ldar15

The reasoning would be simple: The corrupt members of the government have levied a body of men to overthrow the democratic institution that we call the United States of America.

http://law.onecle.com/constitution/article-3/41-levying-war....

"Major" Bloomberg: "The NYPD is my Army", Homeland Security trampling on the US Constitution at every opportunity and at the order of congress, warrantless wiretaps, etc etc. Peaceable Protest made impossible by bureaucracy. Establishment of "First Amendment" zones for the press - where they can't see what's going on. Congress/Executive/SCOTUS making a tidy living from bribes^H^H^H Free Speech Expressed As Money.

There are a great many "bodies of men" acting unconstitutionally in this country, so assuming that a revolution took place, I don't think this line of prosecution would have much of a problem, do you? If a revolution doesn't take place, I think its pretty safe to say that the Government will take your side on the matter.

"Donations are regarded [by those who receive them] as free speech despite the popular opinion that they are bribes."

Yes. That pretty much nails the complaint on the head right there.

"I never saw"

And that would be the second.

I don't think I mentioned the Nazi's, but since you bring it up.

"From the prosperity of the empire during the Wilhelmine era (1890-1914), Germany plunged into World War I, a war it was to lose and one that spawned many of the economic crises that would destroy the successor Weimar Republic."

"During the Hitler era (1933-45), the economy developed a hothouse prosperity, supported with high government subsidies to those sectors that tended to give Germany military power and economic autarky"

Economic crises inducing a transition from democracy to plutocracy/fascism, and massive military spending, ending in wars on multiple fronts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_Germany

I suppose I should also qualify my statement as "dominant states". Since the most common way for small states to be converted to fascism is by the dominant state (i.e. USA) installing fascist/authoritarian governments for them. So I concede that, in general, you may be right.

This is a shake down. If Facebook, Google, reddit, etc have something to gain from this, then they need to step and replace the money our poor senators will lose. This is how america works. You want legal "protection", you pays your "taxes".

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/sopa-the-c...

Or "attempted bribery" that didn't work. o_O

If I get pulled over 10 times by 10 different cops, and I offer each one $100 to let me off, and only one of them takes the bribe - the other 9 don't negate the fact that one guy took the bribe.

"No your honor, I just like giving money to police officers whenever I meet them. See, its just random chance that this one guy let me off. Clearly it was on the merits of the situation, not because my money influenced him."

Cops don't make the laws of course. Otherwise you'd be allowed to bribe cops.

Interesting. You claim:

1) My guy was honest and just expressing his opinion.

2) My guy had trouble raising money when faced with an opponent who also had the same opinion and whose honesty you cannot vouch for.

You argument does not refute our claim: Money goes to the corrupt. Indeed it would appear to support it.

This is why, even though he is a nutjob on reproductive-rights, I have to support Ron Paul. All these issues should be decided by the states, not the feds.

You are mistaken. Bribery and corruption are not protected by the first amendment. Try offering a police officer some cash next time you get a speeding ticket. Or setting up a nice deal to put kids in jail [1].

Of course, this only applies to me, you, county judges, etc. Not senators. Not SCOTUS Justices. Not the people who have the most to gain from such corruption. Not the people who actually decide such laws. Fancy.

[1] http://articles.cnn.com/2009-02-23/justice/pennsylvania.corr...

Power-grabs are the abuse. There need not be any imoral motive behind the desire for this power, nor any plan to use them "for evil". We have already seen (UMG) that, given such power, there will be "accidental" abuse that has a major, negative effect on small players and citizens.

Even if you believe that these were genuine "accidents", do you believe that it is acceptable to allow these interests to have such power? Do you think it is just about "unimportant" things like copying music?

The US is still the worlds largest superpower, but compared to 20 years ago it has vastly less power. Its power has declined and continues to do so. Any student of history will tell you that this is exactly when states transform from free nations to fascist states.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articlei

"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"

"limited times". Apparently the US Constitution disputes your assertion. Bunch of pirates, those founding fathers.

More on the "ownership" myth. Just one of many sites picked from google. http://c4sif.org/2011/07/the-mythology-of-intellectual-prope...

Our founding fathers believed that you should be very careful what powers you give to any authority because, even though they may be nice now, you have no idea who will be in charge in the future.

This is why any student of history is against SOPA. We believe that it does not protect the rights espoused in the Constitution. We believe that it may be abused in the future.

Some people, such as yourself, seem to believe that this would never happen. You seem to think that because there is a need (in your view) for copyright holders to remove "owned" content, that we need a law like this. And further you seem to believe that its ok to have such a broad law, even though it may be open to such abuse.

UMG is just demonstrating why the founding fathers were right and why you are naive and short-sighted.

Here's the thing: if UMG wasn't actively doing it, you'd still be naive and short-sighted. You'd still be an "asshole", in your words, and the founding fathers would still be right.

"There is a plan to murder 6 million jews. Some of you have written in to ask me to condemn this plan. Unfortunately, I cannot condemn this plan, because none of you have come up with a reasonable alternative."

I don't think you can use the excuse that we don't have a way to support your business model, to turn around and support fascism.

Psychopaths, sociopaths, and hackers.

I could draw you a venn diagram if you like.

I can't believe in all your experience, you haven't met extremely smart hackers who are also utterly immoral. A situation like this just means they will be worth more money.

Yeah. Look what we did to Visa and Mastercard after they screwed Wikileaks. Cisco's gonna be totally scared!

I wish I could be there when the penny drops. Your face is going to be awesome.

The rationale, then, is that the compiler should catch mistakes that lead to security holes. On that basis, then, we'll be adding GC memory management, so we never access freed memory, also strongly defined types - e.g. bounded integers, and bounded arrays too. Writing the OS an ADA would satisfy this chap?

"catching security holes" is the compiler version of "think of the children".

In Systems Programming Languages? For "writing operating systems"? There are people who argue we should be writing our operating systems in high level languages anyway. Assuming the premise is we should be using a low-level language, then how does the author reconcile that with "but I want the language to hold my hand when it comes to math".

Choosing "overflow" or "underflow" to mean "I fucked up" is totally arbitrary. Variables usually indicate values that have a domain - a range of valid numbers. Saying "I don't want to think about what that it is, but oh if X hits 2 billion and change then warn me when some math fails" is no better than having it not fail at all. In most cases there's already a problem.

So, simply, writing "OS quality" code means explicitly checking inputs to ensure they are in the permissible range. Once you know what the range is, you know if your code needs to go up to 64bit math to handle them.

UPDATE: Some explanation for the downvote would be appreciated.

Unfortunately, this is exactly what a phisher would say too, so it rightfully has no effect on the discussion.

No it doesn't. It demonstrates that Minecraft's solution is heavy. Minecraft is a cellular automaton. That's why its slow. It would be a mistake to believe that minecraft demonstrates the effectiveness of voxel technology.

Its true that if I put a gun to your child's head and tell you that I'm going to kill her unless you agree to take my job, and you agree, then you gave me your word. Its also true that you genuinely had the choice of saying yes or no. It just that if you had said "no" there would be pretty negative consequences. Would you argue that in this case, had you said "yes", that you should be required to keep your word? Or that you are morally obligated to keep your word? Some fierce word-keepers argue "yes you should". In which case you may stop reading, but probably stop posting too.

Otherwise, let us agree that "I gave my word" is not a moral absolute and we are now debating about degree.

We get where you stand on this. Many disagree.

Not at all. They are only cost centers because that's how business guys divided them up to get they toys they wanted. Consider the following two divisions:

1. Revenue center model

Currently we have no computers. If we build a system that securely allows financial transactions, we can make a lot of revenue. We will assemble a team that builds a secure system for financial transactions.

2. Cost Center model

We will build a system that handles financial transactions. That will be our revenue center. The system will not have security as a requirement. Then we will have a cost center that is responsible for making this system secure.

PHB: Which costs more? Option 1? Ok, do option 2 then. Build me a system that isn't secure first, and then we'll work on that when we can.

SA: We need to patch the servers against critical vulnerabilities.

PHB: Well you can only bring the system down for 8 hours per quarter.

SA: That's not enough time.

PHB: I dont care, I have a business to run!

You: Well it was ok for my boss, so I guess its Ok for NASDAQ. It just the reality of running Windows.

File under, "Space Shuttle, O-Rings, Business Requirements override Technical Reality, What Could Possible Go Wrong", Dept.

Yes and no. The content was cracked almost immediately. We don't need an HDCP crack to rip blurays, so there wasn't much motivation to go after the pipe. That said, I assume the "crack" was dependent on the key being released in September, which basically demonstrates that these things are uncrackable, and its your key security that's the determining factor.

However, the truest part of the article for me was "In the meantime, HDCP continues to bother only a single group of people: those who buy stuff legally."

I thought I'd read the whole article since some are still commenting on it. First of all, if someone were to post an article on HN about a new technology that gets recursive compression (you can compress something 80%, and then do that again and again) because "they have a new algorithm", they would be laughed off the front page. Some people just don't know that that is impossible. Is this is what is being claimed here? There are three ways to get "unlimited detail" in computer worlds. 1) magical compression. 2) algorithmic generation 3) hierarchical composition, and as we know, 1 doesnt exist.

Looking at the article, this is clearly using method 3. Lets look at this "new" hierarchical composition. Hiearchical composition is when any given space is composed of smaller objects, and those smaller objects may also be composed of smaller objects.

When you do this in 2D games from 1980, we use the technical term "tiling the crap out of everything". You have a bunch of obviously repetitive pieces. If each tile is 16x16, and there are 256x256 tiles on a map, then one could say that there are 16 million pixels in the world, on a computer that had only 1Mb of memory.

So that right there is your clue that this guy is a fraud. 42 trillion voxels? Are they 42 trillion unique voxels, or are they tiled? [1] Right. (a "voxel" is the 3d equivalent of a 2D pixel).

The thing about tiling is it doesn't just apply to pixels or voxels. Tiling is just a spatial subdivision algorithm that splits space up in to 2d or 3d grids. You can store a color in each grid cell, and then its a voxel. But you can just as easily store the head of a linked list of polygons. And you can also store a pointer to another tile array, and that tile array can then store voxels, or polygons, or more tile arrays. When you do this, its a hierarchical data structure.

Do games/graphics programmers know all about this? Yes. Do we use hierarchical composition? Yes! All the time! Do we use axis-aligned hierarchies? Yes, e.g. octrees? Do we use regular grid composition all the way down? Fuck no. Why not? Because splitting up space along predetermined, regular, axis-aligned divisions is fucking awful for modeling interesting 3D worlds [3]. What you get is a brick world: [2]. Such rigid, regular, axis aligned hierarchy fits the real world poorly.

[1] http://media1.gameinformer.com/imagefeed/featured/gameinform... [2] http://media1.gameinformer.com/imagefeed/featured/gameinform... [3] Ok, minecraft being the exception =)

If someone were to post an article on HN about a new technology that gets recursive compression (you can compress something 80%, and then do that again and again) because "they have a new algorithm", they would be laughed off the front page.

"... he was forced to solve the riddles himself, rather than plucking the accepted solution from a textbook ..."

The thing is, the textbooks also have all the things that didn't work or don't work well. Even some educated graphics programmers often fail to understand that representing 3D objects is just a data representation and transformation problem. Sure, a hard one, but there's nothing magic about it. Representing the data as a bag of "atoms" instead of polygons just isn't a breakthrough. The problem is still spacial search. The problem is still a simulation of optical physics. Graphics is just an optimization problem now. Attend an IEEE conference and maybe 5% of papers will be new theory, the rest will be about effective optimization techniques.

When someone comes to you and says "I have this awesome idea because I didn't read anybody else's ideas", just walk away.

Clearly she was a prude when it came to language, but not when it came to fucking. Ironic.

Magical thinking alive and well in america. The New Yorker paints a picture of good evidence finally being heard. Reality tells a different story.

"Days before the meeting, however, Gov. Rick Perry replaced the commission chairman with Bradley, district attorney in Williamson County. The session at which Beyler was scheduled to speak was canceled, and the fire expert never appeared before the body."

"But the Texas Forensic Science Commission panel heading the inquiry also found insufficient evidence to prove that state Deputy Fire Marshal Manuel Vasquez and Corsicana Assistant Fire Chief Douglas Fogg were negligent or guilty of misconduct in their arson work."

http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Flawed-scien...

Nothing more powerful than magical thinking and politics combined.

If the App store becomes the only way to install applications, then its back to linux for me. I don't really see that as a horrible dystopian future. Even if Windows 8 hardware gets locked down, there will always be a market for linux boxes. Unless the government mandates otherwise, in which case we've got bigger problems.

"Just do it already"

Er. "Fuck you asshole".

Not the response you were going for I expect, but nonetheless my automatic response.