Can't these satellites be connected somehow to the GPS system that is already in place?
These puppies aren't in geosyncronous orbit, they're much closer in. (That's why their orbit isn't stable, and why you can reach them with a low powered handset.) They zoom across the sky pretty fast from a ground-baszed perspective; geosyncronous sats (like the one you point your satellite TV dish at, or the GPS sats) always seem to be in the same place in the sky. So I don't see how these could be useful in the GPS.
I may have to add some sort of license in the future if only to maintain that the music was originally created by me." The Design Science License has been developed by Michael Stutz as a method by which copyleft can be applied to things other than software.
Are you aware that your capital city has more murders per year than my entire country?
Yes. Are you aware that said capital has very strict gun control laws? Handguns are essentailly forbidden, and long guns very strictly regulated. On the other hand, states that allow good citizens to carry handguns tend to have lower crime rates. And as I pointed out, there are other nations with more guns per capita that have little violent crime.
Gun control laws keep guns away from bad guys about as well as drug control laws keep heroin away from junkies, while keeping law abiding citizens from being able to defend themselves.
Our problem isn't guns in the hand of good citizens. Our problems are the complete breakdown of the socioeconomic structures in our inner cities, the huge gap between the urban underclass and the rest of the nation, lingering rascism, and our insane drug policy. A lot of young men in the high crime innce cities don't expect to live to see thirty - they don't have much incentive to not perpitrate violent crime.
As for violent crime having increased, yes. But the new restrictions were irrelevant to this, because UK subjects have never been able to shoot people for attacking them.
Excuse me? Do you mean that in the UK, it has always been the case that if an innocent citizen was being charged by a knife-wielding attacker and there was a gun nearby, the innocent would be not only legally compelled to be stabbed rather than shoot, he would actually do so? I find both parts of that assertation incredible.
It wasn't like, before we could shoot on sight or something.
Um, the law doesn't allow that here either. (Well, maybe in Texas.)
It's exactly as useful as the original disk. Assuming I can duplicate the physical copy protection scheme
No, its not. Let me make this simple
Original disk = (encrypted data + decryption keys) = useful
Copied.VOB files = (encrypted data) = useless.
If, as posultated, I can duplicate the whole disk, the copy also has the decryption keys. This point has nothing to do with CSS.
Sure, its physically possible to duplicate the whole physical disk in one shot, That's what the piracy shops in Taiwan and HK do.
So you admit that copying is possible, and CSS doesn't prevent it, and yet you still maintain that CSS is a copy protection scheme?? We seem to be using the English language in radically different ways here.
The DVD-ROM drives (and I'm talking about the readers, not the writers, you can't even read the key space off the disk under normal operation, and you can only read one of the encrypted session keys to watch a movie, not all of them) they sell won't let you do it.
Right! That's the lame-o copy protection scheme. It's the hardware, not the software. (How long do you think it will be before we can all have properly operational players the read the whole disks like the unauthorized copiers (I highly object to the term "piracy", there is no bloody violence on the high seas going on here) in Taiwan? My bet is not long.)
Don't forget how gun owners are being treated in this country!
Er... better than anywhere else in the world apart from major war zones?
Not really. Switzerland and Isreal are generally more firearms friendly. Gun laws in the US vary widely from state to state, from near bans in some places to "shall issue" laws for concealed carry in others.
One might think that lawmakers would observe that those states with fewer restrictions on citizens ability to defend themselves tend to suffer less violent crime, and remove such restrictions in their own states; but this would be assuming that politicians are capable of rational thought based on factual observation. Ha.
(I direct readers interested in the subject to my recent piece "Disarm the police. Arm the citizens." Stop by, have a read, leave a comment, help bang on the weblog system I'm hacking together.)
In the UK owning most kinds of gun is illegal, full stop.
And I seem to recall that violent crime in the UK has increased since these restrictions went into effect.
The brothers of the USA (to the north) rejected violence and revolution, in exchange for peacefully changing the system from within.
I'd argue that it's more a case of the British Empire crumbling than of Canada reforming it; and it would have held on for much longer with the resources of the current USA at its full disposal. It might well be that, had the American Revolution been quashed, the British Empire would still hold the US, Canada, India, and Australia today; and without the USA's experiment in constitutional democratic republicanism, that Empire might well still be a real monarchy. (Excuse me while I sneak off to write a few alternate history stories.)
The two countries ended up very similar in terms of freedom, economy, etc.
Only after many years. Is it better to not fight and let people live without freedom for 100 years while things slowly reform, or fight and gain freedom for the next 100 years, if either way after that time freedom is about the same? Tough question.
Um... if you photocopy a coded message, you still have nothing. Without the decryption keys, you have nothing.
No, I have a copy of the message. If I hand them out to 100 people who have decryption keys, they can read the copies just as well as they can read the original. I can do this without having any access to decryption keys myself.
Without DeCSS all you have is a huge, useless, glob of data.
It's exactly as useful as the original disk. Assuming I can duplicate the physical copy protection scheme (which has nothing to do with CSS - if I understand correctly it's sort of like the old trick of burning holes in certain sectors of a floppy), a copied encoded disk can be read by a DVD player just as well as the original. Unauthorized copies of DVDs are alredy being made this way. Write it in letters of fire 100 feet high and stare at it until it burns itself into your brain: CSS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH COPY PROTECTION.
Re:Unix as a philosophy and the Legacy Myth
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The End of Unix?
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· Score: 2
What Unix _is_, is a system of tools which have been refined for 30+ years....New doesn't mean better, and in many cases, it can mean untested or unproven.
I sometimes think that Unix is to operating systems what Levi's jeans are to clothing. A pair of Levi's hasn't changed much since the late 1800s, because they're a highly optimal solution for covering your lower body from the elements. A few minor differences and improvements, yes - like removing the crotch rivet - but a pair of today's 501s would be readily recognizable by Levi Strauss.
Fundamentally, Unix hasn't changed much since sockets and TCP/IP support were added to 4.2 BSD, because it's a highly optimal solution for running a bunch of different stuff at the same time on one machine. Yes, a few neat modifications like loadable kernel modules have come along, but today's Unix would still be largely familiar to a programmer from 15 years ago. Can the same be said of Windows, or MacOS?
The speed of light is constant and will be measured to have the same value by any observer.
The laws of physics will be the same for any observer Actually, the first arises from the second; the value of c is a consequence of the (IIRC) permitivity and permisivity of empty space. (Someone check me on that, it's been a long time since I stopped being a physics major and decided to stick to computers.)
But general relativity - as awesome as it is - is known to be incomplete; it doesn't work well with quantum theory. So it's not impossible that there exist circumstances under which different observers would not agree on the laws of physics. I'm not betting on this - but I wouldn't bet against it either. ("You should never bet against anything in science at odds of more than about 10-12 to 1." -- Ernest Rutherford)
To the effect of DeCSS, it is a program that has only one use: To circumvent the DVD copy-protection scheme.
NO NO NO NO NO NO NO.
No.
Can we please get this straight? DeCSS is not a copy protection scheme. CSS no more protects against copying than writing a message in code prevents it from being photocopied. CSS is about monopoly control of DVD players.
(This is disregarding the fact that the DMCA hasn't got an ethical or constitutional leg to stand on.)
They have the right to a share of any profit made from the exploitation of the work
A fat lot of good that does if the copyright system is disabled.
I don't understand your point. The fact that making copies of a work would no longer be a crime doesn't mean that it couldn't be a crime to sell copies without giving a cut to the artist, or to play their music in your bar to attract customers without giving the artist a cut, or use their music in a movie soundtrack without giving the artist a cut. (Though on second thought, perhaps this is better viewed as a civil rather than a criminal matter.)
So in other words, someone who just wants to create some music and sell CDs has to panhandle for donations or make their money through other activities.
There's nothing to say that they can't sell CDs even though they can be freely copied; Red Hat does. People who want to support the artist will buy them.
This hardly sounds very fair.
This is, and always has been, the case for the vast majority of artists and musicians. Maybe you've noticed the tip jar in front of the band at the bar? Or recall how classical composers had to have patrons? Making it illegal to make copies does little to help the vast majority of artists and musicians.
How many jobs have you held where you had to beg your employer for your paycheck each week?
The audience is not the composer's or performer's employer; there is no agreement or contract that the audience will pay the artist. (But they might have to pay the venue, who might have an agreement with the artist.)
My personal preference would be to get taxed for what I buy, only. Push the sales tax to a 5% Federal Sales Tax...
Problem is that sales taxes are regressive, and it's difficult to have tax deductions for things like charitable contributions or mortgage interest.
These might not be insurmountable problems, if we taxed the sale of different goods at different rates, kept (or even raised) the capital gains tax when we dropped the taxes on labor income, and issued some sort of tax credit vouchers; but it would be complicated. Of course, so are income taxes.
To you or me, 5 billion is a lot, but to the U.S. Federal govt, 5 billion USD is chump change.
Perspective: $5 billion is about $18.50 per American. $18.50 over a couple years is just not anything to get excited about ("Oooh, look, thanks to the Republician congress I got an extra five bucks in my income tax return. Yee-hah.")
There is no moral justification of taxation, period.
In theory (note that disclaimer!) you are the beneficiary of various services rendered by the state, and taxes are just your bill. So (in theory) there is an ethical justification for taxes.
In reality, government is inevitable - if it went away tomorrow, one way or another people would just form a new one. Governments inevitablly collect taxes to support themselves. So arguing about the ethics of taxation is rather like arguing about the ethics of continental drift. We can make changes in the specifics, but the general phenomenon of taxation will be with us for a long time to come.
Many states don't have sales taxes, period.
Many? There's Deleware and one or two others, I thought. But it all pretty much balances out; states with lower sales taxes tend to have higher property or income taxes.
Knowledgeable customers are few and far between. After all, isn't that why they're hiring you or your company to do the job for them?
Sure. But as professionals, it's part of our job to educate clients and employers. When your client/boss/whoever says "We want to put our critical website on a Windows 98 server, because Microsoft is the industry leader!" you explain to them (calmly if possible, which great violence if necessary) why this is not a good idea, right?
Same thing if they start babbling about vendor certifications: you calmly explain that these are largely marketing ploys and not necessarily marks of highly skilled professionals; that you/your staff are well-trained, and have years of experience; that you have worked with clients x, y, and z on projects foo, bar, and baz, and here's how these projects relate to what you're going to do for them.
You don't fund the construction of a building without making sure the contractors are licensed and bonded.
The key difference is that electrical contractors won't hand you a piece of paper with "Certified Square-D Circuit Breaker Installer" that he earned in a few classroom days on it. Contractor licences aren't vendor certifications, they are professional standards administered by the state
I'm surprised to find out that anyone gives a fsck about vendor "certification". I thought everyone had realized it was a meaningless scam by now. A week or two of training isn't going to get you any more knowledge than reading a good book (like an O'Reilly guide) and playing with the system a bit - and an O'Reilly guide is a hell of a lot cheaper.
From the article:
"Our customers ask if we are [certified], and certification gives our business more legitimacy.
Not with knowledgable customers - or knowledgable potential employees.
...we also have to lose a $60,000 employee for two weeks, who after being certified, can move almost anywhere he wants, maybe even over to Red Hat.
In this market, skilled employees can move almost anywhere they want anytime, with or without certification. (Besides, isn't this contradictory to their complaint - Red Hat's certification sucks so bad that certified people suddenly have new opportunites arise and leave our company. Uh, yeah.)
So, a person who writes a story or a song has no rights to it?
They have the right to be acknowledged as the creator of the work, and they have the right to a share of any profit made from the exploitation of the work (live performance, sale of recordings, etcetera). I don't see that they have any right to have the state use force against someone who makes a copy of it; that's always been ethically problematic, and now - like it or not - it's a practical impossibility.
Just because the song isn't "tangible", it should be free to everyone?
Music is free to everyone. No law can stop me from singing Frank Zappa's "Don't Eat the Yellow Snow".
So who's going to pay the songwriter's bills?
Venues that pay performance royalties. People who make voluntary sponsorships. A portion of people who buy concert ticket to bands that play their songs. Website sponsors. All of these are enhanced by having as many people as possible hear their music.
The really depressing thing about Napster and all those MP3 sharing programs, is that being an artist will no longer be a viable employment, as there won't be money in it.
"No longer?" For the vast majority of musicians out there, music is not viable employment. And many of those who do make a meager living at it make their money in performances, not through selling recordings. Even those who have a moderate amount of success in the "big time" enrich mostly the record companies.
Musicians might not be able to make a lot of money off of selling copies of their recordings; but on the other hand, they can be heard by many more people without signing their soul away to a record company, which make other sorts of income (concert tickets, band t-shirts, corporate sponsorships) more possible. And ironically it makes it possible for them to have more control over their music; the artist, not the record company, gets to decide whether their song gets turned into a jingle for some car commercial.
Re:Same story, new look
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Date Pagers
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· Score: 2
Are we really so busy with our lives that we can't spend a few minutes to get to know a person?
The problem is figuring out who to get to know! When I walk by a woman, how would I know that she likes Loony Toons and HHTG, is interested in neopaganism and Buddhism, and could tolerate a guy with a LAN in his house? I could walk right by my perfect match and never know.
While the devices described here are much too simple for this sort of matching, I can readily imagine more complex versions. I don't know that I'd ever buy one, but it doesn't seem like a bad idea.
Have you ever read Kaczynski's work? Yeah I know he was a psycho killer, but his manifesto is very well written and thought provoking. I hate to admit this but there is a lot of truth in it.
Any definition I can think of where Haselton's actions would be considered "testing security" would be so tortuous as to render the phrase meaningless.
Not at all. The blocking software is security software; any analysis or disassembly of it falls into the category of testing "computer security systems".
(Which is putting aside the fact that the DMCA hasn't got a constitutional or ethical leg to stand on and is null and void from the start.)
At ArsDigita, instead of trying to keep up with the latest in fashionable languages, we spend our time worrying about "What data models and workflow structures would we need to run the entire MIT Sloan School from a Web-based system?"
Sage advice. Get a lock on what you're keeping track of and who's changing it how, and the rest is just a SMOP.
I've been amusing myself lately by creating a discussion system at my unreasonable.org website. The interesting part wasn't so much coding it up (in PHP with PostgreSQL and a little Perl), but in figuring out the process - who's doing what to whom, and who might be doing other whats to someone else as I expand the system. I'll probably hack on it for a few months and then do a rewrite to clean up - but the data model shouldn't have to change.
One thing that sometimes gets forgotten is that you can reduce calls to the server by using client-side strategies. For example, putting the raw results of a database query in a Javascript array then mainpulating it (sorting, etc.) in the browser
Ugh! May I puke on your shoes? Because this idea makes me ill.
What happens if I'm running on an old 486? (I know people who are.) What if I have Javascript turned off, or filtered by a firewall? What if I have an browser with a buggy Javascript implementation?
Unless you are in a highly controlled environment where you know the capabilities and configuration of every client, you should never, never, never do anything critical to your site on the client side.
Slashdot Mirror
Gun control laws keep guns away from bad guys about as well as drug control laws keep heroin away from junkies, while keeping law abiding citizens from being able to defend themselves.
Our problem isn't guns in the hand of good citizens. Our problems are the complete breakdown of the socioeconomic structures in our inner cities, the huge gap between the urban underclass and the rest of the nation, lingering rascism, and our insane drug policy. A lot of young men in the high crime innce cities don't expect to live to see thirty - they don't have much incentive to not perpitrate violent crime.
Excuse me? Do you mean that in the UK, it has always been the case that if an innocent citizen was being charged by a knife-wielding attacker and there was a gun nearby, the innocent would be not only legally compelled to be stabbed rather than shoot, he would actually do so? I find both parts of that assertation incredible. Um, the law doesn't allow that here either. (Well, maybe in Texas.)One might think that lawmakers would observe that those states with fewer restrictions on citizens ability to defend themselves tend to suffer less violent crime, and remove such restrictions in their own states; but this would be assuming that politicians are capable of rational thought based on factual observation. Ha.
(I direct readers interested in the subject to my recent piece "Disarm the police. Arm the citizens." Stop by, have a read, leave a comment, help bang on the weblog system I'm hacking together.)
And I seem to recall that violent crime in the UK has increased since these restrictions went into effect.Fundamentally, Unix hasn't changed much since sockets and TCP/IP support were added to 4.2 BSD, because it's a highly optimal solution for running a bunch of different stuff at the same time on one machine. Yes, a few neat modifications like loadable kernel modules have come along, but today's Unix would still be largely familiar to a programmer from 15 years ago. Can the same be said of Windows, or MacOS?
But general relativity - as awesome as it is - is known to be incomplete; it doesn't work well with quantum theory. So it's not impossible that there exist circumstances under which different observers would not agree on the laws of physics. I'm not betting on this - but I wouldn't bet against it either. ("You should never bet against anything in science at odds of more than about 10-12 to 1." -- Ernest Rutherford)
No.
Can we please get this straight? DeCSS is not a copy protection scheme. CSS no more protects against copying than writing a message in code prevents it from being photocopied. CSS is about monopoly control of DVD players.
(This is disregarding the fact that the DMCA hasn't got an ethical or constitutional leg to stand on.)
These might not be insurmountable problems, if we taxed the sale of different goods at different rates, kept (or even raised) the capital gains tax when we dropped the taxes on labor income, and issued some sort of tax credit vouchers; but it would be complicated. Of course, so are income taxes.
In reality, government is inevitable - if it went away tomorrow, one way or another people would just form a new one. Governments inevitablly collect taxes to support themselves. So arguing about the ethics of taxation is rather like arguing about the ethics of continental drift. We can make changes in the specifics, but the general phenomenon of taxation will be with us for a long time to come.
Many? There's Deleware and one or two others, I thought. But it all pretty much balances out; states with lower sales taxes tend to have higher property or income taxes.Same thing if they start babbling about vendor certifications: you calmly explain that these are largely marketing ploys and not necessarily marks of highly skilled professionals; that you/your staff are well-trained, and have years of experience; that you have worked with clients x, y, and z on projects foo, bar, and baz, and here's how these projects relate to what you're going to do for them.
The key difference is that electrical contractors won't hand you a piece of paper with "Certified Square-D Circuit Breaker Installer" that he earned in a few classroom days on it. Contractor licences aren't vendor certifications, they are professional standards administered by the stateI'm surprised to find out that anyone gives a fsck about vendor "certification". I thought everyone had realized it was a meaningless scam by now. A week or two of training isn't going to get you any more knowledge than reading a good book (like an O'Reilly guide) and playing with the system a bit - and an O'Reilly guide is a hell of a lot cheaper.
From the article:
Not with knowledgable customers - or knowledgable potential employees.
In this market, skilled employees can move almost anywhere they want anytime, with or without certification. (Besides, isn't this contradictory to their complaint - Red Hat's certification sucks so bad that certified people suddenly have new opportunites arise and leave our company. Uh, yeah.)
Musicians might not be able to make a lot of money off of selling copies of their recordings; but on the other hand, they can be heard by many more people without signing their soul away to a record company, which make other sorts of income (concert tickets, band t-shirts, corporate sponsorships) more possible. And ironically it makes it possible for them to have more control over their music; the artist, not the record company, gets to decide whether their song gets turned into a jingle for some car commercial.
The problem is figuring out who to get to know! When I walk by a woman, how would I know that she likes Loony Toons and HHTG, is interested in neopaganism and Buddhism, and could tolerate a guy with a LAN in his house? I could walk right by my perfect match and never know.
While the devices described here are much too simple for this sort of matching, I can readily imagine more complex versions. I don't know that I'd ever buy one, but it doesn't seem like a bad idea.
These are the things that occasionally make me proud to be human.
(Which is putting aside the fact that the DMCA hasn't got a constitutional or ethical leg to stand on and is null and void from the start.)
I've been amusing myself lately by creating a discussion system at my unreasonable.org website. The interesting part wasn't so much coding it up (in PHP with PostgreSQL and a little Perl), but in figuring out the process - who's doing what to whom, and who might be doing other whats to someone else as I expand the system. I'll probably hack on it for a few months and then do a rewrite to clean up - but the data model shouldn't have to change.
What happens if I'm running on an old 486? (I know people who are.) What if I have Javascript turned off, or filtered by a firewall? What if I have an browser with a buggy Javascript implementation?
Unless you are in a highly controlled environment where you know the capabilities and configuration of every client, you should never, never, never do anything critical to your site on the client side.