A biologist, an engineer and a mathematician are observing a house, which they know to be empty. Two people enter the house, and some time later three people leave.
The biologist says, "They procreated." The engineer says, "Our initial calculations were wrong" The mathematician says, "If we send one more person in, the house will be empty."
The root servers are the core of what we know as the internet. We need authoritative name servers if we don't want to have to remember IP addresses, and I am happy to see that K is now finally making some move toward securing itself, even if only a little more.
Information Wave will also deploy peer-to-peer clients on the Gnutella network [...] which will offer [dummy] files with popular song titles [...] Clients which connect to our peer-to-peer clients, and then afterwards attempt to illegally access the network will be immediately blacklisted from Information Wave's network. The data collected will be actively maintained and distributed from our network operations site.
If I'm reading this correctly, it looks like the situation IWT wants to prevent is that of RIAA agents "finding" songs being shared, then trying to attack the sharing hosts. If that's right, then even more kudos to them!
This is great. Put your kid on a leash, monitor him electronically, follow his every movement. Why be half-assed about it? Just tag your child like livestock so they can't just "forget" their tracking device somewhere. Are children really denied any human rights that interfere with their parents' plans?
A kid can't pursue happiness if their particular brand of happiness conflicts with their parents' wishes. Think of the standard example of a kid who is gay, and whose parents are religious or otherwise intolerant. Generally what happens is the kid either represses his normal, healthy urges and becomes miserable or rebels against his parents, often being punished for it, often hating his folks for the rest of his life.
A kid can't pursue liberty if his parents don't want him to. A kid (with this or any other tracking device) doesn't have the privacy that we all strive for all the time. The implication is that a child's life is not his own. He is free to live his life until his parents decide he's stepping on their toes or they decide they don't agree with the way he feels about stuff.
Kids' right to life is a whole big bucket o' worms, so I won't go into that -- but you get the idea.
There seems to be a pervasive attitude (not just in North America) that until we reach the age of majority we are not fully human. Speaking in American terms, two of the so-called "self-evident" and "unalienable" rights are waived or subjected to editing according to what the child's parents think.
262 pages and you plan to 'slip it under the door' of your co-workers?
She never mentioned which door. She must have meant the kind of door we all do most of our thinking behind, the one with a convenient 8-inch gap at the bottom. Some days we are more productive in a stall than in a cubicle.
I use greek gods (and mythical figures) as my server names. Makes for very cool names, and there's a hell of a lot of them. Charon is my CoyoteLinux router, Selune is my web server, Kronos my main workstation (I've had him the longest), and so on.
I've got a few more planned for the future: Hermes -- POP Hephaistos -- development & testing Pan -- dedicated media box and, of course, Aphrodite -- pr0n
Here is a (hypothetical) issue that has been bugging me for a while:
Let's say I have written a piece of software and GPLed it. A few months after I release the program into the public, BigCorp inc. starts selling a program that performs a similar function. I am reasonably sure that they have incorporated some of my code (perhaps I recognize some bug or unusual quirk or whatever), and I am offended at the IP violation, but I can't very well email BigCorp and ask to see their source code to make sure none of my code is in there.
So, what recourse would I have? Threats of legal action would carry little weight from most individual programmers I know, and threatening bad press seems the only alternative.
"How do I type "for i in *.dvi do xdvi $i done" in a GUI?"
As Mike is the guy inventing the rules, I don't see why this wouldn't be binding.
"binding?" This is not a legal issue. This is a case of a hacker newsgroup discussing issues with compression. Then someone writes code he thinks has found a loophole, and finds out it has in fact not. Mike's point in saying that Patrick did not meet the challenge is valid.
Sure, it would have been more sportsmanlike for Mike to have said at some point, "sure, you can give me multiple files, but remember that filenames take up space." But either way, Patrick did not meet the challenge. His files took up more room on disk than the original.
LAI
"How do I type "for i in *.dvi do xdvi $i done" in a GUI?"
In any dispute like this, it is reasonable to expect certain things to be taken for granted. At its most basic level, this includes stuff like the definition of a file and of a file system. Nobody would argue that Patrick had successfully completed the challenge if he printed out the original file in fontsize 30, and again in fontsize 9, and included the "compressed" file in an envelope along with a small magnifying glass.
Other assumptions, obviously, are a little more obscure. Sure, Patrick would have done well to have read the FAQ, but even without having done so there are some things he certainly knows. Without having done any Information Theory, I know that the objective of any compression program is to take up less disk space, and I think it reasonable to assume that Patrick knew this as well. Therefore, as much as I applaud his creativity, what he wrote was not compression.
The only issue remaining, then, is whether the wording of the challenge should override the information Patrick could reasonably be assumed to have. I think not. Every hacker instinct I have says that the challenge was intended to spur people to write better code, or at least to get them thinking about how code can be improved. Focussing on the wording of the challenge and saying the equivalent of "well, how was I supposed to know an envelope didn't count as a filesystem? It's not my fault a magnifying glass isn't machine-readable" goes counter to the spirit of the challenge and of constructive programming.
Therefore, Patrick, I'm afraid you did not successfully meet the challenge. Reading what you wrote, I did not think about the space filenames took up until I read the email response to your final submission. I suspect you either made the same oversight as me, or chose to ignore it in favour of rubbing Mike's nose in his choice of words. Either way, you made a valiant effort, but did not earn the prize.
LAI
"How do I type "for i in *.dvi do xdvi $i done" in a GUI?"
Gibson makes the sweeping generalization that Japan is "several clicks down the time line"
Actually, what he said was "The Japanese seem to the rest of us to live several measurable clicks down the time line." This may seem like a minor difference or none at all, but the point is that he doesn't try to say "Japanese people are so and english people are so. This article is not about how the Japanese are, but how the western world sees them, especially England. He writes about the japanese attitude toward new gadgets and fads, which you seem to recognize.
Another thing, which other people have mentioned (but bears repeating) is that Gibson made almost no mention of North America, and less of the US. He was writing for an english (um... paper? service? site?) and would have very different things to say were he writing for a site back home. Especially since "back home" means Vancouver. In fact, he says quite specifically that things are different:
London, being London and whatever else, eminently assured of its ability to do whatever it is that London's always done, can reflect Japan, distort it, enjoy it, in ways that Vancouver, where I live, never can.
What would be interesting would be a longer essay, talking about not only the english perspective on the Japanese, but the North American ones as well. Picture in-character monologues: someone from BAMA, someone from The Bridge, another person from London, and a Brit or Yank living in Osaka.
Ooh... I'm excited... what a cool idea...
Oh, one last thing: There was a mention at the bottom of the article of an upcoming book called 'Pattern Recognition.' Anyone know where I can find out more?
If we had to start over, we'd have to go back to a hardwired computer to design/build a "machine code" one, then use that to build a compiler, etc. It might take less time, but we'd still have to build all the same infrastructure that we build the first time around.
True -- to a point. The rebuilding would be much faster, though, for several reasons.
We would still have paper media, and other non-digital archives. The principles behind modern chips and circuits do not have to be reinvented, just rebuilt.
Only prototypes need be built. We don't have to mass-produce a series of Babbage engines, then vacuum-tube colossi, then generation after generation of PCs. We would need only a few older computers in order to develop newer ones.
Lots of manpower would be used. Think about the number of IT professionals today who would want to contribute in some way to the effort. Personally, I would much rather contribute to the "great rebuilding" than find some line of work I can do without sitting behind a desk getting fat.
Think about how much support the project would have from Those In Charge. Whether, post-reboot, this turns out to be a new feudal-style ruling class, the storm troopers Bill Gates has been gathering in his basement or the usual gang of idiots, the members would very likely be interested in putting resources into getting their iMacs back and playing some solitaire.
I think the real question here is not how long it would take to rebuild what we have now, but what we would do differently. Would we keep configurations as they are, or would we pay more attention to forward-compatibility? For instance, I doubt any of the new machines built would have a 5 1/4" floppy drive. Perhaps 3 1/2"s would be pre-empted too, in favour of something along the lines of ZIP or even DVD-RW.
The most interesting question to me is, what fundamental changes would be made? Right now there is quite a bit of research done into quantum computing, and into biotech. (I know, because I read it on/.) Would these emerging technologies have any sort of impact on rebuilding our computing infrastructure, or would humanity keep the blinders it's worn for so long and doggedly continue along the same path it was on?
I've read through the articles, and their associated links, and there is one topic that the authors seem to be avoiding. There was no mention at all of the preparations NASA will have to make to fight the martian colonies in order to set up our own.
Why is this not mentioned? Do the authors want to cloud the public's mind with talk of "ecosystems" and "terraforming," just so we won't ask about the brave men and women who will fight and die on Mars to secure territory for us to colonize?
If anyone from NASA is reading this, you have to realize that the public is not stupid. We know what is entailed in colonizing a new planet. You need to start thinking about something closer to full disclosure, please.
There's been a lot of talk about kids with guns, and how today's youth has easy access to firearms, and how dangerous this is, and so on.
I think a kid with a lawyer is much more dangerous than a kid with a gun. Think about it: a young, imaginative mind, thinking up new ways to hack the legal system, with his pet lawyer by his side. I wouldn't want to meet them in a dark alley. At least, if you're being held at gunpoint, you can get away by emptying your wallet. The lawyer/kid combo will empty your wallet and say, "okay, now that that's out of the way, what can I get from you?"
At long last, I can point and click without all that annoying interference from meteor showers and mortar fire. $279 is a small price to pay for a mouse that will survive being driven over and submerged, unlike the other ones I've owned.
Best of all, next time my house is hit by a satellite I won't have to worry about my mouse being damaged!
LAI
Another interpretation
on
EULA In Games
·
· Score: 2
One passage especially struck me (bold emphasis mine):
"Sierra... and/or Sierra's licensors shall be entitled, without bond, other security, or proof of damages, to appropriate equitable remedies (including injunctive relief to prohibit a breach of this License Agreement) with respect to threatened or actual breaches of this License Agreement."
So, let's say I call up Sierra's legal department to clarify what constitutes infringement. The hypothetical call:
me: I was just wondering, am I allowed to make a copy of the game CD for backup purposes? For instance, to keep in a safebox.
Sierra: You're not allowed to make any copies of the software, for any... wait... you have a burner?
me: Well, yes, my job requires me...
Sierra: And you have previously used this burner to store information on a compact disk or compact disks?
me: Um, yeah. I develop...
Sierra: *click*
And then I get a letter saying that my stating "I have a burner and know how to use it" constitutes a threat to breach the EULA? Remember: "without [...] proof of damages"
But, wait: if there's a "rat out your friends" clause as well... If a buddy (who also has the game) tells you about someone they know (who also has the game) who has a friend (who also has the game) who has been considering putting up a screenshot of a game on his website, you are violating your own EULA if you don't immediately write to the developers and warn them.
Oooh... and do away with your computer's monitor. One of the walls of your cubicle can act act as a monitor. For those severe technophiles among us, it would be a trip to see our work on three or four walls at a time.
And then you get those working in high-end graphic work, literally surrounded by their art all day. Software companies start selling CubeScapes(tm), and an advert comes out hawking the wonderful features of Quake 4, "Now with PeripheralView(tm)!" Rather than merely having 2 or 3 or 5 screens, we now configure our video cards to deal with SurroundScene(tm).
Besides, think of the snob value of saying "I've got a 152-inch screen"
>Why do they pay the same rate? Because demagoguish politicians have fooled Americans to thinking that corporations pay taxes.
Sure. And the same politicians have fooled the same Americans that owning stocks is one of their many god-given rights. If little old Jane Doe buys stock in a company, she is a part of it. She is a part owner, and that is why she pays the same amount of tax as any other shareholder.
The important distinction here is that in buying stocks, shareholders do not make a tiny money-making entity into part of their personal property. They make a small part of themselves into a part of the larger company.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, the site is slashdotted. Here's a google cache of it:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:5p4B1xNAGXkJ: www.asktog.com/Bughouse/10MostPersistentBugs.html
Here's one of my own favourites:
A biologist, an engineer and a mathematician are observing a house, which they know to be empty. Two people enter the house, and some time later three people leave.
The biologist says, "They procreated."
The engineer says, "Our initial calculations were wrong"
The mathematician says, "If we send one more person in, the house will be empty."
Uh... anyone who cracked the password protection on the question sheet yesterday willing to put up a mirror?
Right here
Here is a mirror of the latest PA strip. I was pissing myself laughing as I uploaded this.
http://pimpninja.org/img/pa_nazis.gif
The root servers are the core of what we know as the internet. We need authoritative name servers if we don't want to have to remember IP addresses, and I am happy to see that K is now finally making some move toward securing itself, even if only a little more.
Yeah, and how long until the first Starbucks shows up on the transantarctic?
"Okay, I'll have an iced cappuccino, an iced tea and an iced iced mocha..."
If I'm reading this correctly, it looks like the situation IWT wants to prevent is that of RIAA agents "finding" songs being shared, then trying to attack the sharing hosts. If that's right, then even more kudos to them!
This is great. Put your kid on a leash, monitor him electronically, follow his every movement. Why be half-assed about it? Just tag your child like livestock so they can't just "forget" their tracking device somewhere. Are children really denied any human rights that interfere with their parents' plans?
A kid can't pursue happiness if their particular brand of happiness conflicts with their parents' wishes. Think of the standard example of a kid who is gay, and whose parents are religious or otherwise intolerant. Generally what happens is the kid either represses his normal, healthy urges and becomes miserable or rebels against his parents, often being punished for it, often hating his folks for the rest of his life.
A kid can't pursue liberty if his parents don't want him to. A kid (with this or any other tracking device) doesn't have the privacy that we all strive for all the time. The implication is that a child's life is not his own. He is free to live his life until his parents decide he's stepping on their toes or they decide they don't agree with the way he feels about stuff.
Kids' right to life is a whole big bucket o' worms, so I won't go into that -- but you get the idea.
There seems to be a pervasive attitude (not just in North America) that until we reach the age of majority we are not fully human. Speaking in American terms, two of the so-called "self-evident" and "unalienable" rights are waived or subjected to editing according to what the child's parents think.
262 pages and you plan to 'slip it under the door' of your co-workers?
She never mentioned which door. She must have meant the kind of door we all do most of our thinking behind, the one with a convenient 8-inch gap at the bottom. Some days we are more productive in a stall than in a cubicle.
$ is what matters...
Well, great! My code has plenty of $'s in it! I guess I'm pretty good.
This raises a few more questions, though: how much are @, % and & worth, and is * worth all of them put together, or their average...
my brain hurts.
Oh, yeah, and my hub's name -- Olympus
:o)
I use greek gods (and mythical figures) as my server names. Makes for very cool names, and there's a hell of a lot of them. Charon is my CoyoteLinux router, Selune is my web server, Kronos my main workstation (I've had him the longest), and so on.
I've got a few more planned for the future:
Hermes -- POP
Hephaistos -- development & testing
Pan -- dedicated media box
and, of course,
Aphrodite -- pr0n
Let's say I have written a piece of software and GPLed it. A few months after I release the program into the public, BigCorp inc. starts selling a program that performs a similar function. I am reasonably sure that they have incorporated some of my code (perhaps I recognize some bug or unusual quirk or whatever), and I am offended at the IP violation, but I can't very well email BigCorp and ask to see their source code to make sure none of my code is in there.
So, what recourse would I have? Threats of legal action would carry little weight from most individual programmers I know, and threatening bad press seems the only alternative.
"How do I type "for i in *.dvi do xdvi $i done" in a GUI?"
"binding?" This is not a legal issue. This is a case of a hacker newsgroup discussing issues with compression. Then someone writes code he thinks has found a loophole, and finds out it has in fact not. Mike's point in saying that Patrick did not meet the challenge is valid.
Sure, it would have been more sportsmanlike for Mike to have said at some point, "sure, you can give me multiple files, but remember that filenames take up space." But either way, Patrick did not meet the challenge. His files took up more room on disk than the original.
LAI
"How do I type "for i in *.dvi do xdvi $i done" in a GUI?"
Other assumptions, obviously, are a little more obscure. Sure, Patrick would have done well to have read the FAQ, but even without having done so there are some things he certainly knows. Without having done any Information Theory, I know that the objective of any compression program is to take up less disk space, and I think it reasonable to assume that Patrick knew this as well. Therefore, as much as I applaud his creativity, what he wrote was not compression.
The only issue remaining, then, is whether the wording of the challenge should override the information Patrick could reasonably be assumed to have. I think not. Every hacker instinct I have says that the challenge was intended to spur people to write better code, or at least to get them thinking about how code can be improved. Focussing on the wording of the challenge and saying the equivalent of "well, how was I supposed to know an envelope didn't count as a filesystem? It's not my fault a magnifying glass isn't machine-readable" goes counter to the spirit of the challenge and of constructive programming.
Therefore, Patrick, I'm afraid you did not successfully meet the challenge. Reading what you wrote, I did not think about the space filenames took up until I read the email response to your final submission. I suspect you either made the same oversight as me, or chose to ignore it in favour of rubbing Mike's nose in his choice of words. Either way, you made a valiant effort, but did not earn the prize.
LAI
"How do I type "for i in *.dvi do xdvi $i done" in a GUI?"
Another thing, which other people have mentioned (but bears repeating) is that Gibson made almost no mention of North America, and less of the US. He was writing for an english (um... paper? service? site?) and would have very different things to say were he writing for a site back home. Especially since "back home" means Vancouver. In fact, he says quite specifically that things are different:
What would be interesting would be a longer essay, talking about not only the english perspective on the Japanese, but the North American ones as well. Picture in-character monologues: someone from BAMA, someone from The Bridge, another person from London, and a Brit or Yank living in Osaka.Ooh... I'm excited... what a cool idea...
Oh, one last thing: There was a mention at the bottom of the article of an upcoming book called 'Pattern Recognition.' Anyone know where I can find out more?
- We would still have paper media, and other non-digital archives. The principles behind modern chips and circuits do not have to be reinvented, just rebuilt.
- Only prototypes need be built. We don't have to mass-produce a series of Babbage engines, then vacuum-tube colossi, then generation after generation of PCs. We would need only a few older computers in order to develop newer ones.
- Lots of manpower would be used. Think about the number of IT professionals today who would want to contribute in some way to the effort. Personally, I would much rather contribute to the "great rebuilding" than find some line of work I can do without sitting behind a desk getting fat.
- Think about how much support the project would have from Those In Charge. Whether, post-reboot, this turns out to be a new feudal-style ruling class, the storm troopers Bill Gates has been gathering in his basement or the usual gang of idiots, the members would very likely be interested in putting resources into getting their iMacs back and playing some solitaire.
I think the real question here is not how long it would take to rebuild what we have now, but what we would do differently. Would we keep configurations as they are, or would we pay more attention to forward-compatibility? For instance, I doubt any of the new machines built would have a 5 1/4" floppy drive. Perhaps 3 1/2"s would be pre-empted too, in favour of something along the lines of ZIP or even DVD-RW.The most interesting question to me is, what fundamental changes would be made? Right now there is quite a bit of research done into quantum computing, and into biotech. (I know, because I read it on /.) Would these emerging technologies have any sort of impact on rebuilding our computing infrastructure, or would humanity keep the blinders it's worn for so long and doggedly continue along the same path it was on?
Why is this not mentioned? Do the authors want to cloud the public's mind with talk of "ecosystems" and "terraforming," just so we won't ask about the brave men and women who will fight and die on Mars to secure territory for us to colonize?
If anyone from NASA is reading this, you have to realize that the public is not stupid. We know what is entailed in colonizing a new planet. You need to start thinking about something closer to full disclosure, please.
I think a kid with a lawyer is much more dangerous than a kid with a gun. Think about it: a young, imaginative mind, thinking up new ways to hack the legal system, with his pet lawyer by his side. I wouldn't want to meet them in a dark alley. At least, if you're being held at gunpoint, you can get away by emptying your wallet. The lawyer/kid combo will empty your wallet and say, "okay, now that that's out of the way, what can I get from you?"
Best of all, next time my house is hit by a satellite I won't have to worry about my mouse being damaged!
LAI
"Sierra... and/or Sierra's licensors shall be entitled, without bond, other security, or proof of damages, to appropriate equitable remedies (including injunctive relief to prohibit a breach of this License Agreement) with respect to threatened or actual breaches of this License Agreement."
So, let's say I call up Sierra's legal department to clarify what constitutes infringement. The hypothetical call:
And then I get a letter saying that my stating "I have a burner and know how to use it" constitutes a threat to breach the EULA? Remember: "without [...] proof of damages"But, wait: if there's a "rat out your friends" clause as well... If a buddy (who also has the game) tells you about someone they know (who also has the game) who has a friend (who also has the game) who has been considering putting up a screenshot of a game on his website, you are violating your own EULA if you don't immediately write to the developers and warn them.
my head hurts
And then you get those working in high-end graphic work, literally surrounded by their art all day. Software companies start selling CubeScapes(tm), and an advert comes out hawking the wonderful features of Quake 4, "Now with PeripheralView(tm)!" Rather than merely having 2 or 3 or 5 screens, we now configure our video cards to deal with SurroundScene(tm).
Besides, think of the snob value of saying "I've got a 152-inch screen"
LAI
Sure. And the same politicians have fooled the same Americans that owning stocks is one of their many god-given rights. If little old Jane Doe buys stock in a company, she is a part of it. She is a part owner, and that is why she pays the same amount of tax as any other shareholder.
The important distinction here is that in buying stocks, shareholders do not make a tiny money-making entity into part of their personal property. They make a small part of themselves into a part of the larger company.
or something.
LAI