Adam knows from reading Dave's mail that Dave is getting ready for a release of P. Dave builds the tarball, fetches the floppy with his secret key from secure storage, and signs the tarball. But in the interval Adam has replaced the tarball with a modified one. Dave signs the compromised tarball and releases it to the world.
The Trusted Computing/Palladium key management stuff could help a lot to prevent/detect compromised hosts.
Although everyone talks about the DRM implications of Palladium, there are other uses. The voting machines in Brazil, for example, could use the system to make sure the votes reported are signed by a chain of software that goes all the way to the hardware. There's no way to ensure that in software only.
That is starting to add up to a huge amount of waste, says Inform, an environmental organization that issued a report this year on old phones.The Environmental Protection Agency helped finance the study.
These people get paid to find problems, whether they are significant or not. If you think cellphones are a significant problem, I dare you to go to a landfill sometime and try to find just one cellphone.
Nor are the chemicals in them a significant danger. Computer monitors, yes, contain a lot of lead. But all these other stories about the dangers of electronic waste are bullshit scare stories.
Database guru Jim Gray discusses what turned out to be the most reasonable solution to sending terabytes of data (the Sloan Digital Sky Survey) in a convenient form across the globe: sending complete servers with terabyte disk subsystems.
The Baffler article by Stevel Albini that was referenced in USA Today is available here. The $-14,000 is not really relevant, it's the difference from a $250,000 advance.
The income statement is a little hard to follow. For one thing, it doesn't have proper indenting for sub-items, so it's hard to tell which things should really be added up.
For those who think it's okay for bands to make nothing on recordings since they make all their money on tours--this band lost money on tours, which is typical, from what I understand.
Talk among yourselves...
on
Ask Larry Wall
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
I will give you a topic: Perl-compatible regular expressions are neither regular nor perl-compatible; discuss.
Seriously, man, we've got PCRE's in javascript, Python, Ruby, XML schema, etc. But now Perl 6 is going to have yet another syntax! Are you sure you want to do this?
Maybe this is another question, but perhaps Perl 6 should actually be called something besides Perl?
When negative numbers were introduced they were known as a mathematical curiosity not useful for anything.
Similarly complex numbers were discovered simply to make basic algebra "closed", now they have hundreds of applications, similarly group theory originally had no practical applications yet is now used in many fields including analysis of molecular interactions which is essential to pharmecutical companies Give it 20 years and I'm sure an application will arise.
I think these are the exceptions rather than the rule, although I'm not sure about this. Newton, Gauss, Euler, Legendre and many others worked on problems from physics and astronomy.
Of those "pure mathematical" developments of twenty years (or forty years) ago, what has been used outside mathematics?
Well, software isn't even the main obstacle. Designing a font is a huge amount of work, and requires lots of special training. The best typography is done by people who have devoted their lives to it.
This is slightly off-topic, but there's an amusing shockwave story about the "Cooper Black" typeface done in the style of "Behind the Music" at Mastication Is Normal: Behind the Typeface
Here's an ISBN number I just scanned (maybe this'll get Amazon slashdotted too) 9780924771453
Yes, most books already have 13-digit EAN barcodes, with 978 assigned as the "Country code" for the ISBN namespace (the country name is Bookland).
Any bar code scanner sold in the last decade (at least) will decode not only UPC and EAN, but several other symbologies, including ones that include letters. There are single chips (from HP, e.g.) that take the analog input from a light measuring device and do everything for you.
What if you could make your own hydrogen out of water, right in the garage? The technology is already available; you electrolyze water by more or less running a fuel cell in reverse.At the moment, this takes more electricity than the hydrogen would ultimately generate.
I just can't wait until they can fix that problem!
Speaking of Google, did anybody else see an ad on Slashdot linking to the Google Appliance. It seems like Google is trying to figure out a way to actually make money. Shocking!
OK, most news sites have print copies of the same articles. Most news sites also use a ton of ads, usually extremely annoying pop-ups/unders/looping ads, etc. Many news sites are also moving towards username/pword +user "profiling".
Even given that their content is mostly paid for by their print editions, I have not heard of any free news site that has ever been profitable. That includes the New York Times, which still loses money on it's free, high-quality content.
LA times wants an e-mail address (I smell spam), and they send your reg info to it to verify that it's valid. I'm not going to go through the effort of generating a temporary e-mail account just so I can play by their marketing department's rules, I'd much rather stop visiting the site altogether, and go back to getting ALL my news from the WSJ (I have a paper subscription.)
Does anybody else find this ironic? You're not willing to give out your email address to get free news, but you do give out your real name and real US mail address for something you pay for?
Yesterday, as we all know, Microsoft fed an 'exclusive' story about its new 'Palladium' DRM/PKI Trust Machine to Newsweek hack Steven Levy (a guy who writes without irony of "high-level encryption"), presumably because they trusted him not to grasp the technology well enough to question it seriously.
This is the Steven Levy who has been writing about computers for two decades now, whose books include:
Crypto : how the code rebels beat the government--saving privacy in the digital age
Insanely great : the life and times of Macintosh, the computer that changed everything
Hackers : heroes of the computer revolution
Obviously, with titles like these, he must be an ignorant Microsoft toady. On the other hand, Thomas C Greene, who has never spoken with anybody involved with the project, knows everything about it and what it is really about.
Furthermore the aerodynamic drag turns out to be a much more important factor than they first expected.
There is a solution to this, which is to build vacuum tunnels. Of course, this is incredibly expensive, but the trains can go much faster and it greatly reduces the stability problems as well as drag.
The Swiss, who have to build tunnels anyway, are planning to build just such a system: Swissmetro. There is actually a cost saving over conventional tunnels since the vacuum tunnels can be smaller (you have to leave space for the air to pass in a conventional tunnel).
A tunnel system would also be much more resistant to sabotage or just animals wandering onto the track. I suspect that eventually we will do this in the U.S., although it may be a hundred years from now.
Re:Didn't here the E or T words..
on
Cradle to Cradle
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· Score: 2
The planet is BIG. There is near infinite room to put garbage and waste, and there's so much aluminum and silica on this planet it will never come close to being all used. What will run out is the energy to process that material. Of course, it's easier to toss that can in a bin than it is to give up a car, now, isn't it.
Everything! is about energy. How much energy does X consume. If it takes less energy to throw something away, we should do that instead - because it's the energy consumption (oil, coal) that's ruining the environment.
The real environmental saviour is safe nuclear (fission and fusion) power. The lobby did a good job on that on in the 70's, though.
These points need repeating because most people just don't know this. Most people have the few that resources are scarce and getting scarcer. In fact, resources have become more plentiful and cheaper throughout recorded history and there's no end in sight to this, as long as we have cheap enough energy to process them.
Garbage is, for the most part, an economic problem, not an ecological problem. The only pollution problem that's both ecologically significant and hard to solve (carbon dioxide) again involves energy.
working on his own, and used his great idea to build a company around it, (Edison Electric Lights)
That's not what happened. Edison had been an inventor for ten years before the light bulb, mostly working on improving the telegraph. He had already established several partnerships and corporations. See this chronology.
(His 1875 deal with Jay Gould, $30,000, would be worth roughly $4.5 million today.)
Note that Wolfgang Petersen was the director of Enemy Mine, NOT the screenwriter. The screenwriter is the one who makes the decisions of what to keep or leave out when adapting a book.
Screenwriters everywhere wish they had that much control. In reality, the producer, screenwriter, director, and editor all shape what ends up on the screen. Occasionally the studio executives re-edit the film.
While Alan Cox is all up in arms about the DMCA and the EUCD, it should be noted that Britain has banned copyright circumvention devices and publishing instructions on how to build circumvention devices since 1988, long before the U.S.
Note, though, that as far as I can tell CSS in no way prevents copying of DVDs (it's still possible to copy a DVD, CSS and all), but merely limits the equipment that the consumer can watch the DVD on to that officially approved by the MPAA for that particular part of the world. In theory, I could play a pirated copy of a region 1 DVD in my region 1 DVD player without difficulty. That's just a theory, mind you, as I haven't actually tried it.
No, that doesn't work. An ordinary DVD-burner does not copy all the parts of the DVD. Specifically it does not copy the parts that are necessary to decrypt the CSS-encrypted video.
I'm surprised there are still people on Slashdot who haven't heard of the exception to patent law called Independent Discovery. I could go ahead and describe it here, or I could quote one of the more eminent legal resources [nolo.com] on the Web. Basically, if you didn't copy the patent directly off their patent claim sheets, then they don't have a case against you (US and UK law):
No, you're wrong. The link you gave is about trade secrets, not patents. Independent discovery does not mean you are safe from patent infringement.
Slashdot Mirror
The Trusted Computing/Palladium key management stuff could help a lot to prevent/detect compromised hosts.
Although everyone talks about the DRM implications of Palladium, there are other uses. The voting machines in Brazil, for example, could use the system to make sure the votes reported are signed by a chain of software that goes all the way to the hardware. There's no way to ensure that in software only.
These people get paid to find problems, whether they are significant or not. If you think cellphones are a significant problem, I dare you to go to a landfill sometime and try to find just one cellphone.
Nor are the chemicals in them a significant danger. Computer monitors, yes, contain a lot of lead. But all these other stories about the dangers of electronic waste are bullshit scare stories.
Verisign (née Network Solutions) evidently forgot to renew NetSol.co.uk (shockwave audio).
Database guru Jim Gray
discusses what turned out to be the most reasonable solution to sending terabytes of data (the Sloan Digital Sky Survey) in a convenient form across the globe: sending complete servers with terabyte disk subsystems.
The income statement is a little hard to follow. For one thing, it doesn't have proper indenting for sub-items, so it's hard to tell which things should really be added up.
For those who think it's okay for bands to make nothing on recordings since they make all their money on tours--this band lost money on tours, which is typical, from what I understand.
Seriously, man, we've got PCRE's in javascript, Python, Ruby, XML schema, etc. But now Perl 6 is going to have yet another syntax! Are you sure you want to do this?
Maybe this is another question, but perhaps Perl 6 should actually be called something besides Perl?
Of those "pure mathematical" developments of twenty years (or forty years) ago, what has been used outside mathematics?
This is slightly off-topic, but there's an amusing shockwave story about the "Cooper Black" typeface done in the style of "Behind the Music" at Mastication Is Normal: Behind the Typeface
Couldn't you have picked a better name? "Mercaptan" stinks!
Yes, most books already have 13-digit EAN barcodes, with 978 assigned as the "Country code" for the ISBN namespace (the country name is Bookland).
Any bar code scanner sold in the last decade (at least) will decode not only UPC and EAN, but several other symbologies, including ones that include letters. There are single chips (from HP, e.g.) that take the analog input from a light measuring device and do everything for you.
There's good information about UPCs and EANs at http://www.adams1.com/pub/russadam/upccode.html
Some mass-market paperbacks have UPCs instead of EANs.
Speaking of Google, did anybody else see an ad on Slashdot linking to the Google Appliance. It seems like Google is trying to figure out a way to actually make money. Shocking!
few on land.
Even given that their content is mostly paid for by their print editions, I have not heard of any free news site that has ever been profitable. That includes the New York Times, which still loses money on it's free, high-quality content.
Does anybody else find this ironic? You're not willing to give out your email address to get free news, but you do give out your real name and real US mail address for something you pay for?
This is the Steven Levy who has been writing about computers for two decades now, whose books include:
Obviously, with titles like these, he must be an ignorant Microsoft toady. On the other hand, Thomas C Greene, who has never spoken with anybody involved with the project, knows everything about it and what it is really about.
There is a solution to this, which is to build vacuum tunnels. Of course, this is incredibly expensive, but the trains can go much faster and it greatly reduces the stability problems as well as drag.
The Swiss, who have to build tunnels anyway, are planning to build just such a system: Swissmetro. There is actually a cost saving over conventional tunnels since the vacuum tunnels can be smaller (you have to leave space for the air to pass in a conventional tunnel).
A tunnel system would also be much more resistant to sabotage or just animals wandering onto the track. I suspect that eventually we will do this in the U.S., although it may be a hundred years from now.
These points need repeating because most people just don't know this. Most people have the few that resources are scarce and getting scarcer. In fact, resources have become more plentiful and cheaper throughout recorded history and there's no end in sight to this, as long as we have cheap enough energy to process them.
Garbage is, for the most part, an economic problem, not an ecological problem. The only pollution problem that's both ecologically significant and hard to solve (carbon dioxide) again involves energy.
That's not what happened. Edison had been an inventor for ten years before the light bulb, mostly working on improving the telegraph. He had already established several partnerships and corporations. See this chronology.
(His 1875 deal with Jay Gould, $30,000, would be worth roughly $4.5 million today.)
Screenwriters everywhere wish they had that much control. In reality, the producer, screenwriter, director, and editor all shape what ends up on the screen. Occasionally the studio executives re-edit the film.
For interesting reading about Gould and how he was regarded in his field, see The Gould Files
- fossils
o logy/IQ/carroll-gould.html
There are some critical reviews of The Mismeasure of Man:
http://www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/jensen-gould
http://www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/Issues/psych
The limitation is built into the medium:
http://www.mediasupply.com/dvdr/faq.html
See Section 296 of the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988 (c. 48)
No, that doesn't work. An ordinary DVD-burner does not copy all the parts of the DVD. Specifically it does not copy the parts that are necessary to decrypt the CSS-encrypted video.
No, you're wrong. The link you gave is about trade secrets, not patents. Independent discovery does not mean you are safe from patent infringement.