Patents? Software patents? There's patents on just about everything, often multiple patents on the same thing. Bringing them into the picture just muddies the waters. There's no way (including using only proprietary software) to be free of violation of software patents. If that's what it takes for something to be legitimate, there's no point in even bothering to try; may as well just raise the Jolly Roger and start downloading everything in sight.
Canonical DOES distribute the ubuntu-restricted-extras components. If they're illegal, why isn't Canonical being sued or prosecuted?
Furthermore, while Canonical doesn't include it, and it's clearly illegal in the United States, I include DVDCSS as perfectly legitimate as well. Just because the US courts have their head up their ass and think it's OK to make it illegal to play one's own DVD on one's own DVD player doesn't mean that refusing to accept that is a case of being "opportunistic" rather than "idealistic". Rather, it's a case of being "idealistic" rather than "legalistic".
I am incredulous at this patent. When you get to [49] you realize you've been reading bloviated shaggy dog joke. Could IBM have a few smartass Slashdotters working in Engineering? My last thought is some engineers in between projects needed to work on something and this was it.
Yep, despite the image, IBM is as full as smartass programmers (and, of course, their pointy-haired nemeses, but no one doubted that) as any technology company. IBM (or a divison, anyway) is likely on one of its periodic pushes to come up with more patents, so a few smartasses came up with this one, and submitted it to their boss, who took them seriously (and didn't read through to 49). And since bonus money is likely involved, they're not going to let the boss in on the joke.
I only use bittorrent on my work computer to download linux distros and other legal content. Happy now?
As for ubuntu-restricted-extras... uh, lets see, what do we have here.
1) Support for MP3 playback and encoding. What's illegal about that? 2) Other audio formats. Same thing. 3) Microsoft fonts. Microsoft released them. They probably regret doing so, but they're legal. 4) Java runtime. Pretty sure that's legal. 5) Flash plugin. Also legal. 6) LAME, another audio encoder 7) DVD playback... sans DVDCSS2. Legal.
They're not "restricted" because they're illegal, they're "restricted" because they're neither "Open Source" or "Free Software".
Really stupid question (not a cryptographer), but is there anything wrong with using multiple hash algorithms (hopefully none derived from one another)? Surely breaking two or more hashes simultaneously would be far harder?
E.g., MD5 is broken. But what if we use both MD5 and SHA-1?
Unfortunately not; once you've broken the strongest hash, the rest can be broken in polynomial time.
This is the thing. All these people saying that they live an hours drive from the train then two hours on the train to work have chosen where to live. They picked the site because it was close to a highway so they could drive to work, and in so doing locked themselves into that mode of travel.
I live near a transit stop. I work near a transit stop. It's still a 3-seat ride taking 1:47 (by the schedule, not including walking time to and from the stops) rather than 0:45 (typical commute in heavy traffic). Since I moved to the area, I've changed jobs several times and moved twice. Also my office has moved a couple of times without my changing jobs. It's not that picking a site locked me into a mode of travel. It's that picking the wrong mode of travel would have locked me into a job and a home. Which would have sucked, because many of the places I worked for no longer exist.
Why expose your IP address by using a public tracker found on Mininova? It's just asking for trouble. Plus, the invite-only sites almost always have much better transfer speeds because ratio matters.
1) I'd never join a group which would have me for a member.
2) Being a member of an invite-only site makes me a target.
Property law isn't entirely about ethics--in fact very little law is. Instead, it's simply about balancing competing interests. Ethical conduct is the domain of criminal law and certain areas of administrative law. Most transactions aren't questions of ethics, and any ethical justification you might rationalize about copyright infringement is mooted by the ethical violations conducted in the unlawful taking. As they say, two wrongs don't make a right.
There's no ethical violation, per se, in "unlawful taking". The existence of a law forbidding something rarely makes an otherwise-ethical action ethical. Furthermore, there is no "taking" involved in copyright infringement.
Quirks in the law do need to be resolved, but it doesn't entitle a person to flaunt it simply because they feel like it.
You know, you like to use a lot of big words and pretend you're a professional in this area, but if you can't use "flout" and "flaunt" properly, you're pretty much giving away the game.
Actual reformers keep having years of hard lobbying and legal work torn apart by both sets of wankers, and the cold truth is that both groups are reviled and equally idiotic.
The only thing "actual reformers" have achieved is to make the law more and more lopsided in favor of the RIAA. If that's the work being torn apart, good.
Doesn't make it a commercial gain, though, does it. If you brew beer at home are you a commercial beer producer if it's just you who drink it?
In the United States, yes. The Robed Nine wanted a way around a few irritating constitutional restrictions, so they reasoned that by brewing beer and drinking beer at home, you were impacting the market for commercially-produced beer and therefore were subject to regulation as a commercial beer producer.
(Really? No. The real case was about growing wheat, not brewing beer, and the subject was "interstate commerce", not "commercial". But the reasoning was the same.)
Whether the Dutch have followed that sort of tortured reasoning is another question, but I'm sure the US doesn't have a monopoly on it.
The RIAA, despite their myriad flaws, are entitled to their day in court. If procedures are balanced and remedies are fair, then I believe that the RIAA's corporate sponsors will quickly decide that the game isn't worth the candle.
When it's Juggernaut (RIAA) vs. Pipsqueak (average Joe), nothing is EVER balanced or fair, except in the Fox News sense. It can't be.
1) Juggernaut's expenses to run its offense are insignificant compared to its size. Pipsqueak's legal costs are significant, perhaps even crushing, to him. 2) Juggernaut has nothing at risk. Pipsqueak is at the risk of bankruptcy if he loses. 3) Juggernaut has played this game before and knows all the moves. It's probably Pipsqueak's first experience with the system 4) This is Juggernaut's job. Pipsqueak is forced to divert time and effort from his life and work to deal with it.
If you wanted fair you shouldn't have joined a society.
I didn't. I was born into one. And because various societies control all useful land (and seas) on Earth, I have no choice but to be subject to one or another.
Society is about the weak banding together to take from the strong and prevent the strong from taking from them. Whether the strong are the physically strong, militarily strong, intellectually strong, or economically strong.
No, society is about some strong people banding together and making sure their own form of strength is the one which counts.
Why on earth would you want to build a data centre? Moore's Law means that most functions that previously required arrays of expensive hardware can be done with a single server.
Needs expand with available capacity.
If your needs are greater than that, surely it makes sense to buy capacity from a cloud computing vendor such as Amazon EC2.
If the data processing is central to your business, it doesn't make sense to outsource it.
It might be the point of view of one man, but it's not a crazy position to take. I for one would want any medical treatment fully tested and certified, irrespective of if it's made out of 'modified' bits of me.
The catch is, each treatment is different. Meaning each one will have to be fully tested and certified. Meaning you'll be long dead before the treatment is allowed. But, it gets even better -- a treatment derived from your own stem cells is only valid for you. So there aren't sufficient possible test subjects. So the test can't be run anyway.
It seems to be difficult for people to understand Red Hat's business model, they are not a software company like Oracle or Microsoft. Oracle and Microsoft provide both software licensing and service, Red Hat provides service. The profit margins on software licensing are insanely high for any mass deployed application as the reproduction cost is virtually zero. Red Hat does not license software so they do not benefit from the fake limited supply created by closed source licensing. Comparing the margins is, well, dumb.
The fact that reproduction cost is "virtually zero" means that you can fairly compare the net margins, not that you can't.
Why don't you take your snide 'try reading a history book or two' remark and shove it up your ass? The Soviets and Chinese accounted for 88% (yes, eight-eight percent) of all Allied military casualties. It doesn't matter how important you think the US intervention was. The fact remains that many more Americans and Britons would have died fighting that war if it wasn't for the Soviets and Chinese bleeding the Axis powers.
If I may dare to quote an American (Patton) on this subject: "The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other guy die for his."
The fact that the Soviets and Chinese died in far greater numbers doesn't mean their contribution was greater.
Lawmakers, listen very carefully. E-bullying is not really any different than bullying. Freedom of Speech is very important and powerful, but it does not excuse one from being responsible or accepting the consequences of their actions from using said Right. Period.
Then you should be happy with this bill; it simply makes two years in prison the consequences of using said right.
No, you're right; it's slavery. Not being caned just means the master isn't quite as brutal, not that he isn't the master.
At any job, if you're dissatisfied with your employer or your work, you can try any number of things, but if your employer isn't interested in working with you, you've only got one real recourse, and that's to leave. Works pretty much the same way the other way; if you're insistent on not doing the job, your employer can't compel you to do it, but he can fire you.
If your employer can, via a broad noncompete or other means, wipe out your ability to secure other employment, he's got you over a barrel. You're his slave.
Normally, water vapor all freezes out of the atmosphere before it gets that high, so there isn't much ice at ozone layer altitudes. Hydrogen, however, happily floats up that high, where it is oxidized by the ozone and forms ice.
It would be a very weak ozone depeletor. CFCs are a problem because the chlorine isn't consumed in the reaction. One molecule of hydrogen can combine with one molecule of ozone, but then it's done.
Carbon black production Hydrocarbon + O2 -> C (carbon black) + H2O + CO2 + other carbon-containing waste
Hydrogen production by steam reforming (requires energy input) CH4 + H2O -> CO + 3H2
"New" process (also requires energy input) CH4 -> C + H2
So looked at as a method of carbon black and hydrogen production, it certainly seems better, but it depends on the relative amounts of energy used for steam reforming versus the "new" process. But if you basically throw away the hydrogen by mixing it back in with the natural gas (as the article suggests), you're wasting a lot of the gain that would be achieved by displacing the steam reforming process.
I'm not really buying the idea that hydrogen-enriched natural gas will burn more cleanly. It will produce less CO2, true, but at the price of less energy per unit volume. And natural gas can already be burned less completely.
I put the scare quotes around "new" because this isn't a new process. According to Wikipedia, not only was it developed (by Kvaerner) in the 1980s, it's actually already in use in Norway for producing hydrogen and carbon black.
Name: The Cult of Apple, Orthodox Gathering of the Tribes: None since the diaspora Major Deity: Steve Wozniak Antichrist: Steve Jobs Sacred Relics: The original Apple I, green screen monitors, the Disc II Mantra: Apple II Forever
For commercial content that is. There's no DRM even on the Kindle for your own content, but you are deluding yourself if you think major publishers are going to allow DRM-free e-books. If you don't want DRM, you are going to be limited to Project Gutenberg and the works of Cory Doctorow, basically.
And Baen's entire output, and some of the works on Fictionwise.
Anyway, as I understand it, even for non-DRMed works, you have to go through Amazon's servers to load stuff onto your Kindle. That's a show-stopper for me. I want to be able to load my books directly from my PC, and not go through some third party on the net (who may in the future go away, add restrictions, or send my reading list to the Department of Homeland Security).
My current eBook is an REB-1100. I'd like something with better resolution and at least grayscale, but not if I can't load books from my computer.
Elk Cloner didn't live in the boot sector. It lived on Track 2, within the DOS area but not the boot sector. Whether a boot sector virus for the Apple II could actually be written is another question. My guess would be "yes" (by using the controller ROM to do most of the work), but it couldn't have much of a payload.
I had the misfortune of catching Cloner when it was in the wild. The program "MASTER CREATE" from the original DOS 3.3 disks (provided they were uninfected) would effectively wipe it out (by replacing the DOS). It hardly deserves to be on a top ten "worst" viruses list; I don't think the PC boot sector viruses are actually inspired by it, despite what the article says.
The problem is that they also gained access to a huge supply of bank account, credit card numbers and such. This itself can be consider a huge crime, even if they weren't planning to use them themselves.
Any retail clerk gains access to a huge supply of credit card numbers. Merely gaining access to such is not a crime, yet.
Legally speaking, hijacking it didn't differ much from creating a botnet for yourself.
Except for the part where you didn't cause (by fraud or via a security hole) the installation of software on the affected machine, and the botnet creator did.
Also hijacking a botnet ofcourse involves interracting with the infected computers, which is a crime.
The laws which make that a crime also make interacting with a web server a crime. They're broken. Furthermore, in this case, the communication was initiated by the infected computers.
Many of the most significant advances in medical science over the past 100 years has to do with a better understanding of nutrition and hygiene. The fact is, "we know better" than to each much of the crap we eat which often leads to sicknesses we wouldn't otherwise get. Quite a few medicines suppress or weaken your immune system as well.
So precisely what is it we eat that causes arthritis (the most common indication for Vioxx)?
Aspirin is good medicine. Nothing has completely replaced it. They will sell you a lot of more advanced things, but aspirin is good and it's "inferior." Quite often things are sold as newer or superior when it is actually quite the same as the thing before it but with a new combination of components or manufacturing process and most importantly, "A New Patent!" Be careful about that.
Aspirin is good. But it has negative effects, like promoting ulcers, particularly with long-term use. It also has a dose-response relationship for pain relief which levels off, though the side-effects continue to get worse. And it's a fairly short-acting medication. The COX-2 inhibitors relieve pain better, for longer, with fewer gastrointestinal side effects. They also slightly increase the chance of heart attack, which is why most of them got banned, but IMO that's a foolish trade of quantity of life for quality of life.
(Not that this is new. After Y2K, did we see any effort to fix the 2038 bug? Nooooo. It's a long time off and we'll have replaced all our software by then, just like we did with our two-digit-date software before 2000.)
Actually, yes. Or, at least, there's a reason for that 64-bit time_t in modern Unixes.
Slashdot Mirror
Patents? Software patents? There's patents on just about everything, often multiple patents on the same thing. Bringing them into the picture just muddies the waters. There's no way (including using only proprietary software) to be free of violation of software patents. If that's what it takes for something to be legitimate, there's no point in even bothering to try; may as well just raise the Jolly Roger and start downloading everything in sight.
Canonical DOES distribute the ubuntu-restricted-extras components. If they're illegal, why isn't Canonical being sued or prosecuted?
Furthermore, while Canonical doesn't include it, and it's clearly illegal in the United States, I include DVDCSS as perfectly legitimate as well. Just because the US courts have their head up their ass and think it's OK to make it illegal to play one's own DVD on one's own DVD player doesn't mean that refusing to accept that is a case of being "opportunistic" rather than "idealistic". Rather, it's a case of being "idealistic" rather than "legalistic".
Yep, despite the image, IBM is as full as smartass programmers (and, of course, their pointy-haired nemeses, but no one doubted that) as any technology company. IBM (or a divison, anyway) is likely on one of its periodic pushes to come up with more patents, so a few smartasses came up with this one, and submitted it to their boss, who took them seriously (and didn't read through to 49). And since bonus money is likely involved, they're not going to let the boss in on the joke.
I only use bittorrent on my work computer to download linux distros and other legal content. Happy now?
As for ubuntu-restricted-extras... uh, lets see, what do we have here.
1) Support for MP3 playback and encoding. What's illegal about that?
2) Other audio formats. Same thing.
3) Microsoft fonts. Microsoft released them. They probably regret doing so, but they're legal.
4) Java runtime. Pretty sure that's legal.
5) Flash plugin. Also legal.
6) LAME, another audio encoder
7) DVD playback... sans DVDCSS2. Legal.
They're not "restricted" because they're illegal, they're "restricted" because they're neither "Open Source" or "Free Software".
Unfortunately not; once you've broken the strongest hash, the rest can be broken in polynomial time.
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.general/5154
I live near a transit stop. I work near a transit stop. It's still a 3-seat ride taking 1:47 (by the schedule, not including walking time to and from the stops) rather than 0:45 (typical commute in heavy traffic). Since I moved to the area, I've changed jobs several times and moved twice. Also my office has moved a couple of times without my changing jobs. It's not that picking a site locked me into a mode of travel. It's that picking the wrong mode of travel would have locked me into a job and a home. Which would have sucked, because many of the places I worked for no longer exist.
1) I'd never join a group which would have me for a member.
2) Being a member of an invite-only site makes me a target.
There's no ethical violation, per se, in "unlawful taking". The existence of a law forbidding something rarely makes an otherwise-ethical action ethical. Furthermore, there is no "taking" involved in copyright infringement.
You know, you like to use a lot of big words and pretend you're a professional in this area, but if you can't use "flout" and "flaunt" properly, you're pretty much giving away the game.
The only thing "actual reformers" have achieved is to make the law more and more lopsided in favor of the RIAA. If that's the work being torn apart, good.
In the United States, yes. The Robed Nine wanted a way around a few irritating constitutional restrictions, so they reasoned that by brewing beer and drinking beer at home, you were impacting the market for commercially-produced beer and therefore were subject to regulation as a commercial beer producer.
(Really? No. The real case was about growing wheat, not brewing beer, and the subject was "interstate commerce", not "commercial". But the reasoning was the same.)
Whether the Dutch have followed that sort of tortured reasoning is another question, but I'm sure the US doesn't have a monopoly on it.
When it's Juggernaut (RIAA) vs. Pipsqueak (average Joe), nothing is EVER balanced or fair, except in the Fox News sense. It can't be.
1) Juggernaut's expenses to run its offense are insignificant compared to its size. Pipsqueak's legal costs are significant, perhaps even crushing, to him.
2) Juggernaut has nothing at risk. Pipsqueak is at the risk of bankruptcy if he loses.
3) Juggernaut has played this game before and knows all the moves. It's probably Pipsqueak's first experience with the system
4) This is Juggernaut's job. Pipsqueak is forced to divert time and effort from his life and work to deal with it.
And that's before any cheating by Juggernaut.
I didn't. I was born into one. And because various societies control all useful land (and seas) on Earth, I have no choice but to be subject to one or another.
No, society is about some strong people banding together and making sure their own form of strength is the one which counts.
Yes, it does. Follow the links to the bill. They not only redefined "television set", they redefined "broadcast" as well.
Needs expand with available capacity.
If the data processing is central to your business, it doesn't make sense to outsource it.
The catch is, each treatment is different. Meaning each one will have to be fully tested and certified. Meaning you'll be long dead before the treatment is allowed. But, it gets even better -- a treatment derived from your own stem cells is only valid for you. So there aren't sufficient possible test subjects. So the test can't be run anyway.
The fact that reproduction cost is "virtually zero" means that you can fairly compare the net margins, not that you can't.
If I may dare to quote an American (Patton) on this subject: "The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other guy die for his."
The fact that the Soviets and Chinese died in far greater numbers doesn't mean their contribution was greater.
Then you should be happy with this bill; it simply makes two years in prison the consequences of using said right.
No, you're right; it's slavery. Not being caned just means the master isn't quite as brutal, not that he isn't the master.
At any job, if you're dissatisfied with your employer or your work, you can try any number of things, but if your employer isn't interested in working with you, you've only got one real recourse, and that's to leave. Works pretty much the same way the other way; if you're insistent on not doing the job, your employer can't compel you to do it, but he can fire you.
If your employer can, via a broad noncompete or other means, wipe out your ability to secure other employment, he's got you over a barrel. You're his slave.
It would be a very weak ozone depeletor. CFCs are a problem because the chlorine isn't consumed in the reaction. One molecule of hydrogen can combine with one molecule of ozone, but then it's done.
Current processes
Carbon black production
Hydrocarbon + O2 -> C (carbon black) + H2O + CO2 + other carbon-containing waste
Hydrogen production by steam reforming (requires energy input)
CH4 + H2O -> CO + 3H2
"New" process (also requires energy input)
CH4 -> C + H2
So looked at as a method of carbon black and hydrogen production, it certainly seems better, but it depends on the relative amounts of energy used for steam reforming versus the "new" process. But if you basically throw away the hydrogen by mixing it back in with the natural gas (as the article suggests), you're wasting a lot of the gain that would be achieved by displacing the steam reforming process.
I'm not really buying the idea that hydrogen-enriched natural gas will burn more cleanly. It will produce less CO2, true, but at the price of less energy per unit volume. And natural gas can already be burned less completely.
I put the scare quotes around "new" because this isn't a new process. According to Wikipedia, not only was it developed (by Kvaerner) in the 1980s, it's actually already in use in Norway for producing hydrogen and carbon black.
Name: The Cult of Apple, Orthodox
Gathering of the Tribes: None since the diaspora
Major Deity: Steve Wozniak
Antichrist: Steve Jobs
Sacred Relics: The original Apple I, green screen monitors, the Disc II
Mantra: Apple II Forever
And Baen's entire output, and some of the works on Fictionwise.
Anyway, as I understand it, even for non-DRMed works, you have to go through Amazon's servers to load stuff onto your Kindle. That's a show-stopper for me. I want to be able to load my books directly from my PC, and not go through some third party on the net (who may in the future go away, add restrictions, or send my reading list to the Department of Homeland Security).
My current eBook is an REB-1100. I'd like something with better resolution and at least grayscale, but not if I can't load books from my computer.
Elk Cloner didn't live in the boot sector. It lived on Track 2, within the DOS area but not the boot sector. Whether a boot sector virus for the Apple II could actually be written is another question. My guess would be "yes" (by using the controller ROM to do most of the work), but it couldn't have much of a payload.
I had the misfortune of catching Cloner when it was in the wild. The program "MASTER CREATE" from the original DOS 3.3 disks (provided they were uninfected) would effectively wipe it out (by replacing the DOS). It hardly deserves to be on a top ten "worst" viruses list; I don't think the PC boot sector viruses are actually inspired by it, despite what the article says.
Any retail clerk gains access to a huge supply of credit card numbers. Merely gaining access to such is not a crime, yet.
Except for the part where you didn't cause (by fraud or via a security hole) the installation of software on the affected machine, and the botnet creator did.
The laws which make that a crime also make interacting with a web server a crime. They're broken. Furthermore, in this case, the communication was initiated by the infected computers.
So precisely what is it we eat that causes arthritis (the most common indication for Vioxx)?
Aspirin is good. But it has negative effects, like promoting ulcers, particularly with long-term use. It also has a dose-response relationship for pain relief which levels off, though the side-effects continue to get worse. And it's a fairly short-acting medication. The COX-2 inhibitors relieve pain better, for longer, with fewer gastrointestinal side effects. They also slightly increase the chance of heart attack, which is why most of them got banned, but IMO that's a foolish trade of quantity of life for quality of life.
Actually, yes. Or, at least, there's a reason for that 64-bit time_t in modern Unixes.