Ahem. If I buy a book it is perfectly legal for me to modify it. I can rip pages out. I can write in it. I can change words in it. I can cut it up in little pieces and tape it back together in a different order creating an entirely different story.
Sorry, I should have been more specific... you cannot modify copyrighted work and redistribute it. If I take a Tom Clancy novel and modify the story so that the terrorists win and try to distribute the modified version I've violating Tom's copyright... only the copyright holder can modify a work or distribute a work.
Of course, parodies and other fair use are exceptions... but filing off a serial number clearly isn't fair use.
Anyway, I ain't no lawyer so I can't argue legal fine points.
Anything you can legally do with a book should be legal on a computer.
Damn straight! I think this serial number law would be a reasonable law if applied to books... that is if you couldn't legally modfy the publishers serial number... It's already illegal to modify the serial number on a car or a gun or whatever. So I don't think it's unreasonable to apply similar law to data.
Sure someone could break the serial number system, but the law could impose punishment to those who do break the serial number system as a disincentive to remove the serial number. This is just like the laws against removing serial numbers on cars and guns. People can easily file off the serial numbers on guns, but they are punished if they are caught so most people don't remove the serial number on their gun.
Even if he didn't remove the serial number, how are you going to find him? Assume he paid cash for the CD and proceed from there.
The serial number could be from the CD burner, or the ethernet card... big brotherish I know, but I'm saying how the serial number is attached should not be legislated... that's up to the hardware and content companies. They could create new data formats that save identifying numbers and then release their content in these new formats. If you "file off" these serial numbers, well then you broke a law and can be punished.
All it takes is for ONE person to successfully bypass the technology, and post the software to do so somewhere on the net. Then anyone can bypass the technology. What do you propose to do about that problem?
Don't punish the person who wrote the software. 1. punishing people for writing software is stupid. 2. making certain software illegal is the same thing as making certain books illegal and violates the constitution. Just punish anyone who uses the software to remove the serial numbers on other people's content. This person would clearly be breaking the law and be punished. However, someone who removes the serial numbers on thier own home movies shouldn't be breaing the law since it's their own digital content.
For example: It's not illegal to write software to crack passwords. It is illegal to use that software to break into someone's system unauthorized. This seems to have worked pretty well and lets people use this software to legally test the security of their own systems.
Because politicians must do something about this problem that bothers their owne^H^H^H^Hlocal industry.
Is there any compromise between doing nothing and Disney's Law?
If they must pass a law... how about something along the lines of... If the owner of digital content places a unique serial number on a given bit of digital content it is illegal to remove or modify that serial number, and doing so has penalty X....
Sure, modifiying someone else's copyrighted works is already illegal, but this would allow people to modify their own works in a very specific way and still keep their copyright... it would also spell out a specific penalty for removing such a serial number.
With legal protection of serial numbers on digital content, lawsuits against the people who illegally release pirated content are possible. It's hard to sue every kid who has a pirated Brittney Spears CD, but this would help you sue the kid who made the original illegal copy.
The entertainment folks can then negotiate with the hardware manufacturers to get some sort of serial number scheme thet would be difficult to bypass... and the law would help stop the few people with the ability to bypass the technology.
Personally, I'd rather not have any more laws... I just tried to think of a way to let the entertainment industry save face, but avoid too many negative consequences... so please don't mod me as a troll just because I actually tried to answer the question... however, please do flame my idea all you want..
I want to build a better matlab... I've been looking at f-script as a possible starting point. I'm learning Cocoa to try and see if I can do the plotting....
I think math toolkits need to be open source, otherwise the work you put into it is tied to the fortunes of a particualr company that either might not be around or decide to stop supporting what you need (like mathworks deciding to stop supporting macs).
Matlab is more than 20 years old now, and showing it's age and Fortran ancestry (has been showing for at least 10 years). It's good at manipulating 2D matrices and applying some functions to them, but everything else is horribly slow, inefficient and unpleasant.
Matlab is slow if you use loops... You should vectorize your matlab programs.
Example:
for i = 1:length(x),
y(i) = x(i)*sin(theta(i)); end
is horrible slow, but can be easily vecotirzed as:
y = x.*sin(theta);
Vectorization takes a while to get the hang of, but is an incredibly powerful feature in Matlab that you'll learn to miss in other languages.
Another good thing about matlab is that it's relatively easy to call fortran and C functions from matlab...
Granted, Matlab is missing a lot of nice features of other languages, but it has many good strengths.
Cool idea, but from what I've read, the transfer rates on bluetooth are pretty poor (less than USB). Is this correct?
Slow transfer rates would still be fun. You don't need to transfer lots of data fast, maybe just a song or two at the same speed that the song plays.
A bluetooth MP3 player would probably be the most fun if it did streaming MP3 files... you could broadcast your own little theme song that people on the street could pick up... or you could trade music back and forth with someone as some sort of whimsical communictation. This could be a lot of fun.
I keep thinking of "I'm gonna get you sucka" where the guy walks around with a band following him playing his theme song.
And it could probably stream MP3 files to a stereo system.... an iPod would make a really neat stereo remote control.
Ever been at one of those 50's diners with the little jukebox on every table... you could now bring your jukebox music with you and put a quater in just to have access to the speaker system...
You could also turn it around and have multiple music channels in a restaurant that could be picked up via a bluetooth device.
Sure probably none of this is very practicle, but it sure seems like fun to me:) And it would be a funny way for wearable computers to take off...
a bluetooth iPod.... Download songs without even bothering to plug in... be a walking radio station... play your ipod music through your stereo where the ipod serves the music and acts as a remote control...
Now there's a man who's never tried to compile the Darwin kernel. The build process is awful, absolutely awful. Admittedly I believe Apple has been working on it but last I check it was *far* more difficult than Linux.
But with microkernal architecture recompiles should be far less frequent than with a monolithic kernal. Hopefully only those who want a 'hot rod' system should even have to bother.
I can think of many reasons.. there is no darwin community to help you when xyz won't work, there is no package manager (fink is not ready for primetime yet), KDE does kiynky stuff with ELF binaries and therefore won't work on Darwin, etc.
I don't think anyone is using Darwin and X instead of Gnu/Linux yet - at least not on their main box; what would the advantages be anyway?
I was thinking the advantage of Darwin over Linux would be better harware support on Macs.
There is a very helpful Darwin community (although not as large as Linux). I guess lack of Linux ports would be a problem, but not a show-stopper. Sure x86 Linux binaries won't work on a Mac whether you have Darwin or linux (unless you do some crazy Linux install on virtual PC),but if you have the source it should be possible to get things to work eventually.
I just have to wonder if one had a Darwin+X+Gnustep system if it would be possible to write Cocoa apps that would run on both that system and on Mac OS X (without a recompile). Such a sytem would be open source and run on Macs and x86 machines... and could possibly benefit from more commercial apps than Linux.
And the Darwin microkernal would be much more user-friendly as far as kernal re-compiles go...
Why Linux and not Darwon+X
on
iBooks love Linux
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The whole OS X vs. Linux debate aside..
Why not use Dawin and X instead of Linux? This way you'd have an open source free as in freedom system with full hardware support.
Am I missing some reason to put Linux on an iBook instead of some Darwin+X configuration?
You don't necessarily have to restrict people's right to publish directly, you just have to restrict their right to do the research.
Interesting point, Freedom of Speech does not protect freedom of thought. Speech is legal, but can be evidence of illegal thought which can be punished.
"Don't even think of breaking our encryption." is now enforcable by law.
What we need is to ressurect a modern version of pythagorus' math cult that is built around the coding and decoding of cyphers... If God wants information to be free then decryption becomes a religious ritual that will be protected by the first amendment.
Since when does ITAR apply to scientific papers written by civillians?? If ITAR and DMCA apply to scientific papers isn't that a blatent violation of the first amendment??
Sure the flying monkeys behind ITAR and DMCA have threatened to sue to censure academics... but there's no way that they would go to court and risk overturning their precious little law.
Besides, ITAR doesn't apply to information that's in the general literature of a field. If you publish results in the public domain frequently and often you avoid the major hassle of ITAR. Otherwise you'll have to get a state department waiver to have a meeting with a foreigner to discuss basic science that they already know anyway.
It seems is IEEE would have stood up for academic freedom they would have had a good chance of overturning ITAR and DMCA in court.
Actually, I bet the new pollicy comes from the company that publishes for the IEEE and wants to protect DMCA from any constitutional challenge because they make piles of money appropriating copyrights for other people's work.
I bet that something like this (anonymous p2p) whill suddenly become popular if they try to do this. Someone will hack their box to spit out unprotected versions of tv episodes etc and anonymously post them on places like freenet.
..and the hardware will encode your hardware serial number and home adress in your posts so that the FBI can find you and take care of your illegal hardware.
(a) IN GENERAL. -- A manufacturer, importer, or seller of digital media devices may not (1) sell, or offer for sale, in interstate commerce, or (2) cause to be transported in, or in a manner affecting, interstate commerce, a digital medial device unless the device includes and utilizes standard security technologies that adhere to the security system standards adopted under section 3.
Ahh, but nothing in section 3 defines the security systems standards this is to be defined later by some industry panel or the FTC, neither group an elected body.
The bill does spell out a list of goals for the security systems standards:
(d) SECURITY SYSTEM STANDARDS. -- In achieving the goals of setting open security standards that will provide effective security for copyrighted works, the security system standards shall ensure, to the extent practicable, that (1) the standard security technologies are -- (A) reliable; (B) renewable; (C) resistant to attack; (D) readily implemented; (E) modular; (F) applicable in multiple technology platforms; (G) extensible; (H) upgradable; (I) not cost prohibitive; and (2) any software portion of such standards is based on open source code.
Nothing in the bill says how these goals would be met, only that the industry panel or the FTC should achieve "the goal of promoting as many lawful uses of copyrighted works as possible, while preventing as much infringement as possible, the encoding rules shall take into account the limitations on the exclusive rights of copyright owners, including the fair use doctrine."
This is a very end-around way to implement restrictions on computer hardware with very limited public debate. Nothing is the bill does anything to protect the usability of computers or state that these security measures work on multiple operating systems -- the industry committee or the FTC is free to mandate whatever bonehead regulation that they want.
It should be the job of those who own copyrighted works to find as many lawful uses of the work as possible. The government shouldn't be in the business of marketting Aladdin V or whatever new flick comes out.
How can the copying of this protected content be prevented without severely crippling your computer?
An encrypted movie is just a bunch of data... How can hardware stop me from trying to break the encryption on the data without limiting the sort of calculations and data handling that I can do?
There is no way to tell unencrypted content from home-made content. The only way to prevent the copying of unencrypted content is to also limit the ability to copy legitimate homemade content.
Here's a specific worm from the can of worms that this law opens: A movie must play to a screen... Today I could capture what's playing on my screen to an mpeg... What if I make a living making how-to videos for software? Then this would outlaw my livlyhood just to prevent people from bootlegging Isthar.
Another worm: I can plug the audio out of one computer into the audio in of another computer and then copy a CD... this law would make this harware illegal. Silly, insane stuff.
Any computer that can do unrestricted computations can be used to break encryption and be used to copy this forbidden data. If only disfunctional computers are legal, then how can scientists or engineers do calculations with computers anymore?? A computer that can't break encryption surely won't be much use to study DNA or to calculate spacecraft trajectories.
We'll be limited to spreadsheets and graphing calculators.
If I have a home video that I made on my own can I make copies of it??? How can software/software tell the difference between a movie that I made myself or one who's encryption has been broken?? How can hardware prevent encryption from being broken without breaking a computer's ability to compute??
Hollings surely doesn't know the answer. Hollywood doesn't know the answer.
The probability for an impact in 2049 is 1e-5 which is 0.001%. If you take range of years you can get a higher probabilty, but I thought the probabilty of impact in a given year was more interesting than over an arbitrary range of years.
I high school (10 years ago) we had an assignment about thinking about how to map cyberspace. My partner and I decided that the best way was via a Ven diagram as oppossed to a physical map of where machines actually were. That is, map the information (then mostly on ftp, gopher, and non-internet BBS's) by subject. You would have a "sports" circle and a "medicine" circle and the overlap would be sports medicine. As a hobby, I've been trying to make such maps every since.
Later, in college, I tried to model a website as a physical system with the links acting like springs. You basically make up some formula causing different web pages to repulse each other and then make links give an attractive "force" that grows with the "distance" between web sites.
This gives you a system of equations that you can solve for an equillibrium point giving an "information distance" between web sites. This will tend to group websites on similar subjects together because they tend to link to each other.... but then again, who cares how close related are to each other, it should still be possible to get a cool picture with this data.
But the stopping point I came up against was how to represent these information distances as a space. I couldn't figure out how to calculate the dimensionality of the space. Was it 2-D, 3-D, or 400-D?
Here's an example of why this is a problem: Take four points that are all 1 meter from each other. In 3-D these points form the corner of a tetrahedron, but you cannot draw these points in 2 dimensions. If I have N equidistant points, I need a space with at least N-1 dimensions.
So how many web pages can be at the same "information distance" from each other? How many dimensions are needed to map the web this way?
Maybe this question only interests me, but I find it fascinating.
I wonder which version of Darwin that they've been using? I've been running some floating-point benchmarks on OS X and I've seen a very large improvement from Darwin ver 5.1 to Darwin ver. 5.3.
What about inventing a new, non-gnu "language"?
on
Abusing the GPL?
·
· Score: 2
Because the GPL says you have to redistribute the source, modified or original, as source. You can do it as binary too, but you have to distribute the source to any person that you distribute a binary to that wants it. This obfustcated text is NOT source code... it is a preprocessed intermediate bytecode.
What if I call my obfuscation a new language, 'C--' and I offer to sell a compiler that compiles my C-- language to C?
Couldn't I offer the source to my new modules written in C-- and link to GPL'ed modules and meet the requirements of the GPL, even if a compiler for C-- is only available commercially?
Heck, I could make several key functions part of the C-- language spec and not have to release the code at all.
Slashdot Mirror
this program is free
give it away or change it
but please keep it free
---
I give you my work
you must let your breath go free
we share the same moon
Ahem. If I buy a book it is perfectly legal for me to modify it. I can rip pages out. I can write in it. I can change words in it. I can cut it up in little pieces and tape it back together in a different order creating an entirely different story.
Sorry, I should have been more specific... you cannot modify copyrighted work and redistribute it. If I take a Tom Clancy novel and modify the story so that the terrorists win and try to distribute the modified version I've violating Tom's copyright... only the copyright holder can modify a work or distribute a work.
Of course, parodies and other fair use are exceptions... but filing off a serial number clearly isn't fair use.
Anyway, I ain't no lawyer so I can't argue legal fine points.
Anything you can legally do with a book should be legal on a computer.
Damn straight! I think this serial number law would be a reasonable law if applied to books... that is if you couldn't legally modfy the publishers serial number... It's already illegal to modify the serial number on a car or a gun or whatever. So I don't think it's unreasonable to apply similar law to data.
Sure someone could break the serial number system, but the law could impose punishment to those who do break the serial number system as a disincentive to remove the serial number. This is just like the laws against removing serial numbers on cars and guns. People can easily file off the serial numbers on guns, but they are punished if they are caught so most people don't remove the serial number on their gun.
Even if he didn't remove the serial number, how are you going to find him? Assume he paid cash for the CD and proceed from there.
The serial number could be from the CD burner, or the ethernet card... big brotherish I know, but I'm saying how the serial number is attached should not be legislated... that's up to the hardware and content companies. They could create new data formats that save identifying numbers and then release their content in these new formats. If you "file off" these serial numbers, well then you broke a law and can be punished.
All it takes is for ONE person to successfully bypass the technology, and post the software to do so somewhere on the net. Then anyone can bypass the technology. What do you propose to do about that problem?
Don't punish the person who wrote the software. 1. punishing people for writing software is stupid. 2. making certain software illegal is the same thing as making certain books illegal and violates the constitution. Just punish anyone who uses the software to remove the serial numbers on other people's content. This person would clearly be breaking the law and be punished. However, someone who removes the serial numbers on thier own home movies shouldn't be breaing the law since it's their own digital content.
For example: It's not illegal to write software to crack passwords. It is illegal to use that software to break into someone's system unauthorized. This seems to have worked pretty well and lets people use this software to legally test the security of their own systems.
Because politicians must do something about this problem that bothers their owne^H^H^H^Hlocal industry.
Is there any compromise between doing nothing and Disney's Law?
If they must pass a law... how about something along the lines of... If the owner of digital content places a unique serial number on a given bit of digital content it is illegal to remove or modify that serial number, and doing so has penalty X....
Sure, modifiying someone else's copyrighted works is already illegal, but this would allow people to modify their own works in a very specific way and still keep their copyright... it would also spell out a specific penalty for removing such a serial number.
With legal protection of serial numbers on digital content, lawsuits against the people who illegally release pirated content are possible. It's hard to sue every kid who has a pirated Brittney Spears CD, but this would help you sue the kid who made the original illegal copy.
The entertainment folks can then negotiate with the hardware manufacturers to get some sort of serial number scheme thet would be difficult to bypass... and the law would help stop the few people with the ability to bypass the technology.
Personally, I'd rather not have any more laws... I just tried to think of a way to let the entertainment industry save face, but avoid too many negative consequences... so please don't mod me as a troll just because I actually tried to answer the question... however, please do flame my idea all you want..
I want to build a better matlab... I've been looking at f-script as a possible starting point. I'm learning Cocoa to try and see if I can do the plotting....
I think math toolkits need to be open source, otherwise the work you put into it is tied to the fortunes of a particualr company that either might not be around or decide to stop supporting what you need (like mathworks deciding to stop supporting macs).
Matlab is more than 20 years old now, and showing it's age and Fortran ancestry (has been showing for at least 10 years). It's good at manipulating 2D matrices and applying some functions to them, but everything else is horribly slow, inefficient and unpleasant.
Matlab is slow if you use loops... You should vectorize your matlab programs.
Example:
for i = 1:length(x),
y(i) = x(i)*sin(theta(i));
end
is horrible slow, but can be easily vecotirzed as:
y = x.*sin(theta);
Vectorization takes a while to get the hang of, but is an incredibly powerful feature in Matlab that you'll learn to miss in other languages.
Another good thing about matlab is that it's relatively easy to call fortran and C functions from matlab...
Granted, Matlab is missing a lot of nice features of other languages, but it has many good strengths.
Unfortunately Octave's plotting is horrible... and the main reason that I use Matlab is for its plotting.
....hmmm :)
What we need is some good open source plotting libraries
Cool idea, but from what I've read, the transfer rates on bluetooth are pretty poor (less than USB). Is this correct?
:) And it would be a funny way for wearable computers to take off...
Slow transfer rates would still be fun. You don't need to transfer lots of data fast, maybe just a song or two at the same speed that the song plays.
A bluetooth MP3 player would probably be the most fun if it did streaming MP3 files... you could broadcast your own little theme song that people on the street could pick up... or you could trade music back and forth with someone as some sort of whimsical communictation. This could be a lot of fun.
I keep thinking of "I'm gonna get you sucka" where the guy walks around with a band following him playing his theme song.
And it could probably stream MP3 files to a stereo system.... an iPod would make a really neat stereo remote control.
Ever been at one of those 50's diners with the little jukebox on every table... you could now bring your jukebox music with you and put a quater in just to have access to the speaker system...
You could also turn it around and have multiple music channels in a restaurant that could be picked up via a bluetooth device.
Sure probably none of this is very practicle, but it sure seems like fun to me
Just a thought....
a bluetooth iPod.... Download songs
without even bothering to plug in... be a walking radio station... play your ipod
music through your stereo where the ipod serves the music and acts as a remote control...
eewwww..... bluetooth ipod beow---
Now there's a man who's never tried to compile the Darwin kernel. The build process is awful, absolutely awful. Admittedly I believe Apple has been working on it but last I check it was *far* more difficult than Linux.
But with microkernal architecture recompiles should be far less frequent than with a monolithic kernal. Hopefully only those who want a 'hot rod' system should even have to bother.
I can think of many reasons.. there is no darwin community to help you when xyz won't work, there is no package manager (fink is not ready for primetime yet), KDE does kiynky stuff with ELF binaries and therefore won't work on Darwin, etc.
I don't think anyone is using Darwin and X instead of Gnu/Linux yet - at least not on their main box; what would the advantages be anyway?
I was thinking the advantage of Darwin over Linux would be better harware support on Macs.
There is a very helpful Darwin community (although not as large as Linux). I guess lack of Linux ports would be a problem, but not a show-stopper. Sure x86 Linux binaries won't work on a Mac whether you have Darwin or linux (unless you do some crazy Linux install on virtual PC),but if you have the source it should be possible to get things to work eventually.
I just have to wonder if one had a Darwin+X+Gnustep system if it would be possible to write Cocoa apps that would run on both that system and on Mac OS X (without a recompile). Such a sytem would be open source and run on Macs and x86 machines... and could possibly benefit from more commercial apps than Linux.
And the Darwin microkernal would be much more user-friendly as far as kernal re-compiles go...
The whole OS X vs. Linux debate aside..
Why not use Dawin and X instead of Linux? This way you'd have an open source free as in freedom system with full hardware support.
Am I missing some reason to put Linux on an iBook instead of some Darwin+X configuration?
You don't necessarily have to restrict people's right to publish directly, you just have to restrict their right to do the research.
Interesting point, Freedom of Speech does not protect freedom of thought. Speech is legal, but can be evidence of illegal thought which can be punished.
"Don't even think of breaking our encryption." is now enforcable by law.
What we need is to ressurect a modern version of pythagorus' math cult that is built around the coding and decoding of cyphers... If God wants information to be free then decryption becomes a religious ritual that will be protected by the first amendment.
Since when does ITAR apply to scientific papers written by civillians?? If ITAR and DMCA apply to scientific papers isn't that a blatent violation of the first amendment??
Sure the flying monkeys behind ITAR and DMCA have threatened to sue to censure academics... but there's no way that they would go to court and risk overturning their precious little law.
Besides, ITAR doesn't apply to information that's in the general literature of a field. If you publish results in the public domain frequently and often you avoid the major hassle of ITAR. Otherwise you'll have to get a state department waiver to have a meeting with a foreigner to discuss basic science that they already know anyway.
It seems is IEEE would have stood up for academic freedom they would have had a good chance of overturning ITAR and DMCA in court.
Actually, I bet the new pollicy comes from the company that publishes for the IEEE and wants to protect DMCA from any constitutional challenge because they make piles of money appropriating copyrights for other people's work.
Seems like Ximian could sell a lot of copies to Mac users if they had an OS X version.
I bet that something like this (anonymous p2p) whill suddenly become popular if they try to do this. Someone will hack their box to spit out unprotected versions of tv episodes etc and anonymously post them on places like freenet.
..and the hardware will encode your hardware serial number and home adress in your posts so that the FBI can find you and take care of your illegal hardware.
From the bill text:
(a) IN GENERAL. -- A manufacturer, importer, or seller of digital media devices may not (1) sell, or offer for sale, in interstate commerce, or (2) cause to be transported in, or in a manner affecting, interstate commerce, a digital medial device unless the device includes and utilizes standard security technologies that adhere to the security system standards adopted under section 3.
Ahh, but nothing in section 3 defines the security systems standards this is to be defined later by some industry panel or the FTC, neither group an elected body.
The bill does spell out a list of goals for the security systems standards:
(d) SECURITY SYSTEM STANDARDS. -- In achieving the goals of setting open security standards that will provide effective security for copyrighted works, the security system standards shall ensure, to the extent practicable, that (1) the standard security technologies are -- (A) reliable; (B) renewable; (C) resistant to attack; (D) readily implemented; (E) modular; (F) applicable in multiple technology platforms; (G) extensible; (H) upgradable; (I) not cost prohibitive; and (2) any software portion of such standards is based on open source code.
Nothing in the bill says how these goals would be met, only that the industry panel or the FTC should achieve "the goal of promoting as many lawful uses of copyrighted works as possible, while preventing as much infringement as possible, the encoding rules shall take into account the limitations on the exclusive rights of copyright owners, including the fair use doctrine."
This is a very end-around way to implement restrictions on computer hardware with very limited public debate. Nothing is the bill does anything to protect the usability of computers or state that these security measures work on multiple operating systems -- the industry committee or the FTC is free to mandate whatever bonehead regulation that they want.
It should be the job of those who own copyrighted works to find as many lawful uses of the work as possible. The government shouldn't be in the business of marketting Aladdin V or whatever new flick comes out.
How can the copying of this protected content be prevented without severely crippling your computer?
An encrypted movie is just a bunch of data... How can hardware stop me from trying to break the encryption on the data without limiting the sort of calculations and data handling that I can do?
There is no way to tell unencrypted content from home-made content. The only way to prevent the copying of unencrypted content is to also limit the ability to copy legitimate homemade content.
Here's a specific worm from the can of worms that this law opens: A movie must play to a screen... Today I could capture what's playing on my screen to an mpeg... What if I make a living making how-to videos for software? Then this would outlaw my livlyhood just to prevent people from bootlegging Isthar.
Another worm: I can plug the audio out of one computer into the audio in of another computer and then copy a CD... this law would make this harware illegal. Silly, insane stuff.
Any computer that can do unrestricted computations can be used to break encryption and be used to copy this forbidden data. If only disfunctional computers are legal, then how can scientists or engineers do calculations with computers anymore?? A computer that can't break encryption surely won't be much use to study DNA or to calculate spacecraft trajectories.
We'll be limited to spreadsheets and graphing calculators.
If I have a home video that I made on my own can I make copies of it??? How can software/software tell the difference between a movie that I made myself or one who's encryption has been broken?? How can hardware prevent encryption from being broken without breaking a computer's ability to compute??
Hollings surely doesn't know the answer. Hollywood doesn't know the answer.
The probability for an impact in 2049 is 1e-5 which is 0.001%. If you take range of years you can get a higher probabilty, but I thought the probabilty of impact in a given year was more interesting than over an arbitrary range of years.
I high school (10 years ago) we had an assignment about thinking about how to map cyberspace. My partner and I decided that the best way was via a Ven diagram as oppossed to a physical map of where machines actually were. That is, map the information (then mostly on ftp, gopher, and non-internet BBS's) by subject. You would have a "sports" circle and a "medicine" circle and the overlap would be sports medicine. As a hobby, I've been trying to make such maps every since.
Later, in college, I tried to model a website as a physical system with the links acting like springs. You basically make up some formula causing different web pages to repulse each other and then make links give an attractive "force" that grows with the "distance" between web sites.
This gives you a system of equations that you can solve for an equillibrium point giving an "information distance" between web sites. This will tend to group websites on similar subjects together because they tend to link to each other.... but then again, who cares how close related are to each other, it should still be possible to get a cool picture with this data.
But the stopping point I came up against was how to represent these information distances as a space. I couldn't figure out how to calculate the dimensionality of the space. Was it 2-D, 3-D, or 400-D?
Here's an example of why this is a problem: Take four points that are all 1 meter from each other. In 3-D these points form the corner of a tetrahedron, but you cannot draw these points in 2 dimensions. If I have N equidistant points, I need a space with at least N-1 dimensions.
So how many web pages can be at the same "information distance" from each other? How many dimensions are needed to map the web this way?
Maybe this question only interests me, but I find it fascinating.
I wonder which version of Darwin that they've been using? I've been running some floating-point benchmarks on OS X and I've seen a very large improvement from Darwin ver 5.1 to Darwin ver. 5.3.
Because the GPL says you have to redistribute the source, modified or original, as source. You can do it as binary too, but you have to distribute the source to any person that you distribute a binary to that wants it. This obfustcated text is NOT source code... it is a preprocessed intermediate bytecode.
What if I call my obfuscation a new language, 'C--' and I offer to sell a compiler that compiles my C-- language to C?
Couldn't I offer the source to my new modules written in C-- and link to GPL'ed modules and meet the requirements of the GPL, even if a compiler for C-- is only available commercially?
Heck, I could make several key functions part of the C-- language spec and not have to release the code at all.
Please tell me that I'm wrong here.
I hope some of the Congressmen realize the difference between "Rip, Mix, Burn" and "Download, Burn."
There seems to be three opinions:
Apple - "Rip, Mix, Burn"
Eisner - "Download, Burn, Steal"
Slashdot - "Burn, Hollywod, Burn"