There would be no need to reverse engineer a pristine copy of the work. Simply proofreading a single copy and correcting some of the existing errors, while at the same time, introducing a few new errors of the same type would be enough to confound any attempt to make a positive identification of the source.
This approach has an incredibly high bogosity factor. I can't imagine anyone in the publishing industry with half a brain who would spend any money on its implementation... Oh wait. We are talking about the partially brain dead idjits who thought DRM was the best thing since sliced bread....
If I was going to do this, I would probably also play with the kerning to force some repagination, add some space characters before the newline at the end of some paragraphs, and so on. This approach to DRM is about as simple to get around as using a black magic marker on the edge of an "uncopyable" CD disk.
We are talking about the brain dead idjits who want ebooks to "wear out" after being read 25 times.
Actually, I was looking forward to having a one-of-a-kind copy of a book. Uniqueness makes them collectable, right?
Seriously, what would the government do if Google just went ahead and released the information?
Uh...put people in Jail for breaking the law? There is no legal defense--so unless you want to move to China, you beg for permission to speak.
Let me give you an example of what sorts of things they can do.
I worked for a bank, once. Banks are closely monitored by the Federal Government.
One of our obligations was to feed everyone and everything to a Federal database of terrorists, drug dealers, money launders and other suck ilk. Including, at one point, the entire duly-elected Palestinian government.
The requirements were so all-encompassing that I used to joke that if you so much as walked your dog past the building, both you and your dog were supposed to be checked against it.
Failure to comply in a satisfactory manner could result in:
o Severe fines and penalties o Revocation of the bank's charter o Extensive prison sentences for both corporate management and the board of directors o Ditto for the CIO, my boss and me/co-workers o Ditto also, I think for the corporate legal department
We once went into a major panic because someone had opened an account and their (fairly common) name didn't come up as a "hit" against a money-laundering Mexican travel agency. Other people with that name have made national news just trying to buy a new car, which is why Federal databases can be so dangerous.
Google may not be a bank, but considering their size, I'm sure that there are more than a few things that come under government scrutiny and/or regulation. So I don't think they're likely to go "lone wolf" here.
Subscribe Subscribe Subscribe! Everything a subscription! Everything an ongoing revenue stream! Lock people in, charge them forever, everything, everywhere, everywhen! Keep them paying! Continue to innovate? That's just not a practical ongoing business model.
Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day.
Teach him to fish, then let him discover that the only lake around is your private property. But you'll rent him a boat and fishing rights on a daily basis.
I didn't see an assertion on his part that "...and so we don't have to deal with it." Rather, we just shouldn't be surprised if there is an adaptation.
Regardless, I still think too much of environmentalist thinking places too much value on an imagined "pristine" environment, when the reality is that much of that vision is just a glimpse of the world as it was X years ago, even though that glimpse may not have been in equilibrium.
I think the word you really wanted was "idealized".
One of the things that keeps me in check (I hope) is reminding myself that for all the hoopla about radioactive waste disposal, the stuff that comes out of a nuclear reactor is less radioactive than what went in(*). Which was mined out of the "pristine" environment.
I'm always confounded when evolution does what it is predicted to do and we are all surprised by it. That waste can be used as food. Something will find a way to eat it.
That's not strictly accurate. Neither is the supposition "and eventually sink to the sea floor." There are two growing patches of plastic which has been ground down to the point where it is now a gloppy film-like consistency to much of it, and it has been bleached white from UV light, and although it's almost degraded to the molecular level... it's not sinking.
Worse, it's killing everything in the area as animals try to turn it into food... which in turn thanks to the food chain, means other animals, who didn't eat it, become contaminated by it, and so on and so on. But at no point has there been much evidence of evolutionary adaptation to convert this plastic waste into an actual food product. Animals adapt to its presence... and maybe eventually won't die because it is infesting the environment... but anything much more complicated than an amoeba has shown zero ability to metabolize this.
You can't trust evolution to clean up after you.:/ This argument is as specious as suggesting that we shouldn't worry about global warming because eventually a creature will be born that eats all of our waste for us and shits out rainbows.
Well, we still have The Market. The Market cures everything, I'm told.
Given how late to the game plastics are, it is fairly impressive how fast they've moved. Some modified natural polymers go a fair way back; but most of the synthetics that we think of as 'plastics' are under a century old, are reasonably novel(not just a synthesis technique that is cheaper than the organic method for producing an existing material), and are often selected, at least in part, for good resistance to decay.
Also, polymers can be pretty tough molecules to crack: even something like cellulose, which is literally older than (some) dirt, is attacked primarily by a relatively small group of specialist organisms.
Three years from now, they'll be demanding the right to vote.
Why would I do that? And even if I did, freedom and privacy are still being lost.
Just remember the phone company already has these records and if it's legal they're trying to monetize the data already.
That has nothing to do with this.
Precisely. I am uncomfortable enough that a private organization is doing everything in its power to exploit information it has extracted about me without my consent. But bringing in a third party bumps it up a notch. We've already had laws passed restricting inter-corporate information trading.
Making it secret sure looks like they are hiding something illicit.
Making it secret means they can lie about "only 300 numbers".
I'd believe "only 300 numbers" a lot more readily if the various Internet services that have come forth all seem to report requests numbering in the thousands.
You can do the same on an iphone if you jailbrake it, which is the same as rooting your android phone. So the Browser is not apart of the OS, and only microsoft was retarded enough to use it as the file manager inside the OS.
And technically, the file manager isn't part of the OS, either, except in the sense of (typically) being bundled with the OS. I worked for several years with people who were hung up on Norton Commander for their file manager.
IE on the other hand (squeaky Steve Ballmer voice) "is an Integral part of the Windows operating system".
(Yes, I know that SELinux is from the NSA, but the risk of putting in back-doors is just to big.)
Risk of all those eyeballs catching it just because it is open source? Just like they didn't catch serious vulnerabilities for years in one of the most used and critical open sourced programs SendMail?
Leaving aside the fact that SendMail is a horrible warty conglomeration of modules for mostly-extinct mail-routine systems supporting rules written in a cryptic macro language. SendMail is a mail application, and while secure mail is very important, security is the very purpose of SELinux.
Where security is one more thing to consider for apps like SendMail, it's the core function of SELinux, and core functions are the most-scrutinized of all, because when they don't work, the app itself is useless.
Aside from that, the mere fact that a large part of SELinux was created under NSA auspices is enough to get the tinfoil crowd digging into it looking for loopholes and backdoors. "Distrust the NSA" may be in the spotlight right now, but not everyone was complacent before.
The problem with "corporations are not people" is I've yet to hear an argument about how that would work, that cannot be used to infringe on "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances".
I dislike the idea of Apple/Ford/McDonalds/etc having as much power as they do, but unless the plan we implement protects the NRA, the EFF, fuck, even PETA, I cannot support it.
I think that the key distinction is in whether the people of the corporation are representing themselves or are being co-opted to represent the corporation.
You can thus have double-representation or even contrary representation (in cases where "the corporation" says something at odds with the views of the majority of its employees and/or shareholders). Because whatever the individuals say themselves is being augmented or controverted by the corporate entity under the direction not of the majority, but the management.
Everyone - real or fictitious - deserves their day in court. Even animals sometimes get that. But the main problem with "Corporations are people" at the political level is that corporations represent a concentration of assets (money, manpower, and so forth) that few private individuals can muster. And often are partly or wholly immune even to the limitations that those few (shall we say 1%) of private individuals are subject to.
It isn't so much a matter of free speech as to who can field the biggest megaphone. The USA was founded upon the idea of one man one vote (not one DOLLAR, one vote), expanding the term to include women and freed slaves, but (so far) no corporation has been issued a voter registration card that I know of.
That entirely depends on what he's lying about. He's most certainly lying about his authorized level of access. This should teach the NSA and CIA that it's a stupid Idea to have Contractors as your network admins, and it's a good way of letting Spy's into your network. IT is not something a spy agency should farm out. However, the power point slides he released are probably a legit document. It's entirely possible for him to be lying, and a traitor.
One thing I've learned in a long and evil career in IT, much of it where I was part of the group that administered security is that there is a wide gap between what's authorized and what's actually possible for a particular individual. A VERY wide gap.
DB2 runs on 32- and 64-bit Intel and AMD processors, POWER processors, and System Z processors. Please tell us which of those is 40 years old.
I run DB2 on 64-bit Intel. I pray that one day it will add the same level of import/export capabilities that come for free with both MySQL and PostgreSQL. Or at least that I can do a dump from an i5 system to the Intel system.
For that matter, I would be overjoyed if they'd just do like everyone else and add a create-from-select SQL option.
Unless he got into office and realized he security is lot trickier than he thought. A politician that never changes their views is more or less deadwood.
We had 8 years of unchanging views, and deadwood would have been better. Deadwood just lies there, it doesn't keep straight on until it goes over a cliff and drags everyone else with it.
But changing your view to match an ugly reality is no better. Better to spend time working on changing reality.
I don't get why internships were ever unpaid in the first place.
Read Dickens. In the Good Old Days, an unpaid internship would have been a luxury. A lot of times, the intern had to pay the employer for the first couple of years.
The US government isn't engaging in economic espionage (and they damned well should, since US businesses pay taxes as well).
I believe that actually there have been some cases come to light not all that long ago where information extracted via US government espionage has been found to have been given to US corporations for their private benefit.
a fair/free trade local brand that the company owners first sold to me at a local farmer's market.
If you bought it direct from the owner at a farmer's market, it's not fair trade. "Fair trade" is indeed a trademark granted by FTO (Fairtrade labeling Organization) for products shipped from the producing countries to the consumer countries that supposedly reward the producers in a "fairer" way. "Supposedly", because all they (FLO and subsidiaries) do is be another middleman who wants their share (for "licensing" feeds, that stay in the consumer country). Those fees are then usually squandered on glossy marketing campaigns, and excessively priced office supplies and services ("excessively priced" because bought from companies operated by friends and families of FLO employees), with little left to help the coffee farmers.
All I can say is that the principals are themselves Kenyan and claim to be dealing directly with people they know back home in Kenya, with a tithe of the proceeds earmarked for community development back in Kenya. They have since graduated to the shelves of local big-name grocers, who presumably have at least some stake in making sure that nothing too extreme is happening.
If there are in fact middlemen eating up the lion's share of the proceeds (and the package claims that the company was founded to reduce that), and, if it's true that Fair Trade USA is gobbling a lot of it up in overpriced office supplies, at least I can console myself that it keeps office-supply companies in business. The original impetus for Fair Trade was that much of the middleman price of coffee was due to lenders whose rates and practices would make Shylock blush.
It may be both: evolution of the coffee rust driven by climate change.
Or it could be a lack of genetic diversity in the coffee trees. The fungus can spread through vast plantations of genetically similar arabica trees. The reason the rust has difficulty infecting wild trees may be because of their diversity, as well as their dispersion.
Disclaimer: I am a tea drinker.
There are 2 ways to grow coffee. You can clear land and plant trees industrial-fashion, which is very efficient - and more likely to expose you to mass infections. Or you can plant the trees in a habitat approximating their wild state, where the coffee trees are interspersed with non-coffee trees and grow shaded. One is efficient and makes for cheaper coffee. The other is not so efficient, but the quality of the coffee is a lot better. It's also likely to slow down propagation of epidemic infections, since there are natural barriers between the coffee trees.
From what I've seen of tea farming, there is no equivalent of "shade grown" tea, and the plant density is high enough that if a similar infection affecting tea plants broke out, it would spread like wildfire. So enjoy it while you can!
Slashdot Mirror
There would be no need to reverse engineer a pristine copy of the work. Simply proofreading a single copy and correcting some of the existing errors, while at the same time, introducing a few new errors of the same type would be enough to confound any attempt to make a positive identification of the source.
This approach has an incredibly high bogosity factor. I can't imagine anyone in the publishing industry with half a brain who would spend any money on its implementation... Oh wait. We are talking about the partially brain dead idjits who thought DRM was the best thing since sliced bread....
If I was going to do this, I would probably also play with the kerning to force some repagination, add some space characters before the newline at the end of some paragraphs, and so on. This approach to DRM is about as simple to get around as using a black magic marker on the edge of an "uncopyable" CD disk.
We are talking about the brain dead idjits who want ebooks to "wear out" after being read 25 times.
Actually, I was looking forward to having a one-of-a-kind copy of a book. Uniqueness makes them collectable, right?
Seriously, what would the government do if Google just went ahead and released the information?
Uh...put people in Jail for breaking the law? There is no legal defense--so unless you want to move to China, you beg for permission to speak.
Let me give you an example of what sorts of things they can do.
I worked for a bank, once. Banks are closely monitored by the Federal Government.
One of our obligations was to feed everyone and everything to a Federal database of terrorists, drug dealers, money launders and other suck ilk. Including, at one point, the entire duly-elected Palestinian government.
The requirements were so all-encompassing that I used to joke that if you so much as walked your dog past the building, both you and your dog were supposed to be checked against it.
Failure to comply in a satisfactory manner could result in:
o Severe fines and penalties
o Revocation of the bank's charter
o Extensive prison sentences for both corporate management and the board of directors
o Ditto for the CIO, my boss and me/co-workers
o Ditto also, I think for the corporate legal department
We once went into a major panic because someone had opened an account and their (fairly common) name didn't come up as a "hit" against a money-laundering Mexican travel agency. Other people with that name have made national news just trying to buy a new car, which is why Federal databases can be so dangerous.
Google may not be a bank, but considering their size, I'm sure that there are more than a few things that come under government scrutiny and/or regulation. So I don't think they're likely to go "lone wolf" here.
Subscribe Subscribe Subscribe! Everything a subscription! Everything an ongoing revenue stream! Lock people in, charge them forever, everything, everywhere, everywhen! Keep them paying! Continue to innovate? That's just not a practical ongoing business model.
Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day.
Teach him to fish, then let him discover that the only lake around is your private property. But you'll rent him a boat and fishing rights on a daily basis.
What space ship will they be flying in?
Soyuz ?Otherwise these guys will be dead by the time the next american capsule/spaceship is ready to go.
Shouldn't we be saying "cosmonauts"?
I'd like to try this out on southerners. You think showing them a picture of a fridge rusting out in someone's backyard will work?
No.
Because it should be rusting out on the front porch, instead.
Also, don't forget the rusting car up on blocks in the front yard.
I didn't see an assertion on his part that "...and so we don't have to deal with it." Rather, we just shouldn't be surprised if there is an adaptation.
Regardless, I still think too much of environmentalist thinking places too much value on an imagined "pristine" environment, when the reality is that much of that vision is just a glimpse of the world as it was X years ago, even though that glimpse may not have been in equilibrium.
I think the word you really wanted was "idealized".
One of the things that keeps me in check (I hope) is reminding myself that for all the hoopla about radioactive waste disposal, the stuff that comes out of a nuclear reactor is less radioactive than what went in(*). Which was mined out of the "pristine" environment.
*Breeder reactors excepted.
I'm always confounded when evolution does what it is predicted to do and we are all surprised by it. That waste can be used as food. Something will find a way to eat it.
That's not strictly accurate. Neither is the supposition "and eventually sink to the sea floor." There are two growing patches of plastic which has been ground down to the point where it is now a gloppy film-like consistency to much of it, and it has been bleached white from UV light, and although it's almost degraded to the molecular level... it's not sinking.
Worse, it's killing everything in the area as animals try to turn it into food... which in turn thanks to the food chain, means other animals, who didn't eat it, become contaminated by it, and so on and so on. But at no point has there been much evidence of evolutionary adaptation to convert this plastic waste into an actual food product. Animals adapt to its presence... and maybe eventually won't die because it is infesting the environment... but anything much more complicated than an amoeba has shown zero ability to metabolize this.
You can't trust evolution to clean up after you. :/ This argument is as specious as suggesting that we shouldn't worry about global warming because eventually a creature will be born that eats all of our waste for us and shits out rainbows.
Well, we still have The Market. The Market cures everything, I'm told.
Given how late to the game plastics are, it is fairly impressive how fast they've moved. Some modified natural polymers go a fair way back; but most of the synthetics that we think of as 'plastics' are under a century old, are reasonably novel(not just a synthesis technique that is cheaper than the organic method for producing an existing material), and are often selected, at least in part, for good resistance to decay.
Also, polymers can be pretty tough molecules to crack: even something like cellulose, which is literally older than (some) dirt, is attacked primarily by a relatively small group of specialist organisms.
Three years from now, they'll be demanding the right to vote.
If you take them at their word
Why would I do that? And even if I did, freedom and privacy are still being lost.
Just remember the phone company already has these records and if it's legal they're trying to monetize the data already.
That has nothing to do with this.
Precisely. I am uncomfortable enough that a private organization is doing everything in its power to exploit information it has extracted about me without my consent. But bringing in a third party bumps it up a notch. We've already had laws passed restricting inter-corporate information trading.
Making it secret sure looks like they are hiding something illicit.
Making it secret means they can lie about "only 300 numbers".
I'd believe "only 300 numbers" a lot more readily if the various Internet services that have come forth all seem to report requests numbering in the thousands.
You can do the same on an iphone if you jailbrake it, which is the same as rooting your android phone. So the Browser is not apart of the OS, and only microsoft was retarded enough to use it as the file manager inside the OS.
And technically, the file manager isn't part of the OS, either, except in the sense of (typically) being bundled with the OS. I worked for several years with people who were hung up on Norton Commander for their file manager.
IE on the other hand (squeaky Steve Ballmer voice) "is an Integral part of the Windows operating system".
They might be more competitive now had they followed his suggestion to split the company into 3 parts for OS, apps, and services.
to which companies? office to oracle? OS to dell? services to SAP??? oh the humanity!!!
No, silly. Split up into 3 independent companies like AT&T was split up into 7 "Baby Bell" companies.
Which then began the process of all merging to form one big company called AT&T.
(Yes, I know that SELinux is from the NSA, but the risk of putting in back-doors is just to big.)
Risk of all those eyeballs catching it just because it is open source? Just like they didn't catch serious vulnerabilities for years in one of the most used and critical open sourced programs SendMail?
Leaving aside the fact that SendMail is a horrible warty conglomeration of modules for mostly-extinct mail-routine systems supporting rules written in a cryptic macro language. SendMail is a mail application, and while secure mail is very important, security is the very purpose of SELinux.
Where security is one more thing to consider for apps like SendMail, it's the core function of SELinux, and core functions are the most-scrutinized of all, because when they don't work, the app itself is useless.
Aside from that, the mere fact that a large part of SELinux was created under NSA auspices is enough to get the tinfoil crowd digging into it looking for loopholes and backdoors. "Distrust the NSA" may be in the spotlight right now, but not everyone was complacent before.
I've grown wary of anything Fox says...
Not fox. Badger.
The problem with "corporations are not people" is I've yet to hear an argument about how that would work, that cannot be used to infringe on "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances".
I dislike the idea of Apple/Ford/McDonalds/etc having as much power as they do, but unless the plan we implement protects the NRA, the EFF, fuck, even PETA, I cannot support it.
I think that the key distinction is in whether the people of the corporation are representing themselves or are being co-opted to represent the corporation.
You can thus have double-representation or even contrary representation (in cases where "the corporation" says something at odds with the views of the majority of its employees and/or shareholders). Because whatever the individuals say themselves is being augmented or controverted by the corporate entity under the direction not of the majority, but the management.
Everyone - real or fictitious - deserves their day in court. Even animals sometimes get that. But the main problem with "Corporations are people" at the political level is that corporations represent a concentration of assets (money, manpower, and so forth) that few private individuals can muster. And often are partly or wholly immune even to the limitations that those few (shall we say 1%) of private individuals are subject to.
It isn't so much a matter of free speech as to who can field the biggest megaphone. The USA was founded upon the idea of one man one vote (not one DOLLAR, one vote), expanding the term to include women and freed slaves, but (so far) no corporation has been issued a voter registration card that I know of.
but i just got a cup of coffee instead
Next time go for the Victory Gin.
That entirely depends on what he's lying about. He's most certainly lying about his authorized level of access. This should teach the NSA and CIA that it's a stupid Idea to have Contractors as your network admins, and it's a good way of letting Spy's into your network. IT is not something a spy agency should farm out. However, the power point slides he released are probably a legit document. It's entirely possible for him to be lying, and a traitor.
One thing I've learned in a long and evil career in IT, much of it where I was part of the group that administered security is that there is a wide gap between what's authorized and what's actually possible for a particular individual. A VERY wide gap.
DB2 runs on 32- and 64-bit Intel and AMD processors, POWER processors, and System Z processors. Please tell us which of those is 40 years old.
I run DB2 on 64-bit Intel. I pray that one day it will add the same level of import/export capabilities that come for free with both MySQL and PostgreSQL. Or at least that I can do a dump from an i5 system to the Intel system.
For that matter, I would be overjoyed if they'd just do like everyone else and add a create-from-select SQL option.
Unless he got into office and realized he security is lot trickier than he thought. A politician that never changes their views is more or less deadwood.
We had 8 years of unchanging views, and deadwood would have been better. Deadwood just lies there, it doesn't keep straight on until it goes over a cliff and drags everyone else with it.
But changing your view to match an ugly reality is no better. Better to spend time working on changing reality.
I don't get why internships were ever unpaid in the first place.
Read Dickens. In the Good Old Days, an unpaid internship would have been a luxury. A lot of times, the intern had to pay the employer for the first couple of years.
I'm not so sure.
The US government isn't engaging in economic espionage (and they damned well should, since US businesses pay taxes as well).
I believe that actually there have been some cases come to light not all that long ago where information extracted via US government espionage has been found to have been given to US corporations for their private benefit.
Solar energy is not clean, nor will it ever be, unless we find a natural way of converting light into energy
Like, say, chlorophyll?
a fair/free trade local brand that the company owners first sold to me at a local farmer's market.
If you bought it direct from the owner at a farmer's market, it's not fair trade. "Fair trade" is indeed a trademark granted by FTO (Fairtrade labeling Organization) for products shipped from the producing countries to the consumer countries that supposedly reward the producers in a "fairer" way. "Supposedly", because all they (FLO and subsidiaries) do is be another middleman who wants their share (for "licensing" feeds, that stay in the consumer country). Those fees are then usually squandered on glossy marketing campaigns, and excessively priced office supplies and services ("excessively priced" because bought from companies operated by friends and families of FLO employees), with little left to help the coffee farmers.
All I can say is that the principals are themselves Kenyan and claim to be dealing directly with people they know back home in Kenya, with a tithe of the proceeds earmarked for community development back in Kenya. They have since graduated to the shelves of local big-name grocers, who presumably have at least some stake in making sure that nothing too extreme is happening.
If there are in fact middlemen eating up the lion's share of the proceeds (and the package claims that the company was founded to reduce that), and, if it's true that Fair Trade USA is gobbling a lot of it up in overpriced office supplies, at least I can console myself that it keeps office-supply companies in business. The original impetus for Fair Trade was that much of the middleman price of coffee was due to lenders whose rates and practices would make Shylock blush.
Thanks very much Juan!
That's Sr. Valdez, to you!
It may be both: evolution of the coffee rust driven by climate change.
Or it could be a lack of genetic diversity in the coffee trees. The fungus can spread through vast plantations of genetically similar arabica trees. The reason the rust has difficulty infecting wild trees may be because of their diversity, as well as their dispersion.
Disclaimer: I am a tea drinker.
There are 2 ways to grow coffee. You can clear land and plant trees industrial-fashion, which is very efficient - and more likely to expose you to mass infections. Or you can plant the trees in a habitat approximating their wild state, where the coffee trees are interspersed with non-coffee trees and grow shaded. One is efficient and makes for cheaper coffee. The other is not so efficient, but the quality of the coffee is a lot better. It's also likely to slow down propagation of epidemic infections, since there are natural barriers between the coffee trees.
From what I've seen of tea farming, there is no equivalent of "shade grown" tea, and the plant density is high enough that if a similar infection affecting tea plants broke out, it would spread like wildfire. So enjoy it while you can!