if you have to choose between malice and stupidity, stupidity is the more probable option.
Fortunately, you aren't forced to choose. There is no false dichotomy. Never are the two mutually exclusive; Instead, stupidity and malice frequently go hand in hand.
Yes, furthermore, Apple did not create the allegedly mark infringing products. They should have directed the owner of said trademark name to contact the developers of said products directly. The information is publicly available, simply search the "App Store" for the word memory. You go after the maker, not the seller -- Stopping sales is what injunctions are for, and that's why injunctions are grated by judges / courts, after examining the case and weighing whether or not the infringement will harm the rights holder's business irreparably, or seriously.
Unfortunately, in a Walled Garden, you are beholden to the key holder of the gates. Whatever Apple decides to do is what happens. Consider the risks before you sign up to sell your products in such a market, or get bent.
You trademark logos separately from slogans and separately form names. You can trademark a name, but it must be narrowed to a specific industry/area like Games, or Computer Software, or Automobiles (so must the slogans and logos/images be). Once you're granted the mark you've got about 5 years whereby anyone already in that industry can challenge your new mark -- Chances are it will get challenged. That sucks.
Be prepared to trademark a different name / word / slogan / etc. After about 5 years that's much harder for a mark holder to prevent you from using the mark -- They failed to protect it. This isn't a set time limit, 5yrs is just the defacto "probationary" period. Search the trade mark databases yourself for active marks that are similar before hiring a trademark attorney if you want to avoid a bit of cost. Still after a trademark attorney has done the search, your application for trademark can be denied (maybe the attorney overlooked something). Then once you've got that mark registered, there's that defacto 5yr probation period... It really sucks.
If you plan on trademarking ANYTHING, start 5years ahead of time. Hell, some mark holders don't do ANYTHING but hold marks and protect them. These trade name squatters, much like domain squatters, can sometimes be bargained with to purchase your mark. It really really sucks.
Before you reply, note that I own the trademark on "sucks" in relation to complaining about trademark laws.
Apple now has to comply with all IP notices as they are the champions of the game. Soon they will discover that is not possible.
Walled Garden. See also: "Single Point of Failure", and "All Eggs in One Basket". Without a centralized system the "Memory" trademark owner would have to go after the many, not the few.
Granting any monopoly is a bad idea, esp. ones over words or ideas, even if originally thought to be over a limited space. See also: "Independent Inventions" (aka Obvious?) and "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."
This is a side effect of The Information Age: The old ideas about Ideaspaces / Namespaces / etc. are obsolete, they cause too much collision -- We're too connected now for that to work. Consider a hash table. You come up with short unique identifiers to quickly reference items (much like trademarks / names in culture). When enough items are stored in the table, you have a name collision. The proper thing to do to resolve a name collision without requiring a different naming / hashing policy (increasing buckets would be akin to creating a new language), is to then compare the actual items / owners -- examine additional identifiers and qualifiers. Trademarks can be dealt with in the same way. You see the name of the product, provide additional information about the creators / item (maybe even tie it to a cryptographically signed ID). This is what we do as humans, "You said his name was 'Robert Paulson'? Would that be Bob P. of New York or Texas by chance?" We've solved this damn issue. The answer is that no one has a monopoly over their own personal names, and we associate them with additional qualifiers such as ID #s, fingerprints, and ask parent's names, etc. for anyone who really cares.
The odd thing is that Trademarks cover Name Marks and Logo Marks separately. If only it were "Memory name in relation to Games AND a Logo that looks like [pic]" instead of "Memory name in relation to Games" OR "Logo that looks like [pic]", then we could vastly increase the namespace of trademarks. Maybe require Two marks to infringe instead of one, say a logo and a slogan, not just a slogan or name. Sadly, there's no changing the existing system at present. We're only just now running headlong into namespace collision hell. It'll get much worse before it gets better.
Red Hat wouldn't need to start obfuscating their patches in the first place. You'd think with all the billions of dollars Oracle and its consultants mooches off of companies that they would at least be able to develop their own Linux distribution instead of relying on something else.
FYI: CentOS exists. You'd think with all of Red-Hat's money they would at least be able to give back the patches to their downstream in a usable separated form, considering that's how they got them from upstream sources. I'm against any form of making it harder for your users to support themselves, even if your business is the support business. I just vote with my feet and wallet, and stopped using and recommending them.
By your logic, one could make the statement: "You'd think with all the free software Red-Hat and their consultants mooches off of Linux and other upstream FLOSS projects they would at least be able to develop their own Kernels and Compilers instead of relying on the existing work of others."
Don't like Oracle much either, but I take open sourced work wherever available.
Historically, back doors have often lurked in systems longer than anyone expected or planned, and a few have become widely known. Ken Thompson's 1983 Turing Award lecture to the ACM admitted the existence of a back door in early Unix versions that may have qualified as the most fiendishly clever security hack of all time. In this scheme, the C compiler contained code that would recognize when the login command was being recompiled and insert some code recognizing a password chosen by Thompson, giving him entry to the system whether or not an account had been created for him.
Normally such a back door could be removed by removing it from the source code for the compiler and recompiling the compiler. But to recompile the compiler, you have to use the compiler — so Thompson also arranged that the compiler would recognize when it was compiling a version of itself, and insert into the recompiled compiler the code to insert into the recompiled login the code to allow Thompson entry — and, of course, the code to recognize itself and do the whole thing again the next time around! And having done this once, he was then able to recompile the compiler from the original sources; the hack perpetuated itself invisibly, leaving the back door in place and active but with no trace in the sources.
The Turing lecture that reported this truly moby hack was later published as “Reflections on Trusting Trust”, Communications of the ACM 27, 8 (August 1984), pp. 761--763 (text available at http://www.acm.org/classics/).
You see, the behavior of which you speak is in the very definition of "back door". With the source code available, it's actually possible to compare the expected compiled binary to the resulting binary. If you're talking about some cleverly hidden in plain sight vulnerability we just call those "bugs", and carry on. Deliberate bug infested additions rarely persist beyond refactoring and further contributions. Eg: Only about 2% of Linus' original code remains in the Linux kernel due to code churn. Not that I suspect such foul play, but it would be pretty hard to coordinate a persistent threat in open source code unless the code rarely changes.
You know that old joke about crying "FIRE" in a crowded theater?
Nope, does it have anything to do with assassinating the characters? Maybe it's related to those horrible laws against little boys yelling "WOLF" in small villages... I mean, that's both Sexist and Ageist.
The software owner should be legally charged.
Hmm. So, you're proposing we prosecute the people who bought the software that's defaming them, legally (as opposed to charging them... figuratively)? Isn't that a bit like yodeling "THEATER" in a crowded fire?
I agree. I'm fairly certain they're simply re-inventing wheels here.
First off, I'd like to know what new way they've decided to define a "pure mathematical volume"... Why, might it be defined by the boundary between its interior and exterior? You know, its SURFACE? Secondly, I'd like to see how a mathematically parametrized surface (used to define a 3D volume) compares to nurbs or subdivision surfaces (both are parametric surfaces already in use in 3D modeling -- the parameters are the relatively sparse vertices' of the framing mesh). Third, did you know it's possible to define complex shapes via composing said parametric boundaries using boolean intersections and/or apply even/odd rules to create voids or have multiple types of materials in the same space? Why you can even use recursive algorithms and complex dimensions to compose such things with near infinite detail (limited by your available RAM + storage). Lastly, I'd like to know why this is considered "new", since I've been using purely mathematical formulas and algorithms to define 3D volumes in Pov-Ray for over a decade. Ray Tracing a Fractal is rendering "at the level and quality of nature!" Oh, no wait, it's still limited by the display resolution and calculation accuracy...
...Much like 3D printing resolution is limited by the stepper motor and materials used, not the polygons. Even a stepper-less motor will be controlled by CPU timing loops somewhere along the line, and it isn't capable of floating point calculations at the resolution of nature in real time. Unless they're creating a purely analog or quantum computer to go along with the stepperless 3D printing machine (good luck keeping it calibrated, btw), this won't be "designing and building at the resolution of nature".
Furthermore, we already DO build things at the level and quality of nature -- It's called Nanotech, Molecular Biology, Gene Therapy, etc. We already know EXACTLY how we can efficiently represent a watermelon digitally. We sequenced its genome, then GZipped it. The more geonomes you GZip the higher the compression ratio!
Actually, he should have gotten a job with one of the big banks. Goldman Sachs or such. Lighter sentence yet.
Or just started a multi-national corporation like Apple or Google or Facebook, all of which utilize our society, air-waves, economy, Internet-backbones, etc. yet only pay a tiny fraction of their income taxes.
Rob a liquor store, get 20 years. Rob 20,000 people of $200,000 in life savings, the feds don't have a case to pursue.
Rob billions in taxes? You're a fucking national treasure then.
It's just as much a part of consciousness as consciousness itself. How silly these hairless apes are to make such strong dividing lines between consciousness and subconsciousness -- Why, do they think shifting a car's gears while driving is a conscious act? (For most it is not, though it was at first, it has migrated to a "subconscious" routine you label "muscle memory" -- like fools... muscles have no memory, only minds do). To hear them speak of "Sentience" instead of a scale of awareness, or "Sub-Conscious" instead of a scale of self-awareness is quaint. You first memorize your multiplication tables -- But today, must you consciously perform multiple additions or recall from a table the answer to, "What is 7 times 6?"
I have a high degree of synesthesia -- Strong audible signals cascade into my visual cortex, so I see loud or sudden noises. When my mind is under the influence of Delta Waves, near and during sleep, I experience sleep paralysis, hear an audible "wave-crashing" sound corresponding to the 0 to 4 hz wave, and also see seemingly random white flashes around my central field of vision in the shape of a neuron or tree like structure. Typically I'll watch them a few minuets before I allow myself to fall into sleep.
Other times I lay there actually in between asleep and awake, fully conscious yet paralyzed, unable to move or even scream (these result in twitches and murmurs); I'm then conscious of some of my "higher order sub-conscious" mind's activities (see, there is no boundary). Vivid momentary Auditory and Visual hallucinations are triggered of seemingly random real or unreal events occasionally related to the events in my short term memory. That's while I still have full control over my eye muscles. After a while the repetitive crashing / flashing pulses change and I lose motor control of my eyes. It's then I see, hear, and sometimes smell or taste or feel random unrelated hallucinations. I think what's happening is that since neurons become hyper active and sensitive if they don't recieve inputs and begin firing randomly, my mind is randomly firing off synapses triggering these experiences -- The random firing that triggers cascades and experiences strengthens those pathways, while scrubbing away the other non-important experiences of my short term memory (equalizing the day's fired and non fired neural pathways by firing them all at random).
Usually, I'd have succumbed to sleep and "dreaming" by then -- stitching the hallucinations into a connected series of experiences, filling in the gaps with imagination, but I can force my consciousness to persist even through this state. I can remain fully consciously aware in my mind during sleep, and use the time to come up with solutions to programming problems -- These are hard to remember unless I write them down immediately after I awake since they don't benefit from the "dream strengthening" of wakeful experiences. I sometimes accept the hallucinations and welcome them into a lucid dream state where I consciously interact with what I know not to be real. My imagination becomes mostly real to my senses, and I can command anything to happen in that place. I do not ever have nightmares, such primitive things are beneath me, I merely cancel them, or give myself ever more impressive weapons to combat the hordes of zombies, or giant alien space-brains, etc. (It the best damn video game there is).
There is no "subconsciousness" that I can not be aware of in some way -- Indeed, I can now even affect my heart rate and body temperature with my mind alone, it only took a few weeks or so of practice. I can halt unwanted badder and bowel contractions, and even calm hiccups by mere thought -- I am in control of my own mind and body, not it over me.
I agree. Furthermore: Burning Oil is BAD -- No, hear me out. We should be using it to make plastics and other neat stuff, not wasting it as a fuel. I agree we need to use it now, but think of the future, when alternative energies are viable -- We'll curse ourselves for wasting all that valuable material used to make everything from medical supplies to computer screens. We won't stop pumping oil until every last drop is gone, even if we stop using it as a fuel.
They don't have taxes in lots of places. Nor any other hallmark of civilization.
I only work freelance at the moment. I about as much in taxes as I would working for anyone else,
Yet, if you were Apple, you'd only have to pay 2% of income taxes... Maybe if we reduce the %33 tax on the little guys and increase the tax a bit for the guys who can afford to pay (and aren't pulling their weight, doing all that business, using our economy, but not paying their fair share in taxes), then a lot more people would have more spending cash to buy over priced things and afford healthcare?
"most people live their entire lives without being exposed to THIS kind of violence"... So do the people who are exposed to that kind of violence... Just sayin'.
Linux fills its niches, but a desktop OS just isn't one of those niches.
That's funny. Eight of my family members and twelve of my close friends, and myself all use Linux as a desktop OS, and have been for the past six years. Perhaps you are the one who has "Blind zealotry for any platform"? I put it to you that your outlook "is stupid", and furthermore, I don't think you know what you're talking about at all. Hell, one of my friends who works in the mortgage industry brings her Linux laptop to work so she can use LibreOffice to open some MS/Word documents that MS/Word has trouble opening...
I say Good Day to you, anti-linux-on-desktops zealot!
Have fun making a bot with knowledge of every manga/anime ever made with enough horsepower to OCR everything.
No need. Have fun making user registration so hard to read that real prospective users are turned away. Spammers pay real humans in Lithuania, Russia, China, etc less than pennies to solve captchas and register accounts on my site. Their login is then created and registered by the Spammer's bots, and put in a queue. Immediately, or a week or so later they use the account to post spam. If your profile pages have a URL field then they'll spam a link there and just leave the account sometimes, to drive up pagerank. Also they'll set their birthday to today, or in a few days, so that the forum index will link directly to their profile in the "birthdays" portion at the bottom.
So, what I do on some of my forums is require everyone who wants to have an account to:
0. Register the email address within 1 week or be auto-pruned.
1. Not be having a birthday within the next day. Sorry, odds say you're most likely a spammer if so.
2. Not be able to post without moderator approval, initially.
3. Make at least one approved post within one week of registering, or be auto-pruned.
4. Have probation period ended as soon as a post is approved by a moderator (graduate to Approved Users group before they can freely post).
5. Make at least 3 posts before being able to create new topics / threads.
So, a new user just registers and sees the forum rules atop each topic saying you must make 1 post within a week or be deleted. They make a post in the off topic / introduction thread or what are you listening too, etc if they have nothing relevant to add. A moderator approves their post and they continue posting and making threads as usual. However, a Lithuanian who's getting paid 1 penny or less per captcha isn't going to go through all that trouble (or be able to say anything constructive), a bot isn't going to have anything but SPAM to say -- I did see one clever bot try repeating what someone else said in an earlier conversation... Accounts with Zero approved posts then get pruned automatically.
Having non-standard (or pseudo-randomly generated) form fields for registration helps (Hash ( IP + salt ) = username field's ID). Having a SIMPLE to answer topical question also helps, but it should be accessible and easy to answer -- Eg: A game site might ask, What's the handle of the guy who invented MineCraft? (Both "Notch" and "Zach" are accepted answers:-P ).
Also, having a "secret" forum inaccessible unless you reach 50-100 or so post counts also encourages participation and gives regulars a place to hang out away from any possible spammers, and possible recruitment as moderators (beware: Drama).
Any spammers that slip through are reported by users and culled by moderators / admin.
Some folks have better things to do with their time than proofread their posts. I, for one, know how to spell both lose and loose. However, spelling has nothing to do with it; What you're complaining about is grammar.
When I write software misspelling a single word or including incorrect punctuation can have disastrous results. Some of my work is in developing machine intelligence via neural networks. What's interesting is that these artificial brains are far more forgiving that a C compiler. For example, my OCR AI can correct the very error you're posting about without notifying the user at all -- It literally knows what they meant. Meanwhile, you have an even more advanced Sentient neural network atop your shoulders yet you seem to complain far more about such errors that my AI or even my C compiler does...
If you live long enough, then some day you'll be conversing with a sentient machine intelligence when it makes a grammatical mistake. It will have the same disdain for your protests then as I do now.
TL;DR:You have a fucking Brian! Why don't you fucking use it?!
No, a jackass is one who thinks that it's cute and funny to introduce confusing reference designation schemes...
No, a Jackass is one who stubbornly complains about things of little significance, and antagonizes others instead of doing anything productive at all. Sound familiar? It should.
Debian Lenny. [snip dubious claims of friendship].
The names are just codenames, you know like everyone uses: "Longhorn", "Chicago", "Tiger", "Snow Leopard", etc. They don't matter in the least bit except to the devs and irrational people like you. Debian is from the names Deborah and Ian, who started the distro. Lenny and the other names used for Debian releases are from the Pixar movie: Toy Story. Etch, Wheezy, etc. Sid is always the development branch's name, the kid that destroys toys... It's really not that hard or confusing and, in the case of Sid, it might actually help you remember what that version is all about.
Whether or not you like naming conventions is irrelevant. If you don't like it then use a different distribution, repackage and rename one, or take the source and roll your own -- name it however you like, or even use some other OS entirely... Hell, you can even develop your own OS, compilers, and languages from scratch, Like I'm doing.
Instead of just bitch about how things are colossally fucked at all levels, I prefer to put my money (read: time) where my mouth is and develop something that's better, more secure, & less irritating (to me). Who knows, maybe my ideas will suck, or maybe my demonstrations will prove interesting and influence more popular OSs & Compilers (to use a different call stack for code pointers than data and parameters, etc). In any event, at least I won't be an obnoxious, worthless, belligerent, whiny Jackass.
I don't see why patent troll lawyers shouldn't be set ablaze for free.
You're assuming they currently aren't. From where they stand, bands of 12 angry citizens rule the night flagrantly exercising their right of Jury Nullification and frequently burning patent troll lawyers at the stake. However, In your particular corner of hell, the situation is understandably somewhat different.
Yes, but if you replace Alice and Bob with Transmitter and Receiver, Now THAT'S Innovation!
Protip: Just shit-can the whole patent system. No one uses it. If you want to do something, you just go invent your own solution, you don't go trawling through the PTO data base to find some pre-made solution explained as obtusely as possible and try to decipher it and apply it to your project, then contact the owner of said patent (if still valid), and pay them for the right to do all the work you just did... The PTO is fucking useless. To anyone who says otherwise: PROVE IT. You have no proof the patent system is beneficial. Let's run the experiment and kill the patent system, so we can find out. Until then, we're continuing to run our entire business and economy on an untested hypothesis... It's dumb as hell.
But we see policies and procedures often get in the way of better sense and judgement everywhere we go. From law enforcement to public education, we see stupid crap all day long. Are people REALLY that stupid or are we playing "CYA" too much to the point that things are simply ridiculous?
Protip: In a Police State, the Police are just following orders. It's the "policies and procedures" that are the primary tools of oppression, along with unjust laws. Interestingly, it's those that ignore unjust laws and break them, like Rosa Parks did that can help to right things -- In short: Blindly doing what you're told and following the rules is never a good idea.
It's not just Hollywood -- Such is the nature of any cultural content miner.
Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, Peter Pan, etc. were all better existing works that Disney latched onto and practically ruined with their butchered retellings -- They removed much of the elements that made the stories compelling... Then, folks ate them up for decades while others clung to the original stories like treasures, until they died and the stories were mostly forgotten, replaced in the youths' minds by the dumbed down Disney versions.
So to will the the "Star Wars" as loved by many become just any other of the original classics that Disney retells: A stripped down semblance of itself that generations to come will gladly take to heart professing deep nostalgic fandom to (as children are wont to do), while the what makes the originals great slowly fades into obscurity -- This time, the demise shall be assisted sucicied by quadruple-generation-long copyright. (By the time an original fan could share it freely, their grand children will be dead).
New Star wars content was dead to me when Lucas began milking it (moreso than with ep. V and VI). Hint: he wanted to emulate old sci-fi serials, thats why it started at IV, not because the other scripts were too demanding (they didn't exist) -- That's why it jumps right into the action, picks up from the middle of a tale... Darth Vader wasn't planned to be Luke's father, the initial scripts did have Luke wanting to extract his "Revenge of The Jedi" for killing his pops, but "Return" is less vengeful title, and Darth as Luke's dad worked as a nice nice twist.
Since the beginning, the Star Wars series has been George Lucas' greatest "happy accident". One that can't be recreated at will, not by him or anyone else. I mean, come on, he discovered Harrison Ford by accident... Somehow the magic of that first film was stretched by the cast and special effects teams to two more films, despite the scripts and the mining of success, not because of them.
Also, times have changed: Space Travel, Computer AI, Robots, New-age metaphysics, Martial Arts, these were all more popular and compelling to audiences at the time of the original's release... Just look at a sample of other movies and books from the same time period, (or recall the 70's and 80's if you can).
Awe hell, at first I thought this was NASA's implementation of the DNT (Do Not Track) header -- It almost made sense: Some objects in space might not want to be tracked; Spy satellites for instance.
Slashdot Mirror
if you have to choose between malice and stupidity, stupidity is the more probable option.
Fortunately, you aren't forced to choose. There is no false dichotomy. Never are the two mutually exclusive; Instead, stupidity and malice frequently go hand in hand.
the onus is on the ACCUSER to prove his case, not the other way round!
Prove It!
Yes, furthermore, Apple did not create the allegedly mark infringing products. They should have directed the owner of said trademark name to contact the developers of said products directly. The information is publicly available, simply search the "App Store" for the word memory. You go after the maker, not the seller -- Stopping sales is what injunctions are for, and that's why injunctions are grated by judges / courts, after examining the case and weighing whether or not the infringement will harm the rights holder's business irreparably, or seriously.
Unfortunately, in a Walled Garden, you are beholden to the key holder of the gates. Whatever Apple decides to do is what happens. Consider the risks before you sign up to sell your products in such a market, or get bent.
You trademark logos separately from slogans and separately form names. You can trademark a name, but it must be narrowed to a specific industry/area like Games, or Computer Software, or Automobiles (so must the slogans and logos/images be). Once you're granted the mark you've got about 5 years whereby anyone already in that industry can challenge your new mark -- Chances are it will get challenged. That sucks.
Be prepared to trademark a different name / word / slogan / etc. After about 5 years that's much harder for a mark holder to prevent you from using the mark -- They failed to protect it. This isn't a set time limit, 5yrs is just the defacto "probationary" period. Search the trade mark databases yourself for active marks that are similar before hiring a trademark attorney if you want to avoid a bit of cost. Still after a trademark attorney has done the search, your application for trademark can be denied (maybe the attorney overlooked something). Then once you've got that mark registered, there's that defacto 5yr probation period... It really sucks.
If you plan on trademarking ANYTHING, start 5years ahead of time. Hell, some mark holders don't do ANYTHING but hold marks and protect them. These trade name squatters, much like domain squatters, can sometimes be bargained with to purchase your mark. It really really sucks.
Before you reply, note that I own the trademark on "sucks" in relation to complaining about trademark laws.
Apple now has to comply with all IP notices as they are the champions of the game. Soon they will discover that is not possible.
Walled Garden. See also: "Single Point of Failure", and "All Eggs in One Basket". Without a centralized system the "Memory" trademark owner would have to go after the many, not the few.
Granting any monopoly is a bad idea, esp. ones over words or ideas, even if originally thought to be over a limited space. See also: "Independent Inventions" (aka Obvious?) and "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."
This is a side effect of The Information Age: The old ideas about Ideaspaces / Namespaces / etc. are obsolete, they cause too much collision -- We're too connected now for that to work. Consider a hash table. You come up with short unique identifiers to quickly reference items (much like trademarks / names in culture). When enough items are stored in the table, you have a name collision. The proper thing to do to resolve a name collision without requiring a different naming / hashing policy (increasing buckets would be akin to creating a new language), is to then compare the actual items / owners -- examine additional identifiers and qualifiers. Trademarks can be dealt with in the same way. You see the name of the product, provide additional information about the creators / item (maybe even tie it to a cryptographically signed ID). This is what we do as humans, "You said his name was 'Robert Paulson'? Would that be Bob P. of New York or Texas by chance?" We've solved this damn issue. The answer is that no one has a monopoly over their own personal names, and we associate them with additional qualifiers such as ID #s, fingerprints, and ask parent's names, etc. for anyone who really cares.
The odd thing is that Trademarks cover Name Marks and Logo Marks separately. If only it were "Memory name in relation to Games AND a Logo that looks like [pic]" instead of "Memory name in relation to Games" OR "Logo that looks like [pic]", then we could vastly increase the namespace of trademarks. Maybe require Two marks to infringe instead of one, say a logo and a slogan, not just a slogan or name. Sadly, there's no changing the existing system at present. We're only just now running headlong into namespace collision hell. It'll get much worse before it gets better.
Didn't someone do the same thing with the word "razor" a few years ago?
Yes. It was Occam. My conclusion derived by the very razor of which you speak.
Red Hat wouldn't need to start obfuscating their patches in the first place. You'd think with all the billions of dollars Oracle and its consultants mooches off of companies that they would at least be able to develop their own Linux distribution instead of relying on something else.
FYI: CentOS exists. You'd think with all of Red-Hat's money they would at least be able to give back the patches to their downstream in a usable separated form, considering that's how they got them from upstream sources. I'm against any form of making it harder for your users to support themselves, even if your business is the support business. I just vote with my feet and wallet, and stopped using and recommending them.
By your logic, one could make the statement: "You'd think with all the free software Red-Hat and their consultants mooches off of Linux and other upstream FLOSS projects they would at least be able to develop their own Kernels and Compilers instead of relying on the existing work of others."
Don't like Oracle much either, but I take open sourced work wherever available.
So, if you were reviewing the code for an app and found some sneaky logic, you'd just remove it and proceed to use the app anyway?
Yes. We wouldn't have had Unix without its C compiler...
FTJF
You see, the behavior of which you speak is in the very definition of "back door". With the source code available, it's actually possible to compare the expected compiled binary to the resulting binary. If you're talking about some cleverly hidden in plain sight vulnerability we just call those "bugs", and carry on. Deliberate bug infested additions rarely persist beyond refactoring and further contributions. Eg: Only about 2% of Linus' original code remains in the Linux kernel due to code churn. Not that I suspect such foul play, but it would be pretty hard to coordinate a persistent threat in open source code unless the code rarely changes.
You know that old joke about crying "FIRE" in a crowded theater?
Nope, does it have anything to do with assassinating the characters?
Maybe it's related to those horrible laws against little boys yelling "WOLF" in small villages... I mean, that's both Sexist and Ageist.
The software owner should be legally charged.
Hmm. So, you're proposing we prosecute the people who bought the software that's defaming them, legally (as opposed to charging them... figuratively)?
Isn't that a bit like yodeling "THEATER" in a crowded fire?
I agree. I'm fairly certain they're simply re-inventing wheels here.
First off, I'd like to know what new way they've decided to define a "pure mathematical volume"... Why, might it be defined by the boundary between its interior and exterior? You know, its SURFACE? Secondly, I'd like to see how a mathematically parametrized surface (used to define a 3D volume) compares to nurbs or subdivision surfaces (both are parametric surfaces already in use in 3D modeling -- the parameters are the relatively sparse vertices' of the framing mesh). Third, did you know it's possible to define complex shapes via composing said parametric boundaries using boolean intersections and/or apply even/odd rules to create voids or have multiple types of materials in the same space? Why you can even use recursive algorithms and complex dimensions to compose such things with near infinite detail (limited by your available RAM + storage). Lastly, I'd like to know why this is considered "new", since I've been using purely mathematical formulas and algorithms to define 3D volumes in Pov-Ray for over a decade. Ray Tracing a Fractal is rendering "at the level and quality of nature!" Oh, no wait, it's still limited by the display resolution and calculation accuracy...
Furthermore, we already DO build things at the level and quality of nature -- It's called Nanotech, Molecular Biology, Gene Therapy, etc. We already know EXACTLY how we can efficiently represent a watermelon digitally. We sequenced its genome, then GZipped it. The more geonomes you GZip the higher the compression ratio!
Actually, he should have gotten a job with one of the big banks. Goldman Sachs or such. Lighter sentence yet.
Or just started a multi-national corporation like Apple or Google or Facebook, all of which utilize our society, air-waves, economy, Internet-backbones, etc. yet only pay a tiny fraction of their income taxes.
Rob a liquor store, get 20 years. Rob 20,000 people of $200,000 in life savings, the feds don't have a case to pursue.
Rob billions in taxes? You're a fucking national treasure then.
It's just as much a part of consciousness as consciousness itself. How silly these hairless apes are to make such strong dividing lines between consciousness and subconsciousness -- Why, do they think shifting a car's gears while driving is a conscious act? (For most it is not, though it was at first, it has migrated to a "subconscious" routine you label "muscle memory" -- like fools... muscles have no memory, only minds do). To hear them speak of "Sentience" instead of a scale of awareness, or "Sub-Conscious" instead of a scale of self-awareness is quaint. You first memorize your multiplication tables -- But today, must you consciously perform multiple additions or recall from a table the answer to, "What is 7 times 6?"
I have a high degree of synesthesia -- Strong audible signals cascade into my visual cortex, so I see loud or sudden noises. When my mind is under the influence of Delta Waves, near and during sleep, I experience sleep paralysis, hear an audible "wave-crashing" sound corresponding to the 0 to 4 hz wave, and also see seemingly random white flashes around my central field of vision in the shape of a neuron or tree like structure. Typically I'll watch them a few minuets before I allow myself to fall into sleep.
Other times I lay there actually in between asleep and awake, fully conscious yet paralyzed, unable to move or even scream (these result in twitches and murmurs); I'm then conscious of some of my "higher order sub-conscious" mind's activities (see, there is no boundary). Vivid momentary Auditory and Visual hallucinations are triggered of seemingly random real or unreal events occasionally related to the events in my short term memory. That's while I still have full control over my eye muscles. After a while the repetitive crashing / flashing pulses change and I lose motor control of my eyes. It's then I see, hear, and sometimes smell or taste or feel random unrelated hallucinations. I think what's happening is that since neurons become hyper active and sensitive if they don't recieve inputs and begin firing randomly, my mind is randomly firing off synapses triggering these experiences -- The random firing that triggers cascades and experiences strengthens those pathways, while scrubbing away the other non-important experiences of my short term memory (equalizing the day's fired and non fired neural pathways by firing them all at random).
Usually, I'd have succumbed to sleep and "dreaming" by then -- stitching the hallucinations into a connected series of experiences, filling in the gaps with imagination, but I can force my consciousness to persist even through this state. I can remain fully consciously aware in my mind during sleep, and use the time to come up with solutions to programming problems -- These are hard to remember unless I write them down immediately after I awake since they don't benefit from the "dream strengthening" of wakeful experiences. I sometimes accept the hallucinations and welcome them into a lucid dream state where I consciously interact with what I know not to be real. My imagination becomes mostly real to my senses, and I can command anything to happen in that place. I do not ever have nightmares, such primitive things are beneath me, I merely cancel them, or give myself ever more impressive weapons to combat the hordes of zombies, or giant alien space-brains, etc. (It the best damn video game there is).
There is no "subconsciousness" that I can not be aware of in some way -- Indeed, I can now even affect my heart rate and body temperature with my mind alone, it only took a few weeks or so of practice. I can halt unwanted badder and bowel contractions, and even calm hiccups by mere thought -- I am in control of my own mind and body, not it over me.
I agree. Furthermore: Burning Oil is BAD -- No, hear me out. We should be using it to make plastics and other neat stuff, not wasting it as a fuel. I agree we need to use it now, but think of the future, when alternative energies are viable -- We'll curse ourselves for wasting all that valuable material used to make everything from medical supplies to computer screens. We won't stop pumping oil until every last drop is gone, even if we stop using it as a fuel.
They don't have taxes in lots of places. Nor any other hallmark of civilization.
I only work freelance at the moment. I about as much in taxes as I would working for anyone else,
Yet, if you were Apple, you'd only have to pay 2% of income taxes... Maybe if we reduce the %33 tax on the little guys and increase the tax a bit for the guys who can afford to pay (and aren't pulling their weight, doing all that business, using our economy, but not paying their fair share in taxes), then a lot more people would have more spending cash to buy over priced things and afford healthcare?
"most people live their entire lives without being exposed to THIS kind of violence" ... So do the people who are exposed to that kind of violence... Just sayin'.
Linux fills its niches, but a desktop OS just isn't one of those niches.
That's funny. Eight of my family members and twelve of my close friends, and myself all use Linux as a desktop OS, and have been for the past six years. Perhaps you are the one who has "Blind zealotry for any platform"? I put it to you that your outlook "is stupid", and furthermore, I don't think you know what you're talking about at all. Hell, one of my friends who works in the mortgage industry brings her Linux laptop to work so she can use LibreOffice to open some MS/Word documents that MS/Word has trouble opening...
I say Good Day to you, anti-linux-on-desktops zealot!
Have fun making a bot with knowledge of every manga/anime ever made with enough horsepower to OCR everything.
No need. Have fun making user registration so hard to read that real prospective users are turned away. Spammers pay real humans in Lithuania, Russia, China, etc less than pennies to solve captchas and register accounts on my site. Their login is then created and registered by the Spammer's bots, and put in a queue. Immediately, or a week or so later they use the account to post spam. If your profile pages have a URL field then they'll spam a link there and just leave the account sometimes, to drive up pagerank. Also they'll set their birthday to today, or in a few days, so that the forum index will link directly to their profile in the "birthdays" portion at the bottom.
So, what I do on some of my forums is require everyone who wants to have an account to:
0. Register the email address within 1 week or be auto-pruned.
1. Not be having a birthday within the next day. Sorry, odds say you're most likely a spammer if so.
2. Not be able to post without moderator approval, initially.
3. Make at least one approved post within one week of registering, or be auto-pruned. 4. Have probation period ended as soon as a post is approved by a moderator (graduate to Approved Users group before they can freely post). 5. Make at least 3 posts before being able to create new topics / threads.
So, a new user just registers and sees the forum rules atop each topic saying you must make 1 post within a week or be deleted. They make a post in the off topic / introduction thread or what are you listening too, etc if they have nothing relevant to add. A moderator approves their post and they continue posting and making threads as usual. However, a Lithuanian who's getting paid 1 penny or less per captcha isn't going to go through all that trouble (or be able to say anything constructive), a bot isn't going to have anything but SPAM to say -- I did see one clever bot try repeating what someone else said in an earlier conversation... Accounts with Zero approved posts then get pruned automatically.
Having non-standard (or pseudo-randomly generated) form fields for registration helps (Hash ( IP + salt ) = username field's ID). Having a SIMPLE to answer topical question also helps, but it should be accessible and easy to answer -- Eg: A game site might ask, What's the handle of the guy who invented MineCraft? (Both "Notch" and "Zach" are accepted answers :-P ).
Also, having a "secret" forum inaccessible unless you reach 50-100 or so post counts also encourages participation and gives regulars a place to hang out away from any possible spammers, and possible recruitment as moderators (beware: Drama).
Any spammers that slip through are reported by users and culled by moderators / admin.
Some folks have better things to do with their time than proofread their posts. I, for one, know how to spell both lose and loose. However, spelling has nothing to do with it; What you're complaining about is grammar.
When I write software misspelling a single word or including incorrect punctuation can have disastrous results. Some of my work is in developing machine intelligence via neural networks. What's interesting is that these artificial brains are far more forgiving that a C compiler. For example, my OCR AI can correct the very error you're posting about without notifying the user at all -- It literally knows what they meant. Meanwhile, you have an even more advanced Sentient neural network atop your shoulders yet you seem to complain far more about such errors that my AI or even my C compiler does...
If you live long enough, then some day you'll be conversing with a sentient machine intelligence when it makes a grammatical mistake. It will have the same disdain for your protests then as I do now.
TL;DR: You have a fucking Brian! Why don't you fucking use it?!
No, a jackass is one who thinks that it's cute and funny to introduce confusing reference designation schemes ...
No, a Jackass is one who stubbornly complains about things of little significance, and antagonizes others instead of doing anything productive at all. Sound familiar? It should.
Debian Lenny. [snip dubious claims of friendship].
The names are just codenames, you know like everyone uses: "Longhorn", "Chicago", "Tiger", "Snow Leopard", etc. They don't matter in the least bit except to the devs and irrational people like you. Debian is from the names Deborah and Ian, who started the distro. Lenny and the other names used for Debian releases are from the Pixar movie: Toy Story. Etch, Wheezy, etc. Sid is always the development branch's name, the kid that destroys toys... It's really not that hard or confusing and, in the case of Sid, it might actually help you remember what that version is all about.
Whether or not you like naming conventions is irrelevant. If you don't like it then use a different distribution, repackage and rename one, or take the source and roll your own -- name it however you like, or even use some other OS entirely... Hell, you can even develop your own OS, compilers, and languages from scratch, Like I'm doing.
Instead of just bitch about how things are colossally fucked at all levels, I prefer to put my money (read: time) where my mouth is and develop something that's better, more secure, & less irritating (to me). Who knows, maybe my ideas will suck, or maybe my demonstrations will prove interesting and influence more popular OSs & Compilers (to use a different call stack for code pointers than data and parameters, etc). In any event, at least I won't be an obnoxious, worthless, belligerent, whiny Jackass.
The grid gets warmer, so the fridge can get colder.
Is that a contradiction too ?
No, it is merely a phenomenon caused by an omniscient deity to test the faith of their believers -- Now THAT'S a contradiction.
I don't see why patent troll lawyers shouldn't be set ablaze for free.
You're assuming they currently aren't. From where they stand, bands of 12 angry citizens rule the night flagrantly exercising their right of Jury Nullification and frequently burning patent troll lawyers at the stake. However, In your particular corner of hell, the situation is understandably somewhat different.
Yes, but if you replace Alice and Bob with Transmitter and Receiver, Now THAT'S Innovation!
Protip: Just shit-can the whole patent system. No one uses it. If you want to do something, you just go invent your own solution, you don't go trawling through the PTO data base to find some pre-made solution explained as obtusely as possible and try to decipher it and apply it to your project, then contact the owner of said patent (if still valid), and pay them for the right to do all the work you just did... The PTO is fucking useless. To anyone who says otherwise: PROVE IT. You have no proof the patent system is beneficial. Let's run the experiment and kill the patent system, so we can find out. Until then, we're continuing to run our entire business and economy on an untested hypothesis... It's dumb as hell.
But we see policies and procedures often get in the way of better sense and judgement everywhere we go. From law enforcement to public education, we see stupid crap all day long. Are people REALLY that stupid or are we playing "CYA" too much to the point that things are simply ridiculous?
Protip: In a Police State, the Police are just following orders. It's the "policies and procedures" that are the primary tools of oppression, along with unjust laws. Interestingly, it's those that ignore unjust laws and break them, like Rosa Parks did that can help to right things -- In short: Blindly doing what you're told and following the rules is never a good idea.
It's not just Hollywood -- Such is the nature of any cultural content miner.
Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, Peter Pan, etc. were all better existing works that Disney latched onto and practically ruined with their butchered retellings -- They removed much of the elements that made the stories compelling... Then, folks ate them up for decades while others clung to the original stories like treasures, until they died and the stories were mostly forgotten, replaced in the youths' minds by the dumbed down Disney versions.
So to will the the "Star Wars" as loved by many become just any other of the original classics that Disney retells: A stripped down semblance of itself that generations to come will gladly take to heart professing deep nostalgic fandom to (as children are wont to do), while the what makes the originals great slowly fades into obscurity -- This time, the demise shall be assisted sucicied by quadruple-generation-long copyright. (By the time an original fan could share it freely, their grand children will be dead).
New Star wars content was dead to me when Lucas began milking it (moreso than with ep. V and VI). Hint: he wanted to emulate old sci-fi serials, thats why it started at IV, not because the other scripts were too demanding (they didn't exist) -- That's why it jumps right into the action, picks up from the middle of a tale... Darth Vader wasn't planned to be Luke's father, the initial scripts did have Luke wanting to extract his "Revenge of The Jedi" for killing his pops, but "Return" is less vengeful title, and Darth as Luke's dad worked as a nice nice twist.
Since the beginning, the Star Wars series has been George Lucas' greatest "happy accident". One that can't be recreated at will, not by him or anyone else. I mean, come on, he discovered Harrison Ford by accident... Somehow the magic of that first film was stretched by the cast and special effects teams to two more films, despite the scripts and the mining of success, not because of them.
Also, times have changed: Space Travel, Computer AI, Robots, New-age metaphysics, Martial Arts, these were all more popular and compelling to audiences at the time of the original's release... Just look at a sample of other movies and books from the same time period, (or recall the 70's and 80's if you can).
Awe hell, at first I thought this was NASA's implementation of the DNT (Do Not Track) header -- It almost made sense: Some objects in space might not want to be tracked; Spy satellites for instance.
Damn Lexdysia...