Re:Hmmm.... that's a nice quote... but....
on
Globalization
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· Score: 2
It boils down to this: If you are a human being, you have some right to life. Those who would abbrogate your right to life for whatever cause are probably evil. They need to be brought to account.
[snip]
Innocents will get killed. Some new bad feelings will be created.
Please tell me the irony was deliberate. You cannot in one breath claim that there is a universal right to life, and that anyone who violates that right is evil, and in the next breath claim that innocent deaths are a reasonable means to an end. It is hypocrisy, plain and simple.
It is this kind of muddy thinking that perpetuates the cycles of revenge in the Middle East, in the Balkans and in Northern Ireland. Sadly, a new cycle of revenge is being created between America and the Muslim world. Do you think the deaths of innocent civilians will make Osama Bin Laden sorry for what he has done? Or will they attract more people to his cause? Do you think that killing the family of a potential terrorist will make him hate you less?
Even if the United States manages to kill the individuals responsible for the September 11 attacks, it will have created thousands of new enemies in the process. Look at what is happening already. Pakistanis are crossing into Afghanistan to help drive out American invaders who aren't even there yet! British Muslims are travelling to Afghanistan to join what they believe is a holy war. They give the same justification for their actions as the American government: their culture is under attack, and they must defend it through retaliation.
As a relatively rational culture, the United States must take the decision to break the cycle of violence. You cannot persuade religious fundamentalists of the correctness of your point of view by bombing them! All you will achieve is to persuade previously moderate people that you are a violent hypocrite.
'Fitness' is easy to determine in simple optimization problems such as the travelling salesman problem, and this is the area where genetic programming has enjoyed some success. But it's difficult to imagine applying genetic programming techniques to the development of what most people think of as software: operating systems, word processors, web browsers and the like. The 'fitness' of large, complex programs can be as difficult to determine, and as subjective, as the 'fitness' of biological organisms. For example, even if you could measure abstract properties of a program such as usability, robustness and performance, what relative weights would you assign to those abstract properties in your overall fitness function? It is absurd to think that a property such as 'usability' could be measured in an automatic way (that is, without large amounts of user testing and statistical analysis of the results), and if a property cannot be measured it cannot be used in a fitness function.
Genetic programming suffers from the same scalability problems as manual programming: it is easy to write an isolated algorithm or procedure, but the difficult part of design is not algorithms but architecture: to design the whole requires an understanding of the parts and vice versa. (Which is not to say that picking the right algorithm isn't important, but it shouldn't be difficult.) Designing the fitness function for a complex program requires as much architectural insight as designing the program itself.
So where will genetic programming come into its own? Consider natural selection. An organism does not live or die based on an abstract fitness function, it lives or dies based on the particular circumstances in which it finds itself. The fitness function is different for each individual in each situation: in fact the fitness function is no less complex than the world itself. The fitness function includes every predator, every drop of rain, every photon escaping from the organism's surface. The enormous complexity of the environment drives the evolution of ever more complex organisms. As more complex organisms evolve, they make the world more complex for their neighbours, so species must continue to evolve just in order to survive: like the Red Queen, they must run to stand still.
Where can we find this kind of complexity in computer science (outside of the POSIX standards documents)? In applications that are connected to the hugely complex social world of human beings: applications like email and chat. There are already programs living 'in the wild' in this complex environment, programs that are able to reproduce in the digital world by exploiting niches in the social world: email viruses.
Evolution will occur in any system that meets three basic requirements:
Competition between individuals for limited resources
Variation among individuals, affecting their chance of reproducing ('fitness')
Inheritance (offspring are more similar to their parent(s) than to a random member of the population)
Wherever evolution occurs, the complexity of the evolving system will increase to match the complexity of its environment. Viruses will eventually exceed the complexity of any hand-written software, because they will evolve to meet the complexity of their environment, the human social environment, which is far more complex than any artifact designed by a single human being.
In order to launch a Mars mission from the Moon, you'd have to transport a huge amount of people and equipment to the Moon to build a mining colony and a high-tech manufacturing facility. In fact you'd probably have to ship more material to the Moon than you would end up sending to Mars, so it would be cheaper to build the Martian ship on Earth (where we already have air, food, water, mines, foundries, factories, laboratories, semiconductor fabrication plants, rocket fuel etc) and skip the Moon entirely.
When people talk about colonising the Moon, they seem to forget that unlike colonies on Earth, lunar colonies won't be able to start small and work their way up. A colony on Earth can start out very small (a handful of farms) and very simple (nothing more advanced than a stone axe). It can sustain itself entirely without external support, gradually augmenting its technology using local resources. (Building wooden houses, dry stone walls, fences, looms, kilns, bricks, tanneries, breweries, forges, and all that other Settlers II shit.) A colony on the Moon would need technology more advanced than anything we currently have on Earth, from day one. In order to maintain that technology, everything needed to support a 21st century civilisation in a hugely hostile environment would have to be shipped from Earth. We're talking about putting Small Town USA, Silicon Valley and the Rust Belt in a rocket and sending them to the Moon. We had enough trouble getting a beach buggy to the Moon!
A self-sufficient lunar colony is an incredibly ambitious venture. It is nothing like a space station. A space station gets everything it needs from Earth. If a computer breaks down, mission control puts a new one in a rocket and sends it up. A self-sufficient lunar colony would have to make its own computers (and lightbulbs, and socks, and lard, and steel, and little tinfoil bags full of freeze-dried ice cream).
(1) Cutting the price of CDs to $10 would cut the record companies' revenue by a third. Piracy probably doesn't harm their revenue stream one cent and it certainly doesn't cut it by a third.
(2) 90% of everything is crap. Producers will resist any tool that allows consumers to intelligently filter products before paying because 90% of what they sell is crap, and they know it. Do you think the people who write filler articles for MSN like the fact that Google is never more than a double-click and 11 keypresses away from their readers? Similarly, do you think record companies would encourage you to ignore 90% of what they sell?
(3) A format that you can use on your computer, in your RIO, and in your car, and which is also suitable for downloading, is a format that's perfect for filesharing networks. Record companies are unlikely to encourage the widespread use of such a format.
You too can be a copyright holder
on
RIAA to DoS Pirates?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
People who oppose extensions to the powers of copyright holders often forget that "copyright holders" doesn't just mean big corporations - "copyright holders" can refer to any schmuck who can string a semi-coherent sentence together. Yes, I'm talking about YOU!
YOU TOO can become a copyright holder, and YOU TOO can have the right to break into ANY COMPUTER YOU LIKE to look for evidence of copyright infringement and then DO WHAT YOU LIKE TO THAT COMPUTER! Don't worry about actually FINDING PROOF of copyright infringement - once you've wiped their hard disk, how are they going to prove they DIDN'T have a copy of your data?
Sounds too good to be true? Just follow these simple steps:
Pick a target computer. Maybe there's a political viewpoint you want to censor, or a business you want to destroy? Perhaps you want to read the personal mail of the head of a recording industry cartel? Or maybe you just want to find out the medical records of a friend or co-worker. These activities would be called "hacking" if they were done by an ordinary person, but remember: you're no ordinary person, you're a copyright holder!
There's a pretty good chance that someone uses your target computer to browse the web. And there's a fairly good chance that they read the same well-respected weblog where you posted your copyrighted material. Well then, there's a chance that those bastards are infringing your copyright! Better break in and find out. They've probably got a copy of your data in their browser cache RIGHT NOW! (By the way, don't worry too much about the definition of "a fairly good chance" - you don't have to waste time with any of that pesky legal stuff like probable cause. You're not a policeman, you're a copyright holder! Or maybe you ARE a policeman. Well that's OK - policemen can be copyright holders too!)
Hack into the target computer and look for evidence of copyright infringement. Criminals are devious people so you should look everywhere for evidence:/etc/passwd is a good place to start. If you find any evidence, or even if you don't, wipe the hard drive to prevent any future infringement. This would be criminal vandalism, or even terrorism, if it was done by an ordinary hacker. But you're no ordinary hacker. That's right... you're a copyright holder!
The copyright in this comment belongs to Sony Music Corporation. Copying and distribution in any form, electronic or otherwise, is strictly prohibited and will one day be retroactively punishable by death. You have been warned.
People who oppose extensions to the powers of copyright holders often forget that "copyright holders" doesn't just mean big corporations - "copyright holders" can refer to any schmuck who can string a semi-coherent sentence together. Yes, I'm talking about YOU!
YOU TOO can become a copyright holder, and YOU TOO can have the right to break into ANY COMPUTER YOU LIKE to look for evidence of copyright infringement and then DO WHAT YOU LIKE TO THAT COMPUTER! Don't worry about actually FINDING PROOF of copyright infringement - once you've wiped their hard disk, how are they going to prove they DIDN'T have a copy of your data?
Sounds too good to be true? Just follow these simple steps:
Pick a target computer. Maybe there's a political viewpoint you want to censor, or a business you want to destroy? Perhaps you want to read the personal mail of the head of a recording industry cartel? Or maybe you just want to find out the medical records of a friend or co-worker. These activities would be called "hacking" if they were done by an ordinary person, but remember: you're no ordinary person, you're a copyright holder!
There's a pretty good chance that someone uses your target computer to browse the web. And there's a fairly good chance that they read the same well-respected weblog where you posted your copyrighted material. Well then, there's a chance that those bastards are infringing your copyright! Better break in and find out. They've probably got a copy of your data in their browser cache RIGHT NOW! (By the way, don't worry too much about the definition of "a fairly good chance" - you don't have to waste time with any of that pesky legal stuff like probable cause. You're not a policeman, you're a copyright holder! Or maybe you ARE a policeman. Well that's OK - policemen can be copyright holders too!)
Hack into the target computer and look for evidence of copyright infringement. Criminals are devious people so you should look everywhere for evidence:/etc/passwd is a good place to start. If you find any evidence, or even if you don't, wipe the hard drive to prevent any future infringement. This would be criminal vandalism, or even terrorism, if it was done by an ordinary hacker. But you're no ordinary hacker. That's right... you're a copyright holder!
The copyright in this comment belongs to Sony Music Corporation. Copying and distribution in any form, electronic or otherwise, is strictly prohibited and will one day be retroactively punishable by death. You have been warned.
They would have to do all of this manually, painfully, slowly, inefficiently (in case of European "collateral damage").
Not really. They could release a virus carrying a list of acceptable IP ranges (addresses of computers physically located in the United States). The virus would only infect computers with acceptable addresses. (A paranoid person might think that Code Red II's preference for addresses on the local subnet was intended to test the viability of this approach.)
The list of acceptable IP ranges wouldn't have to be long. Disabling every Windows box at a handful of ISPs and universities would wipe out most peer-to-peer networks at a stroke. Of course the RIAA would deny writing the virus, but if the truth ever got out the RIAA would want a legal loophole through which to escape.
Recall BBC's nightly broadcasts during WW-II, which frequently concluded with a long list of apparently nonsense phrases. Most of them were, in fact, nonsense, but some were "trigger phrases" aimed at groups like the Resistance to coordinate actions.
Transmission of nonsense phrases to spies in Eastern Europe continued throughout the 1950s, under the codename The Goon Show. To this day, many of them have not been decoded and the chief steganographer is likely to carry their secret meanings to his grave.
Re:Educate yourselves without asking questions?
on
Bert Is Evil
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· Score: 1
Sorry if I came across as arrogant. It wasn't so much the question that I was complaining about, as the moderator who thought it was Insightful to notice that people in South Asia might not recognise a character from Sesame Street.
User starts Word. As the application is loading and initializing and as the user is working, the hard drive is automatically loading all dictionaries, the other Office programs, the equation editor, the charting program, the clip art, the help files, all.docs you've ever edited, all.txt files, local.html files into your 2 GB RAM buffer on the hard drive.
Erm... isn't this what Office does now? (Pre-loading everything when Windows starts.) And isn't it something Slashdotters love to complain about, because it makes Office a memory hog?
You may never, ever use Word to edit html files, but since RAM is so cheap it doesn't matter.
God damn it man, my crusade to rid the world of bloat has nothing to do with the price of RAM! It's a religious issue!
Re:So obviously intentional...
on
Bert Is Evil
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· Score: 2
Oh my God, a Muslim with a sense of humour! Anyone would think they were human beings.
If it helps you to come to terms with the shock, think of the guy who found these images on Google and assembled them in Photoshop as a "fellow geek" rather than a "Muslim".
Good idea. Somebody made a poster of an evil man. Let's force that person off the internet so he can't make any more posters of evil men.
Oh wait, there's a new story on the front page about the evils of censorship and how My Rights Online are being infringed by Big Bad Government Censors. I'd better hop over and show my support...
Re:Does the Middle East get PBS?
on
Bert Is Evil
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· Score: 2
I continue to be shocked by the short-sightedness of most Americans when it comes to international affairs. Was someone really so surprised by the revelation that kids in Afghanistan don't watch the same TV shows as kids in Iowa that they moderated that comment Insightful?
Citizens of a democracy have a responsibility to educate themselves. Citizens of a democracy that bombs other countries have a responsibility to educate themselves about those other countries. Americans, please get a clue about the rest of the world before it's too late.
I didn't miss the part about there being a gay part of town, but the gay part of town is still public. There's no law saying that only gay people can go there and watch what's going on. What happens if a couple of sinister, moralizing breeders want to take turns walking around the gay part of town looking for people to blackmail (or leer at)? That would also give "the heterosexual world" "an open and watching eye 24/7 onto the gay quarter".
The real issue here is not CCTV. The real issue is the fact that some people consider homosexuality to be immoral, and therefore some homosexuals want to keep their orientation secret. But you can't keep something secret and express it in public at the same time, CCTV or no CCTV.
Gays deserve to be able to express themselves by holding hands or kissing in public just as heterosexuals do, and in this certain part of the city they can do so without offending anyone else, without worrying who may find out, etc.
Don't you think it's contradictory to demand the right to "express oneself", "without worrying who may find out"? The whole point about expressing yourself in public is to make your beliefs or actions known to other people. If you don't want other people to know about your beliefs, don't express them in public. If you don't want other people to watch you kissing, don't kiss in the street. If you express your beliefs in public, you have to accept that other people will find out. That's what "in public" means. It doesn't make any difference whether those other people are watching from across the street or through a CCTV camera - after all, the friendly couple standing next to you could be "leering strangers" too.
Could you take a large number, say 918264702176580756012570987, convert it into a melody using 0=C, 1=C#, 2=D etc, and copyright the melody? Because if you could, you could then argue that the number was a derivative work (you could demonstrate how to derive the number from the melody) and any other representation of the number (eg a text string created by converting the number into hex and interpreting each pair of digits as an ASCII character) was also a derivative work covered by your copyright.
How would this be useful? You could do what these guys have done, and copyright every "melody" up to a certain length. As noted by previous posters, this wouldn't give you the ability to sue anybody for breach of copyright. But it would give you immunity from prosecution for violating anybody else's copyright, since you could show for any digital work that the work in question was simply a compilation of your own copyrighted works: namely, all the ASCII strings up to 10 characters in length.
"Most users" are dumb. They have no clue what is the difference between "document" and "program".
Oh high and mighty Slashdotter, kindly explain to this dumb and lowly user the difference between a document and a program, with reference to the following cases:
A Word document with embedded macros - document or program?
A shell script - document or program?
A hex editor taking an executable file as its input
A dynamic linker/loader taking the same executable file as its input
An email that exploits a buffer overflow bug to load arbitrary code
Turing's proof of the undecidability of the halting problem, based on the idea of a Turing machine taking a coded description of itself as its input
I have to pay 80US$ for 256/64 DSL with forced NAT and no real ip or higher speeds options available
You don't have to pay for it, you choose to pay for it. Believe it or not, you could survive without broadband. You could probably survive with no internet connection whatsoever. But you choose not to.
The DSL providers gouge you because they know there are two kinds of people: people who don't want DSL at any price, and people who desperately want DSL. There are very few people who kinda-maybe-want-DSL-but-not-if-it-costs-more-than -$10-a-month. So why would they charge $10 a month when they can charge $80 a month and have nearly the same number of customers?:%s/DSL/crack/g
do i give a damn if the.coms don't get their.000005 cent for an ad banner display that i am never ever going to see or click, yet steals *my* bandwidth and even attempts to identify *me* with their stupid cookies?
What part of "HTTP GET request" don't you understand? Your computer is asking their computer for information. Their computer is providing that information. Their computer is asking your computer to store a cookie. Your computer is complying. At what point are they stealing your bandwidth? If you don't want them to send you information, don't send them an HTTP GET request!
Note that it doesn't say "This logo may not be used on discs not complying with the CD-DA specification". I'll be very surprised if Phillips bitch-slaps any of the other members of the recording industry / playback industry cartel - what would they stand to gain?
However, at some point the amount of secret information required to understand the message exceeds the amount of secret information in the message! In your example, the person receiving the message "Look at the new picture of my dog" needs to have been told beforehand what the signal will be, and what it will mean. The meaning of the message must be transmitted in advance by a secure channel, so the question is why not use the same secure channel to transmit the actual message? Why bother with steganography if you have a secure channel? This is analogous to the problem of distributing one-time pads.
Steganography, like one-time-pad encryption, is only useful when the communicating parties have previously shared a secure communication channel, but can no longer use it. For example, they have previously met face to face but are now working in different countries. This makes it an ideal tool for terrorists who train together and then disperse into society. The advantage of steganography over one-time pad encryption, for a terrorist cell, is that no unusual communication appears to be taking place.
I'm going to develop an ATA driver with the following license agreement:
Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice appears in all copies and that the above copyright notice, this permission notice and the following insult appear in supporting documentation. This software is supplied as is without expressed or implied warranties of any kind. Bill Gates sucks cock.
Slashdot Mirror
[snip]
Innocents will get killed. Some new bad feelings will be created.
Please tell me the irony was deliberate. You cannot in one breath claim that there is a universal right to life, and that anyone who violates that right is evil, and in the next breath claim that innocent deaths are a reasonable means to an end. It is hypocrisy, plain and simple.
It is this kind of muddy thinking that perpetuates the cycles of revenge in the Middle East, in the Balkans and in Northern Ireland. Sadly, a new cycle of revenge is being created between America and the Muslim world. Do you think the deaths of innocent civilians will make Osama Bin Laden sorry for what he has done? Or will they attract more people to his cause? Do you think that killing the family of a potential terrorist will make him hate you less?
Even if the United States manages to kill the individuals responsible for the September 11 attacks, it will have created thousands of new enemies in the process. Look at what is happening already. Pakistanis are crossing into Afghanistan to help drive out American invaders who aren't even there yet! British Muslims are travelling to Afghanistan to join what they believe is a holy war. They give the same justification for their actions as the American government: their culture is under attack, and they must defend it through retaliation.
As a relatively rational culture, the United States must take the decision to break the cycle of violence. You cannot persuade religious fundamentalists of the correctness of your point of view by bombing them! All you will achieve is to persuade previously moderate people that you are a violent hypocrite.
Genetic programming suffers from the same scalability problems as manual programming: it is easy to write an isolated algorithm or procedure, but the difficult part of design is not algorithms but architecture: to design the whole requires an understanding of the parts and vice versa. (Which is not to say that picking the right algorithm isn't important, but it shouldn't be difficult.) Designing the fitness function for a complex program requires as much architectural insight as designing the program itself.
So where will genetic programming come into its own? Consider natural selection. An organism does not live or die based on an abstract fitness function, it lives or dies based on the particular circumstances in which it finds itself. The fitness function is different for each individual in each situation: in fact the fitness function is no less complex than the world itself. The fitness function includes every predator, every drop of rain, every photon escaping from the organism's surface. The enormous complexity of the environment drives the evolution of ever more complex organisms. As more complex organisms evolve, they make the world more complex for their neighbours, so species must continue to evolve just in order to survive: like the Red Queen, they must run to stand still.
Where can we find this kind of complexity in computer science (outside of the POSIX standards documents)? In applications that are connected to the hugely complex social world of human beings: applications like email and chat. There are already programs living 'in the wild' in this complex environment, programs that are able to reproduce in the digital world by exploiting niches in the social world: email viruses.
Evolution will occur in any system that meets three basic requirements:
Wherever evolution occurs, the complexity of the evolving system will increase to match the complexity of its environment. Viruses will eventually exceed the complexity of any hand-written software, because they will evolve to meet the complexity of their environment, the human social environment, which is far more complex than any artifact designed by a single human being.
What do you mean, "play it again"?
When people talk about colonising the Moon, they seem to forget that unlike colonies on Earth, lunar colonies won't be able to start small and work their way up. A colony on Earth can start out very small (a handful of farms) and very simple (nothing more advanced than a stone axe). It can sustain itself entirely without external support, gradually augmenting its technology using local resources. (Building wooden houses, dry stone walls, fences, looms, kilns, bricks, tanneries, breweries, forges, and all that other Settlers II shit.) A colony on the Moon would need technology more advanced than anything we currently have on Earth, from day one. In order to maintain that technology, everything needed to support a 21st century civilisation in a hugely hostile environment would have to be shipped from Earth. We're talking about putting Small Town USA, Silicon Valley and the Rust Belt in a rocket and sending them to the Moon. We had enough trouble getting a beach buggy to the Moon!
A self-sufficient lunar colony is an incredibly ambitious venture. It is nothing like a space station. A space station gets everything it needs from Earth. If a computer breaks down, mission control puts a new one in a rocket and sends it up. A self-sufficient lunar colony would have to make its own computers (and lightbulbs, and socks, and lard, and steel, and little tinfoil bags full of freeze-dried ice cream).
(2) 90% of everything is crap. Producers will resist any tool that allows consumers to intelligently filter products before paying because 90% of what they sell is crap, and they know it. Do you think the people who write filler articles for MSN like the fact that Google is never more than a double-click and 11 keypresses away from their readers? Similarly, do you think record companies would encourage you to ignore 90% of what they sell?
(3) A format that you can use on your computer, in your RIO, and in your car, and which is also suitable for downloading, is a format that's perfect for filesharing networks. Record companies are unlikely to encourage the widespread use of such a format.
YOU TOO can become a copyright holder, and YOU TOO can have the right to break into ANY COMPUTER YOU LIKE to look for evidence of copyright infringement and then DO WHAT YOU LIKE TO THAT COMPUTER! Don't worry about actually FINDING PROOF of copyright infringement - once you've wiped their hard disk, how are they going to prove they DIDN'T have a copy of your data?
Sounds too good to be true? Just follow these simple steps:
- Write some half-baked nonsense and post it on a well-respected weblog. Be sure to include a copyright statement. Hey presto... you're a copyright holder!
- Pick a target computer. Maybe there's a political viewpoint you want to censor, or a business you want to destroy? Perhaps you want to read the personal mail of the head of a recording industry cartel? Or maybe you just want to find out the medical records of a friend or co-worker. These activities would be called "hacking" if they were done by an ordinary person, but remember: you're no ordinary person, you're a copyright holder!
- There's a pretty good chance that someone uses your target computer to browse the web. And there's a fairly good chance that they read the same well-respected weblog where you posted your copyrighted material. Well then, there's a chance that those bastards are infringing your copyright! Better break in and find out. They've probably got a copy of your data in their browser cache RIGHT NOW! (By the way, don't worry too much about the definition of "a fairly good chance" - you don't have to waste time with any of that pesky legal stuff like probable cause. You're not a policeman, you're a copyright holder! Or maybe you ARE a policeman. Well that's OK - policemen can be copyright holders too!)
- Hack into the target computer and look for evidence of copyright infringement. Criminals are devious people so you should look everywhere for evidence:
/etc/passwd is a good place to start. If you find any evidence, or even if you don't, wipe the hard drive to prevent any future infringement. This would be criminal vandalism, or even terrorism, if it was done by an ordinary hacker. But you're no ordinary hacker. That's right... you're a copyright holder!
The copyright in this comment belongs to Sony Music Corporation. Copying and distribution in any form, electronic or otherwise, is strictly prohibited and will one day be retroactively punishable by death. You have been warned.YOU TOO can become a copyright holder, and YOU TOO can have the right to break into ANY COMPUTER YOU LIKE to look for evidence of copyright infringement and then DO WHAT YOU LIKE TO THAT COMPUTER! Don't worry about actually FINDING PROOF of copyright infringement - once you've wiped their hard disk, how are they going to prove they DIDN'T have a copy of your data?
Sounds too good to be true? Just follow these simple steps:
- Write some half-baked nonsense and post it on a well-respected weblog. Be sure to include a copyright statement. Hey presto... you're a copyright holder!
- Pick a target computer. Maybe there's a political viewpoint you want to censor, or a business you want to destroy? Perhaps you want to read the personal mail of the head of a recording industry cartel? Or maybe you just want to find out the medical records of a friend or co-worker. These activities would be called "hacking" if they were done by an ordinary person, but remember: you're no ordinary person, you're a copyright holder!
- There's a pretty good chance that someone uses your target computer to browse the web. And there's a fairly good chance that they read the same well-respected weblog where you posted your copyrighted material. Well then, there's a chance that those bastards are infringing your copyright! Better break in and find out. They've probably got a copy of your data in their browser cache RIGHT NOW! (By the way, don't worry too much about the definition of "a fairly good chance" - you don't have to waste time with any of that pesky legal stuff like probable cause. You're not a policeman, you're a copyright holder! Or maybe you ARE a policeman. Well that's OK - policemen can be copyright holders too!)
- Hack into the target computer and look for evidence of copyright infringement. Criminals are devious people so you should look everywhere for evidence:
/etc/passwd is a good place to start. If you find any evidence, or even if you don't, wipe the hard drive to prevent any future infringement. This would be criminal vandalism, or even terrorism, if it was done by an ordinary hacker. But you're no ordinary hacker. That's right... you're a copyright holder!
The copyright in this comment belongs to Sony Music Corporation. Copying and distribution in any form, electronic or otherwise, is strictly prohibited and will one day be retroactively punishable by death. You have been warned.Not really. They could release a virus carrying a list of acceptable IP ranges (addresses of computers physically located in the United States). The virus would only infect computers with acceptable addresses. (A paranoid person might think that Code Red II's preference for addresses on the local subnet was intended to test the viability of this approach.)
The list of acceptable IP ranges wouldn't have to be long. Disabling every Windows box at a handful of ISPs and universities would wipe out most peer-to-peer networks at a stroke. Of course the RIAA would deny writing the virus, but if the truth ever got out the RIAA would want a legal loophole through which to escape.
Transmission of nonsense phrases to spies in Eastern Europe continued throughout the 1950s, under the codename The Goon Show. To this day, many of them have not been decoded and the chief steganographer is likely to carry their secret meanings to his grave.
Sorry if I came across as arrogant. It wasn't so much the question that I was complaining about, as the moderator who thought it was Insightful to notice that people in South Asia might not recognise a character from Sesame Street.
Erm... isn't this what Office does now? (Pre-loading everything when Windows starts.) And isn't it something Slashdotters love to complain about, because it makes Office a memory hog?
You may never, ever use Word to edit html files, but since RAM is so cheap it doesn't matter.
God damn it man, my crusade to rid the world of bloat has nothing to do with the price of RAM! It's a religious issue!
If it helps you to come to terms with the shock, think of the guy who found these images on Google and assembled them in Photoshop as a "fellow geek" rather than a "Muslim".
Oh wait, there's a new story on the front page about the evils of censorship and how My Rights Online are being infringed by Big Bad Government Censors. I'd better hop over and show my support...
Citizens of a democracy have a responsibility to educate themselves. Citizens of a democracy that bombs other countries have a responsibility to educate themselves about those other countries. Americans, please get a clue about the rest of the world before it's too late.
The real issue here is not CCTV. The real issue is the fact that some people consider homosexuality to be immoral, and therefore some homosexuals want to keep their orientation secret. But you can't keep something secret and express it in public at the same time, CCTV or no CCTV.
Don't you think it's contradictory to demand the right to "express oneself", "without worrying who may find out"? The whole point about expressing yourself in public is to make your beliefs or actions known to other people. If you don't want other people to know about your beliefs, don't express them in public. If you don't want other people to watch you kissing, don't kiss in the street. If you express your beliefs in public, you have to accept that other people will find out. That's what "in public" means. It doesn't make any difference whether those other people are watching from across the street or through a CCTV camera - after all, the friendly couple standing next to you could be "leering strangers" too.
How would this be useful? You could do what these guys have done, and copyright every "melody" up to a certain length. As noted by previous posters, this wouldn't give you the ability to sue anybody for breach of copyright. But it would give you immunity from prosecution for violating anybody else's copyright, since you could show for any digital work that the work in question was simply a compilation of your own copyrighted works: namely, all the ASCII strings up to 10 characters in length.
Oh high and mighty Slashdotter, kindly explain to this dumb and lowly user the difference between a document and a program, with reference to the following cases:
Not that I consider piracy a crime...
You don't have to pay for it, you choose to pay for it. Believe it or not, you could survive without broadband. You could probably survive with no internet connection whatsoever. But you choose not to.
The DSL providers gouge you because they know there are two kinds of people: people who don't want DSL at any price, and people who desperately want DSL. There are very few people who kinda-maybe-want-DSL-but-not-if-it-costs-more-than -$10-a-month. So why would they charge $10 a month when they can charge $80 a month and have nearly the same number of customers? :%s/DSL/crack/g
do i give a damn if the .coms don't get their .000005 cent for an ad banner display that i am never ever going to see or click, yet steals *my* bandwidth and even attempts to identify *me* with their stupid cookies?
What part of "HTTP GET request" don't you understand? Your computer is asking their computer for information. Their computer is providing that information. Their computer is asking your computer to store a cookie. Your computer is complying. At what point are they stealing your bandwidth? If you don't want them to send you information, don't send them an HTTP GET request!
Note that it doesn't say "This logo may not be used on discs not complying with the CD-DA specification". I'll be very surprised if Phillips bitch-slaps any of the other members of the recording industry / playback industry cartel - what would they stand to gain?
Steganography, like one-time-pad encryption, is only useful when the communicating parties have previously shared a secure communication channel, but can no longer use it. For example, they have previously met face to face but are now working in different countries. This makes it an ideal tool for terrorists who train together and then disperse into society. The advantage of steganography over one-time pad encryption, for a terrorist cell, is that no unusual communication appears to be taking place.
...you've discovered the true purpose of Fat Chicks In Party Hats!
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
int main (int argc, char **argv)
{
Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice appears in all copies and that the above copyright notice, this permission notice and the following insult appear in supporting documentation. This software is supplied as is without expressed or implied warranties of any kind. Bill Gates sucks cock.