If you follow the link at the bottom of the page, you arrive on the same site, v1.0. And (most) of the links on that page do indeed point to real-looking but non-existing Yahoo url's. So they just stole the real Yahoo front page and put it up on their site. That's just lame, IMHO. And the parody notice at the bottom is much more concise, and it points to pssss. So I think Yahoo's mistake in sending legal threats to the wrong people is understandable here. I bet Andover's lawyers would do the same if someone just stole Slashdot's frontpage to attract more hits.
I read somewhere (don't remember where, and I don't have a link) that these electric hot air driers actually increase the level of bacteria on a persons hand by 400 percent ! So instead of washing your hands, you're infecting them. Apparently the hot and moist air in these things is the perfect breeding ground...
And besides that, the guy writing the article wishes us a 'Happy New Millennium'... sorry, one year too early, my friend.
Some gems from the maths & computer secton
on
Science in 1999
·
· Score: 3
Efforts to avert year-2000 computer-chip and software problems held the attention of computer experts, engineers, and public officials throughout 1999
The Melissa computer virus exposed new software vulnerabilities, while researchers looked for ways to render computers immune to such digital pests
Advances in computer technology and mathematical techniques threatened the security of the current standard encryption system
Hmm, Linus, Bill Gates, Carly Fiorina, and Jeff Bezos: only four computer people. Or should that be : wow, four computer people. In any case, I think only one (guess which) is a real computer person, the others are just businessmen who have something to do with computers.
I don't think most Slashdotters are against all patents, but more against patenting the obvious (like the icon for these stories indicates). One-click shopping, or banner ads are so obvious (to one 'skilled in the art', eg. a geek) that they shouldn't be patentable. What Google uses is far from obvious, so this merits a patent. I think this was the original idea behind the patent system, but somehow the USPTO seems to have lost the definition of 'obvious' along the way.
It's not the lawyers who make the laws : it's those pesky politicians. Ever heard of the separation of powers : executive branch, judicial branch and legislative branch. Lawyers are not in the legislative branch that makes the laws. They are in the judicial branch that uses these laws to sue people.
So if it's anyones fault, it's the legislative branch (and ultimately the voters, i.e. you).
Their intent is not to hurt people/development/whatever, it's just to make a quick buck.
I generaly don't buy into X or Y is 'evil'. There are very few people who are truly 'evil', in the sense thay they do stuff just to hurt others. To make the obligatory Microsoft reference : Bill Gates isn't evil, he's just trying to make more dollars for his shareholders, and for his own wife and kid. His intent is to make money, not surpress the helpless computer users. If he thought he could make more money by going open source, he would do it faster than you can say GPL, I'm sure.
If you really want evil, take a look at random acts of violence/vandalism, where there is absolutely no personal gain. That's what I define as 'evil'.
Fox wants to make sure that H-P scientists and engineers tell him about what they are creating, so he can protect it legally and exploit it commercially. Sometimes it's a hard sell, says Fox. Inventors are often so accustomed to working every day on their projects that "it looks obvious to them." Indeed, one of the most difficult tasks in this field of intellectual property asset management is to get the engineers and lawyers talking to one another. To encourage engineers to disclose what they are working on, Fox offers cash payments.
See ? It's all about the money. And indeed, if it looks obvious to a normal person, it might not be obvious to a lawyer.
P.S. : at my company, they offer stock options instead of cash.
If you had studied law instead of CS, and you found out you could make big bucks with these patent cases, wouldn't you ? These people aren't evil or anything, they're just interested in making tons of cash. And the current IP system gives them a 'legal' way to do it. It's not the 'stupid lawyers' fault, it's the whole system. The problem is, you need money to change the system, and right now, the lawyers have more of that than us open source geeks, so the system stays in place.
This is silly ! These people deserved to be smacked in their faces with 50 lbs. unix manuals. Question : why is the legal defense fund based in California, while the lawsuit is going to be in France ? If they'd set up a French address, I'd be happy to chip in.
Don't give me that subtitling/dubbing bullshit, I know you people can express yourselves in English! This beingk not trueish. We Belgimen no speaki di Inglesi... At leasty not the non-SlashDot-readink populashion.
Note that they do not claim replacing one page with another costs millions of dollars, but that they claim shutting down a website of a company making millions of dollars is a crime.
Suppose someone took down index.html at www.amazon.com for an hour. That coulde easily run into high losses for them, since their business is web based. I wouldn't know about index.html at www.cocacola.com, though. Do they make any money with their site ?
The problem is that I can only get outside the company network via the company proxy, which allows only traffic on port 80. To make things worse, my home machine is on a cable modem, and the cable provider blocks all ports under 1000. So in order to get round the restrictions I use a script that reads the mail every five minutes and scans for url's. If it finds any, they are downloaded to my home box, which then uploads them to somewhere else (so they have a different url). Now if the filtering software would look for keywords, this wouldn't help me a bit. But if I ROT13 the body of the html, and then add some JavaScript to un-ROT13 the page before displaying it in the browser window, all the proxy server filtering software would see was some junk coming from an innocent url.
That's odd... I just moderated this down, and then I did post a comment in this thread so my moderation was undone. But the 'troll' rating stuck ! I think I found YASB (Yet Another Slashdot Bug). Or is it a feature;-)
Possibility : downmoderate a +5 interesting post to +4 troll, then comment in the thread. Result : +5 troll:-), and the metamoderators won't even get to review it. I think... oh well.
Yet Another Movie That Will Take Months To Get To Europe... I hate it when I read movie reviews on SlashDot for movies that won't be out here in Belgium for months... Why oh why don't these movie people wise up and send those reels earlier ? And don't give me that subtitling/dubbing argument : I understand enough English, thankyouverymuch. They'll beat the 'moviez' crowd that now runs rampant in Europe too.
The company I work for has been experimenting with censoring employee internet usage. It looks as if I won't be able to read Slashdot from work next year anymore, and this annoys me greatly. On to my question :
Since the net supposedly treats censorship as damage, and routes around it, how can I route around this stupid censorship proggie running on our proxy server ? Are there any sites that deal with this sort of thing (preferably non censored).
If there are none, I was thinking on implementing a web page running from my home machine, where I can type in an url and have it automatically mirrored there. Would this work ? Do you happen to know if SurfWatch checks for keywords in downloaded pages or does it just block urls ?
(If it looks for keywords, does any slashdotter know of a rot13 implementation I can use in JavaScript ? I'd just rot13 the page contents, mirror them with the JavaScript slapped onto it, and when the page loads the Script can then nicely decrypt it. Or does this already exist ? If not, can I patent it;-))
As far as I know, it is the numerical representation of the name Nero (the Roman Emperor), in Hebrew alphabet. Each letter also had a numerical value, and for Nero this gave 666. The author of the Apocalypse just wanted to bad-mouth the emperor without saying his name directly, but then again, IANAT (I am not a theologist).
I was thinking the same thing whenk reading the company page : one of the uses they saw for this technology was using it as identification for e-commerce (e.g. Is Citizen 681387 sitting in front of his computer right now, or is it just an 'Evil Hacker(TM)' who is ordering this stuff ?)
Doesn't it say in the Apocalypse somewhere that in order to be able to trade, one needs to be marked by the 'number of the beast' ? And does the name 'Digital Angel' sound funny in this context too ? Especially since Satan is supposed to be a (fallen) angel too, and 666 is a collection of digits...
Enough religious ranting already, I don't believe in any of that stuff anyway, but I just found this funny.
It can be activated either by the "wearer" or by a remote monitoring facility I could think of a few situations where this would have benefits : downed pilots, or rescue workers, law enforcement personnel, elderly people,... But then again, I don't like the 'remote monitoring facility' idea.
Re:I usually find your articles interesting, but..
on
Planet Gattaca
·
· Score: 1
I must agree here : the whole article was nothing but a series of grim predictions about the horrors and abominations gene technology would lead us to. You make it sound as if only mad scientist types would do that kind of research, without any consideration for any consequences. I think most genetic research is done for good causes, like curing cancer, or finding ways to treat disease. Maybe you should invent a new pledge, modelled on your Y2K pledge : The genetics-pledge. Repeat afer me : I will not spread fear and panic...
Slashdot Mirror
If you follow the link at the bottom of the page, you arrive on the same site, v1.0. And (most) of the links on that page do indeed point to real-looking but non-existing Yahoo url's. So they just stole the real Yahoo front page and put it up on their site. That's just lame, IMHO. And the parody notice at the bottom is much more concise, and it points to pssss. So I think Yahoo's mistake in sending legal threats to the wrong people is understandable here. I bet Andover's lawyers would do the same if someone just stole Slashdot's frontpage to attract more hits.
I read somewhere (don't remember where, and I don't have a link) that these electric hot air driers actually increase the level of bacteria on a persons hand by 400 percent ! So instead of washing your hands, you're infecting them. Apparently the hot and moist air in these things is the perfect breeding ground...
And besides that, the guy writing the article wishes us a 'Happy New Millennium'... sorry, one year too early, my friend.
Efforts to avert year-2000 computer-chip and software problems held the attention of computer experts, engineers, and public officials throughout 1999
The Melissa computer virus exposed new software vulnerabilities, while researchers looked for ways to render computers immune to such digital pests
Advances in computer technology and mathematical techniques threatened the security of the current standard encryption system
Hmm, Linus, Bill Gates, Carly Fiorina, and Jeff Bezos: only four computer people. Or should that be : wow, four computer people. In any case, I think only one (guess which) is a real computer person, the others are just businessmen who have something to do with computers.
I don't think most Slashdotters are against all patents, but more against patenting the obvious (like the icon for these stories indicates). One-click shopping, or banner ads are so obvious (to one 'skilled in the art', eg. a geek) that they shouldn't be patentable.
What Google uses is far from obvious, so this merits a patent. I think this was the original idea behind the patent system, but somehow the USPTO seems to have lost the definition of 'obvious' along the way.
I'm in Belgium, it is now 17.23, and hotmail works.
It's not the lawyers who make the laws : it's those pesky politicians. Ever heard of the separation of powers : executive branch, judicial branch and legislative branch. Lawyers are not in the legislative branch that makes the laws. They are in the judicial branch that uses these laws to sue people.
So if it's anyones fault, it's the legislative branch (and ultimately the voters, i.e. you).
Their intent is not to hurt people/development/whatever, it's just to make a quick buck.
I generaly don't buy into X or Y is 'evil'. There are very few people who are truly 'evil', in the sense thay they do stuff just to hurt others. To make the obligatory Microsoft reference : Bill Gates isn't evil, he's just trying to make more dollars for his shareholders, and for his own wife and kid. His intent is to make money, not surpress the helpless computer users. If he thought he could make more money by going open source, he would do it faster than you can say GPL, I'm sure.
If you really want evil, take a look at random acts of violence/vandalism, where there is absolutely no personal gain. That's what I define as 'evil'.
Fox wants to make sure that H-P scientists and engineers tell him about what they are creating, so he can protect it legally and exploit it commercially. Sometimes it's a hard sell, says Fox. Inventors are often so accustomed to working every day on their projects that "it looks obvious to them." Indeed, one of the most difficult tasks in this field of intellectual property asset management is to get the engineers and lawyers talking to one another. To encourage engineers to disclose what they are working on, Fox offers cash payments.
See ? It's all about the money. And indeed, if it looks obvious to a normal person, it might not be obvious to a lawyer.
P.S. : at my company, they offer stock options instead of cash.
If you had studied law instead of CS, and you found out you could make big bucks with these patent cases, wouldn't you ? These people aren't evil or anything, they're just interested in making tons of cash. And the current IP system gives them a 'legal' way to do it. It's not the 'stupid lawyers' fault, it's the whole system. The problem is, you need money to change the system, and right now, the lawyers have more of that than us open source geeks, so the system stays in place.
This is silly ! These people deserved to be smacked in their faces with 50 lbs. unix manuals.
Question : why is the legal defense fund based in California, while the lawsuit is going to be in France ? If they'd set up a French address, I'd be happy to chip in.
Me too... I also wondered what that user friendly comic was about. Thank God there is such a thing as Slashdot to explain it :-)
Don't give me that subtitling/dubbing bullshit, I know you people can express yourselves in English!
This beingk not trueish. We Belgimen no speaki di Inglesi... At leasty not the non-SlashDot-readink populashion.
(this is humour... laugh)
Note that they do not claim replacing one page with another costs millions of dollars, but that they claim shutting down a website of a company making millions of dollars is a crime.
Suppose someone took down index.html at www.amazon.com for an hour. That coulde easily run into high losses for them, since their business is web based. I wouldn't know about index.html at www.cocacola.com, though. Do they make any money with their site ?
The problem is that I can only get outside the company network via the company proxy, which allows only traffic on port 80. To make things worse, my home machine is on a cable modem, and the cable provider blocks all ports under 1000. So in order to get round the restrictions I use a script that reads the mail every five minutes and scans for url's. If it finds any, they are downloaded to my home box, which then uploads them to somewhere else (so they have a different url). Now if the filtering software would look for keywords, this wouldn't help me a bit. But if I ROT13 the body of the html, and then add some JavaScript to un-ROT13 the page before displaying it in the browser window, all the proxy server filtering software would see was some junk coming from an innocent url.
Would this work ?
That's odd... I just moderated this down, and then I did post a comment in this thread so my moderation was undone. But the 'troll' rating stuck ! I think I found YASB (Yet Another Slashdot Bug). Or is it a feature ;-)
:-), and the metamoderators won't even get to review it. I think... oh well.
Possibility : downmoderate a +5 interesting post to +4 troll, then comment in the thread. Result : +5 troll
Yet Another Movie That Will Take Months To Get To Europe... I hate it when I read movie reviews on SlashDot for movies that won't be out here in Belgium for months... Why oh why don't these movie people wise up and send those reels earlier ? And don't give me that subtitling/dubbing argument : I understand enough English, thankyouverymuch. They'll beat the 'moviez' crowd that now runs rampant in Europe too.
Hi,
;-))
The company I work for has been experimenting with censoring employee internet usage. It looks as if I won't be able to read Slashdot from work next year anymore, and this annoys me greatly. On to my question :
Since the net supposedly treats censorship as damage, and routes around it, how can I route around this stupid censorship proggie running on our proxy server ? Are there any sites that deal with this sort of thing (preferably non censored).
If there are none, I was thinking on implementing a web page running from my home machine, where I can type in an url and have it automatically mirrored there. Would this work ? Do you happen to know if SurfWatch checks for keywords in downloaded pages or does it just block urls ?
(If it looks for keywords, does any slashdotter know of a rot13 implementation I can use in JavaScript ? I'd just rot13 the page contents, mirror them with the JavaScript slapped onto it, and when the page loads the Script can then nicely decrypt it. Or does this already exist ? If not, can I patent it
As far as I know, it is the numerical representation of the name Nero (the Roman Emperor), in Hebrew alphabet. Each letter also had a numerical value, and for Nero this gave 666. The author of the Apocalypse just wanted to bad-mouth the emperor without saying his name directly, but then again, IANAT (I am not a theologist).
They can use the repaired telescope to look for debris on Mars fom you-know-what :-)
I was thinking the same thing whenk reading the company page : one of the uses they saw for this technology was using it as identification for e-commerce (e.g. Is Citizen 681387 sitting in front of his computer right now, or is it just an 'Evil Hacker(TM)' who is ordering this stuff ?)
Doesn't it say in the Apocalypse somewhere that in order to be able to trade, one needs to be marked by the 'number of the beast' ? And does the name 'Digital Angel' sound funny in this context too ? Especially since Satan is supposed to be a (fallen) angel too, and 666 is a collection of digits...
Enough religious ranting already, I don't believe in any of that stuff anyway, but I just found this funny.
It can be activated either by the "wearer" or by a remote monitoring facility ... But then again, I don't like the 'remote monitoring facility' idea.
I could think of a few situations where this would have benefits : downed pilots, or rescue workers, law enforcement personnel, elderly people,
I must agree here : the whole article was nothing but a series of grim predictions about the horrors and abominations gene technology would lead us to. You make it sound as if only mad scientist types would do that kind of research, without any consideration for any consequences. I think most genetic research is done for good causes, like curing cancer, or finding ways to treat disease.
Maybe you should invent a new pledge, modelled on your Y2K pledge : The genetics-pledge. Repeat afer me : I will not spread fear and panic...
I also thought of this immediately... Maybe this story should have had the 'rampaging penguin with scimitar' logo ;-)
But then I remembered I took the Y2K pledge.