you have the right to resell or copy work you've bought - but technology can prevent that, and if you circumvent the technology, you're breaking the law
This seems to be saying that it's the presence of anti-copying technology that makes it illegal to copy the data. So here's a thought problem:
Suppose I put in place a "copyright scheme" whereby the last bit of the data was flipped. In order to create an exact copy of the data you have to flip the last bit back before writing your copy. Or you could just ignore it, since that last bit isn't meaningful anyway, or you could copy it twice, since that would effectively flip it twice, back to the original value. Would this "scheme" be sufficient to make it illegal to copy my works?
If you extend the argument in the reverse direction, any scheme which has been hacked open in the manner that CSS was, with code and executables provided to the world, no longer prevents you from copying that work. Therefore, according to the prior argument, it's not illegal. According to the argument that it's only illegal to copy it while technology prevents you from copying it, as soon as technology no longer prevents you from copying it (the moment after you install the circumventing software) it's no longer illegal to copy it. I assume this means it's only illegal to copy it by an act of god.
[...] these tests measure *ability to do well in college*, [...]
These tests are intended to measure the ability to do well in college. They do not succeed. In the course of earning my BA in Psych, I took a lot of classes dealing with both the statistical and emotional aspects of standardized tests. As they are currently implemented, they fail badly in both arenas. Not only are SAT's not a good predictor of college performance (let alone lifetime success, which is really more important anyway), they're only maybe 10% better than random chance.
Why is it that these people are assuming that the minorities "can't" do well on standardized tests?
Because they don't. They just don't. They aren't stupid, but - and here's where those emotional aspects come in - they are made to feel stupid, and then to add injury to insult they are denied the rights to education that they deserve and can benefit from regardless of what those SAT scores say. While I disagree with Affirmative Action in principle, I disagree even more strongly with white people designing tests that don't take into account the way non-white people think - a way which, while equally effective in the real world, does not add up to success on those particular tests.
Why don't they give *EVERYONE* the lego test, and see how it pans out?
Politics, largely, but also fairness. Studies on these kinds of tests show they are good predictors for some things - including, not coincidentally, success in college - but they have to be proven in incremental steps or (a) the public won't accept them and (b) they could fail to work as intended when given to a larger audience. You don't spend a billion dollars to build an arsenal of new bombs unless you've tested a few of them. Incidentally, standardized tests (at least mainstream ones) are ALWAYS graded colorblind; SAT's are graded by machines, anyway, and I have no doubt that the lego tests will also be controlled for color and gender. It's standard practice.
Kinds of intelligence" is probably meaningless anyway. "intelligence" is supposed to refer to the generalized set of "kinds of intelligence". Sure, the tests don't measure them all, but the lego test doesn't *MEASURE* anything, it just gives you a platform to balance your prejudice on.
I'm not sure what you mean here, but the part about giving you a platform to balance your prejudice on is an interesting point. If these tests turn out to be as bad as the SAT's in the practice, they'll certainly be a waste of money, but they won't get adopted, and so there won't be any additional prejudice added by the process of prototyping that's going on now.
Many people have brought up the issue of preserving too much data - in other words, that you should trash useless data rather than subject yourself to the neverending task of keeping it backed up.
I'm asking now, how should you do so?
One paradigm I use is the concept of graduated copies. The idea is that the most vital data - information which is required every day for tasks you use should be the most accessible and the easiest to change. As data becomes less useful it should be moved into less accessible, more static regions of storage, until it moves into your equivalent of a "permanent" archive. Nothing is truly permanent unless we find a shortcut around entropy, but the permanent archive would have the feature that the data stored within never changes, is slow/difficult to access, and degrades very very slowly, but inexorably.
For example, your hard drive, in a few high-traffic folders, is the fastest and most accessible place for data. You can subdivide your hard drive, too, by making folders where you move data you don't think you're using. Eventually the hard drive goes onto your conventional backup media (CD-R's in my case), and you delete the non-vital data in the junk folders from the hard drive. Now the next time the drive gets a backup you're only backing up fresh data; your other junk already HAS a home, on that CD-R.
How you decide what is vital and what is not isn't easy, but here's one way: write a shell script that sorts all files on the drive by last access time, and prints out the bottom, say, 10%. (The bottom being the least-recently-accessed.) This is easier in Linux than in, say, Windows. That data probably never gets accessed, and you should uninstall it or kick it out to your permanent storage.
There are already several forums where security holes of all types (including Windows) are reported. This one was interesting because it has economic-politics implications. I don't know what they are exactly, but it's more meaningful than yet-another-hole-in-sendmail.
I can see a quick-and-dirty use for nano that is inherently biological: microsurgery. Laser surgery is nifty now, but a team of nanobot surgeons with lasers would be nifty *1000. The simplest possible application: send those little buggers in there to fry unwanted fat cells. Sure, it's crass and materialistic, but it will generate revenue for this research.
Contains a lot of thought on the nature of life, the modeling of consciousness in data, and even some thoughts on what to do with yourself when you can live forever as a computer. Do read it.
The student. In fact, except for the Alumni grants (and I doubt anyone asked them about this particular decision), the students pay for everything to happen on-campus.
It always annoys me when people forget this. College ain't free, and students are the customers.
Well, taking these guys to court for perjury would probably be the stupidest thing anyone could possibly do, sort of on the order of a spectator jumping into a bullfighting ring to challenge the bull because his smell offends you.
Generally you are correct, but if you read the last paragraph of the original letter:
I hereby state, under penalty of perjury under the laws of New York and under the laws of the United States, that the information in this notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that this law firm is authorized to act on behalf of the owners of an exclusive rights which are being infringed as set out in this notification.
A written document can contain an oathbound statement, and that statement is (potentially) perjurious because of the phrase "which are being infringed as set out in this notification." If no rights are being infringed upon (as the reply states) then that statement is false, and the lawyer who wrote it damn well knew it.
But not because, as the article claims, they can't charge late fees. (For them to make a profit on late fees would be unscrupulous and evil, which is why they probably do it, but it can't be a LOT of profit.)
If this becomes a real product (I have serious doubts) we may see just how much clout rental chains have with the Motion Picture Industry. Know why Blockbuster started giving away free popcorn if you brought the movie back by 8? It's not because they can put it back on the shelf -- chances are it will stay in the bin for a few more hours after that. It's because, if you bring it back by 8, the store's still open, and you can rent another movie.
They WANT you to go back. Every time you go back to drop off the movie, you might rent another movie.
It may run for much longer than the rechargable batteries currently in portable devices, but you have to replace it. That means going to the store ever' so often, or buying in bulk.
I'm not sure which is worse. Having a cell phone that stays charged for a month would be nice, but as it stands now, I only have to plug it into my cigarette lighter when I need more joos.
I think it's only a matter of time before OpenGL becomes "Open" for real. (You know what I mean.) In the wake of the slew of companies GPL'ing their own games, the pressure is on to crack that sucker wide. God knows there would be hoardes of rabid game programmers waiting to improve it.
Given that they have no overt reason to dis Linux, couldn't this instead be their first effort to make headway into the OS and the community? There has to be a first time for every company. Linus Torvaalds himself provided no support for Linux until he first started writing it:P.
Hell, my roommates and I EACH almost dropped out of school, and we had nothing more than 14.4s to the Internet. (Kids: 14.4 was a MODEM SPEED. That's 14400 bits per second.) We were MUDding 24/7 (literally - there were statistics kept on whose dialup university connection was online the most, and one of the computers on our LAN was always #1 out of the thousands in the list). If we'd had broadband, forget about graduating, we probably would have starved to death.
What you suggest may well be a strategy of RedHat's. With this release, though, Mandrake shows clearly that they have a slightly different strategy: come out of the shadows of being "just like RedHat" to being "Mandrake".
There's no other explanation for them finally diverging from RedHat's versioning scheme with a version all to themselves. And it's not just a marketing gimmick... this really is a newer, better distribution. DrakX and the new X configuration stuff alone makes it my top pick for distro. (Then there's the graphical installer, the partitioner, the speed, the sheer beauty:-)
They just announced that the real thing (the Air release) is now out. Runners on your marks.
Tell you the truth, I downloaded and burned the beta ISO and have been recommending it unreservedly to everyone in earshot ever since. There was a quirk or two with the installer but this is the best Linux distribution I've seen, bar none. (It's about the 5th I've tried - Slackware 1.x being the first.) My copy of Air will be burned onto a CD by 6 PM tonight. (I get home at 5:30.)
Wow, now I know who the US considers its enemies: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Cuba, Sudan, North Korea.
They really ought not to hard-code these countries though. What happens when they change down the road? This legislation ought to read something along the lines of
You may not knowingly export or re-export source code or products developed with this source code to $US_ENEMIES.
I use @Home, and I also use IP Masquerading (which is substantially similar to a proxy). I have also helped tons of people set up IP Masquerading. While exploits of the kind that they are talking about are certainly possible (especially using something like Win98SE's internet connection sharing or similar weak-security Internet sharing tools), to imply that hackers are posting spam using this method is ludicrous.
There are several reasons why. #1: Consider that the volumes of spam we're talking about - probably gigabytes upon gigabytes - would easily paralyze a cable modem connection, particularly when, for most @Home users, the upload cap is approximately 128Kbps (approx. ISDN speed). For anyone to make use of this exploit would require probably a dozen cracked systems per spammer.
#2 Every one of those systems is already being used by a human being (scratch that - several human beings; we are talking about a proxy here), who are going to complain to @Home, at which point they would have put a stop to the spamming.
#3: A UDP is only proposed after repeated attempts to notify the non-compliant admins of the problem. When @Home was notified, they could have found the addresses that the spam was posted from and discovered this "proxy" problem much earlier. Indeed, proxy problem or not, @Home could have remedied the situation much earlier than they are.
#4: Occam's Razor. Mr. Jackson's explanation is not the simplest one that fits all the facts. The simplest explanation is that @Home users are being allowed to post unadulterated spam and not being punished for it.
Having said that, I'm betting the spam problem goes away before the deadline. This is the usual "we don't have a problem and we're fixing it" notice that goes out after most of the UDP's, and usually, the UDP doesn't have to be enacted because the ISP knows (and simply refuses to admit) that they have a problem - and they fix it to avoid the punishment.
All this stuff fails the Occam's Razor test. Why postulate that life began elsewhere, when Earth itself is so well-suited to life? You might as well assume that a car sitting next to an auto factory was assembled accidentally by pieces falling individually out of the sky, rather than having been built in the factory.
You don't let a 12-year-old drive a car or use a loaded gun (although many ignorant families, and I use the word ignorant unrepentantly in this case, do irresponsibly allow their kids both of these freedoms.) The reason you don't allow those things is because the child could DIE. Or become permanently injured, or permanently injure someone else. If they are dead, there is no lesson that they can learn from their mistake.
Surfing the net and looking at porn does not kill your child. It allows him to make decisions on his own. That's what trust is about. Trust them. If they make a mistake, they learn without you having to tell them, and they love you more for it.
Porn, on the other hand, is only fascinating to them until it becomes easy to get access to it. Does censoring it change this behavior in children? No. So why not trust them to find out on their own? Better yet, why not tell them about sex yourself if you don't want them to get misinformation?
The real issue here, though, is censoring anything else the censorware company happens not to like and adds to the black box blacklist. I don't believe kids or adults are going to go into a public library to look at porn. I do know for a fact that censorware companies have lists that block sites that contain real ideas and should be viewable from a public library.
You do realize that the desktop support people who make sure the computers are running right are NOT the same people who wrote the broken code, don't you?
Homer J. Simpson today withdrew his suit against Springfield Nuclear Power Plant alleging that the company's decision to allow him to work from home led to a bizarre accident causing the irradiation of his rear end.
Slashdot Mirror
This seems to be saying that it's the presence of anti-copying technology that makes it illegal to copy the data. So here's a thought problem:
Suppose I put in place a "copyright scheme" whereby the last bit of the data was flipped. In order to create an exact copy of the data you have to flip the last bit back before writing your copy. Or you could just ignore it, since that last bit isn't meaningful anyway, or you could copy it twice, since that would effectively flip it twice, back to the original value. Would this "scheme" be sufficient to make it illegal to copy my works?
If you extend the argument in the reverse direction, any scheme which has been hacked open in the manner that CSS was, with code and executables provided to the world, no longer prevents you from copying that work. Therefore, according to the prior argument, it's not illegal. According to the argument that it's only illegal to copy it while technology prevents you from copying it, as soon as technology no longer prevents you from copying it (the moment after you install the circumventing software) it's no longer illegal to copy it. I assume this means it's only illegal to copy it by an act of god.
That's as good a definition of economic-politics as any I've heard.
These tests are intended to measure the ability to do well in college. They do not succeed. In the course of earning my BA in Psych, I took a lot of classes dealing with both the statistical and emotional aspects of standardized tests. As they are currently implemented, they fail badly in both arenas. Not only are SAT's not a good predictor of college performance (let alone lifetime success, which is really more important anyway), they're only maybe 10% better than random chance.
Why is it that these people are assuming that the minorities "can't" do well on standardized tests?
Because they don't. They just don't. They aren't stupid, but - and here's where those emotional aspects come in - they are made to feel stupid, and then to add injury to insult they are denied the rights to education that they deserve and can benefit from regardless of what those SAT scores say. While I disagree with Affirmative Action in principle, I disagree even more strongly with white people designing tests that don't take into account the way non-white people think - a way which, while equally effective in the real world, does not add up to success on those particular tests.
Why don't they give *EVERYONE* the lego test, and see how it pans out?
Politics, largely, but also fairness. Studies on these kinds of tests show they are good predictors for some things - including, not coincidentally, success in college - but they have to be proven in incremental steps or (a) the public won't accept them and (b) they could fail to work as intended when given to a larger audience. You don't spend a billion dollars to build an arsenal of new bombs unless you've tested a few of them. Incidentally, standardized tests (at least mainstream ones) are ALWAYS graded colorblind; SAT's are graded by machines, anyway, and I have no doubt that the lego tests will also be controlled for color and gender. It's standard practice.
Kinds of intelligence" is probably meaningless anyway. "intelligence" is supposed to refer to the generalized set of "kinds of intelligence". Sure, the tests don't measure them all, but the lego test doesn't *MEASURE* anything, it just gives you a platform to balance your prejudice on.
I'm not sure what you mean here, but the part about giving you a platform to balance your prejudice on is an interesting point. If these tests turn out to be as bad as the SAT's in the practice, they'll certainly be a waste of money, but they won't get adopted, and so there won't be any additional prejudice added by the process of prototyping that's going on now.
I'm asking now, how should you do so?
One paradigm I use is the concept of graduated copies. The idea is that the most vital data - information which is required every day for tasks you use should be the most accessible and the easiest to change. As data becomes less useful it should be moved into less accessible, more static regions of storage, until it moves into your equivalent of a "permanent" archive. Nothing is truly permanent unless we find a shortcut around entropy, but the permanent archive would have the feature that the data stored within never changes, is slow/difficult to access, and degrades very very slowly, but inexorably.
For example, your hard drive, in a few high-traffic folders, is the fastest and most accessible place for data. You can subdivide your hard drive, too, by making folders where you move data you don't think you're using. Eventually the hard drive goes onto your conventional backup media (CD-R's in my case), and you delete the non-vital data in the junk folders from the hard drive. Now the next time the drive gets a backup you're only backing up fresh data; your other junk already HAS a home, on that CD-R.
How you decide what is vital and what is not isn't easy, but here's one way: write a shell script that sorts all files on the drive by last access time, and prints out the bottom, say, 10%. (The bottom being the least-recently-accessed.) This is easier in Linux than in, say, Windows. That data probably never gets accessed, and you should uninstall it or kick it out to your permanent storage.
There are already several forums where security holes of all types (including Windows) are reported. This one was interesting because it has economic-politics implications. I don't know what they are exactly, but it's more meaningful than yet-another-hole-in-sendmail.
I can see a quick-and-dirty use for nano that is inherently biological: microsurgery. Laser surgery is nifty now, but a team of nanobot surgeons with lasers would be nifty *1000. The simplest possible application: send those little buggers in there to fry unwanted fat cells. Sure, it's crass and materialistic, but it will generate revenue for this research.
Contains a lot of thought on the nature of life, the modeling of consciousness in data, and even some thoughts on what to do with yourself when you can live forever as a computer. Do read it.
It always annoys me when people forget this. College ain't free, and students are the customers.
Well, taking these guys to court for perjury would probably be the stupidest thing anyone could possibly do, sort of on the order of a spectator jumping into a bullfighting ring to challenge the bull because his smell offends you.
I hereby state, under penalty of perjury under the laws of New York and under the laws of the United States, that the information in this notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that this law firm is authorized to act on behalf of the owners of an exclusive rights which are being infringed as set out in this notification.
A written document can contain an oathbound statement, and that statement is (potentially) perjurious because of the phrase "which are being infringed as set out in this notification." If no rights are being infringed upon (as the reply states) then that statement is false, and the lawyer who wrote it damn well knew it.
If this becomes a real product (I have serious doubts) we may see just how much clout rental chains have with the Motion Picture Industry. Know why Blockbuster started giving away free popcorn if you brought the movie back by 8? It's not because they can put it back on the shelf -- chances are it will stay in the bin for a few more hours after that. It's because, if you bring it back by 8, the store's still open, and you can rent another movie.
They WANT you to go back. Every time you go back to drop off the movie, you might rent another movie.
I'm not sure which is worse. Having a cell phone that stays charged for a month would be nice, but as it stands now, I only have to plug it into my cigarette lighter when I need more joos.
Given that they have no overt reason to dis Linux, couldn't this instead be their first effort to make headway into the OS and the community? There has to be a first time for every company. Linus Torvaalds himself provided no support for Linux until he first started writing it :P.
Hell, my roommates and I EACH almost dropped out of school, and we had nothing more than 14.4s to the Internet. (Kids: 14.4 was a MODEM SPEED. That's 14400 bits per second.) We were MUDding 24/7 (literally - there were statistics kept on whose dialup university connection was online the most, and one of the computers on our LAN was always #1 out of the thousands in the list). If we'd had broadband, forget about graduating, we probably would have starved to death.
There's no other explanation for them finally diverging from RedHat's versioning scheme with a version all to themselves. And it's not just a marketing gimmick... this really is a newer, better distribution. DrakX and the new X configuration stuff alone makes it my top pick for distro. (Then there's the graphical installer, the partitioner, the speed, the sheer beauty :-)
Tell you the truth, I downloaded and burned the beta ISO and have been recommending it unreservedly to everyone in earshot ever since. There was a quirk or two with the installer but this is the best Linux distribution I've seen, bar none. (It's about the 5th I've tried - Slackware 1.x being the first.) My copy of Air will be burned onto a CD by 6 PM tonight. (I get home at 5:30.)
They really ought not to hard-code these countries though. What happens when they change down the road? This legislation ought to read something along the lines of
You may not knowingly export or re-export source code or products developed with this source code to $US_ENEMIES.
There are several reasons why. #1: Consider that the volumes of spam we're talking about - probably gigabytes upon gigabytes - would easily paralyze a cable modem connection, particularly when, for most @Home users, the upload cap is approximately 128Kbps (approx. ISDN speed). For anyone to make use of this exploit would require probably a dozen cracked systems per spammer.
#2 Every one of those systems is already being used by a human being (scratch that - several human beings; we are talking about a proxy here), who are going to complain to @Home, at which point they would have put a stop to the spamming.
#3: A UDP is only proposed after repeated attempts to notify the non-compliant admins of the problem. When @Home was notified, they could have found the addresses that the spam was posted from and discovered this "proxy" problem much earlier. Indeed, proxy problem or not, @Home could have remedied the situation much earlier than they are.
#4: Occam's Razor. Mr. Jackson's explanation is not the simplest one that fits all the facts. The simplest explanation is that @Home users are being allowed to post unadulterated spam and not being punished for it.
Having said that, I'm betting the spam problem goes away before the deadline. This is the usual "we don't have a problem and we're fixing it" notice that goes out after most of the UDP's, and usually, the UDP doesn't have to be enacted because the ISP knows (and simply refuses to admit) that they have a problem - and they fix it to avoid the punishment.
All this stuff fails the Occam's Razor test. Why postulate that life began elsewhere, when Earth itself is so well-suited to life? You might as well assume that a car sitting next to an auto factory was assembled accidentally by pieces falling individually out of the sky, rather than having been built in the factory.
Surfing the net and looking at porn does not kill your child. It allows him to make decisions on his own. That's what trust is about. Trust them. If they make a mistake, they learn without you having to tell them, and they love you more for it.
Porn, on the other hand, is only fascinating to them until it becomes easy to get access to it. Does censoring it change this behavior in children? No. So why not trust them to find out on their own? Better yet, why not tell them about sex yourself if you don't want them to get misinformation?
The real issue here, though, is censoring anything else the censorware company happens not to like and adds to the black box blacklist. I don't believe kids or adults are going to go into a public library to look at porn. I do know for a fact that censorware companies have lists that block sites that contain real ideas and should be viewable from a public library.
You do realize that the desktop support people who make sure the computers are running right are NOT the same people who wrote the broken code, don't you?
Homer J. Simpson today withdrew his suit against Springfield Nuclear Power Plant alleging that the company's decision to allow him to work from home led to a bizarre accident causing the irradiation of his rear end.
Gotta love it - even we get a plug (He subscribes to "The Linux Grapevine".
You should consider reading the article before you criticize it. (Who moderated this guy up?)