They care, they just havn't acted yet (After all, It's still beta, lets see what people can come up with so we know what we'll need to block when it goes live).
Dude, it's been "beta" for literally years, and it's more stable than a lot of "production" software. It's "beta" in the exact same way that the Debian "testing" branch is unstable software.
If you think google doesnt care about hacks on its service, Why is www.google.com/xml IP restricted? Why does any request to/search from a useragent with "LWP"(default for a perl script using LibWWW Perl, though configurable) in it get 403?
Well, even though I know I'm feeding the trolls:
A) Probably because they are developing something at http://www.google.com/xml and they don't want to release it to the world until it's ready.
B) Because they don't want to be flooded by bots. If you want to have your bot use Google, they give out free SDKs that let you search from a bot as long as you have a key. The search keys are free for up to 1,000 searchs a day; behind that, they ask you to pay a small fee. They aren't doing this to make your life hard, they're doing it to make sure every spammer and script kiddie in existence doesn't flood their service.
You assert that "[a] computer doesn't think" (by which, in context, you are saying that it is not self-aware). You then go on to assert that "nobody knows what self-awareness really means".
If noone knows what self-awareness is, how can you say what does and does not possess it?
You have the minds of slaves. Nothing original has come out of India.
You know, that's absolutely true...well, if you discount the following picayune items:
"Arabic" numerals (invented in India, including the concept of zero; the Arabs got them from the Indians, the West got them from the Arabs and so called them "Arabic numerals")
wootz (the best steel ever made; aka Damascus steel because it was distributed to Westerners through Damascus)
Hinduism (one of the largest religions in the world and, AFAIK, the only one that does not have oceans of blood on its hands in the form of crusades, inquisitions, etc)
the Kama Sutra
the exercises which, when brought to China, eventually evolved into kung fu
the best food in the entire freaking world, bar none (ok, that one is subjective)
----------- Important Notice! The choice of visiting this site has been taken away in Belgium, Luxembourg, The Netherlands and Sweden. Residents of these countries must _click here_! -----------
Now, let's think about this for a minute. They're on the site and from (e.g.) Belgium, so they need to click the link...but, if 'the choice has been taken away', how exactly did they get there?
You know, this whole concept that causality is necessarily inviolate has always struck me as foolish.
I have never seen, nor even heard of, a mathematical proof for cauality. It has always been stated as an assumption. Until it can be proven, I see no reason to accept it blindly.
While I agree that the voting code should be open source, I'm bothered by a couple of things....
1) How do you make sure that the binary in the machine actually came from the code that was open sourced?
2) How do you ensure that the particular instance of the compiler that was used to generate the binary had not been modded to insert trojans into its output?
3) If you answer the above questions with "use checksums", then how do you know that the program generating the checksums has not been tampered with?
The runtime behavior of Java or C#, for instance, could never be properly supported by Parrot due to the lack of thread support [...]
At the risk of feeding a troll....
Are you seriously saying that Perl doesn't have thread support? It's had threads since 5.005. Originally considered an experimental feature, they have been stabilized and rendered core for over a year now.
Umm...civilizedINTENSITY, you need to read more closely. Look again:
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
* a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
(Emphasis added on the "one".)
This means that if I give you a binary and the source code with which I made that binary, I am in compliance with the GPL.
What would I do with 10Mb/s for $150/month? How about:
- running a software company where all developers worked from home, over a VNC, but could all simultaneously videoconference with each other while sharing images of each other's desktops (ala PCAnywhere) in realtime, so it would be possible to do Pair Programming or just help each other debug a problem
- more videoconferencing ideas: instead of needing to fly to a site to have a meeting, you do it over the Net
- sell something like Steve Mann's eyeglass cameras as a commercial product. These allow him to do a lot of oddball but nifty things...from calling his wife and saying "which of these two melons that I'm looking at should I buy?" to keeping an immediately-uploaded-to-his-web-server record of the face of the guy who just mugged him. (I don't know that either example has ever happened to him for real.)
- make the network computer one heck of a lot more feasible
- make distributed computer one heck of a lot more feasible
Actually, I hate to say this (because I think this patent IS insane given where the Web stands today), but this seems like it might be completly legit. If I'm reading the patent correctly, Lockwood filed it back in November of 1994...that was before there really WAS a web, much less e-commerce. At that time, this was actually quite a visionary idea.
Gatotkaca (or anyone who is doing the same sort of thing), if you happen to see this:
My name is David Storrs, and recently I have been spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to make a living working with/on Open Source or Free software (I submitted an Ask Slashdot on it, but it was refused). If you could contact me directly, I'd be very grateful for any advice you might have.
Actually, I'm not worried about this for a lot of reasons:
1) As a skilled and reasonably experienced (7 years) developer, I'm better than most (though certainly not all) of the developers from the Third World.
2) I can actually interview on-site. Making a face-to-face impression is a HUGE advantage.
3) Companies don't even like to let people telecommute if they have a choice; they like to have people in-house, under their eye.
Could a hacker be prevented from circumventing the GPS sensor and pretending to be, say, at the Pentagon instead of Kandahar? Denning struggled for days on that one, then came up with a way to make routers themselves "locationally intelligent"--in other words, the GPS-based encryption itself would change dynamically as it moved through the path from owner to user.
So it isn't just the specific coordinates you throw at it, you also need to show the correct pathing through the routers. Just a wee bit harder, neh?
As long as it withstood at least the marketed capabilities there is no vendor fault.
I'm afraid that I have to disagree with you. There are always implied capabilities that the vendor is responsible for meeting. As a simple example, destructive operations (e.g. reformatting your hard drive) should require a confirmation--people are imperfect, and occasionally we make typos, select the wrong item on a menu, run a command with the order of the arguments swapped, or run a command that we think does one thing but it really does something else.
Here's a more specific, and significant, example. A computer-controlled equipment should have sensors and automatic cutoffs to make sure that it doesn't accidentally crush some foolish human who happened to wander into the wrong place at the wrong time.
David Storrs
Please, go read ANYTHING that Isaac Asimov ever wrote on the subject of robots.
Serious science fiction (as opposed to Hollywood pap) pretty much gave up on the Frankenstein Complex fifty years ago; robots are *not* necessarily evil, nor are they necessarily interested in killing humans. Let it go.
I want a PDA with the capacity (memory, speed, hardware) for speech-generation and voice recognition. Yes, there are situations where voice-communication with your PDA is not appropriate or possible (e.g. in a meeting), but there are times when it would be very handy (when you're driving and want to "jot down" some thoughts).
Respectfully, this is WAY beyond what the state of the art can support right now, or in the foreseeable future.
It's a chicken-and-egg problem...the masses won't be interested in wearables until they are more or less equivalent to desktops. But until the masses are interested, the major players won't devote major funding to getting wearables up to desktop level. Which means that only hobbyists and small businesses will do it. Which means that progress will be very slow.
On the other hand, I think you may be overestimating what you really need. Instead of thinking "What do I need from a wearable in order to do the things that I do on my desktop?" try thinking "What can I do on my wearable that I can't do on my desktop?"
Here are some suggestions:
* have a combined MP3 player/watch/note taker/scheduler/data bank/voice-over-IP cell phone/email/pager, all in one go-anywhere device
* have a personal electronic assistant that helps you remember things based on your current surroundings and other cues (check out the Remembrance Agents Page for more details)
* broadcast video of what you're seeing back to your home basestation. If you get mugged, you have a video of the guy's face. If you see a beautiful sunset, you can watch it (admittedly on a small screen) with your sweetie later.
* mapping software that updates in realtime, showing you where you are and providing you detailed instructions on how to get to your destination.
Well, Mann built a covert display into sunglasses, yes. I applaud his ingenuity and his technical expertise, but he built *one* pair, for his own use.
The author of this piece is talking about making them in quantity (eventually), and selling them to those of us who do not have the time/skills/inclination to build them ourselves. To my mind, that would be a greater service to the world.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, it's been "beta" for literally years, and it's more stable than a lot of "production" software. It's "beta" in the exact same way that the Debian "testing" branch is unstable software.
Well, even though I know I'm feeding the trolls:
A) Probably because they are developing something at http://www.google.com/xml and they don't want to release it to the world until it's ready.
B) Because they don't want to be flooded by bots. If you want to have your bot use Google, they give out free SDKs that let you search from a bot as long as you have a key. The search keys are free for up to 1,000 searchs a day; behind that, they ask you to pay a small fee. They aren't doing this to make your life hard, they're doing it to make sure every spammer and script kiddie in existence doesn't flood their service.
If you're going to buy ridiculous toasters, you should get either this, or this
You beg the question.
You assert that "[a] computer doesn't think" (by which, in context, you are saying that it is not self-aware). You then go on to assert that "nobody knows what self-awareness really means".
If noone knows what self-awareness is, how can you say what does and does not possess it?
You have the minds of slaves. Nothing original has come out of India.
You know, that's absolutely true...well, if you discount the following picayune items:
Actually you need to hit 'a small craft' that is projecting magnetic "wings" dozens, if not hundreds, of kilometers in diameter around itself.
I'm not saying it's trivial, but it's easier than you make it sound.
Quote from the Lindows.com site:
-----------
Important Notice! The choice of visiting this site has been taken away in Belgium, Luxembourg, The Netherlands and Sweden. Residents of these countries must _click here_!
-----------
Now, let's think about this for a minute. They're on the site and from (e.g.) Belgium, so they need to click the link...but, if 'the choice has been taken away', how exactly did they get there?
You know, this whole concept that causality is necessarily inviolate has always struck me as foolish.
I have never seen, nor even heard of, a mathematical proof for cauality. It has always been stated as an assumption. Until it can be proven, I see no reason to accept it blindly.
While I agree that the voting code should be open source, I'm bothered by a couple of things....
1) How do you make sure that the binary in the machine actually came from the code that was open sourced?
2) How do you ensure that the particular instance of the compiler that was used to generate the binary had not been modded to insert trojans into its output?
3) If you answer the above questions with "use checksums", then how do you know that the program generating the checksums has not been tampered with?
4) And so on, ad infinitum.
David Storrs
The runtime behavior of Java or C#, for instance, could never be properly supported by Parrot due to the lack of thread support [...]
At the risk of feeding a troll....
Are you seriously saying that Perl doesn't have thread support? It's had threads since 5.005. Originally considered an experimental feature, they have been stabilized and rendered core for over a year now.
David Storrs
Umm...civilizedINTENSITY, you need to read more closely. Look again:
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
* a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
(Emphasis added on the "one".)
This means that if I give you a binary and the source code with which I made that binary, I am in compliance with the GPL.
David Storrs
What would I do with 10Mb/s for $150/month? How about:
- running a software company where all developers worked from home, over a VNC, but could all simultaneously videoconference with each other while sharing images of each other's desktops (ala PCAnywhere) in realtime, so it would be possible to do Pair Programming or just help each other debug a problem
- more videoconferencing ideas: instead of needing to fly to a site to have a meeting, you do it over the Net
- sell something like Steve Mann's eyeglass cameras as a commercial product. These allow him to do a lot of oddball but nifty things...from calling his wife and saying "which of these two melons that I'm looking at should I buy?" to keeping an immediately-uploaded-to-his-web-server record of the face of the guy who just mugged him. (I don't know that either example has ever happened to him for real.)
- make the network computer one heck of a lot more feasible
- make distributed computer one heck of a lot more feasible
And that's just off the top of my head.
Dave Storrs
Here I thought that this was going to be about China's development of an incredible new video compression codec...
Dave Storrs
Actually, I hate to say this (because I think this patent IS insane given where the Web stands today), but this seems like it might be completly legit. If I'm reading the patent correctly, Lockwood filed it back in November of 1994...that was before there really WAS a web, much less e-commerce. At that time, this was actually quite a visionary idea.
Dave Storrs
Gatotkaca (or anyone who is doing the same sort of thing), if you happen to see this:
My name is David Storrs, and recently I have been spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to make a living working with/on Open Source or Free software (I submitted an Ask Slashdot on it, but it was refused). If you could contact me directly, I'd be very grateful for any advice you might have.
Sincerely,
David Storrs
dstorrs@dstorrs.com
Actually, I'm not worried about this for a lot of reasons:
1) As a skilled and reasonably experienced (7 years) developer, I'm better than most (though certainly not all) of the developers from the Third World.
2) I can actually interview on-site. Making a face-to-face impression is a HUGE advantage.
3) Companies don't even like to let people telecommute if they have a choice; they like to have people in-house, under their eye.
--Dave Storrs
From the article:
Could a hacker be prevented from circumventing the GPS sensor and pretending to be, say, at the Pentagon instead of Kandahar? Denning struggled for days on that one, then came up with a way to make routers themselves "locationally intelligent"--in other words, the GPS-based encryption itself would change dynamically as it moved through the path from owner to user.
So it isn't just the specific coordinates you throw at it, you also need to show the correct pathing through the routers. Just a wee bit harder, neh?
Dave Storrs
I have the developer version. If you'll pardon me for sounding like a 'skater-d00d' for just a moment...it totally rocks!
Dave Storrs
This was posted to /. maybe a couple of weeks ago (although I can't seem to find the reference).
--Dave Storrs
I don't think the article originally claimed it was actually alumnium...certainly someone here on /. pointed out that it was not.
--Dave Storrs
I'm afraid that I have to disagree with you. There are always implied capabilities that the vendor is responsible for meeting. As a simple example, destructive operations (e.g. reformatting your hard drive) should require a confirmation--people are imperfect, and occasionally we make typos, select the wrong item on a menu, run a command with the order of the arguments swapped, or run a command that we think does one thing but it really does something else.
Here's a more specific, and significant, example. A computer-controlled equipment should have sensors and automatic cutoffs to make sure that it doesn't accidentally crush some foolish human who happened to wander into the wrong place at the wrong time. David Storrs
Please, go read ANYTHING that Isaac Asimov ever wrote on the subject of robots.
Serious science fiction (as opposed to Hollywood pap) pretty much gave up on the Frankenstein Complex fifty years ago; robots are *not* necessarily evil, nor are they necessarily interested in killing humans. Let it go.
Dave Storrs
I want a PDA with the capacity (memory, speed, hardware) for speech-generation and voice recognition. Yes, there are situations where voice-communication with your PDA is not appropriate or possible (e.g. in a meeting), but there are times when it would be very handy (when you're driving and want to "jot down" some thoughts).
Dave Storrs
Ummm...would you like the moon with that too?
...use your imagination
Respectfully, this is WAY beyond what the state of the art can support right now, or in the foreseeable future.
It's a chicken-and-egg problem...the masses won't be interested in wearables until they are more or less equivalent to desktops. But until the masses are interested, the major players won't devote major funding to getting wearables up to desktop level. Which means that only hobbyists and small businesses will do it. Which means that progress will be very slow.
On the other hand, I think you may be overestimating what you really need. Instead of thinking "What do I need from a wearable in order to do the things that I do on my desktop?" try thinking "What can I do on my wearable that I can't do on my desktop?"
Here are some suggestions:
* have a combined MP3 player/watch/note taker/scheduler/data bank/voice-over-IP cell phone/email/pager, all in one go-anywhere device
* have a personal electronic assistant that helps you remember things based on your current surroundings and other cues (check out the Remembrance Agents Page for more details)
* broadcast video of what you're seeing back to your home basestation. If you get mugged, you have a video of the guy's face. If you see a beautiful sunset, you can watch it (admittedly on a small screen) with your sweetie later.
* mapping software that updates in realtime, showing you where you are and providing you detailed instructions on how to get to your destination.
*
Dave Storrs
I wear glasses and have a horrific fear of contacts (can't stand the thought of actually *touching* my eyeball).
Nonetheless, if I had a set of these things, I would learn to wear contacts.
Dave Storrs
Well, Mann built a covert display into sunglasses, yes. I applaud his ingenuity and his technical expertise, but he built *one* pair, for his own use.
The author of this piece is talking about making them in quantity (eventually), and selling them to those of us who do not have the time/skills/inclination to build them ourselves. To my mind, that would be a greater service to the world.
Dave Storrs