I hope Palm loses; they said "may we use this", Xerox said something like "no", or "only if you pay us", and Palm said "screw you, we'll just do it anyway".
This wasn't an *accident*. They were aware that Xerox had the patent, they got the idea from Xerox, and they chose to violate the patent anyway.
Not Perl's Fault. C does the same thing. POSIX *requires* the same thing.
And it's been in the docs forever.
What on earth did you think the year *was*? I mean, when you have a "year" in a system you're told is Y2K compliant, and it's under a hundred, doesn't this inspire you to check how you use it?
This is *NOT* a perl problem, nor a design flaw, nor anything of the sort. It's a reasonably plausible design decision that was made about 20 years ago, and everyone has been told about it.
A catastrophe in slow motion...
on
Apocalypse Not
·
· Score: 4
Is a bunch of mild inconveniences.
If you took everything, from thousands of people without power (last August, NY), to 5% of the British credit card swipers rejecting cards (Dec 27-31), to the 911 system in LA mis-prioritizing calls for about 10 minutes, and all the other little things that will go wrong within the next year or three, and even the ones that failed years ago (first credit cards expiring in '00), and you had *ALL* of this on one day, it would have been the global catastrophe we talk about.
Catastrophes are fast. If they aren't fast, we deal with them as they're happening, instead of trying to react to aftermath. Imagine how dangerous a mudslide would be if it were just one ton of mud per day for a long time. It would be a *joke*.
I dunno how many of you play pinball, but I remember games where a score of a million was a huge result, and I vaguely remember games where a score of 100,000 was impressive. I saw a TV show once where a score of 45 was pretty good.
By contrast, there's periodically speculation about what kind of changes would merit a major number change in NetBSD. 1.0 was released in 1994, just over a year after 0.8. 1.1 was a little over a year later.
The most recent NetBSD release is 1.4.1; -current is called "1.4P". Somewhere in there, my i386 converted to ELF, got CardBus support, got a complete rework of the concept of console drivers, got a framework for multiplexing input devices (to make USB keyboards and mice relevant), and got soft updates. None of that justifies a bump to 1.5, apparently.
The bump from 1.3 to 1.4 was a *COMPLETELY NEW* VM subsystem, new compiler, and a dozen or so other features.
I got the IP thing right, but I was shocked to discover the article was *FOR* it in cases like this. Dumb kids, never even patented the lemonade stand.;-)
I think people are a bit drastic in assuming that he *must* be a fraud, just because his results are weird or impossible. After the last ten or twenty years of QM, I'm ready to believe that impossible results will be commonplace.
Would I invest in his company? No. If I had some spending money, and I felt like risking it, I might speculate in his company, just because, if he *does* have anything, it could be worth a lot - even if it's not what he thinks it is.
It's like the guy who thinks water burns, because he's been able to make an engine burn a water/gas combo. He's wrong, but there could be applications for an internal-combustion-and-steam engine.
If he's got neat materials, I don't care if his physics is stupid; he's got neat materials.
That's sort of like what Brooks was arguing about, when he didn't like data hiding.
He changed his mind.
You need an overview of the whole system. Detailed knowledge has a hidden threat - it inclines you to think that the internals of other parts of the system are static, and that you can depend on them.
That's the number of email addresses in their spam list.
Anything that hurts them is good.
(And if you think I care about audio formats, rethink. I don't use RealAudio because they're spammer bastards. Why should I care which proprietary format I can't use people are distributing audio in?)
I have to admit, I haven't seen a fundemental disconnect between reality and genetics this broad since I last listened to Jeremy Rifkin talking.
Katz, you missed the point. Completely. Totally. Nothing you are saying has any relationship or relevance to what's happening.
Gattaca was, indeed, science fiction. It was *fiction*. This is not how we actually behave. It is not a way we would behave even if we did have the genome mapped.
If genes determined everything, maybe we'd have a little reason to worry. They don't. I'm not talking about "how you're raised", I'm talking unexpected variances in hormones, I'm talking plain old random outcomes.
Genetics is a tool. If you angst about it, well, fine, whatever.
But please, don't talk as if you know what you're talking about. This is probably the least sanely written slashdot piece it has ever been my misfortune to come across.
You had no point, you had no evidence for your point, you had no conclusions that followed from anything you said. This piece read like a dumbed-down version of _Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity_.
Are you planning to try to hurt AOL's reputation in front of millions of people by forging their trademark onto a fraudulent medical claim?
If not, I wouldn't worry too much.
Yes, this was a good suit. No, it's not a problem. No, it's not likely to become a problem. There's nothing that they were sued for that people shouldn't, potentially, be sued for.
Someone fussed about distributing jokes to friends. Well, as a friend who gets a lot of jokes, let me say, *STOP*. It's actually pretty irritating to those of us who skim web sites and Usenet already, because we *have* already seen it.
These are not "loopholes". They are permission to make your own ethical decisions.
Larry Wall has a strong belief that people must be allowed to make their own ethical choices. He will give away his code, because this makes him happy. He does not expect you to feel obligated to him by this. If you are obligated to anyone, you are obligated, in his words, to the Author of his story.
Don't like it? Don't use perl.
I think Perens has made a totall ass of himself. "use of Artistic waning"? Perl is still out there, and doing quite well. And, personally, I think Artistic is the best of the licenses. :)
Don't let the fact that you don't want to allow people certain choices blind you to the fact that allowing them those choices isn't a "loophole". GPL is a demand letter with a court date; Artistic is a polite request.
Indeed! Okay, who here thinks Blackdown would have had a finished product within the next six *MONTHS* if Sun hadn't stepped in to offer code and support?
It doesn't matter whether or not *we* believe in the death penalty. We're talking about China; no one outside the country gets a vote. (Nor, for the moment, do people inside the country.)
Yes, they use the death penalty heavily. They have too many people, and the government doesn't want to expend resources taking care of people who are troublesome.
Everyone likes to quote the "total cost of execution" figure, but that's based on our system with appeals and everything. It's a lot cheaper in China; you spend enough to have someone dig a grave, and you spend a bullet.
Good? No. Bad? Very likely. But also not something that we can evaluate plausibly given *our* experience. It's a different world over there.
(Personally, I am not very fond of the death penalty, but I do believe it's a reasonable response to some crimes. Just not very many.)
Sorry, but it's all bullshit. Corporations don't pollute. People decide to pollute. *INDIVIDUAL* people make these decisions. Sometimes in groups, but a group of people won't end up doing something decisive without one of them advocating it.
We, the people, have made choices. Some of them have been bad. The entire idea that "corporations" are at fault is an attempt to throw the blame at someone else.
Sit back down. Take your licks. You earned 'em.
Wanna do something useful? Let's start by seeing how we can foster freedom and choices for people. Hey, guess what! Corporations. Free trade.
More choices, better. Fewer choices, worse. That's the end result of individuality.
Am I an individualist? You betcha. And if you want to take away my right to band together with others, be it a corporation or a marriage, you're gonna have to kill me first.
Telstra is a famously spam-friendly company. They have made it very clear that you can spam all you want from any other network to advertise sites hosted there; it's official policy.
Sorry, but no. We *need* every domain to have real, live, active contact addresses and phone numbers. It's a responsibility and accountability thing, just like postmaster@example.com. (Not having a working postmaster@ is an RBL'able offense, in some cases.)
The solution is to stop the spammers, not to hide contact information which is *NECESSARY* to keep the system running.
It'd take a lot of convincing for me to get involved with helping someone:
1. Who can't spell EPOC.
2. Who doesn't know that EPOC is the OS, not the hardware platform - the platform is an ARM chip.
3. Who doesn't know that someone's already got Linux running on a couple of the Psion units.
Open source doesn't mean "I propose something and thousands of people do it". It means "I do my own research, and I get something going, and people get involved then."
Slashdot Mirror
I hope Palm loses; they said "may we use this", Xerox said something like "no", or "only if you pay us", and Palm said "screw you, we'll just do it anyway".
This wasn't an *accident*. They were aware that Xerox had the patent, they got the idea from Xerox, and they chose to violate the patent anyway.
I seem to recall 'www.free-expression.org' being involved with this.
Not Perl's Fault. C does the same thing. POSIX *requires* the same thing.
And it's been in the docs forever.
What on earth did you think the year *was*? I mean, when you have a "year" in a system you're told is Y2K compliant, and it's under a hundred, doesn't this inspire you to check how you use it?
This is *NOT* a perl problem, nor a design flaw, nor anything of the sort. It's a reasonably plausible design decision that was made about 20 years ago, and everyone has been told about it.
Is a bunch of mild inconveniences.
If you took everything, from thousands of people without power (last August, NY), to 5% of the British credit card swipers rejecting cards (Dec 27-31), to the 911 system in LA mis-prioritizing calls for about 10 minutes, and all the other little things that will go wrong within the next year or three, and even the ones that failed years ago (first credit cards expiring in '00), and you had *ALL* of this on one day, it would have been the global catastrophe we talk about.
Catastrophes are fast. If they aren't fast, we deal with them as they're happening, instead of trying to react to aftermath. Imagine how dangerous a mudslide would be if it were just one ton of mud per day for a long time. It would be a *joke*.
Same thing.
I dunno how many of you play pinball, but I remember games where a score of a million was a huge result, and I vaguely remember games where a score of 100,000 was impressive. I saw a TV show once where a score of 45 was pretty good.
:)
By contrast, there's periodically speculation about what kind of changes would merit a major number change in NetBSD. 1.0 was released in 1994, just over a year after 0.8. 1.1 was a little over a year later.
The most recent NetBSD release is 1.4.1; -current
is called "1.4P". Somewhere in there, my i386
converted to ELF, got CardBus support, got a complete rework of the concept of console drivers, got a framework for multiplexing input devices (to make USB keyboards and mice relevant), and got soft updates. None of that justifies a bump to 1.5, apparently.
The bump from 1.3 to 1.4 was a *COMPLETELY NEW* VM subsystem, new compiler, and a dozen or so other features.
I guess it's just an island of sanity.
How can this be? The first post was topical!
;-)
I got the IP thing right, but I was shocked to discover the article was *FOR* it in cases like this. Dumb kids, never even patented the lemonade stand.
I think people are a bit drastic in assuming that he *must* be a fraud, just because his results are weird or impossible. After the last ten or twenty years of QM, I'm ready to believe that impossible results will be commonplace.
Would I invest in his company? No. If I had some spending money, and I felt like risking it, I might speculate in his company, just because, if he *does* have anything, it could be worth a lot - even if it's not what he thinks it is.
It's like the guy who thinks water burns, because he's been able to make an engine burn a water/gas combo. He's wrong, but there could be applications for an internal-combustion-and-steam engine.
If he's got neat materials, I don't care if his physics is stupid; he's got neat materials.
On the other hand, he sure *sounds* like a kook.
Nothing wrong; I just ran into their VP of policy and privacy in an anti-spam context, and it turns out they're legit, so I'm boosting 'em if I can. :)
More hacker folklore.
Get in there and post feedback, comment in the forums, and/or call CNN, and talk to them about what "hacker" means.
If they want to babble about crackers, fine, but they shouldn't be confusing two very different groups.
That's sort of like what Brooks was arguing about, when he didn't like data hiding.
He changed his mind.
You need an overview of the whole system. Detailed knowledge has a hidden threat - it inclines you to think that the internals of other parts of the system are static, and that you can depend on them.
53,000,000.
That's the number of email addresses in their spam list.
Anything that hurts them is good.
(And if you think I care about audio formats, rethink. I don't use RealAudio because they're spammer bastards. Why should I care which proprietary format I can't use people are distributing audio in?)
I have to admit, I haven't seen a fundemental disconnect between reality and genetics this broad since I last listened to Jeremy Rifkin talking.
Katz, you missed the point. Completely. Totally. Nothing you are saying has any relationship or relevance to what's happening.
Gattaca was, indeed, science fiction. It was *fiction*. This is not how we actually behave. It is not a way we would behave even if we did have the genome mapped.
If genes determined everything, maybe we'd have a little reason to worry. They don't. I'm not talking about "how you're raised", I'm talking unexpected variances in hormones, I'm talking plain old random outcomes.
Genetics is a tool. If you angst about it, well, fine, whatever.
But please, don't talk as if you know what you're talking about. This is probably the least sanely written slashdot piece it has ever been my misfortune to come across.
You had no point, you had no evidence for your point, you had no conclusions that followed from anything you said. This piece read like a dumbed-down version of _Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity_.
Well, let's think.
Are you planning to try to hurt AOL's reputation in front of millions of people by forging their trademark onto a fraudulent medical claim?
If not, I wouldn't worry too much.
Yes, this was a good suit. No, it's not a problem. No, it's not likely to become a problem. There's nothing that they were sued for that people shouldn't, potentially, be sued for.
Someone fussed about distributing jokes to friends. Well, as a friend who gets a lot of jokes, let me say, *STOP*. It's actually pretty irritating to those of us who skim web sites and Usenet already, because we *have* already seen it.
I have a couple of 'em too. I think the URL for my comments is still http://www.plethora.net/~seebs/kinesis.html but I'm not sure. :)
FWIW, NetBSD makes these awesomely useful - you can get a USBPS/2 adapter, and you have a *hot pluggable* Kinesis.
He missed the point entirely.
These are not "loopholes". They are permission to make your own ethical decisions.
Larry Wall has a strong belief that people must be allowed to make their own ethical choices. He will give away his code, because this makes him happy. He does not expect you to feel obligated to him by this. If you are obligated to anyone, you are obligated, in his words, to the Author of his story.
Don't like it? Don't use perl.
I think Perens has made a totall ass of himself. "use of Artistic waning"? Perl is still out there, and doing quite well. And, personally, I think Artistic is the best of the licenses.
:)
Don't let the fact that you don't want to allow people certain choices blind you to the fact that allowing them those choices isn't a "loophole".
GPL is a demand letter with a court date; Artistic is a polite request.
Indeed! Okay, who here thinks Blackdown would have had a finished product within the next six *MONTHS* if Sun hadn't stepped in to offer code and support?
:)
It doesn't matter whether or not *we* believe in the death penalty. We're talking about China; no one outside the country gets a vote. (Nor, for the moment, do people inside the country.)
Yes, they use the death penalty heavily. They have too many people, and the government doesn't want to expend resources taking care of people who are troublesome.
Everyone likes to quote the "total cost of execution" figure, but that's based on our system with appeals and everything. It's a lot cheaper in China; you spend enough to have someone dig a grave, and you spend a bullet.
Good? No. Bad? Very likely. But also not something that we can evaluate plausibly given *our* experience. It's a different world over there.
(Personally, I am not very fond of the death penalty, but I do believe it's a reasonable response to some crimes. Just not very many.)
Sorry, but it's all bullshit. Corporations don't pollute. People decide to pollute. *INDIVIDUAL* people make these decisions. Sometimes in groups, but a group of people won't end up doing something decisive without one of them advocating it.
We, the people, have made choices. Some of them have been bad. The entire idea that "corporations" are at fault is an attempt to throw the blame at someone else.
Sit back down. Take your licks. You earned 'em.
Wanna do something useful? Let's start by seeing how we can foster freedom and choices for people. Hey, guess what! Corporations. Free trade.
More choices, better. Fewer choices, worse. That's the end result of individuality.
Am I an individualist? You betcha. And if you want to take away my right to band together with others, be it a corporation or a marriage, you're gonna have to kill me first.
Telstra is a famously spam-friendly company. They have made it very clear that you can spam all you want from any other network to advertise sites hosted there; it's official policy.
Sorry, but no. We *need* every domain to have real, live, active contact addresses and phone numbers. It's a responsibility and accountability thing, just like postmaster@example.com. (Not having a working postmaster@ is an RBL'able offense, in some cases.)
The solution is to stop the spammers, not to hide contact information which is *NECESSARY* to keep the system running.
It'd take a lot of convincing for me to get involved with helping someone:
1. Who can't spell EPOC.
2. Who doesn't know that EPOC is the OS, not the hardware platform - the platform is an ARM chip.
3. Who doesn't know that someone's already got Linux running on a couple of the Psion units.
Open source doesn't mean "I propose something and thousands of people do it". It means "I do my own research, and I get something going, and people get involved then."
Amazon did the same thing to news.admin.net-abuse.email a while back.
Slime does this kind of thing.
Admittedly, it *was* a security hack - however, it was the one, true, neat security hack.
Thompson changed the world for the five percent or so of people who can understand why his accomplishment is scary.
At least one person who can't figure out why he's on their list is on their list.
Most importantly, the letter is *ONE MEGABYTE*. Not okay. I doubt they really needed a 600k PDF, but if they did, they shoulda emailed a URL.