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if a friend emails you a suspicious .exe, you create a phony account with no permissions then run it from that account. This is also possible in Win2K

Most home users would rather be 0wn3d than spend $200 to upgrade.

and Windows XP.

This virus is here now, and Windows XP isn't in stores yet. Besides, most home users would rather be 0wn3d than spend $1000 to upgrade to a new computer that counteracts the effects of Gates' Law[?] that makes each operating system release run twice as slow and take up twice as much disk space as the one 18 months before.

I find this E2 node about sleeping 2 hours per day really interesting.. anyone with maybe experience got any comments on it?

Offtopic:

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."

is known as Hanlon's Razor. If you want a bit more information, go here.

God bless everything2

Offtopic:

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."

is known as Hanlon's Razor. If you want a bit more information, go here.

God bless everything2

I wonder if it's symbolic that the everything2 link to "mono" only talks about a really bad disease...

There's a lot of discussion of RHIC black holes on everything2. See What if a black hole was created on Earth?.

I own patent 4711/12345 "A method of movement by moving one foot in front of the other to get from a place to another place, regardless of the pace with which this method is applied".

I'll play along: The developers of GNU, PNG, and Ogg Vorbis have worked together to produce another way of getting from one place to another without using feet or legs at all.

(Demonstration)

More info on that e2 link above.. :)

More info on that e2 link above.. :)

We live in a democratic society. Whether you like it, the laws are set and enforced by the representatives elected by the will of the majority of the people

And our representatives will do anything to get re-elected, including taking campaign contributions from Di$neyCo in exchange from passing oppressive copyright laws, such as the Sonny Bono Act and the DMCA, using the anonymous voice vote to hide from accountability to constituents.

We live in a democratic society. Whether you like it, the laws are set and enforced by the representatives elected by the will of the majority of the people

And our representatives will do anything to get re-elected, including taking campaign contributions from Di$neyCo in exchange from passing oppressive copyright laws, such as the Sonny Bono Act and the DMCA, using the anonymous voice vote to hide from accountability to constituents.

You can also look it up at www.everything2.com.
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I'm not defending either camp, so put away that (-1: Troll) click for a second.

The Director always wants to get it done right, taking forever to do it.

The Producer always wants to get it shipped, even with a few flaws.

These are naturally at odds, and the MMORPG market is no exception. When external beta testers get involved, however, they act as an extension of the Director: fix this, fix this, it's not ready yet. The Producer has to intensify the push to release the product before it's perfect but while it still has a market. Every week of development can cost tens of thousands of dollars, and if there are scheduled marketing agreements in place (say, retail endcaps), it's ruinous to blow your deadlines.

The MMORPG genre has a couple other wrinkles that Hollywood doesn't usually have, that complicates these roles.

For one, an Internet-age game can be patched or upgraded AFTER it is released. So 1.0 sucks, that's nothing new. 1.1.6b.alpha.release3 is where it gets better.

For two, the beta testing crowd is a fickle bunch. Some stick to the new product for a long time, while some flee for the Next Big Thing(tm). They're not the core audience. See my writeup on Everything2 about the Life Cycle of an Online Community for my three-act summary of this phenomenon.

Three, the shelf life of an Internet game is far longer than a movie or a solo game. Movies are in the dollar theaters and videotapes in a few months. Solo games are in Wal*Mart bins in a few months. An online community takes that long just to get up a good head of steam.

As Guy Kawasaki (ceo Garage.com) said, "Don't Worry, Be Crappy." You have to ship to make money. You have to get Revision One out there so you can see HOW to make it better, instead of noodling around in the workshop forever.

Technically outer space is defined as the space outside the solar system...

Man, either you live in a rotten country of the sorts, where the CIA helps out real bad ass dictators to launch a coup against the democratically elected government

Not the CIA but the Congress. During the Monica Lewinsky proceedings, the US legislative body passed two bills by anonymous, unaccountable voice vote: Digital Millennium Copyright Act and Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. A voice vote means that constituents back home are unable to review how their representative or senator voted. So how is DisneyCo CEO Michael Eisner not a de facto "bad ass dictator"?

Man, either you live in a rotten country of the sorts, where the CIA helps out real bad ass dictators to launch a coup against the democratically elected government

Not the CIA but the Congress. During the Monica Lewinsky proceedings, the US legislative body passed two bills by anonymous, unaccountable voice vote: Digital Millennium Copyright Act and Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. A voice vote means that constituents back home are unable to review how their representative or senator voted. So how is DisneyCo CEO Michael Eisner not a de facto "bad ass dictator"?

How can Microsoft prosecute schools when they're all still running on Apple IIs?

The version of Basic built into the ROM of all Apple II computers from II Plus to IIGS is copyright Microsoft. "Pay up on Office, or we'll terminate your Applesoft Basic license, and you won't be able to use your IIGS lab."

No, I just want to live in a world where we can respect one anothers' property.

Something that most Slashdotters don't seem particularly good at, I might add (how many Napster fans are there in the audience? How many still use it now that you can't trade copyrighted songs? Thought so.)

"If they wanted GAIM, they should have registered that as well"

So I should be able to create a cookie called, say, Nilli Wafers, and market them under the brand Nabisci, because Nabisco didn't register these particular variations on their trademarks? Envision a world in which I could get away with this, and tell me that unscrupulous people wouldn't take ridiculous advantage of it. Would you rather have that instead?

And, nobody ever said anything about HAL/IBM. See Slippery Slope logical fallacy.

William H. Gates III [and similar obscene names]

Another good way to pick names for forms is to pick a random first name and last name from characters that have appeared in popular major studio movies, such as Pinocchio Poppins ("Pinocchio" from AOL/New Line's The Adventures of Pinocchio with Jonathan Taylor Thomas and Martin Landau, "Poppins" from Disney's Mary Poppins with Julie Andrews and Penis Van Lesbian).

You're usually only surfing one web site at a time, right?.

Of course. everything2.com is the ultimate test in multi browsing skills. I seem to open more windows than I close browsing that site.

This just in...

Australia's government just arrested all workers in the IT field for hacking. The only official comment from the head of ASIS was, "Uhh, oops."

In other news, crackers defaced the government's Web site with some form of an encrypted message reading "j00 g07 0wn3d".

They were obviously doing a search for music from the group Shakespear's Sister

Sadly, the iCab folks have said they're not interested in porting to GNU/Linux. Among the GNU/Linux browsers, my favorite by far is Konqueror. Like iCab on the Macintosh, Konq is small, fast, and customizable. However, it still lags a bit behind in the way of filtering. Site-specific, function-specific JavaScript filtering would be an excellent addition to what's already easily the best browser in the Free world.

When I read these headlines about "countries that time forgot", I just can't help thinking about the same headlines that are routinely applied to our countries (continental Europe), saying:

"Oh, look, those poor little Europeans that still live in the Middle Ages with such some obsolete things as welfare systems, social security for all, minimum wages, and so on. Why don't they realize they live in the 21st century and scrap all those dinausoresque social systems ?"

One world, one language, one socio-economical framework.

Thomas Miconi

the reason I suggested 2050 was because the cap in most of the world is 70 years

William H. Gates III is still alive, isn't he? In cases where works for hire do not have a fixed term, the rule is LIFE of the last surviving contributor plus 70 years. MS-DOS won't go PD until at LEAST 70 years after some slashdot zealot murders bill gates.

"Life plus 70." Doesn't that sound like a prison sentence?

Dickens, which people still read and enjoy

Charles Dickens, sure, he's on Project Gutenberg, but what about Geoffrey Chaucer? If DisneyCo has its way, copyright terms will be repeatedly extended until the average reader can no longer understand the language of works written hundreds of years ago in 1922, and it'll still be constitutional according to the letter of the law.

Public domain is a closed constant set, and the consumers show their approval of this by voting with their dollars for products whose makers engage in destruction of the value of the public domain. Write your representatives in whatever government you're under if you disagree with these practices.

Slashdot.org today announced their latest Internet portal EverythingSlashdot.org which will focus on answering the legalities of everything digitial.

The strange thing about your comment is that everything.slashdot.org actually exists. It's an online information database written and edited by the world. And yes, it has a good writeup about DMCA and the politics of copy protection.

But be warned: The quality standards on Everything are MUCH higher than on Slashdot. In fact, E2 and Slashdot could hardly be more different.

Slashdot.org today announced their latest Internet portal EverythingSlashdot.org which will focus on answering the legalities of everything digitial.

The strange thing about your comment is that everything.slashdot.org actually exists. It's an online information database written and edited by the world. And yes, it has a good writeup about DMCA and the politics of copy protection.

But be warned: The quality standards on Everything are MUCH higher than on Slashdot. In fact, E2 and Slashdot could hardly be more different.

Anything they had done would be convered by patents, which, thankfully, expire after a relatively short period of time.

Not if the Big Faceless GGM Corporations Who Are Above Any Single Country's Law have their way like Disney did with its extension of copyright from 56 years tops to 95 and beyond.

And yes, I am writing my representative letters. "I vote. And so do thousands of librarians who want the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act repealed."

Some couple hundred years ago it was agreed that artists, authors, inventors, and others that used intellectual efforts to create works for the public good should be rewarded for that effort.

Rewarded yes. But is a government-granted monopoly the only way to reward creation of works of authorship? I'd say the future belongs to services and sponsorships. Instead of making money selling records, a would-be Britney Spears could be making money performing, or putting slick ads into her songs (though less flagrantly than "The Joy of Pepsi").

Not everyone agrees, and are free to lobby to change the law of our society

Lobbying is currently defined as donating millions of dollars to a politician's campaign. Who, outside of big faceless corporations with an interest in preserving their monopolies, has the money for that? Most people are so dazzled by marketing that they actively reject the truth about the way the system works (perpetual copyright terms, copyrights that act like patents, region price discrimination coding).

those that don't, can find other contries with a society that agrees with them in this area ... Maybe by being invited to move to someplace they think is better.

Who has $500,000 to spend to move a family and a career, including the cost of learning a new language and culture?

have yet to learn about the value of that compromise.

You call 125-year American copyrights (life + 70 years) a compromise? Take off a century and I'd agree. Bottom line: Write your representatives.

Well, that's why the people reserve all rights not granted to the government

Except Article 1 sections 8 and 10 of the Constitution give Congress the exclusive power "To regulate commerce with foreign nations."

*cough*everything2*cough*

Think about, if it cannot be proven wrong, it has no preditive power. Otherwise its predictions could be checked for correctness.

cf.the fallacy of untestability on everything2.com

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If we're really talking about an intelligent system here, then it deserves to be open. At the very least, it should be allowed to choose it's editors.

If we really want to avoid a "Butlerian Jihad", we need to be prepared to accept AI as citizens with equal rights. The real acid test for intelligence will be a system which is smart enough to go to court and demand its rights. Better that we grant those rights than wait for the strikes, protest-marches and violence to begin.

Don't be a twit, Jon. Ever watch the movie "Amadeus"? Mozart was probably a classic candidate for Attention Deficit Disorder, and the movie depicted his symptoms to a T.

Just because ADD wasn't defined until the twentieth century (1902, mind you, not 1985 as you seem to think) doesn't mean the twentieth century caused ADD.

1. I use exactly two types of GNU tools proper: the gcc suite and the shell utilities suite. Period. My GUI is composed of X and the awesome BlackBox WM. I use vi as my only editor and good old Netscape 4.75 as my only web browser. I find it hard to call the system I use a "GNU/Linux" system.
   
   
2. Granted, without GNU there would be no Linux (thank you gcc, thank you glibc, etc.) Okay. Right. But if that's the only reason why we should call it GNU/Linux, then it should really be Turing/VonNeumann/Djikstra/.../ATT/MIT/GNU/Linux. Hey, if you consider that many graphical apps, even in the very GNOME project, were simply copy/pasted from their Microsoft equivalents (even Miguel says it), you should even add "Gates" somewhere in the name ! (Not to mention the outstanding contribution to the whole Open Source movement bringed by Microsoft's monopolistic practices :o)
   
   In the end, I suspect the perpetual braggling from GNU will prove tiresome enough that people will actually switch everything they can to non-GNU software (KDE everywhere !) just to avoid having to feel guilty everytime they mention their OS under the name of "Linux".
   

Do you know how many hits per day 4000 per second is? Think anyone will ever get that?

Two words: Slashdot effect.

A lot of servlets that do 9-table joins in a Sybase database, all on the same box as the web server is quite different from serving only static HTML ... For that small number of sites (of the slashdot size, perhaps? ;-) that have pipes big enough to keep several server farms busy

Slashdot and similarly-sized sites (such as Everything) generally run their database on a separate server from the web server, on a switched 100baseT or faster Ethernet. Larger sites probably run an Oracle parallel enterprise server anyway.

libsomething.so is a symlink to libsomething.so.2, which in turn points to libsomething.so.2.17. The problem is when an app was coded and debuged on a system with version 2.17, but the end user only has 2.15. In theory, there shouldn't be any incompatible changes between 2.15 and 2.17, so the user just needs to load up to 2.17 and point .so.2 to .so.2.17. But in practice, in many situations this will cause existing binaries that point to .2 (which now points to 2.17) to break. So, the only solution is to load .so.2.17 into a new directory, and set LD_LIBRARY_PATH or LD_PRELOAD accordingly before starting up that app.

A rather nebulous assertion, since you don't give any specific examples. When the api changes the library should go to a new version number.

I'm not saying it's never happened, it's quite conceivable. There are two reasons why this could happen - either the library coders changed an api and didn't rev the version number appropriately (unlikely for any of the major libraries which tend to be maintained in a very professional manner) or an application coder circumvented the normal api (MUCH more likely.) Sometimes inexperienced coders will do this and think they are really clever for it, but it's actually very stupid. Either way, the problem is not in the system design, it's in someone doing something very stupid in their code. In either case it would be instantly clear who screwed up, and thus who should be on the receiving end of a stiff LART. This is probably why it's so rare.

This isn't an issue with GNU cash, and even if it was, it STILL wouldn't be anything like .dll hell, which is a design problem, not a problem with individual coders doing something stupid occasionally.

To take from a list of past-times which cost more than drugs if you get too deeply in to them:

• Anime
• Computers
• Photography
• DJ'ing
• Astronomy
• Paintball
• Cycling
• Skiing

... The list goes on. Audiophiles are no different.

Seriously, this is soooo close to being a good idea. Slashdotters love everything2.com - just imagine the entire WWW like it.

SmartTags could be a very powerful improvement to the WWW if done properly. And that means no concentrated authority on where these links point to. I'd be interested in it if it used an open directory for the link info instead of some corporate "money word" bucket.

As it is, who the hell wants to always be redirected to Microsoft's web site? Besides the pointy haired bosses. :-)

I found this writeup over at E2 amusing: Jesus doesn't care if you say the word "fuck".

--Begin--

Many Christians seem to believe that saying four letter words is a sin that makes the baby Jesus cry. It is surreptitiously implied that the Third Commandment, which prohibits taking the Lord's name in vain, is the source of this.

When it is spelled out like this, it is easy to see the fallacy. The Lord's name is not "fuck", even in Hebrew. Nor is the Lord's name "shit" or any other of the so-called 'bad words' that are frowned upon by so many. A thorough investigation of the Bible will reveal that there is no prohibition against these words, especially in English.

Ephesians 4:29 says "Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen." This seems to apply to things such as gossip, the Monica Lewinsky fiasco, and most of the Southern Baptist Convention, but more weight is given to cuss words than these others.

This leads one to believe that the Christian aversion to four letter words is based more on a desire to be sanctimonious rather than truly Christ-like. Jesus loves people who say "fuck" just as much as those who do not.

--End--

Ok, full disclosure. I wrote it.

Guns don't protect people; people protect people.

Sites like Slashdot, Plastic, and Perl Monks are wonderful to visit because there's always something new from minute to minute

Everything 2 is the same way and isn't limited to technology or political stories. I haven't looked enough at Half-empty to see any difference from E2.

Think how many times you visit Slashdot/Plastic/your-favorite-slashcode-site-here every day.

Clarification: Perl Monks runs Everything not Slashcode.

• Start by convincing them that computers are general-purpose things that are ubiquitous and are getting more so: take apart a video game, show 'em where the computer is, put it back together and it still works... take apart a cellphone or pager, point to the TV, dig up a smart card, etc. It isn't what they do that's important: it is what they can be made to do that is cool.
• Next, go outside and do "people programming." Get a volunteer and have your class figure out how to get the volunteer to do something useful: make sure that the instructions are declarative and are followed verbatim.
• Next class, take the instructions that worked and program a Lego robot to do the task (or any logo with a turtle, etc). Seeing a lego monster doing the same things that the volunteer did outside should be suitably cool as to hook 'em.
• Keep the action going: robots are good, but glowing turtles (especially dynaturtles!) are ok, too.
• Don't play games - write games that the kids can extrapolate into the video games they see all the time. Mugwump and daleks aren't substantially different from Quake (illustrate the point by playing quake for a bit after writing daleks). Maze generation and solving is a good one to try: simple but powerful algorithms.

There are a zillion sites on the subject of teaching computer science to kids. The net of a million lies might not be your friend, but it can be a valuable source of information.

Yes, it is.

Doesn't make it any less fun ;-)

Schadenfreude is an art form. For an example, watch Jerry Springer, particularly the last 20 minutes of the show, in which audience members rediscover the Elizabethan art of bear-baiting.

(Side note. Yeah, we gotta get an interview with Jack Chick. I like this "Loon of the Month" idea.)

Instead of complaing I think that the mozilla/GPLExplorer/whatever folks should add this feature (turned off by default) to their browser and show Microsoft how to do it right.

It could actually be the thing that got mozilla out of the cave and into usage...
--

If proper hyperlinking of article text hadn't become the forgotten point of the Internet,

It hasn't. You just haven't been looking at the right web sites. Everything2.com is linked profusely. Try it; you might like it.

(See what I've written on E2)

If proper hyperlinking of article text hadn't become the forgotten point of the Internet,

It hasn't. You just haven't been looking at the right web sites. Everything2.com is linked profusely. Try it; you might like it.

(See what I've written on E2)

navigation is a critical part of web content - critical enough that browser companies should not tweak with it. they should let web site owners decide what type of navigation they want to put in their pages.

Not necessarily. For instance, many sites disable browsers' contextual menus to keep users from making fair use of images or to keep users from opening new windows, locking them in a frame jail. Users should have the final choice whether to allow these new links, not browser makers or webmasters.

navigation is a critical part of web content - critical enough that browser companies should not tweak with it. they should let web site owners decide what type of navigation they want to put in their pages.

Not necessarily. For instance, many sites disable browsers' contextual menus to keep users from making fair use of images or to keep users from opening new windows, locking them in a frame jail. Users should have the final choice whether to allow these new links, not browser makers or webmasters.