I wish I had $1 for every iPod killer MP3 player that has been released to date. I could then afford an iPod.
And I wish I had $1 for every iPod fanatic who comes up with a reason that the iPod is more desireable than whatever clone just came out. Because then I could get an iPod!;)
Contrary to what you might believe, you don't have a right to infringe on copyrights.
Framed in a sheerly legal way, the above statement is correct. Framed in a moral/ethical way, the above statement has as many differing opinions as slavery and women's rights had in their heyday.
We can no longer endure these indignancies. Don't they know we should all be treated as infallible saints until we can be proven otherwise.
Parent post is currently modded "funny". I can't tell if it was intended to be funny, but regardless there is an underlying serious issue: that of on whom the burden of proof lies in questions of guilt or innocence. Both Congress and the Bush administration are systematically orchestrating numerous radical reductions to the legal protections formerly held by citizens. These protections should be given much more care and public debate than they're getting. I sincerely hope that the debate doesn't simply amount to chuckles at strawman positions.
If P2P systems were not such wonderful tools for piracy and theft, there would be no (legitiomate) complaint
As concerned about copyright violation as corporations and the government are, I believe there is even more to their objections to P2P: it provides a way to share information in general, without being subject to a hierarchical scheme of servers. This worries them because it means they can no longer control information by imposing licensing schemes on servers.
For respondents who would claim otherwise: it's my belief that corporations and the government are all about controlling information, even that which is not specifically copyrighted. Controlling information is an extremely useful tool for (a) retaining power and (b) advertising to consumers. P2P scares those who rely on the historic near-monopoly on media and information distribution.
I must ask....why would anyone WANT to pirate such a movie? If you're going to risk being exposed for leaking a movie...at least leak a movie worth downloading.
Absolutely! I'm thinking of movies like Pink Flamingos.;)
The MIT paper referenced in the article does a nice job of describing how to foil the (presumed) neural network comprising CAPS (how poetic that just a few articles later on slashdot is an article on hash busting to avoid bayesian filters). However, MIT's argument hinges on the ability of terrorist cells to recruit people who do not fit the "typical" profile of a terrorist. This does not seem as probable to me as the MIT paper suggests. The paper cites the existence of John Walker Lindh, Richard Reid, Lucas Helder, Ted Kacynski, and Timothy McVeigh as evidence that "terrorists clearly have no shortage of diversity". I would counter that this roster of five anglo or partially anglo terrorists does not convince me that anglo terrorists are easy enough to find that the end result of CAPS is less security.
Further, there's no mention in the paper that a neural network will evolve as long as new data is fed to it, but it will. If the paper's implication is that ethnicity will weigh heavily in the neural network's calculations, I'd speculate that such a correlation would be only a first-order correlation which would eventually be a casualty of the relentless ability to ferret out non-obvious relationships that neural networks are good at.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing that I like or want the CAPS system. Nor am I arguing the opposite. But while I think the MIT paper starts out decently with a bit of statistics and a light discussion of neural networks, it then tries to make a statistically significant model out of five individuals. It ends up feeling like the authors had a result in mind and worked backwards from it instead of being diligently thorough at every stage of the discussion.
Labeling a machine with a chip it does not have is wrong for the following reasons:
General principle: it's a lie (and worse, it's perpetrated for money).
If the buyer tries to resell the machine, he will lose money in the event that the next owner cares about the distinction.
The buyer is entitled to use the internal parts to build another machine.
If a hardware bug is announced on the chip that resides in a machine but the owner doesn't know it, the owner isn't informed enough to take corrective measures (e.g. replace the chip, avoid certain usages, download new drivers, etc)
without their permissions you are a criminal, both legally and morally. My stuff is my stuff and I'll thanky ou to keep your hands off it. If you wish to audit anyhting I have, physical or virtual, you'd better ask my permission first, or you'll face consequences.
This is a central tenet of the DMCA.
This seems perfectly reasonable and there is plenty of precident in the physical world:
My house has many known security flaws. The largest would be the windows. They are easily broken with just a rock, allowing access.
There's an important flaw in this analogy. In the case of BestBuy's servers, there was (at least the pretext of) the public's security at stake. In the case of your house, there's no "public good" at stake, making it reasonable to presume that the motivation of a person breaking in would be to rob you or do some other outright harm.
I'm not saying the guy who communicated with BestBuy is an angel. His attempt to remain anonymous is IMO evidence of bad faith. But if he'd been forthright about his identity, and had described a less jarring publicizing method than revealing the customer data, I think it'd be arguable that he was looking to supply a public good at a price. If I was a BestBuy customer and there was a serious security flaw in their server that compromised me, I would certainly want it fixed, even if that was instrumented by an interloper who did it for selfish financial reasons (limits withstanding on the financial reward). This is a major problem with the DMCA, which inhibits the open discussion of such flaws.
Note that when you transfer a song from iTunes to the iPod, it does the same basic thing. Decrypts the file using the system key and reencrypts it using iPod specific information, then sticks it on the iPod. The iPod then does the same process as iTunes to play the file, more or less, it's just using a different system key.
Ah. This explains two aspects of ipods that I've found odd up til now: the fact that only itunes can be used to move files to them, and the fact that files can't easily be moved from ipods back to main computers.
The whole concept behind iTunes encryption is that once a machine is authorized, it can play songs without any outside intervention. Meaning that it has everything it needs to decrypt the songs right there on that machine. Meaning that as long as this is true, it can be cracked again.
Yup. I think DRM is fundamentally harder than encryption between two peers because DRM is trying to prevent the recipient of data from using that data in ways other than intended, whereas two-peer encryption is focused on trying to prevent outsiders from gaining access to the data at all. DRM forces the vendor to include the decryption keys SOMEWHERE.
While I abstain from offering an opinion on whether driving while computing is good or bad or something else, I take issue with the following:
Driving is NOT a simple mental process. If it was, don't you think we would have built a robotic system based on a series of simple algorithms to do the driving for us?
Whether a process has been implemented in software is not a good indicator of whether that process is effortless vs impossibly hard for humans. Humans recognize speech without even thinking about it, while computers still are in the dark ages when it comes to speech recognition. Computers render 80 fps full motion game video on the fly, while humans can barely scratch out a crude line drawing of something taking minutes for a single frame.
As long as they steadly increase profit each year, why should Apple change their ways?
Actually, just maintaining profits should be adequate to ward off the need for change. Ever-increasing profits is an unsustainable model for any company, and therefor guarantees eventual change for the worse.
Interspecies gene transfer from a fresh water fish to a salt water fish, to the same fresh water species somewhere else is a large stretch of the imagination.
I wouldn't count on that. A big issue in the San Francisco Bay area has been the phenomenon of foreign tankers emptying their balast chambers (or some kind of huge water-containing chamber) in the SFBay, thereby introducing tons of non-native species to the area.
Insulin == cell phones. Wow you have a very firm grasp on reality
There are differences and there are similarities. If you'd like to make their non-equality the keystone of your argument, then I think we can also comfortably tell people to give up cars, computers, books, refrigerators, toilets, and telephones. After all, none of these things will literally save your life like insulin.
But my point was not so much to equate insulin to cellphones as it was to portray the extrapolation of your apparent disgust for people who value cellphones more than you do. If you really want to convince people that they don't need cellphones as much as they think they do, the point would be much better made by convincing the audience that you know what their needs are and you know how those needs can be reasonably addressed without cellphones. What you chose instead was to deride people. Were you hoping to shame them into giving up their cellphones? If so, I doubt that will work.
your pants will stay up without the cell phone holster connected to your belt. Try it in the safety of your own home if you do not believe me. And legend has it our ancestors traveled across the country side without cell phones back in the olden days.
Right on. And guess what, your pants will stay up even if you choose to not own a car. Rumor has it our ancestors didn't have cars. Heck, rumor has it they even lived in squalor and disease for most of history. Try it, I know you'll love it. So to sum up: because stuff is new, you can't possibly be dependent on it. End of story. I hope all you insulin addicts out there are listening.
I have nothing to hide, and couldn't care less if anybody new where I was located. With hundreds of cell phones being used in any one region, the thought of somebody caring about your location is quite unrealistic.
#1: caring whether people know where you are does not mean you have something to hide.
#2: having something to hide does not mean people should be entitled to know about it.
#3: the number of cellphones being used in a given area has very little to do with the likelihood that someone will care where you are. It has much more to do with who knows that you're carrying a lot of cash, or who thinks that you have too much freedom in your relationship and need to be reigned in via generic oversight.
i personally... dont see the big deal since you could just not carry your cell with you for that ultra-top-secret-underground tinfoil hat clan meeting.
i am more worried about things you cannot opt out of, like face scanning in public places.
I think you should more clearly define what you think of as things that people can opt out of. If there is face scanning, you can opt out: just don't go there. If your car has a tracking device, just choose not to drive it. My point being that "just not carrying your cellphone" may not be a big deal to you but to some people it really is.
we all complain about MS's problems, now we've actually got a outlet to complain to. If you don't speak up now, you really have no room to speak later!
Right... the universally accepted principle that if a corporation you hate holds out the olive branch of a survey, you have to take the survey or give up your position against the company. Mm hmm. Good.
My cursory read of bug 122445 suggests that this is a different bug than that being discussed in the slashdot article; bug 122445 deals with the potential for @ signs in a url to mislead users, while the slashdot article seems to be referring to a one-up on this, namely including the non-printing character %01 before the at sign which ends up being harder for the user to track. Maybe I'm misreading the bug.
My version of mozilla (1.4.1) isn't subject to the bug discussed by the article. My speculation is that if the latest version of mozilla was affected by the bug, and the bug became as widely publicized as the article bug now has been, that it would be fixed within days. Since my version of mozilla appears unaffected, I'm thinking that mozilla isn't affected. This leaves my speculation as unsubstantiated, but there are various other examples from the history of mozilla that do support such faith.
The ipod at the apple store is $399 for the 20G model. The karma is on amazon for $349 for the 20G model. The karma would seem to be cheaper, but not dramatically.
Slashdot Mirror
Judge: 127.0.0.1, have you anything to say for yourself?
127.0.0.1: Yes... one zero zero one zero one one one one zero one one zero zero zero one zero zero one zero.
Court Recorder: Could you repeat that last part? About the zeroes?
And I wish I had $1 for every iPod fanatic who comes up with a reason that the iPod is more desireable than whatever clone just came out. Because then I could get an iPod! ;)
Framed in a sheerly legal way, the above statement is correct. Framed in a moral/ethical way, the above statement has as many differing opinions as slavery and women's rights had in their heyday.
Parent post is currently modded "funny". I can't tell if it was intended to be funny, but regardless there is an underlying serious issue: that of on whom the burden of proof lies in questions of guilt or innocence. Both Congress and the Bush administration are systematically orchestrating numerous radical reductions to the legal protections formerly held by citizens. These protections should be given much more care and public debate than they're getting. I sincerely hope that the debate doesn't simply amount to chuckles at strawman positions.
As concerned about copyright violation as corporations and the government are, I believe there is even more to their objections to P2P: it provides a way to share information in general, without being subject to a hierarchical scheme of servers. This worries them because it means they can no longer control information by imposing licensing schemes on servers.
For respondents who would claim otherwise: it's my belief that corporations and the government are all about controlling information, even that which is not specifically copyrighted. Controlling information is an extremely useful tool for (a) retaining power and (b) advertising to consumers. P2P scares those who rely on the historic near-monopoly on media and information distribution.
"Only two things are certain: the fact that I'm dead, and the fact that people will remember me as I truly was, and I'm not sure about the latter." ;)
Wow, their bands run the gamut from A to... well, B.
Absolutely! I'm thinking of movies like Pink Flamingos. ;)
That is one rockin' tune! Thanks.
Further, there's no mention in the paper that a neural network will evolve as long as new data is fed to it, but it will. If the paper's implication is that ethnicity will weigh heavily in the neural network's calculations, I'd speculate that such a correlation would be only a first-order correlation which would eventually be a casualty of the relentless ability to ferret out non-obvious relationships that neural networks are good at.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing that I like or want the CAPS system. Nor am I arguing the opposite. But while I think the MIT paper starts out decently with a bit of statistics and a light discussion of neural networks, it then tries to make a statistically significant model out of five individuals. It ends up feeling like the authors had a result in mind and worked backwards from it instead of being diligently thorough at every stage of the discussion.
This is a central tenet of the DMCA.
This seems perfectly reasonable and there is plenty of precident in the physical world: My house has many known security flaws. The largest would be the windows. They are easily broken with just a rock, allowing access.
There's an important flaw in this analogy. In the case of BestBuy's servers, there was (at least the pretext of) the public's security at stake. In the case of your house, there's no "public good" at stake, making it reasonable to presume that the motivation of a person breaking in would be to rob you or do some other outright harm.
I'm not saying the guy who communicated with BestBuy is an angel. His attempt to remain anonymous is IMO evidence of bad faith. But if he'd been forthright about his identity, and had described a less jarring publicizing method than revealing the customer data, I think it'd be arguable that he was looking to supply a public good at a price. If I was a BestBuy customer and there was a serious security flaw in their server that compromised me, I would certainly want it fixed, even if that was instrumented by an interloper who did it for selfish financial reasons (limits withstanding on the financial reward). This is a major problem with the DMCA, which inhibits the open discussion of such flaws.
Ah. This explains two aspects of ipods that I've found odd up til now: the fact that only itunes can be used to move files to them, and the fact that files can't easily be moved from ipods back to main computers.
The whole concept behind iTunes encryption is that once a machine is authorized, it can play songs without any outside intervention. Meaning that it has everything it needs to decrypt the songs right there on that machine. Meaning that as long as this is true, it can be cracked again.
Yup. I think DRM is fundamentally harder than encryption between two peers because DRM is trying to prevent the recipient of data from using that data in ways other than intended, whereas two-peer encryption is focused on trying to prevent outsiders from gaining access to the data at all. DRM forces the vendor to include the decryption keys SOMEWHERE.
Whether a process has been implemented in software is not a good indicator of whether that process is effortless vs impossibly hard for humans. Humans recognize speech without even thinking about it, while computers still are in the dark ages when it comes to speech recognition. Computers render 80 fps full motion game video on the fly, while humans can barely scratch out a crude line drawing of something taking minutes for a single frame.
... can be found here.
Actually, just maintaining profits should be adequate to ward off the need for change. Ever-increasing profits is an unsustainable model for any company, and therefor guarantees eventual change for the worse.
I wouldn't count on that. A big issue in the San Francisco Bay area has been the phenomenon of foreign tankers emptying their balast chambers (or some kind of huge water-containing chamber) in the SFBay, thereby introducing tons of non-native species to the area.
There are differences and there are similarities. If you'd like to make their non-equality the keystone of your argument, then I think we can also comfortably tell people to give up cars, computers, books, refrigerators, toilets, and telephones. After all, none of these things will literally save your life like insulin.
But my point was not so much to equate insulin to cellphones as it was to portray the extrapolation of your apparent disgust for people who value cellphones more than you do. If you really want to convince people that they don't need cellphones as much as they think they do, the point would be much better made by convincing the audience that you know what their needs are and you know how those needs can be reasonably addressed without cellphones. What you chose instead was to deride people. Were you hoping to shame them into giving up their cellphones? If so, I doubt that will work.
Right on. And guess what, your pants will stay up even if you choose to not own a car. Rumor has it our ancestors didn't have cars. Heck, rumor has it they even lived in squalor and disease for most of history. Try it, I know you'll love it. So to sum up: because stuff is new, you can't possibly be dependent on it. End of story. I hope all you insulin addicts out there are listening.
#1: caring whether people know where you are does not mean you have something to hide.
#2: having something to hide does not mean people should be entitled to know about it.
#3: the number of cellphones being used in a given area has very little to do with the likelihood that someone will care where you are. It has much more to do with who knows that you're carrying a lot of cash, or who thinks that you have too much freedom in your relationship and need to be reigned in via generic oversight.
I think you should more clearly define what you think of as things that people can opt out of. If there is face scanning, you can opt out: just don't go there. If your car has a tracking device, just choose not to drive it. My point being that "just not carrying your cellphone" may not be a big deal to you but to some people it really is.
Right... the universally accepted principle that if a corporation you hate holds out the olive branch of a survey, you have to take the survey or give up your position against the company. Mm hmm. Good.
My version of mozilla (1.4.1) isn't subject to the bug discussed by the article. My speculation is that if the latest version of mozilla was affected by the bug, and the bug became as widely publicized as the article bug now has been, that it would be fixed within days. Since my version of mozilla appears unaffected, I'm thinking that mozilla isn't affected. This leaves my speculation as unsubstantiated, but there are various other examples from the history of mozilla that do support such faith.
The ipod at the apple store is $399 for the 20G model. The karma is on amazon for $349 for the 20G model. The karma would seem to be cheaper, but not dramatically.
I'd prefer one shaped like a cucumber, much more bang for the buck when you carry it around in your pocket.