Yes, there is overwhelming evidence for evolution but the truth is that the scientific evidence isn't the sort of thing we can present to the public, or even scientists in other areas. Sure, we can give some suggestive examples and talk about DNA similarities and the rest but this isn't really enough evidence on it's own to establish the validity of evolution. What makes the case for evolution so strong isn't any one result but a mass of small details all of which support evolution and refute intelligent design.
Yes, people should believe in evolution but we are lying if we tell them it's because they can see the evidence for themselves. Arguably no person has the time or expertise to evaluate the evidence in all the disparate disciplines which make the case for evolution so strong. The reason we should believe in evolution is because the experts in fields from geology, to genetics, to astrophysics all endorse theories in their fields supportive of evolution. In other words figuring out what sort of science we should accept is a lot like figuring out how to treat cancer. You don't go read the research papers and prescribe yourself a course of chemotherapy. Rather you use what you know about people and society to find a doctor you think knows this area better than you do. Only when you have specific reason to think that the medical profession as a whole is suffering from some bias does it make sense for a non-expert to look at the data themselves.
This might seem like a pedantic objection but the pretense that the public should decide scientific issues for themselves is a huge factor in the success of intelligent design as well as global warming skepticism. If you show people a few fossils, make some comments about DNA and tell them this should convince them of evolution you shouldn't be surprised when they believe someone else who shows them a few fossils, makes some comments about irreducible complexity The situation is even worse for global warming where any intelligent person can see the scientific arguments made in the mass media barely suggest much less establish anthropogenic global warming.
We should be honest with the public and tell them the reason they should believe in evolution as well as anthropogenic climate change is that the experts who have gone through all the details judge these theories to be strongly supported by the data. Anything else is setting ourselves up for a fall.
I really like the idea of a new D&D version. It's a chance to improve some of the imperfect rules in the last edition. For instance the fact that it's nearly impossible to create a fast moving dexterous fighter that has parity with a burly strength based one.
As far as people complaining about having to buy another version I sympathize but you don't have to buy the new version and WoTC shouldn't be forced not to fix the system just because some of us bought the previous version. I don't know if I will buy the new one (I have 3.5) but the next generation of gamers shouldn't be stuck with the imperfections of the system we played.
On the other hand I'm a bit worried about the online subscription part. The publication of feats and other rule changes in dragon was bad enough but an online subscription has even more of an official air about it and will give WoTC a very strong incentive to put overpowerful feats in the subscription. Hopefully, they will mostly just include story/background material and the occasional fix but we will have to wait and see.
Now the GPL may define a derived work however it wants but the GPL only applies if standard copyright law would deem the VMware application to infringe on linux copyrights. I'm not up to speed on this issue but if it only interfaces at a small number of points it very well may not. If the VMware app does not infringe on linux copyright then they do not have to accept the GPL to distribute it and there is no problem.
Of course it's entirely possible that it would be declared an infringing product. I have no idea.
Purpose? Bacteria don't have a purpose they just do what they do. Besides, suppose a company finally succeded in creating a 3d printer capable of printing itself. Would that really make it suddenly unworthy of patent protection.
This is all irrelevant to the question that matters: Is the harm caused by giving one company a monopoly worth the benefits gained from incentivizing research. Now likely this calculation comes out against patents on naturally occurring genes since it is likely to encourage blanket patenting without real research but I don't see any different between patenting instructions for the biological machines in our cells and for the silicon machines in our computers.
So long as we can keep people form patenting obvious DNA sequences it seems like a reasonable policy to me. I just hope they don't take the analogy with software too far and start copyrighting DNA sequences. Then we would have the same mess as we do in the computer field where a fundamentally functional item gets protection for 75+ years without even being forced to reveal the internal workings. Maybe we will get lucky and the net effect will be to take software from copyright protection and put it under patent protection (this is not the same as software patents).
Why isn't it the responsibility of the non-GM crops to prevent their pollen from fertilizing the GM farmers crops? If I breed a new strain of corn using traditional techniques is it my responsibility to make sure that doesn't fertilize anyone else's corn as well?
Don't get me wrong I agree that GM crops should require more extensive testing before they are declared safe but the idea that they can never be declared safe is just absurd. Of course we can't ever know something won't hurt us but that doesn't stop us from making reasonable calculations about risk. Of course biotech companies shouldn't be allowed to shut down a farmer just because his crops happened to get pollinated by GM material (I have no idea if this really happens) but that's just saying that we should treat GM crops sanely.
Any chance from the past is a risk whether it is faster computers (they might take over!!) or a new variety of crops. Dogmatically insisting that no type of GM crop could ever be safe enough to be worth the risk of letting it's pollen out into the wild is just silly.
In other words what's wrong with just deciding about each GM crop on a case by case basis using the best available science at the time (including the certainty we have in that science)?
I visited a LUG once because someone famous was coming by to speak (Stallman? Raymond?) and was so turned off by the whole experience I would never want to go back. The speaker was fine but hearing about upcoming meetings felt like going over to digg and reading one of those stories like '8 tips for using Bash' where they tell you obvious shit like how to turn on color in ls.
I mean this was at a world class research university (caltech) and when I had trouble getting X to compile I would ask the guy down the hall who would then execute some totally crazy command line using four pipes awk and sed which magically fixed the problem. But instead of being the experts the people at the LUG where the linux equivalents of old school Mac users, trading little tips without any real knowledge. I liked the idea of a LUG but only if it has presentations of the sort of shit on kerneltrap and it's the best users not the worst who attend.
Basically I got the sense that LUGs ware a lot like groups like MENSA (supposedly for smart people). Namely that the best people (most knowledgeable, most savy, smartest) weren't going to come because they were all in universities, or working at tech corporations that provided them with more than enough technological/intellectual stimulation. In the beginning it might have been different but once linux adoption was wide enough in academia and the business world it seems inevitable that LUGs would sink to the lowest common denominator.
Maybe the proximity of caltech really biased my experience and LUGs in other areas are different but somehow I think the internet has worked as a great leveler giving the experts even in the most rural places better options and leaving for LUGs people who can't decipher the man pages
Of course google isn't a fucking charity. No one ever said it was, though of course one of the main tenants of capitalism is that honest self-interest can bring great benefits. Google isn't campaigning for sainthood they are just trying to make money without being actively evil. And if you would just use the same standard for google that you use to evaluate your friends you would see they aren't evil.
When your friend offers to go on vacation for you he isn't doing it purely for your benefit. He likes your company and gets a benefit from traveling with you. Even when your friend takes care of you when your sick he (though he may not consciously consider it) is making sure he has someone to take care of him when he doesn't feel well. As long as your friend deals with you fairly and honestly one doesn't consider your friend evil because he advocates things that benefit him. Hell, even when your friend explains the reasons that it would be in everyone's interests to go to the movie he wants to see he isn't being evil unless he is lieing or being underhanded.
Nor is it the case that having bad ideas or ideas you think would cause really really bad things to happen make your friend evil. If your friend is a republic, a democrat, a free trade activist, an environmentalist or a gun rights advocate he still isn't evil. He isn't even evil if his politics happen to correlate with his socioeconomic status. Rich people like low taxes, poor people like social programs but so long as they aren't being underhanded, deceptive or using shady methods to get what they want the fact that they tend to believe things that benefit them still doesn't make them evil.
Whether you like google's policy of data retention and user tracking or not they are upfront about it. They give you the choice to use their services or not and as of yet haven't tried any underhanded lock in schemes or FUD to fend off the competition. So you might believe the world would be better off without Google just like I believe the world would be better off without Mitt Romney but that doesn't make either of them evil.
Why do I care? Well mostly just because I like to argue on slashdot. But also because it seems google is getting more shit for being less evil than other companies and that creates all sorts of bad incentives.
The same way I don't want my parchment to reproduce the feel of letters chisled in stone or my book to reproduce the crinkled, rolled scrolls. Pick a way to present the material that plays to the strengths of the medium and avoids the weaknesses. Spend your time optimizing books for easy searching and display on laptop screens not reproducing an interface that works well for paper. It's not just pointless reproduction of the past it's actually a bad interface for reading on the computer.
A book has the wonderful property that it is easy to flip back and forth between pages. It's easy to estimate where you are/were in a book by the thickness of the remaining pages in your hand. You can perform what amounts to a binary search for a specific page with minimum of fuss. None of these are yet true with books displayed on a computer. However, computers can search the entire book in an instant, combine complex boolean expressions and display snippets from each result. A good book interface should play to these strengths.
Unfortunatly this interface doesn't manage to do this. While quite pretty the page animations make flipping through pages quickly even harder than normal on a computer. The search interface doesn't let you see all the results at once nor do I see any options for a more complex kind of search. However, I really like the tabs on the side of the book that give a sense of where in the book the results are located. That should just be combined with a flat list of results.
Of course reasons of cost and time mean that it is easier to present books in their original form but in 10-15 years this is going to look as silly as the early cars that offered reins instead of steering wheels.
Having page turning animations is just silly. It makes about as much sense as raggedly tearing the edges of books or rolling up the pages to make them look more like scrolls. The point of putting books online is so people can read them not to foist irrelevant and distracting visuals from the physical world onto electronic books. If this was merely a waste of time I wouldn't mind so much but given the poor responsiveness of browser animations for many people this seems like a distraction to serious reading.
I don't deny that physical metaphors are a necessary and powerful way to organize human computer interactions. The trash can metaphor is a great way to communicate how the non-immediate delete facility works. However, if a metaphor is good people don't need to be hit over the head with silly animations emphasizing the point.
Just imagine if the default setting for windows or mac was to have a little garbage truck roll across your screen and pick up your trash (or recycling) every time you emptied it! Or suppose moving files around in folders was accompanied by sounds and images of rustling paper. It would be cute the first time you saw it but would quickly become pretty horrible.
I guess I wouldn't even be making this post if I didn't already have the feeling (true or not) that this project (or at least the funding..I don't doubt the volunteers have nobler intentions) is as much about sticking it to google as it is about helping people get information and read books online for free. A feature like this that seems harmful to reading but makes people go 'ohh cool' just reinforces that impression for me.
Probably I'm just being silly (don't read anything deep into my bias) but that's what it feels like for what it's worth.
To clarify I meant that was the right strategy for increasing readership not informing the public. Sadly the public doesn't understand science well enough to be dismayed by the poor science reporting in places like the NYT. Heck people still eat up the BBC science stories despite a fairly long track record of absolute crap (cow dialects by misquoting researchers).
Yes, ideally we want people who understand both. Unfortunately people who really understand science/tech and want to go into journalism are few and far between. I went to a sciency school and there we had a few people who decided they couldn't really hack it as a scientist or just didn't like all the busy work and looked at science journalism as an option but for the most part people who are interested in science/tech want to actually do something with it in their job not just write about it.
I think a big part of the problem is lack of any incentives. Actually knowing the science doesn't make sure you get a high paying job in science journalism, or even any job. After all the people hiring you know less about science than you and ultimately their job security depends on circulation not accuracy.
Finally there is the fundamental problem of science journalism: science just isn't metaphorical. Telling people that QM gives a way of probabilistically predicting the outcome of an experiment by adding up calculations over all possible (classicalish) paths (feynman diagrams) will never sell newspapers the way telling people that QM says an electron is in two places at once does. Ultimately science is technical and mathematical so trying to explain it metaphorically often does more harm than good.
Sure implementing this patent would be pretty damn evil and intrusive IF it was just foisted on the public. However, we have no reason to believe MS intends to do anything of the kind.
For starters they may be patenting this 'technology' (it's kinda obvious) defensively to prevent other people from implementing it (even as an 3rd party addition to windows). Alternatively they may be planning to offer special free computers to people who agree to be subject to this sort of invasive advertising. I don't like the idea myself but if other people are fairly informed and want to get their free computer anyway why should I tell them they shouldn't?
Whenever I run across a cnet page or similar tech news site (slashdot link, google search) I'm always disappointed. Usually everything they have to say could have fit in a paragraph but it's padded with out of context quotes and general fluff. It never tells me the interesting technical details I might want to know (say like kerneltrap summaries or wikipedia articles) nor does it present any well reasoned opinions that I might want to consider. Frankly the content is just so poor it's better to flail around until you run into the blog or other site that actually has something useful to say.
The problem with sites like cnet is that they can't decide who their audience is. If they want to pitch their writing to the general public then they probably should stick with reviewing the iPhone and stay far away from stories about Linus's comments on the GPL3 or the latest groklaw controversy but the mainstream media has that pretty well covered. On the other hand if they want to appeal to people who are more informed about this stuff then dumbing it down and spending the whole time giving context just won't work.
Maybe the problem is they hired journalism majors with a bit of tech knowledge rather than tech guys who can write reasonably. That's the right strategy for the NYT tech section not cnet. I dunno.
I think you misunderstand the ways in which STM are relevant to this sort of issue. Sure you can do full blown STM with crazy commits and rollbacks that are large and complex but that isn't what causes the problems with most threading issues. Really the primary benefit of STM is just to give an understandable and intuitive means to manage simple things that programmers now do with locks, e.g., making sure the other thread doesn't update part of the object while your thread is making some small change to it.
As far as performance the key here is compiler design. Sure in the fully general case STM may be fairly resource intensive but most cases aren't the general case. The hope is that compilers can be improved to natively support STM and recognize where simplifying assumptions can be made.
In other words practical STM is a way to get the compiler to meet the programmer halfway. Compilers can't do auto-parrililization and won't be able to anytime in the foreseeable future but having programmers deal with very low level constructs like locks and semaphores is confusing and a waste of time. This is a nice comprimise to meet in the middle. At least as long as it is used correctly.
As an aside let me first just say this is a terrible slashdot posting on an interesting subject. The linked article is nothing but an ad (well about page) for yet another job search company. Kudos to their marketing team for getting on slashdot though.
Anyway the comments so far seem to be blurring together several important but very different notions.
The legality of crawling another companies publicly available web site and sucking down their content
The legality of republishing that content in some manner, either as snippets in a search or in some other fashion
The unfairness or harm that one might inflict on another company by doing 1 or 2
All of these are interesting difficult question but let me say a few words about each in turn.
-- For #1 I am reasonably confident that the courts would find crawling that was so resource intensive that it effectively amounted to an DOS attack was banned but it's unclear where this line would be drawn. For instance is crawling that just causes a noticeable slowdown to other users enough to place one in this category? Does the size of the website suffering the slowdown matter or how frequently it happens? It would be unfortunate if archivists were forced to let any owner of a public page opt out because they don't know whose pages are being hosted over 56k modems. A good resolution to this problem will most likely have to await significant agreement on a defacto set of rules for playing nice that congress could then baptize into law. At the moment so long as a reasonable person wouldn't call you a DOS attack your probably safe in regards to the pure server load issue (though IANAL).
A more interesting question here is whether someone crawling your site is bound to follow your terms of service. Those silly little "you are not a member of law enforcement or the RIAA" access requirements have not held up in court suggesting that a totally open website like craigslist can't demand you accept it's terms of use just to crawl it (and your bot surely didn't sign a contract). ---
#2 gets a bit more tricky because now we are talking about copyright law. Obviously if you merely duplicate all their work and host it on your site you will have to pay up when they sue. However, it seems clear that in US courts a transformative use, like creating a search engine, that only displays small snippets of the original work is in the clear. True meta-search engines that repackage the search results of a few search engines seem to be on more shaky ground. So while IANAL it seems to me that if Oodle had been indexing craigslist as one site among many they would have been able to (eventually) win a lawsuit.
-- #3 is where the real action is. While you can probably legally get away with being a dick to some websites practically a de facto standard of good manners for web crawling and indexing is very important. Not only do we need a generally accepted sense of what is fair before we can pass the right laws as a practical matter if you don't comply with the de facto standards you will suffer. Once there is an accepted standard of behavior, like robots.txt, companies that flagrantly disregard it will find the hosts they are trying to crawl entering into an arms race with their crawling software. Oodle may have been in the legal right but even if so the practical difficulties with battling craigslist's web server team may have made it an unattractive prospect. On the other side of the table if you don't place nice with the bots and let them index fairly you may find your site delisted from Google and similar search engines.
Unfortunately it is totally unclear what the right standard in this area should be. Most people agree that the search should normally send people back to the original page but when is it okay to cache? It wouldn't be cool to copy all the posts from craigslist and republish them on your own site (almost certainly illegal) but what about copying all the data displayed in
Trust me I'm not swimming out of my depth. I really am writing a thesis in recursion theory and I present at conferences on this stuff to the world experts in this stuff. I get paid to prove things are or are not equivalent to the halting problem.
Now it is true that for some programs determining what inputs that program halts on is an undecidable problem (consider an interpreter it executes it's input reducing this to the halting problem) Hence the reason I was quite careful to specify that I was talking about a program known to halt '(on a given input)'. In case that wasn't clear let me spell out the theorem more precisely: there is a program S(i,x) so that if the i-th Turing machine halts on input x S(i,x) outputs the states (tuples of tape, head etc..) that Turing machine enters while executing on that input. I mean fuck if we really want to get stupid about this there are only a finite number of programs/input pairs that could be encoded in all the molecules used by the Blu Ray disk/player so there is some program (a giant case statement) that tells you how each one of them behaves.
Of course such a program is totally useless and irrelevant to the question of cryptography. Thus the reason I pointed out that the halting problem simply doesn't apply here. The question in cryptography is not whether something can be computed but whether it can be done so efficiently.
-- Now I won't claim to be an expert in cryptography the same way I am in recursion theory aka computability theory but I do know a fair bit about it (being a mathematician some stuff leaks out) and you are pretty confused.
Just consider the S-box in a normal symmetric cipher (like DES). This tells you how to modify some of the bits of your input based on the value of other bits, i.e., the value of some bits of the content you are decrypting tells you how to change the value of other bits. If you wanted to you could describe this just the same way you did the BD+ VM system. Each encrypted piece of content comes along with instructions that execute on the S-box VM (and lots of other components) that tell you how to modify other bits of the input.
Any block cipher works by letting some bits read from the input affect how you decrypt other bits. The only question is how you do it. If you could make your cryptographic algorithm more secure by exchanging nice simple things like S-boxes for complex computer like VMs they would be doing it.
So what about your claim that BD+ lets them modify the cryptography after a break making it more secure? Well like AACS does, they can revoke the keys of compromised devices but the VM plays no role here. BD+ can't do more than this as Blu Ray players bought next year need to be able to play Blu Ray disks in 3 years which means there must be some pre-established algorithm that lets the current players decode the future disks. That algorithm IS the cryptosystem, calling it a VM doesn't change anything.
At the highest level of abstraction things ALWAYS look like this. Player has some secret information. The information on the disk is somehow encrypted so that it is (supposed to be) hard to compute the content stream without the secret info. The player applies some algorithm (in this case runs the virtual code in a VM after doing some other cryptographic verification) that then produces the content stream as a function of the player secret and the data on the disk. Making this function more complex by sticking a VM inside it only makes the decryption algorithm more obscure. Once you've figured out the algorithm in the BD+ docs, i.e., the non-secret part all the manufacturers get, it's just another cryptosystem.
The reason the Palladium/TPM people use VMs and the like isn't because they make things more secure. If all you wanted to do was prevent unauthorized people from reading your HD you would just encrypt it with a nice symmetric cipher and be done. They implement a VM because it gives them more control. So long as the system'
Right so you have no additional security OVER AND ABOVE what the public key crypto gave you in the first place.
After all the AACS system is basically just read off the encrypted media key (or whatever it is called) off of the disk and use a private key built into the player to decrypt it. If you assume that this can't get compromised then AACS is perfectly secure. If you assume it can get compromised then the emulated VM uses that very compromise to lie about the correct response.
Actually it's a little worse than that even. We get to WATCH how the VM code tries to verify the response from the VM as it executes in our emulator. Now sure the authors can employ techniques designed to confuse us but we have strictly MORE information we can use to crack the VM based security than we did to crack the basic non-VM AACS style security.
Since I actually do research in recursion theory (basically the mathematical study of the halting problem) let me start by saying this has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH THE HALTING PROBLEM. The halting problem, or as you stated it determine the full execution path of a static binary, is provably unsolvable because programs can take arbitrarily long before deciding to halt. Given you know a program halts (on a given input) it's trivial to determine the full execution path. Just run it and see what it does.
In this situation there is nothing at all like this going on. We know that the code on the BluRay disk produces whatever output lets you view the disk not only in finite time but after a very short time.
In fact this situation offers no additional security over a well designed public crypto system AT ALL except for obscurity. The instructions for the virtual machine are just a very complicated sort of key, one that anyone who can crack the base level encryption can view. The memory footprints and all that jazz are only fancy ways of implementing a private key.
There are damn good reasons that the people who implement public key systems and symetric ciphers don't use VM instructions as their keys. A good crypto system is built around SIMPLE and well known mathematical problems because extra complications just provide more places an attacker can find a clever short circuit that you didn't think about. The only reason to think a crypto system is secure is because you think that the attacker doesn't have any shortcuts to compute things in the other direction much faster than brute force. The more complications in your system the more places he could discover a clever trick to undermine your security.
As I argued in my other post the benefits of the BD+ VM aren't really about security but about control. It doesn't make things much harder for the hackers but it does let the content producer execute more control over when things are decrypted. The only security advantage BD+ brings is obscurity and possibly the use of a better underlying crypto system than what AACS uses (the part that decrypts the VM at the beginning).
That's like saying encrypting something once with AES then again with DES makes it more secure. It doesn't matter how many *times* it uses an encrypted key or the like fundamentally the execution process still looks like this.
Hardware/software contains some secret information. This secret information plus some algorithm lets it decode the content on the disk. Renaming that secret information as several private keys (the VM key and whatever else) or otherwise changing how we describe it doesn't make any difference. It's still a cryptographic algorithm to decrypt the content on the disk and fancy wording doesn't make any difference.
I mean suppose someone came up to you and said they could make Diffie-Hellman key exchange more secure by transmitting encrypted VM instructions that would then execute based on some properties of the encrypted key. Your response should be to expect the system to be no more (or even less secure) not more.
In general one wants a cryptographic system to depend on well known mathematical objects so you can be more confident there isn't a clever trick to circumvent the process. Putting in VMs and the like just raises the risk that some clever cryptographer will notice a regularity that can be exploited to reduce the search time to find a key.
The basic idea here is that BD+ allows the BluRay maker to embed virtual machine code (and apparently native code) on their disks which are then executed on the host machine. This code then somehow verifies that the host machine is uncompromised (memory footprints apparently) and then executes whatever process is necessary to decrypt the key that allows content access. Now it seems likely that there is some additional decryption process similar to AACS that decrypts the BD+ virtual code. Perhaps this decryption process is implemented better than the one in AACS but that is the only security advantage BD+ provides.
The only extra security that BD+ can offer over an AACS type system is security through obscurity. There has to be some general cryptographic process to decrypt the BD+ VM instructions. Once decrypted an attacker who is aware of the BD+ standard just needs to emulate the virtual machine and have it pretend it is a valid device to access the content. The BD+ people can talk all they want about memory footprints and tamper checks but these are just a complicated private key for the device. Separating out these functions and putting them in a VM just makes the specification of the encryption scheme more complicated (and more obscure) but doesn't fundamentally increase the security.
So why do the studies want BD+? Well maybe they've been taken in by the claims of extra security but the more plausible reason is that they want the extra control BD+ gives them over their content BD+ might not be a real impediment for the serious pirate/hacker but it does allow the movie studios to implement even more fine grained control over how you use their content. The virtual machine might be set up to prevent you from watching the movie more than once, from using a streaming feature of the device, from using it after some fixed time. Imagine, for instance, movie companies creating tiered pricing based on how many rights you want to have. Say make you pay more if you want to stream it. Disney might release their next version of Aladdin on DVD in two classes. The 'gold' class that lasts forever and the standard class that only lasts 5 years. Well you get the idea.
So no I don't buy the argument that this feature makes the system much more secure (except insofar as it might eliminate some fuckups in how the AACS system was defined) but it certainly is in the Blu Ray consortium and movie theater's interest to portray it this way. Maybe this explains the much wider adoption of Blu Ray by the theaters.... And I used to be rooting for Blu Ray.
What the ruling held was that the header information of your email (and web browsing I believe) is subject to exactly the same standards as the information about what phone numbers you dial. Mostly this seems like an appropriate and totally correct extension of offline legal standards to the online world. The only reason that it is more problematic is that an email header includes things like the subject which contains a little bit of the content.
Still all things considered this seems like the correct rule. Subject lines don't contain that much information and if you are concerned you can just use an unrevealing subject. Moreover, we already contemplate the possibility that someone who happens to glance at the recipients screen might notice the title so it really doesn't seem like we have the same expectation of privacy for the title of the message as we do for the body.
Anyway for a better more interesting discussion about this case you can check out Orin Kerr's comments over at the Volokh Conspiracy.
Actually the studies I've seen show that a significant majority of men prefer brunettes. Now of course blonds are substantially more rare than brunettes so blonds may have better odds of attracting a partner but that doesn't mean they are preferred. Also it might depend on the type of interest.
Moreover, gas is priced competitively. Some gas stations sell the gas cheaper than others and this competition drives the price lower. If there were temperature sensors the gas would just be more expensive to compensate PLUS pay for the temperature sensors.
Actually the test results themselves say they were the result of internal simulations. Still, assuming they were done honestly, internal simulations are probably more accurate than test silicon.
The real story here is not that "AMD LIED." Parent comments are right that AMD did not make any false statements. They were, however, misleading but I would normally let that slide for advertising.
The story is that AMD slammed intel for being deceptive and turned around and did it themselves.
My god what is Google coming to! They let people *pay* them to display their messages. My god I thought they only let people whose political views I approve of buy ad space. I'll never use them as a search engine again.
Christ I'm getting tired of these posts on slashdot about how Google is violating their 'don't be evil' motto because they do something the poster disagrees with. I mean Jesus Christ doesn't anyone else have friends with different political views? Are they *evil* because they don't vote for national healthcare or believe in gun rights or the like? So why is Google evil because you don't agree with everything they do.
BTW for all of those going on about Chinese censorship I, and plenty of other people, happen to honestly believe that Google did the right thing in china because choosing not to censor at all would have just left companies even more willing to censor in the market and possibly creating a Chinese search engine competitor eager to censor. Whether you agree with me or not I'm certainly not evil because we have a difference of opinion. Yet if I can honestly believe this so can Sergey and Eric and refusing to do what they think is best because you will criticize them surely *is* evil. Disagreeing with what Google does and even thinking it is very harmful doesn't make them evil.
Besides, what would be evil is for Google to start exercising too much editorial control over their advertisement system. I sure as hell don't want big corporations like Google deciding for me what are 'good' advertisements that they should offer customer service for and what are bad advertisers that need to be treated poorly.
As an aside while I do favor some form of national healthcare and think the influence of insurance companies is too large I find the way Michael Moore films masquerade as serious inquiry or arguments about the issues really objectionable. Anecdotes simply aren't arguments. Any health care system has shitty, unfair and tragic outcomes. Go read the papers in a country with national health care sometime and you will find similar exposes about how the national health system has failed some individuals. What is relevant is statistical facts and serious policy discussion and Michael Moore films offer neither.
Michael Moore is engaging in propaganda just as much as the healthcare companies. Now he probably (reasonably) sees this as fair play but it's a fallacy to suppose they are a serious look at the issues. Go listen to a real policy debate between experts if you want to actually learn whats the best position, watch a Michael Moore film if you want to get emotionally fired up about something you already believe.
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Yes, there is overwhelming evidence for evolution but the truth is that the scientific evidence isn't the sort of thing we can present to the public, or even scientists in other areas. Sure, we can give some suggestive examples and talk about DNA similarities and the rest but this isn't really enough evidence on it's own to establish the validity of evolution. What makes the case for evolution so strong isn't any one result but a mass of small details all of which support evolution and refute intelligent design.
Yes, people should believe in evolution but we are lying if we tell them it's because they can see the evidence for themselves. Arguably no person has the time or expertise to evaluate the evidence in all the disparate disciplines which make the case for evolution so strong. The reason we should believe in evolution is because the experts in fields from geology, to genetics, to astrophysics all endorse theories in their fields supportive of evolution. In other words figuring out what sort of science we should accept is a lot like figuring out how to treat cancer. You don't go read the research papers and prescribe yourself a course of chemotherapy. Rather you use what you know about people and society to find a doctor you think knows this area better than you do. Only when you have specific reason to think that the medical profession as a whole is suffering from some bias does it make sense for a non-expert to look at the data themselves.
This might seem like a pedantic objection but the pretense that the public should decide scientific issues for themselves is a huge factor in the success of intelligent design as well as global warming skepticism. If you show people a few fossils, make some comments about DNA and tell them this should convince them of evolution you shouldn't be surprised when they believe someone else who shows them a few fossils, makes some comments about irreducible complexity The situation is even worse for global warming where any intelligent person can see the scientific arguments made in the mass media barely suggest much less establish anthropogenic global warming.
We should be honest with the public and tell them the reason they should believe in evolution as well as anthropogenic climate change is that the experts who have gone through all the details judge these theories to be strongly supported by the data. Anything else is setting ourselves up for a fall.
I really like the idea of a new D&D version. It's a chance to improve some of the imperfect rules in the last edition. For instance the fact that it's nearly impossible to create a fast moving dexterous fighter that has parity with a burly strength based one.
As far as people complaining about having to buy another version I sympathize but you don't have to buy the new version and WoTC shouldn't be forced not to fix the system just because some of us bought the previous version. I don't know if I will buy the new one (I have 3.5) but the next generation of gamers shouldn't be stuck with the imperfections of the system we played.
On the other hand I'm a bit worried about the online subscription part. The publication of feats and other rule changes in dragon was bad enough but an online subscription has even more of an official air about it and will give WoTC a very strong incentive to put overpowerful feats in the subscription. Hopefully, they will mostly just include story/background material and the occasional fix but we will have to wait and see.
Now the GPL may define a derived work however it wants but the GPL only applies if standard copyright law would deem the VMware application to infringe on linux copyrights. I'm not up to speed on this issue but if it only interfaces at a small number of points it very well may not. If the VMware app does not infringe on linux copyright then they do not have to accept the GPL to distribute it and there is no problem.
Of course it's entirely possible that it would be declared an infringing product. I have no idea.
Purpose? Bacteria don't have a purpose they just do what they do. Besides, suppose a company finally succeded in creating a 3d printer capable of printing itself. Would that really make it suddenly unworthy of patent protection.
This is all irrelevant to the question that matters: Is the harm caused by giving one company a monopoly worth the benefits gained from incentivizing research. Now likely this calculation comes out against patents on naturally occurring genes since it is likely to encourage blanket patenting without real research but I don't see any different between patenting instructions for the biological machines in our cells and for the silicon machines in our computers.
So long as we can keep people form patenting obvious DNA sequences it seems like a reasonable policy to me. I just hope they don't take the analogy with software too far and start copyrighting DNA sequences. Then we would have the same mess as we do in the computer field where a fundamentally functional item gets protection for 75+ years without even being forced to reveal the internal workings. Maybe we will get lucky and the net effect will be to take software from copyright protection and put it under patent protection (this is not the same as software patents).
Really? Why?
Why isn't it the responsibility of the non-GM crops to prevent their pollen from fertilizing the GM farmers crops? If I breed a new strain of corn using traditional techniques is it my responsibility to make sure that doesn't fertilize anyone else's corn as well?
Don't get me wrong I agree that GM crops should require more extensive testing before they are declared safe but the idea that they can never be declared safe is just absurd. Of course we can't ever know something won't hurt us but that doesn't stop us from making reasonable calculations about risk. Of course biotech companies shouldn't be allowed to shut down a farmer just because his crops happened to get pollinated by GM material (I have no idea if this really happens) but that's just saying that we should treat GM crops sanely.
Any chance from the past is a risk whether it is faster computers (they might take over!!) or a new variety of crops. Dogmatically insisting that no type of GM crop could ever be safe enough to be worth the risk of letting it's pollen out into the wild is just silly.
In other words what's wrong with just deciding about each GM crop on a case by case basis using the best available science at the time (including the certainty we have in that science)?
I visited a LUG once because someone famous was coming by to speak (Stallman? Raymond?) and was so turned off by the whole experience I would never want to go back. The speaker was fine but hearing about upcoming meetings felt like going over to digg and reading one of those stories like '8 tips for using Bash' where they tell you obvious shit like how to turn on color in ls.
I mean this was at a world class research university (caltech) and when I had trouble getting X to compile I would ask the guy down the hall who would then execute some totally crazy command line using four pipes awk and sed which magically fixed the problem. But instead of being the experts the people at the LUG where the linux equivalents of old school Mac users, trading little tips without any real knowledge. I liked the idea of a LUG but only if it has presentations of the sort of shit on kerneltrap and it's the best users not the worst who attend.
Basically I got the sense that LUGs ware a lot like groups like MENSA (supposedly for smart people). Namely that the best people (most knowledgeable, most savy, smartest) weren't going to come because they were all in universities, or working at tech corporations that provided them with more than enough technological/intellectual stimulation. In the beginning it might have been different but once linux adoption was wide enough in academia and the business world it seems inevitable that LUGs would sink to the lowest common denominator.
Maybe the proximity of caltech really biased my experience and LUGs in other areas are different but somehow I think the internet has worked as a great leveler giving the experts even in the most rural places better options and leaving for LUGs people who can't decipher the man pages
Of course google isn't a fucking charity. No one ever said it was, though of course one of the main tenants of capitalism is that honest self-interest can bring great benefits. Google isn't campaigning for sainthood they are just trying to make money without being actively evil. And if you would just use the same standard for google that you use to evaluate your friends you would see they aren't evil.
When your friend offers to go on vacation for you he isn't doing it purely for your benefit. He likes your company and gets a benefit from traveling with you. Even when your friend takes care of you when your sick he (though he may not consciously consider it) is making sure he has someone to take care of him when he doesn't feel well. As long as your friend deals with you fairly and honestly one doesn't consider your friend evil because he advocates things that benefit him. Hell, even when your friend explains the reasons that it would be in everyone's interests to go to the movie he wants to see he isn't being evil unless he is lieing or being underhanded.
Nor is it the case that having bad ideas or ideas you think would cause really really bad things to happen make your friend evil. If your friend is a republic, a democrat, a free trade activist, an environmentalist or a gun rights advocate he still isn't evil. He isn't even evil if his politics happen to correlate with his socioeconomic status. Rich people like low taxes, poor people like social programs but so long as they aren't being underhanded, deceptive or using shady methods to get what they want the fact that they tend to believe things that benefit them still doesn't make them evil.
Whether you like google's policy of data retention and user tracking or not they are upfront about it. They give you the choice to use their services or not and as of yet haven't tried any underhanded lock in schemes or FUD to fend off the competition. So you might believe the world would be better off without Google just like I believe the world would be better off without Mitt Romney but that doesn't make either of them evil.
Why do I care? Well mostly just because I like to argue on slashdot. But also because it seems google is getting more shit for being less evil than other companies and that creates all sorts of bad incentives.
The same way I don't want my parchment to reproduce the feel of letters chisled in stone or my book to reproduce the crinkled, rolled scrolls. Pick a way to present the material that plays to the strengths of the medium and avoids the weaknesses. Spend your time optimizing books for easy searching and display on laptop screens not reproducing an interface that works well for paper. It's not just pointless reproduction of the past it's actually a bad interface for reading on the computer.
A book has the wonderful property that it is easy to flip back and forth between pages. It's easy to estimate where you are/were in a book by the thickness of the remaining pages in your hand. You can perform what amounts to a binary search for a specific page with minimum of fuss. None of these are yet true with books displayed on a computer. However, computers can search the entire book in an instant, combine complex boolean expressions and display snippets from each result. A good book interface should play to these strengths.
Unfortunatly this interface doesn't manage to do this. While quite pretty the page animations make flipping through pages quickly even harder than normal on a computer. The search interface doesn't let you see all the results at once nor do I see any options for a more complex kind of search. However, I really like the tabs on the side of the book that give a sense of where in the book the results are located. That should just be combined with a flat list of results.
Of course reasons of cost and time mean that it is easier to present books in their original form but in 10-15 years this is going to look as silly as the early cars that offered reins instead of steering wheels.
Having page turning animations is just silly. It makes about as much sense as raggedly tearing the edges of books or rolling up the pages to make them look more like scrolls. The point of putting books online is so people can read them not to foist irrelevant and distracting visuals from the physical world onto electronic books. If this was merely a waste of time I wouldn't mind so much but given the poor responsiveness of browser animations for many people this seems like a distraction to serious reading.
I don't deny that physical metaphors are a necessary and powerful way to organize human computer interactions. The trash can metaphor is a great way to communicate how the non-immediate delete facility works. However, if a metaphor is good people don't need to be hit over the head with silly animations emphasizing the point.
Just imagine if the default setting for windows or mac was to have a little garbage truck roll across your screen and pick up your trash (or recycling) every time you emptied it! Or suppose moving files around in folders was accompanied by sounds and images of rustling paper. It would be cute the first time you saw it but would quickly become pretty horrible.
I guess I wouldn't even be making this post if I didn't already have the feeling (true or not) that this project (or at least the funding..I don't doubt the volunteers have nobler intentions) is as much about sticking it to google as it is about helping people get information and read books online for free. A feature like this that seems harmful to reading but makes people go 'ohh cool' just reinforces that impression for me.
Probably I'm just being silly (don't read anything deep into my bias) but that's what it feels like for what it's worth.
To clarify I meant that was the right strategy for increasing readership not informing the public. Sadly the public doesn't understand science well enough to be dismayed by the poor science reporting in places like the NYT. Heck people still eat up the BBC science stories despite a fairly long track record of absolute crap (cow dialects by misquoting researchers).
Yes, ideally we want people who understand both. Unfortunately people who really understand science/tech and want to go into journalism are few and far between. I went to a sciency school and there we had a few people who decided they couldn't really hack it as a scientist or just didn't like all the busy work and looked at science journalism as an option but for the most part people who are interested in science/tech want to actually do something with it in their job not just write about it.
I think a big part of the problem is lack of any incentives. Actually knowing the science doesn't make sure you get a high paying job in science journalism, or even any job. After all the people hiring you know less about science than you and ultimately their job security depends on circulation not accuracy.
Finally there is the fundamental problem of science journalism: science just isn't metaphorical. Telling people that QM gives a way of probabilistically predicting the outcome of an experiment by adding up calculations over all possible (classicalish) paths (feynman diagrams) will never sell newspapers the way telling people that QM says an electron is in two places at once does. Ultimately science is technical and mathematical so trying to explain it metaphorically often does more harm than good.
Sure implementing this patent would be pretty damn evil and intrusive IF it was just foisted on the public. However, we have no reason to believe MS intends to do anything of the kind.
For starters they may be patenting this 'technology' (it's kinda obvious) defensively to prevent other people from implementing it (even as an 3rd party addition to windows). Alternatively they may be planning to offer special free computers to people who agree to be subject to this sort of invasive advertising. I don't like the idea myself but if other people are fairly informed and want to get their free computer anyway why should I tell them they shouldn't?
Whenever I run across a cnet page or similar tech news site (slashdot link, google search) I'm always disappointed. Usually everything they have to say could have fit in a paragraph but it's padded with out of context quotes and general fluff. It never tells me the interesting technical details I might want to know (say like kerneltrap summaries or wikipedia articles) nor does it present any well reasoned opinions that I might want to consider. Frankly the content is just so poor it's better to flail around until you run into the blog or other site that actually has something useful to say.
The problem with sites like cnet is that they can't decide who their audience is. If they want to pitch their writing to the general public then they probably should stick with reviewing the iPhone and stay far away from stories about Linus's comments on the GPL3 or the latest groklaw controversy but the mainstream media has that pretty well covered. On the other hand if they want to appeal to people who are more informed about this stuff then dumbing it down and spending the whole time giving context just won't work.
Maybe the problem is they hired journalism majors with a bit of tech knowledge rather than tech guys who can write reasonably. That's the right strategy for the NYT tech section not cnet. I dunno.
I think you misunderstand the ways in which STM are relevant to this sort of issue. Sure you can do full blown STM with crazy commits and rollbacks that are large and complex but that isn't what causes the problems with most threading issues. Really the primary benefit of STM is just to give an understandable and intuitive means to manage simple things that programmers now do with locks, e.g., making sure the other thread doesn't update part of the object while your thread is making some small change to it.
As far as performance the key here is compiler design. Sure in the fully general case STM may be fairly resource intensive but most cases aren't the general case. The hope is that compilers can be improved to natively support STM and recognize where simplifying assumptions can be made.
In other words practical STM is a way to get the compiler to meet the programmer halfway. Compilers can't do auto-parrililization and won't be able to anytime in the foreseeable future but having programmers deal with very low level constructs like locks and semaphores is confusing and a waste of time. This is a nice comprimise to meet in the middle. At least as long as it is used correctly.
Anyway the comments so far seem to be blurring together several important but very different notions.
All of these are interesting difficult question but let me say a few words about each in turn.
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For #1 I am reasonably confident that the courts would find crawling that was so resource intensive that it effectively amounted to an DOS attack was banned but it's unclear where this line would be drawn. For instance is crawling that just causes a noticeable slowdown to other users enough to place one in this category? Does the size of the website suffering the slowdown matter or how frequently it happens? It would be unfortunate if archivists were forced to let any owner of a public page opt out because they don't know whose pages are being hosted over 56k modems. A good resolution to this problem will most likely have to await significant agreement on a defacto set of rules for playing nice that congress could then baptize into law. At the moment so long as a reasonable person wouldn't call you a DOS attack your probably safe in regards to the pure server load issue (though IANAL).
A more interesting question here is whether someone crawling your site is bound to follow your terms of service. Those silly little "you are not a member of law enforcement or the RIAA" access requirements have not held up in court suggesting that a totally open website like craigslist can't demand you accept it's terms of use just to crawl it (and your bot surely didn't sign a contract).
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#2 gets a bit more tricky because now we are talking about copyright law. Obviously if you merely duplicate all their work and host it on your site you will have to pay up when they sue. However, it seems clear that in US courts a transformative use, like creating a search engine, that only displays small snippets of the original work is in the clear. True meta-search engines that repackage the search results of a few search engines seem to be on more shaky ground. So while IANAL it seems to me that if Oodle had been indexing craigslist as one site among many they would have been able to (eventually) win a lawsuit.
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#3 is where the real action is. While you can probably legally get away with being a dick to some websites practically a de facto standard of good manners for web crawling and indexing is very important. Not only do we need a generally accepted sense of what is fair before we can pass the right laws as a practical matter if you don't comply with the de facto standards you will suffer. Once there is an accepted standard of behavior, like robots.txt, companies that flagrantly disregard it will find the hosts they are trying to crawl entering into an arms race with their crawling software. Oodle may have been in the legal right but even if so the practical difficulties with battling craigslist's web server team may have made it an unattractive prospect. On the other side of the table if you don't place nice with the bots and let them index fairly you may find your site delisted from Google and similar search engines.
Unfortunately it is totally unclear what the right standard in this area should be. Most people agree that the search should normally send people back to the original page but when is it okay to cache? It wouldn't be cool to copy all the posts from craigslist and republish them on your own site (almost certainly illegal) but what about copying all the data displayed in
Trust me I'm not swimming out of my depth. I really am writing a thesis in recursion theory and I present at conferences on this stuff to the world experts in this stuff. I get paid to prove things are or are not equivalent to the halting problem.
Now it is true that for some programs determining what inputs that program halts on is an undecidable problem (consider an interpreter it executes it's input reducing this to the halting problem) Hence the reason I was quite careful to specify that I was talking about a program known to halt '(on a given input)'. In case that wasn't clear let me spell out the theorem more precisely: there is a program S(i,x) so that if the i-th Turing machine halts on input x S(i,x) outputs the states (tuples of tape, head etc..) that Turing machine enters while executing on that input. I mean fuck if we really want to get stupid about this there are only a finite number of programs/input pairs that could be encoded in all the molecules used by the Blu Ray disk/player so there is some program (a giant case statement) that tells you how each one of them behaves.
Of course such a program is totally useless and irrelevant to the question of cryptography. Thus the reason I pointed out that the halting problem simply doesn't apply here. The question in cryptography is not whether something can be computed but whether it can be done so efficiently.
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Now I won't claim to be an expert in cryptography the same way I am in recursion theory aka computability theory but I do know a fair bit about it (being a mathematician some stuff leaks out) and you are pretty confused.
Just consider the S-box in a normal symmetric cipher (like DES). This tells you how to modify some of the bits of your input based on the value of other bits, i.e., the value of some bits of the content you are decrypting tells you how to change the value of other bits. If you wanted to you could describe this just the same way you did the BD+ VM system. Each encrypted piece of content comes along with instructions that execute on the S-box VM (and lots of other components) that tell you how to modify other bits of the input.
Any block cipher works by letting some bits read from the input affect how you decrypt other bits. The only question is how you do it. If you could make your cryptographic algorithm more secure by exchanging nice simple things like S-boxes for complex computer like VMs they would be doing it.
So what about your claim that BD+ lets them modify the cryptography after a break making it more secure? Well like AACS does, they can revoke the keys of compromised devices but the VM plays no role here. BD+ can't do more than this as Blu Ray players bought next year need to be able to play Blu Ray disks in 3 years which means there must be some pre-established algorithm that lets the current players decode the future disks. That algorithm IS the cryptosystem, calling it a VM doesn't change anything.
At the highest level of abstraction things ALWAYS look like this. Player has some secret information. The information on the disk is somehow encrypted so that it is (supposed to be) hard to compute the content stream without the secret info. The player applies some algorithm (in this case runs the virtual code in a VM after doing some other cryptographic verification) that then produces the content stream as a function of the player secret and the data on the disk. Making this function more complex by sticking a VM inside it only makes the decryption algorithm more obscure. Once you've figured out the algorithm in the BD+ docs, i.e., the non-secret part all the manufacturers get, it's just another cryptosystem.
The reason the Palladium/TPM people use VMs and the like isn't because they make things more secure. If all you wanted to do was prevent unauthorized people from reading your HD you would just encrypt it with a nice symmetric cipher and be done. They implement a VM because it gives them more control. So long as the system'
Right so you have no additional security OVER AND ABOVE what the public key crypto gave you in the first place.
After all the AACS system is basically just read off the encrypted media key (or whatever it is called) off of the disk and use a private key built into the player to decrypt it. If you assume that this can't get compromised then AACS is perfectly secure. If you assume it can get compromised then the emulated VM uses that very compromise to lie about the correct response.
Actually it's a little worse than that even. We get to WATCH how the VM code tries to verify the response from the VM as it executes in our emulator. Now sure the authors can employ techniques designed to confuse us but we have strictly MORE information we can use to crack the VM based security than we did to crack the basic non-VM AACS style security.
Since I actually do research in recursion theory (basically the mathematical study of the halting problem) let me start by saying this has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH THE HALTING PROBLEM. The halting problem, or as you stated it determine the full execution path of a static binary, is provably unsolvable because programs can take arbitrarily long before deciding to halt. Given you know a program halts (on a given input) it's trivial to determine the full execution path. Just run it and see what it does.
In this situation there is nothing at all like this going on. We know that the code on the BluRay disk produces whatever output lets you view the disk not only in finite time but after a very short time.
In fact this situation offers no additional security over a well designed public crypto system AT ALL except for obscurity. The instructions for the virtual machine are just a very complicated sort of key, one that anyone who can crack the base level encryption can view. The memory footprints and all that jazz are only fancy ways of implementing a private key.
There are damn good reasons that the people who implement public key systems and symetric ciphers don't use VM instructions as their keys. A good crypto system is built around SIMPLE and well known mathematical problems because extra complications just provide more places an attacker can find a clever short circuit that you didn't think about. The only reason to think a crypto system is secure is because you think that the attacker doesn't have any shortcuts to compute things in the other direction much faster than brute force. The more complications in your system the more places he could discover a clever trick to undermine your security.
As I argued in my other post the benefits of the BD+ VM aren't really about security but about control. It doesn't make things much harder for the hackers but it does let the content producer execute more control over when things are decrypted. The only security advantage BD+ brings is obscurity and possibly the use of a better underlying crypto system than what AACS uses (the part that decrypts the VM at the beginning).
That's like saying encrypting something once with AES then again with DES makes it more secure. It doesn't matter how many *times* it uses an encrypted key or the like fundamentally the execution process still looks like this.
Hardware/software contains some secret information. This secret information plus some algorithm lets it decode the content on the disk. Renaming that secret information as several private keys (the VM key and whatever else) or otherwise changing how we describe it doesn't make any difference. It's still a cryptographic algorithm to decrypt the content on the disk and fancy wording doesn't make any difference.
I mean suppose someone came up to you and said they could make Diffie-Hellman key exchange more secure by transmitting encrypted VM instructions that would then execute based on some properties of the encrypted key. Your response should be to expect the system to be no more (or even less secure) not more.
In general one wants a cryptographic system to depend on well known mathematical objects so you can be more confident there isn't a clever trick to circumvent the process. Putting in VMs and the like just raises the risk that some clever cryptographer will notice a regularity that can be exploited to reduce the search time to find a key.
Are you really sure that time spent will hurt google. I know LOTS of people who *always* have a gmail window open.
So information on BD+ seems relatively hard to find. The best explanations I could find are this presentation, this pdf at dell and best of all this general discussion of SPDC.
... And I used to be rooting for Blu Ray.
The basic idea here is that BD+ allows the BluRay maker to embed virtual machine code (and apparently native code) on their disks which are then executed on the host machine. This code then somehow verifies that the host machine is uncompromised (memory footprints apparently) and then executes whatever process is necessary to decrypt the key that allows content access. Now it seems likely that there is some additional decryption process similar to AACS that decrypts the BD+ virtual code. Perhaps this decryption process is implemented better than the one in AACS but that is the only security advantage BD+ provides.
The only extra security that BD+ can offer over an AACS type system is security through obscurity. There has to be some general cryptographic process to decrypt the BD+ VM instructions. Once decrypted an attacker who is aware of the BD+ standard just needs to emulate the virtual machine and have it pretend it is a valid device to access the content. The BD+ people can talk all they want about memory footprints and tamper checks but these are just a complicated private key for the device. Separating out these functions and putting them in a VM just makes the specification of the encryption scheme more complicated (and more obscure) but doesn't fundamentally increase the security.
So why do the studies want BD+? Well maybe they've been taken in by the claims of extra security but the more plausible reason is that they want the extra control BD+ gives them over their content BD+ might not be a real impediment for the serious pirate/hacker but it does allow the movie studios to implement even more fine grained control over how you use their content. The virtual machine might be set up to prevent you from watching the movie more than once, from using a streaming feature of the device, from using it after some fixed time. Imagine, for instance, movie companies creating tiered pricing based on how many rights you want to have. Say make you pay more if you want to stream it. Disney might release their next version of Aladdin on DVD in two classes. The 'gold' class that lasts forever and the standard class that only lasts 5 years. Well you get the idea.
So no I don't buy the argument that this feature makes the system much more secure (except insofar as it might eliminate some fuckups in how the AACS system was defined) but it certainly is in the Blu Ray consortium and movie theater's interest to portray it this way. Maybe this explains the much wider adoption of Blu Ray by the theaters.
What the ruling held was that the header information of your email (and web browsing I believe) is subject to exactly the same standards as the information about what phone numbers you dial. Mostly this seems like an appropriate and totally correct extension of offline legal standards to the online world. The only reason that it is more problematic is that an email header includes things like the subject which contains a little bit of the content.
Still all things considered this seems like the correct rule. Subject lines don't contain that much information and if you are concerned you can just use an unrevealing subject. Moreover, we already contemplate the possibility that someone who happens to glance at the recipients screen might notice the title so it really doesn't seem like we have the same expectation of privacy for the title of the message as we do for the body.
Anyway for a better more interesting discussion about this case you can check out Orin Kerr's comments over at the Volokh Conspiracy.
Actually the studies I've seen show that a significant majority of men prefer brunettes. Now of course blonds are substantially more rare than brunettes so blonds may have better odds of attracting a partner but that doesn't mean they are preferred. Also it might depend on the type of interest.
Moreover, gas is priced competitively. Some gas stations sell the gas cheaper than others and this competition drives the price lower. If there were temperature sensors the gas would just be more expensive to compensate PLUS pay for the temperature sensors.
Actually the test results themselves say they were the result of internal simulations. Still, assuming they were done honestly, internal simulations are probably more accurate than test silicon.
The real story here is not that "AMD LIED." Parent comments are right that AMD did not make any false statements. They were, however, misleading but I would normally let that slide for advertising.
The story is that AMD slammed intel for being deceptive and turned around and did it themselves.
My god what is Google coming to! They let people *pay* them to display their messages. My god I thought they only let people whose political views I approve of buy ad space. I'll never use them as a search engine again.
Christ I'm getting tired of these posts on slashdot about how Google is violating their 'don't be evil' motto because they do something the poster disagrees with. I mean Jesus Christ doesn't anyone else have friends with different political views? Are they *evil* because they don't vote for national healthcare or believe in gun rights or the like? So why is Google evil because you don't agree with everything they do.
BTW for all of those going on about Chinese censorship I, and plenty of other people, happen to honestly believe that Google did the right thing in china because choosing not to censor at all would have just left companies even more willing to censor in the market and possibly creating a Chinese search engine competitor eager to censor. Whether you agree with me or not I'm certainly not evil because we have a difference of opinion. Yet if I can honestly believe this so can Sergey and Eric and refusing to do what they think is best because you will criticize them surely *is* evil. Disagreeing with what Google does and even thinking it is very harmful doesn't make them evil.
Besides, what would be evil is for Google to start exercising too much editorial control over their advertisement system. I sure as hell don't want big corporations like Google deciding for me what are 'good' advertisements that they should offer customer service for and what are bad advertisers that need to be treated poorly.
As an aside while I do favor some form of national healthcare and think the influence of insurance companies is too large I find the way Michael Moore films masquerade as serious inquiry or arguments about the issues really objectionable. Anecdotes simply aren't arguments. Any health care system has shitty, unfair and tragic outcomes. Go read the papers in a country with national health care sometime and you will find similar exposes about how the national health system has failed some individuals. What is relevant is statistical facts and serious policy discussion and Michael Moore films offer neither.
Michael Moore is engaging in propaganda just as much as the healthcare companies. Now he probably (reasonably) sees this as fair play but it's a fallacy to suppose they are a serious look at the issues. Go listen to a real policy debate between experts if you want to actually learn whats the best position, watch a Michael Moore film if you want to get emotionally fired up about something you already believe.