Yeah, pretty much my thoughts. I see the picture of the green chamaeleon with the caption "SuSE", and I tend to think of the chamaeleon as having a name like that: "Suse" or "Susie".
Such a name would be much less confusing for the neophyte than less obvious names like "Kevin", "Engelbert" or "J. Rothwort Fontwoodleton III, Esq."
Invent and patent your own disc-based distribution medium. It would include a straightforward method of recording to blanks. Ideally, the medium would be similar to removable hard-drives, but more robust, and similar to floppies, but with a huge DVD-size capacity. Perhaps solid-state devices are the way of the future here.
Form your own company to market the invention. At all costs, keep it out of the hands of any company affiliated with The Bad Guys.
Allow any company to manufacture players/drives and blank discs. By opening up the manufacture of players/drives and discs to all comers, you will improve the chance that the market will accept your product. It's why VHS won out over Beta: Beta was Sony-only, and VHS was everyone else.
Charge a token patent royalty on every drive/player that is manufactured. (say, about US$5). You gotta eat, you know.
Charge largish patent royalties (say, about US$5) for every blank disc that is manufactured.
Distribute half or more of the blank-disc royalties to artists. Royalties for prerecorded discs go to the artist appearing on the disc. Royalties from blank discs go to a general pool that's paid to all artists. Movie makers and software makers would be included as "artists" here. They would have less to fear if they got some payment from the sale of blank discs.
Make your company into a recording company for low-volume artists (typically those who would sell less than 1,000 units), so they can get their fair share of royalties from sales.
Try to gain enough market share such that it is a viable competitor to DVD. DVD has enough weaknesses as a format to make another marketable product that overcomes these weaknesses.
Think I'm dreaming? Right now, the world is crying out for a viable replacement for the old 1.4 Mb floppy disc. The 1.4 Mb floppy disc is long past its peak of usefulness, but a floppy drive is still installed by default on all new computers, because no replacement is yet available that meets all of the criteria of robustness, ubiquitousness and ease of use. Invent and patent such a replacement, and you will make millions.
I didn't say it would be easy. But to anyone willing to try, I wish you good luck.
Stallman has talked about this before. It's a serious issue that must be fought, tooth and nail, with lobbying and with civil disobedience, if necessary.
Civil disobedience? A fine idea, but one must choose a method of civil disobedience that would be appropriate for the issue at hand. I suggest that the place to apply the civil disobedience pressure is the place where such software is usually sold.
Here is how such shink-wrapped software is usually sold:
Software retailer sells software to a sucker^H^H^H^H^H^Hcustomer in a pretty, shrink-wrapped box.
Customer takes software home.
Customer starts to install software. Uh, oh, license agreement.
Customer has to agree to the license because they have little chance of getting a refund if they don't agree.
Now my civil disobedience version (made available to all freely under the GPL):
Software retailer sells software to a customer with a laptop in a pretty, shrink-wrapped box.
Customer opens shrink-wrapped box in the store, right in front of the staff.
Customer starts to install software on the laptop. Uh, oh, license agreement.
Customer disagrees with the license agreement.
Customer asks for the refund. (Most license agreements have a refund clause).
Store droid points to sign that says "no refunds on opened software".
Customer points to refund clause in software license agreement. Customer asks why the license agreement cannot be read without opening the box and voiding any chance of a refund from the store.
Customer keeps insisting on the refund until the refund is paid or the store closes.
If store calls the police, the customer leaves quietly with the police, but then later serves a lawsuit on the store for breach of contract and other misdemeanors by the store.
Do this enough, and stores will begin to get the idea that selling shrink-wrapped software isn't such a great idea, after all.
An important point to consider when considering civil disobedience within the software store is that such stores do not take enough responsibility with respect to these agreements. In particular, the store does not give the customer an opportunity to read the text of the license agreement before purchasing the software. Either the FULL TEXT of the license agreement must be printed on the box, or the store must give the customer a copy of the FULL TEXT of the agreement to read before money changes hands.
Shrink-wrapped software isn't always where you expect it, either. I found one such example in a printer I recently bought, and if I didn't agree with it, I was not allowed to use the printer drivers. This shows how disruptive shrink-wrapped license agreemeents can be.
Disclaimer: I am describing the usual method of purchasing shrink-wrapped software within Australia. Your mileage may vary.... --
I've recently made efforts to decrypt the cookie file format for IE, and I can say what most of the fields are.
id This is the cookie name. Don't trust any cookie with a name of "id", "user" or names containing these words if they are from a site you don't know or don't trust. It's a tracking cookie. Delete all such cookies on sight (unless they are from a site you trust, like slashdot), and if possible block access from the site via your firewall.
OPT_OUT This is the cookie value.
doubleclick.net/ This is the domain and path for the cookie. This one means the cookie will be sent to all sites with a domain of doubleclick.net.
0 Don't know what this is, any ideas?
1468938752 31583413 This is the expiration time of the cookie. More details on the format later. When you decrypt this time, you'll find that it's about 2030 or so. Most sites that push cookies at you with an expiration time this far in the future are not to be trusted.
776923520 29321255 This is the creation time of the cookie.
* I don't know what this is either, any ideas?
The times are a 64-bit number. Take the first number, add the second number * 2^32, and divide by (I think) 10 million. You get number of milliseconds since about 1/1/1601. I have been having a little trouble determining the exact epoch (time when number = 0) of this number, because Microsoft seem to be deliberately obfuscating this information. For example, if you export cookies in Netscape format, the exported time is wrong.
If you want to fake this date and time for any reason, such as destroying any usefulness of tracking you by the creation time, then note that the date and time is always exactly divisible by (I think 10 million), with no remainder.
Doubleclick.net and other unscrupulous online businesses rely on one simple principle for their online profiling to work: that the ID cookie that they send you will always be associated with you. This lends itself to some interesting possibilities if you want to really screw around with their online profiling.
The simplest method would be to either block all traffic from doubleclick.net, or frequently go on search-and-destroy missions through your cookie files, looking for doubleclick.net cookies and systematically removing them all from your system. Profiling cannot work if the ID code is no longer valid.
Another method that would take more effort to set up but can potentially cause irreparable damage to the usefulness of the cookie as a profiling tool follows. Set up a central web site for doubleclick.net cookies. Users of the site would download special software that swaps cookies. Then the software would upload your doubleclick.net cookie, and you would receive another random cookie back. Swapping cookies like this destroys them as a tracking resource.
This isn't illegal, but doubleclick.net may decide to sue the site to force them to stop trading cookies in this way anyway. If this happens, all the users on the site can then launch a class action countersuit against doubleclick.net with the goal of forcing them to stop profiling. For example, does it constitute illegal wiretapping? And does doubleclick.net have a valid end-user licence for the use of the personal information in this way?
Everyone, please remember the horrendous Orwellian scenario that already exists when profiling is combined with Web Bugs (also more euphemistically known as clear gifs). Web Bugs are small (typically 1x1 pixel) clear gifs that are found on the bottom of web pages that inform the owners that the page has been loaded. Doubleclick.net already know what pages you visit, a lot more than you think. And it's happening now.
Doubleclick.net are not the only net terrorists that are acting this way. They are merely the most prominent, and the first that have actually admitted to the practice. Where I refer to doubleclick.net here, substitute many other ad banner companies freely.
If you want to boycott companies, the following need to be boycotted, in order of importance:
doubleclick.net and other ad banner companies that send you persistent cookies.
All companies that have web bugs leading back to any of these companies, particularly if they do not disclose their use of web bugs in their "Privacy" page.
All other companies that deal with ad banner companies mentioned in #1.
A better idea is the legal equivalent of Death By A Thousand Cuts. If a thousand people filed a thousand lawsuits against the MPAA in a thousand courts in a thousand jurisdictions, the MPAA would have to hire a thousand lawyers to fight a thousand cases. They can ignore e-mails, but they cannot ignore lawsuits.
Think Gulliver and Lilliput. The Lilliputians were able to subdue Gulliver by sheer weight of numbers, and that's how you fight big corporations.
Alternatively, a thousand people all join in a big class action lawsuit, and fight the MPAA on level terms. There's good grounds for countersuits against the MPAA. Antitrust, restriant of trade, even defamation and libel can be made to stick if you throw it hard enough.
Antitrust: They have an illegal monopoly in player software, and will not allow competition.
Restraint of trade: They are forcing users of the Linux users to use Windows to view DVDs.
Defamation and Libel: They are saying that everyone associated with DeCSS is a pirate who is intent on denying the MPAA their fair slice of royalties. They have to prove that in court, and if they can't or won't, hit them with a defamation or libel lawsuit. I find the piracy claims to be extremely libellious to Linux users, and they shouldn't be allowed to get away with these claims.
You're right. Considering how hard it is to focus X-rays, it is an amazing achievement.
To focus X-rays, one can either find a material that refracts X-rays so that lenses can be built, a material that reflects X-rays so that a reflecting telescope can be built, or find an alternative focusing technique.
X-ray lenses can be built, but the mass of metal required to bend X-rays to a respectable focal length may be too great for a satellite. X-ray mirrors may not be possible. I don't know what they actually use in the satellite, but I think they use an array of mirrors that reflect X-rays in a glancing manner, such that the incoming X-rays are almost parallel to the mirror.
It is interesting to note that the compound eyes of insects focus light in the same manner. Therefore, if the engineers wanted to make another X-ray telescope, they should consult entomologists and study the structures in insect eyes so that the next generation of X-ray telescopes may copy the design principles of insect eyes.
Here's what to do if you are a Linux user or distributor:
Get together with a large group of other Linux users, distributors and so forth, and file a countersuit against the MPAA for restraint of trade. A good lawyer could argue that by refusing to make DVD decoder software available for the Linux operating system, the motion picture cartel are harming the Linux market. I'm not a lawyer, nor am I familiar with American laws, so for all I know this wouldn't work, but something tells me that this sort of action is more likely to succeed than the "trade secret" attempt that we have recently seen.
The MPAA is also working on the big assumption that stopping it in America will stop it everywhere. It won't. All it would do is drive DVD decoder technology to countries with less restriction on reverse-engineering. A decoder for Linux will be available, regardless of the outcome of the panic-mode lawsuits now being filed by the motion picture industry.
There's a small problem with the picture used to depict "spam", as in junk e-mail and the like. It depicts a can of SPAM luncheon meat , which is a registered trademark of Hormel foods.
Hormel's position on this matter is best expressed by the following quotation from their "Spam and the Internet" page:
We do not object to use of [the word "spam"] to describe UCE, although we do object to the use of our product image in association with that term.
This means Hormel don't like pictures of cans of their SPAM luncheon meat used in conjunction with junk e-mail and the like.
I suggest that the logo for "spam" be changed for those legal reasons. Perhaps we could change it to the picture of a pig from O'Reilly's book "Stopping Spam", or some similar porcine picture that's suggestive of "spam".
I happen to have the pair of NASA publications as reference books: (Fifty Year Canon of Solar Eclipses: 1986-2035 and (Fifty Year Canon of Lunar Eclipses: 1986-2035)... so here's the details.
Next total solar eclipse visible from the United States: 21 August 2017. If you live in California, you'll have to go to Oregon to see it (assuming that Oregon's that state north of California, my US geography is not too good)
Then there's a total solar eclipse visible from Texas to the Great Lakes on 8 Apr 2024.
A third American total solar eclipse is on 12 Aug 2045, visible from northern California to Florida.
There's more, but it's pointless posting those because you won't be around in 2078 or 2099 to see those ones (unless you're a Montgomery-Burns-style head-in-a-jar-of-liquid then...)
As for total lunar eclipses, I'll give details of upcoming total eclipses by naming the dates and the approximate position of the point of the Earth's surface that's directly overhead at maximum eclipse:
21 Jan 2000 - Carribbean
16 Jul 2000 - the sea near Brisbane (Australia)
09 Jan 2001 - Saudi Arabia
16 May 2003 - Brazil
09 Nov 2003 - Atlantic Ocean west of Africa
04 May 2004 - Madagascar
28 Oct 2004 - Atlantic Ocean north of Brazil
For the Americans, who are the majority of the Slashotters, these total lunar eclipses should be visible at some point in the night in question:
21 Jan 2000 - good view from all of U.S. and Canada
16 Jul 2000 - beginning of eclipse visible from western U.S., but no view of totality
09 Jan 2001 - end of eclipse visible from eastern U.S. and Canada but no view of totality
16 May 2003 - Good view of eclipse from most of U.S. and Canada, but western regions will miss the beginning of eclipse.
09 Nov 2003 - Most of eclipse visible from the U.S. and Canada, most regions will miss the beginning
04 May 2004 - Not visible
28 Oct 2004 - All of eclipse visible from U.S. and Canada, except for western regions that miss the beginning; all of totality visible
Legend has it that it's this species of penguin (fairy penguin) that bit Linus on the finger when he was at Philip Island, thus inspiring him to adopt a penguin as the logo for Linux. It's unlikely due to the probable lifespans of these birds and that there's so many of them, but wouldn't be ironic if the same penguin that bit Linus was saved by Slashdot donations? If God existed and had a wacky sense of humour, then it could well happen....
As for me, because I live only about 70 kilometres from Philip Island, I think I'll drive down and donate some Australian currency to the penguin hospital in person if they'll let me.
If you ever get your hands on some genuine Australian currency, don't be surprised when you find that the banknotes are made of polymer. The polymer notes last longer than paper money, but they do shrink when you put them in the oven....:)
There's the AC's method of "Hey, look! Elvis" distraction technique (then bend the spoon). But in a large grup of people, there's a chance that someone won't fall for it - especially since this technique won't work a large number of times.
Make the spoon out of soft metal such as tin, and just bend it with one finger in a similar manner to the "Uri Geller" technique.
Perhaps cheaply-made spoons can be bent by thumb pressure in a technique indistinguishable from Uri's "thumb-rubbing" technique.
Yet another method that can be employed is to introduce metal fatigue into the spoon by bending it and straightening it until it can be bent more easily.
There are many dates that could have Y2K potential. Here's just a sample.
4-Jan-2000: First business day in many countries. When people come back from the long weekend and start their computers on the Tuesday, will they work?
31-Jan-2000: The end of the month rolls around. Does all the processing that happens at the end of the month work correctly?
29-Feb-2000: This is the biggest Y2K date apart from 1-Jan-2000. Does your computer know that this date is valid?
End of fiscal year: This date varies in many countries.
31-Dec-2000: Just when you thought Y2K had passed us by, software that assumes all years have 365 days and cannot cope with a 366th day will fail. This actually caused problems on 31-Dec-1996 when software controlling aluminium smelters in New Zealand and Tasmania choked on an unexpected 366th day of the year and shut the smelters down. You don't shut down metal smelters without a very good reason, because they're meant to run continuously.
Y2K isn't the major problem with C software. It's the year 2038. On about January 18, 2038, C's 32-bit time wraps around if the time is encoded as a signed long, and sizeof(long) is 32 bits.
This will affect many date-related calculations in C software. It's not confined to Unix, Linux or any other similar systems, as I have found such software problems in software running on DOS platforms during date compliance testing that included Y2K compliance.
Yes, it means we're all going to go through a situation similar to Y2K all over again leading up to 2038. Nowhere near as bad, of course, but if nothing is done about it, there will be an impact. (Especially if Linux takes over the world!)
An amusing note: 2038 is Unix's Y2K, with the dates starting from 1970. DOS counts dates from 1980, so there could potentially be a Y2K problem on DOS software in 2048 (= 2K).
Virtually all calendric systems that have ever been devised number years from 1. Why? Because that's how ordinal numbers such as first, second and so forth work. The first year was simply called the first year under many systems.
The Ancient Chinese and/or Japanese had a system where years were counted from the time the current Emperor ascended the throne. Some territories in the British Commonwealth also used this system for such purposes as dating legislation. The Romans counted years from the founding of Rome. Jews, Christians and Muslims number years from the timing of major events related to their respective religions. All these systems numbered from one. A "zeroth year in the reign of the current Emperor" is obvious nonsense.
That's why the date on the first day of the new century is going to be 01/01/01 (not 01/01/00!). Using the DD/MM/YY format that I am used to here in Australia, I could read this date as the FIRST day of the FIRST month in the FIRST year of the current century.
It's worth noting here that the way days in the month are numbered - starting from one - is unchanged from the time of the ancient Romans, from whom we got most of our calendar, including the names of most of the months. (For example: Roman Gods: January = Janus, March = Mars; Roman Emperors: July = Julius, August = Augustus; Numbered months: September, October, November, December = seven to ten in Latin.) Things that have changed over about 2,000 years are the number of days assigned to each month and which month is the first month in the year. March used to be the first month of the year. That's why the Leap Day is added to the end of February - it was added to the end of the year - and why the ninth month is called September.
The other reason the ninth month is called September is because the Romans did not have a lot of imagination when naming things. If they couldn't think of a good name, they just gave it a number instead. They even named their children this way sometimes - that's where the name Quentin, meaning "Fifth son" or "Fifth child" came from.
We owe a lot of our calendar to the ancient Romans. Including numbering from one. The Romans did not have a concept of "zero" - it's one of those concepts that might be obvious to us today, but until someone actually thought of it, it never occured to anyone. They didn't need it. Romans concerned themselves with real things, such as trade goods, and an order for zero amphoras of olive oil from Greece wouldn't be considered - if you're going to order something, you always order at least one of it.
For those who are Jewish, there may be religious and ethical problems with eating GM foods. GM "foods" are frequently created by snipping a section of DNA out of one organism and inserting into the genome of another.
Given:
The chapter Leviticus in the the Old Testamant in the Christian Bible contains a prohibition against mating different kinds of animals, and
The rules in Leviticus are often similar to Jewish law
then it is possible that GM foods may not be clean to eat because they're created by a means which may be illegal under Jewish law.
I hope someone who's Jewish and knowledgeable about such things can comment on this.
is restricted, and cannot be accessed. Please do not repeat the request.
The Slashdot effect is truly a sight to behold. I hope the Slashdot effect is always used "for niceness instead of evil" (as Maxwell Smart would have put it). There's not much difference between it and a distributed denial-of-service attack - and let's hope the lawyers of affected sites don't notice the similarity.
For some reason, "please do not repeat the request" reminds me a lot of the "French person" in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where he says "now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time."
proprietary information... which they either obtained by improper means or knew or should have known was obtained by others by improper means
I hope they can prove this allegation of "improper means" in court. Now tell me, if these claims are proven to be false, do the defendants have a case for a suit against the organisation for defamation?
Defendants' posting of the proprietary information licensed by DVD CCA on their web sites has caused the illegal pirating of the motion picture industry's copyrighted content contained on DVDs. Defendants' actions threaten the financial stability of this new digital video format for viewing movies and other images.
I hope they can prove these allegations as well.
The "caused the illegal pirating" allegation could be difficult for the plaintiffs to prove if the defendants have a good lawyer. This charge is the online equivalent of suing a handgun manufacturer for injuries caused by the handguns they make - the toolmaker is not liable for harm caused by the tools they make because they have no control over how the tool is used.
The "financial stability" bit is also interesting. Businesses in general fail to grasp one simple fact: making a profit yesterday and making a profit today does not give a business the right to expect to make a profit tomorrow.
I hope that those involved can pool their resources and hire someone in California to represent them. I also hope that the lawyers for the plaintiffs have proof of valid service for each of the defendants. Is service by e-mail treated as valid service by the courts in various countries these days, considering that it is really easy to forge e-mail? I thought that all legal documents of this kind still had to be sent by registered mail or served by some sort of process server or similar person.
First, a disclaimer: I am not associated with this "Dr Mills" in any way. The name we have in common is merely a coincidence.
The theory has to be bogus.
The Grand Unified Theory, if it is eventually found, will provide a single set of equations to describe the four fundamental forces of nature: strong, weak, electromagnetic and gravity. The Standard Model as currently understood has unified the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces into a single set of equations, but these equations do not include gravity. The unification of gravity with the other forces has occupied the finest minds in nuclear physics for over fifty years. Albert Einstein spent the last thirty years of his life on such a unification and he did not succeed.
Now "Dr" Mills has allegedly created a unified theory of his own, and by using it created a method by which he dissociates water and combines potassium with the hydrogen to produce "hydrinos". As any nuclear physicist worth his salt will tell you, a chemical method cannot produce results that the best particle accelerators existing in the world today have not been able to do.
Also, the process as described cannot produce energy, as it is thermodynamically impossible for it to produce a net energy gain. Energy is required to dissociate the water molecule into its constituents, whether it be by electrolysis, by catalyst or by enzyme. If the alleged process produces ultraviolet light as claimed, the energy required to create this light must come from the dissociation of the water. By the laws of thermodynamics, the energy allegedly produced by the alleged process cannot yield as much energy as was required to dissociate the water molecules.
There is also the question of the "Doctor's" qualifications. Does he have a doctorate in nuclear physics? No. Does he have any accredited degree in nuclear physics? No. Does he have any formal training in nuclear physics? That we don't know, but I believe it's unlikely. Therefore, we can safely assume that the "Doctor" is not qualified to speak on the topic of Grand Unified Theories. Are we to believe that someone with no formal qualifications in nuclear physics has succeeded in something where the greatest minds in nuclear physics of the last fifty years have not? Is Dr Mills, without formal qualifications in the field, a better nuclear physicist than such eminent minds in the field as Einstein and Hawking?
Which, then, is the more likely explanation? That Dr Mills has miraculously and without formal training solved one of the great unsolved scientific problems of our time? Or that he is a fraud and a charlatan, out to fleece gullible people out of their money? The simpler and therefore more likely explanation is that the "Doctor" is a fraud, as is evidenced by his previous exploits.
Like Dr Mills, I lack qualifications in the field of nuclear physics. However, if I can provide good arguments to debunk his claims from general knowledge only, desite my lack of qualifications in the field, then clearly there's something wrong with the claims of Dr Mills.
Be sure not to miss this one, because we won't see another one in the us until May 16, 2003.
There's another lunar eclipse on July 16, 2000 that is visible from east Asia, Australia (best view), and most of the Pacific which is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as one of the longest lunar eclipses. The same circumstances that make the full moon of December 22 worthy of Slashdot discussion also conspire to make the lunar eclipse of July 16 2000 noteworthy:
The full moon of July 16 occurs near lunar apogee, when it appears the smallest in the sky and the moon is travelling at its slowest in its orbit;
The Earth is near aphelion, which means the Earth is also travelling slowly around the sun;
The centre of the Moon will pass within 200 kilometres of the central axis of Earth's shadow cone.
The apogee and aphelion combination makes the eclipse slow, and the really central nature of the eclipse maximises the duration. Together, this makes totality last for 148 minutes, the longest that lunar eclipse totality can last. This is probably the longest lunar eclipse of our lifetimes.
There is one thing that the full moon at perigee provides, and that is an opportunity to photograph the full moon when it appears at its largest in the sky. Then the same photographic arrangement can be used in six months to capture the full moon at close to its smallest in the sky. If you then place the two photographs together side-by-side, the 10% size difference between the perigee full moon and the apogee full moon will be noticeable.
As a member of the Slashdot community, I would like to take the time to offer my condolences to Desmond Llewelyn's family. I and many others in the Slashdot community are fans of his work, and he has also earned our respect for his longevity in Bond movies. Actors for the role of James Bond come and go, but Desmond as 'Q' has been with us almost forever. It is tragic that he has been taken from us in the prime of his life (he would have insisted on that, I'm sure). He will be sadly missed by all who have grown to love his role as 'Q' in James Bond movies, as well as his other acting roles.
Time has name some real twerps as "Man of the Year"
Didn't "Time" name Adolf Hitler as "Man of the Year" sometime in the 30's? I would like to know how they select these people. Interesting styles of facial hair, perhaps? Or maybe "People most likely to do something nasty to a large number of people in the next few years and embarrass Time magazine again." Invading Poland. Newt Gingrich, nuff said. Stupid patents. I'm sure there's many more....
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, pretty much my thoughts. I see the picture of the green chamaeleon with the caption "SuSE", and I tend to think of the chamaeleon as having a name like that: "Suse" or "Susie".
Such a name would be much less confusing for the neophyte than less obvious names like "Kevin", "Engelbert" or "J. Rothwort Fontwoodleton III, Esq."
--
DVD can be defeated. Here's how it might be done:
Think I'm dreaming? Right now, the world is crying out for a viable replacement for the old 1.4 Mb floppy disc. The 1.4 Mb floppy disc is long past its peak of usefulness, but a floppy drive is still installed by default on all new computers, because no replacement is yet available that meets all of the criteria of robustness, ubiquitousness and ease of use. Invent and patent such a replacement, and you will make millions.
I didn't say it would be easy. But to anyone willing to try, I wish you good luck.
--
Stallman has talked about this before. It's a serious issue that must be fought, tooth and nail, with lobbying and with civil disobedience, if necessary.
Civil disobedience? A fine idea, but one must choose a method of civil disobedience that would be appropriate for the issue at hand. I suggest that the place to apply the civil disobedience pressure is the place where such software is usually sold.
Here is how such shink-wrapped software is usually sold:
Now my civil disobedience version (made available to all freely under the GPL):
Do this enough, and stores will begin to get the idea that selling shrink-wrapped software isn't such a great idea, after all.
An important point to consider when considering civil disobedience within the software store is that such stores do not take enough responsibility with respect to these agreements. In particular, the store does not give the customer an opportunity to read the text of the license agreement before purchasing the software. Either the FULL TEXT of the license agreement must be printed on the box, or the store must give the customer a copy of the FULL TEXT of the agreement to read before money changes hands.
Shrink-wrapped software isn't always where you expect it, either. I found one such example in a printer I recently bought, and if I didn't agree with it, I was not allowed to use the printer drivers. This shows how disruptive shrink-wrapped license agreemeents can be.
Disclaimer: I am describing the usual method of purchasing shrink-wrapped software within Australia. Your mileage may vary....
--
I've recently made efforts to decrypt the cookie file format for IE, and I can say what most of the fields are.
id
This is the cookie name. Don't trust any cookie with a name of "id", "user" or names containing these words if they are from a site you don't know or don't trust. It's a tracking cookie. Delete all such cookies on sight (unless they are from a site you trust, like slashdot), and if possible block access from the site via your firewall.
OPT_OUT
This is the cookie value.
doubleclick.net/
This is the domain and path for the cookie. This one means the cookie will be sent to all sites with a domain of doubleclick.net.
0
Don't know what this is, any ideas?
1468938752
31583413
This is the expiration time of the cookie. More details on the format later. When you decrypt this time, you'll find that it's about 2030 or so. Most sites that push cookies at you with an expiration time this far in the future are not to be trusted.
776923520
29321255
This is the creation time of the cookie.
*
I don't know what this is either, any ideas?
The times are a 64-bit number. Take the first number, add the second number * 2^32, and divide by (I think) 10 million. You get number of milliseconds since about 1/1/1601. I have been having a little trouble determining the exact epoch (time when number = 0) of this number, because Microsoft seem to be deliberately obfuscating this information. For example, if you export cookies in Netscape format, the exported time is wrong.
If you want to fake this date and time for any reason, such as destroying any usefulness of tracking you by the creation time, then note that the date and time is always exactly divisible by (I think 10 million), with no remainder.
--
The simplest method would be to either block all traffic from doubleclick.net, or frequently go on search-and-destroy missions through your cookie files, looking for doubleclick.net cookies and systematically removing them all from your system. Profiling cannot work if the ID code is no longer valid.
Another method that would take more effort to set up but can potentially cause irreparable damage to the usefulness of the cookie as a profiling tool follows. Set up a central web site for doubleclick.net cookies. Users of the site would download special software that swaps cookies. Then the software would upload your doubleclick.net cookie, and you would receive another random cookie back. Swapping cookies like this destroys them as a tracking resource.
This isn't illegal, but doubleclick.net may decide to sue the site to force them to stop trading cookies in this way anyway. If this happens, all the users on the site can then launch a class action countersuit against doubleclick.net with the goal of forcing them to stop profiling. For example, does it constitute illegal wiretapping? And does doubleclick.net have a valid end-user licence for the use of the personal information in this way?
Everyone, please remember the horrendous Orwellian scenario that already exists when profiling is combined with Web Bugs (also more euphemistically known as clear gifs). Web Bugs are small (typically 1x1 pixel) clear gifs that are found on the bottom of web pages that inform the owners that the page has been loaded. Doubleclick.net already know what pages you visit, a lot more than you think. And it's happening now.
Doubleclick.net are not the only net terrorists that are acting this way. They are merely the most prominent, and the first that have actually admitted to the practice. Where I refer to doubleclick.net here, substitute many other ad banner companies freely.
If you want to boycott companies, the following need to be boycotted, in order of importance:
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A better idea is the legal equivalent of Death By A Thousand Cuts. If a thousand people filed a thousand lawsuits against the MPAA in a thousand courts in a thousand jurisdictions, the MPAA would have to hire a thousand lawyers to fight a thousand cases. They can ignore e-mails, but they cannot ignore lawsuits.
Think Gulliver and Lilliput. The Lilliputians were able to subdue Gulliver by sheer weight of numbers, and that's how you fight big corporations.
Alternatively, a thousand people all join in a big class action lawsuit, and fight the MPAA on level terms. There's good grounds for countersuits against the MPAA. Antitrust, restriant of trade, even defamation and libel can be made to stick if you throw it hard enough.
Antitrust: They have an illegal monopoly in player software, and will not allow competition.
Restraint of trade: They are forcing users of the Linux users to use Windows to view DVDs.
Defamation and Libel: They are saying that everyone associated with DeCSS is a pirate who is intent on denying the MPAA their fair slice of royalties. They have to prove that in court, and if they can't or won't, hit them with a defamation or libel lawsuit. I find the piracy claims to be extremely libellious to Linux users, and they shouldn't be allowed to get away with these claims.
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You're right. Considering how hard it is to focus X-rays, it is an amazing achievement.
To focus X-rays, one can either find a material that refracts X-rays so that lenses can be built, a material that reflects X-rays so that a reflecting telescope can be built, or find an alternative focusing technique.
X-ray lenses can be built, but the mass of metal required to bend X-rays to a respectable focal length may be too great for a satellite. X-ray mirrors may not be possible. I don't know what they actually use in the satellite, but I think they use an array of mirrors that reflect X-rays in a glancing manner, such that the incoming X-rays are almost parallel to the mirror.
It is interesting to note that the compound eyes of insects focus light in the same manner. Therefore, if the engineers wanted to make another X-ray telescope, they should consult entomologists and study the structures in insect eyes so that the next generation of X-ray telescopes may copy the design principles of insect eyes.
How about defamation, libel, restraint of trade, malicious prosecution ... ? I'm sure a good lawyer can think up lots more :)
Here's what to do if you are a Linux user or distributor:
Get together with a large group of other Linux users, distributors and so forth, and file a countersuit against the MPAA for restraint of trade. A good lawyer could argue that by refusing to make DVD decoder software available for the Linux operating system, the motion picture cartel are harming the Linux market. I'm not a lawyer, nor am I familiar with American laws, so for all I know this wouldn't work, but something tells me that this sort of action is more likely to succeed than the "trade secret" attempt that we have recently seen.
The MPAA is also working on the big assumption that stopping it in America will stop it everywhere. It won't. All it would do is drive DVD decoder technology to countries with less restriction on reverse-engineering. A decoder for Linux will be available, regardless of the outcome of the panic-mode lawsuits now being filed by the motion picture industry.
There's a small problem with the picture used to depict "spam", as in junk e-mail and the like. It depicts a can of SPAM luncheon meat , which is a registered trademark of Hormel foods.
Hormel's position on this matter is best expressed by the following quotation from their "Spam and the Internet" page:
This means Hormel don't like pictures of cans of their SPAM luncheon meat used in conjunction with junk e-mail and the like.
I suggest that the logo for "spam" be changed for those legal reasons. Perhaps we could change it to the picture of a pig from O'Reilly's book "Stopping Spam", or some similar porcine picture that's suggestive of "spam".
Next total solar eclipse visible from the United States: 21 August 2017. If you live in California, you'll have to go to Oregon to see it (assuming that Oregon's that state north of California, my US geography is not too good)
Then there's a total solar eclipse visible from Texas to the Great Lakes on 8 Apr 2024.
A third American total solar eclipse is on 12 Aug 2045, visible from northern California to Florida.
There's more, but it's pointless posting those because you won't be around in 2078 or 2099 to see those ones (unless you're a Montgomery-Burns-style head-in-a-jar-of-liquid then...)
As for total lunar eclipses, I'll give details of upcoming total eclipses by naming the dates and the approximate position of the point of the Earth's surface that's directly overhead at maximum eclipse:
For the Americans, who are the majority of the Slashotters, these total lunar eclipses should be visible at some point in the night in question:
Legend has it that it's this species of penguin (fairy penguin) that bit Linus on the finger when he was at Philip Island, thus inspiring him to adopt a penguin as the logo for Linux. It's unlikely due to the probable lifespans of these birds and that there's so many of them, but wouldn't be ironic if the same penguin that bit Linus was saved by Slashdot donations? If God existed and had a wacky sense of humour, then it could well happen....
:)
As for me, because I live only about 70 kilometres from Philip Island, I think I'll drive down and donate some Australian currency to the penguin hospital in person if they'll let me.
If you ever get your hands on some genuine Australian currency, don't be surprised when you find that the banknotes are made of polymer. The polymer notes last longer than paper money, but they do shrink when you put them in the oven....
The characters in The Matrix know the real secret to bending spoons:
There Is No Spoon
There are many dates that could have Y2K potential. Here's just a sample.
4-Jan-2000: First business day in many countries. When people come back from the long weekend and start their computers on the Tuesday, will they work?
31-Jan-2000: The end of the month rolls around. Does all the processing that happens at the end of the month work correctly?
29-Feb-2000: This is the biggest Y2K date apart from 1-Jan-2000. Does your computer know that this date is valid?
End of fiscal year: This date varies in many countries.
31-Dec-2000: Just when you thought Y2K had passed us by, software that assumes all years have 365 days and cannot cope with a 366th day will fail. This actually caused problems on 31-Dec-1996 when software controlling aluminium smelters in New Zealand and Tasmania choked on an unexpected 366th day of the year and shut the smelters down. You don't shut down metal smelters without a very good reason, because they're meant to run continuously.
Y2K isn't the major problem with C software. It's the year 2038. On about January 18, 2038, C's 32-bit time wraps around if the time is encoded as a signed long, and sizeof(long) is 32 bits.
This will affect many date-related calculations in C software. It's not confined to Unix, Linux or any other similar systems, as I have found such software problems in software running on DOS platforms during date compliance testing that included Y2K compliance.
Yes, it means we're all going to go through a situation similar to Y2K all over again leading up to 2038. Nowhere near as bad, of course, but if nothing is done about it, there will be an impact. (Especially if Linux takes over the world!)
An amusing note: 2038 is Unix's Y2K, with the dates starting from 1970. DOS counts dates from 1980, so there could potentially be a Y2K problem on DOS software in 2048 (= 2K).
Virtually all calendric systems that have ever been devised number years from 1. Why? Because that's how ordinal numbers such as first, second and so forth work. The first year was simply called the first year under many systems.
The Ancient Chinese and/or Japanese had a system where years were counted from the time the current Emperor ascended the throne. Some territories in the British Commonwealth also used this system for such purposes as dating legislation. The Romans counted years from the founding of Rome. Jews, Christians and Muslims number years from the timing of major events related to their respective religions. All these systems numbered from one. A "zeroth year in the reign of the current Emperor" is obvious nonsense.
That's why the date on the first day of the new century is going to be 01/01/01 (not 01/01/00!). Using the DD/MM/YY format that I am used to here in Australia, I could read this date as the FIRST day of the FIRST month in the FIRST year of the current century.
It's worth noting here that the way days in the month are numbered - starting from one - is unchanged from the time of the ancient Romans, from whom we got most of our calendar, including the names of most of the months. (For example: Roman Gods: January = Janus, March = Mars; Roman Emperors: July = Julius, August = Augustus; Numbered months: September, October, November, December = seven to ten in Latin.) Things that have changed over about 2,000 years are the number of days assigned to each month and which month is the first month in the year. March used to be the first month of the year. That's why the Leap Day is added to the end of February - it was added to the end of the year - and why the ninth month is called September.
The other reason the ninth month is called September is because the Romans did not have a lot of imagination when naming things. If they couldn't think of a good name, they just gave it a number instead. They even named their children this way sometimes - that's where the name Quentin, meaning "Fifth son" or "Fifth child" came from.
We owe a lot of our calendar to the ancient Romans. Including numbering from one. The Romans did not have a concept of "zero" - it's one of those concepts that might be obvious to us today, but until someone actually thought of it, it never occured to anyone. They didn't need it. Romans concerned themselves with real things, such as trade goods, and an order for zero amphoras of olive oil from Greece wouldn't be considered - if you're going to order something, you always order at least one of it.
For those who are Jewish, there may be religious and ethical problems with eating GM foods. GM "foods" are frequently created by snipping a section of DNA out of one organism and inserting into the genome of another.
Given:
- The chapter Leviticus in the the Old Testamant in the Christian Bible contains a prohibition against mating different kinds of animals, and
- The rules in Leviticus are often similar to Jewish law
then it is possible that GM foods may not be clean to eat because they're created by a means which may be illegal under Jewish law.I hope someone who's Jewish and knowledgeable about such things can comment on this.
Error 403: Access Forbidden
The URL you requested:
http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/~clau/mozilla
is restricted, and cannot be accessed. Please do not repeat the request.
The Slashdot effect is truly a sight to behold. I hope the Slashdot effect is always used "for niceness instead of evil" (as Maxwell Smart would have put it). There's not much difference between it and a distributed denial-of-service attack - and let's hope the lawyers of affected sites don't notice the similarity.
For some reason, "please do not repeat the request" reminds me a lot of the "French person" in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where he says "now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time."
proprietary information ... which they either obtained by improper means or knew or should have known was obtained by others by improper means
I hope they can prove this allegation of "improper means" in court. Now tell me, if these claims are proven to be false, do the defendants have a case for a suit against the organisation for defamation?
Defendants' posting of the proprietary information licensed by DVD CCA on their web sites has caused the illegal pirating of the motion picture industry's copyrighted content contained on DVDs. Defendants' actions threaten the financial stability of this new digital video format for viewing movies and other images.
I hope they can prove these allegations as well.
The "caused the illegal pirating" allegation could be difficult for the plaintiffs to prove if the defendants have a good lawyer. This charge is the online equivalent of suing a handgun manufacturer for injuries caused by the handguns they make - the toolmaker is not liable for harm caused by the tools they make because they have no control over how the tool is used.
The "financial stability" bit is also interesting. Businesses in general fail to grasp one simple fact: making a profit yesterday and making a profit today does not give a business the right to expect to make a profit tomorrow.
I hope that those involved can pool their resources and hire someone in California to represent them. I also hope that the lawyers for the plaintiffs have proof of valid service for each of the defendants. Is service by e-mail treated as valid service by the courts in various countries these days, considering that it is really easy to forge e-mail? I thought that all legal documents of this kind still had to be sent by registered mail or served by some sort of process server or similar person.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, etc etc etc.
First, a disclaimer: I am not associated with this "Dr Mills" in any way. The name we have in common is merely a coincidence.
The theory has to be bogus.
The Grand Unified Theory, if it is eventually found, will provide a single set of equations to describe the four fundamental forces of nature: strong, weak, electromagnetic and gravity. The Standard Model as currently understood has unified the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces into a single set of equations, but these equations do not include gravity. The unification of gravity with the other forces has occupied the finest minds in nuclear physics for over fifty years. Albert Einstein spent the last thirty years of his life on such a unification and he did not succeed.
Now "Dr" Mills has allegedly created a unified theory of his own, and by using it created a method by which he dissociates water and combines potassium with the hydrogen to produce "hydrinos". As any nuclear physicist worth his salt will tell you, a chemical method cannot produce results that the best particle accelerators existing in the world today have not been able to do.
Also, the process as described cannot produce energy, as it is thermodynamically impossible for it to produce a net energy gain. Energy is required to dissociate the water molecule into its constituents, whether it be by electrolysis, by catalyst or by enzyme. If the alleged process produces ultraviolet light as claimed, the energy required to create this light must come from the dissociation of the water. By the laws of thermodynamics, the energy allegedly produced by the alleged process cannot yield as much energy as was required to dissociate the water molecules.
There is also the question of the "Doctor's" qualifications. Does he have a doctorate in nuclear physics? No. Does he have any accredited degree in nuclear physics? No. Does he have any formal training in nuclear physics? That we don't know, but I believe it's unlikely. Therefore, we can safely assume that the "Doctor" is not qualified to speak on the topic of Grand Unified Theories. Are we to believe that someone with no formal qualifications in nuclear physics has succeeded in something where the greatest minds in nuclear physics of the last fifty years have not? Is Dr Mills, without formal qualifications in the field, a better nuclear physicist than such eminent minds in the field as Einstein and Hawking?
Which, then, is the more likely explanation? That Dr Mills has miraculously and without formal training solved one of the great unsolved scientific problems of our time? Or that he is a fraud and a charlatan, out to fleece gullible people out of their money? The simpler and therefore more likely explanation is that the "Doctor" is a fraud, as is evidenced by his previous exploits.
Like Dr Mills, I lack qualifications in the field of nuclear physics. However, if I can provide good arguments to debunk his claims from general knowledge only, desite my lack of qualifications in the field, then clearly there's something wrong with the claims of Dr Mills.
There's another lunar eclipse on July 16, 2000 that is visible from east Asia, Australia (best view), and most of the Pacific which is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as one of the longest lunar eclipses. The same circumstances that make the full moon of December 22 worthy of Slashdot discussion also conspire to make the lunar eclipse of July 16 2000 noteworthy:
The apogee and aphelion combination makes the eclipse slow, and the really central nature of the eclipse maximises the duration. Together, this makes totality last for 148 minutes, the longest that lunar eclipse totality can last. This is probably the longest lunar eclipse of our lifetimes.
There is one thing that the full moon at perigee provides, and that is an opportunity to photograph the full moon when it appears at its largest in the sky. Then the same photographic arrangement can be used in six months to capture the full moon at close to its smallest in the sky. If you then place the two photographs together side-by-side, the 10% size difference between the perigee full moon and the apogee full moon will be noticeable.
As a member of the Slashdot community, I would like to take the time to offer my condolences to Desmond Llewelyn's family. I and many others in the Slashdot community are fans of his work, and he has also earned our respect for his longevity in Bond movies. Actors for the role of James Bond come and go, but Desmond as 'Q' has been with us almost forever. It is tragic that he has been taken from us in the prime of his life (he would have insisted on that, I'm sure). He will be sadly missed by all who have grown to love his role as 'Q' in James Bond movies, as well as his other acting roles.
Time has name some real twerps as "Man of the Year"
Didn't "Time" name Adolf Hitler as "Man of the Year" sometime in the 30's? I would like to know how they select these people. Interesting styles of facial hair, perhaps? Or maybe "People most likely to do something nasty to a large number of people in the next few years and embarrass Time magazine again." Invading Poland. Newt Gingrich, nuff said. Stupid patents. I'm sure there's many more....