I'm not saying The Dispossessed doesn't deserve a nomination; I'm just saying that it doesn't deserve to be put above a book like The Shockwave Rider, which basically laid the foundation for the dominant form of SF through the '80s and much of the '90s - and which didn't even get nominated.
yup, yer right. I had thought that Stand had been a double-winner; it was at least nominated for the Nebulas.
oh well. yet another example of why awards are useless. The Shockwave Rider is probably the most influential book of the '70s, in that it, along with the work of Dick, was what created cyberpunk. and it didn't even get nominated for either of the Major Awards. Dickson gets nominations for Dorsai! and Time Storm, and that's it. meanwhile, Card pulls down a nomination every time he puts a book out. (now, he's good, but Dickson is much better.) and Stephenson pulls down a Hugo for Diamond Age, but gets a runner-up for the rather superior Cryptonomicon. Pohl hasn't had a Best Novel Hugo since Gateway.
poor ol' Bob Forward once got nominated for a Campbell Award, and that's been it.
it's just commerce. they're really not any different from the Emmys.
Re:The Demise of Fantasy and Science Fiction
on
Harry Potter Wins Hugo
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· Score: 3, Informative
In recent years, science fiction and fantasy (especially childrens' books such as Harry Potter) have failed to come up with anything truly original. No authors have come up with anything which approaches the originality or the epic grandeur shown by Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke.
I will have to violently disagree with this.
Before I begin, I should say that I love both Tolkien and Asimov, grew up reading the Narnia books, and intensely dislike Clarke (except for the rather interesting short story The Billion Names of God, which I think is quite good). Both Tolkien and Asimov get whole bookshelves devoted to them.
I've been reading a lot recently, although only some of it was sf/f. Here's some sf/f authors who are currently publishing that I think are really interesting:
Pat Cadigan started as just William Gibson with more musical references, but has recently diverged into some really weird, really interesting stuff. I'm now only a third of the way into Fools, but it's repeatedly blowing my mind.
Kim Stanley Robinson wrote the Mars trilogy, and while I haven't been able to maintain an interest in anything else he's done, that single achievement is more than enough to rate listing with other important contemporary authors.
Candas Jane Dorsey has only one fantasy book so far, called Black Wine, and if you like dark fantasy at all, it's a must read: possibly the best book of any genre written in the '90s.
Speaking of dark fantasy, Steven Brust has written some pretty amazing stuff. It's true that he was inspired by Zelazny; it's equally true that he has clearly surpassed his inspiration. Tad Williams is correct.
And in the realm of lesser lights, Neal Stephenson has written some promising books, especially Cryptonomicon; Frederik Pohl continues to produce good, quality hard sf; and Kathleen Ann Goonan did impress me with Queen City Jazz, although I haven't read anything else by her yet.
No, the real problem is a lack of recognition for these people. Although Robinson did win some awards, there are huge gaps. Generally speaking, in order to make the Hugos, you've got to have commercial success first: and nowhere is this more clear than in the Dramatic Presentation category, where the 1999 awards didn't even mention New Rose Hotel, probably the best cyberpunk movie ever made.
The Hugos are voted on by fans. Each year, there is a World Science Fiction Convention held somewhere in the world. This year, it was in Philadelphia.
Members of the convention (most of whom are also attendees) are eligible to vote for the Hugos.
The Nebulas have a jury. When the Hugos go wrong (and they do; The Dispossessed is an interesting book, but it's nowhere near as significant as The Shockwave Rider, the Nebula winner that year) it's a matter of mass confusion, not a small, elite group going weird.
Perhaps next year they will give it to American Gods.:)
I've actually lived in Iceland. It's not capitalist. They accept restrictions on the market that would make most Americans, including many who consider themselves quite left-wing, react with horror.
Medieval Iceland wasn't precisely anarchist. They did have a court system, for example. There was a lack of an organized executive, yes, but that's not quite the same thing. (Although I used to think so when I was a teenager, so I understand the confusion.:)
Feudalism has everything to do with corporations. It was what created them: before the feudal state, there were no real corporations. After feudalism, we have the great corporate landowners (guilds, churches, chivalric orders and so on).
The important point about feudalism is that it is based on fictional property rights. People can't own land the way they own personal property: at least, not most of the land. (You can effectively control access to houses and that sort of thing.) Our land law is still built on the illusion that people can really own land. For example, if I rent an apartment, I can change the locks, thus denying my landlord physical access to the land - yet he, she or it still owns the land, and can even sell it legally. This is the essential rule of real property which underlies feudalism, and which we continue to follow in the modern era. A careful examination of pre-feudal, especially non-agrarian, legal systems will reveal a complete absence of this fictional kind of property. With my computers, if I don't have access to the machines themselves, then I don't own them. Perhaps somebody has stolen them from me: but I still don't have them, and I can't sell them to somebody else until I get them back. Real property, on the other hand, can't be stolen. Intellectual property is like real property: it's a legal fiction, granting rights which could not be obtained without the force of the law. I think that modern technology corporations bear remarkable similarity to some of the larger medieval corporations, such as some of the chivalric and monastic orders.
States need gangs of thugs: but in most states, they're organized in some way and follow the dictates of the state. In a fascist state, the gangs are non-organized and act as a primary directing force of the state, in a similar way to the way that they act in organized crime. Examine the history of the fascisti in particular.
As for whether people are reading this, much to my surprise I got modded up (I'm always surprised, I never can figure out why: many of my best comments languish in obscurity, while my offhand jokes get modded up and down eighteen times; I don't get it) on my first comment, so maybe we do have fans. after all, geeks read this site.:) however, I will skip my bonus from now on.
far as I know, it still hasn't been litigated. Certainly there are no appeals court decisions on the matter.
when dealing with new legal issues, of which there are plenty in the electronics world (hell - there've been software patents since the late '70s, and there still isn't a single infringement case), lawyers tend to be cautious and advise their clients that things which might be illegal in fact are.
the DMCA's common-carrier clause is rather complex, and has yet to be tested. something to watch out for.
Re:What About Research That IS Computer Technology
on
ACM vs. RIAA
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· Score: 2
I think one of the workaround to this, is to make the publication of the source code necessary prior to granting any software patent; after source code is the equivalent of blue prints, and these are (I believe !?) necessary in areas which need them.
dangit, that's so right on. with normal, traditional, patented items, we generally see engineering diagrams showing how the thing is made. with pharmaceutical patents, we get chemical formulae. people who want to patent software should be forced to provide the code: at the very least, pseudocode, but C/Forth (a lot of these patents are in machine control systems) or whatever would be ideal.
another important point to consider, with software patents, is that none have been litigated for infringement yet. the holders have been able to obtain significant financial gain through them, of course, but there haven't been any real tests in court.
this is quite correct. the other reason why technical people don't get on juries, by and large, is that there aren't very many of us. statistically the odds are against it.
every single one mentioned in the article, bar one (Code Red), was a client-side Outlook virus
Hello? SirCam? It's an executable. It's mentioned in the article. It's a Windows executable, but it will happily infect people running Eudora on Windows, supposing of course that they are dumb.
It is another victory for the guys at Redmond, of course.
one of the few countries that's worse than the Americans is Turkey. under Turkish law, if you kill a Turkish citizen anywhere in the world, you can be prosecuted - should you happen to visit Turkey. yes, this has really happened. double jeopardy? who cares...
democracy dates back a long time before capitalism. we could go back to ancient athens. you might not think of that as democratic though. we could go to tenth-century iceland. (iceland, where they still haven't bothered with capitalism. they did get democracy, back, though. capitalism. what a crazy idea.:)
capitalism also dates back before democracy. that is, unless you think of early nineteenth-century Britain, the birthplace of capitalism, as democratic. I'm unsure as to whether I'd call it democratic now. never mind before 1832.
fascism is also not rule by corporations. that's what we call feudalism. (our modern feudal lords use intellectual property rights instead of land rights. both are fictions of the law.) fascism is rule by gangs: it was named after the fascisti, and a key component of Nazism as well as the Mussolini and Franco regimes was the gangs of thugs who kept people in line.
judges can't. they have to submit written reasons for their decisions, and "I don't like this law" is an easy route to appeal.
juries, however, have a de facto ability to nullify laws they dislike, by finding against the undesirable law. whether this ability is legal or not is the subject of much debate among legal scholars; it's pointless of course since the only way to take this power away is to make juries submit written reasons, and that'll never happen.:)
the fact that he's not a citizen goes to intent. and since these are criminal proceedings, intent is not only relevant, it's crucial to the prosecution's case. they're going to have to argue that he should have been aware that he was violating the DMCA. it's pretty obvious that he was not, in fact, aware.
the actions of his employer are also totally irrelevant. Elcomsoft isn't on trial. (And yes, before you exclaim in horror, it can be. Criminal prosecutions against corporations do happen: there's no jail term, of course, but fines can be inflicted.)
the company in the United States had a contract with Elcomsoft. now, in order for the prosecution to get him, they're not only going to have to show he ought to have known about the DMCA, but that he either knew or ought to have known about the arrangements to important the Advanced eBook Processor into the United States.
Guys, these are criminal proceedings. This isn't like the MPAA vs. 2600. The state has a much, much higher standard that it has to meet than private individuals do. All Dmitry needs is reasonable doubt.
try punching this AppleScript into a Mac sometime...
tell application "QuickTime Player"
activate
stop every movie
close every movie
getURL "http://www.apple.com/quicktime/favorites/bbc_worl d1/bbc_world1.mov"
present movie 1 scale screen
end tell
Circumvention devices do not have to be software. An interesting point: The most common circumvention device available today is not DeCSS; it's a CD burner. CD burners got to be too common though; I suspect they're illegal under DMCA. The argument against is that they do have a lot of non-infringing uses. However, most burners, especially cheaper ones: this would be questionable at best.
Your specific example is not so good. I believe that in most jurisdictions, locksmiths are legally required to keep master keys: or at least they're allowed to, and they commonly do. Therefore, the squealer would not be revealing secrets: no consequences. Shouting fire in the middle of a forest fire is legal.:)
I don't know which section this is from. however, I can tell you what the subsection means, but a little more context would be nice.
what this means is that government employees and persons working under contract to municipal, state or federal governments may engage in activities that would normally be prohibited by the other parts of that section (this where the context would be nice) if - and only if - they do so in the course of a lawfully authorized investigative, protective, information security, or intelligence activity. Lawfully authorized means that it has to be a cop (or reasonable facsimile), acting within jurisdiction; the local water works cannot decrypt your email, even if they know you're selling secrets to Iraq. At least.
I'm not trained in American law. In some jurisdictions, lawfully authorized could be extended to mean "needs a warrant." Any American lawyers?
Some even come up with good arguments why the DMCA is bad and their arguments are moderated up and everyone else agrees with their point of view.
of course, some of those people aren't Americans, too. for example, I doubt any American politician is quaking in his boots (okay, Hillary isn't worried either:) at the thought of losing my vote.
not that I've voted for anybody who won in an election that wasn't municipal in my life. curious, that. I have a very good history of voting for the winning alderman. in many different cities.:)
Apparently Forth can have a smaller memory footprint than good assembly; it's not going to run as fast, but there never have been many good assembly programmers, and Forth might beat poorly written assembly.
Every high-level language beats poorly written assembly. Believe me, I know. I've seen too much of it.
Apart from that, though, Forth in its original P-Code form is tighter than assembly. At least 33% tighter, and often as high as 90% tighter, particularly in inefficient assembly codes like pre-386 Intel.
I first learned programming in FORTRAN and COBOL long before these languages were "structured", then BASIC, APL, assembly, many more dialects of BASIC and assembly, a little Pascal and LISP, C, and Labview.
Wow, you admit to learning in COBOL. I am in awe of your bravery.:)
Horrible languages designed for appeasing the needs of suits aside, FORTRAN, COBOL, BASIC, Pascal and C are all Algol-family languages. Assembly of course is its own breed. LISP is also. I don't know what Labview is.
It is true that Forth is unique. It's not an Algol-family language, like most languages are, outside of assembly. This is both a strength and a weakness. It's a strength because the way Forth does things is, well, better; it's a weakness because there are no commonly-used operating systems written in it, and it sometimes can be a real pain in the butt calling OS routines from Forth.
The weirdness you reference does not make it harder to do algorithm design in Forth. It makes it easier. What it makes harder is learning Forth in the first place. If it wasn't for Leo Brodie (some of whose books are still in print; unfortunately Starting Forth is not) I doubt there would be nearly as many Forth programmers as there are.
Forth does seem like a great language for p-codes, that is, compiler output that is not machine code. P-code can be machine and OS independent, and protection against rogue code can be built into the interpreters.
Forth is the original language for p-code, as far as I know. I am not sure what you mean by rogue code. Normally, Forth compiles to tokens. Each token is a numerical referent to a routine. For example, here's a sample (rather goofy) Forth program:
: additiondemo
4 5 +.
;
the delimiter between commands is either a space or a CR. so that's actually four commands compiled there (six if you count the compiler control commands). : means compile a new command, and takes an argument following (there are a few commands in Forth which do that) of the name of the function. therefore, this is a new command named "additiondemo."
and by the way, that's what all Forth programs are. new commands. so as you write programs, your Forth just gets bigger. and bigger. there are tools available to reduce your Forth code to the minimum necessary to run a particular command, and then run that command immediately on startup. this is referred to as turnkeying. but you don't have to do that. you can just start Forth on bootup and keep all your programs in RAM all the time.
so back to our program. the command "4" puts the number 4 on the top of the stack. the command "5" does a similar operation. the command + adds the top two numbers on the stack, and places their total back on the top of the stack. (Therefore, at this point there's a 9 on the stack.) the command . pops the number on the top of the stack, and outputs it to the screen (well stdout really).
finally, the command ; says time to stop compiling, write the end of the command, and return to interpreter mode.
anyway, there ya go. that's basically how it all works. that command above should output a single 9, and leave the stack in the same condition it found it.
with most Forth implementations, the 4 and 5 commands would compile to assembly. actually, probably so would the + - but it could compile to a P-code reference to the + command. the . command usually compile to a P-code reference. result? this additiondemo should come in under 10 bytes on most architectures.
this is also why Forth only looks like it's using RPN. in reality, the + command is just a command like any other: it takes its arguments from the stack. it just so happens that it looks like RPN, most of the time. but you can do some rather strange things with +, especially if you have pointers on the stack. some of these things can be useful, although their implementations are usually very hairy.
Mind you Rutgers doesn't use DHCP, so that registering stuff might sound a little non-kosher to you small network DHCP guys:). We've tried, DHCP just isnt an option across ATM, more than two dozen routers and a few hundred VLANs.
if you've got problems with distributing DHCP across your network (and I can well see how you might - the Rutgers network is legendary for size), there's an easy answer.
make lots of DHCP boxen. all you need is an elderly 486/P100 or so with a network card. put one in each subnet. i.e., physically locate it somewhere in the dorm: one DHCP box for each router. the routers will block the DHCP nicely.
in fact, once you get one box working, you should be able to image its drive and just change the subnet it's controlling, at least if you're using the same network card.
Re:Similar Problems
on
Dorm Storm?
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· Score: 3, Informative
Never help anyone with a Compaq Presario. They are a nightmare. Corollary: If you get suckered into helping anyone with a Presario, never, ever, call Compaq Tech Support asking for a recovery disk.
on the upside, Compaq now has its recovery disks and other stuff available for download. at least for the battered old Deskpro I use as a firewall.:)
Re:You have problems, Check this out
on
Dorm Storm?
·
· Score: 2
you also have no network security, at all.
it's kinda funny. last time I was up in Ottawa, I sat down in front of one of your lab computers, and gave a three-finger salute. much to my surprise, the tasks menu appeared. I thought "what can I do?" and tried running telnet. again to my surprise, the machine complied happily and I surfed to my domain and checked my email.
it ran netscape too. you guys really need to download TweakUI and use it. really really need.;)
can't remember the name of the campus. it was the one that's close to U of O.
what's more, DHCP solves all the problems with cross-platform compatibility.
I have a win 3.11 box. (yes, FreeBSD runs on a 386; no, it doesn't run on a 20MB drive:) it takes a DHCP connection just fine. so do macs, *nix boxen, even the old-style DOS boxen. really any decent stack out there supports DHCP, and a lot of the crappy ones do too.
on another topic. at my last workplace, they used fixed IP addresses for each computer workstation. sure, whatever. they also had security set to check to make sure that your IP address was correct: if you were using a non-approved address, the routers would lose your packets. this would prevent people from borrowing addresses, I suppose.
how did they do this? they only had one hub for the entire building. I'm not sure how many micros were in the building. I'm estimating about six hundred or so. I never saw the hub. (I'm hoping it was actually a switch, but based on network performance, I don't think so.) but every 10BaseT cable disappeared into the wall, to re-emerge somewhere in informatics.
why they didn't just use DHCP, I'm not sure. but they were an NT shop.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not saying The Dispossessed doesn't deserve a nomination; I'm just saying that it doesn't deserve to be put above a book like The Shockwave Rider, which basically laid the foundation for the dominant form of SF through the '80s and much of the '90s - and which didn't even get nominated.
yup, yer right. I had thought that Stand had been a double-winner; it was at least nominated for the Nebulas.
oh well. yet another example of why awards are useless. The Shockwave Rider is probably the most influential book of the '70s, in that it, along with the work of Dick, was what created cyberpunk. and it didn't even get nominated for either of the Major Awards. Dickson gets nominations for Dorsai! and Time Storm, and that's it. meanwhile, Card pulls down a nomination every time he puts a book out. (now, he's good, but Dickson is much better.) and Stephenson pulls down a Hugo for Diamond Age, but gets a runner-up for the rather superior Cryptonomicon. Pohl hasn't had a Best Novel Hugo since Gateway.
poor ol' Bob Forward once got nominated for a Campbell Award, and that's been it.
it's just commerce. they're really not any different from the Emmys.
I will have to violently disagree with this.
Before I begin, I should say that I love both Tolkien and Asimov, grew up reading the Narnia books, and intensely dislike Clarke (except for the rather interesting short story The Billion Names of God, which I think is quite good). Both Tolkien and Asimov get whole bookshelves devoted to them.
I've been reading a lot recently, although only some of it was sf/f. Here's some sf/f authors who are currently publishing that I think are really interesting:
No, the real problem is a lack of recognition for these people. Although Robinson did win some awards, there are huge gaps. Generally speaking, in order to make the Hugos, you've got to have commercial success first: and nowhere is this more clear than in the Dramatic Presentation category, where the 1999 awards didn't even mention New Rose Hotel, probably the best cyberpunk movie ever made.
It's not a jury.
The Hugos are voted on by fans. Each year, there is a World Science Fiction Convention held somewhere in the world. This year, it was in Philadelphia.
Members of the convention (most of whom are also attendees) are eligible to vote for the Hugos.
The Nebulas have a jury. When the Hugos go wrong (and they do; The Dispossessed is an interesting book, but it's nowhere near as significant as The Shockwave Rider, the Nebula winner that year) it's a matter of mass confusion, not a small, elite group going weird.
Perhaps next year they will give it to American Gods. :)
I've actually lived in Iceland. It's not capitalist. They accept restrictions on the market that would make most Americans, including many who consider themselves quite left-wing, react with horror.
Medieval Iceland wasn't precisely anarchist. They did have a court system, for example. There was a lack of an organized executive, yes, but that's not quite the same thing. (Although I used to think so when I was a teenager, so I understand the confusion. :)
Feudalism has everything to do with corporations. It was what created them: before the feudal state, there were no real corporations. After feudalism, we have the great corporate landowners (guilds, churches, chivalric orders and so on).
The important point about feudalism is that it is based on fictional property rights. People can't own land the way they own personal property: at least, not most of the land. (You can effectively control access to houses and that sort of thing.) Our land law is still built on the illusion that people can really own land. For example, if I rent an apartment, I can change the locks, thus denying my landlord physical access to the land - yet he, she or it still owns the land, and can even sell it legally. This is the essential rule of real property which underlies feudalism, and which we continue to follow in the modern era. A careful examination of pre-feudal, especially non-agrarian, legal systems will reveal a complete absence of this fictional kind of property. With my computers, if I don't have access to the machines themselves, then I don't own them. Perhaps somebody has stolen them from me: but I still don't have them, and I can't sell them to somebody else until I get them back. Real property, on the other hand, can't be stolen. Intellectual property is like real property: it's a legal fiction, granting rights which could not be obtained without the force of the law. I think that modern technology corporations bear remarkable similarity to some of the larger medieval corporations, such as some of the chivalric and monastic orders.
States need gangs of thugs: but in most states, they're organized in some way and follow the dictates of the state. In a fascist state, the gangs are non-organized and act as a primary directing force of the state, in a similar way to the way that they act in organized crime. Examine the history of the fascisti in particular.
As for whether people are reading this, much to my surprise I got modded up (I'm always surprised, I never can figure out why: many of my best comments languish in obscurity, while my offhand jokes get modded up and down eighteen times; I don't get it) on my first comment, so maybe we do have fans. after all, geeks read this site. :) however, I will skip my bonus from now on.
However, somebody who just blindly used an email program that was downloaded and installed by the house's local teenager, might well be. ;)
interesting question.
far as I know, it still hasn't been litigated. Certainly there are no appeals court decisions on the matter.
when dealing with new legal issues, of which there are plenty in the electronics world (hell - there've been software patents since the late '70s, and there still isn't a single infringement case), lawyers tend to be cautious and advise their clients that things which might be illegal in fact are.
the DMCA's common-carrier clause is rather complex, and has yet to be tested. something to watch out for.
dangit, that's so right on. with normal, traditional, patented items, we generally see engineering diagrams showing how the thing is made. with pharmaceutical patents, we get chemical formulae. people who want to patent software should be forced to provide the code: at the very least, pseudocode, but C/Forth (a lot of these patents are in machine control systems) or whatever would be ideal.
another important point to consider, with software patents, is that none have been litigated for infringement yet. the holders have been able to obtain significant financial gain through them, of course, but there haven't been any real tests in court.
this is quite correct. the other reason why technical people don't get on juries, by and large, is that there aren't very many of us. statistically the odds are against it.
Hello? SirCam? It's an executable. It's mentioned in the article. It's a Windows executable, but it will happily infect people running Eudora on Windows, supposing of course that they are dumb.
It is another victory for the guys at Redmond, of course.
it's a valid question.
one of the few countries that's worse than the Americans is Turkey. under Turkish law, if you kill a Turkish citizen anywhere in the world, you can be prosecuted - should you happen to visit Turkey. yes, this has really happened. double jeopardy? who cares...
how bizarre.
democracy dates back a long time before capitalism. we could go back to ancient athens. you might not think of that as democratic though. we could go to tenth-century iceland. (iceland, where they still haven't bothered with capitalism. they did get democracy, back, though. capitalism. what a crazy idea. :)
capitalism also dates back before democracy. that is, unless you think of early nineteenth-century Britain, the birthplace of capitalism, as democratic. I'm unsure as to whether I'd call it democratic now. never mind before 1832.
fascism is also not rule by corporations. that's what we call feudalism. (our modern feudal lords use intellectual property rights instead of land rights. both are fictions of the law.) fascism is rule by gangs: it was named after the fascisti, and a key component of Nazism as well as the Mussolini and Franco regimes was the gangs of thugs who kept people in line.
judges can't. they have to submit written reasons for their decisions, and "I don't like this law" is an easy route to appeal.
juries, however, have a de facto ability to nullify laws they dislike, by finding against the undesirable law. whether this ability is legal or not is the subject of much debate among legal scholars; it's pointless of course since the only way to take this power away is to make juries submit written reasons, and that'll never happen. :)
for a few weeks.
the fact that he's not a citizen goes to intent. and since these are criminal proceedings, intent is not only relevant, it's crucial to the prosecution's case. they're going to have to argue that he should have been aware that he was violating the DMCA. it's pretty obvious that he was not, in fact, aware.
the actions of his employer are also totally irrelevant. Elcomsoft isn't on trial. (And yes, before you exclaim in horror, it can be. Criminal prosecutions against corporations do happen: there's no jail term, of course, but fines can be inflicted.)
the company in the United States had a contract with Elcomsoft. now, in order for the prosecution to get him, they're not only going to have to show he ought to have known about the DMCA, but that he either knew or ought to have known about the arrangements to important the Advanced eBook Processor into the United States.
Guys, these are criminal proceedings. This isn't like the MPAA vs. 2600. The state has a much, much higher standard that it has to meet than private individuals do. All Dmitry needs is reasonable doubt.
you get five messages a day. that's pretty low.
I live in a heavily filtered world, now. before, though: at one point I was more like sixty messages a day of spam.
try coming back to that after two weeks of Christmas. unenjoyable.
wanna bet?
try punching this AppleScript into a Mac sometime...
tell application "QuickTime Player"l d1/bbc_world1.mov"
activate
stop every movie
close every movie
getURL "http://www.apple.com/quicktime/favorites/bbc_wor
present movie 1 scale screen
end tell
watch the BBC fullscreen...
Circumvention devices do not have to be software. An interesting point: The most common circumvention device available today is not DeCSS; it's a CD burner. CD burners got to be too common though; I suspect they're illegal under DMCA. The argument against is that they do have a lot of non-infringing uses. However, most burners, especially cheaper ones: this would be questionable at best.
Your specific example is not so good. I believe that in most jurisdictions, locksmiths are legally required to keep master keys: or at least they're allowed to, and they commonly do. Therefore, the squealer would not be revealing secrets: no consequences. Shouting fire in the middle of a forest fire is legal. :)
I don't know which section this is from. however, I can tell you what the subsection means, but a little more context would be nice.
what this means is that government employees and persons working under contract to municipal, state or federal governments may engage in activities that would normally be prohibited by the other parts of that section (this where the context would be nice) if - and only if - they do so in the course of a lawfully authorized investigative, protective, information security, or intelligence activity. Lawfully authorized means that it has to be a cop (or reasonable facsimile), acting within jurisdiction; the local water works cannot decrypt your email, even if they know you're selling secrets to Iraq. At least.
I'm not trained in American law. In some jurisdictions, lawfully authorized could be extended to mean "needs a warrant." Any American lawyers?
of course, some of those people aren't Americans, too. for example, I doubt any American politician is quaking in his boots (okay, Hillary isn't worried either :) at the thought of losing my vote.
not that I've voted for anybody who won in an election that wasn't municipal in my life. curious, that. I have a very good history of voting for the winning alderman. in many different cities. :)
I can get 30 fps video no problem on my megabit DSL...
'course, I'm using a proprietary transmission protocol...
Interesting post.
Every high-level language beats poorly written assembly. Believe me, I know. I've seen too much of it.
Apart from that, though, Forth in its original P-Code form is tighter than assembly. At least 33% tighter, and often as high as 90% tighter, particularly in inefficient assembly codes like pre-386 Intel.
Wow, you admit to learning in COBOL. I am in awe of your bravery. :)
Horrible languages designed for appeasing the needs of suits aside, FORTRAN, COBOL, BASIC, Pascal and C are all Algol-family languages. Assembly of course is its own breed. LISP is also. I don't know what Labview is.
It is true that Forth is unique. It's not an Algol-family language, like most languages are, outside of assembly. This is both a strength and a weakness. It's a strength because the way Forth does things is, well, better; it's a weakness because there are no commonly-used operating systems written in it, and it sometimes can be a real pain in the butt calling OS routines from Forth.
The weirdness you reference does not make it harder to do algorithm design in Forth. It makes it easier. What it makes harder is learning Forth in the first place. If it wasn't for Leo Brodie (some of whose books are still in print; unfortunately Starting Forth is not) I doubt there would be nearly as many Forth programmers as there are.
Forth is the original language for p-code, as far as I know. I am not sure what you mean by rogue code. Normally, Forth compiles to tokens. Each token is a numerical referent to a routine. For example, here's a sample (rather goofy) Forth program:
: additiondemo4 5 +
;
the delimiter between commands is either a space or a CR. so that's actually four commands compiled there (six if you count the compiler control commands). : means compile a new command, and takes an argument following (there are a few commands in Forth which do that) of the name of the function. therefore, this is a new command named "additiondemo."
and by the way, that's what all Forth programs are. new commands. so as you write programs, your Forth just gets bigger. and bigger. there are tools available to reduce your Forth code to the minimum necessary to run a particular command, and then run that command immediately on startup. this is referred to as turnkeying. but you don't have to do that. you can just start Forth on bootup and keep all your programs in RAM all the time.
so back to our program. the command "4" puts the number 4 on the top of the stack. the command "5" does a similar operation. the command + adds the top two numbers on the stack, and places their total back on the top of the stack. (Therefore, at this point there's a 9 on the stack.) the command . pops the number on the top of the stack, and outputs it to the screen (well stdout really).
finally, the command ; says time to stop compiling, write the end of the command, and return to interpreter mode.
anyway, there ya go. that's basically how it all works. that command above should output a single 9, and leave the stack in the same condition it found it.
with most Forth implementations, the 4 and 5 commands would compile to assembly. actually, probably so would the + - but it could compile to a P-code reference to the + command. the . command usually compile to a P-code reference. result? this additiondemo should come in under 10 bytes on most architectures.
this is also why Forth only looks like it's using RPN. in reality, the + command is just a command like any other: it takes its arguments from the stack. it just so happens that it looks like RPN, most of the time. but you can do some rather strange things with +, especially if you have pointers on the stack. some of these things can be useful, although their implementations are usually very hairy.
if you've got problems with distributing DHCP across your network (and I can well see how you might - the Rutgers network is legendary for size), there's an easy answer.
make lots of DHCP boxen. all you need is an elderly 486/P100 or so with a network card. put one in each subnet. i.e., physically locate it somewhere in the dorm: one DHCP box for each router. the routers will block the DHCP nicely.
in fact, once you get one box working, you should be able to image its drive and just change the subnet it's controlling, at least if you're using the same network card.
on the upside, Compaq now has its recovery disks and other stuff available for download. at least for the battered old Deskpro I use as a firewall. :)
you also have no network security, at all.
it's kinda funny. last time I was up in Ottawa, I sat down in front of one of your lab computers, and gave a three-finger salute. much to my surprise, the tasks menu appeared. I thought "what can I do?" and tried running telnet. again to my surprise, the machine complied happily and I surfed to my domain and checked my email.
it ran netscape too. you guys really need to download TweakUI and use it. really really need. ;)
can't remember the name of the campus. it was the one that's close to U of O.
what's more, DHCP solves all the problems with cross-platform compatibility.
I have a win 3.11 box. (yes, FreeBSD runs on a 386; no, it doesn't run on a 20MB drive :) it takes a DHCP connection just fine. so do macs, *nix boxen, even the old-style DOS boxen. really any decent stack out there supports DHCP, and a lot of the crappy ones do too.
on another topic. at my last workplace, they used fixed IP addresses for each computer workstation. sure, whatever. they also had security set to check to make sure that your IP address was correct: if you were using a non-approved address, the routers would lose your packets. this would prevent people from borrowing addresses, I suppose.
how did they do this? they only had one hub for the entire building. I'm not sure how many micros were in the building. I'm estimating about six hundred or so. I never saw the hub. (I'm hoping it was actually a switch, but based on network performance, I don't think so.) but every 10BaseT cable disappeared into the wall, to re-emerge somewhere in informatics.
why they didn't just use DHCP, I'm not sure. but they were an NT shop. :)