I'm one of those people who doesn't like cell phones. My land-line is basically already for emergencies only. I'm just as quick to use VoIP as I am the land line.
So I'm one of those people who would gladly ditch the land-line in favor of VoIP once [x] gets improved, where [x] in my case is reliability. VoIP depends on (a) Internet and (b) the power grid, neither of which are near the reliability of POTS.
Even so, I'm still pretty close to ditching the land-line in favor of Vonage. Unfortunately I think it's likely that cell phones will reach POTS price levels before VoIP reaches a POTS level of reliability, so once that happens I may end up going cellular instead of VoIP.
I saw the movie Saturday, and afterward, I realized this:
The movie was okay. I mean, it wasn't terrible, and it wasn't great. It was just okay.
"Why?" I wondered. I didn't feel that the dialog was outrageously different from the books. There were a few deviations, but I actually welcomed them so I'd have something interesting to watch the movie for, instead of just mouthing the words along with the characters ("lunchtime, doubly so").
I then realized why I love the books, but I've never really been interested in the BBC series or in the radio show. The reason is because it's DNA's fiendish love of garden path sentences, of long and garish lines of prose that make the reader stop and parse the same sentence several times, popping words off their mental stack in different orders each time, before they find the one that makes sense, that make the books so hilarious. It's the short and witty lines that work beautifully in book form, but fail to make me even chuckle when presented in a theater ("exactly the way that bricks don't").
The books were hilarious not because of the storyline, or the clever plot, or even the funny jokes--they were hilarious because of DNA's writing style. And that writing style, sadly enough, just doesn't carry over into the Hollywood scene, regardless of how much freedom he had to make the movie exactly how he wanted it. Unfortunately, taking a hilarious writing style and making a movie where a British accent reads paragraphs in that writing style does not a hilarious movie make.
I've got an MP3 of the radio ad that the article talks about. It's called "New York Software Truce". If you can't find it online, reply to this post and I'll send you a copy. Googling the title returns a lot of articles talking about it, at least.
I think the number one best thing about the Internet in research is the fact that it makes people not believe the first thing they read or hear about a subject.
Back in "the olden days," if I'm interested in a subject and I look it up somewhere, I'm likely to believe 100% of what I read, regardless of how accurate it is (both factually correct and representative).
Nowadays people are accustomed to seeing crap, and therefore being skeptical of it. If I search Google for some topic and I find a dozen web sites saying something about it, I'm not very likely to believe anywhere near 100% of what I read, and I think most students aren't going to believe it either, regardless of whether it's a Geocities web page or Wikipedia. They're going to require a little more validation than just seeing a single web page asserting something.
Times have changed. If there are any students who read *anything* on the Web with the idea that it's been fact-checked and 100% true, then they're the same students who would take a purple-and-green Geocities web site about the same topic at face value.
Every dictionary I can find lists "feb-yoo-airy" as *at least* as common as "feb-roo-airy". I suppose you also pronounce sword with a W, almond with an L, and often with a T? There's a such thing as "silent letters" in English you know, genius.
I find that discrimination is more prevalent in academia (where there are no market pressures) than in the "real world" of IT, where as you say, if you don't hire the best person for the job, your competitors likely will.
So don't you think it's more likely that the discrimination is happening at the universities, and the reason why the vast majority of your colleagues are white males is because of discrimination problems in the world of the university, not because of some innate character of white males that makes them superior in Computer Science?
I work for a small company where most of the employees are white males, but we have females and non-white as well. They were not hired to fill up our minority quotas--they were hired because they're top-notch programmers. I think you'll find the same in most companies.
This whole worship of cultural relativism makes me sick. How can it be anything but unacceptable that people are beaten and horribly discriminated against just because they happen to be a female? My god people. The intellectual dishonesty is just amazing.
I think it's sick too. Sick and wrong. But, if you march in there with troops and "liberate" the country, do you honestly think the people will be much better off? People will still have the same misogynist attitudes and do many of the same "inhumane, segregationist, insulting, and discriminatory" things to women and other minorities.
The only way for this to change is for their ideas about women and minorities to change.And there are many ways to help this along besides war. Like gp said, "a country needs to 'liberate' itself." I have no problem with the US providing support to a country who is already in that process, but I think the country itself should decide when it's ready to be liberated--not the US.
The government shouldn't be forced to enforce open source. That's not what inspired this bit of hypothetical legislation (which I know wouldn't stand a snowball's chance in hell in Congress, thank you very much Mr. Safety Cap).
I started with the idea of no copyright, and a consitutional mandate of "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." So what would promote the progress of software?
Well, like music or books or other artistic ventures, we want people to have an incentive to create lots of useful works. Unlike music or books or other similar things, software has "source code" which is tremendously useful for others who are doing similar tasks to look at and at times reuse. So it would make sense, given this idea of "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts," to give an added incentive to those who release their source code as well.
I think that idea (giving more of an incentive to those who release source code) is certainly well within the constitutional framework of copyright, and well within the realm of government legislation.
1) The idea that software is not copyrightable but books/music/etc. are is not novel. In 1980, Bill Gates was arguing that software should be copyrightable, even though bytecode is not in a human-readable form (which was previously a requirement for an artistic work to get copyright), and the law was unclear as to whether bytecode would end up being copyrightable at all.
2) Software is the only thing I know of that can potentially be covered by patent, copyright, and trade secret law. To me, that's insane--and something needs to go.
3) My suggestion: No more copyright or patent for software. Instead, have something different, which I'll call a "software patent". To obtain protection for a piece of bytecode, you must send the source code for this program to the Copyright Office. You then have several choices:
a) Allow the Copyright Office to release your source code immediately. You then have copyright-like protections on both the source code and bytecode for X number of years (say 10 or 20 years).
b) Do not release the source code immediately. You then get copyright-like protections on both the source code and bytecode for Y number of years (say 2 or 5 years). After your Y years are up, your copyright-like protections expire, your work enters the public domain, and your source code is released by the Copyright Office.
*many* websites, which hardcode the textcolor to black, but assume you have a light background. grr.
I'm not sure about Firefox (or whatever your browser of choice is), but with Opera you can have customizable style sheets that are interchangeable with a single hotkey press, so you can override their background colors and foreground colors to make it white-on-black. If perchance it doesn't work with some particular site, or you want to see their actual color scheme, you can switch to their style sheet with the press of a button.
To support the accuracy of (B), you have to ensure:
(1) that every vote record has a unique, identifying number on it, so you can make sure there are no duplicates and none is counted twice.
(2) that you can mathematically prove that the vote record was generated by a registered voter somehow (probably something involving cryptographic hashing?)
(3) that *anonymity* is guaranteed. You simultaneously have to authenticate the vote (show that it was cast by a legal registered voter in this district) but make it impossible to determine the identity of the voter who cast it. Now *that* is hard!
Currently when you vote, you put that "vote record" into a sealed box, watched carefully by election judges. That vote record doesn't have a "unique, identifying number on it" (in many areas at least), and it certainly doesn't have any mathematical/cryptographic hash assuring that it was generated by a registered voter, and since there's nothing tracing it back to the voter, it's completely anonymous.
It should be trivial to do the same with electronic voting--have it print out a paper "vote record", the voter inspects it, and puts it into the ballot box. Problem solved.
Perhaps the 900lb gorilla can force the "entertainment industry" into allowing such features as commercial-skip or other previously frowned upon features to become standard fare for Tivo-like devices?
In another thread somebody mentioned that if you turn off Javascript that this "URL Spoofing Bug" doesn't work either. Anybody with IE care to check it out?
Just tested it with Opera 7.54 for Linux... if you mouseover the actual text, "google.com" shows in the status bar, but if you position your cursor just exactly so that it's kinda over the URL, but not over any of the text, then you can get "microsoft.com" to show.
But I'm kind of confused as to why this is a big deal... can't you just use Javascript to rewrite the status bar anyway?
I'm looking for a wiki that supports authentication (passwords) for multiple users without using.htaccess files, and preferably with the option to have different permissions for different sections, so you could have one section that, say, anybody could view or edit, another section where anybody can view but only logged-in users can edit, and a third section where only logged-in users can view or edit.
Does anybody know of any wiki out there like that? I've searched a bazillion wikis, it seems, and I haven't been able to get *any* of them to work with authentication. They all say that wikis were meant to be open, and having authentication kills the spirit of them. Oh well!
Using encryption on the Internet is the equivalent of arranging an armored car to deliver credit-card information from someone living in a cardboard box to someone living on a park bench. (Gene Spafford)
The problem isn't the security of the data that's encrypted--the armored truck isn't going to have any problems--but what about the cardboard box?
Just as an example, the computer that the data is being sent to has to be connected to the Internet. How secure is this computer from attacks? If someone breaks into that computer, can they get to the unencrypted data?
So if 1000 computers were bought, and only 900 computers were shipped with Windows, and 50 copies of Windows were purchased, then they calculate that 50 copies of Windows were "pirated". They used this same trick for Photoshop, Office, and other programs.
So if you buy a computer and don't have Office pre-installed, and don't purchase a copy from the store, they count that as a "pirated" copy of Office, because obviously you need a copy of Office, right?
Ridiculous. I don't trust the BSA's stats farther than I can throw a truck.
Seriously, what is wrong with a pencil and a piece of paper?
Not much. But there are people who are disabled, or who speak other languages, for whom electronic voting would make it easier to vote.
Sure, we could get away with having a pencil and paper ballot--in fact, that's what I'd recommend for this election--but there is a valid reason to have electronic voting machines somewhere down the line.
I've often thought that "software libre" is rather a mouthful, and not easy for Anglophones (not to mention clueless PHBs) to say or even understand.
But what about "freed software"? It doesn't have the connotations of "free as in beer", and the connotations of "free as in speech" are strong. Sort of like "liberated software".
Plus it's easy to slowly switch over--if half the people say "free software" and half say "software libre," it could be confusing. But if half say "free software" and half say "freed software" I think it'd still work.
Any reasons why this is a Totally Stupid Idea? Don't fail me now, Slashdot! Point out my idiocy. I can take it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm one of those people who doesn't like cell phones. My land-line is basically already for emergencies only. I'm just as quick to use VoIP as I am the land line.
So I'm one of those people who would gladly ditch the land-line in favor of VoIP once [x] gets improved, where [x] in my case is reliability. VoIP depends on (a) Internet and (b) the power grid, neither of which are near the reliability of POTS.
Even so, I'm still pretty close to ditching the land-line in favor of Vonage. Unfortunately I think it's likely that cell phones will reach POTS price levels before VoIP reaches a POTS level of reliability, so once that happens I may end up going cellular instead of VoIP.
Dlugar
Apu: Today, I am no longer an Indian living in America. I am an Indian-American.
Lisa: You know, in a way, all Americans are immigrants. Except, of course Native Americans.
Homer: Yeah, Native Americans like us.
Lisa: No, I mean American Indians.
Apu: Like me.
I saw the movie Saturday, and afterward, I realized this:
The movie was okay. I mean, it wasn't terrible, and it wasn't great. It was just okay.
"Why?" I wondered. I didn't feel that the dialog was outrageously different from the books. There were a few deviations, but I actually welcomed them so I'd have something interesting to watch the movie for, instead of just mouthing the words along with the characters ("lunchtime, doubly so").
I then realized why I love the books, but I've never really been interested in the BBC series or in the radio show. The reason is because it's DNA's fiendish love of garden path sentences, of long and garish lines of prose that make the reader stop and parse the same sentence several times, popping words off their mental stack in different orders each time, before they find the one that makes sense, that make the books so hilarious. It's the short and witty lines that work beautifully in book form, but fail to make me even chuckle when presented in a theater ("exactly the way that bricks don't").
The books were hilarious not because of the storyline, or the clever plot, or even the funny jokes--they were hilarious because of DNA's writing style. And that writing style, sadly enough, just doesn't carry over into the Hollywood scene, regardless of how much freedom he had to make the movie exactly how he wanted it. Unfortunately, taking a hilarious writing style and making a movie where a British accent reads paragraphs in that writing style does not a hilarious movie make.
Dlugar
I've got an MP3 of the radio ad that the article talks about. It's called "New York Software Truce". If you can't find it online, reply to this post and I'll send you a copy. Googling the title returns a lot of articles talking about it, at least.
Dlugar
I just gave it a shot (FC3) and it won't let me browse /home/bob/ if /home/ is chmod a-x, even if /home/bob/ is chmod a+x.
Even typing "cd ~" as a normal user gives me "-bash: cd: home: Permission denied".
Dlugar
I think the number one best thing about the Internet in research is the fact that it makes people not believe the first thing they read or hear about a subject.
Back in "the olden days," if I'm interested in a subject and I look it up somewhere, I'm likely to believe 100% of what I read, regardless of how accurate it is (both factually correct and representative).
Nowadays people are accustomed to seeing crap, and therefore being skeptical of it. If I search Google for some topic and I find a dozen web sites saying something about it, I'm not very likely to believe anywhere near 100% of what I read, and I think most students aren't going to believe it either, regardless of whether it's a Geocities web page or Wikipedia. They're going to require a little more validation than just seeing a single web page asserting something.
Times have changed. If there are any students who read *anything* on the Web with the idea that it's been fact-checked and 100% true, then they're the same students who would take a purple-and-green Geocities web site about the same topic at face value.
Dlugar
I prefer the format used by Cooking for Engineers.
No, what you're missing is:
2 replies beneath your current threshold.
In particlar, this one.
Dlugar
Every dictionary I can find lists "feb-yoo-airy" as *at least* as common as "feb-roo-airy". I suppose you also pronounce sword with a W, almond with an L, and often with a T? There's a such thing as "silent letters" in English you know, genius.
Dlugar
If you use "Plain Old Text" mode it'll make your \n be
. You can still use a lot of htmlish tags like and too. I don't know why it's not the default.
Dlugar
I find that discrimination is more prevalent in academia (where there are no market pressures) than in the "real world" of IT, where as you say, if you don't hire the best person for the job, your competitors likely will.
So don't you think it's more likely that the discrimination is happening at the universities, and the reason why the vast majority of your colleagues are white males is because of discrimination problems in the world of the university, not because of some innate character of white males that makes them superior in Computer Science?
I work for a small company where most of the employees are white males, but we have females and non-white as well. They were not hired to fill up our minority quotas--they were hired because they're top-notch programmers. I think you'll find the same in most companies.
Dlugar
This whole worship of cultural relativism makes me sick. How can it be anything but unacceptable that people are beaten and horribly discriminated against just because they happen to be a female? My god people. The intellectual dishonesty is just amazing.
I think it's sick too. Sick and wrong. But, if you march in there with troops and "liberate" the country, do you honestly think the people will be much better off? People will still have the same misogynist attitudes and do many of the same "inhumane, segregationist, insulting, and discriminatory" things to women and other minorities.
The only way for this to change is for their ideas about women and minorities to change.And there are many ways to help this along besides war. Like gp said, "a country needs to 'liberate' itself." I have no problem with the US providing support to a country who is already in that process, but I think the country itself should decide when it's ready to be liberated--not the US.
Dlugar
The government shouldn't be forced to enforce open source. That's not what inspired this bit of hypothetical legislation (which I know wouldn't stand a snowball's chance in hell in Congress, thank you very much Mr. Safety Cap).
I started with the idea of no copyright, and a consitutional mandate of "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." So what would promote the progress of software?
Well, like music or books or other artistic ventures, we want people to have an incentive to create lots of useful works. Unlike music or books or other similar things, software has "source code" which is tremendously useful for others who are doing similar tasks to look at and at times reuse. So it would make sense, given this idea of "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts," to give an added incentive to those who release their source code as well.
I think that idea (giving more of an incentive to those who release source code) is certainly well within the constitutional framework of copyright, and well within the realm of government legislation.
Dlugar
1) The idea that software is not copyrightable but books/music/etc. are is not novel. In 1980, Bill Gates was arguing that software should be copyrightable, even though bytecode is not in a human-readable form (which was previously a requirement for an artistic work to get copyright), and the law was unclear as to whether bytecode would end up being copyrightable at all.
2) Software is the only thing I know of that can potentially be covered by patent, copyright, and trade secret law. To me, that's insane--and something needs to go.
3) My suggestion:
No more copyright or patent for software. Instead, have something different, which I'll call a "software patent". To obtain protection for a piece of bytecode, you must send the source code for this program to the Copyright Office. You then have several choices:
a) Allow the Copyright Office to release your source code immediately. You then have copyright-like protections on both the source code and bytecode for X number of years (say 10 or 20 years).
b) Do not release the source code immediately. You then get copyright-like protections on both the source code and bytecode for Y number of years (say 2 or 5 years). After your Y years are up, your copyright-like protections expire, your work enters the public domain, and your source code is released by the Copyright Office.
Ideas? Suggestions?
Dlugar
*many* websites, which hardcode the textcolor to black, but assume you have a light background. grr.
I'm not sure about Firefox (or whatever your browser of choice is), but with Opera you can have customizable style sheets that are interchangeable with a single hotkey press, so you can override their background colors and foreground colors to make it white-on-black. If perchance it doesn't work with some particular site, or you want to see their actual color scheme, you can switch to their style sheet with the press of a button.
Just thought you might like to know.
Dlugar
Currently when you vote, you put that "vote record" into a sealed box, watched carefully by election judges. That vote record doesn't have a "unique, identifying number on it" (in many areas at least), and it certainly doesn't have any mathematical/cryptographic hash assuring that it was generated by a registered voter, and since there's nothing tracing it back to the voter, it's completely anonymous.
It should be trivial to do the same with electronic voting--have it print out a paper "vote record", the voter inspects it, and puts it into the ballot box. Problem solved.
Dlugar
Perhaps the 900lb gorilla can force the "entertainment industry" into allowing such features as commercial-skip or other previously frowned upon features to become standard fare for Tivo-like devices?
Dlugar
In another thread somebody mentioned that if you turn off Javascript that this "URL Spoofing Bug" doesn't work either. Anybody with IE care to check it out?
Dlugar
Just tested it with Opera 7.54 for Linux ... if you mouseover the actual text, "google.com" shows in the status bar, but if you position your cursor just exactly so that it's kinda over the URL, but not over any of the text, then you can get "microsoft.com" to show.
... can't you just use Javascript to rewrite the status bar anyway?
But I'm kind of confused as to why this is a big deal
Dlugar
I'm looking for a wiki that supports authentication (passwords) for multiple users without using .htaccess files, and preferably with the option to have different permissions for different sections, so you could have one section that, say, anybody could view or edit, another section where anybody can view but only logged-in users can edit, and a third section where only logged-in users can view or edit.
Does anybody know of any wiki out there like that? I've searched a bazillion wikis, it seems, and I haven't been able to get *any* of them to work with authentication. They all say that wikis were meant to be open, and having authentication kills the spirit of them. Oh well!
Dlugar
Just as an example, the computer that the data is being sent to has to be connected to the Internet. How secure is this computer from attacks? If someone breaks into that computer, can they get to the unencrypted data?
Dlugar
I read an AP wire two years back (wish I could find it--I made a copy somewhere) that detailed their current method of calculating piracy:
(computers bought - software purchased) = software pirated
So if 1000 computers were bought, and only 900 computers were shipped with Windows, and 50 copies of Windows were purchased, then they calculate that 50 copies of Windows were "pirated". They used this same trick for Photoshop, Office, and other programs.
So if you buy a computer and don't have Office pre-installed, and don't purchase a copy from the store, they count that as a "pirated" copy of Office, because obviously you need a copy of Office, right?
Ridiculous. I don't trust the BSA's stats farther than I can throw a truck.
Dlugar
Not much. But there are people who are disabled, or who speak other languages, for whom electronic voting would make it easier to vote.
Sure, we could get away with having a pencil and paper ballot--in fact, that's what I'd recommend for this election--but there is a valid reason to have electronic voting machines somewhere down the line.
Dlugar
It was unfree when I wrote it by virtue of copyright law. I "freed" it by putting the GPL or another "free" license on it.
Dlugar
I've often thought that "software libre" is rather a mouthful, and not easy for Anglophones (not to mention clueless PHBs) to say or even understand.
But what about "freed software"? It doesn't have the connotations of "free as in beer", and the connotations of "free as in speech" are strong. Sort of like "liberated software".
Plus it's easy to slowly switch over--if half the people say "free software" and half say "software libre," it could be confusing. But if half say "free software" and half say "freed software" I think it'd still work.
Any reasons why this is a Totally Stupid Idea? Don't fail me now, Slashdot! Point out my idiocy. I can take it.
Dlugar