The problem is that the arbitrary nature in which China has been ruled with since 1949, ie whats good today is bad tomorrow and the opposite, has meant that many in China simply choose to ignore the government.
As opposed to the U.S.A., where people obey speed limits and don't use drugs, where illegal file trading is unheard of, and where nearly everyone votes.
After rereading the above, I feel that I should clarify: I meant providing a copy without charge, as described in section 3a of the GPL. If the third party gave your friend a copy of the source along with the binary, that third party is not responsible for providing you with a copy of the source code if your friend gives you a copy of the binary without the source.
I screwed up in applying this reasoning to your second link, which was actually refering to section 3b, not 3a. However, section 3b does allow the original distributor of the binary to charge a nominal fee for a copy of the source, so the you can't request the source "without paying". (Well, actually, you can request it, but the original distributor doesn't have to honor the request.)
someone can give a copy to someone else, and then that person can request the source without paying.
Yes, that person can request the source from whoever gave it to him/her, but not necessarily from whoever gave it to whoever gave it to him/her. If you read your second link carefully, you will see that your friend has to give you a copy of the offer. Since the offer refers to the entity giving you the copy, it's the person who gave you a copy of the binary (i.e., your friend) who must supply you with a copy of the source. Whoever gave your friend a copy of the binary must supply your friend with a copy of the source, but need not supply you with a copy.
Disclaimer: IANALADPTBO (... and don't pretend to be one), but that's how I interpret it.
There is no double-standard. The difference between copyrighted GPLed code and public domain code is that public domain code is just that: public domain. There is no requirement to give credit, nor is there any restriction from copyrighting and/or GPLing the derived code. (If there were, it wouldn't be public domain.) The GPL explicitly requires including source code, copyright notices, disclaimers of warranty, etc., with a distribution.
That said, it would be nice if people who used public domain code put a little blurb at the top of the code indicating where it came from.
That's true, but this isn't a criminal case; it's a civil case. So while they can't be forced to incriminate themselves, they can be forced to incivilate themselves.
When a website uses obfuscated JavaScript to do something that can easily be done with straight HTML, my tinfoil hat starts glowing.
There are different levels of trust. The main problem with JavaScript is that it is used by all sorts of people/sites for all sorts of nefarious purposes. I know that this is guilt-by-association, but I am very paranoid in some areas, and this is one of them. This is why I am downloading the source code instead of their convenient executables, so that I can look through it to see if there are any obvious things like a "phone home" module, etc. (Hopefully, their source will compile with gcc.) Had they not used this JavaScript nonsense on their website, I may have trusted them enough to just download and install the binary. However, the very act of using JavaScript, where it is not necessary, makes me suspicious. That's just the kind of guy I am.
Also, what I meant by asking about mirrors was whether anyone knew about existing mirrors, not would somebody make a mirror for me. (I wouldn't download from such a mirror anyway (my paranoia again).) I can see that the way I asked the question could cause it to be interpreted the way that you did, but that was not what I meant. It turns out that someonedid point me to an existing mirror (or maybe that's where the JavaScript takes you; I don't know), which was what I wanted, and for which I am grateful.
I actually did spend a few minutes looking at the JS source to try to figure out what it does, so that I could "emulate" what it was doing manually. It looks to me like they have deliberately made an effort (albeit a small effort) to make it diffucult for people to do this. This leads me not to trust them enough to enable JS for their site. (I probably could have done it after 10-30 minutes, depending, but I got annoyed first. There may have also been problems because I also block cookies and the "referer" field, but I didn't get that far.)
OTOH, they have made their code available, just difficult to get for us paranoids. Thanks to information from an anonymous poster, though, I am now downloading the source for their compiler.
So kudos to them for making their code OS, but less praise for the way that they are doing it.
Wow, I'm over a billion seconds old. Not only that, but I graduated from high school nearly a billion seconds ago.
Other fun facts:
Man first walked on the Moon over a billion seconds ago.
The Beatles broke up about a billion seconds ago.
GWB was getting high/drunk regularly around a billion seconds ago.
Also, a billion minutes ago, Romans were starting to get annoyed about a new upstart religion that was spreading from the Middle East, and Mike Wallace joined the CBS "60 Minutes" news magazine show as the "young tyro".
Again, just off the top of my head, X-Ray CCD's could be used instead of X-Ray film in medicine, perhaps allowing much much shorter durations of exposure to the harmful rays.
They already are, and they do. I recently got a dental X-Ray. The dental assistant used a CCD plate instead of film. She mentioned that the radiation exposure was lessened due to the increased sensivity of the plate. Also, the image appeared on the screen just seconds after it was taken. They even printed out a hardcopy for me.
The only (very minor) downside was that, because the plate was reused and couldn't be autoclaved, thay had to encase it in a thick plastic bag with the wire hanging out of the end. Also, the plate doesn't bend like film. These things made it slightly less comfortable in my mouth than film would be. These were minor inconveiences when compared to less radiation and lower cost.
Unfortunately, the site has some really annoying webcode that prevents me from downloading it. I'd have to either enable JavaScript, which I refuse to do, or spend 15-20 minutes decoding the JavaScript and making my own fake responses, which I also refuse to do. Does anyone have any mirrors?
Honestly look at what it does, what it costs, and what it will take to implement and make the decision from there.
But part of "what it costs" is determining what happens if the closed-source company goes out of business or decides to stop supporting the product after a while. How much will it cost to migrate data or upgrade to a newer version? Unfortunately, governments (like most organizations) rarely are able to look that far ahead.
I'd like to see the end of the kernel/userspace separation. Just put everything in one address space.
You mean like MS-Windows?
With safe languages, there is no need for it.
The problem with "safe" languages is that the underlying system can be used for such odious purposes as D"R"M, and there is no way to get around it. And you would have to have a "safe"-language-only policy on such a system, or you would have a security nightmare similar to that of MS-Windows. (I certainly wouldn't want to use such a system; I like C, even though I usually use Python (a "safe" language).)
Performance could be enhanced by doing more things in libraries (e.g., a ramdisk used exclusively by one application (or a limited set of mutually-trusted/ing applications) could be supported entirely in userspace, with no context-switching necessary). Or several mutually-trusting/ed intercommunicating apps could share the same address space, so no VM remapping would be necessary when switching from one to another, nor would a system call be necessary. (This would be kind of like a lightweight thread mechanism, but different threads could be loaded from different binaries.)
I don't know if any of this would actually be feasible, though, since I haven't really worked on the guts of an OS for about 20 years.
Even better, save your pictures as 16-bit/channel (48-bit color) in a lossless format (such as PNG). You get nearly 50% of the file for your stego, with no loss of picture quality. If you compress your data before you encrypt and stego it, you may even be able to stego a file that's larger than the file in which you are hiding it! Just make sure that you use 48-bit color for all of your pictures (whether you use them for stego or not), and stuff random data (or encrypted mundane data) in the lower bytes of each channel. That will make your stego pictures much more difficult to distinguish from your non-stego pictures.
Another thing that you can do is split the file up into pieces sfter compressing and encrypting it. Store every other bit into pic1, and the remaining bits into pic2. Post the pics into two different USENET newsgroups (or post one and put the other on a website).
You can also intermingle the stego with random data to further hide it. For example, instead of using every channel's LSB (of a 16-bit/channel PNG) to store the stego, use one or two bits (not necessarily the LS bits) of the LSB, and fill in the rest of the LSB with noise. You can use different bits per pixel per picture by using the name of the picture itself, along with a password, to feed the generator that picks the bits to use.
There are so many different ways to hide data and to communicate it in a hidden fashion that I think that it's a lost cause to try to detect any but the most rudimentary or incompetently-implemented steganography schemes.
It boggles my mind to think that we can measure temperature that exactly from 279,000,000,000,000 miles away, and that they are complaining over a 12-degree difference.
Yeah, but that's 12 kelvins, which is 21.6 degrees Fahrenheit (12*9/5). So it's less like the difference between a warm day and a cool day, and more like the difference between a warm day and a cold day.
Whilst discussing with a colleague a mutual acquaintance with unconventional views, I joked that he was probably from Venus. Her response: "Where's Venus?" I answered, "It's a planet." She replied "Oh." in a puzzled tone that left me with the distinct impression that she wasn't quite sure what a planet was.
What pure oxygen atmosphere? That would be leathal to any human breathing it.
Yes, at one atmosphere of pressure. However, pure oxygen at lower pressures is not lethal at all (well, not directly, anyway). The intention was to have pure oxygen at lower pressure, which would have simplified some components and saved some weight in the space capsule. What killed the Apollo 1 astronauts was not the pure oxygen atmosphere, but the fire that spread rapidly in it, due to normally low-combustable materials having much higher combustability in the pure oxygen atmosphere.
I have never drunk coffee (well, maybe a cup or two back in the 70's when I was "experimenting"), but I used to drink two liters of Coca-Cola per day. One day I decided to just give it up cold turkey. I had a bad headache for three or four days, which gradually faded after another day or two. I haven't drunk any Coca-Cola (or any other non-medicinal caffine source) since.
Go cold turkey. You'll feel bad for a week at the outside, and then you'll be fine. You'll (*yawn*) also find that your energy level increases, and Zzzzz...
Slashdot Mirror
What were you doing over there all this time?
After rereading the above, I feel that I should clarify: I meant providing a copy without charge, as described in section 3a of the GPL.
If the third party gave your friend a copy of the source along with the binary, that third party is not responsible for providing you with a copy of the source code if your friend gives you a copy of the binary without the source.
I screwed up in applying this reasoning to your second link, which was actually refering to section 3b, not 3a.
However, section 3b does allow the original distributor of the binary to charge a nominal fee for a copy of the source, so the you can't request the source "without paying".
(Well, actually, you can request it, but the original distributor doesn't have to honor the request.)
Sorry for the mixup.
If you read your second link carefully, you will see that your friend has to give you a copy of the offer.
Since the offer refers to the entity giving you the copy, it's the person who gave you a copy of the binary (i.e., your friend) who must supply you with a copy of the source.
Whoever gave your friend a copy of the binary must supply your friend with a copy of the source, but need not supply you with a copy.
Disclaimer: IANALADPTBO (... and don't pretend to be one), but that's how I interpret it.
The difference between copyrighted GPLed code and public domain code is that public domain code is just that: public domain.
There is no requirement to give credit, nor is there any restriction from copyrighting and/or GPLing the derived code.
(If there were, it wouldn't be public domain.)
The GPL explicitly requires including source code, copyright notices, disclaimers of warranty, etc., with a distribution.
That said, it would be nice if people who used public domain code put a little blurb at the top of the code indicating where it came from.
That's true, but this isn't a criminal case; it's a civil case.
So while they can't be forced to incriminate themselves, they can be forced to incivilate themselves.
Or something.
When a website uses obfuscated JavaScript to do something that can easily be done with straight HTML, my tinfoil hat starts glowing.
There are different levels of trust.
The main problem with JavaScript is that it is used by all sorts of people/sites for all sorts of nefarious purposes.
I know that this is guilt-by-association, but I am very paranoid in some areas, and this is one of them.
This is why I am downloading the source code instead of their convenient executables, so that I can look through it to see if there are any obvious things like a "phone home" module, etc.
(Hopefully, their source will compile with gcc.)
Had they not used this JavaScript nonsense on their website, I may have trusted them enough to just download and install the binary.
However, the very act of using JavaScript, where it is not necessary, makes me suspicious.
That's just the kind of guy I am.
Also, what I meant by asking about mirrors was whether anyone knew about existing mirrors, not would somebody make a mirror for me.
(I wouldn't download from such a mirror anyway (my paranoia again).)
I can see that the way I asked the question could cause it to be interpreted the way that you did, but that was not what I meant.
It turns out that someone did point me to an existing mirror (or maybe that's where the JavaScript takes you; I don't know), which was what I wanted, and for which I am grateful.
Your post is right on the money.
I actually did spend a few minutes looking at the JS source to try to figure out what it does, so that I could "emulate" what it was doing manually.
It looks to me like they have deliberately made an effort (albeit a small effort) to make it diffucult for people to do this.
This leads me not to trust them enough to enable JS for their site.
(I probably could have done it after 10-30 minutes, depending, but I got annoyed first.
There may have also been problems because I also block cookies and the "referer" field, but I didn't get that far.)
OTOH, they have made their code available, just difficult to get for us paranoids.
Thanks to information from an anonymous poster, though, I am now downloading the source for their compiler.
So kudos to them for making their code OS, but less praise for the way that they are doing it.
I am downloading the source now.
Not only that, but I graduated from high school nearly a billion seconds ago.
Other fun facts:
- Man first walked on the Moon over a billion seconds ago.
- The Beatles broke up about a billion seconds ago.
- GWB was getting high/drunk regularly around a billion seconds ago.
Also, a billion minutes ago, Romans were starting to get annoyed about a new upstart religion that was spreading from the Middle East, and Mike Wallace joined the CBS "60 Minutes" news magazine show as the "young tyro".I recently got a dental X-Ray.
The dental assistant used a CCD plate instead of film.
She mentioned that the radiation exposure was lessened due to the increased sensivity of the plate.
Also, the image appeared on the screen just seconds after it was taken.
They even printed out a hardcopy for me.
The only (very minor) downside was that, because the plate was reused and couldn't be autoclaved, thay had to encase it in a thick plastic bag with the wire hanging out of the end.
Also, the plate doesn't bend like film.
These things made it slightly less comfortable in my mouth than film would be.
These were minor inconveiences when compared to less radiation and lower cost.
Unfortunately, the site has some really annoying webcode that prevents me from downloading it.
I'd have to either enable JavaScript, which I refuse to do, or spend 15-20 minutes decoding the JavaScript and making my own fake responses, which I also refuse to do.
Does anyone have any mirrors?
- Dot-slash?
- I think that it means the current directory.
Anyone else?Are you sure that you don't have it backwards?
I don't know what a current directory user id is, though.
How much will it cost to migrate data or upgrade to a newer version?
Unfortunately, governments (like most organizations) rarely are able to look that far ahead.
My comment was meant as a joke.
Since it wasn't moderated that way, I can only assume that nobody on the planet except for me has a sense of humor.
And you would have to have a "safe"-language-only policy on such a system, or you would have a security nightmare similar to that of MS-Windows.
(I certainly wouldn't want to use such a system; I like C, even though I usually use Python (a "safe" language).)
Performance could be enhanced by doing more things in libraries (e.g., a ramdisk used exclusively by one application (or a limited set of mutually-trusted/ing applications) could be supported entirely in userspace, with no context-switching necessary).
Or several mutually-trusting/ed intercommunicating apps could share the same address space, so no VM remapping would be necessary when switching from one to another, nor would a system call be necessary.
(This would be kind of like a lightweight thread mechanism, but different threads could be loaded from different binaries.)
I don't know if any of this would actually be feasible, though, since I haven't really worked on the guts of an OS for about 20 years.
It doesn't matter.
The site is unnavigable with JavaScript turned off.
They just lost a potential customer.
Even better, save your pictures as 16-bit/channel (48-bit color) in a lossless format (such as PNG).
You get nearly 50% of the file for your stego, with no loss of picture quality.
If you compress your data before you encrypt and stego it, you may even be able to stego a file that's larger than the file in which you are hiding it!
Just make sure that you use 48-bit color for all of your pictures (whether you use them for stego or not), and stuff random data (or encrypted mundane data) in the lower bytes of each channel.
That will make your stego pictures much more difficult to distinguish from your non-stego pictures.
Another thing that you can do is split the file up into pieces sfter compressing and encrypting it.
Store every other bit into pic1, and the remaining bits into pic2.
Post the pics into two different USENET newsgroups (or post one and put the other on a website).
You can also intermingle the stego with random data to further hide it.
For example, instead of using every channel's LSB (of a 16-bit/channel PNG) to store the stego, use one or two bits (not necessarily the LS bits) of the LSB, and fill in the rest of the LSB with noise.
You can use different bits per pixel per picture by using the name of the picture itself, along with a password, to feed the generator that picks the bits to use.
There are so many different ways to hide data and to communicate it in a hidden fashion that I think that it's a lost cause to try to detect any but the most rudimentary or incompetently-implemented steganography schemes.
So it's less like the difference between a warm day and a cool day, and more like the difference between a warm day and a cold day.
Whilst discussing with a colleague a mutual acquaintance with unconventional views, I joked that he was probably from Venus.
Her response: "Where's Venus?"
I answered, "It's a planet."
She replied "Oh." in a puzzled tone that left me with the distinct impression that she wasn't quite sure what a planet was.
However, pure oxygen at lower pressures is not lethal at all (well, not directly, anyway).
The intention was to have pure oxygen at lower pressure, which would have simplified some components and saved some weight in the space capsule.
What killed the Apollo 1 astronauts was not the pure oxygen atmosphere, but the fire that spread rapidly in it, due to normally low-combustable materials having much higher combustability in the pure oxygen atmosphere.
Click here!
I have never drunk coffee (well, maybe a cup or two back in the 70's when I was "experimenting"), but I used to drink two liters of Coca-Cola per day.
...
One day I decided to just give it up cold turkey.
I had a bad headache for three or four days, which gradually faded after another day or two.
I haven't drunk any Coca-Cola (or any other non-medicinal caffine source) since.
Go cold turkey.
You'll feel bad for a week at the outside, and then you'll be fine.
You'll (*yawn*) also find that your energy level increases, and Zzzzz