I sunk 4 years into vanilla Nethack before I finally ascended. Don't think I have it in me to take on many variants...which are needed because Nethack wasn't complex enough already?
What will it take before patent laws are thrown out the window and replaced with something sane?
We're at 40 years of the War on Drug Users and counting. There's literally nothing so egregious that the American people will not stand for it. Expect to see patent and copyright infringement become criminal acts in the next decade or two. Copyright infringement is halfway there already.
It's not just streaming. OTA digital TV is compressed to hell. Any time you see wind blown grass or rough seas on OTA digital you get all sorts of macroblocking. Even at HD resolutions, it looks worse than analog SD TV.
Indeed. This is like buying fire insurance for your home, and then getting drunk and doing poi in your living room with liquor bottles stacked on every wall. Insurance shouldn't be license for negligence.
Unauthorized access to a computer system is a much more serious offense than copyright violation. There are good arguments that copyright itself is unethical and counterproductive, but none to suggest that unauthorized computer access is.
We're too busy hating Obama and his Justice Department for failing to prosecute those responsible for the financial crisis. Cisco is barely worth mentioning in comparison to those crimes.
At this point, no one on the left has any love left for Obama. He's proven himself to be a corporatist through and through.
How can a 0.00003 and 0.07000 have different significant digits if they are not represented in a computer memory?
It's a convention that roughly estimates precision. If you measure a quantity, say 0.00003 grams, how precise is that? The actual value could be anywhere from.000025 to.0000349999, or.00003 +/- 16%
Consider.07000 on the other hand. You know that the actual value is between.069995 and.0700049999. That's.07000 +/-.007%. Much more precise.
This is counter intuitive because they are both expressed to the same number of decimal places. Turns out that sig figs work better in calculations. What if you multiply.07000 *.00003? You get 0.0000021. That's seven decimal places. Obviously you can't increase the precision of your measurements by doing math with them.
But try plugging in the range of actual values I mentioned above. We could be looking at.069995 *.000025 OR.070004999 *.0000349999. So the actual product could be anywhere between 0.000001749875000 and 0.000002450175000. If we follow the sig fig rules, the product has the same number of sig figs as the least precise multiplicand..00003 only has one sig fig, so both of those products round to.000002.
That's 3 paragraphs, not 3 sentences. But I hope that helps explain how sig figs work.
I only have so much time for TV. No matter what service I choose I'm not watching more than 2 hours a night, more like 1 hour on average. I might watch a slightly better program with that time, but I wouldn't feel good paying more for it if I was happy with what I had before.
Increasing the selection should bring in a wider range of viewers. More viewers means more revenue to pay for the increased license fees. Why should existing viewers have to offset increased license fees then?
How do you think they're going to get licensing for more movies (especially new releases) without raising more money to pay increased licensing fees?
By paying license fees per view, and not per program. If netflix expands their selection, I'm not watching any more than I ever did. What sense does it make for me to pay more to have access to programs I don't watch?
An end user, who has only the programmed FPGA, can't do anything with this attack.
If I understand correctly, the end user isn't threatened by this attack either then. The only thing the end user has to worry about is potentially getting a cloned device.
Um, yes, absolutely. In fact, significant digits are more applicable in physical science than computer science. Sig figs exist to help us estimate the precision of a measurement, and carry that precision through a calculation. Students should be familiar with sig figs around the time they're asked to calculate simple quantities like density. That's around middle school.
In comp sci, I'm not sure when you'd want to use sig figs. Digital data is usually absolutely precise. There's no error when measuring the length of a string for instance. The only time you need to get into sig figs is if you're digitizing an analog data source. That's not something every programmer needs to do.
Is this the good kind of security breach, which enables end users to do new things with their FPGAs? Or the bad kind, that enables attackers to do malicious things with others FPGAs? Or both?
For the most part, the military wouldn't really have to contribute back to open source. The GPL only requires distribution of source if the binary is distributed. However for the purposes of distribution an organization is considered one entity. So if an organization (such as the military) chose to create a derivative work of some open source software purely for internal use, they wouldn't have to give anyone the source. I would imagine that most military developed software would be for internal use only.
OTOH, the military has in fact contributed to open source in the past. The DoD supported projects like OpenBSD for a long time. It would be nice to see more of that.
No, but it does mean you have certain exclusive rights for a period of time, even more rights than the actual owner. If you rent an apartment, and the landlord leaves cameras around the place he's breaking the law. He doesn't have the right to enter your home, even if he technically owns it. Renting a laptop should be the exact same sort of thing.
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Transcoding lossy formats is always evil. No support is better than propagating generational errors on digital formats.
I sunk 4 years into vanilla Nethack before I finally ascended. Don't think I have it in me to take on many variants...which are needed because Nethack wasn't complex enough already?
No, the immoral part is using the law to stop someone from providing those same public domain articles for cheaper.
What will it take before patent laws are thrown out the window and replaced with something sane?
We're at 40 years of the War on Drug Users and counting. There's literally nothing so egregious that the American people will not stand for it. Expect to see patent and copyright infringement become criminal acts in the next decade or two. Copyright infringement is halfway there already.
It's not just streaming. OTA digital TV is compressed to hell. Any time you see wind blown grass or rough seas on OTA digital you get all sorts of macroblocking. Even at HD resolutions, it looks worse than analog SD TV.
Indeed. This is like buying fire insurance for your home, and then getting drunk and doing poi in your living room with liquor bottles stacked on every wall. Insurance shouldn't be license for negligence.
Unauthorized access to a computer system is a much more serious offense than copyright violation. There are good arguments that copyright itself is unethical and counterproductive, but none to suggest that unauthorized computer access is.
It's a way of keeping track of where I should round. In the above problem, why did I round to .000002 instead of .0000021? Because of sig figs.
We're too busy hating Obama and his Justice Department for failing to prosecute those responsible for the financial crisis. Cisco is barely worth mentioning in comparison to those crimes.
At this point, no one on the left has any love left for Obama. He's proven himself to be a corporatist through and through.
How can a 0.00003 and 0.07000 have different significant digits if they are not represented in a computer memory?
It's a convention that roughly estimates precision. If you measure a quantity, say 0.00003 grams, how precise is that? The actual value could be anywhere from .000025 to .0000349999, or .00003 +/- 16%
Consider .07000 on the other hand. You know that the actual value is between .069995 and .0700049999. That's .07000 +/- .007%. Much more precise.
This is counter intuitive because they are both expressed to the same number of decimal places. Turns out that sig figs work better in calculations. What if you multiply .07000 * .00003? You get 0.0000021. That's seven decimal places. Obviously you can't increase the precision of your measurements by doing math with them.
But try plugging in the range of actual values I mentioned above. We could be looking at .069995 * .000025 OR .070004999 * .0000349999. So the actual product could be anywhere between 0.000001749875000 and 0.000002450175000. If we follow the sig fig rules, the product has the same number of sig figs as the least precise multiplicand. .00003 only has one sig fig, so both of those products round to .000002.
That's 3 paragraphs, not 3 sentences. But I hope that helps explain how sig figs work.
I only have so much time for TV. No matter what service I choose I'm not watching more than 2 hours a night, more like 1 hour on average. I might watch a slightly better program with that time, but I wouldn't feel good paying more for it if I was happy with what I had before.
Increasing the selection should bring in a wider range of viewers. More viewers means more revenue to pay for the increased license fees. Why should existing viewers have to offset increased license fees then?
How do you think they're going to get licensing for more movies (especially new releases) without raising more money to pay increased licensing fees?
By paying license fees per view, and not per program. If netflix expands their selection, I'm not watching any more than I ever did. What sense does it make for me to pay more to have access to programs I don't watch?
It's not illegal if no one enforces the law against it.
An end user, who has only the programmed FPGA, can't do anything with this attack.
If I understand correctly, the end user isn't threatened by this attack either then. The only thing the end user has to worry about is potentially getting a cloned device.
Um, yes, absolutely. In fact, significant digits are more applicable in physical science than computer science. Sig figs exist to help us estimate the precision of a measurement, and carry that precision through a calculation. Students should be familiar with sig figs around the time they're asked to calculate simple quantities like density. That's around middle school.
In comp sci, I'm not sure when you'd want to use sig figs. Digital data is usually absolutely precise. There's no error when measuring the length of a string for instance. The only time you need to get into sig figs is if you're digitizing an analog data source. That's not something every programmer needs to do.
Even games as recent as Wing Commander II (1991) relied on clock cycles for timing.
Is this the good kind of security breach, which enables end users to do new things with their FPGAs? Or the bad kind, that enables attackers to do malicious things with others FPGAs? Or both?
If the scripting language doesn't have any access to external data, what sort of attack vector could there be?
I agree Ferngully II...errr...I mean Avatar would have been just as nice and MUCH less of a skull thumper without the 3D.
Without the 3d, there would have been no reason to see it at all.
There won't be justice until we can hold the people who arrested and tried these men accountable.
For the most part, the military wouldn't really have to contribute back to open source. The GPL only requires distribution of source if the binary is distributed. However for the purposes of distribution an organization is considered one entity. So if an organization (such as the military) chose to create a derivative work of some open source software purely for internal use, they wouldn't have to give anyone the source. I would imagine that most military developed software would be for internal use only.
OTOH, the military has in fact contributed to open source in the past. The DoD supported projects like OpenBSD for a long time. It would be nice to see more of that.
They might actually do a cost benefit analysis that includes free software.
No one's claiming that paying taxes is generous. Similarly, no one should claim that Apple open sourcing WebKit is generous.
Renting does not mean you own it.
No, but it does mean you have certain exclusive rights for a period of time, even more rights than the actual owner. If you rent an apartment, and the landlord leaves cameras around the place he's breaking the law. He doesn't have the right to enter your home, even if he technically owns it. Renting a laptop should be the exact same sort of thing.
a cheap LTO3 drive (which can be had for $200 these days)
Where?