Look up public private key cryptography and get back to me. Asymmetric cryptography does not require revealing the private key to hospitals....
I think the GPs terminology is wrong, but he/she is hinting at a potential problem. The single-instance-public-private-keypair in this scenario is as follows: Pacemakers gets private key Every hospital gets public key
Public key is used to encrypt data destined for the pacemaker. However, if the public key is released more widely than just the hospitals, a bad guy can do bad stuff by encrypting bogus pacemaker commands with the public key, which the pacemaker will assume are legitimate.
One way of securing this is to have a PKI. Hospitals would get signing keys authorized by the pacemaker manufacturer (or perhaps a pacemaker consortium would start a CA), and the hospital could sign and encrypt a message for the pacemaker with a key issued by a trusted node in the chain. Signing is always good:). A PKI is worse in some respects, though: If the root cert of the PKI were compromised, the certs would have to be revoked and new ones issued. This would require removal of everyone's pacemaker.
I agree that the timing of their patent is 'okay.' They did apply before the ipod was out, before there was an itunes service, etc.
I disagree with their patent, still. It's too vague, and too obvious.
The diagram from their patent is a picture of any internet service: Take data from multiple servers, make arrows that point from those servers to a cloud, and some computer devices that connect to the cloud and receive the data. I implemented prior art, as I used to have an account on a unix box with my ISP. I would log in to a shell, and download MIDI and MIK/MOD files from various FTP servers into my Shell account (the 'data aggregator' from their patent). I used 'sz' (Send via Z-modem), an old shell tool, to copy the files from my ISP server to my local laptop (56k connection [actually a bit slower back then, but who's counting]). I would then listen to the music when I rode the bus. I even plugged my laptop's sound output into a cassette adapter and listened to that stuff when I got my first car. This was in 1996. If Apple wants prior art, I'll testify on their behalf;-).
We had about 5 percent growth in both the domestic and worldwide box office, all-time highs on both fronts reminding us once again that good stories well told always find a place in our hearts, our lives and our local theaters.' What ever happened to the ravages of online piracy?"
Not sure about the ravages of online piracy, but inflation in the US was about 3% last year, and the projections for current US inflation put it at about 4.6%. I'm not sure if their growth estimate takes the increase in CPI into account. Mayhaps someone with a more global view on inflation rates could chime in and give us an adjusted Hollywood growth rate?
I would say that people that are members of the KKK or the Nazi party are as a whole exceptions to that rule. But do you think that reading the Astrology section of the paper is in the same category as being a member of the KKK. If so then you also have some issues that need to be worked out.
Godwin's Law.
Anyway, I have no issue with 'reading' the astrology section. It can be funny. It is believing that astrology is truth that troubles me. Perhaps I do have issues? Or perhaps I'm just a scientist. I do think that they both (believing in KKK gospel, and believing in astrological gospel) have some serious flaws in their logic. Astrology is utterly non-scientific, demonstrable by experiment (I used to demonstrate its non-scientificness in a class that I TA'd, by posting the day's horoscopes without the sign listed. People would guess which horoscope was theirs, and then we would analyze the results of their guess versus random chance. Random chance was generally as accurate as the prediction with sufficient sample size). If Eugenics proponents like William Shockley are to be believed, then bigotted groups like the KKK actually have more of a factual and scientific basis than astrology. While I find this troubling, that's okay. Science will eventually sort it out, if we let it.
And no by not hating them doesn't mean you have to join them.
Erm, you just fried my triple-negative logic circuit.
No "state secrets" were lost. If something is "secret", then it's "classified". If it's classified, then it isn't being stored on a system that has access to the internet, directly or indirectly. According to the article, (yes, I read it...) there was some sensative information lost. This is not going to be launch codes or anything that's even remotely that valuable. I'm not saying it's no big deal, I'm saying that it's not nearly as big a deal as you're trying to make it out to be.
Hate to break it to you, but there are a ton of connections between classified networks and the Internet. The connections are generally made via high assurance gateway devices (usually a few systems that work together to protect the connection). Wikipedia has a general article here. There are some of these things actually in use, and their use is a lot wider than you would expect.
In my previous life, I worked for the DoD's head of cross-domain solutions as a research weenie and pen-tester. I'm quite the skeptic about the way the cross-domain world is run: the solutions are all based on super-old and kludgey software, and DoD has been too terrified of risk to admit that it needs to come up with higher-assurance solutions.
Also, there's too much data on DoD's networks to be accurately classified these days. Classification levels are supposed to determine how detrimental a leak would be to national security, but typically a few unclassified documents are assembled into one place and the result is classified. It's also worth noting that in an ideal case, only unclassified material will be on the unclassified network, but security violations happen all the time. At one of my previous employs, a contractor was caught taking a USB hard drive home (as in, to his house) from a classified lab. He got a slap on the wrist. Later, he got a job working for Defense Intelligence. I can only presume that his clearance was not affected.
I was a big proponent of "disinformation" while I was a research weenie: seeding bogus reports, making up totally insane presentations for research projects that weren't real, etc. I think it's a good area for DoD to invest in the idea, as in creating a 'disinformation czar' (or preferably one or two of them per research lab). Let the Chinese steal fake documents and let them waste their money reacting accordingly, I say...
The only major operating systems companies are Microsoft, Sun, and Apple. They have both invested huge amounts of money in creating their products, including developing design documents, rigorous testing, and bugfixing, although most of their core code came from purchases of pre-existing operating systems. I wouldn't want to say that an open-source effort is not possible, but we shouldn't underestimate the magnitude of the job. It involves a lot more effort than just hacking away at some code until it starts working.
(Sorry, I think your opinion is valid, but I couldn't help myself:)).
Wow, you're right, Dell stopped doing that. See the "Dell Proprietary" section on this page: link, which indicates that they only did it between 1996 and 2000. Back when I did PC hardware/tech work, I used to have to replace Dell power supplies on occasion. I was cheap enough that I would rewire ATX supplies instead of buying insanely expensive Dell supplies;-). I'm glad that they've switched to using standard power supplies!
It often surprises people, but when comparing computers with the same features, Macs often turns out to cost less.
Ah, slashdot: you point out the truth that macs actually are cheaper than PCs, and you get modded a troll. Sorry man.
But it is true, so the moderators should mod the parent up. Macs might not be quite as configurable as PCs, but if you compare a low-end Dell to an iMac (say), you'll find that the iMac packs a better video card, bigger monitor, bigger hard drive, more ram, and better CPU for the price. You can argue that you can't upgrade the video card/processor/whatever in an iMac, but most people never do that anyway (and if you want to do that stuff in a Dell, you're going to have to buy a new [proprietarily wired, so expensive] power supply).
Obviously it doesn't hold true for roll-your-own PCs, but then roll-your-own PCs don't come with a decent 1-3 year warranty where you can go to just one company for the machine to get fixed...
Strange how the "Macs are expensive" myth is still out there.
I believe that the X-Prize only required the craft to reach 100 km, which is kind of the accepted division line between space and not-space. It has something to do with the physics of spaceflight factoring more into the equations than the physics of aerodynamics above that altitude.
Awesome, thanks for the info. I guess that the soda bottle only needs to go an extra 99,600 meters to make it into space, then. On the plus side, he's 0.3% of the way there!
To actually achieve orbit, not only does it need to reach this altitude, but also move horizontally at probably over 20,000 miles per hours once it gets there.
Too true. I think that technically he doesn't need to achieve orbit in order to consider his bottle 'in space.' I'm not sure if space even begins at LEO, I was just throwing out a wild(-ass) guess.
I'm kind of surprised that, if this guy is an engineer, he doesn't just do the math. Find out the weight of the bottle, the rate of expellation of air, the differential between the pressure inside the bottle versus the atmosphere, and figure out exactly how much pressure it will take to reach LEO height (at horizontal velocity or not). The math can't be that hard? My guess is that the tensile strength of a plastic bottle, even a kevlar bottle, won't be enough to hold the pressure needed, though...
Schellenberg's two-stage model is easily capable of reaching altitudes of well over 200 metres.
Several years ago, one of his "toy" rockets - actually a Kevlar-reinforced, experimental, single-stage missile pressurized with compressed nitrogen and packing high-tech instruments - flew to just under 379 metres.
Based on that research, Schellenberg is now convinced that it will be possible to put a bottle rocket into orbit.
Wow, 379 meters. With just a few more improvements, he could eek out the other 159,621 meters to Low Earth Orbit with no problem!
reading through some of the motions, that does strike me as the one. I had never read all of the court briefs, just the final summary. This page is probably the most relevant to me: link. I feel bad for that guy! He definitely lost out on a lot of money defending himself. If Mishkoff ever reads this, thank you thank you thank you for sticking up for yourself (and setting a legal precedent for jokers like myself).
WikiLeaks on The Onion appears to be unaffected. Gotta love that that server is anonymously located. If you want to read the document, follow the link above and install TOR, then punch in the URL in the subject...
Guess I should have posted this as an anonymous coward;-).
Pictures -- I'm pretty sure all the pictures we download are copyrighted. Probably at least half of it being on websites that were not the express permission of the owner.
My guess would be that making the pictures available via some protocol like HTTP implies that, while the pictures are copyright protected, permission is granted to website users to download the image and to view it while visiting the site. Music and movies don't and won't come with the same kind of implicit permission.
The "half of it being on websites that were not the express permission" thing is a whole 'nother can of worms. If you see people using your copyright-protected photos/text and transmitting those photos/text from their own websites, you have every right to sue (at least in the US). The trick is that you generally have to show financial harm, which can be a lot harder to do. If your photo and text are available free-of-charge, it will be especially hard for you to show financial harm. If, however, you run a members-only pay site, you would probably win. Similarly, movie companies and music companies charge for their product, so it fairly easy for them to show financial harm.
I often received Cease and Desist letters for my own website (readingfordummies.com) from Wiley Publishing, but I don't make any money off of my website. Their claim was Trademark infringement, which is quite similar to copyright in this case. There was some fun court case in the US that set precedent there (a shopping mall trying to sue a guy that bought their name as a domain name). IIRC it went up to a US circuit court of appeals, and the defendant won by showing he used the site for noncommercial purposes. I dug up the court case in a fancy book on internet and intellectual property law, and flipped it off to Wiley's lawyers (quite a few years ago now) and have not heard from them since...
Select a group of countries with 'similar enough' backgrounds (e.g. Western Europe, North America, Australia. Alt Asia.)
Show me two countries with 'similar enough' backgrounds. I dare ya;-). I would argue that economic prosperity is a bit like chaos theory -- it's not impossible to link taxes and spending with economic success, but it is extraordinarily difficult to decouple that 'success' (whatever metric we're going to use to define economic success) from external factors.
What's the difference between the US and Canada? Climate is a big one (the climate in the US better supports agriculture). Population is another. So is land area. The US has 300M people roughly, and has 100k fewer square kilometers than Canada with its 30M people. Measuring Canada's overall 'success' has to take into consideration that Canada's infrastructure is way more spread out while their tax base is quite lower.
What's the difference between Western Europe and North America? Western Europe has had two major (major being kind of an understatement) land wars fought on its soil in the last hundred year for one. A lot of its time lately has been restoring itself to normalcy. It has also been populated for over 1,700 years longer, which gives is a slight infrastructure benefit but a rather sizable natural resource deficiency.
What's the difference between one Western European nation and another? One was half-communist until 18 years ago. One gave up early on in WW2 and had its infrastructure mostly unharmed. Italy fought a lot, and was invaded by the Allies, and then re-invaded by the Axis. Others have had civil wars in the last 30 years (Italy included, more or less).
What's the difference between Australia and New Zealand? You mean aside from huge land-mass, climate, and population differences?
How about Asian or even African nations? Meddling by different European nations, civil wars, climate difficulties, tsunamis, monsoons.
Well, I think we see where this is going...
I argue that defining economic health is also nigh on impossible. We could use number of homeless as one metric, I suppose. Another might be some measure of national 'inventiveness' like number of patents, research papers published. Another metric might be life expectancy. Yet another could be a survey asking citizens how happy they are.
If you'd like, I'll go dig up statistics. Here are some: - By most studies (though arguably not all studies), there is a higher percentage of homeless in the United States (3.49 million out of 300 million means > 1%) than in Germany (820,000 out of 83 million, which is 1%). Germany's tax base is quite a bit higher than that in the US. Perhaps the legend of the cowboys are to blame in driving people to the streets? - The patent thing I simply can't answer, though I would be interested to see some kind of 'inventiveness versus GDP versus tax base' three-dimensional graph. - The average life expectancy in Japan is 17 years longer than in the US, and their tax base is quite a bit higher. Perhaps southern cooking is to blame for our early deaths? - More people report being happy in Sweden than in the US. Sweden's tax base is much higher. Perhaps copyright makes us sad?
Why not write a distributed project. It will slowly, in the background, hit up all the recently 'tasted' domain names. This would make tasters think that they got a good domain name and buy it. Then they'll go bankrupt, because they'll buy all these crap domain names that are only touched by the distributed client.
A government does not make money. It merely takes money (tax) and redistributes it - a small portion of the money do end up in the market again. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravina_Island_Bridge [wikipedia.org] WP. But this simply reduces the overall efficiency of the market.
I believe that there is a misunderstanding of my argument here. I am claiming exactly what you are saying in your first two sentences. The government creates monetary flow. At the end of the fiscal year, every government agency must have $0 in its coffers. In this, we agree. Where our opinions diverge is in whether this government intervention in an economy reduces efficiency. I believe that it is a great academic argument to make a claim one way or the other. But show me an economy where the central government takes no money for redistribution, and I'll show you a country that does not exist. Every government has to take some money from its economy, or it simply is not a government.
I believe that, in many cases, the central government doing this creates market efficiencies (e.g. creating improved markets and new markets where none existed before). Look at the Internet for a great example. Without direct government intervention, the internet simply would not exist as a tool, and I would argue that without this tool, our economies would move far more slowly than they do today. Also look at the space program -- as a strictly free-market venture, companies would have given up on the idea of putting satellites into orbit because (initially) the risk was just too high. Now we have cheap satellite imagery, which has made economies far more efficient (crop production, mining, and even wars are made more efficient in both money and cost in human lives), as well as other fun satellite tech to help us in the future. When initial risk is too high, the basic research foundations for a market will never come about. This kind of risk is okay for a government, though, since it has no competition to worry about.
I'm sure there are both positive and negative cases for both sides of this argument, though. Governments waste a lot money (slowing down the economy) through failed research/fraud/whatever a lot, just as they help (creating new markets) through research that is simply not feasible by a free market due to risk a lot. I place myself in the camp that we have to accept failure sometimes in experiment, as failure teaches us. In the end, I feel that humanity will not advance as quickly, or at all, in a strictly free market. We need the occasional government-sized initiative to make scientific discovery. Yes, it is possible that discoveries such as those I cited would have come about with government intervention, but to me it seems rather unlikely...
The Federal government has about 1 million employees. There are 300 million people in America so that 0.33% of people are employeed directly by the Federal government.
That would be great if only the Federal government taxed us...
Last I checked, every attempt at socialism had failed. Egalitarian policies have destroyed public education. Unionised businesses are collapsing left, right and centre. Welfare has turned inner cities into crime ridden Third World hellholes.
Last I checked, the United States is doing quite well. Our government hires about 15% of the population directly, and has another 20-25% of the population hired under direct contract work. These are rough numbers, but I did spend a while working in.GOV research labs, and as a.GOV contractor. I definitely saw just how much money is flowing through the things. I could make a pretty good argument that the rest of the economy moves from these spenders (I win a government contract, and use the money to buy computers [dell's income], add an addition to my house [construction workers], buy beer, etc, with the government taking a chunk of each purchase along the way for recycling to pay me more contract money in the future). When we had a depression, we worked to solve the problem by creating the Civilian Conservation Core, setting up government crop buybacks, etc. Now that we're in a recession, our government is handing us all money. Economies are just measures of money moving, and there's no better mover of money than the government...I'd consider the US a democratic republic with socialist leanings.
7) Enough homophobia to shake a stick at. I really fail to see the relevance here. (Some) right wingers hate gays, (some) left wingers hate men, the middle class, whites, Christians and their own country. How does anyone of that automatically verify someone's beliefs?
My guess is that the GP is noting that, in the US, the political right tends to rally behind anti-gay candidates (both the government officials, and their voters). The GP is making a generality here, for sure, but the generality is at least backed up by the fact that the majority of the political right has this sentiment (or such candidates would not consistently win the vote).
What's most amusing to me is how many of the anti-gay candidates end up rubbing people's ankles in the bathroom (senators, leaders of the christian coalition, etc). Not that the left is any better. I only wish that such political folks would work a little more to understand themselves, and that their constituents would work a little more to understand their leader. That shall continue to be my wish...
A real microkernel-based system will have a lot of the userland facilities designed to take advantage of message passing and will probably look more like HURD or Squeak than it will like NT or NeXT. QNX and VxWorks are the only successful microkernel-based systems that I'm aware of, and frankly both of them are losing big to Linux, so we might have to say were the only successful systems in the future...
There are quite a few more microkernels in the world that are used with much success, typically in embedded systems (though some not). L4 and Integrity are also quite popular these days. Integrity powers the F-22 Raptor fighter plane as well a *lot* of avionics platforms and it is making big headway in security systems. Just as an example. There are more commercial microkernels in wide use. Read the article to find out which;-).
It's also a bit hard to say whether microkernel based systems are losing ground to embedded linux. I can think of quite a few places in which VxWorks and Integrity have displaced Linux where Linux had been deployed on commercial devices already (routers, control systems, and medical devices, mainly).
And to pre-empt the "well, 3-4 microkernels is hardly a successful number compared to monolithic kernels" argument, answer me this: how many monolithic kernels are commonly used? I'd argue 2 or 3 (Linux, BSD, I guess Solaris if you don't consider it part of the BSD family). So the 3-4 successful microkernels, 2-3 monolithic kernels, and 2 hybrid systems account for probably 99% of deployed kernels. As for actual percentages of each deployed type, it would probably be something like 20% hybrid, 40% microkernel, and 40% monolithic kernel (yes, these numbers are entirely made up, but given the plethora of embedded devices that run either Linux or some microkernel, I think they outnumber Windows and mac installations by a fair margin;-)).
Reid (Who has used and developed on the Hurd, L4, OSX, NT, Linux, and Integrity, and who did RTFA).
And why is it hypocritical for MS to borrow code that the BSD folks told them they're free to use?
Obviously there's nothing technically wrong with it. But Microsoft does always say that "open source is evil," "open source is a poor business model," "open source is something that you should be afraid of because of the licensing implications." MS' marketing departments pretty much condemn any open source license, whether it's BSD, GNU, Apple, Sun, whatever, for these reasons. Kind of funny that the left hand was using them while the mouth said they were horrible...
You know, I started thinking the same thing a few months ago. I learned to program with Pascal, then BASIC (basic sucked, but it's what they taught in high school), then C, Scheme, C++, and finally Java/C# (these two only in the last year or two). I've been primarily a unix guy in the past, but I actually had a job interview at Microsoft, maybe a year ago. I asked my interviewers technical questions, too. One question that I like asking is, what does an object method look like in memory versus a static method? Most of my interviewers at MS could not answer the question, which I found telling. They're certainly wizards with algorithms and code optimization, but hadn't gone into much depth in how what they're doing actually works in memory. I find a lot of OO programmers don't know what a function pointer is, even though they use them with every new line of code.
I definitely think that learning low-level languages first is the way to go. I do learn a lot of new stuff every day from my younger coworkers who have been using Java since day 1 (mostly programming paradigms and weird stuff in the libraries), but I find myself teaching them a lot as well -- and quite basic stuff too, like what thread an event fired by hardware will run in in their.net code;-).
Slashdot Mirror
Look up public private key cryptography and get back to me. Asymmetric cryptography does not require revealing the private key to hospitals....
:). A PKI is worse in some respects, though: If the root cert of the PKI were compromised, the certs would have to be revoked and new ones issued. This would require removal of everyone's pacemaker.
I think the GPs terminology is wrong, but he/she is hinting at a potential problem. The single-instance-public-private-keypair in this scenario is as follows:
Pacemakers gets private key
Every hospital gets public key
Public key is used to encrypt data destined for the pacemaker. However, if the public key is released more widely than just the hospitals, a bad guy can do bad stuff by encrypting bogus pacemaker commands with the public key, which the pacemaker will assume are legitimate.
One way of securing this is to have a PKI. Hospitals would get signing keys authorized by the pacemaker manufacturer (or perhaps a pacemaker consortium would start a CA), and the hospital could sign and encrypt a message for the pacemaker with a key issued by a trusted node in the chain. Signing is always good
I agree that the timing of their patent is 'okay.' They did apply before the ipod was out, before there was an itunes service, etc.
;-).
I disagree with their patent, still. It's too vague, and too obvious.
The diagram from their patent is a picture of any internet service: Take data from multiple servers, make arrows that point from those servers to a cloud, and some computer devices that connect to the cloud and receive the data. I implemented prior art, as I used to have an account on a unix box with my ISP. I would log in to a shell, and download MIDI and MIK/MOD files from various FTP servers into my Shell account (the 'data aggregator' from their patent). I used 'sz' (Send via Z-modem), an old shell tool, to copy the files from my ISP server to my local laptop (56k connection [actually a bit slower back then, but who's counting]). I would then listen to the music when I rode the bus. I even plugged my laptop's sound output into a cassette adapter and listened to that stuff when I got my first car. This was in 1996. If Apple wants prior art, I'll testify on their behalf
Reid
We had about 5 percent growth in both the domestic and worldwide box office, all-time highs on both fronts reminding us once again that good stories well told always find a place in our hearts, our lives and our local theaters.' What ever happened to the ravages of online piracy?"
Not sure about the ravages of online piracy, but inflation in the US was about 3% last year, and the projections for current US inflation put it at about 4.6%. I'm not sure if their growth estimate takes the increase in CPI into account. Mayhaps someone with a more global view on inflation rates could chime in and give us an adjusted Hollywood growth rate?
Reid
I would say that people that are members of the KKK or the Nazi party are as a whole exceptions to that rule. But do you think that reading the Astrology section of the paper is in the same category as being a member of the KKK. If so then you also have some issues that need to be worked out.
Godwin's Law.
Anyway, I have no issue with 'reading' the astrology section. It can be funny. It is believing that astrology is truth that troubles me. Perhaps I do have issues? Or perhaps I'm just a scientist. I do think that they both (believing in KKK gospel, and believing in astrological gospel) have some serious flaws in their logic. Astrology is utterly non-scientific, demonstrable by experiment (I used to demonstrate its non-scientificness in a class that I TA'd, by posting the day's horoscopes without the sign listed. People would guess which horoscope was theirs, and then we would analyze the results of their guess versus random chance. Random chance was generally as accurate as the prediction with sufficient sample size). If Eugenics proponents like William Shockley are to be believed, then bigotted groups like the KKK actually have more of a factual and scientific basis than astrology. While I find this troubling, that's okay. Science will eventually sort it out, if we let it.
And no by not hating them doesn't mean you have to join them.
Erm, you just fried my triple-negative logic circuit.
Understand that judging groups of people is as a rule wrong. It is called bigotry.
I really, really dislike anyone that belongs to the KKK. Does that make me a bigot?
If it does, should I join the KKK?
Reid
No "state secrets" were lost. If something is "secret", then it's "classified". If it's classified, then it isn't being stored on a system that has access to the internet, directly or indirectly. According to the article, (yes, I read it...) there was some sensative information lost. This is not going to be launch codes or anything that's even remotely that valuable. I'm not saying it's no big deal, I'm saying that it's not nearly as big a deal as you're trying to make it out to be.
Hate to break it to you, but there are a ton of connections between classified networks and the Internet. The connections are generally made via high assurance gateway devices (usually a few systems that work together to protect the connection). Wikipedia has a general article here. There are some of these things actually in use, and their use is a lot wider than you would expect.
In my previous life, I worked for the DoD's head of cross-domain solutions as a research weenie and pen-tester. I'm quite the skeptic about the way the cross-domain world is run: the solutions are all based on super-old and kludgey software, and DoD has been too terrified of risk to admit that it needs to come up with higher-assurance solutions.
Also, there's too much data on DoD's networks to be accurately classified these days. Classification levels are supposed to determine how detrimental a leak would be to national security, but typically a few unclassified documents are assembled into one place and the result is classified. It's also worth noting that in an ideal case, only unclassified material will be on the unclassified network, but security violations happen all the time. At one of my previous employs, a contractor was caught taking a USB hard drive home (as in, to his house) from a classified lab. He got a slap on the wrist. Later, he got a job working for Defense Intelligence. I can only presume that his clearance was not affected.
I was a big proponent of "disinformation" while I was a research weenie: seeding bogus reports, making up totally insane presentations for research projects that weren't real, etc. I think it's a good area for DoD to invest in the idea, as in creating a 'disinformation czar' (or preferably one or two of them per research lab). Let the Chinese steal fake documents and let them waste their money reacting accordingly, I say...
This is the first time in a long time that the borg icon for MS makes entirely too much sense...you will be assimilated, etc.
The only major operating systems companies are Microsoft, Sun, and Apple. They have both invested huge amounts of money in creating their products, including developing design documents, rigorous testing, and bugfixing, although most of their core code came from purchases of pre-existing operating systems. I wouldn't want to say that an open-source effort is not possible, but we shouldn't underestimate the magnitude of the job. It involves a lot more effort than just hacking away at some code until it starts working.
:)).
(Sorry, I think your opinion is valid, but I couldn't help myself
Wow, you're right, Dell stopped doing that. See the "Dell Proprietary" section on this page: link, which indicates that they only did it between 1996 and 2000. Back when I did PC hardware/tech work, I used to have to replace Dell power supplies on occasion. I was cheap enough that I would rewire ATX supplies instead of buying insanely expensive Dell supplies ;-). I'm glad that they've switched to using standard power supplies!
It often surprises people, but when comparing computers with the same features, Macs often turns out to cost less.
Ah, slashdot: you point out the truth that macs actually are cheaper than PCs, and you get modded a troll. Sorry man.
But it is true, so the moderators should mod the parent up. Macs might not be quite as configurable as PCs, but if you compare a low-end Dell to an iMac (say), you'll find that the iMac packs a better video card, bigger monitor, bigger hard drive, more ram, and better CPU for the price. You can argue that you can't upgrade the video card/processor/whatever in an iMac, but most people never do that anyway (and if you want to do that stuff in a Dell, you're going to have to buy a new [proprietarily wired, so expensive] power supply).
Obviously it doesn't hold true for roll-your-own PCs, but then roll-your-own PCs don't come with a decent 1-3 year warranty where you can go to just one company for the machine to get fixed...
Strange how the "Macs are expensive" myth is still out there.
Reid
Visual Studio Guy is the Green Lantern, MSDN Webcast Guy is Superman, Virtual Labs Guy is The Flash. I don't see credit on there anywhere, and this is definitely a marketing thing (not a parody).
I think MSDN Webcast Guy's tagline says it best, "His parents weren't very creative."
I believe that the X-Prize only required the craft to reach 100 km, which is kind of the accepted division line between space and not-space. It has something to do with the physics of spaceflight factoring more into the equations than the physics of aerodynamics above that altitude.
Awesome, thanks for the info. I guess that the soda bottle only needs to go an extra 99,600 meters to make it into space, then. On the plus side, he's 0.3% of the way there!
To actually achieve orbit, not only does it need to reach this altitude, but also move horizontally at probably over 20,000 miles per hours once it gets there.
Too true. I think that technically he doesn't need to achieve orbit in order to consider his bottle 'in space.' I'm not sure if space even begins at LEO, I was just throwing out a wild(-ass) guess.
I'm kind of surprised that, if this guy is an engineer, he doesn't just do the math. Find out the weight of the bottle, the rate of expellation of air, the differential between the pressure inside the bottle versus the atmosphere, and figure out exactly how much pressure it will take to reach LEO height (at horizontal velocity or not). The math can't be that hard? My guess is that the tensile strength of a plastic bottle, even a kevlar bottle, won't be enough to hold the pressure needed, though...
Schellenberg's two-stage model is easily capable of reaching altitudes of well over 200 metres.
Several years ago, one of his "toy" rockets - actually a Kevlar-reinforced, experimental, single-stage missile pressurized with compressed nitrogen and packing high-tech instruments - flew to just under 379 metres.
Based on that research, Schellenberg is now convinced that it will be possible to put a bottle rocket into orbit.
Wow, 379 meters. With just a few more improvements, he could eek out the other 159,621 meters to Low Earth Orbit with no problem!
Reid
reading through some of the motions, that does strike me as the one. I had never read all of the court briefs, just the final summary. This page is probably the most relevant to me: link. I feel bad for that guy! He definitely lost out on a lot of money defending himself. If Mishkoff ever reads this, thank you thank you thank you for sticking up for yourself (and setting a legal precedent for jokers like myself).
WikiLeaks on The Onion appears to be unaffected. Gotta love that that server is anonymously located. If you want to read the document, follow the link above and install TOR, then punch in the URL in the subject...
;-).
Guess I should have posted this as an anonymous coward
Pictures -- I'm pretty sure all the pictures we download are copyrighted. Probably at least half of it being on websites that were not the express permission of the owner.
My guess would be that making the pictures available via some protocol like HTTP implies that, while the pictures are copyright protected, permission is granted to website users to download the image and to view it while visiting the site. Music and movies don't and won't come with the same kind of implicit permission.
The "half of it being on websites that were not the express permission" thing is a whole 'nother can of worms. If you see people using your copyright-protected photos/text and transmitting those photos/text from their own websites, you have every right to sue (at least in the US). The trick is that you generally have to show financial harm, which can be a lot harder to do. If your photo and text are available free-of-charge, it will be especially hard for you to show financial harm. If, however, you run a members-only pay site, you would probably win. Similarly, movie companies and music companies charge for their product, so it fairly easy for them to show financial harm.
I often received Cease and Desist letters for my own website (readingfordummies.com) from Wiley Publishing, but I don't make any money off of my website. Their claim was Trademark infringement, which is quite similar to copyright in this case. There was some fun court case in the US that set precedent there (a shopping mall trying to sue a guy that bought their name as a domain name). IIRC it went up to a US circuit court of appeals, and the defendant won by showing he used the site for noncommercial purposes. I dug up the court case in a fancy book on internet and intellectual property law, and flipped it off to Wiley's lawyers (quite a few years ago now) and have not heard from them since...
Select a group of countries with 'similar enough' backgrounds (e.g. Western Europe, North America, Australia. Alt Asia.)
;-). I would argue that economic prosperity is a bit like chaos theory -- it's not impossible to link taxes and spending with economic success, but it is extraordinarily difficult to decouple that 'success' (whatever metric we're going to use to define economic success) from external factors.
Show me two countries with 'similar enough' backgrounds. I dare ya
What's the difference between the US and Canada? Climate is a big one (the climate in the US better supports agriculture). Population is another. So is land area. The US has 300M people roughly, and has 100k fewer square kilometers than Canada with its 30M people. Measuring Canada's overall 'success' has to take into consideration that Canada's infrastructure is way more spread out while their tax base is quite lower.
What's the difference between Western Europe and North America? Western Europe has had two major (major being kind of an understatement) land wars fought on its soil in the last hundred year for one. A lot of its time lately has been restoring itself to normalcy. It has also been populated for over 1,700 years longer, which gives is a slight infrastructure benefit but a rather sizable natural resource deficiency.
What's the difference between one Western European nation and another? One was half-communist until 18 years ago. One gave up early on in WW2 and had its infrastructure mostly unharmed. Italy fought a lot, and was invaded by the Allies, and then re-invaded by the Axis. Others have had civil wars in the last 30 years (Italy included, more or less).
What's the difference between Australia and New Zealand? You mean aside from huge land-mass, climate, and population differences?
How about Asian or even African nations? Meddling by different European nations, civil wars, climate difficulties, tsunamis, monsoons.
Well, I think we see where this is going...
I argue that defining economic health is also nigh on impossible. We could use number of homeless as one metric, I suppose. Another might be some measure of national 'inventiveness' like number of patents, research papers published. Another metric might be life expectancy. Yet another could be a survey asking citizens how happy they are.
If you'd like, I'll go dig up statistics. Here are some:
- By most studies (though arguably not all studies), there is a higher percentage of homeless in the United States (3.49 million out of 300 million means > 1%) than in Germany (820,000 out of 83 million, which is 1%). Germany's tax base is quite a bit higher than that in the US. Perhaps the legend of the cowboys are to blame in driving people to the streets?
- The patent thing I simply can't answer, though I would be interested to see some kind of 'inventiveness versus GDP versus tax base' three-dimensional graph.
- The average life expectancy in Japan is 17 years longer than in the US, and their tax base is quite a bit higher. Perhaps southern cooking is to blame for our early deaths?
- More people report being happy in Sweden than in the US. Sweden's tax base is much higher. Perhaps copyright makes us sad?
Why not write a distributed project. It will slowly, in the background, hit up all the recently 'tasted' domain names. This would make tasters think that they got a good domain name and buy it. Then they'll go bankrupt, because they'll buy all these crap domain names that are only touched by the distributed client.
For every problem, there is a solution...
A government does not make money. It merely takes money (tax) and redistributes it - a small portion of the money do end up in the market again. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravina_Island_Bridge [wikipedia.org] WP. But this simply reduces the overall efficiency of the market.
I believe that there is a misunderstanding of my argument here. I am claiming exactly what you are saying in your first two sentences. The government creates monetary flow. At the end of the fiscal year, every government agency must have $0 in its coffers. In this, we agree. Where our opinions diverge is in whether this government intervention in an economy reduces efficiency. I believe that it is a great academic argument to make a claim one way or the other. But show me an economy where the central government takes no money for redistribution, and I'll show you a country that does not exist. Every government has to take some money from its economy, or it simply is not a government.
I believe that, in many cases, the central government doing this creates market efficiencies (e.g. creating improved markets and new markets where none existed before). Look at the Internet for a great example. Without direct government intervention, the internet simply would not exist as a tool, and I would argue that without this tool, our economies would move far more slowly than they do today. Also look at the space program -- as a strictly free-market venture, companies would have given up on the idea of putting satellites into orbit because (initially) the risk was just too high. Now we have cheap satellite imagery, which has made economies far more efficient (crop production, mining, and even wars are made more efficient in both money and cost in human lives), as well as other fun satellite tech to help us in the future. When initial risk is too high, the basic research foundations for a market will never come about. This kind of risk is okay for a government, though, since it has no competition to worry about.
I'm sure there are both positive and negative cases for both sides of this argument, though. Governments waste a lot money (slowing down the economy) through failed research/fraud/whatever a lot, just as they help (creating new markets) through research that is simply not feasible by a free market due to risk a lot. I place myself in the camp that we have to accept failure sometimes in experiment, as failure teaches us. In the end, I feel that humanity will not advance as quickly, or at all, in a strictly free market. We need the occasional government-sized initiative to make scientific discovery. Yes, it is possible that discoveries such as those I cited would have come about with government intervention, but to me it seems rather unlikely...
The Federal government has about 1 million employees. There are 300 million people in America so that 0.33% of people are employeed directly by the Federal government.
That would be great if only the Federal government taxed us...
Last I checked, every attempt at socialism had failed. Egalitarian policies have destroyed public education. Unionised businesses are collapsing left, right and centre. Welfare has turned inner cities into crime ridden Third World hellholes.
.GOV research labs, and as a .GOV contractor. I definitely saw just how much money is flowing through the things. I could make a pretty good argument that the rest of the economy moves from these spenders (I win a government contract, and use the money to buy computers [dell's income], add an addition to my house [construction workers], buy beer, etc, with the government taking a chunk of each purchase along the way for recycling to pay me more contract money in the future). When we had a depression, we worked to solve the problem by creating the Civilian Conservation Core, setting up government crop buybacks, etc. Now that we're in a recession, our government is handing us all money. Economies are just measures of money moving, and there's no better mover of money than the government...I'd consider the US a democratic republic with socialist leanings.
Last I checked, the United States is doing quite well. Our government hires about 15% of the population directly, and has another 20-25% of the population hired under direct contract work. These are rough numbers, but I did spend a while working in
7) Enough homophobia to shake a stick at.
I really fail to see the relevance here. (Some) right wingers hate gays, (some) left wingers hate men, the middle class, whites, Christians and their own country. How does anyone of that automatically verify someone's beliefs?
My guess is that the GP is noting that, in the US, the political right tends to rally behind anti-gay candidates (both the government officials, and their voters). The GP is making a generality here, for sure, but the generality is at least backed up by the fact that the majority of the political right has this sentiment (or such candidates would not consistently win the vote).
What's most amusing to me is how many of the anti-gay candidates end up rubbing people's ankles in the bathroom (senators, leaders of the christian coalition, etc). Not that the left is any better. I only wish that such political folks would work a little more to understand themselves, and that their constituents would work a little more to understand their leader. That shall continue to be my wish...
A real microkernel-based system will have a lot of the userland facilities designed to take advantage of message passing and will probably look more like HURD or Squeak than it will like NT or NeXT. QNX and VxWorks are the only successful microkernel-based systems that I'm aware of, and frankly both of them are losing big to Linux, so we might have to say were the only successful systems in the future...
;-).
;-)).
There are quite a few more microkernels in the world that are used with much success, typically in embedded systems (though some not). L4 and Integrity are also quite popular these days. Integrity powers the F-22 Raptor fighter plane as well a *lot* of avionics platforms and it is making big headway in security systems. Just as an example. There are more commercial microkernels in wide use. Read the article to find out which
It's also a bit hard to say whether microkernel based systems are losing ground to embedded linux. I can think of quite a few places in which VxWorks and Integrity have displaced Linux where Linux had been deployed on commercial devices already (routers, control systems, and medical devices, mainly).
And to pre-empt the "well, 3-4 microkernels is hardly a successful number compared to monolithic kernels" argument, answer me this: how many monolithic kernels are commonly used? I'd argue 2 or 3 (Linux, BSD, I guess Solaris if you don't consider it part of the BSD family). So the 3-4 successful microkernels, 2-3 monolithic kernels, and 2 hybrid systems account for probably 99% of deployed kernels. As for actual percentages of each deployed type, it would probably be something like 20% hybrid, 40% microkernel, and 40% monolithic kernel (yes, these numbers are entirely made up, but given the plethora of embedded devices that run either Linux or some microkernel, I think they outnumber Windows and mac installations by a fair margin
Reid
(Who has used and developed on the Hurd, L4, OSX, NT, Linux, and Integrity, and who did RTFA).
And why is it hypocritical for MS to borrow code that the BSD folks told them they're free to use?
Obviously there's nothing technically wrong with it. But Microsoft does always say that "open source is evil," "open source is a poor business model," "open source is something that you should be afraid of because of the licensing implications." MS' marketing departments pretty much condemn any open source license, whether it's BSD, GNU, Apple, Sun, whatever, for these reasons. Kind of funny that the left hand was using them while the mouth said they were horrible...
Reid
You know, I started thinking the same thing a few months ago. I learned to program with Pascal, then BASIC (basic sucked, but it's what they taught in high school), then C, Scheme, C++, and finally Java/C# (these two only in the last year or two). I've been primarily a unix guy in the past, but I actually had a job interview at Microsoft, maybe a year ago. I asked my interviewers technical questions, too. One question that I like asking is, what does an object method look like in memory versus a static method? Most of my interviewers at MS could not answer the question, which I found telling. They're certainly wizards with algorithms and code optimization, but hadn't gone into much depth in how what they're doing actually works in memory. I find a lot of OO programmers don't know what a function pointer is, even though they use them with every new line of code.
.net code ;-).
I definitely think that learning low-level languages first is the way to go. I do learn a lot of new stuff every day from my younger coworkers who have been using Java since day 1 (mostly programming paradigms and weird stuff in the libraries), but I find myself teaching them a lot as well -- and quite basic stuff too, like what thread an event fired by hardware will run in in their