In the US, DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) circumvention is illegal under the DMCA, right?
A while ago I started to wonder. I am regularly receiving some shipping documents in pdf format, and routinely copy/paste bits of text out of them, like document number or so, to add to my own administration. No problem on my Linux box. However once I tried the same while working on my iBook with Apple's pdf viewer, and then I got the message "not allowed to copy" or something in those lines. That was obviously DRM at work.
This however is a cooperative kind of DRM: the software has to actively enforce the restrictions. This as opposed to e.g. DVD or BR, where the restrictions are implemented using an encryption scheme, which always needs to be broken actively.
Anyway it made me wonder whether this ignoring of digital restrictions management instructions in a document is also circumvention? And as such Linux's pdf viewers would be illegal under the DMCA, simply for NOT implementing something?
That's what happens to the unlucky individual, but often the idea lives on and survives this fight. Just look at your average revolution, there have been plenty of them in the past, and the saying definitely applies to most if not all of them.
OTOH applying it to Al Qaeda and so... they're in the third stage now....
Nowadays I'm more expecting to get serious protest actions performed on-line by disgruntled youngsters. DDOS attacks and so, Anonymous style. All they have to do is download some... oh, wait....
Serious questions about this law: is it connection based, or account holder based? How's the disconnection work?
In case of the first: how about you're disconnected, a month later move out, then new tenant/owner of the place remains disconnected?
In case of the second: you're landlord and account holder of the Internet connection of the flat you let out, tenant downloads stuff, gets three strikes, and gets disconnected, will they also disconnect your personal connection?
Also these disconnections, how long are they supposed to last? Is there a time span for it? All I hear is "offenders will be disconnected" but not for how long, suggesting it's a life time ban.
Anonymous pre-paid Internet. Hard to send account owner a notice; even harder to have them disconnected let alone keep them disconnected (the latter of course being the actual punishment).
It was a piece really written by a politician... saying things like "very effective governor x" and "like how we know that a minimum wage causes unemployment" (which imho is not so clear-cut, but that's not the point under discussion).
And in the end he really shows his true colours, surprising no-one mentioned it yet in the comments:
New power turbines would come to market that remove the sulfur and the mercury from coal before combustion, burning only the hydrogen.
Now for sure there will be some hydrogen in coal. Not as gas, but bound as hydrocarbons. Not easy to get that hydrogen out to burn cleanly, without burning the carbon in the process. And besides, current technology that I'm aware of removes those compounds AFTER combustion. When they're not so well attached to the rest of the coal anymore. So much for Mr Science.
It is not clear what global warming may cause exactly. The system is too big, too complex for us to fully understand and model.
One of the interesting effects may be that Europe - at a fairly high latitude but still having a moderate climate - may actually cool down considerably, if the Gulf Stream stops bringing warm tropical waters to the area. A totally opposite effect than the name "global warming" or "greenhouse effect" suggest.
Some areas will get wetter, other areas may get dryer. Large parts of China and Australia have been suffering serious droughts over the last years, which is attributed to climate change. More typhoons/hurricanes are expected too, and besides strong winds they tend to bring a lot of rain indeed. The big issue with climate change is that while we know it's happening, we don't really know what the results will be. Weather patterns are expected to become more extreme, that's bad. Climate zones are shifting fast, faster than nature can keep up with, and that's bad too.
And then of course that little issue of oil running out, probably within a few decades, i.e. well within my lifetime. Coal we have enough of to last a lot longer, but that's even dirtier a fuel than oil. So indeed for that reason alone we should look at alternatives, preferably renewables but nuclear is I think also a good option for at least part of our energy needs. It definitely has it's problems, particularly the waste problem hasn't been solved yet. And anyway putting all your eggs in one basket is a bad idea no matter what, and now we're dependent on oil based fuels for nearly all our energy needs and that alone should be reason enough to look at alternatives.
Yet Hiroshima and Nagasaki are inhabited to this day. The people that survived the bombing never left, and the cities clearly managed to repopulate well.
Fossil fuel consumption is contaminating the whole planet, and threatening to make the whole world inhabitable. Or at least, thanks to rising sea levels, swamping complete nations. And don't forget the huge swathes of grassland that have become desert now.
It's not that the alternatives are so much better; it's more that nuclear issues are located around and easily directly attributed to the nuclear plant. All those deaths from air pollution caused by burning coal are generally not directly linked to that coal fired power plant 20 km away.
Interesting how markets differ. In Hong Kong I've never used web sites to find homes for rent: we just went to an area, walked around the shopping malls, and asked the agents directly on what's available. They always post numerous offers on the window giving you a good idea on what's available in the area and what prices you have to think of. And usually they can show you some flats right away, just walking around the area.
My current home we found through a small flyer posted to a lamp post. That's how some agents advertise too, this was an agent that was doing village houses so more spread out, having a much larger action radius than agents handling high-rises. This agent then showed us around by car, and that included the place we live now.
Larger agents have web sites listing properties, that we only used as rough indication and to look for general areas. They sometimes come with photos, though mostly just a floor plan.
Some sites would at least let you right-click and open in a new tab, but others wouldn't.
Why right click when ctrl + left click does the job just fine? (that's in Firefox at least). And FF also allows you to switch off suppression of the right-click menu. Though it's of course irritating behaviour of those sites.
To me it's a bit like the space race. What has putting a man on the moon brought to mankind? A lot - but the moon rocks and pretty TV images and photos are not the most interesting part of it.
These solar cars have quite some interesting challenges that I can think of as total layman. I think of the solar cells itself: getting more power from less surface area. New materials: stronger and lighter, while still easy machinable. Aerodynamics are an issue. The power train: converting light into motion efficiently. And of course the sheer engineering challenge that puts people's brains to work.
Many of this kind of challenges won't have any direct practical application. But they will have longer term advantages: the research being done may be put to use in totally different areas, it makes people think in a totally different way opening up their minds, whatever. And "solar powered car" sounds good. Many people like cars, and having a car that runs "for free", without any external power input, well that speaks to the imagination of many. The futuristic models that you see there do too.
I've been told before that in case of sunglasses you should always have UV filtering glasses. This as the sunglasses block part of the light (their purpose), causing your pupils to open a bit more, and letting in more UV light than your eyes would receive when not wearing sunglasses at all.
Personally I'm barely wearing sunglasses any more. I'm living in a really sunny country now, and am getting used to it. The sun being high up the sky may also help, wearing a hat works great to keep the direct sun out of your eyes. Very few people here wear sunglasses, far less than I'm used to seeing in cooler, less sunny climates.
iPad: about 10 million units sold first half 2011. So make that 20-25 million for the year. The total tablet market may reach something like 30 million this year.
PC's: about 350 million units sold in 2010.
iPad and other tablets may get all the press, but generic PC units outsell tablets by more than 10 to 1, and those generic PCs again come >90% with Windows pre-installed. No idea what you've been smoking but your statement is clearly nonsensical. You can stop trolling now. If you have something the world in general has to see, Windows is still a pretty good bet.
No matter what, getting stuff up there is expensive. So I'm surprised they want to bring fuel for a rocket-assisted soft landing, as that's a lot of extra weight to carry, and it directly decreases the payload (and in effect pushes up the cost per kg of payload).
Personally I'd rather go for a shuttle-type rocket plane that can glide back to earth. Or, that failing, parachutes. Of course recovery is harder as you can't guide them so well but it's surely cheaper than a soft landing using rockets when you have a thick atmosphere to help you.
The same for getting up: use wings for the first 15-20 km or so, rockets from there. Launching off an airplane. Much cheaper, energy wise. Or at least use an engine that can breath air while it's still in plentiful supply, though admittedly it sounds hard to design a rocket type engine that can both work on atmospheric air and on pure (liquid) oxygen.
One would say there are easier methods, that are more objective. Like: take the statistics provided by the app store on number of downloads, the price of the app (if not free), and from that you have the revenue.
It's normal that the top 20% takes 80% of sales. Like 20% of the products in a typical supermarket create 80% of turnover. Though in the app market it may be even more skewed.
From a security aspect there is a good reason to physically destroy: it is visible from the outside. The difference between a working drive and one that's been hammered on or sawed in two is quite clear, no need to hook it up to a computer to check whether it's been wiped or not. And when it comes to high-security facilities where it's generally not allowed to take out any storage device, so to take it out you have to make sure it's not a hard disk any more, but a lump of metal scrap.
That said for personal use zero'ing the drive indeed will do the job well enough. And preserves the drive for potential future use.
Thanks. This looks like a healthy market to me. Three browsers with >20% market share, IE small enough to be way too small to target exclusively, and Safari as a significant fourth. Much better than the stats from say five years ago.
Another thing is the transmission itself. Have your field radio reach the satellite instead of an overhead plane is a lot harder. I'd expect it takes more power too, which means bigger batteries or shorter battery life which both are not good for the soldier in the field.
But of course as soon as that satellite is there you're good. It has it's advantages over a plane that has to stay airborne nearby, or having a team following you with a base set.
A misbehaving extension should not be able to crash the browser.
Just like a misbehaving application should not be able to crash the underlying operating system.
And this analogy is not exactly far fetched as these days browsers act more and more as an operating system, considering what can be done with AJAX and related technologies.
Anyone has a graph of that? Tables don't make things very "visible". Graphs do.
And that drop is not exactly spectacular, and unlikely to be related to the release schedule. Chrome, where they copied the fast release schedule from, is growing steadily.
I have the same problem. But actually that's Ubuntu's fault(?) for sticking to 3.x in the 10.3 LTS version. I'm upgrading my browser along with all the updates Ubuntu presents me, and that's why I'm now at version 3.6.22.
And just in case you're wondering: I'm running Ubuntu 10.3 because I want a system that just works, yet is up-to-date when it comes to security and serious bugs. And that without the need to completely replace it every six months or so, including getting used to new quirks and a potentially overhauled UI. But then I just want to get things done.
The link you give happens to be the very first link in the summary. Followed indeed by two links to articles, but the link to the actual scrolls is there already.
Slashdot Mirror
In the US, DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) circumvention is illegal under the DMCA, right?
A while ago I started to wonder. I am regularly receiving some shipping documents in pdf format, and routinely copy/paste bits of text out of them, like document number or so, to add to my own administration. No problem on my Linux box. However once I tried the same while working on my iBook with Apple's pdf viewer, and then I got the message "not allowed to copy" or something in those lines. That was obviously DRM at work.
This however is a cooperative kind of DRM: the software has to actively enforce the restrictions. This as opposed to e.g. DVD or BR, where the restrictions are implemented using an encryption scheme, which always needs to be broken actively.
Anyway it made me wonder whether this ignoring of digital restrictions management instructions in a document is also circumvention? And as such Linux's pdf viewers would be illegal under the DMCA, simply for NOT implementing something?
That's what happens to the unlucky individual, but often the idea lives on and survives this fight. Just look at your average revolution, there have been plenty of them in the past, and the saying definitely applies to most if not all of them.
OTOH applying it to Al Qaeda and so... they're in the third stage now....
Nowadays I'm more expecting to get serious protest actions performed on-line by disgruntled youngsters. DDOS attacks and so, Anonymous style. All they have to do is download some ... oh, wait....
Serious questions about this law: is it connection based, or account holder based? How's the disconnection work?
In case of the first: how about you're disconnected, a month later move out, then new tenant/owner of the place remains disconnected?
In case of the second: you're landlord and account holder of the Internet connection of the flat you let out, tenant downloads stuff, gets three strikes, and gets disconnected, will they also disconnect your personal connection?
Also these disconnections, how long are they supposed to last? Is there a time span for it? All I hear is "offenders will be disconnected" but not for how long, suggesting it's a life time ban.
Anonymous pre-paid Internet. Hard to send account owner a notice; even harder to have them disconnected let alone keep them disconnected (the latter of course being the actual punishment).
It was a piece really written by a politician... saying things like "very effective governor x" and "like how we know that a minimum wage causes unemployment" (which imho is not so clear-cut, but that's not the point under discussion).
And in the end he really shows his true colours, surprising no-one mentioned it yet in the comments:
New power turbines would come to market that remove the sulfur and the mercury from coal before combustion, burning only the hydrogen.
Now for sure there will be some hydrogen in coal. Not as gas, but bound as hydrocarbons. Not easy to get that hydrogen out to burn cleanly, without burning the carbon in the process. And besides, current technology that I'm aware of removes those compounds AFTER combustion. When they're not so well attached to the rest of the coal anymore. So much for Mr Science.
It is not clear what global warming may cause exactly. The system is too big, too complex for us to fully understand and model.
One of the interesting effects may be that Europe - at a fairly high latitude but still having a moderate climate - may actually cool down considerably, if the Gulf Stream stops bringing warm tropical waters to the area. A totally opposite effect than the name "global warming" or "greenhouse effect" suggest.
Some areas will get wetter, other areas may get dryer. Large parts of China and Australia have been suffering serious droughts over the last years, which is attributed to climate change. More typhoons/hurricanes are expected too, and besides strong winds they tend to bring a lot of rain indeed. The big issue with climate change is that while we know it's happening, we don't really know what the results will be. Weather patterns are expected to become more extreme, that's bad. Climate zones are shifting fast, faster than nature can keep up with, and that's bad too.
And then of course that little issue of oil running out, probably within a few decades, i.e. well within my lifetime. Coal we have enough of to last a lot longer, but that's even dirtier a fuel than oil. So indeed for that reason alone we should look at alternatives, preferably renewables but nuclear is I think also a good option for at least part of our energy needs. It definitely has it's problems, particularly the waste problem hasn't been solved yet. And anyway putting all your eggs in one basket is a bad idea no matter what, and now we're dependent on oil based fuels for nearly all our energy needs and that alone should be reason enough to look at alternatives.
Yet Hiroshima and Nagasaki are inhabited to this day. The people that survived the bombing never left, and the cities clearly managed to repopulate well.
It's not that the alternatives are so much better; it's more that nuclear issues are located around and easily directly attributed to the nuclear plant. All those deaths from air pollution caused by burning coal are generally not directly linked to that coal fired power plant 20 km away.
Replying twice but totally different comment :)
Interesting how markets differ. In Hong Kong I've never used web sites to find homes for rent: we just went to an area, walked around the shopping malls, and asked the agents directly on what's available. They always post numerous offers on the window giving you a good idea on what's available in the area and what prices you have to think of. And usually they can show you some flats right away, just walking around the area.
My current home we found through a small flyer posted to a lamp post. That's how some agents advertise too, this was an agent that was doing village houses so more spread out, having a much larger action radius than agents handling high-rises. This agent then showed us around by car, and that included the place we live now.
Larger agents have web sites listing properties, that we only used as rough indication and to look for general areas. They sometimes come with photos, though mostly just a floor plan.
Some sites would at least let you right-click and open in a new tab, but others wouldn't.
Why right click when ctrl + left click does the job just fine? (that's in Firefox at least). And FF also allows you to switch off suppression of the right-click menu. Though it's of course irritating behaviour of those sites.
To me it's a bit like the space race. What has putting a man on the moon brought to mankind? A lot - but the moon rocks and pretty TV images and photos are not the most interesting part of it.
These solar cars have quite some interesting challenges that I can think of as total layman. I think of the solar cells itself: getting more power from less surface area. New materials: stronger and lighter, while still easy machinable. Aerodynamics are an issue. The power train: converting light into motion efficiently. And of course the sheer engineering challenge that puts people's brains to work.
Many of this kind of challenges won't have any direct practical application. But they will have longer term advantages: the research being done may be put to use in totally different areas, it makes people think in a totally different way opening up their minds, whatever. And "solar powered car" sounds good. Many people like cars, and having a car that runs "for free", without any external power input, well that speaks to the imagination of many. The futuristic models that you see there do too.
I've been told before that in case of sunglasses you should always have UV filtering glasses. This as the sunglasses block part of the light (their purpose), causing your pupils to open a bit more, and letting in more UV light than your eyes would receive when not wearing sunglasses at all.
Personally I'm barely wearing sunglasses any more. I'm living in a really sunny country now, and am getting used to it. The sun being high up the sky may also help, wearing a hat works great to keep the direct sun out of your eyes. Very few people here wear sunglasses, far less than I'm used to seeing in cooler, less sunny climates.
A quick google gives me the following numbers:
iPad: about 10 million units sold first half 2011. So make that 20-25 million for the year. The total tablet market may reach something like 30 million this year.
PC's: about 350 million units sold in 2010.
iPad and other tablets may get all the press, but generic PC units outsell tablets by more than 10 to 1, and those generic PCs again come >90% with Windows pre-installed. No idea what you've been smoking but your statement is clearly nonsensical. You can stop trolling now. If you have something the world in general has to see, Windows is still a pretty good bet.
No matter what, getting stuff up there is expensive. So I'm surprised they want to bring fuel for a rocket-assisted soft landing, as that's a lot of extra weight to carry, and it directly decreases the payload (and in effect pushes up the cost per kg of payload).
Personally I'd rather go for a shuttle-type rocket plane that can glide back to earth. Or, that failing, parachutes. Of course recovery is harder as you can't guide them so well but it's surely cheaper than a soft landing using rockets when you have a thick atmosphere to help you.
The same for getting up: use wings for the first 15-20 km or so, rockets from there. Launching off an airplane. Much cheaper, energy wise. Or at least use an engine that can breath air while it's still in plentiful supply, though admittedly it sounds hard to design a rocket type engine that can both work on atmospheric air and on pure (liquid) oxygen.
Then better buy some clean clothes at the destination airport. Euhm... wait a minute... what destination airport?
One would say there are easier methods, that are more objective. Like: take the statistics provided by the app store on number of downloads, the price of the app (if not free), and from that you have the revenue.
It's normal that the top 20% takes 80% of sales. Like 20% of the products in a typical supermarket create 80% of turnover. Though in the app market it may be even more skewed.
From a security aspect there is a good reason to physically destroy: it is visible from the outside. The difference between a working drive and one that's been hammered on or sawed in two is quite clear, no need to hook it up to a computer to check whether it's been wiped or not. And when it comes to high-security facilities where it's generally not allowed to take out any storage device, so to take it out you have to make sure it's not a hard disk any more, but a lump of metal scrap.
That said for personal use zero'ing the drive indeed will do the job well enough. And preserves the drive for potential future use.
Thanks. This looks like a healthy market to me. Three browsers with >20% market share, IE small enough to be way too small to target exclusively, and Safari as a significant fourth. Much better than the stats from say five years ago.
Another thing is the transmission itself. Have your field radio reach the satellite instead of an overhead plane is a lot harder. I'd expect it takes more power too, which means bigger batteries or shorter battery life which both are not good for the soldier in the field.
But of course as soon as that satellite is there you're good. It has it's advantages over a plane that has to stay airborne nearby, or having a team following you with a base set.
A misbehaving extension should not be able to crash the browser.
Just like a misbehaving application should not be able to crash the underlying operating system.
And this analogy is not exactly far fetched as these days browsers act more and more as an operating system, considering what can be done with AJAX and related technologies.
Anyone has a graph of that? Tables don't make things very "visible". Graphs do.
And that drop is not exactly spectacular, and unlikely to be related to the release schedule. Chrome, where they copied the fast release schedule from, is growing steadily.
I have the same problem. But actually that's Ubuntu's fault(?) for sticking to 3.x in the 10.3 LTS version. I'm upgrading my browser along with all the updates Ubuntu presents me, and that's why I'm now at version 3.6.22.
And just in case you're wondering: I'm running Ubuntu 10.3 because I want a system that just works, yet is up-to-date when it comes to security and serious bugs. And that without the need to completely replace it every six months or so, including getting used to new quirks and a potentially overhauled UI. But then I just want to get things done.
They probably skipped that one. That version number is pretty tainted by IE.
The link you give happens to be the very first link in the summary. Followed indeed by two links to articles, but the link to the actual scrolls is there already.