"Voters should NEVER receive a receipt. Otherwise, people could be forced to vote for a certain candidate."
How do you use a receipt to force a person to vote for a certain candidate? You ask me to vote for X. I present you a receipt showing *someone* voted for X. How do you know that someone is me?
Voters should never receive a receipt that identifies the voter. Voters can most definitely receive receipts, in fact, they can receive as many receipts as they would like, including the one for their own vote. So long as they can't prove to anyone else which receipt is which.
Please see my other comment where I describe just such a system. A voter can prove to himself that his vote was counted, and if a vote wasn't counted, several people including that voter can prove that someone's vote wasn't counted.
In case my other replies suggested otherwise, I agree. This article is completely and utterly worthless. It's a report on a summary of a study that isn't out yet, and gives us no reason to believe that the study's summary accurately describes the study or that the study is in any sense rigorous.
I am a defender of cryptographic voting systems as potentially providing much better security properties than paper audit trails can. But I have no reason to think this study is legitimate, and frankly think that this type of premature publication suggests that it may not be.
"However, I still wonder what advantage this brings over the old fashioned way..."
There are a few:
1) Individual voters can be assured that their vote was counted. Of course, they cannot prove to others that their vote was counted.
2) If a vote is not counted, the voter can prove that there exists a vote that was not counted. Of course, he cannot prove that it is his vote. He can anonymously submit this cryptographic proof and we'll all know that at least this one vote was "lost".
3) If a member of a group cooperates with that group, the group can make sure that the member's vote is counted. Of course, the group cannot know whether or not the member cooperated.
4) Tampering with the voting system at high level becomes much more difficult. You have to tamper right at the polling places because once a cryptographic proof of a vote is out, you can do nothing to stop it.
5) If extra votes are injected into the system by any means, it will be known where they were injected. It may not be possible to separate the bogus votes from the individual legitimate votes, but at least you'll know what subset of votes must include the bogus votes. For example, you may say "polling place X reported 13,000 votes but only had 11,500 voters, so these 13,000 votes must include 2,500 bogus ones".
"My opinion is that there is no 'secure' e-voting system."
I think we can all agree that there is no secure paper voting system. The paper votes can either not lost can be replaced with other pieces of paper.
"I also do not see any reason to abandon paper-based voting, which still is not 100% secure, but much more difficult to 'hack' due to transparency by distribution of control."
How is paper based voting more difficult to hack than a cryptographically signed, publically available "receipt" for each vote? Pieces of paper can be lost. A cryptographic receipt cannot be lost, because you can then prove it's not in the final tally.
I agree that all current electronic voting systems are bad jokes. But this does not mean that a properly-designed electronic voting scheme cannot be significantly more secure than any paper based system could ever be.
A printout at best proves that your vote was counted. At worst, it's ignored or lost. Cryptographic proof that your vote was counted is superior to a printout in every imaginable way.
How is your vote being printed on a piece of paper that might get lost, ignored, misread, or replaced with another better than a cryptographic receipt that must appear on the final tally or you can prove conclusivley that a validly cast vote was not counted?
"Theo is claiming that the changes that were made to the files are not substantial, and therefore, that the files are Reyk's BSD licensed work, which only Reyk owns, and thus, only Reyk can change the terms on."
If this is true, then Theo is accusing them of doing something impossible. Obviously, they can't have done something impossible. If they can't change the terms on Reyk's work (in the sense of it being impossible for them to do so) then Theo is wrong to accuse them of it. One cannot do the impossible.
Everyone who receives Reyk's work or a derivative work of Reyk's work automatically receives a BSD license from Reyk. Nobody can change this, so accusing someone of changing this is nonsensical.
For example, if I take a dual-licensed work and remove the GPL license from the work and distribute it, you still receive a dual license to that work, from the original author. Neither the GPL nor the BSD license permit you to relicense the original work, but they both specify terms under which you can distribute the original work and create and distribute derivative works.
If Theo was complaining that removing the text of the BSD license from the file was wrong because the BSD license specifically prohibits this and the file was not dual-licensed, he would have a point. But doing this has no effect on the rights recipients of the file get.
The BSD license does *NOT* permit you to relicense the original work. A license that did that would have to be in writing in the United States.
When you receive, say, a copy of the Linux kernel, you receive a GPL license from every single author to the creative elements they authored and contributed. The distributor does not "relicense" the kernel to you. (Read GPL section 6.)
This is true of the BSD license as well. The GPL is explaining the only way a license like the BSD or GPL can work.
I would have much more confidence in a cryptographic scheme that makes it effectively impossible for a voting machine to cheat. This is not all that difficult to accomplish and the necessary design criteria are widely available in the literature. A paper trail doesn't really help.
The basic idea (and I'm oversimplifying, I apologize) works like this:
1) You go to vote. You are shown a voter ID number on the screen. You are welcome to write it down if you wish.
2) You select your candidate of choice. If you wish, you are given a paper receipt providing cryptographic proof that the voter ID you were shown in step 1 voted for the candidate you chose.
3) If anything goes wrong in steps 1 or 2, complain loudly and immediately. This is equivalent to you not being allowed to enter the voting area or a machine displaying a candidate other than the one you pushed.
4) If you wish, you may opt to receive copies of paper receipts of other votes for other candidates too. (So that someone can't demand to see your receipt to prove you voted for a particular candidate, since you can get a receipt of someone else who voted for any candidate.)
5) When the results are publicized, the total number of votes is checked against the total number of voters. Any voter with a paper receipt not on the final tally knows their vote wasn't counted. (Though they can't prove it was their vote, of course, they can prove that *a* valid vote wasn't counted.)
6) The receipts can be scannable with barcode and groups may, if they wish, stay outside of voting areas and ask voters if they may scan their receipts. A church group, for example, could make sure all of its members votes are counted this way, though they could never be truly sure how each member voted.
Your information is excellent, and thank you. But your conclusion is erroneous because you are missing something. The prize money doesn't have to pay for the entire mission, it just has to tip the balance in favor of it being practical.
There are numerous other benefits to putting a rover on the moon. Publicity is perhaps the most obvious. Experience is another. If the prize money covers even a third of the cost, that may be enough to tip the balance in favor of going.
Prize philanthropy is becoming popular again. You don't pay if you don't get results. You don't have to spend money figuring out who to give your money to. And your money gets magnified many times because typically several groups compete and spend in total more than the prize money. Genius.
And if the prize money is not won, all the money spent to try to get the prize goes towards the work you wanted done, and you aren't even out a dime. You gotta love it. Peter Diamandis is a genius, resurrecting both the private space industry (beyond satellites) and the prize philanthropy industry.
Maybe I'm not thinking clearly, but this just doesn't make sense. Any qualified bidder could voluntarily adopt the open access rules, thus forcing anyone who didn't want the bands subject to those rules to outbid that bidder. I can't see how this restriction could possibly raise the value of the bands -- it only takes some applications off the table, applications that might be worth more than the open access ones.
Those who want to keep open access rules off the table would still have to outbid companies like Google who might voluntarily impose those rules if they won the auction.
Suppose I was offering a truck for auction. I might say "the buyer must use the truck to haul gravel" thinking this would make gravel haulers compete more heavily for the truck to stop their competitors from getting a cheap truck. But any gravel hauler could buy the truck anyway, so the gravel haulers and everyone else will bid without the restriction.
I think you argument doesn't make sense, though it's possible that it might still make sense for some more complex reason that I can't quite see.
"In the real world, outside of software, there are plenty of non-transferable licenses. Buy a "lifetime" membership at your local gym, and then try selling it someone else - it isn't allowed since it is stated in the contract at the time of sale. Same thing with Autodesk's software. If someone doesn't like Autodesk's licensing terms they are free not to buy Autodesk software."
Your analogy is complete and total nonsense. In the case of the gym, this is something the gym is not required to do. Nobody is asking Autodesk to do anything but leave them alone. This would be more like if I bought a book at my local gym and when I was finished reading it, they said I couldn't give it to a friend.
The suit to follow is Tanya Andersen's. She has initiated a class action suit on behalf of all innocent people who have been harassed and bullied by RIAA lawyers. In Andersen v. Atlantic, the RIAA will have to defend itself against charges of malicious prosecution, and her case looks like a winner.
I don't think you will ever see any kind of intellectual property protection for facts. If you think for awhile about what it would mean if people could own facts, I think you'll see that it's just too dangerous.
IP laws don't protect "hard work". Patents protect discovery of new designs or methods of accomplishing specific goals. Copyrights protect creative expression.
The closest thing to a law protecting "hard work" is some of the database copyright laws being discussed.
"How much you want to bet the slashdot crowd will accept these figures uncritically because it supports their ideology?"
How do you get that? These figures suggest that fair use is already big enough and that perhaps authors aren't getting to keep enough of the value that they've made possible. Whose ideology do you think that support?
If fair use is ten times copyright, then if I produce a book for which I make $500, then I've made everyone else $5,000. That suggests that there's no reason to expand fair use and that copyright has swung too far from letting authors benefit from the value they create.
But in any event, this study is meaningless. If not for copyright, the pool of things that you could use freely would likely diminish. So you can't really argue anything with these numbers. It's not clear if more free use rights would overall be good or bad, as it would affect *both* sides of the question in unknown ways.
If I get more rights to what I create, I might create more and more people might create. That might mean that even though you have less rights to any given material, there's more material. So while this study might tell us where we are in the balance, it can't tell us on which side of idea we are.
The graph of fair use rights versus fair use value likely looks like an 'n'. On the left side, we have very few fair use rights, and no matter how much content there is, the restrictions on our rights make it not very useful. On the right side, we have many fair use rights, but there isn't as much content because there's less incentive to create content. This tells us where we are, but not where the top of the 'n' is.
Think about this -- fair use rights might not as much as you might hope, but how much more stuff do you have fair use rights to than stuff you have rights that you bought from the copyright holder?
You're confused. You don't need fair use for facts. Facts can be neither copyrighted nor patented.
A copyright may prevent you from *copying* the precise way a person chose to express a fact, but it can't stop you from expressing that same fact another way. In fact, if there's only one way to express a fact, copyright *cannot* protect it at all.
Where's the "-1 Wrong" modifier?! Actually, this one is wrong for so many reasons I don't know where to start.
The simplest thing to point out if that if you use a one-time pad more than once (and you're going to send more than one packet in 10 seconds, I assure you), you lose the security properties of the one-time pad. So all your syncing (which is obviously going to be a huge pain in the butt) is wasted since you didn't get the thing that it was supposed to get you.
OTP are essentially useless in practice. 99% of practical systems that claim to use OTPs actually don't. Worse, OTPs actually *don't* provide many critically-needed security properties and they magnify some vulnerabilities. (It's easier for a MITM to flip a specific bit of a packet protected by an OTP than for a packet protected by DES.)
In many cases, you can secure your endpoints a lot better than the wires between them. In that case, properly configured wireless provides higher security than wired. For some reason, wired device don't seem to offer an encryption -- and I have no idea why.
"Private jet flyers and short haul flights should just be stopped completely, there is absolutely no reason for them, and it will kill people, plain and simple."
Absolutely! Also, skiing and car racing. There's simply no reason for these things, and they kill people.
Oh, also driving. I mean, you can always walk or ride a bicycle. No reason to drive, even though it's more convenient. Heck, you can live closer to where you work.
Perhaps people should have to prove that their need to drive someplace outweighs the harm done before they're allowed to start their car.
"I know plenty of people who worked harder but got no where mostly due to things out of their control."
How hard you work has nothing to do with anything. It's how much value you produce how much more value you let other people produce. These folks didn't work hard, they worked smart and they took risks.
You seriously think they got into universities that helped get them into the right place by luck? That's kind of crazy.
Yes, some luck is involved. If you don't think there's some moral problem with luck being a factor in wealth, work to ban lotteries.
There is no comparison between John Travolta using his own money to build an airstrip on his own property and Google using company money to rent space at a government-owned airstrip. Where's the similarity?
RIM made a lot of procedural errors early in the case that they could not overcome later. Perhaps they didn't have top-notch counsel or perhaps they weren't taking the lawsuit seriously. Unfortunately, that meant that later when the case looked really serious, they were fighting with one hand behind their back and the other one in a cast.
No, you can't patent a sequence of steps that does nothing more than produce the obvious sum of those steps. A sequence of known steps can only be patented if there's some "unexpected synergy" that allows the steps to accomplish something more than the obvious sum of their individual effects.
However, my recollection was that RIM settled with NTP just a few weeks before their patents were declared invalid in another proceeding. I guess I must be missing some details or not up on things that happened after that.
I have read TFA three times, and I can't find anything that it either prohibits or requires. Converters to convert a digital output (such as you would plug into a new digital TV) into analog already exist. So it seems the ruling just requires cable companies to support/allow these boxes. But they're obviously going to do that. Why would they say "even though you have an analog TV and a converter, we won't take your money"?
Am I confused? Does this make any sense?
How are these "must carry" rules? Are they requiring them to carry any signals or just requiring them to provide an analog output? Since the end user can trivially convert a digital signal to an analog one, what effect does that have? Or must the cable company offer the converter at no or low cost?
*sigh* I'm going to have to read the actual FCC rules. TFA is useless.
Yeah, in sum, this almost looks like Russia wants to resume the cold war. They've resumed regular bomber flights equipped with nuclear weapons, demonstrated a gigantic bomb, replaced and restructured their cabinet, and pulled out of the treaty that cemented the end of the cold war (the CFE treaty).
It's not clear what Russia wants out of this. I don't think they are anything like North Korea, basically looking for a payoff in exchange for agreeing to undo all this stuff. Russia just isn't looking for handouts.
I think Russia must feel it's being slighted in some way or being treated unfairly. Most likely by the United States, but this is not certain. They feel they need increasing leverage to combat this. Perhaps they also feel they can take advantage of the fact that world opinion towards the United States is at a new low.
It should be very interesting to see where this goes.
"Copyright was created as a functional tool to promote creativity, innovation, and economic activity," said Black. "It should be measured by that standard, not by some moral rights or abstract measure of property rights."
Let's try it:
Public schools were created to homogenize immigrants and keep children out of the labor force. They should be measured by that standard, not by some moral theory about a right to an education.
Hmm, nope, that doesn't work. Let's try again:
The state secrets privilege was created to permit royalty to keep commoners from nosing in their affairs. They should be measured by that standard, not by some moral theory about separation of powers and consitutional Democracy.
Hmm, nope, that didn't work either. This argument form doesn't seem to work for me. Maybe I don't know how to use it right.
"It's pretty damn hard to avoid having to trust the server; how would you do so?"
You have a super-server that validates the servers. You don't give out the source code to the server, and the server contains internal checks to assure it has not been tampered with. You can also have the clients validate the server's internals.
This can catch most cases of tampering with the server's internal operation. There are, of course, still ways to break this. For example, in an FPS, I can make a way to delay everybody's packets but mine by 300mS and turn it on for just a second or two at critical points.
But you don't have to make the game server trusted, that's just one possible architecture.
"No, but if you don't do that, the players can still use a network sniffer to find out the information that the server has sent but they shouldn't be seeing yet, so you're not actually any better off with your "verified" client."
Not true. You can encrypt the packets and bury the encryption algorithm in your client, whose source code you do not give out. You can require users to run anti-cheat software that looks for any code that might expose the key to them.
Of course, these techniques don't always work, but unfortunately, that's all we have for now. There are games that use untrusted servers and client encryption in just this way, and they are the best solution we have.
I agree that it would be better if we had a better solution, but we don't. If you know, one, please share it with the class.
Slashdot Mirror
"Voters should NEVER receive a receipt. Otherwise, people could be forced to vote for a certain candidate."
How do you use a receipt to force a person to vote for a certain candidate? You ask me to vote for X. I present you a receipt showing *someone* voted for X. How do you know that someone is me?
Voters should never receive a receipt that identifies the voter. Voters can most definitely receive receipts, in fact, they can receive as many receipts as they would like, including the one for their own vote. So long as they can't prove to anyone else which receipt is which.
Please see my other comment where I describe just such a system. A voter can prove to himself that his vote was counted, and if a vote wasn't counted, several people including that voter can prove that someone's vote wasn't counted.
In case my other replies suggested otherwise, I agree. This article is completely and utterly worthless. It's a report on a summary of a study that isn't out yet, and gives us no reason to believe that the study's summary accurately describes the study or that the study is in any sense rigorous.
I am a defender of cryptographic voting systems as potentially providing much better security properties than paper audit trails can. But I have no reason to think this study is legitimate, and frankly think that this type of premature publication suggests that it may not be.
"However, I still wonder what advantage this brings over the old fashioned way..."
There are a few:
1) Individual voters can be assured that their vote was counted. Of course, they cannot prove to others that their vote was counted.
2) If a vote is not counted, the voter can prove that there exists a vote that was not counted. Of course, he cannot prove that it is his vote. He can anonymously submit this cryptographic proof and we'll all know that at least this one vote was "lost".
3) If a member of a group cooperates with that group, the group can make sure that the member's vote is counted. Of course, the group cannot know whether or not the member cooperated.
4) Tampering with the voting system at high level becomes much more difficult. You have to tamper right at the polling places because once a cryptographic proof of a vote is out, you can do nothing to stop it.
5) If extra votes are injected into the system by any means, it will be known where they were injected. It may not be possible to separate the bogus votes from the individual legitimate votes, but at least you'll know what subset of votes must include the bogus votes. For example, you may say "polling place X reported 13,000 votes but only had 11,500 voters, so these 13,000 votes must include 2,500 bogus ones".
"My opinion is that there is no 'secure' e-voting system."
I think we can all agree that there is no secure paper voting system. The paper votes can either not lost can be replaced with other pieces of paper.
"I also do not see any reason to abandon paper-based voting, which still is not 100% secure, but much more difficult to 'hack' due to transparency by distribution of control."
How is paper based voting more difficult to hack than a cryptographically signed, publically available "receipt" for each vote? Pieces of paper can be lost. A cryptographic receipt cannot be lost, because you can then prove it's not in the final tally.
I agree that all current electronic voting systems are bad jokes. But this does not mean that a properly-designed electronic voting scheme cannot be significantly more secure than any paper based system could ever be.
A printout at best proves that your vote was counted. At worst, it's ignored or lost. Cryptographic proof that your vote was counted is superior to a printout in every imaginable way.
How is your vote being printed on a piece of paper that might get lost, ignored, misread, or replaced with another better than a cryptographic receipt that must appear on the final tally or you can prove conclusivley that a validly cast vote was not counted?
"Theo is claiming that the changes that were made to the files are not substantial, and therefore, that the files are Reyk's BSD licensed work, which only Reyk owns, and thus, only Reyk can change the terms on."
If this is true, then Theo is accusing them of doing something impossible. Obviously, they can't have done something impossible. If they can't change the terms on Reyk's work (in the sense of it being impossible for them to do so) then Theo is wrong to accuse them of it. One cannot do the impossible.
Everyone who receives Reyk's work or a derivative work of Reyk's work automatically receives a BSD license from Reyk. Nobody can change this, so accusing someone of changing this is nonsensical.
For example, if I take a dual-licensed work and remove the GPL license from the work and distribute it, you still receive a dual license to that work, from the original author. Neither the GPL nor the BSD license permit you to relicense the original work, but they both specify terms under which you can distribute the original work and create and distribute derivative works.
If Theo was complaining that removing the text of the BSD license from the file was wrong because the BSD license specifically prohibits this and the file was not dual-licensed, he would have a point. But doing this has no effect on the rights recipients of the file get.
The BSD license does *NOT* permit you to relicense the original work. A license that did that would have to be in writing in the United States.
When you receive, say, a copy of the Linux kernel, you receive a GPL license from every single author to the creative elements they authored and contributed. The distributor does not "relicense" the kernel to you. (Read GPL section 6.)
This is true of the BSD license as well. The GPL is explaining the only way a license like the BSD or GPL can work.
I would have much more confidence in a cryptographic scheme that makes it effectively impossible for a voting machine to cheat. This is not all that difficult to accomplish and the necessary design criteria are widely available in the literature. A paper trail doesn't really help.
The basic idea (and I'm oversimplifying, I apologize) works like this:
1) You go to vote. You are shown a voter ID number on the screen. You are welcome to write it down if you wish.
2) You select your candidate of choice. If you wish, you are given a paper receipt providing cryptographic proof that the voter ID you were shown in step 1 voted for the candidate you chose.
3) If anything goes wrong in steps 1 or 2, complain loudly and immediately. This is equivalent to you not being allowed to enter the voting area or a machine displaying a candidate other than the one you pushed.
4) If you wish, you may opt to receive copies of paper receipts of other votes for other candidates too. (So that someone can't demand to see your receipt to prove you voted for a particular candidate, since you can get a receipt of someone else who voted for any candidate.)
5) When the results are publicized, the total number of votes is checked against the total number of voters. Any voter with a paper receipt not on the final tally knows their vote wasn't counted. (Though they can't prove it was their vote, of course, they can prove that *a* valid vote wasn't counted.)
6) The receipts can be scannable with barcode and groups may, if they wish, stay outside of voting areas and ask voters if they may scan their receipts. A church group, for example, could make sure all of its members votes are counted this way, though they could never be truly sure how each member voted.
Your information is excellent, and thank you. But your conclusion is erroneous because you are missing something. The prize money doesn't have to pay for the entire mission, it just has to tip the balance in favor of it being practical.
There are numerous other benefits to putting a rover on the moon. Publicity is perhaps the most obvious. Experience is another. If the prize money covers even a third of the cost, that may be enough to tip the balance in favor of going.
Prize philanthropy is becoming popular again. You don't pay if you don't get results. You don't have to spend money figuring out who to give your money to. And your money gets magnified many times because typically several groups compete and spend in total more than the prize money. Genius.
And if the prize money is not won, all the money spent to try to get the prize goes towards the work you wanted done, and you aren't even out a dime. You gotta love it. Peter Diamandis is a genius, resurrecting both the private space industry (beyond satellites) and the prize philanthropy industry.
Maybe I'm not thinking clearly, but this just doesn't make sense. Any qualified bidder could voluntarily adopt the open access rules, thus forcing anyone who didn't want the bands subject to those rules to outbid that bidder. I can't see how this restriction could possibly raise the value of the bands -- it only takes some applications off the table, applications that might be worth more than the open access ones.
Those who want to keep open access rules off the table would still have to outbid companies like Google who might voluntarily impose those rules if they won the auction.
Suppose I was offering a truck for auction. I might say "the buyer must use the truck to haul gravel" thinking this would make gravel haulers compete more heavily for the truck to stop their competitors from getting a cheap truck. But any gravel hauler could buy the truck anyway, so the gravel haulers and everyone else will bid without the restriction.
I think you argument doesn't make sense, though it's possible that it might still make sense for some more complex reason that I can't quite see.
"In the real world, outside of software, there are plenty of non-transferable licenses. Buy a "lifetime" membership at your local gym, and then try selling it someone else - it isn't allowed since it is stated in the contract at the time of sale. Same thing with Autodesk's software. If someone doesn't like Autodesk's licensing terms they are free not to buy Autodesk software."
Your analogy is complete and total nonsense. In the case of the gym, this is something the gym is not required to do. Nobody is asking Autodesk to do anything but leave them alone. This would be more like if I bought a book at my local gym and when I was finished reading it, they said I couldn't give it to a friend.
The suit to follow is Tanya Andersen's. She has initiated a class action suit on behalf of all innocent people who have been harassed and bullied by RIAA lawyers. In Andersen v. Atlantic, the RIAA will have to defend itself against charges of malicious prosecution, and her case looks like a winner.
I don't think you will ever see any kind of intellectual property protection for facts. If you think for awhile about what it would mean if people could own facts, I think you'll see that it's just too dangerous.
IP laws don't protect "hard work". Patents protect discovery of new designs or methods of accomplishing specific goals. Copyrights protect creative expression.
The closest thing to a law protecting "hard work" is some of the database copyright laws being discussed.
"How much you want to bet the slashdot crowd will accept these figures uncritically because it supports their ideology?"
How do you get that? These figures suggest that fair use is already big enough and that perhaps authors aren't getting to keep enough of the value that they've made possible. Whose ideology do you think that support?
If fair use is ten times copyright, then if I produce a book for which I make $500, then I've made everyone else $5,000. That suggests that there's no reason to expand fair use and that copyright has swung too far from letting authors benefit from the value they create.
But in any event, this study is meaningless. If not for copyright, the pool of things that you could use freely would likely diminish. So you can't really argue anything with these numbers. It's not clear if more free use rights would overall be good or bad, as it would affect *both* sides of the question in unknown ways.
If I get more rights to what I create, I might create more and more people might create. That might mean that even though you have less rights to any given material, there's more material. So while this study might tell us where we are in the balance, it can't tell us on which side of idea we are.
The graph of fair use rights versus fair use value likely looks like an 'n'. On the left side, we have very few fair use rights, and no matter how much content there is, the restrictions on our rights make it not very useful. On the right side, we have many fair use rights, but there isn't as much content because there's less incentive to create content. This tells us where we are, but not where the top of the 'n' is.
Think about this -- fair use rights might not as much as you might hope, but how much more stuff do you have fair use rights to than stuff you have rights that you bought from the copyright holder?
You're confused. You don't need fair use for facts. Facts can be neither copyrighted nor patented.
A copyright may prevent you from *copying* the precise way a person chose to express a fact, but it can't stop you from expressing that same fact another way. In fact, if there's only one way to express a fact, copyright *cannot* protect it at all.
Um, no.
Where's the "-1 Wrong" modifier?! Actually, this one is wrong for so many reasons I don't know where to start.
The simplest thing to point out if that if you use a one-time pad more than once (and you're going to send more than one packet in 10 seconds, I assure you), you lose the security properties of the one-time pad. So all your syncing (which is obviously going to be a huge pain in the butt) is wasted since you didn't get the thing that it was supposed to get you.
OTP are essentially useless in practice. 99% of practical systems that claim to use OTPs actually don't. Worse, OTPs actually *don't* provide many critically-needed security properties and they magnify some vulnerabilities. (It's easier for a MITM to flip a specific bit of a packet protected by an OTP than for a packet protected by DES.)
In many cases, you can secure your endpoints a lot better than the wires between them. In that case, properly configured wireless provides higher security than wired. For some reason, wired device don't seem to offer an encryption -- and I have no idea why.
"Private jet flyers and short haul flights should just be stopped completely, there is absolutely no reason for them, and it will kill people, plain and simple."
Absolutely! Also, skiing and car racing. There's simply no reason for these things, and they kill people.
Oh, also driving. I mean, you can always walk or ride a bicycle. No reason to drive, even though it's more convenient. Heck, you can live closer to where you work.
Perhaps people should have to prove that their need to drive someplace outweighs the harm done before they're allowed to start their car.
"I know plenty of people who worked harder but got no where mostly due to things out of their control."
How hard you work has nothing to do with anything. It's how much value you produce how much more value you let other people produce. These folks didn't work hard, they worked smart and they took risks.
You seriously think they got into universities that helped get them into the right place by luck? That's kind of crazy.
Yes, some luck is involved. If you don't think there's some moral problem with luck being a factor in wealth, work to ban lotteries.
There is no comparison between John Travolta using his own money to build an airstrip on his own property and Google using company money to rent space at a government-owned airstrip. Where's the similarity?
RIM made a lot of procedural errors early in the case that they could not overcome later. Perhaps they didn't have top-notch counsel or perhaps they weren't taking the lawsuit seriously. Unfortunately, that meant that later when the case looked really serious, they were fighting with one hand behind their back and the other one in a cast.
No, you can't patent a sequence of steps that does nothing more than produce the obvious sum of those steps. A sequence of known steps can only be patented if there's some "unexpected synergy" that allows the steps to accomplish something more than the obvious sum of their individual effects.
However, my recollection was that RIM settled with NTP just a few weeks before their patents were declared invalid in another proceeding. I guess I must be missing some details or not up on things that happened after that.
I have read TFA three times, and I can't find anything that it either prohibits or requires. Converters to convert a digital output (such as you would plug into a new digital TV) into analog already exist. So it seems the ruling just requires cable companies to support/allow these boxes. But they're obviously going to do that. Why would they say "even though you have an analog TV and a converter, we won't take your money"?
Am I confused? Does this make any sense?
How are these "must carry" rules? Are they requiring them to carry any signals or just requiring them to provide an analog output? Since the end user can trivially convert a digital signal to an analog one, what effect does that have? Or must the cable company offer the converter at no or low cost?
*sigh* I'm going to have to read the actual FCC rules. TFA is useless.
Yeah, in sum, this almost looks like Russia wants to resume the cold war. They've resumed regular bomber flights equipped with nuclear weapons, demonstrated a gigantic bomb, replaced and restructured their cabinet, and pulled out of the treaty that cemented the end of the cold war (the CFE treaty).
It's not clear what Russia wants out of this. I don't think they are anything like North Korea, basically looking for a payoff in exchange for agreeing to undo all this stuff. Russia just isn't looking for handouts.
I think Russia must feel it's being slighted in some way or being treated unfairly. Most likely by the United States, but this is not certain. They feel they need increasing leverage to combat this. Perhaps they also feel they can take advantage of the fact that world opinion towards the United States is at a new low.
It should be very interesting to see where this goes.
Yeah, but they do expound idiocy like this:
"Copyright was created as a functional tool to promote creativity, innovation, and economic activity," said Black. "It should be measured by that standard, not by some moral rights or abstract measure of property rights."
Let's try it:
Public schools were created to homogenize immigrants and keep children out of the labor force. They should be measured by that standard, not by some moral theory about a right to an education.
Hmm, nope, that doesn't work. Let's try again:
The state secrets privilege was created to permit royalty to keep commoners from nosing in their affairs. They should be measured by that standard, not by some moral theory about separation of powers and consitutional Democracy.
Hmm, nope, that didn't work either. This argument form doesn't seem to work for me. Maybe I don't know how to use it right.
"It's pretty damn hard to avoid having to trust the server; how would you do so?"
You have a super-server that validates the servers. You don't give out the source code to the server, and the server contains internal checks to assure it has not been tampered with. You can also have the clients validate the server's internals.
This can catch most cases of tampering with the server's internal operation. There are, of course, still ways to break this. For example, in an FPS, I can make a way to delay everybody's packets but mine by 300mS and turn it on for just a second or two at critical points.
But you don't have to make the game server trusted, that's just one possible architecture.
"No, but if you don't do that, the players can still use a network sniffer to find out the information that the server has sent but they shouldn't be seeing yet, so you're not actually any better off with your "verified" client."
Not true. You can encrypt the packets and bury the encryption algorithm in your client, whose source code you do not give out. You can require users to run anti-cheat software that looks for any code that might expose the key to them.
Of course, these techniques don't always work, but unfortunately, that's all we have for now. There are games that use untrusted servers and client encryption in just this way, and they are the best solution we have.
I agree that it would be better if we had a better solution, but we don't. If you know, one, please share it with the class.