Why not change the rule to "Top 10 highest scored posts, or all score:5 posts, whichever is larger"?
1. Because the interviewee was told to expect 10 questions, budgeted time for 10 questions, and doesn't deserve to have that sort of bait-n-switch pulled on them.
2. Because having 20 Score: 5 questions shouldn't happen - it's an aberration of stupid moderators who missed the opportunity to winnow down the question pool themselves, by desperately hoping they can mark up and help their own favorite Score:3 post, rather than mark down (this is one instance where "Overrated" should actually be used) a bunch of Score: 5 questions that they think shouldn't be asked.
How many is "most people"? 99%? Then if there are as few as a hundred independent property owners between me and the water company, I've got a more than 60% chance of having to bring my drinking water in buckets from the river (assuming my surrounding property owners are willing to at least let me cross their land with buckets, of course).
I'm a libertarian, but you can take things too far. In that world, I think what would be more likely is that any group with the money to do so would start buying up loops of land via a bunch of pseudonymous holding companies, charge all the traffic will bear to let anyone inside trespass to get out, then buy up the interior of the loop at fire sale prices.
Oh, goody, someone just finished reading Atlas Shrugged...
If you don't like the way Company A sells their bandwidth, don't purchase from Company A.
How about, if I don't like the way Company A sells their product, I rescind the government granted right-of-way that allowed Company A to dig up countless miles of public and private property to bring their product to me?
Fair is a socialist concept.
So is eminent domain, but without it we wouldn't have any cables (or utilities) reaching our homes at all. If we're already granting corporate monopolies based on one socialist theory, why stop there?
Well, the Sun's putting out about 1.4 kW/m^2 at the Earth's radius (around 160e9 meters), and the Sun's radius is around 1.4e9 meters, so the Sun's output at it's surface should be about 1.4 * (160/1.4)^2 = 18300 kW/m^2 = 1830 W/cm^2.
I found a cool.pdf with the Watts/cm^2 values (on page 8; thanks, Google!) for Intel's CPUs up to the PIII, and apparantly the PIII's only at 40 W/cm^2. It's got all sorts of neat past milestones (hot plate) and future goals (nuclear reactor, rocket nozzle, even the Sun's surface, at about where my math claimed) to strive for.
It's always easy to tell who's getting their CS degree and heading off to the workforce... and who's headed off to never-never land for their Ph.D. Large in this case usually means 128 bits. Really. I know about asymptotic analysis; I'm talking about actual programs.
Don't take that personally, BTW... I'm currently in CAM never-never land, and I'm just pissy that the spiffy O(n lg n) Delaunay triangulation algorithm I invented this semester doesn't seem to beat the standard O(n^(5/4)) algorithm for any problem size small enough to test on the 256MB RAM in my PC.
This lacks some of the insight into NP and NPC problems. We only care about the large cases for the most part.
How large is large? 2^128 (for brute forcing common encryption) is pretty much impossibly large, but is 128^1000 (to use the original poster's example) really an improvement?
It's called the first amendment. Free speech in Perl should be as protected as free speech in French. Can anyone honestly say, "It should be legal to tell someone how to make a pipe bomb but not how to decrypt a DVD" with a straight face?
Who didn't notice that? DeCSS was originally Windows software, since it came out shortly before Linux had support for even unencrypted DVDs. Of course Windows software utilizing it would come out before Linux software would.
there was not one full-fledged Linux DVD player on the market (just some shellscripts)
Oh, so if it's put together with bash instead of C, that somehow strips it of any legal consideration? Software developers are supposed to jump from a few kilobytes of decryption code to a few hundred kilobytes of GUI movie player instantaneously? I'm surprised any player software got put together as fast as it did.
The argument was about "substantial non-infringing uses", remember? Playing DVDs without Windows is a substantial non-infringing use, both when it was hard during the trial, and when it's easy now.
Anybody who's thought through DRM knows it's pure shit. The key's going to live in the box, and somebody, somewhere, is going to find it.
Are you sure? I don't see an XBox distribution of Linux yet. If they put out the hardware as well, Microsoft can indeed prevent unauthorized software access to or emulation of it's systems. They are practicing right now.
To be backwards compatible with the PC, of course, they'll have to be able to run unsigned software... but it won't run as "root", so it won't be able to access the media encryption keys or the unencrypted data in RAM that Microsoft-signed DRM applications will.
The XBox is their first try at this, to see what the holes are. My personal prediction is that someone will managed to get Linux booting by finding an buffer overflow in a signed game and using that to get hardware access... and Microsoft will find some way (like mandatory regular software updates that can "untrust" hackable DRM programs) to get around that, too.
And even assuming the key won't be retrievable, unencrypted content will be available at some point along the path from where the bits live to how my brain gets the input.
True. With music, there's no way they're going to be able to prevent you from soldiering 16 bit DACs into your speakers and recovering CD-quality sound on each channel. With video you can't get perfect reproduction that way, but do you think people won't be happy with just VHS quality?
Let MS invest billions into this nonsense. It'll get cracked before it's out of beta, just like everything else they do.
Of course, I'm sure Microsoft knows this. But the entertainment industry may not, and Congress doesn't have a clue. If the difficulty of ripping music and video only adds a week lag before it hits the internet, but if legal and economic attempts to prevent that mean Microsoft has root access to a closed box in every home, how sad do you really think they're going to be?
Even what the DMCA says isn't as bad as how the DMCA is applied. I can name you half a dozen Linux DVD players that rely on DeCSS code; did that make any difference in the courts?
It didn't help matters that Apple computers aren't really that fast; don't get me wrong, I own a mac and I love it, but the PPC just doesn't outclass x86s like Apple claims, at least in real-world applications.
True; the "400Mhz G4 beats 800Mhz Pentium" tests all depended on vectorized assembly stuff, but I don't think there's a benchmark at which a G4 wouldn't have blown away an Intel chip at the same clock speed. I suppose that's part of the problem: "Our computers are slower than theirs, but not nearly as much as you'd think!" isn't a great marketing gimmick.
The computer he was using didn't have any built in IR ports, but he found a little IR receiver that plugs into the serial port for ten or twenty bucks.
It didn't have a long enough cord, though. The computer really should be stuck in a closet (or built with a fanless CPU) for this sort of thing; he had to turn it off to enjoy movies without purring fans as background noise.
Since when does Joe Public compare chips of different architectures?
Since as long as I can remember. I have friends who never played games who saved a bundle on Cyrix chips with weak FPUs... and others who had to avoid those like the plague.
Since right now, especially. It's always been the case that Intel chips could be outsped by random ultraexpensive workstation CPUs at half the clock rate, but now we've got 2Ghz machines being outbenchmarked by *completely compatible* CPUs at 3/4 of the clockrate.
I think AMD's marketing here is shamefully deceptive, but they really did need to do something, and Apple's "public education" attempts about the growing irrelevance of MHz didn't seem to work very well.
A friend of mine had a computer hooked up to receiver (and TV, for onscreen xmms display) for mp3 playback. He gave it one of the modes on his all-in-one remote, installed the IR control module for xmms, and just let it run constantly. He could switch the TV and/or the audio over to the computer at any time, and control all the MP3 playing functions from one of the modes on the remote.
What's the problem with that? It's not like the remote controlled his DVD player perfectly, then screamed "I'm a kludge!" whenever he used it on MP3s.
(he used 320kbit mp3 files and a sound card with digital output, BTW; the sound really wasn't distinguishable from a CD jukebox)
By your logic, just clicking on a hyperlink in the first place might as well be "user intervention".
The fact is, there are some things that users are supposed to be able to do without being afraid of their system being remotely compromised and trashed! And opening a.txt file (or most types of files) of indeterminate origin, just like opening a hyperlink, is among them.
A.signature, maybe. I know you're not about to expend any reputation or liability on a random post on an internet forum. I think anyone with any sense should know the same. I have no idea whether the law agrees with me.
I suppose my problem is with glrotate's phrasing. I don't see why you should be responsible for spouting off on Slashdot any more than I am just because you're in law school. I like the fact that people can hold lawyers responsible for legal advice, but that seems to me to be a "special case" in human interaction, the exchange of warranted information for a fee, not an implicit agreement I have with everyone who's looked at a law text. And despite real concerns for potentially misleading people or exposing law students to needless lawsuits, when you consider the problem from the perspective of established lawyers telling proto-lawyers not to give legal information away for free, it comes off sounding more like price fixing than like ethics.
Of course, you've got it easy. If you think lawyers have to watch shop talk outside of work, imagine what civil and mechanical engineers face in the way of liability. As one of my coolest professors put it, "When doctor screw up, one person die. When engineer screw up, thousand people dead. Everybody die!!!"
I'd really like to know. Currently my choices are:
1. Stop thinking about this question entirely. No, really, stop thinking about it. Try really hard... whoops, I thought about it again.
2. Believe what the law student says, unless he's contradicted by an equally plausible source.
3. Believe the "It's legal to download ROMs if you delete them within 24 hours" type rumors that get spread around the internet by the legally ignorant.
4. Hire a real lawyer to talk to for hundreds of dollars.
I'm sure law school grads (including your ethics lecturer) would love option 2 to be unavailable, but I'm just not seeing a superior alternative here.
The legal costs involved in prosecuting thousands of users for a minimal amount of copyrighted material would not justify the end results.
What's minimal? I suspect an officer on the web could find offenders at a much higher rate than, say, a traffic officer. I don't know what the damages you can get for copyright violation are (Bono probably slipped in a rider somewhere that lets them break your kneecaps), but I'll bet it's more than a speeding ticket.
Locked up over a thousand people without criminal charges, without private access to legal counsel, and without so much as releasing their names to the public. Last I heard ~600 were still in custody.
Damn, you've been on that desert island a while, huh? Wait until you find out what happened to the World Trade Center while you were gone...
128-bit encryption is on the vast majority of internet-connected desktops now. There's absolutely no way that it's possession or use will be made illegal now ("Okay, Granny, we're putting the cuffs on. You should have downgraded your web browser, and you definitely shouldn't have clicked on that https:// link! What do you mean, you don't understand what you did wrong?"), and so any software that wants to escape monitoring can make it's communications indistinguishable from secure HTTP.
With most P2P systems, the solution is obvious: Law enforcement should connect to the networks themselves, seach for copyrighted material, download it to check that it really is copyrighted, identify the criminal by IP (hard, but not very hard), then prosecute. That sort of "undercover work" is essentially what they've been doing with prostitution for decades, a more victimless crime.
With Freenet, though, it's impossible to find the person who inserted copyrighted material. It's impossible to find which node you're getting it from. It is possible to tell which node you're immediately connected to is automatically caching and passing you copyrighted material, but is that enough to prosecute? If not, then the Freenet people are currently debugging and improving the ultimate piracy network. If so, then the very act of running a Freenet node would be illegal... and it would be very hard to distinguish the Freenet node's actions from those of, say, every router and proxy server on the internet.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not change the rule to "Top 10 highest scored posts, or all score:5 posts, whichever is larger"?
1. Because the interviewee was told to expect 10 questions, budgeted time for 10 questions, and doesn't deserve to have that sort of bait-n-switch pulled on them.
2. Because having 20 Score: 5 questions shouldn't happen - it's an aberration of stupid moderators who missed the opportunity to winnow down the question pool themselves, by desperately hoping they can mark up and help their own favorite Score:3 post, rather than mark down (this is one instance where "Overrated" should actually be used) a bunch of Score: 5 questions that they think shouldn't be asked.
For example, maybe Maggie is just being silent to be silent, or maybe that silence could be interpreted as a social protest.
Or maybe that silence could be interpreted as the desire to avoid drastically changing the formula of one of Fox's cash cows. You think?
Halo isn't anti-aliased...
It's limited to 640x480 interlaced, yet it's coming out of a system with a Geforce 3 level chipset inside. I certainly hope it's anti-aliased.
The power output figure you calcuated assumes a point source.
No, it just assumes a spherically symmetric power output.
I think most people would cooperate.
How many is "most people"? 99%? Then if there are as few as a hundred independent property owners between me and the water company, I've got a more than 60% chance of having to bring my drinking water in buckets from the river (assuming my surrounding property owners are willing to at least let me cross their land with buckets, of course).
I'm a libertarian, but you can take things too far. In that world, I think what would be more likely is that any group with the money to do so would start buying up loops of land via a bunch of pseudonymous holding companies, charge all the traffic will bear to let anyone inside trespass to get out, then buy up the interior of the loop at fire sale prices.
Oh, goody, someone just finished reading Atlas Shrugged...
If you don't like the way Company A sells their bandwidth, don't purchase from Company A.
How about, if I don't like the way Company A sells their product, I rescind the government granted right-of-way that allowed Company A to dig up countless miles of public and private property to bring their product to me?
Fair is a socialist concept.
So is eminent domain, but without it we wouldn't have any cables (or utilities) reaching our homes at all. If we're already granting corporate monopolies based on one socialist theory, why stop there?
Well, the Sun's putting out about 1.4 kW/m^2 at the Earth's radius (around 160e9 meters), and the Sun's radius is around 1.4e9 meters, so the Sun's output at it's surface should be about 1.4 * (160/1.4)^2 = 18300 kW/m^2 = 1830 W/cm^2.
.pdf with the Watts/cm^2 values (on page 8; thanks, Google!) for Intel's CPUs up to the PIII, and apparantly the PIII's only at 40 W/cm^2. It's got all sorts of neat past milestones (hot plate) and future goals (nuclear reactor, rocket nozzle, even the Sun's surface, at about where my math claimed) to strive for.
I found a cool
Large in this case usually means infinite
It's always easy to tell who's getting their CS degree and heading off to the workforce... and who's headed off to never-never land for their Ph.D. Large in this case usually means 128 bits. Really. I know about asymptotic analysis; I'm talking about actual programs.
Don't take that personally, BTW... I'm currently in CAM never-never land, and I'm just pissy that the spiffy O(n lg n) Delaunay triangulation algorithm I invented this semester doesn't seem to beat the standard O(n^(5/4)) algorithm for any problem size small enough to test on the 256MB RAM in my PC.
This lacks some of the insight into NP and NPC problems. We only care about the large cases for the most part.
How large is large? 2^128 (for brute forcing common encryption) is pretty much impossibly large, but is 128^1000 (to use the original poster's example) really an improvement?
It's called the first amendment. Free speech in Perl should be as protected as free speech in French. Can anyone honestly say, "It should be legal to tell someone how to make a pipe bomb but not how to decrypt a DVD" with a straight face?
Target the laws at people advertising with it and it no longer becomes profitable.
No, but then it becomes loads of fun to wreak havoc on any person or company you don't like by sending out anonymous advertising spam in their name...
Who didn't notice that? DeCSS was originally Windows software, since it came out shortly before Linux had support for even unencrypted DVDs. Of course Windows software utilizing it would come out before Linux software would.
there was not one full-fledged Linux DVD player on the market (just some shellscripts)
Oh, so if it's put together with bash instead of C, that somehow strips it of any legal consideration? Software developers are supposed to jump from a few kilobytes of decryption code to a few hundred kilobytes of GUI movie player instantaneously? I'm surprised any player software got put together as fast as it did.
The argument was about "substantial non-infringing uses", remember? Playing DVDs without Windows is a substantial non-infringing use, both when it was hard during the trial, and when it's easy now.
Anybody who's thought through DRM knows it's pure shit. The key's going to live in the box, and somebody, somewhere, is going to find it.
Are you sure? I don't see an XBox distribution of Linux yet. If they put out the hardware as well, Microsoft can indeed prevent unauthorized software access to or emulation of it's systems. They are practicing right now.
To be backwards compatible with the PC, of course, they'll have to be able to run unsigned software... but it won't run as "root", so it won't be able to access the media encryption keys or the unencrypted data in RAM that Microsoft-signed DRM applications will.
The XBox is their first try at this, to see what the holes are. My personal prediction is that someone will managed to get Linux booting by finding an buffer overflow in a signed game and using that to get hardware access... and Microsoft will find some way (like mandatory regular software updates that can "untrust" hackable DRM programs) to get around that, too.
And even assuming the key won't be retrievable, unencrypted content will be available at some point along the path from where the bits live to how my brain gets the input.
True. With music, there's no way they're going to be able to prevent you from soldiering 16 bit DACs into your speakers and recovering CD-quality sound on each channel. With video you can't get perfect reproduction that way, but do you think people won't be happy with just VHS quality?
Let MS invest billions into this nonsense. It'll get cracked before it's out of beta, just like everything else they do.
Of course, I'm sure Microsoft knows this. But the entertainment industry may not, and Congress doesn't have a clue. If the difficulty of ripping music and video only adds a week lag before it hits the internet, but if legal and economic attempts to prevent that mean Microsoft has root access to a closed box in every home, how sad do you really think they're going to be?
Even what the DMCA says isn't as bad as how the DMCA is applied. I can name you half a dozen Linux DVD players that rely on DeCSS code; did that make any difference in the courts?
It didn't help matters that Apple computers aren't really that fast; don't get me wrong, I own a mac and I love it, but the PPC just doesn't outclass x86s like Apple claims, at least in real-world applications.
True; the "400Mhz G4 beats 800Mhz Pentium" tests all depended on vectorized assembly stuff, but I don't think there's a benchmark at which a G4 wouldn't have blown away an Intel chip at the same clock speed. I suppose that's part of the problem: "Our computers are slower than theirs, but not nearly as much as you'd think!" isn't a great marketing gimmick.
The computer he was using didn't have any built in IR ports, but he found a little IR receiver that plugs into the serial port for ten or twenty bucks.
It didn't have a long enough cord, though. The computer really should be stuck in a closet (or built with a fanless CPU) for this sort of thing; he had to turn it off to enjoy movies without purring fans as background noise.
Since when does Joe Public compare chips of different architectures?
Since as long as I can remember. I have friends who never played games who saved a bundle on Cyrix chips with weak FPUs... and others who had to avoid those like the plague.
Since right now, especially. It's always been the case that Intel chips could be outsped by random ultraexpensive workstation CPUs at half the clock rate, but now we've got 2Ghz machines being outbenchmarked by *completely compatible* CPUs at 3/4 of the clockrate.
I think AMD's marketing here is shamefully deceptive, but they really did need to do something, and Apple's "public education" attempts about the growing irrelevance of MHz didn't seem to work very well.
A friend of mine had a computer hooked up to receiver (and TV, for onscreen xmms display) for mp3 playback. He gave it one of the modes on his all-in-one remote, installed the IR control module for xmms, and just let it run constantly. He could switch the TV and/or the audio over to the computer at any time, and control all the MP3 playing functions from one of the modes on the remote.
What's the problem with that? It's not like the remote controlled his DVD player perfectly, then screamed "I'm a kludge!" whenever he used it on MP3s.
(he used 320kbit mp3 files and a sound card with digital output, BTW; the sound really wasn't distinguishable from a CD jukebox)
By your logic, just clicking on a hyperlink in the first place might as well be "user intervention".
.txt file (or most types of files) of indeterminate origin, just like opening a hyperlink, is among them.
The fact is, there are some things that users are supposed to be able to do without being afraid of their system being remotely compromised and trashed! And opening a
A .signature, maybe. I know you're not about to expend any reputation or liability on a random post on an internet forum. I think anyone with any sense should know the same. I have no idea whether the law agrees with me.
I suppose my problem is with glrotate's phrasing. I don't see why you should be responsible for spouting off on Slashdot any more than I am just because you're in law school. I like the fact that people can hold lawyers responsible for legal advice, but that seems to me to be a "special case" in human interaction, the exchange of warranted information for a fee, not an implicit agreement I have with everyone who's looked at a law text. And despite real concerns for potentially misleading people or exposing law students to needless lawsuits, when you consider the problem from the perspective of established lawyers telling proto-lawyers not to give legal information away for free, it comes off sounding more like price fixing than like ethics.
Of course, you've got it easy. If you think lawyers have to watch shop talk outside of work, imagine what civil and mechanical engineers face in the way of liability. As one of my coolest professors put it, "When doctor screw up, one person die. When engineer screw up, thousand people dead. Everybody die!!!"
I'd really like to know. Currently my choices are:
1. Stop thinking about this question entirely. No, really, stop thinking about it. Try really hard... whoops, I thought about it again.
2. Believe what the law student says, unless he's contradicted by an equally plausible source.
3. Believe the "It's legal to download ROMs if you delete them within 24 hours" type rumors that get spread around the internet by the legally ignorant.
4. Hire a real lawyer to talk to for hundreds of dollars.
I'm sure law school grads (including your ethics lecturer) would love option 2 to be unavailable, but I'm just not seeing a superior alternative here.
The legal costs involved in prosecuting thousands of users for a minimal amount of copyrighted material would not justify the end results.
What's minimal? I suspect an officer on the web could find offenders at a much higher rate than, say, a traffic officer. I don't know what the damages you can get for copyright violation are (Bono probably slipped in a rider somewhere that lets them break your kneecaps), but I'll bet it's more than a speeding ticket.
Locked up over a thousand people without criminal charges, without private access to legal counsel, and without so much as releasing their names to the public. Last I heard ~600 were still in custody.
Damn, you've been on that desert island a while, huh? Wait until you find out what happened to the World Trade Center while you were gone...
128-bit encryption is on the vast majority of internet-connected desktops now. There's absolutely no way that it's possession or use will be made illegal now ("Okay, Granny, we're putting the cuffs on. You should have downgraded your web browser, and you definitely shouldn't have clicked on that https:// link! What do you mean, you don't understand what you did wrong?"), and so any software that wants to escape monitoring can make it's communications indistinguishable from secure HTTP.
Just the first thing that came to my mind.
With most P2P systems, the solution is obvious: Law enforcement should connect to the networks themselves, seach for copyrighted material, download it to check that it really is copyrighted, identify the criminal by IP (hard, but not very hard), then prosecute. That sort of "undercover work" is essentially what they've been doing with prostitution for decades, a more victimless crime.
With Freenet, though, it's impossible to find the person who inserted copyrighted material. It's impossible to find which node you're getting it from. It is possible to tell which node you're immediately connected to is automatically caching and passing you copyrighted material, but is that enough to prosecute? If not, then the Freenet people are currently debugging and improving the ultimate piracy network. If so, then the very act of running a Freenet node would be illegal... and it would be very hard to distinguish the Freenet node's actions from those of, say, every router and proxy server on the internet.