Clinton is talking about other countries with a bad record on human and political rights. Obama is talking about America, which has good record on human and political rights (*1) and as such can be trusted not to abuse the powers it gives itself while the bad countries must be told off for doing exactly what America is doing.
All said with tongue in cheek.
But seriously, I do think it comes down to how Americans see themselves verses how they see almost everyone else, Americans are the good guys and as such whatever they do is for the greater good.
My understanding was that they had searched for patents which might be applicable within the group before hand, the public request for patents was widen the net in the hope for someone they don't currently have business relationship would be able to help them. That suggests they have already failed to find a patent to fight Google with.
it seems to provide only a half measure of encryption, in that one can easily identify the source.
Phone companies are already required to keep logs of who you are communicating, but not the content of the message, so from a government intrusion point of view, it's keeping the bit they don't have secret without some effort on the governments part.
I suppose if you were texting a mistress and didn't want your wife to know about her existance as well as not knowing about the contents of the messages it might be an issue.
The problem with the gmail approach is that your real address is still part of the address, it's not hard for spammers to take that address and strip +whatever off the username section of the email address.
Even worse, although + is a legal character in email address, a hell of a lot of sites and services don't accept it. For example, I don't think facebook allows email addresses with a + character in the name section.
Googles multiple email address into a single account approach is more of a tracking system than an antispam system, i.e. you could create an email such as myemail+dodgycarinsurancequote@gmail.com, if you get spam to that account and Dodgy Car Insurance Company was the only one you gave that address to, you know the source of email leak and can avoid using them again, but your email has already passed on to the spammer.
I think Paper Maps tend to be better at given a big picture than a GPS. You cant but help see the direction and class of roads, where the towns are etc.
A GPS because of its small screen tends to present a lot of information at small scales but presents relatively little information at medium to large scales. The information is there, but you have to scroll around to find it.
When it comes to reviewing information on a GPS, I think the phrase "can't see the wood for the trees" has a lot of relevance.
Something about growing meat in a lab doesn't sound cheap.
The problem with killing an animal for meat is that a hell of a lot of resources go into growing bits you can't eat just to get a single harvest, although those bits are not without their uses; and requires a lot of land to raise them, even more so if you are looking for ethical farming methods because you have to consider psychological wellbeing rather than just physical wellbeing.
Growing meat in a factory rather than in a field means you can provide just the nutrients needed to grow the bits you actually want to eat, don't require much space and even that space which is needed (however big the VATs and supporting machinery is) can be used more efficently because you can stack the machines into a multistorey building making for a tiny footprint of land use.
It's been 60 years since the first powerful television transmissions, since then wireless communication has become far more widespread but is being reduced in transmission power and used in a more directional manner because by using a lot of short range transmitters rather than a few long range transmitters you get to reuse the frequency in another area without interference with Fibre Optic connection provide the vast majority of the bandwidth and would be completely hidden.
Any Alien civilisation will have the same problem with regard to limited wireless bandwidth and is likely to take a similar approach to delivering information.
Based on a sample of 1 (Earth), it would seem that looking at planets RF emmissions, you would see nothing until a civilisation first developes RF technology, A huge burst of RF noise, then the noise slowly dieing away over however long it takes that civilisation to develop better technologyuntil it's too weak to detect, and for us to detect this very short period of time in an alien civilisation, they would have had to develop this technology within the last 50 years that we have had the capability to hear them + the transmission time from their planet.
Days and years, by which I assume you mean the number of hours in a day, and the number of days in a year, wouldn't be a good place to start building a language because it's specific to our planet.
Hours are an arbitary unit of time, based on geometry and astronomy, therefore 24 would mean nothing to an alien species without them already knowing some specific information about our planet such as how long a day is (in their time reference system) and that we have divided a circle into 360 parts etc. Similarly, the number of days in a year, they would already need to know a fair bit about our planet to realise what 365 means.
Sending the number of days might be useful a bit later on for identifying our planet within the solar system, assuming aliens with similar technology to us, i.e. able to recieve an intentionally sent message from a star, and detect in certain circumstances whether a star has a planet and the basic orbital mechnics of those planets (see Note 1). If they can detect our planet, know it's orbital period and it's rate of spin, then 365 would be clearly point to our planet since it's the only one in our solar system with that number of days in the year.
Note 1: With our current technology, we couldn't detect Earth sized planets around our nearest stars, it's too small, but it's hoped the next generation stuff could detect an Extrasolar Earth
It's fine and dandy on paper, but in practice you have to deal with it.
It's not a huge problem over a short period of time, they aren't planning on using the compressed gas to store energy for days or weeks like in an electric car.
The only reason for this system is to allow regenerative braking without the need for expensive batteries, that means the gas only needs to be compressed for minutes before it's release again.
Identifiable tracking and displaying adverts on a web page are different things, I have no problem with ads being displayed on a website so long as they aren't popups/unders, I don't even mind too much the idea of any one site keeping a record of what interests me within the site. For example, I don't have a problem with Slashdot knowing I tend to read stories which have been tagged YRO, Politics and to a lesser degree Gaming and using that information to tailor adverts from the ad networks.
It's the tracking database where they know every click I've made since I started getting ads from any particular advertising network, across every site I've ever visited, consciously or by accident or by malicious redirect that I have a problem with and knowing that that information is never going to go away... ever. Personally, if I knew that the data would be gone after a few years, I would have a lot less problem with the idea of tracking.
Even then, it doesn't stop the audience just remembering what they saw and typing it up later. If they feel the storyline needs to be a surprise at the time of broadcast, then they need to make everyone in the audience sign an NDA (easy) and have a reasonable expection that no one will break the NDA (nowhere near as easy)
Computers do have lightning fast reflexes. And when in a train, it will always been the computer in charge because the whole point is to reduce the gap between vehicles to below that of what human reflexes are capable of so that the vehicles can take advantage of slipstreams.
I see it a bit differently, I see PC's becoming smaller, maybe losing the keyboard, mouse and display and acting more like small home servers (maybe something like Sheevaplus), left on permantently to act as download managers and act as file servers, perhaps used for home automation.
Media PCs/Games Consoles interact with the home servers to provide living room entertainment, and the user interface too all of this will be something Tablet like, prehaps with bluetooth keyboard and mouse for more serious data entry but still using the tablet as the display/input computer.
Obviously, the PC could disappear completely with the Media PC/Games Console taking over the server role and being left on permantently for downloading stuff.
Having said that, I don't see all that happening in the next 5 years.
I, like most geeks use Adblock to get rid of stuff I don't like about the Internet; not ads for the most part, mainly tracking/popup scripts and such like.
I wonder if there is a market for creating subscription lists of a more political nature, for example, blocking any newspaper site which has sold it's rights to Righthaven. Of course it wouldn't get much in the way subscribers since most people don't know/care about the issue?
That is one possible solution, for example, most people in the developed world no longer work 7 days a week. We could try reducing the working week by another day, and later another day after that. But eventually we will run out of days to cut out of the average working week.
In the end, either the basic social structure for getting paid needs to change, or we need to reach a point where past which robots can not go, either because of technological limits or through artificial restraints created by society which says we can not afford more people out of work (which I'm not hopeful of since we are living in a globalised world and someone somewhere will break the rules and gain a benefit).
Note, above I mention a change to how we are paid, some posters above seem to think that means the government printing money to give to those out of work, I don't think that is needed and indeed couldn't work in the long term. I think it could be accomplished by taxing the companies using machines to produce stuff at a much higher rate and redistributing that money to make up for the loss of the money which is no longer being cycled through the economy via service providers paying wages which in turn is used to buy services. It has to be done like that or you will end up with huge wealth concentration which is deterimental to society, where the poor will always be poor and the rich will be so super rich as to untouchable economically, at that point society breaks down and you will get a violent uprising (which will probably fail because all the resources are in the hands of the super-rich).
A Socialist system might also be required as mentioned above, where the government provides certains requirements for free at the point of use, it would be ironic that the ultimate output of a capitalist government system is the requirement of a socialist government system to look after the population.
Part of that is interaction with Humans, at a basic level, middle management is about getting information from employees whether it is in the form of face-2-face communication (including facial-expressions and body language) & natural language written reports, understanding and analysing the information, then assigning tasks back out to the employees.
All the while machines can't do that 'good enough' to replace human middle management or while tasks in the company are still completed by people, middle management will need to be human.
I think there it's basically a race, between getting a machine which can replace the average office worker (and having management essentially interact with his computerised staff via a keyboard) and having a machine which can understand human communication without any need for specialised training and human staff reporting to a computerised manager... I'm not sure which is worse.
Once businesses realize that they don't have to spend all that money just to rent office space so they can stuff their employees into cubicle farms, well then...
business have been able to do that for a decade already, with decreasing costs as time has progressed. It's not a cost issue, it's a management issue, they simply don't trust that staff will work if the management aren't keeping a constant eye on the grunts.
Obviously this doesn't apply to all employers, but enough to have stopped its uptake.
if it's "buried and alive", doesn't that suggest it was "buried alive" in the first place, unless of course it resuscitated itself after it was buried dead...
If they are all using a similar phrase to decide whether or not to go ahead with legally dubious actions, that suggests they are getting the information from the same source rather than lots of morally questionable people all coming to the same decision independantly.
After the fuss we have kicked up over Gary Mckinnon? Who unlike Assange has clearly broken existing US Law.
Besides, our laws forbid extradition of anyone who is wanted for a political crime or who faces the a threat to their life, which I think you could easily argue applies to Assange.
Interestingly, those laws are our implementation of EU Human Rights legislation, which Sweden is also a member of, so I'm not sure how Sweden could extradite under the same conditions.
Slashdot Mirror
Clinton is talking about other countries with a bad record on human and political rights. Obama is talking about America, which has good record on human and political rights (*1) and as such can be trusted not to abuse the powers it gives itself while the bad countries must be told off for doing exactly what America is doing.
All said with tongue in cheek.
But seriously, I do think it comes down to how Americans see themselves verses how they see almost everyone else, Americans are the good guys and as such whatever they do is for the greater good.
Technically he's suggesting bypassing the big publishing and distribution companies.
My understanding was that they had searched for patents which might be applicable within the group before hand, the public request for patents was widen the net in the hope for someone they don't currently have business relationship would be able to help them. That suggests they have already failed to find a patent to fight Google with.
Phone companies are already required to keep logs of who you are communicating, but not the content of the message, so from a government intrusion point of view, it's keeping the bit they don't have secret without some effort on the governments part. I suppose if you were texting a mistress and didn't want your wife to know about her existance as well as not knowing about the contents of the messages it might be an issue.
Wouldn't this be more like Sneakers, admittedly not as geeky as War Games but certainly a better fit for whats being done.
The problem with the gmail approach is that your real address is still part of the address, it's not hard for spammers to take that address and strip +whatever off the username section of the email address.
Even worse, although + is a legal character in email address, a hell of a lot of sites and services don't accept it. For example, I don't think facebook allows email addresses with a + character in the name section.
Googles multiple email address into a single account approach is more of a tracking system than an antispam system, i.e. you could create an email such as myemail+dodgycarinsurancequote@gmail.com, if you get spam to that account and Dodgy Car Insurance Company was the only one you gave that address to, you know the source of email leak and can avoid using them again, but your email has already passed on to the spammer.
I think Paper Maps tend to be better at given a big picture than a GPS. You cant but help see the direction and class of roads, where the towns are etc.
A GPS because of its small screen tends to present a lot of information at small scales but presents relatively little information at medium to large scales. The information is there, but you have to scroll around to find it.
When it comes to reviewing information on a GPS, I think the phrase "can't see the wood for the trees" has a lot of relevance.
There is also the possibility that it's not just game footage being written there, the security cameras watching the crowd must need storing as well.
The problem with killing an animal for meat is that a hell of a lot of resources go into growing bits you can't eat just to get a single harvest, although those bits are not without their uses; and requires a lot of land to raise them, even more so if you are looking for ethical farming methods because you have to consider psychological wellbeing rather than just physical wellbeing.
Growing meat in a factory rather than in a field means you can provide just the nutrients needed to grow the bits you actually want to eat, don't require much space and even that space which is needed (however big the VATs and supporting machinery is) can be used more efficently because you can stack the machines into a multistorey building making for a tiny footprint of land use.
It's been 60 years since the first powerful television transmissions, since then wireless communication has become far more widespread but is being reduced in transmission power and used in a more directional manner because by using a lot of short range transmitters rather than a few long range transmitters you get to reuse the frequency in another area without interference with Fibre Optic connection provide the vast majority of the bandwidth and would be completely hidden.
Any Alien civilisation will have the same problem with regard to limited wireless bandwidth and is likely to take a similar approach to delivering information.
Based on a sample of 1 (Earth), it would seem that looking at planets RF emmissions, you would see nothing until a civilisation first developes RF technology, A huge burst of RF noise, then the noise slowly dieing away over however long it takes that civilisation to develop better technologyuntil it's too weak to detect, and for us to detect this very short period of time in an alien civilisation, they would have had to develop this technology within the last 50 years that we have had the capability to hear them + the transmission time from their planet.
Days and years, by which I assume you mean the number of hours in a day, and the number of days in a year, wouldn't be a good place to start building a language because it's specific to our planet.
Hours are an arbitary unit of time, based on geometry and astronomy, therefore 24 would mean nothing to an alien species without them already knowing some specific information about our planet such as how long a day is (in their time reference system) and that we have divided a circle into 360 parts etc. Similarly, the number of days in a year, they would already need to know a fair bit about our planet to realise what 365 means.
Sending the number of days might be useful a bit later on for identifying our planet within the solar system, assuming aliens with similar technology to us, i.e. able to recieve an intentionally sent message from a star, and detect in certain circumstances whether a star has a planet and the basic orbital mechnics of those planets (see Note 1). If they can detect our planet, know it's orbital period and it's rate of spin, then 365 would be clearly point to our planet since it's the only one in our solar system with that number of days in the year.
Note 1: With our current technology, we couldn't detect Earth sized planets around our nearest stars, it's too small, but it's hoped the next generation stuff could detect an Extrasolar Earth
It's not a huge problem over a short period of time, they aren't planning on using the compressed gas to store energy for days or weeks like in an electric car.
The only reason for this system is to allow regenerative braking without the need for expensive batteries, that means the gas only needs to be compressed for minutes before it's release again.
Identifiable tracking and displaying adverts on a web page are different things, I have no problem with ads being displayed on a website so long as they aren't popups/unders, I don't even mind too much the idea of any one site keeping a record of what interests me within the site. For example, I don't have a problem with Slashdot knowing I tend to read stories which have been tagged YRO, Politics and to a lesser degree Gaming and using that information to tailor adverts from the ad networks.
It's the tracking database where they know every click I've made since I started getting ads from any particular advertising network, across every site I've ever visited, consciously or by accident or by malicious redirect that I have a problem with and knowing that that information is never going to go away... ever. Personally, if I knew that the data would be gone after a few years, I would have a lot less problem with the idea of tracking.
If the goal is to undercut the cartel to get the price of oil as a basic commodity down, is letting China have them such a bad idea?
Even then, it doesn't stop the audience just remembering what they saw and typing it up later. If they feel the storyline needs to be a surprise at the time of broadcast, then they need to make everyone in the audience sign an NDA (easy) and have a reasonable expection that no one will break the NDA (nowhere near as easy)
Computers do have lightning fast reflexes. And when in a train, it will always been the computer in charge because the whole point is to reduce the gap between vehicles to below that of what human reflexes are capable of so that the vehicles can take advantage of slipstreams.
cos they used to have the money for expensive long term research.
I see it a bit differently, I see PC's becoming smaller, maybe losing the keyboard, mouse and display and acting more like small home servers (maybe something like Sheevaplus), left on permantently to act as download managers and act as file servers, perhaps used for home automation.
Media PCs/Games Consoles interact with the home servers to provide living room entertainment, and the user interface too all of this will be something Tablet like, prehaps with bluetooth keyboard and mouse for more serious data entry but still using the tablet as the display/input computer.
Obviously, the PC could disappear completely with the Media PC/Games Console taking over the server role and being left on permantently for downloading stuff.
Having said that, I don't see all that happening in the next 5 years.
I, like most geeks use Adblock to get rid of stuff I don't like about the Internet; not ads for the most part, mainly tracking/popup scripts and such like.
I wonder if there is a market for creating subscription lists of a more political nature, for example, blocking any newspaper site which has sold it's rights to Righthaven. Of course it wouldn't get much in the way subscribers since most people don't know/care about the issue?
That is one possible solution, for example, most people in the developed world no longer work 7 days a week. We could try reducing the working week by another day, and later another day after that. But eventually we will run out of days to cut out of the average working week.
In the end, either the basic social structure for getting paid needs to change, or we need to reach a point where past which robots can not go, either because of technological limits or through artificial restraints created by society which says we can not afford more people out of work (which I'm not hopeful of since we are living in a globalised world and someone somewhere will break the rules and gain a benefit).
Note, above I mention a change to how we are paid, some posters above seem to think that means the government printing money to give to those out of work, I don't think that is needed and indeed couldn't work in the long term. I think it could be accomplished by taxing the companies using machines to produce stuff at a much higher rate and redistributing that money to make up for the loss of the money which is no longer being cycled through the economy via service providers paying wages which in turn is used to buy services. It has to be done like that or you will end up with huge wealth concentration which is deterimental to society, where the poor will always be poor and the rich will be so super rich as to untouchable economically, at that point society breaks down and you will get a violent uprising (which will probably fail because all the resources are in the hands of the super-rich).
A Socialist system might also be required as mentioned above, where the government provides certains requirements for free at the point of use, it would be ironic that the ultimate output of a capitalist government system is the requirement of a socialist government system to look after the population.
Part of that is interaction with Humans, at a basic level, middle management is about getting information from employees whether it is in the form of face-2-face communication (including facial-expressions and body language) & natural language written reports, understanding and analysing the information, then assigning tasks back out to the employees.
All the while machines can't do that 'good enough' to replace human middle management or while tasks in the company are still completed by people, middle management will need to be human.
I think there it's basically a race, between getting a machine which can replace the average office worker (and having management essentially interact with his computerised staff via a keyboard) and having a machine which can understand human communication without any need for specialised training and human staff reporting to a computerised manager... I'm not sure which is worse.
business have been able to do that for a decade already, with decreasing costs as time has progressed. It's not a cost issue, it's a management issue, they simply don't trust that staff will work if the management aren't keeping a constant eye on the grunts.
Obviously this doesn't apply to all employers, but enough to have stopped its uptake.
if it's "buried and alive", doesn't that suggest it was "buried alive" in the first place, unless of course it resuscitated itself after it was buried dead...
If they are all using a similar phrase to decide whether or not to go ahead with legally dubious actions, that suggests they are getting the information from the same source rather than lots of morally questionable people all coming to the same decision independantly.
After the fuss we have kicked up over Gary Mckinnon? Who unlike Assange has clearly broken existing US Law.
Besides, our laws forbid extradition of anyone who is wanted for a political crime or who faces the a threat to their life, which I think you could easily argue applies to Assange.
Interestingly, those laws are our implementation of EU Human Rights legislation, which Sweden is also a member of, so I'm not sure how Sweden could extradite under the same conditions.