Hmm... as I try to post this, (11:30PM EST) I get repeated messages I haven't seen before: "Database maintenance is currently taking place. Some items such as comment posting and moderation are currently unavailable." Seems an odd time for it. Then - no kidding - my computer starts playing a jaunty little MIDI tune while I have no other programs or sites open, and it does not stop when I click mute. A few seconds later, the music stops. I'm a bit weirded out. Is somebody sending me a message?
Taking this back on topic...
[now day-before-] Yesterday I spent about two hours looking at the Naurus website, details of the Naurus system and tracing Naurus' links with intelligence contractors and agencies as well as major tech and financial firms. I pasted the interesting bits up in my journal.
For detailed info on the hardware and software used by NSA at the AT&T central switching centers see my journal.
The evidence from the Electronic Frontier Foundation's suit against AT&T indicates that the pen-register (phone call records) and call-graph analysis is really just the tip of the iceberg. The equipment that the NSA installed in AT&T's main switching and routing centers is known, it is made by Naurus Inc....
Well, yes - but the 32-bit linpack 7-SPU performance is more like 170 GFLOPS and the bottom rank on the next list will be more like 2000-2400 GFLOPS and that is 64-bit, at which the 7-SPU Cell only does 8.5 GFLOPS (though that is still quite respectable for a single chip). The PS3 does have 1000bT ports (1 in, 2 out), so clustering is a real possibility.
The sanctions were the real killer, and the water system (which was fine until we bombed it in Gulf War I) is still killing tens of thousands of children and others every year. Perhaps 1 million children under the age of 5 have died due to bad water and malnutrition since Gulf War I.
The Iraqi under-5 mortality rate was 50 in 1990 and 125 in 2005. 122,000 Iraqi children under 5 died in 2005. (UNICEF That is at least 512,000 excess child deaths since 1999 when UNICEF estimated there had been at least 500,000 excess child deaths since sanctions began.
The Politics of Dead Children"The other, far more credible source of the 500,000 number is a pair of 1999 UNICEF studies that estimated the under-5 mortality rates of both Iraqi regions based on interviews with a total of 40,000 households."
Is killing over a million infants, preschoolers and kindergarteners worth it? Maybe you should do that calculations again.
Picture a square mile of child graves.
Picture a solid pile of tiny bodies five hundred feet by five hundred feet and four feet high.
It makes me sick to know that my country has done this and continues to do this. This is a crime against humanity in the most revolting possible form, and all those who supported war and sanctions have the blood of a million children on their hands.
No, the Bill of Rights reads: "the rights of the people". In other contexts, the Constitution refers specifically to "citizens". In any event, the rights are natural, not conferred by the Constitution so even spying on private foreign persons abroad is a violation of their natural right to privacy.
You make a good point that the public good of widely available inventions exceeds the individual loss from inability to exclude others from the use of a given invention.
This is why we need a patent royalty clearinghouse to promote the use of patented technology and pay inventors a portion of the value they create without requiring them to negotiate on their own behalf, track down infringers, or wage costly lawsuits and wait many years for payment.
Since the benefits of unfettered access to technology are public goods, the costs of the royalties should also be borne by the public directly, rather than indirectly through higher prices of products made by companies who pay royalties and must compete against those who find it cheaper to infringe. To allow a royalty pool commensurate with the benefits of invention rather than fixed arbitrarily in the budget, the revenue to pay royalties could come from some mechanism such as a tax on wholesale sales with rates set according to the degree different classes of products benefit from patented technology.
For this to work, a robust, un-gameable mechanism for valuing the economic benefit of each patent is needed, preferably based on market principles, but in practice likely requiring a combination of voluntary system of manufacturers confidentially disclosing details of their designs to the royalty clearinghouse and a cadre of expert engineers to analyze products and identify the applicable patents. These engineers would have an incentive to rationalize existing overlapping patent claims and to challenge bad patents. Even a flawed valuation system would be far more fair and effective at promoting the progress of the useful arts than the patent system today.
In order to ensure that patents are actually used and thus earn royalties, patents would come to be written with much more clarity and information on how the invention can be profitably used, as opposed to today where obscurity is intentional for defensive, blocking and "gotcha" patents. A great deal of technology would actually be used instead of sitting on the shelf. Far more money would go to inventors rather than transaction costs and litigation fees. Although the lawyers would get a smaller slice, the pie would be so much bigger that they would still do well, and would do so by aiding inventors rather than infringers.
f you've got a patent you aren't doing anything with, all this decision says is that the judge doesn't HAVE to issue an injunction against the big, bad company until AFTER you prove they've infringed your patent.
Wrong. The SC decision is about a situation where the patent has already been found to be valid and the defendant has been found to be infringing. The District Court must now weigh equity in each case and may order the company to pay to use the patented invention rather than requiring them to simply stop using it. This is not really new - there have been instances of mandatory patent liscensing in the courts before.
The principle does hurt the leverage of a patent holder in negotiating royalties with the infringer and in their ability to negotiate exclusive deals with other potential liscensees.
what about using such a device to create items which are considered dangerous?
This question has been partially addressed in a few novels such as Williams' Aristoi and Sthephenson's The Diamond Age, but it is still a real problem.
One idea is to not have replicators, but instead molecular mills that depend on being hooked up to a feedstock and information link which would allow DRM and legal limitation of objects produced. No small replicator would be used and only the industrial system as a whole would be self-replicating. The problem is that unless you can prevent every person and group from leveraging the available technology of the molecular mills or their products into making a less constrained form of replicator, eventually the technology will be used for whatever purposes are desired but forbidden.
Another approach is universal monitoring, but this would have to be unbelievably intrusive. It is likely that privacy even within a few cubic millimeters within a single person's body would be enough to allow development of replicating nanotech.
Another approach is counting on any rogue uses to be dispersed, small, and unsophisticated compared to the capabilities of law so that the good guys are always far enough ahead to limit any damage.
Another approach is to make sure that no one wants to use the technology in a reckless or harmful way. This would involve monitoring as in the first alternative, but of mental processes as well as changing those processes if they become unsafe. This is generally regarded as dystopian, but if done with a sufficiently light hand by a entity of essentially godlike ethics and intelligence might be the path to the broadest and least constrained individual use of replicating technology.
For any of the above approaches to work in the long term, but in particular the last alternative, intelligence far greater than human is needed, and of course that intelligence would have to have motives that are incorruptibly ethical to avoid it using the technology for malign purposes itself. Such ethics and intelligence would have to be created artificially. Some preliminary work on how this might be done has been going on at Eliezer Yudkowsky's Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence Such an intelligence should also be able to come up with better alternatives. In fact given that such an intelligence would be able to increase its intelligence and see and realize all sorts of possibilities that we cannot, the future becomes effectively unpredictable once such intelligence exists.
What I would like to see is academic books in an electronic format...
What I would like to see is such books in physics, mathematics, engineering, economics and other math-based disciplines with the equations avilable in Mathematica or other major math format with sufficient comments to identify the assumptions and purposes of the isolated equations and the meanings and ranges of the variables.
It could be a secondary effect - low fields affect neural signalling and perhaps other cellular processes which could in turn predispose to getting cancer. The energy can't directly break bonds but it could affect cellular stuctures in more subtle ways. The lower frequencies of modulation could possibly affect some neural signaling, for example. If a field can be biologically sensed, in principle it could have other effects. In pracice, if there is any effect it is almost undetectable.
They are sworn to secrecy, and to discuss the matters they know of to anyone would be a federal offense, punishable by loss of office, a fine, and a prison sentence in real federal prison. The "oversight" is garbage, for the people overseeing the NSA cannot tell anyone about what they know. Sort of opening the crate with the crowbar nailed inside the crate. They may be of the opinion that the operations are illegal and the President needs to be impeached -- BUT.
THEY CAN'T TELL ANYONE.
Your overall point is good, but in fact they can tell us. They may decide that their secrecy oath is less important than their oath to defend the Constitution, and if they do, and make their case from the floor of Congress, the Constitution prohibits them from being made to answer in any other place for what they have said. They may lose their security clearance and their committee positions or even be censured, but they cannot be prosecuted. The real reasons they do not step forward are either that they are not told all they should be about these programs, they think they can make a difference if they stay at the heart of power, they approve of these fascist programs or they are just gutless. Or more than one of the above.
I got into this profession to build systems that solved problems and made people more efficient, leaving them time to do recreational things. So what if everyone can solve some arbitrary problem 20 seconds faster than myself? The job isn't all about coding, hell it isn't even 50% about coding.
Agreed. But the coding-speed based algorithm contests are the least important part of the Topcoder competitions. The marathon contests allow tackling similar problems to the algorithm contests without focusing so much on raw speed.
More interesting to those who want to compete in real software engineering are the the design competitions, development competitions and software assembly competitions. The top earners focus on these (especially the design competitions). The development process is more rigorous that at many (most?) professional development shops. See https://software.topcoder.com/catalog/c_showroom.j sp for a list of competition-developed components, and check out the quality and consistency of the specifications and documentation.
For an overview of the topcoder development process see the sequence of videos at http://software.topcoder.com/ . I found it quite impressive. It pays less than a regular job, but it gives real experience in the whole gamut of proper real-world software engineering practices, and for those who want to demonstrate their skills to employers or who just enjoy challenging competition on real-world problems, I think Topcoder is unique.
Absolutely correct. Also the BLS has jiggered the statistics to artificially lower the reported inflation rate by continuously changing the weights of the items in the basket of goods as well as taking housing prices out of the equation and substituting questionable rent figures. Further, the US gold reserve has been exchanged for paper in last few years in swaps with the central banks of other countries and the IMF; the physical gold was sold by these banks to keep the price of gold low in relation to fiat money. That stopped working two or three years ago, and gold has been rising ever since, pulling all the other rare metals along with it. The Fed under Bernake has stopped reporting M3, security repurchase agreements, and US banks' foreign dollar accounts. The amount removed from sight is greater than all physical US currency in circulation, had been rising sharply, and is strongly predictive of the narrower M2 measure of money.
The national debt, once the present value of Medicare, veterans' benefits, Social Security, and the private sector's debt are all taken into account is in excess of $4*10^13, or more than 330% of GDP. The GDP figure is itself inflated by non-productive activity and accounting trickery. The current account deficit is over 63% of yearly exports. The price of houses in most US metropolitan areas is far out of proportion to household incomes, (5x-10x, up to 15x in SF) - well beyond sustainable levels.
The easy way to reduce the real value of paper debts and improve the balance of trade is to inflate the currency. It is vitually a certainty that it is going to happen.
I agree with your overall point - challenging, "literary" style is sometimes not pretentious, but Dhalgren is a bad example. I love the other fiction Delany wrote, but Dhalgren is all but unreadable - and unrewarding, too. Better examples of notably fine styles which further substantial plots and characters are those of Gene Wolfe, Ursula LeGuin and China Mieville.
When you make a call to another VoIP user (e.g. vonage to vonage), the entire call would be encrypted end-to-end with keys known only to the clients at either end
Won't CALEA prevent VoIP providers from providing truly secure calls? Can you really trust a provider who knows the encryption keys?
no-one between the 2 points can listen to the phonecall. (other than what can normally be done on the PSTN side of the PSTN linkup
In this case the government and the phone company employees can certainly listen in.
And now we know why the Repilicators on SG1 get smashed into little bricks when hit by automatic wepons fire...
(I saw some NXT bots at the LEGO demo table at FIRST this year, and the resemblance to the Replicators is uncanny.)
Re:The USA doesn't 'buy' blood either...
on
Bloodless Surgery
·
· Score: 1
Good point, but while frozen blood does lose some function, when rare blood types are simply unavailable in fresh form anywhere in the state, frozen blood can be a lifesaver. The American Red Cross prevents that. Even in relatively large states or even regions this kind of hard shortage happens every so often. Even more importantly, the prohibition on paid donations for transfusion reduces the supply of fresh blood.
Re:The USA doesn't 'buy' blood either...
on
Bloodless Surgery
·
· Score: 1
Re:The USA doesn't 'buy' blood either...
on
Bloodless Surgery
·
· Score: 1
I believe my father, who runs a blood bank. A quick Google also reveals that red blood cells and platelets can also be frozen, as can cord blood.
Re:The USA doesn't 'buy' blood either...
on
Bloodless Surgery
·
· Score: 1
The Red Cross makes huge profits off its blood monopoly. They also abuse that monopoly by creating artificial shortages - blood freezes well, but they won't allow that to happen. In fact, in the US, the RC doesn't sell even blood to hospitals, it leases it: if blood isn't transfused, the hospitals have to give it back after a certain period. (The EULA on blood is even worse than on software.)
The term "patent trolling" is just name-calling. Patents are supposed to be used by the people who invent things to get money from the people who use those inventions to make products. There is no reason to expect people only to invent things that they themselves are capable of bringing to market, and to impose that expectation would reduce the ideas being published in patents and give no incentive to invent or to disclose.
Focus instead on the real problems with the current parent system:
-companies and their engineers are discouraged from using or even looking at existing 3rd party patents due to a stupid interpretation of the willful infringement rule
-it is too expensive to apply for patents, especially for individuals
-it is far too expensive and time-consuming to get legitimate judgements against infringers
-obvious or prior-art patents are routinely granted, and the examiners' incentives encourage this
-patents are often issued that either do not work or do not fully and comprehensibly disclose how to implement the invention
-there is no automatic licensing scheme (as for public playing of music) or overall royalty % cap to asuage the fears of companies that they'll get nibbled to death by various IP holders for acknowledging all the patented technology that goes into making a state-of-the-art product.
1.)HD-DVD does not use the same wavelength as today's players. It uses the same wavelength as Blu-Ray. 2.)Both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are backwards-compatable with DVD and audio CD via a built-in second laser. 3.)WTF is BD-ROM? Sounds kinky.
Right you are. Millions of people will buy PS3s as game machines, then buy or rent Blu-Ray discs as an afterthought. For them the player is essentially free. HD-DVD doesn't have that advantage. It only takes a little lead at first even in an otherwise level competition to create a snowballing standardization effect in a situaion like this. The same thing happened with the direction clock hands turn in medieval Europe and many other situations.
But the field isn't even level - Blu-Ray has more studios and thus more content, more manufacturers, more disc capacity, more future capacity, and most importantly, much cheaper pre-recorded disks. The last factor is what decided the Betmax vs. VHS battle, and Sony isn't going to make the same mistake this time. HD-DVD doesn't stand a chance at becoming the dominant format. It may get bundled into later Blu-Ray players but three years out the discs won't be in the rental shops and HD-DVD will be considered a mere curiosity.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm... as I try to post this, (11:30PM EST) I get repeated messages I haven't seen before: "Database maintenance is currently taking place. Some items such as comment posting and moderation are currently unavailable." Seems an odd time for it. Then - no kidding - my computer starts playing a jaunty little MIDI tune while I have no other programs or sites open, and it does not stop when I click mute. A few seconds later, the music stops. I'm a bit weirded out. Is somebody sending me a message?
Taking this back on topic...
[now day-before-] Yesterday I spent about two hours looking at the Naurus website, details of the Naurus system and tracing Naurus' links with intelligence contractors and agencies as well as major tech and financial firms. I pasted the interesting bits up in my journal.
For detailed info on the hardware and software used by NSA at the AT&T central switching centers see my journal.
...
The evidence from the Electronic Frontier Foundation's suit against AT&T indicates that the pen-register (phone call records) and call-graph analysis is really just the tip of the iceberg. The equipment that the NSA installed in AT&T's main switching and routing centers is known, it is made by Naurus Inc.
Well, yes - but the 32-bit linpack 7-SPU performance is more like 170 GFLOPS and the bottom rank on the next list will be more like 2000-2400 GFLOPS and that is 64-bit, at which the 7-SPU Cell only does 8.5 GFLOPS (though that is still quite respectable for a single chip). The PS3 does have 1000bT ports (1 in, 2 out), so clustering is a real possibility.
How did this get modded down to 0?
/insert obligatory "imagine a Beowulf..." here
Penguin Power on PS3? Probably. has some useful information.
With 7 SPUs on the PS3 Cell, that's 160-175 single-precision GFLOPS on Linpack. Even on double precision, at 8.5 GFLOPS it's still faster than a P4. Cell Broadband Engine Architecture and its first implementation-A performance view
This is going to be used for real work.
The sanctions were the real killer, and the water system (which was fine until we bombed it in Gulf War I) is still killing tens of thousands of children and others every year. Perhaps 1 million children under the age of 5 have died due to bad water and malnutrition since Gulf War I.
The Iraqi under-5 mortality rate was 50 in 1990 and 125 in 2005. 122,000 Iraqi children under 5 died in 2005. (UNICEF
That is at least 512,000 excess child deaths since 1999 when UNICEF estimated there had been at least 500,000 excess child deaths since sanctions began.
The Politics of Dead Children"The other, far more credible source of the 500,000 number is a pair of 1999 UNICEF studies that estimated the under-5 mortality rates of both Iraqi regions based on interviews with a total of 40,000 households."
Is killing over a million infants, preschoolers and kindergarteners worth it? Maybe you should do that calculations again.
Picture a square mile of child graves.
Picture a solid pile of tiny bodies five hundred feet by five hundred feet and four feet high.
It makes me sick to know that my country has done this and continues to do this. This is a crime against humanity in the most revolting possible form, and all those who supported war and sanctions have the blood of a million children on their hands.
No, the Bill of Rights reads: "the rights of the people". In other contexts, the Constitution refers specifically to "citizens". In any event, the rights are natural, not conferred by the Constitution so even spying on private foreign persons abroad is a violation of their natural right to privacy.
You make a good point that the public good of widely available inventions exceeds the individual loss from inability to exclude others from the use of a given invention.
This is why we need a patent royalty clearinghouse to promote the use of patented technology and pay inventors a portion of the value they create without requiring them to negotiate on their own behalf, track down infringers, or wage costly lawsuits and wait many years for payment.
Since the benefits of unfettered access to technology are public goods, the costs of the royalties should also be borne by the public directly, rather than indirectly through higher prices of products made by companies who pay royalties and must compete against those who find it cheaper to infringe. To allow a royalty pool commensurate with the benefits of invention rather than fixed arbitrarily in the budget, the revenue to pay royalties could come from some mechanism such as a tax on wholesale sales with rates set according to the degree different classes of products benefit from patented technology.
For this to work, a robust, un-gameable mechanism for valuing the economic benefit of each patent is needed, preferably based on market principles, but in practice likely requiring a combination of voluntary system of manufacturers confidentially disclosing details of their designs to the royalty clearinghouse and a cadre of expert engineers to analyze products and identify the applicable patents. These engineers would have an incentive to rationalize existing overlapping patent claims and to challenge bad patents. Even a flawed valuation system would be far more fair and effective at promoting the progress of the useful arts than the patent system today.
In order to ensure that patents are actually used and thus earn royalties, patents would come to be written with much more clarity and information on how the invention can be profitably used, as opposed to today where obscurity is intentional for defensive, blocking and "gotcha" patents. A great deal of technology would actually be used instead of sitting on the shelf. Far more money would go to inventors rather than transaction costs and litigation fees. Although the lawyers would get a smaller slice, the pie would be so much bigger that they would still do well, and would do so by aiding inventors rather than infringers.
f you've got a patent you aren't doing anything with, all this decision says is that the judge doesn't HAVE to issue an injunction against the big, bad company until AFTER you prove they've infringed your patent.
Wrong. The SC decision is about a situation where the patent has already been found to be valid and the defendant has been found to be infringing. The District Court must now weigh equity in each case and may order the company to pay to use the patented invention rather than requiring them to simply stop using it. This is not really new - there have been instances of mandatory patent liscensing in the courts before.
The principle does hurt the leverage of a patent holder in negotiating royalties with the infringer and in their ability to negotiate exclusive deals with other potential liscensees.
what about using such a device to create items which are considered dangerous?
This question has been partially addressed in a few novels such as Williams' Aristoi and Sthephenson's The Diamond Age, but it is still a real problem.
One idea is to not have replicators, but instead molecular mills that depend on being hooked up to a feedstock and information link which would allow DRM and legal limitation of objects produced. No small replicator would be used and only the industrial system as a whole would be self-replicating. The problem is that unless you can prevent every person and group from leveraging the available technology of the molecular mills or their products into making a less constrained form of replicator, eventually the technology will be used for whatever purposes are desired but forbidden.
Another approach is universal monitoring, but this would have to be unbelievably intrusive. It is likely that privacy even within a few cubic millimeters within a single person's body would be enough to allow development of replicating nanotech.
Another approach is counting on any rogue uses to be dispersed, small, and unsophisticated compared to the capabilities of law so that the good guys are always far enough ahead to limit any damage.
Another approach is to make sure that no one wants to use the technology in a reckless or harmful way. This would involve monitoring as in the first alternative, but of mental processes as well as changing those processes if they become unsafe. This is generally regarded as dystopian, but if done with a sufficiently light hand by a entity of essentially godlike ethics and intelligence might be the path to the broadest and least constrained individual use of replicating technology.
For any of the above approaches to work in the long term, but in particular the last alternative, intelligence far greater than human is needed, and of course that intelligence would have to have motives that are incorruptibly ethical to avoid it using the technology for malign purposes itself. Such ethics and intelligence would have to be created artificially. Some preliminary work on how this might be done has been going on at Eliezer Yudkowsky's Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence Such an intelligence should also be able to come up with better alternatives. In fact given that such an intelligence would be able to increase its intelligence and see and realize all sorts of possibilities that we cannot, the future becomes effectively unpredictable once such intelligence exists.
What I would like to see is academic books in an electronic format...
What I would like to see is such books in physics, mathematics, engineering, economics and other math-based disciplines with the equations avilable in Mathematica or other major math format with sufficient comments to identify the assumptions and purposes of the isolated equations and the meanings and ranges of the variables.
It could be a secondary effect - low fields affect neural signalling and perhaps other cellular processes which could in turn predispose to getting cancer. The energy can't directly break bonds but it could affect cellular stuctures in more subtle ways. The lower frequencies of modulation could possibly affect some neural signaling, for example. If a field can be biologically sensed, in principle it could have other effects. In pracice, if there is any effect it is almost undetectable.
They are sworn to secrecy, and to discuss the matters they know of to anyone would be a federal offense, punishable by loss of office, a fine, and a prison sentence in real federal prison. The "oversight" is garbage, for the people overseeing the NSA cannot tell anyone about what they know. Sort of opening the crate with the crowbar nailed inside the crate. They may be of the opinion that the operations are illegal and the President needs to be impeached -- BUT.
THEY CAN'T TELL ANYONE.
Your overall point is good, but in fact they can tell us. They may decide that their secrecy oath is less important than their oath to defend the Constitution, and if they do, and make their case from the floor of Congress, the Constitution prohibits them from being made to answer in any other place for what they have said. They may lose their security clearance and their committee positions or even be censured, but they cannot be prosecuted. The real reasons they do not step forward are either that they are not told all they should be about these programs, they think they can make a difference if they stay at the heart of power, they approve of these fascist programs or they are just gutless. Or more than one of the above.
I got into this profession to build systems that solved problems and made people more efficient, leaving them time to do recreational things. So what if everyone can solve some arbitrary problem 20 seconds faster than myself? The job isn't all about coding, hell it isn't even 50% about coding.
j sp for a list of competition-developed components, and check out the quality and consistency of the specifications and documentation.
b ook&c=most_wins&type=design
Agreed. But the coding-speed based algorithm contests are the least important part of the Topcoder competitions. The marathon contests allow tackling similar problems to the algorithm contests without focusing so much on raw speed.
More interesting to those who want to compete in real software engineering are the the design competitions, development competitions and software assembly competitions. The top earners focus on these (especially the design competitions). The development process is more rigorous that at many (most?) professional development shops. See https://software.topcoder.com/catalog/c_showroom.
For an overview of the topcoder development process see the sequence of videos at http://software.topcoder.com/ . I found it quite impressive. It pays less than a regular job, but it gives real experience in the whole gamut of proper real-world software engineering practices, and for those who want to demonstrate their skills to employers or who just enjoy challenging competition on real-world problems, I think Topcoder is unique.
For a list of top design competitors and links to their statistics see: http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=ComponentRecord
Continuously bouncing your knees up and down (as I seem to do all the time) should prevent thrombosis. Might also give a bit of excercise.
Absolutely correct. Also the BLS has jiggered the statistics to artificially lower the reported inflation rate by continuously changing the weights of the items in the basket of goods as well as taking housing prices out of the equation and substituting questionable rent figures. Further, the US gold reserve has been exchanged for paper in last few years in swaps with the central banks of other countries and the IMF; the physical gold was sold by these banks to keep the price of gold low in relation to fiat money. That stopped working two or three years ago, and gold has been rising ever since, pulling all the other rare metals along with it. The Fed under Bernake has stopped reporting M3, security repurchase agreements, and US banks' foreign dollar accounts. The amount removed from sight is greater than all physical US currency in circulation, had been rising sharply, and is strongly predictive of the narrower M2 measure of money.
The national debt, once the present value of Medicare, veterans' benefits, Social Security, and the private sector's debt are all taken into account is in excess of $4*10^13, or more than 330% of GDP. The GDP figure is itself inflated by non-productive activity and accounting trickery. The current account deficit is over 63% of yearly exports. The price of houses in most US metropolitan areas is far out of proportion to household incomes, (5x-10x, up to 15x in SF) - well beyond sustainable levels.
The easy way to reduce the real value of paper debts and improve the balance of trade is to inflate the currency. It is vitually a certainty that it is going to happen.
I agree with your overall point - challenging, "literary" style is sometimes not pretentious, but Dhalgren is a bad example. I love the other fiction Delany wrote, but Dhalgren is all but unreadable - and unrewarding, too. Better examples of notably fine styles which further substantial plots and characters are those of Gene Wolfe, Ursula LeGuin and China Mieville.
When you make a call to another VoIP user (e.g. vonage to vonage), the entire call would be encrypted end-to-end with keys known only to the clients at either end
Won't CALEA prevent VoIP providers from providing truly secure calls? Can you really trust a provider who knows the encryption keys?
no-one between the 2 points can listen to the phonecall. (other than what can normally be done on the PSTN side of the PSTN linkup
In this case the government and the phone company employees can certainly listen in.
And now we know why the Repilicators on SG1 get smashed into little bricks when hit by automatic wepons fire...
(I saw some NXT bots at the LEGO demo table at FIRST this year, and the resemblance to the Replicators is uncanny.)
Good point, but while frozen blood does lose some function, when rare blood types are simply unavailable in fresh form anywhere in the state, frozen blood can be a lifesaver. The American Red Cross prevents that. Even in relatively large states or even regions this kind of hard shortage happens every so often. Even more importantly, the prohibition on paid donations for transfusion reduces the supply of fresh blood.
Also see: http://www.bloodbook.com/storage.html
I believe my father, who runs a blood bank.
A quick Google also reveals that red blood cells and platelets can also be frozen, as can cord blood.
The Red Cross makes huge profits off its blood monopoly. They also abuse that monopoly by creating artificial shortages - blood freezes well, but they won't allow that to happen. In fact, in the US, the RC doesn't sell even blood to hospitals, it leases it: if blood isn't transfused, the hospitals have to give it back after a certain period. (The EULA on blood is even worse than on software.)
The term "patent trolling" is just name-calling. Patents are supposed to be used by the people who invent things to get money from the people who use those inventions to make products. There is no reason to expect people only to invent things that they themselves are capable of bringing to market, and to impose that expectation would reduce the ideas being published in patents and give no incentive to invent or to disclose.
Focus instead on the real problems with the current parent system:
-companies and their engineers are discouraged from using or even looking at existing 3rd party patents due to a stupid interpretation of the willful infringement rule
-it is too expensive to apply for patents, especially for individuals
-it is far too expensive and time-consuming to get legitimate judgements against infringers
-obvious or prior-art patents are routinely granted, and the examiners' incentives encourage this
-patents are often issued that either do not work or do not fully and comprehensibly disclose how to implement the invention
-there is no automatic licensing scheme (as for public playing of music) or overall royalty % cap to asuage the fears of companies that they'll get nibbled to death by various IP holders for acknowledging all the patented technology that goes into making a state-of-the-art product.
1.)HD-DVD does not use the same wavelength as today's players. It uses the same wavelength as Blu-Ray.
2.)Both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are backwards-compatable with DVD and audio CD via a built-in second laser.
3.)WTF is BD-ROM? Sounds kinky.
Right you are. Millions of people will buy PS3s as game machines, then buy or rent Blu-Ray discs as an afterthought. For them the player is essentially free. HD-DVD doesn't have that advantage. It only takes a little lead at first even in an otherwise level competition to create a snowballing standardization effect in a situaion like this. The same thing happened with the direction clock hands turn in medieval Europe and many other situations.
But the field isn't even level - Blu-Ray has more studios and thus more content, more manufacturers, more disc capacity, more future capacity, and most importantly, much cheaper pre-recorded disks. The last factor is what decided the Betmax vs. VHS battle, and Sony isn't going to make the same mistake this time. HD-DVD doesn't stand a chance at becoming the dominant format. It may get bundled into later Blu-Ray players but three years out the discs won't be in the rental shops and HD-DVD will be considered a mere curiosity.