You can never make a totally secure anything - just one that is good enough under certain circumstances.
However, it is difficult to imagine what circumstances this particular mechanism will be "secure enough" for. In terms of effectiveness, it is probably a bit less secure than a prominent notice reading, "The artist requests that you kindly refrain from distributing digital copies of this album."
Most folks would just give up if it didnt work the first time they tried, they aren't going to jump through any hoops, scribble on it with a sharpie, open up a hex editor, solder a mod-chip into their player, run a distributed cracking engine to decode it, whatever.
You are right; most foks will not do any of this stuff. The "most folks" in question being the same "most folks" who wouldn't upload the disk to the internet in the first place. On the other hand, it is a safe bet that most people who upload music will know and use this trivial work-around. Indeed, as the author points out, they already have; the album is already available via Kazaa.
As most commonly used, "arguably" generally means "somebody might argue that..." A synonym might be "debatably." It is generally used when the writer wishes to acknowledge a particular point of view without endorsing it (or in preparation to demolishing it).
Turn your life around, and you may suddenly get an award at 60 for something you did when you were 25
Think also of the story of Robert Furchgott. When I first met him, in 1980, he was an emininent pharmacologist who had made important early theoretical and experimental contributions to the field. But he was getting on in years, and many people seemed to think that his major work was behind him. He was working on this obscure problem in pharmacology: he was trying to figure out how acetylcholine relaxes vascular smooth muscle to (dilate blood vessels).
It was an obscure problem because acetylcholine doesn't actually seem to play much of a role physiologically in controlling vascular smooth muscle. But Furchgott had discovered that if he prepared his smooth muscle samples really cleanly, with no endothelium (the "skin" on the inside of the vessel) attached, acetylcholine no longer worked. He figured out that the endothelium had to be releasing somthing, which he named "Endothelium Derived Relaxing Factor," EDRF for short. Evenually he and others identified EDRF as nitric oxide, and for this he shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in Medicine.
What makes this particularly cool is that Nobel supposedly established his Prizes because he felt kind of bad about some of the uses to which his great discovery had been put--namely, the stablized form of nitroglycerine known as dynamite. However, nitroglycerine also has a medical use, relieving the pain of angina. Nobody knew how it did this, until Furchgott's discovery opened up the nitric oxide field, and nitroglycerine was recognized to act by releasing nitric oxide (thereby dilating blood vessels in the heart and improving blood flow).
And of course, a few years later, Furchgott's discovery led to the development of Viagra...
Heck, the first whole-body MRI scanner was finished in 1977 -- and the Nobel Prize is being awarded just now? What am I missing on how long it takes for the committee to conclude that something has been revolutionary?
The Nobel Prize committee has made some mistakes in the past, so they tend to be a bit conservative. And in fact, MRI was not immediately acclaimed as the major advance in medical technology that it is now seen to be. In the early days, MRI's were extraordinarily expensive, and there were many accusations that it was just one more unnecessary test driving up the costs of medical care. It took quite a few years for its value to be appreciated.
Does this guy really think that everyone in the world is very ill and requires the depth of testing of an MRI? (Maybe he's just really old and all his peers have been through MRI's...)
Or maybe he has a better doctor than you do. MRI's are used widely these days, since they provide the only good visualization of soft tissue. For example, if you have any kind of joint injury or pain, you are likely to be sent for an MRI.
You really have to use a dual processor Mac to appreciate how much they come in handy. For a single task/single application, the speed boost is not all that impressive, certainly less than double. But for everyday use, the DP system just "feels" snappier than a single processor system with 2x the clock speed. Because, of course, in everyday use, you tend be switching back and forth amoung multiple applications running at once (minimally, the Finder and something else), and Apple's DP systems are very good at distributing the load.
ol... yeah... fairly took the best score generated from code that they compiled without many standard optimizations that should have been turned on.
Or at least, that was an early claim. It ultimately turned out, however, that all the standardized optimizations that should have been turned on, were. And the ones that weren't, actually degraded performance. So it is hardly surprising that subsequent benchmarks are confirming what Apple claimed--the G5's are speed-competitive with the fastest Intels, and for some applications, notably faster.
Indeed! And this new petroleum distillate from the local service shoppe doesn't work for me either. Without the added "lead", it wreaks havoc with my Stutz Bearcat.
Actually, beige G3's are nice machines. The are nearly as fast as the iBooks many people are still carrying. For many tasks, such as web browsing, word processing, and serving up iTunes music, they work quite well.
And mine works just fine with 10.2.8, and it doesn't hang if I repair permissions.
I got the job as I'm the "Computer Guy" and can generally help friends and family with there computer problems.
Evidently, you didn't want to endanger your "computer guy" status by actually reading the directions. But I'm sure your friend was very impressed by your extensive but unnecessary disassembly of her Powerbook, and will probably believe you when you blame Apple for the damage that you did. Oh, by the way, the "easily accessed" slot that you were looking for is on the side, just where it is on a PC, and accepts standard PC wireless cards. The Airport card is for people who don't want to be bothered unplugging their wireless card every time they want to to put something else in that slot.
Aside from a handful who probably had batteries that were in the process of failing to begin with, most people apparently did not experience a reduction in actual battery life--just a reduction in battery time estimates.
After installing the second 10.2.8 update, I ran my battery all the way down to recalibrate the timer, and now it is reporting 2 hours on a charge, which is half an hour better than before the first 10.2.9 update.
Most of us installed the first version of 10.2.8. Only those with dual 450's on slow ethernet networks had a problem, and that was easily fixed by swapping out one file.
So...when you say that they "stampede" off a cliff, facing towards the ones going off in front of them, you were actually referring to lemmings milling around and getting crowded off. Not a "literal stampede", just a metaphorical one that doesn't involve actually running blindly in any direction.
"Randomly milling seems" seems a pretty restrained characterization of what has been described as the "frenzied rush" of a lemming migration.
The sight of a few lemmings....being pushed over a cliff during the frenzied rush of migration, has become the basis of a widespread belief that lemmings commit suicide en masse when their numbers grow too large.
A few lemmings being pushed off a precipice due to crowding as a migration occurs next to a cliff is far different from a "stampede" off the edge, which is what you said
Not exactly. I didn't say that it was a stampede ; I said that it was more like a lemming stampede than like a mass suicide. I must admit that it didn't occur to me that anybody would be so literal as to take seriously the notion of lemmings stampeding.
Animals sometimes stampede off a cliff, because the ones in front are crowded off by the ones behind them. It doesn't have to be a literal stampede; this kind of thing can happen any time you get a mass of animals--or even people--moving together, especially if they are in a hurry.
Have you witnessed this? As the parent post stated, this is an urban legend [site lists reference citations]
Not personally. Actually, my comments are based on the very references that you cite:
These deaths are not deliberate "suicide" attempts, however, but accidental deaths resulting from the lemmings' venturing into unfamiliar territories and being crowded and pushed over dangerous ledges.
Why, because it makes no sense? I've heard people say things like that before, yet it seems to defy logic.
Emotions tend to be contagious. People get a "contact high" from being in a crowd of excited people. And excited people often behave foolishly. In addition, people may do things that they would not do otherwise as part of a mob, because "everybody's doing it" and "it's going to happen anyway." The large number of people diffuses the responsibility. The adage is that "the intelligence of s mob may be calculated by taking the average intelligence of the participants...and dividing by their number."
I gather it's more like a lemming stampede than a mass suicide. The ones at the edge get shoved off by the guys behind--who can't see the edge because there are lemmings in front of them.
This was posted in the previous article (CID LINK) [slashdot.org] and is PLAGARISM. Please mod it down.
Merely repeating a relevant link is not a substantive enough comment to be plagiarized. To be plagiarized, there has to be some degree of originality in what was said.
So much for those who have claimed that our law enforcement agencies can be trusted to reserve the extraordinary powers granted by the Patriot Act solely to defend the nation against extraordinary terrorist threats such as those posed by al-Qada. Even if one agrees that Lamo should be prosecuted for his allegedly benign hacking, he hardly falls into that category.
And considering that dangers have already been uncovered with batteries are low, I sincerely question how much R&D was sacrificed in order to get this product to market on time.
It seems to me less an issue of testing than judgement. They probably figured that people would have enough sense not to run it when it says the batteries are too low. I gather the fix is simply a software upgrade so that it refuses to run at all when the batteries are low.
Of course, most likely the brain does all of the things that people hypothesize, in parallel. That is, it looks at word shape (i.e. number and approximate position of ascenders), "special" (first and last) letters, internal letter pairs, detailed letter order, and sentence context. Once the brain has a pretty good idea of what the word is, the process terminates. Probably, local processes tend to be the fastest--in general, object recognition is faster than object position. So, letter recognition first, followed by letter pairs and identification of fist and last letters, followed by letter order. Word shape is probably in the middle somewhere, Context is probably relatively slow, because it requires meaning, but since context searches are on larger chunks of text, that may compensate. So most of the time, first letter, last letter, and a few internal letters are probably sufficient. But if order of letter pairs is grossly wrong, there is an error generated. So simply randomizing the internal letters usually works, because it only occasionally produces a "non-word" letter pairing. But actually reversing the characters will frequently produce rare or forbidden character ordering, so a lot of error messages will be generated.
It was a tray-loading iMac, I don't think we have any slot loading models. But I left out a couple. Also upgraded a cube and a newer (LCD) iMac. The cube had a minor problem--Word files wanted to open in Word 9 instead of Word X. Everything else was fine.
Oh by the way, there's a small chance that this will hose your system so bad that you won't be able to boot up anymore or repair your system with the CD repair tools or uninstall the update, and the only way to repair your system will be to reinstall the OS from scratch from the CD
I got bit by the bug. Naughty, naughty Apple for being in such a hurry to get out an upgrade that fixed the recently reported Unix bugs that they neglected to test it on a
Dual 450 with a slow Ethernet network. It was certainly annoying. I had to go to the Apple Support Discussion groups, where a guy had already isolated the offending file, download the old one (or copy it from an nonupgraded Mac), put it on a disk, and install it in the dual-450. No, this isn't acceptable, but it's not exactly a disaster, either.
1) Able to use a three button (or more) mouse. Requires external hardware.
By the way, for anybody who doesn't know, Macs work fine with standard 3-button mice, and have for years. With Apple's standard driver (others are available), left button is standard click, scroll wheel (which works) is command-click, and right button is control-click. Apple doesn't like them for philosophical reasons (too confusing to the novice), but if you want one, they're cheap.
Slashdot Mirror
As most commonly used, "arguably" generally means "somebody might argue that..." A synonym might be "debatably." It is generally used when the writer wishes to acknowledge a particular point of view without endorsing it (or in preparation to demolishing it).
Think also of the story of Robert Furchgott. When I first met him, in 1980, he was an emininent pharmacologist who had made important early theoretical and experimental contributions to the field. But he was getting on in years, and many people seemed to think that his major work was behind him. He was working on this obscure problem in pharmacology: he was trying to figure out how acetylcholine relaxes vascular smooth muscle to (dilate blood vessels).
It was an obscure problem because acetylcholine doesn't actually seem to play much of a role physiologically in controlling vascular smooth muscle. But Furchgott had discovered that if he prepared his smooth muscle samples really cleanly, with no endothelium (the "skin" on the inside of the vessel) attached, acetylcholine no longer worked. He figured out that the endothelium had to be releasing somthing, which he named "Endothelium Derived Relaxing Factor," EDRF for short. Evenually he and others identified EDRF as nitric oxide, and for this he shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in Medicine.
What makes this particularly cool is that Nobel supposedly established his Prizes because he felt kind of bad about some of the uses to which his great discovery had been put--namely, the stablized form of nitroglycerine known as dynamite. However, nitroglycerine also has a medical use, relieving the pain of angina. Nobody knew how it did this, until Furchgott's discovery opened up the nitric oxide field, and nitroglycerine was recognized to act by releasing nitric oxide (thereby dilating blood vessels in the heart and improving blood flow).
And of course, a few years later, Furchgott's discovery led to the development of Viagra...
You really have to use a dual processor Mac to appreciate how much they come in handy. For a single task/single application, the speed boost is not all that impressive, certainly less than double. But for everyday use, the DP system just "feels" snappier than a single processor system with 2x the clock speed. Because, of course, in everyday use, you tend be switching back and forth amoung multiple applications running at once (minimally, the Finder and something else), and Apple's DP systems are very good at distributing the load.
Or at least, that was an early claim. It ultimately turned out, however, that all the standardized optimizations that should have been turned on, were. And the ones that weren't, actually degraded performance. So it is hardly surprising that subsequent benchmarks are confirming what Apple claimed--the G5's are speed-competitive with the fastest Intels, and for some applications, notably faster.
And mine works just fine with 10.2.8, and it doesn't hang if I repair permissions.
Evidently, you didn't want to endanger your "computer guy" status by actually reading the directions. But I'm sure your friend was very impressed by your extensive but unnecessary disassembly of her Powerbook, and will probably believe you when you blame Apple for the damage that you did. Oh, by the way, the "easily accessed" slot that you were looking for is on the side, just where it is on a PC, and accepts standard PC wireless cards. The Airport card is for people who don't want to be bothered unplugging their wireless card every time they want to to put something else in that slot.
Aside from a handful who probably had batteries that were in the process of failing to begin with, most people apparently did not experience a reduction in actual battery life--just a reduction in battery time estimates.
After installing the second 10.2.8 update, I ran my battery all the way down to recalibrate the timer, and now it is reporting 2 hours on a charge, which is half an hour better than before the first 10.2.9 update.
Most of us installed the first version of 10.2.8. Only those with dual 450's on slow ethernet networks had a problem, and that was easily fixed by swapping out one file.
"Randomly milling seems" seems a pretty restrained characterization of what has been described as the "frenzied rush" of a lemming migration.
Urban Legend Reference Pages [snopes.com]A stampede, of course, is a kind of "frenzied rush."
Animals sometimes stampede off a cliff, because the ones in front are crowded off by the ones behind them. It doesn't have to be a literal stampede; this kind of thing can happen any time you get a mass of animals--or even people--moving together, especially if they are in a hurry.
Not personally. Actually, my comments are based on the very references that you cite:
--Urban Legend Reference PagesMerely repeating a relevant link is not a substantive enough comment to be plagiarized. To be plagiarized, there has to be some degree of originality in what was said.
So much for those who have claimed that our law enforcement agencies can be trusted to reserve the extraordinary powers granted by the Patriot Act solely to defend the nation against extraordinary terrorist threats such as those posed by al-Qada. Even if one agrees that Lamo should be prosecuted for his allegedly benign hacking, he hardly falls into that category.
Of course, most likely the brain does all of the things that people hypothesize, in parallel. That is, it looks at word shape (i.e. number and approximate position of ascenders), "special" (first and last) letters, internal letter pairs, detailed letter order, and sentence context. Once the brain has a pretty good idea of what the word is, the process terminates. Probably, local processes tend to be the fastest--in general, object recognition is faster than object position. So, letter recognition first, followed by letter pairs and identification of fist and last letters, followed by letter order. Word shape is probably in the middle somewhere, Context is probably relatively slow, because it requires meaning, but since context searches are on larger chunks of text, that may compensate. So most of the time, first letter, last letter, and a few internal letters are probably sufficient. But if order of letter pairs is grossly wrong, there is an error generated. So simply randomizing the internal letters usually works, because it only occasionally produces a "non-word" letter pairing. But actually reversing the characters will frequently produce rare or forbidden character ordering, so a lot of error messages will be generated.
It was a tray-loading iMac, I don't think we have any slot loading models. But I left out a couple. Also upgraded a cube and a newer (LCD) iMac. The cube had a minor problem--Word files wanted to open in Word 9 instead of Word X. Everything else was fine.
I got bit by the bug. Naughty, naughty Apple for being in such a hurry to get out an upgrade that fixed the recently reported Unix bugs that they neglected to test it on a Dual 450 with a slow Ethernet network. It was certainly annoying. I had to go to the Apple Support Discussion groups, where a guy had already isolated the offending file, download the old one (or copy it from an nonupgraded Mac), put it on a disk, and install it in the dual-450. No, this isn't acceptable, but it's not exactly a disaster, either.
The other 5 systems I upgraded worked fine.
By the way, for anybody who doesn't know, Macs work fine with standard 3-button mice, and have for years. With Apple's standard driver (others are available), left button is standard click, scroll wheel (which works) is command-click, and right button is control-click. Apple doesn't like them for philosophical reasons (too confusing to the novice), but if you want one, they're cheap.