My quick intro is:
When these people talk about 'secure content' and such, what they are talking about is securing your computer from you, not securing it for you.
What DRM means is that other people controls what your computer will, or will not, do and you will have essentially no say in that.
That's part of why I don't intend to buy Microsoft's next OS... It has that sort of remote control garbage built in as an integral part of it.
Actually there is a 'sect' of Judaism that considers itself to be both Jewish and Christian (i.e. they're jews that consider Jesus to be the Messiah). Given that Jesus and the first generation or two of deciples would have fit in this definition, I'd say that they'd have to classify as Christian -- Unless you want to consider St. Paul and the other apostles as non-christian (not to mention Jesus, himself).
For me, swap space is like insurance. It's better (and often cheaper) to have it and never need it than to need it and not have it.
Yes ram is incredibly cheap, and any amount of serious swapping is to be avoided. On the other hand, once in a while you do something stupid like having VI load a 2GB log file into RAM, or whip firefox into an 800mb frenzy and then load that 16kx32k image into GIMP, or do that database query that uses *way* more ram than you'd expected.
In general, I'd rather have my system slow to a crawl than blow up in my face when something like that happens. At least, then, I've got the choice of what I want to kill/stop, rather than having random (critical) processes die on me and have no choice other than a post mortem.
If you're that worried about your system slowing to a crawl when you start eating into swap space, then put instrumentation onto the system that alerts you when swap gets over 100MB. At least that way, you keep uptime and some hope of a controled recovery. With the price of hard disk storage being what it is today, it's not having a few spare gigabytes of backup VM resources that seems like a bad idea.
There are two primary ways to retain customers... One is to ensure that they prefer your company (things such as good customer service, etc.). The other is to ensure that they need your company (e.g. by monopolizing the market, or joining a cartel which is really just a distributed monopoly).
Now, granted, even a monopoly needs to do some work to ensure that they don't treat their customers too badly, but if your customer base doesn't have any other serious choices, you don't have to work that hard to keep them from going elsewhere.
Perhaps things like Phone and Cable should be treated like infrastrastructure (e.g. roads). In fact, they really are -- they require a singular shared right-of-way. Perhaps they should have been done the same way -- paid for by taxes and treated like a common right of way.
In many ways, that's what's happened anyways -- but what happened was that the large companies that were contracted and paid to string up those lines (in the form of guaranteed profits) are now using the fact that they got an effective monopoly on those rights-of-way as proof that they are owed the infrastructure that they were contracted to build for the public.
I'm now going to wander into the realm of Net nutrality.
To say that net nutrality is a bad thing is like saying that, because a subsidiary of GM was contracted to build the highways around your city, they now have the right to charge punitive differential tolls for people who drive Ford, and Toyota cars -- or, worse yet, motorcycles and bicycles.
Adam Smith's Open Market consisted of many small businesses. Heavy market concentration and massive economies of scale -- while good for big business wasn't part of his vision. Supposedly (I'm not a Smith scholar), he considered big business to be no better than big government. Personally, I consider big business worse than big government, since big government at least has some modicum of public mediation built into it in the form of elections. A big-business monopoly or cartel, on the other hand, only answers to it's own greed.
This is pretty much proof that having an effective monopoly is bad for customer service. As long as they thought that they had their customer base by the short and curleys they did whatever they wanted -- but now that the possibility of competition is cropping up, they're starting to play nice.
I think that the same can be extrapolated for Microsoft, don't you?
You're still far more likely to die because of an unexpected buildup of ice on the wings. Given that they've already identified the impugned item, this is just a waste of resources better used to a more productive end.
Terrorists have killed about 6000 westerners in the last decade (including about 2500 soldiers on active duty in the Middle East, which are arguably just military deaths, not terrorist). Thats about how many people drunk drivers kill in 2 months. It's also the number of people that the Tobacco industry kills in about 2 weeks.
What we've got here is the sociological equivalent to an anaphylactic alergic reaction.
Well, if this guy is a real kidddy pornster, chances are that he'll have prints of his kiddy pictures to masturbate to. That'll be independant of any computer manipulation by the hacker.
That having been said, I think that it sets a bad precedent to have hackers breaking into people's computers looking for signs of criminal activity. It looks to me like this guy could have obtained enough evidence to identify this creep for the purpose of a search warrent without having to put a backdoor on his machine.
Just because she has a PhD doesn't necessarily mean that it's relevant to what she's talking about.
Just because she's testifying before Congress doesn't mean that she's giving good testimony.
Two examples:
A PhD in Music talking about orbital mechanics
The 12 year old kid who tearfully testified about Iraq soldires draring babies from incubators who turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador (and probably not in Kuwait at the time of the attack).
___
Personally, I'd be inclined to describe PacMan as akin to a computerized game of 'tag'. Now, if you come up with a definition of 'violent' which classifies tag as violent, then you're gonna probably tag pacman with that same definition.
If, on the other hand, you use Bush's definition of iraqi torture as the border for violence, then Pacman doesn't register on the scale.
You can explain it easier in the context of dropping the key size by a big -- for example, encrypting twice with 8 bit keys.
If you encrypt twice with 8 bit keys, then you have to decrypt twice with 8 bit keys, then for each encryption, you have 256 possible keys... This means that across the two decryptions, you have to make a total of 512 guesses.
If, on the other hand, you have a single 16 bit key, then you have 64K possible guesses.
Now, one of the things that this presumes is that, when you find the first key, you can actually verify that you've gotten a 'hit'. Unfortunately, this is often possible to do -- especially if the encapsulated encryption has any sort of recognizable header information on it.
This explanation also ignores the possiblity that the product function of the two encryptions colapses into a function with less than 64K possible keys.
You'd also have to swear out an infomation and expose yourself to a charge of perjury and/or criminal mischief if your accusations prove to be groudless. (not to mention the possibility of a civil countersuit).
If you think about it, all you have to do to get a search warrent issued against your neighbour is drop by the police department and say that you saw them carrying in pot plants and hydroponics gear, or a bloody dead body, or...
Of course, even better than thumb drives would be just doing a network boot (depending on needs). Then you have thin clients with nothing in the box beyond power supply, motherboard and any necessary acquisition hardware.
If you go with low power CPUs, you should even be able to run without fans, and allow the ambient temperatures to heatsink the CPU and power supply through the case. At that point you'll have the connectors as the only likely mechanical failure points.
Try using a Flash drive (Internal USB key?). Newer computers are capable of booting from USB, and this would remove the one primary source of failure (mechanical hard drive death). This would really only leave the cooling fans as possible points of failure, so good quality cooling fans would give you a very stable configuration.
If you're using a Linux base for the acquisition computers, you can probably get away with tiny thumb drives (the lower bound today probably being set by commercial availability rather than technical need) -- Unless, of course, you're expecting to store gigabytes of data on the warehouse acquisition computers (which strikes me as not a very good idea).
Someone from Verizon could call the police and let them know that they have reason to believe that stolen hardware is operating from such and such a place.
Just because some guy phoned them up and said so? The correct course here is for either the police or the shop to get a subpoena for the information. Otherwise Verizon should protect their customers' confidentiality.
Well, the proper thing to do would be for Verison to call the Police and say that you contacted them about the missing computer in stolen computer -- Police report #WXYZ, and that the physical address associated with the IP address that You say the laptop is calling home from is 123 Main st.
In conjunction with your theft report, that should be enough for the police to get a search warrent and go knocking on the door of whomever is at the address.
Alternatively, I guess that you could start a civil lawsuit (or a private criminal prosecution), and swear out the Subpoenas and possibly even the civil equivalent to a search warrent yourself. Once you've proven that you've recovered the laptop at that address, it should be reasonably easy for the police to take on the criminal case.
IANAL so the details are left as an exercise for the reader.
You own the music like you own a book. It's only since companies like Microsoft have started asserting that you paid $XXX for nothing other than the right to click on a 'Yeah, I sell you my soul' button and it's only the clicking of the button (and subsequent agreement) that gives you any right to the software on the CD that you ostensibly paid for... (god what a run-on sentence) that people have been able to swallow the idea that they don't really own the music that they 'buy' at the store.
Back around 1995, I was working on a win3.11 machine with a printer attached to it. I added some memory to the printer and configured it so that it knew about the extra memory. This caused the mouse to stop working. When I reconfigured the printer to think that it had the smaller memory size, the mouse worked again.
I yanked the extra memory and just left the printer that way.
Sounds like Myst. I helped a friend get it running -- she was soo eager to get it going, but then it turned out to be just a lot of pretty pictures with puzzles inbetween..... And lots of walking back and forth.
THe nice thing about the wiki (probably, in their eyes) is that they're probably expecting it to grow exponentially like the original wiki did.
In this case, however, they seem to be expecting tghousands of 'volunteers' to go hunting through an exponentially expanding list of stupid applications and doing the reviewer's jobs for free. I expect that this is really only going to happen to the most agregious of the 'bad' patents.
Other than that, you might be able to hope that some of the big companies will start assigning people to look at these things on an ongoing basis in the hops of slamming just about anything that moves before it get legs. Of course, if they start making agreements as to what they'll 'miss', then we'll have the worst of both worlds -- with the big companies setting up truces against each others' "volunteer" examiners, while the little guys get lambasted.
Slashdot Mirror
When these people talk about 'secure content' and such, what they are talking about is securing your computer from you, not securing it for you.
What DRM means is that other people controls what your computer will, or will not, do and you will have essentially no say in that.
That's part of why I don't intend to buy Microsoft's next OS... It has that sort of remote control garbage built in as an integral part of it.
<ducks>
Actually there is a 'sect' of Judaism that considers itself to be both Jewish and Christian (i.e. they're jews that consider Jesus to be the Messiah). Given that Jesus and the first generation or two of deciples would have fit in this definition, I'd say that they'd have to classify as Christian -- Unless you want to consider St. Paul and the other apostles as non-christian (not to mention Jesus, himself).
Yes ram is incredibly cheap, and any amount of serious swapping is to be avoided. On the other hand, once in a while you do something stupid like having VI load a 2GB log file into RAM, or whip firefox into an 800mb frenzy and then load that 16kx32k image into GIMP, or do that database query that uses *way* more ram than you'd expected.
In general, I'd rather have my system slow to a crawl than blow up in my face when something like that happens. At least, then, I've got the choice of what I want to kill/stop, rather than having random (critical) processes die on me and have no choice other than a post mortem.
If you're that worried about your system slowing to a crawl when you start eating into swap space, then put instrumentation onto the system that alerts you when swap gets over 100MB. At least that way, you keep uptime and some hope of a controled recovery. With the price of hard disk storage being what it is today, it's not having a few spare gigabytes of backup VM resources that seems like a bad idea.
Now, granted, even a monopoly needs to do some work to ensure that they don't treat their customers too badly, but if your customer base doesn't have any other serious choices, you don't have to work that hard to keep them from going elsewhere.
In many ways, that's what's happened anyways -- but what happened was that the large companies that were contracted and paid to string up those lines (in the form of guaranteed profits) are now using the fact that they got an effective monopoly on those rights-of-way as proof that they are owed the infrastructure that they were contracted to build for the public.
I'm now going to wander into the realm of Net nutrality.
To say that net nutrality is a bad thing is like saying that, because a subsidiary of GM was contracted to build the highways around your city, they now have the right to charge punitive differential tolls for people who drive Ford, and Toyota cars -- or, worse yet, motorcycles and bicycles.
Adam Smith's Open Market consisted of many small businesses. Heavy market concentration and massive economies of scale -- while good for big business wasn't part of his vision. Supposedly (I'm not a Smith scholar), he considered big business to be no better than big government. Personally, I consider big business worse than big government, since big government at least has some modicum of public mediation built into it in the form of elections. A big-business monopoly or cartel, on the other hand, only answers to it's own greed.
I think that the same can be extrapolated for Microsoft, don't you?
They're 'freedom fighters' or 'the resistance', or 'heroes' ... anything but terrorist and/or criminals.
Terrorists have killed about 6000 westerners in the last decade (including about 2500 soldiers on active duty in the Middle East, which are arguably just military deaths, not terrorist). Thats about how many people drunk drivers kill in 2 months. It's also the number of people that the Tobacco industry kills in about 2 weeks.
What we've got here is the sociological equivalent to an anaphylactic alergic reaction.
That having been said, I think that it sets a bad precedent to have hackers breaking into people's computers looking for signs of criminal activity. It looks to me like this guy could have obtained enough evidence to identify this creep for the purpose of a search warrent without having to put a backdoor on his machine.
Just because she's testifying before Congress doesn't mean that she's giving good testimony.
Two examples:
- A PhD in Music talking about orbital mechanics
-
The 12 year old kid who tearfully testified about Iraq soldires draring babies from incubators who turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador (and probably not in Kuwait at the time of the attack).
___Personally, I'd be inclined to describe PacMan as akin to a computerized game of 'tag'. Now, if you come up with a definition of 'violent' which classifies tag as violent, then you're gonna probably tag pacman with that same definition.
If, on the other hand, you use Bush's definition of iraqi torture as the border for violence, then Pacman doesn't register on the scale.
If you encrypt twice with 8 bit keys, then you have to decrypt twice with 8 bit keys, then for each encryption, you have 256 possible keys... This means that across the two decryptions, you have to make a total of 512 guesses.
If, on the other hand, you have a single 16 bit key, then you have 64K possible guesses.
Now, one of the things that this presumes is that, when you find the first key, you can actually verify that you've gotten a 'hit'. Unfortunately, this is often possible to do -- especially if the encapsulated encryption has any sort of recognizable header information on it.
This explanation also ignores the possiblity that the product function of the two encryptions colapses into a function with less than 64K possible keys.
If you think about it, all you have to do to get a search warrent issued against your neighbour is drop by the police department and say that you saw them carrying in pot plants and hydroponics gear, or a bloody dead body, or ...
If you go with low power CPUs, you should even be able to run without fans, and allow the ambient temperatures to heatsink the CPU and power supply through the case. At that point you'll have the connectors as the only likely mechanical failure points.
If you're using a Linux base for the acquisition computers, you can probably get away with tiny thumb drives (the lower bound today probably being set by commercial availability rather than technical need) -- Unless, of course, you're expecting to store gigabytes of data on the warehouse acquisition computers (which strikes me as not a very good idea).
In conjunction with your theft report, that should be enough for the police to get a search warrent and go knocking on the door of whomever is at the address.
Alternatively, I guess that you could start a civil lawsuit (or a private criminal prosecution), and swear out the Subpoenas and possibly even the civil equivalent to a search warrent yourself. Once you've proven that you've recovered the laptop at that address, it should be reasonably easy for the police to take on the criminal case.
IANAL so the details are left as an exercise for the reader.
What you don't own is the copyright. Copyright is not the text itself. It is a right with respect to the text.
You own the book, you own the text. What you don't own is the right to distribute copies of the text you own.
You own the music like you own a book. It's only since companies like Microsoft have started asserting that you paid $XXX for nothing other than the right to click on a 'Yeah, I sell you my soul' button and it's only the clicking of the button (and subsequent agreement) that gives you any right to the software on the CD that you ostensibly paid for ... (god what a run-on sentence) that people have been able to swallow the idea that they don't really own the music that they 'buy' at the store.
I yanked the extra memory and just left the printer that way.
Sounds like Myst. I helped a friend get it running -- she was soo eager to get it going, but then it turned out to be just a lot of pretty pictures with puzzles inbetween ..... And lots of walking back and forth.
bigger or smaller than Rosanne Bar?
Anarcy in a suit.
Anarchy was good enough for me..
Good enough for me and Ayn Rand.
In this case, however, they seem to be expecting tghousands of 'volunteers' to go hunting through an exponentially expanding list of stupid applications and doing the reviewer's jobs for free. I expect that this is really only going to happen to the most agregious of the 'bad' patents.
Other than that, you might be able to hope that some of the big companies will start assigning people to look at these things on an ongoing basis in the hops of slamming just about anything that moves before it get legs. Of course, if they start making agreements as to what they'll 'miss', then we'll have the worst of both worlds -- with the big companies setting up truces against each others' "volunteer" examiners, while the little guys get lambasted.
Yep. Lots of room for abuse.