It does take a real MAN to enjoy imaginary pictures on the kind of HTML pages slashdotters are looking at. Wonder if blind people can sue those websites for ADA violation.
There were ideas for blocking spam by letting people charge each other for e-mail. Isn't it much easier and more practical with phone calls? Give one an option to press something like *18 ("I ate") once per call that was placed by the other party. It will charge $5 to the caller and credit $4 to receivers account, with a dollar going to the phone company for the trouble. It will also play a recording to the other side that explains to them what happened.
Discouraging telemarketers will be only one application of this technology. For example, people can make a buck answering short computer questions without setting up 900 number or credit card processing. Or, companies with valid, personalized offers for you can show they are serious by paying for your ears.
As for abuses, they will quickly take care of themselves. If a bozo charges everyone for calls, he will be quickly left alone. If you charge a company you have an account with, they will just bill you back for the pleasure and then you will be able to dispute your bill with the government if they did spam you. If you dialed a wrong number - well it's just five bucks. Watch your fingers. Telemarketers on the other hand, if they still exist, will compile their own don't call lists based on their financial losses.
Texas? Illegal weapons? I thought everyone can already have a real, lethal at long distance, gun over there. Also, it's still possible to compress gas to very high pressure by hand. Just like you lift a car to change a tire. Just takes some time to do it.
Don't forget that the thing has an ARM processor but most of the user code is written as 68K and emulated on the device. There is a way to write some code as ARM, but it's pretty painful (no global variables, C++ features or debugger). This got to be more overhead than copying some files into memory.
I don't think most database programmers can write better space allocation, I/O buffering or virtual memory code than good OS programmers. Did any of you guys write a database buffering code and used something better than a simple LRU list? Like taking physical disk layout into account? If you did, and it performed better than the OS on realistic benchmarks, why not write a reusable device driver that will improve performance of everything, not just the database?
Now it's possible that somehow you have a very good knowledge of your application-specific disk usage pattern and can get a speed up that outweighs user-mode overhead, system swapping your buffers in and out of memory and so on. In this case, you better use a dedicated disk rather than just a partitition. Otherwise, your I/O scheduling code will have interesting interactions with system's swapfile and other normal filesystem activity.
Even then you run a risk that OS code will one day improve and outperform your homegrown changes. Most programmers are better off just tuning their code to work well with OS native filesystem, virtual memory and so on.
What if someone comes up with a hash that describes how the file SOUNDS like? Sort of like MP3 capturing only the portion of the sound you (ok, a slightly quality-challanged person) can hear, the hash will describe some statistics on the file, such as histogram of different frequences. It will be possible to checksum a questionable file and determine how close it is to the original. If several different kinds of statistics are used, it will be hard for someone to alter a file and preserve all of them.
If OGG stores these checksums by default, with a separate hash for each 100K of the file, it will have a real shot at being a network standard for audio. There are some interesting extensions like CDDB carrying track hashes or actually using the information for correcting small errors, like removing a "pop" if the segment of the file is not supposed to have big changes in volume.
Mitnick was given a sentence that was equivalent to that of a recidividist burgler.
Actually, I do have a problem with that. Lets say I didn't lock my home and some curiosity seeker wandered inside when nobody is in, being careful not to delete any objects and to erase all the logs of his or her presense. Then he installed a new lock on my door and sent me e-mail explaining how to use it. I might just let it go. If on the other hand that person posted the content of my home on the TV station, I will sue him. But still I will go after money and making him miserable for some time. Not a lengthy jail term.
Now lets say my computer rather than my home is an object. If I find myself having the same reaction, I will first go the judge that sentenced Kevin and ask to not let me on Internet for couple of years. Most people who protect their desktop the same as their dwelling place need treatment rather than law enforcement.
If on the other hand you are a scientist and all your life's work is on your computer... Well in that case notice that your "home" is letting in cars from a public highway without filtering. Perhaps you should get a cottage next to the beach where you can relax and not worry about heavy security. Then make sure that your real house only allows your cars through, using a long and non-obvious remote control code on your garage. Since most of your neighbors are not so serious about their homes, post signs on every door of your house explaining that people should stay away and why. Then if someone sees the sign and still breaks the lock, go after them. If on the other hand, you forgot to build a roof and some curiosity seeker jumped down from a baloon...
Wow. I vigorously demand that I AM NOT given any chance to access medical, nuclear or air traffic control computers. The last thing I want is a global extinction event because I posted a link to one of those critical servers on slashdot.
Seriously, it's people who set up critical system in such a way that their functionality can be influenced from a network designed for research and entertainment that should be charged with manslaughter. If a script kiddie tried to split IRC network and people died because of that, s\he should be just given grief counseling and not charged with anything.
On the other hand, people who purposely break car or air traffic control should of course be responsible. But someone maintaining a critical computer should first make sure that it can not be shut down accidentaly and provide ample warnings to potential tresspassers on why it should be left alone. It wouldn't do to have an obvious, conviniently located self-destruct switch. Or forward any packets from the Internet without strong encryption, if that.
Hmm... I don't remember all the facts. Is there any evidence that Kevin purposly tried to cause serious harm? Or that he even broke into any systems that did critical real-time control? I thought he was just addicted to getting control of a system, stashing away source code and so on. If you get down to basics of human motivation, real hacking is just another kind of science. Like Indiana Jones style of archeology. Risky, annoying, controversial but ultimately an unavoidable consequence of human curiosity.
Actually, I think Kevin's time is better first spent on a law change so that hacking is never punished in the same way as violent crimes. And that writting programs to use things you legally bought - like a DVD player for Linux or a program to print your ebooks - is legal. Excesses of the government is a much bigger concern than small infractions of individuals.
Anyone here who wouldn't be in trouble if every one of their computer and copyright related "offenses" came to light can throw the first stone. Ever downloaded an unlicensed MP3 plugin for Redhat 8? Ever renamed irc to emacs to violate a school policy on computer use?
Ok, I eat my hat. I'll gladly let the sysadmin restrict my freedom by preventing Code Red from reaching my mailbox. Or configuring firewall to block obnoxious ActiveX controls and the servers to which they connect. I'll even buy him a beer. Just as long as they stay away from my background pictures and pink on blue (well actually green on black) color theme. I do hope that the firings mentioned were of the people who deployed Outlook Express but not antivirus software.
The software audit though - it's impossible for a human being to stop being one at work and possibly hurt the company. What we need is an operating system that clearly separates company's applications and data from personal stuff. Say, personal applications are installed in the private home directory and the whole directory is encrypted with user's password. For a change, Microsoft might actually be the leader here with XP's NTFS encryption. Seems it will be good for everyone. Company will be freed from the responsability for the stuff they can't possibly see. And the user will be sure that his or her stash of warez^H^H^H^H^Hpersonal software will be safe during audit.
One thing I don't understand is how Microsoft proves that the software is unlicensed strongly enough to get someone arrested. What if I just copied all my software to DVD-Rs and threw away the original CDs? What if someone else stole my CD keys? I just hope, now that I switched to MacOSX, that Apple will be satisfied by me spending money on licensed hardware.
As an employee, it's not your network. I wish more system administrators would remember that. "Why are you messing with *my* data center? I've got it just the way I like it". Sorry. SSH and VNC are SECURITY HOLES. Any HACKER can DOWNLOAD the source code ON THE INTERNET and BREAK IN. Microsoft spent millions of dollars and countless man-hours designing remote administation tools. Just keep a cart with a keyboard and monitor, connect it to the server in the rack that stops responding and click Ok on that message box. Also, If I find any non-approved scripting language like Perl, it (and you) are gone. Microsoft already has batch files and you have no reason to muck around.
What, you just said you are going to use Mozilla? You will trust our company security to some FREEWARE when Microsoft has made security the company's first priority for the whole year??? Right here I have a resume of a Visual Basic programmer who wants to migrate our e-commerce server to IIS, SQL server and server-side VBSCript, using Microsoft passport security architecture. I think I would give him a call. Certainly PROPRIETORY SOFTWARE is better than all the FREE-WARE you installed on our network...
Stealing is if you are deprived of your posessions without your consent. If you sell me a crippled graphics card and I modify it for higher performance, you are sure not deprived of any posessions. So if I break the law, it's not a natural law. Rather its one of the rules society made to give an artifical advantage to some people because it might benefit everyone in long term. But while I can see why copyright or patents might benefit society, I don't see a big point in anti-tampering laws.
Lets say that it was always legal to modify anything you bought, hardware, software or data. It would be still illegal to distribute copies of other people's code without permission, but not to post any new code that modifies its behavior. So what's the big deal?
Obviously ATI makes money selling cheaper cards. So they would still sell them and turn profit even if a cheap, legal mod kit was available. If 9500 is in fact artifically crippled, they would probably just remove the performance restriction and everyone would have more fun gaming than now. ATI would still have an option of selling a high end card that really has better hardware or low end that is really cheaper to make. If 9500 is a defective 9700, ATI might provide a control panel that lets users turn on extra features at their own risk. Remember that NVIDIA does have an overclocking control panel?
Windows XP Home addition will either have the same featues as XP Pro or will have the extra code really compiled out rather than just artifically disabled. In the later case, home users will have a leaner, faster OS.
Shareware programmers will release two versions of their code. The free version will not have any timeout, nagging dialogs or ads, because those might be removed by a legal patch. Instead if will just not have code for certain features. This is mostly a win to the users, because low-budget or low-need people will have free software without getting annoyed and spamed.
Sample music will be distributed as 24KHz MP3s or clips. Or perhaps, a couple of songs in an album will be free in full quality. When you pay for music, you will get a full-quality MP3. You just will not be allowed to distribute it. Perhaps it will be watermarked to try to catch you. It will not be illegal to try to remove watermarks, but you will be scared to post a file because you can never know if you removed all of them unless you really mess up file's quality.
All I see is benefit to the users and only a slight challenge to manufacturers. There will be some companies for which current system is so ingrained in their business that they would go under. Some other companies will make less money. But its not the purpose of the law to guarantee that everyone makes as much money as they want. Just that someone is motivated enough to create and manufacture new products.
What's the justification for this device?
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GPS Jamming for $50
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Unless your home is being attacked by GPS-guided weapons, I don't see any moral justification for building a jamming device with a wide range. For rental car companies that track your speed, a low power transmitter similar to FM adapter for an MP3 player should do the trick.
You can justify a blue box because it lets you talk to people you otherwise couldn't without increasing the fixed cost to the phone company. Same for Kazaa and music you wouldn't otherwise buy, warez/abandonware sites and so on. But a GPS jammer used in US would disturb mostly non-evil people without any intelectual benefit to the user.
Just realized that xor will modify a bunch of flags like ZF and mov will not. Even add ax, 1 can not be always replaced with inc ax because the later one doesn't modify the carry flag. So I guess assembler would have to look if you have another instruction that overwrites a flag before anything that tests them or a jmp. So eventually, you still need to use the optimized form yourself, because *ASM can not determine all the cases when it's safe. Just curious, what algorithm did the later versions of MASM use?
It seams a no-brainer that your assembler should change larger, slower instructions to shorter, faster ones when it will not change your code behaviour. I find it amazing that MASM and others actually made you write xor ax, ax or "jmp short l1" or "mov ax, bx" rather than lea ax, [bx] explicitely. I remember a86 actually did some of it, but it wasn't completely compatible with MASM and made you explicetely declare your jmp as forward or backward.
Of course you might need some explicit prefix to say that an instruction shouldn't be touched, say because it's a part of self-modifying code. But for the most part, it's just a laziness on the part of tool developers. Although there was some satisfaction in knowing the tricks and writting better code than other people.
Now the big question is: was MASM written in assembler and did they bootstrap the development process using DEBUG?
It lets you stream your playlists to a Shoutcast server. It also has mp3pro and shows correct length for VBR MP3. But it doesn't LOOK as good as iTunes. So I wrote a Java program to write an older header to my VBR files rather than switch.
I am kind of disappointed that Apple is bullying developers who promote their hardware and software for free. But I am not sure why you need plugin SDK for this project. iTunes writes its libraries and playlists as XML files. I wrote a tiny shell script to copy files in the playlist to my MP3 player, which acts as a USB hard drive. Why not just write a small web server that reads those XML files and lets others browse the files and listen to your playlists as streams?
Also, MacOSX has Samba and NFS in addition to Apple's own file sharing. On a local network, everyone can just export their MP3 collections and then just point MP3 players to the parent directory under which other collections are mounted. Should be even more transparent than the plugin.
I don't understand why Palm won't just pay up and continue using Grafitti. Their user base is similar to Apple - loyal fans that put up with higher price (per Mhz) and less fancy applications because they really like the basic design. Grafitti is a big feature that used to differenciate Palm because you don't have to watch yourself typing like with on-screen keyboard or worry about starting position and size of your strokes, like with handwritting recognition.
It looks like Pocket PC basically copied Grafitti. At least/\ does the expected thing in "block recognition" mode. But now if Palm drops the support, most users will just decide to try a PPC for their next handheld, since they have to learn something new anyway. On the other hand, they will not thing much of paying extra $5 for the Xerox license.
Ok, I mixed up some facts in Dmitry's case. The "bait" I was talking about is actually another case - a russian hacker who was lured by FBI into US by a fake job offer.
About Scientology though - are you REALLY ready to give a person IP rights over God? It would be another (preferable!) turn of events if the copyright holders came out and publically admitted that they made up those texts. But I don't even want to imagine the arrogance it takes to claim ownership of human orgins or supreme beings. Makes me imagine a supreme being with an ear-to-ear grin , raising a flyswatter. Anyone wants to start a religion based on Q continium, or will be get in trouble with Paramount?
It's totally all right to arrest US tourists that broke the laws of your country while living in their own. Have a female visitor from Adobe in Saudi Arabia who doesn't wear a veil at home? Into the jail she goes. It's even Ok to give her job offers and lure her into your country just to arrest her for breaking your laws.
No we don't want anything like that to happen. But both Adobe and US justice system should apologize for Dmitry's detention and make sure nothing like this will happen again. Otherwise, they will have no recourse when a tourist from Texas is jailed in Europe for keeping a firearm in his house.
There are other ways to protect local laws. US certainly could deny a visa to Dmitry or make it illegal for anyone to buy or sell his/her software while in the country. Countries can also sign extradiction treaties to enforce common laws. But if I do something which is legal in my country and then come to yours and follow your laws while there, you can kick me out but not arrest me.
I know someone will say that IP laws are different from making people wear a veil or stay away from a particular religion. But, just imagine you didn't grow up conditioned to the stuff. Then, one day someone tells you a story that you like very much. You are happy and share this story with your friends. Would you expect to end up in jail, even if that someone asked you not to repeat it?
Also, consider the Church of Scientology. If a country accepts their IP rights and prevents people from distributing scientology texts, isn't it a form of religious control? True, in US you will probably get some cease-and-desist warnings before you get arrested for practicing unlicensed scientology. And you might go to a nicer jail than in totalitarian countries. But now we are talking about methods, not principles.
Anyway, countries should just agree to only abuse their own citizens and just decide weather to let others in. In the meanwhile, I hope Adobe is carefully considering foreign laws and background of their employees before sending someone on a business trip. I hear preventing someone from backing up programs they bought is illegal in Russia.
Just look at what you need to do in order to be really successful in programming.
1. Spend enourmous amount of time on your tech hobbies in young age. Free time being limited, it means you don't go out much and don't do well in school (who wants to spend time memorizing when each king/president/whatever came into power when you could be perfecting your tic-tac-toe algorithm?)
2. If you go to college, you will spend your time fighting off professors who want you to mechanically follow the book to do things you already know how to do better. Structural programming experiences, anyone? In addition, you will study subjects that are extremly tedious and are never used in programming, or at least never done manually. Why draw an LR state table by hand when you can just do yacc -v? The best outcome you can hope for is that professors just realize they can not teach you and rubber-stamp your grades to let you move on.
3. Repeat the previous step at work with various Ph.D. - carrying managers that have strong opinions about function names and calling conventions. Finally, give up a good portion of the programming work you wanted to do in the first place to go into office politics and grab good projects, people etc.
Perhaps girls have a tendency to avoid such antisocial lifestyles. After all, there are few female terrorists (well, except for no-longer-Soviet Russia), polititians, mercinaries and so on. It's theoretically possible to imagine a geek-friendly society, but it would involve human-rights abuse of normal people. For now, look for it in an online game near you.
Sorry for a redundant post (I didn't notice your's at first), but could you check this program and see if it can be motified to work with the new stereo. I got their previous model (i1000) and wrote a Java program to play PC MP3 and radio stations. That model used a combination of regular HTTP and universal plug and play.
I doubt they use encryption for performance reasons and also because all stereos will have the same key, found somewhere in the software upgrade image. Just capture and exactly replay any pages coming from the server, until you find an audio/mpeg reponse. At this point substitute your own stream or concatenated files in the playlist.
I wrote a jukebox for their previous stereo (i1000). I wonder if it still works with the new one. Can anyone check here and tell me your experience. If it works you can play your own stations.
1. Release your own program under GPL 2. Wait until people start using/extending it. 3. Sue them for patent and trademark infrigement. 4. Profit!!!
Shouldn't we have GPL+ license that also makes people who write/extend the code give up any patents or trademarks that they put there? Just wait until Microsoft hears this and starts releasing shared source under "GPL".
Well, what if GPL'ed code, released by DeerSoft itself, has SpamAssasin.cpp, opens a top-level window named "SpamAssassin" and has Help/About item with the same name. Aren't file names, window names and contents of documentation part of the GPL'ed code? Or for that matter, name of the compressed file in which the code was distributed? Basically, I don't see what I have to change if they ask me to rename it.
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It does take a real MAN to enjoy imaginary pictures on the kind of HTML pages slashdotters are looking at. Wonder if blind people can sue those websites for ADA violation.
Discouraging telemarketers will be only one application of this technology. For example, people can make a buck answering short computer questions without setting up 900 number or credit card processing. Or, companies with valid, personalized offers for you can show they are serious by paying for your ears.
As for abuses, they will quickly take care of themselves. If a bozo charges everyone for calls, he will be quickly left alone. If you charge a company you have an account with, they will just bill you back for the pleasure and then you will be able to dispute your bill with the government if they did spam you. If you dialed a wrong number - well it's just five bucks. Watch your fingers. Telemarketers on the other hand, if they still exist, will compile their own don't call lists based on their financial losses.
Texas? Illegal weapons? I thought everyone can already have a real, lethal at long distance, gun over there. Also, it's still possible to compress gas to very high pressure by hand. Just like you lift a car to change a tire. Just takes some time to do it.
Don't forget that the thing has an ARM processor but most of the user code is written as 68K and emulated on the device. There is a way to write some code as ARM, but it's pretty painful (no global variables, C++ features or debugger). This got to be more overhead than copying some files into memory.
Now it's possible that somehow you have a very good knowledge of your application-specific disk usage pattern and can get a speed up that outweighs user-mode overhead, system swapping your buffers in and out of memory and so on. In this case, you better use a dedicated disk rather than just a partitition. Otherwise, your I/O scheduling code will have interesting interactions with system's swapfile and other normal filesystem activity.
Even then you run a risk that OS code will one day improve and outperform your homegrown changes. Most programmers are better off just tuning their code to work well with OS native filesystem, virtual memory and so on.
What if someone comes up with a hash that describes how the file SOUNDS like? Sort of like MP3 capturing only the portion of the sound you (ok, a slightly quality-challanged person) can hear, the hash will describe some statistics on the file, such as histogram of different frequences. It will be possible to checksum a questionable file and determine how close it is to the original. If several different kinds of statistics are used, it will be hard for someone to alter a file and preserve all of them. If OGG stores these checksums by default, with a separate hash for each 100K of the file, it will have a real shot at being a network standard for audio. There are some interesting extensions like CDDB carrying track hashes or actually using the information for correcting small errors, like removing a "pop" if the segment of the file is not supposed to have big changes in volume.
Must... port... Cocoa. Or, in the worst case, GNUStep.
Actually, I do have a problem with that. Lets say I didn't lock my home and some curiosity seeker wandered inside when nobody is in, being careful not to delete any objects and to erase all the logs of his or her presense. Then he installed a new lock on my door and sent me e-mail explaining how to use it. I might just let it go. If on the other hand that person posted the content of my home on the TV station, I will sue him. But still I will go after money and making him miserable for some time. Not a lengthy jail term.
Now lets say my computer rather than my home is an object. If I find myself having the same reaction, I will first go the judge that sentenced Kevin and ask to not let me on Internet for couple of years. Most people who protect their desktop the same as their dwelling place need treatment rather than law enforcement.
If on the other hand you are a scientist and all your life's work is on your computer... Well in that case notice that your "home" is letting in cars from a public highway without filtering. Perhaps you should get a cottage next to the beach where you can relax and not worry about heavy security. Then make sure that your real house only allows your cars through, using a long and non-obvious remote control code on your garage. Since most of your neighbors are not so serious about their homes, post signs on every door of your house explaining that people should stay away and why. Then if someone sees the sign and still breaks the lock, go after them. If on the other hand, you forgot to build a roof and some curiosity seeker jumped down from a baloon...
Seriously, it's people who set up critical system in such a way that their functionality can be influenced from a network designed for research and entertainment that should be charged with manslaughter. If a script kiddie tried to split IRC network and people died because of that, s\he should be just given grief counseling and not charged with anything.
On the other hand, people who purposely break car or air traffic control should of course be responsible. But someone maintaining a critical computer should first make sure that it can not be shut down accidentaly and provide ample warnings to potential tresspassers on why it should be left alone. It wouldn't do to have an obvious, conviniently located self-destruct switch. Or forward any packets from the Internet without strong encryption, if that.
Hmm... I don't remember all the facts. Is there any evidence that Kevin purposly tried to cause serious harm? Or that he even broke into any systems that did critical real-time control? I thought he was just addicted to getting control of a system, stashing away source code and so on. If you get down to basics of human motivation, real hacking is just another kind of science. Like Indiana Jones style of archeology. Risky, annoying, controversial but ultimately an unavoidable consequence of human curiosity.
Anyone here who wouldn't be in trouble if every one of their computer and copyright related "offenses" came to light can throw the first stone. Ever downloaded an unlicensed MP3 plugin for Redhat 8? Ever renamed irc to emacs to violate a school policy on computer use?
The software audit though - it's impossible for a human being to stop being one at work and possibly hurt the company. What we need is an operating system that clearly separates company's applications and data from personal stuff. Say, personal applications are installed in the private home directory and the whole directory is encrypted with user's password. For a change, Microsoft might actually be the leader here with XP's NTFS encryption. Seems it will be good for everyone. Company will be freed from the responsability for the stuff they can't possibly see. And the user will be sure that his or her stash of warez^H^H^H^H^Hpersonal software will be safe during audit.
One thing I don't understand is how Microsoft proves that the software is unlicensed strongly enough to get someone arrested. What if I just copied all my software to DVD-Rs and threw away the original CDs? What if someone else stole my CD keys? I just hope, now that I switched to MacOSX, that Apple will be satisfied by me spending money on licensed hardware.
What, you just said you are going to use Mozilla? You will trust our company security to some FREEWARE when Microsoft has made security the company's first priority for the whole year??? Right here I have a resume of a Visual Basic programmer who wants to migrate our e-commerce server to IIS, SQL server and server-side VBSCript, using Microsoft passport security architecture. I think I would give him a call. Certainly PROPRIETORY SOFTWARE is better than all the FREE-WARE you installed on our network...
Lets say that it was always legal to modify anything you bought, hardware, software or data. It would be still illegal to distribute copies of other people's code without permission, but not to post any new code that modifies its behavior. So what's the big deal?
Obviously ATI makes money selling cheaper cards. So they would still sell them and turn profit even if a cheap, legal mod kit was available. If 9500 is in fact artifically crippled, they would probably just remove the performance restriction and everyone would have more fun gaming than now. ATI would still have an option of selling a high end card that really has better hardware or low end that is really cheaper to make. If 9500 is a defective 9700, ATI might provide a control panel that lets users turn on extra features at their own risk. Remember that NVIDIA does have an overclocking control panel? Windows XP Home addition will either have the same featues as XP Pro or will have the extra code really compiled out rather than just artifically disabled. In the later case, home users will have a leaner, faster OS.
Shareware programmers will release two versions of their code. The free version will not have any timeout, nagging dialogs or ads, because those might be removed by a legal patch. Instead if will just not have code for certain features. This is mostly a win to the users, because low-budget or low-need people will have free software without getting annoyed and spamed.
Sample music will be distributed as 24KHz MP3s or clips. Or perhaps, a couple of songs in an album will be free in full quality. When you pay for music, you will get a full-quality MP3. You just will not be allowed to distribute it. Perhaps it will be watermarked to try to catch you. It will not be illegal to try to remove watermarks, but you will be scared to post a file because you can never know if you removed all of them unless you really mess up file's quality.
All I see is benefit to the users and only a slight challenge to manufacturers. There will be some companies for which current system is so ingrained in their business that they would go under. Some other companies will make less money. But its not the purpose of the law to guarantee that everyone makes as much money as they want. Just that someone is motivated enough to create and manufacture new products.
You can justify a blue box because it lets you talk to people you otherwise couldn't without increasing the fixed cost to the phone company. Same for Kazaa and music you wouldn't otherwise buy, warez/abandonware sites and so on. But a GPS jammer used in US would disturb mostly non-evil people without any intelectual benefit to the user.
How is this a hacker tool?
Just realized that xor will modify a bunch of flags like ZF and mov will not. Even add ax, 1 can not be always replaced with inc ax because the later one doesn't modify the carry flag. So I guess assembler would have to look if you have another instruction that overwrites a flag before anything that tests them or a jmp. So eventually, you still need to use the optimized form yourself, because *ASM can not determine all the cases when it's safe. Just curious, what algorithm did the later versions of MASM use?
Of course you might need some explicit prefix to say that an instruction shouldn't be touched, say because it's a part of self-modifying code. But for the most part, it's just a laziness on the part of tool developers. Although there was some satisfaction in knowing the tricks and writting better code than other people.
Now the big question is: was MASM written in assembler and did they bootstrap the development process using DEBUG?
I am kind of disappointed that Apple is bullying developers who promote their hardware and software for free. But I am not sure why you need plugin SDK for this project. iTunes writes its libraries and playlists as XML files. I wrote a tiny shell script to copy files in the playlist to my MP3 player, which acts as a USB hard drive. Why not just write a small web server that reads those XML files and lets others browse the files and listen to your playlists as streams?
Also, MacOSX has Samba and NFS in addition to Apple's own file sharing. On a local network, everyone can just export their MP3 collections and then just point MP3 players to the parent directory under which other collections are mounted. Should be even more transparent than the plugin.
It looks like Pocket PC basically copied Grafitti. At least /\ does the expected thing in "block recognition" mode. But now if Palm drops the support, most users will just decide to try a PPC for their next handheld, since they have to learn something new anyway. On the other hand, they will not thing much of paying extra $5 for the Xerox license.
About Scientology though - are you REALLY ready to give a person IP rights over God? It would be another (preferable!) turn of events if the copyright holders came out and publically admitted that they made up those texts. But I don't even want to imagine the arrogance it takes to claim ownership of human orgins or supreme beings. Makes me imagine a supreme being with an ear-to-ear grin , raising a flyswatter. Anyone wants to start a religion based on Q continium, or will be get in trouble with Paramount?
No we don't want anything like that to happen. But both Adobe and US justice system should apologize for Dmitry's detention and make sure nothing like this will happen again. Otherwise, they will have no recourse when a tourist from Texas is jailed in Europe for keeping a firearm in his house.
There are other ways to protect local laws. US certainly could deny a visa to Dmitry or make it illegal for anyone to buy or sell his/her software while in the country. Countries can also sign extradiction treaties to enforce common laws. But if I do something which is legal in my country and then come to yours and follow your laws while there, you can kick me out but not arrest me.
I know someone will say that IP laws are different from making people wear a veil or stay away from a particular religion. But, just imagine you didn't grow up conditioned to the stuff. Then, one day someone tells you a story that you like very much. You are happy and share this story with your friends. Would you expect to end up in jail, even if that someone asked you not to repeat it?
Also, consider the Church of Scientology. If a country accepts their IP rights and prevents people from distributing scientology texts, isn't it a form of religious control? True, in US you will probably get some cease-and-desist warnings before you get arrested for practicing unlicensed scientology. And you might go to a nicer jail than in totalitarian countries. But now we are talking about methods, not principles.
Anyway, countries should just agree to only abuse their own citizens and just decide weather to let others in. In the meanwhile, I hope Adobe is carefully considering foreign laws and background of their employees before sending someone on a business trip. I hear preventing someone from backing up programs they bought is illegal in Russia.
Just look at what you need to do in order to be really successful in programming.
1. Spend enourmous amount of time on your tech hobbies in young age. Free time being limited, it means you don't go out much and don't do well in school (who wants to spend time memorizing when each king/president/whatever came into power when you could be perfecting your tic-tac-toe algorithm?)
2. If you go to college, you will spend your time fighting off professors who want you to mechanically follow the book to do things you already know how to do better. Structural programming experiences, anyone? In addition, you will study subjects that are extremly tedious and are never used in programming, or at least never done manually. Why draw an LR state table by hand when you can just do yacc -v? The best outcome you can hope for is that professors just realize they can not teach you and rubber-stamp your grades to let you move on.
3. Repeat the previous step at work with various Ph.D. - carrying managers that have strong opinions about function names and calling conventions. Finally, give up a good portion of the programming work you wanted to do in the first place to go into office politics and grab good projects, people etc.
Perhaps girls have a tendency to avoid such antisocial lifestyles. After all, there are few female terrorists (well, except for no-longer-Soviet Russia), polititians, mercinaries and so on. It's theoretically possible to imagine a geek-friendly society, but it would involve human-rights abuse of normal people. For now, look for it in an online game near you.
I doubt they use encryption for performance reasons and also because all stereos will have the same key, found somewhere in the software upgrade image. Just capture and exactly replay any pages coming from the server, until you find an audio/mpeg reponse. At this point substitute your own stream or concatenated files in the playlist.
I wrote a jukebox for their previous stereo (i1000). I wonder if it still works with the new one. Can anyone check here and tell me your experience. If it works you can play your own stations.
A new way to make money on free code:
1. Release your own program under GPL
2. Wait until people start using/extending it.
3. Sue them for patent and trademark infrigement.
4. Profit!!!
Shouldn't we have GPL+ license that also makes people who write/extend the code give up any patents or trademarks that they put there? Just wait until Microsoft hears this and starts releasing shared source under "GPL".
Well, what if GPL'ed code, released by DeerSoft itself, has SpamAssasin.cpp, opens a top-level window named "SpamAssassin" and has Help/About item with the same name. Aren't file names, window names and contents of documentation part of the GPL'ed code? Or for that matter, name of the compressed file in which the code was distributed? Basically, I don't see what I have to change if they ask me to rename it.