That's something that they would need, considering that any law he might have been breaking would be a very flimsy one that would only apply to him if the court wre already convinced that he was a nasty bad hacker.
Flimsy?! He posted the ROM image, which is copyrighted, on his web site. Whatever you may think of IP, that's clearly not a flimsy legal case. He may as well have posted a Windows XP ISO on his site while he was at it.
It is possible to locally decrease the entropy of one system, but you are guaranteed to increase the entropy of everything else by at least the difference.
Exactly - *this* is what I want. Extract heat from the room as electricty for use later (or somewhere else). Sure, it's going to end up as heat again at some point.
No, it isn't what you want. You want to store energy in something, decreasing entropy, solely by "extracting heat" from a room. By "extracting heat", you mean that your device will cool down part of the room. There will be a temperature differential where none existed, so the entropy of the air in the room will have decreased. You will have decreased the entropy both of the room and your device. This cannot occur.
Agreed, but is this *necessarily* so inefficient as to be impractical? I.e. is it that it can't work, or have we just not figured out how to do it?
The issue isn't efficiency, it's: where do you get the cold room?
We can convert electricity directly to heat, without having to "cool something else down" in the process. Why doesn't it work in reverse?
You might think that a generator is the reverse of a motor. However, there is a very important sense in which you would be wrong: they both generate waste heat. Generating waste heat is irreversible, like breaking a glass. The probability of molecules bouncing around in such a way that the glass flies back together or electricity starts flowing in a wire in a hot room is simply astronmically low.
That's a weak, if not utterly wrong, argument for entropy. I haven't studied thermodynamics, but entropy is something I've heard of, looked up in the dictionary, dug around for on google, etc, and frankly I have never seen a acceptable explanation of this "basic" law which so many take for granted. Why is it that it's always presented as some magical "incresing order of things"?
That clearly wasn't an argument, it was a statement. I don't think that way of stating the laws of thermodynamics is helpful in understanding them, by any means, but the laws of thermodynamics still hold. I was going to try to explain how many commonly used portrayals of entropy as disorder are very misleading, but fortunately I found that someone else has done so for me. I refer you to this site for a good exposition of the second law.
Nobody is proposing that your laptop could power itself off the heat it generates. However, lots of systems are designed to recover some of their "wasted" energy. Electric cars have regenerative brakes, for example. This doesn't make them perpetual motion machines, it just gets them a little closer.
You have to understand that the person you replied to wasn't saying this device won't work, just that in due course the universe will end up as cold dust anyway (unless it has enough mass to collapse).
Heat *is* energy. We have ways of turning it into other forms of energy, they're just inefficient, and generally require temperatures above boiling.
Here is your major confusion. We cannot extract energy from heat, per se, only from a difference in temperatures. Since pretty much anywhere you go on this planet is cooler than something above the boiling point of water, we can extract energy from such things. However, a creature on Venus couldn't pick up a rock and extract energy from it, just because it's hot enought to boil water. Where would he/she/it get liquid water?
Will the experts please explain the following: why can't I extract heat from the atmosphere, and turn it into electricity/motion/whatever? We have no problem doing this if there's lots of heat (geothermal power plants), but why can't I have a sort of "reverse air conditioner" that works at room temperate?
Hopefully, this is answered above. Also, since air conditioner create temperature differentials (they increase the difference in temperature between your room and the outside), a reverse air conditioner ouldn't be a machine that creates temperate differentials and produces energy, it would be a machine that destroys temperature differentials as it produces energy. So the device in the article is a reverse air conditioner in a sense.
So the government is regulating what can be said (and showed) on TV? And that is somehow not the same as the government regulating speech? Come again?
No, the government claims ownership of portions of the radio spectrum, and so they get to pick and choose what gets broadcast. Cable TV companies can send you pretty much anything they want.
speaking of Hitler, I must state it's a frightening coincidence Hitler demanded neighboring countries to hand over their Jewish populations or face military aggression. Bush's speech Satuday calling terrorists parasites reminded me of this.
Actually, I think it's more disturbing that you find calling Jews parasites analogous to calling terrorists parasites.
This is like buying a car based on how well it runs without oil in the engine. I suspect my BMW would make for a fantastic video if I tried that too. DON'T DO THAT! I would not pay extra for an engine that would - like using synthetic oil to give an extra two minutes of use.
No it isn't. A car engine will only be running when you're there using it, so you'll notice right away if something goes wrong. In the unlikely event a heatsink fell off when nobody's using the computer, it looks like an AMD processor would become a fire hazard. The car analogy would be having a risk that your car will start smoldering while it's sitting in your garage.
What we have here is a disagreement over how property rights work on the Internet. Basically, they fall between two extremes: (a) "All I did was send a particular series of TCP/IP packets to a particular computer. It's not my fault that it responded by e-mailing me your customers' credit card numbers." and (b) "How dare you attempt to connect to port 80 of my machine without my explicit written permission!"
Your position falls too close to the latter postion. We are not dealing with an area of a website that one has to login to access. In such an area, one probably had to go through some sort of registration that involved becoming aware of the AUP if there is one. That would be the case in your Yahoo example.
The claim that one agrees to an AUP by accessing a site is ludicrous, because it would imply, among other things, that people have some obligation to look around for an AUP if they're dumped in the middle of a site by a third-party link. If the people running a site honestly want all users of a site to agree to certain conditions, they should restrict access to the content to registered users. Obviously, there is a trade-off between making content publically aceessible and requiring registration. One part of this trade-off is that you can't expect people using publically accessible content to follow arbitary rules beyond "don't hack into the server".
So if I reverse engineer Windows XP and distribute a modified version, and Microsoft sues me for copyright violation, does that mean their EULA is viral and anti-business?
IIRC the idea is to convert the standard of mass to a number of electrons accelerated by some well known voltage.
Yeah, but voltage is mass*distance^2/(time^3*amperage), so isn't it circular to use a known voltage? For that matter, doesn't the SI definition of one amp depend on the kilogram (as part of the unit of force)?
This is not informative, this is just failure to read the information given.
If you followed some of the links in the article, you'll find that the litigation began in March. The "same identical thing" didn't happen twice, it happened once and is still ongoing. Courts are slow.
It appears, using openssh 2.9p2 (that currently in debian/unstable) that it sends the entire password in one TCP packet, so no problem there then.
The issue is not, and never was, with the initial password that ssh sends for authentication, but rather with using, for example, su or ssh within an ssh session.
My solution is to type asynchronously, pause for a random interval between each character, or each group of characters.
What you actually want to do is type at a fixed rate (say, one character every two seconds exactly). Clearly, the attacker then gets no information about the password other than its length. Trying to be truly random is harder than just looking at a timepiece that gives seconds as you type your password.
Sending a properly formed HTTP GET request is not tampering with or breaking into a system!!
This isn't like stealing Walmart's candy bars because they fail to put them inside a display case, this is like taking Walmart's candy bars because they put a sign next to them saying "Free Candy".
In general, how am I supposed to know that going to some particular URL in my browser is "breaking into a system"?
And yet you hypocritically accuse someone, who accused someone of not reading the articles, of being a hypocrite by not reading the articles! Just because you read the headline doesn't mean you know what you're talking about. The *cough* text of both articles *cough* clearly explained that the letters from dead people were sent by relatives who signed for them: "Utah officials found two of the pre-fab letters bore the typed names of dead people. Those names had been crossed out by family members who signed for them."
In principle, it could be much more convenient than existing PPV services from a cable provider, but the single-play thing isn't going to fly.
Read the article!
"A film will remain on a computer's hard drive for 30 days but will erase itself 24 hours after it is first run. In that 24 hours, consumers will be able to watch the film as many times as they wish -- pause, fast forward and perform other functions typical of a videocassette or DVD."
Re:I guess they didn't learn their lesson with DiV
on
Rent A Downloadable Movie
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Yay, we can watch it go under a SECOND time!:=) Just like Hollywood tradition to produce bad sequels...
Well, the article says it will be priced similarly to pay-per-view movies. Also, it will be functionally better than pay-per-view movies (which don't give you the ability to pause, rewind, etc.), except that you have to use your computer to view it. People buy pay-per-view movies now. Therefore, the only factor that its success hinges upon is whether people who buy pay-per-view moves are able to use this, and don't mind watching on a monitor (unless they have TV output). The time expiration in and of itself can't cause it to fail, because pay-per-view movies sell. Also, they might later decide to lower the price to make up for the inconvenience of watching on a computer.
Actually, I don't think this will go over all that well, but that's because I suspect that the intersection of the set of people who buy pay-per-view movies and the set of people who want to watch movies using their computers is small. My main point is that people already buy time-limited movies for the price they will be charging.
Slashdot Mirror
That's something that they would need, considering that any law he might have been breaking would be a very flimsy one that would only apply to him if the court wre already convinced that he was a nasty bad hacker.
Flimsy?! He posted the ROM image, which is copyrighted, on his web site. Whatever you may think of IP, that's clearly not a flimsy legal case. He may as well have posted a Windows XP ISO on his site while he was at it.
It is possible to locally decrease the entropy of one system, but you are guaranteed to increase the entropy of everything else by at least the difference.
Exactly - *this* is what I want. Extract heat from the room as electricty for use later (or somewhere else). Sure, it's going to end up as heat again at some point.
No, it isn't what you want. You want to store energy in something, decreasing entropy, solely by "extracting heat" from a room. By "extracting heat", you mean that your device will cool down part of the room. There will be a temperature differential where none existed, so the entropy of the air in the room will have decreased. You will have decreased the entropy both of the room and your device. This cannot occur.
Agreed, but is this *necessarily* so inefficient as to be impractical? I.e. is it that it can't work, or have we just not figured out how to do it?
The issue isn't efficiency, it's: where do you get the cold room?
We can convert electricity directly to heat, without having to "cool something else down" in the process. Why doesn't it work in reverse?
You might think that a generator is the reverse of a motor. However, there is a very important sense in which you would be wrong: they both generate waste heat. Generating waste heat is irreversible, like breaking a glass. The probability of molecules bouncing around in such a way that the glass flies back together or electricity starts flowing in a wire in a hot room is simply astronmically low.
That's a weak, if not utterly wrong, argument for entropy. I haven't studied thermodynamics, but entropy is something I've heard of, looked up in the dictionary, dug around for on google, etc, and frankly I have never seen a acceptable explanation of this "basic" law which so many take for granted. Why is it that it's always presented as some magical "incresing order of things"?
That clearly wasn't an argument, it was a statement. I don't think that way of stating the laws of thermodynamics is helpful in understanding them, by any means, but the laws of thermodynamics still hold. I was going to try to explain how many commonly used portrayals of entropy as disorder are very misleading, but fortunately I found that someone else has done so for me. I refer you to this site for a good exposition of the second law.
Nobody is proposing that your laptop could power itself off the heat it generates. However, lots of systems are designed to recover some of their "wasted" energy. Electric cars have regenerative brakes, for example. This doesn't make them perpetual motion machines, it just gets them a little closer.
You have to understand that the person you replied to wasn't saying this device won't work, just that in due course the universe will end up as cold dust anyway (unless it has enough mass to collapse).
Heat *is* energy. We have ways of turning it into other forms of energy, they're just inefficient, and generally require temperatures above boiling.
Here is your major confusion. We cannot extract energy from heat, per se, only from a difference in temperatures. Since pretty much anywhere you go on this planet is cooler than something above the boiling point of water, we can extract energy from such things. However, a creature on Venus couldn't pick up a rock and extract energy from it, just because it's hot enought to boil water. Where would he/she/it get liquid water?
Will the experts please explain the following: why can't I extract heat from the atmosphere, and turn it into electricity/motion/whatever? We have no problem doing this if there's lots of heat (geothermal power plants), but why can't I have a sort of "reverse air conditioner" that works at room temperate?
Hopefully, this is answered above. Also, since air conditioner create temperature differentials (they increase the difference in temperature between your room and the outside), a reverse air conditioner ouldn't be a machine that creates temperate differentials and produces energy, it would be a machine that destroys temperature differentials as it produces energy. So the device in the article is a reverse air conditioner in a sense.
So the government is regulating what can be said (and showed) on TV? And that is somehow not the same as the government regulating speech? Come again?
No, the government claims ownership of portions of the radio spectrum, and so they get to pick and choose what gets broadcast. Cable TV companies can send you pretty much anything they want.
speaking of Hitler, I must state it's a frightening coincidence Hitler demanded neighboring countries to hand over their Jewish populations or face military aggression. Bush's speech Satuday calling terrorists parasites reminded me of this.
Actually, I think it's more disturbing that you find calling Jews parasites analogous to calling terrorists parasites.
I kind of like the idea of reporting that I am Googlebot, I kind of doubt that they will block that.
Well, they do :) Try it.
This is like buying a car based on how well it runs without oil in the engine. I suspect my BMW would make for a fantastic video if I tried that too. DON'T DO THAT! I would not pay extra for an engine that would - like using synthetic oil to give an extra two minutes of use.
No it isn't. A car engine will only be running when you're there using it, so you'll notice right away if something goes wrong. In the unlikely event a heatsink fell off when nobody's using the computer, it looks like an AMD processor would become a fire hazard. The car analogy would be having a risk that your car will start smoldering while it's sitting in your garage.
What we have here is a disagreement over how property rights work on the Internet. Basically, they fall between two extremes: (a) "All I did was send a particular series of TCP/IP packets to a particular computer. It's not my fault that it responded by e-mailing me your customers' credit card numbers." and (b) "How dare you attempt to connect to port 80 of my machine without my explicit written permission!"
Your position falls too close to the latter postion. We are not dealing with an area of a website that one has to login to access. In such an area, one probably had to go through some sort of registration that involved becoming aware of the AUP if there is one. That would be the case in your Yahoo example.
The claim that one agrees to an AUP by accessing a site is ludicrous, because it would imply, among other things, that people have some obligation to look around for an AUP if they're dumped in the middle of a site by a third-party link. If the people running a site honestly want all users of a site to agree to certain conditions, they should restrict access to the content to registered users. Obviously, there is a trade-off between making content publically aceessible and requiring registration. One part of this trade-off is that you can't expect people using publically accessible content to follow arbitary rules beyond "don't hack into the server".
Incidentally, here's "cat" in Unlambda:
```sii ``s``s``s``s``s``s`ks``s`kk`kc``s``s`ks``s`kk``s`k s``s`kk ``s`kk``s`kk`ki``s``s`ks`ks``s`kk``s`kk`kk``s`k@`k i``s``s`k|`kii`kei
That's kind of long. How about:
```s``sii`ki``s``s`k@`ki``s``s``s`k|`kiii
Users of unlambda should note that the "i" combinator is strictly speaking unnecessary. For further obfuscation, replace "i" with "skk".
Surely you mean "``skk".
So if I reverse engineer Windows XP and distribute a modified version, and Microsoft sues me for copyright violation, does that mean their EULA is viral and anti-business?
Anti-matter exists beyond even a shadow of a doubt.
The Switzerland Coke Machine
Actually, it doesn't seem to be working now. Oh well.
But does the entire world need to know when and for how long you are using the bathroom.
It doesn't show who's using the bathroom, just that it's in use. It's not like you have to login with a username before you can get into the bathroom.
So, define the kilogram as the amount of mass that one liter of pure water contains at 4C.
At what pressure? Your unit of pressure will need to be based on your unit of mass.
IIRC the idea is to convert the standard of mass to a number of electrons accelerated by some well known voltage.
Yeah, but voltage is mass*distance^2/(time^3*amperage), so isn't it circular to use a known voltage? For that matter, doesn't the SI definition of one amp depend on the kilogram (as part of the unit of force)?
This is not informative, this is just failure to read the information given.
If you followed some of the links in the article, you'll find that the litigation began in March. The "same identical thing" didn't happen twice, it happened once and is still ongoing. Courts are slow.
This is answered in dozens of other threads: it's just about the only time that the server doesn't send responses to the keystrokes.
It appears, using openssh 2.9p2 (that currently in debian/unstable) that it sends the entire password in one TCP packet, so no problem there then.
The issue is not, and never was, with the initial password that ssh sends for authentication, but rather with using, for example, su or ssh within an ssh session.
My solution is to type asynchronously, pause for a random interval between each character, or each group of characters.
What you actually want to do is type at a fixed rate (say, one character every two seconds exactly). Clearly, the attacker then gets no information about the password other than its length. Trying to be truly random is harder than just looking at a timepiece that gives seconds as you type your password.
Sending a properly formed HTTP GET request is not tampering with or breaking into a system!!
This isn't like stealing Walmart's candy bars because they fail to put them inside a display case, this is like taking Walmart's candy bars because they put a sign next to them saying "Free Candy".
In general, how am I supposed to know that going to some particular URL in my browser is "breaking into a system"?
And yet you hypocritically accuse someone, who accused someone of not reading the articles, of being a hypocrite by not reading the articles! Just because you read the headline doesn't mean you know what you're talking about. The *cough* text of both articles *cough* clearly explained that the letters from dead people were sent by relatives who signed for them: "Utah officials found two of the pre-fab letters bore the typed names of dead people. Those names had been crossed out by family members who signed for them."
In principle, it could be much more convenient than existing PPV services from a cable provider, but the single-play thing isn't going to fly.
Read the article!
Yay, we can watch it go under a SECOND time! :=) Just like Hollywood tradition to produce bad sequels...
Well, the article says it will be priced similarly to pay-per-view movies. Also, it will be functionally better than pay-per-view movies (which don't give you the ability to pause, rewind, etc.), except that you have to use your computer to view it. People buy pay-per-view movies now. Therefore, the only factor that its success hinges upon is whether people who buy pay-per-view moves are able to use this, and don't mind watching on a monitor (unless they have TV output). The time expiration in and of itself can't cause it to fail, because pay-per-view movies sell. Also, they might later decide to lower the price to make up for the inconvenience of watching on a computer.
Actually, I don't think this will go over all that well, but that's because I suspect that the intersection of the set of people who buy pay-per-view movies and the set of people who want to watch movies using their computers is small. My main point is that people already buy time-limited movies for the price they will be charging.