Get her to make an nice obscure password write it down on a yellow postit note and stick it to the screen thats what most users do.. Write down a weird combination of letters and digits on a post-it note. Add an easy to remember word at the beginning or the end or somewhere in the middle, and don't write it down. The weird letters keep outside hackers out. The easy-to-remember word keeps everyone else out.
Not everyone lives in jurisdictions that consider the act of reverse engineering a cryptographic device illegal. Even at that, generally people would only have a legal case if the reverse engineering / circumvention were to circumvent a copy protection mechanism. IANAL, however. Reverse engineering doesn't mean cracking. If you build a cryptographic device, I can reverse engineer it and then know exactly what you are doing, and I might be able to sell that your device is uncrackable. Or, like in this case, I might say that it isn't actually a cryptographic device:-)
Why should anyone apply for a patent in your system then? Just keep your details secret and you've got the same result. Patents were originally developed specifically to discourage this behavior. One of the ideas behind the patent system is that when you make a valuable invention, I can pay you money to license it since I lack the cleverness needed to figure it out myself. So when I need a good idea (like: How on earth are we going to process all these cheques? ) I read about your patent, and decide to pay you to get use of your brilliant invention. That wouldn't be possible if you kept it secret. So this idea (keeping the implementation of patents secret) makes a lot of sense - if you take the system as it is by face value.
In the pharmaceutical industry, it would actually work. You find a cure for cancer - you patent it and all the patent says is "I found a cure for cancer". A competitor who was one week behind wouldn't be unfairly penalised anymore (that is one of the more ridiculous parts of the patent system in my opinion. Two inventors happen to have the same idea, and the one who is quicker gets it all. Why? This shouldn't be a lottery!). The fact that you found a cure doesn't give anything of your idea away.
In other areas, like "one-click-patent", that wouldn't work because disclosing the idea would be enough for anyone to copy out. But then maybe that is a good idea that it shouldn't be patent worthy. Like a cure for cancer is surely worth a patent, but if I just had the ingenious idea that when people have cancer, instead of letting them die, we just give them the right treatment and heal the illness - that shouldn't be patentable. And that kind of idea seems to be exactly what people get patents for.
Why is software so special that it's the only thing that I know of covered by both copyright and extensive patents? Most things are difficult to copy, software (and books, music etc.) are not difficult to copy. If you wanted to copy your neighbor's Mercedes, how much time and money would that cost you?
The gcc compiler has a GPL exception that allows you to compile proprietary software with it. The gcc compiler doesn't even need such an exception. Copyright law only covers copying of the product itself, so if you want to give me a copy of the gcc compiler, then you have to rely on the GPL for permission. But how you use the compiler is your business, and your business only. Code that you write and compile with a compiler is yours. A compiler could have a EULA that restricts usage, the gcc compiler doesn't have any such restriction. (As an example of a reasonable restriction, the Metrowerks CodeWarrior compilers were sold for good money, but you could also get an identical zero cost version with the restriction that you couldn't _sell_ anything compiled with it, only give it away for free).
A program that needs an exception is yacc or bison, which copy parts of their own source code into the output they generate (for good technical reasons); anything produced by these programs is automatically a derived work, but they have a license that allows any use, as you said.
A lot of people are pretty self-righteous and tend to remark snidely "Why do you need privacy if you've got nothing to hide?" First, everybody has something to hide.
Second, everybody has lots and lots of things that or nobody's business.
Third, everybody would be at a severe disadvantage if somebody else knew everything about them.
As an example, if you are selling a house, you wouldn't want the buyer to know the details of your financial situation.
I doubt he will, he'll be awarded a massive payout "in recognition for hiw work over the last years" and to "compensate him for future earnings", etc etc. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if he got sued by Novell rather soon (not that this would have to do anything with him leaving, they will sue him anyway). Darl McBride got a huge bonus for making the company profitable - however, the only profits that the company made is money that according to Novell was actually theirs. That will be decided in the courts in April or so. I am quite sure that if the court decides for Novell, and Novell cannot get all their money from SCO, and the bonus paid to McBride turns out be incorrect, then Novell will go for his own money.
It is not something that companies would normally do, but in this case there are exceptional circumstances.
Isn't this age discrimination? Do they have such a concept in UK law? Well, usually "age discrimination" takes the form that the police can't hold you responsible for anything you do up to a certain age. On the other hand, try finding a new job when you are fifty, and you will find out what age discrimination is. Even though with a fifty year old, chances are much lower that he or she arrives late on Monday morning with a hangover and incapable of working than with a twenty year old.
Well, that's the crux, in'nit. Old codgers vote. Adolescents can't. No, that is not the crux. Old codgers go to a shop to buy stuff. Adolescents don't. If you can give an example where old codgers congregate so that adolescents are afraid to go about their legitimate business, then please tell us.
The problem with your argument is that the device attacks innocent and guilty alike. Can you not see that there is something wrong with attacking everyone below a certain age? Take a shop and a few youths. There are three possibilities: 1. Kids enter the shop to purchase goods. 2. Kids hanging around outside without causing any damage (and frightening off customers _is_ damage). 3. Kids hanging around outside causing damage. These devices are are obviously there to get rid of group (3). Group (1) is lost customers. I'd say its up to the shop if they lose some people as customers by treating them badly. And group (2): Ok, how many of them are there? Is there seriously no better place to hang around than outside a shop?
Well maybe if you had a fucking place for the kids to hang out and play "football" you wouldn't have this problem. I really get tired of listening to old fucker bitch about the teen "problem" then not do anything about it except to pass useless laws.
My town put in a walk track for the old fucker in town to walk around the park. It was flat and long, perfect for skateboards and shit. Well the old goat started bitch'n about the skateboarders to the town counsel which did what those who do not know always do. The put up signs making it illegal to skateboard in the park.
Thus did nothing to deter the skateboarders who had no place left to go. All it did was give a couple of cops a power trip so they could start busting skateboarders and taking their shit away.
Well finally someone got a clue. They converted the unused tennis courts across the park to a skateboard park. Now the kids have a place to hang out and the old farts got their jogging track back. Could you please explain to us why you couldn't write this posts without using insults and swear words? There was "fucking place", "old fucker", "old fucker again", "and shit", "old goat", "shit", and "old farts". I'd call that a serious attitude problem. Maybe it's a mental health problem.
1. The purpose of copyright is not to give someone a life-long income, the purpose is to give people incentives to create (in this case musical) works, which in turn helps society as a whole. I would like to see how 95 years instead of 50 years copyright will cause more music to be created.
2. If the purpose is to give a life-long income to composers and musicians, then surely record companies and other companies should be excluded. So lets say: 95 years of copyright for the composer and musicians; copyright can be sold or licensed for at most ten years at a time and then automatically falls back to the composer (and any contract saying otherwise is void; note that this about the right to make _copies_, consumers who bought for example a record would have the right to own it and not copy it forever). Works for hire fall into public domain after ten years.
3. If the purpose is to give a life-long income to composers and musicians, then we should say so. Make it for example for the life time of the composer + 10 year (to give a bit of income to heirs), or 50 years from the creation, whichever is longer.
4. We are talking now about real long times. Over that length of time, things tend to get lost. Works get orphaned (because the copyright owner has no idea what is his property, for example), and permission to copy can be impossible to get because the owner cannot be found. I'd like some rules to take that into account.
Firstly, "aren't exactly hurting" is a rather unproven claim. Remember, those investing in Big Media companies typically include things like pension funds that you and I might be paying into. It's not just corporate executives who are potentially losing out here, it's everyday people whose indirect investments rely on the profits of such large businesses. That is a very common misconception. You seem to actually believe that the music industry and film industry is _big_. It isn't. There are quite a few companies that are each bigger than the whole music and film industry together. Take GE, or Walmart, or (in the UK) Tescos, or Shell, or BP. _That_ are big companies (you can figure out yourself where Microsoft is in that list) The music and film industry is just very, very, very loud. If say Microsoft, Apple, Dell, HP, Amazon, Google and a few ISPs held a collection, they could easily buy out the whole industry and distribute everything for free (and make lots of money by selling Windows Media Edition Plus (including free access to everything), iTunes Plus (including free access to everything), bandwidth fees, and enormous savings because they don't have to develop software and hardware for DRM.
The British government has just taken on the responsibility for Northern Rock, with an estimated debt of £100bn (although there are plenty of mortgages outstanding that need to be repaid that should help to repay those 100 billions). A small percentage of that would be plenty to buy the whole music and film industry.
And it was an *ADVERTISED FEATURE* of Leopard and the AEBS until *poof* it wasn't... Yeah, an "advertised feature" that wasn't "advertised" to anyone who wasn't under NDA.
You can't copyright a hardware design (that's what patents are for). You could copyright a circuit board layout, or a schematic (the graphic, not the concept), but it's pretty easy for someone to redo either. Did you see the clickety link to the source code for the h.264 decoder?
Software: Source code -> compiler -> magnetic bits on your hard drive.
Hardware: Source code -> compiler -> lots of transistors in a chip.
Copyright applies to any source code.
It doesn't matter very much which license is used - therefore there is no "best license". The people who did the work chose the license, as is their right. If they thought a different license was better, they would have chosen a different one.
The license only matters when you mix material with different licenses. I cannot quite see how this would apply for example to a h.264 decoder. The best anyone can do is respect the authors and stay with their license.
The memory disambiguation table is a variant on a branch predictor (I'm not going to give the exact Intel algorithm). It's obvious. The only reason no one has done it before is that the benefits didn't outweigh the implementation (and especially, validation) costs. Core 2 is a big enough machine that it's worthwhile.
Here is how I understand what Intel does from the publicly available description: The processor often encounters load instructions, where the memory in question may or may not have been modified by a previous write instruction. (The "may or may not" case happens when a previous store instruction has not finished calculating its address yet. The case that the processor _knows_ the data has been modified is something entirely different). This situation happens quite often, and quite often the store instruction did _not_ modify the data at the load address.
In this situation, the processor cannot just execute the instruction. It can use out-of-order execution, delaying the load instruction, but out-of-order execution has its hands full with _real_ dependencies and it would help if it didn't have to bother with possible dependencies that don't actually happen. Therefore Intel allows the processor to continue with conditional execution.
The text of the patent covers a lot about how to recover from wrong speculative execution, but this is no problem at all. All the hardware for that is available already because of branch prediction. With branch prediction, the processor has to keep track of speculatively executed instructions, undo them if necessary, and continue execution at a different program counter (in case of a branch through a jump table where the destination is predicted incorrectly, restart execution at the jump instruction. In case of a conditional branch predicted to be taken incorrectly, continue after the branch instruction. In this case, continue with the load instruction). So half of the patent isn't infringed upon at all.
The patent also seems to suggest that one should look at the store instructions to make a decision whether to speculatively execute the load or to wait. It doesn't look to me like Intel is doing this. It seems that load instructions that are ready to execute except for store/load hazards are classified as: Safe to execute, known not safe, unknown. "Safe to execute" executes. "Known not safe" doesn't execute. "Not known" can use mostly the same mechanism as branch prediction. I would probably try to actually use the same hardware as for branch prediction. That would trivially allow multi-level approaches (for example, loading a [i] can execute if a previous branch around a statement "if (...) a [i] = x" was executed, and mustn't execute if the branch was not executed. Branch prediction does that kind of thing already, so that would come for free.
The only thing that has to be changed is the mechanism that marks a prediction as correct or false. Usually that is a compare instruction setting some condition codes, here it is an instruction calculating the address of a store instruction.
Now I cannot decide if what they have patented is obvious or not. However, the mechanism that I have described here _is_ obvious as shown by the fact that I, a programmer and not a hardware designer, and therefore not an expert in the field, can describe it. If what Intel does is what I have described then what they do is obvious.
I'll mention a different invention that is just a tiny invention, obvious _after_ you read it and patented (but not obvious _before_ you read it): Branch prediction predicts whether a branch is taken or not. It uses tables, and tables run out of space. When that happens, a branch will use a prediction that was actually intended for a different branch instruction - with not very good results. To improve this, you do a (trivial) static prediction. Then you don't store in your tables whether the branch is taken or not, you store whether it matches the static prediction or not. Quite often (80%
The *only* parts of Vista that's different from XP is the Control Panel and Start Menu. And both of those can be easily toggled to look and work exactly like previous versions of Windows. Here is my experience: A relative bought a new laptop. It came with Vista installed. So she asked me if I could install Windows instead...
Seriously, switching from Windows XP to MacOS X is easier than switching to Vista. And I have the suspicion that switching to Ubuntu might be easier as well.
I gotta know, why is it so disrespectful to show a picture of Muhammad? It is not disrespectful of Muhammad at all. It is exactly the opposite. Muhammad feared that people could be misled to believe that he is more important than he should be; he is just a prophet, not a god. Muslims should pray to Allah, not Muhammad. So by having no pictures of him, the danger of a cult developing is much reduced. You could say that he just didn't want to end up like Elvis. In Christianity, in some parts of Europe there are a few people who are a bit too much in love with Mary (for my taste), that wouldn't have happened if there were no pictures of her around. So from his point of view, it is a very sensible thing not to want any pictures. Muhammad wouldn't be insulted if you had his picture on your wall, he would be worried that maybe your beliefs are going off into the wrong direction and he would say that it is in your own best interest to remove it.
Read your employment contract and check what it says about software you write yourself, not on company time, at night and on weekends, and whether your company has any rights or might have any rights to that code. It is obvious that code you wrote _for_ the company is theirs, but any future work you want to do to that software might be theirs, too.
They probably don't care, until they start to care, and then this might cause problems. For example, you might get a new manager at some time, and he might not like your face, and look how to cause you trouble.
Two IBM employees are listed in the authors metadata of the PDF files submitted by Kenya. Not so coincidentally, Kenya also had one of the largest number of comments submitted. The problem that Microsoft has is that their OOXML "Standard" is a big piece of garbage. It should never have been fast-tracked by ECMA: Fast-tracking is for proposals that are already de-facto standards, widely used and known to work, that just need to be signed off, not for a 6,000 page document that has been put together in a hurry, without any checks from the outside, without any discussion of its merits, full and full and full of errors, mistakes and undesirable features.
Microsoft should never have submitted this. ECMA should never have accepted it. If IBM does everything they can to prevent this standard from happening, they are doing the world a huge favour.
A suit for malicious prosecution would be a civil matter. Hence, the standard would be a proponderence of the evidence. So you would only have to convince 12 jurors that the purpose was more likely improper than proper.
Probably incredibly difficult also. Not really. The only reason for suing someone for copyright infringement that isn't improper is that you had a reason to believe you committed copyright infringement. So you would have to show that they had no reason to believe this. As soon as you have refuted any evidence that they bring for your copyright infringement (not to a degree to convince the judge, but to a degree that the then plaintiff who may have withheld information to the judge should know better), and they continue, then it is improper.
The defendants still lost their motion to disallow the subpoena for their identities. I also cannot find anything in the decision where the judge actually says she considers that the RIAA lawyers should be fined. Sure, she makes clear that she doesn't like it, but that is all. This is all very unfortunate so far.
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In the pharmaceutical industry, it would actually work. You find a cure for cancer - you patent it and all the patent says is "I found a cure for cancer". A competitor who was one week behind wouldn't be unfairly penalised anymore (that is one of the more ridiculous parts of the patent system in my opinion. Two inventors happen to have the same idea, and the one who is quicker gets it all. Why? This shouldn't be a lottery!). The fact that you found a cure doesn't give anything of your idea away.
In other areas, like "one-click-patent", that wouldn't work because disclosing the idea would be enough for anyone to copy out. But then maybe that is a good idea that it shouldn't be patent worthy. Like a cure for cancer is surely worth a patent, but if I just had the ingenious idea that when people have cancer, instead of letting them die, we just give them the right treatment and heal the illness - that shouldn't be patentable. And that kind of idea seems to be exactly what people get patents for.
A program that needs an exception is yacc or bison, which copy parts of their own source code into the output they generate (for good technical reasons); anything produced by these programs is automatically a derived work, but they have a license that allows any use, as you said.
Second, everybody has lots and lots of things that or nobody's business.
Third, everybody would be at a severe disadvantage if somebody else knew everything about them.
As an example, if you are selling a house, you wouldn't want the buyer to know the details of your financial situation.
It is not something that companies would normally do, but in this case there are exceptional circumstances.
Just have to reply to your sig which reads:
"(Mac OS X's) file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary." -- Linus Torvalds on HFS+
If that is what he said, then he is talking out of his arse.
Many different points.
1. The purpose of copyright is not to give someone a life-long income, the purpose is to give people incentives to create (in this case musical) works, which in turn helps society as a whole. I would like to see how 95 years instead of 50 years copyright will cause more music to be created.
2. If the purpose is to give a life-long income to composers and musicians, then surely record companies and other companies should be excluded. So lets say: 95 years of copyright for the composer and musicians; copyright can be sold or licensed for at most ten years at a time and then automatically falls back to the composer (and any contract saying otherwise is void; note that this about the right to make _copies_, consumers who bought for example a record would have the right to own it and not copy it forever). Works for hire fall into public domain after ten years.
3. If the purpose is to give a life-long income to composers and musicians, then we should say so. Make it for example for the life time of the composer + 10 year (to give a bit of income to heirs), or 50 years from the creation, whichever is longer.
4. We are talking now about real long times. Over that length of time, things tend to get lost. Works get orphaned (because the copyright owner has no idea what is his property, for example), and permission to copy can be impossible to get because the owner cannot be found. I'd like some rules to take that into account.
The British government has just taken on the responsibility for Northern Rock, with an estimated debt of £100bn (although there are plenty of mortgages outstanding that need to be repaid that should help to repay those 100 billions). A small percentage of that would be plenty to buy the whole music and film industry.
Software: Source code -> compiler -> magnetic bits on your hard drive.
Hardware: Source code -> compiler -> lots of transistors in a chip.
Copyright applies to any source code.
It doesn't matter very much which license is used - therefore there is no "best license". The people who did the work chose the license, as is their right. If they thought a different license was better, they would have chosen a different one.
The license only matters when you mix material with different licenses. I cannot quite see how this would apply for example to a h.264 decoder. The best anyone can do is respect the authors and stay with their license.
The memory disambiguation table is a variant on a branch predictor (I'm not going to give the exact Intel algorithm). It's obvious. The only reason no one has done it before is that the benefits didn't outweigh the implementation (and especially, validation) costs. Core 2 is a big enough machine that it's worthwhile.
Here is how I understand what Intel does from the publicly available description: The processor often encounters load instructions, where the memory in question may or may not have been modified by a previous write instruction. (The "may or may not" case happens when a previous store instruction has not finished calculating its address yet. The case that the processor _knows_ the data has been modified is something entirely different). This situation happens quite often, and quite often the store instruction did _not_ modify the data at the load address.
In this situation, the processor cannot just execute the instruction. It can use out-of-order execution, delaying the load instruction, but out-of-order execution has its hands full with _real_ dependencies and it would help if it didn't have to bother with possible dependencies that don't actually happen. Therefore Intel allows the processor to continue with conditional execution.
The text of the patent covers a lot about how to recover from wrong speculative execution, but this is no problem at all. All the hardware for that is available already because of branch prediction. With branch prediction, the processor has to keep track of speculatively executed instructions, undo them if necessary, and continue execution at a different program counter (in case of a branch through a jump table where the destination is predicted incorrectly, restart execution at the jump instruction. In case of a conditional branch predicted to be taken incorrectly, continue after the branch instruction. In this case, continue with the load instruction). So half of the patent isn't infringed upon at all.
The patent also seems to suggest that one should look at the store instructions to make a decision whether to speculatively execute the load or to wait. It doesn't look to me like Intel is doing this. It seems that load instructions that are ready to execute except for store/load hazards are classified as: Safe to execute, known not safe, unknown. "Safe to execute" executes. "Known not safe" doesn't execute. "Not known" can use mostly the same mechanism as branch prediction. I would probably try to actually use the same hardware as for branch prediction. That would trivially allow multi-level approaches (for example, loading a [i] can execute if a previous branch around a statement "if (...) a [i] = x" was executed, and mustn't execute if the branch was not executed. Branch prediction does that kind of thing already, so that would come for free.
The only thing that has to be changed is the mechanism that marks a prediction as correct or false. Usually that is a compare instruction setting some condition codes, here it is an instruction calculating the address of a store instruction.
Now I cannot decide if what they have patented is obvious or not. However, the mechanism that I have described here _is_ obvious as shown by the fact that I, a programmer and not a hardware designer, and therefore not an expert in the field, can describe it. If what Intel does is what I have described then what they do is obvious.
I'll mention a different invention that is just a tiny invention, obvious _after_ you read it and patented (but not obvious _before_ you read it): Branch prediction predicts whether a branch is taken or not. It uses tables, and tables run out of space. When that happens, a branch will use a prediction that was actually intended for a different branch instruction - with not very good results. To improve this, you do a (trivial) static prediction. Then you don't store in your tables whether the branch is taken or not, you store whether it matches the static prediction or not. Quite often (80%
Seriously, switching from Windows XP to MacOS X is easier than switching to Vista. And I have the suspicion that switching to Ubuntu might be easier as well.
Read your employment contract and check what it says about software you write yourself, not on company time, at night and on weekends, and whether your company has any rights or might have any rights to that code. It is obvious that code you wrote _for_ the company is theirs, but any future work you want to do to that software might be theirs, too. They probably don't care, until they start to care, and then this might cause problems. For example, you might get a new manager at some time, and he might not like your face, and look how to cause you trouble.
Microsoft should never have submitted this. ECMA should never have accepted it. If IBM does everything they can to prevent this standard from happening, they are doing the world a huge favour.
Probably incredibly difficult also. Not really. The only reason for suing someone for copyright infringement that isn't improper is that you had a reason to believe you committed copyright infringement. So you would have to show that they had no reason to believe this. As soon as you have refuted any evidence that they bring for your copyright infringement (not to a degree to convince the judge, but to a degree that the then plaintiff who may have withheld information to the judge should know better), and they continue, then it is improper.
The defendants still lost their motion to disallow the subpoena for their identities. I also cannot find anything in the decision where the judge actually says she considers that the RIAA lawyers should be fined. Sure, she makes clear that she doesn't like it, but that is all. This is all very unfortunate so far.