I am not sure I would consider searching for buffer overflows the work of "hard core computer guys". Hard core computer guys are people who write interesting software, and advance the state of the art. These guys spend their time griping about how crap Microsoft is, and how 31337 they are, all while bickering amongst themselves like 13 year old schoolgirls.
VA no-longer a Linux company?
on
Forbes on Linux
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· Score: 2
From one of the articles:
His firm has changed its name to VA Software, and its media contact person declined an interview request for this story "because we're no longer a Linux company."
It is getting rediculous - what use is Slashdot if 50% of the stories link to slashdotted sites? Many people have proposed potential solutions for this (such as/. providing a Google-like cache), but the editors always come up with lame excuses.
I understand how they figure that companies "lose money" whenever they're software is pirated. But do they figure into those billions of lost dollars statements like the one above?
No, of course they don't. They make the rediculous assumption that every person who obtains a free copy of the software would have purchased it had the free copy not been available. The result is a hugely inflated idea of financial loss, which is exactly what they want.
The reality is much more complex, in many situations the avilability of free versions of software, which - say - poor students can play with, can motivate that student to purchase, or persuade their employer to purchase, the software when they leave school.
I am just waiting for the day when you get a longer prison sentence for copying the wrong set of bits and giving them to a friend, than you would if you murdered him.
They might be able to do some damage
on
HavenCo Doing Well
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· Score: 3, Insightful
From what I have heard, they have quite a lot of guns on Sealand, and are clearly willing to defend themselves from foreign invasion. Now, one might argue that they wouldn't last long against the SAS - but putting SAS soldiers lives at risk (given that the British courts have recognised Sealand's right to defend itself) should serve as a significant disincentive for any invasion (as would the risk that the British government could be taken to court for mounting such an invasion afterwards).
Did you actually read up on any of the projects you glibly mention? SHRDLU is nothing todo with this, Julia - as far as I can see, doesn't have any learning ability, Cobot does use statistics, but employs nothing approaching the flexibility I have outlined.
Of course people tried this. It doesn't work, at least not better than ALICE.
Then you won't have any trouble providing a reference to this research - will you?
Human language cannot be decribed by regular expressions, nor even by context free grammars (one level up the hierarchy of formal languages), though CFGs are close. So you get ungrammatical garbage or prepared responses like ALICE.
Haven't you been listening? Nobody is suggesting that such a mechanism could approximate human intelligence, but it might be able to find enough conversational patterns to give the illusion of intelligence for a while.
I am amazed that nobody yet has tried to create a "learning" chat bot. It would be pretty straight-forward.
Basically the chat bot would follow simple rules, similar to regular expressions, that would trigger particular statements in response to statements from the user. Each of these rules could also test for "flags" that could be set and unset by rules which "fire". Then, some algorithm could be devised for creating new rules randomly, based on observed behavior. The effectiveness of a rule could be determined by how long the conversation continues after that rule has been used. Good rules could be moved up in priority, and bad rules moved down (and eventually deleted) on this basis.
Walkers in an intellient routing setup would be the most optimial way of doing p2p, hopefully this would loose up some of on the congestion on the current p2p networks and let people with less bandwidth access to the shared files with the least sacrifice on bandwitdh for searches.
Freenet does something quite like this. Requests are routed based on local heuristic knowledge of the network, information gravitates towards the demand for that information through a form of dynamic mirroring.
Yep, and the person who cached the content can then be sued for copyright infringement.
Not in
Europe, and I doubt this is true in the US either (otherwise Google would be illegal).
By uploading the file (even indirectly), you are breaking the law,
If, by "uploading", you mean "inserting", it is extremely unlikely that the RIAA would control one of the 5 or 6 essentially randomly selected nodes that your insert would pass through - and even if they did, they would have no idea who instigated the insert.
I don't know what your legal background is, however the following quote from an LA Weekly article might shed some light on the situation:
Clarke designed Freenet's anonymity and encryption features specifically to protect users against legal liability. Special Agent Ramiro Escudero, an FBI spokesperson, says Clarke's scheme "might possibly" work. The argument would go like this: Someone left a locked suitcase in my closet. I can prove it doesn't belong to me, I can prove I don't have a key, I can prove I have no idea what's inside it -- all I did was agree that it could be left with me. "According to this scenario," cautions Escudero, "it would not appear that you would be criminally liable, but it's always case by case."
ESR annoys me. His constant need to remind people how influential/rich/skilled he is with a sickening false modesty. His self-publicising.
This article is a perfect example, what is the point of it? What is he saying? Basically, he is saying - "Look at me - I am rich!", it has no informative value beyond that. Of course, he should have listened to those who told him to keep quiet, not so much because he might get people begging him for money, but because it makes him look like a total fool when his riches turn into dust.
Good. I can hardly wait for the "music wants to be free" and "find another job, man" commentary from the hordes of slashbots who've never had a job.
There is something to be said for employers who give their employees some flexibility, and place some trust in them to know how to maxamize their own productivity. Many people, particularly software engineers, find that they can work more effectively with music.
And before you accuse me of being a deadbeat "slashbot", I have been both an employee and an employer.
..the condescending remark about Walmart customers this time! How are we geeks supposed to maintain any self-esteem unless we can pick on someone else the way that we were picked on at high-school?
Lest we need any more proof that you can't criticize Linux or Open Source on Slashdot without our wonderful censorsh...er, I mean moderation system kicking in.
This site is pointless, while some of what they say is true, some of it is just pointless nitpicking - clearly serving no further purpose than displaying how utterly smug its authors are. For example:
The narrator stumbles into the realm of science farce when he says that prosperous nations sustain their prosperity to a large extent by creating the perfect low cost labor force: robots. According to the narrator, these robots require no resources beyond those used to create them.
They then go into a boring lecture about thermodynamics and the impossibility of a perpectual motion machine. They didn't consider the possibility that when the movie referred to resources, it might have been talking about scarce resources, such as food. The robots could rely on any number of plentiful resources such as electricity or solar power.
Although it is technically in violation of copyright laws, you are allowed to make a copy of the intellectual property as long as you only use said copy in place of the original
Er, you don't know what you are talking about. Making copies for personal use is not a violation of copyright law because it is fair use. This isn't just something "allowed" by the courts, it is a fundamental part of copyright law.
Find me all the people who die of AIDS who don't have HIV.
While I am reluctant to get into this debate as I am not qualified, one of the problems pointed out in the book on the website is that the definition of AIDS includes the requirement that HIV is present. Because of this, I can safely say that nobody dies of AIDS that doesn't have HIV, but this is really dodging the issue.
1. What do you expect of a country where the Prez does not believe HIV causes AIDS?
I think that, even if he is wrong, that he is brave to stand-up to the powerful corporate interests that are trying to milk AIDS victims for every penny then can muster before they fall to this disease, whatever its cause. There is a well-researched body of opinion that questions the causal link between HIV and AIDS. I don't know whether they are right or not, but I do know that we should value those who question established wisdom, whether they be right or wrong. If the theory that HIV causes AIDS is true, then it should easily withstand any scrutiny or dissent.
There are those who say that because AIDS is so dangerous it is irresponsible for people to raise doubts around it, but I would argue that it is essential for people to question such things precisely because it is so dangerous.
A good source of information on the opinion that HIV does not necessarily cause AIDS can be found here.
The official goal of the PDA project is to test whether location trackers will encourage students to find each other more easily on a sprawling and rapidly growing campus.
That is the dumbest justification I have ever heard. Cell phones are infinitely cheaper (at retail price), many many students have them, and allow you to phone the friend you want to find - they can then, if they want to, not only tell you where they are, but tell you what their movement plans are.
There is nothing technically innovative about triangulating a radio signal, and as compared to cell-phones, it is a terrible way to try to meet up with friends.
Basically, the most valuable thing about this is as a publicity tool for HP and UCSD.
...someone with non-trivial resources bent on flooding the network with junk?
There is probably no way to completely address this issue 100%, however since Freenet decides which files to retain on the basis of their popularity, flooding the network with files would be an uphill struggle, more likely to get you in-trouble with your upstream ISP than seriously affect the network as a whole, assuming that the network is large enough.
Slashdot Mirror
I am not sure I would consider searching for buffer overflows the work of "hard core computer guys". Hard core computer guys are people who write interesting software, and advance the state of the art. These guys spend their time griping about how crap Microsoft is, and how 31337 they are, all while bickering amongst themselves like 13 year old schoolgirls.
It is getting rediculous - what use is Slashdot if 50% of the stories link to slashdotted sites? Many people have proposed potential solutions for this (such as /. providing a Google-like cache), but the editors always come up with lame excuses.
The reality is much more complex, in many situations the avilability of free versions of software, which - say - poor students can play with, can motivate that student to purchase, or persuade their employer to purchase, the software when they leave school.
I am just waiting for the day when you get a longer prison sentence for copying the wrong set of bits and giving them to a friend, than you would if you murdered him.
From what I have heard, they have quite a lot of guns on Sealand, and are clearly willing to defend themselves from foreign invasion. Now, one might argue that they wouldn't last long against the SAS - but putting SAS soldiers lives at risk (given that the British courts have recognised Sealand's right to defend itself) should serve as a significant disincentive for any invasion (as would the risk that the British government could be taken to court for mounting such an invasion afterwards).
Did you actually read up on any of the projects you glibly mention? SHRDLU is nothing todo with this, Julia - as far as I can see, doesn't have any learning ability, Cobot does use statistics, but employs nothing approaching the flexibility I have outlined.
Basically the chat bot would follow simple rules, similar to regular expressions, that would trigger particular statements in response to statements from the user. Each of these rules could also test for "flags" that could be set and unset by rules which "fire". Then, some algorithm could be devised for creating new rules randomly, based on observed behavior. The effectiveness of a rule could be determined by how long the conversation continues after that rule has been used. Good rules could be moved up in priority, and bad rules moved down (and eventually deleted) on this basis.
this paper (PDF) gives a great overview.
I don't know what your legal background is, however the following quote from an LA Weekly article might shed some light on the situation:
This article is a perfect example, what is the point of it? What is he saying? Basically, he is saying - "Look at me - I am rich!", it has no informative value beyond that. Of course, he should have listened to those who told him to keep quiet, not so much because he might get people begging him for money, but because it makes him look like a total fool when his riches turn into dust.
And before you accuse me of being a deadbeat "slashbot", I have been both an employee and an employer.
..the condescending remark about Walmart customers this time! How are we geeks supposed to maintain any self-esteem unless we can pick on someone else the way that we were picked on at high-school?
Lest we need any more proof that you can't criticize Linux or Open Source on Slashdot without our wonderful censorsh...er, I mean moderation system kicking in.
These are the people who give nerds a bad name.
There are those who say that because AIDS is so dangerous it is irresponsible for people to raise doubts around it, but I would argue that it is essential for people to question such things precisely because it is so dangerous.
A good source of information on the opinion that HIV does not necessarily cause AIDS can be found here.
Cell phones are infinitely cheaper (at retail price)
I assume that, in the highly unlikely event that this caught-on, that HP won't be giving the PDAs out free to the rest of the world.
There is nothing technically innovative about triangulating a radio signal, and as compared to cell-phones, it is a terrible way to try to meet up with friends.
Basically, the most valuable thing about this is as a publicity tool for HP and UCSD.