It'll be interesting to see how this plays out in other EU countries where unlocking must legally be provided on request, or where it's banned altogether, e.g.:
Will Apple be prepared to allow unlocked phones in these countries (presumably leading to a free European market in officially unlocked phones), or will they choose to lose sales and not sell where they can't enforce a lockdown and get the revenue that goes with it?
When an individual makes a statement like that, I suppose we can say they'd be right at home here in the UK, where copying a CD you own for personal use isn't legal. Of course nobody actually pays any attention to this law, and even the BPI (UK equivalent of the RIAA) thinks the legal situation is silly:
'Everyone on this site has been complaining about wanting an alternative way to get DRM free music so they can stop paying money to a broken, defective by design system known as DRM. Now put your money where your mouth is and rid yourself of iTunes.'
Sounds good! And I just spotted an album I want at about half the UK CD/iTunes price. But then I clicked on the T&C and got:
'5. Territorial Restrictions
As required by our Digital Content providers, Digital Content will, unless otherwise designated, be available only to customers located in the United States.'
Cheers. If I'm lucky it'll soon be available on this side of the pond at the usual 1 USD = 1 GBP exchange rate for 'digital content'...
As some of the more accurate reports on this finding have pointed out, the changes were in the expression levels of the genes rather than in their composition, so no need to invoke the Flying Spaghetti Monster on this occasion! Gene expression is always responding to changes in environmental conditions, so it's not at all surprising that spaceflight is going to cause some measurable effects (hopefully in genes that are functionaly relevant to the observed change in phenotype).
From the article, it looks like they're using a unique and theoretically uncrackable new form of DRM. All movies released on this format will be encrypted as Bollywood remakes.
But if the various hacks that have been floating around recently translate into something that anyone can use to unlock the (now cheaper) iPhone, won't the Touch start to look a lot less attractive? Anyone upgrading from even a 20Gb ipod is going to be frustrated by the storage on the Touch, anyone who wants to play movies on the nice new screen will also find 16Gb rather limiting, and anyone who wants a mobile net device will prefer to have the phone option for when wifi is out of range. I'd love an unlocked iPhone for wifi and casual PAYG cellular use, or a Touch with the 160Gb drive from the new Classic, but the 16Gb Touch just seems a bit too limiting, neither one thing nor the other. It's still very cool, though, and I'm sure they'll sell to their target market by the truckload.
I'm not sure they're anywhere close to reality just yet. Most of the opinions in the article come from Rick Rubin, who has played in bands himself, produced several legendary albums, and started his own label - i.e., he knows music. It's a positive sign that someone at Sony has been bright enough to hire Rubin to co-head Columbia, but it's less clear that they're actually prepared to act on his ideas ("While Columbia has made some small changes in its organizational structure, it has not instigated the kind of extensive alterations that Rubin says are crucial to the salvation of the business"). If the traditional corporate culture is now coming up with ideas like "asking Columbia artists to give the record company up to 50 percent of their touring, merchandising and online revenue" then they're going to need a much more powerful Reality Distortion Field than Steve Jobs to survive the next couple of years.
'There must have been some gene loss/exchange, however, because many proteins necessary for mitochondrial structure and function are found solely in the genomic DNA.'
In fact _most_ of the genes that encode mitochondrial proteins are now in the nucleus, presumably a result of ancient DNA transfer from the primordial mitochondrial genome to the nuclear genome, so the parent post is substantially correct. The modern mitochondrial genome is pretty vestigial (smaller than that of many viruses). The original article speculates that a Wolbachia bug might one day evolve into an organelle by similar processes, and suggests that the existing insert may have a selective advantage for the host.
You fools! Great Cthulhu is the least of our problems here! Now that this thread has the attention of millions of helpless Slashdot readers, all it would take would be for some idiot to post a link to the original Sumerian text of the Nam-shub of Enki:
I wonder how many days they'll get away with selling this before (a) lawyers find a reason to shut them down, or (b) someone in the hacking community is motivated by this proof of concept to complete a free hack, or (c) someone reverse-engineers the existing hack and releases a free version..? (will iPhoneSimFree be cheeky enough to 'prohibit' reverse engineering _their_ reverse engineering in the license?)
I'd guess the license files (and other text files distributed with dosbox) were never copied to the final location in the first place. They probably just unpacked/installed dosbox once, then copied the minimum number of files required to get their own software to run to the relevant location. I've certainly done this sort of thing with GPL'd binaries and libraries (like gzip or the cygwin dll), but not for re-distribution - publishers need to be more careful! From other posts in the forums, it looks like they didn't even expend much effort in getting the games to run optimally under dosbox (players are likely to get better and more configurable results with their own dosbox installations), which also suggests not much thought went into this. And it's not as if the publishers have anything to gain by not including the license - the GPL allows them to use dosbox in exactly the way they need.
Well this just illustrates the danger of distributing DRM-free media! With properly enforced Rights Management, it would be impossible for stories to be duplicated in this way without authorisation!
On a related note, there seems to be some sort of hardware crack for obtaining unencrypted BBC media streams. Someone calling himself 'freeview' has hacked together a circumvention device (commonly called a 'freeview box', possibly a reference to the old phone phreak 'coloured boxes') that gives 24/7 access to DRM-free BBC digital content. These devices are quite widely available (try ebay.co.uk, or google for 'argos') but up to now have escaped the attention of the BBC Trust, so be careful who you tell...
Not to show the readers how to do it, but to prove the dissection is actually reversible. You could show the internal structure of an iPhone with a hammer and chisel, but the reassembly might be a bit trickier. I believe the the law about this sort of thing is generally quite strictly enforced:
It really ought to be be illegal in all Geek Jurisdictions to publish this sort of thing without a corresponding set of pictures detailing the reassembly (to as-new condition).
'And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom' - Gandalf.
You've got this backwards - the people working in this field are fully aware of the effect of dye staining and UV on DNA. They don't stain the nucleus of the somatic cell, they stain the nucleus of the egg (to make it easy to get rid of). Supposedly the problem isn't DNA damage, but (perhaps) damage to unspecified 'programming factors' elsewhere in the egg.
I think you're greatly overestimating the amount of care that a typical scientific journal takes in preparing images for publication, and the level of knowledge of some of their staff. If you send an RGB image to a journal that requires CMYK, I would bet money that in many cases one of the journal staff will just go into Photoshop and hit Image->Mode->CMYK Colour. This approach requires very little training! The authors, of course, have no control over the submission policy of the journal, and are just doing their best to comply with (as you say) often ambiguous and not particularly logical guidelines. If they ask for CMYK at 300 ppi, then that's what you give them (and yes, there are generally proofs to check exactly how much they've screwed things up). Photoshop at least makes it straightforward to satisfy these requirements, and its use in handling scientific images is nothing new (it was, after all, the only serious option for several years after its introduction, which gave it the same foothold in science it has everywhere else).
If they request CMYK and you send them RGB they'll probably just do a 'one click conversion' to CMYK, so it's better to sort this out yourself in advance if the colour is critical. On the other hand, some journals do indeed specify RGB, especially now that most people read the online editions:
Academic licenses for PS are pretty reasonably priced in any case, while the 16-bit support, colour management and (for many scientists) familiar interface are significant advantages of PS over GIMP.
"My argument being that, the fact that the scientific process is an open process should also mean that the format in which the data are preserved should also be open, and not locked in some proprietary format like MS Doc and, yes, shock-and-horror, Powerpoint files."
But generally they are _preserved_ in an open format, aren't they? PDF is universal for the final versions of biology papers (though occasionally MS-Office formats turn up in downloadable supplementary data - there's really no excuse for this). I don't think it matters at all which formats are used earlier in the submission process - whatever suits the scientist and the journal should be acceptable. The real issue with data access is that the results of research (especially publicly-funded research) should be freely available without journal subscriptions, which is unfortunately far from universal (and certainly not the policy of Science or Nature). Typically the authors sign away their copyright at the time of publication, and aren't even allowed to re-distribute the final version of their own manuscript without restrictions. I'd rather download a Word document from the author's website than pay $50 for an 'open' PDF from a journal my library doesn't subscribe to!
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know the details of the law, but it's been claimed that in (e.g.) Belgium, it's not legal to tie even an unlocked phone to a subscription:
http://mindthegeek.blogspot.com/2007/03/great-idea-from-belgium.html
http://www.ibert.be/2007/08/looks-like-iphone-wont-be-in-belgium.html
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out in other EU countries where unlocking must legally be provided on request, or where it's banned altogether, e.g.:
http://www.unlockiphone.info/2007/07/iphones-in-france-law-says-they-must-be.html
Will Apple be prepared to allow unlocked phones in these countries (presumably leading to a free European market in officially unlocked phones), or will they choose to lose sales and not sell where they can't enforce a lockdown and get the revenue that goes with it?
When an individual makes a statement like that, I suppose we can say they'd be right at home here in the UK, where copying a CD you own for personal use isn't legal. Of course nobody actually pays any attention to this law, and even the BPI (UK equivalent of the RIAA) thinks the legal situation is silly:
http://www.out-law.com/page-7463
'Everyone on this site has been complaining about wanting an alternative way to get DRM free music so they can stop paying money to a broken, defective by design system known as DRM. Now put your money where your mouth is and rid yourself of iTunes.'
Sounds good! And I just spotted an album I want at about half the UK CD/iTunes price. But then I clicked on the T&C and got:
'5. Territorial Restrictions
As required by our Digital Content providers, Digital Content will, unless otherwise designated, be available only to customers located in the United States.'
Cheers. If I'm lucky it'll soon be available on this side of the pond at the usual 1 USD = 1 GBP exchange rate for 'digital content'...
As some of the more accurate reports on this finding have pointed out, the changes were in the expression levels of the genes rather than in their composition, so no need to invoke the Flying Spaghetti Monster on this occasion! Gene expression is always responding to changes in environmental conditions, so it's not at all surprising that spaceflight is going to cause some measurable effects (hopefully in genes that are functionaly relevant to the observed change in phenotype).
From the article, it looks like they're using a unique and theoretically uncrackable new form of DRM. All movies released on this format will be encrypted as Bollywood remakes.
'Is there any special circuitry that says THIS ACTION REQUIRES THE HIGHEST AUTHORIZATION?'
I think the menu looks like this:
(1) CONVENTIONAL WARHEAD - press any key to fire.
(2) NUCLEAR WARHEAD - enter 4-digit PIN.
(3) SONY LITHIUM-ION BATTERY - DIRECT PRESIDENTIAL AUTHORIZATION REQUIRED! UNAUTHORIZED DEPLOYMENT OF WMDs IS A CAPITAL OFFENCE!
'Yeah, b/c I want to web browse with a handheld device, holding the weight of a HDD the whole time.'
You're forgetting that most people reading this will have well-developed muscles from, um, regular 'wrist exercises'.
'Flash is replacing HDDs b/c most people don't have more than a few gigs of music.'
Yes - 640k, sorry 16Gb, ought to be enough for anybody!
But if the various hacks that have been floating around recently translate into something that anyone can use to unlock the (now cheaper) iPhone, won't the Touch start to look a lot less attractive? Anyone upgrading from even a 20Gb ipod is going to be frustrated by the storage on the Touch, anyone who wants to play movies on the nice new screen will also find 16Gb rather limiting, and anyone who wants a mobile net device will prefer to have the phone option for when wifi is out of range. I'd love an unlocked iPhone for wifi and casual PAYG cellular use, or a Touch with the 160Gb drive from the new Classic, but the 16Gb Touch just seems a bit too limiting, neither one thing nor the other. It's still very cool, though, and I'm sure they'll sell to their target market by the truckload.
I'm not sure they're anywhere close to reality just yet. Most of the opinions in the article come from Rick Rubin, who has played in bands himself, produced several legendary albums, and started his own label - i.e., he knows music. It's a positive sign that someone at Sony has been bright enough to hire Rubin to co-head Columbia, but it's less clear that they're actually prepared to act on his ideas ("While Columbia has made some small changes in its organizational structure, it has not instigated the kind of extensive alterations that Rubin says are crucial to the salvation of the business"). If the traditional corporate culture is now coming up with ideas like "asking Columbia artists to give the record company up to 50 percent of their touring, merchandising and online revenue" then they're going to need a much more powerful Reality Distortion Field than Steve Jobs to survive the next couple of years.
'There must have been some gene loss/exchange, however, because many proteins necessary for mitochondrial structure and function are found solely in the genomic DNA.'
In fact _most_ of the genes that encode mitochondrial proteins are now in the nucleus, presumably a result of ancient DNA transfer from the primordial mitochondrial genome to the nuclear genome, so the parent post is substantially correct. The modern mitochondrial genome is pretty vestigial (smaller than that of many viruses). The original article speculates that a Wolbachia bug might one day evolve into an organelle by similar processes, and suggests that the existing insert may have a selective advantage for the host.
'The White Album is still forty-five freakin' dollars!'
. do?ctx=280;-1;-1;-1&sku=85200
If you think that's bad:
http://www.hmv.co.uk/hmvweb/displayProductDetails
32 quid = sixty-eight freakin' dollars (CAD) !
You fools! Great Cthulhu is the least of our problems here! Now that this thread has the attention of millions of helpless Slashdot readers, all it would take would be for some idiot to post a link to the original Sumerian text of the Nam-shub of Enki:
x t=c.1.8.2.3&display=Crit&charenc=j&lineid=c1823.13 4#c1823.134
http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?te
and another to a popular text to speech translator:
http://www.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php
and countless minds could be permanently re-programmed! Goatse and the Shining Trapezohedron have got nothing on this!
I wonder how many days they'll get away with selling this before (a) lawyers find a reason to shut them down, or (b) someone in the hacking community is motivated by this proof of concept to complete a free hack, or (c) someone reverse-engineers the existing hack and releases a free version..? (will iPhoneSimFree be cheeky enough to 'prohibit' reverse engineering _their_ reverse engineering in the license?)
Be careful when sampling this delicacy - some of these 'Dolphins' can be a bit chewy:
1 1/1527243
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/
I'd guess the license files (and other text files distributed with dosbox) were never copied to the final location in the first place. They probably just unpacked/installed dosbox once, then copied the minimum number of files required to get their own software to run to the relevant location. I've certainly done this sort of thing with GPL'd binaries and libraries (like gzip or the cygwin dll), but not for re-distribution - publishers need to be more careful! From other posts in the forums, it looks like they didn't even expend much effort in getting the games to run optimally under dosbox (players are likely to get better and more configurable results with their own dosbox installations), which also suggests not much thought went into this. And it's not as if the publishers have anything to gain by not including the license - the GPL allows them to use dosbox in exactly the way they need.
Yes, here's the link:
1 28297&page=5
http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?t=
Looks more like an oversight than a deliberate violation.
Well this just illustrates the danger of distributing DRM-free media! With properly enforced Rights Management, it would be impossible for stories to be duplicated in this way without authorisation!
On a related note, there seems to be some sort of hardware crack for obtaining unencrypted BBC media streams. Someone calling himself 'freeview' has hacked together a circumvention device (commonly called a 'freeview box', possibly a reference to the old phone phreak 'coloured boxes') that gives 24/7 access to DRM-free BBC digital content. These devices are quite widely available (try ebay.co.uk, or google for 'argos') but up to now have escaped the attention of the BBC Trust, so be careful who you tell...
Not to show the readers how to do it, but to prove the dissection is actually reversible. You could show the internal structure of an iPhone with a hammer and chisel, but the reassembly might be a bit trickier. I believe the the law about this sort of thing is generally quite strictly enforced:
d ynamics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermo
It really ought to be be illegal in all Geek Jurisdictions to publish this sort of thing without a corresponding set of pictures detailing the reassembly (to as-new condition).
'And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom' - Gandalf.
Not sure about DVDs, but they definitely have a CD:
http://www.myspace.com/canseidesersexy
Hope this helps.
You've got this backwards - the people working in this field are fully aware of the effect of dye staining and UV on DNA. They don't stain the nucleus of the somatic cell, they stain the nucleus of the egg (to make it easy to get rid of). Supposedly the problem isn't DNA damage, but (perhaps) damage to unspecified 'programming factors' elsewhere in the egg.
I think you're greatly overestimating the amount of care that a typical scientific journal takes in preparing images for publication, and the level of knowledge of some of their staff. If you send an RGB image to a journal that requires CMYK, I would bet money that in many cases one of the journal staff will just go into Photoshop and hit Image->Mode->CMYK Colour. This approach requires very little training! The authors, of course, have no control over the submission policy of the journal, and are just doing their best to comply with (as you say) often ambiguous and not particularly logical guidelines. If they ask for CMYK at 300 ppi, then that's what you give them (and yes, there are generally proofs to check exactly how much they've screwed things up). Photoshop at least makes it straightforward to satisfy these requirements, and its use in handling scientific images is nothing new (it was, after all, the only serious option for several years after its introduction, which gave it the same foothold in science it has everywhere else).
Some journals are certainly still geared up to use CMYK. See for example:
8
http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/index.cfm?page=107
If they request CMYK and you send them RGB they'll probably just do a 'one click conversion' to CMYK, so it's better to sort this out yourself in advance if the colour is critical. On the other hand, some journals do indeed specify RGB, especially now that most people read the online editions:
http://www.jhc.org/misc/guidelines_figs.shtml
Academic licenses for PS are pretty reasonably priced in any case, while the 16-bit support, colour management and (for many scientists) familiar interface are significant advantages of PS over GIMP.
"My argument being that, the fact that the scientific process is an open process should also mean that the format in which the data are preserved should also be open, and not locked in some proprietary format like MS Doc and, yes, shock-and-horror, Powerpoint files."
But generally they are _preserved_ in an open format, aren't they? PDF is universal for the final versions of biology papers (though occasionally MS-Office formats turn up in downloadable supplementary data - there's really no excuse for this). I don't think it matters at all which formats are used earlier in the submission process - whatever suits the scientist and the journal should be acceptable. The real issue with data access is that the results of research (especially publicly-funded research) should be freely available without journal subscriptions, which is unfortunately far from universal (and certainly not the policy of Science or Nature). Typically the authors sign away their copyright at the time of publication, and aren't even allowed to re-distribute the final version of their own manuscript without restrictions. I'd rather download a Word document from the author's website than pay $50 for an 'open' PDF from a journal my library doesn't subscribe to!