Jon was not questioned under the DMCA, which obviously has no authority in Norway.
Technically that's correct... But the DMCA is just the American incarnation of the WIPO treaty, which Norway (and basically everybody else) has signed. All the nations participating in the treaty are obligated to adopt their own DMCA, whatever they choose to call it. Presumably Norway has done so.
Did I just defend Katz?
Somebody has to say it...
on
Happy Pi Day!
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· Score: 1
This kind of review is the geek equivalent of the football star who picks on the kid with tape on his glasses.
I think it depends on the movie. Complaining about scientific innacuracy in Star Trek: Insurrection, or (god forbid) The Phantom Menace, would be extremely geeky. (In the negative sense.) But MtM was heavily promoted for its realism. DePalma:
Unlike a lot of other science fiction films, the director acknowledges, the most exciting aspect of making the movie was to create realism... "A very important part of the process of writing the script and producing the movie was to keep it as NASA-accurate as possible. It is a work of fiction, but we wanted the science and physics of astronauts getting there to be factual. Many aspects of the script are based on NASA theory and how they would actually plan a Mars mission."
The other problem here is that not only does the movie fail to portray accurate science, it reinforces popular pseudoscience. Others have provided plenty of examples, I won't repeat them... Except maybe the "face" on Mars. Throwing that in was nothing but educational terrorism.
Honestly, it's because of crap like this that Americans are so ignorant about how their own world works (let alone others.) I really believe that.
Anyway, even if you don't mind the scientific innacuracies... Wasn't this movie done before, and a hell of a lot better, in 2010?
What happens if somebody intercepts a bunch of physical this-is-your-PIN letters on their way to the voters
Supposedly, the system verifies your identity using "other personal information"... Probably your mother's maiden name, SSN, that sort of thing.
or -- better yet -- snoops on their PINs when they're being sent online?
The system only allows you to vote once, so this shouldn't be a problem. And incidentally, according to http://election.com/political/ar izona/security.htm, they do use SSL. Of course I can't check for myself.
Sure, it's not foolproof. But it's probably a lot more secure than the complicated paper systems that are in general use.
Very little "technical muscle" is necessary to play DVDs from a particular region. The region ID is just stored in the clear on the DVD, it's up to players to enforce it. If the PS2 can play any encrypted DVDs (which presumably it can,) then its inability to play region 2 DVDs is just a simple (alarmingly stupid) bug.
What I wonder is, if it can't play region 2 DVDs, what can it play? There are region-free DVDs, but not many. I wonder if the current PS2 plays region 1 (American) DVDs? If so, that would be a much more serious issue for the DVD CCA than DeCSS...
IE 5 already does most of this. You can add sites to your "Restricted Zone" or "Trusted Zone", and give them different privleges (e.g. no javascript, no ActiveX, no cookies).
It's not perfect, though. You can only have the four fixed security zones, no more. And it could really use an easier way to block sites, such as a "this site is evil" button on the toolbar.
Personally, what I do is set my default cookie setting to "prompt", and then whenever I see a cookie that's suspicious, I add the domain to my restricted list.
I'm not saying that IE is the perfect browser when it comes to privacy, but if you're using it anyway, it's not too hard to set it up pretty tightly.
Look at it this way... Let's say we let Galileo crash into Europa. (Isn't that extraordinarily unlikely, anyway?) Thirty years later, we land a probe on Europa, and it discovers a colony of organisms near the Galileo crash site. What's the most plausible explanation?
The first scientists to announce the discovery of living extraterrestrial organisms are going to want to be damn sure they've covered all the other possibilities first. We may as well prevent Galileo from becoming an issue in the first place.
Yeah, but carrying a computer and CD-ROM drive around with you could be a pain.
Which gives me a (somewhat offtopic) idea... You know what we really need? Business card size disposable computers, with a nice little color LCD, and enough power to run a little kiosk-type browser. The technology probably isn't too far off...
I have the right to deny you access for exercising this right.
Of course that's true. One of the facets of having a right is having the right to waive that right. (This is rapidly changing in the U.S., but that's another issue...)
But he's missing the point: When he "licensed" the original Quake source, Carmack excercised his right to deny Slade the right to deny anyone else access to his code. In other words, Slade's license to use the source is based on his agreement to not require the waiver in question. He's free to restrict people, but the moment he does, his loses his right to distribute the source.
Hmmm... I don't think it's possible to express this clearly. But rest assured that Slade's trick is B.S., at least in my non-lawyer opinion.
Only system software can launch a separate task. The multi-tasking API is not available to developer applications.
I've never actually written for the Palm (too many resrictive agreements to get the SDK, thought I gather it's easier now,) so I don't know how this plays out in practice, but that's what the documentation says.
I forgot to add, the Cassiopeia is roughly the same size as the Palm IIIc, despite all those other differences. It is about 50% heavier, but I actually kind of like that; it doesn't feel as toylike as the Palm, and I don't really notice the extra three ounces in my pocket. (By the way, I did use a PalmPilot Pro for about two years before it stopped working and I replaced it.)
I don't know about battery life, but I'm sure it's comparable to the Palm. And I think WinCE is actually much easier to use, given that it tries to do so much more.
I don't want MP3 (not enough memory to make it worthwhile),
Actually, the Cassiopeia makes a great MP3 player, after you pop in a 340MB CF hard drive. (Not an option for the Palm.)
and for damn sure I don't want Windows.
And of course, that's the real reason.
And what is the "just in case" scenario on a palmtop that requires multitasking and 65,000 colors?
Well, let's see... Digital photography (using the camera attachment), listening to an MP3 while doing anything else, killing an app when it goes flaky (and yes, that happens on Palms too)... But really, my biggest reason is just that I like to know it's there. It's a real computer, not an overgrown pocket calculator.
I'll stop here, because I'm starting to sound like a shill for Casio. I just don't understand why people are going nuts over this "new" Palm IIIc, when it's substantially inferior to stuff that's been around for months.
I bought a Cassiopeia E-100 (WinCE machine) about four months ago. It cost $50 less (street price is probably equal); it has 16 bit color instead of 8 bit color, a larger and higher resolution screen, 16MB storage vs. 8MB, a standard compact flash slot, a real OS (protected memory, multitasking, etc.), and probably a faster CPU (just guessing on that.)
Now, don't get me wrong, I know that most people don't need a color screen in a PDA, or multitasking, etc. But if, like me, you like to have those features there just in case... What on earth does the IIIc have going for it? Is it just Palm's monopoly power?
(Before anyone flames me... Yes, the PalmOS does preemptively multitask, but only when running Palm code. You can't write a multitasked app for it.)
13 billion years is not enough for any black hole to disappear. There are calculations and theories that show that a black hole of size of our solar system may completely evaporate in 10^70 years. The evaporation is due to matter/antimatter synthesis. There is one particle of antimatter that is produced each second in a volume of 1 square kilometer. This particle annihilates one particle of 'normal' matter. The antimatter particle's don't come from 'nowhere'. They are evaporated from a black hole.
It's not matter-antimatter annihilation, it's matter-"exotic matter" annihilation. "Exotic matter" (there may be a better name for it) is particles with negative mass-energy.
The reason why this is relevant is that matter + antimatter = lots of energy, whereas matter + exotic matter = nothing, thus preserving conservation of energy.
What actually happens is that everywhere in the universe, pairs of particles with positive and negative energy are constantly appearing, as a consequence of quantum mechanics. Normally these particles immediately annihilate eachother, leaving nothing, but near a black hole, the negative half of the pair sometimes falls past the event horizon before it can find its mate. Once it does that, there's nothing that can get it back out again, so the positive particle becomes "real". (And the black hole, having "gained" negative mass, becomes smaller.)
The thing is, larger black holes take longer to evaporate than smaller ones (maybe because of tidal forces?), and for all but the very smallest (hypothetical) black holes, the leftover radiation from the big bang is more than enough to offset the evaporation and keep them growing. So yes, the quasar in question is definitely still around, although I have no idea whether it's still a quasar or not.
As soon as I posted that comment, I knew I should have clarified: Of course 1394 can be used internally. USB can be used internally, too. Parallel ATA can be used externally. But that's not how they're intended to be used.
I should have remembered that the G4 has an internal 1394 port... To make up for my mistake, I spent the past 20 minutes searching for internal firewire devices, and I couldn't find a single one. If 1394 is really intended to replace ATA, then why does Apple still use ATA drives in their latest machines? (It's not like they're big on backwards compatibility these days...)
I stand by my original statement: 1394 and Serial ATA are not competing standards. They do different things conceptually, even though the technology is similar. It wouldn't be the first time that marketing has driven technology.
AFAIK, Firewire is not intended for use with internal devices. (Its internal counterpart is Device Bay, which, unfortunately, looks pretty dead.)
For that matter, Serial ATA is not intended for external devices, so they're really apples and oranges. (No pun intended.)
I, for one, am excited to see somebody is finally addressing the issue of internal connections. Installing a "parallel" ATA drive seems like such a cumbersome process in the era of USB.
The person you're responding to isn't talking about bitwise copies.
I'm sorry, you're right, I meant to include a disclaimer about that. It wasn't clear to me whether or not that was what he meant.
Yes, you can make analog copies fairly easily, although there are a few obstacles. (Macrovision copy protection, loss of quality, and the fact that analog output jacks will be dissappearing in the distant but foreseeable future.)
At any rate, while I don't know the legal details involved, I suspect that the MPAA is much more concerned about legal precedent than about DeCSS. They're afraid that their ability to prevent copying in general might be impaired if they don't fight DeCSS. (I can see the/. comments now: "Why is the MPAA so hung up on Bob's Analog DVD Copier? You can already copy DVDs perfectly, just use DeCSS!")
You cannot make a bitwise copy of a DVD with publically available hardware.
I and a few others have been pushing this point since this fiasco started, so I won't rehash the details here. A cursory investigation of the CSS system should show why it is true.
At this time, the only feasible way to make a digital copy of a DVD is with DeCSS, or a similar program. (And granted, similar programs were around before DeCSS. Ironically, the only thing that makes DeCSS different is that it is less clearly illegal; unlike the others, it does not contain a stolen player key.)
Somebody moderate up these ACs, so it doesn't look like I'm talking to myself.:-) This is a good thread.
Visit koko.org and you will see evidence of many things including creativity (koko and michael paint), ability to understand abstract concepts such as death; express emotion, even grieve (koko to this day still remembers her cat), ability to teach each other signs, even use certain words that they do not like as prejoratives etc.
Which makes it all the more interesting that despite these abilities, she still can't handle basic grammar. It suggests that perhaps (grammatical) human language is a more significant achievement than we think it is, and may, in fact, be the dividing line between the conscious and and non-conscious.
As for the mirror situation, small children have to overcome this as well. Koko is able to look at herself in the mirror and understand that it is her, as well as that she is a gorilla.
For that matter, so can pigeons. "Self-awareness" is a better test of visual acuity than of consciousness.
While koko often uses 2 word "phrases", she also uses 3-6 word phrases shown in most conversations on the site.
This I just don't buy. An awful lot of documented bad science has gone on in these studies, and it is likely that the more extraordinary successes are the result of the "Clever Hans effect" -- due more to the expectations of the experimenter than the ability of the animal. I'd love to offer you a reference here, but my library is really more of dust cover for my floor right now (and my desk, and my chairs, and every other flat surface), so I'm not up to the task of digging out the relevant books.
I do remember one anecdote, though: On one of the famous primate studies (probably Washoe), only one of the interpreters was actually a "native speaker" of sign language. She consistently saw far fewer intelligible "utterances" than her hearing counterparts saw, and ultimately concluded that the others were simply seeing signs that weren't there.
Huh? I can tell you my mental state including emotion and thought processes at any given time.
But there are more subtle thoughts that can't be expressed in any language. This is essentially what computability theory is about, and it's really trippy. Read Godel, Escher, Bach.
Anyway, when I suggest that language (of a certain type) is necessary for consciousness, I don't necessarily mean language for communication. Consider this: Could you teach Koko to multiply two single digit numbers? Probably. Could you teach her to multiply two 10,000 digit numbers? No. She can handle the basic operations, but once you excede her memory capacity, she can't work it out on paper like a human can.
This may seem like a silly distinction to make, but it turns out that the ability to handle computations of arbitrary size is a really big deal in the context of computability theory. That's why I think that the connection between language and consciousness might be significant.
With this one. It's very well established that the Great Apes are self-aware and capable of handling human-invented sign language for communication.
On the contrary, very few linguists/cognitive scientists/primatologists take the "talking apes" seriously these days. That they can communicate is not disputed (as another poster pointed out, so can honeybees,) but they can't begin to handle "language" in the sense that linguists define it.
Any recent book on linguistics should back me up on this. Pinker's The Language Instinct would be a good place to start.
My personal impressions:
- Consciousness is probably a quantity, not a quality. If that is the case, then of course apes are conscious, and so are chickens, octopi, trees, and cornflakes... It's just a matter of degree.
- If consciousness is a quality, then I have a hunch that it's intimately linked to language. Not simply the presence of language, but the nature of a particular species' language. The fact that apes have not been able to use human language may not be due to its sheer complexity, but rather to qualities which are only found in human language. (In particular, its connection to Turing Machines...)
Incidentally, didn't the reviewer mean to refer to "Harvard entomologist E.O. Wilson", rather than James Wilson?
Doesn't GR basically say that the universe has a finite "radius" so-to-speak and that you'll end up back where you started if you could travel long enough. Looks like Hawking's carried that over into the time-dimension as well?
While it may be aesthetically pleasing to think of it that way, I don't think the two properties are related. I actually thought that Hawking's idea had more to do with quantum mechanics than relativity, in that increasing uncertainty in the size of the universe would prevent it from ever actually being 0. I might be wrong, though. IANA cosomologist. However...
Of course didn't GR also say that in order to end up back where you started it would take an infinite amount of time? (All mathematically speaking of course)
That is definitely not right. Spatially, the universe is entirely finite (at least, that's the consensus). Circumnavigating it would take a really long time, longer than the current age of the universe, but it can and will happen (once the universe has been around long enough for the light of the Big Bang to travel from one end to the other.)
Anyway, hasn't Hawking pretty much abandoned the "bounce" idea? I seem to remember him not treating it very seriously in recent editions of A Brief History of Time.
Excuse my brevity, but... BladeENC does use Fraunhofer IP, but it is the opinion of the BladeENC author that he is not subject to the patent under Swedish law. Details are here, excuse the long page.
I don't have time to look into Xing, but it's my impression that it's a commercial product. How do you know they don't pay a license fee to Fraunhofer?
Again, I'm not saying that Fraunhofer has a moral right to control MP3, and I'm not even sure they have a legal right. But it seems like they have a credible case.
In the words of Babelfish, "These programs are legal usually however not, since royalties exhaust their programmer only rarely to the institute for Fraunhofer."
Slashdot Mirror
Did I just defend Katz?
What about 3-14-15926?
Better start making plans...
The other problem here is that not only does the movie fail to portray accurate science, it reinforces popular pseudoscience. Others have provided plenty of examples, I won't repeat them... Except maybe the "face" on Mars. Throwing that in was nothing but educational terrorism.
Honestly, it's because of crap like this that Americans are so ignorant about how their own world works (let alone others.) I really believe that.
Anyway, even if you don't mind the scientific innacuracies... Wasn't this movie done before, and a hell of a lot better, in 2010 ?
Sure, it's not foolproof. But it's probably a lot more secure than the complicated paper systems that are in general use.
Very little "technical muscle" is necessary to play DVDs from a particular region. The region ID is just stored in the clear on the DVD, it's up to players to enforce it. If the PS2 can play any encrypted DVDs (which presumably it can,) then its inability to play region 2 DVDs is just a simple (alarmingly stupid) bug.
What I wonder is, if it can't play region 2 DVDs, what can it play? There are region-free DVDs, but not many. I wonder if the current PS2 plays region 1 (American) DVDs? If so, that would be a much more serious issue for the DVD CCA than DeCSS...
IE 5 already does most of this. You can add sites to your "Restricted Zone" or "Trusted Zone", and give them different privleges (e.g. no javascript, no ActiveX, no cookies).
It's not perfect, though. You can only have the four fixed security zones, no more. And it could really use an easier way to block sites, such as a "this site is evil" button on the toolbar.
Personally, what I do is set my default cookie setting to "prompt", and then whenever I see a cookie that's suspicious, I add the domain to my restricted list.
I'm not saying that IE is the perfect browser when it comes to privacy, but if you're using it anyway, it's not too hard to set it up pretty tightly.
Look at it this way... Let's say we let Galileo crash into Europa. (Isn't that extraordinarily unlikely, anyway?) Thirty years later, we land a probe on Europa, and it discovers a colony of organisms near the Galileo crash site. What's the most plausible explanation?
The first scientists to announce the discovery of living extraterrestrial organisms are going to want to be damn sure they've covered all the other possibilities first. We may as well prevent Galileo from becoming an issue in the first place.
Yeah, but carrying a computer and CD-ROM drive around with you could be a pain.
Which gives me a (somewhat offtopic) idea... You know what we really need? Business card size disposable computers, with a nice little color LCD, and enough power to run a little kiosk-type browser. The technology probably isn't too far off...
But he's missing the point: When he "licensed" the original Quake source, Carmack excercised his right to deny Slade the right to deny anyone else access to his code. In other words, Slade's license to use the source is based on his agreement to not require the waiver in question. He's free to restrict people, but the moment he does, his loses his right to distribute the source.
Hmmm... I don't think it's possible to express this clearly. But rest assured that Slade's trick is B.S., at least in my non-lawyer opinion.
I don't know about battery life, but I'm sure it's comparable to the Palm. And I think WinCE is actually much easier to use, given that it tries to do so much more.
Actually, the Cassiopeia makes a great MP3 player, after you pop in a 340MB CF hard drive. (Not an option for the Palm.)
And of course, that's the real reason.
Well, let's see... Digital photography (using the camera attachment), listening to an MP3 while doing anything else, killing an app when it goes flaky (and yes, that happens on Palms too)... But really, my biggest reason is just that I like to know it's there. It's a real computer, not an overgrown pocket calculator.
I'll stop here, because I'm starting to sound like a shill for Casio. I just don't understand why people are going nuts over this "new" Palm IIIc, when it's substantially inferior to stuff that's been around for months.
I bought a Cassiopeia E-100 (WinCE machine) about four months ago. It cost $50 less (street price is probably equal); it has 16 bit color instead of 8 bit color, a larger and higher resolution screen, 16MB storage vs. 8MB, a standard compact flash slot, a real OS (protected memory, multitasking, etc.), and probably a faster CPU (just guessing on that.)
Now, don't get me wrong, I know that most people don't need a color screen in a PDA, or multitasking, etc. But if, like me, you like to have those features there just in case... What on earth does the IIIc have going for it? Is it just Palm's monopoly power?
(Before anyone flames me... Yes, the PalmOS does preemptively multitask, but only when running Palm code. You can't write a multitasked app for it.)
The reason why this is relevant is that matter + antimatter = lots of energy, whereas matter + exotic matter = nothing, thus preserving conservation of energy.
What actually happens is that everywhere in the universe, pairs of particles with positive and negative energy are constantly appearing, as a consequence of quantum mechanics. Normally these particles immediately annihilate eachother, leaving nothing, but near a black hole, the negative half of the pair sometimes falls past the event horizon before it can find its mate. Once it does that, there's nothing that can get it back out again, so the positive particle becomes "real". (And the black hole, having "gained" negative mass, becomes smaller.)
The thing is, larger black holes take longer to evaporate than smaller ones (maybe because of tidal forces?), and for all but the very smallest (hypothetical) black holes, the leftover radiation from the big bang is more than enough to offset the evaporation and keep them growing. So yes, the quasar in question is definitely still around, although I have no idea whether it's still a quasar or not.
(IANA cosmologist. Or a quantum mechanic.)
As soon as I posted that comment, I knew I should have clarified: Of course 1394 can be used internally. USB can be used internally, too. Parallel ATA can be used externally. But that's not how they're intended to be used.
I should have remembered that the G4 has an internal 1394 port... To make up for my mistake, I spent the past 20 minutes searching for internal firewire devices, and I couldn't find a single one. If 1394 is really intended to replace ATA, then why does Apple still use ATA drives in their latest machines? (It's not like they're big on backwards compatibility these days...)
I stand by my original statement: 1394 and Serial ATA are not competing standards. They do different things conceptually, even though the technology is similar. It wouldn't be the first time that marketing has driven technology.
AFAIK, Firewire is not intended for use with internal devices. (Its internal counterpart is Device Bay, which, unfortunately, looks pretty dead.)
For that matter, Serial ATA is not intended for external devices, so they're really apples and oranges. (No pun intended.)
I, for one, am excited to see somebody is finally addressing the issue of internal connections. Installing a "parallel" ATA drive seems like such a cumbersome process in the era of USB.
Yes, you can make analog copies fairly easily, although there are a few obstacles. (Macrovision copy protection, loss of quality, and the fact that analog output jacks will be dissappearing in the distant but foreseeable future.)
At any rate, while I don't know the legal details involved, I suspect that the MPAA is much more concerned about legal precedent than about DeCSS. They're afraid that their ability to prevent copying in general might be impaired if they don't fight DeCSS. (I can see the
You cannot make a bitwise copy of a DVD with publically available hardware.
I and a few others have been pushing this point since this fiasco started, so I won't rehash the details here. A cursory investigation of the CSS system should show why it is true.
At this time, the only feasible way to make a digital copy of a DVD is with DeCSS, or a similar program. (And granted, similar programs were around before DeCSS. Ironically, the only thing that makes DeCSS different is that it is less clearly illegal; unlike the others, it does not contain a stolen player key.)
Actually, what I had in mind was that it might have millions of bugs, but the bug index just rolls over at 65k...
And they claim there's no 16-bit code left in Win2000...
:-))
(Please don't moderate this if you're not a programmer.
I do remember one anecdote, though: On one of the famous primate studies (probably Washoe), only one of the interpreters was actually a "native speaker" of sign language. She consistently saw far fewer intelligible "utterances" than her hearing counterparts saw, and ultimately concluded that the others were simply seeing signs that weren't there.But there are more subtle thoughts that can't be expressed in any language. This is essentially what computability theory is about, and it's really trippy. Read Godel, Escher, Bach .
Anyway, when I suggest that language (of a certain type) is necessary for consciousness, I don't necessarily mean language for communication. Consider this: Could you teach Koko to multiply two single digit numbers? Probably. Could you teach her to multiply two 10,000 digit numbers? No. She can handle the basic operations, but once you excede her memory capacity, she can't work it out on paper like a human can.
This may seem like a silly distinction to make, but it turns out that the ability to handle computations of arbitrary size is a really big deal in the context of computability theory. That's why I think that the connection between language and consciousness might be significant.
Any recent book on linguistics should back me up on this. Pinker's The Language Instinct would be a good place to start.
My personal impressions:
- Consciousness is probably a quantity, not a quality. If that is the case, then of course apes are conscious, and so are chickens, octopi, trees, and cornflakes... It's just a matter of degree.
- If consciousness is a quality, then I have a hunch that it's intimately linked to language. Not simply the presence of language, but the nature of a particular species' language. The fact that apes have not been able to use human language may not be due to its sheer complexity, but rather to qualities which are only found in human language. (In particular, its connection to Turing Machines...)
Incidentally, didn't the reviewer mean to refer to "Harvard entomologist E.O. Wilson", rather than James Wilson?
How about a bunch of nano-turtles pushing bits around on a chip (literally), following LOGO microcode, emulating an 8088? That'd be a kick.
Sorry, I get a kick out of perverse forms of computation like that... Someday I'm going to build a web server that runs on marbles...
Anyway, hasn't Hawking pretty much abandoned the "bounce" idea? I seem to remember him not treating it very seriously in recent editions of A Brief History of Time.
Excuse my brevity, but... BladeENC does use Fraunhofer IP, but it is the opinion of the BladeENC author that he is not subject to the patent under Swedish law. Details are here, excuse the long page.
I don't have time to look into Xing, but it's my impression that it's a commercial product. How do you know they don't pay a license fee to Fraunhofer?
Again, I'm not saying that Fraunhofer has a moral right to control MP3, and I'm not even sure they have a legal right. But it seems like they have a credible case.
In the words of Babelfish, "These programs are legal usually however not, since royalties exhaust their programmer only rarely to the institute for Fraunhofer."