There doesn't seem to be any required correlation between my XML description of my site's privacy policy and my actualy privacy policy.
For that matter, can anyone comment on the following questions:
How actionabile is violating my site's privacy policy?
What about if the policy is described in XML instead of English?
What if both are used, but the descriptions differ? (i.e., the XML says "We'll keep it all secret," but the English says "We're telling everyone.")
As an aside, wouldn't it be useful to keep a authenticated cache (somewhere other than in dreamland) of the P3P contracts I've agreed to? So that a site can't arbitrarily modify their contract and release my information in accordance with the new contract?
gay + sex ($2,239.56 + $3,836.79) is worth $6076.35 a day.
Um, since I assume you mean to be computing the value of the phrase "gay sex," I think you need to be re-examining your methodology. The phrase "gay sex" would be the intersection of "gay" and "sex," rather than their sum. From what we're told, we have no way of computing their intersection (and therefore, not even what the value of their union is...).
Besides, I think it's pretty obvious therefore that John Lennon would rank higher that Jesus, but what about Thrill Kill Kult?
If he cannot build a watertight battery compartment, what chance in heck does he have of building a generator?
Watertight I've no doubt of. Survive ocean submersion for the decade or more he seems to want it for is more difficult. Maybe cast the whole thing in silicone and without air pockets. Frankly, he'll be putting it in an environment that most plastics and metals fair poorly in, and probably changing it's ambient pressure constantly.
Further, comparing the difficulty of a battery compartment to the difficulty of a generator is disingenuous, I think. What I'm cautioning against is not the difficulty (which I think is about the same, and made quite arduous by the proposed lifetime and environment); I'm concerned about the consequences of an engineering failure.
If almost any of the generation ideas he proposes goes south, worst case is that the device stops working. If a battery compartment leaks, the battery leaks alkalines or lithium compounds into the surrounding seawater.
I wonder if the device couldn't be placed with an end on either end of a thermocline.
The idea would be to use the temperature differential (which can be significant - 10 degrees Faranheit isn't unusual) to generate current. A decent thermocouple would be able to do this without too much difficulty.
The difficulty, of course, is getting the thermocouple on either side of the thermocline. If the device can be of sufficient length (describing it as housed in a pipe suggests as much) this shouldn't be an issue. However, remaining on the thermocline could be difficult. Perhaps some sort of diaphram that would maintain position at the boundary? Tricky.
Augh. Wait, wait. You want to put alkaline batteries underwater? There's two other problems that you need to consider then:
Corrosion. The impression I get (correct or not) is that the device is supposed to have a long lifetime, be small and relatively inexpensive, and perhaps numerious. In those circumstances, the chances of salt water leaking into the battery enclosure sound pretty good. Once that happens, end of life follows rapidly.
Leakage. End of life occurs because the acids from the battery leak out into the surrounding seawater. I hate to sound like a treehugging owllover, but contaiminating other organisms habitats with extremely toxic chemicals they've got nearly no protection against just strikes me as uncool. Depending on placement and ubiquity of the planned device, you could be talking about serious ecological damange. And probably hefty fines, to boot.
Okay, glad we can just jump right to straight logic.
While I agree that "RSA's security relies on the difficulty of factoring" is about the same as "If factoring is hard, then RSA is secure," on reflection I don't think I agree that it's equivalent to [Factoring is hard] -> [RSA is secure]. Consider: in the case that factoring is easy, and RSA is still secure, this statement is still true, since counterfactual conditionals are tautalogical (who'da thunk I'd remember that phrase for a decade?). However, this sense is clear counter what was intended by "RSA's security relies on factoring's difficulty."
So, although I realize I'm reversing myself, I think "relies on" can (at least in this case) be directly substituted by "implies" and have the statement keep its original sense.
In reagrds to "relies solely on," you could as correctly "is mutually dependent on," since sole reliance would suggest both conditionals, and thus an equivalence.
I guess the core of the disagreement between Glorat and me and yourself is that our contention is that the relationship described by "rely" is unambiguously not bidirectional; it's the same as a logical conditional, while you contend that "rely" can describe an equivalence relationship.
I for one find this definition of "rely" entirely novel, and while I'm of an open mind about it, cannot find any definition that suggests that its meaning is ambiguous in this sense. Can you direct me to some other reference regarding this?
Because, after all, I read/. purely for educational purposes.
If you translate this in the current case, it means that: if RSA relies on factoring than any algorithm that breaks RSA could be used to factor composite numbers.
I'm sorry, but could you just confirm your usage of "rely"? In normal English, if I say A relies on B, it implies If B fails then A will fail.
So, "RSA relies on the difficulty of factoring" implies "If factoring were easy, then RSA would be broken." It seem that you're insisting that the opposite conditional is true, that "If RSA were broken, then factoring would be easy." It seems that what you further seem to be saying is that Rabin PKE is equivalent to factoring, from which we can take both conditionals.
So, I don't think there's a disagreement about the fact that a polynomial time factoring algorithm would be applicable to RSA, and the the discovery of such would imply that RSA was broken. How would you phrase that more simply? It seems like a fairly important thing to say about an encryption system.
I guess the quick summary is that we informed laymen had never heard "rely" defined as "is equivalent to," and in fact had believed, from our previous work in maths that "rely" described a unidirectional implication, not an equivalence.
If this is not so, can you point us at references, or explain how to refer to the relationship we'd thought we were describing with "rely," or explain why the importance of the relationship is only "aparent" to the cryptographically niave?
<heresy>I've always found Asimov's novels slow, the characters flat, and the style dry.</heresy> But, his short stories are execellent. The same style that makes his novels tedious make his shorts amazingly satisfying. A science fiction story doesn't need incredible depth of character, it gets by entirely on an idea and its presentation. And Asimov's ideas, I won't deny, were truly excellent.
My favorite story of his, by far, is The Billiard Ball, wherein a scientist kills the engineer who has been leeching off his work for decades by potting a billiard ball through the zero-mass field the engineer has built. Very nice story.
VKB has developed a highly efficient method for projecting an optical image of a keyboard onto a surface. In addition, VKB has developed a detection method through several proprietary developments for the accurate and reliable detection of user interaction, such as typing or cursor control functions (e.g. mouse or touch-pad controls). VKB has resolved all the technological hurdles required to make a practical virtual interface. Include minimizing the power consumption, minimal component size, simple processing, high accuracy and ease of use. VKB has filed numerous patents on its core technology and related applications.
How amazingly informative. I mean "un". Amazingly UNinformative. Babelfish's new marketdroid-to-english option produces:
We figured out how to project a keyboard. We also figured out to make it an actual keyboard. <null statement>. It works quite well. And we patented it.
(Funny how marketdroid-to-english produces all those <null statement> markers...) As how this actually works, this description alone would be enough for me not to be interested in this device: it sounds like snake oil. Especially because the above quote comes from the "Technology" section of VKB's amazingly sparse website.
I mean, who releases something like this without a How's This Work section? Unless of course there's nothing more that a red keyboard projected from a very small box. Do we have any first hand accounts of this thing?
Is it just that they're getting reported more often, or is the frequency of asteroids near-missing the Earth increasing?
While this sounds a little paranoid, there's a big difference between being able to see them better (or reporting them more loudly when we do) and them zipping by more often. The image I have is of some malign asteroid artillery unit ranging on the Earth, and the next (or the one after) will be the beginning of a barrage.
Yeah, that's a good argument. "Because this reviewer viewed an illegally copied and illegally screened pre-release version of a film that's going to make millions, then he's a good guy!" Just because you like the movie doesn't mean that it's not illegal.
You probably support the Napster-supported pirating of copyrighted music too, don't you?
Dammit. This probably qualifies as an off-topic troll, but I'm more than willing to take my lumps on this one.
I'd really like to see this line of reasoning evaporate on Slashdot, for the simple reason that there does exist a difference between legality and morality. Feel free to argue the moral issue of intellectual property, its theft and fair-use, and the tit-for-tat nature of piracy as a response to overreaching corporate manipulation of intellectual property rights.
Please do not argue that "there's a law against it" is one and the same thing as "it's wrong." Ideally, anything that is wrong should be illegal, but even that doesn't make everything illegal wrong.
I use Outlook all the time at work and it's a disjointed pain in the ass, poorly organized and badly designed.
But the unfortunate fact of the matter is that Outlook has an installed base of incredible size. How do they retain so many with a product so poor?
Answer: The product wasn't designed to be a usable, powerful, intuitive MUA. It was designed to provide the most customer lock-in possible, period. In this, it, and all the MS desktop apps, have succeeded admirably. Except maybe WMP.
So, it's probably just my usual paranoid suspicions, but how easily could one of these things -- or, more likely, a more advanced, optimised version -- be turned into a bug that "listens" to the vibrations put on a large flat surface by, say, casual conversation?
One of the stocks in trade of espionage / detective fiction for some time have been laser bugs: point an infrared laser at the windows of a room you want to listen to, and the laser detects vibrations in the windows and system converts the vibrations back into sound. Supposed to actually exist. I've seen them advertized, but couldn't confirm the lack of scam.
As far as affixing an electronic device to a hidden location in a room (under a table, say) why not just use a conventional bug?
Speedpasses (like RG tolltags et al) work something like crystal radios. Really, and RF device only needs power to do amplification, so if you're willing to use an earphone, you can listen to radio. (I think there's also issues of grounding...a powered radio doesn't need a ground wire.)
The quickie here is that radio waves (this is your E&M refresher for the day) are emitted by electrons running back and forth along the length of an antenna, and any grounded conductor in a radio field will have its electrons moving in sympathy. Moving electrons are a current, and as they move from place to place they set up a voltage, so you get power off the air. A very little tiny bit of power, but power all the same. All the remains is to filter the oscillations you want to listen to (by "tuning" the radio) et voila!
Your Usenet information about shorting the inductor, connecting a diode for a harmonic is rather fascinating, since, while using a radio field to supply the juice for a micropower chip is neat and all, tranmission is a higher power requirement. I'd always assumed it transmitted weakly on a different frequency, which was why they were such short range.
Now my question: couldn't you harvest the juice from the air? (And I realize I'm a little off topic here.) Put up a big antenna, wire a peak detector across it, charge capacitors and dump them into your app. Would only be useful for certain applications, but there's gotta be more to using RF for power than speedpasses and paddle keys. I mean, shouldn't the power you can get be directly related to the length of your aerial? Is the ratio really so abysmal?
Re:You are not anal enough either. (IAAL)
on
Abusing the GPL?
·
· Score: 2
Fascinating. If I specifically ask a question of you, SPYvSPY with the understanding that it's for my own (and I guess, the rest of/.'s) edification, and not as legal advice (and certainly not just to be argumentative), could I get you to answer it?
Question is: how does this relate to definitions of pornography? The whole "community standards" doctrine, right? That's always seemed to be an extremely vague definition, but the only acceptable one, regardless of how well it's doing in the Information Age. Can an analogy be drawn between the language of that ruling (I do remember that it is the result of a ruling, not actual legislation, yes?) and the language of the GPL? Is the contract law/criminal law division enough to make the analogy invalid?
(Hell, I'm pretty sure there are better examples of well respected legal vaguenesses.)
I suppose that it's possible that a pornography case would result in the "fact-finding parade" you describe above. But the impression I've always had is that "objective metrics" weren't the purview (or at least not the sole sustinance) of legal discourse; if a contract were so easily measured, why settle disputes with lawyers when a monkey with a calculator could do the figures, no? Actually, the very suggestion that objective metrics should be a requirement of a contract damages my respect for lawyers everywhere.
For stuff like NP-completeness, and Turing machines, etc, the dicipline you're looking for is call "Theory of Computation" by most universities. The Lewis & Papdimitriou textbook is decent and comprehensible. It's one of the few courses, though, that I'd say is difficult to screw up, so I'd almost say any inexpensive text on the subject would suit your needs.
Hell, this might be a good use for the Slashdot journal. I mean, what use is a CS degree if I can't inflict my misunderstanding of mathematics on the uneducated?
Make you a deal, AC. Get a Slashdot login, and I'll start adding journal entries regarding Computation.
I've seen a couple of threads devolve into "this proc emulates that
one...", so I wanted to drop a question in this forum.
I've long wondered what the insurmountable hurdles were to convert the
machine language of one processor were to any other. Should it not be
possible to abstract the results of instructions and convert between
instruction sets?
I can see there being a huge time complexity argument, since the algorithm
I have in mind runs something like: translate instructions from source to
a base language (say, a modified version of MMIX, or whatnot), idealy
designed as a RISC, where there are no convenience instructions - every
instruction is atomic (by which I mean not the usual "is completed all at
once" but "can't be split into other instructions) - and then regather
translation language instructions into destination language
instructions. That "gathering" process is, I'm sure, analogous to some
solved problem, and might even be NP-complete.
I can see a few difficulties, such as differences in registers (both in
number and roles), byte-widths, word lengths, bus function and memory
size, but I see those primarily as features (non multiple byte width
conversion, allowed?) or run-time checks (oops, that program needs more memory than the target machine can address). But the biggest issue would
be the time complexity of the problem.
But if the only workable algorithms are NP, so what? I mean, the concept
here is that I write a set of rules for converting to and from any proc,
and you can write your code for anything (even the JVM...) and have it be
converted into nice code for everything. It might take a while, but at
one run per app, there aren't as many actual instances of the problem, if
it is large and complex, you know?
Better still, I wouldn't need the source for the original code. So I
could conceivably run Windoze through this code, and get an app that'll run on whatever proc I want.
So, the question is: why isn't this feasible, or if it is, why hasn't it
been done?
You know, I hate to be negative, but if you'll recall the/. article from a year ago, Rolltronics picked up the technology from another company that failed while trying to develop it.
I'm afraid that, cool as we all think it would be to print out electronics (and boy would it), that printable electronics is going to show up about a week before the flying car, if at all. Rolltronics was RSN on its product about a year ago, too.
A class action suit, filed by all the users who contributed to the CDDB database should be the only way to resolve that issue once and for all.
Yes, but. First, the suit would need to be started, by someone willing to take on Gracenote, who would need to see the point. Which would mean that:
The suit would have to have legal merit. Being that everyone who contrinuted to the CDDB only had an agreement (of any sort) with the distributor of the software they used, and the distributor had an agreement with the CDDB, it might be very difficult to demonstrate that the CDDB owes its contributors squat.
The suit would have to be financially viableMy understanding is that this sort of suit almost invariably becomes federal, that they're not cheap, and the limited set of legal firms capable of suing them would need to determine that the suit would at least allow them to recoup their expenditures. Also a factor is the risk entailed by any legal shakiness (see previous point.)
Enough of the potential participants would sign onto the suit While this might seem the most trivial problem on Slashdot, if the claimant list is short, a federal judge would probably kick it out. How many contributors actually feel like they were hurt? (Although, more positively, but more depressingly, how many would sign on if they thought they could get damages?) More difficult would be to demonstrate the veracity of the claimant list. Is everyone on that list really a contributor to the CDDB? How can this be proven?
Now as an aside, I feel faintly ridiculous affirming that I am in fact not a lawyer, since it should be obvious by the fact that I'm expressing legal opinions in public without a fee. If I were a lawyer, this would be unethical. Or something. However, I did pay very good attention way back when in civics.
More amusing is the seemingly general contention at Slashdot of all places that AOL/TW is going to be running scared of Apple.
I've always had a soft spot for Apple, but every release from Apple reported here seems to be followed the following thread:
"Man, this doohickey sucks! It's smaller, slower, more expensive, than the Doohickey 2000!"
"Too right. Not to mention it doesn't work on Linux. Or even Windows!"
"Yeah, which explains why Apple is pretty much dead."
So, I'm amused by the contention that "almost dead" Apple holds enough sway to get half of Time Canada canned, or that they'd want yank all their advertising from the largest english media consortium available.
Slashdot Mirror
For that matter, can anyone comment on the following questions:
As an aside, wouldn't it be useful to keep a authenticated cache (somewhere other than in dreamland) of the P3P contracts I've agreed to? So that a site can't arbitrarily modify their contract and release my information in accordance with the new contract?
Um, since I assume you mean to be computing the value of the phrase "gay sex," I think you need to be re-examining your methodology. The phrase "gay sex" would be the intersection of "gay" and "sex," rather than their sum. From what we're told, we have no way of computing their intersection (and therefore, not even what the value of their union is...).
Besides, I think it's pretty obvious therefore that John Lennon would rank higher that Jesus, but what about Thrill Kill Kult?
Watertight I've no doubt of. Survive ocean submersion for the decade or more he seems to want it for is more difficult. Maybe cast the whole thing in silicone and without air pockets. Frankly, he'll be putting it in an environment that most plastics and metals fair poorly in, and probably changing it's ambient pressure constantly.
Further, comparing the difficulty of a battery compartment to the difficulty of a generator is disingenuous, I think. What I'm cautioning against is not the difficulty (which I think is about the same, and made quite arduous by the proposed lifetime and environment); I'm concerned about the consequences of an engineering failure.
If almost any of the generation ideas he proposes goes south, worst case is that the device stops working. If a battery compartment leaks, the battery leaks alkalines or lithium compounds into the surrounding seawater.
That's my two cents.
5900/tcp open vnc
mysql?
mysql nothing. VNC? Woohoo, what fun could be had with that...
The idea would be to use the temperature differential (which can be significant - 10 degrees Faranheit isn't unusual) to generate current. A decent thermocouple would be able to do this without too much difficulty.
The difficulty, of course, is getting the thermocouple on either side of the thermocline. If the device can be of sufficient length (describing it as housed in a pipe suggests as much) this shouldn't be an issue. However, remaining on the thermocline could be difficult. Perhaps some sort of diaphram that would maintain position at the boundary? Tricky.
While I agree that "RSA's security relies on the difficulty of factoring" is about the same as "If factoring is hard, then RSA is secure," on reflection I don't think I agree that it's equivalent to [Factoring is hard] -> [RSA is secure]. Consider: in the case that factoring is easy, and RSA is still secure, this statement is still true, since counterfactual conditionals are tautalogical (who'da thunk I'd remember that phrase for a decade?). However, this sense is clear counter what was intended by "RSA's security relies on factoring's difficulty."
So, although I realize I'm reversing myself, I think "relies on" can (at least in this case) be directly substituted by "implies" and have the statement keep its original sense.
In reagrds to "relies solely on," you could as correctly "is mutually dependent on," since sole reliance would suggest both conditionals, and thus an equivalence.
I for one find this definition of "rely" entirely novel, and while I'm of an open mind about it, cannot find any definition that suggests that its meaning is ambiguous in this sense. Can you direct me to some other reference regarding this?
Because, after all, I read /. purely for educational purposes.
I'm sorry, but could you just confirm your usage of "rely"? In normal English, if I say A relies on B, it implies If B fails then A will fail.
So, "RSA relies on the difficulty of factoring" implies "If factoring were easy, then RSA would be broken." It seem that you're insisting that the opposite conditional is true, that "If RSA were broken, then factoring would be easy." It seems that what you further seem to be saying is that Rabin PKE is equivalent to factoring, from which we can take both conditionals.
So, I don't think there's a disagreement about the fact that a polynomial time factoring algorithm would be applicable to RSA, and the the discovery of such would imply that RSA was broken. How would you phrase that more simply? It seems like a fairly important thing to say about an encryption system.
I guess the quick summary is that we informed laymen had never heard "rely" defined as "is equivalent to," and in fact had believed, from our previous work in maths that "rely" described a unidirectional implication, not an equivalence.
If this is not so, can you point us at references, or explain how to refer to the relationship we'd thought we were describing with "rely," or explain why the importance of the relationship is only "aparent" to the cryptographically niave?
My favorite story of his, by far, is The Billiard Ball, wherein a scientist kills the engineer who has been leeching off his work for decades by potting a billiard ball through the zero-mass field the engineer has built. Very nice story.
How amazingly informative. I mean "un". Amazingly UNinformative. Babelfish's new marketdroid-to-english option produces:
(Funny how marketdroid-to-english produces all those <null statement> markers...) As how this actually works, this description alone would be enough for me not to be interested in this device: it sounds like snake oil. Especially because the above quote comes from the "Technology" section of VKB's amazingly sparse website.
I mean, who releases something like this without a How's This Work section? Unless of course there's nothing more that a red keyboard projected from a very small box. Do we have any first hand accounts of this thing?
While this sounds a little paranoid, there's a big difference between being able to see them better (or reporting them more loudly when we do) and them zipping by more often. The image I have is of some malign asteroid artillery unit ranging on the Earth, and the next (or the one after) will be the beginning of a barrage.
I'm just being a worrying nellie, right? Right?
You probably support the Napster-supported pirating of copyrighted music too, don't you?
Dammit. This probably qualifies as an off-topic troll, but I'm more than willing to take my lumps on this one.
I'd really like to see this line of reasoning evaporate on Slashdot, for the simple reason that there does exist a difference between legality and morality. Feel free to argue the moral issue of intellectual property, its theft and fair-use, and the tit-for-tat nature of piracy as a response to overreaching corporate manipulation of intellectual property rights.
Please do not argue that "there's a law against it" is one and the same thing as "it's wrong." Ideally, anything that is wrong should be illegal, but even that doesn't make everything illegal wrong.
Quick note: check out Apache Gump, which is basically the same deal. And free even.
But the unfortunate fact of the matter is that Outlook has an installed base of incredible size. How do they retain so many with a product so poor?
Answer: The product wasn't designed to be a usable, powerful, intuitive MUA. It was designed to provide the most customer lock-in possible, period. In this, it, and all the MS desktop apps, have succeeded admirably. Except maybe WMP.
Would that it were so. Unfortunately, it's difficult to top the MS Office suite, Outlook included. Certainly with OSS.
Frankly, the Office programs are what most business users need, and a good solid OSS solution would be beautiful, but it hasn't happened yet.
As far as affixing an electronic device to a hidden location in a room (under a table, say) why not just use a conventional bug?
The quickie here is that radio waves (this is your E&M refresher for the day) are emitted by electrons running back and forth along the length of an antenna, and any grounded conductor in a radio field will have its electrons moving in sympathy. Moving electrons are a current, and as they move from place to place they set up a voltage, so you get power off the air. A very little tiny bit of power, but power all the same. All the remains is to filter the oscillations you want to listen to (by "tuning" the radio) et voila!
Your Usenet information about shorting the inductor, connecting a diode for a harmonic is rather fascinating, since, while using a radio field to supply the juice for a micropower chip is neat and all, tranmission is a higher power requirement. I'd always assumed it transmitted weakly on a different frequency, which was why they were such short range.
Now my question: couldn't you harvest the juice from the air? (And I realize I'm a little off topic here.) Put up a big antenna, wire a peak detector across it, charge capacitors and dump them into your app. Would only be useful for certain applications, but there's gotta be more to using RF for power than speedpasses and paddle keys. I mean, shouldn't the power you can get be directly related to the length of your aerial? Is the ratio really so abysmal?
Question is: how does this relate to definitions of pornography? The whole "community standards" doctrine, right? That's always seemed to be an extremely vague definition, but the only acceptable one, regardless of how well it's doing in the Information Age. Can an analogy be drawn between the language of that ruling (I do remember that it is the result of a ruling, not actual legislation, yes?) and the language of the GPL? Is the contract law/criminal law division enough to make the analogy invalid? (Hell, I'm pretty sure there are better examples of well respected legal vaguenesses.)
I suppose that it's possible that a pornography case would result in the "fact-finding parade" you describe above. But the impression I've always had is that "objective metrics" weren't the purview (or at least not the sole sustinance) of legal discourse; if a contract were so easily measured, why settle disputes with lawyers when a monkey with a calculator could do the figures, no? Actually, the very suggestion that objective metrics should be a requirement of a contract damages my respect for lawyers everywhere.
Hm. Most troubling.
Hell, this might be a good use for the Slashdot journal. I mean, what use is a CS degree if I can't inflict my misunderstanding of mathematics on the uneducated?
Make you a deal, AC. Get a Slashdot login, and I'll start adding journal entries regarding Computation.
I've long wondered what the insurmountable hurdles were to convert the machine language of one processor were to any other. Should it not be possible to abstract the results of instructions and convert between instruction sets?
I can see there being a huge time complexity argument, since the algorithm I have in mind runs something like: translate instructions from source to a base language (say, a modified version of MMIX, or whatnot), idealy designed as a RISC, where there are no convenience instructions - every instruction is atomic (by which I mean not the usual "is completed all at once" but "can't be split into other instructions) - and then regather translation language instructions into destination language instructions. That "gathering" process is, I'm sure, analogous to some solved problem, and might even be NP-complete.
I can see a few difficulties, such as differences in registers (both in number and roles), byte-widths, word lengths, bus function and memory size, but I see those primarily as features (non multiple byte width conversion, allowed?) or run-time checks (oops, that program needs more memory than the target machine can address). But the biggest issue would be the time complexity of the problem.
But if the only workable algorithms are NP, so what? I mean, the concept here is that I write a set of rules for converting to and from any proc, and you can write your code for anything (even the JVM...) and have it be converted into nice code for everything. It might take a while, but at one run per app, there aren't as many actual instances of the problem, if it is large and complex, you know?
Better still, I wouldn't need the source for the original code. So I could conceivably run Windoze through this code, and get an app that'll run on whatever proc I want.
So, the question is: why isn't this feasible, or if it is, why hasn't it been done?
I'm afraid that, cool as we all think it would be to print out electronics (and boy would it), that printable electronics is going to show up about a week before the flying car, if at all. Rolltronics was RSN on its product about a year ago, too.
Yes, but. First, the suit would need to be started, by someone willing to take on Gracenote, who would need to see the point. Which would mean that:
- The suit would have to have legal merit. Being that everyone who contrinuted to the CDDB only had an agreement (of any sort) with the distributor of the software they used, and the distributor had an agreement with the CDDB, it might be very difficult to demonstrate that the CDDB owes its contributors squat.
- The suit would have to be financially viableMy understanding is that this sort of suit almost invariably becomes federal, that they're not cheap, and the limited set of legal firms capable of suing them would need to determine that the suit would at least allow them to recoup their expenditures. Also a factor is the risk entailed by any legal shakiness (see previous point.)
- Enough of the potential participants would sign onto the suit While this might seem the most trivial problem on Slashdot, if the claimant list is short, a federal judge would probably kick it out. How many contributors actually feel like they were hurt? (Although, more positively, but more depressingly, how many would sign on if they thought they could get damages?) More difficult would be to demonstrate the veracity of the claimant list. Is everyone on that list really a contributor to the CDDB? How can this be proven?
Now as an aside, I feel faintly ridiculous affirming that I am in fact not a lawyer, since it should be obvious by the fact that I'm expressing legal opinions in public without a fee. If I were a lawyer, this would be unethical. Or something. However, I did pay very good attention way back when in civics.I've always had a soft spot for Apple, but every release from Apple reported here seems to be followed the following thread:
So, I'm amused by the contention that "almost dead" Apple holds enough sway to get half of Time Canada canned, or that they'd want yank all their advertising from the largest english media consortium available.
On the other hand, it's $30 you'll pay on top of the $300 for either Xbox or PS2. Except you won't pay it for the PS2.