Assuming for the moment that identical blocks of code mean anything at all, the issue is where, when and under what conditions those blocks of code come from, not that there are blocks of code.
Lets for the moment assume that the presentation is not a complete fraud and that there are, in fact, two or more identical chunks. Did Linux crib from SCO or versa-vica? Was there a common third-party source? Public domain code? When did the crossover happen? Without this supporting information, such comparisons are meaningless.
It would seem that these reporters are genuinely blindingly naive or SCO is NDAing away the information to continue their extortion... I sure wish someone with the inclination to sign the NDA would be willing to immunize themselves against such tactics prior to visiting the pit.
Um - maybe because air molecules are rather scarce where they want to actually use solar sails? The point of the experiment is to test the practice of solar sailing in something approximating the target environment... or were you being sarcastic?
As far as content tags go, there's are already rating standards: See ICRA (was once RSAC) and the PICS site for details. Most browsers have such filters built in, often even with central administration capabilities.
One problem is the vast number of sites which, for various reasons, don't label appropriately - usually either because they don't label at all or intentionally try to keep ahead of the censorware.
Another problem is that any set of rules will result in miscategorization, while whitelist/blacklists are neither scalable nor do they satisfy the desire for local control of categories.
I'm the concerned parent of a 5 year-old (who uses "google" as a verb), a trained teen sexuality educator, and I'm extremely anti-censorship. As you may guess, I'm occasionally conflicted on this topic. Basically, I've come to the conclusion that for my family, what I'm looking for is a tool that lets me filter out the bulk of the egregious crap (porn, hate, violence, ads) for casual use.
I'd even be satisfied with a warning rather than a hard filter in non-blacklisted cases: "Warning: the requested page will probably make your little head explode - follow this link if you really want to got there or click here if you want someone else to check it out for you".
I'd love to see a basic filter put in place which starts out using only the self-rating tag systems. Add some sort of Bayesian learning system and an anonymous request-to-whitelist button on the filter page for blocked sites which haven't been explicitly blacklisted. As long as these decisions are made locally (say, in the Library), this would seem to be relatively innocuous and could be made to serve both the letter and spirit of the now approved law.
Of course, it also requires human time for the library staff to review said anonymous requests... maybe a voting system to prioritize, or perhaps amortize the requests across a regional district?
At any rate, time to enter damage control mode. Sigh.
They've also said that they will not remove these features from current products. They'll still have 1-button 30-second skip (without the silly secret code you need to enable it on Tivo).
Re: suing - IANAL, but at some point, removal of features directly impacts the value of the product you paid for. Service agreement or no, the degree to which they can remove features is inversely related to the real value of those features. If, for instance, the service was changed so that you could only play recorded shows once, you could probably argue successfully in court that the box no longer performs its basic function.
I seriously think that if it had ever made it to trial, the internet sharing feature would have been upheld as fair use - it is certainly not like p2p: recipients of shared shows cannot then forward them to others. This makes it more restrictive than videotape!
D&M will be pretty careful not to alienate current owners... they also need to maintain some differentiation from Tivo. The fact that ReplayTVs are network-enabled out of the box is a huge win - most of Tivo's benifits are merely a Small Matter Of Programming...
"Infinite time is a COUNTABLE infinity, while the number of things that a monkey could do in an infinite time is a much larget infinity."
Not at all. The number of things a monkey can do (at least, with respect to Shakespeare replication) is not only countable but finite. The product of a finite set and a countably infinite set is still countable. In particular, assuming totally random key banging at a fixed rate, it straightforward to calculate the probably of Othello being emitted by the Monkey Bard in any particular span of time. No - that probability will never reach 1, but then it isn't zero for very long (relatively speaking) either.
Also, note that the product of two (indeed, N!) countably infinite sets is still countable: see
Cantor or the nice little discussion
here
Re:Duh. Its called reflection
on
Hijacking .NET
·
· Score: 1
Well, yes, sortof and no.
Yes: you can indeed call setAccessible(true) on a private member (which you got from the getDeclared*() methods) as long as there isn't a SecurityManager or the SecurityManager enforces a policy which includes supressAccessChecks.
Sortof: there is no SecurityManager installed by default for applications. If there isn't a SecurityManager, there there isn't any Security.
No: the SecurityManager base class forbids this access.
IANASP (I Am Not A Sun Poobah), but I'd rather have a default SecurityManager installed than none at all - allowing use of setAccessible to break language semantics just seems like a bad idea for naive application developers.
Re:Duh. Its called reflection
on
Hijacking .NET
·
· Score: 1
Excuse me? Yes, you can see the member, but you cannot invoke/access it without being explicitly granted additional privileges - the default is certainly not to allow free access to private members.
It is highly likely (IMHO) that Replay will end up being purchased by D&M or a competitor - after all, there is both a significant installed base of users and a non-trivial revenue stream from subscriptions in addition to the IP of the DVR hardware. Heck, maybe even TIVO will bid.
IANAL, but I would think that any purchaser of the replay business unit would be responsible for honoring existing service contracts, including those lifetime subscriptions. If the contracts are breached by replay (e.g. by the buyer or even by replay simply folding), then the owners of the abandoned subscriptions would be due damages and/or part of the auction proceeds.
If the service is abandoned for any reason, it is pretty clear that the replay hacker community will no longer need to restrain themselves - people have been *very* supportive of replay and have tended to come down pretty hard on anyone looking to steal services. If we owners are abandoned, we'll be moving into reverse engineering mode bigtime!
Re:To download or not to download...
on
Nethack 3.4.1 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Exactly - Hack (and, so, nethack) exists solely because rogue was binary-only and unstable on the target machine (PDP11/70 running system 7) with compatability libraries... the author flatly refused requests to give out the source so we could fix it, so Jay wrote hack. Typical Free software story, albeit one of the earliest ones I know of.
As I see it, the whole thing won't work on a broad scale anyway without a great deal of rather expensive personalization of the drugs.
Do you have any idea what "traditional" cancer treatment costs?!? I got about (US) $30K of radiation treatments in one month and I'm pretty sure that 6 months of chemotherapy wasn't exactly cheap. Add in surgery and my personal bill surely tops $60K.
With custom full sequencing coming down in price (see
Race for the $1000 genome is on for instance), such custom tailoring of drugs doesn't seem so ridiculous any more.
I have no idea from what creationist website you're haphazardly cutting-and-pasting this stuff, but it's pretty embarassing.
Google is your friend: here's one
reference which indicates that this is a direct ripoff of an (ahem) "impact" by a "Duane T. Gish, Ph.D." copyright 1991 by the "Institute for Creation Research". And here I thought copyright violations were a sin...
I just bought a
JamCam from the bargain bin at Staples for $25. I figured that it
would be a better deal than a film camera for my 3 year old kid.
Sure it only does 640x480, but it's not like a preschooler will care,
and it has an MMC slot and talks USB... and at maybe $0.15 "developing"
(printing) costs per "roll" (capacity of camera), I figure it'll
pay for itself pretty quickly.
I just bought a JamCam for $25 for my 3-year old daughter at Staples. I figured it would be more durable and cheaper in the long run than any film camera.
Sure it only does 640x480, but it takes MMC cards and has USB and at maybe $0.15 to "develop" a "roll" of film, it'll only take maybe 3 iterations to break even.
Yeek - Amazon is selling it for $80 and has a $30 rebate... gee, maybe I'll end up $5 ahead for buying this thing...
Note that The World (also known as Software Tool and Die) was also started in 1989, but it was (and is) a full-service public dialup ISP. Also of interest in this thread is that they own the "circled at-sign" trademark.
The decision would appear to allow using searchlights, telescopes, and cameras to peek through people's windows...
I suppose that using IR imagery will be ok when it is easy to buy
IR film or
IR camcorders? Whoops - maybe it is just fancy IR imaging equipment that is off-limits.
I'd much rather have seen a decision allowing warrantless passive technology (e.g. IR imaging, RF monitoring, etc) but forbidding the use of active technology (e.g. radar, xray, etc).
Don't try to "hook" them with flash (video games, movies, music, etc) - the point is to teach them that computes are more than all that.
Start by convincing them that computers are general-purpose things that are ubiquitous and are getting more so: take apart a video game, show 'em where the computer is, put it back together and it still works... take apart
a cellphone or pager, point to the TV, dig up a smart card, etc.
It isn't what they do that's important: it is what they can be made to do that is cool.
Next, go outside and do "people programming." Get a volunteer and have your class figure out how to get the volunteer to do something useful: make sure that the instructions are declarative and are followed verbatim.
Next class, take the instructions that worked and program a Lego robot to do the task (or any
logo with a turtle, etc). Seeing a lego monster doing the same things that the volunteer did outside should be suitably cool as to hook 'em.
Keep the action going: robots are good, but glowing turtles (especially dynaturtles!) are ok, too.
Don't play games - write games that the kids can extrapolate into the video games they see all the time. Mugwump and daleks aren't substantially different from Quake (illustrate the point by playing quake for a bit after writing daleks). Maze generation and solving is a good one to try: simple but powerful algorithms.
There are a zillion sites on the subject of teaching computer science to kids. The
net of a million lies might not be your friend, but it can be a valuable source of information.
Nobody is claiming proof of anything. This report is claiming discovery of evidence predicted by big bang theory which had heretofor not been observed.
WALID's submissions to the IETF (example) begin with a statement that "This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with all
provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026.
"
But RFC2026 section 10.3.1 makes it pretty clear that any conforming submissions must disclose "... the existence of any proprietary or intellectual property rights in the contribution..."
Is this merely intellectually dishonest, or is it fraud?
Some in the industry seem to think Fair Use is limited to listening to music recorded on physical media through headphones and perfect copies are not ever ok.
Napster claims the other remotely reasonable extreme, that you can play your music for anyone (it isn't napster's fault if they're recording it.)
to stop this nonsense. How long could it possibly be before some poor kid is beaten by the football team or expelled from school because of a flood of anonymous tips?
I would assume that a court could see the passing along of unsupported anonymous tips as gross negligence leading to personal harm.
Apparently DSS is well known for acting precipitously on anonymous tips: if a dozen people phone in that you've left your kids alone in the car, you'll probably be in jail the next day even if you don't own a car or have any kids.
Simple: so you do a swap for another domain which is satisfactory to your use, having CocaCola pay all the fees for your trouble. Heck, even require them to leave a forwarding pointer at coke.ch to the new site.
Of course, leave it up to them to aquire the "acceptable" name.
So the MPAA's position must be that you can rent a film from the distributer, you can buy a projector, but it is illegal to install the projector in a context where you can show the film unless the design is licenced from the MPAA.
"Any use by which you buy it at a price"?!? Sounds like V is arguing for the defendents.
Let's see: we've got a consortium of media giants who control both ends of the distribution pipe. We've got enormous barriers to entry for any newcomer. We've even got the consortium bullying politicians, arresting people for no obvious reason and doing their best to drag hundreds of unrelated people into court.
Besides - who'd want to copy a DVD anyway? Those same evil people who photocopy paperbacks, I suppose.
Slashdot Mirror
Assuming for the moment that identical blocks of code mean anything at all, the issue is where, when and under what conditions those blocks of code come from, not that there are blocks of code.
Lets for the moment assume that the presentation is not a complete fraud and that there are, in fact, two or more identical chunks. Did Linux crib from SCO or versa-vica? Was there a common third-party source? Public domain code? When did the crossover happen? Without this supporting information, such comparisons are meaningless.
It would seem that these reporters are genuinely blindingly naive or SCO is NDAing away the information to continue their extortion... I sure wish someone with the inclination to sign the NDA would be willing to immunize themselves against such tactics prior to visiting the pit.
Um - maybe because air molecules are rather scarce where they want to actually use solar sails? The point of the experiment is to test the practice of solar sailing in something approximating the target environment... or were you being sarcastic?
One problem is the vast number of sites which, for various reasons, don't label appropriately - usually either because they don't label at all or intentionally try to keep ahead of the censorware.
Another problem is that any set of rules will result in miscategorization, while whitelist/blacklists are neither scalable nor do they satisfy the desire for local control of categories.
I'm the concerned parent of a 5 year-old (who uses "google" as a verb), a trained teen sexuality educator, and I'm extremely anti-censorship. As you may guess, I'm occasionally conflicted on this topic. Basically, I've come to the conclusion that for my family, what I'm looking for is a tool that lets me filter out the bulk of the egregious crap (porn, hate, violence, ads) for casual use.
I'd even be satisfied with a warning rather than a hard filter in non-blacklisted cases: "Warning: the requested page will probably make your little head explode - follow this link if you really want to got there or click here if you want someone else to check it out for you".
I'd love to see a basic filter put in place which starts out using only the self-rating tag systems. Add some sort of Bayesian learning system and an anonymous request-to-whitelist button on the filter page for blocked sites which haven't been explicitly blacklisted. As long as these decisions are made locally (say, in the Library), this would seem to be relatively innocuous and could be made to serve both the letter and spirit of the now approved law.
Of course, it also requires human time for the library staff to review said anonymous requests... maybe a voting system to prioritize, or perhaps amortize the requests across a regional district?
At any rate, time to enter damage control mode. Sigh.
Re: suing - IANAL, but at some point, removal of features directly impacts the value of the product you paid for. Service agreement or no, the degree to which they can remove features is inversely related to the real value of those features. If, for instance, the service was changed so that you could only play recorded shows once, you could probably argue successfully in court that the box no longer performs its basic function.
I seriously think that if it had ever made it to trial, the internet sharing feature would have been upheld as fair use - it is certainly not like p2p: recipients of shared shows cannot then forward them to others. This makes it more restrictive than videotape!
D&M will be pretty careful not to alienate current owners... they also need to maintain some differentiation from Tivo. The fact that ReplayTVs are network-enabled out of the box is a huge win - most of Tivo's benifits are merely a Small Matter Of Programming...
Not at all. The number of things a monkey can do (at least, with respect to Shakespeare replication) is not only countable but finite. The product of a finite set and a countably infinite set is still countable. In particular, assuming totally random key banging at a fixed rate, it straightforward to calculate the probably of Othello being emitted by the Monkey Bard in any particular span of time. No - that probability will never reach 1, but then it isn't zero for very long (relatively speaking) either.
Also, note that the product of two (indeed, N!) countably infinite sets is still countable: see Cantor or the nice little discussion here
Yes: you can indeed call setAccessible(true) on a private member (which you got from the getDeclared*() methods) as long as there isn't a SecurityManager or the SecurityManager enforces a policy which includes supressAccessChecks.
Sortof: there is no SecurityManager installed by default for applications. If there isn't a SecurityManager, there there isn't any Security.
No: the SecurityManager base class forbids this access.
IANASP (I Am Not A Sun Poobah), but I'd rather have a default SecurityManager installed than none at all - allowing use of setAccessible to break language semantics just seems like a bad idea for naive application developers.
Excuse me? Yes, you can see the member, but you cannot invoke/access it without being explicitly granted additional privileges - the default is certainly not to allow free access to private members.
It is highly likely (IMHO) that Replay will end up being purchased by D&M or a competitor - after all, there is both a significant installed base of users and a non-trivial revenue stream from subscriptions in addition to the IP of the DVR hardware. Heck, maybe even TIVO will bid.
IANAL, but I would think that any purchaser of the replay business unit would be responsible for honoring existing service contracts, including those lifetime subscriptions. If the contracts are breached by replay (e.g. by the buyer or even by replay simply folding), then the owners of the abandoned subscriptions would be due damages and/or part of the auction proceeds.
If the service is abandoned for any reason, it is pretty clear that the replay hacker community will no longer need to restrain themselves - people have been *very* supportive of replay and have tended to come down pretty hard on anyone looking to steal services. If we owners are abandoned, we'll be moving into reverse engineering mode bigtime!
Exactly - Hack (and, so, nethack) exists solely because rogue was binary-only and unstable on the target machine (PDP11/70 running system 7) with compatability libraries... the author flatly refused requests to give out the source so we could fix it, so Jay wrote hack. Typical Free software story, albeit one of the earliest ones I know of.
Do you have any idea what "traditional" cancer treatment costs?!? I got about (US) $30K of radiation treatments in one month and I'm pretty sure that 6 months of chemotherapy wasn't exactly cheap. Add in surgery and my personal bill surely tops $60K.
With custom full sequencing coming down in price (see Race for the $1000 genome is on for instance), such custom tailoring of drugs doesn't seem so ridiculous any more.
Google is your friend: here's one reference which indicates that this is a direct ripoff of an (ahem) "impact" by a "Duane T. Gish, Ph.D." copyright 1991 by the "Institute for Creation Research". And here I thought copyright violations were a sin...
Sure it only does 640x480, but it's not like a preschooler will care, and it has an MMC slot and talks USB... and at maybe $0.15 "developing" (printing) costs per "roll" (capacity of camera), I figure it'll pay for itself pretty quickly.
Sure it only does 640x480, but it takes MMC cards and has USB and at maybe $0.15 to "develop" a "roll" of film, it'll only take maybe 3 iterations to break even.
Yeek - Amazon is selling it for $80 and has a $30 rebate... gee, maybe I'll end up $5 ahead for buying this thing...
Note that The World (also known as Software Tool and Die) was also started in 1989, but it was (and is) a full-service public dialup ISP. Also of interest in this thread is that they own the "circled at-sign" trademark.
I suppose that using IR imagery will be ok when it is easy to buy IR film or IR camcorders? Whoops - maybe it is just fancy IR imaging equipment that is off-limits.
I'd much rather have seen a decision allowing warrantless passive technology (e.g. IR imaging, RF monitoring, etc) but forbidding the use of active technology (e.g. radar, xray, etc).
There are a zillion sites on the subject of teaching computer science to kids. The net of a million lies might not be your friend, but it can be a valuable source of information.
This information is particularly apropos given the alternative theory of "colliding universes" very recently proposed.
But RFC2026 section 10.3.1 makes it pretty clear that any conforming submissions must disclose "... the existence of any proprietary or intellectual property rights in the contribution ..."
Is this merely intellectually dishonest, or is it fraud?
Can you get busted for singing a link to DeCSS?
How about saying a link? What about recording yourself saying the link and linking to that?
Egad - Now I can't get the tune out of my head!
Some in the industry seem to think Fair Use is limited to listening to music recorded on physical media through headphones and perfect copies are not ever ok.
Napster claims the other remotely reasonable extreme, that you can play your music for anyone (it isn't napster's fault if they're recording it.)
So what, exactly, does "Fair Use" mean to you?
to stop this nonsense. How long could it possibly be before some poor kid is beaten by the football team or expelled from school because of a flood of anonymous tips?
I would assume that a court could see the passing along of unsupported anonymous tips as gross negligence leading to personal harm.
Apparently DSS is well known for acting precipitously on anonymous tips: if a dozen people phone in that you've left your kids alone in the car, you'll probably be in jail the next day even if you don't own a car or have any kids.
"This will go down on your permanent record!"
Simple: so you do a swap for another domain which is satisfactory to your use, having CocaCola pay all the fees for your trouble. Heck, even require them to leave a forwarding pointer at coke.ch to the new site.
Of course, leave it up to them to aquire the "acceptable" name.
So the MPAA's position must be that you can rent a film from the distributer, you can buy a projector, but it is illegal to install the projector in a context where you can show the film unless the design is licenced from the MPAA.
"Any use by which you buy it at a price"?!? Sounds like V is arguing for the defendents.
Let's see: we've got a consortium of media giants who control both ends of the distribution pipe. We've got enormous barriers to entry for any newcomer. We've even got the consortium bullying politicians, arresting people for no obvious reason and doing their best to drag hundreds of unrelated people into court.
Besides - who'd want to copy a DVD anyway? Those same evil people who photocopy paperbacks, I suppose.