France is already pissed off at having to eat at Macdonellz and having to watch American movies. You mess with their oggs and LA gets vaporized, I tell you true.
The key difference is that they have two versions and they tell you which is which. You don't have to just buy something that looks like a CD and hope it actually works. In fact, you can vote with your euros and not buy the crappy version!
Nightwish did the same thing, by the way, but their crippled version was a limited edition which sold out fairly quickly. I wonder what they learned from that. (Nightwish was tainted with evil, though. They said on their website which was which but the CD package didn't mention it.)
Muggers have to make a living too. The guy was aware that taking my watch and my wallet might annoy me, but hey, he's got to make money somehow, and muggers don't have it easy.
I told him to place me on his "do not mug" list, but he didn't seem interested.
I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that we still occasionally find bits of non-free software that have slipped into the archive. Debian's resources for checking licenses are limited, and not every Debian developer has the same eye for license problems.
Use of marihuana is more popular than that, and it doesn't stop the US government from jailing people for it.
In fact, this NET act sounds like a nice cost-saving opportunity for police departments, which can always use some more of those fancy high-end computers that MP3-collecting geeks use. Not as good as the cars they get from "drug dealers", but still useful in these troubled times.
Their platform is that they should be implementing DRM, without government interference.
This is all laid out in the Industry Cooperation Is Good For Consumers page, where they cite DVDs as a stunning example of the success of anti-copying technology.
The funny thing is that they don't even have to fight the government; this is just the result of the deal the BSA made with the RIAA. I guess the ADP was set up to keep the RIAA honest about its side of the deal.
I was confused because I often test strings this way:
my $value = $headers{'Some-Header'}; if ($value ne "") { print "foo\n"; }
In this case, I would want to treat "" and undef as false, while treating any non-empty string, including "0", as true. To avoid warnings I always have to add a defined($value) check, which is annoying. (Btw, many perl scripts are buggy this way, treating a string that happens to be "0" as being 'not set'.)
English has always had a tendency to gradually combine words that are often used together. Each of the words in the subject was combined from words that used to be separate. Often they merged through an intermediate hyphenated form (bed room, bed-room, bedroom), but sometimes they skipped that.
It appears that the same thing is happening to "a lot". Deal with it. If you want to complain, why not go straight to the source and complain that "a lot" makes no sense as a term of magnitude? "a lot of wood" used to be a specific amount of wood, i.e. one lot. This was gradually perverted into meaning "any large quantity of...", and is now about as meaningful as "many". People used to complain about ye fuck-tardes who use "a lot" on its own, as in "I swear at people at lot". "A lot of what?" they asked.
Perl values can be true, false, or undefined.
There's a fourth possibility for hash values, which can "not exist". You can treat those as
"undefined" if you want to, though.
(Of course, perl values can also be "1" or "2" or whatever because perl doesn't have a specific boolean type; but treating "undefined" as false will cause warnings, while treating "1" as true will not.)
Microsoft is being sleazy about it too. Obviously the government is not going to wait around for volunteers to write a new social security administration program or whatever. They're going to pay some contractor to write it, and the main difference with the Microsoft model is that what the government pays for becomes public property. The contractor's developers are not going to wander off, because they're getting paid!
(Even paid developers wander off, of course, as Microsoft is no doubt painfully aware. But the government can always find a new contractor. It's pretty hard to find a new Microsoft if this one isn't working out.)
He no longer wants to host the list. It's gone completely sour for him. Shutting down the site is a simple and direct consequence of that.
No ulterior motives needed.
Sure, he could jump through various hoops to keep the list up, and continue to provide this valuable service at his own expense. But why should he?
This strikeback would only work against systems that are already infected by a worm. Now, the cute thing about worm-infected systems is this:
You know they're vulnerable, because you know how the worm got in.
Everyone else knows they're vulnerable, because the worm is being noisy about it.
Face it, those systems are going to get owned, one way or another. His proposal is to neutralize them before some script kiddie strings them all together for a DDOS attack.
The converse is that a properly patched system is NOT vulnerable to strikeback, because the strikeback proposal only targets well-known worms. If your systems are vulnerable to well-known worms, then you have bigger problems than the possibility of having a process killed by this guy's neutralizing agent.
So, he's not talking about giving or gaining any kind of power. The ability is already there. He's talking about whether or not it's a good idea to use it.
People are putting locator chips into their children already.
There's a whole business growing up around it. I think these have been mentioned on slashdot before, but I can't find the story.
Here's an article and press release about the company doing it. Fortunately they have it patented, which should impede progress in this direction for a while.
Does your database include data on pending patent applications?
The database only includes data on Published Applications in accordance with the 18 month pre-grant publication rules. Pending patent applications where the applicat has elected to not publish prior to grant remain confidential.
Patent applications don't have to be made public. The process of getting a patent can take a few years, but once the patent is granted it lasts 20 years from the filing date. That is the true "submarine patent" -- one that's not just obscure, but actually secret, and which will be announced next year on something you yourself invented last year, with a starting date two years ago.
There are two keys involved: a private key, held by Microsoft, which is used to sign games, and a public key, which the XBox uses to check the signatures. This works because there is a mathematical relationship between the public and private keys (so they are actually more like two halves of the same key). Getting inside the XBox doesn't help because the private key isn't there.
This arrangement protects the private key, because it can be kept truly secret instead of being hidden away on every XBox somewhere, but the relationship between the public and private keys is also the algorithm's main weakness: if you know the public key (and you do, because it's somewhere on every XBox), then you can use it to simplify the search for the private key, which is exactly what this project is doing.
That weakness is why RSA keys are so long. A single-key algorithm would be fine with 128-bit keys (perhaps 256 bits if you're feeling unusually paranoid), but with RSA, 1024 bits is on the small side, and 2048 bits (like Microsoft uses) is not unusual.
To get back to your comment: the equivalent of a "locksmithing set" would be a mod chip or some other hardware trick to make the XBox behave. The point of the Neo Project is exactly to make the XBox usable without such an inconvenience. Not all users would be willing to buy or make a mod chip or open up their XBox, but if the private key is found, then any program can be signed with it, and users wouldn't have to do anything special.
If we let "them" define the terms, then we've already conceded a large part of the debate. You'd end up having to make an argument for why consumers should have the right to break copy protection in order to pirate intellectual property. As opposed to, say, citizens exercising their right to protect their possessions against accidental damage or wear and tear.
Maybe CmdrTaco has been playing some shitty games:) I would certainly rate the later Final Fantasy games as "art". Myst is well-known for its artistic value. I would even place Homeworld in this category (though it's closer to writing than to visual art).
A category that seems to have been forgotten is the game with a message. Deus Ex has a strong political statement, for example. The Ultima series (at least V and VI, which I played the most) have philosophical points to make.
What about the rest of the field, then? Well, just because it's bad art doesn't mean it isn't art:) I think it's dangerous to get the government involved in regulating games. Imagine the director of FEMA getting to decide whether or not Deus Ex is "too violent".
I agree. It certainly doesn't measure up to the solid research that supports the other side of the argument. What was the url to your source again? I seem to have misplaced it.
A monolith shows up which says "Intellectual property is held sacred and perpetual in the rest of the galaxy. Unfortunately for you, all the patents on civilization are held by the Core races, and everything that could possibly be done with a stringed instrument has been done millions of years ago. You will find licensing terms and royalty arrangements on the third moon of Saturn."
You're mostly right. When you cross the border to the south, you end up in France. That's because Belgium is the border.
You see, the Netherlands and France don't like each other. I mean they really really don't like each other. Each country, in order to keep its distance from its repulsive neighbour, moved the border lines back a bit. And then a bit more, and a bit more... over the centuries, this has led to a wide strip of land between them that neither side wants because it's too close to the other side. And for some reason we call it "Belgium".
Slashdot Mirror
France is already pissed off at having to eat at Macdonellz and having to watch American movies. You mess with their oggs and LA gets vaporized, I tell you true.
Pine is also older than Linux, so it's a bit silly to call it a "Linux email client".
If I can figure out what "R-TX" means, then you can figure out "EUCD" :-)
Nightwish did the same thing, by the way, but their crippled version was a limited edition which sold out fairly quickly. I wonder what they learned from that. (Nightwish was tainted with evil, though. They said on their website which was which but the CD package didn't mention it.)
I told him to place me on his "do not mug" list, but he didn't seem interested.
I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that we still occasionally find bits of non-free software that have slipped into the archive. Debian's resources for checking licenses are limited, and not every Debian developer has the same eye for license problems.
In fact, this NET act sounds like a nice cost-saving opportunity for police departments, which can always use some more of those fancy high-end computers that MP3-collecting geeks use. Not as good as the cars they get from "drug dealers", but still useful in these troubled times.
The funny thing is that they don't even have to fight the government; this is just the result of the deal the BSA made with the RIAA. I guess the ADP was set up to keep the RIAA honest about its side of the deal.
I'll consider starting to like them if they stop spamming and apologize.
It appears that the same thing is happening to "a lot". Deal with it. If you want to complain, why not go straight to the source and complain that "a lot" makes no sense as a term of magnitude? "a lot of wood" used to be a specific amount of wood, i.e. one lot. This was gradually perverted into meaning "any large quantity of...", and is now about as meaningful as "many". People used to complain about ye fuck-tardes who use "a lot" on its own, as in "I swear at people at lot". "A lot of what?" they asked.
(Of course, perl values can also be "1" or "2" or whatever because perl doesn't have a specific boolean type; but treating "undefined" as false will cause warnings, while treating "1" as true will not.)
(Even paid developers wander off, of course, as Microsoft is no doubt painfully aware. But the government can always find a new contractor. It's pretty hard to find a new Microsoft if this one isn't working out.)
Sure, he could jump through various hoops to keep the list up, and continue to provide this valuable service at his own expense. But why should he?
- You know they're vulnerable, because you know how the worm got in.
- Everyone else knows they're vulnerable, because the worm is being noisy about it.
Face it, those systems are going to get owned, one way or another. His proposal is to neutralize them before some script kiddie strings them all together for a DDOS attack.The converse is that a properly patched system is NOT vulnerable to strikeback, because the strikeback proposal only targets well-known worms. If your systems are vulnerable to well-known worms, then you have bigger problems than the possibility of having a process killed by this guy's neutralizing agent.
So, he's not talking about giving or gaining any kind of power. The ability is already there. He's talking about whether or not it's a good idea to use it.
Here's an article and press release about the company doing it. Fortunately they have it patented, which should impede progress in this direction for a while.
Patent applications don't have to be made public. The process of getting a patent can take a few years, but once the patent is granted it lasts 20 years from the filing date. That is the true "submarine patent" -- one that's not just obscure, but actually secret, and which will be announced next year on something you yourself invented last year, with a starting date two years ago.
Young padawan, one day you will bring balance to the force.
This arrangement protects the private key, because it can be kept truly secret instead of being hidden away on every XBox somewhere, but the relationship between the public and private keys is also the algorithm's main weakness: if you know the public key (and you do, because it's somewhere on every XBox), then you can use it to simplify the search for the private key, which is exactly what this project is doing.
That weakness is why RSA keys are so long. A single-key algorithm would be fine with 128-bit keys (perhaps 256 bits if you're feeling unusually paranoid), but with RSA, 1024 bits is on the small side, and 2048 bits (like Microsoft uses) is not unusual.
To get back to your comment: the equivalent of a "locksmithing set" would be a mod chip or some other hardware trick to make the XBox behave. The point of the Neo Project is exactly to make the XBox usable without such an inconvenience. Not all users would be willing to buy or make a mod chip or open up their XBox, but if the private key is found, then any program can be signed with it, and users wouldn't have to do anything special.
If we let "them" define the terms, then we've already conceded a large part of the debate. You'd end up having to make an argument for why consumers should have the right to break copy protection in order to pirate intellectual property. As opposed to, say, citizens exercising their right to protect their possessions against accidental damage or wear and tear.
A category that seems to have been forgotten is the game with a message. Deus Ex has a strong political statement, for example. The Ultima series (at least V and VI, which I played the most) have philosophical points to make.
What about the rest of the field, then? Well, just because it's bad art doesn't mean it isn't art :) I think it's dangerous to get the government involved in regulating games. Imagine the director of FEMA getting to decide whether or not Deus Ex is "too violent".
I agree. It certainly doesn't measure up to the solid research that supports the other side of the argument. What was the url to your source again? I seem to have misplaced it.
A monolith shows up which says "Intellectual property is held sacred and perpetual in the rest of the galaxy. Unfortunately for you, all the patents on civilization are held by the Core races, and everything that could possibly be done with a stringed instrument has been done millions of years ago. You will find licensing terms and royalty arrangements on the third moon of Saturn."
You see, the Netherlands and France don't like each other. I mean they really really don't like each other. Each country, in order to keep its distance from its repulsive neighbour, moved the border lines back a bit. And then a bit more, and a bit more... over the centuries, this has led to a wide strip of land between them that neither side wants because it's too close to the other side. And for some reason we call it "Belgium".