Its grand that you don't look at the banners or you have a program that makes them not even come up... but when everyone starts doing that look out...
I don't have to look out, but you do, because you will be out of a job then. More and more people are ignoring or filtering out ads, click-through rates are going down fast. How sweet it is! Even better that even TV ad filtering is now possible with Tivo.
Personally I said that cause I make a living off of creating sites that their only revenue is ads. I think its a great way to have a site.
Sure, put on your site whatever you want, but never EVER presume that you can use my modem connection and display stuff on my computer screen that I don't approve of. I'm in control of my hardware.
Usually ads are not there unless there is a good service or product cause they would not be able to pay for the ad space.
Funny, my position is just the opposite: if it needs advertising, it must be some crap that nobody wants nor needs. Everything that is genuinely useful doesn't need advertising; people will search for and find it themselves. Ever seen an ad for potatos?
The analytical engine was never built. Babbage's difference engine, a much more primitive special purpose machine, was built several times, even during his lifetime.
I wonder what would happen to its export status if the maintainers received and applied even one bug fix or ehancement derived from a USofA based reviewer/user.
First of all, GPG can be legally exported from its home, Germany, into any country, including the US. It cannot be re-exported from the US. It can never be put on a US FTP server, for example.
Now if the program gets contaminated with a US-written patch, nothing changes. It is still legally exportable from Germany. The writer of the patch may be thrown in jail as an illegal arms dealer, but I wouldn't bet on it.
Please be aware that trading in stock that doesn't pay dividends is strictly a zero sum game: exactly as much money is being lost as is being made. Should be pretty obvious.
The book has at least one essential flaw. The first working, fully programmable general purpose computer was Konrad Zuse's Z3 (Germany, 1941).
The Z3 was not fully programmable: Zuse forgot about the Jump and If-then-else instructions. No loops possible, oops. If you wanted the Z3 to do lots of calculations, you had to feed it a long program on punched tape:-) A German description of the Z3's architecture is here.
The first fully programmable computer was Babbage's analytic engine. Steam power rules! Of course, it was never built. Vaporware rules twice! By the way, his GF Ada Lovelace invented the loop. Chicks rule thrice!
The first operational fully programmable computer was ENIAC (you programmed it by replugging cables). Colossus was a secret special purpose cracking machine for the German Lorenz code and hat limited programmability.
So when they tested you in school, did they apply mild electric shocks to your feet and measure your fear response a week later? Or did they throw you into a pool of water with only a hidden way out?
Researchers who lack the creativity to come up with tests that don't involve the intentional and unnecessary application of pain and suffering are probably deficient in many other ways as well. I hope the paper won't pass peer review and these assholes won't get tenure.
Is it possible today to write a standard graphical Windows app using only free tools and libraries? Will this app be able to use Drag-and-Drop, the registry, standard widgets etc, just like any other app?
I honestly don't know the answer, but I do know that free software is dead upon arrival in an environment without free development tools. People who pay $100 for a compiler always want to retrieve their "investment" with shareware fees.
It takes money (something like US$10,000, if I recall correctly) to challenge a patent. No matter how right you are, you can't just rub the PTO's nose in it.
There's no need to legally challenge the patent with the PTO. You simply program and publish like you always do, and wait until the patent holder threatens to sue you. After they have lost the suit or chickened out, the patent is effectively emasculated.
And of course, during the suit, you keep your legal costs at a minimum by using volunteer free software experts, reading a good legal advice book and avoiding lawyers.
It is of utmost importance for the free software community to never give in to legal patent threats, or else we will drown in them.
If a company sends you a threatening letter, publish it on your web site and then write right back. Tell them that they will never be able to recover money from you since you don't have any, but that you will fight the case till the end, without a lawyer but with massive research support by the free software community regarding prior art and obviousness. Make clear that they will lose money and goodwill if they dare to file a suit, and that they ultimately must lose.
Then spend an afternoon in the nearest law library. The law is not rocket science; lawyers are not needed.
I have personal experience that no company ever files suit against people without sufficient resources. They can do the math.
As someone who worked in one of these places, I can say that making fun of the caller does nothing. The caller is not responsible for the spam, they just need the money
Everybody is responsible for their actions. "I need the money" is no excuse for doing something immoral and rude (albeit legal). Unless you are starving and there is no other way to get food.
Simply say 'No thanks.' and hang up. This prevents you wasting your time and theirs
The goal of course has to be to waste their time without wasting yours. That way, telemarketing gets more expensive, and that's the only language ass holes understand. So say something which keeps them on the line, then lay down the receiver next to the phone and hope that they waste 10 minutes long distance.
Another strategy is to insult the caller, in the hope that he will quit his job which increases the training cost of the telemarketing company.
I never buy books. I simply treat all the books in our local Borders, in out local public library, and in our University library as my personal property. Whenever I want to read one of my books, I go to the friendly people who store my book and read it.
Don't forget to bring your own coffee to Borders and read the New York Times and a couple of magazines for free. Whenever you feel like reading something at home (I rarely do), just buy it and return it after you're done with it. Or get it from the library.
Corporations try to screw you all the time. It's only fair to screw back.
By the way, have you ever realized that advertising is not only annoying, but that you personally pay for it if you buy one of the advertised products?
I've got Caller ID and gleefully IGNORE all calls showing up as "Unavailable" or "Out of area" as these have ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS been salesmen. Being able to killfile their calls is FUN! Heh heh!
It might be fun, but it's not effective since it doesn't cost them money. Here's how I go about it: "Hello, may I tell you a bit about our latest offer..." - "One minute please, I think my father might be more interested." Then I put down the receiver and go back to dinner. The asshole loses time and money.
Paul Erdös, one of the best mathematicians of this century, died in 1996 at the age of 83. During the second half of his life, he was almost constantly on speed. In one of the new biographies, the following story is related: A mathematician friend challenged Erdös to go without drugs for a whole month. Erdös agreed to the bet and won, but later bitterly complained that it was a crime because Mathematics had been slowed down for a month.
--
Place to give hardware away
on
High Tech Junk
·
· Score: 1
You can offer to give away your old hardware at the Giveaway List.
The recipient pays for shipping, otherwise no money changes hands. You can also give away literature or Linux CDs there.
When you open source the SETI client, you of course have to deal with two problems: malignant users who fake results and well meaning but stupid hackers who try to "tune" the program.
Both of these problems can be dealt with if you have massive redundancy. SETI now has about 900,000 participants, about three times as many as projected initially. There's plenty of room for redundancy there.
SETI works like this: you get a block of data, and then your client is supposed to apply several transformations followed by Fast Fourier Transforms. If any of these Fourier results look significant, the client is supposed to tell the server.
To turn this into an open protocol, we simply should require clients to compute an MD5 signature of each of their Fourier transformed data, then compute a single signature of all those signatures, and send that back to the server, in addition to the regular notification of significant results.
The server keeps a database of these signatures, and in fact sends every batch of data to at least three different machines, preferably running different versions of the client on different hardware at different times in different parts of the world. If the received results coincide, everything is ok; if not, the server does the calculation itself and blacklists the bogus clients. Bogus clients should still be fed bogus data, just to keep them busy.
A public access library of data packets and associated correct MD5 result signatures should be available so that people can check their hacked version of the client against it.
Please note that the Free Software Bazaar is a grass roots no-profit alternative to Source Exchange and Cosource which has a much lower overhead and more offers of money for code.
The Free Software Bazaar also is open to developers from all nationalities, so please check it out.
We should also fight for privacy protections on principle. If the two collide, it's up to every individual to decide which principle is the more important one.
If you want to fight software patents on principle, try to get a law passed that prohibits them. Fighting individual software patents in the courts does nothing to invalidate the concept of software patents in general. I claim that this particular software patent has benefits in that it will slow down or halt adoption of P3P.
I'd rather have it open than closed
I'd rather not have it at all.
In fact, a closed alternative wouldn't be that bad if you think about it: without the blessing of W3C, it wouldn't be implemented in many browsers and marketing types couldn't rely on it being present, which defeats the whole concept. It is no coincidence that the Direct Marketing Association (of junk mail and spam fame) collaborates with W3C in this matter.
it is a far better thing that an OPEN standard exists which allows for scrutiny and will (hopefully) follow the wishes of the users.
The standard is open, and that is good. It is a standard for an evil mechanism; it does not answer to any user's need, and it certainly does not increase privacy.
the open-source version of this technology will have a button that says "don't use P3P in any way."
Certainly. You use that button at your own peril though. You won't get into Yahoo or Hotmail or Amazon or Ebay or MTV anymore if you click on that sucker. Remember, you read it here first.
Please don't help these people. P3P deserves to die a horrible death. Here's why:
P3P essentially means that you enter all your personal information (name, address, age, profession, hobbies etc.) into your browser, and then specify a policy which says which sites are allowed to access which parts of this information. Those sites can then pull that information from your browser when you visit them without your further intervention.
This does not increase your privacy one bit. Right now, if you don't want to give out personal information, simply don't fill out that form or insert bogus data. Once P3P is in place, lieing will be a lot harder since you will have to change the database in your browser whenever you want to switch between truthful and false information. Refusing to give out data will also be harder: after a while, sites will simply require that you give them access to your P3P database, just like many sites now require that you allow them to place cookies on your disk.
This is evil technology, and it is favored by marketing types, not by privacy types. (Site operators hate collecting personal information using forms, because many people can't be bothered.) Hopefully, patent law can kill this baby dead.
--
Porn vs. Violent Media
on
Why Kids Kill
·
· Score: 1
What I don't understand about US culture is that it is so tolerant towards depictions of violence and so intolerant towards depictions of sex.
In many European countries for example, kids' shows cannot contain any violence whatsoever and violent video games are reserved for adults, just like hardcore porn. Soft porn is freely available to children. Americans on the other hand don't allow their children access to soft porn, but tolerate depictions of violence.
Overall, this seems counterintuitive, since America's problems with violence seem a lot bigger than Europe's problems with sex.
Slashdot Mirror
--
I don't have to look out, but you do, because you will be out of a job then. More and more people are ignoring or filtering out ads, click-through rates are going down fast. How sweet it is! Even better that even TV ad filtering is now possible with Tivo.
Personally I said that cause I make a living off of creating sites that their only revenue is ads. I think its a great way to have a site.
Sure, put on your site whatever you want, but never EVER presume that you can use my modem connection and display stuff on my computer screen that I don't approve of. I'm in control of my hardware.
Usually ads are not there unless there is a good service or product cause they would not be able to pay for the ad space.
Funny, my position is just the opposite: if it needs advertising, it must be some crap that nobody wants nor needs. Everything that is genuinely useful doesn't need advertising; people will search for and find it themselves. Ever seen an ad for potatos?
--
--
First of all, GPG can be legally exported from its home, Germany, into any country, including the US. It cannot be re-exported from the US. It can never be put on a US FTP server, for example.
Now if the program gets contaminated with a US-written patch, nothing changes. It is still legally exportable from Germany. The writer of the patch may be thrown in jail as an illegal arms dealer, but I wouldn't bet on it.
--
--
The Z3 was not fully programmable: Zuse forgot about the Jump and If-then-else instructions. No loops possible, oops. If you wanted the Z3 to do lots of calculations, you had to feed it a long program on punched tape :-) A German description of the Z3's architecture is here.
The first fully programmable computer was Babbage's analytic engine. Steam power rules! Of course, it was never built. Vaporware rules twice! By the way, his GF Ada Lovelace invented the loop. Chicks rule thrice!
The first operational fully programmable computer was ENIAC (you programmed it by replugging cables). Colossus was a secret special purpose cracking machine for the German Lorenz code and hat limited programmability.
--
Researchers who lack the creativity to come up with tests that don't involve the intentional and unnecessary application of pain and suffering are probably deficient in many other ways as well. I hope the paper won't pass peer review and these assholes won't get tenure.
--
I honestly don't know the answer, but I do know that free software is dead upon arrival in an environment without free development tools. People who pay $100 for a compiler always want to retrieve their "investment" with shareware fees.
--
There's no need to legally challenge the patent with the PTO. You simply program and publish like you always do, and wait until the patent holder threatens to sue you. After they have lost the suit or chickened out, the patent is effectively emasculated.
And of course, during the suit, you keep your legal costs at a minimum by using volunteer free software experts, reading a good legal advice book and avoiding lawyers.
--
If a company sends you a threatening letter, publish it on your web site and then write right back. Tell them that they will never be able to recover money from you since you don't have any, but that you will fight the case till the end, without a lawyer but with massive research support by the free software community regarding prior art and obviousness. Make clear that they will lose money and goodwill if they dare to file a suit, and that they ultimately must lose.
Then spend an afternoon in the nearest law library. The law is not rocket science; lawyers are not needed.
I have personal experience that no company ever files suit against people without sufficient resources. They can do the math.
--
Everybody is responsible for their actions. "I need the money" is no excuse for doing something immoral and rude (albeit legal). Unless you are starving and there is no other way to get food.
Simply say 'No thanks.' and hang up. This prevents you wasting your time and theirs
The goal of course has to be to waste their time without wasting yours. That way, telemarketing gets more expensive, and that's the only language ass holes understand. So say something which keeps them on the line, then lay down the receiver next to the phone and hope that they waste 10 minutes long distance.
Another strategy is to insult the caller, in the hope that he will quit his job which increases the training cost of the telemarketing company.
--
And for man pages, you definitely need tkman.
--
Don't forget to bring your own coffee to Borders and read the New York Times and a couple of magazines for free. Whenever you feel like reading something at home (I rarely do), just buy it and return it after you're done with it. Or get it from the library.
Corporations try to screw you all the time. It's only fair to screw back.
By the way, have you ever realized that advertising is not only annoying, but that you personally pay for it if you buy one of the advertised products?
--
It might be fun, but it's not effective since it doesn't cost them money. Here's how I go about it: "Hello, may I tell you a bit about our latest offer..." - "One minute please, I think my father might be more interested." Then I put down the receiver and go back to dinner. The asshole loses time and money.
--
--
The recipient pays for shipping, otherwise no money changes hands. You can also give away literature or Linux CDs there.
--
Well, form a union. If you are not courageous enough to do that, shut up.
--
Both of these problems can be dealt with if you have massive redundancy. SETI now has about 900,000 participants, about three times as many as projected initially. There's plenty of room for redundancy there.
SETI works like this: you get a block of data, and then your client is supposed to apply several transformations followed by Fast Fourier Transforms. If any of these Fourier results look significant, the client is supposed to tell the server.
To turn this into an open protocol, we simply should require clients to compute an MD5 signature of each of their Fourier transformed data, then compute a single signature of all those signatures, and send that back to the server, in addition to the regular notification of significant results.
The server keeps a database of these signatures, and in fact sends every batch of data to at least three different machines, preferably running different versions of the client on different hardware at different times in different parts of the world. If the received results coincide, everything is ok; if not, the server does the calculation itself and blacklists the bogus clients. Bogus clients should still be fed bogus data, just to keep them busy.
A public access library of data packets and associated correct MD5 result signatures should be available so that people can check their hacked version of the client against it.
--
The Free Software Bazaar also is open to developers from all nationalities, so please check it out.
Axel
--
The real scandal is that we, the hackers, don't aggressively use strong and unbreakable crypto. Why is SMTP still send in the clear? How about HTTP?
It would be trivial to secure these protocols, in fact, secure versions exist, but are largely ignored.
We control the infrastructure and the protocols, so why don't we get off our lazy asses?
--
We should also fight for privacy protections on principle. If the two collide, it's up to every individual to decide which principle is the more important one.
If you want to fight software patents on principle, try to get a law passed that prohibits them. Fighting individual software patents in the courts does nothing to invalidate the concept of software patents in general. I claim that this particular software patent has benefits in that it will slow down or halt adoption of P3P.
I'd rather have it open than closed
I'd rather not have it at all.
In fact, a closed alternative wouldn't be that bad if you think about it: without the blessing of W3C, it wouldn't be implemented in many browsers and marketing types couldn't rely on it being present, which defeats the whole concept. It is no coincidence that the Direct Marketing Association (of junk mail and spam fame) collaborates with W3C in this matter.
--
The standard is open, and that is good. It is a standard for an evil mechanism; it does not answer to any user's need, and it certainly does not increase privacy.
the open-source version of this technology will have a button that says "don't use P3P in any way."
Certainly. You use that button at your own peril though. You won't get into Yahoo or Hotmail or Amazon or Ebay or MTV anymore if you click on that sucker. Remember, you read it here first.
--
P3P essentially means that you enter all your personal information (name, address, age, profession, hobbies etc.) into your browser, and then specify a policy which says which sites are allowed to access which parts of this information. Those sites can then pull that information from your browser when you visit them without your further intervention.
This does not increase your privacy one bit. Right now, if you don't want to give out personal information, simply don't fill out that form or insert bogus data. Once P3P is in place, lieing will be a lot harder since you will have to change the database in your browser whenever you want to switch between truthful and false information. Refusing to give out data will also be harder: after a while, sites will simply require that you give them access to your P3P database, just like many sites now require that you allow them to place cookies on your disk.
This is evil technology, and it is favored by marketing types, not by privacy types. (Site operators hate collecting personal information using forms, because many people can't be bothered.) Hopefully, patent law can kill this baby dead.
--
In many European countries for example, kids' shows cannot contain any violence whatsoever and violent video games are reserved for adults, just like hardcore porn. Soft porn is freely available to children. Americans on the other hand don't allow their children access to soft porn, but tolerate depictions of violence.
Overall, this seems counterintuitive, since America's problems with violence seem a lot bigger than Europe's problems with sex.
--
Yes. See point 3 of the LGPL.
--