> The justification for Child Porn laws is that every photo is a record of an act of child abuse.
Wrong. In many, if not most, jurisdictions, images which depict erotic acts involving minors are illegal, even if they were produced without any child abuse whatsoever: cartoons, images of adults who look like children, computer generated images...
Leave it Baen Books to put some of my childhood back up on the web for free. Anyway, their DRM-free marketing strategy works for me, I've never bought any ebooks anywhere else!
I don't even think (correct me if I'm wrong) that even Bill Gates stole from his #2
There is the unconfirmed rumors that Gates and Ballmer might have been thinking about "stealing" Paul Allen's stock from his estate in the case that he died. See http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/02/2013246 .
> I posit that courts will produce the most fair and practicable rule for both parties.
You meant "for the party which has the most money". Most of us don't have (or wouldn't bother to spend) the mega-dollars (OK, maybe I exaggerate: kilo-dollars) it takes to go unaided to Federal court, even if it was a shoe-in that we would win. Especially if we are talking about personal fair use.
So, your point depends greatly upon whether you are talking about revenue-generating fair use or personal not-for-profit fair use. For the second, it's better to have something codified in law.
or worry about security so much because apps can just run natively in the cloud in a sandboxed instance?
Ah, but obviously the security of the OS and browser still remain important in the case of NaCl (NaCl only protects the OS and browser from the application, not the other way around).
Then suddenly that simple, secure OS that Google made becomes vastly more interesting.
Very interesting observation. Thanks for tying those two things together, I think you deserve +5 for that, but, of course, cannot mod you up.
Frankly, I even think that Google has enough money to develop a competing OS and eventually displace Microsoft from their position of control in the OS market, but I don't think that they're at all interested.
Ah, so when you don't talk on your cellular telephone, you always keep it further from your body than it is when you are using it for talking? I didn't assume that, since, in my experience, most people keep their phone close to their body all the time they have it with them (and actually, some people keep their phone further from their body when they use it to talk, via many modern phones having speakerphone capability built-in, for exactly the reason you have raised).
Oh, you were only thinking about the distance to one's head? I wasn't.
It's comments like this on a site supposedly frequented by those most educated in science and engineering that make me believe that a good portion of these frequenters are doomed to... give the rest of us a bad name.
Yes, great, you may have a point there (I think you overestimate the ability of most people to have a broad knowledge of various subjects --- the post might have been made by a genius computer games programmer who has zero knowledge outside his narrow field of expertise, for example), but really, couldn't you have also explained to the poor, ignorant AC, whoever he is, that the radiation generated by a cell phone on standby is much smaller than that generated by the same phone being used for communication, and that he could have understood this himself if he had just thought about the fact that cell phone batteries are rated by how long they can power the phone in both modes from a full charge, and all cell phones have much longer full-charge standby times than full-charge talking times?
This was the real reason Google bought Agnilux! </wild speculation>
Really, now! You didn't even jump on the chance to claim that Google was tipped off by the special data-mining results from the searches done from Apple IP addresses (that way, you're only missing a way to show how evil Microsoft is also and you could kill all three birds with one post!)
This whole idea starts to remind me of the part of Flight 714 where the villains are arguing who is more evil.
Reality check: I have no evidence whatsoever that Google was "evil" in this way (and personally think it more likely that they wouldn't do this). This is more a conceptual joke than anything else.
There was nothing natural about how Microsoft decided to end the life of Windows XP (in spite of large and continuing demand) just because it happened to suit their business plan (emphasis mine).
Last time I checked, business plans at Microsoft are designed to maximize profit for Microsoft. They might sometimes make mistakes (thus your impression that EOL for XP was "unnatural" --- your impression was that this wasn't a good business decision for MS, but no one can be certain because we cannot rerun history and compare), but that's still a form of economic pressure, even if, as you insightfully observe, it is indirect pressure.
> unlike closed-source products, which live entirely at the whim of their creator
I find it silly that you believe that there is no form of natural selection which drives the development/maintenance of closed-source products. In most cases, such selection forces exist and are largely economic in nature.
So, no, both open- and closed-source products are subject to natural selection, it's just that the selection forces on them are somewhat different.
Seems like interference will have to be computed anyhow to prevent the appearance of unwanted artifacts.
Since the light emitters are not coherent, I doubt that interference effects will be a problem, especially if the angular scanning is intentionally desynchronized for neighboring pixels (i.e., at a particular time t, the pixels in a small neighborhood emit light in as large a variety of angles as possible).
However it's accomplished, I'm looking forward to seeing something that produces results similar to a hologram
And on this note, I can enjoy heartily agreeing with you!
I guess I'll have to take your word for it, so accept my apologies if I was unintentionally too harsh on you.
> Creating light rays apparently emanating from a three dimensional object > with basically two dimensional apparatus is holography
Wikipedia disagrees with you (and so do I), but I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt so I embedded that "way out" for you in my comment.
> generating objects just to see images of them
So an array of microscopic light emitting devices which can emit different intensities of light in different directions is still holography in your opinion? E.g., an array of triplets of RGB LEDs mounted on micromechanical scanning devices (which can scan at speeds fast enough so that all the various angles are integrated by the eye)? Interesting. Most people, I believe, wouldn't classify that as holography.
Judging from these attacks and the two attempts to inject malware in Linux via infected submissions to a site distributing user-submitted Gnome themes, it looks to me like the commercial black hat community is already testing the water for the future when Windows isn't quite as easy to infect/zombie (or perhaps, for a future where most of the clueless are running locked-down non-general-purpose computing devices like the iPad).
I have a feeling that things may start to heat up for FOSS, to the extent that eventually (say in another 10-20 years) I'll have to move from thinking about Linux as being my secure system, to some new exotic OS like Haiku or Plan9 (and even then, there is the big problem that I'll also have to find exotic replacements for things like Firefox and Thunderbird).
Or have I just invented the next mutation of the "Year of the FOSS Desktop" meme?/facepalm
Hmm, let's try to put it into a computer software context. If the only optimization level your compiler had was "-Op" which did perfect optimization by doing a brute-force search over all possible sequences of machine code of a certain size (let's assume that the input data distribution is known), but using this compiler option then required several years of computer time to finish the compilation, this wouldn't be "good" (i.e., useful) in most scenarios, and no one would do any optimization at all.
In other words, attaining (or even trying to attain) perfection in a specific goodness metric almost always causes other goodness metrics to give very non-optimal results. Another example of this is the "over-fitting" problem in machine learning.
One of the reasons I use Linux is that, currently, it is much more secure than Windows, given my personal use scenario.
Yes, if I were a specialist in securing Windows that might not be the case, but I'm not. Yes, if equivalent amount of effort was invested to break the security of casual users of Linux compared to that invested in breaking Windows, again, Linux might not be any more secure than Windows (well, with Linux, there are distros where I can always boot off of USB and then not save any changes, so until Microsoft offers me the same functionality there's little chance that I could use it in as secure a fashion as I can use Linux).
Running Linux in a VM under Windows just wouldn't "cut it" for me. Sorry.
And remember, the only real way to make 3D images without the objects is to recreate the images in 3 dimensions using holography
You lack imagination. Any technology which produces an angular dispersion of light identical to that coming off of the actual objects would work, not just holography (or is that how you define holography?).
only someone else with equally deep pockets has the time and money to engineer something so clearly better that they can recoup the time investment by surpassing VP8
Slashdot Mirror
If you're going to repost FUD or trolling, you should label it as such.
> The justification for Child Porn laws is that every photo is a record of an act of child abuse.
Wrong. In many, if not most, jurisdictions, images which depict erotic acts involving minors are illegal, even if they were produced without any child abuse whatsoever: cartoons, images of adults who look like children, computer generated images...
See the following posts for a possible explanation of the "CP phenomenon": HungryHobo's, above and mine (from a previous story).
30% Informative
40% Flamebait
30% Insightful
I love Slashdot also, but for a different reason, perhaps. (Yes, I know, it has its warts, also.)
And you made me remember: Polywater Doodle!
Leave it Baen Books to put some of my childhood back up on the web for free. Anyway, their DRM-free marketing strategy works for me, I've never bought any ebooks anywhere else!
I don't even think (correct me if I'm wrong) that even Bill Gates stole from his #2
There is the unconfirmed rumors that Gates and Ballmer might have been thinking about "stealing" Paul Allen's stock from his estate in the case that he died. See http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/02/2013246 .
In the name of all mathematicians everywhere I answer you: "Yes".
> is what is left of Caldera
Remind me not to buy stock in a company calling itself SuperEruptor Systems...
> I posit that courts will produce the most fair and practicable rule for both parties.
You meant "for the party which has the most money". Most of us don't have (or wouldn't bother to spend) the mega-dollars (OK, maybe I exaggerate: kilo-dollars) it takes to go unaided to Federal court, even if it was a shoe-in that we would win. Especially if we are talking about personal fair use.
So, your point depends greatly upon whether you are talking about revenue-generating fair use or personal not-for-profit fair use. For the second, it's better to have something codified in law.
or worry about security so much because apps can just run natively in the cloud in a sandboxed instance?
Ah, but obviously the security of the OS and browser still remain important in the case of NaCl (NaCl only protects the OS and browser from the application, not the other way around).
Then suddenly that simple, secure OS that Google made becomes vastly more interesting.
Very interesting observation. Thanks for tying those two things together, I think you deserve +5 for that, but, of course, cannot mod you up.
Google has declared over $30 billion in tangible assets for 2009.
They even paid more than your $1.5 billion estimate in income taxes in 2009.
Frankly, I even think that Google has enough money to develop a competing OS and eventually displace Microsoft from their position of control in the OS market, but I don't think that they're at all interested.
> You fail it too.
Ah, so when you don't talk on your cellular telephone, you always keep it further from your body than it is when you are using it for talking? I didn't assume that, since, in my experience, most people keep their phone close to their body all the time they have it with them (and actually, some people keep their phone further from their body when they use it to talk, via many modern phones having speakerphone capability built-in, for exactly the reason you have raised).
Oh, you were only thinking about the distance to one's head? I wasn't.
It's comments like this on a site supposedly frequented by those most educated in science and engineering that make me believe that a good portion of these frequenters are doomed to ... give the rest of us a bad name.
Yes, great, you may have a point there (I think you overestimate the ability of most people to have a broad knowledge of various subjects --- the post might have been made by a genius computer games programmer who has zero knowledge outside his narrow field of expertise, for example), but really, couldn't you have also explained to the poor, ignorant AC, whoever he is, that the radiation generated by a cell phone on standby is much smaller than that generated by the same phone being used for communication, and that he could have understood this himself if he had just thought about the fact that cell phone batteries are rated by how long they can power the phone in both modes from a full charge, and all cell phones have much longer full-charge standby times than full-charge talking times?
What they are doing is not even questionable, it is completely legal.
Do you know much about German law?
Because in the USA it IS questionable and in some cities it is ILLEGAL.
How do people use public wireless, then? They have to enter all the information manually, as opposed to scanning and just picking out the right SSID?
Could you post some of the case law / legal statutes involved? Thanks!
No, no, Sony, I've used my homebrew to implement a content protection system which prevents my children from copying my musical masterb^Hpieces!
If you update the firmware, you might be breaking the DMCA! You have been warned!
(Welcome to "Illogic in the Courtroom", episode 28)...
This was the real reason Google bought Agnilux! </wild speculation>
Really, now! You didn't even jump on the chance to claim that Google was tipped off by the special data-mining results from the searches done from Apple IP addresses (that way, you're only missing a way to show how evil Microsoft is also and you could kill all three birds with one post!)
This whole idea starts to remind me of the part of Flight 714 where the villains are arguing who is more evil.
Reality check: I have no evidence whatsoever that Google was "evil" in this way (and personally think it more likely that they wouldn't do this). This is more a conceptual joke than anything else.
There was nothing natural about how Microsoft decided to end the life of Windows XP (in spite of large and continuing demand) just because it happened to suit their business plan (emphasis mine).
Last time I checked, business plans at Microsoft are designed to maximize profit for Microsoft. They might sometimes make mistakes (thus your impression that EOL for XP was "unnatural" --- your impression was that this wasn't a good business decision for MS, but no one can be certain because we cannot rerun history and compare), but that's still a form of economic pressure, even if, as you insightfully observe, it is indirect pressure.
> unlike closed-source products, which live entirely at the whim of their creator
I find it silly that you believe that there is no form of natural selection which drives the development/maintenance of closed-source products. In most cases, such selection forces exist and are largely economic in nature.
So, no, both open- and closed-source products are subject to natural selection, it's just that the selection forces on them are somewhat different.
Seems like interference will have to be computed anyhow to prevent the appearance of unwanted artifacts.
Since the light emitters are not coherent, I doubt that interference effects will be a problem, especially if the angular scanning is intentionally desynchronized for neighboring pixels (i.e., at a particular time t, the pixels in a small neighborhood emit light in as large a variety of angles as possible).
However it's accomplished, I'm looking forward to seeing something that produces results similar to a hologram
And on this note, I can enjoy heartily agreeing with you!
> You lack tact.
I guess I'll have to take your word for it, so accept my apologies if I was unintentionally too harsh on you.
> Creating light rays apparently emanating from a three dimensional object
> with basically two dimensional apparatus is holography
Wikipedia disagrees with you (and so do I), but I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt so I embedded that "way out" for you in my comment.
> generating objects just to see images of them
So an array of microscopic light emitting devices which can emit different intensities of light in different directions is still holography in your opinion? E.g., an array of triplets of RGB LEDs mounted on micromechanical scanning devices (which can scan at speeds fast enough so that all the various angles are integrated by the eye)? Interesting. Most people, I believe, wouldn't classify that as holography.
Judging from these attacks and the two attempts to inject malware in Linux via infected submissions to a site distributing user-submitted Gnome themes, it looks to me like the commercial black hat community is already testing the water for the future when Windows isn't quite as easy to infect/zombie (or perhaps, for a future where most of the clueless are running locked-down non-general-purpose computing devices like the iPad).
I have a feeling that things may start to heat up for FOSS, to the extent that eventually (say in another 10-20 years) I'll have to move from thinking about Linux as being my secure system, to some new exotic OS like Haiku or Plan9 (and even then, there is the big problem that I'll also have to find exotic replacements for things like Firefox and Thunderbird).
Or have I just invented the next mutation of the "Year of the FOSS Desktop" meme? /facepalm
Hmm, let's try to put it into a computer software context. If the only optimization level your compiler had was "-Op" which did perfect optimization by doing a brute-force search over all possible sequences of machine code of a certain size (let's assume that the input data distribution is known), but using this compiler option then required several years of computer time to finish the compilation, this wouldn't be "good" (i.e., useful) in most scenarios, and no one would do any optimization at all.
In other words, attaining (or even trying to attain) perfection in a specific goodness metric almost always causes other goodness metrics to give very non-optimal results. Another example of this is the "over-fitting" problem in machine learning.
what chance do mere mortals have?
Yes, what chance do mere mortals have of being in the particular use case this super-geek is in, using an engineering sample CPU?
Answer: 0. Well, not exactly 0 --- you never know exactly what you're buying nowadays!
One of the reasons I use Linux is that, currently, it is much more secure than Windows, given my personal use scenario.
Yes, if I were a specialist in securing Windows that might not be the case, but I'm not. Yes, if equivalent amount of effort was invested to break the security of casual users of Linux compared to that invested in breaking Windows, again, Linux might not be any more secure than Windows (well, with Linux, there are distros where I can always boot off of USB and then not save any changes, so until Microsoft offers me the same functionality there's little chance that I could use it in as secure a fashion as I can use Linux).
Running Linux in a VM under Windows just wouldn't "cut it" for me. Sorry.
And remember, the only real way to make 3D images without the objects is to recreate the images in 3 dimensions using holography
You lack imagination. Any technology which produces an angular dispersion of light identical to that coming off of the actual objects would work, not just holography (or is that how you define holography?).
only someone else with equally deep pockets has the time and money to engineer something so clearly better that they can recoup the time investment by surpassing VP8
Perfect is the enemy of good.