If they couldn't mention anything about mp3, they would instead mention the petabytes worth of music thieves all over the world will steal from them if this software is permitted to exist.
Exactly none. But that doesn't really matter much. Here are a few choice quotes from the article:
"The RIAA and XM are both busy figuring out
if any copyright laws and user agreements have been broken.
"That program is something we don't condone...
It's our expectation they will be shut down," he added. "We're also researching any potential legal violations."
So they're predicting a shutdown even though they've no idea if it is breaking any laws. You can translate this as "Our revenues are $20million a month, we can afford lawyers who will bury this person under frivolous litigation until he's bankrupt. And hey, if we can find a law that will support us, then we could win in court assuming it manages to go all the way to a judgement"
It's pretty much all posturing. The company is working on the same exact thing which they are going to sell for an additional monthly fee. Of course there will shortly be an open source competitor up on sourceforge (assuming there isn't already).
Just goes to show you how squirly the notion of "art" can be. I saw "Reservoir Dogs" and "Pulp Fiction" and I thought they were both deplorable, inhuman and in the case of Pulp Fiction uninteresting (I know I'm in the minority here, for what it's worth I thought Fight Club was terrible too).
However I thought Kill Bill was excellent. I loved the mix between comic-book style and old 70's-era kung foo movies. Brought back good memories.
So, I'm still not sure of Tarantino as an artistic director.
The movie and the book have VERY little in common. Their connection is tenuous at best. In the book this strange pseudo-religion "mercerism" was a key part of the story, as was this mood organ that people used to make them happy or content. In the book at one point Deckard comes across another detective and each thinks the other must be a replicant. The two stories share characters and a dominant theme (is it right for us to enslave 'people' we've manufactured), that's about it.
Just another trip into Kubrick's mangled mind, but I think in this case you just needed a little too many drugs to appreciate it.
I don't think that is a completely fair evaluation of 2001. 2001 was the most honest portrayal of space travel out there. It wasn't glamorous, there were no lasers, communicating with earth involved very long round trip times. It is one of the few movies to show that space is very cold, very quiet and very, very big.
Actually Blade Runner didn't seem all that special. It was a 1940's detective story with a few 22nd century visuals. It is Humphrey Bogart film set in the future with Harrison Ford as Bogart.
It was meant to smack of a 40's detective story, but if that was all you saw, I think real point passed you by. It was a much deeper story of "I don't want to die, where will I go when I do, what will become of everything I have experienced? Can I meet God and negotiate for more time?" We're supposed to connect with Deckard and then at the end suddenly realize that he too is a replicant (if he were merely human, the replicants would have smashed him to pieces 10 minutes into the movie).
The last scene in the movie where Roy saves Deckard we suddenly realize that the replicants are not mindless killing machines. Roy knows his pre-programmed death is near, and even though Deckard has killed his 3 friends, he saves Deckard from a fall that would certainly mean death. Roy then sits down and gives the most important lines of the movie.
I am not convinced that it is broken for the purposes it was designed for. At the absolute most, all that has been shown is that there may have been found an algorithm which can, when given one data set, find a second, very slightly different, data set with the same hash. This opens up the possibility of a denial of service type attack, in that an attacker could muddy the waters out there with a seemingly identical, but corrupt, image of another file. I'm sure the RIAA and the MPAA are salivating over this discovery.
Nothing known allows an attacker in a reasonable amount of time to insert a malicious payload into a file, even if it were as simple a change as altering text in a coherent way, while keeping the same md5 hash. If you download a file which both passes md5 and properly unzips, you can at this time be confident that no error or attack has occurred.
Because I can show you a collision in MD5. It's not that hard.
# echo "There's gold in them thar hills!" |md5sum 208b337f8c1a507ffd9fdf39e6178edb
There's a message and its hash. If it isn't that hard, produce a collision. Preferably one that could potentially be either a corrupted version of the original or a malicious alteration. After that we'll see if it is truly "easy" to produce something similar embedded in a.tar.gz file.
That's unimportant, they didn't evolve into us and they never invented software development. Homo Sapiens are not purely vegetarian and they are us.
and I doubt that any kind of hunting vs keeping a look out for the children is genetically determined.
Can you find evidence of a primitive human society where women hunted and men raised children, or both did the same in equal numbers? Multiple studies have shown that women the world over excel at activities associated with gathering and tending (multitasking, verbal communication) and men excel at activities associated with hunting (spatial recognition, physical strength).
Finally, understanding programs as pretty complex systems, I fail to see why focussing on one thing is an advantage compared to "female multitasking".
Men and women are both on essentially equal footing when it comes to understanding a complex system. However much of programming isn't really learning the finer points of a complex system. It's drudge work of pounding out the code to accomplish whatever it is your piece needs to do. At that point having a single minded focus is a benefit because, well, it's really quite boring. I've known many female programmers who either left the field completely or went into project management because programming was too mind numbing. They weren't really bad at it, just bored.
I don't doubt the differences between men and women, I just doubt that those differences predetermine the things we can do and the subjects we're good in etc.
The difference will affect the difficulty with which one gender or the other learns to competently master some jobs, but certainly not what COULD be done. For instance, a woman will find it easier to be an office manager because she doesn't have to work as hard at simultaneously typing a letter, answering phones and running a batch of copies. It isn't fair to pigeon hole women into the role of administrative assistant, but, if you had two resumes of similarly inexperienced individuals for the position of administrative assistant, one a man and the other a woman, you are statistically more likely to have better results with the woman.
GW Bush is censoring free speech because NBC won't let Michael Moore use a clip from Meet the Press.
IANAL, but isn't there a particular length of a clip that is considered fair use? A lawyer can write all they want, but that doesn't mean what they write is necessarily what the law says.
And John Kerry is censoring free speech because his friend George Butler won't let people slandering John Kerry use a picture he took for their book cover.
Still, IANAL, but don't the courts generally give fairly wide lattitude to political speech? Using many images from George Butler's collection might be questionable, but a poignant image to their political message might be appropriate use.
Anybody who is AL know what the courts have generally done in these circumstances?
Not a problem if you're right, and the guy posting to Yahoo is libeling you.
IANAL, but... Don't you also have to show that a reasonable person would read the posting, believe it, and in some way (maybe not investing in your company) damage you?
If someone writes "That investment was stupid, he should stop smoking crack," they may be libeling you, but the lawsuit wouldn't fly.
the undergraduates get instructors who are nearer in age and perspective to them. It's a system that works, and works well.
I strongly disagree. Grad students are rarely very good at teaching. They also tend to have a lot of studying they have to do and are frequently bitter that they are essentially some professor's research slave. Further their grasp of the subtleties of the subject are far weaker than those of a Ph.D. level professor. I do not follow how a younger instructor who is nearer a student's perspective is in any way "good." I'd much rather learn from someone who has substantial mastery of the subject material.
You'll know most college professors don't know how to teach for shit.
The answer to this is, I think, a little more complicated. There are many universities out there which do not grant Ph.D. degrees. My experience has been that students from those colleges, on average, learn more than those students who attend a Ph.D. granting University.
The reason for this is that these colleges tend to attract instructors who are simply not driven to excel in the world of "publish or perish" but prefer to actually teach. I may be biased here: I attend a university with no Ph.D. program and I have a close relative who is a full professor at a non-Ph.D. granting university who left a tenure track position at a prestigious west coast university because she disliked the focus on research and total disregard for undergraduates.
I strongly feel that it is easy to get an excellent undergraduate education, you just have to go to a lesser known university. Of course this advice will likely come back and bite you if you don't go on to graduate school. At some point an employer is going to ask themselves "have I ever heard of this school? Is it accredited?"
I think you're confusing what the GPL requires with the word "subscription." If you receive a binary of a GPL derived product, the person giving you that binary is required to make available the source code to it for a reasonable duplication fee.
There is no limitation on "subscriptions" outside that. Sveasoft may be on questionable moral ground by cancelling subscriptions, but there is nothing in the GPL preventing it since the GPL doesn't address that situation. Sveasoft can't stop someone from redistributing the binary and source, but they can remove someone from their subscription.
www is hugee, you don't have to restrict to a single area,
I think you might have missed the point of the article. He specifically wants geographical isolation. All this "freeom" the internet has given us has taken away something else. You just don't have the sense of community on the internet. You can't decide "Hey, this weekend let's meet at pub XYZ" and actually interact with these people as humans have evolved to do.
Finally, they could do just as well by setting up a department to find these websites and report them to authorities, which would be useful without the problems of accidental censorship.
Somehow I doubt they are out there spending great deals of effort blocking child porn web sites that could be shut down with just a phone call.
More likely they are blocking child porn web sites that can NOT be shut down with just a phone call. There is no shortage of people out there dedicated to eradicating internet child exploitation. You don't see these things popping up on geocities because it would come down within minutes and all information they had on who posted it would be turned over to the authorities.
I don't see child porn as a political or religious issue. I don't see any need to protect it. It is unlikely that a server delivering child porn is also delivering important information on breast cancer. I think selective censorship of child porn is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
I strongly believe in the jungle-evolution style of distributions, so I welcome any new randomness into the population to find out if natural selection will choose it or forget it... but...
I'm still not seeing what this has over Gentoo, other than the new directory naming scheme (which is, btw, very nice). Portage is a pretty slick system. Ebuilds are fairly simple to write. There isn't much in the way of "unnecessary extra" in them. Is this really that much better?
No you are not missing anything. Yes he is implying that Linux became a full blown mature OS overnight. It's the only way to support his argument. Many of us, but few others, realize that Linux started small and then a large group of contributors popped up and started adding things.
If you read closely, he implies that Linus wrote version 1.0 of the kernel. This is just untrue. We all know this. I remember installing kernel 0.99pl14 using one of the first releases of slackware. By that time there was already a large group of individual contributors.
But nobody would be swayed if he said "are we to believe that Linus wrote this small, buggy OS that couldn't even boot itself all by himself?" After all, that's what the first version was. Subsequent versions were a collaboration among many people all over the world.
Bwahaha, you idiots make me laugh! 16-1=15. 2^15 = 32K. I bet your local community college offers Comp. Sci. 1. You should sign up. You might learn something.
You haven't got the slightest idea what you are talking about.
Good thing you posted as anonymous coward so that the world will not know just how clueless you really are.
Even difficult problems like the travelling salesman or Towers of Hanoi have been solved and added to the calculation engine. This kind of feature adding essentially reduces the calculation time of these problems to a O(1) table lookup.
WHAT? Start making sense. Towers of Hanoi is a 2^n problem, but it doesn't actually "solve" anything. A look-up table would make absolutely no sense. Do you need a look up table to figure out what a stack of rings looks like on peg 2 as opposed to peg 1? You could make a LUT for "move X", but the problem grows so fast, you can quickly see that just 40 discs would create a LUT that would fill most raid arrays.
The traveling salesman is NP-complete. Transforming it to a problem in P has never been done. The notion of a LUT for this problem is silly. You can only precompute the LUT for one instance of the problem. If you can convert all possible such problems to an O(1) lookup table though, you will have solved the P=NP problem and can claim the US$1million prize.
Because you are probably a sysadmin with a degree from DeVry and don't understand that notation, I'll explain it simply: O(1) means "really fast".
You've never taken computing theory yourself, have you? The next paragraph you write emphasizes that either you didn't, or you slept through the class:
If we consider that a signed 16 bit integer can only handle values between -16k through 16k,
2^15 ~= 32K
it becomes obvious that Visicalc simply couldn't handle the types of calculations that we are performing today
Even back in 1979, computers had the same computational power as a turing machine. They could perform the same calculations as computers today, their only limiting factor is available memory and available time.
(32 bits allows us values of +-2 trillion).
2^31 ~= 2 billion (or if you're one of those UK types, 2 thousand million)
Slashdot Mirror
If they couldn't mention anything about mp3, they would instead mention the petabytes worth of music thieves all over the world will steal from them if this software is permitted to exist.
So they're predicting a shutdown even though they've no idea if it is breaking any laws. You can translate this as "Our revenues are $20million a month, we can afford lawyers who will bury this person under frivolous litigation until he's bankrupt. And hey, if we can find a law that will support us, then we could win in court assuming it manages to go all the way to a judgement"
It's pretty much all posturing. The company is working on the same exact thing which they are going to sell for an additional monthly fee. Of course there will shortly be an open source competitor up on sourceforge (assuming there isn't already).
Just goes to show you how squirly the notion of "art" can be. I saw "Reservoir Dogs" and "Pulp Fiction" and I thought they were both deplorable, inhuman and in the case of Pulp Fiction uninteresting (I know I'm in the minority here, for what it's worth I thought Fight Club was terrible too).
However I thought Kill Bill was excellent. I loved the mix between comic-book style and old 70's-era kung foo movies. Brought back good memories.
So, I'm still not sure of Tarantino as an artistic director.
although he was not in the book
The movie and the book have VERY little in common. Their connection is tenuous at best. In the book this strange pseudo-religion "mercerism" was a key part of the story, as was this mood organ that people used to make them happy or content. In the book at one point Deckard comes across another detective and each thinks the other must be a replicant. The two stories share characters and a dominant theme (is it right for us to enslave 'people' we've manufactured), that's about it.
Just another trip into Kubrick's mangled mind, but I think in this case you just needed a little too many drugs to appreciate it.
I don't think that is a completely fair evaluation of 2001. 2001 was the most honest portrayal of space travel out there. It wasn't glamorous, there were no lasers, communicating with earth involved very long round trip times. It is one of the few movies to show that space is very cold, very quiet and very, very big.
Actually Blade Runner didn't seem all that special. It was a 1940's detective story with a few 22nd century visuals. It is Humphrey Bogart film set in the future with Harrison Ford as Bogart.
It was meant to smack of a 40's detective story, but if that was all you saw, I think real point passed you by. It was a much deeper story of "I don't want to die, where will I go when I do, what will become of everything I have experienced? Can I meet God and negotiate for more time?" We're supposed to connect with Deckard and then at the end suddenly realize that he too is a replicant (if he were merely human, the replicants would have smashed him to pieces 10 minutes into the movie).
The last scene in the movie where Roy saves Deckard we suddenly realize that the replicants are not mindless killing machines. Roy knows his pre-programmed death is near, and even though Deckard has killed his 3 friends, he saves Deckard from a fall that would certainly mean death. Roy then sits down and gives the most important lines of the movie.
I am not convinced that it is broken for the purposes it was designed for. At the absolute most, all that has been shown is that there may have been found an algorithm which can, when given one data set, find a second, very slightly different, data set with the same hash. This opens up the possibility of a denial of service type attack, in that an attacker could muddy the waters out there with a seemingly identical, but corrupt, image of another file. I'm sure the RIAA and the MPAA are salivating over this discovery.
Nothing known allows an attacker in a reasonable amount of time to insert a malicious payload into a file, even if it were as simple a change as altering text in a coherent way, while keeping the same md5 hash. If you download a file which both passes md5 and properly unzips, you can at this time be confident that no error or attack has occurred.
JRE 1.4.2_05 offline multi-language install is half that size. An online single-language install will require about 7.6MB of download.
It sounds like maybe you have the JDK.
Why is it important to find a collision if it is trivial to prove that collisions must exist?
there were eg. purely vegetarian homo species
That's unimportant, they didn't evolve into us and they never invented software development. Homo Sapiens are not purely vegetarian and they are us.
and I doubt that any kind of hunting vs keeping a look out for the children is genetically determined.
Can you find evidence of a primitive human society where women hunted and men raised children, or both did the same in equal numbers? Multiple studies have shown that women the world over excel at activities associated with gathering and tending (multitasking, verbal communication) and men excel at activities associated with hunting (spatial recognition, physical strength).
Finally, understanding programs as pretty complex systems, I fail to see why focussing on one thing is an advantage compared to "female multitasking".
Men and women are both on essentially equal footing when it comes to understanding a complex system. However much of programming isn't really learning the finer points of a complex system. It's drudge work of pounding out the code to accomplish whatever it is your piece needs to do. At that point having a single minded focus is a benefit because, well, it's really quite boring. I've known many female programmers who either left the field completely or went into project management because programming was too mind numbing. They weren't really bad at it, just bored.
I don't doubt the differences between men and women, I just doubt that those differences predetermine the things we can do and the subjects we're good in etc.
The difference will affect the difficulty with which one gender or the other learns to competently master some jobs, but certainly not what COULD be done. For instance, a woman will find it easier to be an office manager because she doesn't have to work as hard at simultaneously typing a letter, answering phones and running a batch of copies. It isn't fair to pigeon hole women into the role of administrative assistant, but, if you had two resumes of similarly inexperienced individuals for the position of administrative assistant, one a man and the other a woman, you are statistically more likely to have better results with the woman.
GW Bush is censoring free speech because NBC won't let Michael Moore use a clip from Meet the Press.
IANAL, but isn't there a particular length of a clip that is considered fair use? A lawyer can write all they want, but that doesn't mean what they write is necessarily what the law says.
And John Kerry is censoring free speech because his friend George Butler won't let people slandering John Kerry use a picture he took for their book cover.
Still, IANAL, but don't the courts generally give fairly wide lattitude to political speech? Using many images from George Butler's collection might be questionable, but a poignant image to their political message might be appropriate use.
Anybody who is AL know what the courts have generally done in these circumstances?
Not a problem if you're right, and the guy posting to Yahoo is libeling you.
IANAL, but... Don't you also have to show that a reasonable person would read the posting, believe it, and in some way (maybe not investing in your company) damage you?
If someone writes "That investment was stupid, he should stop smoking crack," they may be libeling you, but the lawsuit wouldn't fly.
the undergraduates get instructors who are nearer in age and perspective to them. It's a system that works, and works well.
I strongly disagree. Grad students are rarely very good at teaching. They also tend to have a lot of studying they have to do and are frequently bitter that they are essentially some professor's research slave. Further their grasp of the subtleties of the subject are far weaker than those of a Ph.D. level professor. I do not follow how a younger instructor who is nearer a student's perspective is in any way "good." I'd much rather learn from someone who has substantial mastery of the subject material.
You'll know most college professors don't know how to teach for shit.
The answer to this is, I think, a little more complicated. There are many universities out there which do not grant Ph.D. degrees. My experience has been that students from those colleges, on average, learn more than those students who attend a Ph.D. granting University.
The reason for this is that these colleges tend to attract instructors who are simply not driven to excel in the world of "publish or perish" but prefer to actually teach. I may be biased here: I attend a university with no Ph.D. program and I have a close relative who is a full professor at a non-Ph.D. granting university who left a tenure track position at a prestigious west coast university because she disliked the focus on research and total disregard for undergraduates.
I strongly feel that it is easy to get an excellent undergraduate education, you just have to go to a lesser known university. Of course this advice will likely come back and bite you if you don't go on to graduate school. At some point an employer is going to ask themselves "have I ever heard of this school? Is it accredited?"
I think you're confusing what the GPL requires with the word "subscription." If you receive a binary of a GPL derived product, the person giving you that binary is required to make available the source code to it for a reasonable duplication fee.
There is no limitation on "subscriptions" outside that. Sveasoft may be on questionable moral ground by cancelling subscriptions, but there is nothing in the GPL preventing it since the GPL doesn't address that situation. Sveasoft can't stop someone from redistributing the binary and source, but they can remove someone from their subscription.
Thief! RIAA! we hates it! We hates it forever!!!
www is hugee, you don't have to restrict to a single area,
I think you might have missed the point of the article. He specifically wants geographical isolation. All this "freeom" the internet has given us has taken away something else. You just don't have the sense of community on the internet. You can't decide "Hey, this weekend let's meet at pub XYZ" and actually interact with these people as humans have evolved to do.
As long as she doesn't emerge kde, she will have probably allowed herself enough time.
Finally, they could do just as well by setting up a department to find these websites and report them to authorities, which would be useful without the problems of accidental censorship.
Somehow I doubt they are out there spending great deals of effort blocking child porn web sites that could be shut down with just a phone call.
More likely they are blocking child porn web sites that can NOT be shut down with just a phone call. There is no shortage of people out there dedicated to eradicating internet child exploitation. You don't see these things popping up on geocities because it would come down within minutes and all information they had on who posted it would be turned over to the authorities.
I don't see child porn as a political or religious issue. I don't see any need to protect it. It is unlikely that a server delivering child porn is also delivering important information on breast cancer. I think selective censorship of child porn is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
I strongly believe in the jungle-evolution style of distributions, so I welcome any new randomness into the population to find out if natural selection will choose it or forget it... but...
I'm still not seeing what this has over Gentoo, other than the new directory naming scheme (which is, btw, very nice). Portage is a pretty slick system. Ebuilds are fairly simple to write. There isn't much in the way of "unnecessary extra" in them. Is this really that much better?
The guy is being charged because his otherwise healthy wife in her 40s, mysteriously died.
He is not being held on the patriot act, but a much older late 80's U.S. Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989.
Good god. I'm not fond of Ashcroft or the PATRIOT Act, but not everything is a conspiracy, you know.
No you are not missing anything. Yes he is implying that Linux became a full blown mature OS overnight. It's the only way to support his argument. Many of us, but few others, realize that Linux started small and then a large group of contributors popped up and started adding things.
If you read closely, he implies that Linus wrote version 1.0 of the kernel. This is just untrue. We all know this. I remember installing kernel 0.99pl14 using one of the first releases of slackware. By that time there was already a large group of individual contributors.
But nobody would be swayed if he said "are we to believe that Linus wrote this small, buggy OS that couldn't even boot itself all by himself?" After all, that's what the first version was. Subsequent versions were a collaboration among many people all over the world.
Bwahaha, you idiots make me laugh! 16-1=15. 2^15 = 32K. I bet your local community college offers Comp. Sci. 1. You should sign up. You might learn something.
You haven't got the slightest idea what you are talking about.
Good thing you posted as anonymous coward so that the world will not know just how clueless you really are.
Even difficult problems like the travelling salesman or Towers of Hanoi have been solved and added to the calculation engine. This kind of feature adding essentially reduces the calculation time of these problems to a O(1) table lookup.
WHAT? Start making sense. Towers of Hanoi is a 2^n problem, but it doesn't actually "solve" anything. A look-up table would make absolutely no sense. Do you need a look up table to figure out what a stack of rings looks like on peg 2 as opposed to peg 1? You could make a LUT for "move X", but the problem grows so fast, you can quickly see that just 40 discs would create a LUT that would fill most raid arrays.
The traveling salesman is NP-complete. Transforming it to a problem in P has never been done. The notion of a LUT for this problem is silly. You can only precompute the LUT for one instance of the problem. If you can convert all possible such problems to an O(1) lookup table though, you will have solved the P=NP problem and can claim the US$1million prize.
Because you are probably a sysadmin with a degree from DeVry and don't understand that notation, I'll explain it simply: O(1) means "really fast".
You've never taken computing theory yourself, have you? The next paragraph you write emphasizes that either you didn't, or you slept through the class:
If we consider that a signed 16 bit integer can only handle values between -16k through 16k,
2^15 ~= 32K
it becomes obvious that Visicalc simply couldn't handle the types of calculations that we are performing today
Even back in 1979, computers had the same computational power as a turing machine. They could perform the same calculations as computers today, their only limiting factor is available memory and available time.
(32 bits allows us values of +-2 trillion).
2^31 ~= 2 billion (or if you're one of those UK types, 2 thousand million)