Well, maybe the US government (and the poor fools commonly known as voters) will get a wakeup call about their own nation's DMCA when a US citizen gets extridited to or detained in New Zeland or Australia, like Jon Johanson and Dimitry Sklyarbov were in the US. The law, in any country, is wrong. Unfortunatly, it seems that the prominent victims of the DMCA have been forginers, and the US is known to be particularly callous towards forgin nationals (especially those from non-english speaking contries).
It really sucks that this would be the case. Let's just hope that the poster-boy US citizen who gets nailed by a forgin version of the DMCA is appealing enough that the press will run the story as front-page news.
Sorry to have sounded inept, but I do know what zaibatsu are. I lived in Japan for a while, and got to see them in action up-close and personal. I know that a bunch of merged comapnies isn't exactly the same thing as a zaibatsu, but I think it's reasonable to say that they would comprise the American equivilant of one.
Anyway, it's only a joke, intended to be amusing before accurate. Also, it seemed a lot funnier at 4 AM when I posted it. ^_^
AOL Time Warner CNN General Motors Ford AT&T Glaxo Smithkline Beecham Amazon Sony Adobe ExxonMobile Texaco Chase Manhattan Hathaway Newport News Inc. (popularly known as Mega-Corp) has announced that it has declared that its rival, Microsoft Daimler Chrisler American Home Products Catapillar BP ABCDisney Barns and Noble Fox Viacom Novartis Boeing CitiGroup Lockheed ADM Sunoco John Deere Enron Apple Gerber A.G. (also known as The Conglomerate) is illegal. The bombing will begin in five minutes.
Have you ever watched Tenchi? If you did, it might occur to you that it has some merit beyond just a show for "little girls." In any event, I beleive that the target audience is 14 year old boys.
Oh, and there are actually legitamate reasons for liking a show intended for little girls. After all, little girls have reasons to like shuch shows. I, for one, happen to appriciate a lot of the same things my 7 year old step-sister does. Waffles, for instance. Soccer, Mark Twain, Miles Davis and annoyng jokes are also on our mutual lists of things that we like.
We both think Ryo-Oki is cute and fuzzy, that Mihoshi is insane, and that Ryoko is really funny. So what? They are.
There are plenty of things that she likes that I can't stand (McDonald's), and plenty of things that I like that she can't stand (The Offspring). What's wrong with a common ground, even if she is a third my age?
Well, maybe we'll find out what all that buisiness with Lady Tokeme and the squid-beard guy was all about.
Or maybe they'll start over again, like they did with Universe and Tokyo, and we'll have Yet Another Incongruous Tenchi Story Arc. That would annoy me, but it would be kind of funny.
Don't get too excited. As it was pointed out, he's still in jail. The case will most likely move forward. We still need to continue our support for Dmitry in the comming ordeal.
The pressure on Adobe applied by the EFF and the community at large of fair-minded technical people has yeiled results. This is proof positive that what we do and think can have an effect. Let's make sure we follow through and see Dmitry aquited, freed and exhonerated.
Let's also not forget that this represents a step in the right direction towards the repeal of the DMCA. The moments after a victory are the most vulnerable moments of any movment. It's very easy to forget about the long-term goals after acomplishing something important. Let's make sure that this success does not distract us from doing what we know is right.
And it's not as if/. hasn't run its share of poorly written/conceived stories. So what if it wasn't "a good enough story"? If the subject matter is important enough, it will speak for itself.
I thought this is what people put radios in their car for. If I think I'm getting tired, I put something like Rage Against the Machine or Offspring in the CD player.
Well, as long as it doesn't use that valium drenched voice that Hal had in 2001. That would put me to sleep even if I were wide awake.
Don't be sad about the SCSC being killed. They upgraded the equipment at Fermilab, making it rather more powerful then the SCSC was going to be. And the upgrade cost a tiny, tiny fraction of the what the SCSC would have cost. It was a boondogle.
And to make you feel better still, they are upgrading the CERN facility right now to be more powerfull that the SCSC ever could have been.
So don't feel bad - the science is getting done. They just killed a pretty-looking project that needed to be killed for the sake of better science. Too bad they didn't have that kind of maturity about the International Space Station.
Government folks just don't seem to understand that MegaUltraHumungous projects are bad for science, no matter how pretty they look. If you have a raft of little projects, you will have a few that are junk, a few that are average, and a handfull that are brilliant. If you have one, big giant project, it will be average at best. It's the same principle with companies - one big company in a market will be crummy at best, and evil at worst. With a bunch of companies, at least a few can really shine.
Um, that means that a cracker only needs to try 9999 combinations. You can also rule out a lot of the low-entropy ones, like 00-fi-ln-00 and 12-fi-ln-34. That leaves you with an even smaller list of probables.
A dictionary attack would probably use a dictionary 5 or 10 times that size, and wouldn't take all that much time to run. A 500 Mhz system can process a lot of ~12 character strings in an hour.
Does the law in Australia allow companies to be held liable for breaches in security? It seems to me that it would be bad faith at the very least. On the other hand, I can't think of an example where a company
had crappy security
got hacked, hurting their users and customers in a tangable way
were sued by thier customers
lost/settled with their customers
As far as I can tell, the hackers are the ones considered culpable, not the incompitant admins who let them in. Is there a legal basis for this, or is it just the way things work? Or am I being paranoid?
If anyone is still interested in this stuff and wants to learn more about quantum physics and the Higgs Boson, but don't want to go back to school to do it, there is an excellent book called The God Particle by Leon Lederman (the former head of Fermilab).
Lederman is a very, very good writer, and manages to pack in a great deal of real, "hard" science without making it a labor to read. He includes the math if you're interested, but organizes the book so that you don't have to follow the math too closely to know what's going on.
No offense to the peopel who pulled off this (no doubt) difficult feat of software engineering, but this brings to mind an addage that seems apropos.
Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
So now we've got linux on a Palm Pilot. Why would we want this instead of Palm OS, which does the job pretty darn well? Are there other applications of the Dragonball processor that I don't know about?
Is there any way we can write to him while he's sitting in jail? Even if he knows he's on the side of right, it could still mean a lot to him to get some good letters of support.
I've never written to anyone in jail or in prison before, so I don't know what's entailed.
Well, you're always allowed to write in whoever you want if they don't appear on the ballot. Every year, thousands of people vote for Scoobie-Do, Donald Duck and Bugs Bunny. Why not CowboyNeal? On the other hand, I don't know what the rules about nicknames and handles are. Maybe there really is a person named Neal Cowboy somewhere.
There's more to DVDs than layers - most DVDs are single-layered anyway. DVD readers use a higher frequency laser than CD players do, which means it has a smaller wavelength. They also have a different and more sophisticated aiming system. This allows the little pits that the laser reads to be smaller and closer together. Hence, more data. It's analogous to hard drives going from 72 MB to 72 GB in less than 10 years - better control sytems and more sensitive read heads let you pack the data closer together on the platters, and thus you get more capacity. Wow.
On the other hand, it's pretty much the same technology, just implemented with current methods and techniques, and after ~20 years of experience making CDs and CD players. The only remarkable thing about DVD players is the content control, and that's not especially impressive.
China does have it's own region. That's why this whole thing is so surreal. I think they are talking about PS2's earmarked for US and Japanese markets that would contain encoding for those regions. Still, I don't get it.
Wait a minute. From what I understood, the DVD copy controll sytem (CSS) was broken wide open and as a result all of the secret keys are now public knowledge. Once the Xing (sp?) player was cracked, it allowed the rest of the players to be cracked as well.
So, um, what technology might they obtain? The DVD cryptosystem? Remind me again why anyone should care?
Um, the GPL is a intelectual property license. As far as I know, it falls into the general catagory of contract law. Every country that I know of has a functioning system of contract law, for the simple reason that it's impossible to do buisiness otherwise.
The GPL probably makes some assumptions that are more true under US and European law than elsewhere, but it is, fundamentally, a contract. The Code of Hammurabi (1792 BCE) contains enough of the fundamentals of contract law that a time traveler could probably defend the GPL with little else. Of course, there are some assumptions in the GPL that might be a little tough to exlpain in aincent Babylon, but the terms of the GPL are clear enough that you could identify a flagrant violation in almost any legal enviornment.
Yes, China is a communist country. But, communist or not, it does have a working system of contract law. Keep in mind that China has a large, complex and vibrant economy. They make everything from locomotives to DRAMs. Without contract law, none of this would be possible.
And I've heard enough about the Chinese government refusing to obey intelectual property standards. This simply isn't the case. While they might make noises and gestures as if they were still communist, the reality is very different. They are signatories of most or all of the international conventions on patents, copyrights and trademarks. It is true that there are plenty of honest-to-goodness software pirates (I hate the using term "pirate") in China, but this is more of an enforcement problem than a legal problem. The government simply doesn't have the resources to investigate and prosecute IP violations the way the US does. That's just a fact of life when your country's per capita purchasing parity is only $3,800.
Before you go posting about countries you've never visteded and/or know little about, you should do a little homework. I use the CIA factbook. Here's the entry for China.
No, the US software industry is not as innovative as it could be. Much time and money is wasted as a result of this "innovation gap". As supporters and friends of Free and opensource systems, I think most of us already agree with that.
However, compare this to what the article is talking about in Japan. Japanese companies are still buying, on the whole, computer systems that are copies of the IBM mainframe systems. Mainframes ceased being a growth industry 25 years ago. The software written for these systems is foisted on the buyers in a way that, in the early 80's and late 70's was proved to stifle innovation in the worst possible way. This is why PC's (for better or worse) took off in the United States - they might be based on a cruddy, rickety architecture and hobbled by a couple of rather odious quasi-monopolies, but at least they allow for a great deal of flexability. The fact that Linux even exists is probably the greatest teastament to this flexability yet.
So, when compaired to IBM in the early 70's, or Hitachi, Fujitsu and NEC today, even the Dreaded Microsoft is a fantastic innovator. You and I might bemone the limp-risted nature of "innovation" that comes from Redmond, but at least there is something to bemone.
When I read the article, this kind of jumped out at me.
As mentioned, Tux's internal architecture is designed specifically for high performance, but that design is only one of five factors critical to its top-notch performance, according to Tux's primary author, Ingo Molnar, kernel development/systems engineer at Red Hat, in Berlin.
This is a sentence, that, when read, on the occasion that I saw it on the screen, caused me to experience, figuratively speaking, the most explosive burst of laughter I have yet to experience, although it may be, for the purposes of English grammer, correct, and furthermore, caused me to wonder if, perhapse, although they may otherwise be of a compotent nature, ZDNet's editors are, figuratively speaking, asleep on the job.
One of the most important philosiphies of UNIX and UNIX-like systems is a modular architecture. Complicated structures can be easily assembled from prefabricated (and highly configurable) parts, usually with little more than some shell scripting as glue.
The opposite development paradigm (championed by klunky kitchen-sink packages like Microsoft Office) tends to be less reliable, slower, more expensive, more difficult to maintain.... you know the rest.
Applications like GnuCash seem to follow the monolithic paradigm. Would it be easier (or otherwise benificial) to break GnuCash up into a number of smaller, simpler applications? For instance, a database and a set of GUIs, with data analysis tools implemented as console programs. That way, with a little knowledge of shell scripting, you could put together a tool to generate virtually any report you wanted.
Many of the previous questions asked questions about the possibility of adding certain features to GnuCash (PalmPilot integration, online banking, XML interfaces for finacial tools...). If GnuCash were more granular, it would be very easy to make the system work with Other applications - easy enough that most Linux users could probably hack together what they needed to make it work.
The problem, of course, is that more granular architechures are often harder to use and configure for new users. UNIX mail, X, and network configuration were all things I agonized over as a new user, mainly because they are hybrids cludged together from very different bits of software.
My question is this - can you have the best of both? Can you make a usable application as large and complex as GnuCash, but still preserve the UNIX "one-function-per-program" design that makes it so extensible?
Um, you should take your own advice, AC. The fact is, Microsoft can and does punish OEMs for offering unconfigured systems. And the fact is, you'll have to look long and hard to find any vendor that will sell you an unconfigured system. None of the major vendors offer unconfigured desktop systems, and the same applies for servers.
It's not a question of Microsoft being evil - the fact is, a lot of people used to opt for unconfigured systems, and would then install an unlicensed copy of Windows. That's a fact that Microsoft took note of, and acted to prevent. This is a very well established and open policy of Microsoft, not some underhanded conspiracy. It's not as if there's any dispute about this.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, you're suppose to post something like "I would have gotten away with it if it hadn't been for those pesky, meddling kids and their van!"
^_^
--
It really sucks that this would be the case. Let's just hope that the poster-boy US citizen who gets nailed by a forgin version of the DMCA is appealing enough that the press will run the story as front-page news.
--
Anyway, it's only a joke, intended to be amusing before accurate. Also, it seemed a lot funnier at 4 AM when I posted it. ^_^
--
Just what America needs. Zibatsu.
--
Oh, and there are actually legitamate reasons for liking a show intended for little girls. After all, little girls have reasons to like shuch shows. I, for one, happen to appriciate a lot of the same things my 7 year old step-sister does. Waffles, for instance. Soccer, Mark Twain, Miles Davis and annoyng jokes are also on our mutual lists of things that we like.
We both think Ryo-Oki is cute and fuzzy, that Mihoshi is insane, and that Ryoko is really funny. So what? They are.
There are plenty of things that she likes that I can't stand (McDonald's), and plenty of things that I like that she can't stand (The Offspring). What's wrong with a common ground, even if she is a third my age?
--
Or maybe they'll start over again, like they did with Universe and Tokyo, and we'll have Yet Another Incongruous Tenchi Story Arc. That would annoy me, but it would be kind of funny.
--
The pressure on Adobe applied by the EFF and the community at large of fair-minded technical people has yeiled results. This is proof positive that what we do and think can have an effect. Let's make sure we follow through and see Dmitry aquited, freed and exhonerated.
Let's also not forget that this represents a step in the right direction towards the repeal of the DMCA. The moments after a victory are the most vulnerable moments of any movment. It's very easy to forget about the long-term goals after acomplishing something important. Let's make sure that this success does not distract us from doing what we know is right.
--
And it's not as if /. hasn't run its share of poorly written/conceived stories. So what if it wasn't "a good enough story"? If the subject matter is important enough, it will speak for itself.
--
Well, as long as it doesn't use that valium drenched voice that Hal had in 2001. That would put me to sleep even if I were wide awake.
"Dave... Dave... Dave, are you listening to me?"
--
And to make you feel better still, they are upgrading the CERN facility right now to be more powerfull that the SCSC ever could have been.
So don't feel bad - the science is getting done. They just killed a pretty-looking project that needed to be killed for the sake of better science. Too bad they didn't have that kind of maturity about the International Space Station.
Government folks just don't seem to understand that MegaUltraHumungous projects are bad for science, no matter how pretty they look. If you have a raft of little projects, you will have a few that are junk, a few that are average, and a handfull that are brilliant. If you have one, big giant project, it will be average at best. It's the same principle with companies - one big company in a market will be crummy at best, and evil at worst. With a bunch of companies, at least a few can really shine.
--
A dictionary attack would probably use a dictionary 5 or 10 times that size, and wouldn't take all that much time to run. A 500 Mhz system can process a lot of ~12 character strings in an hour.
I strongly suggest you try a different scheme.
--
- had crappy security
- got hacked, hurting their users and customers in a tangable way
- were sued by thier customers
- lost/settled with their customers
As far as I can tell, the hackers are the ones considered culpable, not the incompitant admins who let them in. Is there a legal basis for this, or is it just the way things work? Or am I being paranoid?--
Lederman is a very, very good writer, and manages to pack in a great deal of real, "hard" science without making it a labor to read. He includes the math if you're interested, but organizes the book so that you don't have to follow the math too closely to know what's going on.
--
Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
So now we've got linux on a Palm Pilot. Why would we want this instead of Palm OS, which does the job pretty darn well? Are there other applications of the Dragonball processor that I don't know about?
--
I've never written to anyone in jail or in prison before, so I don't know what's entailed.
--
--
--
On the other hand, it's pretty much the same technology, just implemented with current methods and techniques, and after ~20 years of experience making CDs and CD players. The only remarkable thing about DVD players is the content control, and that's not especially impressive.
--
--
So, um, what technology might they obtain? The DVD cryptosystem? Remind me again why anyone should care?
--
The GPL probably makes some assumptions that are more true under US and European law than elsewhere, but it is, fundamentally, a contract. The Code of Hammurabi (1792 BCE) contains enough of the fundamentals of contract law that a time traveler could probably defend the GPL with little else. Of course, there are some assumptions in the GPL that might be a little tough to exlpain in aincent Babylon, but the terms of the GPL are clear enough that you could identify a flagrant violation in almost any legal enviornment.
Yes, China is a communist country. But, communist or not, it does have a working system of contract law. Keep in mind that China has a large, complex and vibrant economy. They make everything from locomotives to DRAMs. Without contract law, none of this would be possible.
And I've heard enough about the Chinese government refusing to obey intelectual property standards. This simply isn't the case. While they might make noises and gestures as if they were still communist, the reality is very different. They are signatories of most or all of the international conventions on patents, copyrights and trademarks. It is true that there are plenty of honest-to-goodness software pirates (I hate the using term "pirate") in China, but this is more of an enforcement problem than a legal problem. The government simply doesn't have the resources to investigate and prosecute IP violations the way the US does. That's just a fact of life when your country's per capita purchasing parity is only $3,800.
Before you go posting about countries you've never visteded and/or know little about, you should do a little homework. I use the CIA factbook. Here's the entry for China.
--
However, compare this to what the article is talking about in Japan. Japanese companies are still buying, on the whole, computer systems that are copies of the IBM mainframe systems. Mainframes ceased being a growth industry 25 years ago. The software written for these systems is foisted on the buyers in a way that, in the early 80's and late 70's was proved to stifle innovation in the worst possible way. This is why PC's (for better or worse) took off in the United States - they might be based on a cruddy, rickety architecture and hobbled by a couple of rather odious quasi-monopolies, but at least they allow for a great deal of flexability. The fact that Linux even exists is probably the greatest teastament to this flexability yet.
So, when compaired to IBM in the early 70's, or Hitachi, Fujitsu and NEC today, even the Dreaded Microsoft is a fantastic innovator. You and I might bemone the limp-risted nature of "innovation" that comes from Redmond, but at least there is something to bemone.
--
--
The opposite development paradigm (championed by klunky kitchen-sink packages like Microsoft Office) tends to be less reliable, slower, more expensive, more difficult to maintain.... you know the rest.
Applications like GnuCash seem to follow the monolithic paradigm. Would it be easier (or otherwise benificial) to break GnuCash up into a number of smaller, simpler applications? For instance, a database and a set of GUIs, with data analysis tools implemented as console programs. That way, with a little knowledge of shell scripting, you could put together a tool to generate virtually any report you wanted.
Many of the previous questions asked questions about the possibility of adding certain features to GnuCash (PalmPilot integration, online banking, XML interfaces for finacial tools...). If GnuCash were more granular, it would be very easy to make the system work with Other applications - easy enough that most Linux users could probably hack together what they needed to make it work.
The problem, of course, is that more granular architechures are often harder to use and configure for new users. UNIX mail, X, and network configuration were all things I agonized over as a new user, mainly because they are hybrids cludged together from very different bits of software.
My question is this - can you have the best of both? Can you make a usable application as large and complex as GnuCash, but still preserve the UNIX "one-function-per-program" design that makes it so extensible?
--
It's not a question of Microsoft being evil - the fact is, a lot of people used to opt for unconfigured systems, and would then install an unlicensed copy of Windows. That's a fact that Microsoft took note of, and acted to prevent. This is a very well established and open policy of Microsoft, not some underhanded conspiracy. It's not as if there's any dispute about this.
--