A decade ago, 'reverse engineering' was known as 'cracking.' It was a semi-noble endeavor by people to defeat ridiculous copy protection schemes.
No, a decade ago 'cracking' was called 'cracking' and 'reverse engineering' was exactly that. Cracking only uses some of the methods of reverse engineering to a copy-protection scheme, then applies a transformation to that scheme to disable it. If the same scheme is used in another product, the same transformation can be applied with no reverse engineering required.
Working out the Microsoft Word file format is not 'cracking' - removing the need for a serial number in WORD.EXE is.
Oh no, the guns were all humanely destroyed. If we're going for a brave new world with less guns, why keep them?
As for enforcing currently existing laws, yes I fully agree. Thomas Hamilton would not have gunned down schoolkids if the school had actually bothered to do a few more background checks on him. You can't legislate against lawbreakers, but you can keep an eye on them.
To be honest, I don't expect crime of any kind to go away, my main concern is gun 'accidents', like the more prevalent car accidents which kill and injure millions of people every year. Most of it is caused by irresponsible people, but at least with cars the licensing system keeps them on their toes. They know that if they're caught breaking the law, they risk fines, imprisonment and losing any right to drive a car. Effective enforcement of road laws brings down the number of road accidents (as does better road and car design, but not as much).
As for the second amendment, much of the talk here on Slashdot is that the majority of the country is stupid, and is willing to give up all their digital rights. Maurading governments can forget gun control as a means of taking over the country, they can do it just by attaching unreasonable restrictions to virtual technologies. That's why I think it's futile to use armaments against the goverment instead of plain old democracy. It just worked against Slobbo.
As for bulletproof armour, guns, knives, etc, they're only as effective as the people who use them. It's not the items themselves that need regulation, it's the people. And personally, I'd use poison to kill someone off, because using a weapon would make a horrible mess.
Who do you think still has guns after applying those measures? As far as 'sides' go, the criminal side have all had theirs confiscated. If you're really worried, give everyone bulletproof armour. Then you can't 'win' using a gun and have to start using nuclear weapons.
Confiscate the guns from people who shouldn't have them. They do this anyway - if you get arrested for a heist, do they give you your gun back?
Increase restrictions on buying new guns. If gun-nuts don't like it, they can stick to their old ones, or jump through the new hoops.
It's just like owning a car - the things you have to do to legally drive one are outweighed by the usefulness of the car itself. The government imposes a tax, paperwork and testing burden on car owners to remind them that they're gleefully burning up billions of gallons of a very limited natural resource and that they're driving the greatest accidental killing machine in modern times.
Just you try setting up a DVD-warez server and offer 500GB a day, and see how long it takes for your ISP to whup your ass and charge you for the bandwidth. The point is that _most_ internet users use a small amount of bandwidth, which doesn't cost the _provider_ money beyond his connectivity rental. That's why you get a flat rate.
It's much the same in the telecoms industry, where the cost of providing a local call is less than the cost of metering and billing those calls at a competitive rate. Obviously uncompetitive bastards like BT will suck their captive audience dry of money with by-the-second metering.
So much for that contract your talking about. The contract was broken LONG ago by the advertisers and I have no compucttion with deleting commercial content from anything I view.
That's lovely reasoning behind it, and I fully sympathise with you - commercial channels only care about the bottom line, gawd help any kids programs that aren't an televisual accessory to merchandise.
But you fail to mention that programs are created with the advertisters and commercialism in mind. If you watch the commercial channels at all, you are buying into it.
Collectively, by lowering the advert viewing figures, I fear we would be pushing the ad-man further and further into the programs themselves.
In that situation, we're going to reach a point where there not even the program is advert free, and we'll need image and speech analysis to block the offending 'messages', instead of just pausing the recording for a couple of minutes.
The problem with making popular devices to edit
out TV commercials is that the advertisers aren't dumb, and they know that their break-time ads aren't going to be watched.
The media sections of newspapers are predicting a return to the 'good old days' of advertisters bankrolling the entire program, so they can snake their message into the scenery and dialogue, if not the entire plot. That hits on the freedom of program-makers to make good TV.
I wouldn't be so eager to announce that you're watching commercial TV without watching the commercials. If you don't like commercials, you should watch publically-funded TV (the BBC is great for that) rather than break the TV social contract.
What I would like to see is a method of being able to alter in a WYSIWYG format the contents of a PDF document or simply create one from scratch in an open source manner. I wonder if such a project exists.
You're in luck - PDFlib can help. Sadly, your hands are tied if you actually want to release anything you write - Aladdin only allow you free-as-in-beer distribution of your stuff.
If you believe he's actually MC Hawking, then he has the same accent as the Amiga's Say program. Therefore, he has a cowboy yankee accent and must be American.
Why are people posting fake adventure scripts that read like ADVENT, or tearfully reminiscing about playing Infocom games or reading adventure books?
The IF contest isn't about paying homage to old classics, it's about writing new ones. Play Photopia. Play Spider and Web. These are new styles, new ideas, new puzzles. Don't judge these games on 1980s commercial game merits; they're not month-long adventures with arcane puzzles to keep you going; They're short stories packed with innovation. Well, at least the good ones are. And it's your job to find those good ones and vote for them.
I see the point, but it seems to simply shift the weakness from the RAM to the CPU. Unless the ciphering is particularly simple, it seems to involve much more work doing an encryption for every SYN and decryption for every ACK. Perhaps it overtakes the ringed-table lookup on these modern 1000MHz CPUs with 100MHz buses.
AFAICS, the Photorius cookies are for building an encryption link. To do all the encryption processing neccessary for every SYN is itself vulnerable to a DoS attack. I would imagine that the SYN flooding protection simply chalked up in a fixed-size array that it recieved a SYN and what sequence number it sent out, and looked in that array when the ACK returns for validity. There's no need to use encryption for this.
I disagree. But if I were to find a corporation that
was my friend, and they really needed my code
in their next for-profit program, I'd happily re-license
my code so they could use it. GPL gives that
control, that choice automatically to me,
rather than to them.
I reckon OpenGL drivers for M$'s XBox will be in the same league as DeCSS and the CueCat Linux drivers, ie verboten by the Grand High Overlords. Dare to use them and die!
Oh lovely, a BSD proponent. Viral as the GPL is, it does have one handy feature - that the code we develop for free cannot be legally turned into for-profit code without our knowledge or consent.
It's quite simple. If you're going to be writing for-free stuff yourself, you are freely welcome to all the GPL code I write. If you're writing for-profit stuff, I don't want to help you unless you want to pay me too! The copyright owner of the code has all rights to it, including licensing it again to different people. In the meantime, nobody's stopping the for-profit people making a workalike to whatever's been GPLed. For the end user, surely that's more choice?
The BSD licenses have a far more political motivation - they want to cancel out choice,
by whoring themselves to whoever will take their code. That way, they gain a lot more influence because big for-profit people are happy to rely on them, and rely on their code. GPL at least lets you know who your friends are.
As far as I remember, it's kind of 'prior art' based. You can't trademark on just the word "Windows", because "Windows" is a common dictionary word. Xerox and Kleenex weren't dictionary words before they were trademarked, and even then they still have the same meaning as the trademarked product.
I mean, surely people would expect their name, address, and demographic stuff to be collected in exchange for what is intentionally a device to take consumers to their commerce?
The bit I like is that we can now use them unfettered, and there's nothing particularly illegal in it until UCITA is passed, yet we can still get them for free. I bet the majority of people who get these with their magazines (maybe not the Radio Shack people) will be psuedo-savvy, and will just use them as DC intended.
DC do seem to have shown a misunderstanding of human nature, but overall I think their plan will work out. A small minority of people would actually buy these for the fun of scanning codes, but most people would like the free gimmick of scanning advertising codes. Heck, they could even be taken immediately to personalised commerce sites if DC start trading user info directly with the sites. Rather than a breach of privacy, it's an enhancement of the shopping experience, where you have to openly sell your soul anyway.
They show Robot Wars in the US on some PBS stations. I've caught a couple of the shows and it's fun. The announcer is somewhat annoying as his excitement level is higher than the action usually warrants. But there is a soccer (football for some of you) competition using robots rather than RC that is really pretty amazing to watch.
Yep, the commentator picked the wrong week to
quit sniffin' glue, but quite a few of the
battles are genuinely edge-of-the-seat stuff, particularly ones with the devastatingly
well engineered robots from series 3, like Razer, Hypnodisc or chaos2.
I can remember being goggle-eyed with wonder when the original Cassius flipped itself several feet into the air and back onto its wheels. Up until then, most of the effective robots were wedges with wheels, and if you were flipped over, you had lost. All hail Rex Garrod, gentlemanly master robot builder!
These CueCats sound really cool for their
unintended purpose, and it sounds like the AOL CDs have a competitor, the amount they're giving out. Anyone willing to mail one to the UK for me? I'll pay shipping, of course:)[my email address is on the front of my website]
Slashdot Mirror
A decade ago, 'reverse engineering' was known as 'cracking.' It was a semi-noble endeavor by people to defeat ridiculous copy protection schemes.
No, a decade ago 'cracking' was called 'cracking' and 'reverse engineering' was exactly that. Cracking only uses some of the methods of reverse engineering to a copy-protection scheme, then applies a transformation to that scheme to disable it. If the same scheme is used in another product, the same transformation can be applied with no reverse engineering required.
Working out the Microsoft Word file format is not 'cracking' - removing the need for a serial number in WORD.EXE is.
Oh no, the guns were all humanely destroyed. If we're going for a brave new world with less guns, why keep them?
As for enforcing currently existing laws, yes I fully agree. Thomas Hamilton would not have gunned down schoolkids if the school had actually bothered to do a few more background checks on him. You can't legislate against lawbreakers, but you can keep an eye on them.
To be honest, I don't expect crime of any kind to go away, my main concern is gun 'accidents', like the more prevalent car accidents which kill and injure millions of people every year. Most of it is caused by irresponsible people, but at least with cars the licensing system keeps them on their toes. They know that if they're caught breaking the law, they risk fines, imprisonment and losing any right to drive a car. Effective enforcement of road laws brings down the number of road accidents (as does better road and car design, but not as much).
As for the second amendment, much of the talk here on Slashdot is that the majority of the country is stupid, and is willing to give up all their digital rights. Maurading governments can forget gun control as a means of taking over the country, they can do it just by attaching unreasonable restrictions to virtual technologies. That's why I think it's futile to use armaments against the goverment instead of plain old democracy. It just worked against Slobbo.
As for bulletproof armour, guns, knives, etc, they're only as effective as the people who use them. It's not the items themselves that need regulation, it's the people. And personally, I'd use poison to kill someone off, because using a weapon would make a horrible mess.
Who do you think still has guns after applying those measures? As far as 'sides' go, the criminal side have all had theirs confiscated. If you're really worried, give everyone bulletproof armour. Then you can't 'win' using a gun and have to start using nuclear weapons.
- Confiscate the guns from people who shouldn't have them. They do this anyway - if you get arrested for a heist, do they give you your gun back?
- Increase restrictions on buying new guns. If gun-nuts don't like it, they can stick to their old ones, or jump through the new hoops.
It's just like owning a car - the things you have to do to legally drive one are outweighed by the usefulness of the car itself. The government imposes a tax, paperwork and testing burden on car owners to remind them that they're gleefully burning up billions of gallons of a very limited natural resource and that they're driving the greatest accidental killing machine in modern times.Sorry Roblimo, your 0-click patent is busted. I cite this Amazon spoof with its 'no-click[tm] ordering'.
The program they make the speed tests with is Intel's iCOMP. Is it any wonder that Intel's CPUs come top?
Just you try setting up a DVD-warez server and offer 500GB a day, and see how long it takes for your ISP to whup your ass and charge you for the bandwidth. The point is that _most_ internet users use a small amount of bandwidth, which doesn't cost the _provider_ money beyond his connectivity rental. That's why you get a flat rate.
It's much the same in the telecoms industry, where the cost of providing a local call is less than the cost of metering and billing those calls at a competitive rate. Obviously uncompetitive bastards like BT will suck their captive audience dry of money with by-the-second metering.
See the Campaign for Unmetered Telecoms for more such arguments.
So much for that contract your talking about. The contract was broken LONG ago by the advertisers and I have no compucttion with deleting commercial content from anything I view.
That's lovely reasoning behind it, and I fully sympathise with you - commercial channels only care about the bottom line, gawd help any kids programs that aren't an televisual accessory to merchandise.
But you fail to mention that programs are created with the advertisters and commercialism in mind. If you watch the commercial channels at all, you are buying into it. Collectively, by lowering the advert viewing figures, I fear we would be pushing the ad-man further and further into the programs themselves. In that situation, we're going to reach a point where there not even the program is advert free, and we'll need image and speech analysis to block the offending 'messages', instead of just pausing the recording for a couple of minutes.
The problem with making popular devices to edit out TV commercials is that the advertisers aren't dumb, and they know that their break-time ads aren't going to be watched.
The media sections of newspapers are predicting a return to the 'good old days' of advertisters bankrolling the entire program, so they can snake their message into the scenery and dialogue, if not the entire plot. That hits on the freedom of program-makers to make good TV.
I wouldn't be so eager to announce that you're watching commercial TV without watching the commercials. If you don't like commercials, you should watch publically-funded TV (the BBC is great for that) rather than break the TV social contract.
Why can't you build one yourself? Aren't TV cards good enough?
What I would like to see is a method of being able to alter in a WYSIWYG format the contents of a PDF document or simply create one from scratch in an open source manner. I wonder if such a project exists.
You're in luck - PDFlib can help. Sadly, your hands are tied if you actually want to release anything you write - Aladdin only allow you free-as-in-beer distribution of your stuff.
If you believe he's actually MC Hawking, then he has the same accent as the Amiga's Say program. Therefore, he has a cowboy yankee accent and must be American.
Why are people posting fake adventure scripts that read like ADVENT, or tearfully reminiscing about playing Infocom games or reading adventure books?
The IF contest isn't about paying homage to old classics, it's about writing new ones. Play Photopia. Play Spider and Web. These are new styles, new ideas, new puzzles. Don't judge these games on 1980s commercial game merits; they're not month-long adventures with arcane puzzles to keep you going; They're short stories packed with innovation. Well, at least the good ones are. And it's your job to find those good ones and vote for them.
The comment title reminds me of a lovely quote from Yellow Submarine:
John: Break the glass.
George: We can't!
Paul: It's Beatle-proof.
John: Nothing is Beatle-proof!
I see the point, but it seems to simply shift the weakness from the RAM to the CPU. Unless the ciphering is particularly simple, it seems to involve much more work doing an encryption for every SYN and decryption for every ACK. Perhaps it overtakes the ringed-table lookup on these modern 1000MHz CPUs with 100MHz buses.
AFAICS, the Photorius cookies are for building an encryption link. To do all the encryption processing neccessary for every SYN is itself vulnerable to a DoS attack. I would imagine that the SYN flooding protection simply chalked up in a fixed-size array that it recieved a SYN and what sequence number it sent out, and looked in that array when the ACK returns for validity. There's no need to use encryption for this.
I disagree. But if I were to find a corporation that was my friend, and they really needed my code in their next for-profit program, I'd happily re-license my code so they could use it. GPL gives that control, that choice automatically to me, rather than to them.
I reckon OpenGL drivers for M$'s XBox will be in the same league as DeCSS and the CueCat Linux drivers, ie verboten by the Grand High Overlords. Dare to use them and die!
Oh lovely, a BSD proponent. Viral as the GPL is, it does have one handy feature - that the code we develop for free cannot be legally turned into for-profit code without our knowledge or consent.
It's quite simple. If you're going to be writing for-free stuff yourself, you are freely welcome to all the GPL code I write. If you're writing for-profit stuff, I don't want to help you unless you want to pay me too! The copyright owner of the code has all rights to it, including licensing it again to different people. In the meantime, nobody's stopping the for-profit people making a workalike to whatever's been GPLed. For the end user, surely that's more choice?
The BSD licenses have a far more political motivation - they want to cancel out choice, by whoring themselves to whoever will take their code. That way, they gain a lot more influence because big for-profit people are happy to rely on them, and rely on their code. GPL at least lets you know who your friends are.
As far as I remember, it's kind of 'prior art' based. You can't trademark on just the word "Windows", because "Windows" is a common dictionary word. Xerox and Kleenex weren't dictionary words before they were trademarked, and even then they still have the same meaning as the trademarked product.
I'll find out by next week, as some kind slashdotters offered to send me theirs when I begged for one yesterday.
I mean, surely people would expect their name, address, and demographic stuff to be collected in exchange for what is intentionally a device to take consumers to their commerce?
The bit I like is that we can now use them unfettered, and there's nothing particularly illegal in it until UCITA is passed, yet we can still get them for free. I bet the majority of people who get these with their magazines (maybe not the Radio Shack people) will be psuedo-savvy, and will just use them as DC intended.
DC do seem to have shown a misunderstanding of human nature, but overall I think their plan will work out. A small minority of people would actually buy these for the fun of scanning codes, but most people would like the free gimmick of scanning advertising codes. Heck, they could even be taken immediately to personalised commerce sites if DC start trading user info directly with the sites. Rather than a breach of privacy, it's an enhancement of the shopping experience, where you have to openly sell your soul anyway.
So much for the vaunted "open source is more secure" mantra...
No, just an end to security through obscurity.
They show Robot Wars in the US on some PBS stations. I've caught a couple of the shows and it's fun. The announcer is somewhat annoying as his excitement level is higher than the action usually warrants. But there is a soccer (football for some of you) competition using robots rather than RC that is really pretty amazing to watch.
Yep, the commentator picked the wrong week to quit sniffin' glue, but quite a few of the battles are genuinely edge-of-the-seat stuff, particularly ones with the devastatingly well engineered robots from series 3, like Razer, Hypnodisc or chaos2.
I can remember being goggle-eyed with wonder when the original Cassius flipped itself several feet into the air and back onto its wheels. Up until then, most of the effective robots were wedges with wheels, and if you were flipped over, you had lost. All hail Rex Garrod, gentlemanly master robot builder!
These CueCats sound really cool for their unintended purpose, and it sounds like the AOL CDs have a competitor, the amount they're giving out. Anyone willing to mail one to the UK for me? I'll pay shipping, of course :)[my email address is on the front of my website]