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RMS to Move Into Bill Gates Building Today
In anonymous reader writes "RMS will be moving his office to the new William H. Gates building at MIT's Stata Center starting today. This marks the end of MIT's use of building NE43, which housed the LCS and AI labs (now combined into CSAIL).
On a strangely unrelated note, shortly after Harvard, in a laudable attempt to retain solidarity with the Open Source community, dedicated the Maxwell Dworkin building (named after Gates' and Ballmer's mothers respectively), Gates' credit card was hacked. After all, they did have his mother's maiden name... "
There's MIT, Stanford... anywhere else that Billy has seen fit to leave his mark?
Why do all the rich schools get all the money? It really pisses of because our poor, which is quite a good school in terms of education it provides, is always in need of money. Hay Mr. Gates, spread the wealth and give a little to poor schools.
p.s. I've seen quite a few MIT and Harvard students in practice and let me tell you, they weren't as good as advertised.
Harvard, in a laudable attempt to retain solidarity with the Open Source community, dedicated the Maxwell Dworkin building (named after Gates' and Ballmer's mothers respectively)
I'm sure I'm just missing something here, but how does naming a building after the mothers of the cofounders of Microsoft build solidiarity with the OSS community in the least?
May we never see th
Just curious, do you happen to know more MIT grads and undergrads in general?
When the last company I worked for went out of business I ended up cleaning out the hiring engineering manager's file cabinet. He had three resume folders: Employee referrals, MIT grads, and Other. There's still something to be said for the MIT name.
And to top if off, he's now the most generous philanthropist too. His foundation, focused on fighting disease and promoting education will leave a bigger and longer lasting legacy than his business accomplishments.
Having some buildings names after him is a small token of apprecation in comparison to his generosity.
Slashdot Moderation: From positive to terrible in 2 "insightful" posts.
You haven't been paying very careful attention to University naming practices, have you? Most universities will name a building whatever the donor who gives it to them says to name it. If Bill Gates wants a building name after himself, his mother, or his favorite pet goldfish from when he was six, any school in the country will oblige him as long as he's writing the check. Besides, you could easily argue that there's a certain pleasant irony in taking a big chunk of money from Mr. Gates and using it to build a facility where the researchers will be doing work that will benefit Free Software.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Apparently, lots of machines (including gnu.org and debian mirrors) were being moved, which caused a significant outage.
Pretty ironic about RMS moving to William H Gates building :(
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
What?
I thought RMS retired from the MIT AI lab 20 years ago?
That's what his bio says too.. can anyone clarify?
WPI was well on it's way to having a good rep before they started pushing their certificate programs. Now I feel the weight of my student loans crushing me even more every time I see one of their commercials and know that the value of my degree is slowly dropping...
How do you know there was no damage? Can you not look beyond the murder part of what he said, and see that he was implying that you have no right to break a law to prove a point like this. And what point did he prove? No public system is unhackable. Just like any house can be broken into and any bank vault can be cracked. .45 caliber holes in your chest.
He had no right to do what he did. No right whatsoever. Come break into my house to prove how easy it is, don't steal anything, just break into my house and call my cell from my home phone, and I'll prove how happy I am you showed me my security hole by putting two
There isn't enough rope in the world to show hackers how much we love them
For instance I had to put up an anonymous FTP for one day. It is dumb I know, but the user needed to upload something from home, didn't know their home IP off hand and didn't understand log ons and that stuff from the FTP end. SO I did it, I allowed anonymous upload to my FTP, and guess what i got, undeletable folders in my ftp folder, so that some guy could use me as a mirror for files on his warez site.
your right they showed me the error of my ways, but truth is I knew the error, I just hoped no one would be such a jerk as to have no respect for other peoples property. Hackers are vandals, I can piss in your mailbox, throw shit at your door, there are lots of things I can do, and probably not get caught to prove I can do them, but I don't, because I don't want to screw with other peoples shit. I have respect for other peoples property.
Hackers probably read their sisters Diaries and say she shouldn't have left it somewhere where I could find it.
It's oppurtunism at it's worst, and they make me sick.
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
I've dealt with this kind of thing before.
This is usually how the situtation goes. Grey hat hacker bored/is curious. Picks a target and goes to town. Finds security vulneribilities and emails them to whatever contact info is available. 9 times out of 10, no response. Other contact attempts usually follow and those in charge either don't understand, don't care, understaffed, or contact info out of date. The problem goes unfixed an the hacker moves on.
This cycle goes on and turns the grey hat more and more black hat. It's rarely a pure act for the bettering of human kind, but it's rarely (except for script kiddies and 13 year olds) intentionally malicious. It's mostly for the curiousity and they are willing to report what they find. The more the hacker is ignored the more they go from simply finding areas where problems could exist, to exploiting problems. People need to stop ignoring the grey hats who report possible problems because they turn into black hats who will embarass you on the grandest of scales.
Not saying I condone exploits in this manner, but the only thing people seem to respond to is embarassment. Then it's scape goat time. Pretending the problem doesn't exist doesn't help anyone. They are going to be punished for reporting the problem. What will this tell others? Don't report the problem. Contact parties in Russia and sell them the card numbers. Cracking down on them doesn't stop them, it just makes them uncooperative.
Well, there is the mythical American Express Black Card for the superrich. Is that swanky enough?
I have some sympathy to that view, but I can also see the counterargument. My company just moved into a new building with a freshly-installed RFID key system. All employees had to hand in their old metal keys to the old building and get a new card or keyfob (their choice) to get into the new building.
In our application, the new keys increase security and increase trust of the employees. First, a metal key only supports authorization, not authentication or accounting (one "A" of "AAA"). It can let people in, but leaves no record who or when it allowed to pass. There is an obvious security advantage to RFID keys.
However, they also build a more trusting environment. If anything comes up missing overnight or over the weekend, it's trivial to know whom to start talking to - there's no shadow of doubt over the rest of the company. Since keys can be revoked at will, even new employees can be given the keys to the office without a loss of accountability, and lost keys can be disabled immediately.
I don't see any real downsides to the new system. It's easier to use (no fumbling for a specific key during bad weather), gives more control to the employeer, and gives more access to the employees. I respect RMS' opinion, but I just don't really agree with it here.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Everyone likes to bash how ugly Stata is on the outside. I like the way it looks, but I can see how others might not.
But, you really should walk through the "Student Street" area before making up your mind. It's pretty breathtaking: a big, open hallway with various corners of other buildings (made of brick, reflective aluminum, glass) sticking through the ceiling at odd angles. Walls painted with several strong, basic hues. Classrooms with cool polka-dotted echo-proof wood panels all over the walls (though these might give a headache after awhile). Lots of swooping stairwells that take you up to places where external walls from another building cut through the glass ceiling and continue all the way through the floor.
It's like a carnival funhouse. Soon to be inhabited by the carnies.