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Eh, this is a problem that can be easily solved by a freelance arson or a few enthusiastic thugs before the project even takes off.

Nothing outlasts an Energizer.

Obligatory.

Best statistics I've been able to find: http://thefiringline.com/forums/showthread.php?t=328876

There was a recent self-defense case in which a woman put 5 of her 6 rounds into a single burglar, who was still mobile for a period of time. Had there been a second attacker, she would have had no ammunition left in her firearm.

If you want an extreme example, see http://www.afn.org/~guns/ayoob.html . He's been the target of 35 robberies, and in one case ended up firing 105 shots in a few minutes. There were 7 armed robbers.

That's ultimately what makes the difference. A single attacker isn't likely to require 10 handgun rounds. Facing 3 or 4 quickly changes things.

It has long been, and still remains, illegal to have a scanner capable of listening into police frequencies in a moving vehicle

All points agreed, except for this one. It is *not* illegal to own and monitor a scanner in a moving vehicle, except in a handful of states. In another handful, it's only illegal when used "in furtherance of a crime" (e.g. used to elude the police after your bank caper ends.)

I have no doubt that, upon being pulled over by a cop, a $500 car jammed wall-to-wall with comms gear *would* get cited and impounded. Some cops just like to harass and intimidate, whether they think you're a terrorist, or they just don't know the law.

I own a Uniden BC-996 scanner. I monitor fire fighters and police activities in my area across several trunking systems. Sometimes it's funny. Sometimes it's scary. And sometimes it's sad.

The entertainment value is there. Even my very non-geeky wife turns it on to listen.

However, many people can't take these scanners with them in their cars. Many state laws prevent them from doing that UNLESS they have permission from the state police to monitor from a car, or you happen to have a federally significant reason, such as possession of a ham radio license.

Rodney King's beating wasn't just a matter of a video tape. There were people who monitored the MDT traffic between the various cops involved. Oh, and by the way, MDT monitoring is illegal now, even from your home.

If you want to offend a cop, drive around with a scanner in your car, configured for the trunking system the local cops are using. They do not like it when people demonstrate their ability to monitor them.

> Because you dont need a hospital? Or First aid?

Yea, right.

How they decided the Clause to allow them to restrict solely in-state activity like CA's medical mj, and more importantly got SCOTUS to go along, I'll never figure out though. I'll just chalk it up to the usual cynical causes.

I don't know how the Justices figured out how CA's medical marijuana had anything to do with interstate commerce either myself, but a majority of them did. If I recall right 3 of the 9 members said the Commerce clause had nothing to do with medical marijuana, unfortunately the other 6 didn't agree. Instead they waved their arms up in the air and a link materialized in their brains, maybe they also said "abracadabra"?

Patent suits are expensive but 9-figure legal bills are the stuff of contingency fees or a few legendary events like the IBM antitrust suit. On the other hand, add in the interference to business while the suit drags on and a patent suit might cost a lot more than just the lawyers's bills.

Bear with me for a moment while I try to get to the point as directly as I can.

There's a program called "Tiny IDEA" which implements the IDEA cipher. It's written in assembler for DOS, and comes with source code; the executable is about 500 bytes. It was originally written by Fauzan Mirza (who has credibility in that he also won Bruce Schneier's $10,000 award for best attack on Twofish during the AES competition). It was later further optimized and improved by someone named Mark Andreas, who I've never heard of in any other context. I'm not qualified to judge the quality of these programs directly, but when you read the manual it's pretty clear that Andreas knew what he was doing.

Tiny IDEA inspired a slew of other "Tiny" encryption programs by other authors, some anonymous, which can be found (free, and mostly with source code) at http://www.afn.org/~afn21533/rgdprogs.htm
(This is an interesting little site largely devoted to privacy and encryption, run by some random cool old guy. I think he wrote some of the "Tiny" spinoff programs.) Of particular note are a couple of Blowfish implementations, because as far as I know Blowfish is the fastest of the strong algorithms. Again, I can't vouch for the quality of these programs, but at least they seem to have a good genealogy.

Now obviously Blowfish implementations are a dime a dozen, but the reason I mention these "Tiny" ones in particular is because they encrypt your original file in-place, right there on the same disk sectors where it already resides, instead of creating a separate output file. This means you probably don't need to shred the original as a separate step, which might save you a great deal of time.

Think again...
http://www.afn.org/~afn09444/scanlaws/
Let freedom ring...

Although your comment isn't the most articulate thing I ever read, I do agree that I didn't make an effort to list the more than 500 nations. So here is a short list.

I think it is possible (and it makes for interesting characters in movies/video games, etc.) when a character can walk through different cultures equally - why does it have to be an either/or situation? can't a person exhibit traits of both?

The handheld vs. permanent rules again vary on a state by state basis.

This site:
http://www.afn.org/~afn09444/scanlaws/
has info about the laws.

Hm, except fans can create decent minis on their own. I bet I know 6 people who could turn out a decent Paneuropean Jaeger Heavy Tank or a USS Iowa.

Also, all that stuff up till now, didn't come with a EULA because the companies didn't follow computer graphics. Heh.

Cthugha, surely?

http://www.afn.org/~cthugha/defines.html/

What the hell is an "enviro-communist" for fuck's sakes?

An enviro-communist is one who uses environmentalism as a rationale for collectivizing land and property, and destroying private property in the means of production. They see mankind as a "plague" and a "cancer" that must be eliminated as much as possible.

They start by regulating the shit out of how people can build on their own land, and push so-called "smart growth" and "sustainable development" laws. Then they move on to outright land grabs, eventually leading to something disturbingly similar to outright collectivization.

Look up the "Wildlands Project" and "Agenda 21" if you don't believe me:

http://www.mtmultipleuse.org/wildlands_map.htm
http://www.afn.org/~govern/usa-wild.gif

I for one, think anyone who tries to impose this sort of eco-communism needs to be killed.

But Netcraft confirms it, mail.fbi.gov is dead!

So are Paul McCartney, God, and BSD(Yay Slashdot!).

Following the concert, the robots met up and started a Styx cover band.

Following the concert, the robots met up and started a Styx cover band.

Yes, damn those gun control laws for trying to keep assault weapons off the street!

Assault weapons have been illegal for 30 years. What you're probably referring to are the semi-automatic rifles that resemble military rifles. The only difference between those and a pistol is the amount of ammo in the magazine. And besides all that, what business is it of yours what type of gun a law abiding citizen uses to defend himself? Criminals are still getting these guns. They're called criminals for a reason (hint: it's because they don't obey the laws).

Or maybe you're referring to gun control laws that require a nice long waiting period before you can get a gun? In my opinion you not being able to wait 3 days before buying a gun is a damn good reason for not selling you one.

Tell that to these people

Corporations aren't people - it's impossible for them to have "ethics".

"Religion... is the smile on a dog"
- New Bohemians, "What I Am"

Are you perhaps referring to this: http://www.afn.org/~afn30091/songs/b/blondie-raptu re.htm?

Interestingly, it seems that it is the profession itself that causes the depression. In one study I read a few years back, when individuals were assessed the summer before law school, they showed rates of depression equivalent to the general population, but even after just the first year of law school, let alone once they graduated, rates of depression jumped to anywhere from 20-40 percent of the population studied.

Even Slashdot is incapable of demolishing the most creative inventions of the mass media. Watch "Outfoxed" (outfoxed.org) if you don't believe me. Imagine all those FOX News viewers hearing these deliberate falsities repeated everywhere and having their world picture altered to include all of it. Or to include SCO's latest fabrications? What room does this leave blogs and the alternative media to reveal to the mainstream that Kerry really isn't that French and that the Bush administration really wanted invade Iraq long before 9/11?

I wrote a decent essay on this topic four years ago.

If it has to have fire, then use Cthuga. Errr... I see that's a music visualization program. Are all the good names taken? I'm starting to see why we get Ogg Vorbis and the like.

A band called Bananarama did a cover of a song called "Venus" in the eighties (1986). It was originally done by Shocking Blue* in 1970.

Lyrics here.

It is a bit of a stretch to go from from a story on a planetary event to a forgettable eighties band, but this is /.

Cthugha, baby!

Nothing like being moderated up for encouraging people to break the law.

It's almost as good as building a highly profitable company around the concept! As long as "Encouraging people to break the law" is legal in most states, I think Slashdot is the least of the real world's concerns.

However, Winamp has pretty much always been free as in beer. Even when they had registration, there was a distinction between the Lite version and the Pro version. At one point I think they were even planning to do "adware" though I'm not sure if a release with that was ever done.

Over here is a complete archive of Winamp releases, except the none of the frelling links work. But you can see the release history at least. At a certain point, Nullsoft was bought by AOL and thus didn't need to do the shareware/registration thing anymore.

As for Open Source, Nullsoft has released a lot of OpenSource stuff, pretty much all for Windows. The most useful being their installer program, I've seen a lot of freeware packages use NSIS. Here's all the programs Nullsoft has released recently. I've always liked Nullsoft's naming approach...

(Historical note: One of the most popular plugins for Winamp has been Geiss, developed by Mr. Ryan Geiss. He originally wrote it independently. Then he got a job with Creative Labs working on Oozic, Creative's own idea for a media player with nifty visuals. Oozic started life as Lava but had to change names, probably for trademark reasons. Sadly, Creative Tech turned asswipe with Oozic, declaring it only available for those who bought their hardware and had it on the driver CD. Anyways, Mr. Geiss left Creative to go work for Nullsoft! Where he developed some more nifty visualization tools such as Milkdrop and Geiss II.)

(BONUS Historical note: Before Winamp, before multi-media players with visualization plugins, there was Cthugha by Kevin "Zaph" Burfitt. Cthugha started life as a DOS freeware program that did pretty VGA animations in synch with music from an audio CD. Eventually a version was developed for Windows 95, and 3D support was even added providing you used a 3DFX card. Sadly the project has languished for years now but not before Kevin released source and a number of folks ported Cthugha to MacOS, Linux, Java and yes, even a Winamp plugin!)

I'm not anti-Iraqi, just anti people with no common sense. How about the 500,000 we killed via sanctions (UN estimates)?

Oh, and how you forget how Saddam was once your friend, when he was using American sold chemical and biological weapons against Islamic people? How you sold him deadly strains of Anthrax? WTF were you doing breeding Anthrax in the first place? For a nation that whines about WMD, you invented them all!!

And they are still angry, most of them blaming Saddam as they should.

Nope:

"I hate Americans," he said. "I want revenge. I will wait, I will join a group, and, one day, I will kill Americans," - Ahmed Muthana, 14 year old Iraqi who's uncle was killed by crossfire in during an operation to surpress an anti-America demonstration.

Saddam's regime had proven links to terrorism against the US and other countries.

Nope. The only tenious link is that he once offered money to the families of suicide bombers in Israel, many years ago. Most of the IRA terrorist organizations funding comes from the US. Should the UK invade you for this?

Saddam and Al Quada were already friends.

Absolutely not! They were sworn enemies! Not all Arabs get along, it's not us vs. them by the way.

Retaliating to effectively stop aggression is not in itself aggression.

Tell that to the kids that'll grow up hating you. Remember, the root of anti-US terrorism is in response to thing the Americans did to them first. But we are digressing into "he started it" terretory now, which is pointless.

By your logic, 9/11 was not an act of aggression as it was retailation to other aggression perpretraited by you. Of course, you aren't taught US/Middle East history in school, and Jerry Bruckheimer ignores the subject, so you can be forgiven for not having a clue.

The terrorists, however, hate freedom and democracy, which is why they are terrorists.

No, they hate America. There are many other countries that embrace freedom and democracy more than the US (e.g. Europe), yet you don't see them lining up to kill us. Bush uses "freedom and democracy" as it is a time-proven method to get the US population behind the "war". "Armed robbery writ large", more like, to paraphrase your Tom Clancy.

Bush and the coalition are dealing with the root cause of terrorism: the regumes which create it.

Good! When do we invade Saudi Arabia, staunch US ally and also the homeland and primary source of funding for the 9/11 attacks? Does that also mean that Bush etc are all resigning? Go read some history moron, the US is the worlds number one supporter of terrorism. Google for "School of the Americas", or if that is too complex for you, click on this link.

As your anti-US and anti-Iraq rants prove.

Actually, I'm very pro-US. I just can't see her anywhere these days. There is someone about who looks like her, but is very different now.

Bush is a scandal. The shit will hit the fan, Enron style, and the US will be forced to appologise to the world for all this. Then people will eat your words and ask "how could we let this happen?"

Hmm. From this site (found via google).

The training manuals used at SOA gave specific instructions in how to hold prisoners in clandestine jails and to use threats of force on them, how to "neutralize" political opponents, how to infiltrate and spy upon civilian organizations and opposition political parties, and other human-rights abuses. This was sort of admitted by the US Army in September 20, 1996, when the manuals were declassified and publicly released, and confirmed by the Pentagon's Inspector General in a report on February 21, 1997. Earlier, things had gotten so bad in El Salvador that the United Nations established a "Truth Commission" to investigate. Among the details, it reported on March 15, 1993 that 74% of the military officers it found to have participated in rape, assassinations, murder, torture, and massacres during El Salvador's "dirty war" were SOA graduates.

I've actually seen these declassified training manuals, you can find them on the web. Lessons in kiddnapping, guerilla warfare, terrorism and extortion. Hardly a sylibus to be proud of!!

I thought Britian was our ally? How does your fantasy have the USA funding the IRA? You do know what that stands for, right?

Most of the IRAs funding comes from donations from the US. Covered here. I live in the UK, have done all my life. I am more than familiar with the troubles.

Please spare me your here-say "evidence" about drug trafficing etc... Again no facts other than some liberal bullshit stories to discredit Bush, because this is all it is about, right?

Hey, I'm not an expert in this. But it is a commonly held belief that the CIA has had links to drug smuggling in the past. And I never mentioned Bush. The question is, was it official CIA policy, or just agents doing it on the side. And is it still on-going?

Tell me from your in depth understanding of American politics how many female, non-caucasions there are in elected government today? Again, you are living in fantasy land.

Woopie do. Gimmie a shout when one gets the top job, or even VP. It's not a problem with your system of politics, more with the media. We're not any better here in the UK. Our countries are both led by very strong believers in Christianity, and we have a history of this. Given the number of times we both hear our leaders say "god" in a speach, I'd say that it was a pretty important factor in our governments actions.

Wow, i never knew all that food and economic assistance we give are loans.

I've had this argument before on /. I was presented with official government figures on a US gov. website as someone pointing out how much aid was given by the US. Most of it was loans. I never bookmarked it, and student grants seem to be getting in the way when googling, so I couldn't find a link. IIRC, the majority of the aid was in the form of loans. Countries have been lending each other money for hundreds of years, it's nothing new.

There is always the neat site, NationMaster. Here are the top 100 international aid per capita and total.

We all donate international aid. Don't put yourself up on some prize-winning podium though. You can't excuse recent indiscressions by pointing out something that we all do anyway.

That's my issue with Americans. Other than that, you are great guys. You get brought up in a very patriotic environment that is now harming your country, due to the inability to view things objectively. In your minds (obviously generalising here), you will always be the hero coming to s

Well, at least in Tomb Raider 2 they have some honest stunt work, like BASE jumping and flying with Birdman Suits. Very cool scenes with no CG in it... although the part where they run out of the building is a bit fake. You can't run with a Birdman suit. You can only waddle forward, much like a penguin or a duck. :-) But for the rest, a big thumbs up for that scene.

Cheers,

Costyn.

The denail of suffrage was based on "erroneously" expunging about thousands black voters from the Florida voting rolls. The management of FLA voter lists was outsourced to a Republican-owned corporation, and administered by Republican officials. Oh, and lets not forget the sheriffs setting up "traffic safety checkpoints" in some predominately black counties--WTF is a traffic safety checkpoint, and when was the last non-election day they occurred?

But don't take my word for it, try here: here: and here:

Theme from the "Greatest American Hero" (Believe it or Not) - Joey Scarbury

Look at what's happened to me
I can't believe it myself
Suddenly I'm on top of the world
Shoulda been somebody else

CHORUS:
Believe it or not I'm walking on air
I never thought I could feel so free
Flying away on a wing and a prayer
Who could it be?
Believe it or not it's just me

Just like the light of a new day
It hit me from out of the blue
Breaking me out of the spell I was in
Making all of my wishes come true

CHORUS

Who could it be?
Believe it or not it's just me

Thank you.

Actually it's perfectly legal to sell radar detectors, but in some states it's illegal to use them.

US law has a wierd way of dealing with things like this - they don't ban the sale of the item, but they make it illegal to use it

Instead of repeating, I will add to (and disagree in part with) what Zathrus said. Sure, legalese serves a need, the need to be precise. But precision and intelligibility (i.e. clarity) are not mutually exclusive. This is the meat of my argument. They *are* compatible, and one must not be sacrificed for the sake of the other in legal documents. Without much further ado in this regard, let me simply offer you a much better argument already made by someone else.

As for my disagreement with Zathrus, I don't think that the evil conspiracy by selfish (and insecure) lawyers is behind the use of legalese. The need for precision *and* the lawyers' laziness seem more likely reasons to me. Plain and simple, it would take more time for the American Airline's team of lawyers to come up with more intelligible yet equally precise EULA. They chose not to spend that extra time, and that's what bothers me.

Would that be the same corporation for public broadcasting that lobbied Congress to ban low-wattage radio stations?

Let's see what that may include:

• UK: "Although it is not illegal to sell, buy or own a scanning or other receiver in the UK, it must only be used to listen to transmissions meant for GENERAL RECEPTION. The services that you can listen to include Amateur and Citizens' Band transmissions, licensed broadcast radio and weather and navigation broadcasts."
• West Virginia: " It shall be illegal to operate or cause to be operated any electrical equipment within a two-mile radius of the reception equipment of any radio astronomy facility if such operation causes interference with reception by said radio astronomy facility of radio waves emanating from any nonterrestrial source." So you need a GPS receiver and a network link...or a postcard... to the radio astronomy facility so as to check if you're interfering?
• Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Greenland, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, New Caledonia, North Africa, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Thailand, Turkey,USA: Scanners illegal or reception of non-public signals forbidden.
• USA: Mobile scanners restricted in many states.
• USA: "unlawful to disclose the content of radio transmissions overheard unless they are amateur radio traffic, broadcasts to the public or distress calls."

meta name="Generator" content="handcoded by Carl Busjahn"

Yeah, THAT must have been hard. Linux may meet your needs, but it has a LONG way to go before it meets mine. 100% GPL? Not on my network.

First of all, I want to get one thing straight. Stealing music is illegal.

So is driving faster than 65 MPH. What's your point?

Such that this is, I think that Digital Rights Managment, properly implemented, could be a great thing.

First off, let me correct your terminology. The term "Digital Rights Management" is a smokescreen, intended to deceive the public. Its proper name is Copy Protection. The free market long ago made the decision that Copy Protection subtracts value from digital media, and is not wanted. The software industry, by and large, accepted this, and went on to make trillions of dollars. But now that older media publishing companies are wading into the digital age, they want to re-hash this mess all over again. It's the same basic idea, except this time they've given it the name, "Digital Rights Management."

I encourage you, do not go along with the semantic dodge, and call this stuff by its true name, Copy Protection. The computing consumer already understands what it is, and what it means for his/her investment in digital works.

Secondly, I can assure you that copy protection, by definition, cannot be implemented fairly. The taxonomy you relate is certainly interesting, meriting further study, perhaps as a basis for new legal frameworks. However, copy protection technology is fundamentally unfair. At its core, it presupposes that uses not authorized beforehand by the copyright holder are prima facie unlawful and prohibited.

As Professor Lessig correctly points out, this is pure bullshit.

But, I'm interested to hear, [ ... ] would DRM really be so bad according to you all? If you bought a car-stereo, a portable stereo, a home stereo, and computer running LinuxDRM (or WindowsDRM), and they were all registered to you, you could buy "Metallica - Master of Puppets (Live with the San Francisco Orchestra).DRM.mp3" and it would run on all your DRM-registered items.

Just so. But in this wonderful world you espouse, where is my right to create a DRM-registered player?

Right now, I can go out and write a visualizer for WinAmp, or XMMS, or Cthugha, or any other music player I care to name, take the digital audio data -- no matter its source -- and convert it into moving visual forms and images. In a world of copy protection, I would not be allowed access to the audio data to create those visualizations because, technically, there's nothing preventing me from, rather than visually transforming the data, just saving it out to disk instead.

So, to write my harmless little display hack, I have to go to the RIAA and fellate some executive to get his permission, in the form of an "authorized player" key, to do so. Not only will this likely cost me thousands of dollars (assuming they don't reject me out of hand as not being a "credible developer"), but they will insist on code audits, precise download and usage statistics, and probably a key renewal fee. Moreover, after doing all this, if I fail to offer the proper ongoing tribute, or someone offers them more money, my "authorized player" key can be revoked, and all copies of my visualizer will stop working. My speech -- in the form of my code -- can be remotely and unaccountably silenced at whim.

All for a fscking display hack.

Now, generalize this to all forms of data meriting "protection": Music, software, text, Web page graphics, user interface layout, font outlines, Quake 3 Arena models, etc. It is not difficult to imagine that "permission" and "authorization keys" will be required to write any piece of software, and that obtaining same will be monsterously expensive, affordable only to wealthy corporations.

Sorry, I'm not buying this. I don't buy for one femtosecond that this level of "protection" is necessary to effect commerce and make fortunes in the digital age. Hell, Bill Gates became the richest man in the world selling stuff that end-users could copy at whim.

These reasons, among others, are why I've arrived at the conclusion: Copy protection is fundamentally unethical, and antithetical to the nature of computing. Copy protection measures as you describe will serve to kill innovation, not spur it.

Schwab

This "slashdot.org" is full of people who have no regard whatsoever for traditional IP laws and rights and discuss ways to subvert them at every turn.

Dur-hey.

This is because those of us who actually understand these machines have realized their economic implications, and that they make copyrights obsolete.

Computers are designed to copy things. Indeed, computers as we understand them today would be useless if they lacked the ability to copy data and move it around. What the Feudal Intellectual Property Lords are trying to do is tell you, down to the smallest detail, what you can and can't make copies of, and what you can and can't do with those copies.

Consider the program Cthugha, which is an audio visualization program. It takes the digital representation of the music on CD and turns it into a light and color show. The IP Lords assert that, unless you have been granted explicit permission by them to do something with "their" music, you should be held criminally accountable. They have never granted explicit permission for you to run "their" music through a color organ. Hence, copyright violation.

Further, since the output of Cthugha is directly related to the musical input, the output could be construed as a derivative work (since there is no new "creative material", only a purely mechanical translation from audio space to visual space). Absent a license, derivative works are expressly prohibited by copyright law. Hence, using Cthugha is a copyright violation; and Cthugha could be held as a device whose sole purpose is to violate copyrights, and would be banned. (And after all, why should Cthugha's authors profit even reputationally from a color organ that would be useless without "their" music, when the major labels should be able to make money by selling you one?)

This is how adherents to current IP law think. This is not reasonable. This is not forward-thinking. This is not socially redeeming in any way. This is stupid. It is reductio ad absurdum, except that it is being taken seriously. On the contrary, it merits nothing but ridicule.

That's why you're seeing so little regard for, "traditional IP laws and rights." It's because they don't merit respect. The era of ubiquitous and zero-cost manufacturing, as heralded by the computer, makes them irrelevant and obsolete.

Please note extremely carefully: I am not saying artisans and inventors should not be justly compensated for their creative works. But the "traditional" laws we have in place for doing this no longer have any realistic bearing on the real world, since the machines themselves defy the fundamental assumptions made by the law. The whole system needs to be scrapped and re-designed anew.

Schwab

This "slashdot.org" is full of people who have no regard whatsoever for traditional IP laws and rights and discuss ways to subvert them at every turn.

Dur-hey.

This is because those of us who actually understand these machines have realized their economic implications, and that they make copyrights obsolete.

Computers are designed to copy things. Indeed, computers as we understand them today would be useless if they lacked the ability to copy data and move it around. What the Feudal Intellectual Property Lords are trying to do is tell you, down to the smallest detail, what you can and can't make copies of, and what you can and can't do with those copies.

Consider the program Cthugha, which is an audio visualization program. It takes the digital representation of the music on CD and turns it into a light and color show. The IP Lords assert that, unless you have been granted explicit permission by them to do something with "their" music, you should be held criminally accountable. They have never granted explicit permission for you to run "their" music through a color organ. Hence, copyright violation.

Further, since the output of Cthugha is directly related to the musical input, the output could be construed as a derivative work (since there is no new "creative material", only a purely mechanical translation from audio space to visual space). Absent a license, derivative works are expressly prohibited by copyright law. Hence, using Cthugha is a copyright violation; and Cthugha could be held as a device whose sole purpose is to violate copyrights, and would be banned. (And after all, why should Cthugha's authors profit even reputationally from a color organ that would be useless without "their" music, when the major labels should be able to make money by selling you one?)

This is how adherents to current IP law think. This is not reasonable. This is not forward-thinking. This is not socially redeeming in any way. This is stupid. It is reductio ad absurdum, except that it is being taken seriously. On the contrary, it merits nothing but ridicule.

That's why you're seeing so little regard for, "traditional IP laws and rights." It's because they don't merit respect. The era of ubiquitous and zero-cost manufacturing, as heralded by the computer, makes them irrelevant and obsolete.

Please note extremely carefully: I am not saying artisans and inventors should not be justly compensated for their creative works. But the "traditional" laws we have in place for doing this no longer have any realistic bearing on the real world, since the machines themselves defy the fundamental assumptions made by the law. The whole system needs to be scrapped and re-designed anew.

Schwab

There is no easy answer to this question. It certainly depends on the alogorithms used. It depends on who implemented it, tamperfree devices, and much more. Here are a couple of links that might give the interested reader some points to start:

Peter Gutmann's excellent crypto tutorial
Some information on Blind Signatures
A very nice link page for privacy and encryption
Ron Rivest's (the R in RSA) homepage with an excellent link section
And a link to buy Applied Cryptography, even if the stories lack accuracy it is a good read

Happy reading!

A book that proclaims man has existed in anatomically modern form for hundreds of millions of years? could this be a creationist tract? Unfortunately it is. The authors misunderstand the concept of a theory, bring religion into science (science ends up being based on a particular religious viewpoint, thus rendering it invalid), misrepresent scientists' theories and statements, and ignores work which contradict their religious ideas.

From the Publisher
I perceive in Forbidden Archeology a work of thoroughgoing scholarship and intellectual adventure. -Dr. Pierce Flynn

Customers who bought this book also bought:

• Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings : Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age by Charles H. Hapgood
• Technology of the Gods : The Incredible Sciences of the Ancients by David Hatcher Childress
• When the Sky Fell : In Search of Atlantis by Rand Flem-Ath, Rose Flem-Ath

Another "pebble" is the authors keen ability to state as true facts innumerable elements that have NOT been proven, simply by stating that, by the absence of any proof to the contrary, a fact is true.

And yet they haven't written one simple law that would prevent the senseless waste of life and equipment that has been caused by skydiving.

Yes they have.

---
The AOL-Time Warner-Microsoft-Intel-CBS-ABC-NBC-Fox corporation:

I am reminded of Mel, a Real Programmer

And I hate to point this part out, too, but not only are we not nearly as controversial; we got there first. I'm pretty certain there's actually even a trademark on the name.

[ looks ]

Yep. 1986.

And for the anal-retentives in the audience, yeah, I think a court would accept a dilution argument, given the close association of the problem spaces.

Cheers,
-- jra
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yes yes... bad form replying to my own post and all... but the specific URL you should go look at is http://www.afn.org/skydive/faq/faq.ht ml#howfast

Charles Bryan in december 1995 hit 321 in a head down dive over Eloy, AZ. If you stay head down and don't have a really baggy jumpsuit on, 300+ is not impossible. Feel free to check skydiving resources. The Skydive Archive is a good start.

Unless SiS has some kind of leverage against the MPAA, expect a binary-only driver with an undocumented API/ioctl() set that basically only lets you play DVDs in a window. Exposing a general API would allow (gasp!) copying or other "unauthorized" digital manipulation of the MPEG stream.

Personally, I'd like to be able to drive the decompression process myself, so I can use the movie as an OpenGL texture to map on to a sphere and bounce it around. The Cthugha-like possibilities are endless, but only if programmers can get at the data in a meaningful way.

Schwab

I think the thing about Doom that kept me on the edge of my seat was the storyline. A sci-fi story that leads (literally) straight to Hell is just awesome.

Did anyone actually even pay attention to the storyline for Quake? Just wondering...

This news is sweet. I can't wait to see the results. I hope the infighting doesn't harm production though.

rusty haskell,
Code Ninja, Java Assassin, Linux Newbie
fuzzcat@yahoo.com
Nine Finger Monarchy

[root@SavageGarden] root# rm -r /mnt/c/windows

And the ploy's working? Looks like the UK courts are more generous than in the U.S.--c.f. Bully Hill Vineyards.