How are people supposed to create copyrighted works in the first place?
Er... are you suggesting that for a copyright holder to make a copy of their own works, that they can self-infringe? That's as ridiculous as saying that for someone to drive their own car, they have committed grand theft auto (the crime, not the game
No, he's not saying this at all.
Under Induce, manufacturers are forbidden from making devices that could conceivably be used to infringe. Which means that you couldn't burn copies of your own CDs, because CD burners could be used to burn other people's CDs, and would hence be illegal.
This is somewhat reminiscent of the laws in Demolition Man: "Red meat is bad for you; therefore it is illegal".
If it's non-obvious and contrived, is it reasonable to assume that Microsoft could be lifting, or at least peeking at, code from the mozilla project and replicating it in their own browser?
Naw; if that were true, IE wouldn't suck so much.
That is only true if they are lifting good
code fragments. However, the very fact that it has this bug puts that assumption into question.
Instead, the Square Root function disappears in scientific mode (real issue, annoying, forces you to enter the square root a longer way, but not a big problem to anyone who actually uses the scientific functions).
Check inv then press x^2.
But the real problem: how do you do arc-trig functions? They *must* be there, because there's absolutely no point in having trig functions without arc-trig, and they're kinda basic features in any calculator calling itself "scientific".
Check inv then sin, cos, or tan.
No hyperbolic trig functions, either.
Check hyp then sin, cos, or tan. (And also inv for their inverses).
This is what you get when you let a bunch of arts degrees from the marketing department design grown-up adult tools.
The single modal checkbox inv replaces 9 buttons by doubling the functionality of
sin, cos, tan, x^2, x^3, ln, log, Pi and dms. And similarly, the hyp checkbox adds an additional 6 functions. Or would you rather have another 15 buttons and the calculator be 20% larger?
(Then again, none of this is documented; the help file is atrocious.)
The purpose of being based outside of the US is not to avoid US laws but not to be under their jurisdiction.
I fail to see the difference between these two terms. Can you please enlighten me? Being unders someone's jurisdiction means Being subject to their laws. Gambling web sites go off-shore, precisely because U.S. law makes running such sites illegal.
If such a company were located in the Grand Caymans, but running off a web hosting service in Texas, you can bet that the Texas webmaster would be in serious hot water.
Last summer, I decided to upgrade the 32GB HD in my Dell Inspiron 5000e to 40GB. I put both drives in a separate machine, but the 32GB wasn't recognized. I put it back, but it remained dead as a doornail. Plus, the Dell refused to power up with the 40GB drive installed. Fortunately, I had the foresight to do a full backup to a 250GB external firewire drive before attempting this.
To make sure my data wasn't all in just one place, I installed the 40GB drive in my other laptop (a Compaq Presario 1200), and installed W98 on it. I then proceeded to copy the backup data down to it. Everything seemed fine; however, disk compares showed an unusual effect - target directories were LARGER than source; Windows was silently erasing some of the files from the source drive. This would have been fine, except as soon as 32GB had been copied, the Compaq's file system was totally trashed, so I not only lost my second copy, but random parts of my three most recent archival backups (all on the same 250GB drive) as well.
And as I said before, we know there are loopholes -- especially with the internet. Gambling sites banned in the U.S., then they flourish on some tropical island along with their owner. Too much of a pain to host a MMORPG in the U.S., then they are going to move to another country.
I wonder what percentage of MMORPGS played are sold via retail stores or mail-order (as opposed to just being downloaded)? (I would guess that it's a pretty high number.)
Because if a game that runs afoul of U.S. laws is hosted offshore, anyone who manufactures or sells the game package within the U.S. may still be liable to legal challenges. How much business would they lose by having to switch to a download-only distribution model?
If you're going to be a grammar nazi, try to avoid stupid typos you dumb fuck.
If you're going to flame somebody else for posting a grammar flame with incorrect grammar, please make sure your own grammar is correct. In particular, 'nazi' should be capitalized, and there should be a comma after 'typos'.
While currently the exception and not the rule, LOTR is a long movie in itself. There are many additional hours of bonus footage. With this technology, you have no chance of watching any of the bonus footage. Guess you'll have to throw it away and watch it another time.
If the degradation is triggered by the laser, each disc would last 8 hours from when you start playing it. Since each disc can hold around 3-4 hours worth of video, there's plenty of time. You could watch part 1 one night, part 2 a week later, then the bonus materials a month after that.
(And, even if it's done by exposure to air, how difficult would it be to shrink-wrap each individual disc within the box? I mean, look how much wrapping you get for cheap dollar-cost items like cookies these days.)
Spam is unsolicited, so google should filter none of his mail.
This guy solicited it.
He asked other people to spread his e-mail address around, so it would act as a honeypot. He did not ask the spammers themselves for spam.
Deliberately posting your e-mail address in a public forum may be imprudent, but it is no more an explicit solicitation of spam than walking into a bar wearing a miniskirt is a solicitation of rape.
Good point about the problem of abandoned accounts, which won't bring Google any ad revenue. Wouldn't be surprised if they start euthanizing inactive accounts.
Both Yahoo and Hotmail automatically close and erase free mail accounts that are inactive for 30 days. I wouldn't be surprised if most other free email services had similar policies.
Except that won't work, as anyone that understands Bayesian filtering will tell you. In the case of every message with "random words" I've checked recently, the random words actually increased the spam score of that message. Why? Because it seems the random words aren't so random and either the same spammer is using the same "random words" over and over or various spammers are using sets of the same words. Over time most of the "random words" they use actually become great indicators of spam since my real email doesn't typically contain the random words they use.
Their mistake is probably using a real dictionary, and then taking a uniform distribution of random words from it.
Unfortunately, words in common usage form a much smaller subset of the language, so random dictionary selections are bound to hit lots of words that nobody has ever heard of.
I could get rid of half of my Nigerian 419 spams by filtering on the word 'modalities' alone.
Its either that or its testing which combinations of things might get through so they can include them with their REAL spam.
And just how could this possibly work? So they send you a message composed entirely of random words. It gets through your filters. But since it has no meaningful content nor valid return address, how are they supposed to know that it actually arrived? You couldn't tell them, even if you wanted to.
Perhaps the "smart" behavior could be created by using a distributed bayesian filter against the contents of a file.
Having a filter automatically file an document in a folder called 'Articles about GNOME' is fairly easy. Having it also file it in a folder called 'Articles by John' (or worse, 'Articles by John's friends') is a lot harder, and I'd love to see the AI in a filter that could file it in 'Articles that I find interesting'.
No, it will spend the endd of cybercafe gaming using Valve products. It's incredibly short-sighted, and I doubt that Valve's competitors would go along with it.
As it is now, that is probably the case. However, what I actually wrote, as the last line of my post was:
So, even if Valve has the legal high ground here, if this kind of usurious licensing policy catches on, it could spell the end of cybercafe gaming.
Basically, if everyone follow Valve's trend and starts to charge licencing fees like this, there will be no games in cybercafes at all.
Although, the cybercafe program that Valve has allows all of the Valve's games to be playable for $9/month (per computer)... unless it's been recently changed (I don't have the time [or need] to go check the Steam website). Alot of these cybercafes make more than that per computer, especially coming into the summer season.
Yes. For Valve. Now, if every other computer game manufacturer started charging the same, then any cybercafe that had games from twenty different publishers on their computers would have to pay licensing fees of $180/seat each month, or $2160/year. Per computer.
To put it another way: if a computer is charged $9/month, that's roughly 30c/day, or $6/day for 20 games, which is 25c/hour. If the machines only average 25% usage, this jumps to $1 per paid hour (and the license fees still keep aggregating, even during off-peak hours, or hours when the cafe is closed). If the owner charges $2/hour, this means the licensing fees would take up half his gross income, even before you count any expenses. If his other costs were just $1/hour, he had a 100% profit margin, but he's now making 0%. If his other costs are more, he's now operating at a loss. And how many businesses do you know with 100+% profit margins?
So, even if Valve has the legal high ground here, if this kind of usurious licensing policy catches on, it could spell the end of cybercafe gaming.
In point of fact, what you're describing is not defined as procreation, so you (and most of us at/.) are safe on that count.
According to the treaty, it doesn't matter if the device is used for such activity, merely that it is capable of such use. So, unless you're sterile, you're going to jail (where, ironically, it will likely gets lots more use...)
50 million people losing power is significant. A guy not able to get his e-mail through a cable provider in Florida is not. I also recall tons of front page articles during the California rolling blackouts.
One guy in Florida who can't get his mail isn't news. One of the largest cable ISPs in the US having e-mail delays of one week is news.
Wouldn't save your bandwidth either as the mail still has to hit your SMTP server, fully transmitted, for the filter to work.
90% of the spam I get can be recognized by the subject line alone. Once a subject line is recognized as spam, there's no need to receive the body of the message; just drop the connection immediately. For even the smallest spams, this would reduce bandwidth by 50%; longer ones, like Nigerian 419 scams, or ones with embedded graphics (or worse, viruses) would save substantially more.
I've written this breakthrough program which calculates the digits of the googolplex, but now I'm afraid of being prosecuted under the DMCA for copyright infringement. Please help!
int main(int argc, char **argv) {
printf("1");
while (1)
printf(",000");
}
Actually, the number of zeros will be 1 (modulo 3) so you really should have written:
int main(int argc, char **argv) {
printf("10");
while (1)
printf(",000");
}
(And why does the Slashdot submission form ruthlessly turn " " into normal spaces, destroying indentation?)
You have to consider also, that Google is a different word than googol. It's unlikely that anyone searching for information on one would inadvertently stumble upon the other.
Not really. The very first time I ever heard of Google was from a link at the top of Yahoo's main page that said Powered by Google. For several days I couldn't figure out why, whenever I typed
www.googol.com
I would get a math page, but whenever I followed the link from Yahoo I would get the search engine. It's very easy to confuse two things that sound the same. (Just read the spelling on many Slashdot posts...)
Even if they are being scammed, aren't this person and his/her accomplices committing mail/wire fraud?
Fraud happens when you unjustly enrich yourself at someone else's expense. Attempted fraud happens when you try to do that; it's only fraud if you actually succeed. Since escrow was [allegedly] being used, and the buyer had complete control, how could fraud happen? Buyer sends money to escrow company; seller sends him garbage; buyer says 'this isn't acceptable'; seller receives no money. Fraud might have been possible if they had sent something that could be confused with the real thing (for example, a working laptop with a slower CPU, less RAM, etc.)
but that wasn't the case here. Besides which, unless the buyer actually deposited money with the escrow company (cough cough), it's all moot anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
How are people supposed to create copyrighted works in the first place?
Er... are you suggesting that for a copyright holder to make a copy of their own works, that they can self-infringe? That's as ridiculous as saying that for someone to drive their own car, they have committed grand theft auto (the crime, not the game
No, he's not saying this at all.
Under Induce, manufacturers are forbidden from making devices that could conceivably be used to infringe. Which means that you couldn't burn copies of your own CDs, because CD burners could be used to burn other people's CDs, and would hence be illegal.
This is somewhat reminiscent of the laws in Demolition Man: "Red meat is bad for you; therefore it is illegal".
If it's non-obvious and contrived, is it reasonable to assume that Microsoft could be lifting, or at least peeking at, code from the mozilla project and replicating it in their own browser?
Naw; if that were true, IE wouldn't suck so much.
That is only true if they are lifting good code fragments. However, the very fact that it has this bug puts that assumption into question.
Instead, the Square Root function disappears in scientific mode (real issue, annoying, forces you to enter the square root a longer way, but not a big problem to anyone who actually uses the scientific functions).
Check inv then press x^2.
But the real problem: how do you do arc-trig functions? They *must* be there, because there's absolutely no point in having trig functions without arc-trig, and they're kinda basic features in any calculator calling itself "scientific".
Check inv then sin, cos, or tan.
No hyperbolic trig functions, either.
Check hyp then sin, cos, or tan. (And also inv for their inverses).
This is what you get when you let a bunch of arts degrees from the marketing department design grown-up adult tools.
The single modal checkbox inv replaces 9 buttons by doubling the functionality of sin, cos, tan, x^2, x^3, ln, log, Pi and dms. And similarly, the hyp checkbox adds an additional 6 functions. Or would you rather have another 15 buttons and the calculator be 20% larger?
(Then again, none of this is documented; the help file is atrocious.)
The purpose of being based outside of the US is not to avoid US laws but not to be under their jurisdiction.
I fail to see the difference between these two terms. Can you please enlighten me? Being unders someone's jurisdiction means Being subject to their laws. Gambling web sites go off-shore, precisely because U.S. law makes running such sites illegal.
If such a company were located in the Grand Caymans, but running off a web hosting service in Texas, you can bet that the Texas webmaster would be in serious hot water.
Last summer, I decided to upgrade the 32GB HD in my Dell Inspiron 5000e to 40GB. I put both drives in a separate machine, but the 32GB wasn't recognized. I put it back, but it remained dead as a doornail. Plus, the Dell refused to power up with the 40GB drive installed. Fortunately, I had the foresight to do a full backup to a 250GB external firewire drive before attempting this.
To make sure my data wasn't all in just one place, I installed the 40GB drive in my other laptop (a Compaq Presario 1200), and installed W98 on it. I then proceeded to copy the backup data down to it. Everything seemed fine; however, disk compares showed an unusual effect - target directories were LARGER than source; Windows was silently erasing some of the files from the source drive. This would have been fine, except as soon as 32GB had been copied, the Compaq's file system was totally trashed, so I not only lost my second copy, but random parts of my three most recent archival backups (all on the same 250GB drive) as well.
And as I said before, we know there are loopholes -- especially with the internet. Gambling sites banned in the U.S., then they flourish on some tropical island along with their owner. Too much of a pain to host a MMORPG in the U.S., then they are going to move to another country.
I wonder what percentage of MMORPGS played are sold via retail stores or mail-order (as opposed to just being downloaded)? (I would guess that it's a pretty high number.)
Because if a game that runs afoul of U.S. laws is hosted offshore, anyone who manufactures or sells the game package within the U.S. may still be liable to legal challenges. How much business would they lose by having to switch to a download-only distribution model?
If you're going to be a grammar nazi, try to avoid stupid typos you dumb fuck.
If you're going to flame somebody else for posting a grammar flame with incorrect grammar, please make sure your own grammar is correct. In particular, 'nazi' should be capitalized, and there should be a comma after 'typos'.
While currently the exception and not the rule, LOTR is a long movie in itself. There are many additional hours of bonus footage. With this technology, you have no chance of watching any of the bonus footage. Guess you'll have to throw it away and watch it another time.
If the degradation is triggered by the laser, each disc would last 8 hours from when you start playing it. Since each disc can hold around 3-4 hours worth of video, there's plenty of time. You could watch part 1 one night, part 2 a week later, then the bonus materials a month after that.
(And, even if it's done by exposure to air, how difficult would it be to shrink-wrap each individual disc within the box? I mean, look how much wrapping you get for cheap dollar-cost items like cookies these days.)
Spam is unsolicited, so google should filter none of his mail.
This guy solicited it.
He asked other people to spread his e-mail address around, so it would act as a honeypot. He did not ask the spammers themselves for spam.
Deliberately posting your e-mail address in a public forum may be imprudent, but it is no more an explicit solicitation of spam than walking into a bar wearing a miniskirt is a solicitation of rape.
Good point about the problem of abandoned accounts, which won't bring Google any ad revenue. Wouldn't be surprised if they start euthanizing inactive accounts.
Both Yahoo and Hotmail automatically close and erase free mail accounts that are inactive for 30 days. I wouldn't be surprised if most other free email services had similar policies.
Except that won't work, as anyone that understands Bayesian filtering will tell you. In the case of every message with "random words" I've checked recently, the random words actually increased the spam score of that message. Why? Because it seems the random words aren't so random and either the same spammer is using the same "random words" over and over or various spammers are using sets of the same words. Over time most of the "random words" they use actually become great indicators of spam since my real email doesn't typically contain the random words they use.
Their mistake is probably using a real dictionary, and then taking a uniform distribution of random words from it. Unfortunately, words in common usage form a much smaller subset of the language, so random dictionary selections are bound to hit lots of words that nobody has ever heard of.
I could get rid of half of my Nigerian 419 spams by filtering on the word 'modalities' alone.
Its either that or its testing which combinations of things might get through so they can include them with their REAL spam.
And just how could this possibly work? So they send you a message composed entirely of random words. It gets through your filters. But since it has no meaningful content nor valid return address, how are they supposed to know that it actually arrived? You couldn't tell them, even if you wanted to.
Perhaps the "smart" behavior could be created by using a distributed bayesian filter against the contents of a file.
Having a filter automatically file an document in a folder called 'Articles about GNOME' is fairly easy. Having it also file it in a folder called 'Articles by John' (or worse, 'Articles by John's friends') is a lot harder, and I'd love to see the AI in a filter that could file it in 'Articles that I find interesting'.
No, it will spend the endd of cybercafe gaming using Valve products. It's incredibly short-sighted, and I doubt that Valve's competitors would go along with it.
As it is now, that is probably the case. However, what I actually wrote, as the last line of my post was:
So, even if Valve has the legal high ground here, if this kind of usurious licensing policy catches on, it could spell the end of cybercafe gaming.
Basically, if everyone follow Valve's trend and starts to charge licencing fees like this, there will be no games in cybercafes at all.
Although, the cybercafe program that Valve has allows all of the Valve's games to be playable for $9/month (per computer)... unless it's been recently changed (I don't have the time [or need] to go check the Steam website). Alot of these cybercafes make more than that per computer, especially coming into the summer season.
Yes. For Valve. Now, if every other computer game manufacturer started charging the same, then any cybercafe that had games from twenty different publishers on their computers would have to pay licensing fees of $180/seat each month, or $2160/year. Per computer.
To put it another way: if a computer is charged $9/month, that's roughly 30c/day, or $6/day for 20 games, which is 25c/hour. If the machines only average 25% usage, this jumps to $1 per paid hour (and the license fees still keep aggregating, even during off-peak hours, or hours when the cafe is closed). If the owner charges $2/hour, this means the licensing fees would take up half his gross income, even before you count any expenses. If his other costs were just $1/hour, he had a 100% profit margin, but he's now making 0%. If his other costs are more, he's now operating at a loss. And how many businesses do you know with 100+% profit margins?
So, even if Valve has the legal high ground here, if this kind of usurious licensing policy catches on, it could spell the end of cybercafe gaming.
In point of fact, what you're describing is not defined as procreation, so you (and most of us at /.) are safe on that count.
According to the treaty, it doesn't matter if the device is used for such activity, merely that it is capable of such use. So, unless you're sterile, you're going to jail (where, ironically, it will likely gets lots more use...)
Wrapping yourself in tinfoil is also effective.
Even if satellites might not be able to track you. you will be visible to the naked eye from low earth orbit.
The UN is accountable to its member states and its member states are accountable to its citizens. Don't think so shallowly, such is unwelcome.
The first part is true. The second part is true only for representative governments, which are, sadly, still a minority on this planet.
Or do you have no idea how the UN operates?
Or do you have no idea how the world operates?
If you offer to sell me a turd for $1000, and I buy it, have you committed fraud?
Those doing the purchasing had a duty to make sure they were getting a fair and proper deal, and were spending money wisely. They failed to do this.
If I go to a doctor with a mild headache and he gives me unnecessary brain surgery instead of an aspirin, that is malpractice and fraud.
50 million people losing power is significant. A guy not able to get his e-mail through a cable provider in Florida is not. I also recall tons of front page articles during the California rolling blackouts.
One guy in Florida who can't get his mail isn't news. One of the largest cable ISPs in the US having e-mail delays of one week is news.
Wouldn't save your bandwidth either as the mail still has to hit your SMTP server, fully transmitted, for the filter to work.
90% of the spam I get can be recognized by the subject line alone. Once a subject line is recognized as spam, there's no need to receive the body of the message; just drop the connection immediately. For even the smallest spams, this would reduce bandwidth by 50%; longer ones, like Nigerian 419 scams, or ones with embedded graphics (or worse, viruses) would save substantially more.
int main(int argc, char **argv) {
printf("1");
while (1)
printf(",000");
}
Actually, the number of zeros will be 1 (modulo 3) so you really should have written:
int main(int argc, char **argv) {
printf("10");
while (1)
printf(",000");
}
(And why does the Slashdot submission form ruthlessly turn " " into normal spaces, destroying indentation?)
You have to consider also, that Google is a different word than googol. It's unlikely that anyone searching for information on one would inadvertently stumble upon the other.
Not really. The very first time I ever heard of Google was from a link at the top of Yahoo's main page that said Powered by Google. For several days I couldn't figure out why, whenever I typed www.googol.com I would get a math page, but whenever I followed the link from Yahoo I would get the search engine. It's very easy to confuse two things that sound the same. (Just read the spelling on many Slashdot posts...)
Even if they are being scammed, aren't this person and his/her accomplices committing mail/wire fraud?
Fraud happens when you unjustly enrich yourself at someone else's expense. Attempted fraud happens when you try to do that; it's only fraud if you actually succeed. Since escrow was [allegedly] being used, and the buyer had complete control, how could fraud happen? Buyer sends money to escrow company; seller sends him garbage; buyer says 'this isn't acceptable'; seller receives no money. Fraud might have been possible if they had sent something that could be confused with the real thing (for example, a working laptop with a slower CPU, less RAM, etc.) but that wasn't the case here. Besides which, unless the buyer actually deposited money with the escrow company (cough cough), it's all moot anyway.
discovering other planets is only has good as our ability to get there, which is nil.
By the same logic, studying the Sun is useless, since you (literally) have a snowball's chance in hell of ever getting there.