Competition is good. Even if Mir2 is never built, the Russians might have good ideas.
Taking their experience into account, it would be a waste to not plan another space station.
I don't see the word exclusive mentioned anywhere in the press announcement.
What I wonder is how they want to do the sampling? Is every citizen of Tonga now obliged to give blood/gene samples to Autogen? What happens to people who refuse?
While I do not see a problem with the research, I think it's a violation of human rights if samples are not given freely.
Yet, if Tongans(?) have to volunteer to give samples, what's the deal with the deal?
Well, there are several ways that you can prove
to have been at a certain location at a certain point in time:
positive evidence: You shoot yourself in the head. The police finds you and estimates the time of death.
negative evidence: You blow yourself up. Your body is nowwhere to be found. This proves that you must have been there at the time of the explosion.
circumstancial evidence: You make the woman next to you pregnant. The prove will be there nine months later. This method is rather fuzzy. Sometimes the uncertainty principle kicks in and you're not the father.
solipsistic evidence: you are the center of the universe, therefoer your location never changes. There is nothing to prove. To whom, anyway?
democratic evidence: people vote where you are right now. This works in some states. Others will not reach a decision and keep on recounting the votes. Not recommended.
Having read the cryptome home page, they promised not to publish, then learned that someone else knew, and then did publish.
What I'm missing is the explanation why they changed their mind. It looks like they wanted to publish before someone else does.
I would like to know if they considered the timing of all this. For someone named in this report, a couple of hours to leave the country might make a big difference.
Now, let's patent all weird SF technologies and Gizmos right now! ...because it means that 20 years from now, everyone can use it without patent restrictions, right?
Patents are open source on a different time scale...
HDCP uses a 56-bit key, with individual keys distributed to the various vendors. A violated key could be tracked down and revoked over a satellite broadcast network, for example.
Now, what would they mean with a "violated" key? A key that has been discovered? Wasn't "compromised" the terminology for that (not being native English speaker myself)?
Ok, so Sony gets a key from Intel for its monitors. One year later someone discovers, ehhh, violates the key, Intel broadcasts the revoke and one million monitors all over the world go into eternal screensave mode (except without stars)? Is that it?
I always thought that copy protection will bring us back to the dark ages!
Well, with an ink signature you have more possibilities: - graphological experts detecting a fake signature - you have an alibi, e.g. you were not at the place of signing
As to the burden of proof: if someone has a valid digital signature from you, it's your task to prove its incorrectness, isn't it?
So, in light of this, the Digital Signature Act (or whatever they're calling it) is really quite irrelevant. If you and I sign an electronic contract with digital signatures, and we both mark it affirmatively, then the signature is valid -- period. (The virtue of digital signature algorithms is in that the signatures are difficult to repudiate -- while anyone could sign a contract as "Robert J. Hansen", presumably only I could sign a contract with my OpenPGP private key.)" The critical point in that statement is "you and I". Indeed, if we both do it, it's perfectly allright and your statement is correct. More accurate however would be: "a holder of my key and a holder of your key".
See, a physical signature is a property of a person, while a digital signature is a property of a key (together with an algorithm). Now everyone with my key can do the same "signature" and there is no expert in the world who can detect a difference.
This can be relevant in a court case. How do you defend yourself and prove that a certain digital "signature" was not done by you. You can't. Repeat after me: "I cannot prove in court that I did not digitally sign a document."
I'm not a lawyer, but I have the feeling that it is an important feature of a signature that you can prove it's done by a certain individual. And digital signatures are lacking this feature.
Someone announces a chip and the someone else announces a computer using that chip and now we have comments on/. like "wow, cool, this is a nice product!"
In medieval times, alchemists kept their recipes hidden in their books. Promises of golden riches, available Real Soon Now, could never be kept.
Then came science, where knowledge was published and shared. And discussed. And improved. And whole society prospered.
What huge difference it made when the scientific model was applied to physics, chemistry and such in the 18th, 19th and 20th century. Imagine what there is to come, now that we also apply it to software!
Source code is knowledge. Knowledge is power. So, open source is power for everyone, right?
I think there are really two issues here: 1. protection against child abusers and 2. sexual content on the Internet
Without being a psychologist, I dare to say that no kid has ever been screwed up by seeing pictures of naked men or women. Even pictures of the erotic kind I would consider harmless.
Now pronography as in S&M, child abuse, sodomy, etc. is another thing. A child seeing this will not understand it, might get it wrong (e.g. a wrong mental image of what sex is about). So, a child needs guidance when getting first in contact with these topics (which it sometime in its life will).
I grew up in Europe (and live here). I also lived for one year in the States. I can confirm what other posters wrote: sex/moral and US society is hard to understand for a European. Let me tell my, totally subjective, impressions:
As you all probably have experienced, sometime in your life as a teenager, you enter what I call the snigger-phase. You tell each other jokes about sex without knowing what you talk about. You look at the first pictures of naked women/men, everyone is a little bit nervous, it's a secret thing and you don't quite know yet how to handle the issues. Puberty.
Now, when I was in the States (midwest, probably the worst area for this kind of topic), it felt like a time machine. Collegues', thirty years of age, beer-inspired bar behaviour pretty much reminded me of my teenage years! How strange
And those were good friends of mine, very nice people - don't get me wrong. I felt as if they never learned how to handle the topic. They were insecure about it.
I could now try to analyze American society seen as a spinoff from 18th/19th European moral standards. But that really takes me out of my field, so I better don't go that way.
PS. I liked my stay in the US very much, not least because of the friends I made there.
As long as your behavior is not considered as block a police action, you might be fine. But then again security might sent you the bill for "wasting their time".
Or imagine the parking lot surveilled as belonging to a company. So, it's private ground and you are employed there. Would you still try to fool the system? I don't think so, since this might end up in your file at human resources.
Instead of using it for parking lots, imagine a system at your work place which tracks cases of sexual harassment. It would record how often you look other persons "up and down", etc. One less lawsuit for the company and the system pays off.
Applause to Dell for handling the issue in this manner! I never bought Dell, however this story increases my trust in this company. So I will more likely become a customer in the future.
Other companies would probably only offer a service pack several month later...
In my experience with bigger companies, a software project got to produce patents.
It's expected, planned in and budgeted for that a project produces a number of patents. Development managers' performance is measured by this. It's often more vital than the performance or maintainability of the produced code. (Well, everyone knows that that will be bad anyway, don't you?)
So, people write patent applications for something...anything, just to keep the monkeys off their backs.
Now, I don't know about yahoo. This patent presented is a least a Good Thing for performance. By reading/. more people know about it - maybe some websites get faster over the next months...;)
Yep, the last company I worked for did commercial web system based on Linux and Oracle. Nice combination. Once you have ORacle installed, it works rock solid with good performance. That was the Oracle 8.0.4 not the 8i. The only thing we had trouble with was the context cartridge. Now that it is integrated in 8i, it might have improved...
We also worked with both Informix "options" (not under Linux though) and that database is full of excitements and surprises, if you know what I mean.
Everybody is speaking about money and why a free OS is a good choice for China...
That might be true, but I would think that the availability of the source is making the OS attractive for security reasons. It enables the Chinese to verify that there are no hooks in the OS which can be exploited by someone else.
This is no conspiracy theory. Europeans have made experiences with American software version which have intentionally weak security. European military is considering if it can trust sensitive information to products like Lotus Notes, etc.
So it makes sense for non-US countries to rely on software where the source code is available. And with the increase of business on the Internet, this will, IMHO, make sense for everyone.
How can we legally accept digital signatures and transactions of all kinds, if we cannot verify that the code performing them is doing the right thing? Can a the worlds business be based on a black box made by a few companies in one nation? I doubt it.
The whole thing is a mess because back in 1995, when the new PCS licenses were auctioned, Sprint decided to go for CDMA.
They were negotiating with TDMA/GSM suppliers when someone changed their mind to go for American technology.
This was like a catalyst for all the other PCS operators who were basically waiting for Sprint to make up their mind. You have to understand that noone wanted to built an island surrounded by the big Sprint with no way to roam. These licenses are *expensive*.
Had Sprint decided otherwise, the whole wireless world would be a different place. Not only would we have real, global roaming, but cheaper phones (more volumes), a bigger market for wireless data and, last but not least, easier agreements on a new G3 standard.
While I'm all for competition and choices, having an own American standard on this is not in the interest of consumers.
You are right about the processor's capabilities. However multitasking operating system have a hard time to support this.
When you have two processes running, A and B, then all processor registered are saved and restored when the OS switches from A to B and vice versa. Otherwise they would step on each others toes.
But maybe one could write a "virus" which infects non FP-using programs and lets fp calculations run during programs execution time?
It would not believe that unwritten codex is stopping an army from applying a new technology. That would be quite naive, IMHO.
I see the example from WWII as more relevant where none of the involved parties dared to use the (nerve) gas weapons on the battlegrounds. Since noone had a defense against those, noone wanted to start the usage.
Even though the U.S. military might be quite protected from cyberwarfare, a lot of the civilian US installations like banks, insureance, government, etc. is probably not. Serbian or Serbia supporting knowledgable people could have easily attacked the US in a counterattack. In the end systems everywhere would be going down (or could not be trusted any longer) without anybody knowing the attacking party.
In this light, the decision of the US not to use this new kind of weapon is wise. The reason they give to the press is lame...
The article at the digital bits gives a good assessment of what this might mean to DVD.
It will be interesting to see what the industry can do to fix "lost" activation keys. And that probably depends on if all discovered keys are in software or hardware players...
Slashdot Mirror
Competition is good. Even if Mir2 is never built, the Russians might have good ideas.
Taking their experience into account, it would be a waste to not plan another space station.
What I wonder is how they want to do the sampling? Is every citizen of Tonga now obliged to give blood/gene samples to Autogen? What happens to people who refuse?
While I do not see a problem with the research, I think it's a violation of human rights if samples are not given freely.
Yet, if Tongans(?) have to volunteer to give samples, what's the deal with the deal?
Can I buy some Visa/Master Card numbers and expiration dates?
Oh, it's already on eBay. I see...
What I'm missing is the explanation why they changed their mind. It looks like they wanted to publish before someone else does.
I would like to know if they considered the timing of all this. For someone named in this report, a couple of hours to leave the country might make a big difference.
Now is this post an advertisement, or what?
Patents are open source on a different time scale...
Now, what would they mean with a "violated" key? A key that has been discovered? Wasn't "compromised" the terminology for that (not being native English speaker myself)?
Ok, so Sony gets a key from Intel for its monitors. One year later someone discovers, ehhh, violates the key, Intel broadcasts the revoke and one million monitors all over the world go into eternal screensave mode (except without stars)? Is that it?
I always thought that copy protection will bring us back to the dark ages!
- graphological experts detecting a fake signature
- you have an alibi, e.g. you were not at the place of signing
As to the burden of proof: if someone has a valid digital signature from you, it's your task to prove its incorrectness, isn't it?
So, in light of this, the Digital Signature Act (or whatever they're calling it) is really quite irrelevant. If you and I sign an electronic contract with digital signatures, and we both mark it affirmatively, then the signature is valid -- period. (The virtue of digital signature algorithms is in that the signatures are difficult to repudiate -- while anyone could sign a contract as "Robert J. Hansen", presumably only I could sign a contract with my OpenPGP private key.)" The critical point in that statement is "you and I". Indeed, if we both do it, it's perfectly allright and your statement is correct. More accurate however would be: "a holder of my key and a holder of your key".
See, a physical signature is a property of a person, while a digital signature is a property of a key (together with an algorithm). Now everyone with my key can do the same "signature" and there is no expert in the world who can detect a difference.
This can be relevant in a court case. How do you defend yourself and prove that a certain digital "signature" was not done by you. You can't. Repeat after me: "I cannot prove in court that I did not digitally sign a document."
I'm not a lawyer, but I have the feeling that it is an important feature of a signature that you can prove it's done by a certain individual. And digital signatures are lacking this feature.
sounds a bit heavy to me.
Give me a break.
Then came science, where knowledge was published and shared. And discussed. And improved. And whole society prospered.
What huge difference it made when the scientific model was applied to physics, chemistry and such in the 18th, 19th and 20th century. Imagine what there is to come, now that we also apply it to software!
Source code is knowledge. Knowledge is power. So, open source is power for everyone, right?
1. protection against child abusers and
2. sexual content on the Internet
Without being a psychologist, I dare to say that no kid has ever been screwed up by seeing pictures of naked men or women. Even pictures of the erotic kind I would consider harmless.
Now pronography as in S&M, child abuse, sodomy, etc. is another thing. A child seeing this will not understand it, might get it wrong (e.g. a wrong mental image of what sex is about). So, a child needs guidance when getting first in contact with these topics (which it sometime in its life will).
I grew up in Europe (and live here). I also lived for one year in the States. I can confirm what other posters wrote: sex/moral and US society is hard to understand for a European. Let me tell my, totally subjective, impressions:
As you all probably have experienced, sometime in your life as a teenager, you enter what I call the snigger-phase. You tell each other jokes about sex without knowing what you talk about. You look at the first pictures of naked women/men, everyone is a little bit nervous, it's a secret thing and you don't quite know yet how to handle the issues. Puberty.
Now, when I was in the States (midwest, probably the worst area for this kind of topic), it felt like a time machine. Collegues', thirty years of age, beer-inspired bar behaviour pretty much reminded me of my teenage years! How strange
And those were good friends of mine, very nice people - don't get me wrong. I felt as if they never learned how to handle the topic. They were insecure about it.
I could now try to analyze American society seen as a spinoff from 18th/19th European moral standards. But that really takes me out of my field, so I better don't go that way.
PS. I liked my stay in the US very much, not least because of the friends I made there.
I found those very well written and highly informative.
But then again security might sent you the bill for "wasting their time".
Or imagine the parking lot surveilled as belonging to a company. So, it's private ground and you are employed there. Would you still try to fool the system? I don't think so, since this might end up in your file at human resources.
Instead of using it for parking lots, imagine a system at your work place which tracks cases of sexual harassment. It would record how often you look other persons "up and down", etc. One less lawsuit for the company and the system pays off.
Scary...
Other companies would probably only offer a service pack several month later...
Radioshack and Microsoft.
I'm staring at it for 5 minutes now, but I still don't get the joke. I'm sure it's in there somewhere...
It's expected, planned in and budgeted for that a project produces a number of patents. Development managers' performance is measured by this. It's often more vital than the performance or maintainability of the produced code. (Well, everyone knows that that will be bad anyway, don't you?)
So, people write patent applications for something...anything, just to keep the monkeys off their backs.
Now, I don't know about yahoo. This patent presented is a least a Good Thing for performance. By reading /. more people know about it - maybe some websites get faster over the next months...;)
We also worked with both Informix "options" (not under Linux though) and that database is full of excitements and surprises, if you know what I mean.
That might be true, but I would think that the availability of the source is making the OS attractive for security reasons. It enables the Chinese to verify that there are no hooks in the OS which can be exploited by someone else.
This is no conspiracy theory. Europeans have made experiences with American software version which have intentionally weak security. European military is considering if it can trust sensitive information to products like Lotus Notes, etc.
So it makes sense for non-US countries to rely on software where the source code is available. And with the increase of business on the Internet, this will, IMHO, make sense for everyone.
How can we legally accept digital signatures and transactions of all kinds, if we cannot verify that the code performing them is doing the right thing? Can a the worlds business be based on a black box made by a few companies in one nation? I doubt it.
They were negotiating with TDMA/GSM suppliers when someone changed their mind to go for American technology.
This was like a catalyst for all the other PCS operators who were basically waiting for Sprint to make up their mind. You have to understand that noone wanted to built an island surrounded by the big Sprint with no way to roam. These licenses are *expensive*.
Had Sprint decided otherwise, the whole wireless world would be a different place. Not only would we have real, global roaming, but cheaper phones (more volumes), a bigger market for wireless data and, last but not least, easier agreements on a new G3 standard.
While I'm all for competition and choices, having an own American standard on this is not in the interest of consumers.
When you have two processes running, A and B, then all processor registered are saved and restored when the OS switches from A to B and vice versa. Otherwise they would step on each others toes.
But maybe one could write a "virus" which infects non FP-using programs and lets fp calculations run during programs execution time?
I see the example from WWII as more relevant where none of the involved parties dared to use the (nerve) gas weapons on the battlegrounds. Since noone had a defense against those, noone wanted to start the usage.
Even though the U.S. military might be quite protected from cyberwarfare, a lot of the civilian US installations like banks, insureance, government, etc. is probably not. Serbian or Serbia supporting knowledgable people could have easily attacked the US in a counterattack. In the end systems everywhere would be going down (or could not be trusted any longer) without anybody knowing the attacking party.
In this light, the decision of the US not to use this new kind of weapon is wise. The reason they give to the press is lame...
It will be interesting to see what the industry can do to fix "lost" activation keys. And that probably depends on if all discovered keys are in software or hardware players...