the gov don't want you getting information off the oficial channels. stick to your tv and leave the internet alone.
This lot don't want people to take information from anywhere else than themselves, Fox News and the Washington Times.
But I suspect that the reason Blogs were in the simulation was because of their speed of reaction rather than anything else.
The biggest cyberwar effect being seen today is freebooting groups of partisans launching unofficial (and possibly sometimes official) actions. A big concern in the intel community is that these unofficial actors my tip an international incident into a crisis.
Take the current spate of attacks by Islamist hackers attacking targets in Denmark. Imagine if Denmark was a crazy-actor like Libya or Iran and a cyberattack by one of those unofficial freebooters took out a major infrastructure. Or imagine what might happen if Iranian hackers attacked Denmark, took out a major infrastructure and Danish hackers retaliated in kind.
Add freebooter hackers into an environment where diplomats are doing everything they can to avoid escalation and the potential for disaster is large.
UNIX was first implemented seriously on the PDP-11/20, which is best classed as a minicomputer. And while the system did indeed use terminals of a sort, they were dumb terminals. It's really not any different than how the keyboard, mouse and monitor are connected to your PC now.
It would have been quite a trick to design an operating system based on the principles of the network protocols later developed on it.
That said, the dumb terminal to mainframe concept was a big part of the UNIX legacy. UNIX was designed from the start as a multi-user environment for the individual user. The kernel supported multiple users but the tasks it was designed for were single user tasks, mostly programming. UNIX was a reaction against mainframe computing of its day.
The author is completely wrong when he says that Windows did not have any security until 2000. Windows NT was designed from the outset to obtain Orange book B2 certification. It would take a huge amount of work to get Linux to meet that criteria. It is generally considered to be 'B2 equivalent' but thats like saying that being ABD is the same thing as having a Phd, the only people who say that are ABD grad students.
Likewise the author is completely wrong about Microsoft being likely to take the O/S in that direction. Unix and VMS led the minicomputer revolution. Gates led the microcomputer revolution which was even more against the central processing store model of computing. If you look at all the early microcomputers you will find that they all ran Microsoft Basic. When IBM went to Microsoft while it was building the PC it was the BASIC they wanted. They only demanded a bootstrap loader when Kildal refused to deal with them for CPM.
The company that tried to make the network the operating system was Netscape. They failed for several reasons, the most important of which was you can't hire 5000 world class engineers in a year and even if you could that you would not end up with a world class team. MarcA's policy of never hiring anyone he thought might be smarter than him didn't help either.
The company that seems to be making the attempt now is Google. They might make it, at this point it is unclear.
Agreed. I might be tempted to use it for my personal domains, but given their desire to store and archive EVERYTHING I would never recommend it for corporate use if they plan to do this. The issue of e-mail trails in litigation alone would be enough to keep most organizations away from their service.
The concern there is not the fear of unearthing the evidence, its the sheer cost of processing the subpoena.
Shifting that cost to google sounds real sweet to me. Plus they can probably charge the plaintif for the reasonable costs if they are not a direct party to the suit.
So what you're saying is if I loose a lot of money because some badly written software crashed in the middle of a transaction, then the software vendor can't hide behind the clause in their EULA/license that basically states "use this at your own risk". If that's the case, why haven't Microsoft, or even some large open source projects, been sued over large bugs or security holes?
Something called the Hands test.
The expected harm is less than the cost of the remedy. It would be hard to convince the judge that the cost of avoiding the problem was less than the expected harm.
I'd love it if the Gov would just get the hell out of my life, and get back to the basics: Securing the nation from threats, internal and external.
You mean like unnecessary dependence on foreign oil?
How does keeping the government the hell out of your life fit with performing illegal warrantless wiretaps and being responsible for the largest growth in government spending since the Johnson administration?
How fscking stupid can you iberals be? Next thing the weather you don't like will be the fault of GWB
Only to the extent that he is doing nothing to stop global warming has done his best to prevent increasing fuel economy restrictions on cars and in particular SUV and has intentionally disrupted other nations attempts to address the problem.
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And like the sign in the garage that says 'we are not responsible for anything' it has no effect. The point of those disclaimers is that they discourage the ignorant from filing suit, not that they have legal effect. If you can proved that you suffered a loss as a result of negligence on the part of the garage then you can sue, the right to sue for negligence cannot be surrendered under contract law.
I don't think that the arguments being advanced by the Internet legal experts are the right ones for craigslist to use. They are the ones that those lawyers would like craigslist to use but that does not make them the ones most likely to win this particular case.
There is plenty of case law that has upheld the constitutionality of anti-discrimination laws such as the fair housing act. Congress did not intend to give online companies a pass on those acts and intentionally facilitate discrimination.
If craigslist did win that way it would be a shortlived victory. Congress would clarify its intentions soon enough.
The best defense for craigslist is to do what they are doing and saying that they have taken every reasonable precaution to ensure that discriminatory ads are not published and that these precautions are effective.
Saying 'not our problem' is the worst thing they could do. Courts do not like people telling them that the law does not apply to them.
Are there any cases of patents actually helping people/companies? Why do I see story after story of companies whipping out their patents and hurting technology by suing and/or demanding massive royalty payments? Can someone point to any good uses of patents?
Patents helping companies, yes, plenty. AT&T was founded on a patent.
Patents helping society, yes, some. It is doubtful that there would be as much medical research without the incentive of a patent.
Junk patents harming society, well lets start with Henry Ford.
Before he invented the assembly line Ford made a much more important step to making cheap motor cars possible. He took on the Selden patent and the automotive manufacturers cartel. At the time the cartel insisted that you could only get a patent license if you paid a large royalty per car and that the car cost at least a certain amount. The other motor manufacturers went along with it even though they knew the patent was junk because it kept their sales prices high.
Looking at what we know of the AT&T case I can not tell whether it is in fact an example of a good or a bad patent. AT&T spent billions a year on Bell labs. Bell labs was founded as a patent factory. AT&T spent billions on research and then made it back licensing the patents.
This is a fair deal provided that two important criteria are met. First the party that gets the patent should be the actual real inventor of the invention. This is where the USPTO goes wrong by not following its own rules. They allow patents despite copious prior art and they allow patents that are far too broad.
The second criteria is that the 'invention' must be something that would not have been discovered anyway. This is where the US patent law needs to be changed. The 'obvious' criteria is not working.
A third criteria some people are trying to propose is some sort of fence test. A big problem with software patents is that you don't know where the field of the invention starts or stops. I think that this is probably just another aspect of the second prong.
I have no problem with the patentability of the RSA algorithm. There are four or five other patents I have read that are justifiable. But 98% of the software patents issued are pure junk.
I think the thing that stinks is that they sit there, knowing full well that they hold the patent, and let the tech go into wide-spread use before informing anyone that they hold the patent.
I agree it stinks, in fact I have been working on a part 4 to my essay where I make the same point.
The problem is how to get from 'this stinks' as Plankton would say,to solving the problem without creating ways to game the patent system entirely.
One solution would be to have a requirement that patent holders have to monitor major standards efforts in their field of invention, but how do you arrive at a legal definition of a standards effort? How do you avoid the problem of someone creating a bogus standards organization for the sole purpose of creating an exclusion to a patent?
OK I know this particular problem would not make slashdotters upset. However it would likely allow the patent trolls to stop the law being changed.
I am not interested in just debating the problem ad nauseam on slashdot, I want to get it fixed. To do that we need to create a wedge between the patent trolls and the major corporate holders of IP.
If you look at what free software people want and where the interests of the big computer corporations lie there is a huge overlap, probably 95%. The problem is that a small number of ultras insist on all or nothing.
And I have a patent for Windows Viruses... so ya 'all better stop writing them or I'll sue your @ss.
It would not be the first.
A lot of companies with DRM schemes patent the circumvention technology so that they can sue companies that come out with decoding tools.
I don't know of a case in virus land, there would be a problem establishing novelty. But there certainly are people who would like to go after certain virus writers who try to avoid criminal liability by having other people distribute their code.
The patent system is an utter mess but I am not sure this is really evidence of abuse. AT&T may well have a genuine claim, they have certainly spent a huge amount developing compression technologies.
Bell labs was a patent factory, they invested billions a year on research. Bell labs is an example of how the system is meant to work. Spend a non trivial amount on research, get a limited term monopoly in the invention in return.
There are many other patent holders getting royalties from MPEG4, why not AT&T if they have a valid claim?
I am not opposed to software patents in general, just the junk ones, which means at least 98%. The real problem is that the USPTO does not follow the rules it is supposed to. See my blog essay.
One of the problems with the current patent system is that there are so many junk patents being circulated by the trolls that the claims of genuine inventors are devalued.
Actually you could have a causality loop but only of a type that converges and only if you exclude non determinism.
Considering the way quantum computers work I don't see why you should not be able to have a causality loop at the quantum level that converged by looping over time as well as space.
The problem is that you cannot have a non deterministic event in the loop if it is going to have a hope of converging.
This is the real flaw in the back to the future style scenarios, they only work in terms of the macro variables. Marty is born, the parents get married. For the series to converge it has to at a minimum end in Marty getting into the time machine at the precise instant he did in the original universe.
The guy who wrote the article simply does not understand the question that is being debated by the likes of Feynman et. al.
Everyone agrees that practical time travel is at the very least exceptionally unlikely. But whether our model of the universe excludes the posibility of time travel is another matter entirely.
Note that even if our model of the universe allows for time travel it does not mean that time travel is possible. Not least because we know that our model of the universe cannot possibly be completely right. Quantum physics provides an excelent model of the universe at a large scale, relativity provides a good model at the cosmological scale. The problem is that the two models are incompatible. At leas one of our models must be wrong. Most likely they are both approximations.
The other issue that the writer does not seem to grasp is that the ability for matter to travel through time and the ability of information to travel through time are very different issues. For meaningful time travel it has to be possible for information to move backwards in time and not just matter. Otherwise what would come out the other end would be a random soup of quantum particles, not the time traveller. This is the problem with black hole time travel, the most that can come out the other side is a random soup.
The 'proof' provided by the author only demonstrates that he does not have the slightest understanding of the subject he is pontificating on. dt/dt = 0??? No, all that shows is that the dimensions of the two quantities are the same. Besides x/x = 1 in most algebras.
So why is the only DRM that we ever hear about that which 'protects' entertainment media distributed by the large corporations?
Because very few people actually bother to find out what is really going on.
When Brian LaMacchia gave a talk on Palladium at MIT RMS didn't bother to show up till late, then at the end gave a long harangue that demonstrated only that he had not listened to a single word of the talk.
Trusted computing is not a very good copyright enforcement mechanism, it is as good as anything else that is going to be around and that is going to probably allow computers to do the same sort of stuff that dedicated media devices are allowed to play etc.
Trusted computing is a much better solution for the problem 'how can I know that this machine has not been tampered with', in other words to answer the Thomson paradox.
But.. much greater purchasing power? Not where I come from. Most of the money around here (Cincinnati... 2 million person metro area) belongs to Republican families.
If you look at the demographics support for gay marriage rises with education, as does wealth. Support for gay marriage is also greater amongst younger people than old people.
Sure there are a lot of people who vote republican who are very opposed to gay marriage. They are mostly angry working class males. The folk with the big houses who vote Republican are most likely doing it for the tax breaks.
Thats the way a party for the super rich has to operate. They know they can't deliver tax cuts or federal contracts to folk living in trailer parks. But what they can do is to give them someone to blame for their situation and then put a hate plank in their platform against that group. Its an old trick, been around even longer than the Republican party's Southern Strategy.
The Republican party is not run by gay haters, they have enough gay staffers to prove that. Its worse than that, the GOP is run by people who cynically manipulate anti-gay hatred as an electoral strategy.
Fortunately the majority has changed its attitude over the past few years. It is one thing to be against gay marriage in the abstract, quite another to be railing about Elton John or Rosanne Barr.
At this point the number of people strongly for gay marriage is much greater than the number strongly against. On top of that we have much greater purchasing power.
So the bottom line is that we can hurt the bottom line of Ford really bad when it decides to pander to bigotts by dropping ads in the gay press. Blizzard are about to find out the same.
Say what you want about it being Blizzard's game and they can set the rules blah blah, but they damn well better set the rules for everyone. This notion that some of their players aren't mature enough to be tolerant is bunk.
Corporations do not have a moral right to participate in bigotry.
We have the power of the pure here and damned right we are going to hurt them. As we just showed Ford motors, it is bad business to back hate groups.
Either Blizzard are going to eat humble pie pronto or they are going to face an expensive boycott.
That's it. The GPL grants you the further rights to take that modified code and change it any way you like. But it does not grant you the right to install that modified software back on that same machine.
But this is probably what you want with an embedded device. I do not want it to be possible for a hacker to compromise my WiFi router by reprogramming it with malicious code.
There are plenty of sources of cheap, unrestricted hardware. I would much prefer a definition of openess in terms of what you can do with the device. For example, I cannot control my Dish PVR from the Internet. Access to the source code allowing me to rewrite the code so that it supports this function is good. A built in, documented capability to accept programming commands via an RS232 or USB port is better.
The answer is purely economic -- don't buy a trusted platform based machine. Don't buy an OS that supports trusted platforms (Vista.) Don't allow friends, families or your business to buy trusted platform machines. If you're in a position to purchase hardware, get "no hardware enforcement of digital signatures" written as a requirement into your RFQs.
All Palladium does is to restrict access to certain pieces of data (i.e. encryption keys) so that they are only available to certain programs whose executeable has a specific hash value that run in a protected part of the O/S. It does not secure the boot path as most people seem to assume, that is simply not practical.
Linus makes the point that trusted hardware is not DRM. He then says that trusted hardware could be used to enforce a creative commons license by saying 'this content can never be encrypted'.
I think that Linus is probably wrong there, if you have restrictions such as the one he suggests they would interfere with the types of creative commons use we assume today.
But trusted hardware is not very much good for copyright protection DRM in any case. That is break once run anywhere, just the same as the CSS scheme in DVDs
The real value of DRM is in implementing operating system features like 'check this machine does not have a trojan' or controlling circulation of private documents.
They can start by eliminating (as I understand it) the use of patent fees to fund the USPTO. Those fees should go into the general fund and the USPTO should have a budget like everyone else. That way the USPTO isn't encouraged to allow every patent that crosses their path to be accepted just to collect the fees.
Dream on, the USPTO pays a substantial fraction of its revenues into the general fund, it is considered a profit center.
The USPTO does everything they can to avoid public review before issue - unlike every other Patent office. And its only the USPTO that causes this amount of problems issuing crap patents.
This has to be BS. There are very lareg corporations with financials much more complex than Gates' taxes.
This sounds ridiculous. Do Warren Buffet's taxes need the special computer also?
Not really, if you look at the IRS tax forms you will see that they only allow for figures up to $99,999,999. The back end software is probably all in COBOL. So there must be quite a few people whose return can not be submitted with the standard system.
Corporate taxes are submitted on different returns and are processed differently in any case. In the case of the largest companies each division will be filing taxes separately in any case.
Sounds to me as if the FBI were just trying it on.
The point of warrants is in part to make sure that people cannot go around nicking things by pretending to be police. In this case 30 computers probably represents a good $50,000 worth of capital and another $50,000 or so of installation effort. There has to be a good reason before that amount of money is impounded.
And the whole problem with snooping is that our federal system is based on "injury" if you aren't "injured" adaquately they won't hear your case... Privacy is a really hard thing to measure, because they are collecting the information to use against somebody later.
That is not going to be the problem. The problem will be lack of evidence that AT&T committed a tort.
What I expect is going to happen here is that AT&T is going to respond pretty quickly with a sworn statement to the effect that it has never participated in or facilitated any wiretap not authorized by a court order.
The reason Bush and co had to go to the NSA rather than the FBI is because the FBI has no choice but to get a warrant. The CEO of AT&T is not going to risk going to jail, without a court order that they can easily obtain the administration has absolutely no means of compulsion.
The NSA does not need cooperation from AT&T to conduct wiretapping any more than it needs cooperation from the local telcos when it taps foreign communications.
So the EFF is only doing AT&T a favor here, opportunity to set the record straight.
The Tragedy of the Commons has to do with the inefficient allocation of common resources.
The phrase began as a political slogan used to steal land from peasants. In England the process was known as the Enclosure movement, in Scotland the clearances.
The basic principle was that the local Lord would decide he would be quite a bit richer if he controled local land use absolutely. He would then go to parliament and after administering the requisite bribes a bill would be passed that would essentially transfer most of the best bits of land to the Lord leaving the peasants with a few uneconomic scraps that he would be able to buy up cheap the minute that any fell on hard times.
If you live in the US and have scottish ancestry the chances are your ancestors emigrated to escape from the clearances.
The point is that when people talk about economic efficiency they frequently mean efficient from a limited point of view.
The US Republican party pulled a similar trick with the California energy market. The system they chose was great for Enron, terrible for California tax payers.
Slashdot Mirror
This lot don't want people to take information from anywhere else than themselves, Fox News and the Washington Times.
But I suspect that the reason Blogs were in the simulation was because of their speed of reaction rather than anything else.
The biggest cyberwar effect being seen today is freebooting groups of partisans launching unofficial (and possibly sometimes official) actions. A big concern in the intel community is that these unofficial actors my tip an international incident into a crisis.
Take the current spate of attacks by Islamist hackers attacking targets in Denmark. Imagine if Denmark was a crazy-actor like Libya or Iran and a cyberattack by one of those unofficial freebooters took out a major infrastructure. Or imagine what might happen if Iranian hackers attacked Denmark, took out a major infrastructure and Danish hackers retaliated in kind.
Add freebooter hackers into an environment where diplomats are doing everything they can to avoid escalation and the potential for disaster is large.
It would have been quite a trick to design an operating system based on the principles of the network protocols later developed on it.
That said, the dumb terminal to mainframe concept was a big part of the UNIX legacy. UNIX was designed from the start as a multi-user environment for the individual user. The kernel supported multiple users but the tasks it was designed for were single user tasks, mostly programming. UNIX was a reaction against mainframe computing of its day.
The author is completely wrong when he says that Windows did not have any security until 2000. Windows NT was designed from the outset to obtain Orange book B2 certification. It would take a huge amount of work to get Linux to meet that criteria. It is generally considered to be 'B2 equivalent' but thats like saying that being ABD is the same thing as having a Phd, the only people who say that are ABD grad students.
Likewise the author is completely wrong about Microsoft being likely to take the O/S in that direction. Unix and VMS led the minicomputer revolution. Gates led the microcomputer revolution which was even more against the central processing store model of computing. If you look at all the early microcomputers you will find that they all ran Microsoft Basic. When IBM went to Microsoft while it was building the PC it was the BASIC they wanted. They only demanded a bootstrap loader when Kildal refused to deal with them for CPM.
The company that tried to make the network the operating system was Netscape. They failed for several reasons, the most important of which was you can't hire 5000 world class engineers in a year and even if you could that you would not end up with a world class team. MarcA's policy of never hiring anyone he thought might be smarter than him didn't help either.
The company that seems to be making the attempt now is Google. They might make it, at this point it is unclear.
The concern there is not the fear of unearthing the evidence, its the sheer cost of processing the subpoena.
Shifting that cost to google sounds real sweet to me. Plus they can probably charge the plaintif for the reasonable costs if they are not a direct party to the suit.
Something called the Hands test.
The expected harm is less than the cost of the remedy. It would be hard to convince the judge that the cost of avoiding the problem was less than the expected harm.
Software liability lawsuits will come though.
You mean like unnecessary dependence on foreign oil?
How does keeping the government the hell out of your life fit with performing illegal warrantless wiretaps and being responsible for the largest growth in government spending since the Johnson administration?
Only to the extent that he is doing nothing to stop global warming has done his best to prevent increasing fuel economy restrictions on cars and in particular SUV and has intentionally disrupted other nations attempts to address the problem.
And like the sign in the garage that says 'we are not responsible for anything' it has no effect. The point of those disclaimers is that they discourage the ignorant from filing suit, not that they have legal effect. If you can proved that you suffered a loss as a result of negligence on the part of the garage then you can sue, the right to sue for negligence cannot be surrendered under contract law.
I don't think that the arguments being advanced by the Internet legal experts are the right ones for craigslist to use. They are the ones that those lawyers would like craigslist to use but that does not make them the ones most likely to win this particular case.
There is plenty of case law that has upheld the constitutionality of anti-discrimination laws such as the fair housing act. Congress did not intend to give online companies a pass on those acts and intentionally facilitate discrimination.
If craigslist did win that way it would be a shortlived victory. Congress would clarify its intentions soon enough.
The best defense for craigslist is to do what they are doing and saying that they have taken every reasonable precaution to ensure that discriminatory ads are not published and that these precautions are effective.
Saying 'not our problem' is the worst thing they could do. Courts do not like people telling them that the law does not apply to them.
Patents helping companies, yes, plenty. AT&T was founded on a patent.
Patents helping society, yes, some. It is doubtful that there would be as much medical research without the incentive of a patent.
Junk patents harming society, well lets start with Henry Ford.
Before he invented the assembly line Ford made a much more important step to making cheap motor cars possible. He took on the Selden patent and the automotive manufacturers cartel. At the time the cartel insisted that you could only get a patent license if you paid a large royalty per car and that the car cost at least a certain amount. The other motor manufacturers went along with it even though they knew the patent was junk because it kept their sales prices high.
Looking at what we know of the AT&T case I can not tell whether it is in fact an example of a good or a bad patent. AT&T spent billions a year on Bell labs. Bell labs was founded as a patent factory. AT&T spent billions on research and then made it back licensing the patents.
This is a fair deal provided that two important criteria are met. First the party that gets the patent should be the actual real inventor of the invention. This is where the USPTO goes wrong by not following its own rules. They allow patents despite copious prior art and they allow patents that are far too broad.
The second criteria is that the 'invention' must be something that would not have been discovered anyway. This is where the US patent law needs to be changed. The 'obvious' criteria is not working.
A third criteria some people are trying to propose is some sort of fence test. A big problem with software patents is that you don't know where the field of the invention starts or stops. I think that this is probably just another aspect of the second prong.
I have no problem with the patentability of the RSA algorithm. There are four or five other patents I have read that are justifiable. But 98% of the software patents issued are pure junk.
I agree it stinks, in fact I have been working on a part 4 to my essay where I make the same point.
The problem is how to get from 'this stinks' as Plankton would say,to solving the problem without creating ways to game the patent system entirely.
One solution would be to have a requirement that patent holders have to monitor major standards efforts in their field of invention, but how do you arrive at a legal definition of a standards effort? How do you avoid the problem of someone creating a bogus standards organization for the sole purpose of creating an exclusion to a patent?
OK I know this particular problem would not make slashdotters upset. However it would likely allow the patent trolls to stop the law being changed.
I am not interested in just debating the problem ad nauseam on slashdot, I want to get it fixed. To do that we need to create a wedge between the patent trolls and the major corporate holders of IP.
If you look at what free software people want and where the interests of the big computer corporations lie there is a huge overlap, probably 95%. The problem is that a small number of ultras insist on all or nothing.
It would not be the first.
A lot of companies with DRM schemes patent the circumvention technology so that they can sue companies that come out with decoding tools.
I don't know of a case in virus land, there would be a problem establishing novelty. But there certainly are people who would like to go after certain virus writers who try to avoid criminal liability by having other people distribute their code.
Bell labs was a patent factory, they invested billions a year on research. Bell labs is an example of how the system is meant to work. Spend a non trivial amount on research, get a limited term monopoly in the invention in return.
There are many other patent holders getting royalties from MPEG4, why not AT&T if they have a valid claim?
I am not opposed to software patents in general, just the junk ones, which means at least 98%. The real problem is that the USPTO does not follow the rules it is supposed to. See my blog essay.
One of the problems with the current patent system is that there are so many junk patents being circulated by the trolls that the claims of genuine inventors are devalued.
Considering the way quantum computers work I don't see why you should not be able to have a causality loop at the quantum level that converged by looping over time as well as space.
The problem is that you cannot have a non deterministic event in the loop if it is going to have a hope of converging.
This is the real flaw in the back to the future style scenarios, they only work in terms of the macro variables. Marty is born, the parents get married. For the series to converge it has to at a minimum end in Marty getting into the time machine at the precise instant he did in the original universe.
Everyone agrees that practical time travel is at the very least exceptionally unlikely. But whether our model of the universe excludes the posibility of time travel is another matter entirely.
Note that even if our model of the universe allows for time travel it does not mean that time travel is possible. Not least because we know that our model of the universe cannot possibly be completely right. Quantum physics provides an excelent model of the universe at a large scale, relativity provides a good model at the cosmological scale. The problem is that the two models are incompatible. At leas one of our models must be wrong. Most likely they are both approximations.
The other issue that the writer does not seem to grasp is that the ability for matter to travel through time and the ability of information to travel through time are very different issues. For meaningful time travel it has to be possible for information to move backwards in time and not just matter. Otherwise what would come out the other end would be a random soup of quantum particles, not the time traveller. This is the problem with black hole time travel, the most that can come out the other side is a random soup.
The 'proof' provided by the author only demonstrates that he does not have the slightest understanding of the subject he is pontificating on. dt/dt = 0??? No, all that shows is that the dimensions of the two quantities are the same. Besides x/x = 1 in most algebras.
Because very few people actually bother to find out what is really going on.
When Brian LaMacchia gave a talk on Palladium at MIT RMS didn't bother to show up till late, then at the end gave a long harangue that demonstrated only that he had not listened to a single word of the talk.
Trusted computing is not a very good copyright enforcement mechanism, it is as good as anything else that is going to be around and that is going to probably allow computers to do the same sort of stuff that dedicated media devices are allowed to play etc.
Trusted computing is a much better solution for the problem 'how can I know that this machine has not been tampered with', in other words to answer the Thomson paradox.
If you look at the demographics support for gay marriage rises with education, as does wealth. Support for gay marriage is also greater amongst younger people than old people.
Sure there are a lot of people who vote republican who are very opposed to gay marriage. They are mostly angry working class males. The folk with the big houses who vote Republican are most likely doing it for the tax breaks.
Thats the way a party for the super rich has to operate. They know they can't deliver tax cuts or federal contracts to folk living in trailer parks. But what they can do is to give them someone to blame for their situation and then put a hate plank in their platform against that group. Its an old trick, been around even longer than the Republican party's Southern Strategy.
The Republican party is not run by gay haters, they have enough gay staffers to prove that. Its worse than that, the GOP is run by people who cynically manipulate anti-gay hatred as an electoral strategy.
At this point the number of people strongly for gay marriage is much greater than the number strongly against. On top of that we have much greater purchasing power.
So the bottom line is that we can hurt the bottom line of Ford really bad when it decides to pander to bigotts by dropping ads in the gay press. Blizzard are about to find out the same.
Bigottry is bad for business.
They could adopt like my friends across the road did.
Corporations do not have a moral right to participate in bigotry.
We have the power of the pure here and damned right we are going to hurt them. As we just showed Ford motors, it is bad business to back hate groups.
Either Blizzard are going to eat humble pie pronto or they are going to face an expensive boycott.
But this is probably what you want with an embedded device. I do not want it to be possible for a hacker to compromise my WiFi router by reprogramming it with malicious code.
There are plenty of sources of cheap, unrestricted hardware. I would much prefer a definition of openess in terms of what you can do with the device. For example, I cannot control my Dish PVR from the Internet. Access to the source code allowing me to rewrite the code so that it supports this function is good. A built in, documented capability to accept programming commands via an RS232 or USB port is better.
The answer is purely economic -- don't buy a trusted platform based machine. Don't buy an OS that supports trusted platforms (Vista.) Don't allow friends, families or your business to buy trusted platform machines. If you're in a position to purchase hardware, get "no hardware enforcement of digital signatures" written as a requirement into your RFQs.
That is not how Palladium works, as this article explains.
All Palladium does is to restrict access to certain pieces of data (i.e. encryption keys) so that they are only available to certain programs whose executeable has a specific hash value that run in a protected part of the O/S. It does not secure the boot path as most people seem to assume, that is simply not practical.
I think that Linus is probably wrong there, if you have restrictions such as the one he suggests they would interfere with the types of creative commons use we assume today.
But trusted hardware is not very much good for copyright protection DRM in any case. That is break once run anywhere, just the same as the CSS scheme in DVDs
The real value of DRM is in implementing operating system features like 'check this machine does not have a trojan' or controlling circulation of private documents.
Dream on, the USPTO pays a substantial fraction of its revenues into the general fund, it is considered a profit center.
The USPTO does everything they can to avoid public review before issue - unlike every other Patent office. And its only the USPTO that causes this amount of problems issuing crap patents.
Not really, if you look at the IRS tax forms you will see that they only allow for figures up to $99,999,999. The back end software is probably all in COBOL. So there must be quite a few people whose return can not be submitted with the standard system.
Corporate taxes are submitted on different returns and are processed differently in any case. In the case of the largest companies each division will be filing taxes separately in any case.
The point of warrants is in part to make sure that people cannot go around nicking things by pretending to be police. In this case 30 computers probably represents a good $50,000 worth of capital and another $50,000 or so of installation effort. There has to be a good reason before that amount of money is impounded.
That is not going to be the problem. The problem will be lack of evidence that AT&T committed a tort.
What I expect is going to happen here is that AT&T is going to respond pretty quickly with a sworn statement to the effect that it has never participated in or facilitated any wiretap not authorized by a court order.
The reason Bush and co had to go to the NSA rather than the FBI is because the FBI has no choice but to get a warrant. The CEO of AT&T is not going to risk going to jail, without a court order that they can easily obtain the administration has absolutely no means of compulsion.
The NSA does not need cooperation from AT&T to conduct wiretapping any more than it needs cooperation from the local telcos when it taps foreign communications.
So the EFF is only doing AT&T a favor here, opportunity to set the record straight.
The phrase began as a political slogan used to steal land from peasants. In England the process was known as the Enclosure movement, in Scotland the clearances.
The basic principle was that the local Lord would decide he would be quite a bit richer if he controled local land use absolutely. He would then go to parliament and after administering the requisite bribes a bill would be passed that would essentially transfer most of the best bits of land to the Lord leaving the peasants with a few uneconomic scraps that he would be able to buy up cheap the minute that any fell on hard times.
If you live in the US and have scottish ancestry the chances are your ancestors emigrated to escape from the clearances.
The point is that when people talk about economic efficiency they frequently mean efficient from a limited point of view.
The US Republican party pulled a similar trick with the California energy market. The system they chose was great for Enron, terrible for California tax payers.