I'm not sure that I see what you mean by "cleaner". Just because government intervention is bad in some areas of life, it doesn't logically follow that it must be bad in all areas of life. As an example, there are quite strict privacy laws in Germany and France that run contrarty to this US approach. Both (the US and European) are intervening in the issue of privacy - but with completely opposite results. Are both "bad" just because they are government interventions?
It strikes me as bizarre that someone is prevented from starting up a small business like that, but I don't see the connection to the debate on privacy. The "fascist" level of control that I alluded to was an observation that fascist regimes start by collating information on the population, then use it to begin repression. America is heading down that slippery slope.
Debate is healthy when it's real debate. This has been framed in terms that are so wrong it is shocking. Just a couple of quotes from the article that really stand out:
"Privacy no longer can mean anonymity" - without anonymity there is no such thing as privacy. Traffic analysis is a wonderful tool if we are talking about communications, and if we're datamining for activities then tagging everything with a real id makes it a lot easy. Nothing like removing two freedoms for the price of one.
"Protecting anonymity isn't a fight that can be won. Anyone that's typed in their name on Google understands that" - Erm, if you already have somebodies name then anonymity is hard. Surely the real question is whether you can get it in the first place. Surely not a US politician trying to mislead the public over the terms of a debate. I'm shocked...
The reason that I put this response to you, in this thread, rather than someone else later on is this. Why are you trying to equate the debate with a "liberal" (in the US sense) desire for social control? Most of Europe has had extensive social programs in place for decades without feeling the need for this fascist level of control over people's lives. Do you not think it possible that the two subjects are independent?
Maybe you should chase the etymology one level deeper. If the original data cannot be recovered then it is not "hidden" but "destroyed". You may not believe that the term encryption means a two-way process with an available decryption function - but that is the definition that the crypto community uses, and so it's good enough for me.
The only interesting thing on that site is the link to news.bbc.co.uk. Given that the main use of the beeb's website is for the news and that most people with a clue would just bypass that server and hit the frontpage for the news site the only thing we can infer from the statistic is that most clueless people use windows...
You are completely wrong on every count, but that has already been pointed out by other replies.
I thought that I'd just point out that the mistake that you are making is confusing the legal definition of a munition under export controls, with the definition of a supercomputer. And that definition has also suffered inflation over the years because it stopped American manufacturers from selling midrange machines when it became outdated.
It reminded me of this case from earlier this month. The inventor in the story was testing his new device when he was clocked by a speed camera. In the court case his GPS logs were used as evidence that he was 12mph slower than the speed gun recorded. He may have had a motive for pursuing it through to a court case as he is starting a company to comercialise the device.
GPUs were foremost designed to execute large numbers of linearly-ordered simple matrix/vector operations per clock cycle.
Minor correction - I know what you mean when you say "linearly-ordered" but a more accurate way to describe it would be: large sets of independent operations per clock-cycle. The sequential encoding that happens between clock cycles is true of most processors, and not specific to GPUs. The key is high performance is the lack of communication between separate instances of the pixel shader which is a property of the independence of the sub-problems.
You're right about the chess search, in contrast to what the poster above you claims, a GPU would not be suitable for evaluating the heuristic because of the branching control flow within the heuristic. An interesting scoring function would be to try and encode a neural network that can score the position: then data packing would be an issue but a neural net can be converted into very efficient GPU code as long as the number of pixels that you are gathering the position from is quite low.
The real performance killer would be the scatter at the other end - once a position is scored the card needs to perform sorting to filter out the high scoring positions from the low. This sorting may be avoidable on the newer CUDA cards as their memory architecture allows an efficient scatter without the need to sort data.
Yup, no-limit hold'em has been fully solved when your stack is only 10BB (10 times the big blind: i.e. you're sitting at a $1/$2 table and you have only $20).
When did this happen? They haven't even solved Rhode Island poker yet. This would be a huge result - do you have a link to the paper?
If you tell me that byte 12,243,264 is 245 (unsigned, obviously)
Ok that actually made me chuckle:)
However, if I knew that you were talking about an MP3 of "Like a Virgin," then you have to contend with fair use
It's an interesting question; so fair use extends to quotation. And if I were to quote a sentence from a book then nobody would contend that it wasn't fair-use of that material. Even if I were to tell you where that sentence lay within the text. If a million different people were willing to do this, then you would have the entire text of the book. Nobody distributed it - so who broke copyright?
(As I write this I can hear the penny analogy in Office Space with the quip; and all we're doing is automating that a couple of million times a second)
No, that's a logical hole that you can't get out of it.
So your telling me that if the legality of the byte 34 is dependent on fair use? That's silly. So if I tell you that in a certain file the byte at position 12243264 has value 245 then you are trying to claim that I've violated someones copyright. Whose, exactly? Do you have any idea how many different files that statement is true of?
My gmail account had 535 spams in the last 30 days against 20 genuine emails. So that's roughly 96%. My gmail account name hasn't been splashed anywhere public, I only use it for companies that require an email for registration and with friends. The account name is 10 characters long and won't appear in a dictionary anywhere.
So I would guess that my usage patterns put me somewhere near the average and I'm seeing the spam levels that they talk about. You might be very lucky:)
In one of the news bbc pages linked from the open rights group story is the following quote:
The BBC has said the problem in offering a cross-platform download service lies in protecting rights holders' content.
Strange... I would have thought this would be much easier on linux. They can release almost any DRM scheme that they want and it will be broken in days - truly problem free. Even with the Vista hooks into the OS that they seem to be relying on they are only delaying the inevitable.
If they did would it fair to close down the market and say "Sorry, you can buy Sony if you want to use the service that you've already paid for"? Don't forget that the BBC is publicly funded, and supporting a commercial monopoly is not in its charter.
The bandwidth question has cropped up again. Given that they are not talking about access to their entire catalogue, but a small (1 week?) window of it - why don't the ISPs put a proxy on their networks so that it is only downloaded once, and the majority of the bandwidth is internal?
Yeah the prototype kits are pricey. I've wanted to play with some of these panels for a while, but not at the current prices. If you go to E-Ink's website and follow the links through to the store they have kits with the 5/6" screen for $2000!! and the 8/9" screen for $4000.
No, your correction shows that you have no understanding of how this works.
A.wav ripped from a CD is a number that encodes the song in a very straightforward way (uniform time sampling). This is what person C buys when they buy a CD.
When the wav is compressed into an mp3, a new smaller number is generated, which when passed through a certain algorithm produces another number which sounds reasonably like the first. It certainly doesn't recreate the original, otherwise the mp3 compression would be loseless.
Your line of logic is flawed after your first mistake. Furthermore, the point being argued by the OP and the poster that I replied to is not about transmitting an mp3 and claiming it's something else. The question is how small a block of that mp3 does copyright still apply to?
Further to the GP's comments above; only a lawyer would see what he said as an "attempt to fool the courts" rather than as a basic question about ownership, given the laws of our universe. Take a step aback from the case at hand and consider what he is actually saying.
Musician A : Writes a song Evil Company B : Actively pursues copyright cases against the song
How far is this allowed to go? The situation that we have now is that random person C buys a copy of the song as a number (quite a big number, but just a number non-the-less). Person C now computes another smaller number which if interpreted in the right way sounds like the song. And he proceeds to distribute this number.
Any copyright claim assumes that Evil Company B owns the number computed by Person C. Any geek can see instantly that this is a fucked up situation. So take the GP's question again: how small can I make these portions of this number before Evil Company B doesn't own it?
Do they own individual bits? Because if they do then there are only two copyrights in the world, they should have expired by now and everyone else is fucked. If the "block" is bigger than a bit then how small are the numbers that people are allowed to own. What if I tell you that 17 is a block in a Kylie Minogue track - does that give her ownership of it? Has sieving for primes just become harder without a license from Kylie?
It's been established in patent law for a long time that it isn't possible to own numbers because society and progress would be fundamentally broken if you could. The recent flurry of copyright battles over digital information seems to have forgotten this decision.
I'd like to see some performance numbers for the new drive in the Alienware, but after digging around I could only find these numbers.
The short summary is read performance isn't fantastic, and write performance really sucks. Although the final benchmark shows a writespeed of 40MB/s, all of the "real-world" tests shows a sustained write speed of 5-10MB/s.
Basically dreadful, given that performance, prize and size are normally a pick two out of three choice for storage, finding a system that offers pick zero out of three is awful.
That sounds interesting but kind of hard: the basic search is expanding out a tree as you test different moves to yield different positions. Doesn't stream computing work better on datasets with fixed dimension? We've got a blue gene upstairs that would be sweet to try this out on, but there's a long queue and somehow I doubt I would get priority:(
Re:Exhaustive?
on
Cracking Go
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Oddly enough this very question forms the basis of the article that you haven't read...:)
The basic asnwer is that we can optimise doing something simple and replicate lots, far, far better than optimisiing something complex and replicating it a few times. Which if you think about it is the approach that the brain / evolution of the brain opts for.
The "brute-force" approach described is actually mid-way between a pure brute-force (exhaustive) search and a "smart" search using quite sophisticated techniques to prune the tree. The author talks about alpha-beta pruning, null-move generation and hypothesis testing. These techniques are still pure-search (brute force) techniques - ie you could apply them to any game tree, but their effects are similar to how a smart (tailored to the specific game) approach would work.
And your whole (original) post seems to be based on the premise that somehow it is not right for the RIAA to "prosecute" the defendants under the civil law due to the reduced burden of proof.
No my point was that the RIAA had failed to provide any evidence at all, under either burden of proof.
I'm not familiar with the rules of evidence, and I definitely don't know how evidence is going to be handled in internet related cases, but I can assure you that at least in the jurisdiction here, a screenshot itself is NOT enough to prove anything, even "on the balance of probabilities".
Try reading the article (no seriously, I'm not just flaming you). The RIAA's case was based on a screenshot of kazaa with the defendent's IP address and a filename, plus the dubious claim that "making available" the file was illegal.
I'm fairly sure that in my jurisdiction a screenshot isn't valid evidence of anything either, but in the case under discussion that is how it went. My post was pointing out that such a decision is bullshit, and clearly a travesty of justice.
If the second half of my post seemed like "a poster who knows nothing about relevant law and yet babbles as if I do" then perhaps you should read the context above it that explains the list of points are things that the RIAA did *in that trial* which do *not* constitute proof. Not a description of my understanding of law.
Perhaps then you will understand why NewYorkLawyer made an ass of himself, and why that *was not the point* of the post.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure that I see what you mean by "cleaner". Just because government intervention is bad in some areas of life, it doesn't logically follow that it must be bad in all areas of life. As an example, there are quite strict privacy laws in Germany and France that run contrarty to this US approach. Both (the US and European) are intervening in the issue of privacy - but with completely opposite results. Are both "bad" just because they are government interventions?
It strikes me as bizarre that someone is prevented from starting up a small business like that, but I don't see the connection to the debate on privacy. The "fascist" level of control that I alluded to was an observation that fascist regimes start by collating information on the population, then use it to begin repression. America is heading down that slippery slope.
Debate is healthy when it's real debate. This has been framed in terms that are so wrong it is shocking. Just a couple of quotes from the article that really stand out:
"Privacy no longer can mean anonymity" - without anonymity there is no such thing as privacy. Traffic analysis is a wonderful tool if we are talking about communications, and if we're datamining for activities then tagging everything with a real id makes it a lot easy. Nothing like removing two freedoms for the price of one.
"Protecting anonymity isn't a fight that can be won. Anyone that's typed in their name on Google understands that" - Erm, if you already have somebodies name then anonymity is hard. Surely the real question is whether you can get it in the first place. Surely not a US politician trying to mislead the public over the terms of a debate. I'm shocked...
The reason that I put this response to you, in this thread, rather than someone else later on is this. Why are you trying to equate the debate with a "liberal" (in the US sense) desire for social control? Most of Europe has had extensive social programs in place for decades without feeling the need for this fascist level of control over people's lives. Do you not think it possible that the two subjects are independent?
Ahh, all the good ones die young
Maybe you should chase the etymology one level deeper. If the original data cannot be recovered then it is not "hidden" but "destroyed". You may not believe that the term encryption means a two-way process with an available decryption function - but that is the definition that the crypto community uses, and so it's good enough for me.
What a great solid rebuttal. You really addressed his point well.
The only interesting thing on that site is the link to news.bbc.co.uk. Given that the main use of the beeb's website is for the news and that most people with a clue would just bypass that server and hit the frontpage for the news site the only thing we can infer from the statistic is that most clueless people use windows...
You are completely wrong on every count, but that has already been pointed out by other replies.
I thought that I'd just point out that the mistake that you are making is confusing the legal definition of a munition under export controls, with the definition of a supercomputer. And that definition has also suffered inflation over the years because it stopped American manufacturers from selling midrange machines when it became outdated.
It reminded me of this case from earlier this month. The inventor in the story was testing his new device when he was clocked by a speed camera. In the court case his GPS logs were used as evidence that he was 12mph slower than the speed gun recorded. He may have had a motive for pursuing it through to a court case as he is starting a company to comercialise the device.
Blowouts are avoiding by keeping the product in vapor form prior to installation...
Minor correction - I know what you mean when you say "linearly-ordered" but a more accurate way to describe it would be: large sets of independent operations per clock-cycle. The sequential encoding that happens between clock cycles is true of most processors, and not specific to GPUs. The key is high performance is the lack of communication between separate instances of the pixel shader which is a property of the independence of the sub-problems.
You're right about the chess search, in contrast to what the poster above you claims, a GPU would not be suitable for evaluating the heuristic because of the branching control flow within the heuristic. An interesting scoring function would be to try and encode a neural network that can score the position: then data packing would be an issue but a neural net can be converted into very efficient GPU code as long as the number of pixels that you are gathering the position from is quite low.
The real performance killer would be the scatter at the other end - once a position is scored the card needs to perform sorting to filter out the high scoring positions from the low. This sorting may be avoidable on the newer CUDA cards as their memory architecture allows an efficient scatter without the need to sort data.
It's an interesting question; so fair use extends to quotation. And if I were to quote a sentence from a book then nobody would contend that it wasn't fair-use of that material. Even if I were to tell you where that sentence lay within the text. If a million different people were willing to do this, then you would have the entire text of the book. Nobody distributed it - so who broke copyright?
(As I write this I can hear the penny analogy in Office Space with the quip; and all we're doing is automating that a couple of million times a second)
No, that's a logical hole that you can't get out of it.
So your telling me that if the legality of the byte 34 is dependent on fair use? That's silly. So if I tell you that in a certain file the byte at position 12243264 has value 245 then you are trying to claim that I've violated someones copyright. Whose, exactly? Do you have any idea how many different files that statement is true of?
My gmail account had 535 spams in the last 30 days against 20 genuine emails. So that's roughly 96%. My gmail account name hasn't been splashed anywhere public, I only use it for companies that require an email for registration and with friends. The account name is 10 characters long and won't appear in a dictionary anywhere.
:)
So I would guess that my usage patterns put me somewhere near the average and I'm seeing the spam levels that they talk about. You might be very lucky
Strange... I would have thought this would be much easier on linux. They can release almost any DRM scheme that they want and it will be broken in days - truly problem free. Even with the Vista hooks into the OS that they seem to be relying on they are only delaying the inevitable.
If they did would it fair to close down the market and say "Sorry, you can buy Sony if you want to use the service that you've already paid for"? Don't forget that the BBC is publicly funded, and supporting a commercial monopoly is not in its charter.
The bandwidth question has cropped up again. Given that they are not talking about access to their entire catalogue, but a small (1 week?) window of it - why don't the ISPs put a proxy on their networks so that it is only downloaded once, and the majority of the bandwidth is internal?
Yeah the prototype kits are pricey. I've wanted to play with some of these panels for a while, but not at the current prices. If you go to E-Ink's website and follow the links through to the store they have kits with the 5/6" screen for $2000!! and the 8/9" screen for $4000.
Not quite as pervasive as paper just yet...
No, your correction shows that you have no understanding of how this works.
.wav ripped from a CD is a number that encodes the song in a very straightforward way (uniform time sampling). This is what person C buys when they buy a CD.
A
When the wav is compressed into an mp3, a new smaller number is generated, which when passed through a certain algorithm produces another number which sounds reasonably like the first. It certainly doesn't recreate the original, otherwise the mp3 compression would be loseless.
Your line of logic is flawed after your first mistake. Furthermore, the point being argued by the OP and the poster that I replied to is not about transmitting an mp3 and claiming it's something else. The question is how small a block of that mp3 does copyright still apply to?
Further to the GP's comments above; only a lawyer would see what he said as an "attempt to fool the courts" rather than as a basic question about ownership, given the laws of our universe. Take a step aback from the case at hand and consider what he is actually saying.
Musician A : Writes a song
Evil Company B : Actively pursues copyright cases against the song
How far is this allowed to go? The situation that we have now is that random person C buys a copy of the song as a number (quite a big number, but just a number non-the-less). Person C now computes another smaller number which if interpreted in the right way sounds like the song. And he proceeds to distribute this number.
Any copyright claim assumes that Evil Company B owns the number computed by Person C. Any geek can see instantly that this is a fucked up situation. So take the GP's question again: how small can I make these portions of this number before Evil Company B doesn't own it?
Do they own individual bits? Because if they do then there are only two copyrights in the world, they should have expired by now and everyone else is fucked. If the "block" is bigger than a bit then how small are the numbers that people are allowed to own. What if I tell you that 17 is a block in a Kylie Minogue track - does that give her ownership of it? Has sieving for primes just become harder without a license from Kylie?
It's been established in patent law for a long time that it isn't possible to own numbers because society and progress would be fundamentally broken if you could. The recent flurry of copyright battles over digital information seems to have forgotten this decision.
5. Current performance really sucks.
I'd like to see some performance numbers for the new drive in the Alienware, but after digging around I could only find these numbers.
The short summary is read performance isn't fantastic, and write performance really sucks. Although the final benchmark shows a writespeed of 40MB/s, all of the "real-world" tests shows a sustained write speed of 5-10MB/s.
Basically dreadful, given that performance, prize and size are normally a pick two out of three choice for storage, finding a system that offers pick zero out of three is awful.
That sounds interesting but kind of hard: the basic search is expanding out a tree as you test different moves to yield different positions. Doesn't stream computing work better on datasets with fixed dimension? We've got a blue gene upstairs that would be sweet to try this out on, but there's a long queue and somehow I doubt I would get priority :(
Oddly enough this very question forms the basis of the article that you haven't read... :)
The basic asnwer is that we can optimise doing something simple and replicate lots, far, far better than optimisiing something complex and replicating it a few times. Which if you think about it is the approach that the brain / evolution of the brain opts for.
The "brute-force" approach described is actually mid-way between a pure brute-force (exhaustive) search and a "smart" search using quite sophisticated techniques to prune the tree. The author talks about alpha-beta pruning, null-move generation and hypothesis testing. These techniques are still pure-search (brute force) techniques - ie you could apply them to any game tree, but their effects are similar to how a smart (tailored to the specific game) approach would work.
No my point was that the RIAA had failed to provide any evidence at all, under either burden of proof.
Try reading the article (no seriously, I'm not just flaming you). The RIAA's case was based on a screenshot of kazaa with the defendent's IP address and a filename, plus the dubious claim that "making available" the file was illegal.
I'm fairly sure that in my jurisdiction a screenshot isn't valid evidence of anything either, but in the case under discussion that is how it went. My post was pointing out that such a decision is bullshit, and clearly a travesty of justice.
If the second half of my post seemed like "a poster who knows nothing about relevant law and yet babbles as if I do" then perhaps you should read the context above it that explains the list of points are things that the RIAA did *in that trial* which do *not* constitute proof. Not a description of my understanding of law.
Perhaps then you will understand why NewYorkLawyer made an ass of himself, and why that *was not the point* of the post.
I thought that was what you meant but did you hear the whoosh as you said it?