Controlling access to copyrighted media is not the DRM BIOS's direct role; its role is to ensure that the operating system that boots can be trusted to do so.
Right now, a secure trusted music player may ensure that the copyrighted media it plays never ends up in the wrong hands (i.e., the user's); however, there's nothing (in theory) stopping the no-good thieving user from replacing the audio device driver with one which makes a copy of the unencrypted sample stream elsewhere. If the OS requires drivers to be signed, then the OS can be hacked; they can boot from a hacked kernel which doesn't enforce this requirement.
This is where the DRM BIOS comes in; under it, all bootup code would have to be digitally signed. Any code that's signed would, in theory, continue the chain and not load any other code which is untrusted in a privileged capacity. Only once the black iron sandbox is built does any potentially untrustworthy code get loaded, where it can't do anything untoward.
Incidentally, this may be compatible with the GPL. Linux could still be distributed with source code you could look at; just that if you compiled your own kernel, it wouldn't boot on your machine (at least not on the bare metal).
Britain will sign this treaty every bit as quickly as it signed the other WIPO treaties (including the one that mandated the DMCA and EUCD), and signed up for US-style software patents. The British government, like any other McWorld government, takes orders from multinational corporations. After all, if they lose investor confidence, there goes the economy.
If anybody is likely to hold out it would probably be someone like Brazil.
AFAIK, GPS and Galileo work on the same principles (constellations of satellites sending timed signals, with the unit triangulating them). Correct me if I'm wrong, but couldn't you have a unit in which all the GPS/Galileo-specific functionality is in software run by a DSP chip connected to sufficiently general-purpose hardware for picking up signals from satellites, for little if any more than the cost of a hardwired GPS/Galileo unit?
The character development arcs in Chicken Run were done to Hollywood formula (i.e., the Mel Gibson character's journey of self-discovery). It could well have been plotted using the screenwriting software commonly used in Hollywood (and probably was).
The Wallace & Gromit films, in contrast, have a charming naivete about them. The characters aren't instances of a Hollywood-developed psychological model, embodying drives and motivations and moving along like cogs in a well-oiled machine, but just characters, gleefully violating the rules. To a Hollywood studio executive, this would be crude, sloppy characterization (and if Hollywood money was involved, it would be sent to a script doctor to fix it before it ever got to filming); yet it works, and seems to have more soul than the products of Hollywood.
Making a receiver flexible enough to speak GPS, Galileo and even Glonass if one wants it should be just a matter or filling a black box with sufficiently general-purpose components to be adaptable and writing the firmware in such a way to configure them to understand the appropriate system. In the age of software radio, FPGAs and reconfigurable processors, this isn't far-fetched. Such a system might be marginally more expensive than a GPS-only receiver, but the added flexibility would more than make up for it, and economies of scale would do the rest.
The problem with VST plugins is that most of the commercial ones use various low-level API calls to implement copy protection. (The music software industry is very much into copy protection of all sorts, sometimes in three different layers for one app.) This is the reason why MacOS 9 VST plugins are unsupported under OSX: because enough plugins wouldn't work that it wouldn't make commercial sense to implement such a feature.
I'm not sure if this is the case for Windows VST plugins; I tried a few with an early version of vstserver, and was able to get the MDA free plugins working, though I had no luck with commercial plugins like Steinberg's LM4 and Waldorf Attack.
I suspect that the shape of the jaw and cheekbones would be the obvious thing. There are probably sets of measurements which can be plugged into a formula to give a maleness/femaleness index.
Re: Okay, call me crazy
on
The Face Detector
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The human brain is not a general-purpose computer. There are specialised modules, which evolved by natural selection, for various tasks which were evolutionarily adaptive in the ancestral environment. Which is to say, if being able to perform one type of mental processing quickly helped your hunter-gatherer ancestors survive, find fit mates and not get cheated or otherwise bested by competitors, it gradually evolved into an optimised piece of neural hardware, its template coded in their DNA. Being able to recognise faces quickly (and thus be able to match an image of someone to what you know about them and their reputation) was a major advantage in a highly social environment, and so evolved into a highly optimised module.
Sometimes, through various disorders, these modules don't work properly. Which is why conditions such as autism (dysfunction of the relating-to-other-people module), schizophrenia (inability to distinguish between internal and external stimuli), face blindness (the face-recognition module). and so on, can exist. Sure, a face-blind person can step themselves through a face-recognition algorithm, but it's slow and laborious, and by the time you're done, that cute girl/guy you're wondering whether you recognised has moved on.
Both the US and Soviet space programmes were bootstrapped on rocket science captured from Nazi Germany after WW2. German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun became one of the pioneers of the US space programme.
One could say that rocketry was a pan-European endeavour, having been developed in Germany and tested in England.
Apparently Tony Blair is looking at abolishing or severely reducing the license fee when the BBC charter is next up for review in 2006. Mind you, I suspect he's more concerned about remaining in a certain Mr. Murdoch's good books than about the grievious injustice of levying it.
I wonder if most Britons would really want to cast off the oppressive yoke of the television license, if it meant being limited to US-style profit-oriented broadcasters and possibly an enfeebled, PBS-like BBC at the mercy of politicians.
You can still find boxes of Kodak Gold Ultima discs at computer swap meets in Australia from time to time. They look authentic, and the media reports itself as "Kodak Japan" when burned.
Have you tried doing anything with the open-source Java implementations (kaffe and the open-source implementation of the class libraries)? Virtually nothing non-trivial will run with them, and if one wants to run anything in Java, one needs to get the Sun J2RE/J2SDK.
An open specification doesn't mean that compatible open-source implementations will exist; look at GNUStep, for example. (How long have they been working on getting OpenStep working? 10 years or something?)
MP3s may not be going anywhere, but the software to work with them might. A patentholder is entitled to prohibit unauthorised implementations of their patents. All Fraunhofer has to do is send cease & desist letters to the websites hosting LAME, xmms and such (which they are entitled to do under patent law), and the software disappears. They could also C&D artists/websites publishing (non-copyright-violating) music in MP3 formats; in fact, the infrastructure for tracking down and suing large numbers of internet users already exists, courtesy of the RIAA, and we may well see FhG borrow it to sort out their own intellectual-property violation problem. (Especially if the RIAA pay them to do so.)
From what I gather of Pinker's theory is that language is implemented by a dedicated module in the human brain. This module is just neurological hardware, operating entirely by physical means, and does not invoke any sort of deus ex machina; therefore, what it does is an algorithm.
The language module does invoke other parts of the brain, such as general knowledge; however, there's nothing in the process that depends on it being in a human brain. Given that cognition is a physical process, one could postulate a computer program that could achieve the same results, even if drawing on a very large database of cultural information. The suggestion that language is "innately human" sounds a bit too much like carbon chauvinism, the belief that intelligence is an exclusive property of carbon-based life.
In Eastern Europe, where credit card fraud is a huge problem, card companies have started sending SMS messages to cardholders every time their card is charged, allowing those whose card numbers have been stolen to cancel them in time. Hopefully this idea will spread elsewhere.
Under the FCC Broadcast Flag mandate, open-source HDTV-decoding software is illegal. If Adobe's actions are the result of government pressure, it is not hard to imagine an attempt to criminalise the distribution of source code which could be used to compile image-processing applications that illegally bypass government-mandated currency checks.
The option to sort files in case-insensitive alphabetical order. Yes, I know that UNIX is case-sensitive and most Linux filesystems are as well, but from a human interface point of view, it makes sense to put "Pictures" and "pictures" together, rather than half a listbox away.
Bookmarks/favourites, either global or on a per-application basis. MacOS 9 had this in its file selector, and it was rather useful. You could bookmark folders you looked in often, and saved a lot of filesystem-traversing time.
It would make sense for the next generation of DVD formats to be based not on just a disc, but on a disc in a cartridge, with an optional smart-card chip embedded. This would have several advantages:
Robustness: rental DVDs often require replacement due to scratching, and usually don't last very long. Cartridges would prevent this.
User settings: The smartcard chip in the cartridge could remember where the disc was last stopped, which audio track/subtitle setting was in effect, &c.
Copy Protection/Access Control. Yes, everyone here knows it's evil, but Hollywood love this shit. And the DVD encryption is obviously not strong enough, otherwise people wouldn't be ripping DVDs to DivX files on their laptops. With a smart chip, the disc can be encrypted with a key that has to be obtained from the chip. The chip can regulate the issuing of the decryption key (or keys), for example, with consumer versions only playing on one authorised device. Rental versions could be reset at the video library, with the chip preventing playback after the rental period expires. If the logic is in the chip, studios are free to impose additional restriction (i.e., not playing on general-purpose computers either at all or without a certain level of trusted-client authentication/cooperation from the OS).
From the content industry's point of view, those arguments should be compelling.
I have a kspread spreadsheet keeping track of my CD collection, which isn't huge. It takes the best part of a minute to load it in, and changing cells causes it to freeze for long periods of time.
I'm not sure whether this is just kspread being badly written and inefficient or an intrinsic result of KDE infrastructure overheads, though I suspect the latter. There have been times when I tried starting the KDE file manager, or logging into KDE desktops, and found myself waiting minutes in doing so. This is unacceptable.
I've got an Archos Jukebox Recorder (the older, pre-video model), and am very happy with it. It's a USB2 mass storage device, which means I can mount it and copy files to/from it without using any proprietary software, and it also does recording (and did so a year or two before Apple added recording to the iPod). The internal firmware is nothing to write home about, but there exists open-source replacement firmware for it which is excellent. Also, its batteries are standard NiMH AA batteries which are easily replaced when they wear out.
I haven't looked at the new Archos units, but, IMHO, Archos tend to be first in terms of adding features (look at the plug-in modules for the Gmini, for example), and tend to have fairly sensible design.
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Controlling access to copyrighted media is not the DRM BIOS's direct role; its role is to ensure that the operating system that boots can be trusted to do so.
Right now, a secure trusted music player may ensure that the copyrighted media it plays never ends up in the wrong hands (i.e., the user's); however, there's nothing (in theory) stopping the no-good thieving user from replacing the audio device driver with one which makes a copy of the unencrypted sample stream elsewhere. If the OS requires drivers to be signed, then the OS can be hacked; they can boot from a hacked kernel which doesn't enforce this requirement.
This is where the DRM BIOS comes in; under it, all bootup code would have to be digitally signed. Any code that's signed would, in theory, continue the chain and not load any other code which is untrusted in a privileged capacity. Only once the black iron sandbox is built does any potentially untrustworthy code get loaded, where it can't do anything untoward.
Incidentally, this may be compatible with the GPL. Linux could still be distributed with source code you could look at; just that if you compiled your own kernel, it wouldn't boot on your machine (at least not on the bare metal).
Britain will sign this treaty every bit as quickly as it signed the other WIPO treaties (including the one that mandated the DMCA and EUCD), and signed up for US-style software patents. The British government, like any other McWorld government, takes orders from multinational corporations. After all, if they lose investor confidence, there goes the economy.
If anybody is likely to hold out it would probably be someone like Brazil.
AFAIK, GPS and Galileo work on the same principles (constellations of satellites sending timed signals, with the unit triangulating them). Correct me if I'm wrong, but couldn't you have a unit in which all the GPS/Galileo-specific functionality is in software run by a DSP chip connected to sufficiently general-purpose hardware for picking up signals from satellites, for little if any more than the cost of a hardwired GPS/Galileo unit?
The character development arcs in Chicken Run were done to Hollywood formula (i.e., the Mel Gibson character's journey of self-discovery). It could well have been plotted using the screenwriting software commonly used in Hollywood (and probably was).
The Wallace & Gromit films, in contrast, have a charming naivete about them. The characters aren't instances of a Hollywood-developed psychological model, embodying drives and motivations and moving along like cogs in a well-oiled machine, but just characters, gleefully violating the rules. To a Hollywood studio executive, this would be crude, sloppy characterization (and if Hollywood money was involved, it would be sent to a script doctor to fix it before it ever got to filming); yet it works, and seems to have more soul than the products of Hollywood.
If open sourcing could save Iridium, who knows what it could do for satellite navigation.
Making a receiver flexible enough to speak GPS, Galileo and even Glonass if one wants it should be just a matter or filling a black box with sufficiently general-purpose components to be adaptable and writing the firmware in such a way to configure them to understand the appropriate system. In the age of software radio, FPGAs and reconfigurable processors, this isn't far-fetched. Such a system might be marginally more expensive than a GPS-only receiver, but the added flexibility would more than make up for it, and economies of scale would do the rest.
The problem with VST plugins is that most of the commercial ones use various low-level API calls to implement copy protection. (The music software industry is very much into copy protection of all sorts, sometimes in three different layers for one app.) This is the reason why MacOS 9 VST plugins are unsupported under OSX: because enough plugins wouldn't work that it wouldn't make commercial sense to implement such a feature.
I'm not sure if this is the case for Windows VST plugins; I tried a few with an early version of vstserver, and was able to get the MDA free plugins working, though I had no luck with commercial plugins like Steinberg's LM4 and Waldorf Attack.
I suspect that the shape of the jaw and cheekbones would be the obvious thing. There are probably sets of measurements which can be plugged into a formula to give a maleness/femaleness index.
The human brain is not a general-purpose computer. There are specialised modules, which evolved by natural selection, for various tasks which were evolutionarily adaptive in the ancestral environment. Which is to say, if being able to perform one type of mental processing quickly helped your hunter-gatherer ancestors survive, find fit mates and not get cheated or otherwise bested by competitors, it gradually evolved into an optimised piece of neural hardware, its template coded in their DNA. Being able to recognise faces quickly (and thus be able to match an image of someone to what you know about them and their reputation) was a major advantage in a highly social environment, and so evolved into a highly optimised module.
Sometimes, through various disorders, these modules don't work properly. Which is why conditions such as autism (dysfunction of the relating-to-other-people module), schizophrenia (inability to distinguish between internal and external stimuli), face blindness (the face-recognition module). and so on, can exist. Sure, a face-blind person can step themselves through a face-recognition algorithm, but it's slow and laborious, and by the time you're done, that cute girl/guy you're wondering whether you recognised has moved on.
Both the US and Soviet space programmes were bootstrapped on rocket science captured from Nazi Germany after WW2. German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun became one of the pioneers of the US space programme.
One could say that rocketry was a pan-European endeavour, having been developed in Germany and tested in England.
If your CDs were stolen, so was your license to the music on them. As such, your spindle of CD-Rs is illegal.
Apparently Tony Blair is looking at abolishing or severely reducing the license fee when the BBC charter is next up for review in 2006. Mind you, I suspect he's more concerned about remaining in a certain Mr. Murdoch's good books than about the grievious injustice of levying it.
I wonder if most Britons would really want to cast off the oppressive yoke of the television license, if it meant being limited to US-style profit-oriented broadcasters and possibly an enfeebled, PBS-like BBC at the mercy of politicians.
You can still find boxes of Kodak Gold Ultima discs at computer swap meets in Australia from time to time. They look authentic, and the media reports itself as "Kodak Japan" when burned.
These use a dark blue (Super AZO) dye and are said to burn at up to 52x. The label also gives a 100-year archival life.
Have you tried doing anything with the open-source Java implementations (kaffe and the open-source implementation of the class libraries)? Virtually nothing non-trivial will run with them, and if one wants to run anything in Java, one needs to get the Sun J2RE/J2SDK.
An open specification doesn't mean that compatible open-source implementations will exist; look at GNUStep, for example. (How long have they been working on getting OpenStep working? 10 years or something?)
MP3s may not be going anywhere, but the software to work with them might. A patentholder is entitled to prohibit unauthorised implementations of their patents. All Fraunhofer has to do is send cease & desist letters to the websites hosting LAME, xmms and such (which they are entitled to do under patent law), and the software disappears. They could also C&D artists/websites publishing (non-copyright-violating) music in MP3 formats; in fact, the infrastructure for tracking down and suing large numbers of internet users already exists, courtesy of the RIAA, and we may well see FhG borrow it to sort out their own intellectual-property violation problem. (Especially if the RIAA pay them to do so.)
From what I gather of Pinker's theory is that language is implemented by a dedicated module in the human brain. This module is just neurological hardware, operating entirely by physical means, and does not invoke any sort of deus ex machina; therefore, what it does is an algorithm.
The language module does invoke other parts of the brain, such as general knowledge; however, there's nothing in the process that depends on it being in a human brain. Given that cognition is a physical process, one could postulate a computer program that could achieve the same results, even if drawing on a very large database of cultural information. The suggestion that language is "innately human" sounds a bit too much like carbon chauvinism, the belief that intelligence is an exclusive property of carbon-based life.
Yes, because we all know that both major parties really need the geek/penguinhead vote.
In Eastern Europe, where credit card fraud is a huge problem, card companies have started sending SMS messages to cardholders every time their card is charged, allowing those whose card numbers have been stolen to cancel them in time. Hopefully this idea will spread elsewhere.
Under the FCC Broadcast Flag mandate, open-source HDTV-decoding software is illegal. If Adobe's actions are the result of government pressure, it is not hard to imagine an attempt to criminalise the distribution of source code which could be used to compile image-processing applications that illegally bypass government-mandated currency checks.
From the content industry's point of view, those arguments should be compelling.
Except that KDE stuff usually runs like a dog.
I have a kspread spreadsheet keeping track of my CD collection, which isn't huge. It takes the best part of a minute to load it in, and changing cells causes it to freeze for long periods of time.
I'm not sure whether this is just kspread being badly written and inefficient or an intrinsic result of KDE infrastructure overheads, though I suspect the latter. There have been times when I tried starting the KDE file manager, or logging into KDE desktops, and found myself waiting minutes in doing so. This is unacceptable.
Actually, the appropriately anal term is "gibioctet", to rule out the possibility of non-8-bit bytes. (They exist on some architectures, you know.)
I've got an Archos Jukebox Recorder (the older, pre-video model), and am very happy with it. It's a USB2 mass storage device, which means I can mount it and copy files to/from it without using any proprietary software, and it also does recording (and did so a year or two before Apple added recording to the iPod). The internal firmware is nothing to write home about, but there exists open-source replacement firmware for it which is excellent. Also, its batteries are standard NiMH AA batteries which are easily replaced when they wear out.
I haven't looked at the new Archos units, but, IMHO, Archos tend to be first in terms of adding features (look at the plug-in modules for the Gmini, for example), and tend to have fairly sensible design.