The article references using large, complex polynomial equations to "describe" the file. I'm gathering that they then distribute the 100 coefficients for each polynomial around the net, and that's part of what makes it so secure.
Then on their site, I see a lot of talk about encryption prior to being uploaded (which I would think isn't necessary since they're only distributing coefficients), and there's no mention of polynomials at all.
So what exactly are they doing? The article really makes me wonder about the applicability of the polynomial approach to more general data compression, for example.
Also, distributing coefficients also should (IMHO) neatly address the "you've got a snippet of kiddie porn on your computer" concerns, since you don't -- you just have long, essentially random, numbers that aren't themselves part of *anything*. (that is, any given 128-byte chunk of a JPEG will probably look pretty random, but it might still be possible to reconstruct a part of an image, but it sounds like that's not the case here. maybe.)
Or was that whole bit about polynomials and points on a line and such just mumbo-jumbo?
Because the person who published and the person complaining are the same person?
The person who *originally* published is the daughter of the person complaining.
The people who *currently* are publishing, that is, the tabloids, are being sued (rightfully, in my mind) for essentially spreading unsubstantiated rumor.
Look at it this way: If you're a reporter, and you tell your editor that "I've heard from a friend of a friend that this Hudson kid had a crazy party, can I do a story on it?" he'd say no. How should this be any different?
It doesn't matter what operating system you use, by its very nature, it is too complicated to completely remove all bugs in any meaningful timeframe. Nobody tries to say Windows, OS X or Linux are bug-free But it's not just about bugs, it's also about design. At its core, following good software programming practices both to avoid bugs or unforeseen vulnerabilities, but also to ensure that systems are actually designed with security in mind in the first place.
I can't think of a good example offhand, but imagine building a to-do application for yourself, then letting other people use it, then deciding to make it a true multi-user product and bolting on some kind of user authentication system. It's almost certainly not going to be as secure as it would have been if it were designed from the start as a secure, multi-user program. (does that make sense?)
A lot of security problems seem to be the result of shortcuts -- "trusting" a particular piece of input data to be within reasonable bounds, or "assuming" that the session ID provided by the user is actually *their* session ID and not someone else's, etc. Not necessarily bugs, but laziness and bad design.
You start attacking the problem at that level, and I contend that even very large systems of software (like an operating system -- which, despite its complexity is still just a collection of lots of smaller pieces of software) -- even very large systems will benefit from increased security.
Sort of reminds me of Bruce Potter's "8 Dirty Little Secrets of Information Security." The premise of that talk was pretty much that anti-virus, firewalls, IDS, etc., were all just band-aids that masked the real problem: We write (and buy) crappy products. He even showed an extensive quote regarding current threats and the inadequacy of counter-measures, and after everyone in the audience had finished nodding their heads, revealed it was from 1972.
We've been fighting the same problem, in the same way, for 35 years. It's time we regrouped and found a better way to attack it.
Here is a copy of the DefCon version of the speech (I think he's given it a few different places, so there are subtly different versions out there). I'm sure the video is floating out there somewhere, too (though I couldn't find it on YouTube). He's fun to watch.:)
I guess you completely forgot about LBJ. Forgot, in what way? That he was a former Senator who did (or did not) do well as President? I wasn't trying to make an all-inclusive list of Presidents with Senate experience, just to point out a couple of bad ones and a couple of good ones.
Senators rarely do well as President And just how many Senators became President? I'm pretty sure it's a darned small number, and I only know of two sitting Senators who were elected (Kennedy and Harding). Interesting that 3 of the 4 front runners this time around are Senators currently in office. Okay, I just found a list of former Senators that became President -- it includes Nixon and John Quincy Adams, but it also has Truman and Monroe, so I'm still not convinced that "Senators rarely do well" is true.
Governors often do well as President Oh? George W. Bush done well? Jimmy Carter? On the other hand, you've also got both Roosevelts, Clinton, Reagan, and, yeah, Thomas Jefferson. So that might be true, but it seems that more recent experience (like, say, in my lifetime) has been about 50-50.
To stay on topic -- I'm registered independent, but mostly vote Democratic 'cause I'm sick of the religious right controlling everything the Republicans do. If a vote for McCain has even the ghost of a chance to bring the Republicans more to the center, then it might be worth making that vote. (I don't see Clinton or Obama doing the same for the Democrats, certainly not to the degree that Bill Clinton did).
Plus, it'd be fun to say that we have a president who wasn't even *born* in the US. (He was born in the Panama Canal Zone).
Wow. The EDUCASE proposal, at least according to the Ars article, seems to be pretty much what I've been saying for at least a decade. A quasi-private gov't agency to build the infrastructure, neat little boxes at the house to convert fiber to POTS, Ethernet, and CATV (this was before HDTV:) ), and bandwidth rented to whomever's got a service to sell.
In theory, such a system would let you call your cable company, tell them "Screw You!", hang up, call a different cable company and say "I wanna give you my money!", hang up, and in 5 minutes turn on the TV and watch with the new company.
The really interesting thing this go-round is that the technology now exists -- the Verizon FIOS boxes are pretty much exactly what I had in mind, give-or-take. Now we just need some kind of opening that up to competition and we've got it. (with appropriate broad-market penetration and upgraded backbone, naturally).
I'm not sure there's an easy way to convince Verizon to do that, but I suppose that there could be a government agency that'll take over "ownership" of the lines, and then they simply contract back to Verizon (or someone else) for maintenance of it. To pay Verizon back for all the investment they've made, maybe they have "free" bandwidth on the system for, say, 10 years, after which they pay whatever their competition is paying.
In the meantime, the new agency continues to deploy FIOS-like services as widely as possible, Verizon is no longer saddled with the cost of expanding the infrastructure, competition flourishes, angels sing, and the US resumes its rightful place at the top of the geek pyramid.
Never happen. We as a country are way too tied to the "let the market decide" way of doing business, and it's shoved us backwards in the Cellular Phone world, and now in the broadband world. Sometimes we're really our own worst enemies.
So will we be seeing Detectives: Green, Stabler, Benson, Munch, Tutuola, Goren, Eames and Logan riding around on these? I doubt it. On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if Goren owned a Segway.:)
First off, any implanted chip would essentially be an RFID system. I personally wear a proximity-card picture badge around my neck all day at work, and the system only knows where I am to within a few hundred feet -- and then only when I've personally badged into whatever door I'm behind. If I've tailgated behind someone, then the system could think I'm still a quarter-mile away (it's a large complex).
Second, FFS, the only GPS *transmitters* that I'm aware of are orbiting the earth. I really wish people would get that through their heads.
Agassi has computed the economics of oil - prices are above $90 a barrel - and concluded that electricity is the only answer for future personal transportation, because gas will be too expensive. How expensive is "too expensive"? I just did a couple checks, and the average price of gas in the UK is $7.88 a gallon (converted from pence/litre for the UK average). Granted, they probably drive a lot less than we do and have smaller cars, but still -- expensive gas hasn't exactly destroyed the British economy.
I liked my prius partially for the mileage, but also for the low pollution and even just for the quiet, smooth ride it had when on batteries. So even if gas were $1 a gallon, if the electric were the same (or slightly more) cost/mile to operate, I'd use electric/hybrids to enjoy the other benefits.
I guess I'm just saying, they might not focus exclusively on cost/mile as compared to gas, 'cause I'm not sure that argument holds water....
in the Netherlands, the courts can't overturn laws that violate the Dutch constitution (that is, the Netherlands have no constitutional court). Interestingly enough, neither do we, at a codified level. The only reason the Supreme Court has the power to decide on the constitutionality of laws is because it asserted that right, and nobody's taken any steps to reverse that. (see Judicial Review in the US).
Then again, maybe the Dutch constitution is actually explicit in denying constitutional review by the courts, whereas the US constitution is open to interpretation, which is exactly what the court did in 1803.
I was pretty sure that Google already did some kind of checking for this sort of dodge. It could be that the sites in question have found some way to dodge the dodge -- maybe they figured out when a google revisit (with a different user agent) would occur, or maybe they recognize google IP addresses and always give the scammed page regardless of user agent, or some other similar trick.
That's what makes this scary -- as I said, I thought google was already on the lookout for such scams, and if they're being beat on such a large scale it might mean a major shift in google's strategy is in order...
I've just submitted "Terpsichore" as a name (so nobody else do it, dammit!).
Terpsichore is a Muse -- helping inspire the creative process of mere mortals.
Muse of dancing, delight, and chorus [chorus might imply parallel voices, though really in this context it's a dramatic chorus, but I'm hoping they overlook that:) ]
The last syllable is pronounced "core"
It starts with "Terp" (the short name of the Maryland mascot -- Terrapin)
Plus, as a bonus, it connects to Monty Python via the Cheese Sketch.
The bill makes spoofing CID illegal for calls made "in connection with any telecommunications service or IP-enabled voice service". It further goes on to define "IP-enabled voice service" as being calls placed over TCP/IP or a successor protocol, for a fee. So if someone sets up a free computer-to-POTS gateway, they can continue to spoof with impunity?
It'd be nice if this also required CID on all calls (except those blocked on a call-by-call basis), 'cause I still get a lot of phone calls with "UNKNOWN" or even just completely blank. At least, it should require CID for all commercial-to-residential calls, whether for-profit or not, so I can stop answering all those damned surveys and campaign calls that Congress (bugger-em) decided to leave exempt from the Do Not Call list.
OK, someone's going to have to explain this for me. Why do we have to have an actual object to define a weight?
You don't. That's just the way we've done it in the past. I read a really interesting article a couple months ago in American Scientist magazine called An Exact Value for Avogadro's Number that addresses exactly this question. In the past, Avogadro's Number (6.02andchange x 10^23) was defined experimentally, based on the reference kilogram. These scientists propose reversing that -- defining the number absolutely, based on the number of atoms of a particular element that fit within a sphere of a certain size. It's sort of similar to what they're doing with the silicon sphere, but it's all done on paper, rather than by actually manufacturing an artifact.
The advantage of this, they say, is that the number will remain constant and not be affected over time as refinements in building and measuring such "reference kilograms" change the accepted mass of a kilogram. They make several other arguments, as well, but it's much better if you just read the article.:) It's also mentioned that a similar approach was taken to defining the meter, based on an absolute definition of the speed of light.
Essentially, as I read it he's arguing for no criminal liability for illegal redistribution due to having no intent to distribute. Yet he admits to having placed copyrighted works in public folders on a public university system, which allowed others to copy his work. Further, he must have had the ability to set filesystem permissions to intentionally prevent redistribution. I think he's liable. If they can't prove criminal misconduct, at the least by his own admission they can prove civil negligence.
This argument would damn every soccer-mom and burger-flipper who plugs a home computer into their cable modem without remembering to set up a firewall. I think that, reading the citations in the motion, they make a good point -- copyright infringement, they argue, requires both intent and commercial gain, not to mention actual infringement (which nobody has proven even happened).
Though I've grown weary of all the crazy analogies flung around on Slashdot of late, I feel the need to provide one of my own: You're sitting in a university library with your laptop, and the guy across the table from you gets up to search the stacks for something, leaving his folder of music CDs on the table. You grab one, stick it in your laptop, and in a couple minutes have ripped a perfect digital copy of it, before the guy even returns. Is he then criminally liable for having permitted you to infringe the copyright of that CD, because he didn't lock up the discs or take them with him? Or, worse, if you have the ability to do exactly what I just described, but don't take advantage of it, is he still liable just for having provided the opportunity for infringement?
BTW, I'm not sure this motion is on the behalf of a single defendant, but all of them (it's listed as representing Does 1-21).
When I first read about this earlier in the week, my first thought was "isn't this just a signed message?" It sure sounded like it -- it shows up in your inbox with a little blue ribbon next to it, and so forth. So why pay some company a per-message fee for this? Just get an honest-to-God email signing certificate, that's signed by trusted authorities (that is, has a chain of trust that goes back to what's included in your browser / email client), and then sign all your email? Then people can easily tune their inbound SPAM filters to give a lower score to properly signed messages.
And this would have the side effect of finally getting signed/encrypted mail to the masses, at least on a low-level. Why the hell I can't just get myself a certificate and have my bank email me my statements, encrypted, automatically is beyond me. I really hate having to remember to go out to everyone's site once a month to download PDFs.
There is no chance at all that it's their homeworld.
How about this (admittedly remote) idea. First, background:
Cylons worship one God (who seems fairly adamant about His charges being monotheistic)
The 13th tribe (let's call 'em Terrans) included at least some who worshiped one "jealous" Kobol God above all others (remember the Temple in Eye of Jupiter) (I won't even mention the name this God obviously shares with another, more familiar, jealous God...:) )
The Cylons are vulnerable to a virus that humans developed immunity to hundreds of years ago
Now, crazy speculation:
The Terrans, on their way to Earth, left behind another little colony of people nearer to Kobol
The Cylons discovered this colony
The Terrans, on this colony, helped develop the humanoid Cylons, using their own DNA as a guide (maybe cloning themselves to create the original 12 models, and incidentally passing on vulnerability to that virus)
Of those 12, 5 models realized the error of worshiping only the one God, and got "thrown out" as heretics
These 5 managed to figure out where Earth was (maybe with help of sympathetic Terrans) and have moved on to Earth
The remaining 7 exterminated the polytheistic Terrans (hell, probably *all* Terrans ) on the aforementioned speculative 13th-tribe-colony-become-humanoid-cylon-factory, and went on to start the current Cylon war
Season 4 will be all about the humans and Cylons figuring all this out, realizing that to an extent they've all been manipulated by the Final 5 and the Terrans, and...I don't know what next.
All of this could even have occurred right *on* Earth, with the Final Five somehow wiping the memory of earth from the consciousness of the other 7, but I think it'd be too much of a stretch for the mechanical Cylons to have stumbled on Earth, rather than stumbling on an intermediate colony.
I've got more to this (I gave it a lot of thought when the season ended, and even think there might be connections to polytheism and the ability to reproduce), but this is the gist of it, as far as I can remember....
(BTW, if RDM reads this and I'm close to his master plan, then I want a hat.)
I just checked the MacBook specs, and saw this under display: "13.3-inch (diagonal) glossy widescreen TFT display with support for millions of colors"
What exactly does "support for millions of colors" mean, anyway? In the world of (E|H)DTV monitors, "supports 1080i" generally means "can display a 1080 image, but only at 768" or somesuch. I look for words like "native resolution" to figure out what something is technically, actually, capable of.
And if Apple can show that EVERYONE in the industry is doing exactly the same thing, with similar advertising language, then it's probably not going to go anywhere. It's sort of a visual equivalent to the silly GB vs GiB argument, though at least in that case hard drive manufacturers have started better explaining their side of the equation....
Agreed. Surely she could get in touch with them, right? Presumably she has nothing to hide, and could easily let SCO know "here I am, stop this nonsense".
True, but until they actually reach her with a subpoena, she's not under any legal requirement to do so. Hearing about a subpoena in the news (or via a motion she's retrieved from the internet) isn't nearly the same thing as actually being served. And if she's not actively dodging it (for example, if she's honestly taking a long-planned vacation somewhere and prefers to keep the destination private), then that's just SCO's tough luck.
I mean, really, why make it easy for SCO?
On a slightly different point, was it just me, or did this motion sound really whiny, even considering the history of this case?
From the article:
In prior years, it wasn't uncommon for a No. 1 record to sell 500,000 or 600,000 copies a week. Isn't the criteria for certifying a record "Gold" half a million units sold? So in recent years, top-selling albums were Gold after only a couple weeks, and then again every week after for some span? Isn't that a little crazy? (I mean, it used to be that a Gold record was something really popular, really good, and with very broad appeal, not just a sudden flash in the pan).
Maybe it's not so much that people are buying fewer albums, but that people are no longer buying into the mega-hype machine that's been turning nobodys into new pop royalty for a year, only to totally vanish after their pitiful-selling follow-up album two years later. (not to mention the countless tabloid-quality screwups they're bound to commit).
Put another way: The industry found a way to push our buttons, and push them HARD, for a few years there. Have we finally figured out where that button is, and have properly re-adjusted its threshold? One can only hope.
Actually, neither iTunes nor CDDB caught it. The person who put the CD in caught it, when he realized that the data CDDB/iTunes returned wasn't for the CD he'd put in, but was close enough in content that he was intrigued enough to do an a/b comparison.
I'm betting a bunch of other people saw the same thing, and either didn't correct it, or said "huh" and just "corrected" the artist's name based on what they thought it was supposed to be, assuming the data in CDDB was wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
The article references using large, complex polynomial equations to "describe" the file. I'm gathering that they then distribute the 100 coefficients for each polynomial around the net, and that's part of what makes it so secure.
Then on their site, I see a lot of talk about encryption prior to being uploaded (which I would think isn't necessary since they're only distributing coefficients), and there's no mention of polynomials at all.
So what exactly are they doing? The article really makes me wonder about the applicability of the polynomial approach to more general data compression, for example.
Also, distributing coefficients also should (IMHO) neatly address the "you've got a snippet of kiddie porn on your computer" concerns, since you don't -- you just have long, essentially random, numbers that aren't themselves part of *anything*. (that is, any given 128-byte chunk of a JPEG will probably look pretty random, but it might still be possible to reconstruct a part of an image, but it sounds like that's not the case here. maybe.)
Or was that whole bit about polynomials and points on a line and such just mumbo-jumbo?
Because the person who published and the person complaining are the same person?
The person who *originally* published is the daughter of the person complaining.
The people who *currently* are publishing, that is, the tabloids, are being sued (rightfully, in my mind) for essentially spreading unsubstantiated rumor.
Look at it this way: If you're a reporter, and you tell your editor that "I've heard from a friend of a friend that this Hudson kid had a crazy party, can I do a story on it?" he'd say no. How should this be any different?
I can't think of a good example offhand, but imagine building a to-do application for yourself, then letting other people use it, then deciding to make it a true multi-user product and bolting on some kind of user authentication system. It's almost certainly not going to be as secure as it would have been if it were designed from the start as a secure, multi-user program. (does that make sense?)
A lot of security problems seem to be the result of shortcuts -- "trusting" a particular piece of input data to be within reasonable bounds, or "assuming" that the session ID provided by the user is actually *their* session ID and not someone else's, etc. Not necessarily bugs, but laziness and bad design.
You start attacking the problem at that level, and I contend that even very large systems of software (like an operating system -- which, despite its complexity is still just a collection of lots of smaller pieces of software) -- even very large systems will benefit from increased security.
Sort of reminds me of Bruce Potter's "8 Dirty Little Secrets of Information Security." The premise of that talk was pretty much that anti-virus, firewalls, IDS, etc., were all just band-aids that masked the real problem: We write (and buy) crappy products. He even showed an extensive quote regarding current threats and the inadequacy of counter-measures, and after everyone in the audience had finished nodding their heads, revealed it was from 1972.
:)
We've been fighting the same problem, in the same way, for 35 years. It's time we regrouped and found a better way to attack it.
Here is a copy of the DefCon version of the speech (I think he's given it a few different places, so there are subtly different versions out there). I'm sure the video is floating out there somewhere, too (though I couldn't find it on YouTube). He's fun to watch.
To stay on topic -- I'm registered independent, but mostly vote Democratic 'cause I'm sick of the religious right controlling everything the Republicans do. If a vote for McCain has even the ghost of a chance to bring the Republicans more to the center, then it might be worth making that vote. (I don't see Clinton or Obama doing the same for the Democrats, certainly not to the degree that Bill Clinton did).
Plus, it'd be fun to say that we have a president who wasn't even *born* in the US. (He was born in the Panama Canal Zone).
Wow. The EDUCASE proposal, at least according to the Ars article, seems to be pretty much what I've been saying for at least a decade. A quasi-private gov't agency to build the infrastructure, neat little boxes at the house to convert fiber to POTS, Ethernet, and CATV (this was before HDTV :) ), and bandwidth rented to whomever's got a service to sell.
In theory, such a system would let you call your cable company, tell them "Screw You!", hang up, call a different cable company and say "I wanna give you my money!", hang up, and in 5 minutes turn on the TV and watch with the new company.
The really interesting thing this go-round is that the technology now exists -- the Verizon FIOS boxes are pretty much exactly what I had in mind, give-or-take. Now we just need some kind of opening that up to competition and we've got it. (with appropriate broad-market penetration and upgraded backbone, naturally).
I'm not sure there's an easy way to convince Verizon to do that, but I suppose that there could be a government agency that'll take over "ownership" of the lines, and then they simply contract back to Verizon (or someone else) for maintenance of it. To pay Verizon back for all the investment they've made, maybe they have "free" bandwidth on the system for, say, 10 years, after which they pay whatever their competition is paying.
In the meantime, the new agency continues to deploy FIOS-like services as widely as possible, Verizon is no longer saddled with the cost of expanding the infrastructure, competition flourishes, angels sing, and the US resumes its rightful place at the top of the geek pyramid.
Never happen. We as a country are way too tied to the "let the market decide" way of doing business, and it's shoved us backwards in the Cellular Phone world, and now in the broadband world. Sometimes we're really our own worst enemies.
First off, any implanted chip would essentially be an RFID system. I personally wear a proximity-card picture badge around my neck all day at work, and the system only knows where I am to within a few hundred feet -- and then only when I've personally badged into whatever door I'm behind. If I've tailgated behind someone, then the system could think I'm still a quarter-mile away (it's a large complex).
Second, FFS, the only GPS *transmitters* that I'm aware of are orbiting the earth. I really wish people would get that through their heads.
I liked my prius partially for the mileage, but also for the low pollution and even just for the quiet, smooth ride it had when on batteries. So even if gas were $1 a gallon, if the electric were the same (or slightly more) cost/mile to operate, I'd use electric/hybrids to enjoy the other benefits.
I guess I'm just saying, they might not focus exclusively on cost/mile as compared to gas, 'cause I'm not sure that argument holds water....
Then again, maybe the Dutch constitution is actually explicit in denying constitutional review by the courts, whereas the US constitution is open to interpretation, which is exactly what the court did in 1803.
I was pretty sure that Google already did some kind of checking for this sort of dodge. It could be that the sites in question have found some way to dodge the dodge -- maybe they figured out when a google revisit (with a different user agent) would occur, or maybe they recognize google IP addresses and always give the scammed page regardless of user agent, or some other similar trick.
That's what makes this scary -- as I said, I thought google was already on the lookout for such scams, and if they're being beat on such a large scale it might mean a major shift in google's strategy is in order...
Damn, that was a bad movie.
Plus, as a bonus, it connects to Monty Python via the Cheese Sketch.
Wish me luck.
The bill makes spoofing CID illegal for calls made "in connection with any telecommunications service or IP-enabled voice service". It further goes on to define "IP-enabled voice service" as being calls placed over TCP/IP or a successor protocol, for a fee . So if someone sets up a free computer-to-POTS gateway, they can continue to spoof with impunity?
It'd be nice if this also required CID on all calls (except those blocked on a call-by-call basis), 'cause I still get a lot of phone calls with "UNKNOWN" or even just completely blank. At least, it should require CID for all commercial-to-residential calls, whether for-profit or not, so I can stop answering all those damned surveys and campaign calls that Congress (bugger-em) decided to leave exempt from the Do Not Call list.
OK, someone's going to have to explain this for me. Why do we have to have an actual object to define a weight?
:) It's also mentioned that a similar approach was taken to defining the meter, based on an absolute definition of the speed of light.
You don't. That's just the way we've done it in the past. I read a really interesting article a couple months ago in American Scientist magazine called An Exact Value for Avogadro's Number that addresses exactly this question. In the past, Avogadro's Number (6.02andchange x 10^23) was defined experimentally, based on the reference kilogram. These scientists propose reversing that -- defining the number absolutely, based on the number of atoms of a particular element that fit within a sphere of a certain size. It's sort of similar to what they're doing with the silicon sphere, but it's all done on paper, rather than by actually manufacturing an artifact.
The advantage of this, they say, is that the number will remain constant and not be affected over time as refinements in building and measuring such "reference kilograms" change the accepted mass of a kilogram. They make several other arguments, as well, but it's much better if you just read the article.
Wow. In the time it took me to write that response, three other people came up with the same basic analogy.
:)
I'm honestly not sure how I feel about that.
Essentially, as I read it he's arguing for no criminal liability for illegal redistribution due to having no intent to distribute. Yet he admits to having placed copyrighted works in public folders on a public university system, which allowed others to copy his work. Further, he must have had the ability to set filesystem permissions to intentionally prevent redistribution. I think he's liable. If they can't prove criminal misconduct, at the least by his own admission they can prove civil negligence.
This argument would damn every soccer-mom and burger-flipper who plugs a home computer into their cable modem without remembering to set up a firewall. I think that, reading the citations in the motion, they make a good point -- copyright infringement, they argue, requires both intent and commercial gain, not to mention actual infringement (which nobody has proven even happened).
Though I've grown weary of all the crazy analogies flung around on Slashdot of late, I feel the need to provide one of my own: You're sitting in a university library with your laptop, and the guy across the table from you gets up to search the stacks for something, leaving his folder of music CDs on the table. You grab one, stick it in your laptop, and in a couple minutes have ripped a perfect digital copy of it, before the guy even returns. Is he then criminally liable for having permitted you to infringe the copyright of that CD, because he didn't lock up the discs or take them with him? Or, worse, if you have the ability to do exactly what I just described, but don't take advantage of it, is he still liable just for having provided the opportunity for infringement?
BTW, I'm not sure this motion is on the behalf of a single defendant, but all of them (it's listed as representing Does 1-21).
When I first read about this earlier in the week, my first thought was "isn't this just a signed message?" It sure sounded like it -- it shows up in your inbox with a little blue ribbon next to it, and so forth. So why pay some company a per-message fee for this? Just get an honest-to-God email signing certificate, that's signed by trusted authorities (that is, has a chain of trust that goes back to what's included in your browser / email client), and then sign all your email? Then people can easily tune their inbound SPAM filters to give a lower score to properly signed messages.
And this would have the side effect of finally getting signed/encrypted mail to the masses, at least on a low-level. Why the hell I can't just get myself a certificate and have my bank email me my statements, encrypted, automatically is beyond me. I really hate having to remember to go out to everyone's site once a month to download PDFs.
Just a thought...
How about this (admittedly remote) idea. First, background:
- Cylons worship one God (who seems fairly adamant about His charges being monotheistic)
- The 13th tribe (let's call 'em Terrans) included at least some who worshiped one "jealous" Kobol God above all others (remember the Temple in Eye of Jupiter) (I won't even mention the name this God obviously shares with another, more familiar, jealous God...
:) )
- The Cylons are vulnerable to a virus that humans developed immunity to hundreds of years ago
Now, crazy speculation:- The Terrans, on their way to Earth, left behind another little colony of people nearer to Kobol
- The Cylons discovered this colony
- The Terrans, on this colony, helped develop the humanoid Cylons, using their own DNA as a guide (maybe cloning themselves to create the original 12 models, and incidentally passing on vulnerability to that virus)
- Of those 12, 5 models realized the error of worshiping only the one God, and got "thrown out" as heretics
- These 5 managed to figure out where Earth was (maybe with help of sympathetic Terrans) and have moved on to Earth
- The remaining 7 exterminated the polytheistic Terrans (hell, probably *all* Terrans ) on the aforementioned speculative 13th-tribe-colony-become-humanoid-cylon-factory, and went on to start the current Cylon war
- Season 4 will be all about the humans and Cylons figuring all this out, realizing that to an extent they've all been manipulated by the Final 5 and the Terrans, and...I don't know what next.
All of this could even have occurred right *on* Earth, with the Final Five somehow wiping the memory of earth from the consciousness of the other 7, but I think it'd be too much of a stretch for the mechanical Cylons to have stumbled on Earth, rather than stumbling on an intermediate colony.I've got more to this (I gave it a lot of thought when the season ended, and even think there might be connections to polytheism and the ability to reproduce), but this is the gist of it, as far as I can remember....
(BTW, if RDM reads this and I'm close to his master plan, then I want a hat.)
I just checked the MacBook specs, and saw this under display: "13.3-inch (diagonal) glossy widescreen TFT display with support for millions of colors"
What exactly does "support for millions of colors" mean, anyway? In the world of (E|H)DTV monitors, "supports 1080i" generally means "can display a 1080 image, but only at 768" or somesuch. I look for words like "native resolution" to figure out what something is technically, actually, capable of.
And if Apple can show that EVERYONE in the industry is doing exactly the same thing, with similar advertising language, then it's probably not going to go anywhere. It's sort of a visual equivalent to the silly GB vs GiB argument, though at least in that case hard drive manufacturers have started better explaining their side of the equation....
Agreed. Surely she could get in touch with them, right? Presumably she has nothing to hide, and could easily let SCO know "here I am, stop this nonsense".
True, but until they actually reach her with a subpoena, she's not under any legal requirement to do so. Hearing about a subpoena in the news (or via a motion she's retrieved from the internet) isn't nearly the same thing as actually being served. And if she's not actively dodging it (for example, if she's honestly taking a long-planned vacation somewhere and prefers to keep the destination private), then that's just SCO's tough luck.
I mean, really, why make it easy for SCO?
On a slightly different point, was it just me, or did this motion sound really whiny, even considering the history of this case?
Maybe it's not so much that people are buying fewer albums, but that people are no longer buying into the mega-hype machine that's been turning nobodys into new pop royalty for a year, only to totally vanish after their pitiful-selling follow-up album two years later. (not to mention the countless tabloid-quality screwups they're bound to commit).
Put another way: The industry found a way to push our buttons, and push them HARD, for a few years there. Have we finally figured out where that button is, and have properly re-adjusted its threshold? One can only hope.
iTunes didn't catch it, CDDB did.
Actually, neither iTunes nor CDDB caught it. The person who put the CD in caught it, when he realized that the data CDDB/iTunes returned wasn't for the CD he'd put in, but was close enough in content that he was intrigued enough to do an a/b comparison.
I'm betting a bunch of other people saw the same thing, and either didn't correct it, or said "huh" and just "corrected" the artist's name based on what they thought it was supposed to be, assuming the data in CDDB was wrong.
So kudos to the guy who noticed!