From the article: He said the San Jose, Calif.-based company regularly pulls postings from its site upon receiving complaints from copyright or trademark holders of licensed music, software, movies, clothing and other goods.
In other words, ebay is relatively pro-active about stopping improper auctions. However, there are limits to how much policing they can do. Given the volume ebay does in legitimate auctions, I doubt they would be unhappy if we could wave a magic wand and make all the illegitimate ones disappear. Napster, on the other hand, intended from the beginning to be a service for copyright infringement. To quote from the injunction awhile back:
The evidence shows that, in fact, promoting the new artist was not the chief strategy in Napster's business plan. Defendant promoted the availability of songs by major stars as, and I quote from some of their papers, "opposed to having to go through page after page of unknown artists."
In short, even though I disagree with the reasoning of the ruling (which tends to minimize the distinction between ebay and Napster), I feel it was still a correct outcome because of the intent behind the services in question.
If one believes that censorship is a Bad Thing(tm), then attacking the efficacy of censorware is essentially a non-sequitor.
Well, in this case, attacking the efficacy of censorware has caused at least one congressional candidate to rethink his policy of demanding censorware in schools and libraries. Peacefire's policy of continually revealing the short-comings of censorware, especially with regard to over-censhorship, is exactly what's needed to argue against censorware products. Consider the following hypothetical scenario:
Your local library is considering installing censorware on their computers. Do you:
Argue that a recent report showed that the most popular censorware products improperly censored the web sites over two dozen political candidates.
Argue that censorware's like bad and stuff. Freedom of speech! Damn the man! Power to the people!
My question is why in the world did they own OPERATER?
Because unlike domain names, you can have 1-800-673-7283 and not realize anything's up until you're getting slashdotted by poor spellers. Besides, MCI probably has hundreds or thousands of other 800 numbers with no particular significance.
When AT&T introduced their 1-800-OPERATOR collect-call system, MCI diverted a noticeable fraction of the income stream by activating a similar service on 1-800-OPERATER (a number they conveniently already owned).
As the quote indicates, MCI already owned the number in question when illiterate Americans started calling it left and right in an effort to place collect calls. MCI just profited by giving them what they wanted. (Although admittedly, one could argue that the most ethical course MCI could've taken would have been to give the number to AT&T.)
Instead, what if a good hacker decided to drop a few dozen lines of code in amongst the 10s of millions or so lines in Windows to make it easier for *them* to hack. Why hunt down security holes, when you can code them into the product yourself.
First the obligatory joke: Isn't that what MS does anyway?
But, in all seriousness, MS does have internal protections in place. Consider this: When I interned there last summer, there were something on the order of 500 interns there. These were virtually all normal college-aged CS geeks -- and not all of them were die-hard Microsoft drones, either. With that many people, in that demographic, for that short of a time period, I'd be willing to bet that if all the Windows source code was open for the viewing, something would've happened already. On the other hand, what was generally accessible on the corporate network were the websites for each of the various projects -- the sort of stuff that'd be best kept secret from a business standpoint, but would have zero interest to the Slashdot crowd.
And as a random aside, even the developer kit for the Barney Actimates doll that MS produces is kept secured from general access, for reasons that should be fairly obvious. (Creating a humorous yet vulgar Barney dialog is left as an exercise to the reader.)
As near as I can tell, to get the QM2000 board they're talking about, you need to buy Pangolin's LD2000 system (which includes the board and some software). The bargain-basement version (designed for just doing playback of existing stuff and little else) is $2000, which puts it right on par with the PS2's *grin*. I think that's high enough that I can resist the temptation, at least until they get Star Wars working.
The only reason that this might NOW become an exploit is that the feeble minded script kiddies are reading it here on/.
For dubious values of exploit. The impression I gathered is that the processor has to be re-patched by the BIOS every time the system starts up. Besides, there're already viruses out that trash your BIOS.
The only thing of significance that I can think of is that if the microcode path is actually stored in the CMOS (hard to tell from the Byte article -- they keep referring to it as "BIOS Data"), then on a system that protects the BIOS from being casually reflashed (via a jumper or what-not) malicious code could hypothetically write data into the CMOS that would prevent the CPU from being able to run after it gets patched.
But, if someone can write to the CMOS, they can do plenty of other nasty things, anyway. And the worst case scenario would involves physically resetting the CMOS, which could just as easily be necessary if a virus were to throw a boot password in there. So the short, medium, and long of the situation is that, from a security standpoint, I believe it's a non-issue.
Re:The "Truth" about who Microsoft really is
on
Microsoft Cracked
·
· Score: 2
Also, a press release from one of the groups doing it.
Which brings up an interesting circumvention technique. If you were to hypothetically assume that a pool of open source developers were all able to get their hands on the Windows source, could the sneak around the law by releasing some sort of diff (probably something other than 'diff -u', given that that tends to include original code)? Maybe an XOR scheme with some heavy versioning magic? It obviously wouldn't stop the entire source distribution or the resulting build from being illegal, but it might be just enough of a gray area to get a public collaborative effort going. windows.sourceforge.net, anyone?
So, go ahead, express your negative opinion of art - I'm not grousing about people who do that. I just won't take you seriously if you say "Anyone/I can do that" without backing it up.
In that case, I feel I definitely over-reacted to your post. However, I still feel that there's some merit to my arguments. While the odds are certainly against me literally producing a similar artwork, and while I due appreciate that the artist was expanding on a traditional art style, I still feel that I haven't gained anything significant from having viewed that art. The way I see it, the phrase "I could've done that", while not necessarily literally true, accurately sums up the poster's intent: Namely that creating one thousand "doodles" that (to most people) appear to be half-assed isn't a major accomplishment.
So I suppose that there is a degree of vindication by calling the average Slashdot reader over the issue of the ease of producing something better. However, that still doesn't convince us that it's any better than, say, a modern artist who paints the top half of the canvas one color and the bottom half another color, and gets the result displayed in a museum. It seems that geeks, of all people, are much more willing to call "Bullshit!" when the situation dictates it.
Those of you offended at this guy's "bad art", go out and create something better, and show this guy up. Otherwise, you're all talk.
Err, "creation" and "evaluation" are two completely separate skills. There's no drawing test to get into a museum, movies are watched by people other than actors, and so forth.
If, in order to express my negative opinion about a piece of art, I must be capable of creating something better, then I will happily admit that that work of art is the greatest ever created, and thus none of us are worthy to judge it. Therefore, it should be safely locked away in an underground vault, away from our plebeian senses.
Similarly, I will have to excuse myself from voting in this upcoming election, as I'm not nearly as polished a public speaker as any of the candidates, even when you factor in Bush's occasional stutter.
And as an aside, if someone wishes to supply me with a Palm Vx, I'll be more than happy to try to make a better piece of art.
Yes, but that's the entire appeal of the piece. Through a subtle juxtaposition of form and style, it manages to create a holistic embodiment of the tedium of modern existence, as expressed through our neo-techno-centric culture.
Furthermore, it manages to utilize shading and light, in order to express a sort of fuzzy gray, that is neither black nor white. This shows the artist's intention of trying to break from the traditional, clear-cut boundries of society, instead opting for a nebulous ambiguity.
Also, the work speaks to the viewer's logical side, for it implicitly poses the conundrum, "If this is not art, then it must be pornography. Yet I feel no sexual thrill from the work. Therefore, it must be art."
Finally, the doodlish nature embodies man's inner-child. Are we not all children at heart, especially when we get a new, expensive, electronic toy?
(I'm generally reluctant to post humerous material on serious stories. But I can't see how anyone in their right mind can take this work seriously.)
...making the job of the people in the unmarked van across the street just that much easier.
Seriously, though, do they have any type of encryption/authentication? Not to be a paranoid freak or anything, but the thought of broadcasting everything I type (and possibly even accepting "typing" broadcast from elsewhere) makes me cringe.
First, a disclaimer on where I'm coming from on this:
I run Redhat both at work and at home and am quite happy with it. I have no problems with Redhat as a company, and none of the problems in the distributions I've used have been severe enough to convince me to switch.
That being said, I actually think a university standardizing on Redhat is a bad idea. A big part of the whole college experience involves diversity and new things. At my school, I got to play around with Sun and SGI boxen, running Solaris and IRIX respectively. J. Random Student can (and, if he really gets into Unix, almost certainly will) install Linux or one of the BSDs on his own PC. Things like Solaris or IRIX aren't nearly as easy to come by. Furthermore, to truely appreciate the depth of Unix and the various issues related to writing portable software, it helps to have experience to more than just Linux.
Actually, I count three actions: Moving the mouse pointer to the button, pushing the mouse button down, releasing the mouse button. One could argue that "action" could be perpetually redefined to treat whatever the user just did as atomic. It's not inconceivable to broaden "action" to refer to the more generalized task of "buying an item on a web site (despite multiple clicks; just how driving a car could be construed as a single action despite continuous modifications of the car's input devices over a span of several minutes)" or as narrow as "applying X newtons of force to the mouse for N seconds along vector V".
Accolade has done this with a few of their titles here. Included is Star Control 2 (one of the best games every made, in my [and many other people's] opinion).
I would've posted something sooner, but today, of all days, I was too distracted to religiously check Slashdot for updates.
...and wouldn't you know it? I clicked on the link for this story, only to have Slashdot hang on me. And then while the page was actually loading, I got a phone call from a salesman at AT&T, so I had to refrain from looking at the winners until I could get him off the phone -- I figured if I suddenly started screaming, "Yes! Holy shit! Yes!" while still on the phone, I might wind up having to explain to my boss why we had a new 10 year long distance contract. And then after seeing it, I was just too excited to be coherent enough to actually sit down and type something. So I had to get up and wander around a bit to burn off the excess manic energy. The one small problem with that course of events is that, when you're at work, the best excuse to get up and walk around is to get a cup of coffee. Which means I'm now even more jittery and manic and starting to ramble on and on incoherently. Anyways... I just wanted to thank everyone at Slashdot, not just for running the contest and picking my entry, but for everything else they do, as well. My thanks also go out to the moderators, without whom, my entry wouldn't have been in the running in the first place. But most of all, I'd like to thank Natalie Portman, in a shameless effort to get this post modded up, because despite being able to cook up a bogus patent application for karma whoring and trolling, I still haven't been able to actually put those techniques into practice enough to get the "post at +2" bonus.
However, there's one key twist that makes stock market investments "legitimate": Dividends. Now, in the case of someone like Microsoft, the company performance has been so great monetarily that has been unnecessary to issue dividends. However, the stock value is predicated upon the future promise that dividends will be issued at some point. If Microsoft were to officially declare the stock dividends would absolutely, positively never be issued (which I'm not sure they can legally do -- we're talking hypotheticals here), their stock would become worthless.
Method for soliciting recognition via an exploitation of the memetic tendencies of the geek archetype.
Abstract
A method for soliciting peer recognition (both positive and negative), in the form of commentary (both explicit text-based replies and implicit via ratings of those replies). These goals are accomplished through a number of techniques, including: (1) Exploiting the Linux evangelism meme, (2) Exploiting the Linux distribution evangelism memes, (3) Exploiting the Microsoft bashing meme, (4) Exploiting the gratuitous mention of "Natalie Portman" meme, (5) Exploiting the humorous haiku meme, (6) Exploiting the Napster controversy meme, (7) Exploiting the criticism of JonKatz meme, (8) Exploiting the "I know you're going to mod me down for this" meme, (9) Exploiting the Beowulf meme, (10) Exploiting the redundant story meme, (11) Exploiting the redundant story meme, (12) Exploiting the "CmdrTaco can't spell" meme, (13) Exploiting the "Slashdot Cruiser" meme.
Claims
1) All mindless Linux evangelism and trolling, done solely for the purpose of garnering replies and attention, is covered by this patent. This claim should also be construed to include any and all benchmark data.
2) Any mention of a Linux distribution, by someone who hasn't personally installed and run at least three different distributions, is likewise covered under this patent. Any addition, any mention of Redhat releases that end in ".0" are additionally covered by this claim.
3) Virtually any mention of Microsoft is covered by the claim.
4) All references to "Natalie Portman" that don't revolve around a discussion of her serious work as an actress are covered by this claim. "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace" does not count as a serious work and is thus included in the claim.
5) Any message with seventeen syllables is covered by this claim.
6) Virtually any mention of Napster is covered by this claim. This includes references to Metallica, Lars, and Napster-like programs, such as Gnutella and Mojo Nation.
7) While any mentions of JonKatz would logically be covered by the scope of this claim, the claimant is hearby waiving all claims in this area, so that people may still freely bitch about JonKatz.
8) Given the number of highly modded posts with the phrase "I know I'm going to get modded down for this, but...", the claim is made that this is the one guaranteed way in which to shamelessly and indirectly beg for positive moderation. This claim is intended to cover both the practice as well as the subsequent moderation, thus moderators who do not license this patent may only mod down posts containing this phrase.
9) Any and all mentions of building a Beowulf cluster out of Linux boxes, fish, belly-button lint, or any other conceivable item shall be covered by this claim, with the exception of actual Beowulf cluster discussions. The concept of building a Beowulf cluster out of Natalie Portmans shall be covered by both this claim and claim #4, and will also be referred to any relevant medical ethics boards over the issue of human cloning.
10) Any complaints that a story got posted multiple times, while possible accurate, shall still be covered by this claim.
11) Any complaints that a story got posted multiple times, while possible accurate, shall still be covered by this claim.
12) Any criticisms of CmdrTaco's spelling and/or grammar shall be covered by this claim, unless such criticisms are also accompanied by an offer by the critic to serve as an unpaid proofreader for all Slashdot postings.
13) Any mention of the Slashdot Cruiser, with the exception of news related to the contest itself, shall be considered to fall under this claim. The concept of building a Beowulf cluster out of Slashdot Cruisers shall be covered by both this claim and claim #4.
...so, now that I've managed to patent most of trolling and karma whoring, the quality of discussion on Slashdot should improve exponentially.
The version of the story I heard was that 1-800-OPERATER was already assigned to MCI as an internal number. It was only after they started receiving idiot callers left and right on the line that they switched it over to their own version of the service. However, I do fully admit to not doing any research into how much of the story is true and how much is urban legend. But it's worth noting that, unlike domain-name typos, it's quite plausibly for similar phone numbers to already be in use -- you're mapping to a much smaller domain where it's rather easy to get the telephone equivilant of salshdot.org, especially when you consider the fact that the entire 800-number space has already been filled up.
If we can only be held liable for securely signed digital statements, you've suddenly added a much more substantial amount of freedom to online communications that doesn't have a real-world counter-part. For example, if an anonymous death threat to the president gets tracked back to you in the real world, you're in deep shit. But under your proposed system of only securely signed messages counting, all but the stupidest of criminals would be given carte blanche.
"Hello, TiVo customer service? I'm a slashdot reader who's decided to go off half-cocked and completely cancel my service to prevent you from spying on me and passing my viewing habits on to the FBI's Carnivore system! Free Mitnick! Boycott the RIAA! I am not a kook."
Slashdot Mirror
He said the San Jose, Calif.-based company regularly pulls postings from its site upon receiving complaints from copyright or trademark holders of licensed music, software, movies, clothing and other goods.
In other words, ebay is relatively pro-active about stopping improper auctions. However, there are limits to how much policing they can do. Given the volume ebay does in legitimate auctions, I doubt they would be unhappy if we could wave a magic wand and make all the illegitimate ones disappear. Napster, on the other hand, intended from the beginning to be a service for copyright infringement. To quote from the injunction awhile back:
The evidence shows that, in fact, promoting the new artist was not the chief strategy in Napster's business plan. Defendant promoted the availability of songs by major stars as, and I quote from some of their papers, "opposed to having to go through page after page of unknown artists."
In short, even though I disagree with the reasoning of the ruling (which tends to minimize the distinction between ebay and Napster), I feel it was still a correct outcome because of the intent behind the services in question.
Well, technically, they're correct. ESR's home page *is* about hacking.
Well, in this case, attacking the efficacy of censorware has caused at least one congressional candidate to rethink his policy of demanding censorware in schools and libraries. Peacefire's policy of continually revealing the short-comings of censorware, especially with regard to over-censhorship, is exactly what's needed to argue against censorware products. Consider the following hypothetical scenario:
Your local library is considering installing censorware on their computers. Do you:
Is that really necessary? Wouldn't a normal wash/dry cycle contain enough abuse to disable the RF tag?
Because unlike domain names, you can have 1-800-673-7283 and not realize anything's up until you're getting slashdotted by poor spellers. Besides, MCI probably has hundreds or thousands of other 800 numbers with no particular significance.
When AT&T introduced their 1-800-OPERATOR collect-call system, MCI diverted a noticeable fraction of the income stream by activating a similar service on 1-800-OPERATER (a number they conveniently already owned).
As the quote indicates, MCI already owned the number in question when illiterate Americans started calling it left and right in an effort to place collect calls. MCI just profited by giving them what they wanted. (Although admittedly, one could argue that the most ethical course MCI could've taken would have been to give the number to AT&T.)
Business plan:
1) Start giving away our product
2) Get Slashdotted
3) ???
4) Profit!
First the obligatory joke: Isn't that what MS does anyway?
But, in all seriousness, MS does have internal protections in place. Consider this: When I interned there last summer, there were something on the order of 500 interns there. These were virtually all normal college-aged CS geeks -- and not all of them were die-hard Microsoft drones, either. With that many people, in that demographic, for that short of a time period, I'd be willing to bet that if all the Windows source code was open for the viewing, something would've happened already. On the other hand, what was generally accessible on the corporate network were the websites for each of the various projects -- the sort of stuff that'd be best kept secret from a business standpoint, but would have zero interest to the Slashdot crowd.
And as a random aside, even the developer kit for the Barney Actimates doll that MS produces is kept secured from general access, for reasons that should be fairly obvious. (Creating a humorous yet vulgar Barney dialog is left as an exercise to the reader.)
As near as I can tell, to get the QM2000 board they're talking about, you need to buy Pangolin's LD2000 system (which includes the board and some software). The bargain-basement version (designed for just doing playback of existing stuff and little else) is $2000, which puts it right on par with the PS2's *grin*. I think that's high enough that I can resist the temptation, at least until they get Star Wars working.
For dubious values of exploit. The impression I gathered is that the processor has to be re-patched by the BIOS every time the system starts up. Besides, there're already viruses out that trash your BIOS.
The only thing of significance that I can think of is that if the microcode path is actually stored in the CMOS (hard to tell from the Byte article -- they keep referring to it as "BIOS Data"), then on a system that protects the BIOS from being casually reflashed (via a jumper or what-not) malicious code could hypothetically write data into the CMOS that would prevent the CPU from being able to run after it gets patched.
But, if someone can write to the CMOS, they can do plenty of other nasty things, anyway. And the worst case scenario would involves physically resetting the CMOS, which could just as easily be necessary if a virus were to throw a boot password in there. So the short, medium, and long of the situation is that, from a security standpoint, I believe it's a non-issue.
Also, a press release from one of the groups doing it.
Which brings up an interesting circumvention technique. If you were to hypothetically assume that a pool of open source developers were all able to get their hands on the Windows source, could the sneak around the law by releasing some sort of diff (probably something other than 'diff -u', given that that tends to include original code)? Maybe an XOR scheme with some heavy versioning magic? It obviously wouldn't stop the entire source distribution or the resulting build from being illegal, but it might be just enough of a gray area to get a public collaborative effort going. windows.sourceforge.net, anyone?
In that case, I feel I definitely over-reacted to your post. However, I still feel that there's some merit to my arguments. While the odds are certainly against me literally producing a similar artwork, and while I due appreciate that the artist was expanding on a traditional art style, I still feel that I haven't gained anything significant from having viewed that art. The way I see it, the phrase "I could've done that", while not necessarily literally true, accurately sums up the poster's intent: Namely that creating one thousand "doodles" that (to most people) appear to be half-assed isn't a major accomplishment.
So I suppose that there is a degree of vindication by calling the average Slashdot reader over the issue of the ease of producing something better. However, that still doesn't convince us that it's any better than, say, a modern artist who paints the top half of the canvas one color and the bottom half another color, and gets the result displayed in a museum. It seems that geeks, of all people, are much more willing to call "Bullshit!" when the situation dictates it.
Err, "creation" and "evaluation" are two completely separate skills. There's no drawing test to get into a museum, movies are watched by people other than actors, and so forth.
If, in order to express my negative opinion about a piece of art, I must be capable of creating something better, then I will happily admit that that work of art is the greatest ever created, and thus none of us are worthy to judge it. Therefore, it should be safely locked away in an underground vault, away from our plebeian senses.
Similarly, I will have to excuse myself from voting in this upcoming election, as I'm not nearly as polished a public speaker as any of the candidates, even when you factor in Bush's occasional stutter.
And as an aside, if someone wishes to supply me with a Palm Vx, I'll be more than happy to try to make a better piece of art.
Furthermore, it manages to utilize shading and light, in order to express a sort of fuzzy gray, that is neither black nor white. This shows the artist's intention of trying to break from the traditional, clear-cut boundries of society, instead opting for a nebulous ambiguity.
Also, the work speaks to the viewer's logical side, for it implicitly poses the conundrum, "If this is not art, then it must be pornography. Yet I feel no sexual thrill from the work. Therefore, it must be art."
Finally, the doodlish nature embodies man's inner-child. Are we not all children at heart, especially when we get a new, expensive, electronic toy?
(I'm generally reluctant to post humerous material on serious stories. But I can't see how anyone in their right mind can take this work seriously.)
Seriously, though, do they have any type of encryption/authentication? Not to be a paranoid freak or anything, but the thought of broadcasting everything I type (and possibly even accepting "typing" broadcast from elsewhere) makes me cringe.
I run Redhat both at work and at home and am quite happy with it. I have no problems with Redhat as a company, and none of the problems in the distributions I've used have been severe enough to convince me to switch.
That being said, I actually think a university standardizing on Redhat is a bad idea. A big part of the whole college experience involves diversity and new things. At my school, I got to play around with Sun and SGI boxen, running Solaris and IRIX respectively. J. Random Student can (and, if he really gets into Unix, almost certainly will) install Linux or one of the BSDs on his own PC. Things like Solaris or IRIX aren't nearly as easy to come by. Furthermore, to truely appreciate the depth of Unix and the various issues related to writing portable software, it helps to have experience to more than just Linux.
Actually, I count three actions: Moving the mouse pointer to the button, pushing the mouse button down, releasing the mouse button. One could argue that "action" could be perpetually redefined to treat whatever the user just did as atomic. It's not inconceivable to broaden "action" to refer to the more generalized task of "buying an item on a web site (despite multiple clicks; just how driving a car could be construed as a single action despite continuous modifications of the car's input devices over a span of several minutes)" or as narrow as "applying X newtons of force to the mouse for N seconds along vector V".
Accolade has done this with a few of their titles here. Included is Star Control 2 (one of the best games every made, in my [and many other people's] opinion).
And then while the page was actually loading, I got a phone call from a salesman at AT&T, so I had to refrain from looking at the winners until I could get him off the phone -- I figured if I suddenly started screaming, "Yes! Holy shit! Yes!" while still on the phone, I might wind up having to explain to my boss why we had a new 10 year long distance contract.
And then after seeing it, I was just too excited to be coherent enough to actually sit down and type something. So I had to get up and wander around a bit to burn off the excess manic energy. The one small problem with that course of events is that, when you're at work, the best excuse to get up and walk around is to get a cup of coffee. Which means I'm now even more jittery and manic and starting to ramble on and on incoherently. Anyways...
I just wanted to thank everyone at Slashdot, not just for running the contest and picking my entry, but for everything else they do, as well.
My thanks also go out to the moderators, without whom, my entry wouldn't have been in the running in the first place.
But most of all, I'd like to thank Natalie Portman, in a shameless effort to get this post modded up, because despite being able to cook up a bogus patent application for karma whoring and trolling, I still haven't been able to actually put those techniques into practice enough to get the "post at +2" bonus.
However, there's one key twist that makes stock market investments "legitimate": Dividends. Now, in the case of someone like Microsoft, the company performance has been so great monetarily that has been unnecessary to issue dividends. However, the stock value is predicated upon the future promise that dividends will be issued at some point. If Microsoft were to officially declare the stock dividends would absolutely, positively never be issued (which I'm not sure they can legally do -- we're talking hypotheticals here), their stock would become worthless.
Abstract
A method for soliciting peer recognition (both positive and negative), in the form of commentary (both explicit text-based replies and implicit via ratings of those replies). These goals are accomplished through a number of techniques, including: (1) Exploiting the Linux evangelism meme, (2) Exploiting the Linux distribution evangelism memes, (3) Exploiting the Microsoft bashing meme, (4) Exploiting the gratuitous mention of "Natalie Portman" meme, (5) Exploiting the humorous haiku meme, (6) Exploiting the Napster controversy meme, (7) Exploiting the criticism of JonKatz meme, (8) Exploiting the "I know you're going to mod me down for this" meme, (9) Exploiting the Beowulf meme, (10) Exploiting the redundant story meme, (11) Exploiting the redundant story meme, (12) Exploiting the "CmdrTaco can't spell" meme, (13) Exploiting the "Slashdot Cruiser" meme.
Claims
1) All mindless Linux evangelism and trolling, done solely for the purpose of garnering replies and attention, is covered by this patent. This claim should also be construed to include any and all benchmark data.
2) Any mention of a Linux distribution, by someone who hasn't personally installed and run at least three different distributions, is likewise covered under this patent. Any addition, any mention of Redhat releases that end in ".0" are additionally covered by this claim.
3) Virtually any mention of Microsoft is covered by the claim.
4) All references to "Natalie Portman" that don't revolve around a discussion of her serious work as an actress are covered by this claim. "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace" does not count as a serious work and is thus included in the claim.
5)
Any message with
seventeen syllables is
covered by this claim.
6) Virtually any mention of Napster is covered by this claim. This includes references to Metallica, Lars, and Napster-like programs, such as Gnutella and Mojo Nation.
7) While any mentions of JonKatz would logically be covered by the scope of this claim, the claimant is hearby waiving all claims in this area, so that people may still freely bitch about JonKatz.
8) Given the number of highly modded posts with the phrase "I know I'm going to get modded down for this, but...", the claim is made that this is the one guaranteed way in which to shamelessly and indirectly beg for positive moderation. This claim is intended to cover both the practice as well as the subsequent moderation, thus moderators who do not license this patent may only mod down posts containing this phrase.
9) Any and all mentions of building a Beowulf cluster out of Linux boxes, fish, belly-button lint, or any other conceivable item shall be covered by this claim, with the exception of actual Beowulf cluster discussions. The concept of building a Beowulf cluster out of Natalie Portmans shall be covered by both this claim and claim #4, and will also be referred to any relevant medical ethics boards over the issue of human cloning.
10) Any complaints that a story got posted multiple times, while possible accurate, shall still be covered by this claim.
11) Any complaints that a story got posted multiple times, while possible accurate, shall still be covered by this claim.
12) Any criticisms of CmdrTaco's spelling and/or grammar shall be covered by this claim, unless such criticisms are also accompanied by an offer by the critic to serve as an unpaid proofreader for all Slashdot postings.
13) Any mention of the Slashdot Cruiser, with the exception of news related to the contest itself, shall be considered to fall under this claim. The concept of building a Beowulf cluster out of Slashdot Cruisers shall be covered by both this claim and claim #4.
The version of the story I heard was that 1-800-OPERATER was already assigned to MCI as an internal number. It was only after they started receiving idiot callers left and right on the line that they switched it over to their own version of the service. However, I do fully admit to not doing any research into how much of the story is true and how much is urban legend. But it's worth noting that, unlike domain-name typos, it's quite plausibly for similar phone numbers to already be in use -- you're mapping to a much smaller domain where it's rather easy to get the telephone equivilant of salshdot.org, especially when you consider the fact that the entire 800-number space has already been filled up.
If we can only be held liable for securely signed digital statements, you've suddenly added a much more substantial amount of freedom to online communications that doesn't have a real-world counter-part. For example, if an anonymous death threat to the president gets tracked back to you in the real world, you're in deep shit. But under your proposed system of only securely signed messages counting, all but the stupidest of criminals would be given carte blanche.
"Hello, TiVo customer service? I'm a slashdot reader who's decided to go off half-cocked and completely cancel my service to prevent you from spying on me and passing my viewing habits on to the FBI's Carnivore system! Free Mitnick! Boycott the RIAA! I am not a kook."