(Another too-late post...)

The difference between US "Fair Use" and UK "Fair Dealing" is at least somewhat described at https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Fair_dealing#United_Kingdom and in greater detail by a McGill Law Review PDF paper linked there.

As I read it, broadly the UK system enumerates a (restricted, fixed) set of allowed exceptions, while the US system allows any use conceivably to be "fair" pursuant to a set of factors (that are in practice defined by the court as-needed.)

Apparently the UK system doesn't explicitly allow "parody" which is one reason this comes up (as sort of referenced in the BBC article).

But I suspect the UK copyright minister isn't really interested in promoting "parody"; it's more about trying not to strangle the next Google from being invented in the UK. Ask yourself the broader business/economic question like "Google has taken such liberties with copyright fair use in their business model... man that worked out well... why couldn't Google have been invented in the UK? Oh yeah, the copyright system is really picky about what is/isn't allowed and this is anti-innovation; maybe we should legislate by liberty-allowing priority/tests than explictly enumerating consumers' rights and let the courts sort it out".

    --LP

I've now looked at the Microsoft patent. While I don't know the specifics of the SGI O2 implementation, I doubt they were "processing each of the copies of the frame in parallel, using a different channel of the multiple channels of the GPU" as described in Claim 1. However, IANAL (or should I say IANAPA...)

The claims seem to revolve around handling certain parts of video encoding in a GPU vs certain parts in the CPU but the site is slashdotted so I can't review it at the moment.

All that said, if I were looking for prior art, I would look at SGI patents for SGI's Indigo IMPACT and/or IMPACT Compression board hardware (e.g. see http://www.wordiq.com/definition/SGI_Indigo2) and even better, the slightly later "O2" workstation graphics they implemented in 1997 (see http://www.wordiq.com/definition/SGI_O2 ). The IMPACT graphics video handling was done all in hardware off the CPU as far as I know, but the O2 had a unified memory architecture and integrated graphics in such a way that some video texture operations were handled on the graphics chipset (the MJPEG compression?) and some in the CPU (texture storage in general purpose RAM). Whether this split of CPU/GPU operations matches the claims MS is patenting, I don't know and would welcome informed comment.

(More broadly, I would add that I thought PCs were doing video decoding on the GPU as far back as Nvidia's Riva TNT if not the slightly earlier Riva 128 (1998). Don't know any implementation specifics tho.)

    --LP

(Sorry I'm posting so late on this topic...)

If cars drive themselves, google's blog claims this could reduce greenhouse emissions.

This seems wishful thinking at best or greenwashing at worst... autonomous cars will be a disaster that will increase greenhouse gasses substantially.

Why?
1) because now more people can afford, in terms of their time, to drive further for work. So they will. And
2) if transportation of raw materials is cheaper because drivers aren't needed, the volume of material transported will go up, assuming the demand for goods is somewhat elastic with the price. With the amount of material transported increasing, the gasoline required for that transport and thus the carbon emitted will increase.

Color me a pessimist. Autonomous cars will be great for human freedom, and for human safety, but reduced greenhouse emissions is one thing that will not be a benefit.

Now if Google could build us some nice carpool-sharing app hooked to Google directions, with a reputation engine for the fellow passengers (perhaps in conjunction with their autonomous car work) to avoid unpleasant passenger surprises, *that* I could see helping reduce greenhouse emissions.

    --LP

Back in the late 80s we had a bunch of 10MHz XT clones in a computer lab networked together using Novel and 10BASE2 or maybe even TokenRing. Some of the games we had ran timing loops for the original 4.77 MHz PC so we had some simple TSR that sat on the interrupt timer and ran some NOPs to slow the computers down. I thought it would be a funny prank to add this to the AUTOEXEC.BAT file on most of the boot floppies in the lab, sadly I didn't test it on more than one computer.

The interrupts and NOPs interfered greatly with the network cards, causing the whole thing to come crashing down when more than a couple of the computers were running at a time. It took at least a couple of days for the sysadmin to sort it out.

RIP George, thanks for introducing me to the Internet and I'm sorry that you didn't get to stick around for Linux and /. I should have taken your Minix class when I had the chance.

I have a parenthetical aside regarding the word "you".

To take a step back, and at the risk of over-rationalizing this poster's intent, the sloppy language might be due to sloppy thinking, and the sloppy thinking is likely a fruit of a sloppy language-- Modern English. Although it happened before I was born, I've become increasingly aware the decline of the English language in one specific case... we've lost the words to distinguish second-person-singular "you" from second-person-plural "you-as-a-group"/"you all". Currently "you" could mean "just you" or it could mean "you and your community"/"you all"/"all of you".

In older english (e.g. Shakespeare or the King James Bible), there is "thee" if it's directed at a single person, and "ye" if its directed at you-as-a-group (Nobody ever explained that to me as a kid! I thought they were the same!) (And thou/you are used for objects of sentences.) And unfortunately, none of the modern multi-word alternatives for a plural "you" slip off the tongue easily or have a neutral connotation, e.g. "you all" or "the lot of you" or "you people". (Although "y'all" and "youse guys" are the regional equivalents of the old "ye".)

For the English-speaking Christians out there, this means if Paul is telling his listeners that "you" should do something, it might (as seen in the Greek or the Spanish or the ...) actually imply a command for collective action, when by default most people would assume he is just addressing you as an individual.

I have no idea if this loss of a distinct second-person plural reflects Western individualism, helped caused it, or is a coincidence, but I don't think its a complete coincidence.

It certainly affects the nature of dialog between peoples, since the speaker, lacking a distinct multiple-person-second-person-familiar plural, typically will A) need to attach a label to the other party to (semi-)accurately describe them as a group, (rather than addressing them as "you all" in a more personal relational way), or B) just use "you" which can then lead to a situation as we all just witnessed where they are accused of an ad-hominem attack when that may not have actually been their intention. Their true intention was to lump you together with some unspecified other people, but that's a little different than attacking you personally. In any case, neither options A) nor B) lead to particularly friendly relationship-building outcomes among groups.

</rant>

Actually none of my comments were meant to discuss re-using a one-time pad. I'm not sure which of my comments you're referring to, but perhaps you are thinking of my comment about splitting a 1TB one-time pad into 10 components, each for use with one of 10 different parties. That's not re-use. Otherwise, I completely agree with your comments that using a one-time pad multiple times is, by definition, no longer a one-time pad and has much different security properties.

    --LP

I've been thinking this same thing (using USB keys for a OTP, and "why don't we do that?") for a couple years now, but 10 minutes after reading your post, the following problems/"considerations" with the USB OTP approach did start to enter my mind:

1) I can see that with a big 2TB pad, you'd also want/need to cycle through pads... the longer you keep the same pad without destroying it, the more data an attacker can get with rubber-hose cryptography if they recover your pad... by coming to your(or his/her) house with a gun and ripping the USB key off your neck. Or seizing it when you/they travel.

2) Also, the other trouble I can forsee with OTPs is that you need one of them for each person you need to communicate with securely. Typically if you are doing something needing this security, you are not doing it with just one other person... you also need to communicate with multiple parties. Once you have 5-10 parties to communicate securely with, the OTP can get a little cumbersome. Carrying around 5-10 USB keys and keeping them straight? And I can't envision it working with 200+ counterparties (a USB-OTP-for-the-web scenario). If you partition your 1TB USB into, say, 10 parts, one for each counterparty, you still have problems. You still need to get 1/10th of that USB key to each of the other parties without giving them the other 9/10ths of the key. (Or your whole gang could use a set of the same 1TB keys and you are trading off convenience versus chances of an informant/leaker, and if you're paranoid enough to be using 1TB OTP, why make that tradeoff?) And don't the counterparties need to communicate so they need their own web of keys?

3) There is the little problem of USB-PC security: wouldn't putting the USB key in a PC expose your whole OTP to the perhaps-infected PC? How does this actually work?

One can see that subversion-resistant secure random number generation, secure transport, and secure key usage, and secure key destruction are all required to make OTPs actually secure.

I predict someone will attempt to market USB one-time pads within 5 years as a sort of snake-oil bandaid, and I can see a distant future where they get used, but I don't see them becoming used widely/securely particularly soon. (Disclaimer: bank tokens that give you 5-digit codes for authenticating transactions do make a lot more sense to me however and might be one targetted use of this technology.)

    --LP

P.S. I have not read the security literature on one-time pads. Forgive me if I'm stating the obvious.
P.P.S. I was kind of stunned last week though when getting a mini-SD card for my phone that I can, for $50, get something that is literally the width/length/thickness of my pinkie fingernail that contains 8GB.

Markup Fail! Great Zero Challenge

The [a href="http://16systems.com/zero.php"]Great Zero Challenge[/url] says otherwise. They're simply asking for the filename of one of the files on a drive that has been wiped once with zeros. Despite offering the challenge for over a year and actively speaking to data recovery companies, no one has taken them up on the offer.

In other words, the KDE team destroyed a perfectly functioning desktop environment to build a better Weatherbug.

This is a perfect summary of may reaction to KDE4. Mod parent up.

KDE4's panel is one of those things that you figure out and then say "WhereTF was the tutorial for this?" That is, after you figure out that you have to manually add it because it's not there by default. You can right-click where it doesn't have any programs or on the edge, and there's a rectangle you can click+hold and drag to change size I think.

I call this the Microsoft Excel Charting experience: where you have to guess where and how (left-click, right-click,click-and-drag) to click to set various parameters. It's frankly exhausting, more like a crappy game of skill than configuration.

KDE3, conversely, gives me a tree view, and somewhere within that tree are all the settings I need. I may take a bit of time looking through the tree to find what want, but no magical clicking is required, and I don't have to guess what an option does: it's clearly labeled.

KDE4 is a massive step backwards; Gnome, which I've always detested because it's not configurable, is preferable to KDE4. I'm really at a loss as to what the KDE4 team was thinking.

KDE 4.1 looks like Gnome, only worse. The default font sizes are HUGE, and the default antialiasing is horrible. The launcher button on the kicker panel, instead of just showing applications, shows a tabbed panel that starts on the "favorites" tab; to actually launch an app, I have to chose the application tab, then get a list in a HUGE font, when menu, instead of cascading, are replaced by sub-panels, and the replacement is made slower by stupid animation.

The kicker panel itself is way too large, probably 50 pixels high.

The desktop isn't a normal desktop, instead there's some pseudo-transparent lozenge in which desktop items are grouped.

When I open "System Settings", I get some multi-applet container like MS-Windows or Gnome, not the tree-view I saw in KDE 3.5. I can't even find most things I want to change (like Window Decorations) or even a menu with an about which would tell me what app I'm running.

Did I screw up the install somehow? Am I still running Gnome (no, can't be, every app starts with "K").

What the hell??? If I wanted Gnome or Vista, I'd run that crap. Why can't KDE be KDE?

Help!

I liked KDE because it was clean and functional. KDE 4.1 is a travesty.

Ok, read this bullshit marketing drivel from KDE, it reads like an MBA's sales pitch:

        However Plasma is more than just this familiar collection of utilities, it is a common framework for creating integrated interfaces. It is flexible enough to provide interfaces for mobile devices, media centres and desktop computers; to support the traditional desktop metaphor as well as well as designs that haven't yet been imagined.

Christ, man, I just want to launch an app, and occasionally glance down at the laucher to see how much battery life I have. I don't want a "framework" that can do everything.

But, says KDE:

        Plasma takes a different approach, engaging the user by creating a dynamic and highly customizable environment.

I don't want to be engaged, I just want to launch an app. I'll probably maximize that app, so the desktop won't even be getting a look.

But, says KDE, you can get rid of the gee-whiz gee-gaws:

        With Plasma, you can let your desktop (and accompanying support elements) act like it always did. You can have a task bar, a background image, shortcuts, etc. If you want to, however, you can use tools provided by Plasma to take your experience further, letting your desktop take shape based on what you want and need.

Oh, ok, that's cool. So can I get rid of the "cashew" control on the desktop?

        Although putting an option to disable the cashew for desktops sounds reasonable, from a coding point of view it would introduce unnecessary complexity and would break the design. What has been suggested is, since the destkop itself (a containment) is handled by plugins, to write a plugin that would draw the desktop without the cashew itself. Currently some work ("blank desktop" plugin) is already present in KDE SVN. With containment type switching expected by KDE 4.2, it is not unreasonable to see alternative desktop types developed by then.

So let me get this straight: Plasma's a revolutionary framework that can do things "that haven't yet been imagined." But it also supports the traditional desktop.

But getting rid on a "cashew" on the desktop is too hard to code, but if you write a trivial plugin that redraws the entire desktop (which isn't so trivial, as it's a yet unready work in progress, and won't even be possible until the next release of KDE) you can get around this unwanted "feature".

Come on, guys, your super framework requires a plugin to be written just to present a blank desktop? And plugins won't work until 4.2? And a boolean "don't show" would break the design? You guys got seduced into major mission creep.

This isn't a desktop environment, it's the dev's toy. Which is great, but don't claim it's ready for end users.

Anyone know where I can get an old NeXT optical disc converted to a PC-accessible modern format?

I googled around, sent emails and filled in 'contact us' forms on a number of archive-retrieval websites and never got any response back.