Announce that you are going to auction a dollar bill to the highest bidder with the proviso that both the higest bidder and the next highest bidder need to pay their bids, but only the highest bidder actually gets the dollar.
Once the bidding gets going, it's difficult to stop. Whatever I bid, you can outbid me by a penny. Eventually, I'll bid $1 and you'll still be better off bidding $1.01 because you're only out 0.01 compared to being out 0.99.
From the point of view of the bidders, it is a non-zero sum game.
The privilege Harper & Row presume reaches every citizen, not just those trained to hack. And thus the decision by Congress to deny fair use rights to one class of users is inconsistent with the presupposition of Harper & Row
These are several, strong briefs attacking the DCMA and CSS from several different angles: authority, freedom of speech, freedom to link, unconstitutionality of the act. I can't imagine that much will be left standing once the courts are through. Hollywood may have bought Congress and the White House, but they haven't bought the Judiciary -- yet.
2.4.0 was released very early in January, not "just last week".
If MS released a patch or hotfix a week after a major release, it would be because of a horiffic bug or security hole. The *reason* for the release is important.
2.4.1 adds functionality. ReiserFS is a journaling filesystem that is now in the official kernel. That's good news.
Linux has had problems with 2.x.1 releases being les stable than 2.x.0. Linus intends this not to be the case.
Producing patches often is a good thing whether it fixes a bug or adds functionality. That dosn't mean that any patch or upgrade can't simultaneously represent an embarassment for a developer. That depends entirely on the reason for the release.
If the FCC got 5,000,000 letters saying this law is WRONG, I'd think that would have an impact on the enforcement of the law. Wouldn't you agree?
No.
The FCC has no choice but to enforce the law. Period.
I wonder about the wisdom of posting the way to make a comment here on/. If the typical comment on the website is any indication, the FCC is going to get (and ignore) a bunch of whiny comments that don't address the issues they've outlined in the Notice for Rulemaking.
Re:Good Fnarg! that article is so full of shit.
on
2.2 vs 2.4
·
· Score: 4
A speed issue would be a delay loop overflow, but anyone still using counter-based delay loops should sit down with a game developer and learn about more robust throttling methods. Every decent computer architecture has a system clock that can be used to accurately measure time in tiny increments.
You've seen the BogoMIPS reported in a Linux kernel boot? That measure is reported when the kernel calibrates a certain timing loop which it uses for microsecond delays. There are some *very* good reasons why the kernel still uses timing loops not the least of which is that the gettimeofday() syscall is much too slow for the kernel to use for this purpose.
Believe me, the kernel developers know what they are doing. If you doubt that, spend some time reading the archives of the kernel development list or the weekly Kernel Traffic summary.
What they did (or near as dammit) was write something akin to the NFS mounting code, except using UNIX sockets instead of IP sockets. This code had to be part of the Linux kernel, and was hence GPL. Then they wrote a closed-source piece of filesystem code which ran as root in userland. The GPL code in the kernel would then mount the filesystem being exported by the closed-source fileserver code.
It's funny that they took this approach as it was entirely unnecessary.
A filesystem can be implemented in a module. Linus specifically allows closed source modules to be used with the GPL kernel. If the filesystem had been implemented as a module, it could have coexisted just fine with the GPL kernel.
Following Lisa's posting about "@Home blocking PORT 25" I would like to add that AOL does the same thing.
And good for them. AOL has been castigated for years as spammers used to grab a disposable AOL account, point to and open relay and spew until the plug got pulled. do {} while (1);
So AOL filters outgoing port 25. You were able to work around it by using a different port for your SMTP. Excellent. But don't criticize them for taking an action.
Not necessarially. Depending on the cost of cycles, it may be sufficient to use a less efficient approach that is not completely scalable.
Secondly, the algorithm must have minimal communication requirements. Rendering, for example, is parallelizable, however in most modern rendering applications each computer would need an entire description of the scene being rendered. This could be a huge amount of information, running into gigabytes, yet it would need to be distributed to every participant in the rendering process.
I do actuarial projections for a life insurance company. I have a set of assets (investments with future cash flows to the company) and liabilities (insurance policies with future cash flows). The liability cash flows influence what funds are available for investing (or dis-investing). Industry regulations require that I investigate the adaquacy of the type and amount of the company's assets under different interest rate environments. The regulators want to make sure that even if interest rates and/or equity values spike up or drop down dramatically, the company will not become insolvent. The tricky part is that the liability cash flows are often dependant on the interest income that they assets can generate and the interest income that assets can generate is dependant on the interest rate environment when each of the cash flows occurs.
Because of the interrelatedness of the two portfolios, there are two ways I can go about dividing up this project. I can slice by time, calculating all of the cash flows that I need at a given time to determine whether there is cash to invest or assets to sell. This is the most efficient method, but it has high communications requirements.
Or, I can project all of the liabilities over future times and get a series of liability cash flows which then imply a series of asset portfolios and interest rates and then iterate back and forth between liabilities and assets until the answers converge. (Typically on the order of 10 or so iterations and not hundreds or thousands). This is less efficient, but has lower communications requirements. If cycles are sufficiently cheap, it may pay to use a less efficient algorithm.
Thirdly, the algorithm must be robust, if someone decides to screw things up, and hack their client to send back malicious data (as happened with Seti@home) they must not be able to invalidate the work that everyone else has done.
That depends entirely on the incentives. SETI was vulnerable because there was a competition to rack up completed cells. If the incentives to participate are designed properly, the may be no incentive to hack the client.
The answer is that the root servers don't hold all of the DNS entries, they point you at other servers that either have the information you need or will refer you to another server that does.
If you request the.ca domain, the root server tells you which server to go to look up a.ca. That server will tell you where to get the blah.ca domain and that server will do the rest of the work pointing you to ftp.blah.ca.
If you request a.uk, the root server will send you off in another direction.
I read your write up. Interesting stuff there. My question is how do I determine if a system has been hit? Are there telltale log entries or will netstat show unusual connections?
The more I learn about Mormonism, the more of it I see in OSC's books. I realize that it's his faith, but the themes seem to be getting more obvious. From the subtle elements of the Worthington Chronicles to the much more overt parts of Pastwatch and Lovelock. I'm sorry to say that I enjoyed the older works much more than the later ones.
When the analog signal goes off the air everyone has to make a choice between buying an HDTV or having learn to live without the magic tube.
There's a third choice: rioting in the streets.
If analog TV gets turned off without substancial numers of people having the ability to watch Jerry Springer, there will be rioting. Government will back down.
There's nothing fundamental about the landscape orientation of a screen. With the proper drivers, the screen could be used either in portrait or in landscape mode. In any event, writing on the pad would just put the input into a document. If the document didn't fit ont he screen, it would be scrollable.
wouldn't writing on the pad mash the keys against the table?
My impression is that there is no keyboard on the unit, just a place to plug in an external keyboard.
I think that there's a real niche market for this kind of thing. I attend meetings and would love to have my huge financial spreadsheets available without printing out 60 pages of output.
But 5 pounds and 2.5 hours battery life dosn't seem all that useful. I have some meetings that go on longer than that.
But you've got to admit that the signal from a Sol-like system is a lot harder to detect than the signal from one of these systems with huge planets close in or tidally locked.
My point is that more time is needed to look for hard-to-find systems before we can begin to discuss if current models can reproduce the range of mass distributions observed.
I was the victim of an inaccurate background check. Five years ago, I was hired for a job in NYC for which a background check was required. I had to give my notice to my old company before the check could be begun. I did so. Two weeks later, after my last day at my old company and as I was about to leave Chicago with my stuff packed up in my car, I got a phone call that there was a problem with the background check -- there was a bench warrent for my arrest for failure to appear to answer a drug charge. This was a Thursday and I was scheduled to begin work on Monday.
Now I've never been arrested and I've never failed to appear before a judge when summoned. The company was going to check into it further, but they wanted me to bring proof that there *wasn't* a warrant out for my address.
I called the local police who said "Come on down and we'll work it out." I wasn't stupid enough for that one. I called the office of the State's Attorney and asked them to look up the warrant. At first they said that they couldn't tell me anything. After explaining my story the guy said he shouldn't tell me this, but there were no warrents out for my arrest.
I felt more confident, but still had nothing to show my new employer. I went to the local police station and they took my ID and ran a warrant check. They said there were no warrants, but they couldn't give me anything in writing.
I left the next morning and called the company from the halfway point. They said that Equifax (a credit reporting company) had to send someone to the courthouse. Don't bother reporting for work on Monday.
I drove the rest of the way to New York not having a job. In the end it worked out alright. The warrant was for someone with the same name but different address and date of birth. I started the new job on Wednesday (and was paid for the two days that I didn't work while they were checking out the report.)
But it could have been much worse. Equifax sent me a copy of the report listing the warrant for my address, but it had disclaimers all over it that they are not responsible for the accuracy of the information. If I had lost that job because of a slanderous background check, would I have had any recourse?
Yet the Halloween documents point out how M$ is going to try to smash open-source: not with copyright, but with patents.
MS has been found in a court of law to be a monopoly in the market of PC operating systems. The trial would be shorter this time and it would (a) strip MS of the patent and (b) break them up for good.
Remember, the Holloween documents were written before Jackson's Findings of Fact.
What is outlandish is that the systems that they've found so far don't look like our system in terms of the distribution of matter by distance from the star. This raises question about whether the models of planetary formation that we have (which were designed by looking at our own system) are adequate to produce these kinds of mass distributions.
The simplest explanation for these apparent anomalies is that we're not getting an unbiased sample in the systems that we are finding. Our methods for finding solar systems (look for periodic wobbles in the spectrum of a star) is biased to finding large planets near stars and large planets in tidally locked orbits. And look! This is what we've found.
The real question is could we detect our own solar systems at these distances (>100 LY from Earth) with these methods. I'm no astronomer, but I don't think so.
They start out by defining a series of symbols and methodology of representing base 10 numbers and equality using a set of (apparently) arbitrary symbols, by displaying the base 1 and base 2 equivalents. This seems fair, though I'm not sure I would have bothered with base 10.
All mathematical symbols are arbitrary. There's nothing inherent about the symbol '=' that means equality. It is just a convention.
For the purposes of this message, the symbols are defined. The numerals are defined by cardinality of sets. Base-10 is used becuase it is more compact than Base 2 and it is the base that we use more often.
Similarly, the operators are defined on later pages. I haven't looked at the other pages in the message, but I would define + by referencing the special value 0, the identity element under addition. Multiplication is probably defined in terms of addition and exponentiation in terms of
Even if the aliens who receive and decode this message don't know about this particular prime, they might be able to determine its primality using similar methods to those used by us to do so. As such, the primality test of this number is a pretty big brag on our mathematical abilities.
Slashdot Mirror
Announce that you are going to auction a dollar bill to the highest bidder with the proviso that both the higest bidder and the next highest bidder need to pay their bids, but only the highest bidder actually gets the dollar.
Once the bidding gets going, it's difficult to stop. Whatever I bid, you can outbid me by a penny. Eventually, I'll bid $1 and you'll still be better off bidding $1.01 because you're only out 0.01 compared to being out 0.99.
From the point of view of the bidders, it is a non-zero sum game.
These are several, strong briefs attacking the DCMA and CSS from several different angles: authority, freedom of speech, freedom to link, unconstitutionality of the act. I can't imagine that much will be left standing once the courts are through. Hollywood may have bought Congress and the White House, but they haven't bought the Judiciary -- yet.
2.4.0 was released very early in January, not "just last week".
If MS released a patch or hotfix a week after a major release, it would be because of a horiffic bug or security hole. The *reason* for the release is important.
2.4.1 adds functionality. ReiserFS is a journaling filesystem that is now in the official kernel. That's good news.
Linux has had problems with 2.x.1 releases being les stable than 2.x.0. Linus intends this not to be the case.
Producing patches often is a good thing whether it fixes a bug or adds functionality. That dosn't mean that any patch or upgrade can't simultaneously represent an embarassment for a developer. That depends entirely on the reason for the release.
Nosferatu is clearly the same story as Bram Stoker's Dracula. Replace Dracula with Orlok and Renfield with Knock and story is the same.
The story is here.
If the FCC got 5,000,000 letters saying this law is WRONG, I'd think that would have an impact on the enforcement of the law. Wouldn't you agree?
/. If the typical comment on the website is any indication, the FCC is going to get (and ignore) a bunch of whiny comments that don't address the issues they've outlined in the Notice for Rulemaking.
No.
The FCC has no choice but to enforce the law. Period.
I wonder about the wisdom of posting the way to make a comment here on
A speed issue would be a delay loop overflow, but anyone still using counter-based delay loops should sit down with a game developer and learn about more robust throttling methods. Every decent computer architecture has a system clock that can be used to accurately measure time in tiny increments.
You've seen the BogoMIPS reported in a Linux kernel boot? That measure is reported when the kernel calibrates a certain timing loop which it uses for microsecond delays. There are some *very* good reasons why the kernel still uses timing loops not the least of which is that the gettimeofday() syscall is much too slow for the kernel to use for this purpose.
Believe me, the kernel developers know what they are doing. If you doubt that, spend some time reading the archives of the kernel development list or the weekly Kernel Traffic summary.
What they did (or near as dammit) was write something akin to the NFS mounting code, except using UNIX sockets instead of IP sockets. This code had to be part of the Linux kernel, and was hence GPL. Then they wrote a closed-source piece of filesystem code which ran as root in userland. The GPL code in the kernel would then mount the filesystem being exported by the closed-source fileserver code.
It's funny that they took this approach as it was entirely unnecessary.
A filesystem can be implemented in a module. Linus specifically allows closed source modules to be used with the GPL kernel. If the filesystem had been implemented as a module, it could have coexisted just fine with the GPL kernel.
Following Lisa's posting about "@Home blocking PORT 25" I would like to add that AOL does the same thing.
And good for them. AOL has been castigated for years as spammers used to grab a disposable AOL account, point to and open relay and spew until the plug got pulled. do {} while (1);
So AOL filters outgoing port 25. You were able to work around it by using a different port for your SMTP. Excellent. But don't criticize them for taking an action.
It's the tragedy of the commons.
Firstly, the algorithm must be parallelizable.
Not necessarially. Depending on the cost of cycles, it may be sufficient to use a less efficient approach that is not completely scalable.
Secondly, the algorithm must have minimal communication requirements. Rendering, for example, is parallelizable, however in most modern rendering applications each computer would need an entire description of the scene being rendered. This could be a huge amount of information, running into gigabytes, yet it would need to be distributed to every participant in the rendering process.
I do actuarial projections for a life insurance company. I have a set of assets (investments with future cash flows to the company) and liabilities (insurance policies with future cash flows). The liability cash flows influence what funds are available for investing (or dis-investing). Industry regulations require that I investigate the adaquacy of the type and amount of the company's assets under different interest rate environments. The regulators want to make sure that even if interest rates and/or equity values spike up or drop down dramatically, the company will not become insolvent. The tricky part is that the liability cash flows are often dependant on the interest income that they assets can generate and the interest income that assets can generate is dependant on the interest rate environment when each of the cash flows occurs.
Because of the interrelatedness of the two portfolios, there are two ways I can go about dividing up this project. I can slice by time, calculating all of the cash flows that I need at a given time to determine whether there is cash to invest or assets to sell. This is the most efficient method, but it has high communications requirements.
Or, I can project all of the liabilities over future times and get a series of liability cash flows which then imply a series of asset portfolios and interest rates and then iterate back and forth between liabilities and assets until the answers converge. (Typically on the order of 10 or so iterations and not hundreds or thousands). This is less efficient, but has lower communications requirements. If cycles are sufficiently cheap, it may pay to use a less efficient algorithm.
Thirdly, the algorithm must be robust, if someone decides to screw things up, and hack their client to send back malicious data (as happened with Seti@home) they must not be able to invalidate the work that everyone else has done.
That depends entirely on the incentives. SETI was vulnerable because there was a competition to rack up completed cells. If the incentives to participate are designed properly, the may be no incentive to hack the client.
Yeah, why not, that worked just great with .alt
.ca domain, the root server tells you which server to go to look up a .ca. That server will tell you where to get the blah.ca domain and that server will do the rest of the work pointing you to ftp.blah.ca.
.uk, the root server will send you off in another direction.
The answer is that the root servers don't hold all of the DNS entries, they point you at other servers that either have the information you need or will refer you to another server that does.
If you request the
If you request a
Somehow I don't feel so safe. Acme Corp. dosn;t have a good record of safety.
Thanks for the information. Now that I know what to look for I can check out the few systems that I have installed.
I won't need the perl program as I'll fix any holes that may be open.
I read your write up. Interesting stuff there. My question is how do I determine if a system has been hit? Are there telltale log entries or will netstat show unusual connections?
The more I learn about Mormonism, the more of it I see in OSC's books. I realize that it's his faith, but the themes seem to be getting more obvious. From the subtle elements of the Worthington Chronicles to the much more overt parts of Pastwatch and Lovelock. I'm sorry to say that I enjoyed the older works much more than the later ones.
When the analog signal goes off the air everyone has to make a choice between buying an HDTV or having learn to live without the magic tube.
There's a third choice: rioting in the streets.
If analog TV gets turned off without substancial numers of people having the ability to watch Jerry Springer, there will be rioting. Government will back down.
There's nothing fundamental about the landscape orientation of a screen. With the proper drivers, the screen could be used either in portrait or in landscape mode. In any event, writing on the pad would just put the input into a document. If the document didn't fit ont he screen, it would be scrollable.
wouldn't writing on the pad mash the keys against the table?
My impression is that there is no keyboard on the unit, just a place to plug in an external keyboard.
I think that there's a real niche market for this kind of thing. I attend meetings and would love to have my huge financial spreadsheets available without printing out 60 pages of output.
But 5 pounds and 2.5 hours battery life dosn't seem all that useful. I have some meetings that go on longer than that.
Is that a nano-probe in your pants or are you just glad to see me?
"You idiot, you just sneezed *into* the capsule?"
"Oh, just tell them we're sending up 'lifeforms'."
But you've got to admit that the signal from a Sol-like system is a lot harder to detect than the signal from one of these systems with huge planets close in or tidally locked.
My point is that more time is needed to look for hard-to-find systems before we can begin to discuss if current models can reproduce the range of mass distributions observed.
I was the victim of an inaccurate background check. Five years ago, I was hired for a job in NYC for which a background check was required. I had to give my notice to my old company before the check could be begun. I did so. Two weeks later, after my last day at my old company and as I was about to leave Chicago with my stuff packed up in my car, I got a phone call that there was a problem with the background check -- there was a bench warrent for my arrest for failure to appear to answer a drug charge. This was a Thursday and I was scheduled to begin work on Monday.
Now I've never been arrested and I've never failed to appear before a judge when summoned. The company was going to check into it further, but they wanted me to bring proof that there *wasn't* a warrant out for my address.
I called the local police who said "Come on down and we'll work it out." I wasn't stupid enough for that one. I called the office of the State's Attorney and asked them to look up the warrant. At first they said that they couldn't tell me anything. After explaining my story the guy said he shouldn't tell me this, but there were no warrents out for my arrest.
I felt more confident, but still had nothing to show my new employer. I went to the local police station and they took my ID and ran a warrant check. They said there were no warrants, but they couldn't give me anything in writing.
I left the next morning and called the company from the halfway point. They said that Equifax (a credit reporting company) had to send someone to the courthouse. Don't bother reporting for work on Monday.
I drove the rest of the way to New York not having a job. In the end it worked out alright. The warrant was for someone with the same name but different address and date of birth. I started the new job on Wednesday (and was paid for the two days that I didn't work while they were checking out the report.)
But it could have been much worse. Equifax sent me a copy of the report listing the warrant for my address, but it had disclaimers all over it that they are not responsible for the accuracy of the information. If I had lost that job because of a slanderous background check, would I have had any recourse?
_Godel, Escher, Bach_ missed the point: it's not "self-reference" which is so powerful, but rather "reference" itself.
You missed the point of GEB. The Godel Incompleteness Theorem could not have been proved without self-referential statements.
Yet the Halloween documents point out how M$ is going to try to smash open-source: not with copyright, but with patents.
MS has been found in a court of law to be a monopoly in the market of PC operating systems. The trial would be shorter this time and it would (a) strip MS of the patent and (b) break them up for good.
Remember, the Holloween documents were written before Jackson's Findings of Fact.
I crashed my Dodge into a tree and it took forever to fsck the engine.
What is outlandish is that the systems that they've found so far don't look like our system in terms of the distribution of matter by distance from the star. This raises question about whether the models of planetary formation that we have (which were designed by looking at our own system) are adequate to produce these kinds of mass distributions.
The simplest explanation for these apparent anomalies is that we're not getting an unbiased sample in the systems that we are finding. Our methods for finding solar systems (look for periodic wobbles in the spectrum of a star) is biased to finding large planets near stars and large planets in tidally locked orbits. And look! This is what we've found.
The real question is could we detect our own solar systems at these distances (>100 LY from Earth) with these methods. I'm no astronomer, but I don't think so.
They start out by defining a series of symbols and methodology of representing base 10 numbers and equality using a set of (apparently) arbitrary symbols, by displaying the base 1 and base 2 equivalents. This seems fair, though I'm not sure I would have bothered with base 10.
All mathematical symbols are arbitrary. There's nothing inherent about the symbol '=' that means equality. It is just a convention.
For the purposes of this message, the symbols are defined. The numerals are defined by cardinality of sets. Base-10 is used becuase it is more compact than Base 2 and it is the base that we use more often.
Similarly, the operators are defined on later pages. I haven't looked at the other pages in the message, but I would define + by referencing the special value 0, the identity element under addition. Multiplication is probably defined in terms of addition and exponentiation in terms of
Even if the aliens who receive and decode this message don't know about this particular prime, they might be able to determine its primality using similar methods to those used by us to do so. As such, the primality test of this number is a pretty big brag on our mathematical abilities.