What's more likely to happen is it will drive freelancers like me out of the market since we'll have to pay the state for the "right" to work on someones computer. To me it probably wouldn't be worth it to pay the licensing fee since freelance work is something I do rarely and never make much money at.
You can always work unlicenced. The computers themselves don't care, and if you're just occassionally freelancing, your customers likely know you already or were refered to you - which lowers the probability they will narc you to the Authorities. Just don't leave any written records. After all, is non-conforming to assinine regulations a wrong thing to do?
Considering most flybacks have only one high-voltage output, you can't pick the wrong one. Also, flybacks differ not only by the output voltage, but also by the pinout at the bottom and the connection and rating of other coils (the transformer usually supplies several voltages, and has several coils at the "primary" side). So it should be rather difficult to put a wrong flyback in, and if you by chance get one with identical size and pins, it's either a rebranded equivalent, or other things won't work.
/me makes a particularly bad immitation of Bob Dylan
"Come soldiers and generals from all the land
And don't ask the questions you can't understand
Old enemy's dead, there's a new one to stand
Your history lessons are aging
Just forget the Commies, there are new fears at hand:
The buzzwords they're a-changing!"
I'm an American, and although I hardly support everything my government does, I don't see the point in 'being loved.'
It's pretty much related to 'not being blown up so often'.
Iran's mullah's think we're the great Satan and we should all die or submit to allah. Why the fuck would we ever think we could get those guys to love us? Why would we want to?
The mullahs are only as powerful as how much the people respect them. The more they will dislike you, the more likely they are to trust them and their Satan stuff instead of you.
You may also publish anonymously or pseudonymously, or team up with somebody else to "claim" the work. With suitable open-source licence they can't just walk away with the stuff. You won't get your True Name on the results, but you and everybody else get the results. Cross-border legal relations are helpful as well; you may like to pick your accomplice from Canada or Europe or anywhere else outside of the easy reach of the US lawyers.
If your nym can't be economically traced back to you, the lawyers can't reach you. You can always "join and take over" the project when the situation becomes favorable for that.
The same approach should be possible for DMCA-related or cryptography-related code - anything where a corporation or a government claims you can't work on $SOMETHING.
those things are just so flimsy (why, when they're printing, you can hardly hear any noise from them at all).
Just drop it on tiled floor. When you'll finish collecting the fragments, you'll be in the right mindset to appreciate the engineering of 90's.
Or, get a Monday early-morning deadline, get stranded somewhere without access to a 24/7 computer shop, and get your inkjet run out of ink (or at least think it's out of ink) and then remember how you used to renovate the dotmatrix tape cartridges in such situations, or how you used to swap tapes from cheaper cartridges to the more expensive ones.
Not all aspects of technological "progress" are an improvement.
(Alternatively, get some form that has to be printed with a carbon copy. Yes, there are such ones in many areas of the industry. Bleh.)
However - would you prefer having chance of being infected with smallpox, or would you prefer to have probability you get only chickenpox instead?
Worms are bad. But I'll prefer the Net with a mix of White Knight Worms with Nasty Evil Worms than NEWs only.
If your patches are sufficiently up to date, WKWs and NEWs have the same low impact on you. But when you make a mistake, which is matter of time as you are only a human, a WKW can save your day, or at least ruin it less than the NEW, especially a NEW with a destructive payload.
Epidemiology and immunology have a lot of parallels with computer security and networks.
More interesting variant: what if the program is powered by neural network or other learning engine, and taught about
individual types of music by feeding it huge amounts of existing songs...
...and to make it even more interesting, we could employ EEG or other brain (or generally physiological reactions) monitoring device to sense the listener's reaction to the given moment of the song, and use it in teaching mode for emphasizing some parts of input and in generating mode to reject melody segments that don't elicit the desired reaction.
even if you can memorize the design with ease, and can construct this patented device to save a life, the patent owner - by
law - can sue you!
It's always better to be alive and infringing than dead and legal.
let's say that I create a program that creates original works. It randomly goes about making a melody, harmony and rhythm. I broadcast the music created by it via internet radio.
More interesting variant: what if the program is powered by neural network or other learning engine, and taught about individual types of music by feeding it huge amounts of existing songs - immitating the way human brain learns? If the output happens to be similar to some input - who is responsible? The one who runs the program in music-generating mode? The one who runs the radio server? The one who assembles and/or runs the teaching set? The one who writes the code? Or perhaps the one who has the most money of them?
It strikes me that this would be a prime target for Microsoft to strike a blow against Linux in the Windows interoperability area.
They are aware they won't gain nearly as much as it would seem. The only result would be adoption of some of the many existing NFS clients for Windows by some and "underground" use of "infringing" Samba by others.
So for all I care, even one company took monopoly of one thing... GOOD! Finally! Let them implement it only once and sell it.
One word: Microsoft.
Do you really want more Microsofts in other areas of technology?
The actual useful stuff came from people who wanted to make money
out of it, not from lone visionaries flying kites.
You are forgetting that if you want to work on distribution/usage of something, you first have to get the given something discovered. There would be much less cool things in the world without the lone visionaries you are so easily dismissing.
Using such software (even if you wrote your own implementation and are doing so in private) is infringing. Downloading it from overseas (from somewhere that does not allow software patents, say) is almost certainly an illegal "importing" of the infringing product.
The keyword here is effective enforcement. If you make the infrastructure easy enough to modify, "illegal" patches appear sooner or later on P2P or the mentioned overseas servers. You then don't have to supply them yourself, and your hands can stay clear, while your users will still be able to get the benefits of eg. the WMV compatibility. Given that "illegal" devices typically don't advertise their capabilities (or does your Freevo/MythTV call home and reports its software revisions?) to the world, the patent enforcers may have as much ammo as they can wish for, but that's worthless when there are no targets to aim at. Not a panacea, but in many cases may be a good situation improvement.
Of course, one could not gain reputation from doing so,...
One could, but not with one's real identity. A reputation can be gained for a "nym" built on the anonymous infrastructure - so you won't be able to publish as John Public, but could become famous as John Doe 4324, holder of the GPG key 0x42342132A. When a suitable infrastructure of Chaumian e-cash emerges, you even could get paid.
Also, you can always decide to link your nym with your real identity, when it becomes a tactical advantage (eg. if patents would get repealed, or couple decades later for a historical book). It's one-way road, though.
Now, she is trying to embed a bit of the photographer in the picture, too. The patterns in the iris - the colored part of the
eye - are at least as distinctive as a person's fingerprint. With money from the Air Force, Professor Fridrich is designing a
camera that takes two pictures at once: one though the camera lens, and a smaller one of the photographer's iris. The iris
image along with the time and place of the photo session would then be compressed, encrypted and instantly hidden within the
larger picture just taken.
If that encoded information is someday tampered with, or missing, then it is obvious that the photo can no longer be trusted.
Countermeasure against this is easy; just print the image with sufficiently high resolution, then photograph it. Voila - a fresh iris image is encoded in the file.
Why not just digitally sign the file in the camera itself? Alternatively, if for forensic purposes, connect a cellphone to the camera and wirelessly get a timestamp from an authorized timeserver, and register the image's signed hash there. Any subsequent tampering is then very easy to detect.
No, this technique, and other similar authentication methods will make crappy overcompressed jpegs obsolete in applications where authentication is important.
If you need authentication, can't you just add a signed hash of the image as a chunk of the JPEG file?
Alternatively, sacrifice the warranty and just solder a standard connector in (requires high-freq knowledge).
Or do what those NZ guys did in earlier Slashdot post couple weeks ago, and use some USB dongle with a parabolic dish. Alternatively, enhance it with modifying the dongle to make its own antenna directional to improve the dongle-dish assembly properties.
Modification: Put the RFID into a ring that the operators will wear, and the reader into the keyboard. The ring can be the base for the chip's antenna coil. Lock the input when there is no RFID response for more than 10 seconds. Voila - automatic login, automatic logout, zero attention needed to operate the system. Short range of the sensing prevents false identifying of different person unless they both want to have their hands over the keyboard at once, and as the presence of hands over the keyboard is necessary to type, we can tie the presence of the RFID to typing. The hands tend to have certain orientation over the keyboard as well, so the sensing coil can be locted in its front part, parallel to the coil on the body of the ring.
If the ID ring is forgotten or lost, a temporary or new one can be issued immediately. The tying of the ring ID and the person ID can be temporary as well, the binding being renewed every time its wearer comes to work and authorizes himself using biometrics. Automatic renewal can be tied to eg. opening door or getting coffee from vending machine, anywhere where we already can comfortably do biometric scan together with the RFID scan, keeping the binding information fresh without posing burden for the user.
As an extension, every person can have their own group of applications running on the server, with an interface like the "screen" process, and the terminals automatically connecting and disconnecting to this process of the user, making their "desktops" following them along the dumb terminals (eg. I walk away from terminal1, its screen goes dark; I walk to terminal2 and lay my hand over the keyboard, and my desktop appears in the state I left it in).
Next step: lots of obscure companies filling lawsuits against key aspects of Microsoft technologies; most of them being used as proxies of bigger parties who don't want risk the heat themselves - the SCO tactics.
Microsoft is a big player. A stinkin'-big monster. But even the monsters can die, when swarmed with overwhelming number of individually weak enemies. Like when a rodent visits a beehive; the bees, much smaller themselves than the animal, feed it with enough poison - for the cost of lives of many of them - to kill it. Then they push it out of the hive, or seal the dead body off the rest of the hive with wax.
Not even the biggest players can survive long after making enemies all around.
Slashdot Mirror
Be accurate. "Some of them may have a purpose" could be better formulation.
You can always work unlicenced. The computers themselves don't care, and if you're just occassionally freelancing, your customers likely know you already or were refered to you - which lowers the probability they will narc you to the Authorities. Just don't leave any written records. After all, is non-conforming to assinine regulations a wrong thing to do?
Considering most flybacks have only one high-voltage output, you can't pick the wrong one. Also, flybacks differ not only by the output voltage, but also by the pinout at the bottom and the connection and rating of other coils (the transformer usually supplies several voltages, and has several coils at the "primary" side). So it should be rather difficult to put a wrong flyback in, and if you by chance get one with identical size and pins, it's either a rebranded equivalent, or other things won't work.
Even the LCDs involve high voltage, for the fluorescent tube. But it's a minor thingy in comparison with the CRT anode voltage. Ouch.
"Come soldiers and generals from all the land
And don't ask the questions you can't understand
Old enemy's dead, there's a new one to stand
Your history lessons are aging
Just forget the Commies, there are new fears at hand:
The buzzwords they're a-changing!"
It's pretty much related to 'not being blown up so often'.
Iran's mullah's think we're the great Satan and we should all die or submit to allah. Why the fuck would we ever think we could get those guys to love us? Why would we want to?
The mullahs are only as powerful as how much the people respect them. The more they will dislike you, the more likely they are to trust them and their Satan stuff instead of you.
If your nym can't be economically traced back to you, the lawyers can't reach you. You can always "join and take over" the project when the situation becomes favorable for that.
The same approach should be possible for DMCA-related or cryptography-related code - anything where a corporation or a government claims you can't work on $SOMETHING.
Just drop it on tiled floor. When you'll finish collecting the fragments, you'll be in the right mindset to appreciate the engineering of 90's.
Or, get a Monday early-morning deadline, get stranded somewhere without access to a 24/7 computer shop, and get your inkjet run out of ink (or at least think it's out of ink) and then remember how you used to renovate the dotmatrix tape cartridges in such situations, or how you used to swap tapes from cheaper cartridges to the more expensive ones.
Not all aspects of technological "progress" are an improvement.
(Alternatively, get some form that has to be printed with a carbon copy. Yes, there are such ones in many areas of the industry. Bleh.)
However - would you prefer having chance of being infected with smallpox, or would you prefer to have probability you get only chickenpox instead?
Worms are bad. But I'll prefer the Net with a mix of White Knight Worms with Nasty Evil Worms than NEWs only.
If your patches are sufficiently up to date, WKWs and NEWs have the same low impact on you. But when you make a mistake, which is matter of time as you are only a human, a WKW can save your day, or at least ruin it less than the NEW, especially a NEW with a destructive payload.
Epidemiology and immunology have a lot of parallels with computer security and networks.
Ummm... the one that isn't Bush?
Republicrats, Demicans.
Republican'ts, Demagocrats.
Because of the lawyer threat that can possibly lead to the disappearance of the original source? Better to have local mirrors of endangered species.
Though it's true that Bittorent is overkill for this purpose; other P2P architectures are more suitable here.
It's always better to be alive and infringing than dead and legal.
let's say that I create a program that creates original works. It randomly goes about making a melody, harmony and rhythm. I broadcast the music created by it via internet radio.
More interesting variant: what if the program is powered by neural network or other learning engine, and taught about individual types of music by feeding it huge amounts of existing songs - immitating the way human brain learns? If the output happens to be similar to some input - who is responsible? The one who runs the program in music-generating mode? The one who runs the radio server? The one who assembles and/or runs the teaching set? The one who writes the code? Or perhaps the one who has the most money of them?
They are aware they won't gain nearly as much as it would seem. The only result would be adoption of some of the many existing NFS clients for Windows by some and "underground" use of "infringing" Samba by others.
Or avoid leaving evidence it was *you* who looked. Dynamic IPs, shared computers, libraries, and proxies are friends.
One word: Microsoft.
Do you really want more Microsofts in other areas of technology?
The actual useful stuff came from people who wanted to make money out of it, not from lone visionaries flying kites.
You are forgetting that if you want to work on distribution/usage of something, you first have to get the given something discovered. There would be much less cool things in the world without the lone visionaries you are so easily dismissing.
Money aren't everything. By far.
The keyword here is effective enforcement. If you make the infrastructure easy enough to modify, "illegal" patches appear sooner or later on P2P or the mentioned overseas servers. You then don't have to supply them yourself, and your hands can stay clear, while your users will still be able to get the benefits of eg. the WMV compatibility. Given that "illegal" devices typically don't advertise their capabilities (or does your Freevo/MythTV call home and reports its software revisions?) to the world, the patent enforcers may have as much ammo as they can wish for, but that's worthless when there are no targets to aim at. Not a panacea, but in many cases may be a good situation improvement.
One could, but not with one's real identity. A reputation can be gained for a "nym" built on the anonymous infrastructure - so you won't be able to publish as John Public, but could become famous as John Doe 4324, holder of the GPG key 0x42342132A. When a suitable infrastructure of Chaumian e-cash emerges, you even could get paid.
Also, you can always decide to link your nym with your real identity, when it becomes a tactical advantage (eg. if patents would get repealed, or couple decades later for a historical book). It's one-way road, though.
Good question. These ones are the "Bores", also known as "Suits".
For the most effective effective sting, it's advised to employ "bees" with 7.62 mm diameter.
If that encoded information is someday tampered with, or missing, then it is obvious that the photo can no longer be trusted.
Countermeasure against this is easy; just print the image with sufficiently high resolution, then photograph it. Voila - a fresh iris image is encoded in the file.
Why not just digitally sign the file in the camera itself? Alternatively, if for forensic purposes, connect a cellphone to the camera and wirelessly get a timestamp from an authorized timeserver, and register the image's signed hash there. Any subsequent tampering is then very easy to detect.
If you need authentication, can't you just add a signed hash of the image as a chunk of the JPEG file?
Alternatively, sacrifice the warranty and just solder a standard connector in (requires high-freq knowledge).
Or do what those NZ guys did in earlier Slashdot post couple weeks ago, and use some USB dongle with a parabolic dish. Alternatively, enhance it with modifying the dongle to make its own antenna directional to improve the dongle-dish assembly properties.
If the ID ring is forgotten or lost, a temporary or new one can be issued immediately. The tying of the ring ID and the person ID can be temporary as well, the binding being renewed every time its wearer comes to work and authorizes himself using biometrics. Automatic renewal can be tied to eg. opening door or getting coffee from vending machine, anywhere where we already can comfortably do biometric scan together with the RFID scan, keeping the binding information fresh without posing burden for the user.
As an extension, every person can have their own group of applications running on the server, with an interface like the "screen" process, and the terminals automatically connecting and disconnecting to this process of the user, making their "desktops" following them along the dumb terminals (eg. I walk away from terminal1, its screen goes dark; I walk to terminal2 and lay my hand over the keyboard, and my desktop appears in the state I left it in).
Microsoft is a big player. A stinkin'-big monster. But even the monsters can die, when swarmed with overwhelming number of individually weak enemies. Like when a rodent visits a beehive; the bees, much smaller themselves than the animal, feed it with enough poison - for the cost of lives of many of them - to kill it. Then they push it out of the hive, or seal the dead body off the rest of the hive with wax.
Not even the biggest players can survive long after making enemies all around.
Not necessarily. Microsoft "products" stink bad enough to make even the flies sick.