Of course, the fact that you own credit and debit cards but use cash for almost every transaction might also be used for marketing purposes. Do you get a lot of junkmail about bug detectors and tin foil underpants?
Should the government also make access to true randomness illegal so that any string of bits that seems sufficiently random can be assumed to be an illegally encrypted message?
Good idea. Write to your congressman and suggest that they ban entropy. Entropy is the basis of all encryption methods, and encryption makes it possible for terrorists to discuss their evil plans in secret, right under the Government's nose. For the safety of the American people the Government should strive to reduce the amount of entropy in the world, and if possible eliminate it completely. In this time of knee-jerk patriotism, what elected official could oppose such an idea?
Mind you it's going to be awfully cold if they succeed...
You need to learn the difference between a private citizen and a country.
Explain to me how you can tell the difference in Afghanistan, where "the government" is simply the most powerful faction, or whoever happens to control Kabul at the moment. The only difference I can see between "the government" and "a powerful faction" is that "the government" can declare war on another country. (Legislative powers are irrelevant in Afghanistan.) Does that mean the government is the Taliban, or Osama bin Laden? Bin Laden is a private individual, and he is one of the most important targets of this war. The US has not declared war on any country - this is essentially a war against organisations and individuals who fund and harbour terrorists, so my comparison with organisations and individuals who fund terrorists in the UK was appropriate.
Apparently you also need to learn what terrorism means.
"The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons." - The American Heritage Dictionary. Read about the CIA's assassination of Salvador Allende. You will find that it fits that definition rather well.
This article by a former CIA operative explains why Western intelligence agencies have been unable to penetrate bin Laden's organisation. The problem is not lack of funding, but lack of operatives who could plausibly penetrate such an organisation.
The only solution offered in the article is to support the leader of the second most powerful faction in Afghanistan after the Taliban, one Ahmad Shah Mas'ud. Unfortunately for the CIA, Mas'ud was assassinated by a suicide bomber on September 9.
If you want an example of a country that sponsors terrorism, look no further than the USA. Try looking up the Irish Freedom Committee on Google, or read this article. Naive Americans have been funding terrorism in the UK for decades. Does that mean you need to bomb Chicago to rid the world of terrorism?
The CIA has assassinated a number of political leaders, including democratically elected presidents. Those actions would doubtlessly be called "terrorism" if the victims were Americans. Does that mean you need to bomb Washington to rid the world of terrorism?
The IRA has recently been training FARC terrorists in Columbia. The IRA is funded by American organisations like the IFC. Does that mean America is sponsoring terrorism in Columbia too? Wow, it's starting to look like one of those world wide terrorist networks I keep hearing about - and Americans are bankrolling it.
In reality, of course, it's not a global terror network. It's simply a bunch of violent, power-hungry organisations funded by naive individuals who are fooled by stirring words such as "patriotism", "history", "identity" and "freedom". I'm afraid your government is just another one of those organisations, and you are just another one of those fools.
I have previously read (forgotten where) that in theory async. computers will always be slower that sync. computers.
I don't think the advantage of async is a direct increase in speed, but rather a decrease in die size (because the clock signal doesn't have to be propagated to all parts of the chip), which leads to a decrease in power requirements and allows the chip to operate faster without overheating.
No one kills 5,000 innocent civilians without being hunted to the very ends of the earth and brought to a very stern account.
Except perhaps the United States. The Jordanian Red Crescent (the name under which the Red Cross operates in Islamic countries) estimated that 113,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in the war, 60% of them children. (Many of these deaths would have been caused by the destruction of essential infrastructure, not directly by bombing, hence the high number of children killed.) I'm not by any means a supporter of either Sinn Fein or Saddam Hussein, but you're naive if you think that only the US has innocent civilians, and only the enemies of the US harbour terrorists.
You can easily make each item in the output stream into a "text object" as follows:
$ some-command 2> some-fifo | sed -e "s/^/TextObject:/" > some-fifo
Now you can read the combined error and output streams from some-fifo and separate the "Text objects" from the "Error objects" based on whether or not each line starts with "TextObject:".
If you feel primitive using plain-text tools you can always call the FIFO an ObjectStream.;-)
I sympathise with your desire for revenge. But please try to bear in mind in the days and weeks to come that revenge against a large group of people will hurt many innocent people. Those responsible for this attack are unspeakably evil individuals, but don't get so caught up in your desire to punish them that you end up hurting yet more innocent people - for example the civilians of another country. God forbid this tragedy should get any worse; that's what will happen if the US seeks revenge against an easy national target such as Palestine or Afghanistan rather than hunting down the individuals responsible for this awful attack. Please don't add your voice to those calling out for blood. Enough blood has been spilled already. Let us find and punish the individuals responsible, but let us not make an easy scapegoat out of innocent civilians, whatever their nationality or religion.
Aspirin is still a patented drug in most parts of the world, and thus very expensive. (There's no generic aspirin in the Czech Republic, for example - you have to buy Bayer aspirin.)
In that case, keep your song to yourself. No teenagers with ukeleles will ever hear it, copy it, or mess it up. But if you choose to publish your 'memory' and sell copies of it to teenagers with ukeleles, it will become part of their lives as well as your own: fair game to be copied, parodied and modified by anyone who hears it.
Or are you saying that other people don't have the right to make songs that reflect their experience of life, just because part of that experience involves your songs?
OK, blame your nephews for the fact that your dollars are paying a corporation to pay a politician to trample your freedom, and your nephews' freedom. Whatever rationalization makes you happy...
By the same argument, advertising is pointless unless it persuades every person on the planet to buy the product. In fact, advertising works by changing a few people's minds. Boycotts work the same way. You only need to change a few people's minds to start hurting a company's profits.
I don't think a boycott by a few thousand geeks will put Disney out of business. But if it hurts their bottom line a little bit, it will affect their corporate strategy a little bit.
Stop buying Disney products. Tell your friends to stop buying Disney products, and tell them why:
Disney is supporting a law in the US that would give the government unprecedented powers to interfere with the way we use our personal computers.
If Disney gets its way, you will not be able to buy a computer in the US unless its software has been approved by the government, and it will be a crime to connect a computer to the internet if it is running unapproved software. The definition of 'approved software' will be determined by companies with a commercial interest in restricting the usefulness of home computers for education and entertainment.
It is likely that if the US adopts this law, it will begin to put pressure on other countries to do the same (as has happened with patents, copyright extension and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act). The best way to prevent this intrusion by the US government into our lives is to let Disney know that it is losing customers because of its support for this law.
Unfortunately, I don't think most people would feel betrayed if their personal information was stolen from a Microsoft server, or any server. They would blame the hackers. The media profile of hackers is so high, and the profile of security experts is so low, that most people don't realise it's possible to secure your data against hackers, and they won't expect the system administrator to be held responsible if a hacker breaks into the system.
Your point about public domain information doesn't make sense, because every patented device must be made public. That's why patents exist: to give inventors an incentive to reveal how their devices work, in exchange for protection from competing devices based on their design. Knowing how a device works, whether you got that information by reading the patent or by reverse engineering, does not stop you being liable to pay patent licensing fees.
As for your second point, there's a lot of middle ground between publishing an API and requiring an NDA. Sure it costs money to publish an API, but it also costs money to have a lawyer draft an NDA. There's a third, free, option: don't publicly document the API, but don't persecute anyone for sharing information about it.
You wouldn't be so flippant if I you were strapped into an electric chair and there was a Yale student with his finger on the button. Respect mah authoriteh!;-)
To be fair, given the description of the attack, Intel is probably right that it still does prevent "casual copying." On the other hand, it angers me that they're trying to prevent casual (including fair use) copying, but don't mind that somebody willing to invest some money in hardware and a couple of weeks can start producing bootleg devices.
Only one person needs to retrieve the master key. The master key could be used to mass-produce HDCP descramblers. After that, casual copying would be possible without buying 4 PCs and 50 displays.
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Of course, the fact that you own credit and debit cards but use cash for almost every transaction might also be used for marketing purposes. Do you get a lot of junkmail about bug detectors and tin foil underpants?
I've got a law of thermodynamics here that says you're wrong. ;-)
Vietnam, you idiot.
Guerrillas move.
Good idea. Write to your congressman and suggest that they ban entropy. Entropy is the basis of all encryption methods, and encryption makes it possible for terrorists to discuss their evil plans in secret, right under the Government's nose. For the safety of the American people the Government should strive to reduce the amount of entropy in the world, and if possible eliminate it completely. In this time of knee-jerk patriotism, what elected official could oppose such an idea?
Mind you it's going to be awfully cold if they succeed...
Buy it before they ban it.
Explain to me how you can tell the difference in Afghanistan, where "the government" is simply the most powerful faction, or whoever happens to control Kabul at the moment. The only difference I can see between "the government" and "a powerful faction" is that "the government" can declare war on another country. (Legislative powers are irrelevant in Afghanistan.) Does that mean the government is the Taliban, or Osama bin Laden? Bin Laden is a private individual, and he is one of the most important targets of this war. The US has not declared war on any country - this is essentially a war against organisations and individuals who fund and harbour terrorists, so my comparison with organisations and individuals who fund terrorists in the UK was appropriate.
Apparently you also need to learn what terrorism means.
"The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons." - The American Heritage Dictionary. Read about the CIA's assassination of Salvador Allende. You will find that it fits that definition rather well.
The only solution offered in the article is to support the leader of the second most powerful faction in Afghanistan after the Taliban, one Ahmad Shah Mas'ud. Unfortunately for the CIA, Mas'ud was assassinated by a suicide bomber on September 9.
The CIA has assassinated a number of political leaders, including democratically elected presidents. Those actions would doubtlessly be called "terrorism" if the victims were Americans. Does that mean you need to bomb Washington to rid the world of terrorism?
The IRA has recently been training FARC terrorists in Columbia. The IRA is funded by American organisations like the IFC. Does that mean America is sponsoring terrorism in Columbia too? Wow, it's starting to look like one of those world wide terrorist networks I keep hearing about - and Americans are bankrolling it.
In reality, of course, it's not a global terror network. It's simply a bunch of violent, power-hungry organisations funded by naive individuals who are fooled by stirring words such as "patriotism", "history", "identity" and "freedom". I'm afraid your government is just another one of those organisations, and you are just another one of those fools.
I don't think the advantage of async is a direct increase in speed, but rather a decrease in die size (because the clock signal doesn't have to be propagated to all parts of the chip), which leads to a decrease in power requirements and allows the chip to operate faster without overheating.
America's treatment of Sinn Fein puts it in which category?
No one kills 5,000 innocent civilians without being hunted to the very ends of the earth and brought to a very stern account.
Except perhaps the United States. The Jordanian Red Crescent (the name under which the Red Cross operates in Islamic countries) estimated that 113,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in the war, 60% of them children. (Many of these deaths would have been caused by the destruction of essential infrastructure, not directly by bombing, hence the high number of children killed.) I'm not by any means a supporter of either Sinn Fein or Saddam Hussein, but you're naive if you think that only the US has innocent civilians, and only the enemies of the US harbour terrorists.
I wonder if Microsoft Flight Simulator has a version of Excel hidden in it somewhere?
The NSA's working on it. It's not feature-complete yet: so far it just watches what you type.
$ some-command 2> some-fifo | sed -e "s/^/TextObject:/" > some-fifo
Now you can read the combined error and output streams from some-fifo and separate the "Text objects" from the "Error objects" based on whether or not each line starts with "TextObject:".
If you feel primitive using plain-text tools you can always call the FIFO an ObjectStream. ;-)
I sympathise with your desire for revenge. But please try to bear in mind in the days and weeks to come that revenge against a large group of people will hurt many innocent people. Those responsible for this attack are unspeakably evil individuals, but don't get so caught up in your desire to punish them that you end up hurting yet more innocent people - for example the civilians of another country. God forbid this tragedy should get any worse; that's what will happen if the US seeks revenge against an easy national target such as Palestine or Afghanistan rather than hunting down the individuals responsible for this awful attack. Please don't add your voice to those calling out for blood. Enough blood has been spilled already. Let us find and punish the individuals responsible, but let us not make an easy scapegoat out of innocent civilians, whatever their nationality or religion.
Aspirin is still a patented drug in most parts of the world, and thus very expensive. (There's no generic aspirin in the Czech Republic, for example - you have to buy Bayer aspirin.)
Or are you saying that other people don't have the right to make songs that reflect their experience of life, just because part of that experience involves your songs?
OK, blame your nephews for the fact that your dollars are paying a corporation to pay a politician to trample your freedom, and your nephews' freedom. Whatever rationalization makes you happy...
I don't think a boycott by a few thousand geeks will put Disney out of business. But if it hurts their bottom line a little bit, it will affect their corporate strategy a little bit.
Disney is supporting a law in the US that would give the government unprecedented powers to interfere with the way we use our personal computers.
If Disney gets its way, you will not be able to buy a computer in the US unless its software has been approved by the government, and it will be a crime to connect a computer to the internet if it is running unapproved software. The definition of 'approved software' will be determined by companies with a commercial interest in restricting the usefulness of home computers for education and entertainment.
It is likely that if the US adopts this law, it will begin to put pressure on other countries to do the same (as has happened with patents, copyright extension and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act). The best way to prevent this intrusion by the US government into our lives is to let Disney know that it is losing customers because of its support for this law.
Unfortunately, I don't think most people would feel betrayed if their personal information was stolen from a Microsoft server, or any server. They would blame the hackers. The media profile of hackers is so high, and the profile of security experts is so low, that most people don't realise it's possible to secure your data against hackers, and they won't expect the system administrator to be held responsible if a hacker breaks into the system.
As for your second point, there's a lot of middle ground between publishing an API and requiring an NDA. Sure it costs money to publish an API, but it also costs money to have a lawyer draft an NDA. There's a third, free, option: don't publicly document the API, but don't persecute anyone for sharing information about it.
I wish I had moderator points I could give you.
You wouldn't be so flippant if I you were strapped into an electric chair and there was a Yale student with his finger on the button. Respect mah authoriteh! ;-)
Only one person needs to retrieve the master key. The master key could be used to mass-produce HDCP descramblers. After that, casual copying would be possible without buying 4 PCs and 50 displays.