For those who are waiting for the DVD before seeing the movie, did I mention SPOILER WARNING?
The "guy on the table right across from Neo" is Smith...now, whether that makes the cliff-hanger better or not, I don't know, but since nobody in their right mind would describe the awesome Agent Smith as "the guy on the table right across from Neo", I figured you might actually not be a troll, and might actually not have realized that.
heh...the article description is misleading, but that's EXACTLY what this is (or attempts to be at least, there are many reasons why it doesn't look like it's effective).
They try to block IP addresses used by the RIAA to scan the network...heh...
and i'm curious to know how it is that the average computer scientist or programmer thinks himself skilled or trained to comment on "constraint of indivudual rights vs big corporations."
I never thought I needed to be skilled or trained to comment my opinions about anything.
I do however think that if I were in charge of giving advice to legislators about IP law proposals (and I'm not), I'd need to be skilled in both the political and legal sides as well as the technical side. In fact, I think that I'd need that background to create those bill proposals as well. Never did I say I was qualified, but I sure would like the people doing that job to be.
so far i've seen virtually thousands of posts by hackers on slashdot who have no real understanding of even relatively straightforward concepts such as 'fair use'...
So what you're saying is that programmers and computer scientists are not qualified to be patent lawyers. No argument from me. They do, however, have a very valuable opinion on the probable effectiveness of IP laws, and how hard it is to enforce them. They also know exactly how those laws will affect them in their perfectly legal endeavors.
...but rather bleat nonsense about "Corporate States of America" or whatever.
I've never said that myself, but out of curiosity, I'd like to know your position on current lobbying and the effect of campaign contributions by corporations on policies introduced by our represantatives. Perhaps that will help explain your qualification of the above criticism as "bleat nonsense". Frankly, I don't think insults accomplish anything either, but I tend to treat that type of comment in the same way as political cartoons...they're designed to get your attention, so they may be pretty harsh.
Given that as IP lawyers at CCIPS part of your responsibilities is not only enforcing current laws, but also "reviewing new policy proposals, legislation, or international agreements related to IP", I'd like to know something about your overall technical background.
A frequent gripe with the geeks here at slashdot, myself included, is that apparently legislators are not sufficiently well informed to create IP laws, frequently proposing and enacting laws which either constrain individual rights in favor of protecting those of big corporations (like the DMCA), or are simply not effective, because they can never patch the frequently referred to "analog hole" which is always a required step for humans to get to the information.
Given that for ethical reasons, you may not give your honest opinion on said legislation since you are required to enforce them, I'd simply like to know if I can trust that you are sufficiently well-informed to give council on these ever emerging new IP legislations. Do you feel that you truly have sufficient technical experience as opposed to your obvious legal ones? Can you elaborate on what type of experience you feel helps to qualify you to truly understand the ramification of these legislations?
I have a much bigger fundamental problem with this non-accountable electronic voting process that does not produce a verifiable paper ballot for each vote cast.
Yeah...judging from our last presidential election, I'd say verifiable paper ballot's certainly proved their value.
Sarcasm aside, even assuming some sabotage of an electronic system...would the error become worse than having humans read it? Besides the innevitable error inheritant in having someone for hours doing the exact same thing over and over (thus each recount in florida yielded different results), can you really assure no sabotage. How can you absolutely be sure that there aren't a lot of people counting the paper ballots thinking, "I really don't want this guy to win, so every 3 votes he gets, I'll count one as a vote for my favorite candidate"?
I'm confused...I'm not an aol user, but I keep hearing stuff about people not getting their legitimate e-mail because aol is spam filtering tons of false positives.
*I'll* definitely vote with my wallet. How do you propose to convince the millions of people who have no idea what DRM is to do the same?
Only problem with any type of voting...you're in the minority, you lose, whether you're right or not. And the whole "DRM prevents pirates, pirates are terrorists" campaigns make sure that we're in the minority. The user who doesn't want to use his own hardware any differently, ie the parents of the small children this is aimed at, sees no difference between a DRM enabled and a DRM disabled console, and hears the big companies saying that DRM is good.
Here is a good idea, lets get a huge mail list and send it to everyone in the world.
But how are we going to get all the e-mail addresses from everyone in the world? I propose we buy it from corporations willing to sell this information, and then include an "unsubscribe" button with each e-mail...we will use the responses from the people who click "unsubscribe" to determine whether an e-mail address is still active or not.
We also need to format our e-mail in a way that will get past those people with bayesian spam filters...we don't want them to think we're spamming them...quite to the contrary, we're giving them an offer they can't refuse...we're offering to end all their spam troubles...in exchange for a small fee which we will use to buy the e-mail information from the companies mentioned above.
So hold on...winning in a fairly contested game of skill is somehow *MORE* repugnant than killing people and laughing as their blood spatters in a realistic fashion?
Like I said, look at my other post, because I'm NOT of the opinion that the game is at fault in either 3d shooters or poker...HOWEVER, if you were to blame games for anything, let's compare the both of them, shall we?
3d shooter: Kill "virtual representations of people" as you've mentioned. No damage to the actual person, possible psychological damage to you, if you believe in that stuff (I tend to believe it can do damage only if you already have psychological issues, in which case just about anything in normal life could trigger it, not just games).
Online poker with real money: Possible damages fall in two categories. If you're addicted you can lose all your money and your family money...bye bye college fund for your child, bye bye house, etc. If you're not addicted, you play reasonably, and either lose minimal amounts of money, or win big and ruin the real lives, not "virtual representations" of the addicted ones.
Now...like I said in my previous post, go read it, goddamnit. I think the blame of such a thing falls squarely on the shoulders of the addicted individual, NOT the game. If you find online shooters repugnant, don't play it. People who think gambling is bad shouldn't gamble.
No, the object of the game is to make the *real* person on the other side lose all their money.
Not to say the blame is on the the game (see my other post responding to the the parent of yours), but if you're going there, understand what it is you're talking about.
If this was a gambling addiciton piece, there'd be slashdot posts complaining of how you can indeed just play money games for pure entertainment without being considered an addict.
I definitely agree with you, they're taking this "gaming addiction" too far, but there are plenty of gambling addiciton pieces out there as well...count your blessings that they're not making it to slashdot.
I'm tired of hearing about gambling addictions. I think of them the same way you apparently think of computer gaming addiction stories. I don't want to hear more about the poor people losing they're house to pay their gambling debts...if they were dumb enough to bet what they couldn't afford, they're not addicts, they're idiots, and they deserve to lose the money. Likewise, if some idiot commits suicide because something happened to his online Everquest character, that's one less idiot populating the world.
-1 flamebait, or whatever, but I have karma to burn and since you've pushed a button, I want to voice my opinion.
Both times the results were laughable. Not a single coupon was for somethind I used, or wanted to use, or might have been persuaded to use, based on the data they've 'gathered'.
Well, I can tell you it works really well for some people. My amazon "recommended items" section is ridiculous. It's gotten so good, I started checking it when I want to rent a movie, but I don't know what to rent. I don't think it matters how much they know of my movie preferences, but that'd scare the hell out of me if I were concerned for some other reason (so don't point them out).
Dijkstra developed some very efficient algorithms, and algorithms span all computer languages, even if I were to agree with you that C++ and perl are no longer used...which I don't.
What comes to mind right at first is Dijkstra's Shortest Path Algorithm. And hey, look...that page has java programs. In fact, take a look at a Java applet to better understand the algorithm.
If I have a company that manufactures low profit margin widgets, and I have a competitor who manufactures low profit margin widgets, and I devise a business process that streamlines my manufacturing to eke out more profits, I won't want my competitor to have that business process.
Of course you don't. That's the point though. Everybody wants to get patents, it protects them. I remember the good old days when companies had to worry about industrial espionage to protect their production methods which were better than the competiton. Those days, you kept your better widget production method secret, and you stay ahead of the competition until they figure out how to better their system on their own. What you want is an unfair business practice that gives you the advantage...that's what everyone wants for themselves.
Of course, patents are still necessary. If you create an invention, and then a big company with lots of capital copies your idea, and sells the same thing for much cheaper than you possibly could, that's not competition, that's hanging you and using your own idea as the rope. The line must be drawn between patenting a product and an idea though, just like it used to be. There must also be a *short* limit on the time you're allowed to sell your invention without any competition, basically enough time to let you be established in the business, so that by the time the other companies can join in, you can hold your own. I'll leave it to people more intelligent than I to figure out what's a reasonable time, but I'll go ahead and say that this time should definitely be different depending on what it is you're patenting...it should be decided in an individual basis.
Why is this a good thing? Someone that's willing to buy this device seems like they'd also be of the mindset to lie at the return counter if their CPU kills itself early after an Overclocking Session Gone Bad (TM).
Oh, c'mon. I don't want to physically mess with my cpu and all of the sudden I'm an immoral person?
Overclocking processors isn't that dangerous of a thing, btw. Unless you did something physically wrong while installing the thing, or the heatsink (which would cause the proc to burn even if you didn't overclock it), all you'll have is an unstable system, in which case you bring the speed down until you get your perfect heat and speed balance. Chances are many of these cpu's computer stores refused to take back were indeed bad, and they were using overclocking as an excuse to screw the customer.
Err...of course a metric by file size wouldn't work. But regardless of what compression algorithm you use, 10% of the original resolution won't be fully restored. Even if you're algorithm if fully lossless, if you decrease the resolution, you won't be able to get the full resolution information back.
The same people who collect everything I do online?
Forgive me, but I hope they rot in hell with their compromised software.
Upon analysis of your post, we have decided you are a possible security risk. Given the location you have posted at, "news for nerds" and all, there's also a high probability you are a programmer, and thus able to write "compromised code" yourself if contracted.
Our people are currently identifying your real identity and should be arriving at your house shortly. Please do not resist...wait...our tracking software doesn't work? It's been compromised by the Chinese? You mean they now have his identity?
Err...we were just joking about arresting you. Please don't accept any recruiting offer that you might receive from any foreign country. That would be unpatriotic.
What if the court stated some metric? Like "must be at least 50% less than the original"... how about cutting the image in halves. Then posting both halves on your site such that they appear as one? Neither half violates individually?
That wasn't an issue even when fair use was an unquestioned law. If you were to reproduce an entire short story in the form of 2 line quotes, no one in their right mind would believe you're not violating the copyright.
I think you're right in the sense that a "thumbnail" is arbitrary, but I think that if the court did state some metrics, the problem would be pretty much solved. At least when it comes to pictures.
Since the applicability of fair-use defenses to copyright infringement touches on all kinds of common uses of the Internet as well as rulemaking related to the scope of the DMCA, this decision will probably have an effect on the discussion.
Yes, it does have an effect. The effect is that basically fair use applies to corporations, but not to the private citizens.
When a private citizen sues a corporation for copyright infringement, it's fair use. When a corporation sues a private citizen, it's piracy.
Well...they said what "defects" they found, and they put up the snippets of code. That means that the apache people can now fix it for themselves.
Of course, NULL pointer references and uninitialized variables are easy enough to detect and fix, but I think the point is to measure the carelessness of the programmer. If a programmer makes these kinds of mistakes, he's bound to make worse ones.
Yeah, my sense of humor isn't very sophisticated. I'm laughing at your post too.
Oh...you're serious...
In that case...::clears throat::
How dare you judge someone based on their preference of a tv show? Why can I say that I'm a fan of the Simpsons without anyone drawing any conclusions, but the moment I mention I'm a fan of star trek I'm accused of not quite being able to differentiate fantasy and reality? Why am I accused of being a nerd because I watch a show with technobabble? But all of this is insignificant next to your biggest mistake. HOW DARE YOU SPELL "PHASERS" WITH A 'Z'?????
Furthermore, there's no "nerd" setting on a phaser. A type II phaser has 16 settings, which range from stun to high levels of heat which can actually vaporize human beings. It has not been shown in any of the star trek episodes of any series that nerds suffer the effects of any phaser setting differently.
Now...::takes a deep breath::...let me give you an advice. If you can't handle the nerdiness, don't browse "news for nerds"
Slashdot Mirror
All our ships are belong to U.S. Ok...I was really late in my joke, but I just saw that post while metamoderating :)
For those who are waiting for the DVD before seeing the movie, did I mention SPOILER WARNING?
The "guy on the table right across from Neo" is Smith...now, whether that makes the cliff-hanger better or not, I don't know, but since nobody in their right mind would describe the awesome Agent Smith as "the guy on the table right across from Neo", I figured you might actually not be a troll, and might actually not have realized that.
They try to block IP addresses used by the RIAA to scan the network...heh...
I never thought I needed to be skilled or trained to comment my opinions about anything.
I do however think that if I were in charge of giving advice to legislators about IP law proposals (and I'm not), I'd need to be skilled in both the political and legal sides as well as the technical side. In fact, I think that I'd need that background to create those bill proposals as well. Never did I say I was qualified, but I sure would like the people doing that job to be.
so far i've seen virtually thousands of posts by hackers on slashdot who have no real understanding of even relatively straightforward concepts such as 'fair use'...
So what you're saying is that programmers and computer scientists are not qualified to be patent lawyers. No argument from me. They do, however, have a very valuable opinion on the probable effectiveness of IP laws, and how hard it is to enforce them. They also know exactly how those laws will affect them in their perfectly legal endeavors.
I've never said that myself, but out of curiosity, I'd like to know your position on current lobbying and the effect of campaign contributions by corporations on policies introduced by our represantatives. Perhaps that will help explain your qualification of the above criticism as "bleat nonsense". Frankly, I don't think insults accomplish anything either, but I tend to treat that type of comment in the same way as political cartoons...they're designed to get your attention, so they may be pretty harsh.
A frequent gripe with the geeks here at slashdot, myself included, is that apparently legislators are not sufficiently well informed to create IP laws, frequently proposing and enacting laws which either constrain individual rights in favor of protecting those of big corporations (like the DMCA), or are simply not effective, because they can never patch the frequently referred to "analog hole" which is always a required step for humans to get to the information.
Given that for ethical reasons, you may not give your honest opinion on said legislation since you are required to enforce them, I'd simply like to know if I can trust that you are sufficiently well-informed to give council on these ever emerging new IP legislations. Do you feel that you truly have sufficient technical experience as opposed to your obvious legal ones? Can you elaborate on what type of experience you feel helps to qualify you to truly understand the ramification of these legislations?
Yeah...judging from our last presidential election, I'd say verifiable paper ballot's certainly proved their value.
Sarcasm aside, even assuming some sabotage of an electronic system...would the error become worse than having humans read it? Besides the innevitable error inheritant in having someone for hours doing the exact same thing over and over (thus each recount in florida yielded different results), can you really assure no sabotage. How can you absolutely be sure that there aren't a lot of people counting the paper ballots thinking, "I really don't want this guy to win, so every 3 votes he gets, I'll count one as a vote for my favorite candidate"?
I'm confused...I'm not an aol user, but I keep hearing stuff about people not getting their legitimate e-mail because aol is spam filtering tons of false positives.
Only problem with any type of voting...you're in the minority, you lose, whether you're right or not. And the whole "DRM prevents pirates, pirates are terrorists" campaigns make sure that we're in the minority. The user who doesn't want to use his own hardware any differently, ie the parents of the small children this is aimed at, sees no difference between a DRM enabled and a DRM disabled console, and hears the big companies saying that DRM is good.
When was the last time you checked? Been away for a while?
But how are we going to get all the e-mail addresses from everyone in the world? I propose we buy it from corporations willing to sell this information, and then include an "unsubscribe" button with each e-mail...we will use the responses from the people who click "unsubscribe" to determine whether an e-mail address is still active or not.
We also need to format our e-mail in a way that will get past those people with bayesian spam filters...we don't want them to think we're spamming them...quite to the contrary, we're giving them an offer they can't refuse...we're offering to end all their spam troubles...in exchange for a small fee which we will use to buy the e-mail information from the companies mentioned above.
Like I said, look at my other post, because I'm NOT of the opinion that the game is at fault in either 3d shooters or poker...HOWEVER, if you were to blame games for anything, let's compare the both of them, shall we?
3d shooter: Kill "virtual representations of people" as you've mentioned. No damage to the actual person, possible psychological damage to you, if you believe in that stuff (I tend to believe it can do damage only if you already have psychological issues, in which case just about anything in normal life could trigger it, not just games).
Online poker with real money: Possible damages fall in two categories. If you're addicted you can lose all your money and your family money...bye bye college fund for your child, bye bye house, etc. If you're not addicted, you play reasonably, and either lose minimal amounts of money, or win big and ruin the real lives, not "virtual representations" of the addicted ones.
Now...like I said in my previous post, go read it, goddamnit. I think the blame of such a thing falls squarely on the shoulders of the addicted individual, NOT the game. If you find online shooters repugnant, don't play it. People who think gambling is bad shouldn't gamble.
Not to say the blame is on the the game (see my other post responding to the the parent of yours), but if you're going there, understand what it is you're talking about.
I definitely agree with you, they're taking this "gaming addiction" too far, but there are plenty of gambling addiciton pieces out there as well...count your blessings that they're not making it to slashdot.
I'm tired of hearing about gambling addictions. I think of them the same way you apparently think of computer gaming addiction stories. I don't want to hear more about the poor people losing they're house to pay their gambling debts...if they were dumb enough to bet what they couldn't afford, they're not addicts, they're idiots, and they deserve to lose the money. Likewise, if some idiot commits suicide because something happened to his online Everquest character, that's one less idiot populating the world.
-1 flamebait, or whatever, but I have karma to burn and since you've pushed a button, I want to voice my opinion.
Well, I can tell you it works really well for some people. My amazon "recommended items" section is ridiculous. It's gotten so good, I started checking it when I want to rent a movie, but I don't know what to rent. I don't think it matters how much they know of my movie preferences, but that'd scare the hell out of me if I were concerned for some other reason (so don't point them out).
What comes to mind right at first is Dijkstra's Shortest Path Algorithm. And hey, look...that page has java programs. In fact, take a look at a Java applet to better understand the algorithm.
Of course you don't. That's the point though. Everybody wants to get patents, it protects them. I remember the good old days when companies had to worry about industrial espionage to protect their production methods which were better than the competiton. Those days, you kept your better widget production method secret, and you stay ahead of the competition until they figure out how to better their system on their own. What you want is an unfair business practice that gives you the advantage...that's what everyone wants for themselves.
Of course, patents are still necessary. If you create an invention, and then a big company with lots of capital copies your idea, and sells the same thing for much cheaper than you possibly could, that's not competition, that's hanging you and using your own idea as the rope. The line must be drawn between patenting a product and an idea though, just like it used to be. There must also be a *short* limit on the time you're allowed to sell your invention without any competition, basically enough time to let you be established in the business, so that by the time the other companies can join in, you can hold your own. I'll leave it to people more intelligent than I to figure out what's a reasonable time, but I'll go ahead and say that this time should definitely be different depending on what it is you're patenting...it should be decided in an individual basis.
Oh, c'mon. I don't want to physically mess with my cpu and all of the sudden I'm an immoral person?
Overclocking processors isn't that dangerous of a thing, btw. Unless you did something physically wrong while installing the thing, or the heatsink (which would cause the proc to burn even if you didn't overclock it), all you'll have is an unstable system, in which case you bring the speed down until you get your perfect heat and speed balance. Chances are many of these cpu's computer stores refused to take back were indeed bad, and they were using overclocking as an excuse to screw the customer.
Err...of course a metric by file size wouldn't work. But regardless of what compression algorithm you use, 10% of the original resolution won't be fully restored. Even if you're algorithm if fully lossless, if you decrease the resolution, you won't be able to get the full resolution information back.
The same people who collect everything I do online?
Forgive me, but I hope they rot in hell with their compromised software.
Upon analysis of your post, we have decided you are a possible security risk. Given the location you have posted at, "news for nerds" and all, there's also a high probability you are a programmer, and thus able to write "compromised code" yourself if contracted.
Our people are currently identifying your real identity and should be arriving at your house shortly. Please do not resist...wait...our tracking software doesn't work? It's been compromised by the Chinese? You mean they now have his identity?
Err...we were just joking about arresting you. Please don't accept any recruiting offer that you might receive from any foreign country. That would be unpatriotic.
--The NSAThat wasn't an issue even when fair use was an unquestioned law. If you were to reproduce an entire short story in the form of 2 line quotes, no one in their right mind would believe you're not violating the copyright.
I think you're right in the sense that a "thumbnail" is arbitrary, but I think that if the court did state some metrics, the problem would be pretty much solved. At least when it comes to pictures.
Yes, it does have an effect. The effect is that basically fair use applies to corporations, but not to the private citizens.
When a private citizen sues a corporation for copyright infringement, it's fair use. When a corporation sues a private citizen, it's piracy.
Of course, NULL pointer references and uninitialized variables are easy enough to detect and fix, but I think the point is to measure the carelessness of the programmer. If a programmer makes these kinds of mistakes, he's bound to make worse ones.
Yes. I also quite suprised when I noticed I didn't have any spam today.
Oh...you're serious...
In that case...::clears throat::
How dare you judge someone based on their preference of a tv show? Why can I say that I'm a fan of the Simpsons without anyone drawing any conclusions, but the moment I mention I'm a fan of star trek I'm accused of not quite being able to differentiate fantasy and reality? Why am I accused of being a nerd because I watch a show with technobabble? But all of this is insignificant next to your biggest mistake. HOW DARE YOU SPELL "PHASERS" WITH A 'Z'?????
Furthermore, there's no "nerd" setting on a phaser. A type II phaser has 16 settings, which range from stun to high levels of heat which can actually vaporize human beings. It has not been shown in any of the star trek episodes of any series that nerds suffer the effects of any phaser setting differently.
Now...::takes a deep breath::...let me give you an advice. If you can't handle the nerdiness, don't browse "news for nerds"