Start out your presentation stating that you're willing to dive as low as the executives ask you to but you're going to give them a high level view. Have slides after the end of your presentation as backup to support this claim. Keep large numbers of systems generalized with figures next to them to let the executives know how many devices or users you're supporting. Include meaningful statistics like 'requests per hour' to give them a good hint of how capable your system is.
If you're briefing one or two executives, see if you can pull up their calendar for the past few months and see what kind of meetings they've been in. If anything overlaps with what you're presenting do not brief the same thing twice. If you have multiple executives, tailor your presentation to the top one or two in importance. Nobody wants their time wasted with something they've already seen.
If they want a low level view, you might put together an example story of the flow of information from the sprinkler A all the way back to your server and the response back with all the challenges faced along the way. Keep it interesting, uncluttered and as simple as possible unless further questions are asked.
If you've got budget, pick up the three Edward Tufte books on The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information & Visual Explanations. Read them and incorporate that sort of data presentation into your reports.
Another great thing is if you can get interesting metrics established and defined and then develop scripts to ingest this information automatically into weekly reports (think of a perl script that digests very large log files). Have them create a cover sheet with the most general metrics and convert it to PDF or whatever the execs prefer to view them in. If you've got time, tailor them to the specific reader (your CTO is going to be interested in different things than your CEO or marketing director).
But the answer comes from German city of Bremen, from a company dubbed Vector Foil. Vector Foil manufactures an innovative strong, lightweight, transparent polymer known as ethylene tetra fluoro ethylene (ETFE). At just one percent of glass, ETFE is described as 99 percent nothing. And considering that it can withstand winds of 180 miles per hour, it could be the breakthrough for the Houston Dome.
I'm not a mechanical engineer nor did any of my college coursework overlap with that but my gut feeling was pure skepticism and doubt. At least it's a long long way off if they follow through.
The guy posting Beatles songs was clearly in the wrong.
I just wrote about this in my journal last night and would like to point out that Media Rights Technology (MRT, owners of BlueBeat.com) has a long history of neurosis when it comes to the legal system. Although not cross referenced above, you may recognize MRT as the very same people who sued everyone in 2007 for not implementing DRM. If you're Hank Risan, you've probably been asking yourself "How can I twist the law in a bizarre way to get rich quick?" And here we are.
You can find the latest map on the CDC site and look at how helpful it is! Apparently everyone's boned except for DC, Georgia, Guam, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. Since there's no report of flu in the Virgin Islands, I propose the government provides free plane tickets for anyone who isn't infected so that they might escape the wave of vomit brewing in our fair country.
But in all seriousness their report does have some decent data on it.
I did not agree with the tiny 10-page article that barely had enough substance for 1 physical paper.
It's worse than that. I hate to spoil the ending for you but he comes to the conclusion that the British outlet is the greatest with a 10 out of 10 score. Why? Safety features. Features like shuttering and built in fuses. Both of which are optional on American outlets as well -- I'm sure -- as they are on outlets around the world. Maybe they're standard in the UK but they're optional in the US. I'd rather have the option than even more regulation. Also, the picture for the US is ungrounded. I'm beginning to think this article was written by someone who's never really cared to understand the diversity of plugs in countries other than his own (which I would never use in the US and very rarely see). Nationalistic garbage is about all this amounts to. Yawn.
I would just like to point out that everyone is getting their information from a single point: Michael Geist's blog. Granted, he's rarely wrong but blogs are blogs. So where is this "leaked document" that the summary alludes to? Every source I find online points back to Geist. Even the articles Geist cites at the bottom of his blog point back to him. Even Wikipedia points back to him. I'm not saying that he's wrong nor am I trying to deflate the severity of this but Geist is even relying on other sources:
Sources say that the draft text, modeled on the U.S.-South Korea free trade agreement, focuses on following five issues...
Then following that even he says:
If accurate...
Doesn't leave me a whole lot of confidence that we're getting all the unadulterated facts here. I would seek information better than third or fourth hand accounts of something before I went around screaming about the sky falling (trust me, I speak from experience of being fooled by a single blog post).
Secret Copyright Treaty Leaks. It's Bad. Very Bad.
So where is the leaked document so that I may judge for myself?
I thought we discussed this in July? Or is this a different exploit?
I think it's pretty clear that De Raadt and others have been discussing this vulnerability for quite sometime. On a list of affected systems, you can see it's been known on that site since August. Here's another fix discussed that involves setting PER_CLEAR_ON_SETID mask to MMAP_PAGE_ZERO and that's from July (unfortunately, as the Register article said, that might cause problems with applications). In fact I think Spengler has been talking about this for quite sometime as I believe you can find exploit code here and a video of it in use here against SELinux. If that's not the same exploit it sure seems to be very similar in nature.
You do realize that this essentially allows corporations to write law. This is some real scary shit, and I'm amazed that it finds cheerleaders among ordinary people.
I'm sorry, I must have missed that. I re-read the Geist piece and I'm still not seeing it. I read the agenda and I don't see that on the list. Could you cite where you're getting this information besides "the usual lobbyists are doing their usual thing?" If you don't think corporations influence law in every single country across the world already, you're misinformed.
This is some real scary shit...
Or it's business as usual. Scary why? Because you said so? Oh no, EU ISPs are going to be liable for customers doing illegal shit on their networks? That's really scary. Even Geist didn't make this sound as apocalyptic as you did.
... and I'm amazed that it finds cheerleaders among ordinary people.
So your argument with no citation relies on name calling. "Cheerleaders among ordinary people?" Saying, "To reiterate, I don't agree with some of these laws they are discussing" makes me a cheerleader? A call to acknowledgment of small benefits makes me a cheerleader? Hoping that these talks result in relaxing some of these laws makes me a cheerleader? To anyone reading these posts, be wary of the people who call you names when you embark on rational level headed analysis of any situation.
Really, curious I may be but a cheerleader I am not. I'm amazed you received so many positive moderations for a post so devoid of any real content or meaningful counterpoints against the points I raised.
If anything it only brings the Internet under the rule of law and in line with most other social mediums.
And, you know, this could alleviate a lot of the "bring iTunes/Amazon MP3/Hulu to the rest of the world" complaints we get so frequently on Slashdot. Hell, I'd like to see Spotify in the US myself. But all too often you see labels balk at foreign markets and a lot of time (though not always) they cite lack of copyright control and enforcement in these countries.
So, yeah, it's horrible that we're getting ACTA/DMCA the world over but at the end of the day, the countries participating in this may actually think that they are doing something good for their constituents as consumers. And you know, they might be right. For people living outside the United States, would you put up with stricter DMCA-like rules if it meant massively more purchasing options for you? I can't say I would opt for this (as I'm living in the US) but I imagine if I were living in Korea I would support this if it meant I could purchase Amazon MP3s instead of relying on less than reputable sites for acquiring music.
While this global system for enforcing copyright may be initially overly harsh, I think we have to recognize copyright law enforcement in other countries needs to be increased before publishers, labels and film studios become comfortable with digital mediums as an equal and fair distribution method the world over.
To reiterate, I don't agree with some of these laws they are discussing. I hope that's why they're holding the discussions. But do not overlook the benefits and fail to weigh them against the costs as you consider this discussion.
However, I still feel that 75 years is way too long of a copyright term.
Emphatically agreed. While I'm being overly optimistic, hopefully the global community can influence the US positively in this respect.
The bad news is that artificial intelligence has yet to fully deliver on its promises.
Only idiots, marketers, businessmen and outsiders ever thought we would be completely replaced by artificially intelligent machines. The people actually putting artificial intelligence into practice knew that AI, like so many other things, would benefit us in small steps. So many forms of automation are technically basic artificial intelligence, it's just very simple artificial intelligence. While you might want to argue that the things we benefit from are heuristics, statistics and messes of if/then decision trees, successful AI is nothing more than that. Everyone reading this enjoys benefits of AI but you probably don't know it. For instance, your hand written mail is most likely read by a machine that uses optical character recognition to decide where it goes with a pretty good success rate and confidence factor to fail over to humans. Recommendation systems are often based on AI algorithms. I mean, the article even says this:
The ability of your bank's financial software to detect potentially fraudulent activity on your accounts or alter your credit score when you miss a mortgage payment are just two of many common examples of AI at work, says Mow. Speech and handwriting recognition, business process management, data mining, and medical diagnostics -- they all owe a debt to AI.
Having taken several courses on AI, I never found a contributor to the field that promised it to be the silver bullet -- or even remotely comparable to the human mind. I don't ever recall reading anything other than fiction claiming that humans would soon be replaced completely by thinking machines.
In short, I don't think it's fair to put it in this list as it has had success. It's easy to dismiss AI if the only person you hear talking about it is the cult-like Ray Kurzweil but I assure you the field is a valid one (unlike CASE or ERP). In short, AI will never die because the list of applications -- though small -- slowly but surely grows. It has not gone 'bunk' (whatever the hell that means). You can say expert systems have failed to keep their promises but not AI on the whole. The only thing that's left a sour taste in your mouth is salesmen and businessmen promising you something they simply cannot deliver on. And that's nothing new nor anything specific to AI.
Eliminate Warrantless Wiretaps. Barack Obama opposed the Bush
Administration’s initial policy on warrantless wiretaps because it crossed the line
between protecting our national security and eroding the civil liberties of American
citizens. As president, Obama would update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
to provide greater oversight and accountability to the congressional intelligence
committees to prevent future threats to the rule of law.
2004-10-08 FTC files suit against Wallace to stop infecting computers with spyware that promised to remove the problem for $30.
2006-03-22 FTC files suit against Wallace--Wallace and co-defendants fined for over $5 million.
2008-01-26 MySpace awarded $230 million from Wallace in LA.
2009-10-29 (Yesterday) Facebook awarded $711 million from Wallace.
If you say seven hundred million and jail time is too much, I say it isn't enough. A warning didn't stop him, five million didn't stop him, two hundred million didn't stop him and I'm sure seven hundred million won't stop him. Throw the book at him and lock him up--this is definition CAN-SPAM Act. And he's a heavy repeat offender, it's not like this guy was blindsided with a surprise ruling. Spam is too kind of a label for this guy, I would hit him for extortion and identity theft on massive scales in addition to CAN-SPAM.
How he continued to operate with a two hundred million dollar loss a year and a half ago is beyond me. Is he just declaring bankruptcy (like he did back June '09), rolling over and doing it again? Or avoiding states where there's a warrant for his arrest or what?
Reminds me of the time I was at the Science Museum in Minnesota and they had an exhibit from the Museum of Bad Science (or something like that). Anyway they had a shoe-fitting flouroscope which was a device that shoe stores bought. Basically you would put shoes on your child's feet but to see how well they fit you would jam their leg in this thing and see the bones of the toes up to the tip of the shoe and see how well it fit. See the problem yet?
Although store clerks were frequently exposed to the radiation from the machines, the radiation was more dangerous to children who placed their feet directly into the radiation. The exposure rate is thought to have been approximately 0.005 Gy to 0.058 Gy per second. If children tried on several pairs of shoes per visit it was posited that they could be exposed to as much as 0.1 Gy to 1.16 Gy. In fact, experiments indicated that radiation could exceed 1 microGy per hour as far as 10 feet away from the machine.
This device should be a warning (and I think it has been if you look at how cautious people are of new technologies like cell phones). Hopefully my sperm aren't being fried when I walk through a scanner in an airport--at least the parents of the 30s were using X-rays for their convenience and not the invasion of their privacy!
The importance is that that puts the effect at smaller than a planck length (which is the assumed smallest possible distance that something measurable can happen in classical physics). From the first article:
The spread in travel time of 0.9 second between the highest- and lowest-energy gamma rays, if attributed to quantum effects rather than the dynamics of the explosion itself, suggested that any quantum effects in which the slowing of light is proportional to its energy do not show up until you get down to sizes about eight-tenths of the Planck length, according to the Nature paper, whose lead author was Sylvain Guiriec of the University of Alabama.
Granted they say it would have to be proven much smaller than a planck length for most people to accept this as empirical proof, it is empirical data backing Einstein. The 9/10s could be due to the explosion or a physical effect but the latter is now more unlikely given the many light year distance.
This stuff seems to be going down faster than it's getting replicated--indicating it probably is real footage. As the submitter, there were a number of sites I was able to reach this morning that had a lot more footage and has apparently been taken down. From CNN's iReport to China's 56.com and youku.com video hosting sites.
For an official statement, G4TV quotes Activision (when asked about the footage being in the game) as saying:
Yes it is. The scene establishes the depth of evil and the cold bloodedness of a rogue Russian villain and his unit. By establishing that evil, it adds to the urgency of the player’s mission to stop them.
Players have the option of skipping over the scene. At the beginning of the game, there are two ‘checkpoints’ where the player is advised that some people may find an upcoming segment disturbing. These checkpoints can’t be disabled.
Modern Warfare 2 is a fantasy action game designed for intense, realistic game play that mirrors real life conflicts, much like epic, action movies. It is appropriately rated 18 for violent scenes, which means it is intended for those who are 18 and older.
Sure to raise controversy, sure to garner eyeballs and sure to sell copies it looks like. Just the right amount of controversy I guess.
To be fair, these cars were expected to turn, and go up and down hills. Something no mere mortal car would dare perform...
I think what they mean was that it requires less electricity to remain straight on a flat plane going at a fixed speed. When you slow down to complete an S-curve or start going up a hill, your fuel consumption is drastically affected. The driver of the Tesla Roadster kept the speed as close to 55 kmph as he could to achieve the best efficiency event though that's a modest pace and not really a racing speed. This wasn't a course making long straight lines through the salt flats and that's probably important to note. I don't think "race" is a good description for the course. It's more like a realistic challenge with completion time hardly a factor.
Until very recently, most Hollywood heavyweights were loath to speak too openly about the promise of digital entertainment — the downloading and streaming of movies and television shows on computers, Internet-enabled televisions and mobile devices. Nobody wanted to anger retail partners like Wal-Mart or do anything that might slow the DVD gravy train.
followed up with
A variety of factors have influenced Hollywood’s new aggression on the digital front. This year, Wal-Mart and other big-box retailers started cutting the amount of shelf space they devote to DVDs, and some other retail partners, like Circuit City, have gone out of business. So movie studios now worry less about angering them by pulling digital levers.
The article actually highlights some moves that Disney (I know, I was shocked as well) has made to improve digital ownership for the consumer. And there are going to be a lot of failures (Disney already tried Moviebeam) but it's probably pretty clear that this is the future past Blu-ray.
The film studios' reasons for falling sales? First it was piracy. Now that that's been reigned in it must be rentals, Netflix and Redbox. And once that tapers off and the DVD gravy train doesn't kick back up it'll be some other bullshit. Never will it be the fact that 99% of movie trailers I see today I don't care for and 99% of the ones I watch have little to no replay value. Never will it be the declining quality of the product. Never will it be the fact that I have bought this movie in three other formats goddammit--why do I need to pay for blu-ray? Never will it be the fact that buying it on blu-ray allows me to play it on only one device in my house when I have many more capable of playing movies.
Go ahead, pin the blame on someone else. I don't care. But you won't fix the problem until you look at all the contributing factors. It is ignorance to think it is just one of these. Die a slow painful death, I just hope my children don't have to put with you acting like children.
A spokeswoman for the church, Agnès Bron, called the verdict "an Inquisition for modern times."
Help me out here, which Inquisition are you trying to draw a parallel to?
In all of the most popular ones I think it was the several hundreds (possibly thousands) of individuals being persecuted for not believing Roman Catholicism (the popular religion). Crazy Catholic tribunals prosecuting people on arcane doctrine! Usually resulting in the end of their life or excommunication. Now the current situation is the government of France in a single instance finding the Church of Scientology guilty of fraud. Was there anything to do with religious doctrine in this case? Because I thought fraud was fraud whether you're the pope or Richard Dawkins! And the result is a paltry sum of $900,000 that is -- what? -- 1/7th of what it cost Tom Cruise to get to his last level of clairvoyance?
To reiterate, you're not being persecuted for your beliefs but instead your finances... which sound more like extortion through coercion to me than anything else.
Go ahead and use this to try to appeal to people with a persecution complex. If they have one, they won't find more persecution anywhere else than your ranks. I'm glad that sane people -- when hassled by you -- can now be informed that your accounting practices in France have been legally decried as fraud!
Apparently the author of the summary is unfamiliar with lobbying so here goes the simplest explanation I can think of for it.
Need every new technological category get its own patent rules, and how do those rules get decided?
Depends on the leaders of that category. The people with the most money will give tiny amounts of that money to the lawmakers. Then a bill is introduced and these weird rules probably get tagged onto some bill that has a much more important focus (like health care or one of the various wars we are engaged in). Since all the lawmakers received money from the the people with money, nobody objects.
Here's one of many examples in which a bill titled "Affordable Health Choices Act" gets tiny peppering of patent law attached to it like this (which is in regards to the category 'interchangeable biological products'):
... (i) a final court decision on all patents in suit in an action instituted under subsection (l)(6) against the applicant that submitted the application for the first approved interchangeable biosimilar biological product; or
(ii) the dismissal with or without prejudice of an action instituted under subsection (l)(6) against the applicant that submitted the application for the first approved interchangeable biosimilar biological product;...
What's worse is that no voter immediately cares. Everyone cares more about things that directly affect them--like their health or their kin dying on some god forsaken soil. The immediate threat of these lobbyists is not only unseen but no one is held accountable down the line. You have to get someone not too politically savvy to be the poster child/target for this stuff if it's a whole bill you're introducing -- like Sonny Bono on copyright extension. Oh and there's another neat little thing in American politics where if you vote for that bill and then something like this gets added and you vote against the bill, your opponents label you as a "flip flopper", "waffler" or "indecisive."
Now, I paint a picture where opposition to lobbyists never arises because no one makes it a serious issue. But there are a few examples of this working positively. Example is the generic drug manufacturers do actually have some money and realize they are getting the short end of the stick so you have these lobbying wars occasionally. The really ironic thing is that name brand drugs are more expensive for the consumer. But often the consumer is on a health plan where they pay a small percentage or a copay on their drugs. If it is a copay and the consumer buys the $100/dose Calvin Klein drugs instead of the $1/dose Walmart drugs, someone (like your health care provider) is paying a lot more. Now, imagine what kind of state our health care would be in when there can't be any generic drugs for 12 years? Won't matter if you're a copay or a percentage, you'll be taking that $100/dose because it's your health and you can't exactly put a price on your health.
Well, that's an important point but the author of this defends himself:
Distributions no longer need to have separate downloads for various
platforms. Given enough disc space, there's no reason you couldn't
have one DVD.iso that installs an x86-64, x86, PowerPC, SPARC, and MIPS
system, doing the right thing at boot time. You can remove all the
confusing text from your website about "which installer is right for me?"
You no longer need to have separate/lib,/lib32, and/lib64 trees.
Third party packagers no longer have to publish multiple.deb/.rpm/etc
for different architectures. Installers like
MojoSetup benefit, too.
A download that is largely data and not executable code, such as a
large video game, doesn't need
to use disproportionate amounts of disk space and bandwidth to supply
builds for multiple architectures. Just supply one, with a slightly
larger binary with the otherwise unchanged hundreds of megabytes of data.
You no longer need to use shell scripts and flakey logic to pick the right
binary and libraries to load. Just run it, the system chooses the best
one to run.
The ELF OSABI for your system changes someday? You can still support your
legacy users.
Ship a single shared library that provides bindings for a scripting
language and not have to worry about whether the scripting language
itself is built for the same architecture as your bindings.
Ship web browser plugins that work out of the box with multiple platforms.
Ship kernel drivers for multiple processors in one file.
Transition to a new architecture in incremental steps.
Support 64-bit and 32-bit compatibility binaries in one file.
No more ia32 compatibility libraries! Even if your distro doesn't make
a complete set of FatELF binaries available, they can still provide it
for the handful of packages you need for 99% of 32-bit apps you want to
run on a 64-bit system.
Have a CPU that can handle different byte orders? Ship one binary that
satisfies all configurations!
Ship one file that works across Linux and FreeBSD (without a platform
compatibility layer on either of them).
One hard drive partition can be booted on different machines with
different CPU architectures, for development and experimentation.
Same root file system, different kernel and CPU architecture.
Prepare your app on a USB stick for sneakernet, know it'll work on
whatever Linux box you are likely to plug it into.
While you may be able to claim none of those points are overly compelling and target a very small part of the population, you have to recognize there's more than just satisfying non-free applications. Furthermore, I think you mean to say that it's "only useful for non-open source applications" as there are tons of free software applications out there that are not open source but are free (like Microsoft's Express editions of Visual Studio).
Heartland has been endorsed by some of the country's leading scholars, public policy experts, and elected officials. Dr. Milton Friedman calls Heartland "a highly effective libertarian institute."
Basically they don't want to label themselves as Libertarian because that would foolishly scare away potential non-Libertarians from reading their work. Instead they rely on their publications to speak for their views instead of a label with baggage. If you're an economist, however, you recognize them for what they are: predominantly libertarian with hints of conservatism. Popular knowledge agrees.
I posit that one of the most prized products of Capitalism and the free market is to reduce the cost for the end consumer and raise the quality of the products and services. Now, the scientific formula for deciding the positive effectiveness of this is: (customer's percieved value)/(actual retail cost)
So you can see that as the actual retail cost approaches zero, the positive effects of capitalism approach infinity! Unfortunately when the actual cost is zero, it's undefined and your interpretation may vary.
Basically I suggest open source software people instruct these complaining parties to donate a penny or fraction of a penny to once again make them look like the epitome of our capitalistic system at work. Anyone else (who isn't stupid) may continue to use it for free and -- at least in the case of open source software -- enjoy unparalleled benefits like being able to modify and redistribute the source let alone view it. Problem solved.
The sheriff in question was no doubt trying to just drum up some publicity for himself. Remind me again why he's enforcing laws he clearly doesn't understand?
You don't realize how right you are. From Mr. Dart's Wikipedia page:
In October 2008, Dart made national news when he announced that he was suspending all foreclosure evictions in Cook County. The number of such evictions had increased dramatically since 2006 as a result of the national subprime mortgage crisis. Dart stated that many of the people being evicted were renters who had faithfully paid their rent but had not known that their landlord was in financial trouble. He explained that in many cases, mortgage companies had not fulfilled their obligation to identify tenants in the foreclosed properties, and said, "These mortgage companies only see pieces of paper, not people, and don't care [...] who gets hurt along the way... We're not going to do their jobs for them anymore. We're just not going to evict innocent tenants. It stops today."
The Illinois Bankers Association was critical of Dart, accusing him of "ignoring his legal responsibilities" and of engaging in "vigilantism".
Dart says that he is enforcing an Illinois state law which requires the banks to determine whether the persons resident at an address are actually the persons to whom the foreclosure notice should be served.
Due largely to these efforts, Time Magazine named Dart one of its 100 most influential people for 2009.
That last sentence will probably have him championing things (or rather trying) for the rest of his life. I have the feeling this ain't the end of the Craigslist shenanigans nor is it the last thing Mr. Dart will overstep his duties on. He's got a J.D. from Loyola University and a Bachelor's Degree in History and General Social Studies from Providence College. What is he doing trying to practice law?
I think distributions rights get really complicated across regions and countries. If someone owns the rights to digital distributions or all distributions of a work, Amazon's probably got to pay them a premium for their market. Just look at DVDs, I can't even by "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence" in the states. I would imagine selection would be vastly hobbled for several reasons across different countries. And let's not forget Germany's regulation of book prices "in an effort to protect authors, publishers, and small booksellers." There could be a lot of factors at work here--most of which are specific to a single country.
Slashdot Mirror
Start out your presentation stating that you're willing to dive as low as the executives ask you to but you're going to give them a high level view. Have slides after the end of your presentation as backup to support this claim. Keep large numbers of systems generalized with figures next to them to let the executives know how many devices or users you're supporting. Include meaningful statistics like 'requests per hour' to give them a good hint of how capable your system is.
If you're briefing one or two executives, see if you can pull up their calendar for the past few months and see what kind of meetings they've been in. If anything overlaps with what you're presenting do not brief the same thing twice. If you have multiple executives, tailor your presentation to the top one or two in importance. Nobody wants their time wasted with something they've already seen.
If they want a low level view, you might put together an example story of the flow of information from the sprinkler A all the way back to your server and the response back with all the challenges faced along the way. Keep it interesting, uncluttered and as simple as possible unless further questions are asked.
If you've got budget, pick up the three Edward Tufte books on The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information & Visual Explanations. Read them and incorporate that sort of data presentation into your reports.
Another great thing is if you can get interesting metrics established and defined and then develop scripts to ingest this information automatically into weekly reports (think of a perl script that digests very large log files). Have them create a cover sheet with the most general metrics and convert it to PDF or whatever the execs prefer to view them in. If you've got time, tailor them to the specific reader (your CTO is going to be interested in different things than your CEO or marketing director).
But the answer comes from German city of Bremen, from a company dubbed Vector Foil. Vector Foil manufactures an innovative strong, lightweight, transparent polymer known as ethylene tetra fluoro ethylene (ETFE). At just one percent of glass, ETFE is described as 99 percent nothing. And considering that it can withstand winds of 180 miles per hour, it could be the breakthrough for the Houston Dome.
I'm not a mechanical engineer nor did any of my college coursework overlap with that but my gut feeling was pure skepticism and doubt. At least it's a long long way off if they follow through.
The guy posting Beatles songs was clearly in the wrong.
I just wrote about this in my journal last night and would like to point out that Media Rights Technology (MRT, owners of BlueBeat.com) has a long history of neurosis when it comes to the legal system. Although not cross referenced above, you may recognize MRT as the very same people who sued everyone in 2007 for not implementing DRM. If you're Hank Risan, you've probably been asking yourself "How can I twist the law in a bizarre way to get rich quick?" And here we are.
You can find the latest map on the CDC site and look at how helpful it is! Apparently everyone's boned except for DC, Georgia, Guam, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. Since there's no report of flu in the Virgin Islands, I propose the government provides free plane tickets for anyone who isn't infected so that they might escape the wave of vomit brewing in our fair country.
But in all seriousness their report does have some decent data on it.
I did not agree with the tiny 10-page article that barely had enough substance for 1 physical paper.
It's worse than that. I hate to spoil the ending for you but he comes to the conclusion that the British outlet is the greatest with a 10 out of 10 score. Why? Safety features. Features like shuttering and built in fuses. Both of which are optional on American outlets as well -- I'm sure -- as they are on outlets around the world. Maybe they're standard in the UK but they're optional in the US. I'd rather have the option than even more regulation. Also, the picture for the US is ungrounded. I'm beginning to think this article was written by someone who's never really cared to understand the diversity of plugs in countries other than his own (which I would never use in the US and very rarely see). Nationalistic garbage is about all this amounts to. Yawn.
Jamie found a Boing Boing story that will probably get your blood to at least a simmer.
Well maybe Jamie should read yesterday's Slashdot.
I would just like to point out that everyone is getting their information from a single point: Michael Geist's blog. Granted, he's rarely wrong but blogs are blogs. So where is this "leaked document" that the summary alludes to? Every source I find online points back to Geist. Even the articles Geist cites at the bottom of his blog point back to him. Even Wikipedia points back to him. I'm not saying that he's wrong nor am I trying to deflate the severity of this but Geist is even relying on other sources:
Sources say that the draft text, modeled on the U.S.-South Korea free trade agreement, focuses on following five issues...
Then following that even he says:
If accurate ...
Doesn't leave me a whole lot of confidence that we're getting all the unadulterated facts here. I would seek information better than third or fourth hand accounts of something before I went around screaming about the sky falling (trust me, I speak from experience of being fooled by a single blog post).
Secret Copyright Treaty Leaks. It's Bad. Very Bad.
So where is the leaked document so that I may judge for myself?
The bug was found by Brad Spengler last month.
I thought we discussed this in July? Or is this a different exploit?
I think it's pretty clear that De Raadt and others have been discussing this vulnerability for quite sometime. On a list of affected systems, you can see it's been known on that site since August. Here's another fix discussed that involves setting PER_CLEAR_ON_SETID mask to MMAP_PAGE_ZERO and that's from July (unfortunately, as the Register article said, that might cause problems with applications). In fact I think Spengler has been talking about this for quite sometime as I believe you can find exploit code here and a video of it in use here against SELinux. If that's not the same exploit it sure seems to be very similar in nature.
You do realize that this essentially allows corporations to write law. This is some real scary shit, and I'm amazed that it finds cheerleaders among ordinary people.
I'm sorry, I must have missed that. I re-read the Geist piece and I'm still not seeing it. I read the agenda and I don't see that on the list. Could you cite where you're getting this information besides "the usual lobbyists are doing their usual thing?" If you don't think corporations influence law in every single country across the world already, you're misinformed.
This is some real scary shit ...
Or it's business as usual. Scary why? Because you said so? Oh no, EU ISPs are going to be liable for customers doing illegal shit on their networks? That's really scary. Even Geist didn't make this sound as apocalyptic as you did.
... and I'm amazed that it finds cheerleaders among ordinary people.
So your argument with no citation relies on name calling. "Cheerleaders among ordinary people?" Saying, "To reiterate, I don't agree with some of these laws they are discussing" makes me a cheerleader? A call to acknowledgment of small benefits makes me a cheerleader? Hoping that these talks result in relaxing some of these laws makes me a cheerleader? To anyone reading these posts, be wary of the people who call you names when you embark on rational level headed analysis of any situation.
Really, curious I may be but a cheerleader I am not. I'm amazed you received so many positive moderations for a post so devoid of any real content or meaningful counterpoints against the points I raised.
If anything it only brings the Internet under the rule of law and in line with most other social mediums.
And, you know, this could alleviate a lot of the "bring iTunes/Amazon MP3/Hulu to the rest of the world" complaints we get so frequently on Slashdot. Hell, I'd like to see Spotify in the US myself. But all too often you see labels balk at foreign markets and a lot of time (though not always) they cite lack of copyright control and enforcement in these countries.
So, yeah, it's horrible that we're getting ACTA/DMCA the world over but at the end of the day, the countries participating in this may actually think that they are doing something good for their constituents as consumers. And you know, they might be right. For people living outside the United States, would you put up with stricter DMCA-like rules if it meant massively more purchasing options for you? I can't say I would opt for this (as I'm living in the US) but I imagine if I were living in Korea I would support this if it meant I could purchase Amazon MP3s instead of relying on less than reputable sites for acquiring music.
While this global system for enforcing copyright may be initially overly harsh, I think we have to recognize copyright law enforcement in other countries needs to be increased before publishers, labels and film studios become comfortable with digital mediums as an equal and fair distribution method the world over.
To reiterate, I don't agree with some of these laws they are discussing. I hope that's why they're holding the discussions. But do not overlook the benefits and fail to weigh them against the costs as you consider this discussion.
However, I still feel that 75 years is way too long of a copyright term.
Emphatically agreed. While I'm being overly optimistic, hopefully the global community can influence the US positively in this respect.
The bad news is that artificial intelligence has yet to fully deliver on its promises.
Only idiots, marketers, businessmen and outsiders ever thought we would be completely replaced by artificially intelligent machines. The people actually putting artificial intelligence into practice knew that AI, like so many other things, would benefit us in small steps. So many forms of automation are technically basic artificial intelligence, it's just very simple artificial intelligence. While you might want to argue that the things we benefit from are heuristics, statistics and messes of if/then decision trees, successful AI is nothing more than that. Everyone reading this enjoys benefits of AI but you probably don't know it. For instance, your hand written mail is most likely read by a machine that uses optical character recognition to decide where it goes with a pretty good success rate and confidence factor to fail over to humans. Recommendation systems are often based on AI algorithms. I mean, the article even says this:
The ability of your bank's financial software to detect potentially fraudulent activity on your accounts or alter your credit score when you miss a mortgage payment are just two of many common examples of AI at work, says Mow. Speech and handwriting recognition, business process management, data mining, and medical diagnostics -- they all owe a debt to AI.
Having taken several courses on AI, I never found a contributor to the field that promised it to be the silver bullet -- or even remotely comparable to the human mind. I don't ever recall reading anything other than fiction claiming that humans would soon be replaced completely by thinking machines.
In short, I don't think it's fair to put it in this list as it has had success. It's easy to dismiss AI if the only person you hear talking about it is the cult-like Ray Kurzweil but I assure you the field is a valid one (unlike CASE or ERP). In short, AI will never die because the list of applications -- though small -- slowly but surely grows. It has not gone 'bunk' (whatever the hell that means). You can say expert systems have failed to keep their promises but not AI on the whole. The only thing that's left a sour taste in your mouth is salesmen and businessmen promising you something they simply cannot deliver on. And that's nothing new nor anything specific to AI.
Eliminate Warrantless Wiretaps. Barack Obama opposed the Bush Administration’s initial policy on warrantless wiretaps because it crossed the line between protecting our national security and eroding the civil liberties of American citizens. As president, Obama would update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to provide greater oversight and accountability to the congressional intelligence committees to prevent future threats to the rule of law.
Also, I thought he was assembling a cabinet critical of warrantless wiretapping?
What's wrong with this picture?
2004-10-08 FTC files suit against Wallace to stop infecting computers with spyware that promised to remove the problem for $30.
2006-03-22 FTC files suit against Wallace--Wallace and co-defendants fined for over $5 million.
2008-01-26 MySpace awarded $230 million from Wallace in LA.
2009-10-29 (Yesterday) Facebook awarded $711 million from Wallace.
If you say seven hundred million and jail time is too much, I say it isn't enough. A warning didn't stop him, five million didn't stop him, two hundred million didn't stop him and I'm sure seven hundred million won't stop him. Throw the book at him and lock him up--this is definition CAN-SPAM Act. And he's a heavy repeat offender, it's not like this guy was blindsided with a surprise ruling. Spam is too kind of a label for this guy, I would hit him for extortion and identity theft on massive scales in addition to CAN-SPAM.
How he continued to operate with a two hundred million dollar loss a year and a half ago is beyond me. Is he just declaring bankruptcy (like he did back June '09), rolling over and doing it again? Or avoiding states where there's a warrant for his arrest or what?
Although store clerks were frequently exposed to the radiation from the machines, the radiation was more dangerous to children who placed their feet directly into the radiation. The exposure rate is thought to have been approximately 0.005 Gy to 0.058 Gy per second. If children tried on several pairs of shoes per visit it was posited that they could be exposed to as much as 0.1 Gy to 1.16 Gy. In fact, experiments indicated that radiation could exceed 1 microGy per hour as far as 10 feet away from the machine.
This device should be a warning (and I think it has been if you look at how cautious people are of new technologies like cell phones). Hopefully my sperm aren't being fried when I walk through a scanner in an airport--at least the parents of the 30s were using X-rays for their convenience and not the invasion of their privacy!
The spread in travel time of 0.9 second between the highest- and lowest-energy gamma rays, if attributed to quantum effects rather than the dynamics of the explosion itself, suggested that any quantum effects in which the slowing of light is proportional to its energy do not show up until you get down to sizes about eight-tenths of the Planck length, according to the Nature paper, whose lead author was Sylvain Guiriec of the University of Alabama.
Granted they say it would have to be proven much smaller than a planck length for most people to accept this as empirical proof, it is empirical data backing Einstein. The 9/10s could be due to the explosion or a physical effect but the latter is now more unlikely given the many light year distance.
For an official statement, G4TV quotes Activision (when asked about the footage being in the game) as saying:
Yes it is. The scene establishes the depth of evil and the cold bloodedness of a rogue Russian villain and his unit. By establishing that evil, it adds to the urgency of the player’s mission to stop them.
Players have the option of skipping over the scene. At the beginning of the game, there are two ‘checkpoints’ where the player is advised that some people may find an upcoming segment disturbing. These checkpoints can’t be disabled.
Modern Warfare 2 is a fantasy action game designed for intense, realistic game play that mirrors real life conflicts, much like epic, action movies. It is appropriately rated 18 for violent scenes, which means it is intended for those who are 18 and older.
Sure to raise controversy, sure to garner eyeballs and sure to sell copies it looks like. Just the right amount of controversy I guess.
To be fair, these cars were expected to turn, and go up and down hills. Something no mere mortal car would dare perform...
I think what they mean was that it requires less electricity to remain straight on a flat plane going at a fixed speed. When you slow down to complete an S-curve or start going up a hill, your fuel consumption is drastically affected. The driver of the Tesla Roadster kept the speed as close to 55 kmph as he could to achieve the best efficiency event though that's a modest pace and not really a racing speed. This wasn't a course making long straight lines through the salt flats and that's probably important to note. I don't think "race" is a good description for the course. It's more like a realistic challenge with completion time hardly a factor.
Until very recently, most Hollywood heavyweights were loath to speak too openly about the promise of digital entertainment — the downloading and streaming of movies and television shows on computers, Internet-enabled televisions and mobile devices. Nobody wanted to anger retail partners like Wal-Mart or do anything that might slow the DVD gravy train.
followed up with
A variety of factors have influenced Hollywood’s new aggression on the digital front. This year, Wal-Mart and other big-box retailers started cutting the amount of shelf space they devote to DVDs, and some other retail partners, like Circuit City, have gone out of business. So movie studios now worry less about angering them by pulling digital levers.
The article actually highlights some moves that Disney (I know, I was shocked as well) has made to improve digital ownership for the consumer. And there are going to be a lot of failures (Disney already tried Moviebeam) but it's probably pretty clear that this is the future past Blu-ray.
The film studios' reasons for falling sales? First it was piracy. Now that that's been reigned in it must be rentals, Netflix and Redbox. And once that tapers off and the DVD gravy train doesn't kick back up it'll be some other bullshit. Never will it be the fact that 99% of movie trailers I see today I don't care for and 99% of the ones I watch have little to no replay value. Never will it be the declining quality of the product. Never will it be the fact that I have bought this movie in three other formats goddammit--why do I need to pay for blu-ray? Never will it be the fact that buying it on blu-ray allows me to play it on only one device in my house when I have many more capable of playing movies.
Go ahead, pin the blame on someone else. I don't care. But you won't fix the problem until you look at all the contributing factors. It is ignorance to think it is just one of these. Die a slow painful death, I just hope my children don't have to put with you acting like children.
A spokeswoman for the church, Agnès Bron, called the verdict "an Inquisition for modern times."
Help me out here, which Inquisition are you trying to draw a parallel to?
... which sound more like extortion through coercion to me than anything else.
In all of the most popular ones I think it was the several hundreds (possibly thousands) of individuals being persecuted for not believing Roman Catholicism (the popular religion). Crazy Catholic tribunals prosecuting people on arcane doctrine! Usually resulting in the end of their life or excommunication. Now the current situation is the government of France in a single instance finding the Church of Scientology guilty of fraud. Was there anything to do with religious doctrine in this case? Because I thought fraud was fraud whether you're the pope or Richard Dawkins! And the result is a paltry sum of $900,000 that is -- what? -- 1/7th of what it cost Tom Cruise to get to his last level of clairvoyance?
To reiterate, you're not being persecuted for your beliefs but instead your finances
Go ahead and use this to try to appeal to people with a persecution complex. If they have one, they won't find more persecution anywhere else than your ranks. I'm glad that sane people -- when hassled by you -- can now be informed that your accounting practices in France have been legally decried as fraud!
Most memories of Grandpa have been archived. It's time to pull the plug. RIP you browser crashing old coot.
Need every new technological category get its own patent rules, and how do those rules get decided?
Depends on the leaders of that category. The people with the most money will give tiny amounts of that money to the lawmakers. Then a bill is introduced and these weird rules probably get tagged onto some bill that has a much more important focus (like health care or one of the various wars we are engaged in). Since all the lawmakers received money from the the people with money, nobody objects.
Here's one of many examples in which a bill titled "Affordable Health Choices Act" gets tiny peppering of patent law attached to it like this (which is in regards to the category 'interchangeable biological products'):
... (i) a final court decision on all patents in suit in an action instituted under subsection (l)(6) against the applicant that submitted the application for the first approved interchangeable biosimilar biological product; or
...
(ii) the dismissal with or without prejudice of an action instituted under subsection (l)(6) against the applicant that submitted the application for the first approved interchangeable biosimilar biological product;
What's worse is that no voter immediately cares. Everyone cares more about things that directly affect them--like their health or their kin dying on some god forsaken soil. The immediate threat of these lobbyists is not only unseen but no one is held accountable down the line. You have to get someone not too politically savvy to be the poster child/target for this stuff if it's a whole bill you're introducing -- like Sonny Bono on copyright extension. Oh and there's another neat little thing in American politics where if you vote for that bill and then something like this gets added and you vote against the bill, your opponents label you as a "flip flopper", "waffler" or "indecisive."
Now, I paint a picture where opposition to lobbyists never arises because no one makes it a serious issue. But there are a few examples of this working positively. Example is the generic drug manufacturers do actually have some money and realize they are getting the short end of the stick so you have these lobbying wars occasionally. The really ironic thing is that name brand drugs are more expensive for the consumer. But often the consumer is on a health plan where they pay a small percentage or a copay on their drugs. If it is a copay and the consumer buys the $100/dose Calvin Klein drugs instead of the $1/dose Walmart drugs, someone (like your health care provider) is paying a lot more. Now, imagine what kind of state our health care would be in when there can't be any generic drugs for 12 years? Won't matter if you're a copay or a percentage, you'll be taking that $100/dose because it's your health and you can't exactly put a price on your health.
While you may be able to claim none of those points are overly compelling and target a very small part of the population, you have to recognize there's more than just satisfying non-free applications. Furthermore, I think you mean to say that it's "only useful for non-open source applications" as there are tons of free software applications out there that are not open source but are free (like Microsoft's Express editions of Visual Studio).
Where did you get the idea that these guys are libertatians?
From their about page:
Heartland has been endorsed by some of the country's leading scholars, public policy experts, and elected officials. Dr. Milton Friedman calls Heartland "a highly effective libertarian institute."
Basically they don't want to label themselves as Libertarian because that would foolishly scare away potential non-Libertarians from reading their work. Instead they rely on their publications to speak for their views instead of a label with baggage. If you're an economist, however, you recognize them for what they are: predominantly libertarian with hints of conservatism. Popular knowledge agrees.
I posit that one of the most prized products of Capitalism and the free market is to reduce the cost for the end consumer and raise the quality of the products and services. Now, the scientific formula for deciding the positive effectiveness of this is: (customer's percieved value)/(actual retail cost)
So you can see that as the actual retail cost approaches zero, the positive effects of capitalism approach infinity! Unfortunately when the actual cost is zero, it's undefined and your interpretation may vary.
Basically I suggest open source software people instruct these complaining parties to donate a penny or fraction of a penny to once again make them look like the epitome of our capitalistic system at work. Anyone else (who isn't stupid) may continue to use it for free and -- at least in the case of open source software -- enjoy unparalleled benefits like being able to modify and redistribute the source let alone view it. Problem solved.
The sheriff in question was no doubt trying to just drum up some publicity for himself. Remind me again why he's enforcing laws he clearly doesn't understand?
You don't realize how right you are. From Mr. Dart's Wikipedia page:
In October 2008, Dart made national news when he announced that he was suspending all foreclosure evictions in Cook County. The number of such evictions had increased dramatically since 2006 as a result of the national subprime mortgage crisis. Dart stated that many of the people being evicted were renters who had faithfully paid their rent but had not known that their landlord was in financial trouble. He explained that in many cases, mortgage companies had not fulfilled their obligation to identify tenants in the foreclosed properties, and said, "These mortgage companies only see pieces of paper, not people, and don't care [...] who gets hurt along the way ... We're not going to do their jobs for them anymore. We're just not going to evict innocent tenants. It stops today."
The Illinois Bankers Association was critical of Dart, accusing him of "ignoring his legal responsibilities" and of engaging in "vigilantism".
Dart says that he is enforcing an Illinois state law which requires the banks to determine whether the persons resident at an address are actually the persons to whom the foreclosure notice should be served.
Due largely to these efforts, Time Magazine named Dart one of its 100 most influential people for 2009.
That last sentence will probably have him championing things (or rather trying) for the rest of his life. I have the feeling this ain't the end of the Craigslist shenanigans nor is it the last thing Mr. Dart will overstep his duties on. He's got a J.D. from Loyola University and a Bachelor's Degree in History and General Social Studies from Providence College. What is he doing trying to practice law?
OK what costs? Scanning/turning into an e-book?
I think distributions rights get really complicated across regions and countries. If someone owns the rights to digital distributions or all distributions of a work, Amazon's probably got to pay them a premium for their market. Just look at DVDs, I can't even by "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence" in the states. I would imagine selection would be vastly hobbled for several reasons across different countries. And let's not forget Germany's regulation of book prices "in an effort to protect authors, publishers, and small booksellers." There could be a lot of factors at work here--most of which are specific to a single country.