He's probably just one of those Politically Correct, feminized-types who's jumped on the bandwagon of alternating between using "he" and "she" in order to appear less "sexist".
And this moron is probably one of those neoconservative, homophobic, God-and-country types that think 95% of the world is wrong. I bet she's even more to the right than Genghis Khan.
Copyright infringement is a crime and, on a large scale, a felony. See 17 U.S.C. 506:
Willful copyright infringement is criminalized by 17 U.S.C. 506(a)
in concert with 18 U.S.C. 2319 for economically motivated infringement or
large-scale infringement (even if not committed for commercial gain). Felony
penalties attach to violations involving reproduction or distribution of at least
ten copies valued at more than $2,500.
As Larry Lessig points out in his most recent book, this turns an enormous number of otherwise law-abiding Americans--some 40 percent--into felons. Moreover, it exposes them to literally millions of dollars of civil damages.
The tragedy of this is not only that these penalties are overly harsh, not commensurate with the crime, and burden millions of users for the benefit of a relatively small industry.
The tragedy is that it is a grotesque distortion of the once highly limited copyright law, a law that was only meant to regulate publishers. The incessant lobbying of spineless representatives has caused the scope and penalties of 'infringement' to balloon, without deliberation and without consulting the public.
Just as importantly, it is the industry's public relation's 'propaganda' (as Chomsky would call it) that has effectively morphed public opinion about what copyright was, what it is, and what it should be. It has changed from merely affecting publishers to affecting everyone, and it seems to many 'natural' and 'obvious' that individual users are committing willful and egregious crimes. It is not surprising, therefore, to find the parent post accepting the sad truth--"Downloading copyrighted material that you have not purchased is a crime."--wholeheartedly.
In the press release, ATT seems to justify this decision by saying that: According to industry estimates, more than 40% of American households have now migrated to some combination of bundled communications services. Recent regulatory decisions make it financially infeasible for AT&T to offer a competitive bundle of services to consumers. AT&T has determined that it cannot effectively compete against bundled competition by selling only standalone LD.
Well, maybe they shouldn't have sold AT&T Broadband.
Why don't highly important OSS projects use second level protection, like only allowing X user to modify files N Y P at a file system level?
The reason is simple. If a program is to allow any users (say, only those who are authorized to modify certain files), the program itself must have adequate permissions to modify those files. If they are system files, the program must be suid root.
Heap and buffer overflow attacks--like the sort discovered in CVS--allow unprivileged users to execute arbitrary code with the permissions of the program. Since the program itself has been hijacked, it bypasses exactly the sort of second-level protection you suggest.
Sandboxing techniques aim to counteract this by running the program in a "protected" environment, thus externalizing these kinds of checks you suggest. However, much research has shown that sandboxes themselves can be vulnerable, incomplete (think race conditions), and so on.
Security is a hard problem, and even common attack techniques are, from an algorithmic perspective, highly subtle. Simple answers often do not work.
The Helix Platform is a "media framework." According to their own page:
The Helix(TM) DNA Client is the universal playback engine designed to support the decode and playback of any data type desired... The Helix DNA Client is designed as an open, comprehensive platform that enables playback of digital media products and applications for any format, operating system, or device. [It] supports any audio or video codec through well-defined file format and decoder APIs.
What will the next 2.4 revision be called?
on
2.4.9 Kernel Released
·
· Score: 0, Troll
As the 2.4.x kernel series has been headed to higher and higher revision (x) numbers, I've been wondering what will occur when those numbers are exhausted.
Seeing as how we're at 2.4.9, will all the next revisions be 2.4.9.x? It's probably way too early for 2.6.
--Alex
From the same exact page that features the much-repeated "99.999%, 50 minutes of network down-time every 10 years" phrase is this quote and a Flash animation showing what happens when you cross two (gasp!) of the main trans-Pacific fibers.
"Southern Cross features self-healing triple Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) ring architecture.
The Southern Cross network comprises two separate cables to provide maximum security. The size of the Pacific Ocean is such that if a cable breaks it is typically out of service for 12 days."
It seems they expect this stuff, and that traffic is automatically rerouted through the remaining fiber(s).
Did some ship come across thousands of miles of Pacific water, efficiently cutting all Southern Cross underwater sea fibers? Or was there in fact *no* downtime and the Slashdot posting is (gasp again!) inaccurate?
Can someone clarify the circumstances of the outage--specifically whether more than one Southern Cross cable was in fact cut?//alex.diaz
I would gather that after x amount of days of having not submitted an archived block, it is handed off to someone else.
On a tangentially related note, I always wondered what happens when people throw McDonald's fries and beverage containers in the trash without peeling the "Instantly Win 1 Million" game piece.
Well there are restrictions in the GPL for how Microsoft could use such software--they couldn't, for instance, incorporate the code into their own product code without releasing the source for the appropriate portions of that product.
Some claim that this is one of the reasons for Microsoft's hostility towards GPL software--they can't "embrace and extend" it their way.
Well there are restrictions in the GPL for how Microsoft could use such software--they couldn't, for instance, incorporate the code into their own product code without releasing the source for the appropriate portions of that product.
Some claim that this is one of the reasons for Microsoft's hostility towards GPL software--they can't "embrace and extend" it their way.
Do you mean pipe the noise-cancellation into stereo speakers?
If that's what you're saying, I don't think it's possible with the technology and circuitry in the headphones. The way they work is that small low-frequency-sensitive microphones in the outer part of the earcup pick up the sound waves going towards your ear. The sound signal is then inverted* in a signal processor and fed out of speakers in the headphones. The sound from the speakers interferes with the "original" sound and cancels it. This process is known as destructive interference.
The "NoiseBlocker" unit on the cord is simply the piece of circuitry that processes the sound input from the microphone and computes a cancelling sound that it sends back to the speakers in the headphones. It is virtually useless without the headphones and speakers in the headphones.
The reason this works reasonably well in headphones is because the sound and speakers come in a very specific orientation and angle into your ear. It is therefore possible to cancel the sounds going in that direction.
In a big room, however, aren't in a specified position, and the sounds going into your ear are change in phase and volume depending on where you are sitting. Ambient noise cancellation is relatively ineffective because the precise phase and direction of waves is extremely variable and the speaker isn't directly in the line-of-sound as it is in headphones.
By the way, the reason that noise-cancelling mufflers on some new busses works is because they cancel the sound at the line-of-sound exiting the exhast pipe. A microphone in the pipe can pick up the sounds exiting the muffler, a circuitry inverts, them, and then the sound is pumped back out at an opposite phase to cancel the noise exiting the pipe.
In short, common noise cancellation technology works because it intercepts the line-of-sound between your ear and the source. If the noise cancellation mechanism cannot do this, it is not effective.
Absolutely. Of course, they won't stop *all* ambient noise, but they seem to work exceedingly well for low, monotonous sounds like airplane jets. In fact, American Airlines now includes the Bose Noise Cancelling headphones in its first and business class cabins on transcontinental flights--apparently they really reduce stress.
I would gather that the hum of airplane jets is not too unlike that of fans. If you can stand headphones on your head for long perionds of time, it may be worth a shot.
You'd think that if the astronauts on the space shuttle were able to think of using container frames as table parts, the people down here might have been able to think of a way preparing to do that.
Considering the enormously high cost per unit mass to send things to space, I would hope that they would be maximizing the materials (plan to have packing materials fold out into other useful items, etc). Enough waste material to do things like building a table that's "too bulky to send up" or a muffler sort of scares me.
Well Rose-Hulman, who owns that domain, is quite well known for its excellent engineering departments (according to USNews, they are the #1 non-graduate-degree-granting school in virtually all the engineering specialties). Probably that ROOT acronym was no mistake, either:D.
Actually, if you don't count the players for Windows CE devices, Microsoft has players available for three platforms: Windows, Mac, and Solaris.
The Solaris one's existance stunned me when I saw it listed on the Microsoft site. I personally have not tried it, though. It does sort of prove that the porting of WMP to Linux and other Unices is limited not by the "difficulty" of porting the MFC-centric apps, but by sheer unwillingness to have anything of theirs on the Linux platform. I'm not sure why they selected Solaris though, but I assume it has to do with corporate politics, their relationship with Sun, and God knows what else.
Well, technically it is possible for a particle to move faster than the speed of light--in a medium. Although we have not yet observed (and if Einstein is right, we should never) an object that moves faster than light in a vacuum, it is certainly possible in a medium such as air or water.
Such a phenomenon is
Cherenkov radiation, where electrons travelling faster than light in the medium cause the emission of a blue glow.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, Congress exists to *make laws* and laws are what lawyers' work is all about.
And this moron is probably one of those neoconservative, homophobic, God-and-country types that think 95% of the world is wrong. I bet she's even more to the right than Genghis Khan.
The tragedy of this is not only that these penalties are overly harsh, not commensurate with the crime, and burden millions of users for the benefit of a relatively small industry.
The tragedy is that it is a grotesque distortion of the once highly limited copyright law, a law that was only meant to regulate publishers. The incessant lobbying of spineless representatives has caused the scope and penalties of 'infringement' to balloon, without deliberation and without consulting the public.
Just as importantly, it is the industry's public relation's 'propaganda' (as Chomsky would call it) that has effectively morphed public opinion about what copyright was, what it is, and what it should be. It has changed from merely affecting publishers to affecting everyone, and it seems to many 'natural' and 'obvious' that individual users are committing willful and egregious crimes. It is not surprising, therefore, to find the parent post accepting the sad truth--"Downloading copyrighted material that you have not purchased is a crime."--wholeheartedly.
In the press release, ATT seems to justify this decision by saying that:
According to industry estimates, more than 40% of American households have now migrated to some combination of bundled communications services. Recent regulatory decisions make it financially infeasible for AT&T to offer a competitive bundle of services to consumers. AT&T has determined that it cannot effectively compete against bundled competition by selling only standalone LD.
Well, maybe they shouldn't have sold AT&T Broadband.
The reason is simple. If a program is to allow any users (say, only those who are authorized to modify certain files), the program itself must have adequate permissions to modify those files. If they are system files, the program must be suid root.
Heap and buffer overflow attacks--like the sort discovered in CVS--allow unprivileged users to execute arbitrary code with the permissions of the program. Since the program itself has been hijacked, it bypasses exactly the sort of second-level protection you suggest.
Sandboxing techniques aim to counteract this by running the program in a "protected" environment, thus externalizing these kinds of checks you suggest. However, much research has shown that sandboxes themselves can be vulnerable, incomplete (think race conditions), and so on.
Security is a hard problem, and even common attack techniques are, from an algorithmic perspective, highly subtle. Simple answers often do not work.
That is gorgeous. Simply brilliant.
What's next, they'll run an open source jobs site on IIS?
Ohh wait. They do.
The whole /. front page is italicized.
As the 2.4.x kernel series has been headed to higher and higher revision (x) numbers, I've been wondering what will occur when those numbers are exhausted. Seeing as how we're at 2.4.9, will all the next revisions be 2.4.9.x? It's probably way too early for 2.6. --Alex
From the same exact page that features the much-repeated "99.999%, 50 minutes of network down-time every 10 years" phrase is this quote and a Flash animation showing what happens when you cross two (gasp!) of the main trans-Pacific fibers. "Southern Cross features self-healing triple Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) ring architecture. The Southern Cross network comprises two separate cables to provide maximum security. The size of the Pacific Ocean is such that if a cable breaks it is typically out of service for 12 days." It seems they expect this stuff, and that traffic is automatically rerouted through the remaining fiber(s). Did some ship come across thousands of miles of Pacific water, efficiently cutting all Southern Cross underwater sea fibers? Or was there in fact *no* downtime and the Slashdot posting is (gasp again!) inaccurate? Can someone clarify the circumstances of the outage--specifically whether more than one Southern Cross cable was in fact cut? //alex.diaz
I would gather that after x amount of days of having not submitted an archived block, it is handed off to someone else.
On a tangentially related note, I always wondered what happens when people throw McDonald's fries and beverage containers in the trash without peeling the "Instantly Win 1 Million" game piece.
Well there are restrictions in the GPL for how Microsoft could use such software--they couldn't, for instance, incorporate the code into their own product code without releasing the source for the appropriate portions of that product.
Some claim that this is one of the reasons for Microsoft's hostility towards GPL software--they can't "embrace and extend" it their way.
Well there are restrictions in the GPL for how Microsoft could use such software--they couldn't, for instance, incorporate the code into their own product code without releasing the source for the appropriate portions of that product. Some claim that this is one of the reasons for Microsoft's hostility towards GPL software--they can't "embrace and extend" it their way.
Do you mean pipe the noise-cancellation into stereo speakers?
If that's what you're saying, I don't think it's possible with the technology and circuitry in the headphones. The way they work is that small low-frequency-sensitive microphones in the outer part of the earcup pick up the sound waves going towards your ear. The sound signal is then inverted* in a signal processor and fed out of speakers in the headphones. The sound from the speakers interferes with the "original" sound and cancels it. This process is known as destructive interference.
The "NoiseBlocker" unit on the cord is simply the piece of circuitry that processes the sound input from the microphone and computes a cancelling sound that it sends back to the speakers in the headphones. It is virtually useless without the headphones and speakers in the headphones.
The reason this works reasonably well in headphones is because the sound and speakers come in a very specific orientation and angle into your ear. It is therefore possible to cancel the sounds going in that direction.
In a big room, however, aren't in a specified position, and the sounds going into your ear are change in phase and volume depending on where you are sitting. Ambient noise cancellation is relatively ineffective because the precise phase and direction of waves is extremely variable and the speaker isn't directly in the line-of-sound as it is in headphones.
By the way, the reason that noise-cancelling mufflers on some new busses works is because they cancel the sound at the line-of-sound exiting the exhast pipe. A microphone in the pipe can pick up the sounds exiting the muffler, a circuitry inverts, them, and then the sound is pumped back out at an opposite phase to cancel the noise exiting the pipe.
In short, common noise cancellation technology works because it intercepts the line-of-sound between your ear and the source. If the noise cancellation mechanism cannot do this, it is not effective.
Absolutely. Of course, they won't stop *all* ambient noise, but they seem to work exceedingly well for low, monotonous sounds like airplane jets. In fact, American Airlines now includes the Bose Noise Cancelling headphones in its first and business class cabins on transcontinental flights--apparently they really reduce stress. I would gather that the hum of airplane jets is not too unlike that of fans. If you can stand headphones on your head for long perionds of time, it may be worth a shot.
You could pop in an 802.11b card in one of those, which would be *very* cool. However, there's still that pesky power cord you'd have to deal with....
You'd think that if the astronauts on the space shuttle were able to think of using container frames as table parts, the people down here might have been able to think of a way preparing to do that.
Considering the enormously high cost per unit mass to send things to space, I would hope that they would be maximizing the materials (plan to have packing materials fold out into other useful items, etc). Enough waste material to do things like building a table that's "too bulky to send up" or a muffler sort of scares me.
Well Rose-Hulman, who owns that domain, is quite well known for its excellent engineering departments (according to USNews, they are the #1 non-graduate-degree-granting school in virtually all the engineering specialties). Probably that ROOT acronym was no mistake, either :D.
:D.
* Delerium considers applying to Rose-Hulman
Actually, if you don't count the players for Windows CE devices, Microsoft has players available for three platforms: Windows, Mac, and Solaris.
The Solaris one's existance stunned me when I saw it listed on the Microsoft site. I personally have not tried it, though. It does sort of prove that the porting of WMP to Linux and other Unices is limited not by the "difficulty" of porting the MFC-centric apps, but by sheer unwillingness to have anything of theirs on the Linux platform. I'm not sure why they selected Solaris though, but I assume it has to do with corporate politics, their relationship with Sun, and God knows what else.
Has anyone seen the Solaris WMP?
Well, technically it is possible for a particle to move faster than the speed of light--in a medium. Although we have not yet observed (and if Einstein is right, we should never) an object that moves faster than light in a vacuum, it is certainly possible in a medium such as air or water.
Such a phenomenon is Cherenkov radiation, where electrons travelling faster than light in the medium cause the emission of a blue glow.