The experiments used three implanted electrodes -- one in the brain
region that senses reward or pleasure, and one each in areas that
process signals from the rat's left and right whisker bundles.
So, where the hell is this pleasure region of the brain, and how can I
get an electrode implanted there? (Of course, the remote would have
a 256-bit encrypted password known only to me...)
..free transfer.prn so sex.com becomes sex.com.prn...
Of course, the above poster neglects to mention that he/she has reserved
com.prn and hopes to collect a fortune leasing out
subdomains after the free initial transfer.
If it
lost the hardware business it would immediately drop its revenues from $8 billion to around $500 million. Even
if its profits went up at the same time (which they might), they would get crucified on Wall Street for this.
No sane company would ever pursue a strategy that involved such a dramatic cut in its revenue
stream.
About 10 years ago my wife spilled some Coke (or Pepsi) into the
dashboard, and somehow it drained into the radio/cassette, rendering the
unit nonfunctional. The dealer and a repairman declared it a
total loss.
Here is what I did to resurrect it.
I took the radio out of the car and the cover off the radio. I
filled the kitchen sink with cold, clean water and soaked everything,
cassette player and all, for 1 hour. Drained the water, refilled the
sink, and soaked for another 15 minutes (rinse cycle). Finally, I
baked it at 160 deg F in an (electric) oven for 8 hours.
Why 160? I figured a car radio could get that hot when the car was
in the sun with the doors closed. I hesitated to go higher, mainly
concerned with the plastic parts in the cassette player.
The radio and cassette still work fine to this day. Yeah, I still
own the car - these days only gas-hogging SUVs match the surprising
storage space inside of the tiny-looking frame of a 1988 Honda Wagovan,
AFAIK made only one year, and only in tan. With plenty of headroom for
extra-tall folks.
The author completely ignores the possibility that the pirated versions
actually helped promote the software. For example, Alice has a pirated
version she shows to friend Bob. Impressed, Bob gets and pays for an
officially registered copy. If Alice had to pay for it, she probably
wouldn't have it it the first place, and Bob would have never known
it existed. For better or worse, piracy is probably the best marketing
tool there is. The key is to keep the fact you know this a secret (and publicly, constantly whine
about how you can barely afford
toilet paper because of pirates), and make it somewhat difficult but not too difficult to pirate.
If you would have read the link I had, you would have figured it out
that the problem is legacy application don't do this. You can't just
start changing legacy behaviour, and expect things like digital
signatures, etc to not break tremendously. The whole mbox thing is
fraught with legacy problems.
I read the link and I disagree with it. My point is to change the
mbox "standard" to correctly escape
"From "s and fix the legacy applications using
it. I don't want signature software to predict mangling or premangle my
message; I would consider such software to be broken also and it too
should be fixed. If a signature breaks because of mangling that is a
good thing, since it tells me my message was corrupted. For
you, "From" mangling might be a minor nuisance; for others it is a
serious problem, especially when the user has no idea it's happened
until it's too late, such as after a LaTeX article appears permanently
in print. The user has a right to expect a message to go through
intact.
I don't see how my proposal would make things any worse than they are
now, even before all legacy apps are corrected. Already "From"s are
mangled unpredictably depending on the message's path, and already
signatures break accordingly. With my proposed mbox standard, over time
the problem would eventually go away as legacy apps are slowly corrected;
but with the present mbox standard the problem will never go
away.
Re:Unix email can also corrupt plain-text...
on
Borking Outlook Express
·
· Score: 1, Redundant
A very interesting analysis [netscape.com]
of this by JWZ points out that it's not really escaping 'From', but munging it, because there is no 'escaping' of >From
Why can't it be a true escape with the following algorithm?
To escape: If a line begins with n ">"s (including n=0), followed
by the 5 characters "From ", then prefix the line with an additional
">".
To unescape: If a line begins with n ">"s (n >= 1), followed
by the 5 characters "From ", then remove the first ">".
Unix email can also corrupt plain-text...
on
Borking Outlook Express
·
· Score: 5, Informative
There is an amusing Unix bug ("feature"?) with plain text email that bites
co-authors emailing (as in-line text) LaTeX documents back and forth. A
line beginning with the 5 characters "From " will have a ">" put in
front of it on many systems. This causes LaTeX to render the word as
"?From" (with upside down question mark). Once I caught this in the
nick of time just before the final proof was submitted. I now routinely
change all "From" to "{}From" since I just know my coauthors are going
to send it back in-line. But I'd bet there are quite a few published
scientific papers out there with the typo "?From" in them.
I understand the purpose of the ">" is to escape the "From "
that separates emails. But I never understood why it was not
unescaped upon reading the email.
By the way the problem is so common that the LaTeX manual
has an index entry called, "From, line beginning with", and calls the problem "a bit of fossilized
stupidity".
How does PostgreSQL compare to Oracle?
Is PostgreSQL more or less secure than Oracle? I don't know.
I've never heard of a problem with it nor have I had one.
Is PostgreSQL faster or slower than Oracle? I don't know, and
apparently Oracle desperately doesn't want anyone to find out.
From benchmarks that have had
Oracle results deleted
to benchmarks that someone (I wonder who?) has
gotten the ISP to remove for "violation of our Terms of Service"
(this used to be a benchmark),
Oracle is very aggressive in preventing anyone from finding out
how their database really performs. I wonder why?
(However what might be another version of the second benchmark
seems to have survived
by carefully avoiding the mention of names of proprietary
products.) All I know is that after trying to deal with the bloat of
Oracle on a less-than-mainframe-class PC, PostgreSQL was a lean,
mean breath of fresh air. Converting PL/SQL to PL/pgSQL was
easy, too.
I use pdflatex to generate
PDF files directly, instead of latex -> dvipdf.
It comes with the latex package. I recall there
were some problems with some documents
with the two step process
that went away with pdflatex, but it's been a
long time since I used dvipdf and I can't remember
the details. I've never had a problem with
pdflatex.
According to Joel, the single greatest development sin a software
company can commit is "deciding to completely rewrite your product from
scratch, on the theory that all your code is messy and bug prone and is
bloated...A programmer will whine about a function that he thinks is
messy. It's supposed to be a simple function to display a window or
something, but for some reason it takes up two pages and has all these
ugly little hairs and stuff on it and nobody knows why. OK. I'll tell
you why. Those are bug fixes. One of them fixes that bug that Jill had
when she tried to install the thing on a computer that didn't have
Internet Explorer. Another one fixes a bug that occurs in low memory
conditions. Another one fixes some bug that occurred when the file is
on a floppy disk and the user yanks out the diskette in the middle.
That LoadLibrary call is sure ugly but it makes the code work on old
versions of Windows 95. When you throw that function away and start
from scratch, you are throwing away all that knowledge. All those
collected bug fixes. Years of programming work."
My God. So this is what Microsoft code looks like? It's a miracle
it can be maintained at all. This sounds like sloppy coding by
trial-and-error, at its worst. Code filled with "ugly little hairs and
stuff" that "nobody knows why" is almost a guaranteed recipe for buggy,
unstable code. If all these "bug fixes" were properly commented to
begin with there would be no argument as to why they should be kept.
Thank God for open source, where programmers are _proud_ to show off
their code (well, a lot of them, anyway).
I would attribute the successfulness of Microsoft, and the
failure of others, to factors other than the quality of its code.
Well, that's over 4 million subscribers -- $1.50 per subscriber
per week. Would the subscribers not be willing to absorb
a price increase of what amounts to a cup of coffee per
week to keep their cable modem service? And any more
than that, say $2.00 per week, would be a $100 million
per year profit. Sure you might
lose a few but most would probably pay -- I mean what's the
alternative?
Translucent windowing has also been in Linux; here is an
example (not mine; look it up on Usenet). (Warning: Partial
nudity.) I don't know how it compares since the site referenced in the
article has been slashdotted.
Lastly, how can you say telling the "truth" is always good. Your credit
card number, home address, and phone number are the "truth".
You are mixing up privacy with truth. No one says you have to reveal
your credit card number to me. But stating a false one rarely serves
any purpose other than fraud. And imagine if the phone book, rather
than simply suppressing unlisted phone numbers, listed them with false
information, so you could not trust anything you found in it.
Lies are not always bad.
With this statement, you tell me I cannot trust anything you say. If
you're going to say something, tell the truth, otherwise say nothing, if
it's none of my business. If it is my business, like a flaw in a
product I'm about to purchase from you, then you should say it, and
truthfully. That is, if you are an honorable person. (Perhaps I am
unusual in that respect; if I sell someone a used car I just cannot feel
good about myself unless I disclose its known problems.)
We have
no laws that simply say you cannot lie.
And I would want no such law. It is a matter of ethics and trust. Once
a government, company, or girlfriend is caught in a lie, you can no longer
trust them, except under very extraordinary circumstances.
We limit your right to yell fire. We limit commercial speech. We limit
your right to speak intentional lies about people (e.g., slander/libel
laws). All are generally recognized to be in the public's best
interest. Why is it any less legitimate to not allow the public 100%
free and open access to sensitive and detailed information?
Regarding your 3 examples:
Yelling fire (when there is not one) entails stating a falsehood.
A fraudulent or misleading claim in a commercial entails stating a falsehood.
Slander and libel entail stating falsehoods.
This, in my mind, is their distinction. Telling lies is never
good. Knowing the truth is always good.
From the interview: The GNU/Hurd, as a desktop system is quite
usable, albeit, a bit slow. In terms of stability, there are not many
major crashers. Which is to say, an uptime of over a week is quite
possible.
In this age of MS-think, that means it's time to release it!
That said, I would not recommend using the GNU/Hurd on a server. At
least not yet.
Hey, it was meant to be a joke - my humor must be too subtle, sorry.
But you do raise an interesting speculation - if software can be
licensed instead of sold, why can't hardware, subject to the same
terms? In other words you don't own the XBox, you just license it
from Microsoft. For the same $299 price (or whatever it is).
That way they could have a more or less consistent EULA throughout
their product line. Or is this not possible because
the "property" not quite as "intellectual"?
You instead purchase a retail box version of the OS at Best Buy, from
buy.com, or any other number of vendors.
Now you have a copy of a Windows OS that you can carry with you to any
single new machine you purchase.
That's the way it used to be, before Activation(TM). With XP,
you're permanently locked to the first machine you installed it
on (and even then, if you upgrade your hardware, you're at
MS's mercy as to whether they'll let you reactivate).
Either they fix
'em as they go bad (and with piss poor ventalation and kiddies manhandling 'em they're going to go bad
quicker than normal) and eat a lot of $$$, or they don't fix 'em and piss off a lot of customers.
The EULA probably states something like
"The HARDWARE comes AS IS, with no implied warranty of merchantability, no
warranty of fitness for a particular purpose, nor any warranty against
interference with your enjoyment of the HARDWARE or against
infringement, blah, blah, blah..." As for
pissing off customers, Windows 3.1, 95, 98,... have already conditioned their expectations.
Re:FYI: Google has organized all newstory links.
on
More On Tragedy
·
· Score: 2
A general overview of
some companies' status. (I didn't see this on AP/Reuters newsfeeds.)
Some message boards are attempting to collect
lists of survivors such as this.
Of course it is DMCA, not DCMA. I also have
trouble with MSCE, I mean MCSE. (Don't mod
this up; it's just that I can't bear not to
correct my silly error.)
Slashdot Mirror
So, where the hell is this pleasure region of the brain, and how can I get an electrode implanted there? (Of course, the remote would have a 256-bit encrypted password known only to me...)
Of course, the above poster neglects to mention that he/she has reserved com.prn and hopes to collect a fortune leasing out subdomains after the free initial transfer.
Try the Kensington FlyLight. It plugs into the USB port for its power. I love it, and my GF bought one for her boss for xmas, who loves it too.
So far it is the only Windows USB device that has never crashed. :)
Except maybe VALinux?
Here is what I did to resurrect it.
I took the radio out of the car and the cover off the radio. I filled the kitchen sink with cold, clean water and soaked everything, cassette player and all, for 1 hour. Drained the water, refilled the sink, and soaked for another 15 minutes (rinse cycle). Finally, I baked it at 160 deg F in an (electric) oven for 8 hours.
Why 160? I figured a car radio could get that hot when the car was in the sun with the doors closed. I hesitated to go higher, mainly concerned with the plastic parts in the cassette player.
The radio and cassette still work fine to this day. Yeah, I still own the car - these days only gas-hogging SUVs match the surprising storage space inside of the tiny-looking frame of a 1988 Honda Wagovan, AFAIK made only one year, and only in tan. With plenty of headroom for extra-tall folks.
The author completely ignores the possibility that the pirated versions actually helped promote the software. For example, Alice has a pirated version she shows to friend Bob. Impressed, Bob gets and pays for an officially registered copy. If Alice had to pay for it, she probably wouldn't have it it the first place, and Bob would have never known it existed. For better or worse, piracy is probably the best marketing tool there is. The key is to keep the fact you know this a secret (and publicly, constantly whine about how you can barely afford toilet paper because of pirates), and make it somewhat difficult but not too difficult to pirate.
I read the link and I disagree with it. My point is to change the mbox "standard" to correctly escape "From "s and fix the legacy applications using it. I don't want signature software to predict mangling or premangle my message; I would consider such software to be broken also and it too should be fixed. If a signature breaks because of mangling that is a good thing, since it tells me my message was corrupted. For you, "From" mangling might be a minor nuisance; for others it is a serious problem, especially when the user has no idea it's happened until it's too late, such as after a LaTeX article appears permanently in print. The user has a right to expect a message to go through intact.
I don't see how my proposal would make things any worse than they are now, even before all legacy apps are corrected. Already "From"s are mangled unpredictably depending on the message's path, and already signatures break accordingly. With my proposed mbox standard, over time the problem would eventually go away as legacy apps are slowly corrected; but with the present mbox standard the problem will never go away.
Why can't it be a true escape with the following algorithm?
To escape: If a line begins with n ">"s (including n=0), followed by the 5 characters "From ", then prefix the line with an additional ">".
To unescape: If a line begins with n ">"s (n >= 1), followed by the 5 characters "From ", then remove the first ">".
I understand the purpose of the ">" is to escape the "From " that separates emails. But I never understood why it was not unescaped upon reading the email.
By the way the problem is so common that the LaTeX manual has an index entry called, "From, line beginning with", and calls the problem "a bit of fossilized stupidity".
How does PostgreSQL compare to Oracle? Is PostgreSQL more or less secure than Oracle? I don't know. I've never heard of a problem with it nor have I had one. Is PostgreSQL faster or slower than Oracle? I don't know, and apparently Oracle desperately doesn't want anyone to find out. From benchmarks that have had Oracle results deleted to benchmarks that someone (I wonder who?) has gotten the ISP to remove for "violation of our Terms of Service" (this used to be a benchmark), Oracle is very aggressive in preventing anyone from finding out how their database really performs. I wonder why? (However what might be another version of the second benchmark seems to have survived by carefully avoiding the mention of names of proprietary products.) All I know is that after trying to deal with the bloat of Oracle on a less-than-mainframe-class PC, PostgreSQL was a lean, mean breath of fresh air. Converting PL/SQL to PL/pgSQL was easy, too.
I use pdflatex to generate PDF files directly, instead of latex -> dvipdf. It comes with the latex package. I recall there were some problems with some documents with the two step process that went away with pdflatex, but it's been a long time since I used dvipdf and I can't remember the details. I've never had a problem with pdflatex.
How Slashdot Saved Salon
My God. So this is what Microsoft code looks like? It's a miracle it can be maintained at all. This sounds like sloppy coding by trial-and-error, at its worst. Code filled with "ugly little hairs and stuff" that "nobody knows why" is almost a guaranteed recipe for buggy, unstable code. If all these "bug fixes" were properly commented to begin with there would be no argument as to why they should be kept. Thank God for open source, where programmers are _proud_ to show off their code (well, a lot of them, anyway).
I would attribute the successfulness of Microsoft, and the failure of others, to factors other than the quality of its code.
Well, that's over 4 million subscribers -- $1.50 per subscriber per week. Would the subscribers not be willing to absorb a price increase of what amounts to a cup of coffee per week to keep their cable modem service? And any more than that, say $2.00 per week, would be a $100 million per year profit. Sure you might lose a few but most would probably pay -- I mean what's the alternative?
Translucent windowing has also been in Linux; here is an example (not mine; look it up on Usenet). (Warning: Partial nudity.) I don't know how it compares since the site referenced in the article has been slashdotted.
You are mixing up privacy with truth. No one says you have to reveal your credit card number to me. But stating a false one rarely serves any purpose other than fraud. And imagine if the phone book, rather than simply suppressing unlisted phone numbers, listed them with false information, so you could not trust anything you found in it.
Lies are not always bad.
With this statement, you tell me I cannot trust anything you say. If you're going to say something, tell the truth, otherwise say nothing, if it's none of my business. If it is my business, like a flaw in a product I'm about to purchase from you, then you should say it, and truthfully. That is, if you are an honorable person. (Perhaps I am unusual in that respect; if I sell someone a used car I just cannot feel good about myself unless I disclose its known problems.)
We have no laws that simply say you cannot lie.
And I would want no such law. It is a matter of ethics and trust. Once a government, company, or girlfriend is caught in a lie, you can no longer trust them, except under very extraordinary circumstances.
Regarding your 3 examples:
-
Yelling fire (when there is not one) entails stating a falsehood.
-
A fraudulent or misleading claim in a commercial entails stating a falsehood.
-
Slander and libel entail stating falsehoods.
This, in my mind, is their distinction. Telling lies is never good. Knowing the truth is always good."The dog ate my homework."
"Why didn't you print out another copy?"
"It ate my monitor too..."
"Why didn't you print out another monitor?"
"It ate my computer too..."
In this age of MS-think, that means it's time to release it!
That said, I would not recommend using the GNU/Hurd on a server. At least not yet.
Hmm, that never stopped our friends in Redmond.
(Seriously, though, an interesting interview.)
MORE ptrace vulnerabilities? I thought these were fixed in 2.4.9.
Hey, it was meant to be a joke - my humor must be too subtle, sorry. But you do raise an interesting speculation - if software can be licensed instead of sold, why can't hardware, subject to the same terms? In other words you don't own the XBox, you just license it from Microsoft. For the same $299 price (or whatever it is). That way they could have a more or less consistent EULA throughout their product line. Or is this not possible because the "property" not quite as "intellectual"?
Now you have a copy of a Windows OS that you can carry with you to any single new machine you purchase.
That's the way it used to be, before Activation(TM). With XP, you're permanently locked to the first machine you installed it on (and even then, if you upgrade your hardware, you're at MS's mercy as to whether they'll let you reactivate).
The EULA probably states something like "The HARDWARE comes AS IS, with no implied warranty of merchantability, no warranty of fitness for a particular purpose, nor any warranty against interference with your enjoyment of the HARDWARE or against infringement, blah, blah, blah..." As for pissing off customers, Windows 3.1, 95, 98,... have already conditioned their expectations.
A general overview of some companies' status. (I didn't see this on AP/Reuters newsfeeds.) Some message boards are attempting to collect lists of survivors such as this.
Of course it is DMCA, not DCMA. I also have trouble with MSCE, I mean MCSE. (Don't mod this up; it's just that I can't bear not to correct my silly error.)