On the contrary: Equally large amounts of false negatives and false positives is exactly the same as random guessing. [Shannon, 1948]
Not true in general. For example, a system that yields 1% false negatives and 1% false positives is still 98% reliable, and much better than random guessing.
That law, as questionable as it is, doesn't criminalize anything retroactively. It just imposes certain registration requirements on certain individuals, that must be carried out after the law was passed. As such, it would probably pass constitution muster, at least as far as the clause you quoted was concerned. (But then again, I'm not a lawyer, so this is just a personal opinion and not a legal one.)
It is the retailer's choice to offer a "no questions asked" return policy. It is irrelevant that many customers abuse such a policy. When the store offers such a policy, it assumes the all risks involved because of "no questions asked". It is unethical (and also illegal) for them to pawn off that risk on unsuspecting customers who are paying full retail price and expecting new products.
What they should have done is to refurbish the goods (add new shrink-wrap, reformat memory sticks and hard drives, reset phones to factory defaults, etc.) and offer them for sale as-is at a discount. That they didn't even try to refurbish media before re-selling it as new shows that not only are they unscrupulous, they're also stupid.
More importantly, it would mean the defendant wouldn't have to pay those obscene legal fees
No. It only means that they don't have to pay the RIAA's obscene legal fees. They will still have to pay any legal fees to their own lawyers. And since the case is dismissed without prejudice, the RIAA is free to bring it again, costing even MORE legal fees.
This isn't about making English prose that humans are expected to read and make sense of. Rather, it's about making English prose that anti-spam and anti-virus filters won't automatically flag and delete. If somebody has a web page or an email that exploits a vulnerablity, a good anti-spam or anti-virus filter could prevent it from loading based on the payload alone, without even having to know about the vulnerability itself (While vulnerabilities constantly change, the rules governing what is valid x86 code do not). Now, however, this is no longer the case.
You are welcome to make your private key the product of two large Mersenne primes.
Since all Mersenne primes are of the form 2^p-1, one only need to search p possibilities. Since the largest currently known Mersenne prime is 2^43112609, this is equivalent to 26-bit encryption. Also, since only 47 Mersenne primes are actually known, one could use a simple table search, reducing this to 6-bit encryption. Breaking 6-bit encryption is left as an exercise for the reader.
Just make the button detect authorized fingerprints only and require a heartbeat in the finger and also scan the operator's retina and alter lighting to make sure that the iris responds "correctly" to random changes in light level.
Bet you can't circumvent that with just duct tape. Now, with an Arduino, some peripheral hardware and a few spare evenings....
Require a retinal scan to operate the safety button, and somebody's going to lose an eye...
I have. And unlike drugs, you can replace a game with pretty much any other form of entertainment. That's the difference.
Who NEEDS 16+ hours of entertainment a day? There's not that much difference between replacing one game with another, or one entertainment time-sink for another - and replacing one drug with another. If (say) someone plays WoW 16 hours a day until his internet connection goes down - and then switches to 16 hours of Wii a day, that would indicate an addiction.
If I buy a computer from Dell instead of IBM, is it a PC? Is an artificial gem with the same chemical properties and structure as diamond a diamond? If the thing's identical in all meaningful ways to an Apple branded Mac, shouldn't it also be considered a Mac?
Because intellectual property laws don't correspond to the laws of physics. A Mac clone might be physically identical to a Mac, but legally, it's not identical to a Mac(TM), since nobody but Apple (and possibly their licencees) are legally allowed to use Apple's trademark names.
If Psystar is simply selling a PC that will run Leopard, then Psystar is not violating any license. The user would be the one violating the license but like you said, Apple will have a hell of a time finding those users.
Yes, but that defense flies out the window if they're pre-installing Leopard on machines before selling them.
Even though DVD uses DRM, it's a DRM with stable and predictable semantics,
very similar to those associated with any other physical object (it can be
used, re-used, moved, transferred, or sold, just not duplicted).
Not like this voodoo associated with DRM-encumbered downloaded content that behaves like nothing else in our own common experience. (Just imagine books that you can read but nobody else can, or books that you can't read if you put on 5 pounds).
If you install a new monitor, your DVD movies will STILL play.
If you move your DVD from one computer to another, your DVD movies will STILL play.
You can even give your DVD to someone else, they can watch them just fine.
Perhaps you should look up the meaning of you can't average something that doesn't exist yet and industry average vs. company average. It's basic temporal physics and logic.
Firstly. average is a simple word and concept that has a well-defined and easily-searchable meaning. you can't average something that doesn't exist yet is not something you can "look up".
Secondly, your example did provide specific numbers as an exapmple, so they could be averaged.
Thirdly, there was no mention of industry average vs. company average in this thread before. When the term average was used indiscriminately to mean both terms, it was comparing apples to oranges, and confusing the issue.
Company X has treated some customers better (than average), while not treating any customers worse (than average).
Perhaps you should look up the meaning of average in a dictionary or elementary school math textbook. If some people are treated better than average, others must necessarily be treated worse than average. It's basic math. Company X may have a higher average customer service quality (such as 105), which makes it better than Company Y, but those receiving only 100 are getting below-average service, even if that service is as good as the average service for Company Y.
I have always been disgusted by the disingeunousness of memory manufacturers by inflating the sizes of their devices, but at least they DO actually put a note on the side of the box stating what they mean. The fact that they rely on the fact that most people can't be bothered to read the fine print may be despicable, but hardly actionable.
(And this choice is deliberate - they KNOW that their disks will be used on operating systems that use binary metrics to display disk sizes, yet they always use decimal metrics themselves. This has irritated me in much the same way that my entire life, grocery stores have sold hot dogs in packages of 10 and hot dog buns in packages of 8, knowing full well that these products were designed to be used together).
I also always used to hate the fact that RAM was typically measured in bytes, wheras ROMs were typically measured in bits - making them seem to be 8x as large unless you paid attention. This was most notable on video game cartridges, where 128KB games were called "Mega cartridges" because they had a megabit of data.
(And let's not get into the confusion between KBps/MBps and Kbps/Mbps for measuring bandwidth...)
You should have then turned around and brought charges against the guy for extortion.
The only way this would have a chance of being successful is if you could prove that he had no intention of doing business under that trademark as such, but purchased it solely for the purpose of extorting money from you.
(Otherwise, every lawsuit could potentially be considered a form of extortion, since most of them are of the form "do this (or stop doing that) or I will force you to give me money").
They know what consumers mean by 1GB, enough to put wording on the box explaining they're not using the standard meaning. Too bad this is only Seagate, the whole industry needs this.
Precisely. Because there is some discrepancy as to what the word "Megabyte" actually means, they make it perfectly clear by stating what they mean by it on the outside of the box, to make sure the customer is no confused. It's a pity that most people can't be bothered to read the words, they just look at the HUGE NUMBERS on the front of the box and then ignore the rest, and then sue when it means what it says instead of what they think it ought to have said.
Actually, this is merely a cultural thing. Many cultures find it convenient to use base 10 because (most) people have 10 fingers to count with. However, the human brain does not inerently favor decimal arithmetic. Some cultures have used other bases in the past (for example, Babylon used base 60 - and you can see how pervasive that was, since we still use such numbers in circular measurement). I also believe that Unicode includes some number systems that are in base 12 (although I might be mistaken).
By redefining "Giga" to mean 2^30 instead of 10^9 like the accepted notation, they have virtually robbed me of about 7% of my drive by understating the size of my files, etc
How, exactly, have they robbed you? Your files occupy exactly the same number of sectors and tracks on the disk, regardless of whether the operating system displays them in Bytes, or Kilobytes (/1024), Megabyres (/1048576). On Windows, look at a file in the directory listing, and it shows binary kilobytes/megabytes. But right-click/Properties and it shows you the exact number of bytes as a decimal number. Chosing one display or another does not alter the actual storage capacity of your drive at all - only your own perception of it.
It's like operating systems (like Unix and Windows/XP) that store the system date in GMT rather than local time. The time signature of a file does not change, regardless of what symbolic representation you choose to display it in.
Or the 50 year old man has donated , and his marrow has been used by several recipients in the same geographic area...
Well, the original items were about stem cells from umbilical cords, but I suppose the same issue would also apply to any other bone marrow transplants.
"Sure, my client's DNA was found at the scene, but knowing as you know do that at least one other person shares that DNA, the choice before you is no choice at all."...
"After all, there is no way of knowing for sure whether this cold-blooded murder was committed by my client, a 50 year old man from Portland, or by a 3-year old toddler from Orlando".
How much do you want to bet that "unnamed customers" are synonymous with "various federal and state police agencies, DOD, and NSA"?
From TFA, those "unnamed customers" are companies that have the need to remotely reboot their machines. This feature is NOT a backdoor - it merely allows someone WHO ALREADY HAS WRITE ACCESS TO THE ENCRYPED DRIVE (i.e. someone who has already given the passphrase) to grant a one-time certificate that permits a reboot without asking for the passphrase again. The major risk here is that someone will rob your store during the 60 seconds it takes to reboot over the phone, a possible, but highly unlikely scenario.
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On the contrary: Equally large amounts of false negatives and false positives is exactly the same as random guessing. [Shannon, 1948]
Not true in general. For example, a system that yields 1% false negatives and 1% false positives is still 98% reliable, and much better than random guessing.
I see you have a fine intuitive understanding of the American political system.
That law, as questionable as it is, doesn't criminalize anything retroactively. It just imposes certain registration requirements on certain individuals, that must be carried out after the law was passed. As such, it would probably pass constitution muster, at least as far as the clause you quoted was concerned. (But then again, I'm not a lawyer, so this is just a personal opinion and not a legal one.)
It is the retailer's choice to offer a "no questions asked" return policy. It is irrelevant that many customers abuse such a policy. When the store offers such a policy, it assumes the all risks involved because of "no questions asked". It is unethical (and also illegal) for them to pawn off that risk on unsuspecting customers who are paying full retail price and expecting new products.
What they should have done is to refurbish the goods (add new shrink-wrap, reformat memory sticks and hard drives, reset phones to factory defaults, etc.) and offer them for sale as-is at a discount. That they didn't even try to refurbish media before re-selling it as new shows that not only are they unscrupulous, they're also stupid.
More importantly, it would mean the defendant wouldn't have to pay those obscene legal fees
No. It only means that they don't have to pay the RIAA's obscene legal fees. They will still have to pay any legal fees to their own lawyers. And since the case is dismissed without prejudice, the RIAA is free to bring it again, costing even MORE legal fees.
This isn't about making English prose that humans are expected to read and make sense of. Rather, it's about making English prose that anti-spam and anti-virus filters won't automatically flag and delete. If somebody has a web page or an email that exploits a vulnerablity, a good anti-spam or anti-virus filter could prevent it from loading based on the payload alone, without even having to know about the vulnerability itself (While vulnerabilities constantly change, the rules governing what is valid x86 code do not). Now, however, this is no longer the case.
You are welcome to make your private key the product of two large Mersenne primes.
Since all Mersenne primes are of the form 2^p-1, one only need to search p possibilities. Since the largest currently known Mersenne prime is 2^43112609, this is equivalent to 26-bit encryption. Also, since only 47 Mersenne primes are actually known, one could use a simple table search, reducing this to 6-bit encryption. Breaking 6-bit encryption is left as an exercise for the reader.
Just make the button detect authorized fingerprints only and require a heartbeat in the finger and also scan the operator's retina and alter lighting to make sure that the iris responds "correctly" to random changes in light level.
Bet you can't circumvent that with just duct tape. Now, with an Arduino, some peripheral hardware and a few spare evenings....
Require a retinal scan to operate the safety button, and somebody's going to lose an eye...
Kind of like vampires, doesn't matter what the holy symbol is as long as it does the job. I guess you've never seen Love at First Bite.
I have. And unlike drugs, you can replace a game with pretty much any other form of entertainment. That's the difference.
Who NEEDS 16+ hours of entertainment a day? There's not that much difference between replacing one game with another, or one entertainment time-sink for another - and replacing one drug with another. If (say) someone plays WoW 16 hours a day until his internet connection goes down - and then switches to 16 hours of Wii a day, that would indicate an addiction.
Except that MMO is not an 'addiction' . . . it is a 'habit.' His friend will go through no withdrawal if his account expired tomorrow.
I see that you've obviously never been really into a game...
If I buy a computer from Dell instead of IBM, is it a PC? Is an artificial gem with the same chemical properties and structure as diamond a diamond? If the thing's identical in all meaningful ways to an Apple branded Mac, shouldn't it also be considered a Mac?
Because intellectual property laws don't correspond to the laws of physics. A Mac clone might be physically identical to a Mac, but legally, it's not identical to a Mac(TM), since nobody but Apple (and possibly their licencees) are legally allowed to use Apple's trademark names.
If Psystar is simply selling a PC that will run Leopard, then Psystar is not violating any license. The user would be the one violating the license but like you said, Apple will have a hell of a time finding those users.
Yes, but that defense flies out the window if they're pre-installing Leopard on machines before selling them.
Even though DVD uses DRM, it's a DRM with stable and predictable semantics, very similar to those associated with any other physical object (it can be used, re-used, moved, transferred, or sold, just not duplicted). Not like this voodoo associated with DRM-encumbered downloaded content that behaves like nothing else in our own common experience. (Just imagine books that you can read but nobody else can, or books that you can't read if you put on 5 pounds). If you install a new monitor, your DVD movies will STILL play. If you move your DVD from one computer to another, your DVD movies will STILL play. You can even give your DVD to someone else, they can watch them just fine.
Perhaps you should look up the meaning of you can't average something that doesn't exist yet and industry average vs. company average. It's basic temporal physics and logic.
Firstly. average is a simple word and concept that has a well-defined and easily-searchable meaning. you can't average something that doesn't exist yet is not something you can "look up".
Secondly, your example did provide specific numbers as an exapmple, so they could be averaged.
Thirdly, there was no mention of industry average vs. company average in this thread before. When the term average was used indiscriminately to mean both terms, it was comparing apples to oranges, and confusing the issue.
Company X has treated some customers better (than average), while not treating any customers worse (than average).
Perhaps you should look up the meaning of average in a dictionary or elementary school math textbook. If some people are treated better than average, others must necessarily be treated worse than average. It's basic math. Company X may have a higher average customer service quality (such as 105), which makes it better than Company Y, but those receiving only 100 are getting below-average service, even if that service is as good as the average service for Company Y.
Right.
I have always been disgusted by the disingeunousness of memory manufacturers by inflating the sizes of their devices, but at least they DO actually put a note on the side of the box stating what they mean. The fact that they rely on the fact that most people can't be bothered to read the fine print may be despicable, but hardly actionable.
(And this choice is deliberate - they KNOW that their disks will be used on operating systems that use binary metrics to display disk sizes, yet they always use decimal metrics themselves. This has irritated me in much the same way that my entire life, grocery stores have sold hot dogs in packages of 10 and hot dog buns in packages of 8, knowing full well that these products were designed to be used together).
I also always used to hate the fact that RAM was typically measured in bytes, wheras ROMs were typically measured in bits - making them seem to be 8x as large unless you paid attention. This was most notable on video game cartridges, where 128KB games were called "Mega cartridges" because they had a megabit of data.
(And let's not get into the confusion between KBps/MBps and Kbps/Mbps for measuring bandwidth...)
You should have then turned around and brought charges against the guy for extortion.
The only way this would have a chance of being successful is if you could prove that he had no intention of doing business under that trademark as such, but purchased it solely for the purpose of extorting money from you.
(Otherwise, every lawsuit could potentially be considered a form of extortion, since most of them are of the form "do this (or stop doing that) or I will force you to give me money").
They know what consumers mean by 1GB, enough to put wording on the box explaining they're not using the standard meaning. Too bad this is only Seagate, the whole industry needs this.
Precisely. Because there is some discrepancy as to what the word "Megabyte" actually means, they make it perfectly clear by stating what they mean by it on the outside of the box, to make sure the customer is no confused. It's a pity that most people can't be bothered to read the words, they just look at the HUGE NUMBERS on the front of the box and then ignore the rest, and then sue when it means what it says instead of what they think it ought to have said.
Humans work in powers of ten.
Actually, this is merely a cultural thing. Many cultures find it convenient to use base 10 because (most) people have 10 fingers to count with. However, the human brain does not inerently favor decimal arithmetic. Some cultures have used other bases in the past (for example, Babylon used base 60 - and you can see how pervasive that was, since we still use such numbers in circular measurement). I also believe that Unicode includes some number systems that are in base 12 (although I might be mistaken).
By redefining "Giga" to mean 2^30 instead of 10^9 like the accepted notation, they have virtually robbed me of about 7% of my drive by understating the size of my files, etc
How, exactly, have they robbed you? Your files occupy exactly the same number of sectors and tracks on the disk, regardless of whether the operating system displays them in Bytes, or Kilobytes (/1024), Megabyres (/1048576). On Windows, look at a file in the directory listing, and it shows binary kilobytes/megabytes. But right-click/Properties and it shows you the exact number of bytes as a decimal number. Chosing one display or another does not alter the actual storage capacity of your drive at all - only your own perception of it.
It's like operating systems (like Unix and Windows/XP) that store the system date in GMT rather than local time. The time signature of a file does not change, regardless of what symbolic representation you choose to display it in.
But in true Internet tradition it's a case of let's play whack-a-mole...
Maybe not anymore - remember, the Russian mob probably has nukes...
Or the 50 year old man has donated , and his marrow has been used by several recipients in the same geographic area...
Well, the original items were about stem cells from umbilical cords, but I suppose the same issue would also apply to any other bone marrow transplants.
"Sure, my client's DNA was found at the scene, but knowing as you know do that at least one other person shares that DNA, the choice before you is no choice at all."...
"After all, there is no way of knowing for sure whether this cold-blooded murder was committed by my client, a 50 year old man from Portland, or by a 3-year old toddler from Orlando".
How much do you want to bet that "unnamed customers" are synonymous with "various federal and state police agencies, DOD, and NSA"?
From TFA, those "unnamed customers" are companies that have the need to remotely reboot their machines. This feature is NOT a backdoor - it merely allows someone WHO ALREADY HAS WRITE ACCESS TO THE ENCRYPED DRIVE (i.e. someone who has already given the passphrase) to grant a one-time certificate that permits a reboot without asking for the passphrase again. The major risk here is that someone will rob your store during the 60 seconds it takes to reboot over the phone, a possible, but highly unlikely scenario.