It then goes on to grant unlimited distribution provided specific rules are adhered to.
I'm sorry, but that statement is hilarious. You are granted "unlimited" distribution "provided specific rules are adhered to". I do not dispute that the GPL grants more rights than you would have without it (it specifically says you do not have to accept it). However, it offers only "limited" distribution rights. In fact, your distribution rights are limited to licensing under the GPL.
It is certainly true that the distribution rights are much greater than most commercial packages. That is, you have non-zero distribution rights (most EULAs claim to limit even resale of the "purchased license"). However, compared to the BSD license, the GPL is a straightjacket when it comes to distribution. This is, of course, the point of the GPL: GPL developers do not want their hard work put into a closed-source product. The GPL is designed to force open-source distribution of derivatives.
Does this mean that SCO now has a legal basis for suing Joe User for downloading a Red Hat ISO?
What do you mean a "legal basis"? They've certainly intimated that they could and might sue for such. However, you can sue anyone you like for anything you like. The sued can, of course, countersue for harassment, etc. In this case, I would expect IBM to file a counter-motion for an injunction against SCO saying IBM cannot distribute AIX. Regardless, SCO's attempted revocation of the AIX license does not affect the legality of Linux. It's merely SCO's retaliation (blackmail, if you will) for IBM not giving SCO what they want.
The judge is likely to make a quick decision (IANAL) between the two injunctions, as SCO is clearly costing IBM by their statements and IBM is clearly costing SCO by distributing unlicensed code (only one of those is "illegal", but which one?). Oh, the anticipation.
Someone making $20 an hour would "lose" about $3.33 an hour by watching 10 minutes of commercials. That's a far cry from the $0.001 it might cost you to receive a spam. Do you get 3,300 spams a day?:-) That's your break even point.
One spam costs me a couple seconds to recognize and delete if my Spam filter does not catch it. It also can cost me much longer if I want to not receive it in the future, finding the unsubscription instructions and figuring out if the sender is of sufficient quality that I believe that unsubscribing is even worth it. Presuming that it's SPAM from a real company, then I have follow the unsubscription request. Then, about 30% of the time (or more), when I get another e-mail a month later, I have to find out who cares at the company and tell them that their unsubscription system is buggy and that would they please manually delete me.
$0.001 at $20/hr is 180 milliseconds to perform all those actions, which is probably not enough. Let's say 2 minutes per e-mail (a conservative estimate), which is $0.66 of time, assuming the same $20/hr number. Now the "break even point" is 5/day (presuming your numbers, which I do not), which is well below the amount of SPAM I get a day.
If your alternative strategy for dealing with SPAM was to delete SPAM as it comes in, you have to carefully balance the time spent to make sure it is SPAM and the probability of deleting a legitimate e-mail.
As of March 1, 2003, the Secret Service and the Customs Services have been moved from the Treasury Department to the Department of Homeland Security. ATF has been split between the "tax and trade bureau", which remained in the Treasury Department, and the "law enforcement functions", which moved to the Department of Justice.
I know it's a joke, but it's a little out-of-date.
The beauty of mathematics is that it doesn't work like natural sciences. Once something is proved, it is forever proven and correct in maths.
Testing if a proof is correct is not exactly easy. That is, you have to prove the proof is correct, and then prove that proof of the proof is correct. You can have bugs, much like Dunwoody's proof did. In fact, most proofs of this caliber have bugs in them for a couple years until they are found and fixed or the proof falls apart.
I do not know examples of any long times (decades or longer) that a proof has gone before discovering a problem, but it is the fear of many a doctoral candidate in mathematics and theoretical computer science that someone on the committee will bring up some case that shows your theorem is wrong. I saw this happen during a paper presentation once (not a defense), making the entire work wrong in a single stroke. Not pleasant for the presentor, I'm sure.
Re:Yes, well, here is my experience...
on
Legacy-Free PCs
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Performance! Every keypress, I have to wait MICROSECONDS for the keyboard to patiently transmit the key codes over these archaic, slow transmission wires to get to the motherboard, which then has to translate the ANALOG signal (yes, they are still varying the voltage back and forth to transmit the signal, just like Alexander Graham's phone did) back to digital. It's like surfing the Internet on a dialup.
With USB, suddenly all those signal can be transmitted digitally at USB speeds. This means my computer gets the signals faster and the response time is better (like surfing on a T3). You may not notice a difference, but, believe me, this makes a big difference for people who type at speeds above 2000 words per minute.
More seriously, the main goal, as I understand it, is to cut down on the number of connectors and definitely the numeber of different types of connectors. Your mouse, your keyboard, your printer, and all your normal peripherals (modulo the monitor) can be connected via a signal interface: USB. Of course, they then create two USB connections and then there's the power problem. They also did not help with connections to the outside world (phone line or ethernet), although it's not clear how they could. The point is to get rid of the finding-the-right-jack problem and make it 'plug it into any jack'.
For completeness, that guy was Karl Frederich Gauss. He also found a way to construct a regular 17-gon with straight-edge and compass (actually, an infinite class, but I forget the rule). He also did physics, mostly in magnetism.
My personal theory is that the Internet is being run by 20 morons:
We are all morons. Not complete morons, of course. Assuming that we make mistakes 1% of the time, but catch those mistakes 99% of the time before they become a problem, that still means that we make un-caught mistakes (are morons) 0.01% of the time. Thus, everyone is at least 0.0001 of a moron. If there are 200,000 system and network administrators out there, that means there are 20 morons running the Internet.
Determining the number of morons using the Internet is left to the interested reader.
The "bold" button does not refer to "sections" of the document.
However, claim 13 of '574 starts with "a browser for navigating a document". A website is not a browser. It is a document. In fact, the title of both patent '841 and patent '574 is "structure document browser", not "structured document" or "structured document browsing".
Acrobat Reader's outline view (where it continues to be displayed on the side) to be might infringe. Powerpoint might infringe (browsing the presentation with a list of the slides on the side). Web browsers might infringe because it will render documents with this functionality. However, I do not see how one can objectively construe a website (a set of (possibly dynamic) text files with loose definitions of layout and navigation) to be a "browser", unles the website navigation is writtin in Java (thereby perhaps making it a "browser").
Re: speed of light can vary
on
E ~ mc^2
·
· Score: 1
Through water it's about c/1.335.
Hmm...This comment made me consider the speed of light through a moving medium. If the water was flowing at some high speed (relative to the observer, of course) while light was traveling through the medium, I believe that this would actually cause the propogation speed of light non-constant between inertial frames.
Using Mozilla, I generally block a site if and when it sends me an annoying graphic, which is usually, but not always, advertisement. I've found, however, that once I block an advertisement, I click on it more often.
I use the keyboard for screen movement, so I must click on the window to get it focus. I do this by picking a blank part of the screen and clicking there. Increasingly, this blank part is a blocked graphical advertisement. Thus, these clicks become advertising hits when before they rarely were.
This may not match the behavior of other people, but now that I'm blocking ads, the number of advertisements I "click on" has gone up enomorously (less than one a month to about one a week).
Is that ability ever utilized to any extent in legitimate, day-to-day operations?
Yes. My company, Lumeta, does scans of corporate networks, connecting to hundreds to thousands of new machines every second. Of course, if this is done at the OS-level, this is a non-issue, since we do not use connect() anyway (does not give us enough information, reactivity, or control), but rather construct packets from scratch and, regardless, we can play with the OS, since it runs on FreeBSD.
If, on the other hand, this is done on the network-level, this would cause problems, and we would have to be put on exclude lists on every router up to the corporate backbone. We balance the load across the corporation's entire IP space, but it takes a lot of divisions to get from even 100/second to 1/second.
We already run into issues where a certain router vendor has an odd "cache" that is not reaped when memory starts to become low. This would make things much worse.
Unfortunately, if this can be disabled in the OS programatically, it is useless, so the network is the obvious place to put such a restriction. Of course, now the network is retaining state about all connections going through it. Most firewalls already do this, however.
"i have to pay $130 for just being able to install software easily?!?"
What Lindows want them to think is: "I have to pay $130 per year and I get access to a gigantic list of programs I can use?"
Of course, the programs are available already (perhaps only most of them), but with more-difficult install mechanisms, but it's not clear to me that is obvious to the normal user or that they would care that they are paying $130 to get packages wrapped the way they understand.
Of course, this only works if Lindows work hard to maintain this list of programs, which, as has been pointed out, is not a simple task. On the other hand, that is what I view the $130 is supposed to buy. We'll see.
That's the beauty of settlement. They did not admit it was illegal (at least, their actions imply they settled without an admission of guilt) and it was not found illegal by a court, so therefore, it would have to be taken to court (an entirely new lawsuit) and proven illegal.
$67 millions dollars and not have to admit guilt? Sounds like a "good business decision" to me.
Higher fees are certainly not the solution. Higher fees are there either to pay for the changes or to penalize people who game the system (excessive number of claims). I presume you mean the base rate increase, since charging extra for patents that require an examainer to review thousands of claims seems excessively sane.
They did not propose raising the patent fee to reduce the number of patents filed; they are raising the fees to get the resources to do their job better. They want to hire more examainers so they have more time to examine patents, better certification and training, and audits. You could argue that these are not the right way to go, but the fee increase is there to give them enough money to make the changes.
Their goal is to reduce the backlog, improve the review process, and to penalize companies and individuals who are gaming the system ("throw everything at the wall, just to see what will stick").
And, of course, if the federal government did not charge a ~10% hidden tax on patent fees, the increase would not have to be as great.
I can't take out a patent on a method of using my car to light my house
Are you sure about that?
All inventions are new application of existing technology (ignore patents on DNA, since that is not always new). You take a bit of this, a bit of that, and pretty soon you have a car.
Since I program, I think in terms of software. Libraries exist, but I can create a new routine that uses the functions. Just because all I did was find a new application for libraries does not mean I did not create something, nor that what I did not have value.
To take your argument to the extreme: "I'm sorry, this invention is just a new application for atoms."
I do agree that "do X with a computer", where X has been around forever does not seem very innovative. On the other hand, if it was not innovative, why was it not done earlier? (no demand, no one pursued, no one had thought of it (but that would make it innovative)). On the other other hand, just because it is innovative does not mean that it should qualify for a patent.
That they have destroyed the artistic integrity of the original by augmenting with their own artistic vision.
To an artist, this probably sounds like support for DGA, while CleanFlicks could read it the other way entirely.
I propose a different analogy. What if someone bought your software (presuming you do not share the communistic software vision of "write software as you can and use software as you need"), altered it to take out the "dirty" parts, and then resold it? For example, Microsoft buys copies of TuxRacer, changes the character to Wile E. Gates (Tux being "dirtied" by all that GPL exposure) and cripples Linux support, and then resells it as Microsoft-enhanced TuxRacer. However, since most software packages are tools, not "works of art", this analogy is imperfect.
My personal feeling is that editted films (btw, I consider adding commercials to be editting) are generally much worse than their original, but they should not be enjoined from making it for those who do want it.
*donning asbestos body armor* The basic claim is: Look, Napster was found to be illegal, and we really do not see how this is different. We are losing money from the continued operation and we are obviously going to win, could you please shut them down now?
How do they functionally differ from Napster? Given the Napster precedent, what arguement is there to make that THIS ruling should and will be different? A summary judgement (from my understanding, please correct if I am wrong) is generally granted for the prosecution when a) you can demonstrate or argue that the continued operation of the defendent is having a (significant?) negative affect on your business and b) you can demonstrate that you have a high likelihood of winning the case. RIAA argued both in the Napster case, so why would the SJ not be awarded? You may disagree with the Napster ruling, but a judge made the ruling according to the evidence and laws as he or she understood them, which is strong evidence from the court's PoV.
RIAA is a abusive monopoly, working hard to cripple the computer and software industries. (IMO, although this is only a side-effect of their efforts, not their goal). However, Napster, et al were built for illegally distributing copyright files. Sure, they would not have to be used that way, but it is the vast majority of the traffic (okay, the vast majority of file transfers) and that is what makes them popular. Given this, I do not see how it should not be shut down, even if shutting it down assists an organization as repulsive as the RIAA. If you do not like the RIAA, take action directly: talk to your representatives (either to oppose pro-RIAA legislation or to propose or support pro-competition legislation), fund their opposition (both alternative music sources (crippled by the RIAA stranglehold) and those fighting their actions (please try to focus on the less hopeless actions)), and refuse to do business with them.
Re:depends on what you call perfect
on
Awari Solved
·
· Score: 1
I agree with everything you've said.
However, let's say you are writing a program to play against a imperfect opponent. If the first player is guaranteed to win, then how should the computer play as the second player? The goal is to give your opponent an appealing move that improves your situation. This is a different problem, as you can use past behavior to try to guess at future behavior (what the opponent values, etc). Perfect requires a notion of the goals of your opponent, which are not always clear (what if the opponent is trying to let you win without being obvious about it (parent-like behavior for small children)). The simplistic notion of "maximizing the worst they could do" is the one used for these solutions, but there are other interesting ones.
RoShamBo is game theoretically an uninteresting game. If every played the random strategy, no one would win. However, since some people do not, suddenly the game changes. The random strategy does no better with a suboptimal opponent, while other strategies do better.
Re: wouldn't improperly encrypted pkts be better
on
Wireless Camouflage?
·
· Score: 2
This sounds more interesting to me. I have no closely looked at the exploitation of WEP to see if introduces a low level (~1%) of improperly encrypted packets would cause problems or not. My guess is that it would, although you would have to be careful that the false encryptions were subtly wrong. What I do not know if how much harder it would make it. Perhaps more important, I do not know how possible it is to do with commercial cards.
Of course, the much better solution would be if encryption was used properly by wireless networks. If you add a good key management system, it might even be usable (a globally shared key is just not a good idea). Many people are working on these, of course. Of course, it does not matter how good your encryption is if people do not use it.
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It then goes on to grant unlimited distribution provided specific rules are adhered to.
I'm sorry, but that statement is hilarious. You are granted "unlimited" distribution "provided specific rules are adhered to". I do not dispute that the GPL grants more rights than you would have without it (it specifically says you do not have to accept it). However, it offers only "limited" distribution rights. In fact, your distribution rights are limited to licensing under the GPL.
It is certainly true that the distribution rights are much greater than most commercial packages. That is, you have non-zero distribution rights (most EULAs claim to limit even resale of the "purchased license"). However, compared to the BSD license, the GPL is a straightjacket when it comes to distribution. This is, of course, the point of the GPL: GPL developers do not want their hard work put into a closed-source product. The GPL is designed to force open-source distribution of derivatives.
Does this mean that SCO now has a legal basis for suing Joe User for downloading a Red Hat ISO?
What do you mean a "legal basis"? They've certainly intimated that they could and might sue for such. However, you can sue anyone you like for anything you like. The sued can, of course, countersue for harassment, etc. In this case, I would expect IBM to file a counter-motion for an injunction against SCO saying IBM cannot distribute AIX. Regardless, SCO's attempted revocation of the AIX license does not affect the legality of Linux. It's merely SCO's retaliation (blackmail, if you will) for IBM not giving SCO what they want.
The judge is likely to make a quick decision (IANAL) between the two injunctions, as SCO is clearly costing IBM by their statements and IBM is clearly costing SCO by distributing unlicensed code (only one of those is "illegal", but which one?). Oh, the anticipation.
Someone making $20 an hour would "lose" about $3.33 an hour by watching 10 minutes of commercials. That's a far cry from the $0.001 it might cost you to receive a spam. Do you get 3,300 spams a day? :-) That's your break even point.
One spam costs me a couple seconds to recognize and delete if my Spam filter does not catch it. It also can cost me much longer if I want to not receive it in the future, finding the unsubscription instructions and figuring out if the sender is of sufficient quality that I believe that unsubscribing is even worth it. Presuming that it's SPAM from a real company, then I have follow the unsubscription request. Then, about 30% of the time (or more), when I get another e-mail a month later, I have to find out who cares at the company and tell them that their unsubscription system is buggy and that would they please manually delete me.
$0.001 at $20/hr is 180 milliseconds to perform all those actions, which is probably not enough. Let's say 2 minutes per e-mail (a conservative estimate), which is $0.66 of time, assuming the same $20/hr number. Now the "break even point" is 5/day (presuming your numbers, which I do not), which is well below the amount of SPAM I get a day.
If your alternative strategy for dealing with SPAM was to delete SPAM as it comes in, you have to carefully balance the time spent to make sure it is SPAM and the probability of deleting a legitimate e-mail.
As of March 1, 2003, the Secret Service and the Customs Services have been moved from the Treasury Department to the Department of Homeland Security. ATF has been split between the "tax and trade bureau", which remained in the Treasury Department, and the "law enforcement functions", which moved to the Department of Justice.
I know it's a joke, but it's a little out-of-date.
The beauty of mathematics is that it doesn't work like natural sciences. Once something is proved, it is forever proven and correct in maths.
Testing if a proof is correct is not exactly easy. That is, you have to prove the proof is correct, and then prove that proof of the proof is correct. You can have bugs, much like Dunwoody's proof did. In fact, most proofs of this caliber have bugs in them for a couple years until they are found and fixed or the proof falls apart.
I do not know examples of any long times (decades or longer) that a proof has gone before discovering a problem, but it is the fear of many a doctoral candidate in mathematics and theoretical computer science that someone on the committee will bring up some case that shows your theorem is wrong. I saw this happen during a paper presentation once (not a defense), making the entire work wrong in a single stroke. Not pleasant for the presentor, I'm sure.
Performance! Every keypress, I have to wait MICROSECONDS for the keyboard to patiently transmit the key codes over these archaic, slow transmission wires to get to the motherboard, which then has to translate the ANALOG signal (yes, they are still varying the voltage back and forth to transmit the signal, just like Alexander Graham's phone did) back to digital. It's like surfing the Internet on a dialup.
With USB, suddenly all those signal can be transmitted digitally at USB speeds. This means my computer gets the signals faster and the response time is better (like surfing on a T3). You may not notice a difference, but, believe me, this makes a big difference for people who type at speeds above 2000 words per minute.
More seriously, the main goal, as I understand it, is to cut down on the number of connectors and definitely the numeber of different types of connectors. Your mouse, your keyboard, your printer, and all your normal peripherals (modulo the monitor) can be connected via a signal interface: USB. Of course, they then create two USB connections and then there's the power problem. They also did not help with connections to the outside world (phone line or ethernet), although it's not clear how they could. The point is to get rid of the finding-the-right-jack problem and make it 'plug it into any jack'.
For completeness, that guy was Karl Frederich Gauss. He also found a way to construct a regular 17-gon with straight-edge and compass (actually, an infinite class, but I forget the rule). He also did physics, mostly in magnetism.
My personal theory is that the Internet is being run by 20 morons:
We are all morons. Not complete morons, of course. Assuming that we make mistakes 1% of the time, but catch those mistakes 99% of the time before they become a problem, that still means that we make un-caught mistakes (are morons) 0.01% of the time. Thus, everyone is at least 0.0001 of a moron. If there are 200,000 system and network administrators out there, that means there are 20 morons running the Internet.
Determining the number of morons using the Internet is left to the interested reader.
CmdrTaco is practicing informatics without a license! CmdrTaco has let the terrorists already win!
Current data:
180 petabits/day = 22.5 petabytes/day = 273 gigabytes/sec.
Presuming 250 million people using the Internet, that's 1118 bytes/sec for each person, or 92 MB/day. Are you doing your part?
2007 prediction:
5,175 petabits/day = 650 petabytes/day = 7.66 terabytes/sec.
Presuming 1 billion people using the Internet, that's 7,850 bytes/sec per person, or 647 MB/day. An average of one CD per day per person.
The "bold" button does not refer to "sections" of the document.
However, claim 13 of '574 starts with "a browser for navigating a document". A website is not a browser. It is a document. In fact, the title of both patent '841 and patent '574 is "structure document browser", not "structured document" or "structured document browsing".
Acrobat Reader's outline view (where it continues to be displayed on the side) to be might infringe. Powerpoint might infringe (browsing the presentation with a list of the slides on the side). Web browsers might infringe because it will render documents with this functionality. However, I do not see how one can objectively construe a website (a set of (possibly dynamic) text files with loose definitions of layout and navigation) to be a "browser", unles the website navigation is writtin in Java (thereby perhaps making it a "browser").
Through water it's about c/1.335.
Hmm...This comment made me consider the speed of light through a moving medium. If the water was flowing at some high speed (relative to the observer, of course) while light was traveling through the medium, I believe that this would actually cause the propogation speed of light non-constant between inertial frames.
I had not noticed that before.
Using Mozilla, I generally block a site if and when it sends me an annoying graphic, which is usually, but not always, advertisement. I've found, however, that once I block an advertisement, I click on it more often.
I use the keyboard for screen movement, so I must click on the window to get it focus. I do this by picking a blank part of the screen and clicking there. Increasingly, this blank part is a blocked graphical advertisement. Thus, these clicks become advertising hits when before they rarely were.
This may not match the behavior of other people, but now that I'm blocking ads, the number of advertisements I "click on" has gone up enomorously (less than one a month to about one a week).
Is that ability ever utilized to any extent in legitimate, day-to-day operations?
Yes. My company, Lumeta, does scans of corporate networks, connecting to hundreds to thousands of new machines every second. Of course, if this is done at the OS-level, this is a non-issue, since we do not use connect() anyway (does not give us enough information, reactivity, or control), but rather construct packets from scratch and, regardless, we can play with the OS, since it runs on FreeBSD.
If, on the other hand, this is done on the network-level, this would cause problems, and we would have to be put on exclude lists on every router up to the corporate backbone. We balance the load across the corporation's entire IP space, but it takes a lot of divisions to get from even 100/second to 1/second.
We already run into issues where a certain router vendor has an odd "cache" that is not reaped when memory starts to become low. This would make things much worse.
Unfortunately, if this can be disabled in the OS programatically, it is useless, so the network is the obvious place to put such a restriction. Of course, now the network is retaining state about all connections going through it. Most firewalls already do this, however.
"i have to pay $130 for just being able to install software easily?!?"
What Lindows want them to think is: "I have to pay $130 per year and I get access to a gigantic list of programs I can use?"
Of course, the programs are available already (perhaps only most of them), but with more-difficult install mechanisms, but it's not clear to me that is obvious to the normal user or that they would care that they are paying $130 to get packages wrapped the way they understand.
Of course, this only works if Lindows work hard to maintain this list of programs, which, as has been pointed out, is not a simple task. On the other hand, that is what I view the $130 is supposed to buy. We'll see.
That's the beauty of settlement. They did not admit it was illegal (at least, their actions imply they settled without an admission of guilt) and it was not found illegal by a court, so therefore, it would have to be taken to court (an entirely new lawsuit) and proven illegal.
$67 millions dollars and not have to admit guilt? Sounds like a "good business decision" to me.
Higher fees are certainly not the solution. Higher fees are there either to pay for the changes or to penalize people who game the system (excessive number of claims). I presume you mean the base rate increase, since charging extra for patents that require an examainer to review thousands of claims seems excessively sane.
They did not propose raising the patent fee to reduce the number of patents filed; they are raising the fees to get the resources to do their job better. They want to hire more examainers so they have more time to examine patents, better certification and training, and audits. You could argue that these are not the right way to go, but the fee increase is there to give them enough money to make the changes.
Their goal is to reduce the backlog, improve the review process, and to penalize companies and individuals who are gaming the system ("throw everything at the wall, just to see what will stick").
And, of course, if the federal government did not charge a ~10% hidden tax on patent fees, the increase would not have to be as great.
I can't take out a patent on a method of using my car to light my house
Are you sure about that?
All inventions are new application of existing technology (ignore patents on DNA, since that is not always new). You take a bit of this, a bit of that, and pretty soon you have a car.
Since I program, I think in terms of software. Libraries exist, but I can create a new routine that uses the functions. Just because all I did was find a new application for libraries does not mean I did not create something, nor that what I did not have value.
To take your argument to the extreme: "I'm sorry, this invention is just a new application for atoms."
I do agree that "do X with a computer", where X has been around forever does not seem very innovative. On the other hand, if it was not innovative, why was it not done earlier? (no demand, no one pursued, no one had thought of it (but that would make it innovative)). On the other other hand, just because it is innovative does not mean that it should qualify for a patent.
How would you feel?
That they have destroyed the artistic integrity of the original by augmenting with their own artistic vision.
To an artist, this probably sounds like support for DGA, while CleanFlicks could read it the other way entirely.
I propose a different analogy. What if someone bought your software (presuming you do not share the communistic software vision of "write software as you can and use software as you need"), altered it to take out the "dirty" parts, and then resold it? For example, Microsoft buys copies of TuxRacer, changes the character to Wile E. Gates (Tux being "dirtied" by all that GPL exposure) and cripples Linux support, and then resells it as Microsoft-enhanced TuxRacer. However, since most software packages are tools, not "works of art", this analogy is imperfect.
My personal feeling is that editted films (btw, I consider adding commercials to be editting) are generally much worse than their original, but they should not be enjoined from making it for those who do want it.
*donning asbestos body armor*
The basic claim is: Look, Napster was found to be illegal, and we really do not see how this is different. We are losing money from the continued operation and we are obviously going to win, could you please shut them down now?
How do they functionally differ from Napster? Given the Napster precedent, what arguement is there to make that THIS ruling should and will be different? A summary judgement (from my understanding, please correct if I am wrong) is generally granted for the prosecution when a) you can demonstrate or argue that the continued operation of the defendent is having a (significant?) negative affect on your business and b) you can demonstrate that you have a high likelihood of winning the case. RIAA argued both in the Napster case, so why would the SJ not be awarded? You may disagree with the Napster ruling, but a judge made the ruling according to the evidence and laws as he or she understood them, which is strong evidence from the court's PoV.
RIAA is a abusive monopoly, working hard to cripple the computer and software industries. (IMO, although this is only a side-effect of their efforts, not their goal). However, Napster, et al were built for illegally distributing copyright files. Sure, they would not have to be used that way, but it is the vast majority of the traffic (okay, the vast majority of file transfers) and that is what makes them popular. Given this, I do not see how it should not be shut down, even if shutting it down assists an organization as repulsive as the RIAA. If you do not like the RIAA, take action directly: talk to your representatives (either to oppose pro-RIAA legislation or to propose or support pro-competition legislation), fund their opposition (both alternative music sources (crippled by the RIAA stranglehold) and those fighting their actions (please try to focus on the less hopeless actions)), and refuse to do business with them.
If the four plots listed are `an exhaustive summary of what can happen in a "Star Trek" movie', why is Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country missing?
Sorry, my sarcasm detector exploded.
I agree with everything you've said.
However, let's say you are writing a program to play against a imperfect opponent. If the first player is guaranteed to win, then how should the computer play as the second player? The goal is to give your opponent an appealing move that improves your situation. This is a different problem, as you can use past behavior to try to guess at future behavior (what the opponent values, etc). Perfect requires a notion of the goals of your opponent, which are not always clear (what if the opponent is trying to let you win without being obvious about it (parent-like behavior for small children)). The simplistic notion of "maximizing the worst they could do" is the one used for these solutions, but there are other interesting ones.
RoShamBo is game theoretically an uninteresting game. If every played the random strategy, no one would win. However, since some people do not, suddenly the game changes. The random strategy does no better with a suboptimal opponent, while other strategies do better.
This sounds more interesting to me. I have no closely looked at the exploitation of WEP to see if introduces a low level (~1%) of improperly encrypted packets would cause problems or not. My guess is that it would, although you would have to be careful that the false encryptions were subtly wrong. What I do not know if how much harder it would make it. Perhaps more important, I do not know how possible it is to do with commercial cards.
Of course, the much better solution would be if encryption was used properly by wireless networks. If you add a good key management system, it might even be usable (a globally shared key is just not a good idea). Many people are working on these, of course. Of course, it does not matter how good your encryption is if people do not use it.