Yes, you beat me to it. A correctly-configured ECC motherboard with real ECC memory would defeat this. Watch out for fake ECC memory that just simulates the correction bits.

Once memory starts being vulnerable to row interference, having a machine without ECC becomes much more dangerous, regardless of this exploit.

One thing that Mozilla doesn't get (and engineers in general, I ween) is that changing things imposes a cognitive load on the users.

I'm used to Firefox, it does what I want and doesn't require my attention very much. The major reason I don't switch to Chrome or any of the other browsers is cognitive load: I'd have to learn an entire new way of doing things. Different looks, different icons, different behaviour... it would take hours to figure out the new system, many minor "how can I get it to do this..." moments amortized over the next year.

Every time Firefox changes, it's a distraction. Something to notice, figure out, and get around. For me this time it's the offline cache system - no amount of fiddling with the options or about:config will cause the system to save tabs on program exit and load those tabs anew on start - the weather *has* to show yesterday's page on program startup(*).

The previous issue (for me) was putting the window rendering in an external thread, the upshot was that cascading menus took several seconds to render. Click, count to three, then see the bookmarks... move the cursor, count to three, see the selection bar move down. Setting the about:config option to undo this caused Firefox to crash on every boot, but un-setting "use hardware acceleration" fixed that. (My dad is *totally* going to figure that out and not move to Chrome instead.)

All this "OMGWTF we need to be like Chrome!!!" and "OMGWTF we need a chicklet interface" is driving users away from the system. For every change, a number of users say "screw it, I'm moving to $OtherBrowser".

Changing behaviour at all is stupid, doing it once a month is ridiculously stupid. They're thinking in terms of "how can we add more functionality" instead of "how can we attract and keep users".

Pro tip: adding complexity to every little feature does not necessarily make your software more popular.

(*) To be fair, I've only tried 6 of the 64 possible combinations of options that might affect this (in Options->Privacy and about:config). It might be a simple fix, I just need to uncover the right combination of options to do it.

You have the Part 15 and ISM services for that. You really can buy a microwave link that's metropolitan-distance and legal to use.

We lost much of our 440 capability to PAVE PAWS in California. Remember, Amateur Radio is not the primary service on many bands. The military is on 440.

If you want that nearly infinite microwave spectrum, you have the Part 15 and ISM services. Absolutely nothing is stopping you. Power is not the issue with those frequencies, it's line of sight and Fresnel zones.

No, I absolutely do not have to prefix my words with anything. You do that by posting as an anonymous coward. I use my real name to indicate that I stand behind my words.

Yes. The usual mechanism here would be WiFi security, with HTTPS or SSL inside of it.

OK, no real technical data and some absurd claims here.

First all-digital transceiver? No. There have been others. Especially if you allow them to have a DAC and an ADC and no other components in the analog domain, but even without that, there are lots of IoT-class radios with direct-to-digital detectors and digital outputs directly to the antenna. You might have one in your car remote (mine is two-way).

And they have to use patented algorithms? Everybody else can get along with well-known technology old enough that any applicable patents are long expired.

It would be nicer if there was some information about what they are actually doing. If they really have patented it, there's no reason to hold back.

Well, I'm a copyright lawyer, so I doubt I'm "completely and totally ignorant of the law." Have you considered the possibility that your analysis is wrong?

Just thought I'd mention it, since you did make a rather broad statement suggesting that works cannot enter the public domain unless deliberately placed there by the copyright holder. While copyright holders can put works into the public domain, it's not true that that is the only way for works to enter the public domain.

"Um, no. That would not be the scenes a faire doctrine."

The scenes a faire doctrine, which I don't have to google for, thanks, permits people to copy without fear of infringement, stock elements from works, which are typical, if not indispensible, for works that have a particular setting, genre, theme, etc.

In this case, where you have a show about teenagers fighting monsters with martial arts and giant robots, it would not infringe if you had a five person team, each member of which had personalities as described above, and where the members of the team were color-coded. It's simply expected of the genre, and therefore fair game, even if you copied it from another copyrighted work.

Now if the specific thing you copied was a very detailed example, and you kept all the details, you might then have a problem. So it depends on how much Power Rangers embellished on this standard device, if they did, and if so, how much of that embellishment, if any, was used in this case.

If you disagree as to my explanation, please feel free to actually say what you think the scenes a faire doctrine is.

I didn't say Disney's Peter Pan. I was talking about JM Barrie's Peter Pan, which Disney's Peter Pan is based on.

A new version of Peter Pan, based on Barrie's, could still tarnish the character well enough (if done right, and if widely published) so as to harm Disney's Peter Pan merely by association. But it would be lawful to do this. Disney's copyright on their version of Peter Pan does not extend to stopping other people from making their own derivatives of Barrie's work, even if they're very unwholesome derivatives.

Spock in Amok Time is good Spock, just rageful and murderous. Evil Spock (with a goatee -- that's how you can tell he's evil) was from episode 33, "Mirror, Mirror."

Time shifting is typically something that the end-user does. Tivo, like Sony before it (The original time shifting lawsuit was against Sony for their Betamax), merely makes the machine. So long as there is at least a potential lawful use for the recording function of the machine, they can go on making them. The Supreme Court found that at least some time shifting would be fair, and that was enough.

Space shifting is another example, the original case was against Diamond for their Rio MP3 players, but Apple's iPod relied on it, as did basically everyone else.

No, the purpose of the use for time shifting, while not precisely commercial, is to simply use the work in the way that an ordinary user, who did not time shift, would use it. It's not strongly against fair use, but it certainly doesn't weigh for it in the way that an educational or transformative use would. At best it is a wash.

It does.

(Though the question of parodying a mark directly is different from parodying a work which happens to contain a mark. Parodying Star Wars, which includes X-Wings, and the Millennium Falcon, and Lightsabers, and so on is different from parodying the Star Wars logo all by itself)

Also, remember that trademarks are inferior to, and cannot be used as a substitute for, copyrights. And that trademarks themselves are subject to various limitations to allow for certain types of unauthorized use.

Peter Pan is in the public domain in the US. You can absolutely have Peter Pan promoting drug use ('fairy dust' can be the street name; a side effect might be paranoid hallucinations of ticking crocodiles, etc.), and publish it widely enough to detract from Disney's ability to keep Peter Pan a wholesome character that they can make tons of money off.

Go nuts.

But because people can ignore that -- In fact, I'm confident that there are bad porn versions of Peter Pan floating around -- it doesn't really detract from the original, or from the Disney movies, unless you allow it to. It's up to you, the audience member.

That's not quite right.

There's no special status for works which are parodies. Some parodies can be fair uses, but not all parodies are. And not all fair uses are parodies, though some fair uses are.

In any case, one factor in determining whether a use is fair or not is how much, and of that how substantial a part, of the original work is used. It's possible to have a fair use that uses all of a work, but also possible to have a use which uses very little of a work, but which is not fair.

While it all depends on the circumstances at hand, a good rule of thumb is to take only so much as you need. If you wanted to make a parody of Star Wars about how Luke waving the lightsaber around in Obi-Wan's house is dangerous, because Luke is a klutz, you could probably use some footage of that scene from the movie. You would have a harder time justifying using the entire movie, but only changing that one scene for the purposes of parody.

This is the oft-cited parody/satire dichotomy.

No seriously, some people really get into this stuff.

Anyway, it's not a bright line rule or anything, though some people like to pretend that it is. Satire is just as able to be a fair use as a parody can be, and a loss on the third fair use factor does not by itself prevent a use from being a fair use. There are no bright lines in fair use; it's all case-by-case analyses, utterly dependent on the specific facts at issue.

That's not really true. There is no hard and fast rule to this effect. Certainly fair use allows for both some parodies (but not all parodies) and some satires (but not all satires).

Courts generally are more likely to find fair use where the use was limited to what was needed, and generally find that satires don't need to use particular works so much as parodies do (because a parody is aimed at the work itself, whereas satires merely employ a work to aim at a different target altogether). But there's nothing in the law that prevents a satire from being a fair use depending on the overall circumstances. It's just a little harder to show.