The user entry can be modified as often as you like (we default to slightly less than once/month), while the admin key/password is constant, but unique to this particular PC.
Do they use PKCS#5 or similar to strengthen the user supplied passphrases? It also seems like it would be easier and safer to just encrypt the master key with an administrative public key and store it on the laptop and a server somewhere. That way individual admin keys aren't required for every single laptop, and laptops never need to know the private administrative key.
Why full disk encryption and not just the home directory?? Maybe things are so mixed up on Windows that you need full disk, but on OS X, Linux, and other Unixes it should be sufficient to encrypt only the home directory of users.
C:\Windows\Temp, the swap file, and the registry are some good examples. On Unix, what about/tmp and/var/{log,spool}? There are many places that sensitive data can end up that aren't under/home or Documents and Settings. Furthermore, if the system volume is not encrypted it is very easy to insert trojans or other malware into the operating system while the computer is offline. Either pulling the drive and modifying it or just booting the computer from USB or CD gives an attacker full control over the computer and its data once the authorized user logs back on.
A possible proof that the hard disk is the same one connected to the DSL/cable modem at the time MediaSentry was looking for stuff would be to find either a cookie or something in some log on the computer that contains its IP address and a timestamp. That would effectively prove that the computer was on the Internet at that time with that specific hard disk. I don't think the Windows event log stores DHCP IP addresses when they're assigned, but if it's a direct DSL connection it might have more verbose logging.
4. Ask them if they have the necessary licenses from Microsoft and any other companies to make copies of the data on the hard disk, including any legally purchased music they might encounter. Almost every forensic software package creates a complete duplicate of the hard disk as its first step to preserve the chain of evidence. Additionally, ask them if they will violate copyright law if they duplicate the hard disk and there are illegally copied media files on the disk that they don't own the copyright to. In criminal investigations, law enforcement is generally exempt from copyright law for the purposes of evidence gathering. I don't think individuals and companies have the same leeway during discovery, so basically the entire premise they are basing their case on will prevent them from performing an accurate forensic examination. Even if they don't make a duplicate copy of the drive, they will still be unlicensed to view certain files simply because the defendant doesn't have the right to relicense them. I imagine this has come up in courts before where companies try to hide things like trade secrets and copyrighted documents from discovery, but in those cases they are generally the sole owner of those documents and can be compelled to release them. A person owns almost none of the rights to software and other media on their own computer.
I think it's only fair that the plaintiffs should have to play by their own rules, e.g. that any use or copies of copyrighted material without explicit permission is absolutely forbidden.
Of course you know that's an exaggeration, but just out of curiosity, why do you think that (small percentage) should NOT own (larger percentage) of the world's wealth? Personally, I'd rather live in that world where I can move as high as my talent can take me, than live in a world of enforced "equality" that really means transferring money from the doers to the takers.
Where do you think rich people get their money? Trees? Rich people take their money from the profits of things that normal people buy, basically by skimming off the top of everyone else's labor. There's no way to become wealthy in a vacuum, the *only* way is to get a little slice of everyone else's pie.
In this case, the specific sequences connected to the disease was not common knowledge beforehand. In addition, you have to come up with relevant primers to amplify the relevant sequence in a specific, yet reproducible, manner to aid detection. I don't think anyone has really tried to challenge the exact scope of the patent, as it might be possible to circumvent it by changing the method or even trying to purify and detect the protein product instead. (However, that would NOT be a trivial thing to do, much harder than the current genetic test.)
The most important question is whether it would be worth it for any company, even a large one, to take the risk of patent litigation or infringement in order to find out. Most likely the actual test is very cheap and therefore wouldn't yield a large return on investment. It's safer for all the other companies to pay the patent extortion and pass the cost on to all of us. Even if you don't get this test, your health insurance rates are higher to pay for other people's tests.
I don't see what that has to do with anything. Someone asked someone else to stop linking directly to his content, which cost him money. Instead of acting like a decent human, he continued to do so. Now his lack of common courtesy has been penalized by the law. The system works.
That's like asking someone else not to give out the punchline to your jokes. It may be impolite, but there shouldn't be anything illegal about it, nor should it be cause for civil action. The relevant fact is that the HTTP server is honoring requests and serving up data. If you *don't* want deep linking to occur, just set a cookie on the main page that is required to download the content. It's incredibly simple to prevent most deep linking, or even better just set up bittorrent for large popular downloads.
I'm a bit torn here, for while I think that lawsuits over this issue are a bit over the top, I do have some sympathy for SFX. I fight leeches and deep linkers from Myspace all the time. They will deep link to audio files on my site, sometimes 10 clips at a time, and have them autoplay every time someone visits their profile. As you can imagine, this sucks the bandwidth right out of my site. I've had to resort to referrer logging so I don't have a huge bill at the end of the month.
What's funny is that your site appears to just be snippets of other media, and you're complaining about leechers and deep linkers. After all, one could argue that people who want to hear snippets of audio from some work could just go obtain a copy of that work and then listen to it on their own, so your entire audience is really composed of leeches. Not that I have a problem with fair use audio samples, but I definitely don't think it's too much of a burden for you to handle referrers properly so as not to waste bandwidth, especially when the alternative means implying some arbitrary terms of service for every HTTP transaction.
If I ask you to stop direct-linking to my content - content which I pay to transfer - and you don't, you're a shithead, and you should be fined.
Need I remind you that HTTP is a stateless protocol? If I connect to your server and request a document and you send it, that's your problem. If I needed permission to request documents from your server then I couldn't really fetch index.html in the first place, now could I? Don't forget that in the days of FTP, *everything* was a deep link if it was linked at all, but the FTP server itself presented the terms of use whenever a user connected. HTTP doesn't present the client with any terms of service, so none apply. If you want to provide "protected" content on your server, make sure it checks that the client is authorized to have it before sending it.
Except if you took a high resoluiton picture you'd actually have a copy, distinct from the original. A better analogy might be an artist puts their painting in a gallery window, and you open a shop across the street and put in a telescope so people can see the orignal painting, People still have to go *somewhere* to see the painting, and you *haven't* made an unauthorized copy, you just removed the original context (the gallery window) and replaced it with your own shop.
Yeah, but what if you stick a prism behind the telescope and let two people see it at once? What if you split the image from the telescope a hundred thousand ways and send the resulting photons to other galleries around the country? Sure, you might have to shine a really bright light on the picture or amplify the light stream to make it show up with any intensity at the galleries, but have you made any copies?
>> Information theory says information can not be created, only lost. Entropy is forever increasing. >> So where did the original order and information come from?
> It says no such thing. It'd be trivially wrong if it did, as order emerges from chaotic systems constantly.
Actually, what is true is that entropy is non-decreasing for any closed system, such as the universe. However, within such a closed system energy transfer from one region to another can decrease the local entropy of the receiving region. For instance, the sun provides the earth with enough energy to allow a local decrease of entropy, but on the whole the solar system is gaining entropy. When order emerges from chaotic systems there is a total increase in entropy, it's just that the chaotic system had a lot of energy to spare. Look at it this way: When an ordered system emerges from a chaotic system, how much energy would it take to put the ordered system back into the same chaotic state that preceded it? It would take the same amount of energy lost to entropy to reverse the ordered system to its chaotic predecessor, otherwise the conservation of energy would be violated.
In response to the original post, the order given to the original universe was simply a point source of incredibly high energy and low entropy (the big bang). From there, entropy has increased, as has order. If the universe had been created in a uniform state everywhere, it would have maximal entropy and no hope for any order.
I won't claim to be smart enough to solve the whole 'free will' debate, but personally I hope free will exists - it (in theory) allows us to help people improve themselves. Otherwise, as soon as someone is shown to have criminal tendencies you might as well just put a bullet in their head and dump them in a hole somewhere.
That's one way to remove bad tendencies from the brain, but there are subtler methods that don't require the death of the individual. Fixing brains will just become the next big business to replace the prison industry.
at the very base of quantum physics is the measurement problem: when a measurement is made, the many quantum possiblities of particles collapse into one actuality. so far, no one has any explanation of what determines which possibility becomes the actuality, and some physicists believe the choice is made by the conscious observer.
Actually, the act of observation simply occurs in every possible quantum universe, but to the observer it appears as if the other possibilities have vanished. That's the way the math works, and it's silly to assume that one "real" universe is all that exists, and that somehow probability magically works with entanglement to always produce consistent results. All the consistent universes exist, and the observers in each universe can understand what happens in the other universes although they're physically unreachable after quantum states collapse into separate universes.
Free will is just the collective hallucination of observers in every possible universe, each believing that the choices he made actually effected the universe. In reality, each observer's choices are decided for her by the universe, after which her brain thinks it has made a decision. So in a sense free will exists, because every conceivable action happens in some universe, allowing the brain to think it has made a free choice in all cases.
And now, every picture on Myspace will become part of your Permanent Record.
And every picture you take of public figures and post on the Internet will be part of the permanent record, too. The power of an open society is that the rich and powerful cannot hide their actions from scrutiny.
First of all, what's the their probability of a false alarm? Even if they false alarm fairly infrequently, the vast amount of content on the Web means they could easily have a flood of false alarms, in addition to whatever actual copies are found. The user of the system is then going to have to have human beings sift through that flood to identify what's A) really a copy, B) whether that copy is infringing or not, and C) if so, is it worth taking action against the infringer?
You must be new here. The solution is D) Send a generic DMCA takedown notice to everyone and their ISP regardless of fair use.
I'm in what is almost certainly a tiny minority of Slashdotters in that I actually create copyrightable material rather than only consume it. I'm again in the minority in that I think copyrights are a good thing and again in the minority in that I can separate out the purpose of copyrights and the evil actions of the legal arms of **AA companies.
Tiny minority? Everyone who posts to slashdot is creating copyrighted material. Everyone who sends an email or writes on a post-it note is creating copyrighted material. Everyone with a myspace account creates copyrighted material. Don't pretend that you are part of an elite minority with special rights, the fact is that the creation and distribution of information is a normal human activity that everyone in the civilized world participates in. As part of this activity it is extremely common to quote other people and to comment on what they've said or created. It is likewise very common to share books, movies, and pictures with friends and other people either to simply share with them or to get their opinion on something. The fact that the Internet allows copies of information to be shared instead of one single physical object in no way changes the social implications of the sharing. Basically, copyright law is a horribly broken restraint on free society in the information age and is just being milked for money by the **AA and other companies.
I beg to disagree. The exp curve has no such thing. Only in relation to something else, you can point a definite limit; for example, the rate of technological evolution could surpass the rate of human learning ability at some point.
I think the proper reference point is the human lifespan. Sure, medicine and technology have progressed in the past and extended the lives of people who otherwise would have died young, but what he is predicting is enough medical and technological improvements to endlessly extend the human lifespan. E.g., at some point every human that is born will have *every* future development occur within their expected lifespan. That point may have even been sometime in the last century, Kurzeil certainly hopes so.
So you believe there is some magical algorithm which, when implemented, is self-aware? The "turing test" obfuscates the issue. It is not intelligent if it is not self-aware. Even if it can give the appearance of responding intelligently.
Such an algorithm exists, because there are intelligent animals (including ourselves) we can observe.
People are always giving the appearance of responding intelligently without actually being very intelligent. People in general are not that intelligent. We work with a very abstract and simplified model of the universe consisting mostly of "objects", large things obeying simple laws and having relatively simple properties. Only a few people are intelligent enough to understand physics and mathematics, and even fewer are intelligent enough to discover new things in those fields. Most of what the general public considers intelligence is the ability to say the right things at the right time in social situations, and some generic tool using skills. In that sense, current chatter-bots are almost good enough to fool a sizable segment of the population, especially if they don't know they're participating in a turing test. Our brains favor the familiar interpretation of events, and this always leads to over-simplification of problems and the rejection of statistical evaluation in favor of simple heuristics. AI will be much, much better. Eventually.
That logic is fallacious, even if the observable universe is a "simulation", then this simulation runs inside a real universe, and we're at the start again figuring out what the universe is.
That's even worse logic, because it assumes some "real" universe indistinguishable from a simulation. How can anything distinguish between a real universe and a simulation from within that universe? Science can't say whether any universe is real or not, because empirically every universe is real to the observers within it.
Plus I subscribe to another logic: if the universe is similar to a video game, then it's because as video games increase in complexity they start to approach the model of a little universe:D
At some point we'll be able to stick a sentient AI in our video games that's smart enough to devise the scientific method and philosophy and consider its video game to be a real universe. Who's to say it's not?
The best thing is that you can do the same thing with TCP/IP if you have to. Have the "server" tell both clients what ports to use and each can send a SYN packet to each other with the same ports and ip addresses, e.g. client A sends a SYN from Aip:Aport to Bip:Bport, and B sends from Bip:Bport to Aip:Aport. Whichever packet goes out first opens the firewall to return packets from the other side, so only one retry is necessary for both sides to get the SYN and send back a SYN_ACK. Some firewalls may not accept an incoming SYN on a connection in the SYN_SENT state, so in this case the client behind the broken firewall would have to tell the server what the ip, port, and sequence numbers for the SYN packet were and the server would forward the information to the other end so that the SYN_ACK could be sent back. This could be accomplished transparently if the server is able to spoof the SYN_ACK response to the client.
Complex instructions reduce the overall code size), reducing the need for code cache and RAM. Especially with 64 bit architectures this makes a big difference. Instead of 8 byte RISC instructions, the average instruction size is probably closer to 3 or 4 bytes (not including immediate values, which of course in 80x86 can be smaller than the machine word size). Obviously RISC chips can be designed with small instruction word sizes, and for instance a pretty good RISC instruction set could live in 32 bit words, but then there are extra alignment issues to deal with. Overall, I think the idea of having a compact instruction set wins out over the simplicity of a full RISC design. Not that there aren't things I'd change with 80x86, for instance it would be nice if the next generation of x86-64 chips would support a more RISCy 64-bit mode of execution for pure 64-bit code, allowing developers (or compilers) to make the tradeoff between code size and RISC speed advantages. x86-64 already includes 8 extra registers, so perhaps having another 16 (or 48) available only from a 64-bit RISC mode could help hasten the transition to a saner instruction set.
"Ycagwyw,1983,%" is a bit more hard to brute force attack than "password2".:)
On the other hand, if someone is always listening to the Stones I have a pretty good idea of some passwords to try.
By your method all I need to know is the age of the victim and where they grew up. Google for all dates in their lifetime plus 10 years before, organize the associated events by page-rank and then try every acronym of every popular phrase from that era in descending order of popularity and locality with each random character. My guess is fewer than a thousand tries for most people, less than a billion for everyone else. It's a very bad idea to use a password containing material available on the Internet, especially if it can be ranked by popularity. Consider this: Google is able to crawl every website on the Internet several times a month. It would be trivial for them to try every 1 to 20 byte subsequence, every acronym, and lots of alternate spellings of the text they see.
Diamonds are hard in terms of "they don't scratch" but are (relatively) brittle. I believe if you smash a diamond with a hammer it WILL shatter along its crystal faces. (I could be wrong on this)
As far as I can tell, diamond has a similar toughness to strong plastics. References from wikipedia on fracture toughness and diamond aren't really clear, but seem to put diamond between metals and general plastics in terms of toughness, hence my assumption that they are probably about as strong as polycarbonate lenses. I can't find any toughness values for plastic lenses or case studies of which material is actually tougher for use in glasses, though. I suppose I'll have to build a diamond press and try it for myself.
Insurance companies really don't want people to get hurt, since they have to pay for it. Invest in Healthcare instead.
On topic, the only thing I really want is industrial diamond glasses. No more soft plastic lenses or thick glass ones, just a few mm of diamond for any eye adjustment you could need. As an added bonus, you could use them to sharpen your knives.
I think we might be able to get the nuclear waste facilities to bury the RIAA in concrete out in Nevada somewhere, but only if they won't be able to contaminate the radioactive isotopes.
Slashdot Mirror
The user entry can be modified as often as you like (we default to slightly less than once/month), while the admin key/password is constant, but unique to this particular PC.
Do they use PKCS#5 or similar to strengthen the user supplied passphrases? It also seems like it would be easier and safer to just encrypt the master key with an administrative public key and store it on the laptop and a server somewhere. That way individual admin keys aren't required for every single laptop, and laptops never need to know the private administrative key.
Why full disk encryption and not just the home directory?? Maybe things are so mixed up on Windows that you need full disk, but on OS X, Linux, and other Unixes it should be sufficient to encrypt only the home directory of users.
/tmp and /var/{log,spool}? There are many places that sensitive data can end up that aren't under /home or Documents and Settings. Furthermore, if the system volume is not encrypted it is very easy to insert trojans or other malware into the operating system while the computer is offline. Either pulling the drive and modifying it or just booting the computer from USB or CD gives an attacker full control over the computer and its data once the authorized user logs back on.
C:\Windows\Temp, the swap file, and the registry are some good examples. On Unix, what about
A possible proof that the hard disk is the same one connected to the DSL/cable modem at the time MediaSentry was looking for stuff would be to find either a cookie or something in some log on the computer that contains its IP address and a timestamp. That would effectively prove that the computer was on the Internet at that time with that specific hard disk. I don't think the Windows event log stores DHCP IP addresses when they're assigned, but if it's a direct DSL connection it might have more verbose logging.
4. Ask them if they have the necessary licenses from Microsoft and any other companies to make copies of the data on the hard disk, including any legally purchased music they might encounter. Almost every forensic software package creates a complete duplicate of the hard disk as its first step to preserve the chain of evidence. Additionally, ask them if they will violate copyright law if they duplicate the hard disk and there are illegally copied media files on the disk that they don't own the copyright to. In criminal investigations, law enforcement is generally exempt from copyright law for the purposes of evidence gathering. I don't think individuals and companies have the same leeway during discovery, so basically the entire premise they are basing their case on will prevent them from performing an accurate forensic examination. Even if they don't make a duplicate copy of the drive, they will still be unlicensed to view certain files simply because the defendant doesn't have the right to relicense them. I imagine this has come up in courts before where companies try to hide things like trade secrets and copyrighted documents from discovery, but in those cases they are generally the sole owner of those documents and can be compelled to release them. A person owns almost none of the rights to software and other media on their own computer.
I think it's only fair that the plaintiffs should have to play by their own rules, e.g. that any use or copies of copyrighted material without explicit permission is absolutely forbidden.
Of course you know that's an exaggeration, but just out of curiosity, why do you think that (small percentage) should NOT own (larger percentage) of the world's wealth? Personally, I'd rather live in that world where I can move as high as my talent can take me, than live in a world of enforced "equality" that really means transferring money from the doers to the takers.
Where do you think rich people get their money? Trees? Rich people take their money from the profits of things that normal people buy, basically by skimming off the top of everyone else's labor. There's no way to become wealthy in a vacuum, the *only* way is to get a little slice of everyone else's pie.
In this case, the specific sequences connected to the disease was not common knowledge beforehand. In addition, you have to come up with relevant primers to amplify the relevant sequence in a specific, yet reproducible, manner to aid detection. I don't think anyone has really tried to challenge the exact scope of the patent, as it might be possible to circumvent it by changing the method or even trying to purify and detect the protein product instead. (However, that would NOT be a trivial thing to do, much harder than the current genetic test.)
The most important question is whether it would be worth it for any company, even a large one, to take the risk of patent litigation or infringement in order to find out. Most likely the actual test is very cheap and therefore wouldn't yield a large return on investment. It's safer for all the other companies to pay the patent extortion and pass the cost on to all of us. Even if you don't get this test, your health insurance rates are higher to pay for other people's tests.
I don't see what that has to do with anything. Someone asked someone else to stop linking directly to his content, which cost him money. Instead of acting like a decent human, he continued to do so. Now his lack of common courtesy has been penalized by the law. The system works.
That's like asking someone else not to give out the punchline to your jokes. It may be impolite, but there shouldn't be anything illegal about it, nor should it be cause for civil action. The relevant fact is that the HTTP server is honoring requests and serving up data. If you *don't* want deep linking to occur, just set a cookie on the main page that is required to download the content. It's incredibly simple to prevent most deep linking, or even better just set up bittorrent for large popular downloads.
I'm a bit torn here, for while I think that lawsuits over this issue are a bit over the top, I do have some sympathy for SFX. I fight leeches and deep linkers from Myspace all the time. They will deep link to audio files on my site, sometimes 10 clips at a time, and have them autoplay every time someone visits their profile. As you can imagine, this sucks the bandwidth right out of my site. I've had to resort to referrer logging so I don't have a huge bill at the end of the month.
What's funny is that your site appears to just be snippets of other media, and you're complaining about leechers and deep linkers. After all, one could argue that people who want to hear snippets of audio from some work could just go obtain a copy of that work and then listen to it on their own, so your entire audience is really composed of leeches. Not that I have a problem with fair use audio samples, but I definitely don't think it's too much of a burden for you to handle referrers properly so as not to waste bandwidth, especially when the alternative means implying some arbitrary terms of service for every HTTP transaction.
If I ask you to stop direct-linking to my content - content which I pay to transfer - and you don't, you're a shithead, and you should be fined.
Need I remind you that HTTP is a stateless protocol? If I connect to your server and request a document and you send it, that's your problem. If I needed permission to request documents from your server then I couldn't really fetch index.html in the first place, now could I? Don't forget that in the days of FTP, *everything* was a deep link if it was linked at all, but the FTP server itself presented the terms of use whenever a user connected. HTTP doesn't present the client with any terms of service, so none apply. If you want to provide "protected" content on your server, make sure it checks that the client is authorized to have it before sending it.
Except if you took a high resoluiton picture you'd actually have a copy, distinct from the original. A better analogy might be an artist puts their painting in a gallery window, and you open a shop across the street and put in a telescope so people can see the orignal painting, People still have to go *somewhere* to see the painting, and you *haven't* made an unauthorized copy, you just removed the original context (the gallery window) and replaced it with your own shop.
Yeah, but what if you stick a prism behind the telescope and let two people see it at once? What if you split the image from the telescope a hundred thousand ways and send the resulting photons to other galleries around the country? Sure, you might have to shine a really bright light on the picture or amplify the light stream to make it show up with any intensity at the galleries, but have you made any copies?
>> Information theory says information can not be created, only lost. Entropy is forever increasing.
>> So where did the original order and information come from?
> It says no such thing. It'd be trivially wrong if it did, as order emerges from chaotic systems constantly.
Actually, what is true is that entropy is non-decreasing for any closed system, such as the universe. However, within such a closed system energy transfer from one region to another can decrease the local entropy of the receiving region. For instance, the sun provides the earth with enough energy to allow a local decrease of entropy, but on the whole the solar system is gaining entropy. When order emerges from chaotic systems there is a total increase in entropy, it's just that the chaotic system had a lot of energy to spare. Look at it this way: When an ordered system emerges from a chaotic system, how much energy would it take to put the ordered system back into the same chaotic state that preceded it? It would take the same amount of energy lost to entropy to reverse the ordered system to its chaotic predecessor, otherwise the conservation of energy would be violated.
In response to the original post, the order given to the original universe was simply a point source of incredibly high energy and low entropy (the big bang). From there, entropy has increased, as has order. If the universe had been created in a uniform state everywhere, it would have maximal entropy and no hope for any order.
I won't claim to be smart enough to solve the whole 'free will' debate, but personally I hope free will exists - it (in theory) allows us to help people improve themselves. Otherwise, as soon as someone is shown to have criminal tendencies you might as well just put a bullet in their head and dump them in a hole somewhere.
That's one way to remove bad tendencies from the brain, but there are subtler methods that don't require the death of the individual. Fixing brains will just become the next big business to replace the prison industry.
at the very base of quantum physics is the measurement problem: when a measurement is made, the many quantum possiblities of particles collapse into one actuality. so far, no one has any explanation of what determines which possibility becomes the actuality, and some physicists believe the choice is made by the conscious observer.
Actually, the act of observation simply occurs in every possible quantum universe, but to the observer it appears as if the other possibilities have vanished. That's the way the math works, and it's silly to assume that one "real" universe is all that exists, and that somehow probability magically works with entanglement to always produce consistent results. All the consistent universes exist, and the observers in each universe can understand what happens in the other universes although they're physically unreachable after quantum states collapse into separate universes.
Free will is just the collective hallucination of observers in every possible universe, each believing that the choices he made actually effected the universe. In reality, each observer's choices are decided for her by the universe, after which her brain thinks it has made a decision. So in a sense free will exists, because every conceivable action happens in some universe, allowing the brain to think it has made a free choice in all cases.
And now, every picture on Myspace will become part of your Permanent Record.
And every picture you take of public figures and post on the Internet will be part of the permanent record, too. The power of an open society is that the rich and powerful cannot hide their actions from scrutiny.
First of all, what's the their probability of a false alarm? Even if they false alarm fairly infrequently, the vast amount of content on the Web means they could easily have a flood of false alarms, in addition to whatever actual copies are found. The user of the system is then going to have to have human beings sift through that flood to identify what's A) really a copy, B) whether that copy is infringing or not, and C) if so, is it worth taking action against the infringer?
You must be new here. The solution is D) Send a generic DMCA takedown notice to everyone and their ISP regardless of fair use.
I'm in what is almost certainly a tiny minority of Slashdotters in that I actually create copyrightable material rather than only consume it. I'm again in the minority in that I think copyrights are a good thing and again in the minority in that I can separate out the purpose of copyrights and the evil actions of the legal arms of **AA companies.
Tiny minority? Everyone who posts to slashdot is creating copyrighted material. Everyone who sends an email or writes on a post-it note is creating copyrighted material. Everyone with a myspace account creates copyrighted material. Don't pretend that you are part of an elite minority with special rights, the fact is that the creation and distribution of information is a normal human activity that everyone in the civilized world participates in. As part of this activity it is extremely common to quote other people and to comment on what they've said or created. It is likewise very common to share books, movies, and pictures with friends and other people either to simply share with them or to get their opinion on something. The fact that the Internet allows copies of information to be shared instead of one single physical object in no way changes the social implications of the sharing. Basically, copyright law is a horribly broken restraint on free society in the information age and is just being milked for money by the **AA and other companies.
I beg to disagree. The exp curve has no such thing. Only in relation to something else, you can point a definite limit; for example, the rate of technological evolution could surpass the rate of human learning ability at some point.
I think the proper reference point is the human lifespan. Sure, medicine and technology have progressed in the past and extended the lives of people who otherwise would have died young, but what he is predicting is enough medical and technological improvements to endlessly extend the human lifespan. E.g., at some point every human that is born will have *every* future development occur within their expected lifespan. That point may have even been sometime in the last century, Kurzeil certainly hopes so.
So you believe there is some magical algorithm which, when implemented, is self-aware? The "turing test" obfuscates the issue. It is not intelligent if it is not self-aware. Even if it can give the appearance of responding intelligently.
Such an algorithm exists, because there are intelligent animals (including ourselves) we can observe.
People are always giving the appearance of responding intelligently without actually being very intelligent. People in general are not that intelligent. We work with a very abstract and simplified model of the universe consisting mostly of "objects", large things obeying simple laws and having relatively simple properties. Only a few people are intelligent enough to understand physics and mathematics, and even fewer are intelligent enough to discover new things in those fields. Most of what the general public considers intelligence is the ability to say the right things at the right time in social situations, and some generic tool using skills. In that sense, current chatter-bots are almost good enough to fool a sizable segment of the population, especially if they don't know they're participating in a turing test. Our brains favor the familiar interpretation of events, and this always leads to over-simplification of problems and the rejection of statistical evaluation in favor of simple heuristics. AI will be much, much better. Eventually.
That logic is fallacious, even if the observable universe is a "simulation", then this simulation runs inside a real universe, and we're at the start again figuring out what the universe is.
:D
That's even worse logic, because it assumes some "real" universe indistinguishable from a simulation. How can anything distinguish between a real universe and a simulation from within that universe? Science can't say whether any universe is real or not, because empirically every universe is real to the observers within it.
Plus I subscribe to another logic: if the universe is similar to a video game, then it's because as video games increase in complexity they start to approach the model of a little universe
At some point we'll be able to stick a sentient AI in our video games that's smart enough to devise the scientific method and philosophy and consider its video game to be a real universe. Who's to say it's not?
The best thing is that you can do the same thing with TCP/IP if you have to. Have the "server" tell both clients what ports to use and each can send a SYN packet to each other with the same ports and ip addresses, e.g. client A sends a SYN from Aip:Aport to Bip:Bport, and B sends from Bip:Bport to Aip:Aport. Whichever packet goes out first opens the firewall to return packets from the other side, so only one retry is necessary for both sides to get the SYN and send back a SYN_ACK. Some firewalls may not accept an incoming SYN on a connection in the SYN_SENT state, so in this case the client behind the broken firewall would have to tell the server what the ip, port, and sequence numbers for the SYN packet were and the server would forward the information to the other end so that the SYN_ACK could be sent back. This could be accomplished transparently if the server is able to spoof the SYN_ACK response to the client.
Complex instructions reduce the overall code size), reducing the need for code cache and RAM. Especially with 64 bit architectures this makes a big difference. Instead of 8 byte RISC instructions, the average instruction size is probably closer to 3 or 4 bytes (not including immediate values, which of course in 80x86 can be smaller than the machine word size). Obviously RISC chips can be designed with small instruction word sizes, and for instance a pretty good RISC instruction set could live in 32 bit words, but then there are extra alignment issues to deal with. Overall, I think the idea of having a compact instruction set wins out over the simplicity of a full RISC design. Not that there aren't things I'd change with 80x86, for instance it would be nice if the next generation of x86-64 chips would support a more RISCy 64-bit mode of execution for pure 64-bit code, allowing developers (or compilers) to make the tradeoff between code size and RISC speed advantages. x86-64 already includes 8 extra registers, so perhaps having another 16 (or 48) available only from a 64-bit RISC mode could help hasten the transition to a saner instruction set.
"Ycagwyw,1983,%" is a bit more hard to brute force attack than "password2". :)
On the other hand, if someone is always listening to the Stones I have a pretty good idea of some passwords to try.
By your method all I need to know is the age of the victim and where they grew up. Google for all dates in their lifetime plus 10 years before, organize the associated events by page-rank and then try every acronym of every popular phrase from that era in descending order of popularity and locality with each random character. My guess is fewer than a thousand tries for most people, less than a billion for everyone else. It's a very bad idea to use a password containing material available on the Internet, especially if it can be ranked by popularity. Consider this: Google is able to crawl every website on the Internet several times a month. It would be trivial for them to try every 1 to 20 byte subsequence, every acronym, and lots of alternate spellings of the text they see.
Diamonds are hard in terms of "they don't scratch" but are (relatively) brittle. I believe if you smash a diamond with a hammer it WILL shatter along its crystal faces. (I could be wrong on this)
As far as I can tell, diamond has a similar toughness to strong plastics. References from wikipedia on fracture toughness and diamond aren't really clear, but seem to put diamond between metals and general plastics in terms of toughness, hence my assumption that they are probably about as strong as polycarbonate lenses. I can't find any toughness values for plastic lenses or case studies of which material is actually tougher for use in glasses, though. I suppose I'll have to build a diamond press and try it for myself.
Insurance companies really don't want people to get hurt, since they have to pay for it. Invest in Healthcare instead.
On topic, the only thing I really want is industrial diamond glasses. No more soft plastic lenses or thick glass ones, just a few mm of diamond for any eye adjustment you could need. As an added bonus, you could use them to sharpen your knives.
I think we might be able to get the nuclear waste facilities to bury the RIAA in concrete out in Nevada somewhere, but only if they won't be able to contaminate the radioactive isotopes.