along the same lines, is the new and coming drug, Bremelanotide. It was created with the intention of being an artificial tanning agent, at which it succeeded, but a large number of the test subjects, both male and female, reported highly increased sexual arousal during the tests.
I just have to ask: was the pun intended with the phrase "coming drug"?:)
According to a new theory, any black hole that pops out of the Large Hadron Collider under construction in Switzerland might be surrounded by a black ring -- forming a microscopic 'black Saturn'.
I'm happy as long as the collider doesn't start emitting blue-ringed uranuses.
This isn't the first time Daniel Lyons has floated the "who is Pamela Jones" line. That particular article also shed tears over O'Gara being called down for her stalking.
Wouldn't it be delicious if this lead to Lyons being asked in court if O'Gara was lying when she wrote the stalker article, since it's Lyon's position that Jones doesn't exist.
In reality, it is fueled by the citizens demanding more from their government under the delusion that it will help them. People don't understand that when the government gives you something, it has to take it from you first.
Benefits from a government don't by any means have to emerge from a zero-sum game where someone loses something meaningful. Example: the laws against murder, well, citizens had to "give up" the right to murder in return for this protection... is that really an onerous concession? Or consider a government's capacity to centrally administrate any of a number of programs that benefit the public: roads, defense, investment in large-scale infrastructure... the benefit of having such coordination doesn't seem to make sense when considered in the "zero sum" paradigm. In a purely monetary sense, then yes, taxes to pay for things do have to come from people and corporations, so the model there is closer to zero sum, but the "to give something, has to take first" statement seemed more broadly intended than that...
The Bible, all religion aside, is at least a historic text. Many of the stories and accounts in the Bible can be and have been verified. Regardless of your religious preferences, you don't contest the fact that pharos existed, crosses were used for execution or that Caesar was in charge of Rome.
Is Harry Potter an historic text because children really do attend schools, and take multiple classes teaching them different subjects, as depicted in those books?
While the bible uses settings that may be mappable to various locations on earth, the bible's point has never been to assert that pharoahs existed, or that crosses were used. The bible is basically one giant assertion that there is a god, a heaven and hell, and most of the rest is detail about how to get on the right or wrong side of said heaven/hell dichotomy. To declare the bible an historic text based on its inclusion of a few possibly-verifiable but completely-beside-the-point elements seems somewhere between misguided and manipulative.
The NeXT Cube had a slick, very usable graphical interface (the direct ancestor of Mac OS X) and a productive development environment using Objective-C. Its processor was a 25MHz 68030. There isn't any magic spell that has been cast to make programmers more stupid or make compilers worse over the last twenty years.
No one's saying programmers are more stupid or compilers are worse. But operating systems and graphics layers have become much more demanding. Witness the fact that computers are STILL often "too slow" at the same routine tasks they were 10 years ago, despite running 100 times faster. That's WITH a heavy-duty specialized GPU doing most of the graphics.
Apple is of course free to write a completely stripped down, optimized mini-OS for their phone, and such a thing might run very well on their chip. But the question at hand in this thread is whether such an effort would qualify as "OSX".
The FSF is shooting itself in the foot big time. They're handing Microsoft a huge victory on a platter. Consider how this ban will affect those customers of Novell who use Linux.
Here's another way to look at it: consider how enormous an opportunity Novell is handing to anyone who wants to step in and take Novell's customers. An existing distro could do it, or -- even more poignantly -- someone could run with the code from OpenSuse, or with the code from Novell itelf... "look, we have the very code you're running now, and WE legally pledge NOT to ever engage in the bullshit that Novell jumped into."
YouTube has acknowledged receiving a DMCA request from Viacom
Does the DMCA apply here, as opposed to good old copyright law? The only part of the DMCA that I've been told about is the part prohibiting the circumention of encryption on copyrighted works... is youtube allegedly guilty of such, or is there another part of the DMCA that I haven't picked up on?
Bill Gates has done a LOT more "good guy" stuff than just about anyone else in his position ever has. How many billionaire CEO's have ever given as much to legitimate charities as Bill Gates? How many others have decided to give their entire $multi-billion fortune away when they die to a charitable foundation? Guys like Gates and Warren Buffet deserve at least a little "good guy" cred for that.
There are numerous ways to skin the related math. Comparing myself to Bill Gates, Gates wins hands down in terms of total amount donated, or percentage of holdings donated. On the other hand, I slaughter him with regard to scarcity of personal holdings remaining after all donations.
There's humor in my point above, but seriousness too. Bill Gates has not had to live without anything purchasable that he's wanted, whereas I've had to live without quite a lot of things that by varying degrees are "essential". Doesn't make me a better person than Gates, but conversely his pain-free, involved-as-he-wants-to-be actions don't make him a better person than me.
This line of thought applies when comparing Gates to other execs as well. How many of these execs have as much money as Gates to start with? How much did they have left when their donations were tallied up? How much in excess of some arbitrary standard of living/possessing did those amounts clock in at? All these questions are fundamentally aimed at discerning how much was really "given" in a way that cost the giver something, vs simply rearranged. If a corporate exec donates a billion dollars and keeps ten million for a lengthy retirement, how does that compare to a starving child who gives away a piece of bread and dies as a consequence? Who gets more "good guy" karma points?
I saw her Switch ad when it came out. I didn't get the cult fascination then, and I don't get it now either. So fine, whatever. Fast forward 5 years later and I'm wondering what the hell any of us are doing reading an interview with her.
I agree, this epidemic of fascination with girls one has never met just seems put on. Plus, all my energy is currently devoted to my adoration of Natalie Portman.
Over the years, the U.S. government has eroded its citizens' rights to the point of absurdity. This latest president has only made a bad situation worse.
I think I agree with your point, except that it doesn't go far enough wrt Bush: this latest president (Bush) has made privacy-related matters much much worse... I've always been privacy minded, and while none of the previous administrations have terribly outraged me in that regard, Bush has consistently been just disastrously awful. IMO the worst president ever, in this regard and many others.
Clinton really wasn't that bad. Whatever bad things Clinton did, Bush has made them seem like the good old days.
Ah, I see. Quite clever! Thank you for the excellent explanation.
My feeling is that this technique doesn't sufficiently qualify a hash as broken, since anyone who digitally signs a doc and either remembers the gist of it or keeps a copy for themselves can require the folks using this technique to produce their copy of the doc for discovery... and of course it would never stand up to technical scrutiny, the monkeying would be obvious.
due to the block based nature of many hash algorithms and the nature of many file formats, for many applications if someone can find ANY two inputs that give the same hash you are in shit
This is what a hash is by design: obscurity. For mathematical reasons alone, you can't have a unique hash for your megabyte message crammed in (say) 256 bytes.
Your point about the impossibility of producing unique M-byte hashes for every N-byte message (where N>M) is of course mathematically correct. But instead of thinking of hashes as working via obscurity, think of the function of the ideal hash to be: the impossibility of finding data with a matching hash without so radically changing the input data that the change is obvious to anyone who sees it. For example, if someone can produce a page of text that has the same hash value as garbage, or as a video of a monkey, the value of the hash function is not diminished. Whereas if someone can produce two license agreements that differ only in the phrases "I accept the following terms" and "I do *not* accept the following terms", the hash function is considered broken.
A hash function seeks to re-map a mathematical space in such a way that previously "adjacent" places in the input space are far apart in the output space. An ideal hash function would do this
(a) uniformly: for all points in the space; and
(b) unpredictably: H(A)-H(B) != H(A+X)-H(B+X); (so for example, by this criteria a simple checksum is not a good hash)
You are going to notice if someone walks up [to within 4 feet of] you and starts wanding you to get an RFID signal.
Sure, one wouldn't notice if someone dressed in an LED clown suit with a megaphone started jumping up and down with a wand announcing, "Please remain immobile, I am about to scan you." But you're not going to notice if there's a reader embedded in the wall of a hallway where you're walking.
Maybe Einstein was right that "God doesn't play dice" (a rather misunderstood statement given that Einstein was an ardent aetheist).
All Einstein meant was that god doesn't play dice because non-existent entities don't play (or say or do) anything.:) He could just as easily have phrased it "That god won't hunt."
If... a DRM scheme that allowed full legitimate usage (format shifting, time shifting, playback on different devices, etc.) and only blocked illicit usage (illegal copying), would you support the usage of such a DRM scheme?
Depends on what the "etc" in the allowed functionality list is. Things I want include
[a] guaranteed ability to backup media, or otherwise completely hassle-free retrieval of media in the event of loss/destruction
[b] a guarantee that no new restrictions will be placed on the media in the future
[c] the ability to play on as many devices as I want, perhaps not at precisely the same instant but with no overhead/hassle for registering/unregistering devices as "valid"
[d][ when the DRM system fails (like key-finding logic screws up), it allows rather than restricts playback (erring on the side of the consumer), and
[e] only a single purchase ever required, i.e. no "rental" or "licensing" terms that manifest as multiple payments.
If "etc" does not include all of the above, then I'm probably not interested... really, the only concession I want to make for DRM is that I won't ever give the media to someone else. If "etc" *does* include all of the above, there is some chance I'd be interested.
In other words, if you object to DRM schemes, is your objection based on principled or practical concerns?
You tell me. My list above is, IMO, comprised of requests that are simply geared to make my life functionally (practically) easier. I'm willing to suppose that "wanting ease" is a practical rather than principled concern.
But look at item [c]... in practical terms, the ability to play on as many devices as I want means either letting them play simultaneously, or having all involved devices implement the hardware and software required to communicate utterly reliably (and I would not be satisfied with paying any arbitrary additional cost that such hardware/software levied on the price). Due to the technical impossibility of getting such a reliable and cost effective communication technology spec'd out and the probable impossibity of getting companies to agree on the standard (they can't even agree on disk formats, fcs), this probably requires that I be allowed to play on as many devices as I want simultaneously. Would DRM folks stand for this? If not, does this requirement amount to a practical one (because I want my life to be easy) or a principled one (because I refuse to let technological and political limitations prevent me from having having what I want)? If the latter, who's forcing the principle here... me, or the premise of this "Ask Slashdot" that gives a "restricted only in principle" utopia as a premise?
I posit that the foundation of this Ask Slashdot is flawed. There is no bright-line dichotomy between "practical" and "principled" when it comes to DRM.
So I'd attribute this more to carrier paranoia than to Jobs' control issues
If it's true that carriers don't want this, what way do they have of exerting pressure on Apple?
I'm thinking of an analogy to cable, where cable internet providers don't want to lose cable tv revenue due to (say) youtube viewing... but short of capping bandwidth there's not a lot of leverage cable providers can wield.
When Steve Jobs was arranging iTunes, he needed buy-in from the copyright-holding music industry to legally distribute the songs. No such factors apply here that I know of.
Slashdot Mirror
I just have to ask: was the pun intended with the phrase "coming drug"? :)
I'm happy as long as the collider doesn't start emitting blue-ringed uranuses.
Wouldn't it be delicious if this lead to Lyons being asked in court if O'Gara was lying when she wrote the stalker article, since it's Lyon's position that Jones doesn't exist.
For the record, those of us who hate copyright will not despise someone for disregarding copyright law.
Benefits from a government don't by any means have to emerge from a zero-sum game where someone loses something meaningful. Example: the laws against murder, well, citizens had to "give up" the right to murder in return for this protection... is that really an onerous concession? Or consider a government's capacity to centrally administrate any of a number of programs that benefit the public: roads, defense, investment in large-scale infrastructure... the benefit of having such coordination doesn't seem to make sense when considered in the "zero sum" paradigm. In a purely monetary sense, then yes, taxes to pay for things do have to come from people and corporations, so the model there is closer to zero sum, but the "to give something, has to take first" statement seemed more broadly intended than that...
Is Harry Potter an historic text because children really do attend schools, and take multiple classes teaching them different subjects, as depicted in those books?
While the bible uses settings that may be mappable to various locations on earth, the bible's point has never been to assert that pharoahs existed, or that crosses were used. The bible is basically one giant assertion that there is a god, a heaven and hell, and most of the rest is detail about how to get on the right or wrong side of said heaven/hell dichotomy. To declare the bible an historic text based on its inclusion of a few possibly-verifiable but completely-beside-the-point elements seems somewhere between misguided and manipulative.
No one's saying programmers are more stupid or compilers are worse. But operating systems and graphics layers have become much more demanding. Witness the fact that computers are STILL often "too slow" at the same routine tasks they were 10 years ago, despite running 100 times faster. That's WITH a heavy-duty specialized GPU doing most of the graphics.
Apple is of course free to write a completely stripped down, optimized mini-OS for their phone, and such a thing might run very well on their chip. But the question at hand in this thread is whether such an effort would qualify as "OSX".
Here's another way to look at it: consider how enormous an opportunity Novell is handing to anyone who wants to step in and take Novell's customers. An existing distro could do it, or -- even more poignantly -- someone could run with the code from OpenSuse, or with the code from Novell itelf... "look, we have the very code you're running now, and WE legally pledge NOT to ever engage in the bullshit that Novell jumped into."
Does the DMCA apply here, as opposed to good old copyright law? The only part of the DMCA that I've been told about is the part prohibiting the circumention of encryption on copyrighted works... is youtube allegedly guilty of such, or is there another part of the DMCA that I haven't picked up on?
Or is even this response less than the response that is deserved, despite being perhaps the extent of what the FSF is legally capable of doing?
Perhaps "Maxwell's rubber" might catch on...
Exactly. Another great one is "truthiness". Hoping to see "Harry Potter and the Undeniable Truthiness".
There are numerous ways to skin the related math. Comparing myself to Bill Gates, Gates wins hands down in terms of total amount donated, or percentage of holdings donated. On the other hand, I slaughter him with regard to scarcity of personal holdings remaining after all donations.
There's humor in my point above, but seriousness too. Bill Gates has not had to live without anything purchasable that he's wanted, whereas I've had to live without quite a lot of things that by varying degrees are "essential". Doesn't make me a better person than Gates, but conversely his pain-free, involved-as-he-wants-to-be actions don't make him a better person than me.
This line of thought applies when comparing Gates to other execs as well. How many of these execs have as much money as Gates to start with? How much did they have left when their donations were tallied up? How much in excess of some arbitrary standard of living/possessing did those amounts clock in at? All these questions are fundamentally aimed at discerning how much was really "given" in a way that cost the giver something, vs simply rearranged. If a corporate exec donates a billion dollars and keeps ten million for a lengthy retirement, how does that compare to a starving child who gives away a piece of bread and dies as a consequence? Who gets more "good guy" karma points?
I agree, this epidemic of fascination with girls one has never met just seems put on. Plus, all my energy is currently devoted to my adoration of Natalie Portman.
I think I agree with your point, except that it doesn't go far enough wrt Bush: this latest president (Bush) has made privacy-related matters much much worse... I've always been privacy minded, and while none of the previous administrations have terribly outraged me in that regard, Bush has consistently been just disastrously awful. IMO the worst president ever, in this regard and many others.
Clinton really wasn't that bad. Whatever bad things Clinton did, Bush has made them seem like the good old days.
Not if the movie's encrypted with a one-time pad! ;)
My feeling is that this technique doesn't sufficiently qualify a hash as broken, since anyone who digitally signs a doc and either remembers the gist of it or keeps a copy for themselves can require the folks using this technique to produce their copy of the doc for discovery... and of course it would never stand up to technical scrutiny, the monkeying would be obvious.
Could you explain this a bit more fully?
Your point about the impossibility of producing unique M-byte hashes for every N-byte message (where N>M) is of course mathematically correct. But instead of thinking of hashes as working via obscurity, think of the function of the ideal hash to be: the impossibility of finding data with a matching hash without so radically changing the input data that the change is obvious to anyone who sees it. For example, if someone can produce a page of text that has the same hash value as garbage, or as a video of a monkey, the value of the hash function is not diminished. Whereas if someone can produce two license agreements that differ only in the phrases "I accept the following terms" and "I do *not* accept the following terms", the hash function is considered broken.
A hash function seeks to re-map a mathematical space in such a way that previously "adjacent" places in the input space are far apart in the output space. An ideal hash function would do this
Sure, one wouldn't notice if someone dressed in an LED clown suit with a megaphone started jumping up and down with a wand announcing, "Please remain immobile, I am about to scan you." But you're not going to notice if there's a reader embedded in the wall of a hallway where you're walking.
All Einstein meant was that god doesn't play dice because non-existent entities don't play (or say or do) anything. :) He could just as easily have phrased it "That god won't hunt."
Look at the bones!
Depends on what the "etc" in the allowed functionality list is. Things I want include
- [a] guaranteed ability to backup media, or otherwise completely hassle-free retrieval of media in the event of loss/destruction
- [b] a guarantee that no new restrictions will be placed on the media in the future
- [c] the ability to play on as many devices as I want, perhaps not at precisely the same instant but with no overhead/hassle for registering/unregistering devices as "valid"
- [d][ when the DRM system fails (like key-finding logic screws up), it allows rather than restricts playback (erring on the side of the consumer), and
- [e] only a single purchase ever required, i.e. no "rental" or "licensing" terms that manifest as multiple payments.
If "etc" does not include all of the above, then I'm probably not interested... really, the only concession I want to make for DRM is that I won't ever give the media to someone else. If "etc" *does* include all of the above, there is some chance I'd be interested.In other words, if you object to DRM schemes, is your objection based on principled or practical concerns?
You tell me. My list above is, IMO, comprised of requests that are simply geared to make my life functionally (practically) easier. I'm willing to suppose that "wanting ease" is a practical rather than principled concern.
But look at item [c]... in practical terms, the ability to play on as many devices as I want means either letting them play simultaneously, or having all involved devices implement the hardware and software required to communicate utterly reliably (and I would not be satisfied with paying any arbitrary additional cost that such hardware/software levied on the price). Due to the technical impossibility of getting such a reliable and cost effective communication technology spec'd out and the probable impossibity of getting companies to agree on the standard (they can't even agree on disk formats, fcs), this probably requires that I be allowed to play on as many devices as I want simultaneously. Would DRM folks stand for this? If not, does this requirement amount to a practical one (because I want my life to be easy) or a principled one (because I refuse to let technological and political limitations prevent me from having having what I want)? If the latter, who's forcing the principle here... me, or the premise of this "Ask Slashdot" that gives a "restricted only in principle" utopia as a premise?
I posit that the foundation of this Ask Slashdot is flawed. There is no bright-line dichotomy between "practical" and "principled" when it comes to DRM.
If it's true that carriers don't want this, what way do they have of exerting pressure on Apple?
I'm thinking of an analogy to cable, where cable internet providers don't want to lose cable tv revenue due to (say) youtube viewing... but short of capping bandwidth there's not a lot of leverage cable providers can wield.
When Steve Jobs was arranging iTunes, he needed buy-in from the copyright-holding music industry to legally distribute the songs. No such factors apply here that I know of.
What kinds of things am I missing?
Isn't low quality porn an oxymoron? :)