From the RIAA John Doe FAQ:
When we come across a user who is distributing copyrighted music files, we download copyrighted music files (of our member companies) the user is offering, as well as document the date and time that we downloaded those files. Do any P2P clients keep a log of files up/downloaded? If so, record your own song and give it a clever name like 'Timberlake's Justified'. Stick it up and wait for the RIAA to come along and snag it. Then sue/countersue them. Lewis Carroll taught me how to do it:
"Is it very long?" Alice asked, for she had heard a good deal of poetry that day.
"It's long," said the Knight, "but it's very, very beautiful. Everybody that hears me sing it--either it brings the tears into their eyes, or else--"
"Or else what?" said Alice, for the Knight had made a sudden pause.
"Or else it doesn't, you know. The name of the song is called 'Haddock's Eyes'."
"Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?" Alice said, trying to feel interested.
"No, you don't understand," the Knight said, looking a little vexed. "That's what the name is called. The name really is 'The Aged Aged Man'."
"Then I ought to have said 'That's what the song is called?'" Alice corrected herself.
"No, you oughtn't: that's quite another thing! The song is called 'Ways and Means': but that's only what it's called, you know!"
"Well, what is the song, then?" said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.
"I was coming to that," the Knight said. "The song really is 'A-sitting on a Gate': and the tune's my own invention."
Steven Kurtz sounds like a bit of a nutjob to me. Unless his 'proposal for the release of mutant flies in restaurants' is Johnathan Swift style satire.
Most biotech scientists would support labelling of GM foods. Only the Monsato's of the world oppose this. It's a reasonable, conservative viewpoint. When that doesn't occur, the crazies come out and want to release mutant flies, or do other insane things.
People with these type of radical viewpoints will continue to grow in the U.S., as the government becomes more disconnected from the people.
(eg. Because of congressional gerrymandering something like 80% of U.S. house representatives are in safe districts, and have almost no risk of party loss in an election.)
The consequence of this is that these politicians have less incentive to worry about the concerns of their electorate. Enter the lobbyists to fill this time on their hands.
Let's assume this isn't horseshit fed to the masses to keep using Java technology.
(eg. like dressing up in a Penguin suit while handing SCO a paper bag full of money under the table.)
From a business point of view, what's the point?
Mono is nearing release 1.0 and is a very attractive platform for developers. Releasing Java open source 3 years ago would have screwed Microsoft hard, but now I'm not so sure.
I still think open sourcing is the best strategic move for Sun, but I think they have no clue on how to exploit it. They will probably do something silly like release it under the IBM CPL since that's what their competitors are doing.
The best move for them is obviously to GPL it, and use a Trolltech style licensing model. GNU Classpath will naturally get in the way. (again, should have did it 3 years ago).
However, the COO, Johnathan Schwartz recently teased in the media that they might release Looking Glass, Sun's new 3D desktop widget toolkit as open source. I've seen it, it looks great.
If they GPL'd that as well, Sun might have a chance at getting a serious revenue stream happening.
I doubt this will happen though. Sun will keep withering out of fear and inertia. It's the nature of the beast.
Metal Storm's technology is pretty close to useless. It might have a limited role protecting naval frigates as a patriot anti-missle type defensive weapon but that's it. The logistics of carrying and resupplying a gun that turns over that much ammunition is absurd.
Freshmeat is always worth a look too. The biggest problem I found was too much choice.
So far I've tried Chronos but I found that not all it's CPAN dependancies were resolvable for me. I've also tried MyCalendar. It's nice and simple, accessible via the web, but unfortunately it's webpages are too big to fit in my cellphone's memory. My ideal solution would serve up some tight WML when necessary and possibly be accessible via Outlook for my secretary.
So, I haven't found my ideal solution yet.
If anyone has any opinion on the other web calendaring solutions, please share...
As a security researcher, I find this article nice propaganda for Microsoft, but otherwise lacking of any merit whatsoever.
1. Online Elections
I wrote at length a few weeks ago about the benefits of Trusted Computing for online elections. It would be highly unwise to run election software on a typical PC in today's insecure environment, but once TC becomes available, the enhanced security could make online elections very practical and safe. Attestation is crucial for this application by allowing the voting server to make sure that the user's voting software has not been altered on the disk.
Tell me again why the user needs any voting software at all? Of course they don't, a webpage would suffice. The issue is authentication and key management complexity, neither of which are solved by TC.
2. Online Gambling
Note that unlike the earlier example of online games, in this case it is the server, not the client, which must be running the TC program. Clients would not need to be trusted since there is generally no way the players can cheat in these games. This architecture has the advantage that TC does not need to be as widely available as for most of the other applications discussed here. It should be possible for non-TC client software to verify an attestation produced by a TC server, and that is all that is needed to let casinos prove that they are playing a fair and honest game.
No one who's looked at TC has thought it would be secure against a determined and well funded adversary. BTW, this is the definition of 'good security'. It's that your system should be secure against attackers with unlimited financial resources. TC is designed to stop Johnny Lunchbox from getting 'unauthorized content', not to stop a casino with massive economic incentives from key recovery/hacking their RNG.
3. P2P Networks
A widely referenced paper by three Harvard students described how Trusted Computing can protect P2P networking.
Widely referenced where? Certainly not on Citeseer or DBLP. I just checked.
...TC technology can improve the privacy of P2P networks in many ways. Most importantly, the remote attestation feature allows peers to have confidence that the participants in the rest of the network are running legitimate versions of software. This will open entirely new possibilities for making the networks more reliable and more private. P2P software can limit the amount of data available to the end user of the machine, so that he does not see which other computers in the network his data comes from, or learn names or other identifying information about the rest of the network. This relies on process isolation and the much-maligned ability of TC to protect programs from the computer's users. Only by keeping users from being able to pierce the anonymity of the network can the P2P system gain similar immunity from authorities who are trying to shut the network down.
Right...the 'authorities' have the capability of choosing which programs people can run on their computers and they decide to allow P2P clients! Wow, it's so easy. There are a number of other ill founded assertions, both just in this paragraph and the rest of the article. I'll leave those as an exercise for the reader.
Make no mistake. Any legislation that mandated TC hardware (as is the trend) in PC's are the first step to living in a nanny state where your most basic thoughts and actions are influenced by millions of idiotic Kathy Lee Gifford[1] and Tipper Gore wannabes who would rather impose totalitarian control on our society then allow their child a horrific glimpse of Janet Jackson's nipple.
[1] I really don't know if KLG is that vocal anymore. I've probably been watching South Park too much.
Pnet existed before mono. Pnet never gained credibility because the project leader (and story submitter) Rhys Weatherley is a pain in the ass to deal with. This story is an example of his trollish ways. The grandiose statement "C is dead" is a quote out of context. Miguel said something like: "To me, C is dead [for gui applications], except for the mono JIT [that I wrote]."
Mono has succeded because of good leadership. Pnet has failed for lack of it. After two years, mono has achieved and exceeded all of pnet's goals, leaving pnet with an inferior toolset (eg. their IL runtime lacks a JIT and is extremely slow).
Rhys seems to desperately want peer validation in the free software world. In his twisted worldview, he sees Miguel as a power hungry dictator (I kid you not) and literally hates his guts for mono's successes, of who's glory he believes is rightfully his, because he was there first.
In response to mono's achievements, Rhys and his small band of zealots seem to have spun their wheels a bit, biting off several new projects. For example the aformentioned C compiler and also a commitment to develop a native X System.Windows.Forms implementation, as opposed to the mono approach which is reusing the Wine project's winelib.
This is truly ironic considering Rhys absolute uncritical devotion to RMS's free software philosophies. Mono tends to promote Gtk# as the reccomended GUI library of choice. The Pnet SWF implementation will ultimately be a great enabler to proprietary software companies wishing to run their software on Linux. Yes, it will be a license violation. However it will be impossible to stop, because the users will be commiting it, rather than the sw company! No distribution required!
If (and I stress if) the senior management in question was Paul Allen, he should be going to jail. Wall Street does not take pump and dump schemes lightly and that's exactly what this is; except in this case SCO is the proxy, rather than the principle in a zero-sum game.
MS political contributions aside, the SEC is the least likely federal agencies to bend to political pressure because their credibility is what keeps the market in check. Pissing them off is not a good move. It wouldn't have been Paul Allen, his lawyers couldn't possibly be that stupid.
If EV1 is the rape victim, they are the rape victim that chose not to prosecute their rapist in court and gave the rapist $1Million to rape others.
Principals and integrity may not mean much to many big companies, but often small businesses succeed by steering clear of companies without any 'humanity'.
Supporting (even indirectly) a lawsuit against a gift economy that supports education and economic development (especially in poor countries) is in my judgement, inhuman.
I think most knowledgeable security people read that quote and cringed. I'm dissapointed to see RSA going the fear salesman route. Well if you can't beat the charlatans, might as well join them.
It's generally accepted within the legitimate security community that cyber terrorism is a non-issue. The threat can be completely mitigated by creating laws that prohibit safety critical systems from being connected to the internet. (eg. Traffic systems). And if we expand the definition of cyberspace to the limit, we need to move away from insecure SCADA systems. That's it.
In Australia you can file your taxes electronically using a WIN32 application that is terribly written. It consistently estimates your refund/liability incorrectly even with the simplest tax information. For example, a salary-only return with no deductions, no adjustments, etc.
Putting their support for monopolists aside, government incompetence is so 90's. The concept of DETERMINISM needs to be explained to the ATO.
If anything should be deterministic it's the tax code. The refund/liability amount should be perfect to the last penny, in all but the most complex returns.
Even in that situation, the estimated return should be correct, but potentially there may be arguments about the content of the return itself, not the resulting amount.
I bought a Kodak DX-3215 digital camera 2 years ago. It's a peice of crap. The box claimed to take AA batteries, but they don't work properly. You need to purchase Kodak's proprietary batteries.
The outcome of this poorly thought out money raising idea alienated the customer (me) and I probably won't buy Kodak again.
But the bigger story is what's interesting; Digital cameras have made Kodak's traditional business of selling film and ancillary products/services obsolete. As technological innovation speeds up (it won't slow down) there will be more and more organisations motivated to stop the earth from spinning on it's axis, and the clever ones like the RIAA will use spineless politicians to do their dirty work, hurting social progress.
Why the submitter linked to a php script is beyond me: (announcement starts)
Announcing KDE 3.2
DATELINE FEBRUARY 3, 2004 KDE Project Ships New Major Release Of Leading Open Source Desktop Environment Splash
February 3, 2004 (The Internet) - The KDE Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of KDE 3.2, the third major release of the award-winning KDE3 desktop platform. KDE 3.2 is the result of a combined year-long effort by hundreds of individuals and corporations from around the globe. This diverse team has been working successfully together since 1997 to make KDE the leading Open Source desktop software for Linux and UNIX.
As with previous KDE releases, version 3.2 provides an integrated desktop and a comprehensive set of applications that combine to create an environment that is usable for a wide variety of tasks right out of the box. In addition to the many new applications making their debut in KDE 3.2, the veteran applications have been refined and augmented generously. By installing some or all of these applications common desktop tasks such as web browsing, file management, email, personal information management, instant messaging, software and web development, multimedia, education and entertainment can be accomplished quickly and easily. This impressive collection of software is complemented by a recent update to the KOffice integrated office suite.
Reflecting its international team and focus, KDE 3.2 is currently available in 42 different languages. Partial translations into 32 other languages are also available, many of which are expected to be completed during the KDE 3.2 life cycle. With 74 different languages and full localization support, no other desktop is as ready to serve the needs of today's global community.
KDE 3.2 also provides improvements in usability and performance. Noticeable speed boosts in application start up times and webpage rendering together with many interface refinements make KDE 3.2 the most usable and performant KDE ever. Attention was also paid to ensuring that KDE is accessible to those with disabilities. Several accessibility related applications are included with 3.2 and work on integrating accessibility technologies directly into KDE's foundations is ongoing.
KDE has earned a reputation for quality and a comprehensive feature set among its global user base that is estimated to number in the millions. KDE is also proud to be the default user interface for several operating systems including Ark Linux, Conectiva, Knoppix, Lindows, Lycoris, Mandrake Linux, SUSE Linux, TurboLinux and Xandros. KDE is also available as a part of Debian, Free/Open/NetBSD, Gentoo, Libranet, Red Hat Linux, Slackware and Solaris, among others. In addition to these operating system vendors, more and more companies are offering commercial support for KDE, some of which are listed in the business directory of the KDE::Enterprise website. With the release of KDE 3.2, the KDE Project looks to enhance and grow this ecosystem of users and supporters. Highlights At A Glance
Some of the highlights in KDE 3.2 are listed below..
* Increased performance and standards compliance
o Lowered start up times for applications and hundreds of optimizations make KDE 3.2 the fastest KDE ever!
o Working in concert with Apple Computer Inc.'s Safari web browser team, KDE's web support has seen huge performance boosts as well as increased compliance with widely accepted web standards
o Increased support for FreeDesktop.org standards in KDE 3.2 strengthens interoperability with other Linux and UNIX software.
* New applications
o JuK: a jukebox-style music player
o Kopete: an instant messenger with support for AOL Instant Messenger, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, Gadu-Gadu, Jabber, IRC, SMS and WinPopup
o KWallet: providing integrated, secure storage of passwords and web form data
o Kontact: a unified interfa
Putting corporate politics aside, what would be nice from a technical perspective is an intermediate language that is register-based. Microsoft decided to copy java so thoroughly they also copied java's mistakes by making the.NET runtime a stack machine. Market reality tells us Intel/AMD is not going away anytime soon, it would have been wise to make MSIL fit more nicely into the x86 architecture for performance purposes.
The mono/.DOTGNU projects are similarly unfathomable. It will be nice to have these tools available to run more bloated GUI's, but if one of these projects really wanted to differentiate itself, that project should instead focus on a C# to native-compiler using gcc's backend and let the other project focus on a compiler-to-MSIL. I guarantee you that project would become the 'winner'.
More excellent work from John Walker. As usual stupidity abounds on Slashdot with most of the criticism way off the mark. "This is useless because he didn't customize it to my every need". Whatever.
A useful fact the detractors haven't mentioned is that in light of the recent 'academic break' paper published by Courtois and Pierpzyk, AES and several other ciphers should be no longer considered suitable for those with a high level of paranoia.
That game was a beautiful demonstration of anti-computer chess strategy. Kasparov pushed his pawns early to close the game, gain a space advantage, enhance the power of his knights, and play long term, while the computer thrashed around without the ability to detect these abstract strategic moves AKA a _plan_. See here for more info.
What the hell is that?" "Why, it's a death ray, my good man! Behold!" "Hey! Feels warm. Kind of nice." "Well, it's just a prototype. With proper funding, I'm confident this little baby could destroy an area the size of New York City!" "But I wanna help people, not kill them!" "Oh. Oh, well, to be honest - the death ray only has evil applications."
As many others have pointed out RF emissions in the deregulated 2.4ghz range are no different then that used in baby monitors, DECT phones, etc. However, the widespread intentional use of RF for communication is a very recent phenomenon in human development.
I think it's quite likely that increased RF usage IS causing us an indeterminate level of harm as a society. The question is how much (or how little). I suspect it's greater than people (technologists) think. There was a paper published recently that showed cell phone use in metal carriages (trains) could easily approach unsafe levels. Does humanity deem this unknown cost worthwhile? So far the answer seems to be a resounding yes. Or at the very least -we don't care.
Realistically a tremendous amount of ambient radiation in the environment could be mitigated by better managed spectrum allocation policies. But nowadays the public interest is a seconday concern to that of entrenched business and politics.
We just gave up the idea that we can beat them as Kasparov lost to a computer and that is engough to prove that computers have surpassed humands. Your misinformed. The best Deep Fritz could recently score against Kramnik was a 4-4 tie, with Kramnik winning the second and third games before falling behind in later games probably due to fatigue.
Beating a computer is easy. I do it myself sometimes. The hard part is beating a computer on a specific date, at a certain time under tournament conditions with the world watching - and Kramnik proved it against a 8 way Xeon machine searching around 2 million nodes (moves) a second. Can Kramnik calculate more or even close to this? Hardly.
The point isn't that Deep Blue's search depth is around 100 million nodes/second and that Kramnik's match was somehow inferior. The point is that proper anti-computer chess strategy evaporates a computer's tactical advantage gained through brute-forcing the position if a reasonable level of discipline is maintained once peices start coming off the table. This is why you frequently see computers in middlegame positions wildly swing their game assessment from (+4.66 to -14.66) as a new search depth is reached in a position an intermediate chess player wouldn't play into. Yes, chess is a finite problem space but that space is enormous, approximately 10^150 legal positions and that's more positions then atoms thought to exist in the known universe. The fact is with the exception of breakthrough in quantum computing and assuming Moore's law holds, the heat death of the sun would come before a chess computer could even calculate 0.000000000000001% of that space.
So computers are great for short-term tactical finesses that are easily calculated but are useless middlegame players. They are also useless opening players, but they get the advantage of having the opening book.
Slashdot Mirror
When we come across a user who is distributing copyrighted music files, we download copyrighted music files (of our member companies) the user is offering, as well as document the date and time that we downloaded those files.
Do any P2P clients keep a log of files up/downloaded? If so, record your own song and give it a clever name like 'Timberlake's Justified'. Stick it up and wait for the RIAA to come along and snag it. Then sue/countersue them.
Lewis Carroll taught me how to do it:
Judge:
Bailiff, remand Mr. Doe into custody. Mr. Doe, how do you plead?
Bailiff:
Judge, the defendant has failed to appear.
Judge:
Issue an arrest warrant in Mr. Doe's name.
Case dismissed.
RIAA:
Doh!
I buy Codeweavers products. They give back to the community, unlike Transgaming.
Actually this makes it work:
modprobe bttv
modprobe cx8800
modprobe tda9887
I just bought the Leadtek WinFast 2000 XP Expert.
I can't get it to work under Linux 2.6.7, at least not 'out of the box'.
The move to a 10 bit decoder probably requires passing an as of yet unknown parameter to modprobe.
Probably not the best card for newbies/lazy people...
Steven Kurtz sounds like a bit of a nutjob to me. Unless his 'proposal for the release of mutant flies in restaurants' is Johnathan Swift style satire.
Most biotech scientists would support labelling of GM foods. Only the Monsato's of the world oppose this. It's a reasonable, conservative viewpoint. When that doesn't occur, the crazies come out and want to release mutant flies, or do other insane things.
People with these type of radical viewpoints will continue to grow in the U.S., as the government becomes more disconnected from the people.
(eg. Because of congressional gerrymandering something like 80% of U.S. house representatives are in safe districts, and have almost no risk of party loss in an election.)
The consequence of this is that these politicians have less incentive to worry about the concerns of their electorate. Enter the lobbyists to fill this time on their hands.
Let's assume this isn't horseshit fed to the masses to keep using Java technology.
(eg. like dressing up in a Penguin suit while handing SCO a paper bag full of money under the table.)
From a business point of view, what's the point?
Mono is nearing release 1.0 and is a very attractive platform for developers. Releasing Java open source 3 years ago would have screwed Microsoft hard, but now I'm not so sure.
I still think open sourcing is the best strategic move for Sun, but I think they have no clue on how to exploit it. They will probably do something silly like release it under the IBM CPL since that's what their competitors are doing.
The best move for them is obviously to GPL it, and use a Trolltech style licensing model. GNU Classpath will naturally get in the way. (again, should have did it 3 years ago).
However, the COO, Johnathan Schwartz recently teased in the media that they might release Looking Glass, Sun's new 3D desktop widget toolkit as open source. I've seen it, it looks great.
If they GPL'd that as well, Sun might have a chance at getting a serious revenue stream happening.
I doubt this will happen though. Sun will keep withering out of fear and inertia. It's the nature of the beast.
Metal Storm's technology is pretty close to useless. It might have a limited role protecting naval frigates as a patriot anti-missle type defensive weapon but that's it. The logistics of carrying and resupplying a gun that turns over that much ammunition is absurd.
Your in luck. I've been looking for something similiar and I bothered to search the web.
A grumpy editor's calendar search
Enterprise Solutions Overview
Open Source Overview
Linux Links
Freshmeat is always worth a look too. The biggest problem I found was too much choice.
So far I've tried Chronos but I found that not all it's CPAN dependancies were resolvable for me. I've also tried MyCalendar.
It's nice and simple, accessible via the web, but unfortunately it's webpages are too big to fit in my cellphone's memory. My ideal solution would serve up some tight WML when necessary and possibly be accessible via Outlook for my secretary.
So, I haven't found my ideal solution yet.
If anyone has any opinion on the other web calendaring solutions, please share...
1. Online Elections
Tell me again why the user needs any voting software at all? Of course they don't, a webpage would suffice. The issue is authentication and key management complexity, neither of which are solved by TC.
2. Online Gambling
No one who's looked at TC has thought it would be secure against a determined and well funded adversary. BTW, this is the definition of 'good security'. It's that your system should be secure against attackers with unlimited financial resources.
TC is designed to stop Johnny Lunchbox from getting 'unauthorized content', not to stop a casino with massive economic incentives from key recovery/hacking their RNG.
3. P2P Networks
Widely referenced where? Certainly not on Citeseer or DBLP. I just checked.
Right...the 'authorities' have the capability of choosing which programs people can run on their computers and they decide to allow P2P clients! Wow, it's so easy. There are a number of other ill founded assertions, both just in this paragraph and the rest of the article. I'll leave those as an exercise for the reader.
Make no mistake. Any legislation that mandated TC hardware (as is the trend) in PC's are the first step to living in a nanny state where your most basic thoughts and actions are influenced by millions of idiotic Kathy Lee Gifford[1] and Tipper Gore wannabes who would rather impose totalitarian control on our society then allow their child a horrific glimpse of Janet Jackson's nipple.
[1] I really don't know if KLG is that vocal anymore. I've probably been watching South Park too much.
The inside story:
Pnet existed before mono. Pnet never gained credibility because the project leader (and story submitter) Rhys Weatherley is a pain in the ass to deal with. This story is an example of his trollish ways. The grandiose statement "C is dead" is a quote out of context. Miguel said something like: "To me, C is dead [for gui applications], except for the mono JIT [that I wrote]."
Mono has succeded because of good leadership. Pnet has failed for lack of it. After two years, mono has achieved and exceeded all of pnet's goals, leaving pnet with an inferior toolset (eg. their IL runtime lacks a JIT and is extremely slow).
Rhys seems to desperately want peer validation in the free software world. In his twisted worldview, he sees Miguel as a power hungry dictator (I kid you not) and literally hates his guts for mono's successes, of who's glory he believes is rightfully his, because he was there first.
In response to mono's achievements, Rhys and his small band of zealots seem to have spun their wheels a bit, biting off several new projects. For example the aformentioned C compiler and also a commitment to develop a native X System.Windows.Forms implementation, as opposed to the mono approach which is reusing the Wine project's winelib.
This is truly ironic considering Rhys absolute uncritical devotion to RMS's free software philosophies. Mono tends to promote Gtk# as the reccomended GUI library of choice. The Pnet SWF implementation will ultimately be a great enabler to proprietary software companies wishing to run their software on Linux. Yes, it will be a license violation. However it will be impossible to stop, because the users will be commiting it, rather than the sw company! No distribution required!
I doubt it's Paul Allen.
If (and I stress if) the senior management in question was Paul Allen, he should be going to jail. Wall Street does not take pump and dump schemes lightly and that's exactly what this is; except in this case SCO is the proxy, rather than the principle in a zero-sum game.
MS political contributions aside, the SEC is the least likely federal agencies to bend to political pressure because their credibility is what keeps the market in check. Pissing them off is not a good move. It wouldn't have been Paul Allen, his lawyers couldn't possibly be that stupid.
If EV1 is the rape victim, they are the rape victim that chose not to prosecute their rapist in court and gave the rapist $1Million to rape others.
Principals and integrity may not mean much to many big companies, but often small businesses succeed by steering clear of companies without any 'humanity'.
Supporting (even indirectly) a lawsuit against a gift economy that supports education and economic development (especially in poor countries) is in my judgement, inhuman.
I think most knowledgeable security people read that quote and cringed. I'm dissapointed to see RSA going the fear salesman route. Well if you can't beat the charlatans, might as well join them.
It's generally accepted within the legitimate security community that cyber terrorism is a non-issue. The threat can be completely mitigated by creating laws that prohibit safety critical systems from being connected to the internet. (eg. Traffic systems). And if we expand the definition of cyberspace to the limit, we need to move away from insecure SCADA systems. That's it.
In Australia you can file your taxes electronically using a WIN32 application that is terribly written. It consistently estimates your refund/liability incorrectly even with the simplest tax information. For example, a salary-only return with no deductions, no adjustments, etc.
Putting their support for monopolists aside, government incompetence is so 90's. The concept of DETERMINISM needs to be explained to the ATO.
If anything should be deterministic it's the tax code. The refund/liability amount should be perfect to the last penny, in all but the most complex returns.
Even in that situation, the estimated return should be correct, but potentially there may be arguments about the content of the return itself, not the resulting amount.
Arch has some very nice features, probably too many. It's so powerful that it scares people off.
Octopy looks like a promising qt gui frontend for arch to solve that problem.
I bought a Kodak DX-3215 digital camera 2 years ago. It's a peice of crap. The box claimed to take AA batteries, but they don't work properly. You need to purchase Kodak's proprietary batteries.
The outcome of this poorly thought out money raising idea alienated the customer (me) and I probably won't buy Kodak again.
But the bigger story is what's interesting; Digital cameras have made Kodak's traditional business of selling film and ancillary products/services obsolete. As technological innovation speeds up (it won't slow down) there will be more and more organisations motivated to stop the earth from spinning on it's axis, and the clever ones like the RIAA will use spineless politicians to do their dirty work, hurting social progress.
Why the submitter linked to a php script is beyond me:
.
(announcement starts)
Announcing KDE 3.2
DATELINE FEBRUARY 3, 2004
KDE Project Ships New Major Release Of Leading Open Source Desktop Environment
Splash
February 3, 2004 (The Internet) - The KDE Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of KDE 3.2, the third major release of the award-winning KDE3 desktop platform. KDE 3.2 is the result of a combined year-long effort by hundreds of individuals and corporations from around the globe. This diverse team has been working successfully together since 1997 to make KDE the leading Open Source desktop software for Linux and UNIX.
As with previous KDE releases, version 3.2 provides an integrated desktop and a comprehensive set of applications that combine to create an environment that is usable for a wide variety of tasks right out of the box. In addition to the many new applications making their debut in KDE 3.2, the veteran applications have been refined and augmented generously. By installing some or all of these applications common desktop tasks such as web browsing, file management, email, personal information management, instant messaging, software and web development, multimedia, education and entertainment can be accomplished quickly and easily. This impressive collection of software is complemented by a recent update to the KOffice integrated office suite.
Reflecting its international team and focus, KDE 3.2 is currently available in 42 different languages. Partial translations into 32 other languages are also available, many of which are expected to be completed during the KDE 3.2 life cycle. With 74 different languages and full localization support, no other desktop is as ready to serve the needs of today's global community.
KDE 3.2 also provides improvements in usability and performance. Noticeable speed boosts in application start up times and webpage rendering together with many interface refinements make KDE 3.2 the most usable and performant KDE ever. Attention was also paid to ensuring that KDE is accessible to those with disabilities. Several accessibility related applications are included with 3.2 and work on integrating accessibility technologies directly into KDE's foundations is ongoing.
KDE has earned a reputation for quality and a comprehensive feature set among its global user base that is estimated to number in the millions. KDE is also proud to be the default user interface for several operating systems including Ark Linux, Conectiva, Knoppix, Lindows, Lycoris, Mandrake Linux, SUSE Linux, TurboLinux and Xandros. KDE is also available as a part of Debian, Free/Open/NetBSD, Gentoo, Libranet, Red Hat Linux, Slackware and Solaris, among others. In addition to these operating system vendors, more and more companies are offering commercial support for KDE, some of which are listed in the business directory of the KDE::Enterprise website. With the release of KDE 3.2, the KDE Project looks to enhance and grow this ecosystem of users and supporters.
Highlights At A Glance
Some of the highlights in KDE 3.2 are listed below.
* Increased performance and standards compliance
o Lowered start up times for applications and hundreds of optimizations make KDE 3.2 the fastest KDE ever!
o Working in concert with Apple Computer Inc.'s Safari web browser team, KDE's web support has seen huge performance boosts as well as increased compliance with widely accepted web standards
o Increased support for FreeDesktop.org standards in KDE 3.2 strengthens interoperability with other Linux and UNIX software.
* New applications
o JuK: a jukebox-style music player
o Kopete: an instant messenger with support for AOL Instant Messenger, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, Gadu-Gadu, Jabber, IRC, SMS and WinPopup
o KWallet: providing integrated, secure storage of passwords and web form data
o Kontact: a unified interfa
1) Noise detection equipment.
2) Take up smoking - use a modified bong to prevent excessive discharge of ash.
Putting corporate politics aside, what would be nice from a technical perspective is an intermediate language that is register-based. Microsoft decided to copy java so thoroughly they also copied java's mistakes by making the .NET runtime a stack machine. Market reality tells us Intel/AMD is not going away anytime soon, it would have been wise to make MSIL fit more nicely into the x86 architecture for performance purposes.
The mono/.DOTGNU projects are similarly unfathomable. It will be nice to have these tools available to run more bloated GUI's, but if one of these projects really wanted to differentiate itself, that project should instead focus on a C# to native-compiler using gcc's backend and let the other project focus on a compiler-to-MSIL. I guarantee you that project would become the 'winner'.
More excellent work from John Walker. As usual stupidity abounds on Slashdot with most of the criticism way off the mark. "This is useless because he didn't customize it to my every need". Whatever.
A useful fact the detractors haven't mentioned is that in light of the recent 'academic break' paper published by Courtois and Pierpzyk, AES and several other ciphers should be no longer considered suitable for those with a high level of paranoia.
That game was a beautiful demonstration of anti-computer chess strategy. Kasparov pushed his pawns early to close the game, gain a space advantage, enhance the power of his knights, and play long term, while the computer thrashed around without the ability to detect these abstract strategic moves AKA a _plan_.
See here for more info.
What the hell is that?"
"Why, it's a death ray, my good man! Behold!"
"Hey! Feels warm. Kind of nice."
"Well, it's just a prototype. With proper funding, I'm confident this little baby could destroy an area the size of New York City!"
"But I wanna help people, not kill them!"
"Oh. Oh, well, to be honest - the death ray only has evil applications."
As many others have pointed out RF emissions in the deregulated 2.4ghz range are no different then that used in baby monitors, DECT phones, etc. However, the widespread intentional use of RF for communication is a very recent phenomenon in human development.
I think it's quite likely that increased RF usage IS causing us an indeterminate level of harm as a society. The question is how much (or how little). I suspect it's greater than people (technologists) think. There was a paper published recently that showed cell phone use in metal carriages (trains) could easily approach unsafe levels. Does humanity deem this unknown cost worthwhile? So far the answer seems to be a resounding yes. Or at the very least -we don't care.
Realistically a tremendous amount of ambient radiation in the environment could be mitigated by better managed spectrum allocation policies. But nowadays the public interest is a seconday concern to that of entrenched business and politics.
We just gave up the idea that we can beat them as Kasparov lost to a computer and that is engough to prove that computers have surpassed humands.
Your misinformed. The best Deep Fritz could recently score against Kramnik was a 4-4 tie, with Kramnik winning the second and third games before falling behind in later games probably due to fatigue.
Beating a computer is easy. I do it myself sometimes. The hard part is beating a computer on a specific date, at a certain time under tournament conditions with the world watching - and Kramnik proved it against a 8 way Xeon machine searching around 2 million nodes (moves) a second. Can Kramnik calculate more or even close to this? Hardly.
The point isn't that Deep Blue's search depth is around 100 million nodes/second and that Kramnik's match was somehow inferior. The point is that proper anti-computer chess strategy evaporates a computer's tactical advantage gained through brute-forcing the position if a reasonable level of discipline is maintained once peices start coming off the table. This is why you frequently see computers in middlegame positions wildly swing their game assessment from (+4.66 to -14.66) as a new search depth is reached in a position an intermediate chess player wouldn't play into. Yes, chess is a finite problem space but that space is enormous, approximately 10^150 legal positions and that's more positions then atoms thought to exist in the known universe. The fact is with the exception of breakthrough in quantum computing and assuming Moore's law holds, the heat death of the sun would come before a chess computer could even calculate 0.000000000000001% of that space.
So computers are great for short-term tactical finesses that are easily calculated but are useless middlegame players. They are also useless opening players, but they get the advantage of having the opening book.