Reverse engineering an open source (GPL) application?
Open Source does not imply well documented.
I don't know how well or badly documented Firefox source code is, but if the code is not well documented, trying to understand it may well be considered reverse engineering.
You are assuming that there are a finite number of exploitable ways of attacking the company.
There is. Since the connections have a finite data range, there's a finite (although large) number of possible bit patterns attackers might send. Also all computers they could use for the attacks have finite memory (this is even true if they make use of a botnet), therefore the number of algorithms they could apply in the attack is finite as well.
Explanation: Every FritzBox can be accessed locally using the domain name "fritz.box" - which of course implies that this would clash with a public TLD named "box". And since AVM almost certainly doesn't have a trade mark on "box", they couldn't even sue you for it (them might be willing to buy it, though).
Simply switch off auto update. Maybe if enough people do so, they will revert to a more sane development cycle. What good is a new browser if nobody uses it?
Electronic only media can be altered retroactively.
Not necessarily.
trivial with DRM'ed electronic only media that is streamed from the cloud.
I've highlighted the relevant part. It's not the media being digital, it's the media storage not being under your control.
If the only institutions which could own books were libraries, it would also be relatively easy to rewrite history by just replacing all the books in the libraries. And if you can store a file on your own hard disk, inaccessible to anyone but you, they will have a hard time to change it.
Text files that are over 20 years old are very hard to read.
Not at all. Now documents which were written not as text files, but in some arcane proprietary document format are a completely different matter.
Of course I'm assuming that the file itself is kept on readily readable media. If the file is stored on a 5.25" floppy disk, you might have problems to read it, of course.
Most of them are microsoft files and even Word can't read them.
Microsoft Word files are not text files. Never have been.
What are the odds of a file created toady being readable in a 100 years?
Given that most documents today are written in some SGML or XML format, and for text documents this means the actual text is basically in plain ASCII, the odds are quite good (again, provided the file itself is readable).
There's this fantasy that the internet itself is perpetual but it may not exist in a hundred years.
And your library may burn down next week. Any imagination of perpetual storage is pure fantasy. There are some storage methods which are more durable than others (and if you want it to survive for a long time, you better put it in stone or burned clay), but none provide guaranteed eternal storage.
One hard drive crash can wipe out all your books.
Provided you do not make proper backups. Which, BTW, is much easier to do for hard disks than for paper books.
Hard drives? I'm thrilled when they last 3 years let alone a 100.
You must have had very bad hard drives. Up to now I've had only one hard drive failure (and even there I'm not sure it is a real hard drive failure; the computer's power supply unit was going bad, and only then the hard drive stopped working, and even there only one partition went bad [but in a way to cause physical read errors]), and none in the first three years. Which doesn't mean it can't happen, but it means that it is not that unusual for them not to remain intact over three years.
I think putting it on clay tablets and burning them would have created a much more durable memory. After all, AFAIK microfilm is easily flammable.
Of course it would have been more expensive. OTOH, if our culture should really get completely destroyed, it would also help some archaeologists to find out more about our culture. We shouldn't forget to add teaching material for the language, though.
For this to go any further, I guess we would have clarify what we mean by:
"Since I saw" "Have never seen"
For me, I take it as seen anywhere, not just in person. I mean, we don't learn everything we are taught by being at the point of origin or subject.
For me, "have never seen", without any further qualification, means "have never seen the object itself" (as opposed to e.g. an image of the object). For example, despite having seen Jurassic Park, I still maintain that I've never seen a dinosaur.
That's a dictionary, as in it tracks the use of the word, if you could convince enough people to start referring to the Sun as Howard, eventually the dictionary would have to add the definition of the sun to the list under Howard. But, it doesn't mean that it's actually a reflection of reality.
It would be a reflection of reality. What a word means or doesn't mean is entirely a matter of what it is used for. Therefore if the word "child" is used to refer to a fetus, a fetus is a child, by definition. You may argue, then, that being "child" is, in your view, not the relevant property, but e.g. being "born" is more important to you. But you cannot argue that "child" doesn't mean something if it is so widely used to mean exactly that that it even appears in a dictionary under that meaning.
Well, if you want to know whether a tornado is likely to come to your home, I think the image quality will be your least worry. More important is the fact that you're most likely lacking the knowledge to translate the data about the current situation (which is what the satellites give you) into accurate forecasts.
but there's no program path which will ever access it again, and thus it should be discarded
Memory management does not work that way (also lol halting problem).
First: That was a definition of "memory leak" which is completely independent of any way memory works or doesn't work. Ans as such, the halting problem is irrelevant for it (it does imply that for this definition of "memory leak" it is impossible to write an algorithm which in finite time tells for an arbitrary program whether it will be leak-free for any input, but that's true also for the more conservative definition, so it's irrelevant).
But the halting problem is irrelevant here also in another way: It says that you cannot write an algorithm which decides for an arbitrary program whether it halts. That doesn't imply that it isn't possible for a certain given program to tell whether it halts (indeed, it's trivial to decide that int main(){} always halts, int main() { while(1); } never does). And it especially doesn't tell you about the properties of well written programs.
Wielding the halting problem doesn't get you anywhere, unless you are speaking about mandatory behaviour of compilers.
Well, maybe soon they will find that imprisoning someone for something he said isn't violating freedom of speech, because after all, the imprisoning is done after he said it, and therefore cannot hinder him from saying it.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is the whole point. It's another example of the same flawed logic, in an example where the flaw is very obvious.
Yeah, and without water, plants cannot do photosynthesis. Indeed, the whole point of photosynthesis is to produce sugar from water and carbon dioxide.
There's some bad logic going on here:
* Flies need that protein for magnetic sensing.
* Humans have the protein.
* Therefore humans can do magnetic sensing.
Obviously humans also do photosynthesis:
* Plants need water for photosynthesis.
* Humans need water.
* Therefore humans do photosynthesis.
Open Source does not imply well documented.
I don't know how well or badly documented Firefox source code is, but if the code is not well documented, trying to understand it may well be considered reverse engineering.
What if some illegal activity was done from a cloud process? Will they seize the complete cloud infrastructure?
The summary claims it could emit light at any wavelength, but I'd bet they can't get even close to Planck length. :-)
No, the ultimate defense is a retroreflector. That way, the laser beam will target exactly its source.
I predict that in 2029 computers will surpass Ray Kurzweil in making overly optimistic predictions. :-)
There is. Since the connections have a finite data range, there's a finite (although large) number of possible bit patterns attackers might send. Also all computers they could use for the attacks have finite memory (this is even true if they make use of a botnet), therefore the number of algorithms they could apply in the attack is finite as well.
Bitcoins?
Obviously you never heard of fractal geometry. :-)
So you are saying they embrace HTML5/standards?
To piss off AVM, get "box" :-)
Explanation: Every FritzBox can be accessed locally using the domain name "fritz.box" - which of course implies that this would clash with a public TLD named "box". And since AVM almost certainly doesn't have a trade mark on "box", they couldn't even sue you for it (them might be willing to buy it, though).
Simply switch off auto update. Maybe if enough people do so, they will revert to a more sane development cycle. What good is a new browser if nobody uses it?
Oops, I just noticed I should also have highlighted the "DRMed".
Not necessarily.
I've highlighted the relevant part. It's not the media being digital, it's the media storage not being under your control.
If the only institutions which could own books were libraries, it would also be relatively easy to rewrite history by just replacing all the books in the libraries. And if you can store a file on your own hard disk, inaccessible to anyone but you, they will have a hard time to change it.
Well, the summary speaks about a few generations. Which is quite a while. What did the world look like three generations ago?
Not at all. Now documents which were written not as text files, but in some arcane proprietary document format are a completely different matter.
Of course I'm assuming that the file itself is kept on readily readable media. If the file is stored on a 5.25" floppy disk, you might have problems to read it, of course.
Microsoft Word files are not text files. Never have been.
Given that most documents today are written in some SGML or XML format, and for text documents this means the actual text is basically in plain ASCII, the odds are quite good (again, provided the file itself is readable).
And your library may burn down next week. Any imagination of perpetual storage is pure fantasy. There are some storage methods which are more durable than others (and if you want it to survive for a long time, you better put it in stone or burned clay), but none provide guaranteed eternal storage.
Provided you do not make proper backups. Which, BTW, is much easier to do for hard disks than for paper books.
You must have had very bad hard drives. Up to now I've had only one hard drive failure (and even there I'm not sure it is a real hard drive failure; the computer's power supply unit was going bad, and only then the hard drive stopped working, and even there only one partition went bad [but in a way to cause physical read errors]), and none in the first three years. Which doesn't mean it can't happen, but it means that it is not that unusual for them not to remain intact over three years.
I think putting it on clay tablets and burning them would have created a much more durable memory. After all, AFAIK microfilm is easily flammable.
Of course it would have been more expensive. OTOH, if our culture should really get completely destroyed, it would also help some archaeologists to find out more about our culture. We shouldn't forget to add teaching material for the language, though.
For this to go any further, I guess we would have
clarify what we mean by:
"Since I saw"
"Have never seen"
For me, I take it as seen anywhere, not just in person.
I mean, we don't learn everything we are taught by being
at the point of origin or subject.
For me, "have never seen", without any further qualification, means "have never seen the object itself" (as opposed to e.g. an image of the object). For example, despite having seen Jurassic Park, I still maintain that I've never seen a dinosaur.
I have seen vinyl records, BTW.
these guys sound like a bunch of emo script kiddies
stop playing with your pecker and dreamcast and go meet some girls
But what girls would like to meet a bunch of emo script kiddies?
That's a dictionary, as in it tracks the use of the word, if you could convince enough people to start referring to the Sun as Howard, eventually the dictionary would have to add the definition of the sun to the list under Howard. But, it doesn't mean that it's actually a reflection of reality.
It would be a reflection of reality. What a word means or doesn't mean is entirely a matter of what it is used for. Therefore if the word "child" is used to refer to a fetus, a fetus is a child, by definition. You may argue, then, that being "child" is, in your view, not the relevant property, but e.g. being "born" is more important to you. But you cannot argue that "child" doesn't mean something if it is so widely used to mean exactly that that it even appears in a dictionary under that meaning.
Well, if you want to know whether a tornado is likely to come to your home, I think the image quality will be your least worry.
More important is the fact that you're most likely lacking the knowledge to translate the data about the current situation (which is what the satellites give you) into accurate forecasts.
but there's no program path which will ever access it again, and thus it should be discarded
Memory management does not work that way (also lol halting problem).
First: That was a definition of "memory leak" which is completely independent of any way memory works or doesn't work. Ans as such, the halting problem is irrelevant for it (it does imply that for this definition of "memory leak" it is impossible to write an algorithm which in finite time tells for an arbitrary program whether it will be leak-free for any input, but that's true also for the more conservative definition, so it's irrelevant).
But the halting problem is irrelevant here also in another way: It says that you cannot write an algorithm which decides for an arbitrary program whether it halts. That doesn't imply that it isn't possible for a certain given program to tell whether it halts (indeed, it's trivial to decide that int main(){} always halts, int main() { while(1); } never does). And it especially doesn't tell you about the properties of well written programs.
Wielding the halting problem doesn't get you anywhere, unless you are speaking about mandatory behaviour of compilers.
Well, maybe soon they will find that imprisoning someone for something he said isn't violating freedom of speech, because after all, the imprisoning is done after he said it, and therefore cannot hinder him from saying it.