What an innovation Nintendo made!! I talked to some of my EE friends and they said it would have never occured to them to wrap wires in plastic! Absolutely genius! I have to give major kudos to Nintendo for such an invention. Truly this was what the US Constitution intended when it allowed a patent system.
I've been talking to some lawyers and I'm pretty sure that I can patent the use of arithmetic on the web. A search of a database contained in a patent clerk's ass didn't turn up any prior art. If anyone wants to join me in creating a start-up based on this patent, just reply to this post. I have already picked out a stock symbol for when we IPO - ISUK.
You'd need to develop some sort of queueing system so that users could submit there jobs, specifying the number of processors, length of calculation, etc. and then the batch system could optimally run the jobs. At least thats how they do it on supercomputers that I have used.
What would be neat is if a LUG would team up with a school district and develop a system at a particular high school that would be a resource for the whole district to use for science projects or whatever. The LUG could help develop a cirriculum that could be taught in workshops at the different schools.
Imagine you are a humble inventor. You come up with a clever idea and receive an overly broad patent. Now you have a government sanctioned monopoly on a huge industry niche. Now the other guys down the street cannot even start a business in the same field without infringing on your patent, so they starve to death along with their families, while you sail your yacht off the coast of Barbados.
The point of patents is to promote innovation by making it much less profitable to keep trade secrets and to promote alternate designs. For example patenting a specific design for a fuel injection system, not patenting the idea of a fuel injection system. That way the guys down the street have to work to find another, possibly better way to solve the problem. Overly broad patents only serve to hinder industry.
The GPL has NOTHING to do with patents!!! I don't know where you got that idea. The GPL is based on copyright law and the fact that a copyright holder of code has the right to dictate licensing terms for its use.
Sorry, I am absolutely correct. Readers don't see the uncommitted data being written by another transaction, but rather previously committed data, and therefore aren't blocked by writers.
I guess my background in DBs is overly academic:) Heh, and my professor worked on PostgreSQL at Berkeley and at 2 major DB companies. I just always pictured it as a single, shared buffer pool/cache in memory, which was both read from and written to. I guess I need to bust out the PGSQL source tarball.
Rollback doesn't affect committed data - read the definition of "commit" in any text on transaction processing if you don't understand.
Of course rollback doesn't effect committed transactions, which is why I questioned letting dirty pages get read before commiting.
You are right that many commercial dbs do lock on a page basis. You are wrong in insisting that all do, and that row-level locking can not implement transaction semantics.
I don't know what post you read, but I never insisted that all DBs use page-level locking or that it is necessary for proper serialization. I just stated that in my experience, it is very common, because it provides good transaction throughput. What are the benefits from row-level locking?
Postgres, Interbase and Oracle all implement concurrency control such that readers NEVER wait for writers...
This is incorrect. Readers must wait when a page (the usual locking granularity AFAIK) is write locked or they could use data that is later rolled back. That would be an unrepeatable read and is bad.
Oh yes, the joys of two phase locking...
Anyone know why PostgreSQL is so slow (relatively) for single users? I heard that the default setting always flushed the cache after a write, but I don't know if this the problem or even if it is true.
I agree with your analysis of SGI, but you are completely wrong about the Cray computers. At least recent machines ARE collections of commodity CPUs. The Cray T3E is just a bunch of Alphas hooked together with an incredibly fast I/O system.
It wasn't the individual processors that made Crays fast - I had a faster processor on my desktop than a single node in a T3E I have used. But hook up 700 of them with a bus that is faster than the one in your dektop system and watch out.
Until networking components match the speed of these buses, most parallel computations will be much slower on beowulf type machines (commodity networking hardware) than on Crays.
Well, I certainly hope that in the future our current theories are considered 'lame', otherwise physicists of the future will be out of a job.
Any scientific theory is just a model of reality. We continually refine these, but at any moment we try to use the most useful one, ie the one that explains the most and allows future theorizing. We accept that it isn't the truth, but you gotta work from something. Unfortunately science is sometimes held back by personal ambition/egoism, but I think these problems are inherent in any human endeavour. But when evidence is found to contradict these theories, the theories are eventually rethought.
One problem with some TOE (theories of everything) is that they have so many parameters that while certain ranges of those parameters are disproved, the theory as a whole may never be disproved.
The point is - the scientific method works, eventually.
A Command Line Interface is an outdated user interface only useful for file management, system administration, and sophisticated text processing.
Except everyone I know who seriously uses AutoCAD is constantly going to the keyboard. Once you become an expert on a complex program's functionality, a command line is much faster than a GUI.
IBM has done some really neat molecule size atomic artwork. They figured out how to move atoms with a Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM) and then arranged them on a substrate to write the IBM logo, among other things.
You can check some out here. There are also tons of other pictures there with some short explanations. Definitely worth a browse.
I feel it is becoming more and more difficult for an european to understand the american way of thinking...
Don't worry, we Americans don't actually think.;)
Seriously though, I thought it was pretty standard knowledge that Tesla pioneered AC power transmission, the electric motor (Faraday was the dynamo, right?), as well as other stuff. At least my high school physics book contained that info. I think his most interesting idea was to have electricity flowing throught the Earth all the time, so that you just had to stick a metal rod in the ground to get power. Well that and the death rays.
In my opinion what is more interesting is that Tesla was the stereotypical eccentric engineer/inventor who didn't care about financial interests or publicity. He worked with Westinghouse was never very reliable. Edison was a glory/money hound. Look who history had more recognition for (at least in the US in the past).
It is a lesson for current techies to speak up and be proactive about intellectual property, lest Al Gore & Bill Gates be recognized as the creators of the Internet.
One other lesson to get from Tesla is that he was celibate all his life. That's right folks, even the great Mr. Tesla couldn't invent a Get Laid Ray.
I hate to be an asshole and abuse my +1, but a horrible Java banner appeared ad on slashdot! It was for Jane's IT and wanted you to move a car around or something. I usually browse with junkbuster, but I decided to use a windows box for a few seconds, and this is the shock I get!
Slashdot/Andover gets bought by VA Linux, and a few days later Java banner ads appear. Coincidence? I think not.
Actually, it's kind of wierd. If you look at the GPL in section 3 it seems to give you the option of distributing the source with the binaries, or of offering the source to anyone who asks. I'm not sure that this allows them to refuse to give the source to someone. Anyone have clarification?
Here's the text in question:
a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,...
Actually, computers are suppose to be tools. For some tasks and for some people, an appliance is what is necessary. For other people and for other applications, a highly configurable and option rich environment is needed.
All my grandmother's friends have email. She however freaks out when her flashlight runs out of batteries and still uses an electric typewriter. She will never be comfortable using even a Windows OS. She needs an internet appliance so she can communicate via email with her family and friends all over the world, with as seamless an interface as a telephone or toaster.
I develop software and do scientific research. UN*X systems have the development environment tightly coupled to the whole concept of the UN*X operating system. It makes software development easy and fast. I find it much easier to write my code in Emacs and invoke gcc & gdb from bash or a Makefile than I did coding in Visual C++ (for you this might not be true). To analyze the large amount of scientific data that I have to, nothing is easier than sort, cut, tr, perl, etc.
I'm sort of rambling here, but my point is that there is no one interface that is suited to all people and all situations. I find the Mac easy to get started on, but for me it doesn't scale up as well as UN*X - once I get to the intermediate/expert level of use I am more efficient on UNIX.
What I would like to see in UNIX apps is a complete decoupling of interface and implementation, with GUIs built using something like XUL. Then you could create a 'novice' UI that exposed many of the common tools and made liberal use of the mouse. This could be used to transition users into a more advanced UI that emphasized shortcut keys and scripting. This would require all developers to expose the functionality of their program in a standard way. Maybe this could automatically be integrated into one of the standard GUI toolkits so that there doesn't have to be any extra work done by developers?
You're ability to make a copy of a purchased work isn't inhibited (as people regularly mention here) as CSS does not prevent bitwise copying But isn't this what the DVD consortium's case is based on in the East Coast? In the West Coast their case is based on trade secrets, but that argument is really shaky.
Now, you physically own the carrier, you are licensed to access the contents, but it's the player licensing which is the missing element. But there is no need for a player license! The DVD CCA never patented their method, they just have it as a trade secret. A trade secret only provides protection against a non-innocent spreading the information. For example, someone walking into your office and stealing the info off your desk and distributing it. It does not however protect against others reverse-engineering your product. If they wanted to protect their technique so badly, they should have patented it, but there are stricter requirements for a patent (which CSS might not meet).
You could own a box identical to a cable decoder and plug it in and watch programming. But you aren't licensed to watch that programming... My point exactly. In that case you are illegally obtaining cable service. You are however licensed to watch a DVD that you have purchased. Just because the DVD CCA realy doesn't want you to doesn't mean the law (as it is written) supports them. Unfortunately the law as it is practiced seems to be supporting them so far.
all you need to do is pull the encrypted stream onto Linux as a file and then use a Linux DeCSS to test it. Well, you couldn't do this when Linux didn't have a filesystem for DVDs. Besides, why do you object to a windows version? I'm not sure what it is about DeCSS that you object to? You haven't even brought up pirating yet
Access control does not prevent "fair use" of copyright materials. It controls *access*. I think I'm not expressing my point well enough. I have no problem with DVDs having CSS protection on them. I have every problem with companies telling me that I have no right to twiddle the bits on a piece of copyrighted work that I have purchased a license for. Actually this brings up an interesting question - does the purchaser buy the rights to use the encrypted content, or the viewable content? I would have to say it is the viewable content, but I could see it going either way.
"Fair use" BTW, does not cover works in their entirity, so unless you want to watch movies and skip the last half hour, you are on dubious ground. You're partly correct here. Fair Use would not allow me to quote the whole contents of a book in a magazine article, nor even a sizable chunk of text. The amount depends on many circumstances (there was a case on this topic concerning Jimmy Carter's memoirs actually). But we are talking about an individuals right to do what they want with a copyrighted work that they have legally obtained. You are allowed to make an archive copy of a work in its entirety, so obviously your interpretation of fair use is incomplete. In Nintendo v Galoob, Nintendo sued Galoob for making a device that altered its games. The 'Game Genie' would allow a player to change values in the code governing how many lives a player had for example. Galoob won. The court ruled that the individual has a right to govern their playing experience and that Nintendo suffered no harm. I would contend that the case before us is very similar.
a case can be made for economic harm to legitimate licensees of the decryption technology. Think of it like oooh cable descrambling. You can do it, but it's hardly a *right*. The case of cable descrambling is very different. You can only use DeCSS if you already have a copy of the DVD. Thus you have already paid for it and there is no economic damage. With cable descrambling on the other hand the information is sent to everyone and its only use would be to unlock information that you haven't paid for.
Oh my gosh! You just changed the mind of all/. readers with your uninformed post! You bastard!
Seriously though, the reason DeCSS was written for Windows was that there was no UDF (DVD style) filesystem at the time that the program was written. It was a proof of concept that the program could be written. Of course there were several hacks before this that would allow you to grab raw video off a DVD - one would just read the contents of the framebuffer. It has to be readable sometime.
What the real issue here is that you should be able to openly read your DVD and watch the video backwards if you want to, or to watch the DVD with pink plastic wrap in front of your TV. It's called fair use, look into it. In copyright law cases of the past it has actually had a strong presence.
The DVD companies should be allowed to implement whatever crypto measures they want to prevent me from using their product - however I should be allowed to do anything I want to circumvent those measures. As long as I don't redistribute the material there is no economic damage.
Sorry if this post is somewhat blunt, but that's what you get for going against the Slashdot official party line! (joke)
Re:WTF?? #$%& USA Hegemony again!
on
NASA Gets Smart
·
· Score: 2
Your post has been moderated up to 2, so I thought I should address some of your points, whether or not you are serious.
I didn't see anyone claim that Russia is stealing money from the USA. They agreed to build a module for an international space station, we gave them funding, they missed their deadline, we gave them more funding. If they don't meet their next deadline, we won't give them more funding, and we will continue the project with our own back up module. In light of the fact that Russia continues to spend money on its own space station and doesn't seem commited to the ISS, isn't it reasonable to call them on it?
No one forced Russia to participate in the ISS. Do you think international cooperation is wrong?
Slashdot Mirror
What an innovation Nintendo made!! I talked to some of my EE friends and they said it would have never occured to them to wrap wires in plastic! Absolutely genius! I have to give major kudos to Nintendo for such an invention. Truly this was what the US Constitution intended when it allowed a patent system.
I've been talking to some lawyers and I'm pretty sure that I can patent the use of arithmetic on the web. A search of a database contained in a patent clerk's ass didn't turn up any prior art. If anyone wants to join me in creating a start-up based on this patent, just reply to this post. I have already picked out a stock symbol for when we IPO - ISUK.
You'd need to develop some sort of queueing system so that users could submit there jobs, specifying the number of processors, length of calculation, etc. and then the batch system could optimally run the jobs. At least thats how they do it on supercomputers that I have used.
What would be neat is if a LUG would team up with a school district and develop a system at a particular high school that would be a resource for the whole district to use for science projects or whatever. The LUG could help develop a cirriculum that could be taught in workshops at the different schools.
Imagine you are a humble inventor. You come up with a clever idea and receive an overly broad patent. Now you have a government sanctioned monopoly on a huge industry niche. Now the other guys down the street cannot even start a business in the same field without infringing on your patent, so they starve to death along with their families, while you sail your yacht off the coast of Barbados.
The point of patents is to promote innovation by making it much less profitable to keep trade secrets and to promote alternate designs. For example patenting a specific design for a fuel injection system, not patenting the idea of a fuel injection system. That way the guys down the street have to work to find another, possibly better way to solve the problem. Overly broad patents only serve to hinder industry.
The GPL has NOTHING to do with patents!!! I don't know where you got that idea. The GPL is based on copyright law and the fact that a copyright holder of code has the right to dictate licensing terms for its use.
Sorry, I am absolutely correct. Readers don't see the uncommitted data being written by another transaction, but rather previously committed data, and therefore aren't blocked by writers.
:) Heh, and my professor worked on PostgreSQL at Berkeley and at 2 major DB companies. I just always pictured it as a single, shared buffer pool/cache in memory, which was both read from and written to. I guess I need to bust out the PGSQL source tarball.
I guess my background in DBs is overly academic
Rollback doesn't affect committed data - read the definition of "commit" in any text on transaction processing if you don't understand.
Of course rollback doesn't effect committed transactions, which is why I questioned letting dirty pages get read before commiting.
You are right that many commercial dbs do lock on a page basis. You are wrong in insisting that all do, and that row-level locking can not implement transaction semantics.
I don't know what post you read, but I never insisted that all DBs use page-level locking or that it is necessary for proper serialization. I just stated that in my experience, it is very common, because it provides good transaction throughput. What are the benefits from row-level locking?
My I'm feeling defensive this afternoon....
Postgres, Interbase and Oracle all implement concurrency control such that readers NEVER wait for writers...
This is incorrect. Readers must wait when a page (the usual locking granularity AFAIK) is write locked or they could use data that is later rolled back. That would be an unrepeatable read and is bad.
Oh yes, the joys of two phase locking...
Anyone know why PostgreSQL is so slow (relatively) for single users? I heard that the default setting always flushed the cache after a write, but I don't know if this the problem or even if it is true.
I agree with your analysis of SGI, but you are completely wrong about the Cray computers. At least recent machines ARE collections of commodity CPUs. The Cray T3E is just a bunch of Alphas hooked together with an incredibly fast I/O system.
It wasn't the individual processors that made Crays fast - I had a faster processor on my desktop than a single node in a T3E I have used. But hook up 700 of them with a bus that is faster than the one in your dektop system and watch out.
Until networking components match the speed of these buses, most parallel computations will be much slower on beowulf type machines (commodity networking hardware) than on Crays.
Well, I certainly hope that in the future our current theories are considered 'lame', otherwise physicists of the future will be out of a job.
Any scientific theory is just a model of reality. We continually refine these, but at any moment we try to use the most useful one, ie the one that explains the most and allows future theorizing. We accept that it isn't the truth, but you gotta work from something. Unfortunately science is sometimes held back by personal ambition/egoism, but I think these problems are inherent in any human endeavour. But when evidence is found to contradict these theories, the theories are eventually rethought.
One problem with some TOE (theories of everything) is that they have so many parameters that while certain ranges of those parameters are disproved, the theory as a whole may never be disproved.
The point is - the scientific method works, eventually.
The problems you are having are with multisession discs. You should still be able to rip any of the tracks though. Try cdparanoia on Linux.
I bought a Leftfield CD with a video on it and the only problem I had was that I couldn't rip track 5 so I had to record it in analog.
Personally I don't have a stereo system, so I rely on mp3s as a way to queue a large amount of music with instant access.
1. Putty
3. LiteStep
Not that either of these makes Windows perfect, but definitely a lot more usable.
A Command Line Interface is an outdated user interface only useful for file management, system administration, and sophisticated text processing.
Except everyone I know who seriously uses AutoCAD is constantly going to the keyboard. Once you become an expert on a complex program's functionality, a command line is much faster than a GUI.
I am not going to try to fit my CD label information on that silly inner ring. If I write on the disk, isn't that going to ruin it?
Since you will never be able to fill up 140 Gb, you will only need one and thus will never need to label it!
IBM has done some really neat molecule size atomic artwork. They figured out how to move atoms with a Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM) and then arranged them on a substrate to write the IBM logo, among other things.
You can check some out here. There are also tons of other pictures there with some short explanations. Definitely worth a browse.
I feel it is becoming more and more difficult for an european to understand the american way of thinking...
;)
Don't worry, we Americans don't actually think.
Seriously though, I thought it was pretty standard knowledge that Tesla pioneered AC power transmission, the electric motor (Faraday was the dynamo, right?), as well as other stuff. At least my high school physics book contained that info. I think his most interesting idea was to have electricity flowing throught the Earth all the time, so that you just had to stick a metal rod in the ground to get power. Well that and the death rays.
In my opinion what is more interesting is that Tesla was the stereotypical eccentric engineer/inventor who didn't care about financial interests or publicity. He worked with Westinghouse was never very reliable. Edison was a glory/money hound. Look who history had more recognition for (at least in the US in the past).
It is a lesson for current techies to speak up and be proactive about intellectual property, lest Al Gore & Bill Gates be recognized as the creators of the Internet.
One other lesson to get from Tesla is that he was celibate all his life. That's right folks, even the great Mr. Tesla couldn't invent a Get Laid Ray.
I hate to be an asshole and abuse my +1, but a horrible Java banner appeared ad on slashdot! It was for Jane's IT and wanted you to move a car around or something. I usually browse with junkbuster, but I decided to use a windows box for a few seconds, and this is the shock I get!
Slashdot/Andover gets bought by VA Linux, and a few days later Java banner ads appear. Coincidence? I think not.
I think the click through agreement was written by the same geniuses behind Microsoft's licenses.
In case anyone wants to avoid the agreement just stick this in an html file and click...
<form method=post action=http://m.spi.org/cgi-bin/newqry>
<input type=hidden name=ISA value=Init>
<h2><input type=submit name=submit value="I Suck"></h2></form>
Actually, it's kind of wierd. If you look at the GPL in section 3 it seems to give you the option of distributing the source with the binaries, or of offering the source to anyone who asks. I'm not sure that this allows them to refuse to give the source to someone. Anyone have clarification?
...
Here's the text in question:
a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
Computers are supposed to be appliances
Actually, computers are suppose to be tools. For some tasks and for some people, an appliance is what is necessary. For other people and for other applications, a highly configurable and option rich environment is needed.
All my grandmother's friends have email. She however freaks out when her flashlight runs out of batteries and still uses an electric typewriter. She will never be comfortable using even a Windows OS. She needs an internet appliance so she can communicate via email with her family and friends all over the world, with as seamless an interface as a telephone or toaster.
I develop software and do scientific research. UN*X systems have the development environment tightly coupled to the whole concept of the UN*X operating system. It makes software development easy and fast. I find it much easier to write my code in Emacs and invoke gcc & gdb from bash or a Makefile than I did coding in Visual C++ (for you this might not be true). To analyze the large amount of scientific data that I have to, nothing is easier than sort, cut, tr, perl, etc.
I'm sort of rambling here, but my point is that there is no one interface that is suited to all people and all situations. I find the Mac easy to get started on, but for me it doesn't scale up as well as UN*X - once I get to the intermediate/expert level of use I am more efficient on UNIX.
What I would like to see in UNIX apps is a complete decoupling of interface and implementation, with GUIs built using something like XUL. Then you could create a 'novice' UI that exposed many of the common tools and made liberal use of the mouse. This could be used to transition users into a more advanced UI that emphasized shortcut keys and scripting. This would require all developers to expose the functionality of their program in a standard way. Maybe this could automatically be integrated into one of the standard GUI toolkits so that there doesn't have to be any extra work done by developers?
A woman's place is in the home!!!!
In front of her computer.
Hacking better NFS support into the next Linux kernel release.
I submitted this to /. a while ago but...
Here's a watch from Casio that can play 32MB of MP3s. Not too practical, but pretty neat.
They also have a watch that is a digital camera.
See it here.
I should be sleeping, but just one more reply...
You're ability to make a copy of a purchased work isn't inhibited (as people regularly mention here) as CSS does not prevent bitwise copying
But isn't this what the DVD consortium's case is based on in the East Coast? In the West Coast their case is based on trade secrets, but that argument is really shaky.
Now, you physically own the carrier, you are licensed to access the contents, but it's the player licensing which is the missing element.
But there is no need for a player license! The DVD CCA never patented their method, they just have it as a trade secret. A trade secret only provides protection against a non-innocent spreading the information. For example, someone walking into your office and stealing the info off your desk and distributing it. It does not however protect against others reverse-engineering your product. If they wanted to protect their technique so badly, they should have patented it, but there are stricter requirements for a patent (which CSS might not meet).
You could own a box identical to a cable decoder and plug it in and watch programming. But you aren't licensed to watch that programming...
My point exactly. In that case you are illegally obtaining cable service. You are however licensed to watch a DVD that you have purchased. Just because the DVD CCA realy doesn't want you to doesn't mean the law (as it is written) supports them. Unfortunately the law as it is practiced seems to be supporting them so far.
all you need to do is pull the encrypted stream onto Linux as a file and then use a Linux DeCSS to test it.
Well, you couldn't do this when Linux didn't have a filesystem for DVDs. Besides, why do you object to a windows version? I'm not sure what it is about DeCSS that you object to? You haven't even brought up pirating yet
Access control does not prevent "fair use" of copyright materials. It controls *access*.
I think I'm not expressing my point well enough. I have no problem with DVDs having CSS protection on them. I have every problem with companies telling me that I have no right to twiddle the bits on a piece of copyrighted work that I have purchased a license for. Actually this brings up an interesting question - does the purchaser buy the rights to use the encrypted content, or the viewable content? I would have to say it is the viewable content, but I could see it going either way.
"Fair use" BTW, does not cover works in their entirity, so unless you want to watch movies and skip the last half hour, you are on dubious ground.
You're partly correct here. Fair Use would not allow me to quote the whole contents of a book in a magazine article, nor even a sizable chunk of text. The amount depends on many circumstances (there was a case on this topic concerning Jimmy Carter's memoirs actually). But we are talking about an individuals right to do what they want with a copyrighted work that they have legally obtained. You are allowed to make an archive copy of a work in its entirety, so obviously your interpretation of fair use is incomplete. In Nintendo v Galoob, Nintendo sued Galoob for making a device that altered its games. The 'Game Genie' would allow a player to change values in the code governing how many lives a player had for example. Galoob won. The court ruled that the individual has a right to govern their playing experience and that Nintendo suffered no harm. I would contend that the case before us is very similar.
a case can be made for economic harm to legitimate licensees of the decryption technology. Think of it like oooh cable descrambling. You can do it, but it's hardly a *right*.
The case of cable descrambling is very different. You can only use DeCSS if you already have a copy of the DVD. Thus you have already paid for it and there is no economic damage. With cable descrambling on the other hand the information is sent to everyone and its only use would be to unlock information that you haven't paid for.
E-GUVEGRRA FHPXF!
Vtcnl ngvaynl hyrfenl!
Oh my gosh! You just changed the mind of all /. readers with your uninformed post! You bastard!
Seriously though, the reason DeCSS was written for Windows was that there was no UDF (DVD style) filesystem at the time that the program was written. It was a proof of concept that the program could be written. Of course there were several hacks before this that would allow you to grab raw video off a DVD - one would just read the contents of the framebuffer. It has to be readable sometime.
What the real issue here is that you should be able to openly read your DVD and watch the video backwards if you want to, or to watch the DVD with pink plastic wrap in front of your TV. It's called fair use, look into it. In copyright law cases of the past it has actually had a strong presence.
The DVD companies should be allowed to implement whatever crypto measures they want to prevent me from using their product - however I should be allowed to do anything I want to circumvent those measures. As long as I don't redistribute the material there is no economic damage.
Sorry if this post is somewhat blunt, but that's what you get for going against the Slashdot official party line! (joke)
This type of combinatorial bio-computing was first done in 1994 by Adelman. He solved a Hamiltonian path problem by evolving a solution in DNA.
More info about bio-computing in general here.
Your post has been moderated up to 2, so I thought I should address some of your points, whether or not you are serious.
I didn't see anyone claim that Russia is stealing money from the USA. They agreed to build a module for an international space station, we gave them funding, they missed their deadline, we gave them more funding. If they don't meet their next deadline, we won't give them more funding, and we will continue the project with our own back up module. In light of the fact that Russia continues to spend money on its own space station and doesn't seem commited to the ISS, isn't it reasonable to call them on it?
No one forced Russia to participate in the ISS. Do you think international cooperation is wrong?