Yes, that's the layout. Those rectangles have meaning, e.g. a rectangle of the polysilicon layer crossing a rectangle of the active layer is a transistor, and by the type of doping layer rectangle its in you know whether it's a p or n. Going from a layout to a schematic is simple, that's how LVS (layout versus schematic) works to verify that the layout is in fact the same circuitry as your schematic.
So finding which "rectangle" to alter to disable protection is really the same as finding which "transistor" or "signal" to disable, and is quite possible in practice. Not-trivial, but certainly not out of line for anyone who can afford a high tech fab in the first place.
The problem with the swamp was...it was a swamp. Both sides had to deal with it and it didn't work out so well particularly for the invaders.
Yeah, the "defend the beachhead from the army" part of the plan worked, but the "leave the beachhead so as to continue the invasion" not so much. I was just trying to pick out what positive successes I could.;)
And I want to know WHY I was modded troll, btw.
Seriously, who cares what an idiot with mod points thinks? Karma means dick.
Okay, whatever. There's a difference between "generally held" to have "broadly the same rights", and "afforded the full protection of the Constitution as a person via court precedent with the full weight of law" (said precedent actually coming later than the linked case, but as a consequence of it).
It's not -really- a person, though. It is an -entity-, yes, but not an actual -person-.
That's right, it's not really a person. It's all based on a pun, the fact that they used to be called "corporate persons", and since that's the same word used in the 14th Amendment (though not the same sense of the word), it was argued that corporations should have equal protection under the laws as actual persons. A really bad pun is what caused all this mess.
Fun Fact: The 14th Amendment language regarding "persons" was applied to corporations (not people) before it was applied to women (people) and homosexuals (people).
Citation needed. I can pipe/dev/random into any decent stereo system and not damage the speakers, as long as the DAC's volume is turned down below half of maximum line level.
Dude,/dev/random is so much better when you crank it.
Of course the feds don't care -- look, they feel free to even admit that they are abusing the powers granted to them, that they aren't even bothering to follow the already extremely permissive laws that guide them. It's been going on for years -- ever since the first report after the enactment of the USAPATRIOT Act -- and still they aren't called on it.
No, for some reason not enough people care. Firstly I blame the media -- just like the previous reports, and even the NSA wiretapping scandal, this will show up in the news for a little while then quietly vanish. Secondly I blame people who even when presented with facts by the media just blindly assume that it's all done to catch terrorists and they don't care. They're told the their privacy is being abused, and they mentally convert this into their privacy not being abused, only terrorists and since when do terrorists deserve privacy?
Even Congress -- now Democrat controlled -- doesn't do much but feign shock and dismay that the powers they granted without even reading what they were are being abused.
Some people care, but it just doesn't seem to be enough.
Alternatively, produce the chips with the "combination lock" set to "open" to begin with and bypass activation altogether.
That's undoubtedly the tack they will take, since the company that originated the design would notice a large number of identical IDs coming from one source. The thing they really want to do is make it so that the original company never knows they made the chip at all.
in other words, like every existing anti piracy mechanism to date.
Yes, but it's actually even worse. Because with normal DRM, you're trying to keep the guy who is watching the DVD from being able to copy the DVD.
But in this case, it's actually like you're trying to keep the guy who is making the DVD from being able to copy it. They don't even have to break your DRM or work around it, they just have to decide not to build it in.
Making evasion a non-trivial task is all any protection or encryption scheme can hope to do. How nontrivial it is made is the key factor.
Except this really has nothing to do with the encryption. It has to do with a manufacturer deciding not to build the encryption into the product. All they have to is identify the signal that decides whether the chip "activates" and tie it to vdd. It's like if you're talking about the lock on a safe, and you said "well no lock is perfect", but the fact is that the person you're trying to keep out of the safe is the safe maker themselves; they can just make a safe with no lock.
What I'm saying is that while it may be "non-trivial" it is certainly easy enough for a company with the resources to fabricate fine-featured silicon chips to do in a short period of time.
It doesn't sound like this is a consumer-level activation, but a one-time, manufacturer-side process:
Yeah, though it's still pretty silly.
The outsourced manufacturing company wouldn't have the ability to activate them, so couldn't sell extras to the black market.
Since the whole problem is that the outsourced manufacturing company has the layout (blueprint), then they certainly would be able to activate the chip by removing the "lock" circuitry from the layout and manufacturing chips which require no activation! It may be a non-trivial task to reverse-engineer which parts of the chip are responsible, but if the money is there it is certainly possible and would be worth it.
In other words this lock would only exist on the legitimate parts, and wouldn't exist on the bootleg ones, and the bootleg chips would operate exactly like an "activated" legitimate part.
I think it's kind of ironic that the acronym EPIC was also the acronym used to describe the Itanium's IA-64 instruction set (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing). Though I doubt this one will even make it out of academia.
NOTHING was done right on the Bay of Pigs invasion. NOTHING.
Not true! The anti-aircraft guns the American advisers (really commanders) personally had added to their otherwise unarmed ships worked very well in fending off Cuba's air force for quite some time, and despite the terrible landing location their plan to stymie the Cuban army by turning a narrow road in the swamp into a killing field worked perfectly.
Oh yeah, that was all pretty much in spite of the higher-level mission planners and politicos... Everything they did was a clusterfuck.
Decision for Disaster is a great book on the Bay of Pigs invasion, written by one of the two American advisers who went on the mission. Highly recommended.
Three times in the past fifty years the military in Turkey has overthrown the government through force (and once without), only to subsequently relinquish power and restore democracy.
While the idea of a military who considers the stewardship of secular democracy to be their solemn duty is fascinating, I think the particular circumstances that lead to this being effective are fairly unique so in general I don't think it can work. Most coups don't work out that well for the people (which isn't to say that these coups didn't result in their fair share of violence and suffering).
You have a theory how the world behaves. You do a numerical simulation based on that theory, and amazingly, it proves true.
Well that's not exactly the case. We have a theory of how the world behaves, and Hawking Radiation is a predicted emergent property of that theory. It's not an axiom, it's a predicted consequence, so it isn't a given based on the theory. Here, we have a detailed simulation that shows that yes, if the underlying theory is correct, then we should expect to see Hawking Radiation.
It is true that this is in no way a real-world observation that shows that the theory accurately models reality. However it does have a non-trivial and non-circular implication for our theory.
Obama will likely fare slightly better in the caucus in Texas, only because the core of the Democrat party--the baby boomers who constitute the majority of Hillary supporters--had families to get back to and jobs they had to get up for the next morning. Hillary supporters simply didn't have the ability to "two-step" all the way into the early morning hours, while it apparently is far easier for the young, first time voters who make up Obama's base to spend literally six hours of their time at their local middle school or fire station.
Yeah? Well the church my precinct's caucus was held in was packed to the freaking gills -- standing room only, they had to open up an annex which they also completely filled -- and it took over an hour after the sign-in began for everyone to sign the books for Obama. If you were Clinton supporter, you were done in about two minutes because there simply weren't many people in line in front of you.
And despite your stereotype, these were by and large middle aged working-class adults with families. Many of them had brought their families with them so that they could caucus -- some even had infants in papooses strapped to their chests. You can say whatever crud you want about baby-boomers with families; the ones who cared, the ones who were passionate about their candidate, they made it to the caucus.
Since irrational Obama supporters apparently run the internets, I fully expect this post to be modded "Troll" or something, because it doesn't contain the requisite amount of Obama bias and instead offers a firsthand account of what went down in Texas last night, and posits a reasonable theory for the disparity between primary and caucus votes. How scandalous. Do your candidate of choice proud, and suppress any relatively objective post you see.
Of course, objectively made-up stereotypes. And here's a reasonable theory for the disparity between primary and caucus votes:
Texas has an open primary. With the Republican nomination essentially decided, there was no point for a Republican to vote in their party's primary, meaning they were free to vote in the Democratic primary. A strategic vote for the candidate most likely to lose the general election is a way to strengthen their own candidate. However it wasn't worth going to the trouble to caucus just for the sake of a strategic vote. This is the supposed advantage of the caucus -- that it attracts only those who are truly passionate about their candidates. Nobody's going to crowd into a packed church and stand for hours as the heat rises from all the bodies just to cast a "strategic" vote. But as they finish up their shopping at Randals? Sure, why not sabotage the other party.
What I am concerned about is the fundamental violation of my rights and the rights of my neighbors and fellow citizens.
I believe that you are concerned with your rights, but I don't believe for a second that you give a rat's ass about your neighbor's rights when you're willing to let your neighbor die on the street in the name of being "entitled to the fruits of your labor".
You benefit from the fruits of others' labor on a daily basis, you wouldn't be able to have the fruits of your own labor were it not for the labor of others, and the only way you've given them any compensation is through your taxes. Why do you think you should be entitled to make use of the labor of others without giving anything in return? The view that everything you've acquired is solely the product of your own efforts is selfish and wrong.
No man is an island, no matter how much you may believe it to be so. That you would use that belief to refrain from compensating others' for their labors even as you blindly ride on their backs is exactly why we must have taxes.
Well Supertux and Jazz don't actually look anything like Mario and Sonic, and the levels themselves don't look much alike either (supertux does have some resemblance to mario levels).
As to the boards in question, there may be enough resemblance there for a copyright suit. The pattern and colors are obviously directly taken from the Scrabble board. There's an argument to be made there.
However, as another poster discovered from the original article, the references made are all regarding trademark, which is a much clearer case since regardless of whether the board is copied, it is clearly supposed to be thought of as the Scrabble board as is the name "Scrabulous". So Matel may just be going after that, and not worrying about the copyright issue at all.
I'm no expert on the subject, all I know is that there is no clear cutoff on such things. I think "significant similarity" is the suitably ambiguous metric.
After making that post, I went to scrabulous.com which has a screenshot, and the board has no writing on it but otherwise looks the same as the Scrabble board with the exact same pattern and colors for the normal squares and the double/triple letter/word score squares. That's probably enough to at least make copyright violation claim plausible.
You can copyright a piece of visual art -- even if it's what you'd call "graphic design" -- and assuming the board of Scrabulous looks just like the real game board, then it very well could be a copyright violation.
Texas is only sometimes considered to be part of "The South", and a metropolitan center like Dallas/Fort Worth even less so. Strictly speaking I think Texas is "Southwest", and certainly not "The Deep South" which is probably what the GP was referring to.
Southern Evangelicals are certainly a bigger problem than any Catholics, though, as far as anti-science teaching.
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I like Bill Hick's response to that argument.
"Well, God put fossils here to test our faith!"
"I think he put you here to test my faith, dude."
Manufacturers get rectangles.
Yes, that's the layout. Those rectangles have meaning, e.g. a rectangle of the polysilicon layer crossing a rectangle of the active layer is a transistor, and by the type of doping layer rectangle its in you know whether it's a p or n. Going from a layout to a schematic is simple, that's how LVS (layout versus schematic) works to verify that the layout is in fact the same circuitry as your schematic.
So finding which "rectangle" to alter to disable protection is really the same as finding which "transistor" or "signal" to disable, and is quite possible in practice. Not-trivial, but certainly not out of line for anyone who can afford a high tech fab in the first place.
The problem with the swamp was...it was a swamp. Both sides had to deal with it and it didn't work out so well particularly for the invaders.
;)
Yeah, the "defend the beachhead from the army" part of the plan worked, but the "leave the beachhead so as to continue the invasion" not so much. I was just trying to pick out what positive successes I could.
And I want to know WHY I was modded troll, btw.
Seriously, who cares what an idiot with mod points thinks? Karma means dick.
Okay, whatever. There's a difference between "generally held" to have "broadly the same rights", and "afforded the full protection of the Constitution as a person via court precedent with the full weight of law" (said precedent actually coming later than the linked case, but as a consequence of it).
It's not -really- a person, though. It is an -entity-, yes, but not an actual -person-.
That's right, it's not really a person. It's all based on a pun, the fact that they used to be called "corporate persons", and since that's the same word used in the 14th Amendment (though not the same sense of the word), it was argued that corporations should have equal protection under the laws as actual persons. A really bad pun is what caused all this mess.
Fun Fact: The 14th Amendment language regarding "persons" was applied to corporations (not people) before it was applied to women (people) and homosexuals (people).
Wonderful world, eh?
Citation needed. I can pipe /dev/random into any decent stereo system and not damage the speakers, as long as the DAC's volume is turned down below half of maximum line level.
/dev/random is so much better when you crank it.
Dude,
Of course the feds don't care -- look, they feel free to even admit that they are abusing the powers granted to them, that they aren't even bothering to follow the already extremely permissive laws that guide them. It's been going on for years -- ever since the first report after the enactment of the USAPATRIOT Act -- and still they aren't called on it.
No, for some reason not enough people care. Firstly I blame the media -- just like the previous reports, and even the NSA wiretapping scandal, this will show up in the news for a little while then quietly vanish. Secondly I blame people who even when presented with facts by the media just blindly assume that it's all done to catch terrorists and they don't care. They're told the their privacy is being abused, and they mentally convert this into their privacy not being abused, only terrorists and since when do terrorists deserve privacy?
Even Congress -- now Democrat controlled -- doesn't do much but feign shock and dismay that the powers they granted without even reading what they were are being abused.
Some people care, but it just doesn't seem to be enough.
Alternatively, produce the chips with the "combination lock" set to "open" to begin with and bypass activation altogether.
That's undoubtedly the tack they will take, since the company that originated the design would notice a large number of identical IDs coming from one source. The thing they really want to do is make it so that the original company never knows they made the chip at all.
in other words, like every existing anti piracy mechanism to date.
Yes, but it's actually even worse. Because with normal DRM, you're trying to keep the guy who is watching the DVD from being able to copy the DVD.
But in this case, it's actually like you're trying to keep the guy who is making the DVD from being able to copy it. They don't even have to break your DRM or work around it, they just have to decide not to build it in.
Making evasion a non-trivial task is all any protection or encryption scheme can hope to do. How nontrivial it is made is the key factor.
Except this really has nothing to do with the encryption. It has to do with a manufacturer deciding not to build the encryption into the product. All they have to is identify the signal that decides whether the chip "activates" and tie it to vdd. It's like if you're talking about the lock on a safe, and you said "well no lock is perfect", but the fact is that the person you're trying to keep out of the safe is the safe maker themselves; they can just make a safe with no lock.
What I'm saying is that while it may be "non-trivial" it is certainly easy enough for a company with the resources to fabricate fine-featured silicon chips to do in a short period of time.
It doesn't sound like this is a consumer-level activation, but a one-time, manufacturer-side process:
Yeah, though it's still pretty silly.
The outsourced manufacturing company wouldn't have the ability to activate them, so couldn't sell extras to the black market.
Since the whole problem is that the outsourced manufacturing company has the layout (blueprint), then they certainly would be able to activate the chip by removing the "lock" circuitry from the layout and manufacturing chips which require no activation! It may be a non-trivial task to reverse-engineer which parts of the chip are responsible, but if the money is there it is certainly possible and would be worth it.
In other words this lock would only exist on the legitimate parts, and wouldn't exist on the bootleg ones, and the bootleg chips would operate exactly like an "activated" legitimate part.
I think it's kind of ironic that the acronym EPIC was also the acronym used to describe the Itanium's IA-64 instruction set (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing). Though I doubt this one will even make it out of academia.
NOTHING was done right on the Bay of Pigs invasion. NOTHING.
Not true! The anti-aircraft guns the American advisers (really commanders) personally had added to their otherwise unarmed ships worked very well in fending off Cuba's air force for quite some time, and despite the terrible landing location their plan to stymie the Cuban army by turning a narrow road in the swamp into a killing field worked perfectly.
Oh yeah, that was all pretty much in spite of the higher-level mission planners and politicos... Everything they did was a clusterfuck.
Decision for Disaster is a great book on the Bay of Pigs invasion, written by one of the two American advisers who went on the mission. Highly recommended.
Here's another.
Three times in the past fifty years the military in Turkey has overthrown the government through force (and once without), only to subsequently relinquish power and restore democracy.
While the idea of a military who considers the stewardship of secular democracy to be their solemn duty is fascinating, I think the particular circumstances that lead to this being effective are fairly unique so in general I don't think it can work. Most coups don't work out that well for the people (which isn't to say that these coups didn't result in their fair share of violence and suffering).
Actually, I believe that there was an attempt to port Quake so that it's playable via Sneakernet.
Lame. It doesn't even support rocket jumping!
You have a theory how the world behaves. You do a numerical simulation based on that theory, and amazingly, it proves true.
Well that's not exactly the case. We have a theory of how the world behaves, and Hawking Radiation is a predicted emergent property of that theory. It's not an axiom, it's a predicted consequence, so it isn't a given based on the theory. Here, we have a detailed simulation that shows that yes, if the underlying theory is correct, then we should expect to see Hawking Radiation.
It is true that this is in no way a real-world observation that shows that the theory accurately models reality. However it does have a non-trivial and non-circular implication for our theory.
Without the sudden (orchestrated) disappearances from the race by the only serious contenders (Giuliani and Romney),
Puh-lease. Guiliani did worse in the some of the primaries than Ron Paul, and I don't hear anyone calling him a serious contender.
You have a point about Romney who dropped out too early, but Giuliani? That farce of a candidacy was over after the first primary.
I would be interested to know just how much of each dollar spent goes to actual health care, and how much goes to all those other things.
I don't have a link handy, but I've read in the past that the split is 10/90.
Obama will likely fare slightly better in the caucus in Texas, only because the core of the Democrat party--the baby boomers who constitute the majority of Hillary supporters--had families to get back to and jobs they had to get up for the next morning. Hillary supporters simply didn't have the ability to "two-step" all the way into the early morning hours, while it apparently is far easier for the young, first time voters who make up Obama's base to spend literally six hours of their time at their local middle school or fire station.
Yeah? Well the church my precinct's caucus was held in was packed to the freaking gills -- standing room only, they had to open up an annex which they also completely filled -- and it took over an hour after the sign-in began for everyone to sign the books for Obama. If you were Clinton supporter, you were done in about two minutes because there simply weren't many people in line in front of you.
And despite your stereotype, these were by and large middle aged working-class adults with families. Many of them had brought their families with them so that they could caucus -- some even had infants in papooses strapped to their chests. You can say whatever crud you want about baby-boomers with families; the ones who cared, the ones who were passionate about their candidate, they made it to the caucus.
Since irrational Obama supporters apparently run the internets, I fully expect this post to be modded "Troll" or something, because it doesn't contain the requisite amount of Obama bias and instead offers a firsthand account of what went down in Texas last night, and posits a reasonable theory for the disparity between primary and caucus votes. How scandalous. Do your candidate of choice proud, and suppress any relatively objective post you see.
Of course, objectively made-up stereotypes. And here's a reasonable theory for the disparity between primary and caucus votes:
Texas has an open primary. With the Republican nomination essentially decided, there was no point for a Republican to vote in their party's primary, meaning they were free to vote in the Democratic primary. A strategic vote for the candidate most likely to lose the general election is a way to strengthen their own candidate. However it wasn't worth going to the trouble to caucus just for the sake of a strategic vote. This is the supposed advantage of the caucus -- that it attracts only those who are truly passionate about their candidates. Nobody's going to crowd into a packed church and stand for hours as the heat rises from all the bodies just to cast a "strategic" vote. But as they finish up their shopping at Randals? Sure, why not sabotage the other party.
What I am concerned about is the fundamental violation of my rights and the rights of my neighbors and fellow citizens.
I believe that you are concerned with your rights, but I don't believe for a second that you give a rat's ass about your neighbor's rights when you're willing to let your neighbor die on the street in the name of being "entitled to the fruits of your labor".
You benefit from the fruits of others' labor on a daily basis, you wouldn't be able to have the fruits of your own labor were it not for the labor of others, and the only way you've given them any compensation is through your taxes. Why do you think you should be entitled to make use of the labor of others without giving anything in return? The view that everything you've acquired is solely the product of your own efforts is selfish and wrong.
No man is an island, no matter how much you may believe it to be so. That you would use that belief to refrain from compensating others' for their labors even as you blindly ride on their backs is exactly why we must have taxes.
Prisons? Aren't those a French invention?
I thought we were calling them "Freedom Houses" now.
*gets out his eraser and starts removing that "Land Of The Free" line from all the songbooks...*
;)
Sorry, that's also illegal.
j/k
Well Supertux and Jazz don't actually look anything like Mario and Sonic, and the levels themselves don't look much alike either (supertux does have some resemblance to mario levels).
As to the boards in question, there may be enough resemblance there for a copyright suit. The pattern and colors are obviously directly taken from the Scrabble board. There's an argument to be made there.
However, as another poster discovered from the original article, the references made are all regarding trademark, which is a much clearer case since regardless of whether the board is copied, it is clearly supposed to be thought of as the Scrabble board as is the name "Scrabulous". So Matel may just be going after that, and not worrying about the copyright issue at all.
I'm no expert on the subject, all I know is that there is no clear cutoff on such things. I think "significant similarity" is the suitably ambiguous metric.
After making that post, I went to scrabulous.com which has a screenshot, and the board has no writing on it but otherwise looks the same as the Scrabble board with the exact same pattern and colors for the normal squares and the double/triple letter/word score squares. That's probably enough to at least make copyright violation claim plausible.
You can copyright a piece of visual art -- even if it's what you'd call "graphic design" -- and assuming the board of Scrabulous looks just like the real game board, then it very well could be a copyright violation.
Texas is only sometimes considered to be part of "The South", and a metropolitan center like Dallas/Fort Worth even less so. Strictly speaking I think Texas is "Southwest", and certainly not "The Deep South" which is probably what the GP was referring to.
Southern Evangelicals are certainly a bigger problem than any Catholics, though, as far as anti-science teaching.