I actually like the name LibreOffice more than OpenOffice.
I like how the LibreOffice name lets them dispense with insisting that the program is technically named OpenOffice.org, even though no one calls it that, as a trademark circumvention. I can appreciate the problem they had, but naming the program after its own website is just silly.
True; I should have said IDLE, the windowed IDE, which will render it in all cases as far as I know. I was trying to sidestep the "need a browser that supports the characters" in the GP post. (Also, I believe the code snippet I posted requires Python 3.0 or later.)
"And God was like 'Moses, dude, you totally need to kill your son.' And Moses was all "WTF?" but then he goes "Meh, F it." So God's all "LOL, dude you were totally gonna do it. I pranked you good!'"
You know how, even though only a tiny fraction of a percent of people actually respond to spam by buying the product, sending the spam is so cheap that it's still profitable to do so? I always assumed that the incomprehensible leetspeak just tacks on another factor of 0.1 or so but the resulting sales still justify the spamming. Or at least that's what the spammers think; who knows whether they're being economically rational.
I was thinking about TrueCrypt too, and wondering if its plausible deniability could backfire under these sorts of laws. Part of its strategy is that its ciphertexts have no headers; they're indistinguishable from a random stream of bytes. But suppose I type
$ head/dev/urandom -c 1048576 > allmysecrets.tc
I've effectively just created a TrueCrypt archive with no password. Good news if you want to throw out some chaff to waste attackers' resources; bad news if the police demand you hand over a nonexistent password. (And yes, it would be stupid to carry a fake archive around on your hard drive for no reason, but there are legitimate ways you could have this problem. Like the chaff tactic I mentioned earlier, or maybe you were testing the PRNG. Or maybe you have a file with only some random noise that the police somehow conclude must contain a steganographic TrueCrypt archive.)
I wonder, before they convicted this kid, did they have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a password existed and he knew it? If he simply claimed to have forgotten it, I can't imagine how they could produce actual evidence to the contrary.
If the universe is not Turing complete, could you please explain how the universe can run my Laptop on it's substrate?
My computer is Turing complete. My computer exists in this universe. No system that is not Turing complete can simulate one that is.
Correct, but the question of the AC above was "Is the universe equivalent to a Turing machine?" Your argument merely shows that the universe is greater than or equal to a Turing machine. If the behavior of a Turing machine is insufficient to model the universe—and quantum mechanics suggests that it is—then you wouldn't really say that the universe is "equivalent" to a Turing machine.
As a side note, I expect that a quantum-mechanical universe could be modeled by a Turing machine if the nondeterminism that we observe at the quantum level turned out to be deterministic but highly chaotic—that is, the Turing machine uses a really good PRNG. (I've often wondered about that nondeterminism-versus-chaos question and I imagine that real scientists must have tried to tackle it. Anyone want to spare me some Googling and fill me in?)
A bonus of keeping LibreOffice will be that they can stop the nonsense with ".org" in the name. There was some sort of trademark problem* with just "OpenOffice", even though that's what everyone calls it. As a workaround, they named the software suite after its own website?
* That is, even before the Oracle/community split, which is causing a further dispute over the OpenOffice.org name.
No, it's not a humorous article, given that it's exactly how mainstream science reporting looks like.
It is still humorous. As the saying goes, it's funny because it's true. (And if you think the situation is too dismal to be funny, that just makes it black humor.)
Of course if your encryption software writes some kind of header - which wouldn't affect the security of the encrypted contents - then it will be obvious to anyone looking that you have an encrypted container. So this is 99% about implementation and 1% about encryption algorithms.
TrueCrypt implements a headerless encryption protocol for just this reason. Its ciphertext files should be indistinguishable from a sequence of random bytes. So all you have to do is hide those bytes steganographically, or have a plausible excuse for sending/storing a bunch of random bytes.
The customer is NOT allowed to take advantage of the global market by "outsourcing" THEIR suppliers of media by ordering from a different, cheaper region.
And if you've ever bought used textbooks on the Internet, you'll probably quickly discover what a sweet discount you can get when the global market stays global for you. I've bought plenty of (English-language) textbooks that were originally sold to the Indian subcontinent; they're exactly the same between the covers as the American editions but priced quite differently, and you can often save some good money. (Competitive pricing keeps the prices all pretty much the same, but the foreign editions are often the cheapest, sometimes by as much as $10-$20. And I'd have to guess that they pull down the prices of the other editions.)
The catch is that there's a small but visible red box announcing that the book was for such-and-such countries and that any sale outside those countries is "UNAUTHORIZED"—which is true, but it refers to the publishers' contracts with their own retailers. They indeed do not authorize secondhand sale to the U.S., but that doesn't make it the least bit illegal or unethical. (They also don't authorize me to scribble in the margin or dip the book in peanut butter or whatever, but who's asking their permission? After the publisher sells the book to a contract-bound vendor, who sells it to a private citizen, the publisher's power to authorize anything is null.) But they sure as hell don't mind letting some Westerner assume that they'd be buying stolen property, so they're no clearer than they need to be about whether such an "UNAUTHORIZED" sale is actually dishonest.
The parent poster is absolutely right about what the region codes do: divide the market into pieces where each one can be charged a different price, while keeping the pieces from trading with each other and benefiting from a free secondary market as I did with my books. To criminalize breaking the codes has no purpose other than to help publishers make more money in a sickeningly anti-capitalistic way. Good for whoever cracked the codes: they've done something for the little guy and his ability to buy and sell his own property like a capitalist. (And perhaps you thought that "capitalist" always meant "pro-corporation"...)
A researcher has calculated the 2,000,000,000,000,000th digit of pi [...] the digit – when expressed in binary – is 0.
"Digit" without qualification usually means decimal digit. So presumably, he found the two quadrillionth decimal digit, which, in binary, is 0. Let me just convert that to decimal...
Do you think a lot of people are going to say that they support something that was just described to them as "ultraviolent" and "sexually violent"?
I'm especially interested in this term "ultraviolent". What is supposed to distinguish ultraviolence from regular violence anyway? It seems pretty obvious that people are subliminally extrapolating from the word ultraviolet and don't realize how dumb they sound.
Ultraviolence: violence that is even violenter than the violentest violence that can by seen by the human eye.
I recommend checking out the website of Musopen, the parent project, where they host all their existing public-domain performances. (As TFS says, they're currently working on recording symphonies; they already have many smaller-scale pieces like concertos and sonatas.) In particular, I'm really liking their streaming radio. You want an Internet radio station (1) to have access to a large selection of good music and (2) not to have excessive ads, a subscription fee, or some ridiculous DRM or custom client software. Every Internet radio station I've tried fails on at least one of these criteria: the amateur ones on #1 and commercial on #2 (and often #1 also). But all big library of uncopyrighted music seems to allow Musopen to achieve both. As long as you like classical music, it's basically perfect.
First off, I agree that music played (competently) on real instruments is going to be better than synthesized music, in all but a few very exceptional cases.
However—and stop me if I'm being naive—isn't it much cheaper and faster to arrange a MIDI "performance" of a given piece than to record a live one, and wouldn't it be good to exploit that to make public-domain music available where a live recording is infeasible? A comprehensive public-domain library of classical music, even in the form of inferior synthetic renderings, would be of great value. If it's possible for one guy with a computer and some sheet music to contribute to such a thing (and that's a legitimate "if"; I'm not a musician and I'm just guessing about how hard it would be), don't we want that while we're waiting for really good public-domain recordings?
There's already a torrent on The Pirate Bay with all of their existing work, sonatas and concertos mostly. (Despite being on TPB, it's obviously legal assuming the provenance is true.) The webpage lists 0 seeders, but I'm downloading it right now and it's got 97% availability; only a few files are missing pieces, and those could be replaced by downloading them from the website. In fact, if enough people do so and seed them long enough, the torrent could become self-sustaining. A nice way to help the project*, although kicking in a few bucks as the parent suggested would obviously be even better.
* This is assuming that they would want people downloading the torrent, which is unofficial but quite consistent with the project's stated purpose. Perhaps they would prefer that people go to their website instead? I don't know. If in doubt, donate some money.
There is no way to "create" a work into the public domain.
I call bullshit. This is the first time EVER (seriously) I've read anything like that and I think I know quite a lot about IP and licensing.
Do you know of any US law that forbids the author from WAIVING his/her copyrights? What happens after he/she waives the rights? The work should be instantly in the public domain! Refute my arguments, please.
There's no law saying you can't waive your own copyright, but it's an open question of interpretation whether you can or not. Read about it here. (Summary: If Alice says she waives her copyright on something and Bob uses it, the law may or may not protect Bob if Alice turns around and sues him anyway. To use an extreme analogy, it's impossible to give legally valid permission for someone else to murder you. Another part of the problem, apparently, is that the "public domain" isn't a legally recognized entity; it's just the term we use to describe absence of copyright. The law places copyright on your work automatically and it might be impossible, as with the murder example, for your declaration to stop the law from doing so.)
Hence, so-called "public domain–equivalent licensing" is used as a workaround. You can see this in the Wikipedia template that users use to place their own photos and such into the public domain: "I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In case this is not legally possible, I grant any entity the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law." Creative Commons also has two lengthierdocuments meant to achieve essentially the same thing, although their Attribution license is nearly equivalent in practice.
...the messages contain a link to a site that will download a malicious file to the victim's PC.
Shouldn't it be that the site uploads a file to the PC, while the PC (or the worm itself) downloads it? I know the distinction is lost on the vast majority of users these days—which is a shame, since the concepts of "sending" and "receiving" are important enough to distinguish—but c'mon, this is Slashdot.
But it's a bit of a mystery to me why they have grown so much in the US. A meal is bought as a unit, like toothpaste. That toothpaste tubes get imperceptibly smaller and smaller I can understand, it makes perverse business sense. But why do serving sizes go the other way?
Food is really cheap in the industrialized world. The relatively expensive part of producing a fast food meal to sell is the labor. So if you're already paying for a human being to take the order and prepare the food, not to mention the infrastructure and overhead of the business, it costs only a pittance to increase the serving size. And by spending a few extra cents that way, you can offer a more attractive deal than your competitors and/or justify a price increase of a dollar or two. So it's no wonder these restaurants pile on as much food as their customers will eat.
This is just my understanding; I could be wrong or missing something.
Skype uses a closed, secret protocol. It may or may not be properly encrypted. There may or may not be intentional backdoors.
Furthermore, even if it is properly encrypted and there are no intentional backdoors, it is unlikely that the implementation is as secure against side-channel attacks as peer-reviewed software would be. In principle, no small, closed team of coders should be expected to be clever enough to catch every possible bug or weakness. Security through obscurity and all that.
(And just because the last two Slashdot threads I read on the subject had commenters who misunderstood "security through obscurity", let me just head it off now: keeping a password or key secret is not security through obscurity. "No obscurity" means keeping nothing secret except the key—that is, the algorithms, protocols, and source code are all disclosed.)
The act becomes retroactively illegal based on subsequent illegal acts--or plans to commit illegal acts--which is just stupid.
It makes more sense if you understand the concept of mens rea. The act does not become illegal retroactively as you say; it is illegal or not, at the time you make the recording, based on your state of mind at that same time. In other words, you're guilty if and only if you're thinking to do harm, which is actually pretty universal in criminal law (setting aside criminal negligence and "victimless crimes"). IANAL.
About half of that is the brain, which comes down to 25 million bytes, or a million lines of code.
I'm not even sure what to say about this statement
I assume that you're reacting to the ridiculous assumption that bits of genome-encoded data translate into ASCII bytes of textual computer source code. But it's especially bad that he's not even applying math to those ridiculous assumptions correctly. (Pardon the redundancy, since many other commenters who know more about biology than I do have torn Kurzweil's reasoning more than adequately to shreds, but I think I'll dig into the purely mathematical idiocy here, since I'm somewhat qualified to comment on it.) He's dividing by 25 at entirely the wrong time: the 25 million bytes is the estimated output of a lossless compression algorithm, so he seems to think that every line of source code is made of about 25 bytes of compressed binary data rather than, say, source code. Twenty-five characters per source line may be a reasonable estimate—if fit only for the back of an envelope—but to model lossless compression that way is just plain naive, since it depends on redundancy between lines of code and can't be reduced to a constant multiplier that applies well to all situations. And if it could, 25 would be too big.
To show what I mean, the.tar.bz2 archive containing the latest stable release of the Linux kernel is about 70 million bytes (two significant digits). Applying Kurzweil's approach, you can divide that number by 25 to estimate that it contains about 2.8 million lines of source code. Wikipedia tells me that it's more like 12.6 million. So the brain must contain vastly more information than Kurzweil is concluding, and almost certainly not even by as small a factor as in my Linux example.
Naturally, I couldn't even glance at this headline without thinking of Bruce Schneier. He has written a post on his blog disclaiming responsibility. On the other hand, if there's anyone at all who can hunt down the perpetrators... this will easily be the most epic cyber-battle ever!
(From the "don't explain the joke" department: Schneier is a well-respected and, some say, godlike security expert. He has a tradition or running joke of "Friday Squid Blogging" where he posts something squid-related every Friday. I couldn't turn up an explanation of it, but I assume it's because he likes squids.)
Slashdot Mirror
I actually like the name LibreOffice more than OpenOffice.
I like how the LibreOffice name lets them dispense with insisting that the program is technically named OpenOffice.org, even though no one calls it that, as a trademark circumvention. I can appreciate the problem they had, but naming the program after its own website is just silly.
True; I should have said IDLE, the windowed IDE, which will render it in all cases as far as I know. I was trying to sidestep the "need a browser that supports the characters" in the GP post. (Also, I believe the code snippet I posted requires Python 3.0 or later.)
'\u002e\u0627\u06cc\u0631\u0627\u0646'
I really don't want to read the new version:
"And God was like 'Moses, dude, you totally need to kill your son.' And Moses was all "WTF?" but then he goes "Meh, F it." So God's all "LOL, dude you were totally gonna do it. I pranked you good!'"
That actually exists. (Okay, not really, but it's sort of the same idea.)
You know how, even though only a tiny fraction of a percent of people actually respond to spam by buying the product, sending the spam is so cheap that it's still profitable to do so? I always assumed that the incomprehensible leetspeak just tacks on another factor of 0.1 or so but the resulting sales still justify the spamming. Or at least that's what the spammers think; who knows whether they're being economically rational.
I was thinking about TrueCrypt too, and wondering if its plausible deniability could backfire under these sorts of laws. Part of its strategy is that its ciphertexts have no headers; they're indistinguishable from a random stream of bytes. But suppose I type
$ head /dev/urandom -c 1048576 > allmysecrets.tc
I've effectively just created a TrueCrypt archive with no password. Good news if you want to throw out some chaff to waste attackers' resources; bad news if the police demand you hand over a nonexistent password. (And yes, it would be stupid to carry a fake archive around on your hard drive for no reason, but there are legitimate ways you could have this problem. Like the chaff tactic I mentioned earlier, or maybe you were testing the PRNG. Or maybe you have a file with only some random noise that the police somehow conclude must contain a steganographic TrueCrypt archive.)
I wonder, before they convicted this kid, did they have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a password existed and he knew it? If he simply claimed to have forgotten it, I can't imagine how they could produce actual evidence to the contrary.
If the universe is not Turing complete, could you please explain how the universe can run my Laptop on it's substrate?
My computer is Turing complete. My computer exists in this universe. No system that is not Turing complete can simulate one that is.
Correct, but the question of the AC above was "Is the universe equivalent to a Turing machine?" Your argument merely shows that the universe is greater than or equal to a Turing machine. If the behavior of a Turing machine is insufficient to model the universe—and quantum mechanics suggests that it is—then you wouldn't really say that the universe is "equivalent" to a Turing machine.
As a side note, I expect that a quantum-mechanical universe could be modeled by a Turing machine if the nondeterminism that we observe at the quantum level turned out to be deterministic but highly chaotic—that is, the Turing machine uses a really good PRNG. (I've often wondered about that nondeterminism-versus-chaos question and I imagine that real scientists must have tried to tackle it. Anyone want to spare me some Googling and fill me in?)
A bonus of keeping LibreOffice will be that they can stop the nonsense with ".org" in the name. There was some sort of trademark problem* with just "OpenOffice", even though that's what everyone calls it. As a workaround, they named the software suite after its own website?
* That is, even before the Oracle/community split, which is causing a further dispute over the OpenOffice.org name.
No, it's not a humorous article, given that it's exactly how mainstream science reporting looks like.
It is still humorous. As the saying goes, it's funny because it's true. (And if you think the situation is too dismal to be funny, that just makes it black humor.)
Of course if your encryption software writes some kind of header - which wouldn't affect the security of the encrypted contents - then it will be obvious to anyone looking that you have an encrypted container. So this is 99% about implementation and 1% about encryption algorithms.
TrueCrypt implements a headerless encryption protocol for just this reason. Its ciphertext files should be indistinguishable from a sequence of random bytes. So all you have to do is hide those bytes steganographically, or have a plausible excuse for sending/storing a bunch of random bytes.
The customer is NOT allowed to take advantage of the global market by "outsourcing" THEIR suppliers of media by ordering from a different, cheaper region.
And if you've ever bought used textbooks on the Internet, you'll probably quickly discover what a sweet discount you can get when the global market stays global for you. I've bought plenty of (English-language) textbooks that were originally sold to the Indian subcontinent; they're exactly the same between the covers as the American editions but priced quite differently, and you can often save some good money. (Competitive pricing keeps the prices all pretty much the same, but the foreign editions are often the cheapest, sometimes by as much as $10-$20. And I'd have to guess that they pull down the prices of the other editions.)
The catch is that there's a small but visible red box announcing that the book was for such-and-such countries and that any sale outside those countries is "UNAUTHORIZED"—which is true, but it refers to the publishers' contracts with their own retailers. They indeed do not authorize secondhand sale to the U.S., but that doesn't make it the least bit illegal or unethical. (They also don't authorize me to scribble in the margin or dip the book in peanut butter or whatever, but who's asking their permission? After the publisher sells the book to a contract-bound vendor, who sells it to a private citizen, the publisher's power to authorize anything is null.) But they sure as hell don't mind letting some Westerner assume that they'd be buying stolen property, so they're no clearer than they need to be about whether such an "UNAUTHORIZED" sale is actually dishonest.
The parent poster is absolutely right about what the region codes do: divide the market into pieces where each one can be charged a different price, while keeping the pieces from trading with each other and benefiting from a free secondary market as I did with my books. To criminalize breaking the codes has no purpose other than to help publishers make more money in a sickeningly anti-capitalistic way. Good for whoever cracked the codes: they've done something for the little guy and his ability to buy and sell his own property like a capitalist. (And perhaps you thought that "capitalist" always meant "pro-corporation"...)
Agreed. Let's look at the exact phrasing.
A researcher has calculated the 2,000,000,000,000,000th digit of pi [...] the digit – when expressed in binary – is 0.
"Digit" without qualification usually means decimal digit. So presumably, he found the two quadrillionth decimal digit, which, in binary, is 0. Let me just convert that to decimal...
*uses calculator*
Apparently that's equivalent to 0.
Do you think a lot of people are going to say that they support something that was just described to them as "ultraviolent" and "sexually violent"?
I'm especially interested in this term "ultraviolent". What is supposed to distinguish ultraviolence from regular violence anyway? It seems pretty obvious that people are subliminally extrapolating from the word ultraviolet and don't realize how dumb they sound.
Ultraviolence: violence that is even violenter than the violentest violence that can by seen by the human eye.
I recommend checking out the website of Musopen, the parent project, where they host all their existing public-domain performances. (As TFS says, they're currently working on recording symphonies; they already have many smaller-scale pieces like concertos and sonatas.) In particular, I'm really liking their streaming radio. You want an Internet radio station (1) to have access to a large selection of good music and (2) not to have excessive ads, a subscription fee, or some ridiculous DRM or custom client software. Every Internet radio station I've tried fails on at least one of these criteria: the amateur ones on #1 and commercial on #2 (and often #1 also). But all big library of uncopyrighted music seems to allow Musopen to achieve both. As long as you like classical music, it's basically perfect.
First off, I agree that music played (competently) on real instruments is going to be better than synthesized music, in all but a few very exceptional cases.
However—and stop me if I'm being naive—isn't it much cheaper and faster to arrange a MIDI "performance" of a given piece than to record a live one, and wouldn't it be good to exploit that to make public-domain music available where a live recording is infeasible? A comprehensive public-domain library of classical music, even in the form of inferior synthetic renderings, would be of great value. If it's possible for one guy with a computer and some sheet music to contribute to such a thing (and that's a legitimate "if"; I'm not a musician and I'm just guessing about how hard it would be), don't we want that while we're waiting for really good public-domain recordings?
There's already a torrent on The Pirate Bay with all of their existing work, sonatas and concertos mostly. (Despite being on TPB, it's obviously legal assuming the provenance is true.) The webpage lists 0 seeders, but I'm downloading it right now and it's got 97% availability; only a few files are missing pieces, and those could be replaced by downloading them from the website. In fact, if enough people do so and seed them long enough, the torrent could become self-sustaining. A nice way to help the project*, although kicking in a few bucks as the parent suggested would obviously be even better.
* This is assuming that they would want people downloading the torrent, which is unofficial but quite consistent with the project's stated purpose. Perhaps they would prefer that people go to their website instead? I don't know. If in doubt, donate some money.
I'M BLIND!
Seriously, that site amazes me on multiple levels. Did you see this at the bottom?
Best viewed with Microsoft Internet Explorer. Forget all the other browsers and down with the Web 2.0 net police.
It's as though they can't shut off their irrationally idiocentric attitude in any facet of life.
There is no way to "create" a work into the public domain.
I call bullshit. This is the first time EVER (seriously) I've read anything like that and I think I know quite a lot about IP and licensing.
Do you know of any US law that forbids the author from WAIVING his/her copyrights? What happens after he/she waives the rights? The work should be instantly in the public domain! Refute my arguments, please.
There's no law saying you can't waive your own copyright, but it's an open question of interpretation whether you can or not. Read about it here. (Summary: If Alice says she waives her copyright on something and Bob uses it, the law may or may not protect Bob if Alice turns around and sues him anyway. To use an extreme analogy, it's impossible to give legally valid permission for someone else to murder you. Another part of the problem, apparently, is that the "public domain" isn't a legally recognized entity; it's just the term we use to describe absence of copyright. The law places copyright on your work automatically and it might be impossible, as with the murder example, for your declaration to stop the law from doing so.)
Hence, so-called "public domain–equivalent licensing" is used as a workaround. You can see this in the Wikipedia template that users use to place their own photos and such into the public domain: "I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In case this is not legally possible, I grant any entity the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law." Creative Commons also has two lengthier documents meant to achieve essentially the same thing, although their Attribution license is nearly equivalent in practice.
...the messages contain a link to a site that will download a malicious file to the victim's PC.
Shouldn't it be that the site uploads a file to the PC, while the PC (or the worm itself) downloads it? I know the distinction is lost on the vast majority of users these days—which is a shame, since the concepts of "sending" and "receiving" are important enough to distinguish—but c'mon, this is Slashdot.
But it's a bit of a mystery to me why they have grown so much in the US. A meal is bought as a unit, like toothpaste. That toothpaste tubes get imperceptibly smaller and smaller I can understand, it makes perverse business sense. But why do serving sizes go the other way?
Food is really cheap in the industrialized world. The relatively expensive part of producing a fast food meal to sell is the labor. So if you're already paying for a human being to take the order and prepare the food, not to mention the infrastructure and overhead of the business, it costs only a pittance to increase the serving size. And by spending a few extra cents that way, you can offer a more attractive deal than your competitors and/or justify a price increase of a dollar or two. So it's no wonder these restaurants pile on as much food as their customers will eat.
This is just my understanding; I could be wrong or missing something.
Musicians making money from performing music to live audiences. You know, the way they did for thousands of years (figuratively speaking).
It's okay, money and music have both existed for more than 2,000 years—you're safe from the grammar Nazis if you use the word "literally" here!
Skype uses a closed, secret protocol. It may or may not be properly encrypted. There may or may not be intentional backdoors.
Furthermore, even if it is properly encrypted and there are no intentional backdoors, it is unlikely that the implementation is as secure against side-channel attacks as peer-reviewed software would be. In principle, no small, closed team of coders should be expected to be clever enough to catch every possible bug or weakness. Security through obscurity and all that.
(And just because the last two Slashdot threads I read on the subject had commenters who misunderstood "security through obscurity", let me just head it off now: keeping a password or key secret is not security through obscurity. "No obscurity" means keeping nothing secret except the key—that is, the algorithms, protocols, and source code are all disclosed.)
The act becomes retroactively illegal based on subsequent illegal acts--or plans to commit illegal acts--which is just stupid.
It makes more sense if you understand the concept of mens rea. The act does not become illegal retroactively as you say; it is illegal or not, at the time you make the recording, based on your state of mind at that same time. In other words, you're guilty if and only if you're thinking to do harm, which is actually pretty universal in criminal law (setting aside criminal negligence and "victimless crimes"). IANAL.
I'm not even sure what to say about this statement
I assume that you're reacting to the ridiculous assumption that bits of genome-encoded data translate into ASCII bytes of textual computer source code. But it's especially bad that he's not even applying math to those ridiculous assumptions correctly. (Pardon the redundancy, since many other commenters who know more about biology than I do have torn Kurzweil's reasoning more than adequately to shreds, but I think I'll dig into the purely mathematical idiocy here, since I'm somewhat qualified to comment on it.) He's dividing by 25 at entirely the wrong time: the 25 million bytes is the estimated output of a lossless compression algorithm, so he seems to think that every line of source code is made of about 25 bytes of compressed binary data rather than, say, source code. Twenty-five characters per source line may be a reasonable estimate—if fit only for the back of an envelope—but to model lossless compression that way is just plain naive, since it depends on redundancy between lines of code and can't be reduced to a constant multiplier that applies well to all situations. And if it could, 25 would be too big.
To show what I mean, the .tar.bz2 archive containing the latest stable release of the Linux kernel is about 70 million bytes (two significant digits). Applying Kurzweil's approach, you can divide that number by 25 to estimate that it contains about 2.8 million lines of source code. Wikipedia tells me that it's more like 12.6 million. So the brain must contain vastly more information than Kurzweil is concluding, and almost certainly not even by as small a factor as in my Linux example.
Naturally, I couldn't even glance at this headline without thinking of Bruce Schneier. He has written a post on his blog disclaiming responsibility. On the other hand, if there's anyone at all who can hunt down the perpetrators... this will easily be the most epic cyber-battle ever!
(From the "don't explain the joke" department: Schneier is a well-respected and, some say, godlike security expert. He has a tradition or running joke of "Friday Squid Blogging" where he posts something squid-related every Friday. I couldn't turn up an explanation of it, but I assume it's because he likes squids.)