Beyond incredibly simple computing tasks, like writing simple sort functions, there is little chance of inadvertantly writing code identical to code found elsewhere. Everyone's code is different.
Still got the problem of slower response to requests that way. Think about it:
Web server receives HTTP request for comment submission page Web server sends request for new image to dedicated box Dedicated box generates image Dedicated box sends image to web server Web server sends HTTP reply to client
As opposed to:
Web server receives HTTP request for comment submission page Web server generates reply, including pre-generated image. Web server sends HTTP reply to client.
You'd need more than fifteen, I'd say. How hard would it be for someone to acquire all fifteen images, then compare each image they get sent against each image in their stash? Even with some random noise thrown in, they could probably get away with a nearest match for 8 out of ten tries.
I figure it's best to have a set of 1000+ images, so it takes time to build up a stash of significant size. Additionally, a small number of the images should be regenerated at a regular interval (with different font or font size), so the set is constantly changing. Say, ten images every half hour. Ideally, the background of the images should be completely random.
I think you'd find that you can't just "concatenate" the images. They might need a little more processing than knocking them together end-to-end! Additionally, you'd probably be working with uncompressed bitmaps initially, so you'd probably want to convert them to a compressed format.
It strikes me that this sort of image processing is entirely out of place in a web server. Anything it needs to do to generate a page should be as quick and simple as possible. Admittedly, for slashdot, this often means generating a page of several hundred comments/comment titles every few seconds, but this doesn't make it OK to add to the load.
Considering the article's source, I'm somewhat dubious about their definition of fact. Their research into the Offspring/trademark situation stopped at exactly the point at which the story would have detracted from the intended thrust of the article. They make the claim that napster is actively opposing independent clients and servers, but have provided no examples of napster's supposed hypocrisy in this matter.
This is a transparent attempt to smear napster, and a clumsy one at that. Remember, MSNBC is the same unbiased news corporation that once claimed that the 2.4 kernel was 15 months late, a date that, at the time, would have put the 2.4 release only two months after the 2.2 release!
No, they legally could not have let it go. If they had, they would have lost legal control of their trademark. If you don't defend your trademarks, you lose them. This is one way in which trademark law differs from patent law.
Wouldn't it be a bit processor intensive to render a seperate image every time somebody wants to post something? Seperate images for digits would be now good, as they'd just check the filenames. If filenames are variable, they'd check file sizes. So you have to have your number on a sperately generated image each time around.
The obvious solution is to have a huge store of these images ready to use somewhere, so the web server just has to choose a pre-rendered image.
Could you enter into a little more detail about your simple benchmarks? I find it difficult to believe that a single-processor intel system would out-perform and E6000 in more than a few areas. I have to assume that the tests did not involve anything that might benefit from the E6000's multiprocessing capabilities. Did any of your benchmarks compare the relative abilities of the two systems to cope with large amounts of concurrent users? How did they compare on FPU performance?
I am interested to know what benchmarks you seem to think would disqualify a 30 processor(max) enterprise server from a business environment, and what makes a single processor PC a suitable replacement.
Judges are not idiots. A threat of violence is a threat of violence, and will be taken as one. Your excuse that it would be an "accident" would not get you anywhere. You would be clearly making a threat, and would probably receive a more severe than usual sentence, as the threat would be made to avoid legal proceedings.
I don't know where the five T gang enters into it. I suppose it was that you were up late, and not very coherent. I certainly didn't bring them up, the same way I never mentioned dairy farming, but that dominated your previous post.
As for by my reckoning, no. This is by your reckoning. You were the one that said it was OK to run around issuing threats, as I recall. It is most certainly not just considered "advice" under the law, to threaten a person's business and their life. The reason the five T's are able to do this with impunity is that they threaten shopkeepers who are scared to go to the police, or who believe that the police will not help them.
Productivity is not immaterial. It just isn't measured on the scales you have chosen.It would be nice if the whole world were so simple, but it isn't, nor could it ever be. Don't put words in my mouth.
Are you a farmer? You have the brilliant grasp of the intricacies of business and the law that I would usually attribute to country folk. Plus you are preoccupied with dairy farming. You certainly seem to have been paying attention to Bob Kattar as well.
You have a beautiful land to work on, and clean air to breathe. We have to make do with money. We earn it, and you can't possibly understand how difficult it actually is to do some of these jobs. It gives you ulcers, takes your health and sends you to an early grave. You have it good in some ways.
A few points of fact:
We have more lawyers in Australia than we know what to do with. There are more lawyers who are unable to get jobs as lawyers than there are that can. The reason Australia doesn't suffer from nuisance lawsuits is that court actions actually cost money for the plaintiff to start here.
There will always be a need for accountants. Even if taxation is simpified, (though I doubt it ever will be), keeping books for a mid-sized to large company is a difficult job, requiring a certain level of expertise.
Your plan in the event of a lawsuit will most likely land you in gaol for assault or fraud.(Threats of violence are considered assault. Actual violence is assault and battery, or worse). As you said, Australian law is enforced with a little more common sense than US law.
I construe from the fact that you aren't worth suing, that you aren't in charge of a wildly successful business. I wonder why that might be?
1. How are we going to find the cash to pay seven figure salaries all them poor downtrodden workers who do all the important stuff?
2. What about those bankrupt farmers the government was paying to not grow anything?
3. No, but I remeber the part where all the useless people like hairdresser, telephone sanitisers and <em>possibly<em> insurance executives were put on a space ark to Earth. Perhaps my copy was abridged or expurgated?
God forbid you should ever be in business for yourself. You would be crippled by lawsuits, unable to raise capital and unable to deal with taxation. Nobody would know about you, since you wouldn't be able to market your product, but that's OK, because you wouldn't sell anything because you wouldn't be able to close a deal to save your life.
These are not useless people. They are highly paid because they are highly skilled and highly desired by companies. <em>You<em> need to develop some perspective, and realise that you do not have all the answers, and that you are only skilled to do your job, not theirs.
You are incoherent. You haven't read his post and, in fact, appear to be in agreement with the statement you labelled as "bullshit."
Postal workers and teachers are not paid well, which you seem to have overlooked. You're closing statements are particularly in difficult to comprehend. Are you saying that 80% of the US population is white, and then complaining that the whites hold the majority of jobs? If so, do you realise that this is mathematically stupid of you? If not, I apologise, and ask, what is your point, exactly?
You took a pertinent quote about freedom of speech, from a great philospoher and humanitarian, and rephrased it to defend the rights of immoral men to be immoral. If you aren't an idiot and a lout, what could you possibly be, I wonder? It certainly isn't the action of an intelligent person to say something so palpably ridiculous.
And MS did break the law. Sherman antitrust act, remember? So what they did was also illegal. It comes under the heading of anti-competitive activities. Since the entire US economy is based on the idea that competition will level out inequalities and get the best deal for everyone, it is crucial that the government take action when a company tries to reduce competition (ie. through creating a monopoly or attempting to sign market splitting agreements with competitors like Netscape).
Or are you going to tell me that a law that protects consumers from greedy businessmen is unjust?
Anyhow, innovative or not, Linux users never started a "Freedom to Innovate Network" without actually doing much innovation. We simply aren't hypocritical enough for that.
Linus was most specifically NOT imitating Tannenbaum. Minix was a microkernel architecture. Linux is a monolithic kernel. Linus and Tannenbaum were involved in a considerable debate over the relative merits of the two different approaches.
Every OS builds upon it's forebears, but claiming that Linus's monolithic kernel is an "imitation" of Tannenbaum's microkernel is a laughable misunderstanding of the situation. Linux did appropriate some of minix's code. Linux has also taken code from BSD and vice versa. Why not just claim that Linus, Tannenbaum, and every other *nix developer is just imitating Thompson and Ritchie?
Linux has, in many senses, been an innovation. Touting it's roots in minix as proof of imitation is the mark of a misinformed lout.
GUI is an easy target and always has been. Almost every commercial GUI has been an imitation, direct or indirect, of the work done at Xerox PARC. Pick something else to harp on about. GUI design is always imitation.
How about Linux's kernel HTTP server (experimental and probably not a sensible thing for the average web host, but nonetheless very innovative). ip-masquerading is an innnovative and cheap solution, which saved a lot of people from having to buy expensive gateway/firewall systems. Is it not innovative?
Finally, I am certain that when Voltaire stated, "I do not agree with what you are saying, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" he did not foresee it would be paraphrased by idiots to support their inactivity and lack of opposition to the misdeeds of crooked businessmen. Let me clarify what your final statement says: "I think Microsoft are liars, thieves and scoundrels, but I will defend their right to lie, cheat and steal until the day I die."
uhhh...Evidently I thought the Napoleonioc wars commenced on the date of his birth. My mistake.
Hitler could have invaded Britain, had he continued targetting airfields for bombing raids in the Battle of Britain, instead of starting the blitz early. He could have defeated fighter command, but he gave them enough breathing space to recover. This was the mistake that lost him the Battle of Britain, and made invasion impossible in 1940.
The Afrika Corps was under-supplied and under-manned because British bombers were so effective at bombing their supply ships, thanks to the codebreaking work done at Bletchley Park.
I agree with your point about the Soviets. They would definitely have won the war. I wish they had. They might have shut the hell up about it.
Well put, but Hitler never actually abandoned the invasion of Britain. September 1940 was the pretty much as late as he could put it that year, as he did not want to invade in Winter. Operation Sealion was merely postponed, due to the unexpected success of fighter command at repelling german bombers. It was never rescheduled, because by the middle of 1941, it was clear that the Luftwaffe would never be able to eliminate the RAF, which was essential for invasion.
Additionally, Hitler was unable to invade in 1941 because, as you said, his troops were busy being pummelled in Africa. Later in the war, they were busy freezing to death at the gates of Stalingrad. American soldiers never saw elite german soldiers in that war. They never fought against a full-strength luftwaffe, either.
Canada, BTW, entered the war fairly early.
You'll never convince the yanks though. They've been indoctrinated since age six to believe that they saved the world. They also believe that Washington was incapable of telling lies, and that most of their ancestors arrived on the Mayflower.
I propose that the French take up the practice of reminding Americans that they saved their butts in the war if independence! That's right. During your great war of independence, that formed your nation, where you kicked redcoat butt, most of the British army was busy fighting Napoleon, and could not have cared less about you whiney colonials. Had Napoleon not been a concern, I am certain that you yanks would be speaking the Queen's English right now, instead of garbling it with your guttural accents and misspelling it at evey opportunity.
Completely wrong. Quicksort finishes when it has partitioned the array into partitions of 1 element apiece. At this point it is completely sorted. Since it is not possible to Bubblesort (or anything-sort) sequences of length = 1, Bubblesort cannot possibly be used.
That story about Einstein doing terribly in primary school was never true. It was a joke he made at a press conference, because somebody asked him how he did in school. Most of the reporters there failed to realise he was pulling their leg, and reported it as true. People who like to repeat surprising "facts" have been spreading the story ever since. If Einstein had trouble with things like simple math, he would never have come close to his theory of relativity.
Just because a standard doesn't specify what you can and cannot do in a specific area, doesn't mean you can do whatever you want. It is usually expected that the people reading standards can figure a few things out for themselves.
A good rule of thumb with standards: If I write some software (ie. Kerberos) and it doesn't work with other software of the same type, I must have broken something somewhere. Is that so difficult?
It should go without saying that an authentication protocol such as kerberos should not require additional proprietary authentication. If you need such additional authentication, it should be handled within the secure channel established using kerberos, NOT during kerberos authentication.
So no, they did not extend it, they broke it. You can tell because it doesn't work properly anymore. If they want to mince words and claim that they did nothing wrong because it doesn't say you can't do incredibly boneheaded things, fine. It appears that now authors of specifications will be forced to consider the writing of their document to be similar to the drafting of a law, all because MS is too thick to implement anything correctly unless it is explicitly required to.
I think you'll find that site operators are personally responsible under US law for everything on their sites. It's part of a set of laws the US passed in the 80's specifically so that this sort of thing would be possible.
There is no way Slashdot or Andover can fight this and win. It's a drag to have to censor things on the whim of MS, and will no doubt anger a large number of people, but if you don't you may find yourselves out on the street.
My advice is: comply with their demands for now, but move to a country without DMCA as soon as is reasonable.
The code-talkers were brought into the war because the US army needed a way for troops in combat to communicate over the radio, without the japanese understanding them. It was only used for speech transmissions in combat situations. It was never a written cipher.
This is the only reason it was never broken. Had it been written out and transmitted in morse code, as most machine ciphers were, it would have been broken very quickly. The nature of spoken navajo as being very alien to the japanese language was the only thing preventing them from interpreting it. Add to that the fact that it was spoken in high-stress combat situations by men who were probably trying to take cover while yelling responses into a radio, and you can see why the japanese never broke it.
In point of fact, the US navy used one-time pads for all of it's critically secret transmissions. These are provably unbreakable. They are however, inconvenient. Machine ciphers were used for less critical communication.
Code-talkers were used because rapid communication was required. It had nothing to do with the security of the navajo tongue. This is a misconception that is largely the fault of the semi-illiterate hacks at the X-Files.
Slashdot Mirror
Beyond incredibly simple computing tasks, like writing simple sort functions, there is little chance of inadvertantly writing code identical to code found elsewhere. Everyone's code is different.
I was thinking in terms of JDK1.2's orb.
Just a proof-of-concept implementation, IIRC.
Still got the problem of slower response to requests that way. Think about it:
Web server receives HTTP request for comment submission page
Web server sends request for new image to dedicated box
Dedicated box generates image
Dedicated box sends image to web server
Web server sends HTTP reply to client
As opposed to:
Web server receives HTTP request for comment submission page
Web server generates reply, including pre-generated image.
Web server sends HTTP reply to client.
You'd need more than fifteen, I'd say. How hard would it be for someone to acquire all fifteen images, then compare each image they get sent against each image in their stash? Even with some random noise thrown in, they could probably get away with a nearest match for 8 out of ten tries.
I figure it's best to have a set of 1000+ images, so it takes time to build up a stash of significant size. Additionally, a small number of the images should be regenerated at a regular interval (with different font or font size), so the set is constantly changing. Say, ten images every half hour. Ideally, the background of the images should be completely random.
I think you'd find that you can't just "concatenate" the images. They might need a little more processing than knocking them together end-to-end! Additionally, you'd probably be working with uncompressed bitmaps initially, so you'd probably want to convert them to a compressed format.
It strikes me that this sort of image processing is entirely out of place in a web server. Anything it needs to do to generate a page should be as quick and simple as possible. Admittedly, for slashdot, this often means generating a page of several hundred comments/comment titles every few seconds, but this doesn't make it OK to add to the load.
Considering the article's source, I'm somewhat dubious about their definition of fact. Their research into the Offspring/trademark situation stopped at exactly the point at which the story would have detracted from the intended thrust of the article. They make the claim that napster is actively opposing independent clients and servers, but have provided no examples of napster's supposed hypocrisy in this matter.
This is a transparent attempt to smear napster, and a clumsy one at that. Remember, MSNBC is the same unbiased news corporation that once claimed that the 2.4 kernel was 15 months late, a date that, at the time, would have put the 2.4 release only two months after the 2.2 release!
No, they legally could not have let it go. If they had, they would have lost legal control of their trademark. If you don't defend your trademarks, you lose them. This is one way in which trademark law differs from patent law.
Wouldn't it be a bit processor intensive to render a seperate image every time somebody wants to post something? Seperate images for digits would be now good, as they'd just check the filenames. If filenames are variable, they'd check file sizes. So you have to have your number on a sperately generated image each time around.
The obvious solution is to have a huge store of these images ready to use somewhere, so the web server just has to choose a pre-rendered image.
Could you enter into a little more detail about your simple benchmarks? I find it difficult to believe that a single-processor intel system would out-perform and E6000 in more than a few areas. I have to assume that the tests did not involve anything that might benefit from the E6000's multiprocessing capabilities. Did any of your benchmarks compare the relative abilities of the two systems to cope with large amounts of concurrent users? How did they compare on FPU performance?
I am interested to know what benchmarks you seem to think would disqualify a 30 processor(max) enterprise server from a business environment, and what makes a single processor PC a suitable replacement.
Judges are not idiots. A threat of violence is a threat of violence, and will be taken as one. Your excuse that it would be an "accident" would not get you anywhere. You would be clearly making a threat, and would probably receive a more severe than usual sentence, as the threat would be made to avoid legal proceedings.
I don't know where the five T gang enters into it. I suppose it was that you were up late, and not very coherent. I certainly didn't bring them up, the same way I never mentioned dairy farming, but that dominated your previous post.
As for by my reckoning, no. This is by your reckoning. You were the one that said it was OK to run around issuing threats, as I recall. It is most certainly not just considered "advice" under the law, to threaten a person's business and their life. The reason the five T's are able to do this with impunity is that they threaten shopkeepers who are scared to go to the police, or who believe that the police will not help them.
Productivity is not immaterial. It just isn't measured on the scales you have chosen.It would be nice if the whole world were so simple, but it isn't, nor could it ever be. Don't put words in my mouth.
Are you a farmer? You have the brilliant grasp of the intricacies of business and the law that I would usually attribute to country folk. Plus you are preoccupied with dairy farming. You certainly seem to have been paying attention to Bob Kattar as well.
You have a beautiful land to work on, and clean air to breathe. We have to make do with money. We earn it, and you can't possibly understand how difficult it actually is to do some of these jobs. It gives you ulcers, takes your health and sends you to an early grave. You have it good in some ways.
A few points of fact:
We have more lawyers in Australia than we know what to do with. There are more lawyers who are unable to get jobs as lawyers than there are that can. The reason Australia doesn't suffer from nuisance lawsuits is that court actions actually cost money for the plaintiff to start here.
There will always be a need for accountants. Even if taxation is simpified, (though I doubt it ever will be), keeping books for a mid-sized to large company is a difficult job, requiring a certain level of expertise.
Your plan in the event of a lawsuit will most likely land you in gaol for assault or fraud.(Threats of violence are considered assault. Actual violence is assault and battery, or worse). As you said, Australian law is enforced with a little more common sense than US law.
I construe from the fact that you aren't worth suing, that you aren't in charge of a wildly successful business. I wonder why that might be?
dammit
1. How are we going to find the cash to pay seven figure salaries all them poor downtrodden workers who do all the important stuff?
2. What about those bankrupt farmers the government was paying to not grow anything?
3. No, but I remeber the part where all the useless people like hairdresser, telephone sanitisers and <em>possibly<em> insurance executives were put on a space ark to Earth. Perhaps my copy was abridged or expurgated?
God forbid you should ever be in business for yourself. You would be crippled by lawsuits, unable to raise capital and unable to deal with taxation. Nobody would know about you, since you wouldn't be able to market your product, but that's OK, because you wouldn't sell anything because you wouldn't be able to close a deal to save your life.
These are not useless people. They are highly paid because they are highly skilled and highly desired by companies. <em>You<em> need to develop some perspective, and realise that you do not have all the answers, and that you are only skilled to do your job, not theirs.
You are incoherent. You haven't read his post and, in fact, appear to be in agreement with the statement you labelled as "bullshit."
Postal workers and teachers are not paid well, which you seem to have overlooked. You're closing statements are particularly in difficult to comprehend. Are you saying that 80% of the US population is white, and then complaining that the whites hold the majority of jobs? If so, do you realise that this is mathematically stupid of you? If not, I apologise, and ask, what is your point, exactly?
You took a pertinent quote about freedom of speech, from a great philospoher and humanitarian, and rephrased it to defend the rights of immoral men to be immoral. If you aren't an idiot and a lout, what could you possibly be, I wonder? It certainly isn't the action of an intelligent person to say something so palpably ridiculous.
And MS did break the law. Sherman antitrust act, remember? So what they did was also illegal. It comes under the heading of anti-competitive activities. Since the entire US economy is based on the idea that competition will level out inequalities and get the best deal for everyone, it is crucial that the government take action when a company tries to reduce competition (ie. through creating a monopoly or attempting to sign market splitting agreements with competitors like Netscape).
Or are you going to tell me that a law that protects consumers from greedy businessmen is unjust?
Anyhow, innovative or not, Linux users never started a "Freedom to Innovate Network" without actually doing much innovation. We simply aren't hypocritical enough for that.
Linus was most specifically NOT imitating Tannenbaum. Minix was a microkernel architecture. Linux is a monolithic kernel. Linus and Tannenbaum were involved in a considerable debate over the relative merits of the two different approaches.
Every OS builds upon it's forebears, but claiming that Linus's monolithic kernel is an "imitation" of Tannenbaum's microkernel is a laughable misunderstanding of the situation. Linux did appropriate some of minix's code. Linux has also taken code from BSD and vice versa. Why not just claim that Linus, Tannenbaum, and every other *nix
developer is just imitating Thompson and Ritchie?
Linux has, in many senses, been an innovation. Touting it's roots in minix as proof of imitation is the mark of a misinformed lout.
GUI is an easy target and always has been. Almost every commercial GUI has been an imitation, direct or indirect, of the work done at Xerox PARC. Pick something else to harp on about. GUI design is always imitation.
How about Linux's kernel HTTP server (experimental and probably not a sensible thing for the average web host, but nonetheless very innovative). ip-masquerading is an innnovative and cheap solution, which saved a lot of people from having to buy expensive gateway/firewall systems. Is it not innovative?
Finally, I am certain that when Voltaire stated, "I do not agree with what you are saying, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" he did not foresee it would be paraphrased by idiots to support their inactivity and lack of opposition to the misdeeds of crooked businessmen. Let me clarify what your final statement says: "I think Microsoft are liars, thieves and scoundrels, but I will defend their right to lie, cheat and steal until the day I die."
Certainly not what Voltaire meant.
uhhh...Evidently I thought the Napoleonioc wars commenced on the date of his birth. My mistake.
Hitler could have invaded Britain, had he continued targetting airfields for bombing raids in the Battle of Britain, instead of starting the blitz early. He could have defeated fighter command, but he gave them enough breathing space to recover. This was the mistake that lost him the Battle of Britain, and made invasion impossible in 1940.
The Afrika Corps was under-supplied and under-manned because British bombers were so effective at bombing their supply ships, thanks to the codebreaking work done at Bletchley Park.
I agree with your point about the Soviets. They would definitely have won the war. I wish they had. They might have shut the hell up about it.
Well put, but Hitler never actually abandoned the invasion of Britain. September 1940 was the pretty much as late as he could put it that year, as he did not want to invade in Winter. Operation Sealion was merely postponed, due to the unexpected success of fighter command at repelling german bombers. It was never rescheduled, because by the middle of 1941, it was clear that the Luftwaffe would never be able to eliminate the RAF, which was essential for invasion.
Additionally, Hitler was unable to invade in 1941 because, as you said, his troops were busy being pummelled in Africa. Later in the war, they were busy freezing to death at the gates of Stalingrad. American soldiers never saw elite german soldiers in that war. They never fought against a full-strength luftwaffe, either.
Canada, BTW, entered the war fairly early.
You'll never convince the yanks though. They've been indoctrinated since age six to believe that they saved the world. They also believe that Washington was incapable of telling lies, and that most of their ancestors arrived on the Mayflower.
I propose that the French take up the practice of reminding Americans that they saved their butts in the war if independence! That's right. During your great war of independence, that formed your nation, where you kicked redcoat butt, most of the British army was busy fighting Napoleon, and could not have cared less about you whiney colonials. Had Napoleon not been a concern, I am certain that you yanks would be speaking the Queen's English right now, instead of garbling it with your guttural accents and misspelling it at evey opportunity.
Completely wrong. Quicksort finishes when it has partitioned the array into partitions of 1 element apiece. At this point it is completely sorted. Since it is not possible to Bubblesort (or anything-sort) sequences of length = 1, Bubblesort cannot possibly be used.
That story about Einstein doing terribly in primary school was never true. It was a joke he made at a press conference, because somebody asked him how he did in school. Most of the reporters there failed to realise he was pulling their leg, and reported it as true. People who like to repeat surprising "facts" have been spreading the story ever since. If Einstein had trouble with things like simple math, he would never have come close to his theory of relativity.
Just because a standard doesn't specify what you can and cannot do in a specific area, doesn't mean you can do whatever you want. It is usually expected that the people reading standards can figure a few things out for themselves.
A good rule of thumb with standards: If I write some software (ie. Kerberos) and it doesn't work with other software of the same type, I must have broken something somewhere. Is that so difficult?
It should go without saying that an authentication protocol such as kerberos should not require additional proprietary authentication. If you need such additional authentication, it should be handled within the secure channel established using kerberos, NOT during kerberos authentication.
So no, they did not extend it, they broke it. You can tell because it doesn't work properly anymore. If they want to mince words and claim that they did nothing wrong because it doesn't say you can't do incredibly boneheaded things, fine. It appears that now authors of specifications will be forced to consider the writing of their document to be similar to the drafting of a law, all because MS is too thick to implement anything correctly unless it is explicitly required to.
I think you'll find that site operators are personally responsible under US law for everything on their sites. It's part of a set of laws the US passed in the 80's specifically so that this sort of thing would be possible.
There is no way Slashdot or Andover can fight this and win. It's a drag to have to censor things on the whim of MS, and will no doubt anger a large number of people, but if you don't you may find yourselves out on the street.
My advice is: comply with their demands for now, but move to a country without DMCA as soon as is reasonable.
The code-talkers were brought into the war because the US army needed a way for troops in combat to communicate over the radio, without the japanese understanding them. It was only used for speech transmissions in combat situations. It was never a written cipher.
This is the only reason it was never broken. Had it been written out and transmitted in morse code, as most machine ciphers were, it would have been broken very quickly. The nature of spoken navajo as being very alien to the japanese language was the only thing preventing them from interpreting it. Add to that the fact that it was spoken in high-stress combat situations by men who were probably trying to take cover while yelling responses into a radio, and you can see why the japanese never broke it.
In point of fact, the US navy used one-time pads for all of it's critically secret transmissions. These are provably unbreakable. They are however, inconvenient. Machine ciphers were used for less critical communication.
Code-talkers were used because rapid communication was required. It had nothing to do with the security of the navajo tongue. This is a misconception that is largely the fault of the semi-illiterate hacks at the X-Files.