For example, on Question 3, "Who is the vice chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on back care?", which took the Googler 6 min, 27 sec, all I did was put "vice chairman" "all-party parliamentary group" "back care" into Google, and got one PDF (well, two, but they were the same).
Instead of loading the PDF (or being confused), I viewed it as HTML, searched for "back care", and had the name of the Vice Chairman (labelled as V.Ch.), Janet Dean, MP. 20 seconds.
What did trains ever do to you to deserve such dismissal? One can similarly argue that the Internet isn't a revolution either. It's just an evolution - people already knew how to get information from computer A to computer B, the Internet just made the process faster.
What makes both the steam engine and the Internet revolutions isn't the fact that things are faster than before, it's the whole spectrum of things that you couldn't even think of doing before simply because it wasn't even remotely practical. (As an example, you could easily use pigeons to check your e-mail, but it's a little silly, isn't it?) You could easily have stolen all sorts of content before your beloved Internet, people used to use diskettes for these things. Before that, magnetic tapes and punch cards.
What our legislators need to understand isn't what the Internet is so much as what it isn't. They need to be told, quite frankly, that the Internet isn't new or scary or a cesspool of anarchy, because that's what they're being told, and they're making all sorts of crazy laws because of it. They need to understand that the Internet doesn't let you do anything you couldn't technically do before. They're perfectly capable of understanding what's going on, but the right information isn't getting to them. They're being lobbied by Microsoft, the RIAA, the MPAA - entities whose objectives are to convince legislators that the Internet represents dangerous and uncharted territory - territory that they'd be more than happy to guide our legislators through...
What does this mean? It means that we would have the ability to solve any system of boolean equations in polynomial time.
What does that mean? It means that for any computer algorithm you can think of, having the output lets us efficiently find an input that gives it.
Why do we care? Because that's just what breaking secret-key crypto is. Or public-key crypto, for that matter!
A polynomial-time solution to an NP-Complete problem would render all our current public-key and secret-key crypto useless. The only thing we'd have left would be the one-time pad. Factoring is not NP-Complete, but it is NP, so it will also be solvable. (Or you can also think of it from the undoing a computer algorithm point of view).
Donny
Here is a completely unrelated Slashdot article...
on
Microchips That Evolve
·
· Score: 4
Properly implemented, code re-use can pay off immediately. I have worked in shops where every time we added a client, we needed a new copy of the code. Even though most of the processing was the same for the new client, we had to start out with a copy of the code
Whoa! Since when did OOP have a monopoly on code reuse? cp copies procedural programs too!
That's not a useful measure of scalability. Last I checked, Freenet isn't that searchable. If you wanted to search it, you would need to keep lists of what's around. As more people put more content on, and more lists get circulated around, then, we need bigger lists of lists and then that makes it... um... uh... n^2.
I'm not sure what kind of scalability you're talking about, but it sure isn't searching capability. (If you didn't have to search for these damned things, wouldn't you just connect directly to whereever the thing was with FTP or something?) In this sense, Freenet's aim may be to secure documents in a non-removable and dynamic way, but search scalability is still n^2, and if 6 billion people decided to put their mp3's on, good luck building your collection of South African jazz mp3's.
How come whenever P2P is mentioned everyone starts to spout half-truths (or just complete mis-truths) as if they knew exactly what they were talking about?
Okay, I'm always skeptical when a couple of goonies manage to wrangle some VC money with a idea that has lots of buzzwords and promises to be really really hot.
I'm not saying that this is the case here, mind you. I haven't looked into the particulars of this company at all (other than the fact that its home-page looks home-made).
Here is my question:
The thing that has been plaguing these glorified FTP clients is the real-time searching utility. It has an inherent O(n^2) feel to it. 50 users want to use the network, and search for files on 49 computers. 50000 users want to use the network, and search for files on 49999 computers. Seems O(n^2) to me.
The Napster (Scour etc) solution is the central server, which people dislike, since these "P2P" fly-by-night companies are turning to the dark side at a rate not seen since the original Star Wars flicks came out.
The Gnutella (Freenet etc) solution is "maybe n won't get so big". Or, in desperation, "let's not search everyone's else's computer". Doesn't seem like people would go for that. I'd like to find that one guy who likes the same obscure stuff that I do. Isn't that supposed to be one of the advantages of this type of file exchange?
So that's the (billion-dollar) problem. Here's the proposed solution:
Let's use the IRC network instead.
Does something seem fishy here? How would this fix the inherent O(N^2) problems? It seems to me that these people are solving the O(N^2) problem by finding an unused network so N can start at 0 again. Does anyone else out there sense this?
I'm not 100% sure what you've been smoking, but the CNN data has been reporting:
Bush 2,909,136 49%
Gore 2,907,331 49%
with 100% of precincts reporting since about 5:30 AM (EST) this morning, and the numbers haven't changed since then.
Actually, Florida (at least according to some offical-looking person who spoke on TV this morning) actually will accept mail-in ballots from foreign U.S. citizens (e.g. military personnel) postmarked yesterday for up to 10 days after the election, so I don't know what's up with this *being* there stuff...
The only thing I can presume (to account for your claim that Gore is 200 votes ahead) is that you either mistook a 7 for a 9 or vice versa, and only subtracted the last couple of digits.
At least you were right about nothing meaning anything until after the recount. (How did you get rated 5 anyways? Oh well.)
Donny
p.s. Wow, I hope Slashdot gives the Canadian elections this much coverage in three weeks' time...
> Also, does anybody know how this works in physical print?
So I wrote up a list of instructions on "How to use the photocopier" and posted it up in my office. Little did I know that one of my officemates used these instructions to photocopy the entire Encyclopedia Britannica (illegally, I might add!). In fact, soon after that, everyone in my office was into the photocopying craze. So now the powers that be are telling me that I effectively "transported my officemates to someone's home to burgularize it" by posting easy instructions on how to operate the photocopier and I have been asked to take down those instructions.
Of course, I countered with the argument that many other documents were available which told you how to use the photocopier, including one very thorough "Photocopier Manual", but no-one seemed to listen. In fact, I heard that the corporations behind the lawsuit were going to go after the writers of the "Photocopier Manual" later.
Well, after the courts ruled against me, I took down the sheet of instructions, but I copied them onto the wall. That way, people can't take the instructions with them to the photocopier.
Right now, I have a sheet of paper posted in my office with instructions on how to find the photocopier manual. I wonder how long it will be until that is illegal too...
Donny
Re:The impossibility of Online Voting
on
Online Voting?
·
· Score: 1
Online voting is simply impractical. From a cryptographic viewpoint, it is easy to concoct a scheme with some desired properties, but cryptography can only assure security between the computer and the central authority holding the election. Here is the main problem:
THERE IS NOTHING BINDING A VOTER TO A COMPUTERIZED VOTE,
at least not in a way that perserves some of the properties of traditional physical voting the some of us may take for granted in the "First" world.
Here are some scenarios to demonstrate my point:
1) I am a big, fat, abusive jerk and I want to make sure my family (or my friends, or even total strangers) vote for the candidate I want. I watch them vote (with baseball bat handy).
This can't happen when everyone who votes does it in a physically secure location.
2) I am an even bigger, fatter, more abusive, jerk and I don't trust my family (or my friends or complete strangers) even under threat of the baseball bat. I'll just vote for them. If passwords, etc, are needed, I'll just beat it out of them.
Unless I really look like the people I want to impersonate, this can't happen in a physical voting situation.
3) I am an unemployed misfit in the Phillipines who has nothing better to do than to release computer viruses. I disable millions of computers during voting day.
4) I am the government. How the hell am I going to securely send private keys to my 100000000 voters and correctly bind each key to a particular voter? Is there a feasible system to do this which is fraud-proof?
5) I am unscrupulous. I secretly offer to buy people's computer voting identities for a princely sum. Since I am funded by some large communist government with a record of meddling in American elections, I can buy many votes.
These are just examples. The key to current voting methods is the assurance of _physical_ security. It will be many many years before computer technology can assume that responsibility. Any feasible computerized voting system (especially on the large scale) must have a way of binding physical identities to computerized votes in a way that perserves the "desired" properties of voting listed above not only after the computerized vote has been cast, but before, as well.
Schneier likes to talk about these "side-channel attacks", as he calls them, when discussing other types of protocols, and it would seem that this philosophy should apply to the secure election protocols as well.
There is a big difference between quantum computing and DNA computing. In fact, there is a big difference between what people usually mean by DNA computing, and the results described here in this article. To summarize (and I'm condensing things a bit for brevity):
Quantum computers use quantum states instead of discrete states to perform computations. Quantum bits or "qubits" are quantum superpositions of the "pure" states corresponding to 0 and 1. (e.g. if we consider the 0 and 1 states to be two different energy levels of a certain electron in an atom, if we don't observe the electron, we can place the electron into a superposition of states corresponding to the two energy levels). The power of quantum computing (in theory, at least) comes from using these qubits instead of normal bits because by acting on a superposition of quantum states, we perform the action on each quantum state in the superposition individually.
Quantum computers actually require a completely different model of computation than the one that current computers are based on, and are potentially (if all this theory pans out) counterexamples to the Church-Turing thesis (that all computing devices are polynomially equivalent to a Turing machine).
DNA computing is more about mass parallelization than a new model of computing. It is based on the idea that by encoding solutions of combinatorial problems (read: NP-Complete) in DNA, and using modern DNA manipulation techniques (which include searching for particular sequences), we can find a solution with particular properties (read: optimal). For example, to solve the Travelling-Salesman Problem, we can generate (randomly) trillions of solutions and then pick out the optimal one. The advantage is that generating these is quick, and any operation you perform is performed on each strand at the same time. This massive parallelism makes it possible to solve search problems (TSP, Satisfiability, etc) that were not previously feasible, but DNA computing still falls under the Church-Turing thesis and so all the same complexity-theory results apply. DNA computing just reduces the constant involved by a factor of 100000000000000 or so.
The article mentioned here seems to point more towards a "computer built with DNA", where DNA is being used to build components that will mimic the action of a circuit-based computer. It seems that this would simply bring several orders of magnitude of miniaturization to current computers, rather than anything fancy-schmancy in the theoretical computer science realm.
Donny
P.S. If you saw something on work at Los Alamos, it's probably on quantum computers.
> Besides, RedHat isn't charging just for the
> media. They are charging for the customer
> support you get when you buy the boxed product,
> as well as a set of printed manuals.
Perhaps the RIAA should consider a new business model where they release the mp3's for free and
sell the CD's in "boxed products" with printed manuals and customer support. I wonder what that would be like...
RIAA Customer Support: Hello, you have reached the new RIAA, how may we help you?
CD Purchaser: Hi, I was wondering if there is any Linux support for the lastest Britney Spears CD.
CS: No, we don't officially support Linux. It says so on our website, www.riaa.com!
CP: Yes, well can you guys release the specs so me and my 10000 best friends can write an open-source version of the software we need to read the CD. It's very annoying to have Windows-only...
CS: No problem. Britney Spears is 5' 4" and 130 lbs. Her birthday is December the 2nd, 1981.
CP: No, that's not really what I...
CS: Thanks for calling the new RIAA! Call back soon!
You have forgotten about images which contain nothing but text, so that 100 bytes of text become 100K of some stupid LZW78-based "patented" graphics interchange format.
It would be nice if web surfers can initiate class-action suits against websites for general shittiness. (Is that a word?) I already have a few in mind.
> Congress granted "Olympic" special status a while back.
Hey, _your_ Congress, not mine. Copyright law is still done on a per-nation basis (modulo a few international treaties), so I don't think they would have a basis for suing the Olympic Gyros place beside my school, for example.
> It's called a bicycle. It uses a highly efficient energy source that only needs food, > water and air to operate and the byproducts aren't nearly as harmful to the environment as > a gasoline engine. The best part? The cost, for less than one hundred dollars you too can have > a bicycle. So stop killing yourself and the environment and get out of your car.
Sure, but the trunk space sucks. And you can't snooze in the back while someone else drives.
I have a problem with parting with $120 if all I want are 10 songs that would fit on a $12 CD if someone just thought to sell them together without all the stupid filler.
As for Steely Dan, I've never heard of him. If I am prevented from listening to it without buying it, I'll never listen to it and some record company just lost one potential sale. And I don't care about it enough to get off my duff and find it at the CD store just to sample it, either.
Just think... I might really like Steely Dan's music and never know it.
Suppose we took once of those iMac hockey-puck mice and decided to make it wireless. Okay, now let's remove the button in favour of the tilt-a-whirl scheme. Now what do you have?
A round object that does not obviously orient in any particular direction! Pretty useful for a mouse, eh?
Okay, so what's the answer? Make it look like a plaster mould of Bigfoot's footprint. While we're at it, make it impossible to use your left hand with it.
Okay, we've had all sorts of analogies already, but I think this one is might contain something insightful.
The issue here is whether or not it is legal to link to a website if you know that people are going to do illegal things with your link. In fact, it gets worse, because mp3board.com is trying to make money by showing ads to people wanting to get at these mp3's so they can commit crimes. Is mp3board.com committing a crime?
Consider, for a moment, a document like "The Anarchist Cookbook", or any one of the myriad bomb-making instruction manuals. I will place such a document on the web (assuming it's out of copyright or something - that's not the point) and put advertisements all over the place so maybe I make some money too. Now, I have suitable disclaimers around, but I know that some there will always be stupid people that will commit crimes based on the information which I have posted.
Am I committing a crime? You can get this sort of stuff all by yourself. I'm just trying to make it more convenient for you and show you some stupid ads.
No, the First Amendment tells me that I should not be stopped from this course of action. Okay, maybe the FBI keeps a closer watch on me because they think I might be in on some criminal activity, but that's separate. By the same token, I think that mp3board.com is not committing a crime by publishing information that could lead to people committing crimes (like downloading those evil MP3's), even if they are trying to make a bit of ad money off of it.
Just like telling someone how to make a bomb from common household products (so that they have everything they could possibly need to make a bomb) is protected under the First Amendment, telling someone how to obtain mp3's (so that they have everything they could possibly need to infringe someone's copyright) from the Internet should be protected too.
Donny
(p.s. indeed, I'd much rather have kids downloading mp3's than making bombs anyways)
The latest version of Windows (Windows5000000, in keeping with Microsoft's numbering style) will have operating system support for C#, and will not let anything written in another language to run properly. Microsoft will claim that this is "a feature", that "users wanted this", and "the other languages were just rejected by the market".
In addition, to address concerns that other companies are _illegally_ writing compilers for C#, Microsoft decides to drastically change the language so that none of these compilers will work with the new "official" Microsoft C# standard (this also forces everyone to buy the new Microsoft Visual-C# compiler). And to make sure that people don't write unauthorized development tools again, Microsoft decides to make all of the changes proprietary and not to tell anyone about them. Aha, now Microsoft has TOTAL CONTROL! Mwahahahaha!
Donny
P.S. Does anyone else think that the only reason Microsoft didn't call it C+ is because it was already a fruit drink?
Slashdot Mirror
For example, on Question 3, "Who is the vice chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on back care?", which took the Googler 6 min, 27 sec, all I did was put "vice chairman" "all-party parliamentary group" "back care" into Google, and got one PDF (well, two, but they were the same).
Instead of loading the PDF (or being confused), I viewed it as HTML, searched for "back care", and had the name of the Vice Chairman (labelled as V.Ch.), Janet Dean, MP. 20 seconds.
What makes both the steam engine and the Internet revolutions isn't the fact that things are faster than before, it's the whole spectrum of things that you couldn't even think of doing before simply because it wasn't even remotely practical. (As an example, you could easily use pigeons to check your e-mail, but it's a little silly, isn't it?) You could easily have stolen all sorts of content before your beloved Internet, people used to use diskettes for these things. Before that, magnetic tapes and punch cards.
What our legislators need to understand isn't what the Internet is so much as what it isn't. They need to be told, quite frankly, that the Internet isn't new or scary or a cesspool of anarchy, because that's what they're being told, and they're making all sorts of crazy laws because of it. They need to understand that the Internet doesn't let you do anything you couldn't technically do before. They're perfectly capable of understanding what's going on, but the right information isn't getting to them. They're being lobbied by Microsoft, the RIAA, the MPAA - entities whose objectives are to convince legislators that the Internet represents dangerous and uncharted territory - territory that they'd be more than happy to guide our legislators through...
Check these out:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/08/27/123821 3
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/04/10/043622 0
Stop the insanity!
Donny
Any secret key algorithm would be affected too.
Why? Because SAT is an NP-Complete problem.
What does this mean? It means that we would have the ability to solve any system of boolean equations in polynomial time.
What does that mean? It means that for any computer algorithm you can think of, having the output lets us efficiently find an input that gives it.
Why do we care? Because that's just what breaking secret-key crypto is. Or public-key crypto, for that matter!
A polynomial-time solution to an NP-Complete problem would render all our current public-key and secret-key crypto useless. The only thing we'd have left would be the one-time pad. Factoring is not NP-Complete, but it is NP, so it will also be solvable. (Or you can also think of it from the undoing a computer algorithm point of view).
Donny
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/08/27/1238213.shtm l
Heck, this one's more informative.
Donny
Whoa! Since when did OOP have a monopoly on code reuse? cp copies procedural programs too!
Donny
That's not a useful measure of scalability. Last I checked, Freenet isn't that searchable. If you wanted to search it, you would need to keep lists of what's around. As more people put more content on, and more lists get circulated around, then, we need bigger lists of lists and then that makes it... um... uh... n^2.
I'm not sure what kind of scalability you're talking about, but it sure isn't searching capability. (If you didn't have to search for these damned things, wouldn't you just connect directly to whereever the thing was with FTP or something?) In this sense, Freenet's aim may be to secure documents in a non-removable and dynamic way, but search scalability is still n^2, and if 6 billion people decided to put their mp3's on, good luck building your collection of South African jazz mp3's.
How come whenever P2P is mentioned everyone starts to spout half-truths (or just complete mis-truths) as if they knew exactly what they were talking about?
Good question. You tell me.
Donny
Okay, I'm always skeptical when a couple of goonies manage to wrangle some VC money with a idea that has lots of buzzwords and promises to be really really hot.
I'm not saying that this is the case here, mind you. I haven't looked into the particulars of this company at all (other than the fact that its home-page looks home-made).
Here is my question:
The thing that has been plaguing these glorified FTP clients is the real-time searching utility. It has an inherent O(n^2) feel to it. 50 users want to use the network, and search for files on 49 computers. 50000 users want to use the network, and search for files on 49999 computers. Seems O(n^2) to me.
The Napster (Scour etc) solution is the central server, which people dislike, since these "P2P" fly-by-night companies are turning to the dark side at a rate not seen since the original Star Wars flicks came out.
The Gnutella (Freenet etc) solution is "maybe n won't get so big". Or, in desperation, "let's not search everyone's else's computer". Doesn't seem like people would go for that. I'd like to find that one guy who likes the same obscure stuff that I do. Isn't that supposed to be one of the advantages of this type of file exchange?
So that's the (billion-dollar) problem. Here's the proposed solution:
Let's use the IRC network instead.
Does something seem fishy here? How would this fix the inherent O(N^2) problems? It seems to me that these people are solving the O(N^2) problem by finding an unused network so N can start at 0 again. Does anyone else out there sense this?
Donny
I'm not 100% sure what you've been smoking, but the CNN data has been reporting:
Bush 2,909,136 49%
Gore 2,907,331 49%
with 100% of precincts reporting since about 5:30 AM (EST) this morning, and the numbers haven't changed since then.
Actually, Florida (at least according to some offical-looking person who spoke on TV this morning) actually will accept mail-in ballots from foreign U.S. citizens (e.g. military personnel) postmarked yesterday for up to 10 days after the election, so I don't know what's up with this *being* there stuff...
The only thing I can presume (to account for your claim that Gore is 200 votes ahead) is that you either mistook a 7 for a 9 or vice versa, and only subtracted the last couple of digits.
At least you were right about nothing meaning anything until after the recount. (How did you get rated 5 anyways? Oh well.)
Donny
p.s. Wow, I hope Slashdot gives the Canadian elections this much coverage in three weeks' time...
> Also, does anybody know how this works in physical print?
So I wrote up a list of instructions on "How to use the photocopier" and posted it up in my office. Little did I know that one of my officemates used these instructions to photocopy the entire Encyclopedia Britannica (illegally, I might add!). In fact, soon after that, everyone in my office was into the photocopying craze. So now the powers that be are telling me that I effectively "transported my officemates to someone's home to burgularize it" by posting easy instructions on how to operate the photocopier and I have been asked to take down those instructions.
Of course, I countered with the argument that many other documents were available which told you how to use the photocopier, including one very thorough "Photocopier Manual", but no-one seemed to listen. In fact, I heard that the corporations behind the lawsuit were going to go after the writers of the "Photocopier Manual" later.
Well, after the courts ruled against me, I took down the sheet of instructions, but I copied them onto the wall. That way, people can't take the instructions with them to the photocopier.
Right now, I have a sheet of paper posted in my office with instructions on how to find the photocopier manual. I wonder how long it will be until that is illegal too...
Donny
Online voting is simply impractical. From a cryptographic viewpoint, it is easy to concoct a scheme with some desired properties, but cryptography can only assure security between the computer and the central authority holding the election. Here is the main problem:
THERE IS NOTHING BINDING A VOTER TO A COMPUTERIZED VOTE,
at least not in a way that perserves some of the properties of traditional physical voting the some of us may take for granted in the "First" world.
Here are some scenarios to demonstrate my point:
1) I am a big, fat, abusive jerk and I want to make sure my family (or my friends, or even total strangers) vote for the candidate I want. I watch them vote (with baseball bat handy).
This can't happen when everyone who votes does it in a physically secure location.
2) I am an even bigger, fatter, more abusive, jerk and I don't trust my family (or my friends or complete strangers) even under threat of the baseball bat. I'll just vote for them. If passwords, etc, are needed, I'll just beat it out of them.
Unless I really look like the people I want to impersonate, this can't happen in a physical voting situation.
3) I am an unemployed misfit in the Phillipines who has nothing better to do than to release computer viruses. I disable millions of computers during voting day.
4) I am the government. How the hell am I going to securely send private keys to my 100000000 voters and correctly bind each key to a particular voter? Is there a feasible system to do this which is fraud-proof?
5) I am unscrupulous. I secretly offer to buy people's computer voting identities for a princely sum. Since I am funded by some large communist government with a record of meddling in American elections, I can buy many votes.
These are just examples. The key to current voting methods is the assurance of _physical_ security. It will be many many years before computer technology can assume that responsibility. Any feasible computerized voting system (especially on the large scale) must have a way of binding physical identities to computerized votes in a way that perserves the "desired" properties of voting listed above not only after the computerized vote has been cast, but before, as well.
Schneier likes to talk about these "side-channel attacks", as he calls them, when discussing other types of protocols, and it would seem that this philosophy should apply to the secure election protocols as well.
Donny
To clarify a few things:
There is a big difference between quantum computing and DNA computing. In fact, there is a big difference between what people usually mean by DNA computing, and the results described here in this article. To summarize (and I'm condensing things a bit for brevity):
Quantum computers use quantum states instead of discrete states to perform computations. Quantum bits or "qubits" are quantum superpositions of the "pure" states corresponding to 0 and 1. (e.g. if we consider the 0 and 1 states to be two different energy levels of a certain electron in an atom, if we don't observe the electron, we can place the electron into a superposition of states corresponding to the two energy levels). The power of quantum computing (in theory, at least) comes from using these qubits instead of normal bits because by acting on a superposition of quantum states, we perform the action on each quantum state in the superposition individually.
Quantum computers actually require a completely different model of computation than the one that current computers are based on, and are potentially (if all this theory pans out) counterexamples to the Church-Turing thesis (that all computing devices are polynomially equivalent to a Turing machine).
DNA computing is more about mass parallelization than a new model of computing. It is based on the idea that by encoding solutions of combinatorial problems (read: NP-Complete) in DNA, and using modern DNA manipulation techniques (which include searching for particular sequences), we can find a solution with particular properties (read: optimal). For example, to solve the Travelling-Salesman Problem, we can generate (randomly) trillions of solutions and then pick out the optimal one. The advantage is that generating these is quick, and any operation you perform is performed on each strand at the same time. This massive parallelism makes it possible to solve search problems (TSP, Satisfiability, etc) that were not previously feasible, but DNA computing still falls under the Church-Turing thesis and so all the same complexity-theory results apply. DNA computing just reduces the constant involved by a factor of 100000000000000 or so.
The article mentioned here seems to point more towards a "computer built with DNA", where DNA is being used to build components that will mimic the action of a circuit-based computer. It seems that this would simply bring several orders of magnitude of miniaturization to current computers, rather than anything fancy-schmancy in the theoretical computer science realm.
Donny
P.S. If you saw something on work at Los Alamos, it's probably on quantum computers.
> Besides, RedHat isn't charging just for the
> media. They are charging for the customer
> support you get when you buy the boxed product,
> as well as a set of printed manuals.
Perhaps the RIAA should consider a new business model where they release the mp3's for free and
sell the CD's in "boxed products" with printed manuals and customer support. I wonder what that would be like...
RIAA Customer Support: Hello, you have reached the new RIAA, how may we help you?
CD Purchaser: Hi, I was wondering if there is any Linux support for the lastest Britney Spears CD.
CS: No, we don't officially support Linux. It says so on our website, www.riaa.com!
CP: Yes, well can you guys release the specs so me and my 10000 best friends can write an open-source version of the software we need to read the CD. It's very annoying to have Windows-only...
CS: No problem. Britney Spears is 5' 4" and 130 lbs. Her birthday is December the 2nd, 1981.
CP: No, that's not really what I...
CS: Thanks for calling the new RIAA! Call back soon!
--
Donny
The United States could have used "Patent Infringment" as an excuse to enter World War II.
I wonder how patent lawyers would have fared against the German army.
Donny
... and I quote:
.NET base-class library."
"In C#, enums are not just integers. They're actually strongly typed value types that derive from System.Enum in the
Wow! Now, next time I accidentally set the colour of my car to "Tuesday", the compiler will throw a hissy-fit at me! Hooray for C-#!
Donny
> More things we should sue for:
You have forgotten about images which contain nothing but text, so that 100 bytes of text become 100K of some stupid LZW78-based "patented" graphics interchange format.
It would be nice if web surfers can initiate class-action suits against websites for general shittiness. (Is that a word?) I already have a few in mind.
Donny
> Congress granted "Olympic" special status a while back.
Hey, _your_ Congress, not mine. Copyright law is still done on a per-nation basis (modulo a few international treaties), so I don't think they would have a basis for suing the Olympic Gyros place beside my school, for example.
Donny
> It's called a bicycle. It uses a highly efficient energy source that only needs food,
> water and air to operate and the byproducts aren't nearly as harmful to the environment as
> a gasoline engine. The best part? The cost, for less than one hundred dollars you too can have
> a bicycle. So stop killing yourself and the environment and get out of your car.
Sure, but the trunk space sucks. And you can't snooze in the back while someone else drives.
Donny
> I don't have a problem parting with $12.
Neither do I, but that's not really the problem.
I have a problem with parting with $120 if all I want are 10 songs that would fit on a $12 CD if someone just thought to sell them together without all the stupid filler.
As for Steely Dan, I've never heard of him. If I am prevented from listening to it without buying it, I'll never listen to it and some record company just lost one potential sale. And I don't care about it enough to get off my duff and find it at the CD store just to sample it, either.
Just think... I might really like Steely Dan's music and never know it.
Donny
Suppose we took once of those iMac hockey-puck mice and decided to make it wireless. Okay, now let's remove the button in favour of the tilt-a-whirl scheme. Now what do you have?
A round object that does not obviously orient in any particular direction! Pretty useful for a mouse, eh?
Okay, so what's the answer? Make it look like a plaster mould of Bigfoot's footprint. While we're at it, make it impossible to use your left hand with it.
Donny
You must be the first person I have _ever_ encountered that reads Playboy for news.
Donny
If we call the Pentium 4's successor the Pentium 5, it will be confused with P5, the abbreviation for the original pentium.
Donny
Okay, we've had all sorts of analogies already, but I think this one is might contain something insightful.
The issue here is whether or not it is legal to link to a website if you know that people are going to do illegal things with your link. In fact, it gets worse, because mp3board.com is trying to make money by showing ads to people wanting to get at these mp3's so they can commit crimes. Is mp3board.com committing a crime?
Consider, for a moment, a document like "The Anarchist Cookbook", or any one of the myriad bomb-making instruction manuals. I will place such a document on the web (assuming it's out of copyright or something - that's not the point) and put advertisements all over the place so maybe I make some money too. Now, I have suitable disclaimers around, but I know that some there will always be stupid people that will commit crimes based on the information which I have posted.
Am I committing a crime? You can get this sort of stuff all by yourself. I'm just trying to make it more convenient for you and show you some stupid ads.
No, the First Amendment tells me that I should not be stopped from this course of action. Okay, maybe the FBI keeps a closer watch on me because they think I might be in on some criminal activity, but that's separate. By the same token, I think that mp3board.com is not committing a crime by publishing information that could lead to people committing crimes (like downloading those evil MP3's), even if they are trying to make a bit of ad money off of it.
Just like telling someone how to make a bomb from common household products (so that they have everything they could possibly need to make a bomb) is protected under the First Amendment, telling someone how to obtain mp3's (so that they have everything they could possibly need to infringe someone's copyright) from the Internet should be protected too.
Donny
(p.s. indeed, I'd much rather have kids downloading mp3's than making bombs anyways)
The latest version of Windows (Windows5000000, in keeping with Microsoft's numbering style) will have operating system support for C#, and will not let anything written in another language to run properly. Microsoft will claim that this is "a feature", that "users wanted this", and "the other languages were just rejected by the market".
In addition, to address concerns that other companies are _illegally_ writing compilers for C#, Microsoft decides to drastically change the language so that none of these compilers will work with the new "official" Microsoft C# standard (this also forces everyone to buy the new Microsoft Visual-C# compiler). And to make sure that people don't write unauthorized development tools again, Microsoft decides to make all of the changes proprietary and not to tell anyone about them. Aha, now Microsoft has TOTAL CONTROL! Mwahahahaha!
Donny
P.S. Does anyone else think that the only reason Microsoft didn't call it C+ is because it was already a fruit drink?
I think any proper geek should refer to this as "anniversary[0]".
Donny