Well, if intelligence can run on mostly deterministic machines, then presumably we could design the machines such that we could copy them. I think the only problems with copying brains are that nature didn't think to put in a JTAG interface so we could extract the structure and state of the neurons in a simple way, our tissue growing skills aren't up to the task of making a blank brain, and we don't have fast enough processors or precise enough models to physically simulate a brain-sized object.
This is discounting the possibility that intelligence relies on some strange quantum-physicsy effect, to the extent that it couldn't achieve sentience without actually using this effect. But it would have to be a strange effect indeed if it made it provably impossible to abstract the hardware. Even if some magic quantum interaction is necessary for intelligence, you would expect to be able to make some hardware that performs it in an artificial way, which your robot brain would necessarily have access to. (Similar to how we have hardware that can produce actual random numbers, something computers otherwise wouldn't be able to do.)
While you could conceivably argue that Apple isn't at fault for their DRM, that doesn't hold for Microsoft. Microsoft started writing DRM software long before they started selling music.
At the time Linux was named (not by Linus, who wanted to call it Freax, but at the insistence of Ari Lemmke, who controlled the FTP server), he had written the vast majority of it.
Well what we really ought to do is change the way we compute sales tax. Prices on the shelves should be given with tax included, and they ought to be divisible by at least 5. Then you'd never really need pennies. At which point you could discontinue them, but it wouldn't be an issue, because nobody would end up getting stuck with them.
Here's a clue: if you don't want to read about whether a product is worth it, don't click on a Slashdot article about it. Slashdot would suck if nobody shared their opinions. It would be improved, however, if you reserved your complaining about complaints for articles about how often one should complain.
So you really wouldn't be bothered by a camera in your bedroom that doesn't tell you whether it's transmitting, as long as our infallible media told you it would only be used with judicial oversight?
I think the issue is that the technology to monitor cell phones remotely while off, if it exists, does not just make it easier to bug cell phones. It actually constitutes bugging them. Bugging someone's home doesn't mean turning on a mic you put there earlier, it means putting the mic there in the first place. If cell phones can really do this, it would mean your phone has already been bugged, and unless there's probable cause to suspect every cell phone user, illegally so.
Ha ha, sir. I hereby laugh at your naivety in trusting DRM not to screw you. Let's face it - for the foreseeable future, the only way to buy music is on CDs.
A few points: Are you sure it's an invention and not a discovery? Are you sure it's not just pure math? And are you sure it's a "truly novel" data structure, not just a combination linked list hash table or something? More practically: If the data structure is at all useful, and unless the company never lets its employees leave, doesn't give them Internet access, and euthanizes rather than fires them, then it's likely the data structure will see the light of day.
How often do programmers look to expired patents to learn how to implement things? Almost never.
It's not just because patents are written in intentionally obfuscated legalese. It's because when you see software in action, it's easy to figure out how it works, even though it's hard to implement it well. It's because given a specific problem to solve, programmers generally solve it in similar ways. In obvious ways. It's because the time invested in programming isn't spent figuring out how to do things, it's spent artfully expressing those algorithms to the computer. Which is why software should be copyrightable, but not be patentable.
Well, the problem is that they can illegally break the deal, or break the spirit of the deal but get away with it on a technicality. Specifically, if you released software under the GPL, part of the deal was that you give recipients of the software (for example, Novell) the right to any of your patents embodied in the software. You also said that if Novell modifies the software, they have to extend the same deal to anyone getting it from them. In other words, Novell can't add their own patented stuff to your software, wait until you integrate it, and then let only their customers use their patents, which would effectively usurp control of the software's use.
So the problem is, people fear the following will happen: Novel (probably unintentionally) integrates something Microsoft has a patent on. Years later, Microsoft starts suing open source users who are now using this patent, but not Novell's users, who are protected by the deal. Suddenly the only way to legally use the software is to get it from Novell or Microsoft. This might not have a profound effect on individual users, but most companies are scared to death of (the vague threat of) getting sued by MS, so they'd pay up.
Even if bandwidth is a physical entity, running an open wireless access point that broadcasts it's SSID is about the same as putting out a bowl of free candy on Halloween. You have to expect people to take some, and even though it's not nice, it's not theft even if one person empties the bowl. However, if you were to restrict access to it, even in a very limited way (like a "Keep Off" sign or WEP), then it's a different thing entirely.
If the problem is a bunch of stupid people, the solution is not removal of anonymity, or censorship, but education. Even if you succeed in removing most untrue statements, you would only have reinforced the dangerous tendency of people to believe everything they read. Hence requiring even more censorship. It's kind of a vicious cycle.
Hmm, you created an account just to make that comment, which links to that website three times. Don't you just love the smell of astroturf in the morning?
Most shrink-wrap EULAs attempt to restrict rights that you already had by virtue of buying a copy of the software (fair use, doctrine of first sale, ability to make backups, ability to reverse-engineer, privacy). Most "open source" licenses like CC or the GPL give you rights you would not otherwise have (the right to distribute copies and derivative works) in return for you agreeing to some limitations (not changing the license or adding DRM).
Currently it's easy to copy both CSS-protected and unprotected DVDs. So the simplest path for the MPAA would be to change (or remove) the DRM on the files you download to allow you to burn unprotected DVDs. Instead, they're going out of their way by changing the CSS spec, presumably so the DVDs you burn will have CSS. Why would they do that? My guess is they're also trying to fix CSS so you can't copy these burned DVDs. Which puts them a step below the music industry, which does let Apple allow you to burn ordinary CDs.
Re:What's the copy protection like?
on
Prey Review
·
· Score: 1
Nobody complains about needing discs for consoles because in most cases, that's a technical requirement, not an artificial one. On the PC, people have to pay for insane amounts of storage, so they're righteously pissed off when this storage doesn't gain them any convenience (except less-horrible load times).
If, every 4 years, you were asked which of the two most popular Slashdot users you prefer to be allowed to post, would you consider that an effective moderation system? Here on Slashdot, we enjoy relatively frequent moderation, not just of users but of specific ideas, with limited ability to describe our agreement or objection, or the ability to post rebuttals which can be similarly moderated. Not surprisingly, Slashdot's groupthink approximates the will of the people on technical issues much better than the US government does.
How will having lots of smaller disks be more reliable? If they mirror each other, yes, but if they are striped, they'll be a lot less reliable. Plus who has room (and power) in their case for 7 drives? Datacenters, sure, but not home users.
It's amazing that cable companies have the gaul to complain. They started off selling the service of retransmitting broadcast TV over cables to people too far out of town for good reception. The broadcast companies, in good old-fashioned American tradition, sued. I guess it's just a fact of life that companies offering new services will be hassled by those who profit from the old ones.
If the government were to provide internet bandwidth directly, they'd feel justified in censoring it ("I don't want my tax dollars going to no pornography or nuthin"), and there would be no competition to curtail that.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I too have been annoyed by the utter lack of entertainment after the mid-1980's.
Well, if intelligence can run on mostly deterministic machines, then presumably we could design the machines such that we could copy them. I think the only problems with copying brains are that nature didn't think to put in a JTAG interface so we could extract the structure and state of the neurons in a simple way, our tissue growing skills aren't up to the task of making a blank brain, and we don't have fast enough processors or precise enough models to physically simulate a brain-sized object.
This is discounting the possibility that intelligence relies on some strange quantum-physicsy effect, to the extent that it couldn't achieve sentience without actually using this effect. But it would have to be a strange effect indeed if it made it provably impossible to abstract the hardware. Even if some magic quantum interaction is necessary for intelligence, you would expect to be able to make some hardware that performs it in an artificial way, which your robot brain would necessarily have access to. (Similar to how we have hardware that can produce actual random numbers, something computers otherwise wouldn't be able to do.)
While you could conceivably argue that Apple isn't at fault for their DRM, that doesn't hold for Microsoft. Microsoft started writing DRM software long before they started selling music.
At the time Linux was named (not by Linus, who wanted to call it Freax, but at the insistence of Ari Lemmke, who controlled the FTP server), he had written the vast majority of it.
Well what we really ought to do is change the way we compute sales tax. Prices on the shelves should be given with tax included, and they ought to be divisible by at least 5. Then you'd never really need pennies. At which point you could discontinue them, but it wouldn't be an issue, because nobody would end up getting stuck with them.
Here's a clue: if you don't want to read about whether a product is worth it, don't click on a Slashdot article about it. Slashdot would suck if nobody shared their opinions. It would be improved, however, if you reserved your complaining about complaints for articles about how often one should complain.
I think the issue is that the technology to monitor cell phones remotely while off, if it exists, does not just make it easier to bug cell phones. It actually constitutes bugging them. Bugging someone's home doesn't mean turning on a mic you put there earlier, it means putting the mic there in the first place. If cell phones can really do this, it would mean your phone has already been bugged, and unless there's probable cause to suspect every cell phone user, illegally so.
Ha ha, sir. I hereby laugh at your naivety in trusting DRM not to screw you. Let's face it - for the foreseeable future, the only way to buy music is on CDs.
Yeah, that Commander Keen guy is pretty darn cool.
A few points: Are you sure it's an invention and not a discovery? Are you sure it's not just pure math? And are you sure it's a "truly novel" data structure, not just a combination linked list hash table or something? More practically: If the data structure is at all useful, and unless the company never lets its employees leave, doesn't give them Internet access, and euthanizes rather than fires them, then it's likely the data structure will see the light of day.
It's not just because patents are written in intentionally obfuscated legalese. It's because when you see software in action, it's easy to figure out how it works, even though it's hard to implement it well. It's because given a specific problem to solve, programmers generally solve it in similar ways. In obvious ways. It's because the time invested in programming isn't spent figuring out how to do things, it's spent artfully expressing those algorithms to the computer. Which is why software should be copyrightable, but not be patentable.
So the problem is, people fear the following will happen: Novel (probably unintentionally) integrates something Microsoft has a patent on. Years later, Microsoft starts suing open source users who are now using this patent, but not Novell's users, who are protected by the deal. Suddenly the only way to legally use the software is to get it from Novell or Microsoft. This might not have a profound effect on individual users, but most companies are scared to death of (the vague threat of) getting sued by MS, so they'd pay up.
Even if bandwidth is a physical entity, running an open wireless access point that broadcasts it's SSID is about the same as putting out a bowl of free candy on Halloween. You have to expect people to take some, and even though it's not nice, it's not theft even if one person empties the bowl. However, if you were to restrict access to it, even in a very limited way (like a "Keep Off" sign or WEP), then it's a different thing entirely.
If the problem is a bunch of stupid people, the solution is not removal of anonymity, or censorship, but education. Even if you succeed in removing most untrue statements, you would only have reinforced the dangerous tendency of people to believe everything they read. Hence requiring even more censorship. It's kind of a vicious cycle.
Try adding nodev to the options column for that filesystem in /etc/fstab.
Hmm, you created an account just to make that comment, which links to that website three times. Don't you just love the smell of astroturf in the morning?
Most shrink-wrap EULAs attempt to restrict rights that you already had by virtue of buying a copy of the software (fair use, doctrine of first sale, ability to make backups, ability to reverse-engineer, privacy). Most "open source" licenses like CC or the GPL give you rights you would not otherwise have (the right to distribute copies and derivative works) in return for you agreeing to some limitations (not changing the license or adding DRM).
Currently it's easy to copy both CSS-protected and unprotected DVDs. So the simplest path for the MPAA would be to change (or remove) the DRM on the files you download to allow you to burn unprotected DVDs. Instead, they're going out of their way by changing the CSS spec, presumably so the DVDs you burn will have CSS. Why would they do that? My guess is they're also trying to fix CSS so you can't copy these burned DVDs. Which puts them a step below the music industry, which does let Apple allow you to burn ordinary CDs.
Nobody complains about needing discs for consoles because in most cases, that's a technical requirement, not an artificial one. On the PC, people have to pay for insane amounts of storage, so they're righteously pissed off when this storage doesn't gain them any convenience (except less-horrible load times).
If, every 4 years, you were asked which of the two most popular Slashdot users you prefer to be allowed to post, would you consider that an effective moderation system? Here on Slashdot, we enjoy relatively frequent moderation, not just of users but of specific ideas, with limited ability to describe our agreement or objection, or the ability to post rebuttals which can be similarly moderated. Not surprisingly, Slashdot's groupthink approximates the will of the people on technical issues much better than the US government does.
Nope, 400 mbps would be .4 bits per second, which is .05 bytes per second, or about .000071 Libraries of Congress per millenium.
How will having lots of smaller disks be more reliable? If they mirror each other, yes, but if they are striped, they'll be a lot less reliable. Plus who has room (and power) in their case for 7 drives? Datacenters, sure, but not home users.
It's amazing that cable companies have the gaul to complain. They started off selling the service of retransmitting broadcast TV over cables to people too far out of town for good reception. The broadcast companies, in good old-fashioned American tradition, sued. I guess it's just a fact of life that companies offering new services will be hassled by those who profit from the old ones.
I recommend you read "Wetware" by Rudy Rucker. It explores the idea of what would happen if humans got a hold of replicator-like technology.
If the government were to provide internet bandwidth directly, they'd feel justified in censoring it ("I don't want my tax dollars going to no pornography or nuthin"), and there would be no competition to curtail that.