Well they can already do that now, for example by installing microphones in suspect's homes, but it requires a court warrant and a considerable amount of work. The Bundestrojaner would make snooping simpler, both in technical and in legal terms. And we know that if technology is cheap and simple, it's going to be used more. That is, i think, the government's goal here: gaining the ability to infiltrate a large number of computers, say of a significant percentage of Muslim citizens, or the globalization sceptics of Attac, or any other group that potentially features undesirable behaviour. No court would ever allow such a sweeping surveillance, and the police doesn't have the resources to bug thousands of homes anyway.
They also don't ask you to enter the whole PIN, but only a few randomly selected digits ("Please enter the 3rd and 5th digit of your PIN"), so an attacker who grabs the screen only once still doesn't have enough information. I think that's pretty smart.
Last I checked, 35mm was approximately 3500-4000 DPI. That's significantly more than even the latest digital cameras.
No it's not. The Nikon D2X has 4288 x 2848 pixels on a 23.7 x 15.7 mm sensor, That's around 4600 pixels per inch. Now, if you actually measure the resolution, a Bayer sensor never reaches its theoretical limit (the rule of thumb is that you get a resolution of about 75% of the pixel density), and Phil Askey measured 2400 lines per picture height for the D2X, which corresponds to around 3900 dpi. So right now film and top-of-the-line digital are very much in the same league.
Re:Like Borrowing from a Library, only more expens
on
Textbooks With EULAs
·
· Score: 1
It's not feasible to make a new physical copy for everyone and give it to them indefinitely.
It's possible, though potentially very expensive. Many libraries keep several copies of frequently requested books around. They don't keep a million copies of every book, because then costs would go through the roof and so would their fees. So a shop that sells DRMed e-books simply acts like a library that does store a million copies of every book. To the customer, the question is then: am i willing to pay x dollars more for the convenience of having every book available anytime? Usually, markets are pretty efficient answering questions like this.
But since the creators are used to relying on the physical book's lack of manipulation features to ensure their incomes, the first impulse has been to take them away. We need to figure out an alternative mechanism where people get paid and the text gets freed.
Actually this problem was solved several hundred years ago. When printing with moveable letters was invented, the first thing that happened was that publishers began ripping off authors, reprinting and often modifying their works at will. As a consequence, we invented copyright law. This kinda worked because there were only so many publishers and they were businesses that wanted to stay in business. These days, everybody can copy digital content, and suing grandmothers out of their pension plans and teenagers out of their college education has been tried and found not to be very effective. So, copyright owners have begun to believe that copyright law should better be enforced through technical means than through lawyers.
Like Borrowing from a Library, only more expensive
on
Textbooks With EULAs
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Time-limited access to a book is a known concept, that's what libraries are for.
Back when i was in college, library access for us students was free, and non-students paid a modest fee (you could call this a flatrate). You could borrow a book for a month and have that period extended (if noone else requested that copy) to up to three months. After that you had to return it, but could re-borrow it a day later.
Seems to me as if DRMed textbooks would compete with libraries. But if the customers have a choice between a) buying the book at full price, b) having DRMed access to it for 5 months at 33% discount, c) borrowing it from a library for 1-3 months for a small flat fee, this product seems vastly overpriced to me.
So, to be successful, these books will have to be a lot cheaper. After all, the market will determine what their price should be.
Make the hacker spend 16 hours a day fielding help-desk inquiries in an AOL chat room for computer novices. Force him to do this with a user name at least as uncool as KoolDude and to work on a vintage IBM PC with a 2400-baud dial-up connection. Most painful of all for any geek, make him use Windows 95 for the rest of his life.
The Weimar Republic died because of a complex set of reason, but a major point was that the Nazis were allowed to shout around their hate-speech, to incite the masses, to channel the masses prejudices and fears with plain-out lies.
Well, we agree on most points, but here i beg to differ. While the reasons for the Weimar Republic's demise were indeed complex, imho hate-speech was not even among the most important. The most effective NSDAP propaganda of 1930 wouldn't today be covered by paragraph 130. There is one famous poster that shows a sketch of large greyish mass of poor people, and above that it printed "Hitler - our last hope". There is no way you could declare that illegal under paragraph 130. Also, the revisionist stance on the Versailles treaty was widely shared back then amoung supporters of all parties. Had 130 existed back then it would have done nothing against that. Regarding Versailles, the Nazis did not say much that other parties didn't, they were just more successful in convincing people that they could actually pull it off.
I could go on, but my point is: the reasons why so many people voted for the NSDAP in the two 1932 elections were more rational than most people today think. Those were not poor illiterate masses that could be seduced by anybody. They had seen democracy at work for more than a decade, and didn't like what they saw. In 1932, Germany's democratic parties were in very bad shape. Brüning had been running the country for a while on Notverordnungen, effectively circumventing all democratic mechanisms. As Haffner and others have pointed out, the nationalists around Schleicher planned to replace democracy with some sort of junta and saw Hitler as a tool they could use for that purpose. The communists listened to Stalin and ate up precious votes the SPD would be missing. People had been through new elections every couple of months, but none of these elections ever seemed to actually change anything. In this environment, Hitler sold the more credible product: "We will make you feel proud again."
There were many things in Hitler's propaganda back then that would be covered by 130 today. But i think that he would have won chancellorship in 1933 even with a 100%-paragraph-130-compatible campaign in the months before.
The "founding fathers&mothers" did not install the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Schriften. Neither did they install the Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle Multimedia-Diensteanbieter. Instead, they wrote a constitution which in article 5 plainly says "(1) Everybody has the right to [...] unhindered access to information from commonly available sources [...] Censorship does not happen". These are the actual words of the German constitution (modulo my rough translation)
Much like in the USA (where there are numerous Supreme Court decisions on the subject), the government may restrict this right under very specific circumstances. Again, article 5: "(2) These rights are limited by the general legislation, the laws for protection of the youth and the right of personal honor."
The personal honor provision allows the government to outlaw libel, the youth protection clause allows it to restrict access to adult material. Note that there is no Nazi speech clause there (as would be expected if your statements were true). In fact, i doubt that the ominous "general legislation" clause in paragraph (2) covers the banning of swastikas and such, but since no Nazi has ever tried to challenge this at Germany's Bundesverfassungsgericht, we have yet to find out.
The disturbing trend behind the recent attempts to declare unwanted information illegal is that we seem to think that bad things will go away if we don't talk about them. They won't.
And the Weimar Republic did not die because Nazis were allowed to speak. It died because there weren't enough Democrats around to answer them.
nearly three-quarters of land-based plants and animals went extinct.
Plants do photosynthesis, consuming carbon dioxide and producing oxygen. Why would a decline in oxygen levels kill them?
And something else: we humans have adapted to thin-air conditions quite easily. People live in Nepal and Tibet, and it did not even take evolution. Ordinary flatlanders can move to Tibet, too, and after a couple of weeks they have adapted to the thinner air. We are mammals, with big brains and a high metabolism, so we need a lot of oxygen. Surely the reptiles of 250 Million years ago needed much less oxygen, so why didn't they make it?
and
wikipedia doesn't mention one either. And the amount of water involved was rather large, several hundred liters, so it did not just sneak in. It is unknown how and why the water got into the tank, but none of the possible reasons usually discussed (a misguided attempt to clean the tank, a wrongly connected nitrogen pipe, sabotage) makes Union Carbide look good.
And even if there was a strike: wouldn't you expect management to make sure that your plant doesn't blow up in case of a simple labor dispute?
A spamfilter should not decide what the criteria for spam and ham are. It should only decide whether a particular mail fits the spam criterium or not. So if you categorize a mail as ham, your filter should treat it as ham. Anything else is a false positive.
If Western civil society had simply condemned the act, given the Taliban 30 days to deliver the criminals and been very careful to not kill a single innocent civilian, Al Quaeda would have been ostracised by their own support base.
Actually, that's pretty much what the US did. It asked the Taliban to extradite Bin Laden or else. The Taliban said no, and the US answered "OK, then else." War followed.
This lesson has been learnt by the British in Northern Ireland, by the Spanish in the Basque Country, by the French in Sardinia,
FTA: "The pump also has a curious side effect: people implanted with the device have no pulse."
They had better put an obvious port on it so paramedics know it's there before sending voltage through.
Maybe these things will make artificial "Thump, Thump" sounds, just like some digicams that do an audible but synthetic "click" when triggered.
A real-world example: I want to create a CVS repository which is accessible by local users Alice, Bob, and Charlie (and no one else). I can't run pserver and I can't create groups. ACLs solve the problem trivially, but I can't think of another way.
That's a standard problem with a standard solution. If you use pserver, map Alice, Bob and Charlie to a common cvs user and make the repository accessible to that user only. If you don't want to use pserver: create a group cvsabc, make Alice, Bob and Charlie members of this group, then chown cvs:cvsabc and chmod 2750 the repository, and do yourself a favour: restrict access from remote machines to ext/SSH only.
If you can't create groups, you are probably not root. That's another standard problem with a standard solution: become root. If you can't do that, you probably shouldn't do user administration anyway.
- Gentoo - we're migrating away from freeBSD which was just not up to date and functional enough for our needs, so the portage system sounds an interesting option.
And on the first day, the Server said: emerge light!
He bought a Linux distribution for as much money as Windows would have cost. He installed it on his PC. It didn't work as advertised.
Dit it? Did the box say: "Sound system xyz supported out of the box?" If i recall the article correctly, he just expected the distro to support his sound system. Well, I once expected MS-DOS to run on my C64, too, and it didn't, but back then my complaints went unheard.
Besides: he got the sound to work under ALSA, but "only until I rebooted. Then the sound went away again." I suspect a (probably trivial) problem with his particular configuration of ALSA, not with Linux itself.
Ethylene Glycol has an ethylene functional group in it, which is characterised by a reactive carbon-carbon double bond.
This is just not true. Ethylene glycol is HO-CH_2-CH_2-OH, no double bonds involved. For toxicity info, see here or here.
Besides, the compund the article talks about is polyethylene glycol, which is the polymer of ethylene glycol (as the name says), chemical formula is HO-(CH_2-CH_2-O)_n-H (n usually >>100). See here.
In his classic "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman" Richard Feynman explains how he "earned" the patents on nuclear submarines and nuclear airplanes. At that time, neither technology existed. On the other hand, afaik he never tried to extort royalties from the US Navy for the USS Nautilus, so perhaps that doesn't count as a real submarine...
According to this
wiki
Hollywood was built this way:
"Thus, filmmakers working in California could work independent of Edison's control, and if Edison ever sent agents to California, word would usually reach Los Angeles before the agents did, and the filmmakers could escape to nearby Mexico."
Slashdot Mirror
Well they can already do that now, for example by installing microphones in suspect's homes, but it requires a court warrant and a considerable amount of work. The Bundestrojaner would make snooping simpler, both in technical and in legal terms. And we know that if technology is cheap and simple, it's going to be used more. That is, i think, the government's goal here: gaining the ability to infiltrate a large number of computers, say of a significant percentage of Muslim citizens, or the globalization sceptics of Attac, or any other group that potentially features undesirable behaviour. No court would ever allow such a sweeping surveillance, and the police doesn't have the resources to bug thousands of homes anyway.
That's an Imperial assload; it's only used in Britain. It's equal to 1.24 U.S. assloads.
So Britons crap bigger than Americans?
They also don't ask you to enter the whole PIN, but only a few randomly selected digits ("Please enter the 3rd and 5th digit of your PIN"), so an attacker who grabs the screen only once still doesn't have enough information. I think that's pretty smart.
It's possible, though potentially very expensive. Many libraries keep several copies of frequently requested books around. They don't keep a million copies of every book, because then costs would go through the roof and so would their fees. So a shop that sells DRMed e-books simply acts like a library that does store a million copies of every book. To the customer, the question is then: am i willing to pay x dollars more for the convenience of having every book available anytime? Usually, markets are pretty efficient answering questions like this.
Actually this problem was solved several hundred years ago. When printing with moveable letters was invented, the first thing that happened was that publishers began ripping off authors, reprinting and often modifying their works at will. As a consequence, we invented copyright law. This kinda worked because there were only so many publishers and they were businesses that wanted to stay in business. These days, everybody can copy digital content, and suing grandmothers out of their pension plans and teenagers out of their college education has been tried and found not to be very effective. So, copyright owners have begun to believe that copyright law should better be enforced through technical means than through lawyers.
Time-limited access to a book is a known concept, that's what libraries are for.
Back when i was in college, library access for us students was free, and non-students paid a modest fee (you could call this a flatrate). You could borrow a book for a month and have that period extended (if noone else requested that copy) to up to three months. After that you had to return it, but could re-borrow it a day later.
Seems to me as if DRMed textbooks would compete with libraries. But if the customers have a choice between a) buying the book at full price, b) having DRMed access to it for 5 months at 33% discount, c) borrowing it from a library for 1-3 months for a small flat fee, this product seems vastly overpriced to me.
So, to be successful, these books will have to be a lot cheaper. After all, the market will determine what their price should be.
That would be cruel and unusual punsihment...
Well, we agree on most points, but here i beg to differ. While the reasons for the Weimar Republic's demise were indeed complex, imho hate-speech was not even among the most important. The most effective NSDAP propaganda of 1930 wouldn't today be covered by paragraph 130. There is one famous poster that shows a sketch of large greyish mass of poor people, and above that it printed "Hitler - our last hope". There is no way you could declare that illegal under paragraph 130. Also, the revisionist stance on the Versailles treaty was widely shared back then amoung supporters of all parties. Had 130 existed back then it would have done nothing against that. Regarding Versailles, the Nazis did not say much that other parties didn't, they were just more successful in convincing people that they could actually pull it off.
I could go on, but my point is: the reasons why so many people voted for the NSDAP in the two 1932 elections were more rational than most people today think. Those were not poor illiterate masses that could be seduced by anybody. They had seen democracy at work for more than a decade, and didn't like what they saw. In 1932, Germany's democratic parties were in very bad shape. Brüning had been running the country for a while on Notverordnungen, effectively circumventing all democratic mechanisms. As Haffner and others have pointed out, the nationalists around Schleicher planned to replace democracy with some sort of junta and saw Hitler as a tool they could use for that purpose. The communists listened to Stalin and ate up precious votes the SPD would be missing. People had been through new elections every couple of months, but none of these elections ever seemed to actually change anything. In this environment, Hitler sold the more credible product: "We will make you feel proud again."
There were many things in Hitler's propaganda back then that would be covered by 130 today. But i think that he would have won chancellorship in 1933 even with a 100%-paragraph-130-compatible campaign in the months before.
The "founding fathers&mothers" did not install the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Schriften. Neither did they install the Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle Multimedia-Diensteanbieter. Instead, they wrote a constitution which in article 5 plainly says "(1) Everybody has the right to [...] unhindered access to information from commonly available sources [...] Censorship does not happen". These are the actual words of the German constitution (modulo my rough translation)
Much like in the USA (where there are numerous Supreme Court decisions on the subject), the government may restrict this right under very specific circumstances. Again, article 5: "(2) These rights are limited by the general legislation, the laws for protection of the youth and the right of personal honor."
The personal honor provision allows the government to outlaw libel, the youth protection clause allows it to restrict access to adult material. Note that there is no Nazi speech clause there (as would be expected if your statements were true). In fact, i doubt that the ominous "general legislation" clause in paragraph (2) covers the banning of swastikas and such, but since no Nazi has ever tried to challenge this at Germany's Bundesverfassungsgericht, we have yet to find out.
The disturbing trend behind the recent attempts to declare unwanted information illegal is that we seem to think that bad things will go away if we don't talk about them. They won't.
And the Weimar Republic did not die because Nazis were allowed to speak. It died because there weren't enough Democrats around to answer them.
From the article:
Plants do photosynthesis, consuming carbon dioxide and producing oxygen. Why would a decline in oxygen levels kill them?
And something else: we humans have adapted to thin-air conditions quite easily. People live in Nepal and Tibet, and it did not even take evolution. Ordinary flatlanders can move to Tibet, too, and after a couple of weeks they have adapted to the thinner air. We are mammals, with big brains and a high metabolism, so we need a lot of oxygen. Surely the reptiles of 250 Million years ago needed much less oxygen, so why didn't they make it?
and wikipedia doesn't mention one either. And the amount of water involved was rather large, several hundred liters, so it did not just sneak in. It is unknown how and why the water got into the tank, but none of the possible reasons usually discussed (a misguided attempt to clean the tank, a wrongly connected nitrogen pipe, sabotage) makes Union Carbide look good.
And even if there was a strike: wouldn't you expect management to make sure that your plant doesn't blow up in case of a simple labor dispute?
A spamfilter should not decide what the criteria for spam and ham are. It should only decide whether a particular mail fits the spam criterium or not. So if you categorize a mail as ham, your filter should treat it as ham. Anything else is a false positive.
They are celebrating false positives?
Actually, that's pretty much what the US did. It asked the Taliban to extradite Bin Laden or else. The Taliban said no, and the US answered "OK, then else." War followed.
Get a map. Sardinia is Italian.
Maybe these things will make artificial "Thump, Thump" sounds, just like some digicams that do an audible but synthetic "click" when triggered.
That's a standard problem with a standard solution. If you use pserver, map Alice, Bob and Charlie to a common cvs user and make the repository accessible to that user only. If you don't want to use pserver: create a group cvsabc, make Alice, Bob and Charlie members of this group, then chown cvs:cvsabc and chmod 2750 the repository, and do yourself a favour: restrict access from remote machines to ext/SSH only.
If you can't create groups, you are probably not root. That's another standard problem with a standard solution: become root. If you can't do that, you probably shouldn't do user administration anyway.
As usual, The Straight Dope has an exhaustive entry on the issue:
And on the first day, the Server said: emerge light!
...only to step out of the shower in Episode VII, telling us that IV,V, and VI were only a dream.
He bought a Linux distribution for as much money as Windows would have cost. He installed it on his PC. It didn't work as advertised.
Dit it? Did the box say: "Sound system xyz supported out of the box?" If i recall the article correctly, he just expected the distro to support his sound system. Well, I once expected MS-DOS to run on my C64, too, and it didn't, but back then my complaints went unheard.
Besides: he got the sound to work under ALSA, but "only until I rebooted. Then the sound went away again." I suspect a (probably trivial) problem with his particular configuration of ALSA, not with Linux itself.
This is just not true. Ethylene glycol is HO-CH_2-CH_2-OH, no double bonds involved. For toxicity info, see here or here.
Besides, the compund the article talks about is polyethylene glycol, which is the polymer of ethylene glycol (as the name says), chemical formula is HO-(CH_2-CH_2-O)_n-H (n usually >>100). See here.
In his classic "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman" Richard Feynman explains how he "earned" the patents on nuclear submarines and nuclear airplanes. At that time, neither technology existed. On the other hand, afaik he never tried to extort royalties from the US Navy for the USS Nautilus, so perhaps that doesn't count as a real submarine...
Does the offshoring result in lower prices for software and services? If the cost-saving was real and significant, prices should drop...
According to this wiki Hollywood was built this way: