Do tell. Please, how exactly does my having more than one sexual relationship hurt anyone?
Well, clearly, it hurts him, because you're having a lot more fun than he is. By controlling you, he maximizes his own happiness. Quite simple, really.
A theocracy doesn't sound bad to me as long as the government is just following a good set of beliefs rather than creating new ones.
And that, right there, is what I find most terrifying. People think that an arational theocracy is OK, if the beliefs that it's imposing on others is "good" in their estimation -- meaning that it's their set of beliefs. Of course, What's "good" is highly subjective. There are a lot of people in the world who think that Sharia law is just fine and dandy, and we'd all be a lot better if we buried cheating women up to their heads in sand and stoned them to death. Once you've accepted the premise that arationality is acceptable in government, it's just a matter of degree how far you decide to go in impressing your superstitions on everyone else. You may draw the line at just telling people who they can have sex with, while someone else may go further and tell them what clothes they can wear -- there's no difference in kind there, just of degrees.
Either you reject theocracies on premise, or you have to accept nearly all of them, since there is no rational basis for presuming that any one set of superstitions is superior to any other.
Why does the USA need so many spies in Canada, that they have to hire contractors to fill the need?
Well, they're the same spies, but a few years ago they all got fired when their jobs got outsourced to Bangalore. But then, after some highly amusing incidents, they decided that espionage-via-unsolicited-phonecalls didn't work so well, and they hired back all their old spies as independent contractors.
If inheritable political power is such a bad thing, why is inheritable financial power any better?
Because it springs from the conscious desire of a free person, to give their possessions onto another person. It is simply an extension of simple property rights. If I own something, I should be able to dispose of it however I wish; if I have a computer, and I decide to give it to someone else, that's my right, since it's my property. I could decide to give it to my offspring, give it to my spouse, or give it to some bum on the street, it doesn't really matter.
There is a fundamental human desire to wish for the betterment of one's offspring; thus, many people choose to save substantial sums and give them to their children. They do this consciously, and at the expense of other things that they could have done with the assets (e.g. save for the children as opposed to blowing it on an RV). And as you pointed out indirectly, it doesn't really eliminate "privilege," since people who are wealthy and/or successful have many non-monetary means of helping their children maintain their advantage. In fact, the most highly privileged have arguably far more ways of doing that, via personal connections and the strength of their name alone, than someone from 'new money' who has only earned their fortune recently.
Inheritance taxes aren't some anti-aristocratic tool, but a basic insult to the concept of economic and personal freedom in its most basic senses. What it prevents isn't the perpetuation of privilege; instead it simply keeps people from the bourgeois class from ascending to power too quickly. By punishing money, it benefits those at the very highest echelons who can afford to perpetuate their power in other ways, while preventing competition from moving up from the bourgeois class.
Yeah, not sure what kind of clubs you go to, but (well, prior to the ban, anyway), it was easily worth $12 to not deal with the smell of the 9:30 Club (one of the more famous small venues near DC).
I'll have to try going again sometime but I basically stopped going to see live music because every time I'd go, I'd leave feeling like I had just worked a shift in a 19th-century coal mine. Yech.
Well, given the scope to which "Interstate Commerce" has been expanded, to include even transactions or activities which occur solely within the bounds of one state, you'd think that maybe the FTC could step in and stop this.
(Not that I'm saying that the expansion of Interstate Commerce is a good thing, but if they can stop Californians from getting marijuana despite state laws making it legal, you'd think they could enforce FTC restrictions over the will of a bunch of asshat legislators in Florida.)
any use of a LOC logotype or emblem however would not be protected, as they can qualify as trademarks.
Possibly, although I think the Lanham Act would still let you get away with it in the context of comparative advertising; even if you can't, it's not germane to this conflict anyway -- Cato wasn't using the LoC logo or emblem, they were just using the names in otherwise-generic text.
I think this guy at the LoC is in over his head; he should have called Legal before he hauled off and started sending out nasty emails. The Cato people love to pursue stuff like this, since it just fits into their image of the USG as a bunch of corrupt, wasteful, generally inept bureaucrats.
I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up costing that asshole his job, or at least his promotability.
All the more reason why anonymity is a danger- it's dangerous to do business with people you don't know and can't trust. In fact, it's stupid to do so. If you can't hit a man in the nose when he cheats you, how do you know he's not going to cheat you? What you're really arguing for is the right to commit fraud against your neighbors.
What are you going on about?
Anonymity in business and in financial transactions is a very different scenario and discussion from anonymity generally, in civic, political, or personal life. Setting aside the fact that it's quite possible to do business anonymously or pseudonymously (and people do it, all the time), your choice to be anonymous would simply be a factor in another person's choice of whether or not to do business with you.
If you'd rather do business with "Frank T. Doe, SSN 123-45-6789, of 123 Oak Street, Springfield, MA, USA" instead of "supercoolguy123", that's fine; if enough people also choose to do that, then people will choose to be non-anonymous in order to engage in trade. However, I'm not sure that people care nearly as much as you are implying, and in reality people will engage in trade with pseudonymous and/or abstract entities all the time if they have some system for building a reputation or mediating the transaction via a third party.
Why not just issue everyone passports? What benefit would a new card/system have?
Because people might realize how creepy and fascist the government has become, when they need an actual "internal passport" to travel within their own country, like the Soviet Union, China, or North Korea.
But you're right in thinking that there's no difference; it's effectively the same thing. It's just that this way, it sounds nicer.
I like the national ID because it arguable can fold services 1, 2, 4, and 7 into one stupid card and cut the bureaucracy.
Hahahahahaha(snort)hahha... ha... ha.
Okay, I'm done.
Seriously, do you really think that's going to happen? Have you ever worked with the government? What you'll end up with is one gigantic new Federal agency, which contains all the bureaucracy of the agencies it was supposed to replace, plus a lot of administrative overhead, plus the added cost of high-level management... it'll be a total shitshow. That's what the government does. They don't "cut bureaucracy," they are bureaucracy.
And none of this ID crap would change the state drivers' license procedure, so you'd still have all the same crap at the state-level DMVs. No elimination there. And this ID wouldn't replace Passports, so you still have that separately, under the State Department -- that's not going away any time soon.
There's no "reduction" of anything happening here. All it's going to do is create a new layer of bureaucracy on top of what already exists in the form of your state drivers license.
It'll be a few hundred million dollars of taxpayer dollars down the drain, and the end result will be a whole lot of personal data siloed in some giant database run by a brand-new agency in Washington.*
* Probably not actually in Washington; it'll probably get an office somewhere out on the fringes somewhere.
Kings have been doing this for a while.
on
Thailand Sues YouTube
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Xerxes flew into a rage at this, and he commanded that the Hellespont be struck with three hundred strokes of the whip and that a pair of foot-chains be thrown into the sea.... He also commanded the scourgers to speak outlandish and arrogant words: "You hateful water, our master lays his judgment on you thus, for you have unjustly punished him even though he's done you no wrong! Xerxes the king will pass over you, whether you wish it or not! It is fitting that no man offer you sacrifices, for you're a muddy and salty river!" In these ways he commanded that the sea be punished...
except that you don't have the stored chemical energy, you have to get the power for each shot from the ship generators.
Which they already have. Really, really big ones; it takes a crapload of energy to push a ship through the water quickly, too, and in order to do it, the Navy (and its contractors) have gotten good at extracting a lot of energy from either nuclear reactions or petrochemicals in short order.
A current-generation Aegis frigate has two GE LM2500 gas turbines, each producing 33,600 shaft HP, which is about 25MW. So that's 50MW right there, without any exotic technology; even accounting for the conversion to electricity, that's far more than you'd need for a railgun's accumulators.
The reason we don't have railguns on battleships right now (aside from the fact that we don't really have any battleships in service) are that there's no demand. Yeah, it would be cool to fire a tungsten slug at some ridiculous speed over the horizon, but then again you can do the same thing with a missile right now and not have to deal with Congress getting their panties in a bunch over how much money you're spending.
There are a whole lot of defense/military projects that are probably technically feasible, if anyone (anyone with a lot of money and resources, that is) wanted to build one -- but there hasn't been a whole lot driving military innovation since the end of the Cold War. There's just no reason to spend the money without any enemy that's close to developing the same thing.
Now, maybe in ten or fifteen years, the situation might be different, if the Chinese start spending a lot of money on advanced weapons programs. The U.S. military, historically, tends to be reluctant to change what it perceives to be a 'good thing,' right up until they are clearly shown to be behind the times, following which there's a massive rush to update everything. (Cf. naval aviation vs battleships, the Zero vs the Wildcat, long rifles vs submachine guns as personal weapons, or any number of other disputes.)
Ardour: The 2.0 release (just out last week) is AWESOME! Get it!
What's the hardware support like in Ardour for multitrack interfaces? I've always been intrigued with it (sent them some money once, just because I thought the project sounded cool) but IMO, the success or failure of a DAW is driven not only by its functionality and ease of use, but also by its compatibility with hardware. First, there's the I/O itself, but then things like control surfaces and MIDI.
With Garageband or Logic, it's pretty easy to tell if something's going to be compatible -- either it'll work with CoreAudio or it won't, and generally if it will, it'll be advertised as such -- is there a comprehensive HCL around for Ardour somewhere, that I'm just missing?
Why are we here in 2007 with a billion years of word processing behind us and we still can't annotate documents in a word processor?
The PDF editing / commenting / markup workflow in Adobe Acrobat Professional is actually pretty good, if you can afford the price tag. It lets you take PDFs and basically do everything you'd want to do to paper documents with them, including passing them around to reviewers and condensing various reviewers' notes down into one final version for review by the author; even does nice digital signatures and authentication (and it has built-in OCR for converting scans to searchable PDFs)... unfortunately, everyone involved has to have a copy of Acrobat, so it's useless for most workflows where you only review documents occasionally.
I think it's marketed almost solely to corporations who want to work paperlessly/electronically, and can afford to issue everyone a copy at $450 each.
The technology is there, it's just that frankly there isn't enough demand for the "paperless office" to really make it happen. If you're in the same building, it's a whole lot easier to just print the document out and go to town on it with a $0.30, red felt-tip pen, than to use a bunch of software to clumsily approximate the same thing.
Paper is cheap, software, and implementing software, is expensive. The current systems just aren't broken enough for most people to want to fix them.
Because he's living in a place where the opportunities for aerospace engineers are virtually zero. I've been there -- it's beautiful, great place to raise children, wonderful place to live, but tough place to try to work if you're in a high-tech profession. He might be able to get more work down around Portland (IIRC National Semi has a big prototype fab right outside Portland, they might have something for him), but that's not exactly commuting distance.
Now, it might be that he's just made a choice that doing odd jobs in Southwest Harbor, ME is better than doing aerospace engineering in Florida, Texas, or California, but in any case, he's made a choice.
I wonder what the endgame might be out of situations like this.
Right now, my understanding is that to produce and get approval for a drug, you need to release its chemical formula and other information about it.
But I wonder if at some point in the future, if the drug companies get too worried about their profits due to genericization in countries like Thailand and Brazil, that they might try to implement some sort of "drug DRM." Rather than making the composition of the drug open, don't release what's actually in it, and just test it as a 'black box,' show empirically through tests that it's effective and reasonably safe, but dope the actual pills with a lot of random substances that make it difficult to reverse-engineer (or have the actual drug only be something that's produced in the body through subtle combinations of various things in the pill, or keep the methods of producing the various chemicals in the pills a secret). I'm sure there are lots of bizarre ways that the drug companies could think up to protect the compositions.
Now, I'm not saying that any of these schemes would be effective at protecting the composition -- if the market for a generic drug is big enough, the labs in Thailand can probably afford to spend a lot of time with a mass spectrometer/gas chromatograph and unravel it, but that doesn't mean the drug companies wouldn't try, and waste a lot of time and effort in the process.
As we've seen in the battles over digital IP, there are a whole lot of things that can end up as collateral damage in the fights between rightsholders who see the gravy train slowing down, and people who want their products at a lower price than is being offered.
Anyone need a Arcserve / Veritas / Tivoli Storage Administrator ?
On the bright side, there are a lot of people out there who are of the opinion that IBM hardware and software is pretty great (although a bit pricey) but that their consulting stuff is what sucks. So the fact that you have experience with IBM systems isn't a bad resume line at all.
Personally I've always thought that buying PwC was a bad move for IBM, and they should have just consolidated down to their core strengths -- big iron hardware, the AS/400 series, pure research, microchips and processors, and intellectual property.
But still, I'm not sure I believe all this, because Sam Palmisano was a consulting/GS guy, not a hardware-and-systems guy. If anything, I'd expect them to be axing hardware (which is what they're really good at, but I never said I thought they were bright).
At any rate, IBM GS still has a lot of USG contracts, and those can't be outsourced.
Yup. They spent some huge sum of money to an advertising/PR firm, in order to come up with a name for this new, hot (well, they wanted it to be hot), consulting company. That's what they came up with. "Monday." Like, everybody's least-favorite day. The day you wish was always some other day.
And that's how they got called "IBM Global Services," which doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but then again, nobody ever says, "sounds like a case of the IBM Global Services."
(Well, actually they might, but that's a different topic.)
However, just being able to read in the bits now allows one to search those bits for the Media key. Eventually it will be figured out where the media key is stored. at that point any software player that can access the bits can grab the keys. Of course I suppose the media key is encrypted with a player specific key that can be revoked. However if the player specific key for the Xbox is known it's unlikely they would actually dare revoke it.
Sort of. If you know the Volume ID, which you can now sniff from an XBox HD-DVD drive, then you can make a bit-by-bit copy of the rest of the disc. (Actually I don't know whether the drive even prevents you from doing this without a Volume ID.)
But as you started to surmise, although the Title Keys -- they're the real goal here, the MacGuffin in this little play -- are on the disc, they're encrypted at least two times; once with the combination of the [Media Key + Volume ID] which together comprise the Volume Unique Key, but also encrypted with the Player/Processing Key. And this player or processing key is what the AACSLA has the whole revocation scheme for.
Just to clarify, the processing key for the XBox360 has not been compromised. To date, I don't think the processing key for any hardware player has been compromised. (Each hardware player, each individual machine, has its own key...however, software players aren't so unique. Each version of the software shares one key.) The keys that have been compromised have been sniffed from the memory of software HD-DVD players. Although the new versions of HD-DVD software will probably try to encrypt and obfuscate their memory more, this will probably continue to happen until the AACSLA either gives up or abandons the concept of software players entirely (Microsoft would probably try to kill them, because it would destroy the software-based HTPC concept).
So far, the processing key that has been found is one that the AACSLA people will happily revoke. This doesn't do anything for all the movies that have currently been released, though. But in order to decrypt new movies, the Doom9 guys will need to get their paws on a new version of a software player, and do the sniffing thing all over again, in order to get a new processing key.
The threat to the AACSLA is that, over time, the Doom9 and other hackers will find ways of discovering the new processing keys very quickly, to the point where it becomes impractical for them to even issue discs with the new keys anymore. (Just remember, it takes them probably a month or so to issue a new key and get it into production, and even when they do, it doesn't "fix" the old discs, it just means that the hackers need to rinse and repeat with the new key. If the hackers can demonstrate that they can find every new key, then AACS is effectively impotent.)
So what (in a nutshell) is IBM Global Services? What do they do?
It's IBM's consulting division.
In a nutshell, it's all of IBM except the parts with which you're probably familiar from the Good Old Days; it's all the business consulting, management consulting, logistics, etc.
What it's not is the remaining parts of IBM hardware; the AS/400 division, the mainframe division, software division (Lotus) etc.
I think Cringlely is dead wrong on all this -- in the past few years it's been Global Services and software that are really hauling everything else along. I think Hardware would probably survive on its own, as long as they could keep the IBM marque, but the money is in the service crap.
(as hackers have created a hack that CAN'T be revoked)
I spent a while trying to get my head around AACS last night, and the bottom line is that what comes out of the un-revocable hack that you mention isn't the same thing as what's being posted around the internet, and what the AACSLA has the whole revocation scheme for.
Oversimplification ahead, and I may have some of the details wrong or, but this is the gist of it: the content -- the movie itself -- is encrypted with title keys. These title keys are encrypted with a volume unique key (VUK). The VUK is composed of two parts, a media key and a Volume ID.
The Media Key is the thing that you get with the code that's being posted all over the Internet (the Processing Key). Processing Keys can be revoked, but only for new discs -- so the discs that are out in circulation as of the compromise of the Processing Key, are out. They're cracked. However, future discs will use a new Processing Key, and that one that's around on the internet won't work... so the hackers will need to go back and sniff/debug an updated software player to figure out the new Processing Key.
The "un-revocable hack" you mentioned, doesn't have anything to do with the Media Key, it's all about the Volume ID. The purpose of the Volume ID is to prevent bit-for-bit copying. In a lot of ways it's very similar to parts of the CSS system used on DVDs right now; it's a key specific to each batch of pressed discs, written to the disc in a way that's difficult to read off manually (the drive isn't supposed to let the user see it at all), and impossible to write to a blank disc... so if you made a "bit-perfect" copy of a disc, the Volume ID wouldn't be there (because you can't read it and/or because you can't write it to the new disc) and you'd be missing one of the elements required to decrypt.
So: while the Volume ID hack involving the XBox360 drive is a major step forwards (backwards if you're the AACS!), it's not a silver bullet, and it doesn't make future titles trivial to compromise. There's still going to be a cat-and-mouse game in the near future, where the AACS will try to revoke Processing Keys and try to discourage the publication of new ones as discs are released. (It's been pointed out by several people now, that the AACS' over-the-top reaction to publication of the processing key, may indicate that they've realized that their revocation procedures aren't nearly as fast or as flexible as the people who are going to be compromising them.)
I'm not trying to troll, but I've seen transcripts and whatnot of presidential speeches, addresses, and these things broadcast on TV and radio, and I've never noticed or heard of copyright before (unlike sports, movies, TV programs, etc).
Presidential speeches -- ones actually given by the sitting President -- are in the public domain, as a product of a U.S. government official created during the course of their duties.
However, a campaign speech that someone gave while running for election wouldn't necessarily be in the public domain, nor possibly would a campaign speech given by the President (since it's arguable as to whether campaigning is really part of his official duties as a U.S. government employee). Now, in reality, I don't think I've ever heard of anyone blocking the publication of transcripts of campaign speeches -- they're usually pretty easy to get -- but I expect that they're copyrighted either by the candidate's committee (the nonprofit corporation that also holds all their campaign money, and employs the speechwriters).
In addition to that, which would be the copyright on the text of the speech itself, the networks who broadcast the speeches and debates also claim copyright on the video recording (although other networks use clips from each other without formal permission, under Fair Use, all the time: e.g. Jon Stewart frequently shows news clips with the originating network's banner blurred out). It's an open question in my mind whether this is defensible: copyright law in the U.S. doesn't protect "sweat of the brow" or simple movement from one media to another, but it does protect something that is 'fixed' into a medium. The question then is whether, if you record the President giving the State of the Union, are you actually fixing that speech into a medium, and deserving of copyright protection? Or has the President (or his speechwriter) already done the creative act, by writing the speech, and the TV camera is simply mechanically reproducing this. I would like to believe the latter (actually I'd like to have a blanket law that anything recorded, written, spoken, or performed in the U.S. Capitol or any other place where the Legislature is in session is automatically in the public domain, but I'm not getting my hopes up), but I suspect that the courts would probably find for the networks. (There's probably precedent on this somewhere but I'm too lazy to look.)
But you're right to think that actual Presidential speeches are free and clear; if you want to print out the State of the Union and make it into wallpaper, or perform it in front of an audience, or sing it to your dog, nobody's going to stop you.
This happens even if the phone line is disconnected. It does not require anyone from DISH showing up to do updates. I certainly believe that the satellite connection is two-way, though they do seem to prefer a phone connection over satellite up-link.
Erm, no.
The satellite connection (for satellite TV, not internet) is definitely not two-way. If it was, you'd have to have all sorts of warnings all over your satellite dish, telling people not to step in front of it, or stare directly into the feedhorn, etc., because of the EM radiation hazard. Plus, you'd have to have a fairly big amplifier somewhere, and a much better feedline than most people's satellite dishes use. And you'd have to aim the dishes a lot more carefully.
What's happening is that the upstream communication is all done over the phone line, but downstream is done via the satellite. You don't need to have an upstream connection to get software updates -- it's a "push" technology, not "pull" like apt-get. They can beam down a software update whenever they want, and unless you have hacked the receiver to somehow ignore the update, it will download and install it (hopefully checking it against some sort of cryptographic signature or key that's delivered once in a while via telephone).
Back a while ago, there was a big sting operation where the satellite companies, one of them anyway, worked with the Feds and sent out bad firmware (over the satellite downlink, not over the telephone or anything) that bricked all the cracked smartcards that some people were using. It was actually a fairly interesting trick on their part; they crafted a logic bomb and forced people to install it into their smartcards over a period of years (by commanding the STBs to only work with cards that had been updated), byte by byte, until the whole thing was there, waiting, and then they pulled the trigger and created an irrecoverable race condition. Story here.
Anyway, I think the whole thing is bullshit, and I think the laws that protect satellite TV broadcasters were the beginning of a very bad chapter in U.S. jurisprudence, although I doubt I'll live long enough to see it rectified. Any person ought to have the right to set up whatever type of circuitry they want to, and do whatever they want with the signals on the public airwaves that arrive on their property, so long as what they're doing doesn't generate interference that extends off of their property. There was no reason to give the satellite TV providers the protection they got; having satellite TV isn't enough of a public benefit to make it worth trampling on almost 100 years of communications law. If the market really wanted satellite TV, then it would have happened without such protection -- just like regular terrestrial TV and radio happened without draconian laws being specially crafted to make the signals only receivable on special sets. (And yes, I know, satellites are expensive, but I bet that the very first terrestrial TV stations, for their time, were just as expensive and risky as launching a bird is today.) In short, the legislators back in the '80s wanted to rush things, and thought they would jump-start "progress" through legislation. The DMCA and the whole doctrine of "anti-circumvention" are the direct result.
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Do tell. Please, how exactly does my having more than one sexual relationship hurt anyone?
Well, clearly, it hurts him, because you're having a lot more fun than he is. By controlling you, he maximizes his own happiness. Quite simple, really.
A theocracy doesn't sound bad to me as long as the government is just following a good set of beliefs rather than creating new ones.
And that, right there, is what I find most terrifying. People think that an arational theocracy is OK, if the beliefs that it's imposing on others is "good" in their estimation -- meaning that it's their set of beliefs. Of course, What's "good" is highly subjective. There are a lot of people in the world who think that Sharia law is just fine and dandy, and we'd all be a lot better if we buried cheating women up to their heads in sand and stoned them to death. Once you've accepted the premise that arationality is acceptable in government, it's just a matter of degree how far you decide to go in impressing your superstitions on everyone else. You may draw the line at just telling people who they can have sex with, while someone else may go further and tell them what clothes they can wear -- there's no difference in kind there, just of degrees.
Either you reject theocracies on premise, or you have to accept nearly all of them, since there is no rational basis for presuming that any one set of superstitions is superior to any other.
Why does the USA need so many spies in Canada, that they have to hire contractors to fill the need?
Well, they're the same spies, but a few years ago they all got fired when their jobs got outsourced to Bangalore. But then, after some highly amusing incidents, they decided that espionage-via-unsolicited-phonecalls didn't work so well, and they hired back all their old spies as independent contractors.
If inheritable political power is such a bad thing, why is inheritable financial power any better?
Because it springs from the conscious desire of a free person, to give their possessions onto another person. It is simply an extension of simple property rights. If I own something, I should be able to dispose of it however I wish; if I have a computer, and I decide to give it to someone else, that's my right, since it's my property. I could decide to give it to my offspring, give it to my spouse, or give it to some bum on the street, it doesn't really matter.
There is a fundamental human desire to wish for the betterment of one's offspring; thus, many people choose to save substantial sums and give them to their children. They do this consciously, and at the expense of other things that they could have done with the assets (e.g. save for the children as opposed to blowing it on an RV). And as you pointed out indirectly, it doesn't really eliminate "privilege," since people who are wealthy and/or successful have many non-monetary means of helping their children maintain their advantage. In fact, the most highly privileged have arguably far more ways of doing that, via personal connections and the strength of their name alone, than someone from 'new money' who has only earned their fortune recently.
Inheritance taxes aren't some anti-aristocratic tool, but a basic insult to the concept of economic and personal freedom in its most basic senses. What it prevents isn't the perpetuation of privilege; instead it simply keeps people from the bourgeois class from ascending to power too quickly. By punishing money, it benefits those at the very highest echelons who can afford to perpetuate their power in other ways, while preventing competition from moving up from the bourgeois class.
...the smells...
Yeah, not sure what kind of clubs you go to, but (well, prior to the ban, anyway), it was easily worth $12 to not deal with the smell of the 9:30 Club (one of the more famous small venues near DC).
I'll have to try going again sometime but I basically stopped going to see live music because every time I'd go, I'd leave feeling like I had just worked a shift in a 19th-century coal mine. Yech.
Well, to be fair, linking to the Brady Campaign's website is about as balanced as linking to the RIAA's page on piracy.
Well, given the scope to which "Interstate Commerce" has been expanded, to include even transactions or activities which occur solely within the bounds of one state, you'd think that maybe the FTC could step in and stop this.
(Not that I'm saying that the expansion of Interstate Commerce is a good thing, but if they can stop Californians from getting marijuana despite state laws making it legal, you'd think they could enforce FTC restrictions over the will of a bunch of asshat legislators in Florida.)
any use of a LOC logotype or emblem however would not be protected, as they can qualify as trademarks.
Possibly, although I think the Lanham Act would still let you get away with it in the context of comparative advertising; even if you can't, it's not germane to this conflict anyway -- Cato wasn't using the LoC logo or emblem, they were just using the names in otherwise-generic text.
I think this guy at the LoC is in over his head; he should have called Legal before he hauled off and started sending out nasty emails. The Cato people love to pursue stuff like this, since it just fits into their image of the USG as a bunch of corrupt, wasteful, generally inept bureaucrats.
I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up costing that asshole his job, or at least his promotability.
All the more reason why anonymity is a danger- it's dangerous to do business with people you don't know and can't trust. In fact, it's stupid to do so. If you can't hit a man in the nose when he cheats you, how do you know he's not going to cheat you? What you're really arguing for is the right to commit fraud against your neighbors.
What are you going on about?
Anonymity in business and in financial transactions is a very different scenario and discussion from anonymity generally, in civic, political, or personal life. Setting aside the fact that it's quite possible to do business anonymously or pseudonymously (and people do it, all the time), your choice to be anonymous would simply be a factor in another person's choice of whether or not to do business with you.
If you'd rather do business with "Frank T. Doe, SSN 123-45-6789, of 123 Oak Street, Springfield, MA, USA" instead of "supercoolguy123", that's fine; if enough people also choose to do that, then people will choose to be non-anonymous in order to engage in trade. However, I'm not sure that people care nearly as much as you are implying, and in reality people will engage in trade with pseudonymous and/or abstract entities all the time if they have some system for building a reputation or mediating the transaction via a third party.
Why not just issue everyone passports? What benefit would a new card/system have?
Because people might realize how creepy and fascist the government has become, when they need an actual "internal passport" to travel within their own country, like the Soviet Union, China, or North Korea.
But you're right in thinking that there's no difference; it's effectively the same thing. It's just that this way, it sounds nicer.
I like the national ID because it arguable can fold services 1, 2, 4, and 7 into one stupid card and cut the bureaucracy.
... ha. .. ha.
... it'll be a total shitshow. That's what the government does. They don't "cut bureaucracy," they are bureaucracy.
Hahahahahaha(snort)hahha
Okay, I'm done.
Seriously, do you really think that's going to happen? Have you ever worked with the government? What you'll end up with is one gigantic new Federal agency, which contains all the bureaucracy of the agencies it was supposed to replace, plus a lot of administrative overhead, plus the added cost of high-level management
And none of this ID crap would change the state drivers' license procedure, so you'd still have all the same crap at the state-level DMVs. No elimination there. And this ID wouldn't replace Passports, so you still have that separately, under the State Department -- that's not going away any time soon.
There's no "reduction" of anything happening here. All it's going to do is create a new layer of bureaucracy on top of what already exists in the form of your state drivers license.
It'll be a few hundred million dollars of taxpayer dollars down the drain, and the end result will be a whole lot of personal data siloed in some giant database run by a brand-new agency in Washington.*
* Probably not actually in Washington; it'll probably get an office somewhere out on the fringes somewhere.
except that you don't have the stored chemical energy, you have to get the power for each shot from the ship generators.
Which they already have. Really, really big ones; it takes a crapload of energy to push a ship through the water quickly, too, and in order to do it, the Navy (and its contractors) have gotten good at extracting a lot of energy from either nuclear reactions or petrochemicals in short order.
A current-generation Aegis frigate has two GE LM2500 gas turbines, each producing 33,600 shaft HP, which is about 25MW. So that's 50MW right there, without any exotic technology; even accounting for the conversion to electricity, that's far more than you'd need for a railgun's accumulators.
The reason we don't have railguns on battleships right now (aside from the fact that we don't really have any battleships in service) are that there's no demand. Yeah, it would be cool to fire a tungsten slug at some ridiculous speed over the horizon, but then again you can do the same thing with a missile right now and not have to deal with Congress getting their panties in a bunch over how much money you're spending.
There are a whole lot of defense/military projects that are probably technically feasible, if anyone (anyone with a lot of money and resources, that is) wanted to build one -- but there hasn't been a whole lot driving military innovation since the end of the Cold War. There's just no reason to spend the money without any enemy that's close to developing the same thing.
Now, maybe in ten or fifteen years, the situation might be different, if the Chinese start spending a lot of money on advanced weapons programs. The U.S. military, historically, tends to be reluctant to change what it perceives to be a 'good thing,' right up until they are clearly shown to be behind the times, following which there's a massive rush to update everything. (Cf. naval aviation vs battleships, the Zero vs the Wildcat, long rifles vs submachine guns as personal weapons, or any number of other disputes.)
Ardour: The 2.0 release (just out last week) is AWESOME! Get it!
What's the hardware support like in Ardour for multitrack interfaces? I've always been intrigued with it (sent them some money once, just because I thought the project sounded cool) but IMO, the success or failure of a DAW is driven not only by its functionality and ease of use, but also by its compatibility with hardware. First, there's the I/O itself, but then things like control surfaces and MIDI.
With Garageband or Logic, it's pretty easy to tell if something's going to be compatible -- either it'll work with CoreAudio or it won't, and generally if it will, it'll be advertised as such -- is there a comprehensive HCL around for Ardour somewhere, that I'm just missing?
Why are we here in 2007 with a billion years of word processing behind us and we still can't annotate documents in a word processor?
... unfortunately, everyone involved has to have a copy of Acrobat, so it's useless for most workflows where you only review documents occasionally.
The PDF editing / commenting / markup workflow in Adobe Acrobat Professional is actually pretty good, if you can afford the price tag. It lets you take PDFs and basically do everything you'd want to do to paper documents with them, including passing them around to reviewers and condensing various reviewers' notes down into one final version for review by the author; even does nice digital signatures and authentication (and it has built-in OCR for converting scans to searchable PDFs)
I think it's marketed almost solely to corporations who want to work paperlessly/electronically, and can afford to issue everyone a copy at $450 each.
The technology is there, it's just that frankly there isn't enough demand for the "paperless office" to really make it happen. If you're in the same building, it's a whole lot easier to just print the document out and go to town on it with a $0.30, red felt-tip pen, than to use a bunch of software to clumsily approximate the same thing.
Paper is cheap, software, and implementing software, is expensive. The current systems just aren't broken enough for most people to want to fix them.
Why is he not still an aerospace engineer?
Because he's living in a place where the opportunities for aerospace engineers are virtually zero. I've been there -- it's beautiful, great place to raise children, wonderful place to live, but tough place to try to work if you're in a high-tech profession. He might be able to get more work down around Portland (IIRC National Semi has a big prototype fab right outside Portland, they might have something for him), but that's not exactly commuting distance.
Now, it might be that he's just made a choice that doing odd jobs in Southwest Harbor, ME is better than doing aerospace engineering in Florida, Texas, or California, but in any case, he's made a choice.
I wonder what the endgame might be out of situations like this.
Right now, my understanding is that to produce and get approval for a drug, you need to release its chemical formula and other information about it.
But I wonder if at some point in the future, if the drug companies get too worried about their profits due to genericization in countries like Thailand and Brazil, that they might try to implement some sort of "drug DRM." Rather than making the composition of the drug open, don't release what's actually in it, and just test it as a 'black box,' show empirically through tests that it's effective and reasonably safe, but dope the actual pills with a lot of random substances that make it difficult to reverse-engineer (or have the actual drug only be something that's produced in the body through subtle combinations of various things in the pill, or keep the methods of producing the various chemicals in the pills a secret). I'm sure there are lots of bizarre ways that the drug companies could think up to protect the compositions.
Now, I'm not saying that any of these schemes would be effective at protecting the composition -- if the market for a generic drug is big enough, the labs in Thailand can probably afford to spend a lot of time with a mass spectrometer/gas chromatograph and unravel it, but that doesn't mean the drug companies wouldn't try, and waste a lot of time and effort in the process.
As we've seen in the battles over digital IP, there are a whole lot of things that can end up as collateral damage in the fights between rightsholders who see the gravy train slowing down, and people who want their products at a lower price than is being offered.
Anyone need a Arcserve / Veritas / Tivoli Storage Administrator ?
On the bright side, there are a lot of people out there who are of the opinion that IBM hardware and software is pretty great (although a bit pricey) but that their consulting stuff is what sucks. So the fact that you have experience with IBM systems isn't a bad resume line at all.
Personally I've always thought that buying PwC was a bad move for IBM, and they should have just consolidated down to their core strengths -- big iron hardware, the AS/400 series, pure research, microchips and processors, and intellectual property.
But still, I'm not sure I believe all this, because Sam Palmisano was a consulting/GS guy, not a hardware-and-systems guy. If anything, I'd expect them to be axing hardware (which is what they're really good at, but I never said I thought they were bright).
At any rate, IBM GS still has a lot of USG contracts, and those can't be outsourced.
Monday
Yup. They spent some huge sum of money to an advertising/PR firm, in order to come up with a name for this new, hot (well, they wanted it to be hot), consulting company. That's what they came up with. "Monday." Like, everybody's least-favorite day. The day you wish was always some other day.
And that's how they got called "IBM Global Services," which doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but then again, nobody ever says, "sounds like a case of the IBM Global Services."
(Well, actually they might, but that's a different topic.)
However, just being able to read in the bits now allows one to search those bits for the Media key. Eventually it will be figured out where the media key is stored. at that point any software player that can access the bits can grab the keys. Of course I suppose the media key is encrypted with a player specific key that can be revoked. However if the player specific key for the Xbox is known it's unlikely they would actually dare revoke it.
Sort of. If you know the Volume ID, which you can now sniff from an XBox HD-DVD drive, then you can make a bit-by-bit copy of the rest of the disc. (Actually I don't know whether the drive even prevents you from doing this without a Volume ID.)
But as you started to surmise, although the Title Keys -- they're the real goal here, the MacGuffin in this little play -- are on the disc, they're encrypted at least two times; once with the combination of the [Media Key + Volume ID] which together comprise the Volume Unique Key, but also encrypted with the Player/Processing Key. And this player or processing key is what the AACSLA has the whole revocation scheme for.
Just to clarify, the processing key for the XBox360 has not been compromised. To date, I don't think the processing key for any hardware player has been compromised. (Each hardware player, each individual machine, has its own key...however, software players aren't so unique. Each version of the software shares one key.) The keys that have been compromised have been sniffed from the memory of software HD-DVD players. Although the new versions of HD-DVD software will probably try to encrypt and obfuscate their memory more, this will probably continue to happen until the AACSLA either gives up or abandons the concept of software players entirely (Microsoft would probably try to kill them, because it would destroy the software-based HTPC concept).
So far, the processing key that has been found is one that the AACSLA people will happily revoke. This doesn't do anything for all the movies that have currently been released, though. But in order to decrypt new movies, the Doom9 guys will need to get their paws on a new version of a software player, and do the sniffing thing all over again, in order to get a new processing key.
The threat to the AACSLA is that, over time, the Doom9 and other hackers will find ways of discovering the new processing keys very quickly, to the point where it becomes impractical for them to even issue discs with the new keys anymore. (Just remember, it takes them probably a month or so to issue a new key and get it into production, and even when they do, it doesn't "fix" the old discs, it just means that the hackers need to rinse and repeat with the new key. If the hackers can demonstrate that they can find every new key, then AACS is effectively impotent.)
So what (in a nutshell) is IBM Global Services? What do they do?
It's IBM's consulting division.
In a nutshell, it's all of IBM except the parts with which you're probably familiar from the Good Old Days; it's all the business consulting, management consulting, logistics, etc.
What it's not is the remaining parts of IBM hardware; the AS/400 division, the mainframe division, software division (Lotus) etc.
I think Cringlely is dead wrong on all this -- in the past few years it's been Global Services and software that are really hauling everything else along. I think Hardware would probably survive on its own, as long as they could keep the IBM marque, but the money is in the service crap.
(as hackers have created a hack that CAN'T be revoked)
... so the hackers will need to go back and sniff/debug an updated software player to figure out the new Processing Key.
... so if you made a "bit-perfect" copy of a disc, the Volume ID wouldn't be there (because you can't read it and/or because you can't write it to the new disc) and you'd be missing one of the elements required to decrypt.
I spent a while trying to get my head around AACS last night, and the bottom line is that what comes out of the un-revocable hack that you mention isn't the same thing as what's being posted around the internet, and what the AACSLA has the whole revocation scheme for.
Oversimplification ahead, and I may have some of the details wrong or, but this is the gist of it: the content -- the movie itself -- is encrypted with title keys. These title keys are encrypted with a volume unique key (VUK). The VUK is composed of two parts, a media key and a Volume ID.
The Media Key is the thing that you get with the code that's being posted all over the Internet (the Processing Key). Processing Keys can be revoked, but only for new discs -- so the discs that are out in circulation as of the compromise of the Processing Key, are out. They're cracked. However, future discs will use a new Processing Key, and that one that's around on the internet won't work
The "un-revocable hack" you mentioned, doesn't have anything to do with the Media Key, it's all about the Volume ID. The purpose of the Volume ID is to prevent bit-for-bit copying. In a lot of ways it's very similar to parts of the CSS system used on DVDs right now; it's a key specific to each batch of pressed discs, written to the disc in a way that's difficult to read off manually (the drive isn't supposed to let the user see it at all), and impossible to write to a blank disc
So: while the Volume ID hack involving the XBox360 drive is a major step forwards (backwards if you're the AACS!), it's not a silver bullet, and it doesn't make future titles trivial to compromise. There's still going to be a cat-and-mouse game in the near future, where the AACS will try to revoke Processing Keys and try to discourage the publication of new ones as discs are released. (It's been pointed out by several people now, that the AACS' over-the-top reaction to publication of the processing key, may indicate that they've realized that their revocation procedures aren't nearly as fast or as flexible as the people who are going to be compromising them.)
I'm not trying to troll, but I've seen transcripts and whatnot of presidential speeches, addresses, and these things broadcast on TV and radio, and I've never noticed or heard of copyright before (unlike sports, movies, TV programs, etc).
Presidential speeches -- ones actually given by the sitting President -- are in the public domain, as a product of a U.S. government official created during the course of their duties.
However, a campaign speech that someone gave while running for election wouldn't necessarily be in the public domain, nor possibly would a campaign speech given by the President (since it's arguable as to whether campaigning is really part of his official duties as a U.S. government employee). Now, in reality, I don't think I've ever heard of anyone blocking the publication of transcripts of campaign speeches -- they're usually pretty easy to get -- but I expect that they're copyrighted either by the candidate's committee (the nonprofit corporation that also holds all their campaign money, and employs the speechwriters).
In addition to that, which would be the copyright on the text of the speech itself, the networks who broadcast the speeches and debates also claim copyright on the video recording (although other networks use clips from each other without formal permission, under Fair Use, all the time: e.g. Jon Stewart frequently shows news clips with the originating network's banner blurred out). It's an open question in my mind whether this is defensible: copyright law in the U.S. doesn't protect "sweat of the brow" or simple movement from one media to another, but it does protect something that is 'fixed' into a medium. The question then is whether, if you record the President giving the State of the Union, are you actually fixing that speech into a medium, and deserving of copyright protection? Or has the President (or his speechwriter) already done the creative act, by writing the speech, and the TV camera is simply mechanically reproducing this. I would like to believe the latter (actually I'd like to have a blanket law that anything recorded, written, spoken, or performed in the U.S. Capitol or any other place where the Legislature is in session is automatically in the public domain, but I'm not getting my hopes up), but I suspect that the courts would probably find for the networks. (There's probably precedent on this somewhere but I'm too lazy to look.)
But you're right to think that actual Presidential speeches are free and clear; if you want to print out the State of the Union and make it into wallpaper, or perform it in front of an audience, or sing it to your dog, nobody's going to stop you.
This happens even if the phone line is disconnected. It does not require anyone from DISH showing up to do updates. I certainly believe that the satellite connection is two-way, though they do seem to prefer a phone connection over satellite up-link.
Erm, no.
The satellite connection (for satellite TV, not internet) is definitely not two-way. If it was, you'd have to have all sorts of warnings all over your satellite dish, telling people not to step in front of it, or stare directly into the feedhorn, etc., because of the EM radiation hazard. Plus, you'd have to have a fairly big amplifier somewhere, and a much better feedline than most people's satellite dishes use. And you'd have to aim the dishes a lot more carefully.
What's happening is that the upstream communication is all done over the phone line, but downstream is done via the satellite. You don't need to have an upstream connection to get software updates -- it's a "push" technology, not "pull" like apt-get. They can beam down a software update whenever they want, and unless you have hacked the receiver to somehow ignore the update, it will download and install it (hopefully checking it against some sort of cryptographic signature or key that's delivered once in a while via telephone).
Back a while ago, there was a big sting operation where the satellite companies, one of them anyway, worked with the Feds and sent out bad firmware (over the satellite downlink, not over the telephone or anything) that bricked all the cracked smartcards that some people were using. It was actually a fairly interesting trick on their part; they crafted a logic bomb and forced people to install it into their smartcards over a period of years (by commanding the STBs to only work with cards that had been updated), byte by byte, until the whole thing was there, waiting, and then they pulled the trigger and created an irrecoverable race condition. Story here.
Anyway, I think the whole thing is bullshit, and I think the laws that protect satellite TV broadcasters were the beginning of a very bad chapter in U.S. jurisprudence, although I doubt I'll live long enough to see it rectified. Any person ought to have the right to set up whatever type of circuitry they want to, and do whatever they want with the signals on the public airwaves that arrive on their property, so long as what they're doing doesn't generate interference that extends off of their property. There was no reason to give the satellite TV providers the protection they got; having satellite TV isn't enough of a public benefit to make it worth trampling on almost 100 years of communications law. If the market really wanted satellite TV, then it would have happened without such protection -- just like regular terrestrial TV and radio happened without draconian laws being specially crafted to make the signals only receivable on special sets. (And yes, I know, satellites are expensive, but I bet that the very first terrestrial TV stations, for their time, were just as expensive and risky as launching a bird is today.) In short, the legislators back in the '80s wanted to rush things, and thought they would jump-start "progress" through legislation. The DMCA and the whole doctrine of "anti-circumvention" are the direct result.