If your system has been infected by the 1iOn worm, it was insecure. Most admins with infected systems who didn't notice the intrusion right away probably only become aware of the situation when their system is used in some other attack. Now here comes the Cheese worm, plugs the hole and leaves a message. You read the message. Should you trust your system after that? Not at all. It has been compromised by one worm and then another one. There is no reason to believe that the first one was successfully removed, the second one was really white hat or that these were the only intrusions, since anyone could have used the same backdoor through which the Cheese worm came in and have his own additional backdoor in place. If you see the message, wipe the system and install a clean and hopefully safer system. The message already implies that the purpose of the Cheese worm isn't repairing systems and saving the admins some work. It's purpose is to take the systems with undetected intrusions out of the skript kiddies' hands. It fights fire with fire only where water is unavailable. There is only one thing I don't like about this worm: It looks and feels exactly like an attack. In consequence, admins spend time pursuing the (automatic) offenders and systems might get overloaded with scans if the worm gets out of "control".
It's true that visual quality won't win a game of Quake, but for high visual quality, full anti aliasing is the way to go: If you want to see some really bad visual "quality", turn off texture filtering: replace the trilinear mipmapping (GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR) with mipmapped nearest neigbor (GL_NEAREST_MIPMAP_NEAREST). Now that sucks. But interestingly, edge aliasing is not a problem in that mode. Why isn't it? Because the filtering is the same for all pixels - almost none. With texture filtering enabled but missing edge antialiasing, the edges stick out (even in high resolutions) and become the most obvious signal that you are looking at polygons, not stairs and archs. FSAA really is a great leap for immersion in not-so-fast games.
Violations of the DMCA are actively pursued even if they happened outside of US legislation. Providers outside of the US are scared into pulling non-compliant websites, for example.
The other problem is the nature of the law: The DMCA prohibits making something available to the American public. Thus I can break the DMCA even if I have never set foot on US territory. The EU data protection directive on the other hand prohibits exporting data out of the EU. That law can only be broken by a EU citizen.
Sending a huge asteroid to destroy a planet inhabited by a civilization almost ready to defend itself against such a thing probably earns you +5, Funny on Slashdot-o-Gods and you'd happily ignore comments about how destroying something can be funny.
Don't you remember James Bond - Golden Eye?
Seriously, most nukes are set to go off in the upper atmosphere, because that's how they'll cause the most damage. On their way to their target, they travel even higher. Engineers building mass destruction weapons aren't idiots, you know. Uhm, wait...
It's not about packets or internet links. It's about information being exported to circumvent EU laws. Person related information may not be exported to non-EU companies which do not meet certain privacy standards. It is irrelevant whether that data is transported by an internet packet, through a phone line, in a letter or on horseback. As long as the link is sufficiently safe and the non-EU company handles all person-related data from the EU according to EU standards, no one is going to complain.
The directive isn't primarily aimed at the internet. It's about what companies are allowed to do with information on the net as well as outside of it. The main aspect is data gathered by financial institutions. That's mostly a non-internet thing.
Europe has a different, more restrictive view on protection of person-related information. Companies are trying to evade the restrictions by moving data across the border and having it processed by non-european companies. The regulation tries to stop this malpractice.
The EU has been accused of trying to impose laws beyond its frontiers. The regulation does not tell non-EU companies how they may handle data. It tells EU companies how they must not use data and forbids exporting that data to circumvent the law. This is not even close to the US pushing the DMCA beyond US territory.
Like in this picture? http://137.226.147.189/scan.jpg (That is not a goatse.cx link.)
The picture was taken with a true three pass scanner. Kids, try this at home. Anyone can easily reproduce the problems and effects of that technique with a digital camera: Take 3 photos of the same scene, discard the red and green channels from the first picture, the green and blue from the second and the red and blue from the third. Then combine the three channels into one picture. This might give you an impression of how excellent the work of the photographer and his models really is.
4000000 DM / 3000 Computers = 1333 DM/Computer
The 4 MegaDM budget obviously doesn't include the computers. They are looking for a sponsor to provide them. BTW: Huge prizes take away from the fun for many and give it to few.
It is still unclear what games will be played. Prizes have not been announced. The reason for providing the machines is probably not to avoid cheating. More likely it's a logistics problem to bring 3000 computers to the location and to provide power, network, IPs, etc to all of them in just a few hours. Judging from my experience with small events (up to 20 players), there's always at least one who "can't see anyone else on the net" or some other problem which needs the attention of an "admin". Scale that up and you know why they chose to provide the hardware.
Cheating is not black and white. Some even call a rocket jump script (or duck jump script if you prefer CounterStrike) cheating. Some think replacing models and tuning the graphics for maximum visibility is fine. It's a LAN, you can watch them as they play. It's probably harder to cheat undetected than to win without cheating.
Accuracy in the presence of context is unnecessary overhead. Licenses are not blindly ok-clicked because they are too complicated to understand but because they are too long.
the challengers intent is either to make a fool out of someone, or to make money. Not only does this person (Mike) believe the challenge will not be successfully met, he also believes it cannot be successfully met.
He also didn't expect anyone to expect anyone to take that challenge. It was a rhetorical challenge. He put it in the FAQ to underline the futility of writing a compressor for random data. See the problem with taking guesses at other people's intentions?
I think he doesn't deserve to get the $5000, because he didn't compress the data (which he realized himself when he pointed out that using the filename would be cheating). He does however deserve to get the $100 entrance fee back, because he played by the rules. The important thing is that if you choose to create a set of rules for something, especially if they sound like you have thought about all implications, you have to expect that they will be seen as an exact description of what is allowed and what is not. Loopholes found will be loopholes exploited. On the other hand, if you state your intention and point out that you want people to act with that intention in mind, you open yourself up to ambiguousity which has its advantages and disadvantages.
In this case (The challengee already explained this): the filename and other fileheader information was not counted as part of the orginal.dat file, therefore logic dictates that filesystem information was not to be counted. The rules don't explain this, so logic deduction and asking for clarification are the only ways to resolve the ambiguousity. The challengee did both.
Why do rules exist? Because people usually have different opinions on one hand and need to agree on certain things on the other hand. To really understand someone else's intentions, you need to know his context. For relatively homogeneous groups, that is not a problem. Everyone in the field of information theory would probably understand that several files were against the intention of the challenger. The more the contexts differ, the harder becomes gaining certainty about someone else's intentions. That's why rulesets in heterogeneous groups become bloated and look like they deal with every special case. But context is never really obliterated, just reduced. As with many things, balance is more desirable than the extremes.
Opt-in, opt-out, neither one works. Identification of the sender is what helps. Outlaw commercial mail without precise information about who sent it in a machine readable format, including a toll-free phone number, office address (no po-box) and the name of the person in charge. There is no way to prove that you never opted-in, that's why spam always comes with a "thanks for your inquiry" these days. It is however possible to prove that someone sent you mail without the required information. When all commercial mail is easily identifiably, it can be filtered out reliably. Then there can be a mail-server option to not accept any commercial mail without risking that other mail is thrown away, too.
Nobody said it was going to be easy, but there's a difference between "attention grabbing but meaningless animation" and "informative static advertising". Small size is not really important, as long as the ad does not force the content into unreadable narrow columns. Ads need to be interesting (not the "uh, what's that advertising for" kind of interesting, but "uh, I want to know more about that" kind of interesting). That does not require animation at all. It may require in-content placement, site dependant design, and even interaction. But damn the thing if it moves before I interact with it. What I don't understand is what marketing folks expect customers to do. Do they really expect me to click on that flashy, uninformative piece of bandwith hog to enter their site and then, then what? I buy all their products? Marvel at the great webdesign? Replace all my bookmarks with their URL? If you have a really cool product, why not just show a picture of it? If you think your prices are lowest, why not list some examples?
No one is forcing you to look at this stuff. If you really think it's so bad then find some other source for information.
That's exactly what I'm starting to do, now that huge Flash animations are taking the place of animated GIFs which replaced static ones. I'm evaluating blocking software. Like I said: It's an advertising "war". For quite some time now I am getting my newsheadlines from a compilation page. The maintainers of that page claim that they have the OK from the newssites they list. I am not saying that advertising has to go away. But making it more intrusive and annoying is ROCK STUPID, because it drives people away.
About the "forcing": Before you visit a website, you don't know what kind of advertising will annoy you next. Since almost all my websurfing starts with a search-engine, I come often visit sites I have never been to before. That's why I call it "force" and not "ask". Give me a dialog (non-modal, please, before displaying ads and content) informing me that the site uses Flash advertising and I'll happily leave. Like it's now, blocking software is one solution and not using the web the only alternative.
But it also has *tons* of ads. No
problem I just flip past. The paper seems to
be doing just fine. I would have no problem with an Internet site that worked that way.
That's what the story is about. Advertisers do have a problem with sites that work that way, because static ads don't get them the attention they want. Soon you will not be able to read a webpage without some popup covering it up, a big Flash area surrounded by small content areas or a 20 second fullscreen advertisement. Then when people don't visit these sites, content will be pulled, because "banner ads didn't work and now Flash and fullscreen and popups don't work either. No way to pay for the content. Bye." Again: Annoying customers is STUPID.
By the way, you didn't get the "not free" part: Advertising does not give you free content. You pay for the content plus the ads indirectly. Because of that, it's in your interest to make advertising effective for both the advertiser and the consumer. Therefore recommending to "just ignore them" is not the right way.
There are local, advertising sponsored, free newspapers around here, too. I do like these because they usually contain advertising from local stores. The first thing that goes into the bin is the content. If advertising on the web were that interesting, it wouldn't be ignored that often. I want hard facts: New Product? What does it do? How much does it cost? Why your's? Don't tell me about how cool your company is. Don't tell me it's hip to buy your stuff. And no animations where the main content of the page is static! If the ad tells me what I want to know, my attention is caught easily enough without hurting my eyes.
The notiont that banner ads are there to get you free information is wrong in several ways. First, companies are not trying to give you something for free. They are trying to make money. Second, banner ads cost money. Not only does the advertiser pay money for ad space, but the viewer pays again with time, being distracted from what he was doing and even money if he pays by the minute for his internet access. Like you said, it's a tradeoff, but that tradeoff can become unacceptable if the cost incurred on the viewer rises. Full screen ads or even large, Flash animated banner ads displayed in the most prominent position on a webpage, completely distracting from the "free" information, cross the line for many. Instead of escalating the banner ad "war" by forcing more annoying ads down the throats of non-willing viewers, advertising companies should think of a way to make advertising less annoying yet still more effective. That's why people are asking for more convenience, better targeted ads and even incentives.
To those who think being watched all the time is ok: STASI ("Staatssicherheit") in the former German Democratic Republic had people spy on their neighbour. People feared to criticize their government in any way. And who says only the government is interested in video surveillance data? Realtime automatic user tracking may really be feasible in the near future and there are many more uses for that kind of data than just fighting crime...
It's not the letter of the law which makes the difference. It's about what you feel is "the right thing". Slashdot type of people treat violation of the GPL like a sacrilege because the GPL represents free sharing. The GPL is the monument of absence of corporate control.
The music industry on the other hand monopolizes something which is part of everyone's everday life: music. Is it ok that you buy a CD today which contains some songs that you like, only to find out in 2007 that you can't buy a player anymore and have to buy the same data again in holocube format. And that one song you really liked isn't even available anymore. While everyone probably agrees that anyone in the music industry should get paid for doing a decent job, the way of the music industry as a whole is very questionable.
And if that were not enough to make people feel that copying is morally ok, there is one more important reason: Somehow capitalism fails in cases of extremely low per-piece production costs. Is the amount of money someone gathers by creating a single hit really justifyable? Is the value of such a song really so much higher than someone elses hard work of several years of even a lifetime?
BTW: If other industry's products were as easily copied as MP3 files, people would do that, too. The reason is that it's NOT theft as that would require some object to be removed from someone's property. Making COPIES inherently doesn't do that.
There is no such thing as "the truth". What matters is what people believe and what you yourself believe. Both the U.S. and China have a track record that suggests not to believe too easily what they claim. Since none of us was onboard these planes, we have to resort to attempts of "informed speculation".
U.S. spy operations are at least questionable. Just to name one: Echelon and surrounding rumours about industrial espionage.
The U.S. is spying on China. Is that necessary? Probably. Do you think its ok for your neighbour to spy on you, just so he "feels safer"? Probably not.
If they move, even unaccelerated, current is induced. A moving magnet would only fail to cause induced current if the magnet produced an ideal magnetic field moving in the exakt wrong direction, which is not likely to happen anytime soon with fridge magnets). This kind of stuff can be tested easily down here on earth in a cheap experiment: http://www.picotech.com/experiments/magnetic_induc tion/magnetic_induction.html (Note that in that experiment the magnet is accelerated, but it is explained that that is not what causes the current.) BTW: fridge magnets never give off electromagnetic radiation. They just have a magnetic field.
Except for the part about being able to crack any encryption instantaneously (actually, only US government-based encryption). That was crap.
That chip is the holy grail of public key cryptography: A way to quickly factorize large integers. It's a fictional movie. Shame on them for making things up that *could* exist. At least they don't have long haired viruses announcing that tankers will be sunk if ransom demands aren't fulfilled. Oh wait, someone *could* write such a beast...
User stupidity can't be cured by technical means. You will learn this the hard way. "What? I can't save porn to my home directory? Better change those permissions..."
Slashdot Mirror
If your system has been infected by the 1iOn worm, it was insecure. Most admins with infected systems who didn't notice the intrusion right away probably only become aware of the situation when their system is used in some other attack. Now here comes the Cheese worm, plugs the hole and leaves a message. You read the message. Should you trust your system after that? Not at all. It has been compromised by one worm and then another one. There is no reason to believe that the first one was successfully removed, the second one was really white hat or that these were the only intrusions, since anyone could have used the same backdoor through which the Cheese worm came in and have his own additional backdoor in place. If you see the message, wipe the system and install a clean and hopefully safer system. The message already implies that the purpose of the Cheese worm isn't repairing systems and saving the admins some work. It's purpose is to take the systems with undetected intrusions out of the skript kiddies' hands. It fights fire with fire only where water is unavailable. There is only one thing I don't like about this worm: It looks and feels exactly like an attack. In consequence, admins spend time pursuing the (automatic) offenders and systems might get overloaded with scans if the worm gets out of "control".
It's true that visual quality won't win a game of Quake, but for high visual quality, full anti aliasing is the way to go: If you want to see some really bad visual "quality", turn off texture filtering: replace the trilinear mipmapping (GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR) with mipmapped nearest neigbor (GL_NEAREST_MIPMAP_NEAREST). Now that sucks. But interestingly, edge aliasing is not a problem in that mode. Why isn't it? Because the filtering is the same for all pixels - almost none. With texture filtering enabled but missing edge antialiasing, the edges stick out (even in high resolutions) and become the most obvious signal that you are looking at polygons, not stairs and archs. FSAA really is a great leap for immersion in not-so-fast games.
Violations of the DMCA are actively pursued even if they happened outside of US legislation. Providers outside of the US are scared into pulling non-compliant websites, for example.
The other problem is the nature of the law: The DMCA prohibits making something available to the American public. Thus I can break the DMCA even if I have never set foot on US territory. The EU data protection directive on the other hand prohibits exporting data out of the EU. That law can only be broken by a EU citizen.
Sending a huge asteroid to destroy a planet inhabited by a civilization almost ready to defend itself against such a thing probably earns you +5, Funny on Slashdot-o-Gods and you'd happily ignore comments about how destroying something can be funny.
Don't you remember James Bond - Golden Eye? Seriously, most nukes are set to go off in the upper atmosphere, because that's how they'll cause the most damage. On their way to their target, they travel even higher. Engineers building mass destruction weapons aren't idiots, you know. Uhm, wait...
It's not about packets or internet links. It's about information being exported to circumvent EU laws. Person related information may not be exported to non-EU companies which do not meet certain privacy standards. It is irrelevant whether that data is transported by an internet packet, through a phone line, in a letter or on horseback. As long as the link is sufficiently safe and the non-EU company handles all person-related data from the EU according to EU standards, no one is going to complain.
The directive isn't primarily aimed at the internet. It's about what companies are allowed to do with information on the net as well as outside of it. The main aspect is data gathered by financial institutions. That's mostly a non-internet thing.
Europe has a different, more restrictive view on protection of person-related information. Companies are trying to evade the restrictions by moving data across the border and having it processed by non-european companies. The regulation tries to stop this malpractice.
The EU has been accused of trying to impose laws beyond its frontiers. The regulation does not tell non-EU companies how they may handle data. It tells EU companies how they must not use data and forbids exporting that data to circumvent the law. This is not even close to the US pushing the DMCA beyond US territory.
Like in this picture?
http://137.226.147.189/scan.jpg (That is not a goatse.cx link.)
The picture was taken with a true three pass scanner. Kids, try this at home. Anyone can easily reproduce the problems and effects of that technique with a digital camera: Take 3 photos of the same scene, discard the red and green channels from the first picture, the green and blue from the second and the red and blue from the third. Then combine the three channels into one picture. This might give you an impression of how excellent the work of the photographer and his models really is.
4000000 DM / 3000 Computers = 1333 DM/Computer
The 4 MegaDM budget obviously doesn't include the computers. They are looking for a sponsor to provide them. BTW: Huge prizes take away from the fun for many and give it to few.
It is still unclear what games will be played. Prizes have not been announced. The reason for providing the machines is probably not to avoid cheating. More likely it's a logistics problem to bring 3000 computers to the location and to provide power, network, IPs, etc to all of them in just a few hours. Judging from my experience with small events (up to 20 players), there's always at least one who "can't see anyone else on the net" or some other problem which needs the attention of an "admin". Scale that up and you know why they chose to provide the hardware.
Cheating is not black and white. Some even call a rocket jump script (or duck jump script if you prefer CounterStrike) cheating. Some think replacing models and tuning the graphics for maximum visibility is fine. It's a LAN, you can watch them as they play. It's probably harder to cheat undetected than to win without cheating.
There's a funny bug in Netscape Navigator before 4.75 which involves blockquote (and some other stuff, all valid HTML4):
(table)(tr)(td style="padding: 5")
(blockquote cite="http://127.0.0.1/")
(p)text(/p)
(/blockquote) (table)(tr)(td)(p)text(/p)(/td)(/tr)(/table) (/td)(/tr)(/table)
This crashes the browser instantly if JavaScript is enabled. Maybe there are more funky bugs involving blockquote?
Accuracy in the presence of context is unnecessary overhead. Licenses are not blindly ok-clicked because they are too complicated to understand but because they are too long.
the challengers intent is either to make a fool out of someone, or to make money. Not only does this person (Mike) believe the challenge will not be successfully met, he also believes it cannot be successfully met.
He also didn't expect anyone to expect anyone to take that challenge. It was a rhetorical challenge. He put it in the FAQ to underline the futility of writing a compressor for random data. See the problem with taking guesses at other people's intentions?
I think he doesn't deserve to get the $5000, because he didn't compress the data (which he realized himself when he pointed out that using the filename would be cheating). He does however deserve to get the $100 entrance fee back, because he played by the rules. The important thing is that if you choose to create a set of rules for something, especially if they sound like you have thought about all implications, you have to expect that they will be seen as an exact description of what is allowed and what is not. Loopholes found will be loopholes exploited. On the other hand, if you state your intention and point out that you want people to act with that intention in mind, you open yourself up to ambiguousity which has its advantages and disadvantages.
In this case (The challengee already explained this): the filename and other fileheader information was not counted as part of the orginal.dat file, therefore logic dictates that filesystem information was not to be counted. The rules don't explain this, so logic deduction and asking for clarification are the only ways to resolve the ambiguousity. The challengee did both.
Why do rules exist? Because people usually have different opinions on one hand and need to agree on certain things on the other hand. To really understand someone else's intentions, you need to know his context. For relatively homogeneous groups, that is not a problem. Everyone in the field of information theory would probably understand that several files were against the intention of the challenger. The more the contexts differ, the harder becomes gaining certainty about someone else's intentions. That's why rulesets in heterogeneous groups become bloated and look like they deal with every special case. But context is never really obliterated, just reduced. As with many things, balance is more desirable than the extremes.
Opt-in, opt-out, neither one works. Identification of the sender is what helps. Outlaw commercial mail without precise information about who sent it in a machine readable format, including a toll-free phone number, office address (no po-box) and the name of the person in charge. There is no way to prove that you never opted-in, that's why spam always comes with a "thanks for your inquiry" these days. It is however possible to prove that someone sent you mail without the required information. When all commercial mail is easily identifiably, it can be filtered out reliably. Then there can be a mail-server option to not accept any commercial mail without risking that other mail is thrown away, too.
Nobody said it was going to be easy, but there's a difference between "attention grabbing but meaningless animation" and "informative static advertising". Small size is not really important, as long as the ad does not force the content into unreadable narrow columns. Ads need to be interesting (not the "uh, what's that advertising for" kind of interesting, but "uh, I want to know more about that" kind of interesting). That does not require animation at all. It may require in-content placement, site dependant design, and even interaction. But damn the thing if it moves before I interact with it. What I don't understand is what marketing folks expect customers to do. Do they really expect me to click on that flashy, uninformative piece of bandwith hog to enter their site and then, then what? I buy all their products? Marvel at the great webdesign? Replace all my bookmarks with their URL? If you have a really cool product, why not just show a picture of it? If you think your prices are lowest, why not list some examples?
No one is forcing you to look at this stuff. If you really think it's so bad then find some other source for information.
That's exactly what I'm starting to do, now that huge Flash animations are taking the place of animated GIFs which replaced static ones. I'm evaluating blocking software. Like I said: It's an advertising "war". For quite some time now I am getting my newsheadlines from a compilation page. The maintainers of that page claim that they have the OK from the newssites they list. I am not saying that advertising has to go away. But making it more intrusive and annoying is ROCK STUPID, because it drives people away. About the "forcing": Before you visit a website, you don't know what kind of advertising will annoy you next. Since almost all my websurfing starts with a search-engine, I come often visit sites I have never been to before. That's why I call it "force" and not "ask". Give me a dialog (non-modal, please, before displaying ads and content) informing me that the site uses Flash advertising and I'll happily leave. Like it's now, blocking software is one solution and not using the web the only alternative.
But it also has *tons* of ads. No problem I just flip past. The paper seems to be doing just fine. I would have no problem with an Internet site that worked that way.
That's what the story is about. Advertisers do have a problem with sites that work that way, because static ads don't get them the attention they want. Soon you will not be able to read a webpage without some popup covering it up, a big Flash area surrounded by small content areas or a 20 second fullscreen advertisement. Then when people don't visit these sites, content will be pulled, because "banner ads didn't work and now Flash and fullscreen and popups don't work either. No way to pay for the content. Bye." Again: Annoying customers is STUPID.
By the way, you didn't get the "not free" part: Advertising does not give you free content. You pay for the content plus the ads indirectly. Because of that, it's in your interest to make advertising effective for both the advertiser and the consumer. Therefore recommending to "just ignore them" is not the right way.
There are local, advertising sponsored, free newspapers around here, too. I do like these because they usually contain advertising from local stores. The first thing that goes into the bin is the content. If advertising on the web were that interesting, it wouldn't be ignored that often. I want hard facts: New Product? What does it do? How much does it cost? Why your's? Don't tell me about how cool your company is. Don't tell me it's hip to buy your stuff. And no animations where the main content of the page is static! If the ad tells me what I want to know, my attention is caught easily enough without hurting my eyes.
The notiont that banner ads are there to get you free information is wrong in several ways. First, companies are not trying to give you something for free. They are trying to make money. Second, banner ads cost money. Not only does the advertiser pay money for ad space, but the viewer pays again with time, being distracted from what he was doing and even money if he pays by the minute for his internet access. Like you said, it's a tradeoff, but that tradeoff can become unacceptable if the cost incurred on the viewer rises. Full screen ads or even large, Flash animated banner ads displayed in the most prominent position on a webpage, completely distracting from the "free" information, cross the line for many. Instead of escalating the banner ad "war" by forcing more annoying ads down the throats of non-willing viewers, advertising companies should think of a way to make advertising less annoying yet still more effective. That's why people are asking for more convenience, better targeted ads and even incentives.
To those who think being watched all the time is ok: STASI ("Staatssicherheit") in the former German Democratic Republic had people spy on their neighbour. People feared to criticize their government in any way. And who says only the government is interested in video surveillance data? Realtime automatic user tracking may really be feasible in the near future and there are many more uses for that kind of data than just fighting crime...
It's not the letter of the law which makes the difference. It's about what you feel is "the right thing". Slashdot type of people treat violation of the GPL like a sacrilege because the GPL represents free sharing. The GPL is the monument of absence of corporate control.
The music industry on the other hand monopolizes something which is part of everyone's everday life: music. Is it ok that you buy a CD today which contains some songs that you like, only to find out in 2007 that you can't buy a player anymore and have to buy the same data again in holocube format. And that one song you really liked isn't even available anymore. While everyone probably agrees that anyone in the music industry should get paid for doing a decent job, the way of the music industry as a whole is very questionable.
And if that were not enough to make people feel that copying is morally ok, there is one more important reason: Somehow capitalism fails in cases of extremely low per-piece production costs. Is the amount of money someone gathers by creating a single hit really justifyable? Is the value of such a song really so much higher than someone elses hard work of several years of even a lifetime?
BTW: If other industry's products were as easily copied as MP3 files, people would do that, too. The reason is that it's NOT theft as that would require some object to be removed from someone's property. Making COPIES inherently doesn't do that.
But maybe we're just greedy.
There is no such thing as "the truth". What matters is what people believe and what you yourself believe. Both the U.S. and China have a track record that suggests not to believe too easily what they claim. Since none of us was onboard these planes, we have to resort to attempts of "informed speculation".
U.S. spy operations are at least questionable. Just to name one: Echelon and surrounding rumours about industrial espionage.
The U.S. is spying on China. Is that necessary? Probably. Do you think its ok for your neighbour to spy on you, just so he "feels safer"? Probably not.
Floppies in space. I do understand that NASA wants well tested stuff up there, but tested and FAILED?
If they move, even unaccelerated, current is induced. A moving magnet would only fail to cause induced current if the magnet produced an ideal magnetic field moving in the exakt wrong direction, which is not likely to happen anytime soon with fridge magnets). This kind of stuff can be tested easily down here on earth in a cheap experiment: http://www.picotech.com/experiments/magnetic_induc tion/magnetic_induction.html (Note that in that experiment the magnet is accelerated, but it is explained that that is not what causes the current.) BTW: fridge magnets never give off electromagnetic radiation. They just have a magnetic field.
Except for the part about being able to crack any encryption instantaneously (actually, only US government-based encryption). That was crap.
That chip is the holy grail of public key cryptography: A way to quickly factorize large integers. It's a fictional movie. Shame on them for making things up that *could* exist. At least they don't have long haired viruses announcing that tankers will be sunk if ransom demands aren't fulfilled. Oh wait, someone *could* write such a beast...
User stupidity can't be cured by technical means. You will learn this the hard way. "What? I can't save porn to my home directory? Better change those permissions..."