> we wouldn't have to be using multimillion/billion dollar technologies to figure the thing out
What else were we going to do with that money? Give it to the politicians? They just give it to their friends. Better that it goes to science.
Re:If the review is accurate, the book is revision
on
In Search of Stupidity
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· Score: 5, Interesting
> IBM's biggest blunders with OS/2 didn't come until after Windows 95
That wasn't a blunder by IBM. That was a deliberate marketing decision by Microsoft. Windows 95 was released about six months ahead of schedule. One month it was going to be due in summer, the next month it was to be on store shelves by Christmas.
The way that I see it:
Microsoft blindsided IBM and doomed the computer industry with Windows 95. Microsoft and IBM were in a race for years to see who would own the desktop. Microsoft deduced, correctly, that whatever OS people picked up next, no matter what it was or who it came from, would become the default OS simply because people, after paying $100 for one, weren't going to shell out another $100 even if the first was completely broken. Windows 95, known in beta as Chicago, was falling progressively further and further behind schedule and it looked like IBM and OS/2 were going to sweep the field.
So what did MS do? They took a horrific beta edition, Chicago, slapped enough duct tape and bubblegum on it so that it would work, with massive amounts of coaxing, on just over half of the high volume production systems being shipped, and put it on the store shelves about six months before it had been scheduled to be released. They didn't make a better product but they did get the first product onto the shelves. Coupling it with a monstrosity of an EULA and the budding resistance from stores to refund money for unuseable (but opened) software Microsoft managed to turn the entire American population into a free army of beta testers and socially engineered them to accept sub-par software as a norm. The majority of American consumers didn't know any better, knew nothing about the acceptable levels of software quality, and when Win95 broke repeatedly they, lemminglike, kept calling customer support centers until someone would promise to ship them a floppy or a CD with the necessary patches for their hardware.
How did IBM lose? They stuck to schedule and attempted to uphold their standards of software functionality before releasing it onto the public.
What did the computer industry gain? A.com boom-bust, the triumph of x86 architecture over m68k architecture (not really a gain but that's the way things went), the enormous expansion and mangling of years and years of carefully planned and thought out standards, and an "all sales final" reputation of a seedy used car salesman. Well, it made a few millionaires too but you'd never guess it by looking at the horrendously tangled mess that is the internet and the industry these days.
Thank you Microsoft for bringing all of the stray cats and dogs from the whole neighborhood to play/poop/pee in the carefully planned sandbox that we had.
How would you handle a situation where a private user makes a post to an online discussion group expressing opinion A. Some other individual picks up the post and, without notifying the author or obtaining their consent, uses it to promote a product (Makuka Olive Oil supplements), sell advertising space on the web page, and express an opinion B (which is complete opposite that of the original author's opinion A) by (deliberately?) misinterpreting the subject line of the original e-mail.
To add insult to injury the web page defames the original author by egregious use of improper paraphrasing--attributing to the author both drug use and a heart attack and making it seem as if the author is willing to testify to the direct association of the heart attack with an event which never actually occurred, at least not within the context of the original forum post. The heartdiseaseguru.com page is automatically regenerated with each page load and may or may not contain the libelous statement which appears in the summary provided with a Google search--it does about two out of five page loads.
Upon gaining employment with a large corporate entity in the Real World, outside of the realm of web pages featuring dietary supplements and their frivolous/libelous authors, the original author is puzzled that he is getting the third degree from his management and can't gain the support of HR even if he's being verbally assaulted in the hallways by senior group leaders. This is because the HR rep, while scraping the web for employees' names and known e-mail addresses (a morally questionable tactic--even if it is, and it may not be depending upon local laws, perfectly legal), came across a web page that attributed drug use and a heart attack to a new star employee--the perfect way to find the "what's wrong with this otherwise perfect picture" and completely dismantle what might have been an otherwise booming start to an ascending career.
In theory, yes. In practice, no. Here's why: the system has already been standardized and stabilized. The system currently works. If people are upset because their character set isn't supported in DNS then please cry a river and then go get a box of kleenex and get over it. If those societies had set up the DNS system in the first place perhaps they could have done it perfect to their hearts' desire. Since they didn't then they can't. The system is what it is. As a network society we shouldn't expand something so close to the core of the operation of the global internet until a comprehensive majority of downstream apps are written to conform with protocols and specifications which will handle an expanded DNS character set.
A more important problem to address at this time is farming of the existing DNS name space. Too many domain names are being held--for ransom, just for the sake of holding them, or to spite the guy down the street that wants the domain name--by business units (companies, divisions of companies, departments of divisions of companies, conglomerates, associations... anything that isn't private interest) and are no longer available to people who may legitimately have a reason to put them to use.
This is an example of mathematical modelling describing several different phenomena correlating with an occurence of a natural event which happens to describe a condition that produces a recognizable, noticeable, and appreciable display. This is a three dimensional zone described similar to x = 0... 20 meters, x^2 -3x -18, mirrored across both the x and y axes and spinning around the y axis in which molecules of water present in an airstream over the surface of a jet are compressed to a degree which significantly blocks the passage of light detectable to the human eye. A transformation of state occurs along the surface of a three dimensional zone that can be modelled well by fluid engineering.
There are billions upon billions of examples of systems that are very complex to describe both in science and math. Only a few happen to have a solution which produces an effect which makes it to google video and Slashdot.
Hehe. This is the only exploit in the GPL that I've found. Set up a network of programmers to continuously fork the code, like playing rugby with ownership, such that the comment lines containing all of the credits fill up so much space that it eventually breaks something, somewhere, in the system attempting to compile it. This includes the possibility that the text readable file size to hold all of the credits is too large for the filesystem on which it resides.
> I can't help but think that this is what provides license to directors to create a story from a mythology
DragonLance did it with Tales, and Heroes, and Tales II, and Heroes II. They had a number of other series which also branched out into sets of multiple trilogies.
The Thieves' World set was like this in that it was a long set of books written by multiple authors all telling tales of characters in a common world. Thieves' World didn't cover the same time frame that Tolkien did.
Somehow those companies managed to figure out how to regulate who owns what rights without making too many people unhappy. Some characters got killed off by authors who didn't create them and the stories were published. The only situation that I've ever heard of within the authoring world in the fantasy genre is Gary Gygax leaving TSR. I don't know the reason why he left TSR, but he did, but he seems to be doing okay now and TSR certainly didn't have too bad a time of it.
If you look at the computer industry there's the CP/M and QDOS debacle.
There's really nothing wrong with it. The Hobbit is a natural and fairly well-known prequel to LOTR. Tolkien also wrote many other books about the world in which all of this took place. There was the Silmarillion, which handled much of the history of the first and second ages (LOTR takes place in the third age) and Unfinished Tales which, as far as I know, deals mostly with the more legendary characters and their stories outside of LOTR. I owned a copy of Unfinished Tales but never read more than a few pages from it.
What I don't understand is why they don't carry on their lawsuit against New Line and go ahead and make the films with MGM.
Quoting from Peter Jackson to the One Ringers:
"MGM, who own a portion of the film rights in The Hobbit, publicly stated they wanted to make the film with us"
"Mark Ordesky called Ken and told him that New Line would no longer be requiring our services on the Hobbit and the LOTR 'prequel'"
If MGM is willing to stave off the inevitable attack from New Lines lawyers about what portion of the film rights is enough to allow them to release the movie then Peter Jackson should have an avenue to make the movie if he really wants to.
Maybe New Line went ahead with someone else to make The Hobbit. This shouldn't prevent Peter Jackson from making one.
The very first post in the fine article mentions that the author,"heard a bunch of rings being collected". What is the significance of the rings being collected, whose rings are they, and why is the author listening to them?
This is definitely an "embrace, extend, extinguish" maneuver.
FTFA (italics are mine): (quoting Noel Power) "I also got the impression that they (Sun -- with respect to Sun's proprietary VBA support implementation) deemphasizing support for their solution. We hope to increase the pace of our upstreaming efforts and aim to have the initial effort completed in the next couple of months."
If the goal of OOo is to encourage people to migrate away from MS and towards FOSS then deemphasizing VBA support is in the best interest of the end users in order to encourage them to write their macros in a language and environment free of MS encumberance. Noel's effort seems more to turn OOo into a MS Office clone which can then be made ready for the patent and intellectual property lawsuits that MS has been threatening for the last year. Once Noel has the VBA support to his liking in OOo then he'll have job security in continuing to maintain it and will be playing right into MS' hands and opening OOo up to the same types of arguments that MS has recently been making about Samba.
Aside: When did FOSS become FLOSS? After reading the wikipedia.org entry on FLOSS I'm suspicious that it was written by a partial fanboi who wants to astroturf some 'net jargon.
This isn't the type of thing that gets used on a large range of hardware to create a botnet or a spam zombie. This is the sort of thing that is used by the a$$wipe that follows you around/. and trolls every post you make--how does he always happen to know when you made a post? Sure he might just read/. constantly but for eff's sakes, he's got to sleep sometimes, doesn't he? This is the sort of thing that's used by that obnoxious #%&@wit op on IRC who, without fail, will arrive three minutes after you do and begin haranguing you--no matter what time of day or night you wake up and decide to log on. This is the sort of thing that's used by that really odd person you met on AIM/Yahoo/MSN/ICQ who never IMs when you're just casually cruising around the 'net but always seems to be there whenever you get into doing something productive.
Yes, there's such a thing as coincidence, but coincidence has a natural frequency and, when that natural frequency is exceeded then you have to start looking into what other people may call paranoia or conspiracy theory. The fact is that, if it's above the natural level of coincidence, then it's not paranoia or conspiracy--there really is somebody who has embedded a rootkit in your NIC, and used it to store extra functions in your monitor, and uses that to reinfect your OS each time you apply a new patch, reinstall, or change hard drives.
This is not the sort of attack vector that's used for frivolous collection of pwned boxes. This is the sort of attack vector used for targetted harassment.
I do appreciate you walking through this so politely. I've seen it before but you're the first person to do it without using all sorts of profanities and insulting my heritage along the way. It does make a certain amount of sense and I'd be inclined to agree but not without thinking about it more thoroughly:
Write a 1 over a 1? 0.1 * 1 + 0.9 * 1 = 1.0 Write another 1 over that? 0.1 * 1 + 0.9 * 1 = 1.0 Write a zero over that? 0.1 * 1.0 + 0.9 * 0 = 0.1 Write another zero over that? 0.1 * 0.1 + 0.9 * 0 = 0.01
Okay. That might seem to work, maybe. It doesn't seem like it would yield any useful residual data after a single overwrite, though. Many of the claims of data salvage which inspired things like gazillion pass data shredding are rooted in a propagated belief that the residual field will be meaningful more than one overwrite down the line.
My other question is about the analog field polarities. How are those actually stored on the platter? If the platter is some metal alloy matrix then I would imagine that the write head changes an oxidation state of a patch of the alloy (which brings us close to the concept of data density--how many atoms are in each patch that make up an individual bit or byte). With data densities having become so enormous these days it's hard to imagine that our 10%/90% variances have a window large enough to be meaningful, again, after one or two rewrites.
What I might envision happening is that someone could create a topographic magnetic map of each patch and then be able to say something akin to,"The atoms in the 90% southeast quadrant are all of the 0 charge, but right next to that is a thin line of atoms with a +1 charge, and right next to that is a thin line of atoms with a +2 charge, and..." and on. Maybe, theoretically, but again this would be increasingly difficult with the increasing data densities on modern platters. It would certainly be enormously tedious to attempt to reconstruct even a 1k text file using this technique. It's not something that common citizen should be worried about unless they plan on really ticking off a legal opponent who has extraordinarily deep pockets or really wants to make an example of them.
I guess I'm going to have to stick with my original thought: That yes, technically, in theory, it's probably possible to do. In practice, though, the anecdotal evidence which fuels the popular concept that it is possible to do most likely comes from people who plain didn't use a proper overwrite (eg. quick format) and the people who recovered the data wanted to make the recovery techniques sound sexy for PR and the quarterly report.
> The writing will flip the magnetization most of the way there, so you can tell if it was a 1 or a 0, it just won't be exactly 1 or 0. Think of writing as "old value *.1 + new value *.9"; you never really destroy the old values, but you make them weaker and weaker every time
This sounds like the principle behind Fourier Transform sampling for scientific instruments like MS and NMR. With years of writing and overwriting (ie. conducting an FT experiment on constantly changing data), wouldn't this sort of thinking result in the entire hard drive ending up as 0.5--or some random noise--rather than a meaningful data signal?
Well, you may want to use a all ones (value 256) fill rather than a zero or one fill. It's possible that a zero fill is transparent and doesn't actually flip bits. I don't know enough about the low level function of drives. With respect to a value 256 fill, though, I completely agree with you--a single pass should be enough to render any discernable residual magnetic field data, especially on today's drives, into complete gibberish.
> As for how, the short version is that if you write a one and then a zero, you end up with.1; the old value leaks in a bit
I've always wondered, if this were really true, why we don't see random errors cropping up constantly especially on heavily used portions of hard drives.
> See, when you overwrite, the write head doesn't exactly line up with the old stuff--so you'll have little bits of the old data sticking out from above or below the track
Is there a similiar random misalignment with the read head and, if so, why again do we not observe daily errors on heavily used portions of hard drives? If not then how does the read head compensate for the misalignment of the write head?
The questions are simple but the premise is sound. While I agree, in theory, with the technical papers that contend that this sort of data recovery can be done I don't see how, in practice, it can work for data recovery but not be a problem in everyday use. The magnetic field on the drive is what it is--it has no way of knowing if it is being read for recovery purposes or for standard reading.
Maybe there's a quantum mechanical "FBI/NSA/Investigator" bit which gets set at the beginning of the drive which instructs the rest of the magnetic fields to cooperate with investigative purposes in a recovery lab which is left unset inside of a standard computer. Personally I think that most of the technical papers discussing the theory behind such low level hard drive forensics rely on anecdotal empirical evidence from years past (mostly recovered from drives where people didn't bother to properly wipe the data at all--such as using quick formats) and add just enough extremely technical theory to make it sound plausible and keep the populance in starry-eyed awe (under the sway of FUD) of the near magical capabilities of the high priests in the Cathedral.
> Many people argue that changing that would make things worse, not better
Most people argue against change as a reactionary. Many people that argue against change are profiting enormously from the status quo. With the health care industry intimately tied to insurance and the stock market, and with the implementation of the health care industry (hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies) being in large part for profit business ventures, and with the sheer mountains of government regulations dealing with all of the above, I don't know how you can seriously contend that the health care industry is very nearly a free market.
99% of all the people in the world are idiots. Even the most selective of colleges take their student pool from the top 5% of candidates. Statistically, 80% of students, even at the most selective colleges, are still idiots.
FTFA:Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (vol 103, p 17979)
But going to the PNAS home page, the largest page number in the current issue (which is v.103) is 17063. Accessing the PNAS Early Edition page and searching for "pain" or "saliva" doesn't turn up anything which seems relevent. So where do I read the original article?
Maybe Newscientist should start using the DOI system so that we can easily resolve and find the original article.
People with means and money steal from those who do not, with blatant disregard of laws which they would use in a heartbeat to protect themselves if the tables were turned. In the Quick Overview on the JMRI home page it is stated that, not only is Katzer using JMRI's software without giving them due credit, but Katzer is attempted to obtain money per copy from JMRI for the distribution of their own code using a patent to show ownership while completely ignoring the prior art. According to the JMRI website Katzer has gone so far as to contact the employer of one of the JMRI contributors, Bob Jacobsen, in an effort to intimidate Bob into bending to Katzer's desires.
It happens all the time. Consider the following example in which a private author made a post to a forum debunking an article which attempted to associate marijuana use with an acute risk of cardiac arrest. That post was subsequently misquoted and the subject line taken out of context in the interest of expressing the exact opposite opinion, promote a product, sell advertising space, and defame the original author by putting words in their mouth. When human resources representatives came across the heartdiseaseguru.com page while scraping the web for employees' e-mail addresses, the private author subsequently experienced a complete loss of credibility in the workplace due to: an alleged heart attack which wasn't reported in the preemployment screening (which never happened), alleged marijuana use (which the employer would never have known about), and a propensity for making completely unsubstantiated claims (that marijuana use is a cause of an acute heart attack). The heartdiseaseguru.com web page is regenerated each time it is loaded. About one out of every five page loads will result in the story on the side reading with a line "Steven Maximilln maximilln at hotmail.com reported using the drug within an hour before heart attack". This implies that the author does use marijuana and has had a heart attack--neither of which is true according to the original post on the MAPS forum.
Thankfully the JMRI team has legal counsel available to them. Let's hope that they are able to secure a true and just judgement which will preserve their rights to their own code. The private author in the example above endured harassment, loss of promotion options, and eventually became homeless. Every attorney contacted to remedy the situation has asked for a retainer fee to even look at the two web links cited above.
> If you push your opponent against the wall and he finally relents... do you just scoff at him?
Yes. I had a perfect example just the other day.
As a homeless person I'm sitting on a corner here in La Jolla and this fellow rides up to me on a $1500 touring bicycle with a smart-aleck look on his face, gently rattling the coins in his pocket, and asks me,"Do you need any change?"
I saw a perfect opportunity and looked up as slowly as possible. "Change?" I asked softly.
He began to grin, almost as if he were unzipping his fly for me to give him a blowjob.
"What the hell can I do with change? <pause to watch his face explode in surprise as I sever his dick with his own zipper> Do you have a twenty?"
He blinked in astonishment, stammered out,"N-n-no", and then rode on.
Moral of the story: If you're riding a $1500 touring bike around one of America's most exclusive communities and you pass a homeless man, don't offer him some paltry sum of change. He just might shove a three foot long steel rod up your backside. Go ahead and give the man something he can use.
Same thing applies to the RIAA. This sort of thing is just a paltry handout. Their hoping that people will say,"AH! A gasp of air!" and be placated. It's time to make a stand. If they're willing to watch us starve right in front of them then, by God, let's not disappoint them.
If the copyright holder were the creator or author then I might be inclined to agree with you. Most often the copyright holder is a corporate conglomerate which happened to have an enormous amount of extra cash lying around and caught a creator or author in a vulnerable position. Sure, the author/creator makes a decent bit of money (in some cases--not most), but the corporate conglomerate often makes exponentially more. If the copyright could somehow be more firmly attached to the author or creator then there would be a more acceptable sharing of wealth and I would be in favor of stricter adherence to copyright. In true Robin Hood form, though, I have no qualms about bending the rules to take from a corporation which is fiendishly taking advantage of the very people that provide them with a product to profit from.
Slashdot Mirror
> we wouldn't have to be using multimillion/billion dollar technologies to figure the thing out
What else were we going to do with that money? Give it to the politicians? They just give it to their friends. Better that it goes to science.
> IBM's biggest blunders with OS/2 didn't come until after Windows 95
.com boom-bust, the triumph of x86 architecture over m68k architecture (not really a gain but that's the way things went), the enormous expansion and mangling of years and years of carefully planned and thought out standards, and an "all sales final" reputation of a seedy used car salesman. Well, it made a few millionaires too but you'd never guess it by looking at the horrendously tangled mess that is the internet and the industry these days.
That wasn't a blunder by IBM. That was a deliberate marketing decision by Microsoft. Windows 95 was released about six months ahead of schedule. One month it was going to be due in summer, the next month it was to be on store shelves by Christmas.
The way that I see it:
Microsoft blindsided IBM and doomed the computer industry with Windows 95. Microsoft and IBM were in a race for years to see who would own the desktop. Microsoft deduced, correctly, that whatever OS people picked up next, no matter what it was or who it came from, would become the default OS simply because people, after paying $100 for one, weren't going to shell out another $100 even if the first was completely broken. Windows 95, known in beta as Chicago, was falling progressively further and further behind schedule and it looked like IBM and OS/2 were going to sweep the field.
So what did MS do? They took a horrific beta edition, Chicago, slapped enough duct tape and bubblegum on it so that it would work, with massive amounts of coaxing, on just over half of the high volume production systems being shipped, and put it on the store shelves about six months before it had been scheduled to be released. They didn't make a better product but they did get the first product onto the shelves. Coupling it with a monstrosity of an EULA and the budding resistance from stores to refund money for unuseable (but opened) software Microsoft managed to turn the entire American population into a free army of beta testers and socially engineered them to accept sub-par software as a norm. The majority of American consumers didn't know any better, knew nothing about the acceptable levels of software quality, and when Win95 broke repeatedly they, lemminglike, kept calling customer support centers until someone would promise to ship them a floppy or a CD with the necessary patches for their hardware.
How did IBM lose? They stuck to schedule and attempted to uphold their standards of software functionality before releasing it onto the public.
What did the computer industry gain? A
Thank you Microsoft for bringing all of the stray cats and dogs from the whole neighborhood to play/poop/pee in the carefully planned sandbox that we had.
How would you handle a situation where a private user makes a post to an online discussion group expressing opinion A. Some other individual picks up the post and, without notifying the author or obtaining their consent, uses it to promote a product (Makuka Olive Oil supplements), sell advertising space on the web page, and express an opinion B (which is complete opposite that of the original author's opinion A) by (deliberately?) misinterpreting the subject line of the original e-mail.
To add insult to injury the web page defames the original author by egregious use of improper paraphrasing--attributing to the author both drug use and a heart attack and making it seem as if the author is willing to testify to the direct association of the heart attack with an event which never actually occurred, at least not within the context of the original forum post. The heartdiseaseguru.com page is automatically regenerated with each page load and may or may not contain the libelous statement which appears in the summary provided with a Google search--it does about two out of five page loads.
Upon gaining employment with a large corporate entity in the Real World, outside of the realm of web pages featuring dietary supplements and their frivolous/libelous authors, the original author is puzzled that he is getting the third degree from his management and can't gain the support of HR even if he's being verbally assaulted in the hallways by senior group leaders. This is because the HR rep, while scraping the web for employees' names and known e-mail addresses (a morally questionable tactic--even if it is, and it may not be depending upon local laws, perfectly legal), came across a web page that attributed drug use and a heart attack to a new star employee--the perfect way to find the "what's wrong with this otherwise perfect picture" and completely dismantle what might have been an otherwise booming start to an ascending career.
> I'm all for adding non-latin characters
In theory, yes. In practice, no. Here's why: the system has already been standardized and stabilized. The system currently works. If people are upset because their character set isn't supported in DNS then please cry a river and then go get a box of kleenex and get over it. If those societies had set up the DNS system in the first place perhaps they could have done it perfect to their hearts' desire. Since they didn't then they can't. The system is what it is. As a network society we shouldn't expand something so close to the core of the operation of the global internet until a comprehensive majority of downstream apps are written to conform with protocols and specifications which will handle an expanded DNS character set.
A more important problem to address at this time is farming of the existing DNS name space. Too many domain names are being held--for ransom, just for the sake of holding them, or to spite the guy down the street that wants the domain name--by business units (companies, divisions of companies, departments of divisions of companies, conglomerates, associations... anything that isn't private interest) and are no longer available to people who may legitimately have a reason to put them to use.
I read that and assumed that she meant a sensory deprivation or isolation tank--commonly associated with a hyperbaric chamber.
This is an example of mathematical modelling describing several different phenomena correlating with an occurence of a natural event which happens to describe a condition that produces a recognizable, noticeable, and appreciable display. This is a three dimensional zone described similar to x = 0 ... 20 meters, x^2 -3x -18, mirrored across both the x and y axes and spinning around the y axis in which molecules of water present in an airstream over the surface of a jet are compressed to a degree which significantly blocks the passage of light detectable to the human eye. A transformation of state occurs along the surface of a three dimensional zone that can be modelled well by fluid engineering.
There are billions upon billions of examples of systems that are very complex to describe both in science and math. Only a few happen to have a solution which produces an effect which makes it to google video and Slashdot.
Hehe. This is the only exploit in the GPL that I've found. Set up a network of programmers to continuously fork the code, like playing rugby with ownership, such that the comment lines containing all of the credits fill up so much space that it eventually breaks something, somewhere, in the system attempting to compile it. This includes the possibility that the text readable file size to hold all of the credits is too large for the filesystem on which it resides.
> I can't help but think that this is what provides license to directors to create a story from a mythology
DragonLance did it with Tales, and Heroes, and Tales II, and Heroes II. They had a number of other series which also branched out into sets of multiple trilogies.
The Thieves' World set was like this in that it was a long set of books written by multiple authors all telling tales of characters in a common world. Thieves' World didn't cover the same time frame that Tolkien did.
Somehow those companies managed to figure out how to regulate who owns what rights without making too many people unhappy. Some characters got killed off by authors who didn't create them and the stories were published. The only situation that I've ever heard of within the authoring world in the fantasy genre is Gary Gygax leaving TSR. I don't know the reason why he left TSR, but he did, but he seems to be doing okay now and TSR certainly didn't have too bad a time of it.
If you look at the computer industry there's the CP/M and QDOS debacle.
There's really nothing wrong with it. The Hobbit is a natural and fairly well-known prequel to LOTR. Tolkien also wrote many other books about the world in which all of this took place. There was the Silmarillion, which handled much of the history of the first and second ages (LOTR takes place in the third age) and Unfinished Tales which, as far as I know, deals mostly with the more legendary characters and their stories outside of LOTR. I owned a copy of Unfinished Tales but never read more than a few pages from it.
What I don't understand is why they don't carry on their lawsuit against New Line and go ahead and make the films with MGM.
Quoting from Peter Jackson to the One Ringers:
"MGM, who own a portion of the film rights in The Hobbit, publicly stated they wanted to make the film with us"
"Mark Ordesky called Ken and told him that New Line would no longer be requiring our services on the Hobbit and the LOTR 'prequel'"
If MGM is willing to stave off the inevitable attack from New Lines lawyers about what portion of the film rights is enough to allow them to release the movie then Peter Jackson should have an avenue to make the movie if he really wants to.
Maybe New Line went ahead with someone else to make The Hobbit. This shouldn't prevent Peter Jackson from making one.
The scientific community refers to it as social defeat stress disorder.
More good information and relevent links can be found here.
> could not just as probably have caused a ready-created universe which did not require a God to exist?
The question still remains: what caused it to exist?
Call it whatever you like but something caused it to exist.
The very first post in the fine article mentions that the author,"heard a bunch of rings being collected". What is the significance of the rings being collected, whose rings are they, and why is the author listening to them?
This is definitely an "embrace, extend, extinguish" maneuver.
FTFA (italics are mine): (quoting Noel Power) "I also got the impression that they (Sun -- with respect to Sun's proprietary VBA support implementation) deemphasizing support for their solution. We hope to increase the pace of our upstreaming efforts and aim to have the initial effort completed in the next couple of months."
If the goal of OOo is to encourage people to migrate away from MS and towards FOSS then deemphasizing VBA support is in the best interest of the end users in order to encourage them to write their macros in a language and environment free of MS encumberance. Noel's effort seems more to turn OOo into a MS Office clone which can then be made ready for the patent and intellectual property lawsuits that MS has been threatening for the last year. Once Noel has the VBA support to his liking in OOo then he'll have job security in continuing to maintain it and will be playing right into MS' hands and opening OOo up to the same types of arguments that MS has recently been making about Samba.
Aside: When did FOSS become FLOSS? After reading the wikipedia.org entry on FLOSS I'm suspicious that it was written by a partial fanboi who wants to astroturf some 'net jargon.
This isn't the type of thing that gets used on a large range of hardware to create a botnet or a spam zombie. This is the sort of thing that is used by the a$$wipe that follows you around /. and trolls every post you make--how does he always happen to know when you made a post? Sure he might just read /. constantly but for eff's sakes, he's got to sleep sometimes, doesn't he? This is the sort of thing that's used by that obnoxious #%&@wit op on IRC who, without fail, will arrive three minutes after you do and begin haranguing you--no matter what time of day or night you wake up and decide to log on. This is the sort of thing that's used by that really odd person you met on AIM/Yahoo/MSN/ICQ who never IMs when you're just casually cruising around the 'net but always seems to be there whenever you get into doing something productive.
Yes, there's such a thing as coincidence, but coincidence has a natural frequency and, when that natural frequency is exceeded then you have to start looking into what other people may call paranoia or conspiracy theory. The fact is that, if it's above the natural level of coincidence, then it's not paranoia or conspiracy--there really is somebody who has embedded a rootkit in your NIC, and used it to store extra functions in your monitor, and uses that to reinfect your OS each time you apply a new patch, reinstall, or change hard drives.
This is not the sort of attack vector that's used for frivolous collection of pwned boxes. This is the sort of attack vector used for targetted harassment.
I do appreciate you walking through this so politely. I've seen it before but you're the first person to do it without using all sorts of profanities and insulting my heritage along the way. It does make a certain amount of sense and I'd be inclined to agree but not without thinking about it more thoroughly:
..." and on. Maybe, theoretically, but again this would be increasingly difficult with the increasing data densities on modern platters. It would certainly be enormously tedious to attempt to reconstruct even a 1k text file using this technique. It's not something that common citizen should be worried about unless they plan on really ticking off a legal opponent who has extraordinarily deep pockets or really wants to make an example of them.
Write a 1 over a 1? 0.1 * 1 + 0.9 * 1 = 1.0
Write another 1 over that? 0.1 * 1 + 0.9 * 1 = 1.0
Write a zero over that? 0.1 * 1.0 + 0.9 * 0 = 0.1
Write another zero over that? 0.1 * 0.1 + 0.9 * 0 = 0.01
Okay. That might seem to work, maybe. It doesn't seem like it would yield any useful residual data after a single overwrite, though. Many of the claims of data salvage which inspired things like gazillion pass data shredding are rooted in a propagated belief that the residual field will be meaningful more than one overwrite down the line.
My other question is about the analog field polarities. How are those actually stored on the platter? If the platter is some metal alloy matrix then I would imagine that the write head changes an oxidation state of a patch of the alloy (which brings us close to the concept of data density--how many atoms are in each patch that make up an individual bit or byte). With data densities having become so enormous these days it's hard to imagine that our 10%/90% variances have a window large enough to be meaningful, again, after one or two rewrites.
What I might envision happening is that someone could create a topographic magnetic map of each patch and then be able to say something akin to,"The atoms in the 90% southeast quadrant are all of the 0 charge, but right next to that is a thin line of atoms with a +1 charge, and right next to that is a thin line of atoms with a +2 charge, and
I guess I'm going to have to stick with my original thought: That yes, technically, in theory, it's probably possible to do. In practice, though, the anecdotal evidence which fuels the popular concept that it is possible to do most likely comes from people who plain didn't use a proper overwrite (eg. quick format) and the people who recovered the data wanted to make the recovery techniques sound sexy for PR and the quarterly report.
> The writing will flip the magnetization most of the way there, so you can tell if it was a 1 or a 0, it just won't be exactly 1 or 0. Think of writing as "old value * .1 + new value * .9"; you never really destroy the old values, but you make them weaker and weaker every time
This sounds like the principle behind Fourier Transform sampling for scientific instruments like MS and NMR. With years of writing and overwriting (ie. conducting an FT experiment on constantly changing data), wouldn't this sort of thinking result in the entire hard drive ending up as 0.5--or some random noise--rather than a meaningful data signal?
Well, you may want to use a all ones (value 256) fill rather than a zero or one fill. It's possible that a zero fill is transparent and doesn't actually flip bits. I don't know enough about the low level function of drives. With respect to a value 256 fill, though, I completely agree with you--a single pass should be enough to render any discernable residual magnetic field data, especially on today's drives, into complete gibberish.
> As for how, the short version is that if you write a one and then a zero, you end up with .1; the old value leaks in a bit
I've always wondered, if this were really true, why we don't see random errors cropping up constantly especially on heavily used portions of hard drives.
> See, when you overwrite, the write head doesn't exactly line up with the old stuff--so you'll have little bits of the old data sticking out from above or below the track
Is there a similiar random misalignment with the read head and, if so, why again do we not observe daily errors on heavily used portions of hard drives? If not then how does the read head compensate for the misalignment of the write head?
The questions are simple but the premise is sound. While I agree, in theory, with the technical papers that contend that this sort of data recovery can be done I don't see how, in practice, it can work for data recovery but not be a problem in everyday use. The magnetic field on the drive is what it is--it has no way of knowing if it is being read for recovery purposes or for standard reading.
Maybe there's a quantum mechanical "FBI/NSA/Investigator" bit which gets set at the beginning of the drive which instructs the rest of the magnetic fields to cooperate with investigative purposes in a recovery lab which is left unset inside of a standard computer. Personally I think that most of the technical papers discussing the theory behind such low level hard drive forensics rely on anecdotal empirical evidence from years past (mostly recovered from drives where people didn't bother to properly wipe the data at all--such as using quick formats) and add just enough extremely technical theory to make it sound plausible and keep the populance in starry-eyed awe (under the sway of FUD) of the near magical capabilities of the high priests in the Cathedral.
> Many people argue that changing that would make things worse, not better
Most people argue against change as a reactionary. Many people that argue against change are profiting enormously from the status quo. With the health care industry intimately tied to insurance and the stock market, and with the implementation of the health care industry (hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies) being in large part for profit business ventures, and with the sheer mountains of government regulations dealing with all of the above, I don't know how you can seriously contend that the health care industry is very nearly a free market.
You've never heard of the 99:5:80 theorem?
99% of all the people in the world are idiots.
Even the most selective of colleges take their student pool from the top 5% of candidates.
Statistically, 80% of students, even at the most selective colleges, are still idiots.
I carry my entire collection of The Orb with me in my shoulder bag at all times. :)
FTFA:Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (vol 103, p 17979)
But going to the PNAS home page, the largest page number in the current issue (which is v.103) is 17063. Accessing the PNAS Early Edition page and searching for "pain" or "saliva" doesn't turn up anything which seems relevent. So where do I read the original article?
Maybe Newscientist should start using the DOI system so that we can easily resolve and find the original article.
People with means and money steal from those who do not, with blatant disregard of laws which they would use in a heartbeat to protect themselves if the tables were turned. In the Quick Overview on the JMRI home page it is stated that, not only is Katzer using JMRI's software without giving them due credit, but Katzer is attempted to obtain money per copy from JMRI for the distribution of their own code using a patent to show ownership while completely ignoring the prior art. According to the JMRI website Katzer has gone so far as to contact the employer of one of the JMRI contributors, Bob Jacobsen, in an effort to intimidate Bob into bending to Katzer's desires.
It happens all the time. Consider the following example in which a private author made a post to a forum debunking an article which attempted to associate marijuana use with an acute risk of cardiac arrest. That post was subsequently misquoted and the subject line taken out of context in the interest of expressing the exact opposite opinion, promote a product, sell advertising space, and defame the original author by putting words in their mouth. When human resources representatives came across the heartdiseaseguru.com page while scraping the web for employees' e-mail addresses, the private author subsequently experienced a complete loss of credibility in the workplace due to: an alleged heart attack which wasn't reported in the preemployment screening (which never happened), alleged marijuana use (which the employer would never have known about), and a propensity for making completely unsubstantiated claims (that marijuana use is a cause of an acute heart attack). The heartdiseaseguru.com web page is regenerated each time it is loaded. About one out of every five page loads will result in the story on the side reading with a line "Steven Maximilln maximilln at hotmail.com reported using the drug within an hour before heart attack". This implies that the author does use marijuana and has had a heart attack--neither of which is true according to the original post on the MAPS forum.
Thankfully the JMRI team has legal counsel available to them. Let's hope that they are able to secure a true and just judgement which will preserve their rights to their own code. The private author in the example above endured harassment, loss of promotion options, and eventually became homeless. Every attorney contacted to remedy the situation has asked for a retainer fee to even look at the two web links cited above.
> If you push your opponent against the wall and he finally relents ... do you just scoff at him?
Yes. I had a perfect example just the other day.
As a homeless person I'm sitting on a corner here in La Jolla and this fellow rides up to me on a $1500 touring bicycle with a smart-aleck look on his face, gently rattling the coins in his pocket, and asks me,"Do you need any change?"
I saw a perfect opportunity and looked up as slowly as possible. "Change?" I asked softly.
He began to grin, almost as if he were unzipping his fly for me to give him a blowjob.
"What the hell can I do with change? <pause to watch his face explode in surprise as I sever his dick with his own zipper> Do you have a twenty?"
He blinked in astonishment, stammered out,"N-n-no", and then rode on.
Moral of the story: If you're riding a $1500 touring bike around one of America's most exclusive communities and you pass a homeless man, don't offer him some paltry sum of change. He just might shove a three foot long steel rod up your backside. Go ahead and give the man something he can use.
Same thing applies to the RIAA. This sort of thing is just a paltry handout. Their hoping that people will say,"AH! A gasp of air!" and be placated. It's time to make a stand. If they're willing to watch us starve right in front of them then, by God, let's not disappoint them.
If the copyright holder were the creator or author then I might be inclined to agree with you. Most often the copyright holder is a corporate conglomerate which happened to have an enormous amount of extra cash lying around and caught a creator or author in a vulnerable position. Sure, the author/creator makes a decent bit of money (in some cases--not most), but the corporate conglomerate often makes exponentially more. If the copyright could somehow be more firmly attached to the author or creator then there would be a more acceptable sharing of wealth and I would be in favor of stricter adherence to copyright. In true Robin Hood form, though, I have no qualms about bending the rules to take from a corporation which is fiendishly taking advantage of the very people that provide them with a product to profit from.