My Rijndael Implementation. 1.3 Gbps, $10 part. Free (as in rights and beer). Have a nice day.
And you put your crypto at the endpoints anyway, which is a silicon world.
One of the classic mistakes is creating your own cryptographic algorithm when perfectly good ones will suffice.
AES/Rijndael is FAST in hardware, a $10 FPGA can do counter mode encryption, fully key agile, at 1.3 Gbps. Why create an algorithm dependant on chaotic laser behavior when you know that you can get cheap encryption which is secure in available hardware.
Warhol style worms are purely active worms, which require no human intervention to spread. This worm sounds like an intervention-required worm/trojan (like a mailworm) but which spreads through MSN instead of email.
It would be a warhol-like worm if the message sent automatically opened the web page, making it a purely autonomous worm. I sorta wish it was, because that would be an interesting validation of the speed of topologically aware active worms. Then again, I don't use MSN Messenger.
For those who are interested, a more formal analysis is available Here, a paper I submitted to Usenix Security on the subject.
Various companies make them (flash USB key drives), they are a VERY nice solution for sneakerneting, however the reliability sometimes SUCKS (typical consumer grade, not tested before shipping).
We ordered 2 of em from a different company, one worked fine and dandy, the other had a bad connection somewhere internally and would crash the USB bus and only mount about 1/8 of the time. They were $80 each for 64 MB versions (a good price, mind you), but next time, we will only buy locally, so that returns can be much easier.
http://www.3dcenter.de/artikel/2001/10-24_a.php. (In german), they compared the effects of the "optimizations". Apparently, ATi is fudging the quality in order to get the frame rate up. This fudging only occurs on "Quake3", and is how the improved frame rate occurs.
Re:What if there is nobody to retalliate against?
on
Our New Pearl Harbor
·
· Score: 2
How do you get weapons on board?
Ceramic Bladed Knives
Glass knives
Razor blades & plastic handles
Fashion cutting instruments out of
Bullets hidden in sealed metal object (belt buckels etc) and plastic derringers.
How do you pilot a plane?
Microsoft Flight Simulator and 767 Pilot in Command, a near commercial grade, highly detailed flight simulator for a 767. (757 uses the same cockpit).
How do you coordinate?
Hank, bob, you take this plane, crash it into tower one. I'll take that plane, crash it into tower two. The timing doesn't have to be very precise.
Fortuntaly, however, it looks like a larger, more organized group.
What if there is nobody to retalliate against?
on
Our New Pearl Harbor
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
In the early aftermath of the heinous attacks on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon, there is much speculation that this attack
had to be the work of a significant, organized organization. Although
we desire to believe that this attack required a large group, one that
we could potentially retaliate against, an attack of this magnitude
requires only a few individuals and a very small amount of
preparation.
It only takes a couple of armed individuals to commandeer a plane in
the air once they get a weapon aboard, while a few minutes thought
outside an airport checkpoint will reveal a half dozen methods a
terrorist could use. Once the terrorists gain control over the plane,
it is again straightforward for the terrorists to conduct a controlled
crash: readily available flight simulation programs are very
powerful, capable of providing the necessary training for a targeted
crash.
Thus, a dozen reasonably intelligent zealots, willing to die for their
cause, could easily prepare, train, plan, and execute an attack on
this scale in under a week. What will we do if it turns out that it
was a small group? What will we do if there is nobody left to blame?
To follow up on my own post with some additional information
Trademark is like copyright, you can claim it and use it and that is enough to grant you a good degree of legal protection. Sell, for $1, a copy and support for your open source project to a friend, and voila, you have used it in commerce and can now claim a trademark (tm) and/or service mark (sm).
This is generally enough to have staked your flag in the sand, and if you are the first one using it, it should be fine. Things can get messier if someone is also using the trademark, and you both don't know about each other, but otherwise it is generally "good enough" for most purposes.
If you want more protection, you can register your trademark (R). Registering essentially is the US federal government officially approving and granting you the rights for a 10 year period (renewable indefinately). This costs ~$380/mark to file.
Just say you will sell support/copies if desired, so that there IS the potential for commerce. That is all you need to say, and you get a trademark.
You WILL have to do some things to protect the trademark, but that should mostly be a straightforward manner of sending a nastygram to anyone else, and just writing an appendix to your open source liscence stating something like "Name X is a trademark of the X Group. Permission is given to use this mark in conjunction with this software, and software which is compatable with the protocols defined by Name X, if this trademark is acknowledegd, etc etc etc".
I am not a huge football fan, but I like watching good, skilled football. I caught about 1/3 of one XFL game, before being sick by seing two "professional" football teams which would have had a hard time beating CAL[1]. It is a minor league, no question about it.
Most of the camera work was distracting. The cameras on the field were pointless, the in-the-face-interviews of players was a waste of time, in general, the packaging disrupted what little substance there was.
However, the above-the-field wired camera (which was positioned above and behind the QB) was a new and, IMO, useful angle. I'd guess that, of all the crap thrown into the XFL telecast, it will be the one new feature which ends up common in football telecasts.
It gave a good sense of the flow of the game, from the offense's perspective. But, defense can wins Superbowls, and I wish they would also run a camera, in the same way, from the defensive viewpoint (but it might be too low to the field to do so).
[1] Yes, I go to UC Berkeley (aka Cal). Our football team sucks. I'll still go to the games, but it doesn't change the basic premise.
Let us assume a 1u high rackmount mini-server, which is burning 100W of power [1], and which will have a 2 year lifetime before you call it obsolete and scrap it because the space you are renting would be better served by new machines.
Now let us assume a ridiculous power cost of $.50/kwh (note, current rates are around $.10/kwh, and may rise as high as $.15 when all is said and done. Even if you are being charged for cooling as part of the power budget, 50 cents a kilowatt hour is a ridiculous charge).
This means the server costs $.05/hr to operate, or about $900 in lifetime power costs over the 2 year lifetime, assuming vastly overpriced power.
Now given a miracle transmeta server which burns only 50W (after all, you still have to power the ethernet, disks, memory, etc). EVEN IF it has identical performance, it can only cost $450 more for it to be cost effective. If it is lower performance along with lower power (which it will be), there is no point in purchasing it.
[1] Current dual processor, stacked, HIGH end (2x933 MHz PIII) 1u systems will burn ~200W. Couple that with a still excessive but slightly more reasonable power cost of $.25/kwh and the calucation is roughly the same: a lifetime power cost of $900. Something like the BriQ is only burning 40W, but being sold for the remarkably low form factor (can probably fit 4 in a 1U rackmount), not ops/W.
Nicholas C Weaver, Winged Rat Consulting
nweaver@cs.berkeley.edu
The low power, many microprocessor solution has been propounded many times, and it has routinely failed in the marketplace. Why?
People don't care about low power on servers. Even if the power costs and cooling costs are trippled, only a handful are in a position where optimizing for power, not speed is important.
Theoretical peak, N cheap processors is much more powerful than one expensive processor. The difficulty has always been in programming, not building. If we understood how to program for this model, people would be buildings things like 8-StrongARM+fp-on-a-chip machines.
Server machines which perform some sort of service need to have both good throughput and good latency. Nobody will buy a server if it can do some gazillion-transactions-per-second if each transaction takes a minute to complete. This is why even big message passing setups are usually built using high performance processors.
Similarly, non-SMP machines have repeatedly failed when compared to SMP machines, because a message passing machine is much more difficult to program. Yes, if you can rephrase your programs to run on a cluster, then you see the impressive possibility in cost/performance, but it is really difficult to program well. People pay the extra cost for SMP machines simply because they can actually program them for a wider variety of applications.
Most problems which can be translated to a message passing structure have already been migrated to clusters of cheap machines. It is problems like databases, which don't map well to message passing, which is why people buy "servers", and it is these problems which are why people buy E10ks.
Dietzel knows better, he is an intelligent scientist, but he is acting like some corporate PR flack. Such dishonesty I can accept from someone who is ignorant, but he knows better.
Nicholas C Weaver, Winged Rat Consulting
nweaver@cs.berkeley.edu
GPL/BSD, whatever floats your boat, it is your code, do whatever.
But I personally believe that the GPL can be dangerous, as it actually discourages the reuse of code. And this can seriously hurt a program. Here is an example:
Bison is a wonderful tool, a really nice LALR(1) parser generator, and far superior to YACC. However, when you use Bison, it includes a large quantity of code in order to create the parser generator used by the program.
7 or 8 years ago, Bison was under the GPL, and, since it includes a good hunk of itself in any program compiled by bison, the output of Bison was under the GPL. Therefore any program which used Bison to construct it was under the GPL. As a result, nobody used Bison, outside of GCC and class projects.
Since then, they changed Bison's liscence so the output is under the LGPL. As a result, it can now be used as a general purpose tool, like GCC.
Except that if the firewall is COMPLETE except for the proxies, one must construct covert channels through the proxy, which is easier to monitor and control.
I don't care HOW large the country is, the number of actual links going into the country are fairly limited, and can easily be restricted by restricting all communication across the boundry except for a set of government controled proxies which handle filtering the traffic and insuring that nothing naughty gets through.
If you did your effects in Mpeg 4 structured audio instead of MIDI, you might get considerably more performance.
Why? Because there is considerable research in compiling MP4-SA to C and then running the native code, to get greater performance out of arbitrary effects, filters, etc.
The Stowaway is also sold for the Palm Pilot (as the Palm branded "Palm Portable Keyboard"). It radically changes the character of the Pilot.
As stock, the Pilot is a mobil data output device, an extension of the desktop computer used to display information (calendar, phone numbers, maps, etc). Yes, you can also use it for some data input, but it is not very well suited for the task.
With the keyboard, it is an excellent data input as well as output device. I use it to take notes and compose thoughts and messages all the time. It is far superior to a notebook as a text entry device, as a notebook is considerably larger, when both the palm and the keyboard can fit in my pants or jacket pockets.
The Palm and Keyboard (the keyboard is also available for Wince machines) radically transforms the nature of the PDA, and is definatly worth the $100 price tag.
I personally thought it stank. The pacing was way too slow. At one hour in, it felt like 1.5. With 6 hours to work with, one should be able to include most everything and have it make sense. Yet the acting was so soporific that there wasn't any time to do so.
I was watching with a friend who hadn't read the book in a long time, and the friend was royally confused by it. I knew what was going on, but would have much rather had things better referenced and explained. Or at least properly introduce the characters. The secondary characters (Gurney, Duncan, Hawat, Yeoh) are almost indistinguisable and nonexistant. Jessica seems a background figure, an "Also starring" type.
And Paul and the Duke were so horribly miscast. Paul is intelligent, a born leader, a near Mentat, Benne Gesserit trained, even before getting to Arrakis. Yet this Paul seems like an even-more-annoying Luke, some whining, half asleep blond kid who hates where he is. And the Duke, he wants to come off as somewhat royal and impressive, he comes off as asleep.
Finally, there were changes that were just pointless. Why bring Irulan into the plot at all? She is something of a ghostly narrator until the very end. Why bring Chani into the plot as a servent (or I at least think that is Chani, if not, who is she and why bother)? Why change things in needless ways. You need to cut things (although cutting the Bull's head was annoying to me, it said a lot about the Atrades) when adapting such a large novel, but you shouldn't need to add random junk.
Remember, with Outlook as the desktop client, you have the patented Microsoft Insecurity Inside(tm) design school.
Even Microsoft has been directly and successfully attacked, in a rather significant and spectacular manner (enough that the intruder could go browsing around and make new accounts) through the use of email trojans.
I think there is enough fodder, between the attacks on Microsoft and the various email worms, to ban outlook altogether.
I had the misfortune of being nominated for homecoming king in high school, as a not-that-funny-joke by the waterpolo team. Nobody consulted me. Nobody asked me. I personally found the whole thing frustrating and humiliating.
Fortunatly, some of the administration was probably slightly paranoid [1]. There was a rumor that I won the ballot, but was removed from consideration because there was a high likelyhood that I wouldn't show.
[1] (Most of) the teachers loved me [2], the administrators hated me. I had, and still have, a general thing against pigheaded, stupid, and incompetent administrators. And they knew it.
[2] With the notable exception of the bastard who ran MUN. Something about humiliating his daughter and outcompeting the seniors as a freshman ticked him off. Serves him right, the bastard. AP US history was better anyway.
Err, both the Chemistry (OCD & Romantic Love corrolations) and the Psych (Incompetent people fail to recognise their incompetence) are serious results.
Sometimes the Ig Nobel prizes are for actual serious research, albeit with a silly bent. This is one of them.
I don't think there is anything wrong with this winning the Ig Nobel for medicine, it is FUNNY gosh-darnet, even if it is serious research. About 1/4 or so of the winners in any given year are such research.
Similarly, the psych one is another serious paper, albeit with a silly result (a corrolation in chemical effect between romantic love and OCD). If anything, winning the Ig Nobel is good for these indeavors, because they give publicity for research which might otherwise go unnoticed or forgotten.
Me, I'd love to write a serious paper which would win an Ig Nobel. I'd definatly show up to pick it up.
You don't quite understand. The state universities CAN get a copyright. And, depending on what contract I sign, either I or the University get the copyright on whatever I produce. Your Little Mermaid analogy is not correct, since the animators explicitly sign over all their rights to Disney.
In either case (myself or the university owning the copyright on my lecture), it is both unethical and a violation of our IP law, for someone else to produce a derivitive work for commercial purposes. Making this practice specifically disallowed is, in my mind, a good thing.
Then again, if some individual or organization ASKS to take notes during lectures of mine, I may very well give permission, depending on the company and whether I believe such notes would be useful for students to purchase.
The purpose of the legislation is to prohibit the commercial distribution of lecture notes WITHOUT the consent of the instructor.
This will not affect most on campus notetaking services, as they already ask for instructor's consent.
As an occasional instructor, I believe that this is a good legislation: I created the lecture, for the university, either I or the University should retain the copyright on the lecture.
Personally, I post my slides and have them available at a local copy shop before the lectures begin, because this is a useful service to the students. I don't gain any compensation from doing so, it just makes things easier both for myself and for my students.
But I don't believe that someone should be able to make a derivitive work (which a set of lecture notes would be, since they are a direct or nearly direct transcription of my presentation), and profit from it, without my consent.
Slashdot Mirror
My Rijndael Implementation. 1.3 Gbps, $10 part. Free (as in rights and beer). Have a nice day. And you put your crypto at the endpoints anyway, which is a silicon world.
One of the classic mistakes is creating your own cryptographic algorithm when perfectly good ones will suffice.
AES/Rijndael is FAST in hardware, a $10 FPGA can do counter mode encryption, fully key agile, at 1.3 Gbps. Why create an algorithm dependant on chaotic laser behavior when you know that you can get cheap encryption which is secure in available hardware.
Warhol style worms are purely active worms, which require no human intervention to spread. This worm sounds like an intervention-required worm/trojan (like a mailworm) but which spreads through MSN instead of email.
It would be a warhol-like worm if the message sent automatically opened the web page, making it a purely autonomous worm. I sorta wish it was, because that would be an interesting validation of the speed of topologically aware active worms. Then again, I don't use MSN Messenger.
For those who are interested, a more formal analysis is available Here, a paper I submitted to Usenix Security on the subject.
Sprint tried it, in the SF bay area, and it died. Will Earthlink fare any better?
Various companies make them (flash USB key drives), they are a VERY nice solution for sneakerneting, however the reliability sometimes SUCKS (typical consumer grade, not tested before shipping).
We ordered 2 of em from a different company, one worked fine and dandy, the other had a bad connection somewhere internally and would crash the USB bus and only mount about 1/8 of the time. They were $80 each for 64 MB versions (a good price, mind you), but next time, we will only buy locally, so that returns can be much easier.
http://www.3dcenter.de/artikel/2001/10-24_a.php. (In german), they compared the effects of the "optimizations". Apparently, ATi is fudging the quality in order to get the frame rate up. This fudging only occurs on "Quake3", and is how the improved frame rate occurs.
How do you get weapons on board?
How do you pilot a plane?
Microsoft Flight Simulator and 767 Pilot in Command, a near commercial grade, highly detailed flight simulator for a 767. (757 uses the same cockpit).
How do you coordinate?
Hank, bob, you take this plane, crash it into tower one. I'll take that plane, crash it into tower two. The timing doesn't have to be very precise.
Fortuntaly, however, it looks like a larger, more organized group.
In the early aftermath of the heinous attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, there is much speculation that this attack had to be the work of a significant, organized organization. Although we desire to believe that this attack required a large group, one that we could potentially retaliate against, an attack of this magnitude requires only a few individuals and a very small amount of preparation.
It only takes a couple of armed individuals to commandeer a plane in the air once they get a weapon aboard, while a few minutes thought outside an airport checkpoint will reveal a half dozen methods a terrorist could use. Once the terrorists gain control over the plane, it is again straightforward for the terrorists to conduct a controlled crash: readily available flight simulation programs are very powerful, capable of providing the necessary training for a targeted crash.
Thus, a dozen reasonably intelligent zealots, willing to die for their cause, could easily prepare, train, plan, and execute an attack on this scale in under a week. What will we do if it turns out that it was a small group? What will we do if there is nobody left to blame?
To follow up on my own post with some additional information
Trademark is like copyright, you can claim it and use it and that is enough to grant you a good degree of legal protection. Sell, for $1, a copy and support for your open source project to a friend, and voila, you have used it in commerce and can now claim a trademark (tm) and/or service mark (sm).
This is generally enough to have staked your flag in the sand, and if you are the first one using it, it should be fine. Things can get messier if someone is also using the trademark, and you both don't know about each other, but otherwise it is generally "good enough" for most purposes.
If you want more protection, you can register your trademark (R). Registering essentially is the US federal government officially approving and granting you the rights for a 10 year period (renewable indefinately). This costs ~$380/mark to file.
More information at US Trademark Basics
Nicholas C Weaver, Winged Rat Consulting
Just say you will sell support/copies if desired, so that there IS the potential for commerce. That is all you need to say, and you get a trademark.
You WILL have to do some things to protect the trademark, but that should mostly be a straightforward manner of sending a nastygram to anyone else, and just writing an appendix to your open source liscence stating something like "Name X is a trademark of the X Group. Permission is given to use this mark in conjunction with this software, and software which is compatable with the protocols defined by Name X, if this trademark is acknowledegd, etc etc etc".
IANAL, YMMV
Nicholas C Weaver, Winged Rat Consulting
I am not a huge football fan, but I like watching good, skilled football. I caught about 1/3 of one XFL game, before being sick by seing two "professional" football teams which would have had a hard time beating CAL [1]. It is a minor league, no question about it.
Most of the camera work was distracting. The cameras on the field were pointless, the in-the-face-interviews of players was a waste of time, in general, the packaging disrupted what little substance there was.
However, the above-the-field wired camera (which was positioned above and behind the QB) was a new and, IMO, useful angle. I'd guess that, of all the crap thrown into the XFL telecast, it will be the one new feature which ends up common in football telecasts.
It gave a good sense of the flow of the game, from the offense's perspective. But, defense can wins Superbowls, and I wish they would also run a camera, in the same way, from the defensive viewpoint (but it might be too low to the field to do so).
[1] Yes, I go to UC Berkeley (aka Cal). Our football team sucks. I'll still go to the games, but it doesn't change the basic premise.
Nicholas C Weaver, Winged Rat Consulting
Let us assume a 1u high rackmount mini-server, which is burning 100W of power [1], and which will have a 2 year lifetime before you call it obsolete and scrap it because the space you are renting would be better served by new machines.
Now let us assume a ridiculous power cost of $.50/kwh (note, current rates are around $.10/kwh, and may rise as high as $.15 when all is said and done. Even if you are being charged for cooling as part of the power budget, 50 cents a kilowatt hour is a ridiculous charge).
This means the server costs $.05/hr to operate, or about $900 in lifetime power costs over the 2 year lifetime, assuming vastly overpriced power.
Now given a miracle transmeta server which burns only 50W (after all, you still have to power the ethernet, disks, memory, etc). EVEN IF it has identical performance, it can only cost $450 more for it to be cost effective. If it is lower performance along with lower power (which it will be), there is no point in purchasing it.
[1] Current dual processor, stacked, HIGH end (2x933 MHz PIII) 1u systems will burn ~200W. Couple that with a still excessive but slightly more reasonable power cost of $.25/kwh and the calucation is roughly the same: a lifetime power cost of $900. Something like the BriQ is only burning 40W, but being sold for the remarkably low form factor (can probably fit 4 in a 1U rackmount), not ops/W.
Nicholas C Weaver, Winged Rat Consulting
nweaver@cs.berkeley.edu
The low power, many microprocessor solution has been propounded many times, and it has routinely failed in the marketplace. Why?
Similarly, non-SMP machines have repeatedly failed when compared to SMP machines, because a message passing machine is much more difficult to program. Yes, if you can rephrase your programs to run on a cluster, then you see the impressive possibility in cost/performance, but it is really difficult to program well. People pay the extra cost for SMP machines simply because they can actually program them for a wider variety of applications.
Most problems which can be translated to a message passing structure have already been migrated to clusters of cheap machines. It is problems like databases, which don't map well to message passing, which is why people buy "servers", and it is these problems which are why people buy E10ks.
Dietzel knows better, he is an intelligent scientist, but he is acting like some corporate PR flack. Such dishonesty I can accept from someone who is ignorant, but he knows better.
Nicholas C Weaver, Winged Rat Consulting
nweaver@cs.berkeley.edu
GPL/BSD, whatever floats your boat, it is your code, do whatever. But I personally believe that the GPL can be dangerous, as it actually discourages the reuse of code. And this can seriously hurt a program. Here is an example: Bison is a wonderful tool, a really nice LALR(1) parser generator, and far superior to YACC. However, when you use Bison, it includes a large quantity of code in order to create the parser generator used by the program. 7 or 8 years ago, Bison was under the GPL, and, since it includes a good hunk of itself in any program compiled by bison, the output of Bison was under the GPL. Therefore any program which used Bison to construct it was under the GPL. As a result, nobody used Bison, outside of GCC and class projects. Since then, they changed Bison's liscence so the output is under the LGPL. As a result, it can now be used as a general purpose tool, like GCC.
Nicholas C Weaver
nweaver@cs.berkeley.edu
Except that if the firewall is COMPLETE except for the proxies, one must construct covert channels through the proxy, which is easier to monitor and control.
Nicholas C Weaver
nweaver@cs.berkeley.edu
I don't care HOW large the country is, the number of actual links going into the country are fairly limited, and can easily be restricted by restricting all communication across the boundry except for a set of government controled proxies which handle filtering the traffic and insuring that nothing naughty gets through.
Nicholas C Weaver
nweaver@cs.berkeley.edu
If you did your effects in Mpeg 4 structured audio instead of MIDI, you might get considerably more performance.
Why? Because there is considerable research in compiling MP4-SA to C and then running the native code, to get greater performance out of arbitrary effects, filters, etc.
More info is available here
Nicholas C Weaver
nweaver@cs.berkeley.edu
The Stowaway is also sold for the Palm Pilot (as the Palm branded "Palm Portable Keyboard"). It radically changes the character of the Pilot.
As stock, the Pilot is a mobil data output device, an extension of the desktop computer used to display information (calendar, phone numbers, maps, etc). Yes, you can also use it for some data input, but it is not very well suited for the task.
With the keyboard, it is an excellent data input as well as output device. I use it to take notes and compose thoughts and messages all the time. It is far superior to a notebook as a text entry device, as a notebook is considerably larger, when both the palm and the keyboard can fit in my pants or jacket pockets.
The Palm and Keyboard (the keyboard is also available for Wince machines) radically transforms the nature of the PDA, and is definatly worth the $100 price tag.
Nicholas C Weaver
nweaver@cs.berkeley.edu
I personally thought it stank. The pacing was way too slow. At one hour in, it felt like 1.5. With 6 hours to work with, one should be able to include most everything and have it make sense. Yet the acting was so soporific that there wasn't any time to do so.
I was watching with a friend who hadn't read the book in a long time, and the friend was royally confused by it. I knew what was going on, but would have much rather had things better referenced and explained. Or at least properly introduce the characters. The secondary characters (Gurney, Duncan, Hawat, Yeoh) are almost indistinguisable and nonexistant. Jessica seems a background figure, an "Also starring" type.
And Paul and the Duke were so horribly miscast. Paul is intelligent, a born leader, a near Mentat, Benne Gesserit trained, even before getting to Arrakis. Yet this Paul seems like an even-more-annoying Luke, some whining, half asleep blond kid who hates where he is. And the Duke, he wants to come off as somewhat royal and impressive, he comes off as asleep.
Finally, there were changes that were just pointless. Why bring Irulan into the plot at all? She is something of a ghostly narrator until the very end. Why bring Chani into the plot as a servent (or I at least think that is Chani, if not, who is she and why bother)? Why change things in needless ways. You need to cut things (although cutting the Bull's head was annoying to me, it said a lot about the Atrades) when adapting such a large novel, but you shouldn't need to add random junk.
Nicholas C Weaver
nweaver@cs.berkeley.edu
Remember, with Outlook as the desktop client, you have the patented Microsoft Insecurity Inside(tm) design school.
Even Microsoft has been directly and successfully attacked, in a rather significant and spectacular manner (enough that the intruder could go browsing around and make new accounts) through the use of email trojans.
I think there is enough fodder, between the attacks on Microsoft and the various email worms, to ban outlook altogether.
Nicholas C Weaver
nweaver@cs.berkeley.edu
I had the misfortune of being nominated for homecoming king in high school, as a not-that-funny-joke by the waterpolo team. Nobody consulted me. Nobody asked me. I personally found the whole thing frustrating and humiliating.
Fortunatly, some of the administration was probably slightly paranoid [1]. There was a rumor that I won the ballot, but was removed from consideration because there was a high likelyhood that I wouldn't show.
[1] (Most of) the teachers loved me [2], the administrators hated me. I had, and still have, a general thing against pigheaded, stupid, and incompetent administrators. And they knew it.
[2] With the notable exception of the bastard who ran MUN. Something about humiliating his daughter and outcompeting the seniors as a freshman ticked him off. Serves him right, the bastard. AP US history was better anyway.
Nicholas C Weaver
nweaver@cs.berkeley.edu
Err, both the Chemistry (OCD & Romantic Love corrolations) and the Psych (Incompetent people fail to recognise their incompetence) are serious results.
Nicholas C Weaver
nweaver@cs.berkeley.edu
Sometimes the Ig Nobel prizes are for actual serious research, albeit with a silly bent. This is one of them. I don't think there is anything wrong with this winning the Ig Nobel for medicine, it is FUNNY gosh-darnet, even if it is serious research. About 1/4 or so of the winners in any given year are such research.
Similarly, the psych one is another serious paper, albeit with a silly result (a corrolation in chemical effect between romantic love and OCD). If anything, winning the Ig Nobel is good for these indeavors, because they give publicity for research which might otherwise go unnoticed or forgotten.
Me, I'd love to write a serious paper which would win an Ig Nobel. I'd definatly show up to pick it up.
Nicholas C Weaver
nweaver@cs.berkeley.edu
You don't quite understand. The state universities CAN get a copyright. And, depending on what contract I sign, either I or the University get the copyright on whatever I produce. Your Little Mermaid analogy is not correct, since the animators explicitly sign over all their rights to Disney.
In either case (myself or the university owning the copyright on my lecture), it is both unethical and a violation of our IP law, for someone else to produce a derivitive work for commercial purposes. Making this practice specifically disallowed is, in my mind, a good thing.
Then again, if some individual or organization ASKS to take notes during lectures of mine, I may very well give permission, depending on the company and whether I believe such notes would be useful for students to purchase.
Nicholas C Weaver
nweaver@cs.berkeley.edu
The purpose of the legislation is to prohibit the commercial distribution of lecture notes WITHOUT the consent of the instructor.
This will not affect most on campus notetaking services, as they already ask for instructor's consent.
As an occasional instructor, I believe that this is a good legislation: I created the lecture, for the university, either I or the University should retain the copyright on the lecture.
Personally, I post my slides and have them available at a local copy shop before the lectures begin, because this is a useful service to the students. I don't gain any compensation from doing so, it just makes things easier both for myself and for my students.
But I don't believe that someone should be able to make a derivitive work (which a set of lecture notes would be, since they are a direct or nearly direct transcription of my presentation), and profit from it , without my consent.
Nicholas C Weaver
nweaver@cs.berkeley.edu