Slashdot Mirror

This really needs to be a presidential election issue. I'll vote for whoever says they will end Internet Technology patents.

While America works to protect intellectual property, everyone else is innovating.

Well, this reminds me of the trained honey bees for land mine detection

I had a few friends who chased the overtime route. They made a bit of headway with their employer before the final answer was found. You can read more about the result here.

It's mild, I realize, but the cover picture bugs the shit out of me. Combining the (mildly concerning) sexualization, (mildly concerning) appropriation of cultural symbols, and (mildly concerning) sensationalism of "kiss your cubicle goodbye", this cover seems inappropriate to me.

I realize I may be more sensitive to these things than y'all who aren't candy-assed liberals, but... it bugs me. If this sort of sexualized picture was used for some non-sensationalistic purpose, like selling cars, I might not mind. If this sort of sensationalistic copy were on some photograph that were not sexual or did not appropriate "exotic" cultural symbols it might not bother me either.

The way it stands, I tore the cover off of my magazine when it was delivered and briefly considered cancelling my (charter) subscription. (All the while thinking "After all those years of mediocrity from Wired, this is what is going to make me cancel?")

This gun was considered a possible replacement to the land mine situation in the DMZ. Don't know what's been developing with it since I saw it on /. 2 years ago.

Wired ran an article in 2000 about other groups who were using the same method to the same purpose. It's quite a bit longer and more detailed, giving a more complete picture of how it's intended to work.

Check it out heironymouscoward...you made Wired News with this post, hats off.

MyDoom Targets Linux Antagonist

I don't know if I would agree with that, but you do imply that there are civil rights abuses happening. With that, I agree wholeheartedly. That should change, and repealing many parts of the Patriot Act would be a good start.

"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." - Al Gore, CNN's "Late Edition", 9 March 1999.

OS X in black and white!

Before looking at SPF you may want to read what Claus Assmann [theaimsgroup.com], and Wietse Venema [theaimsgroup.com] have to say on the subject.

You might also want to read what Steve Bellovin (one of the guys who invented USENET among other things) and Eric Raymond have to say about it. They spend a little more time understanding SPF...

Wired story with Raymond's comments.

Bellovin's comments in an email to the SPF mailing list.

It's been done - check out the i-30 from Japan.

Or he could have done something like this.. Now that's impressive.

Oh but it does!

Use a black felt pen. If you do it right you get to label the CD and defeat copy protection at the same time

I wonder if they will complain about diseases in chat rooms regarding orkut??

Online currency exchange article

You sound more than just a bit paranoid, and more than a little looney too.

And I think you're a bit over the top with your "looney" tunes remark.

I think a little paranoia healthy. For example, check out this SlashDot article entiteld "Slashdot | Rental Car + GPS = Speeding Ticket." Okay, it wasn't RF technology but this next one is ... ... a Buffalo charter school, students wear a plastic ID card with their name, photo and a Radio Frequency Identification tag. For now, they track school attendance, but the principal "plans to use RFID to track library loans, disciplinary records, cafeteria purchases and visits to the nurse's office." So much for HIPPA regulations.

Or this one, The Postal Service is looking into tracking every piece of mail, not just by location of the letter a la FedEx, but by the identity of the sender. They're starting with bulk mailings, but want to expand it to all mail.

Yeah, that gives me warm fuzzies.

In other words, for you to attach the "black hole" label to the original reply is a WAY over the top when you consider the potential for Wal*Mart to sell access to their tracking technology.

Think about it, all this guy was saying is what protection does from queries like "how many size 4 coats in pink purchased within the past 6 months are buying big Macs" turning into "where is so-n-so's little girl now."

As a parent myself, such a little paranioa like that goes a long way.

Then again, some said I was nuts when I looked supspiciously at all those cookies those banner ads were tossing onto my computer back in 1998 ...

Um, maybe you'd like to wait for the government actually to do something bad before you start saying "I told you so"?

You mean, like legitimizing spam? What about all the knee-jerk draconian laws that have been enacted to stop script kiddies? Let's also not forget about the DMCA. Federal government regulating computers no workie. I told you so.

Reminds me of the license plate on one of Linus' cars: coffee, chocolate, men: some things are better rich.

It may not an order of magnitude less than the other guys; but I think they're still doing OK.

I find myself wandering; "If we find life on Mars will it be related?"

Meteorites originating from mars do land on earth. Surly rocks from earth have found there way to mars. Perhaps taking life with them? We are losing some of our outer atmosphere all the time, surly some microbes must escape also? They would face the cold vacuum of space and all that radiation, dieing a cold lonely death. But give our microbe a big enough rock of the right type, and there would seem to be some hope of survival.
Have you got a relative on Mars?

I wonder how many of these 532 are children and kindly old grandparents this time. It is the height of hypocricy to sue people and cry to Congress on one hand, but pay Big Champagne to track what's hot among file traders on the other. The RIAA and affiliated labels are a criminal syndicate just like the mafia. Boycott them!

But do you love it this much?

Diamond is actually pretty common here, DeBeers monopolies leading to artifical scarcity notwithstanding...

But I think what kills the prospect of a Martian diamond industry is probably the prospect of synthetic diamonds in the near future. If we can make them here on a large scale for not much money, well... seems the bottom will drop out of the diamond market pretty soon.

Of course that doesn't preclude us finding some other really rare and valuable ores on Mars, but if it's anything new, we probably wouldn't even know what to do with it/make from it yet, and it might not even be useable on Earth (after all, if it ever developed here, it didn't last too long, so odds are it still wouldn't like the Earth climate very much.)

Must... use... better... html. ;) Link provided below.

Stratospheric Net Service Floats into Action

I note that a bunch of these items are not yet shipping, including the Phantom Gaming System that came in 3rd in this years Vaporware Awards

Hey All! Have you ever seen Linus Torvald's wife Tove Torvalds? Not to be rude but can't that beautiful baby get a makeover and put on the sexy?! I mean, Linus has become very metro recently and he is a very trendy metrosexual! You see, Linus used to look like a complete dork. But now, if I was a faggot, I would be all over this guy today! In the meantime, I'm sure Linus is getting his share of the booth babes... ;)

Hey All! Have you ever seen Linus Torvald's wife Tove Torvalds? Not to be rude but can't that beautiful baby get a makeover and put on the sexy?! I mean, Linus has become very metro recently and he is a very trendy metrosexual! You see, Linus used to look like a complete dork. But now, if I was a faggot, I would be all over this guy today! In the meantime, I'm sure Linus is getting his share of the booth babes... ;)

...judging from this article over at Wired News: The anti-counterfeit software in Photoshop CS was developed by the Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group, an organization established by the governors of the G-10 central banks to promote the use of anti-counterfeit devices in the computer industry.

...judging from this article over at Wired News: The anti-counterfeit software in Photoshop CS was developed by the Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group, an organization established by the governors of the G-10 central banks to promote the use of anti-counterfeit devices in the computer industry.

yeah, and the ps2 is powerful enough to guide cruise missiles too, remember?

Billions Registered

Why should the websites that these people are seeing the ads on be forced to develop and support a website free of charge?

Wrong. At least one of the named companies is a nationwide ISP that charges its users for the privilege of receiving banner ads on its home page, and presumably will now be charging them to receive these new ones. This same company is about to release a major browser update that blocks pop-up ads. (BTW, I don't see much difference between this situation and D-Squared Solutions' alleged extortion.)

Which is of course why the Slammer worm is completely impossible.

Best wishes,
Mike.

Leopards.... I'd expect more from a /. user....

Broadband Over Powerlines?

Broadband Power!

Broadband Over Powerlines hits a Snag

What the heck? I know St. Louis-based Ameren has been testing this for over a year.

I have seen a lot of data and reports on the interference problems which I think we all expected. However, I have not seen anything that this would be actually dangerous. Surely with the testing somebody would have noticed if people were getting zapped.

I would like to see some data before labelling this as potentially dangerous to one's health.

AC

The idea of transferring data over power lines has been suggested before... but at least in the case reported in wired of Nov. 2001, it didn't work--despite what everone wanted to believe.

the article.

The Macintosh's Twisted Truth, which talks about how Jef Raskin was the real inventor of the Mac (and how Jobs wanted to kill the Macintosh project at the time), and Apple's Unlikely Guardian Angel, which details how Microsoft support the Mac from day one.

The Macintosh's Twisted Truth, which talks about how Jef Raskin was the real inventor of the Mac (and how Jobs wanted to kill the Macintosh project at the time), and Apple's Unlikely Guardian Angel, which details how Microsoft support the Mac from day one.

The Macintosh's Twisted Truth, which talks about how Jef Raskin was the real inventor of the Mac (and how Jobs wanted to kill the Macintosh project at the time), and Apple's Unlikely Guardian Angel, which details how Microsoft support the Mac from day one.

Wow, secret searches by the feds

The searches still require warrants (despite phony ACLU claims).


Wrong. There are lots of searches that do not require warrents, and the recent legislation put into law by Mr. Bush -- the Intelligence Authroization Act for Fiscal Year 2004 does two things. First, it redefines financial institution to include just about everything. Second, it grants FBI power to obtain records (and forbid the requestee from reporting the request to the target) from a financial institution without requiring permission from a judge. No court order is needed to access records held by financial institutions, nor does the FBI need to prove just cause. It is a blank check. More detailed info is in a Wired article

The fact that Patriot II would have allowed the executive branch to remove someones citizenhip based on a whim

No, it would not. The person being removed would only be removed if they became a terrorist for an enemy foreign interest. Not a "whim".


Ok smart ass. Define Terrorist so that it isn't just up to the "whim" of the government. Lately what passes for "terrorist activity" is quite laughable. Law inforcement has classified minor drug offenders, as they coudl be rasing money for terrorist activities. Untill 'terrorist' is defined, it is a 'whim'.

Also in the news, e-books from Amazon will obiliterate the printed book market, grocery delivery services will annihilate the brick and mortar grocery stores, DigiScent smelling PC devices are the next video cards, broadband video retails are the wave of the future, and PointCast rocks.

(I'd have thrown in more digitally oriented links, but the websites are all, well, gone)

In 1994, the Marines broke new ground by employing a modified version of the bloody Doom PC game, supposedly to teach teamwork skills.

Well, Thinking Machines got bought out (in effect) when parallel computing made the transition from a "niche" to a "mainstream" technology -- once IBM, Sun, etc., all started selling MPP supercomputers, most of the specialized MPP companies went under or were bought by mainstream computer companies. In Thinking Machine's case, my recollection is that Oracle bought the Data Mining team, and Sun bought the compiler and OS team, and Danny Hillis went on to run a really cool group at Disney and to design a really cool clock. So Thinking Machine's technology and architecture won (virtually all of the world's fastest supercomputers are MPP), the company didn't survive the transition. Shame -- the people were really cool, and the food was amazing.

That people would find our clear and concise messages "pedantic/weird/irrelevant" is surreal. I suppose I'm focusing on business email, but I certainly find that people appreciate it when I keep to the point and use as little of their time as possible.

I don't have an "elaborate system". The simplest case is to quote nothing. it works fine in most cases. The next and entirely optional step is "delete everything except a sentence or a paragraph that establishes context." It's not rocket science.

I completely understand that people are under no obligation to be polite. That's not my point. People are under no obligation to not send their messages ENTIRELY IN CAPS or in txt msg spk. Just because there is no obligation doesn't mean it isn't rude.

When communicating with other people, be it in person, by telephone, in a speech, by letter, by email, or even a Slashdot post, one should strive to be clear and concise. This isn't some wild-eyed, bearded, Unix user proclaimation, this is a simple extension of basic communication skills taught in high school. In the past businesses managed to communicate by memo and letter without quoting every single piece of prior correspondance. If necessary for context prior correspondance might be quoted ("In your letter of February 4rd you state..."). When facsimilies became mainstream they carried forward existing practices. Those practices still apply to email.

(Completely random gripe: For some reason adding new technology seems to make people forget the lessons of the past. I'm slowly unlearning my past few years of exposure to PowerPoint hell, and rediscovering that the public speaking class I hated in high school taught me exactly what I needed to know to give truly compelling talks. PowerPoint is in fact a pretty good tool, but it's easy to confuse the tool for the purpose.)

Also in that magazine, just last September, a convict volunteered for the trip, and suggested that others in his position might also be suitable and willing to make the trip.

Also in that magazine, just last September, a convict volunteered for the trip, and suggested that others in his position might also be suitable and willing to make the trip.

w00t. Sun .au files!

My first introduction "digital music" was also sally.au (and with some fun with xhost and .rhosts, we told Sally to pretend to enjoy herself by jumping to random machines in the lab, whereupon we walked away and watched hilarity ensue through a nearby window), followed up immediately by both parts of Negativland's "U2" parody.

The ironic part is that I got the .au files (and later, the MP3s) of the Negativland tracks because you couldn't buy the U2 parody due to U2's label suing Negativland for copyright infringement. That's right. RIAA's landsharks were suing people to PREVENT people from BUYING music. (Because, of course, it was music that they didn't control. So it's OK to sue people for producing it.) The only way to obtain the tracks in question was to digitize and pirate them.

Wired also has an article on the mess.

Eventually it all got settled, and the world has been able to download "the forbidden single" directly from the band's own website in a wide variety of formats, including (of course) MP3 for several years now.