No, let's not. AFAIK, no one in the history of Linux has ever used the word compiling in that context. Inventing your own term to describe something like that is fine. Appropriating an analogous term from some other field is also ok, particularly if it's a good analogy. However, if it's already a word used in the SAME field and has a very specific technical meaning then it probably means you don't know what you're talking about and you're trying to sound sophisticated.
Well, I don't see the point of what you've done in that case. You were presented with their ToS before you began using the service and you used the service. Regardless of what you may have deleted in the installer, you are probably responsible for adhering to the T's or they'll be happy to stop providing you the S. My point is that, legally, you might as well just cross your fingers when you click "I Accept." I don't think you get any protection by monkeying with the installer files.
I take it you took that amended copy and had it reviewed by Blizzard personnel duly authorized to accept your changes on the company's behalf, right? Otherwise, I'll take any bet you'd care to make that you are legally bound by the original ToS to the extent that such agreements are enforceable in the first place.
Actually, the Electoral College doesn't amplify the political power of small states. There's no need for an elector to do that -- just apportion votes according to the number of seats in the House and give them all to the popular winner in that state. That's essentially equivalent to what we do now (except for Maine and Nebraska) and doesn't involve elected officials casting votes on behalf of the people.
Furthermore, nothing about federalism is in any way tied to electors. So I don't get your point there either. The EC is, at this point, a historical artifact.
If you're electing someone to elect someone for you, then you're electing a representative. Do you really dispute that? No, it's not the reason we call the system a representative democracy, but I already said that - did you even finish reading my post?
Umm, no, we would still be a Republic, even without the Electoral College. In fact, in its current form, the Electoral College is a farce that only serves to distort the influence of voters in different states. The intent of the Electoral College is that you elect someone better informed whom you trust to cast a vote that serves your interests. Instead, the electors pretty much vote strictly along party lines. You can argue whether this is good or bad for the system, but it's not the electors who put the "representative" in "representative democracy," it's the politicians we elect.
I agree -- for most people, point and shoot is the way to go. I think the article author agrees also.
Personally, I think the question is not whether to have a P&S or a DSLR, it's whether to have just the P&S or a P&S *and* the DSLR. All those reasons that a P&S is more convenient for a casual photographer are just as true for a serious photographer when he's not on a shoot. He mentions in the article the idea that the photographer, not the camera, makes the picture. There's a corollary to that -- the cheap P&S you're carrying in your front pocket takes a better picture than the high end DSLR that's at home in its case. You never know when the perfect photo might just happen and it's a lot easier to be ready all the time with a P&S.
Modern P&S digicams are good enough and cheap enough that unless you really *know* that you want a DSLR, you probably don't really want it. Get the P&S and take pictures with it. Try to take the kinds of pictures you're interested in taking. Most of them will come out just fine. If you really find that you don't have the control or image quality that you're after, even after practicing your framing and working with the settings that you do have on the P&S, then think about the DSLR. In the meantime, you'll have learned a lot about composition and subjects. And, face it, most of the pictures you'd have taken during this learning period would have been lousy with a DSLR too, so you're not likely to have missed out on much. This has the additional benefit that the same camera will be cheaper tomorrow than it is today (barring major earthquakes in Southeast Asia), so there's no reason to hurry out and buy it.
A great many of the small countries on the list have detained citizens for expressing themselves freely online. Even if the country is small, that is another part of the world where people are not free to share ideas. That is the basic freedom that made the Internet what it is.
Individually, it would be difficult for these nations to have an impact on the Internet as a whole. However, it sure puts a damper on it for its own citizens. Many of these people are not free to leave their country to find an unfiltered pipe. For some it's because they can't afford to uproot their family, for many it's because the oppressive government won't allow its citizens to leave.
Furthermore, the list is not short, and it includes the most populous country on the planet. That could result in the norm world-wide being heavy Internet censorship. Any country, of whatever size, that engages in this behavior is an enemy of the Internet as a whole.
Good point. Don't forget that unlike sprinkling ash on the icecaps, this would essentially be irreversible. If it does start screwing things up, it's going to be awfully hard to send someone up to pick up the trillions of reflectors to fix the problem.
Frankly, I trust the stability of nature in the face of perturbations more than I trust our ingenuity to manage a nonlinear chaotic system through engineering. We're pretty good at solving simple problems with technology, but we're nowhere near being able to predict the effects that even a few percent drop in solar heating would have.
Why exactly do you need to know the offset from GMT to qualify to travel somewhere? I fail to see how this supports the idea that it's easier to live in a GMT-only world.
Here's the bottom line. Some calculations are easier to do in GMT, some are easier to do in local time. Which is more convenient depends on which calculations you're doing. Neither is inherently superior -- they both have strengths and weaknesses. Reasonable people will differ on which they want to use, but it's evident which method most people prefer.
There's no need to get pissy about how the unwashed masses are using an intellectually inferior timekeeping system. I know it may seem that your superior knowledge of sums and differences places you in a unique position to dictate timekeeping conventions, but it's actually not hard to convert from one to the other. From time to time you'll need to do that either way you operate.
Using GMT is easier for the specific problem of arranging international conference calls and similar things. It's less convenient for almost any other use. If I want to book a flight to Ouagadougu, I want to arrive at a reasonable time (locally) so I want to see a flight arrival time in local time. When I get there, I want to ask the guy at the hotel what time they serve breakfast and get an answer that I can immediately relate to the behavior of the sun and moon. Further, it's not any harder to look up what the offset for EST is than it is to look up whether Adelaide has daylight at 14:30 GMT. If you frequently work with people in a time zone, you learn the offset.
Still, for the specific purpose of arranging conference calls, it can be convenient to work in GMT. So use it for that! You've still got to check that it's a reasonable time for all the attendees, involving table lookups, but at least only one person has to do the lookups. For my conf calls, we just post the time for each location in the announcement.
Overall, I really don't see the logic to switching wholesale over to GMT time being that compelling. Local time is useful beyond being what we're just used to.
This is the last post on this topic I've got in me, but I disagree with your characterization of what he did. If there were ANYTHING non-obvious about his tool with respect to the exploit, I might agree. On the contrary, a would-be terrorist with a Xerox machine and the publicly available flight timetables could do what he's done. His tool doesn't make their job materially easier. If it's illegal, it's a silly technicality; he's not aiding in the commission of a crime in any real sense at all.
Simply describing how to commit a crime is not the same as encouraging another to commit that crime. In my example, arguing that there's material assistance being provided is absurd -- anyone who has the ability to drive a car already knows that he can just open an unlocked car, turn the ignition, and drive off. It might be a conspiracy if he said, "Psst, that particular car over there is unlocked and has its keys in the ignition."
Now, you can argue which is more analogous to the actual situation we're discussing. In actual fact, it's not quite like either analogy. It's more like a guy with a megaphone telling a crowd, "Hey, you've all left your keys in the ignitions of your unlocked cars, they're likely to be stolen," with the explicit intention of helping them better secure their vehicles. Sure, he's aiding anyone who might use that information to conclude that there are cars available to steal, but he just wasn't getting the attention of the car owners when he told them one-by-one.
Anyway, arguing by analogy is kind of silly because it's easy enough to contrive details that make or break a particular view. My real opinion on the matter is that it's absolutely critical to be able to have open discussions about weaknesses in security systems in order to plug those weaknesses. Demonstrating a weakness is sometimes the only way to get that weakness plugged in a reasonable amount of time. In this case, I don't think he should be prosecuted because (a) the actual amount of aid he's providing to a would-be criminal is very small (as we've discussed at length and you seem to agree); (b) even with that aid, the actual risk to anyone due to someone using his "technical assistance" is small (all they can do is get from one side of a checkpoint to the other -- why bother? It's no more terrorizing to attack a crowd on one side or the other, and his boarding passes will not permit access to the planes); (c) his intention was helping to plug a security hole that was being ignored; and (d) those who have knowingly allowed this hole to exist without doing anything are not being punished for their flagrant incompetence, so justice is hardly being fairly meted out.
I do see what you're saying, in that technically, he probably violated the law. I just don't agree that justice is served by punishing every technical violation.
That might be true if this guy was being accused of committing a directly illegal act. The reason it's relevant that his action is trivial is because he's being accused of taking steps that will aid others. It's less like he stole an unlocked car and more like he told a guy on the street, "Hey, if a car is unlocked and has its key in the ignition, you can just jump in and drive off!" The triviality of his contribution, IMO, means he hasn't materially aided in the commission of a (hypothetical) crime. As a result, it hardly rises to a conspiracy type charge.
Well, it *ought* to be a perfectly acceptable defense to argue that it's such a pathetic example of conspiracy that it's clearly not what's intended to be punished by those laws. The whole case is a joke (except for the security hole he demonstrates) and it's sad that it's probably going to be seriously prosecuted. The bar for conspiracy should be set significantly higher than this kind of thing and a prosecutor should have the sense, professionalism, and honor not to take part in this political grandstanding bullshit. (ha what a pipe dream)
But seriously, if that's all it takes to punch a hole in the TSA security, then I think we as taxpayers collectively want our billions back because they're being spent on incompetent idiots instead of security professionals.
Actually, no, anyone using the tool AND presenting the output to a TSA or airline representative to gain entry to the secured area in the airport is committing a crime. Printing a "forged" airline boarding pass is not a crime in and of itself. The crime would occur when one attempted to use the document.
The claim against this guy, as I understand it, is that he can foresee that someone will use this to commit a crime. As a result, he's part of some unnamed conspiracy to do so. Frankly, that's bullshit, but that's the way it seems to be working.
Also remember that possession of a copy of something, such as an MP3, is not evidence of any crime. The RIAA has to show that you either illegally made and distributed a copy or that you obtained your copy from an illegal source. The onus is on them to demonstrate this and you have no obligation to demonstrate why your copy is legal. At least, for now...
IANAL either and I haven't really read the details here, but I would imagine that the court has instructed the defendant not to tamper with the data. If there's evidence that it's been recently wiped, that'd probably get them in more trouble with the court than they risk with the RIAA.
You don't need to measure the stretch out-of-band if your modulation is sensible. Lay down a known pattern in the disk and as you read along, monitor the properties of that pattern and you can work out how it's been deformed. You can then invert the deformation to pull out the correct data. It's somewhat more complicated than my radio Doppler example since you're working in two dimensions and have to deal with aligning the head with the proper data track, but I suspect they already need to do this to some degree since the current generation of disk materials must expand and contract somewhat.
Anyway, it's an interesting problem. I suspect it's surmountable, and probably already surmounted.
Slashdot Mirror
No, let's not. AFAIK, no one in the history of Linux has ever used the word compiling in that context. Inventing your own term to describe something like that is fine. Appropriating an analogous term from some other field is also ok, particularly if it's a good analogy. However, if it's already a word used in the SAME field and has a very specific technical meaning then it probably means you don't know what you're talking about and you're trying to sound sophisticated.
You mean I can pay $10k on eBay to buy a console that can play those old 8-bit video games? Sign me up!
Well, I don't see the point of what you've done in that case. You were presented with their ToS before you began using the service and you used the service. Regardless of what you may have deleted in the installer, you are probably responsible for adhering to the T's or they'll be happy to stop providing you the S. My point is that, legally, you might as well just cross your fingers when you click "I Accept." I don't think you get any protection by monkeying with the installer files.
I take it you took that amended copy and had it reviewed by Blizzard personnel duly authorized to accept your changes on the company's behalf, right? Otherwise, I'll take any bet you'd care to make that you are legally bound by the original ToS to the extent that such agreements are enforceable in the first place.
Thanks for the civics lesson.
Actually, the Electoral College doesn't amplify the political power of small states. There's no need for an elector to do that -- just apportion votes according to the number of seats in the House and give them all to the popular winner in that state. That's essentially equivalent to what we do now (except for Maine and Nebraska) and doesn't involve elected officials casting votes on behalf of the people.
Furthermore, nothing about federalism is in any way tied to electors. So I don't get your point there either. The EC is, at this point, a historical artifact.
If you're electing someone to elect someone for you, then you're electing a representative. Do you really dispute that? No, it's not the reason we call the system a representative democracy, but I already said that - did you even finish reading my post?
Umm, no, we would still be a Republic, even without the Electoral College. In fact, in its current form, the Electoral College is a farce that only serves to distort the influence of voters in different states. The intent of the Electoral College is that you elect someone better informed whom you trust to cast a vote that serves your interests. Instead, the electors pretty much vote strictly along party lines. You can argue whether this is good or bad for the system, but it's not the electors who put the "representative" in "representative democracy," it's the politicians we elect.
I agree -- for most people, point and shoot is the way to go. I think the article author agrees also.
Personally, I think the question is not whether to have a P&S or a DSLR, it's whether to have just the P&S or a P&S *and* the DSLR. All those reasons that a P&S is more convenient for a casual photographer are just as true for a serious photographer when he's not on a shoot. He mentions in the article the idea that the photographer, not the camera, makes the picture. There's a corollary to that -- the cheap P&S you're carrying in your front pocket takes a better picture than the high end DSLR that's at home in its case. You never know when the perfect photo might just happen and it's a lot easier to be ready all the time with a P&S.
Modern P&S digicams are good enough and cheap enough that unless you really *know* that you want a DSLR, you probably don't really want it. Get the P&S and take pictures with it. Try to take the kinds of pictures you're interested in taking. Most of them will come out just fine. If you really find that you don't have the control or image quality that you're after, even after practicing your framing and working with the settings that you do have on the P&S, then think about the DSLR. In the meantime, you'll have learned a lot about composition and subjects. And, face it, most of the pictures you'd have taken during this learning period would have been lousy with a DSLR too, so you're not likely to have missed out on much. This has the additional benefit that the same camera will be cheaper tomorrow than it is today (barring major earthquakes in Southeast Asia), so there's no reason to hurry out and buy it.
A great many of the small countries on the list have detained citizens for expressing themselves freely online. Even if the country is small, that is another part of the world where people are not free to share ideas. That is the basic freedom that made the Internet what it is.
Individually, it would be difficult for these nations to have an impact on the Internet as a whole. However, it sure puts a damper on it for its own citizens. Many of these people are not free to leave their country to find an unfiltered pipe. For some it's because they can't afford to uproot their family, for many it's because the oppressive government won't allow its citizens to leave.
Furthermore, the list is not short, and it includes the most populous country on the planet. That could result in the norm world-wide being heavy Internet censorship. Any country, of whatever size, that engages in this behavior is an enemy of the Internet as a whole.
Good morning to you too, asshole.
Good point. Don't forget that unlike sprinkling ash on the icecaps, this would essentially be irreversible. If it does start screwing things up, it's going to be awfully hard to send someone up to pick up the trillions of reflectors to fix the problem.
Frankly, I trust the stability of nature in the face of perturbations more than I trust our ingenuity to manage a nonlinear chaotic system through engineering. We're pretty good at solving simple problems with technology, but we're nowhere near being able to predict the effects that even a few percent drop in solar heating would have.
Was that in the late 60s, early 70s? :-)
Why exactly do you need to know the offset from GMT to qualify to travel somewhere? I fail to see how this supports the idea that it's easier to live in a GMT-only world.
Here's the bottom line. Some calculations are easier to do in GMT, some are easier to do in local time. Which is more convenient depends on which calculations you're doing. Neither is inherently superior -- they both have strengths and weaknesses. Reasonable people will differ on which they want to use, but it's evident which method most people prefer.
There's no need to get pissy about how the unwashed masses are using an intellectually inferior timekeeping system. I know it may seem that your superior knowledge of sums and differences places you in a unique position to dictate timekeeping conventions, but it's actually not hard to convert from one to the other. From time to time you'll need to do that either way you operate.
Using GMT is easier for the specific problem of arranging international conference calls and similar things. It's less convenient for almost any other use. If I want to book a flight to Ouagadougu, I want to arrive at a reasonable time (locally) so I want to see a flight arrival time in local time. When I get there, I want to ask the guy at the hotel what time they serve breakfast and get an answer that I can immediately relate to the behavior of the sun and moon. Further, it's not any harder to look up what the offset for EST is than it is to look up whether Adelaide has daylight at 14:30 GMT. If you frequently work with people in a time zone, you learn the offset.
Still, for the specific purpose of arranging conference calls, it can be convenient to work in GMT. So use it for that! You've still got to check that it's a reasonable time for all the attendees, involving table lookups, but at least only one person has to do the lookups. For my conf calls, we just post the time for each location in the announcement.
Overall, I really don't see the logic to switching wholesale over to GMT time being that compelling. Local time is useful beyond being what we're just used to.
Insightful? No. Troll? Probably not. Funny? Yeah.
This is the last post on this topic I've got in me, but I disagree with your characterization of what he did. If there were ANYTHING non-obvious about his tool with respect to the exploit, I might agree. On the contrary, a would-be terrorist with a Xerox machine and the publicly available flight timetables could do what he's done. His tool doesn't make their job materially easier. If it's illegal, it's a silly technicality; he's not aiding in the commission of a crime in any real sense at all.
Simply describing how to commit a crime is not the same as encouraging another to commit that crime. In my example, arguing that there's material assistance being provided is absurd -- anyone who has the ability to drive a car already knows that he can just open an unlocked car, turn the ignition, and drive off. It might be a conspiracy if he said, "Psst, that particular car over there is unlocked and has its keys in the ignition."
Now, you can argue which is more analogous to the actual situation we're discussing. In actual fact, it's not quite like either analogy. It's more like a guy with a megaphone telling a crowd, "Hey, you've all left your keys in the ignitions of your unlocked cars, they're likely to be stolen," with the explicit intention of helping them better secure their vehicles. Sure, he's aiding anyone who might use that information to conclude that there are cars available to steal, but he just wasn't getting the attention of the car owners when he told them one-by-one.
Anyway, arguing by analogy is kind of silly because it's easy enough to contrive details that make or break a particular view. My real opinion on the matter is that it's absolutely critical to be able to have open discussions about weaknesses in security systems in order to plug those weaknesses. Demonstrating a weakness is sometimes the only way to get that weakness plugged in a reasonable amount of time. In this case, I don't think he should be prosecuted because (a) the actual amount of aid he's providing to a would-be criminal is very small (as we've discussed at length and you seem to agree); (b) even with that aid, the actual risk to anyone due to someone using his "technical assistance" is small (all they can do is get from one side of a checkpoint to the other -- why bother? It's no more terrorizing to attack a crowd on one side or the other, and his boarding passes will not permit access to the planes); (c) his intention was helping to plug a security hole that was being ignored; and (d) those who have knowingly allowed this hole to exist without doing anything are not being punished for their flagrant incompetence, so justice is hardly being fairly meted out.
I do see what you're saying, in that technically, he probably violated the law. I just don't agree that justice is served by punishing every technical violation.
That might be true if this guy was being accused of committing a directly illegal act. The reason it's relevant that his action is trivial is because he's being accused of taking steps that will aid others. It's less like he stole an unlocked car and more like he told a guy on the street, "Hey, if a car is unlocked and has its key in the ignition, you can just jump in and drive off!" The triviality of his contribution, IMO, means he hasn't materially aided in the commission of a (hypothetical) crime. As a result, it hardly rises to a conspiracy type charge.
Well, it *ought* to be a perfectly acceptable defense to argue that it's such a pathetic example of conspiracy that it's clearly not what's intended to be punished by those laws. The whole case is a joke (except for the security hole he demonstrates) and it's sad that it's probably going to be seriously prosecuted. The bar for conspiracy should be set significantly higher than this kind of thing and a prosecutor should have the sense, professionalism, and honor not to take part in this political grandstanding bullshit. (ha what a pipe dream)
But seriously, if that's all it takes to punch a hole in the TSA security, then I think we as taxpayers collectively want our billions back because they're being spent on incompetent idiots instead of security professionals.
Actually, no, anyone using the tool AND presenting the output to a TSA or airline representative to gain entry to the secured area in the airport is committing a crime. Printing a "forged" airline boarding pass is not a crime in and of itself. The crime would occur when one attempted to use the document.
The claim against this guy, as I understand it, is that he can foresee that someone will use this to commit a crime. As a result, he's part of some unnamed conspiracy to do so. Frankly, that's bullshit, but that's the way it seems to be working.
Except in this case the "exploit" is pathetically trivial. Anyone who was interested in causing harm would be able to do this on their own.
Also remember that possession of a copy of something, such as an MP3, is not evidence of any crime. The RIAA has to show that you either illegally made and distributed a copy or that you obtained your copy from an illegal source. The onus is on them to demonstrate this and you have no obligation to demonstrate why your copy is legal. At least, for now...
IANAL either and I haven't really read the details here, but I would imagine that the court has instructed the defendant not to tamper with the data. If there's evidence that it's been recently wiped, that'd probably get them in more trouble with the court than they risk with the RIAA.
You don't need to measure the stretch out-of-band if your modulation is sensible. Lay down a known pattern in the disk and as you read along, monitor the properties of that pattern and you can work out how it's been deformed. You can then invert the deformation to pull out the correct data. It's somewhat more complicated than my radio Doppler example since you're working in two dimensions and have to deal with aligning the head with the proper data track, but I suspect they already need to do this to some degree since the current generation of disk materials must expand and contract somewhat.
Anyway, it's an interesting problem. I suspect it's surmountable, and probably already surmounted.
And now you're all part of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement instead of simple copyright infringement!