Mounting things to light poles is 10,000 times more practical.

For years, we have had a cut-out in ITAR 121 that applies to Open Source, it is due to a lawsuit that Phil Karn brought against the Federal Government. Thus, you can implement with impunity, and export to anywhere, as long as it's Open Source.

Rather than an encryption gateway, having your email client handle encryption avoids the problem of man-in-the-middle attacks between the gateway and the client.

I don't have much reason to encrypt, but Thunderbird has my certificate installed and does my digital signing. This is not unusual for a modern email client.

I think you missed the point. Your bunch of angry students will reform the politics that are so screwed up, thanks in large part to CU. All they have to do is grow up and VOTE. And that doesn't mean voting a straight ticket for either of the current parties in power, it means voting for the person who understands the root of the problem and has a determination to fix it, or becoming that candidate themselves.

But first , in order to do that, the education system baby MUST be thrown out with the dirty bath water. The intelligent child, the one who can think and fix things, is now held back to the lowest speed of learning that the slowest child is capable of. So now we get high school grads who can't read the evening fishwrap, or make change at the fast food window without the computer in the cash register. Their experience in school was the most boring you can imagine.

This is NOT a new phenomenon by any means. It was being imposed on me, and I could see the end result forming in my own mind in the late '40's when they had decided to remove phonics from the system, lock, stock and even its roots were excised, although I did get that as one of the last to get it in the early 40's. So what did I do? First I tried to sit in on the high school senior physics class as a freshman, but that blew up when I corrected the teacher about Newtons 3rd Law. IMNSHO that was so damned basic he should have been fired for incompetence. So I could see that my education was essentially frozen in time, but that wasn't me. I still had lots to learn and knew that in my field of interest, I likely would never stop learning until I wasn't able to any more. My field of interest? Radio, then tv, electronics in general, and now for the last 35 years, computers.

So I quit, and with only an 8th grade diploma, I started fixing radio's then tv's for a living. Switching to specialize in broadcasting in the early 60's by passing the 1st Phone test, by then I already had fingerprints in places only a few others could claim as I helped build the tv cameras that were on the Trieste when it went down into the mohole in Feb 1960.

Since that time, the sign on the office door has said Chief Engineer most of the time, and I am also a Certified Electronics Technician since '72. I'd heard, while I was the EIC at KXNE, that the community college was testing for that as a passing grade for a 2 year course they were teaching, so I walked in and plunked down the money and sat for the test, passing it with a good enough grade I could skip the apprenticeship requirements, while down with the flu & never cracked a study guide. All that stuff came easy for me. It started at 1:15PM, and I noted that when I turned in the test at 2pm, eyebrows went up and he asked if I was sure? Sure as I'll ever be. He said most don't finish the test in the 3 hours allocated. I said I'm not most. 10 days later I had a card from the N.E.C., and that got me more respect than the 1st Phone ever did.

Now retired and 78 YO, I am proof that being good at electronic ditch digging has its rewards. Not a millionaire, but I have enough, and I don't owe anybody a cent except yearly taxes etc. And I keep busy, currently building the stuff to put a 3x stronger, servo controlled motor in my table top, and cnc converted lathe, with my already cnc'd (by me) table top milling machine.

Keeps me out of the bars don'tcha know. :)

Education is great, but I have met university profs who, when discussing relativity, did not believe it was a phenomenon, a source of distortion in a UHF tv transmitter employing klystron amplifiers. Those folks amaze me, having obtained the sheepskin, they stop learning, they know it all! That's BS folks. Living itself is learning.

It is criminal to treat the gifted youngster as a nuisance to be tolerated, and not fed the knowledge being sought, particularly when the teacher is incompetent to teach the subject and teaches it wrong. Fix the educational system to stop that bull shit, and the results of that will fix everything else. It won't be over night, more like 2 generations, and will be accompanied by much kicking and screaming as the incompetents are weeded out, but the net result will be an improved society as a whole.

And that's my $0.02, in 1934 dollars, but you'll need to adjust for inflation since. ;-)

Cheers, Gene

If this fingerprint scanner works as poorly and as slowly as the fingerprint scanner on my Thinkpad, there's no way in hell anyone would want this on a gun.

If on the other hand you want to make sure no one can ever fire the gun, this sounds great.

I'd rather fight about the details of implementation and bureaucracy than continue to allow content producers to completely block some uses, sue people over others, and charge exorbitant fees to those they don't like.

I'm thinking that with compulsory licensing (as I describe it), new business models would be enabled because they don't have to ask permission. It would just be their responsibility to pay the negotiated fee. (and they don't have to do any negotiation at all since it's set on a large scale -- renegotiated periodically by content owner and distributor stake-holders and not set by fiat by one or the other). There would be no "licensing deals", and e.g. movie studios wouldn't be able to discriminate against iTunes, Netflix, Amazon, or TPB.

Payment would mostly be by the honor system, using copyright registrations to figure out who to pay (imagine every file having a "copyright holder" hash in it somewhere that identifies who to pay). I'm sure content owners would use a trade organization (MPAA) to track down non-payers, but they wouldn't be able to sue for more than e.g. 3*(license fee) so no more grandmas with $100,000 bills for 2 songs, and it only would make sense for them to go after large distributors.

Imagine an app that takes a hash of each media file you have, looks it up in a central copyright database, and tells you how much it would cost to copy it all onto your friend's laptop, and it would all be legal. I don't want *enforced* drm-style payment, just decent and legal accounting...there are always exceptions and I don't want to re-buy all my music when my HDD crashes, nor do I want anyone's software to tell me whether what I'm doing is legal or not.

Who said it was a tax? Or that the government was involved? All I meant by "compulsory licensing" is that the owner of content would be legally obligated to grant possession and distribution to any entity that asks, for a fixed fee that is negotiated on a large scale (rather than a negotiated punitive damage in court). I'm imagining this would be privately administered, except that there has to be a law to get it started. E.g. imagine that everything on TPB was explicitly legal, and that TPB was tasked with collecting $1.50 for each movie...

This is a good reason to have content production and distribution handled by different entities. Content producers are paranoid and afraid that everyone will abscond with their special little flower, while content distributors are overly liberal in distributing to as wide an audience as possible. It makes sense for these two groups to fight it out to decide what the best compromise of protection vs. distribution is.

Personally, I want compulsory licensing. Posessing or obtaining content would always be legal, and the question becomes who you're supposed to pay and how much (a non-discriminatory licensing fee). It turns the question into an economic one, instead of a criminal one. An entity distributing content without collecting the licensing fee could be sued, but only for an amount proportional to the licensing fees.

Yes, the German one looks a lot more impressive, with a real person in it (piloting using the remote control) rather than a mannequin.

That is also a possibility. A language barrier of sorts.

I am reminded of a phrase I saw years ago, that said England and America were two great countries, separated by a common language. ;-)

Cheers, Gene

Yes, that is the generally accepted practice, diddled only by the endian-ness of the processor.
Personally I have trouble with big endian hardware, but that's just me. There is no reason it can't work just as well as long as the compiler knows about it. But what little programming I do today is both on smaller cpu's, and in assembly. Or for stuff on this linux box, a bash script seems to work well too.

Cheers, Gene

Where I am talking about the address of the data, which may actually live in any address the hardware can access. So you still aren't fully grokking the concept.

And I am sad because I can't seem to explain it any better.

Cheers, Gene

Then it sounds like you don't understand the term "pointer" either. To summarize a bit, a pointer is usually of a size (number of bits) that is a native size for the hardware at hand, and could be as much as 256 bits in currently working hardware, but typically 64 bits in consumer hardware.

Secondly, it is considered to be (usually) a pointer, which if used as a memory address to be read, would result in the reading of the data at that address.

But there are nuances to what you do with that data, because its possible that the data you just read from that pointers address, is in fact a real address, the pointer, that the next stage of this 'indirection' will be read from.

Hardware is generally limited to just one of these indirections, but software is free to use as many as the programmer can keep track of, with some 'databases' being organized around doing just that for the programmer.

This is not a new concept by any means, it could be done on the early cpu's from 30 to 35 years, maybe even 40 years ago. The 1802 from rca could do it as an assembly macro, so could the dane bramaged Z-80's & 6502's, and the 6809, which could do it in hardware in addition to its Program Counter Relative addressing, made heavy use of that ability nearly 30 years ago. Even the TI-9900, which had only one internal register, used that register as an index into the structure of a register stack held in memory, so that changing context on the 9900 was a simple reload of this register with the master address of the register stack of the next process to be given some time to run. Simple, fast context switches, an architecture that should have had more industry support than it got. I think, because its speed limit was real time memory access, the simplicity of it got thrown out like the baby with the bath water but today's cache memory speeds, right on the die with the cpu, could make the concept workable again. .2 nanosecond IRQ service anyone? But it would likely take several millions of dollars to bring a modern, 64 or 128 bit version of the 9900 to life.

Cheers, Gene

When you win a copyright case you may be awarded your attorneys fees. I can't wait to see YouTube's attorneys fee motion. It's going to make my firm's bills seem like chicken feed.

But the defendant's lawyers have done a great job of beating back the Evil Empire, and in so doing have accomplished an important victory for the vitality of the internet.

Yeah.

And trying to 'maximize' the 'minimal' legal authority that exists to support their positions.

And trying to maximize their eroding monopolies.