This is the guy who claimed that Americans wouldn't be writing code in the year 2000, isn't it? I remember reading a couple pages of his book, The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer (saw it a library & looked interesting). His contention was that American coders were overpaid and lazy and the all the software comapnies would move overseas by "the end of the decade " (written in the early 90s).... oops.
Actually, the best known factoring algorithm is NP. For an integer of size n, e^(.5(sqrt(ln n))(sqrt(ln(ln n))))) steps are required to factor it. This is the best algorithm (Garret, Number Theory, 2000). I could not explain it for the life of me, so please do not ask.
Here's a more easily understood NP prob - the traveling salesman. The salesman wants to visit n cities one time each. Find the shortest route.
There are n! routes (n choices for first stop, n-1 choices for the second,.... = n(n-1)(n-2)... = n!)
This expression, n! is greater than n^k, k is an int. This assume n is big, which is the standard assumption.
Effective proceedings to a large extent depend on the quality of the neutral. Intellectual property disputes demand not only optimal process skills on the part of the decision maker, but also specialized knowledge within the areas of patents, trademarks, copyright, designs or other form of intellectual property that is the subject of the dispute.
Who are these people? How are they selected? Should we really have one corporate IP lawyer serving as an arbitrator for another corporation's complaint? More importantly, can I sign up to be an arbitrator?
The Complainant argues that if the Respondent were to use the said domain names in connection with active www sites, it is likely that such use would disrupt the Complainant's legitimate business and divert members of the public from the Complainant's www sites. It is further argued by the Complainant that if the Respondent were to use said domain names in connection with active www sites, consumers searching the Internet for the term would likely discover any such site established by the Respondent. The Complainant further submits that it would be likely that such consumers would choose to visit the such sites established by the Respondent, if only to satisfy their curiosity as to the content of such sites. Respondent would thus divert potential consumers of Complainant to his www sites by the use of said domain names.
So the only entitity authorized to provide any information related to Guinness Beer is the company itself? If I want to criticize their product, I must make sure only to use domain names that will not show up in a search, i.e. no one will ever see my criticism.
Mandatory stupid analogy: A guy passing out pamphlets that oppose Company X's (insert gripe here). The WIPO rules he can't put the name of the company on the front of the pamphlet because people might see it. He also can't pass out pamphlets in the same city as Company X because passerbys might be curious about the pamphlets. All the pamphlets are confiscated and he goes home very sad
What will you do to protect the rights of atheists and those who hold minority faiths, such as Wicca, Santaria, Shinto, et al?
No Reply
No reply??? OK, Ralph doesn't know jack about crypto - that's fine, although given the fact that this is a real issue, he should learn. But this champion of the opressed has no opinion on minority religions??
Gee, I was a little annoyed when George Bush v1.0 declared that I wasn't a citizen since I don't believe in God. You can bet I'm not voting for Ralph, as much as his opinions on IP make me want to. OT, nader's ideas about IP seem like an open-sourcer's dream - it sounds like he (or staff) wrote them up just for our entertainment. No one else will care what he thinks about IP -what's he going to do, stop getting contributions from Amazon? This is like Gore campaigning in front of minority groups or Bush to the religious right - he's preaching to the choir, after making sure he knows what the choir wants to hear.
Intel is trying to patent specific instructions. Unless you license those instructions from Intel, you'll have to use different ones in your chips. Right now AMD et al all implement the intel instruction set - this is what intel wants to avoid.
This means that code will have to be re-compiled to run on a machine with an AMD or other non-Intel chip. This won't happen, instead all the others will be driven out of the market. Can you really software (other than OSS) being available in 5 or 6 versions?
Ok, this is redundant with another post, but I think you are right. My IP lawyer/father buys your logic. A trade secret must be given protection in proportion to its value. This is possibly the world's most valuable trade secret, which would seem to indicate you should take extraordinary precautions in protecting it.
Arguably, no physically networked computer should contain the source code - they should look like my old 486, no modem, no network, nothing. This is how we secure nuclear launch codes. If you want a less extreme example, the financial backbone used by major banks is a set of data lines unconnected to the net or the telphone networks - it's physically secure.
Trade secret protections dissolve if the secret is revealed due to improper protection. Of course, now the software is still copyrighted. However, a copyright provides minimal protection for ideas - it's very difficult to win a copyright suit against a work that isn't a carbon copy or damn close.
In other words, if somebody spams this to a usenet group and it gets mirrored ten million times, this probably proves 1) it is insanely valuable and 2) it should have been better protected.
My lawyer has required me insert this statement: This statement should not be construed as competent legal counsel. Should you posses a concrete interest in this matter, you should seek the services of attorney. Under no circumstances is the poster or any associate of said poster in any way liable for any damages or liabilities incurred as a result of this statement, including any implied, consequential, or other damages or liablities.
Forgive me, oh Slashdot, I put a legal disclaimer in a post!!!!
My attorney informed me you are probably correct, as far as the trade secrecy of the source codes. A trade secret is valid only as long as it is secret - you are responsible for taking precautions to protect trade secrets commensurate with their value. Given the value of the MS source code, it would seem that a "commensurate protection" would be to leave it totally off the net - on machines physically not connected to anything else.
Of course, the code is still copyrighted, but you have fair use exemptions, specifically research, to argue about there.
This is NOT sound legal advice, it was given to me off the cuff by a lawyer who gave up IP work a couple years back. Still worth a thought.
Along the same note, you need to understand how the security works so you don't get taken to the cleaners. Two real examples:
1) Some mid-90s PCs had a key-lock on them. The computer wouldn't operate if this physical lock were set to "off". If you ever opened one of them up you'd find something interesting - all the lock did was close a circuit - anyone with a screwdriver and a wire clipper could bypass this magic lock in 2 minutes. But a company I was involved with thought these things would work and they left machines storing senstitve legal information "locked" and unattended.
2) I used to use a program that stored passwords using a really bad cipher in an obvious location, "password =abcdedfgh" in the config file. These passwords weren't trivial, you were supposed to use SSH or SSL to transmit them remotely. But any idiot with a copy of the software could discover the encryption "algorithm" real fast. ('a' really did encrypt to 'b'). The project manager covered his ass with "I told the developer to encrypt it" but he was either too stupid or lazy to see whether the encryption was worthwile. If I were writing in-house security programs.
Both of these stemmed from people who had no understanding of their "security" measures. A curious peon noticed them - what if real bad guys were interested? If you're buying the stuff, ask for detailed explanation of how it works, algorithm, key length, etc. Anyone who doesn't answer these questions isn't worth talking to. If security software is being developed in house, I would copy the source verbatim from Scheiner's Applied Cyrpto or a similar work.
Wow, the other day I was in class and the instructor kept talking about "ghettoizing the opinion page" and how the media never interviews non-voters.....
It seems to me that Jon Katz uses his class at the U of M as an initial test for his posts - if no one makes them seem foolish there, he writes them up and posts 'em.
I could pre-post all Jon Katz stories by transcribing his lecture and posting it within 30 minutes. The benefits would be quite subsantial:
1) You would never have to see a Jon Katz post again - they would all be rejected as "redundant" due to a RandomPeon post.
2) I would condense the posts - I'll write down key repeated phrases from lectures, connect them, and post that instead.
3) I will include my reply with the post so you don't even have to wait for a reader to respond before someone tells Jon he's wrong.
Any thoughts?
Yes, you're right. The official Win 3.1x documentation tells you to contact the vendor for an updated version of applications that would require "real-mode" (?) support. (I think the command line switch was "-r" for "real", but you get the idea.)
"The real question in terms of quality degradation is whether the sound quality is good enough for the common pirate. If you subject a music file to a modification whose quality degradation would bother a recording engineer but would not bother most of the people who download MP3s, that would be a problem."
The group also posits that its work could easily be repeated, and that it would be a cinch for an enterprising coder to turn one or more of its watermark-removal techniques into a downloadable program that would let any MP3 pirate "press a button to commit piracy."
Of course, the only reason to circumvent SDMI is to produce an infinite number of copies for general distribution - I would never want to have to buy a new copy of a recording every time I buy a new computer or excercise any other fair use right.
These folks are toeing the RIAA line - they don't consider the consequences of their actions. All they know about the ethical or moral issues involved is what the RIAA told them.
Why do people do surveys on issues like this? They're never accurate, people hang up and people lie, to the point that the data is meaningless.
First of all, people hang up a hell of a lot on pollsters any more - thank telemarketing. But is hanging up independent of response? We don't know what the hangup callers think, whether they're answers would be the same as non-hangup folks, or whether they would be more likely to answer yes or no to any particular question. I would think hangups would come from people who value their privacy, which might be people who would support free speech (There's no proven connection of course, that's a wild guess, but there's no way to prove/disprove it. It seems reasonable.)
A bigger problem is that people who do answer give the "right" answer no matter how unbiasedly the question is phrased. No one wants to say to a stranger "I support porn, as a matter of fact, I enjoy many pornographic products." There's no benefit to giving a truthful "incorrect" answer and no penalty for a false "correct" answer. This problem doesn't crop up in more vanilla-type polls, like "who ya gonna vote for?" because there is no socially incorrect response. To do this type of survey with any confidence, you need to use some confidentiality techniques that aren't possible via telephone...
More likely, it was industry working in collusion with the state to ban labor unions and prevent fair negotiations that was responsible. That's obviously a "Buchananite" fascist phemonenon, not a libertarian one.
Yeah, that's pretty much what I was getting at. The problem kicks in when we corporations buying the govt protection from workers, which imbalances wealth more, which means the corps buy the govt more...
Capitalism avoids this neatly, because it's probably in my interest to keep my property unpolluted.
Yeah, but what happens when my pollution mostly effects others, tragedy of the commons-style? When a power plant puts lots of nasty stuff in the air, sure it affects the owners/employees, etc. but not very much. To them, the benefits of a little pollution are outweighed by the economic gains from that pollution. They're not evil - this is normal human behavior. But other people get affected by this pollution, whether they want to or not, whether they use the energy or not. I suppose they could all sue the power company and the refineries, and on and on - regulation is a better solution, it's cheaper and gives less money to lawyers than a class action suit against every single company.
I don't know if government has really done all that much to stablilze the economy, but I really don't know much economic history. It's hard for me to assess the impact it had. I would think it's hard for anyone to assess.
We all know about the Great Depression, but it's called the "Great" Depression because in the 1800s there were regular depressions, not recessions. (A recession is a lot less bad - distinction is sort of arbitrary, I could get technical, but no point). The boom-bust cycle that goes with markets had very high points and very low points. Imagine a whole economy with the stability of the dot-coms - wouldn't be very good. After the depression, the Federal Reserve took an active role in trying keep the booms and busts to tolerable levels. This is why Greenspan plays with interest rates and buys and sells money(really) - to regulate the business cycle. Since the Fed stepped up to the plate, we haven't seen another depression.
This is the least likely of the four possible outcomes: Gore wins both, Bush wins both, Gore wins popular and Bush wins electoral, and Bush wins popular and Gore wins electoral.
Why? The states that have very small populations, i.e. empty Western states, are Bush diehards. In Wyoming, the have ~300,000 people and get 3 electoral votes (2 Senators + 1 representative). In California they get 54(?) elctoral votes and have 33 million people. This means that each Wyominger gets 1/100,000 = 000 001 of an electoral vote Californians each get.000 000 13 electoral votes apiece. That is a difference of about ten-fold, and Bush is more or less guaranteed to win the teeny states.
I never said anything nice about hard-core socialism - it really sucks. I'm not a commie, etc. I think I said "IMHO, a well-regulated capitalist system best distribution", where there should have been a few more words, i.e. "IMHO, a well-regulated capitalist system is the best distribution".
Capitalism is simply freedom mapped onto the ecomomic domain. It means I can freely enter into contractual agreements with whomever I please. Government does not control my economic interactions, but it may be appealed to for the resolution of contract disputes.
I don't think that's totally accurate - it defines freedom in a sense that assumes a lot of rights and corresponding restrictions, especially the right to own property and the right not to have the bigger guy take it away from you, which corresponds to a prohibition against taking other people's crap. You can't talk about any type of restriction without an enforcing entitity, so even in an ultra-capitalist world we have to have govts. These things are complex social ideas tied up with the idea of govt itself.
That system sucks infinitely more than paying a streamlined judiciary and police force to enforce free, private contracts. Read Soviet history. A lack of clear property rights is an elevator to hell.
Absolutely. The only question is, does capitalism without an active govt suck less? If so, how much less does it suck? If you look at 17-19th century history, you get some nasty stuff - sweatshops, the enclosure movement, shitty life for everybody except the top 0.5%, and shitty economies. Markets are great, but they do a poor job of regulating themselves, and the market cycles in the 1800s were so extreme they did too much harm - that's why we have the Fed do magic tricks with money today - that modest govt intervention keeps capitalism from being hurt by its own stupidity without losing the benefits. I could keep ranting about crap like the environment, etc. but this is enough.
I was speaking in more abstract terms. Capitalism, even the very laissez-faire variety, is a distribution of resources according to govt control. I get resources based on the market value of my labor, plus any gifts others give me. If someone steals, defrauds, or otherwise acquires my resources I call the cops, and they get my resources back. Of course, even in an ultra-capitalist society, I still have to pay for the cops, military, the tax system, and the people who make decisions about how much resource to devote to these things. This system really sucks - read history.
A command economy is the opposite end of the spectrum - the govt makes most resource allocation decisions, the market makes very few. But both systems, and everything in between, have resources that are distributed in accordance w/ govt rules. IMHO, a well-regulated capitalist system best distribution, but that's beside the point. Can the internet really end the need for some type of system along these lines?
The sci-fi writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that he hoped
he would live to see the day -- and he believed he would -- when politics in
its present form would cease to matter. "The time will come," he wrote in an
essay, "when most of our present controversies on these matters will seem as
trivial, or as meaningless, as the theological debates in which the keenest
minds of the Middle Ages dissipated their energies." "
Browsing on the CNN and Washington Post political Web sites and watching
cable news, it seems to me that Clarke may live to see that day, at least
for a part of the world -- the tech nation, many high school and college
students, people under 40. **i.e. demographics of Slashdot readers, more or
less** Journalists, boomers, CEOs and the elderly may still be paying
attention to the strange ritual being conducted by the Republicans and
Democrats, but from this perspective smack in the middle of an ascending and
vibrant alternative culture, nobody else appears to be.
OK, we don't care about politics, but the post on Al Gore and GW and inheritance taxes generate 1100+ comments, and the one on presidential candidates and filtering
software is pushing 600 comments right now. Needless to say, most of these
comments, including mine, are probably stupid, redundant and/or redundant,
but this still seems to indicate a (quantitative) level of discussion unseen
in other slashdot stories. I can't find one story in the past week breaking
500 comments (many that come close are also about US politics). OK, some of
the crap Katz wrote got lots of comments too - but even that was
election-related. (I actually like his stuff, but I feel obligated to use
at least one instance of profanity in an post about John Katz.)
It's kind of hard to believe that the Slashdot folks find politics irrelevant. I think the real challenge to the political structure comes from it's inabiltity to control information anymore. Think MojoNation, HQed in the Caymans. There's no way any legal system will have any effect on those guys. Will this make the rest of the system irrelevant? Probably not. Non-information resources are finite and we have to have some system to distribute them....
Fascinatingly, the litigation happy RIAA hasn't filed a lawsuit alleging libel. You would think that they would sue the pants off of Salon for publishing something untrue IF they actually demonstrate it was untrue.
Instead of saying "We swear on a stack of Holy Bibles that SDMI isn't cracked" we got something like "No one can confirm the results...." and "wrote about how the record companies are running scared, emergency meetings, those kinds of things. It's so far from the truth -- it's not factually inaccurate, it's a perception,..."
I think the lack of lawsuit/categorical denial is pretty good evidence SDMI has indeed died and it's just too early to admit it. If these people had a leg to stand on they'd already have Salon in court.
Let's assume that economies are supposed to be somewhat "fair", i.e. your return from the economy is very roughly connected with how hard you work and how talented you are. Most people claim this is one of the many reasons capitalism is good - it rewards hard work (it's true IMHO).
Working 40 hrs/week should net you under $20,000 at min wage (very rough number, i don't care to do 6.25 * 40 * 52 = $13,000. ok, i just did). Does anyone care to claim with a straight face that a CEO who is compensated $10 million a year works 769.2 times harder than the janitor??? If not, what entitlement does that CEO have to earn 769.2 times more? What claim does he/she have on the money that the govt doesn't?? After all, while they may have *earned* it in an accouting sense, it's very hard to make an argument that they deserve that much money. An even more extreme justification kicks in when we start talking about heirs, who unlike the CEO contribute absolutely nothing to society? What right do they have to their money?
These people should be giving extremely large sums of their undeserved wealth to the less fortunate. If they are unwilling to do so, the govt has every right to "assist" in this process.
God this is annoying. I gotta compete with 1000+ comments to get modded up:)
Bush = "However, I do believe we must find a way to apply our copyright laws to ensure that artists, writers, and creators can earn a profit from their creations, ".....
Pretty much the line we get from RIAA/MPAA - except we all know the artists will never benefit.
Gore = "Years ago, when radio was invented there was a huge controversy. How in the world are songwriters ever going to get protected when the songs are just broadcast over the radio? It's similar in some ways to the Napster phenomenon, and they came up with solutions. Now, artists are compensated every time a song is played on the radio. It ought to be easier, over time, to come up with a way that has a little bit of compensation for artists. I think we need to keep working on a compromise that allows Napster-type technologies to flourish but does not take away the artist's intellectual property."
This seems like Napster's solution - charge 20 million people a relatively insignificant monthly fee and you end up with a load of money.
OK, Bush (or Bush's staff) seems to be toeing the RIAA - we have to make sure artists and corporations get their due in new media - think SDMI, etc.
Gore (or Gore's staff) suggests that new media demand new solutions - his comments about compromise suggest (maybe) that he would favor something like the settlement Napster proposed - nominal fee, payed to evil ASCP.
Neither one is charming, but Gore is less disturbing....
Given the fact that code is speech - it is, this is clearly established in law and also common sense, any decision to restrict DeCSS is clearly unconstitutional. If an idiot judge in NY decides that the 1st Ammendment no longer applies, that's his perogative, but I hardly see any reason why this should affect anyone.
Furthermore, courts are unique among govt branches - their decisions have to be accepted by a lot of people to mean anything. By making a decision that was clearly unconstitutional, idiotic, and uneforceable, Judge Kaplan is doing the whole judicial branch a disservice. Courts only matter if people listen to them and they can only make decisions that people will probably choose to listen to, the second they start making absurd decisions they have no power. This is why the Supreme Court didn't order instaneous integration in Brown v. Board of Education - it knew that decision would be ignored in the South, and if the Court made a decision and got ignored once, it would never matter what the court ruled again. Kaplan actually did make a ruling that he knew 1) would be met with general contempt and 2) was absolutely uneforceable.
Actually, my 486 has no cpu util problems with a quick connection, it's the teeny memory in the thing and the slow as hell HD that make it impractical for use with a web browser, but it sill FTPs, usenets, etc just fine. I could upgrade the HD and memory, but I can't play new games on it so I got a new machine a year ago. Most non-gamers could use it just fine for net access with under $200 of upgrades.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the guy who claimed that Americans wouldn't be writing code in the year 2000, isn't it? I remember reading a couple pages of his book, The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer (saw it a library & looked interesting). His contention was that American coders were overpaid and lazy and the all the software comapnies would move overseas by "the end of the decade " (written in the early 90s).... oops.
Oops, I forgot to mention something:
there's no *known* method to determine the shortest route other than compare all of the routes. So you have to calculate and compare all n! routes.
Actually, the best known factoring algorithm is NP. For an integer of size n, e^(.5(sqrt(ln n))(sqrt(ln(ln n))))) steps are required to factor it. This is the best algorithm (Garret, Number Theory, 2000). I could not explain it for the life of me, so please do not ask.
.... = n(n-1)(n-2)... = n!)
Here's a more easily understood NP prob - the traveling salesman. The salesman wants to visit n cities one time each. Find the shortest route.
There are n! routes (n choices for first stop, n-1 choices for the second,
This expression, n! is greater than n^k, k is an int. This assume n is big, which is the standard assumption.
Effective proceedings to a large extent depend on the quality of the neutral. Intellectual property disputes demand not only optimal process skills on the part of the decision maker, but also specialized knowledge within the areas of patents, trademarks, copyright, designs or other form of intellectual property that is the subject of the dispute.
Who are these people? How are they selected? Should we really have one corporate IP lawyer serving as an arbitrator for another corporation's complaint? More importantly, can I sign up to be an arbitrator?
The Complainant argues that if the Respondent were to use the said domain names in connection with active www sites, it is likely that such use would disrupt the Complainant's legitimate business and divert members of the public from the Complainant's www sites. It is further argued by the Complainant that if the Respondent were to use said domain names in connection with active www sites, consumers searching the Internet for the term would likely discover any such site established by the Respondent. The Complainant further submits that it would be likely that such consumers would choose to visit the such sites established by the Respondent, if only to satisfy their curiosity as to the content of such sites. Respondent would thus divert potential consumers of Complainant to his www sites by the use of said domain names.
So the only entitity authorized to provide any information related to Guinness Beer is the company itself? If I want to criticize their product, I must make sure only to use domain names that will not show up in a search, i.e. no one will ever see my criticism.
Mandatory stupid analogy: A guy passing out pamphlets that oppose Company X's (insert gripe here). The WIPO rules he can't put the name of the company on the front of the pamphlet because people might see it. He also can't pass out pamphlets in the same city as Company X because passerbys might be curious about the pamphlets. All the pamphlets are confiscated and he goes home very sad
#2 is pretty bad too:
2) Minority Religions... by Electric Angst
What will you do to protect the rights of atheists and those who hold minority faiths, such as Wicca, Santaria, Shinto, et al?
No Reply
No reply??? OK, Ralph doesn't know jack about crypto - that's fine, although given the fact that this is a real issue, he should learn. But this champion of the opressed has no opinion on minority religions??
Gee, I was a little annoyed when George Bush v1.0 declared that I wasn't a citizen since I don't believe in God. You can bet I'm not voting for Ralph, as much as his opinions on IP make me want to. OT, nader's ideas about IP seem like an open-sourcer's dream - it sounds like he (or staff) wrote them up just for our entertainment. No one else will care what he thinks about IP -what's he going to do, stop getting contributions from Amazon? This is like Gore campaigning in front of minority groups or Bush to the religious right - he's preaching to the choir, after making sure he knows what the choir wants to hear.
Intel is trying to patent specific instructions. Unless you license those instructions from Intel, you'll have to use different ones in your chips. Right now AMD et al all implement the intel instruction set - this is what intel wants to avoid.
This means that code will have to be re-compiled to run on a machine with an AMD or other non-Intel chip. This won't happen, instead all the others will be driven out of the market. Can you really software (other than OSS) being available in 5 or 6 versions?
Ok, this is redundant with another post, but I think you are right. My IP lawyer/father buys your logic. A trade secret must be given protection in proportion to its value. This is possibly the world's most valuable trade secret, which would seem to indicate you should take extraordinary precautions in protecting it.
Arguably, no physically networked computer should contain the source code - they should look like my old 486, no modem, no network, nothing. This is how we secure nuclear launch codes. If you want a less extreme example, the financial backbone used by major banks is a set of data lines unconnected to the net or the telphone networks - it's physically secure.
Trade secret protections dissolve if the secret is revealed due to improper protection. Of course, now the software is still copyrighted. However, a copyright provides minimal protection for ideas - it's very difficult to win a copyright suit against a work that isn't a carbon copy or damn close.
In other words, if somebody spams this to a usenet group and it gets mirrored ten million times, this probably proves 1) it is insanely valuable and 2) it should have been better protected.
My lawyer has required me insert this statement: This statement should not be construed as competent legal counsel. Should you posses a concrete interest in this matter, you should seek the services of attorney. Under no circumstances is the poster or any associate of said poster in any way liable for any damages or liabilities incurred as a result of this statement, including any implied, consequential, or other damages or liablities.
Forgive me, oh Slashdot, I put a legal disclaimer in a post!!!!
My attorney informed me you are probably correct, as far as the trade secrecy of the source codes. A trade secret is valid only as long as it is secret - you are responsible for taking precautions to protect trade secrets commensurate with their value. Given the value of the MS source code, it would seem that a "commensurate protection" would be to leave it totally off the net - on machines physically not connected to anything else.
Of course, the code is still copyrighted, but you have fair use exemptions, specifically research, to argue about there.
This is NOT sound legal advice, it was given to me off the cuff by a lawyer who gave up IP work a couple years back. Still worth a thought.
Along the same note, you need to understand how the security works so you don't get taken to the cleaners. Two real examples:
1) Some mid-90s PCs had a key-lock on them. The computer wouldn't operate if this physical lock were set to "off". If you ever opened one of them up you'd find something interesting - all the lock did was close a circuit - anyone with a screwdriver and a wire clipper could bypass this magic lock in 2 minutes. But a company I was involved with thought these things would work and they left machines storing senstitve legal information "locked" and unattended.
2) I used to use a program that stored passwords using a really bad cipher in an obvious location, "password =abcdedfgh" in the config file. These passwords weren't trivial, you were supposed to use SSH or SSL to transmit them remotely. But any idiot with a copy of the software could discover the encryption "algorithm" real fast. ('a' really did encrypt to 'b'). The project manager covered his ass with "I told the developer to encrypt it" but he was either too stupid or lazy to see whether the encryption was worthwile. If I were writing in-house security programs.
Both of these stemmed from people who had no understanding of their "security" measures. A curious peon noticed them - what if real bad guys were interested? If you're buying the stuff, ask for detailed explanation of how it works, algorithm, key length, etc. Anyone who doesn't answer these questions isn't worth talking to. If security software is being developed in house, I would copy the source verbatim from Scheiner's Applied Cyrpto or a similar work.
Wow, the other day I was in class and the instructor kept talking about "ghettoizing the opinion page" and how the media never interviews non-voters..... It seems to me that Jon Katz uses his class at the U of M as an initial test for his posts - if no one makes them seem foolish there, he writes them up and posts 'em. I could pre-post all Jon Katz stories by transcribing his lecture and posting it within 30 minutes. The benefits would be quite subsantial: 1) You would never have to see a Jon Katz post again - they would all be rejected as "redundant" due to a RandomPeon post. 2) I would condense the posts - I'll write down key repeated phrases from lectures, connect them, and post that instead. 3) I will include my reply with the post so you don't even have to wait for a reader to respond before someone tells Jon he's wrong. Any thoughts?
Yes, you're right. The official Win 3.1x documentation tells you to contact the vendor for an updated version of applications that would require "real-mode" (?) support. (I think the command line switch was "-r" for "real", but you get the idea.)
"The real question in terms of quality degradation is whether the sound quality is good enough for the common pirate. If you subject a music file to a modification whose quality degradation would bother a recording engineer but would not bother most of the people who download MP3s, that would be a problem."
The group also posits that its work could easily be repeated, and that it would be a cinch for an enterprising coder to turn one or more of its watermark-removal techniques into a downloadable program that would let any MP3 pirate "press a button to commit piracy."
Of course, the only reason to circumvent SDMI is to produce an infinite number of copies for general distribution - I would never want to have to buy a new copy of a recording every time I buy a new computer or excercise any other fair use right.
These folks are toeing the RIAA line - they don't consider the consequences of their actions. All they know about the ethical or moral issues involved is what the RIAA told them.
Why do people do surveys on issues like this? They're never accurate, people hang up and people lie, to the point that the data is meaningless.
First of all, people hang up a hell of a lot on pollsters any more - thank telemarketing. But is hanging up independent of response? We don't know what the hangup callers think, whether they're answers would be the same as non-hangup folks, or whether they would be more likely to answer yes or no to any particular question. I would think hangups would come from people who value their privacy, which might be people who would support free speech (There's no proven connection of course, that's a wild guess, but there's no way to prove/disprove it. It seems reasonable.)
A bigger problem is that people who do answer give the "right" answer no matter how unbiasedly the question is phrased. No one wants to say to a stranger "I support porn, as a matter of fact, I enjoy many pornographic products." There's no benefit to giving a truthful "incorrect" answer and no penalty for a false "correct" answer. This problem doesn't crop up in more vanilla-type polls, like "who ya gonna vote for?" because there is no socially incorrect response. To do this type of survey with any confidence, you need to use some confidentiality techniques that aren't possible via telephone...
More likely, it was industry working in collusion with the state to ban labor unions and prevent fair negotiations that was responsible. That's obviously a "Buchananite" fascist phemonenon, not a libertarian one.
Yeah, that's pretty much what I was getting at. The problem kicks in when we corporations buying the govt protection from workers, which imbalances wealth more, which means the corps buy the govt more...
Capitalism avoids this neatly, because it's probably in my interest to keep my property unpolluted.
Yeah, but what happens when my pollution mostly effects others, tragedy of the commons-style? When a power plant puts lots of nasty stuff in the air, sure it affects the owners/employees, etc. but not very much. To them, the benefits of a little pollution are outweighed by the economic gains from that pollution. They're not evil - this is normal human behavior. But other people get affected by this pollution, whether they want to or not, whether they use the energy or not. I suppose they could all sue the power company and the refineries, and on and on - regulation is a better solution, it's cheaper and gives less money to lawyers than a class action suit against every single company.
I don't know if government has really done all that much to stablilze the economy, but I really don't know much economic history. It's hard for me to assess the impact it had. I would think it's hard for anyone to assess.
We all know about the Great Depression, but it's called the "Great" Depression because in the 1800s there were regular depressions, not recessions. (A recession is a lot less bad - distinction is sort of arbitrary, I could get technical, but no point). The boom-bust cycle that goes with markets had very high points and very low points. Imagine a whole economy with the stability of the dot-coms - wouldn't be very good. After the depression, the Federal Reserve took an active role in trying keep the booms and busts to tolerable levels. This is why Greenspan plays with interest rates and buys and sells money(really) - to regulate the business cycle. Since the Fed stepped up to the plate, we haven't seen another depression.
This is the least likely of the four possible outcomes: Gore wins both, Bush wins both, Gore wins popular and Bush wins electoral, and Bush wins popular and Gore wins electoral.
.000 000 13 electoral votes apiece. That is a difference of about ten-fold, and Bush is more or less guaranteed to win the teeny states.
Why? The states that have very small populations, i.e. empty Western states, are Bush diehards. In Wyoming, the have ~300,000 people and get 3 electoral votes (2 Senators + 1 representative). In California they get 54(?) elctoral votes and have 33 million people. This means that each Wyominger gets 1/100,000 = 000 001 of an electoral vote Californians each get
Under socialism,
I never said anything nice about hard-core socialism - it really sucks. I'm not a commie, etc. I think I said "IMHO, a well-regulated capitalist system best distribution", where there should have been a few more words, i.e. "IMHO, a well-regulated capitalist system is the best distribution".
Capitalism is simply freedom mapped onto the ecomomic domain. It means I can freely enter into contractual agreements with whomever I please. Government does not control my economic interactions, but it may be appealed to for the resolution of contract disputes.
I don't think that's totally accurate - it defines freedom in a sense that assumes a lot of rights and corresponding restrictions, especially the right to own property and the right not to have the bigger guy take it away from you, which corresponds to a prohibition against taking other people's crap. You can't talk about any type of restriction without an enforcing entitity, so even in an ultra-capitalist world we have to have govts. These things are complex social ideas tied up with the idea of govt itself.
That system sucks infinitely more than paying a streamlined judiciary and police force to enforce free, private contracts. Read Soviet history. A lack of clear property rights is an elevator to hell.
Absolutely. The only question is, does capitalism without an active govt suck less? If so, how much less does it suck? If you look at 17-19th century history, you get some nasty stuff - sweatshops, the enclosure movement, shitty life for everybody except the top 0.5%, and shitty economies. Markets are great, but they do a poor job of regulating themselves, and the market cycles in the 1800s were so extreme they did too much harm - that's why we have the Fed do magic tricks with money today - that modest govt intervention keeps capitalism from being hurt by its own stupidity without losing the benefits. I could keep ranting about crap like the environment, etc. but this is enough.
I was speaking in more abstract terms. Capitalism, even the very laissez-faire variety, is a distribution of resources according to govt control. I get resources based on the market value of my labor, plus any gifts others give me. If someone steals, defrauds, or otherwise acquires my resources I call the cops, and they get my resources back. Of course, even in an ultra-capitalist society, I still have to pay for the cops, military, the tax system, and the people who make decisions about how much resource to devote to these things. This system really sucks - read history.
A command economy is the opposite end of the spectrum - the govt makes most resource allocation decisions, the market makes very few. But both systems, and everything in between, have resources that are distributed in accordance w/ govt rules. IMHO, a well-regulated capitalist system best distribution, but that's beside the point. Can the internet really end the need for some type of system along these lines?
From Jon's orig post:
The sci-fi writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that he hoped he would live to see the day -- and he believed he would -- when politics in its present form would cease to matter. "The time will come," he wrote in an essay, "when most of our present controversies on these matters will seem as trivial, or as meaningless, as the theological debates in which the keenest minds of the Middle Ages dissipated their energies." " Browsing on the CNN and Washington Post political Web sites and watching cable news, it seems to me that Clarke may live to see that day, at least for a part of the world -- the tech nation, many high school and college students, people under 40. **i.e. demographics of Slashdot readers, more or less** Journalists, boomers, CEOs and the elderly may still be paying attention to the strange ritual being conducted by the Republicans and Democrats, but from this perspective smack in the middle of an ascending and vibrant alternative culture, nobody else appears to be.
OK, we don't care about politics, but the post on Al Gore and GW and inheritance taxes generate 1100+ comments, and the one on presidential candidates and filtering software is pushing 600 comments right now. Needless to say, most of these comments, including mine, are probably stupid, redundant and/or redundant, but this still seems to indicate a (quantitative) level of discussion unseen in other slashdot stories. I can't find one story in the past week breaking 500 comments (many that come close are also about US politics). OK, some of the crap Katz wrote got lots of comments too - but even that was election-related. (I actually like his stuff, but I feel obligated to use at least one instance of profanity in an post about John Katz.)
It's kind of hard to believe that the Slashdot folks find politics irrelevant. I think the real challenge to the political structure comes from it's inabiltity to control information anymore. Think MojoNation, HQed in the Caymans. There's no way any legal system will have any effect on those guys. Will this make the rest of the system irrelevant? Probably not. Non-information resources are finite and we have to have some system to distribute them....
Fascinatingly, the litigation happy RIAA hasn't filed a lawsuit alleging libel. You would think that they would sue the pants off of Salon for publishing something untrue IF they actually demonstrate it was untrue.
Instead of saying "We swear on a stack of Holy Bibles that SDMI isn't cracked" we got something like "No one can confirm the results...." and "wrote about how the record companies are running scared, emergency meetings, those kinds of things. It's so far from the truth -- it's not factually inaccurate, it's a perception,..."
I think the lack of lawsuit/categorical denial is pretty good evidence SDMI has indeed died and it's just too early to admit it. If these people had a leg to stand on they'd already have Salon in court.
Let's assume that economies are supposed to be somewhat "fair", i.e. your return from the economy is very roughly connected with how hard you work and how talented you are. Most people claim this is one of the many reasons capitalism is good - it rewards hard work (it's true IMHO).
Working 40 hrs/week should net you under $20,000 at min wage (very rough number, i don't care to do 6.25 * 40 * 52 = $13,000. ok, i just did). Does anyone care to claim with a straight face that a CEO who is compensated $10 million a year works 769.2 times harder than the janitor??? If not, what entitlement does that CEO have to earn 769.2 times more? What claim does he/she have on the money that the govt doesn't?? After all, while they may have *earned* it in an accouting sense, it's very hard to make an argument that they deserve that much money. An even more extreme justification kicks in when we start talking about heirs, who unlike the CEO contribute absolutely nothing to society? What right do they have to their money?
These people should be giving extremely large sums of their undeserved wealth to the less fortunate. If they are unwilling to do so, the govt has every right to "assist" in this process.
God this is annoying. I gotta compete with 1000+ comments to get modded up:)
Bush = "However, I do believe we must find a way to apply our copyright laws to ensure that artists, writers, and creators can earn a profit from their creations, ".....
Pretty much the line we get from RIAA/MPAA - except we all know the artists will never benefit.
Gore = "Years ago, when radio was invented there was a huge controversy. How in the world are songwriters ever going to get protected when the songs are just broadcast over the radio? It's similar in some ways to the Napster phenomenon, and they came up with solutions. Now, artists are compensated every time a song is played on the radio. It ought to be easier, over time, to come up with a way that has a little bit of compensation for artists. I think we need to keep working on a compromise that allows Napster-type technologies to flourish but does not take away the artist's intellectual property."
This seems like Napster's solution - charge 20 million people a relatively insignificant monthly fee and you end up with a load of money.
OK, Bush (or Bush's staff) seems to be toeing the RIAA - we have to make sure artists and corporations get their due in new media - think SDMI, etc.
Gore (or Gore's staff) suggests that new media demand new solutions - his comments about compromise suggest (maybe) that he would favor something like the settlement Napster proposed - nominal fee, payed to evil ASCP.
Neither one is charming, but Gore is less disturbing....
Given the fact that code is speech - it is, this is clearly established in law and also common sense, any decision to restrict DeCSS is clearly unconstitutional. If an idiot judge in NY decides that the 1st Ammendment no longer applies, that's his perogative, but I hardly see any reason why this should affect anyone.
Furthermore, courts are unique among govt branches - their decisions have to be accepted by a lot of people to mean anything. By making a decision that was clearly unconstitutional, idiotic, and uneforceable, Judge Kaplan is doing the whole judicial branch a disservice. Courts only matter if people listen to them and they can only make decisions that people will probably choose to listen to, the second they start making absurd decisions they have no power. This is why the Supreme Court didn't order instaneous integration in Brown v. Board of Education - it knew that decision would be ignored in the South, and if the Court made a decision and got ignored once, it would never matter what the court ruled again. Kaplan actually did make a ruling that he knew 1) would be met with general contempt and 2) was absolutely uneforceable.
Actually, my 486 has no cpu util problems with a quick connection, it's the teeny memory in the thing and the slow as hell HD that make it impractical for use with a web browser, but it sill FTPs, usenets, etc just fine. I could upgrade the HD and memory, but I can't play new games on it so I got a new machine a year ago. Most non-gamers could use it just fine for net access with under $200 of upgrades.