on entering from the US by bus. This was before the current terrorism craze, too. They wanted to know where I was going (Montreal) and where I'd be staying (I said I planned to find a youth hostel). They asked if I was employed in the US (I said yes) and what I did (I told them). They asked how much money I had with me (about 100 USD cash, plus some credit cards that I put on the counter). They never really seemed to become satisfied with my answers, but eventually they got tired of questioning me and let me through.
I think they mainly wanted to make sure I wasn't trying to move to Canada with a residential visa and become a public burden. I had formerly thought that Canada->US was the difficult direction to travel in, but Canada now is pretty sticky too.
I just need to encode Ogg in real time. My P3-750 laptop does it at maybe 5x real time, so I need the equivalent of about a p3-150. A 400 mhz XScale would probably be fine if it had floating point. Know of anything?
Looks like the Via motherboards use around 10 watts watts because of all the heavy video stuff on them (they are intended for media centers etc). On the other hand the ARM chip has no floating point processor. I've been looking for a small, low-powered board that can run an Ogg Vorbis encoder, which uses lots of floating point. Nothing looks attractive yet.
The first amendment is what's called "statutory law", which means law written by legislators. Other laws passed by Congress are also statutory law.
When you ask "where specifically does it say in the 1st amendment", you're asking where is the statutory law that says so-and-so, with the implication that if it's not in a statute, it's not law. That's how it works in, say, Germany or France, which are what's called "civil law countries", which means "the law" and "the statutes" are the same thing. But that's not how law works in the US.
The US (and the UK, Canada, etc.) are what's called a "common-law country", just like the UK and various others. That means there's two kinds of law: statute law, written by legislators, and case law, written by judges. BOTH ARE LAW. And legislation is written taking this into account. In civil-law countries, legislators have to anticipate all kinds of details and contingincies into the statutes. So the German civil code has a lot more sections and subsections than the US statutes. Something is either in the statute or else it isn't. The law is fairly sharply defined, which sometimes leads to Procrustian results.
In the US, the law instead has a fractal boundary. The Constitution and the statutes are sort of a seed crystal. They state a generality and express an intention. Figuring out how to apply the generality and interpret the intention is left as a complex judgement call assigned to certain highly trained people called "judges" whose job, as the name implies, is to make judgement calls. Whenever a judge above a certain level makes a judgement call, that call becomes part of the law, binding on other judges, and in some cases (where the Constitution is involved), binding on the Congress. The law thereby grows a new tendril based that governs what happens with similar cases in the future.
This isn't some cockamamie idea invented by Bill Clinton---it's what was written into the Constitution by the Framers, based on 300+ years (now 500+ years) of English legal tradition that governed the American Colonies before the US became independent. If you're proposing that we throw out the Constitution and every other law on the books and start over with a civil law system, well fine, there's nothing wrong with having such a philosophy (might as well make us a monarchy while you're at it). But you don't get to pick and choose, living in the common-law system for things that you like and expressing outrage at it for things that you don't like. It's all or nothing.
So to answer your question, it doesn't matter whether the 1st amendment's wording specifically mentions journalists. There's ample case law (written by judges interpreting the 1st amendment) protecting journalists and that's what Nick is relying on.
Of course there's a free alternative. Other people are free to write similar software, or at least they used to be, and maybe they've even written it already (remember that "free" refers to freedom, not price, or in this case even existence of the software). Of course now the software lobby is trying to take that freedom away, through software patents.
There is no fundamental right to prevent the public from sharing something that you've published. There's a body of law called copyright for doing that, but it's not a fundamental right, it's just an artificial government intervention that people decided to authorize in order to create an incentive for authors to publish. Some people with an overactive sense of entitlement think that copyright is a fundamental right, but that's simply not recognized by history by the law, and any theories grounded on assuming such a right exists are simply hogwash. Without the intervention, perhaps less stuff would get written, and even less stuff would get published, but life would generally go on just fine.
For more info, see the book Free Culture (text downloadable from link) by FSF board member Prof. Lawrence Lessig.
The people at your former workplace did exactly the right thing by avoiding GPL code. I'm sure you would say people not willing to honor the terms of your company's licenses (i.e. no sharing, pay for each copy, etc). should not use your company's code. So I don't see why you have trouble with the notion that people not wanting to honor the GPL's terms shouldn't use GPL code.
I myself write closed source code sometimes, but I expect to get paid for doing it. When I write code as a volunteer, it's GPL. I don't see why I should want to do development for your closed source product so you can get money for shipping my code, unless I'm getting some of that money myself. If you want to use the closed source policies to charge people to use code, write the code yourself or pay someone to write it. In wanting to use GPL code in closed source products, it sounds to me like you're just a freeloader looking for a handout.
The point is that yield for monitors has gotten good enough that dead pixels aren't so common any more. Monitors with bad pixels can be sold as factory seconds. I would expect though that under a no-dead-pixel policy, monitors with dead pixels would not be made, since the dead pixel is caused by a bad transistor in the TFT matrix and would be found during testing before the monitor is assembled. The TFT matrix used to be an extremely expensive part, but is not so much any more. So they'd just scrap it and use another one in that monitor.
From http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=3934945
Land Mines Add to Sri Lanka's Misery
Tidal waves that hammered Sri Lanka have uprooted land mines that threaten to kill or maim survivors trying to return home while endangering relief workers, a Unicef official said today.
The tsunami have scattered mines and destroyed warning signs, said Ted Chaiban, the aid agency's Sri Lanka chief.
"Land mines are posing a new risk to Sri Lankans, and to relief efforts," he said. "Mines were floated by the floods and washed out of known mine fields, so now we don't know where they are and the warning signs... have been swept away or destroyed."
The greatest danger will come when survivors begin to return to their homes, not knowing where the mines are, Chaiban said.
More than 1.5 million mines have been planted across Sri Lanka by the army and Tamil Tiger rebels have been fighting for a separate homeland since 1983.
since they contain all kinds of mechanical stuff with lubricants that dry out, electronic components like flash memory which drop bits over time, etc.
Tape these days also has error correction, actually generally multiple layers so you can completely wipe out a region of tape and still restore the data that the region held. You need a RAID to do that with disks.
Tell you what, take a tape cartridge and a disk drive holding the same data. Drop both of them on the floor from 5 feet, which one do you think you're more likely to restore from?
The 400gb figure is "compressed", i.e. marketing fantasy.
LTO3 will be 400gb native, but it's not available yet, and the media will cost a fortune for a while after it's introduced.
I want him to design the next Fry's Electronics "theme store" that they put up around Silicon Valley. It should look just like that hypercube2 case. Yow!
Source code for codecs included? What codecs? Winamp? Realaudio? I thought that this was the hard part, and difficult to get or release source code for.
There's no need for violence and in fact such a law could work by withholding the willingness of the state to apply the violence that is (as you say) behind all laws.
For example, Congress could decide to refuse to enforce copyrights on programs distributed without source, could refuse to enforce confidentiality agreements for API's, etc. Then if Microsoft tries to bust you for pirating copies of MS Excel, the court throws the case out unless they've released the source. If you publish the specs to some piece of hardware that you've signed a nondisclosure agreement for, the court says "we don't recognize that kind of agreement, it's like a gambling debt, work it out for yourself". (Of course you'd still have an ethical dilemma on your hands in the second case). RMS has suggested something like this in discussions I've heard him speak in. He is quite clear, actually forcing anyone to reveal secrets would be tyrannical.
In both examples above, it's the person calling on the government to apply violence to enforce secrecy, who gets his/her request denied. It's not the threat of violence that enforces the law. It's the refusal to use violence unless the source and/or specs are released, that suddenly makes it in the requester's interest to release the source and/or specs.
It means metal detectors will find your passport cover.
When I go through airport security, I get wanded and they look in my wallet, which bugs the heck out of me. I usually carry my passport and cash in a nylon neck pouch though, and that doesn't set off the metal detectors. I don't like the sound of this new wire mesh thing. Big Brother and for that matter any club or courthouse I might visit has no need to know whether I'm carrying a passport.
I first saw the Witte Fietsen at Hacking at ahe End of the Universe (HEU) in Lelystad, about 100 km south of Amsterdam. I was amazed. The bikes were clean and identical and looked like they had just come from a bike shop. They were white and had "Witte Fietsen" painted on the frames. I had heard of the white bikes before, but figured they had stopped existing ages ago, and that they were junky bikes made up from scrounged parts.
As for the NYC subway, it is run by the NYC Transit Authority which is part of the city government. Yes the NYCTA charges fares on most of its network (though it does have some free routes, like from JFK airport to Far Rockaway). The subway itself has in many years decided to operate for free on new years' eve (makes for less drunk driving fatilities). On the other days, the collected fares are still only around 35% of the subway's expenses. That amount (35%) is much higher than mass transit systems in other cities.
The most expensive and pervasive free subsidized transportation system of them all, of course, is roads used by automobiles. Every time someone rides a bike somewhere, that's a little bit less road capacity needed. If giving a free bike to everyone in a city avoids the need to add some extra lanes to a few streets, that could well result in a net savings by giving away the bikes.
has been going on since the 1960's and works fine in the places where it operates. It is cheaper to run per user than conventional public transit systems like buses and undergrounds, all of which have subsidized fares that cost much more than the bikes do. Do you think the New York Subway is also run by hippies?
Ahh, I missed that part. Well in that case, hacking the bikes is a little bit closer to tax evasion than vandalism. Tax evasion isn't so nice either, but it's a common pasttime of people everywhere:).
someone tries to convert the streets of a city into their private retail space without paying anything for it?
If I run a bike shop and pay rent and/or taxes on the property, so anyone can come look at the bikes but if they want to use one, they have to pay, that's a normal retail situation. I'm entitled to control what happens with my bikes within my private space.
What happens, though, if I just start locking the bikes up to lampposts and advertising that anyone can call a phone number to pay to unlock them? Am I not trying to convert the public lampposts into private retail space without paying any rent or tax? Who is taking what from whom? Perhaps some philosopher could conclude that I've really just abandoned the bikes, and rather than hacking 10% of them, CCC might have done better to hack 100%.
BTW, the public bicycle concept AFAIK started in Holland, with the Witte Fietsen ("white bicycles" in Dutch) project. Hippies scrounged up old bikes and parts during a transit strike, got them working and painted them white, and then just left them all over the place for people to use for free. Sort of a bicycle version of the GNU project. If you needed to get somewhere, you'd just find a white bike, ride it wherever you were going, and leave it for someone else to find and use.
This was several decades ago. Witte Fietsen actually worked as envisioned by the hippies, and was successful enough that local government decided to pick up the expenses. It is still active today in some parts of Holland, though in the big cities, sadly, the bikes get stolen too fast.
The dial-a-bike thing seems like a pale imitation. Witte Fietsen didn't need to be hacked.
The grading criteria are on the web site. There are 100 points available for the class. 85% gets an A, 75%=B, etc. 40% of the grade is exams and 60% is finding the 10 bugs. Each bug is 6%. So if you get all 40 exam points and find 5 bugs, that's 70% which is midway between a B and a C.
The student who spent 300 hours and expects to fail didn't use the 300 hours the right way. My guess is that he took a few programs and spent 300 hours examining them microscopically for obscure combinations of conditions that might be bugs, and didn't find enough. The right way to do it is take lots and lots of programs and just scroll them quickly and note the bugs that leap out at you. There are lots of bugs like that waiting to be found, believe me.
It sounds to me like the students spent too much time on the homework and exams (40% of the grade according to the first slide) and not enough on finding exploits (60% of the grade).
There are a hell of a lot of *nix exploits out there. I've certainly found more than 10 myself over the years even when I wasn't concertedly looking for them. Someone taking a class like that should have had at least a notion of what they were getting into and how to go about finding exploits. I don't think "find 10 bugs" is all that hard a goal for a semester of work, especially if it's graded like
10 bugs=A
9=B+
8=B
7=B-
...
Really anyone with the slighest determination should be able to find a few exploitable bugs, especially in programs that weren't really intended to accept potentially-hostile data (but always end up getting it anyway). Add to that the 40% from the exams and homework, and this course doesn't sound terribly hard to pass if you go about it with the right attitude.
Fantastic, a global database of cryptographically authenticated email addresses that have been tested to reach a real person.
We need a new key format, that doesn't have a live email address but instead has a hash of one. You'd send the address separately so it could be compared against the hash. There'd be salting to stop brute force searches. The database server could then still verify all the addresses (by sending emails out) but the actual email addresses would stay unpublished.
That's basically the idea. Base station equipment lasts longer than handsets, but I bet 90% of the base station stuff in service is less than 5 years old, and that will still be true in 5 years. So, expiring the leases after 5 years shouldn't affect the cost of sinking that equipment by more than 10%.
Slashdot Mirror
on entering from the US by bus. This was before the current terrorism craze, too. They wanted to know where I was going (Montreal) and where I'd be staying (I said I planned to find a youth hostel). They asked if I was employed in the US (I said yes) and what I did (I told them). They asked how much money I had with me (about 100 USD cash, plus some credit cards that I put on the counter). They never really seemed to become satisfied with my answers, but eventually they got tired of questioning me and let me through.
I think they mainly wanted to make sure I wasn't trying to move to Canada with a residential visa and become a public burden. I had formerly thought that Canada->US was the difficult direction to travel in, but Canada now is pretty sticky too.
I just need to encode Ogg in real time. My P3-750 laptop does it at maybe 5x real time, so I need the equivalent of about a p3-150. A 400 mhz XScale would probably be fine if it had floating point. Know of anything?
Looks like the Via motherboards use around 10 watts watts because of all the heavy video stuff on them (they are intended for media centers etc). On the other hand the ARM chip has no floating point processor. I've been looking for a small, low-powered board that can run an Ogg Vorbis encoder, which uses lots of floating point. Nothing looks attractive yet.
The first amendment is what's called "statutory law", which means law written by legislators. Other laws passed by Congress are also statutory law.
When you ask "where specifically does it say in the 1st amendment", you're asking where is the statutory law that says so-and-so, with the implication that if it's not in a statute, it's not law. That's how it works in, say, Germany or France, which are what's called "civil law countries", which means "the law" and "the statutes" are the same thing. But that's not how law works in the US.
The US (and the UK, Canada, etc.) are what's called a "common-law country", just like the UK and various others. That means there's two kinds of law: statute law, written by legislators, and case law, written by judges. BOTH ARE LAW. And legislation is written taking this into account. In civil-law countries, legislators have to anticipate all kinds of details and contingincies into the statutes. So the German civil code has a lot more sections and subsections than the US statutes. Something is either in the statute or else it isn't. The law is fairly sharply defined, which sometimes leads to Procrustian results.
In the US, the law instead has a fractal boundary. The Constitution and the statutes are sort of a seed crystal. They state a generality and express an intention. Figuring out how to apply the generality and interpret the intention is left as a complex judgement call assigned to certain highly trained people called "judges" whose job, as the name implies, is to make judgement calls. Whenever a judge above a certain level makes a judgement call, that call becomes part of the law, binding on other judges, and in some cases (where the Constitution is involved), binding on the Congress. The law thereby grows a new tendril based that governs what happens with similar cases in the future.
This isn't some cockamamie idea invented by Bill Clinton---it's what was written into the Constitution by the Framers, based on 300+ years (now 500+ years) of English legal tradition that governed the American Colonies before the US became independent. If you're proposing that we throw out the Constitution and every other law on the books and start over with a civil law system, well fine, there's nothing wrong with having such a philosophy (might as well make us a monarchy while you're at it). But you don't get to pick and choose, living in the common-law system for things that you like and expressing outrage at it for things that you don't like. It's all or nothing.
So to answer your question, it doesn't matter whether the 1st amendment's wording specifically mentions journalists. There's ample case law (written by judges interpreting the 1st amendment) protecting journalists and that's what Nick is relying on.
Nick dePlume's operation should be found to be protected free speech and any laws saying otherwise should be ruled unconstitutional.
Well, I'm similarly not free to hit people over the head on the street and take their wallets, but that's not what we usually mean by freedom.
Of course there's a free alternative. Other people are free to write similar software, or at least they used to be, and maybe they've even written it already (remember that "free" refers to freedom, not price, or in this case even existence of the software). Of course now the software lobby is trying to take that freedom away, through software patents.
The people at your former workplace did exactly the right thing by avoiding GPL code. I'm sure you would say people not willing to honor the terms of your company's licenses (i.e. no sharing, pay for each copy, etc). should not use your company's code. So I don't see why you have trouble with the notion that people not wanting to honor the GPL's terms shouldn't use GPL code.
I myself write closed source code sometimes, but I expect to get paid for doing it. When I write code as a volunteer, it's GPL. I don't see why I should want to do development for your closed source product so you can get money for shipping my code, unless I'm getting some of that money myself. If you want to use the closed source policies to charge people to use code, write the code yourself or pay someone to write it. In wanting to use GPL code in closed source products, it sounds to me like you're just a freeloader looking for a handout.
The point is that yield for monitors has gotten good enough that dead pixels aren't so common any more. Monitors with bad pixels can be sold as factory seconds. I would expect though that under a no-dead-pixel policy, monitors with dead pixels would not be made, since the dead pixel is caused by a bad transistor in the TFT matrix and would be found during testing before the monitor is assembled. The TFT matrix used to be an extremely expensive part, but is not so much any more. So they'd just scrap it and use another one in that monitor.
From http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=3934945
... have been swept away or destroyed."
Land Mines Add to Sri Lanka's Misery
Tidal waves that hammered Sri Lanka have uprooted land mines that threaten to kill or maim survivors trying to return home while endangering relief workers, a Unicef official said today.
The tsunami have scattered mines and destroyed warning signs, said Ted Chaiban, the aid agency's Sri Lanka chief.
"Land mines are posing a new risk to Sri Lankans, and to relief efforts," he said. "Mines were floated by the floods and washed out of known mine fields, so now we don't know where they are and the warning signs
The greatest danger will come when survivors begin to return to their homes, not knowing where the mines are, Chaiban said.
More than 1.5 million mines have been planted across Sri Lanka by the army and Tamil Tiger rebels have been fighting for a separate homeland since 1983.
Tape these days also has error correction, actually generally multiple layers so you can completely wipe out a region of tape and still restore the data that the region held. You need a RAID to do that with disks.
Tell you what, take a tape cartridge and a disk drive holding the same data. Drop both of them on the floor from 5 feet, which one do you think you're more likely to restore from?
Archiving to disk is just asking for trouble.
The 400gb figure is "compressed", i.e. marketing fantasy. LTO3 will be 400gb native, but it's not available yet, and the media will cost a fortune for a while after it's introduced.
I want him to design the next Fry's Electronics "theme store" that they put up around Silicon Valley. It should look just like that hypercube2 case. Yow!
Source code for codecs included? What codecs? Winamp? Realaudio? I thought that this was the hard part, and difficult to get or release source code for.
For example, Congress could decide to refuse to enforce copyrights on programs distributed without source, could refuse to enforce confidentiality agreements for API's, etc. Then if Microsoft tries to bust you for pirating copies of MS Excel, the court throws the case out unless they've released the source. If you publish the specs to some piece of hardware that you've signed a nondisclosure agreement for, the court says "we don't recognize that kind of agreement, it's like a gambling debt, work it out for yourself". (Of course you'd still have an ethical dilemma on your hands in the second case). RMS has suggested something like this in discussions I've heard him speak in. He is quite clear, actually forcing anyone to reveal secrets would be tyrannical.
In both examples above, it's the person calling on the government to apply violence to enforce secrecy, who gets his/her request denied. It's not the threat of violence that enforces the law. It's the refusal to use violence unless the source and/or specs are released, that suddenly makes it in the requester's interest to release the source and/or specs.
It means metal detectors will find your passport cover. When I go through airport security, I get wanded and they look in my wallet, which bugs the heck out of me. I usually carry my passport and cash in a nylon neck pouch though, and that doesn't set off the metal detectors. I don't like the sound of this new wire mesh thing. Big Brother and for that matter any club or courthouse I might visit has no need to know whether I'm carrying a passport.
I first saw the Witte Fietsen at Hacking at ahe End of the Universe (HEU) in Lelystad, about 100 km south of Amsterdam. I was amazed. The bikes were clean and identical and looked like they had just come from a bike shop. They were white and had "Witte Fietsen" painted on the frames. I had heard of the white bikes before, but figured they had stopped existing ages ago, and that they were junky bikes made up from scrounged parts. As for the NYC subway, it is run by the NYC Transit Authority which is part of the city government. Yes the NYCTA charges fares on most of its network (though it does have some free routes, like from JFK airport to Far Rockaway). The subway itself has in many years decided to operate for free on new years' eve (makes for less drunk driving fatilities). On the other days, the collected fares are still only around 35% of the subway's expenses. That amount (35%) is much higher than mass transit systems in other cities. The most expensive and pervasive free subsidized transportation system of them all, of course, is roads used by automobiles. Every time someone rides a bike somewhere, that's a little bit less road capacity needed. If giving a free bike to everyone in a city avoids the need to add some extra lanes to a few streets, that could well result in a net savings by giving away the bikes.
has been going on since the 1960's and works fine in the places where it operates. It is cheaper to run per user than conventional public transit systems like buses and undergrounds, all of which have subsidized fares that cost much more than the bikes do. Do you think the New York Subway is also run by hippies?
Ahh, I missed that part. Well in that case, hacking the bikes is a little bit closer to tax evasion than vandalism. Tax evasion isn't so nice either, but it's a common pasttime of people everywhere :).
If I run a bike shop and pay rent and/or taxes on the property, so anyone can come look at the bikes but if they want to use one, they have to pay, that's a normal retail situation. I'm entitled to control what happens with my bikes within my private space.
What happens, though, if I just start locking the bikes up to lampposts and advertising that anyone can call a phone number to pay to unlock them? Am I not trying to convert the public lampposts into private retail space without paying any rent or tax? Who is taking what from whom? Perhaps some philosopher could conclude that I've really just abandoned the bikes, and rather than hacking 10% of them, CCC might have done better to hack 100%.
BTW, the public bicycle concept AFAIK started in Holland, with the Witte Fietsen ("white bicycles" in Dutch) project. Hippies scrounged up old bikes and parts during a transit strike, got them working and painted them white, and then just left them all over the place for people to use for free. Sort of a bicycle version of the GNU project. If you needed to get somewhere, you'd just find a white bike, ride it wherever you were going, and leave it for someone else to find and use.
This was several decades ago. Witte Fietsen actually worked as envisioned by the hippies, and was successful enough that local government decided to pick up the expenses. It is still active today in some parts of Holland, though in the big cities, sadly, the bikes get stolen too fast.
The dial-a-bike thing seems like a pale imitation. Witte Fietsen didn't need to be hacked.
The student who spent 300 hours and expects to fail didn't use the 300 hours the right way. My guess is that he took a few programs and spent 300 hours examining them microscopically for obscure combinations of conditions that might be bugs, and didn't find enough. The right way to do it is take lots and lots of programs and just scroll them quickly and note the bugs that leap out at you. There are lots of bugs like that waiting to be found, believe me.
There are a hell of a lot of *nix exploits out there. I've certainly found more than 10 myself over the years even when I wasn't concertedly looking for them. Someone taking a class like that should have had at least a notion of what they were getting into and how to go about finding exploits. I don't think "find 10 bugs" is all that hard a goal for a semester of work, especially if it's graded like
Really anyone with the slighest determination should be able to find a few exploitable bugs, especially in programs that weren't really intended to accept potentially-hostile data (but always end up getting it anyway). Add to that the 40% from the exams and homework, and this course doesn't sound terribly hard to pass if you go about it with the right attitude.
More seriously, CVS sucks. Efforts spent reimplementing it are better spent replacing it (Subversion, Arch, Darcs, whatever).
We need a new key format, that doesn't have a live email address but instead has a hash of one. You'd send the address separately so it could be compared against the hash. There'd be salting to stop brute force searches. The database server could then still verify all the addresses (by sending emails out) but the actual email addresses would stay unpublished.
That's basically the idea. Base station equipment lasts longer than handsets, but I bet 90% of the base station stuff in service is less than 5 years old, and that will still be true in 5 years. So, expiring the leases after 5 years shouldn't affect the cost of sinking that equipment by more than 10%.