If you don't like the results, go to the Worldcon and
vote.
It's not that hard. Preregister in advance to save the money, find some friends, get a hotel room, and have a good time.
Some people take their fun way too seriously. The hugos are a classic example of this. It's just a vote by a group of geeks attenting a yearly international party. Your local mayor probably gets more voter turnout in the local election.
"Any portion of any creation can be removed and redistributed in a creation of your own unless the original creation is released under an approved open source license."
This allows Slashdot readers to make themselves distributors for other people's music, software, video, etc, but makes sure Microsoft will never distribute their GPLed code for something as tacky as profit.
When programming in a literate system do you describe the objects and methods from a programming viewpoint, a business viewpoint, or from a metaphor viewpoint?
When we build systems, we work directly with the client and we are able to describe the system in three equal, but very different ways. Depending on the documentation required and the target audience, we can describe the system in a way that allows everyone involved to communicate effectively. This is an advantage I don't want to lose.
From what I've read, literate programming seems to be a discipline
that works best when the programmers are isolated from the client. How it works when the programmers and the client closely interact is something I simply don't understand.
As I understand it, as a beta tester, I cannot in good faith sign a NDA when testing a product and run that product on a machine where I have already agreed with current Microsoft EULA's. The EULA seems to force me to disclose whatever happens to be installed on that PC.
"With existing fabrication techniques, the team estimates that a million-quantum-dot computer (1,024 x 1,024 array) could be built today and operated in the megahertz range."
There is a big difference betweens licenses such as BSD and other licenses. And that difference is restriction. I don't want publicly created works placed under ANY form of restriction, nor do I want the government to adopt a policy that exchanges a bias for one form of restricted software for another.
Anyone who wants to put restictions on their own code, hey, I'm all for that. One of the principles behind all of this once was the right to choose your own license and distribution methods (unless of course you're the RIAA, then we have the right to choose your licenses and distribution methods for you), but I draw the line at allowing someone else to set the restrictions on code and concepts that my tax dollars also paid for.
I've come to the conclusion that privacy activists are fighting the wrong battle.
There seems to be two main assumptions when dealing with privacy: 1) X can't be trusted. With X being any group other than the privacy group advocating something. 2) X needs to insure our privacy.
In all honesty, these two beliefs are mutally exclusive. If you can't trust the government or the corporations or anyone else (and I'll agree that you probably can't), then stop looking for a method for them to insure your privacy.
The only solution to insure your privacy is to insure than no external entity is capable of tracking you. In the case of libraries, this means NOT checking books out. It means paying with cash everywhere. It means no phone service, credit cards, charge cards, discount cards, banking accounts, driver's license, car, or anything else that involves filling out an application or showing any form of identification.
And even that isn't a safe bet. You have to also not allow your face to be seen in public, where a camera can record you in a specific location at a specific time.
It's simply too easy to track data. Giving outside agencies method to quit tracking your data only works if you trust those agencies.
Maybe a better solution is to make all, or at least as much of the data as possible, public. After all, the problem is the ability of someone to use data about you in a method you don't approve of. Another solution to that is to level the playing field. When spammers and telemarketers can't hide behind a wall of anonymity any more than you, when goverment officials have all their dirty little secrets made public, then perhaps we'll see a change in behavior.
But as long as some groups have access to information that everyone else doesn't have, you'll have the same problem over and over. Either you need to insure your privacy yourself of you need to insure that they have no pricacy either.
You could submit it to slashdot. They would proceed to ignore the article in favor of questions about "discovering weapons", "factoring large primes", and other silliness. It would be likely that they would publish the article immediately after it was too late, such as discussing upcoming confrences after they start or the difference in LOTR DVDs after the first one had been released. (And a month after the differences had been announced).
For example, if what you discovered was time travel, simply send the damn machine, or better yet, millions of the machine into the future 2 years from now.
If you discover a new energy source, use that energy source to power a device that will reveal that energy source in X amount of time.
(I won't touch discovering a weapon. A weapon is not a discovery, it's an implementation.)
Meanwhile, the very act of warning the world, seriously increases the odds that someone else will duplicate your discovery long before your time is up. After all, the materials you used are all there, the knowledge is all there, what the heck makes you think you're so unique that you're the only person working on the problem or capable of coming up with an answer. Historicly, any discovery is usually a horse race, with multiple groups likely to arrive at the same answer in rapid succession.
On of the big principles of Open Source is that people should be allowed to choose their own license and distribution method and that we respect that decision.
We don't have to like their decision, but if we are to have any hope of having our own licenses respected, then we must do the same to everyone else.
When someone decides for themselves what license and distribution model someone else's creation should fall under and they take it upon themselves to enforce their decision, they're no better than what we accuse the RIAA of being. They take the decision out of the creator's hands and assume that right for themselves.
And if that's what the movement have become, I, for one, am disgusted with it. What kind of people are we to sell out or principles for simple greed?
This must be a bad link since the article doesn't even remotely say what the story says it says. But it's a good read anyway.
It completely fails to deal with offshore locations not under the juristiction of any country. Without that, the entire concept falls apart.
I really tire of the viewpoints of Europeans that think the United States is the only source of online legal stupidity. Unfortunately, I've grown used to it. It's sad, because when an idea is presented in this way, many people tend to think the idea is as pointless as the person presenting it.
He also doesn't deal well with issues of spam, DOS attacks, etc. If one country decides to ignore spammers, does it become a diplomatic issue? Can we expect India and Pakistan to declare cyber-war on each other?
Meanwhile, I look forward to the EU deciding to control their portion of the internet and reading the BBC tirades on how much they're screwing up.
I'm sorry that makes no sense at all. How can a federal court decide something is against the constitution but only on one area of a particular state? More importantly, why would they? That would mean the same trial would either effectively have to be tried a few hundred times or the Supreme Court can give up any hope of sleeping.
Can you find a reference to back up that claim of yours?
Theoretical Scientists have discovered that the V-ship is powered by a homeopathic antiradioactive nuclear (HARN) power plant.
This incredible breakthough was paved the way by new age researchers. It's well know that it's possible to treat medical problems by giving someone immensely weak doses of substances that would cause similar symptoms in large does. What most scientists didn't realize was that the same thing could be accomplished with nuclear power.
By having a small dose of nuclear material (in this case the glowing stuff scraped off the watch hands from an old glow-in-the-dark watch) blocked by an extremely watered down substance (the remaining amount of lead in a lead pencil), massive amounts of nuclear power can be harnessed. Also, since the objects naturally cause a minute amount of gravity to affect the ship, the ship responds with an incredible amount of anti-gravity, allowing it to fly.
But the databases don't contain a single key. Instead they contain multiple keys, which allows you to do a match easily enough. You would know this if you stepped out of academia long enough to take a look at the real world. The more keys you have, the more accurate the results, and most databases do their best to store as much information as possible.
And while Visa is unlikely to share it's credit card data, Visa is not the sole repository of credit card data. Transactions are stored at the merchant, the merchant bank, that bank's processor, visa, the cardholder's bank, and the cardholder's bank's processor. If the security at any of them is breached, then the data can quickly be released to the wild.
And while these organizations want their data secure, that is a far cry from keeping it secure as we have seen time and time again. In the case of the grocery store tracking your purchases, that data tracking is almost never done in house, but it's instead done by an external company that does the same type of data mining for a variety of businesses.
If data was as isolated as you believe and was limited in size to only a few simple fields, yes, it would become the non-trivial problem that is so popular in academia. Unfortunately, the data is widespead, detailed, and accessed daily as a cost of doing business.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that between names, addresses, social security numbers, credit cards, drivers licenses, and hosts of other identification methods, tracking someone isn't very difficult. You match up the information on their tax forms with the information from their credit card purchases with the information at various country offices and you're pretty much good to go.
It's like the lock on your car door. People lock their car doors because it makes them feel secure. But if they lock the keys in their car, they know they can call a locksmith and he'll have that door open in 60 seconds. What they don't think about (and what they don't want to think about) is that if a locksmith can open it up in 60 seconds then a good theif can do it in half the time, especially as the code required to make a new key is right there in plain sight.
For now Americans have the illusion of privacy. It makes them happy and it makes the job of those people who would gather information about them easier.
Sean Connery: Ah! Well met! I'll take Months That Start With Feb, Trebek.
Alex Trebek: For how much?
Sean Connery: Suprise me, you filthy bastard!
Alex Trebek: Okay, that's completely unnecessary. Months That Start With Feb for $800. This is the only month that starts with Feb. [ Sean Connery buzzes in ] Mr. Connery?
Sean Connery: Febtober!
Alex Trebek:No. [ Calista Flockhart buzzes in ] Calista Flockhart.
Calista Flockhart: What is.. Febturday?
Alex Trebek: No.
Sean Connery: She said turd!
Alex Trebek: I hate you! The answer was February. That's the month that starts with Feb. It was last month!
Sean Connery: Aha! A trick question!
Alex Trebek: Yeah, it was a trick question, Mr. Connery. Why don't you pick a category?
Sean Connery: I've got to ask you about the Penis Mightier.
Alex Trebek: What? No. No, no, that is The Pen is Mightier.
Sean Connery: Gussy it up however you want, Trebek. What matters is does it work? Will it really mighty my penis, man?
Alex Trebek: It's not a product, Mr. Connery.
Sean Connery: Because I've ordered devices like that before - wasted a pretty penny, I don't mind telling you. And if The Penis Mightier works, I'll order a dozen.
Alex Trebek: It's not a Penis Mightier, Mr. Connery. There's no such thing!
Nicholas Cage: Wait, wait, wait.. are you selling Penis Mightiers?
Alex Trebek: No! No, I'm not.
Sean Connery: Well, you're sitting on a gold mine, Trebek!
While I normally would object to click-through licensing, I wouldn't object to it in one particular format that the lawyers might agree to.
I'm more than willing to accept a short and simple click-through license that provides both parties almost no rights to eath others "information". In short, they have no rights to do information gathering on me, my software, etc, and I have no rights to do anything more with the software than evaluate it's basic functionality in whatever limited manner it's creator finds acceptable.
Should I find the software meets my needs, I would then be willing to deal with the longer more complicated licenses that may be required. Under this scenario, I would even be more than happy to have the community approve a closed source evaluation license provided it was followed by an open source final license.
I belive this to be an acceptable compromise in both open and closed source applications. It allows potential customers to evaluate software solutions before agreeing to all the terms that the full license may require.
"Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice."
"Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived. "
"Corporations do not speak in the same voice as these new networked conversations. To their intended online audiences, companies sound hollow, flat, literally inhuman."
"I wonder how long it will take for some marketroid to figure out a way to use the phenom as a way to promote their rather bad and awful party, bar, or social event?"
Been there. Done that. Count the number of Linux/hacker/security/opensource/etc conventions on Slashdot in the future. It's gotten to the point where I come to slashdot to find upcoming conventions. I've yet to find a better listing. (I wish it more timely sometimes, but it's definately one of the most comprehensive.)
Sony's Mavica FD series is called so because it uses a Floppy Drive for media storage. Now they have a CD series, but the truth is I can buy floppy disks almost anywhere. The same can't be said for sony memory cards or mini-CDs.
The problem with getting rid of floppy drives is that you have to hunt down every possible use for them from boot disks to driver disks to emergency pocket storage to cameras to everything else and find a common solution to all of them.
Yes, some hardware can boot properly off of CD. Now make sure every piece of hardware available has drivers on CD and pray to whatever god you worship that the RIAA and/or Microsoft doesn't start to lobby to have the standards for CD drives radically changed to make it more "secure".
Yes, it's time for the floppy drive to go, but it was also time for the tape deck to go over a decade ago and they're still being sold today.
Actually some of the spam I get contains my OWN copyrighted material (they take screen shots of my web site and then tell me how they can promote my web site so people can find it...). Under this law I would (in theory) be allowed to be a real bastard to these buttheads.
Slashdot Mirror
Some people take their fun way too seriously. The hugos are a classic example of this. It's just a vote by a group of geeks attenting a yearly international party. Your local mayor probably gets more voter turnout in the local election.
See you at Torcon.
"Any portion of any creation can be removed and redistributed in a creation of your own unless the original creation is released under an approved open source license."
This allows Slashdot readers to make themselves distributors for other people's music, software, video, etc, but makes sure Microsoft will never distribute their GPLed code for something as tacky as profit.
When we build systems, we work directly with the client and we are able to describe the system in three equal, but very different ways. Depending on the documentation required and the target audience, we can describe the system in a way that allows everyone involved to communicate effectively. This is an advantage I don't want to lose.
From what I've read, literate programming seems to be a discipline that works best when the programmers are isolated from the client. How it works when the programmers and the client closely interact is something I simply don't understand.
As I understand it, as a beta tester, I cannot in good faith sign a NDA when testing a product and run that product on a machine where I have already agreed with current Microsoft EULA's. The EULA seems to force me to disclose whatever happens to be installed on that PC.
Pop Up stopper does the job of killing pop up ads while allowing me to surf sites that actually "need" to pop up a new window.
Intel's lawyers could not be reached for comment.
However, within minutes the domain name "million-quantum.com" was registered by some greedy slashdotter hoping to cash in.
Anyone who wants to put restictions on their own code, hey, I'm all for that. One of the principles behind all of this once was the right to choose your own license and distribution methods (unless of course you're the RIAA, then we have the right to choose your licenses and distribution methods for you), but I draw the line at allowing someone else to set the restrictions on code and concepts that my tax dollars also paid for.
I've come to the conclusion that privacy activists are fighting the wrong battle.
There seems to be two main assumptions when dealing with privacy:
1) X can't be trusted. With X being any group other than the privacy group advocating something.
2) X needs to insure our privacy.
In all honesty, these two beliefs are mutally exclusive. If you can't trust the government or the corporations or anyone else (and I'll agree that you probably can't), then stop looking for a method for them to insure your privacy.
The only solution to insure your privacy is to insure than no external entity is capable of tracking you. In the case of libraries, this means NOT checking books out. It means paying with cash everywhere. It means no phone service, credit cards, charge cards, discount cards, banking accounts, driver's license, car, or anything else that involves filling out an application or showing any form of identification.
And even that isn't a safe bet. You have to also not allow your face to be seen in public, where a camera can record you in a specific location at a specific time.
It's simply too easy to track data. Giving outside agencies method to quit tracking your data only works if you trust those agencies.
Maybe a better solution is to make all, or at least as much of the data as possible, public. After all, the problem is the ability of someone to use data about you in a method you don't approve of. Another solution to that is to level the playing field. When spammers and telemarketers can't hide behind a wall of anonymity any more than you, when goverment officials have all their dirty little secrets made public, then perhaps we'll see a change in behavior.
But as long as some groups have access to information that everyone else doesn't have, you'll have the same problem over and over. Either you need to insure your privacy yourself of you need to insure that they have no pricacy either.
You could submit it to slashdot. They would proceed to ignore the article in favor of questions about "discovering weapons", "factoring large primes", and other silliness. It would be likely that they would publish the article immediately after it was too late, such as discussing upcoming confrences after they start or the difference in LOTR DVDs after the first one had been released. (And a month after the differences had been announced).
For example, if what you discovered was time travel, simply send the damn machine, or better yet, millions of the machine into the future 2 years from now.
If you discover a new energy source, use that energy source to power a device that will reveal that energy source in X amount of time.
(I won't touch discovering a weapon. A weapon is not a discovery, it's an implementation.)
Meanwhile, the very act of warning the world, seriously increases the odds that someone else will duplicate your discovery long before your time is up. After all, the materials you used are all there, the knowledge is all there, what the heck makes you think you're so unique that you're the only person working on the problem or capable of coming up with an answer. Historicly, any discovery is usually a horse race, with multiple groups likely to arrive at the same answer in rapid succession.
On of the big principles of Open Source is that people should be allowed to choose their own license and distribution method and that we respect that decision.
We don't have to like their decision, but if we are to have any hope of having our own licenses respected, then we must do the same to everyone else.
When someone decides for themselves what license and distribution model someone else's creation should fall under and they take it upon themselves to enforce their decision, they're no better than what we accuse the RIAA of being. They take the decision out of the creator's hands and assume that right for themselves.
And if that's what the movement have become, I, for one, am disgusted with it. What kind of people are we to sell out or principles for simple greed?
More people who appear to be tollway violators because they didn't pull their transponder out soon enough.
Transponder mod chips for random serial numbers.
People on cell phones pulling out transponders as they try to get through the booth.
People setting up their own silent tracking antennas and keeping all information.
Transponder mod chips with serial numbers belonging to people tracked with the previous method.
Beowolf transponder clusters to make it look like you're a traveling traffic jam.
This must be a bad link since the article doesn't even remotely say what the story says it says. But it's a good read anyway.
It completely fails to deal with offshore locations not under the juristiction of any country. Without that, the entire concept falls apart.
I really tire of the viewpoints of Europeans that think the United States is the only source of online legal stupidity. Unfortunately, I've grown used to it. It's sad, because when an idea is presented in this way, many people tend to think the idea is as pointless as the person presenting it.
He also doesn't deal well with issues of spam, DOS attacks, etc. If one country decides to ignore spammers, does it become a diplomatic issue? Can we expect India and Pakistan to declare cyber-war on each other?
Meanwhile, I look forward to the EU deciding to control their portion of the internet and reading the BBC tirades on how much they're screwing up.
I'm sorry that makes no sense at all. How can a federal court decide something is against the constitution but only on one area of a particular state? More importantly, why would they? That would mean the same trial would either effectively have to be tried a few hundred times or the Supreme Court can give up any hope of sleeping.
Can you find a reference to back up that claim of yours?
Article
ruling Kuro5hin thread on the subject
Theoretical Scientists have discovered that the V-ship is powered by a homeopathic antiradioactive nuclear (HARN) power plant.
This incredible breakthough was paved the way by new age researchers. It's well know that it's possible to treat medical problems by giving someone immensely weak doses of substances that would cause similar symptoms in large does. What most scientists didn't realize was that the same thing could be accomplished with nuclear power.
By having a small dose of nuclear material (in this case the glowing stuff scraped off the watch hands from an old glow-in-the-dark watch) blocked by an extremely watered down substance (the remaining amount of lead in a lead pencil), massive amounts of nuclear power can be harnessed. Also, since the objects naturally cause a minute amount of gravity to affect the ship, the ship responds with an incredible amount of anti-gravity, allowing it to fly.
But the databases don't contain a single key. Instead they contain multiple keys, which allows you to do a match easily enough. You would know this if you stepped out of academia long enough to take a look at the real world. The more keys you have, the more accurate the results, and most databases do their best to store as much information as possible.
And while Visa is unlikely to share it's credit card data, Visa is not the sole repository of credit card data. Transactions are stored at the merchant, the merchant bank, that bank's processor, visa, the cardholder's bank, and the cardholder's bank's processor. If the security at any of them is breached, then the data can quickly be released to the wild.
And while these organizations want their data secure, that is a far cry from keeping it secure as we have seen time and time again. In the case of the grocery store tracking your purchases, that data tracking is almost never done in house, but it's instead done by an external company that does the same type of data mining for a variety of businesses.
If data was as isolated as you believe and was limited in size to only a few simple fields, yes, it would become the non-trivial problem that is so popular in academia. Unfortunately, the data is widespead, detailed, and accessed daily as a cost of doing business.
What's important to Americans isn't privacy.
It's the illusion of privacy.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that between names, addresses, social security numbers, credit cards, drivers licenses, and hosts of other identification methods, tracking someone isn't very difficult. You match up the information on their tax forms with the information from their credit card purchases with the information at various country offices and you're pretty much good to go.
It's like the lock on your car door. People lock their car doors because it makes them feel secure. But if they lock the keys in their car, they know they can call a locksmith and he'll have that door open in 60 seconds. What they don't think about (and what they don't want to think about) is that if a locksmith can open it up in 60 seconds then a good theif can do it in half the time, especially as the code required to make a new key is right there in plain sight.
For now Americans have the illusion of privacy. It makes them happy and it makes the job of those people who would gather information about them easier.
Probably from this old Saturday night live skitAlex Trebek: Mr. Connery, why don't
you pick?
Sean Connery: Ah! Well met! I'll take Months That Start With Feb, Trebek.
Alex Trebek: For how much?
Sean Connery: Suprise me, you filthy bastard!
Alex Trebek: Okay, that's completely unnecessary. Months That Start With Feb for $800. This is the only month that starts with Feb. [ Sean Connery buzzes in ] Mr. Connery?
Sean Connery: Febtober!
Alex Trebek:No. [ Calista Flockhart buzzes in ] Calista Flockhart.
Calista Flockhart: What is.. Febturday?
Alex Trebek: No.
Sean Connery: She said turd!
Alex Trebek: I hate you! The answer was February. That's the month that starts with Feb. It was last month!
Sean Connery: Aha! A trick question!
Alex Trebek: Yeah, it was a trick question, Mr. Connery. Why don't you pick a category?
Sean Connery: I've got to ask you about the Penis Mightier.
Alex Trebek: What? No. No, no, that is The Pen is Mightier.
Sean Connery: Gussy it up however you want, Trebek. What matters is does it work? Will it really mighty my penis, man?
Alex Trebek: It's not a product, Mr. Connery.
Sean Connery: Because I've ordered devices like that before - wasted a pretty penny, I don't mind telling you. And if The Penis Mightier works, I'll order a dozen.
Alex Trebek: It's not a Penis Mightier, Mr. Connery. There's no such thing!
Nicholas Cage: Wait, wait, wait.. are you selling Penis Mightiers?
Alex Trebek: No! No, I'm not.
Sean Connery: Well, you're sitting on a gold mine, Trebek!
I'm more than willing to accept a short and simple click-through license that provides both parties almost no rights to eath others "information". In short, they have no rights to do information gathering on me, my software, etc, and I have no rights to do anything more with the software than evaluate it's basic functionality in whatever limited manner it's creator finds acceptable.
Should I find the software meets my needs, I would then be willing to deal with the longer more complicated licenses that may be required. Under this scenario, I would even be more than happy to have the community approve a closed source evaluation license provided it was followed by an open source final license.
I belive this to be an acceptable compromise in both open and closed source applications. It allows potential customers to evaluate software solutions before agreeing to all the terms that the full license may require.
"Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice."
"Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived. "
"Corporations do not speak in the same voice as these new networked conversations. To their intended online audiences, companies sound hollow, flat, literally inhuman."
http://www.cluetrain.org/
Been there. Done that. Count the number of Linux/hacker/security/opensource/etc conventions on Slashdot in the future. It's gotten to the point where I come to slashdot to find upcoming conventions. I've yet to find a better listing. (I wish it more timely sometimes, but it's definately one of the most comprehensive.)
"Smart Mob"
News for Linguists. Stuff to banter.
Sony's Mavica FD series is called so because it uses a Floppy Drive for media storage. Now they have a CD series, but the truth is I can buy floppy disks almost anywhere. The same can't be said for sony memory cards or mini-CDs.
The problem with getting rid of floppy drives is that you have to hunt down every possible use for them from boot disks to driver disks to emergency pocket storage to cameras to everything else and find a common solution to all of them.
Yes, some hardware can boot properly off of CD. Now make sure every piece of hardware available has drivers on CD and pray to whatever god you worship that the RIAA and/or Microsoft doesn't start to lobby to have the standards for CD drives radically changed to make it more "secure".
Yes, it's time for the floppy drive to go, but it was also time for the tape deck to go over a decade ago and they're still being sold today.
Interesting.
Actually some of the spam I get contains my OWN copyrighted material (they take screen shots of my web site and then tell me how they can promote my web site so people can find it...). Under this law I would (in theory) be allowed to be a real bastard to these buttheads.
*grin*