One of the major benefits of a service like the iTMS over P2P networks, even for somebody who doesn't care about copyright or legalities, is convenience. Finding music on P2P is still hard; it takes effort, you often find poor encodings, mislabeled songs, etc. Buying from the iTMS is extremely convenient; their selection is good, finding things is easy, and you know that your song will be good quality and properly titled and tagged.
Allofmp3.com offers the same kind of convenience as the iTMS. If you don't care about copyright but you don't feel like wasting time and effort on the P2P networks, I imagine it could be worthwhile.
Do you really, honestly believe that they had no idea that their permission, which let them undercut every single legit big-name music store on the planet, might not have been 100% legitimate?
If you answer "yes", please contact me; I have a very nice bridge in New York that you may be interested in purchasing.
Consumers don't have the right to buy hardware of their choosing even when such hardware does not exist. This mandate does not directly affect consumers at all. It certainly affects them indirectly, but I don't know how much that matters to the court.
Hardware manufacturers, on the other hand, are being explicitly prohibited from manufacturing a certain class of items, and as such are much more directly affected by the law and would therefore have much more cause to challenge it.
I personally like Heinlein's idea for a bicameral legislature. One house only passes bills, and requires a 2/3rds majority. The other house only repeals bills, and requires only 1/3rds of the vote to do so. It seems to me that this would be a nice division of responsibility and would ensure that the legal system didn't get too complicated.
I don't know about all of them, but Unsanity is one of the most well-known Mac software companies out there. Delicious Monster is pretty well-known too, although their fame is rather recent and it remains to be seen if it'll last. People must take names like these pretty seriously, because the companies seem to be doing reasonably well.
The system isn't "flawed", it just doesn't work the way karma whores want it to work. You don't get karma for Funny because the editors don't think it excessive Funny deserves a posting bonus. If you don't like that, tough cookies. There's no prize for maximum karma.
In theory, they could be solved with the exact same techniques.
In practice, the universe is not large enough to hold a computer that could accomplish it before the heat death or big crunch, whichever it turns out to be.
What a bunch of morons. It's one thing to accidentally write a security hole in your software. It's another thing entirely to claim that you deliberately make it so your software leaves your users' systems wide open to anybody who feels like taking advantage.
You haven't really explained why you need to teach the same languages that are used in industry, though, you just kind of restated it.
Learning computer languages is easy. What's hard is learning how to program, and learning various concepts and ideas. Once somebody knows how to program, understands OO, functional programming, generic programming, etc., then he should be able to pick up a new language in very little time. If you really feel that your graduates should know the languages that industry uses, rather than merely being prepared to learn them, have a Java course somewhere along the line. But the idea that you need to teach everything in Java so that they understand it is fundamentally flawed.
People teach Java because Java is simply a better C++ (as is C#).
That makes two posts now that have responded with this line of reasoning, as if C++ and Java were the only two choices. This comparison is like praising your restaurant's food "because it's better than McDonald's". The fact that this line of reasoning is so common just underlines my point that people are choosing more based on "what industry uses", rather than on what would actually make a good teaching tool.
Both produce large quantities of schlock. They don't care about the material, but they know that it sells. Nobody respects them, but they make a lot of money anyway.
My (limited) experience is that it's rather the opposite. That is, Java, like C++ before it, is taught because it's what everybody think industry uses, and they feel that they should teach the same.
Of course, teaching to what industry uses is completely missing the point in a CS program. Languages are easy to learn, what they should be teaching is something that is best suited to learning the underlying concepts, which Java most certainly is not.
As far as anybody knows, no. If such a technique were known, this article wouldn't be very big news. Before this technique, the best way anybody knew of to generate two pieces of data with the same SHA-1 hash was to just try a ton of random data until you found two pieces with the same hash.
This is cryptography, so it's always talking about possibilities.
With 160 bits of hash, the probability that two pieces of data will hash to the same value is incredibly low. Using a brute-force technique, you'd have to use all of the computers on the planet for thousands of years to find a collision. This is, for all intents and purposes, "impossible", and thus the hash is effectively collision-free.
With the new findings, a wealthy organization could actually find a collision with a reasonable amount of money and time.
If the democratically-elected municipal government of some Texas city decides they want to tax everybody a little more and spend it on WiFi, why shouldn't they? If the residents don't like it, they should vote that way, that's what democracy is all about.
What would you use such a powerfull bomb for? To prepare occupation? The only thing such a bomb is useful for is to create fear, terror in your enemies' hearts. -- I will have to say that you are wrong.
Please read and quote all relevant context. Better luck next time. Thanks for playing.
Mild winters do not prove that global warming is happening, any more than record cold winters (which are happening at a pretty good clip, look at Afghanistan and Algeria this year) prove that global warming is not happening.
Local variation is huge compared to climate change, which is measured in single digits even over the space of centuries, and your argument merely makes your side look silly.
Note, this is not to say that global warming isn't happening or that it's not important. All I'm saying is that you can't disprove it or prove it just by looking at a few winters in one spot.
Slashdot Mirror
What's ironic about it? The story is about a legally-mandated DRM scheme, which has just about zero to do with actual copyright.
One of the major benefits of a service like the iTMS over P2P networks, even for somebody who doesn't care about copyright or legalities, is convenience. Finding music on P2P is still hard; it takes effort, you often find poor encodings, mislabeled songs, etc. Buying from the iTMS is extremely convenient; their selection is good, finding things is easy, and you know that your song will be good quality and properly titled and tagged.
Allofmp3.com offers the same kind of convenience as the iTMS. If you don't care about copyright but you don't feel like wasting time and effort on the P2P networks, I imagine it could be worthwhile.
Do you really, honestly believe that they had no idea that their permission, which let them undercut every single legit big-name music store on the planet, might not have been 100% legitimate?
If you answer "yes", please contact me; I have a very nice bridge in New York that you may be interested in purchasing.
Consumers don't have the right to buy hardware of their choosing even when such hardware does not exist. This mandate does not directly affect consumers at all. It certainly affects them indirectly, but I don't know how much that matters to the court.
Hardware manufacturers, on the other hand, are being explicitly prohibited from manufacturing a certain class of items, and as such are much more directly affected by the law and would therefore have much more cause to challenge it.
I personally like Heinlein's idea for a bicameral legislature. One house only passes bills, and requires a 2/3rds majority. The other house only repeals bills, and requires only 1/3rds of the vote to do so. It seems to me that this would be a nice division of responsibility and would ensure that the legal system didn't get too complicated.
I don't know about all of them, but Unsanity is one of the most well-known Mac software companies out there. Delicious Monster is pretty well-known too, although their fame is rather recent and it remains to be seen if it'll last. People must take names like these pretty seriously, because the companies seem to be doing reasonably well.
This is obviously false, as a US anti-satellite weapon destroyed an end-of-lifed science satellite in 1985 during a test.
The system isn't "flawed", it just doesn't work the way karma whores want it to work. You don't get karma for Funny because the editors don't think it excessive Funny deserves a posting bonus. If you don't like that, tough cookies. There's no prize for maximum karma.
Because it used to be that something else would kill you first, but that's not so common these days?
In theory, they could be solved with the exact same techniques.
In practice, the universe is not large enough to hold a computer that could accomplish it before the heat death or big crunch, whichever it turns out to be.
Slashdot is not the place to spout zealous remarks.
You must be new here.
Sounds like it's going to be worth a lot of money for Wikimedia. I bet they get a ton of donations because of this event.
I'm not sure what language the second half of the submission is in, but Babelfish isn't helping. Can somebody provide a translation?
They should have stood farther back when the gravitas was handed out.
"It's not a bug, it's a feature!"
What a bunch of morons. It's one thing to accidentally write a security hole in your software. It's another thing entirely to claim that you deliberately make it so your software leaves your users' systems wide open to anybody who feels like taking advantage.
You haven't really explained why you need to teach the same languages that are used in industry, though, you just kind of restated it.
Learning computer languages is easy. What's hard is learning how to program, and learning various concepts and ideas. Once somebody knows how to program, understands OO, functional programming, generic programming, etc., then he should be able to pick up a new language in very little time. If you really feel that your graduates should know the languages that industry uses, rather than merely being prepared to learn them, have a Java course somewhere along the line. But the idea that you need to teach everything in Java so that they understand it is fundamentally flawed.
People teach Java because Java is simply a better C++ (as is C#).
That makes two posts now that have responded with this line of reasoning, as if C++ and Java were the only two choices. This comparison is like praising your restaurant's food "because it's better than McDonald's". The fact that this line of reasoning is so common just underlines my point that people are choosing more based on "what industry uses", rather than on what would actually make a good teaching tool.
The comparison is pretty good, actually.
Both produce large quantities of schlock. They don't care about the material, but they know that it sells. Nobody respects them, but they make a lot of money anyway.
My (limited) experience is that it's rather the opposite. That is, Java, like C++ before it, is taught because it's what everybody think industry uses, and they feel that they should teach the same.
Of course, teaching to what industry uses is completely missing the point in a CS program. Languages are easy to learn, what they should be teaching is something that is best suited to learning the underlying concepts, which Java most certainly is not.
As far as anybody knows, no. If such a technique were known, this article wouldn't be very big news. Before this technique, the best way anybody knew of to generate two pieces of data with the same SHA-1 hash was to just try a ton of random data until you found two pieces with the same hash.
This is cryptography, so it's always talking about possibilities.
With 160 bits of hash, the probability that two pieces of data will hash to the same value is incredibly low. Using a brute-force technique, you'd have to use all of the computers on the planet for thousands of years to find a collision. This is, for all intents and purposes, "impossible", and thus the hash is effectively collision-free.
With the new findings, a wealthy organization could actually find a collision with a reasonable amount of money and time.
If the democratically-elected municipal government of some Texas city decides they want to tax everybody a little more and spend it on WiFi, why shouldn't they? If the residents don't like it, they should vote that way, that's what democracy is all about.
How many Imperial Libraries is that?
You forgot the previous two sentences:
What would you use such a powerfull bomb for?
To prepare occupation?
The only thing such a bomb is useful for is to create fear, terror in your enemies' hearts.
--
I will have to say that you are wrong.
Please read and quote all relevant context. Better luck next time. Thanks for playing.
Mild winters do not prove that global warming is happening, any more than record cold winters (which are happening at a pretty good clip, look at Afghanistan and Algeria this year) prove that global warming is not happening.
Local variation is huge compared to climate change, which is measured in single digits even over the space of centuries, and your argument merely makes your side look silly.
Note, this is not to say that global warming isn't happening or that it's not important. All I'm saying is that you can't disprove it or prove it just by looking at a few winters in one spot.