I still wouldn't use the terms "dead" or "alive" to characterize viruses. Viruses, if I remember, are DNA fragments that hijack the reproductive mechanisms of cells into producing more viruses. The DNA and protein coating break down over time, which is why a lot of viruses are unable to infect cells after they sit around for a while.
It all depends on your basic life definition. Most would consider something alive if it reproduces using things it already has. Thus, a set of DNA and a DNA "interpreter" that builds new amino acid chains. Viruses have no such interpreters, and rely on those supplied by the host cell.
Though humorously ironic, this may fall under the definition of barratry, which is to drum up legal turmoil among those who would otherwise not bother with it. No lawyer am I, but I think it has to be made into a class action suit before the State could go contacting people.
Do you remember the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game that was ported to NES? There was a Pizza Hut ad on nearly every screen.
On the subject of product placement, the Stallone flick Demolition Man was recently shown on cable, and they nearly eliminated the Taco Bell product placement. They kept the scenes, just edited out 1 or 2 seconds here and there. What's up with that?
You still can't patent an idea or algorithm or thought. But you can invent a physical device that implements your idea, and that is patentable. The question is where do you draw the line for an innovative and new physical device that is non-obvious. These days, tacking on "implementation by computer running software" is enough to make it a physical device.
But we still have patents granted that push the line farther. Some would argue that it should be the job of the USPTO to control where that line is, but it seems they just grant the patents and let private enterprise decide where that line is, through patent attourneys. Hell of a racket, isn't it? The US government, through patent law and USPTO policy, has created an entire patent-litigation industry.
My feeling has always been that if the government is going to make policies and use taxes to run the USPTO, they should have some responsibility to follow the spirit of the patent system. The process should be transparent and hassle-free, or it will only hinder industry - opposite the spirit of the system!
...patent method of acquiring money solely from exploiting patent institutions...
Patents have to be for something that is a physical invention. Patenting ideas shouldn't be, but write some software and run it on a computer, and you have yourself a physical invention. It's silly but true!
There may be much prior art of filing lawsuits manually through lawyers, but you could get a patent on some sort of web-based automatic lawsuit-bot software that files patent infringement suits in just one click (well, two clicks, just to be safe).
Then you can still sue anyone who uses any computer software (word processors) to file patent infringement lawsuits, because your patent will be broad enough to cover them.
I don't believe that these will be used to enforce speed limits. The goal is to decongest toll booths, as more cars can get through a transponder toll booth per hour than the throw-coins-at-the-basket-and-wait-for-the-gate kind. If data is used to write tickets no one will carry the devices.
The thing most people don't understand about enforcement of speeding tickets is that the main goal is to maximize ticket revenue, not to reduce the number of speeders on the road.
If law enforcement writes too many speeding tickets or sets the fines too high, people might actually slow down, cutting off revenue.
Oddly enough, the two swimmers in the photograph you mention are the same person.
This software is most useful for compositing pictures taken with a camera that is not specially designed to take panoramic pictures in one snap of the shutter. The software overcomes the limit of the photographic hardware.
What he was trying to say is that he doesn't know what you're talking about either. Neither do I, in fact. Replace "this" in your previous post so that it is not ambiguous.
I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote a paper on this or that. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too?'
That would be an accurate comparison if people were copying music and then selling them for profit, rather than giving them away for free.
Actually, it would be an even better comparison if people were copying music and taking credit for creating it. Plagiarism is NOT comparable to any copyright-related crime.
Meanwhile, when you swipe your card at the checkout, they track your purchasing habits. So if the feds want to know who is buying large amounts of cheez whiz they know where to go...
Grocery stores really don't care who you are, you're just a number on a card. You can usually sign up for one with a fake name and address and they won't care. They just ask for that so they can send you sale ads in the mail. The real reason for the cards is to track a specific person from visit to visit, so they know that people who buy Hormel chilli always show up the next day to buy extra TP. There's no real need to link the number on the card to any other identity, which is why you can get away with using an alias.
While we're at it....
on
How to Save PGP
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
Did 8-track kill music revenues? How about tape? MD? CD? MP3? Nope nope nope nope. It simply amazes me how afraid most folks are of change.
It's not that the companies that distribute such media are afraid of change, it's that someone else is bringing about the change, and they will be left behind.
The 8-track or compact disc didn't kill all music revenues, just the revenues of the companies who distributed on the old media and couldn't catch up to those who embraced the distribution format.
The FP in ICFP stands for functional programming. It's a programming contest designed to flex functional programming languages, and promote their use. Deal with it. The reason they let any language enter is that everyone might not be so privvy to functional programming.
Part of the first prize is that the judges will say "[insert winning programming language] is the programming language of choice for discriminating hackers." Something similar for second prize.
So, yes they're biased towards functional programming languages. Deal.
I'm on the side that somewhat silently watches the whole thing, in my own mind seeing neither one standing in the end. I see a future where distribution channels for music are irrelevant and transparent. I'm on the side that creates art for the sake of art. Any monetary compensation is nice, but not required for motivation to create. I'm on the side that thinks Britney Spears, NSync, Back Street Boys, etc. aren't music as much as they are an image, a fad, that record companies sell to the kids. They won't be around for long. Sure they have some talent, I just wish that they would concentrate on the love of their art and not so much the image that the record companies that employ them wish to sell. When their fad does go out of style, maybe they will join this side and just enjoy music, and share their art, rather than restrict it.
There are alot on this third relatively quiet side who just shut up, enjoy music for music's sake, and wait confidently for the inevitable shift in the way society enjoys music. It's shifting now, watch closely and you'll have something interesting to tell your grand kids.
Back in the days before the Internet, high bandwidth and GHz computers, consumers did not have the ABILITY to distribute music like their commercial counterparts... this is why making a tape for your friends never got ANYONE in this country arrested. It was no big threat simply due to the amount of tapes you could dub and distribute was so miniscule.
And back in those days is when most of those senators and members of that committee grew up for the most part. When you're on in your years and all you ever knew is suddenly turned upside down by this "newfangled Internet" you tend to try and apply older thinking to the way society should handle something like this, when in fact it will eventually change society in a way you haven't yet imagined. In the case of easily-distributed digital music, it will effect music's entire role in society, in a way few people, and even fewer senators and music "industry" executives, can forsee.
I'm not saying that our country is run by old fogies or anything. But look at Moore's law, which states technology generally improves exponentially, while a human's life span doesn't shrink exponentially. Thus generation gaps get bigger.
Page 6 Says that linking to web sites is still legal. I do find comfort in the fact that the judge realises that linking is essential to the WWW, and that a web master cannot be held responsible for the contents of a site to which it links.
I do have to admit that the judge's reasoning is the most sound I've seen so far in favor of the DVD CCA, but only when considering the issues of trade secrets, not copy protection. The judge merely granted them the right to protect their licensed algorithms, but this is shaky ground which will be heavily debated in the future. I am confident that this whole thing will work itself out to some open DVD standard in time to come.
Please use caution when considering the cost effectiveness of copying a DVD movie.
Currently, the cost of creating a DVD is high, and it is somewhat cumbersome to move around several gigabytes of data at once. But we can't ignore tha fact that someday, a few years down the road, average Joe will be able to burn double-sided DVD's with video information stored on his 1 terabyte hard drive. It's not cost effective now or very possible to burn DVDs but soon it will be.
But rather, we can use the cost effectiveness argument to clarify the purpose behind DeCSS' creation, in the context of present time. You say something like "Why would one use this software to help us pirate DVDs when nowadays it's not possible to effectively do so at all." DeCSS exists today, even though it's totally impractical to pirate DVDs today, so how can DeCSS and piracy be connected?
Sure, you could point out that down the road, DeCSS will still make piracy easier, but an unencrypted DVD movie is only of use to computer users with MPEG2 players, as software DVD players and console DVD players will just laugh at your unencrypted data (or choke, depends). If you want to get raw video data, just use a frame buffer grabber. That couldn't be too hard to write, hasn't anyone ever needed to record what they see on the monitor to a video file?
My main point is that when using the cost-effectiveness argument against DeCSS being a piracy tool, then be sure to include time context.
Other than that stuff, another way to look at things is to see what use a huge file is, encrypted or unencrypted.
So let's say you have a 5 gig file of encrypted video that you grabbed from a DVD. You do this by mounting the DVD as a drive using the experimental filesystem for DVDs (I forget the name, there's info on how to do this on opendvd.org) and grabbing the file. If you burn this to a blank DVD using your thousand dollar equipment, you have a disc that won't play in a DVD console player because it has no key blocks on it. Using fancier hardware, you could get those key blocks and write them to the disc (it's just like any other data, you just need the right hardware to do it.) and have a DVD that works on console players. You can supposedly trick software players into playing a file. I don't know if this file has to be encrypted or not. A straight MPEG2 player won't do anything with encrypted data.
So now let's say you have a 5 gig file of unencrypted video data that you just DeCSSed. You can copy it to a DVD disc and it's useless in a console player. You can use the special hardware to even put the key blocks on the disc and you still have a worthless disc. (So the console runs decrypted data through a decryptor and gets what? Scambled eggs?) The unencrypted files can be viewed on a computer with a simple MPEG2 player.
So we've established that making a DVD disc that can be played in console players requires special hardware, and DeCSS doesn't help us. And playing a file on a computer, it doesn't matter if it's encrypted or not, as long as those players really can be tricked into playing an encrypted DVD from hard disk. So would someone please clear up the details on getting software players to play movies on hard disk?
Ignorance can be fixed by knowledge. So he didn't know how to load your pager battery properly. He made the mistake once and won't do it again. He was ignorant in the fine art of pager battery replacement and got a quick lesson, and now, with that knowledge gained, he loads his pager batteries properly. Stupidity, however, is when he can't figure it out after being told how several times. Ignorance is lack of knowledge, where stupidity is a state of mind.
I see a whole bunch of scientists, as expected. I'm going to pick Mozart. He contrasted to the aristocratic musicians of his day in his behavior. But he was definately a genius in his field, showing up all the snobby composers who saw him as unrefined.
I loaded up Slashdot's front page in Netscape 0.94 and it is actually legible. Although, it crashed pretty quickly, probably because I was running it and Communicator 4.5 simultaneously.
What's your whole take on the DeCSS thing, and how they intended to secure DVD content through obscurity of the decryption key. Hardware hacking of CSS keys is nearly impossible, since you can lock down microprocessor code stored in on-chip EPROM so it will be unreadable except by the processor during execution (A feature in some processors, like some in the Motorola 6811 family). But with computer software, how can you ever lock down code in the same way? Do you see their method of security as fundamentally flawed, at least in the computer software realm?
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If I recall, the definition of a Beowulf cluster does not specify Linux specifically, only a free operating system.
Look it up
I still wouldn't use the terms "dead" or "alive" to characterize viruses. Viruses, if I remember, are DNA fragments that hijack the reproductive mechanisms of cells into producing more viruses. The DNA and protein coating break down over time, which is why a lot of viruses are unable to infect cells after they sit around for a while.
It all depends on your basic life definition. Most would consider something alive if it reproduces using things it already has. Thus, a set of DNA and a DNA "interpreter" that builds new amino acid chains. Viruses have no such interpreters, and rely on those supplied by the host cell.
Though humorously ironic, this may fall under the definition of barratry, which is to drum up legal turmoil among those who would otherwise not bother with it. No lawyer am I, but I think it has to be made into a class action suit before the State could go contacting people.
Do you remember the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game that was ported to NES? There was a Pizza Hut ad on nearly every screen.
On the subject of product placement, the Stallone flick Demolition Man was recently shown on cable, and they nearly eliminated the Taco Bell product placement. They kept the scenes, just edited out 1 or 2 seconds here and there. What's up with that?
As the saying goes, "Nothing is fool-proof, as fools are so ingenious."
You still can't patent an idea or algorithm or thought. But you can invent a physical device that implements your idea, and that is patentable. The question is where do you draw the line for an innovative and new physical device that is non-obvious. These days, tacking on "implementation by computer running software" is enough to make it a physical device.
But we still have patents granted that push the line farther. Some would argue that it should be the job of the USPTO to control where that line is, but it seems they just grant the patents and let private enterprise decide where that line is, through patent attourneys. Hell of a racket, isn't it? The US government, through patent law and USPTO policy, has created an entire patent-litigation industry.
My feeling has always been that if the government is going to make policies and use taxes to run the USPTO, they should have some responsibility to follow the spirit of the patent system. The process should be transparent and hassle-free, or it will only hinder industry - opposite the spirit of the system!
Patents have to be for something that is a physical invention. Patenting ideas shouldn't be, but write some software and run it on a computer, and you have yourself a physical invention. It's silly but true!
There may be much prior art of filing lawsuits manually through lawyers, but you could get a patent on some sort of web-based automatic lawsuit-bot software that files patent infringement suits in just one click (well, two clicks, just to be safe).
Then you can still sue anyone who uses any computer software (word processors) to file patent infringement lawsuits, because your patent will be broad enough to cover them.
I don't believe that these will be used to enforce speed limits. The goal is to decongest toll booths, as more cars can get through a transponder toll booth per hour than the throw-coins-at-the-basket-and-wait-for-the-gate kind. If data is used to write tickets no one will carry the devices.
The thing most people don't understand about enforcement of speeding tickets is that the main goal is to maximize ticket revenue, not to reduce the number of speeders on the road.
If law enforcement writes too many speeding tickets or sets the fines too high, people might actually slow down, cutting off revenue.
How unfortunate to live in a part of the world that does not have talking kettles.
Oddly enough, the two swimmers in the photograph you mention are the same person.
This software is most useful for compositing pictures taken with a camera that is not specially designed to take panoramic pictures in one snap of the shutter. The software overcomes the limit of the photographic hardware.
What he was trying to say is that he doesn't know what you're talking about either. Neither do I, in fact. Replace "this" in your previous post so that it is not ambiguous.
I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote a paper on this or that. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too?'
That would be an accurate comparison if people were copying music and then selling them for profit, rather than giving them away for free.
Actually, it would be an even better comparison if people were copying music and taking credit for creating it. Plagiarism is NOT comparable to any copyright-related crime.
Meanwhile, when you swipe your card at the checkout, they track your purchasing habits. So if the feds want to know who is buying large amounts of cheez whiz they know where to go...
Grocery stores really don't care who you are, you're just a number on a card. You can usually sign up for one with a fake name and address and they won't care. They just ask for that so they can send you sale ads in the mail. The real reason for the cards is to track a specific person from visit to visit, so they know that people who buy Hormel chilli always show up the next day to buy extra TP. There's no real need to link the number on the card to any other identity, which is why you can get away with using an alias.
While we're at it, why don't we buy the Montreal Expos
Did 8-track kill music revenues? How about tape? MD? CD? MP3? Nope nope nope nope. It simply amazes me how afraid most folks are of change.
It's not that the companies that distribute such media are afraid of change, it's that someone else is bringing about the change, and they will be left behind.
The 8-track or compact disc didn't kill all music revenues, just the revenues of the companies who distributed on the old media and couldn't catch up to those who embraced the distribution format.
The FP in ICFP stands for functional programming. It's a programming contest designed to flex functional programming languages, and promote their use. Deal with it. The reason they let any language enter is that everyone might not be so privvy to functional programming.
Part of the first prize is that the judges will say "[insert winning programming language] is the programming language of choice for discriminating hackers." Something similar for second prize.
So, yes they're biased towards functional programming languages. Deal.
I'm on the side that somewhat silently watches the whole thing, in my own mind seeing neither one standing in the end. I see a future where distribution channels for music are irrelevant and transparent. I'm on the side that creates art for the sake of art. Any monetary compensation is nice, but not required for motivation to create. I'm on the side that thinks Britney Spears, NSync, Back Street Boys, etc. aren't music as much as they are an image, a fad, that record companies sell to the kids. They won't be around for long. Sure they have some talent, I just wish that they would concentrate on the love of their art and not so much the image that the record companies that employ them wish to sell. When their fad does go out of style, maybe they will join this side and just enjoy music, and share their art, rather than restrict it.
There are alot on this third relatively quiet side who just shut up, enjoy music for music's sake, and wait confidently for the inevitable shift in the way society enjoys music. It's shifting now, watch closely and you'll have something interesting to tell your grand kids.
Back in the days before the Internet, high bandwidth and GHz computers, consumers did not have the ABILITY to distribute music like their commercial counterparts ... this is why making a tape for your friends never got ANYONE in this country arrested. It was no big threat simply due to the amount of tapes you could dub and distribute was so miniscule.
And back in those days is when most of those senators and members of that committee grew up for the most part. When you're on in your years and all you ever knew is suddenly turned upside down by this "newfangled Internet" you tend to try and apply older thinking to the way society should handle something like this, when in fact it will eventually change society in a way you haven't yet imagined. In the case of easily-distributed digital music, it will effect music's entire role in society, in a way few people, and even fewer senators and music "industry" executives, can forsee.
I'm not saying that our country is run by old fogies or anything. But look at Moore's law, which states technology generally improves exponentially, while a human's life span doesn't shrink exponentially. Thus generation gaps get bigger.
Page 6 Says that linking to web sites is still legal. I do find comfort in the fact that the judge realises that linking is essential to the WWW, and that a web master cannot be held responsible for the contents of a site to which it links.
I do have to admit that the judge's reasoning is the most sound I've seen so far in favor of the DVD CCA, but only when considering the issues of trade secrets, not copy protection. The judge merely granted them the right to protect their licensed algorithms, but this is shaky ground which will be heavily debated in the future. I am confident that this whole thing will work itself out to some open DVD standard in time to come.
Please use caution when considering the cost effectiveness of copying a DVD movie.
Currently, the cost of creating a DVD is high, and it is somewhat cumbersome to move around several gigabytes of data at once. But we can't ignore tha fact that someday, a few years down the road, average Joe will be able to burn double-sided DVD's with video information stored on his 1 terabyte hard drive. It's not cost effective now or very possible to burn DVDs but soon it will be.
But rather, we can use the cost effectiveness argument to clarify the purpose behind DeCSS' creation, in the context of present time. You say something like "Why would one use this software to help us pirate DVDs when nowadays it's not possible to effectively do so at all." DeCSS exists today, even though it's totally impractical to pirate DVDs today, so how can DeCSS and piracy be connected?
Sure, you could point out that down the road, DeCSS will still make piracy easier, but an unencrypted DVD movie is only of use to computer users with MPEG2 players, as software DVD players and console DVD players will just laugh at your unencrypted data (or choke, depends). If you want to get raw video data, just use a frame buffer grabber. That couldn't be too hard to write, hasn't anyone ever needed to record what they see on the monitor to a video file?
My main point is that when using the cost-effectiveness argument against DeCSS being a piracy tool, then be sure to include time context.
Other than that stuff, another way to look at things is to see what use a huge file is, encrypted or unencrypted.
So let's say you have a 5 gig file of encrypted video that you grabbed from a DVD. You do this by mounting the DVD as a drive using the experimental filesystem for DVDs (I forget the name, there's info on how to do this on opendvd.org) and grabbing the file. If you burn this to a blank DVD using your thousand dollar equipment, you have a disc that won't play in a DVD console player because it has no key blocks on it. Using fancier hardware, you could get those key blocks and write them to the disc (it's just like any other data, you just need the right hardware to do it.) and have a DVD that works on console players. You can supposedly trick software players into playing a file. I don't know if this file has to be encrypted or not. A straight MPEG2 player won't do anything with encrypted data.
So now let's say you have a 5 gig file of unencrypted video data that you just DeCSSed. You can copy it to a DVD disc and it's useless in a console player. You can use the special hardware to even put the key blocks on the disc and you still have a worthless disc. (So the console runs decrypted data through a decryptor and gets what? Scambled eggs?) The unencrypted files can be viewed on a computer with a simple MPEG2 player.
So we've established that making a DVD disc that can be played in console players requires special hardware, and DeCSS doesn't help us. And playing a file on a computer, it doesn't matter if it's encrypted or not, as long as those players really can be tricked into playing an encrypted DVD from hard disk. So would someone please clear up the details on getting software players to play movies on hard disk?
Ignorance can be fixed by knowledge. So he didn't know how to load your pager battery properly. He made the mistake once and won't do it again. He was ignorant in the fine art of pager battery replacement and got a quick lesson, and now, with that knowledge gained, he loads his pager batteries properly. Stupidity, however, is when he can't figure it out after being told how several times. Ignorance is lack of knowledge, where stupidity is a state of mind.
I see a whole bunch of scientists, as expected. I'm going to pick Mozart. He contrasted to the aristocratic musicians of his day in his behavior. But he was definately a genius in his field, showing up all the snobby composers who saw him as unrefined.
I loaded up Slashdot's front page in Netscape 0.94 and it is actually legible. Although, it crashed pretty quickly, probably because I was running it and Communicator 4.5 simultaneously.
What's your whole take on the DeCSS thing, and how they intended to secure DVD content through obscurity of the decryption key. Hardware hacking of CSS keys is nearly impossible, since you can lock down microprocessor code stored in on-chip EPROM so it will be unreadable except by the processor during execution (A feature in some processors, like some in the Motorola 6811 family). But with computer software, how can you ever lock down code in the same way? Do you see their method of security as fundamentally flawed, at least in the computer software realm?
The game ends in checkmate in the fifth move with a pawn promotion to a knight. Enjoy.