If someone comes up with a really inexpensive way to extract, ship, and store helium, you're on to something. Otherwise, the cost of the helium exceeds the savings in shipping weight. I'd hold out for hydrogren. If you had some cheap/abundant source of power (high efficiency solar, maybe?), you could extract hydrogen from water to store in the bubbles.
It's the unique identification that's troubling (Yes, I know: no products at Wal-Mart are individually tagged, yet).
1. The subject is big. Number 31 shoe, 96cm waist, 84cm inseam, xxl t-shirt
2. based on styles, subject is likely male.
3. Based on T-Shirt, subject likely is a user of FreeBSD
4. Based on T-shirt, subject likely speaks English
Moreover, subject is wearing shirt #61546658573563071514, also detected at local GNAA meeting.
5. Subject wears boxers.
Confirmed: Boxers #92050673446231519451 were purchased through a local specialty outlet.
6. Based on leather wallet, subject probably does not belong to PETA.
Flag: Wallet #04927029069037495406 was previously correlated with different subject. Contact local authorities.
Generic tagging is only so worrisome. Uniquely-identified tags are much more creepy.
Admittedly, RFID tags would make all kinds of theft extremely inconvenient. A thief would have to scan for all the RFID tags in stolen items and disable all of them, with a microwave oven or something. Otherwise, a police offer could stroll through a pawn shop or flea market and take inventory of everything reported stolen.
The police would have gotten this inventory of stolen items from you. All you would have to do is walk around your house, talking inventory of all your stuff as you pass. When you get robbed, you walk through again, making an automatic list of everything that turns up missing. You hand over the missing list of IDs to the cops.
The signal required to disable an RFID tag is potentially high enough to catch the RFID on fire and/or damage your hearing, sight, and internal organs.
RFID's are unique tags. They not only report what you bought (a teapot), but exactly which one you bought (the red one, lot 17, #228), forever after. In a way, that teapot has become a unique identifier of you. Extend that to your clothing, shoes, and personal effects, each of which is now uniquely identified. Any one of these tags could be potentially used to uniquely identify you everywhere you go, without you ever consenting, knowing, or even noticing. Now, if you didn't want to be so easily identified or tagged, you might be inclined to fly into a tempest over that teapot.
UPC's couldn't be read without an optical scanner; ie, you know when a UPC in your possession is being scanned. With RFID's, all you have to do is walk close enough to any scanner for it to pick up the ID.
I want some way to burn out RFID's after I buy something. If Wal-Mart won't supply it, I'll have to buy one.
(a) Importation into the United States, without the authority of the owner of copyright under this title, of copies or phonorecords of a work that have been acquired outside the United States is an infringement of the exclusive right to distribute copies or phonorecords under section 106, actionable under section 501. This subsection does not apply to -
(2) importation, for the private use of the importer and not for distribution, by any person with respect to no more than one copy or phonorecord of any one work at any one time, or by any person arriving from outside the United States with respect to copies or phonorecords forming part of such person's personal baggage;
And, as we learned from RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia (regarding the Diamond RIO MP3 player), facilitation of personal use gets broad protection under fair use.
So, is downloading MP3's from Russia importation or not? If it is importation, then personal use is covered under section 602. If it is not importation, then the duplication in the U.S. should still be covered under personal use; i.e., you legally bought the right in Russia to duplicate the copyrighted work to your Diamond RIO MP3 player for your personal use in the U.S.
But ideally they're representing artists rights, put to that position by artists...
That is not correct. The *RI* organizations represent the recording industry, not artists. Recording artists are represented by organizations like the Recording Acadamy and the Recording Artists Coalition --organizations which are often at odds with the RIAA.
You know, it seems that every school board wants a set a of textbooks that match their own criteria. Some school systems want creationism taught alongside evolution; other systems want phonics emphasized over rote spelling. With paper textbooks, no publisher can produce a textbook that pleases every set of criteria. At best, the publishers can come up with variants on the original textbook, and update the next edition to suit a plurality of customers.
Enter electronic textbooks. Publishers can now produce a unique version of any textbook for any given school system. What's more, the content is no longer static for years and years. Found a typo in that edition? We'll have that corrected and downloaded to you in a week. A major change in biology studies because of human genome research? No problem. Examples, homework assignments, and content need only be limited by how much the publisher can organize and layout. School systems' per-student textbook costs drop down to the cost of a computer per student (which follows them through high school or 'till they break it) and the publisher subscription costs.
Sure, there are problems with textbooks on a tablet computer. However, the cost and content benefits are so strong, school systems will be forced to switch. The bag full of books we lugged to and from school (through the snow) (uphill) (both ways) will become the old-fogey gag of our children.
Rats, I spilled some. Well, I'll just use a towel to...
Hold on there, this is taking longer than...
No matter, I'll just get the mop and...
Sponge? No...
Paper towels? No...
Hazmat pellets? No...
I'd love to see a web site with this format, devoted to all the proposed solutions to SPAM. Call it the Baloney Detection Kit for Spam.
Or, the "Spam That's Really Baloney Detection Kit..."
Or, the "Spam Proposal Detection Kit for Spam..."
This is pretty funny. The more successful the program gets, the more this pair is creating a potential distributed denial of service attack on their own web servers.
"I don't care what they write about me as long as they spell my name right." --P. T. Barnum
How many of you would have heard of Michael's Computers without SlashDot and Tom's Hardware Guide? Sure, it's mostly negative coverage, but even bad publicity is better than no publicity. I daresay Michael will see an unexpected surge of buyers after this, and it's all thanks to Tom and the SlashDot community.
I'm not so sure. What would be the threat to an offshore ISP, based in a carefully chosen country (like Vanatua or SeaLand)? The FBI has no jurisdiction over the out-of-country ISP, so the FBI can't get anything useful from them, if the provider even logs anything useful. Remember, AnonX isn't bound by the CALEA regulations. The local, US-based ISP can open all of a subscriber's traffic to the FBI, but it's all encrypted packets from that perspective. The raw equipment and software to run the offshore ISP are basically fixed costs, and the cost of bandwidth roughly scales with the number of subscribers. On the contray, I think the encrypted VPN/IPSec providers may thrive. Of course, at least part of the new susbscribers may be pedofiles and terrorists, but that's just one of those consequences of secure anonymity.
Isn't this exactly what AnonX promises? For $6/month, you can tunnel all of your traffic over an encrypted VPN to Vanatua and then to the Internet at large. Vanatua has excellent privacy protection, and AnonX doesn't keep any logs, anyway. The FBI's pressure on ISP's makes AnonX seem even more attractive.
You have the idea. The broadcast industry is already having trouble making money. If they have trouble recouping investment on content, they will reduce their risk by producing less expensive content in the first place. That means more reality television and more game shows --because they are so darn cheap to crank out. The largest sports outlets will get coverage, so long as their broadcast fees don't go too high. By the way, according to Greg Craig, president of the Turner network, the only "top tier" TV sports remaining are football and NASCAR racing. No, really. The rest are breaking even or a net loss. Oh, and Drew Carey says his show 'Whose Line is it, anyway?' will be around forever, because the show is so darn cheap. As long as viewers keep watching and advertisers keep paying, the digital broadcasters will keep putting something on the air. Of course, if the viewers tire of unscripted shows and sports, broadcast TV (digital or analog) will gradually go bankrupt and disaappear.
I wonder: If the intent of the circumvention it NOT intended to circumvent producer protection of their rights...
Come on. You've been reading SlashDot long enough to know that circumvention of protection alone is a violation of the DMCA. If you bypass the broadcast flag's protection algorithm, you're in violation of the DMCA, even if you do nothing with the digital output. If the broadcast flag is in place, there is no legal way to exercise fair use rights on protected broadcasts--not even for time-shifting.
Hold on there. If you bypass the protection, you're violating the DMCA, even if the purpose is for fair use. That's why we might want to prevent the broadcast flag from becoming standard in the first place.
The motion picture and television industries know that digital broadcast is coming. They want to be able to play their content (movies and TV shows) over these digital channels. They are afraid that persons uknown will record the content in perfect digital clarity, and redistribute it overseas, for free or for profit. Overseas syndication is a big profit center for these guys; they don't want to give it up without a fight.
If the broadcast flag fails, these industries just won't introduce content to digital broadcast. Movies will be available strictly by satellite or by digital cable (which already have protection built in). Original broadcast televions shows (which already have something like a 1 in 20 success rate) will just never appear on broadcast digital TV. In fact, broadcast digital TV might completely fail as a widespread technology (like AM stereo) for lack of content and because of low consumer adoption.
The FCC sees its jobs as making that kind of widespread adoption possible, easy, and necessary. That's why the FCC adopted the broadcast flag. They think it's the only way that enough content will come to broadcast digital for the medium to have any chance of success.
What we are left to ponder is this: Is broadcast digital televison so important that we are willing to accept these kind of use restrictions from the industry? Whatever you decide, be sure to let the FCC know.
Apologies if I missed an earlier comment that got this right. The way I see it, you need a demonstration that only works at 2.5GB/s, and no slower. IMHO, streaming video is no good, because you can always buffer it, drop frames, or otherwise compensate for slower transfer rates. Backups don't work, because you can do them on a slower connection; it just takes a little longer. The remote robot suggested earlier is on the right track, but it may not be transferring enough data in both directions to require the full 2.5GB/s.
So, what application needs to transfer that much information that fast, and no slower? I don't have a definitive answer for you, but maybe someone else on SlashDot does. I suspect the answer is in real-time data collection, simulation, and/or prediction. Think tornado forcasts. Think earthquakes and tsunami's. Think real time stock market forcasts (this may not be enough data). Think real time disaster effects and emergency response, like a dirty bomb or a new volcano.
Now, when you think you have the right application picked out, test against a shorter alternative pipe; say, 100MB or 1GB or whatever you propose to replace. Will your application work --even in a degraded fashion-- on the slower pipe? If so, it's not right for you. Make the application more demanding, or choose another application.
When you have the demonstration application picked out, please post it back on SlashDot.
Hear! Hear! Have you tried googling for information on Microsoft's products? Some of the results are on target, but lots of them are references to the generic words for which the products have been named. I actually have to avoid using words like "access" generically, because listeners get confused about whether I mean the generic word or the product.
Do you suppose this ruling will impact other products using words that were generic before the product was named? If so, Microsoft has plenty to worry about. Look at their flagship products: Office Word Excel Access SQL Server Outlook
If "Windows" can't be protected on the basis that "windows" was a generic word before it was trademarked, what will protect the other products? I'm not meaning to pick on just Microsoft here; there are lots of software products that use generic word names. Will all of them have to be renamed?
Slashdot Mirror
If someone comes up with a really inexpensive way to extract, ship, and store helium, you're on to something. Otherwise, the cost of the helium exceeds the savings in shipping weight. I'd hold out for hydrogren. If you had some cheap/abundant source of power (high efficiency solar, maybe?), you could extract hydrogen from water to store in the bubbles.
It's the unique identification that's troubling (Yes, I know: no products at Wal-Mart are individually tagged, yet).
1. The subject is big. Number 31 shoe, 96cm waist, 84cm inseam, xxl t-shirt
2. based on styles, subject is likely male.
3. Based on T-Shirt, subject likely is a user of FreeBSD
4. Based on T-shirt, subject likely speaks English
Moreover, subject is wearing shirt #61546658573563071514, also detected at local GNAA meeting.
5. Subject wears boxers.
Confirmed: Boxers #92050673446231519451 were purchased through a local specialty outlet.
6. Based on leather wallet, subject probably does not belong to PETA.
Flag: Wallet #04927029069037495406 was previously correlated with different subject. Contact local authorities.
Generic tagging is only so worrisome. Uniquely-identified tags are much more creepy.
Admittedly, RFID tags would make all kinds of theft extremely inconvenient. A thief would have to scan for all the RFID tags in stolen items and disable all of them, with a microwave oven or something. Otherwise, a police offer could stroll through a pawn shop or flea market and take inventory of everything reported stolen.
The police would have gotten this inventory of stolen items from you. All you would have to do is walk around your house, talking inventory of all your stuff as you pass. When you get robbed, you walk through again, making an automatic list of everything that turns up missing. You hand over the missing list of IDs to the cops.
The signal required to disable an RFID tag is potentially high enough to catch the RFID on fire and/or damage your hearing, sight, and internal organs.
RFID's are unique tags. They not only report what you bought (a teapot), but exactly which one you bought (the red one, lot 17, #228), forever after. In a way, that teapot has become a unique identifier of you. Extend that to your clothing, shoes, and personal effects, each of which is now uniquely identified. Any one of these tags could be potentially used to uniquely identify you everywhere you go, without you ever consenting, knowing, or even noticing. Now, if you didn't want to be so easily identified or tagged, you might be inclined to fly into a tempest over that teapot.
UPC's couldn't be read without an optical scanner; ie, you know when a UPC in your possession is being scanned. With RFID's, all you have to do is walk close enough to any scanner for it to pick up the ID.
I want some way to burn out RFID's after I buy something. If Wal-Mart won't supply it, I'll have to buy one.
While some degree of importation is allowed per 602 and 109, this doesn't qualify
Let's go to the code, shall we?
US Code Title 17, Chapter 6, Sec. 602 Infringing importation of copies or phonorecords
(a) Importation into the United States, without the authority of the owner of copyright under this title, of copies or phonorecords of a work that have been acquired outside the United States is an infringement of the exclusive right to distribute copies or phonorecords under section 106, actionable under section 501. This subsection does not apply to -
(2) importation, for the private use of the importer and not for distribution, by any person with respect to no more than one copy or phonorecord of any one work at any one time, or by any person arriving from outside the United States with respect to copies or phonorecords forming part of such person's personal baggage;
MAI SYSTEMS CORP. v. PEAK COMPUTER didn't involve importing for personal use, so hardly applicable here.
And, as we learned from RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia (regarding the Diamond RIO MP3 player), facilitation of personal use gets broad protection under fair use.
So, is downloading MP3's from Russia importation or not? If it is importation, then personal use is covered under section 602. If it is not importation, then the duplication in the U.S. should still be covered under personal use; i.e., you legally bought the right in Russia to duplicate the copyrighted work to your Diamond RIO MP3 player for your personal use in the U.S.
But ideally they're representing artists rights, put to that position by artists...
That is not correct. The *RI* organizations represent the recording industry, not artists. Recording artists are represented by organizations like the Recording Acadamy and the Recording Artists Coalition --organizations which are often at odds with the RIAA.
You know, it seems that every school board wants a set a of textbooks that match their own criteria. Some school systems want creationism taught alongside evolution; other systems want phonics emphasized over rote spelling. With paper textbooks, no publisher can produce a textbook that pleases every set of criteria. At best, the publishers can come up with variants on the original textbook, and update the next edition to suit a plurality of customers.
Enter electronic textbooks. Publishers can now produce a unique version of any textbook for any given school system. What's more, the content is no longer static for years and years. Found a typo in that edition? We'll have that corrected and downloaded to you in a week. A major change in biology studies because of human genome research? No problem. Examples, homework assignments, and content need only be limited by how much the publisher can organize and layout. School systems' per-student textbook costs drop down to the cost of a computer per student (which follows them through high school or 'till they break it) and the publisher subscription costs.
Sure, there are problems with textbooks on a tablet computer. However, the cost and content benefits are so strong, school systems will be forced to switch. The bag full of books we lugged to and from school (through the snow) (uphill) (both ways) will become the old-fogey gag of our children.
Rats, I spilled some. Well, I'll just use a towel to...
Hold on there, this is taking longer than...
No matter, I'll just get the mop and...
Sponge? No...
Paper towels? No...
Hazmat pellets? No...
I may be here awhile.
This article advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam.
I'd love to see a web site with this format, devoted to all the proposed solutions to SPAM. Call it the Baloney Detection Kit for Spam.
Or, the "Spam That's Really Baloney Detection Kit..."
Or, the "Spam Proposal Detection Kit for Spam..."
Fine! You think of a good name.
This is pretty funny. The more successful the program gets, the more this pair is creating a potential distributed denial of service attack on their own web servers.
"I don't care what they write about me as long as they spell my name right." --P. T. Barnum
How many of you would have heard of Michael's Computers without SlashDot and Tom's Hardware Guide? Sure, it's mostly negative coverage, but even bad publicity is better than no publicity. I daresay Michael will see an unexpected surge of buyers after this, and it's all thanks to Tom and the SlashDot community.
Does that swampland come with free shipping, or is that extra?
I'm not so sure. What would be the threat to an offshore ISP, based in a carefully chosen country (like Vanatua or SeaLand)? The FBI has no jurisdiction over the out-of-country ISP, so the FBI can't get anything useful from them, if the provider even logs anything useful. Remember, AnonX isn't bound by the CALEA regulations. The local, US-based ISP can open all of a subscriber's traffic to the FBI, but it's all encrypted packets from that perspective. The raw equipment and software to run the offshore ISP are basically fixed costs, and the cost of bandwidth roughly scales with the number of subscribers. On the contray, I think the encrypted VPN/IPSec providers may thrive. Of course, at least part of the new susbscribers may be pedofiles and terrorists, but that's just one of those consequences of secure anonymity.
Isn't this exactly what AnonX promises? For $6/month, you can tunnel all of your traffic over an encrypted VPN to Vanatua and then to the Internet at large. Vanatua has excellent privacy protection, and AnonX doesn't keep any logs, anyway. The FBI's pressure on ISP's makes AnonX seem even more attractive.
It may be (more) crap, but there will be content.
You have the idea. The broadcast industry is already having trouble making money. If they have trouble recouping investment on content, they will reduce their risk by producing less expensive content in the first place. That means more reality television and more game shows --because they are so darn cheap to crank out. The largest sports outlets will get coverage, so long as their broadcast fees don't go too high. By the way, according to Greg Craig, president of the Turner network, the only "top tier" TV sports remaining are football and NASCAR racing. No, really. The rest are breaking even or a net loss. Oh, and Drew Carey says his show 'Whose Line is it, anyway?' will be around forever, because the show is so darn cheap. As long as viewers keep watching and advertisers keep paying, the digital broadcasters will keep putting something on the air. Of course, if the viewers tire of unscripted shows and sports, broadcast TV (digital or analog) will gradually go bankrupt and disaappear.
I wonder: If the intent of the circumvention it NOT intended to circumvent producer protection of their rights...
Come on. You've been reading SlashDot long enough to know that circumvention of protection alone is a violation of the DMCA. If you bypass the broadcast flag's protection algorithm, you're in violation of the DMCA, even if you do nothing with the digital output. If the broadcast flag is in place, there is no legal way to exercise fair use rights on protected broadcasts--not even for time-shifting.
And just consider: complaining about it gets modded up (Score:4, Funny). At least, it's better than this one (Score:1, 50% Funny, 50% Overrated).
Hold on there. If you bypass the protection, you're violating the DMCA, even if the purpose is for fair use. That's why we might want to prevent the broadcast flag from becoming standard in the first place.
A little background:
The motion picture and television industries know that digital broadcast is coming. They want to be able to play their content (movies and TV shows) over these digital channels. They are afraid that persons uknown will record the content in perfect digital clarity, and redistribute it overseas, for free or for profit. Overseas syndication is a big profit center for these guys; they don't want to give it up without a fight.
If the broadcast flag fails, these industries just won't introduce content to digital broadcast. Movies will be available strictly by satellite or by digital cable (which already have protection built in). Original broadcast televions shows (which already have something like a 1 in 20 success rate) will just never appear on broadcast digital TV. In fact, broadcast digital TV might completely fail as a widespread technology (like AM stereo) for lack of content and because of low consumer adoption.
The FCC sees its jobs as making that kind of widespread adoption possible, easy, and necessary. That's why the FCC adopted the broadcast flag. They think it's the only way that enough content will come to broadcast digital for the medium to have any chance of success.
What we are left to ponder is this: Is broadcast digital televison so important that we are willing to accept these kind of use restrictions from the industry? Whatever you decide, be sure to let the FCC know.
Wait, can you give me more information on this so called "hammer" approach? How much more storage would I get?
Apologies if I missed an earlier comment that got this right. The way I see it, you need a demonstration that only works at 2.5GB/s, and no slower. IMHO, streaming video is no good, because you can always buffer it, drop frames, or otherwise compensate for slower transfer rates. Backups don't work, because you can do them on a slower connection; it just takes a little longer. The remote robot suggested earlier is on the right track, but it may not be transferring enough data in both directions to require the full 2.5GB/s.
So, what application needs to transfer that much information that fast, and no slower? I don't have a definitive answer for you, but maybe someone else on SlashDot does. I suspect the answer is in real-time data collection, simulation, and/or prediction. Think tornado forcasts. Think earthquakes and tsunami's. Think real time stock market forcasts (this may not be enough data). Think real time disaster effects and emergency response, like a dirty bomb or a new volcano.
Now, when you think you have the right application picked out, test against a shorter alternative pipe; say, 100MB or 1GB or whatever you propose to replace. Will your application work --even in a degraded fashion-- on the slower pipe? If so, it's not right for you. Make the application more demanding, or choose another application.
When you have the demonstration application picked out, please post it back on SlashDot.
Hear! Hear!
Have you tried googling for information on Microsoft's products? Some of the results are on target, but lots of them are references to the generic words for which the products have been named. I actually have to avoid using words like "access" generically, because listeners get confused about whether I mean the generic word or the product.
Do you suppose this ruling will impact other products using words that were generic before the product was named? If so, Microsoft has plenty to worry about. Look at their flagship products:
Office
Word
Excel
Access
SQL Server
Outlook
If "Windows" can't be protected on the basis that "windows" was a generic word before it was trademarked, what will protect the other products? I'm not meaning to pick on just Microsoft here; there are lots of software products that use generic word names. Will all of them have to be renamed?