorney-client privilege. The Feds show up at Microsoft's door with several court orders. They order the tracking of the suspect, and they provide the IP addresses of computer in the offices of the defendant's attorney and the ACLU and demand that Microsoft install a backdoor patch to download documents off that computer. Of course the download will be indiscriminate...maybe this lawyer will also have you as a client, and your files will go to the Feds also.
Far-fetched? Perhaps, but certainly plausible. Suppose it's not the American government, but the Chinese looking for a few journalists or Falun Gong members. Still far-fetched? Which way do you think Microsoft will go when the choice is a few journalists in prison or losing access to the Chinese market?
Privacy is always good.
I come from the generation who can actually do math without a calculator. We used slide rules and log tables. We could interpolate.
All due respect, but every generation makes this kind of argument about their kids. My grandfather was a blacksmith, making horseshoes and metal tools. He knew how to pluck chicken and how to gut and clean a deer. He knew how to treat a turkey's wing so that it was rough enough to use as a scouring pad. My parents don't know how to do this, and I don't either.
My father knows how to take apart a car engine, at least the older mechanical systems. He knows how to do tool-and-die work and carpentry, although he doesn't know about log tables.
Do I know how to do any of this? No way, and I don't need to. I can go to the store and pick up a plucked chicken, the hardware store has plenty of tools made by other people and I would hire a mechanic to do car work. While I know all about log tables, they are an archaic tool, and I'd be a tool as well if I relied upon them in today's world.
Instead I can program a computer in several languages, operate million-dollar plasma-etching and lithography systems, and calculate the hyperfine-structure of a hydrogen emission spectrum. Every generation (and person) acquires skills useful and relevant to the society they live in, and dropping irrelevant skills is just a part of technological advancement.
The cosmic radiation in question has enough energy to travel across the galaxy, blast through several kilometres of atmosphere, penetrate your building's roof and walls and then punch through the box holding your film before actually interacting with the film. Seems unlikely that you'll be able to do much more to keep the film fresh.
My comment was poorly worded, and I failed to make the point that although the current DNA database was perfectly capable of getting sibling matches, it was illegal to disclose that information. Only perfect matches are released to police investigators, even when they find out, for example, that the subject in question was a sibling to someone already in the system.
Here's the worry, I think: law enforcement agencies could take a crime scene sample, run it against the entire Ancestry.com database, and decide that whoever comes up with the closest match must have done it.
The police can't even do this with their own database yet. The administrators of the DNA database only provide names for exact DNA matches. One of the network news shows (Dateline, 60 Minutes, etc) had a piece not too long ago where the police submitted DNA from crime scenes and found the database had matches to relatives of the unknown sources, but couldn't get those names because it wasn't a perfect match.
I thought this whole business was remarkably clever of the Canadian government. They managed to sidestep a messy showdown with Hollywood by outlawing something that isn't a problem. Seriously, our movie theatres are not giant igloos, and pirating movies on a camcorder hasn't been an issue for a decade or more (has it ever been?). These days pirated movies usually come from stolen or "borrowed" cinema masters.
Given the choice between having Hollywood lobbying against something stupid, like a camcorder ban, or something more serious, like a DMCA equivalent, I'd much rather pacify them with the stupid stuff.
Maybe the prospect of having to pay for its bugs will finally force Microsoft to ship better code.