Apparently most of Slashdot doesn't realize that if Debian dies... so does Ubuntu.
That's like saying that if Linus dies, so does Linux. Thanks to the genius of free software, it doesn't matter what dies, so long as something else pops up in it's place. If Debian disappeared from the earth tomorrow, all those users would still exist and they would need to get some software to put on their blank HDD's.
It's the double standards about this argument that bother me. If it was not for proprietary software, the GPL movement and the GNU free software directory would not exist.
You really should read some history of the whole open source movement. All the software Stallman was originally using WAS at least somewhat free (at least implicitly, if not explicitly). The FSF was created as a result of Stallman's later encounters with proprietary software, not because the mood just suddenly struck him after having been previously relying on proprietary software.
Your claim here fails for any number of reasons, the most obvious being that it doesn't even make logical sense. If there was no proprietary software, then by your own definition of the situation, everything else would HAVE to either free software, or we just wouldn't have any software at all.
Yes it does. Most countries aren't so silly as to make all of their bill denominations the same size and color. But that's another rant.
Acutally, it's pretty easy for one to argue that this is a good thing.
Making all the bills the same size and color means that people have to actually LOOK AT THE BILLS. This makes it a lot harder to pass off a counterfeit bill.
And even better choice you be if the made the security features (holograms, color changing ink, etc) the actual indicator of value itself. Then you'd have people checking those features every time they got a bill.
In short, you want people looking at something that is hard to fake to determine that value of their money. A piece of paper of the right size and color isn't hard to fake.
This is not, as you "VERY CLEARLY" suggested earlier, as if they are forced to both sell their product and provide a better license.
I NEVER very clearly suggested this, as I haven't suggested it at all my. My entire point, is that it doesn't matter if they quit selling their software, they are still bound by the decision.
They can be required to turn over code under a certain liscense but I never mentioned requiring them to sell anything.
So you think the EU can order a US company to sell their product in the EU? I don't know where people get ideas like this.
No, that's very clearly NOT AT ALL what I'm talking about. My point is that it doesn't MATTER whether or not MS decides to quit, they've already been convicted of a crime.
The above are the things that can happen to them if they continue to sell their software in the EU without complying with the other terms of the court order.
Damn why don't people get it? If a court tells you to do something, you have to do it or else they can punish you further. If you get a speeding ticket you can't just stop driving and the fine goes away.
I've never heard this, and if true, it has absolutely nothing to do with the GOP or Rossi. I met with the state GOP chairman last week, and we talked about the case, and it is in no way based on illegal aliens.
And you just took his word for it?
Christ man, why don't you actually check some facts before posting?
It's not like this guy doesn't have an interest in getting you to take his side....
It's not like politicians have never lied before, especially republicans...
That's false. Some of them did turn out to be juveniles, yes, but it was not "at least half." Not even close.
Do you have a link or did a republican tell you this in another private, off the record conversation as well?
Hey, if you turn out to be right that'll be an interesting suprise, but right now it seems pretty obvious that you don't have best BS filter around. Politicians seems to have enough trouble keeping their on the record lies straight, let alone being trustworthy in a face to face, 'I can deny it later', conversation. (This goes for both sides.)
They don't have to. They can decide not to sell their software in the EU.
Where the hell did you get this idea?
If a court orders you to do something, you can't just decide to not do something else and the order goes away.
I really don't understand where people get ideas like this. If a judge orders them to release their code they have to do it. If they don't they can be fined, have assets seized, be thrown in jail, etc.
If they decide never to sell their software again in the EU, that doesn't undo a court order, and that doesn't protect them from any of the above punishments.
College hardly teaches you anything tangible(unless you major in something really technical). What college does is teach you how to think , solve future problems, and conduct research. All of these things are important for people not to be dumbasses in life
Only if they can actually apply them to....well... LIFE!
While it's neat to know all sorts of esoteric stuff, it's really not useful unless you can actually DO SOMETHING with it.
If someone comes out of college with a head full of knowedge, but no way to apply that information to their life, they can still end up being quite a dumbass.
Radio waves are radio waves. Once your frequency, modulation system, etc. are documented, anyone can fake your radio waves.
Not really true.
It's far easier to secure the higher layers (in the OSI sense) -- the data you're sending over the radio waves.
Except that does nothing to protect you from DOS attacks.
This guy was asking for a system where no one else could transmit but authorized users. Obviously you can't actually prevent someone from building a transmitter, but you can design your modulation scheme such that without the proper "key" all your transmissions will be discarded as noise by a receiver.
There is no practical way to provide secure RF transmissions.
Sure there is.
Take military GPS for example.
Try and explain to me how you're going to spoof a military GPS signal......
What this guy needs to do is research something called Electronic Counter-Countermeasures (ECCM). This is a common military problem.
For example:
Joe's shooting a radar-guided missile at Steve. If Steve can send back enough fake radar pulses to throw off the missile's tracking, Joe will never be able to shoot him down with a radar guided missile.
Note:
-Remember: "The important part is that only authorized users (ie. no hackers) would be able to broadcast signals."
Obviously you can't prevent someone from building/buying a transmitter. Encryption can be a solution, but you're looking at it from the wrong angle. He want's to stop people from spoofing transmissions, he doesn't seem to care if you can decode what he's transmitting. (Just like a missile doesn't care that much if you know that it's a missile, so long as you can't avoid it or jam it.)
One idea would be to have a set of matched filters at each end who's filter coefficients are determined by a continuously varying cryptographic keystream. This would actually allow you to reject spoofed signals pretty well. Think CDMA, but with a constanly changing code.
You have a mistake in how much wire you actually need.....However in this case first or all you are only running current for 4 seconds!
You need to acutally design for a much more severe case than 4 seconds. Think full throttle up to 80+ MPH (acceleration heats the wires too) and the a panic stop from 80 MPH.
60-0 MPH was just to give a ballpark of the amount of energy you need to dissipate and the size of the equipment you'd need to do it. A vehicle that could only handle 4 seconds of high current would be dangerously underdesigned.
Probably you would want actually to stop from 60MPH in about 3.5 seconds, and also you would not likely need to dissipate all the energy as generated electricity.
The real trouble is that I was being consevative with the energy. An actual car would need to be able to handle a panic stop from 80 MPH plus. So you have to double all your numbers.
And you have to be pretty conservative with you current ratings, since you may have just done a full-throttle acceleration up to that 80MPH.
I think there's probably a point of dimishing returns after you're getting a certain percentage your breaking force from regnerative breaking.
(Consider the extra weight of all the equipment to handle a full panic stop, vs that percent of the time that you're actually going to use it.)
Also consider the bigger wires, motors and batteries add weight, which in turn makes stopping harder.
A super-fast charging battery could eliminate any need for mechanical brakes except as safety backups.
Except that your electrical system would burst into flames if you did a 60-0 MPH panic stop.
k=.5*m*v^2=.5*1000*26.82^2=359656.2 joules
spread this out over 4 seconds and you get about 90,000 watts!
If you were using a battery voltage of 100V, you would still need a battery system that could handle 900 amps of current. If you were using 0000 gauage wire, which is 0.46" in diameter, you'd be running 3X the reccommend current for that wire guage. So even if your motors and your batteries could handle the current (which they can't), just your wiring itself would probably end up weighing as much as a set of normal, mechanical brakes.
It would be neat if all that energy could be recovered, but I expect mechanical brakes are going to be around for quite some time. Of course if you did build a car that could do this, and it ever broke, the electrical system in the car could provide enough current to weld itself together (and a half dozen other cars...simulatneously).
His take was simple--Americans and French are the only two cultures that think their culture is the best and want to impose it (in some fashion) on everyone else.
I take it he'd never heard of Germans?
There was even a couple little wars about that issue.
And then of course there's the middle east... where people are actively killing themselves and each other for this very purposes..... and some of them aren't even americans!
I suppose it's not your hypothesis, but I just feel the need to say that it's overly simplistic and obviously flawed.
What's funny is that much of the world actually LOVES american culture, they just hate americans.
Your knowledge about binary packages and especially Your knowledge about binary packages and especially where they come from and how easily they can be modified seems quite lacking.
What's wrong with you man?
You're getting all condescending with out understanding any of the points I made.
There's no such difference, since we're talking about creating your own ebuilds
We're not. We're talking about downloading an ebuild as opposed to downloading an RPM, autopackage or whatever.
There's nothing ebuild would have done to solve that problem, because it wasn't problem with ABI, mplayer just didn't like 2.96, recompiling it with it would not have helped.
Portage solves this problem by installing the correct libraries for each package automagically and by recompiling each package to use libaries that actually exist on the system.
If you give me a binary compiled for a library I don't have, it isn't going to work. Rebuiling the RPM from source IS THE SAME FUCKING THING THAT PORTAGE DOES, EXCEPT THAT PORTAGE DOES IT AUTOMATICALLY. If you're rebuilding the code from source, you're no longer distributing binaries.
To act is if I don't know "about binary packages and especially where they come from and how easily they can be modified" is being a total fucktard. If you're building from source, you're not using binary packages as your distribution mechanism. Why? Because you wouldn't have the source code to build the program from if you did.
Mods, I generally try to aviod calling someone a 'fucktard', but guys like this really deserve to get flamed to a crisp. If you're going to be condescending at least have a clue what you're talking about.
But the point stands that this will only catch small-timers that aren't smart enough to set up encrypted communications.
Except that wiretaps are too expensive to use to catch small-timers. But they're oh so useful for going after suspected communists/homosexuals/terrorists/politcal leaders. And with former iran/contra henchmen on staff, you can bet the current adminstration would never do anything of the sort, right?
Anyone who thinks that big organized crime doesn't have their own IT guys who know this stuff forwards and backwards, and set up secure communications and encrypted storage for their bosses is a fool.
From reading the article in the posted link in the parent it is obvious that Immersion did own most of the so called prior art thus negating the argument.
It doesn't matter who owns the prior art.
If it did, it would be trivial to have a neverending patent on a device, all you'd have to do is make a trivial change and re-patent it every ten years. You'd always own the prior art.
The suit against sony was based on newer patents of updated technologies developed by immersion and licensed by almost all of the other counsole and third party add-on manufactures.
A. If the "updating" is obvious, it's not patentable.
B. Liscensing on its own doesn't really say much about the validity of a patent. See my previous post in the thread regarding this.
Apparently several companies already recognize Immersion's patent on the technology as being valid and have licensed it from them.
This means basically nothing.
Step one: Get a silly patent.
Step two: Liscense it for virtually nothing to a few big companies.
Step three: Claim that the other companies having liscensed you patent is proof of its validity and demand an arbitrarily large chunk of money from all the other companies that didn't liscense your patent. Make sure this amount is completely unreasonable ($50,000,000 for something that took you one day to think of and $10,000 to patent).
Is Sony notorious for infringing upon patents?
Sony's notorious for being retarded, but I expect they'll ultimately win this case. They should be able to show tons of prior art in this case. See my previous post.
A controller that vibrates isn't exactly a logical thing.
Sure it is.
It's pretty much a degnerate case of a force feedback controller, which is something that has been in development for ages. It's an idea that's obvious to anyone even remotely clueful in this area.
The patent is completely valid and numerous manufacturers have licensed it for their use.
You know this how?
Besides being an obvious idea, and therefore non-patentable there are tons of other reasons this patent could be ruled invaild.
Sony should be able to fill the courtroom with examples of force feedback/vibration prior to the filing date of this patent. It should be easy to show that vibrating controllers came about from a simple evolution of designs that were already out there, showing no real "invention" just the packing of pre-existing technology in an obvious package.
Slashdot Mirror
(admittedly, brief exposure to alcohol doesn't really sterilize anything... but I feel better doing it... how's that for being dogmatic?).
Could you please elaborate on this?
For example, is pouring alcohol on a cut worthless?
Apparently most of Slashdot doesn't realize that if Debian dies... so does Ubuntu.
That's like saying that if Linus dies, so does Linux. Thanks to the genius of free software, it doesn't matter what dies, so long as something else pops up in it's place. If Debian disappeared from the earth tomorrow, all those users would still exist and they would need to get some software to put on their blank HDD's.
It's the double standards about this argument that bother me. If it was not for proprietary software, the GPL movement and the GNU free software directory would not exist.
You really should read some history of the whole open source movement. All the software Stallman was originally using WAS at least somewhat free (at least implicitly, if not explicitly). The FSF was created as a result of Stallman's later encounters with proprietary software, not because the mood just suddenly struck him after having been previously relying on proprietary software.
Your claim here fails for any number of reasons, the most obvious being that it doesn't even make logical sense. If there was no proprietary software, then by your own definition of the situation, everything else would HAVE to either free software, or we just wouldn't have any software at all.
Yes it does. Most countries aren't so silly as to make all of their bill denominations the same size and color. But that's another rant.
Acutally, it's pretty easy for one to argue that this is a good thing.
Making all the bills the same size and color means that people have to actually LOOK AT THE BILLS. This makes it a lot harder to pass off a counterfeit bill.
And even better choice you be if the made the security features (holograms, color changing ink, etc) the actual indicator of value itself. Then you'd have people checking those features every time they got a bill.
In short, you want people looking at something that is hard to fake to determine that value of their money. A piece of paper of the right size and color isn't hard to fake.
This is not, as you "VERY CLEARLY" suggested earlier, as if they are forced to both sell their product and provide a better license.
I NEVER very clearly suggested this, as I haven't suggested it at all my. My entire point, is that it doesn't matter if they quit selling their software, they are still bound by the decision.
They can be required to turn over code under a certain liscense but I never mentioned requiring them to sell anything.
So you think the EU can order a US company to sell their product in the EU? I don't know where people get ideas like this.
No, that's very clearly NOT AT ALL what I'm talking about. My point is that it doesn't MATTER whether or not MS decides to quit, they've already been convicted of a crime.
The above are the things that can happen to them if they continue to sell their software in the EU without complying with the other terms of the court order.
Damn why don't people get it? If a court tells you to do something, you have to do it or else they can punish you further. If you get a speeding ticket you can't just stop driving and the fine goes away.
I've never heard this, and if true, it has absolutely nothing to do with the GOP or Rossi. I met with the state GOP chairman last week, and we talked about the case, and it is in no way based on illegal aliens.
And you just took his word for it?
Christ man, why don't you actually check some facts before posting?
It's not like this guy doesn't have an interest in getting you to take his side....
It's not like politicians have never lied before, especially republicans...
That's false. Some of them did turn out to be juveniles, yes, but it was not "at least half." Not even close.
Do you have a link or did a republican tell you this in another private, off the record conversation as well?
Hey, if you turn out to be right that'll be an interesting suprise, but right now it seems pretty obvious that you don't have best BS filter around. Politicians seems to have enough trouble keeping their on the record lies straight, let alone being trustworthy in a face to face, 'I can deny it later', conversation. (This goes for both sides.)
They don't have to. They can decide not to sell their software in the EU.
Where the hell did you get this idea?
If a court orders you to do something, you can't just decide to not do something else and the order goes away.
I really don't understand where people get ideas like this.
If a judge orders them to release their code they have to do it. If they don't they can be fined, have assets seized, be thrown in jail, etc.
If they decide never to sell their software again in the EU, that doesn't undo a court order, and that doesn't protect them from any of the above punishments.
If this is true, couldn't one use a very powerful RF pulse to fry the chips?
Yes, but I imagine the FCC would never allow such a thing to be sold unless it included it's own RF-tight enclosure (like a microwave).
College hardly teaches you anything tangible(unless you major in something really technical). What college does is teach you how to think , solve future problems, and conduct research. All of these things are important for people not to be dumbasses in life
Only if they can actually apply them to....well... LIFE!
While it's neat to know all sorts of esoteric stuff, it's really not useful unless you can actually DO SOMETHING with it.
If someone comes out of college with a head full of knowedge, but no way to apply that information to their life, they can still end up being quite a dumbass.
Radio waves are radio waves. Once your frequency, modulation system, etc. are documented, anyone can fake your radio waves.
Not really true.
It's far easier to secure the higher layers (in the OSI sense) -- the data you're sending over the radio waves.
Except that does nothing to protect you from DOS attacks.
This guy was asking for a system where no one else could transmit but authorized users. Obviously you can't actually prevent someone from building a transmitter, but you can design your modulation scheme such that without the proper "key" all your transmissions will be discarded as noise by a receiver.
... trying to make radio not transmittable is like trying to make water not wet.
The key is not to make radio waves not transmittable, but to make it easy to reject any radio waves other than the ones you don't want.
There is no practical way to provide secure RF transmissions.
Sure there is.
Take military GPS for example.
Try and explain to me how you're going to spoof a military GPS signal......
What this guy needs to do is research something called Electronic Counter-Countermeasures (ECCM). This is a common military problem.
For example:
Joe's shooting a radar-guided missile at Steve. If Steve can send back enough fake radar pulses to throw off the missile's tracking, Joe will never be able to shoot him down with a radar guided missile.
Note:
-Remember: "The important part is that only authorized users (ie. no hackers) would be able to broadcast signals."
Obviously you can't prevent someone from building/buying a transmitter. Encryption can be a solution, but you're looking at it from the wrong angle. He want's to stop people from spoofing transmissions, he doesn't seem to care if you can decode what he's transmitting. (Just like a missile doesn't care that much if you know that it's a missile, so long as you can't avoid it or jam it.)
One idea would be to have a set of matched filters at each end who's filter coefficients are determined by a continuously varying cryptographic keystream. This would actually allow you to reject spoofed signals pretty well. Think CDMA, but with a constanly changing code.
You have a mistake in how much wire you actually need.....However in this case first or all you are only running current for 4 seconds!
You need to acutally design for a much more severe case than 4 seconds. Think full throttle up to 80+ MPH (acceleration heats the wires too) and the a panic stop from 80 MPH.
60-0 MPH was just to give a ballpark of the amount of energy you need to dissipate and the size of the equipment you'd need to do it. A vehicle that could only handle 4 seconds of high current would be dangerously underdesigned.
Probably you would want actually to stop from 60MPH in about 3.5 seconds, and also you would not likely need to dissipate all the energy as generated electricity.
The real trouble is that I was being consevative with the energy. An actual car would need to be able to handle a panic stop from 80 MPH plus. So you have to double all your numbers.
And you have to be pretty conservative with you current ratings, since you may have just done a full-throttle acceleration up to that 80MPH.
I think there's probably a point of dimishing returns after you're getting a certain percentage your breaking force from regnerative breaking.
(Consider the extra weight of all the equipment to handle a full panic stop, vs that percent of the time that you're actually going to use it.)
Also consider the bigger wires, motors and batteries add weight, which in turn makes stopping harder.
A super-fast charging battery could eliminate any need for mechanical brakes except as safety backups.
Except that your electrical system would burst into flames if you did a 60-0 MPH panic stop.
k=.5*m*v^2=.5*1000*26.82^2=359656.2 joules spread this out over 4 seconds and you get about 90,000 watts!
If you were using a battery voltage of 100V, you would still need a battery system that could handle 900 amps of current. If you were using 0000 gauage wire, which is 0.46" in diameter, you'd be running 3X the reccommend current for that wire guage. So even if your motors and your batteries could handle the current (which they can't), just your wiring itself would probably end up weighing as much as a set of normal, mechanical brakes.
It would be neat if all that energy could be recovered, but I expect mechanical brakes are going to be around for quite some time. Of course if you did build a car that could do this, and it ever broke, the electrical system in the car could provide enough current to weld itself together (and a half dozen other cars...simulatneously).
His take was simple--Americans and French are the only two cultures that think their culture is the best and want to impose it (in some fashion) on everyone else.
I take it he'd never heard of Germans?
There was even a couple little wars about that issue.
And then of course there's the middle east... where people are actively killing themselves and each other for this very purposes..... and some of them aren't even americans!
I suppose it's not your hypothesis, but I just feel the need to say that it's overly simplistic and obviously flawed.
What's funny is that much of the world actually LOVES american culture, they just hate americans.
Your knowledge about binary packages and especially Your knowledge about binary packages and especially where they come from and how easily they can be modified seems quite lacking.
What's wrong with you man?
You're getting all condescending with out understanding any of the points I made.
There's no such difference, since we're talking about creating your own ebuilds
We're not. We're talking about downloading an ebuild as opposed to downloading an RPM, autopackage or whatever.
There's nothing ebuild would have done to solve that problem, because it wasn't problem with ABI, mplayer just didn't like 2.96, recompiling it with it would not have helped.
Portage solves this problem by installing the correct libraries for each package automagically and by recompiling each package to use libaries that actually exist on the system.
If you give me a binary compiled for a library I don't have, it isn't going to work. Rebuiling the RPM from source IS THE SAME FUCKING THING THAT PORTAGE DOES, EXCEPT THAT PORTAGE DOES IT AUTOMATICALLY. If you're rebuilding the code from source, you're no longer distributing binaries.
To act is if I don't know "about binary packages and especially where they come from and how easily they can be modified" is being a total fucktard. If you're building from source, you're not using binary packages as your distribution mechanism. Why? Because you wouldn't have the source code to build the program from if you did.
Mods, I generally try to aviod calling someone a 'fucktard', but guys like this really deserve to get flamed to a crisp. If you're going to be condescending at least have a clue what you're talking about.
I hope I never think any of my passwords are so clever that I feel compelled to tell everyone about them.
Reminds me of one of my favorite userfriendly strips:
Tech: Hello
User: Hi, I need (some random tech support thing)
Tech: Sure, what's your password?
User: Asterix asterix asterix asterix asterix asterix
Tech: (stunned silence)
User: HA! You can't tell if I'm being stupid or clever.
Well yes, that is mean... But it's somewhat less mean than murder and embezzlement...
Yes but it's not like the gov't hasn't done those things as well.
But the point stands that this will only catch small-timers that aren't smart enough to set up encrypted communications.
Except that wiretaps are too expensive to use to catch small-timers. But they're oh so useful for going after suspected communists/homosexuals/terrorists/politcal leaders. And with former iran/contra henchmen on staff, you can bet the current adminstration would never do anything of the sort, right?
Anyone who thinks that big organized crime doesn't have their own IT guys who know this stuff forwards and backwards, and set up secure communications and encrypted storage for their bosses is a fool.
Which makes me think of the movie "Sneakers".
They're a multi-billion dollar international company. I'm sure that they had a competent lawyer, who attempted to get the patent ruled invalid.
You would think so, but these are the same guys who came up with memory stick.
From reading the article in the posted link in the parent it is obvious that Immersion did own most of the so called prior art thus negating the argument.
It doesn't matter who owns the prior art.
If it did, it would be trivial to have a neverending patent on a device, all you'd have to do is make a trivial change and re-patent it every ten years. You'd always own the prior art.
The suit against sony was based on newer patents of updated technologies developed by immersion and licensed by almost all of the other counsole and third party add-on manufactures.
A. If the "updating" is obvious, it's not patentable.
B. Liscensing on its own doesn't really say much about the validity of a patent. See my previous post in the thread regarding this.
This means basically nothing.
Is Sony notorious for infringing upon patents?
Sony's notorious for being retarded, but I expect they'll ultimately win this case. They should be able to show tons of prior art in this case. See my previous post.
A controller that vibrates isn't exactly a logical thing.
Sure it is.
It's pretty much a degnerate case of a force feedback controller, which is something that has been in development for ages. It's an idea that's obvious to anyone even remotely clueful in this area.
The patent is completely valid and numerous manufacturers have licensed it for their use.
You know this how?
Besides being an obvious idea, and therefore non-patentable there are tons of other reasons this patent could be ruled invaild.
Here's a link showing prior art in 1985.
Sony should be able to fill the courtroom with examples of force feedback/vibration prior to the filing date of this patent. It should be easy to show that vibrating controllers came about from a simple evolution of designs that were already out there, showing no real "invention" just the packing of pre-existing technology in an obvious package.
I never said I was part of that 97% jackass...
Nor did I. Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the word "if"?
There's no reason to resort to this ad hominem crap because you're ticked about something I didn't even say.