That a coupon is a copyrightable work with some originality. I don't think that will fly. If the coupon is not a work protected under the act, then there is no prohibition against cirumventing. Also, the word circumventing implies actions taken with intent to get around the protection. If I delete a 10 GB file to free up space on my HD and it turns out that file was used by my DVD burning software as a database of disks I'm not allowed to copy, am I guilty of circumventing?
In the former case, what cost $100 in 1800 cost less than $49 in 1850. Now read that last sentence over slowly for maximum comprehension - prices actually fell by half in the years 1800-1850
You should at least mention that this was due to the industrial revolution, which was basically Moore's law applied to manufacturing and distribution. The overall production and transportation base in the US grew like crazy during this period, so manufacturers coulds sell things for 1/2 as much and still make a profit.
Exponential growth for a business isn't even possible, unless maybe you start out really, really small, and for a short amount of time.
Not exactly. Most financial measures of growth are compounded measures, which are exponential functions. For example, compound interest of 5% gives exponential growth of 1.05^n, where n is the number of compounding periods. When economists say that the GDP is growing at 3% or that an investment is giving an annual rate of return of 10%, those are (averaged) exponential growth rates.
You're neglecting two factors that contribute to long-term growth: inflation and productivity. Inflation is false growth, because it mainly reflects the amount by which the growth of the money supply (including credit) increases faster than the over all economy (supply of funds growing faster than the demand). People can charge $150 instead of $120, but the profit margins remain constant, because the suppliers charge more too. This is distinguished from price increases based on supply and demand of the product itself, or due to speculation.
Productivity is "real" growth because it reflects the ability to produce more goods from the same resources. Again productivity is measured as a percentage increase, which tranlsates to exponential growth when averaged over time.
Actually, I think in this case ignorance IS an excuse. Not ignorance of the law, but ignorance of the fact that infringing activity was occurring. IIRC, copyright infringement requires that the infringement occurs knowingly and intentionally. On the other hand, IANAL.
Don't they already track people entering Manhattan through any of the bridges or tunnels because they are all terrorist targets? They already know you're in there.
I tried out the demo program in IE, and yes it's a popup that goes fullscreen, but it doesn't disable any of the OS functionality. So you can right click the icon for the popup on the Windows taskbar (at least with "Autohide" turned on) and select "Close" without losing the main browser. You can also Alt-Tab to get out of it. So the hack isn't as escape-proof as advertised.
On the other hand, just being able to bypass the popup blocker is bad enough, and there is a large user pool out there that is completely unaware of the keyboard controls on the Windows desktop that would fall into the trap of clicking anything on the popup to try to get out. So a Close button or a simulation of an OS window frame around the fullscreen would be very tempting for a user to click on.
Overall, I think this is a serious issue, but not the end of the world as portrayed by the website.
I find it particularly disturbing that people would actually say it's not fair to the theater owner to expect him to exercise his discretion on whether to prosecute someone. Yeah, it's not like we actually want people to act as thinking beings instead of little automatons with no will of their own.
Well, if the license agreement between the distributor and the theater obligates the theater to prosecute all instances of infringement, then it isn't being an automaton, it's complying with a contractual obligation. And this type of clause is pretty damn likely given the current climate. Otherwise the theater owners would have the discretion to not prosecute their own employees that image the film in the projection room.
I'm glad you said that "most games" only evoke emotion through cutscenes.
I think just about every player was inspired to emotion by their first interaction with the Norbert character in Nashkel in Baldur's Gate. In most cases Norbert probably didn't survive the experience, despite the fact that he never did anything to threaten the player. He really was that annoying.
...shows it's false. If you take away the story from a movie, you're left with a collection of dailies with no editing. The art of the movie is in the application of all the technical aspects of creating the images and sounds combined with the scripting and editing that merge these into a coherent (or at least cohessive) work. Similarly, the key of making art out of a game involves the combination of the technical aspects with a vision of the story (or stories) it tells via it's various plot lines.
I also take issue with the idea in another thread that to be art, the plot threads of a game must be mutually consistent. Perhaps there IS a way out for Romeo and Juliet, but it has to involve a level of sacrifice that makes the player realize what is lost. Maybe they have to burn Capua to the ground and spend the remainder of their lives as fugitives in order to distract their families enough to get away. Or maybe the emphasis of the story could shift completely away from the tragedy and morph into something like "The Taming of the Shrew". This even raises the possibility that some plotlines of a game could rise to the level of high art, while others fall back to melodrama. But even high art is rarely flawless.
Given that an RPG contains all of the elements that make up a movie, and then some, I don't see how Ebert can go around claiming that no game can ever rise to the level of high art. Unless he is also saying that no movie can ever achieve that level either. Imagine that instead of a movie, there was an RPG of "Casablanca" (or pick your favorite), and the main game flow followed the exact plotline and points of view of the movie during the game. Would the game be any less of a work of art than the movie? And what if all of the potential plotlines of the game were similarly satisfying, both emotionally and intellectually? Wouldn't that actually be a greater achievement than the movie that actually exists?
Well it depends where and what the pointer points to. After all, buffer overrun and printf exploits work because the user can use the program itself to place data into specific memory locations that cause the functions to misbehave predictably.
The issue in this case seems to be that once the memory has been freed, any process can grab that memory via the OS. So if you write a program to grab all available free memory with a given byte pattern, you are guaranteed to place your byte pattern in that location. Then you could manipulate the behavior of the original process by giving it a particular data sequence that forces it to load and/or execute the code at the dangling pointer. It would require some careful coordination between the virtual address spaces of the two programs, and it would leave traces (spike in memory usage), but it's at least theoretically possible.
Another possibility might be to use the original process to load data into the freed pointer, but this scenario would require the program to write a pointer that according to design would not be valid, without doing a new allocation and address assignment to it. The real flaw in this case wouldn't be the dangling pointer, but the write to unallocated memory.
Maybe LUGs should virtualize their meetings on Second Life or similar virtual spaces. That would give most of the benefits of the live meetings (interactive troubleshooting, a decent-sized audience for presentations), but allow for geographically dispersed groups to interact or consolidate if that makes sense.
Two issues: First, Walmart can't dictate prices if the manufacturers ALL set price floors. The manufacturers can do this now, as long as they don't explicitly collude in doing so. This is the effective practice of the airline industry.
The bottom line on this legalized price fixing is that it's the equivalent of a tariff or subsidy in making consumer prices go up, but the money goes to manufacturers instead of government.
As bogus as I think the neo-fascist anti-terrorism measures are, there is a plausible rationale to all this. As usual they're trying to fight the last war. All of the 9/11 terrorists entered the US legally on student or tourist visas. These measures are simply designed to aid DHS in identifying people who overstay their visa, and if a new terrorist act does occur, aid in identifying the movements of the perpetrators. It's also designed to tie in with the new biometric passport requirements so that they have the right to gather the data needed to validate that the person entering actually has the biometrics presented in the passport.
The question is whether this benefit justifies the ever more intrusive methods of data gathering. I would think that a couple of fingerprints on each visit (say they could be randomly selected by the DHS agent), or an alternative method would be sufficient. I mean Disney World uses 2-fingerprint scans to validate the identification of multi-day passholders, and they process people through their entry very quickly. So the fingerprinting process COULD be done in an unobtrusive manner. I'm not laying any bets that DHS'll opt for this method, though.
Seems like the actual evidence points to them being ass-clowns that screw up left and right
Actually, I think they're just promulgating that other tenet of neo-con ideology: That the government needs to be shrunk because the government can't do anything right and everything should be privatized and opened to market forces. If you lead government, but believe that the government is inherently incompetent, you don't have any motivation to make it perform to any standard.
...or that all the black holes in the universe had already established their event horizons before the laws of relativity became valid. In other words, before or very shortly after the big bang/blowup.
If you're going to rake computer pundits over the coals for the empty calories they feed us, you should apply the same standards to business pundits, stock pickers, political pundits, economists, IANALs and any other discipline where people attempt to predict the behavior of organizations for which they can't tell valid data from misinformation.
Apart from the wire fraud (false takedown notices, court orders to ISPs based on flawed evidence), I'd like to see an extortion charge (pay us or we'll sue you when the basis for their claim is too weak to sustain the claim), although that is probably just wishful thinking. Are any of the other 30+ crimes potentially applicable, even at a stretch?
You'd need more exact calculations to find out the exact effect on the vehicles. Since the air is a fluid, additional drag placed on air molecules at any distance from the car will not be transmitted 100% back to the car. In fact, the transmission is actually minimal unless the turbine actually compresses the air mass against the vehicle. Think for example of the breeze behind a truck. If you are far enough away, the main blast hits you well after the truck has gone by, so the turbine could actually decrease drag by forcing air back into low pressure zone behind the truck. Also, the original jersey barrier dissipated much of the baseline wind energy as friction of the air against its surface. This energy could be harnessed without increasing drag on the car.
There will likely be little or no effect on the fuel consumption overall. If you think of the problem in 3 dimensions, you can see that the proportion of wind directed to the area of the jersey barrier is relatively small, compared with the wind directed above the barrier and to other sides of the vehicle. The most likely effect will be on trailing vehicles in a line. The turbine could reduce the benefit of "drafting" behind a tractor-trailer by causing the air to fill in more rapidly behind the leader.
In 2005, a yield to the right law failed passage in Florida because people felt it would encourage speeding. I was against it because it wasn't coupled with a "pass on the left" law, so while the slower vehicles were trying to move right, the third or 4th speeder in line could swing out to the right to pass and not be held liable when they rear-ended the slower guy changing lanes. It's the combination of these two laws that would do the most for highway safety in the US.
I'm not buying the idea that yield to the right is even the law in most states without more evidence. I'm sure that it's a healthy minority, but the only place I know of for sure that actually has these laws is Germany, and that definitely isn't one of the US.
I though even the OS community had realised by now how ridiculous this argument is. World economy would in effect come to a halt if every company and public office started to scan source codes for potential vulnerabilities. This is hardly a selling argument and being a wise-ass about it has never helped the OS movement. You miss the point. For security vulnerabilities, this isn't a "many eyes" argument, it's a "support flexibility" argument. Given the time it takes for many vendors to close their security holes, if a company finds a severe threat to its security, open source gives it the option of developing their own patch, regardless of whether the vendor or the open-source community agrees with their assessment of the risk level. Even if the community never benefits from one company's analysis of a security issue, that company will have benefited.
And it doesn't have to be tied to a pro-active security scan, so your argument about the world economy grinding to a halt is just bogus. Even in the current reactive mode, where patches are triggered by vulnerability exploits, open source comes out ahead. A corporation using open source can run a particular exploit through a source code debugger to find out the offending code for themselves. This is nowhere near as labor intensive as a full scan of a product and still provides much more disclosure to the customer than is provided my MS or any other closed-source vendor.
You mean like a B-Tree with a parent back-link for reverse traversal (available just about everywhere programs are written)? Or a 3-D data cube structured as a sextuple link to allow back and forward traversal in any of the 3 dimensions? I believe the early 3-D spreadsheets like QubeCalc used this type of structure.
Once you've done it in 1,2 and 3 dimensions, there's no justification for issuing a patent for n-dimensional generalization. Unless there is something novel in the way the data structure is being used (i.e., he is patenting a combination of data structure + algorithm), the feds should sue this guy. There is so much prior art that is so widely available for this that it's a complete failure of his obligations under the patent application process to disclose prior art.
We don't let people on the public roads without a drivers' license. We don't let people fly planes without a pilot's license. We don't let anyone broadcast radio without a license.
Computers should only be allowed on the public internet when they are administered by a licensed operator. It's a matter of competence, public safety and accountability. And a great new business opportunity.
If he'd used the right laws (contract vs. copyright) he may have had a case. Not so much to prevent publication, but for a share of any profits being made.
Slashdot Mirror
That a coupon is a copyrightable work with some originality. I don't think that will fly. If the coupon is not a work protected under the act, then there is no prohibition against cirumventing. Also, the word circumventing implies actions taken with intent to get around the protection. If I delete a 10 GB file to free up space on my HD and it turns out that file was used by my DVD burning software as a database of disks I'm not allowed to copy, am I guilty of circumventing?
You should at least mention that this was due to the industrial revolution, which was basically Moore's law applied to manufacturing and distribution. The overall production and transportation base in the US grew like crazy during this period, so manufacturers coulds sell things for 1/2 as much and still make a profit.
Not exactly. Most financial measures of growth are compounded measures, which are exponential functions. For example, compound interest of 5% gives exponential growth of 1.05^n, where n is the number of compounding periods. When economists say that the GDP is growing at 3% or that an investment is giving an annual rate of return of 10%, those are (averaged) exponential growth rates.
You're neglecting two factors that contribute to long-term growth: inflation and productivity. Inflation is false growth, because it mainly reflects the amount by which the growth of the money supply (including credit) increases faster than the over all economy (supply of funds growing faster than the demand). People can charge $150 instead of $120, but the profit margins remain constant, because the suppliers charge more too. This is distinguished from price increases based on supply and demand of the product itself, or due to speculation.
Productivity is "real" growth because it reflects the ability to produce more goods from the same resources. Again productivity is measured as a percentage increase, which tranlsates to exponential growth when averaged over time.
Actually, I think in this case ignorance IS an excuse. Not ignorance of the law, but ignorance of the fact that infringing activity was occurring. IIRC, copyright infringement requires that the infringement occurs knowingly and intentionally. On the other hand, IANAL.
Don't they already track people entering Manhattan through any of the bridges or tunnels because they are all terrorist targets? They already know you're in there.
I tried out the demo program in IE, and yes it's a popup that goes fullscreen, but it doesn't disable any of the OS functionality. So you can right click the icon for the popup on the Windows taskbar (at least with "Autohide" turned on) and select "Close" without losing the main browser. You can also Alt-Tab to get out of it. So the hack isn't as escape-proof as advertised.
On the other hand, just being able to bypass the popup blocker is bad enough, and there is a large user pool out there that is completely unaware of the keyboard controls on the Windows desktop that would fall into the trap of clicking anything on the popup to try to get out. So a Close button or a simulation of an OS window frame around the fullscreen would be very tempting for a user to click on.
Overall, I think this is a serious issue, but not the end of the world as portrayed by the website.
Well, if the license agreement between the distributor and the theater obligates the theater to prosecute all instances of infringement, then it isn't being an automaton, it's complying with a contractual obligation. And this type of clause is pretty damn likely given the current climate. Otherwise the theater owners would have the discretion to not prosecute their own employees that image the film in the projection room.
I'm glad you said that "most games" only evoke emotion through cutscenes.
I think just about every player was inspired to emotion by their first interaction with the Norbert character in Nashkel in Baldur's Gate. In most cases Norbert probably didn't survive the experience, despite the fact that he never did anything to threaten the player. He really was that annoying.
...shows it's false. If you take away the story from a movie, you're left with a collection of dailies with no editing. The art of the movie is in the application of all the technical aspects of creating the images and sounds combined with the scripting and editing that merge these into a coherent (or at least cohessive) work. Similarly, the key of making art out of a game involves the combination of the technical aspects with a vision of the story (or stories) it tells via it's various plot lines. I also take issue with the idea in another thread that to be art, the plot threads of a game must be mutually consistent. Perhaps there IS a way out for Romeo and Juliet, but it has to involve a level of sacrifice that makes the player realize what is lost. Maybe they have to burn Capua to the ground and spend the remainder of their lives as fugitives in order to distract their families enough to get away. Or maybe the emphasis of the story could shift completely away from the tragedy and morph into something like "The Taming of the Shrew". This even raises the possibility that some plotlines of a game could rise to the level of high art, while others fall back to melodrama. But even high art is rarely flawless. Given that an RPG contains all of the elements that make up a movie, and then some, I don't see how Ebert can go around claiming that no game can ever rise to the level of high art. Unless he is also saying that no movie can ever achieve that level either. Imagine that instead of a movie, there was an RPG of "Casablanca" (or pick your favorite), and the main game flow followed the exact plotline and points of view of the movie during the game. Would the game be any less of a work of art than the movie? And what if all of the potential plotlines of the game were similarly satisfying, both emotionally and intellectually? Wouldn't that actually be a greater achievement than the movie that actually exists?
Well it depends where and what the pointer points to. After all, buffer overrun and printf exploits work because the user can use the program itself to place data into specific memory locations that cause the functions to misbehave predictably.
The issue in this case seems to be that once the memory has been freed, any process can grab that memory via the OS. So if you write a program to grab all available free memory with a given byte pattern, you are guaranteed to place your byte pattern in that location. Then you could manipulate the behavior of the original process by giving it a particular data sequence that forces it to load and/or execute the code at the dangling pointer. It would require some careful coordination between the virtual address spaces of the two programs, and it would leave traces (spike in memory usage), but it's at least theoretically possible.
Another possibility might be to use the original process to load data into the freed pointer, but this scenario would require the program to write a pointer that according to design would not be valid, without doing a new allocation and address assignment to it. The real flaw in this case wouldn't be the dangling pointer, but the write to unallocated memory.
Maybe LUGs should virtualize their meetings on Second Life or similar virtual spaces. That would give most of the benefits of the live meetings (interactive troubleshooting, a decent-sized audience for presentations), but allow for geographically dispersed groups to interact or consolidate if that makes sense.
Two issues: First, Walmart can't dictate prices if the manufacturers ALL set price floors. The manufacturers can do this now, as long as they don't explicitly collude in doing so. This is the effective practice of the airline industry.
Second, we shouldn't try to compete with China on price. The Chinese are already so cut-throat on price they've caught farmers force-feeding hogs wastewater in order to boost their slaughter weight: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070628/ap_on_re_as/ch ina_tainted_food_4;_ylt=ApRK2t0xDcTW7iWXDmb.lL9PzW QA(about 1/2 way through the article). Such water is also used for irrigating crops such as garlic.
This DOES open an opportunity to compete on quality. After toothpaste, petfood, toy trains and god knows what else that hasn't been reported http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070628/ap_on_he_me/ch ina_tainted_products;_ylt=ApcHoI_80H3MHW8LRmCRXlXM WM0F, there is going to be a quality backlash that results in even greater growth of things like 100-mile radius food shopping.
The bottom line on this legalized price fixing is that it's the equivalent of a tariff or subsidy in making consumer prices go up, but the money goes to manufacturers instead of government.
As bogus as I think the neo-fascist anti-terrorism measures are, there is a plausible rationale to all this. As usual they're trying to fight the last war. All of the 9/11 terrorists entered the US legally on student or tourist visas. These measures are simply designed to aid DHS in identifying people who overstay their visa, and if a new terrorist act does occur, aid in identifying the movements of the perpetrators. It's also designed to tie in with the new biometric passport requirements so that they have the right to gather the data needed to validate that the person entering actually has the biometrics presented in the passport.
The question is whether this benefit justifies the ever more intrusive methods of data gathering. I would think that a couple of fingerprints on each visit (say they could be randomly selected by the DHS agent), or an alternative method would be sufficient. I mean Disney World uses 2-fingerprint scans to validate the identification of multi-day passholders, and they process people through their entry very quickly. So the fingerprinting process COULD be done in an unobtrusive manner. I'm not laying any bets that DHS'll opt for this method, though.
Seems like the actual evidence points to them being ass-clowns that screw up left and right
Actually, I think they're just promulgating that other tenet of neo-con ideology: That the government needs to be shrunk because the government can't do anything right and everything should be privatized and opened to market forces. If you lead government, but believe that the government is inherently incompetent, you don't have any motivation to make it perform to any standard.
...or that all the black holes in the universe had already established their event horizons before the laws of relativity became valid. In other words, before or very shortly after the big bang/blowup.
If you're going to rake computer pundits over the coals for the empty calories they feed us, you should apply the same standards to business pundits, stock pickers, political pundits, economists, IANALs and any other discipline where people attempt to predict the behavior of organizations for which they can't tell valid data from misinformation.
Apart from the wire fraud (false takedown notices, court orders to ISPs based on flawed evidence), I'd like to see an extortion charge (pay us or we'll sue you when the basis for their claim is too weak to sustain the claim), although that is probably just wishful thinking. Are any of the other 30+ crimes potentially applicable, even at a stretch?
Dunno. It could also be "Moan Ad" or "Mo' nad".
You'd need more exact calculations to find out the exact effect on the vehicles. Since the air is a fluid, additional drag placed on air molecules at any distance from the car will not be transmitted 100% back to the car. In fact, the transmission is actually minimal unless the turbine actually compresses the air mass against the vehicle. Think for example of the breeze behind a truck. If you are far enough away, the main blast hits you well after the truck has gone by, so the turbine could actually decrease drag by forcing air back into low pressure zone behind the truck. Also, the original jersey barrier dissipated much of the baseline wind energy as friction of the air against its surface. This energy could be harnessed without increasing drag on the car.
There will likely be little or no effect on the fuel consumption overall. If you think of the problem in 3 dimensions, you can see that the proportion of wind directed to the area of the jersey barrier is relatively small, compared with the wind directed above the barrier and to other sides of the vehicle. The most likely effect will be on trailing vehicles in a line. The turbine could reduce the benefit of "drafting" behind a tractor-trailer by causing the air to fill in more rapidly behind the leader.
In 2005, a yield to the right law failed passage in Florida because people felt it would encourage speeding. I was against it because it wasn't coupled with a "pass on the left" law, so while the slower vehicles were trying to move right, the third or 4th speeder in line could swing out to the right to pass and not be held liable when they rear-ended the slower guy changing lanes. It's the combination of these two laws that would do the most for highway safety in the US.
I'm not buying the idea that yield to the right is even the law in most states without more evidence. I'm sure that it's a healthy minority, but the only place I know of for sure that actually has these laws is Germany, and that definitely isn't one of the US.
And it doesn't have to be tied to a pro-active security scan, so your argument about the world economy grinding to a halt is just bogus. Even in the current reactive mode, where patches are triggered by vulnerability exploits, open source comes out ahead. A corporation using open source can run a particular exploit through a source code debugger to find out the offending code for themselves. This is nowhere near as labor intensive as a full scan of a product and still provides much more disclosure to the customer than is provided my MS or any other closed-source vendor.
You mean like a B-Tree with a parent back-link for reverse traversal (available just about everywhere programs are written)? Or a 3-D data cube structured as a sextuple link to allow back and forward traversal in any of the 3 dimensions? I believe the early 3-D spreadsheets like QubeCalc used this type of structure.
Once you've done it in 1,2 and 3 dimensions, there's no justification for issuing a patent for n-dimensional generalization. Unless there is something novel in the way the data structure is being used (i.e., he is patenting a combination of data structure + algorithm), the feds should sue this guy. There is so much prior art that is so widely available for this that it's a complete failure of his obligations under the patent application process to disclose prior art.
We don't let people on the public roads without a drivers' license. We don't let people fly planes without a pilot's license. We don't let anyone broadcast radio without a license.
Computers should only be allowed on the public internet when they are administered by a licensed operator. It's a matter of competence, public safety and accountability. And a great new business opportunity.
If he'd used the right laws (contract vs. copyright) he may have had a case. Not so much to prevent publication, but for a share of any profits being made.
Maybe, but it's more likely to bring new meaning to the phrase "yeast infection"...