This only works if both sides have similar amounts of money. You cannot hire the best lawyers unless you can afford it.
Still, it's much better in the "equals" case at cutting down on frivolous lawsuits than the US model... but would change nothing with regard to RIAA's legal attack dogs.
They permit the death penalty. It's not like I was planning to go there while that situation persisted anyhow.
Seriously, what the hell do you expect of a country whose legislation permits the same country to selectively violate such a person's right to life towards whom they have state-level responsibility? Can anything that is not enslavement be expected of such a nation? "As for Nihon, we will be the ideal nation-state whenever it best suits us. When it does not, you get boned. Fundamentally."
Fuck 'em. And fuck the US, China, Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, basically every last damn African country and every other undercivilized shithole in the world.
Indeed. I'd guess that they're taught how to grind out Java with minimal skill rather than how to reason about object visibility and lifecycle. The market, apparently, needs shitty programmers too. What really sends me for a loop is that sometimes it's _universities_ that provide this shitty level of training.
But as I reasoned in the grandparent post, you can't balance out performance with micro-optimizations as most of them (like that one) are utterly and completely dominated by cache and (more importantly) memory latency. It's like saying that virtual methods are slow: perhaps if you call them in an inner loop but otherwise just bloody ignore them already.
Using myself as a reference point, I'd say that people who think about things like that are just wanking to avoid actual work. And that's cool -- there's only so many hard coding hours one can put in after all. But sometimes this turns into "improved" code that's difficult to read and nigh impossible to modify while preserving the "improved"-ness.
Oh deary me. A check on every call? That's what, a compare and a "not taken by default" conditional jump? Plus registration of WeakPtr objects with the GC, but that's really just the creation cost.
What's that one point zero two cycle cost these days... one ninth of a L1 cache hit's latency? Assuming an Athlon XP or 64 with a three instruction wide pipeline.
Also. What the heck are managed language programmers thinking about micro-performance anyhow?
The solution here is quite simple. Encrypt your sensitive data with GNU Privacy Guard, for your own public key. This leaves a header in the files produced which identifies your key pair by the key ID. Key IDs are used to e.g. download public keys from keyservers and are also indicated in message signatures, and the public key generally indicates the owner of the private half.
Then keep your key pair on a separate, well-hidden USB fob, or on a VPS somewhere in the deep, dark butts of Interring. Only keep it on a virtual memory filesystem on a system with encrypted swap partitions. If cops come bust your door down, they have to disconnect your computer in order to seize it. (You do have good passwords for when it's running, yeah?) This causes the copy of your private key to disappear.
Boom. Instant proof of not having the key.
You could also hide the private key in some obfuscated location on the filesystem. My desktop Debian GNU/Linux system has some 130,000 files installed on/usr alone; one file among the 2,800 files in/usr/lib that's got a valid ELF header but where the data doesn't make any sense isn't going to raise any eyebrows. Private keys are also rather small, and you could just stick it in any old JPEG image of your house on your hard drive with e.g. outguess.
This method can be extended to full-disk encryption if you encrypt the disk key with GPG to your own public key, and name the result something really obvious such as "disk_master_key.bin.gpg".
So yeah. Another law that's mostly useful for harassing hippies. Way to go. Very nice for making cops not look like the slimeballs they are.
Please note that Finland also had to fight the Germans after Finland made separate peace with the USSR at the end of the Continuation War. This one was known as the Lapland War, and it was mostly fought by teenagers since the treaty with the USSR somehow managed to disqualify anyone experienced from being in the army for real.
Nazi Germany was an ally to Finland, but they were a bitter enemy afterward. This is why any neo-nazi in Finland is by definition utterly fucking bonkers, just like an overt Stalinist would be (though perhaps a bit less than the same Stalinist in today's Russia).
The thing about GnuPG is that you generally want to use it in conjunction with an E-mail application. Thus rather than fancy GUIs for GnuPG, we have interface libraries so that e-mail program authors can facilitate integration into their programs.
See libgpgme (GPG made easy) for instance. It's quite simple for something as complex as public key encryption.
Still, I'd quite like to have a snazzier key management program, since it's a bit overkill to have every MUA reimplement that.
The Beavis version would be more along the lines of... "Uh huh, huh huh huh, uh huh, or something... I am CORNHOLIO! I need metal shavings for my bunghole! Bungggghoooole! Gagagagagaga. I have no bunghole! Or something."
What exactly is non-commercial these days? Depending on who you've been listening to, a mother breastfeeding her baby is commercial behaviour; clearly the infant is receiving a loan in the form of sustenance, in exchange for which the mother will in the future expect certain house chores to be performed.
Prosecutors in certain European countries have claimed that conveying non-Free music between friends is commercial behaviour even if no cash changes hands, because the recipient receives something that is worth money and the giver receives goodwill. Certainly it would seem that ms. Kroes has had one pulled over her this time.
I agree with all of this. Yet nothing would stop a purchaser of this stuff from going to court in a different US state, and starting the PR blitz all over again. Perhaps if they had a judge with a favourable disposition. Perhaps Novell's previous accomplishments could be chucked out, or delayed for years on end. (Though I gotta wonder... SCO did reach quite far with the "slander of title" thing, already.)
This whole SCO thing has now been around for what, four years? More? Groklaw's been around nearly forever, Intarbutts time. I don't believe that the press would have enough of a critical eye for the second SCO's press releases in, say, 2012. They certainly don't remember one year old things readily.
The SCO thrust caught fire, blew up and is sinking at a respectable clip. Since it became obvious that this would happen (sometime in the summer), SCO's puppet masters had them "re-focus" their business into "mobile solutions". We should all know that "mobile solutions" is where shitty ideas and companies re-focus in order to perhaps get a little bit more investments in; therefore we can consider that SCO is basically a walking corpse at this moment.
This "Unix IP" sale is so that SCO can be permitted to sink and Novell & IBM may attempt to get their butter & 2K monies (as in JA I AM MADE OF) from a shell of a shitheap, if they can. Once the "Unix IP" package is moved elsewhere, SCO's puppet masters may attempt to re-do this whole operation in a few years in a more favourable legal environment and perhaps a judge that is more "reliable" (i.e. in their pocket).
There's a minor hole in this coreography though. If 6 million has been offered for the "Unix IP" parcel, then it should be obviously outside the group of stuff that SCO may hammer to get out of deep red again. The money from the sale would obviously go to pay executive salaries (some 80,000$ a month, is it?) and lawyer fees (well past 5 million US$, I reckon). I suppose we'll see whether the SCO chapter 11 trustee is in the puppeteer's pocket or not.
I must say that Microsoft planned this one out pretty well. Of course their plan relies on corruption to smooth the way so that their side can execute their moves quicker than the opposition, as always, but still.
Pardon me, but I believe the correct expression here is "member of the national socialist worker's party of Germany, style of expression subdepartment". Please report to the incinerator at your earliest convenience. Heil Hitler!
Would you at least make sure that the story abstract defines all abbreviations and initialisms to which it refers? IMSLP? What on earth is that, and where is it, and what does it have to do with the story?
Also note that the correct way is to say "Internet Protocol (IP)", rather than "IP (Internet Protocol)". The first is civilized, and the second is look mom I know initialisms oh lawd I'm so l33tz0r.
China went from agrarian to industrialized through economic planning. Same as the Soviet Union. Planning, as it turns out, is a really good way to go from an agrarian economy to an industrialized one. (This is not to say that China didn't have all sorts of cool shit before the revolution; just that they were behind on industrialization.)
The crucial difference between e.g. Nigeria and the CCCP is that Nigeria lacks 1) an agrarian economy to start with (subsistence farming doesn't count) and 2) a strong government capable of enacting a planned economy without getting "bombed back to stone age" as you Yanks like to put it. In Nigeria's particular case, they're also hamstrung by Shell's private arm^W^Wsecurity contractors and its attendant corruption.
They're putting it to good use, right? Besides, claims of squatting would sound rather strange considering ifpi.com had lapsed in March already, and they're only twitching now that it's become a mite embarrassing.
Still, one shouldn't underestimate the potential for corruption in organizations like the WIPO. Especially since they have their hands in the large and varied jar of "intellectual property".
There's basically two kinds of religion. Think of them as two sides of the same coin, if you will -- people will call them by one name and rarely distinguish between heads and tails in routine discussion.
The first is the kind you see in the news about backwards rural USA. Well at least I keep hoping it's just the backwards, rural parts. Generally people also assume it in countries like Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan under the Taliban movement, Pakistan and so forth. In this kind, religion is used as an excuse to tell people what to think. "I am the priest, I interpret these words for you, therefore you must do as I say and think as I command". A vehicle for power, and a despicable abuse of basically any scripture from the pre-industrialized world and doubly so for the trusted position of a priest in a community. Powerful tie-ins with the local political system are more rule than the exception.
In this kind, the "points of faith" are taught as fixed, undebatable and in a way that one either accepts them verbatim, is ostracized or has their head lopped off or some other control mechanism comes into play. Generally just telling people as children that Jesus really hates them does the trick. The adherent's life is secondary to the requirements of the faith. Science? HERETIC, NONCONFORMIST, SEIZE HIM.
The second is where religion is a vehicle for philosophy, taken in its proper temporal and cultural context and interpreted and reinterpreted personally. In turn, where people aren't inclined to do the thinking for themselves, priests act as a sort of an outlet for wisdom, a weekly philosophy dispenser if you will, whether it is from whichever Book applies or just in general, so that the people have some sort of a minimum baseline of civilization even where they would turn to barbarianism otherwise.
Here, religion knows its proper position and sticks to it, taking a back seat to the adherents' own lives. Science pretty much just pops up where watered appropriately due to non-suppression of original thought, what with plenty of people being used to having thoughts for themselves even if they weren't scientists as such. Yet the faithful have some sort of a cultural backstop to fall back on in hard times (personal crises etc) without turning to juvenile, reductionist bo'shit like Ayn Rand or Nietzsche.
It's like in the Soviet Union. The cops acted, and now they must act as though they weren't acting for nothing. In order to save face, they're willing to drag anyone through any amount of shit, including jail time and absurd fines, just to seem godlike and 100% precise in everything they do. (Which is in itself absurd, since perfection is by definition unattainable.)
That's not quite correct. The thing that makes TPB on the right side of the law is that Swedish copyright law has not been modified to include contributory infringement, or anything equivalent to it. The Berne convention did not require it, and from the looks of things right now it'd be political suicide to pass such a thing in Sweden.
Indeed. At best, quantum computing will provide a different tradeoff from what is available right now. Perhaps it'll be a tradeoff into physical space.
Right now, it takes rather much physical space (racks of computers, cooling apparatuses, etc) and plenty of power to factor a single 1024-bit RSA key. Even then it takes enough time to be impractical as a routine operation. Certainly it can be scaled up to shorten the time, but diminishing returns apply and at the far end you end up banging your head against the limits of the interconnect used.
So yeah. The sun isn't setting on RSA quite yet. My current 2048-bit public key expires in 2012; given how fucking fast computers have got these past few years, I guess my next one is going to be at least 4096 bits. How much space and time is factoring one of those going to take, even with quantum computers?
Slashdot Mirror
It's also an Increase in seemingly Random capitalization of Words that are usually not Capitalized in written English.
This only works if both sides have similar amounts of money. You cannot hire the best lawyers unless you can afford it.
Still, it's much better in the "equals" case at cutting down on frivolous lawsuits than the US model... but would change nothing with regard to RIAA's legal attack dogs.
They permit the death penalty. It's not like I was planning to go there while that situation persisted anyhow.
Seriously, what the hell do you expect of a country whose legislation permits the same country to selectively violate such a person's right to life towards whom they have state-level responsibility? Can anything that is not enslavement be expected of such a nation? "As for Nihon, we will be the ideal nation-state whenever it best suits us. When it does not, you get boned. Fundamentally."
Fuck 'em. And fuck the US, China, Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, basically every last damn African country and every other undercivilized shithole in the world.
Indeed. I'd guess that they're taught how to grind out Java with minimal skill rather than how to reason about object visibility and lifecycle. The market, apparently, needs shitty programmers too. What really sends me for a loop is that sometimes it's _universities_ that provide this shitty level of training.
But as I reasoned in the grandparent post, you can't balance out performance with micro-optimizations as most of them (like that one) are utterly and completely dominated by cache and (more importantly) memory latency. It's like saying that virtual methods are slow: perhaps if you call them in an inner loop but otherwise just bloody ignore them already.
Using myself as a reference point, I'd say that people who think about things like that are just wanking to avoid actual work. And that's cool -- there's only so many hard coding hours one can put in after all. But sometimes this turns into "improved" code that's difficult to read and nigh impossible to modify while preserving the "improved"-ness.
That gives me an idea...
Oh deary me. A check on every call? That's what, a compare and a "not taken by default" conditional jump? Plus registration of WeakPtr objects with the GC, but that's really just the creation cost.
What's that one point zero two cycle cost these days... one ninth of a L1 cache hit's latency? Assuming an Athlon XP or 64 with a three instruction wide pipeline.
Also. What the heck are managed language programmers thinking about micro-performance anyhow?
The solution here is quite simple. Encrypt your sensitive data with GNU Privacy Guard, for your own public key. This leaves a header in the files produced which identifies your key pair by the key ID. Key IDs are used to e.g. download public keys from keyservers and are also indicated in message signatures, and the public key generally indicates the owner of the private half.
/usr alone; one file among the 2,800 files in /usr/lib that's got a valid ELF header but where the data doesn't make any sense isn't going to raise any eyebrows. Private keys are also rather small, and you could just stick it in any old JPEG image of your house on your hard drive with e.g. outguess.
Then keep your key pair on a separate, well-hidden USB fob, or on a VPS somewhere in the deep, dark butts of Interring. Only keep it on a virtual memory filesystem on a system with encrypted swap partitions. If cops come bust your door down, they have to disconnect your computer in order to seize it. (You do have good passwords for when it's running, yeah?) This causes the copy of your private key to disappear.
Boom. Instant proof of not having the key.
You could also hide the private key in some obfuscated location on the filesystem. My desktop Debian GNU/Linux system has some 130,000 files installed on
This method can be extended to full-disk encryption if you encrypt the disk key with GPG to your own public key, and name the result something really obvious such as "disk_master_key.bin.gpg".
So yeah. Another law that's mostly useful for harassing hippies. Way to go. Very nice for making cops not look like the slimeballs they are.
Please note that Finland also had to fight the Germans after Finland made separate peace with the USSR at the end of the Continuation War. This one was known as the Lapland War, and it was mostly fought by teenagers since the treaty with the USSR somehow managed to disqualify anyone experienced from being in the army for real.
Nazi Germany was an ally to Finland, but they were a bitter enemy afterward. This is why any neo-nazi in Finland is by definition utterly fucking bonkers, just like an overt Stalinist would be (though perhaps a bit less than the same Stalinist in today's Russia).
The thing about GnuPG is that you generally want to use it in conjunction with an E-mail application. Thus rather than fancy GUIs for GnuPG, we have interface libraries so that e-mail program authors can facilitate integration into their programs.
See libgpgme (GPG made easy) for instance. It's quite simple for something as complex as public key encryption.
Still, I'd quite like to have a snazzier key management program, since it's a bit overkill to have every MUA reimplement that.
The Beavis version would be more along the lines of... "Uh huh, huh huh huh, uh huh, or something... I am CORNHOLIO! I need metal shavings for my bunghole! Bungggghoooole! Gagagagagaga. I have no bunghole! Or something."
What exactly is non-commercial these days? Depending on who you've been listening to, a mother breastfeeding her baby is commercial behaviour; clearly the infant is receiving a loan in the form of sustenance, in exchange for which the mother will in the future expect certain house chores to be performed.
Prosecutors in certain European countries have claimed that conveying non-Free music between friends is commercial behaviour even if no cash changes hands, because the recipient receives something that is worth money and the giver receives goodwill. Certainly it would seem that ms. Kroes has had one pulled over her this time.
I agree with all of this. Yet nothing would stop a purchaser of this stuff from going to court in a different US state, and starting the PR blitz all over again. Perhaps if they had a judge with a favourable disposition. Perhaps Novell's previous accomplishments could be chucked out, or delayed for years on end. (Though I gotta wonder... SCO did reach quite far with the "slander of title" thing, already.)
This whole SCO thing has now been around for what, four years? More? Groklaw's been around nearly forever, Intarbutts time. I don't believe that the press would have enough of a critical eye for the second SCO's press releases in, say, 2012. They certainly don't remember one year old things readily.
The SCO thrust caught fire, blew up and is sinking at a respectable clip. Since it became obvious that this would happen (sometime in the summer), SCO's puppet masters had them "re-focus" their business into "mobile solutions". We should all know that "mobile solutions" is where shitty ideas and companies re-focus in order to perhaps get a little bit more investments in; therefore we can consider that SCO is basically a walking corpse at this moment.
This "Unix IP" sale is so that SCO can be permitted to sink and Novell & IBM may attempt to get their butter & 2K monies (as in JA I AM MADE OF) from a shell of a shitheap, if they can. Once the "Unix IP" package is moved elsewhere, SCO's puppet masters may attempt to re-do this whole operation in a few years in a more favourable legal environment and perhaps a judge that is more "reliable" (i.e. in their pocket).
There's a minor hole in this coreography though. If 6 million has been offered for the "Unix IP" parcel, then it should be obviously outside the group of stuff that SCO may hammer to get out of deep red again. The money from the sale would obviously go to pay executive salaries (some 80,000$ a month, is it?) and lawyer fees (well past 5 million US$, I reckon). I suppose we'll see whether the SCO chapter 11 trustee is in the puppeteer's pocket or not.
I must say that Microsoft planned this one out pretty well. Of course their plan relies on corruption to smooth the way so that their side can execute their moves quicker than the opposition, as always, but still.
Pardon me, but I believe the correct expression here is "member of the national socialist worker's party of Germany, style of expression subdepartment". Please report to the incinerator at your earliest convenience. Heil Hitler!
Sarcasm on the internet: a dead form of art since September 1993...
Would you at least make sure that the story abstract defines all abbreviations and initialisms to which it refers? IMSLP? What on earth is that, and where is it, and what does it have to do with the story?
Also note that the correct way is to say "Internet Protocol (IP)", rather than "IP (Internet Protocol)". The first is civilized, and the second is look mom I know initialisms oh lawd I'm so l33tz0r.
China went from agrarian to industrialized through economic planning. Same as the Soviet Union. Planning, as it turns out, is a really good way to go from an agrarian economy to an industrialized one. (This is not to say that China didn't have all sorts of cool shit before the revolution; just that they were behind on industrialization.)
The crucial difference between e.g. Nigeria and the CCCP is that Nigeria lacks 1) an agrarian economy to start with (subsistence farming doesn't count) and 2) a strong government capable of enacting a planned economy without getting "bombed back to stone age" as you Yanks like to put it. In Nigeria's particular case, they're also hamstrung by Shell's private arm^W^Wsecurity contractors and its attendant corruption.
They're putting it to good use, right? Besides, claims of squatting would sound rather strange considering ifpi.com had lapsed in March already, and they're only twitching now that it's become a mite embarrassing.
Still, one shouldn't underestimate the potential for corruption in organizations like the WIPO. Especially since they have their hands in the large and varied jar of "intellectual property".
Without France there wouldn't be an USA, just a greater Britain.
There's no proof, of course. No man has returned to tell the tale.
Rawr!
(... and that doesn't mean a fucking lot ...)
There's basically two kinds of religion. Think of them as two sides of the same coin, if you will -- people will call them by one name and rarely distinguish between heads and tails in routine discussion.
The first is the kind you see in the news about backwards rural USA. Well at least I keep hoping it's just the backwards, rural parts. Generally people also assume it in countries like Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan under the Taliban movement, Pakistan and so forth. In this kind, religion is used as an excuse to tell people what to think. "I am the priest, I interpret these words for you, therefore you must do as I say and think as I command". A vehicle for power, and a despicable abuse of basically any scripture from the pre-industrialized world and doubly so for the trusted position of a priest in a community. Powerful tie-ins with the local political system are more rule than the exception.
In this kind, the "points of faith" are taught as fixed, undebatable and in a way that one either accepts them verbatim, is ostracized or has their head lopped off or some other control mechanism comes into play. Generally just telling people as children that Jesus really hates them does the trick. The adherent's life is secondary to the requirements of the faith. Science? HERETIC, NONCONFORMIST, SEIZE HIM.
The second is where religion is a vehicle for philosophy, taken in its proper temporal and cultural context and interpreted and reinterpreted personally. In turn, where people aren't inclined to do the thinking for themselves, priests act as a sort of an outlet for wisdom, a weekly philosophy dispenser if you will, whether it is from whichever Book applies or just in general, so that the people have some sort of a minimum baseline of civilization even where they would turn to barbarianism otherwise.
Here, religion knows its proper position and sticks to it, taking a back seat to the adherents' own lives. Science pretty much just pops up where watered appropriately due to non-suppression of original thought, what with plenty of people being used to having thoughts for themselves even if they weren't scientists as such. Yet the faithful have some sort of a cultural backstop to fall back on in hard times (personal crises etc) without turning to juvenile, reductionist bo'shit like Ayn Rand or Nietzsche.
It's like in the Soviet Union. The cops acted, and now they must act as though they weren't acting for nothing. In order to save face, they're willing to drag anyone through any amount of shit, including jail time and absurd fines, just to seem godlike and 100% precise in everything they do. (Which is in itself absurd, since perfection is by definition unattainable.)
That's not quite correct. The thing that makes TPB on the right side of the law is that Swedish copyright law has not been modified to include contributory infringement, or anything equivalent to it. The Berne convention did not require it, and from the looks of things right now it'd be political suicide to pass such a thing in Sweden.
Indeed. At best, quantum computing will provide a different tradeoff from what is available right now. Perhaps it'll be a tradeoff into physical space.
Right now, it takes rather much physical space (racks of computers, cooling apparatuses, etc) and plenty of power to factor a single 1024-bit RSA key. Even then it takes enough time to be impractical as a routine operation. Certainly it can be scaled up to shorten the time, but diminishing returns apply and at the far end you end up banging your head against the limits of the interconnect used.
So yeah. The sun isn't setting on RSA quite yet. My current 2048-bit public key expires in 2012; given how fucking fast computers have got these past few years, I guess my next one is going to be at least 4096 bits. How much space and time is factoring one of those going to take, even with quantum computers?