Better yet: ban the cable companies from selling or renting cable equipment. Conflict of interest solved!
Power companies don't sell you washers with your power service. Telephone companies don't sell you telephones with your telephone service. Water companies don't sell you faucets.
Why do we continue to let monopolies abuse the market like this? If you are a monopoly provider of service X, you should not be allowed to sell, promote, or distribute any devices that connect to service X.
...a kinetic impact would roughly “push” the asteroid into a different orbit, and a gravity tractor would “tug slowly”...by using nothing more than the gravitational attraction between the two bodies.
I didn't think we could produce enough kinetic energy to affect anything large enough to be a threat. Similarly, I would be surprised if we could get any significant mass into space to attract it via gravity. Am I totally off-base here? It seems to me that we would need to rely on either 1) nuclear power or 2) external power (solar?) to have any significant impact. For example: attach a solar sail to the asteroid to slow it down or change the direction. Or a solar-shield that might cool one part of the asteroid and change the orbit. Or a nuclear blast to push it.
Which begs the question of why it took 6 years to grant the patent. Since 2004, tons of software has done this. If a patent takes more than a month, something is wrong. Because technology can change radically in 6 years.
...Nearly, because you want to be viewing it from just slightly above...
That is not physically possible since the monitor is taller than my torso. It is a 22" display.
My 22" display is about 25" tall including the border, but not the stand. The stand, at the lowest possible setting, adds another inch or two. With my chair at the highest setting my eyes are about at the center of the display. I cannot comfortably reach my keyboard at that height and 5'9 my feet barely touch the floor. So the goal of getting my eye level to the top of the display seems impossible unless the top of my desk was at my knees when I sit down.
I don't understand how anyone can use a display this large in portrait mode unless they are 7 feet tall.
Would you mind answering a question for me? Why don't color blind people keep a color filter in their pocket for just such cases? Based on your example I assume you are red-green color blind. So in that case, couldn't you hold a red filter up to your eye? If the control turns black, it was green. If it stays the same, it was red or gray.
I'm not advocating that people should not consider color blindness in their system designs or anything insensitive. I'm just curious if this hack would help.
16:9 monitors are not good candidates for rotation. Here at work, they "upgraded" my 5:4 monitors to 16:9 monitors. I had one 5:4 display in portrait, and the other in landscape. If I do that with the 16:9 displays, the portrait one becomes very difficult to use.
LCD displays have a better horizontal viewing angle than vertical viewing angle. So when you flip the monitor, you have a poor horizontal viewing angle. That means that the display must be directly in front of you. That doesn't work with dual-monitors. Then, it is so tall that it is about 1.5 pages (which is a waste) and it is actually a different focus to the top of the display from the bottom. This is very stressful on the eyes. It's silly.
Have you ever tried to use a 16:9 monitor turned sideways? It's ridiculous. The viewing angle on the vertical (now, the horizontal) part of the monitor is terrible so you have to be sitting exactly in front of it or you can't see it. This is no good if you have 2 monitors. The monitor is so tall that your focus on the top and bottom parts of the monitor are different.
If using more bandwidth costs the cell carriers more money, perhaps they should charge people for using more bandwidth. This is the only industry I've ever heard of where when demand exceeds supply, they simply refuse to increase capacity.
Quiz: If a bean farmer harvests 1 million beans per month, and they sell out the first day, which of the following would the bean farmer do? A) Only sell beans to customers who use specific kinds of plates. This would limit the number of beans customers demanded to an amount they can provide. Since there is no way for the seller to know what kind of plates people have, they must pressure manufacturers of plates to enforce the rules. When pressed on the issue, complain that the only way to produce more beans would be to buy more land and seeds, which are expensive. B) Buy more land and seeds and produce more beans.
Any reasonable farmer would choose option B. They would put together a plan, see how much more land they could afford to buy, and how many more beans they can produce on that land. For reasons beyond my understanding, telecom companies choose option A. They tell people that 3G has limited bandwidth, and limit their customers to using it for specific applications. But of course, 3G has no idea what application is using the bandwidth, so they make the software refuse to use the 3G connection even though it can use it and no one would ever know. Option B would be to build more cell towers and upgrade their bandwidth.
True. Perhaps one day Microsoft will do that. But he was talking about C# and.NET, which is designed to be cross-platform, and has 3rd-party implementations for every major OS out there. The specific feature that Melted was asking for is a basic language design feature, and has nothing to do with cross-platform.
Oh yeah, sure we can. I wasn't intending to cry foul and make a big deal of it. I merely intended to point out a way to avoid this problem entirely. It's a lesson I learned on a recent project, too late unfortunately.:-(
Why do I keep seeing articles about new super-powerful ARM7 chips, when ARM9 has been out for a long while? Even my Nintendo DS has an ARM9, so I can't imagine it is that ARM9 is too big or complicated or inefficient.
Security is part of the design, not the implementation.
Most developers still haven't learned that security isn't something you check for at various access points in the code: it is something you build directly into the business layer. For example, your code should not have a method like this anywhere:
public DeletePicture(int pictureID)
The method should be:
public DeletePicture(SecurityCredentials user, int pictureID)
This way it is impossible for your web to accidentally call DeletePicture() without checking for security. The security check is built-in to the lower-level and there is nothing you can do about it. Having worked on secure web services before, I realize I did not do this in my design, which was great for making simple tools, but it meant that all user-facing code had to have checks for security loopholes. The web is especially weird because users can hack the pages and the HTTP requests to call your methods in ways you never
This is not even close to the first human powered ornithopter. One of the most significant recent attempts is Yves Rousseau who crashed and became a paraplegic as a result of one of his flights.
(1) Except as provided by clause (2) of this subsection, the copyright owner may elect, at any time before final judgment is rendered, to recover, instead of actual damages and profits, an award of statutory damages for all infringements involved in the action, with respect to any one work, for which any one infringer is liable individually, or for which any two or more infringers are liable jointly and severally, in a sum of not less than $750 or more than $30,000 as the court considers just. For the purposes of this subsection, all the parts of a compilation or derivative work constitute one work.
(2) In a case where the copyright owner sustains the burden of proving, and the court finds, that infringement was committed willfully, the court in its discretion may increase the award of statutory damages to a sum of not more than $150,000. In a case where the infringer sustains the burden of proving, and the court finds, that such infringer was not aware and had no reason to believe that his or her acts constituted an infringement of copyright, the court in its discretion may reduce the award of statutory damages to a sum of not less than $200. The court shall remit statutory damages in any case where an infringer believed and had reasonable grounds for believing that his or her use of the copyrighted work was a fair use under section 107, if the infringer was: (i) an employee or agent of a nonprofit educational institution, library, or archives acting within the scope of his or her employment who, or such institution, library, or archives itself, which infringed by reproducing the work in copies or phonorecords; or (ii) a public broadcasting entity which or a person who, as a regular part of the nonprofit activities of a public broadcasting entity (as defined in subsection (g) of section 118) infringed by performing a published nondramatic literary work or by reproducing a transmission program embodying a performance of such a work.
(Watch me get sued for copying legal text verbatim)
Some thoughts: - This is all at the discretion of the judge. - The $200 seems to apply per copyright infringement charge. But what is that unit really? Naturally, the RIAA would say "per song" but even $200 per album seems extreme. Per song? What if a 30-second clip is enough to be a copyright infringement. Can the RIAA claim that a 2 minute song is 4 30-second infringements so that is $200 * 4 = $800? Or... is a 35 second song really 5 overlapping infringements of 30-second clips so that's $200 * 5 = $1000. I don't think this is what the authors of the law intended. Could you even buy individual tracks when this law was written?
That's not fair though. The whole point of punitive damages is to punish the infringer, not just force them to buy it. If all you pay for is the price of the song, then why ever buy anything? Just pirate it - the worst that happens is you have to pay for it. Because there was willful intent here, I think the rule of treble damages applies.
Clearing the cookies daily is what I always wanted. Track me over the course of a browsing session. But no long-term marketing. Clearing on exit is annoying because I close and reopen my browser 50 times a day and I get tired of logging in. Maybe I just need to learn to keep one browser window open all day.
It's not blu-ray that was cracked: it was HDCP. So the new players would still play blu-ray disks, they just would use a different content protection on the way to the television. It won't make Sony look dumb since Intel made HDCP.
Does this mean the industry will rally around a replacement for HDCP? Will we all need to buy new TV's again? New blu-ray players? New video cards and laptops? Or do they think they can keep this genie bottled-up forever? This here could be exactly why DRM should be illegal and why the DMCA should be repealed. Imagine that every 5-10 years -- every protocol, every connector, every player -- has to be replaced because the industry won't back it unless it has a new unbreakable DRM system. This would be bad for everyone except the select few at the top of the industry who are collaborating to profit off of re-selling new devices to everyone. It half-way makes me suspect that they collude to release these systems, then crack them just as the get adoption to force everyone to buy new systems.
But this is a worst-case scenario. Time will tell...
According to an Intel official, the most likely scenario for a hacker would be to create a computer chip with the master key embedded it, that could be used to decode Blu-ray discs."
That seems unlikely to me. Am I missing something? Isn't the most likely scenario that someone will use the key to make free/OSS blu-ray playback software? And transcoding tools? I imagine that some Chinese manufacturers could use the key to make a cheap blu-ray player without paying the MPAA's ransom to get a player key. But it seems more likely that software would come first.
Slashdot Mirror
Better yet: ban the cable companies from selling or renting cable equipment. Conflict of interest solved!
Power companies don't sell you washers with your power service.
Telephone companies don't sell you telephones with your telephone service.
Water companies don't sell you faucets.
Why do we continue to let monopolies abuse the market like this? If you are a monopoly provider of service X, you should not be allowed to sell, promote, or distribute any devices that connect to service X.
The article suggests two approaches:
...a kinetic impact would roughly “push” the asteroid into a different orbit, and a gravity tractor would “tug slowly”...by using nothing more than the gravitational attraction between the two bodies.
I didn't think we could produce enough kinetic energy to affect anything large enough to be a threat. Similarly, I would be surprised if we could get any significant mass into space to attract it via gravity. Am I totally off-base here? It seems to me that we would need to rely on either 1) nuclear power or 2) external power (solar?) to have any significant impact. For example: attach a solar sail to the asteroid to slow it down or change the direction. Or a solar-shield that might cool one part of the asteroid and change the orbit. Or a nuclear blast to push it.
I would think this is the first law that lawyers would want to change.
Which begs the question of why it took 6 years to grant the patent. Since 2004, tons of software has done this. If a patent takes more than a month, something is wrong. Because technology can change radically in 6 years.
...Nearly, because you want to be viewing it from just slightly above...
That is not physically possible since the monitor is taller than my torso. It is a 22" display.
My 22" display is about 25" tall including the border, but not the stand. The stand, at the lowest possible setting, adds another inch or two. With my chair at the highest setting my eyes are about at the center of the display. I cannot comfortably reach my keyboard at that height and 5'9 my feet barely touch the floor. So the goal of getting my eye level to the top of the display seems impossible unless the top of my desk was at my knees when I sit down.
I don't understand how anyone can use a display this large in portrait mode unless they are 7 feet tall.
Would you mind answering a question for me? Why don't color blind people keep a color filter in their pocket for just such cases? Based on your example I assume you are red-green color blind. So in that case, couldn't you hold a red filter up to your eye? If the control turns black, it was green. If it stays the same, it was red or gray.
I'm not advocating that people should not consider color blindness in their system designs or anything insensitive. I'm just curious if this hack would help.
16:9 monitors are not good candidates for rotation. Here at work, they "upgraded" my 5:4 monitors to 16:9 monitors. I had one 5:4 display in portrait, and the other in landscape. If I do that with the 16:9 displays, the portrait one becomes very difficult to use.
LCD displays have a better horizontal viewing angle than vertical viewing angle. So when you flip the monitor, you have a poor horizontal viewing angle. That means that the display must be directly in front of you. That doesn't work with dual-monitors. Then, it is so tall that it is about 1.5 pages (which is a waste) and it is actually a different focus to the top of the display from the bottom. This is very stressful on the eyes. It's silly.
Have you ever tried to use a 16:9 monitor turned sideways? It's ridiculous. The viewing angle on the vertical (now, the horizontal) part of the monitor is terrible so you have to be sitting exactly in front of it or you can't see it. This is no good if you have 2 monitors. The monitor is so tall that your focus on the top and bottom parts of the monitor are different.
If using more bandwidth costs the cell carriers more money, perhaps they should charge people for using more bandwidth. This is the only industry I've ever heard of where when demand exceeds supply, they simply refuse to increase capacity.
Quiz: If a bean farmer harvests 1 million beans per month, and they sell out the first day, which of the following would the bean farmer do?
A) Only sell beans to customers who use specific kinds of plates. This would limit the number of beans customers demanded to an amount they can provide. Since there is no way for the seller to know what kind of plates people have, they must pressure manufacturers of plates to enforce the rules. When pressed on the issue, complain that the only way to produce more beans would be to buy more land and seeds, which are expensive.
B) Buy more land and seeds and produce more beans.
Any reasonable farmer would choose option B. They would put together a plan, see how much more land they could afford to buy, and how many more beans they can produce on that land. For reasons beyond my understanding, telecom companies choose option A. They tell people that 3G has limited bandwidth, and limit their customers to using it for specific applications. But of course, 3G has no idea what application is using the bandwidth, so they make the software refuse to use the 3G connection even though it can use it and no one would ever know. Option B would be to build more cell towers and upgrade their bandwidth.
True. Perhaps one day Microsoft will do that. But he was talking about C# and .NET, which is designed to be cross-platform, and has 3rd-party implementations for every major OS out there. The specific feature that Melted was asking for is a basic language design feature, and has nothing to do with cross-platform.
Oh yeah, sure we can. I wasn't intending to cry foul and make a big deal of it. I merely intended to point out a way to avoid this problem entirely. It's a lesson I learned on a recent project, too late unfortunately. :-(
Thank you. That makes a lot more sense now.
as a result of one of his flights.
He did fine on the first 212 flights. And this isn't the only person to ever actually fly one.
I think that statutory damages are usually a multiple of the actual damages. In the case of copyright law, they are not - which is really silly.
Why do I keep seeing articles about new super-powerful ARM7 chips, when ARM9 has been out for a long while? Even my Nintendo DS has an ARM9, so I can't imagine it is that ARM9 is too big or complicated or inefficient.
Security is part of the design, not the implementation.
Most developers still haven't learned that security isn't something you check for at various access points in the code: it is something you build directly into the business layer. For example, your code should not have a method like this anywhere:
public DeletePicture(int pictureID)
The method should be:
public DeletePicture(SecurityCredentials user, int pictureID)
This way it is impossible for your web to accidentally call DeletePicture() without checking for security. The security check is built-in to the lower-level and there is nothing you can do about it. Having worked on secure web services before, I realize I did not do this in my design, which was great for making simple tools, but it meant that all user-facing code had to have checks for security loopholes. The web is especially weird because users can hack the pages and the HTTP requests to call your methods in ways you never
This is not even close to the first human powered ornithopter. One of the most significant recent attempts is Yves Rousseau who crashed and became a paraplegic as a result of one of his flights.
Aha! Great point! I hope their lawyer reads this section and appeals. It would be another blow to the RIAA if they can't inflate the charges this way.
I really had to read this for myself:
US Copyright Law: Chapter 5. Statutory damages
(1) Except as provided by clause (2) of this subsection, the copyright owner may elect, at any time before final judgment is rendered, to recover, instead of actual damages and profits, an award of statutory damages for all infringements involved in the action, with respect to any one work, for which any one infringer is liable individually, or for which any two or more infringers are liable jointly and severally, in a sum of not less than $750 or more than $30,000 as the court considers just. For the purposes of this subsection, all the parts of a compilation or derivative work constitute one work.
(2) In a case where the copyright owner sustains the burden of proving, and the court finds, that infringement was committed willfully, the court in its discretion may increase the award of statutory damages to a sum of not more than $150,000. In a case where the infringer sustains the burden of proving, and the court finds, that such infringer was not aware and had no reason to believe that his or her acts constituted an infringement of copyright, the court in its discretion may reduce the award of statutory damages to a sum of not less than $200. The court shall remit statutory damages in any case where an infringer believed and had reasonable grounds for believing that his or her use of the copyrighted work was a fair use under section 107, if the infringer was: (i) an employee or agent of a nonprofit educational institution, library, or archives acting within the scope of his or her employment who, or such institution, library, or archives itself, which infringed by reproducing the work in copies or phonorecords; or (ii) a public broadcasting entity which or a person who, as a regular part of the nonprofit activities of a public broadcasting entity (as defined in subsection (g) of section 118) infringed by performing a published nondramatic literary work or by reproducing a transmission program embodying a performance of such a work.
(Watch me get sued for copying legal text verbatim)
Some thoughts:
- This is all at the discretion of the judge.
- The $200 seems to apply per copyright infringement charge. But what is that unit really? Naturally, the RIAA would say "per song" but even $200 per album seems extreme. Per song? What if a 30-second clip is enough to be a copyright infringement. Can the RIAA claim that a 2 minute song is 4 30-second infringements so that is $200 * 4 = $800? Or... is a 35 second song really 5 overlapping infringements of 30-second clips so that's $200 * 5 = $1000. I don't think this is what the authors of the law intended. Could you even buy individual tracks when this law was written?
That's not fair though. The whole point of punitive damages is to punish the infringer, not just force them to buy it. If all you pay for is the price of the song, then why ever buy anything? Just pirate it - the worst that happens is you have to pay for it. Because there was willful intent here, I think the rule of treble damages applies.
So that is $2.97 per song.
Clearing the cookies daily is what I always wanted. Track me over the course of a browsing session. But no long-term marketing. Clearing on exit is annoying because I close and reopen my browser 50 times a day and I get tired of logging in. Maybe I just need to learn to keep one browser window open all day.
It's not blu-ray that was cracked: it was HDCP. So the new players would still play blu-ray disks, they just would use a different content protection on the way to the television. It won't make Sony look dumb since Intel made HDCP.
Does this mean the industry will rally around a replacement for HDCP? Will we all need to buy new TV's again? New blu-ray players? New video cards and laptops? Or do they think they can keep this genie bottled-up forever? This here could be exactly why DRM should be illegal and why the DMCA should be repealed. Imagine that every 5-10 years -- every protocol, every connector, every player -- has to be replaced because the industry won't back it unless it has a new unbreakable DRM system. This would be bad for everyone except the select few at the top of the industry who are collaborating to profit off of re-selling new devices to everyone. It half-way makes me suspect that they collude to release these systems, then crack them just as the get adoption to force everyone to buy new systems.
But this is a worst-case scenario. Time will tell...
Nevermind! AceJohnny's post: breaks HDCP, not AACS explains my mistake.
According to an Intel official, the most likely scenario for a hacker would be to create a computer chip with the master key embedded it, that could be used to decode Blu-ray discs."
That seems unlikely to me. Am I missing something? Isn't the most likely scenario that someone will use the key to make free/OSS blu-ray playback software? And transcoding tools? I imagine that some Chinese manufacturers could use the key to make a cheap blu-ray player without paying the MPAA's ransom to get a player key. But it seems more likely that software would come first.