They are alleging that "he was the author of the code that became the Kronos malware"... even if this allegation were true, that should be entirely irrelevant if he neither authored the Kronos malware nor assisted in its distribution.... heck, by that reasoning, practically every computer programming language creator ever should be held accountable for "writing software that would eventually become malware" as well... because essentially, that's what would be amounted to by what they were saying.
You can't justly hold an inventor of a technology accountable for how nefarious people might use it unless you can reasonably demonstrate that there was some kind of cooperation between the inventor and the people that committed the wrongdoing.
Why not hold the parents responsible for breeding in the first place if their child grows up and becomes a murderer?
Gawd, there are so many things wrong with this entire thing, I can barely believe that this trial is actually happening. It is just so fucked up that I don't have the words...
You are redefining hope to include not only blind faith, but actions which may be taken based upon it. Hope, by definition, harms nobody except possibly the one doing the hoping, and even then, only in that they may not have their hopes realized when they expect them.
"every concept"??? Or just "every technology"? I would agree with the latter, but something like "hope" for example, is certainly a concept, but you'd be hard pressed to come up with a way that it can actually ever be utilized for evil
Nope. My daughter-in-law is vegan but doesn't brag about it at all. It only ever comes up when someone who doesn't know her offers her something that isn't on her preferred menu.
No, it only suggests that the conditions were sufficient to have some non-zero probability for life.... it does not imply that it was *EVER* particularly likely, and even that says nothing about the likelihood of complex intelligent life other than as a precondition for the latter.
A person can win a lottery the very first time that they ever play... that does not mean that the odds of him winning were ever very high. Similarly, the fact that we exist does not imply any kind of certainty or likelihood to our existence before it occurred, only a non-zero probability... and a sufficient small probability multiplied even by the number of even remotely possible occurrences in all of space and time may still evaluate to a very tiny number that might suggest our existence is nothing more than a blind (and very fortuitous) fluke.
I am not necessarily suggesting that the chance that complex life exists elsewhere is necessarily that small... but I am suggesting that it is not that inconceivable that we *are* alone.
Actually, if you are willing to some mathematical speculation, it gets even more depressing.
If the rarity of intelligent life is rare enough, we might actually be entirely alone. Take the busy beaver function for example... it is known that the busy beaver function rises so much faster than any computable function such that one need go no further than BB(25) to get to a number larger than Grahams Number, and given that there could be as many as 26 dimensions, even Grahams number may be vastly smaller than the number of distinct types of states that the universe could represent.
So if the chance of life forming was something like 1/BB(26), it may be just a sheer fluke out of absolutely astronomically odds that we are even here at all.
Of course, the chance of life forming may be much larger than this... we just don't know, and as you suggest, we may never know... But really, it's not entirely unthinkable that we are alone in the universe as well.
The universe's behavior is, for all intents and purposes, non-deterministic in the sense that any ability one may allegedly have to accurate predict the outcome of some state of the even a very tiny subset of the universe given all all available input cannot actually be observed.
Proof:
Assume that a black box could exist that can predict the outcome of a particular experiment wherein the output of black box is read as input. If this cannot be done, then any so-called deterministic nature to the universe is irrelevant, because you can't assume that any particular predicted outcome is necessarily what will actually happen.
The experiment is designed as follows: A mechanism has two levers, one on the right and one on the left, and is designed to read the output of the black box, and activate the lever that the black box indicates. The left lever of the mechanism outputs "right" while the right lever out outputs "left". The black box simply has to produce as output whatever the mechanism ultimately will. However, similar to the halting problem, this creates a paradox, as you can see that despite the entirely deterministic nature of the experiment, the black box cannot be used to predict its outcome.
Therefore, either the universe is non-deterministic, or else it is non-deterministic for all practical purposes, since any so-called prediction can only be as accurate insomuch as that information is never actually observed in the present. I personally subscribe to the former position because I believe it is the simpler situation, but even if the latter were true, it is entirely irrelevant to reality.
And if you can't predict the outcome of a random number generator, even if you know absolutely everything about it, what is the difference between that and truly random?
It doesn't help matters that the edit box in which one creates such posts will happily accept such characters as input and display them appropriately there.
You are still forcing the developer to conform to a single pattern for playing any kind of video, and as the number of useful ways that a computer could be programmed to plausibly do that is not bounded, it is an arbitrary limitation that can only stifle innovation.
The first step, of course, is to disable all html5 video autoplay capabability... I'm completely on board with you on that one, but since you can programatically bypass this by starting the video from jajvascript, where a programmer could do literally anything, it is only a first step, and the remaining steps may not fully lead to where you want to be.
The most you might be able to do is make sure that no video playing through a standard api ever gets launched by inline javascript code in the web page, by a method invoked through the window's onload event, or by a timer event that was scheduled by either of the two unless there was at least one UI gesture event on the stack as well, regardless of what the UI event is.
Anything more and you'll just end up arbitrarily limiting what developers are allowed to do, and essentially preemptively censoring any potentially innovative ideas that may come in the future.
While fonts themselves can be copyrighted, the typeface itself that is rendered by a font cannot be. So it is, in fact, entirely possible to create a lookalike font to a copyrighted font without infringing on the copyright on the latter as long as the lookalike font itself was not actually copied from the the copyrighted font.
In general (but not always), this means that the lookalike font was created from samples of text that use the original font, specifically text that only a utilizes a subset of the font, and a font designer would apply the patterns used in the characters within that sample to extrapolate the design of the remaining characters. Often, the end result can be virtually indistinguishable to almost anyone visually unless one knows exactly what to look for, and in exactly which glyphs. An excellent example of just how similar typefaces can be without infringing on copyright is to compare the typefaces Helvetica, Grotesque, and Arial.
In the case of something like a logo, the number of character samples can be often small enough that no differences will be detectable to the human eye at all.
If returns are at the seller's expense, then I would expect the seller to charge more for any products that they determine is more likely to be returned so that the extra profit on the unreturned products can subsidized the expense the seller must bear for returned products. This might make it less likely that they move the product in the first place, but there's a fine line that the seller is going to have to try and balance, and if they cannot sell an item profitably because of the number of returns, then they are reasonably left with no choice but to discontinue that product (which is actually in the best interests of the customer as well, since it does not waste the customer's time with products they are going to have to return)
It's a pretty safe bet that using a gun as a defense against aliens that have the technology to reach us is going to be approximately as effective as trying to blow out a multi-acre wildfire with your breath..
The biggest problem with it being that they're going to get all kinds of hopelessly unqualified applicants, which will create more work for HR to weed those ones out quickly.
I mentioned Turing completeness because it best describes why the number of different possible ways that a program might potentially receive such an input from an end user is not bounded, and so any restrictions you impose upon it such as requiring specific UI gestures to activate videos could very easily wind up hampering innovation as well.
Fundamentally, it's not an entirely dissimilar attitude from those of certain politicians that would suggest that no "normal person" would ever want to use end-to-end encryption as a justification for disallowing it.
Speaking my own personal experience, and the people that I've seen get elected in the places that I've lived, it is entirely possible for an honest person to become a politician... but it is, regrettably, quite rare... and rarer still for people to recognize it before they vote. I can only attest to having seen it for sure one time in the 45 years since I've been old enough to vote.
Even if that position were true, it is irrelevant... since everyone, and I mean *EVERYONE*, including Ms Rudd, has something to hide.
But having something to hide does not mean that there is anything wrong, it can be simply because they simply want something to be private.
I mean, most people wear clothes when they are socializing with others. Is there something wrong with people's bodies that they need to keep them covered up? (There very well be for some, but this is beside the point). I am, of course, being rhetorical... people generally keep their privates covered up when they are in public because they are just that: private.
So to suggest that real people don't need end-to-end encryption is saying that real people don't really need any privacy. I'd like to see what she'd have to say if she were made aware that by extension, she should be required to never wear any clothes anymore.... unless she contends that she herself is not a real person.
So you propose to lock every developer into this allegedly "standard" UI gesture, preventing any and all possible attempts that programers might make to innovate. I came up with what might have been a plausible example, and you challenge the entire notion by suggesting that basically no reasonable person would ever have a reasonb want to do that... without justification, I might add. If your imagination is really so poor as to be incapable of thinking outside of some preconceived box, or to imagine that there are ideas to be discovered in the future that have not yet been conceived, it's unsuprising that you would expect all programmers to conform to your box as well.
I mean, why bother having a Turing complete language at all if you are just going to end up restricting what the developer is allowed to do?
How does safari define "autoplay"? If the web page contains js code that tries to play a video, does it block it? If so, what if this js code was being invoked in an event-handler, in response to clicking on a custom js video player widget's "play" button? How can safari tell the difference between a video playing that the user wanted to watch vs one that they didn't intend on?
Or does the user have to then whitelist every website that uses custom js video players?
Then you would be forcing absolutely anything that wanted to play videos into using that gesture... disallowing any kind of custom controls. That's too restrictive. What if the video was simply a cut-scene in a game that the person was playing on the website? Should the user be forced to use this "standard" gesture every time the game is playing some video?
I can appreciate the intent in your suggestion, but in the end, I believe it is simply too restrictive, and pushes programmers into a corner by telling them that they aren't allowed to innovate in this one particular area because anything that you haven't foreseen when imposing this notion would be disallowed.
Auto-play is annoying, but it may not be possible to entirely prevent without also turning off all javascript that runs when the page is loaded as well, since the play functionality could be activated under program control, and if you simply disallowed that as well, then even when a user *tries* to play a video and clicks an on-screen button to start it, the js code that would otherwise start the video playing would not be able to do so.
I'd personally settle for simply not allowing any videos to play at all if they are not entirely inside of the currently visible browser window, or are in any other tab than the current one.
As a minor addendum of a more personal note, if one will forgive the brief OT comment, while I could say that I am deeply flattered that one or more people that reply as AC's to virtually every single one of my posts on any story here in the past few weeks are apparently so interested in everything that I have to say that they don't miss a single comment I make here, I would rather that his/her/their comments be more relevant to what I was saying or the subject at hand instead of repeating the same non-sequiturs every time. That is all.
Actually, you're right.... I never thought about it before, but yes. As someone else suggested, maybe I'm outside the normal curve for what sort of things can distract me.
I can attest to the fact that I can very easily be distracted from concentration by screaming children, however, or when a large truck goes by the building where I work and seems to causes the whole floor to shake, so my concentration is not infallible.
Slashdot Mirror
They are alleging that "he was the author of the code that became the Kronos malware"... even if this allegation were true, that should be entirely irrelevant if he neither authored the Kronos malware nor assisted in its distribution.... heck, by that reasoning, practically every computer programming language creator ever should be held accountable for "writing software that would eventually become malware" as well... because essentially, that's what would be amounted to by what they were saying.
You can't justly hold an inventor of a technology accountable for how nefarious people might use it unless you can reasonably demonstrate that there was some kind of cooperation between the inventor and the people that committed the wrongdoing.
Why not hold the parents responsible for breeding in the first place if their child grows up and becomes a murderer?
Gawd, there are so many things wrong with this entire thing, I can barely believe that this trial is actually happening. It is just so fucked up that I don't have the words...
I think he means by utilizing each hand, identically.
But thank you for that... I can't recall the last time I saw a post on Slashdot that made me laugh that hard.
You are redefining hope to include not only blind faith, but actions which may be taken based upon it. Hope, by definition, harms nobody except possibly the one doing the hoping, and even then, only in that they may not have their hopes realized when they expect them.
"every concept"??? Or just "every technology"? I would agree with the latter, but something like "hope" for example, is certainly a concept, but you'd be hard pressed to come up with a way that it can actually ever be utilized for evil
Nope. My daughter-in-law is vegan but doesn't brag about it at all. It only ever comes up when someone who doesn't know her offers her something that isn't on her preferred menu.
No, it only suggests that the conditions were sufficient to have some non-zero probability for life.... it does not imply that it was *EVER* particularly likely, and even that says nothing about the likelihood of complex intelligent life other than as a precondition for the latter.
A person can win a lottery the very first time that they ever play... that does not mean that the odds of him winning were ever very high. Similarly, the fact that we exist does not imply any kind of certainty or likelihood to our existence before it occurred, only a non-zero probability... and a sufficient small probability multiplied even by the number of even remotely possible occurrences in all of space and time may still evaluate to a very tiny number that might suggest our existence is nothing more than a blind (and very fortuitous) fluke.
I am not necessarily suggesting that the chance that complex life exists elsewhere is necessarily that small... but I am suggesting that it is not that inconceivable that we *are* alone.
Actually, if you are willing to some mathematical speculation, it gets even more depressing.
If the rarity of intelligent life is rare enough, we might actually be entirely alone. Take the busy beaver function for example... it is known that the busy beaver function rises so much faster than any computable function such that one need go no further than BB(25) to get to a number larger than Grahams Number, and given that there could be as many as 26 dimensions, even Grahams number may be vastly smaller than the number of distinct types of states that the universe could represent. So if the chance of life forming was something like 1/BB(26), it may be just a sheer fluke out of absolutely astronomically odds that we are even here at all.
Of course, the chance of life forming may be much larger than this... we just don't know, and as you suggest, we may never know... But really, it's not entirely unthinkable that we are alone in the universe as well.
The universe's behavior is, for all intents and purposes, non-deterministic in the sense that any ability one may allegedly have to accurate predict the outcome of some state of the even a very tiny subset of the universe given all all available input cannot actually be observed.
Proof:
Assume that a black box could exist that can predict the outcome of a particular experiment wherein the output of black box is read as input. If this cannot be done, then any so-called deterministic nature to the universe is irrelevant, because you can't assume that any particular predicted outcome is necessarily what will actually happen.
The experiment is designed as follows: A mechanism has two levers, one on the right and one on the left, and is designed to read the output of the black box, and activate the lever that the black box indicates. The left lever of the mechanism outputs "right" while the right lever out outputs "left". The black box simply has to produce as output whatever the mechanism ultimately will. However, similar to the halting problem, this creates a paradox, as you can see that despite the entirely deterministic nature of the experiment, the black box cannot be used to predict its outcome.
Therefore, either the universe is non-deterministic, or else it is non-deterministic for all practical purposes, since any so-called prediction can only be as accurate insomuch as that information is never actually observed in the present. I personally subscribe to the former position because I believe it is the simpler situation, but even if the latter were true, it is entirely irrelevant to reality.
And if you can't predict the outcome of a random number generator, even if you know absolutely everything about it, what is the difference between that and truly random?
It doesn't help matters that the edit box in which one creates such posts will happily accept such characters as input and display them appropriately there.
I can only assume you are being deliberately ironic, since you, yourself, are asking this question without an account attached to it
You are still forcing the developer to conform to a single pattern for playing any kind of video, and as the number of useful ways that a computer could be programmed to plausibly do that is not bounded, it is an arbitrary limitation that can only stifle innovation.
The first step, of course, is to disable all html5 video autoplay capabability... I'm completely on board with you on that one, but since you can programatically bypass this by starting the video from jajvascript, where a programmer could do literally anything, it is only a first step, and the remaining steps may not fully lead to where you want to be.
The most you might be able to do is make sure that no video playing through a standard api ever gets launched by inline javascript code in the web page, by a method invoked through the window's onload event, or by a timer event that was scheduled by either of the two unless there was at least one UI gesture event on the stack as well, regardless of what the UI event is.
Anything more and you'll just end up arbitrarily limiting what developers are allowed to do, and essentially preemptively censoring any potentially innovative ideas that may come in the future.
While fonts themselves can be copyrighted, the typeface itself that is rendered by a font cannot be. So it is, in fact, entirely possible to create a lookalike font to a copyrighted font without infringing on the copyright on the latter as long as the lookalike font itself was not actually copied from the the copyrighted font.
In general (but not always), this means that the lookalike font was created from samples of text that use the original font, specifically text that only a utilizes a subset of the font, and a font designer would apply the patterns used in the characters within that sample to extrapolate the design of the remaining characters. Often, the end result can be virtually indistinguishable to almost anyone visually unless one knows exactly what to look for, and in exactly which glyphs. An excellent example of just how similar typefaces can be without infringing on copyright is to compare the typefaces Helvetica, Grotesque, and Arial.
In the case of something like a logo, the number of character samples can be often small enough that no differences will be detectable to the human eye at all.
If returns are at the seller's expense, then I would expect the seller to charge more for any products that they determine is more likely to be returned so that the extra profit on the unreturned products can subsidized the expense the seller must bear for returned products. This might make it less likely that they move the product in the first place, but there's a fine line that the seller is going to have to try and balance, and if they cannot sell an item profitably because of the number of returns, then they are reasonably left with no choice but to discontinue that product (which is actually in the best interests of the customer as well, since it does not waste the customer's time with products they are going to have to return)
It's a pretty safe bet that using a gun as a defense against aliens that have the technology to reach us is going to be approximately as effective as trying to blow out a multi-acre wildfire with your breath..
The biggest problem with it being that they're going to get all kinds of hopelessly unqualified applicants, which will create more work for HR to weed those ones out quickly.
I mentioned Turing completeness because it best describes why the number of different possible ways that a program might potentially receive such an input from an end user is not bounded, and so any restrictions you impose upon it such as requiring specific UI gestures to activate videos could very easily wind up hampering innovation as well.
Fundamentally, it's not an entirely dissimilar attitude from those of certain politicians that would suggest that no "normal person" would ever want to use end-to-end encryption as a justification for disallowing it.
Speaking my own personal experience, and the people that I've seen get elected in the places that I've lived, it is entirely possible for an honest person to become a politician... but it is, regrettably, quite rare... and rarer still for people to recognize it before they vote. I can only attest to having seen it for sure one time in the 45 years since I've been old enough to vote.
Even if that position were true, it is irrelevant... since everyone, and I mean *EVERYONE*, including Ms Rudd, has something to hide.
But having something to hide does not mean that there is anything wrong, it can be simply because they simply want something to be private.
I mean, most people wear clothes when they are socializing with others. Is there something wrong with people's bodies that they need to keep them covered up? (There very well be for some, but this is beside the point). I am, of course, being rhetorical... people generally keep their privates covered up when they are in public because they are just that: private.
So to suggest that real people don't need end-to-end encryption is saying that real people don't really need any privacy. I'd like to see what she'd have to say if she were made aware that by extension, she should be required to never wear any clothes anymore.... unless she contends that she herself is not a real person.
So you propose to lock every developer into this allegedly "standard" UI gesture, preventing any and all possible attempts that programers might make to innovate. I came up with what might have been a plausible example, and you challenge the entire notion by suggesting that basically no reasonable person would ever have a reasonb want to do that... without justification, I might add. If your imagination is really so poor as to be incapable of thinking outside of some preconceived box, or to imagine that there are ideas to be discovered in the future that have not yet been conceived, it's unsuprising that you would expect all programmers to conform to your box as well.
I mean, why bother having a Turing complete language at all if you are just going to end up restricting what the developer is allowed to do?
link
Ms. Rudd should be called out quite clearly for employing such blatant logical fallacy.
How does safari define "autoplay"? If the web page contains js code that tries to play a video, does it block it? If so, what if this js code was being invoked in an event-handler, in response to clicking on a custom js video player widget's "play" button? How can safari tell the difference between a video playing that the user wanted to watch vs one that they didn't intend on?
Or does the user have to then whitelist every website that uses custom js video players?
Then you would be forcing absolutely anything that wanted to play videos into using that gesture... disallowing any kind of custom controls. That's too restrictive. What if the video was simply a cut-scene in a game that the person was playing on the website? Should the user be forced to use this "standard" gesture every time the game is playing some video?
I can appreciate the intent in your suggestion, but in the end, I believe it is simply too restrictive, and pushes programmers into a corner by telling them that they aren't allowed to innovate in this one particular area because anything that you haven't foreseen when imposing this notion would be disallowed.
Auto-play is annoying, but it may not be possible to entirely prevent without also turning off all javascript that runs when the page is loaded as well, since the play functionality could be activated under program control, and if you simply disallowed that as well, then even when a user *tries* to play a video and clicks an on-screen button to start it, the js code that would otherwise start the video playing would not be able to do so.
I'd personally settle for simply not allowing any videos to play at all if they are not entirely inside of the currently visible browser window, or are in any other tab than the current one.
As a minor addendum of a more personal note, if one will forgive the brief OT comment, while I could say that I am deeply flattered that one or more people that reply as AC's to virtually every single one of my posts on any story here in the past few weeks are apparently so interested in everything that I have to say that they don't miss a single comment I make here, I would rather that his/her/their comments be more relevant to what I was saying or the subject at hand instead of repeating the same non-sequiturs every time. That is all.
I would think that if you truly care about photography, then you own a dedicated camera.
You can buy a dedicated camera for maybe half the price of the latest iPhone that totally blows the camera functions of the iPhone away.
You just can't typically get the cost of a dedicated camera subsidized by the provider of your cell phone plan.
Actually, you're right.... I never thought about it before, but yes. As someone else suggested, maybe I'm outside the normal curve for what sort of things can distract me.
I can attest to the fact that I can very easily be distracted from concentration by screaming children, however, or when a large truck goes by the building where I work and seems to causes the whole floor to shake, so my concentration is not infallible.