Or, for instance, let downloaders agree they won't sell your music. The big labels aren't going to distribute it for free, but P2P users will.
If you want to stop the P2P distibution as well (or at least make it illegal), let them agree to not distribute your music at all. Since they can point out your website to their friends, they can generate more hits to your webpage.
You can also put an ad in the ID3 tag of the mp3's you offer for download:)
Guess what, most people just want to look at web pages. Period. No customization.
Using FireFox adds NO value for them, since they can view all pages already, view one page at a time and hence don't need tabs, and give nothing for something invisible like security.
What bullshit. Religion and science can mix perfectly. If they wouldn't, why are so many of the great scientists of the past religious? They don't bite each other since they focus on different things. Its only when you let one dictate the other when things go wrong.
The whole thing is starting to be a media hype here in Holland. The news sites (including big dutch ones like NOS and AD) all seem to copy the information from the same sources, but nowhere is his proof actually verified.
Some sites falsely claim he can find the roots of/any mathematical function/, some sites falsely claim/formulas have been found for polynomials up to grade 5/. They clearly do not know what they're talking about.
He himself is quoted as saying to have discovered the new quadratic formula but which is applicable to all degrees. This is quite strange when considering Abel's theory, and the fact he uses 2 pages to describe his solution, one of them filled with a visual description of the matrices he uses.
It seems like noone bothered to call a university to verify it; also, the mathematical world knows nothing about this proof and it has been on the schools site for weeks (apparently). It all seems totally overhyped.
Re:Factoring is not known to be NP-complete
on
The End of Encryption?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
What about the NP-complete Mine Sweeper? NP-complete problems in Tetris?
Factoring is in the intersection of NP and coNP, and thus is (with the current knowledge) probably easier than NP-complete problems. Proving P=NP makes NP-complete problems easier, but Factoring never was that difficult.
It draws its strength partially due to the fact that it uses very large numbers. So even a polynomial algorithm (if it has a high degree) may not be fast enough in practice if a key can be generated much faster.
proof of P=NP without supplying an algorithm
on
The End of Encryption?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
A proof of P=NP could merely show there must exist a P algorithm for every NP problem. It doesn't necessarily have to give such an algorithm, only show its theoretical existence. While such a proof would prove P=NP, it would still be of little practicle use.
Only once such a conversion algorithm is found then, yes, every NP problem can be actually solved in polynomial time.
Can't poll the PC and find out that sol.exe is up all day?
Because that doesn't show the difference between a) running it in the background and actually playing only one or two games while waiting for something to be downloaded and b) playing it all day long.
If you desperately want usage statistics, you probably need something in the range of screenshots or better. Solitaire doesn't use any CPU power that will show up in polls if they aren't at tiny regular intervals.
Yes, because that might make the underlaying applications (IE, Windows) obsolete.
That is a big potential loss on one hand, and there is no gain for MS on the other. IE is old but still dominating the desktop.. why risk changing that? Every plugin supplier will support IE anyway.
Not only is IE a free product, noone forces Microsoft to provide patches to its faulty software. The EULA states it is provided/as is/. The user agreed on that. If it sucks, nothing stops the user from switching to other products. But the user shouldn't hold MS responsible for the laziness of the user to stick to its sucking software and not try anything else.
Should open source programmers be blamed if they dont fix the bugs in their software? Should they be sued? (Ofcourse, the argument 'you can fix it yourself' doesn't hold, since most people do not know how to program).
The blame doesn't rest with stubborn users who refuse to switch.
Why not? Very good alternatives are available, and you're even ready to install and configure for them?
If they don't even want to try them, then they shouldn't bitch about the spyware etc at all. They choose not to seriously look at alternatives. You can hardly blame MS for that.
Very few sites actually need IE (internet banking here in the Netherlands is one example). For those sites, if they use them, keep IE around.
But what process is then going to be used to weed out the crap? Surely not many researchers want to waste time reading yet another 'article' ridden with errors because it was written by some hobbyist.
On the Internet, it is hard to distinguish good and bad/wrong texts without evaluating everything yourself, which takes/alot/ of time on complicated scientific claims. Journals (largely) do that for you.
So if everyone publishes on the net, companies would arise filtering the information off the net, or allowing submissions. If the company performs is good enough, they will live on submissions alone without having to weed through the pile of crap. Hence, journals are reborn in basically the same way they exist now.
Microsoft's monopoly lives on the tight MS-Windows Windows Apps connection. Severing this link threatens the users' need of buying MS Windows to support its apps. Having this link is 'one of the reasons to stick to MS Windows'.
If all software would run under Linux, including their installers, MS Windows would soon cease to sell: it is not needed anymore. This means no more forced/encouraged bundling of WMP/IE/Office on the desktop, slowly moving in alternatives installed by default.
Users might actually like the (sometimes free) alternatives, leaving MS with less sold apps. This also means their proprietary formats will loose momentum, one of the reasons people 'have to stick to MS Office, etc'.
Sounds like you run critical apps on a platform, both made by companies either of which you do not trust to make their software work correctly? If the apps can't stand patching OS security holes, the app doesn't function correctly. If you do not trust MS to make a proper OS or patches to their own software, you shouldn't use their software either.
Maybe Windows isn't the ideal platform to use, especially if it can be brought down quite easily by such a worm?
What will you do when the next vulnerability comes out and a patch arrives, say, within the hour? Test for weeks and see your system go down by the next worm? This question seems quite independant of the number of employees in the security and virus teams.
How does management think about all this? The company is basically a sitting duck.
1. Remove IE/WMP etc from Windows 2. Lower the prices of Windows by, say, 1 euro (this step can easily be omitted). 3. Sell IE/WMP on a seperate CD for, say, 1 euro. Include tools basically essential to do anything on this CD. Maybe they try even to include GUI parts, which surely aren't part of an OS as X-Windows users can easily point out.
Ofcourse, competition could theoretically assemble Open Source CDs for 1 euro offering the same. But which average user would trust an assembled bunch of free software over a compiled CD created by the maker of the OS? Joe couldn't care less about Free Software Movements, but he knows and wants IE, Word and Windows Explorer.
Since one cannot run IE/WMP without Windows anyway and computer stores are surely going to sell them, the situation is the same in practice but now the user has to insert a CD after the first boot.
Ofcourse bash can do it as well using the proper constructions. That is not the point. Care should be taken not to view bash as a golden hammer when it comes to shell scripting. The same goes for 'ftsh', ofcourse. It won't try to replace bash for every script out there.
The author merely thinks it would be nice to have a shell in which such fault-tolerant constructions are natural by design. Just to save people headaches when writing simple scripts which are there to get some job done, not to waste time dealing with every single possible failure and time-out by hand.
[quote] So the question is: Does the US court have jurisdiction of these crimes, if they did occur in Australia? [/quote]
Basically he's running an organisation which is active in the US and is committing crimes there. As such, I can imagine this is why the US court thinks he comitted crimes in america.
(Western) countries exchange people wanted in other (western) countries. The policy if this is even while his/her crimes wouldn't be a crime in their home country, seems to differ per country. It's basically a choice between 'harboring criminals' in the eyes of the other country (US) and keeping the other country from doing just that when Australia wants to get criminals from the US.
Apparently, either Australia agrees his activities are criminal, or they extradite him based on US request and laws instead of their own.
In my country (The Netherlands) at least, one doesn't get extradited for doing stuff which would be legal out here. So we might for instance 'harbour drug criminals' while we do not think that is the case.
a) they give shit about tabbed browsing b) they give shit about security c) GoogleBar kills the popups as well d) they do not have to install or configure it e) it displays all pages correctly
Mozilla just does not offer enough extra to make the switch into the unknown, for most users.
Mozilla should provide something substantially better now that IE isn't being updated. Otherwise, they die in the next round when new Windows+IE do provide more.
Sigh. There are tons of simple and cheap phones and you know it. Even non-mobile phones are still produced and sold every day. Noone is forcing you to buy this product.
If you don't like technological progress, don't read slashdot. Or does 'because we can' only apply to some useless hobby open source project?
Technology creates uses which in turn inspires technology. If not, we'd be in the stone age still, clubbing bears/women and dragging them to our caves.
[quote]
"But it is two steps up and one step down as we are segregating males and females. It's saying that the girls aren't as good as the males." [/quote] Why? There can be both single gender and mixed competitions right?
Besides, in many fields which emulate some kind of war-like tactics, we men seem to be genetically at the advantage (on average, ofcourse). This is so in many sports as well as games like chess, etc.
If this advantage does not extend to CS, the single gender games will die from natural causes anyway.
A bigger problem is enforcing single gender games over the internet, imho.
Linux is secure... out of the box. However without a skilled administrator, it's very easy to open up LOTS of holes.
Without a skilled administrator, the same goes for Windows though. Apparently, 'secure out of the box' doesn't make that much difference: it requires skill to make a box securely provide a service. Even though Linux claims superior security, it appears an active target for hackers. Apparently more skill is needed than is present amongst the wide installation base of Linux.
It seems better to draw lessons on security rather than ignore any studies which lessens such claims. Apparently, it is either too easy to create an unsecure system and/or too hard to keep installed kernels updated.
Due to growing deployment of Linux, such problems arise, just like they did with the growth of Windows. In server land, it seems Linux is now the one having these problems.
At any rate, the figure 'if you've got a hacked system, 80% chance it's Linux' does create some responsibility towards the maintainers of the OS.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, for instance, let downloaders agree they won't sell your music. The big labels aren't going to distribute it for free, but P2P users will.
:)
If you want to stop the P2P distibution as well (or at least make it illegal), let them agree to not distribute your music at all. Since they can point out your website to their friends, they can generate more hits to your webpage.
You can also put an ad in the ID3 tag of the mp3's you offer for download
Guess what, most people just want to look at web pages. Period. No customization.
Using FireFox adds NO value for them, since they can view all pages already, view one page at a time and hence don't need tabs, and give nothing for something invisible like security.
What bullshit. Religion and science can mix perfectly. If they wouldn't, why are so many of the great scientists of the past religious? They don't bite each other since they focus on different things. Its only when you let one dictate the other when things go wrong.
The whole thing is starting to be a media hype here in Holland. The news sites (including big dutch ones like NOS and AD) all seem to copy the information from the same sources, but nowhere is his proof actually verified.
/any mathematical function/, some sites falsely claim /formulas have been found for polynomials up to grade 5/. They clearly do not know what they're talking about.
Some sites falsely claim he can find the roots of
He himself is quoted as saying to have discovered the new quadratic formula but which is applicable to all degrees. This is quite strange when considering Abel's theory, and the fact he uses 2 pages to describe his solution, one of them filled with a visual description of the matrices he uses.
It seems like noone bothered to call a university to verify it; also, the mathematical world knows nothing about this proof and it has been on the schools site for weeks (apparently). It all seems totally overhyped.
What about the NP-complete Mine Sweeper? NP-complete problems in Tetris?
Factoring is in the intersection of NP and coNP, and thus is (with the current knowledge) probably easier than NP-complete problems. Proving P=NP makes NP-complete problems easier, but Factoring never was that difficult.
It draws its strength partially due to the fact that it uses very large numbers. So even a polynomial algorithm (if it has a high degree) may not be fast enough in practice if a key can be generated much faster.
A proof of P=NP could merely show there must exist a P algorithm for every NP problem. It doesn't necessarily have to give such an algorithm, only show its theoretical existence. While such a proof would prove P=NP, it would still be of little practicle use.
Only once such a conversion algorithm is found then, yes, every NP problem can be actually solved in polynomial time.
Can't poll the PC and find out that sol.exe is up all day?
Because that doesn't show the difference between a) running it in the background and actually playing only one or two games while waiting for something to be downloaded and b) playing it all day long.
If you desperately want usage statistics, you probably need something in the range of screenshots or better. Solitaire doesn't use any CPU power that will show up in polls if they aren't at tiny regular intervals.
Yes, because that might make the underlaying applications (IE, Windows) obsolete.
That is a big potential loss on one hand, and there is no gain for MS on the other. IE is old but still dominating the desktop.. why risk changing that? Every plugin supplier will support IE anyway.
Maybe the university didn't want to take the chance that this final-year-student would trash three Volvos..
Not only is IE a free product, noone forces Microsoft to provide patches to its faulty software. The EULA states it is provided /as is/. The user agreed on that. If it sucks, nothing stops the user from switching to other products. But the user shouldn't hold MS responsible for the laziness of the user to stick to its sucking software and not try anything else.
Should open source programmers be blamed if they dont fix the bugs in their software? Should they be sued? (Ofcourse, the argument 'you can fix it yourself' doesn't hold, since most people do not know how to program).
The blame doesn't rest with stubborn users who refuse to switch.
Why not? Very good alternatives are available, and you're even ready to install and configure for them?
If they don't even want to try them, then they shouldn't bitch about the spyware etc at all. They choose not to seriously look at alternatives. You can hardly blame MS for that.
Very few sites actually need IE (internet banking here in the Netherlands is one example). For those sites, if they use them, keep IE around.
But what process is then going to be used to weed out the crap? Surely not many researchers want to waste time reading yet another 'article' ridden with errors because it was written by some hobbyist.
/alot/ of time on complicated scientific claims. Journals (largely) do that for you.
On the Internet, it is hard to distinguish good and bad/wrong texts without evaluating everything yourself, which takes
So if everyone publishes on the net, companies would arise filtering the information off the net, or allowing submissions. If the company performs is good enough, they will live on submissions alone without having to weed through the pile of crap. Hence, journals are reborn in basically the same way they exist now.
Microsoft's monopoly lives on the tight MS-Windows Windows Apps connection. Severing this link threatens the users' need of buying MS Windows to support its apps. Having this link is 'one of the reasons to stick to MS Windows'.
If all software would run under Linux, including their installers, MS Windows would soon cease to sell: it is not needed anymore. This means no more forced/encouraged bundling of WMP/IE/Office on the desktop, slowly moving in alternatives installed by default.
Users might actually like the (sometimes free) alternatives, leaving MS with less sold apps. This also means their proprietary formats will loose momentum, one of the reasons people 'have to stick to MS Office, etc'.
Sounds like you run critical apps on a platform, both made by companies either of which you do not trust to make their software work correctly? If the apps can't stand patching OS security holes, the app doesn't function correctly. If you do not trust MS to make a proper OS or patches to their own software, you shouldn't use their software either.
Maybe Windows isn't the ideal platform to use, especially if it can be brought down quite easily by such a worm?
What will you do when the next vulnerability comes out and a patch arrives, say, within the hour? Test for weeks and see your system go down by the next worm? This question seems quite independant of the number of employees in the security and virus teams.
How does management think about all this? The company is basically a sitting duck.
..isn't a seperate country but part of Great Britain since 1707? Welcome back to earth..
Isn't that forbidden by DMCA? :)
So what stops MS from doing this in practice:
1. Remove IE/WMP etc from Windows
2. Lower the prices of Windows by, say, 1 euro (this step can easily be omitted).
3. Sell IE/WMP on a seperate CD for, say, 1 euro. Include tools basically essential to do anything on this CD. Maybe they try even to include GUI parts, which surely aren't part of an OS as X-Windows users can easily point out.
Ofcourse, competition could theoretically assemble Open Source CDs for 1 euro offering the same. But which average user would trust an assembled bunch of free software over a compiled CD created by the maker of the OS? Joe couldn't care less about Free Software Movements, but he knows and wants IE, Word and Windows Explorer.
Since one cannot run IE/WMP without Windows anyway and computer stores are surely going to sell them, the situation is the same in practice but now the user has to insert a CD after the first boot.
Ofcourse bash can do it as well using the proper constructions. That is not the point. Care should be taken not to view bash as a golden hammer when it comes to shell scripting. The same goes for 'ftsh', ofcourse. It won't try to replace bash for every script out there.
The author merely thinks it would be nice to have a shell in which such fault-tolerant constructions are natural by design. Just to save people headaches when writing simple scripts which are there to get some job done, not to waste time dealing with every single possible failure and time-out by hand.
[quote]
So the question is: Does the US court have jurisdiction of these crimes, if they did occur in Australia?
[/quote]
Basically he's running an organisation which is active in the US and is committing crimes there. As such, I can imagine this is why the US court thinks he comitted crimes in america.
(Western) countries exchange people wanted in other (western) countries. The policy if this is even while his/her crimes wouldn't be a crime in their home country, seems to differ per country. It's basically a choice between 'harboring criminals' in the eyes of the other country (US) and keeping the other country from doing just that when Australia wants to get criminals from the US.
Apparently, either Australia agrees his activities are criminal, or they extradite him based on US request and laws instead of their own.
In my country (The Netherlands) at least, one doesn't get extradited for doing stuff which would be legal out here. So we might for instance 'harbour drug criminals' while we do not think that is the case.
Well the creation and passing of these laws as well as the laws against smoking in public areas certainly got my attention.
:P
But maybe that was the main point of passing them in the first place: there's more were this came from! Vote against us or die
3) The code is likely just plain bad. It may need a major rewrite before others in the community could start to contribute.
:)
That hasn't stopped people from contributing to gcc though
Maybe users like IE because
a) they give shit about tabbed browsing
b) they give shit about security
c) GoogleBar kills the popups as well
d) they do not have to install or configure it
e) it displays all pages correctly
Mozilla just does not offer enough extra to make the switch into the unknown, for most users.
Mozilla should provide something substantially better now that IE isn't being updated. Otherwise, they die in the next round when new Windows+IE do provide more.
Sigh. There are tons of simple and cheap phones and you know it. Even non-mobile phones are still produced and sold every day. Noone is forcing you to buy this product.
If you don't like technological progress, don't read slashdot. Or does 'because we can' only apply to some useless hobby open source project?
Technology creates uses which in turn inspires technology. If not, we'd be in the stone age still, clubbing bears/women and dragging them to our caves.
[quote]
"But it is two steps up and one step down as we are segregating males and females. It's saying that the girls aren't as good as the males."
[/quote]
Why? There can be both single gender and mixed competitions right?
Besides, in many fields which emulate some kind of war-like tactics, we men seem to be genetically at the advantage (on average, ofcourse). This is so in many sports as well as games like chess, etc.
If this advantage does not extend to CS, the single gender games will die from natural causes anyway.
A bigger problem is enforcing single gender games over the internet, imho.
Linux is secure... out of the box. However without a skilled administrator, it's very easy to open up LOTS of holes.
Without a skilled administrator, the same goes for Windows though. Apparently, 'secure out of the box' doesn't make that much difference: it requires skill to make a box securely provide a service. Even though Linux claims superior security, it appears an active target for hackers. Apparently more skill is needed than is present amongst the wide installation base of Linux.
It seems better to draw lessons on security rather than ignore any studies which lessens such claims. Apparently, it is either too easy to create an unsecure system and/or too hard to keep installed kernels updated.
Due to growing deployment of Linux, such problems arise, just like they did with the growth of Windows. In server land, it seems Linux is now the one having these problems.
At any rate, the figure 'if you've got a hacked system, 80% chance it's Linux' does create some responsibility towards the maintainers of the OS.