In Brazil (and most likely in other countries too) an IP address and a timestamp of an event coming from it (DoS attack, break-in attempt, fraud ou whatever) is enough to identify the user. If something unlawful is performed on the net, the authorities have the right to obtain the user's identity from the ISP. ISPs are required to be able to identify users based on IP/timestamp. Most ISPs disencourage IP-sharing (one user buys fat-pipe link, provides access to friends/neighbours via NAT) and even if that is the case, the subscription owner is legally responsible for whatever crimes their NAT'ed friends commit online.
Frank Herbert's Dune saga is the one to be beaten on the body count department. By the end of the Muaddib's Jihad (transition from the first to the second book, if I recall correctly, and I'm not talking about the Butlerian Jihad that happened before, but the rise of the Muaddib), 12 billion people had died in the wars.
* USS Welcome To Our New Dolphin Overlords * USS Welcome To Our New Iceberg Overlords (Titanic only) * USS First Post * USS Back in the USSR * USS DarlMcBrideSuxALot
Not only expensive, it's unfeasible too. The fMRI scan becomes useless if the patient moves the head even slightly, moving the brain with relation to the anatomical scan and losing calibration.
The only way to force a conscious person not to move would be with some very bad threatening, but if you are allowed to torture the suspect, then you don't really need the fMRI anyway.
Also, people with ferromagnetic implants and pacemakers can't go inside MR scanners. At the very best, terrorist organizations would cease being equal opportunity employers and require that recruits have pacemakers.
In a country where peanut bags come with may contain peanuts printed and microwave ovens must tell the owner explictly not to use it to dry pets, to avoid liability with very stupid customers, I wouldn't be surprised if someone accused of currency destruction sued either
(a) The oven manufacturer, for not stating that it may damage currency in the manual; or
(b) The government, for not printing do not microwave in the currency; or
(c) The bank who gave them currency without a proper usage manual.
Building the transmission lines to bring the generated power to Earth is left as an exercise to the reader ?
They should think first on getting men on Mars. And then back to Earth. Alive. What to do there should be planned later, since of course there will be unpredicted issues about the environment. And there would be no point placing a power plant there if there were no people to use that power for something.
the problem with any kind of online payments, at all, is that people living on countries other than the site's country (believe or not, the majority of the world population is not unitedstadian) are often in trouble to pay at all.
credit cards pose a secutiry risk (both for in-country and foreigners), independent of how good encryption is, there is always the human factor on the other side. The moment you give the card number, independent of the buy being $ 0.50 or $ 500, you are at risk. The micro-ness of the values only bring more risk of security look-overs.
If that's not enough, international credit cards are not easily available to everyone, especially young, income-less students, who are a considerable part of the "people who use the net" and are likely to be the main targets of such "content producers".
International bill sending poses more issues than any merchant is willing to face.
The only way for this to work is if a multi-national company sets up a station on every target country (US, Canada, all over Europe, probably South America and some places in Asia too, for most businesses) for selling net credit. Of course this company will be a monopoly, which isn't good; Moreover, politicians would come up with lovely absurd taxes on such services (allowing citizens to mess freely with the external debt is a bad idea, anyway), and the micro-payments would no longer be micro.
It may work for small segments and businesses, which is enough to get this yet-another-dot-com in the blue, but micro-payments aren't taking over the "content industry".
First, if you're leaving for a coffee break, you should lock your terminal, which will prevent others from seeing your screen contents while you're out anyway.
Second, how many different polarizations are there ? Last time I studied optics, one pair of glasses will work on any of these monitors (maybe needing some rotation/tilting). Unless you can assure polarizing glasses will always be bright red so you recognize "people with bright red glasses coming near my computer", and you can't assure that - it's quite easy to make polarizing lenses -
the protection is senseless.
I can hardly wait until some company buys monitors and glasses to all their employees and then put several monitors in the same room, all people with polarizing glasses, making the whole buy futile. (Hmm, ok, will prevent the floor sweeper from reading your screen. Great.)
It's amazing the capability that some people have to pick only the wrong parts of certain ideas to apply. Two examples:
Java. Compiled languages take long to compile but run fast. Interpreted languages need no compilation but don't run so fast. Java is the non-reasonable average solution where it takes long to both compile and run.
Partial Anarchy. The good side of anarchy is that you are 1. truly free 2. pay no taxes 3. can chop whomever's head you want to. The bad side is that you've got to do everything on your own because there is no organized representation of society (tribe, city, whatever) to do them for you.
The proposition in the article is that we waste our time trying to solve things we already pay the governments to solve, without the prizes of freedom (you'll still live under a DMCA/DRM world and won't be able to chop George Bush with an axe no matter how many children you save or how many epidemics your work avoids).
I'm still for the good old-fashioned plain Anarchy.
...how they think we will get computers to do what we want...
What ?? I thought the current research line in HCI was getting computers to get humans to do what they [computers] want. Computers doing what humans mistell them to do is soooo 20th Century...
and what CPU are you using on it ? I have one too. I tried using a 1400 MHz T-Bird Athlon on it, the BIOS refused to use 133 MHz FSB and sticked to 100 MHz FSB. Despite the volcano over it, the chip went to 120 degrees Celsius after 15 minutes of operation and died. Now I'm using a 1100 MHz Athlon (and for the extra cost of the new CPU I could have bought a better MoBo like an ASUS A7N266 in the first place) and am scared like hell.
Not to mention that the BIOS PCI IRQ assignment is amazingly stupid. It works like this: video card on IRQ 5, everything else on IRQ 11 (onboard LAN, onboard sound, USRobotics internal modem, USB controller).
Me: Are you sure this cooler (a CoolerMaster) is enough for this 1.4 GHz Athlon you're selling me ?
Salesman: Sure, here is AMD's cooler certification page, see, this model is certified for K7 model 4 up to 1.4 GHz.
Two hours later, mobo, cpu and cooler mounted, box booted. CPU temperature: 85 Celsius. 5 minutes after
starting the distributed.net client: CPU temperature 120 Celsius, self-rebooted, CPU dead.
Now I wonder where in Alaska AMD certifies coolers.
writing in PDF is reasonably easy - there are lots of utilities and libraries that do it that are listed on Freshmeat, even a PERL CPAN module for creating PDFs. It's reading, formatting and displaying PDFs that is a pain to code.
Adobe has released the PDF specs, they're
here
(see the File Format Specification section).
I saw it and thought "cool, I'll make my own pdf viewer which just throws fonts away and displays text and images without screwing spacing like xpdf does". Except that the document is awfully written (that's what happens on tech companies hiring more lawyers than engineers) and contains several references to compression algorithms that are way too generic.
Really, programmer's lives are boring, I wish my life would be as exciting as other people's life appear to be.
Wrong. Programmer's lives are exciting, as long as you like Computer Science and enjoy tweaking with the little bits, discovering new things. Now, if Miguel started writing Unix software thinking he would be rich, surrounded by girls and driving Romero's Ferrari, he's far beyond dumbness.
slash kernel slash sched dot c slash asterisk
line break asterisk (...) 1998-12-28 Implemented
better SMP scheduling by Ingo Molnar
Dang! It's the vanilla kernel where are user mode Linux and Alan's cool toys ?
switches station
...Then Iluvatar arose, and the Ainur perceived that he smiled; and he lifted up his left hand, and a new theme began amid the storm...
Silmarillion. Spoken. Again.
switches station again
eight dot three four six minus a dash greather than c zero wb zero yn dot eat...
Yay, they've got Reiser in this one, but they're still reciteing the console driver, it'll be 3 days before we get to the filesystem
switches stations frantically
hash include less-than linux slash config dot h NO NO GET OUT OF HERE WHAT ARE YOU DOING ?
Hello, I am Richard M. Stallman and you are being deceived, for it takes much more than a kernel to get a computer going. Here are 3 billion lines of GNU code that this radio hasn't read aloud yet. [DOOR SLAMS] Tee hee, and how do you think you get those tiny little icons on the screen ? Here's the XFree86 source to be read.
turns off radio, goes to slashdot, picks cowboyneal option on poll
I never used the KDE calculator. I recommend you
learn bc.
Usually you'll start a session on an xterm and make calculations as needed, but
echo "34 * (7 + 5000)" | bc
works too. Better than bc, only a real HP48G within reach. And yes, I would kill for a Palm calculator application with 1/3 of the HP48G functionality.
FAQ #4 lists the requirements to play these CDs
on a PC:
PC with at least Pentium® 133mHz or compatible processor, 32 MB RAM, CD-ROM drive, soundcard and speakers, Microsoft ®Windows95®, Windows98®, Windows2000®, Windows ME®, Windows XP® or Windows NT 4 ® with Service Pack 4
the word was carefully chosen to be PC, not
computer, which would enrage
Mac users at large.
This is a bad sign that real soon now CDs may come with "Designed for Windows" or
"Requires Windows" banners on the covers.
Needless to say, 3 days after the first CD is out with the scheme, an open source decoder/ripper for it will be out on freshmeat. And it probably
wil compile on Mac OS X out of the box.:)
many large corporations (like banks) use OS/2 as their platform, and have tens of thousands of OS/2-based ATMs scattered around.
It seems that IBM finally understood that their marketing department is ugliest collection of coneheads on Earth, which, together with the usual business practices from Microsoft, laid OS/2 behind in the big desktop boom of the early 1990s.
So, they stopped trying to sell OS/2 the joe home user, and started selling to big enterprise places, where IBM already had one heck of a market share since the mainframe era, and the name IBM actually means something.
Currently IBM ships OS/2 under the "eComStation" name. They're just not worried about calling it OS/2 anymore: the concept OS/2 was meant to be - the true unleashing of 32-bit GUI platforms - just wasn't filled in by OS/2, it was filled by Windows and Mac OS. (it was meant to have look-and-feel coherence with Motif too, but that's another tale)
Last but not least: while the article calls OS/2 a dead horse, it's a decent operating system over which IBM has full control and can tame to its purposes whenever needed. Example ? Remember those big, bad ass S/390 machines IBM sells and which we love to say "they run Linux!" ? Ever managed to see a demonstration of one of those in a LinuxExpo or other exhibit ? The software in ROM that manages the virtual servers (each running a separate copy of Linux in its own VM) is OS/2 and WPS. (actually it's a one-board-PC with OS/2 in ROM that plugs in the S/390 VM control slot (not sure of nomenclature here) and manages the VMs.
Slashdot Mirror
In Brazil (and most likely in other countries too) an IP address and a timestamp of an event coming from it (DoS attack, break-in attempt, fraud ou whatever) is enough to identify the user. If something unlawful is performed on the net, the authorities have the right to obtain the user's identity from the ISP. ISPs are required to be able to identify users based on IP/timestamp. Most ISPs disencourage IP-sharing (one user buys fat-pipe link, provides access to friends/neighbours via NAT) and even if that is the case, the subscription owner is legally responsible for whatever crimes their NAT'ed friends commit online.
Frank Herbert's Dune saga is the one to be beaten on the body count department. By the end of the Muaddib's Jihad (transition from the first to the second book, if I recall correctly, and I'm not talking about the Butlerian Jihad that happened before, but the rise of the Muaddib), 12 billion people had died in the wars.
* USS Welcome To Our New Dolphin Overlords
* USS Welcome To Our New Iceberg Overlords (Titanic only)
* USS First Post
* USS Back in the USSR
* USS DarlMcBrideSuxALot
and the list goes on, and on
then SCO owns BSD, not Linux. Veridict: you sued the wrong people, buy glasses.
Not only expensive, it's unfeasible too. The fMRI scan becomes useless if the patient moves the head even slightly, moving the brain with relation to the anatomical scan and losing calibration.
The only way to force a conscious person not to move would be with some very bad threatening, but if you are allowed to torture the suspect, then you don't really need the fMRI anyway.
Also, people with ferromagnetic implants and pacemakers can't go inside MR scanners. At the very best, terrorist organizations would cease being equal opportunity employers and require that recruits have pacemakers.
If an asteroid that runs Linux were to be found, SCO would buy it so they could claim prior art and charge for licenses.
- (a) The oven manufacturer, for not stating that it may damage currency in the manual; or
or all of them, and won some.(b) The government, for not printing do not microwave in the currency; or
(c) The bank who gave them currency without a proper usage manual.
Building the transmission lines to bring the generated power to Earth is left as an exercise to the reader ?
They should think first on getting men on Mars. And then back to Earth. Alive. What to do there should be planned later, since of course there will be unpredicted issues about the environment. And there would be no point placing a power plant there if there were no people to use that power for something.
credit cards pose a secutiry risk (both for in-country and foreigners), independent of how good encryption is, there is always the human factor on the other side. The moment you give the card number, independent of the buy being $ 0.50 or $ 500, you are at risk. The micro-ness of the values only bring more risk of security look-overs.
If that's not enough, international credit cards are not easily available to everyone, especially young, income-less students, who are a considerable part of the "people who use the net" and are likely to be the main targets of such "content producers".
International bill sending poses more issues than any merchant is willing to face.
The only way for this to work is if a multi-national company sets up a station on every target country (US, Canada, all over Europe, probably South America and some places in Asia too, for most businesses) for selling net credit. Of course this company will be a monopoly, which isn't good; Moreover, politicians would come up with lovely absurd taxes on such services (allowing citizens to mess freely with the external debt is a bad idea, anyway), and the micro-payments would no longer be micro.
It may work for small segments and businesses, which is enough to get this yet-another-dot-com in the blue, but micro-payments aren't taking over the "content industry".
KDE's X lock (don't ask me what it uses, I only use KDE at some university labs) already blanks the screen.
Second, how many different polarizations are there ? Last time I studied optics, one pair of glasses will work on any of these monitors (maybe needing some rotation/tilting). Unless you can assure polarizing glasses will always be bright red so you recognize "people with bright red glasses coming near my computer", and you can't assure that - it's quite easy to make polarizing lenses - the protection is senseless.
I can hardly wait until some company buys monitors and glasses to all their employees and then put several monitors in the same room, all people with polarizing glasses, making the whole buy futile. (Hmm, ok, will prevent the floor sweeper from reading your screen. Great.)
The proposition in the article is that we waste our time trying to solve things we already pay the governments to solve, without the prizes of freedom (you'll still live under a DMCA/DRM world and won't be able to chop George Bush with an axe no matter how many children you save or how many epidemics your work avoids).
I'm still for the good old-fashioned plain Anarchy.
fnord
Full argument on this Humorix Editorial.
What ?? I thought the current research line in HCI was getting computers to get humans to do what they [computers] want. Computers doing what humans mistell them to do is soooo 20th Century...
and what CPU are you using on it ? I have one too. I tried using a 1400 MHz T-Bird Athlon on it, the BIOS refused to use 133 MHz FSB and sticked to 100 MHz FSB. Despite the volcano over it, the chip went to 120 degrees Celsius after 15 minutes of operation and died. Now I'm using a 1100 MHz Athlon (and for the extra cost of the new CPU I could have bought a better MoBo like an ASUS A7N266 in the first place) and am scared like hell.
Not to mention that the BIOS PCI IRQ assignment is amazingly stupid. It works like this: video card on IRQ 5, everything else on IRQ 11 (onboard LAN, onboard sound, USRobotics internal modem, USB controller).
Salesman: Sure, here is AMD's cooler certification page, see, this model is certified for K7 model 4 up to 1.4 GHz.
Two hours later, mobo, cpu and cooler mounted, box booted. CPU temperature: 85 Celsius. 5 minutes after starting the distributed.net client: CPU temperature 120 Celsius, self-rebooted, CPU dead.
Now I wonder where in Alaska AMD certifies coolers.
writing in PDF is reasonably easy - there are lots of utilities and libraries that do it that are listed on Freshmeat, even a PERL CPAN module for creating PDFs. It's reading, formatting and displaying PDFs that is a pain to code.
I saw it and thought "cool, I'll make my own pdf viewer which just throws fonts away and displays text and images without screwing spacing like xpdf does". Except that the document is awfully written (that's what happens on tech companies hiring more lawyers than engineers) and contains several references to compression algorithms that are way too generic.
If we make innovation illegal, only Microsoft will innovate.
Wrong. Programmer's lives are exciting, as long as you like Computer Science and enjoy tweaking with the little bits, discovering new things. Now, if Miguel started writing Unix software thinking he would be rich, surrounded by girls and driving Romero's Ferrari, he's far beyond dumbness.
slash kernel slash sched dot c slash asterisk line break asterisk (...) 1998-12-28 Implemented better SMP scheduling by Ingo Molnar
Dang! It's the vanilla kernel where are user mode Linux and Alan's cool toys ?
switches station
Silmarillion. Spoken. Again.
switches station again
eight dot three four six minus a dash greather than c zero wb zero yn dot eat...
Yay, they've got Reiser in this one, but they're still reciteing the console driver, it'll be 3 days before we get to the filesystem
switches stations frantically
hash include less-than linux slash config dot h NO NO GET OUT OF HERE WHAT ARE YOU DOING ?
Hello, I am Richard M. Stallman and you are being deceived, for it takes much more than a kernel to get a computer going. Here are 3 billion lines of GNU code that this radio hasn't read aloud yet. [DOOR SLAMS] Tee hee, and how do you think you get those tiny little icons on the screen ? Here's the XFree86 source to be read.
turns off radio, goes to slashdot, picks cowboyneal option on poll
Usually you'll start a session on an xterm and make calculations as needed, but
echo "34 * (7 + 5000)" | bc
works too. Better than bc, only a real HP48G within reach. And yes, I would kill for a Palm calculator application with 1/3 of the HP48G functionality.
PC with at least Pentium® 133mHz or compatible processor, 32 MB RAM, CD-ROM drive, soundcard and speakers, Microsoft ®Windows95®, Windows98®, Windows2000®, Windows ME®, Windows XP® or Windows NT 4 ® with Service Pack 4
the word was carefully chosen to be PC, not computer , which would enrage Mac users at large.
This is a bad sign that real soon now CDs may come with "Designed for Windows" or "Requires Windows" banners on the covers.
Needless to say, 3 days after the first CD is out with the scheme, an open source decoder/ripper for it will be out on freshmeat. And it probably wil compile on Mac OS X out of the box. :)
It seems that IBM finally understood that their marketing department is ugliest collection of coneheads on Earth, which, together with the usual business practices from Microsoft, laid OS/2 behind in the big desktop boom of the early 1990s.
So, they stopped trying to sell OS/2 the joe home user, and started selling to big enterprise places, where IBM already had one heck of a market share since the mainframe era, and the name IBM actually means something.
Currently IBM ships OS/2 under the "eComStation" name. They're just not worried about calling it OS/2 anymore: the concept OS/2 was meant to be - the true unleashing of 32-bit GUI platforms - just wasn't filled in by OS/2, it was filled by Windows and Mac OS. (it was meant to have look-and-feel coherence with Motif too, but that's another tale)
Last but not least: while the article calls OS/2 a dead horse, it's a decent operating system over which IBM has full control and can tame to its purposes whenever needed. Example ? Remember those big, bad ass S/390 machines IBM sells and which we love to say "they run Linux!" ? Ever managed to see a demonstration of one of those in a LinuxExpo or other exhibit ? The software in ROM that manages the virtual servers (each running a separate copy of Linux in its own VM) is OS/2 and WPS. (actually it's a one-board-PC with OS/2 in ROM that plugs in the S/390 VM control slot (not sure of nomenclature here) and manages the VMs.
Do your own assigment.