Those laws get applied all the time to recognized political, religious or commercial speech, and come up in libel, slander, and fraud cases. Even if sexually related speech should have all the protections of other speech, sexual aspects shouldn't give such speech more protection than we would give to philosophical, scientific, or political speech.
Private use should absolutely be more protected than public commercial use. Unless we want to live in an inside-out society where what happens in private is everyone's business but the public things (foreign policy, lobbying, corporate influence in the government, etc.) must not be discussed.
If neither of the two is itself illegal, then prima facie the combination is not illegal.
Put enough legal black dots onto a legal white page, and you can create something illegal. Similarly, knives and human bodies are not illegal, but putting one in the other may be illegal.
Photoshopping kids' heads onto naked adults is sick, disgusting, immoral, and/or unethical? Who made you the thought police? It's not like he was handing them out on the street corner or in a school yard. Would it have been just fine if he age-progressed the faces to look like adult faces, like they do for missing child posters?
Do you not have excellent math skills or something?
There is no observable difference to the copyright owner between a library and people with 1,000 copies of a song that was paid for once, so long as none of them play it at the same time. The owner gets paid for one song, and 1,000 people get to listen to it practically whenever they want. The only difference is that the library enforces that only one copy is played at a time, whereas it's only statistically likely that one pirated song out of 1,000 is being played at any given time. I don't have any idea if 1,000 is the appropriate statistical number, but for any given song at any given time, there is a number of purchased copies and an average number of people listening to that song per minute. Divide that average by the length of the song and multiply by the number of owned copies, and there's your number.
Obviously the copyright owner sells fewer copies in the library scenario, but that just means the business model of selling songs has to change.
Okay, so you have a means of magically separating air in a box into slightly warmer and slightly cooler regions indefinitely. Put a heat pipe and a thermocouple or sterling engine between the two sides.
You will *always* have a distribution of energies in the molecules, and in fact having a uniform energy for every single molecule would have much less entropy than a random box full of gas. Random collisions are sufficient to produce a gaussian distribution of energy states from a completely uniform set of energy states, and from this distribution maxwell's demon will always be able to produce a temperature gradient, allowing free energy extraction across the difference.
When the universe is in heat death, there will still be a distribution of energies. It will be an incredibly narrow distribution, but if maxwell's demon could still separate them into warmer and cooler regions, free energy could still be extracted. In fact, a series of maxwell's demons could produce an arbitrarily large temperature difference at either end.
In the old days, the sick and disabled died due to unpreventable natural causes. Today, we're able to save their lives, although perhaps not reverse disability. In the future, reversing disabilities will be as common as life saving treatment is today. I think it's perfectly rational to keep people in deep comas or children who age improperly around in the hope that they might be cured. In the long run, there are vastly fewer people in this category than the entire population, so it's not a measurable drain on society. To me, it seems like a reasonable tradeoff. Occasionally you get surprising results like Ambien waking people up from certain types of comas.
If the child in this story were able to get a treatment allowing her to start growing normally, would you still consider euthanasia the right choice? What if there's a 50% probability of such a treatment developing within the next 20 or 30 years when it would still be viable to treat her?
D32JFS3 / D32JFS3 = XXXXXXX (he has now established the encrypted data for the value 1).
division is the solution to a multiplicative and additive identity: dividend = quotient*divisor + remainder.
Homomorphic encryption allows multiplication and addition of ciphertext, but not division, because the quotient would be encrypted. There is no algorithm to determine a quotient such that the remainder is less than the divisor (because the less than operator does not exist in homomorphic encryption), which is required to solve a standard division problem.
It may also be true that the cipher relies on overdefinition of numbers, e.g. A=E(1) may not equal B=E(1) for any two encryptions, but D(A) = D(B) = 1. This can be accomplished by carrying random state within the ciphertext that accumulates with operations but does not affect the decrypted result.
Maxwell's demon would violate the second law of thermodynamics. There is, in fact, no physical law propping the second law up; it's just the statistical average for the universe in general. There are potential futures where all the atoms in a gas randomly fly to one side of its container, allowing us to shove a piston in there and extract free energy from them when they expand again. The likelihood of such an event is so low that it's about as likely as angels descending from heaven and doing our work for us. On the quantum level, you might be able to get a free energy machine to work for a little while because of the simplicity. E.g. if there's a 49% chance of lower entropy and 51% chance of increasing entropy for some simple reaction, and you run enough experiments, you can get an arbitrarily long sequences of entropy decreasing actions. But over time, all the experiments would average out to a net increase in entropy (e.g. no free energy in the long run).
If you're a many worlds type of person, the solution is obvious; just don't explore the statistically likely universes. Build a bomb big enough to destroy the entire earth, and detonate it when the free energy machine doesn't work. The only remaining humans will be in branches of the multiverse where free energy is working just fine. A bit extreme, but it's one way to get rid of that pesky second law.
Is there a difference between selling pirated CDs and having some MP3s sitting in the upload folder of P2P software? If not, is there a difference between potentially uploading mp3s and publicly performing a copyrighted song by singing or humming it in a crowd? Is there a difference between singing a song which is on a CD you own versus singing a song which you only heard for free on the radio, or perhaps even heard via public performance infringement from someone's cell phone ring tone? I think it's obvious that personal use is almost always fair use, versus infringement for profit. File sharing is much closer in actual harm and intent to playing a stereo in a public place, or even a library. The only difference is that libraries are so inefficient right now that people don't automatically see the similarity. If you could check a CD out from a library, play the song you wanted, and return it in no more time than it took to play the song, it would be indistinguishable in effect from casual P2P file sharing.
How was the power output of 2/3hp actually measured? Estimating it based on speed, an estimate of wind speed, and an estimate of drag could lead to some inaccuracy. I'd believe the dynamometer more, to be honest. Does yours measure real wheel power via motor resistance or some other method?
Most free/OSS media players (including vlc and mplayer) just use libavcodec (ffmpeg) as the backend.
Here's the list of projects using ffmpeg. Differences in playback are probably due to hardware or the particular options selected in a given media player and the output driver (Xv, SDL, OpenGL, DirectX, etc.).
Why spend my last $50,000 to develop and produce a product if MegaCorp can (legally) repackage it and flood the market within three months, at half the price, putting me out of business?
If you can recoup that $50,000 with a moderate profit within those three months, then it seems like a fair trade to me. If you can invest $50,000 and then reap millions or billions of dollars off of that $50,000 investment, it points to a skewed economic model. Look at it this way; no matter what patents you hold there will be a perfectly legal knockoff device out within a year anyway. One that is designed to avoid your patents and have some sort of nifty feature to differentiate it in the market. That's just the nature of manufacturing.
It's pretty simple to implement if you have access to the DFA for the regular expression by just adding a transition to an empty accepting state when the end-of-string symbol is encountered in any existing state, and returning the position in the string at which the match fails. This would be hard to do in general by re-using an existing regular expression engine, unless it allows manipulation of the DFA state machine and returns the character position that caused a potential string to fail to match, since it would basically involve building the DFA from the regular expression, modifying it, and then translating it back into a regular expression that could be passed to the engine. PCRE supports partial matches and can return the partially matched string in some circumstances, which would allow one to find the problem character by chopping characters off the end of the string until a partial match occurs.
See this post about the problem that at least predates the patent by a few years. Unfortunately, no one mentions how to solve the problem in the regexp library.
The IBM patent includes some other features such as ignoring invalid characters in an input string and continuing to match the remaining characters. This could be accomplished by further modifying the regular expression engine to not return failure when there is no transition from a state for a particular character in the trial string, but to merely flag the character as invalid and remain in the same state and trying the next character in the string. The return value for such a function could just be a array of boolean flags for each character in the trial string identifying it as valid or invalid.
Overall, it looks like a novel use of DFAs for user interface feedback. Still, not something I'd consider worthy of a patent.
I can apply hundreds or thousands of foot pounds of torque by standing on a long lever. However, I cannot produce more than about.09 horsepower for any length of time. Uniform torque through the power band is important for good acceleration unless you have a continuously variable transmission, but other than that the maximum power and efficiency is what matters (and motors are far better at providing constant torque than internal combustion engines). 0-60 in 4s is rather slow for a supercar, but if it can maintain a higher efficiency by regenerative braking it may have a chance. Electric motors can usually handle 150-200% of their rated power for short bursts, like accelerating out of a turn using the energy regenerated from breaking coming into it.
It passed the decrypted packet_length value back to the other end in an error message, according to the article. Shouldn't that have allowed arbitrary recovery of plaintext by just xoring the returned packet length with the previous ciphertext block used as the IV?
Putting my sysadmin cap on, the first thing that comes to mind when seeing a Slackware, or for that matter Gentoo, box is "Oh God no, a tweaker".
If you have to administer a slackware user's box, it probably means they have died. To all my fellow slackers, don't forget to put the root password and some documentation in your will.
If it weren't for some users flooding the network with massive filesharing packets, this would all be a non-issue. Actually, for most users it still is since most users are not affected at all by bandwidth strangling.
So hulu, youtube, and itunes (not to mention spam) are going to go away if filesharing is turned off on the entire Internet? Riiiight.
I think this is just Microsoft trying to embrace and extend. There's no better way to do that then making most existing C and C++ code invalid. The quickest alternative, of course, is to write it in C# or some other embraced language.
Hypocritically, Microsoft did NOT add memset to the banned list despite it having almost exactly the same problems as memcpy. Why? Almost every MSDN example begins with "memset(somestruct,0,sizeof(somestruct))" and invalidating every MSDN example would probably look bad.
As you pointed out, the size of the destination buffer makes no sense when dealing with pure pointers. Often memcpy is used to move memory around inside larger buffers, which completely invalidates memcpy_s as a safe replacement. memcpy is also often used to copy smaller buffers into larger ones, and accidentally copying the uninitialized (or carefully crafted by some exploit) data that comes after the source object can be just as dangerous. The correct replacement, memcpy_overkill(void *source_object, size_t source_size, size_t source_offet, void *dest_object, size_t dest_size, size_t dest_offset, size_t count) is what they're REALLY looking for, but this is impractical primarily because of the heavy use of context-less pointers (to objects within arrays, or within some other structure; the void * in memcpy's prototype hints at further possibilities) in C and C++.
Right. There are, presumably, a finite non-negative integer number of "computers" consisting of a microprocessor and a display, of which a subset have ran Linux and an open source desktop environment (or maybe the text mode virtual console should count too?) for more than 50% of their uptime (not counting BIOS boot time). Presumably, a subset of computers have also ran Windows for more than 50% of their uptime. Clearly, those subsets are not distinct because of virtual machines, so it is possible for the subset of computers that "run Linux" to overlap the subset that "run Windows", but that shouldn't hinder the ability of anyone to state the actual number of computers in those subsets.
Actually collecting the statistics may prove difficult, but that should be interpreted as "the objectivity of limited surveys is just a myth." Picking on numbers is just silly.
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Those laws get applied all the time to recognized political, religious or commercial speech, and come up in libel, slander, and fraud cases. Even if sexually related speech should have all the protections of other speech, sexual aspects shouldn't give such speech more protection than we would give to philosophical, scientific, or political speech.
Private use should absolutely be more protected than public commercial use. Unless we want to live in an inside-out society where what happens in private is everyone's business but the public things (foreign policy, lobbying, corporate influence in the government, etc.) must not be discussed.
Put enough legal black dots onto a legal white page, and you can create something illegal. Similarly, knives and human bodies are not illegal, but putting one in the other may be illegal.
Do you not have excellent math skills or something?
Encryption and multiple backup sites.
Anyone remember the CD rootkits?
There is no observable difference to the copyright owner between a library and people with 1,000 copies of a song that was paid for once, so long as none of them play it at the same time. The owner gets paid for one song, and 1,000 people get to listen to it practically whenever they want. The only difference is that the library enforces that only one copy is played at a time, whereas it's only statistically likely that one pirated song out of 1,000 is being played at any given time. I don't have any idea if 1,000 is the appropriate statistical number, but for any given song at any given time, there is a number of purchased copies and an average number of people listening to that song per minute. Divide that average by the length of the song and multiply by the number of owned copies, and there's your number.
Obviously the copyright owner sells fewer copies in the library scenario, but that just means the business model of selling songs has to change.
Okay, so you have a means of magically separating air in a box into slightly warmer and slightly cooler regions indefinitely. Put a heat pipe and a thermocouple or sterling engine between the two sides.
You will *always* have a distribution of energies in the molecules, and in fact having a uniform energy for every single molecule would have much less entropy than a random box full of gas. Random collisions are sufficient to produce a gaussian distribution of energy states from a completely uniform set of energy states, and from this distribution maxwell's demon will always be able to produce a temperature gradient, allowing free energy extraction across the difference.
When the universe is in heat death, there will still be a distribution of energies. It will be an incredibly narrow distribution, but if maxwell's demon could still separate them into warmer and cooler regions, free energy could still be extracted. In fact, a series of maxwell's demons could produce an arbitrarily large temperature difference at either end.
In the old days, the sick and disabled died due to unpreventable natural causes. Today, we're able to save their lives, although perhaps not reverse disability. In the future, reversing disabilities will be as common as life saving treatment is today. I think it's perfectly rational to keep people in deep comas or children who age improperly around in the hope that they might be cured. In the long run, there are vastly fewer people in this category than the entire population, so it's not a measurable drain on society. To me, it seems like a reasonable tradeoff. Occasionally you get surprising results like Ambien waking people up from certain types of comas. If the child in this story were able to get a treatment allowing her to start growing normally, would you still consider euthanasia the right choice? What if there's a 50% probability of such a treatment developing within the next 20 or 30 years when it would still be viable to treat her?
D32JFS3 / D32JFS3 = XXXXXXX (he has now established the encrypted data for the value 1).
division is the solution to a multiplicative and additive identity: dividend = quotient*divisor + remainder.
Homomorphic encryption allows multiplication and addition of ciphertext, but not division, because the quotient would be encrypted. There is no algorithm to determine a quotient such that the remainder is less than the divisor (because the less than operator does not exist in homomorphic encryption), which is required to solve a standard division problem.
It may also be true that the cipher relies on overdefinition of numbers, e.g. A=E(1) may not equal B=E(1) for any two encryptions, but D(A) = D(B) = 1. This can be accomplished by carrying random state within the ciphertext that accumulates with operations but does not affect the decrypted result.
Maxwell's demon would violate the second law of thermodynamics. There is, in fact, no physical law propping the second law up; it's just the statistical average for the universe in general. There are potential futures where all the atoms in a gas randomly fly to one side of its container, allowing us to shove a piston in there and extract free energy from them when they expand again. The likelihood of such an event is so low that it's about as likely as angels descending from heaven and doing our work for us. On the quantum level, you might be able to get a free energy machine to work for a little while because of the simplicity. E.g. if there's a 49% chance of lower entropy and 51% chance of increasing entropy for some simple reaction, and you run enough experiments, you can get an arbitrarily long sequences of entropy decreasing actions. But over time, all the experiments would average out to a net increase in entropy (e.g. no free energy in the long run).
If you're a many worlds type of person, the solution is obvious; just don't explore the statistically likely universes. Build a bomb big enough to destroy the entire earth, and detonate it when the free energy machine doesn't work. The only remaining humans will be in branches of the multiverse where free energy is working just fine. A bit extreme, but it's one way to get rid of that pesky second law.
Is there a difference between selling pirated CDs and having some MP3s sitting in the upload folder of P2P software? If not, is there a difference between potentially uploading mp3s and publicly performing a copyrighted song by singing or humming it in a crowd? Is there a difference between singing a song which is on a CD you own versus singing a song which you only heard for free on the radio, or perhaps even heard via public performance infringement from someone's cell phone ring tone? I think it's obvious that personal use is almost always fair use, versus infringement for profit. File sharing is much closer in actual harm and intent to playing a stereo in a public place, or even a library. The only difference is that libraries are so inefficient right now that people don't automatically see the similarity. If you could check a CD out from a library, play the song you wanted, and return it in no more time than it took to play the song, it would be indistinguishable in effect from casual P2P file sharing.
"Hive/Hadoop cluster at Facebook stores more than 2PB of uncompressed data and routinely loads 15 TB of data daily."
How was the power output of 2/3hp actually measured? Estimating it based on speed, an estimate of wind speed, and an estimate of drag could lead to some inaccuracy. I'd believe the dynamometer more, to be honest. Does yours measure real wheel power via motor resistance or some other method?
Most free/OSS media players (including vlc and mplayer) just use libavcodec (ffmpeg) as the backend.
Here's the list of projects using ffmpeg. Differences in playback are probably due to hardware or the particular options selected in a given media player and the output driver (Xv, SDL, OpenGL, DirectX, etc.).
Just turn on a blur/soften filter. It's probably what WMP is doing.
Why spend my last $50,000 to develop and produce a product if MegaCorp can (legally) repackage it and flood the market within three months, at half the price, putting me out of business?
If you can recoup that $50,000 with a moderate profit within those three months, then it seems like a fair trade to me. If you can invest $50,000 and then reap millions or billions of dollars off of that $50,000 investment, it points to a skewed economic model. Look at it this way; no matter what patents you hold there will be a perfectly legal knockoff device out within a year anyway. One that is designed to avoid your patents and have some sort of nifty feature to differentiate it in the market. That's just the nature of manufacturing.
People that appreciate/quote/use/follow xkcd... XKCD followers to XKCD are much like mud to a mud-guard.
So people who don't read xkcd are like mud that flies into other cars' windshields? Maybe you need a more precise car analogy.
It's pretty simple to implement if you have access to the DFA for the regular expression by just adding a transition to an empty accepting state when the end-of-string symbol is encountered in any existing state, and returning the position in the string at which the match fails. This would be hard to do in general by re-using an existing regular expression engine, unless it allows manipulation of the DFA state machine and returns the character position that caused a potential string to fail to match, since it would basically involve building the DFA from the regular expression, modifying it, and then translating it back into a regular expression that could be passed to the engine. PCRE supports partial matches and can return the partially matched string in some circumstances, which would allow one to find the problem character by chopping characters off the end of the string until a partial match occurs.
See this post about the problem that at least predates the patent by a few years. Unfortunately, no one mentions how to solve the problem in the regexp library.
The IBM patent includes some other features such as ignoring invalid characters in an input string and continuing to match the remaining characters. This could be accomplished by further modifying the regular expression engine to not return failure when there is no transition from a state for a particular character in the trial string, but to merely flag the character as invalid and remain in the same state and trying the next character in the string. The return value for such a function could just be a array of boolean flags for each character in the trial string identifying it as valid or invalid.
Overall, it looks like a novel use of DFAs for user interface feedback. Still, not something I'd consider worthy of a patent.
I can apply hundreds or thousands of foot pounds of torque by standing on a long lever. However, I cannot produce more than about .09 horsepower for any length of time. Uniform torque through the power band is important for good acceleration unless you have a continuously variable transmission, but other than that the maximum power and efficiency is what matters (and motors are far better at providing constant torque than internal combustion engines). 0-60 in 4s is rather slow for a supercar, but if it can maintain a higher efficiency by regenerative braking it may have a chance. Electric motors can usually handle 150-200% of their rated power for short bursts, like accelerating out of a turn using the energy regenerated from breaking coming into it.
It passed the decrypted packet_length value back to the other end in an error message, according to the article. Shouldn't that have allowed arbitrary recovery of plaintext by just xoring the returned packet length with the previous ciphertext block used as the IV?
So is that roughly 11 years of total uptime now, or did you have to upgrade/replace it?
Putting my sysadmin cap on, the first thing that comes to mind when seeing a Slackware, or for that matter Gentoo, box is "Oh God no, a tweaker".
If you have to administer a slackware user's box, it probably means they have died. To all my fellow slackers, don't forget to put the root password and some documentation in your will.
If it weren't for some users flooding the network with massive filesharing packets, this would all be a non-issue. Actually, for most users it still is since most users are not affected at all by bandwidth strangling.
So hulu, youtube, and itunes (not to mention spam) are going to go away if filesharing is turned off on the entire Internet? Riiiight.
So why is strncpy in the banned function list?
I think this is just Microsoft trying to embrace and extend. There's no better way to do that then making most existing C and C++ code invalid. The quickest alternative, of course, is to write it in C# or some other embraced language.
Hypocritically, Microsoft did NOT add memset to the banned list despite it having almost exactly the same problems as memcpy. Why? Almost every MSDN example begins with "memset(somestruct,0,sizeof(somestruct))" and invalidating every MSDN example would probably look bad.
As you pointed out, the size of the destination buffer makes no sense when dealing with pure pointers. Often memcpy is used to move memory around inside larger buffers, which completely invalidates memcpy_s as a safe replacement. memcpy is also often used to copy smaller buffers into larger ones, and accidentally copying the uninitialized (or carefully crafted by some exploit) data that comes after the source object can be just as dangerous. The correct replacement, memcpy_overkill(void *source_object, size_t source_size, size_t source_offet, void *dest_object, size_t dest_size, size_t dest_offset, size_t count) is what they're REALLY looking for, but this is impractical primarily because of the heavy use of context-less pointers (to objects within arrays, or within some other structure; the void * in memcpy's prototype hints at further possibilities) in C and C++.
Right. There are, presumably, a finite non-negative integer number of "computers" consisting of a microprocessor and a display, of which a subset have ran Linux and an open source desktop environment (or maybe the text mode virtual console should count too?) for more than 50% of their uptime (not counting BIOS boot time). Presumably, a subset of computers have also ran Windows for more than 50% of their uptime. Clearly, those subsets are not distinct because of virtual machines, so it is possible for the subset of computers that "run Linux" to overlap the subset that "run Windows", but that shouldn't hinder the ability of anyone to state the actual number of computers in those subsets.
Actually collecting the statistics may prove difficult, but that should be interpreted as "the objectivity of limited surveys is just a myth." Picking on numbers is just silly.