... who holds the patent on using the WM_PAINT message to detect when a portion of an application's window needs to be redrawn. Clearly, someone other than Apple owns this patent, and is refusing to license it to them, because the Windows version of iTunes has been plagued with gaping areas of blackness since its first release.
I mean, come on... does nobody at Apple own a copy of the freaking Petzold book? </rant>
I see where you're coming from, but I think it's more like, "if you don't want to pay for the staff."
eBay is not a charity or a government agency, so I don't expect them to eat the costs incurred by playing whack-a-mole with 50,000 Nigerian crooks. Those costs would be passed on to you and me... and it's dumb for them to spend money when volunteeers would do the work for free.
One of the popular refrains from eBay's management is that they don't have the resources needed to police auctions on a proactive basis. They can only respond to complaints from users.
From personal experience, it takes eBay anywhere from three to eight hours to kill a series of bogus scripted auction postings created with a phished account. That's more than enough time for the phisher to reel in multiple victims, all the while making the whole eBay marketplace look like a Romanian gypsy fair.
eBay needs to do two things to combat fraud. First, add a prominent, one-click "Report this auction" button to all listings. Right now the report link is buried at the bottom of the page. It leads you through the typical maze of customer-support options before dropping you at a page where you have to click yet another link to bring the auction to eBay's attention.
Second, when a user clicks "Report this auction," the notification message it creates should be transmitted, simultaneously, to several participants in a large network of trusted volunteers. These users would be recruited based on factors such as experience, feedback, and a history of accurate fraud reports. They would not have the ability to terminate auctions unilaterally -- they wouldn't be quite that "trusted" -- but they would have the ability to vet the violation report for legitimacy and forward it via a private channel to eBay, where an employee would be able to terminate the offending user's auctions immediately without a lot of additional reviewing overhead.
Formalizing the concept of community policing is the only way I can see for eBay to maintain credibility, in light of the undiminished volume of idiots who keep turning their accounts over to phishers on a daily basis. I agree with eBay management when they claim they can't police the site on their own. It's time they harnessed some of the outrage that's out there in the community, and put it to good use.
This is a good place to mention Luis Cupido's web site. He's actually managed to pick up the Voyager 1 signal on a 5.6-meter dish, using a lot of DSP-fu and maybe -- you be the judge -- a bit of wishful thinking.
You really don't get this whole freedom thing, do you?
If your religion is really that important to you, are you really going to be happy with a career that conflicts with it so frequently? Geez, first they shove that evil-ution stuff down your throat in pre-med, then, before you know it, you're being asked to help rape victims.
Should you be "free" to drown your kids in the bathtub, if the Invisible Sky Fairy tells you to? No? Gee, maybe there really ought to be limits to freedom.
Yep. I run the SpamBayes plugin for Outlook, which displays a percent-spam rating for each message. In my setup, anything over 90% is treated as spam, while traffic ranking between 30-90% goes to an "Unsure" folder for manual inspection.
Out of a few hundred spams per day, the filter will typically miss one or two... but those misses have historically been very close to the "unsure" margin, typically 20-30% spam. However, over the past few weeks, there have been perhaps half a dozen spams with 0% spam ratings.
I've been a SpamBayes user for a couple of years, since its earliest betas, and this has never happened before. Looking at the raw message text, I'm seeing various obscure technical terms that would never make sense for spammers to include arbitrarily. Many appear to be culled from mailing lists I'm on -- "Universal collision detection" was one subject line that really got my attention. Other 0%-spam message bodies have contained lists of terms related to RF tech and other stuff that the spammer could have extracted from my own web site.
So, either spammers are abandoning the Project Gutenberg corpora in favor of modern technical sources, or they're getting smart enough to extract filter-poisoning text from victims' websites.
Both tactics would imply desperation on the spammers' parts, because their new targets are technically-literate people whom I'd expect to be among their least-likely customers. (Insert snarky remark about how English majors are more likely than engineering nerds to buy Viagra...)
If any emergency medical provider has moral objections to some procedure/drug/activity, they ought not be forced to either provide said procedure or to not treat anyone at all.
No, they ought to go flip burgers or write AJAX code or do something besides work in the medical field under a professional oath and state-sanctioned license.
How is banning a minor from watching a porno any different from not allowing them into a bar?
Alcohol has demonstrable physiological effects on developing brains. Porn (and video games) do not. This was at the heart of the judge's decision: ultimately, there's no way to justify value judgements about the appropriateness of media content without waving a Bible around.
That's not how our legal system is supposed to work, although you (and the other poster) are absolutely correct in implying that it often works that way in reality.
The shops should have their business license removed for selling clearly Mature/Adult only materuial to minors. Here in the UK shops are fined large amounts, and even risk prison for breaking age based laws. Here is an overview from the trading standards...
This is the US, not the UK. Here is an overview from our trading standards:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
The decision of the judge was correct in all respects, as far as US law is concerned.
If an app breaks, you can troubleshoot with regmon and filemon, i.e. many apps need r/w perms in their own directory for some retarded reason.
There are a lot of reasons for this, and they aren't all retarded. Sometimes it makes sense to install and run multiple instances of an application; e.g., one where each instance uses a specific virtual COM port. When the OS, in a misguided attempt at being trendy and "multi-user" and all that, forces everything to write to a user-specific data directory, that convenience goes out the window.
I have yet to hear a coherent explanation of why writing to my own.INI file under \program files\appname is a security risk. Prevent me from writing to someone else's installation directory if you like, and certainly to the OS directory, but for Christ's sake, let me write to my own directory, already.
In any event, copyright, or the expiration of copyright, was never a guarantee of physical access to anything.
Bull. That is EXACTLY the original intent of copyright. Originally, a copyright holder was REQUIRED to lodge a copy of the protected work with the Library of Congress to ensure its eventual availability to the public domain. The whole idea behind the Library of Congress was guaranteed physical access to protected works.
Now, the law not only doesn't require this assurance, but it explicitly sanctions technological measures designed to ensure that a protected work never becomes copyable.
How anyone can reconcile that fact with the Constitution's plain-language mandate is beyond me... but then, IANAL.
Incorrect. The Supreme Court said that the definition of a "limited time" was up to Congress. DRM that's based on strong encryption doesn't just take control of IP out of the consumer's hands -- it takes control out of Congress's hands as well.
100 years from now, no act of Congress is going to make it possible to play a BluRay disc if, by some unlikely chance, the media consortium gets the encryption right this time. When access to a work remains blocked after the expiration of its copyright term, the publisher will have failed to live up to its part of the copyright bargain.
In short, when Congress passed the DMCA, they willingly gave up their ability to enforce the limited-time clause in exchange for payoffs from industry lobbyists. The Constitution doesn't permit them to do that, and (inexplicably, IMO) the courts have never ruled on that point.
Because copyright law in the US is constitutional only insofar as a work is protected for a "limited time." DRM violates the limited-time clause, so the DMCA and any other DRM-promoting legislation is prima facie unconstitutional.
It is staggeringly horrible UI design. Try explaining how to edit an.INI file to a customer who can't even find it because Windows is hiding the suffix from sight.
Windows is based on MS-DOS file conventions, and MS-DOS file conventions mandate the use of suffixes to distinguish file types. Microsoft's attempt to fool users into thinking otherwise without changing the underlying filetype model was a horrible design decision by any rational standards. (Not to mention a security hole big enough to fly a 747 through.)
OK, thanks -- I see what you meant. The Economist piece just talked briefly about the bureaucratic hassles associated with licensing tracer compounds for clinical use; it didn't mention anything about Alzheimer's. Sounds like some of Stevens's PET advocacy had a legitimate purpose, while some of it was just his usual pork-belly cronyism in action.
We need to insert "broadcast flag" laws into the books that prohibit them from interfering with our rights.
The basis in law is already there; it's just universally ignored.
Congress's mandate is to enforce copyright for a limited time. To the extent that a DRM implementation does not provide for an automatic, guaranteed expiration date, it cannot be enforced through copyright-related legislation.
That is perhaps the most direct route to having the DMCA ruled unconstitutional. Someday, someone will explain to me why no one has ever pursued this argument in court. (It might be a question of legal standing; i.e., until someone has actually been unable to access content because of a 70-year-old DRM scheme, nothing can be done by the courts. If that's true, wow... I guess that's what we get when we let lawyers design complex systems.)
In the industry I follow, Stevens' bullying work on PET imaging (positron emission tomography) is truly stunning.
It's pretty OT for this thread, but did you read the recent piece in The Economist that talked about the FDA's unreasonable foot-dragging policy towards PET? I agree that Stevens is a pork-hounding, industry-shilling asshat of the first magnitude, but unless I'm missing another critical side of the story, his work on PET has probably already saved hundreds if not thousands of lives.
Unlike the broadcast-flag case, it's not clear whose interests were served by the FDA's prior policy of treating chemically-well-understood radiotracers like investigative drugs.
That article is 100% bullshit. "Failure" is not the term used when someone doesn't reach 20/20 correction. No ethical refractive surgeon markets the procedure as a sure-fire way to get rid of glasses. The goal is reduction of dependency on glasses or contacts.
In practical terms, that means 20/40 or better -- good enough to drive without corrective lenses. That's considered a "successful" outcome, barring any permanent side effects that the patient wasn't expecting.
Looking at the web site of the clinic that I visited a few years ago, 99% of their moderate myopes and 99.9% of their low myopes achieve 20/40 or better. Most patients fall into one of those two categories, but even the worst-case patients have a 20/40 correction rate of 97%.
After reading about the experience of Beck Weathers on Mount Everest (he had radial keratotomy surgery, and during the climb experienced blindness... I've decided that maybe glasses aren't so bad after all
After reading about the experience of Henry H. Bliss, a real estate broker who was knocked down and run over at Central Park West and 74th Street in New York City in the first US automobile-pedestrian fatality on September 13, 1889, I've decided that maybe horses aren't so bad after all.
Like the other poster pointed out, $5000 gets you some pretty decent SA hardware nowadays. Not state-of-the-art, but then, the actual RF hardware hasn't changed much since the 1980s. Most of the R&D progress has gone into making them cheaper and faster (e.g., replacing crystal filters with FFTs), rather than "better." And obviously, instrument firmware is way more capable now.
Host-based utility programs can go a long way toward covering the "firmware gap" between older and newer instruments, though. I have an open-source surveillance package that works well with most of the late-80s and newer-vintage Tektronix and HP analyzers (see website in comment header), and there are others. A $2000-$3000 (US) Tektronix portable took this screenshot with my freeware Win32 app.
But yeah, for simple WiFi diagnostics, this USB dongle sounds like a much better fit. High-resolution, high-precision spectrum analyzers don't add much value when dealing with wideband modes like WiFi. Cheap ones are fine. I don't know that I would advocate that the average Slashdotter drop $5K on an HP 8566B.
Why do you say that? Before MS came along, people could choose inexpensive computers from Atari, Apple, Commodore. There was healthy, competitive growth
That's actually not a good illustration of "healthy, competitive growth." What you had were a bunch of machines running 1-MHz 6502s that were all just different enough to make life annoying for application developers. If it hadn't been for the rise of MS-DOS, those 6502 machines would have been replaced by a bunch of machines running 8-12 MHz 68000s that were all just different enough to make life annoying for application developers.
Even though the early MS-DOS machines were far from the best of their generation in any respect at all, the market's demand for standardization was stronger than its demand for anything else. Despite the technical innovations from the Apple guys, Commodore, and others, PCs were never really accessible to the masses until the clone makers demonstrated that a single unified platform was actually better for competition as a whole. Bad news for Apple and Amiga-heads, good news for a few hundred million of the rest of us.
The microwave that wiped out the upper reaches of the 2.4-GHz band in this spectogram is two rooms away; the WiFi antenna generating the trace on channel 6 is about eight feet away. Most microwaves seem to occupy the higher portion of the band, so if you stick with channel 1 or channel 6, you may not have a problem. Also, some routers (not mine, unfortunately) can send shorter packets that avoid the oven-interference problem altogether.
Slashdot Mirror
... who holds the patent on using the WM_PAINT message to detect when a portion of an application's window needs to be redrawn. Clearly, someone other than Apple owns this patent, and is refusing to license it to them, because the Windows version of iTunes has been plagued with gaping areas of blackness since its first release.
I mean, come on... does nobody at Apple own a copy of the freaking Petzold book?
</rant>
I see where you're coming from, but I think it's more like, "if you don't want to pay for the staff."
eBay is not a charity or a government agency, so I don't expect them to eat the costs incurred by playing whack-a-mole with 50,000 Nigerian crooks. Those costs would be passed on to you and me... and it's dumb for them to spend money when volunteeers would do the work for free.
One of the popular refrains from eBay's management is that they don't have the resources needed to police auctions on a proactive basis. They can only respond to complaints from users.
From personal experience, it takes eBay anywhere from three to eight hours to kill a series of bogus scripted auction postings created with a phished account. That's more than enough time for the phisher to reel in multiple victims, all the while making the whole eBay marketplace look like a Romanian gypsy fair.
eBay needs to do two things to combat fraud. First, add a prominent, one-click "Report this auction" button to all listings. Right now the report link is buried at the bottom of the page. It leads you through the typical maze of customer-support options before dropping you at a page where you have to click yet another link to bring the auction to eBay's attention.
Second, when a user clicks "Report this auction," the notification message it creates should be transmitted, simultaneously, to several participants in a large network of trusted volunteers. These users would be recruited based on factors such as experience, feedback, and a history of accurate fraud reports. They would not have the ability to terminate auctions unilaterally -- they wouldn't be quite that "trusted" -- but they would have the ability to vet the violation report for legitimacy and forward it via a private channel to eBay, where an employee would be able to terminate the offending user's auctions immediately without a lot of additional reviewing overhead.
Formalizing the concept of community policing is the only way I can see for eBay to maintain credibility, in light of the undiminished volume of idiots who keep turning their accounts over to phishers on a daily basis. I agree with eBay management when they claim they can't police the site on their own. It's time they harnessed some of the outrage that's out there in the community, and put it to good use.
Before you start criticizing policy on actions taken to prevent it, consider what the real life impact would be without taking those measures.
Umm... about the same?
This is a good place to mention Luis Cupido's web site. He's actually managed to pick up the Voyager 1 signal on a 5.6-meter dish, using a lot of DSP-fu and maybe -- you be the judge -- a bit of wishful thinking.
A fascinating, if somewhat slow-loading, page.
You really don't get this whole freedom thing, do you?
If your religion is really that important to you, are you really going to be happy with a career that conflicts with it so frequently? Geez, first they shove that evil-ution stuff down your throat in pre-med, then, before you know it, you're being asked to help rape victims.
Should you be "free" to drown your kids in the bathtub, if the Invisible Sky Fairy tells you to? No? Gee, maybe there really ought to be limits to freedom.
Has anyone else observed this???
Yep. I run the SpamBayes plugin for Outlook, which displays a percent-spam rating for each message. In my setup, anything over 90% is treated as spam, while traffic ranking between 30-90% goes to an "Unsure" folder for manual inspection.
Out of a few hundred spams per day, the filter will typically miss one or two... but those misses have historically been very close to the "unsure" margin, typically 20-30% spam. However, over the past few weeks, there have been perhaps half a dozen spams with 0% spam ratings.
I've been a SpamBayes user for a couple of years, since its earliest betas, and this has never happened before. Looking at the raw message text, I'm seeing various obscure technical terms that would never make sense for spammers to include arbitrarily. Many appear to be culled from mailing lists I'm on -- "Universal collision detection" was one subject line that really got my attention. Other 0%-spam message bodies have contained lists of terms related to RF tech and other stuff that the spammer could have extracted from my own web site.
So, either spammers are abandoning the Project Gutenberg corpora in favor of modern technical sources, or they're getting smart enough to extract filter-poisoning text from victims' websites.
Both tactics would imply desperation on the spammers' parts, because their new targets are technically-literate people whom I'd expect to be among their least-likely customers. (Insert snarky remark about how English majors are more likely than engineering nerds to buy Viagra...)
If any emergency medical provider has moral objections to some procedure/drug/activity, they ought not be forced to either provide said procedure or to not treat anyone at all.
No, they ought to go flip burgers or write AJAX code or do something besides work in the medical field under a professional oath and state-sanctioned license.
How is banning a minor from watching a porno any different from not allowing them into a bar?
Alcohol has demonstrable physiological effects on developing brains. Porn (and video games) do not. This was at the heart of the judge's decision: ultimately, there's no way to justify value judgements about the appropriateness of media content without waving a Bible around.
That's not how our legal system is supposed to work, although you (and the other poster) are absolutely correct in implying that it often works that way in reality.
Here in the UK shops are fined large amounts, and even risk prison for breaking age based laws. Here is an overview from the trading standards...
This is the US, not the UK. Here is an overview from our trading standards:
The decision of the judge was correct in all respects, as far as US law is concerned.
If an app breaks, you can troubleshoot with regmon and filemon, i.e. many apps need r/w perms in their own directory for some retarded reason.
.INI file under \program files\appname is a security risk. Prevent me from writing to someone else's installation directory if you like, and certainly to the OS directory, but for Christ's sake, let me write to my own directory, already.
There are a lot of reasons for this, and they aren't all retarded. Sometimes it makes sense to install and run multiple instances of an application; e.g., one where each instance uses a specific virtual COM port. When the OS, in a misguided attempt at being trendy and "multi-user" and all that, forces everything to write to a user-specific data directory, that convenience goes out the window.
I have yet to hear a coherent explanation of why writing to my own
I have mod points, but unfortunately there isn't a mod option for "trotting out the same old Ayn Rand quote whether it's applicable or not"
It's also a shame there isn't a mod option for "trotting out the same old knee-jerk, ad hominem Ayn Rand criticism whether it's applicable or not."
Put another way: if there were no Godwin, the Nazis would have found it useful to invent him.
In any event, copyright, or the expiration of copyright, was never a guarantee of physical access to anything.
Bull. That is EXACTLY the original intent of copyright. Originally, a copyright holder was REQUIRED to lodge a copy of the protected work with the Library of Congress to ensure its eventual availability to the public domain. The whole idea behind the Library of Congress was guaranteed physical access to protected works.
Now, the law not only doesn't require this assurance, but it explicitly sanctions technological measures designed to ensure that a protected work never becomes copyable.
How anyone can reconcile that fact with the Constitution's plain-language mandate is beyond me... but then, IANAL.
Incorrect. The Supreme Court said that the definition of a "limited time" was up to Congress. DRM that's based on strong encryption doesn't just take control of IP out of the consumer's hands -- it takes control out of Congress's hands as well.
100 years from now, no act of Congress is going to make it possible to play a BluRay disc if, by some unlikely chance, the media consortium gets the encryption right this time. When access to a work remains blocked after the expiration of its copyright term, the publisher will have failed to live up to its part of the copyright bargain.
In short, when Congress passed the DMCA, they willingly gave up their ability to enforce the limited-time clause in exchange for payoffs from industry lobbyists. The Constitution doesn't permit them to do that, and (inexplicably, IMO) the courts have never ruled on that point.
And you should be able to do that because...?
Because copyright law in the US is constitutional only insofar as a work is protected for a "limited time." DRM violates the limited-time clause, so the DMCA and any other DRM-promoting legislation is prima facie unconstitutional.
It's not horrible UI design at all
.INI file to a customer who can't even find it because Windows is hiding the suffix from sight.
It is staggeringly horrible UI design. Try explaining how to edit an
Windows is based on MS-DOS file conventions, and MS-DOS file conventions mandate the use of suffixes to distinguish file types. Microsoft's attempt to fool users into thinking otherwise without changing the underlying filetype model was a horrible design decision by any rational standards. (Not to mention a security hole big enough to fly a 747 through.)
OK, thanks -- I see what you meant. The Economist piece just talked briefly about the bureaucratic hassles associated with licensing tracer compounds for clinical use; it didn't mention anything about Alzheimer's. Sounds like some of Stevens's PET advocacy had a legitimate purpose, while some of it was just his usual pork-belly cronyism in action.
We need to insert "broadcast flag" laws into the books that prohibit them from interfering with our rights.
The basis in law is already there; it's just universally ignored.
Congress's mandate is to enforce copyright for a limited time. To the extent that a DRM implementation does not provide for an automatic, guaranteed expiration date, it cannot be enforced through copyright-related legislation.
That is perhaps the most direct route to having the DMCA ruled unconstitutional. Someday, someone will explain to me why no one has ever pursued this argument in court. (It might be a question of legal standing; i.e., until someone has actually been unable to access content because of a 70-year-old DRM scheme, nothing can be done by the courts. If that's true, wow... I guess that's what we get when we let lawyers design complex systems.)
In the industry I follow, Stevens' bullying work on PET imaging (positron emission tomography) is truly stunning.
It's pretty OT for this thread, but did you read the recent piece in The Economist that talked about the FDA's unreasonable foot-dragging policy towards PET? I agree that Stevens is a pork-hounding, industry-shilling asshat of the first magnitude, but unless I'm missing another critical side of the story, his work on PET has probably already saved hundreds if not thousands of lives.
Unlike the broadcast-flag case, it's not clear whose interests were served by the FDA's prior policy of treating chemically-well-understood radiotracers like investigative drugs.
That article is 100% bullshit. "Failure" is not the term used when someone doesn't reach 20/20 correction. No ethical refractive surgeon markets the procedure as a sure-fire way to get rid of glasses. The goal is reduction of dependency on glasses or contacts.
In practical terms, that means 20/40 or better -- good enough to drive without corrective lenses. That's considered a "successful" outcome, barring any permanent side effects that the patient wasn't expecting.
Looking at the web site of the clinic that I visited a few years ago, 99% of their moderate myopes and 99.9% of their low myopes achieve 20/40 or better. Most patients fall into one of those two categories, but even the worst-case patients have a 20/40 correction rate of 97%.
After reading about the experience of Beck Weathers on Mount Everest (he had radial keratotomy surgery, and during the climb experienced blindness... I've decided that maybe glasses aren't so bad after all
After reading about the experience of Henry H. Bliss, a real estate broker who was knocked down and run over at Central Park West and 74th Street in New York City in the first US automobile-pedestrian fatality on September 13, 1889, I've decided that maybe horses aren't so bad after all.
Like the other poster pointed out, $5000 gets you some pretty decent SA hardware nowadays. Not state-of-the-art, but then, the actual RF hardware hasn't changed much since the 1980s. Most of the R&D progress has gone into making them cheaper and faster (e.g., replacing crystal filters with FFTs), rather than "better." And obviously, instrument firmware is way more capable now.
Host-based utility programs can go a long way toward covering the "firmware gap" between older and newer instruments, though. I have an open-source surveillance package that works well with most of the late-80s and newer-vintage Tektronix and HP analyzers (see website in comment header), and there are others. A $2000-$3000 (US) Tektronix portable took this screenshot with my freeware Win32 app.
But yeah, for simple WiFi diagnostics, this USB dongle sounds like a much better fit. High-resolution, high-precision spectrum analyzers don't add much value when dealing with wideband modes like WiFi. Cheap ones are fine. I don't know that I would advocate that the average Slashdotter drop $5K on an HP 8566B.
Why do you say that? Before MS came along, people could choose inexpensive computers from Atari, Apple, Commodore. There was healthy, competitive growth
That's actually not a good illustration of "healthy, competitive growth." What you had were a bunch of machines running 1-MHz 6502s that were all just different enough to make life annoying for application developers. If it hadn't been for the rise of MS-DOS, those 6502 machines would have been replaced by a bunch of machines running 8-12 MHz 68000s that were all just different enough to make life annoying for application developers.
Even though the early MS-DOS machines were far from the best of their generation in any respect at all, the market's demand for standardization was stronger than its demand for anything else. Despite the technical innovations from the Apple guys, Commodore, and others, PCs were never really accessible to the masses until the clone makers demonstrated that a single unified platform was actually better for competition as a whole. Bad news for Apple and Amiga-heads, good news for a few hundred million of the rest of us.
...but when exactly was Apple ever 'in touch' with the OS Community?
When they shipped the Apple ][+ with a commented assembly-language listing of its firmware.
Not so much since then.
"Approximately nil" leakage, unfortunately, is still a lot of energy when you're starting with a 500- or 600-watt magnetron.
See the example screenshot on this page: http://www.thegleam.com/ke5fx/gpib/ssm.htm
The microwave that wiped out the upper reaches of the 2.4-GHz band in this spectogram is two rooms away; the WiFi antenna generating the trace on channel 6 is about eight feet away. Most microwaves seem to occupy the higher portion of the band, so if you stick with channel 1 or channel 6, you may not have a problem. Also, some routers (not mine, unfortunately) can send shorter packets that avoid the oven-interference problem altogether.