a. Gilbert O'Sullivan vs. Biz Markie: In a 1991 lawsuit, singer Gilbert O'Sullivan sued rap performer Biz Markie, and 8 other defendants for sampling, or including without permission, a small portion of O'Sullivan's "Alone Again Naturally," Markie's song, "Alone Again."
b. The rap song borrowed just 3 words, and 8 bars of the music from O'Sullivan's hit, but what it borrowed, particularly the words, "Alone again, naturally" was an important part of the original tune.
c. Markie's attorney defended this action on the grounds that stealing bits and pieces from songs was common in the music industry, but the court ruled against the rapper.
d. Had Markie used the less recognized, or important parts of O'Sullivan's song, it is possible that there would have been no judgment against Markie.
So it's not quite as horrible as the original article suggested.
With AI, even if you're using some manner of evolutionary algorithm, the changes will happen much quicker; many thousands of 'mutations' a day may be checked for efficacy.
That is, unless we have to simulate every single sub-atomic particle. We don't yet know how complex a universe has to be for it to be able to evolve intelligent species.
The computer that the EA would run on would exist within our current universe, so it would have at most the same amount of CPU that the universe has.
So... pray that no God created us, otherwise our current universe has the minimal amount of complexity required to generate human-level intelligence within any reasonable amount of time (billions of years). (That is, assuming the God would be much more intelligent than us. If he's some guy sitting in a lab somewhere who figured out how to write an EA that would generate something more intelligent than him/her/it, then we might be in luck).
Well, Napster reports the MP3's length in seconds as well as its bitrate, so it knows which files are probably MP3s. I don't know if it filters files based on this info though.
So maybe there's a group of people out there trading zips with an extra mp3 header, using strange filenames so people can't find them as easily. But I haven't run across them.
I wish I could use some of my extra karma to moderate these posts up.:)
I think that the current system has a lot of social inertia behind it; the current system works moderately well and CmdrTaco has probably spent a lot of time fine-tuning it. I hope they get a chance to implement something like this, but I'm not holding my breath.
Finally, someone came out with a PDA that has a button arrangement for playing games.:) Very similar to a gameboy...
Re:Cool XOR pointer trick for doubly-linked lists
on
The New Garbage Man
·
· Score: 1
a ^= b;
b ^= a; a ^= b;
simply swaps the two variables without needing a temporary. There are better hacks thogh, I'm sure. Someone should write a "mind-blowing hack list to be used in asserting your dominance over the freshmen" list.
Exactly. It's a similar distinction between good hackers and bad crackers...
Hackers find problems and bring them to the attention of the public so they can get fixed asap.
Crackers find problems and then exploit them.
Really bad nasty evil crackers find problems, but only exploit them when a really tasty target comes along so that the exploit doesn't get publicly known until it can be used to get lotsa $$$.
So... amazon would probably rate somewhere in the middle of the scale... slightly above script kiddies, but not much.
I'm in awe yet again... I can't believe that Amazon really expects to keep getting broad-reaching patents without something happening. My only conclusion is that they must be doing this to force the courts to realize how idiotic some software patents can be. And they get to make a buck or two along the way.
I contend that a really evil company would be more stealthy in trying to take over the world. For instance, if Microsoft had been not -quite- so pushy in forcing hardware OEMs to bundle their OS, they might have been able to amass power longer without drawing negative attention, and thus be better prepared for the negative attention when it happened.
regarding 'good spam' vs. 'bad spam', you are _quite_ insane
:) *shrug* So I was trying to not be knee-jerk about it, so sue me.
There seem to be gray areas with spam... not all unsolicited email is necessarily unwanted? not all unsolicited email from organizations are even unwanted? Certainly not all spam is good and if we could find a technical way to eliminate it, it'd be cool, but I don't know that the issue is that clear cut. Maybe I haven't thought about it long enough.
How the hell is an advertiser supposed to determine whether an individual lives in Colorado, or whether an e-mail address is owned by a resident of Colorado? Is any viable method provided for legitimate advertisers (or anyone, for that matter) to determine this?
As an ISP in Colorado, the first thing I would do is setup filters on anything with a subject line starting with 'ADV:' - I've instantly solved all of my spam problems? Umm.. probably not.
Maybe it's not enforcable, but maybe we could pull a social engineering trick here:
Concede that certain kinds of spam (eg. JCPenny sales) are less agressive and annoying than other forms of spam (eg. porn/get-rich-quick)
Don't have ISPs filter out email based on the string. Even if they did filter, the JCPennies will still put the ADV, and the get-rich-quickers still won't.
Get the law passed in enough states that at least US-based advertisers just put the ADV in so they don't have to go through the effort of figuring out the destination state.
Public opinion will become more negative towards the get-rich-quickers (because they're not playing by the rules), and perhaps that'd be enough to keep the "bad spam" to a dull roar.
If you've had much contact with security specialists working for the government, how much confidence do you have in them that they're smart enough to:
Understand the problem well enough
Spot good solutions if they come along
Slashdot generally seems to feel that the government doesn't have a clue about tech issues, but the NSA has had its moments of brilliance in the past.
DDoS attacks ARE a problem. I could imagine that they could serve as terrorist/psychological attacks in time of war. Because the computers that are doing the actual DoS attacks could be within the country being attacked, the attacks would be nearly impossible to stop at the borders.
I believe there's some law about real-life protesting... you're allowed to stand in front of a building and protest, as long as you don't prevent customers from getting into the building. I assume that it's not a huge stretch to extend that law to the 'net.
And in other news: A different type of DoS attack is being carried out against Yahoo. At least 40 web articles have been written so far, showing evidence of how many reporters must be calling Yahoo right now. Once the second round of DoS attacks are stopped, the techies can finally get some work done beefing up the site.
Is this the new preferred method of trolling? It's similar to the Crash Eschelon project... put out enough rubish that's not obviously rubish so that they waste processing power on useless stuff.
44% of people did not distribute because there was no "unfirom secure distribution system." That's more than the 16% of record execs. How many artists is that?
Piracy is a problem... music producers need to put bread on the table; getting a lot of recognition isn't enough. This is true even if you destroy the giant music companies. But inconviencing the consumer isn't the best way to make money or to encourage them to come back.
It's nice that we can get public TV, Babelfish, Google, and Linux for free, but until music producers find a novel and unobtrusive way to make money, they'll still need to be paid directly and they'll need to try to prevent piracy.
What SDMI is, what it's not? David Futrelle from IBM has a comment about that:
As far as I can tell, the main aim of the plan [using SDMI] seems to be to confuse consumers as to what is and isn't kosher in the digital music arena so none of them will have time left to engage in music piracy.
Instead of trying to make it harder for the consumer, he suggests that the music industry makeit easier for people to get to music. He contends that searching for illegal takes time and it's difficult to find the exact song you're looking for. If the music industry were to make it extremely convenient to get songs from them, consumers would pay a small amount of change for each song in exchange for the time saved.
I found a survey about SDMI here. 32% of the people who took the survey were musicians or songwriters, and 16% were executives or label owners.
There are several interesting results:
For the people who don't have music available on the web, there were several reasons given. Piracy was halfway down the list.
56% of the people responded No to "Has the lack of a uniform secure distribution system limited your distribution of music online?"
33% responded "RIIA" to "Do you feel that SDMI has furthered the objectives of the RIAA or the industry as a whole?"
64% responded "Detrimental" to "Do you feel that the fact that the SDMI decision making process, not being open to the public, press or interested parties, had a detrimental or positive impact on the group's work?"
Seriously though, is the PS2 suited for scientific calculations? It's optimized for graphics, not raw power, right?
What about a render farm of them? Could you use the 3D accel to speed up image processing, or would it be no different than scientific processing?
What about the network? The PS2 will supposedly support PCMCIA cards, so could you just stick a 100Mbps ethernet in it? That would put the price at $450 each, but that's still a great deal for each node. Plus they're small (but not directly rack-mountable).
"It [Emotion Engine] could provide the processing power for the PlayStation 2 to challenge cheap PCs as the entry-level device of choice for home access to the Web."
which is nothing like "they're going to replace PCs as we know it".
Someone will want to port linux to it though... which will lead to hooking them up with that "B" word.
Slashdot Mirror
- a. Gilbert O'Sullivan vs. Biz Markie: In a 1991 lawsuit, singer Gilbert O'Sullivan sued rap performer Biz Markie, and 8 other defendants for sampling, or including without permission, a small portion of O'Sullivan's "Alone Again Naturally," Markie's song, "Alone Again."
So it's not quite as horrible as the original article suggested.b. The rap song borrowed just 3 words, and 8 bars of the music from O'Sullivan's hit, but what it borrowed, particularly the words, "Alone again, naturally" was an important part of the original tune.
c. Markie's attorney defended this action on the grounds that stealing bits and pieces from songs was common in the music industry, but the court ruled against the rapper.
d. Had Markie used the less recognized, or important parts of O'Sullivan's song, it is possible that there would have been no judgment against Markie.
That is, unless we have to simulate every single sub-atomic particle. We don't yet know how complex a universe has to be for it to be able to evolve intelligent species.
The computer that the EA would run on would exist within our current universe, so it would have at most the same amount of CPU that the universe has.
So... pray that no God created us, otherwise our current universe has the minimal amount of complexity required to generate human-level intelligence within any reasonable amount of time (billions of years). (That is, assuming the God would be much more intelligent than us. If he's some guy sitting in a lab somewhere who figured out how to write an EA that would generate something more intelligent than him/her/it, then we might be in luck).
So maybe there's a group of people out there trading zips with an extra mp3 header, using strange filenames so people can't find them as easily. But I haven't run across them.
Since the link is broken at the moment, here's a link to the story: Agilent Optical Switch
See The Coming of the Fibersphere, a great essay about something that this switch makes possible.
I think that the current system has a lot of social inertia behind it; the current system works moderately well and CmdrTaco has probably spent a lot of time fine-tuning it. I hope they get a chance to implement something like this, but I'm not holding my breath.
Finally, someone came out with a PDA that has a button arrangement for playing games. :) Very similar to a gameboy...
- a ^= b;
simply swaps the two variables without needing a temporary. There are better hacks thogh, I'm sure. Someone should write a "mind-blowing hack list to be used in asserting your dominance over the freshmen" list.b ^= a;
a ^= b;
Hackers find problems and bring them to the attention of the public so they can get fixed asap.
Crackers find problems and then exploit them.
Really bad nasty evil crackers find problems, but only exploit them when a really tasty target comes along so that the exploit doesn't get publicly known until it can be used to get lotsa $$$.
So... amazon would probably rate somewhere in the middle of the scale... slightly above script kiddies, but not much.
I contend that a really evil company would be more stealthy in trying to take over the world. For instance, if Microsoft had been not -quite- so pushy in forcing hardware OEMs to bundle their OS, they might have been able to amass power longer without drawing negative attention, and thus be better prepared for the negative attention when it happened.
Conclusion: Amazon is not a truly evil company?
:) *shrug* So I was trying to not be knee-jerk about it, so sue me.
There seem to be gray areas with spam... not all unsolicited email is necessarily unwanted? not all unsolicited email from organizations are even unwanted? Certainly not all spam is good and if we could find a technical way to eliminate it, it'd be cool, but I don't know that the issue is that clear cut. Maybe I haven't thought about it long enough.
- How the hell is an advertiser supposed to determine whether an individual lives in Colorado, or whether an e-mail address is owned by a resident of Colorado? Is any viable method provided for legitimate advertisers (or anyone, for that matter) to determine this?
- As an ISP in Colorado, the first thing I would do is setup filters on anything with a subject line starting with 'ADV:' - I've instantly solved all of my spam problems? Umm.. probably not.
Maybe it's not enforcable, but maybe we could pull a social engineering trick here:Selling quake is illegal? How'd they manage that? And why??
you see this, and block it...
it says "I can't see HQ, someone must be screwing with me, I'll shut down".
This might even be enforcable by DCMA for "attempting to circumvent a security measure".
MSN was hit on tuesday though. The attack continued from 6pm until the next morning.
- Understand the problem well enough
- Spot good solutions if they come along
Slashdot generally seems to feel that the government doesn't have a clue about tech issues, but the NSA has had its moments of brilliance in the past.DDoS attacks ARE a problem. I could imagine that they could serve as terrorist/psychological attacks in time of war. Because the computers that are doing the actual DoS attacks could be within the country being attacked, the attacks would be nearly impossible to stop at the borders.
I believe there's some law about real-life protesting... you're allowed to stand in front of a building and protest, as long as you don't prevent customers from getting into the building. I assume that it's not a huge stretch to extend that law to the 'net.
Cyberattack Cripples Yahoo (APBNews)
Who's Behing Yahoo Attack? (ZDNet)
FBI talks with Yahoo! about attack (ZDNet)
How a basic attack crippled Yahoo (CNet) (with stupid protocol animations too!)
And in other news: A different type of DoS attack is being carried out against Yahoo. At least 40 web articles have been written so far, showing evidence of how many reporters must be calling Yahoo right now. Once the second round of DoS attacks are stopped, the techies can finally get some work done beefing up the site.
Is this the new preferred method of trolling? It's similar to the Crash Eschelon project... put out enough rubish that's not obviously rubish so that they waste processing power on useless stuff.
Piracy is a problem... music producers need to put bread on the table; getting a lot of recognition isn't enough. This is true even if you destroy the giant music companies. But inconviencing the consumer isn't the best way to make money or to encourage them to come back.
It's nice that we can get public TV, Babelfish, Google, and Linux for free, but until music producers find a novel and unobtrusive way to make money, they'll still need to be paid directly and they'll need to try to prevent piracy.
Or have I completely missed the mark?
- As far as I can tell, the main aim of the plan [using SDMI] seems to be to confuse consumers as to what is and isn't kosher in the digital music arena so none of them will have time left to engage in music piracy.
Instead of trying to make it harder for the consumer, he suggests that the music industry makeit easier for people to get to music. He contends that searching for illegal takes time and it's difficult to find the exact song you're looking for. If the music industry were to make it extremely convenient to get songs from them, consumers would pay a small amount of change for each song in exchange for the time saved.There are several interesting results:
For the people who don't have music available on the web, there were several reasons given. Piracy was halfway down the list.
56% of the people responded No to "Has the lack of a uniform secure distribution system limited your distribution of music online?"
33% responded "RIIA" to "Do you feel that SDMI has furthered the objectives of the RIAA or the industry as a whole?"
64% responded "Detrimental" to "Do you feel that the fact that the SDMI decision making process, not being open to the public, press or interested parties, had a detrimental or positive impact on the group's work?"
There are many more questions on the survey, read it for yourself.
Seriously though, is the PS2 suited for scientific calculations? It's optimized for graphics, not raw power, right?
What about a render farm of them? Could you use the 3D accel to speed up image processing, or would it be no different than scientific processing?
What about the network? The PS2 will supposedly support PCMCIA cards, so could you just stick a 100Mbps ethernet in it? That would put the price at $450 each, but that's still a great deal for each node. Plus they're small (but not directly rack-mountable).
- "It [Emotion Engine] could provide the processing power for the PlayStation 2 to challenge cheap PCs as the entry-level device of choice for home access to the Web."
which is nothing like "they're going to replace PCs as we know it".Someone will want to port linux to it though... which will lead to hooking them up with that "B" word.
Got any other info on Mr. O'Connor? Know his middle name or address?