I'm using python in an environment with lots of external strings (from the web, from files), and the current mechanism is horrible. I end up with non-ASCII data in strings a lot if I'm not extremely careful with thinking about which string is ASCII and which is uninterpreted bytes, and have spend endless hours debugging silly decoding problems.
If nothing else, having the read() methods return bytes and dealing with strings as unicode objects (regardless of internal encoding, I doubt that the python spec forces an interpreter to choose a unicode encoding for internal use) forces you to think about the encoding/decoding, which is a necessity in the post-ASCII world.
I would think that they should also enable you to specify an encoding on opening a file, so you can do something like
f = file.open('/tmp/bla', 'utf-8') mystring = f.read()
rather than forcing you to do f.read().decode(), which I think is ugly and tedious.
As a student, I always thought that the plethora of streamreaders, writers, stringwriters, bufferedwriters etc in java was a complete mess, but I definitely appreciate it now...
Okay, here are my 3 reasons why a company would not accept this challenge:
(1) economical:
- I am asked to mail 60 USD to a random address, who claim they will return it to me if I send the harddisk back. This is a risk (how do I know it is not a scam?) - In any case, I lose shipping charges both ways - Maximum gain is 40$, plus an obscure web site calls me King of data recovery. - Risk + Cost >> Gain
(2) International
I am asked to ship a US Postal money. A WHAT? Hello, creditcard? Paypal? Normal internaional cheque?
(3) Disassembly
All reasons I've heard for doing something more than dd is that there might be residual magnetic charge on the platter that is ignored by the filesystem. According to the rules of engagement, only some weird collection of institutions ("established data recovery business located in the United States of America" or "National government law enforcement or intelligence agency (NSA, CIA, FBI)") may disassemble the drive. How am I going to detect residual charge if I cannot disassemble it?
The last arguments compounds the first two, as only US Companies can disasseble, and disassembly voids the deposit, meaning I am certainly out 60$.
Next time that they want to be "noble and just to dispel myths, falsehoods and untruths", they should make a challenge that is actually interesting to any party to pick up.
[...] * When you type URLs or queries in the address bar, the letters you type are sent to Google [...] * If you navigate to a URL that does not exist, Google Chrome may send the URL to Google [...] [...]
In short, they get a list of (almost) every site you visit. Since they need to send suggestions back, they also use your IP address.
If this were really done for your convenience ("so the Suggest feature can automatically recommend terms or URLs you may be looking for") they would delete your data or at least guarantee to anonymize it (ie drop the IP info).
[Words such as retain, delete or remove only occurr once in the privacy declaration, on stating that you can delete the history in your browser at any time. Thanks, goog!]
Some facts to make you feel less comfortable spouting patriottic nonsense:
1) You're wrong. The US is #26 in debt with 60% GDP. Some european countries are worse (eg belgium at 85%, france at 64), some are much better (eg holland at 46%, UK at 43%, spain at 35%).
2) US citizens don't save money, but are in debt themselves (eg creditcards). This means that most of the US debt is in the hands of foreign countries or nationals, while a large part of the european public debts is in European hands since europeans save a lot more.
3) The US imports way more than it exports (currently, the trade deficit is 600 billion (!), down from 800 due to the extremely weak dollar). Since these goods have to be bought capital flows out (eg to gulf states for buying oil). This capital flows back in the form of investments in US companies. This sounds good, but what it means is that you are selling Americal companies to foreigners to pay for your consumption. The EU countries generally have trade balance or surplus
Users may wish to turn on the privacy mode if they are planning a surprise party, buying presents or researching a medical condition and do not want others users of the same computer to find out.
If you don't know the exact probability of something happening, you can attach a probability to the probability.
From science, suppose your hypothesis is that something is binomially distributed with p=0.5 (eg number of heads from fair coin flip). Suppose after 100 trials you find a number of heads that lead you to reject the hypothesis with p0.05. In that case, you would say:
I reject the null hypothesis with p0.05
In other words:
It is very unlikely that the null hypothesis is true
in other words:
It is very unlikely that the probability of getting a head is 0.5
In other words: if you have uncertain data about a probability, it is perfectly natural to state that some event has probability X with probability Y
Waste hydrogen? I would have expected them to have some use for that.
The obvious thing to do with hydrogen is to use it as fuel. But think about it: burning it would undo the electrolysis by consuming all the oxygen generated, so unless they are looking for a way to convert electricity into a chemical fuel, it isn't very useful...
if oxygen is scarcer than energy, burning stuff isn't a sensible thing to do
AFAIK, yes, if you fill the decoy volume it will kill your hidden volume.
which makes you wonder how long it'll be until a tool is developed for law enforcement specifically designed to fuck up these volumes.
They can only do that if they've confiscated your laptop *and* acquired your 'decoy' password. At that point, your only concerns are they not getting your data and you being able to deny the data is there in the first place.
Somebody deleting all your sensitive files is not a bad thing to happen at that point.
I think they are globally unique, and since they are 6 bytes long the supply is practically infinite (256^6 = 216x10^12, ie every person can have something like 30,000 mac addresses)
Come to think of it, it's a bit silly that they used 4 bytes for the address that has to be globally unique and 6 bytes for the one that only has to be locally unique...
I'm no computer scientist but isn't it fairly trivial for them to get your mac (or at least that of your router) from your network traffic anyway? If I'm not mistaken, MAC never leaves the immediate network, ie your router gets your mac, the next hop that of the router, and so on, but the final destination only gets the mac of the last router in between
So, can somebody use comcast to locate a illegally published copyrighted piece, show it to the copyright owner, and then have him/her sue comcast for publishing it? That would show them!:-)
What I don't get is this: I thought the principle behind the DMCA was that Yahoo, on being served a notice, would take down the possibly illicit material, and that the poster could get it back on by identifying himself and taking legal responsibility.
It seemed to me (not an American, not a lawyer) like a good system: the host is responsible in the first instance and takes material down without judging about the illegality (which the host can't), unless the poster takes responsibility and claims it is not illegal (fair use, own work, whatever), and it can be settled in court.
Apparently, it doesn't work that way...? Or does the poster not have the guts to stand up for his right? Or does yahoo go further than required by the DMCA?
I agree that people should stop nitpicking on grammar or spelling errors in comments --- part of the community here is not a native speaker of English (including yours truly) and we will often get tense or prepositions wrong. Also, punctuation rules differ per language; using commas and apostrophes correctly is not trivial in your native tongue so have a bit of patience with your fellow slashgeek.
For the editors I have no mercy, however: they are paid professionals and should get their spelling and grammar right. And avoid dupes!:-) They post an average of one article per hour, so surely they have time to proofread a paragraph and check links (and link to print versions) in that time...?
I'm no lawyer and I don't know anything about the French legal system --- but I think it is fairly rare for a lawyer to get a ban and this will look bad on his CV, and I'm pretty sure the penalties will get heavier for repeat offense or copycats.
It would also be interesting to see whether some of the threatened people are willing to take civil action...
The analogy is flawed: they block off something I have the right do do.
To extend your analogy: suppose you own property next to mine and I have legal right-of-way. Now, you're not allowed to build a gate and not give me the key, since I have the right to pass over your property to mine. That is what DRM is trying to do: they 'guard' their property in a way that also blocks my legal rights (ie fair use copying, distribution after copyright ends).
I'm a bit worried about 'giving' google all my history, cookies, and stored passwords, protected by a PIN.
Since the PIN is the only thing you need to set up on a new computer, I don't think the data sent to google is encrypted (using a key unknown by google, ie more than https)?
I guess they don't really want my passwords, but the navigation and form history coupled to my search history... brrr... (I don't even want to imagine using gmail too)
Note: I'm not saying google is evil, I wouldn't trust anyone with that much data, and certainly not a US company with a history of complying to Chinese government demands...
I own at least (bought and payed for) 5 Civilization CD's (including expansion packs). Because of the new 3D hardware requirements I downloaded Civ IV and played it for half a year before buying it. I never installed the bought version and the first thing I did after buying each expansion pack was downloading a cracked.exe to avoid having to have the CD in the drive. For me, the lessons are:
- your core audience will pay for the game, whether you have copy protection or not. The fringe (which is almost always bigger than the core) might well be more inclined to buy a game if they can't easily download it. - requiring the CD in the drive is annoying and stupid (eg my subnotebook does not even have an optical drive and can still (barely) play Civ IV) - having to go to a store and buy physical stuff is really annoying. If a game is decent, I would never download it "illegally"* if I could download it from the company web site for a reasonable sum (which is lower than 20$)..02 etc
*) of course, being in a civilized country there is no such thing as illegal downloading, and pirating has something to do with ships and bloodletting... maybe "downloading from an unofficial source" would be the best euphemism...
There's no reason you need to buy a "Linux PC". It's not like there's some logo organization that is in charge of approving "Linux-capable" PCs like there is for Vista.
Maybe this is a really silly question, but why is there no 'Linux Ready' logo, meaning that there are drivers available and all the functionality of the device (or components of the computer) can be used on the latest stable Debian/Ubuntu/RH without recompiling the kernel? I know that I would find it very useful to know which stuff to buy and which to avoid...
(I am aware that the linux market is not incredibly large, but the logo testing cannot be that expensive, and if it can give an extra couple percent sales...)
The situation is complex. Traditional definitions of country include issuing money and sovereignty (ie no other states have power over what happens in your territory); many EU countries do not have their own currency (and hence monetary politics) and although sovereign countries can 'give away' part of their sovereignty in treaties while still remaining a sovereign country you can make a convincing case that current European decision making *and* judiciary is going beyond that.
On the other hand: there is no european army or police force; the Iraq war showed convincingly that there is no European foreign policy; european 'law' only becomes law by national legislatures passing national laws that implement European directives; there is *no* european constitution since some members decided not to ratify it (but there are tons of treaties that could be interpreted as forming the constitution); there is no sensible European Parliament; the european equivalent of the 'bill of rights' is the European Convention on Human Rights which is the Council of Europe rather than the EU, which includes Russia and Switserland. Very importantly, EU citizens in the great majority consider themselves national citizens first, and europeans second (or third, after region/city), and the elections that count are national elections, which are generally about national issues.
"Country" is a useful abstraction that has high explanatory power, but it is ultimately a projection of a complicated continuum on a dichotomous variable. Entities like Pennsylvania, Scotland, Liechtenstein, the EU, Kosovo, Taiwan, Hongkong, etc. show that the discussion is a lot more complicated than that.
IMHO, the really interesting question is not whether the EU is a country or not, it is whether we want to delegate more power to 'Brussels' and how we can control such power. The colonies that became the USA went through the same process more than two hundred years ago, and they had an external threat to convince people that a confederation was not enough. Also, the US shows that even a constitution framed by very intelligent people who did their utmost to limit the power of the federal government to an enumerated set can gradually become a much more centralized state without changing its constitution, so without giving the member states and direct say in the matter. This makes me (as an EU citizen) wary of the EU becoming a confederacy or even federal state, as I would be afraid that it will gradually shift to a more centralized state.
I'm sorry for that, I guess I'm not used to subtleties on slashdot:-$ Good thing you can still get modded up for missing jokes here...
I was aware that that was his blog; I thought you were telling him that since he has a blog over there he should stop harassing us with his frequent posts and stories. Anyway...
I like the posts of NewYorkCountryLawyer, and if the editors or readers of slashdot would get sick of them they would not get past the firehose. And if slashdot were against people keeping journals and submitting them as stories, why do you think "Slashdot journal entries can be automatically submitted as stories"?
If you care about Your Rights Online, I think both his stories and his comments are to the point and well written and at least HIAL. If you don't care about your rights online, you can choose not to see that section in your preferences.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm using python in an environment with lots of external strings (from the web, from files), and the current mechanism is horrible. I end up with non-ASCII data in strings a lot if I'm not extremely careful with thinking about which string is ASCII and which is uninterpreted bytes, and have spend endless hours debugging silly decoding problems.
If nothing else, having the read() methods return bytes and dealing with strings as unicode objects (regardless of internal encoding, I doubt that the python spec forces an interpreter to choose a unicode encoding for internal use) forces you to think about the encoding/decoding, which is a necessity in the post-ASCII world.
I would think that they should also enable you to specify an encoding on opening a file, so you can do something like
f = file.open('/tmp/bla', 'utf-8')
mystring = f.read()
rather than forcing you to do f.read().decode(), which I think is ugly and tedious.
As a student, I always thought that the plethora of streamreaders, writers, stringwriters, bufferedwriters etc in java was a complete mess, but I definitely appreciate it now...
Okay, here are my 3 reasons why a company would not accept this challenge:
(1) economical:
- I am asked to mail 60 USD to a random address, who claim they will return it to me if I send the harddisk back. This is a risk (how do I know it is not a scam?)
- In any case, I lose shipping charges both ways
- Maximum gain is 40$, plus an obscure web site calls me King of data recovery.
- Risk + Cost >> Gain
(2) International
I am asked to ship a US Postal money. A WHAT? Hello, creditcard? Paypal? Normal internaional cheque?
(3) Disassembly
All reasons I've heard for doing something more than dd is that there might be residual magnetic charge on the platter that is ignored by the filesystem. According to the rules of engagement, only some weird collection of institutions ("established data recovery business located in the United States of America" or "National government law enforcement or intelligence agency (NSA, CIA, FBI)") may disassemble the drive. How am I going to detect residual charge if I cannot disassemble it?
The last arguments compounds the first two, as only US Companies can disasseble, and disassembly voids the deposit, meaning I am certainly out 60$.
Next time that they want to be "noble and just to dispel myths, falsehoods and untruths", they should make a challenge that is actually interesting to any party to pick up.
From their privacy page:
[...]
* When you type URLs or queries in the address bar, the letters you type are sent to Google [...]
* If you navigate to a URL that does not exist, Google Chrome may send the URL to Google [...]
[...]
In short, they get a list of (almost) every site you visit. Since they need to send suggestions back, they also use your IP address.
If this were really done for your convenience ("so the Suggest feature can automatically recommend terms or URLs you may be looking for") they would delete your data or at least guarantee to anonymize it (ie drop the IP info).
[Words such as retain, delete or remove only occurr once in the privacy declaration, on stating that you can delete the history in your browser at any time. Thanks, goog!]
Some facts to make you feel less comfortable spouting patriottic nonsense:
1) You're wrong. The US is #26 in debt with 60% GDP. Some european countries are worse (eg belgium at 85%, france at 64), some are much better (eg holland at 46%, UK at 43%, spain at 35%).
2) US citizens don't save money, but are in debt themselves (eg creditcards). This means that most of the US debt is in the hands of foreign countries or nationals, while a large part of the european public debts is in European hands since europeans save a lot more.
3) The US imports way more than it exports (currently, the trade deficit is 600 billion (!), down from 800 due to the extremely weak dollar). Since these goods have to be bought capital flows out (eg to gulf states for buying oil). This capital flows back in the form of investments in US companies. This sounds good, but what it means is that you are selling Americal companies to foreigners to pay for your consumption. The EU countries generally have trade balance or surplus
FTFA:
Users may wish to turn on the privacy mode if they are planning a surprise party, buying presents or researching a medical condition and do not want others users of the same computer to find out.
Yeah, right...
If you don't know the exact probability of something happening, you can attach a probability to the probability.
From science, suppose your hypothesis is that something is binomially distributed with p=0.5 (eg number of heads from fair coin flip). Suppose after 100 trials you find a number of heads that lead you to reject the hypothesis with p0.05. In that case, you would say:
I reject the null hypothesis with p0.05
In other words:
It is very unlikely that the null hypothesis is true
in other words:
It is very unlikely that the probability of getting a head is 0.5
In other words: if you have uncertain data about a probability, it is perfectly natural to state that some event has probability X with probability Y
Waste hydrogen? I would have expected them to have some use for that.
The obvious thing to do with hydrogen is to use it as fuel. But think about it: burning it would undo the electrolysis by consuming all the oxygen generated, so unless they are looking for a way to convert electricity into a chemical fuel, it isn't very useful...
if oxygen is scarcer than energy, burning stuff isn't a sensible thing to do
AFAIK, yes, if you fill the decoy volume it will kill your hidden volume.
which makes you wonder how long it'll be until a tool is developed for law enforcement specifically designed to fuck up these volumes.
They can only do that if they've confiscated your laptop *and* acquired your 'decoy' password. At that point, your only concerns are they not getting your data and you being able to deny the data is there in the first place.
Somebody deleting all your sensitive files is not a bad thing to happen at that point.
I think they are globally unique, and since they are 6 bytes long the supply is practically infinite (256^6 = 216x10^12, ie every person can have something like 30,000 mac addresses)
Come to think of it, it's a bit silly that they used 4 bytes for the address that has to be globally unique and 6 bytes for the one that only has to be locally unique...
Seriously though, how difficult is it to use the slashdot search engine with the capitalized words in the title? third hit...
Obligatory:
http://video.google.nl/videoplay?docid=1628597280384324194
So, can somebody use comcast to locate a illegally published copyrighted piece, show it to the copyright owner, and then have him/her sue comcast for publishing it? That would show them! :-)
What I don't get is this: I thought the principle behind the DMCA was that Yahoo, on being served a notice, would take down the possibly illicit material, and that the poster could get it back on by identifying himself and taking legal responsibility.
It seemed to me (not an American, not a lawyer) like a good system: the host is responsible in the first instance and takes material down without judging about the illegality (which the host can't), unless the poster takes responsibility and claims it is not illegal (fair use, own work, whatever), and it can be settled in court.
Apparently, it doesn't work that way...? Or does the poster not have the guts to stand up for his right? Or does yahoo go further than required by the DMCA?
I agree that people should stop nitpicking on grammar or spelling errors in comments --- part of the community here is not a native speaker of English (including yours truly) and we will often get tense or prepositions wrong. Also, punctuation rules differ per language; using commas and apostrophes correctly is not trivial in your native tongue so have a bit of patience with your fellow slashgeek.
:-) They post an average of one article per hour, so surely they have time to proofread a paragraph and check links (and link to print versions) in that time...?
For the editors I have no mercy, however: they are paid professionals and should get their spelling and grammar right. And avoid dupes!
I'm no lawyer and I don't know anything about the French legal system --- but I think it is fairly rare for a lawyer to get a ban and this will look bad on his CV, and I'm pretty sure the penalties will get heavier for repeat offense or copycats.
It would also be interesting to see whether some of the threatened people are willing to take civil action...
The analogy is flawed: they block off something I have the right do do.
To extend your analogy: suppose you own property next to mine and I have legal right-of-way. Now, you're not allowed to build a gate and not give me the key, since I have the right to pass over your property to mine. That is what DRM is trying to do: they 'guard' their property in a way that also blocks my legal rights (ie fair use copying, distribution after copyright ends).
I'm a bit worried about 'giving' google all my history, cookies, and stored passwords, protected by a PIN.
Since the PIN is the only thing you need to set up on a new computer, I don't think the data sent to google is encrypted (using a key unknown by google, ie more than https)?
I guess they don't really want my passwords, but the navigation and form history coupled to my search history... brrr... (I don't even want to imagine using gmail too)
Note: I'm not saying google is evil, I wouldn't trust anyone with that much data, and certainly not a US company with a history of complying to Chinese government demands...
And we knew it, too! At least, of us!...
It is a permissive license, meaning that it permits reuse within proprietary software ...
I own at least (bought and payed for) 5 Civilization CD's (including expansion packs). Because of the new 3D hardware requirements I downloaded Civ IV and played it for half a year before buying it. I never installed the bought version and the first thing I did after buying each expansion pack was downloading a cracked .exe to avoid having to have the CD in the drive. For me, the lessons are:
.02 etc
- your core audience will pay for the game, whether you have copy protection or not. The fringe (which is almost always bigger than the core) might well be more inclined to buy a game if they can't easily download it.
- requiring the CD in the drive is annoying and stupid (eg my subnotebook does not even have an optical drive and can still (barely) play Civ IV)
- having to go to a store and buy physical stuff is really annoying. If a game is decent, I would never download it "illegally"* if I could download it from the company web site for a reasonable sum (which is lower than 20$).
*) of course, being in a civilized country there is no such thing as illegal downloading, and pirating has something to do with ships and bloodletting... maybe "downloading from an unofficial source" would be the best euphemism...
Maybe this is a really silly question, but why is there no 'Linux Ready' logo, meaning that there are drivers available and all the functionality of the device (or components of the computer) can be used on the latest stable Debian/Ubuntu/RH without recompiling the kernel? I know that I would find it very useful to know which stuff to buy and which to avoid...
(I am aware that the linux market is not incredibly large, but the logo testing cannot be that expensive, and if it can give an extra couple percent sales...)
The situation is complex. Traditional definitions of country include issuing money and sovereignty (ie no other states have power over what happens in your territory); many EU countries do not have their own currency (and hence monetary politics) and although sovereign countries can 'give away' part of their sovereignty in treaties while still remaining a sovereign country you can make a convincing case that current European decision making *and* judiciary is going beyond that.
:-)
On the other hand: there is no european army or police force; the Iraq war showed convincingly that there is no European foreign policy; european 'law' only becomes law by national legislatures passing national laws that implement European directives; there is *no* european constitution since some members decided not to ratify it (but there are tons of treaties that could be interpreted as forming the constitution); there is no sensible European Parliament; the european equivalent of the 'bill of rights' is the European Convention on Human Rights which is the Council of Europe rather than the EU, which includes Russia and Switserland. Very importantly, EU citizens in the great majority consider themselves national citizens first, and europeans second (or third, after region/city), and the elections that count are national elections, which are generally about national issues.
"Country" is a useful abstraction that has high explanatory power, but it is ultimately a projection of a complicated continuum on a dichotomous variable. Entities like Pennsylvania, Scotland, Liechtenstein, the EU, Kosovo, Taiwan, Hongkong, etc. show that the discussion is a lot more complicated than that.
IMHO, the really interesting question is not whether the EU is a country or not, it is whether we want to delegate more power to
'Brussels' and how we can control such power. The colonies that became the USA went through the same process more than two hundred years ago, and they had an external threat to convince people that a confederation was not enough. Also, the US shows that even a constitution framed by very intelligent people who did their utmost to limit the power of the federal government to an enumerated set can gradually become a much more centralized state without changing its constitution, so without giving the member states and direct say in the matter. This makes me (as an EU citizen) wary of the EU becoming a confederacy or even federal state, as I would be afraid that it will gradually shift to a more centralized state.
Anyway...
I'm sorry for that, I guess I'm not used to subtleties on slashdot :-$ Good thing you can still get modded up for missing jokes here...
I was aware that that was his blog; I thought you were telling him that since he has a blog over there he should stop harassing us with his frequent posts and stories. Anyway...
NYCL: keep up the good work :-)
Others: go forth and multiply the HTTP GET requests
I like the posts of NewYorkCountryLawyer, and if the editors or readers of slashdot would get sick of them they would not get past the firehose. And if slashdot were against people keeping journals and submitting them as stories, why do you think "Slashdot journal entries can be automatically submitted as stories"?
If you care about Your Rights Online, I think both his stories and his comments are to the point and well written and at least HIAL. If you don't care about your rights online, you can choose not to see that section in your preferences.
NewYorkCountryLawyer, keep up the good work!