I just heard Tony Blair express much the same sentiment. I was struck by his eloquence, especially in contrast to Bush's poorly delivered speech from that Louisiana swamp he hightailed it to. Giuliani & Pataki are in NYC, exhibiting traits of leadership, and Bush is where?
You know, I've been pretty evenly appalled by the actions of the Israelis and the Palestinians. But seeing the CNN footage of the Palestinians dancing in the street, celebrating this incident, I find I have no sympathy for them any longer, regardless of any Palestinian complicity in this attack. Propaganda, perhaps, but effective.
Plea for peace? I'm a little frightened by the level of testosterone-fueled rhetoric I see here, but on the other hand, I can no longer raise my voice in opposition to it. Maybe it's time to let the jarheads play Rambo, once and if the various TLA agencies can get on the ball and figure out who did this. Yes, violence begets violence, but with terrorists, so, apparently, do attempts to make peace.
Well, to pick a nit, it's a metaphor, not an analogy, and it's hardly mine. After all, I'm not the one who decided to call that big, mostly blank space on my UI a "desktop."
To your point, sure, the manufacturer has every right to decide to offer a built-in pencil holder. He could also clutter it up with all sorts of other things, annoying me to the point that I decide to get a different desk.
The problem comes when there's only one desk manufacturer, with a very limited selection of models. At that point, he becomes a monopoly, and can reasonably expect some regulation in what he can & cannot do. Whether or not Microsoft constitutes a monopoly is open to debate, but the prevailing opinion would seem to be that it does.
When it comes down to it Windows is Microsoft's OS and they should be able to do what they want with it
In my office at work, I have a nice wooden desk leased from a furniture provider. Although it's their desk, NOT ONCE have I had to ask their permission to put something on it. If they were to say to me, "You may only place paper on our desktop if you simultaneously have a pair of RonBert Scissors laying on it," I would quickly trade it in for one from a different company.
Thank god office furniture isn't supplied by a monopolistic tyrant.
This reminds me of one of the things about the DMCA that really annoys me: there is no requirement that the copyright protection mechanism be reasonably well-designed, and whether I've violated the law is based not on my intent, but rather on the intent of the mechanism's designer. So if someone is stupid enough to think that Lempel-Ziv compression is a good copyright protection mechanism, and uses it with that intent, I can then unknowingly violate the DMCA by gunzipping a file.
The DMCA is a legal crutch for lazy companies that can't be bothered to design truly secure solutions. Or perhaps more honestly, for companies that know that consumers would balk at the inconvenience of using truly secure DVDs, etc., but still want to pretend that they're protecting something.
No, the DMCA makes it illegal to attempt to circumvent any device designed to protect copyrighted material. It's just as illegal for you to attempt to crack protection on a DVD containing your home movies as it is to crack Star Wars; in this case, it's the device that's protected by the law, not the material.
I don't think.org websites should ever be for-profit businesses as that is not how that domain was
intended to be used.
That's a very popular misconception. The.org domain is intended to be a catch-all for domains
that don't qualify for any other TLD.
Huh? You just told him both that it was a misconception, and that it's right. Look at what you said: if.org is intended for domains that don't qualify for other domains, and commercial entities qualify for.com, then.org is not intended for commercial entities. Of course, things have changed since 1984 (Obligatory karma-whore RFC link).
You're wrong, and I agree with you!
Re:Jeeeze, the moderation nowadays....
on
Star In A Jar
·
· Score: 1
Dark Matter... does not interact with matter at all
Eh? I suspect that you mean something other than what you said. Dark Matter is the "missing matter" that we need to find to explain the current rate of expansion of the universe and the rotational velocity of galaxies. It's only because of its gravitational interaction with matter that we know it exists at all.
There's also a pretty good essay on the topic here.
Personally, I'd be delighted if my employer did this. I know what opportunities are available to me, but I'm happy with my current job. However, I am annoyed to receive several cold calls per week from recruiters; anything my company does to prevent these guys from pestering me at work is a good thing, IMHO. In fact, the best thing about the latest economic downturn is that I get fewer of these calls now; the downside, though, is that now I get more calls from people trying to place employees.
If I want a new job, I'm perfectly capable of picking up the phone.
This is something of a "me too" post, but in this case it's warranted; it can't be said too often -- run screaming from PVCS. The above author's post is glowing recommendation of PVCS when compared with what I'd tell you about it.
Everything he says is true, except we actually did get it to work under Solaris (if you can call what it does "working".) It comes with a set of command line tools that were apparently first written when DOS was new and a GUI that is fitted to the system badly on top of them. You'll find that if you use the command line tools exclusively, you'll confuse the GUI, as the command line tools don't have any concept of the GUI's "folders." So those you'll have to edit by hand. However, you can't limit yourself exclusively to using the GUI, as it's not functional enough and it's intolerably slow. Hit ctl-C at the wrong time when using any given command, and you've got to call an admin to cleanup the lock files it will leave behind.
My favorite indication that the Intersolv developers have absolutely no Unix clue: The GUI is very windows-flavored. Run the GUI on a serious unix system, and it will stat each and every filesystem to build a filesystem display. Whee! Watch all of those automounts kick off! See the NFS traffic fly! Or simply go to lunch and hope it's done when you return.
For watermarking to work, there would have to be a pattern that is recongnizable by the control software, no?
Well, yes, but it certainly doesn't have to be as simple as you imply. Here's a deliberately simplified example. In my simple watermarking scheme, flipping the first bit of any byte represents a Q, the 2nd, an R, 3rd - M, 4th - U, 5th - S, 6th - B, 7th - Z, 8th - N. Numbering starts with the MSB. What three letters have I encoded in the following bytes?
10001100 11101011 00101011
Don't know? It would probably help if you knew that the reference encoding was:
10001000 11111011 00001011
So I've encoded BUM. The content producer isn't likely to be as helpful as I. He's not going to distribute his masters (the reference encoding.) But in a court of law, he can easily demonstrate the presence of his watermark. And certainly any watermark detection software he runs has access to them, while any you run does not. In essense, the original encoding of the material, that is, the version before the watermark is applied, serves as a secret key.
In a real scheme, the changes are likely to be much more sparse. The encoder could select a random byte from every KB for modification (as long as it didn't noticibly affect the picture, song, etc.) You could try altering bits to destroy the watermark, but to make it unrecoverable is likely to require you essentially to destroy the work itself.
Re:Can we please give them the benefit of the doub
on
Sony Violating GPL?
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· Score: 1
Easy. They have yet to remove all the "Palm sux0r" comments.
Comparing laws protecting weak crypto with laws prohibiting mail tampering is interesting, but flawed. A law, narrowly drafted to protect a very specific service, might, IMHO, be good or at least acceptable. Too bad that in order to protect the mail, we now find it necessary to prohibit:
studying individual envelopes, to determine whether they might be openable,
opening envelopes, even if used for purposes other than mail delivery, and
teaching others how to open envelopes.
BTW, manufacturing letter openers is now a federal offense. Also, we're considering criminalizing the manufacture of envelopes that are too difficult for government employees to open and re-seal surreptitiously.
I'm going to call you on your call. The original poster's assertion was probably correct:
If you're buying 1000 OS-less PC's there's a far greater chance you'll resell them or use an illegal liscense. (sic)
Is an individual more likely to use a pirated OS if he buys one PC or 1000? Seems to me that the motivation to avoid paying for a license is far greater if it's 1000x instead of x. I'd say yes.
Is an individual more likely to be a reseller if he buys a single PC or if he buys 1000 PCs? I can't imagine a reseller buying one machine at a time, so this is an obvious yes.
What is the basis you making this assertion? If I am a company that is convinced of the value of Linux and want to deploy it in MY COMPANY, the chance that I will use an illegal license is ZERO, The chance that I will resell them is ZERO.
While this is a true statement, it has little bearing on the original assertion. You can't move from the specific to the general like this. It is entirely analogous to saying that the probability of rolling a 2-6 on a six-sided die is not greater than that of rolling a 1, because if I roll a one, the chance that I will roll a 2-6 is ZERO.
This is your admin speaking; Stop consuming my swap space with template instantions!:)
Seriously, tmpfs is cool, but it's dangerous to encourage the unwary huddled masses to use it excessively. I administer several solaris boxen with massive amounts of swap space./tmp is tmpfs, and is therefore huge and fast. My machines stay up for months, if not years, at a time, so there are no reboots to clear the filesystem. Periodically,/tmp fills up with cruft from clueless lusers, and I get the sort of phone calls I'd rather avoid. Sigh.
Developer: Yo, admin guy, I was in the middle of an hour-long build when the compiler claimed it couldn't allocate memory, something about "insufficient swap space" it said. You better fix this, you clueless jerk! You just wasted a half-hour of my time!
Admin: You're the one who always compiles in/tmp, right? And leaves multiple builds hanging out there?
Developer: Yeah, tmpfs rocks, dood!
I'd like to assume that all slashdot readers that actually work on a box administered by someone else are informed and careful enough to avoid making such mistakes. Being a skeptic, though, I'd always pepper any suggestion of using tmpfs with warnings.:(
(Yes, I am assuming that the linux tmpfs is the same as the virtual-memory-based Solaris tmpfs. If it's substantially different, please ignore the above and forgive me for not RTFLMing.)
That gives the cable operator a license to rebroadcast, alright, but doesn't say anything about an obligation to pay. I don't dispute that stations are obligated to give a retransmission license to cable operators, just that the cable operators are obligated to pay to retransmit. Your main point was right on; compulsory licenses are not a new-fangled idea. In fact, they date back at least to the days of player pianos.
(b) A commercial broadcast signal may be retransmitted without
express authority of the originating station if--
(1) The distributor is a cable system and the signal is that of a
commercial television station (including a low-power television station)
that is being carried pursuant to the Commission's must-carry rules set
forth in Sec. 76.56
and also Sec 76.60 Compensation for Carriage:
A cable operator is prohibited from accepting or requesting monetary
payment or other valuable consideration in exchange either for carriage
or channel positioning of any broadcast television station carried in
fulfillment of the must-carry requirements, except that
(a) Any such station may be required to bear the costs associated with delivering a good quality signal or a baseband video signal to the
principal headend of the cable system; or
(b) A cable operator may accept payments from stations which would be considered distant signals under the cable compulsory copyright license, 17 U.S.C. 111, as indemnification for any increased copyright liability resulting from carriage of such signal.
The FCC is worried about cable operators demanding money to carry broadcast signals, not vice versa.
I failed to find a reference to the FCC decision regarding a station's right to either elect coverage under must carry or receive compensation, but not both, but I did find this interesting tidbit in a VIACOM SEC filing
Commercial
stations have the additional right to elect either to require a multichannel
distributor to carry the station pursuant to the must carry provisions of the
Act or to require that the cable operator secure the station's "retransmission
consent" on a negotiated basis before the station can be carried (i.e.,
retransmitted) on the cable system. All of the Company's television stations are
carried on cable systems serving the communities in the stations' markets.
Certain of the stations obtained carriage by asserting must carry rights and
other stations granted retransmission consent. Failure to be carried on cable
systems could be detrimental to the business of a television station. The
application of must carry requirements to additional services which a
broadcaster might transmit over the digital spectrum is to be decided by the FCC
except that the 1996 Telecommunications Act expressly provides that any
"ancillary and supplementary" services provided by broadcasters in that spectrum
will not be entitled to mandatory cable carriage. The must carry rules have been
challenged by cable program services and cable system operators.
cable providers pay a government-decided rate to broadcasters in order to transmit their content.
Not so. The FCC has mandated that cable operators must carry locally broadcast stations with audiences over a certain size. But the cable companies don't pay to do so; instead, the station benefits from higher paid advertising rates due to their increased audience size.
In fact, there was a recent FCC ruling regarding a station that was demanding that cable operators begin paying them to retransmit. The ruling said that any station that tried to charge a cable operator was no longer covered by the must carry rule.
A zero-sum game is one where an improvement in the standing (which I'll deliberately leave vague,
but you can think of it as "chance to win") of one player necessarily results in a worsening of the standing of another
player.
That's a necessary, but not sufficient, condition. Not only does there have to be a "worsening", but the worsening must be equivalent to the net gain of the other players. Classic poker is zero-sum, but a poker game in which Donald Trump (as a bystander, not a player) offered to pay me $100 for each $1 I gained would not be.
Non-zero-sum games offer the opportunity for cooperative strategies, but don't require them. In the Trump poker game, I could pretty easily convince my opponents that they should play to lose by offering to repay them $20 for each dollar lost, or I could just rely on my own skill and keep those twenties to myself.
#2 is an excellent point! What application is important enough to warrant the use of all those cycles and still unimportant enough to rely on the results of computation performed in an untrusted environment?
Anyone think Juno will actually be able to secure the operation and communication with these remote agents enough to prevent tampering?
A bunch of bitching, and few predictions. Get a clue, or use this one:
Bush's appointment of Michael Powell as FCC chairman spells the end for DTV in its present incarnation. Powell's hands off, strict interpretation of the FCCs mandate will ensure that the FCC does not take a leadership role in the transition to digital television, and will throw the whole matter back into the lap of a deadlocked Congress. With the broadcasters, the cable companies, and the equipment manufactuers all at one another's throats, Congress will never be able to figure out which contributer to listen to, and the whole thing will stagnate to the public dismay and private delight of NBC, ABC, and CBS.
Slashdot Mirror
I just heard Tony Blair express much the same sentiment. I was struck by his eloquence, especially in contrast to Bush's poorly delivered speech from that Louisiana swamp he hightailed it to. Giuliani & Pataki are in NYC, exhibiting traits of leadership, and Bush is where?
You know, I've been pretty evenly appalled by the actions of the Israelis and the Palestinians. But seeing the CNN footage of the Palestinians dancing in the street, celebrating this incident, I find I have no sympathy for them any longer, regardless of any Palestinian complicity in this attack. Propaganda, perhaps, but effective.
Plea for peace? I'm a little frightened by the level of testosterone-fueled rhetoric I see here, but on the other hand, I can no longer raise my voice in opposition to it. Maybe it's time to let the jarheads play Rambo, once and if the various TLA agencies can get on the ball and figure out who did this. Yes, violence begets violence, but with terrorists, so, apparently, do attempts to make peace.
To your point, sure, the manufacturer has every right to decide to offer a built-in pencil holder. He could also clutter it up with all sorts of other things, annoying me to the point that I decide to get a different desk.
The problem comes when there's only one desk manufacturer, with a very limited selection of models. At that point, he becomes a monopoly, and can reasonably expect some regulation in what he can & cannot do. Whether or not Microsoft constitutes a monopoly is open to debate, but the prevailing opinion would seem to be that it does.
Thank god office furniture isn't supplied by a monopolistic tyrant.
The DMCA is a legal crutch for lazy companies that can't be bothered to design truly secure solutions. Or perhaps more honestly, for companies that know that consumers would balk at the inconvenience of using truly secure DVDs, etc., but still want to pretend that they're protecting something.
No, the DMCA makes it illegal to attempt to circumvent any device designed to protect copyrighted material. It's just as illegal for you to attempt to crack protection on a DVD containing your home movies as it is to crack Star Wars; in this case, it's the device that's protected by the law, not the material.
You're wrong, and I agree with you!
There's also a pretty good essay on the topic here.
"Reflections on Trusting Trust", Ken Thompsom, Communication of the ACM, Vol. 27, No. 8, August 1984, pp. 761-763
If I want a new job, I'm perfectly capable of picking up the phone.
Under the digital television spec, the broadcaster can actually change the channel on your television, with or without your approval.
Everything he says is true, except we actually did get it to work under Solaris (if you can call what it does "working".) It comes with a set of command line tools that were apparently first written when DOS was new and a GUI that is fitted to the system badly on top of them. You'll find that if you use the command line tools exclusively, you'll confuse the GUI, as the command line tools don't have any concept of the GUI's "folders." So those you'll have to edit by hand. However, you can't limit yourself exclusively to using the GUI, as it's not functional enough and it's intolerably slow. Hit ctl-C at the wrong time when using any given command, and you've got to call an admin to cleanup the lock files it will leave behind.
My favorite indication that the Intersolv developers have absolutely no Unix clue: The GUI is very windows-flavored. Run the GUI on a serious unix system, and it will stat each and every filesystem to build a filesystem display. Whee! Watch all of those automounts kick off! See the NFS traffic fly! Or simply go to lunch and hope it's done when you return.
Well, yes, but it certainly doesn't have to be as simple as you imply. Here's a deliberately simplified example. In my simple watermarking scheme, flipping the first bit of any byte represents a Q, the 2nd, an R, 3rd - M, 4th - U, 5th - S, 6th - B, 7th - Z, 8th - N. Numbering starts with the MSB. What three letters have I encoded in the following bytes?
10001100 11101011 00101011
Don't know? It would probably help if you knew that the reference encoding was:
10001000 11111011 00001011
So I've encoded BUM. The content producer isn't likely to be as helpful as I. He's not going to distribute his masters (the reference encoding.) But in a court of law, he can easily demonstrate the presence of his watermark. And certainly any watermark detection software he runs has access to them, while any you run does not. In essense, the original encoding of the material, that is, the version before the watermark is applied, serves as a secret key.
In a real scheme, the changes are likely to be much more sparse. The encoder could select a random byte from every KB for modification (as long as it didn't noticibly affect the picture, song, etc.) You could try altering bits to destroy the watermark, but to make it unrecoverable is likely to require you essentially to destroy the work itself.
Easy. They have yet to remove all the "Palm sux0r" comments.
BTW, manufacturing letter openers is now a federal offense. Also, we're considering criminalizing the manufacture of envelopes that are too difficult for government employees to open and re-seal surreptitiously.
Is an individual more likely to be a reseller if he buys a single PC or if he buys 1000 PCs? I can't imagine a reseller buying one machine at a time, so this is an obvious yes.
While this is a true statement, it has little bearing on the original assertion. You can't move from the specific to the general like this. It is entirely analogous to saying that the probability of rolling a 2-6 on a six-sided die is not greater than that of rolling a 1, because if I roll a one, the chance that I will roll a 2-6 is ZERO.Seriously, tmpfs is cool, but it's dangerous to encourage the unwary huddled masses to use it excessively. I administer several solaris boxen with massive amounts of swap space. /tmp is tmpfs, and is therefore huge and fast. My machines stay up for months, if not years, at a time, so there are no reboots to clear the filesystem. Periodically, /tmp fills up with cruft from clueless lusers, and I get the sort of phone calls I'd rather avoid. Sigh.
I'd like to assume that all slashdot readers that actually work on a box administered by someone else are informed and careful enough to avoid making such mistakes. Being a skeptic, though, I'd always pepper any suggestion of using tmpfs with warnings. :(
(Yes, I am assuming that the linux tmpfs is the same as the virtual-memory-based Solaris tmpfs. If it's substantially different, please ignore the above and forgive me for not RTFLMing.)
Google is a wonderful thing.
Here's the FCC must carry regulation. Note section 76.64, Retransmission Consent:
and also Sec 76.60 Compensation for Carriage:
The FCC is worried about cable operators demanding money to carry broadcast signals, not vice versa.I failed to find a reference to the FCC decision regarding a station's right to either elect coverage under must carry or receive compensation, but not both, but I did find this interesting tidbit in a VIACOM SEC filing
Not so. The FCC has mandated that cable operators must carry locally broadcast stations with audiences over a certain size. But the cable companies don't pay to do so; instead, the station benefits from higher paid advertising rates due to their increased audience size.
In fact, there was a recent FCC ruling regarding a station that was demanding that cable operators begin paying them to retransmit. The ruling said that any station that tried to charge a cable operator was no longer covered by the must carry rule.
So you're suggesting that the open source community should follow the shining example set by Microsoft? That's got to be a first.
That's a necessary, but not sufficient, condition. Not only does there have to be a "worsening", but the worsening must be equivalent to the net gain of the other players. Classic poker is zero-sum, but a poker game in which Donald Trump (as a bystander, not a player) offered to pay me $100 for each $1 I gained would not be.
Non-zero-sum games offer the opportunity for cooperative strategies, but don't require them. In the Trump poker game, I could pretty easily convince my opponents that they should play to lose by offering to repay them $20 for each dollar lost, or I could just rely on my own skill and keep those twenties to myself.
#2 is an excellent point! What application is important enough to warrant the use of all those cycles and still unimportant enough to rely on the results of computation performed in an untrusted environment? Anyone think Juno will actually be able to secure the operation and communication with these remote agents enough to prevent tampering?
A bunch of bitching, and few predictions. Get a clue, or use this one: Bush's appointment of Michael Powell as FCC chairman spells the end for DTV in its present incarnation. Powell's hands off, strict interpretation of the FCCs mandate will ensure that the FCC does not take a leadership role in the transition to digital television, and will throw the whole matter back into the lap of a deadlocked Congress. With the broadcasters, the cable companies, and the equipment manufactuers all at one another's throats, Congress will never be able to figure out which contributer to listen to, and the whole thing will stagnate to the public dismay and private delight of NBC, ABC, and CBS.