Here is the whole crux of the problem. Infinity is not a number, it's a concept. It's not possible to plug infinity into an equation, come up with a result, and call the process mathematics. Infinity is used to describe a trend in the equation as numbers plugged into it become greater and greater in an unbounded fashion.
The reason this is significant is that if two numbers approach infinite values that does not make them equal. For example 2 * x where x approaches infinity approaches infinity. You could choose to write this as 2 * infinity = infinity. But 1 + 2 * x where x approaches infinity also approaches infinity. You could write this as 1 + 2 * infinity = infinity. Then you're tempted to say 2 * infinity = 1 + 2 * infinity. You can prove all manner of nonsense because you're no longer doing mathematics.
We used to call this MovieCritic. It used a system called LikeMinds to basically mine their database of users' movie preferences in order to define relationships between the tastes of various users. The theory being that if you feel pretty much the same way about a lot of movies as particular other users do, you're pretty likely to enjoy the movies they liked but which you haven't yet seen. I never had it recommend a movie I didn't enjoy, and I was pretty surprised by some of its recommendations. I saw movies based on MovieCritic's suggestions that I never would have bothered with on my own, and really enjoyed them.
MovieCritic shut down in 2002, and the LikeMinds technology was apparently acquired by Adobe, who as far as I can tell are using it for toilet paper.
Corporations aren't people. You can't expect them to react like people, so you can't punish them the way you punish people. If you want to modify the behavior of a corporation, you have to endanger its market share. Two ways I can think of to do this would be to place limits on the amount of advertising they can do and to tax _other_ companies for continuing to do business with them.
One of the main reasons that our legal system has difficulty influencing the behavior of corporations is that it attempts to apply the same pressures against them that are used against individuals. You can't put a company in jail, so you're left with fines. The problem is that money is actually worth much less to a corporation than it is to an individual. Unless you can levy a large enough fine to put the company out of business, they are only forced to pass the fine onto their consumers. We end up punishing ourselves.
What we need to do is go back to basics and re-examine the concept of punishment as it applies to corporations. What is valuable to corporations? Market share. How do they acquire market share? Through advertising, and through relationships with other corporations or government agencies. In order to effectively punish them, you have to impose penalties that impact these channels. For instance:
Place a cap on the amount of advertising the company can do. Impose fees on other entities for doing business with this company.
Many forms of virus do in fact reproduce themselves by hijacking enzymatic processes in living cells. The idea of a virus subverting one of these computing systems would be a very real concern. The terminology appears to have come full circle.
That's an interesting point of view, philosophically. I think the central point here is, what qualifies as use of the system, and what qualifies as abuse? Considering that the laws of the United States accept as a central mandate the separation of church from state, I think a strong case could probably be made to say that a state-funded institution can not lawfully be used to spread what is essentially thinly-veiled religious doctrine. Therefore the intervention of the justice system to prevent such a situation from continuing would be an example of its proper functioning. Essentially, the point is that when a criminal injures himself breaking into your house, it makes a certain kind of sense to object to his filing civil charges in order to obtain compensation. That is no kind of argument to abandon the concept of civil court.
One might be tempted to take with a grain of salt an interpretation of the results of this study that fails to explain why the report wasn't written by the chimpanzees conducting the experiment.
One thing I'm puzzled that VLC doesn't do is provide a hotkey for skipping DVD chapters forwards and backwards. I went looking and found this changeset, which if I read correctly is a patch to a branched version of the 0.8.1 version of the code. I'm afraid it doesn't help me much, though, because I don't know how to obtain the branched version to patch it. It shows, though, that someone was willing to put the time in to develop this feature. I wonder why it hasn't found its way into the official code base?
If what you say were accurate, then the purpose of DRM would be to allow a media provider to let my hardware listen to a piece of music that I am not allowed to hear. Although a ridiculous example, this would be a perfectly viable use of cryptography. A is the sender. B is the intended recipient. C is the outsider. When a media provider provides media, however, the listener is the intended recipient. Hardware is just a transmission method.
Of course. And I'll buy this new hardware because it lets me do so much less than my 15 year old CD player lets me do now. And I'll keep it next to my DIVX player.
Here's the thing about cryptography. It's designed to allow A and B to communicate without C being able to understand what's being said. The flaw with DRM is that B and C are the same person. You don't have to worry about all the cryptographic chains of trust, because the desired end result is still that the user should have access to the data. Data you have access to, you can copy. It's just that simple. DRM is an attempt to have one's cake and eat it, too. It's a perpetual motion machine.
I'm sure this is a troll, but it's also an opportunity for instruction in logic. We see here the logical fallacy of distraction known as a false dilemma. The hidden assumption in this argument is that there are only two possible explanations for the existence of life as we know it, either the currently accepted scientific theories involving evolution and natural selection or the answers provided in a holy text. The arguer then points out flaws in the first argument in order to prove the validity of the only remaining option. It would be trivial to devise any number of alternate possible explanations.
It's about what you say you oppose. It's the appearance of impropriety that's to be avoided. The actual impropriety itself is great if you can get away with it without seeming, in public, to condone it.
Actually, it's likely to do even less than that. I'm willing to bet at least 90% of the.xxx domains will be registered to sites that already own the.com domain of the same name. Which they're not going to give up.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is the whole crux of the problem. Infinity is not a number, it's a concept. It's not possible to plug infinity into an equation, come up with a result, and call the process mathematics. Infinity is used to describe a trend in the equation as numbers plugged into it become greater and greater in an unbounded fashion.
The reason this is significant is that if two numbers approach infinite values that does not make them equal. For example 2 * x where x approaches infinity approaches infinity. You could choose to write this as 2 * infinity = infinity. But 1 + 2 * x where x approaches infinity also approaches infinity. You could write this as 1 + 2 * infinity = infinity. Then you're tempted to say 2 * infinity = 1 + 2 * infinity. You can prove all manner of nonsense because you're no longer doing mathematics.
Using sound to screw things? Doesn't the RIAA do this already?
Sorry, I just had to. It was there.
If they don't retain fingerprint data, just what exactly are they matching the drivers' fingerprints to?
We used to call this MovieCritic. It used a system called LikeMinds to basically mine their database of users' movie preferences in order to define relationships between the tastes of various users. The theory being that if you feel pretty much the same way about a lot of movies as particular other users do, you're pretty likely to enjoy the movies they liked but which you haven't yet seen. I never had it recommend a movie I didn't enjoy, and I was pretty surprised by some of its recommendations. I saw movies based on MovieCritic's suggestions that I never would have bothered with on my own, and really enjoyed them.
MovieCritic shut down in 2002, and the LikeMinds technology was apparently acquired by Adobe, who as far as I can tell are using it for toilet paper.
Corporations aren't people. You can't expect them to react like people, so you can't punish them the way you punish people. If you want to modify the behavior of a corporation, you have to endanger its market share. Two ways I can think of to do this would be to place limits on the amount of advertising they can do and to tax _other_ companies for continuing to do business with them.
One of the main reasons that our legal system has difficulty influencing the behavior of corporations is that it attempts to apply the same pressures against them that are used against individuals. You can't put a company in jail, so you're left with fines. The problem is that money is actually worth much less to a corporation than it is to an individual. Unless you can levy a large enough fine to put the company out of business, they are only forced to pass the fine onto their consumers. We end up punishing ourselves.
What we need to do is go back to basics and re-examine the concept of punishment as it applies to corporations. What is valuable to corporations? Market share. How do they acquire market share? Through advertising, and through relationships with other corporations or government agencies. In order to effectively punish them, you have to impose penalties that impact these channels. For instance:
Place a cap on the amount of advertising the company can do.
Impose fees on other entities for doing business with this company.
Many forms of virus do in fact reproduce themselves by hijacking enzymatic processes in living cells. The idea of a virus subverting one of these computing systems would be a very real concern. The terminology appears to have come full circle.
Set up several of these servers and advertise them. Arrest anyone who requests access.
And then drown. What does that prove?
That's an interesting point of view, philosophically. I think the central point here is, what qualifies as use of the system, and what qualifies as abuse? Considering that the laws of the United States accept as a central mandate the separation of church from state, I think a strong case could probably be made to say that a state-funded institution can not lawfully be used to spread what is essentially thinly-veiled religious doctrine. Therefore the intervention of the justice system to prevent such a situation from continuing would be an example of its proper functioning.
Essentially, the point is that when a criminal injures himself breaking into your house, it makes a certain kind of sense to object to his filing civil charges in order to obtain compensation. That is no kind of argument to abandon the concept of civil court.
One might be tempted to take with a grain of salt an interpretation of the results of this study that fails to explain why the report wasn't written by the chimpanzees conducting the experiment.
That's a good point, I haven't downloaded the newer sources to look, just assumed something would be mentioned about it in the changelog.
Ah! There they are! They are hidden, though, you have to enable the checkbox for "Advanced options" in Hotkey settings in order to see them. Thanks!
One thing I'm puzzled that VLC doesn't do is provide a hotkey for skipping DVD chapters forwards and backwards. I went looking and found this changeset, which if I read correctly is a patch to a branched version of the 0.8.1 version of the code. I'm afraid it doesn't help me much, though, because I don't know how to obtain the branched version to patch it. It shows, though, that someone was willing to put the time in to develop this feature. I wonder why it hasn't found its way into the official code base?
I like him. He's silly.
If what you say were accurate, then the purpose of DRM would be to allow a media provider to let my hardware listen to a piece of music that I am not allowed to hear. Although a ridiculous example, this would be a perfectly viable use of cryptography. A is the sender. B is the intended recipient. C is the outsider. When a media provider provides media, however, the listener is the intended recipient. Hardware is just a transmission method.
Just goes to show, if enough people use a word incorrectly, the usage becomes correct.
Of course. And I'll buy this new hardware because it lets me do so much less than my 15 year old CD player lets me do now. And I'll keep it next to my DIVX player.
Nice troll, though.
Here's the thing about cryptography. It's designed to allow A and B to communicate without C being able to understand what's being said. The flaw with DRM is that B and C are the same person. You don't have to worry about all the cryptographic chains of trust, because the desired end result is still that the user should have access to the data. Data you have access to, you can copy. It's just that simple. DRM is an attempt to have one's cake and eat it, too. It's a perpetual motion machine.
While we're picking nits, the plural of matrix is matrices.
I'm sure this is a troll, but it's also an opportunity for instruction in logic. We see here the logical fallacy of distraction known as a false dilemma. The hidden assumption in this argument is that there are only two possible explanations for the existence of life as we know it, either the currently accepted scientific theories involving evolution and natural selection or the answers provided in a holy text. The arguer then points out flaws in the first argument in order to prove the validity of the only remaining option. It would be trivial to devise any number of alternate possible explanations.
That was Indiana.
Okay, I got a thumb cramp just looking at that thing.
Useful, functional grammar.
It's about what you say you oppose. It's the appearance of impropriety that's to be avoided. The actual impropriety itself is great if you can get away with it without seeming, in public, to condone it.
Actually, it's likely to do even less than that. I'm willing to bet at least 90% of the .xxx domains will be registered to sites that already own the .com domain of the same name. Which they're not going to give up.