A variation of "Fair use rights" sounds appropriate.
As for a letter, here's where buzzwords would be usefully employed. Remember that big business like to cloak their viewpoint using unemotive words and inpenetrable words of Latin and Greek roots when sugarcoating something unpleasant, but when they want to make something innocuous sound bad they use emotive words with Germanic roots.
Suppose your company wants to cut staff. If you're the owner of the company, you would use words like "retrenchment", "recruitment freeze" and "downsizing". If you're a staff member, you would use words like "mass sackings" and "think of my children".
In 1987, when I started university, the students at our university were permitted to run a small and simple BBS application that they wrote themselves. This was a couple of years before we got universal Internet access, so it was mostly limited to students of our university. In organisation, it was sort of like newsgroups on Usenet, except inactive areas (called "rooms") would be deleted periodically.
To advertise a forthcoming university event, one second-year student had the bright idea of posting an identical message advertising that event into every room on the board. He must have done it by hand with copy and paste, I never found out exactly how he did it. But one day I found this identical message in each of the more than forty rooms I could visit. It generated a lot of flamage, and earned him a nomination for "most stupid act" at the end-of-year awards from the BBS users' group.
500 deep algorithms, 1000 is maturity? To me this sounds a bit like like Bill Gates saying that 640K is enough for anyone, or the ancient Greeks saying that mathematics is mature because Euclid has codified his geometric axioms, or the head of the US patent office saying that everything's been invented in 1899. (All of which are probably apocryphal, but I digress.)
It's too premature. Computer science has been around for little over half a century. Who knows what will be discovered in the centuries ahead? Mathematics is the source of many algorithms, yet new discoveries are being made in mathematics even now. Don't stop searching when we get to 1000. There's still going to be many new and wondrous algorithms to discover for the geniuses of the future.
Spyware's vulnerability
on
Spy v. Spy
·
· Score: 2
Spyware performs two basic tasks:
1. Gather information 2. Notify snooper
Spyware would have to tell the snooper what it found sooner or later, and this is its weak point. Suppose it e-mailed its logs off to someone periodically. If you could write software that searched for spyware config files and changed them so it emailed you instead, then the spyware would be defanged.
I'm just imagining what the marine life around these things will look like once they've been in place a few years. Far from being detrimental, they'll actually be prime real estate for marine life. They will provide shade and places for seaweed and other plant life to grow. A single piece of driftwood in the open ocean can attract a lot of marine life, so imagine what these babies will do.
Advantages: * Pronounceable and fairly easy to remember. * Function of each server is obvious. * More scalable than a theme-based convention. * Easy to think up new names.
Disadvantages: * Boring. * No indication of which customer that server is assigned to. A simple database of server/customer assignments will allow someone to get this information easily as needed.
The point to remember when planning for thousands of servers is that the efficiency of *any* theme-based convention breaks down at some point. First, because it becomes more difficult to come up with new names in that theme. Second, because remembering the names and functions of all the machines becomes difficult. With 5000 machines, no suitable theme is likely to be found.
This suggestion is perhaps a bit bland and boring. However, remember that the theme you choose is likely to be with you for a while, and that you must work with the machines on a daily basis. If you had to find a machine in a hurry in a room with 5000 of them, would you find it quicker if it was SQL1885 (which is in the row of SQL1800's) or if it was named Bambi and it was in the row of Disney characters?
We should get the assistance of native speakers of Chinese, Japanese and Korean to translate essential information on how to close open relays, secure their systems, etc. Get them to create a web page in their native languages with this information. Then we can refer speakers of those languages to those web pages.
We should also convince the authors of Red Flag Linux and any other Asian *n?x distributions to ship their products with their mail servers closed by default.
Another problem is that security holes are less likely to be closed. The sysadmins may be unaware of the latest security holes because of the language barrier. These unpatched Asian systems may be r00ted by hax0rs, and thus serve as an easy spam gateway. The translation project should include Asian-language versions of bugtraq mailing lists.
Nintendo demands that you immediately... turn over your remaining stock to Nintendo.
IANAL, but this is obviously an illegal demand:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated...
-- Fourth amemdment, US constitution
No person shall... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law...
A look at the previous 5 years--for which the data is more complete--also shows that each year, Win2K and Windows NT had far fewer security vulnerabilities than Linux
Win2K had zero reported security vulnerabilities before it was released....
Here are some Slashdot articles that have been posted about cheating in online games. You may want to give them a quick read if you're developing an online game.
Black holes suck in everything near them including light...
This is a very common misconception, judging by the number of otherwise well-informed Slashdot readers who have been repeating this fallacy. Black holes do not suck in things any more than the Earth or Sun do. The unusual gravitational effects of a black hole are only evident for bodies that are close to the event horizon.
If the Sun was replaced by a black hole with the same mass, the planets and other bodies in the solar system would continue to orbit as if nothing unusual had happened. They would NOT be "sucked in".
Transmitting 144 petabytes over a 1M link takes 4355 years, 3 months
If you were unfortunate enough to be still using a 300 bps modem, this would take 152,227,742 years (including start and stop bits)
Your MP3 collection would need to have 183,000 years of continuous music to fill 144 petabytes.
The bandwidth of a single 144 petabyte file being carried across the Pacific in a 747 is an impressive 3,336,000,000 bytes per second (assuming a 12-hour flight time).
And the RIAA probably wants to control this. Muhahaha.
Asking if someone else packed your bags or if your bag has been out of your sight is likely to subject you to some extra scrutiny. Accept this extra scrutiny willingly, it's for your safety. There is a small chance that while the bag was out of your sight, someone slipped a bomb or other similar device into it.
One major benefit of replacing the copper tracks on the mainboard with optical fibre would be a significant reduction in radio emissions from your PC. Those copper tracks with electrons zipping back and forth emite a lot of electromagnetic radiation due to the motion of the electrons within the wires. Replace the copper wires with optical fibre, and you get a PC that emits much less radio interference.
One thing that the article didn't mention was the definition of piracy. Traditionally, "piracy" with respect to a copyrighted work has meant the duplication and selling of a copyrighted work. Think of street vendors in Hong Kong selling copies of pirated software such as Microsoft Office for $5. However, there is a disturbing trend amongst the RIAA, MPAA and other industry cartels to make the definition of piracy as broad as possible, including many activities currently protected by law as fair use. Did you rip that MP3 off that CD you purchased? Ha, say the RIAA, you're a PIRATE!
This overuse of the term "piracy" must be stopped because many members of the public already believe that any copying of a coprighted work is "piracy" and "illegal". This is not the case.
To undermine the RIAA's and MPAA's attempt to take away our legal rights, I urge all Slashdotters to use the term "piracy" only in the strict narrow sense of selling illegal copies for profit. The ripping of a CD you own into MP3's for your own personal use is not piracy. Downloading MP3 copies from a web site is not piracy if you already own legal copies of the tracks on CD, cassette tape or vinyl LP. Downloading MP3's if you don't legally own the tracks already is not "piracy": use the more neutral term "copyright infringement" for this activity if no money changed hands.
I will digress for a moment to explain how language is used by coporations and other powerful people. "Piracy" is an emotive word, which is deliberately used to provoke emotion. It invokes images of jolly rogers and sword-wielding bandits on the high seas. If they didn't want to provoke emotion, they would use a neutral term such as "copyright infringement". In short, if it's something allegedly bad that you're doing to them, it's "ouch, ouch, use emotive language", but if it's something bad they're doing to you, it's "softly, softly, use neutral language."
I would be interested to see how "piracy" is defined in the proposed legislation. The chances are good, however, that "piracy" is defined as broadly as possible, including many acts traditionally protected as "fair use" such as copying for your own personal use.
I guess someone has a lot of time on their hands. Or maybe someone wants to recapture the experience of Etch-a-sketch with a GPS receiver and a real-time graphical display. Maybe they're perfecting the art of giving future GPS-based incarnations of Big Brother "the finger".
in today's age of worms upon virus upon other nasty things....
There's one very nasty "advertisement" doing the rounds of the Net to which dialup Windows users are vulnerable. It downloads a 44K application to the victim's PC called "dialer.exe". When the victim runs that program it hangs up their dialup connection and dials a 1-900 number to access a web site. The victim will then be billed $50 on their phone bill.
Banner ads that have rapidly flickering images may also be harmful to people vulnerable to epileptic seizures and other neurological problems. It is only a matter of time before a web site is sued for displaying such flickering ads on their page without an epilepsy warning.
With little nasties like this doing the rounds, I will block banner ads and all cookies until they change their practises.
Right now, we are just past the peak of the 11-year solar cycle, with the Sun having more spots on its face than a teenager with acne. These spots are the cause of a lot of the solar activity we are seeing.
It is a class S3 flare, which is strong enough to expose people travelling in commercial jets at high altitude to radiation equivalent to 1 chest x-ray. On average, the Sun only has about a dozen storms this strong or stronger every solar cycle (11 years). In other words, it's a fairly big one. (reference: http://www.sec.noaa.gov/NOAAscales/#SolarRadiation Storms
When I think about what the legislators are trying to do, closing stable doors after the horses have bolted comes immediately to mind. How are they going to persuade terrorists to use this form of encryption?
Never underestimate the comedy potential that can be made by use of the appropriate creature enchantments.
I tap my ornithopter to kill your Scryb sprite
I tap my ornithopter to prevent 1 damage
I attack with my Unholy Strengthed ornithopter
Oh, all those creatures died? How many, five? I put five +1/+1 counters on my ornithopter....
My commiserations to all Magic players who have ever been killed by an Ornithopter.
Now that we've got a PIII booting in 0.8 seconds, to achieve "seven nines", we have 2.2 seconds spare. What can we do with this time? I'm sure we can do a lot of valuable system maintenanace in this time that we would not have otherwise been able to do.
We could:
Swap out a dead power supply.
Replace a faulty memory module.
Swap the UPS for one that has its own in-built generator.
Put fluffy dice over the console.
Change the grey cables for ones in designer colours.
Wave a dead chicken over the console.
Upgrade the mainboard.
Look busy so marketing can't have the latest item in their wish list installed.
Remove the thing that marketing wanted installed because it's making the system unstable. If it's not unstable, you would not be rebooting, would you?
I use a 33K modem from home because installing cables in my block of flats in Australia requires a mountain of paperwork.
I remember getting ONE packet EVERY TEN SECONDS (I timed it) downloading Quicktime from the Apple site. The intervals between packets were far too regular to be caused merely by "slow traffic". I eventually gave up. Quicktime sucks anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Cast the debate in terms of rights
A variation of "Fair use rights" sounds appropriate.
As for a letter, here's where buzzwords would be usefully employed. Remember that big business like to cloak their viewpoint using unemotive words and inpenetrable words of Latin and Greek roots when sugarcoating something unpleasant, but when they want to make something innocuous sound bad they use emotive words with Germanic roots.
Suppose your company wants to cut staff. If you're the owner of the company, you would use words like "retrenchment", "recruitment freeze" and "downsizing". If you're a staff member, you would use words like "mass sackings" and "think of my children".
He wasn't the first -
In 1987, when I started university, the students at our university were permitted to run a small and simple BBS application that they wrote themselves. This was a couple of years before we got universal Internet access, so it was mostly limited to students of our university. In organisation, it was sort of like newsgroups on Usenet, except inactive areas (called "rooms") would be deleted periodically.
To advertise a forthcoming university event, one second-year student had the bright idea of posting an identical message advertising that event into every room on the board. He must have done it by hand with copy and paste, I never found out exactly how he did it. But one day I found this identical message in each of the more than forty rooms I could visit. It generated a lot of flamage, and earned him a nomination for "most stupid act" at the end-of-year awards from the BBS users' group.
It is simple enough that can be described in a piece of paper...
Any algorithm can be described on a piece of paper, provided you can get pieces of paper that are large enough.
500 deep algorithms, 1000 is maturity? To me this sounds a bit like like Bill Gates saying that 640K is enough for anyone, or the ancient Greeks saying that mathematics is mature because Euclid has codified his geometric axioms, or the head of the US patent office saying that everything's been invented in 1899. (All of which are probably apocryphal, but I digress.)
It's too premature. Computer science has been around for little over half a century. Who knows what will be discovered in the centuries ahead? Mathematics is the source of many algorithms, yet new discoveries are being made in mathematics even now. Don't stop searching when we get to 1000. There's still going to be many new and wondrous algorithms to discover for the geniuses of the future.
Spyware performs two basic tasks:
1. Gather information
2. Notify snooper
Spyware would have to tell the snooper what it found sooner or later, and this is its weak point. Suppose it e-mailed its logs off to someone periodically. If you could write software that searched for spyware config files and changed them so it emailed you instead, then the spyware would be defanged.
I'm just imagining what the marine life around these things will look like once they've been in place a few years. Far from being detrimental, they'll actually be prime real estate for marine life. They will provide shade and places for seaweed and other plant life to grow. A single piece of driftwood in the open ocean can attract a lot of marine life, so imagine what these babies will do.
Name them after their function, and number them.
Web servers:
WEB1
...
WEB5000
SQL servers:
SQL1
...
SQL5000
Advantages:
* Pronounceable and fairly easy to remember.
* Function of each server is obvious.
* More scalable than a theme-based convention.
* Easy to think up new names.
Disadvantages:
* Boring.
* No indication of which customer that server is assigned to. A simple database of server/customer assignments will allow someone to get this information easily as needed.
The point to remember when planning for thousands of servers is that the efficiency of *any* theme-based convention breaks down at some point. First, because it becomes more difficult to come up with new names in that theme. Second, because remembering the names and functions of all the machines becomes difficult. With 5000 machines, no suitable theme is likely to be found.
This suggestion is perhaps a bit bland and boring. However, remember that the theme you choose is likely to be with you for a while, and that you must work with the machines on a daily basis. If you had to find a machine in a hurry in a room with 5000 of them, would you find it quicker if it was SQL1885 (which is in the row of SQL1800's) or if it was named Bambi and it was in the row of Disney characters?
This is an excellent idea.
We should get the assistance of native speakers of Chinese, Japanese and Korean to translate essential information on how to close open relays, secure their systems, etc. Get them to create a web page in their native languages with this information. Then we can refer speakers of those languages to those web pages.
We should also convince the authors of Red Flag Linux and any other Asian *n?x distributions to ship their products with their mail servers closed by default.
Another problem is that security holes are less likely to be closed. The sysadmins may be unaware of the latest security holes because of the language barrier. These unpatched Asian systems may be r00ted by hax0rs, and thus serve as an easy spam gateway. The translation project should include Asian-language versions of bugtraq mailing lists.
Nintendo demands that you immediately ... turn over your remaining stock to Nintendo.
... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law ...
IANAL, but this is obviously an illegal demand:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated...
-- Fourth amemdment, US constitution
No person shall
-- Fifth amemdment, US constitution
From the article:
A look at the previous 5 years--for which the data is more complete--also shows that each year, Win2K and Windows NT had far fewer security vulnerabilities than Linux
Win2K had zero reported security vulnerabilities before it was released....
Here are some Slashdot articles that have been posted about cheating in online games. You may want to give them a quick read if you're developing an online game.
Combating cheating in online games (16 November 2000)
Multiplayer Game Cheating (16 July 2000)
From the article:
Black holes suck in everything near them including light...
This is a very common misconception, judging by the number of otherwise well-informed Slashdot readers who have been repeating this fallacy. Black holes do not suck in things any more than the Earth or Sun do. The unusual gravitational effects of a black hole are only evident for bodies that are close to the event horizon.
If the Sun was replaced by a black hole with the same mass, the planets and other bodies in the solar system would continue to orbit as if nothing unusual had happened. They would NOT be "sucked in".
Transmitting 144 petabytes over a 1M link takes 4355 years, 3 months
If you were unfortunate enough to be still using a 300 bps modem, this would take 152,227,742 years (including start and stop bits)
Your MP3 collection would need to have 183,000 years of continuous music to fill 144 petabytes.
The bandwidth of a single 144 petabyte file being carried across the Pacific in a 747 is an impressive 3,336,000,000 bytes per second (assuming a 12-hour flight time).
And the RIAA probably wants to control this. Muhahaha.
From the interview:
... a black cube, a metre to a side, that when it boots says "resistance is futile, you will be assimilated."
"And I *did* assimilate lots of other computers to make mine."
I can imagine it now
Asking if someone else packed your bags or if your bag has been out of your sight is likely to subject you to some extra scrutiny. Accept this extra scrutiny willingly, it's for your safety. There is a small chance that while the bag was out of your sight, someone slipped a bomb or other similar device into it.
Yes.
One major benefit of replacing the copper tracks on the mainboard with optical fibre would be a significant reduction in radio emissions from your PC. Those copper tracks with electrons zipping back and forth emite a lot of electromagnetic radiation due to the motion of the electrons within the wires. Replace the copper wires with optical fibre, and you get a PC that emits much less radio interference.
One thing that the article didn't mention was the definition of piracy. Traditionally, "piracy" with respect to a copyrighted work has meant the duplication and selling of a copyrighted work. Think of street vendors in Hong Kong selling copies of pirated software such as Microsoft Office for $5. However, there is a disturbing trend amongst the RIAA, MPAA and other industry cartels to make the definition of piracy as broad as possible, including many activities currently protected by law as fair use. Did you rip that MP3 off that CD you purchased? Ha, say the RIAA, you're a PIRATE!
This overuse of the term "piracy" must be stopped because many members of the public already believe that any copying of a coprighted work is "piracy" and "illegal". This is not the case.
To undermine the RIAA's and MPAA's attempt to take away our legal rights, I urge all Slashdotters to use the term "piracy" only in the strict narrow sense of selling illegal copies for profit. The ripping of a CD you own into MP3's for your own personal use is not piracy. Downloading MP3 copies from a web site is not piracy if you already own legal copies of the tracks on CD, cassette tape or vinyl LP. Downloading MP3's if you don't legally own the tracks already is not "piracy": use the more neutral term "copyright infringement" for this activity if no money changed hands.
I will digress for a moment to explain how language is used by coporations and other powerful people. "Piracy" is an emotive word, which is deliberately used to provoke emotion. It invokes images of jolly rogers and sword-wielding bandits on the high seas. If they didn't want to provoke emotion, they would use a neutral term such as "copyright infringement". In short, if it's something allegedly bad that you're doing to them, it's "ouch, ouch, use emotive language", but if it's something bad they're doing to you, it's "softly, softly, use neutral language."
I would be interested to see how "piracy" is defined in the proposed legislation. The chances are good, however, that "piracy" is defined as broadly as possible, including many acts traditionally protected as "fair use" such as copying for your own personal use.
I guess someone has a lot of time on their hands. Or maybe someone wants to recapture the experience of Etch-a-sketch with a GPS receiver and a real-time graphical display. Maybe they're perfecting the art of giving future GPS-based incarnations of Big Brother "the finger".
in today's age of worms upon virus upon other nasty things....
There's one very nasty "advertisement" doing the rounds of the Net to which dialup Windows users are vulnerable. It downloads a 44K application to the victim's PC called "dialer.exe". When the victim runs that program it hangs up their dialup connection and dials a 1-900 number to access a web site. The victim will then be billed $50 on their phone bill.
Banner ads that have rapidly flickering images may also be harmful to people vulnerable to epileptic seizures and other neurological problems. It is only a matter of time before a web site is sued for displaying such flickering ads on their page without an epilepsy warning.
With little nasties like this doing the rounds, I will block banner ads and all cookies until they change their practises.
Right now, we are just past the peak of the 11-year solar cycle, with the Sun having more spots on its face than a teenager with acne. These spots are the cause of a lot of the solar activity we are seeing.
http://www.spaceweather.com has more information about this flare.
n Storms
It is a class S3 flare, which is strong enough to expose people travelling in commercial jets at high altitude to radiation equivalent to 1 chest x-ray. On average, the Sun only has about a dozen storms this strong or stronger every solar cycle (11 years). In other words, it's a fairly big one. (reference: http://www.sec.noaa.gov/NOAAscales/#SolarRadiatio
When I think about what the legislators are trying to do, closing stable doors after the horses have bolted comes immediately to mind. How are they going to persuade terrorists to use this form of encryption?
Never underestimate the comedy potential that can be made by use of the appropriate creature enchantments.
I tap my ornithopter to kill your Scryb sprite
I tap my ornithopter to prevent 1 damage
I attack with my Unholy Strengthed ornithopter
Oh, all those creatures died? How many, five? I put five +1/+1 counters on my ornithopter....
My commiserations to all Magic players who have ever been killed by an Ornithopter.
Now that we've got a PIII booting in 0.8 seconds, to achieve "seven nines", we have 2.2 seconds spare. What can we do with this time? I'm sure we can do a lot of valuable system maintenanace in this time that we would not have otherwise been able to do.
We could:
Of course, you might have to work fast....
I use a 33K modem from home because installing cables in my block of flats in Australia requires a mountain of paperwork.
I remember getting ONE packet EVERY TEN SECONDS (I timed it) downloading Quicktime from the Apple site. The intervals between packets were far too regular to be caused merely by "slow traffic". I eventually gave up. Quicktime sucks anyway.