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Slashback: Dilemma, Privacy, Chess
Front-row seats. zer0vector writes "The previously mentioned camera that was attached to the external fuel tank on Atlantis gave some great shots of launch this afternoon on NASA TV. During the feed, it looked like the ejection of the solid rocket boosters damaged or obscured the camera, leading to a fuzzy image during the fuel tank separation stage."
SkyNet has not yet achieved consciousness. DrEnter writes "According to this Yahoo article, Vladimir Kramnik has defeated 'Deep Fritz' (apparently the world's most powerful chess computer) to take the lead, 2.5-0.5 (the first game was a draw). You can find out more details at the contest site."
Damned if you do, but also if you don't. cybaea writes "A recent article in InfoWorld argues that the latest Windows 2000 and Windows XP Service Packs may be illegal for health care providers under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. To make matters worse, not installing the Service Packs may also be illegal. Damned if you do, damned if you don't ..."
Dad, please switch to a real operating system. It's still spreading. deego writes " An e-mail-borne computer virus that lets crackers control infected Windoze machines remotely continues to spread and constitutes the most severe attack this year. The worm, known as W32.Bugbear, or I-Worm.Tanatos, infects computers that use Microsoft's Windows operating systems. It was first spotted a week ago and has spread to dozens of countries. Article here."
Please sit down first. calib0r writes "CNN.com is running an article on the most recent events dealing with the nissan.com lawsuit. Salon.com ran an article about this a few months ago. More information can also be found here."
Just about EVERYTHING is illegal under HIPAA. I've never seen such ridiculously stringent specs. If you want a good laugh, check out www.hipaacomply.com and read through the technology FAQ's. Even faxing is restricted.
What's your damage, Heather?
How do I get privacy while playing chess on the internet while making sure I don't get the bugbear virus?
Kramnik gets $1,000,000 if he wins, $800,000 if he draws, and $600,000 if he loses. I knew I wasn't spending all that time on Yahoo! Chess for nothing...
It's laughable to say that Deep Fritz is the strongest computer programme - Deep Blue (that defeated Kasparov) evaluated 200 million positions per second compared to Deep Fritz's 3-4 million. Deep Blue was running on an IBM-made supercomputer. Fritz isn't.
Grr! Arg!
But Uzi Nissan, whose family name is also the name of a month in Hebrew and Arabic[...]
"We've always seen this case as protecting the Nissan brand and not about money," he said. "What we are saying is the word Nissan by itself is our registered trademark and we're the only ones with the right to use the name Nissan by itself."
It gets better - Nissan Motor has registered the domain name nissancomputer.com which they'll "give" to Nissan Computers if Nissan Motor get given the nissan.com domain name. Now, if they've brought nissancomputer.com with the express purpose of squatting on it for exchange of monies, services or goods (for example, a domain name) - surley that's a blatant case of cybersquatting by Nissan Motor?
If Nissan Motors wanted to have an exclusive name, they should have made one up.
They took an existing word (in 2 languages, nonetheless) which also happens to be a surname. Now, they can't expect exclusive rights over that name.
- Bugbear actually uses one of forty different subject lines. It also sometimes throws in some random data, just for fun.
- Bugbear is a descendant of Badtrans, a nasty but not particularly widespread virus from earlier this year. The keystroke logger seems to have been borrowed bit-for-bit (at least in the copy I isolated and analysed).
JousterThere is no way to save users from themselves. If a sizable part of the population need to use computers, there will always be a significant number of those who do stupid things from them. These problems will continue no matter how secure Windows becomes. These problems will occur on any software platform that is simple enough for the general population to use.
Actually, with a certain class of user, Windows' automatic updates make Windows more secure than Linux. Amoung windows users, that class is rather large. We may see less of the Code Red Viruses, but the Shoot Yourself in the Foot Viruses will continue.
Linux does have one advantage though. It is intensely hard to install programs for Linux. It is so complicated that it is very hard to automate. And as long as users have to install viruses by hand, and download the correct libraries to get them to run, you can be sure that Linux users won't have to worry much about a Linux virus spreading like wildfire across the net.
Can I register a domain name SomeCompany.com and then do the following:
My response would have been, "damn right, freedom of speech..."
But now, I'm just confused.
What did he do that violated any laws?
He's paid $2.2 million in legal fees. It's not like he had a choice about showing up in court to defend himself.
Now Nissan motors can take his domain name after all the legal bills? And if not, he'll be ordered to give them financial reparations for "diluting their brand name?"
Does it annoy anyone else that NASA spent $750,000 on the technical equivalent an X-10 webcam?
And it failed! I mean, what the hell?
Private space enterprises deserve to eat NASA's breakfast, dinner AND lunch once they get started.
That is a ridiculous statement! If you read through all the things listed maybe you would realise some people _can't_ install microsoft's patches because of there EULA requirements.
...the scariest part has to be that they let a Windows operating system anywhere near brain surgery....
During the feed, it looked like the ejection of the solid rocket boosters damaged or obscured the camera...
That can be a problem for the crew too, or used to be. Each SRB has rocket motors that separate it from the external tank at around two minutes MET. Debris from these motors can get on the forward orbiter windows. Not too many years ago the shuttle flight software was changed - a "window washer" mod - to fire the FU RCS jets for a few seconds at SRB seperation to keep the windscreen clear of debris.
Just thought you'd be interested to know...
--JIm
I believe Clark has the right idea
"...the health care industry needs to go to Microsoft with a joint NDA (nondisclosure agreement) and indemnification agreement, requiring Microsoft to hold their HIPAA-compliant customers harmless should patient information be leaked via this mechanism."
Not a prayer that MS would agree, but it will be interesting when they get pulled into court the first time a provider claims it was the update and MS forced them to allow it.
The regulatory oversight may do more to open MS software than the DOJ. Logic, reason, and innovation are not the watch words of these organizations. Regulations were passed, comply or be destroyed.
It is hard for me to decide who I want to win. MS or the regulators...
We've been told at my University that we (as system administrators) can go ahead and click the "I accept" on any Microsoft service pack or hotfix, our licensing agreement with M$ overrides anything they put in a EULA.
Microsoft could actually wind up violating their own agreement if they take action not specified in the big license.
That said, even while as a programmer I'm somewhat rooting for Deep Fritz, as a fellow man I can't help but be in awe of the fact that Kramnik is able to think better than a machine that "thinks" millions of times faster than him.
Why? I can, for instance, look at a picture of my wife and identify her as my wife in a fraction of a second. The best image-recognition software in the world can't reliably do even that simple task.
I'm not the least bit surprised to see a human beating a computer in a complex activity like chess, and that's with lots of handicaps in Fritz' favor (it doesn't have to analyze an image of the board in order to determine where the pieces are, for instance). The amazing part is not the human beating the computer, but the computer beating the human (which won't happen in this case, but it's getting close).
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
Of course, he might actually have a spine (or independant wealth), and wanted the domain more than the money.
This strikes me as no different than the McDonalds (the junk-food chain) vs McDonalds (the family owned restaurant that predates the fast food chain) a while back. The bigger business considers itself more important, and has the money to throw at lawyers to make that delusion a reality.
If *you* had a family domain, and some company offered you what you consider a pittance for it, how would you feel? Would you consider yourself an informed "hardball" player? Would you "cackle with glee" at your great luck in having a valuable name?
It really disgusts me that companies consider themselves more important than individuals. It disgusts me even more that the legal system mostly agrees with them. Neither of those comes *close*, however, to the disgust I feel about actual individual *humans* who agree that companies have more rights than everyone else, and actually criticize other humans for standing up for what few rights we have left.
Press releases touting this week's match boast that Fritz has beaten both Kasparov and Deep Blue. The win over Kasparov came, however, in a super fast kind of chess, where computers have a decided edge. And Fritz didn't really beat Deep Blue-it beat an early version of its software running on slower hardware.
Do I think that there is an added value to better algorithms and pruning methods over pure computational firepower? Sure, but you need to keep in mind that now that Deep Blue has been disassembled, there is no way to get an honest, head to head comparison.
As if it matters, I still get my but kicked by good old GNU Chess.
Since neither Hebrew nor Arabic is written with Latin characters, I find the "it's the name of a month" argument rather weak. Furthermore, the owner of www.nissan.com is incorporated in the United States, where "Nissan" cannot be considered a common word
As far as the "waiting until 1999" argument goes, it sounds like Nissan is claiming he didn't infringe until 1999 when he started linking to car sites, meaning he was generating revenue based on visitors who were looking for www.nissanmotors.com.
I think this argument holds water.
However, the remedy the company is asking for is way out of proportion. Nissan Motors should be granted an injunction against www.nissan.com being used to adverstise cars.
Just the tank camera, no cutaways, all the way from launch to SRB seperation.
Play it fast (hold the frame advance button down) for another cool view of the whole launch in about 15 seconds.
One simple rule for its versus it's
Since neither Hebrew nor Arabic is written with Latin characters, I find the "it's the name of a month" argument rather weak.
Erm... if you want to take that tack... "Nissan" in Japanese isn't written with Latin characters either.
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Dum de dum.
Freedom is not the license to do what we like, it is the power to do what we ought.