The question I have, is who has more lobbyists? The hardware or media industires? That will probably be the deciding factor.
Possibly the biggest difficulty in this fight is that the media industries have an ace up their sleeve. Namely, they are the media. They can run warm fuzzy stories about Sen. Hollings standing up for the rights of "artists" in the face of Internet criminals. And any Congress-critter who opposes them better not have any upset interns for the media to dig up. Whether or not it would work is one thing. But I bet that media lobbyists can make very effective use of the threat.
Amazingly, Newsweek seems to have spent a lot of effort to rag on the music industry in a recent issue. About three pages blaming their lagging sales on too much bad formula music and too-high prices. It also discussed the successes of "O Brother Where Art Thou" at the Grammy's as evidence that even the folks who work in the music industry know that most of the stuff they are shoveling out the door is crap. Another one page article about Hollings and the SSSCA making it quite clear that that the proposed law would impinge on legal copying as well as pointing out that the Internet can probably do for media industries what the VCR did for the movie industry, namely make them a shitload of money if they would just stop trying to make it illegal.
I don't know, but it seems that print media is much more willing to actually run stories on the issues involved. Maybe it's because they are an older industry. Maybe they just see it as a way to kick a competitor. Maybe it's the fact that I don't have cable and never watch broadcast news. Has anybody ever seen any coverage of this issue in the broadcast media? How biased did it seem?
Have you noticed that people who use "immature" in this way are rarely over the age of 21?
Really. That's quite an astute observation. Would you care to enlighten me as to how you know the age of people who call others immature? It also in no way invalidates my point, which is that you talk in a way which makes you look immature. Very few adults I know use the word 'asswipe'. Quite a few use the word immature. Also note that I in no way implied that I knew how old you were, since of course there is no way for me to tell. I simply stated that you conduct yourself in a manner which makes you look immature. Which is true irrespective of your true age. Are you going to deny that you talk like a child? If you do so, are you going to call me names at the same time? If you do all that, could you please try to use the names "boogerhead" or "snotnose" to demonstrate your mental superiority?
And the suit is being pressed in a California court where the DMCA definitely applies. Read the article. And watch your mouth. Do you think using words like "asswipe" really helps make your point? Or do you think it just makes you look immature?
Remarkably, the article doesn't mention if the DMCA is being invoked. It probably won't be, because then it would be applied in the manner Congress actually meant, which would break the perfect record of the DMCA only being misused. Also, News Corp. and it's subsidiaries are quite capable of fighting a legal battle of almost any scope and duration. This would increase the risk of an actual court precedent against the DMCA. Once again, this would break the perfect record of the DMCA only being invoked against relatively powerless victims. The DMCA is far too powerful a tool for misuse for anyone to risk it's long and promising future.
he relationship between the difficulty to get a stolen car, and the amount you have to pay to get a car, and the extra utility you get from a car you actually own, is such that few people bother.
So, extending that analogy, stealing copyrighted content has to be difficult enough that, given how useful and easy-to-acquire non-stolen content is, most people will purchase the non-stolen content.
This is tough, though. Almost by definition, DRM technology makes the non-stolen content less useful by restricting what can be done with it, where you can use it, etc. As a result, the stolen content is often more useful. This is the fundamental flaw in all DRM technology. It punishes the legal user by giving them handicapped content. When you try to charge more for something that does less, don't be suprised if sales suck.
Pirated content usually has the attributes of being cheap, useful, and easy to find. For some content (say music), the "legal" content is expensive, crippled, and hard to find. No wonder it doesn't sell. I think the only long-term strategy which will work is to actually make the legal content cheap, useful, and easy to find. It will always cost more than free pirated content, but if it's competetive people will buy it. By leaving out DRM, it can be useful (and cheaper too, since DRM is just uneccessary overhead). It's the "easy to find" where I think legal content can get the upper hand. There need to be prosecutions of the people who actually make copyrighted content available in an easy-to-find manner. Pirated content can't be eliminated, but it can be pushed underground where it's not easy for the general public to find. It's not even very hard to do. The software industry does a pretty good job of keeping pirated software underground so that it's not easy to find. I think this is the answer to the "ease of theft". The DRM only has to be cracked once to extract the unprotected content. And lots of people will specialize in exactly that. Look at software copy protection. No body has ever invented something which can't be cracked. But, for things to be easy to steal, they have to be easy to find. And that's the key. Make sure any warez site that shows up on google gets shut down. Find the folks who are putting 100GB of pirated music up on a fat pipe for anyone to take (note I am not advocating trying to shut down the basic tools, but going after the people who are actually illegally distributing copyrighted material.) As long as your average user can't easily find the pirated material, the legal stuff looks more attractive.
While it's nice to think they should be able to do whatever they want with a disc, the lassaiz-faire argument doesn't apply since the entire market is already regulated by the government in the form of copyright law.
In my opinion, a good fair law would be one that stipulates that if a company wants copyright protection they have to let the consumer have full access to the content for the purpose of space and time shifting. If a company wants to take away that ability from the consumer and use copy protection, they should not be allowed copyright protection. Copyrights are a balance between the public and the content creators. It's the governments job to maintain that balance, not the copyright holders. If they don't like the way the balance is set, they should get off it and rely on techincal solutions alone. It's stupid for us to pretend that copyright is a balance while allowing copyright holders to continually make their side 'heavier' using technical countermeasures against fair use and laws such as the DMCA.
He wants more legal tests of the GPL, and would love to make an example of your employer. Don't go there.
Don't listen to Bruce. You're employer should definitely go there. Some of us would like nothing better than to watch a blatant GPL violator get dragged over the coals in court. Oh what a fun spectator sport it would be.:-) Is your employer rich? If so, it could be a good way to get a nice FSF endowment started, eh? So many court cases are depressing from an open source coder point of view. Your employer could help cheer us all up! Please? Oh, and your lawyer should know that I have a patent pending on "A method of getting rich by convincing a hapless client to step into a bottomless legal morass"
of "-1 Didn't Bother To Read The Article". The number of people in this thread who posted and clearly did not read the article is astounding. We need some way of making everybody actually read the article and then start the thread over again. Sheesh.
reminds me of Cryptonomicon. Yeah, that's probably why Cryptonomicon is one of the references in the article!
The LED's don't indicate the data pattern, just the transmission pattern.. It depends on the equipment. Many older serial devices do indicate the data.
I call BS on this one... (Score:2, Informative) Uh, OK. Trying reading the article. And who modded this up?
Tempest (Score:4, Informative)....To do this with an LED would require that the LED be actually driven by the data signal. Most of them go on at the start of the packet or byte and go off at the end, they don't go on for 1 and off for 0. So, you might be able to do a little traffic analysis, but you would not be able to recover the data. True for some devices but not others. Please read the article. It's quite clear about where this does and does not work.
Yeah Right (Score:3, Interesting) After that, good luck doing the packet reconstruction, parse the IP tunnelling, determine what protocol I'm using, and separating signals from my browser, FTP client, weather ticker, httpd, apt-get and realplayer streaming all running at the same time. OK. Maybe you read the article. But this is just silly. Any good packet analyzer like Ethereal will do all this.
Anyways, this is complete FUD. You cannot pick out binary packet data from transmit/receive status lights. OK. Try reading the article next time.
The light blinks ON when data is going, OFF when it's not. Might make a nice indication of when there is data, but not what that data was. Once again. Read the article. Some things work this way. Some don't.
I would have to agree with you on this one. Even if the router were only serving a 1.5Mbit T1, that's still 1.5 million bits per second. I have a hard time believing that an LED can blink fast enough to reliably recreate that data. Read the article. Your T1 CSU/DSU probably isn't going to drive the LED at 1MHz or more but the LED is quite capable of switching at up to 10MHz.
That's pretty feasable, but even if it would blink for every packet you recieved, or even every byte, you still wouldn't know the contents of the bits, or whether it's a one or a zero. I'm still calling BS. Read the article.
Another vote for "Bullsh*t". I'm pretty certain that the LED doesn't blink for *every* single bit. And what about compression techniques that use phase and so on? You are not actually putting just ones and zeros onto the wire you know. Read the article. The external modems which are vulnerable are transmitting data from the RS-232 side of the modem which has very simple encoding. This is clearly explained in the article.
Wow. We get a nice, well written article with lots of specifics and details about exactly which devices were tested and which leak information, all the way to including comparative graphs of received optical signals, and people call BS on it? I suggest the folks making "tin foil hat" jokes invest in a different type of head gear: reading glasses!
The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.
If anybody from your firm states in court that the obfuscated version of the code meets this definition, they will be perjuring themselves. Your company is not going to be having the developers maintain the obfuscated code. Any claim that the obfuscated code is actually the "source code" is a lie. Claiming that it is isn't any more true than claiming that your intermediate.s files are the source code.
Tell your company they should hire better lawyers. And find another job, because your employers appear to be a bunch of dishonest pricks.
Exactly which of my claims don't you believe? Or do you simply disagree with my opinion that Microsoft should stand up and take their medicine? Of course, the fact that your post consists almost entirely of name calling and baseless suppositions about what the rest of the world believes, I don't even know why I'm bothering. Anytime you want to actually discuss facts feel free to come back. In the mean time, just crawl off into your troll hole.
Sure, it may be difficult or expensive for them to remove IE from the OS, but it's NOT impossible. What sort of effort is involved is their problem, not the courts.
Exactly. Even if it means that have to go back to shipping NT and Win95, that's what they should have to do. Microsoft chose to intermingle the browser and the OS in what has now been determined to be a criminal act. If they knew it was illegal and did it anyway, I have no sympathy for how hard it might be to undo. If they didn't realize what they were doing was illegal, well I don't have any sympathy there either. M$ can afford the best lawyers in the world. If they didn't realize they were breaking the law, tough shit. At a minimum that should have realized that they were skirting close to the edge of what's legal given their prior antitrust difficulties.
Microsoft loves playing hardball. Time for them to shut up and accept their punishment. Sometimes hardball hurts.
I know how matter and anti-matter work. Where are you going to get the anti-matter? That's the fuel. And there isn't any naturally occuring on the planet for the exact reason you describe. So please, how are you going to get antimatter without expending more energy than you get out of it? Good lord, do you really think that plain old matter qualifies as 'fuel'? If so, I've got some sand in my back yard. Perhaps you can tell me how to use that to heat my house? Oh yeah, just go pick up some anti-matter and mix it with the sand. Whatever. You're going to have to try harder if you ever want a +1 Bonus.:-P
It's quite disingenous for Mundie to state that government tax revenues would fall since Microsoft doesn't pay any taxes!. Since I personally do more to support the government tax coffers than all of Microsoft, he can just sit down and shut up.
I wonder if Craig Mundie personally pays any income tax? Or if he is able to find enough loopholes to skip out on his obligations just like his employer.
dont really know, cince they just now have some antimatter to play with,
Actually, they've been making antimatter for years. Making positrons (anti-matter electrons) is not especially difficult. Look up the "Advanced Photon Source" at Argonne. They regularly use positrons as a method of generating high-power X-Ray beams.
i am guessing that a few years some scientist will figure out how to make it reqall fricking hot to generate steam or cause a huge number of thermocouples to generate electricity. it's not my job.
Ha ha ha. What? Are you for real? If you have lots of steam or heat, why not just use a turbine to make electricity?
All right, who took down the "You must have an IQ of 50 to post" sign and let this guy in? Ha ha ha. Or maybe I've been trolled. reqall fricking hot Ha ha ha. That's the funniest thing I've read today. What is a gree-freak anyway? I'm not normally one to pick on grammer, but when it keeps your post from parsing, it's a problem. Check out the "Preview" button sometime.
Um, how exactly would you build an "antimatter generation plant? Or more specifically, where exactly are you going to get antimatter to use as fuel? There aren't exactly big natural deposits lying around. Antimatter might make an excellent method for storing and transporting energy someday, but it is not itself an energy source. It's just like hydrogen in this sense. You can do lots of interesting things with it, but it is not a fuel source because you have to make it and that process takes more energy than you get out of it.
The first nuclear power plant was fired up in metro Chicago! if they thought it was dangerous
Actually it was dangerous. Starting up a nuclear reactor in a squash court in downtown Chicago was dangerous then, and it's dangerous today. Just because nothing went wrong doesn't make it safe. The risk of blowing up Chicago was probably about zero. The risk of making a big chuck of Chicago uninhabitable and making a lot of people sick had their reactor caught on fire was very real.
The public's fear of nuclear power is not entirely unfounded. Fissonable materials are extremely dangerous to humans. You don't really want to be shipping it around all over the place like gasoline. Accidents do happen. And it's very hard to clean up.
On the other hand, some countries are still actively developing nuclear power. South Africa, I belive, is in the process of building a "pebble bed" reactor which should be quite safe compared to the reactor designs used currently. It is claimed to be meltdown-proof, and the fuel should always stay contained inside of the "pebbles" reducing the risk of contamination. Of course, you still need a plant to manufacture the pebbles themselves, and that plant could turn into a mess if not properly run.
The only effective voice the people have is the ballot box. The only way to use that voice is to vote for a third party. Both the Republicans and the Democrats have been 100% bribed into doing whatever the corporations want. The only reason they can screw the people is because most people are so stupid that they either vote for the Republicrats or don't vote at all. The politicians will not pay attention until they start losing votes. Period.
Step one: Vote. You have to vote. Anybody who does not vote is expressing their consent for the current government. If you don't like what Congress and the President are doing, you have to vote, and you have to vote for somebody else! I don't care if you vote for the Greens, the Libertarians, the NLP. Hell, vote for the damn Communists if you want. I don't care. Just vote. And until the number of votes against the current oligarchy increases, it will remain business as usual in Washington.
Anybody who didn't vote at all in the last election: thanks asshole. Try to get off your ass once a year, pay attention, and do something constructive. If you voted for the Republicans or Democrats, I don't really want to hear you bitch about the way the government is mistreating you because it's the people you elected. If you don't like it, why did you vote for a bunch of crooks who are taking bribes in public anyway?
Sorry for the rant, but I really belive this is the only thing that has any chance of working.
They have proven time and time again that they can be a very flexible entity. I have confidence that they would adapt to fit the needs of the market.
You are probably right. I think Microsoft's future will most likely be a lot like IBM. At one point IBM was the undisputed king of computers, and was in fact investigated for anti-trust violations. Now, years later, they are not really leading the industry per se, but they are definitely still a strong company. But I can still haveBut I can still have my d my dreams of Microsofts imminent Enron-style implosion, can't I?
However, everybody is not going to stop buying their product. You don't believe that, either.
No, not everybody. But a lot of people are starting to grumble. Especially overseas, and that's where I think a lot of the change will come from. American's don't mind being beholden to an American corporation so much. Especially one that is often portrayed as an example of everything that is "right" with the American economy. Other countries don't necessarily think it's such a good idea to be under the thumb of an American monopoly. Witness recent stories about movements towards open source in the German, Chinese, and Korean governements. Really, for what a single good sized govt pays out to Microsoft every year, they could probably keep development moving pretty rapidly on needed office software products.
The primary test of a monopoly is whether or not you can price above the actual cost of your product.
Which Microsoft does. To the point that they have cash just piling which they don't know what to do with. To the point where a good argument can be made that they are defrauding stockholders by not paying dividends.
You state that MS needs 40% profit margins to survive...to cover their costs? If so, then that 40% is not really profit, is it?
Um, profits are not the money used to cover your costs. It's the money left over. You know that and I know that. I never stated that M$ needed a 40% profit margin to cover their costs because, duh, then it wouldn't be a "profit" margin would it?
I also know, and I'll bet you also know, that the long term survival of a large publicly traded company is due in large part to the value of their stock. Losing money is OK as long as wall street is happy with the way things are going and keeps the capital flowing. Making money is not enough if wall street doesnt like the way things are going, and your stock crashes. Wall street expects companies to keep performing at least as well as they have in the past. If Microsoft's profits plummet due to changing market conditions, the company could be in serious jeprody even though revenues might be sufficient to cover the real costs of developement, production, and support.
The only thing that would result in MS losing monopoly power would be a drastic change in their licensing practices.
By this logic, as long as Microsoft never changes their licensing practices, they will never loose their monopoly. Even if everybody stopped buying their product, they would have a monopoly as long as the license was the same? You don't even believe that.
You may have a doctorate in anti trust law for all I know. But it appears you skipped Logic 101 during collage.
by making the argument that M$ will crumble if forced to lower their prices, ESR is actually saying that Microsoft is not a monopoly...that the current pricing scheme used by M$ is driven by the market.
Actually, I think he means that Microsoft is currently using monopoly pricing, and has in the past. But when PC prices were higher, the market simply absorbed the monopoly prices and accepted them. Now that the market is changing due to the plummeting cost of every other component of the PC, Microsoft may no longer be able to maintain their pricing. Since the current structure of the company is based upon massive profit margins, the company could be in real danger if they have to give up their monopoly pricing and adapt to the market. Just because Microsoft may not be able to maintain monopoly prices in the future does not mean that they don't get those prices today. Or that they haven't in the past.
Monopolies come and go. Just because M$ may not have a monopoly next year doesn't mean that they didn't have one last year. By your logic, AT&T was never a monopoly since they aren't one today. All ESR is really arguing is that he thinks the market is changing to where M$ will not be able to keep their monopoly, and that they will not be able to adjust to that change. While you can argue about whether the market is actually changing to a point where M$ might have to actually lower prices, it's not really much of a stretch to believe that M$ would collapse if they had to go from their ~40% profit margins down to single digit margins like a lot of companies in the PC business.
Well, they list the top speed as 17MPH. So if you plan on riding into walls at top speed, I would recommend a helmet. But seriously, I doubt that the HT would just fall over if it ran into something that forced it to stop. You would probably just get the wind knocked out of you as the handle bars plant themselves into your solar plexus.
On the other hand, given the diameter of the wheels, you might be amazed at the curbs it could hop. I can't find any specs for the exact diameter, but the web pages do state that it raises the rider 8" off of the ground. The pictures make it appear that the top of the riding platform is maybe half way up the wheel, if even that. I would guess that they might be up to 20" diameter wheels. Large wheels in combination with a lot of torque forcing the HT to stay upright might enable it to jump some pretty amazing curbs. Not that I want to be the person to test the theory.:-)
To the companie's credit, their press release never says this is a "next-generation DVD". It's just a high capacity optical disc which will be used to store video. Just like DVD's were never meant to be a "next gen LaserDisc", these discs are their own format. They don't even have the same form factor as DVD's since they are encased in a cartridge like the old MO drives that NeXT used.
The reason they didn't even try to make them backwards compatable is that the technology is entirely dependent on using blue lasers for reading, something which current DVD's don't have. So they would have had to sacrifice most, if not all, of the increased density to make them readable in current DVD players. And if they did that, who would care? Sometimes backwards compatability has to be dropped if you want an increase in performance. Now, whether or not consumers will see "Blue-ray" as being good enough to justify dropping DVD's remains to be seen.
For doing this type of war driving, you don't need to actually connect to each AP. The card is put into a low-level promiscuous mode, so it can receive all packets. Every AP sends out a continuous stream of 'beacon' packets which the software can use to determine what networks are available. Also, at least on Prism-based cards, you get both a signal and noise measure for every packet received. So you just drive around snarfing up packets, and every one you get you can check for the source MAC address (to determine the AP) and the S/N ratio. No need to talk to the AP's at all, it's totally passive.
One thing you do need to do is change channels. 802.11b specifies 11 channels (in the US), so to be thourough you should check them all. To be efficient, you can only check 1,6,11 because that's what everybody uses. Depending on how many channels you are checking and how fast you scan puts a limit on how fast you can drive and expect to pick everything up.
Of course, if you are just checking out coverage for a specific AP, you can stay on it's channel and wander around the immediate area to get lots of good data points about it's coverage. It all depends on what exactly you are trying to accomplish.
I'm sorry, but this is bullshit. Money is not speech. Paying money to politicians in exchange for privledged access is bribery. If you want to spend your money buying a newspaper ad in support of a politician, that's free speech. Handing him an envelope of money at a dinner so that he'll give you special treatment is bribery. Giving large sums of money to both parties, which is what a lot of the big doners do, is especially blatent bribery.
If your little sound bite money is speach were true, then income tax would be unconstitutional. After all, how can you tax a person's first amendment rights? Face it, the whole 'money is speech' is a load of crap that the crooks use to cover up their crimes. You want to support a politician? Buy an ad yourself. Volunteer some time. Make phone calls. Go door to door. Get the word out. That's free speech. Passing bribes is a crime, not speech. Until folks like you open your eyes to the blatent corruption going on, nothing is going to improve.
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Possibly the biggest difficulty in this fight is that the media industries have an ace up their sleeve. Namely, they are the media. They can run warm fuzzy stories about Sen. Hollings standing up for the rights of "artists" in the face of Internet criminals. And any Congress-critter who opposes them better not have any upset interns for the media to dig up. Whether or not it would work is one thing. But I bet that media lobbyists can make very effective use of the threat.
Amazingly, Newsweek seems to have spent a lot of effort to rag on the music industry in a recent issue. About three pages blaming their lagging sales on too much bad formula music and too-high prices. It also discussed the successes of "O Brother Where Art Thou" at the Grammy's as evidence that even the folks who work in the music industry know that most of the stuff they are shoveling out the door is crap. Another one page article about Hollings and the SSSCA making it quite clear that that the proposed law would impinge on legal copying as well as pointing out that the Internet can probably do for media industries what the VCR did for the movie industry, namely make them a shitload of money if they would just stop trying to make it illegal.
I don't know, but it seems that print media is much more willing to actually run stories on the issues involved. Maybe it's because they are an older industry. Maybe they just see it as a way to kick a competitor. Maybe it's the fact that I don't have cable and never watch broadcast news. Has anybody ever seen any coverage of this issue in the broadcast media? How biased did it seem?
Have you noticed that people who use "immature" in this way are rarely over the age of 21?
Really. That's quite an astute observation. Would you care to enlighten me as to how you know the age of people who call others immature? It also in no way invalidates my point, which is that you talk in a way which makes you look immature. Very few adults I know use the word 'asswipe'. Quite a few use the word immature. Also note that I in no way implied that I knew how old you were, since of course there is no way for me to tell. I simply stated that you conduct yourself in a manner which makes you look immature. Which is true irrespective of your true age. Are you going to deny that you talk like a child? If you do so, are you going to call me names at the same time? If you do all that, could you please try to use the names "boogerhead" or "snotnose" to demonstrate your mental superiority?
And the suit is being pressed in a California court where the DMCA definitely applies. Read the article. And watch your mouth. Do you think using words like "asswipe" really helps make your point? Or do you think it just makes you look immature?
Remarkably, the article doesn't mention if the DMCA is being invoked. It probably won't be, because then it would be applied in the manner Congress actually meant, which would break the perfect record of the DMCA only being misused. Also, News Corp. and it's subsidiaries are quite capable of fighting a legal battle of almost any scope and duration. This would increase the risk of an actual court precedent against the DMCA. Once again, this would break the perfect record of the DMCA only being invoked against relatively powerless victims. The DMCA is far too powerful a tool for misuse for anyone to risk it's long and promising future.
he relationship between the difficulty to get a stolen car, and the amount you have to pay to get a car, and the extra utility you get from a car you actually own, is such that few people bother.
So, extending that analogy, stealing copyrighted content has to be difficult enough that, given how useful and easy-to-acquire non-stolen content is, most people will purchase the non-stolen content.
This is tough, though. Almost by definition, DRM technology makes the non-stolen content less useful by restricting what can be done with it, where you can use it, etc. As a result, the stolen content is often more useful. This is the fundamental flaw in all DRM technology. It punishes the legal user by giving them handicapped content. When you try to charge more for something that does less, don't be suprised if sales suck.
Pirated content usually has the attributes of being cheap, useful, and easy to find. For some content (say music), the "legal" content is expensive, crippled, and hard to find. No wonder it doesn't sell. I think the only long-term strategy which will work is to actually make the legal content cheap, useful, and easy to find. It will always cost more than free pirated content, but if it's competetive people will buy it. By leaving out DRM, it can be useful (and cheaper too, since DRM is just uneccessary overhead). It's the "easy to find" where I think legal content can get the upper hand. There need to be prosecutions of the people who actually make copyrighted content available in an easy-to-find manner. Pirated content can't be eliminated, but it can be pushed underground where it's not easy for the general public to find. It's not even very hard to do. The software industry does a pretty good job of keeping pirated software underground so that it's not easy to find. I think this is the answer to the "ease of theft". The DRM only has to be cracked once to extract the unprotected content. And lots of people will specialize in exactly that. Look at software copy protection. No body has ever invented something which can't be cracked. But, for things to be easy to steal, they have to be easy to find. And that's the key. Make sure any warez site that shows up on google gets shut down. Find the folks who are putting 100GB of pirated music up on a fat pipe for anyone to take (note I am not advocating trying to shut down the basic tools, but going after the people who are actually illegally distributing copyrighted material.) As long as your average user can't easily find the pirated material, the legal stuff looks more attractive.
While it's nice to think they should be able to do whatever they want with a disc, the lassaiz-faire argument doesn't apply since the entire market is already regulated by the government in the form of copyright law.
In my opinion, a good fair law would be one that stipulates that if a company wants copyright protection they have to let the consumer have full access to the content for the purpose of space and time shifting. If a company wants to take away that ability from the consumer and use copy protection, they should not be allowed copyright protection. Copyrights are a balance between the public and the content creators. It's the governments job to maintain that balance, not the copyright holders. If they don't like the way the balance is set, they should get off it and rely on techincal solutions alone. It's stupid for us to pretend that copyright is a balance while allowing copyright holders to continually make their side 'heavier' using technical countermeasures against fair use and laws such as the DMCA.
He wants more legal tests of the GPL, and would love to make an example of your employer. Don't go there.
:-) Is your employer rich? If so, it could be a good way to get a nice FSF endowment started, eh? So many court cases are depressing from an open source coder point of view. Your employer could help cheer us all up! Please? Oh, and your lawyer should know that I have a patent pending on "A method of getting rich by convincing a hapless client to step into a bottomless legal morass"
Don't listen to Bruce. You're employer should definitely go there. Some of us would like nothing better than to watch a blatant GPL violator get dragged over the coals in court. Oh what a fun spectator sport it would be.
of "-1 Didn't Bother To Read The Article". The number of people in this thread who posted and clearly did not read the article is astounding. We need some way of making everybody actually read the article and then start the thread over again. Sheesh.
....To do this with an LED would require that the LED be actually driven by the data signal. Most of them go on at the start of the packet or byte and go off at the end, they don't go on for 1 and off for 0. So, you might be able to do a little traffic analysis, but you would not be able to recover the data. True for some devices but not others. Please read the article. It's quite clear about where this does and does not work.
reminds me of Cryptonomicon. Yeah, that's probably why Cryptonomicon is one of the references in the article!
The LED's don't indicate the data pattern, just the transmission pattern.. It depends on the equipment. Many older serial devices do indicate the data.
I call BS on this one... (Score:2, Informative) Uh, OK. Trying reading the article. And who modded this up?
Tempest (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah Right (Score:3, Interesting) After that, good luck doing the packet reconstruction, parse the IP tunnelling, determine what protocol I'm using, and separating signals from my browser, FTP client, weather ticker, httpd, apt-get and realplayer streaming all running at the same time. OK. Maybe you read the article. But this is just silly. Any good packet analyzer like Ethereal will do all this.
Anyways, this is complete FUD. You cannot pick out binary packet data from transmit/receive status lights. OK. Try reading the article next time.
The light blinks ON when data is going, OFF when it's not. Might make a nice indication of when there is data, but not what that data was. Once again. Read the article. Some things work this way. Some don't.
I would have to agree with you on this one. Even if the router were only serving a 1.5Mbit T1, that's still 1.5 million bits per second. I have a hard time believing that an LED can blink fast enough to reliably recreate that data. Read the article. Your T1 CSU/DSU probably isn't going to drive the LED at 1MHz or more but the LED is quite capable of switching at up to 10MHz.
That's pretty feasable, but even if it would blink for every packet you recieved, or even every byte, you still wouldn't know the contents of the bits, or whether it's a one or a zero. I'm still calling BS. Read the article.
Another vote for "Bullsh*t". I'm pretty certain that the LED doesn't blink for *every* single bit. And what about compression techniques that use phase and so on? You are not actually putting just ones and zeros onto the wire you know. Read the article. The external modems which are vulnerable are transmitting data from the RS-232 side of the modem which has very simple encoding. This is clearly explained in the article.
Wow. We get a nice, well written article with lots of specifics and details about exactly which devices were tested and which leak information, all the way to including comparative graphs of received optical signals, and people call BS on it? I suggest the folks making "tin foil hat" jokes invest in a different type of head gear: reading glasses!
The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.
.s files are the source code.
If anybody from your firm states in court that the obfuscated version of the code meets this definition, they will be perjuring themselves. Your company is not going to be having the developers maintain the obfuscated code. Any claim that the obfuscated code is actually the "source code" is a lie. Claiming that it is isn't any more true than claiming that your intermediate
Tell your company they should hire better lawyers. And find another job, because your employers appear to be a bunch of dishonest pricks.
Yeah, you're probably right. Consider yourself dismissed, kook.
Exactly which of my claims don't you believe? Or do you simply disagree with my opinion that Microsoft should stand up and take their medicine? Of course, the fact that your post consists almost entirely of name calling and baseless suppositions about what the rest of the world believes, I don't even know why I'm bothering. Anytime you want to actually discuss facts feel free to come back. In the mean time, just crawl off into your troll hole.
Sure, it may be difficult or expensive for them to remove IE from the OS, but it's NOT impossible. What sort of effort is involved is their problem, not the courts.
Exactly. Even if it means that have to go back to shipping NT and Win95, that's what they should have to do. Microsoft chose to intermingle the browser and the OS in what has now been determined to be a criminal act. If they knew it was illegal and did it anyway, I have no sympathy for how hard it might be to undo. If they didn't realize what they were doing was illegal, well I don't have any sympathy there either. M$ can afford the best lawyers in the world. If they didn't realize they were breaking the law, tough shit. At a minimum that should have realized that they were skirting close to the edge of what's legal given their prior antitrust difficulties.
Microsoft loves playing hardball. Time for them to shut up and accept their punishment. Sometimes hardball hurts.
I know how matter and anti-matter work. Where are you going to get the anti-matter? That's the fuel. And there isn't any naturally occuring on the planet for the exact reason you describe. So please, how are you going to get antimatter without expending more energy than you get out of it? Good lord, do you really think that plain old matter qualifies as 'fuel'? If so, I've got some sand in my back yard. Perhaps you can tell me how to use that to heat my house? Oh yeah, just go pick up some anti-matter and mix it with the sand. Whatever. You're going to have to try harder if you ever want a +1 Bonus. :-P
It's quite disingenous for Mundie to state that government tax revenues would fall since Microsoft doesn't pay any taxes!. Since I personally do more to support the government tax coffers than all of Microsoft, he can just sit down and shut up.
I wonder if Craig Mundie personally pays any income tax? Or if he is able to find enough loopholes to skip out on his obligations just like his employer.
dont really know, cince they just now have some antimatter to play with,
Actually, they've been making antimatter for years. Making positrons (anti-matter electrons) is not especially difficult. Look up the "Advanced Photon Source" at Argonne. They regularly use positrons as a method of generating high-power X-Ray beams.
i am guessing that a few years some scientist will figure out how to make it reqall fricking hot to generate steam or cause a huge number of thermocouples to generate electricity. it's not my job.
Ha ha ha. What? Are you for real? If you have lots of steam or heat, why not just use a turbine to make electricity?
All right, who took down the "You must have an IQ of 50 to post" sign and let this guy in? Ha ha ha. Or maybe I've been trolled. reqall fricking hot Ha ha ha. That's the funniest thing I've read today. What is a gree-freak anyway? I'm not normally one to pick on grammer, but when it keeps your post from parsing, it's a problem. Check out the "Preview" button sometime.
Um, how exactly would you build an "antimatter generation plant? Or more specifically, where exactly are you going to get antimatter to use as fuel? There aren't exactly big natural deposits lying around. Antimatter might make an excellent method for storing and transporting energy someday, but it is not itself an energy source. It's just like hydrogen in this sense. You can do lots of interesting things with it, but it is not a fuel source because you have to make it and that process takes more energy than you get out of it.
The first nuclear power plant was fired up in metro Chicago! if they thought it was dangerous
Actually it was dangerous. Starting up a nuclear reactor in a squash court in downtown Chicago was dangerous then, and it's dangerous today. Just because nothing went wrong doesn't make it safe. The risk of blowing up Chicago was probably about zero. The risk of making a big chuck of Chicago uninhabitable and making a lot of people sick had their reactor caught on fire was very real.
The public's fear of nuclear power is not entirely unfounded. Fissonable materials are extremely dangerous to humans. You don't really want to be shipping it around all over the place like gasoline. Accidents do happen. And it's very hard to clean up.
On the other hand, some countries are still actively developing nuclear power. South Africa, I belive, is in the process of building a "pebble bed" reactor which should be quite safe compared to the reactor designs used currently. It is claimed to be meltdown-proof, and the fuel should always stay contained inside of the "pebbles" reducing the risk of contamination. Of course, you still need a plant to manufacture the pebbles themselves, and that plant could turn into a mess if not properly run.
WE MUST DO SOMETHING - TODAY
The only effective voice the people have is the ballot box. The only way to use that voice is to vote for a third party. Both the Republicans and the Democrats have been 100% bribed into doing whatever the corporations want. The only reason they can screw the people is because most people are so stupid that they either vote for the Republicrats or don't vote at all. The politicians will not pay attention until they start losing votes. Period.
Step one: Vote. You have to vote. Anybody who does not vote is expressing their consent for the current government. If you don't like what Congress and the President are doing, you have to vote, and you have to vote for somebody else! I don't care if you vote for the Greens, the Libertarians, the NLP. Hell, vote for the damn Communists if you want. I don't care. Just vote. And until the number of votes against the current oligarchy increases, it will remain business as usual in Washington.
Anybody who didn't vote at all in the last election: thanks asshole. Try to get off your ass once a year, pay attention, and do something constructive. If you voted for the Republicans or Democrats, I don't really want to hear you bitch about the way the government is mistreating you because it's the people you elected. If you don't like it, why did you vote for a bunch of crooks who are taking bribes in public anyway?
Sorry for the rant, but I really belive this is the only thing that has any chance of working.
They have proven time and time again that they can be a very flexible entity. I have confidence that they would adapt to fit the needs of the market.
You are probably right. I think Microsoft's future will most likely be a lot like IBM. At one point IBM was the undisputed king of computers, and was in fact investigated for anti-trust violations. Now, years later, they are not really leading the industry per se, but they are definitely still a strong company. But I can still haveBut I can still have my d my dreams of Microsofts imminent Enron-style implosion, can't I?
However, everybody is not going to stop buying their product. You don't believe that, either.
No, not everybody. But a lot of people are starting to grumble. Especially overseas, and that's where I think a lot of the change will come from. American's don't mind being beholden to an American corporation so much. Especially one that is often portrayed as an example of everything that is "right" with the American economy. Other countries don't necessarily think it's such a good idea to be under the thumb of an American monopoly. Witness recent stories about movements towards open source in the German, Chinese, and Korean governements. Really, for what a single good sized govt pays out to Microsoft every year, they could probably keep development moving pretty rapidly on needed office software products.
I'll take the definition behind door number three Monty: "foolish or careless" ;-)>
The primary test of a monopoly is whether or not you can price above the actual cost of your product.
Which Microsoft does. To the point that they have cash just piling which they don't know what to do with. To the point where a good argument can be made that they are defrauding stockholders by not paying dividends.
You state that MS needs 40% profit margins to survive...to cover their costs? If so, then that 40% is not really profit, is it?
Um, profits are not the money used to cover your costs. It's the money left over. You know that and I know that. I never stated that M$ needed a 40% profit margin to cover their costs because, duh, then it wouldn't be a "profit" margin would it?
I also know, and I'll bet you also know, that the long term survival of a large publicly traded company is due in large part to the value of their stock. Losing money is OK as long as wall street is happy with the way things are going and keeps the capital flowing. Making money is not enough if wall street doesnt like the way things are going, and your stock crashes. Wall street expects companies to keep performing at least as well as they have in the past. If Microsoft's profits plummet due to changing market conditions, the company could be in serious jeprody even though revenues might be sufficient to cover the real costs of developement, production, and support.
The only thing that would result in MS losing monopoly power would be a drastic change in their licensing practices.
By this logic, as long as Microsoft never changes their licensing practices, they will never loose their monopoly. Even if everybody stopped buying their product, they would have a monopoly as long as the license was the same? You don't even believe that.
You may have a doctorate in anti trust law for all I know. But it appears you skipped Logic 101 during collage.
by making the argument that M$ will crumble if forced to lower their prices, ESR is actually saying that Microsoft is not a monopoly...that the current pricing scheme used by M$ is driven by the market.
Actually, I think he means that Microsoft is currently using monopoly pricing, and has in the past. But when PC prices were higher, the market simply absorbed the monopoly prices and accepted them. Now that the market is changing due to the plummeting cost of every other component of the PC, Microsoft may no longer be able to maintain their pricing. Since the current structure of the company is based upon massive profit margins, the company could be in real danger if they have to give up their monopoly pricing and adapt to the market. Just because Microsoft may not be able to maintain monopoly prices in the future does not mean that they don't get those prices today. Or that they haven't in the past.
Monopolies come and go. Just because M$ may not have a monopoly next year doesn't mean that they didn't have one last year. By your logic, AT&T was never a monopoly since they aren't one today. All ESR is really arguing is that he thinks the market is changing to where M$ will not be able to keep their monopoly, and that they will not be able to adjust to that change. While you can argue about whether the market is actually changing to a point where M$ might have to actually lower prices, it's not really much of a stretch to believe that M$ would collapse if they had to go from their ~40% profit margins down to single digit margins like a lot of companies in the PC business.
Well, they list the top speed as 17MPH. So if you plan on riding into walls at top speed, I would recommend a helmet. But seriously, I doubt that the HT would just fall over if it ran into something that forced it to stop. You would probably just get the wind knocked out of you as the handle bars plant themselves into your solar plexus.
:-)
On the other hand, given the diameter of the wheels, you might be amazed at the curbs it could hop. I can't find any specs for the exact diameter, but the web pages do state that it raises the rider 8" off of the ground. The pictures make it appear that the top of the riding platform is maybe half way up the wheel, if even that. I would guess that they might be up to 20" diameter wheels. Large wheels in combination with a lot of torque forcing the HT to stay upright might enable it to jump some pretty amazing curbs. Not that I want to be the person to test the theory.
To the companie's credit, their press release never says this is a "next-generation DVD". It's just a high capacity optical disc which will be used to store video. Just like DVD's were never meant to be a "next gen LaserDisc", these discs are their own format. They don't even have the same form factor as DVD's since they are encased in a cartridge like the old MO drives that NeXT used.
The reason they didn't even try to make them backwards compatable is that the technology is entirely dependent on using blue lasers for reading, something which current DVD's don't have. So they would have had to sacrifice most, if not all, of the increased density to make them readable in current DVD players. And if they did that, who would care? Sometimes backwards compatability has to be dropped if you want an increase in performance. Now, whether or not consumers will see "Blue-ray" as being good enough to justify dropping DVD's remains to be seen.
For doing this type of war driving, you don't need to actually connect to each AP. The card is put into a low-level promiscuous mode, so it can receive all packets. Every AP sends out a continuous stream of 'beacon' packets which the software can use to determine what networks are available. Also, at least on Prism-based cards, you get both a signal and noise measure for every packet received. So you just drive around snarfing up packets, and every one you get you can check for the source MAC address (to determine the AP) and the S/N ratio. No need to talk to the AP's at all, it's totally passive.
One thing you do need to do is change channels. 802.11b specifies 11 channels (in the US), so to be thourough you should check them all. To be efficient, you can only check 1,6,11 because that's what everybody uses. Depending on how many channels you are checking and how fast you scan puts a limit on how fast you can drive and expect to pick everything up.
Of course, if you are just checking out coverage for a specific AP, you can stay on it's channel and wander around the immediate area to get lots of good data points about it's coverage. It all depends on what exactly you are trying to accomplish.
I'm sorry, but this is bullshit. Money is not speech. Paying money to politicians in exchange for privledged access is bribery. If you want to spend your money buying a newspaper ad in support of a politician, that's free speech. Handing him an envelope of money at a dinner so that he'll give you special treatment is bribery. Giving large sums of money to both parties, which is what a lot of the big doners do, is especially blatent bribery.
If your little sound bite money is speach were true, then income tax would be unconstitutional. After all, how can you tax a person's first amendment rights? Face it, the whole 'money is speech' is a load of crap that the crooks use to cover up their crimes. You want to support a politician? Buy an ad yourself. Volunteer some time. Make phone calls. Go door to door. Get the word out. That's free speech. Passing bribes is a crime, not speech. Until folks like you open your eyes to the blatent corruption going on, nothing is going to improve.