I understand that they'll be able to crack 1024, but still, 3 years to see my e-mails. It's not worth it for them. Now when they got it down to 3 hours I'll be worried, but by then we'll probably be using 4096.
True, but what you need to think about is forward secrecy.
There are lots of things being transmitted today that are still going to be in use three years from now. For example, think of financial information: if you use an encryption standard that's acceptable right now, but can be broken in three years (or, is trivially breakable in three years due to increases in computer power or techniques), then you're in trouble, because some of that information is still going to be sensitive/valuable in three years. The fact that you'll be using 4096 bits then doesn't matter, if someone grabs it now and crunches on it for a while. Same with identification numbers (SSNs, etc); if I grab a batch of numbers today, most of them will probably still be good in ten or fifteen years, and some of them will still be good in 30 or 40. That's how far out you need to be thinking when choosing an encryption standard for that data.
There are some things where only immediate security matters (transmitting big session keys that get thrown away a few hours or minutes later), but many other things -- and I think general file encryption falls into this category -- where it's hard to predict for how long the encrypted information might be sensitive or valuable.
A while (several years) ago, I wrote a post about how I think there are many parallels between firearms in the physical world, and circumventive/disruptive technologies in the informational world.
If you look at what the Second Amendment does, I don't think it's really that far of a leap. The function of the Second Amendment is to give people a powerful tool -- namely, weapons -- which can be used for good or ill, with the unspoken premise and assumption [1] that most people will use them responsibly. (And also that some people will use them irresponsibly, but that this is a fair price to pay, similar to the hypothetical 'guilty man' that you must let go free in order to ensure you're not condemning innocent ones by mistake.)
Similarly, there are many software tools which can be used in a variety of ways, many of them unproductively or outright harmfully. I don't think that the Constitution prohibits the Government from regulating actions, but I think there's ample evidence that there's a difference between making an action illegal, and making the tools which might be used to accomplish that action illegal. When you ban a tool, you're implicitly stating that you think people aren't responsible enough to be trusted with it, when I think it's clear that our country was supposed to operate -- succeed or fail -- on the opposite assumption.
Over the years, I think that this premise has been chipped away at to the point where it's virtually gone from our law or jurisprudence. [2] Perhaps such a culture of personal responsibility wouldn't have worked in the long run; maybe it would have proved impossible to scale. But if that's true, then I think it's ultimately a pretty damning indictment of democracy in general. If we're not ready to throw away the whole concept, I think you have to accept the number of people who will misuse tools when they are made freely available (despite whatever punishments you set out for the misuse; i.e. they are acting irrationally) as simply the cost of living in a free society. Personally, I think it's a small price to pay, given the alternative.
[1] I think you can argue quite readily that this assumption is pervasive in most, if not all, democratic systems: if you don't think that the majority of people are inherently good and responsible, then democracy in general just wouldn't seem like a very good idea.
[2] In addition to laws concerning weapons, which are the obvious example, you also have some of the broader "burglar's tools" laws that cover simple possession, or their extension to cans of paint, etc.; more recently you have the series of laws and regulations that led up to the DMCA, which began with satellite TV anti-descrambling laws and pretty much proceeded in a straight path from there to the disgrace we're currently dealing with.
It's sad really, OS X is a good operating system and most of its problems stem from being owned by Apple, insisting things be exactly a certain way, it is ruining their chances for a lot of opportunities.
Actually, and I say this as a Mac user, OS X / Darwin is an unspectacular (really -- there were some really painful DB and Apache performance benchmarks vs Linux that came out a while ago) operating system, the only saving grace of which is that it's owned by Apple, which can keep it basically under control. If it wasn't for that, it would probably end up like Plan9, or any number of other interesting OSes that very few people actually use.
The reason I've always bought Macs, and will continue to buy them (although I do keep a Linux workstation around at home now too) is because they're a closed platform. You want a wireless card? There's no screwing around -- you go to the Apple store, you buy a wireless card. It costs a lot of money, but it's worth every goddamn penny, because you know it's going to work without any screwing around. There's only one, the drivers are all built-in, it's well documented (from a user's perspective) and usually well QAed. Linux can't say that, and Windows certainly can't either; it's a direct consequence of the Mac being a closed platform. (You do get it on other high-end closed platforms; e.g. some mid-range and higher IBM gear -- you want something, you call your IBM rep with your checkbook in hand, they send someone to plug it in, end of story.)
I'm as much of an open-source and open-standards guy as anyone -- I wouldn't want Apple dominating the computer field, any more than I enjoy Microsoft dominating it (not at all). But to say that Apple's strength isn't derived at least in large part from the fact that they control everything, from the hardware up to the userland apps, is naive. (And they do a good job at it, too -- but they wouldn't have the opportunity to excel if they didn't have that platform to work with.) Perhaps Apple could open everything up and still succeed by selling a guaranteed-to-work "reference platform"... but why mess with something that works?
Why not make an "Uncrippled for non-US" edition?
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Dell Linux Details
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Are there any "European Linux" distros that don't kowtow to the U.S. DMCA rule, and include libdvdcss by default?
It seems like all the major distros basically play by the U.S. rules, but with the seeming increasing popularity of Linux in Europe, I'd think that the time would be right for somebody to just stop following idiotic U.S. regulations and make a distro that's not hampered by anti-circumvention... I mean, why not have "Crippled for U.S." and "Un-Crippled" mirrors, and just ship the same distro with a different/etc/apt/sources.list file depending on whether it's the "US ISO" or the "International ISO"? (And, duh, everyone except for corporate users in the U.S. would probably just download the European version, but the point would be that in order to get the 'good stuff,' you'd have to shamefully pretend to live in a country that doesn't suck so bad at IP laws.)
It would be sorta like the 40-bit encryption restrictions in the early 90s, only in reverse. We need to make it screamingly obvious to politicians in the U.S., that America is losing on something that the rest of the world is doing without us, because of our stupid rules.
I don't normally encourage obnoxious European holier-than-thou-ism, but this is one case where it could be put to useful effect.
I think that you basically mentioned the only real place where there's a market for PPC: on servers. Although I've always been a big fan of the Power architecture (I have a dual-G5 spaceheater sitting under my desk that I'm writing this on, right now), I don't think that offering G5 PowerMacs along side Intel PowerMacs would really do anything besides confuse customers and potentially make the platform less appealing for developers who don't realize how easy Universal code is to produce. So I think that's a non-starter.
However, keeping OS X Server (which under the hood really isn't that different from regular old OS X, but it's marketed as a totally different product) Universal, and producing PPC XServes in addition to Intel boxes, might not be a bad idea. PPC XServes have always had a fair bit of popularity in the HPC and scientific-computing segments over x86, and for servers, a lot of the software in use is OSS anyway and is architecture-agnostic by design. So they wouldn't really be confusing any developers there -- most of the software that runs on OS X Server is either supplied by Apple, or is OSS, or (in the case of custom HPC code) may have been written/optimized specifically for Power/Altivec in the past already, so they'd be saving their customers work by offering a PPC product.
I think there could be a lot to gain by keeping a PPC model around. They might not even have to do too much hardware design; if they didn't burn too many bridges with IBM on the way out, they could probably use one of IBM's Power-based blade-server boards in a 1U case...particularly with the way Cell hasn't been selling, IBM would probably be happy for the microprocessor sales.
True. However, it's easy to find out if a user has completely disabled JavaScript -- browsers like Firefox let you selectively disable various "features" of JS, so you can keep doing scripts from annoying things (resizing windows, eliminating the address / tool bars, right-click context menus, etc.) without disabling script behavior. This makes sure that your browser looks like one that's using JS, so it won't fail any "JavaScript is required to view this page!" asshattery, but you'll still be able to retain control of your browser.
Actually I did look it up, but there was no entry (Random-House). As my initial guess for the choosen usage
I hate to be the one to have to say this, but maybe you'd better get a better dictionary.
The default one in Firefox (dictionary.reference.com) isn't too bad; you can get it by typing "dict {word}" into the URL field. Although honestly, Google seems to just get better and better as a spell-checker; actually it'd be pretty slick someday if spelling packages could failover to Google for suggestions, on detecting a word not in their dictionary -- that would let them stay more or less permanently up-to-date, even on neologisms. (I bet Google would consider such automated queries abusive, though.)
... where the hell has all the common sense gone in the copyright debate? I also assumed that we had a certain level of civility on Slashdot, and that calling your fellow Slashdotters "fuckpuppets" was enough to land you a -1 flamebait mod.
Er, I think he was referring to the MPAA as the "utter fuckpuppets," not to anyone on Slashdot.
Other party-line systems solved this long ago
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Cleaning up Thunder Bluff
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· Score: 2, Interesting
This problem has been solved elsewhere. I used to spend a lot of time working in video production and in the theater; in 90% of theaters and studios, they use a headset intercom system made by ClearCom. It's a pretty simple "party line" (or sometimes 2 channel) system, where everybody has a headset and a belt pack, with a PTT switch. The PTT can also be locked on, if you need hands-free operation.
However, the designers realized that letting people lock on their mics could get pretty annoying in a hurry, for exactly the reasons you mentioned -- everybody else on the circuit doesn't need to hear you breathing, swallowing, talking to people not on the 'com, etc.
So they have a feature where the person at the master console can hit a button, and 'unlock' everyone's mics that are locked on. The way this is done is actually a pretty neat use of analog electronics, but it's not really relevant. The point is that the PTT-lock is a "soft lock" (the button doesn't lock down mechanically or anything), so it can be remotely unset. So that way if the person at the master console needs to break in, or just gets tired of hearing you breathe into your mic, they can just hit the button and shut you up (at least long enough to reach down and hit the button again).
Seems like this would be a good feature for video games that feature a team 'com, because essentially they're doing the same things as ClearComs in a production studio. You'd have a team leader, and they'd have the capability of unhooking people's stuck mics if they started yelling at their mom.
The only hardware change is that you have to have the PTT switch as a separate control line, rather than as part of the audio feed. (You have to have separate "headphone out," "mic in," and "PTT" lines, like most 2-way radios, rather than just "headphone" and "mic," with the PTT switch installed in the mic line.) This allows the mic keying to be done in the console, rather than in the headset -- which is really where it should be, even on a full-duplex connection. Also, it would let you actually use the PTT switch as more than just a switch for your own mic; you could set it up so that a quick double-tap of the PTT by the person in charge would unset other people's mics, and/or you could put the PTT switch any place you wanted, not just on your headset. (You could use it via a footswitch, or on your controller, or any other place you wanted.)
Anyway, 'teamspeak' and other systems are relatively new in the video game world, but the problems you're describing aren't new or very unique; they're all solved issues in other mediums, and hopefully someone in the video-game world will eventually take a look at some of those other systems and borrow the solutions.
In addition to all of that- assuming there was a foolproof way to completely restrict certain things while allowing other things to get through, I doubt those who would have the ability to implement it would do so; I would think anyone that knowledgeable would have a vested interest in the information remaining free.
I think that's a hell of an assumption. I know lots of very technically capable, bright, creative people, who are borderline amoral (at least when it comes to accepting assignments, not necessarily in their personal or private lives, or how they conduct themselves) and wouldn't have any problem working for virtually anyone who's willing to sign their paycheck.
In fact, I think the majority of really, really bright people that I know are like that, to a certain extent. They might have some personal hangups, but if you presented the (socially) "ugly" task to them as a technical challenge, and it really was a challenge, I know people who'd do it just because it was interesting. To a certain class of person, and I don't necessarily exempt myself here, doing something interesting is more rewarding than doing something good. Not everyone has the patience to be Mother Teresa; a lot of us would much rather be Edward Teller.
To continue that historical example: lots of physicists and engineers -- many very good ones, some of the best -- worked in government labs on nuclear weapons programs; basically building bigger and better bombs. It's pretty tough to come up with a rationalization for why that's a Good Thing, but I can tell you from experience that most people who do work like that don't really even perform the rationalization. (The politicians do that, but I don't think the actual engineers really care that much.) They just focus on the work, because the work is interesting, and allows them a comfortable life; that's more than a lot of people get right there.
If you pay people right, and put them in the right atmosphere (basically closed environment with a lot of other technical people), and present the problem as a purely abstract intellectual challenge, very bright people will do all sorts of stuff that might, taken from a broader perspective, not seem like a social good.
At least in France, many of the problems were solved by local loop unbundling. I imagine the same would work here.
We had local loop unbundling here in the U.S., but then the FCC took it away. Now if you want DSL, it's back to the local phone company -- except for the places where they still have outstanding contracts with independent ISPs (like Speakeasy, etc.), there's no choice.
The FCC's rationale for reneging on the LLU decision was that consumers now had "choice" without it -- between the cable company, and the phone company. The nature of the decision had something to do with classing DSL as a 'data service' as opposed to a 'communications service' or something similarly pedantic, but the upshot was that it didn't require wholesale line leases to competitors, or let them charge more for it, or something.
I can't find a source on it right now, but I distinctly remember reading about it (maybe about a year ago, maybe a bit more).
(Reason I wasn't finding anything is that "LLU" or "Local Loop Unbundling" only seems to be used in the press in the U.K. and Europe; in the 'States they seem to call it 'Line Sharing,' probably to maintain their mandatory 6th-grade reading level.)
Well, the way the states keep pushing the primaries up, give it a few years and you'll be able to vote in the general election while simultaneously voting in the primary for the next one.
I agree with you that this is a problem, however, I don't think that making someone pull out a drivers license is really the solution.
Drivers licenses aren't that hard to fake, particularly when you only need to get it past a store clerk who isn't really trained to inspect them and probably doesn't care that much anyway. (When's the last time you've ever had your signature questioned? There's a page around where a guy signed CC slips with increasingly ridiculous things, and never got stopped.) Add in a lot of financial incentive for crooks to make up fake DLs, and they'll be turning them out by the bushel-basket. All you'd be doing is creating an arms race between thousands of people with a lot of time on their hands (the forgers), and the government, which is big, slow, and inefficient. Who do you think is going to win? (Ask the AACS -- it's basically the same problem, just in a different medium.)
The solution is to force the credit card companies to accept responsibility for bad charges, and keep them from forcing it down on the merchants, so that they have some interest in promoting well-designed, secure systems. A system more like that used in many European countries -- where you swipe your card and then enter a PIN -- would be a big step forward. No, it's not perfect; someone could still hold you up at gun/knifepoint and demand your cards and your PINs, but it does stop a lot of passive theft and snooping of the card number. Smartcards (where the card holds the CC number and only releases it in encrypted form), preferably with a built-in PIN-pad or biometric reader (so that the merchant terminal couldn't snoop on you) would be another big step. But you can't -- just absolutely can't -- have a system that lets you just swipe a piece of plastic (or not even that, with the RFID ones) and walk away, without any verification at all, and also have security against fraud and theft. The public doesn't want to hear that.
Many people far smarter than I have thought about how to make financial transactions secure, and in some cases do it without even breaching anonymity! It's all quite possible, but the banks and CC processors have absolutely no interest in it right now, and people by and large are pretty apathetic. But if we wanted to bring some security to the credit card system, the tools are out there -- just adding a drivers-license swipe to an already broken current system would just be polishing a turd, and giving people a false sense of security (not to mention risking other personal information that they rightly may wish to keep private from the merchant).
I totally hear where you're coming from -- someone in my family lost a few hundred bucks (a non-trivial amount to them, a college student) last year due to fraud, and they're still working on getting it all back. But frankly I think it's better to do nothing, than to take ineffective half-measures. When the public is ready for real security in financial transactions, lots of smart people will be there to show them the way. The public's not there yet.
I'm not entirely sure, but I guess the idea is that it inspects cables that are installed in tunnels or other large conduits, underground.
Not sure how useful that is, or who it's most useful to, because in my area all the underground utilities are laid right in the dirt, cut-and-cover fashion, with a backhoe (or, one assumes, the really early parts with steam shovels or picks and spades). The only places I personally know of that have big underground vaults and tunnels are universities that have centralized steam heating; there you get a lot of insulation value (and thus cost savings) by putting the steam lines in a vault with an airspace around them. (There are technologies now for putting steam lines directly into the ground, using lots of modern insulation, but I think that's all post-1960s plastics stuff -- anything built before that probably has steam lines insulated with air underground.) Once you have those tunnels, they tend to get re-used for other utilities besides heating, so I could see where maybe you'd want to use a robot.
I guess this is designed mostly for use in planned communities (universities) that were planned out with lots of big underground infrastructure and tunnelwork, or in urban areas where there's a lot down there -- but for the majority of underground stuff in the U.S. outside of major urban centers I'm not sure it would work. There I think you'd want some sort of a "pig" (device/sensor package that goes inside a pipe and is pushed along by pressure behind it, common on oil pipelines), or external imaging (ground-penetrating radar, maybe).
If someone says "papers, please," I expect them to have a badge, a gun, and probable cause.
Sadly we've gotten away from that in several areas, but on my more optimistic days I still think there's some small chance of fixing it without another Revolution. Guess we'll see.
I was just thinking about maintenance robots yesterday. It was during a nice walk along the creek in our town. I was admiring the quaint little stream of water and the stones over which it flowed and the grass through which it wound, and then the rusty shopping cart.
The world will be a more beautiful place when the autonomous robots start to finally appear.
Why? Then you'll just be tripping over discarded robot bits -- battery packs, broken manipulators, spent fuel-cell refills -- instead of beer cans and shopping carts.
What makes you think that people will program robots to be any less slovenly then they themselves are?
Doesn't seem like a particularly worthwhile feature, particularly when it comes at the cost of going from a fairly reasonable, compact, implementable specification, to a behemoth like OOXML's.
People seem to have this idea that everyone is going to go and convert their existing documents forward into ODF/OOXML. I really don't think this is going to happen, perhaps outside where it's mandated by the government. It's never happened in the past, and I've seen companies and organizations migrate from WordPerfect to Word, and any number of other internal formats. Those old documents aren't going to get converted; they're going to sit around in whatever format they're in.
But that's actually OK -- the problem with the Word format, once it's been reduced to a non-moving target, is tractable. There are a number of OSS packages that will open DOC files. The problem is just stopping the Microsoft-driven treadmill of additional features and modifications to the format that keep them in charge. As long as new documents are being created in ODF, the fact that old documents are still in DOC is fine; owning a "dead language" doesn't give Microsoft any advantage; they can't leverage that to break anything in the future.
I've yet to see any compelling reasons to use OOXML, and there are a lot of compelling reasons in favor of ODF (open format, relatively simple spec, many existing implementations with open codebases, etc.) and none in favor of OOXML.
The only things I've ever seen in OOXML that don't exist in ODF are the 'Microsoft braindeath compatibility features'; the tags that say "Do spacing like Word 95!" and can only ever be implemented by Microsoft, because they're the only ones who really understand WTF "spacing like Word 95" means.
Actually, what I thought was crazy is that Apple customers aren't the only ones using the Core processors, why single them out? Is Apple even the largest customer of Intel 32-bit processors?
Apparently because on Slashdot, making some sort of backhanded Apple comment at the end of every story guarantees a lot of comments.
I thought it was a total non sequitur, too. Apple users will be upset? How about all the people who can't reboot into OS X and go on their merry way? I think they're going to be a bit more pissed.
Okay, so you can't get them for the punitive damages associated with patent infringement, but you can sue them for the value of the "unauthorized use" that they committed.
That's basically an extension of what I said above; they can take the patent (like any other piece of property) by eminent domain, but they have to compensate you for it. What 28 USC 1498 is doing, is saying that if/when they do this, you can't use the normal willful-infringement statues to hammer them in the same way that you could a private individual.
So I was a little incorrect to say that you could go after them for "infringement," but I still maintain that you're incorrect to say that they can do it uncompensated -- by law they have to compensate you, probably based on whatever rates the patent is generally licensed out at, or whatever the lost business is worth to you. If would be up to you to argue in court what's "just," but I'm sure there's a lot of caselaw on it, and on defining the value of a patent generally.
Basically the effect of these laws is to guarantee that the government gets -- or can get, anyway -- pretty much the best deal available in the market on a patented invention or product; if a patentee tries to screw the government (which would make sense -- I mean, the government by definition has the deepest pockets of all, mostly because they've got their hands elbow-deep in everyone else's), the government can just take the patent and only have to pay (probably) the prevailing licensing cost, since that would be the obvious "compensation."
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I understand that they'll be able to crack 1024, but still, 3 years to see my e-mails. It's not worth it for them. Now when they got it down to 3 hours I'll be worried, but by then we'll probably be using 4096.
True, but what you need to think about is forward secrecy.
There are lots of things being transmitted today that are still going to be in use three years from now. For example, think of financial information: if you use an encryption standard that's acceptable right now, but can be broken in three years (or, is trivially breakable in three years due to increases in computer power or techniques), then you're in trouble, because some of that information is still going to be sensitive/valuable in three years. The fact that you'll be using 4096 bits then doesn't matter, if someone grabs it now and crunches on it for a while. Same with identification numbers (SSNs, etc); if I grab a batch of numbers today, most of them will probably still be good in ten or fifteen years, and some of them will still be good in 30 or 40. That's how far out you need to be thinking when choosing an encryption standard for that data.
There are some things where only immediate security matters (transmitting big session keys that get thrown away a few hours or minutes later), but many other things -- and I think general file encryption falls into this category -- where it's hard to predict for how long the encrypted information might be sensitive or valuable.
A while (several years) ago, I wrote a post about how I think there are many parallels between firearms in the physical world, and circumventive/disruptive technologies in the informational world.
If you look at what the Second Amendment does, I don't think it's really that far of a leap. The function of the Second Amendment is to give people a powerful tool -- namely, weapons -- which can be used for good or ill, with the unspoken premise and assumption [1] that most people will use them responsibly. (And also that some people will use them irresponsibly, but that this is a fair price to pay, similar to the hypothetical 'guilty man' that you must let go free in order to ensure you're not condemning innocent ones by mistake.)
Similarly, there are many software tools which can be used in a variety of ways, many of them unproductively or outright harmfully. I don't think that the Constitution prohibits the Government from regulating actions, but I think there's ample evidence that there's a difference between making an action illegal, and making the tools which might be used to accomplish that action illegal. When you ban a tool, you're implicitly stating that you think people aren't responsible enough to be trusted with it, when I think it's clear that our country was supposed to operate -- succeed or fail -- on the opposite assumption.
Over the years, I think that this premise has been chipped away at to the point where it's virtually gone from our law or jurisprudence. [2] Perhaps such a culture of personal responsibility wouldn't have worked in the long run; maybe it would have proved impossible to scale. But if that's true, then I think it's ultimately a pretty damning indictment of democracy in general. If we're not ready to throw away the whole concept, I think you have to accept the number of people who will misuse tools when they are made freely available (despite whatever punishments you set out for the misuse; i.e. they are acting irrationally) as simply the cost of living in a free society. Personally, I think it's a small price to pay, given the alternative.
[1] I think you can argue quite readily that this assumption is pervasive in most, if not all, democratic systems: if you don't think that the majority of people are inherently good and responsible, then democracy in general just wouldn't seem like a very good idea.
[2] In addition to laws concerning weapons, which are the obvious example, you also have some of the broader "burglar's tools" laws that cover simple possession, or their extension to cans of paint, etc.; more recently you have the series of laws and regulations that led up to the DMCA, which began with satellite TV anti-descrambling laws and pretty much proceeded in a straight path from there to the disgrace we're currently dealing with.
It's sad really, OS X is a good operating system and most of its problems stem from being owned by Apple, insisting things be exactly a certain way, it is ruining their chances for a lot of opportunities.
... but why mess with something that works?
Actually, and I say this as a Mac user, OS X / Darwin is an unspectacular (really -- there were some really painful DB and Apache performance benchmarks vs Linux that came out a while ago) operating system, the only saving grace of which is that it's owned by Apple, which can keep it basically under control. If it wasn't for that, it would probably end up like Plan9, or any number of other interesting OSes that very few people actually use.
The reason I've always bought Macs, and will continue to buy them (although I do keep a Linux workstation around at home now too) is because they're a closed platform. You want a wireless card? There's no screwing around -- you go to the Apple store, you buy a wireless card. It costs a lot of money, but it's worth every goddamn penny, because you know it's going to work without any screwing around. There's only one, the drivers are all built-in, it's well documented (from a user's perspective) and usually well QAed. Linux can't say that, and Windows certainly can't either; it's a direct consequence of the Mac being a closed platform. (You do get it on other high-end closed platforms; e.g. some mid-range and higher IBM gear -- you want something, you call your IBM rep with your checkbook in hand, they send someone to plug it in, end of story.)
I'm as much of an open-source and open-standards guy as anyone -- I wouldn't want Apple dominating the computer field, any more than I enjoy Microsoft dominating it (not at all). But to say that Apple's strength isn't derived at least in large part from the fact that they control everything, from the hardware up to the userland apps, is naive. (And they do a good job at it, too -- but they wouldn't have the opportunity to excel if they didn't have that platform to work with.) Perhaps Apple could open everything up and still succeed by selling a guaranteed-to-work "reference platform"
Are there any "European Linux" distros that don't kowtow to the U.S. DMCA rule, and include libdvdcss by default?
... I mean, why not have "Crippled for U.S." and "Un-Crippled" mirrors, and just ship the same distro with a different /etc/apt/sources.list file depending on whether it's the "US ISO" or the "International ISO"? (And, duh, everyone except for corporate users in the U.S. would probably just download the European version, but the point would be that in order to get the 'good stuff,' you'd have to shamefully pretend to live in a country that doesn't suck so bad at IP laws.)
It seems like all the major distros basically play by the U.S. rules, but with the seeming increasing popularity of Linux in Europe, I'd think that the time would be right for somebody to just stop following idiotic U.S. regulations and make a distro that's not hampered by anti-circumvention
It would be sorta like the 40-bit encryption restrictions in the early 90s, only in reverse. We need to make it screamingly obvious to politicians in the U.S., that America is losing on something that the rest of the world is doing without us, because of our stupid rules.
I don't normally encourage obnoxious European holier-than-thou-ism, but this is one case where it could be put to useful effect.
I think that you basically mentioned the only real place where there's a market for PPC: on servers. Although I've always been a big fan of the Power architecture (I have a dual-G5 spaceheater sitting under my desk that I'm writing this on, right now), I don't think that offering G5 PowerMacs along side Intel PowerMacs would really do anything besides confuse customers and potentially make the platform less appealing for developers who don't realize how easy Universal code is to produce. So I think that's a non-starter.
However, keeping OS X Server (which under the hood really isn't that different from regular old OS X, but it's marketed as a totally different product) Universal, and producing PPC XServes in addition to Intel boxes, might not be a bad idea. PPC XServes have always had a fair bit of popularity in the HPC and scientific-computing segments over x86, and for servers, a lot of the software in use is OSS anyway and is architecture-agnostic by design. So they wouldn't really be confusing any developers there -- most of the software that runs on OS X Server is either supplied by Apple, or is OSS, or (in the case of custom HPC code) may have been written/optimized specifically for Power/Altivec in the past already, so they'd be saving their customers work by offering a PPC product.
I think there could be a lot to gain by keeping a PPC model around. They might not even have to do too much hardware design; if they didn't burn too many bridges with IBM on the way out, they could probably use one of IBM's Power-based blade-server boards in a 1U case...particularly with the way Cell hasn't been selling, IBM would probably be happy for the microprocessor sales.
True. However, it's easy to find out if a user has completely disabled JavaScript -- browsers like Firefox let you selectively disable various "features" of JS, so you can keep doing scripts from annoying things (resizing windows, eliminating the address / tool bars, right-click context menus, etc.) without disabling script behavior. This makes sure that your browser looks like one that's using JS, so it won't fail any "JavaScript is required to view this page!" asshattery, but you'll still be able to retain control of your browser.
and they used to offer Internet service over both connections, but recently they've dropped support for Cable modems and now only do DSL
If that means you're stuck with ghetto PPPoE-based DSL, then you have my deepest sympathies. That really sucks.
Actually I did look it up, but there was no entry (Random-House). As my initial guess for the choosen usage
I hate to be the one to have to say this, but maybe you'd better get a better dictionary.
The default one in Firefox (dictionary.reference.com) isn't too bad; you can get it by typing "dict {word}" into the URL field. Although honestly, Google seems to just get better and better as a spell-checker; actually it'd be pretty slick someday if spelling packages could failover to Google for suggestions, on detecting a word not in their dictionary -- that would let them stay more or less permanently up-to-date, even on neologisms. (I bet Google would consider such automated queries abusive, though.)
Also, you may be able to collect multiple bounties from different organizations for the same hole.
... but I bet breaking an NDA with the Russian mob could adversely affect your ability to work in the computer-security field in the future.
True
ugly pubescent teens (or maybe /.ers?)
./ers didn't get to make out when they were pubescent teens.
those are mutually exclusive?
Most
... where the hell has all the common sense gone in the copyright debate? I also assumed that we had a certain level of civility on Slashdot, and that calling your fellow Slashdotters "fuckpuppets" was enough to land you a -1 flamebait mod.
Er, I think he was referring to the MPAA as the "utter fuckpuppets," not to anyone on Slashdot.
This problem has been solved elsewhere. I used to spend a lot of time working in video production and in the theater; in 90% of theaters and studios, they use a headset intercom system made by ClearCom. It's a pretty simple "party line" (or sometimes 2 channel) system, where everybody has a headset and a belt pack, with a PTT switch. The PTT can also be locked on, if you need hands-free operation.
However, the designers realized that letting people lock on their mics could get pretty annoying in a hurry, for exactly the reasons you mentioned -- everybody else on the circuit doesn't need to hear you breathing, swallowing, talking to people not on the 'com, etc.
So they have a feature where the person at the master console can hit a button, and 'unlock' everyone's mics that are locked on. The way this is done is actually a pretty neat use of analog electronics, but it's not really relevant. The point is that the PTT-lock is a "soft lock" (the button doesn't lock down mechanically or anything), so it can be remotely unset. So that way if the person at the master console needs to break in, or just gets tired of hearing you breathe into your mic, they can just hit the button and shut you up (at least long enough to reach down and hit the button again).
Seems like this would be a good feature for video games that feature a team 'com, because essentially they're doing the same things as ClearComs in a production studio. You'd have a team leader, and they'd have the capability of unhooking people's stuck mics if they started yelling at their mom.
The only hardware change is that you have to have the PTT switch as a separate control line, rather than as part of the audio feed. (You have to have separate "headphone out," "mic in," and "PTT" lines, like most 2-way radios, rather than just "headphone" and "mic," with the PTT switch installed in the mic line.) This allows the mic keying to be done in the console, rather than in the headset -- which is really where it should be, even on a full-duplex connection. Also, it would let you actually use the PTT switch as more than just a switch for your own mic; you could set it up so that a quick double-tap of the PTT by the person in charge would unset other people's mics, and/or you could put the PTT switch any place you wanted, not just on your headset. (You could use it via a footswitch, or on your controller, or any other place you wanted.)
Anyway, 'teamspeak' and other systems are relatively new in the video game world, but the problems you're describing aren't new or very unique; they're all solved issues in other mediums, and hopefully someone in the video-game world will eventually take a look at some of those other systems and borrow the solutions.
In addition to all of that- assuming there was a foolproof way to completely restrict certain things while allowing other things to get through, I doubt those who would have the ability to implement it would do so; I would think anyone that knowledgeable would have a vested interest in the information remaining free.
I think that's a hell of an assumption. I know lots of very technically capable, bright, creative people, who are borderline amoral (at least when it comes to accepting assignments, not necessarily in their personal or private lives, or how they conduct themselves) and wouldn't have any problem working for virtually anyone who's willing to sign their paycheck.
In fact, I think the majority of really, really bright people that I know are like that, to a certain extent. They might have some personal hangups, but if you presented the (socially) "ugly" task to them as a technical challenge, and it really was a challenge, I know people who'd do it just because it was interesting. To a certain class of person, and I don't necessarily exempt myself here, doing something interesting is more rewarding than doing something good. Not everyone has the patience to be Mother Teresa; a lot of us would much rather be Edward Teller.
To continue that historical example: lots of physicists and engineers -- many very good ones, some of the best -- worked in government labs on nuclear weapons programs; basically building bigger and better bombs. It's pretty tough to come up with a rationalization for why that's a Good Thing, but I can tell you from experience that most people who do work like that don't really even perform the rationalization. (The politicians do that, but I don't think the actual engineers really care that much.) They just focus on the work, because the work is interesting, and allows them a comfortable life; that's more than a lot of people get right there.
If you pay people right, and put them in the right atmosphere (basically closed environment with a lot of other technical people), and present the problem as a purely abstract intellectual challenge, very bright people will do all sorts of stuff that might, taken from a broader perspective, not seem like a social good.
At least in France, many of the problems were solved by local loop unbundling. I imagine the same would work here.
7 .html
We had local loop unbundling here in the U.S., but then the FCC took it away. Now if you want DSL, it's back to the local phone company -- except for the places where they still have outstanding contracts with independent ISPs (like Speakeasy, etc.), there's no choice.
The FCC's rationale for reneging on the LLU decision was that consumers now had "choice" without it -- between the cable company, and the phone company. The nature of the decision had something to do with classing DSL as a 'data service' as opposed to a 'communications service' or something similarly pedantic, but the upshot was that it didn't require wholesale line leases to competitors, or let them charge more for it, or something.
I can't find a source on it right now, but I distinctly remember reading about it (maybe about a year ago, maybe a bit more).
Finally found some reference to it:
FCC Could Rule on DSL Line Sharing
FCC Halts DSL-Sharing by Telcos
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20040303-348
(Reason I wasn't finding anything is that "LLU" or "Local Loop Unbundling" only seems to be used in the press in the U.K. and Europe; in the 'States they seem to call it 'Line Sharing,' probably to maintain their mandatory 6th-grade reading level.)
Well, the way the states keep pushing the primaries up, give it a few years and you'll be able to vote in the general election while simultaneously voting in the primary for the next one.
Save a lot of taxpayer money that way, actually.
I agree with you that this is a problem, however, I don't think that making someone pull out a drivers license is really the solution.
Drivers licenses aren't that hard to fake, particularly when you only need to get it past a store clerk who isn't really trained to inspect them and probably doesn't care that much anyway. (When's the last time you've ever had your signature questioned? There's a page around where a guy signed CC slips with increasingly ridiculous things, and never got stopped.) Add in a lot of financial incentive for crooks to make up fake DLs, and they'll be turning them out by the bushel-basket. All you'd be doing is creating an arms race between thousands of people with a lot of time on their hands (the forgers), and the government, which is big, slow, and inefficient. Who do you think is going to win? (Ask the AACS -- it's basically the same problem, just in a different medium.)
The solution is to force the credit card companies to accept responsibility for bad charges, and keep them from forcing it down on the merchants, so that they have some interest in promoting well-designed, secure systems. A system more like that used in many European countries -- where you swipe your card and then enter a PIN -- would be a big step forward. No, it's not perfect; someone could still hold you up at gun/knifepoint and demand your cards and your PINs, but it does stop a lot of passive theft and snooping of the card number. Smartcards (where the card holds the CC number and only releases it in encrypted form), preferably with a built-in PIN-pad or biometric reader (so that the merchant terminal couldn't snoop on you) would be another big step. But you can't -- just absolutely can't -- have a system that lets you just swipe a piece of plastic (or not even that, with the RFID ones) and walk away, without any verification at all, and also have security against fraud and theft. The public doesn't want to hear that.
Many people far smarter than I have thought about how to make financial transactions secure, and in some cases do it without even breaching anonymity! It's all quite possible, but the banks and CC processors have absolutely no interest in it right now, and people by and large are pretty apathetic. But if we wanted to bring some security to the credit card system, the tools are out there -- just adding a drivers-license swipe to an already broken current system would just be polishing a turd, and giving people a false sense of security (not to mention risking other personal information that they rightly may wish to keep private from the merchant).
I totally hear where you're coming from -- someone in my family lost a few hundred bucks (a non-trivial amount to them, a college student) last year due to fraud, and they're still working on getting it all back. But frankly I think it's better to do nothing, than to take ineffective half-measures. When the public is ready for real security in financial transactions, lots of smart people will be there to show them the way. The public's not there yet.
I'm not entirely sure, but I guess the idea is that it inspects cables that are installed in tunnels or other large conduits, underground.
Not sure how useful that is, or who it's most useful to, because in my area all the underground utilities are laid right in the dirt, cut-and-cover fashion, with a backhoe (or, one assumes, the really early parts with steam shovels or picks and spades). The only places I personally know of that have big underground vaults and tunnels are universities that have centralized steam heating; there you get a lot of insulation value (and thus cost savings) by putting the steam lines in a vault with an airspace around them. (There are technologies now for putting steam lines directly into the ground, using lots of modern insulation, but I think that's all post-1960s plastics stuff -- anything built before that probably has steam lines insulated with air underground.) Once you have those tunnels, they tend to get re-used for other utilities besides heating, so I could see where maybe you'd want to use a robot.
I guess this is designed mostly for use in planned communities (universities) that were planned out with lots of big underground infrastructure and tunnelwork, or in urban areas where there's a lot down there -- but for the majority of underground stuff in the U.S. outside of major urban centers I'm not sure it would work. There I think you'd want some sort of a "pig" (device/sensor package that goes inside a pipe and is pushed along by pressure behind it, common on oil pipelines), or external imaging (ground-penetrating radar, maybe).
Those robots would not last long.
And in America we find this creepy.
If someone says "papers, please," I expect them to have a badge, a gun, and probable cause.
Sadly we've gotten away from that in several areas, but on my more optimistic days I still think there's some small chance of fixing it without another Revolution. Guess we'll see.
What I'm wondering is why go after the intermediate?
Deep pockets.
I was just thinking about maintenance robots yesterday. It was during a nice walk along the creek in our town. I was admiring the quaint little stream of water and the stones over which it flowed and the grass through which it wound, and then the rusty shopping cart.
The world will be a more beautiful place when the autonomous robots start to finally appear.
Why? Then you'll just be tripping over discarded robot bits -- battery packs, broken manipulators, spent fuel-cell refills -- instead of beer cans and shopping carts.
What makes you think that people will program robots to be any less slovenly then they themselves are?
Doesn't seem like a particularly worthwhile feature, particularly when it comes at the cost of going from a fairly reasonable, compact, implementable specification, to a behemoth like OOXML's.
People seem to have this idea that everyone is going to go and convert their existing documents forward into ODF/OOXML. I really don't think this is going to happen, perhaps outside where it's mandated by the government. It's never happened in the past, and I've seen companies and organizations migrate from WordPerfect to Word, and any number of other internal formats. Those old documents aren't going to get converted; they're going to sit around in whatever format they're in.
But that's actually OK -- the problem with the Word format, once it's been reduced to a non-moving target, is tractable. There are a number of OSS packages that will open DOC files. The problem is just stopping the Microsoft-driven treadmill of additional features and modifications to the format that keep them in charge. As long as new documents are being created in ODF, the fact that old documents are still in DOC is fine; owning a "dead language" doesn't give Microsoft any advantage; they can't leverage that to break anything in the future.
What precisely does OOXML do, that ODF won't?
I'm genuinely curious.
I've yet to see any compelling reasons to use OOXML, and there are a lot of compelling reasons in favor of ODF (open format, relatively simple spec, many existing implementations with open codebases, etc.) and none in favor of OOXML.
The only things I've ever seen in OOXML that don't exist in ODF are the 'Microsoft braindeath compatibility features'; the tags that say "Do spacing like Word 95!" and can only ever be implemented by Microsoft, because they're the only ones who really understand WTF "spacing like Word 95" means.
Actually, what I thought was crazy is that Apple customers aren't the only ones using the Core processors, why single them out? Is Apple even the largest customer of Intel 32-bit processors?
Apparently because on Slashdot, making some sort of backhanded Apple comment at the end of every story guarantees a lot of comments.
I thought it was a total non sequitur, too. Apple users will be upset? How about all the people who can't reboot into OS X and go on their merry way? I think they're going to be a bit more pissed.
Okay, so you can't get them for the punitive damages associated with patent infringement, but you can sue them for the value of the "unauthorized use" that they committed.
That's basically an extension of what I said above; they can take the patent (like any other piece of property) by eminent domain, but they have to compensate you for it. What 28 USC 1498 is doing, is saying that if/when they do this, you can't use the normal willful-infringement statues to hammer them in the same way that you could a private individual.
So I was a little incorrect to say that you could go after them for "infringement," but I still maintain that you're incorrect to say that they can do it uncompensated -- by law they have to compensate you, probably based on whatever rates the patent is generally licensed out at, or whatever the lost business is worth to you. If would be up to you to argue in court what's "just," but I'm sure there's a lot of caselaw on it, and on defining the value of a patent generally.
Basically the effect of these laws is to guarantee that the government gets -- or can get, anyway -- pretty much the best deal available in the market on a patented invention or product; if a patentee tries to screw the government (which would make sense -- I mean, the government by definition has the deepest pockets of all, mostly because they've got their hands elbow-deep in everyone else's), the government can just take the patent and only have to pay (probably) the prevailing licensing cost, since that would be the obvious "compensation."