I'm wondering if some kind of one time pads could be generated by all parties involved, combined togther with public key cryptography, that would allow such a system. Don't throw pseudo-cryptographic nonsense into it. The problem is a human one; it cannot be solved purely by technology.
You have a task that gathers data from many sources, and needs to verify the identity of those sources. Many people and groups will try to attack, corrupt or undermine that data. Furthermore, any verification in place to detect and prevent such attacks can also be considered vulnerable, but ALSO gets saddled with a deadline as laws in many states prevent recounts after a brief timespan.
The "attacks" could be purely technological -- (subvert the software), all the way to social (have poll workers set up certain locations in a way that delays people who are waiting to vote in areas that tend to be against your candidate).
People speak of the importance of a paper trail, but that merely diverts the point of vulnerability. How do we detect that a recount is needed in the first place? Who is doing the recount? How do we know it is any better than the first count?
It's not Republicans telling what kind of car I should drive, what kind of food I can eat and if, when, and where I want to have a cigarette. It's not Republicans telling me what kind of health care I should have and it's not Republicans trying to take away my money to give it to someone else. It's not Republicans who are trying to use taxes to affect my behavior (carbon and gas taxes) and it's not Republicans who want to put a remote control on my thermostat so they can turn my AC down if THEY think I'm using too much electricity. No, they just want to tell you that you can't have an abortion, tell you that you can't be taught the theory of evolution, tell you that you need a national ID card, tell you that your kids and their kids may be in Iraq well into the distant future, and tell you that Uncle Sam can be trusted to monitor your every move.
You sound much more Libertarian than Republican. The Republican Party in its current format has strayed far, far away from the old model of states' rights and limited government.
Gas tanks don't explode. It takes 3 things to get something to burn. Oxygen, Heat, Fuel. To get something to explode, the fuel needs to be dispersed in the oxgen and there needs to be enough oxygen to support the explosion. Gas *vapor* is what's most dangerous. Dat to day you don't deal with that, except when you fill up or when your car has mechanical problems. But in a crash, if a gas tank were to leak, you suddenly have a high risk situation.
Also, boats -- particularly inboards, are more dangerous. Gas vapor is heavier than air so it tends to collect in the bilge area, whereas a car has open air beneath it. That's why you're supposed to run the blower for a bit before attempting to start a boat engine.
Capacitors on the other hand, have extremely high discharge rates and require no fuel, oxygen or heat to explode. Enough energy to power a vehicle for more than 100 miles would cause serious damage if the capacitor were to fail from an accident or manufacturing defect.
Everyone may think putting capacitors in a car is a good thing, but you're essentially mounting bombs in the car. A properly designed ultracapacitor would ground out to the car's body in the event of a failure. It should be safer than gas simply because there is nothing that can be dispersed in an accident.
In addition to being non-transferrable, patents should be assigned only to the person(s) who create them. Corporations should not be allowed to amass patent portfolios. In other words, when one of those PhD researchers decides to leave Microsoft, he takes his patents with him.
I think in a free market it is certainly acceptable for Microsoft to highly compensate that person so he would stay with the company. But that's much different from the company owning the patent itself.
If you only protect specific implementations of ideas, then people actually have to implement them. It rewards creating a product and selling it - what a concept!
Patents reward companies that lock up technology and produce nothing except a clogged court system.
6) Copyright offers enough protection already, without patents.
Of course this conflicts with your #4 to some degree. However, when you have competitors trying to imitate your product by writing their own source from scratch, it motivates you to stay one step ahead by improving your own product. For that reason, I think copyright produces more technological progress than patents do, at least in the software industry.
Or you can call your phone company and report that number as a nuisance caller. They will block it for you in most cases.
Verizon was surprisingly helpful when I had this problem awhile back. In my case, some company's fax machine was calling my voice number multiple times per day... talk about annoying.
I would be pissed that all these tech companies rake in the money by ripping off my invention. Odds are:
a) by the time the patent application was filed, it was already obvious b) they didn't invent it, or they acquired the patent from someone else c) they have made no effort whatsoever to put the invention into production
Q: Is there any benefit to password protecting your home Wifi network? I have IT friends that say the only real benefit is that multiple users can slow down the connection, but they state that there is no security reason. Is this correct?
A: I run an open wireless network at home. There's no password, and there's no encryption. Honestly, I think it's just polite. Why should I care if someone on the block steals wireless access from me? When my wireless router broke last month, I used a neighbor's access until I replaced it. That answer is so bad it almost sounds like sarcasm. Given how easy it is to sniff sensitive data from an unencrypted wireless network, I can't imagine Bruce would allow it unless he segments his network or wires up his own PC.
no plant built in the US was ever as dangerous as Chernobyl
Hanford's N reactor was arguably *more* dangerous than Chernobyl. Both used graphite moderation and water cooling. Neither had a containment building. And the Hanford site processed nearly double the fuel and was 14 years older than Chernobyl. It was an accident waiting to happen.
Despite that, I am in favor of more responsible nuclear power usage in the U.S. But claiming that we never built plants as dangerous as Chernobyl is disingenuous.
The main problem is a combination of the short spindown time, and something wanting to write out to the drive every 30 seconds or so.
First, my perspective: yes, I had a laptop drive die while running an older version of Ubuntu. I'm not sure if the problem is still present in current builds, though, as I haven't used it in awhile.
On to what I quoted -- one problem with the default Ubuntu setup is ext3. The system will periodically write out to the journal even when it is otherwise idle. This occurs even if you have noatime set in your fstab.
Unfortunately, it is working exactly as it was designed.
I think you'd be hard pressed to show that patents were designed to be sold and traded.
If patents were only assigned to the original inventor, only to *individuals* (not corporations), and non-transferrable, then most of the problems with patent litigation would go away.
Granted, there are other problem areas, such as the lengthy term and the issue of software / business method patents. But if corporations were not permitted to purchase or acquire patents from inventors, then the best they could do is hire the inventors. And that's just not a sound business model for a patent-troll firm.
The funny thing is that most people don't realize how many of the desktop performance enhancements Con is responsible for, even ignoring the CPU scheduler.
The preemptible kernel, preempt of the big kernel lock, tick speed settings, and recently, the tickless kernel option can all be directly or indirectly credited to contributions from Con Kolivas. If you look back to kernels prior to these changes, the desktop performance was slightly irritating at times for average use, and downright awful for high-resolution audio and 3D game use.
Whatever Linus' arguments were about the scheduler decision, I still think it was shortsighted of him to drive Con away from kernel dev work. If any effort had been made whatsoever to reach a compromise, we could've kept a great advocate for desktop users.
Whenever Linux or another kernel developer would bring up a point of failure in Kolvias's scheduler instead of Fixing the problem Kolvias would lash out and say it wasn't broken.
CFS won not because it was a better scheduler at the time, but because Inglo worked with the developers to make it better, instead of fighting everyone who questioned anything about it.
I believe Linus was the claiming Ingo worked better with the developers (or at least I saw him write to that effect on the LKML). By contrast, Kolivas had many individuals helping out with his branch who were quite pleased with his progress.
The problem is that Kolivas was working to help desktop, and particularly 3D game users. He'd say it wasn't broken if it was optimizing for those particular platforms at a cost of a fraction of a percent Oracle performance. Most of the kernel devs don't care 2 cents about 3D or desktop users, and many are employed by large enterprise businesses, so you can see who won.
Personally I think Kolivas should've been given full access to merge his code. Many of us found his work very useful and it's sad to see him driven away by a few people who are oblivious to what everyday users need. Even if his scheduler was not the default one, it still would've been nice to have as a mainline kernel option.
- SEAL
Re:fun yes; groundbreaking no
on
BioShock Review
·
· Score: 1
As I mentioned, that's fine and all when you finally hit the ending portion of the game, but your suspension of disbelief is completely broken when you first run into that situation.
It would have been more plausible had they introduced the first plasmid after a significant ghost scene to make the player suspect he was being influenced in some way.
Yes I finished it, but none of the plot completion helps earlier in the game when you're ready to say "bah this is stupid I would never do that".
fun yes; groundbreaking no
on
BioShock Review
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Bioshock was definitely overhyped in my opinion. The atmosphere and art direction were good, no doubt. But gameplay was nothing new from other first person shooters. In fact, I'd say it was even more limited than System Shock 2 or Thief. Stealth as an option? Not really. You pretty much had to fight your way through the game. There were no conversations with decisions to make (ala Fallout). Just recorded conversations you could pick up through the game much like the goofy notes found in No One Lives Forever. There was very little interaction in the game other than combat. No vehicles. Not much in the way of object interaction, either.
Also a much hyped feature was the ability to create your own items like ammo. Well... not really. It was just a collect-the-crap thing that allowed you to sort of unlock extra ammo. It wasn't on the level of, say, the spellbuilder in the Elder Scrolls series.
Finally, there were a lot of plot discrepancies and things that pulled me out of the storyline. Like if I were a plane crash survivor, discovering this underwater city, why would I just inject myself with a syringe I found on a table? There are a lot of things like that which caused the game to simply fall back into the vanilla FPS genre. I find it comparable to Heretic / Hexen, with modern graphics.
The work they did was definitely polished but it's disappointing because there is SO MUCH MORE they could've done with the storyline and gameplay.
In addition to copyright, you might look into registering a trademark if applicable. That's getting into a question better suited for your lawyer, though.
If it's a copyrightable work, you automatically have the copyright to it. But if you want additional peace of mind, file with the copyright office so you have official documentation and a date associated with it. I'm speaking from a U.S.-centric viewpoint, of course.
According to Ms. Foster's motion papers (pdf), her attorneys received no response to their email inquiry about payment.
If you're trying to collect money owed due to a legal ruling, it'd be prudent for your attorney to pick up the phone, and/or put the request in writing and send it via certified mail.
Maybe less than 20 seconds, but it doesn't need to be less than 15 seconds. Most modern cars could probably do just fine with 1/2 the horsepower they currently have. 1971 Volkswagen Super Beetle could go 0-60 in 19 seconds, it had 60hp and had a curb weight of 2400 lbs. We have no need to accelerate faster, just our addiction to bigger, better, faster. What ever happened to "moderation in all things"?
But today you can buy a Mini Cooper S that weighs around 2600 lbs (with far more safety features), has 175hp, 0-60 in under 7 secs and gets far better gas mileage than the 1971 VW. Granted the Mini costs a lot more, but _that's_ modernization.
As a side note, acceleration capability used irresponsibly is a waste of fuel, yes, but having on-demand acceleration available is actually a safety enhancement.
Flash memory on a camera isn't a problem for storage size, but it is a problem for write speed. Most cameras use an intermediate buffer of more expensive memory that is then written out to the flash card. So you may have to wait a second or two after shooting a few pictures. That's one of the reasons why certain models (Canon 1Ds Mark II or whatever they're calling it these days) cost so much -- because of number of rapid-fire shots they can take.
That said, most of the higher end cameras support a RAW format as an optional setting, for lossless images.
The US versions of cars sold in Europe and Japan often have weaker motors, softer suspensions, power-sucking auto transmissions, cheaper seats, lower-quality tires, and weaker brakes. Why? Because US consumers don't know any better and don't expect anything more.
OK I need to throw something in on this one. I don't have a firsthand knowledge of motorcycles, but for cars, I can say that many of the engine changes to vehicles sold in the U.S. are a result of California's extremely tough emissions standards. The other big thing you'll notice is that U.S. safety regulations are usually more strict than elsewhere (ex: mandated airbags, etc).
Since California is such a large market, many manufacturers feel compelled to meet their standards in order to achieve higher sales numbers. The result is that cars either cost more, or they skimp on features in other areas to offset the extra costs.
I own a 2006 Lotus Elise (U.S. model). Compare it to earlier ones made for the European market: the U.S. version has swapped in a Toyota engine to meet the emissions standards, and the car itself weighs about 400 lbs more due to airbags and other U.S. requirements.
a) I'm not a MySQL proponent. b) When I mentioned performance I was discussing postgres versus Oracle. b) I said performance is not the only issue for an enterprise database solution, which MySQL is not.
But I guess expecting someone to read parent posts on Slashdot is sortof like expecting someone to read the article.
Slashdot Mirror
You have a task that gathers data from many sources, and needs to verify the identity of those sources. Many people and groups will try to attack, corrupt or undermine that data. Furthermore, any verification in place to detect and prevent such attacks can also be considered vulnerable, but ALSO gets saddled with a deadline as laws in many states prevent recounts after a brief timespan.
The "attacks" could be purely technological -- (subvert the software), all the way to social (have poll workers set up certain locations in a way that delays people who are waiting to vote in areas that tend to be against your candidate).
People speak of the importance of a paper trail, but that merely diverts the point of vulnerability. How do we detect that a recount is needed in the first place? Who is doing the recount? How do we know it is any better than the first count?
You sound much more Libertarian than Republican. The Republican Party in its current format has strayed far, far away from the old model of states' rights and limited government.
Also, boats -- particularly inboards, are more dangerous. Gas vapor is heavier than air so it tends to collect in the bilge area, whereas a car has open air beneath it. That's why you're supposed to run the blower for a bit before attempting to start a boat engine. Capacitors on the other hand, have extremely high discharge rates and require no fuel, oxygen or heat to explode. Enough energy to power a vehicle for more than 100 miles would cause serious damage if the capacitor were to fail from an accident or manufacturing defect.
Everyone may think putting capacitors in a car is a good thing, but you're essentially mounting bombs in the car. A properly designed ultracapacitor would ground out to the car's body in the event of a failure. It should be safer than gas simply because there is nothing that can be dispersed in an accident.
In addition to being non-transferrable, patents should be assigned only to the person(s) who create them. Corporations should not be allowed to amass patent portfolios. In other words, when one of those PhD researchers decides to leave Microsoft, he takes his patents with him.
I think in a free market it is certainly acceptable for Microsoft to highly compensate that person so he would stay with the company. But that's much different from the company owning the patent itself.
Thank you - that's exactly the point.
If you only protect specific implementations of ideas, then people actually have to implement them. It rewards creating a product and selling it - what a concept!
Patents reward companies that lock up technology and produce nothing except a clogged court system.
6) Copyright offers enough protection already, without patents.
Of course this conflicts with your #4 to some degree. However, when you have competitors trying to imitate your product by writing their own source from scratch, it motivates you to stay one step ahead by improving your own product. For that reason, I think copyright produces more technological progress than patents do, at least in the software industry.
Or you can call your phone company and report that number as a nuisance caller. They will block it for you in most cases.
Verizon was surprisingly helpful when I had this problem awhile back. In my case, some company's fax machine was calling my voice number multiple times per day... talk about annoying.
a) by the time the patent application was filed, it was already obvious
b) they didn't invent it, or they acquired the patent from someone else
c) they have made no effort whatsoever to put the invention into production
A: I run an open wireless network at home. There's no password, and there's no encryption. Honestly, I think it's just polite. Why should I care if someone on the block steals wireless access from me? When my wireless router broke last month, I used a neighbor's access until I replaced it. That answer is so bad it almost sounds like sarcasm. Given how easy it is to sniff sensitive data from an unencrypted wireless network, I can't imagine Bruce would allow it unless he segments his network or wires up his own PC.
no plant built in the US was ever as dangerous as Chernobyl
Hanford's N reactor was arguably *more* dangerous than Chernobyl. Both used graphite moderation and water cooling. Neither had a containment building. And the Hanford site processed nearly double the fuel and was 14 years older than Chernobyl. It was an accident waiting to happen.
Despite that, I am in favor of more responsible nuclear power usage in the U.S. But claiming that we never built plants as dangerous as Chernobyl is disingenuous.
So in essence, you're saying that we should replace votes with cash donations.
Or vote people into office who are so rich that they don't care about corporate bribes.
The main problem is a combination of the short spindown time, and something wanting to write out to the drive every 30 seconds or so.
First, my perspective: yes, I had a laptop drive die while running an older version of Ubuntu. I'm not sure if the problem is still present in current builds, though, as I haven't used it in awhile.
On to what I quoted -- one problem with the default Ubuntu setup is ext3. The system will periodically write out to the journal even when it is otherwise idle. This occurs even if you have noatime set in your fstab.
Unfortunately, it is working exactly as it was designed.
I think you'd be hard pressed to show that patents were designed to be sold and traded.
If patents were only assigned to the original inventor, only to *individuals* (not corporations), and non-transferrable, then most of the problems with patent litigation would go away.
Granted, there are other problem areas, such as the lengthy term and the issue of software / business method patents. But if corporations were not permitted to purchase or acquire patents from inventors, then the best they could do is hire the inventors. And that's just not a sound business model for a patent-troll firm.
The funny thing is that most people don't realize how many of the desktop performance enhancements Con is responsible for, even ignoring the CPU scheduler.
The preemptible kernel, preempt of the big kernel lock, tick speed settings, and recently, the tickless kernel option can all be directly or indirectly credited to contributions from Con Kolivas. If you look back to kernels prior to these changes, the desktop performance was slightly irritating at times for average use, and downright awful for high-resolution audio and 3D game use.
Whatever Linus' arguments were about the scheduler decision, I still think it was shortsighted of him to drive Con away from kernel dev work. If any effort had been made whatsoever to reach a compromise, we could've kept a great advocate for desktop users.
Whenever Linux or another kernel developer would bring up a point of failure in Kolvias's scheduler instead of Fixing the problem Kolvias would lash out and say it wasn't broken.
CFS won not because it was a better scheduler at the time, but because Inglo worked with the developers to make it better, instead of fighting everyone who questioned anything about it.
I believe Linus was the claiming Ingo worked better with the developers (or at least I saw him write to that effect on the LKML). By contrast, Kolivas had many individuals helping out with his branch who were quite pleased with his progress.
The problem is that Kolivas was working to help desktop, and particularly 3D game users. He'd say it wasn't broken if it was optimizing for those particular platforms at a cost of a fraction of a percent Oracle performance. Most of the kernel devs don't care 2 cents about 3D or desktop users, and many are employed by large enterprise businesses, so you can see who won.
Personally I think Kolivas should've been given full access to merge his code. Many of us found his work very useful and it's sad to see him driven away by a few people who are oblivious to what everyday users need. Even if his scheduler was not the default one, it still would've been nice to have as a mainline kernel option.
- SEAL
As I mentioned, that's fine and all when you finally hit the ending portion of the game, but your suspension of disbelief is completely broken when you first run into that situation.
It would have been more plausible had they introduced the first plasmid after a significant ghost scene to make the player suspect he was being influenced in some way.
Yes I finished it, but none of the plot completion helps earlier in the game when you're ready to say "bah this is stupid I would never do that".
Bioshock was definitely overhyped in my opinion. The atmosphere and art direction were good, no doubt. But gameplay was nothing new from other first person shooters. In fact, I'd say it was even more limited than System Shock 2 or Thief. Stealth as an option? Not really. You pretty much had to fight your way through the game. There were no conversations with decisions to make (ala Fallout). Just recorded conversations you could pick up through the game much like the goofy notes found in No One Lives Forever. There was very little interaction in the game other than combat. No vehicles. Not much in the way of object interaction, either.
Also a much hyped feature was the ability to create your own items like ammo. Well... not really. It was just a collect-the-crap thing that allowed you to sort of unlock extra ammo. It wasn't on the level of, say, the spellbuilder in the Elder Scrolls series.
Finally, there were a lot of plot discrepancies and things that pulled me out of the storyline. Like if I were a plane crash survivor, discovering this underwater city, why would I just inject myself with a syringe I found on a table? There are a lot of things like that which caused the game to simply fall back into the vanilla FPS genre. I find it comparable to Heretic / Hexen, with modern graphics.
The work they did was definitely polished but it's disappointing because there is SO MUCH MORE they could've done with the storyline and gameplay.
In addition to copyright, you might look into registering a trademark if applicable. That's getting into a question better suited for your lawyer, though.
If it's a copyrightable work, you automatically have the copyright to it. But if you want additional peace of mind, file with the copyright office so you have official documentation and a date associated with it. I'm speaking from a U.S.-centric viewpoint, of course.
According to Ms. Foster's motion papers (pdf), her attorneys received no response to their email inquiry about payment.
If you're trying to collect money owed due to a legal ruling, it'd be prudent for your attorney to pick up the phone, and/or put the request in writing and send it via certified mail.
Maybe less than 20 seconds, but it doesn't need to be less than 15 seconds. Most modern cars could probably do just fine with 1/2 the horsepower they currently have. 1971 Volkswagen Super Beetle could go 0-60 in 19 seconds, it had 60hp and had a curb weight of 2400 lbs. We have no need to accelerate faster, just our addiction to bigger, better, faster. What ever happened to "moderation in all things"?
But today you can buy a Mini Cooper S that weighs around 2600 lbs (with far more safety features), has 175hp, 0-60 in under 7 secs and gets far better gas mileage than the 1971 VW. Granted the Mini costs a lot more, but _that's_ modernization.
As a side note, acceleration capability used irresponsibly is a waste of fuel, yes, but having on-demand acceleration available is actually a safety enhancement.
Flash memory on a camera isn't a problem for storage size, but it is a problem for write speed. Most cameras use an intermediate buffer of more expensive memory that is then written out to the flash card. So you may have to wait a second or two after shooting a few pictures. That's one of the reasons why certain models (Canon 1Ds Mark II or whatever they're calling it these days) cost so much -- because of number of rapid-fire shots they can take.
That said, most of the higher end cameras support a RAW format as an optional setting, for lossless images.
The US versions of cars sold in Europe and Japan often have weaker motors, softer suspensions, power-sucking auto transmissions, cheaper seats, lower-quality tires, and weaker brakes. Why? Because US consumers don't know any better and don't expect anything more.
OK I need to throw something in on this one. I don't have a firsthand knowledge of motorcycles, but for cars, I can say that many of the engine changes to vehicles sold in the U.S. are a result of California's extremely tough emissions standards. The other big thing you'll notice is that U.S. safety regulations are usually more strict than elsewhere (ex: mandated airbags, etc).
Since California is such a large market, many manufacturers feel compelled to meet their standards in order to achieve higher sales numbers. The result is that cars either cost more, or they skimp on features in other areas to offset the extra costs.
I own a 2006 Lotus Elise (U.S. model). Compare it to earlier ones made for the European market: the U.S. version has swapped in a Toyota engine to meet the emissions standards, and the car itself weighs about 400 lbs more due to airbags and other U.S. requirements.
Congrats on not even reading what I wrote.
a) I'm not a MySQL proponent.
b) When I mentioned performance I was discussing postgres versus Oracle.
b) I said performance is not the only issue for an enterprise database solution, which MySQL is not.
But I guess expecting someone to read parent posts on Slashdot is sortof like expecting someone to read the article.