Being an ex-native of Nizhnij Novgorod, I can shed some light on why those 6 cities get special treatment.
Moscow and St. Peterburg are trivial -- the two metropolises are far larger than any other city in Russia, have the highest density of foreigners, economic activity, etc.
Nizhnij Novgorod and Togliatti, both noticeably smaller, are the sites of two major automotive factories, which entails (1) a lot of economic activity, (2) increased foreign ties, and, most importantly (3) much more mafia interest. Obviously all 3 have their say.
Krasnoyarsk and Novorossiysk are a bit more of a suprise, but presumably this links with their raw materials industries, which scores on the same 3 points as above.
Does this excuse UPS behavior? No. But definitely goes to show that the local distribution of power has serious effects on the operations of a US company. Hrm....
And for the record, in terms of population, Moscow/StPetersburg/NN are the top 3, but the other 3 are minor towns that aren't much more important than most US county seats.
Instead of killing people's UINs, they should've just done the other half of the job for themselves too -- "Hi. We noticed that your age and/or birthday as stated in your profile indicates that you're under the age of 13. Since you agreed to our user policy when you signed up, you must be over the age of 13 and thus lying on your profile. Your age has been reset to 13, and the birthday adjusted accordingly. Please do not lie in your profile in the future."
I'm really skeptical about them getting something like this to work, I mean, I make typos in my 12 charachter password, but to be expected to type a sentence with the same rhythm? I still want retina scanners.
I would hope that the system they're developing does NOT expect the user to put conscious effort into typing with the "same rhythm." The process of typing a full sentence, with timing data, has much higher dimensionality than any human observer could possibly take advantage of. Whether or not there are relevant parameters to be extracted from this remains to be seen, but I would stay clear of making statements such as the above until a good learning algorithm spends some quality time with the data. The only way this will work is if a learning algorithm manages to extract parameters which uniquely identify the user no matter what the user "tries" to do.
You're pretty much wrong. Most on-board computers are still about 20-25 years behind today's bleeding edge simply because NASA (and its sister agencies elsewhere) is really hesitant to bring in anything but the old, "tried and true" technology. What you really heard was probably that NASA's ground control has been switching to Linux en masse. Yes, that's right (been there, seen it). Not for the on-board stuff though. At least not for most of it. There have been a few press releases as to the otherwise, but it's not nearly as widespread as you seem to imply.
You can fastforward through commercials, or if the phone rings, you can back up to where you left off.
And just how happy do you think advertisers will be about this idea? True, you can turn off your normal TV during commercials, or tape it and fastforward through it -- but this box makes it so much easier! Then, I'm guessing it won't be another 2 years before someone comes along with a plugin to automatically filter commercials out. Hey, I'm all for it, of course -- no one likes commercials anyway, right? Well, we tend to forget that commercial money is what fuels the TV networks. As commercials become much easier to screen out, the money is going to drift off, and, inevitably, program quality will go (further) down. Not that I blame TiVo for this phenomenon -- it's most likely coming no matter what, but it's a concern nevertheless.
As unkind as it may be to Eddy Jansson and hem.passagen.se, it would sure be damn funny if someone (or a large group of someones) started an HTTP flood on the page, just so by the time Mattel gets the logs, it has to fly a charter plain from Sweden just to deliver all the backup tapes with the logs. Then, of course, if there's any sanity left in this world, they shouldn't ever get access to the logs...
(this poster does not endorse irresponsible behavior. this poster just thinks it WOULD be funny...)
No, it's not "red." The image on the page is not a visible-spectrum photograph; it's most likely false-color from the lower end of the X-ray spectrum
Yes, this is significant, since it basically allows us to see 13 billion years back in time. That's about 3/4 of the way to the beginning of the universe by current estimates (which are, on the average, circa 16-18 billion).
Yes, there most likely are structures that are "further" (or, equivalently, older) than this one, but probably not by far. The high energy during the first 1-2 billion years would have most likely prevented the formation of large structures. The first proto-stars are thought to have appeared at circa 2B-3B years from Da Bang.
No, Elvis is not there. Neither is LinuxOne's innovative and brilliant release that will soon change the world.
Intellectual property did not become a major issue until the first half of this century. It is not an accident that this coincident with the first shift of brainpower out of traditional academia and into for-profit corporations. Intellectual property did not become a top-priority issue until the past 2 decades, which coincided with a much greater shift of the same nature, due to the blooming of computer technology. For centuries before all this, science was concentrated in academia, where people pursued knowledge for the sake of knowledge, not for the sake of profit. The modern capitalist state discourages that to a large extent. While I don't advocate communism per se, it may be worthwhile to note that a disproportionate part of advances in science made in this century came from communist nations, where science did not have to depend on, or be subservient to, corporate interests. This goes for science in general just as well for any subset thereof.
I am not asking for a revolution. If there's one thing this century has taught us, it is that those are largely pointless. And that a free-market society is the best we have. What I ask for is that the free-market philosophy be limited when it comes to pursuit of knowledge. As long as universities prosper, we will see good research, which doesn't get hogged by some corporation, and which remains in the public domain for the good of mankind. If current trends continue, we'll see increasing brain drains, such as Microsoft's infamous raid on Carnegie Mellon's OS faculty (for those of you who haven't heard, they came, offered huge salaries, and basically left the CMU CS dept without any OS specialists), which will transfer brain power in the hands of those who cannot use it ethically simply because their primary goal is profit.
Unfortunately, academia requires a huge investment to maintain, since it does not naturally flourish under market forces; it is that investment that is needed to keep "intellectual property" out of the hands of those who want to "own" it. And it is that investment that needs to be made continually for research as we know it to survive.
Re:Adults yes younger people no.
on
LonelyNet
·
· Score: 1
Generally this is because older people think in terms of mutually exclusive events.
That's an utterly unfounded statement. "Mutually exclusive events"? Come on now,.give your parents credit for thinking rationally, at least. The real problem lies in the fact that the percentage of adults using real-time interaction tools on the 'net hasn't yet reached critical mass. The critical mass I speak of is that moment when there's just enough of your friends already doing it so that you want to do it yourself. Then positive feedback forms, and there's an exponential explosion.
The first age group, HS/college, to reach this critical mass with respect to real-time online communication hit it around summer of '97, when ICQ exploded into the millions. As the previous reply points out, we're now seeing a boom in the senior citizen population (I believe I've heard the following at least 2 times in the past week: "Oh my god, hell just froze over; I got an ICQ message from grandma"). My guess regarding the (unexpected, for me) fact that senior citizens got here faster than the middle-age population is that it's probably explainable by them having more time available to learn these technologies.
voice control for gimp CAN and SHOULD work
on
Voice-Op Linux PDA
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· Score: 3
Now consider this: the gimp explain voice control in that? "draw the mona lisa"?
No, not quite. Voice control won't replace any 2-dimensional manipulator interfaces any time soon (at least not for non-disabled users). No one is claiming that the mouse will be rendered useless. After all, "a picture is worth..." Well, ya know.
BUT. How much do you really enjoy clicking around the gimp toolbox? Or, worse yet, searching for a filter you don't normally use in 3- or 4- deep menu system while losing that exact pixel you were over in the image. Right there, a secondary interface via voice would be ideal. No need to lift hand off mouse or move the pointer at all. Just "Use filter A, settings 50%, 3, no." I'm generally against voice recognition, but this would be one of the few spots I'd definitely want to see it.
Out of seventy-one comments filed and available so far, only Time Warner's is favorable toward the DMCA
Keep in mind that this is in an online forum, most likely visited by those who are seriously concerned about it. The only thing this means is that 70 people are pissed. This certainly does not say anything about {public,community,national,*} attitude toward the matter. And, frankly, they most likely won't care anyway.
Ok, let's be realistic now. In real life, do cops go to every house and search just to check if there're loads of crack lying around? Hell no. At least in the US, laws postulate necessity good reason for search warrants. Port scans are, to within reason, equivalent. No one wants FBI sniffing at their boxes all the time -- just because of the unnecessary traffic if nothing else.
The real answer lies in assigning liability to anyone who left their system insecure and allowed it to become an intermediate point in an attack. No more of this "oh they are victims too" bullshit. If your system's hole is used to cause damage elsewhere, it's your fault. While some laws currently propose that, it has not been enforced. It needs to be. Administering a system on the net should be a responsibility, and leaving holes (especially known holes) around is a sign of an irresponsible sysadmin. Start enforcing this, and the world will have less moron sysadmins. In case y'all don't remember, the 'net was started back in the days where the very few who were given admin access knew what they were doing, and was largely based on that premise. The further we stray from that, the more of these attacks we'll see.
Christian: Are there something you really miss in regards to game development on Linux, like support for Force Feedback devices etc.?
My dream would be that game programmers would stop using Direct3D and DirectPlay.
My dream, on the other hand, would be that more people begin to understand how hard it is to change standards once they're established. Yes, it's unfortunate that so much code goes in that direction now, but since the trend is set, it is impossibly difficult to switch back. So, with the real world in mind, the only solution is porting the Direct3D, etc, engines rather than the games themselves. Fix the problem, not the solution.
...is Derek Simkowiak's page documenting his dialogue with them. URL: http://www.kd-dev.com/~dereks/linuxone/ . If anyone has been compiling similar information, post it up here too.
You're forgetting that the latter dropped out early, and, more importantly, assuming that the former went to one in the first place. Doesn't take a HS diploma to run a scam, ya know...
Combine that with an option below the Comment window... [snip] The best part about this is that it's a vouluntary system. Since it's a contract that you knowingly enter into, there's no problems with comments beig `stolen', taken out of context, or abused.
That's only half of a solution. The best part of the GPL -- the one that is probably single-handedly responsible for its success -- is its "genetic" nature. Once something is GPL, all derived material is GPL as well. So to really reinstate that in this situation, we would need an ability to mark threads as "open-text." That is, if I post a question, I should have the option of not just marking the question as open-text, but rather marking all follow-up discussion as open-text. Then and only then will you have a viable system for preserving the "open" flavor.
Look at the apple.com, for instance. Eye candy? Perhaps. Look again. Notice any _text_? It's nearly 100% images. Even what should've been sheer plaintext. Ugh. The average Apple user is very unlikely to notice. Apple realizes the Linux crowd is generally more perceptive to such things; it just might be that someone in there consciously made _that_ page much more lynx-friendly than the average apple.com site.
Then again, the spelling error (couldn't find it btw), and inaccurate info are another issue...
Slashdot Mirror
Being an ex-native of Nizhnij Novgorod, I can shed some light on why those 6 cities get special treatment.
Moscow and St. Peterburg are trivial -- the two metropolises are far larger than any other city in Russia, have the highest density of foreigners, economic activity, etc.
Nizhnij Novgorod and Togliatti, both noticeably smaller, are the sites of two major automotive factories, which entails (1) a lot of economic activity, (2) increased foreign ties, and, most importantly (3) much more mafia interest. Obviously all 3 have their say.
Krasnoyarsk and Novorossiysk are a bit more of a suprise, but presumably this links with their raw materials industries, which scores on the same 3 points as above.
Does this excuse UPS behavior? No. But definitely goes to show that the local distribution of power has serious effects on the operations of a US company. Hrm....
And for the record, in terms of population, Moscow/StPetersburg/NN are the top 3, but the other 3 are minor towns that aren't much more important than most US county seats.
Everyone, pick your favorite NASA official, and send him a little gift of "Firewalls for Dummies." Or "for Complete Idiots" -- did that come out yet?
Instead of killing people's UINs, they should've just done the other half of the job for themselves too -- "Hi. We noticed that your age and/or birthday as stated in your profile indicates that you're under the age of 13. Since you agreed to our user policy when you signed up, you must be over the age of 13 and thus lying on your profile. Your age has been reset to 13, and the birthday adjusted accordingly. Please do not lie in your profile in the future."
I'm really skeptical about them getting something like this to work, I mean, I make typos in my 12 charachter password, but to be expected to type a sentence with the same rhythm? I still want retina scanners.
I would hope that the system they're developing does NOT expect the user to put conscious effort into typing with the "same rhythm." The process of typing a full sentence, with timing data, has much higher dimensionality than any human observer could possibly take advantage of. Whether or not there are relevant parameters to be extracted from this remains to be seen, but I would stay clear of making statements such as the above until a good learning algorithm spends some quality time with the data. The only way this will work is if a learning algorithm manages to extract parameters which uniquely identify the user no matter what the user "tries" to do.
...is trolling! C'mon, people, you've been on /. long enough, you should know a good troll when you see one!
...I think I speak for most Americans here when I say it's time to
N U K EC A N A D A ! ! !
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=bo ycotts!
/.-ers to foget about all boycotts they decide to declare!
And the best part is -- posts expire after 2 weeks, which is just enough for
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=bo ycotts!
/.-ers to foget about all boycotts they decide to declare!
And the best part is -- posts expire after 2 weeks, which is just enough for
You're pretty much wrong. Most on-board computers are still about 20-25 years behind today's bleeding edge simply because NASA (and its sister agencies elsewhere) is really hesitant to bring in anything but the old, "tried and true" technology. What you really heard was probably that NASA's ground control has been switching to Linux en masse. Yes, that's right (been there, seen it). Not for the on-board stuff though. At least not for most of it. There have been a few press releases as to the otherwise, but it's not nearly as widespread as you seem to imply.
... is the One True Ping. All-powerful, invincible, in existence somewhere orbiting a nameless star.
You can fastforward through commercials, or if the phone rings, you can back up to where you left off.
And just how happy do you think advertisers will be about this idea? True, you can turn off your normal TV during commercials, or tape it and fastforward through it -- but this box makes it so much easier! Then, I'm guessing it won't be another 2 years before someone comes along with a plugin to automatically filter commercials out. Hey, I'm all for it, of course -- no one likes commercials anyway, right? Well, we tend to forget that commercial money is what fuels the TV networks. As commercials become much easier to screen out, the money is going to drift off, and, inevitably, program quality will go (further) down. Not that I blame TiVo for this phenomenon -- it's most likely coming no matter what, but it's a concern nevertheless.
As unkind as it may be to Eddy Jansson and hem.passagen.se, it would sure be damn funny if someone (or a large group of someones) started an HTTP flood on the page, just so by the time Mattel gets the logs, it has to fly a charter plain from Sweden just to deliver all the backup tapes with the logs. Then, of course, if there's any sanity left in this world, they shouldn't ever get access to the logs...
(this poster does not endorse irresponsible behavior. this poster just thinks it WOULD be funny...)
FWIW:
Altavista.com, Advanced search, "chocolate chip cookie" (with quotes) in the Boolean Query field, page 2, hit #20 yields soft porn (www.pinupmall.com/Julie.Html) as of Monday 7pm PST. For the record, I am still wholly supportive of the free speech cause; the above is solely an interesting experiment.
Fund academia. It is that simple.
Intellectual property did not become a major issue until the first half of this century. It is not an accident that this coincident with the first shift of brainpower out of traditional academia and into for-profit corporations. Intellectual property did not become a top-priority issue until the past 2 decades, which coincided with a much greater shift of the same nature, due to the blooming of computer technology. For centuries before all this, science was concentrated in academia, where people pursued knowledge for the sake of knowledge, not for the sake of profit. The modern capitalist state discourages that to a large extent. While I don't advocate communism per se, it may be worthwhile to note that a disproportionate part of advances in science made in this century came from communist nations, where science did not have to depend on, or be subservient to, corporate interests. This goes for science in general just as well for any subset thereof.
I am not asking for a revolution. If there's one thing this century has taught us, it is that those are largely pointless. And that a free-market society is the best we have. What I ask for is that the free-market philosophy be limited when it comes to pursuit of knowledge. As long as universities prosper, we will see good research, which doesn't get hogged by some corporation, and which remains in the public domain for the good of mankind. If current trends continue, we'll see increasing brain drains, such as Microsoft's infamous raid on Carnegie Mellon's OS faculty (for those of you who haven't heard, they came, offered huge salaries, and basically left the CMU CS dept without any OS specialists), which will transfer brain power in the hands of those who cannot use it ethically simply because their primary goal is profit.
Unfortunately, academia requires a huge investment to maintain, since it does not naturally flourish under market forces; it is that investment that is needed to keep "intellectual property" out of the hands of those who want to "own" it. And it is that investment that needs to be made continually for research as we know it to survive.
Generally this is because older people think in terms of mutually exclusive events.
That's an utterly unfounded statement. "Mutually exclusive events"? Come on now,.give your parents credit for thinking rationally, at least. The real problem lies in the fact that the percentage of adults using real-time interaction tools on the 'net hasn't yet reached critical mass. The critical mass I speak of is that moment when there's just enough of your friends already doing it so that you want to do it yourself. Then positive feedback forms, and there's an exponential explosion.
The first age group, HS/college, to reach this critical mass with respect to real-time online communication hit it around summer of '97, when ICQ exploded into the millions. As the previous reply points out, we're now seeing a boom in the senior citizen population (I believe I've heard the following at least 2 times in the past week: "Oh my god, hell just froze over; I got an ICQ message from grandma"). My guess regarding the (unexpected, for me) fact that senior citizens got here faster than the middle-age population is that it's probably explainable by them having more time available to learn these technologies.
Now consider this: the gimp explain voice control in that? "draw the mona lisa"?
No, not quite. Voice control won't replace any 2-dimensional manipulator interfaces any time soon (at least not for non-disabled users). No one is claiming that the mouse will be rendered useless. After all, "a picture is worth..." Well, ya know.
BUT. How much do you really enjoy clicking around the gimp toolbox? Or, worse yet, searching for a filter you don't normally use in 3- or 4- deep menu system while losing that exact pixel you were over in the image. Right there, a secondary interface via voice would be ideal. No need to lift hand off mouse or move the pointer at all. Just "Use filter A, settings 50%, 3, no." I'm generally against voice recognition, but this would be one of the few spots I'd definitely want to see it.
Out of seventy-one comments filed and available so far, only Time Warner's is favorable toward the DMCA
Keep in mind that this is in an online forum, most likely visited by those who are seriously concerned about it. The only thing this means is that 70 people are pissed. This certainly does not say anything about {public,community,national,*} attitude toward the matter. And, frankly, they most likely won't care anyway.
Ok, let's be realistic now. In real life, do cops go to every house and search just to check if there're loads of crack lying around? Hell no. At least in the US, laws postulate necessity good reason for search warrants. Port scans are, to within reason, equivalent. No one wants FBI sniffing at their boxes all the time -- just because of the unnecessary traffic if nothing else.
The real answer lies in assigning liability to anyone who left their system insecure and allowed it to become an intermediate point in an attack. No more of this "oh they are victims too" bullshit. If your system's hole is used to cause damage elsewhere, it's your fault. While some laws currently propose that, it has not been enforced. It needs to be. Administering a system on the net should be a responsibility, and leaving holes (especially known holes) around is a sign of an irresponsible sysadmin. Start enforcing this, and the world will have less moron sysadmins. In case y'all don't remember, the 'net was started back in the days where the very few who were given admin access knew what they were doing, and was largely based on that premise. The further we stray from that, the more of these attacks we'll see.
Christian: Are there something you really miss in regards to game development on Linux, like support for Force Feedback devices etc.?
My dream would be that game programmers would stop using Direct3D and DirectPlay.
My dream, on the other hand, would be that more people begin to understand how hard it is to change standards once they're established. Yes, it's unfortunate that so much code goes in that direction now, but since the trend is set, it is impossibly difficult to switch back. So, with the real world in mind, the only solution is porting the Direct3D, etc, engines rather than the games themselves. Fix the problem, not the solution.
...is Derek Simkowiak's page documenting his dialogue with them. URL: http://www.kd-dev.com/~dereks/linuxone/ . If anyone has been compiling similar information, post it up here too.
You're forgetting that the latter dropped out early, and, more importantly, assuming that the former went to one in the first place. Doesn't take a HS diploma to run a scam, ya know...
One word, perl.
Combine that with an option below the Comment window... [snip] The best part about this is that it's a vouluntary system. Since it's a contract that you knowingly enter into, there's no problems with comments beig `stolen', taken out of context, or abused.
That's only half of a solution. The best part of the GPL -- the one that is probably single-handedly responsible for its success -- is its "genetic" nature. Once something is GPL, all derived material is GPL as well. So to really reinstate that in this situation, we would need an ability to mark threads as "open-text." That is, if I post a question, I should have the option of not just marking the question as open-text, but rather marking all follow-up discussion as open-text. Then and only then will you have a viable system for preserving the "open" flavor.
Look at the apple.com, for instance. Eye candy? Perhaps. Look again. Notice any _text_? It's nearly 100% images. Even what should've been sheer plaintext. Ugh. The average Apple user is very unlikely to notice. Apple realizes the Linux crowd is generally more perceptive to such things; it just might be that someone in there consciously made _that_ page much more lynx-friendly than the average apple.com site.
Then again, the spelling error (couldn't find it btw), and inaccurate info are another issue...