You mean that when all those people were warning us about how all that surveillance could be abused, how all the increases in police power could wind up being a problem, they were right? WOW!
Simplified Chinese is more common, at least judging by what my Chinese friends write (I have been trying to learn how to read and write Mandarin for a few months, and my friends have been helpful).
Yes, if you know what you are doing. The problem with straight razors is not how close of a shave you get, it is the amount of practice one needs to get it right. There is a reason that "safety razors" are so named.
The end of the Internet as we knew it happened years ago, when it became so heavily commercialized. This is just another drop in an already near-full bucket.
Things like solar and will will eventually become economical
The problem with solar power is that producing a state of the art solar cell requires almost as much energy as the cell will gather over its entire useful lifespan. If I were going to point to a "green" source of energy, I would point to wind; a wind turbine is much less energy-intensive to produce, and you can augment with with nuclear power to cover low-wind periods.
In any case, Gates was spot on when he pointed out that fossil fuels kill people slowly, which makes them politically expedient. Nuclear + wind and hydroelectric is probably our best bet for the next few decades.
A lot of "power users" use email programs like Thunderbird. I know that a lot of people like Google's approach to threads in Gmail, but to be perfectly honest I prefer a tree view, particularly on busy mailing lists where conversations often fork. I also don't know of any webmail clients that discourage top posting, nor any which have decent Usenet support (yes, there are still good conversations on technical topics on Usenet). There is also the issue of being unable to use PGP or S/MIME with your webmail, excepting a few cheap hacks like FireGPG (yes, it is a cheap hack) and snake-oil solutions like Hushmail.
On the other hand, if you are simulation a brain, I suspect that you don't really need to have fast communication between any two nodes; localized subclusters should communicate quickly, with slower communication between clusters. This wouldn't work for *all* problems, but for the specific problem they mentioned it seems to be a workable solution.
So the method is common in notebooks today... meaning it has been in wide use for at least a few years now. The patent holder just waited until everyone had committed to selling that design, so that they could just sue everyone. Submarine patent tactics if I ever saw them.
Not likely; have you ever dealt with people in the real world? Most people are still struggling to figure out their computers, and the fact that they keep buying more computers with more complex software doesn't help. It also doesn't help that people are being forced to learn new models of personal computing every few years; by the time they have figured out the way people started doing things five years ago, everything has changed and they have to start again. Couple this with that fact that most of these people have little interest in actually learning about their computers, and you have your standard "check if it is plugged in" level tech support calls.
On the other hand, the ability of Watson to augment a live human at a call center should be considered. On several occasions, I have been transferred from one person to another because the first few people had no clue what I was asking about -- "You want to do what with your cell phone? What's GSM? Do you want to buy a 3G plan?" It would be very helpful if something Watson could help them understand what it is that is being asked, and perhaps provide some sort of answers.
Now, I may be overly optimistic about the way that Watson will ultimately be used, but that is another story entirely. Watson is not necessarily a bad idea for those situations where a less-than-knowledgeable person is forced to deal with a technical question from a customer (and I really cannot be the only person in the world who asks technical questions).
Most people have no concept of their freedoms, and cannot think far enough into the future to imagine how giving up their rights could possibly be a bad thing. When the FBI/NSA/DEA says, "we are only going to use this power to keep you safe from those dangerous people," most Americans accept that explanation and even go as far as to defend the agencies that are undermining their rights. There is something of an assumption that there is no way that law enforcement or espionage agencies would ever abuse the power they are given.
Simply put, law enforcement agencies wanted many of the provisions in the PATRIOT act years before it was passed, but nobody was willing to go that far. Then we were attacked by terrorists, and suddenly the political climate changed and the concerns about undermining our constitutional rights magically disappeared. Now that law enforcement has the power they wanted, they are not going to give it up without a fight.
The word "Linux" can be used to describe just the kernel alone, or the GNU/Linux (to use Stallman's nomenclature, which Linus Torvalds rejects) system in general
Android and TiVo demonstrate why Stallman is right on this issue. Nobody can deny that Android and TiVo are using Linux as a kernel, but the userland is completely different and certainly isn't GNU. Gone are the days when you could assume that any computer running Linux would also be running GNU.
That's what the author meant, and most people (who even know what Linux is in the first place) take as understood.
Most people on/. -- not most people in general. People may have heard of "Linux," not know exactly what it is, then hear "ANDROID IS LINUX" and immediately think that it must be the same as Fedora or Ubuntu. That kind of confusion is not a good thing for anyone.
That might not matter quite as much as you think. Do you only have nonsense conversations with your contacts on Facebook? Do people only post nonsense messages on your "wall?" Do you only click on random links? Facebook collects a lot more information than what you overtly give them.
For a dating site, would you say the women are the product, and the men are the customers?
No, but for a cattle farm I would say that cows are the product. The farmers feed and generally take care of the herd, but nobody would claim that there is some kind of "tit for tat" relationship.
Out of curiosity, what if the US and the UK were targeting websites that were spreading computer viruses, or websites that were used as command-and-control points for viruses?
It would still be bad. Governments should not be filtering Internet communications, nor should they be enforcing their laws in other countries.
They should not be. How do you prove that a particular person was the person who clicked on "I Agree?" It is not like you have a copy of a contract, with the person's signature on it.
How about the fact that copyrighted DVDs frequently come with "structure" DRM, in an attempt to discourage ripping (which is legitimate for personal use e.g. to play a movie on a tablet that doesn't have a DVD drive)? Or the fact that DVD players are designed to force people to watch certain tracks on the DVD before they can see the actual feature? Or the fact that DVD players refuse to play DVDs from different "regions?"
With DVDs alone, there are plenty of reasons that a person might opt to download "pirated" copies instead of dealing with the hassle themselves.
Yeah I should have been a bit clearer; that was a worst-case estimate. It is closer to ten to the thirteenth years by my calculations, but that is still far beyond the limits of practicality.
if somebody else made something, they have a say over how it's used,
"Made something" -- you mean like, if I made a hammer and sold it to you, I could dictate how you use it? Oh, wait, we are not talking about making "something," we are talking about copyright law, which restricts the ability of people to speak freely (yeah, that does include repeating what someone else told you i.e. making a copy). The point of that restriction is to encourage artists and writers; nobody has a natural right to copyrights, it is just a compromise that was originally intended (in America) to ensure that people would have access to literature, art, and so forth.
3DES can offer up to 112 bits of security; even your GPU could check one key per nanosecond with 10000-way parallelism, you are looking at something to the effect of 16464665330209 years of work to do a brute force key search.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean that when all those people were warning us about how all that surveillance could be abused, how all the increases in police power could wind up being a problem, they were right? WOW!
Simplified Chinese is more common, at least judging by what my Chinese friends write (I have been trying to learn how to read and write Mandarin for a few months, and my friends have been helpful).
Stop perpetuating the Bitcoin scam please.
Yes, if you know what you are doing. The problem with straight razors is not how close of a shave you get, it is the amount of practice one needs to get it right. There is a reason that "safety razors" are so named.
The end of the Internet as we knew it happened years ago, when it became so heavily commercialized. This is just another drop in an already near-full bucket.
Things like solar and will will eventually become economical
The problem with solar power is that producing a state of the art solar cell requires almost as much energy as the cell will gather over its entire useful lifespan. If I were going to point to a "green" source of energy, I would point to wind; a wind turbine is much less energy-intensive to produce, and you can augment with with nuclear power to cover low-wind periods.
In any case, Gates was spot on when he pointed out that fossil fuels kill people slowly, which makes them politically expedient. Nuclear + wind and hydroelectric is probably our best bet for the next few decades.
A lot of "power users" use email programs like Thunderbird. I know that a lot of people like Google's approach to threads in Gmail, but to be perfectly honest I prefer a tree view, particularly on busy mailing lists where conversations often fork. I also don't know of any webmail clients that discourage top posting, nor any which have decent Usenet support (yes, there are still good conversations on technical topics on Usenet). There is also the issue of being unable to use PGP or S/MIME with your webmail, excepting a few cheap hacks like FireGPG (yes, it is a cheap hack) and snake-oil solutions like Hushmail.
On the other hand, if you are simulation a brain, I suspect that you don't really need to have fast communication between any two nodes; localized subclusters should communicate quickly, with slower communication between clusters. This wouldn't work for *all* problems, but for the specific problem they mentioned it seems to be a workable solution.
So the method is common in notebooks today... meaning it has been in wide use for at least a few years now. The patent holder just waited until everyone had committed to selling that design, so that they could just sue everyone. Submarine patent tactics if I ever saw them.
Not likely; have you ever dealt with people in the real world? Most people are still struggling to figure out their computers, and the fact that they keep buying more computers with more complex software doesn't help. It also doesn't help that people are being forced to learn new models of personal computing every few years; by the time they have figured out the way people started doing things five years ago, everything has changed and they have to start again. Couple this with that fact that most of these people have little interest in actually learning about their computers, and you have your standard "check if it is plugged in" level tech support calls.
With software written by Indians!
On the other hand, the ability of Watson to augment a live human at a call center should be considered. On several occasions, I have been transferred from one person to another because the first few people had no clue what I was asking about -- "You want to do what with your cell phone? What's GSM? Do you want to buy a 3G plan?" It would be very helpful if something Watson could help them understand what it is that is being asked, and perhaps provide some sort of answers.
Now, I may be overly optimistic about the way that Watson will ultimately be used, but that is another story entirely. Watson is not necessarily a bad idea for those situations where a less-than-knowledgeable person is forced to deal with a technical question from a customer (and I really cannot be the only person in the world who asks technical questions).
Most people have no concept of their freedoms, and cannot think far enough into the future to imagine how giving up their rights could possibly be a bad thing. When the FBI/NSA/DEA says, "we are only going to use this power to keep you safe from those dangerous people," most Americans accept that explanation and even go as far as to defend the agencies that are undermining their rights. There is something of an assumption that there is no way that law enforcement or espionage agencies would ever abuse the power they are given.
Simply put, law enforcement agencies wanted many of the provisions in the PATRIOT act years before it was passed, but nobody was willing to go that far. Then we were attacked by terrorists, and suddenly the political climate changed and the concerns about undermining our constitutional rights magically disappeared. Now that law enforcement has the power they wanted, they are not going to give it up without a fight.
The word "Linux" can be used to describe just the kernel alone, or the GNU/Linux (to use Stallman's nomenclature, which Linus Torvalds rejects) system in general
Android and TiVo demonstrate why Stallman is right on this issue. Nobody can deny that Android and TiVo are using Linux as a kernel, but the userland is completely different and certainly isn't GNU. Gone are the days when you could assume that any computer running Linux would also be running GNU.
That's what the author meant, and most people (who even know what Linux is in the first place) take as understood.
Most people on /. -- not most people in general. People may have heard of "Linux," not know exactly what it is, then hear "ANDROID IS LINUX" and immediately think that it must be the same as Fedora or Ubuntu. That kind of confusion is not a good thing for anyone.
That might not matter quite as much as you think. Do you only have nonsense conversations with your contacts on Facebook? Do people only post nonsense messages on your "wall?" Do you only click on random links? Facebook collects a lot more information than what you overtly give them.
For a dating site, would you say the women are the product, and the men are the customers?
No, but for a cattle farm I would say that cows are the product. The farmers feed and generally take care of the herd, but nobody would claim that there is some kind of "tit for tat" relationship.
Out of curiosity, what if the US and the UK were targeting websites that were spreading computer viruses, or websites that were used as command-and-control points for viruses?
It would still be bad. Governments should not be filtering Internet communications, nor should they be enforcing their laws in other countries.
what do you think about EULAs being binding?
They should not be. How do you prove that a particular person was the person who clicked on "I Agree?" It is not like you have a copy of a contract, with the person's signature on it.
With a half a billion Facebook users, a story about someone who is trying to wrest control of the system from Mark Zuckerberg seems newsworthy.
How about the fact that copyrighted DVDs frequently come with "structure" DRM, in an attempt to discourage ripping (which is legitimate for personal use e.g. to play a movie on a tablet that doesn't have a DVD drive)? Or the fact that DVD players are designed to force people to watch certain tracks on the DVD before they can see the actual feature? Or the fact that DVD players refuse to play DVDs from different "regions?"
With DVDs alone, there are plenty of reasons that a person might opt to download "pirated" copies instead of dealing with the hassle themselves.
Didn't we learn our lesson the last time? Are we really going to go down this road again?
Yeah I should have been a bit clearer; that was a worst-case estimate. It is closer to ten to the thirteenth years by my calculations, but that is still far beyond the limits of practicality.
is the ability to copy something an inaliable right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech
if somebody else made something, they have a say over how it's used,
"Made something" -- you mean like, if I made a hammer and sold it to you, I could dictate how you use it? Oh, wait, we are not talking about making "something," we are talking about copyright law, which restricts the ability of people to speak freely (yeah, that does include repeating what someone else told you i.e. making a copy). The point of that restriction is to encourage artists and writers; nobody has a natural right to copyrights, it is just a compromise that was originally intended (in America) to ensure that people would have access to literature, art, and so forth.
3DES can offer up to 112 bits of security; even your GPU could check one key per nanosecond with 10000-way parallelism, you are looking at something to the effect of 16464665330209 years of work to do a brute force key search.