Not only is it unnecessary, but such a law would be completely unenforceable. Look at how much trouble online gaming servers have in preventing people from running bots which play their characters for them.
CloneDVD isn't free, but it does everything that this program claims to do, except without any DRM
The problem is that CloneDVD isn't "legit" in the sense that using it to copy copyrighted DVDs probably isn't legal. I realize that many don't care about such things, and I'm not saying that I agree with the law, but nevertheless, many people do. At least RealDVD, with its $20 charge for each copy is legit. Personally, I think the price is a bit high, however, as many, if not most, DVDs cost less than $20, so you could simply buy a second copy for the same price. Might be worthwhile for DVDs costing more, however.
DVD Decrypter development stopped years ago as well.
I think the grandparent probably meant DVDFabDecrypter, which is a different product. But you're right, DVD Decryptor stopped before development of the latest anti-copy techniques.
Your argument is a valid one, but you might have won more people to your side, and gotten modded higher if all your examples weren't so one-sided. Most of the examples bills you cite would be considered fairly far to the left of center by a majority of Slashdot readers.
The headline, although factually correct, is somewhat misleading as it seems to imply that what is interesting about the particle is that it is doubly strange. In fact, doubly strange particles have been observed for some time. (Eg. the so-called "cascade" particles, which are baryons consisting of two strange quarks and a light quark (u or d).) The discovery discussed here is a baryon consisting of a b quark together with two strange quarks. This particle is not unexpected, but this is a first observation of a b baryon with no light quarks, so it is interesting.
If only there were some branch of the government whose job it was to ensure that people's constitutional rights were protected!
We have such a thing in Canada. It's called the Human Rights Commission. They protect people's constitutional rights largely by
fining people for speech they deem offensive to others. You should be glad you have no such thing in America!
This is a serious question. As a user of the Internet, naturally I don't want my ISP throttling my connection based on my surfing habits, but I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the government getting involved here.
Now, given that cable companies typically operate with a government granted monopoly to run cables to people's houses, it is perfectly reasonable that perhaps they have some obligations to go with that monopoly, but I'm not aware of any such obligations in legislation at this time. On what legal authority is the FCC basing their complaint at this time? If they do have "rules" about even-handed, open Internet access, do they apply to all ISPs, or just those that are taking advantage of a government granted monopoly? Do these rules apply to anyone running a router? Are they just making up rules as they go along? As much as I dislike Comcast's policies in this matter, the actions of the FCC frighten me a lot more.
They're not necessarily doing anything criminal; they might just be trying to protect themselves from discovery obligations in a civil suit. You don't have to be doing something wrong to get sued. Why make your opponent's job easier by keeping information which might help their case?
What, like if the source code is open, then that will prevent backdoors ? Erm hello, the client software isn't the problem, it's the network of Skype servers the bloody data passes through that is the weak point in the equation.
But for Skype to Skype calls, they promise end-to-end encryption. If this can be verified by examining the source, and if the key management is done properly, then it shouldn't matter if the encrypted data passes through the Skype network or not. That's kind of the whole point of end-to-end encryption protocols: you shouldn't have to trust the intermediate servers.
Yes, a DVD sold to a rental company (with suitable accompanying rights) normally costs a lot more than the ones you buy in the shops that are labelled "not for rental". I don't have any recent figures, but a few years ago the difference was roughly an order of magnitude, depending on the product.
What country do you live in? IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that here in the USA no special license is required to rent out movies. If I'm wrong, please let me know. Does anyone know in which countries a special license is required?
I thought in the U.S., unlike many other countries, accreditation of colleges was done by private organizations. Shouldn't it be these organizations that institute these requirements? If I want to start up a college in my basement and issue Ph.D.'s, isn't it up to me to set the requirements? In fact, don't I have a First Amendment right to do so? Now, if I issue degrees, and claim to be accredited by a certain board, when if fact, I am not, then I am committing fraud, and that's already a crime. But what right does the government have to be setting standards on college requirements? Or this attached to some kind of federal funding? The article doesn't seem to make this clear. Does anyone have more information on this?
The headline of the article certainly implies, even if it doesn't actually state, that these researches are actually facing charges. According to the article referenced, there is no mention whatsoever of any criminal investigation, or any evidence that these researchers have even been contacted by authorities. As far as I can tell, the entire article is based on speculation by the EFF and others. It is hard to imagine that wiretapping laws would apply here since (a) the researchers running the exit node are offering a free service and are not in the networking "business", (b) people running Tor voluntarily send their data out to Tor nodes, (c) as an exit node operator, these researchers probably cannot identify the actual people engaging in this communication (at least that should be the case if Tor is running properly), and (d) the study they released only shows aggregate data, and doesn't reveal the private communications of individual users. Doesn't there have to be a specific victim in order for wiretapping charges to apply? (IANAL, I'd love to hear from lawyers on this point.) How is this different from any other network usage study?
Personally, I don't think the CM text really matters. They are all equally bad. The basics they teach you are what a Langrangian is, and unfortunately always underemphasized what a Hamiltonian is (used REPEATEDLY in QM).
Try Goldstein. A solid treatment of both the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formulations, as well as canonical transformations, Poisson brackets (which become commutators in QM), and the least action principle.
In my undergrad, a physics professor told me, "There's no particularly good book on QM".
I've heard the same thing, and used to think so too, but one book I discovered which I really like is Modern Quantum Mechanics by Sakurai. It is a modern, and reasonably complete treatment which I like.
I second the vote for Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics. I used it in my last undergrad year, and it is very good. In order to do the problems, you really need a solid background in solving PDEs, but with a math undergrad degree, you've likely already had a course in that subject.
For Classical Mechanics the book I used as an undergrad was Goldstein. Many of the problems are tedious and difficult, but there is a wealth of useful information in the text.
I also second the recommendation of Kittel & Kroemer for an introduction to Stat. Mech. The problems are all very doable making this a great book for self study. That might not be so true of Jackson or Goldstein, but others have already recommended some less difficult texts.
Also, if you're going into astrophysics, you'll need some background on relativity. For special relativity, Taylor & Wheeler is a good introduction, and Schutz is a good intro. to general relativity.
Actually, electrons in the ground state s orbitals have wavefunctions which significantly overlap with the nucleus. They don't annihilate because the proton is not the anti-particle of the electron: the positron is. Any such annihilation between electrons and protons would violate conservation of baryon number.
They will annihilate after some time (the particle's lifetime), but they can be bound together for some time before that happens.
Exactly. The process by which a particle and anti-particle annihilate is electromagnetic, resulting in the production of photons. Since the timescale for electromagnetic interactions is much longer than that for strong interactions (and it is the strong force which binds the b and b-bar quarks in a meson), the meson exists long enough to have a very definite, observable mass. This is measured by reconstructing the 4-momenta of the decay products to form an invariant mass. When plotted in a histogram, a peak is found at the particle's mass.
Nah, they'll take your TCP/IP stack and stamp "(C) Microsoft corporation" on it.
Just kidding.
I don't know whether or not Microsoft actually used the BSD TCP/IP code or not, but if they did, it is one of the best arguments ever for the BSD license over GPL: interoperability. When free code can interoperate with well-established commercial code, it increases its chances of being used.
Suppose back in the day, when Microsoft first added Internet capability to its operating systems, they decided not to use standard BSD code but instead wrote their own "TCP/IP stack". And suppose, as Microsoft often does, they had done it in a non-standard way, with non-standard extensions. Given the huge installed base of Windows PCs in businesses and homes, which set of standards do you think would have won out? The open Unix type TCP/IP, or the new, proprietary, Windows version of TCP/IP, with its undocumented and possibly patented extensions and incompatibilities? Imagine if we were all forced to have Windows simply to use the Internet?
If they can solve the problem of refueling infrastructure and sufficient mileage per refuel, there's no reason why not to go with a non-gas car.
It isn't just an issue of refueling infrastructure and top speed that's the issue. It's refueling time. I can fill my car's gas tank from near empty to full in under 5 minutes. A typical electric car takes about 8 hours to charge. So even if the range of an electric car is extended to match that of a gas powered car, and even if there is a sufficient refueling infrastructure, it still isn't practical to drive an electric car on a long distance trip. Fuel cells are more promising as they run on a liquid fuel.
Yes, the first computer I used was a Commodore PET model 2001 with 8K of RAM and a cassette deck built into the unit right beside the keyboard. (My father was a teacher and he was able to bring these computers home from school on weekends and summer vacations.) We soon upgraded to a PET 4032 with a 2031 disk drive. We purchased our own C64 system shortly after that, and although the games blew those of the PET out of the water, I kind of miss the old PETs.
If you don't agree with the parent's post, by all means, reply and state your position. But this looks like a well-reasoned post, and I don't see anything in it that could be considered trolling.
Nonsense. Any router that can be crashed by anything that a computer connected to it does has a critical bug and should be recalled immediately. Really? So if I have an especially nasty computer that sends a 100kV "signal" down the twisted pair cable to the router, it's the router's fault if it gets fried?
So they're trying to make it look like they are committing copyright infringement and they are investigated. Is this a surprise?
If I go outside every night wearing overalls covered in blood stains, dig holes in my front yard, and bury body sized bundles wrapped in garbage bags every night for a couple of weeks, I'll probably be investigated for murder. If I build a large enclosure in my backyard, and fill it with heating lamps which use a prodigious amount of electricity and generate a lot of heat, and I sit on my front porch smoking a leafy substance wrapped in paper, I'll probably be investigated for running a grow-op. If I show up at school carrying a fake, but real-looking machine gun, it will probably draw the attention of the authorities.
In fact, isn't it a crime to try to fool the police into thinking you're committing a crime? Usually it gets a disorderly conduct charge or something like that.
I'm not saying there are no problems with copyright enforcement, or the tactics of the RIAA, but being able to frame your printer is not a good example of that.
Slashdot Mirror
I've never read any Dawkins, but from the few clips I've seen of him on TV he seems like a bit of an ass.
That's because you only watch South Park.
Not only is it unnecessary, but such a law would be completely unenforceable. Look at how much trouble online gaming servers have in preventing people from running bots which play their characters for them.
CloneDVD isn't free, but it does everything that this program claims to do, except without any DRM
The problem is that CloneDVD isn't "legit" in the sense that using it to copy copyrighted DVDs probably isn't legal. I realize that many don't care about such things, and I'm not saying that I agree with the law, but nevertheless, many people do. At least RealDVD, with its $20 charge for each copy is legit. Personally, I think the price is a bit high, however, as many, if not most, DVDs cost less than $20, so you could simply buy a second copy for the same price. Might be worthwhile for DVDs costing more, however.
DVD Decrypter development stopped years ago as well.
I think the grandparent probably meant DVDFabDecrypter, which is a different product. But you're right, DVD Decryptor stopped before development of the latest anti-copy techniques.
Your argument is a valid one, but you might have won more people to your side, and gotten modded higher if all your examples weren't so one-sided. Most of the examples bills you cite would be considered fairly far to the left of center by a majority of Slashdot readers.
The headline, although factually correct, is somewhat misleading as it seems to imply that what is interesting about the particle is that it is doubly strange. In fact, doubly strange particles have been observed for some time. (Eg. the so-called "cascade" particles, which are baryons consisting of two strange quarks and a light quark (u or d).) The discovery discussed here is a baryon consisting of a b quark together with two strange quarks. This particle is not unexpected, but this is a first observation of a b baryon with no light quarks, so it is interesting.
If only there were some branch of the government whose job it was to ensure that people's constitutional rights were protected!
We have such a thing in Canada. It's called the Human Rights Commission. They protect people's constitutional rights largely by fining people for speech they deem offensive to others. You should be glad you have no such thing in America!
If you don't want a future employer seeing pictures of you drunk and naked at a frat party, don't put them on the internet!
And what's to stop someone else from posting that pic of you drunk and naked at the frat party?
This is a serious question. As a user of the Internet, naturally I don't want my ISP throttling my connection based on my surfing habits, but I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the government getting involved here.
Now, given that cable companies typically operate with a government granted monopoly to run cables to people's houses, it is perfectly reasonable that perhaps they have some obligations to go with that monopoly, but I'm not aware of any such obligations in legislation at this time. On what legal authority is the FCC basing their complaint at this time? If they do have "rules" about even-handed, open Internet access, do they apply to all ISPs, or just those that are taking advantage of a government granted monopoly? Do these rules apply to anyone running a router? Are they just making up rules as they go along? As much as I dislike Comcast's policies in this matter, the actions of the FCC frighten me a lot more.
They're not necessarily doing anything criminal; they might just be trying to protect themselves from discovery obligations in a civil suit. You don't have to be doing something wrong to get sued. Why make your opponent's job easier by keeping information which might help their case?
What, like if the source code is open, then that will prevent backdoors ? Erm hello, the client software isn't the problem, it's the network of Skype servers the bloody data passes through that is the weak point in the equation.
But for Skype to Skype calls, they promise end-to-end encryption. If this can be verified by examining the source, and if the key management is done properly, then it shouldn't matter if the encrypted data passes through the Skype network or not. That's kind of the whole point of end-to-end encryption protocols: you shouldn't have to trust the intermediate servers.
The only downside is that there isn't any encryption, so it'd be pretty trivial to bug.
I'd say that's a pretty huge downside, given the context in which the question was asked!
Yes, a DVD sold to a rental company (with suitable accompanying rights) normally costs a lot more than the ones you buy in the shops that are labelled "not for rental". I don't have any recent figures, but a few years ago the difference was roughly an order of magnitude, depending on the product.
What country do you live in? IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that here in the USA no special license is required to rent out movies. If I'm wrong, please let me know. Does anyone know in which countries a special license is required?
I thought in the U.S., unlike many other countries, accreditation of colleges was done by private organizations. Shouldn't it be these organizations that institute these requirements? If I want to start up a college in my basement and issue Ph.D.'s, isn't it up to me to set the requirements? In fact, don't I have a First Amendment right to do so? Now, if I issue degrees, and claim to be accredited by a certain board, when if fact, I am not, then I am committing fraud, and that's already a crime. But what right does the government have to be setting standards on college requirements? Or this attached to some kind of federal funding? The article doesn't seem to make this clear. Does anyone have more information on this?
The headline of the article certainly implies, even if it doesn't actually state, that these researches are actually facing charges. According to the article referenced, there is no mention whatsoever of any criminal investigation, or any evidence that these researchers have even been contacted by authorities. As far as I can tell, the entire article is based on speculation by the EFF and others. It is hard to imagine that wiretapping laws would apply here since (a) the researchers running the exit node are offering a free service and are not in the networking "business", (b) people running Tor voluntarily send their data out to Tor nodes, (c) as an exit node operator, these researchers probably cannot identify the actual people engaging in this communication (at least that should be the case if Tor is running properly), and (d) the study they released only shows aggregate data, and doesn't reveal the private communications of individual users. Doesn't there have to be a specific victim in order for wiretapping charges to apply? (IANAL, I'd love to hear from lawyers on this point.) How is this different from any other network usage study?
Personally, I don't think the CM text really matters. They are all equally bad. The basics they teach you are what a Langrangian is, and unfortunately always underemphasized what a Hamiltonian is (used REPEATEDLY in QM).
Try Goldstein. A solid treatment of both the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formulations, as well as canonical transformations, Poisson brackets (which become commutators in QM), and the least action principle.
In my undergrad, a physics professor told me, "There's no particularly good book on QM".
I've heard the same thing, and used to think so too, but one book I discovered which I really like is Modern Quantum Mechanics by Sakurai. It is a modern, and reasonably complete treatment which I like.
I second the vote for Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics. I used it in my last undergrad year, and it is very good. In order to do the problems, you really need a solid background in solving PDEs, but with a math undergrad degree, you've likely already had a course in that subject.
For Classical Mechanics the book I used as an undergrad was Goldstein. Many of the problems are tedious and difficult, but there is a wealth of useful information in the text.
I also second the recommendation of Kittel & Kroemer for an introduction to Stat. Mech. The problems are all very doable making this a great book for self study. That might not be so true of Jackson or Goldstein, but others have already recommended some less difficult texts.
Also, if you're going into astrophysics, you'll need some background on relativity. For special relativity, Taylor & Wheeler is a good introduction, and Schutz is a good intro. to general relativity.
Actually, electrons in the ground state s orbitals have wavefunctions which significantly overlap with the nucleus. They don't annihilate because the proton is not the anti-particle of the electron: the positron is. Any such annihilation between electrons and protons would violate conservation of baryon number.
They will annihilate after some time (the particle's lifetime), but they can be bound together for some time before that happens.
Exactly. The process by which a particle and anti-particle annihilate is electromagnetic, resulting in the production of photons. Since the timescale for electromagnetic interactions is much longer than that for strong interactions (and it is the strong force which binds the b and b-bar quarks in a meson), the meson exists long enough to have a very definite, observable mass. This is measured by reconstructing the 4-momenta of the decay products to form an invariant mass. When plotted in a histogram, a peak is found at the particle's mass.
Nah, they'll take your TCP/IP stack and stamp "(C) Microsoft corporation" on it. Just kidding.
I don't know whether or not Microsoft actually used the BSD TCP/IP code or not, but if they did, it is one of the best arguments ever for the BSD license over GPL: interoperability. When free code can interoperate with well-established commercial code, it increases its chances of being used.
Suppose back in the day, when Microsoft first added Internet capability to its operating systems, they decided not to use standard BSD code but instead wrote their own "TCP/IP stack". And suppose, as Microsoft often does, they had done it in a non-standard way, with non-standard extensions. Given the huge installed base of Windows PCs in businesses and homes, which set of standards do you think would have won out? The open Unix type TCP/IP, or the new, proprietary, Windows version of TCP/IP, with its undocumented and possibly patented extensions and incompatibilities? Imagine if we were all forced to have Windows simply to use the Internet?
No, I like the BSD, and I'm stickin' too it.
If they can solve the problem of refueling infrastructure and sufficient mileage per refuel, there's no reason why not to go with a non-gas car.
It isn't just an issue of refueling infrastructure and top speed that's the issue. It's refueling time. I can fill my car's gas tank from near empty to full in under 5 minutes. A typical electric car takes about 8 hours to charge. So even if the range of an electric car is extended to match that of a gas powered car, and even if there is a sufficient refueling infrastructure, it still isn't practical to drive an electric car on a long distance trip. Fuel cells are more promising as they run on a liquid fuel.
Yes, the first computer I used was a Commodore PET model 2001 with 8K of RAM and a cassette deck built into the unit right beside the keyboard. (My father was a teacher and he was able to bring these computers home from school on weekends and summer vacations.) We soon upgraded to a PET 4032 with a 2031 disk drive. We purchased our own C64 system shortly after that, and although the games blew those of the PET out of the water, I kind of miss the old PETs.
If you don't agree with the parent's post, by all means, reply and state your position. But this looks like a well-reasoned post, and I don't see anything in it that could be considered trolling.
So they're trying to make it look like they are committing copyright infringement and they are investigated. Is this a surprise?
If I go outside every night wearing overalls covered in blood stains, dig holes in my front yard, and bury body sized bundles wrapped in garbage bags every night for a couple of weeks, I'll probably be investigated for murder. If I build a large enclosure in my backyard, and fill it with heating lamps which use a prodigious amount of electricity and generate a lot of heat, and I sit on my front porch smoking a leafy substance wrapped in paper, I'll probably be investigated for running a grow-op. If I show up at school carrying a fake, but real-looking machine gun, it will probably draw the attention of the authorities.
In fact, isn't it a crime to try to fool the police into thinking you're committing a crime? Usually it gets a disorderly conduct charge or something like that.
I'm not saying there are no problems with copyright enforcement, or the tactics of the RIAA, but being able to frame your printer is not a good example of that.