I would do this at work for writing code, but alas, I currently work on Windows, and its support for portrait monitors, let alone landscape+portrait, is broken enough that the path of least pain is just to use landscape alone.

Specifically, there seems to be no way to get proper antialiased fonts in portrait mode. While ClearType makes Windows fonts quite tolerable, it doesn't (and arguably can't) work in portrait mode. Traditional antialiasing could work, but for some inexplicable reason Windows disables it for a large range of font sizes (something like 7..13).

Even worse, you can either use ClearType on all of your monitors or none of them. On portrait monitors Windows, when using ClearType, still renders the fonts as if it was landscape; the result is an incredibly blurry, colored mess. So if you have one portrait monitor, you have to tolerate aliased fonts on all of your displays.

I live in Finland. Why do you think there is "instability" in "having to form a coalition government"? To the contrary, I find it ensures that every vote counts to the extent it should. I also would be somewhat horrified if some party in my country got enough votes that it could form a government alone. It would have way too much power.

Let's consider a simple example, say we have parties A (40% of votes), B (35 %), C (15 %) and D (10 %).

To be stable a coalition should have around 60 % of members of parliament behind it. Hence, generally the interesting stable coalitions would be A+B, A+C+D and B+C+D.

Now this allows for the parties to haggle and trade on those issues they consider most important. For example, say that party B strongly wants to have higher taxes for fuel, while party A is strongly opposed to it. Party A somewhat prefers to impose fascism, while the other parties don't want that.

Now, say that parties C and D would, everything else being equal, not want higher taxes for fuel, but they don't consider it a core issue.

Now, let's say party C wants to safeguard some minority to a larger extent compared to the other parties, and none of the other parties is strongly opposed to that (but would not do it on their own). Party D has similarly some core issue of its own.

Now, A+B may not be a good coalition because their agendas are so contradictory that it's hard to figure out a good deal. A+C+D would be a viable coalition: A, C and D get their wish on fuel taxes, but A has to give up on fascism (which it mildly prefers) and accept the core agendas of C and D.

Also, B+C+D would be possible; probably B would have to make some concessions that A is not willing to make.

As you can see, every party has an incentive to offer to give up to an extent on their minor agendas in order to reach a consensus that is preferable to each of them. And this, I believe, makes everybody get a better deal.

Also, a two-party system (which is a natural result of your voting system) seems to be incredibly polarizing. See, you have two kinds of people, democrats and republicans, and it seems to me that the ones you don't belong to are those crazy lunatic bastards. I find it hard to imagine that is healthy for a population.

Current_Pending_Sector > 0 means you most likely already have unrecoverable errors on your disk, because otherwise the sectors would already have been remapped (and thus not pending). So if your CPS = 3, expect there to be at least three sectors which will return an uncorrectable error when read. Writing to these sectors will allow them to be remapped, which will decrease your CPS.

The only thing I don't quite understand is the possible motivation for XimpleWare to only sue for patent infringement, but not for copyright infringement. It's not like you have to choose between the two (you can have both), and anyway it seems that a copyright claim would be quite strong.

Maybe it's just to keep the lawsuit more contained and therefore save in attorney's fees and costs? On the other hand it seems to me that only claiming patent infringement encourages the defendants to challenge the validity of the patents (which are anyway questionable after Bilski and Alice Corp), while they would have much more incentive to settle if there also was a copyright claim that they had little hope of winning.

Whether the access is gained by the same way or a different way from how a copyright owner would do it is not material to the law; the authorization of the copyright owner is the defining criterion. The law defines circumvention thus:

to "circumvent a technological measure" means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner'

For example, most non-authorized decryption would quite obviously be done in the same way as a copyright owner authorized device would do it. This would not make it not circumvention within the meaning of the law; the definition of circumvention is quite broad and essentially focuses on circumventing the requirement for authorization.

A mechanism doesn't need to prevent copying in order to qualify for DMCA's anticircumvention protections; it only needs to control access to a work. That's why you specifically need an exception for phones, among other things, even if phone unlocking does not let you copy the phone or its software.

"No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under [the Copyright Law]".

You would be right that this does not qualify as a DMCA takedown request. In this case that doesn't matter very much though, because the letter was sent to the publisher of the article, not only to a mere carrier of the article (like an ISP).

Normally carriers are not liable for what their customers do, unless they have sufficient (in legal terms, actual or constructive) knowledge of the infringing activity. The idea behind DMCA takedown requests is that by sending a certain formal request to an ISP, where you among other things must allege in good faith that your copyrights are being infringed, you put the ISP formally on notice that certain activity is infringing and thereby oblige the ISP to provisionally remove the content pending a counter-notice from the poster of the content. An ISP still has the option to not remove the content, but in that case it assumes liability if it turns out the content was in fact infringing. Significantly, sending a formal DMCA takedown request to an ISP has three special effects compared to sending a free-form cease and desist letter:

1) It puts the ISP under a threat of liability if it does not remove the content;

2) It absolves the ISP from liability towards the customer for removing the content;

3) It makes the sender of the takedown notice liable for damages and attorney's fees for knowingly materially misrepresenting facts in the notice.

So when sending a notice to an ISP (party other than who posted the information), it makes sense to send a DMCA notice, because the party has less incentive to act on free-form requests and because it can actually incur liability if it does. Thus many ISPs routinely disregard non-DMCA takedown requests.

When sending a notice to someone who actually posted the allegedly infringing content, it makes less sense to send a DMCA takedown request. The recipient is liable in any case, and sending the notice puts you in a disadvantage by making it more likely that you are liable for damages and attorney's fees.

I speculate Tektronix's challenge would most likely fail in this case rather because the information posted is not "any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof" that is primarily designed to circumvent a technical measure that effectively controls access to a protected work. (It certainly is primarily designed to circumvent, but it doesn't fall into any of the enumerated categories of technology, product, service, device or component.)

I don't think this article quite hits the nail. Specifically, its interpretation of the ruling is wrong (though IANAL). Having said that, this is certainly a positive ruling (if you are, like me, opposed to software patents), and in general my impression is that the trend is clearly against software patents. I'm not sure if there is any software patent the court would eventually uphold, but it generally prefers to avoid such sweeping rulings on matters that are not immediately before it. That is, the court is not entirely sure that no software patent can pass the muster, so it prefers to wait until it sees more credible software patents (like compression algorithms, apparently) to rule on those.

The article claims the Supreme Court ruled that the "invention" is not patent-eligible because "each step does no more than require a generic computer to perform generic computer functions". However, this is not the whole analysis and is akin to saying that no electrical circuit can get patent protection if it can be divided into basic components.

Let me quote the relevant parts from the ruling.

(page 7, emphasis added, internal quotations removed)

That is, the "elements", or the steps the algorithm in question performs, are to be considered both individually and as an ordered combination. The article somehow reads the second prong of this analysis entirely out, but such a reading is not faithful to the decision. Similarly to how an electrical circuit that consists of basic components can still merit patent protection, the court leaves open the possibility that an algorithm composed of "ordinary" steps might be eligible if the steps "as an ordered combination" contains an "inventive concept" that is "sufficient to ensure that the patent in practice amounts to significantly more than a patent upon [an abstract idea] itself".

The text that the article quotes is from page 15 of the ruling:

But this is only the paragraph that analyzes the claim elements separately. What the article does not recognize is the paragraph that immediately follows:

So, the fact that an algorithm only performs "purely conventional" steps is not the end of the inquiry; it just may be sufficient that such an algorithm when viewed as a whole ("ordered combination") may warrant protection.

Care to elaborate? I live in a Scandinavian country too and I'm curious about what's american-right-wing about our school system :)

This seems to be a rather natural result of a two-party, winner-takes-it-all system, or rather an electoral system that favors such systems.

I know this isn't going to be liked here, but I want to say it anyway:

One of the eternal prides of the American people is their freedom of speech. You are comparatively free to incite whatever kind of racial/ethnic/religious hatred, and the beautiful theory is that enough good speech will nullify the effects of bad speech.

I say (and have said before) this only works precisely because you don't live in a democracy, but in a system where the actual ruling class have the power do not let the government to be swayed by such popular sentiments and moreover control the sentiments by controlling media. I believe it is fair to say that historically having such freedoms in actual democracies very much tends to lead to genocides and otherwise really bad results.

It's quite simple really: The US cannot prevent losing control, but they can have it happen in an orderly way and perhaps get a better position in the resulting system.

You see, it's not like there is some magical Key To the Internet which is stored in a bunker in Oregon and which you can choose to either hand over or not. It's also not something you really can defend with guns to prevent other countries from having it.

It's rather more like having control over the rules of international air traffic. If you do it well and neutrally enough, it might be that few countries are annoyed that they don't have a say in the process you have set up for writing the rules. But you have no way of really enforcing those rules except inside your own borders.

Currently ICANN which drafts the rules (and works as the judges) for the Internet is for historical reasons set up as a US entity. It having control over the Internet means no more and no less than all countries deciding to implement their decisions.

The reason why ICANN still has control and the reason for this statement by the EU is that other countries are still hoping for a negotiated solution, because that's generally the way the civilized world works. The US might be in a slightly better position to negotiate than other countries, but if it refuses to negotiate, it will surely lose that advantage. An orderly solution would be in everybody's interests, while more unilateral action would harm everyone.

The orderly way to proceed would be to continue with ICANN, just internationalized. The disorderly way might be setting up a parallel organization and start disregarding ICANN.

Still you must realize it's a pipe dream that a single country with a few percent of world population could keep the right to make the rules for much longer. So sad you Americans feel offended about this. The rest of the world doesn't really think it's even asking for anything that in any meaningful sense belongs to you when they ask to have a say.

They ohappens y won't be easily able to go after Wikimedia Foundation itself, but they might be able to go after volunteers who live in Finland. I think particularly vulnerable would be the person who translated the fundraising notice to Finnish, if he happens to live in Finland.

Not that I really expect this to lead to much. I think it's entirely plausible that even if he got charged and found guilty, the court would decide to not punish him (and quite certainly he wouldn't get more than a small fine in the tens or hundreds of euros range).

I think there is a practical difference between a 2-party system and a n-party system where n > 2. It's not what you think, though, and I'm not sure which one is really better in practice.

At least from my observations, a two-party system produces heavy polarization. Nowhere have I seen such a polarization as the one in US between Democrats and Republicans. Everyone is sure that their POV is the good one and cannot comprehend how someone can possibly support the other party. As you say, you can choose your flavor of police state.

A system of three roughly equally big parties, however, seems to emphasize consensus. As none of the three parties can hope to form a government alone, they will need to secure the cooperation of at least one of the two other. None of them can afford to become the lone different party, because that would just result always in the other two parties forming a government (unless the winning party manages to persuade enough smaller parties to join a coalition government with the two other parties left out). The result is that you have three basically identical parties that are more or less only differentiated by how they market themselves. Of course there are politicians in the parties that would like to be different, but in order to secure a government with another of the parties, you will need to make concessions, which usually excludes the points of view that are unique to one party.

So, the end result is that you can choose from three flavors which are not really that different. Not that consensus policymaking would necessarily be bad - it's not.

In my country a fourth big party has recently emerged. It will be interesting to see how this affects the dynamics as we've only seen something like two elections where this was the case.

Of course it also depends on the system used in elections. I think the US-style "winner takes it all" system basically forces only two big parties to emerge.

Still, as someone who lives in a country with more than two big parties, I don't think I'd ever want to see a government effectively controlled by only a single party, not for any period of time.

Well, that's exactly the new thing here. You can think it this way:

The program being interpreted is a black box function, taking in an encrypted state and outputting an action to execute and the resulting encrypted state (this is accomplished using homomorphic encryption). The state can include things like values for variables, but it also includes the program counter. What the interpreter does is it loops this function over and over, at each step executing the action it outputs. Because you cannot observe the state (as you never have it in decrypted form), you cannot deduce anything beyond the actions.

Note that any program can be expressed in this form: Essentially, in a conventional processor the black box boolean function you are executing is the function from a state to the next state (to the next instruction or next clock cycle, however you wish to view it).

As to how it's possible to keep the state and the computed function secret, that's the thing done using homomorphic encryption, and nobody claimed that to be easy, but there's no reason why it should be theoretically impossible, and it in fact turns out to be possible. The thing is, you *do* have the state, including the program counter, but it's only available to you in a form which you cannot read.

And how easy do you think watching in a debugger an interpreter execute a program is, even if nothing there is obfuscated?

Here, the interpreter is not obfuscated. You do not need to run it in a debugger, you can read the source code. But the program being interpreted is such that you can only deduce what it does to an input by running it on that input, and you gain no additional information of its workings.

Even not being new to Slashdot, I'm completely baffled by your talk about "an article with little details", considering it links to the paper that will be presented in a conference that has all the details you would want.