U g0tz a k1d d4t 41n7 d01n h1z w3rK r1t3, b1zn0tch!
Your son is not completing his assignment correctly, ma'am.
h3 k33p t4lk1n L1k3 h3 41n7 g0tZ n0 c3ntz!
His manner of writing indicates a lack of formative education.
WTF?
I wonder why this might be the case?
U = p3n1s 1n U aZZ!
My experience tells me this is usually the result of poor parenting. For instance, a child's mother may spend more time with her husband or boyfriend than with her child, robbing him of important life lessons.
sux0rz 2BU!
The results of a bad upbringing reflect negatively on the responsible parent.
h0p3 y3r br4t g3tz h1z NUTZ ch0ppa 0ff!
Your son may find it difficult to complete his assignments at school, and may experience ridicule from his peers.
Today's software is too complex to be comprehended by the human mind in all its permutation of states. Add in network effects when this software runs alongside other software, and on multiple machines, and the following conversation will always be accurate:
Question: Does software package XYZ contain show-stopping security holes?
Answer: Yes.
Throw in clueless admins, and you've got a big barrel of fun. Open source can't help you here.
This doesn't mean that open-source software isn't better for other reasons, but I've always shied away from saying open-source is more secure because I don't believe any piece of software is truly secure these days. So what if IIS has ten root holes and Apache has one (hypothetically)? You're still insecure.
Anyway, why are they calling it a P2P attack network? Aren't ALL worms peer-to-peer??? I don't remember Code Red checking in to an "attack server" before connecting to other IP addresses.
I've been doing backups this way on Linux for aLongTime(tm). On FreeBSD I've also used dump/restore to an NFS-mounted RAID drive (does dump work okay on Linux these days? I've always been afraid to try it for some reason, maybe earlier versions weren't stable).
rsync is just so cool. First of all, it can work over the network through ssh, or through it's own daemon (faster), or on a local filesystem. You can "pull" backups from the server or "push" them from the client. Over the network, it can divides the files into blocks and just sends the blocks that are different. It has a fairly sophisticated way to specify files to exclude/include (for instance, exclude/home/*/.blah/* can be used to not save the contents of everybody's.blah directory, but keep the directory itself). You can set up a script to just backup given subdirectories so you can checkpoint your important project without backing up the whole show. etc etc.
I use it both to save over the network using the rsync daemon, and to a local separate drive. On a local drive it's great, because you can easily retrieve files that you've accidentally deleted, just using cp. It's also great for stuff like "diff -r/etc/backups/etc" to see if something changed.
I never thought of his technique for incremental backups, but since it uses hard links, I wonder how that interferes with the original hard links in your files?? Looks interesting.
There are many flags and options that rsync has, here are the ones I use to pull complete backups from another host onto a local drive (yeah --archive is a bit redundant here).
Those of you who think that stealing a physical DVD is somehow the same as making a copy of the numbers on it, should contemplate why there is a "fair use" clause in the copyright law, but none in the laws for physical property. (i.e. "a television may be removed from its owner's home for scholarly or nonprofit purposes").
Of course the fact that there are separate laws to begin with, the fact the copyrights expire (presumably), and the fact that there is a separate and specific clause in the Constitution about creator's rights should also suggest that these are different activities.
Well, I support any "intellectual property" scheme that aligns itself with the needs and wishes of the people who use the copyrighted material. In other words, if you generally do what's useful and natural to you, and it doesn't break the law, then the law is fair and just.
I also DON'T believe that there is any equivalence between the terms of the GPL and terms that keep you from making copies. The latter will always be at odds with society.
When millions and millions of people become part of "GPL-violation networks" and we start reading about GPL violations on a daily basis, and the news of P2P and filesharing dwindles to a trickle, then I might re-think my beliefs.
Of course that's just me. Someone else on/. (such as yourself perhaps) may have wildly different views.
In this particular case, I would agree that someone who leaked the movie has to be found and dealt with. They probably violated a real contractual obligation, or actually stole (in the literal sense) a reel of film or disc containing the movie. I don't believe a collective punishment of anyone who has the movie on their hard drive is warranted though.
Well, everytime I've played with circuits on a breadboard, 9 times out of 10, if it involves a speaker, I hear the local high-powered AM news station coming out of it. If there's a computer nearby, I hear "digital noise". In fact it's pretty damn annoying and changes depending on how close my fingers are, whether I'm touching this or that part, etc.
All you need is an antenna (stray bit of connecting wire), diode (transistor would work), filter (all the capacitance and resistance in a breadboard) and amplifier.
I wonder if they went back and checked, just how many combinations DON'T pick up the harmonics of nearby computers... I'd bet most of them pick up the noise.
Well, distributing the content after changing it is pretty fuzzy, they shouldn't misrepresent someone else's work.
But I wonder if it would be possible in the future to distribute only the edits to the movie. Then you buy/rent the original movie and then apply the edits. In fact you could probably come up with some interesting satirical mash-ups this way (imagine turning a long movie into a 15-minute short about some incidental character). Kinda like distributing a source code patch, it could even include new content. But never actually distributes the original.
They'd try and shut it down like everything else, but morally I think it would be in the clear.
FROM: BILLG
TO: THE TROOPS
RE: GET MOVING ON VENEZUELA DONATIONS
Hey kids. Just got my desktop machine working again after that last service pack (what a bitch that was, huh?). And what did I see in my daily Linux Encroachment report? Apparently some piss-ant country that we could buy and sell like it was a stick of bubble gum is mandating open source software in government. How did we miss this one? Peru, Venezulela, I get them all mixed up anyway. But you know what this means! Pack your bags, it's time for a field trip!
I figure 10,000 brand new PCs for the schools, pre-loaded with Windows XP and Word, plus a nice plaque and a fruit basket, that should be enough to get them to drop this stupid idea.
And this time, let's be sure that the blue screens start coming up in about 8 months. I think Venezuala will be able to afford the Win2K upgrades we'll offer them to fix the problem.
Get moving! This one should be even easier than ol' Meheeko was.
"Right tool for the job" doesn't mean you ignore the licensing, though. The license is as important as the feature set. A crappy screwdriver that you can use as much as you like is almost always a better tool than a nice one that costs $.05 per rotation to use.
Yes, I agree. It's always bothered me that in this society you have to be a different person when you're "at work".
Part of the problem of course is that our culture is so varied, you can't have everybody dress and act the way they "usually" do, or you'll offend someone (i.e., keep your politics and religion to yourself if they aren't mainstream).
But, whatever the reason, self-employed is the best way to go, especially with computer-related jobs. The goal is to minimize the time you're a "work" person and maximize the time you're just yourself.
I guess a lot of the folks here saying this okay, this is Apple's right, etc., these people must be big Apple fans.
Well, I'm an Apple fan, and I think this is ridiculous. If you sell or give away a product that's perfectly capable of doing something that's useful to the recipient, and you purposely turn off, or don't enable, that feature for whatever reason, you must be nuts not to expect that someone will figure out how to turn it.
If someone suggested this with regular, non-software items, they'd be laughed out of the boardroom. "You mean if someone discovers that free Apple hammers can hammer ANY nail, not just $3 Apple nails, we sue them for telling how?"
The guy was supplying something that was useful for iDVD owners. Apple was witholding this useful feature because they thought it would make them more money. What obligation do we have to Apple to keep the secret? None. They don't have the obligation to make their products as useful as possible, but that doesn't mean we should be prevented from finding new uses for them.
I don't feel sorry for Apple in this case. Anyone who sells any item should know, someone out there will take it apart and figure out how it works. And then they'll tell everybody else.
Copyright law, including the overbroad DMCA, basically allows companies to profit from keeping these kinds of secrets. Many of these secrets are inside the very products themselves. This means people will find those secrets. Does this seem like a stable, self-organizing free market to you?
An interesting streamlining of the GPL. However he takes out all the "social statements" which may or may not be a good thing.
A few comments:
You can use GNU GPL Software for any purpose. You can modify, copy and distribute GNU
GPL Software, including derivatives, for commercial or non-commercial purposes.
In return, you must agree:
No no, you can use the Software for any purpose. Period. If you re-distribute the software, THEN you must agree to the terms.
The license should emphasize that it only covers "copying, distribution and modification". No one should feeled compelled to accept the GPL, just because they are using the software. This also helps dispel the stupid notion that you don't have a right to use software you buy or download unless someone grants it to you.
This, in my opinion, is one of the greatest thing about the GPL. It lies dormant and only applies to you if you distribute copies. You don't need to read it, you don't need to "click-through" it. You only need to care when distributing copies, which you aren't allowed to do to begin with. In fact, if I were writing the GPL, I'd put that up at the very beginning (after a warranty disclaimer if that's necessary): "you don't need to read this unless distributing copies" or something similar.
if you distribute GNU GPL Software, you include two things: a copy of this license and a ready means of obtaining the source code for the Software.
Define "ready means"..
That if you distribute a derivative of GNU GPL Software, you include a notice explaining
the changes you made.
(Nitpick) why isn't this included with the previous requirement? What constitutes a "notice explaining the change"? A diff? A paragraph? Is this important?
The GPL is wordy, partly because it spells out some of this stuff in more detail (for instance, see item #3 in it). The "revised GPL" should also be specific whenever possible.
Anyway, the GPL does need to be streamlined and clarified to a certain extent, and perhaps the FSF can get some ideas from this revision. For instance, cutting out the Preamble of the GPL entirely might be a good idea, and replace it with a link to the FSF philosophies.
Well since a lot of folks are using this as a place to post questions here's mine.. (and whoever posted about switching tabs with the keyboard, thank you! My mozilla experience just got 157.9% better.:-)
How can I make Mozilla bring up a confirmation dialog before quitting, if there are multiple windows open, or files being downloaded. And it would also be nice to get a confirmation before closing a window with multiple tabs.
Basically I'd like Mozilla to confirm before closing any content in other windows or tabs besides the current one. I usually have about 5-10 Mozilla windows spread out over multiple desktops, some with multiple tabs, and whenever I accidentally quit or hit the close button I cringe as I try to remember what was open that I really needed to look at.
Some other options for this might be a "bookmark all windows and tabs in one big fat bookmark", or a "remember all open windows and tabs on exit" kind of option.
I use Konquerer about as much as I do Mozilla, where "Quit" just quits the current window, and quitting the bookmark editor doesn't quit the browser.. sometimes I get them mixed up. Other times my brain just goes off on its own...
Or maybe 1.1 can do this?? Somebody, please drop some Mozilla science on me.:-)
Well, I hope that radio signal is encrypted or keyed to the individual.. what if two of these folks stand right next to each other?? What if they walk near a radio transmitter, do their eyes go haywire??
Also, how do they know that animal trials were successful??
You need 1) a time machine, 2) ability to access to the many-worlds multiverse, and 3) access to the album sale data.
Just set your time machine back to sometime before Fanning writes the first Napster code. Then, choose a universe where he falls madly in love with a lovely blonde, and gets rid of "that stupid computer" at her request. Monitor CD sales for the next couple of years.
Next, choose the current universe (or maybe one exactly like this one, except where nobody thought of this experiment, just in case there's some weird time looping feedback thing going on). Monitor CD sales for the same period.
Then, you'll be able to say if Napster and file sharing affected the music industry, all other things being equal.
I swear, I bet these so-called "economists" can't even change the gravitational constant of the universe!
Wow, I totally agree with her hollywood stance, and her views on children and giving parents opportunities to better raise them. I hope she fleshes out more details and issues in her campaign.
From what I saw on the weblog, she's young and enthusiastic and intelligent and has a lot of potential. I hope she has the power to learn and grow from her interactions with the people she meets on the internet. A lot of people will be willing to help out.
She definitely needs the ol' slashdot interview treatment eh? And I'd like to know where to send the campaign donation, because she's getting one from me. (But only after I hear more of what she has to say, of course.)
If you're worried about losing control of your OS, please take a nice long look at Microsoft, a company that sells very little hardware (and outsources every piece of hardware it does sell, including the X-Box) but is one of the richest and most successful companies in the history of mankind, based solely on OS sales.
Yeah, based on OS sales to hardware makers. If Apple can figure out how to get OSX pre-installed on PC hardware, they'd be rich. They'd be Microsoft in fact, since that's all Microsoft had before they got where they are now.
For now, if Apple makes the OS run on x86 hardware, they don't gain much. In fact they might lose some hardware sales.
Chernin argued that piracy will not only hurt creators of original content but also consumers if movie studios lose so many ticket sales that they begin cutting expenses.
Well well. While the rest of us are cutting our expenses and companies are going bankrupt left and right, the darling movie industry can't seem to even comprehend the concept.
I'll start to feel sorry for the movie industry when they actually lose money for a few years in a row. Actually I won't feel sorry at all, I'll feel like the theory of evolution has just been validated.
I represent the web site Example.com, the premier web site used on the internet for examples in books and articles. My client's site is refernced in over 50,000 publications and web sites, more than 10 times as many as their nearest competitor, ForInstance.com.
Through your slashdot posting, you have posted a circumvention device (the "Device") which defeats the patent-pending content protections in the Example.com web site.
We ask that you please cease and desist your infringing post at once. Or we'll sue you into a fine powder.
The interesting (and disturbing) thing is that this stuff was never legal to begin with.
Copying a CD, making a mix disc for your girlfriend, having a group of people watch one copy of a videotape, loaning CDs to friends, these are all legally fuzzy.
These things have been going since the beginning of consumer recording devices. I have stacks of home-copied tapes and Apple II games from my high school days. But not until the internet have the Media Corporations been able to actually *see* the data flying around. And not until the internet have they even considered the idea of *monitoring* your recording devices.
So to them, this is great. Now they can finally fully and completely enforce all those laws that were drafted in the phonograph era and patched here and there whenever a new technology comes out.
But to the rest of us, it shows just how much power copyright law gives the copyright holder.
What to do? Well the obvious thing is to never ever buy anything from those corps again. And avoid new technology until the appropriate "DeCSS-esque" hack is available (no matter what the article says, the technology will be cracked and the information will be relatively easy to find). That way you can always remain in control of your own possessions. I don't see any other solution. The government believes "copyright" and "capitalism" go hand-in-hand, even though too strong copyright is decidedly anti-freedom and anti-capitalistic.
Really. He probably had to fill a deadline and came up with this, knowing it would generate a lot of interest. First he says this:
The DMCA is both an egregious law and a brazen power grab by Hollywood, the music industry and software companies. It is probably unconstitutional. It creates unnecessary federal crimes, cedes too much authority to copyright holders, and should be unceremoniously tossed out by the courts. (As a bonus, perhaps we could horsewhip its many fans in Congress.)
Then he goes on to say "no wait a minute, it's not so bad, we can live with it". He goes on to say, basically, how he believes the line between "encryption research" and "trafficking in circumvention devices" is completely clear and bright.
Well guess what. It ain't. I don't feel like the line between code and speech is a clear one. He even acknowledges in his article that including code in a research paper is vital:
If published research does not include working code--which is a vital part of research--the odds of a successful lawsuit rapidly approach zero.
So, by his own words, the chances of a lawsuit are not zero if you include code.
And what is code? How about some pseudocode? How about a working copy of code, except some constants are changed? How about a complete working example of code, but only in the print version? If this print version later appears on the web in full, will the author suddenly be liable? (Remember, by their own words, they went after Skylarov because his name was in the copyright notice, not because he personally was trafficking in the device.)
He then goes on to mention all the recent news items (the HP flap, IEEE, etc) and dismisses them all by saying basically: well it's bad PR for these companies, so they'll withdraw their lawsuits. Well, no thanks, "bad PR" is a pretty thin safety net.
And I also sense a vibe that traditional security research published in a journal or university web site, with lots of verbage is okay, but a bugtraq posting from "Cyb3rH4xx0r" who lives in his mom's basement is not. Well personally, I learn as much from posted exploit code as I do from long-winded papers. And any smart person could generate one from the other. Which is why a researcher should be a afraid, even if they don't use code in their paper.
So I think a security researcher has every right to be afraid of the DMCA. We know exactly why: because 1) code is not always considered speech and 2) pretty much anything can be a "technological protection measure", from bits in a TrueType font (remember that one?) to ineffective LFSR's in DVD players. Put these two together with the DMCA and you feel the chilling wind.
(And that's not even discussing the awful "takedown" provision of the DMCA, which allows copyright holders to arbitrarily take down web pages and eBay auctions. I'm surprised we haven't seen more abuse of that one from people forging affidavits.)
I thought it was very difficult to simulate a quantum computer on a classical computer. Some problems in quantum mechanics can't be properly simulated by a classical system at all.
Once you go past a certain number of qubits, it takes too long to simulate all the possible interactions.
Not that I don't believe we'll see a working quantum co-processor in the next few decades, I'm positive we will.
But I'm just wondering how they came up with the "million qubits" number.
I think this is a great idea! For one thing, we could have quality free fonts for Linux distributions to use. Most of the "free" and "donated" fonts on Linux are honestly pretty crappy and aren't good typography by any stretch of the imagination.
And it would nice to have an official "Linux" font, which might even show up in print.
We could call the font "Penguin", Penguin bold, Penguin Oblique, etc. Unless there's already a font with that name, then we could call it "Linus". And there could be a big all-caps all-bold font called "RMS". Heh.
Someone who knows about this stuff should see about commissioning a Linux font and putting it into the GPL domain (or whatever is appropriate, I guess a font is like a mini computer program in some ways).
The only contemporary typographer I'm familiar with is Jon Hoefler, I believe he's a pretty hip guy so maybe he'd be willing to design and give away a font for a one-time fee. Who knows..
Unfortunately fonts in general have to be designed by a single person or team, because the glyphs all have to look the "same". So open-source font development would probably be a bad idea.
Slashdot Mirror
D33r MrZ. butts3x0r
Dear Mrs. Endlove,
U g0tz a k1d d4t 41n7 d01n h1z w3rK r1t3, b1zn0tch!
Your son is not completing his assignment correctly, ma'am.
h3 k33p t4lk1n L1k3 h3 41n7 g0tZ n0 c3ntz!
His manner of writing indicates a lack of formative education.
WTF?
I wonder why this might be the case?
U = p3n1s 1n U aZZ!
My experience tells me this is usually the result of poor parenting. For instance, a child's mother may spend more time with her husband or boyfriend than with her child, robbing him of important life lessons.
sux0rz 2BU!
The results of a bad upbringing reflect negatively on the responsible parent.
h0p3 y3r br4t g3tz h1z NUTZ ch0ppa 0ff!
Your son may find it difficult to complete his assignments at school, and may experience ridicule from his peers.
Today's software is too complex to be comprehended by the human mind in all its permutation of states. Add in network effects when this software runs alongside other software, and on multiple machines, and the following conversation will always be accurate:
Question: Does software package XYZ contain show-stopping security holes?
Answer: Yes.
Throw in clueless admins, and you've got a big barrel of fun. Open source can't help you here.
This doesn't mean that open-source software isn't better for other reasons, but I've always shied away from saying open-source is more secure because I don't believe any piece of software is truly secure these days. So what if IIS has ten root holes and Apache has one (hypothetically)? You're still insecure.
Anyway, why are they calling it a P2P attack network? Aren't ALL worms peer-to-peer??? I don't remember Code Red checking in to an "attack server" before connecting to other IP addresses.
I've been doing backups this way on Linux for aLongTime(tm). On FreeBSD I've also used dump/restore to an NFS-mounted RAID drive (does dump work okay on Linux these days? I've always been afraid to try it for some reason, maybe earlier versions weren't stable).
rsync is just so cool. First of all, it can work over the network through ssh, or through it's own daemon (faster), or on a local filesystem. You can "pull" backups from the server or "push" them from the client. Over the network, it can divides the files into blocks and just sends the blocks that are different. It has a fairly sophisticated way to specify files to exclude/include (for instance, exclude /home/*/.blah/* can be used to not save the contents of everybody's .blah directory, but keep the directory itself). You can set up a script to just backup given subdirectories so you can checkpoint your important project without backing up the whole show. etc etc.
I use it both to save over the network using the rsync daemon, and to a local separate drive. On a local drive it's great, because you can easily retrieve files that you've accidentally deleted, just using cp. It's also great for stuff like "diff -r /etc /backups/etc" to see if something changed.
I never thought of his technique for incremental backups, but since it uses hard links, I wonder how that interferes with the original hard links in your files?? Looks interesting.
There are many flags and options that rsync has, here are the ones I use to pull complete backups from another host onto a local drive (yeah --archive is a bit redundant here).
Those of you who think that stealing a physical DVD is somehow the same as making a copy of the numbers on it, should contemplate why there is a "fair use" clause in the copyright law, but none in the laws for physical property. (i.e. "a television may be removed from its owner's home for scholarly or nonprofit purposes").
Of course the fact that there are separate laws to begin with, the fact the copyrights expire (presumably), and the fact that there is a separate and specific clause in the Constitution about creator's rights should also suggest that these are different activities.
Well, I support any "intellectual property" scheme that aligns itself with the needs and wishes of the people who use the copyrighted material. In other words, if you generally do what's useful and natural to you, and it doesn't break the law, then the law is fair and just.
I also DON'T believe that there is any equivalence between the terms of the GPL and terms that keep you from making copies. The latter will always be at odds with society.
When millions and millions of people become part of "GPL-violation networks" and we start reading about GPL violations on a daily basis, and the news of P2P and filesharing dwindles to a trickle, then I might re-think my beliefs.
Of course that's just me. Someone else on /. (such as yourself perhaps) may have wildly different views.
In this particular case, I would agree that someone who leaked the movie has to be found and dealt with. They probably violated a real contractual obligation, or actually stole (in the literal sense) a reel of film or disc containing the movie. I don't believe a collective punishment of anyone who has the movie on their hard drive is warranted though.
Well, everytime I've played with circuits on a breadboard, 9 times out of 10, if it involves a speaker, I hear the local high-powered AM news station coming out of it. If there's a computer nearby, I hear "digital noise". In fact it's pretty damn annoying and changes depending on how close my fingers are, whether I'm touching this or that part, etc.
All you need is an antenna (stray bit of connecting wire), diode (transistor would work), filter (all the capacitance and resistance in a breadboard) and amplifier.
I wonder if they went back and checked, just how many combinations DON'T pick up the harmonics of nearby computers... I'd bet most of them pick up the noise.
Well, distributing the content after changing it is pretty fuzzy, they shouldn't misrepresent someone else's work.
But I wonder if it would be possible in the future to distribute only the edits to the movie. Then you buy/rent the original movie and then apply the edits. In fact you could probably come up with some interesting satirical mash-ups this way (imagine turning a long movie into a 15-minute short about some incidental character). Kinda like distributing a source code patch, it could even include new content. But never actually distributes the original.
They'd try and shut it down like everything else, but morally I think it would be in the clear.
TO: THE TROOPS
RE: GET MOVING ON VENEZUELA DONATIONS
Hey kids. Just got my desktop machine working again after that last service pack (what a bitch that was, huh?). And what did I see in my daily Linux Encroachment report? Apparently some piss-ant country that we could buy and sell like it was a stick of bubble gum is mandating open source software in government. How did we miss this one? Peru, Venezulela, I get them all mixed up anyway. But you know what this means! Pack your bags, it's time for a field trip!
I figure 10,000 brand new PCs for the schools, pre-loaded with Windows XP and Word, plus a nice plaque and a fruit basket, that should be enough to get them to drop this stupid idea.
And this time, let's be sure that the blue screens start coming up in about 8 months. I think Venezuala will be able to afford the Win2K upgrades we'll offer them to fix the problem.
Get moving! This one should be even easier than ol' Meheeko was.
xoxox,
BillG
"Right tool for the job" doesn't mean you ignore the licensing, though. The license is as important as the feature set. A crappy screwdriver that you can use as much as you like is almost always a better tool than a nice one that costs $.05 per rotation to use.
Yes, I agree. It's always bothered me that in this society you have to be a different person when you're "at work".
Part of the problem of course is that our culture is so varied, you can't have everybody dress and act the way they "usually" do, or you'll offend someone (i.e., keep your politics and religion to yourself if they aren't mainstream).
But, whatever the reason, self-employed is the best way to go, especially with computer-related jobs. The goal is to minimize the time you're a "work" person and maximize the time you're just yourself.
I guess a lot of the folks here saying this okay, this is Apple's right, etc., these people must be big Apple fans.
Well, I'm an Apple fan, and I think this is ridiculous. If you sell or give away a product that's perfectly capable of doing something that's useful to the recipient, and you purposely turn off, or don't enable, that feature for whatever reason, you must be nuts not to expect that someone will figure out how to turn it.
If someone suggested this with regular, non-software items, they'd be laughed out of the boardroom. "You mean if someone discovers that free Apple hammers can hammer ANY nail, not just $3 Apple nails, we sue them for telling how?"
The guy was supplying something that was useful for iDVD owners. Apple was witholding this useful feature because they thought it would make them more money. What obligation do we have to Apple to keep the secret? None. They don't have the obligation to make their products as useful as possible, but that doesn't mean we should be prevented from finding new uses for them.
I don't feel sorry for Apple in this case. Anyone who sells any item should know, someone out there will take it apart and figure out how it works. And then they'll tell everybody else.
Copyright law, including the overbroad DMCA, basically allows companies to profit from keeping these kinds of secrets. Many of these secrets are inside the very products themselves. This means people will find those secrets. Does this seem like a stable, self-organizing free market to you?
An interesting streamlining of the GPL. However he takes out all the "social statements" which may or may not be a good thing.
A few comments:
No no, you can use the Software for any purpose. Period. If you re-distribute the software, THEN you must agree to the terms.
The license should emphasize that it only covers "copying, distribution and modification". No one should feeled compelled to accept the GPL, just because they are using the software. This also helps dispel the stupid notion that you don't have a right to use software you buy or download unless someone grants it to you.
This, in my opinion, is one of the greatest thing about the GPL. It lies dormant and only applies to you if you distribute copies. You don't need to read it, you don't need to "click-through" it. You only need to care when distributing copies, which you aren't allowed to do to begin with. In fact, if I were writing the GPL, I'd put that up at the very beginning (after a warranty disclaimer if that's necessary): "you don't need to read this unless distributing copies" or something similar.
Define "ready means"..
(Nitpick) why isn't this included with the previous requirement? What constitutes a "notice explaining the change"? A diff? A paragraph? Is this important?
The GPL is wordy, partly because it spells out some of this stuff in more detail (for instance, see item #3 in it). The "revised GPL" should also be specific whenever possible.
Anyway, the GPL does need to be streamlined and clarified to a certain extent, and perhaps the FSF can get some ideas from this revision. For instance, cutting out the Preamble of the GPL entirely might be a good idea, and replace it with a link to the FSF philosophies.
Well since a lot of folks are using this as a place to post questions here's mine.. (and whoever posted about switching tabs with the keyboard, thank you! My mozilla experience just got 157.9% better. :-)
How can I make Mozilla bring up a confirmation dialog before quitting, if there are multiple windows open, or files being downloaded. And it would also be nice to get a confirmation before closing a window with multiple tabs.
Basically I'd like Mozilla to confirm before closing any content in other windows or tabs besides the current one. I usually have about 5-10 Mozilla windows spread out over multiple desktops, some with multiple tabs, and whenever I accidentally quit or hit the close button I cringe as I try to remember what was open that I really needed to look at.
Some other options for this might be a "bookmark all windows and tabs in one big fat bookmark", or a "remember all open windows and tabs on exit" kind of option.
I use Konquerer about as much as I do Mozilla, where "Quit" just quits the current window, and quitting the bookmark editor doesn't quit the browser .. sometimes I get them mixed up. Other times my brain just goes off on its own...
Or maybe 1.1 can do this?? Somebody, please drop some Mozilla science on me. :-)
Well, I hope that radio signal is encrypted or keyed to the individual.. what if two of these folks stand right next to each other?? What if they walk near a radio transmitter, do their eyes go haywire??
Also, how do they know that animal trials were successful??
You need 1) a time machine, 2) ability to access to the many-worlds multiverse, and 3) access to the album sale data.
Just set your time machine back to sometime before Fanning writes the first Napster code. Then, choose a universe where he falls madly in love with a lovely blonde, and gets rid of "that stupid computer" at her request. Monitor CD sales for the next couple of years.
Next, choose the current universe (or maybe one exactly like this one, except where nobody thought of this experiment, just in case there's some weird time looping feedback thing going on). Monitor CD sales for the same period.
Then, you'll be able to say if Napster and file sharing affected the music industry, all other things being equal.
I swear, I bet these so-called "economists" can't even change the gravitational constant of the universe!
Wow, I totally agree with her hollywood stance, and her views on children and giving parents opportunities to better raise them. I hope she fleshes out more details and issues in her campaign.
From what I saw on the weblog, she's young and enthusiastic and intelligent and has a lot of potential. I hope she has the power to learn and grow from her interactions with the people she meets on the internet. A lot of people will be willing to help out.
She definitely needs the ol' slashdot interview treatment eh? And I'd like to know where to send the campaign donation, because she's getting one from me. (But only after I hear more of what she has to say, of course.)
Go Grubb!
If you're worried about losing control of your OS, please take a nice long look at Microsoft, a company that sells very little hardware (and outsources every piece of hardware it does sell, including the X-Box) but is one of the richest and most successful companies in the history of mankind, based solely on OS sales.
Yeah, based on OS sales to hardware makers. If Apple can figure out how to get OSX pre-installed on PC hardware, they'd be rich. They'd be Microsoft in fact, since that's all Microsoft had before they got where they are now.
For now, if Apple makes the OS run on x86 hardware, they don't gain much. In fact they might lose some hardware sales.
Chernin argued that piracy will not only hurt creators of original content but also consumers if movie studios lose so many ticket sales that they begin cutting expenses.
Well well. While the rest of us are cutting our expenses and companies are going bankrupt left and right, the darling movie industry can't seem to even comprehend the concept.
I'll start to feel sorry for the movie industry when they actually lose money for a few years in a row. Actually I won't feel sorry at all, I'll feel like the theory of evolution has just been validated.
is it faster than Lynx?
Dear ftobin:
I represent the web site Example.com, the premier web site used on the internet for examples in books and articles. My client's site is refernced in over 50,000 publications and web sites, more than 10 times as many as their nearest competitor, ForInstance.com.
Through your slashdot posting, you have posted a circumvention device (the "Device") which defeats the patent-pending content protections in the Example.com web site.
We ask that you please cease and desist your infringing post at once. Or we'll sue you into a fine powder.
Yours,
LawyerDrone #456/23
"I'd like to take that stupid X Box and crack that moron from MIT over the head with it."
Yup, it's pretty funny. Funny in a sad, head-shaking sort of way. Reminds me of a quote from the dad of a school shooter, heard on CNN:
"I told him, if you take that gun to school, I'm going to kick your ass!"
The violence is already there, folks.
The interesting (and disturbing) thing is that this stuff was never legal to begin with.
Copying a CD, making a mix disc for your girlfriend, having a group of people watch one copy of a videotape, loaning CDs to friends, these are all legally fuzzy.
These things have been going since the beginning of consumer recording devices. I have stacks of home-copied tapes and Apple II games from my high school days. But not until the internet have the Media Corporations been able to actually *see* the data flying around. And not until the internet have they even considered the idea of *monitoring* your recording devices.
So to them, this is great. Now they can finally fully and completely enforce all those laws that were drafted in the phonograph era and patched here and there whenever a new technology comes out.
But to the rest of us, it shows just how much power copyright law gives the copyright holder.
What to do? Well the obvious thing is to never ever buy anything from those corps again. And avoid new technology until the appropriate "DeCSS-esque" hack is available (no matter what the article says, the technology will be cracked and the information will be relatively easy to find). That way you can always remain in control of your own possessions. I don't see any other solution. The government believes "copyright" and "capitalism" go hand-in-hand, even though too strong copyright is decidedly anti-freedom and anti-capitalistic.
Really. He probably had to fill a deadline and came up with this, knowing it would generate a lot of interest. First he says this:
Then he goes on to say "no wait a minute, it's not so bad, we can live with it". He goes on to say, basically, how he believes the line between "encryption research" and "trafficking in circumvention devices" is completely clear and bright.
Well guess what. It ain't. I don't feel like the line between code and speech is a clear one. He even acknowledges in his article that including code in a research paper is vital:
So, by his own words, the chances of a lawsuit are not zero if you include code.
And what is code? How about some pseudocode? How about a working copy of code, except some constants are changed? How about a complete working example of code, but only in the print version? If this print version later appears on the web in full, will the author suddenly be liable? (Remember, by their own words, they went after Skylarov because his name was in the copyright notice, not because he personally was trafficking in the device.)
He then goes on to mention all the recent news items (the HP flap, IEEE, etc) and dismisses them all by saying basically: well it's bad PR for these companies, so they'll withdraw their lawsuits. Well, no thanks, "bad PR" is a pretty thin safety net.
And I also sense a vibe that traditional security research published in a journal or university web site, with lots of verbage is okay, but a bugtraq posting from "Cyb3rH4xx0r" who lives in his mom's basement is not. Well personally, I learn as much from posted exploit code as I do from long-winded papers. And any smart person could generate one from the other. Which is why a researcher should be a afraid, even if they don't use code in their paper.
So I think a security researcher has every right to be afraid of the DMCA. We know exactly why: because 1) code is not always considered speech and 2) pretty much anything can be a "technological protection measure", from bits in a TrueType font (remember that one?) to ineffective LFSR's in DVD players. Put these two together with the DMCA and you feel the chilling wind.
(And that's not even discussing the awful "takedown" provision of the DMCA, which allows copyright holders to arbitrarily take down web pages and eBay auctions. I'm surprised we haven't seen more abuse of that one from people forging affidavits.)
I thought it was very difficult to simulate a quantum computer on a classical computer. Some problems in quantum mechanics can't be properly simulated by a classical system at all.
Once you go past a certain number of qubits, it takes too long to simulate all the possible interactions.
Not that I don't believe we'll see a working quantum co-processor in the next few decades, I'm positive we will.
But I'm just wondering how they came up with the "million qubits" number.
I think this is a great idea! For one thing, we could have quality free fonts for Linux distributions to use. Most of the "free" and "donated" fonts on Linux are honestly pretty crappy and aren't good typography by any stretch of the imagination.
And it would nice to have an official "Linux" font, which might even show up in print.
We could call the font "Penguin", Penguin bold, Penguin Oblique, etc. Unless there's already a font with that name, then we could call it "Linus". And there could be a big all-caps all-bold font called "RMS". Heh.
Someone who knows about this stuff should see about commissioning a Linux font and putting it into the GPL domain (or whatever is appropriate, I guess a font is like a mini computer program in some ways).
The only contemporary typographer I'm familiar with is Jon Hoefler, I believe he's a pretty hip guy so maybe he'd be willing to design and give away a font for a one-time fee. Who knows..
Unfortunately fonts in general have to be designed by a single person or team, because the glyphs all have to look the "same". So open-source font development would probably be a bad idea.