Reading through the article, I'm loving just about everything about this camera, except the most important part of all...the sensor, which is absolutely tiny. Forget about a camera for cinema, with a sensor that size you're going to be struggling to get it not to look like a webcam video. Looking at the company that makes the actual camera element, though, it looks like they also sell a model with a more reasonably sized sensor, but it can only do 5fps. If they really want to pass this thing off as a motion picture camera, they need to find a solution that will give them a big sensor at a respectable frame rate. Hopefully that will be possible in the near future, because the rest of this project looks downright awesome.
...except that MonoDroid is a completely proprietary platform, and I don't know about you, but this free software developer likes to keep his software running on free systems.
You're kidding, right? You really shouldn't go around calling other people idiots when you're the one comparing software to a potato. A piece of software is an intellectual work that can be reproduced infinitely at almost 0 cost. A potato is a physical commodity that can be reproduced with almost 0 intellectual effort but at substantial cost. The economics behind the production of products that fundamentally different are as different as...well, as different as a code library is from a friggin' potato.
Regardless of your opinion on copyright, software patents, or free/open-source software, physical commodities and intellectual works are completely, fundamentally different, and calling someone an idiot for treating them like the two distinct concepts that they are is just beautifully ironic.
Well, its likely application is in controlled commercial use, medical imaging and the like I would imagine, so any near-term use will almost certainly be under controlled lighting conditions.
That being said, give 'em five years and they'll probably have it in a 1D churning out noiseless photos at ISO 51200 or some such nonsense. I used to think my 20D's marginally-usable ISO 3200 was pretty darn impressive, and now we've got insanely high res cameras doing 12800 and still looking decent. The way sensor technology keeps improving, I'm not even going to try predicting how far they may get even in the next couple of years, let alone decades down the road...
Oh noes, we're not taking over the world, our evil plan is foiled!
Surely, you don't really think that's what it's all about, do you? Who cares if Windows has more market share? The purpose of free software projects is to produce quality free software, and as long as we continue to do that we could care less whether more people are using it than the proprietary alternative.
"We're trying to figure out what the future of search is," Mr Schmidt said. “One idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type.
"I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."
Surely he jests. I know Google hasn't always been the most steadfast guardian of personal privacy, but coming right out and stating that you want your company to become so intertwined with peoples' lives that it will plan their future for them? That's just creepy...
Of course they wouldn't. If the US really does have "secret assassins and super-spies" all over the world, the last thing they're going to do is let the entire world know about it by conveniently disappearing someone like Julian Assange right after he releases some embarrassing documents. Especially considering that the damage, insomuch as there has been any significant damage, is already done.
If those sorts of agencies really exist, they're not going to be run by idiots. You don't kill the public mouthpiece right after he's revealed some embarrassing secrets, you at least wait until he's been out of the spotlight for a year or two. Of course, if they're smart, they wouldn't kill him at all, since that would in all likelihood just galvanize the rest of the Wikileaks organization to keep doing what they're doing. Realistically, they'd want to find the sources of leaks like these before Wikileaks got involved and make them disappear.
You expected a well-adjusted, polite individual to be behind this secretive organization? Of course he's a narcissistic jerk, just like a lot of other important people who do very important things. The mild-mannered, softly-spoken types just don't get things done the way abrasive jerks do, and personality issues not withstanding, Mr. Assange's organization has accomplished some very impressive feats.
Well, to be pedantic about it, they've become provably secure in a way we hadn't proven before;) The possible is always possible, regardless of whether someone has actually done it yet or not...
Well, if you're willing to start with a premise as flawed as "Piracy = Copyright Infringement," you should be able to derive just about any absurdity you want.
Ignoring that massive untruth, though, you're still repeating an all-too-common fallacy. "You espouse this view, which I disagree with. Other people who I connect you with because I'm incapable of separating different groups of people I disagree with hold a seemingly contradictory view. Therefore you're all hypocrites."
Aside from the fact that commercial copyright infringement and person-to-person file-sharing are not the same thing, you're making the completely unfounded assumption that GPL defenders and file-sharers are all one-and-the same. I write and use free software, and I don't download or otherwise use proprietary software, or "pirate" other content. Sorry to poke a hole in your carefully constructed fantasy world, there...
Sounds like a great way to ensure that everyone makes sure their car gets "stolen" or "destroyed" rather than selling or junking it. Or make odometer hacking more common...
Heh, here I was hoping that I wasn't way off base about cracking AES-256 because I'd get a million replies about how wrong I was...guess I should have done the math first:)
Did no one notice that this guy just proposed initiating an attack---even a nuclear one---against a civilian target of great religious importance in a nation that has never and almost certainly will never attack us? As unreasonable as the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations and a lot of our other foreign policies are, that's just a whole new level of crazy.
Eh, my guess is that if it really is an "insurance" file, then someone involved in whatever department the files pertain to has already received the key, decrypted it, and knows exactly what it is. After all, if you really want to blackmail someone, you don't benefit from keeping the information secret from the person you're trying to blackmail. "I have 1.4GB of very sensitive information but I won't tell you what it is" isn't going to be particularly persuasive when you're trying to stop someone from coming after you. On the other hand, "I have 1.4GB of very sensitive information, it's already on thousands or millions of people's computers, and here's the key so you can see what it really is" carries an awful lot of weight if it's really something you don't want people to see. And the beauty of posting it in encrypted form is that if whoever holds this particular insurance policy decides to call it into effect, the US government has to prevent not the dissemination of a 1.4GB file (which would be nigh-well impossible anyways) but a 256 bit key, and we've all seen how well trying to stop people from sharing a single hexadecimal string worked out for the HD-DVD folks;) Of course, there's also the danger that the public could get together and crack your key with distributed computing, and then you lose your leverage...
Please, society, produce a Bieber who's famous for something other than being an idiotic teen popstar. If he stays in the limelight, I'm going to have to stop identifying myself in public:(
The same way they would begin to think about committing code from an American company into the mainstream Linux kernel? The fact that the Chinese government carries out some nefarious business doesn't mean that each and every one of the billion-plus Chinese citizens is out to get us. Besides, it's not like we're just accepting arbitrary binary blobs here: contributions to the kernel are human-readable source code that the tinfoil hat crowd is perfectly welcome to pore over in detail...
...because I copy code that others have explicitly given me permission to copy without paying them royalties, the same way I allow others to copy my code? If there's already a good solution to the problem you're trying to solve that you can use with an include statement, why in the world wouldn't you? How could you possibly consider it productive to needlessly duplicate someone else's work when you could be busy building something new and useful of your own? Regardless, patents have nothing to do with copying code, but rather with implementing algorithms.
If a problem has been solved, the only reason you would want a different one is if it does a better job at solving that problem (or if you find it amusing to find a new solution, which is a perfectly valid reason to pursue solutions, but not of any particular benefit to society at large). You may want different solutions for subtly different problems, but if you're dealing with the same problem in either case, the optimal solution will always be optimal.
If I need a data structure that I can allocate dynamically and traverse cheaply in one direction, then I want a singly linked list. If you patent the singly linked list and force me to look for a different solution, I'm not going to find a better one, and it's unlikely that even the most brilliant minds in computer science would find a better solution. What you will end up with are myriad sub-optimal solutions being used all over the place not because it makes any sense to use them, but because no one can use the one that does make sense. In reality, you just end up with things like VP8, which is, as I understand it, remarkably similar but slightly inferior to H.264. It does the job, it works well enough, but it's still not quite as good as what it's working around. That's the kind of "innovation" you get from software patents.
Now, as for the good type of innovation you seem to insist can only arise from restrictive licensing of mathematical concepts---more efficient solutions to existing problems, or modified solutions that solve subtly different problems more effectively---we have volumes full of algorithms that constitute exactly those sorts of innovations, and the vast majority of them predate software patents.
Well, I guess having computer scientists spending their days finding new (usually suboptimal) algorithms for already solved problems to skirt the dozens of software patents any given project will likely infringe, rather than doing meaningful new work is an innovative concept, but it's certainly not a productive one.
You're fundamentally misunderstanding patents. If you patent your software technique, that absolutely does prevent me from reimplementing it in a novel way. In fact, that's exactly the purpose of a patent: it prevents your competitors from using your idea. Not your specific implementation, but any implementation of your idea. You think the terms should be much shorter, so how much shorter? How about three years? How great do you think your computing experience would be today if every new idea in computing that's less than three years old was the exclusive property of a single firm and couldn't be reimplemented by competitors (or even F/OSS software, which obviously could never pay license fees on patents)?
Surely, you don't consider the number of pages of reported security vulnerabilities on some website to be a reliable metric for the security of the browser? That doesn't take into account the potential consequences of vulnerabilities, how difficult they are to exploit, how quickly they're patched, or any other meaningful figure. That's like comparing the crime levels of municipalities by the number of police responses in a given time period. If you completely ignore every significant detail about all of the incidents, a small town with a particularly anal police force could look like a hellish den of thieves and murderers.
If they went at it by brute force, anyways. It may not be conceivable to either one of us, but there is always the possibility that they've discovered some mathematical technique that makes the decryption trivial, without having told the rest of the world. Very unlikely, of course, but not impossible...
Perhaps because he/she recognizes the idiocy of software patents, and cares more about doing what's right than their own bank account? I know it's a novel concept, but some people do live for more than just money...
The actual decoding is being done on the card, and the company (at least according to their blog posts) licenses the relevant patents for the card. Since all you're doing in software is sending the card encoded data and getting back processed data, you don't have to worry about patent claims. Not that it isn't BS that the manufacturer has to pay royalties to implement an algorithm on their hardware, but at least it isn't an issue for the users.
Slashdot Mirror
Reading through the article, I'm loving just about everything about this camera, except the most important part of all...the sensor, which is absolutely tiny. Forget about a camera for cinema, with a sensor that size you're going to be struggling to get it not to look like a webcam video. Looking at the company that makes the actual camera element, though, it looks like they also sell a model with a more reasonably sized sensor, but it can only do 5fps. If they really want to pass this thing off as a motion picture camera, they need to find a solution that will give them a big sensor at a respectable frame rate. Hopefully that will be possible in the near future, because the rest of this project looks downright awesome.
...except that MonoDroid is a completely proprietary platform, and I don't know about you, but this free software developer likes to keep his software running on free systems.
You're kidding, right? You really shouldn't go around calling other people idiots when you're the one comparing software to a potato. A piece of software is an intellectual work that can be reproduced infinitely at almost 0 cost. A potato is a physical commodity that can be reproduced with almost 0 intellectual effort but at substantial cost. The economics behind the production of products that fundamentally different are as different as...well, as different as a code library is from a friggin' potato.
Regardless of your opinion on copyright, software patents, or free/open-source software, physical commodities and intellectual works are completely, fundamentally different, and calling someone an idiot for treating them like the two distinct concepts that they are is just beautifully ironic.
Well, its likely application is in controlled commercial use, medical imaging and the like I would imagine, so any near-term use will almost certainly be under controlled lighting conditions.
That being said, give 'em five years and they'll probably have it in a 1D churning out noiseless photos at ISO 51200 or some such nonsense. I used to think my 20D's marginally-usable ISO 3200 was pretty darn impressive, and now we've got insanely high res cameras doing 12800 and still looking decent. The way sensor technology keeps improving, I'm not even going to try predicting how far they may get even in the next couple of years, let alone decades down the road...
Oh noes, we're not taking over the world, our evil plan is foiled!
Surely, you don't really think that's what it's all about, do you? Who cares if Windows has more market share? The purpose of free software projects is to produce quality free software, and as long as we continue to do that we could care less whether more people are using it than the proprietary alternative.
"We're trying to figure out what the future of search is," Mr Schmidt said. “One idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type. "I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."
Surely he jests. I know Google hasn't always been the most steadfast guardian of personal privacy, but coming right out and stating that you want your company to become so intertwined with peoples' lives that it will plan their future for them? That's just creepy...
The plan is to measure voltage generated by water moving around the cables, not current traveling through them.
Of course they wouldn't. If the US really does have "secret assassins and super-spies" all over the world, the last thing they're going to do is let the entire world know about it by conveniently disappearing someone like Julian Assange right after he releases some embarrassing documents. Especially considering that the damage, insomuch as there has been any significant damage, is already done.
If those sorts of agencies really exist, they're not going to be run by idiots. You don't kill the public mouthpiece right after he's revealed some embarrassing secrets, you at least wait until he's been out of the spotlight for a year or two. Of course, if they're smart, they wouldn't kill him at all, since that would in all likelihood just galvanize the rest of the Wikileaks organization to keep doing what they're doing. Realistically, they'd want to find the sources of leaks like these before Wikileaks got involved and make them disappear.
Kind of comes off as a narcissistic jerk here.
You expected a well-adjusted, polite individual to be behind this secretive organization? Of course he's a narcissistic jerk, just like a lot of other important people who do very important things. The mild-mannered, softly-spoken types just don't get things done the way abrasive jerks do, and personality issues not withstanding, Mr. Assange's organization has accomplished some very impressive feats.
Well, to be pedantic about it, they've become provably secure in a way we hadn't proven before ;) The possible is always possible, regardless of whether someone has actually done it yet or not...
Well, if you're willing to start with a premise as flawed as "Piracy = Copyright Infringement," you should be able to derive just about any absurdity you want.
Ignoring that massive untruth, though, you're still repeating an all-too-common fallacy. "You espouse this view, which I disagree with. Other people who I connect you with because I'm incapable of separating different groups of people I disagree with hold a seemingly contradictory view. Therefore you're all hypocrites."
Aside from the fact that commercial copyright infringement and person-to-person file-sharing are not the same thing, you're making the completely unfounded assumption that GPL defenders and file-sharers are all one-and-the same. I write and use free software, and I don't download or otherwise use proprietary software, or "pirate" other content. Sorry to poke a hole in your carefully constructed fantasy world, there...
Sounds like a great way to ensure that everyone makes sure their car gets "stolen" or "destroyed" rather than selling or junking it. Or make odometer hacking more common...
Heh, here I was hoping that I wasn't way off base about cracking AES-256 because I'd get a million replies about how wrong I was...guess I should have done the math first :)
Did no one notice that this guy just proposed initiating an attack---even a nuclear one---against a civilian target of great religious importance in a nation that has never and almost certainly will never attack us? As unreasonable as the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations and a lot of our other foreign policies are, that's just a whole new level of crazy.
Eh, my guess is that if it really is an "insurance" file, then someone involved in whatever department the files pertain to has already received the key, decrypted it, and knows exactly what it is. After all, if you really want to blackmail someone, you don't benefit from keeping the information secret from the person you're trying to blackmail. "I have 1.4GB of very sensitive information but I won't tell you what it is" isn't going to be particularly persuasive when you're trying to stop someone from coming after you. On the other hand, "I have 1.4GB of very sensitive information, it's already on thousands or millions of people's computers, and here's the key so you can see what it really is" carries an awful lot of weight if it's really something you don't want people to see. And the beauty of posting it in encrypted form is that if whoever holds this particular insurance policy decides to call it into effect, the US government has to prevent not the dissemination of a 1.4GB file (which would be nigh-well impossible anyways) but a 256 bit key, and we've all seen how well trying to stop people from sharing a single hexadecimal string worked out for the HD-DVD folks ;) Of course, there's also the danger that the public could get together and crack your key with distributed computing, and then you lose your leverage...
Please, society, produce a Bieber who's famous for something other than being an idiotic teen popstar. If he stays in the limelight, I'm going to have to stop identifying myself in public :(
The same way they would begin to think about committing code from an American company into the mainstream Linux kernel? The fact that the Chinese government carries out some nefarious business doesn't mean that each and every one of the billion-plus Chinese citizens is out to get us. Besides, it's not like we're just accepting arbitrary binary blobs here: contributions to the kernel are human-readable source code that the tinfoil hat crowd is perfectly welcome to pore over in detail...
Surely you jest! Can you imagine the mayhem that would ensue if the terrorists could see the source code to our hospitals? /s
...because I copy code that others have explicitly given me permission to copy without paying them royalties, the same way I allow others to copy my code? If there's already a good solution to the problem you're trying to solve that you can use with an include statement, why in the world wouldn't you? How could you possibly consider it productive to needlessly duplicate someone else's work when you could be busy building something new and useful of your own? Regardless, patents have nothing to do with copying code, but rather with implementing algorithms.
If a problem has been solved, the only reason you would want a different one is if it does a better job at solving that problem (or if you find it amusing to find a new solution, which is a perfectly valid reason to pursue solutions, but not of any particular benefit to society at large). You may want different solutions for subtly different problems, but if you're dealing with the same problem in either case, the optimal solution will always be optimal.
If I need a data structure that I can allocate dynamically and traverse cheaply in one direction, then I want a singly linked list. If you patent the singly linked list and force me to look for a different solution, I'm not going to find a better one, and it's unlikely that even the most brilliant minds in computer science would find a better solution. What you will end up with are myriad sub-optimal solutions being used all over the place not because it makes any sense to use them, but because no one can use the one that does make sense. In reality, you just end up with things like VP8, which is, as I understand it, remarkably similar but slightly inferior to H.264. It does the job, it works well enough, but it's still not quite as good as what it's working around. That's the kind of "innovation" you get from software patents.
Now, as for the good type of innovation you seem to insist can only arise from restrictive licensing of mathematical concepts---more efficient solutions to existing problems, or modified solutions that solve subtly different problems more effectively---we have volumes full of algorithms that constitute exactly those sorts of innovations, and the vast majority of them predate software patents.
Well, I guess having computer scientists spending their days finding new (usually suboptimal) algorithms for already solved problems to skirt the dozens of software patents any given project will likely infringe, rather than doing meaningful new work is an innovative concept, but it's certainly not a productive one.
You're fundamentally misunderstanding patents. If you patent your software technique, that absolutely does prevent me from reimplementing it in a novel way. In fact, that's exactly the purpose of a patent: it prevents your competitors from using your idea. Not your specific implementation, but any implementation of your idea. You think the terms should be much shorter, so how much shorter? How about three years? How great do you think your computing experience would be today if every new idea in computing that's less than three years old was the exclusive property of a single firm and couldn't be reimplemented by competitors (or even F/OSS software, which obviously could never pay license fees on patents)?
Surely, you don't consider the number of pages of reported security vulnerabilities on some website to be a reliable metric for the security of the browser? That doesn't take into account the potential consequences of vulnerabilities, how difficult they are to exploit, how quickly they're patched, or any other meaningful figure. That's like comparing the crime levels of municipalities by the number of police responses in a given time period. If you completely ignore every significant detail about all of the incidents, a small town with a particularly anal police force could look like a hellish den of thieves and murderers.
If they went at it by brute force, anyways. It may not be conceivable to either one of us, but there is always the possibility that they've discovered some mathematical technique that makes the decryption trivial, without having told the rest of the world. Very unlikely, of course, but not impossible...
Perhaps because he/she recognizes the idiocy of software patents, and cares more about doing what's right than their own bank account? I know it's a novel concept, but some people do live for more than just money...
The actual decoding is being done on the card, and the company (at least according to their blog posts) licenses the relevant patents for the card. Since all you're doing in software is sending the card encoded data and getting back processed data, you don't have to worry about patent claims. Not that it isn't BS that the manufacturer has to pay royalties to implement an algorithm on their hardware, but at least it isn't an issue for the users.