IANAL, but I believe that if I left a few cases of beer on the sidewalk for a few days (discounting the skunk factor) and some or all of it disappeared, it would be regarded as "Shame on me" for not securing my property, and I would have no case.
But if you left them in your house, and forgot to lock your front door, and someone came in and took them (then left a sign by the road saying "this house is unlocked! help yourself!") then that would be a crime.
Hopefully something tragic will happen and they will have to enter the decontamination room and spread goo on each other again!!!!
That Vulcan is one skanky girl. The translator is cute, tho'.
Not that I've got anything against Vulcans, I liked Spock's apprentice in the one where Kirk and Bones get exiled to the prison planet. I am amazed that Kirk never made a move on her, maybe that bit ended up on the cutting room floor.
A big benefit for the publisher is that you get customers of the product right away, who are more likely to either buy it when they belong to a company or put in a word to switch to it from a competitors product. Why isn't this type of license used more often? I
This sort of licensing scheme is quite common, when I was a student I got MATLAB and CodeWarrior, in addition to MS Office under these terms. Unfortunately it did not result in more sales for those companies when I graduated, although if I'd gone into Engineering, it would have:-)
Or maybe they already have. If the US had been more proactive about limiting space research by unstable and undeveloped nations, then we wouldn't have to worry about this.
Have you ever wondered why it is that the US wants to regulate (Islamic dictator and harbourer of terrorists) Saddam Hussein, but hasn't tried to do the same to (Islamic dictator and harbourer of terrorists) Musharraf? It's because Musharraf already has nuclear weapons, and Saddam doesn't.
The point is: there is a limit to how proactive even the US can be in today's world. I don't think that India would permit itself to be regulated - they have always been fiercely independant people (one of the reasons the British Empire, proportionally stronger in the world back then than the US is now, couldn't hold on to them).
It would take an obscene amount of money to feed everyone that is starving in the world, provide the infrastructure necessary to send the food everywhere it needs to go, and insure that they will be able to provide for themselves in the future
Actually, that all exists already. There is already way too much food in the world - the US and EU destroy millions of tonnes of it every year. After all, food surpluses are a precondition of population growth, not the other way round, and the population is growing.
Growing the food is easy - our civilization understood farming centuries ago. Distributing the food is easy - logistics is a well-developed science, practiced by Walmat, UPS and the Marines, you can even do a degree in it. The difficult part is purely in the realm of the political. So long as tyrants like Robert Mugabe use starvation as a tool of population control, or nations like Somalia keep feudal civil wars going, famines are inevitable.
These are the men with just enough "obscene amount of money", but have failed to act.
The Gates Foundation has given billions away. Literally. What have you done?
3,000,000 counts of manslaughter per year.
If you really believed that, you wouldn't have a computer to post to/. from, or indeed any other posessions. You would have given every cent to charity and right now be working for free on a subsistence farm in the third world. But you'd rather sit on the sidelines and run your mouth about things that are far beyond your understanding.
Office was written with unnecessarily proprietary binary file formats. They could have gone the OpenOffice.org route and published file formats which could be shared by others.
The file format doesn't matter - it's trivially simply from your own VB/VBA code to call Word (or Excel or whatever) to open a document and manipulate it. Want to extract text from thousands of Word docs in batch? No problemo. The fact that.doc itself is proprietary is irrelevant: the interfaces to get at the data in those documents is well-documented.
I'm trying to convince my wife to switch from Windows to Linux. However, one program she loves is Broderbund's PrintShop, which I haven't found a Linux equivalent of yet
One thing you need to ask yourself is why, if her Windows software does what she needs, do you want her to switch? Remember that what is the right solution for one person, such as yourself, may well not be right for someone else. Are you trying to convince her for an ideological reason of your own, to "convert" her? Because that just sounds like a recipe for strife, particularly since dual-booting is so easy these days.
Then it isn't science. Review by independent scientists is a fundamental part of science.
You've misunderstood. There are two questions here:
Was the research conducted in a professional, rigorous and objective manner?
What research should we be funding in the first place?
Item 1 is obviously best assessed by independant scientists, because it can be measured relatively objectively and requires scientific skill. Point 2 is unsuitable for independant scientists for a number of reasons. Firstly, what is the objective of funding research in the first place? Is it to advance knowledge for its own sake, or to solve specific problems that are facing civilization?
Unfortunately the vast majority of people have no understanding of science or its principles.
And secondly, what is considered acceptable subject matter for research by the taxpayer? Scientists often forget that it's the "unwashed masses" who foot the bill for their expensive toys. No matter what scientists think are the benefits - and no matter how skillful their rhetoric - if the general public doesn't want to fund research into XXX, then those scientists should not receive a penny of taxpayer's money.
This is illustrated in the matter of stem cell research. There are undoubtedly benefits to such research, and the scientists from point 1 would be happy for it, from the perspective of pure science. But it's up to the people in point 2 - on whose behalf the research is being done - to make the decision. If the scientists disagree, well, they should find their own funding.
OTP is unbreakable, and so "the golden age of privacy" will not end because of quantum computers.
Only if your pad is truly random. There's a scene in Cryptonomicon in which they realize the vicar's wife is looking at the letters as she draws them out of the tombola used to randomize; being a native English speaker she is subconsciously biased to prefer certain letters over others, and this is enough to open a chink in the armor.
Consider, for a moment, the social changes that would imediately take place if privacy were nonexistant, in the sense that all cryptography could be broken with a trivial effort by anyone and their brother, using off-the-shelf hardware
How would this technology work against one-time pads? Besides, historically technologies have always tended to balance. Someone makes a better tank, then someone makes a better tank-killer, then the cycle repeats. If today's sophisticated encryption can in the future be defeated with cheap devices, then the crypto that this future society considers sophisticated would be well beyond ours. Consider the relative computational power of Bletchly Park and the sophistication of Engima of the early 40s and the power and sophistication of a 21st Century desktop PC.
International politics would be forever changed.
Not really. It would simply switch from broadcast and ciphers to the diplomatic bag and codes - which is how it worked for centuries. Complexity in international affairs is nothing new.
40 PC's hardly constitutes an Enterprise. It would be an entirely different story if you had 5k+ desktop users to install to, support, and make happy.
Damn right. 40 PCs is a small enough network that you can install new software by hand, and 40 users are a small enough community that they can just wander into your office when they've got a problem.
An "enterprise" deployment would be an unattended installation on several thousand desktops in multiple locations, possibly in multiple countries. If it goes wrong, hundreds of people might find themselves unable to do any useful work, and you can't fix it without doing another mass deployment.
Backed by the US government and the CIA, Augusto Pinochet seizes control of the Chilean military. The previous commander, Rene Scheider, was assassinated by the CIA when he refused to lead a coup against the democratically elected president, Dr. Salvador Allende, who was murdered in his home. This began a 2-decade long reign of terror in which thousands were imprisoned, tortured and killed, and thousands more were exiled.
Let's hope the next "regime change" is better managed, or Ground Zero and Desert Storm II will only be the start of the West's problems.
It's still good for low-volume file serving and Web serving, but as a desktop machine, it's pretty much useless.
It's no slower than it was when you bought it - there's no reason that you couldn't use it for the same things now. I wrote my MSc dissertation last year on an old P200 with 64M RAM, a 2M graphics card and 15" screen running NT4 and Word 97. For word processing, that machine will continue to be adequate until the hardware fails.
This could be a good way for smaller chipmakers to break into the market. If they refuse to quit selling non-DRM processors, they'll guarentee themselves plenty of geek customers.
You're assuming that "geeks" are a sufficiently large market to make that worthwhile. Why, when games and applications companies don't bother to port their products, do you assume this? The "geek market" is too small, unless you can use it as a testing ground for mainstream products (like PDAs).
Worldwide Sharia... That's right Christians, Lesbians, Gays, Jews, Moderate Islamics, Hindu's now you too can live in a world where You can be beheaded for any variety of personal belief.
I don't doubt that there are Islamic fundamentalists who do want this, but it is inaccurate to consider all of them to be part of a homogenous group. All al-Queda want is isolation of the Middle East from Western influence.
Establishment of a Celiphate. Basically these guys want to restart the crusades.
Moslems want to restart the crusades? I suggest you go back and reread your mediaeval history.
Death to anyone who may stop them.
That's hardly a trait of al-Queda, or Islam in general. Since it's September 11th, perhaps you ought to study what the CIA started on September 11th, 1973 in Chile. I'll get you started: democratically elected president murdered in his home, military dictator (Pinochet) took over the country, thousands imprisoned, tortured and killed, thousands more exiled.
There is evidence Iraq funded the Al Quaieda network
Newsflash: every SUV-driving American has probably funded the al-Queda network. The most patriotic thing any American can do is to leave the car at home and walk. But you funnel billions of dollars a year to the Middle East and think that a flag bumper sticker makes you a patriot.
There is evidence Saddam is researching intercontinental missiles
Really? Last I heard the US was accusing North Korea of selling components to Iraq. You know, North Korea, part of the "axis of evil"? It has an active WMD programme, but no "regime change" seems to be needed there. So we can easily conclude that the missile argument is a red herring.
Saddam, this week, publicly threatened the US if any more sanctions were added
No, if the US attacked him.
Every other day Iraqi's fire upon US airplanes patrolling the no-fly zones
Why the hell not? It's their country!
I Don't have the evidence to back this up, but I know it's true
THESE GUYS WANT TO KILL US. Plain and Simple. Ignoring the rhetoric, it comes down to that.
No, they don't. What they want is two things: 1) for the US to leave Saudi Arabia and 2) for Islamic countries to return to old-fashioned Islam without Western influences.
They may kill some Americans (and really, 911 is insignificant compared to what most European cities endured in WW2) but they are doing it in support of their goals, not as an end in itself.
Well, Cerf's already had the experience of developing TCP/IP, which emphatically didn't have any useful security built in. Maybe this time he'll do a little better. Or maybe he'll get a clue and simply adopt something like DECnet or SNA which really does have protocol-level security and robustness built in.
Why would you need to? OS and applications are a few gigs at most, and MP3s you can just re-encode from the original CDs.
The benefit of having massive storage is simply as a cache: it's more convenient to have your music in one place than having to manually change CDs. The only people who are going to be generating and using 320Gb of original data (large databases, video streams, etc) are going to be able to afford to back it up anyway, because they're professionals rather than home users.
Well, 320 Gigs of data takes a *long* time to accumulate, even with rips and all. Losing that would take you a good amount of time and bandwidth to accumulate again.
So get one of these in an external drive case, mirror onto it, then take it away and lock it in a vault. Cheap, easy and fast... just the way I like it.
Slashdot Mirror
IANAL, but I believe that if I left a few cases of beer on the sidewalk for a few days (discounting the skunk factor) and some or all of it disappeared, it would be regarded as "Shame on me" for not securing my property, and I would have no case.
But if you left them in your house, and forgot to lock your front door, and someone came in and took them (then left a sign by the road saying "this house is unlocked! help yourself!") then that would be a crime.
Didn't the Commodore have a 'true random number generator' that used white noise from the sound card?
The Entropy Gathering Daemon similarly sources randomness from your hardware's interaction with the outside world.
Hopefully something tragic will happen and they will have to enter the decontamination room and spread goo on each other again!!!!
That Vulcan is one skanky girl. The translator is cute, tho'.
Not that I've got anything against Vulcans, I liked Spock's apprentice in the one where Kirk and Bones get exiled to the prison planet. I am amazed that Kirk never made a move on her, maybe that bit ended up on the cutting room floor.
Will Microsoft wait till the new company comes up with something truely nifty, and then buy it up (like they did to get their hands on Halo)?
Possibly. If you read the NYT article, it does say that Microsoft have already negotiated first-refusal if the company ever comes up for sale.
A big benefit for the publisher is that you get customers of the product right away, who are more likely to either buy it when they belong to a company or put in a word to switch to it from a competitors product. Why isn't this type of license used more often? I
:-)
This sort of licensing scheme is quite common, when I was a student I got MATLAB and CodeWarrior, in addition to MS Office under these terms. Unfortunately it did not result in more sales for those companies when I graduated, although if I'd gone into Engineering, it would have
Or maybe they already have. If the US had been more proactive about limiting space research by unstable and undeveloped nations, then we wouldn't have to worry about this.
Have you ever wondered why it is that the US wants to regulate (Islamic dictator and harbourer of terrorists) Saddam Hussein, but hasn't tried to do the same to (Islamic dictator and harbourer of terrorists) Musharraf? It's because Musharraf already has nuclear weapons, and Saddam doesn't.
The point is: there is a limit to how proactive even the US can be in today's world. I don't think that India would permit itself to be regulated - they have always been fiercely independant people (one of the reasons the British Empire, proportionally stronger in the world back then than the US is now, couldn't hold on to them).
It would take an obscene amount of money to feed everyone that is starving in the world, provide the infrastructure necessary to send the food everywhere it needs to go, and insure that they will be able to provide for themselves in the future
/. from, or indeed any other posessions. You would have given every cent to charity and right now be working for free on a subsistence farm in the third world. But you'd rather sit on the sidelines and run your mouth about things that are far beyond your understanding.
Actually, that all exists already. There is already way too much food in the world - the US and EU destroy millions of tonnes of it every year. After all, food surpluses are a precondition of population growth, not the other way round, and the population is growing.
Growing the food is easy - our civilization understood farming centuries ago. Distributing the food is easy - logistics is a well-developed science, practiced by Walmat, UPS and the Marines, you can even do a degree in it. The difficult part is purely in the realm of the political. So long as tyrants like Robert Mugabe use starvation as a tool of population control, or nations like Somalia keep feudal civil wars going, famines are inevitable.
These are the men with just enough "obscene amount of money", but have failed to act.
The Gates Foundation has given billions away. Literally. What have you done?
3,000,000 counts of manslaughter per year.
If you really believed that, you wouldn't have a computer to post to
Hm...would that imply that XFS would be say a really good candidate FS for building video streaming devices?
Well, yes. Which is one of the things SGI designed it for in the first place. Have you only just realized?
Office was written with unnecessarily proprietary binary file formats. They could have gone the OpenOffice.org route and published file formats which could be shared by others.
.doc itself is proprietary is irrelevant: the interfaces to get at the data in those documents is well-documented.
The file format doesn't matter - it's trivially simply from your own VB/VBA code to call Word (or Excel or whatever) to open a document and manipulate it. Want to extract text from thousands of Word docs in batch? No problemo. The fact that
I'm trying to convince my wife to switch from Windows to Linux. However, one program she loves is Broderbund's PrintShop, which I haven't found a Linux equivalent of yet
One thing you need to ask yourself is why, if her Windows software does what she needs, do you want her to switch? Remember that what is the right solution for one person, such as yourself, may well not be right for someone else. Are you trying to convince her for an ideological reason of your own, to "convert" her? Because that just sounds like a recipe for strife, particularly since dual-booting is so easy these days.
The Stargate!
That extra door is just a plaster mockup the technicians from Cheyenne Mountain left behind.
You've misunderstood. There are two questions here:
Item 1 is obviously best assessed by independant scientists, because it can be measured relatively objectively and requires scientific skill. Point 2 is unsuitable for independant scientists for a number of reasons. Firstly, what is the objective of funding research in the first place? Is it to advance knowledge for its own sake, or to solve specific problems that are facing civilization?
Unfortunately the vast majority of people have no understanding of science or its principles.
And secondly, what is considered acceptable subject matter for research by the taxpayer? Scientists often forget that it's the "unwashed masses" who foot the bill for their expensive toys. No matter what scientists think are the benefits - and no matter how skillful their rhetoric - if the general public doesn't want to fund research into XXX, then those scientists should not receive a penny of taxpayer's money.
This is illustrated in the matter of stem cell research. There are undoubtedly benefits to such research, and the scientists from point 1 would be happy for it, from the perspective of pure science. But it's up to the people in point 2 - on whose behalf the research is being done - to make the decision. If the scientists disagree, well, they should find their own funding.
...Harry's voice sounded a bit odd? "Harry Potter: the year my voice broke" or something...
:-)
I would have no ethical problems whatsoever with treating the actors with hormones to keep their growth in line with the filming schedule
OTP is unbreakable, and so "the golden age of privacy" will not end because of quantum computers.
Only if your pad is truly random. There's a scene in Cryptonomicon in which they realize the vicar's wife is looking at the letters as she draws them out of the tombola used to randomize; being a native English speaker she is subconsciously biased to prefer certain letters over others, and this is enough to open a chink in the armor.
Consider, for a moment, the social changes that would imediately take place if privacy were nonexistant, in the sense that all cryptography could be broken with a trivial effort by anyone and their brother, using off-the-shelf hardware
How would this technology work against one-time pads? Besides, historically technologies have always tended to balance. Someone makes a better tank, then someone makes a better tank-killer, then the cycle repeats. If today's sophisticated encryption can in the future be defeated with cheap devices, then the crypto that this future society considers sophisticated would be well beyond ours. Consider the relative computational power of Bletchly Park and the sophistication of Engima of the early 40s and the power and sophistication of a 21st Century desktop PC.
International politics would be forever changed.
Not really. It would simply switch from broadcast and ciphers to the diplomatic bag and codes - which is how it worked for centuries. Complexity in international affairs is nothing new.
... one of these. GSM roaming where it's available, satellite where it's not.
40 PC's hardly constitutes an Enterprise. It would be an entirely different story if you had 5k+ desktop users to install to, support, and make happy.
Damn right. 40 PCs is a small enough network that you can install new software by hand, and 40 users are a small enough community that they can just wander into your office when they've got a problem.
An "enterprise" deployment would be an unattended installation on several thousand desktops in multiple locations, possibly in multiple countries. If it goes wrong, hundreds of people might find themselves unable to do any useful work, and you can't fix it without doing another mass deployment.
Plus I love the line on the "about" page: "No Microsoft products were used in the creation of this website."
What better proof could you ask for that Microsoft isn't actually a monopoly?
Not 2001, but 1973.
Backed by the US government and the CIA, Augusto Pinochet seizes control of the Chilean military. The previous commander, Rene Scheider, was assassinated by the CIA when he refused to lead a coup against the democratically elected president, Dr. Salvador Allende, who was murdered in his home. This began a 2-decade long reign of terror in which thousands were imprisoned, tortured and killed, and thousands more were exiled.
Let's hope the next "regime change" is better managed, or Ground Zero and Desert Storm II will only be the start of the West's problems.
It's still good for low-volume file serving and Web serving, but as a desktop machine, it's pretty much useless.
It's no slower than it was when you bought it - there's no reason that you couldn't use it for the same things now. I wrote my MSc dissertation last year on an old P200 with 64M RAM, a 2M graphics card and 15" screen running NT4 and Word 97. For word processing, that machine will continue to be adequate until the hardware fails.
This could be a good way for smaller chipmakers to break into the market. If they refuse to quit selling non-DRM processors, they'll guarentee themselves plenty of geek customers.
You're assuming that "geeks" are a sufficiently large market to make that worthwhile. Why, when games and applications companies don't bother to port their products, do you assume this? The "geek market" is too small, unless you can use it as a testing ground for mainstream products (like PDAs).
Worldwide Sharia... That's right Christians, Lesbians, Gays, Jews, Moderate Islamics, Hindu's now you too can live in a world where You can be beheaded for any variety of personal belief.
I don't doubt that there are Islamic fundamentalists who do want this, but it is inaccurate to consider all of them to be part of a homogenous group. All al-Queda want is isolation of the Middle East from Western influence.
Establishment of a Celiphate. Basically these guys want to restart the crusades.
Moslems want to restart the crusades? I suggest you go back and reread your mediaeval history.
Death to anyone who may stop them.
That's hardly a trait of al-Queda, or Islam in general. Since it's September 11th, perhaps you ought to study what the CIA started on September 11th, 1973 in Chile. I'll get you started: democratically elected president murdered in his home, military dictator (Pinochet) took over the country, thousands imprisoned, tortured and killed, thousands more exiled.
We have seen the enemy, and he is us.
There is evidence Iraq funded the Al Quaieda network
Newsflash: every SUV-driving American has probably funded the al-Queda network. The most patriotic thing any American can do is to leave the car at home and walk. But you funnel billions of dollars a year to the Middle East and think that a flag bumper sticker makes you a patriot.
There is evidence Saddam is researching intercontinental missiles
Really? Last I heard the US was accusing North Korea of selling components to Iraq. You know, North Korea, part of the "axis of evil"? It has an active WMD programme, but no "regime change" seems to be needed there. So we can easily conclude that the missile argument is a red herring.
Saddam, this week, publicly threatened the US if any more sanctions were added
No, if the US attacked him.
Every other day Iraqi's fire upon US airplanes patrolling the no-fly zones
Why the hell not? It's their country!
I Don't have the evidence to back this up, but I know it's true
Yeah, like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.
THESE GUYS WANT TO KILL US. Plain and Simple. Ignoring the rhetoric, it comes down to that.
No, they don't. What they want is two things: 1) for the US to leave Saudi Arabia and 2) for Islamic countries to return to old-fashioned Islam without Western influences.
They may kill some Americans (and really, 911 is insignificant compared to what most European cities endured in WW2) but they are doing it in support of their goals, not as an end in itself.
Why can't more programmers think this way?
Well, Cerf's already had the experience of developing TCP/IP, which emphatically didn't have any useful security built in. Maybe this time he'll do a little better. Or maybe he'll get a clue and simply adopt something like DECnet or SNA which really does have protocol-level security and robustness built in.
How do you backup 320Gigs ??
Why would you need to? OS and applications are a few gigs at most, and MP3s you can just re-encode from the original CDs.
The benefit of having massive storage is simply as a cache: it's more convenient to have your music in one place than having to manually change CDs. The only people who are going to be generating and using 320Gb of original data (large databases, video streams, etc) are going to be able to afford to back it up anyway, because they're professionals rather than home users.
Well, 320 Gigs of data takes a *long* time to accumulate, even with rips and all. Losing that would take you a good amount of time and bandwidth to accumulate again.
So get one of these in an external drive case, mirror onto it, then take it away and lock it in a vault. Cheap, easy and fast... just the way I like it.