notice that the 2nd 3rd and 4th violations must occur to a protected (ie government) computer. Hacking yahoo.com and putting "I WUZ HERE" doesn't make you a terrorist. Neither does posting security holes, or sharing MP3s, or reverse engineering DVDs, or what have you.
As used in this title, the term `Federal terrorism offense' means a violation of, or an attempt or conspiracy to violate-
...1030(a)(1), (a)(4), (a)(5)(A), or (a)(7) (relating to protection of computers)... "
And here are the sections from the US Code that it refers to:
"Sec. 1030. Fraud and related activity in connection with computers
(a) Whoever -
(1) having knowingly accessed a computer without authorization
or exceeding authorized access, and by means of such conduct
having obtained information that has been determined by the
United States Government pursuant to an Executive order or
statute to require protection against unauthorized disclosure for
reasons of national defense or foreign relations, or any
restricted data, as defined in paragraph y. of section 11 of the
Atomic Energy Act of 1954, with reason to believe that such
information so obtained could be used to the injury of the United
States, or to the advantage of any foreign nation willfully
communicates, delivers, transmits, or causes to be communicated,
delivered, or transmitted, or attempts to communicate, deliver,
transmit or cause to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted
the same to any person not entitled to receive it, or willfully
retains the same and fails to deliver it to the officer or
employee of the United States entitled to receive it;
(4) knowingly and with intent to defraud, accesses a protected
computer without authorization, or exceeds authorized access, and
by means of such conduct furthers the intended fraud and obtains
anything of value, unless the object of the fraud and the thing
obtained consists only of the use of the computer and the value
of such use is not more than $5,000 in any 1-year period;
(5)
(A) knowingly causes the transmission of a program,
information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct,
intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected
computer;
(7) with intent to extort from any person, firm, association,
educational institution, financial institution, government
entity, or other legal entity, any money or other thing of value,
transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication
containing any threat to cause damage to a protected computer; "
now IANAL, but this seems to make the following things terrorism:
1) Getting or transmitting any information that can be a threat to national security via computer (ie classified stuff)
2) Knowingly and intentionally doing damage to a computer system of at least $5000
3) Making and spreading viruses and computer worms
4) Threatening to do any of the above (within federal jurisdiction), with the intent to do it.
That's my interpretation, and it's probably wrong. I'm mainly posting this for easy reference.
If you care, it's perfectly possible to write code that doesn't crash and doesn't allow hackers and virusses to take over your computer
Oh wait, look at Redhat, look at Debian, look at any other linux distribution. I guess, according to your logic, that linux developers also "don't care"?
If some piece of software contained a bug that the operator did not (and could not, I'm speaking generally here, not regarding the sendmail example) know about, then I would say it's entirely the creator of that piece of software's fault...
But as mentioned in the parent post, patches for the latest microsoft worm exploits were available a few months to up to almost a year ago. And they were all right there for all to see on Windows Update. Your argument holds no water
You seem to miss the point. The point isn't that Congress shouldn't authorize the use of force. It's that their particular authorization was way too vague and upsets the balance of power in our government.
This is why in many professional projects they like to stay away from the term "bug" -- using the terms "errors" and "defects" instead.
Errors-- bugs found before project release (presumably fixed)
Defects-- bugs found after project release.
This story is talking about 100,000 errors that have been found in the under-development mozilla. Previous stories about 65000 win2k bugs were about defects in the shipped win2k product. If distinctions like this were more common, we wouldn't be having so many problems with people confusing the two.
seriously, Ad Hominem insults are *not* equivalent to admitting defeat, there's *no* logical reason to take them as such, and therefore, equating an insult with an admission of defeat is a *fallacy*. Any assertion otherwise bears the burden of proof. And watch out, proving that something is *necessarily* the case is somewhat tricky.
The first insult hurled is a confession that the insulter has run out of reason and is admitting defeat.
This isn't necessarily true. Think of how much the Linux community has insulted Microsoft. And we probably started it first.
Name calling is never a valid argument, but asserting that it means the other side has admitted defeat, or has "run out of reason" is just as fallacious. Insulting is natural human behavior.
What about loading with GUIDs, like COM, instead? Then you can still patch and bugfix libraries like j7953 said.
Besides, if the checksum is the filename, and hard-coded into the app... then no one is actually *computing* the checksum. So it's no different than an arbitrary number..... and What if two different DLLs have identical checksums??
One more example, along the lines of IP: If you create a better mouse trap, you can patent the design and the plans to make one. If someone reads your plans - do they have the right to tell the world how to make their own better mouse trap using what they remember of your design?
Yes they do. What's illegal is to actually build and sell said mouse trap. You're confusing patent and copyright.
Consider a software company, floated on the free market. They release a new product, their share price goes up.
The company is now worth more, anyone who has any holding in the company has just gained money. This money was created, it did not change hands. Net amount of money in the world increases.
Uh, no. In order for said shareholders to get this money, they have to sell stock. Money changes hands.
The only time the amount of money in the world increases is when the Fed or banks decide to print more. But that usually inflates, leaving the world with approximately the same amount of "wealth." And as was mentioned earlier, he only time wealth can really increase is when new resources are introduced to the economy.
Well perhaps if you knew ANYTHING about the scientific method, and how it is epistemologically much more superior than the "revelation" of the bible, or any other source of religious faith, and if you didn't allude to tired old creationist arguments that have been shown to be fallacious time and time again (ie moon dust), then you wouldn't be a troll. Though I would have moderated you up as funny.
The question is -- how much money did it take to research and develop these new business practices, and is the "reward of success" enough to make up for the money lost?
Does anyone have any actual DATA about how much it costs companies to "develop new business practices"? If the increase in efficiency from the new practices can cover the costs of developing them, then there's no justification for patent protection.
Also, patents were supposed to increase techological innovation -- in the product sphere. Do business methods even count as such?
How moronic it is that words such as Pentium or 'for dummies' can be trademarked
Perhaps I should be able to create a new x86 CPU and call it the "pentium"? Or start a new line of "for dummies" books? That in itself would confuse consumers and create unfair competition. Now take it to the extreme -- what if anyone could use any trademarked name they chose? How would you be able to differentiate between products if they could all have the same name?
Anyone who thinks they need the support of armed police and federal agents, backing IP law, to make their living... then maybe you OUGHT to go broke. You exist at the expense of everyone else's freedom. You existance is too expensive.
Inventions take time and money to create. If people are able to simply copy your design after you have spent all the time in research 'n development, then you will not be able to make enough money on your product to cover your research costs, since the new competitors will undercut you.
Whether this is true or not, this is how business people think. The result is -- without patent protection, you'll see a huge drop in the amount of new products or innovations on those products. There's a lot of evidence that shows that the strenght of an economy is heavily influenced by the progress of technology in that economy. Therefore, patent law is an attempt to balance the inefficiency caused by temporary monopoly with the benefit of increased technological progress.
Copyright law is a bit less economically sound in its justification, but it's the same kind of thing -- to promote creation of information products (whether fiction or nonfiction, music or movie, digital or analog or sketched in sand).
It's true people created before copyright protection -- but that was also before xerox or even high-speed printing presses, which make mass-copying viable. Not to mention widespread digital media.
And it's true that people will still create without copyright. But having the creator of a work able to control how it's copied is important in our increasingly money-oriented world. If they wish to waive rights, they can do that in our system. The only real problems come about when individuals pass over their copyrights to a large corporation (ie music publisher) for cash. Then both the consumers and the musicians get screwed. (You do realize that most bands get the majority of their money from performances rather than album sales right? The idea is that an album will get more people at their concerts. Most of the album money goes to the publisher)
You're attacking some sort of strawman charicature of patents.
If you were to "patent the process of transcribing a sequence of 1's and 0's to a digital medium..." etc, then your patent would be invalidated in your first suit because of *significant* prior art.
You'll see that there are already significant restrictions, at least in the law, of what can be patented. Our USPTO seems to be a little lenient though (ie how the hell can genes be patented? Aren't they "physical phenomena"? oh well, pet peeve there).
However, I do agree that business methods shouldn't be patentable... at best they fall under "trade secrets." That's just imho.
I have a hard time thinking that anyone would really want to spend an enourmous amount of time sifting through a mountain of Win2k source code to debug their program
Have you ever been debugging a program in windows, and something is going horribly wrong, and you've narrowed it down to somewhere in the big black box of "KERNEL32.DLL" which comes up as a bunch of asm gobbledeegook in your IDE? Source Code could definately be useful there.
Ever tried low-level kernel mode programming in windows? Do you realize how useful code would be to kernel-mode debugging?
Have you ever been hacking around with something in linux and found the included source code to be incredibly helpful?
Any way you slice it, having the OS source is a good thing for developers.
When [Netscape] opened up the code they had very few people who contributed or even really cared,
That's odd... where'd netscape 6 come from again? Besides, web browser source code vs OS source code is apples and oranges, from the perspective of developers
Well this just goes to show that you don't know what either of these terms really means, since you can't have both non sequitur and begging the question in the same argument!
Begging the question means that your conclusion follows directly from one of your premises (ie that you basically asserted the conclusion as a premise). Non sequitur means that the argument doesn't follow at all. Now tell me, how can your conclusion follow directly from a premise when your argument doesn't even follow in the first place??
besides, neither of those were applicable to the statement you replied to. He was using your own logic against you and pointing out your arbitrary unstated assumptions (ie that the big bang needs a cause, but "god" doesn't). Obviously his subtlety was lost on you.
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The following sentence is true.
I think the jargon file put it the best....
on
Dreamcast Runs Linux
·
· Score: 1
hack value n.
Often adduced as the reason or motivation for expending effort toward a seemingly useless goal, the point being that the accomplished goal is a hack. For example, MacLISP had features for reading and printing Roman numerals, which were installed purely for hack value. See display hack for one method of computing hack value, but this cannot really be explained, only experienced. As Louis Armstrong once said when asked to explain jazz: "Man, if you gotta ask you'll never know." (Feminists please note Fats Waller's explanation of rhythm: "Lady, if you got to ask, you ain't got it.")
140 encoding characters? From what I can see of the encrypted message, there are roughly 600 characters in the entire message. Once you get to the point where the number of encoding characters reaches the number of message characters, isn't the entire information content transferred to the encryption key, and you the message itself becomes garbage?
As long as the key can produce every letter (or most letters), then this doesn't happen.
For example, this encryption could have easily used a key that had 600+ symbols, which mapped to all letters of the alphabet. This key can still produce *any* message you want, and therefore the "information content" has not transferred to the key. And yet you could still encode a message where no symbol is repeated at all in the cyphertext.
As an even more extreme example, I could encode my message as a series of numbers which are indexes to characters in a novel, say, War and Peace. Wouldn't that suck.
In the case you're citing (ie HELLO...), the only "information content" in the key is which letters *can't* be in the plaintext. Information on sequencing and length is still in the cyphertext, and that's what's important.
If Pi is infinite, then it has enough digits for us to find any imaginable number contained in it.
The asertion that any infinite number must have any imaginable number in it is completely false.
And here's a simple counterexample: I can think of an infinite chain of numbers that doesn't have the number "2" in it. Now this chain won't have the number "42" in it, which is certainly an imaginable number. Therefore, your premise is wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
sorry I didn't see that someone already posted this above. Please be merciful with your redundant moderations ^_^
notice that the 2nd 3rd and 4th violations must occur to a protected (ie government) computer. Hacking yahoo.com and putting "I WUZ HERE" doesn't make you a terrorist. Neither does posting security holes, or sharing MP3s, or reverse engineering DVDs, or what have you.
From our proposed bill:
"SS 25. Federal terrorism offense defined
As used in this title, the term `Federal terrorism offense' means a violation of, or an attempt or conspiracy to violate-
...1030(a)(1), (a)(4), (a)(5)(A), or (a)(7) (relating to protection of computers)... "
And here are the sections from the US Code that it refers to:
"Sec. 1030. Fraud and related activity in connection with computers
(a) Whoever -
(1) having knowingly accessed a computer without authorization
or exceeding authorized access, and by means of such conduct
having obtained information that has been determined by the
United States Government pursuant to an Executive order or
statute to require protection against unauthorized disclosure for
reasons of national defense or foreign relations, or any
restricted data, as defined in paragraph y. of section 11 of the
Atomic Energy Act of 1954, with reason to believe that such
information so obtained could be used to the injury of the United
States, or to the advantage of any foreign nation willfully
communicates, delivers, transmits, or causes to be communicated,
delivered, or transmitted, or attempts to communicate, deliver,
transmit or cause to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted
the same to any person not entitled to receive it, or willfully
retains the same and fails to deliver it to the officer or
employee of the United States entitled to receive it;
(4) knowingly and with intent to defraud, accesses a protected
computer without authorization, or exceeds authorized access, and
by means of such conduct furthers the intended fraud and obtains
anything of value, unless the object of the fraud and the thing
obtained consists only of the use of the computer and the value
of such use is not more than $5,000 in any 1-year period;
(5)
(A) knowingly causes the transmission of a program,
information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct,
intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected
computer;
(7) with intent to extort from any person, firm, association,
educational institution, financial institution, government
entity, or other legal entity, any money or other thing of value,
transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication
containing any threat to cause damage to a protected computer; "
now IANAL, but this seems to make the following things terrorism:
1) Getting or transmitting any information that can be a threat to national security via computer (ie classified stuff)
2) Knowingly and intentionally doing damage to a computer system of at least $5000
3) Making and spreading viruses and computer worms
4) Threatening to do any of the above (within federal jurisdiction), with the intent to do it.
That's my interpretation, and it's probably wrong. I'm mainly posting this for easy reference.
Oh wait, look at Redhat, look at Debian, look at any other linux distribution. I guess, according to your logic, that linux developers also "don't care"?
If some piece of software contained a bug that the operator did not (and could not, I'm speaking generally here, not regarding the sendmail example) know about, then I would say it's entirely the creator of that piece of software's fault...
But as mentioned in the parent post, patches for the latest microsoft worm exploits were available a few months to up to almost a year ago. And they were all right there for all to see on Windows Update. Your argument holds no water
You seem to miss the point. The point isn't that Congress shouldn't authorize the use of force. It's that their particular authorization was way too vague and upsets the balance of power in our government.
Errors-- bugs found before project release (presumably fixed)
Defects-- bugs found after project release.
This story is talking about 100,000 errors that have been found in the under-development mozilla. Previous stories about 65000 win2k bugs were about defects in the shipped win2k product. If distinctions like this were more common, we wouldn't be having so many problems with people confusing the two.
you're an idiot!!!
hehe
seriously, Ad Hominem insults are *not* equivalent to admitting defeat, there's *no* logical reason to take them as such, and therefore, equating an insult with an admission of defeat is a *fallacy*. Any assertion otherwise bears the burden of proof. And watch out, proving that something is *necessarily* the case is somewhat tricky.
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The following sentence is true.
This isn't necessarily true. Think of how much the Linux community has insulted Microsoft. And we probably started it first.
Name calling is never a valid argument, but asserting that it means the other side has admitted defeat, or has "run out of reason" is just as fallacious. Insulting is natural human behavior.
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The following sentence is true.
What about loading with GUIDs, like COM, instead? Then you can still patch and bugfix libraries like j7953 said.
... then no one is actually *computing* the checksum. So it's no different than an arbitrary number. .... and What if two different DLLs have identical checksums??
Besides, if the checksum is the filename, and hard-coded into the app
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The following sentence is true.
Yes they do. What's illegal is to actually build and sell said mouse trap. You're confusing patent and copyright.
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The following sentence is true.
The company is now worth more, anyone who has any holding in the company has just gained money. This money was created, it did not change hands. Net amount of money in the world increases.
Uh, no. In order for said shareholders to get this money, they have to sell stock. Money changes hands.
The only time the amount of money in the world increases is when the Fed or banks decide to print more. But that usually inflates, leaving the world with approximately the same amount of "wealth." And as was mentioned earlier, he only time wealth can really increase is when new resources are introduced to the economy.
-------------
The following sentence is true.
Well perhaps if you knew ANYTHING about the scientific method, and how it is epistemologically much more superior than the "revelation" of the bible, or any other source of religious faith, and if you didn't allude to tired old creationist arguments that have been shown to be fallacious time and time again (ie moon dust), then you wouldn't be a troll. Though I would have moderated you up as funny.
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The following sentence is true.
Is this really that big a deal? Download or buy your own mp3 encoding software. How many people use Media Player to encode mp3s anyway?
Sure, "joe average computer user" might, and would use WMA if it comes out sounding the best, but again, so what?
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The following sentence is true.
You can get debug builds of MS operating systems if you're an MSDN subscriber.
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The following sentence is true.
Does anyone have any actual DATA about how much it costs companies to "develop new business practices"? If the increase in efficiency from the new practices can cover the costs of developing them, then there's no justification for patent protection.
Also, patents were supposed to increase techological innovation -- in the product sphere. Do business methods even count as such?
-------------
The following sentence is true.
Perhaps I should be able to create a new x86 CPU and call it the "pentium"? Or start a new line of "for dummies" books? That in itself would confuse consumers and create unfair competition. Now take it to the extreme -- what if anyone could use any trademarked name they chose? How would you be able to differentiate between products if they could all have the same name?
-------------
The following sentence is true.
Inventions take time and money to create. If people are able to simply copy your design after you have spent all the time in research 'n development, then you will not be able to make enough money on your product to cover your research costs, since the new competitors will undercut you.
Whether this is true or not, this is how business people think. The result is -- without patent protection, you'll see a huge drop in the amount of new products or innovations on those products. There's a lot of evidence that shows that the strenght of an economy is heavily influenced by the progress of technology in that economy. Therefore, patent law is an attempt to balance the inefficiency caused by temporary monopoly with the benefit of increased technological progress.
Copyright law is a bit less economically sound in its justification, but it's the same kind of thing -- to promote creation of information products (whether fiction or nonfiction, music or movie, digital or analog or sketched in sand).
It's true people created before copyright protection -- but that was also before xerox or even high-speed printing presses, which make mass-copying viable. Not to mention widespread digital media.
And it's true that people will still create without copyright. But having the creator of a work able to control how it's copied is important in our increasingly money-oriented world. If they wish to waive rights, they can do that in our system. The only real problems come about when individuals pass over their copyrights to a large corporation (ie music publisher) for cash. Then both the consumers and the musicians get screwed. (You do realize that most bands get the majority of their money from performances rather than album sales right? The idea is that an album will get more people at their concerts. Most of the album money goes to the publisher)
-------------
The following sentence is true.
If you were to "patent the process of transcribing a sequence of 1's and 0's to a digital medium ..." etc, then your patent would be invalidated in your first suit because of *significant* prior art.
Here, educate yourself: http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/doc/general/.
You'll see that there are already significant restrictions, at least in the law, of what can be patented. Our USPTO seems to be a little lenient though (ie how the hell can genes be patented? Aren't they "physical phenomena"? oh well, pet peeve there).
However, I do agree that business methods shouldn't be patentable ... at best they fall under "trade secrets." That's just imho.
-------------
The following sentence is true.
Have you ever been debugging a program in windows, and something is going horribly wrong, and you've narrowed it down to somewhere in the big black box of "KERNEL32.DLL" which comes up as a bunch of asm gobbledeegook in your IDE? Source Code could definately be useful there.
Ever tried low-level kernel mode programming in windows? Do you realize how useful code would be to kernel-mode debugging?
Have you ever been hacking around with something in linux and found the included source code to be incredibly helpful?
Any way you slice it, having the OS source is a good thing for developers.
When [Netscape] opened up the code they had very few people who contributed or even really cared,
That's odd... where'd netscape 6 come from again? Besides, web browser source code vs OS source code is apples and oranges, from the perspective of developers
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The following sentence is true.
Well this just goes to show that you don't know what either of these terms really means, since you can't have both non sequitur and begging the question in the same argument!
Begging the question means that your conclusion follows directly from one of your premises (ie that you basically asserted the conclusion as a premise). Non sequitur means that the argument doesn't follow at all. Now tell me, how can your conclusion follow directly from a premise when your argument doesn't even follow in the first place??
besides, neither of those were applicable to the statement you replied to. He was using your own logic against you and pointing out your arbitrary unstated assumptions (ie that the big bang needs a cause, but "god" doesn't). Obviously his subtlety was lost on you.
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The following sentence is true.
Often adduced as the reason or motivation for expending effort toward a seemingly useless goal, the point being that the accomplished goal is a hack. For example, MacLISP had features for reading and printing Roman numerals, which were installed purely for hack value. See display hack for one method of computing hack value, but this cannot really be explained, only experienced. As Louis Armstrong once said when asked to explain jazz: "Man, if you gotta ask you'll never know." (Feminists please note Fats Waller's explanation of rhythm: "Lady, if you got to ask, you ain't got it.")
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The following sentence is true.
As long as the key can produce every letter (or most letters), then this doesn't happen.
For example, this encryption could have easily used a key that had 600+ symbols, which mapped to all letters of the alphabet. This key can still produce *any* message you want, and therefore the "information content" has not transferred to the key. And yet you could still encode a message where no symbol is repeated at all in the cyphertext.
As an even more extreme example, I could encode my message as a series of numbers which are indexes to characters in a novel, say, War and Peace. Wouldn't that suck.
In the case you're citing (ie HELLO...), the only "information content" in the key is which letters *can't* be in the plaintext. Information on sequencing and length is still in the cyphertext, and that's what's important.
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The following sentence is true.
- click on "visualizing" and "videos". There, there's some videos
- It doesn't project in "thin air", it uses mirrors to create a projected image of a real object or tv screen.
- under R&D they're working on a computer monitor that displayes animated 3d images, and some crude tactile feedback
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The following sentence is true.
http://www.atarihq.com/coinop s/l aser/timetrav.html
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The following sentence is true.
The asertion that any infinite number must have any imaginable number in it is completely false.
And here's a simple counterexample: I can think of an infinite chain of numbers that doesn't have the number "2" in it. Now this chain won't have the number "42" in it, which is certainly an imaginable number. Therefore, your premise is wrong.
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The following sentence is true.