Given that there was a clean reverse-engineering process though, this would not seem to apply.
Didn't the DeCSS authors get the first key they used out of Xing's DVD software? Unfortunately, I think that means that DeCSS wasn't a clean reverse engineering job.
Since they depended on clues they extracted from Xing's DVD software to discover valid decryption keys, the plaintiffs could argue that DeCSS would not exist if the authors hadn't stolen the intellectual property of the plaintiffs.
--
Greetings New User! Be sure to replace this text with a
Given that there was a clean reverse-engineering process though, this would not seem to apply.
Didn't the DeCSS authors get the first key they used out of Xing's DVD software? Unfortunately, I think that means that DeCSS wasn't a clean reverse engineering job.
Since they depended on clues they extracted from Xing's DVD software to discover valid decryption keys, the plaintiffs could argue that DeCSS would not exist if the authors hadn't stolen the intellectual property of the plaintiffs.
--
Greetings New User! Be sure to replace this text with a
Re:What defines a big rock/asteroid vs a moon?
on
Earth's Second Moon
·
· Score: 1
The only difference between an asteroid and a moon is whether it orbits the sun (asteroid) or another planet (moon).
There is good reason to suspect, for example, that the moons of Mars are captured asteroids, along with Charon (Pluto's moon).
--
Greetings New User! Be sure to replace this text with a
There are coding techniques where you could break up the target code into A, B, C, and D, but you only need three of the four to recover the target.
This could be done to any level of complexity - i.e., set it up so that whenever 3 random SlashDotters meet, they could combine their secret decoder rings to produce the DeCSS source...
--
Greetings New User! Be sure to replace this text with a
No, I would disagree with that. It might be possible to approximate a brain with a turing machine, but that might not be good enough.
I'm not saying we will never have AI, or anything like that - I just don't believe it will be on a digital computer. I'd suspect that the hardware for developing an artificial intelligence will end up having many of the same features as a biological brain.
The day PDAs are more like computers and less like glorified calendars is the day the market will really take off.
You're kidding, right?
I chose the palm precisely because it's OS had nothing in common with traditional computer operating systems. It does what I want it to do. With no muss, no fuss, no crashes and I had effectively mastered it 10 minutes after I opened the box. The fact that I later discovered I could also write software for it in any number of languages was a huge bonus, but not the reason I bought it in the first place.
If my palm was as hard to use as a WinCE device I would have taken it back and gone back to my paper day timer.
To my mind, devices like the Palm are the future of all computers: task specific devices that are enhanced by a microprocessor but which do not attempt to be an all purpose computer.
As for LINUX - I would have thought LINUX to be a strange choice, since UNIX varients tend to be too fat for this type of hardware. I know someone was claiming to have gotten LINUX to boot on a Palm, but they ran out of memory before it even got process #1 started...
i guess it's time to start wondering about the validity of everything *except* that which we behold with our own eyes...
Except that studies have shown that human memory is incredibly inaccurate. First, people tend to draw instant conclusions about what they are seeing and then edit their own memories to fit their conclusions. Second, studies have shown that a skilled interviewer can cause a person to alter their own memories, either adding or removing information, or changing information. In the case of false memory syndrome it has been shown that people can become convinced that events happened to them that never happened, or that things didn't happen which actually did.
In a frightening short period of time, what a person believes they saw happen and what actually happened can become incredibly different.
I suspect that we are going to start seeing the need for embedded signatures in video and still photos - say, a hash code at the end of each frame, signed by the camera that created the video or photograph. Even that wouldn't be foolproof (I edit a video, then play it into a second camera which re-records it, and writes it's own signature onto it.) It would be a big step forward.
The Dragonball processor has no MMU. And only has an execution space of about 64K (the max you'll have at any one time is 56K). Yes, the Dragonball has *access* to more memory for storage, etc. but not for actually program execution.
That's not really any different from the original 68000 - the 64k limit (actually, it's a +/- 32k limit) comes from wanting your binaries to be relocatable: They have to use relative addressing instead of absolute, and the 68k instruction set uses 16 bits for relative addressing.
The same restriction existed on Commodore Amigas and Atari STs, etc.. The Amiga OS binary file format handled this by requiring that no function be larger than one 32k chunk, and using jump tables to map calls and accesses between chunks. The jump tables were recalculated by the program loader each time the program was read from disk. This was completely hidden from the programmer and user - if they didn't care to look, it seemed to them as if they could write programs as large as the Amiga's memory space.
Because this was a performance hit, careful programmers made sure frequently called functions ended up in the same chunk as the functions that called them. It also lent itself to software-based virtual memory since chunks were ready made for swapping in and out of memory.
Therefore, being afraid that GM crops will drive out non-GM crops (under cultivation) is as silly as being afraid that my new traditionally selected long-grain rice will supplant other breeds of long-grain rice cause mine is better.
No, there are additional risks. There have been demonstrated cases of GM traits jumping from crops to wild relatives. The current most popular GM crops have a resistance to the herbicide "Round Up". This is great - you can use more Round Up and more efficiently keep weeds out of your crops. Until the weedy relatives of your crops start getting the resistance, too.
This is nothing new - weeds grow more resistant to herbicides every day - but the fact that the GM genes jump at all means that stranger genes will jump, too. Frost resistance is a trait derived from a bacterial gene. If it jumps, what side effects might that have? Maybe none at all, maybe something unexpected. No one knows for sure, and Monsanto doesn't want to find out.
That's just silly and false. Study up on it, take a look at the yield possible with vertical (even very short vertical) growing structures and hydroponics.
And what does that have to do with organic farming? I bet very few people would consider hydroponics to be "organic".
He's right. People with fuzzy headed ideas about organic farming have never seen droves of hispanic children picking bugs off their crops one at a time.
Anyone who actually builds a robot wouldn't bother to put in those stupid moral codes.
... Have you actually read any of Asimov's books? The 3 laws weren't created out of thin air. Asimov asked the question "What would it take for people frightened by technology to allow robots into their homes?" (remember, he started writing a long time before the West became so machine happy.) His answer was the three laws. Even better, those laws allowed for the creation of a series of novels based on logic puzzles: Given the 3 laws, how can a robot commit murder? How do you identify a robot that does not have the 3 laws installed, but which is pretending that it does? What are the consequences to humanity of being surrounded by semi-immortal, nearly-omnipotent nurse maids?
As literature, the 3 laws were an excellent tool for exploring the relationship between man and machine. They were never meant to be principles for actual robotic design.
--
Re:Interesting story...
on
Sex in Space
·
· Score: 1
How do you officially think about sex?
How does the old line go? "Put a flag over her head and do it for your country"
To be gender neutral, wasn't there also some british peeress who said "I just close my eyes and think of england."
--
Re:Newton's Laws of Motion can be Fun
on
Sex in Space
·
· Score: 1
It's been a long time, but I don't remember identical twins - lesbian or otherwise - in Titan. There was the captain, Cirocco Jones, and her first mate, (name escapes me. Maggie? something like that).
I remember giving the trilogy to my baby sister as an example of strong women in sci-fi.
Jon Katz, where are you? Left handed people need your advocacy on this matter. We're BORN this way, which you can't say for the high school nerds you've been championing lately.
Hmmmm...
I'm fairly certain I was born a nerd, as well as left handed.
If not, I'm going to have to have a serious talk with my parents for letting me read all those books when I should have been playing "beat the crap out of the freak" with all my class mates.
Do you know what the casualty rates were for D-Day? And that was for a force that didn't have to worry about spy sats giving the other guys 3 days notice you were coming.
Interesting tidbit about the AtariTramielC= games: people claimed that effectively the Amiga is a descendant of the Atari 400/800 series, while the ST is a descendent of the C64.
I don't know that the allegations of infanticide were proved or disproved, nontheless China does strongly discourage families from having more than one child. There are exceptions made for rural farming families (possibly bowing to the inevitable), but in the cities the one child policy has had a huge impact on life in china. I've even seen complaints that many of these "only children" are spoiled rotten - something that china never had to deal with...
As far as "...a westerner probably [having] the environmental impact of 5 or more third world citizens." I have to say I have my doubts. My understanding from geography and economics classes is that underdeveloped countrys actually have a greater negative environmental impact than western societys because they don't have the resources to avoid things like burning inefficient fuels and dumping wastes into the water and the ground. One economics instructor explained it as environmentalism being a luxury of first world countries, which makes sense to me. I could be wrong though.
While it's true that we don't burn down the forests like they do in many undeveloped areas, Americans consume well over ten times the amount of energy per person than most of the rest of the world, and generate nearly 20 times the amount of garbage per person. In addition, a lot of that slash-and-burn farming is done to raise cattle for sale in America.
As far as "...a westerner probably [having] the environmental impact of 5 or more third world citizens." I have to say I have my doubts. My understanding from geography and economics classes is that underdeveloped countrys actually have a greater negative environmental impact than western societys because they don't have the resources to avoid things like burning inefficient fuels and dumping wastes into the water and the ground. One economics instructor explained it as environmentalism being a luxury of first world countries, which makes sense to me. I could be wrong though. While it's true that we don't burn down the forests like they do in many undeveloped areas, Americans consume well over ten times the amount of energy per person than most of the rest of the world, and generate nearly 20 times the amount of garbage per person. In addition, a lot of that slash-and-burn farming is done to raise cattle for sale in America. --
Like you, I will omit rendering an opinion, except on your conclusion:
Abortion does not occur frequently enough to put a serious dent in the birth rate. There would have to be millions of abortions each year and there are only (serious hand-waving here) a few tens of thousands performed each year.
Slashdot Mirror
Earlier, someone said:
Given that there was a clean reverse-engineering process though, this would not seem to apply.
Didn't the DeCSS authors get the first key they used out of Xing's DVD software? Unfortunately, I think that means that DeCSS wasn't a clean reverse engineering job.
Since they depended on clues they extracted from Xing's DVD software to discover valid decryption keys, the plaintiffs could argue that DeCSS would not exist if the authors hadn't stolen the intellectual property of the plaintiffs.
--
Greetings New User! Be sure to replace this text with a
Given that there was a clean reverse-engineering process though, this would not seem to apply.
Didn't the DeCSS authors get the first key they used out of Xing's DVD software? Unfortunately, I think that means that DeCSS wasn't a clean reverse engineering job.
Since they depended on clues they extracted from Xing's DVD software to discover valid decryption keys, the plaintiffs could argue that DeCSS would not exist if the authors hadn't stolen the intellectual property of the plaintiffs.
--
Greetings New User! Be sure to replace this text with a
The only difference between an asteroid and a moon is whether it orbits the sun (asteroid) or another planet (moon).
There is good reason to suspect, for example, that the moons of Mars are captured asteroids, along with Charon (Pluto's moon).
--
Greetings New User! Be sure to replace this text with a
Maybe A xor B xor C xor D produces DeCSS.
There are coding techniques where you could break up the target code into A, B, C, and D, but you only need three of the four to recover the target.
This could be done to any level of complexity - i.e., set it up so that whenever 3 random SlashDotters meet, they could combine their secret decoder rings to produce the DeCSS source...
--
Greetings New User! Be sure to replace this text with a
No, the wife got those.
--
Greetings New User! Be sure to replace this text with a
Sounds like time for a chain letter.
Any body want to get it started?
Hi! Please send this source code to your ten closest friends. If you do, The Justice Department will search your computer for free!
Better yet - what about an Outlook Express virus that propagates the source code???
(I can't believe I actually just suggested that. Must be the drugs. I had surgery the other week & I'm still in recovery.)
--
Greetings New User! Be sure to replace this text with a
Yeah, but by the time it solved the problem, it was too late.
Of course, the solution solved that problem too...
--
No, I would disagree with that. It might be possible to approximate a brain with a turing machine, but that might not be good enough.
I'm not saying we will never have AI, or anything like that - I just don't believe it will be on a digital computer. I'd suspect that the hardware for developing an artificial intelligence will end up having many of the same features as a biological brain.
--
The day PDAs are more like computers and less like glorified calendars is the day the market will really take off.
You're kidding, right?
I chose the palm precisely because it's OS had nothing in common with traditional computer operating systems. It does what I want it to do. With no muss, no fuss, no crashes and I had effectively mastered it 10 minutes after I opened the box. The fact that I later discovered I could also write software for it in any number of languages was a huge bonus, but not the reason I bought it in the first place.
If my palm was as hard to use as a WinCE device I would have taken it back and gone back to my paper day timer.
To my mind, devices like the Palm are the future of all computers: task specific devices that are enhanced by a microprocessor but which do not attempt to be an all purpose computer.
As for LINUX - I would have thought LINUX to be a strange choice, since UNIX varients tend to be too fat for this type of hardware. I know someone was claiming to have gotten LINUX to boot on a Palm, but they ran out of memory before it even got process #1 started...
--
i guess it's time to start wondering about the validity of everything *except* that which we behold with our own eyes...
Except that studies have shown that human memory is incredibly inaccurate. First, people tend to draw instant conclusions about what they are seeing and then edit their own memories to fit their conclusions. Second, studies have shown that a skilled interviewer can cause a person to alter their own memories, either adding or removing information, or changing information. In the case of false memory syndrome it has been shown that people can become convinced that events happened to them that never happened, or that things didn't happen which actually did.
In a frightening short period of time, what a person believes they saw happen and what actually happened can become incredibly different.
I suspect that we are going to start seeing the need for embedded signatures in video and still photos - say, a hash code at the end of each frame, signed by the camera that created the video or photograph. Even that wouldn't be foolproof (I edit a video, then play it into a second camera which re-records it, and writes it's own signature onto it.) It would be a big step forward.
--
The Dragonball processor has no MMU. And only has an execution space of about 64K (the max you'll have at any one time is 56K). Yes, the Dragonball has *access* to more memory for storage, etc. but not for actually program execution.
That's not really any different from the original 68000 - the 64k limit (actually, it's a +/- 32k limit) comes from wanting your binaries to be relocatable: They have to use relative addressing instead of absolute, and the 68k instruction set uses 16 bits for relative addressing.
The same restriction existed on Commodore Amigas and Atari STs, etc.. The Amiga OS binary file format handled this by requiring that no function be larger than one 32k chunk, and using jump tables to map calls and accesses between chunks. The jump tables were recalculated by the program loader each time the program was read from disk. This was completely hidden from the programmer and user - if they didn't care to look, it seemed to them as if they could write programs as large as the Amiga's memory space.
Because this was a performance hit, careful programmers made sure frequently called functions ended up in the same chunk as the functions that called them. It also lent itself to software-based virtual memory since chunks were ready made for swapping in and out of memory.
--
Therefore, being afraid that GM crops will drive out non-GM crops (under cultivation) is as silly as being afraid that my new traditionally selected long-grain rice will supplant other breeds of long-grain rice cause mine is better.
No, there are additional risks. There have been demonstrated cases of GM traits jumping from crops to wild relatives. The current most popular GM crops have a resistance to the herbicide "Round Up". This is great - you can use more Round Up and more efficiently keep weeds out of your crops. Until the weedy relatives of your crops start getting the resistance, too.
This is nothing new - weeds grow more resistant to herbicides every day - but the fact that the GM genes jump at all means that stranger genes will jump, too. Frost resistance is a trait derived from a bacterial gene. If it jumps, what side effects might that have? Maybe none at all, maybe something unexpected. No one knows for sure, and Monsanto doesn't want to find out.
--
That's just silly and false. Study up on it, take a look at the yield possible with vertical (even very short vertical) growing structures and hydroponics.
And what does that have to do with organic farming? I bet very few people would consider hydroponics to be "organic".
He's right. People with fuzzy headed ideas about organic farming have never seen droves of hispanic children picking bugs off their crops one at a time.
--
Hmmmm... Haven't read it yet, but wouldn't an EMP that strong also fry every pacemaker, TV camera, etc.. in the area?
I'd hate to be the guy who killed the AARP delegation in the next courtroom...
--
Anyone who actually builds a robot wouldn't bother to put in those stupid moral codes.
... Have you actually read any of Asimov's books? The 3 laws weren't created out of thin air. Asimov asked the question "What would it take for people frightened by technology to allow robots into their homes?" (remember, he started writing a long time before the West became so machine happy.) His answer was the three laws. Even better, those laws allowed for the creation of a series of novels based on logic puzzles: Given the 3 laws, how can a robot commit murder? How do you identify a robot that does not have the 3 laws installed, but which is pretending that it does? What are the consequences to humanity of being surrounded by semi-immortal, nearly-omnipotent nurse maids?
As literature, the 3 laws were an excellent tool for exploring the relationship between man and machine. They were never meant to be principles for actual robotic design.
--
How do you officially think about sex?
How does the old line go? "Put a flag over her head and do it for your country"
To be gender neutral, wasn't there also some british peeress who said "I just close my eyes and think of england."
--
It's been a long time, but I don't remember identical twins - lesbian or otherwise - in Titan. There was the captain, Cirocco Jones, and her first mate, (name escapes me. Maggie? something like that).
I remember giving the trilogy to my baby sister as an example of strong women in sci-fi.
--
Jon Katz, where are you? Left handed people need your advocacy on this matter. We're BORN this way, which you can't say for the high school nerds you've been championing lately.
Hmmmm...
I'm fairly certain I was born a nerd, as well as left handed.
If not, I'm going to have to have a serious talk with my parents for letting me read all those books when I should have been playing "beat the crap out of the freak" with all my class mates.
--
Do you know what the casualty rates were for D-Day? And that was for a force that didn't have to worry about spy sats giving the other guys 3 days notice you were coming.
--
Interesting tidbit about the AtariTramielC= games: people claimed that effectively the Amiga is a descendant of the Atari 400/800 series, while the ST is a descendent of the C64.
--
So your saying that it's anti-semetic to be pro-life?
Or to have an optimistic view of population growth?
--
I don't know that the allegations of infanticide were proved or disproved, nontheless China does strongly discourage families from having more than one child. There are exceptions made for rural farming families (possibly bowing to the inevitable), but in the cities the one child policy has had a huge impact on life in china. I've even seen complaints that many of these "only children" are spoiled rotten - something that china never had to deal with...
--
As far as "...a westerner probably [having] the environmental impact of 5 or more third world citizens." I have to say I have my doubts. My understanding from geography and economics classes is that underdeveloped countrys actually have a greater negative environmental impact than western societys because they don't have the resources to avoid things like burning inefficient fuels and dumping wastes into the water and the ground. One economics instructor explained it as environmentalism being a luxury of first world countries, which makes sense to me. I could be wrong though.
While it's true that we don't burn down the forests like they do in many undeveloped areas, Americans consume well over ten times the amount of energy per person than most of the rest of the world, and generate nearly 20 times the amount of garbage per person. In addition, a lot of that slash-and-burn farming is done to raise cattle for sale in America.
--
As far as "...a westerner probably [having] the environmental impact of 5 or more third world citizens." I have to say I have my doubts. My understanding from geography and economics classes is that underdeveloped countrys actually have a greater negative environmental impact than western societys because they don't have the resources to avoid things like burning inefficient fuels and dumping wastes into the water and the ground. One economics instructor explained it as environmentalism being a luxury of first world countries, which makes sense to me. I could be wrong though. While it's true that we don't burn down the forests like they do in many undeveloped areas, Americans consume well over ten times the amount of energy per person than most of the rest of the world, and generate nearly 20 times the amount of garbage per person. In addition, a lot of that slash-and-burn farming is done to raise cattle for sale in America.
--
Like you, I will omit rendering an opinion, except on your conclusion:
Abortion does not occur frequently enough to put a serious dent in the birth rate. There would have to be millions of abortions each year and there are only (serious hand-waving here) a few tens of thousands performed each year.
--