Well, I don't know so much about it, but I thought that just about anything that can show some kind of graphics can use the framebuffer directly, and bypass the heavier stuff in X... It least MPlayer can. Don't know if Qt does...
It's a really bad sign for/. that this thread isn't higher and with more comments... (No, I'm not new here, but I thought/.ers could do better than this).
It does perhaps not count as an exploit, but what about enabling web-bugs?
It is a really, really bad idea to have a mail program that loads images without the user knowing, and it is definately a security flaw, because it allows the sender to track e-mail reading habits and possibly associate a name with e-mail and surfing habits.
Reminds me: A friend of mine has a really old car, and knowing full well that it would take any skilled attacker ten seconds to open a locked door, he just left it unlocked, so at least anybody breaking in wouldn't destroy anything by doing so. He was hoping that if anybody stole the car, he would at least get the car back some day in one piece. Well, what happens? Some moron decides to steal it, doesn't check the doors, just smashes a window, tries to jump-start it, but in the process destroys the ignition! So, the car was originally intentionally open and easy to steal, but several parts of it was destroyed anyway... Lucky guy, eh...?
Hm, that doesn't count as a reference in my book. A proper reference is a precise reference to software systems that constitutes prior art or a paper or other patent describing it.
Here in Norway, we've had this for a long time, I don't think DSL was ever tied to phone. It seems to come at the same prize too. For some time, I planned to get just ADSL from a provider that was actually not offer a phone line, and go for VoIP out, phone in.
But in the end I went for a provider with but phone and ADSL anyway. Kind of regret it, but that's life.
Anyway, what I can't get is a really vanilla offering, just the bandwidth. Now I have to pay for five e-mail addresses that I don't use, 50 MB webspace that I don't use, anti-virus that I don't use, etc., etc.
A method to use claim 1) to make it fill the whole screen
A method to make a button to make it disappear.
A method in which you right click on the pager in Kicker.
A method to use the previous claim to launch the pager.
This will do the same thing, AFAICS. So it is just a small and obvious subset of what KDE allready does... Allthough it eats too much CPU to be useful...:-)
Hm, I'm not so sure I agree with you there... I read the claims, and while I'm always getting confused by reading claims, the only thing they could have done, that hasn't been done here is that you could scale each desktop and actually use it... Say you had a bunch of applications open, 2x2 matrix for example, and normally you'd like to work with only one desktop open, but suddenly you want all four. So you scale the whole thing in, get all four desktops on your desktop, and you can use all applications open. That I must admit I haven't seen before. I was too confused by the patent application, but I didn't see that there. Anybody?
Come to think of it, that could be useful...:-)
Another thing I've been thinking about when using virtual desktops with Xinerama, is the ability to connect any arbitrary virtual desktop with any screen. Rather than having them side-by-side (or whatever), you use the pager to click on the desktop you want to appear in which screen. Anybody know of a WM that does this?
Besides, isn't it common to have references to previous relevant systems in a patent application...? I mean, if it were real, they should at least give a reference to the old FVWM pager.... (Actually, the FVWM pager was a killer app for me when I first discovered UNIX 10 years ago).
No, but by being a party to UN conventions, you agree to make laws that conform. Basically, in Europe, you can take the government to court in Haag if you think that a national court is not taking your humans rights seriously enough. Here in Norway (we've had free speech-clauses in the Constitution since 1814), people have done that a few times, and won. It works as a good cluestick for national courts.
I agree. This stuff has been in "testing" for at least ten years now, and it has had the same problems all along, interference issues and all that. Someone wake me up if it actually gets into production....:-)
Thanks a lot! Yeah, I agree, Bayes is really great, and it catches a lot of my spam, but some things that are really common is good to catch with regexs too. So, I inserted your rule and gave it a score of 1.0 to test it out, thanks a lot!
Since I reject stuff at a score of 12, it is not just about having it marked as spam, but also being so sure about it that I can get it above 12, so that I don't have to see it.
It doesn't work for people who train their filters themselves. Indeed, with my well-trained SA install, my Bayes marks those spams as BAYES_99.
But my old university, that has 40000 users, this has completely defeated their Bayesian filters. They say that the disk and CPU needed to have per-user bayesian training is prohibetively expensive, and they found that training for all users were doing more harm than good.
So, we definately need more approaches to the problem.
Yep. Actually, the cosmological constant can result in many funny forms of universes, including my favorite "bouncing universe", which, sadly, is now pretty solidly rejected by observations.:-)
Hehe, that's what it is like posting on/., one thing that's a bit unclear, get flamed for it...:-) Sorry about that.
Anyway, I think it is relevant to mention my view of the motivation of the 911 terrorists: I think their basic idea was to provoke a US counter-reaction so bad it basically would provoke arabs to stand up in an all-fronts war.
It hasn't happened, and to be honest, I don't think it is thanks to GWB, I think it is due to that the terrorists are severly overestimating the hatred towards the west by Mohammad Average Arab. If the hatred was as common as you seem to suggest, the situation would have gotten out of hand allready, like the terrorists incorrectly thought.
But I admit that the only thing I have to back this up, is the impression I've had from travelling. In fact, I have no close Arab friends like you have.
It wasn't the introduction of the cosmological constant per se that Einstein thought of as his greatest blunder, it was the failure to realize and predict that the Universe is expanding. The cosmological constant he had there to get a static universe, and that's bad. Also, the cosmological constant isn't Evil, it comes rather naturally from solving the equations. I never got as far as actually doing that, but I followed a back-of-envelope solution once, and it comes out sort of like an integration constant. I think of it as a natural parameter that should be constrained by observations just like any other parameter, and I see no particular reason why it should be 0.
Wow, for a rant like this it is impressive that you can't get the first fact straight:
and even less to arab politics,
Iran is not arabic!! This is the kind of ignorance that pisses Iranians off (and probably arabs too).
The Arab world is really hating the Western world.
Rubbish! Have you travelled in the Arab world? I have. There are few places were you meet more heartfelt friendliness, openness and generosity than in the Arab world. If there is hate, it is only among a small number of people, and when you meet people face-to-face, and you return their respect, it's gone. It is about mutual respect.
The fact that Western countries are, on a daily, institutionna, historical, cultural basis, denying the Arab heir is just a part of what make them hate us *so much*.
This has some merit, but it is not a real source of hatred. But if you are prepared to sit down and hear what an Arab has to say about their heritage and what the Arab world has given to the west, you'd be respected. You'll also notice that many Arabs and Iranians too are prepared and very interested in taking the best of what the West has to offer. They have no hatred against the west, to the contrary, they would like to incorporate in their culture what they feel is good, and democracy is certainly one of the things they'll be working with.
But Arabs and Iranians have a lot to be proud of, and what they don't want is westerners coming in and tell them what to do. They appreciate help when they ask for it, but they mostly want to do things their own way, based on what they think are the best from their own culture and western culture.
AOL. I'm only counting accurately the stuff SpamAssassin rejects, which is about 90% of my spam, and that's about 180 a day before xmas, 200 shortly thereafter, and 230 a day now.
I think a real opt-in law with good fines would be a workable solution (we have one here in Norway, and there are a few spammers who got spanked and they haven't tried a again), but the problem with CAN SPAM is that it legitimitizes spam, so it was clearly flawed from the outset.
As posted elsewhere to this story, I think it looks awfully like XSP Logicsheets. At least, I'm extremely surprised it wasn't mentioned in the references, because it does the same.
...and then you can use that to get them into free software philosophy and say something to the effect that: "in the old software industry, if you need a specific feature, you may request that it'll be added in the next release, but it is their business decision whether it is sufficient market pressure to add it. With free software, instead of making a request, you hire people to add it. So, yes, indeed there is a cost to free software, but the decisions are yours, you retain control. In addition to control, it also has the advantage that the path to the people who know the code best, the people who wrote it, is shorter."
Well, I think what they just patented are in fact what Cocoon refers to as XSP Logicsheets. The patent is from 2000, I think Cocoon was well developed by then, but I'm not sure the logicsheets were that solid at that time, as I got interested in the project at a later point.
However, mixing markup and code to this extent is something I consider a Bad Idea[tm], and Cocoon and AxKit now has much better approaches.
Yep, this seems just like an extension of ASP and the like to include XML. Big deal. If the idea of scripting like you did with CGI a long time ago was 1.0, ASP was 1.1. Nowadays, 2.0 is ready, and it separates markup from logic, like in Cocoon and AxKit.
This is not to say that patents aren't evil, but the best MS can do is to patent dying concepts, we have little to fear.
But, well, BTW, did I RTFPatent? Of course not!:-)
Hehe. Take it from me, unless you're a world class athlete, there is always a cute little 18 year-old girl who do it better than you. Get over it.:-)
I learnt this fact of life allready when I was 16, and I think it probably helped me avoid a too-inflated ego...: It was at the end of one of my first mountain triathlon, and after three hours of running a was totally exhausted. Just before the final hard climb, there was this girl, one year younger than me, who just parked me completely.
You bet, if you meet one of those one the threadmill next to you, and you awaken her competition instinct, you'll find yourself dying at the end of the threadmill at the end of the day...:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I don't know so much about it, but I thought that just about anything that can show some kind of graphics can use the framebuffer directly, and bypass the heavier stuff in X... It least MPlayer can. Don't know if Qt does...
It does perhaps not count as an exploit, but what about enabling web-bugs?
It is a really, really bad idea to have a mail program that loads images without the user knowing, and it is definately a security flaw, because it allows the sender to track e-mail reading habits and possibly associate a name with e-mail and surfing habits.
Nasty enough for me...
Reminds me: A friend of mine has a really old car, and knowing full well that it would take any skilled attacker ten seconds to open a locked door, he just left it unlocked, so at least anybody breaking in wouldn't destroy anything by doing so. He was hoping that if anybody stole the car, he would at least get the car back some day in one piece. Well, what happens? Some moron decides to steal it, doesn't check the doors, just smashes a window, tries to jump-start it, but in the process destroys the ignition! So, the car was originally intentionally open and easy to steal, but several parts of it was destroyed anyway... Lucky guy, eh...?
Hm, that doesn't count as a reference in my book. A proper reference is a precise reference to software systems that constitutes prior art or a paper or other patent describing it.
Whoops, you're right. Thanks. I thought the intra-EU-relations court was in Strasbourg, the rest in Haag. Nice to clear it up.
I haven't had time to switch yet, but when I do, I really want matroxfb working too... :-)
But in the end I went for a provider with but phone and ADSL anyway. Kind of regret it, but that's life.
Anyway, what I can't get is a really vanilla offering, just the bandwidth. Now I have to pay for five e-mail addresses that I don't use, 50 MB webspace that I don't use, anti-virus that I don't use, etc., etc.
This will do the same thing, AFAICS. So it is just a small and obvious subset of what KDE allready does... Allthough it eats too much CPU to be useful... :-)
Come to think of it, that could be useful... :-)
Another thing I've been thinking about when using virtual desktops with Xinerama, is the ability to connect any arbitrary virtual desktop with any screen. Rather than having them side-by-side (or whatever), you use the pager to click on the desktop you want to appear in which screen. Anybody know of a WM that does this?
Besides, isn't it common to have references to previous relevant systems in a patent application...? I mean, if it were real, they should at least give a reference to the old FVWM pager.... (Actually, the FVWM pager was a killer app for me when I first discovered UNIX 10 years ago).
No, but by being a party to UN conventions, you agree to make laws that conform. Basically, in Europe, you can take the government to court in Haag if you think that a national court is not taking your humans rights seriously enough. Here in Norway (we've had free speech-clauses in the Constitution since 1814), people have done that a few times, and won. It works as a good cluestick for national courts.
I agree. This stuff has been in "testing" for at least ten years now, and it has had the same problems all along, interference issues and all that. Someone wake me up if it actually gets into production.... :-)
Besides, how is the scale defined?
I think that if you research it, you'll find that it was something that Fahrenheit just pulled out from thin air...
Since I reject stuff at a score of 12, it is not just about having it marked as spam, but also being so sure about it that I can get it above 12, so that I don't have to see it.
But my old university, that has 40000 users, this has completely defeated their Bayesian filters. They say that the disk and CPU needed to have per-user bayesian training is prohibetively expensive, and they found that training for all users were doing more harm than good.
So, we definately need more approaches to the problem.
Yep. Actually, the cosmological constant can result in many funny forms of universes, including my favorite "bouncing universe", which, sadly, is now pretty solidly rejected by observations. :-)
Anyway, I think it is relevant to mention my view of the motivation of the 911 terrorists: I think their basic idea was to provoke a US counter-reaction so bad it basically would provoke arabs to stand up in an all-fronts war.
It hasn't happened, and to be honest, I don't think it is thanks to GWB, I think it is due to that the terrorists are severly overestimating the hatred towards the west by Mohammad Average Arab. If the hatred was as common as you seem to suggest, the situation would have gotten out of hand allready, like the terrorists incorrectly thought.
But I admit that the only thing I have to back this up, is the impression I've had from travelling. In fact, I have no close Arab friends like you have.
It wasn't the introduction of the cosmological constant per se that Einstein thought of as his greatest blunder, it was the failure to realize and predict that the Universe is expanding. The cosmological constant he had there to get a static universe, and that's bad. Also, the cosmological constant isn't Evil, it comes rather naturally from solving the equations. I never got as far as actually doing that, but I followed a back-of-envelope solution once, and it comes out sort of like an integration constant. I think of it as a natural parameter that should be constrained by observations just like any other parameter, and I see no particular reason why it should be 0.
Iran is not arabic!! This is the kind of ignorance that pisses Iranians off (and probably arabs too).
Rubbish! Have you travelled in the Arab world? I have. There are few places were you meet more heartfelt friendliness, openness and generosity than in the Arab world. If there is hate, it is only among a small number of people, and when you meet people face-to-face, and you return their respect, it's gone. It is about mutual respect.
This has some merit, but it is not a real source of hatred. But if you are prepared to sit down and hear what an Arab has to say about their heritage and what the Arab world has given to the west, you'd be respected. You'll also notice that many Arabs and Iranians too are prepared and very interested in taking the best of what the West has to offer. They have no hatred against the west, to the contrary, they would like to incorporate in their culture what they feel is good, and democracy is certainly one of the things they'll be working with.
But Arabs and Iranians have a lot to be proud of, and what they don't want is westerners coming in and tell them what to do. They appreciate help when they ask for it, but they mostly want to do things their own way, based on what they think are the best from their own culture and western culture.
Neither do RMS.
And who provided him with the tools to allow him to do that?
I think a real opt-in law with good fines would be a workable solution (we have one here in Norway, and there are a few spammers who got spanked and they haven't tried a again), but the problem with CAN SPAM is that it legitimitizes spam, so it was clearly flawed from the outset.
As posted elsewhere to this story, I think it looks awfully like XSP Logicsheets. At least, I'm extremely surprised it wasn't mentioned in the references, because it does the same.
...and then you can use that to get them into free software philosophy and say something to the effect that: "in the old software industry, if you need a specific feature, you may request that it'll be added in the next release, but it is their business decision whether it is sufficient market pressure to add it. With free software, instead of making a request, you hire people to add it. So, yes, indeed there is a cost to free software, but the decisions are yours, you retain control. In addition to control, it also has the advantage that the path to the people who know the code best, the people who wrote it, is shorter."
However, mixing markup and code to this extent is something I consider a Bad Idea[tm], and Cocoon and AxKit now has much better approaches.
This is not to say that patents aren't evil, but the best MS can do is to patent dying concepts, we have little to fear.
But, well, BTW, did I RTFPatent? Of course not! :-)
I learnt this fact of life allready when I was 16, and I think it probably helped me avoid a too-inflated ego...: It was at the end of one of my first mountain triathlon, and after three hours of running a was totally exhausted. Just before the final hard climb, there was this girl, one year younger than me, who just parked me completely.
You bet, if you meet one of those one the threadmill next to you, and you awaken her competition instinct, you'll find yourself dying at the end of the threadmill at the end of the day... :-)