The DeCSS case was different; in the DeCSS case we were talking about a piece of software which does something. Here we're talking about a paper. A paper with printed text on it can't help me circumvent any copy protection! That's crazy talk! It's like saying it's illegal to carry around a concealed drawing of a hand gun on the grounds that the drawing is a weapon.
Re:Official reports of mundane activity
on
Space Station BSOD
·
· Score: 1
Actually, that's exactly what it is; rocket science! This is *NASA* we're talking about here.
Buy it, then return it.
Let's face it, we can cry about fair use all we want, but the government isn't about to step in and anger some of their biggest tax-payers. Money talks; if you buy a CD you can't copy, return it. Tell them you won't buy a CD you can't exercise your rights to fair-use over. You take your concerns to the retailers; they'll take your concerns to the RIAA - democracy in motion.:P
I work for a telecommunications company...
on
CS vs CIS
·
· Score: 1
I do development work on the ATM firmware side of a 450 gigabit switch for a major telecommunications company in Ottawa. Know what? NO ONE I've met, outside of the ~4% of our employees in IT, have CIS degrees. In fact, the number of CS degrees is pretty small too; it's mostly systems engineers (although, I personally have am CS).
That guy who played the elven Cleric, that was Tom Baker! Yes, THE Tom Baker, of Dr. Who fame!
I kept expecting a little balding man in a robe to pop up and have everyone shout "Dungeon master!".:)
Seriously, though, the movie wasn't THAT bad. Yes, it was a little reminicent of Star Wars. So was "Gladiator" in a lot of ways. Just because you have an empire under seige, a young empress, a nd a war, it does not follow that you have Star Wars episode 1. There are plenty of historical examples that follow this formula, and believe it or not, none of them stole their history from Mr. Lucas.
Yes, I admit, when theif boy came out onto the balcony in the elf tree-village, I leaned over to my girlfriend and said "But you have a power I could never understand". And admittedly, the glowing blue good magical sword, and the glowing red evil magical sword... well let's just say I was waiting for someone's hand to get cut off in that scene. I'm not sure that these similarities were intentional though.
Re:Radar detectors are only illegal in Ontario....
on
Cheap MP3 Broadcaster
·
· Score: 1
Uhh, no.
In Quebec, it is illegal to POSSES a radar detector. Even if it is dismantled/disabled/not plugged in/in the trunk, etc... It's a $1000 fine and seizure of equipment.
Well, YOUR intertia would do that in real life. It all depends how heavy this sphere is. Assumedly, though, it's light enough that you can start it "rolling" with minimal effort, so I'm guessing it would stop in the same.
My big complaint is that, essentially, you're walking on your screen. Better hope you have nice, soft, and very clean shoes.
This will take a fair amount of reading up on, as I don't know all the details off hand, but;
Lego makes a product called Mindstorm. It consists of a number of sensors (light sensors, touch sensors, etc...), motors, and other various useful robotic parts that fit together with normal lego blocks. You plug this stuff up to a computer, and write software to control the lego. The software that comes with the kits is fairly simple, and only lets you build some simple behaviour, but someone wrote a special lego operating system called LegOS, and you can write full blown software for it. People have made little minature photocopiers and other interesting projects this way. I believe there are C and Java compilers available, but I'm a little fuzzy on the exact details (I'm saving up for a lego mindstorm kit myself, otherwise I'd know these things:).
If you're interested in this stuff, I'm sure there's a number of good web resources out there. As well, O'Reilly has an excelent book (I believe it's called "The Lego Mindstorm Unofficial Handbook") which covers a wide range of interesting things you can make Lego's product do. (There was even a slashdot review of the book, check out http://slashdot.org/books/99/11/24/0928207.shtml and http://slashdot.org/books/99/12/23/1419242.shtml, and do a search for "Mindstorm" on slashdot, you'll find some interesting stuff).
Making computers easy to use for non-computer people. The Windows interface is all about trying to come up with intuitive systems; systems you don't have to learn or know anything about in order to use (and so long as you get a machine with Windows pre-installed, windows is pretty good at it... until the user trys to update his video card drivers because some game tells him to, and then he has to reinstall windows, and it asks him what port his printer is on, and he phones up me and says "What's a port?"... But I digress).
In this respect, a natural language interface is perfect. "mv a* foo" is not exactly a command the novice might guess.
My chief concern is the imperfections in algorithims involved in natural language processing. Knowing Microsoft, typing in "play starcraft" is likely to bring up anything from a "helpful" paperclip telling me how to organize my starcraft documents, to a "su;rm -rf/".
you don't want it to, it will also come up WHERE you don't want it to. I can see some serious abuse of this kind of technology.
Lots of windows applications are already very presumtious about their importance in your life. Many an email package dines themselves to be of such import that, upon receiving new mail, they bring themselves to the foreground and open up a dialogue box informing you of your urgent life-or-death mail from XYZ-Spamco asking you to buy their product. Of course, the fact that you were mid-command, telneted into a unix box trying to stop circuit board etcher before it starts because you just realized there was a fault in your layout. But no, that spam mail is more important than your carefully preped sheet of copper laminated fiberglass.
Now, not only can applications bother you with this sort of thing, they can make sure the dialog box comes up right where you're looking, intentionally breaking your train of thought.
This is less about Linux, and more about how to roll out 2500 secure Linux boxes (or any other OS) at the same time.
Norton Ghost (Originally writen by Binary Research, a Canadian company) is a pretty sweet piece of software that will let you "clone" a disk partition, even over a network to multiple clients simultaneously using IP multicast. This means you can set up Linux on one workstation, install all your software and security patches, link up all 2500 machines by network, insert a Ghost boot disk in the other 2499 machines, then copy your complete installation - software and all - to all 2500 machines at once.
What can we do? The one thing consumers have always been able to do. Take it back, and demand your money back. If they won't give you your money, scream a lot.:)
Aren't these units still under waranty? Don't tell me UCITA has made hardware waranties legaly-unbinding as well! Take it back to your place of purchase, tell 'em it's broken (which it is), and get a new one.
...on an airplane. A cell phone on the ground has line of sight to maybe 2 cell towers at a time. Maybe 3 if you're downtown. From an airplane 30,000 feet up, you're phone's sphere of effect just got huge. Just immagine the cell tower selection algorithim with an input size of 4000 possible towers. Add to that the fact that you're going several hundred MPH and you'd be changing towers every couple seconds. You're looking at a distributed system nightmare. And there's FCC regulations that prohibit you from using your phone up there too.
Here in Ottawa we have Bell Sympatico, a child corperation of Bell Sigma, a child corperation of Bell Canada. Bell Sympatico offers the ADSL and dialup internet connections (no shell, no web space, no mail forwarding, it's not really dialup service, since there aren't all that many services).
I myself subscribe to DSL via Magma Communications Corp. Why would I do such a thing? 1) Magma offers static IPs, and doesn't run their connections through a web-caching proxy. 2) Sympatico has to be the saddest run excuse for a buisness I've ever seen. Magma manages to get my issues with bell resolved much faster than Sympatico ever could. And Sympatico's "technical support" is a select group of lowest-common-denominator arts students, who aren't allowed to be on the phone with you for more than 15 minutes. Magma is also somewhat more honest about network outages, whereas Sympatico tends to down their entire network, and then have tech support tell their customers "Everything is fine, something must be wrong with your modem".
Grr... I get angry just thinking about them...
Keep in mind the core competency of a phone company is providing telephone service. They aren't internet companies, and if it's anything like it is up here, then they really don't know much about being an internet company.
Ok, first of all, we have Microsoft which takes an open source specification, modifies it in a few near-trivial ways, then claims it's their own copyrighted work. This is pretty classic "Microsoft innovation" for you, but let's put the fact that Microsoft doesn't actually own Kerberos aside.
I don't know if Slashdot has already modified the story in question, but when *I* look back over the story at the articles MS claims contain actual copies of the specification, all I find is links to the specification. Also, it seems that all the timestamps in MS's letter are off by an hour (although this could just be a result of some crazy database porting to the new/. server?). So overall, MS's letter is grossly innacurate.
There's about a dozen differnt ways slashdot can fight this.
A link to a site should never be illegal. Microsoft doesn't own links (although maybe they'll copyright the 'A HREF="" COLOR=""' tag when they're done butchering kerberos, they have to be free to innovate after all). If Microsoft has problems with the content of a page, then they should go to that page to solve their problems, not pages which link to it. This is common sense, although I don't know if the law in the US upholds common sense anymore, so we'll have to see.
It's arguable that Slashdot is only acting as a conduit for information. An ISP if you will. (Hey, wait a minute, where have I heard/that/ argument before?). That has some unpleasant conotations under the burdensome DMCA, but it's still worth looking into.
Under fair use, copyrighted materials can be reproduced for commentary in an educational or journalistic environment, which Slashdot quallifies as IMHO (the latter, at any rate).
I'm at work right now, so I'm gonna cut this off and get to my point; I originally thought that slashdot should remove portions of the document actually posted to the discussion groups, and leave the links etc... but the more I think about it, the more I realize how wrong this would be. I don't think the messages should be modified at all.
If we're forced to change them, I think we should replace offending content with "***CENSORED BY MICROSOFT***" to express our disconent (I'd suggest a boycott, but I hardly think that'd be effective amongst slashdot readers, since I doubt many of us use MS's software except under extreme duress;).
Well, about one thing anyway: The front line of defense against such sophisticated viruses is a continually evolving computer-operating system that attracts the efforts of eager software developers, Gates said. As that recent CBC article points out, an "eager software developer" constitutes a hacker, and what penguin-powered continually evolving hacker-maintained operating sytem do you know of?:) And yet somehow, despite the fact that we don't produce our OS and our software under the same roof, or even in the same country, or even have any communication with each other in many circumstances, Linux mysteriously remains free of the ravages of the I LOVE YOU virus. Shocking.
If I put up a bunch of MP3s on a public web server, and artists vistit my site, and I am in violation of their copyright, they have every right to pursue me legally. If they come to my site, how is it "invasion of privacy"? It's a public FTP site.
If I put all my MP3s up on a napster server, I'm putting them up in a similar public forum. If I do a search for "Metallica" I get back a list of songs and the usernames of the users who have them. Napster is in no way an anonymous service. How is it that when I do a search for Metallica and find out Quartz has some songs I can download is NOT an invasion of privacy, yet when Metallica does the same search, and tells Napster to disable Quartz's account, that IS an invasion of privacy?
We all know that services like Napster let us try music before we by it, and diversify our musical tastes, which helps the industry, but if Metallica believes that this isn't true they have a right to that belief, and I think they have a right to do what they're doing. It might make them look like jerks, and it's certainly very obvious that they have no idea where the future of music distribution is, but they have a right to be jerks. The darwinist nature of our economy will ensure that those unwilling to adapt will fall by the wayside.
Says "HACKS" across the front, and has a photograph of a huge balloon inflating in the middle of the Harvard/Yale football match, as well as a diagram of the device they built and burried in the field to inflate the balloon. Across the top it says "MIT 1, HARVARD-YALE 0".
You can get all kinds of stuff like this on MIT campus.
Slashdot Mirror
The DeCSS case was different; in the DeCSS case we were talking about a piece of software which does something. Here we're talking about a paper. A paper with printed text on it can't help me circumvent any copy protection! That's crazy talk! It's like saying it's illegal to carry around a concealed drawing of a hand gun on the grounds that the drawing is a weapon.
Actually, that's exactly what it is; rocket science! This is *NASA* we're talking about here.
:P
Buy it, then return it. Let's face it, we can cry about fair use all we want, but the government isn't about to step in and anger some of their biggest tax-payers. Money talks; if you buy a CD you can't copy, return it. Tell them you won't buy a CD you can't exercise your rights to fair-use over. You take your concerns to the retailers; they'll take your concerns to the RIAA - democracy in motion. :P
I do development work on the ATM firmware side of a 450 gigabit switch for a major telecommunications company in Ottawa. Know what? NO ONE I've met, outside of the ~4% of our employees in IT, have CIS degrees. In fact, the number of CS degrees is pretty small too; it's mostly systems engineers (although, I personally have am CS).
That guy who played the elven Cleric, that was Tom Baker! Yes, THE Tom Baker, of Dr. Who fame!
:)
I kept expecting a little balding man in a robe to pop up and have everyone shout "Dungeon master!".
Seriously, though, the movie wasn't THAT bad. Yes, it was a little reminicent of Star Wars. So was "Gladiator" in a lot of ways. Just because you have an empire under seige, a young empress, a nd a war, it does not follow that you have Star Wars episode 1. There are plenty of historical examples that follow this formula, and believe it or not, none of them stole their history from Mr. Lucas.
Yes, I admit, when theif boy came out onto the balcony in the elf tree-village, I leaned over to my girlfriend and said "But you have a power I could never understand". And admittedly, the glowing blue good magical sword, and the glowing red evil magical sword... well let's just say I was waiting for someone's hand to get cut off in that scene. I'm not sure that these similarities were intentional though.
Uhh, no.
In Quebec, it is illegal to POSSES a radar detector. Even if it is dismantled/disabled/not plugged in/in the trunk, etc... It's a $1000 fine and seizure of equipment.
Well, YOUR intertia would do that in real life. It all depends how heavy this sphere is. Assumedly, though, it's light enough that you can start it "rolling" with minimal effort, so I'm guessing it would stop in the same.
My big complaint is that, essentially, you're walking on your screen. Better hope you have nice, soft, and very clean shoes.
This will take a fair amount of reading up on, as I don't know all the details off hand, but;
:).
Lego makes a product called Mindstorm. It consists of a number of sensors (light sensors, touch sensors, etc...), motors, and other various useful robotic parts that fit together with normal lego blocks. You plug this stuff up to a computer, and write software to control the lego. The software that comes with the kits is fairly simple, and only lets you build some simple behaviour, but someone wrote a special lego operating system called LegOS, and you can write full blown software for it. People have made little minature photocopiers and other interesting projects this way. I believe there are C and Java compilers available, but I'm a little fuzzy on the exact details (I'm saving up for a lego mindstorm kit myself, otherwise I'd know these things
If you're interested in this stuff, I'm sure there's a number of good web resources out there. As well, O'Reilly has an excelent book (I believe it's called "The Lego Mindstorm Unofficial Handbook") which covers a wide range of interesting things you can make Lego's product do. (There was even a slashdot review of the book, check out http://slashdot.org/books/99/11/24/0928207.shtml and http://slashdot.org/books/99/12/23/1419242.shtml, and do a search for "Mindstorm" on slashdot, you'll find some interesting stuff).
Making computers easy to use for non-computer people. The Windows interface is all about trying to come up with intuitive systems; systems you don't have to learn or know anything about in order to use (and so long as you get a machine with Windows pre-installed, windows is pretty good at it... until the user trys to update his video card drivers because some game tells him to, and then he has to reinstall windows, and it asks him what port his printer is on, and he phones up me and says "What's a port?"... But I digress).
/".
In this respect, a natural language interface is perfect. "mv a* foo" is not exactly a command the novice might guess.
My chief concern is the imperfections in algorithims involved in natural language processing. Knowing Microsoft, typing in "play starcraft" is likely to bring up anything from a "helpful" paperclip telling me how to organize my starcraft documents, to a "su;rm -rf
you don't want it to, it will also come up WHERE you don't want it to. I can see some serious abuse of this kind of technology.
Lots of windows applications are already very presumtious about their importance in your life. Many an email package dines themselves to be of such import that, upon receiving new mail, they bring themselves to the foreground and open up a dialogue box informing you of your urgent life-or-death mail from XYZ-Spamco asking you to buy their product. Of course, the fact that you were mid-command, telneted into a unix box trying to stop circuit board etcher before it starts because you just realized there was a fault in your layout. But no, that spam mail is more important than your carefully preped sheet of copper laminated fiberglass.
Now, not only can applications bother you with this sort of thing, they can make sure the dialog box comes up right where you're looking, intentionally breaking your train of thought.
This is less about Linux, and more about how to
roll out 2500 secure Linux boxes (or any other OS) at the same time.
Norton Ghost (Originally writen by Binary Research, a Canadian company) is a pretty sweet piece of software that will let you "clone" a disk partition, even over a network to multiple clients simultaneously using IP multicast. This means you can set up Linux on one workstation, install all your software and security patches, link up all 2500 machines by network, insert a Ghost boot disk in the other 2499 machines, then copy your complete installation - software and all - to all 2500 machines at once.
neither replies to pings nor traceroutes...
What can we do? The one thing consumers have always been able to do. Take it back, and demand your money back. If they won't give you your money, scream a lot. :)
Aren't these units still under waranty? Don't tell me UCITA has made hardware waranties legaly-unbinding as well! Take it back to your place of purchase, tell 'em it's broken (which it is), and get a new one.
...on an airplane. A cell phone on the ground has line of sight to maybe 2 cell towers at a time. Maybe 3 if you're downtown. From an airplane 30,000 feet up, you're phone's sphere of effect just got huge. Just immagine the cell tower selection algorithim with an input size of 4000 possible towers. Add to that the fact that you're going several hundred MPH and you'd be changing towers every couple seconds. You're looking at a distributed system nightmare. And there's FCC regulations that prohibit you from using your phone up there too.
Here in Ottawa we have Bell Sympatico, a child
corperation of Bell Sigma, a child corperation
of Bell Canada. Bell Sympatico offers the ADSL
and dialup internet connections (no shell, no
web space, no mail forwarding, it's not really
dialup service, since there aren't all that
many services).
I myself subscribe to DSL via Magma Communications
Corp. Why would I do such a thing? 1) Magma
offers static IPs, and doesn't run their connections through a web-caching proxy. 2) Sympatico has to be the saddest run excuse for a buisness I've ever seen. Magma manages to get my issues with bell resolved much faster than Sympatico ever could. And Sympatico's "technical support" is a select group of lowest-common-denominator arts students, who aren't allowed to be on the phone with you for more than 15 minutes. Magma is also somewhat more honest about network outages, whereas Sympatico tends to down their entire network, and then have tech support tell their customers "Everything is fine, something must be wrong with your modem".
Grr... I get angry just thinking about them...
Keep in mind the core competency of a phone company is providing telephone service. They aren't internet companies, and if it's anything like it is up here, then they really don't know much about being an internet company.
Just my $0.02.
Ok, first of all, we have Microsoft which takes an open source specification, modifies it in a few near-trivial ways, then claims it's their own copyrighted work. This is pretty classic "Microsoft innovation" for you, but let's put the fact that Microsoft doesn't actually own Kerberos aside.
/. server?). So overall, MS's letter is grossly innacurate.
/that/ argument before?). That has some unpleasant conotations under the burdensome DMCA, but it's still worth looking into.
;).
I don't know if Slashdot has already modified the story in question, but when *I* look back over the story at the articles MS claims contain actual copies of the specification, all I find is links to the specification. Also, it seems that all the timestamps in MS's letter are off by an hour (although this could just be a result of some crazy database porting to the new
There's about a dozen differnt ways slashdot can fight this.
A link to a site should never be illegal. Microsoft doesn't own links (although maybe they'll copyright the 'A HREF="" COLOR=""' tag when they're done butchering kerberos, they have to be free to innovate after all). If Microsoft has problems with the content of a page, then they should go to that page to solve their problems, not pages which link to it. This is common sense, although I don't know if the law in the US upholds common sense anymore, so we'll have to see.
It's arguable that Slashdot is only acting as a conduit for information. An ISP if you will. (Hey, wait a minute, where have I heard
Under fair use, copyrighted materials can be reproduced for commentary in an educational or journalistic environment, which Slashdot quallifies as IMHO (the latter, at any rate).
I'm at work right now, so I'm gonna cut this off and get to my point; I originally thought that slashdot should remove portions of the document actually posted to the discussion groups, and leave the links etc... but the more I think about it, the more I realize how wrong this would be. I don't think the messages should be modified at all.
If we're forced to change them, I think we should replace offending content with "***CENSORED BY MICROSOFT***" to express our disconent (I'd suggest a boycott, but I hardly think that'd be effective amongst slashdot readers, since I doubt many of us use MS's software except under extreme duress
Ahh, but slashdot is a new source, and fair use does cover reporting.
:)
Also, it's the end users posting this stuff, Slashdot is acting only as a conduit for infromation flow. (where have I heard that argument before?
Well, about one thing anyway: The front line of defense against such sophisticated viruses is a continually evolving computer-operating system that attracts the efforts of eager software developers, Gates said. As that recent CBC article points out, an "eager software developer" constitutes a hacker, and what penguin-powered continually evolving hacker-maintained operating sytem do you know of? :) And yet somehow, despite the fact that we don't produce our OS and our software under the same roof, or even in the same country, or even have any communication with each other in many circumstances, Linux mysteriously remains free of the ravages of the I LOVE YOU virus. Shocking.
If I put up a bunch of MP3s on a public web server, and artists vistit my site, and I am in violation of their copyright, they have every right to pursue me legally. If they come to my site, how is it "invasion of privacy"? It's a public FTP site.
If I put all my MP3s up on a napster server, I'm putting them up in a similar public forum. If I do a search for "Metallica" I get back a list of songs and the usernames of the users who have them. Napster is in no way an anonymous service. How is it that when I do a search for Metallica and find out Quartz has some songs I can download is NOT an invasion of privacy, yet when Metallica does the same search, and tells Napster to disable Quartz's account, that IS an invasion of privacy?
We all know that services like Napster let us try music before we by it, and diversify our musical tastes, which helps the industry, but if Metallica believes that this isn't true they have a right to that belief, and I think they have a right to do what they're doing. It might make them look like jerks, and it's certainly very obvious that they have no idea where the future of music distribution is, but they have a right to be jerks. The darwinist nature of our economy will ensure that those unwilling to adapt will fall by the wayside.
You mean they were expelled, or they were incorrigible? :P
Says "HACKS" across the front, and has a photograph of a huge balloon inflating in the middle of the Harvard/Yale football match, as well as a diagram of the device they built and burried in the field to inflate the balloon. Across the top it says "MIT 1, HARVARD-YALE 0".
You can get all kinds of stuff like this on MIT campus.
And reading on paper isn't?
I guess that the people at the Library of Congress must do their research by sitting in a big circle and reading books to each other.
The MamboX player looks pretty promising. It's due out pretty soon, and it's MSRP isn't something that's going to empty my wallet either.
But now it's back down.