Why does one need to be rich?
The perfect person to bring suit against any big organization commiting perjery/slander in this manner is somebody poor. Preferably a law student.
Think about it. As a student, the opportunity cost of filing a lawsuit is very low. The cost is mearly your time. Don't hire a lawyer, just go in and represent yourself. You only have to do a decent job at it. You can sit back and smile, and realize that every hour of proceedings is costing you maybe $10 an hour (as a student), while it is costing those big corporations perhaps 1000x as much.
Now, there is the slight risk that they might sue you back for their legal costs. So it would be wise to make sure that your case has a decent amount of validity, and to perhaps check if the EFF would be willing to volunteer legal aid in the event of cuch a countersuit.
I notice that you have Win 3.1 as the direct ancestor of Win95, with DOS influencing.
Shouldn't it be the other way around, given that the first version of Win95 was really just DOS with some 32 bit code, and a GUI totally unlike Win 3.1?
OpenBSD takes a very serious stance towards security.
Therefore,they fix a lot of stuff which -could- be a vulnerability. The fix anything that looks remotely suspicious at all. This is a fairly paranoid view of the world.
Bugtraq, however, tends to only have proven exploits. It's hard enough for most developers to keep up with this much smaller set of problems. They don't have the time to fix all of the possibles, maybees, and coulds that the OpenBSD people fix.
On the other hand, I'm sure that if there was a very serious problem in a common GPLed tool, the BSD people would submit a fix if they were the ones to find it. However, OpenBSD, while it does include GPLed software, tries to avoid it, since the GPL has more restrictive terms than the BSD licence. So, they aren't playing around with a very large set of GPLed software.
I do remember reading that some major OSS group (Apache ?) uncovered a large number of serious buffer overflow exploits in the TCP/IP stack of nearly every OS out there, OSS or not. They submited patches to all of the open ones, but the closed OSes are still mostly vulnerable. Different open-source teams do contribute to one another, which is part of the strenght of open source.
It's all too easy to configure a linux system so you get terrible performance. At a bare minimum you should:
1) Update your kernel.
This isn't the easiest improvement, but it's not too hard, and the payoff includes increased security. You could probably use the 2.4.0-test6, but if you want to be safe, then go with 2.2.16. For performance reasons, try to only compile in what drivers you need, and leave out what you don't.
2) hdparm is your friend.
Read the docs carefully, but "hdparm -d3 -c3 -u1/dev/hda" is *probably* safe, especially if you have a newer IDE drive. If you aren't using DMA, then your drive is running slooooowwww.
3) Pick through/etc/rc.d by hand.
RH is especially bad at running silly services. You don't need half of the stuff the have in there. As a general rule, trash anything starting with an r (rstad for example). These tend to be RPC daemons, which you (usually) don't want/need. RH6.2 starts the power-management daemon no matter what. That is utterly brain-dead. Get rid of it. Basically, the only stuff you (usually) need running all the time is init (duh), syslogd, klogd, crond (maybe), inetd, identd (maybe), lpd, gpm, xfs, sshd, and the mingetty's. Even atd is superflous. Most of the stuff RH runs is a small cycle drain, and eats a few pages. Some can be a signifigant security risk though (finger). It pays to clean it up.
4) Configure X by hand.
You don't have to do it all by hand, but do run xf86config. It's a pain (especially when you have to dig through manuals to find your monitor's specs), but well worth a responsive x. If you want to take advantage of a nVidia graphics card, you'll need XFree4. And if you feel that the UI is lacking, spend some time (read: many obsessed weeks) tweaking just about everything. It is amazing how much nicer a custom X setup feels than the KDE/GNOME defaults.
Linux can be a very responsive, efficient, slick OS. The big packages, however, take a very conservative approach towards initial configuration. You basically end up with an setup that doesn't take advantage of your hardware, but rather sinks to the lowest possible denominator of capabilities. You also end up with a setup that doesn't use the latest (and most improved) versions, and tends to run/install everything, just in case the user needs it.
Remember, Mandrake 7 ships on 3 CD's, and those 3 CD's contain just about all of the software (+source for most) most people could possibly want (except crypto), will run on almost any system, and is has documentation out the wazoo. Most people also have little use for the majority of it, and have a much better system than Mandrake assumes. Sure, the pretty autoconfiguration GUI's will configure you system with no trouble at all, but you'll get a very nasty setup.
Oh, and BTW, try Emacs/JDE/blackdown for java on linux. I've been using that, and it works great. The latest version of the JDE even has nifty support for automagic javadoc.
He wasn't using standard optical stuff. He was using these newfangled solid-state lasers/detectors that aren't available except special made to do research. He determined the performance experimentally (on this really nifty 8-way SMP rig, btw) and saw that the performance of optical interconnects w/out a L2 cache was the same as with L2 cache and standard connections. Both setups also used some aggresive prefetch techniques that are again not available commercially.
but think about using an optical interconnect rather than copper wires. No cross-talk, and you could actually send those insanely high-frequency signals the handful of inches between the memory and the CPU with nearly zero latency.
Drool....
Some guy who works across the hall tried using optical interconnects, and got the performance of main memory up to nearly L2-cache levels. Xeon, we don't need no stinkin' Xeon:)
Perhaps the proper term is 'subtle', or 'terse', rather than ambiguous. Any language that reaches past a certain point of complexity can be used to say anything (and therefore be absolutely non-ambiguous). Non-germanic (read: not german or english) languages tend to leave a lot of stuff out that make a sentance absolutely and braindead-easy to understand.
There's nothing ambiguous about any of:
x * x + 1 * 7 -- (infix)
(x * x) + (1 * 7) -- (paren'ed infix)
x x * 1 7 * + -- (postfix)
( + ( * x x) ( * 1 7)) -- (elisp ? )
+ * x x * 1 7 -- (prefix).
But the varieties with parentheses make it absolutely clear what is meant. Neither is Japanese any more ambiguous than English. It's just that Japanese leaves out the parentheses (and the operator when you're multiplying, and encourages you to to mix postfix and prefix, and...).
Who was cracking Novell's LANManager password scheme - included in Win9x - before l0phtcrack was released? How many DDoS attacks had you heard of before the release of trinoo, etc? What about fragmented IP packets before teardrop?
It may be true that nobody had heard about them, but that doesn't equate with them not occurring. Before the full public releases, if somebody took your machine down using fragmented IP's, it was chalked up as random flakyness. If your Win9x passwords got cracked, you didn't know how they did it. Nobody knew these expoits were going on because nobody had heard about their existence.
Also, before public disclosure, the only people who could use them were probably much more talented than the average script kiddie, and therefore probably fairly good at covering their tracks.
Just because you don't know about an exploit doesn't means it doesn't exist. That makes about as much sense as burying your head in the sand.
A friend of mine is really into Dave Matthews Band. DMB has a very friendly taping policy. They let anyone tape anything. They do not, however let people get hookups to the sound system, where they could get near recording-studio quality.
Anyway, my friend's cousin knew the proprieter of a venue that DMB visited on tour once. My friend's cousin talked the proprieter into letting him plug his commercial-quality minidisc recorder into the sound-system hookup. Got the whole concert, digitally from the time it hit the microphones.
Now, this isn't the source of any of those illegal bootlegs. There are three copies of that concert in existence. The three people who have copies get a real kick out of having the only copies of a DMB concert, so they aren't spreading it around. But suppose DMB had done a new song on that visit. Or suppose that instead of a concert, it was the tech at the recording studio making a copy. Or DMB visited a radio station, played their new song on the air, and the station kept a copy. And suppose that the people who got the copy wanted to make a quick buck.
You don't have to be a high-up to get access to near recording-studio quality copies of an artists song in an 'unofficial' manner. All it takes is some decent recording equipment and a Y-jack in the right place.
There was a semi-recent article about the electronic signatures bill (and how it had nothing to do with crypto), where I noticed some interesting clauses.
It said (best (IANAL) I could tell) that the legal validity of a contract is not affected if the signing is automatic without the knowledge of the signer, that reciept by the other party of proof that the contract was signed is not needed, and that if the (supposed) signer hasn't even been informed about the contract, it is still valid/legally binding. All of which is pretty silly if you ask me, and probably about as constitutional as a rats ass.
Anyway, why not just ping Time Warner et. al. with a very large packet. One with the data part being, rather than a random string of bytes, a carefully crafted contract, having them agree to whatever you darn please?
Probably some obvious legal problem with it, but it's just a thought.
Yes, there are neutrino detectors. And yes, they can generated a fairly well-controlled beam of neutrinos. However, the detectors are usually gigantic tubs of water. Not the sort of thing you carry around in your back pocket. And the transmitter is a particle accellerator. You can't just pop a couple of AA batteries into them.
Many M$ apps don't even use the DLL's like they are supposed to. They statically link them. Third-party vendors tend to Do The Right Thing, and dynamically link to the DLL's, and get bit.
M$, on the other hand, statically links the DLL's that many of their apps use.
So they get code reuse, but they don't reuse binaries at all. At least in *NIX, the C libraries are all dynamically linked. Just think about the bloat we would have if they were always statically linked instead. *shudder*
This is the first time that ATI has been on par with performance leaders since
I hear that the new Voodoos support full-screen hardware anti-aliasing. Given that, then it doesn't matter if ATI/RIVA are ahead triangle/sec or pixel/sec wise, since good anti-aliasing gives a much better looking picture, even at lower resolutions. I mean, anti-aliased 1024/786 @ 60FPS. Who needs more?
The Tom's hardware review makes a reference to the anti-aliasing setting in the driver options, but doesn't appear to say if the card does it in hardware or not. Anybody know for sure one way or the other?
it just isn't a pure functional language. That is, you can write C code that conforms to the definition of a functional language, but you can, if you want to, cheat.
That, and some of the language semantics that make the other functional languages elegant are missing from C. The code ends up seeming kludgy if you do it the pure-functional way.
There's an international functional programming competition (ICFP Functional Programming Contest). Usually there are many C/C++/Java submissions, and even some in Perl/Python/Pascal. Last year I believe somebody even submitted assembler (it was a semi-hoax, as they had actually written C and then assembled it, but they were going for the joke catagory anyway). Two years ago the winning program was written in Cilk, which is a parallelized varient of C. Last year the winner was written in Objective Camel, and the runner-up in Haskel (which is a paralell pure-functional language (I think)).
I forgot. I have heard of a (confirmed) virus that does physical damage. It pulled a neat hardware trick that on one of the original IBM-PC's, would cause the disk drive to make a little clicking noise. Perfectly harmless, and did it ~ once a month. No biggy.
Thing is, that on later hardware, that harmless bit of code would fry the drive motor.
I have no clue as to whether it damages modern floppy drives. Given that it was written for the IBM-PC, it may not even run properly anymore.
There were a set of viruses (supposedly) written by people working for the Soviet Union that could physically damage you computer. One of them did do the monitor refresh rate thing. Another (supposedly) fiddled with the DAC on you video card to fsck it up royally.
Of course, while a friend of mine did have some actual binaries claiming to be some of these viruses, he never tried them out. But then again, who would?
I've also heard it rumoured that by poking the same register over and over and over again as fast as possible you can blow them out on some chips that were marginal so far as the specs went.
You could also seriously mess up certain types of hard-drives by doing a 'low-level format'. The procedure used to be used to clear older drives and prepare them for an ordinary format. Some newer drives respond poorly to this sort of thing, and end up getting necessary information (sector coding + the like) wiped.
Also, for BIOSes that support it (all new ones) you could (I suppose) have a boot virus that immediately causes a hard boot. Might possible hurt the power supply it happened unoticed for long enough. You could do the same thing to the motor on the CD-ROM drive (or a hard-drive), by spinning it up and down repeatedly. Of course, if the user is sitting at the machine when this happens, it's a bit suspicious. But if you did it to a closeted server, you'd have hours to cause mechanical failures.
This whole post is a bit vague, rumourish, and unconfirmed. Except the monitor-refresh thing. I've had a monitor die because of that (no virus, just a stupid shareware game poking the video card). The rest is just hearsay. But it's all plausible/probably hearsay.
It is true that gas-powered cars aren't intrinsically evil. It is also true that (many) people don't take into consideration the costs of gas/maintence when they buy a car. If they had to pay a large premium up front, it would open their eyes a bit.
You could also require dealers to estimate fuel costs, and list them on the lease agreement (not charge, just list). However, a premium on gas-guzzlers would point it out to people quite a bit more. Shelling out money has more of a psychological effect than seeing a estimate of future cost.
Taxing people thousands of dollars for driving fuel-inefficient cars is excessive. The issues isn't fuel economy (since people pay for the full price of fuel) but pollution. A tax on cars with poor fuel economy might be reasonable. This sentance seems to contradict itself. Perhaps you mean "A tax on cars with poor emmisions might be reasonable". Well, the two are usually related.
You say you want people to pay for their effect on others. But if high overall demand from lots of people buying SUVs drives up prices, the people with efficient little cars have to pay more too, even though they contributed very little to the high demand.
Sorry. I've been getting increasingly annoyed at people, and my tone has been going downhill, despite my best efforts to stay reasonable.
Oh, and I called you an idiot and a fool in another comment. My apologies./. is getting a little lagged, and I suppose I should try to keep more up-to-date on replies/re-replies.
No, I really take a more traditional, conservative approach to everything (traditional conservative, not moral conservative). Do whatever you damn well please (smoke, fuck, pollute, encrypt everything, whatever), just so long as you stop your fist before you smash into my face (actually, 2 inches before, or I'll (try to) break your arm). So far as pollution goes, most people are really whuppin' up on me, and I don't like it. Keep yer smog to yourself, please, or at least pay me for it.
here is the beginning of a thread I started along those lines. Perhaps you'd care to elaborated to this guy Rombuu I chastised (later in that thread) what internalizing negative externalities means. I don't have time to give the fool a thorough tongue-lashing, and you seem to know what it's all about.
Damn. I haven't gotten a lick of work done today, and I'm leaving in an hour. Good thing the boss never shows up.
At least not according to the best information I've heard.
I do know that they haven't been increasing production to match increasing demand for quite a few years now. We haven't noticed it until now though because we've had a succession of mild winters, cutting the consumption of fuel oil enough to offset the lack of increases.
Of course, I wouldn't have a hard time believing it if Clinton/Gore did do such a thing. Oh well. Guess who I'm not voting for anyway.
Yeah, I know about the whole pipeline/environmental thing (live in St. Louis). That may have upped them a little, but as many state reps. from the midwest have been pointing out, the environmental factors can't account for hardly any of the price jumps. They're blaming it on price fixing. IMHO it was probably just a price scare (people overestimating the effect of the environmental/pipeline thing). Prices around here have gone down to reasonable (not low, but not bad) levels, except at the really slow filling stations.
Yeah, it is unusual for OPEC to hold this well. Of course, cutting taxes is (paradoxially) probably helping them. When they cut gas taxes, OPEC counties can either a) Charge more w/out raising the price (& therefore cutting consumption) past pre-taxcut levels, or b) Charge the same, and sell more oil at the same profit/barrell. Yes, it's counter-intuitive, but think of it as OPEC just reinstituting the cut taxes, with the proceeds going to them instead. Raising taxes may help to break the cartel (along with cutting consumption), but that would be political suicide since us 'mericans are stupid.
Oh well.
If you have some decent referrence to the Clinton/Gore thing, I'd be interested.
Social engineering would be saying "Ban burning gasoline/inefficient cars".
You should have said, "Why don't you internalize negative externalities somewhere else?".
All I'm suggesting is that air isn't really free. It is a resource that belongs to everybody. But since there is no well-defined sense of property rights (I own 1/200,000,000 of the air in this country, and here it is), people treat it like a free good. Well, since it isn't feasable to parcel it up, the best way to give it well-defined property rights is tax its use.
The EPA already does this with the pollution credits system. Monitoring the pollution emitted on umpteen million cars isn't feasable either. So instead, tax the gas consumption (more gas burnt = more air used), and tax cars (less clean car = more air used). It's indirect, but it's the same thing as charging for the use of the air. Treating anything like a free good is a Bad Thing, especially when it is a very limited resource.
You don't have to get rid of your gas-powered vehicle. But if it is generating a lot of smog, there is no good reason why you shouldn't have to pay for the right to do so.
Gas prices are high now because demand is high. Not because of a supply shock. Not because of pipeline breaks. Not because of taxes. Gas prices in the US are high because people are demanding a lot of gasoline, and the supply hasn't grown with the demand.
It is true that in the short run, gasoline demand is inelastic. But nearly everything has a low elasticity of demand in the short run. If gas prices stay very high for 3 years, many people will have bought more fuel efficent cars. For now, however, people aren't going to dump their cars overnight. No sane person would expect that.
Also, I didn't suggest switching away from gasoline entirely. Hybrid cars like the Prius and Insight are as equally valid as fuel cells or natural gas. You can still burn gas, just don't burn it at 12 mpg.
<RANT> Please, do the world a favor and take a basic economics class. That applies to everybody, not just this AC, or even the ppl. on/.. People have a lot of absurd beliefs about the way things work, and the economists have had most of them licked since Adam Smith (with a tip of the hat to Keynes for filling it out).
And vote. That's important too. Stupid politicians get away with stupid stuff because people don't vote (US and elsewhere).
Vote + take an econ. class. Could you all just do those two things for me? Pretty please with sugar on top? </RANT>
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Why does one need to be rich? The perfect person to bring suit against any big organization commiting perjery/slander in this manner is somebody poor. Preferably a law student. Think about it. As a student, the opportunity cost of filing a lawsuit is very low. The cost is mearly your time. Don't hire a lawyer, just go in and represent yourself. You only have to do a decent job at it. You can sit back and smile, and realize that every hour of proceedings is costing you maybe $10 an hour (as a student), while it is costing those big corporations perhaps 1000x as much. Now, there is the slight risk that they might sue you back for their legal costs. So it would be wise to make sure that your case has a decent amount of validity, and to perhaps check if the EFF would be willing to volunteer legal aid in the event of cuch a countersuit.
I notice that you have Win 3.1 as the direct ancestor of Win95, with DOS influencing.
Shouldn't it be the other way around, given that the first version of Win95 was really just DOS with some 32 bit code, and a GUI totally unlike Win 3.1?
At least it should be equal contrib...
OpenBSD takes a very serious stance towards security.
Therefore,they fix a lot of stuff which -could- be a vulnerability. The fix anything that looks remotely suspicious at all. This is a fairly paranoid view of the world.
Bugtraq, however, tends to only have proven exploits. It's hard enough for most developers to keep up with this much smaller set of problems. They don't have the time to fix all of the possibles, maybees, and coulds that the OpenBSD people fix.
On the other hand, I'm sure that if there was a very serious problem in a common GPLed tool, the BSD people would submit a fix if they were the ones to find it. However, OpenBSD, while it does include GPLed software, tries to avoid it, since the GPL has more restrictive terms than the BSD licence. So, they aren't playing around with a very large set of GPLed software.
I do remember reading that some major OSS group (Apache ?) uncovered a large number of serious buffer overflow exploits in the TCP/IP stack of nearly every OS out there, OSS or not. They submited patches to all of the open ones, but the closed OSes are still mostly vulnerable. Different open-source teams do contribute to one another, which is part of the strenght of open source.
It's all too easy to configure a linux system so you get terrible performance. At a bare minimum you should:
/dev/hda" is *probably* safe, especially if you have a newer IDE drive. If you aren't using DMA, then your drive is running slooooowwww.
/etc/rc.d by hand.
1) Update your kernel.
This isn't the easiest improvement, but it's not too hard, and the payoff includes increased security. You could probably use the 2.4.0-test6, but if you want to be safe, then go with 2.2.16. For performance reasons, try to only compile in what drivers you need, and leave out what you don't.
2) hdparm is your friend.
Read the docs carefully, but "hdparm -d3 -c3 -u1
3) Pick through
RH is especially bad at running silly services. You don't need half of the stuff the have in there. As a general rule, trash anything starting with an r (rstad for example). These tend to be RPC daemons, which you (usually) don't want/need. RH6.2 starts the power-management daemon no matter what. That is utterly brain-dead. Get rid of it. Basically, the only stuff you (usually) need running all the time is init (duh), syslogd, klogd, crond (maybe), inetd, identd (maybe), lpd, gpm, xfs, sshd, and the mingetty's. Even atd is superflous. Most of the stuff RH runs is a small cycle drain, and eats a few pages. Some can be a signifigant security risk though (finger). It pays to clean it up.
4) Configure X by hand.
You don't have to do it all by hand, but do run xf86config. It's a pain (especially when you have to dig through manuals to find your monitor's specs), but well worth a responsive x. If you want to take advantage of a nVidia graphics card, you'll need XFree4. And if you feel that the UI is lacking, spend some time (read: many obsessed weeks) tweaking just about everything. It is amazing how much nicer a custom X setup feels than the KDE/GNOME defaults.
Linux can be a very responsive, efficient, slick OS. The big packages, however, take a very conservative approach towards initial configuration. You basically end up with an setup that doesn't take advantage of your hardware, but rather sinks to the lowest possible denominator of capabilities. You also end up with a setup that doesn't use the latest (and most improved) versions, and tends to run/install everything, just in case the user needs it.
Remember, Mandrake 7 ships on 3 CD's, and those 3 CD's contain just about all of the software (+source for most) most people could possibly want (except crypto), will run on almost any system, and is has documentation out the wazoo. Most people also have little use for the majority of it, and have a much better system than Mandrake assumes. Sure, the pretty autoconfiguration GUI's will configure you system with no trouble at all, but you'll get a very nasty setup.
Oh, and BTW, try Emacs/JDE/blackdown for java on linux. I've been using that, and it works great. The latest version of the JDE even has nifty support for automagic javadoc.
He wasn't using standard optical stuff. He was using these newfangled solid-state lasers/detectors that aren't available except special made to do research. He determined the performance experimentally (on this really nifty 8-way SMP rig, btw) and saw that the performance of optical interconnects w/out a L2 cache was the same as with L2 cache and standard connections. Both setups also used some aggresive prefetch techniques that are again not available commercially.
but think about using an optical interconnect rather than copper wires. No cross-talk, and you could actually send those insanely high-frequency signals the handful of inches between the memory and the CPU with nearly zero latency.
:)
Drool....
Some guy who works across the hall tried using optical interconnects, and got the performance of main memory up to nearly L2-cache levels. Xeon, we don't need no stinkin' Xeon
Perhaps the proper term is 'subtle', or 'terse', rather than ambiguous. Any language that reaches past a certain point of complexity can be used to say anything (and therefore be absolutely non-ambiguous). Non-germanic (read: not german or english) languages tend to leave a lot of stuff out that make a sentance absolutely and braindead-easy to understand.
There's nothing ambiguous about any of:
x * x + 1 * 7 -- (infix)
(x * x) + (1 * 7) -- (paren'ed infix)
x x * 1 7 * + -- (postfix)
( + ( * x x) ( * 1 7)) -- (elisp ? )
+ * x x * 1 7 -- (prefix).
But the varieties with parentheses make it absolutely clear what is meant. Neither is Japanese any more ambiguous than English. It's just that Japanese leaves out the parentheses (and the operator when you're multiplying, and encourages you to to mix postfix and prefix, and...).
Taken from the OpenBSD homepage:
Three years without a remote hole in the default install!
Two years without a localhost hole in the default install!
and if you look at the Bugtraq stats:
Linux (aggr.): 10 23 84 30
OpenBSD: 1 2 4 2
Windows NT: 4 6 99 37
Who was cracking Novell's LANManager password scheme - included in Win9x - before l0phtcrack was released? How many DDoS attacks had you heard of before the release of trinoo, etc? What about fragmented IP packets before teardrop?
It may be true that nobody had heard about them, but that doesn't equate with them not occurring. Before the full public releases, if somebody took your machine down using fragmented IP's, it was chalked up as random flakyness. If your Win9x passwords got cracked, you didn't know how they did it. Nobody knew these expoits were going on because nobody had heard about their existence.
Also, before public disclosure, the only people who could use them were probably much more talented than the average script kiddie, and therefore probably fairly good at covering their tracks.
Just because you don't know about an exploit doesn't means it doesn't exist. That makes about as much sense as burying your head in the sand.
A friend of mine is really into Dave Matthews Band. DMB has a very friendly taping policy. They let anyone tape anything. They do not, however let people get hookups to the sound system, where they could get near recording-studio quality.
Anyway, my friend's cousin knew the proprieter of a venue that DMB visited on tour once. My friend's cousin talked the proprieter into letting him plug his commercial-quality minidisc recorder into the sound-system hookup. Got the whole concert, digitally from the time it hit the microphones.
Now, this isn't the source of any of those illegal bootlegs. There are three copies of that concert in existence. The three people who have copies get a real kick out of having the only copies of a DMB concert, so they aren't spreading it around. But suppose DMB had done a new song on that visit. Or suppose that instead of a concert, it was the tech at the recording studio making a copy. Or DMB visited a radio station, played their new song on the air, and the station kept a copy. And suppose that the people who got the copy wanted to make a quick buck.
You don't have to be a high-up to get access to near recording-studio quality copies of an artists song in an 'unofficial' manner. All it takes is some decent recording equipment and a Y-jack in the right place.
There was a semi-recent article about the electronic signatures bill (and how it had nothing to do with crypto), where I noticed some interesting clauses.
It said (best (IANAL) I could tell) that the legal validity of a contract is not affected if the signing is automatic without the knowledge of the signer, that reciept by the other party of proof that the contract was signed is not needed, and that if the (supposed) signer hasn't even been informed about the contract, it is still valid/legally binding. All of which is pretty silly if you ask me, and probably about as constitutional as a rats ass.
Anyway, why not just ping Time Warner et. al. with a very large packet. One with the data part being, rather than a random string of bytes, a carefully crafted contract, having them agree to whatever you darn please?
Probably some obvious legal problem with it, but it's just a thought.
Uh, if you check out the links, they go to amazon.com, buy.com, varsitybooks.com, and cdnow.com.
Now, think about reasons for book/computer stores near college campuses doing poorly (HINT: amazon.com, buy.com, and varsitybooks.com).
Now, what does cdnow.com sell? *cough* CD's *cough*
So again I pose a question: do you need to be hit with the clue-by-four any harder?
Earlier research, released by Soundscan in May, showed declining CD sales at stores near universities
In other news, computer stores and books stores next to college campuses are showing the lowest sales rates in years.
I wonder why? Could there perhaps be a connection?
Yes, there are neutrino detectors. And yes, they can generated a fairly well-controlled beam of neutrinos. However, the detectors are usually gigantic tubs of water. Not the sort of thing you carry around in your back pocket. And the transmitter is a particle accellerator. You can't just pop a couple of AA batteries into them.
Many M$ apps don't even use the DLL's like they are supposed to. They statically link them. Third-party vendors tend to Do The Right Thing, and dynamically link to the DLL's, and get bit.
M$, on the other hand, statically links the DLL's that many of their apps use.
So they get code reuse, but they don't reuse binaries at all. At least in *NIX, the C libraries are all dynamically linked. Just think about the bloat we would have if they were always statically linked instead. *shudder*
This is the first time that ATI has been on par with performance leaders since
I hear that the new Voodoos support full-screen hardware anti-aliasing. Given that, then it doesn't matter if ATI/RIVA are ahead triangle/sec or pixel/sec wise, since good anti-aliasing gives a much better looking picture, even at lower resolutions. I mean, anti-aliased 1024/786 @ 60FPS. Who needs more?
The Tom's hardware review makes a reference to the anti-aliasing setting in the driver options, but doesn't appear to say if the card does it in hardware or not. Anybody know for sure one way or the other?
it just isn't a pure functional language. That is, you can write C code that conforms to the definition of a functional language, but you can, if you want to, cheat.
That, and some of the language semantics that make the other functional languages elegant are missing from C. The code ends up seeming kludgy if you do it the pure-functional way.
There's an international functional programming competition (ICFP Functional Programming Contest). Usually there are many C/C++/Java submissions, and even some in Perl/Python/Pascal. Last year I believe somebody even submitted assembler (it was a semi-hoax, as they had actually written C and then assembled it, but they were going for the joke catagory anyway). Two years ago the winning program was written in Cilk, which is a parallelized varient of C. Last year the winner was written in Objective Camel, and the runner-up in Haskel (which is a paralell pure-functional language (I think)).
I forgot. I have heard of a (confirmed) virus that does physical damage. It pulled a neat hardware trick that on one of the original IBM-PC's, would cause the disk drive to make a little clicking noise. Perfectly harmless, and did it ~ once a month. No biggy.
Thing is, that on later hardware, that harmless bit of code would fry the drive motor.
I have no clue as to whether it damages modern floppy drives. Given that it was written for the IBM-PC, it may not even run properly anymore.
There were a set of viruses (supposedly) written by people working for the Soviet Union that could physically damage you computer. One of them did do the monitor refresh rate thing. Another (supposedly) fiddled with the DAC on you video card to fsck it up royally.
Of course, while a friend of mine did have some actual binaries claiming to be some of these viruses, he never tried them out. But then again, who would?
I've also heard it rumoured that by poking the same register over and over and over again as fast as possible you can blow them out on some chips that were marginal so far as the specs went.
You could also seriously mess up certain types of hard-drives by doing a 'low-level format'. The procedure used to be used to clear older drives and prepare them for an ordinary format. Some newer drives respond poorly to this sort of thing, and end up getting necessary information (sector coding + the like) wiped.
Also, for BIOSes that support it (all new ones) you could (I suppose) have a boot virus that immediately causes a hard boot. Might possible hurt the power supply it happened unoticed for long enough. You could do the same thing to the motor on the CD-ROM drive (or a hard-drive), by spinning it up and down repeatedly. Of course, if the user is sitting at the machine when this happens, it's a bit suspicious. But if you did it to a closeted server, you'd have hours to cause mechanical failures.
This whole post is a bit vague, rumourish, and unconfirmed. Except the monitor-refresh thing. I've had a monitor die because of that (no virus, just a stupid shareware game poking the video card). The rest is just hearsay. But it's all plausible/probably hearsay.
It is true that gas-powered cars aren't intrinsically evil. It is also true that (many) people don't take into consideration the costs of gas/maintence when they buy a car. If they had to pay a large premium up front, it would open their eyes a bit.
You could also require dealers to estimate fuel costs, and list them on the lease agreement (not charge, just list). However, a premium on gas-guzzlers would point it out to people quite a bit more. Shelling out money has more of a psychological effect than seeing a estimate of future cost.
Taxing people thousands of dollars for driving fuel-inefficient cars is excessive. The issues isn't fuel economy (since people pay for the full price of fuel) but pollution. A tax on cars with poor fuel economy might be reasonable.
This sentance seems to contradict itself. Perhaps you mean "A tax on cars with poor emmisions might be reasonable". Well, the two are usually related.
You say you want people to pay for their effect on others. But if high overall demand from lots of people buying SUVs drives up prices, the people with efficient little cars have to pay more too, even though they contributed very little to the high demand.
Sorry. I've been getting increasingly annoyed at people, and my tone has been going downhill, despite my best efforts to stay reasonable.
/. is getting a little lagged, and I suppose I should try to keep more up-to-date on replies/re-replies.
Oh, and I called you an idiot and a fool in another comment. My apologies.
No, I really take a more traditional, conservative approach to everything (traditional conservative, not moral conservative). Do whatever you damn well please (smoke, fuck, pollute, encrypt everything, whatever), just so long as you stop your fist before you smash into my face (actually, 2 inches before, or I'll (try to) break your arm). So far as pollution goes, most people are really whuppin' up on me, and I don't like it. Keep yer smog to yourself, please, or at least pay me for it.
here is the beginning of a thread I started along those lines. Perhaps you'd care to elaborated to this guy Rombuu I chastised (later in that thread) what internalizing negative externalities means. I don't have time to give the fool a thorough tongue-lashing, and you seem to know what it's all about.
Damn. I haven't gotten a lick of work done today, and I'm leaving in an hour. Good thing the boss never shows up.
At least not according to the best information I've heard.
I do know that they haven't been increasing production to match increasing demand for quite a few years now. We haven't noticed it until now though because we've had a succession of mild winters, cutting the consumption of fuel oil enough to offset the lack of increases.
Of course, I wouldn't have a hard time believing it if Clinton/Gore did do such a thing. Oh well. Guess who I'm not voting for anyway.
Yeah, I know about the whole pipeline/environmental thing (live in St. Louis). That may have upped them a little, but as many state reps. from the midwest have been pointing out, the environmental factors can't account for hardly any of the price jumps. They're blaming it on price fixing. IMHO it was probably just a price scare (people overestimating the effect of the environmental/pipeline thing). Prices around here have gone down to reasonable (not low, but not bad) levels, except at the really slow filling stations.
Yeah, it is unusual for OPEC to hold this well. Of course, cutting taxes is (paradoxially) probably helping them. When they cut gas taxes, OPEC counties can either a) Charge more w/out raising the price (& therefore cutting consumption) past pre-taxcut levels, or b) Charge the same, and sell more oil at the same profit/barrell. Yes, it's counter-intuitive, but think of it as OPEC just reinstituting the cut taxes, with the proceeds going to them instead. Raising taxes may help to break the cartel (along with cutting consumption), but that would be political suicide since us 'mericans are stupid.
Oh well.
If you have some decent referrence to the Clinton/Gore thing, I'd be interested.
Social engineering would be saying "Ban burning gasoline/inefficient cars".
You should have said, "Why don't you internalize negative externalities somewhere else?".
All I'm suggesting is that air isn't really free. It is a resource that belongs to everybody. But since there is no well-defined sense of property rights (I own 1/200,000,000 of the air in this country, and here it is), people treat it like a free good. Well, since it isn't feasable to parcel it up, the best way to give it well-defined property rights is tax its use.
The EPA already does this with the pollution credits system. Monitoring the pollution emitted on umpteen million cars isn't feasable either. So instead, tax the gas consumption (more gas burnt = more air used), and tax cars (less clean car = more air used). It's indirect, but it's the same thing as charging for the use of the air. Treating anything like a free good is a Bad Thing, especially when it is a very limited resource.
You don't have to get rid of your gas-powered vehicle. But if it is generating a lot of smog, there is no good reason why you shouldn't have to pay for the right to do so.
Gas prices are high now because demand is high. Not because of a supply shock. Not because of pipeline breaks. Not because of taxes. Gas prices in the US are high because people are demanding a lot of gasoline, and the supply hasn't grown with the demand.
/.. People have a lot of absurd beliefs about the way things work, and the economists have had most of them licked since Adam Smith (with a tip of the hat to Keynes for filling it out).
It is true that in the short run, gasoline demand is inelastic. But nearly everything has a low elasticity of demand in the short run. If gas prices stay very high for 3 years, many people will have bought more fuel efficent cars. For now, however, people aren't going to dump their cars overnight. No sane person would expect that.
Also, I didn't suggest switching away from gasoline entirely. Hybrid cars like the Prius and Insight are as equally valid as fuel cells or natural gas. You can still burn gas, just don't burn it at 12 mpg.
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Please, do the world a favor and take a basic economics class. That applies to everybody, not just this AC, or even the ppl. on
And vote. That's important too. Stupid politicians get away with stupid stuff because people don't vote (US and elsewhere).
Vote + take an econ. class. Could you all just do those two things for me? Pretty please with sugar on top?
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