There is no way a kernel patch can violate the DMCA for the simple fact that the Linux kernel doesn't enforce any type of copy protection.
Doing it like this is just prudent. Why should someone from Europe have to know all the details of US law, weigh the chances of it being a violation, when non-US people have already gone to jail over it and there's the option of not distributing it to Americans in the first place?
Posting this in the US would not be a violation of the DMCA except if you used some ludicrously tortured logic.
Tell that to Skylarov, who wrote a program that was mandatory in Russia under Russian law, and who found himself in jail in the US under the DMCA. It doesn't matter if he wins in the end, or isn't even allowed back in or whatever. He's totally innocent, has nothing to do with the US and shouldn't have been treated like that.
You can make up any BS laws you want for yourselves over there, but totally innocent people who have nothing to do with the US end up in jail because of them. I think the thefreeworld.net site is a brilliant idea.
If there's even the tiniest chance that some information posted could be illegal under some strange law of a country you have nothing to do with (and this security info certainly could be), and they're known to get (innocent, foreign, never been to the US) people jailed over this stupid law, then the prudent thing to do is post that info only on sites like this.
Unfortunately, given how few people in the US even know their own laws, it's practically impossible for people in Russia, Norway etc to be aware of all the weird quirks in US law, and they don't even know they should be aware of them. And people from those countries were still jailed for doing something perfectly legal. The US is a threat.
I'm sorry for ranting, mod me a troll or something, I can get real angry over stuff like this.
If programs like Kazaa were hosted on sites like this, then the program isn't distributed to Americans, and hence there is no argument left to drag them (a Danish/Dutch/Australian/Some Baltic State-ian operation...) into a US court.
Any Americans still using it (by lying on the form) would do so illegally, of course. Kazaa could maybe even sue them if they wanted to...
Say I write something in an interpreted language, Python, Perl, Java, whatever.
The interpreter binary that runs the code is signed, totally officially Palladium-fine.
Then I can write any Python code that does whatever, can't I? You can't sign the ASCII source code.
I conclude that any language interpreter, or any application that has any sort of scripting language (say IE, Outlook, Word) can't have any means of breaking out of DRM in the language or it won't be certified. This is unbelievably crippling.
Say I have a Palladium-enabled computer and I have bought some digital audio from the Net. How can I do something completely normal with it, like burn it to a CD so I can listen to it in my car?
As soon as you only buy the hardware then the finances get all screwed.
Yes, but that's not your problem, is it? That's a "feature" of their business model. If people decide to use their property in some other way, or just decide to buy no games, then it may cost MS money - but that doesn't make it illegal! You never went into any agreement with them to let them keep making profit off you, you just bought some box cheaply.
On the other hand, these mod chips apparently contain a modified version of the Xbox's RAM, and therefore they're quite simply illegal, if they really do.
On the other manipulator, they do claim to have patented their novel fog screen dingus, so it would seem that the USPTO disagrees with you.
They're from Finland.
Besides, write something like this down in language that's precise enough, and similar-but-not-exactly-the-same things wouldn't count as prior art, I think.
Deep Blue (that defeated Kasparov) evaluated 200 million positions per second compared to Deep Fritz's 3-4 million.
But DB did that on processors that didn't communicate with each other.Many transpositions occur when you build a tree of moves from some position (say, 1.e4 e6 2.d4 and 1.d4 e6 2.e4 are the same position). DF calculates such positions only once because the results are cached, DB didn't. It's quite possible that DF actually looks at more *distinct* positions, and it's certainly the stronger program.
Either the world must agree on some copyright laws
They do. Ever heard of the Berne convention, that sort of thing? Copyright law is international, based on treaties.
[...] or companies like KaZaa can continue merrily...
Of course they can. They do nothing illegal under copyright law. Their users may break the law, but that doesn't mean KaZaa is breaking it. That's what a Dutch court decided, using the existing, international, copyright law.
What this world needs isn't international laws for this sort of thing, but a United States that doesn't choose to ignore them whenever it pleases them.
Then, we'll also shoot Kazaa for that stuff like stealing Amazon royalties from charities and other websites. They should hang for that.
On the front page of their site, have users select which country they're from. Deny access to everyone who selects "United States". There, they've complied with US law.
Of course, users could lie - but that's a DMCA violation (circumventing a technology used to protect copyrights) and obvious cracking attempt, how could Kazaa ever be held responsible for that?:-).
LFS makes the case for calling it GNU/Linux
on
LFS 4.0 Released
·
· Score: 2
One point that installing LFS drives home: GNU/Linux is a totally fair name. If I recall correctly, of the LFS version I installed, 45 of 61 packages came from ftp.gnu.org, and some others were also part of the project. Calling my system a GNU system is actually more accurate than calling it Linux. But I'll reserve that name for systems running Hurd.
My home box, a 600Mhz AMD Duron, was bought two years ago, and I spent some days installing LFS on it. It's still the system I use now. A lot of software was added over time.
It works fine. However, now, after two years, package management is getting a bit aggravating. I find I have to upgrade libraries and stuff before I can install some new things, and there's no good way to uninstall the old ones. So you just make install the new one over it and hope it's all ok. I suppose I could look at the logs of make install to see what went where, and delete it by hand, but many of those logs are gone and it's too much work.
And recently I wanted to install something that triggered a bug in my trusty old gcc 2.95.2 (an actual software caused sig 11). So I installed gcc 3.2, the latest. And yes, many things have trouble, probably because their C++ isn't entirely up to the standard, but it's still irritating. Also some.configure scripts seems to get confused when the gcc version is 3.2. Keeping both around is doable, but not as smooth as I'd want it.
This system is fun, and everything is *exactly* like I want it, but I'll go to some "real" distro on my next computer.
Can anyone suggest some good chess strategy books?
"How to reassess your chess" by Jeremy Silman is probably the most-recommended chess strategy book, but it's not for beginners, more for somewhat advanced club players. A cheap, all-round good book to start with may be "The Mammoth Book of Chess", by Burgess and Nunn. Go to Amazon for reviews by people and sample pages, they're good for that sort of thing.
Of course there are always the game sites the offer chess online.
The best for Slashdot geeks should be FICS, at http://www.freechess.org, with its command line interface and geeky audience (usually 400+ players online). The best Linux client to play there is eboard.
Incidentally, SCID is a *great* GPL'ed chess database, originally for Linux but also ported to Windows, that makes Chessbase obsolete as far as I'm concerned.
i do need to go, but here are some things for children of this post to do:
I'm not a child of your post, but I'm a drunk chess player.
Look up some refernece that talked about how Kasparov's playing style is perhaps less suited to showcasing humanity's superioty to computers than Karpovs's was.
Kasparov is lethal when he has the initiative. He wants complex, tactical, attacking positions, and he's better at them than any human. Unfortunately, these positions tend to depend on calculation, which is what computers shine at. Karpov, like Kramnik, is more about prophylaxis, which is preventing any active options the opponent may have.
Although it must be said that at top level, all these players have a universal style. You can't become the world top player with a purely positional or a purely tactical style. Give Karpov a position that calls for a tactical solution, he's likely to play it. Put Kasparov in a quiet, strategical position, he'll usually know exactly what to do.
The differences show, mostly, in the choice of openings. They like different setups. Karpov choses the Caro-Kann (1.e4 c6) vs 1.e4, which is a very positional, defensive opening. Kasparov goes for the throat with the sharpest lines of the Sicilian (1.e4 c5). [if you're not a serious chess player, please believe me, that one square further makes a huge difference].
Kramnik plays the Berlin (1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 Nf6). An opening that gives White a positional advantage - just not enough of an advantage to win. It typically leads to an endgame that's better for White, though, in the hands of grandmasters, not yet winning. And he knows it well. There's no way a computer will understand all the subtleties in these quiet positions, Fritz isn't going to beat him here.
On the other hand, Kasparov actually lost to Judit Polgar, the world's highest rated woman, in the recent Russia vs Rest of the World match. Kasparov had a huge plus score vs Polgar beforehand, but he was tired, thought he could get an easy draw in that line just like Kramnik does. But he couldn't (a report of the match, including comments on the Polgar-Kasparov game, is at Chess Cafe). He just doesn't have the feeling for defending those worse, yet not yet losing, passive positions.
So the difference in style in small, but it's certainly there. And Kramnik's is much better against computers.
That makes no sense at all. How could Lindows be held responsible for what other people distribute?
No, Lindows distributes. Under a public license (the "P" in "GPL", remember), meaning they grant rights to everyone, including the people who don't receive it directly from them, but through others. Or who didn't receive it at all and just want to get the source code that the GPL grants them rights to. Section 3b of the GPL is pretty clear about it: any third party can order the source from them, for at most the cost of distribution.
With its 2.4 diameter mirror, the smallest object that the Hubble can resolve at the Moon's distance of around 400,000 kilometers is about 80 meters across.
(and so it can't make out the lunar modules that are there)
There are several interesting developments here. For one thing, Tiscali allies with Kazaa - a natural step for them, because after all, they want to sell bandwidth, and why would people need a lot of bandwidth, if there weren't any applications like Kazaa?
Then in the second article, one of the things that's mentioned is that they partner with a music company for which Kazaa is actually the only way it distributes its music. This may be good for Kazaa's legal case, after all Napster seemed to lose mostly because they couldn't show that their networks were used legitimately at all.
On the other hand, I wonder what the judge will think of the new feature against 'bogus music and video files', that are inserted by the record companies to make the network useless. Almost all of those files will make themselves look like songs that are actually illegal to trade, so making a feature to stop them, however useful and natural to make, could be seen as actively helping to download copyrighted stuff.
But I can't really see them winning the case in the US anyway, after Napster.
No, they have not. That would mean that whoever receives a message sent with this data had the same pad, and that isn't the case.If it were, a 12-terabit stamp-size one-time pad would still be rather good.
I'm a bit unclear how this works in practice though. They say they can check the patterns the thing makes against a "secure" database. They can't store all the 12 terabits there.
So, I assume, they pick some number (say, 100) of ways to shine a laser at it at random, and store those in the server. When it's time for identification, the server tells the token reading gadget which position(s) the laser should be in, it sends the pattern back, and it can be checked.
One possible attack is obvious, it may be possible to find out which random spots for the laser have been stored for this token by asking for a verification enough times. However, that gives you the task of making an object that fits into a reader, that gives the right patterns for all the 100 ways... And that's Hard. So it may not even be necessary to randomize the laser positions, just check some number of standard patterns, and it will be too hard to make an item that can fake them all.
Thanks for listening to my train of thought. I think I get it now:)
But it frustrates me that so many scientists always seem to believe that water in a liquid form is a necessity of life.
Of course I know nothing about what is necessary for life. But water is a really unique chemical. Because of the hydrogen bridges, many salts dissolve (ionize) very easily in water, and not in other chemicals.If you can't ionize salts, there is a large number of elements that you just can't use as a primitive life form because it'll remain rock. It's not so unreasonable to assume that complex life is very unlikely without water.
So, in summary, the trend of several recent articles:
US consumers lose fair use rights, are "repressed" more and more, because of large media corporation lobbies.
Those media large corporations don't even understand what's good for them.
Long term plan for pay per use, my ass. They're selling less and less. If they make it more expensive, and even worse quality (well, that's far-fetched, ok), people will buy even less no matter what the method of paying for it.
Yes, it's strange at first sight that you need a license, from the US government no less, to go to the moon. They don't even launch there, they launch from Kazakhstan, as the article says.
But that also means this is a US company launching space craft from abroad. I would think a few permits are involved there - like in exporting it there in the first place. I don't know exactly what sort of technology export restrictions there currently are, but I think spacecraft will be covered.
And of course they need a license from the guy who patented 'flying to the moon' as a business method...
I tried going for a run a few months ago. After about half a mile, I just collapsed. [...]
As for dying without 10-20 years. Good. Anything to bring an early end to my miserable existence.
Don't run, walk. If you can't even walk a mile, you're already half dead, but as long as you can still move, you can improve gradually, it's really quite a fast process. And a miserable existence? Feeling bad all the time? Well, duh, that wouldn't have anything to do with not being fit, would it. Being fat makes you feel miserable, because you don't have the energy for anything.
You have a choice: force yourself to do a little exercise a few times a week (perhaps feeling miserable the first few weeks), or force yourself to feel miserable all the time, the rest of your life.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no way a kernel patch can violate the DMCA for the simple fact that the Linux kernel doesn't enforce any type of copy protection.
Doing it like this is just prudent. Why should someone from Europe have to know all the details of US law, weigh the chances of it being a violation, when non-US people have already gone to jail over it and there's the option of not distributing it to Americans in the first place?
Posting this in the US would not be a violation of the DMCA except if you used some ludicrously tortured logic.
Tell that to Skylarov, who wrote a program that was mandatory in Russia under Russian law, and who found himself in jail in the US under the DMCA. It doesn't matter if he wins in the end, or isn't even allowed back in or whatever. He's totally innocent, has nothing to do with the US and shouldn't have been treated like that.
You can make up any BS laws you want for yourselves over there, but totally innocent people who have nothing to do with the US end up in jail because of them. I think the thefreeworld.net site is a brilliant idea.
If there's even the tiniest chance that some information posted could be illegal under some strange law of a country you have nothing to do with (and this security info certainly could be), and they're known to get (innocent, foreign, never been to the US) people jailed over this stupid law, then the prudent thing to do is post that info only on sites like this.
Unfortunately, given how few people in the US even know their own laws, it's practically impossible for people in Russia, Norway etc to be aware of all the weird quirks in US law, and they don't even know they should be aware of them. And people from those countries were still jailed for doing something perfectly legal. The US is a threat.
I'm sorry for ranting, mod me a troll or something, I can get real angry over stuff like this.
If programs like Kazaa were hosted on sites like this, then the program isn't distributed to Americans, and hence there is no argument left to drag them (a Danish/Dutch/Australian/Some Baltic State-ian operation...) into a US court.
Any Americans still using it (by lying on the form) would do so illegally, of course. Kazaa could maybe even sue them if they wanted to...
Say I write something in an interpreted language, Python, Perl, Java, whatever.
The interpreter binary that runs the code is signed, totally officially Palladium-fine.
Then I can write any Python code that does whatever, can't I? You can't sign the ASCII source code.
I conclude that any language interpreter, or any application that has any sort of scripting language (say IE, Outlook, Word) can't have any means of breaking out of DRM in the language or it won't be certified. This is unbelievably crippling.
Say I have a Palladium-enabled computer and I have bought some digital audio from the Net. How can I do something completely normal with it, like burn it to a CD so I can listen to it in my car?
What is it that causes these kinds of conflicts and mistrust?
People. Things like this happen now and then absolutely everywhere. It seems that's how we work.
As soon as you only buy the hardware then the finances get all screwed.
Yes, but that's not your problem, is it? That's a "feature" of their business model. If people decide to use their property in some other way, or just decide to buy no games, then it may cost MS money - but that doesn't make it illegal! You never went into any agreement with them to let them keep making profit off you, you just bought some box cheaply.
On the other hand, these mod chips apparently contain a modified version of the Xbox's RAM, and therefore they're quite simply illegal, if they really do.
On the other manipulator, they do claim to have patented their novel fog screen dingus, so it would seem that the USPTO disagrees with you.
They're from Finland.
Besides, write something like this down in language that's precise enough, and similar-but-not-exactly-the-same things wouldn't count as prior art, I think.
Deep Blue (that defeated Kasparov) evaluated 200 million positions per second compared to Deep Fritz's 3-4 million.
But DB did that on processors that didn't communicate with each other.Many transpositions occur when you build a tree of moves from some position (say, 1.e4 e6 2.d4 and 1.d4 e6 2.e4 are the same position). DF calculates such positions only once because the results are cached, DB didn't. It's quite possible that DF actually looks at more *distinct* positions, and it's certainly the stronger program.
Either the world must agree on some copyright laws
They do. Ever heard of the Berne convention, that sort of thing? Copyright law is international, based on treaties.
[...] or companies like KaZaa can continue merrily...
Of course they can. They do nothing illegal under copyright law. Their users may break the law, but that doesn't mean KaZaa is breaking it. That's what a Dutch court decided, using the existing, international, copyright law.
What this world needs isn't international laws for this sort of thing, but a United States that doesn't choose to ignore them whenever it pleases them.
Then, we'll also shoot Kazaa for that stuff like stealing Amazon royalties from charities and other websites. They should hang for that.
On the front page of their site, have users select which country they're from. Deny access to everyone who selects "United States". There, they've complied with US law.
Of course, users could lie - but that's a DMCA violation (circumventing a technology used to protect copyrights) and obvious cracking attempt, how could Kazaa ever be held responsible for that? :-).
One point that installing LFS drives home: GNU/Linux is a totally fair name. If I recall correctly, of the LFS version I installed, 45 of 61 packages came from ftp.gnu.org, and some others were also part of the project. Calling my system a GNU system is actually more accurate than calling it Linux. But I'll reserve that name for systems running Hurd.
My home box, a 600Mhz AMD Duron, was bought two years ago, and I spent some days installing LFS on it. It's still the system I use now. A lot of software was added over time.
It works fine. However, now, after two years, package management is getting a bit aggravating. I find I have to upgrade libraries and stuff before I can install some new things, and there's no good way to uninstall the old ones. So you just make install the new one over it and hope it's all ok. I suppose I could look at the logs of make install to see what went where, and delete it by hand, but many of those logs are gone and it's too much work.
And recently I wanted to install something that triggered a bug in my trusty old gcc 2.95.2 (an actual software caused sig 11). So I installed gcc 3.2, the latest. And yes, many things have trouble, probably because their C++ isn't entirely up to the standard, but it's still irritating. Also some .configure scripts seems to get confused when the gcc version is 3.2. Keeping both around is doable, but not as smooth as I'd want it.
This system is fun, and everything is *exactly* like I want it, but I'll go to some "real" distro on my next computer.
Can anyone suggest some good chess strategy books?
"How to reassess your chess" by Jeremy Silman is probably the most-recommended chess strategy book, but it's not for beginners, more for somewhat advanced club players. A cheap, all-round good book to start with may be "The Mammoth Book of Chess", by Burgess and Nunn. Go to Amazon for reviews by people and sample pages, they're good for that sort of thing.
Of course there are always the game sites the offer chess online.
The best for Slashdot geeks should be FICS, at http://www.freechess.org, with its command line interface and geeky audience (usually 400+ players online). The best Linux client to play there is eboard.
Incidentally, SCID is a *great* GPL'ed chess database, originally for Linux but also ported to Windows, that makes Chessbase obsolete as far as I'm concerned.
Hope this helps.I'm not a child of your post, but I'm a drunk chess player.
Look up some refernece that talked about how Kasparov's playing style is perhaps less suited to showcasing humanity's superioty to computers than Karpovs's was.
Kasparov is lethal when he has the initiative. He wants complex, tactical, attacking positions, and he's better at them than any human. Unfortunately, these positions tend to depend on calculation, which is what computers shine at. Karpov, like Kramnik, is more about prophylaxis, which is preventing any active options the opponent may have.
Although it must be said that at top level, all these players have a universal style. You can't become the world top player with a purely positional or a purely tactical style. Give Karpov a position that calls for a tactical solution, he's likely to play it. Put Kasparov in a quiet, strategical position, he'll usually know exactly what to do.
The differences show, mostly, in the choice of openings. They like different setups. Karpov choses the Caro-Kann (1.e4 c6) vs 1.e4, which is a very positional, defensive opening. Kasparov goes for the throat with the sharpest lines of the Sicilian (1.e4 c5). [if you're not a serious chess player, please believe me, that one square further makes a huge difference].
Kramnik plays the Berlin (1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 Nf6). An opening that gives White a positional advantage - just not enough of an advantage to win. It typically leads to an endgame that's better for White, though, in the hands of grandmasters, not yet winning. And he knows it well. There's no way a computer will understand all the subtleties in these quiet positions, Fritz isn't going to beat him here.
On the other hand, Kasparov actually lost to Judit Polgar, the world's highest rated woman, in the recent Russia vs Rest of the World match. Kasparov had a huge plus score vs Polgar beforehand, but he was tired, thought he could get an easy draw in that line just like Kramnik does. But he couldn't (a report of the match, including comments on the Polgar-Kasparov game, is at Chess Cafe). He just doesn't have the feeling for defending those worse, yet not yet losing, passive positions.
So the difference in style in small, but it's certainly there. And Kramnik's is much better against computers.
That makes no sense at all. How could Lindows be held responsible for what other people distribute?
No, Lindows distributes. Under a public license (the "P" in "GPL", remember), meaning they grant rights to everyone, including the people who don't receive it directly from them, but through others. Or who didn't receive it at all and just want to get the source code that the GPL grants them rights to. Section 3b of the GPL is pretty clear about it: any third party can order the source from them, for at most the cost of distribution.
Anyone know the _optical_ resolution for maximum "zoon" on Hubble...?
There was a relevant picture at The Astronomy Picture of the Day a few months ago that mentioned this issue:
(and so it can't make out the lunar modules that are there)There are several interesting developments here. For one thing, Tiscali allies with Kazaa - a natural step for them, because after all, they want to sell bandwidth, and why would people need a lot of bandwidth, if there weren't any applications like Kazaa?
Then in the second article, one of the things that's mentioned is that they partner with a music company for which Kazaa is actually the only way it distributes its music. This may be good for Kazaa's legal case, after all Napster seemed to lose mostly because they couldn't show that their networks were used legitimately at all.
On the other hand, I wonder what the judge will think of the new feature against 'bogus music and video files', that are inserted by the record companies to make the network useless. Almost all of those files will make themselves look like songs that are actually illegal to trade, so making a feature to stop them, however useful and natural to make, could be seen as actively helping to download copyrighted stuff.
But I can't really see them winning the case in the US anyway, after Napster.
If each one was unique then they (being whoever would want to) could track you via the usage of your epoxy token.
You mean, in the same way they can track you by the unique *number* on your credit card already?
They've discovered the one-time pad!
No, they have not. That would mean that whoever receives a message sent with this data had the same pad, and that isn't the case.If it were, a 12-terabit stamp-size one-time pad would still be rather good.
I'm a bit unclear how this works in practice though. They say they can check the patterns the thing makes against a "secure" database. They can't store all the 12 terabits there.
So, I assume, they pick some number (say, 100) of ways to shine a laser at it at random, and store those in the server. When it's time for identification, the server tells the token reading gadget which position(s) the laser should be in, it sends the pattern back, and it can be checked.
One possible attack is obvious, it may be possible to find out which random spots for the laser have been stored for this token by asking for a verification enough times. However, that gives you the task of making an object that fits into a reader, that gives the right patterns for all the 100 ways... And that's Hard. So it may not even be necessary to randomize the laser positions, just check some number of standard patterns, and it will be too hard to make an item that can fake them all.
Thanks for listening to my train of thought. I think I get it now :)
It's embarassing to be moderated to 5 when Christopher Thomas and roman_mir gave more coherent, similar ideas that scored lower. Read theirs as well.
But it frustrates me that so many scientists always seem to believe that water in a liquid form is a necessity of life.
Of course I know nothing about what is necessary for life. But water is a really unique chemical. Because of the hydrogen bridges, many salts dissolve (ionize) very easily in water, and not in other chemicals.If you can't ionize salts, there is a large number of elements that you just can't use as a primitive life form because it'll remain rock. It's not so unreasonable to assume that complex life is very unlikely without water.
So, in summary, the trend of several recent articles:
Long term plan for pay per use, my ass. They're selling less and less. If they make it more expensive, and even worse quality (well, that's far-fetched, ok), people will buy even less no matter what the method of paying for it.
Yes, it's strange at first sight that you need a license, from the US government no less, to go to the moon. They don't even launch there, they launch from Kazakhstan, as the article says.
But that also means this is a US company launching space craft from abroad. I would think a few permits are involved there - like in exporting it there in the first place. I don't know exactly what sort of technology export restrictions there currently are, but I think spacecraft will be covered.
And of course they need a license from the guy who patented 'flying to the moon' as a business method...
I tried going for a run a few months ago. After about half a mile, I just collapsed. [...]
As for dying without 10-20 years. Good. Anything to bring an early end to my miserable existence.
Don't run, walk. If you can't even walk a mile, you're already half dead, but as long as you can still move, you can improve gradually, it's really quite a fast process. And a miserable existence? Feeling bad all the time? Well, duh, that wouldn't have anything to do with not being fit, would it. Being fat makes you feel miserable, because you don't have the energy for anything.
You have a choice: force yourself to do a little exercise a few times a week (perhaps feeling miserable the first few weeks), or force yourself to feel miserable all the time, the rest of your life.