Comment Re:More expensive for whom? (Score 4, Insightful) 183
Intel has an insanely high Gross Profit Margin of 75%. That is the opposite of selling at a loss.
Comment Re:Key Point Missing (Score 2) 34
The summary misses a key point. Yes they scan and store the entire book, but they are _NOT_ making the entire book available to everyone. For the most part they are just making it searchable.
Agreed that it's not in the summary, but as you correctly note, it's just a "summary". Anyone who reads the underlying blog post will read this among the facts on which the court based its opinion: "The public was allowed to search by keyword. The search results showed only the page numbers for the search term and the number of times it appeared; none of the text was visible."
So those readers who RTFA will be in the know.
Submission + - Appeals Court finds scanning to be fair use in Authors Guild v Hathitrust
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: In Authors Guild v Hathitrust, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has found that scanning whole books and making them searchable for research use is a fair use. In reaching its conclusion, the 3-judge panel reasoned, in its 34-page opinion (PDF), that the creation of a searchable, full text database is a "quintessentially transformative use", that it was "reasonably necessary" to make use of the entire works, that maintaining maintain 4 copies of the database was reasonably necessary as well, and that the research library did not impair the market for the originals. Needless to say, this ruling augurs well for Google in Authors Guild v. Google, which likewise involves full text scanning of whole books for research.
Comment ARIN is not in address exhaustion mode (Score 1) 197
> As of now, only AfriNIC is not in address exhaustion mode."
That is not true - ARIN (north America's RiR) is still handing out IPv4's and will continue to do so until down to their last
Comment Re:Still relevant nowadays? (Score 1) 58
For dual screen setups, using the proprietary drivers is an absolute mess, while the open source drivers work perfectly. And the free drivers are perfectly adequate for non-high-end-gaming. I can play Minecraft at 1920x1600 with the open source Radeon driver at acceptable framerates.
Comment Re:Still relevant nowadays? (Score 1) 58
Yes. There are free software projects making a driver for each of those, build upon Mesa. Both AMD (a lot) and NVIDIA (in small measure) has actually contributed to those projects, in addition to their closed source drivers.
Comment Re:Still relevant nowadays? (Score 2) 58
My impression is that basically all Linux distributions install the open source drivers by default. And in my experience, installing the proprietary drivers is messy.
And most distributions uses 3D in the window manager by default.
So I imagine that many more Linux users use the open source drivers (which in turn use Mesa) than uses the proprietary drivers.
Submission + - Councilman/Open Source Developer submits Open Source bill (gothamgazette.com)
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: New York City Council Member Ben Kallos (KallosEsq), who also happens to be a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) developer, just introduced legislation to mandate a government preference for FOSS and creating a Civic Commons website to facilitate collaborative purchasing of software. He argues that NYC could save millions of dollars with the Free and Open Source Software Preferences Act 2014, pointing out that the city currently has a $67 million Microsoft ELA. Kallos said: "It is time for government to modernize and start appreciating the same cost savings as everyone else."
Comment Re:Apply to Hollywood? Please? (Score 1) 136
Can this be used as precedent to dismiss all the pending RIAA and MPAA lawsuits? What about reversing past suits whose victims are already in the body count?
Don't I wish.
Comment A little late, but welcome (Score 1) 136
A cynic might argue that the key difference in this case was that, for a change, the ISP's, and not merely defendants, were challenging the subpoenas; but of course we all know that justice is 'blind'.
An ingrate might bemoan the Court's failure to address the key underlying fallacy in the "John Doe" cases, that because someone pays the bill for an internet account that automatically makes them a copyright infringer; but who's complaining over that slight omission?
A malcontent like myself might be a little unhappy that it took the courts ten (10) years to finally come to grips with the personal jurisdiction issue, which would have been obvious to 9 out of 10 second year law students from the get go, and I personally have been pointing it out and writing about it since 2005; but at least they finally did get there.
And a philosopher might wonder how much suffering might have been spared had the courts followed the law back in 2004 when the John Doe madness started; but of course I'm a lawyer, not a philosopher. :)
Bottom line, though: this is a good thing, a very good thing. Ten (10) years late in coming, but good nonetheless. - R.B. )
An ingrate might bemoan the Court's failure to address the key underlying fallacy in the "John Doe" cases, that because someone pays the bill for an internet account that automatically makes them a copyright infringer; but who's complaining over that slight omission?
A malcontent like myself might be a little unhappy that it took the courts ten (10) years to finally come to grips with the personal jurisdiction issue, which would have been obvious to 9 out of 10 second year law students from the get go, and I personally have been pointing it out and writing about it since 2005; but at least they finally did get there.
And a philosopher might wonder how much suffering might have been spared had the courts followed the law back in 2004 when the John Doe madness started; but of course I'm a lawyer, not a philosopher.
Bottom line, though: this is a good thing, a very good thing. Ten (10) years late in coming, but good nonetheless. - R.B. )
Comment Re:I'd say "right now". And it's getting better. (Score 1) 92
MineCraft
Comment Re:piratebay (Score 2) 306
And from http://www.sintel.org/download
FCC Orders Comcast To Stop Labeling Equipment Rental a Service Fee 97
An anonymous reader writes "The FCC denied an appeal by Comcast, which argued that its practice of charging customers separately for a DTA (digital terminal adapter) -- a converter box that allows cable subscribers with older televisions to receive digital channels, which the company said would be provided at no charge -- is not subject to rate regulation, because it is a service fee. The ruling was issued on March 19."
Also from the article: "In an e-mail last week to the Star Tribune, Comcast vice president of corporate affairs Mary Beth Schubert said the case “involved a relatively minor dispute about the way certain items are presented on the rate card but has no effect on overall pricing.” But, [Michael Bradley, an attorney whose firm represented Minneapolis-area franchising authorities in the dispute] argued the FCC’s decision sets a strong precedent for transparency within the cable industry."
Comment Re:FIPS 140-2 4.9.2. The Other Back Door. (Score 1) 168
> 2^128 - 2^112 [...] it's significant, especially if you have a huge data center in Utah.
But 2^128/2^112=2^16=65536
As an upper limit, assume that you remove 100*2^112. But that will still only eliminate 100/65536=0.1% of the search space. Any key that is brute-forceable by NSA with those 0.1% removed is also brute-forceable without those 0.1% of the search space removed.
> What may be worse (I don't know) is the simultaneous equations that it creates that are invariant for keys from such a source. Maybe they could be used in a cryptographic attack to help solve the sorts of attack that try to build big systems of simultaneous equations to attack the key schedule.
Something like this seems slightly more likely. But assuming the bits were perfectly random before the removal of repeated blocks, for finite keys it still doesn't generate anything that couldn't have been generated by chance without the removal of repeated blocks.
Comment Re:FIPS 140-2 4.9.2. The Other Back Door. (Score 1) 168
I agree that the output is not random by the standard definition. And obviously a bad RNG.
But making a practical attack based on that seems unlikely to me.
> For the record, RdRand doesn't do this because I refused to put it in because it's a back door in the spec.
Wait what - you designed Intel's RdRand hardware RNG?
So, since there is a lot of paranoia about backdoors in that, is there a backdoor?
