Many people make this point; but it is incorrect. The OEM (MS in this case) is not making 100,000 boxes and then trying to sell them all. The OEM makes devices in many runs, from hundreds to thousands per run. This limits the capital needed to manufacture units, and at the same time allows engineers to introduce changes between runs if needed (like the security code change).
All this means that if you don't buy 100,000 boxes MS won't be making them, and therefore won't be losing $1M.
"mass copying off the Internet is illegal and deserves to be a high priority for the Department of Justice"
And I thought all these months that they are actually all busy catching Osama and the anthrax guy... But apparently 100,000,000 teens d/loading Britney are much more dangerous.
I've been without a TV for about 8 years now and it's been really nice...
The best part is that after coming home from work I actually have to find something constructive to do with my time....
like posting to slashdot.... BEST. POST. EVER.;)
There is nothing wrong with posting on/. - it is a two-way discussion with other people, as opposed to one-way passive consumption of someone's else ideas. If you feel that discussion here is too elitist for you, go to Yahoo boards. If you feel that you are too elitist for the discussion here, go to other weblogs (K5 etc.)
In other words, trolls on/. are moderated into oblivion, whereas trolls on TV tell you how you must live your life. Choose.
do you shoot the postman when he delivers junk mail?
The postman does not force me to read the junk mail as a condition to read my other, important mail.
Most mail rooms have large recycling containers for junk mail. From my point of view, I don't even receive the junk mail - it goes directly into recycling. On the other hand, if the postman starts inserting junk mail inside of other envelopes, then I may be upset about that...
If you weren't retarded, you would not buy your PCs from maintstream dealers, but you'd get the components and kitbash them up yourself.
He is not retarded, he is wise. We tried your approach, and it didn't work - too many defective parts, too expensive. After that failure we ended up buying from Dell and never were sorry about that.
I also see that you don't comprehend the scale of the operation. If I were to propose to hand-assemble 1000 PCs, I'd be kicked out of the job before I even finish my speech;-) Such assembly would require a whole team of people who have to be knowledgeable etc. Also, I'd have to worry about spare parts, compatibility, upgrades, repairs... this is insane. I can assemble two or three boxes for a mom'n'pop business, but not more than that.
with an intent to deprive: you agreed to return the car after the mutually agreed upon rent terms expire.
without the owner's consent: he gave you the keys, didn't he?
unlawful or felonious: you walked through the front door and asked for a service that the owner provides as a business.
complete possession: you never claimed that the car is now yours.
The contract or some articles of it may be invalid, but it does not make the whole deal a crime.
For example, you rent a car, use it normally and return. The clerk then notices that the contract form is not his, but from a neighboring rental agency - the guy from there came yesterday, had his cold beer wrapped in it and forgot to throw it away, and then a trainee used it for your rental contract. Obviously, the contract is invalid because the form is wrong, the legalese is wrong, the business name is wrong... but where is the crime on your part?
In such case courts can possibly (IANAL) throw away the old, invalid contract and make a new, correct one, redoing all contract-related negotiations. In my example above, the court would ask the rental agency to make the contract on the same terms that the renter requested. But if the wrong contract contained something objectionable (such as "you may not drive more than 20 miles per day") and the rental clerk, of course, didn't tell you about that (because his agency doesn't have this rule) then this rule would be disallowed even if the actual renter has any claim of it.
Theft, n.
1. (Law) The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious taking and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same; larceny.
Note: To constitute theft there must be a taking without the owner's consent, and it must be unlawful or felonious; every part of the property stolen must be removed, however slightly, from its former position; and it must be, at least momentarily, in the complete possession of the thief.
The highlighted requirements are not present, therefore it is not a theft.
This is really a great idea! It is useful not only to verify the file. There are so many files, so many artists that it is next to impossible to find out even what genre the music belongs to. A small preview (of phone quality, 50 kB) would be easy to grab, especially for modem users. It is very disappointing to download a significant chunk of the file only to find rap there:-(
it stands to reason that the cost of settling there would be that much higher.
Not necessarily. Mars is better for humans. It has atmosphere (not much but still better than nothing); it will protect the surface from meterorites and space dust. On Moon there is no atmosphere, and you can be killed by a grain of sand sailing through you at 10 km/s. The atmosphere is non-corrosive (95% CO2). There is plenty of water on Mars (and not much - on the Moon).
Temperature on Moon is extreme, from very cold to very hot. On Mars, however, the temperature is more smooth, and averages -63 degrees Celsius - this is what we have at Arctic and Antarctic research stations.
Presence of atmosphere will help Martian colonists because they can use lighter, simpler spacesuits instead of vacuum ones that are necessary on Moon.
Neither Mars nor Moon have planetary magnetic fields. That is not nice because magnetic field of Earth helps in deflecting the Solar wind. There are regional magnetic spots, but they are not very large.
Mars is farther from Earth, true, but colonists are not going to fly back and forth too often anyway. In many aspects, given the launch system already in place, the cost of launch to Mars can be comparable to the flight to the Moon. The most expensive part is to get started.
Say your local government banned an activity you participated in regularly and enjoyed greatly because it was wrongly perceived as a threat to their power. Let's call this hypothetical activity "football".
Let's call this hypothetical activity "recreational drug use", shall we? Run it through your scenario and see what you get:
"What do you do? You can't participate in "drug use", and you can't tell you fellow citizens that the government is wrong about "drug use" because they a) control all the media, and b) aren't afraid to arrest anyone who supports "drug use". In these circumstances, you might even argue that it's reasonable for you to attempt armed rebellion against this totalitarian regime."
Sounds familiar?
Now, what these guys have chosen to do, by comparison, is the most non-violent thing they could do to press their case
Non-violent, true, but crime nonetheless.
I am actually surprised to see how many Western people try to rock the boat (Chinese boat, in this case) just because they think the boat is better off sunk. It is wrong, and nobody likes when foreigners meddle in internal affairs and very complicated political intrigues of a big country. For example, american sentiments are fully behind FG, so much that nobody wants to hear that FG is an asian equivalent of Taliban (or Asahara's gang.) But apparently it is.
Are the Falun terrorists for "hijacking" Chinese TV?
I doubt they will be branded as terrorists, since no harm or threat was caused by this prank. However, the government will be in its rights to question every FG member, and maybe arrest a lot of them for participation in this deed.
But the more FG does what it just did, the clearer it becomes for the West that FG is indeed what Chinese government claimed all along - an army of militants, not a health club. The hack of a satellite falls into territory of sabotage and propaganda, something that health clubs don't do.
Perhaps our future math students will be able to better understand more complex complex systems when they can see them rendered in a more realistic fashion
No way. Most math problems are N-dimensional. Try to visualize a Jacobian;-)
why can paralysis victems not regrow their nerve cells in order to walk again?
It is a big question, and I am not a doctor. But probably your question is incorrectly stated. There is no such single thing as "paralysis". There are many illnesses and injuries that have symptoms of paralysis. If a portion of the brain gets seriously damaged (in a stroke, for example) then some functionality can be lost. Some of lost functionality can be later regained, and so far it is attributed to brain's rerouting capabilities. But I don't know much about that, and nobody knows.
Even if paralysis is caused by nerve damage, nerves grow very slowly. If a significant section of a nerve is lost, it may never be restored.
The only other assumption that would change things here would be the "soul" hypothesis. However, it has not been proven to be correct or incorrect yet. The modern theory that associates self-awareness to electro-chemical processes in the brain has much more solid foundation already, even though modern computers are not good enough to simulate a brain yet.
That's exactly why I used this theory in my analogy - it makes more sense at this time. If the soul gets discovered in some way (for example, as a wave in ether or hyperspace) then very many concepts will change.
The key to percieved continuity of conciousness is memory. Think about it: if your memory were wiped clean and replaced with a completely different history instantaneously, you'd never realize that you used to be someone\something else.
No. That would work only for the copy of me, but not for the original. The copy does not see a break in memories anyway. The problem is the original. Just imagine, you walk into a chamber, stand there for a minute, and then the operator says "All ready, you've been copied, now be please so kind to walk to the wall and I will shoot you." That is a problem - break of continuity for the original person.
Think about this process. You are teleporting somewhere. You enter the Blue Chamber, press the button. Instantly the surroundings begin to fade into something else, colors fade, teleport operators become more and more transparent, and at the same time other people become visible where they weren't... and finally everything is stable again, and you are in Green chamber at the other end, with all your memories intact and not broken for a moment. That would work.
Nerve cells (axons) do regenerate, how else damaged nerves could be reconnected?
Neurons, on the other hand, were believed to not regenerate at all. Recent studies, however, disprove this theory, concluding, in part, that "the human hippocampus retains its ability to generate neurons throughout life".
what are the theological or philosophical repercussions of killing and rebuilding your physical self?
For all practical purposes, it is like if you die (and disappear) each time you go to sleep, and your complete copy gets reconstructed at the instant you wake up.
Given that cells of your body don't live long, you are a new, reborn person, every N years.
The key to perceived continued existence is the slow transfer of your consciousness into another body, with clear departure from the old one. The copy operation (cp) is not good enough, you need the move (mv) here.
Then, beyond any doubt, you should read Shannon's original paper, published in 1948. There is some math involved (the course is normally taken on 4th year in a University), but don't worry.
Snannon's 1948 paper, and Kotelnikov's math (from 1933) laid the foundation of the information theory as we know it.
it is only zero bits if you know that the answer is "42" or "not 42" and you know that the answer is correct
That's why I specifically mentioned that;-) Global truths are always like that.
if you have a general question whose answer can be any n-dimensional string of unicode characters, you will have 16 bits x n of information, i believe
No, it is not so simple. The quantity of information depends on the probability of certain symbols in certain places. For example:
Q: I want to send either "King Lear" or "Hamlet" from Mars to Earth. How much information would that be?
A: That would be one bit, even though each book has hundreds of thousands of characters. This is because one bit is all you need to fully recover the message at the receiving end.
Theory of information is an interesting subject, a required course for any RF/EE engineer. That's where your Reed-Solomon codes come from, for your magic.PAR files;-)
Since targeting info is downloaded into the rocket anyway, so can be the key to decipher it. The key can be as long as you want, the only restriction is that a human would need to key it in before launch.
The whole system (warhead - rocket - launch - target) can be easily secured with so many layers of encryption code (most of which is not even in the firmware most of the time, and maybe not even in the launch site computers!) that it would definitely make it easier for terr'ists just to smuggle the warhead into the target country rather than try to risk it all breaking through layers of encrypted stuff, which undoubtedly has lots of anti-debugging "trapdoors" that render it useless. For example, it is known that IFF boxes are usually fitted with a small explosive charge, and you can't open them without knowing exactly how.
If you could sell ``42'' I reckon you would get a hell of a lot for it - and that's, what, a byte?:)
Actually, it is 0 bits, if the answer (42) is correct, and the question is known. This is because any other "Deep Thought" box can provide this answer without access to the number 42 before or during computations. That's basic theory of information. Also, the answer "is it day or night" at a random time carries 1 bit of information; the same answer only during the day carries 0 bits.
Here you would have to store every moderation as a link connecting node A to node B and somehow perform a distributed computation in order to isolate the self-referring parts of the network.
That's how PGP's Web of Trust works. It is fully applicable here. A hierarchy of trusted signers would vouch for the authenticity; each signer can be anonymous, and signer's trust can be added or revoked. All you need to add is the ability to download the signature separately (or before) the song.
if crappy cables and splitters (of the type you'd find at $DISCOUNT_STORE) can cause problems from outside signals getting in, it would follow that there might be some leakage of the cable signal outside these parts.
If you mean cheap splitters may introduce unusually high losses, and therefore the lost signal is radiated then this is not quite so. The #1 cause of losses is bad contact inside (or too good a contact where there shouldn't be one:-) This causes standing wave in the cable segment, and all the lost energy is transformed into heat. It is awfully hard to radiate any meaningful signal from within a shielded box; it is much easier to convert it to heat, locally or elsewhere.
Generally, a broken cable or a mechanically damaged splitter can become an antenna. If you have a gap, and if the current flows through that gap, you get a nice antenna. There are circumstances when you may be noticeably radiating the signal. However I would presume that such cases are not frequent enough so that the cable company can depend on this effect in running a very expensive cable hunting operation, when live people drive around and point antennas at houses. The product of all probabilities would be so low, and deniability would be so high that there would be no justification for the whole hunt in first place.
If I were in charge and tasked with this, I would rather send regular technicians to check who gets the cable (to verify the wiring at the pole, filters etc). If they see invalid wiring, they should remove it. But if someone tampered with the cable on their own premises, it is just too expensive to pursue - there are just too many valid reasons for a strong emission from a cable segment. For example, the cable in a wall can be damaged with a drill bit or a nail. The cable company can't enter premises anyway, especially if the apartment owner does not have a contract with the cable company. They could call police and apply for a search warrant, but I haven't heard about such development yet (I doubt the warrant would be granted anyway, only on basis of RF measurements - which will be considered an illegal search in first place). The judge would just tell them to disconnect their property - cable signal - and be done with it.
Slashdot Mirror
All this means that if you don't buy 100,000 boxes MS won't be making them, and therefore won't be losing $1M.
And I thought all these months that they are actually all busy catching Osama and the anthrax guy... But apparently 100,000,000 teens d/loading Britney are much more dangerous.
The best part is that after coming home from work I actually have to find something constructive to do with my time ....
like posting to slashdot.... ;)
BEST. POST. EVER.
There is nothing wrong with posting on /. - it is a two-way discussion with other people, as opposed to one-way passive consumption of someone's else ideas. If you feel that discussion here is too elitist for you, go to Yahoo boards. If you feel that you are too elitist for the discussion here, go to other weblogs (K5 etc.)
In other words, trolls on /. are moderated into oblivion, whereas trolls on TV tell you how you must live your life. Choose.
The postman does not force me to read the junk mail as a condition to read my other, important mail.
Most mail rooms have large recycling containers for junk mail. From my point of view, I don't even receive the junk mail - it goes directly into recycling. On the other hand, if the postman starts inserting junk mail inside of other envelopes, then I may be upset about that...
He is not retarded, he is wise. We tried your approach, and it didn't work - too many defective parts, too expensive. After that failure we ended up buying from Dell and never were sorry about that.
I also see that you don't comprehend the scale of the operation. If I were to propose to hand-assemble 1000 PCs, I'd be kicked out of the job before I even finish my speech ;-) Such assembly would require a whole team of people who have to be knowledgeable etc. Also, I'd have to worry about spare parts, compatibility, upgrades, repairs... this is insane. I can assemble two or three boxes for a mom'n'pop business, but not more than that.
The contract or some articles of it may be invalid, but it does not make the whole deal a crime.
For example, you rent a car, use it normally and return. The clerk then notices that the contract form is not his, but from a neighboring rental agency - the guy from there came yesterday, had his cold beer wrapped in it and forgot to throw it away, and then a trainee used it for your rental contract. Obviously, the contract is invalid because the form is wrong, the legalese is wrong, the business name is wrong... but where is the crime on your part?
In such case courts can possibly (IANAL) throw away the old, invalid contract and make a new, correct one, redoing all contract-related negotiations. In my example above, the court would ask the rental agency to make the contract on the same terms that the renter requested. But if the wrong contract contained something objectionable (such as "you may not drive more than 20 miles per day") and the rental clerk, of course, didn't tell you about that (because his agency doesn't have this rule) then this rule would be disallowed even if the actual renter has any claim of it.
The highlighted requirements are not present, therefore it is not a theft.
This is really a great idea! It is useful not only to verify the file. There are so many files, so many artists that it is next to impossible to find out even what genre the music belongs to. A small preview (of phone quality, 50 kB) would be easy to grab, especially for modem users. It is very disappointing to download a significant chunk of the file only to find rap there :-(
Not necessarily. Mars is better for humans. It has atmosphere (not much but still better than nothing); it will protect the surface from meterorites and space dust. On Moon there is no atmosphere, and you can be killed by a grain of sand sailing through you at 10 km/s. The atmosphere is non-corrosive (95% CO2). There is plenty of water on Mars (and not much - on the Moon).
Temperature on Moon is extreme, from very cold to very hot. On Mars, however, the temperature is more smooth, and averages -63 degrees Celsius - this is what we have at Arctic and Antarctic research stations.
Presence of atmosphere will help Martian colonists because they can use lighter, simpler spacesuits instead of vacuum ones that are necessary on Moon.
Neither Mars nor Moon have planetary magnetic fields. That is not nice because magnetic field of Earth helps in deflecting the Solar wind. There are regional magnetic spots, but they are not very large.
Mars is farther from Earth, true, but colonists are not going to fly back and forth too often anyway. In many aspects, given the launch system already in place, the cost of launch to Mars can be comparable to the flight to the Moon. The most expensive part is to get started.
Let's call this hypothetical activity "recreational drug use", shall we? Run it through your scenario and see what you get:
"What do you do? You can't participate in "drug use", and you can't tell you fellow citizens that the government is wrong about "drug use" because they a) control all the media, and b) aren't afraid to arrest anyone who supports "drug use". In these circumstances, you might even argue that it's reasonable for you to attempt armed rebellion against this totalitarian regime."
Sounds familiar?
Now, what these guys have chosen to do, by comparison, is the most non-violent thing they could do to press their case
Non-violent, true, but crime nonetheless.
I am actually surprised to see how many Western people try to rock the boat (Chinese boat, in this case) just because they think the boat is better off sunk. It is wrong, and nobody likes when foreigners meddle in internal affairs and very complicated political intrigues of a big country. For example, american sentiments are fully behind FG, so much that nobody wants to hear that FG is an asian equivalent of Taliban (or Asahara's gang.) But apparently it is.
I doubt they will be branded as terrorists, since no harm or threat was caused by this prank. However, the government will be in its rights to question every FG member, and maybe arrest a lot of them for participation in this deed.
But the more FG does what it just did, the clearer it becomes for the West that FG is indeed what Chinese government claimed all along - an army of militants, not a health club. The hack of a satellite falls into territory of sabotage and propaganda, something that health clubs don't do.
Thanks, your comment only strengthents my point ;-)
No way. Most math problems are N-dimensional. Try to visualize a Jacobian ;-)
It is a big question, and I am not a doctor. But probably your question is incorrectly stated. There is no such single thing as "paralysis". There are many illnesses and injuries that have symptoms of paralysis. If a portion of the brain gets seriously damaged (in a stroke, for example) then some functionality can be lost. Some of lost functionality can be later regained, and so far it is attributed to brain's rerouting capabilities. But I don't know much about that, and nobody knows.
Even if paralysis is caused by nerve damage, nerves grow very slowly. If a significant section of a nerve is lost, it may never be restored.
That's exactly why I used this theory in my analogy - it makes more sense at this time. If the soul gets discovered in some way (for example, as a wave in ether or hyperspace) then very many concepts will change.
No. That would work only for the copy of me, but not for the original. The copy does not see a break in memories anyway. The problem is the original. Just imagine, you walk into a chamber, stand there for a minute, and then the operator says "All ready, you've been copied, now be please so kind to walk to the wall and I will shoot you." That is a problem - break of continuity for the original person.
Think about this process. You are teleporting somewhere. You enter the Blue Chamber, press the button. Instantly the surroundings begin to fade into something else, colors fade, teleport operators become more and more transparent, and at the same time other people become visible where they weren't... and finally everything is stable again, and you are in Green chamber at the other end, with all your memories intact and not broken for a moment. That would work.
Nerve cells (axons) do regenerate, how else damaged nerves could be reconnected?
Neurons, on the other hand, were believed to not regenerate at all. Recent studies, however, disprove this theory, concluding, in part, that "the human hippocampus retains its ability to generate neurons throughout life".
For all practical purposes, it is like if you die (and disappear) each time you go to sleep, and your complete copy gets reconstructed at the instant you wake up.
Given that cells of your body don't live long, you are a new, reborn person, every N years.
The key to perceived continued existence is the slow transfer of your consciousness into another body, with clear departure from the old one. The copy operation (cp) is not good enough, you need the move (mv) here.
Start here, this is an introduction.
Then, beyond any doubt, you should read Shannon's original paper, published in 1948. There is some math involved (the course is normally taken on 4th year in a University), but don't worry.
Snannon's 1948 paper, and Kotelnikov's math (from 1933) laid the foundation of the information theory as we know it.
That's why I specifically mentioned that ;-) Global truths are always like that.
if you have a general question whose answer can be any n-dimensional string of unicode characters, you will have 16 bits x n of information, i believe
No, it is not so simple. The quantity of information depends on the probability of certain symbols in certain places. For example:
Q: I want to send either "King Lear" or "Hamlet" from Mars to Earth. How much information would that be?
A: That would be one bit, even though each book has hundreds of thousands of characters. This is because one bit is all you need to fully recover the message at the receiving end.
Theory of information is an interesting subject, a required course for any RF/EE engineer. That's where your Reed-Solomon codes come from, for your magic .PAR files ;-)
It might come as a surprise to many at /., but NP is not that famous, compared to many other stars.
The whole system (warhead - rocket - launch - target) can be easily secured with so many layers of encryption code (most of which is not even in the firmware most of the time, and maybe not even in the launch site computers!) that it would definitely make it easier for terr'ists just to smuggle the warhead into the target country rather than try to risk it all breaking through layers of encrypted stuff, which undoubtedly has lots of anti-debugging "trapdoors" that render it useless. For example, it is known that IFF boxes are usually fitted with a small explosive charge, and you can't open them without knowing exactly how.
Actually, it is 0 bits, if the answer (42) is correct, and the question is known. This is because any other "Deep Thought" box can provide this answer without access to the number 42 before or during computations. That's basic theory of information. Also, the answer "is it day or night" at a random time carries 1 bit of information; the same answer only during the day carries 0 bits.
That's how PGP's Web of Trust works. It is fully applicable here. A hierarchy of trusted signers would vouch for the authenticity; each signer can be anonymous, and signer's trust can be added or revoked. All you need to add is the ability to download the signature separately (or before) the song.
If you mean cheap splitters may introduce unusually high losses, and therefore the lost signal is radiated then this is not quite so. The #1 cause of losses is bad contact inside (or too good a contact where there shouldn't be one :-) This causes standing wave in the cable segment, and all the lost energy is transformed into heat. It is awfully hard to radiate any meaningful signal from within a shielded box; it is much easier to convert it to heat, locally or elsewhere.
Generally, a broken cable or a mechanically damaged splitter can become an antenna. If you have a gap, and if the current flows through that gap, you get a nice antenna. There are circumstances when you may be noticeably radiating the signal. However I would presume that such cases are not frequent enough so that the cable company can depend on this effect in running a very expensive cable hunting operation, when live people drive around and point antennas at houses. The product of all probabilities would be so low, and deniability would be so high that there would be no justification for the whole hunt in first place.
If I were in charge and tasked with this, I would rather send regular technicians to check who gets the cable (to verify the wiring at the pole, filters etc). If they see invalid wiring, they should remove it. But if someone tampered with the cable on their own premises, it is just too expensive to pursue - there are just too many valid reasons for a strong emission from a cable segment. For example, the cable in a wall can be damaged with a drill bit or a nail. The cable company can't enter premises anyway, especially if the apartment owner does not have a contract with the cable company. They could call police and apply for a search warrant, but I haven't heard about such development yet (I doubt the warrant would be granted anyway, only on basis of RF measurements - which will be considered an illegal search in first place). The judge would just tell them to disconnect their property - cable signal - and be done with it.