Yeah, and then they could interact with the *real* Holy Grail of digicams: cheap removeable CCD-like devices that act as both film and storage. Think optical-magetic sandwich with electricly activated sensitivity--no need to worry about exposing the "film", and you get the ability to choose resolution, sensitivity, price, and other sensor characteristics within the same camera. Put that in an affordable SLR body. OK... umm.. maybe that's more than one grail...
Oh, BTW, please copy this and spread it around as prior art in case some jerk tries to patent the very concept of doing this. It's so bloody obvious.
Not sure about the attribution. The first time I ever saw it was when Phil Plait used it at the University of Virginia. I got the attribution from Google, but Google's news archives also show Phil Plait as having the earliest USENET posting with that sig. Does anybody know of an earlier usage in some other medium?
Should I just stop using resources altogether (i.e. die?)
Only if you agree to be burried at sea or without a casket.
Do you know how much polyester and stuff is in a modern casket? And don't get me started on cremation. Just think of the awful ammount of fossil fuels used, not to mention greenhouse gasses that you'll release if you do that.
No way on this dying thing. You'd better keep living... or else!
Its insane that you can patent "Doing something someone already did, but doing it to THIS instead of THAT."
OK then it's insane that you can patent...
...using a cable to control a control a fixed-wing aircraft.
...using a weight to prevent a boiler explosion.
...using a centrifugal device to regulate a steam engine.
In fact, aren't most patents just a case of using X on Y, where the combination of X and Y were never thought of before?
That's the key though--never thought of before. Also, it has to be "non obvious". For example, using a wrench to pound nails is pretty obvious to anyone who has ever needed to hang a picture and had a wrench handy but not a hammer.
Let me state uniquivocally that applying strong encryption to ZIP is about as obvious as you can get. If I were a patent examiner not only would I not grant the patent, but I'd stamp REJECTED on their foreheads as well as their applications and tell them not to come back for at least a year.
It would be nice to think that we could weed out junk patents by applying your "no X used to Y" rule, but alas we can't. We still have to use judgement.
On The Internet Nobody Knows you aren't half a dozen Indian "Java Programmers". Not that I would condone or participate in such a deception; but I have to admit, the prospect of multiplying crappy 3rd world wages into something that could actually provide a living in NY or LA is intriguing.
Has anybody ever tried it?
How much of what of what's done on these jobs is redundant, boiler-plate kind of stuff? I would think that most outsourcing firms have a good library of templates and stuff that they use when they write your "custom code". "Sir, that will take 3 coders at least 5 days". Then, when he gets off the phone: "Sanjay, pull from network library 604!"
I turned on Fox news and their live shot showed just a whisp of smoke. Looked like a kitchen or electrical fire maybe. No big deal.
I certainly wouldn't say the smoke was "billowing". That's just sensationalist journalism.
DirectFB Inherently Insecure?
on
Qt On DirectFB
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Not being familiar with it, the first thing I did was read the FAQ:
Q: Whenever I try to start a DirectFB application, I get the error message
Error opening/dev/tty0 A: You have to be root to run DirectFB apps. The main reason is that only root is allowed to change virtual terminals.
So. In order to get the supposed benefits of DFB, you have to run apps as root? I guess maybe you could log on as a user and su the DFB apps, but that's a pain. Why should a graphics lib muck up security? That seems inherently broken to me. If it really just abstracts graphics then there should be no problem with user apps running it.
This isn't really my area of expertise. Perhaps there's something I'm missing. Can anybody clue me in?
10 Spoof MSN Client 20 Spawn as many clients as possible 30 If packet for client contains '$' GOTO 50 40 GOTO 30 50 Profit!
I Have Something Like This Built Into My House
on
Picking Up the Pieces
·
· Score: 1
It's called a fireplace.
Actually, we don't use it for that purpose very often, but when we do it's been found to be quite effective. Just don't use it for items that might produce noxious and/or flue-clogging fumes when burned; such as credit cards.
For my old credit cards, I manually shred them with scissors. I'm careful to cut through the number, name, expiration date, etc. I then distribute the pieces into different garbage cans about the house. Some, such as the infrequently used laundry and bathroom cans, won't send their contents to the curb for weeks after the most frequently used can (in the kitchen).
Even if some thief was determined enough to reassemble my card, he would be quite disappointed to find that there is often no more than $2000 of available credit on it.
And the spud-raisin debates continue. Forget the dictionary, OK? What about Miss Manners?
If the musicians were in the room, could you upload it and comfortably let them know what you are doing?
For jam-bands like Phish and a few fringe artists you probably could (at least for some of their songs). That's sharing. For everybody else it's not sharing. The dictionary may not say it, but sharing implies a mutual agreement between all parties involved. Sharing as we know it is a polite activity between friends. Uploading an artist's music against their will, and in the anonymity of your computer room is nothing like the sharing we were taught in kindergarden.
Phish shares their concerts. Fans appropriate Metallica.
appropriate
1. to take for one's own or exclusive use.
2. to take improperly, as without permission
3. to set aside for a specific use or a certain person.
File sharing is not being made a felony. Phish can share all the music they want. File appropriation is the felony.
A less drastic step would be to simply levy a state tax on non-refillable cartridges and/or printers that use them. States levy widely varrying taxes on stuff all the time. Virginia's tobacco tax is a heck of a lot lower than say... New York's.
So if the issue comes up, they should just re-write it as a really high tax on printers that use non-refillable cartridges. There's precedent for the tax, and precedent for the tax widely varying from state-to-state. However, I don't think there is precedent for the tax being so high that it effectively kills the market. Anybody know?
I tried the exact URL, and Google hadn't cached it yet. However, typing "parallel computing" filetype:ppt into Google got a lot of hits, which may be mirrors of this material.
This doesn't make any sense to me. I'm on 28.8, and 20 results from Google still come up instantly. Bandwidth might be an issue for the linked pages, but certainly not the search results. Even when I was on 14.4, back when Yahoo! was the hot search engine, it was no problem.
So, what if these guys are on 300 baud and they get compressed search results via... e-mail??? The delay waiting for results to navigate e-mail systems probably negates the savings from the compression. Why not send compressed results over HTTP using a web-browser like application? Of course then you are still faced with bandwidth issues on the links you follow.
It just doesn't make sense to me, unless they write a server-side proxy that intelligently filters Flash, popups, Java, superfluous graphics, audio, and other useless stuff that "web designers" like to use. The proxy could present pages in such a way as to offer users the option of downloading blocked files when the AI fails. That just cries out for a Mozilla mod or some other kind of custom browser; certainly not an e-mail client.
, we will also promote the distribution and adoption of Mozilla applications and technologies. In addition, we will raise funds to ensure Mozilla's long-term survival
We will organize as a tax exempt charity to provide a nice tax writeof for AOL-TW, while continuing to further their corporate objectives against Microsoft.
To be fair, they do mention that they are seeking 501(c)(3) status at the bottom of the release.
Anybody else sense a trend? Open Source "charitable" orgs as a corporate tax shelter? Once again, you have to hand it to RMS--he was at the cutting edge on this. The FSF was perhaps the first Open Source nonprofit. Something like Mozilla.org will allow corporations to obtain the tax writeof without having to buy into the political stand of the Free Software movement.
It's a win-win for corporations. They can place the unprofitable portions of their business into the nonprofit. They can influence the nonprofits with their money. They can effectively employee people for less than minimum wage.
It will be interesting to see how long it takes legislators to wake up to this, and call for charitable org reform. I wager that at least one generation (20 years) will pass and get fat off these exemptions before anything happens.
Napster--Quintessentially Dot-bomb?
on
All The Rave
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Pitchman: I have a 19-year old programmer who wants to promote a system that distributes other people's copyrighted works and will probably give rise to all kinds of troublesome legal issues, but he does it on the Internet so it's really cutting edge.
Wow. I have a whole userid devoted to hating me. I guess I've arrived. Not sure what milestones come after this... Imposters? Interviews? Phone calls late at night? A magnanimous patron? Bodyguards? A highly modified black Transam? German women who want my body?
Oh well. I guess I shouldn't be too flattered. Your.sig looks like one that somebody else uses, and the mod up to 2 on such a fresh account is supicious. Odds are you're just some loser on break from Podunk U who used your other account to moderate up iendedi.
Also, you come off like a real crackpot. As a matter of policy, istartedi will no longer respond to iendedi.
OK, instead of trying to be funny I'll just make my point dead on: Regardless of what they say, how can you trust them? There's an inherent conflict of interest in the question. If they say they don't profile at all, would you believe that? Would they reveal their profile?
I think the only honest answer they could give your question is "no comment".
My apologies for implying that you are looking for tactical information to commit IP crimes.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, and then they could interact with the *real* Holy Grail of digicams: cheap removeable CCD-like devices that act as both film and storage. Think optical-magetic sandwich with electricly activated sensitivity--no need to worry about exposing the "film", and you get the ability to choose resolution, sensitivity, price, and other sensor characteristics within the same camera. Put that in an affordable SLR body. OK... umm.. maybe that's more than one grail...
Oh, BTW, please copy this and spread it around as prior art in case some jerk tries to patent the very concept of doing this. It's so bloody obvious.
Not sure about the attribution. The first time I ever saw it was when Phil Plait used it at the University of Virginia. I got the attribution from Google, but Google's news archives also show Phil Plait as having the earliest USENET posting with that sig. Does anybody know of an earlier usage in some other medium?
Should I just stop using resources altogether (i.e. die?)
Only if you agree to be burried at sea or without a casket.
Do you know how much polyester and stuff is in a modern casket? And don't get me started on cremation. Just think of the awful ammount of fossil fuels used, not to mention greenhouse gasses that you'll release if you do that.
No way on this dying thing. You'd better keep living... or else!
"To escape from our own island, we must each metaphorically kill our own Gilligan" ----John Tornblad.
I ground my own mirror and made an amazing discovery.
The Moon is actually football-shaped, and slightly blurred at the ends!
Those fools in the mainstream science community just refuse to believe me though.
Its insane that you can patent "Doing something someone already did, but doing it to THIS instead of THAT."
OK then it's insane that you can patent...
...using a cable to control a control a fixed-wing aircraft.
...using a weight to prevent a boiler explosion.
...using a centrifugal device to regulate a steam engine.
In fact, aren't most patents just a case of using X on Y, where the combination of X and Y were never thought of before?
That's the key though--never thought of before. Also, it has to be "non obvious". For example, using a wrench to pound nails is pretty obvious to anyone who has ever needed to hang a picture and had a wrench handy but not a hammer.
Let me state uniquivocally that applying strong encryption to ZIP is about as obvious as you can get. If I were a patent examiner not only would I not grant the patent, but I'd stamp REJECTED on their foreheads as well as their applications and tell them not to come back for at least a year.
It would be nice to think that we could weed out junk patents by applying your "no X used to Y" rule, but alas we can't. We still have to use judgement.
My last apartment was soooo small...
Nah. Too easy.
On The Internet Nobody Knows you aren't half a dozen Indian "Java Programmers". Not that I would condone or participate in such a deception; but I have to admit, the prospect of multiplying crappy 3rd world wages into something that could actually provide a living in NY or LA is intriguing.
Has anybody ever tried it?
How much of what of what's done on these jobs is redundant, boiler-plate kind of stuff? I would think that most outsourcing firms have a good library of templates and stuff that they use when they write your "custom code". "Sir, that will take 3 coders at least 5 days". Then, when he gets off the phone: "Sanjay, pull from network library 604!"
I turned on Fox news and their live shot showed just a whisp of smoke. Looked like a kitchen or electrical fire maybe. No big deal.
I certainly wouldn't say the smoke was "billowing". That's just sensationalist journalism.
Not being familiar with it, the first thing I did was read the FAQ:
So. In order to get the supposed benefits of DFB, you have to run apps as root? I guess maybe you could log on as a user and su the DFB apps, but that's a pain. Why should a graphics lib muck up security? That seems inherently broken to me. If it really just abstracts graphics then there should be no problem with user apps running it.
This isn't really my area of expertise. Perhaps there's something I'm missing. Can anybody clue me in?
It's called a fireplace.
Actually, we don't use it for that purpose very often, but when we do it's been found to be quite effective. Just don't use it for items that might produce noxious and/or flue-clogging fumes when burned; such as credit cards.
For my old credit cards, I manually shred them with scissors. I'm careful to cut through the number, name, expiration date, etc. I then distribute the pieces into different garbage cans about the house. Some, such as the infrequently used laundry and bathroom cans, won't send their contents to the curb for weeks after the most frequently used can (in the kitchen).
Even if some thief was determined enough to reassemble my card, he would be quite disappointed to find that there is often no more than $2000 of available credit on it.
I wasn't defending the penalties set forth in the bill. I agree that they are totally out of line.
The central fallacy of that argument? If nothing were being taken, nobody would care.
A simple demonstration:
I just stole 50,000 Quatloos from you. Aren't you outraged?
Of course not. Your Quatloo account reall is nothing.
And the spud-raisin debates continue. Forget the dictionary, OK? What about Miss Manners?
If the musicians were in the room, could you upload it and comfortably let them know what you are doing?
For jam-bands like Phish and a few fringe artists you probably could (at least for some of their songs). That's sharing. For everybody else it's not sharing. The dictionary may not say it, but sharing implies a mutual agreement between all parties involved. Sharing as we know it is a polite activity between friends. Uploading an artist's music against their will, and in the anonymity of your computer room is nothing like the sharing we were taught in kindergarden.
Phish shares their concerts. Fans appropriate Metallica.
appropriate
1. to take for one's own or exclusive use.
2. to take improperly, as without permission
3. to set aside for a specific use or a certain person.
File sharing is not being made a felony. Phish can share all the music they want. File appropriation is the felony.
They should just secede.
A less drastic step would be to simply levy a state tax on non-refillable cartridges and/or printers that use them. States levy widely varrying taxes on stuff all the time. Virginia's tobacco tax is a heck of a lot lower than say... New York's.
So if the issue comes up, they should just re-write it as a really high tax on printers that use non-refillable cartridges. There's precedent for the tax, and precedent for the tax widely varying from state-to-state. However, I don't think there is precedent for the tax being so high that it effectively kills the market. Anybody know?
It just needs to get cached by Google.
I tried the exact URL, and Google hadn't cached it yet. However, typing "parallel computing" filetype:ppt into Google got a lot of hits, which may be mirrors of this material.
No Borg icon? No wise cracks? What gives?
This doesn't make any sense to me. I'm on 28.8, and 20 results from Google still come up instantly. Bandwidth might be an issue for the linked pages, but certainly not the search results. Even when I was on 14.4, back when Yahoo! was the hot search engine, it was no problem.
So, what if these guys are on 300 baud and they get compressed search results via... e-mail??? The delay waiting for results to navigate e-mail systems probably negates the savings from the compression. Why not send compressed results over HTTP using a web-browser like application? Of course then you are still faced with bandwidth issues on the links you follow.
It just doesn't make sense to me, unless they write a server-side proxy that intelligently filters Flash, popups, Java, superfluous graphics, audio, and other useless stuff that "web designers" like to use. The proxy could present pages in such a way as to offer users the option of downloading blocked files when the AI fails. That just cries out for a Mozilla mod or some other kind of custom browser; certainly not an e-mail client.
, we will also promote the distribution and adoption of Mozilla applications and technologies. In addition, we will raise funds to ensure Mozilla's long-term survival
We will organize as a tax exempt charity to provide a nice tax writeof for AOL-TW, while continuing to further their corporate objectives against Microsoft.
To be fair, they do mention that they are seeking 501(c)(3) status at the bottom of the release.
Anybody else sense a trend? Open Source "charitable" orgs as a corporate tax shelter? Once again, you have to hand it to RMS--he was at the cutting edge on this. The FSF was perhaps the first Open Source nonprofit. Something like Mozilla.org will allow corporations to obtain the tax writeof without having to buy into the political stand of the Free Software movement.
It's a win-win for corporations. They can place the unprofitable portions of their business into the nonprofit. They can influence the nonprofits with their money. They can effectively employee people for less than minimum wage.
It will be interesting to see how long it takes legislators to wake up to this, and call for charitable org reform. I wager that at least one generation (20 years) will pass and get fat off these exemptions before anything happens.
Pitchman: I have a 19-year old programmer who wants to promote a system that distributes other people's copyrighted works and will probably give rise to all kinds of troublesome legal issues, but he does it on the Internet so it's really cutting edge.
VC: Here's a truckload of money.
Your userid is iendedi???
Wow. I have a whole userid devoted to hating me. I guess I've arrived. Not sure what milestones come after this... Imposters? Interviews? Phone calls late at night? A magnanimous patron? Bodyguards? A highly modified black Transam? German women who want my body?
Oh well. I guess I shouldn't be too flattered. Your .sig looks like one that somebody else uses, and the mod up to 2 on such a fresh account is supicious. Odds are you're just some loser on break from Podunk U who used your other account to moderate up iendedi.
Also, you come off like a real crackpot. As a matter of policy, istartedi will no longer respond to iendedi.
...could you make sure there is no TIA? TIA.
OK, instead of trying to be funny I'll just make my point dead on: Regardless of what they say, how can you trust them? There's an inherent conflict of interest in the question. If they say they don't profile at all, would you believe that? Would they reveal their profile?
I think the only honest answer they could give your question is "no comment".
My apologies for implying that you are looking for tactical information to commit IP crimes.
In other words "Please provide me with a detailed profile of the people you are seeking".
Well, we're looking for just about anyone except guys named Dowd. So feel free to burn Windows OS CD-ROMs by the truckload. We aren't looking for you.
And while you're at it, if you're White, feel free to smoke pot in your Cadillac Escalade. They're totally not on the list.