They're providing a service. They have requirements to which you must agree for them to provide that service. The fact that it's free is irrelevant. That is the entire basis of a license: you do these things and/or you don't do these other things, and we'll license you to use this.
Terms of Service, End-user License Agreement, contract, terms, license... they're all approximately the same thing if they're regulating your access to copyrighted material. Quoting: "You can't use Pandora to steal music, and you have to listen to it through pandora.com or on a device officially supported by Pandora". In other words, it's not your music; it's their music, and to listen to it, you'll play by their rules.
When you buy software it almost always comes with a EULA where the owner stipulates the licensing terms, when you buy music it doesn't come with a EULA and the terms of use are simply those laid out by copyright law.... you can write a contract to dictate the terms of just about anything, but the music industry does not do this unlike say the software industry - also copyright material - that does do this.
Only coincidentally: the music industry has chosen to take that approach. There's really no reason for them to have to. The law doesn't care what licensing the music industry chooses to sell. In choosing to sell it under that license, they have dictated what terms you will have, as I have said many times now.
If it just so happened to be the other way round - if the music industry sold music only under written contracts and software was sold under the default provisions of copyright law - would we be having the opposite argument?
That's what I thought too. TFA doesn't say, but the press release (one of the "sources" listed in TFA) indicates that they'll be bringing disposable endoscopes to the market in 2012 for "only a few euros".
Also, "decent" image = 250x250 pixels at 44 FPS. No indication of whether it's color or grayscale, but I suspect it's grayscale. The press release says it supplies "razor-sharp pictures", but I suspect that's only by comparison to existing endoscopes...
Yeah. 1mm x 1mm x 1.5mm isn't anywhere near approaching the smallest size the human eye can see unaided (remember the iPhone's retina display?). And they probably meant Kosher salt (the kind they put on pretzels).
I suspect that what they meant was that, the average person would just barely be able to spot one of these stuck on a nearby wall unless they got up close to it, where they'd be able to see it better.
Either by plugging into a programming interface, or if there is none by removing the ROM chip from its socket or de-soldering it and then reading it with a special device. You do know the basic gist of how a ROM works? You give it voltage, a clock, and an address, and you get a single unit of memory (byte or word). You record the contents of that memory cell, increment the address counter, pulse the clock, and you get the next unit of memory. Etc. Obviously you use a computerized device that does that automatically.
the license terms are dictated by copyright law and not by copyright holders
The license terms are dictated by both. If the copyright holders wanted to stipulate additional terms, they could.
Also, you're an idiot. You keep claiming that your argument only applies to music, but then you refer to "copyright owner", "copyright law" and "copyright holders". Music is not some special category of copyrighted work that gets treated differently, as I've pointed out a few times now. Your claims about "copyright" in general might happen to be generally accurate if "copyright" only applies to music, but in reality it happens to not. What's more, even if they are generally accurate about music, they are only coincidentally so because of the music industry's typical licensing practice.
You mean in the case of "I've encrypted your music with my public key, and now you want to play it". Well, duh, you have to distribute the private key. You've encrypted their music with your public key, and they need your private key to decrypt it so they can hear it.
That does beg the question, though, of why you're using public/private key encryption in such a retarded way to begin with.
("Your" music in this specific case meaning only that you're licensed to listen to it. It obviously doesn't actually belong to you; it belongs to the RIAA.)
The ROM doesn't just contain data; it contains both code and data. Reverse engineering the code was necessary to determine where in the code/data the private key was located. They could have put it anywhere on the ROM.
The "old" version botches >7-bit Unicode on both the preview and in the final post. It only looks fine in the editing text area, which I suspect is what OP meant when he said it looked fine in the "preview".
The AJAX version of the site strips out all of the characters but replaces a select few of them with their HTML-entity equivalents, so copy-and-paste from a website that uses the curly quote characters into a Slashdot comment has the curly quote marks correctly preserved in the comment if it's posted using the new editor. But the vast majority of Unicode characters don't work (including the … horizontal ellipsis character).
And both versions strip out HTML entity codes that it doesn't recognize.
Neither version shows something different in the preview from what's actually posted, so OP apparently just didn't notice in the preview. Or, as he was obviously using the old form, maybe he just clicked "submit".
I was having the same issue with the Post Anonymously checkbox. Then Slashdot apparently reverted the code back to the version where the Post Anonymously checkbox still worked but clicking a post opened its parent posts one by one. (And links seem to work.) So no, it isn't quite as simple as OP being completely computer illiterate. It was actually broken.
i never said my comments applied to anything outside of music in any way, shape or form
Ah. You live in some special fantasy world where "music" is magically protected under something other than "copyright" and is mysteriously different from every other form of copyrightable work.
Right, I'll leave you to it then. As I have no idea what reality you live in, you're welcome to stay there and I'll not try to bring my reality, or any other, into the picture.
Agreed, this is only a filing of the report, no follow-up. It's customary in every law enforcement organisation to file every report, no matter how stupid.
No, it isn't just a "filing of the report". It's a memo to the Director of the FBI informing him of the report that they received.
Granted that they do have to file something on every report they receive, I'd still presume that they don't send a memo to the FBI director every time some crackpot reports seeing UFOs.
Claiming to see flying saucers and claiming that 3 of them crashed and were recovered are slightly different things. I would think that floating unidentifiable spots of light are a little bit easier to hallucinate than crashed disc-shaped aircraft with dead crews.
He could very well be lying, but the idea that he's a crackpot imagining all of it is a little harder to swallow.
Naturally it stands to reason that you can't triangulate if there's only one point to triangulate from. If every message between you and the internet passes over exactly the same segment of the route, that's as close as they could get. However apparently whoever did this study found that, on the average, that's pretty close to the person's actual location.
Go up and click the tinyurl link I posted and see if you understand what I mean. The period of the pattern is the least common multiple of the dimensions of all 3 images, and if the dimensions of the images are prime, their LCM is relatively large.
That would require a custom firmware. This looks like a kludgy hack that just happens to have the looping effect, but I'm still wondering how it happened to avoid overwriting the FAT. Maybe there's a special bit that you have to set to overwrite sector 0 or the flash chip will just report a write error, which would cause the controller to skip over it.
If the flash controller thought that the chip held 500 GB, the address bus would be large enough but it's quite probable that the flash chip soldered onto it would just completely ignore the highest bits of the data address. Looping would occur as a natural side-effect. The main thing I'm puzzled over is how you'd avoid overwriting sector 0 (which stores the FAT) when you loop over.
This isn't about law enforcement finding somebody. Obviously if they want to find somebody they can. This is about marketers and trend researchers finding out where their visitors are coming from. It's about demographics and advertising.
A mess of code? Did you even look at it? It was 3 static PNG images, and a CSS rule that looked like "background:url(image1.png),url(image2.png),url(image3.png);". Tiling the images was all done automatically by the browser.
Not if you're doing it correctly. For example, in the example I used before, suppose you're actually in Chicago and the ping times are 50 ms to LA and 12 ms to NYC. You want to look like you're in Las Vegas, and you want the ping times to look like 120 ms to LA and 500 to NYC, so you'd delay an extra 70 ms when you get pinged from LA and an extra 488 ms when you get pinged from NYC. Then suppose they try pinging you from Denver, and your real ping time to Denver is 25 ms. Vegas is closer to LA than to Denver, so you want to look like your ping to Denver is 300 ms, which means you delay an extra 275 ms when you get a ping from a server in Denver. Etc. If you do it correctly, they can't tell you're manipulating the results - just that your connection has high latency.
So you have actual ping times, from Chicago: LA: 50 ms Denver: 25 ms NYC: 12 ms which reveals that you're about 1/3 of the way from NYC to Denver, and about twice as far from LA as from Denver.
But the person trying to locate you sees pings of: LA: 120 ms Denver: 300 ms NYC: 500 ms giving the false impression that you're about 1/4 of the way from LA to Denver.
Slashdot Mirror
They aren't selling you a license at all.
They're providing a service. They have requirements to which you must agree for them to provide that service. The fact that it's free is irrelevant. That is the entire basis of a license: you do these things and/or you don't do these other things, and we'll license you to use this.
Terms of Service, End-user License Agreement, contract, terms, license... they're all approximately the same thing if they're regulating your access to copyrighted material. Quoting: "You can't use Pandora to steal music, and you have to listen to it through pandora.com or on a device officially supported by Pandora". In other words, it's not your music; it's their music, and to listen to it, you'll play by their rules.
When you buy software it almost always comes with a EULA where the owner stipulates the licensing terms, when you buy music it doesn't come with a EULA and the terms of use are simply those laid out by copyright law. ... you can write a contract to dictate the terms of just about anything, but the music industry does not do this unlike say the software industry - also copyright material - that does do this.
Only coincidentally: the music industry has chosen to take that approach. There's really no reason for them to have to. The law doesn't care what licensing the music industry chooses to sell. In choosing to sell it under that license, they have dictated what terms you will have, as I have said many times now.
If it just so happened to be the other way round - if the music industry sold music only under written contracts and software was sold under the default provisions of copyright law - would we be having the opposite argument?
I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I need a car analogy.
The actual press release said a grain of "coarse" salt.
That's what I thought too. TFA doesn't say, but the press release (one of the "sources" listed in TFA) indicates that they'll be bringing disposable endoscopes to the market in 2012 for "only a few euros".
Also, "decent" image = 250x250 pixels at 44 FPS. No indication of whether it's color or grayscale, but I suspect it's grayscale. The press release says it supplies "razor-sharp pictures", but I suspect that's only by comparison to existing endoscopes...
Yeah. 1mm x 1mm x 1.5mm isn't anywhere near approaching the smallest size the human eye can see unaided (remember the iPhone's retina display?). And they probably meant Kosher salt (the kind they put on pretzels).
I suspect that what they meant was that, the average person would just barely be able to spot one of these stuck on a nearby wall unless they got up close to it, where they'd be able to see it better.
Either by plugging into a programming interface, or if there is none by removing the ROM chip from its socket or de-soldering it and then reading it with a special device. You do know the basic gist of how a ROM works? You give it voltage, a clock, and an address, and you get a single unit of memory (byte or word). You record the contents of that memory cell, increment the address counter, pulse the clock, and you get the next unit of memory. Etc. Obviously you use a computerized device that does that automatically.
The fact is in the real world no-one uses EULAs or any derivation thereof to sell music to consumers
Sure they do. Here's one.
the license terms are dictated by copyright law and not by copyright holders
The license terms are dictated by both. If the copyright holders wanted to stipulate additional terms, they could.
Also, you're an idiot. You keep claiming that your argument only applies to music, but then you refer to "copyright owner", "copyright law" and "copyright holders". Music is not some special category of copyrighted work that gets treated differently, as I've pointed out a few times now. Your claims about "copyright" in general might happen to be generally accurate if "copyright" only applies to music, but in reality it happens to not. What's more, even if they are generally accurate about music, they are only coincidentally so because of the music industry's typical licensing practice.
Private keys have to be distributed in this case.
You mean in the case of "I've encrypted your music with my public key, and now you want to play it". Well, duh, you have to distribute the private key. You've encrypted their music with your public key, and they need your private key to decrypt it so they can hear it.
That does beg the question, though, of why you're using public/private key encryption in such a retarded way to begin with.
("Your" music in this specific case meaning only that you're licensed to listen to it. It obviously doesn't actually belong to you; it belongs to the RIAA.)
The ROM doesn't just contain data; it contains both code and data. Reverse engineering the code was necessary to determine where in the code/data the private key was located. They could have put it anywhere on the ROM.
The "old" version botches >7-bit Unicode on both the preview and in the final post. It only looks fine in the editing text area, which I suspect is what OP meant when he said it looked fine in the "preview".
The AJAX version of the site strips out all of the characters but replaces a select few of them with their HTML-entity equivalents, so copy-and-paste from a website that uses the curly quote characters into a Slashdot comment has the curly quote marks correctly preserved in the comment if it's posted using the new editor. But the vast majority of Unicode characters don't work (including the … horizontal ellipsis character).
And both versions strip out HTML entity codes that it doesn't recognize.
Neither version shows something different in the preview from what's actually posted, so OP apparently just didn't notice in the preview. Or, as he was obviously using the old form, maybe he just clicked "submit".
I was having the same issue with the Post Anonymously checkbox. Then Slashdot apparently reverted the code back to the version where the Post Anonymously checkbox still worked but clicking a post opened its parent posts one by one. (And links seem to work.) So no, it isn't quite as simple as OP being completely computer illiterate. It was actually broken.
i never said my comments applied to anything outside of music in any way, shape or form
Ah. You live in some special fantasy world where "music" is magically protected under something other than "copyright" and is mysteriously different from every other form of copyrightable work.
Right, I'll leave you to it then. As I have no idea what reality you live in, you're welcome to stay there and I'll not try to bring my reality, or any other, into the picture.
Agreed, this is only a filing of the report, no follow-up. It's customary in every law enforcement organisation to file every report, no matter how stupid.
No, it isn't just a "filing of the report". It's a memo to the Director of the FBI informing him of the report that they received.
Granted that they do have to file something on every report they receive, I'd still presume that they don't send a memo to the FBI director every time some crackpot reports seeing UFOs.
Claiming to see flying saucers and claiming that 3 of them crashed and were recovered are slightly different things. I would think that floating unidentifiable spots of light are a little bit easier to hallucinate than crashed disc-shaped aircraft with dead crews.
He could very well be lying, but the idea that he's a crackpot imagining all of it is a little harder to swallow.
Obviously they died of a SYN flood.
Naturally it stands to reason that you can't triangulate if there's only one point to triangulate from. If every message between you and the internet passes over exactly the same segment of the route, that's as close as they could get. However apparently whoever did this study found that, on the average, that's pretty close to the person's actual location.
That explains it.
...about every one of a few million people who visit the site.
Right...
Go up and click the tinyurl link I posted and see if you understand what I mean. The period of the pattern is the least common multiple of the dimensions of all 3 images, and if the dimensions of the images are prime, their LCM is relatively large.
That would require a custom firmware. This looks like a kludgy hack that just happens to have the looping effect, but I'm still wondering how it happened to avoid overwriting the FAT. Maybe there's a special bit that you have to set to overwrite sector 0 or the flash chip will just report a write error, which would cause the controller to skip over it.
If the flash controller thought that the chip held 500 GB, the address bus would be large enough but it's quite probable that the flash chip soldered onto it would just completely ignore the highest bits of the data address. Looping would occur as a natural side-effect. The main thing I'm puzzled over is how you'd avoid overwriting sector 0 (which stores the FAT) when you loop over.
You're right, of course...
This isn't about law enforcement finding somebody. Obviously if they want to find somebody they can. This is about marketers and trend researchers finding out where their visitors are coming from. It's about demographics and advertising.
A mess of code? Did you even look at it? It was 3 static PNG images, and a CSS rule that looked like "background:url(image1.png),url(image2.png),url(image3.png);". Tiling the images was all done automatically by the browser.
Not if you're doing it correctly. For example, in the example I used before, suppose you're actually in Chicago and the ping times are 50 ms to LA and 12 ms to NYC. You want to look like you're in Las Vegas, and you want the ping times to look like 120 ms to LA and 500 to NYC, so you'd delay an extra 70 ms when you get pinged from LA and an extra 488 ms when you get pinged from NYC. Then suppose they try pinging you from Denver, and your real ping time to Denver is 25 ms. Vegas is closer to LA than to Denver, so you want to look like your ping to Denver is 300 ms, which means you delay an extra 275 ms when you get a ping from a server in Denver. Etc. If you do it correctly, they can't tell you're manipulating the results - just that your connection has high latency.
So you have actual ping times, from Chicago:
LA: 50 ms
Denver: 25 ms
NYC: 12 ms
which reveals that you're about 1/3 of the way from NYC to Denver, and about twice as far from LA as from Denver.
But the person trying to locate you sees pings of:
LA: 120 ms
Denver: 300 ms
NYC: 500 ms
giving the false impression that you're about 1/4 of the way from LA to Denver.