I don't know how it is at other schools, but Stanford's policy in CS courses is (in general), that as long as you cite specifically that you received aid or used code from a source, or worked together, and you understand what it does, they cannot bring charges of dishonesty against you, since you are not misrepresenting yourself. Of course, they are free to give you a lower or failing grade on that project if the point of the project was to implement your own work.
If someone had a heart attack or something, and a cell phone jammer prevented someone else from dialing 911 (or its equivalent), could the owner of the cell phone jammer face legal liability?
I haven't seen technical details about this scheme, but other companies have tried similar schemes (the most recent being some company in Germany). All of them have proven to be impractical because they break a significant portion of existing audio CD players.
Having said that, there's talk about media detection capabilities in future CD or DVD players (search for Jim Taylor's DVD faq), so you can still burn them to *D-R, you just can't play them, if a song is designated (probably by a watermark) not to be played on recordable media. Of course, all you need in that case is a firmware patch.
Many if not most medium to high end TV models sold in Europe and Asia are multi-system, meaning they can display a PAL, NTSC, or SECAM signal, all in one unit, and switch between them.
Doesn't Windows pop up a warning message every time you connect to the Internet with open shared volumes? At least the last version of Windows (98) I used did.
I also wonder why Microsoft doesn't put the basic notion of the ability for IP-based ACLs for file sharing in Windows out of the box.
Sure, but how long before the powerful players in the "foo" industry collude and REQUIRE that all "foo"s must be licensed from the "Foo Consortium", or face a lawsuit, and as part of this licensing, must include this "GPS Chip"? The result being that you can't buy any "foo" on the open market without GPS tracking capability, unless you find a backdoor or hack it.
If you think that's outlandish, it's exactly what the DVD industry is RIGHT NOW (except the GPS part, and that's probably only a matter of time).
That's probably why most (all the one's I've seen at least) credit card applications require your social security number to be put on the app in the first place.
[Sun Users' Group & elsewhere] n. 1. Software EXchange. A technique invented by the blue-green algae hundreds of millions of years ago to speed up their evolution, which had been terribly slow up until then. Today, SEX parties are popular among hackers and others (of course, these are no longer limited to exchanges of genetic software). In general, SEX parties are a Good Thing, but unprotected SEX can propagate a virus. See also pubic directory.
Or will they ban those as well once the record industry gets a clue? If yes, then this case has far more chilling implications in Germany than simply stopping pirated music.
What's next on the slippery slope? Checking the actual bits that flow across the net for MP3 headers? (after all, the record industry says that nearly all MP3s out there are illegal; who cares about inconveniencing a handful of law abiders who just want to distribute their own works in this format) And then ban encryption once people start doing that?
Once again, it potentially is a never ending arms race that benefits none.
There's been an excellent open-source raytracing/radiosity renderer, POVRay available for years now. They're currently working on a major rewrite, which should bring it up to par with the best engines in the commercial world, with features like caustics, interacting media, etc.
It's not GPL, but they're thinking about adopting that licence.
An important part of Microsoft's kernel level DRM is the authentication of drivers, to be sure that you aren't using a hacked driver that simply takes decoded audio and writes it to a file. Drivers will have to be "signed" by Microsoft to ensure they're "compliant", in order for the appropriate codecs to output decoded audio to them.
It doesn't take a stretch of the imagination to see how Microsoft, as the sole "signer" of drivers, to favor its own hardware/software over other third party products.
Same goes for software -- since visualization/EQ plug-ins, etc. need access to decoded raw audio, you can bet that MS will enforce a similar signing policy for such software before allowing API-level accesss to decrypted bitstream.
MS could oh so conviently "delay" signing of say, WinAmp's plugins, while MS's own Media Player can work with these formats right out of the box!
The Secure Audio Path compliant driver will simply disable the sound card's digital output if playing a file which has the proper bits set. Replace the driver you say? Sorry, but since Secure Audio Path is a kernel-level feature, Microsoft's audio codec can just query the OS, and refuse to decode protected audio if a non-Secure Audio Path compliant driver (read: one "signed" by Microsoft) is being used.
Yeah, you could record analog out, but no one is really concerned about that...
There's definitely a tax on audio CD-Rs, which explains their higher price versus data CD-Rs, and I'm sure other media -- even "computer" media -- as well.
Any idea of when they (Pioneer?) will be releasing them on the market (not just to OEMs)? This seriously rocks -- DVD-R for $995 (according to news.com), especially considering that the previous cheapest one was ~$5000 or so.
I read on some web page (I think one of the DeCSS pages) that some countries like New Zealand and Switzerland actually prohibit region coded DVD players by law as an illegal restraint of trade. All DVD players sold there are modified units. Can anyone verify this or give further examples of this?
I don't know how much research the writer of the article did, but he is very wrong.
GSM is not used in Japan. (indeed, Japan, along with the US, Canada and Mexico, are the only major developed countries without well-developed GSM coverage.)
NTT DoCoMo's iMode technology is vastly different from GSM, and you can't really have one on top of the other -- the former is packet-based, the other is connection-based.
Is AT&T going to offer two incompatible standards -- GSM and iMode?! How will they reconcile them??
The observation that a tetrachromat has the ability to differentiate between colors that, to us, seem matching is well taken.
Specifically, "color" is simply a mapping of a spectral power distribution (SPD) of all the continuous wavelengths across the visible spectrum range. Since there are an infinite number of SPDs, it follows that there are colors which have different SPDs which appear to our trichromatic eyes to have identical colors when they're not. These colors are known as "metamers". The tetrachromatic person would be able to distinguish some metamers -- she would see that they are indeed different.
Mathematically, the color that we (trichromats) perceive can be described with threee values: the integral of the SPD multipled by three different weighing functions to describe the three different types of cones/rods in our eyes. Each is most sensitive at some particular wavelength int he vis. light spectrum.
As an analogy, someone with monochromatic vision can only see luminance -- mathematically speaking, the integral of the SPD (multiplied by some appropriate weighing function), which is just a single scalar value. They wouldn't be able to tell whether say, a color was bright blue (on the upper end of the wavelength spectrum) or darker yellow, since they're all the same "value".
Doesn't NSI run the.com root servers, which are responsible for the entire.com domain, regardless of which registrar registered it?
They don't let you register a company with a dirty word in it, but yet, they are obligated to provide root name service (ie, pointing queries to the actual ISP's DNS server)
Slashdot Mirror
Wow -- this will make all the time corporate workers spend playing Playstation games at work even better!
I don't know how it is at other schools, but Stanford's policy in CS courses is (in general), that as long as you cite specifically that you received aid or used code from a source, or worked together, and you understand what it does, they cannot bring charges of dishonesty against you, since you are not misrepresenting yourself. Of course, they are free to give you a lower or failing grade on that project if the point of the project was to implement your own work.
Read up on quantum encryption -- quantum computing is a two edge sword.
If someone had a heart attack or something, and a cell phone jammer prevented someone else from dialing 911 (or its equivalent), could the owner of the cell phone jammer face legal liability?
Having said that, there's talk about media detection capabilities in future CD or DVD players (search for Jim Taylor's DVD faq), so you can still burn them to *D-R, you just can't play them, if a song is designated (probably by a watermark) not to be played on recordable media. Of course, all you need in that case is a firmware patch.
Many if not most medium to high end TV models sold in Europe and Asia are multi-system, meaning they can display a PAL, NTSC, or SECAM signal, all in one unit, and switch between them.
as described in the article. Oh well, I guess we can forget about interplanetary Quake games for the time being...
for their legal actions taken against those who oh-so-illegally reverse engineered the CueCats, I guess! =)
I also wonder why Microsoft doesn't put the basic notion of the ability for IP-based ACLs for file sharing in Windows out of the box.
This idea lives on today in the Playstation and Playstation 2. That's why you can't play copied games without a modchip.
If you think that's outlandish, it's exactly what the DVD industry is RIGHT NOW (except the GPS part, and that's probably only a matter of time).
This is the first troll on /. that I've seen moderated to +5. Bravo!
That's probably why most (all the one's I've seen at least) credit card applications require your social security number to be put on the app in the first place.
SEX /seks/
[Sun Users' Group & elsewhere] n. 1. Software EXchange. A technique invented by the blue-green algae hundreds of millions of years ago to speed up their evolution, which had been terribly slow up until then. Today, SEX parties are popular among hackers and others (of course, these are no longer limited to exchanges of genetic software). In general, SEX parties are a Good Thing, but unprotected SEX can propagate a virus. See also pubic directory.
Their actual page seems to be like that of Transmeta pre-2000... but the Google cache works wonders.
Or will they ban those as well once the record industry gets a clue? If yes, then this case has far more chilling implications in Germany than simply stopping pirated music.
What's next on the slippery slope? Checking the actual bits that flow across the net for MP3 headers? (after all, the record industry says that nearly all MP3s out there are illegal; who cares about inconveniencing a handful of law abiders who just want to distribute their own works in this format) And then ban encryption once people start doing that?
Once again, it potentially is a never ending arms race that benefits none.
It's not GPL, but they're thinking about adopting that licence.
It doesn't take a stretch of the imagination to see how Microsoft, as the sole "signer" of drivers, to favor its own hardware/software over other third party products.
Same goes for software -- since visualization/EQ plug-ins, etc. need access to decoded raw audio, you can bet that MS will enforce a similar signing policy for such software before allowing API-level accesss to decrypted bitstream.
MS could oh so conviently "delay" signing of say, WinAmp's plugins, while MS's own Media Player can work with these formats right out of the box!
Yeah, you could record analog out, but no one is really concerned about that...
There's definitely a tax on audio CD-Rs, which explains their higher price versus data CD-Rs, and I'm sure other media -- even "computer" media -- as well.
Any idea of when they (Pioneer?) will be releasing them on the market (not just to OEMs)? This seriously rocks -- DVD-R for $995 (according to news.com), especially considering that the previous cheapest one was ~$5000 or so.
Ironic.
GSM is not used in Japan. (indeed, Japan, along with the US, Canada and Mexico, are the only major developed countries without well-developed GSM coverage.)
NTT DoCoMo's iMode technology is vastly different from GSM, and you can't really have one on top of the other -- the former is packet-based, the other is connection-based.
Is AT&T going to offer two incompatible standards -- GSM and iMode?! How will they reconcile them??
Specifically, "color" is simply a mapping of a spectral power distribution (SPD) of all the continuous wavelengths across the visible spectrum range. Since there are an infinite number of SPDs, it follows that there are colors which have different SPDs which appear to our trichromatic eyes to have identical colors when they're not. These colors are known as "metamers". The tetrachromatic person would be able to distinguish some metamers -- she would see that they are indeed different.
Mathematically, the color that we (trichromats) perceive can be described with threee values: the integral of the SPD multipled by three different weighing functions to describe the three different types of cones/rods in our eyes. Each is most sensitive at some particular wavelength int he vis. light spectrum.
As an analogy, someone with monochromatic vision can only see luminance -- mathematically speaking, the integral of the SPD (multiplied by some appropriate weighing function), which is just a single scalar value. They wouldn't be able to tell whether say, a color was bright blue (on the upper end of the wavelength spectrum) or darker yellow, since they're all the same "value".
More information can be found here: http://www.cs.brown.edu/exploratory/research/apple ts/appletDescriptions/metamers/home.html
They don't let you register a company with a dirty word in it, but yet, they are obligated to provide root name service (ie, pointing queries to the actual ISP's DNS server)
It's a very interesting paradox.