Tech Supporters Have tried this....
on
Anticryptography
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· Score: 2
No matter how simply i try to put things (I even managed to relate the different between RAM and HDD space to a board game) Someone can't make sense of it./me learns brain ASM to try to communicate with all the universally illiterate people.
If i want to lookup common net scams, i'll go to a virus database and find the "virus hoaxes" area. Watch, they also give you money for refering new members to this wonderful membership plan. I can see it now: join and be showcased as part of the biggest scam in our museum, the museum itself!
If they bother trying to press charges against someone for royalties they'll be shot down within a month. I believe just about every semi-secure web based email or online transaction site uses something like that. I even found an old password protection cgi two YEARS ago that did that. Why must common sense be so rare?
Sure, it sounds nice, and i'd sure like to have a smaller box, but can you pop a 15" monitor or a zipdrive on one of those babies? I know, they're just portable things but even a laptop can do that =) I think i'll keep my pocket filled with useful things (like a wallet and car keys) until I either see the light of teeny tiny pc's with no disk space or I get hit in the head with one hard enough that I loose all common sense and buy one.
There are too kinds of software that you'll find on download sites. Software that is intended to get the job done and software that is intended to help the programmer learn wtf he is doing. You'll very often find more of the latter than of the former, but each plays its own role in the programming community. If you see a piece of software that sucks, dont just delete it, email the author and tell him that it sucks. Let him know what you think is good and bad, so he can learn. Who knows, you may be helping out a future alan cox.
I'll bet that judges would make more justifyable decisions if they actually knew what the person was talking about instead of having to pick the person who uses the longer words. Not only would it increase the public opinion of the legal system, but some proper rulings will be more likely to be made.
At under $2/m, well under $50 a year, I'd be willing to subscribe for unlimited access. Considering thats still the price of only 2 cd's, and it's not gonna be so much that no one can afford it. $19.95/m (a decent isp price) would be rediculus, but this is progress...
The way copyright law is is that a person can restrict all other people from doing anything similar enough to what they have already done. This can be abused by the copyright holder or it can be used to just make sure proper credit is given. I think that copyright law in whole needs a re-write.
I'm sure some of you have read the book "Zodiac", by Neil Stephenson. In it, a scientist creates a wonder bacteria, that lives on waste and produces harmless material. However, they, shall we say, messed up, and ended up creating a killer bacteria that does just the opposite. Before releasing this wonder microbe into the atmosphere we should really make sure that it works, and in a nice BIG, yet controlled environment, not something the size of a household fishtank. I for one would prefer to be able to breath the air without wearing a detoxifying filter.
I still recall when updating GNOME meant to download 30 odd rpms that you didnt know if you needed/wanted and praying nothing went wrong. Now helix (err, ximian) has this nice little installer to help you get it set up, and a nice little updater to tell you whats out of date. It's very easy to use and nice. KDE, AFAIK, hasnt had that so far. Putting that in widespread use would probably make KDE more popular among the *nix communities. Hey, maybe i'd even finally install KDE2
If you think about it, just about anything can be used to copy music. Let's take normal household items. A pen. A pen can be used to copy proprietory sheet music, which is illegal if they have there way. A refrigerator magnet. Floppy disks and harddisks are magnetic media. As soon as i can think of a way to make a paperclip a "piracy tool" I'm going to cancel my vacation to france and instead spend the time watching monty python and wishing all Europeans had as much common sense as they do.
The bigger the crystals, the bigger the thief problem. Hmm, does this "make the gigantic crystals" sound like a certain Rick Moranis movie to you? You know, the one that he almost destroyed vegas with when he made his kid gigantic instead of the crystals?
Well, the virus effects several things. Downtime required to restore from backup or clean the virus out. Lost money during that downtime. The lost money from any data lost between the last backup and attack time. Plus, the loss of respect due to being hit by the virus. If you are a small company, or the computer that is hit is not very important, losses will be minimal. But if your primary server goes down and you are a big corp, then if you dont have backups ready and in the loop (thank you round robin DNS) you'll be in big trouble. In short, big companies have the worry of losing more money and customers, but they wont have to worry anywhere near as much as a small company where that kind of loss can really do damage.
First they can't make toys that look like guns, now this! Watch, by 2003 it'll be illegal to sell little micromachine fighter airplaines.
I still think the DSL companies are a conspiracy
on
DSL Woes
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· Score: 1
For some reason, even though i am only 16000 feet to the office, 2000 feet within the limit, i can't get anything higher than a 384 kb upstream. My neighbor, less than 100 feet away, can get a full 1.5 meg SDSL line from the same company. I'd love to be able to relate to this article, but paying $90 a month for slower access than i should be getting is not as good as paying for free dialup for an infinitely smaller price (nothing).
Yes, it was a complete rip off 2001. In fact, i just realized that the big picture of whats-her-name (the captain's (not kirk) girlfriend) was just like the starchild at the end...
Hopefully they'll cut out that big 30 minutes of just flying through V'Ger's cloud. I remember falling asleep during that, waking up and not missing a thing.
The School's really don't have much of a choice in the matter. If they encourage people to inform, they get the above mentioned result. If they DON'T, then they face lawsuits for not taking proper precautions to ensure the safety of the students. It's a catch 22. I think the best possible way to do it would be to make it anonymous, to avoid the above result, but that leaves the open hole for pranks to get people in serious trouble. I can't see any "perfect" solution to this, but I don't think that the current system has failed completely. (and in relation to a comment i saw as i was clicking reply, yes, no matter what the outcome, the lawyers get rich off of it.)
In this case, the guy did nothing wrong. Some people, such as myself, have signed NDA's with fancy wordings so I can't reveal the internal workings of the company, so I'd have to be careful how i worded any backings to my opinions. But if, as he says, he has no contractual obligation, this is just a company trying to make sure their stock price is nice and high and stays that way. This is similar to the little catch in California, where it is legal to perscribe marijuana for medicinal uses, but any doctor that does will loose their license to practice soon thereafter. I believe the basic wording would be "Yeah, you can do it, but we'll sue your ass as soon as ya do!"
In several countries, things like VOIP are outlawed, for protection of phone companies. Which means that this will be impossible to use to call people in those countries, or recieve calls from them. Considering the trend of companies having absolute power in the US, i wouldnt be surprised if the FBI made a raid on members of this project for participating in activities that could hurt the phone companies.
With an open source gaming platform, people who aspire to write video games fora living can see what a modern game looks like from the inside, as opposed to getting the source 2 years out of date, like we got with descent 1 and 2, doom, etc. Hopefully this will be put to good use.
Slashdot Mirror
Bleem.
No matter how simply i try to put things (I even managed to relate the different between RAM and HDD space to a board game) Someone can't make sense of it. /me learns brain ASM to try to communicate with all the universally illiterate people.
If i want to lookup common net scams, i'll go to a virus database and find the "virus hoaxes" area. Watch, they also give you money for refering new members to this wonderful membership plan. I can see it now: join and be showcased as part of the biggest scam in our museum, the museum itself!
If they bother trying to press charges against someone for royalties they'll be shot down within a month. I believe just about every semi-secure web based email or online transaction site uses something like that. I even found an old password protection cgi two YEARS ago that did that. Why must common sense be so rare?
Sure, it sounds nice, and i'd sure like to have a smaller box, but can you pop a 15" monitor or a zipdrive on one of those babies? I know, they're just portable things but even a laptop can do that =) I think i'll keep my pocket filled with useful things (like a wallet and car keys) until I either see the light of teeny tiny pc's with no disk space or I get hit in the head with one hard enough that I loose all common sense and buy one.
There are too kinds of software that you'll find on download sites. Software that is intended to get the job done and software that is intended to help the programmer learn wtf he is doing. You'll very often find more of the latter than of the former, but each plays its own role in the programming community. If you see a piece of software that sucks, dont just delete it, email the author and tell him that it sucks. Let him know what you think is good and bad, so he can learn. Who knows, you may be helping out a future alan cox.
I'll bet that judges would make more justifyable decisions if they actually knew what the person was talking about instead of having to pick the person who uses the longer words. Not only would it increase the public opinion of the legal system, but some proper rulings will be more likely to be made.
At under $2/m, well under $50 a year, I'd be willing to subscribe for unlimited access. Considering thats still the price of only 2 cd's, and it's not gonna be so much that no one can afford it. $19.95/m (a decent isp price) would be rediculus, but this is progress...
I guess he's gonna be my record for kernel speed compiling now. =(
I'm sure your favorite goldfish would much rather take a nice airline trip to space than get flushed down the toilet.
The way copyright law is is that a person can restrict all other people from doing anything similar enough to what they have already done. This can be abused by the copyright holder or it can be used to just make sure proper credit is given. I think that copyright law in whole needs a re-write.
I'm sure some of you have read the book "Zodiac", by Neil Stephenson. In it, a scientist creates a wonder bacteria, that lives on waste and produces harmless material. However, they, shall we say, messed up, and ended up creating a killer bacteria that does just the opposite. Before releasing this wonder microbe into the atmosphere we should really make sure that it works, and in a nice BIG, yet controlled environment, not something the size of a household fishtank. I for one would prefer to be able to breath the air without wearing a detoxifying filter.
I still recall when updating GNOME meant to download 30 odd rpms that you didnt know if you needed/wanted and praying nothing went wrong. Now helix (err, ximian) has this nice little installer to help you get it set up, and a nice little updater to tell you whats out of date. It's very easy to use and nice. KDE, AFAIK, hasnt had that so far. Putting that in widespread use would probably make KDE more popular among the *nix communities. Hey, maybe i'd even finally install KDE2
How can they call it "1-click ordering" if you have to click 2 times just to open up the window?
If you think about it, just about anything can be used to copy music. Let's take normal household items. A pen. A pen can be used to copy proprietory sheet music, which is illegal if they have there way. A refrigerator magnet. Floppy disks and harddisks are magnetic media. As soon as i can think of a way to make a paperclip a "piracy tool" I'm going to cancel my vacation to france and instead spend the time watching monty python and wishing all Europeans had as much common sense as they do.
The bigger the crystals, the bigger the thief problem. Hmm, does this "make the gigantic crystals" sound like a certain Rick Moranis movie to you? You know, the one that he almost destroyed vegas with when he made his kid gigantic instead of the crystals?
Well, the virus effects several things. Downtime required to restore from backup or clean the virus out. Lost money during that downtime. The lost money from any data lost between the last backup and attack time. Plus, the loss of respect due to being hit by the virus. If you are a small company, or the computer that is hit is not very important, losses will be minimal. But if your primary server goes down and you are a big corp, then if you dont have backups ready and in the loop (thank you round robin DNS) you'll be in big trouble. In short, big companies have the worry of losing more money and customers, but they wont have to worry anywhere near as much as a small company where that kind of loss can really do damage.
First they can't make toys that look like guns, now this! Watch, by 2003 it'll be illegal to sell little micromachine fighter airplaines.
For some reason, even though i am only 16000 feet to the office, 2000 feet within the limit, i can't get anything higher than a 384 kb upstream. My neighbor, less than 100 feet away, can get a full 1.5 meg SDSL line from the same company. I'd love to be able to relate to this article, but paying $90 a month for slower access than i should be getting is not as good as paying for free dialup for an infinitely smaller price (nothing).
Yes, it was a complete rip off 2001. In fact, i just realized that the big picture of whats-her-name (the captain's (not kirk) girlfriend) was just like the starchild at the end...
Hopefully they'll cut out that big 30 minutes of just flying through V'Ger's cloud. I remember falling asleep during that, waking up and not missing a thing.
The School's really don't have much of a choice in the matter. If they encourage people to inform, they get the above mentioned result. If they DON'T, then they face lawsuits for not taking proper precautions to ensure the safety of the students. It's a catch 22. I think the best possible way to do it would be to make it anonymous, to avoid the above result, but that leaves the open hole for pranks to get people in serious trouble. I can't see any "perfect" solution to this, but I don't think that the current system has failed completely. (and in relation to a comment i saw as i was clicking reply, yes, no matter what the outcome, the lawyers get rich off of it.)
In this case, the guy did nothing wrong. Some people, such as myself, have signed NDA's with fancy wordings so I can't reveal the internal workings of the company, so I'd have to be careful how i worded any backings to my opinions. But if, as he says, he has no contractual obligation, this is just a company trying to make sure their stock price is nice and high and stays that way. This is similar to the little catch in California, where it is legal to perscribe marijuana for medicinal uses, but any doctor that does will loose their license to practice soon thereafter. I believe the basic wording would be "Yeah, you can do it, but we'll sue your ass as soon as ya do!"
In several countries, things like VOIP are outlawed, for protection of phone companies. Which means that this will be impossible to use to call people in those countries, or recieve calls from them. Considering the trend of companies having absolute power in the US, i wouldnt be surprised if the FBI made a raid on members of this project for participating in activities that could hurt the phone companies.
With an open source gaming platform, people who aspire to write video games fora living can see what a modern game looks like from the inside, as opposed to getting the source 2 years out of date, like we got with descent 1 and 2, doom, etc. Hopefully this will be put to good use.