Judging by his writing style, which is incoherent, rambling, and in a lot of places just plain wrong. He was charismatic, but from what I've read about the Nazis most of the successes (e.g. the invasion of most of Europe and the militarisation of Germany) were either orchestrated by other people, were blind luck (and failed miserably when he tried to repeat them), but most of the disasters for them (e.g. the invasion of Russia) happened when Hitler overrode the opinions of the people he'd previously let get on with running the empire.
The allies didn't underestimate Hitler so much as underestimate the ability of competent people to ride the coat tails of a charismatic leader. If he'd been assassinated in the late '30s, most of Europe would probably be speaking German now...
Do you keep those form letters? When I get one from my MP, I leave it out on my coffee table. When people come around, they often notice the House of Commons letterhead and ask what it is. I show them that it's an example of him acting against the interests of his constituents and not replying to any of the points I made. Does it make a difference? I have no idea, but if it convinces half a dozen people vote against him then that's noticeable in an election where the difference between the winning candidate and the second place was only about 800 votes...
Re:House of Representatives
on
House Passes CISPA
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· Score: 3, Informative
You know, that's only true as long as the majority of the US population keeps voting for the person who spends the most money...
Random fact: 20 years after running an advert saying 'Why 1984 won't be like 1984' a computer company introduced a flat screen computer with a built-in camera. I wondered if the answer to their original comment was 'delays in R&D'.
So, how many problems in the US in, say, the last 10 years have been solved by an armed populous? The USAPATRIOT Act? The DMCA? The TSA?
Or do bullets just act as a security blanket to prevent people from bothering to get actively involved in the democratic process because they 'can always overthrow the government later if it gets really bad...'
In wales, at least, Plaid has pretty sane policies towards IP. My Plaid MEP has spent much of her time campaigning for shorter copyright terms and against software patents.
Rather than the votes cast, take a look at how many people turned up for the debates. I count 19 in that picture, but there are probably a few out of camera shot. The other two hundred just turned up for the vote. In the original Slashdot article about the act, there was copy of that picture but with the caption changed to 'Democracy FAIL'. Somehow, very appropriate.
It's a shame that a big part of the reason for it being banned in Germany was the statement that Nazi germany was a very efficient system of government. That's something that really needs repeating, every time someone proposes a law aimed at increasing the efficiency of their government...
The most truly terrifying source I've read from the second world war was (a translation of excerpts from) the diary of a concentration camp guard. Simple, banal, entries about his family, the same sorts of concerns as anyone else in wartime, and the occasional entry about how many people had been 'processed' by his camp. If you'd met him, he'd probably have seemed like a friendly and reasonable person, doing a job just like any other. It just happened that his job involved working people to death. Reading statements like the recent comment by an Apple exec about how great Foxconn's ability to get people up in the middle of the night to make a change to a product design reminds me that this attitude is still alive in senior positions.
I came here to say the same thing. Banning publication is a service to anyone who, like me, might have the misguided belief that they'd learn something by reading it. Other than that Hitler was a semi-literate drooling moron with a god complex, I mean, which can be learned from other far less painful sources.
Reading the bible, it's clear that God is deeply insecure and has about the emotional maturity of a two year old right through the old testament. In the new testament he gets laid and turns into a hippy.
Soon, in this case, is still a few years away. MPEG-2 was published in 1996, so any patents in it are likely to have been filed by at least 1995. This still leaves three more years before they all expire. Amusingly, TFA (which is full of flamebait) seems to think that both MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 Part 2 were released in 2002, and that DVDs were first released in 2002. Those DVDs I saw in 1998 containing MPEG-2 video must have come from a time traveller...
You know, when I was a small child I was taught that there's no such thing as a free lunch: if a service is 'free' then you should work out why you're not being charged for it, who is really paying, and why. I was also taught the aphorism that few things are more expensive than a free service. Neither of these things were particularly insightful observations: they were things my parents had been taught by their parents. Somehow, when the Internet is involved, this basic common sense seems to be lost on a lot of people.
Would they really be able to convince Amazon or Apple or Sony to sell the books DRM free from their marketplaces?
Who cares? Purchasers have three choices:
Buy from Amazon, works on the Kindle.
Buy from Apple, works on the iPad.
Buy directly from Tor, works anywhere.
Which do you think Tor would rather they do? Not sure about Tor, but my publisher really likes direct sales of eBooks because the margin is higher (they get to keep the cut that the retailer usually takes). In fact, this is one of the main reasons why the music labels dropped DRM on music - it prevented the retailers controlling the channel.
Or of publishers like Pearson and O'Reilly, who also don't use DRM in their eBooks (if you buy them via Amazon you may get Kindle DRM, but not if you buy them directly), but also have a sufficiently large turnover that the example they set is relevant.
I have a US bank account which is very much like the grandparent described. I also managed to get them to give me the login credentials over the phone knowing only my name, address, and date of birth. Security there is appalling and in any other vaguely civilised country would mean that they would be liable for pretty much anything bad that happened to my account.
In contrast, my UK bank has an authentication scheme much as you describe. Any time I pay a new person (or a large amount), I need to separately authenticate that transaction, including typing the amount into the external device that generates a single-use token from the chip on my card. The debit card from my US bank doesn't even have a chip...
In theory, a distributed botnet could attempt a brute force crack from multiple sources against one account, but how often would that happen unless you were specifically targeted in the first place?
I have a colocated server that sees this on SSH, and it isn't even hosting anything important. Each bot is blocked after a couple of tries (for increasing periods of time). Given the number of attacks I see on an unimportant server, I'd imagine ones like hotmail would see a huge number. It's also probably much harder for them to distinguish legitimate failures from real attacks.
If you choose a weak password and your hotmail account is compromised, then it's no more Microsoft's fault than it's Google's fault if you choose a weak password for your GMail account and that's compromised. The only real fail for Microsoft here (assuming it wasn't compromised due to a vulnerability in Hotmail) is allowing weak passwords, and since he used the same one in GMail then it's also a problem there.
That's not what being backed by something means. It just means that computational work is done to create bitcoins. A gold-backed currency is not backed by the miners' effort in digging gold out of the ground, it is backed by the fact that you are guaranteed to be able to exchange it for gold. The US dollar is not backed by the effort involved in printing bits of green paper, it is backed by the promise of the US government to accept it in payment for taxes (and the legal requirement that US citizens must accept them for settling debts).
Bitcoins take real effort to create, but this is not effort that creates something, and that's the problem. It's like using ash as a currency and saying 'well, you get energy when you burn whatever you needed to create the ash, so it's backed by that energy'. You can't take the ash and turn it into that energy, and you can't take a bitcoin and change it into useful computational work. That proof-of-computation is not useful, because it is not proof of useful computation. It is just proof that you've run an algorithm that generates a magic number. The only value comes if you can persuade people to all share the illusion that that magic number is valuable. Historically, there have only been two ways of doing that:
Force of arms: accept this currency or we will have you thrown in prison / shot. This must be backed by a reasonable expectation that you can actually enforce it.
Trust: accept this currency and we promise to accept it in exchange for things of a similar value in the future. This only works if you are a large and trusted organisation, such as a bank or the government of a relatively successful economy.
By the promise of the US government to accept them in payment for taxes. With the federal income tax rate at over 10%, this guarantees that there is always at least one group that will be consuming a lot of US dollars every year, and another group (US taxpayers) that will need them for this purpose. It also derives a lot of its value from the fact that it is used as the currency for trading oil - if you want oil, you need US dollars.
How does an average consumer user encode in WebM out of iMovie?
Install the QuickTime WebM codec and select 'export'.
How does the average consumer alter the hardware decoder in modern smartphones and tablets to decode WebM format instead of H.264?
I can't think of any modern SoCs that come with H.264 decoders in hardware. They come with some specialised DSPs for image and video processing, but most of the steps that they accelerate in H.264 are also present in VP8, and in numerous other codecs.
fuck you for being in favour of removing my freedom of choice to use H.264.
Did you check the manual for your device? If you do, then you will notice some very small print telling you that the H.264 output that you record may only be used for noncommercial purposes, and if you want to use it commercially (which includes putting it on a web site with ads) then you will need to buy a separate patent license for commercial use of H.264.
RSA? Someone working in GCHQ invented the same algorithm a few decades earlier, but didn't disclose it. In the intervening period, no one came up with it even though there was an obvious need for this kind of cryptography. I'd say it's pretty close to the canonical example of an algorithm deserving a patent: not obvious, not trivial, documented well enough that anyone could implement it, and with a clear use.
On the other hand, things like Marching Cubes are pretty obvious - it's basically the naive way of doing isosurfacing from a voxel data set, and to make matters worse the algorithm in the original patent application was wrong.
Right at the far extreme are things like Amazon's one-click patent, which don't even describe enough of the system to be able to be used to implement what was described in the application. To make this even worse, pretty much any moderately competent web developer could implement it without referring to the patent just by looking at the UI.
No, he's right. A currency with those properties would be worth billions. However, for it to have those properties it would have to be backed by something. It doesn't really matter what it's backed by, it could be lumps of metal, the value of a company, the promise of a government, or even the promise of doing some computational work in the future, as long as all parties agree that it's something of value. The problem with bitcoin is that it is backed by the promise of doing some computational make-work, not even useful computation.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do people insist on calling him a moron?
Judging by his writing style, which is incoherent, rambling, and in a lot of places just plain wrong. He was charismatic, but from what I've read about the Nazis most of the successes (e.g. the invasion of most of Europe and the militarisation of Germany) were either orchestrated by other people, were blind luck (and failed miserably when he tried to repeat them), but most of the disasters for them (e.g. the invasion of Russia) happened when Hitler overrode the opinions of the people he'd previously let get on with running the empire.
The allies didn't underestimate Hitler so much as underestimate the ability of competent people to ride the coat tails of a charismatic leader. If he'd been assassinated in the late '30s, most of Europe would probably be speaking German now...
Do you keep those form letters? When I get one from my MP, I leave it out on my coffee table. When people come around, they often notice the House of Commons letterhead and ask what it is. I show them that it's an example of him acting against the interests of his constituents and not replying to any of the points I made. Does it make a difference? I have no idea, but if it convinces half a dozen people vote against him then that's noticeable in an election where the difference between the winning candidate and the second place was only about 800 votes...
You know, that's only true as long as the majority of the US population keeps voting for the person who spends the most money...
Random fact: 20 years after running an advert saying 'Why 1984 won't be like 1984' a computer company introduced a flat screen computer with a built-in camera. I wondered if the answer to their original comment was 'delays in R&D'.
So, how many problems in the US in, say, the last 10 years have been solved by an armed populous? The USAPATRIOT Act? The DMCA? The TSA?
Or do bullets just act as a security blanket to prevent people from bothering to get actively involved in the democratic process because they 'can always overthrow the government later if it gets really bad...'
In wales, at least, Plaid has pretty sane policies towards IP. My Plaid MEP has spent much of her time campaigning for shorter copyright terms and against software patents.
Rather than the votes cast, take a look at how many people turned up for the debates. I count 19 in that picture, but there are probably a few out of camera shot. The other two hundred just turned up for the vote. In the original Slashdot article about the act, there was copy of that picture but with the caption changed to 'Democracy FAIL'. Somehow, very appropriate.
You know who else published Mein Kampf? The NAZIs!
It's a shame that a big part of the reason for it being banned in Germany was the statement that Nazi germany was a very efficient system of government. That's something that really needs repeating, every time someone proposes a law aimed at increasing the efficiency of their government...
The most truly terrifying source I've read from the second world war was (a translation of excerpts from) the diary of a concentration camp guard. Simple, banal, entries about his family, the same sorts of concerns as anyone else in wartime, and the occasional entry about how many people had been 'processed' by his camp. If you'd met him, he'd probably have seemed like a friendly and reasonable person, doing a job just like any other. It just happened that his job involved working people to death. Reading statements like the recent comment by an Apple exec about how great Foxconn's ability to get people up in the middle of the night to make a change to a product design reminds me that this attitude is still alive in senior positions.
IT'S TERRIBLE! It's boring, repetitious, tedious, egowank
I came here to say the same thing. Banning publication is a service to anyone who, like me, might have the misguided belief that they'd learn something by reading it. Other than that Hitler was a semi-literate drooling moron with a god complex, I mean, which can be learned from other far less painful sources.
Reading the bible, it's clear that God is deeply insecure and has about the emotional maturity of a two year old right through the old testament. In the new testament he gets laid and turns into a hippy.
Soon, in this case, is still a few years away. MPEG-2 was published in 1996, so any patents in it are likely to have been filed by at least 1995. This still leaves three more years before they all expire. Amusingly, TFA (which is full of flamebait) seems to think that both MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 Part 2 were released in 2002, and that DVDs were first released in 2002. Those DVDs I saw in 1998 containing MPEG-2 video must have come from a time traveller...
You know, when I was a small child I was taught that there's no such thing as a free lunch: if a service is 'free' then you should work out why you're not being charged for it, who is really paying, and why. I was also taught the aphorism that few things are more expensive than a free service. Neither of these things were particularly insightful observations: they were things my parents had been taught by their parents. Somehow, when the Internet is involved, this basic common sense seems to be lost on a lot of people.
Would they really be able to convince Amazon or Apple or Sony to sell the books DRM free from their marketplaces?
Who cares? Purchasers have three choices:
Which do you think Tor would rather they do? Not sure about Tor, but my publisher really likes direct sales of eBooks because the margin is higher (they get to keep the cut that the retailer usually takes). In fact, this is one of the main reasons why the music labels dropped DRM on music - it prevented the retailers controlling the channel.
Or of publishers like Pearson and O'Reilly, who also don't use DRM in their eBooks (if you buy them via Amazon you may get Kindle DRM, but not if you buy them directly), but also have a sufficiently large turnover that the example they set is relevant.
I have a US bank account which is very much like the grandparent described. I also managed to get them to give me the login credentials over the phone knowing only my name, address, and date of birth. Security there is appalling and in any other vaguely civilised country would mean that they would be liable for pretty much anything bad that happened to my account.
In contrast, my UK bank has an authentication scheme much as you describe. Any time I pay a new person (or a large amount), I need to separately authenticate that transaction, including typing the amount into the external device that generates a single-use token from the chip on my card. The debit card from my US bank doesn't even have a chip...
In theory, a distributed botnet could attempt a brute force crack from multiple sources against one account, but how often would that happen unless you were specifically targeted in the first place?
I have a colocated server that sees this on SSH, and it isn't even hosting anything important. Each bot is blocked after a couple of tries (for increasing periods of time). Given the number of attacks I see on an unimportant server, I'd imagine ones like hotmail would see a huge number. It's also probably much harder for them to distinguish legitimate failures from real attacks.
If you choose a weak password and your hotmail account is compromised, then it's no more Microsoft's fault than it's Google's fault if you choose a weak password for your GMail account and that's compromised. The only real fail for Microsoft here (assuming it wasn't compromised due to a vulnerability in Hotmail) is allowing weak passwords, and since he used the same one in GMail then it's also a problem there.
That might tell you something, as you do know that pyramids and ponzi schemes never bounce back. Don't you?
No, I don't know that. I've only read about a few hundred such scams, but from what I recall a lot of them manage to have second or third waves.
That's not what being backed by something means. It just means that computational work is done to create bitcoins. A gold-backed currency is not backed by the miners' effort in digging gold out of the ground, it is backed by the fact that you are guaranteed to be able to exchange it for gold. The US dollar is not backed by the effort involved in printing bits of green paper, it is backed by the promise of the US government to accept it in payment for taxes (and the legal requirement that US citizens must accept them for settling debts).
Bitcoins take real effort to create, but this is not effort that creates something, and that's the problem. It's like using ash as a currency and saying 'well, you get energy when you burn whatever you needed to create the ash, so it's backed by that energy'. You can't take the ash and turn it into that energy, and you can't take a bitcoin and change it into useful computational work. That proof-of-computation is not useful, because it is not proof of useful computation. It is just proof that you've run an algorithm that generates a magic number. The only value comes if you can persuade people to all share the illusion that that magic number is valuable. Historically, there have only been two ways of doing that:
Bitcoin has neither.
By the promise of the US government to accept them in payment for taxes. With the federal income tax rate at over 10%, this guarantees that there is always at least one group that will be consuming a lot of US dollars every year, and another group (US taxpayers) that will need them for this purpose. It also derives a lot of its value from the fact that it is used as the currency for trading oil - if you want oil, you need US dollars.
How does an average consumer user encode in WebM out of iMovie?
Install the QuickTime WebM codec and select 'export'.
How does the average consumer alter the hardware decoder in modern smartphones and tablets to decode WebM format instead of H.264?
I can't think of any modern SoCs that come with H.264 decoders in hardware. They come with some specialised DSPs for image and video processing, but most of the steps that they accelerate in H.264 are also present in VP8, and in numerous other codecs.
fuck you for being in favour of removing my freedom of choice to use H.264.
Did you check the manual for your device? If you do, then you will notice some very small print telling you that the H.264 output that you record may only be used for noncommercial purposes, and if you want to use it commercially (which includes putting it on a web site with ads) then you will need to buy a separate patent license for commercial use of H.264.
Can you cite a software patent that has merit?
RSA? Someone working in GCHQ invented the same algorithm a few decades earlier, but didn't disclose it. In the intervening period, no one came up with it even though there was an obvious need for this kind of cryptography. I'd say it's pretty close to the canonical example of an algorithm deserving a patent: not obvious, not trivial, documented well enough that anyone could implement it, and with a clear use.
On the other hand, things like Marching Cubes are pretty obvious - it's basically the naive way of doing isosurfacing from a voxel data set, and to make matters worse the algorithm in the original patent application was wrong.
Right at the far extreme are things like Amazon's one-click patent, which don't even describe enough of the system to be able to be used to implement what was described in the application. To make this even worse, pretty much any moderately competent web developer could implement it without referring to the patent just by looking at the UI.
No, he's right. A currency with those properties would be worth billions. However, for it to have those properties it would have to be backed by something. It doesn't really matter what it's backed by, it could be lumps of metal, the value of a company, the promise of a government, or even the promise of doing some computational work in the future, as long as all parties agree that it's something of value. The problem with bitcoin is that it is backed by the promise of doing some computational make-work, not even useful computation.