If the MPAA want to protect their stuff they shouldn't license the decryption algorithms to PC implementations. You'd think they would have learned that with DVD. Don't put secret algorithms on widely available hardware with lots of debuggers and hacking tools. Duh.
This would slow down the crackers a LOT - but not entirely.
d) your own machine has malware on it that intercepted the address.
Don't assume that because you know about malware and run a couple programs to prevent or eradicate it, that you don't have any. Now if you're not running an MS operating system, the likelihood of this is nearly zero, but no matter what you do it's never actually zero. Just very close.
Not many on slashdot care a whole lot about Vista sales.
Even fewer care what MS marketing says about Vista sales.
Nobody cares what someone else says about what MS says about Vista sales.
Government use of MS Word should be disallowed because some numpty pencil pusher doesn't know how some of its features work? What a compelling argument that is.
It's a perfectly good argument. Using a tool or designing a part that doesn't allow a critical mistake is standard practice. Google for Poka Yoke.
There is all type of sensitive information floating around the government. It goes to congress critters, their aids, through email, etc. Do you know another way to ensure that none of these people ever accidentally create documents with change tracking turned on? I didn't think so.
That's funny. How many people actually type their drivers license into an online demo like that? I'd try it if they provided a description of the algorithm and some simple source code.
Not necessarily. Using kinetic energy to overcome the electrostatic repulsion of nuclei would be hot. Finding a way to lower the barrier or tunnel through it need not be hot. The original cold fusion concept involved palladium saturated with hydrogen - a state that wasn't well understood at the time and may well be different than considering a 2 atom system in a hot low density environment. Anyway, I always thought "cold fusion" meant not using huge kinetic energy to make it work regardless of the scale.
On another note. I always found it interesting that D+D = He4 fusion is rejected by the physicists because the resulting He4 would have too much energy and eject a neutron to become He3. So why then does He4 constitute 90-something percent of the naturally occurring helium? What is the reaction that is supposed to produce this atom? It's just a question, I'm not claiming anyone is right or wrong with this. I really want to understand where it is supposed to come from.
So where's your published paper where you provide an alternative theory to explain galatic rotation?
The theory is Newtons law of gravitation - applied correctly.
I think my post above explains the problem well enough. I have better things to do than try to publish a paper for a bunch of so-called experts that think keplers laws can be used to model a whole galaxy. OTOH, every time I make one of my rant posts here, someone always makes the point you just did - put up or shut up;-) And yes, that is a valid point. So now I have to dig out that code I wrote a few years ago and make some pretty graphs...
That link is interesting, but baked right into their assumptions is the existence of Dark Matter. They assume the mass ratio of plasma to solid stuff is high. This is probably based on the assumption that Dark Matter holds a normal galaxy together. Every time I've read about why dark matter is required to hold a galaxy together, it comes down to the galactic rotation curve "problem". I've said it many times before, using Keplers laws to say what the rotation curve should be is invalid, yet that's what may people do. Including Wikipedia! If one models a galaxy as a uniform disk of point masses, you get an expected rotation curve quite different from that - even increasing towards the edge. The obvious discrepancy in the later case is that galaxies have a non-uniform mass distribution (big surprise huh). The bottom line is that we must not use a 2-body gravitational model for a system with millions (or billions) of bodies. OTOH if some jackass hadn't made this mistake we wouldn't have had all these exciting stories about Dark Matter for the last how many years....
HBO's big concern is the analog hole--in essence the gap in DRM that lets consumers capture the unencrypted analog signal from an HD signal. He, apparently, would like to plug the hole, but can't due to meddlesome laws.
That would be the meddlesome laws of physics right?
If the air flow is fast and smooth, adding a wind generator will certainly slow it down and increase drag on the vehicles. If as some have suggested, there is an area where the wind is already getting blocked by shrubs or some such, we should not put an equally disruptive turbine there, but instead replace the shrub with something to smooth the airflow thus improving the efficiency of the cars. The ICE is a terrible way to generate electricity - if you can do it without reducing the mileage, you should instead improve the roads to increase the mileage.
Have the charging pad double as a mouse pad, and the phone double as a wireless mouse. For me the key is limiting the number of devices I carry, and the amount of crap on my desk.
Thanks for the good reply. Sorry about paraphrasing - I did that based my memory of an interview with RMS on some site. It's my memory of RMS paraphrasing the GPLv3. Agreed, the license is the last word. However, no one managed to explain compatibility to my satisfaction. Several (including you) mentioned the BSD which does not require derived works to be BSD licensed. I was under the impression that GPLv3 was trying to be compatible with the Apache license (and Eclipse). That does not appear possible because the Apache license seems to indicate derived works also be Apache licensed - it doesn't explicitly say that but it seems to be a condition since existing copyright notices must be included. GPL certainly requires retention of the GPL license. Neither one indicates that you may use another license with similar terms. Using the BSD license to explain compatibility is almost like using the public domain as an example.
Now if GPLv3 achieves the same goals as Apache, it seems plausible that Apache could switch to GPLv3 and that would IMHO be a good thing. One less license to worry about, and increased ability to mix and match code.
I may have been off base with the DRM stuff, but I still say it will be possible to TiVOize code regardless of what terms they put in the license. Requiring that the user be able to hack the box/code in spite of the DMCA seems like a good idea, but in the end it will not stop people from making it very difficult to run modified code on some devices.
To be clear, I have great respect for RMS and his efforts. GPL is IMHO the best free license available. I just worry that his agenda may have grown to the unachievable. I also worry that adding terms to the license may also add loopholes in the same way that adding more features to a piece of software may introduce bugs.
IMHO the dual license issue is holding back Firefox and OpenOffice.org as well. There are GPLed things that would make sense to include in each of those, but will not be included because of the dual license issue. Evince and (in the near future) gnash would make nice additions to firefox, not to mention the fact that they couldn't leverage existing SVG code going into 1.5 but had to write their own. Sure there are plugins, but for common stuff it should just be in there. OpenOffice is apparently planning to rewrite the charting portion of the spreadsheet. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to use existing GPLed code for that? Perhaps taken from gnumeric. Never mind the merits or lack of, the point is that they don't even have the option because of the dual license.
Getting out before it breaks you into a thousand pieces and then remakes you into a twisted version of yourself you barely recognize seems like a pretty good idea to me.
RMS seems to be going down this path. Trying to fight closed hardware, DRM, MS/Novell, allow exceptions, try to be compatible with other licenses? I fear GPL3 is trying for too much.
Can someone please explain what it means for licenses to be "compatible"? If I've got code under Apache license and code under the GPLv3, I assume those can not be merged anyway because each body of code says derivatives must be under the same license. What then does license compatibility really mean exactly? Wouldn't it be better to write other apps from scratch under GPL than alter the license to be compatible with certain apps license?
What about DRM? GPL3 says you have to provide everything needed to make the app run. Does that mean the compiler too? Will every GPL3 project have to provide the whole toolchain? That would seem like a good idea if it were not such a burden. After all if someone uses a proprietary processor with a proprietary compiler they can Tivoize anything they like without using DRM. Should they have to provide the compiler? Does every project need to?
But I have to ask, while AMD were on top with the Athlon for several years - were they just sitting on their laurels?
Yes and No. That's around the time Hector the Sector Director took over. That's what our FreeScale rep told me he was called back at Motorola:-) He was not missed. From what I saw, he seemed to focus on marketing followed by fab building at AMD. The Hammer architecture was already a work in progress when he took over, so he can't be given credit for that. Modern AMD chips are still small refinements to that same design. Even the new K8L or whatever they call it is going to be mostly the same - they are going to put in a full SSE unit instead of 1/2 of one that they've been getting away with for so long. IMHO they waited too long for that change probably because someone was trying to optimize dollars and didn't notice Intel was about to make a large performance gain. Oops. Anyway, they rested on their design laurels for 6 years now and are still doing so. Maybe they just plain don't see how to ramp core performance (per dollar?) in a significant way beyond K8L. Performance per watt (or per dollar) is a good measure, but they must not forget that the numerator is still performance.
If this would simplify the work of the PTO, shouldn't they also reduce the length of time the patent is valid for? Remember, they extended from 17 years from date of grant to 20 years from date of filing because the process takes so long. If the process is going to get simpler, shouldn't we see a reduction in the term? Yes yes, I know. The big guys sponsoring this would probably prefer a longer term - that's why we need to proactively find justification for a shorter term:-)
I am rather happy with my 42" DLP at 1280x720. Since DVD already has to be scaled up, and most broadcast HDTV is in 720p it makes the most sense. At the viewing distance I have, I doubt if I could tell much difference if the resolution was higher. Didn't we all see the article the other day about the resolution of the human eye and all that? So unless everyone is buying HD-DVD or BlueRay players (some are), there isn't much to be gained from 1080p (lack of source material). I guess what I'm saying is that not everyone wants 1080p in 2007 like you say. Agreed that 768 is stupid - no TV source material has that resolution:-)
Now what I would like is a 1920x1080 (or perhaps x1200) monitor - I sit close enough for that resolution to have some real value.
So if you've got code released under GPL 3 and some code released under Apache, how EXACTLY does one combine those into a single program? The GPLed code says derivatives must be released under GPL, and I presume the Apache licensed code says it must stay under that license. So what license does one use for the combined work? How does your answer conform to the terms of both the original licenses.
AFAICT there is no such thing a license compatibility.
Oh yea, no problem. My coworkers in England have not changed, so for 3 weeks they are 4 hours different instead of 5. I say we just move it 3 months more (or whatever the amount is) so we never have to change our clocks.
On another note, just because power consumption hasn't changed doesn't mean it had no effect. The goal was to reduce power consumed by large corporations. Somehow I doubt if more people coming to work in the dark had that effect either.... OTOH, people driving to work in the dark reduces gas mileage which equals more profit for oil companies - would it be enough of a change for them to measure?
Agreed. And a bunch of idiots are going to point out that nobody actually implements it directly. x86 instructions are "translated" on the fly to whatever RISC type processor is actually doing the work - or some such. They'll claim it doesn't matter what the ISA is any more because of this capability. There are two problems with these arguments. 1) it takes circuitry and power to break down crappy instructions into nice ones. 2) the inefficient encoding takes more space - this requires extra unwanted instruction cache (circuitry and power).
The general principle that universities use is that anything you turn in, you assign copyright to the university.
Bullshit. I never heard of a uni require a student to sign a copyright assignment agreement. nor did I sign one.
This means the instructor can use turnitin without violating copyright law.
Um no. Not without a signed legal document.
Is it right to require students to give up copyright over their own work?
No.
I don't agree with it, but it's not unreasonable.
Glad you don't agree, but it IS unreasonable. Imagine a "writer" teaching a literature class and snaging ideas from a few good students papers. Is that right? Aside from this potential abuse, is there ANY legitimate reason to require a student to assign copyright to the school? Just remember that the school doesn't have a place where they archive all these exciting papers they get. The prof normally grades then and gives them back.
Most assignments are similar to "work for hire", written to a specification of someone else for a particular purpose (in this case, grading).
Back to Bullshit again. No one is paying the student. In fact, the student is paying for an education.
If you read the new GPL 3 draft, there is a section that says something like: If you do not specify a specific version of GPL then users can imply any version ever published. I don't recall if it say "published by the FSF". Even if it does, it leaves the door open for management at the FSF to change philosophy over time resulting in bad things with future versions of the GPL. Of course people would have the option of using older versions of software if it all went closed source some day.
I don't recall if you can put a derivative work under a specific GPL version or not. I need to reread that section - if you can take GPL3 code and put it under GPL2 just because someone didn't specify a version then why have a GPL3 at all?
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If the MPAA want to protect their stuff they shouldn't license the decryption algorithms to PC implementations. You'd think they would have learned that with DVD. Don't put secret algorithms on widely available hardware with lots of debuggers and hacking tools. Duh.
This would slow down the crackers a LOT - but not entirely.
d) your own machine has malware on it that intercepted the address.
Don't assume that because you know about malware and run a couple programs to prevent or eradicate it, that you don't have any. Now if you're not running an MS operating system, the likelihood of this is nearly zero, but no matter what you do it's never actually zero. Just very close.
Not many on slashdot care a whole lot about Vista sales.
Even fewer care what MS marketing says about Vista sales.
Nobody cares what someone else says about what MS says about Vista sales.
There is all type of sensitive information floating around the government. It goes to congress critters, their aids, through email, etc. Do you know another way to ensure that none of these people ever accidentally create documents with change tracking turned on? I didn't think so.
That's funny. How many people actually type their drivers license into an online demo like that? I'd try it if they provided a description of the algorithm and some simple source code.
This is a great reason to disallow the use of MS Word in government. Does ODF support this change tracking stuff? Or should they stick to ASCII files?
On another note. I always found it interesting that D+D = He4 fusion is rejected by the physicists because the resulting He4 would have too much energy and eject a neutron to become He3. So why then does He4 constitute 90-something percent of the naturally occurring helium? What is the reaction that is supposed to produce this atom? It's just a question, I'm not claiming anyone is right or wrong with this. I really want to understand where it is supposed to come from.
I think my post above explains the problem well enough. I have better things to do than try to publish a paper for a bunch of so-called experts that think keplers laws can be used to model a whole galaxy. OTOH, every time I make one of my rant posts here, someone always makes the point you just did - put up or shut up
That link is interesting, but baked right into their assumptions is the existence of Dark Matter. They assume the mass ratio of plasma to solid stuff is high. This is probably based on the assumption that Dark Matter holds a normal galaxy together. Every time I've read about why dark matter is required to hold a galaxy together, it comes down to the galactic rotation curve "problem". I've said it many times before, using Keplers laws to say what the rotation curve should be is invalid, yet that's what may people do. Including Wikipedia! If one models a galaxy as a uniform disk of point masses, you get an expected rotation curve quite different from that - even increasing towards the edge. The obvious discrepancy in the later case is that galaxies have a non-uniform mass distribution (big surprise huh). The bottom line is that we must not use a 2-body gravitational model for a system with millions (or billions) of bodies. OTOH if some jackass hadn't made this mistake we wouldn't have had all these exciting stories about Dark Matter for the last how many years....
That would be the meddlesome laws of physics right?
If the air flow is fast and smooth, adding a wind generator will certainly slow it down and increase drag on the vehicles. If as some have suggested, there is an area where the wind is already getting blocked by shrubs or some such, we should not put an equally disruptive turbine there, but instead replace the shrub with something to smooth the airflow thus improving the efficiency of the cars. The ICE is a terrible way to generate electricity - if you can do it without reducing the mileage, you should instead improve the roads to increase the mileage.
Have the charging pad double as a mouse pad, and the phone double as a wireless mouse. For me the key is limiting the number of devices I carry, and the amount of crap on my desk.
Thanks for the good reply. Sorry about paraphrasing - I did that based my memory of an interview with RMS on some site. It's my memory of RMS paraphrasing the GPLv3. Agreed, the license is the last word. However, no one managed to explain compatibility to my satisfaction. Several (including you) mentioned the BSD which does not require derived works to be BSD licensed. I was under the impression that GPLv3 was trying to be compatible with the Apache license (and Eclipse). That does not appear possible because the Apache license seems to indicate derived works also be Apache licensed - it doesn't explicitly say that but it seems to be a condition since existing copyright notices must be included. GPL certainly requires retention of the GPL license. Neither one indicates that you may use another license with similar terms. Using the BSD license to explain compatibility is almost like using the public domain as an example.
Now if GPLv3 achieves the same goals as Apache, it seems plausible that Apache could switch to GPLv3 and that would IMHO be a good thing. One less license to worry about, and increased ability to mix and match code.
I may have been off base with the DRM stuff, but I still say it will be possible to TiVOize code regardless of what terms they put in the license. Requiring that the user be able to hack the box/code in spite of the DMCA seems like a good idea, but in the end it will not stop people from making it very difficult to run modified code on some devices.
To be clear, I have great respect for RMS and his efforts. GPL is IMHO the best free license available. I just worry that his agenda may have grown to the unachievable. I also worry that adding terms to the license may also add loopholes in the same way that adding more features to a piece of software may introduce bugs.
IMHO the dual license issue is holding back Firefox and OpenOffice.org as well. There are GPLed things that would make sense to include in each of those, but will not be included because of the dual license issue. Evince and (in the near future) gnash would make nice additions to firefox, not to mention the fact that they couldn't leverage existing SVG code going into 1.5 but had to write their own. Sure there are plugins, but for common stuff it should just be in there. OpenOffice is apparently planning to rewrite the charting portion of the spreadsheet. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to use existing GPLed code for that? Perhaps taken from gnumeric. Never mind the merits or lack of, the point is that they don't even have the option because of the dual license.
Can someone please explain what it means for licenses to be "compatible"? If I've got code under Apache license and code under the GPLv3, I assume those can not be merged anyway because each body of code says derivatives must be under the same license. What then does license compatibility really mean exactly? Wouldn't it be better to write other apps from scratch under GPL than alter the license to be compatible with certain apps license?
What about DRM? GPL3 says you have to provide everything needed to make the app run. Does that mean the compiler too? Will every GPL3 project have to provide the whole toolchain? That would seem like a good idea if it were not such a burden. After all if someone uses a proprietary processor with a proprietary compiler they can Tivoize anything they like without using DRM. Should they have to provide the compiler? Does every project need to?
If this would simplify the work of the PTO, shouldn't they also reduce the length of time the patent is valid for? Remember, they extended from 17 years from date of grant to 20 years from date of filing because the process takes so long. If the process is going to get simpler, shouldn't we see a reduction in the term? Yes yes, I know. The big guys sponsoring this would probably prefer a longer term - that's why we need to proactively find justification for a shorter term :-)
I am rather happy with my 42" DLP at 1280x720. Since DVD already has to be scaled up, and most broadcast HDTV is in 720p it makes the most sense. At the viewing distance I have, I doubt if I could tell much difference if the resolution was higher. Didn't we all see the article the other day about the resolution of the human eye and all that? So unless everyone is buying HD-DVD or BlueRay players (some are), there isn't much to be gained from 1080p (lack of source material). I guess what I'm saying is that not everyone wants 1080p in 2007 like you say. Agreed that 768 is stupid - no TV source material has that resolution :-)
Now what I would like is a 1920x1080 (or perhaps x1200) monitor - I sit close enough for that resolution to have some real value.
AFAICT there is no such thing a license compatibility.
What is the reason they want Apache compatibility?
On another note, just because power consumption hasn't changed doesn't mean it had no effect. The goal was to reduce power consumed by large corporations. Somehow I doubt if more people coming to work in the dark had that effect either.... OTOH, people driving to work in the dark reduces gas mileage which equals more profit for oil companies - would it be enough of a change for them to measure?
Agreed. And a bunch of idiots are going to point out that nobody actually implements it directly. x86 instructions are "translated" on the fly to whatever RISC type processor is actually doing the work - or some such. They'll claim it doesn't matter what the ISA is any more because of this capability. There are two problems with these arguments. 1) it takes circuitry and power to break down crappy instructions into nice ones. 2) the inefficient encoding takes more space - this requires extra unwanted instruction cache (circuitry and power).
Um no. Not without a signed legal document.
No.
Glad you don't agree, but it IS unreasonable. Imagine a "writer" teaching a literature class and snaging ideas from a few good students papers. Is that right? Aside from this potential abuse, is there ANY legitimate reason to require a student to assign copyright to the school? Just remember that the school doesn't have a place where they archive all these exciting papers they get. The prof normally grades then and gives them back.
Back to Bullshit again. No one is paying the student. In fact, the student is paying for an education.
If you read the new GPL 3 draft, there is a section that says something like: If you do not specify a specific version of GPL then users can imply any version ever published. I don't recall if it say "published by the FSF". Even if it does, it leaves the door open for management at the FSF to change philosophy over time resulting in bad things with future versions of the GPL. Of course people would have the option of using older versions of software if it all went closed source some day.
I don't recall if you can put a derivative work under a specific GPL version or not. I need to reread that section - if you can take GPL3 code and put it under GPL2 just because someone didn't specify a version then why have a GPL3 at all?