But errors go down when you combine independent results. That's why doing an experiment 100 times gives you smaller error bars than doing it 10 times. (Assuming statistical errors dominate the systematic ones. If GPS and the Galileo are based on independent satellites, there should be no systematic error common to both.) A properly designed combined receiver would know how to combine the two results and report the results and error bars correctly.
I know Microsoft claims XBox modding is a DMCA violation. Is any modding necessary to put Linux on the PS2?
If so, this could be a great DMCA test case, since NCSA is a respectable organization, and would present a much more sympathetic case in court. Even if they don't go after NCSA, others could use it as an example.
XBox modders, for instance, claiming substantial non-infringing uses could point to the NCSA PS2 cluster as an example.
That's what makes this such a difficult case. If the court rules for Monsanto, what's to stop a seed company from genetically engineering an especially virulent form of a crop, which spreads like wildfire and eliminates all other form of that crop from the face of the planet. Soon, a few companies could control the entire world's food supply and you couldn't even have a vegetable garden in your own backyard.
On the other hand, if the court rules for the farmer, what's to stop farmers from stealing small amounts of seed from a neighbor who bought the patented crop and growing it for enough years to have a full crop and then claiming that a bird pooped the seeds on their field. This would effectively destroy IP rights of all seed companies.
Honestly, I don't know what the correct decision here would be. Either result could have disasterous implications.
Since when is choosing not to rat someone out to the cops the same as condoning their behavior?
Also, I don't equate looking at pictures of a crime with committing a crime. Looking at pictures of children being exploited is sick, but I'm not comfortable with the government telling me what kind of pictures I'm allowed to look at. (Not that I'm into kiddie porn myself. Most of it is heartbreaking to look at.)
I think that child abuse is serious enough that it is important we have some perspective on the issue, and use our resources to go after real crimes.
this isn't just pr0n, but child porn. big difference. let's say you found emails, etc., that the guy was running a drug ring, selling crank to kids down at the local school yard. or that he was funneling money to al qaida or something. where do yo draw the line.
Ok, fair enough. If the kids in the kiddie porn were his own kids, or there was some other evidence that he had taken the pictures himself (they were taken in his house, for instance), then I would agree that one should get the police involved immediately. But if he just downloaded some stuff off the net, I think the correct response is just tell him to delete it from the office computer and do his jerking off at home!
Really, do we have to make a federal case out of everything?
I absolutely agree. And the first step in the chain should be the employee himself. Confront him, and explain the trouble he could get himself and his company into for having that garbage on a company machine. Advise him to erase it, or at least encrypt it and transfer it to his home computer. That would probably be enough to make the problem go away. If the employee doesn't do anything about it, then go to the boss, explaining politely the serious legal trouble the company could get into otherwise.
Just a minor correction - authoring mode DVD-Rs have the CSS area available for use, and the burners can use it to write the keys onto.
The burners were $3,000-4,000 when last I checked, they're still pretty pricey, but much better than a press:).
This raises an interesting point then. Why are the prices of these authoring systems so high? Is there any legislation requiring burners that can burn the key area to have a certain minimum price? Is special licensing required due to patent issues? If not, what's to stop some consumer electronics manufacturer who is not owned by a parent company that also owns a movie studio from selling DVD burners that can do true bit-for-bit copies, including key areas, and selling them at consumer level prices? I imagine they could make a fortune.
actually, you don't need to decrypt anything to make a bit-by-bit copy. Kind of silly, if you think about it.
Remember though that DVDs require two decryption keys to work: one of which is stored in the player, and the other in a special area on the DVD. Blank DVDs have this key area zeroed out and can't record data on them, so unless you have a DVD press in your basement you can't make a true bit-for-bit copy which includes this vital key area. This is why decryption tools like DeCSS are necessary if you wish to copy CSS encoded DVDs on your computer.
I'm not in favor of these IP strongarm tactics, but one good thing that may come out of all this is it may encourage people to start using BSD instead of Linux, just as the GIF fiasco caused wider adoption of PNG.
So what good reasons remain for using MP3? (Except from the tons of pirat MP3s you can download from the net.)
Err, well, how about the fact that I have yet to see a portable or car CD player that plays a CD-ROM full of Ogg-vorbis files? When I'm at home, I can listen to my orignal CDs. There's no need for compression. When I'm on the road, I don't like to take my thousand or so CDs with me. But I need something to play the music on. So far, the only devices I know of that will play Ogg Vorbis files are PCs!
Sure, my ISP can set up a perl script that goes through the logs and generates a summary, but what prevents *me* from setting up an e-mail server that *doesn't* count the number of mails I've sent?
Those that have a mail server running would be responsible to keep track of the e-mail processed by that server. What's to stop the convenience store down the street from not keeping track of its sales and collecting state sales tax? What's to stop you from not reporting all of your income on your 1040? Sure, people cheat. But they can get in serious trouble if they are caught.
I'm not saying I'm in favor of an e-mail tax, but I don't think the accounting would be hugely difficult.
I can setup an e-mail server on a *nix box in 5 minutes. (Literally, I know I've done it). How do you account for how many e-mails a user sent?
Couldn't you just a few lines to sendmail which counts the number of e-mails a user sends, and at the end of the month print out a summary? Or use sendmail's existing logging features and write a perl script to go through the logs and generate a summary? Really, it doesn't sound that difficult. Or am I missing something here?
McDonald's doesn't know what the RFID was for originally, but they really don't care, they can just assign the RFID to me.
What's to stop McDonald's from taking a digital snapshot of your license plate. Ever driven across the border lately? Customs booths all take snapshots of your license plates as you drive up. Nothing to stop McDonald's from doing the same thing. The question is, why would they want to?
But my point is, if you have license plates on your car, which all states require, you have no anonymity when driving anyway. RFID tags in tires may make it marginally cheaper to ID cars, but digital cameras are dirt cheap nowadays, so it probably isn't that much cheaper.
The article doesn't state whether that's $2 per month or $2 per year. (The phone book is usually published anually.) $2 per year is nothing worth worrying about, but $2 a month seems unreasonable.
No, the Open Source zealots have an answer for that...
Their software will be exempted.
Since when do lawmakers take their guidance from the Open Source Community? I think such regulation will be devastating for open source or low-cost software. It will be like medicine, where malpractice insurance will raise prices. And don't expect any exemptions for free/Open Source software.
The interesting thing about this case is that the RIAA walked up to Verizon and demanded the customers name. No subpoena, no court order.
Er, I thought there was a court order. That's the whole point of this story. The RIAA at first asked Verizon to hand over the names without a court order, and Verizon refused, and now there is a court order. So what's the problem here?
Yep. This is one of the best pre-release videos I've seen. It is on one single-sided single-layer DVD, so it does use tighter compression than most movies (averaging around 4Mbps), but I noticed no problems whatsoever with the picture quality (surprisingly!) It was real DVD quality!
It featured anamorphic widescreen as well as Dolby digital sound. The only caveat is the phrase "For your consideration" appears every ten minutes (at 4 min, 14 min, 24 min, etc.) and this stays on the screen for a few seconds. Not a big deal really, and fortunately it doesn't appear when there are subtitles when the characters are speaking Elvish.
Of course I plan to buy the special edition when it comes out in November, but this should hold me over till then.
No, I think the poster was saying Why not go to Blockbuster for the popular stuff, use Netflix for the harder to find items.
Blockbuster is quite likely to have the titles that might be harder to get at Netflix due to its popularity. And conversely, Netflix is more likely to have a copies available of the less popular stuff you won't find at Blockbuster.
And I'm surprised to hear you claim you can't get Spirited Away at Blockbuster. It's become quite a popular movie!
Customarily we consider only the set of positive integers when discussing primality. However, primality can be defined in any ring (such as the integers) as follows: a number is prime if it is divisible only by itself, units, or products of itself and units. A unit in any element of a ring which has a multiplicative inverse. The only units in the ring of integers are thus 1 and -1. So a prime integer is an integer divisible only by itself, 1, -1, and -1*itself.
In the ring of polynomials with real coefficients, the units are the constants (zero-order polynomials), and so a polynomial like x+1 is considered "prime", although the term "irreducible" is usually used instead when talking about polynomials.
In the ring of rational numbers (which also happens to be a field), all non-zero numbers have multiplicative inverses, so all rational numbers are prime (in the rationals) making it a not very useful concept there!.
Slashdot Mirror
If so, this could be a great DMCA test case, since NCSA is a respectable organization, and would present a much more sympathetic case in court. Even if they don't go after NCSA, others could use it as an example.
XBox modders, for instance, claiming substantial non-infringing uses could point to the NCSA PS2 cluster as an example.
On the other hand, if the court rules for the farmer, what's to stop farmers from stealing small amounts of seed from a neighbor who bought the patented crop and growing it for enough years to have a full crop and then claiming that a bird pooped the seeds on their field. This would effectively destroy IP rights of all seed companies.
Honestly, I don't know what the correct decision here would be. Either result could have disasterous implications.
So if you see a coworking downloading The Matrix Reloaded, you'd immediately call 911?
Since when is choosing not to rat someone out to the cops the same as condoning their behavior?
Also, I don't equate looking at pictures of a crime with committing a crime. Looking at pictures of children being exploited is sick, but I'm not comfortable with the government telling me what kind of pictures I'm allowed to look at. (Not that I'm into kiddie porn myself. Most of it is heartbreaking to look at.)
I think that child abuse is serious enough that it is important we have some perspective on the issue, and use our resources to go after real crimes.
Ok, fair enough. If the kids in the kiddie porn were his own kids, or there was some other evidence that he had taken the pictures himself (they were taken in his house, for instance), then I would agree that one should get the police involved immediately. But if he just downloaded some stuff off the net, I think the correct response is just tell him to delete it from the office computer and do his jerking off at home!
Really, do we have to make a federal case out of everything?
The burners were $3,000-4,000 when last I checked, they're still pretty pricey, but much better than a press :).
This raises an interesting point then. Why are the prices of these authoring systems so high? Is there any legislation requiring burners that can burn the key area to have a certain minimum price? Is special licensing required due to patent issues? If not, what's to stop some consumer electronics manufacturer who is not owned by a parent company that also owns a movie studio from selling DVD burners that can do true bit-for-bit copies, including key areas, and selling them at consumer level prices? I imagine they could make a fortune.
Remember though that DVDs require two decryption keys to work: one of which is stored in the player, and the other in a special area on the DVD. Blank DVDs have this key area zeroed out and can't record data on them, so unless you have a DVD press in your basement you can't make a true bit-for-bit copy which includes this vital key area. This is why decryption tools like DeCSS are necessary if you wish to copy CSS encoded DVDs on your computer.
Err, well, how about the fact that I have yet to see a portable or car CD player that plays a CD-ROM full of Ogg-vorbis files? When I'm at home, I can listen to my orignal CDs. There's no need for compression. When I'm on the road, I don't like to take my thousand or so CDs with me. But I need something to play the music on. So far, the only devices I know of that will play Ogg Vorbis files are PCs!
Those that have a mail server running would be responsible to keep track of the e-mail processed by that server. What's to stop the convenience store down the street from not keeping track of its sales and collecting state sales tax? What's to stop you from not reporting all of your income on your 1040? Sure, people cheat. But they can get in serious trouble if they are caught.
I'm not saying I'm in favor of an e-mail tax, but I don't think the accounting would be hugely difficult.
Couldn't you just a few lines to sendmail which counts the number of e-mails a user sends, and at the end of the month print out a summary? Or use sendmail's existing logging features and write a perl script to go through the logs and generate a summary? Really, it doesn't sound that difficult. Or am I missing something here?
What's to stop McDonald's from taking a digital snapshot of your license plate. Ever driven across the border lately? Customs booths all take snapshots of your license plates as you drive up. Nothing to stop McDonald's from doing the same thing. The question is, why would they want to?
But my point is, if you have license plates on your car, which all states require, you have no anonymity when driving anyway. RFID tags in tires may make it marginally cheaper to ID cars, but digital cameras are dirt cheap nowadays, so it probably isn't that much cheaper.
The article doesn't state whether that's $2 per month or $2 per year. (The phone book is usually published anually.) $2 per year is nothing worth worrying about, but $2 a month seems unreasonable.
Well, the way Canada got around that one was to call it a "levy" instead of a tax. (Canada has a similar law.)
Their software will be exempted.
Since when do lawmakers take their guidance from the Open Source Community? I think such regulation will be devastating for open source or low-cost software. It will be like medicine, where malpractice insurance will raise prices. And don't expect any exemptions for free/Open Source software.
Er, I thought there was a court order. That's the whole point of this story. The RIAA at first asked Verizon to hand over the names without a court order, and Verizon refused, and now there is a court order. So what's the problem here?
It featured anamorphic widescreen as well as Dolby digital sound. The only caveat is the phrase "For your consideration" appears every ten minutes (at 4 min, 14 min, 24 min, etc.) and this stays on the screen for a few seconds. Not a big deal really, and fortunately it doesn't appear when there are subtitles when the characters are speaking Elvish.
Of course I plan to buy the special edition when it comes out in November, but this should hold me over till then.
Blockbuster is quite likely to have the titles that might be harder to get at Netflix due to its popularity. And conversely, Netflix is more likely to have a copies available of the less popular stuff you won't find at Blockbuster.
And I'm surprised to hear you claim you can't get Spirited Away at Blockbuster. It's become quite a popular movie!
Ever heard of CODs? In fact, the scenario you just described as being "illegal" is done by UPS and similar companies every day!
In the ring of polynomials with real coefficients, the units are the constants (zero-order polynomials), and so a polynomial like x+1 is considered "prime", although the term "irreducible" is usually used instead when talking about polynomials.
In the ring of rational numbers (which also happens to be a field), all non-zero numbers have multiplicative inverses, so all rational numbers are prime (in the rationals) making it a not very useful concept there!.