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Media

The Technology Behind the Magic Yellow Line 261

CurtMonash writes "Fandome offers a fascinating video explaining how the first-down line on football broadcasts actually works. Evidently, theres a lot of processing both to calculate the exact location being photographed on the field — including optical sensors and two steps of encoding — and to draw a line in exactly the right place onscreen. For those who don't want to watch the whole video, highlights are here."
Security

NSA Patents a Way To Spot Network Snoops 161

narramissic writes "The National Security Agency has patented a technique for figuring out whether someone is messing with your network by measuring the amount of time it takes to send different types of data and sounding an alert if something takes too long. 'The neat thing about this particular patent is that they look at the differences between the network layers,' said Tadayoshi Kohno, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Washington. But IOActive security researcher Dan Kaminsky wasn't so impressed: 'Think of it as — if your network gets a little slower, maybe a bad guy has physically inserted a device that is intercepting and retransmitting packets. Sure, that's possible. Or perhaps you're routing through a slower path for one of a billion reasons.'"

Comment Re:GPL anti-business? (Score 1) 633

Traditional business models rely on monopoly, and profits for development efforts are directly related to how long they retain that monopoly. They can charge more for software that is unlikely to be duplicated quickly by competitors.

GPL precludes the monopoly business model by requiring any software project incorporating GPL code to also be GPL, thus relinquishing the monopoly.

This is the default price of GPL code, and thus why most businesses regard the GPL as anathema. It makes their business of selling software less profitable, and opens them up to lawsuits if someone, somewhere uses unlicensed code.

They can try to licence the code under more compatible terms, but this is often impractical/impossible/too expensive if the GPL code has many contributors, and

This means the businesses that make use of GPL software have to base their business plans on sources of income that are not dependent on their software monopoly: by charging for their services, instead of their products.

They then only make money when they are actually working, instead of making residual income from selling copies of their completed work.

Businesses that depend on their software monopoly, thus consider GPL to be anti-business.

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