One user in 10,000 probably writes vb code to manipulate office documents.
You're wrong about that. Ever used Outlook to automagically arrange a meeting? It does that by sending VBA macros with the notification messages so that if the recipients click "I Accept" (or whatever the button label is), their calendar is automatically updated and a confirmation message is sent with more VBA code to update your calendar to show that they're coming.
This is actually a Neat Idea, BUT the implementation is lousy. You can argue it should be hard-coded, but that restricts organizations' capacity to customize their setup. Instead, the problem is simply that the security model hasn't been thought through. There's no reason why, if you're using Outlook to automagically schedule meetings, you should allow messages from outside your internal network to automatically run their attached VBA code. And why should any mail message you receive have the ability to zap your files? It's also quite difficult to centrally administer the configuration to make sure some luser doesn't fat-finger his/her own config and open up a gaping hole in your security. This is what prevents this Neat Idea from becoming a Good Thing.
That, and the fact that you have to have an all-Outlook shop for the whole thing to work.
...if they were there, they should still be there and thriving and easily found, even in the Martian extremes.
A nice argument, with only one tiny flaw: all life found to date or theorized about requires liquid water, at least for a reaction medium if nothing else, and there isn't any liquid water on the Martian surface.
On Telstra's side is a lot of money and for some users the fact that outage didn't "cost" them much.
"Loss" is an interesting question in this case. If some 31337 h4x0r uses up my download quota (which I've paid for), that would count as loss. If I have to do a security audit, or take other corrective measures to counter the risks that sensitive information should now be considered to be in the public domain, then the cost of those measures would count as loss as well. But I imagine their exclusion clauses would exempt them from common law liability (Telstra would be stupid if they didn't do that), so the question is moot.
So what are you saying? That we entrust our money into the banks' safekeeping, but they have no legal responsibility whatsoever to keep it safe? That's ridiculous (IMHO). Banks aren't liable for bank robberies because they take reasonable care to ensure that your money's safe. That doesn't mean it's totally safe, but they've done everything reasonable to keep it safe.
There is no law of criminal negligence with regard to security AFAIK. But if you lose something or are harmed as a result of a security breach (and that could include the loss of private/personal information), you could pursue them under the civil law of negligence, I would imagine.
If ST:TOS ships are any indication, Federation ships of that era should be pretty awkward looking (not that it matters in space).
I was expecting this ship to be a Daedalus-class vessel (same basic configuration as the Constitution class, only with a spherical primary hull and totally cylindrical secondary hull), since they were the mainstay of Earth's fleet around the birth of the Federation. The fact of an Earth ship being subconded into Starfleet until the Federation got its own construction efforts underway would also explain why this ship wouldn't have an NCC registry.
The romulan war hasn't happened yet in this timeline, according to an article i read.
2156: First Romulan war
2161: Formation of the Federation.
Assuming that the new Enterprise is a Federation ship, as opposed to just an Earth ship predating the Federation, what you've said doesn't make sense. Unless you're confusing the first Romulan war with the second.
Fair enough, but unfortunately I don't see this bill getting knocked back, so our only hope lies with an innocent defendant willing to take the matter to appeal. Then you have all the usual problems with appeals against findings of fact.
So I guess we're in more trouble than I originally thought.:(
As an example of succesfully proving an "intent" circumstantially where there was none in fact, take a look at my ongoing case.
I agree that intent is a difficult area, especially in fields so poorly understood by the legal system as IT is, but as I put to werdna, possession may be treated differenly to action.
Your case is an example of what happens when the law fails, but I'm not going to argue about the merits of the American legal system, since my knowledge of it is very poor. I can only hope that when a case is brought against an innocent party under this new law that Australian courts will set an appropriate precedent. I still have enough faith in my legal system to think that they will.
However, Natasha Stott Despoja (who, interestingly, seems to be as despised by the hard left as she is by the right) did submit a fairly insightful dissenting opinion in response to the net censorship bill.
Yes, but that was rather offset by the fact that she supported the recent amendments to the Copyright Act. Wouldn't have anything to do with her having lots of friends in the media and publishing, oh no...
To my mind, Labor's Kate Lundy is probably the best-informed federal politician when it comes to tech issues (her Second Reading speech for the Digital Agenda Bill was the most insightful, and included references to Free p2p projects like Gnutella), but she's encumbered by a party machine that still hasn't woken up yet.
In theory, a state of mind must be proved just as the factual elements, beyond a reasonable doubt. In practice, a jury is instructed by the judge that they may infer intent from any of the circumstances in which the crime was committed.
True, but surely that's dependent on the nature of the offence. With crimes such as assault, break and enter, etc, it would be relatively easy to infer intent from the circumstances, but possession is a different matter. Mere possession of a kitchen knife is not sufficient to say you intended to commit an offence, but wielding it in a threatening manner would be. Of course, there are enough offences with respect to going armed, carrying a concealed weapon, etc, to give me pause.
I am but a first-year law student, and my knowledge of criminal law is very poor, so I will bow to you on this.
Okay, from my reading of the Bill (PDF), it seems that the new offence is possession with intent (Schedule 1 lists the relevant amendments to the Criminal Code, you're looking for Part 10.7, Division 478.3). Means they have to prove you were going to commit a crime with the tool. It's a bit hard to prove that a sys admin who uses a particular tool for legit purposes was going to commit a crime.
As a matter of fact, given the legitimate usefulness of most 'cracker' tools, it seems that it would be quite difficult to prove that anyone was going to commit a crime unless you had a smoking-gun e-mail or other clear evidence of intent.
.NET is bigger than simply a "write-once-run-anywhere" virtual machine..NET is the framework that will get all these run-anywhere apps talking to one another using very standard interfaces based on a set of standard interaction models (HailStorm). At least, that's my take after trying to wade my way through all the MS marketspeak.
Remember all the noise about document-centric apps back in the early '90s when Win 3.1 was still king? How the Holy Grail was to have different apps working together seamlessly through standard technologies like OLE so that the only thing that mattered was the document, not the app?.NET is a network version of that, only much, much bigger, and geared towards transactions rather than documents.
C#, the CLI, etc, are simply the technologies.NET will be founded upon.
No, they know it because they've made a point of remembering stuff about you in order to enhance their business in the future.
Maybe, but it's much more personal, and you have the opportunity to judge whether the waiter/host likes you or is just remembering YAC (Yet Another Customer) based on body language and other non-verbal cues. Chances are you won't go back to a restaurant where the staff seemed disinterested, even if they had managed to remember that it was your cat's birthday that day.
Plus, I think (and this is pure speculation) that people think that others will act in a more moral and ethical manner in a face-to-face situation than if one was just data on screen. Irrational, but it does matter, IMO.
Well, there is the issue of all that wasted bandwidth that could have been used for much more useful things, such as downloading and trying different distros/packages...
Seriously, very few people here are for banning porn, or even think that it's necessarily immoral. It's just that we thought the Interent would be used to achieve, well, loftier goals, like the creation of a global society based on the exchange of ideas and knowledge. The fact that it's primary role is that of a giant porn server is a bit of a let-down, so to speak.
I could be wrong, but who's asking for this? What major need is Microsoft expecting to solve with.NET? Microsoft with their monopoly is able to change the rules of successful product development -- instead of developing something that solves people's problems, they spend billions developing things to entrench their monopoly but no one complains about.
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree with you on this one. The Web as it stands is a lousy technology with which to manage transaction-based activities. As an example, let's say you want to buy something online without using a credit card. You need to get the price from the vendor, contact your bank, authorize a funds transfer, then notify the vendor that the transfer has been completed or is waiting for their confirmation. Now, try to come up with a "1-click" solution that will do all this using the today's Web as its technological basis. Not possible.
The Web as it stands simply can't do stuff like this. It was essentially designed for information retrieval, not complex multi-stage transactions. As people try to use it for more and more of their daily business, they will come to realize this, and that's when they'll want something like.NET to provide the transaction services they need.
So yes, I think there is a need for the kind of services that.NET provides, and I therefore think that it's important for the OS/Free software communities to come up with a port or an alternative.
Yes, it will be possible to do an OSS port of.NET. You simply can't create something as big and as ubiquitous as that and keep details of the protocols, et al that it uses under wraps. AFAIK, Microsoft has no intention of doing that.
What they do intend doing is whacking as much IP protection on it as possible, so that they can control the future development of the transaction models (such as HailStorm) and thereby control a large amount of the transaction-based activity on the 'net (most e-commerce, if they're successful). It simply won't be legal to create an OS/Free port of.NET without MS's say-so, and by the way they're behaving, they ain't gonna say so.
Remember, profit isn't as important to MS as control is.
Well, if they had accepted my submission of this earlier today (see below), where I pointed this out in my write-up, this wouldn't be such a problem. I just guess the/. editorial staff aren't that interested in accuracy in reporting. Or maybe I've just made my way onto the submissions killfile somehow. Who knows?
2001-07-02 01:59:21 Australian Lawyer Patents Wheel (articles,patents) (rejected)
This is how the Unix labs at the University of Queensland's CS school were setup until the end of last year (they now use "true" hardware-basd xterms AFAIK). The difference was that our xterms were truly dumb; they only ran the X server, everything else ran on a single dual-SPARC box (I think) and piped its output over the network to the relevant terminal.
Worked really well, unless you tried using it the day before a concurrent/communicating processes assignment was due...
No, the whole point of putting the spaceport there is that it's so close to the equator, and therefore affords the greatest impetus to spacecraft being launched. I think it's because the greater distance from the fulcrum point (the Earth's axis) results in a higher linear velocity, although I can't be sure about that.
The Earth rotates in an Easterly direction (Sun rises in the East, sets in the West), so the best launch direction is to the East. So we just might still get junk falling on us from failed launches:(.
As a community, we really need to make up our minds; how come we want music to have to be able to be distributed free once the artist has been paid for his work, but we don't want the New York Times to put it's entire back issue archive into digital form?
I don't think we do. It's just nice to see large media and publishing copmanies get a taste of their own medicine, and it's also pretty embarrassing for them not to be practising what they preach.
Who knows? Maybe they'll get a clue and start lobbying the elected representatives they've got on retainer to make more enlightened IP legislation. (Yeah right, dream on. They'll probably just do their usual trick of negotiating exemptions for themselves while keeping the legal stick handy for the rest of us.)
The bit about Netscape taking down Windows... Once again I'd wager the coders did something bad with privileged code.
The real reason is that memory protection is handled incompetently under Win9x. IIRC, the upper 2 GB of every process's address space on any Win32 box maps to kernerl memory. Under WinNT, a process trying to access this region will segfault. Under Win9x, this region is totally open to userland processes.
Again, IIRC. I'm not a professional Windows developer.
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One user in 10,000 probably writes vb code to manipulate office documents.
You're wrong about that. Ever used Outlook to automagically arrange a meeting? It does that by sending VBA macros with the notification messages so that if the recipients click "I Accept" (or whatever the button label is), their calendar is automatically updated and a confirmation message is sent with more VBA code to update your calendar to show that they're coming.
This is actually a Neat Idea, BUT the implementation is lousy. You can argue it should be hard-coded, but that restricts organizations' capacity to customize their setup. Instead, the problem is simply that the security model hasn't been thought through. There's no reason why, if you're using Outlook to automagically schedule meetings, you should allow messages from outside your internal network to automatically run their attached VBA code. And why should any mail message you receive have the ability to zap your files? It's also quite difficult to centrally administer the configuration to make sure some luser doesn't fat-finger his/her own config and open up a gaping hole in your security. This is what prevents this Neat Idea from becoming a Good Thing.
That, and the fact that you have to have an all-Outlook shop for the whole thing to work.
A nice argument, with only one tiny flaw: all life found to date or theorized about requires liquid water, at least for a reaction medium if nothing else, and there isn't any liquid water on the Martian surface.
Interstellar navigation? Interplanetary, surely.
On Telstra's side is a lot of money and for some users the fact that outage didn't "cost" them much.
"Loss" is an interesting question in this case. If some 31337 h4x0r uses up my download quota (which I've paid for), that would count as loss. If I have to do a security audit, or take other corrective measures to counter the risks that sensitive information should now be considered to be in the public domain, then the cost of those measures would count as loss as well. But I imagine their exclusion clauses would exempt them from common law liability (Telstra would be stupid if they didn't do that), so the question is moot.
So what are you saying? That we entrust our money into the banks' safekeeping, but they have no legal responsibility whatsoever to keep it safe? That's ridiculous (IMHO). Banks aren't liable for bank robberies because they take reasonable care to ensure that your money's safe. That doesn't mean it's totally safe, but they've done everything reasonable to keep it safe.
There is no law of criminal negligence with regard to security AFAIK. But if you lose something or are harmed as a result of a security breach (and that could include the loss of private/personal information), you could pursue them under the civil law of negligence, I would imagine.
If ST:TOS ships are any indication, Federation ships of that era should be pretty awkward looking (not that it matters in space).
I was expecting this ship to be a Daedalus-class vessel (same basic configuration as the Constitution class, only with a spherical primary hull and totally cylindrical secondary hull), since they were the mainstay of Earth's fleet around the birth of the Federation. The fact of an Earth ship being subconded into Starfleet until the Federation got its own construction efforts underway would also explain why this ship wouldn't have an NCC registry.
The romulan war hasn't happened yet in this timeline, according to an article i read.
2156: First Romulan war
2161: Formation of the Federation.
Assuming that the new Enterprise is a Federation ship, as opposed to just an Earth ship predating the Federation, what you've said doesn't make sense. Unless you're confusing the first Romulan war with the second.
Fair enough, but unfortunately I don't see this bill getting knocked back, so our only hope lies with an innocent defendant willing to take the matter to appeal. Then you have all the usual problems with appeals against findings of fact.
So I guess we're in more trouble than I originally thought. :(
As an example of succesfully proving an "intent" circumstantially where there was none in fact, take a look at my ongoing case.
I agree that intent is a difficult area, especially in fields so poorly understood by the legal system as IT is, but as I put to werdna, possession may be treated differenly to action.
Your case is an example of what happens when the law fails, but I'm not going to argue about the merits of the American legal system, since my knowledge of it is very poor. I can only hope that when a case is brought against an innocent party under this new law that Australian courts will set an appropriate precedent. I still have enough faith in my legal system to think that they will.
However, Natasha Stott Despoja (who, interestingly, seems to be as despised by the hard left as she is by the right) did submit a fairly insightful dissenting opinion in response to the net censorship bill.
Yes, but that was rather offset by the fact that she supported the recent amendments to the Copyright Act. Wouldn't have anything to do with her having lots of friends in the media and publishing, oh no...
To my mind, Labor's Kate Lundy is probably the best-informed federal politician when it comes to tech issues (her Second Reading speech for the Digital Agenda Bill was the most insightful, and included references to Free p2p projects like Gnutella), but she's encumbered by a party machine that still hasn't woken up yet.
True, but surely that's dependent on the nature of the offence. With crimes such as assault, break and enter, etc, it would be relatively easy to infer intent from the circumstances, but possession is a different matter. Mere possession of a kitchen knife is not sufficient to say you intended to commit an offence, but wielding it in a threatening manner would be. Of course, there are enough offences with respect to going armed, carrying a concealed weapon, etc, to give me pause.
I am but a first-year law student, and my knowledge of criminal law is very poor, so I will bow to you on this.
Thanks for that. Moderators: please mod up parent.
Okay, from my reading of the Bill (PDF), it seems that the new offence is possession with intent (Schedule 1 lists the relevant amendments to the Criminal Code, you're looking for Part 10.7, Division 478.3). Means they have to prove you were going to commit a crime with the tool. It's a bit hard to prove that a sys admin who uses a particular tool for legit purposes was going to commit a crime.
As a matter of fact, given the legitimate usefulness of most 'cracker' tools, it seems that it would be quite difficult to prove that anyone was going to commit a crime unless you had a smoking-gun e-mail or other clear evidence of intent.
.NET is bigger than simply a "write-once-run-anywhere" virtual machine. .NET is the framework that will get all these run-anywhere apps talking to one another using very standard interfaces based on a set of standard interaction models (HailStorm). At least, that's my take after trying to wade my way through all the MS marketspeak.
Remember all the noise about document-centric apps back in the early '90s when Win 3.1 was still king? How the Holy Grail was to have different apps working together seamlessly through standard technologies like OLE so that the only thing that mattered was the document, not the app? .NET is a network version of that, only much, much bigger, and geared towards transactions rather than documents.
C#, the CLI, etc, are simply the technologies .NET will be founded upon.
No, they know it because they've made a point of remembering stuff about you in order to enhance their business in the future.
Maybe, but it's much more personal, and you have the opportunity to judge whether the waiter/host likes you or is just remembering YAC (Yet Another Customer) based on body language and other non-verbal cues. Chances are you won't go back to a restaurant where the staff seemed disinterested, even if they had managed to remember that it was your cat's birthday that day.
Plus, I think (and this is pure speculation) that people think that others will act in a more moral and ethical manner in a face-to-face situation than if one was just data on screen. Irrational, but it does matter, IMO.
There is nothing wrong with porn.
Well, there is the issue of all that wasted bandwidth that could have been used for much more useful things, such as downloading and trying different distros/packages...
Seriously, very few people here are for banning porn, or even think that it's necessarily immoral. It's just that we thought the Interent would be used to achieve, well, loftier goals, like the creation of a global society based on the exchange of ideas and knowledge. The fact that it's primary role is that of a giant porn server is a bit of a let-down, so to speak.
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree with you on this one. The Web as it stands is a lousy technology with which to manage transaction-based activities. As an example, let's say you want to buy something online without using a credit card. You need to get the price from the vendor, contact your bank, authorize a funds transfer, then notify the vendor that the transfer has been completed or is waiting for their confirmation. Now, try to come up with a "1-click" solution that will do all this using the today's Web as its technological basis. Not possible.
The Web as it stands simply can't do stuff like this. It was essentially designed for information retrieval, not complex multi-stage transactions. As people try to use it for more and more of their daily business, they will come to realize this, and that's when they'll want something like .NET to provide the transaction services they need.
So yes, I think there is a need for the kind of services that .NET provides, and I therefore think that it's important for the OS/Free software communities to come up with a port or an alternative.
Yes, it will be possible to do an OSS port of .NET. You simply can't create something as big and as ubiquitous as that and keep details of the protocols, et al that it uses under wraps. AFAIK, Microsoft has no intention of doing that.
What they do intend doing is whacking as much IP protection on it as possible, so that they can control the future development of the transaction models (such as HailStorm) and thereby control a large amount of the transaction-based activity on the 'net (most e-commerce, if they're successful). It simply won't be legal to create an OS/Free port of .NET without MS's say-so, and by the way they're behaving, they ain't gonna say so.
Remember, profit isn't as important to MS as control is.
Well, if they had accepted my submission of this earlier today (see below), where I pointed this out in my write-up, this wouldn't be such a problem. I just guess the /. editorial staff aren't that interested in accuracy in reporting. Or maybe I've just made my way onto the submissions killfile somehow. Who knows?
2001-07-02 01:59:21 Australian Lawyer Patents Wheel (articles,patents) (rejected)
This is how the Unix labs at the University of Queensland's CS school were setup until the end of last year (they now use "true" hardware-basd xterms AFAIK). The difference was that our xterms were truly dumb; they only ran the X server, everything else ran on a single dual-SPARC box (I think) and piped its output over the network to the relevant terminal.
Worked really well, unless you tried using it the day before a concurrent/communicating processes assignment was due...
No, the whole point of putting the spaceport there is that it's so close to the equator, and therefore affords the greatest impetus to spacecraft being launched. I think it's because the greater distance from the fulcrum point (the Earth's axis) results in a higher linear velocity, although I can't be sure about that.
The Earth rotates in an Easterly direction (Sun rises in the East, sets in the West), so the best launch direction is to the East. So we just might still get junk falling on us from failed launches :(.
I don't think we do. It's just nice to see large media and publishing copmanies get a taste of their own medicine, and it's also pretty embarrassing for them not to be practising what they preach.
Who knows? Maybe they'll get a clue and start lobbying the elected representatives they've got on retainer to make more enlightened IP legislation. (Yeah right, dream on. They'll probably just do their usual trick of negotiating exemptions for themselves while keeping the legal stick handy for the rest of us.)
The bit about Netscape taking down Windows... Once again I'd wager the coders did something bad with privileged code.
The real reason is that memory protection is handled incompetently under Win9x. IIRC, the upper 2 GB of every process's address space on any Win32 box maps to kernerl memory. Under WinNT, a process trying to access this region will segfault. Under Win9x, this region is totally open to userland processes.
Again, IIRC. I'm not a professional Windows developer.