Well, it also mentions that in some areas of the Galaxis, the Guide has already replaced the Encyclopedia Galactica as primary source of knowledge. And one of the reasons was that it's cheaper. I just hope they never put the words "Don't Panic" on the front page, otherwise a Vogon construction fleet might come the next thursday and demolish the Earth.:-)
To me the description of the EPIC system sounds as much as a danger as as an utopia:
If the news you get is assembled for you personally, then no two persons get the same news. You cannot just refer me to "the article over there" because if I go to "over there" I'll get a slightly different article.
Now, such a world of fully personalized content would be the perfect world for mainpulation. It doesn't even have intentional. If you are a believer in the effectiveness and value of DRM, you'll especially be interested in positive statements about DRM. Now, the filters are programmed to show you mostly what you are interested in, therefore you'll be shown mostly positive stuff on DRM. OTOH a DRM hater will be shown mostly negative things about DRM.
Now you might say that this happens anyway, but currently, if you are against DRM and someone else is for it, you can tell him "well, read that web page, it shows why DRM is bad." Now, there's some likelyhood that he'll indeed go to that page, and be it just to more effectively argue against it, and therefore gets at least the other position this way (and of course if an opposing opinion hits the mass media, it is more or less impossible to ignore it).
However with such personalized content, if he goes to the very same page, he will see something different than you've seen. His assembly will likely contain more positive statements about DRM and less negative.
In short, such a system, if just neutrally selecting news according to your interest, would likely show everyone content which fits to his own bias (note that there will not be much incentive to avoid that, the best way to make money from someone is to tell him what he wants to hear). IOW, the personalized view would probably amplify each one's bias.
Now, if it is actively manipulated behind the scenes, things get even worse. Say you want to hide some fact from the general public, and you have access to the underlying system. Then you can effectively hinder the spread of information by just making it not shown. For an outside person who has the information from somewhere else (or who even has put it into the system), it would be close to impossible to decide if the information is not shown to others because the algorithm just decided it's not interesting enough for the readers, or if someone manipulated the system to explicitly not show it.
Well, he probably hopes that by the time HVDs are in production, there will have been enough Sony-like incidents that DRMed media are simply not sellable at all any more.
They are incompatible, but in a different way than zip disks and floppy disks. They are incompatible the way LS120 and 3.5" floppy disks were. The physical format is the same (you can put both disks in the same drive), but the reading units are different (if a drive wants to support both, it has to have two different reading units; although since for BRD/HD-DVD the laser wavelength is actually the same, maybe it's also possible to have an optic which can be switched between the two e.g. by moving some lens, I don't know the details of the formats to know if that could be possible). Indeed, one selling point of LS120 was that the drive could read/write both normal and LS120 disks, despite the fact that the method of reading/writing was completely different.
I'm unlikely to buy a BluRay or HD-DVD player anytime soon, even if they get cheap. Therefore I personally don't really care how many Movies I'll get on which format. I highly doubt I'd see much of a different on my (non-HDTV) TV anyway (and I'm not going to buy a new TV either). I might, however, buy a burner as soon as they are reasonably cheap. Not for burning movies, but for storing data. And for that, there are basically three benchmarks:
How much data can I store on it?
How much data per Euro can I store on it?
How reliable/durable is my data on them?
In a nutshell, I'd like to have large, cheap and reasonably reliable storage.
Something along the lines of "no one has the right to deny another the exercise of his free will unless said exercise denies another their free exercise of will."
Of course, the problem with that definition is that in the clashing of two free wills, there's no objective way to define which free will is the one denying the other.
Example:
You want to go along a certain way. It's your free will to go there. I want to hinder others to go that way. It's my free will to hinder them. Now, who of us is denying the other one his free will? Well, we both do. Ok, then who of us should get his free will? Well, the modern society has a set of rules which basically says: It depends.
The main concept this depends on is the concept of property: There are certain rules by which I can claim a certain area as my property, and if I may deny you to go a certain way depends on if this way is part of that area. The same is true if it is someone else's property, and he asked me to deny others to go that way.
Otherwise I probably may not deny you to go there, although there are of course other exceptions, e.g. if I'm a fireman and there's a fire where you'd want to go and it would be just too dangerous for you to go there, or you would hinder putting the fire out. Or if you are a prisoner, and I'm a prison guard.
You see, your general rule doesn't help even at the simple question "may I deny you to go there"?
I don't know, but I could think of several possible reasons:
Having the same size should make it possible to produce drives which read both BD and CD/DVD
Having the same size might allow to re-use some of the machines handling them in the factory (e.g. the machines which put them in their cases)
If they had only half the diameter, there would fit only 1/4 of the data on them, and 12.5 GB surely isn't enough of a difference to win against 8.5 GB Dual Layer DVD.
Well, you just have to read the binary, too (don't trust the disassembler, it could be manipulated as well; disassemble on your own).
Ah, and don't forget to check your hardware. What does the best checking of the software help if your CPU silently changes the meaning of certain special code sequences?
Indeed, that would be the perfect backdoor: The processor detects a very specific series of instructions (possibly with certain other conditions, e.g. some restrictions on the address the sequence starts, maybe a certain register must contain a certain value, the possibilities are endless), and after detecting that sequence, a string compare instruction will not only compare the strings with each other, but also one of them with a built-in value, and return true in both cases. The sequence of instructions is of course chosen by the fact that it occurs in a widespread login binary before the password check. This way, you can inspect the source and binary of both the compiler and the login program as long as you want, you'll never find the backdoor. The conditions in the processor ensure that you are very unlikely to find it accidentally on unrelated code (and maybe they can even disable that backdoor in common debugging scenarios).
As a result of fear from Sarbanes-Oxley, our IT folks have instituted fairly stringent password requirements. [...] However, when I login, I enter "matlegpq", and it works because Solaris only cares about the first 8 characters!
Do they also happen to have stringent requirements about disclosing your password?:-)
The problem with bombing cancer patients is that you don't just destroy the cancer, but also the patients. Hmmm... well, we will just call it collateral damage.:-)
No, you misunderstood. It would at first sit there and watch you, and then, after it has learned enough about your behaviour, it contacts your buddies and tries to look like you to them. For example, it could catch typical phrases you use, as well as about what topic you chat with whom. That way, it could manage to not only chat from your account, but at the same type look so "typically you" that your buddies would more likely accept them as you, and therefore download the virus file (the stated contents of which would also be adapted, so if you typically chat with one of your buddies about programming, then it may e.g. claim to have found a great new code analysis tool, while to the other buddy you are talking about movies with, it would be e.g. a trailer to a new movie).
Well, just wait until the AI gets more advanced. Then it will first sit silently on your computer for a while and watch your chatting behaviour. And then it will try to imitate you.
Well, if it really indices all important C/C++ OSS projects then it should also index glibc (covers all standard C functions), gcc including libstdc++ (covers all standard C++ functions), Linux (covers Posix calls and of course Linux specific calls), X, gtk, gnome, KDE (together cover most GUI stuff) and Wine (covers a lot of the Windows APIs).
Well, given that assigning something to itself is a no-op (unless it's a volatile or an user-defined type with overloaded assignment operator with non-standard semantics, and unless something is an uninitialized variable causing undefined behaviour on read), this is just a verbose way to write "if (something)...", while "(if something == something)" would (under equivalent conditions) just be a complicated way to write "if (true)..."
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it also mentions that in some areas of the Galaxis, the Guide has already replaced the Encyclopedia Galactica as primary source of knowledge. And one of the reasons was that it's cheaper. :-)
I just hope they never put the words "Don't Panic" on the front page, otherwise a Vogon construction fleet might come the next thursday and demolish the Earth.
To me the description of the EPIC system sounds as much as a danger as as an utopia:
If the news you get is assembled for you personally, then no two persons get the same news. You cannot just refer me to "the article over there" because if I go to "over there" I'll get a slightly different article.
Now, such a world of fully personalized content would be the perfect world for mainpulation. It doesn't even have intentional. If you are a believer in the effectiveness and value of DRM, you'll especially be interested in positive statements about DRM. Now, the filters are programmed to show you mostly what you are interested in, therefore you'll be shown mostly positive stuff on DRM. OTOH a DRM hater will be shown mostly negative things about DRM.
Now you might say that this happens anyway, but currently, if you are against DRM and someone else is for it, you can tell him "well, read that web page, it shows why DRM is bad." Now, there's some likelyhood that he'll indeed go to that page, and be it just to more effectively argue against it, and therefore gets at least the other position this way (and of course if an opposing opinion hits the mass media, it is more or less impossible to ignore it).
However with such personalized content, if he goes to the very same page, he will see something different than you've seen. His assembly will likely contain more positive statements about DRM and less negative.
In short, such a system, if just neutrally selecting news according to your interest, would likely show everyone content which fits to his own bias (note that there will not be much incentive to avoid that, the best way to make money from someone is to tell him what he wants to hear). IOW, the personalized view would probably amplify each one's bias.
Now, if it is actively manipulated behind the scenes, things get even worse. Say you want to hide some fact from the general public, and you have access to the underlying system. Then you can effectively hinder the spread of information by just making it not shown. For an outside person who has the information from somewhere else (or who even has put it into the system), it would be close to impossible to decide if the information is not shown to others because the algorithm just decided it's not interesting enough for the readers, or if someone manipulated the system to explicitly not show it.
Well, he probably hopes that by the time HVDs are in production, there will have been enough Sony-like incidents that DRMed media are simply not sellable at all any more.
They are incompatible, but in a different way than zip disks and floppy disks. They are incompatible the way LS120 and 3.5" floppy disks were. The physical format is the same (you can put both disks in the same drive), but the reading units are different (if a drive wants to support both, it has to have two different reading units; although since for BRD/HD-DVD the laser wavelength is actually the same, maybe it's also possible to have an optic which can be switched between the two e.g. by moving some lens, I don't know the details of the formats to know if that could be possible). Indeed, one selling point of LS120 was that the drive could read/write both normal and LS120 disks, despite the fact that the method of reading/writing was completely different.
In a nutshell, I'd like to have large, cheap and reasonably reliable storage.
Of course, the problem with that definition is that in the clashing of two free wills, there's no objective way to define which free will is the one denying the other.
Example:
You want to go along a certain way. It's your free will to go there.
I want to hinder others to go that way. It's my free will to hinder them.
Now, who of us is denying the other one his free will? Well, we both do.
Ok, then who of us should get his free will? Well, the modern society has a set of rules which basically says: It depends.
The main concept this depends on is the concept of property: There are certain rules by which I can claim a certain area as my property, and if I may deny you to go a certain way depends on if this way is part of that area. The same is true if it is someone else's property, and he asked me to deny others to go that way.
Otherwise I probably may not deny you to go there, although there are of course other exceptions, e.g. if I'm a fireman and there's a fire where you'd want to go and it would be just too dangerous for you to go there, or you would hinder putting the fire out. Or if you are a prisoner, and I'm a prison guard.
You see, your general rule doesn't help even at the simple question "may I deny you to go there"?
I guess you missed a joke here.
Oh damn, I guess I'll have to watch out for the guy with the gun!
Are you sure you wanted
to press the "Ok" button
on the "Are you sure"
dialog box?
[ OK ] [ Cancel ]
They will soon need it: 50 GB for the data, 250 GB for the DRM.
So are we now finally going to get an East Pole and a West Pole?
Robotics?
Well, you just have to read the binary, too (don't trust the disassembler, it could be manipulated as well; disassemble on your own).
Ah, and don't forget to check your hardware. What does the best checking of the software help if your CPU silently changes the meaning of certain special code sequences?
Indeed, that would be the perfect backdoor: The processor detects a very specific series of instructions (possibly with certain other conditions, e.g. some restrictions on the address the sequence starts, maybe a certain register must contain a certain value, the possibilities are endless), and after detecting that sequence, a string compare instruction will not only compare the strings with each other, but also one of them with a built-in value, and return true in both cases. The sequence of instructions is of course chosen by the fact that it occurs in a widespread login binary before the password check. This way, you can inspect the source and binary of both the compiler and the login program as long as you want, you'll never find the backdoor. The conditions in the processor ensure that you are very unlikely to find it accidentally on unrelated code (and maybe they can even disable that backdoor in common debugging scenarios).
Do they also happen to have stringent requirements about disclosing your password?
The problem with bombing cancer patients is that you don't just destroy the cancer, but also the patients. Hmmm ... well, we will just call it collateral damage. :-)
No, you misunderstood. It would at first sit there and watch you, and then, after it has learned enough about your behaviour, it contacts your buddies and tries to look like you to them.
For example, it could catch typical phrases you use, as well as about what topic you chat with whom. That way, it could manage to not only chat from your account, but at the same type look so "typically you" that your buddies would more likely accept them as you, and therefore download the virus file (the stated contents of which would also be adapted, so if you typically chat with one of your buddies about programming, then it may e.g. claim to have found a great new code analysis tool, while to the other buddy you are talking about movies with, it would be e.g. a trailer to a new movie).
You mean you invite that person for a touring trip and consider anyone who rejects that offer as AI?
Well, just wait until the AI gets more advanced. Then it will first sit silently on your computer for a while and watch your chatting behaviour. And then it will try to imitate you.
Sorry, but a computer using this processor is not usually called PC.
Well, if it really indices all important C/C++ OSS projects then it should also index glibc (covers all standard C functions), gcc including libstdc++ (covers all standard C++ functions), Linux (covers Posix calls and of course Linux specific calls), X, gtk, gnome, KDE (together cover most GUI stuff) and Wine (covers a lot of the Windows APIs).
35 switch, but 55 default? Do you have switches with more than one default case, or did I miss another use of that keyword?
Well, given that assigning something to itself is a no-op (unless it's a volatile or an user-defined type with overloaded assignment operator with non-standard semantics, and unless something is an uninitialized variable causing undefined behaviour on read), this is just a verbose way to write "if (something) ...", while "(if something == something)" would (under equivalent conditions) just be a complicated way to write "if (true) ..."
So the code calls 61,718,232 functions which don't even exist?
But maybe they just meant "Total Number of Function Calls"
Another possible scenario: After he had formatted the disk, he restored a backup which already contained the infection.