Solar power is no answer today. It is not cost-effective, although it is renewable.
NONE of the renewables are close to cost-effective. The best ones wouldn't kick in until oil triples in price. What's more, there is no present capacity for any of the renewables, either. Although people like to project what could happen if solar panels covered every home, they fail to consider it would require many thousandfold increases in solar panel production capacity which create their own production problems.
Nuclear energy, OTOH, has enough energy to power the US and Britain through 100 years at our current pace when considered alone, and can go head to head with oil and natural gas for cost effective power plants. It is a solution staring us in the face.
What's more, using it will buy us a lot more time to find cost-effective renewable strategies in the form of more efficient solar power and biodiesel.
Was it a democrat that wiretapped Dr Martin Luther King? How about the domestic spying in WWII and the internment camps? Pot Kettle Black. Now get your house in order then you can cry all you want. It is partisan rhetoric like yours that doesn't help matters.
Open debate about national policy is at the heart of a democracy. A country that only allows pro-national rhetoric is a fascist state. Surely you are suggesting you would rather live in one of those, eh?
I think you are missing a big point. IP generated business.
The federal government poured a lot of money into science and engineering R&D in the 50s and 60s, and there were a lot of patents generated as a result. This poured IP into US based businesses. And they used it to make money and jobs for people in the US.
In recent years, science and engineering R&D money from the government has waned in favor of biomedical R&D, and IP from medical discovery is on the rise.
At the same time, other nations have "caught on" to our little R&D approach. The fraction of papers in top scientific journal from US universities is decreasing, as are the fraction of patents from US inventors. IP is being spread more evenly.
The US has always had an IP advantage over much of the world, and any way you try to quantify this advantage it is decreasing. R&D money is one way to help. But it may be the case that we will never dominate invention the way the US did 40 years ago.
When I think traditional republican, I think personal privacy, constitutional protection, fiscal conservatism, and social conservatism. But Bush, who got all those always-vote-republican votes, has completely departed from those first three key traditional republican values!
Democrats are the party of personal privacy, and the ACLU is the strongest defender. Republicans attack personal privacy in favor of government rights with every chance they get.
Fiscal conservatism stopped being a Republican value when Reagan took office. Clinton has been the only fiscally responsible person in office in 30 years.
You've got Bush all wrong on constitutional protection though. In his interpretation of the constitution, he is the king of America. He gets to decide how he is going to interpret law and judicial findings. That then becomes his law. And Congress is too spineless to stand up to him. On selling American ports to Arab countries, on warrantless wiretapping of US citizens, the list goes on and on. Bush is just doing what he need to do to keep America secure, trust him, he can't give you or Congress the details because it would compromise American security, and besides the bad guys are listening, but Bush is doing the right thing.
If every bit of code was copyrightable, even a "Hello World" program would be a copyright infringement if it were copied out of a book and posted to the web. In this context, it is easy to see that not everything is eligible for copyright.
Every bit of originally created source code is copyrightable...although in many cases code is copied from a public, common, source, like "Hello World".
For infringement to take place, you need to demonstrate that copying took place, that is, that the accused copier had access to the original and used it. Even if the source code is nearly identical, it does not mean there was infringement. You need to establish the copier had access to, and used, the original to create his copy.
I'm not sure a repository is useful for copyright issues. Those are proving minor, anyhow. For patent issues it would be very powerful, but there is another problem. The USPTO doesn't check outside the application and patent database. That is, if something HAS prior art, but that prior art is not patented or included in the application, then the patent examiner will grant the patent anyway in ignorance. The burden then falls on the holder of the prior art to establish that it is prior art. Which means hiring lawyers, litigating a case, etc. It is a PITA. And this is one of the principal ways the system is borked. Patent examiners have no means by which they can access prior art that is not in the system.
I really like atomic clock sync-age. It lets my watch agree with my NTP time on my computer. But it has a battery...
Today, for $50-60 US, you can get an atomic clock sync'd watch which recharges with solar power. That will be my next watch, but probably after it cheapens a little....
To me, watches are mainly functional. Nothing keeps better time than my watch, but lots of things cost more...
Google claims to be fighting the good fight of protecting their users' data, but how different is the data that the government wants, from the data the Google itself uses to comprise the various lists of most popular searches, the 'popular topics' are in news.google.com, etc? I'm not sure that I'd like my search to be part of such a public display. Is Google's users' data being user improperly in that case, too?
You have a right to be secure in your person and possessions against unreasonable search by the government.
You do not have this same right against Google.
It is a very good thing to draw the line at stuff like this. The government SHOULD have to strongly justify its desire to have search data in general, and not search data that relates to any crime.
It is a dumb fishing expedition, and Google is calling them on it and using it to their PR advantage.
When you think about all the personal data that exists in the corporate world, you could easily conclude that we already live in a 1984-like state IF the government can access that data at its leisure.
The findings are bogus: they cite a 0.3% difference between more highly educated Alzheimer's patients and their counterparts. The counterargument is that plenty of people who wound normally go to grad school insead choose to work in industry. This small lifestyle difference for four years in a subject's late twenties should not effect tests given at age 65+. More likely is that some other factor is introduced by lifestyle differences between the two major career paths.
Well, it is already established that more educated people have a lower risk of Alzheimer's, and a later onset. This study, however, follows a few hundred already diagnosed patients for five years, and notes that the rate of cognitive decline is faster in the more educated patients. Probably they just didn't have enough coffee Be a little more interesting when the study itself is available instead of the press release.
In my brief stint in neurology (for psych) a glaring problem was the lack of transition between perceived, subjective, experience, and the empirical brain data. I can tell you what areas light up when you look at an apple (as opposed to a straight line), but as of yet know one (that I know of) has a plausable theory of how this translates into perception.
The Mind/Brain problem has been addressed most successfully by scientists studying spiking of neurons in the brain and not using imaging techniques. Neuronal spiking are direct measures of the communications between neurons.
In the 1960s, scientists in Vernon Mountcastle's lab demonstrated that firing of peripheral mechanoreceptors matched nearly perfectly with subjects perceptual intensity for different modes of touch on the fingerpads. SS Stevens, a psychologist, seized on these findings to ask the same question, and found that sound perceptual intensity and perceptual brightness of light similarly are encoded at the peripheral level, and somehow linearly preserved through the nervous system to the point at which subjects can report these perceptions.
Most people working on the Mind/Brain problem now take it for granted that perceptual attributes are derived exclusively from the spiking of neurons in parts of the neocortex, and not from BOLD signal. And in many cases in which scientists ask direct questions about perception by trying to relate spiking of neocortical neurons to perceptual outputs (like Bill Newsome and Ranulfo Romo and Greg DeAngelis), they get answers.
There is no free trade with China. We run a $700+ billion dollar a year deficit with China, which would normally cause a currency adjustment. However, China manipulates the yuan and buys US t-bills to stabilize it, which is really pushing our own economic stability to the limits. They are not playing fair.
"Free" trade is just like "free" anything else. It is fine as long as all parties get an equal footing. Free trade with China is letting them buy our country and supply us with debt, with the deck stacked in their favor through their currency tricks, They have not held up their end of "free" trade by being an economic partner on an equal footing.
Ultimately, this practice will end with a substantial inflationary period. However, neither Bush nor China want to push it to the limits, so anything deemed minor by Congress, like human rights in China, will be pushed to the back-burner. If we threaten them with something like this, and they alter their trading practices, we will get a massive dose of inflation quickly. And no one wants that.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
And like the sign in the garage that says 'we are not responsible for anything' it has no effect. The point of those disclaimers is that they discourage the ignorant from filing suit, not that they have legal effect. If you can proved that you suffered a loss as a result of negligence on the part of the garage then you can sue, the right to sue for negligence cannot be surrendered under contract law.
According to the DMCA, Craiglist would be a service provider providing transitory caching for the data clearly identified as originating from users.
The key difference here is that the former informs the user who is then free to make a decision about whether they want to trust a non-'Bluehat' binary, and the latter tells the consumeruser he isn't allowed to run a binary that's not from 'Bluehat'.
That's right, it makes it impossible for linux to be used at that level of security - the level at which you want a machine only to run binaries from a trusted source.
I can see many scenarios where that would be useful in combination with strong cryptography, and many ways in which commercial linux providers would want to offer that option to their clients. Suppose that Bluehat offers and extended really inexpensive maintenance contract that requires users only run their binaries. They are free to play with the source, re-compile and run on other machines without sensitive data, send patches to bluehat to run on the machines with sensitive data. But they cannot run their own compiled binary on the machine with sensitive data, because the machine owner wants protection for his data, and his insurance company requires additional liability protection.
GPLv3 would lock linux out of markets that desire that level of functionality. Stallman would say it is an issue of user freedom...
Alan doesn't really address the issue at ALL. He says he doesn't like DRM, that is all.
The issue here as I understand it is that under GPLV3, if you use DRM, you have to provide the keys. Which sorta ruins the whole thing. It says something like is cryptography is used to control function, then the source must be provided so that a recipient can recompile and have a functional binary ie: if function requires a digital key, the recipient must have the private key.
An example. The linux kernel team releases a kernel. Bluehat, the newest kernel distro, teams up with Mactel. Mactel provides a motherboard and CPU that will only run Bluehat signed binaries.
Under GPLV3, Bluehat needs to provide their private key with the kernel so that anyone can recompile an appropriately signed binary.
Yet the whole point of signing the binary is exclusively identifying it as coming from Bluehat.
So GPLV3 effectively prevents digital signatures from being used to determine if a binary may be from a source the user trusts!
Thomas Halwedra is a young'in with very little real world experience and any practical experience. They kid is in college and has a bunch of machines at home. I think he takes an extremely simplistic view of windows and unix security.
I think he should do some groundwork for his education. Let's sentence him to be the sys admin in a mixed linux/Mac/Windows environment. Several dozen of each type of machine. Let him admin all the machines for about a year, and then see what he thinks...
49% of your time fixing borked windows machines 49% of your time replacing toner and rebooting printers 1% of your time updating *nix machines 1% of your time helping people set up their new Macs.
If windows were reliable and secure, billions in earnings would be lost in the workplace.
There is nothing special about UNIX or linux that makes it immune from viruses.
However, in UNIX culture, there is something. The first rules of security. First, the default installation should not act as a server operating system. The system should not respond to ANY outside requests for anything unless enabled to by the system admin.
Second, no action on the system should be performed with any more than the minimum set of privileges necessary. Everything should be done with user privileges, not system privileges, unless absolutely necessary.
The use of these basic security rules applied more or less throughout the UNIX world, and for MAC OS X as well. Windows INTENTIONALLY ignores these rules in order to "maximize the user experience", and in doing so spawned a multi-billion dollar anti-virus industry.
Here's a thought - do your job, but do it REALLY well. Research all the prior art and don't apply for anything with a hint of prior art. Make the system that you hate, at least work as well as possible. And THEN if they try to make you apply for a patent with prior art, you can pull out your ethics stick.
That'll be tough. Anyone working in a field in which IP is actually used MUST be well-versed on patents. Some employers may make a conscious decision to walk blindly through the patent minefield to reduce liability, but that also increases chances of getting nailed.
The truly strong patent is the one in which the field is well researched, the ideas are novel and provide some new claims that other patents do not. And reading up on the available prior art is the best way to accomplish that...
BTW, it is fairly common to read up on prior art ONLY in the patent database. It is actually a PITA to cite prior art not in the patent database, because you need to have something official describing the prior art, which can be difficult to get in a way suitable to the patent office. In a very real way, the patent office makes it hard to cite non-patented prior art in patent applications.
Similarly, the patent officers do not even check outside your application for prior art that is not in the patent database.
Honestly, I don't have a problem with software patents provided they meet reasonable standards for invention. There's a lot of cool software inventions by "little guys" who are getting crushed by big companies.
However, I do have a problem with little guys who patent things in the toll-road model. Only there to collect tolls, have no inclination on actually producing a product. This is the Wright brothers model. They made tons of aviation inventions, and hardly any airplanes, just set up patent toll-roads that others eventually worked around.
This guy is a chump....RTFM...he has no measure related to hearing damage. He is upset because he claims he bought a "defective product".
European iPods are now limited to 100 dB SPL after similar realizations there.
130 dB SPL, for 3-4 hours, can cause damage that is measurable the next day. That is 10X higher in amplitude than 110 dB SPL, which is probably close to the iPod plus earbud level at full juice. But it is not unreasonable to think that chronic usage at full juice has potential to wreck your high frequency hearing.
But I'm pretty sure this guy has no case, he's probably fishing for a settlement from Apple or a class-action.
1) Ear buds are no "louder" than anything else on teh market, because earbuds aren't loud, period. Loudness is a measurement of the sound pressure levels at the eardrum. Ear bud may be nore effective in converting the signal from the device to sound waves, and so for the same driver levels produce a louder sound at the eardrum. But that sound level is TOTALLY UNDER TEH USER'S CONTROL!
My main point is that if you take the same speaker and a) embed it in foam, and suspend it in air outside the acoustic meatus, and b) but it in a bud and seal it in the ear canal then the first option will be about 10 times lower in sound amplitude than the second option, IF THE SPEAKERS ARE THE SAME.
Loudness is not a property of sound waves in any case, it is a property of a perceiving system, and I did not use it improperly.
The sound amplitude, or intensity, at the eardrum is MUCH larger at the eardrum for a sealed in the ear canal headphone than an external one.
And, if a manufacturer provides a standard audio range signal with a headphone with a 10 fold advantage in intensity, then they've increased the range of signal than can cause hearing damage by a factor of 10! Whether that is actually what happened, and whether that constitutes neglect, are issues of consequence.
These laws are made so that product makers are not able to produce products willy-nilly without consideration for their potential impact on society. Just as cigarette makers have a responsibility to inform the consumer of potential drawbacks to using their products (like it will kill 1 in 4 users by age 70), so do headphone makers have a responsibility to ensure that teenagers will not all be deaf when they hit 60.
And historically, neglect cases in which destruction of sensory inputs has occurred have resulted in REALLY large judgments. This one still hinges on a lot....do the earbuds use the same speakers, what is the precedent for earbuds headphones, what consumer awareness did Apple use (for example, do they make a reasonable attempt to inform earbud users that the sound level has been re-calibrated and they shouldn't always listen with the level on 11 with earbuds), etc.
I don't think it is likely to result in a judgment, but I can see circumstances where it would have merit. Hearing loss is associated with tinnitus in many, a form of slow torture.
What does speaker impedance have to do with efficiency (volume)? High-efficiency speakers can be designed for low or high impedances. The same is true of low-efficiency speakers.
The impedance changes will scale the power output delivered to the speaker input. Whereas it is possible that some of this power will not become sound, changes from speaker to speaker are pretty meager. At least, I've tested many cone speakers to calibrate their sound levels, they were all the same impedance, and within a couple decibels of identical in calibration. Change the impedance though, and the sound level changes dramatically. But also, cone speakers don't develop significant heat through use (which would be where transferred power that didn't become sound would go).
May not apply for different speaker technologies...
Except for that little volume control thingy on the iPod. The sound pressure level tht hits ones ears when using these devices is under 100% user control. Relative gain of the components is irrelevant.
Right now I drive a slow diesel car. If I trade it in for a sports car and wreck it, should I then sue the manufacturer because the gas pedal was so much more responsive?
Components in multi-component systems are designed to work together and provide a reasonable level of safety. Suppose you took your car in for a maintenance checkup, and they installed a nitrous booster that automatically activated when you floor it. And they don't tell you about it, and you crash the first time you floor it.
Ok, definitely overly dramatic, but I don't think it is that hard to see the liability there.
Now, consumer audio has used the same signal range for decades. The headphones designed to work with that signal range may have some liability NOT to create sound amplitudes that will cause hearing damage. I think that is the point being explored by the lawsuit, and honestly, I think it is valid. I mean, the guys designed the ear buds KNOW they are louder. And everyone knows overexposure to loud noise causes hearing damage, and that the targetted market is particularly susceptible.
The volume coming out of headphones is determined by the speaker impedance, not its size. In any case, all headphones are designed to work with the same range of signal, so if your headphones can't get loud enough, you know to blame the headphone designer....or maybe he is afraid of getting sued?
Earbuds can boost the signal by 20 dB. Lots of listening to loud music will cause, mostly, long-term damage, although it appears exposure when you are young causes more damage than the same exposure when you are old (kinda like smoking and cancer - risk of cancer is much greater for people smoking in their teens). You preferentially lose high frequency hair cells first because they are higher metabolism and get blown out more easily.
Now, obviously, the earbud designers should have known that 1) loud music can cause hearing damage 2) their headphones would offer a 20 dB boost
And so they should have made them higher impedance so that the noise was 20 dB softer when you use an in-ear headphone compared to a over ear headphone. Probably they didn't, and probably there is some liability there.
Luckily, I am not a teen anymore, and have little hearing threshold damage, so I crank it!
Autistics unquestionably have abnormal timing in signals coming from different brain areas. The over-produce myelin, which makes neural connections higher speed, but probably also removes the synchronizing influences that are apresent in most people. As a result, the autistic cannot integrate different brain areas well, most notably the sensory inputs are not wired properly to cause appropriate emotional responses. The emotions appear detached from the environment of the autistic child.
The savant abilities can be explained by an autistic child trying to use LOCAL circuitry to solve problems that the normal child would use widely distributed circuitry to solve. Maybe you can fold proteins in your head, but you can't smile at your mother when she walks in the room.
I dunno bout that. The fMRI gives you BOLD signal at sub-mm resolution over the entire brain.
The near IR gives you one measure of brain activation.
Somehow I think the fMRI would be more powerful.
But I wonder why facial analysis is not used instead. First of all, it can be done with much less expensive equipment. Paul Ekman has conducted studies documenting how powerful this analysis is. Here is a link
Basically, he looks at subjects facial muscles. Lying causes uncontrollable actions in some of the muscles. Ekman runs a company that consults for the FBI, CIA, and other law enforcement agencies, and that trains them to detect liars. How good is he?
Well, a co-worker went in for one of his studies. It was simple. You are given a large group of topics. You pick 4. You are instructed to tell lies about two, and the truth about two. And, you are told to try to fool Ekman about which is which.
I don't think a single person fooled Ekman, not even once.
fMRI is neat and cool right now, giving sub-mm spatial resolution and 1-2 second temporal resolution, but there are simpler solutions that cost much much less money.
Slashdot Mirror
Solar power is no answer today. It is not cost-effective, although it is renewable.
NONE of the renewables are close to cost-effective. The best ones wouldn't kick in until oil triples in price. What's more, there is no present capacity for any of the renewables, either. Although people like to project what could happen if solar panels covered every home, they fail to consider it would require many thousandfold increases in solar panel production capacity which create their own production problems.
Nuclear energy, OTOH, has enough energy to power the US and Britain through 100 years at our current pace when considered alone, and can go head to head with oil and natural gas for cost effective power plants. It is a solution staring us in the face.
What's more, using it will buy us a lot more time to find cost-effective renewable strategies in the form of more efficient solar power and biodiesel.
Was it a democrat that wiretapped Dr Martin Luther King? How about the domestic spying in WWII and the internment camps? Pot Kettle Black. Now get your house in order then you can cry all you want. It is partisan rhetoric like yours that doesn't help matters.
Open debate about national policy is at the heart of a democracy. A country that only allows pro-national rhetoric is a fascist state. Surely you are suggesting you would rather live in one of those, eh?
I think you are missing a big point. IP generated business.
The federal government poured a lot of money into science and engineering R&D in the 50s and 60s, and there were a lot of patents generated as a result. This poured IP into US based businesses. And they used it to make money and jobs for people in the US.
In recent years, science and engineering R&D money from the government has waned in favor of biomedical R&D, and IP from medical discovery is on the rise.
At the same time, other nations have "caught on" to our little R&D approach. The fraction of papers in top scientific journal from US universities is decreasing, as are the fraction of patents from US inventors. IP is being spread more evenly.
The US has always had an IP advantage over much of the world, and any way you try to quantify this advantage it is decreasing. R&D money is one way to help. But it may be the case that we will never dominate invention the way the US did 40 years ago.
When I think traditional republican, I think personal privacy, constitutional protection, fiscal conservatism, and social conservatism. But Bush, who got all those always-vote-republican votes, has completely departed from those first three key traditional republican values!
Democrats are the party of personal privacy, and the ACLU is the strongest defender. Republicans attack personal privacy in favor of government rights with every chance they get.
Fiscal conservatism stopped being a Republican value when Reagan took office. Clinton has been the only fiscally responsible person in office in 30 years.
You've got Bush all wrong on constitutional protection though. In his interpretation of the constitution, he is the king of America. He gets to decide how he is going to interpret law and judicial findings. That then becomes his law. And Congress is too spineless to stand up to him. On selling American ports to Arab countries, on warrantless wiretapping of US citizens, the list goes on and on. Bush is just doing what he need to do to keep America secure, trust him, he can't give you or Congress the details because it would compromise American security, and besides the bad guys are listening, but Bush is doing the right thing.
If every bit of code was copyrightable, even a "Hello World" program would be a copyright infringement if it were copied out of a book and posted to the web. In this context, it is easy to see that not everything is eligible for copyright.
Every bit of originally created source code is copyrightable...although in many cases code is copied from a public, common, source, like "Hello World".
For infringement to take place, you need to demonstrate that copying took place, that is, that the accused copier had access to the original and used it. Even if the source code is nearly identical, it does not mean there was infringement. You need to establish the copier had access to, and used, the original to create his copy.
I'm not sure a repository is useful for copyright issues. Those are proving minor, anyhow. For patent issues it would be very powerful, but there is another problem. The USPTO doesn't check outside the application and patent database. That is, if something HAS prior art, but that prior art is not patented or included in the application, then the patent examiner will grant the patent anyway in ignorance. The burden then falls on the holder of the prior art to establish that it is prior art. Which means hiring lawyers, litigating a case, etc. It is a PITA. And this is one of the principal ways the system is borked. Patent examiners have no means by which they can access prior art that is not in the system.
I really like atomic clock sync-age. It lets my watch agree with my NTP time on my computer. But it has a battery...
Today, for $50-60 US, you can get an atomic clock sync'd watch which recharges with solar power. That will be my next watch, but probably after it cheapens a little....
To me, watches are mainly functional. Nothing keeps better time than my watch, but lots of things cost more...
For heavens sake, why is everyone so arrogant to think that our species is capable of uprooting the climate cycle of a planet?
I know, the idea that there is substantial warming in the northern hemisphere seems strange too....
Espcially when you look at this photo
I mean, where could all that heat production be coming from?
Google claims to be fighting the good fight of protecting their users' data, but how different is the data that the government wants, from the data the Google itself uses to comprise the various lists of most popular searches, the 'popular topics' are in news.google.com, etc? I'm not sure that I'd like my search to be part of such a public display. Is Google's users' data being user improperly in that case, too?
You have a right to be secure in your person and possessions against unreasonable search by the government.
You do not have this same right against Google.
It is a very good thing to draw the line at stuff like this. The government SHOULD have to strongly justify its desire to have search data in general, and not search data that relates to any crime.
It is a dumb fishing expedition, and Google is calling them on it and using it to their PR advantage.
When you think about all the personal data that exists in the corporate world, you could easily conclude that we already live in a 1984-like state IF the government can access that data at its leisure.
The findings are bogus: they cite a 0.3% difference between more highly educated Alzheimer's patients and their counterparts. The counterargument is that plenty of people who wound normally go to grad school insead choose to work in industry. This small lifestyle difference for four years in a subject's late twenties should not effect tests given at age 65+. More likely is that some other factor is introduced by lifestyle differences between the two major career paths.
Well, it is already established that more educated people have a lower risk of Alzheimer's, and a later onset. This study, however, follows a few hundred already diagnosed patients for five years, and notes that the rate of cognitive decline is faster in the more educated patients. Probably they just didn't have enough coffee Be a little more interesting when the study itself is available instead of the press release.
In my brief stint in neurology (for psych) a glaring problem was the lack of transition between perceived, subjective, experience, and the empirical brain data. I can tell you what areas light up when you look at an apple (as opposed to a straight line), but as of yet know one (that I know of) has a plausable theory of how this translates into perception.
The Mind/Brain problem has been addressed most successfully by scientists studying spiking of neurons in the brain and not using imaging techniques. Neuronal spiking are direct measures of the communications between neurons.
In the 1960s, scientists in Vernon Mountcastle's lab demonstrated that firing of peripheral mechanoreceptors matched nearly perfectly with subjects perceptual intensity for different modes of touch on the fingerpads. SS Stevens, a psychologist, seized on these findings to ask the same question, and found that sound perceptual intensity and perceptual brightness of light similarly are encoded at the peripheral level, and somehow linearly preserved through the nervous system to the point at which subjects can report these perceptions.
Most people working on the Mind/Brain problem now take it for granted that perceptual attributes are derived exclusively from the spiking of neurons in parts of the neocortex, and not from BOLD signal. And in many cases in which scientists ask direct questions about perception by trying to relate spiking of neocortical neurons to perceptual outputs (like Bill Newsome and Ranulfo Romo and Greg DeAngelis), they get answers.
There is no free trade with China. We run a $700+ billion dollar a year deficit with China, which would normally cause a currency adjustment. However, China manipulates the yuan and buys US t-bills to stabilize it, which is really pushing our own economic stability to the limits. They are not playing fair.
"Free" trade is just like "free" anything else. It is fine as long as all parties get an equal footing. Free trade with China is letting them buy our country and supply us with debt, with the deck stacked in their favor through their currency tricks, They have not held up their end of "free" trade by being an economic partner on an equal footing.
Ultimately, this practice will end with a substantial inflationary period. However, neither Bush nor China want to push it to the limits, so anything deemed minor by Congress, like human rights in China, will be pushed to the back-burner. If we threaten them with something like this, and they alter their trading practices, we will get a massive dose of inflation quickly. And no one wants that.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
And like the sign in the garage that says 'we are not responsible for anything' it has no effect. The point of those disclaimers is that they discourage the ignorant from filing suit, not that they have legal effect. If you can proved that you suffered a loss as a result of negligence on the part of the garage then you can sue, the right to sue for negligence cannot be surrendered under contract law.
According to the DMCA, Craiglist would be a service provider providing transitory caching for the data clearly identified as originating from users.
As such, they bear no liability for its content.
DMCA section 512A.
Case closed.
The key difference here is that the former informs the user who is then free to make a decision about whether they want to trust a non-'Bluehat' binary, and the latter tells the consumeruser he isn't allowed to run a binary that's not from 'Bluehat'.
That's right, it makes it impossible for linux to be used at that level of security - the level at which you want a machine only to run binaries from a trusted source.
I can see many scenarios where that would be useful in combination with strong cryptography, and many ways in which commercial linux providers would want to offer that option to their clients. Suppose that Bluehat offers and extended really inexpensive maintenance contract that requires users only run their binaries. They are free to play with the source, re-compile and run on other machines without sensitive data, send patches to bluehat to run on the machines with sensitive data. But they cannot run their own compiled binary on the machine with sensitive data, because the machine owner wants protection for his data, and his insurance company requires additional liability protection.
GPLv3 would lock linux out of markets that desire that level of functionality. Stallman would say it is an issue of user freedom...
Alan doesn't really address the issue at ALL. He says he doesn't like DRM, that is all.
The issue here as I understand it is that under GPLV3, if you use DRM, you have to provide the keys. Which sorta ruins the whole thing. It says something like is cryptography is used to control function, then the source must be provided so that a recipient can recompile and have a functional binary ie: if function requires a digital key, the recipient must have the private key.
An example. The linux kernel team releases a kernel. Bluehat, the newest kernel distro, teams up with Mactel. Mactel provides a motherboard and CPU that will only run Bluehat signed binaries.
Under GPLV3, Bluehat needs to provide their private key with the kernel so that anyone can recompile an appropriately signed binary.
Yet the whole point of signing the binary is exclusively identifying it as coming from Bluehat.
So GPLV3 effectively prevents digital signatures from being used to determine if a binary may be from a source the user trusts!
Thomas Halwedra is a young'in with very little real world experience and any practical experience. They kid is in college and has a bunch of machines at home. I think he takes an extremely simplistic view of windows and unix security.
I think he should do some groundwork for his education. Let's sentence him to be the sys admin in a mixed linux/Mac/Windows environment. Several dozen of each type of machine. Let him admin all the machines for about a year, and then see what he thinks...
49% of your time fixing borked windows machines
49% of your time replacing toner and rebooting printers
1% of your time updating *nix machines
1% of your time helping people set up their new Macs.
If windows were reliable and secure, billions in earnings would be lost in the workplace.
There is nothing special about UNIX or linux that makes it immune from viruses.
However, in UNIX culture, there is something. The first rules of security.
First, the default installation should not act as a server operating system. The system should not respond to ANY outside requests for anything unless enabled to by the system admin.
Second, no action on the system should be performed with any more than the minimum set of privileges necessary. Everything should be done with user privileges, not system privileges, unless absolutely necessary.
The use of these basic security rules applied more or less throughout the UNIX world, and for MAC OS X as well. Windows INTENTIONALLY ignores these rules in order to "maximize the user experience", and in doing so spawned a multi-billion dollar anti-virus industry.
Here's a thought - do your job, but do it REALLY well. Research all the prior art and don't apply for anything with a hint of prior art. Make the system that you hate, at least work as well as possible. And THEN if they try to make you apply for a patent with prior art, you can pull out your ethics stick.
That'll be tough. Anyone working in a field in which IP is actually used MUST be well-versed on patents. Some employers may make a conscious decision to walk blindly through the patent minefield to reduce liability, but that also increases chances of getting nailed.
The truly strong patent is the one in which the field is well researched, the ideas are novel and provide some new claims that other patents do not. And reading up on the available prior art is the best way to accomplish that...
BTW, it is fairly common to read up on prior art ONLY in the patent database. It is actually a PITA to cite prior art not in the patent database, because you need to have something official describing the prior art, which can be difficult to get in a way suitable to the patent office. In a very real way, the patent office makes it hard to cite non-patented prior art in patent applications.
Similarly, the patent officers do not even check outside your application for prior art that is not in the patent database.
Honestly, I don't have a problem with software patents provided they meet reasonable standards for invention. There's a lot of cool software inventions by "little guys" who are getting crushed by big companies.
However, I do have a problem with little guys who patent things in the toll-road model. Only there to collect tolls, have no inclination on actually producing a product. This is the Wright brothers model. They made tons of aviation inventions, and hardly any airplanes, just set up patent toll-roads that others eventually worked around.
This guy is a chump....RTFM...he has no measure related to hearing damage. He is upset because he claims he bought a "defective product".
European iPods are now limited to 100 dB SPL after similar realizations there.
130 dB SPL, for 3-4 hours, can cause damage that is measurable the next day. That is 10X higher in amplitude than 110 dB SPL, which is probably close to the iPod plus earbud level at full juice. But it is not unreasonable to think that chronic usage at full juice has potential to wreck your high frequency hearing.
But I'm pretty sure this guy has no case, he's probably fishing for a settlement from Apple or a class-action.
1) Ear buds are no "louder" than anything else on teh market, because earbuds aren't loud, period. Loudness is a measurement of the sound pressure levels at the eardrum. Ear bud may be nore effective in converting the signal from the device to sound waves, and so for the same driver levels produce a louder sound at the eardrum. But that sound level is TOTALLY UNDER TEH USER'S CONTROL!
My main point is that if you take the same speaker and
a) embed it in foam, and suspend it in air outside the acoustic meatus, and
b) but it in a bud and seal it in the ear canal
then the first option will be about 10 times lower in sound amplitude than
the second option, IF THE SPEAKERS ARE THE SAME.
Loudness is not a property of sound waves in any case, it is a property of a perceiving system, and I did not use it improperly.
The sound amplitude, or intensity, at the eardrum is MUCH larger at the eardrum for a sealed in the ear canal headphone than an external one.
And, if a manufacturer provides a standard audio range signal with a headphone with a 10 fold advantage in intensity, then they've increased the range of signal than can cause hearing damage by a factor of 10! Whether that is actually what happened, and whether that constitutes neglect, are issues of consequence.
These laws are made so that product makers are not able to produce products willy-nilly without consideration for their potential impact on society. Just as cigarette makers have a responsibility to inform the consumer of potential drawbacks to using their products (like it will kill 1 in 4 users by age 70), so do headphone makers have a responsibility to ensure that teenagers will not all be deaf when they hit 60.
And historically, neglect cases in which destruction of sensory inputs has occurred have resulted in REALLY large judgments. This one still hinges on a lot....do the earbuds use the same speakers, what is the precedent for earbuds headphones, what consumer awareness did Apple use (for example, do they make a reasonable attempt to inform earbud users that the sound level has been re-calibrated and they shouldn't always listen with the level on 11 with earbuds), etc.
I don't think it is likely to result in a judgment, but I can see circumstances where it would have merit. Hearing loss is associated with tinnitus in many, a form of slow torture.
What does speaker impedance have to do with efficiency (volume)? High-efficiency speakers can be designed for low or high impedances. The same is true of low-efficiency speakers.
The impedance changes will scale the power output delivered to the speaker input. Whereas it is possible that some of this power will not become sound, changes from speaker to speaker are pretty meager. At least, I've tested many cone speakers to calibrate their sound levels, they were all the same impedance, and within a couple decibels of identical in calibration. Change the impedance though, and the sound level changes dramatically. But also, cone speakers don't develop significant heat through use (which would be where transferred power that didn't become sound would go).
May not apply for different speaker technologies...
Except for that little volume control thingy on the iPod. The sound pressure level tht hits ones ears when using these devices is under 100% user control. Relative gain of the components is irrelevant.
Right now I drive a slow diesel car. If I trade it in for a sports car and wreck it, should I then sue the manufacturer because the gas pedal was so much more responsive?
Components in multi-component systems are designed to work together and provide a reasonable level of safety. Suppose you took your car in for a maintenance checkup, and they installed a nitrous booster that automatically activated when you floor it. And they don't tell you about it, and you crash the first time you floor it.
Ok, definitely overly dramatic, but I don't think it is that hard to see the liability there.
Now, consumer audio has used the same signal range for decades. The headphones designed to work with that signal range may have some liability NOT to create sound amplitudes that will cause hearing damage. I think that is the point being explored by the lawsuit, and honestly, I think it is valid. I mean, the guys designed the ear buds KNOW they are louder. And everyone knows overexposure to loud noise causes hearing damage, and that the targetted market is particularly susceptible.
The volume coming out of headphones is determined by the speaker impedance, not its size. In any case, all headphones are designed to work with the same range of signal, so if your headphones can't get loud enough, you know to blame the headphone designer....or maybe he is afraid of getting sued?
Earbuds can boost the signal by 20 dB. Lots of listening to loud music will cause, mostly, long-term damage, although it appears exposure when you are young causes more damage than the same exposure when you are old (kinda like smoking and cancer - risk of cancer is much greater for people smoking in their teens). You preferentially lose high frequency hair cells first because they are higher metabolism and get blown out more easily.
Now, obviously, the earbud designers should have known that
1) loud music can cause hearing damage
2) their headphones would offer a 20 dB boost
And so they should have made them higher impedance so that the noise was 20 dB softer when you use an in-ear headphone compared to a over ear headphone. Probably they didn't, and probably there is some liability there.
Luckily, I am not a teen anymore, and have little hearing threshold damage, so I crank it!
Mr Gallagher, you are the only liberal in this year's first year law school class. And that is NOT a good thing.
-Law School Professor at Notre Dame Law about 16 years ago.
Autistics unquestionably have abnormal timing in signals coming from different brain areas. The over-produce myelin,
which makes neural connections higher speed, but probably also removes the synchronizing influences that are apresent
in most people. As a result, the autistic cannot integrate different brain areas well, most notably the sensory inputs
are not wired properly to cause appropriate emotional responses. The emotions appear detached from the environment
of the autistic child.
The savant abilities can be explained by an autistic child trying to use LOCAL circuitry to solve problems that the normal
child would use widely distributed circuitry to solve. Maybe you can fold proteins in your head, but you can't smile at
your mother when she walks in the room.
I dunno bout that. The fMRI gives you BOLD signal at sub-mm resolution over the entire brain. The near IR gives you one measure of brain activation. Somehow I think the fMRI would be more powerful. But I wonder why facial analysis is not used instead. First of all, it can be done with much less expensive equipment. Paul Ekman has conducted studies documenting how powerful this analysis is. Here is a link Basically, he looks at subjects facial muscles. Lying causes uncontrollable actions in some of the muscles. Ekman runs a company that consults for the FBI, CIA, and other law enforcement agencies, and that trains them to detect liars. How good is he? Well, a co-worker went in for one of his studies. It was simple. You are given a large group of topics. You pick 4. You are instructed to tell lies about two, and the truth about two. And, you are told to try to fool Ekman about which is which. I don't think a single person fooled Ekman, not even once.
fMRI is neat and cool right now, giving sub-mm spatial resolution and 1-2 second temporal resolution, but there are simpler solutions that cost much much less money.