You own a peice of DRM'd music for which you contracted to play on a single computer. Can you sell that to someone else. NO. you contracted for that.
Actually, if you never signed a contract (or at least a click through agreement), you can sell it all you like. I remember a fellow attempting to sell his copy of an iTunes song just to prove he could do it. It's allowed by copyright law, so without a pre-existing agreement you are not restricted from sale.
Well yes and no. Yes if there was no contract then you have whatever your normal rights are. But if congress passed a law that said you do not have the right to play DRMd music in any way that was not the intended purpose, then to do so is not one of your normal rights. So yeah you are right that no contract was signed, but you also might not have the right to do as you please with your property.
read your "contract" for your credit card agreement sometime. In fact you specifically contracted to let them change any of the provisions of the contract without notice.
It seems pretty clear the moderators are moding down anyone who defends the NY times. All we seem to have are people saying "nytimes who gives a flip" and then when someone who reads it comments cleverly on the infantile level of discourse they get modded as flame bait.
Mod the discussion not your opinion. mod up more often than you mod down.
proposed solution: pick 1000 entires at random and retain the highest.
analysis: at first glance it might seem that the problem seems ill formed since the size of the array is not specified. But note that this is not a parametric problem. You are asked for the median, so the actual numerical values of the array irrelevant, only the rank order. Some wiseguys here have suggested returning the largest double precision number as a gaurenteed bound. While a wise ass answer it does raise a second interesting false lead. Even if the number were represented in infinite precision and this could be aribtrarily large or small the proposed solution does not care. Again this is because all that matters is the ranking of the numbers not their values.
COnsider the proposed solution. pick any cell at random and examine the number. if this number is returned there is a 50% chance it is equal to or greater than the median of the set. (if this is not obvious, dwell on the meaning of the word median: it means half the numbers are above/below that number.). So the chance it is below the median is 0.5. if you choose 1000 numbers the chance that all are below the median is 0.5^1000 which is roughly 1 part in a google.
So the author is right, this algorithm fails less often than the probability that there is a cosmic ray that corrupts the calculation or their is a power blackout in the middle of it or that you have a heart attack.
thurrott@winnetmag.com
why not write him and tell him how full of crap he is?
by the way he gave the aero presentation at the longhorn dev conference. looking at his slides you can see what he thinks "task" context dependent interfact is..eg. push in a CD or plun in a spart card and it asks you if you want to open in in iTunes, open in in the finder, or initialize it for HFS+. Oh wait that's panther. IN Longhorn when you insert a CD you have to wait three years for Microsoft to create the task context dependent interface.
Slashdot moderators Must use cell phones 24/7. How else to explain how a lame article like this makes it onto slash dot when my insightful and inciteful suggestions go rejected. sigh. what's the trick to getting a submission accepted?
Setting aside the abuses of the DMCA. What does the DMCA say. It says you should not break in to my house just because I used an inferior lock. It's not my responsibility to protect my music/movies/software as perfectly as possible. It's your responsibility not to decode my works and give them away without my consent. THe fact the law even had to be written is what I was lamenting. Slashdotter's did not cause it per say, but their (minority one hopes) support for the right to steal is what made it neccessary to spell it out. Carrying burgulars tools is a crime, and so is carrying DECSS is what the judge decided.
You want to see some pro-theft comments? look in this topic higher up under "why do SLASHDOTTER's think that stealing is okay". their people defend the theft.
On a conciliatory note. I too suspect that the record industry does probably rig the playing field. They do add value but they also jealously guard the gates and charge for entry. The beauty of the internet is that we may be able to storm the gates. But that does not mean we should pillage the village. We still need to pay the villagers inside for their wares.
But the real topic here was infact Movie copying. And I would be hard pressed to argue that the movie creators or the people who sweep their floors are not well compensated or that 8 bucks to watch twin towers is not a fair price for the effort involved.
Do you think test-driving a car at a dealership is stealing it? Do you think that borrowing your friend's car to check it out is stealing it?
Do anything without the owner's permission is potentially a crime. If the dealer wants you to test drive its fine, but he has to be in control or he doesn't really own it does he? When you borrow a freind's car he is the owner not TOYOTA. If your freind was in the bussiness of making a large number of replicas of his car and giving them away or selling them that would be violating TOYOTAs intellectual property. Why is this so hard to grasp?
The paying audience for music you steal has a finite capacity too.
It seems like people are saying its okay to steal binary numbers but not other things. But you dont really want the binary numbers do you? you dont want to just hex dump "Rollover bethoven" you want to listen to it. So it has value right? and you have taken that value without paying.
If I break into your home you would not like it. If I break into your home with 1's and 0's and steal your 1's and Zero's is that okay? If I program you java enables toaster to burn down your house is it okay because I did not actually take anything from you I just gave you some extra 1's and zeros?
Oh, and do you sneak in to theaters or amusement parks too? I mean you aren't taking away anyone elses enjoyment are you, the play or movie or park ride woul dhave happened anyhow. and how would you know if the ride was fun if you did not get free ride?
Just because its "easy" to steal does not make it your right.
your lament about adveritsing is pitiful. poor boy. advertising has only been going on for ten millenia and no it has not gotten more deceitful. Maybe you have just gotten more gullable? Or be honest and admit that you are just using this as your pathetic self justifcation of why you think its not stealing in your case. For example, I dont think I'm so gullible to advertisings charms, so If you and I download a peice of music I'd be stealing, but you wouln't be right?
title says it all. I'm against the abuses of the draconian DMCA, but it's easy to see why it became neccessary. People who think its okay to steal something because it is not well locked.
Why is this not theft. why do so many slashdotters think it okay to steal. just because it's easy and all they have to do is push a button does not make it honest or legal. If you knowingly receive stolen goods that is a crime. And you know you are --there is no reasonable defense. and No not it's not sticking it to the "man" or an act of noble protest.
Why has this anrachaic "free love" notion got perverted in to greedy self absorbed and self justifed crimminal behavior.
Antique? You must have an MTV sized attention span. 60 million users is how many napster claimed at its peak. Most companies would kill for that. I would be surprised if Lime wire could match that. And as for a distribution model, a bussiness model, having central index servers and distributed content servers lets the bussiness control the show. Gnutella does not have a bussiness capable model. Gnutella is mostly for the sector of slash dot populated by "free love free lunch" imbeciles who think is is "okay" to steal because they can.
my guess is that when something copy protected replaces mp3 that gnutella could become a viable bussiness model, the company would just sell or rent you an unlocking key. But napster would still be a better idea.
So many comments on this board say something like "why should MS have to do anything they dont want to, it's there software?"
Well That my freinds is the whole point of the anti-trust act. It recognizes that there is a diffence between a small or competative company and a company with dominant market leverage. And the law says that the rules are different for you and you do have some rules of conduct imposed on you. Yes your liberty as a large entity is restricted for the public good. But of course you are enjoying the fact that your rise to power was enabled by free markets and in return this is what you must not do: Use your market dominance to stifle innovation// competion. You may not use your market dominance in one market sector to stifle or dominate another market sector.
the classic example of the latter, is at one point general motors could have made cars that only run on GM gasoline. Of course, they didn't and of course now they would not have the leverage to do so. But that is the nature of the law that protects free markets.
The negative example is APPLE. Sure apple is a closed system. But given their pathetic market share they do not dominate a market sector sufficiently to impose their will on another market sector. Some would argue this by trying to narrowly define a "market sector". And this is exactly what MS has done in court, except they tried to widen the defintion to show they were not dominating a market sector or they tried to widen it to define an OS as encomapssing browsers, VMs etc... Really its not an entirely bad argument for them to make, but that's whay we have courts and that is why it has taken this long to get a decent well considered and appealed decision.
so now we have one and its fair. It imperfectly punishes MS but the crime was vague too. So its a solomonic compromise.
my only regret is that I wish that there was sort of RICO act for this. That is MS has clearly shown that it has made the same nature of violation many many times. I was dissapointed that Penfields decision was not carried out because while the Appeals court was correct in saying the decision was too harsh for the crime at hand, it ignored the preponderance and repetion of minor violations that was ingrained in this comapny and required a structural remedy not a penalty.
Lack of reflectivity is not invisiblity as normally perceived by humans. like one person said, it would look like someone photoshopped a hole in a scene. But for many types of remote sensing (radar, lidar, and low light imaging) you only "see" things that reflect light. In photoshop terms this is like a very empty picture with a black background. Anything that wants to hide merely has to be black. Thus things that dont reflect are never scene in remote sensing. (not unlike the so-called "dark matter" of the universe that has gone undetected to date)
been reading the original negative index of refraction paper from 2000
the following preposterous claim may actually be true.
1) a lens (actually just a flat slab) of negative index of refraction n=-1 would
perfectly focus an incident wave IN THE FAR FIELD more tightly than the diffraction limit of light (i.e. to much less than its wavelength).
(note I said IN THE FAR FIELD, we all know about nearfield stuff)
add to this the recent fabrication of negative index materials and it gets more interesting.
first the easy to understand part:
n=-1 slab acts a lot like a phase conjugate mirror, except instead of being a mirror it does not reflect the light but rather refocuses it downstream.
THE KEY POINT:
BUT as we also know they must obey a diffraction limit on how well they can refocus the beam
Why cant they do better? well the diffraction limit comes from the fact that not all the fourier components are there. where did they go? well one place they went was the aperature cut off. But suppose we built the worlds largest perfect lens so that the aperature cut-off did not matter. We still could not focus light below the size of wavelength
Why? Well there is one other place we lost fourier compontents. imagine the following you have a light source that is smaller than the wavelength of light (e.g. a molecule! or maybe a nearfield light source). what happens? well the small size means there are fourier terms that have k-vercots so large that for any given wavelength they cannot propagate. that is they are evenescant near field light that quickly dies away. the K-vectors that can propagate, the small ones, cant be refocused to an object as small as the source.
Thus you supposedly cant ever refocus light in the farfield to smaller than a wavelength of light.
But wait! those evanescent waves die exponentially so they do reach the far field, just they are really really weak. suppose you were to selectively amplify them up and then refocus the light with out phase conjugate mirror? well then you could focus light to smaller than a wavelength.
Now here is where it gets REALLY SPOOKY!, if you do the math a negative one index of refraction does exactly that, it conjugates the phase and it AMPLIFIES ANY IMAGINARY K-VECTORS!!!!!!!!! that is it AMPLIFIES evenescent waves.
But wait "CONSERVATION OF ENERGY YOU SCREAM !!!!". Nope! not a problem, because evanescent waves dont carry energy. "Baloney" you say. well okay, imagine an evenescent wave propagating, where does its energy go? is it absorbed by the air? put it in vacuum and it would still be evenascent. No the poynting vectors conspire to recouple the energy back to the source of the wave. THe author claims this means one can amplify these waves at no energy cost.
No need to get technical, but it is in fact possible to have qauntum probability waves exiting a resonator before the entered it. (No i'm not making this up, it was published in Nature two years ago.) There may be not infomation content is transmitted. Recently it has been proposed that gravity waves may be faster than electromagnetic waves (i.e. light).
but in regards to the article, the final comment was sheer speculation. THe existence of a negative index suggests that it might be possible to create a composte substance with an index less than one yielding an electomagnetic propagation media with a speed faster than vacuum.
One interesting application of this might be zero reflectivity materials. Right now the problem with (almost) all materials is that if they have any absorption at all then by defineition thay have a different index of refraction than air and consequently an inescapable reflectivity. (yes, black paint always refelcts some light!). this is bad news if you are a stealth airplane. Some ferrite materials posses an unusualy perimtivity/permiability that lets them actually have absorption yet a matched index but they are too heavy to put on an airplane. this might break open a whole new class.
Much of what is claimed in the article and comapnion article is wrong, no doubt distorted through the prism of some "science writer" or attempt to dumb it down. For exampe, you cant focus light to a perfect point or even less that the wavelength of light.
the ways one can escape these limits in a semantic sense is that you can change the index of refration of the media so the wavelength is shorter than in vaccum, but that's not really accomnlishing the goal. Alternatively, near field or or ther diffraction effects can confine a light field to a region smaller the wavelength, but it cant propagate in vacuum/air that way.
likewise the claim you could make a perfecly flat focusing lens by combining poistive and negative materials is pretty hilarious too. You can do that right now with conventional positive only materials. (example take two plano confave lenses of high index material, and fill the space between them with water. voila!).
on the other hand you could do a lot of really interesting stuff with negative index materials that is harder to put in laymans terms. one example, the speed of light might be faster than in vacuum.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, if you never signed a contract (or at least a click through agreement), you can sell it all you like. I remember a fellow attempting to sell his copy of an iTunes song just to prove he could do it. It's allowed by copyright law, so without a pre-existing agreement you are not restricted from sale.
Well yes and no. Yes if there was no contract then you have whatever your normal rights are. But if congress passed a law that said you do not have the right to play DRMd music in any way that was not the intended purpose, then to do so is not one of your normal rights. So yeah you are right that no contract was signed, but you also might not have the right to do as you please with your property.
read your "contract" for your credit card agreement sometime. In fact you specifically contracted to let them change any of the provisions of the contract without notice.
mod it so.
It seems pretty clear the moderators are moding down anyone who defends the NY times. All we seem to have are people saying "nytimes who gives a flip" and then when someone who reads it comments cleverly on the infantile level of discourse they get modded as flame bait.
Mod the discussion not your opinion. mod up more often than you mod down.
Problem: find a number larger than the median
proposed solution: pick 1000 entires at random and retain the highest.
analysis: at first glance it might seem that the problem seems ill formed since the size of the array is not specified. But note that this is not a parametric problem. You are asked for the median, so the actual numerical values of the array irrelevant, only the rank order. Some wiseguys here have suggested returning the largest double precision number as a gaurenteed bound. While a wise ass answer it does raise a second interesting false lead. Even if the number were represented in infinite precision and this could be aribtrarily large or small the proposed solution does not care. Again this is because all that matters is the ranking of the numbers not their values.
COnsider the proposed solution. pick any cell at random and examine the number. if this number is returned there is a 50% chance it is equal to or greater than the median of the set. (if this is not obvious, dwell on the meaning of the word median: it means half the numbers are above/below that number.). So the chance it is below the median is 0.5. if you choose 1000 numbers the chance that all are below the median is 0.5^1000 which is roughly 1 part in a google.
So the author is right, this algorithm fails less often than the probability that there is a cosmic ray that corrupts the calculation or their is a power blackout in the middle of it or that you have a heart attack.
Read the article in the parent post. It contains actual information as opposed to the ravings found elsewhere.
by the way he gave the aero presentation at the longhorn dev conference. looking at his slides you can see what he thinks "task" context dependent interfact is. .eg. push in a CD or plun in a spart card and it asks you if you want to open in in iTunes, open in in the finder, or initialize it for HFS+. Oh wait that's panther. IN Longhorn when you insert a CD you have to wait three years for Microsoft to create the task context dependent interface.
what a rube.
Slashdot moderators Must use cell phones 24/7. How else to explain how a lame article like this makes it onto slash dot when my insightful and inciteful suggestions go rejected. sigh. what's the trick to getting a submission accepted?
Setting aside the abuses of the DMCA. What does the DMCA say. It says you should not break in to my house just because I used an inferior lock. It's not my responsibility to protect my music/movies/software as perfectly as possible. It's your responsibility not to decode my works and give them away without my consent. THe fact the law even had to be written is what I was lamenting. Slashdotter's did not cause it per say, but their (minority one hopes) support for the right to steal is what made it neccessary to spell it out. Carrying burgulars tools is a crime, and so is carrying DECSS is what the judge decided.
You want to see some pro-theft comments? look in this topic higher up under "why do SLASHDOTTER's think that stealing is okay". their people defend the theft.
But the real topic here was infact Movie copying. And I would be hard pressed to argue that the movie creators or the people who sweep their floors are not well compensated or that 8 bucks to watch twin towers is not a fair price for the effort involved.
Do you think test-driving a car at a dealership is stealing it? Do you think that borrowing your friend's car to check it out is stealing it? Do anything without the owner's permission is potentially a crime. If the dealer wants you to test drive its fine, but he has to be in control or he doesn't really own it does he? When you borrow a freind's car he is the owner not TOYOTA. If your freind was in the bussiness of making a large number of replicas of his car and giving them away or selling them that would be violating TOYOTAs intellectual property. Why is this so hard to grasp?
It seems like people are saying its okay to steal binary numbers but not other things. But you dont really want the binary numbers do you? you dont want to just hex dump "Rollover bethoven" you want to listen to it. So it has value right? and you have taken that value without paying.
If I break into your home you would not like it. If I break into your home with 1's and 0's and steal your 1's and Zero's is that okay? If I program you java enables toaster to burn down your house is it okay because I did not actually take anything from you I just gave you some extra 1's and zeros?
Is sneaking into a movie theater or an amusement park not a crime?
Just because its "easy" to steal does not make it your right.
your lament about adveritsing is pitiful. poor boy. advertising has only been going on for ten millenia and no it has not gotten more deceitful. Maybe you have just gotten more gullable? Or be honest and admit that you are just using this as your pathetic self justifcation of why you think its not stealing in your case. For example, I dont think I'm so gullible to advertisings charms, so If you and I download a peice of music I'd be stealing, but you wouln't be right?
title says it all. I'm against the abuses of the draconian DMCA, but it's easy to see why it became neccessary. People who think its okay to steal something because it is not well locked.
Why has this anrachaic "free love" notion got perverted in to greedy self absorbed and self justifed crimminal behavior.
my guess is that when something copy protected replaces mp3 that gnutella could become a viable bussiness model, the company would just sell or rent you an unlocking key. But napster would still be a better idea.
Well That my freinds is the whole point of the anti-trust act. It recognizes that there is a diffence between a small or competative company and a company with dominant market leverage. And the law says that the rules are different for you and you do have some rules of conduct imposed on you. Yes your liberty as a large entity is restricted for the public good. But of course you are enjoying the fact that your rise to power was enabled by free markets and in return this is what you must not do: Use your market dominance to stifle innovation
the classic example of the latter, is at one point general motors could have made cars that only run on GM gasoline. Of course, they didn't and of course now they would not have the leverage to do so. But that is the nature of the law that protects free markets.
The negative example is APPLE. Sure apple is a closed system. But given their pathetic market share they do not dominate a market sector sufficiently to impose their will on another market sector. Some would argue this by trying to narrowly define a "market sector". And this is exactly what MS has done in court, except they tried to widen the defintion to show they were not dominating a market sector or they tried to widen it to define an OS as encomapssing browsers, VMs etc... Really its not an entirely bad argument for them to make, but that's whay we have courts and that is why it has taken this long to get a decent well considered and appealed decision.
so now we have one and its fair. It imperfectly punishes MS but the crime was vague too. So its a solomonic compromise.
my only regret is that I wish that there was sort of RICO act for this. That is MS has clearly shown that it has made the same nature of violation many many times. I was dissapointed that Penfields decision was not carried out because while the Appeals court was correct in saying the decision was too harsh for the crime at hand, it ignored the preponderance and repetion of minor violations that was ingrained in this comapny and required a structural remedy not a penalty.
Lack of reflectivity is not invisiblity as normally perceived by humans. like one person said, it would look like someone photoshopped a hole in a scene. But for many types of remote sensing (radar, lidar, and low light imaging) you only "see" things that reflect light. In photoshop terms this is like a very empty picture with a black background. Anything that wants to hide merely has to be black. Thus things that dont reflect are never scene in remote sensing. (not unlike the so-called "dark matter" of the universe that has gone undetected to date)
been reading the original negative index of refraction paper from 2000 the following preposterous claim may actually be true. 1) a lens (actually just a flat slab) of negative index of refraction n=-1 would perfectly focus an incident wave IN THE FAR FIELD more tightly than the diffraction limit of light (i.e. to much less than its wavelength). (note I said IN THE FAR FIELD, we all know about nearfield stuff) add to this the recent fabrication of negative index materials and it gets more interesting. first the easy to understand part: n=-1 slab acts a lot like a phase conjugate mirror, except instead of being a mirror it does not reflect the light but rather refocuses it downstream. THE KEY POINT: BUT as we also know they must obey a diffraction limit on how well they can refocus the beam Why cant they do better? well the diffraction limit comes from the fact that not all the fourier components are there. where did they go? well one place they went was the aperature cut off. But suppose we built the worlds largest perfect lens so that the aperature cut-off did not matter. We still could not focus light below the size of wavelength Why? Well there is one other place we lost fourier compontents. imagine the following you have a light source that is smaller than the wavelength of light (e.g. a molecule! or maybe a nearfield light source). what happens? well the small size means there are fourier terms that have k-vercots so large that for any given wavelength they cannot propagate. that is they are evenescant near field light that quickly dies away. the K-vectors that can propagate, the small ones, cant be refocused to an object as small as the source. Thus you supposedly cant ever refocus light in the farfield to smaller than a wavelength of light. But wait! those evanescent waves die exponentially so they do reach the far field, just they are really really weak. suppose you were to selectively amplify them up and then refocus the light with out phase conjugate mirror? well then you could focus light to smaller than a wavelength. Now here is where it gets REALLY SPOOKY!, if you do the math a negative one index of refraction does exactly that, it conjugates the phase and it AMPLIFIES ANY IMAGINARY K-VECTORS!!!!!!!!! that is it AMPLIFIES evenescent waves. But wait "CONSERVATION OF ENERGY YOU SCREAM !!!!". Nope! not a problem, because evanescent waves dont carry energy. "Baloney" you say. well okay, imagine an evenescent wave propagating, where does its energy go? is it absorbed by the air? put it in vacuum and it would still be evenascent. No the poynting vectors conspire to recouple the energy back to the source of the wave. THe author claims this means one can amplify these waves at no energy cost.
but in regards to the article, the final comment was sheer speculation. THe existence of a negative index suggests that it might be possible to create a composte substance with an index less than one yielding an electomagnetic propagation media with a speed faster than vacuum.
Retard. of course it works, I've done similar things many times.
the ways one can escape these limits in a semantic sense is that you can change the index of refration of the media so the wavelength is shorter than in vaccum, but that's not really accomnlishing the goal. Alternatively, near field or or ther diffraction effects can confine a light field to a region smaller the wavelength, but it cant propagate in vacuum/air that way.
likewise the claim you could make a perfecly flat focusing lens by combining poistive and negative materials is pretty hilarious too. You can do that right now with conventional positive only materials. (example take two plano confave lenses of high index material, and fill the space between them with water. voila!).
on the other hand you could do a lot of really interesting stuff with negative index materials that is harder to put in laymans terms. one example, the speed of light might be faster than in vacuum.