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First off, obviously Hatch doesn't know the differences between a hacker and a cracker.

No, he is using EXACTLY the right word. I'm so tired of people redefining this word, and then getting pissed when others don't recognize their attempts to redefine it.

One of the original definitions of hacker was one who breaks into computers. ESR has attempted to "deprecate" this meaning, but I don't recognize his right to deprecate, and no one else should either.

That's one of the definitions of hacker. Get over it.

The Jargon File has for a long time been perverted by ESR to suit his not-so-hidden agenda.

On other entries, I'm inclined to agree; I don't see, though, what agenda he could be furthering in this particular case.

The Jargon File has for a long time been perverted by ESR to suit his not-so-hidden agenda.

On other entries, I'm inclined to agree; I don't see, though, what agenda he could be furthering in this particular case.

Yes, it was around 2.2.8 or 2.2.9

Godwin's Law merely states that as a thread's length increases, the probability of using Nazis or the Holocaust as a metric to compare peoples' arguments approaches 1. There's nothing about who wins or who loses.

Not strictly true, according to the Jargon File:

[...] There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. [...]

Or did it? Seems I heard once the IBM got in trouble for their attempts to 'lock in' customers by playing games with connectors, similar to Msft's API's. All I can find is this:

[from: http://163.18.14.55/datapro/06090-1.htm]

"A System/390 plug-compatible system is a mainframe computer or other device (such as a storage or tape subsystem) supplied by a vendor that interfaces to IBM's systems or which can substitute for IBM's equipment and run the same programs and peripherals without modification. The original IBM PCM market was effectively created over 40 years ago with the 1956 Consent Decree--the landmark U.S. antitrust legislation that forced IBM to share its technology with other manufacturers. The terms of that decree were largely revoked in January 1996, however. PCM manufacturers are sometimes called "IBMulators" or software-compatible vendor (SCVs)."

I think that antitrust action is necessary to create an "Msft Compatible Application" MARKET (not "monopoly") which will encourage competition, innovation and ultimately benefit the consumer, similar to action taken with IBM to create the Plug Compatible Mainframe MARKET.

Cf. also connector conspiracy.

As any Usenet or Slashdot dicussion thread created after September 11, 2001 grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis, Hitler, or Osama Bin Laden approaches one.

Do you just collect the extensions, or do you collect some way of telling which extension a file should have (ala the file command in Un*x)? If you do the latter, your collection may be of some assistance to ESR.

6. Repeat step 6 for as many actions as you want to modify for this file type.

Ah, I always wondered why this took so long. It's because you go into an infinite loop at the end. Perhaps I should run Windows on a Cray-3.

This ruling does make a difference! You know why: for copyright law.

If this holds up, than ESR was right in Homesteading the Noosphere, where he describes our world as an virtual information space independant of the physical space.

Following that idea consequently, I coded the Askemos system and had to conclude that it is impossible to copy information in that space.

Could someone find out the reference please!

The funny thing is: jails already exists somehow:

When I wrote the Askemos system, which works from exactly the same assumption (namely an information space being independant of the physical space as already lined out by ESR over the past year in Homesteading the Noosphere) I had to model a democratic rights system. Suddenly I found myself coding a virtual jail!

The realy interesting consequence is something else: you can't copy information is such a space.

Maybe there are some people who don't like that judge anymore, but don't know that yet;-)

Why not do a readable Intercal contest instead?

I once heard, it may be a rumour, but at least it's a nice story, that (once upon a time) russian coders liked to write code with obfuscation built in. They were so scared to loose their jobs that they wrote code only themselves could understand, using strange/misleading variable names, senseless loops or whatever. Can anyone confirm this?

It's a well documented phenomena.

The insane War on Drugs has militarized our American inner cities with police using legal guns to shoot and kill innocent bystanders, and druggies using "illegal" guns to shoot back at police and at competitors.

Drug dealers can't go to court to solve turf problems, nor can they go to court to gain relief from some junkie who just ripped them off. Their only relief is to use their "illegal" gun to administer instant "justice."

Decriminalizing the ingestion of whatever substances you wish to put into your body, for whatever reasons you may have for that ingestion, would go a long way towards reducing the 10,369 statistic.

But instead, our National Socialist government insists that they have the (unconstitiontional) right to impose National standards on every Social group through out the country regading what you can or cannot ingest. The result is the carnage of the Drug War, and those politicians who are responsible for the carnage continue to claim that they're only continuing it for "the good of the people."

What alternative use does a handgun have?

And, had our politicians not traitorously trashed the second amendment many years ago, the events on September 11 may have been prevented completely. Had any one of the passengers on AA Flight 11 been armed as the second Amendment prevents the government from restricting ("...shall not be infringed." doesn't allow for an infringement on airplanes as an exception) those hijackers wouldn't have even made it to the flight attendants before being challenged and/or shot.

You see, the politicians don't trust ordinary Americans with the right to self-defense. They believe they know better and are less likely to go crazy and use armed force in a detrimental way. (Anybody remember Ruby Ridge and Waco?)

Because most of the people who write and speak for the "media" have been trained at Columbia University, they have an immediate bias against individual self-defense rights. They assume that Americans are incapable of making good decisions regarding the use of armed force. See Eric S. Raymond's thoughts on this. As Raymond points out, yes, there is a vanishingly small minority that cannot, and should not, handle their own self-defense. But if you punish everyone for the inabilities of an extremely small minority, you are doing just what Ben Franklin warns against in my .sig below.

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759.

Thanks, ESR.

...before they're declared illegal by the Office of Homeland Security.

Why? Because when faced by a horde of armed geeks, negotiating with the moderates looks awfully good to The Powers That Be.

Maj. Kong

... is of course the S l a s h d o t E f f e c t.

Sooo... congresscritters are thinking of passing a nasty ole law? Rob could just threaten to post a story like "An anonymous coward writes: Streaming video of Natalie Portmans hot grit's posted to the US Congress Web site. "([sic] - TacoLexicon in force. my real grammar is better.)

Congress would naturally cave in and meet all our demands. Well, maybe not RMS's...

At least, they will never see me buying one of their cards until they release the source of their drivers for inclusion in XFree 4.x !!

Is their anyone at Nvidia who can read and pass on the essay from RMS (esp. the appendix from the Magic Cauldron) :
Why Closing Drivers Loses A Vendor Money

PHB /P-H-B/

[Usenet; common; rarely spoken] Abbreviation, "Pointy-Haired Boss". From the Dilbert character, the archetypal halfwitted middle-management type. See also pointy-haired.

Hey, what's the "postercomment compression filter"? I violated it prior to adding this useless text.

bug-compatible adj.

[common] Said of a design or revision that has been badly compromised by a requirement to be compatible with fossil s or misfeature s in other programs or (esp.) previous releases of itself. "MS-DOS 2.0 used \ as a path separator to be bug-compatible with some cretin's choice of / as an option character in 1.0."

bug-compatible adj.

[common] Said of a design or revision that has been badly compromised by a requirement to be compatible with fossil s or misfeature s in other programs or (esp.) previous releases of itself. "MS-DOS 2.0 used \ as a path separator to be bug-compatible with some cretin's choice of / as an option character in 1.0."

bug-compatible adj.

[common] Said of a design or revision that has been badly compromised by a requirement to be compatible with fossil s or misfeature s in other programs or (esp.) previous releases of itself. "MS-DOS 2.0 used \ as a path separator to be bug-compatible with some cretin's choice of / as an option character in 1.0."

bug-compatible adj.

[common] Said of a design or revision that has been badly compromised by a requirement to be compatible with fossil s or misfeature s in other programs or (esp.) previous releases of itself. "MS-DOS 2.0 used \ as a path separator to be bug-compatible with some cretin's choice of / as an option character in 1.0."

From this story, it would look like that Adrian is a cracker in every sense of the word, and not a hacker.

From this story, it would look like that Adrian is a cracker in every sense of the word, and not a hacker.

Boxen is in the Jargon File. Are you a newbie or just completely lacking in cultural literacy?

No natural light would be the show stopping minus for sub surface office buildings. I know us techy types don't mind not seeing the Big Blue Room; however it seems to be important to the PHB/MBA types out there.

A Second Look at the Cathedral and Bazaar

Boxen as a plural usage is derived in imitation of the older "VAXen", a term hoary with lore from the Wizards of olde.

Both

Boxen
and
VAXen

have Jargon File file entries associated with these terms.

jeremiah cornelius

Boxen as a plural usage is derived in imitation of the older "VAXen", a term hoary with lore from the Wizards of olde.

Both

Boxen
and
VAXen

have Jargon File file entries associated with these terms.

jeremiah cornelius

Once again the word 'hacker' is used instead of 'cracker'...

Two links to "The Jargon File" for those still ignoring the difference :

Hacker

Cracker

Once again the word 'hacker' is used instead of 'cracker'...

Two links to "The Jargon File" for those still ignoring the difference :

Hacker

Cracker

(Joke! Joke! My precious karma...meltinnnnnnnnng...)

Why'd they stop? 'Cause all the "dark future" stuff they read about kept coming true! Reality TV, Corporate owned gov'ments, cameras in your toliet...Gee, I guess we really do live in interesting times.

It's a Brave New 1984.

Those aren't links, they're text with too much punctuation to be English sentences. Original and Description are links.

Best of luck with your meeting! For a Congressman to actively seek opinions from "one of us" gives me some hope.

You may find some helpful information from the following articles:
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
Freeware Creators Eye Corporate Users

I believe the majority of the book is available at Eric's homepage.

I have to agree. Assembly failure modes can be VERY much more subtle than high-level language failure modes. I have to deal with this regularly, as I write debug assembly code on some rather complex processors. (VLIW CPUs with exposed delay slots lead to some really hard to spot bugs occasionally that have absolutely no analogs in the C world. These bugs can be some of the most annoying Heisenbugs you've ever seen, too...) Basically, writing in assembly code gives you raw speed, but you pay the penalty in not having some sanity checks on your code.

On a related note: One of my professors was fond of pointing out a study that found that programs tend to have about the same defect density per line of code regardless of the language they're written in. That is, if you tend to have one bug per 50 lines of code (let's say), it doesn't matter if the code is ASM, C, Java, SQL, or Bourne Shell Script. Imagine how many lines of ASM it would take to be equivalent to cp file1 file2?

Now only slightly off topic...

Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means

Uhm, I'm a little fuzzy on this because it's been awhile, but doesn't that terminate a DOS program via INT 21h with an errorlevel of 0?

Then for you Apple ][ folk out there... what does 2C 30 C0 do? :-)

Thats a Palm V or Palm VII AND a phone. You don't have to wait to get it, its available NOW.

I've read recently that they have a color unit that will be available soon, but if you need it now, and don't want your BF number too high (Batman factor ) then this is the ticket.

Oh, this just screams for people to pull a NSA Line Eater-like filler into their mail, if just to PO the lawyer at the other side of the litigation and render their indexing useless.

The Harry Potter books ask that question quite clearly: "What if there are real magicians walking among us?" They certainly qualify, although I think most people would classify them as "fantasy."

Still, as has been pointed out elsewhere on this thread, the Hugo rules do allow the selection of works of fantasy. And Hugos are voted on by the fans, and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire has certainly been very popular. Does that put it in the same class with The Dispossessed, or The Forever War, or The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, or Neuromancer (to name four previous Hugo winners with which I'm familiar)? Not necessarily, but does it necessarily have to be in the same class?

For the record, I've read all four of the Harry Potter series to date, and I thoroughly enjoyed them. Rowling's writing reminds me a lot of Roald Dahl's, in particular. And I know I'm not alone among adult geeks in liking them; I note that the Jargon File now contains the word "muggle." In retrospect, Goblet of Fire (the longest and most complex Harry Potter to date) winning the Hugo seems not only likely, but almost inevitable.

Eric

The Harry Potter books ask that question quite clearly: "What if there are real magicians walking among us?" They certainly qualify, although I think most people would classify them as "fantasy."

Still, as has been pointed out elsewhere on this thread, the Hugo rules do allow the selection of works of fantasy. And Hugos are voted on by the fans, and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire has certainly been very popular. Does that put it in the same class with The Dispossessed, or The Forever War, or The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, or Neuromancer (to name four previous Hugo winners with which I'm familiar)? Not necessarily, but does it necessarily have to be in the same class?

For the record, I've read all four of the Harry Potter series to date, and I thoroughly enjoyed them. Rowling's writing reminds me a lot of Roald Dahl's, in particular. And I know I'm not alone among adult geeks in liking them; I note that the Jargon File now contains the word "muggle." In retrospect, Goblet of Fire (the longest and most complex Harry Potter to date) winning the Hugo seems not only likely, but almost inevitable.

Eric

Hey, I like Eric's stuff just as much as the next guy, but in light of what's been going on in schools the past few years, I can understand not wanting kids to have exposure to things that romanticize the power to kill. From the first paragraph of ESR's Ethics From the Barrel of a Gun:

There is nothing like having your finger on the trigger of a gun to reveal who you really are. Life or death in one twitch -- ultimate decision, with the ultimate price for carelessness or bad choices.

Windows 2000 will be either canceled or dead on arrival. Either way it will turn into a horrendous train wreck, the worst strategic disaster in Microsoft's history. However, their marketing spin on this failure will be so deft that it will barely affect their hold on the consumer desktop within the next two years.

Is there an echo in here?

Xix.
P.S. I apologise if the above links are broken. I can reach cached copies, but not the pages themselves. Blame the PHBs.

Windows 2000 will be either canceled or dead on arrival. Either way it will turn into a horrendous train wreck, the worst strategic disaster in Microsoft's history. However, their marketing spin on this failure will be so deft that it will barely affect their hold on the consumer desktop within the next two years.

Is there an echo in here?

Xix.
P.S. I apologise if the above links are broken. I can reach cached copies, but not the pages themselves. Blame the PHBs.

The plural of box is not boxen, the plural of UNIX is not UNICES, and the plural of mongoose is not polygoose. jf

Nobody complains when people say "boxen" just for fun ... why should they complain when people say "virii" just for fun?

Certainly, I laugh at all those who say "virii" thinking it's the actual plural of virus--but similarly I laugh at all those who get their panties in a knot trying to correct those who lovingly and playfully use "virii" as a "playful distortion of language".

Please, do us all a favor and get a grip!

I think one of the workaround to this, is to make the publication of the source code necessary prior to granting any software patent

Oh great, I can see it now, pattens with very vegue discriptions, and the actual code in BF, INTERCAL and befunge . Excellent, now we will all be able to follow what's going on. Can we get a law passed making it a capital crime to have a pattent with polyglot source in these languages?

PLEASE DON'T GIVE UP

10 DO >>[-<+]<,

COME FROM 10

PLEASE DO DIE NOW

(and no, that won't work. Unless I'm really lucky.)

No doubt due to ESR's Sex Tips for Geeks. :)

--Pinball Wizard
(posting anonymously to preserve my precious karma)

MOD THIS UP YOU FUCKING COMPUTER NERDS! i'm sick and fucking tired of you four eyed pieces of shit who smell nasty as fuck being soo gay. look at the type of people you idolize. here, lemmy give you some links:

ESR
RMS
linus torvalds
alan cox
alan cox's wife

i really wonder how many of you fucks on here look like these people? most of you? you fucking computer nerds make me sick!