Don't give them any ideas--by doing so they could probably report their winnings (from themseves), but not their losses (to themselves) on their accounting statements, artificially inflating profits.
Didn't Enron do something similar (using some method other than a lawsuit to pay themselves)?
Does the article mention the O-notation efficiency of the DNA TSP algorithm? Even if it can "check all the solutions at once", setting up all the DNA required to actually solve the problem may not run in polynomial time (or polynomial space, which is the same thing.)
The issue with DNA storage (at least, at this point) is the reliability of said storage. DNA works as a storage mechanism for biological systems (me), because slight replication errors usually don't cause failure; even if they do, it's usually of no consequence, since cells die all the time. (Cancer is an interesting exception, where the failure mode is "not dying" rather than "dying".) Also, cells have a huge array of DNA-repair enzymes and mechanisms--I don't know the details of all of them (IANAB). I do know, though, that the repair method in many cases is "kill affected cell".
Computers, OTOH, often need every bit to be correct. Even so, I imagine that some sort of molecular storage will be in use sometime in the future.
Quantum effects are random, but the probabilities are known. On a small scale, this can be quite random: if you stare at a particular atom of plutonium, you can't predict when it will decay. But (through the law of large numbers), if you stare at 10^20 atoms, you can predict very precisely what percentage will have decayed over a given time-frame. Most of the phenomena we observe have scales much larger than those governed by this randomness, so we don't see it and everything is nice and predictable.
We can contrive exceptions, though. By using a Geiger counter or somesuch, it's possible to detect individual nuclear decays and generate an observable (macro-level) audible or electrical signal, making this a good way to generate random seeds.
Plus, computers would have uranium in them. How cool is that?
Most setups now have a thermocouple somewhere in the case whose output is accessible to software--mine has one on the processor, for instance. It shouldn't be hard to request 5-6 digits from it and use the least significant digit(s) to generate a seed.
Alternately, many systems can also monitor the voltage coming off the power supply. Use the fluctuations in that to generate a seed.
The easiest way to get a truly random seed is to look for random elements in nature, and electrical line noise (from whatever source) is random and accessible.
Yes, but they'd have to actually make that fork. I doubt they have all that much technical staff left, since they've shifted focus from production of code to production of lawsuits.
And, as changes are made to gcc in the future, that fork will have to be kept up-to-date as well if it's to be used in the same situations the main branch of gcc is. That's even more programmer time.
Whatever alteration is made to the gcc code to break compatibility on SCO systems, it needs to be one that someone can't just find and comment out in five minutes.
"Eventually it started getting so bad that you could occasionally, and then frequently, hear a click that I eventually figured out was the HDD turning on or off."
I've got a similar mysterious clicking noise in my system. Every once in a while, I'll hear two clicks, about.75 sec apart, and between them the system freezes (no mouse movements, etc.) However, I've had no PSU or stability problems to speak of, other than the standard occasional wonkiness that comes with win98.
When more people break the law (so to speak) than voted for the head of the government that makes the laws, one wonders about the health of American democracy...
With Mozart's Requiem I can possibly understand to some degree, because of the unusual circumstances surrounding the work--I'm sure the publisher did have to do a significant amount of arrangement to pull together the various pieces written by different people. But for other pieces where the original score is complete, there is absolutely no logical or ethical reason a publisher should have any IP rights to the performance.
No, the publishers aren't in it for the fun of it, or for the betterment of society. They're in it for profit. That's why they sell scores, instead of giving them away. They perform a valuable service by recopying original manuscripts, extracting orchestra parts, and printing and distributing scores. None of this, in my opinion and that of many others, is entitled to copyright protection other than "don't photocopy this."
In many other languages, French for example, "copyright" is rendered "right of the author". That's the [i]author[/i], not the author's typist or proofreader.
If Bach, or Handel, or Brahms were still alive, then I would hope that they [i]would[/i] receive royalties from paid performances of their works. That's what the system's for! But giving royalties to those not involved in the artistic creation of the music (either its composition or its performance) strikes me, and many others, as wrong. Yes, this goes against what the law says. But the situation is the same as with other objections to copyright law: a large number of people believe the law is unjust, but cannot change it because the current political system favors business over individuals. (Keep in mind the chilling statistic that more Americans have used Kazaa than voted for Bush Junior.) So, having no other recourse, people lose respect for the law... which is a dangerous thing.
When I buy the sheet music to a composition which is not itself protected by copyright, I should be able to do whatever the hell I want with the knowledge I gain from that music. (Copying it is another issue, of course.)
If I discover a new, patentable invention using data obtained with (say) gas chromatography, I do not and should not have to share income from the patent with the inventor of the gas chromatograph. (And, yes, I realize that patents are different from copyrights. It's an example.)
Interesting sidenote. In music history, the professor told the following story: The Church had a tradition concerning a 100-200-year-old piece (I forget which) that the score should never be released outside the church, so that no performance could occur without the Church's permission. Mozart, with his incredible memory, attended a church service at which the piece was performed, went home, and copied out the score. The professor's opinion, and that of everyone in the class, was that he had done a Good Deed for Music and for Humanity by making a beautiful piece of music available to everyone. Nowadays he'd be prosecuted.
Music needs an equivalent to Project Gutenberg: downloadable, public-domain scores. There is no reason for public-domain information to cost more than the price of compilation and reproduction, which in today's society is essentially zero.
I am a member of a fairly successful American university choir. We record all of our performances for our own use, but can't sell--or even distribute for free--most of them, because of copyright laws. Keep in mind nearly all of our repetoire was composed before 1917.
Last fall we performed Mozart's Requiem Mass (composed 1791), and many of the singers wanted to make and sell/give away a recording... but we found out to our dismay that we couldn't. Why? Because the [i]scores[/i] we were using were covered by copyright. This is a bit absurd--of all the people who deserve to earn money off that performance, the typesetters and editors are the last on the list. We already paid them for their work, dammit: we paid $1000 for a hundred copies (plus orchestra parts) of something that should be public domain.
We have many recordings we'd love to publish on the Internet (publicity and all), but can't.
There are two CD's which we have secured copyright permission (from the score publisher--neither work itself is covered by copyright) to sell. While I'm not involved in the finances of the choir, I do know that the CD's cost $10 and we make a $5 profit off of each. Now, where does that other $5 go? Jewel cases, inserts, and the costs of CD replication are no more than $.50-$1, so [i]someone[/i] is getting $4 royalties from each disc--almost certainly the publisher of the score.
Modern copyright law isn't necessarily friendly to the "small artists". We'd love to put up our recordings on the Internet, or sell more CD's at concerts (the two aren't mutually exclusive!) for a greater profit... but we can't.
And all of us would be tickled pink if one of our recordings showed up on Kazaa.
I'm sure many people use a custom hosts-file for ad blocking, with various popup/banner sites redirected to 127.0.0.1 or 0.0.0.0.
Why not redirect them to 68.163.90.12 (www.riaa.org) instead? Same effect, and you're doing a good deed (costing some scumbags a wee bit of bandwidth and CPU) in the meantime.
Wouldn't help. In elections having a clue is only a force-multiplier, not a force in itself... the only real force in elections is money... and Hollings has too much of that for anyone to beat him, sadly.
Although it probably never happens, the stereotypical script kiddie break-in/website defacement displays some childish "you have been pwned by BobTheLeet" message.
Now, since it's a malicious midi file that does the damage, you can notify them in full stereo! It should be possible to make crude synthesized speech over MIDI, using combinations of instruments whose spectra resemble various vowels, with percussion for consonants. MIDI cards do vary, but it should be possible.
Actually, since 1) the first 10-15 harmonics are easily enough to distinguish vowels, 2) midi has 16 channels, 3) the ocarina sample on most midi banks has both a quick attack and is very close to a pure sine wave, you can construct realistic vowel spectra from scratch!
Now for the greater challenge: how exactly do you pronounce "pwned"?
While/. has been known to indulge in a little over-the-top microsoft bashing when bugs like these come out, there's a reason they (especially ones like this) make the front page.
Windows has a huge installed base, and windows machines tend to be targeted by kiddies looking for DDoS zombies.
And of course this is a big bug. Run arbitrary code through a midi file? That's huge, and deserves to be on the front page. Apache security holes of much less import make the front page, and they probably belong there too.
Suppose I run a store with two doors separated by 50m. A sign is posted on one door saying "Buying from this store is illegal, and we will take you to court if you attempt to purchase from us." The other door has no such sign.
Is a customer who walks through the other door, buys a widget, and walks out liable? Of course not.
Likewise, SCO, by running a public ftp server with the kernel, is offering that kernel to everyone who asks. Is it now illegal to ask a ftp server for a file (which it will gladly send you if you ask) before making sure that their entire webpage doesn't ask you not to use it?
The problem is that every ultra-draconian/crazy measure (like this, or like UCITA, or the bill that would allow the **AA's to legally DoS people's computers) makes laws that are less outrageous seem tame by comparison. The next DMCA will pass more easily if, when it's proposed, everyone looks back at proposals like this and says "This new law isn't overly oppressive--it's much milder than those others!"
"There is little that is bad about the big carriers..."
I imagine they sink about as well as the large ones, but are much more expensive to build. This is why the Navy doesn't use battleships any more; with the advent of guided missiles and improved torpedoes, a ship doesn't need to be huge to have offensive punch. (A ship DID have to be large to stand up to the recoil of 16" guns--hence battleships.)
But the endurance of a ship does not scale linearly with size. A tac-nuke will kill a huge carrier just as it will a smaller one.
The fact that our (US) military does not pay that much attention to survivability of ships is a sign of a trend: we are now focused on smacking around those weaker than ourselves (Iraq, Afghanistan) rather than fighting an even battle (WW2).
Play a well-known snippet of music, with possibly slight random distortion to prevent programs from doing bitwise recognition, and have the user type in the artist or the song name (the software should accept either). They should get three tries to get one correct, in case the user doesn't know, say, the Beatles, or Vivaldi, or Mozart.
This could be simplified and expanded by simply hvaing users match a work of art to the artist. Hamlet=Shakespeare, Star Wars=Geore Lucas, and so forth.
While designing a test that is simple enough for a computer to give but difficult enough that a computer cannot trivially answer it, drawing on the shared cultural knowledge of humans might be a solution.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't give them any ideas--by doing so they could probably report their winnings (from themseves), but not their losses (to themselves) on their accounting statements, artificially inflating profits.
Didn't Enron do something similar (using some method other than a lawsuit to pay themselves)?
I hold the patent on the programming technique used as "whitespace". That'll be $10 per space and $100 per line-feed, please.
Does the article mention the O-notation efficiency of the DNA TSP algorithm? Even if it can "check all the solutions at once", setting up all the DNA required to actually solve the problem may not run in polynomial time (or polynomial space, which is the same thing.)
The issue with DNA storage (at least, at this point) is the reliability of said storage. DNA works as a storage mechanism for biological systems (me), because slight replication errors usually don't cause failure; even if they do, it's usually of no consequence, since cells die all the time. (Cancer is an interesting exception, where the failure mode is "not dying" rather than "dying".) Also, cells have a huge array of DNA-repair enzymes and mechanisms--I don't know the details of all of them (IANAB). I do know, though, that the repair method in many cases is "kill affected cell".
Computers, OTOH, often need every bit to be correct. Even so, I imagine that some sort of molecular storage will be in use sometime in the future.
Quantum effects are random, but the probabilities are known. On a small scale, this can be quite random: if you stare at a particular atom of plutonium, you can't predict when it will decay. But (through the law of large numbers), if you stare at 10^20 atoms, you can predict very precisely what percentage will have decayed over a given time-frame. Most of the phenomena we observe have scales much larger than those governed by this randomness, so we don't see it and everything is nice and predictable.
We can contrive exceptions, though. By using a Geiger counter or somesuch, it's possible to detect individual nuclear decays and generate an observable (macro-level) audible or electrical signal, making this a good way to generate random seeds.
Plus, computers would have uranium in them. How cool is that?
Most setups now have a thermocouple somewhere in the case whose output is accessible to software--mine has one on the processor, for instance. It shouldn't be hard to request 5-6 digits from it and use the least significant digit(s) to generate a seed.
Alternately, many systems can also monitor the voltage coming off the power supply. Use the fluctuations in that to generate a seed.
The easiest way to get a truly random seed is to look for random elements in nature, and electrical line noise (from whatever source) is random and accessible.
Yes, but they'd have to actually make that fork. I doubt they have all that much technical staff left, since they've shifted focus from production of code to production of lawsuits.
And, as changes are made to gcc in the future, that fork will have to be kept up-to-date as well if it's to be used in the same situations the main branch of gcc is. That's even more programmer time.
Whatever alteration is made to the gcc code to break compatibility on SCO systems, it needs to be one that someone can't just find and comment out in five minutes.
"Eventually it started getting so bad that you could occasionally, and then frequently, hear a click that I eventually figured out was the HDD turning on or off."
.75 sec apart, and between them the system freezes (no mouse movements, etc.) However, I've had no PSU or stability problems to speak of, other than the standard occasional wonkiness that comes with win98.
I've got a similar mysterious clicking noise in my system. Every once in a while, I'll hear two clicks, about
What could this be?
When more people break the law (so to speak) than voted for the head of the government that makes the laws, one wonders about the health of American democracy...
With Mozart's Requiem I can possibly understand to some degree, because of the unusual circumstances surrounding the work--I'm sure the publisher did have to do a significant amount of arrangement to pull together the various pieces written by different people. But for other pieces where the original score is complete, there is absolutely no logical or ethical reason a publisher should have any IP rights to the performance. No, the publishers aren't in it for the fun of it, or for the betterment of society. They're in it for profit. That's why they sell scores, instead of giving them away. They perform a valuable service by recopying original manuscripts, extracting orchestra parts, and printing and distributing scores. None of this, in my opinion and that of many others, is entitled to copyright protection other than "don't photocopy this." In many other languages, French for example, "copyright" is rendered "right of the author". That's the [i]author[/i], not the author's typist or proofreader. If Bach, or Handel, or Brahms were still alive, then I would hope that they [i]would[/i] receive royalties from paid performances of their works. That's what the system's for! But giving royalties to those not involved in the artistic creation of the music (either its composition or its performance) strikes me, and many others, as wrong. Yes, this goes against what the law says. But the situation is the same as with other objections to copyright law: a large number of people believe the law is unjust, but cannot change it because the current political system favors business over individuals. (Keep in mind the chilling statistic that more Americans have used Kazaa than voted for Bush Junior.) So, having no other recourse, people lose respect for the law... which is a dangerous thing. When I buy the sheet music to a composition which is not itself protected by copyright, I should be able to do whatever the hell I want with the knowledge I gain from that music. (Copying it is another issue, of course.) If I discover a new, patentable invention using data obtained with (say) gas chromatography, I do not and should not have to share income from the patent with the inventor of the gas chromatograph. (And, yes, I realize that patents are different from copyrights. It's an example.) Interesting sidenote. In music history, the professor told the following story: The Church had a tradition concerning a 100-200-year-old piece (I forget which) that the score should never be released outside the church, so that no performance could occur without the Church's permission. Mozart, with his incredible memory, attended a church service at which the piece was performed, went home, and copied out the score. The professor's opinion, and that of everyone in the class, was that he had done a Good Deed for Music and for Humanity by making a beautiful piece of music available to everyone. Nowadays he'd be prosecuted. Music needs an equivalent to Project Gutenberg: downloadable, public-domain scores. There is no reason for public-domain information to cost more than the price of compilation and reproduction, which in today's society is essentially zero.
I am a member of a fairly successful American university choir. We record all of our performances for our own use, but can't sell--or even distribute for free--most of them, because of copyright laws. Keep in mind nearly all of our repetoire was composed before 1917.
Last fall we performed Mozart's Requiem Mass (composed 1791), and many of the singers wanted to make and sell/give away a recording... but we found out to our dismay that we couldn't. Why? Because the [i]scores[/i] we were using were covered by copyright. This is a bit absurd--of all the people who deserve to earn money off that performance, the typesetters and editors are the last on the list. We already paid them for their work, dammit: we paid $1000 for a hundred copies (plus orchestra parts) of something that should be public domain.
We have many recordings we'd love to publish on the Internet (publicity and all), but can't.
There are two CD's which we have secured copyright permission (from the score publisher--neither work itself is covered by copyright) to sell. While I'm not involved in the finances of the choir, I do know that the CD's cost $10 and we make a $5 profit off of each. Now, where does that other $5 go? Jewel cases, inserts, and the costs of CD replication are no more than $.50-$1, so [i]someone[/i] is getting $4 royalties from each disc--almost certainly the publisher of the score.
Modern copyright law isn't necessarily friendly to the "small artists". We'd love to put up our recordings on the Internet, or sell more CD's at concerts (the two aren't mutually exclusive!) for a greater profit... but we can't.
And all of us would be tickled pink if one of our recordings showed up on Kazaa.
I'm sure many people use a custom hosts-file for ad blocking, with various popup/banner sites redirected to 127.0.0.1 or 0.0.0.0.
Why not redirect them to 68.163.90.12 (www.riaa.org) instead? Same effect, and you're doing a good deed (costing some scumbags a wee bit of bandwidth and CPU) in the meantime.
What are the legal ramifications of this?
Wouldn't help. In elections having a clue is only a force-multiplier, not a force in itself... the only real force in elections is money... and Hollings has too much of that for anyone to beat him, sadly.
Mickey Mouse already has a senate seat... what state is Fritz Hollings (D-Disney) from again?
I'm just glad it's midi music--midi is a separate mixer channel and can be killed without muting the mp3 player.
Once everyone gets broadband and they use background mp3's or oggs... bah.
Although it probably never happens, the stereotypical script kiddie break-in/website defacement displays some childish "you have been pwned by BobTheLeet" message.
Now, since it's a malicious midi file that does the damage, you can notify them in full stereo! It should be possible to make crude synthesized speech over MIDI, using combinations of instruments whose spectra resemble various vowels, with percussion for consonants. MIDI cards do vary, but it should be possible.
Actually, since 1) the first 10-15 harmonics are easily enough to distinguish vowels, 2) midi has 16 channels, 3) the ocarina sample on most midi banks has both a quick attack and is very close to a pure sine wave, you can construct realistic vowel spectra from scratch!
Now for the greater challenge: how exactly do you pronounce "pwned"?
While /. has been known to indulge in a little over-the-top microsoft bashing when bugs like these come out, there's a reason they (especially ones like this) make the front page.
Windows has a huge installed base, and windows machines tend to be targeted by kiddies looking for DDoS zombies.
And of course this is a big bug. Run arbitrary code through a midi file? That's huge, and deserves to be on the front page. Apache security holes of much less import make the front page, and they probably belong there too.
...it'd make them too much like kuro5hin.org...
Suppose I run a store with two doors separated by 50m. A sign is posted on one door saying "Buying from this store is illegal, and we will take you to court if you attempt to purchase from us." The other door has no such sign.
Is a customer who walks through the other door, buys a widget, and walks out liable? Of course not.
Likewise, SCO, by running a public ftp server with the kernel, is offering that kernel to everyone who asks. Is it now illegal to ask a ftp server for a file (which it will gladly send you if you ask) before making sure that their entire webpage doesn't ask you not to use it?
The problem is that every ultra-draconian/crazy measure (like this, or like UCITA, or the bill that would allow the **AA's to legally DoS people's computers) makes laws that are less outrageous seem tame by comparison. The next DMCA will pass more easily if, when it's proposed, everyone looks back at proposals like this and says "This new law isn't overly oppressive--it's much milder than those others!"
... is an option off of the right-click menu on an image with the following options:
-Block images/popups from this directory
-Block images/popups from this server
-Add this server->0.0.0.0 to hosts file
Who cares if it can tell the difference? I sure can't.
"There is little that is bad about the big carriers..."
I imagine they sink about as well as the large ones, but are much more expensive to build. This is why the Navy doesn't use battleships any more; with the advent of guided missiles and improved torpedoes, a ship doesn't need to be huge to have offensive punch. (A ship DID have to be large to stand up to the recoil of 16" guns--hence battleships.)
But the endurance of a ship does not scale linearly with size. A tac-nuke will kill a huge carrier just as it will a smaller one.
The fact that our (US) military does not pay that much attention to survivability of ships is a sign of a trend: we are now focused on smacking around those weaker than ourselves (Iraq, Afghanistan) rather than fighting an even battle (WW2).
Someone should tell this to the morons who got us involved in Iraq.
... music, for instance.
Play a well-known snippet of music, with possibly slight random distortion to prevent programs from doing bitwise recognition, and have the user type in the artist or the song name (the software should accept either). They should get three tries to get one correct, in case the user doesn't know, say, the Beatles, or Vivaldi, or Mozart.
This could be simplified and expanded by simply hvaing users match a work of art to the artist. Hamlet=Shakespeare, Star Wars=Geore Lucas, and so forth.
While designing a test that is simple enough for a computer to give but difficult enough that a computer cannot trivially answer it, drawing on the shared cultural knowledge of humans might be a solution.
... who's to make them sign NCA's?