Why would we jail someone for spamming? They are non-violent offenders. Now, after forcing us to waste our time dealing with spam, we get the additional opportunity to pay for his housing for up to 11 years. I think we should place non-violent offenders under house arrest and have them work to undo the damage they did. Maybe have him spend several years identifying spam or doing community service.
This jailing of people for computer crimes that did not cause physical injury and do not present a continuing danger is ridiculous. Take the money they made illegally away and then have them do something to make it up to the community while on probation. Now, if they make a second attempt and get convicted again at whatever they were convicted of originally... then let's reestablish public gallows and hang them, then mount their head on a spike somewhere preferably near a webcam. The point is, either way, they don't go to prison and we save money.
In serious, this whole idea of throwing people in jail for things they did on a computer (including copyright violations) that didn't result in someone being bodily harmed or killed is totally out of proportion and a short-sighted way of dealing with the problem. You can beat the living crap out of someone, enough to give them some minor form of permanent disability for the rest of their life, and get a year in most states - and that's the maximum, which will only be applied if you are a chronic repeat offender.
You may not need a generation ship. You could use a cryogenic ship. There are several species on earth that can go into indefinite freeze and reanimate (frogs being one). It's likely that human cryogenics will become a reality long before the technology for sending a self-sufficient colony to another solar system becomes a reality and therefore the colonists who leave Earth will be the ones who arrive, even if they are very old in real time when they do, but not much older in biological time.
"IBM, Microsoft, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, CA and Red Hat have already agreed to review some software patent applications for the one-year community review project."
Wait... so large companies with lots of existing patents have volunteered to review new patents in the field to try and help the examiner dismiss them? Was not the patent system set up in part to encourage small inventors and entrepreneurs? Could this be an even more obvious conflict of interest?
"Technical experts in the computer arts registering with the CPRP website will review and submit information for up to 250 published patent applications, with no mare than 15 patens being accepted from one applicant/company at a time, the USPPTO said."
250? Drop in the bucket? Only 15 at a time from one company sounds like convenient plausible deniability for organizations that file hundreds per year.
"Consent will be obtained from all applicants whose applications are volunteered and selected for this pilot... Some applicants today can wait up to four years for a first response on software applications. The idea with the pilot is to shorten that wait considerably."
So you can either go to the end of the line or get to run the gauntlet of the entrenched companies trying to help dismiss your patent?
That is one of the most horrific things I have ever seen in modern technology. That's like goatse.cz for browsers. Impressive you got it to work, but what possessed you to do such a thing?
Christians were not the target of the actual group historically referenced, and the game materials talk of targeting both sides:
Hashshashin
Aside from that, this is one of the most bizarre commentaries I have ever seen. How does the logic even connect? Would you be comfortable if the game featured a Christian sect running around assassinating Muslims during the Crusades? How about if you could play both sides? Would you play it then?
Sorry, semantic digression: Will people stop it with the cui bono!? Just say it in English, which you have to do anyway in repetition since some people don't know what cui bono means. For someone who reads both Latin and English it reads like this. "But makes one think, who is benefitting? Who is benefitting from these articles?"
I've been doing some research on OpenID, which seems to be considered as a possible substrate for building trusted identities (OpenID, as its proponents are quick to point out, only establishes an identity token, not trust). However, I hope that trust does not get built on the OpenID model because the OpenID protocol for identification is very poor from a security standpoint, a blindness to which the OpenID proponents have (I think) because of the vocabulary used.
Basically, the way OpenID works is that you connect to some site, give it your OpenID, which is just a URL, and the site you connected to (in the initial 1.0 standard of OpenID), gets the content at the URL. From the URL, it finds the URL of an identity server and redirects your browser to that server. Here's where the problem lies: In OpenID terms the site that you connected to is called the 'relying party'. However, you are really the 'relying' party because you are relying on the site you just connected to to send you the correct URL of your identity server. If instead they send you to a machine that merely proxies your identity server, they get your identity server password as you authenticate and your identity is compromised.
Now, there are various ways that OpenID proponents say this can be handled, but it's a fundamentally dangerous security model when you rely on an untrusted site to direct you to your identity system. The use of encrypted keychains (keyword bing encrypted here) with browser autofill, albeit not perfect, is much more secure system and works well enough that I'm not sure what the real savings of OpenID are (OpenID proponents will point to all kinds of other uses that OpenID could *potentially* be used for, but the process it was designed for and only practical purpose to date is to log into web sites using a URL instead of a username and password). Is saving having to fill in a password really worth this much complexity: http://openid.net/pres/protocolflow-1.1.png ?
When it comes to trust, we need to figure out a less complex methodology for identity before we can start establishing trusted identities. We also need to make an identity valuable, and right now an OpenID identity doesn't really represent something of value to general users who already have keychains and autofill. In fact, OpenID proponents often defend OpenID by saying that it should be used for low risk logins like blogs and the like. In that case, non-encrypted browser auto-complete is already superior from an end user perspective, and generally enabled by default or by clicking yes on one dialog window with first use of browser.
"Google rarely allows outsiders to visit the unit, and it has been cautious about allowing Mr. Singhal to speak with the news media about the magical, mathematical brew inside the millions of black boxes that power its search engine."
I could see tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, but millions?
I suggest a change in perspective. A good piece of technology is one that doesn't intrude on your life and doesn't have to be maintained. If you start adding all kinds of technical gizmos and gadgets to your house, you will become a slave to maintaining them. Home automation technology just is not to the point yet where you can install and forget. It's constant tweaks and upgrades, failed components, trying to figure out odd configuration files, languages, and protocols to get things to work correctly and with each other. At the end of the day you will spend far more time maintaining it than it will ever give you in improved lifestyle or productivity. Focus the your technical research on the low tech items that will make your house easy to live in, like good electrical wiring, good plumbing, good toiliets, sinks, and energy efficient appliances. You've got hundreds of hours of research to do on that front before you should even think about Star Trek style housing.
I'm not sure I agree with the post you replied to because it becomes a complex issue, but you are already represented by your two senators and your representative. That's your maximum representative entitlement in the federal government. How would you feel if you strongly supported a candidate for your representation and a bunch of people in the next state over funded another candidate who won using that money to vote for their interests instead of yours?
This is both insightful and funny. Within the next couple decades, books may become antiques. They really are legacy media platforms. I actually like reading a book better than reading on a computer, but two things:
1. I'm dated. I grew up reading books on paper, pre-Internet. This is not true of new generations. I had a vertigo moment the other day when I was on a train and I heard a young girl who was maybe eight years old telling her grandmother, with full confidence, of information she had found on this and that web site. There was no awe in her voice, this was all very matter of fact. In her world view, the Internet was simply an assumed platform, not something new. There are cognitively mature people alive today who have never known the Internet NOT to exist. 2. Surely within the next couple decades electronic book reading technology will get parity on heft, size of screen, resolution, and outdoor viewing.
I think I'll go read a book now for old times' sake.
It's pretty impressive how the toll booth structure absorbed the impact easily. The structure did not even wobble. It looks like a tollbooth operator would have been okay even in the booth that was hit, at least if there was no shrapnel from the explosion. No doubt concussed and shocked, but alive. I say good engineering on that one.
Someone else said that the driver was having seizures several hours before the accident? Why was he driving? It's lucky that the tollbooth stopped him or he could have killed several other people. It's unfortunate he died, but fortunate no one else was hurt.
By the way, watch the SUV that just goes on by through the EZ Pass at regular speed as if nothing happened. Just another day on the turnpike, I guess. Also, the nitwit running towards the flaming car might want to lookup what 'secondary explosion' means.
Seems like if BoB has an 'in' with CCP, Goons have an 'in' with Slashdot. Do you realize how fast this made it onto the Slashdot front page (before CCP even had a chance to respond that they would respond)? I personally think that game owners and site editors have whatever editorial discretion (which includes modifying game balance) they want over their game/site - it's the player/reader's discretion to play/read, so I'm not getting upset about it, but methinks there is a greater "meta game" going on here then most people are aware.
Then again.. if you go down this alley... you have to then ask yourself... what meta game am I playing? Isn't the whole MMOG scene fun?:)
The reason that programming is the most important skill a child should be learning is that there will soon come a time when being able to 'talk to machines' by at least having mastery of a high level programming language will be a basic prerequisite to starting, managing, or working for a company. Not having solid skills will be like not learning English, or not knowing how to use a Word Processor in the current business environment. Even if your child's future lies in academia, all serious research and advanced learning will require the same.
40 Years Is Not Very Long
on
Videogames Turn 40
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
40 years is not very long for what has transpired between the early video games and modern video games. Video games are sort of the representative tip of the iceberg in computing technology . Aside from some super computer applications and the like, video games often represent computer hardware taken to the limits of simulation of some internally consistent model, from the bizarre (2D Mario worlds) to the more realistic (3D FPS with more accurately modeled physics). MMOGs (and MUDs before them) have traced the capabilities of networks, with Second Life, for all its wrinkles, probably best (or poorly, as the actual user experience may be) excercising the networking envelope because of it's just-in-time content streaming and server multiplexing.
Of course, that doesn't mean that modern video games are any more enjoyable than Pong and the earlier games, which almost have an advantage in that the only thing they could focus on was gameplay, but it does show an impressive advancement along the technical curve. With that curve tending upwards and advancement getting faster, it's fun to imagine what the next 40 years will bring.
I do not argue that many children in the developed countries have partents who provide a highly privileged lifestyle and will buy their children a computer or any technical item they want. However, a large number of children in developed countries do not have access to a similar computer as a consequence of urban or rural poverty or parental disinterest in or ignorance about the importance of technological educaiton. Furthermore, few schools in developed countries, even at the university level, have a curriculum centered around a common computing platform available to all students.
It might be deferred cost, but whether it's Americans now or Americans later, they will pay. The only other options are to default on bonds or massively devalue the dollar by issuing more currency (remember that foreign creditor, though foreign, hold their U.S. debt in dollars), both of which have significant consequences.
I find it disturbing that such focus is put on third world children when a significant number of children in the U.S. and other developed countries do not have access to a similiar device or good educational opportunities. It's a shared failure of Western governments and projects such as the OLPC to favor others over their own for the sake of political correctness and what I can only describe as some sort of institutional guilt over priviliege combined with well-intentioned, but nonetheless clueless, naivete.
When it comes to technical leadership, it is sort of like the airline safety instructions you get - if the airmasks drop down, secure your own first so you can help others without losing your ability to do so. Think about it while you go to mod me down.
Sounds like in many cases you have to pay for the privilege of having your credit protected. Why should we have to pay a for-profit company money to secure our credit?
Who is going to recoup the cost of longer jail terms? We only need to lock someone up if they are a continuing threat to others if not locked up, which in this case would mean they would continue to intentionally make terrorist hoaxes (which, if only a hoax, is not really a threat per se so much as a considerable annoyance). This bill is inherently contradictory. If someone *intentionally* and *with malice* makes a terrorist hoax, I want them contributing some portion of their income to paying responder overtime so I don't have to, not sitting in jail getting housed and fed on my dime.
Also, if this is a reaction to the scare in Boston, the bill should be rewritten so that people affected by the reaction should be able to bring civil suit against the government for wasting their time, not the other way down. Although, that would, on a large scale, result in people suing themselves, which would no doubt be interesting, and perhaps educational.
Yes, this is something with which to be concerned. This is the intellectual property clause. Although, fairly standard, never accept a contract that does not limit the scope of owned property by the employing party to only code or documentation created on their time and/or their machines and/or their network. Anything else you think of or do is your own and they not need to be notified.
Since they clearly want you, make them change that. You have power now. When you sign, you give it up.
Also, make sure to check out the non-compete clause. With an intellectual property clause like that you are probably dealing with some contract dickheads, though they might just have copied it from somewhere else.
Question of curiosity: Where's the DOJ on enforcing antitrust acts? Intel with an 80%+ market share seems to run afoul of the normal calculations used by antitrust rules to determine if a monopoly exists in a particular market and therefore merit a splintering. Has Intel already beat away attempts to do this?
Slashdot Mirror
Why would we jail someone for spamming? They are non-violent offenders. Now, after forcing us to waste our time dealing with spam, we get the additional opportunity to pay for his housing for up to 11 years. I think we should place non-violent offenders under house arrest and have them work to undo the damage they did. Maybe have him spend several years identifying spam or doing community service.
This jailing of people for computer crimes that did not cause physical injury and do not present a continuing danger is ridiculous. Take the money they made illegally away and then have them do something to make it up to the community while on probation. Now, if they make a second attempt and get convicted again at whatever they were convicted of originally... then let's reestablish public gallows and hang them, then mount their head on a spike somewhere preferably near a webcam. The point is, either way, they don't go to prison and we save money.
In serious, this whole idea of throwing people in jail for things they did on a computer (including copyright violations) that didn't result in someone being bodily harmed or killed is totally out of proportion and a short-sighted way of dealing with the problem. You can beat the living crap out of someone, enough to give them some minor form of permanent disability for the rest of their life, and get a year in most states - and that's the maximum, which will only be applied if you are a chronic repeat offender.
You may not need a generation ship. You could use a cryogenic ship. There are several species on earth that can go into indefinite freeze and reanimate (frogs being one). It's likely that human cryogenics will become a reality long before the technology for sending a self-sufficient colony to another solar system becomes a reality and therefore the colonists who leave Earth will be the ones who arrive, even if they are very old in real time when they do, but not much older in biological time.
FTA
"IBM, Microsoft, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, CA and Red Hat have already agreed to review some software patent applications for the one-year community review project."
Wait... so large companies with lots of existing patents have volunteered to review new patents in the field to try and help the examiner dismiss them? Was not the patent system set up in part to encourage small inventors and entrepreneurs? Could this be an even more obvious conflict of interest?
"Technical experts in the computer arts registering with the CPRP website will review and submit information for up to 250 published patent applications, with no mare than 15 patens being accepted from one applicant/company at a time, the USPPTO said."
250? Drop in the bucket? Only 15 at a time from one company sounds like convenient plausible deniability for organizations that file hundreds per year.
"Consent will be obtained from all applicants whose applications are volunteered and selected for this pilot... Some applicants today can wait up to four years for a first response on software applications. The idea with the pilot is to shorten that wait considerably."
So you can either go to the end of the line or get to run the gauntlet of the entrenched companies trying to help dismiss your patent?
That is one of the most horrific things I have ever seen in modern technology. That's like goatse.cz for browsers. Impressive you got it to work, but what possessed you to do such a thing?
Christians were not the target of the actual group historically referenced, and the game materials talk of targeting both sides:
Hashshashin Aside from that, this is one of the most bizarre commentaries I have ever seen. How does the logic even connect? Would you be comfortable if the game featured a Christian sect running around assassinating Muslims during the Crusades? How about if you could play both sides? Would you play it then?
Sorry, semantic digression: Will people stop it with the cui bono!? Just say it in English, which you have to do anyway in repetition since some people don't know what cui bono means. For someone who reads both Latin and English it reads like this. "But makes one think, who is benefitting? Who is benefitting from these articles?"
I've been doing some research on OpenID, which seems to be considered as a possible substrate for building trusted identities (OpenID, as its proponents are quick to point out, only establishes an identity token, not trust). However, I hope that trust does not get built on the OpenID model because the OpenID protocol for identification is very poor from a security standpoint, a blindness to which the OpenID proponents have (I think) because of the vocabulary used.
Basically, the way OpenID works is that you connect to some site, give it your OpenID, which is just a URL, and the site you connected to (in the initial 1.0 standard of OpenID), gets the content at the URL. From the URL, it finds the URL of an identity server and redirects your browser to that server. Here's where the problem lies: In OpenID terms the site that you connected to is called the 'relying party'. However, you are really the 'relying' party because you are relying on the site you just connected to to send you the correct URL of your identity server. If instead they send you to a machine that merely proxies your identity server, they get your identity server password as you authenticate and your identity is compromised.
Now, there are various ways that OpenID proponents say this can be handled, but it's a fundamentally dangerous security model when you rely on an untrusted site to direct you to your identity system. The use of encrypted keychains (keyword bing encrypted here) with browser autofill, albeit not perfect, is much more secure system and works well enough that I'm not sure what the real savings of OpenID are (OpenID proponents will point to all kinds of other uses that OpenID could *potentially* be used for, but the process it was designed for and only practical purpose to date is to log into web sites using a URL instead of a username and password). Is saving having to fill in a password really worth this much complexity: http://openid.net/pres/protocolflow-1.1.png ?
When it comes to trust, we need to figure out a less complex methodology for identity before we can start establishing trusted identities. We also need to make an identity valuable, and right now an OpenID identity doesn't really represent something of value to general users who already have keychains and autofill. In fact, OpenID proponents often defend OpenID by saying that it should be used for low risk logins like blogs and the like. In that case, non-encrypted browser auto-complete is already superior from an end user perspective, and generally enabled by default or by clicking yes on one dialog window with first use of browser.
Not sure about this:
"Google rarely allows outsiders to visit the unit, and it has been cautious about allowing Mr. Singhal to speak with the news media about the magical, mathematical brew inside the millions of black boxes that power its search engine."
I could see tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, but millions?
If the UK sites in particular are the ones you want out of you search results, compare these searches on Google:
digestives london
digestives london -inurl:.uk
I suggest a change in perspective. A good piece of technology is one that doesn't intrude on your life and doesn't have to be maintained. If you start adding all kinds of technical gizmos and gadgets to your house, you will become a slave to maintaining them. Home automation technology just is not to the point yet where you can install and forget. It's constant tweaks and upgrades, failed components, trying to figure out odd configuration files, languages, and protocols to get things to work correctly and with each other. At the end of the day you will spend far more time maintaining it than it will ever give you in improved lifestyle or productivity. Focus the your technical research on the low tech items that will make your house easy to live in, like good electrical wiring, good plumbing, good toiliets, sinks, and energy efficient appliances. You've got hundreds of hours of research to do on that front before you should even think about Star Trek style housing.
I'm not sure I agree with the post you replied to because it becomes a complex issue, but you are already represented by your two senators and your representative. That's your maximum representative entitlement in the federal government. How would you feel if you strongly supported a candidate for your representation and a bunch of people in the next state over funded another candidate who won using that money to vote for their interests instead of yours?
This is both insightful and funny. Within the next couple decades, books may become antiques. They really are legacy media platforms. I actually like reading a book better than reading on a computer, but two things:
1. I'm dated. I grew up reading books on paper, pre-Internet. This is not true of new generations. I had a vertigo moment the other day when I was on a train and I heard a young girl who was maybe eight years old telling her grandmother, with full confidence, of information she had found on this and that web site. There was no awe in her voice, this was all very matter of fact. In her world view, the Internet was simply an assumed platform, not something new. There are cognitively mature people alive today who have never known the Internet NOT to exist.
2. Surely within the next couple decades electronic book reading technology will get parity on heft, size of screen, resolution, and outdoor viewing.
I think I'll go read a book now for old times' sake.
It's pretty impressive how the toll booth structure absorbed the impact easily. The structure did not even wobble. It looks like a tollbooth operator would have been okay even in the booth that was hit, at least if there was no shrapnel from the explosion. No doubt concussed and shocked, but alive. I say good engineering on that one.
Someone else said that the driver was having seizures several hours before the accident? Why was he driving? It's lucky that the tollbooth stopped him or he could have killed several other people. It's unfortunate he died, but fortunate no one else was hurt.
By the way, watch the SUV that just goes on by through the EZ Pass at regular speed as if nothing happened. Just another day on the turnpike, I guess. Also, the nitwit running towards the flaming car might want to lookup what 'secondary explosion' means.
Seems like if BoB has an 'in' with CCP, Goons have an 'in' with Slashdot. Do you realize how fast this made it onto the Slashdot front page (before CCP even had a chance to respond that they would respond)? I personally think that game owners and site editors have whatever editorial discretion (which includes modifying game balance) they want over their game/site - it's the player/reader's discretion to play/read, so I'm not getting upset about it, but methinks there is a greater "meta game" going on here then most people are aware.
:)
Then again.. if you go down this alley... you have to then ask yourself... what meta game am I playing? Isn't the whole MMOG scene fun?
The reason that programming is the most important skill a child should be learning is that there will soon come a time when being able to 'talk to machines' by at least having mastery of a high level programming language will be a basic prerequisite to starting, managing, or working for a company. Not having solid skills will be like not learning English, or not knowing how to use a Word Processor in the current business environment. Even if your child's future lies in academia, all serious research and advanced learning will require the same.
40 years is not very long for what has transpired between the early video games and modern video games. Video games are sort of the representative tip of the iceberg in computing technology . Aside from some super computer applications and the like, video games often represent computer hardware taken to the limits of simulation of some internally consistent model, from the bizarre (2D Mario worlds) to the more realistic (3D FPS with more accurately modeled physics). MMOGs (and MUDs before them) have traced the capabilities of networks, with Second Life, for all its wrinkles, probably best (or poorly, as the actual user experience may be) excercising the networking envelope because of it's just-in-time content streaming and server multiplexing.
Of course, that doesn't mean that modern video games are any more enjoyable than Pong and the earlier games, which almost have an advantage in that the only thing they could focus on was gameplay, but it does show an impressive advancement along the technical curve. With that curve tending upwards and advancement getting faster, it's fun to imagine what the next 40 years will bring.
I do not argue that many children in the developed countries have partents who provide a highly privileged lifestyle and will buy their children a computer or any technical item they want. However, a large number of children in developed countries do not have access to a similar computer as a consequence of urban or rural poverty or parental disinterest in or ignorance about the importance of technological educaiton. Furthermore, few schools in developed countries, even at the university level, have a curriculum centered around a common computing platform available to all students.
That's a lot of perspective in three sentences. Well said.
Ronald Reagan did have kids.
It might be deferred cost, but whether it's Americans now or Americans later, they will pay. The only other options are to default on bonds or massively devalue the dollar by issuing more currency (remember that foreign creditor, though foreign, hold their U.S. debt in dollars), both of which have significant consequences.
I find it disturbing that such focus is put on third world children when a significant number of children in the U.S. and other developed countries do not have access to a similiar device or good educational opportunities. It's a shared failure of Western governments and projects such as the OLPC to favor others over their own for the sake of political correctness and what I can only describe as some sort of institutional guilt over priviliege combined with well-intentioned, but nonetheless clueless, naivete.
When it comes to technical leadership, it is sort of like the airline safety instructions you get - if the airmasks drop down, secure your own first so you can help others without losing your ability to do so. Think about it while you go to mod me down.
Sounds like in many cases you have to pay for the privilege of having your credit protected. Why should we have to pay a for-profit company money to secure our credit?
Who is going to recoup the cost of longer jail terms? We only need to lock someone up if they are a continuing threat to others if not locked up, which in this case would mean they would continue to intentionally make terrorist hoaxes (which, if only a hoax, is not really a threat per se so much as a considerable annoyance). This bill is inherently contradictory. If someone *intentionally* and *with malice* makes a terrorist hoax, I want them contributing some portion of their income to paying responder overtime so I don't have to, not sitting in jail getting housed and fed on my dime.
Also, if this is a reaction to the scare in Boston, the bill should be rewritten so that people affected by the reaction should be able to bring civil suit against the government for wasting their time, not the other way down. Although, that would, on a large scale, result in people suing themselves, which would no doubt be interesting, and perhaps educational.
"which totalitarian governments have tended to do, of having a national ID"
I agree the Real ID initiative is unwarranted, but what totalitarian governments have national ID?
Yes, this is something with which to be concerned. This is the intellectual property clause. Although, fairly standard, never accept a contract that does not limit the scope of owned property by the employing party to only code or documentation created on their time and/or their machines and/or their network. Anything else you think of or do is your own and they not need to be notified.
Since they clearly want you, make them change that. You have power now. When you sign, you give it up.
Also, make sure to check out the non-compete clause. With an intellectual property clause like that you are probably dealing with some contract dickheads, though they might just have copied it from somewhere else.
Question of curiosity: Where's the DOJ on enforcing antitrust acts? Intel with an 80%+ market share seems to run afoul of the normal calculations used by antitrust rules to determine if a monopoly exists in a particular market and therefore merit a splintering. Has Intel already beat away attempts to do this?