A reasonably competent programmer could implement this in an hour: simply take the user's own IP address, and then sort the IPs of potential peers by the number of prefix bits in common, then do a random selection from that list, weighted towards the best-matching end.
It sounds like this scheme would wreak havoc on the stats kept by private trackers, definitely not a one hour job.
Local peer discovery only finds peers on my local network, not on near networks.
Agreed, but I was responding to one of his hypothetical hyperbolic scenarios: "connecting to your neighbour through at the same fucking router". The problem is definitely not as bad as the parent originally made it sound.
In any case, it does sound like my second suggested solution would work for his case, flipping the peer.resolve_country variable to true. Granted, he would have to flip that flag, and come back the next day to make sure all his torrents have an Australian peer. If a torrent he really wanted didn't have an Australian peer, then he would have to manually set that flag back to false. It's a pain, but it's definitely doable.
One of the features that I've been anxiously awaiting is the "Local Peer Discovery" feature in uTorrent 1.7x. Basically, it uses a multicast to discover bittorrent clients that are active on your local network. It can determine if they are seeding or leeching a torrent that you're interested in. If it's available on the network, it will try to use it as a peer, and download it at massive speeds.
[...]
I can think of a couple of really great uses for this. The first is a scenario that I run into at work occasionally. I'll try to download a video or file that a co-worker wants to see as well. Instead of competing for bandwidth, we can now both download it at the same time, and share the pieces quickly and automatically.
The other great use that I'm really excited about is LAN parties. For those of you that don't know, a common LAN party problem is that everyone wants to get a copy of a game off of one computer. Everyone tries to copy it at one time, effectively rendering the network and the hard drive useless. The current solution is to copy it to some computers, and then have people get it from the copies. It works, but it's manual, and it's not fun.
Talking about Walters, doesn't her carreer as a wildly successful news anchor contradict the OPs statement 'The issue is it can obviously inhibit options for jobs/other aspects of life etc.'. I don't think that it's obvious at all. The need for adult speech pathology seems massively overrated for most people in most professions if even news anchors can get away with having an impediment.
Women are the exceptions, where it comes to speech impediments. The studies I've read seem to indicate women didn't have as many speech impediments as men did, and when they did suffer them, whether it was the result of them being born with or as the result of a well-documented brain injury, their recovery rates were much higher than those of men suffering the same condition.
Unless you want me to speak very loud and slow to everyone!
Whatever you do! Do not speak more slowly.
Americans actually swallow their words when they speak. If you're French (like me), then slowing your speech down will only have the opposite effect, you won't swallow your words, you'll enunciate them all too well, and that will only confuse the American person/telephone system even more.
When an American says to slow down your speech, it usually means they want you to elongate your syllables (so that each syllable has two beats just like in Jazz music, whereas in French or in Chinese many syllables are just one short beat).
Not that I expect the guys who need to understand this to actually understand what I'm saying. This stuff is not easy to explain.
I think evolutionary change is being stifled by both medicine and civilization.
This is attributing an intent to evolutionary change. There is no such thing as intent where it comes to evolution.
Reproductive "success" is not genetic anymore, its based on social factors.
Reproductive "success" has always partially been based on social factors anyway.
Once out of the womb, our babies can not survive on their own. To you, this is probably completely natural, but just imagine if you had *not* gone through that process yourself. Imagine if you were an alien who was aware of evolution, but who had also been left to fend for himself and survive on his own just two minutes after his own birth. To you, that alien, the human race as we know it now would seem artificial and weak, not deserving to live, as I'm sure it would run against your sense of what evolution's true intent was supposed to be about.
No, I think we all know what Ayn Rand would have thought of the "too big to fail" argument. For instance, when she gave the example of the Steel industry being completely replaced by the new kind of steel. She prayed for their early demise, not for their all-out protection.
Then why does congress get this kind of protection when private citizens suspected of a crime do not?
It's an internal investigation. I recall one woman was accused of stealing a cell phone at her company. She refused to hand it over when someone saw her with it. The next morning, she had been fired and a notice was posted on every floor saying that she had been fired for theft of corporate property.
Later on, the woman sued for wrongful dismissal, won, and got some extra award for punitive damages. The cell phone she was using was indeed the exact same make and model the Corporation had purchased, but she had no trouble proving that she had indeed purchased the cell phone herself and been using it for quite a while.
So if your company starts accusing you of a crime, they're certainly free to tell everyone about it, not just their HR/legal personnel, but they better sure follow a process and be damn sure that you did commit such a crime -- otherwise -- that might get them in trouble otherwise.
Don't worry, they're using those earthquake retro-fit funds, in fact before this happened, they were already projected to go way over-budget by the time the new bridge was finished.
Yes, worldwide Nokia sells four times the number of smart-phones than Apple does. It still has an immense war chest of cash on-hand. And for every iPhone sold, Nokia gets a cut of it anyway. So it's not like Nokia is going away anytime soon.
Hulu may be able to unblock the IPs of the US military bases without getting itself in trouble with its content providers (after all, most US military bases are technically US soil). However, this means the military would have to provide Hulu with a list of its IP addresses, which it may be reluctant to provide -- for security reasons.
Look at the hex, make changes. The conept is no different then inserting or replacing a JMP to get around software protection.
Exactly! This software sounds like it might work for getting around non-technical vendor-imposed arbitrary limitations.
If you don't feel like paying for the Standard Edition of SQL Server 2005 anymore, now you won't have to, you can just purchase the slightly crippled Workgroup edition, and have ClearView make sure the database keeps on running after it blows by its self-imposed limits. Don't have legal copies of Windows 7, that's ok. Now your government or your office will have a contingency plan, should Microsoft decide to hit the kill switch on you.
Not that I expect this software to work that well. In my mind, there is no substitute for having a real knowledgeable human being tinkering with an hex editor in the same manner as this software will try to do.
That being said, I expect such software to work very well on contrived prepared examples, and I expect such software will make lots of money even if it doesn't work very well in real life. It's the nature of legacy software used in business. You can usually sell any automated magical half-baked solutions for untold amounts money if the customer comes to you at the same point he thinks he's about to lose everything (and has no idea, or no intention, on getting it fixed the right way in the first place).
You could also experiment with with snapping pictures of the formulas as they're on the board, or video recording the black board or projector with a good web cam.
If you're recording, you may have to ask permission from the instructor, and/or double-check the laws in your state. And whether you chose a normal camera, a phone camera, or a good web cam, you'll want to carefully read its customer reviews to make sure it works well with your Mac, and as the necessary resolution/optical zoom to pick out what's on the board (or what's being projected).
This is not to say that the German town is a perfect counter-example to what you're saying, it's not, for instance even if they took out all the signs and many of the rules -- they still kept a town-wide speed-limit of 30 mph. But perhaps something can be learned from this experiment, and perhaps we should try to run such experiments ourselves in the US, first in smaller towns just like they did, and then in slightly larger and larger towns to see if the concept still works.
Seriously why not Japan, or most European countries?
Because Japan, or most European countries, are not currently purchasing this technology from the United States. Once Japan or European countries decide to continue awarding very large contracts worth billions of dollars to companies such as Cisco and other American conglomerates, then I'm sure Obama will be more than willing to go over there and praise the hell out of those people responsible for those awards as well.
...with books its not really that hard to get 2 copies from 2 seperate sources. Diff the two and you can create a unique sig than matches neither.
Wrong.
Let's say, Amazon tries to protect one of the Harry Potter books, one as small as the one with the smallest word count: 76,944 words. Let's assume that their watermarking algorithm (or an Amazon employee) selects 277 words to make the permutations on. Let's further say that their algorithm finds an average of 5 synonyms for each word selected (so that would make 5 synonyms + the 1 original word = 6 total average variations for each selected word).
Let's further assume that once you get your two copies, your diff can only detect 58 variations between the two copies. And you have a friend who purchases a third copy still, and now between all three, your diff detects a total of 139 variations. Assuming no clean copy of the dead tree version of this book is published yet. How many legitimate copies of this ebook do you think you will need to purchase, before you can be assured that the original identities of the purchasers are completely laundered/erased from the resulting ebook?
Yes, the term for it is "watermark". And watermarking, even synonym watermarking is nothing new. It's too bad they didn't use that word in their patent description. If they had known the right word to search for, they would most likely have found a number of prior art examples.
In any case, it will be interesting to compare (to diff) the different watermarked versions of the same ebooks. I predict this will increase the number of illegal copies of the watermarked PDFs, not reduce them.
If you bank says there's something wrong with your account, either call them via their listed phone number or go visit them in person.
This is missing the point of the article. It's the banks voice mail systems that were compromised. So even if you call them back at their official listed number, you may still be duped by their re-programmed voice mail system.
It is ok if people post thoughtful messages, but this is not always the case. A lot of people can't help giving their senseless opinion and having 50 messages like that can only hurt the people left behind.
Who are you? Paris Hilton or Britney Spears? Personally, I do *trust* my friends. In fact, if my family wants to have some things posted on my wall, they'll have to go through one of my friends to do it.
This is the reason why posting privileges exist. I do not use Facebook to communicate with my family members, nor do I want people who I've previously blocked from my account, to gain posting/visibility privileges on my account once I've passed away. Hopefully, Facebook will find a way to gauge and follow my wishes, or at the very least transfer over my existing permission settings, within the constraints of existing estate laws of course (actually, this is an area where a new enterprising Estate lawyer who's not afraid to use/understand technology could get his clients from, in addition to the normal Estate stuff, such a lawyer could figure out ways to keep the wishes of his deceased clients on how their Facebook page (and other online profiles/sites/email accounts/digital porn collection) should be administered after they've passed away).
This is actually a smart move Facebook is making. Targeted ads for funeral services, insurance, flowers, last minute airplane tickets, car/limo service, etc., should be a nice source of revenue for Facebook. Also sometimes, going to a last minute funeral far away is not always feasible or cost effective, for everyone involved. At least with tools like this one becoming more ubiquitous, someone could die suddenly at 2PM, his death could appear on Twitter at 2:05 PM, and the entire funeral ceremony and reception afterward could be completed entirely online through Facebook by the time it's 7 PM the same day.
The purpose of patent protection is to allow the patent holder to appropriate the investment the underlying innovation requires. Without patents, the incentive to invest in R&D is diminished. The US is good at biotechnology innovation, and part of the reason for this is because biotech firms know that if their research is successful, they'll be given a chance to recuperate their investment.
Please take note of the circular nature of your argument.
Making money leads to => good biotech. Our biotech is so good because => it makes lots of $$$.
Is that the best argument you/we can come up with? -- because it makes lots of money? Shouldn't biotech be measured instead by the number of diseases it cures? or by the number of years it can push back death? and/or by the number of years it can increase our quality of life? It sounds to me like our incentives are ass-backwards. The longer we extend pharmacological patents, the longer those pharmacological companies will want us to stay sick and/or unhealthy.
And no, I'm not suggesting that people are thinking that way, or that there is even such a conspiracy. The sad truth is that there doesn't need to be one (a conspiracy). Decisions like these are very formulaic, and made often within spreadsheets. Our in-house experts are so over-specialized, they're not going to make mistakes. And shareholders are so insulated from the decisions of the companies they own, they're certainly not going to care either.
You want the Federal Election Commission to trust a voting machine written in a language used by script-kiddies?! That is utterly laughable in light of the DIEBOLD VB/Access debacle
No, but I'm not opposed to them giving it a try either. If you look at the projects on sourceforge, the overwhelming majority of them are either dead or dormant, but that doesn't make the open source process that lead to them a complete dud.
Some great open source projects have come out of sourceforge (and many other places as well of course). I don't know if the success rate is 1%, or 0.5%, or even lower than that, but whatever it is, I'd still consider the process a good one.
Also, the desire to create open source software is so high and the barrier to entry is so low, many programming newbies end up cutting their teeth on those types of projects. This encourages participation and programming literacy. And a newbie may not be able to code a perfect voting solution for instance, but at least even if his solution is not selected for any election, or doesn't even come close to being selected for one, it only means that there is at least one more person that's at least semi-computer literate and invested enough to weigh in for the process of selecting a voting solution.
Well, this guy was extradited from Australia to USA for copyright infringement. Australian pirate to be extradited to the United States
Not that I like this ruling in the least, we all know Australia did this because it's the lapdog of the United States, but this guy wasn't a normal watered-down pirate -- as the word usually means these days.
This guy actually did the cracking, the zero-day releases, the killings, the rapings, and sailed throughout South East Asia looking for cargo ships to break into and commandeer.
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like this scheme would wreak havoc on the stats kept by private trackers, definitely not a one hour job.
Agreed, but I was responding to one of his hypothetical hyperbolic scenarios: "connecting to your neighbour through at the same fucking router". The problem is definitely not as bad as the parent originally made it sound.
In any case, it does sound like my second suggested solution would work for his case, flipping the peer.resolve_country variable to true. Granted, he would have to flip that flag, and come back the next day to make sure all his torrents have an Australian peer. If a torrent he really wanted didn't have an Australian peer, then he would have to manually set that flag back to false. It's a pain, but it's definitely doable.
This issue has been fixed since version 1.7x.
You can also do it this other way if you want.
And then, there is always PeerGuardian if you're looking for something else still.
Women are the exceptions, where it comes to speech impediments. The studies I've read seem to indicate women didn't have as many speech impediments as men did, and when they did suffer them, whether it was the result of them being born with or as the result of a well-documented brain injury, their recovery rates were much higher than those of men suffering the same condition.
Whatever you do! Do not speak more slowly.
Americans actually swallow their words when they speak. If you're French (like me), then slowing your speech down will only have the opposite effect, you won't swallow your words, you'll enunciate them all too well, and that will only confuse the American person/telephone system even more.
When an American says to slow down your speech, it usually means they want you to elongate your syllables (so that each syllable has two beats just like in Jazz music, whereas in French or in Chinese many syllables are just one short beat).
Not that I expect the guys who need to understand this to actually understand what I'm saying. This stuff is not easy to explain.
I think evolutionary change is being stifled by both medicine and civilization.
This is attributing an intent to evolutionary change. There is no such thing as intent where it comes to evolution.
Reproductive "success" is not genetic anymore, its based on social factors.
Reproductive "success" has always partially been based on social factors anyway.
Once out of the womb, our babies can not survive on their own. To you, this is probably completely natural, but just imagine if you had *not* gone through that process yourself. Imagine if you were an alien who was aware of evolution, but who had also been left to fend for himself and survive on his own just two minutes after his own birth. To you, that alien, the human race as we know it now would seem artificial and weak, not deserving to live, as I'm sure it would run against your sense of what evolution's true intent was supposed to be about.
No, I think we all know what Ayn Rand would have thought of the "too big to fail" argument. For instance, when she gave the example of the Steel industry being completely replaced by the new kind of steel. She prayed for their early demise, not for their all-out protection.
Then why does congress get this kind of protection when private citizens suspected of a crime do not?
It's an internal investigation. I recall one woman was accused of stealing a cell phone at her company. She refused to hand it over when someone saw her with it. The next morning, she had been fired and a notice was posted on every floor saying that she had been fired for theft of corporate property.
Later on, the woman sued for wrongful dismissal, won, and got some extra award for punitive damages. The cell phone she was using was indeed the exact same make and model the Corporation had purchased, but she had no trouble proving that she had indeed purchased the cell phone herself and been using it for quite a while.
So if your company starts accusing you of a crime, they're certainly free to tell everyone about it, not just their HR/legal personnel, but they better sure follow a process and be damn sure that you did commit such a crime -- otherwise -- that might get them in trouble otherwise.
Don't worry, they're using those earthquake retro-fit funds, in fact before this happened, they were already projected to go way over-budget by the time the new bridge was finished.
Yes, worldwide Nokia sells four times the number of smart-phones than Apple does. It still has an immense war chest of cash on-hand. And for every iPhone sold, Nokia gets a cut of it anyway. So it's not like Nokia is going away anytime soon.
Hulu may be able to unblock the IPs of the US military bases without getting itself in trouble with its content providers (after all, most US military bases are technically US soil). However, this means the military would have to provide Hulu with a list of its IP addresses, which it may be reluctant to provide -- for security reasons.
There's this amazing thing with muscles, if you use them they get stronger.
Not me. I have anti-muscles, if I use them a lot -- I start crying.
Look at the hex, make changes. The conept is no different then inserting or replacing a JMP to get around software protection.
Exactly! This software sounds like it might work for getting around non-technical vendor-imposed arbitrary limitations.
If you don't feel like paying for the Standard Edition of SQL Server 2005 anymore, now you won't have to, you can just purchase the slightly crippled Workgroup edition, and have ClearView make sure the database keeps on running after it blows by its self-imposed limits. Don't have legal copies of Windows 7, that's ok. Now your government or your office will have a contingency plan, should Microsoft decide to hit the kill switch on you.
Not that I expect this software to work that well. In my mind, there is no substitute for having a real knowledgeable human being tinkering with an hex editor in the same manner as this software will try to do.
That being said, I expect such software to work very well on contrived prepared examples, and I expect such software will make lots of money even if it doesn't work very well in real life. It's the nature of legacy software used in business. You can usually sell any automated magical half-baked solutions for untold amounts money if the customer comes to you at the same point he thinks he's about to lose everything (and has no idea, or no intention, on getting it fixed the right way in the first place).
You could also experiment with with snapping pictures of the formulas as they're on the board, or video recording the black board or projector with a good web cam. If you're recording, you may have to ask permission from the instructor, and/or double-check the laws in your state. And whether you chose a normal camera, a phone camera, or a good web cam, you'll want to carefully read its customer reviews to make sure it works well with your Mac, and as the necessary resolution/optical zoom to pick out what's on the board (or what's being projected).
Do you realize that traffic rules were designed _specifically_ to minimize the impact of drivers' mistakes?
Not that I disagree with the fact that the parent poster might be deluding himself, I really don't know if he's a good driver or not, but...
German town bans road signs to cut accidents
This is not to say that the German town is a perfect counter-example to what you're saying, it's not, for instance even if they took out all the signs and many of the rules -- they still kept a town-wide speed-limit of 30 mph. But perhaps something can be learned from this experiment, and perhaps we should try to run such experiments ourselves in the US, first in smaller towns just like they did, and then in slightly larger and larger towns to see if the concept still works.
Seriously why not Japan, or most European countries?
Because Japan, or most European countries, are not currently purchasing this technology from the United States. Once Japan or European countries decide to continue awarding very large contracts worth billions of dollars to companies such as Cisco and other American conglomerates, then I'm sure Obama will be more than willing to go over there and praise the hell out of those people responsible for those awards as well.
Mapmakers have been adding fictitious towns for many years (as many have commented).
Damn, I've always wanted to become the mayor/sheriff/owner of my own town.
...with books its not really that hard to get 2 copies from 2 seperate sources. Diff the two and you can create a unique sig than matches neither.
Wrong.
Let's say, Amazon tries to protect one of the Harry Potter books, one as small as the one with the smallest word count: 76,944 words. Let's assume that their watermarking algorithm (or an Amazon employee) selects 277 words to make the permutations on. Let's further say that their algorithm finds an average of 5 synonyms for each word selected (so that would make 5 synonyms + the 1 original word = 6 total average variations for each selected word).
Let's further assume that once you get your two copies, your diff can only detect 58 variations between the two copies. And you have a friend who purchases a third copy still, and now between all three, your diff detects a total of 139 variations. Assuming no clean copy of the dead tree version of this book is published yet. How many legitimate copies of this ebook do you think you will need to purchase, before you can be assured that the original identities of the purchasers are completely laundered/erased from the resulting ebook?
Yes, the term for it is "watermark". And watermarking, even synonym watermarking is nothing new. It's too bad they didn't use that word in their patent description. If they had known the right word to search for, they would most likely have found a number of prior art examples.
In any case, it will be interesting to compare (to diff) the different watermarked versions of the same ebooks. I predict this will increase the number of illegal copies of the watermarked PDFs, not reduce them.
If you bank says there's something wrong with your account, either call them via their listed phone number or go visit them in person.
This is missing the point of the article. It's the banks voice mail systems that were compromised. So even if you call them back at their official listed number, you may still be duped by their re-programmed voice mail system.
It is ok if people post thoughtful messages, but this is not always the case. A lot of people can't help giving their senseless opinion and having 50 messages like that can only hurt the people left behind.
Who are you? Paris Hilton or Britney Spears? Personally, I do *trust* my friends. In fact, if my family wants to have some things posted on my wall, they'll have to go through one of my friends to do it.
This is the reason why posting privileges exist. I do not use Facebook to communicate with my family members, nor do I want people who I've previously blocked from my account, to gain posting/visibility privileges on my account once I've passed away. Hopefully, Facebook will find a way to gauge and follow my wishes, or at the very least transfer over my existing permission settings, within the constraints of existing estate laws of course (actually, this is an area where a new enterprising Estate lawyer who's not afraid to use/understand technology could get his clients from, in addition to the normal Estate stuff, such a lawyer could figure out ways to keep the wishes of his deceased clients on how their Facebook page (and other online profiles/sites/email accounts/digital porn collection) should be administered after they've passed away).
This is actually a smart move Facebook is making. Targeted ads for funeral services, insurance, flowers, last minute airplane tickets, car/limo service, etc., should be a nice source of revenue for Facebook. Also sometimes, going to a last minute funeral far away is not always feasible or cost effective, for everyone involved. At least with tools like this one becoming more ubiquitous, someone could die suddenly at 2PM, his death could appear on Twitter at 2:05 PM, and the entire funeral ceremony and reception afterward could be completed entirely online through Facebook by the time it's 7 PM the same day.
The purpose of patent protection is to allow the patent holder to appropriate the investment the underlying innovation requires. Without patents, the incentive to invest in R&D is diminished. The US is good at biotechnology innovation, and part of the reason for this is because biotech firms know that if their research is successful, they'll be given a chance to recuperate their investment.
Please take note of the circular nature of your argument.
Making money leads to => good biotech. Our biotech is so good because => it makes lots of $$$.
Is that the best argument you/we can come up with? -- because it makes lots of money? Shouldn't biotech be measured instead by the number of diseases it cures? or by the number of years it can push back death? and/or by the number of years it can increase our quality of life? It sounds to me like our incentives are ass-backwards. The longer we extend pharmacological patents, the longer those pharmacological companies will want us to stay sick and/or unhealthy.
And no, I'm not suggesting that people are thinking that way, or that there is even such a conspiracy. The sad truth is that there doesn't need to be one (a conspiracy). Decisions like these are very formulaic, and made often within spreadsheets. Our in-house experts are so over-specialized, they're not going to make mistakes. And shareholders are so insulated from the decisions of the companies they own, they're certainly not going to care either.
You want the Federal Election Commission to trust a voting machine written in a language used by script-kiddies?! That is utterly laughable in light of the DIEBOLD VB/Access debacle
No, but I'm not opposed to them giving it a try either. If you look at the projects on sourceforge, the overwhelming majority of them are either dead or dormant, but that doesn't make the open source process that lead to them a complete dud.
Some great open source projects have come out of sourceforge (and many other places as well of course). I don't know if the success rate is 1%, or 0.5%, or even lower than that, but whatever it is, I'd still consider the process a good one.
Also, the desire to create open source software is so high and the barrier to entry is so low, many programming newbies end up cutting their teeth on those types of projects. This encourages participation and programming literacy. And a newbie may not be able to code a perfect voting solution for instance, but at least even if his solution is not selected for any election, or doesn't even come close to being selected for one, it only means that there is at least one more person that's at least semi-computer literate and invested enough to weigh in for the process of selecting a voting solution.
Well, this guy was extradited from Australia to USA for copyright infringement. Australian pirate to be extradited to the United States
Not that I like this ruling in the least, we all know Australia did this because it's the lapdog of the United States, but this guy wasn't a normal watered-down pirate -- as the word usually means these days.
This guy actually did the cracking, the zero-day releases, the killings, the rapings, and sailed throughout South East Asia looking for cargo ships to break into and commandeer.
If you want more women in the field, do things that attract them.
The female programmers I know can't get laid either, so I assume your suggestion is to just start bringing in some male strippers as well.