Er, actually, I think it's a terrible patent. In fact, I called it "ridiculous" in my post.
My point, which I might not have been clear enough about, was this: this kind of statistical anomaly will happen in any large system. There will be mistakes. The bigger issue with the patent office is all of the bad patents that aren't so obviously ridiculous on their face.
I went on to say that this is a case of getting the right conclusion from the wrong evidence. If the criteria for calling the patent system "non-broken" is that this kind of patent *never* *ever* *ever* happens, we will never have a non-broken system. Because even in the best system, egregious mistakes are occasionally made.
I think this was probably a more clear explanation of my position. Did you get it that time?
And, if you've got a minute, could you translate "And someone is clearly underage such that no common sense has yet prevailed from life experience" into English? I'm not sure whether I agree or not, because I can't decipher it.
A funny quote from the article is "But just because the patent office granted this and other questionable patents doesn't mean the system is broken".;)
Ok, clearly someone is way underage to be submitting stories to slashdot. The patent office handles literally hundreds of thousands of applications a year. I challenge anyone to find that large of a system with an error rate of zero. From internet routing to CNN to squirrels in headlights, with a large enough sample size, you are going to be able to find problems. With this rationalle, everything is broken.
Now, I've got some real objections to the current patent system. I think lots of things are patentable that shouldn't be. However, even if the laws were changed and patents really tightened up, I guarantee you that some weird ones will still slip through.
So, can we please see an end to the/. sport of finding the most ridiculous patents and waving them around as evidence that patents are "broken"? Even if patents were overhauled and the most extreme/. views prevailed, these same examples would still exist. Sometimes, the issue is the bureaucracy and human error, not a "broken" system.
That said, I do think the system is broken; this is just a case of getting the right conclusion from the wrong evidence ("It would be dangerous to jump off a tall building because it's hard to see exactly where you'd land").
Cheers -b
Re:And what did Sikorsky do for a living?
on
The Coming Air Age
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· Score: 2
Fair enough, but you probably don't question it when a farmer says everyone needs food.
The trick is determining whether the guy is telling everyone they need something because he's in the industry, or whether he's in the industry because everyone needs it. Of course, we can only make that distinction in hindsight.
Still, I think you're dead on about Sikorsky. Everyone needs a helicopter? Apparently he didn't pay much attention to the way people drive in two dimensions.
Damn, I wasn't even going to post because I was sure someone would have gotten to this first. Apparently not, unless it was moderated into the dirt.
The technology in question works by "modulating the light from the projector" in such a way that it interferes with video cameras "much the same way computer monitors do."
My read is that they're introducing an artificial refresh to movies -- right now, each frame from the movie is put in place, then lit up all at once, then moved out of the way for the next frame. What these bozos want, by my read, is to put each frame in place and then run a horizontal bar of light down the frame, so that in the "real world" only part of the screen is illuminated at any given time.
This would take advantage of the relatively slow refresh rate (sort of) of our eyes, while causing problems for CCD-based stuff, much like computer monitors do (that monitor you're looking at -- it's flashing really quickly).
The thing that sucks here is that it will probably degrade the movie-going experience for *everyone* in the name of anti-piracy. Part of what makes the movie theater experience nice (or at least superior to TV sets) is the way film looks. This will likely degrade that.
Sure, they could try to compensate by upping the frame rate, or scanning each frame two or three times, but the bottom line is: this will change the way movies look. Not dramatically, and Mom and Pop probably either won't notice or will only come away with the subliminal (subluminal?) impression that movies aren't as engrossing as they used to be.
I haven't seen this technology in use, but I've played with film quite a bit, and my expectation is that it will be the equivelent of replacing nice incandescent lights in an office with flourescent lights -- you can still see, noting really *seems* to be flashing, but something is just *not right*.
And that pisses me off, and if my expectation is right, this will likely keep me out of any theater adopting this technology and make me wait for the DVD release, which I will hopefully be able to continue to play on a good DLP or LCD projector, sans refresh.
I suppose the studios won't care, as they'll just get my cash for the DVD rather than through movie tickets, but this could hurt movie theaters as film buffs stay away in droves (and talk down the theater experience to the general populace).
Cheers -b
Re:Porn companies?
on
SSSCA Hearing
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· Score: 3, Interesting
As usual, porn is way ahead of mainstream business. Browse the gnutella network for porn (god knows there's enough of it). Look at what percentage of it is really more of an ad for a site. Or, more unpleasantly, what percentage opens 8 million browser windows when you go to view a movie.
Many porn companies intentionally release a portion of their catalogue, with ads embedded. It's the classic "free sample" gambit; we're betting that if you like these 10 pics, or these 2 videos, that you'll consider paying for more (I use "we" in a loose sense; my company doesn't engage in this practice becasue there's no way to limit minors' access).
So porn has adapted and found a way to make money from technological innovation, while the mainstreamers are still trying to use legislation to turn back the clock and make last century's business models work today. It's not the first time; it won't be the last time.
(When I tire of my career in the adult internet, I'm going to get rich being a consultant who follows the adult industry and then goes and tells everyone else what to do next. I'll be considered a visionary.)
1) If slashdot is anything like my company, network bandwidth, while significant, is a small percentage of overhead. Things like salaries do not increase with pageviews. While metrics and pageviews are certainly important to/., I can't believe that their costs would double if pageviews did. I know that my overall operating costs go up about 10% with doubled pageviews.
2) The dot coms didn't crash because they were "selling metered resources at a flat rate." They crashed, largely, because they were operating in the "lose money on every customer, make it up in volume" business model. Some were in metered resources, some weren't. If your aphorism was true, golf clubs wouldn't exist, amusement parks wouldn't offer season passes, and we'd pay by the hour for software usage. Er.
That said, I'm going to go ahead and pay their $5/month. But I think it's a real mistake for a community site to implement a pricing model that discourages pageviews, and which penalizes its most active members. But, hey, I applaud the market experiment. If I find it's costing me too much, I'll just use the site less.
1) MegaAssault ("Arnold Schwarzenegger, as an man involuntarily committed to the old folks home, must escape using only the minigun that his old war buddy smuggled in disguised as a tennis racket"). $49.95, one-time-play solid state video device.
2) Something good by an actual artist. $49.95, play as much as you want, keep it and show it to friends when they visit.
Of course, if you go for option 1, you'll have to put a dollar into your SSVD player every fifteen minutes to keep the movie going. You'll also have to clean up the mess after the SSVD melts itself at the end of the movie (don't worry, it's a myth that these things can explode rather than melting, we promise).
Next, you'll have to report to the Entertainment Clinic, where they will perform brain surgery to remove all memories of the movie, so you'll have to buy another copy if you want to think about it.
They'll be monitoring your email, too, to make sure you don't tell anyone anything about the movie (in case the brain wipe didn't take). And one out of 10 times you watch a Hollywood movie, your house will be raided by the police (motto: "To protect and serve Hollywood"), who will search for any illegal copies you might have made.
Option 2 is looking better and better, isn't it?
Cheers -b
Re:I guess that kid hit puberty early...
on
iWarez
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· Score: 1
Nah, it's nothing that new or that brave.
Friends and I used to go into computer stores (in the early/mid 80's), buy a box of preformatted disks (DS/DD for only $40/box of 10!), and then one of us would copy off software from the demo machines while the others distracted the salesman types. That was simply the way to get good pirated software (Wordstar, etc) when it took too long to download over 2400bps modems.
Then again, we also used to steal the mouseballs from the first Macs, and load all sorts of wacky homebrew TSR programs on the PC/XT's (and AT's, when they came out).
Um, so CD burners should be illegal because they can make exact duplicates of the original? How about CD copying software? How about blank CD's? For fsck's sake, man, how about computers in general? Heck, every time I boot, I'm reading copyrighted Microsoft (sorry, but it's true) material into my system's memory, goddamit!
Do you really believe the Sony/Nintendo/RIAA theory that anything that could possibly be used in an illegal manner should itself be illegal? I'm really curious. From Pentium processers to bleach, I'll bet I can find an illegal use for just about anything. Under this line of reasoning, rocks would be illegal because you could bang someone over the head with them. And don't try to claim "that's different", unless you're willing to argue that copyright violation is so much worse than murder that it merits much more legislative and judicial intervention in peoples' daily lives.
Bottom line: we're dangerously close to living in a system where intellectual property laws and cases operate on a presumption of guilt. That's just messed up.
Good god. Read, man, read. Or at least don't hide behind anonymity and cowardice.
Invite only, when applied to my mailing list, means this:
- I participate in several public mailing lists, know people in real life, keep up with old coworkers, you know.
- If someone seems compatible with the list, I'll drop them a note off-list to ask if they would like to be on my little list.
- Members can suggest other people, but it's not as sinister as you make it sound. A member will sometimes drop me a note reccomending someone else by highlighting what they've written on the web or another list. If I like that stuff, I'll invite the new person. Nobody is ever added to the list without a personal invitation and personal request to be from their side.
Is that clear enough? And explained in small enough words? There is no great evil here that you need to crusade against, I promise!
Is it really that hard to believe that someone actually operates a legit mailing list, doesn't sell/trade/disclose addresses, goes beyond even normal double-opt in (I personally read a personal note that they send) and still gets accused of doing so? That there might be another place that addresses are harvested from?
That was my original point. Obviously some people are so locked into their presumptions that they will do mental and symantec gymnastics to prop them up.
I'm curious how most mailing lists work, then, if the central server doesn't collect the email addresses of subscribers. You have seen a mailing list before, right?
See my other response to the yokel who jumped to the most negative possible conclusion. I used "opt-in" rather than "invite only" to avoid appearing snooty. Obviously, I should have just been blunt.
This was moderated as funny, and it is. Some people are just *looking* for something to be self-righteous about.
I operate an invite-only mailing list with about 500 recipients. You, sir, are not getting the next invite (one of the requirements is being able to carry on a civil debate, with at least decent reasoning).
By semi-public SMTP server, I meant one that only accepts incoming mail from certain networks. Poor mail server admin? Where in the world did you come up with that?
I guess you're just looking for something to complain about, and the word "moron" probably leaps to mind because you hear it all the time. No coincidence, that.
This is very, very simpleminded and outright wrong.
I operate a service that collects emails for a private mailing list. I am the only one with access to the database. There is no web-based facility to harvest the addresses.
Every now and then I get an 8 page rant from some joker using this method to "prove" that I gave their email address to spammers. It's always very self-righteous because they are so sure that this is the pefect way to figure out where spammers got their address.
Well, I know firsthand that it simple is not. I have two theories:
1) email scanning. I also operate a semi-public smtp server, and I have it set to log multiple "user does not exist" messages going to the same ip address. At least once a week, there are thousands; "a@x.com" then "b@x.com" and on up into "aacd@x.com".
2) However, they probably aren't going to get longer addresses that way. What seems likely to me is that someone is sniffing traffic at public peering points, or on ISP's networks themselves. It wouldn't be a bad way for some tech to make extra cash.
But no matter what the real reason is, please don't assume that if get spam to a made-up, one-time-use address, that the person you originally gave that address to is at fault. I can assure you that that is simply not the case.
Hmmm... what do you think the odds are that we'll see a bill proposed that would change that? Can't have all that valuable intellectual property just sent out to anyone, now can we?
(I don't think I've ever used the word "intellectual" in reference to broadcast TV content before.)
-b
...They can't see that because they'd all rather have a dime today than a dollar tomorrow. It's not even their fault, really; they're answerable to shareholders, like everyone else.
As long as people see the stock market as a short term, get-rich-quick environment, corporations have to look at their businesses that way. You want long-term stability and decent behavior? Buy into companies that act that way (and realize that you'll make less money in the short term).
There's a lot to be said for US-style capitalism, but it seems we've hit the point of diminishing returns. Companies are incented to rape their customers for short-term profit so big shareholders can get out with a big profit... and then the company goes to hell while the shareholders move on to the next "fast growing" company, which has no choice but to do the same thing (by no choice, I mean that the majority shareholders, including corporate officers, all stand to gain by that behavior).
Rather than just hacking in general, you should identify a particular area where kernal development has lagged. That way, you can make incremental improvements in long-neglected code rather than trying to one-up the preeminent kernel hackers.
For instance, I've noticed that there is a sad lack of resources devoted to incorporating practical jokes into the kernel. Everything is so "write to disk, read from disk, move bytes around, manage processes" boring.
I've got some ideas you might want to consider for your first project. Implement these babies, and I'm sure you'll garner a great deal of attention.
- Fake "blue screen" crashes: When "root" is logged on locally, intermittently go to a blue screen with memory dump info for a few seconds, then switch back to console mode as if nothing happened.
- "Ha! Just Kidding!" memory manager: when an app requests a memory allocation, periodically claim that it has failed for no reason at all. That'll keep 'em laughing forever!
- Unionized thread scheduling: implement the concepts of lunch breas, smoke breaks, and overtime into thread scheduling. Union threads should refuse to work with non-union threads. Periodic strikes for better working conditions, and so on.
Do a good job with this stuff, and I'd be shocked if it wasn't included in the main tree!
Well, I agree that the zero-whatever claim is probably bogus. But this proof here seems equally bogus to me.
If the claim is that a compressor can reduce *any* byte sequence from X to Y bytes, sure, it's a solid proof.
However, if you discard Zero-whatever's claim of compression "random" data (which sounds like marketing speak), and look at reasonable probabilities, it's clear that lossless compression is possible -- otherwise RLE wouldn't work.
So, if you subscribe to the proof above, you have to shoot down not only Zero-whatever, but also RLE, which is silly.
Me, I think Zero-whatever is full of, well, you know. However I'd like to see them debunked on some more solid basis than a literal interpretation of marketing-speak, which is always pretty questionable.
Flash: a sudden rash of brutal murders by IT managers has shocked the country. Already strained relations between managers and tech workers exploded into violence in late December with news the "megabytes" are actually "mibibytes."
Joe, a slashdot reading techie, heads into the IT Manager's office after a staff meeting.
IT Manager: "Hey, Joe, accounting finally approved your requisition for another 512 megs for the development oracle box. Go ahead and order it." Joe the Tech: "But boss, we need mibs, not megs. Those sun machines don't even support megs." IT Manager: "What? What are mibs? Didn't we buy 256 megs for another sun box last week?" Joe the Tech: "Yeah, but now megs are mibs. We need 2 to the power of x bytes, not 10 to the power of x. Megs used to be that, but now they're not." IT Manager: (pulls.357 magnum from desk drawer) "Blam! Blam! Blam!"
Just a little holiday fantasy, folks. Intended to be fictional and humorous. Neither character in any way represents real people, living or dead, and I am not in high school, so I believe it is still legal for me to write violent fantasies.
Cheers -b
In the car? Put down that cell phone!
on
Portable GameCube
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· Score: 2
Why does it have to be used in a car? That would the most annoying place to use it. Why not on a pinick with your girlfriend? Come on you can't wait til Mario Karts comes out for this system..
Ok, I don't usually write comments with inflamatory subjects like this, but I'm really irritated with them.
Two years ago, I gave DwoB $50 because I liked their attitude and cause. I'm not the most charitable person, but I regularly give $50ish to causes that strike me.
I swear to you that DwoB has used that entire $50, and probably much more, to send me paper mail soliciting more money. I've gotten 2 to 3 pieces of USPS mail from them a month for the past two years. It's gotten to where I throw them out without opening them.
Needless to say, they are not getting another dime from me. Maybe one of these days when I'm less irritated I'll deal with calling or writing them so they stop using other people's money to solicit me.
...Michael Colicos, the guy over at qflux.net, has been working on something similar in his day job; in fact, his work will be on the cover of the Novebmer 30 issue of Cell (probably the most pristigous biology journal).
Colicos also has a series of "virtual intelligence" programs and screensavers (win32 only, unfortunately) that do some interesting stuff.
...I've been a server admin for an IRC network that runs 2000+ peak users for the past few years. What do we need to do to get/. attention? Who the f*ck is OPN, anyways?
This topic comes up every so often - what happens when computers fall into the wrong hands? I think that's a "when", not an "if", as that happens with almost everything.
Or
This topic comes up every so often - what happens when architecture falls into the wrong hands? I think that's a "when", not an "if", as that happens with almost everything.
Or
This topic comes up every so often - what happens when encryption falls into the wrong hands? I think that's a "when", not an "if", as that happens with almost everything.
What do you think? Is there any technology that is so inherently dangerous that it's in our best interest to closely guard it? To make it secret?
Me, I don't think so. But I welcome opposing viewpoints.
IADNAL, but it's important to understand the distinction between civil court and criminal court. In criminal cases, they have to prove guilt beyond a resonable doubt. In civil court, they only have to prove the the preponderance of evidence indicates that the defendant is responsible for whatever.
That's how they got OJ, and all the other people who won their criminal cases; if the criminal case doesn't work, you go for a civil suit and ask for very large damages. It doesn't even violate double jeopardy, since the courts have decided that civil cases don't count as being tried.
Welcome to the land of the free, with the most fair legal system in the world!
Cheers
-b
As long as they pass the PCGA (Protection of Children from Government Act) at the same time. Here's my proposed text for the PCGA:
Individual Senators and Representatives may be sued in civil court by any parent who feels their children were harmed by a law that the Congressman voted for. The parents shall be given presumption in all cases and do not have to prove that the law actually produced harm to their child, only that the law could reasonably be considered to have the potential to harm the child.
Slashdot Mirror
Er, actually, I think it's a terrible patent. In fact, I called it "ridiculous" in my post.
My point, which I might not have been clear enough about, was this: this kind of statistical anomaly will happen in any large system. There will be mistakes. The bigger issue with the patent office is all of the bad patents that aren't so obviously ridiculous on their face.
I went on to say that this is a case of getting the right conclusion from the wrong evidence. If the criteria for calling the patent system "non-broken" is that this kind of patent *never* *ever* *ever* happens, we will never have a non-broken system. Because even in the best system, egregious mistakes are occasionally made.
I think this was probably a more clear explanation of my position. Did you get it that time?
And, if you've got a minute, could you translate "And someone is clearly underage such that no common sense has yet prevailed from life experience" into English? I'm not sure whether I agree or not, because I can't decipher it.
-b
Ok, clearly someone is way underage to be submitting stories to slashdot. The patent office handles literally hundreds of thousands of applications a year. I challenge anyone to find that large of a system with an error rate of zero. From internet routing to CNN to squirrels in headlights, with a large enough sample size, you are going to be able to find problems. With this rationalle, everything is broken.
Now, I've got some real objections to the current patent system. I think lots of things are patentable that shouldn't be. However, even if the laws were changed and patents really tightened up, I guarantee you that some weird ones will still slip through.
So, can we please see an end to the /. sport of finding the most ridiculous patents and waving them around as evidence that patents are "broken"? Even if patents were overhauled and the most extreme /. views prevailed, these same examples would still exist. Sometimes, the issue is the bureaucracy and human error, not a "broken" system.
That said, I do think the system is broken; this is just a case of getting the right conclusion from the wrong evidence ("It would be dangerous to jump off a tall building because it's hard to see exactly where you'd land").
Cheers
-b
Fair enough, but you probably don't question it when a farmer says everyone needs food.
The trick is determining whether the guy is telling everyone they need something because he's in the industry, or whether he's in the industry because everyone needs it. Of course, we can only make that distinction in hindsight.
Still, I think you're dead on about Sikorsky. Everyone needs a helicopter? Apparently he didn't pay much attention to the way people drive in two dimensions.
Cheers
-b
Damn, I wasn't even going to post because I was sure someone would have gotten to this first. Apparently not, unless it was moderated into the dirt.
The technology in question works by "modulating the light from the projector" in such a way that it interferes with video cameras "much the same way computer monitors do."
My read is that they're introducing an artificial refresh to movies -- right now, each frame from the movie is put in place, then lit up all at once, then moved out of the way for the next frame. What these bozos want, by my read, is to put each frame in place and then run a horizontal bar of light down the frame, so that in the "real world" only part of the screen is illuminated at any given time.
This would take advantage of the relatively slow refresh rate (sort of) of our eyes, while causing problems for CCD-based stuff, much like computer monitors do (that monitor you're looking at -- it's flashing really quickly).
The thing that sucks here is that it will probably degrade the movie-going experience for *everyone* in the name of anti-piracy. Part of what makes the movie theater experience nice (or at least superior to TV sets) is the way film looks. This will likely degrade that.
Sure, they could try to compensate by upping the frame rate, or scanning each frame two or three times, but the bottom line is: this will change the way movies look. Not dramatically, and Mom and Pop probably either won't notice or will only come away with the subliminal (subluminal?) impression that movies aren't as engrossing as they used to be.
I haven't seen this technology in use, but I've played with film quite a bit, and my expectation is that it will be the equivelent of replacing nice incandescent lights in an office with flourescent lights -- you can still see, noting really *seems* to be flashing, but something is just *not right*.
And that pisses me off, and if my expectation is right, this will likely keep me out of any theater adopting this technology and make me wait for the DVD release, which I will hopefully be able to continue to play on a good DLP or LCD projector, sans refresh.
I suppose the studios won't care, as they'll just get my cash for the DVD rather than through movie tickets, but this could hurt movie theaters as film buffs stay away in droves (and talk down the theater experience to the general populace).
Cheers
-b
I am part owner and work for a porn company, of sorts.
As usual, porn is way ahead of mainstream business. Browse the gnutella network for porn (god knows there's enough of it). Look at what percentage of it is really more of an ad for a site. Or, more unpleasantly, what percentage opens 8 million browser windows when you go to view a movie.
Many porn companies intentionally release a portion of their catalogue, with ads embedded. It's the classic "free sample" gambit; we're betting that if you like these 10 pics, or these 2 videos, that you'll consider paying for more (I use "we" in a loose sense; my company doesn't engage in this practice becasue there's no way to limit minors' access).
So porn has adapted and found a way to make money from technological innovation, while the mainstreamers are still trying to use legislation to turn back the clock and make last century's business models work today. It's not the first time; it won't be the last time.
(When I tire of my career in the adult internet, I'm going to get rich being a consultant who follows the adult industry and then goes and tells everyone else what to do next. I'll be considered a visionary.)
Cheers
-b
What? I've got to disagree here, for two reasons:
1) If slashdot is anything like my company, network bandwidth, while significant, is a small percentage of overhead. Things like salaries do not increase with pageviews. While metrics and pageviews are certainly important to /., I can't believe that their costs would double if pageviews did. I know that my overall operating costs go up about 10% with doubled pageviews.
2) The dot coms didn't crash because they were "selling metered resources at a flat rate." They crashed, largely, because they were operating in the "lose money on every customer, make it up in volume" business model. Some were in metered resources, some weren't. If your aphorism was true, golf clubs wouldn't exist, amusement parks wouldn't offer season passes, and we'd pay by the hour for software usage. Er.
That said, I'm going to go ahead and pay their $5/month. But I think it's a real mistake for a community site to implement a pricing model that discourages pageviews, and which penalizes its most active members. But, hey, I applaud the market experiment. If I find it's costing me too much, I'll just use the site less.
Cheers
-b
It's 2020. You want to watch a movie at home.
Your choices:
1) MegaAssault ("Arnold Schwarzenegger, as an man involuntarily committed to the old folks home, must escape using only the minigun that his old war buddy smuggled in disguised as a tennis racket"). $49.95, one-time-play solid state video device.
2) Something good by an actual artist. $49.95, play as much as you want, keep it and show it to friends when they visit.
Of course, if you go for option 1, you'll have to put a dollar into your SSVD player every fifteen minutes to keep the movie going. You'll also have to clean up the mess after the SSVD melts itself at the end of the movie (don't worry, it's a myth that these things can explode rather than melting, we promise).
Next, you'll have to report to the Entertainment Clinic, where they will perform brain surgery to remove all memories of the movie, so you'll have to buy another copy if you want to think about it.
They'll be monitoring your email, too, to make sure you don't tell anyone anything about the movie (in case the brain wipe didn't take). And one out of 10 times you watch a Hollywood movie, your house will be raided by the police (motto: "To protect and serve Hollywood"), who will search for any illegal copies you might have made.
Option 2 is looking better and better, isn't it?
Cheers
-b
Nah, it's nothing that new or that brave.
Friends and I used to go into computer stores (in the early/mid 80's), buy a box of preformatted disks (DS/DD for only $40/box of 10!), and then one of us would copy off software from the demo machines while the others distracted the salesman types. That was simply the way to get good pirated software (Wordstar, etc) when it took too long to download over 2400bps modems.
Then again, we also used to steal the mouseballs from the first Macs, and load all sorts of wacky homebrew TSR programs on the PC/XT's (and AT's, when they came out).
Cheers
-b
Um, so CD burners should be illegal because they can make exact duplicates of the original? How about CD copying software? How about blank CD's? For fsck's sake, man, how about computers in general? Heck, every time I boot, I'm reading copyrighted Microsoft (sorry, but it's true) material into my system's memory, goddamit!
Do you really believe the Sony/Nintendo/RIAA theory that anything that could possibly be used in an illegal manner should itself be illegal? I'm really curious. From Pentium processers to bleach, I'll bet I can find an illegal use for just about anything. Under this line of reasoning, rocks would be illegal because you could bang someone over the head with them. And don't try to claim "that's different", unless you're willing to argue that copyright violation is so much worse than murder that it merits much more legislative and judicial intervention in peoples' daily lives.
Bottom line: we're dangerously close to living in a system where intellectual property laws and cases operate on a presumption of guilt. That's just messed up.
Cheers
-b
Good god. Read, man, read. Or at least don't hide behind anonymity and cowardice.
Invite only, when applied to my mailing list, means this:
- I participate in several public mailing lists, know people in real life, keep up with old coworkers, you know.
- If someone seems compatible with the list, I'll drop them a note off-list to ask if they would like to be on my little list.
- Members can suggest other people, but it's not as sinister as you make it sound. A member will sometimes drop me a note reccomending someone else by highlighting what they've written on the web or another list. If I like that stuff, I'll invite the new person. Nobody is ever added to the list without a personal invitation and personal request to be from their side.
Is that clear enough? And explained in small enough words? There is no great evil here that you need to crusade against, I promise!
Is it really that hard to believe that someone actually operates a legit mailing list, doesn't sell/trade/disclose addresses, goes beyond even normal double-opt in (I personally read a personal note that they send) and still gets accused of doing so? That there might be another place that addresses are harvested from?
That was my original point. Obviously some people are so locked into their presumptions that they will do mental and symantec gymnastics to prop them up.
Cheers
-b
I'm curious how most mailing lists work, then, if the central server doesn't collect the email addresses of subscribers. You have seen a mailing list before, right?
See my other response to the yokel who jumped to the most negative possible conclusion. I used "opt-in" rather than "invite only" to avoid appearing snooty. Obviously, I should have just been blunt.
Cheers
-b
This was moderated as funny, and it is. Some people are just *looking* for something to be self-righteous about.
I operate an invite-only mailing list with about 500 recipients. You, sir, are not getting the next invite (one of the requirements is being able to carry on a civil debate, with at least decent reasoning).
By semi-public SMTP server, I meant one that only accepts incoming mail from certain networks. Poor mail server admin? Where in the world did you come up with that?
I guess you're just looking for something to complain about, and the word "moron" probably leaps to mind because you hear it all the time. No coincidence, that.
Cheers
-b
This is very, very simpleminded and outright wrong.
I operate a service that collects emails for a private mailing list. I am the only one with access to the database. There is no web-based facility to harvest the addresses.
Every now and then I get an 8 page rant from some joker using this method to "prove" that I gave their email address to spammers. It's always very self-righteous because they are so sure that this is the pefect way to figure out where spammers got their address.
Well, I know firsthand that it simple is not. I have two theories:
1) email scanning. I also operate a semi-public smtp server, and I have it set to log multiple "user does not exist" messages going to the same ip address. At least once a week, there are thousands; "a@x.com" then "b@x.com" and on up into "aacd@x.com".
2) However, they probably aren't going to get longer addresses that way. What seems likely to me is that someone is sniffing traffic at public peering points, or on ISP's networks themselves. It wouldn't be a bad way for some tech to make extra cash.
But no matter what the real reason is, please don't assume that if get spam to a made-up, one-time-use address, that the person you originally gave that address to is at fault. I can assure you that that is simply not the case.
Cheers
-b
Hmmm... what do you think the odds are that we'll see a bill proposed that would change that? Can't have all that valuable intellectual property just sent out to anyone, now can we?
(I don't think I've ever used the word "intellectual" in reference to broadcast TV content before.)
-b
...They can't see that because they'd all rather have a dime today than a dollar tomorrow. It's not even their fault, really; they're answerable to shareholders, like everyone else.
As long as people see the stock market as a short term, get-rich-quick environment, corporations have to look at their businesses that way. You want long-term stability and decent behavior? Buy into companies that act that way (and realize that you'll make less money in the short term).
There's a lot to be said for US-style capitalism, but it seems we've hit the point of diminishing returns. Companies are incented to rape their customers for short-term profit so big shareholders can get out with a big profit... and then the company goes to hell while the shareholders move on to the next "fast growing" company, which has no choice but to do the same thing (by no choice, I mean that the majority shareholders, including corporate officers, all stand to gain by that behavior).
Cheers
-b
Rather than just hacking in general, you should identify a particular area where kernal development has lagged. That way, you can make incremental improvements in long-neglected code rather than trying to one-up the preeminent kernel hackers.
For instance, I've noticed that there is a sad lack of resources devoted to incorporating practical jokes into the kernel. Everything is so "write to disk, read from disk, move bytes around, manage processes" boring.
I've got some ideas you might want to consider for your first project. Implement these babies, and I'm sure you'll garner a great deal of attention.
- Fake "blue screen" crashes: When "root" is logged on locally, intermittently go to a blue screen with memory dump info for a few seconds, then switch back to console mode as if nothing happened.
- "Ha! Just Kidding!" memory manager: when an app requests a memory allocation, periodically claim that it has failed for no reason at all. That'll keep 'em laughing forever!
- Unionized thread scheduling: implement the concepts of lunch breas, smoke breaks, and overtime into thread scheduling. Union threads should refuse to work with non-union threads. Periodic strikes for better working conditions, and so on.
Do a good job with this stuff, and I'd be shocked if it wasn't included in the main tree!
Cheers
-b
Well, I agree that the zero-whatever claim is probably bogus. But this proof here seems equally bogus to me.
If the claim is that a compressor can reduce *any* byte sequence from X to Y bytes, sure, it's a solid proof.
However, if you discard Zero-whatever's claim of compression "random" data (which sounds like marketing speak), and look at reasonable probabilities, it's clear that lossless compression is possible -- otherwise RLE wouldn't work.
So, if you subscribe to the proof above, you have to shoot down not only Zero-whatever, but also RLE, which is silly.
Me, I think Zero-whatever is full of, well, you know. However I'd like to see them debunked on some more solid basis than a literal interpretation of marketing-speak, which is always pretty questionable.
Cheers
-b
Flash: a sudden rash of brutal murders by IT managers has shocked the country. Already strained relations between managers and tech workers exploded into violence in late December with news the "megabytes" are actually "mibibytes."
Just a little holiday fantasy, folks. Intended to be fictional and humorous. Neither character in any way represents real people, living or dead, and I am not in high school, so I believe it is still legal for me to write violent fantasies.
Cheers
-b
Why does it have to be used in a car? That would the most annoying place to use it. Why not on a pinick with your girlfriend? Come on you can't wait til Mario Karts comes out for this system..
Ok, I don't usually write comments with inflamatory subjects like this, but I'm really irritated with them.
Two years ago, I gave DwoB $50 because I liked their attitude and cause. I'm not the most charitable person, but I regularly give $50ish to causes that strike me.
I swear to you that DwoB has used that entire $50, and probably much more, to send me paper mail soliciting more money. I've gotten 2 to 3 pieces of USPS mail from them a month for the past two years. It's gotten to where I throw them out without opening them.
Needless to say, they are not getting another dime from me. Maybe one of these days when I'm less irritated I'll deal with calling or writing them so they stop using other people's money to solicit me.
Cheers
-b
...Michael Colicos, the guy over at qflux.net, has been working on something similar in his day job; in fact, his work will be on the cover of the Novebmer 30 issue of Cell (probably the most pristigous biology journal).
Colicos also has a series of "virtual intelligence" programs and screensavers (win32 only, unfortunately) that do some interesting stuff.
Cheers
-b
...I've been a server admin for an IRC network that runs 2000+ peak users for the past few years. What do we need to do to get /. attention? Who the f*ck is OPN, anyways?
Confused
-b
Try
Or
Or
What do you think? Is there any technology that is so inherently dangerous that it's in our best interest to closely guard it? To make it secret?
Me, I don't think so. But I welcome opposing viewpoints.
Cheers
-b
IADNAL, but it's important to understand the distinction between civil court and criminal court. In criminal cases, they have to prove guilt beyond a resonable doubt. In civil court, they only have to prove the the preponderance of evidence indicates that the defendant is responsible for whatever. That's how they got OJ, and all the other people who won their criminal cases; if the criminal case doesn't work, you go for a civil suit and ask for very large damages. It doesn't even violate double jeopardy, since the courts have decided that civil cases don't count as being tried. Welcome to the land of the free, with the most fair legal system in the world! Cheers -b
As long as they pass the PCGA (Protection of Children from Government Act) at the same time. Here's my proposed text for the PCGA:
What do you think? Unanimous support in Congress?
Cheers
-b