My father teaches technical writing, so I have developed a love for these things. Sadly, I don't have links, but my favorites are:
"Warning: Weak Batteries May Cause Errotic Response"
(a little sticker from the bottom of a neighborhood child's RC car. My dad has this one mounted in his office)
And my personal favorite:
the graphic of an idiot tipping a soda machine onto his head, complete with lightning bolts indicating pain. And the caption "Warning: Do not rock or tip machine, injury or death may result".
I realize there were a few geniuses killed trying to steal a soda. (One of them was in college, his parents are suing...) I'd like to think Darwin had ridden us of lower primates without the mastery of "Heavy rock fall on head == not good".
Of course, I also have a sticker on one of my boxes which reads: "Notice: All money is removed from this machine daily". I like the sentiment, and since the soda machine in my office it was affixed to is set up to dispense for free, I figured it wasn't really needed.
Computer Science o' course. I actually checked out your web page when you first posted. Your name is vaguely familiar, but I think we were a few years apart. I graduated in '99.:)
I spent some time in college studying Natural Language Processing. Amazing stuff. One of the coolest things about _all_ languages is that the frequencies of "tokens" (generally words) is mathematically predictable. If I remember correctly, the break down follows Zipf's Law, and is something like 1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4 etc...
Obviously the most common words occur much more often, but as the corpus (i.e. set of words you know) grows, you get rapidly dimishing returns. 500 words is a pretty good set of words if they are the most common words in the language. To lineraly increase the likelyhood of the doll knowing a random word the makers would have to add memory at a much greater than linear rate.
And all this so it won't say "shit, fart, damn, fuck". Ahhh science. I feel safer already.
Man they're a ton of us JHU geeks out today... I actually entered in 1999. If I recall correctly, the majority of the reason for the 15 -> 7 jump was that Mike (Sugar Daddy) Bloomberg gave us a metric assload of money. So did Krieger. I'm sure there were other factors, but a quick 100 million dollars buys a lot.:)
We've had them in Austin, Texas for some time now. In fact, I'm watching a show I "time-shifted" earlier right now. I have to admit the technology is cool, but not as rapid as you might think.
For one thing, if it is recording something, expect the remote to be sluggish. Like 5-10 second response times when it's feeling especially pissy.
I've also had a few cases of corruption a long time ago when I was recording two shows at once (yep, you can do that, but two's the limit) Both shows came out garbled and pretty much unwatchable.
Sometimes it locks up. You'll need to unplug it for a bit and let it think about what it did wrong. Oh, and when they don't turn it on until it gets the clock signal, they mean it. That, and sometimes I've lost everything which was stored after a power outage. Which is strange, cuz you would think the hard-drive would be okay with that...
I realize I've listed a bunch of negatives here. I do like the device, and it's worth the few bucks a month.
Now if I can just continue to resist the urge to explore those USB, FireWire, and other interesting bits, things will be grand.:)
The article, and the discussion which follows fails to address the most important question: what are the "standards for release"?
The are listed as strigent, but no details are given. "No shoes, no shirt, no DNA" might be strigent in someplaces, but not others. What where the conditions they met?
I remember reading an interesting paper a while back about metadata and some security implications. Doesn't the whole idea of metadata-as-file leave the casual user open to problems of unsure content?
For example:
1) Someone makes an image called "Cool Wallpaper.jpg" (cuz the average Joe doesn't use PNG). 2) Joe user downloads it and installs it in some common directory 3) Joe gets busted for child pr0n cuz they attached something nasty in the metadata
This is a pretty bad example, but I can think of all sorts of interesting issues with badly configured common space and executable files. (I realize that if the ACL's are correct this isn't a problem, but Joe Average tends to mess up a lot)
Even though good ol' Ollie North is now some sorta of polictial hero in some circles, there was that whole little "Iran-Contra" arms thing. You know, were we were selling them Stinger missles and other fun toys. Of course, we "don't clearly recall" at lot of this under oath.
Here in the US, it's illegal (I think) to do things like use a hidden camera to peek up your customer's skirts because there is a "reasonable expectaction of privacy". So where does that end? If I don't choose to advertise my waistsize, or brand of underwear, does I have a legal right not to have that infomation active "read" off me?
While the shower of sparks and smell of melting plastic in the microwave is fun, I'm much rather swap as many RFID tags as possible with my friends, neighbors, and random objects around the house.
I suspect you could quickly mask your "signature" by carrying a wide swath of tags with you when you go shopping. I'd love to see the database which has a customer walking in wearing a woman's left shoe, hiking boot, 14 boxes of oatmeal, a child's tanktop and four library books.
The article has very little information. The FTC is asking for the power to investigate "secretly". What does this mean? If it means they simply want the ability to setup email "stings" (e.g. email addresses like cutegirl123@hotmail.com instead of spamcop@ftc.gov) then I have no problem. If it means they want to start wiretapping without warrants, that's a different issue.
This does raise an interesting point... what about libel? Does it apply? (Or some analog?) If SCO turns out to be knowingly spreading false information could IBM et. al sue them for lost business? I'd LOVE to see them get bitchslapped.:)
Of course it is stupid to assume all managers are dumb. I have had the priviledge of working with some great ones.
The most telling remark I've ever heard from a senior management-type was "Well, development is a cost-center after all..." Meaning that we lost money that the sales team made. The idea that there would be nothing to sell without development and support seemed to have never crossed this guy's mind.
To me, the problem is that managers in the tech industry seldom have background in the skills they are managing. Their development teams are interchangable parts, and if a task is deemed too ambitious, the solution is simply to swap in a better part. Too often this "better" part is simply a team lead by an engineer without the good sense to stand up and protest.
If the customer asks for a faster car, redesigning the engine might make sense. If the customer asks for a car which get 1000 miles to the gallon and flies, no amount of redesign is gonna help.
I realize I've strayed a bit from the topic of simple defects being covered up, but I think there is a common thread...
In my experience, it is seldom the engineers who make the ethic calls. (Sure, about code reuse, etc...) In the engineers in this article actually did raise objections, but weren't listened to.
The simple truth is that management will decide what type of product is shipped. Great engineers with shitty management still equals trouble,
Okay... here's an idea... some enterprising geek needs to develop a tool which tracks the evolution of kernel patches. (sorta like that cool 3-D fly through mapping posted a while back)
When I write code, it's never perfect the first few iterations. If I were to lift it, it would probably have a much lower defect rate.
So, here's the idea: by graphing the changes in the source code as it evolves, we could narrow down where a potential violation could be. It would likely be in a section of code which was checked in in bulk, and has required little tweaking since.
Now of course if the original developer did a lot of testing before submitting the first patch, then this therory has problems.
If the code was lifted and then changed, it won't be detected, but then the offense has already been corrected, so as long as you aren't running that particular kernel, you are infringing less. (cuz I suppose you could claim derived works are tainted...)
A huge mistake
on
SCO DOS'ed
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Damnit. This sort of crap is exactly what we don't need! SCO's not pursuing this case because they expect to win, they're trying to get as much media attention as possible. The more bad press the OSS/Linux/GNU/hacker community gets, the stronger the need to shut SCO up becomes. They want to be bought out. Demostrating to the world that there are "evil hackers" out there with little respect for corporations and the law just adds fuel to a fire.
The drama the DDoS kiddies serves as a nice distraction that SCO has no case!
Umm... we don't seem to much care were people happen to live these days. A lot of the people the US are detaining didn't get picked up in the US. I suspect that is Mr. Ashcroft wanted to declare this guy a "terrorist" we'd have no putting pressure on NZ to ship him to Cuba. We've been playing pretty fast and loose with the whole "you're with us or against us" thing lately.
I should also note that I don't agree with this policy. And while there might be some infomation provided by this project which could conceivably aid some "evil-doer", I really doubt that there is going to be a lot disclosed which a motivated graduate of a decent engineering school couldn't figure out on his own. And we've never heard of a terrorist going to college... must less and American college... heavens no!;)
While I agree that the term shouldn't be "watered down", I think you've misunderstood the reach of the law. Pretty much Texas wants you to have an ABET accredited degree (which most of us "engineers" have) and you have to take one of their "exams"
Of course, they don't have an exam for software. So you have to get a waiver based on a combination of experience and "references from existing PE's".
Oh, and it's a $3000 buck fine if I put "engineer" on my business card. Having graduated from one of the top ABET accredited engineering schools in the country, I find this a little annoying.
Wanna start a poll on how long till you get served with a DMCA-inspired charge? (I'm sure a smart lawyer could find "copyright" somewhere in the design)
So here's what I don't get. How much do the Bells, AOL-Time-Warners, and other people "owe" the public for the resources they use?
It seems to me that if I have to look at ugly utility polls, have land all carved up for right-of-ways, and otherwise make the infrastructure these folks depend on possible, they ought to be somewhat accountable to the public.
I'm certainly not saying I'd rather not have heat, light, and cable, but since they require such a tight intergration with the everyday life of the public, what does the public get out of it?
My parents don't have cable, but I can't count the times the linemen from TW have crashed down their driveway, tromped through my mom's garden, and generally made a mess to fix the lines which run along the back edge of the property. TW should be allowed to do this, but shouldn't they be forced to be just as accessable to the public?
and his already done it... so... bfd
on
Verbing Weirds Google
·
· Score: 2, Informative
google (GOO.gul) v. To use an Internet search engine such as google.com to look for information related to a new or potential girlfriend or boyfriend. (Note that Google(TM) is a trademark of Google Technologies Inc.) --Googling pp.
1) If they fail to attempt defend their trademark, they lose the rights to it. This means you could see competitors like "New! Microsoft Google. We Google like no one else!"
2) They aren't asking him to delete all references, just note that the term is a trademark. I don't think that's too much to ask.
From the link: We ask that you help us to protect our brand by deleting the definition of "google" found at wordspy.com or revising it to take into account the trademark status of Google. (emphasis added)
Slashdot Mirror
My father teaches technical writing, so I have developed a love for these things. Sadly, I don't have links, but my favorites are:
"Warning: Weak Batteries May Cause Errotic Response"
(a little sticker from the bottom of a neighborhood child's RC car. My dad has this one mounted in his office)
And my personal favorite:
the graphic of an idiot tipping a soda machine onto his head, complete with lightning bolts indicating pain. And the caption "Warning: Do not rock or tip machine, injury or death may result".
I realize there were a few geniuses killed trying to steal a soda. (One of them was in college, his parents are suing...) I'd like to think Darwin had ridden us of lower primates without the mastery of "Heavy rock fall on head == not good".
Of course, I also have a sticker on one of my boxes which reads: "Notice: All money is removed from this machine daily". I like the sentiment, and since the soda machine in my office it was affixed to is set up to dispense for free, I figured it wasn't really needed.
Computer Science o' course. I actually checked out your web page when you first posted. Your name is vaguely familiar, but I think we were a few years apart. I graduated in '99. :)
I spent some time in college studying Natural Language Processing. Amazing stuff. One of the coolest things about _all_ languages is that the frequencies of "tokens" (generally words) is mathematically predictable. If I remember correctly, the break down follows Zipf's Law, and is something like 1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4 etc...
Obviously the most common words occur much more often, but as the corpus (i.e. set of words you know) grows, you get rapidly dimishing returns. 500 words is a pretty good set of words if they are the most common words in the language. To lineraly increase the likelyhood of the doll knowing a random word the makers would have to add memory at a much greater than linear rate.
And all this so it won't say "shit, fart, damn, fuck". Ahhh science. I feel safer already.
Man they're a ton of us JHU geeks out today... I actually entered in 1999. If I recall correctly, the majority of the reason for the 15 -> 7 jump was that Mike (Sugar Daddy) Bloomberg gave us a metric assload of money. So did Krieger. I'm sure there were other factors, but a quick 100 million dollars buys a lot. :)
We've had them in Austin, Texas for some time now. In fact, I'm watching a show I "time-shifted" earlier right now. I have to admit the technology is cool, but not as rapid as you might think.
:)
For one thing, if it is recording something, expect the remote to be sluggish. Like 5-10 second response times when it's feeling especially pissy.
I've also had a few cases of corruption a long time ago when I was recording two shows at once (yep, you can do that, but two's the limit) Both shows came out garbled and pretty much unwatchable.
Sometimes it locks up. You'll need to unplug it for a bit and let it think about what it did wrong. Oh, and when they don't turn it on until it gets the clock signal, they mean it. That, and sometimes I've lost everything which was stored after a power outage. Which is strange, cuz you would think the hard-drive would be okay with that...
I realize I've listed a bunch of negatives here. I do like the device, and it's worth the few bucks a month.
Now if I can just continue to resist the urge to explore those USB, FireWire, and other interesting bits, things will be grand.
The article, and the discussion which follows fails to address the most important question: what are the "standards for release"?
The are listed as strigent, but no details are given. "No shoes, no shirt, no DNA" might be strigent in someplaces, but not others. What where the conditions they met?
I remember reading an interesting paper a while back about metadata and some security implications. Doesn't the whole idea of metadata-as-file leave the casual user open to problems of unsure content?
For example:
1) Someone makes an image called "Cool Wallpaper.jpg" (cuz the average Joe doesn't use PNG).
2) Joe user downloads it and installs it in some common directory
3) Joe gets busted for child pr0n cuz they attached something nasty in the metadata
This is a pretty bad example, but I can think of all sorts of interesting issues with badly configured common space and executable files. (I realize that if the ACL's are correct this isn't a problem, but Joe Average tends to mess up a lot)
You gotta love anyone who state in their "services" sections:
"Deploy Customer Acquisition Viral Direct Email Program"
Can we string him up now?
Even though good ol' Ollie North is now some sorta of polictial hero in some circles, there was that whole little "Iran-Contra" arms thing. You know, were we were selling them Stinger missles and other fun toys. Of course, we "don't clearly recall" at lot of this under oath.
Here in the US, it's illegal (I think) to do things like use a hidden camera to peek up your customer's skirts because there is a "reasonable expectaction of privacy". So where does that end? If I don't choose to advertise my waistsize, or brand of underwear, does I have a legal right not to have that infomation active "read" off me?
While the shower of sparks and smell of melting plastic in the microwave is fun, I'm much rather swap as many RFID tags as possible with my friends, neighbors, and random objects around the house.
I suspect you could quickly mask your "signature" by carrying a wide swath of tags with you when you go shopping. I'd love to see the database which has a customer walking in wearing a woman's left shoe, hiking boot, 14 boxes of oatmeal, a child's tanktop and four library books.
The article has very little information. The FTC is asking for the power to investigate "secretly". What does this mean? If it means they simply want the ability to setup email "stings" (e.g. email addresses like cutegirl123@hotmail.com instead of spamcop@ftc.gov) then I have no problem. If it means they want to start wiretapping without warrants, that's a different issue.
This does raise an interesting point... what about libel? Does it apply? (Or some analog?) If SCO turns out to be knowingly spreading false information could IBM et. al sue them for lost business? I'd LOVE to see them get bitchslapped. :)
Of course it is stupid to assume all managers are dumb. I have had the priviledge of working with some great ones.
The most telling remark I've ever heard from a senior management-type was "Well, development is a cost-center after all..." Meaning that we lost money that the sales team made. The idea that there would be nothing to sell without development and support seemed to have never crossed this guy's mind.
To me, the problem is that managers in the tech industry seldom have background in the skills they are managing. Their development teams are interchangable parts, and if a task is deemed too ambitious, the solution is simply to swap in a better part. Too often this "better" part is simply a team lead by an engineer without the good sense to stand up and protest.
If the customer asks for a faster car, redesigning the engine might make sense. If the customer asks for a car which get 1000 miles to the gallon and flies, no amount of redesign is gonna help.
I realize I've strayed a bit from the topic of simple defects being covered up, but I think there is a common thread...
In my experience, it is seldom the engineers who make the ethic calls. (Sure, about code reuse, etc...) In the engineers in this article actually did raise objections, but weren't listened to.
The simple truth is that management will decide what type of product is shipped. Great engineers with shitty management still equals trouble,
Okay... here's an idea... some enterprising geek needs to develop a tool which tracks the evolution of kernel patches. (sorta like that cool 3-D fly through mapping posted a while back)
When I write code, it's never perfect the first few iterations. If I were to lift it, it would probably have a much lower defect rate.
So, here's the idea: by graphing the changes in the source code as it evolves, we could narrow down where a potential violation could be. It would likely be in a section of code which was checked in in bulk, and has required little tweaking since.
Now of course if the original developer did a lot of testing before submitting the first patch, then this therory has problems.
If the code was lifted and then changed, it won't be detected, but then the offense has already been corrected, so as long as you aren't running that particular kernel, you are infringing less. (cuz I suppose you could claim derived works are tainted...)
Damnit. This sort of crap is exactly what we don't need! SCO's not pursuing this case because they expect to win, they're trying to get as much media attention as possible. The more bad press the OSS/Linux/GNU/hacker community gets, the stronger the need to shut SCO up becomes. They want to be bought out. Demostrating to the world that there are "evil hackers" out there with little respect for corporations and the law just adds fuel to a fire.
The drama the DDoS kiddies serves as a nice distraction that SCO has no case!
Umm... we don't seem to much care were people happen to live these days. A lot of the people the US are detaining didn't get picked up in the US. I suspect that is Mr. Ashcroft wanted to declare this guy a "terrorist" we'd have no putting pressure on NZ to ship him to Cuba. We've been playing pretty fast and loose with the whole "you're with us or against us" thing lately.
;)
I should also note that I don't agree with this policy. And while there might be some infomation provided by this project which could conceivably aid some "evil-doer", I really doubt that there is going to be a lot disclosed which a motivated graduate of a decent engineering school couldn't figure out on his own. And we've never heard of a terrorist going to college... must less and American college... heavens no!
Seriously...technical challenge aside,this guy has got to be stupid if he doesn't think the fed's are gonna want to talk to him.
I mean, model rockets can practially land you in jail...
While I agree that the term shouldn't be "watered down", I think you've misunderstood the reach of the law. Pretty much Texas wants you to have an ABET accredited degree (which most of us "engineers" have) and you have to take one of their "exams"
Of course, they don't have an exam for software. So you have to get a waiver based on a combination of experience and "references from existing PE's".
So, pretty much, it's a boy's club.
The exam schedule
Oh, and it's a $3000 buck fine if I put "engineer" on my business card. Having graduated from one of the top ABET accredited engineering schools in the country, I find this a little annoying.
Wanna start a poll on how long till you get served with a DMCA-inspired charge? (I'm sure a smart lawyer could find "copyright" somewhere in the design)
So here's what I don't get. How much do the Bells, AOL-Time-Warners, and other people "owe" the public for the resources they use?
It seems to me that if I have to look at ugly utility polls, have land all carved up for right-of-ways, and otherwise make the infrastructure these folks depend on possible, they ought to be somewhat accountable to the public.
I'm certainly not saying I'd rather not have heat, light, and cable, but since they require such a tight intergration with the everyday life of the public, what does the public get out of it?
My parents don't have cable, but I can't count the times the linemen from TW have crashed down their driveway, tromped through my mom's garden, and generally made a mess to fix the lines which run along the back edge of the property. TW should be allowed to do this, but shouldn't they be forced to be just as accessable to the public?
google
(GOO.gul) v. To use an Internet search engine such as google.com to look for information related to a new or potential girlfriend or boyfriend. (Note that Google(TM) is a trademark of Google Technologies Inc.)
--Googling pp.
IANAL, but...
1) If they fail to attempt defend their trademark, they lose the rights to it. This means you could see competitors like "New! Microsoft Google. We Google like no one else!"
2) They aren't asking him to delete all references, just note that the term is a trademark. I don't think that's too much to ask.
From the link: We ask that you help us to protect our brand by deleting the definition of "google" found at wordspy.com or revising it to take into account the trademark status of Google. (emphasis added)
No, I would say scary after. If it were encrypted, if would be much harder to do.
...
I suppose you could claim "spoofed ip"