Why doesn't everybody quit bitching about it and help the guy out? If you couldn't tell by the website linked (and by the runaway HTTP errors), this is obviously not this guy's job and it's just something he's doing to do it. He's sharing all this great stuff with us, why don't some of us offer to assist with bandwidth/technical stuff?
I know we all agree that this is awesome but is it really necessary to waste mod points on a post (1) from an AC (2) that doesn't contribute anything whatsoever to the discussion? C'mon now people!
Add random (but light) noise to the images while they're being served and randomize their filenames. There will be no way for an automated system to identify if it's been served the same image twice because the filename and checksum of the image would have been different.
Sometimes there's not enough time for that. You have to be proactive about your concentration in the car as a driver and for the benefit of the drive when you're ridin' shotgun.
One of the differences is that when you're talking with a passenger who's in your car, they can see the road conditions and know when to shut up if there's a particularly dangerous traffic situation that they know requires your attention. The person on the other end of the cell phone doesn't know that and will just keep on talking.
Since the time of the ancient Greeks, the best way to get and keep funding for useful projects was to have military applications for them. A lot of really useful research and really useful inventions have come out of DARPA (*ahem* internet *cough*). Even Leonardo da Vinci had to slave a bit for the man.
In other words put a sock in it because we're guests on their network.
So welcoming our shrimpy overlords with their superiour vision would be a little late if I did it now. Obviously they're here and they have four-digit UIDs.
Seriously try what I said to try if you've got a linux/unix/mac system to try it on. You'll come up just slightly larger than the original file pretty much every single time.
Considering the output of a coin toss to be a random variable, and the string of bits to be a randomly variant process of probability 0.5, the probability of any given pattern is 2^(-n) where n is the length of the pattern in bits. Square it to give the probability of that pattern repeating. In order to come up with a file that's smaller than the original file you need many patterns repeating many times. Really. The entropy of a random stream is really high, and you will never compress a file beyond the file's entropy limits. It's just not possible unless you throw information away.
Totally not even how VoIP works. You're making the assumption that chunk #123 actually got there. There's no ACK packets in VoIP; if a packet is received out of sequence it's dropped. That's that "jitter" that happens when the line breaks up a bit every now and again. It's your packets not all taking the same route and getting to the destination device out of order.
You have to remember: VoIP is a real-time protocol, and keeping up with real time is the paramount concern, not necessarily absolute accuracy.
Whatever solution there is to this problem it has to work on packets as individual items. It can't work on a whole conversation because that's just not how phone conversations happen. If it really were that simple, we could just email each other encrypted mp3s and the system would work beautifully.
Seconded, enthusiastically. He's a lawyer but he's keeping the RIAA's lawyers in check purely by his own sheer awesomeness. We're really fortunate to have him on slashdot; he always keeps us informed and lifts the level of discourse on slashdot with his contributions.
NYCL needs to reply to this, so we can know if he really is the son of justice. I must know.
The entropy for a perfectly random coin toss will always be one bit. The formula, if I'm remembering right, is -sum(p_i * log(p_i)) where the p's are the probabilities of the various possible outcomes. In the case of a fair coin toss, these are both 0.5 and the outcome is 1, or 1 bit.
If the stream you're compressing has patterns in it, it is purely by coincidence and overall, the average entropy of any number of these streams will turn out to be 1 if you sample enough of them. Furthermore, if you do have a perfectly random string of bits, zlib, gzip, and all the rest will deliver a bigger file because of the overhead necessary for those file formats.
Try it on the command line, dd if=/dev/urand of=random_bits bs=1024 count=100 && gzip random_bits. Getting a smaller file out of that is more improbable than being attacked by a shark while being struck by lightning while you're holding a winning lottery ticket.
Of course you get some compression. You probably get a file that's ever-so-slightly bigger than just one of the encrypted files. The encrypted files—assuming pretty effective encryption—have close to their maximum entropy (ideal encryption, like a well-chosen one-time-pad, would have entropy equivalent to the length of the message in bytes, making it indistinguishable from random data). Repeating them reduces the overall entropy of the message as with each identical packet no additional information is conveyed, so the whole message would have entropy equivalent to the length of one message.
VoIP's voice transfer protocol (RTP? I forget the acronym) sends the packets in order though as they come. To compress a bunch of repeated sounds together would introduce a lot of lag into the transmission, because the receiving end would need to gather the packets in compressed groups. Then, they'd all arrive at once and you'd hear little chunks of conversation each time that happened, but there would be more lag the more packets you compressed together.
You could argue that the right to display the work publicly was ceded to you when you purchased the sculpture. Seeing as many people who buy sculptures display them outside or at least somewhere visible publicly (like a courtyard), this is probably what happens.
Nobody really buys a Blackberry for the express purpose of gaming, and it's not at all a gaming platform, but games are very popular on them. Same goes for other phones. Though gaming is never going to be the focus of the iPhone, games could be the thing that pushes some people over the edge to get one.
For the time being, the only way to control intellectual property in a digital format in the ways that you have described is to obtain it for free.
There. Fixed that for ya. We're winning, and we're gonna keep winning until the other side decides to abandon their antiquated business practices.
I'm not file sharing really, but I want those who are to not be prosecuted the way they are. I want the legal system to not be tampered with. I want the courts and the companies to both acknowledge that none of us are criminals.
Ok. When you've run empires in the past and fought wars with the British and the United States hundreds of years ago, you get the title of "developed" country no matter what your economy is like nowadays.
Slashdot Mirror
What did any of that have to do with what I wrote?
Why doesn't everybody quit bitching about it and help the guy out? If you couldn't tell by the website linked (and by the runaway HTTP errors), this is obviously not this guy's job and it's just something he's doing to do it. He's sharing all this great stuff with us, why don't some of us offer to assist with bandwidth/technical stuff?
I know we all agree that this is awesome but is it really necessary to waste mod points on a post (1) from an AC (2) that doesn't contribute anything whatsoever to the discussion? C'mon now people!
Or make a post on craigslist under the free section. Do that and anything—however useless—will be gone in seconds.
Add random (but light) noise to the images while they're being served and randomize their filenames. There will be no way for an automated system to identify if it's been served the same image twice because the filename and checksum of the image would have been different.
YMBNH
I feel so ashamed.... I had to look that up. Now, do I feel ashamed because I had to look it up, or because I did look it up?
I'll just be keeping the answer to that to myself.
Sometimes there's not enough time for that. You have to be proactive about your concentration in the car as a driver and for the benefit of the drive when you're ridin' shotgun.
One of the differences is that when you're talking with a passenger who's in your car, they can see the road conditions and know when to shut up if there's a particularly dangerous traffic situation that they know requires your attention. The person on the other end of the cell phone doesn't know that and will just keep on talking.
Since the time of the ancient Greeks, the best way to get and keep funding for useful projects was to have military applications for them. A lot of really useful research and really useful inventions have come out of DARPA (*ahem* internet *cough*). Even Leonardo da Vinci had to slave a bit for the man.
In other words put a sock in it because we're guests on their network.
So welcoming our shrimpy overlords with their superiour vision would be a little late if I did it now. Obviously they're here and they have four-digit UIDs.
HOT
Seriously try what I said to try if you've got a linux/unix/mac system to try it on. You'll come up just slightly larger than the original file pretty much every single time.
Considering the output of a coin toss to be a random variable, and the string of bits to be a randomly variant process of probability 0.5, the probability of any given pattern is 2^(-n) where n is the length of the pattern in bits. Square it to give the probability of that pattern repeating. In order to come up with a file that's smaller than the original file you need many patterns repeating many times. Really. The entropy of a random stream is really high, and you will never compress a file beyond the file's entropy limits. It's just not possible unless you throw information away.
Omg I didn't know... I am so sorry.... ;-P
Totally not even how VoIP works. You're making the assumption that chunk #123 actually got there. There's no ACK packets in VoIP; if a packet is received out of sequence it's dropped. That's that "jitter" that happens when the line breaks up a bit every now and again. It's your packets not all taking the same route and getting to the destination device out of order.
You have to remember: VoIP is a real-time protocol, and keeping up with real time is the paramount concern, not necessarily absolute accuracy.
Whatever solution there is to this problem it has to work on packets as individual items. It can't work on a whole conversation because that's just not how phone conversations happen. If it really were that simple, we could just email each other encrypted mp3s and the system would work beautifully.
Seconded, enthusiastically. He's a lawyer but he's keeping the RIAA's lawyers in check purely by his own sheer awesomeness. We're really fortunate to have him on slashdot; he always keeps us informed and lifts the level of discourse on slashdot with his contributions.
NYCL needs to reply to this, so we can know if he really is the son of justice. I must know.
The entropy for a perfectly random coin toss will always be one bit. The formula, if I'm remembering right, is -sum(p_i * log(p_i)) where the p's are the probabilities of the various possible outcomes. In the case of a fair coin toss, these are both 0.5 and the outcome is 1, or 1 bit.
If the stream you're compressing has patterns in it, it is purely by coincidence and overall, the average entropy of any number of these streams will turn out to be 1 if you sample enough of them. Furthermore, if you do have a perfectly random string of bits, zlib, gzip, and all the rest will deliver a bigger file because of the overhead necessary for those file formats.
Try it on the command line, dd if=/dev/urand of=random_bits bs=1024 count=100 && gzip random_bits. Getting a smaller file out of that is more improbable than being attacked by a shark while being struck by lightning while you're holding a winning lottery ticket.
Of course you get some compression. You probably get a file that's ever-so-slightly bigger than just one of the encrypted files. The encrypted files—assuming pretty effective encryption—have close to their maximum entropy (ideal encryption, like a well-chosen one-time-pad, would have entropy equivalent to the length of the message in bytes, making it indistinguishable from random data). Repeating them reduces the overall entropy of the message as with each identical packet no additional information is conveyed, so the whole message would have entropy equivalent to the length of one message.
VoIP's voice transfer protocol (RTP? I forget the acronym) sends the packets in order though as they come. To compress a bunch of repeated sounds together would introduce a lot of lag into the transmission, because the receiving end would need to gather the packets in compressed groups. Then, they'd all arrive at once and you'd hear little chunks of conversation each time that happened, but there would be more lag the more packets you compressed together.
You could argue that the right to display the work publicly was ceded to you when you purchased the sculpture. Seeing as many people who buy sculptures display them outside or at least somewhere visible publicly (like a courtyard), this is probably what happens.
IANAL, though.
Which of those steps is "PROFIT!"? Seriously I want to know why this nonsense continues.
Doesn't that make it all the more low?
For shame, sniping another man's mod points. Tsk tsk tsk.
We should mod them insightful instead?
Nobody really buys a Blackberry for the express purpose of gaming, and it's not at all a gaming platform, but games are very popular on them. Same goes for other phones. Though gaming is never going to be the focus of the iPhone, games could be the thing that pushes some people over the edge to get one.
There. Fixed that for ya. We're winning, and we're gonna keep winning until the other side decides to abandon their antiquated business practices.
I'm not file sharing really, but I want those who are to not be prosecuted the way they are. I want the legal system to not be tampered with. I want the courts and the companies to both acknowledge that none of us are criminals.
Ok. When you've run empires in the past and fought wars with the British and the United States hundreds of years ago, you get the title of "developed" country no matter what your economy is like nowadays.