Your "slightly less naive algorithm" costs about $0.25 more than just hooking the LED driver into the data line, and it takes up more board space.
I'd suggest adding a capacitor. A.1uF capacitor takes up very little space, costs 1 or 2 cents, and in conjunction with the 330 ohm resistor typically used with LED's gives a time delay of about 33 microseconds. That's good enough to hide anything over 30KHz, so modems for plain telephone lines (which might be so low quality that the modem has to step down to 10 or 20K) should either have a bigger capacitor or just not connect Txd and Rxd to LED's.
dentists for instance use modems to dial-in to EDI systems run by insurance companies to check claims info...
modem based EDI systems to do credit checks
Deadplant, thank you for two common scenarios where a laptop and a detector inconspicuous and wide angle enough to be used without looking suspicious could in fact steal valuable data. Looks like we'd better take this seriously.
There are many simple ways of frustrating this:
1) Use modem and NIC cards that don't have the blinking lights.
2) Put the hardware under the desk, with an appropriate partition or modesty panel between the back of the PC and the customers.
3) Black electrical tape
4) Get hardware where the blinking of the LED's does not correspond to the data. In some cases, the LED's are driven by an IC that blinks it at a constant, human readable rate as long as the input (data line) is active; this clearly distinguishes a working line from one that is stuck "on", but it's more expensive than needed just to mask the data. If there aren't slow-responding LED's, then add a 3-cent capacitor to extend the turn on/off time.
There are two ways to put in an LED to show when a device is transmitting or receiving. One is to tie it to the transmit or receive enable/detect signal, IF there is any. The other is to tie it to the data line. In that case, the LED may be blinking right along with the data, although too fast for the human eye to see. It looks like it is on continually, but the signal could be recovered with a fast enough detector. This depends on the LED turn-on/turn-off time; if it's 8 nS (pretty common), a 56K modem would be easy to pick up. ADSL or cable modems at a few MHZ would be sending out a clear signal; I'm not sure if there are cheap optical detectors that will work at those speeds, but there are expensive ones that go into the gigahertz. 10MHz ethernet signals would be "blurry" but with a good detector, a fast ADC, and some signal processing you could recover them. With 100MHZ ethernet, no data could be recovered.
But before you can do any of that, you have to be able to _see_ the blinking lights. If someone can get into your wiring closet and focus an optical detector on your hub, it would be a heck of a lot simpler to just connect the network sniffer by cable. The real hazard is if the blinking lights are pointed out the window -- that's an unusual location for a network hub, switch, router. or server, but it's quite likely your business has some desktop computers with the back towards a window and the LED's for the NIC and modem cards visible from outside, so a telescope in a van parked across the street could, in theory, extract the data. For instance the receptionist's computer is probably oriented this way; it probably isn't worthwhile for someone to go to this much trouble to find out what a receptionist is up to, but if the NIC is showing data flowing to and from other machines on a shared network cable, better stick on a bit of electrical tape...
Shooting yourself in the foot -- twice
on
Abusing the GPL?
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· Score: 2
So they make the changes they need in the open-source code, then before release they obfuscate it, and release it under GPL. So (they claim) the obfuscated source code still meets the GPL license, but is unusable to outsiders. Except maybe it violates the GPL license because the obfuscated code is not the preferred form for editing, and IIRC that's how the GPL defines "source code". This sounds a lot like the story of the soldier who shot himself in the foot to get out of the Army, and was court-martialed for damaging gov't property. And they kept him on the Army rolls until he finished his sentence in Leavenworth.. Whether or not this legal hack holds up in court, it's not a good idea, because:
1) Software maintenance of the obfuscated code would be a nightmare, even using the company's "dictionary" recording the obfuscations. Two other options: (a) Keep the un-obfuscated code, edit that, and run it through the obfuscater again. But that definitely means what you released wasn't the actual source. (b) Have a de-obfuscator program that uses the dictionary to reverse all obfuscations. But having that around amounts to an admission that the obfuscated code isn't editable in practice...
2) The downloadable obfuscated code would have to credit the original open-source code. So get one of those software plagiarism detector programs that analyzes for similar structures, and use that to discover the renaming and re-arranging that went into obfuscation. Add a little more code to get an automatic de-obfuscator. And the parts that don't match are the company's "secret" code changes.
The answer should be teaching kids/people that building bombs and guns is not appropriate behavior for living in a society... My, what idealism. Klebold and Harris were _nuts_ and didn't want to learn about living peacefully with others.
Klebold and Harris were still living in their parents' homes. Their arsenal was stored in one of their parents' garages. You might not be able to control your kids when they are away from your home, but you really should be able to keep them from building bombs and accumulating enough firearms for a small war in your own garage. How much freedom you can or should give your teenage kids depends on how much responsibility they have demonstrated; Klebold and Harris apparently already had enough of a record to show that they needed close supervision...
"That's the way good software gets designed. So if you pull out a piece it won't run" is a direct quote from Ballmer. Either he's lying or he's totally incompetent.
Copyright in the USA now runs the lifetime of the author + 75 years, or 95 years for corporate works. And unless the Supreme Court intervenes with a definition of "limited time" (Constitutionally, Congress may establish copyrights and patents for a limited time), or bribery under guise of campaign contributions becomes illegal, it looks like Congress will continue to tack on 20 years every time the first Mickey Mouse film nears expiration, and nothing since 1928 will ever go into the public domain.
A single backup copy arguably comes under fair use, although I don't think this has been definitely established in law for books and movies. However, it takes a lot of labor to copy or scan bound books, so it doesn't often make sense when all you can make is one copy. And with the older movies, in many cases no library or private party ever had access to the film -- it just rotted away in some company storage vault, or may even have been incinerated. (Nitrate film must burn spectacularly!)
Libraries have sometimes cut apart bound books to feed them through a microfiche camera for more compact storage. It's expensive, so it only happens for books they recognize as valuable; many of the older books wind up in landfill. However, microfiche decays too, faster than all but the worst paper, and so these libraries are now losing their older collections.
Acid-free paper will last for many centuries if properly stored, but I'm not sure about photocopier toner, and copying and storing books that way would be quite costly. Only a few of the tens of thousands of books published every year can be saved that way, and it's rather unlikely that we're picking the right ones from the viewpoint of historians in 2500 CE.
The best prospect for indefinite data storage is probably something like Project Gutenberg: put it on-line and invite others to mirror it. For text files (books and source code), chances are storage is going to be so cheap that they'll mirror everything forever rather than trying to evaluate what's worth keeping. But before this happens, it's got to enter the public domain, and quite often they'll be too deteriorated to scan before the copyrights expire.
Long copyrights are breaking the social contract implicit in the roots of Intellectual Property, and made explicit in our Constitution: copyrights are issued for a limited time to encourage the authors. No one has an inherent right to IP. Now, to the extent that money motivates writing (and it's not necessarily the main reason), it's usually the immediate payoff that counts: the fee when a magazine article is published, the advance from a book publisher, etc. If 20 years later the book gets turned into a movie, that's a nice bonus, but it wasn't why the author wrote it, and I certainly hope he didn't have to wait that long to make a living from his writing. Surely no one writes a book in the anticipation that, 75 years after one is dead one's great-grandchildren can retire on the royalties. Nor does it seem to be a good idea to put Disney, Inc., in the position where they can stop making new movies and stay rich forever just by re-selling Mickey Mouse and Snow White -- with threats that, if you don't buy the DVD now, you won't have another chance in your lifetime. (Disney has actually run advertisements saying that.)
So, I think about 40 years ought to be the limit. (Life of the Author discriminates against the elderly and the unhealthy, a fixed term is better.) Also, I think that if you think your work is important enough to have copyright running more than a few years, you should pay to ensure that it is available to mankind forever. That is: an original work is automatically copyrighted for five years. (This differs from the present law only in shortening the term.) Most books and software are gone from stores long before then. If you want copyright to run longer, you must register it, including paying to etch it in platinum (or maybe just copper) and store it in a vault at stable temperature and humidity.
There also should be a provision that you lose copyright if the work goes out of publication for more than five years.
Maybe we should also allow a less expensive option for authors who want to retain rights to movies, etc., but don't want to go to much expense: put the text on-line, allowing free copying as-is, but retaining the rights to derivative works.
The school has adopted a policy that if turnitin.com catches plagerism you must prove your innocence.
That is definitely a bad policy. Note that turnitin.com makes no warrantee as to accuracy -- that means, the teachers better check the results for themselves, or you sue them and your boneheaded administrators, not turnitin. This is quite proper, because apparently turnitin just runs a program against a database; at a reasonable cost, they cannot keep a staff of subject-matter experts to verify whether alleged matches are actually plagiarism.
Turnitin.com keeps a copy of every student paper submitted and students have no choice in this matter.
Of course they keep a copy -- how else are they going to recognize it when you sell it to someone else next year? And if their program finds possible plagiarism, they should send the allegedly matching paper to the professor to verify whether it really was plagiarized.
So to make this work, they have to keep the papers and make limited copies, but they should not be exposing the papers themselves on the web. So are submitted papers "contents of this web site"? And if they are claiming that, since the copyright hasn't been explicitly transferred, do they have to right to even hold a copy, let alone send it out to professors at other schools if it happens to match new submissions? The "Policy" seems to cover too much and too little.
They need to hire a lawyer that actually understands what they are doing.
The "no warrantee to the accuracy of the service" clauses are pretty understandable. Without that, every student who'd been smart enough to rephrase a few sentences would be suing them. To stay out of lawsuits, they aren't about to deliver a final judgement as to whether plagiarism has occurred, but simply report that two papers resemble each other and let the teachers figure out whether the resemblance is sufficient to support an accusation of plagiarism. If the prof doesn't compare the papers for himself, then they want it damned clear that you sue the prof and the school, not them...
So it doesn't exploit security holes in MS's new, barely finished.net framework. Instead, it exploits the gaping security holes which have remained in Outlook for years. This is a good thing???
This became a copyright issue when the best Congress money can buy extended copyright to longer than the useful lifetime of most media. Maybe about 10% of all the movies over 50 years have survived because the studios copied them to newer film before the old cellulose nitrate film decayed away. With all the extensions passed to copyright law, now even books from the 1930's are disappearing as the paper deteriorates...
My recommendation: (1) No copyright to run longer than 40 years. (2) To maintain a copyright for more than five years, require payment of a fat fee, plus depositing the copyrighted work in entirety (e.g., all source code for a program), in the Library of Congress in a _permanent_ form. Etched in stone or platinum using machine-readable fonts would do nicely.
MPEG-4 decoding logic is just silicon -- it will become very cheap very fast when it goes into full production, while blue lasers use exotic materials and processes, and probably will remain rather expensive. So red-laser will genuinely have a cost advantage. Blue-laser will have two definite advantages: better picture quality, and the writeable version (when it comes out) will be high enough capacity to do complete computer backups in two to five disks -- red laser writeable DVD is not only snarled in incompatible formats, but with capacities around 5 GB, it's too small compared to modern harddrives.
So now the REAL REASON why they (the content providers) still want to pursue red-laser: They get to give consumers a low-quality version of the video image!!! The content providers have probably already sold you Star Wars (for instance) on VHS and DVD both. If they go straight to proper blue-laser high density, they only get to sell it one more time. If they put out red-laser psuedo-high-density first, they sell it two more times. That's all...
if not, then just have a dual laser mechinism (they've been done before, and cheaply too).
CD drives use an infrared laser. Cheap single-laser DVD drives can read the stamped CD's with the red laser, but cannot read CD-R or CD-RW. The dyes in CD-R/W go from highly reflective to almost back in infrared when written, but change very little in visible light. (Use about half a CD-R and try to see which part has been used; there is a subtle difference, but not at all enough contrast to read microdots.) Better DVD/CD drives have red and infrared lasers.
Likewise, you could probably read standard CD's and DVD's with a blue laser, but if you want to read the writeable formats, you might have to put three lasers in the system. This gets expensive.
OTOH, because there have been several competing writeable DVD formats, almost everyone has been waiting to see which one would win before buying, and so there isn't that big of an installed base to worry about. Get ONE blue-light writeable format that is capacious enough for hard drive backups, and I'll buy, even if I have to saw a hole in that damned fancy HP Pavilion case to mount it together with the CD-R/W drive...
There are two kinds of LCD: reflective and transmissive. Laptop screens are nearly always transmissive backlit, that is there is a white flourescent light and a grid of red-green-blue filter dots behind it, and electric fields manipulate the liquid crystals to let light pass through in selected sub-pixels. In most office & home conditions this gives much better color, but in competition with the sun, that backlight is bound to lose.
Reflective displays put a mirror behind the LCD. Where a pixel is on, incident light passes through the LCD, is reflected off the mirror, and passes through again. Where a pixel is off, the light is blocked. Most reflective displays are cheap ones in calculators, hand-held games, gas pumps, etc. These are monochrome and with fairly poor contrast all the time. But there are better ones, and it _is_ possible for them to work in direct sunlight, if they are made with enough light blocking capability to stop even sunlight. It also needs a light to work at night -- since this cannot shine through, and it had better not glare in the driver's eyes, it's a little more complicated to add it, but others have cited some off-the-shelf modules you can use. And you will need a contrast adjustment with a very wide range, to handle everything from full sunlight to dim night-time lighting.
To go in a car, it also must handle a wide range of temperatures. Check the freezing and boiling or breakdown points of the liquid crystal material. The LCD displays in gas pumps do handle a pretty wide range, although they need a temperature sensor to adjust the bias in cold weather.
I worked Customer Service for a big name card once. I would say on average 80% of calls were concerning "This fucking sixty dollar charge I didn't authorize!!!". But the credit card company isn't selling the goods themselves, merely recording charges made by companies that somehow have the customers' card numbers. Be careful where you give out your number and you won't be having those problems. (Unless you tend to forget about certain charges...)
The only thing that could come from this is a lawsuit for misleading advertising, and then only if the company advertised the maze as completely secure.
But a certain software company is advertising that it's latest server software is completely secure, and will run long periods unattended. The default installation turns out to be wide open, and I rather suspect that the servers will have to be rebooted far more often than is true of well-tuned installations of several competing products, two of which are _free_. The problem here is that American courts will generally figure that obfuscated phrasing in the fine print of contracts override public claims like this...
I don't have a.ps reader, so all I could read was the abstract, and judging by that maybe I couldn't read the article anyhow... Can you explain a bit more of it in something resembling English, please?
1. Can a program transform other programs so as to preserve the functionality while making the output program harder to read? Yes, because there are a wide variety of programs in common use that do just that. They're called compilers and assemblers.
2. How resistant to reverse engineering is it possible to make an obfuscated program? Apparently being mathematicians, Barak, et. al., would probably go for absolute unbreakability, or breakable only in exponential time, while the MPAA is obviously willing to settle for quite a lot less...
the notion of obfuscation is somewhat contrived
I'm in considerable doubt as to what "anything one can efficiently compute given O(P), one could also efficiently compute given oracle access to P" means, but it seems not only contrived but even backwards. Translation please?
They proved that not every function is obfuscatable. However for all we know, it might be that most functions are obfuscatable, which is good enough. True. That a mathematician can write a program specifically to break your system doesn't mean your system is useless...
I'm no Linux expert, but it seems likely to me that these issues are not a problem with Linux so much as with the Linux "experts." They'll tell you a ridiculously overcomplicated way of doing something from the command line whether or not there is a point and click equivalent, just because they disdain using the GUI. First, if having to kill a process that froze is a common experience, this sort of implies that either that application or the OS has some bugs that ought to be looked into. (Like Windows!) Second, if it is something the average user should know, there should be, and usually is, an open source utility that does it from KDE and Gnome; this ought to be in the standard distros, and the gurus ought to teach that first...
As for the second example, assuming there is a reason to require compilation to install the application at all, couldn't the software be distributed with a script to do both the RPM and install?
The basic issue here is that user-friendly Linux distros don't exist because users aren't running Linux. Let MS fumble so as to make Windows non-viable on the $350 machine they are trying to sell to your Aunt Minnie, and someone would work out the details of how to make a Linux pre-loaded machine suitable for her real fast. But no one's going to bother if Windows Lite is going at an OEM cost of maybe $35.
Umm... From what I see, the only reason that corporations tolerate MS's bullcrap (daily crashes, frequent upgrades forced by file incompatibilities, etc.) is that "everyone knows how to use Windows." Lose the low end, and the only way they could hang onto the high end would be to actually _be_ better. And we all damned well know that there are several better options for a server OS under $800, and it would be mighty hard to justify paying $1300 for Windows + Office on the desktops...
I think that in the long run, Windows is going to get pushed out because of excessive costs -- but it's not the direct sale price of the product that will do this. As soon as MS sees itself losing ground at the bottom end, they will spin off a low-priced, slightly crippled Windows to keep their hold on that market. The real excess costs of Windows occur AFTER you buy it: Everyone loses hours a week to crashes, and to having to reboot the server after every security patch. You also buy Office. You get locked into Office because of incompatible files. You get forced to buy Office again every 3 years because of incompatible files -- and if you manage to finally freeze things at XP, someday MS will shut off the product activation service for this, so when your HD crashes, you'll HAVE to buy the new version. You have to buy expensive virus filters and subscribe to update services just to slow down the Outlook viruses. Viruses e-mail company trade secrets to China. People lose more hours cleaning up after viruses. Your virus filters strip off attachments that people needed to get their jobs done...
Correction, I didn't think this all the way through. As someone pointed out, women in that era were usually married by 18. By the time early Alzheimer's begins in the late 30's, their first children would be nearly grown up, and certainly be able to take care of the younger ones. Of course, trying to watch a flock of younger ones plus a demented mother is a hell of a burden for a teenager, and some would fail, but there isn't much of a selection effect here.
However,men usually didn't get married until the late 20's (they had to establish themselves economically first), and if the father went senile when the oldest kid was 12, the family was in serious trouble. Death directly by starvation was a remote possibility because neighbors, church, and charities would help, but this help generally didn't extend as far as bringing the family out of poverty or bringing the diet up to par with intact and successful families. The kids would be malnourished a bit, and more susceptible to disease. The boys would take risky jobs at too young an age just to get out of there; if that didn't kill or cripple them, they would still have to work a lot longer and harder to reach the point where they could afford to marry, and a good many would remain bachelors. The girls might make an even worse career choice, and prostitutes rarely have babies that survive.
No -- IQ = 100 is supposed to be the average of the American population as of the date the first IQ test was invented. The average has been slowly climbing ever since then. IIRC, it's around 110 now. Through the 1950's, this rise was assumed to be due to the reduced occurrence of intelligence-stunting events such as malnutrition and certain infections. This explanation doesn't work anymore; I don't know whether the attempts to make the test culturally neutral have also led to a little dumbing down, or whether increased stimulation of sorts in early childhood (TV, pre-school, toys actually designed as IQ test practice) has led to an increase in whatever the test measures. (It certainly doesn't seem to correlate with being smart in practical matters, like figuring when a stock is overhyped or a politician is bullshitting.)
Very good point. To select for one particular combination of 20 paternal genes requires screening over a million sperm. If we understood what all the genes do, we'd probably want to screen 100 of them -- that's 10^30 possible combinations, and I doubt anyone is going to produce that many sperm in one lifetime. And on the ova side, the choice is probably always going to be limited to the best in a few dozen. This does leave lots of room for chance.
Or we could use a very tiny needle to pick out the best set of chromosomes from a limited sample, and insert them into one egg or sperm. In this case the "chance" factor is the random damage caused by the manipulation... I think I'd rather just have my sperm filtered to somewhat reduce the prevalence of genes for shortness, weakness, and extreme nearsightedness. Unless they are tied to intelligence, that is, because I'd have no idea how to raise a big, strong, dumb kid.
My biggest concern is that the primary selection criteria are likely to be negatives, that is "bad" genes to be eliminated (starting with early Alzheimers), and this will reduce genetic diversity, while possibly losing some apparently bad genes before the good side of them is discovered. Face it: if a fatal disease-causing gene occurs in the population often enough for the disease to be identified, there must be or have been some selective advantage to it to balance the disease aspect. Example: one sickle cell anemia gene makes you nearly immune to malaria, two kill you. Hence it's fairly common in certain areas of African where everyone gets infected with malaria, and it's still killing Americans whose 10 x grandparents came from Africa. Tay-Sachs and many others must have some similar advantage in particular environments, but we don't know what it is. What are we losing when we eliminate those genes?
Say you're an intelligent but pudgy software engineer/couch potato type and you actually manage to get the doctors to screen embryos and sperm most likely to create an athletic individual. If the child created may have a better chance of becoming atheltic, but if he follows his parents example, he will probably be just as pudgy.
Better idea: select for the genes that allow some couch potatoes to stay reasonably slender and healthy.
Actually, in the old ways (19th century and earlier), natural selection would have operated against this gene because sometimes the children would die of neglect when the mother's mind degenerated too far to take care of them...
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Your "slightly less naive algorithm" costs about $0.25 more than just hooking the LED driver into the data line, and it takes up more board space.
.1uF capacitor takes up very little space, costs 1 or 2 cents, and in conjunction with the 330 ohm resistor typically used with LED's gives a time delay of about 33 microseconds. That's good enough to hide anything over 30KHz, so modems for plain telephone lines (which might be so low quality that the modem has to step down to 10 or 20K) should either have a bigger capacitor or just not connect Txd and Rxd to LED's.
I'd suggest adding a capacitor. A
dentists for instance use modems to dial-in to EDI systems run by insurance companies to check claims info...
modem based EDI systems to do credit checks
Deadplant, thank you for two common scenarios where a laptop and a detector inconspicuous and wide angle enough to be used without looking suspicious could in fact steal valuable data. Looks like we'd better take this seriously.
There are many simple ways of frustrating this:
1) Use modem and NIC cards that don't have the blinking lights.
2) Put the hardware under the desk, with an appropriate partition or modesty panel between the back of the PC and the customers.
3) Black electrical tape
4) Get hardware where the blinking of the LED's does not correspond to the data. In some cases, the LED's are driven by an IC that blinks it at a constant, human readable rate as long as the input (data line) is active; this clearly distinguishes a working line from one that is stuck "on", but it's more expensive than needed just to mask the data. If there aren't slow-responding LED's, then add a 3-cent capacitor to extend the turn on/off time.
There are two ways to put in an LED to show when a device is transmitting or receiving. One is to tie it to the transmit or receive enable/detect signal, IF there is any. The other is to tie it to the data line. In that case, the LED may be blinking right along with the data, although too fast for the human eye to see. It looks like it is on continually, but the signal could be recovered with a fast enough detector. This depends on the LED turn-on/turn-off time; if it's 8 nS (pretty common), a 56K modem would be easy to pick up. ADSL or cable modems at a few MHZ would be sending out a clear signal; I'm not sure if there are cheap optical detectors that will work at those speeds, but there are expensive ones that go into the gigahertz. 10MHz ethernet signals would be "blurry" but with a good detector, a fast ADC, and some signal processing you could recover them. With 100MHZ ethernet, no data could be recovered.
But before you can do any of that, you have to be able to _see_ the blinking lights. If someone can get into your wiring closet and focus an optical detector on your hub, it would be a heck of a lot simpler to just connect the network sniffer by cable. The real hazard is if the blinking lights are pointed out the window -- that's an unusual location for a network hub, switch, router. or server, but it's quite likely your business has some desktop computers with the back towards a window and the LED's for the NIC and modem cards visible from outside, so a telescope in a van parked across the street could, in theory, extract the data. For instance the receptionist's computer is probably oriented this way; it probably isn't worthwhile for someone to go to this much trouble to find out what a receptionist is up to, but if the NIC is showing data flowing to and from other machines on a shared network cable, better stick on a bit of electrical tape...
So they make the changes they need in the open-source code, then before release they obfuscate it, and release it under GPL. So (they claim) the obfuscated source code still meets the GPL license, but is unusable to outsiders. Except maybe it violates the GPL license because the obfuscated code is not the preferred form for editing, and IIRC that's how the GPL defines "source code". This sounds a lot like the story of the soldier who shot himself in the foot to get out of the Army, and was court-martialed for damaging gov't property. And they kept him on the Army rolls until he finished his sentence in Leavenworth.. Whether or not this legal hack holds up in court, it's not a good idea, because:
1) Software maintenance of the obfuscated code would be a nightmare, even using the company's "dictionary" recording the obfuscations. Two other options:
(a) Keep the un-obfuscated code, edit that, and run it through the obfuscater again. But that definitely means what you released wasn't the actual source.
(b) Have a de-obfuscator program that uses the dictionary to reverse all obfuscations. But having that around amounts to an admission that the obfuscated code isn't editable in practice...
2) The downloadable obfuscated code would have to credit the original open-source code. So get one of those software plagiarism detector programs that analyzes for similar structures, and use that to discover the renaming and re-arranging that went into obfuscation. Add a little more code to get an automatic de-obfuscator. And the parts that don't match are the company's "secret" code changes.
The answer should be teaching kids/people that building bombs and guns is not appropriate behavior for living in a society ... My, what idealism. Klebold and Harris were _nuts_ and didn't want to learn about living peacefully with others.
Klebold and Harris were still living in their parents' homes. Their arsenal was stored in one of their parents' garages. You might not be able to control your kids when they are away from your home, but you really should be able to keep them from building bombs and accumulating enough firearms for a small war in your own garage. How much freedom you can or should give your teenage kids depends on how much responsibility they have demonstrated; Klebold and Harris apparently already had enough of a record to show that they needed close supervision...
"That's the way good software gets designed. So if you pull out a piece it won't run" is a direct quote from Ballmer. Either he's lying or he's totally incompetent.
Copyright in the USA now runs the lifetime of the author + 75 years, or 95 years for corporate works. And unless the Supreme Court intervenes with a definition of "limited time" (Constitutionally, Congress may establish copyrights and patents for a limited time), or bribery under guise of campaign contributions becomes illegal, it looks like Congress will continue to tack on 20 years every time the first Mickey Mouse film nears expiration, and nothing since 1928 will ever go into the public domain.
A single backup copy arguably comes under fair use, although I don't think this has been definitely established in law for books and movies. However, it takes a lot of labor to copy or scan bound books, so it doesn't often make sense when all you can make is one copy. And with the older movies, in many cases no library or private party ever had access to the film -- it just rotted away in some company storage vault, or may even have been incinerated. (Nitrate film must burn spectacularly!)
Libraries have sometimes cut apart bound books to feed them through a microfiche camera for more compact storage. It's expensive, so it only happens for books they recognize as valuable; many of the older books wind up in landfill. However, microfiche decays too, faster than all but the worst paper, and so these libraries are now losing their older collections.
Acid-free paper will last for many centuries if properly stored, but I'm not sure about photocopier toner, and copying and storing books that way would be quite costly. Only a few of the tens of thousands of books published every year can be saved that way, and it's rather unlikely that we're picking the right ones from the viewpoint of historians in 2500 CE.
The best prospect for indefinite data storage is probably something like Project Gutenberg: put it on-line and invite others to mirror it. For text files (books and source code), chances are storage is going to be so cheap that they'll mirror everything forever rather than trying to evaluate what's worth keeping. But before this happens, it's got to enter the public domain, and quite often they'll be too deteriorated to scan before the copyrights expire.
Long copyrights are breaking the social contract implicit in the roots of Intellectual Property, and made explicit in our Constitution: copyrights are issued for a limited time to encourage the authors. No one has an inherent right to IP. Now, to the extent that money motivates writing (and it's not necessarily the main reason), it's usually the immediate payoff that counts: the fee when a magazine article is published, the advance from a book publisher, etc. If 20 years later the book gets turned into a movie, that's a nice bonus, but it wasn't why the author wrote it, and I certainly hope he didn't have to wait that long to make a living from his writing. Surely no one writes a book in the anticipation that, 75 years after one is dead one's great-grandchildren can retire on the royalties. Nor does it seem to be a good idea to put Disney, Inc., in the position where they can stop making new movies and stay rich forever just by re-selling Mickey Mouse and Snow White -- with threats that, if you don't buy the DVD now, you won't have another chance in your lifetime. (Disney has actually run advertisements saying that.)
So, I think about 40 years ought to be the limit. (Life of the Author discriminates against the elderly and the unhealthy, a fixed term is better.) Also, I think that if you think your work is important enough to have copyright running more than a few years, you should pay to ensure that it is available to mankind forever. That is: an original work is automatically copyrighted for five years. (This differs from the present law only in shortening the term.) Most books and software are gone from stores long before then. If you want copyright to run longer, you must register it, including paying to etch it in platinum (or maybe just copper) and store it in a vault at stable temperature and humidity.
There also should be a provision that you lose copyright if the work goes out of publication for more than five years.
Maybe we should also allow a less expensive option for authors who want to retain rights to movies, etc., but don't want to go to much expense: put the text on-line, allowing free copying as-is, but retaining the rights to derivative works.
The school has adopted a policy that if turnitin.com catches plagerism you must prove your innocence.
That is definitely a bad policy. Note that turnitin.com makes no warrantee as to accuracy -- that means, the teachers better check the results for themselves, or you sue them and your boneheaded administrators, not turnitin. This is quite proper, because apparently turnitin just runs a program against a database; at a reasonable cost, they cannot keep a staff of subject-matter experts to verify whether alleged matches are actually plagiarism.
Of course they keep a copy -- how else are they going to recognize it when you sell it to someone else next year? And if their program finds possible plagiarism, they should send the allegedly matching paper to the professor to verify whether it really was plagiarized.
So to make this work, they have to keep the papers and make limited copies, but they should not be exposing the papers themselves on the web. So are submitted papers "contents of this web site"? And if they are claiming that, since the copyright hasn't been explicitly transferred, do they have to right to even hold a copy, let alone send it out to professors at other schools if it happens to match new submissions? The "Policy" seems to cover too much and too little.
They need to hire a lawyer that actually understands what they are doing.
The "no warrantee to the accuracy of the service" clauses are pretty understandable. Without that, every student who'd been smart enough to rephrase a few sentences would be suing them. To stay out of lawsuits, they aren't about to deliver a final judgement as to whether plagiarism has occurred, but simply report that two papers resemble each other and let the teachers figure out whether the resemblance is sufficient to support an accusation of plagiarism. If the prof doesn't compare the papers for himself, then they want it damned clear that you sue the prof and the school, not them...
So it doesn't exploit security holes in MS's new, barely finished .net framework. Instead, it exploits the gaping security holes which have remained in Outlook for years. This is a good thing???
This became a copyright issue when the best Congress money can buy extended copyright to longer than the useful lifetime of most media. Maybe about 10% of all the movies over 50 years have survived because the studios copied them to newer film before the old cellulose nitrate film decayed away. With all the extensions passed to copyright law, now even books from the 1930's are disappearing as the paper deteriorates...
My recommendation: (1) No copyright to run longer than 40 years. (2) To maintain a copyright for more than five years, require payment of a fat fee, plus depositing the copyrighted work in entirety (e.g., all source code for a program), in the Library of Congress in a _permanent_ form. Etched in stone or platinum using machine-readable fonts would do nicely.
MPEG-4 decoding logic is just silicon -- it will become very cheap very fast when it goes into full production, while blue lasers use exotic materials and processes, and probably will remain rather expensive. So red-laser will genuinely have a cost advantage. Blue-laser will have two definite advantages: better picture quality, and the writeable version (when it comes out) will be high enough capacity to do complete computer backups in two to five disks -- red laser writeable DVD is not only snarled in incompatible formats, but with capacities around 5 GB, it's too small compared to modern harddrives.
So now the REAL REASON why they (the content providers) still want to pursue red-laser: They get to give consumers a low-quality version of the video image!!! The content providers have probably already sold you Star Wars (for instance) on VHS and DVD both. If they go straight to proper blue-laser high density, they only get to sell it one more time. If they put out red-laser psuedo-high-density first, they sell it two more times. That's all...
if not, then just have a dual laser mechinism (they've been done before, and cheaply too).
CD drives use an infrared laser. Cheap single-laser DVD drives can read the stamped CD's with the red laser, but cannot read CD-R or CD-RW. The dyes in CD-R/W go from highly reflective to almost back in infrared when written, but change very little in visible light. (Use about half a CD-R and try to see which part has been used; there is a subtle difference, but not at all enough contrast to read microdots.) Better DVD/CD drives have red and infrared lasers.
Likewise, you could probably read standard CD's and DVD's with a blue laser, but if you want to read the writeable formats, you might have to put three lasers in the system. This gets expensive.
OTOH, because there have been several competing writeable DVD formats, almost everyone has been waiting to see which one would win before buying, and so there isn't that big of an installed base to worry about. Get ONE blue-light writeable format that is capacious enough for hard drive backups, and I'll buy, even if I have to saw a hole in that damned fancy HP Pavilion case to mount it together with the CD-R/W drive...
There are two kinds of LCD: reflective and transmissive. Laptop screens are nearly always transmissive backlit, that is there is a white flourescent light and a grid of red-green-blue filter dots behind it, and electric fields manipulate the liquid crystals to let light pass through in selected sub-pixels. In most office & home conditions this gives much better color, but in competition with the sun, that backlight is bound to lose.
Reflective displays put a mirror behind the LCD. Where a pixel is on, incident light passes through the LCD, is reflected off the mirror, and passes through again. Where a pixel is off, the light is blocked. Most reflective displays are cheap ones in calculators, hand-held games, gas pumps, etc. These are monochrome and with fairly poor contrast all the time. But there are better ones, and it _is_ possible for them to work in direct sunlight, if they are made with enough light blocking capability to stop even sunlight. It also needs a light to work at night -- since this cannot shine through, and it had better not glare in the driver's eyes, it's a little more complicated to add it, but others have cited some off-the-shelf modules you can use. And you will need a contrast adjustment with a very wide range, to handle everything from full sunlight to dim night-time lighting.
To go in a car, it also must handle a wide range of temperatures. Check the freezing and boiling or breakdown points of the liquid crystal material. The LCD displays in gas pumps do handle a pretty wide range, although they need a temperature sensor to adjust the bias in cold weather.
I worked Customer Service for a big name card once. I would say on average 80% of calls were concerning "This fucking sixty dollar charge I didn't authorize!!!". But the credit card company isn't selling the goods themselves, merely recording charges made by companies that somehow have the customers' card numbers. Be careful where you give out your number and you won't be having those problems. (Unless you tend to forget about certain charges...)
The only thing that could come from this is a lawsuit for misleading advertising, and then only if the company advertised the maze as completely secure.
But a certain software company is advertising that it's latest server software is completely secure, and will run long periods unattended. The default installation turns out to be wide open, and I rather suspect that the servers will have to be rebooted far more often than is true of well-tuned installations of several competing products, two of which are _free_. The problem here is that American courts will generally figure that obfuscated phrasing in the fine print of contracts override public claims like this...
I don't have a .ps reader, so all I could read was the abstract, and judging by that maybe I couldn't read the article anyhow... Can you explain a bit more of it in something resembling English, please?
1. Can a program transform other programs so as to preserve the functionality while making the output program harder to read? Yes, because there are a wide variety of programs in common use that do just that. They're called compilers and assemblers.
2. How resistant to reverse engineering is it possible to make an obfuscated program? Apparently being mathematicians, Barak, et. al., would probably go for absolute unbreakability, or breakable only in exponential time, while the MPAA is obviously willing to settle for quite a lot less...
the notion of obfuscation is somewhat contrived
I'm in considerable doubt as to what "anything one can efficiently compute given O(P), one could also efficiently compute given oracle access to P" means, but it seems not only contrived but even backwards. Translation please?
They proved that not every function is obfuscatable. However for all we know, it might be that most functions are obfuscatable, which is good enough. True. That a mathematician can write a program specifically to break your system doesn't mean your system is useless...
I'm no Linux expert, but it seems likely to me that these issues are not a problem with Linux so much as with the Linux "experts." They'll tell you a ridiculously overcomplicated way of doing something from the command line whether or not there is a point and click equivalent, just because they disdain using the GUI. First, if having to kill a process that froze is a common experience, this sort of implies that either that application or the OS has some bugs that ought to be looked into. (Like Windows!) Second, if it is something the average user should know, there should be, and usually is, an open source utility that does it from KDE and Gnome; this ought to be in the standard distros, and the gurus ought to teach that first...
As for the second example, assuming there is a reason to require compilation to install the application at all, couldn't the software be distributed with a script to do both the RPM and install?
The basic issue here is that user-friendly Linux distros don't exist because users aren't running Linux. Let MS fumble so as to make Windows non-viable on the $350 machine they are trying to sell to your Aunt Minnie, and someone would work out the details of how to make a Linux pre-loaded machine suitable for her real fast. But no one's going to bother if Windows Lite is going at an OEM cost of maybe $35.
Umm... From what I see, the only reason that corporations tolerate MS's bullcrap (daily crashes, frequent upgrades forced by file incompatibilities, etc.) is that "everyone knows how to use Windows." Lose the low end, and the only way they could hang onto the high end would be to actually _be_ better. And we all damned well know that there are several better options for a server OS under $800, and it would be mighty hard to justify paying $1300 for Windows + Office on the desktops...
I think that in the long run, Windows is going to get pushed out because of excessive costs -- but it's not the direct sale price of the product that will do this. As soon as MS sees itself losing ground at the bottom end, they will spin off a low-priced, slightly crippled Windows to keep their hold on that market. The real excess costs of Windows occur AFTER you buy it: Everyone loses hours a week to crashes, and to having to reboot the server after every security patch. You also buy Office. You get locked into Office because of incompatible files. You get forced to buy Office again every 3 years because of incompatible files -- and if you manage to finally freeze things at XP, someday MS will shut off the product activation service for this, so when your HD crashes, you'll HAVE to buy the new version. You have to buy expensive virus filters and subscribe to update services just to slow down the Outlook viruses. Viruses e-mail company trade secrets to China. People lose more hours cleaning up after viruses. Your virus filters strip off attachments that people needed to get their jobs done...
Correction, I didn't think this all the way through. As someone pointed out, women in that era were usually married by 18. By the time early Alzheimer's begins in the late 30's, their first children would be nearly grown up, and certainly be able to take care of the younger ones. Of course, trying to watch a flock of younger ones plus a demented mother is a hell of a burden for a teenager, and some would fail, but there isn't much of a selection effect here.
However,men usually didn't get married until the late 20's (they had to establish themselves economically first), and if the father went senile when the oldest kid was 12, the family was in serious trouble. Death directly by starvation was a remote possibility because neighbors, church, and charities would help, but this help generally didn't extend as far as bringing the family out of poverty or bringing the diet up to par with intact and successful families. The kids would be malnourished a bit, and more susceptible to disease. The boys would take risky jobs at too young an age just to get out of there; if that didn't kill or cripple them, they would still have to work a lot longer and harder to reach the point where they could afford to marry, and a good many would remain bachelors. The girls might make an even worse career choice, and prostitutes rarely have babies that survive.
No -- IQ = 100 is supposed to be the average of the American population as of the date the first IQ test was invented. The average has been slowly climbing ever since then. IIRC, it's around 110 now. Through the 1950's, this rise was assumed to be due to the reduced occurrence of intelligence-stunting events such as malnutrition and certain infections. This explanation doesn't work anymore; I don't know whether the attempts to make the test culturally neutral have also led to a little dumbing down, or whether increased stimulation of sorts in early childhood (TV, pre-school, toys actually designed as IQ test practice) has led to an increase in whatever the test measures. (It certainly doesn't seem to correlate with being smart in practical matters, like figuring when a stock is overhyped or a politician is bullshitting.)
Very good point. To select for one particular combination of 20 paternal genes requires screening over a million sperm. If we understood what all the genes do, we'd probably want to screen 100 of them -- that's 10^30 possible combinations, and I doubt anyone is going to produce that many sperm in one lifetime. And on the ova side, the choice is probably always going to be limited to the best in a few dozen. This does leave lots of room for chance.
Or we could use a very tiny needle to pick out the best set of chromosomes from a limited sample, and insert them into one egg or sperm. In this case the "chance" factor is the random damage caused by the manipulation... I think I'd rather just have my sperm filtered to somewhat reduce the prevalence of genes for shortness, weakness, and extreme nearsightedness. Unless they are tied to intelligence, that is, because I'd have no idea how to raise a big, strong, dumb kid.
My biggest concern is that the primary selection criteria are likely to be negatives, that is "bad" genes to be eliminated (starting with early Alzheimers), and this will reduce genetic diversity, while possibly losing some apparently bad genes before the good side of them is discovered. Face it: if a fatal disease-causing gene occurs in the population often enough for the disease to be identified, there must be or have been some selective advantage to it to balance the disease aspect. Example: one sickle cell anemia gene makes you nearly immune to malaria, two kill you. Hence it's fairly common in certain areas of African where everyone gets infected with malaria, and it's still killing Americans whose 10 x grandparents came from Africa. Tay-Sachs and many others must have some similar advantage in particular environments, but we don't know what it is. What are we losing when we eliminate those genes?
Say you're an intelligent but pudgy software engineer/couch potato type and you actually manage to get the doctors to screen embryos and sperm most likely to create an athletic individual. If the child created may have a better chance of becoming atheltic, but if he follows his parents example, he will probably be just as pudgy.
Better idea: select for the genes that allow some couch potatoes to stay reasonably slender and healthy.
Actually, in the old ways (19th century and earlier), natural selection would have operated against this gene because sometimes the children would die of neglect when the mother's mind degenerated too far to take care of them...