What if the sales-person told me that the phone “can’t get viruses” and I want to verify that this known exploit has been patched?
There is no reason that clicking a widget on a website should be able to exploit the OS. Besides which, as far as I can tell there is no reason that a website couldn’t just as easily exploit the phone with a drive-by attack instead of requiring user action.
You don’t get to attack any arbitrary idea of your choosing. You get to attack what I said, and what I said was:
That only works when you are under the impression that the police will handle it in a way that benefits most of the involved parties.
Now, if your neighbour punches his wife, there’s a pretty good probability that the police will handle it in a way that helps everyone. Not a certainty, just a good probability, and the particular situation is such that if you neglect to act, people are going to get hurt. So, once again, it is probably right to call the cops. A double-parked car, on the other hand, is probably not going to hurt anyone and I, for one, am not getting paid to do the police’s job for them.
I’m arguing the aptness of your analogy by pointing out that it depends on whether or not you think that calling the cops will be beneficial. Calling the cops on your neighbour will probably benefit his wife, you would hope, and people will probably think you were doing the right thing. Calling the cops on your neighbour’s illegally-parked car is just going to cost him the fee of the ticket, and makes you appear to be an asshole.
I heard one student walk out of a classroom boasting to his friend that he'd like to see IT fix that mess
Wow, you should have flagged him down and asked him if he’d like to see just how easy it was. Make it interesting and bet him a pizzas or a case of beer that a reboot would fix it.
And if I kick the tyre on the vehicle to make sure it’s solidly built and the tyre falls off and rolls across the floor? Am I liable for vandalizing their display model?
Nice straw-man. I never said that I want a society without police.
I said that in order to preserve one’s rights, the police need to have their authority properly limited and need to be held accountable for their actions.
The founders of our country happened to have agreed with this sentiment as they created the court system as a check on the executive branch (the executors of justice: i.e. the police).
The police exist to execute the law – to put criminals in jail. The court system exists to protect you from them – to keep innocent people out of jail.
The more you trust someone, the easier it is for them to violate your rights if they so wish. I choose whom I trust, and if you violate that trust, you lose it. The police are not my friends. I respect their authority, but I do not trust them to execute it perfectly because they are human just like anyone else.
I want a society with police. I want a society which has a distrust of police that forces them to be honest.
Yeah, I was trying to think of the name of the setting for focus on a manual camera and f-stop was what I came up with. You’re correct, the f-stop is the aperture (more specifically, it’s a function of both the aperture and the inherent focal length of the lens).
I meant to refer to the setting for focus, which is typically a continuous adjustment that usually goes from quite near to infinity (depending on the lens). It’s been a while since I used a manual camera and I can’t remember what it’s called... I guess it’s just called the focal distance, and as that’s much too obvious I’d forgotten it.
In this lens, the aperture/f-number is the bottom set of numbers (adjusted by rotating clicks between the lower ring and the middle one) and the focal distance is the upper scale in the white box (adjusted by turning the topmost ring, which turns smoothly without clicking).
see[ing] the [police] as something to fear or distrust [indicates] deficits in your psychology and character
reality
Heh. Your naivety is amusing. Who exactly has just given a perfect example of an alternate reality? (Hint: it wasn’t me.)
The police are paid to find city code violations so that the city can generate revenue from fines and to arrest lawbreakers and put them in jail. Only indirectly do they protect you, probably, if you make the crap-shoot assumption that the guy committing that crime isn’t doing it to you. If someone is committing a crime against you, assuming that the police will protect you is another crap-shoot assumption – that they’re close enough and respond quick enough and are able to keep the crime from occurring even if they do get there soon enough to watch it happen.
Why it is so important to you that a blind faith and trust is needed for the people meant to put you in jail if you break the law – yet have admitted that there will always be corruption within their ranks – says to me that you understand reality... and choose to live somewhere else, because reality is too unpleasant.
However, at any reasonable distance the focal distance isn’t really a factor... setting the f-stop on a manual camera, for instance, you hit the “infinity” setting pretty soon on most lenses. The main thing is that filmmakers should avoid using pop-out effects that appear to be so close to you that your brain is trying to shift focus for a very near object and just makes it blurry.
No. He is correct. Close one eye and shift your focus from something very close to something distant. Everything out of focus is blurry. In a 3D movie, the focal plane of everything (NOT the parallax, but the actual distance at which the image will be sharp and in focus to your eye) is at the same distance.
There are two different attributes of 3D: Focal distance (how far away it actually is) and parallax (how much it appears to move if you move your head, or perceived by one eye vs. the other).
Parallax is easy to simulate and gives a very strong sense of 3D; focal distance is impossible to simulate (using current technology – it’d require a hologram) and gives a very weak sense of 3D, at a distance. Focal distance is almost a non-factor for distant objects. For near objects, it is much more noticeable.
The key – to doing 3D well, and not causing headaches – is to not cause objects to seem so close to you that the focal distance should be significantly different than it really is. Yes, that means you can’t do your lame jump-out-of-the-screen effects. Too bad, so sad...
Of course the other huge headache-inducer is when the producer decides to play with the lens effects to limit the range of focus... and then half the screen is horribly blurry. If you didn’t want to look at the blurry parts, you’re fine... but as soon as you want to look at something blurry, your eye starts trying to focus on it and can’t. In other words... this can be done, if it is done carefully and the audience only looks at the foreground. However, you had better be damn good at making your audience look where you want them to or else they’ll all hate you.
somehow the publicity talks about how great it is that you can use it to regain control over the device that you own, rather than about how anyone else can do the same
Yeah... strange things happen when security is designed to keep users boxed in rather than to keep bad guys shut out.
Agreed, merely typesetting a public domain text would not be original enough to warrant a copyright. Perhaps you misunderstand me. As we have both reiterated, factual information / public domain works are not copyrightable. However, if a public domain work were to be reprinted with cover art, flyleaf summary, a foreword/preface, new illustrations, et cetera, it is almost certain that the work, as a whole, would be original enough so as to be copyrightable. The copyright would apply only to the originality of the entire work: not to the specific portions on their own which were clearly not copyrightable, naturally.
As such, it is a hasty generalisation to assume that because the primary work being published was within the public domain that the copyright was “fraudulent”. If anything, the publisher at the very least probably had enough reason to believe that it was a valid copyright, and successfully charging them with any crime (for “fraudulently” copyrighting it) would be very difficult if not entirely impossible.
Hence my reaction to orgelspieler’s outrage is similar to the reaction I have for people who want Obama impeached: You’re wasting your time; find something better to focus your attention on.
0. On a virtual keyboard, translate every word in the dictionary into a graph – vertices and angles and distances. Use the middle of each key as the vertex for that letter as spelling out the word.
1. When the user types a word, translate the taps into a similar graph.
2. Filter your dictionary to words of the same number of letters as the user-entered word. For each of these dictionary words:
2a. Scale all of the sides’ lengths in the user-entered graph such that their total length is equal to the total length of the dictionary word’s graph.
2b. Rotate the user-entered graph such that the angle of the first line of the graph is the same as the angle of the first line of the dictionary word’s graph.
2c. Convert back to Cartesian coordinates (x and y pairs on the virtual keyboard) now that you have normalized (scaled and rotated) the user-entered pattern.
2d. Do a least-squares analysis: for each point, take the root of the sum of the squares of the x and y displacements between the point tapped by the user and the dictionary word’s letter. Sum these values from all of the vertices in the graph.
2e. Rotate the user-entered graph such that the angle of the last line is the same as the angle of the dictionary word’s graph’s first line (assuming they might have typed it upside down). Repeat steps 2c and 2d.
3. Lower value means better fit. Pick word corresponding to lowest value.
While the U.K. and other Commonwealth countries have the concept of copyright for "typographical arrangement," the U.S. does not.
Citation needed. In the 1991 ruling on Feist v. Rural Tel. Service Co. you will find statements such as the following:
a compilation of facts may possess the requisite originality because the author typically chooses which facts to include, in what order to place them, and how to arrange the data so that readers may use them effectively, [however] copyright protection extends only to those components of the work that are original to the author, not to the facts themselves.
A compilation is not copyrightable per se, but is copyrightable only if its facts have been “selected, coordinated, or arranged in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship.”
Rural has a valid copyright in the directory as a whole because it contains some forward text and some original material in the yellow pages
Hence, Feist would have been infringing had they scanned and duplicated Rural’s telephone book, but since they only extracted the listings (facts) they were within the law in so doing.
Part of the issue is that if they’ve done just about anything at all to it, they can copyright their “creative work” as a whole.
For instance, you cannot copyright information, so the information in the phone book is free for the taking. However the book itself (its graphics, fonts, layout and formatting) is copyrighted, so you cannot just cut the binding, scan the pages, and re-print exact copies of it.
Agreed. Hasty over-generalizations are bad, however.
I’m reminded of the quote attributed to Winston Churchill... “You want me to work for less than I’m worth! – what sort of worker do you believe me to be?” To which the response is: Once we’ve determined that you will be paid less than you’re really worth, we’re left to haggle over how much less you’ll accept.
It didn’t take long to make. It just took a while for somebody to conceive of it.
It’s not just checking finger position relative to the keys, either. It’s creating a “pattern” for the word that you type, then comparing that pattern to the patterns of known words and picking the best match. It is insensitive to scale or angle, so I’m guessing they’re using distances and angles between each tap. But how...
I imagine that, just like matching noisy data to a best-fit straight line, an inaccurate crooked line could be matched to the crooked line it’s supposed to fit and the quality of the fit be quantified using a variation of the least-squares method... oh shit, I’ve said too much.
The really clever ones create a hypothetical situation that their original rant applied to, then continue to argue and reiterate their initial point claiming it’s a perfectly valid point for the situation they described even if it’s completely irrelevant to the article.
Slashdot Mirror
Zoom! Enhance!
Yes. Mine actually doubles as a laptop computer.
What if the sales-person told me that the phone “can’t get viruses” and I want to verify that this known exploit has been patched?
There is no reason that clicking a widget on a website should be able to exploit the OS. Besides which, as far as I can tell there is no reason that a website couldn’t just as easily exploit the phone with a drive-by attack instead of requiring user action.
You don’t get to attack any arbitrary idea of your choosing. You get to attack what I said, and what I said was:
That only works when you are under the impression that the police will handle it in a way that benefits most of the involved parties.
Now, if your neighbour punches his wife, there’s a pretty good probability that the police will handle it in a way that helps everyone. Not a certainty, just a good probability, and the particular situation is such that if you neglect to act, people are going to get hurt. So, once again, it is probably right to call the cops. A double-parked car, on the other hand, is probably not going to hurt anyone and I, for one, am not getting paid to do the police’s job for them.
I’m arguing the aptness of your analogy by pointing out that it depends on whether or not you think that calling the cops will be beneficial. Calling the cops on your neighbour will probably benefit his wife, you would hope, and people will probably think you were doing the right thing. Calling the cops on your neighbour’s illegally-parked car is just going to cost him the fee of the ticket, and makes you appear to be an asshole.
I heard one student walk out of a classroom boasting to his friend that he'd like to see IT fix that mess
Wow, you should have flagged him down and asked him if he’d like to see just how easy it was. Make it interesting and bet him a pizzas or a case of beer that a reboot would fix it.
And if I kick the tyre on the vehicle to make sure it’s solidly built and the tyre falls off and rolls across the floor? Am I liable for vandalizing their display model?
But if going to channel 11 broke the TV, that isn’t my fault.
Nice straw-man. I never said that I want a society without police.
I said that in order to preserve one’s rights, the police need to have their authority properly limited and need to be held accountable for their actions.
The founders of our country happened to have agreed with this sentiment as they created the court system as a check on the executive branch (the executors of justice: i.e. the police).
The police exist to execute the law – to put criminals in jail. The court system exists to protect you from them – to keep innocent people out of jail.
The more you trust someone, the easier it is for them to violate your rights if they so wish. I choose whom I trust, and if you violate that trust, you lose it. The police are not my friends. I respect their authority, but I do not trust them to execute it perfectly because they are human just like anyone else.
I want a society with police. I want a society which has a distrust of police that forces them to be honest.
Yeah, I was trying to think of the name of the setting for focus on a manual camera and f-stop was what I came up with. You’re correct, the f-stop is the aperture (more specifically, it’s a function of both the aperture and the inherent focal length of the lens).
I meant to refer to the setting for focus, which is typically a continuous adjustment that usually goes from quite near to infinity (depending on the lens). It’s been a while since I used a manual camera and I can’t remember what it’s called... I guess it’s just called the focal distance, and as that’s much too obvious I’d forgotten it.
In this lens, the aperture/f-number is the bottom set of numbers (adjusted by rotating clicks between the lower ring and the middle one) and the focal distance is the upper scale in the white box (adjusted by turning the topmost ring, which turns smoothly without clicking).
police misconduct always exists and always will
see[ing] the [police] as something to fear or distrust [indicates] deficits in your psychology and character
reality
Heh. Your naivety is amusing. Who exactly has just given a perfect example of an alternate reality? (Hint: it wasn’t me.)
The police are paid to find city code violations so that the city can generate revenue from fines and to arrest lawbreakers and put them in jail. Only indirectly do they protect you, probably, if you make the crap-shoot assumption that the guy committing that crime isn’t doing it to you. If someone is committing a crime against you, assuming that the police will protect you is another crap-shoot assumption – that they’re close enough and respond quick enough and are able to keep the crime from occurring even if they do get there soon enough to watch it happen.
Why it is so important to you that a blind faith and trust is needed for the people meant to put you in jail if you break the law – yet have admitted that there will always be corruption within their ranks – says to me that you understand reality ... and choose to live somewhere else, because reality is too unpleasant.
Police misconduct is different in western industrialized nations. I would not call it rare. Only different.
However, at any reasonable distance the focal distance isn’t really a factor... setting the f-stop on a manual camera, for instance, you hit the “infinity” setting pretty soon on most lenses. The main thing is that filmmakers should avoid using pop-out effects that appear to be so close to you that your brain is trying to shift focus for a very near object and just makes it blurry.
No. He is correct. Close one eye and shift your focus from something very close to something distant. Everything out of focus is blurry. In a 3D movie, the focal plane of everything (NOT the parallax, but the actual distance at which the image will be sharp and in focus to your eye) is at the same distance.
There are two different attributes of 3D: Focal distance (how far away it actually is) and parallax (how much it appears to move if you move your head, or perceived by one eye vs. the other).
Parallax is easy to simulate and gives a very strong sense of 3D; focal distance is impossible to simulate (using current technology – it’d require a hologram) and gives a very weak sense of 3D, at a distance. Focal distance is almost a non-factor for distant objects. For near objects, it is much more noticeable.
The key – to doing 3D well, and not causing headaches – is to not cause objects to seem so close to you that the focal distance should be significantly different than it really is. Yes, that means you can’t do your lame jump-out-of-the-screen effects. Too bad, so sad...
Of course the other huge headache-inducer is when the producer decides to play with the lens effects to limit the range of focus... and then half the screen is horribly blurry. If you didn’t want to look at the blurry parts, you’re fine... but as soon as you want to look at something blurry, your eye starts trying to focus on it and can’t. In other words... this can be done, if it is done carefully and the audience only looks at the foreground. However, you had better be damn good at making your audience look where you want them to or else they’ll all hate you.
That only works when you are under the impression that the police will handle it in a way that benefits most of the involved parties.
A bit hard to be speeding while you are “stopped in traffic”.
somehow the publicity talks about how great it is that you can use it to regain control over the device that you own, rather than about how anyone else can do the same
Yeah... strange things happen when security is designed to keep users boxed in rather than to keep bad guys shut out.
Agreed, merely typesetting a public domain text would not be original enough to warrant a copyright. Perhaps you misunderstand me. As we have both reiterated, factual information / public domain works are not copyrightable. However, if a public domain work were to be reprinted with cover art, flyleaf summary, a foreword/preface, new illustrations, et cetera, it is almost certain that the work, as a whole, would be original enough so as to be copyrightable. The copyright would apply only to the originality of the entire work: not to the specific portions on their own which were clearly not copyrightable, naturally.
As such, it is a hasty generalisation to assume that because the primary work being published was within the public domain that the copyright was “fraudulent”. If anything, the publisher at the very least probably had enough reason to believe that it was a valid copyright, and successfully charging them with any crime (for “fraudulently” copyrighting it) would be very difficult if not entirely impossible.
Hence my reaction to orgelspieler’s outrage is similar to the reaction I have for people who want Obama impeached: You’re wasting your time; find something better to focus your attention on.
Nah, I doubt that. Probably simpler.
0. On a virtual keyboard, translate every word in the dictionary into a graph – vertices and angles and distances. Use the middle of each key as the vertex for that letter as spelling out the word.
1. When the user types a word, translate the taps into a similar graph.
2. Filter your dictionary to words of the same number of letters as the user-entered word. For each of these dictionary words:
2a. Scale all of the sides’ lengths in the user-entered graph such that their total length is equal to the total length of the dictionary word’s graph.
2b. Rotate the user-entered graph such that the angle of the first line of the graph is the same as the angle of the first line of the dictionary word’s graph.
2c. Convert back to Cartesian coordinates (x and y pairs on the virtual keyboard) now that you have normalized (scaled and rotated) the user-entered pattern.
2d. Do a least-squares analysis: for each point, take the root of the sum of the squares of the x and y displacements between the point tapped by the user and the dictionary word’s letter. Sum these values from all of the vertices in the graph.
2e. Rotate the user-entered graph such that the angle of the last line is the same as the angle of the dictionary word’s graph’s first line (assuming they might have typed it upside down). Repeat steps 2c and 2d.
3. Lower value means better fit. Pick word corresponding to lowest value.
While the U.K. and other Commonwealth countries have the concept of copyright for "typographical arrangement," the U.S. does not.
Citation needed. In the 1991 ruling on Feist v. Rural Tel. Service Co. you will find statements such as the following:
a compilation of facts may possess the requisite originality because the author typically chooses which facts to include, in what order to place them, and how to arrange the data so that readers may use them effectively, [however] copyright protection extends only to those components of the work that are original to the author, not to the facts themselves.
A compilation is not copyrightable per se, but is copyrightable only if its facts have been “selected, coordinated, or arranged in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship.”
Rural has a valid copyright in the directory as a whole because it contains some forward text and some original material in the yellow pages
Hence, Feist would have been infringing had they scanned and duplicated Rural’s telephone book, but since they only extracted the listings (facts) they were within the law in so doing.
Part of the issue is that if they’ve done just about anything at all to it, they can copyright their “creative work” as a whole.
For instance, you cannot copyright information, so the information in the phone book is free for the taking. However the book itself (its graphics, fonts, layout and formatting) is copyrighted, so you cannot just cut the binding, scan the pages, and re-print exact copies of it.
Agreed. Hasty over-generalizations are bad, however.
I’m reminded of the quote attributed to Winston Churchill... “You want me to work for less than I’m worth! – what sort of worker do you believe me to be?” To which the response is: Once we’ve determined that you will be paid less than you’re really worth, we’re left to haggle over how much less you’ll accept.
It didn’t take long to make. It just took a while for somebody to conceive of it.
It’s not just checking finger position relative to the keys, either. It’s creating a “pattern” for the word that you type, then comparing that pattern to the patterns of known words and picking the best match. It is insensitive to scale or angle, so I’m guessing they’re using distances and angles between each tap. But how...
I imagine that, just like matching noisy data to a best-fit straight line, an inaccurate crooked line could be matched to the crooked line it’s supposed to fit and the quality of the fit be quantified using a variation of the least-squares method... oh shit, I’ve said too much.
I just wish I’d thought of it first...
The really clever ones create a hypothetical situation that their original rant applied to, then continue to argue and reiterate their initial point claiming it’s a perfectly valid point for the situation they described even if it’s completely irrelevant to the article.
Parent appears to have written his post while under the influence of LSD (lysdexia).
Quit acting like $150,000-a-year jobs are equally easy to find anywhere.