There are plenty of tech terms that are abused for more regularly than "app." My least favorite is "cloud" or "cloud computing," which is almost entirely devoid of meaning -- I have heard it used to refer to everything from websites and web applications to remote data storage. I have even heard people refer to running internal application servers as "running your own cloud" (what?). At least "app" has something resembling a definition.
I would hardly call the PS3 restriction system "minimal" -- just take a look at the combination of hacks that was needed to finally crack it. Frankly, the way Sony screwed up ECDSA signing was just dumb luck -- had they not screwed up (i.e. had they implemented ECDSA signing correctly), it would have been significantly harder to crack the PS3.
I do not agree with the DMCA or the way it is abused by companies like Sony, but this is not a case of minimal effort.
Making the legal system work faster? We have too many laws for that. Ironically, it seems that the police want this mandatory retention so that they can better prosecute people for breaking the very same laws that are responsible for our judicial slow down.
That is true in general. In this particular case, change = room 101. Seriously, I want the old Slashdot, not this crap. What was the point of all this? Why? WHY?
The only possible way I can see for them to release more Matrix movies is to do prequels. I am not saying that is a good idea -- it was pretty bad for Star Wars -- but that is the only thing that will make sense.
Not that making more Matrix movies can really make sense in any universe...
I can think of a few reasons that they shouldn't be having sex with the targets of their investigation. How do we know that a particular officer is not unnecessarily prolonging an investigation, so that he can continue having sex with the targets? How do we know that an investigation is warranted at all?
Keep in mind that undercover officers are professional liars, trained and employed by the government to gain the trust of and betray the targets of certain investigations. If undercover officers are running around having sex with people while they are undercover, as part of that job, then how could anyone ever trust anyone they become intimate with? Your girlfriend that you have been dating for three months could be an undercover cop.
There are certain boundaries that the government and its agents should not be crossing. I would rather see some environmentalists evade investigation than live in a society where undercover cops are paid to have sex with their targets.
Unfortunately, those same old people are educating their own replacements. In the broader world, the one beyond the confines of/., there are plenty of young people who believe that DRM is necessary and who are willing to prosecute file sharers and push to keep old media models alive by any means. This problem goes much deeper than the generational gap.
Clearly, you are misunderstanding the purpose of 21st century governments. The purpose of your government is to ensure that corporations and their shareholders become wealthier.
Perhaps they are referring to some sort of fully homomorphic cryptosystem, although the publicly known systems are not exactly practical (it would just be foolish to deploy a classified system here, so I doubt this is the case; the point is that it is possible to encrypt software).
Why would you claim someone is not the brightest of applicants, just because they partied when they were in college? That is exactly the sort of attitude that created this problem in the first place: employers who have this notion that anyone who doesn't conform to the ideal defined by US government propaganda is somehow less desirable. Why does it matter to you that an applicant to whatever sort of job you might employ them for smoked pot when they were in college? Why would you go digging through someone's Facebook profile to find evidence of what sort of partying they did in college?
Of course, we have plenty of anti-drug propaganda to keep us far from the ideal. A picture of someone taking a bong hit at a party could be reason to be rejected from a job -- there are still places that perform pre-employment drug screenings, last I checked, and photographic evidence of illegal drug use may not go over so well. When we keep telling people that anyone who uses illegal drugs is an unreliable drug abuser who couldn't possibly hold a job, and when we require people to maintain a "drug free workplace" or forfeit government contracts, the idea that employers will forgive some college partying seems a bit far fetched.
Not your website that you need to worry about; the plugin targets Facebook/MySpace/etc., where a lot of people are posting embarrassing pictures of their late teenage years which may resurface when they are looking for a job. The whole point is that those websites do not have any option for expiring images.
The real question is, are your friends conniving enough to save embarrassing photos of you on their hard drive, just in case someone years later wants to see it? Employers are not browsing your friends' hard drives; they are, however, browsing your Facebook profile, and they may see all the partying you did in college (or whatever). You may not remember that the pictures are there, especially if you have lots and lots of pictures; your future employer should not stumble across evidence of some long-forgotten party.
Of course, your friends might still post pictures on their own profiles, without encryption. The system is far from perfect.
That would be true if this were a DRM system, that is, if your adversary were the people you are sharing the image with. The point of the system is to ensure that people who carelessly leave images online will not have to worry about some random future employer stumbling across an embarrassing picture years later -- the service will (presumably) stop giving out the decryption key after the expiration date.
Of course, this turns the service into a trusted third party, and I strongly doubt that the keys will actually be deleted from their database; more likely, the keys will be kept just in case law enforcement asks for them. It is not a perfect system, it is just meant to chip away at the problem.
P is defined as the set of decision problems that can be solved by a deterministic Turing machine in polynomial time. NP is the set of decision problems that can be solved by a non-deterministic Turing machine in polynomial time. NP-Complete problems are problems in NP such that the existence of a deterministic polynomial time algorithm to solve any one of the NP-complete problems would imply that P=NP; any NP complete problem can be reduced to any other NP complete problem in polynomial time.
Perhaps you should take another look at the state of software patents. You can pretty much patent anything -- eHarmony managed to get a patent on singular value decomposition. You can violate a software patent without realizing it, easily, even if your algorithm seems to have nothing to do with the patent in question.
Obviousness and prior art are barely even factors in granting software patents. The law itself doesn't seem to be a factor anymore -- supposedly, you cannot patent math, yet somehow people manage to get patents on algorithms, even purely numerical algorithms.
Slashdot Mirror
There are plenty of tech terms that are abused for more regularly than "app." My least favorite is "cloud" or "cloud computing," which is almost entirely devoid of meaning -- I have heard it used to refer to everything from websites and web applications to remote data storage. I have even heard people refer to running internal application servers as "running your own cloud" (what?). At least "app" has something resembling a definition.
I believe Google did something similar as a publicity stunt, asking people in Times Square which browser they used. Most people could not answer.
I would hardly call the PS3 restriction system "minimal" -- just take a look at the combination of hacks that was needed to finally crack it. Frankly, the way Sony screwed up ECDSA signing was just dumb luck -- had they not screwed up (i.e. had they implemented ECDSA signing correctly), it would have been significantly harder to crack the PS3.
I do not agree with the DMCA or the way it is abused by companies like Sony, but this is not a case of minimal effort.
Making the legal system work faster? We have too many laws for that. Ironically, it seems that the police want this mandatory retention so that they can better prosecute people for breaking the very same laws that are responsible for our judicial slow down.
That was a joke, right? The old /. worked fine for everyone. Each new iteration has created more problems for more people, without fixing anything.
Change != bad
That is true in general. In this particular case, change = room 101. Seriously, I want the old Slashdot, not this crap. What was the point of all this? Why? WHY?
What's going on here?
They want you to pay them before "shifting."
why do lawyers believe they can stop the march of technological progress?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money
The only possible way I can see for them to release more Matrix movies is to do prequels. I am not saying that is a good idea -- it was pretty bad for Star Wars -- but that is the only thing that will make sense.
Not that making more Matrix movies can really make sense in any universe...
They made more than one?
I can think of a few reasons that they shouldn't be having sex with the targets of their investigation. How do we know that a particular officer is not unnecessarily prolonging an investigation, so that he can continue having sex with the targets? How do we know that an investigation is warranted at all?
Keep in mind that undercover officers are professional liars, trained and employed by the government to gain the trust of and betray the targets of certain investigations. If undercover officers are running around having sex with people while they are undercover, as part of that job, then how could anyone ever trust anyone they become intimate with? Your girlfriend that you have been dating for three months could be an undercover cop.
There are certain boundaries that the government and its agents should not be crossing. I would rather see some environmentalists evade investigation than live in a society where undercover cops are paid to have sex with their targets.
Unfortunately, those same old people are educating their own replacements. In the broader world, the one beyond the confines of /., there are plenty of young people who believe that DRM is necessary and who are willing to prosecute file sharers and push to keep old media models alive by any means. This problem goes much deeper than the generational gap.
Clearly, you are misunderstanding the purpose of 21st century governments. The purpose of your government is to ensure that corporations and their shareholders become wealthier.
*wooosh*
(Hint: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_September_That_Never_Ended)
The question remains, though: what reason was there to switch to this screw head? If there is a good technical reason for it, fine, but let's hear it.
Perhaps they are referring to some sort of fully homomorphic cryptosystem, although the publicly known systems are not exactly practical (it would just be foolish to deploy a classified system here, so I doubt this is the case; the point is that it is possible to encrypt software).
Which NGs are you in? From where I sit, it is still September.
Why would you claim someone is not the brightest of applicants, just because they partied when they were in college? That is exactly the sort of attitude that created this problem in the first place: employers who have this notion that anyone who doesn't conform to the ideal defined by US government propaganda is somehow less desirable. Why does it matter to you that an applicant to whatever sort of job you might employ them for smoked pot when they were in college? Why would you go digging through someone's Facebook profile to find evidence of what sort of partying they did in college?
Of course, we have plenty of anti-drug propaganda to keep us far from the ideal. A picture of someone taking a bong hit at a party could be reason to be rejected from a job -- there are still places that perform pre-employment drug screenings, last I checked, and photographic evidence of illegal drug use may not go over so well. When we keep telling people that anyone who uses illegal drugs is an unreliable drug abuser who couldn't possibly hold a job, and when we require people to maintain a "drug free workplace" or forfeit government contracts, the idea that employers will forgive some college partying seems a bit far fetched.
Not your website that you need to worry about; the plugin targets Facebook/MySpace/etc., where a lot of people are posting embarrassing pictures of their late teenage years which may resurface when they are looking for a job. The whole point is that those websites do not have any option for expiring images.
The real question is, are your friends conniving enough to save embarrassing photos of you on their hard drive, just in case someone years later wants to see it? Employers are not browsing your friends' hard drives; they are, however, browsing your Facebook profile, and they may see all the partying you did in college (or whatever). You may not remember that the pictures are there, especially if you have lots and lots of pictures; your future employer should not stumble across evidence of some long-forgotten party.
Of course, your friends might still post pictures on their own profiles, without encryption. The system is far from perfect.
That would be true if this were a DRM system, that is, if your adversary were the people you are sharing the image with. The point of the system is to ensure that people who carelessly leave images online will not have to worry about some random future employer stumbling across an embarrassing picture years later -- the service will (presumably) stop giving out the decryption key after the expiration date.
Of course, this turns the service into a trusted third party, and I strongly doubt that the keys will actually be deleted from their database; more likely, the keys will be kept just in case law enforcement asks for them. It is not a perfect system, it is just meant to chip away at the problem.
P is defined as the set of decision problems that can be solved by a deterministic Turing machine in polynomial time. NP is the set of decision problems that can be solved by a non-deterministic Turing machine in polynomial time. NP-Complete problems are problems in NP such that the existence of a deterministic polynomial time algorithm to solve any one of the NP-complete problems would imply that P=NP; any NP complete problem can be reduced to any other NP complete problem in polynomial time.
Perhaps you should take another look at the state of software patents. You can pretty much patent anything -- eHarmony managed to get a patent on singular value decomposition. You can violate a software patent without realizing it, easily, even if your algorithm seems to have nothing to do with the patent in question.
Obviousness and prior art are barely even factors in granting software patents. The law itself doesn't seem to be a factor anymore -- supposedly, you cannot patent math, yet somehow people manage to get patents on algorithms, even purely numerical algorithms.
You might want to check your NTP settings...