No technological countermeasures are going to keep a source's identity from being known to the reporter himself, and for that reporter a refusal to testify could be damning. It wouldn't be difficult, however, to set up a system to circumvent court orders to turn over documents or files.
A previous poster mentioned serving the data from offshore. This is a good start, but there's nothing to stop a court from ordering you to access the data and turn it over. Better would be for the EFF, perhaps, and a consortium of newspapers to hire an attorney to watch over the data and give him discretion to withhold it from the owners of the data. Having an explicit agreement to turn over the data could be construed, perhaps, as obstructing justice before the fact (which would be an interesting case to try), but trusting the host's judgement with a wink and a nod could solve a lot of issues. As long as you have control over the data, it's your ass on the line. As soon as you relinquish it, it's somebody else's problem. And if that somebody else is out of the jurisdiction, it's nobody's problem.
I see some features that will tie in well with this. It already makes Local Search a lot more handy. I could see Google using aggregated GSM phone locator signals to forecast traffic patterns and then, after asking you when you intend to start and end your trip (so it can route you around traffic), estimating when you'll want to eat lunch, etc, so that bricks-and-mortar restaurants, gas stations on the selected route can pay for advertising - it's one segment of the economy Google has not yet touched.
The only PC I've killed was through old-fashioned physical trauma -- I was moving out of my dorm room sophomore year and, as I hate moving more than anything, wanted to speed up the process a bit. Seeing that a graduating senior had left a twin-size bed skirt, I had an insight: I would lay the bed skirt out on the (carpeted) floor, pile all my stuff on the bed skirt, and then slide everything along, pulling the edge of the skirt. It worked beautifully -- I maneuvered it into and out of the elevator, even -- until i got the the door of my building, when the corner of a box hit the door jamb, pitching my PC onto the (decidedly not carpeted) sidewalk. Cracked motherboard, dead CPU. RIP.
This program seems to do a good job of providing a framework for inventors/discoverers to decide what rights they can assign related to their inventions/discoveries. In many cases, though, abdicating exclusive rights to a discovery would amount to ensuring that the fruits of your research never do any actual good -- sure redundant or obvious software patents inhibit advances in computing fields. But biotech patents, even if they're based on our own DNA, are essential if any biotech-based cure is ever to make it to market.
It's one thing for a scientist (or programmer) to have donated his time and creativity and renounce the rights to patent from his discovery. It's quite another to hope that pharmaceutical companies will forfeit their rights to exclusivity, plant workers will donate their time to manufacture, shippers will donate space on their trucks, attorneys will donate their time to ensure regulatory approval, and investors will look the other way while it happens. It's fine to argue that patents hinder innovation in a lot of sectors -- but in biotech, given the expense incurred getting anything to the point where it could treat/cure anyone, GPLing a promising discovery will ensure that it will never benefit anyone.
Case in point: we've known for decades that "good" cholesterol helps cancel out bad cholesterol and prevent arterial plaque from accumulating. Why not just put "good cholesterol" in a pill? Because it's a commodity. Everyone can do it, so no one does. Instead you have drugs like statins that do the same thing in a much more roundabout way -- and everyone is worse of because of it.
that there is a greater variation in a number of traits among males than females. For example, there are more males at the very top end of the IQ scale than females -- but also many more males at the bottom, as well. The result is that male and female IQ scores end up averaging out.
That said, what Dr. Summers said is neither new nor controversial. Pinker wrote about it in Blank Slate almost 10 years ago, if I recall, and studies showing that females have much better language skills than males have been around for some time. As we're all exposed to language, I find it hard to argue that females are better at using it than males because they are socially channelled into doing so.
Incidentally, studies on gay men and lesbians found that they tend to have aptitudes more like those of the opposite sex than is normal for their genders (males better with words than straight men, lesbians better with math, spacial relationships than the average straight woman).
The difference is that, while a court ruling might have been able to prohibit the widespread importation and sale of VCRs, stamping out filesharing is (I'll go out on a limb here) impossible. The record companies are wasting a lot of money suing companies for the benefit of, having won, having to contend with the Freenets of the world.
Remember, at the time this treaty was signed space was still very much a frontier. It was more than reasonable not to want military endeavors to derail lunar exploration or peaceful scientific research. It was also in everybody's interest not to do something like allow nuclear weapons to be stationed on satellites, because it would have been much more difficult to differentiate between a nuclear decapitation strike from orbit and, say, a meteor. Neither of these is an issue with the proposal to put anti-satellite weapons into space and, for what it's worth, I think it's a good idea. Even the Iranians now have photo sats.
If space isn't a huge issue, you could consider using water tanks for their thermal mass. If you keep the house heated most of the time, the water temperature will stay constant even if it's not directly heated. If the power goes out, the water's thermal mass will slow down the cooling process considerably. Ditto the heating, if your power goes out in the summer.
Finger length ratios have also been tied to sexual orientation -- homosexual men (like myself) tend to have longer index fingers relative to their ring fingers, whereas lesbians have more typically male finger length ratios. Which actually makes me wonder whether the reason the estrogen-enhanced researchers, etc, might be having fewer children (as mentioned in TFA) because more of them are gay.
As I recall, research has also found that sex-atypical finger length ratios and homosexuality both were more prevalent in chess masters and mathematicians than in the general population. Why, if the pre-natal androgens are operative in both cases, gays seem to be so good at dressing and mathematicians, researchers and chessmasters so bad, I can't begin to guess.
Given how little it costs to register a domain name, one shouldn't be surprised that Google is shotgunning the DNS for names and products they never intend to market. Still, I don't know how in the loop we should assume Doerr is. His string theory parallel in TFA was pained and stupid. VCs are worse than marketroids at this stuff -- I've met my share, and if they didn't have the money to suck in entrepreneurs that actually know what they're doing, I suspect most of them would be in middle management. Schlock.
I seem to recall hearing that one of the biggest challenges in building a space vehicles, and one of the biggest components weight-wise, is the windows. IIRC, one of the Japanese companies developed a TV screen with resolution so high it was virtually indistinguishable from reality. What about wallpapering the inside of the craft with these and leaving cameras outside?
One of the big reasons TV doesn't look realistic is that we can't change our focus between the foreground and the background -- but everything here would be so far away it shouldn't matter. And it would save a lot of engineering hassle, it seems, if not weight (because the TVs would weigh something, of course)
Google 'Yellowstone volcano.' In one of the two or three times I favored my intro to geology class with my presence, my professor explained that much of Yellowstone National Park is the caldera of a giant volcano, according to him the largest on earth, hence the geysers and sulfurous springs. If it were to erupt again -- fortunately it does so rarely, about once every 600k years -- it would cover most of the Western US in ash and if it did so without warning, would kill millions of people.
I read a few years ago about research into microshutters to protect against laser attacks on satellites. A lot of countries, the US and China included, are working on anti-missile lasers that could just as easily be used to blind intel sats. These shutters would be unobstrusive in profile (like looking through a chain-link fence, say), but would flip into place to block sensors from damage if a laser attack were detected. This would probably be the type of fix people would look for, rather than blocking out specific frequencies, say.
"IBM's new system nudges past a nearly three-year-old computer speed record of 35.86 "teraflops," or trillions of calculations per second, with a working speed of 36.01 teraflops....The current record-holder, known as the Earth Simulator, is a supercomputer in Yokohama, Japan, designed to simulate earthquakes."
Won't it be great when IBM announces that they built Blue Gene to simulate Japanese earthquakes? Neener neener.
The reason there are so many more readers of management books than there are good managers is that a huge part of being a good manager is understanding and empathizing with people, whether those people are above or below you hierarchically. These simulations may teach good business strategy, but they certainly cannot teach good interpersonal relations, which for the forseeable future is going to be a humans-only endeavor.
Ultimately I think this is like writing classes --you can teach someone to write grammatically, but it is a much tougher thing to teach him to write well, and an impossible thing to teach him to be creative or inspired. Either you've got the spark or you don't.
There are some cases in which being able to patent something is the only way a company will invest the time or resources to develop. Take as an example Esperion Pharmaceuticals, who developed a drug that will save me from all the cheeseburgers I've been eating.
Scientists have known for years that merely injecting someone with "good" cholesterol could help ease congestive heart failure, but because it's something we all produce anyway, it couldn't be patented and nobody was willing to spend the money to manufacture a low-margin commodity.
Somebody noticed, though, that residents of a small town in Italy died with baby-smooth arteries and almost never had heart attacks. A researcher found that they produced a mutant form of cholesterol that functioned like "drano for the arteries." Because it was a mutated form, it was patentable, and the researcher sold out to Esperion, which Pfizer bought within months for more than a billion dollars.
I think people on here, understandably, are coming at this from a software background. There is really no other industry, though, where innovation comes as cheaply and easily. MS et al. have definitely abused the system, but it might be a better idea to militate for software-specific patent reform than for patent reform more generally, as 20 years is not a lot of time in some industries (the airline industry comes to mind, where it takes more than a decade to produce a new passenger jet) to recover the costs of innovation. Another benefit is that the longer the patent lifespan, the longer the period a company has to amortize its R&D costs, and the less they have to charge up-front.
Mapquest and Terraserver et al have been offering up USGS satellite photos for years. What they're proposing to do here is not a more intensive form of surveillance, but a more complete job of mapping. All the information retreived by this system, AFAIK, would just be used to construct, say, 3D models of public buildings and cities, all of which information is easily available to the average pedestrian.
The NIMBY thing is particularly tragic because the Yucca Mountain debate is painted as though, because the site isn't 100% safe, we shouldn't store our waste there, as though our waste were currently stored in some kind of interdimensional X-zone, instead of spread around the country in vast stretches of poorly defended and leaky containment vessels. Yucca may not be 100% stable -- but it's orders of magnitude more stable than the system we have in place now.
Given that corporations are the biggest users of VoIP right now, and given that it takes a burning-bush level miracle to get in touch with a human person at most large corps, I imagine most of this will be computerized voices yammering at each other for minutes on end. "Thank you for calling Bank of America." A: "Free trial of Viagra, no commitments" B: "For information about your account, press one now."
Remember that the people who try to use Google News -- or any other news service -- to get "subversive" news make up a much larger portion of "Chinese society" than those who worked with Google to cripple the service. They are showing respect for the Chinese government, not Chinese society or the Chinese people.
The latter part of the quote brings up a good point -- that everyone assumes that someone else is doing the security auditing. When I learned CPR, the first thing the instructor told us was never to say "Somebody call 911" to a group of gawkers, but to point to a specific gawker and say, "You -- call 911."
Why not a meta-auditing system after slashdot's model for open-source software?
The article fails to consider that, even if open source software has more than vulnerabilities than closed source, those who find such a vulnerability are more likely to publish a fix than an exploit.
Slashdot Mirror
No technological countermeasures are going to keep a source's identity from being known to the reporter himself, and for that reporter a refusal to testify could be damning. It wouldn't be difficult, however, to set up a system to circumvent court orders to turn over documents or files.
A previous poster mentioned serving the data from offshore. This is a good start, but there's nothing to stop a court from ordering you to access the data and turn it over. Better would be for the EFF, perhaps, and a consortium of newspapers to hire an attorney to watch over the data and give him discretion to withhold it from the owners of the data. Having an explicit agreement to turn over the data could be construed, perhaps, as obstructing justice before the fact (which would be an interesting case to try), but trusting the host's judgement with a wink and a nod could solve a lot of issues. As long as you have control over the data, it's your ass on the line. As soon as you relinquish it, it's somebody else's problem. And if that somebody else is out of the jurisdiction, it's nobody's problem.
I see some features that will tie in well with this. It already makes Local Search a lot more handy. I could see Google using aggregated GSM phone locator signals to forecast traffic patterns and then, after asking you when you intend to start and end your trip (so it can route you around traffic), estimating when you'll want to eat lunch, etc, so that bricks-and-mortar restaurants, gas stations on the selected route can pay for advertising - it's one segment of the economy Google has not yet touched.
The only PC I've killed was through old-fashioned physical trauma -- I was moving out of my dorm room sophomore year and, as I hate moving more than anything, wanted to speed up the process a bit. Seeing that a graduating senior had left a twin-size bed skirt, I had an insight: I would lay the bed skirt out on the (carpeted) floor, pile all my stuff on the bed skirt, and then slide everything along, pulling the edge of the skirt. It worked beautifully -- I maneuvered it into and out of the elevator, even -- until i got the the door of my building, when the corner of a box hit the door jamb, pitching my PC onto the (decidedly not carpeted) sidewalk. Cracked motherboard, dead CPU. RIP.
This program seems to do a good job of providing a framework for inventors/discoverers to decide what rights they can assign related to their inventions/discoveries. In many cases, though, abdicating exclusive rights to a discovery would amount to ensuring that the fruits of your research never do any actual good -- sure redundant or obvious software patents inhibit advances in computing fields. But biotech patents, even if they're based on our own DNA, are essential if any biotech-based cure is ever to make it to market.
It's one thing for a scientist (or programmer) to have donated his time and creativity and renounce the rights to patent from his discovery. It's quite another to hope that pharmaceutical companies will forfeit their rights to exclusivity, plant workers will donate their time to manufacture, shippers will donate space on their trucks, attorneys will donate their time to ensure regulatory approval, and investors will look the other way while it happens. It's fine to argue that patents hinder innovation in a lot of sectors -- but in biotech, given the expense incurred getting anything to the point where it could treat/cure anyone, GPLing a promising discovery will ensure that it will never benefit anyone.
Case in point: we've known for decades that "good" cholesterol helps cancel out bad cholesterol and prevent arterial plaque from accumulating. Why not just put "good cholesterol" in a pill? Because it's a commodity. Everyone can do it, so no one does. Instead you have drugs like statins that do the same thing in a much more roundabout way -- and everyone is worse of because of it.
that there is a greater variation in a number of traits among males than females. For example, there are more males at the very top end of the IQ scale than females -- but also many more males at the bottom, as well. The result is that male and female IQ scores end up averaging out.
That said, what Dr. Summers said is neither new nor controversial. Pinker wrote about it in Blank Slate almost 10 years ago, if I recall, and studies showing that females have much better language skills than males have been around for some time. As we're all exposed to language, I find it hard to argue that females are better at using it than males because they are socially channelled into doing so.
Incidentally, studies on gay men and lesbians found that they tend to have aptitudes more like those of the opposite sex than is normal for their genders (males better with words than straight men, lesbians better with math, spacial relationships than the average straight woman).
for people to peel off when they're drunk.
The difference is that, while a court ruling might have been able to prohibit the widespread importation and sale of VCRs, stamping out filesharing is (I'll go out on a limb here) impossible. The record companies are wasting a lot of money suing companies for the benefit of, having won, having to contend with the Freenets of the world.
Remember, at the time this treaty was signed space was still very much a frontier. It was more than reasonable not to want military endeavors to derail lunar exploration or peaceful scientific research. It was also in everybody's interest not to do something like allow nuclear weapons to be stationed on satellites, because it would have been much more difficult to differentiate between a nuclear decapitation strike from orbit and, say, a meteor. Neither of these is an issue with the proposal to put anti-satellite weapons into space and, for what it's worth, I think it's a good idea. Even the Iranians now have photo sats.
If space isn't a huge issue, you could consider using water tanks for their thermal mass. If you keep the house heated most of the time, the water temperature will stay constant even if it's not directly heated. If the power goes out, the water's thermal mass will slow down the cooling process considerably. Ditto the heating, if your power goes out in the summer.
Finger length ratios have also been tied to sexual orientation -- homosexual men (like myself) tend to have longer index fingers relative to their ring fingers, whereas lesbians have more typically male finger length ratios. Which actually makes me wonder whether the reason the estrogen-enhanced researchers, etc, might be having fewer children (as mentioned in TFA) because more of them are gay.
As I recall, research has also found that sex-atypical finger length ratios and homosexuality both were more prevalent in chess masters and mathematicians than in the general population. Why, if the pre-natal androgens are operative in both cases, gays seem to be so good at dressing and mathematicians, researchers and chessmasters so bad, I can't begin to guess.
Given how little it costs to register a domain name, one shouldn't be surprised that Google is shotgunning the DNS for names and products they never intend to market. Still, I don't know how in the loop we should assume Doerr is. His string theory parallel in TFA was pained and stupid. VCs are worse than marketroids at this stuff -- I've met my share, and if they didn't have the money to suck in entrepreneurs that actually know what they're doing, I suspect most of them would be in middle management. Schlock.
I seem to recall hearing that one of the biggest challenges in building a space vehicles, and one of the biggest components weight-wise, is the windows. IIRC, one of the Japanese companies developed a TV screen with resolution so high it was virtually indistinguishable from reality. What about wallpapering the inside of the craft with these and leaving cameras outside?
One of the big reasons TV doesn't look realistic is that we can't change our focus between the foreground and the background -- but everything here would be so far away it shouldn't matter. And it would save a lot of engineering hassle, it seems, if not weight (because the TVs would weigh something, of course)
Google 'Yellowstone volcano.' In one of the two or three times I favored my intro to geology class with my presence, my professor explained that much of Yellowstone National Park is the caldera of a giant volcano, according to him the largest on earth, hence the geysers and sulfurous springs. If it were to erupt again -- fortunately it does so rarely, about once every 600k years -- it would cover most of the Western US in ash and if it did so without warning, would kill millions of people.
I read a few years ago about research into microshutters to protect against laser attacks on satellites. A lot of countries, the US and China included, are working on anti-missile lasers that could just as easily be used to blind intel sats. These shutters would be unobstrusive in profile (like looking through a chain-link fence, say), but would flip into place to block sensors from damage if a laser attack were detected. This would probably be the type of fix people would look for, rather than blocking out specific frequencies, say.
From the Washington Post article:
"IBM's new system nudges past a nearly three-year-old computer speed record of 35.86 "teraflops," or trillions of calculations per second, with a working speed of 36.01 teraflops....The current record-holder, known as the Earth Simulator, is a supercomputer in Yokohama, Japan, designed to simulate earthquakes."
Won't it be great when IBM announces that they built Blue Gene to simulate Japanese earthquakes? Neener neener.
The reason there are so many more readers of management books than there are good managers is that a huge part of being a good manager is understanding and empathizing with people, whether those people are above or below you hierarchically. These simulations may teach good business strategy, but they certainly cannot teach good interpersonal relations, which for the forseeable future is going to be a humans-only endeavor.
Ultimately I think this is like writing classes --you can teach someone to write grammatically, but it is a much tougher thing to teach him to write well, and an impossible thing to teach him to be creative or inspired. Either you've got the spark or you don't.
There are some cases in which being able to patent something is the only way a company will invest the time or resources to develop. Take as an example Esperion Pharmaceuticals, who developed a drug that will save me from all the cheeseburgers I've been eating.
Scientists have known for years that merely injecting someone with "good" cholesterol could help ease congestive heart failure, but because it's something we all produce anyway, it couldn't be patented and nobody was willing to spend the money to manufacture a low-margin commodity.
Somebody noticed, though, that residents of a small town in Italy died with baby-smooth arteries and almost never had heart attacks. A researcher found that they produced a mutant form of cholesterol that functioned like "drano for the arteries." Because it was a mutated form, it was patentable, and the researcher sold out to Esperion, which Pfizer bought within months for more than a billion dollars.
I think people on here, understandably, are coming at this from a software background. There is really no other industry, though, where innovation comes as cheaply and easily. MS et al. have definitely abused the system, but it might be a better idea to militate for software-specific patent reform than for patent reform more generally, as 20 years is not a lot of time in some industries (the airline industry comes to mind, where it takes more than a decade to produce a new passenger jet) to recover the costs of innovation. Another benefit is that the longer the patent lifespan, the longer the period a company has to amortize its R&D costs, and the less they have to charge up-front.
Mapquest and Terraserver et al have been offering up USGS satellite photos for years. What they're proposing to do here is not a more intensive form of surveillance, but a more complete job of mapping. All the information retreived by this system, AFAIK, would just be used to construct, say, 3D models of public buildings and cities, all of which information is easily available to the average pedestrian.
The NIMBY thing is particularly tragic because the Yucca Mountain debate is painted as though, because the site isn't 100% safe, we shouldn't store our waste there, as though our waste were currently stored in some kind of interdimensional X-zone, instead of spread around the country in vast stretches of poorly defended and leaky containment vessels. Yucca may not be 100% stable -- but it's orders of magnitude more stable than the system we have in place now.
Given that corporations are the biggest users of VoIP right now, and given that it takes a burning-bush level miracle to get in touch with a human person at most large corps, I imagine most of this will be computerized voices yammering at each other for minutes on end. "Thank you for calling Bank of America." A: "Free trial of Viagra, no commitments" B: "For information about your account, press one now."
Remember that the people who try to use Google News -- or any other news service -- to get "subversive" news make up a much larger portion of "Chinese society" than those who worked with Google to cripple the service. They are showing respect for the Chinese government, not Chinese society or the Chinese people.
The latter part of the quote brings up a good point -- that everyone assumes that someone else is doing the security auditing. When I learned CPR, the first thing the instructor told us was never to say "Somebody call 911" to a group of gawkers, but to point to a specific gawker and say, "You -- call 911."
Why not a meta-auditing system after slashdot's model for open-source software?
The article fails to consider that, even if open source software has more than vulnerabilities than closed source, those who find such a vulnerability are more likely to publish a fix than an exploit.