Can you copyright the output of an algorithm? Seriously, copyright requires a creative element...
While sribe focuses on the creative element one must also ask who the copyright would go to. The constitution grants congress the power
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
To my understanding this has always been interpreted to mean authors have rights to their writings and inventors have rights to their discoveries.
Does anyone know - could these debug features be used to do something like break Operating System security models, leading to privilege escalation issues, or for other nefarious purposes?
If there is some way to enable privileged instructions without using a privileged instruction it would completely circumvent operating system security.
Perhaps the slashdotted site answers this but I have to wonder why not just have a separate opcode to turn the debugging on?
Employers disregard the law because it is cheaper to pay the fine (when they get caught) than to fix the underlying problem. If the fine is increased to the point that it costs more than fixing the underlying problem the underlying problem will be fixed.
droopus has been commenting on his prison sentence for some time. He won't fess up to exactly what he did but from previous posts it appears he blew up some federal property with explosives. Whatever the case there is one thing you can count on, he will not tell you the whole story.
Minnesota garnishment rules would allow the RIAA to cease up to 25% of Thomas-Rasset's income for ten years. At any time they could also file bankruptcy for her and cease any significant assets she has such as a car worth more than $2,000 and personal belongings worth more than a modest sum. So they could garnish her wages for nine years, then force her into bankruptcy.
It's also worth noting she has to pay interest on the judgment. It is doubtful she would even be able to pay that.
A reasonable fine would be on the order of $50 to $100 per song.
Is that $50 to $100 for each of the 24 songs she was sued over or $50 to $100 for each of the thousands of songs she had listed through Kazaa? It seems likely to me that most of those songs were never downloaded by anyone yet they certainly seem relevant to how much harm she actually caused.
Even reading that, I can't say for sure if copyright infringement would be dischargable or not. It's quite possible that courts would consider it 'injury to the property of another'.
If it were, the injury would still have to be malicious.
I came over with ten 100 dollar bills and had to visit a bank to break it up into 10s and 20s to actually be able to spend it on anything
Everybody will accept 20s as that is what virtually every ATM dispenses. I have traveled all over the US and have had no problem using 100s. I have on occasion had people request that I pay with something smaller and I will when I can. I have also had someone comment that I took all their change when I used a hundred dollar bill early in the morning. But I have not had them refused. I could picture a vendor selling food on a street corner turning down large bills but most people have no problem with them.
One thing to note. If you go someplace where you get the service first and pay afterward, such as a sit-down restaurant or parking garage, they have to accept all legal tender including 100s.
If you honestly think that acting as a group exempts you from the individual responsibility for your actions, then you know nothing about corporate law in America and should just stop talking now before you make yourself look even more foolish
The whole point of a corporation is to put a limit on a shareholder's liability. A shareholder can not be held personally liable for the actions of the corporation. Shareholder liability is limited to the money they invested in the corporation. Libel and slander are civil offenses, not crimes. Individuals working for a corporation are not going to be held liable for slander or libel. Instead, the corporation will be ordered to pay (if they lose). If the corporation runs out of money, its assets will be auctioned off and the corporation dissolved.
You cite the example of Jeffrey Skilling. But that case is completely different. Skilling was convicted of defrauding shareholders, lying to auditors, and insider trading. Those are all crimes. In fact they are all crimes against shareholders.
Take a look at the political ads playing these days. Notice that none of them are sponsored by Target, Microsoft, or other major corporations. Instead they are sponsored by front groups that Target, Microsoft et. al. contribute to. Do you really think Target, Microsoft, or even the people working in those front groups will be held responsible for lying to the American people?
The preditors will not have to stop flying based on a ruling that the intellectual property of IISI was stolen. See the last clause of the fifth amendment to our Constitution: "nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation." This means the CIA doesn't need a license, it just needs to be willing to pay just compensation.
You're going by the assumption that intellectual rights are property. If the government uses someone's software they are not 'taking' it away from the owner. The government could just as well revoke the copyright (granted for "limited times") as buy the software outright. I challenge you to use your legal skills and resources to find a precedent that takes copyright via eminent domain.
Whatever language you write an operating system in will have to have the same "dangerous" facilities as C, pointer access, type casting, etc. Remember without an OS you cannot have safe managed code - you need to be able to implement things like page table mappings, page protection, interrupt processing, etc.
Even in an operating system much of the code is basic, ordinary loops, list traversals, indexing into arrays, and other simple stuff that doesn't require pointer manipulation. Which is why an operating system should be written in a language which requires the developer to consciously open up pointer manipulation and disable bounds checking rather than placing the burden on the developer to carefully check bounds everywhere on their own. The latter is virtually guaranteed to leave security holes as developers will undoubtedly forget to check bounds in at least a few places.
As another respondent pointed out, simple object references and type casting don't have to be done so loosely as in C. The careless way developers use pointer arithmetic and type casting in C lies at the heart of many security holes.
Seriously, if you think your people are good enough to write a SECURE operating system from the ground up, then shouldn't they be good enough to take existing code and determine whether that is secure enough for them?
Security needs to be designed in from the ground up. Take a look at Windows, Linux, and MacOS. New exploits are constantly being discovered in those systems because security was not a key part of the development process when they were written.
Windows, Linux, and MacOS were all written in C which burdens the developer with safeguarding against all manner of possible security holes. In C a security hole is as likely as a bug with the exception that a bug is likely to be discovered and fixed by the developer while a security hole will go unnoticed until an attacker discovers it. If you want to build a secure OS today you should start with tools that eliminate the most common security holes. That would include automatic bounds checking which none of the aforementioned systems were built with.
If you want a secure system you make sure every action and every module of code is authenticated before it runs. The system will work a lot better if it is designed that way from the ground up. Existing operating systems would at minimum have to be modified to do this.
A secure system would be developed with best-practices that reduce the likelihood of exposing a vulnerability. For example, the potential attack vectors for shell injection attacks would go through a centralized library that safeguards against it.
All of these things are best done by writing a new system from scratch with more secure tools and practices. At the same time, the developers can look to Linux or BSD for example algorithms on how to solve common problems but make sure the actual implementation uses the aforementioned best practices.
The US does have fewer criminals to fill up the database with: US crime rates are substantially lower (and decreasing) than, say, in Europe (where they are increasing). And a large part of US crimes is concentrated in illegal alien populations or inner-city (gang?) related.
That comes across like a bunch of ignorant stereotyping. Let's take a look at actual numbers. The US has the 24th highest murder rate in this survey at 0.042802 per 1000 people. Aside from Poland, the only European nations with a higher rate are former Soviet Bloc Countries. Wikipedia has a more complete table showing a very similar picture.
Countries do not collect stats on other crimes in a manner similar enough to develop an international comparison.
As for your comment on illegal alien populations being responsible for "a large part of US crimes" I haven't seen any statistics on that and I doubt anyone else has either. There is no good way to compile such statistics. It does however make sense. If someone can not ask law enforcement to help settle disputes they will take the law into their own hands. The person they retaliate against will retaliate back. The simple solution to that is to open up the gates to legal immigration. Black markets work the same way. It is why the war on drugs drives up the crime rate.
someone at the MN governor's office can pick up the phone and say "WTF? HELP" and they WILL get support. If fact for a big contract like this they will probably get tier 1 first class "ass kissing and tripping over themselves to try to fix it" level of support, oh and from a SINGLE vendor.
The governor could get better support from his own in-house staff. My employer uses BPOS. We have 20,000 people on it, yet we have terrible support. The state of Minnesota has 36,000 employees. Something tells me the difference is not significant enough to get better support.
A few years ago Minnesota was looking at mandating open standards for all government operations. Now they have taken a huge step towards vendor lock-in. This move will lock up Minnesota's history for decades to come. At the same time it will make the state's operations far less reliable.
The article comments that Minnesota is switching over to something businesses have found great success in for years. As someone that has to use BPOS at work I must say the system is incredibly unreliable. We have had email simply disappear into a void. The service is slow. It frequently stops working for hours at a time. We have had other email delivered hours after it was sent.
We had to disable rather important functionality in order to migrate over to BPOS as we are not allowed to customize anything. Now we have users doing things by hand which used to be automated.
Before we switched over to BPOS I considered email as trustworthy and reliable as most utilities. My employer has structured the company with the assumption that email will be a reliable communications medium. With BPOS in place it is a burden on our organization.
you didn't care that he had no experience, ties to some pretty unsavory characters, and no real plusses besides that he was well spoken.
Those are some pretty weak arguments. They were mostly over-hyped claims made by his opponents. I didn't vote for Obama, but those points were not the signs that were worth listening to.
For me, the big deciding point was when Obama voted to grant the phone companies immunity for their illegal and unconstitutional wiretapping of the American people. His actual vote on this singular, critical issue tells you everything you need to know about him. His actions before the election flew in the face of his claims to protect civil liberties.
However, when people is fed, healthy and working, democracy will eventually find its way. Look at history for a number of examples.
Alright, I'll call your bluff on that. What are some historical examples of democracy finding its way when the people are fed, healthy, and working and why would it have been different if the people were not fed, healthy, and working?
My recollection is that about two thirds of most movie budgets go to marketing. That leaves about $5 million for the movie. If you look at IMDB you will see the movie gets a fairly good rating, but if you read the written reviews you will see almost everyone hates it*. No doubt a part of the marketing budget went towards getting a good IMDB rating. Another chunk of the budget probably went towards getting some OSCARs as well.
Other people are commenting on the cost of filming. Having seen this movie I can say all but the last 30 seconds of the movie were filmed with a shaky, hand-held camera (which literally made me sick). There was a poor script, with poor directing. There were no big-name actors to garner a huge paycheck. The movie was not in the least bit realistic. The movie catered towards people's sense of patriotism which is the only reason anyone gives it a good review.
*That was the case a month before these lawsuits were filed. Since this was pointed out some positive reviews have moved up on the list gushing with accolades for Kathryn Bigelow's masterful work.
Also, let me point out thedirt.com claims it wasn't properly served, yet got the paperwork with the judgment to give to the press, which is all served in exactly the same manner. It must be magic.
If they were served through the US Postal System there is no guarantee the summons actually made it to the defendant.
Two days ago a postal employee put my neighbor's mail in my mailbox. If it had been certified mail it probably still would have wound up in my mailbox and marked as delivered. Yet I'll bet the next letter she gets will end up in the correct mailbox. It must be magic.
Aside from that a summons is usually served in person to avoid this very situation. While a ruling is simply mailed out.
Apollo was completed in less than ten years. That occurred with very little prior knowledge and the threat of a Russian moon hanging over us. Even with that Congress canceled the last two Apollo missions.
This program is planned to take 50% longer than Apollo building upon what we already know. Frankly, any manned mission scheduled to take longer than Apollo will be canceled before it gets off the ground. Between now and 2025 there will be four presidential elections. That is potentially four wishy-washy politicians who will use NASA as a bargaining chip to get their preferred legislation passed. If they were at all serious about this, they would be scheduling to complete it within six years.
This program is just fungible pork-barrel politics. It sends money to certain congressional districts and it can be canceled before anyone has to deliver working results.
It is really easy to achieve a 100% true positive rate. Just accuse everyone.
The article didn't mention false positives. It would not surprise me at all if this technology would have at least two orders of magnitude more false positives than true positives in the real world. You can't get away from the fact that terrorists are rare so they will be lost in the noise of all the people who are not terrorists.
Let's say the police go through 50 suspects, none of whom are terrorists. With an 83% accuracy rate the odds of all suspects correctly identifying no targets is 0.83^50 = 8.99 x 10^-5 = 0.00899%. In other words, with just 50 suspects there is better than a 99.99% chance law enforcement would be acting on bogus information. It takes only four suspects before there is better than a 50% chance of acting on bogus information.
Real world use would likely see results worse than the 83% achieved in the lab.
It's worth noting that page nine of the Frankencamera team's paper mentions the work of Joshi et al when it discusses deblurring pictures. Neel Joshi was the lead researcher from the article we are discussing.
How do they know what is or is not legal? With Viacom caught paying third parties to upload their material to YouTube and then suing Google for distributing the material it appears the copyright holders don't even know which content is legal.
What *should* be happening, at the very least, is that a full copy (including source and binaries, in the case of software) of any copyrighted work be placed in government escrow so that it can be released to the public after the copyright expires
It is worth noting copyright does make a feeble attempt at this. In order to sue for copyright infringement the work must be registered. In order to seek statutory damages the work must be registered before the infringement. One of the requirements of registration is disclosure of the source code.
Unfortunately, the law is really weak in this area. The copyright holder only has to turn over the first 25 and last 25 pages of source. If the source is submitted electronically, the copyright office actually prefers that it be in PDF format. Also, if there are trade secrets in the source the copyright holder can block out the trade secrets.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps you're confused about the outcome of Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co. Phone books and other collections of facts may not be copyrighted because they lack creativity. Hence the question:
While sribe focuses on the creative element one must also ask who the copyright would go to. The constitution grants congress the power
To my understanding this has always been interpreted to mean authors have rights to their writings and inventors have rights to their discoveries.
If there is some way to enable privileged instructions without using a privileged instruction it would completely circumvent operating system security.
Perhaps the slashdotted site answers this but I have to wonder why not just have a separate opcode to turn the debugging on?
Employers disregard the law because it is cheaper to pay the fine (when they get caught) than to fix the underlying problem. If the fine is increased to the point that it costs more than fixing the underlying problem the underlying problem will be fixed.
droopus has been commenting on his prison sentence for some time. He won't fess up to exactly what he did but from previous posts it appears he blew up some federal property with explosives. Whatever the case there is one thing you can count on, he will not tell you the whole story.
Minnesota garnishment rules would allow the RIAA to cease up to 25% of Thomas-Rasset's income for ten years. At any time they could also file bankruptcy for her and cease any significant assets she has such as a car worth more than $2,000 and personal belongings worth more than a modest sum. So they could garnish her wages for nine years, then force her into bankruptcy.
It's also worth noting she has to pay interest on the judgment. It is doubtful she would even be able to pay that.
Is that $50 to $100 for each of the 24 songs she was sued over or $50 to $100 for each of the thousands of songs she had listed through Kazaa? It seems likely to me that most of those songs were never downloaded by anyone yet they certainly seem relevant to how much harm she actually caused.
If it were, the injury would still have to be malicious.
Everybody will accept 20s as that is what virtually every ATM dispenses. I have traveled all over the US and have had no problem using 100s. I have on occasion had people request that I pay with something smaller and I will when I can. I have also had someone comment that I took all their change when I used a hundred dollar bill early in the morning. But I have not had them refused. I could picture a vendor selling food on a street corner turning down large bills but most people have no problem with them.
One thing to note. If you go someplace where you get the service first and pay afterward, such as a sit-down restaurant or parking garage, they have to accept all legal tender including 100s.
The whole point of a corporation is to put a limit on a shareholder's liability. A shareholder can not be held personally liable for the actions of the corporation. Shareholder liability is limited to the money they invested in the corporation. Libel and slander are civil offenses, not crimes. Individuals working for a corporation are not going to be held liable for slander or libel. Instead, the corporation will be ordered to pay (if they lose). If the corporation runs out of money, its assets will be auctioned off and the corporation dissolved.
You cite the example of Jeffrey Skilling. But that case is completely different. Skilling was convicted of defrauding shareholders, lying to auditors, and insider trading. Those are all crimes. In fact they are all crimes against shareholders.
Take a look at the political ads playing these days. Notice that none of them are sponsored by Target, Microsoft, or other major corporations. Instead they are sponsored by front groups that Target, Microsoft et. al. contribute to. Do you really think Target, Microsoft, or even the people working in those front groups will be held responsible for lying to the American people?
You're going by the assumption that intellectual rights are property. If the government uses someone's software they are not 'taking' it away from the owner. The government could just as well revoke the copyright (granted for "limited times") as buy the software outright. I challenge you to use your legal skills and resources to find a precedent that takes copyright via eminent domain.
Even in an operating system much of the code is basic, ordinary loops, list traversals, indexing into arrays, and other simple stuff that doesn't require pointer manipulation. Which is why an operating system should be written in a language which requires the developer to consciously open up pointer manipulation and disable bounds checking rather than placing the burden on the developer to carefully check bounds everywhere on their own. The latter is virtually guaranteed to leave security holes as developers will undoubtedly forget to check bounds in at least a few places.
As another respondent pointed out, simple object references and type casting don't have to be done so loosely as in C. The careless way developers use pointer arithmetic and type casting in C lies at the heart of many security holes.
Security needs to be designed in from the ground up. Take a look at Windows, Linux, and MacOS. New exploits are constantly being discovered in those systems because security was not a key part of the development process when they were written.
Windows, Linux, and MacOS were all written in C which burdens the developer with safeguarding against all manner of possible security holes. In C a security hole is as likely as a bug with the exception that a bug is likely to be discovered and fixed by the developer while a security hole will go unnoticed until an attacker discovers it. If you want to build a secure OS today you should start with tools that eliminate the most common security holes. That would include automatic bounds checking which none of the aforementioned systems were built with.
If you want a secure system you make sure every action and every module of code is authenticated before it runs. The system will work a lot better if it is designed that way from the ground up. Existing operating systems would at minimum have to be modified to do this.
A secure system would be developed with best-practices that reduce the likelihood of exposing a vulnerability. For example, the potential attack vectors for shell injection attacks would go through a centralized library that safeguards against it.
All of these things are best done by writing a new system from scratch with more secure tools and practices. At the same time, the developers can look to Linux or BSD for example algorithms on how to solve common problems but make sure the actual implementation uses the aforementioned best practices.
That comes across like a bunch of ignorant stereotyping. Let's take a look at actual numbers. The US has the 24th highest murder rate in this survey at 0.042802 per 1000 people. Aside from Poland, the only European nations with a higher rate are former Soviet Bloc Countries. Wikipedia has a more complete table showing a very similar picture.
Countries do not collect stats on other crimes in a manner similar enough to develop an international comparison.
As for your comment on illegal alien populations being responsible for "a large part of US crimes" I haven't seen any statistics on that and I doubt anyone else has either. There is no good way to compile such statistics. It does however make sense. If someone can not ask law enforcement to help settle disputes they will take the law into their own hands. The person they retaliate against will retaliate back. The simple solution to that is to open up the gates to legal immigration. Black markets work the same way. It is why the war on drugs drives up the crime rate.
I think fighting fires is an excellent example of the government doing some good (although, obviously not in this case).
The governor could get better support from his own in-house staff. My employer uses BPOS. We have 20,000 people on it, yet we have terrible support. The state of Minnesota has 36,000 employees. Something tells me the difference is not significant enough to get better support.
A few years ago Minnesota was looking at mandating open standards for all government operations. Now they have taken a huge step towards vendor lock-in. This move will lock up Minnesota's history for decades to come. At the same time it will make the state's operations far less reliable.
The article comments that Minnesota is switching over to something businesses have found great success in for years. As someone that has to use BPOS at work I must say the system is incredibly unreliable. We have had email simply disappear into a void. The service is slow. It frequently stops working for hours at a time. We have had other email delivered hours after it was sent.
We had to disable rather important functionality in order to migrate over to BPOS as we are not allowed to customize anything. Now we have users doing things by hand which used to be automated.
Before we switched over to BPOS I considered email as trustworthy and reliable as most utilities. My employer has structured the company with the assumption that email will be a reliable communications medium. With BPOS in place it is a burden on our organization.
Those are some pretty weak arguments. They were mostly over-hyped claims made by his opponents. I didn't vote for Obama, but those points were not the signs that were worth listening to.
For me, the big deciding point was when Obama voted to grant the phone companies immunity for their illegal and unconstitutional wiretapping of the American people. His actual vote on this singular, critical issue tells you everything you need to know about him. His actions before the election flew in the face of his claims to protect civil liberties.
Alright, I'll call your bluff on that. What are some historical examples of democracy finding its way when the people are fed, healthy, and working and why would it have been different if the people were not fed, healthy, and working?
My recollection is that about two thirds of most movie budgets go to marketing. That leaves about $5 million for the movie. If you look at IMDB you will see the movie gets a fairly good rating, but if you read the written reviews you will see almost everyone hates it*. No doubt a part of the marketing budget went towards getting a good IMDB rating. Another chunk of the budget probably went towards getting some OSCARs as well.
Other people are commenting on the cost of filming. Having seen this movie I can say all but the last 30 seconds of the movie were filmed with a shaky, hand-held camera (which literally made me sick). There was a poor script, with poor directing. There were no big-name actors to garner a huge paycheck. The movie was not in the least bit realistic. The movie catered towards people's sense of patriotism which is the only reason anyone gives it a good review.
*That was the case a month before these lawsuits were filed. Since this was pointed out some positive reviews have moved up on the list gushing with accolades for Kathryn Bigelow's masterful work.
If they were served through the US Postal System there is no guarantee the summons actually made it to the defendant.
Two days ago a postal employee put my neighbor's mail in my mailbox. If it had been certified mail it probably still would have wound up in my mailbox and marked as delivered. Yet I'll bet the next letter she gets will end up in the correct mailbox. It must be magic.
Aside from that a summons is usually served in person to avoid this very situation. While a ruling is simply mailed out.
Apollo was completed in less than ten years. That occurred with very little prior knowledge and the threat of a Russian moon hanging over us. Even with that Congress canceled the last two Apollo missions.
This program is planned to take 50% longer than Apollo building upon what we already know. Frankly, any manned mission scheduled to take longer than Apollo will be canceled before it gets off the ground. Between now and 2025 there will be four presidential elections. That is potentially four wishy-washy politicians who will use NASA as a bargaining chip to get their preferred legislation passed. If they were at all serious about this, they would be scheduling to complete it within six years.
This program is just fungible pork-barrel politics. It sends money to certain congressional districts and it can be canceled before anyone has to deliver working results.
It is really easy to achieve a 100% true positive rate. Just accuse everyone.
The article didn't mention false positives. It would not surprise me at all if this technology would have at least two orders of magnitude more false positives than true positives in the real world. You can't get away from the fact that terrorists are rare so they will be lost in the noise of all the people who are not terrorists.
Let's say the police go through 50 suspects, none of whom are terrorists. With an 83% accuracy rate the odds of all suspects correctly identifying no targets is 0.83^50 = 8.99 x 10^-5 = 0.00899%. In other words, with just 50 suspects there is better than a 99.99% chance law enforcement would be acting on bogus information. It takes only four suspects before there is better than a 50% chance of acting on bogus information.
Real world use would likely see results worse than the 83% achieved in the lab.
It's worth noting that page nine of the Frankencamera team's paper mentions the work of Joshi et al when it discusses deblurring pictures. Neel Joshi was the lead researcher from the article we are discussing.
How do they know what is or is not legal? With Viacom caught paying third parties to upload their material to YouTube and then suing Google for distributing the material it appears the copyright holders don't even know which content is legal.
It is worth noting copyright does make a feeble attempt at this. In order to sue for copyright infringement the work must be registered. In order to seek statutory damages the work must be registered before the infringement. One of the requirements of registration is disclosure of the source code.
Unfortunately, the law is really weak in this area. The copyright holder only has to turn over the first 25 and last 25 pages of source. If the source is submitted electronically, the copyright office actually prefers that it be in PDF format. Also, if there are trade secrets in the source the copyright holder can block out the trade secrets.