There is *no* purpose in Slashdotters pondering this little mathematical tidbit. The law has no interest in it. The law in america, where this suit takes place, defines derivative work as:
DERIVATIVE WORK - A work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a 'derivative work'. 17 U.S.C.
That certainly is open to some degree of interpretation, but it seems to me the key here is not that the torrent hash *could* be generated from the copyrighted work, but rather that it *was*. My guess is that a torrent file isn't going to count as a derivative work, but high-minded math riddles have no bearing on the situation.
I think that if it's just a large 2-dimensional barcode, then you could just make a copy of a passport that looks reasonably like you. People use their friend's IDs all the time to pretend to be 21, so there is precedent...
It doesn't say that, hence technology that would enable the government to do that would worry me. It *should* say that, but it doesn't. I think the US needs to pass an amendment guaranteeing privacy, personally.
But you've missed my point. If you're standing, facing towards the line of civil liberties, and you take hundreds of small steps forward, they will add up to you crossing the line, but you can take little steps to the left or right forever and never cross. I don't see digitally encoding a picture onto a passport as in any way consisting of a little step away from civil rights. The form of the content being stored doesn't make any difference. In any case, even if this is a small step in the wrong direction, not taking this step makes no difference. The proper response is to enact legislation guaranteeing rights and freedoms, such that they would outlaw this move if it were in fact a step in the wrong direction...
What sort of worries me about the use of fingerprints and such is that they provide information to the government that has uses outside of matching you to your identification. If they have your fingerprint stored in a computer, then they can just go fingerprint all the soda cans or whatever thrown out after that anti-IMF rally and produce a list of everyone who was there. The trick is to legislate against these things, and maybe if we really wanna be cool we could pass a constitutional amendment protecting privacy (the nebulous interpretation of one existing now is subject to change whenever the supreme court gets bored).
We can use technology to protect our privacy, and we can use technology to eliminate it, so we'll have to keep ourselves safe and free with legislation instead. We outlaw murder, not knives...
This honestly doesn't seem like such a big deal to me. Consider that this changes very little: there's already a picture on your passport, and any country that wants could just photocopy or scan that. This probably won't help prevent terrorism, though it certainly seems to eliminate a less sophisticated avenue of fraud. Far fewer people have the technology to produce a fake passport with a smart chip than without.
Here's another interesting potential positive. When you want a visa to visit a country (something we americans don't need to do for most "westernized" nations) you usually need to send along 2 passport-sized photos, which means the PITA of going to get pictures taken. Now, if the embassy of Brunei has a smartcard reader for the passport, they could just download the picture from your passport instead! Electronic storage of visas and such might even eventually let us do all these things over the net.
There are privacy issues with any form of identification, but they rely less on what the identifier is but more on how it is used. If we want to preserve our rights, we need to fight against regulations forcing us to show or carry ID (a la Gilmore). The form these IDs take is not so important (well, unless they want to implant them in our skin, or make them checkable via radio, etc, but these are separate animals...)
Certainly I'm not advocating we give up on software. My exact point is what you said, that you won't get assurances. A lot of people think Ogg is magic anti-patent medication, when really it's just a format noone has claimed to own a piece of yet. What I'd advocate is developing a new format with new technology that we can patent and then open source the patents. Those patents would speak to the legality of the format--if the USPTO granted us this patent on our waveform encoding it is surely non-obviously different from your patent. I'm sure your honor agrees;-)
I also agree that this new license on mp3 is utterly unenforceable on end users, but I suspect there will be some discussion that may end with AOL, MS, and other decoder producers paying that 50k one time licensing fee...I doubt winamp will drop mp3 support, and I'll go ahead and guarantee MS wont drop it from WMP.
No, you're still misunderstanding me. Just because a patent is published doesn't mean I'm going to find it, or think it applies to me.
I patent something, then you use it. Then I sue you. This happens relatively frequently. Just because due diligence is possible doesn't make it perfect, and opinions of applicability tend to differ. See eg the recent JPEG fiasco. Despite the fact that the USPTO even has most patents online, noone who looked thought that patent applied or thought to enforce it until now...
Ahh...you misunderstand me. Let's say I patented something in 1997. In 2000 you came out with a piece of software that uses my patented technology. I don't have to tell you that in 2000, I can wait until 2005 when you have lots of money and then sue you. The point is that the only limitation on when I can wait until is the expiration of the patent. Any time before then is fine. (of course, when u join a workgroup and promise to reveal your patents that might apply and don't, you get in trouble...rambus)
There's going to be quite a few posts (and there already are some) asking if Ogg is ready for use, why people don't use Ogg, etc. As of now, Ogg is certainly a good choice, because noone is claiming to have a patent on its technology. However, there is a problem.
US patent law doesn't require you to disclose your patent within any given period of time. You can wait until half the country is using Ogg decoders, then sue all those people. Because of this, there's no such thing as a known unpatented technology. You can only make a good attempt.
So, how do we create guaranteed patent-free formats? My theory has always been you create a non-profit, and then use the nonprofit to discover new technology for you encoder, which the nonprofit patents. Then it licenses the patent as free for everyone. It's not foolproof, but it's a pretty good bet that this would have less patent issues. Then again, for now, Ogg it is...
Declan also posted logs of the way the server was responding all weekend at http://www.mccullagh.org/bin/riaamon/ in case anyone is curious how bad it got...it rotates the logs out, so look before they're gone
Impact? Yes, certainly. Was it a total disaster in any way other than the the horde of media stories? Not really... Big sites that have measurable impacts on the economy etc have backups, 24/7 staff, etc. Net traffic swamping things is a PITA, but it's not exactly a disaster, and for those worms which had a measurable impact people quickly came up with ways to cut down on that. I'm not saying it doesn't require attention, just that there's no way anything on the net could do damage on the scale schmidt claims.
As far as IPv6, once you're adding more addresses anyway it becomes much cheaper to just add more than you'll ever need than it would be to have to switch over twice or three times or more. ISTR some sort of plan w/ IPv6 where everyone basically gets their own private netblock and non-routable things happen.
Besides, if you wanted to network every traffic light in California you'd need IPv6 because IPv4 doesn't have enough space. That still doesn't mean that the IPv6 traffic network and the IPv6 internet would be linked.
While it seems that the phrase "snake oil salesmen" has passed out of the vernacular in favor of "really good excuse to sell product," Schmidt is really nothing more than a fearmonger. While I could imagine a worm moving through the internet fairly quickly, I can't imagine it doing too much serious harm. I mean, nothing could be much more serious that code red or Melissa or something. The net is fairly heterogeneous, so if a big chunk of end-user windows machines become infected, who gives a crap? Worst thing is a slight dip in sales at Amazon or buy.com, and McAfee, Symantec, etc get some new sales. Even a windows machine can be armored against these things if you try. Also, spreading instantly isn't even feasible. It takes time for a machine to find connected hosts, transmit and process things, etc.
What worries me most is this absurd prediction that traffic lights and the power grid etc will become part of the internet. There are no good reasons for traffic lights to be on the public internet, and lots of good reasons for them not to be. However, there are lots of good reasons to control such things by computer, and the best way to take advantage of this is by using economies of scale through the use of commodity hardware. In other words, over TCP/IP. So, the traffic light network assigns all lights an IP address. This isn't the same as being on the internet. And despite all the fearmongering it's unlikely to happen.
Remember, these people have been predicting critical infrastructure death for 10 years, and their theoretical net-wide worm actually hit 14 years ago! Be fearless, build firewalls, and update your software, and ignore this moron (though if you can use it to convince your boss you need a new dual 1.5ghz machine with a giant plasma display, go for it...)
You often here people speak hypothetically, and sometimes not-so-hypothetically, about what happens when someone decides to close-source something they own the copyright to, but have licensed under the GPL. We all know that others can take the last GPL release and fork a GPL branch. The question often raised is "What about third party contributed patches?" Who holds copyright on those patches when noone has claimed it one way or the other, except for the copyright notice for the original owner at the head of the file? Can the closed-source version use those patches? Do the contributors who wrote the patches have any recourse?
Yes, I realize, the link was in the story write-up. I guess I jumped the gun there. I'm on the NYLUG mailing list. Anyway, it is still helpful to know where the protest is. Apparently the NYTimes sent a reporter, which is good, but despite being contacted no TV media showed. A surprisingly large number of people on the street already knew about the issue...
A protest by NYLUG and LXNY took place in front of the main branch of the New York Public Library, which happens to be across the street from the adobe offices. Here's a link to some pictures!
If I remember correctly (and I only just graduated) it was 5 pt increments 55-85, 88, then 90-100 in 1 pt increments. There was definitely a 60. Getting a 55 or 60 meant you failed. There are no grades that are below 55. There are numerical codes beginning with 0 for things like never showing or medically excused (for gym) such as 04, 07, etc. But those don't get averaged in.
The UC admissions process changed a whole bunch starting with people who graduated in 1999. Basically, California passed something that made it really hard to get into a UC school if you weren't living in California. For 1998 grads, 50% of applicants (or like 30 ppl or so) got in to UC Berkley. For 1999 grads, 5% got in (3 ppl for the math disadvantaged). I graduated in 2000. I didn't bother applying to a UC school. Even though by their logic I had a 4.0 GPA.
Just thought I'd mention this. And as an aside, Dave is right (at least in recent times). There are no grades below I think a 55. They definitely don't go all the way down to zero.
Dave, if you're reading this, do you know if Seth still wants his Douglas Adams books back?
Someone's already addressed how you're talking abotu a former professor who never (afaik) hired students to work at his ISP anyway, so I (as another stuy2k) will address your english class issue. I have no clue how you managed to only take one english class. The official requirements (which in my four years they let noone get around) were that you must take eight english courses while at stuy (this amounts to one for every semester). If you had taken freshmen english in high school (as I had) then they will make you take a second set of senior english classes. Now, because they want to really drive home the importance of english, they are eliminating the acceleration and making everyone take freshman english at stuy.
As a former grad (class of 2000) who has been involved in the networking setup in stuy, the way we got the.edu is that back when we registered the domain, any school could have a.edu. Since then, things have changed, and only a four-year accredited university can have a.edu. Places like stuy, and Bronx Science where my brother goes, get to keep the.edu because they were grandfathered in. Also, stuy has a full class B block of IP addresses, (149.89.0.0/16) the same way. I always thought stuy should give some of those back, since I know they don't need 4-5 computers per student....
I think the article makes lots and lots of interesting points, but I don't really see how a company can expect to make enough money off of these spare cycles to say double my DSL capacity and pay my electric bill. If they get paid a penny an hour, and they get 21*24 hours, that's still only around 5 dollar, which is nowhere near enough to pay for what they want to give as an incentive.
Is there really a big difference?
on
CS vs CIS
·
· Score: 2
At my school (Northwestern) the only difference between CS and CIS is that CS is in the engineering school and CIS is in the College of Arts And Science. Basically, if you wanted a double in chem or philosophy (I'm going for CIS + Philos) then you would do CIS, and if you wanted a double with Computer engineering or Chemcial engineering you'd go for CS. If you didn't want a double major, you'd have to choose between the moronic engineering base courses or the equally bad but slightly more balanced A&S base courses. The requirements for the major itself are literally identical. Then again, YMMV.
As a Unix Admin who is 18 years old and only graduated HS last June, I probably have a reasonably unique perspective on the situation. I've been fooling around with Unix stuff for years, but had taken up my time with too many other things to do it for money until I graduated. I spent the entire summer as an intern for a rising dotcom (there are so few these days) and in the fall went off to college. I'm currently on my winter break, working again at the same place. I realize that I could practically triple my pay, plus get benefits, if I were to drop out and work full time, but I think the true geek in all of us realizes there may be more in life than computers. What you ask?
I'm currently going for a double major in Computer Science (but of course) and (gasp) philosophy. Interesting stuff. I'm also getting more advanced education in the sciences and math, and exploring history and literature in more detail than I previously was able. I'm also starting a band (I can sort of play the guitar, but not well yet) and just hanging out and having fun. I'm not there for the money, or even learning a career. Basically I'm there for the education, and for the experience. I encourage all of you who are still in HS to go on to college, and those of you who are in college to stay there. The jobs will be waiting when you graduate, but you can never go back and be young again.
Slashdot Mirror
There is *no* purpose in Slashdotters pondering this little mathematical tidbit. The law has no interest in it. The law in america, where this suit takes place, defines derivative work as:
DERIVATIVE WORK - A work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a 'derivative work'. 17 U.S.C.
That certainly is open to some degree of interpretation, but it seems to me the key here is not that the torrent hash *could* be generated from the copyrighted work, but rather that it *was*. My guess is that a torrent file isn't going to count as a derivative work, but high-minded math riddles have no bearing on the situation.
I think that if it's just a large 2-dimensional barcode, then you could just make a copy of a passport that looks reasonably like you. People use their friend's IDs all the time to pretend to be 21, so there is precedent...
It doesn't say that, hence technology that would enable the government to do that would worry me. It *should* say that, but it doesn't. I think the US needs to pass an amendment guaranteeing privacy, personally.
But you've missed my point. If you're standing, facing towards the line of civil liberties, and you take hundreds of small steps forward, they will add up to you crossing the line, but you can take little steps to the left or right forever and never cross. I don't see digitally encoding a picture onto a passport as in any way consisting of a little step away from civil rights. The form of the content being stored doesn't make any difference. In any case, even if this is a small step in the wrong direction, not taking this step makes no difference. The proper response is to enact legislation guaranteeing rights and freedoms, such that they would outlaw this move if it were in fact a step in the wrong direction...
What sort of worries me about the use of fingerprints and such is that they provide information to the government that has uses outside of matching you to your identification. If they have your fingerprint stored in a computer, then they can just go fingerprint all the soda cans or whatever thrown out after that anti-IMF rally and produce a list of everyone who was there. The trick is to legislate against these things, and maybe if we really wanna be cool we could pass a constitutional amendment protecting privacy (the nebulous interpretation of one existing now is subject to change whenever the supreme court gets bored).
We can use technology to protect our privacy, and we can use technology to eliminate it, so we'll have to keep ourselves safe and free with legislation instead. We outlaw murder, not knives...
This honestly doesn't seem like such a big deal to me. Consider that this changes very little: there's already a picture on your passport, and any country that wants could just photocopy or scan that. This probably won't help prevent terrorism, though it certainly seems to eliminate a less sophisticated avenue of fraud. Far fewer people have the technology to produce a fake passport with a smart chip than without.
Here's another interesting potential positive. When you want a visa to visit a country (something we americans don't need to do for most "westernized" nations) you usually need to send along 2 passport-sized photos, which means the PITA of going to get pictures taken. Now, if the embassy of Brunei has a smartcard reader for the passport, they could just download the picture from your passport instead! Electronic storage of visas and such might even eventually let us do all these things over the net.
There are privacy issues with any form of identification, but they rely less on what the identifier is but more on how it is used. If we want to preserve our rights, we need to fight against regulations forcing us to show or carry ID (a la Gilmore). The form these IDs take is not so important (well, unless they want to implant them in our skin, or make them checkable via radio, etc, but these are separate animals...)
Certainly I'm not advocating we give up on software. My exact point is what you said, that you won't get assurances. A lot of people think Ogg is magic anti-patent medication, when really it's just a format noone has claimed to own a piece of yet. What I'd advocate is developing a new format with new technology that we can patent and then open source the patents. Those patents would speak to the legality of the format--if the USPTO granted us this patent on our waveform encoding it is surely non-obviously different from your patent. I'm sure your honor agrees ;-)
I also agree that this new license on mp3 is utterly unenforceable on end users, but I suspect there will be some discussion that may end with AOL, MS, and other decoder producers paying that 50k one time licensing fee...I doubt winamp will drop mp3 support, and I'll go ahead and guarantee MS wont drop it from WMP.
No, you're still misunderstanding me. Just because a patent is published doesn't mean I'm going to find it, or think it applies to me.
I patent something, then you use it. Then I sue you. This happens relatively frequently. Just because due diligence is possible doesn't make it perfect, and opinions of applicability tend to differ. See eg the recent JPEG fiasco. Despite the fact that the USPTO even has most patents online, noone who looked thought that patent applied or thought to enforce it until now...
Ahh...you misunderstand me. Let's say I patented something in 1997. In 2000 you came out with a piece of software that uses my patented technology. I don't have to tell you that in 2000, I can wait until 2005 when you have lots of money and then sue you. The point is that the only limitation on when I can wait until is the expiration of the patent. Any time before then is fine. (of course, when u join a workgroup and promise to reveal your patents that might apply and don't, you get in trouble...rambus)
There's going to be quite a few posts (and there already are some) asking if Ogg is ready for use, why people don't use Ogg, etc. As of now, Ogg is certainly a good choice, because noone is claiming to have a patent on its technology. However, there is a problem.
US patent law doesn't require you to disclose your patent within any given period of time. You can wait until half the country is using Ogg decoders, then sue all those people. Because of this, there's no such thing as a known unpatented technology. You can only make a good attempt.
So, how do we create guaranteed patent-free formats? My theory has always been you create a non-profit, and then use the nonprofit to discover new technology for you encoder, which the nonprofit patents. Then it licenses the patent as free for everyone. It's not foolproof, but it's a pretty good bet that this would have less patent issues. Then again, for now, Ogg it is...
--
Declan also posted logs of the way the server was responding all weekend at http://www.mccullagh.org/bin/riaamon/ in case anyone is curious how bad it got...it rotates the logs out, so look before they're gone
Impact? Yes, certainly. Was it a total disaster in any way other than the the horde of media stories? Not really... Big sites that have measurable impacts on the economy etc have backups, 24/7 staff, etc. Net traffic swamping things is a PITA, but it's not exactly a disaster, and for those worms which had a measurable impact people quickly came up with ways to cut down on that. I'm not saying it doesn't require attention, just that there's no way anything on the net could do damage on the scale schmidt claims.
As far as IPv6, once you're adding more addresses anyway it becomes much cheaper to just add more than you'll ever need than it would be to have to switch over twice or three times or more. ISTR some sort of plan w/ IPv6 where everyone basically gets their own private netblock and non-routable things happen.
Besides, if you wanted to network every traffic light in California you'd need IPv6 because IPv4 doesn't have enough space. That still doesn't mean that the IPv6 traffic network and the IPv6 internet would be linked.
While it seems that the phrase "snake oil salesmen" has passed out of the vernacular in favor of "really good excuse to sell product," Schmidt is really nothing more than a fearmonger. While I could imagine a worm moving through the internet fairly quickly, I can't imagine it doing too much serious harm. I mean, nothing could be much more serious that code red or Melissa or something. The net is fairly heterogeneous, so if a big chunk of end-user windows machines become infected, who gives a crap? Worst thing is a slight dip in sales at Amazon or buy.com, and McAfee, Symantec, etc get some new sales. Even a windows machine can be armored against these things if you try. Also, spreading instantly isn't even feasible. It takes time for a machine to find connected hosts, transmit and process things, etc.
What worries me most is this absurd prediction that traffic lights and the power grid etc will become part of the internet. There are no good reasons for traffic lights to be on the public internet, and lots of good reasons for them not to be. However, there are lots of good reasons to control such things by computer, and the best way to take advantage of this is by using economies of scale through the use of commodity hardware. In other words, over TCP/IP. So, the traffic light network assigns all lights an IP address. This isn't the same as being on the internet. And despite all the fearmongering it's unlikely to happen.
Remember, these people have been predicting critical infrastructure death for 10 years, and their theoretical net-wide worm actually hit 14 years ago! Be fearless, build firewalls, and update your software, and ignore this moron (though if you can use it to convince your boss you need a new dual 1.5ghz machine with a giant plasma display, go for it...)
You often here people speak hypothetically, and sometimes not-so-hypothetically, about what happens when someone decides to close-source something they own the copyright to, but have licensed under the GPL. We all know that others can take the last GPL release and fork a GPL branch. The question often raised is "What about third party contributed patches?" Who holds copyright on those patches when noone has claimed it one way or the other, except for the copyright notice for the original owner at the head of the file? Can the closed-source version use those patches? Do the contributors who wrote the patches have any recourse?
Yes, I realize, the link was in the story write-up. I guess I jumped the gun there. I'm on the NYLUG mailing list. Anyway, it is still helpful to know where the protest is. Apparently the NYTimes sent a reporter, which is good, but despite being contacted no TV media showed. A surprisingly large number of people on the street already knew about the issue...
A protest by NYLUG and LXNY took place in front of the main branch of the New York Public Library, which happens to be across the street from the adobe offices. Here's a link to some pictures!
Click me!
set prompt=("%n@%m:%/ {%!} ")
tcsh...
If I remember correctly (and I only just graduated) it was 5 pt increments 55-85, 88, then 90-100 in 1 pt increments. There was definitely a 60. Getting a 55 or 60 meant you failed. There are no grades that are below 55. There are numerical codes beginning with 0 for things like never showing or medically excused (for gym) such as 04, 07, etc. But those don't get averaged in.
The UC admissions process changed a whole bunch starting with people who graduated in 1999. Basically, California passed something that made it really hard to get into a UC school if you weren't living in California. For 1998 grads, 50% of applicants (or like 30 ppl or so) got in to UC Berkley. For 1999 grads, 5% got in (3 ppl for the math disadvantaged). I graduated in 2000. I didn't bother applying to a UC school. Even though by their logic I had a 4.0 GPA.
Just thought I'd mention this. And as an aside, Dave is right (at least in recent times). There are no grades below I think a 55. They definitely don't go all the way down to zero.
Dave, if you're reading this, do you know if Seth still wants his Douglas Adams books back?
L
Someone's already addressed how you're talking abotu a former professor who never (afaik) hired students to work at his ISP anyway, so I (as another stuy2k) will address your english class issue. I have no clue how you managed to only take one english class. The official requirements (which in my four years they let noone get around) were that you must take eight english courses while at stuy (this amounts to one for every semester). If you had taken freshmen english in high school (as I had) then they will make you take a second set of senior english classes. Now, because they want to really drive home the importance of english, they are eliminating the acceleration and making everyone take freshman english at stuy.
As a former grad (class of 2000) who has been involved in the networking setup in stuy, the way we got the .edu is that back when we registered the domain, any school could have a .edu. Since then, things have changed, and only a four-year accredited university can have a .edu. Places like stuy, and Bronx Science where my brother goes, get to keep the .edu because they were grandfathered in. Also, stuy has a full class B block of IP addresses, (149.89.0.0/16) the same way. I always thought stuy should give some of those back, since I know they don't need 4-5 computers per student....
things are always late when humans are involved...especially when it's flying things (stay away from LGA)
2001-04-07 14:23:35
I think the article makes lots and lots of interesting points, but I don't really see how a company can expect to make enough money off of these spare cycles to say double my DSL capacity and pay my electric bill. If they get paid a penny an hour, and they get 21*24 hours, that's still only around 5 dollar, which is nowhere near enough to pay for what they want to give as an incentive.
At my school (Northwestern) the only difference between CS and CIS is that CS is in the engineering school and CIS is in the College of Arts And Science. Basically, if you wanted a double in chem or philosophy (I'm going for CIS + Philos) then you would do CIS, and if you wanted a double with Computer engineering or Chemcial engineering you'd go for CS. If you didn't want a double major, you'd have to choose between the moronic engineering base courses or the equally bad but slightly more balanced A&S base courses. The requirements for the major itself are literally identical. Then again, YMMV.
As a Unix Admin who is 18 years old and only graduated HS last June, I probably have a reasonably unique perspective on the situation. I've been fooling around with Unix stuff for years, but had taken up my time with too many other things to do it for money until I graduated. I spent the entire summer as an intern for a rising dotcom (there are so few these days) and in the fall went off to college. I'm currently on my winter break, working again at the same place. I realize that I could practically triple my pay, plus get benefits, if I were to drop out and work full time, but I think the true geek in all of us realizes there may be more in life than computers. What you ask?
I'm currently going for a double major in Computer Science (but of course) and (gasp) philosophy. Interesting stuff. I'm also getting more advanced education in the sciences and math, and exploring history and literature in more detail than I previously was able. I'm also starting a band (I can sort of play the guitar, but not well yet) and just hanging out and having fun. I'm not there for the money, or even learning a career. Basically I'm there for the education, and for the experience. I encourage all of you who are still in HS to go on to college, and those of you who are in college to stay there. The jobs will be waiting when you graduate, but you can never go back and be young again.