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I'll give 5-1 odds this fartknocker is mad his pitcher pulled out early last night.

For all non-homo slashdot users, check this

The Locksmithing FAQ says:

• 3. Is it legal to carry lock picks?

• This depends on where you are. In the U.S. the common case seems to be that it is legal to carry potential "burglar tools" such as keys, picks, crowbars, jacks, bricks, etc., but use of such tools to commit a crime is a crime in itself. Call your local library, district attorney, police department, or your own attorney to be sure. Possession of potential "burglar tools" can be be used as evidence against you if you are found in incriminating circumstances. An example of a state law can be found in the Viginia State Code: Section 18.2-94 _Possession of burglarious tools, etc._ "If any person have in his possession any tools, implements or outfit, with intent to commit burglary, robbery or larceny, upon conviction thereof he shall be guilty of a Class 5 felony."

  Note that the prosecution has to prove "intent". However, the law continues: "The possession of such burglarious tools, implements or outfit by any person other than a licensed dealer, shall be prima facie evidence of an intent to commit burglary, robbery or larceny." This means that the possessor can have a bit of an uphill battle and has to convince the jury that this 'prima facie evidence' is misleading.

  Places where it *is* illegal to carry lock picks: The District of Columbia, New York State and Illinois. New Jersey law appears to make these illegal if they can work motor vehicle locks. There may be many other places as well (such as Canada, Maryland and California.) It can be hard to tell since the relevant laws can be dealing with burglary, motor vehicles or locksmith regulation, etc. This emphasizes the importance of finding out for *your* area - and determining the applicability to *your* circumstances (e.g., locksmith, full or part-time), repo worker, building maintenance worker, ...

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Think of CSS (the "encryption") as a widget. CSS (the real DVD code) is a machine that makes a widget. (decodes the data) Now it is possible to patent the widget, or patent the machine, both of which I do not believe have been done.

Can't be. 'cause if it was patented, the algorithm would have been public knowledge (patents ARE public knowledge), and writing DeCSS would have not necessitated any reverse engineering at all, and would have been done mere days after the first DVDs hit the market.

So, that's why CSS is a trade secret rather than a patent or a copyright: "security" through obscurity.

But once you let the genie out of the bottle, it ain't coming back in...

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Isn't Bank turning/merging into Metcalfe just before hitting Leitrim road???
Just asking, I'm new to Ottawa...

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Why didn't the dude register the domain corinthian.org instead of .com in the first place????

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This is silly. Geographical borders are quite justified when you have small business whose radius is within one city or even one city district.

Having worldwide domain names isn't justified for such cases.

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Having journalists who are unafraid to dig into the private lives of politicians means that there is a far greater chance of scandal and corruption being uncovered and exposed, something which can only benefit society in the long run - who wants corrupt leaders?

" La liberté de presse ne s'use que lorsqu'on ne s'en sert pas "

Freedom of press only wears-out when you don't use it.

That's the slogan of "Le Canard Enchaîné", that french icon of journalism that uncovered more than one scandal and caused many public figures to resign...

Interestingly enough, that weekly has no advertising whatsoever; it solely survives through what people pay to read it, so it is a truly free newspaper.

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Tried one once.
It really sucks. It's like running on ice; the only way you can change your course is by the propulsion system. That is, you cannot decelerate faster than you can accelerate. A little bit like a jet boat, but much worse: there is no water resistance to slow you down fast...
It's no surprising they didn't catch more than that...

BTW, what's that regulation against hovercraft???

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People who live in paper houses should not throw matches...

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I think that it's far more important that something be done about the sin and family-destroying habit of gambling. In Hong Kong, an average of 10% of every family's income goes to horse racing, and 30% of all men have what could be described as a gambling addiction.

Okay. Then, by your numbers, 30% of all men in Hong Kong are stupid. You said it, not me.

That's cultural. Orientals believe in predestination; so if they believe that they will win, nothing will stop them from gambling.

* * *

Ever have a bus full of Baptists stop in your driveway to try to pick up one more before going to the church?
...
Then I told them if their bus wasn't removed from my driveway in under 30 seconds, I'd have them cited for trespassing, and slammed the door.

Reminds me of the last time the jehovah witness came to my place. I knew they were coming, 'cause I saw them bang on my neighbour's doors, then heard the same doors slam soon enough afterwards. Turns out that I was just about to take my shower, so when they rang the door, I answered them naked, and when they turned around, I just followed them on the street, until the corner, still naked.

They never came back.

I whish we had baptists here, so I could do the trick again on them...

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Your argument also overlooked religion. I for one do not belive in gambling for religious reasons, and I would consider restricting your freedom to gambol because it offends my religion. I do not know how I would accually vote on this issue if it came up, but don't ignore it.

How about me considering restricting your "freedom" to religion because shoving your religion down my throat restricts my freedom to, say, gamble or simply enjoy anal or oral sex with anybody I want?

Don't shove your fucking religion down my throat, and I won'd shove anything down your throat, nor anything up your ass, for that matter.

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Then I go around saying things like:
"I win the lotto every week. All I have to do is not play. I net $52/year doing it...every year. Which is much more than the average joe who plays it and maybe wins $5 once every other year".

Actually, whenever a convenience store proposes me a lottery ticket, when the store is crowded, I say very loudly " I win $1 at every drawing, I don't buy a ticket ". I'm sure plenty of people lining up behind me to buy one didn't buy...

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" A tax on the mathematically challenged ".

- The Royal Canadian Air Farce

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My question is simple: what's the difference between illegal gambling and state-sanctioned lotteries?

It's very simple, and any moron could readily figure it out:

• Illegal gambling: profits go to criminals, who use it for their OWN advantage, and it usually ain't for the public good.
• State lotteries: profits go to the states, who use it for EVERYBODY's advantage (think how much more taxes you'd have to pay if there weren't state lotteries) and it usually is for the public good.

Any other questions?

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...we have a set of ethics which we were given by the Lord.
...
"Sorry, we could have stopped it, but I would have had to jaywalk to do so, ...

... And our Lord Jesus H. Fucking Christ spread his buns, and said: "Thou shalt not jaywalk, and always cross on thy green lights"... [Peter 89:45.12]

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The idea that the FBI can scan E-mails as they enter or leave your ISP sounds scary at first, but what you have to remember is that you are not a criminal. They're hardly going to want to read your E-mail about your trip to see your sister at BJU are they? It's not like there are people reading your personal mail, it's just a machine and can't make value Judgements on what you write.

So, if you're not afraid of the FBI looking at your e-mails to your sister, you're surely not afraid at letting ME look at those same e-mails, no?

By the same token, you won't mind either me looking at those e-mails you sent to that chick you met last month at Catalina, no?

Can't you see it's a matter of principle, or are you just dumed-down by mass-media hysteria not to realize your fundamental rights are being trampled???

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I am British. And I can imagine a few .....
...

• Any culture who values children of one gender over the other

That's a low blow. Of course, by saying that, one does not stop at looking at the historical and cultural factors that made it so, say, like a "social" system that does not provides at all for the care of the elderly, so they have to rely on their children, and since women are poorer than men, well, better have a son rather than a daughter...

Now, how about saying "any social system where WOMEN are EXPECTED to be POORER than MEN?".

Ooops, you'd be shooting down a lot more "social" systems out there. Including your own.

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Nah, let's rather see Ewoks fuck Jar-Jar, and see the offspring: Chewbacca.

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I am *NOT* in the US. Here, copyright is a civil matter.

And sharing files, say, trough Napster certainly doesn't bring financial gain or commercial advantage, so it cannot be criminal in the US.

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If you help someone commit a criminal act (piracy), you are guilty of aiding and abetting a criminal act.

Pirating MP3s **IS NOT** a criminal act.

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- sigh -

The article talks about packet-sniffers who basically delay packets based ont the nature of the protocol (say, like port number used, or maybe even what is within that packet - "Hmmm, looks like a Napster packet, so, I'm gonna put it on the back-burner for a little while...").

So, the next logical step with Gnutella is to use an innocuous protocol, say, like SMTP, where two Gnutella-NG server/clients transfer the warez using SMTP... The program could even break the big file in several manageable chunks, and re-assemble them. It could also "encrypt" the packets with a simple randomly-generated packet at the start of the transmission (sent by another method) to fool packet sniffers/delayers...

Imagination will route through the most stringent censorship methods...

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Ha! Because how dismal their life may be, it is still better than what they had back at home

And also, when one gets screwed, he won't readily admit it, so they grin and bear it.

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It was conquered in early 19th century, and I don't know what would be worse for it, the rule of Czarist Russia and later Communist USSR, or what it had before that -- some local customs were umm... extremely un-civilized and had really poor respect for human life, leave alone democracy.

Yeah? And what about the democratic/human rights situation in the early 19th century in the USA? Only landowners could vote, there was slavery...

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If we're universally hated, how come we have the highest immigration rate in the world?

That's because most of the unsuccessful-at-home people who want to immigrate to the US are the most vulnerable to hollywood's propaganda machine.

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the U.S. press is, perhaps unintentionally, one of the single most pervasive and irresponsible agents for foreign intelligence. They routinely violate people's civil rights by interfering with their right to a fair trial, they endanger national security by releasing classified information to the public, they interfere with ongoing investigations, and they place U.S. and U.N. soldiers and their missions in jeopardy by their aggressive reporting of active military operations.

Loose lips sink ships.

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Plus, think about it.. if everyone on Gnutella got subpoenas on their doorstep towmorrow for downloading copyrighted information, we would have even more popular support for the cause. The more people the RIAA piss off with these bully tactics, the better off we are.

Not only that, but imagine how the judicial system would react in front of the ensuing onslaught of litigation? After 5000 cases of "Plastika - vs - Joe-Blow-who-downloaded-the-latest-hit", judges will soon tell the RIAA to go screw itself pretty quick.

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In other words, there is no longer any obstacle to directly debiting your bank account for whatever amount the government (state, city, federal) decides you owe them.

What's the difference between that, and retail stores THAT DEMAND that you leave your bags at the cash register, because they THINK that you MAY rob them????

When some storeowner pulls that stunt on me, I shout loudly in the store that I will not do business with people who automatically assume that I will rob them.

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This is the same fucking thing in the private sectors. Managers are valued by how much people work under them, and heaven forbid they don't spend their whole budgets, lest they lose them next year.

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The lines that Katz complains about aren't just there accidentally. They enforce discipline, respect, and fear. Fear of a wasted day, fear of an inexplicable fine, fear of a missing sheet of paper.

Interesting. I hang around some european diplomats, and they thus have tax-free status. This means that they have their sales tax refunded monthly. So, I asked one of them to buy an expensive item for me, to save the tax, and he said that I should'nt do that, because the civil servants here are much nicer than in [Europe] : " I once incorrecty filled a tax form, and the lady [not in Europe] at the counter nicely explained to me my mistake, and even filled the form for me and checked all the papers. In [Europe], I would have had a fine and would have to go to three different other queues, so I don't think it's fair to cheat the tax people here ".

I bought my expensive item myself, and was happy to pay the tax.

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To pay all I have to do is walk through a metal-detector thingy that picks up all of the price codes for everything I bought and automatically charges me.

Some french supermarkets have experimented with a caddy-mounted barcode scanner, which adds to the tab whatever you put in the cart and also subtracts whatever you take-out from it. When you pass at the cash, you merely pay the indicated price.

Dunno if the experiment was wildly successful beyond hopes, though...

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You think that's bad, in my state they not only ake blood samples at birth without your consent, they also inject you with disease organisms throughout your childhood without your consent. As a matter of fact, they will do it even if you are protesting loudly while they do it!

Comeon, you're a grown-up boy, aren't you? Grown-up boys don't cry, eh? It's just a little pinprick, anyway.

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Finding cylinders only? How about double hemispheres???

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No such trouble here. We made the boss's Netscape cache directory shareable and we only need to go look there...

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They're probably racist enough to consider non-whites to be animals, and since pictures of naked animals are not considered pornographic, they don't care about that...

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t's cultural, and an anglo-saxon/celtic trait which can be traced all the way back to the magna-carta.

The main idea is that anyone can expect to accummulate as much wealth/power possible, even if it is endangering the welfare of others. So, naturally, any government that steps in to protect people from abuse is bound to be branded as "intrusive" by those most powerful and wealthiest elements of society.

Witness big media and hollywood that has been hammering "government is bad" into the head of the people for decades, to the point that they will actively vote for scaling down the government, even it it means misery and hardship for them...

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It's the fact that he bundled the paperwork together and took that along with the swab into the back room that fuels a conspiracy theory.

That's because you pissed them off, and so they will clone you and abuse your clone with all sorts of invasion of privacy, physical and otherwise...

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...
especially if people regain control of the supership Titan, hidden away somewhere deep in the galaxy by Cale's dad.

Gosh, lord, here is the plot of the french comic series " Le vagabond des limbes ", by Godard & Ribera. (Book cover shots here). In it, a renegade flees from authority in an invincible ship designed by his father. Interestingly, though, there is another duplicate of the ship in the hands of the authorities, but since both ships are invincible, none can dent the other.

Can't american scriptwriters invent something really original???

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This reminds me of Boris Vian's song, La java des bombes atomiques , which described some amateur tinkerer making atomic bombs in his garage...

(Quick English translation below for the french-impaired)...

La java des bombes atomiques

My uncle, a famous tinkerer
used to make, as an amateur
some atomic bombs

Without ever learning anything
he was a real genius
when it came to practical works

He locked himself all day long
in his workshop
to make his experiments

And in the evening,
he came back home,
and explained it all to us.

To make an A-bombs,
children, believe me,
it's really a piece of cake.

The detonator question
is solved is a quarter hour
it's the one we put aside.

And for the H-bomb,
it's not much harder,
but one thing bothers me,
is that the bombs I make
only have a action radius
of only three meters fifty.

There's something wrong there,
I'm going back right now.

He worked at it for days
trying, with love,
to improve the yield.

When he ate with us,
he wolfed down his soup
We saw to his appearance
that he fell upon a hard part
but we dared not say anyhing.

Then one evening, during the meal,
here he sighs, and starts shouting:

As I'm getting older,
I see better
that my brain is failing
it ain't a brain anymore
it's like béchamel sauce
It's been months and years
I've tried to increase my bomb's
yield, and I never noticed
that the only thing that matters
it's the place where it falls down.

There's something wrong there,
I'm going back right now.

Knowing that success will be close,
all the great heads of state
came to visit him.

He received them and excused him
that his shop was so small.

But as soon as they were all in,
he locked-them up,
telling them be nice!

And when the bomb went off,
of those people nothing remained.

My uncle, in front of the result,
didn't chicken-out
He played the dummy
In front of the court
Before the jury,
he mumbled

Gentlemen, it's a horrible bad luck
But I swear in front of God
That in my soul and conscience
That by destroying those crooks,
I am convinced of having
Served my countryu.

They were embarrased,
So they sentenced him,
then they pardoned him.

And in reward, the country
elected him head of the government.

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That's assuming you get a trial. They could just invoke the name of Mitnick and deny you bail, and lock you up in solitary until you agree to waive your right even to have a bail hearing. Then they won't let you examine any of the "evidence" in your case and will generate a few gigabytes of crap. When you finally get the right to examine it, they'll print out tens of thousands of pages of binaries on a dot-matrix printer and let you look at it with a flashlight for five minutes a day in a dark room.

You should have said "a dot matrix printer with a faded ribbon with holes and creases"...

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It can be stated much simpler: a well-educated population in a democracy that doesn't listen only to SIGs.

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At that point the secret police storm in, having been eavesdropping on the entire conversation. They throw Alice, Bob and Charlie in jail. They go to the website, pull the information, get the pads and read the Neiman-Marcus Cookie Recipe for themselves. Guess what? This protocol has completely, totally and utterly failed.

Not at all. The protocol did what it wanted to do: it told whoever wanted the cookie recipe where to find it, and they found it.

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[1] "Free speech" is only meaningful when it can be widely heard. Perfect encryption without public decryption is like locking yourself in a trunk and throwing away the key. If every Joe Sixpack and Dexter Tapedglasses can read your message without prior arrangement, so can Joe Gannon and Janet Reno. if JS and DT can't read it, it ain't 'free speech', its 'private communications'.

(For convenience, let's call the act of getting the pads and XORing them together " schkroping ").

Not at all. If you describe such a text as being available by schkroping together, say, 95FE35321DA3, 95843938475894, 3948382830405, 409530404950 and 28305049394, (presumably each pad being locatable by it's "name"), you'd get a schkroping browser with will get the information you want just as (insert your favourite HTML browser name do), except that the URL would be the name of the various pads constituting the information.

Hey! Let's invent a new URL type: shkrp://(pad 1),(pad 2),(pad 3),...(pad n )

[3] While independently assigned padnames of 8 bytes may offer 2^64 names, there is a 50% chance of collision after relatively few pads are generated (i.e. millions). The birthday problem the article mentions doesn't suggest high freedom from collisions (as he implies), it means collisons are much likelier than we expect: if there are 24 people in a room, it's *probable* (>50%) that there'll be a birthday collision (shared birthday) even though there are 366 possible days in the dataspace. He cites this as proof that collisions will *not* be a problem

However, here, you're right. There WILL be name collisions when you just take the first n bytes of the pad to identify it. But what can we do? If we take the last n bytes of the pad, we'll have the same problem. Even if we XOR them together, or if we XOR the CRC of the pad over that.

Ultimately, it would seem that the only real unique key would have to be the pad itself!!!! Which hardly solves the problem at hand...

The method could sure be greatly improved by the million eyeballs now looking at it; how about incorporating it in freenet, as the author suggests????

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The CPU fan makes modestly more noise (with the case closed) then the real fan. Of corse disk chatter is louder then both those...so I have to make sure the MP3 player never stops :-)

So, what you need is a noise-cancelling MP-3 player which, in a preliminary setup steo, records the fan noise your computer makes, then subtracts that noise from whatever music it plays, thus cancelling the noise of your machine. In addition, it could also check disk activity and subtract the disk chatter...

For that matter, why don't MP-3 players come with an automatic heuristic equalizer, in which the MP-3 player sends a variable-frequency signal through the speakers, and with a microphone, measures the speaker's frequency response, then adjust the equalizer controls accordingly? I recall, some 20 years ago seeing an ANALOG graphic equalizer that did just that...

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But the Internet has very low barriers to entry

This is true in a comparable sense (say compared to getting venture capital to open a storefront, etc...) However there is still many barriers. Not to be an elitist, but let's face it, not everyone can code, not everyone can run a business, and there aren't that many jobs out there for Joe-SixPack that are net-related.

Not true. A friend of mine (about whom I talked above) would never had prospered if he did not had an online catalog. And yet, he was the unlikeliest guy to get connected; a retired railroader who also owns a tavern, he instantly saw the Internet potential and he was quick to harness it to his advantage.

Just like any small-business owner who asks a plumber to do some plumbing work, he hired some coding kids to do his website and everyone was happy.

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Companies can also use their own website to promote offline sales. A website can be a lot more interactive than a brochure. You can provide extra services to entice people back, and at the same time give them information about your products.

On-line catalogs are quite effective, especially when your inventory changes rapidly. A friend of mine has had a business selling surplus sleeping-car parts (yes, there is quite a market for that), parts that he acquired while scrapping some 60 surplus sleeping cars over several months.

Well, he had an almost "real-time" catalog, showing the parts he had available, complete with pictures, he would get different kind of parts as he would work with different kind of cars, and that online catalog accounted for well over 90% of the sales he did.

There was no way a paper-based catalog could have coped-up with the various changes that happenned. In fact, whenever somebody asked him for a paper catalog, he would simply print the website and charge $20 to mail it to the prospect (subject to discount on the first purchase).

In fact, he got several of his customers getting wired (people who would not have thought about even touching a computer), as they found out that it was far more effective and hassle-free to go online...

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Let's see here: CNET and DoubleClick have patented banner ads. Amazon and LinkShare claim patents on affiliate programs.

No sweat. Moving elsewhere (that's everywhere) where software & business plans aren't patentable will just do the trick.

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That space aboard Mir could be occupied by Science, but no, they chose to pimp it out instead.

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You know, what joe average is buying when he gets a dvd is a 'movie'. If you say in a court 'they can always make analog snippets of it in a classroom or whatever'.. they are right. If the 'product' that falls under copyright, as the people percieve it, is simply 'the movie'.
To us geeks, though.. the 'product' under copyright is a collection of bits, that when decrypted a certain way and run through the appropriate codec produces a movie. See the difference?
They are buying a movie.. we are buying bits.

No matter what the media is, analog videotape, digital videotape, celluloid film, zootrope, flipbook, or DVD, the thing can ultimately broken into bits (magnetic domains, dyed silver grains, ink droplets) anyways.

So, no matter what, you end up buying bits anyway.

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BLOCKQUOTE>

These advancements are truly an amazing thing and I applaud the science behind it. With all technology, however, it has the potential to be abused.

It's a good thing bow and arrows weren't perfected, otherwise thousands of people would have been killed.
It's a good thing stirrups weren't perfected, otherwise archers would be terribly more deadly whilst on horseback.
It's a good thing gunpowder wasn't perfected, otherwise extra thousands of people would have been killed in wars.
It's a good thing steam power wasn't perfected, otherwise thousands of people would have lead a dreary existence in factories.
It's a good thing railroads weren't perfected, otherwise thousands of indians would have had their livelyhood destroyed and land stolen.
It's a good thing ships weren't perfected, otherwise thousands of people would have drowned at sea.
It's a good thing aircraft wasn't perfected, otherwise thousands of people would have been killed in aircrashes.
It's a good thing airships weren't perfected, otherwise thousands of people would have been burned in hydrogen fires.
It's a good thing automobiles weren't invented, otherwise thousands of people would have been killed and maimed in traffic.
It's a good thing computers weren't perfected, otherwise thousands of people would have suffered carpal tunnel syndrome.
It's a good thing space shuttles weren't perfected, otherwise slightly more than half a dozen would have been killed by O-ring failures.
It's a good thing slashdot wasn't perfected, otherwise thousands of people would have been died of boredom reading really stupid posts...

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Basically, is having a plasma rocket inherently more dangerous to be launching through the atmoshpere than the normal chemical rockets currenntly employed?

There is no reason for it to be. In order to lift X tons to orbit, the exhaust would expend a total of Y energy; the total amount of energy would be the same no matter what the propellant is and how it got raised to that speed/temperature.

Of course, I'm not taking account whether the exhaust is radioactive or not, or is water vapour or some super-yucky fluorine-based concoction...

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