Each big (hollow) custom piece replaces anywhere from 10 to 100 individual bricks in a Lego kit. This enables them to sell the kit at an affordable price.
your Web-enabled wireless phone will be able to recommend a nearby restaurant...and then make your reservation for you.
It could even recommend a movie based on what you liked and didn't like in the past -- and, by the way, it's playing three blocks away, starts in half an hour and only a few tickets are left, so would you like to purchase one now with your credit card?
This is just about the worst way to use computers.
People are good at these things, and computers are bad at them.
For instance, the District Court
analogized the injury due to publication of DeCSS to the publication of a bank vault combination in a national
newspaper, indicating that such publication could be restrained. Universal at 315. The District Court, unfortunately, is
mistaken. In Chicago Lock v. Fanberg, 676 F.2d 400 (9th Cir. 1982), the defendant was sued on a trade secret theory
for selling books that contained lock key codes that enabled persons to more easily duplicate keys to plaintiff's locks.
The Ninth Circuit found that these books could be published because the lock key codes were obtained through
reverse engineering.
In the world of open source software, bug reports are useful information. Making them public is a
service to other users, and improves the OS. Making them public systematically is so important
that highly intelligent people voluntarily put time and money into running bug databases. In the
commercial OS world, however, reporting a bug is a privilege that you have to pay lots of money
for. But if you pay for it, it follows that the bug report must be kept confidential--otherwise
anyone could get the benefit of your ninety-five bucks! And yet nothing prevents NT users from
setting up their own public bug database.
This is, in other words, another feature of the OS market that simply makes no sense unless you
view it in the context of culture. What Microsoft is selling through Pay Per Incident isn't technical
support so much as the continued illusion that its customers are engaging in some kind of rational
business transaction. It is a sort of routine maintenance fee for the upkeep of the fantasy. If
people really wanted a solid OS they would use Linux, and if they really wanted tech support
they would find a way to get it; Microsoft's customers want something else.
The first time the user runs the program, require a password. Supply the password in response to email registration.
If a 3rd party distributes the password along with the program, then they are circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under [the DCMA]
If the writer signs a contract with the publisher, then the contract controls what the publisher can and cannot do with the writer's work.
If the writer doesn't sign a contract, then a particular clause in the federal copyright statute controls.
This clause was written over ten years ago for the specfic purpose of settling disputes like the one before the court. However, it predates the web, and it isn't quite clear how it should be applied to works that are republished online. Since the lower courts don't agree, the Supreme Court gets to decide.
The significance of this going forward is minimal. Once the court decides how to interpret the law, then writers and publishers will know what they are agreeing to when they do business without a contract; if they don't like those terms, then they will write contracts with terms that they do like.
BTW
Much as I'd like to see the big publishers get their wings clipped, I wouldn't call their behavior piracy.
When a question of law is close enough to get to the Supreme Court, I think both sides are entitled to a presumption of good faith.
imagine printing the screen...on paper...press the screen against your own...skin...attach a...computer to the output wires...you have a living organism-chamelion.
Rudy Rucker anticipated this in his novel Software. He called it flicker-cladding.
The number of momentum states is (essentially) equal to the number of Si atoms in the crystal. So if you make a crystal with only a few atoms, you only get a few momentum states.
That may push the bands around so that you get a direct band gap,
OR
That may make it possible to get a significant carrier population in the zero-momentum state, even though that isn't the lowest energy state.
(the NYT article mentioned millions of
digits per second)
From the NYT article
The numbers can be coming by at an enormous speed -- 10 million million per second, for example.
They may come at that speed, but I can't receive them at that speed: I don't have terabit ethernet, and I don't know how receive infrared satellite transmissions, and my atomic clock only gives me 100 picosecond resolution, so I can't synchronize my decoder to a 10 THz bit stream.
Now if it is only a billion bits per second, I can probably manage, but then someone else can also capure them on disk and archive them on tape.
The article argues that web ads are failing because
networks can't provide user demographics
advertisers don't know how to use the medium
but holds out hope these things may improve in time. However, Jakob Nielsen has been arguing for years that web advertising is inherently unworkable. See, for example
Remember back when the NSA was pushing the clipper chip? Clipper was going to be tamper-resistant, and they were claiming it would cost $30M to crack.
Their point was that only big companies and foreign governments have that kind of money. Companies won't crack it, because there's no profit in it. Governments will crack it, but they won't publish the results: they will keep the secret for their own use. So the NSA was arguing that the Clipper chip was effectively uncrackable.
But the fact is, money doesn't crack chips: engineers crack chips. You can buy engineers for something like $100K/year, so when the NSA said it would cost $30M to crack the clipper chip, what they were actually saying is that it would take 300 engineering-years.
So the real question is whether 300 engineering-years of talent will be brought to bear on the problem. And the answer is yes, it will. It will come from dorm rooms, and university labs, and random hackers all over the world.
They won't have as much equipment or funding as the NSA, but they will be highly motivated, they will collaborate over the internet, and they will crack it.
I'll go out on a limb and predict no more than one year.
I've read the article, and the comments, and a followed a bunch of the links, and (forgive me for being clueless) I do not understand how they intend to implement copy protection on hard drives.
The logical interface to a hard drive is
store(int blockNumber, char *pcBlock)
fetch(int blockNumber, char *pcBlock)
If the drive supports this interface, then I can copy data on and off of it at will; if the drive doesn't support this interface, then what interface will it provide???
My ISP's machines went to their knees late Friday. The problem was cleared up by Saturday.
When I asked, they said there was a huge email backlog upstream from them, and that their own machines choked holding all the messages that they couldn't deliver.
The strange part is that after the problem was cleared, response time on their machines got way better. Not just better than it was on Friday; better than has has been for weeks.
I visited the Royal Observatory
on
Longitude
·
· Score: 3
I visited the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England a few weeks ago. It's a museum now. There were two displays that caught my eye.
A GPS receiver, running, battery powered, LCD display, showing
0 0.0145' W longitude
or about 35 feet off of the prime meridian. (Well, that's where it was...)
A 4 foot cast iron cylinder, with glass caps, a pendulum inside, a vacuum pump and assorted other machinery outside. The plaque explained that this was the standard high-precision timepiece used in the Soviet Union through the 1970s? 1980s? (I forget the exact date; it was quote recent) by TV stations, and radio stations, or anyplace else that needed to know the correct time.
The plaque was tactful about it, but what it basically said was that the Soviets used these monsters because they could build a vacuum chamber, and they couldn't build a quartz clock...
If they believe that your code is a work for hire, then they apparently view you strictly as an employee.
In this case, they wouldn't have any principled objection to your forming a union, in order to bargin for the best possible compensation and working conditions.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps someone should file a Habeus Corpus petiton?
They do that to keep the cost down.
Each big (hollow) custom piece replaces anywhere from 10 to 100 individual bricks in a Lego kit. This enables them to sell the kit at an affordable price.
I had an erector set. It had sharp edges, a million little pieces, and I could never think of anything interesting to do with it.
I got my start programming with
- Think-A-Dot
- DigiComp I
Think-A-Dot was a plastic box with 8 flip-flops inside. You dropped marbles in the top to toggle them.DigiComp I was a 3-bit state machine, implemented in plastic. I spent hours programming it when I was 9 or 10.
It could even recommend a movie based on what you liked and didn't like in the past -- and, by the way, it's playing three blocks away, starts in half an hour and only a few tickets are left, so would you like to purchase one now with your credit card?
This is just about the worst way to use computers. People are good at these things, and computers are bad at them.
See Why Smart Agents Are A Dumb Idea for further analysis.
she stated that computer programs were expressive, and the judge asked her to explain....I felt the response was lacking.
This was discussed extensively in the Amicus Curiae briefs, for example, at
- Programmers' & Academics' Amici Brief in "MPAA v. 2600"
Case
- EFF/2600 Appeal Brief in MPAA v. 2600 Case
- ACM's Amicus Brief in "MPAA v. 2600" Case
He didn't use the "digital crowbar" metaphor, but insisted that publishing DeCSS was like publishing the combination to a bank vault in a newspaperThe EFF/2600 Appeal Brief in MPAA v. 2600 Case says
You will probably get more feedback if you provide an email address, either on SlashDot or on your web page.
YOW! I just found a copy of advert.dll installed on my machine.
There is some commentary on the Oregon computer crime law at Remarks on Oregon vs. Schwartz
Software Tool and Die hosts web sites. In my experience, they are secure, reliable, and straightforward to deal with.
If a 3rd party distributes the password along with the program, then they are circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under [the DCMA]
If the writer signs a contract with the publisher, then the contract controls what the publisher can and cannot do with the writer's work. If the writer doesn't sign a contract, then a particular clause in the federal copyright statute controls.
This clause was written over ten years ago for the specfic purpose of settling disputes like the one before the court. However, it predates the web, and it isn't quite clear how it should be applied to works that are republished online. Since the lower courts don't agree, the Supreme Court gets to decide.
The significance of this going forward is minimal. Once the court decides how to interpret the law, then writers and publishers will know what they are agreeing to when they do business without a contract; if they don't like those terms, then they will write contracts with terms that they do like.
BTW
Much as I'd like to see the big publishers get their wings clipped, I wouldn't call their behavior piracy. When a question of law is close enough to get to the Supreme Court, I think both sides are entitled to a presumption of good faith.
Rudy Rucker anticipated this in his novel Software . He called it flicker-cladding.
The number of momentum states is (essentially) equal to the number of Si atoms in the crystal. So if you make a crystal with only a few atoms, you only get a few momentum states.
That may push the bands around so that you get a direct band gap,
OR
That may make it possible to get a significant carrier population in the zero-momentum state, even though that isn't the lowest energy state.
From the NYT article
They may come at that speed, but I can't receive them at that speed: I don't have terabit ethernet, and I don't know how receive infrared satellite transmissions, and my atomic clock only gives me 100 picosecond resolution, so I can't synchronize my decoder to a 10 THz bit stream.Now if it is only a billion bits per second, I can probably manage, but then someone else can also capure them on disk and archive them on tape.
see How The Internet Will Make The Record Labels Evaporate
- networks can't provide user demographics
- advertisers don't know how to use the medium
but holds out hope these things may improve in time. However, Jakob Nielsen has been arguing for years that web advertising is inherently unworkable. See, for exampleRemember back when the NSA was pushing the clipper chip? Clipper was going to be tamper-resistant, and they were claiming it would cost $30M to crack.
Their point was that only big companies and foreign governments have that kind of money. Companies won't crack it, because there's no profit in it. Governments will crack it, but they won't publish the results: they will keep the secret for their own use. So the NSA was arguing that the Clipper chip was effectively uncrackable.
But the fact is, money doesn't crack chips: engineers crack chips. You can buy engineers for something like $100K/year, so when the NSA said it would cost $30M to crack the clipper chip, what they were actually saying is that it would take 300 engineering-years.
So the real question is whether 300 engineering-years of talent will be brought to bear on the problem. And the answer is yes, it will. It will come from dorm rooms, and university labs, and random hackers all over the world.
They won't have as much equipment or funding as the NSA, but they will be highly motivated, they will collaborate over the internet, and they will crack it.
I'll go out on a limb and predict no more than one year.
The logical interface to a hard drive is
If the drive supports this interface, then I can copy data on and off of it at will; if the drive doesn't support this interface, then what interface will it provide???
It's just an image, not a working web page.
a dobe.jpg">here</a>
<html>
<head>
<title>You are forbidden to read this</title>
</head>
<body bgcolor="ffffff">
<img src="adobe.jpg">
<!-- An alternate copy
<a href="http://i16.yimg.com/16/b7d5c7ab/h/d381eac0/
-->
</body>
</html>
When I asked, they said there was a huge email backlog upstream from them, and that their own machines choked holding all the messages that they couldn't deliver.
The strange part is that after the problem was cleared, response time on their machines got way better. Not just better than it was on Friday; better than has has been for weeks.
The plaque was tactful about it, but what it basically said was that the Soviets used these monsters because they could build a vacuum chamber, and they couldn't build a quartz clock...
The meta-Turing test counts a thing as intelligent if it seeks to devise and apply Turing tests to objects of its own creation.
-- Lew Mammel, Jr.
In this case, they wouldn't have any principled objection to your forming a union, in order to bargin for the best possible compensation and working conditions.
$25/month gets
- 250 hours connect time
- 15MB storage
- 56K modem pools scattered all over eastern MA
- telnet from anywhere
- ssh
- a shell account
- email
- a full news feed
- a web page
World is basically never down