No, it's not me. Some people are just dorks I guess. I'm sort of flattered, though.
Re:Bad publicity and Watching a meteor shower
on
Leonid Meteor Shower
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· Score: 1
I tried putting red cellophane on my torch, but it was too hot and it all melted. Maybe I need more cellophane, or less fire.
Forgot about that problem. I think the first time I tried this I made sure it was a cheap torch. I don't know what sort of torch you were using, but the one I had was big enough that the cellophane wasn't too close to the light bulb. If you want to be really cheap, you can get the same sort of effect from a red plastic shopping bag. (I used the one that the torch came in.)
Bad publicity and Watching a meteor shower
on
Leonid Meteor Shower
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· Score: 5, Informative
Woohoo! IAAAA (I Am An Amateur Astronomer). =) Anyway, I have two main
things to say. The first is a rant about the media blowing things out of
proportion, and the second is some tips on how to look for a meteor
shower.
I hope it is really great this year, but please nobody assume that it's
going to happen just because it's in a newspaper or on the news.
Astronomy's one of those cost-benefit things where 99 out of 100 times there's a
warning and you get up at 3 in the morning and nothing happens. The other
time you see something and it's either average, or spectacular and a
life-long memory.
In 1966, everyone assumed that the Leonids had died, because they hadn't
shown up at all in the 30's. A relatively small number of people went out
at the time that they were predicted, and they saw a really awesome
display.
The Leonids were again predicted to be really big in 1999, to the point
where CNN was showing Japanese people in downtown Tokyo setting up
deck chairs on the roof of office blocks. The whole thing fizzled, and
immediately afterwards lots of the editorial media started complaining
that nothing had happened. The same thing was predicted again for last
year, and nothing really happened on the spectacular scale of what was
expected.
This year, someone else has predicted that it'll happen by using a
slightly different system. Like I said I hope it's right. I'll definitely be up in the morning watching with friends from my local club, and if nothing happens we'll drag out the telescopes nad look at other stuff in the sky.
We never bother bringing the media in on possibly "big" events anymore,
though, because they just blow the entire general public's expectations
out of proportion and then blame astronomers for being wrong when it
doesn't come off. If something happens then we all get to see it and tell
the media after it's happened - if we're lucky, someone got a good
photograph.
So don't get your hopes up. Anyway, for everyone who does go out and look, here's some pointers:
Try to find a group of people - ideally people who are interested in
observing of some sort, but otherwise just grab some friends. Astronomical
observing is so much more fun when there are other people around
to enjoy it.
Take some binoculars if you have them - they'll give you something to do
if there aren't any meteors straight away, or at all. You can see
so much more in the sky with binoculars. Magnification isn't
important, but the size of the objective lens is, because the bigger it is
the more light it collects and the more you can see.
Find somewhere dark. The darker, the better. Get away from civilisation,
get away from streetlights. Don't use a torch because a
flash of it wrecks anything up to an hour's worth of your eye's dark
adaption. If and when you need to use a torch, use a red filtered one,
since red light has the least effect on your eyes. (Putting some red
cellophane over an ordinary torch usually works okay.) Be careful of
interior car lights that come on when you open the door - they're
annoying.
Take lots of warm clothes, and be prepared to be up all night.
Several layers of clothes is good, because the air pockets trap in body
heat. Also grab a warm hat, gloves, and generally as much as you can find.
You don't have to wear it straight away but have it nearby for when you
get cold. (Which often happens when you're outside at night and not moving
around much - especially when moving into the winter like the northern
hemisphere is.)
Take along a thermos and put hot coffee in it, or something similar.
You'll want it after a while and having it there is much better than going
inside. Also having a deck chair or a rug, or something else to lie back on for looking up is good. It gets a bit difficult straining your neck back all the time.
The Leonids are called that because they fly out from about that part of
the sky. When the Earth's going through space, it's like the dust
splattering on a windscreen, and the central point of that splattering
(for this shower) is Leo. You might see them all over the sky, but they
can all be traced back to this one point. If you want to know where and
when Leo is, you could use a star map program like this one (I don't think there are any decent open source ones available, but please tell me if anyone knows of one), or try a website like this one. Even if Leo's not
visible, you might still see meteors - they'll just look like they're
coming from below the horizon.
Have fun. =P And if you're still interested, go and find a local
astronomical society. Local ones are usually better than big ones because you get to actually go out and do stuff.
I can remember when shareware programs were very prominent, which was especially during the time when dial-up computer bulletin boards were around.
I'm not sure if there was any "official" standard licence, but nearly every shareware author included a licence stating that you could charge for distribution costs of the program, but not for the program itself. Usually this was placed on a shareware version of the program, and anyone wanting the full version would send money to the author or (on the later days) a publishing company.
The thing is that even with this licence, there were still companies that made money - completely legitimately - through distributing shareware programs. Simtel and various others made CD's full of thousands of shareware programs, an application gold mine at the time, that people could buy in shops for $30. They were really popular for BBS system operators.
There was at least one other company near where I am that was packaging up shareware programs into sleek plastic satchels, and marketing them under their distribution brand in all the computer shops for about $10 each. It was completely legal because they were charging for the the time and effort they'd put into the packaging and distribution.
So in answer to your question about whether that clause in the OTSL prevents programs being available for commercial re-selling, the answer is no it doesn't. It's completely possible for commercial entities to re-sell it. Of course, companies could use it commercially anyway without trying to sell it, and the clause you've highlighted doesn't talk about that at all. I'm not sure how you think any inability to sell the code prevents it from being used commercially. Just because they're not allowed to sell someone's effort doesn't mean they can't use it for their business to make money.
The problem is that in order for all browsers to see everything, a web site would probably have to use HTML 1.0, resulting in a very boring web. More current technologies aren't standards based since they are so new. Where does it stop? Everything must be compatible with Mosaic 1.0?
I disagree. There are at least two ways to provide content for web browsers that don't support the latest standards. The first is to detect the browser and display for it, and the other is to design degradable pages - which is the proper way to do it, and what the w3c has been continuously trying to encourage people to do for the last ten years. (Except for a couple of looney years when HTML 3.2 was around.)
If you look properly at the HTML 4.01 or even better the XHTML 1.0 strict spec (which is basically the same thing except with an XML syntax enforced), the whole thing is rigged around building a page using only basic markup like headings, paragraphs, lists, and so on. Nearly everything to do with formatting has been deprecated, except for what was more or less available in HTML originally.
The HTML syntax has been reduced to the one for providing the actual information - or that's what the intention is, at least. All of the cool looking stuff has been moved to other specs like CSS (which is approaching version 3), that are defined externally and linked to the HTML file. With the most modern standards, it's possible to take a very basic HTML web page of marked up information, and turn it into a flashy, presentational marvel. That is for people who choose to use browsers that display those extentions. At the same time however, it doesn't prevent blind people from getting directly to the information. It doesn't prevent people using lynx.
IMHO, good web design should always put the information part on the HTML and build the presentation around it. The alternative is serving browser-specific content, but that's really ugly because your server needs to know about all the different browsers, and it needs more server hardware for the extra processing.
The time where it is useful is for web browsers that think they support a certain standard and act like they support a certain standard, but then completely screw it up. Netscape 4 does this with CSS. Some of the earlier browsers do it with javascript, and so on.
It's not just legacy browsers that don't support modern standards, it's modern browsers that don't work in visual media. For example, tell me how a speech browser would support the tabbed menu selector at the top of MSN in a way that would convey "The Microsoft Network Experience". And yet you can be sure it supports all the standards that are relevant to its media.
The thing is that it's always supposed to have been up to the user agent on the user end to decide how to present the content. That's why web servers serve up markup instead of images. I wish more managers out there would understand that. Incidently, does anyone know if Microsoft was letting in MSIE clients who had CSS and/or Javascript disabled? I forgot to check.
My feeling now is that Microsoft has just recently used some hypocritical doublespeak and screwed over a general management view of how web standards are supposed to work, stating some of the facts but ignoring the most important ideals that they're there for.
I wish/. posters and moderators would just sit and think for a couple of minutes.. (I guess I shouldn't expect more from slashdot.) Try going for something that's actually insightful or interesting or informative instead of knee-jerk anti-Microsoft.
This can be brought back to the locked door argument that comes up over and over again. Just because someone's lock is faulty doesn't mean that it's okay to break into their home. Same with writing a virus.
Whether it's industrial terrorism or not should depend on the intent of the person who released the virus, and whether or not they believed or intended it would attack an industry rather than just a specific person - which would be a more ordinary crime instead.
It's the same as if someone broke into a company's building and spiked their water supply so they all got too sick to work. That's also industrial terrorism, and I don't see how it's so different from crippling a company by breaking their network.
It'd be quite hard for a person who released any of the recent anti-Microsoft worms or viruses to admit that they weren't in some way of malicious intent and didn't realise they could do serious industrial damage. That's industrial terrorism. Just because you don't have to step outside your home doesn't make it okay.
Irrespective of Microsoft's attitude toward security, which incidently is one that I wouldn't trust or use personally for anything important, I don't think you can easily claim that all viruses aren't industrial terrorism.
And yes, I do think that Microsoft should fix their own problems and no legislation they're trying to push through should let them off. I don't like Microsoft's tactics, I just agree with what they're arguing.
If ISP's were owned and operated by governments for the purpose of delivering email, I'd agree with you. But because they're commercial entities who have an independent agreement with a user, I don't personally have a problem with blocking email.
ISP's provide Internet connectivity. If and when they provide a pop3 server (or something else) to relay people's mail, it's an added bonus.
I don't know if MAPS is the way to go or not, but IMHO anything criminal should come from the ISP breaking an agreement with the user - not just automatic determined by a government. There are lots of reasons why an ISP might not want to agree to deliver all email in the first place, and governments shouldn't require them to because of their business category. If there's an arrangement with users that says the ISP should deliver a person's email, and they don't carry that out, then there's a problem.
Hopefully that's a normal part of most ISP agreements, but I don't know for sure. I don't like it that lots of ISP's use MAPS without properly informing their users what's going on so people can decide.
Where I'm living (New Zealand) it's a legal requirement for businesses to accept cash as payment if that is what the customer wants to pay with.
I'm not sure exactly how it's worked out, but I think it applies specifically if you accept bank deposits for something (which is the only other type of money by definition), you have to accept an equal amount of cash as an alternative. It probably doesn't apply with barter systems.
The main reason for this is partly what you've just talked about. People need the option to pay for something without the risk of being tracked.
The other reason is that by keeping cash money relevant the government can be aware of how much legitimate money is out there, since bank deposits are just an abstraction of real cash. Even though they can inflate it lots of times by being loaned and re-loaned, they can't exist without it.
Thanks for confirming it. One thing about this that I'm not sure I understand is where you say it emits radiation.
One definitive concept about black holes is that nothing can escape from past the event horizon including light and other radiation. Do you mean radiation from other things that come near it without getting too close?
Black holes have a reputation for being mass-gobbling irreversible singularities, and they are. But this doesn't mean a black hole where the Sun is would swallow the Earth. I'm not an expert so someone can correct me if they know it better or more accurately.
Any amount of mass can be turned into a black hole - you just have to crush it into a small enough space. This is because every bit of matter has an event horizon, including the Sun (or the Earth for that matter). The difference with the Sun and most things is that the event horizon for the amount of matter in the sun is smaller than the Sun. If you crushed all of Sun's matter into a sufficiently tiny space that it was all inside, then everything else that moved inside would collapse and not return.
What most people don't realise is that if the Sun spontaneously turned into a black hole, we wouldn't die from being sucked in. We'd die from lack of solar energy. Because the Sun-black-hole would have the same mass, everything orbiting it would continue to orbit it the same way it is at the moment. The only big difference would be when something happened to wander inside the event horizon at which point it wouldn't leave, if you ignore all the wierd relativity things that go on at that point at least.
So I guess the point is that just because someone says they might be able to make a black hole, it doesn't mean you'll be instantly sucked in tommorrow without any warning.
Meta information isn't restrictive. It's descriptive.
If you chose to ignore an author's copyright notices then that's completely up to you, and this wouldn't stop you from copying it.
The main problem I have with the "information wants to be free" crowd is when someone takes my work and starts showing it off and taking credit for it as their own. Giving it away is one thing, but if it goes into the public domain I'd lose most of my incentive to create anything new.
I'm not in favour of totalitarian restrictive measures like CSS that work like a broadsword in blocking people's rights to fair use. But allowing authors to hold copyrights on their work is perfectly okay the way I see it.
I know that there are arguments about how if you place information on the web then it's practically public domain, and there's some merit to that I guess. After all, how can you stop people from downloading it?
At the same time though, I think it's silly not to allow people to put their stories and their artwork and what is essentially their copyrighted material on the web where people can access it without the ability to tell people not to copy it.
The napster-like thing with many image search engines is a problem. Even when image search engines including google can give a good indication of where an image is coming from, they often show complete versions of them (even if reduced size) that people can download without seeing any copyright information, and save without going through the source. For text searches there's a fair use issue because most search engines only display a couple of lines, except I've heard some people complain about the google cache. Also it's possible to put meta information on pages saying you don't want them indexed. With image searches it's much more difficult.
When Babylon 5 was around, and probably still, there was a policy that fan websites could use as many promotional images as they wanted to as long as they explicitly stated that they were copyright to the studio, and required everyone grabbing it to say the same.
Image search engines can't do this because they can't read things like watermarks. What we could do though is have a standard allowing for publishers to associate copyright information with files so that search engines know when and how they should be able to index and display other people's copyrighted work.
It would be a voluntary thing and if search engines want to make legal judgements about whether copyright claims are going too far, it would be completely up to them. But it would allow for image search engines to operate cleanly and make sure they don't go futher than the copyright holder wants them to, at least with reason of a good legal argument.
Make it a text file in the same directory, or something. Requiring it to be at the top level directory of a domain would mean that some publishers without access to that dir won't easily be able to set meta information for their own stuff.
The ACM code of ethics has deliberate loopholes!
on
ACM vs. RIAA
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· Score: 3, Informative
Are you sure you've read the code properly? Just because you don't agree with the executives of the society doesn't mean you can't argue against them. That what scientific debate is for, and from what I can tell having just checked, those executives haven't influenced the idea behind the code of ethics at all.
As it should be with any good society, the ACM does not dictate to its members. On the contrary, the members define the ACM and what it stands for. This isn't rhetoric, it's realtime definition generation and the ACM's code of ethics demonstrates it perfectly.
In the past couple of weeks I've been looking around for papers crossing ethics and databases for some postgraduate work I'm doing. The presence of papers in the ACM digital library was strangely vacuuous, but I did find one paper by Donn B. Parker titled Rules of Ethics in Information Processing. It was published in 1968 in the Communications of the ACM. You can see the abstract here, but you might need an ACM login for the abstract and probably a member to download the pdf.
When he wrote it, Donn Parker was the Secretary of the ACM as well as the Chairman of the ACM Professional Standards and Practices Committee. He was arguing in favour of the first ever edition of the ethical rules of conduct for ACM members that was adopted in 1966.
One of the major points of his argument was that it was important to have guidelines to effectively say that "members must be ethical". On the other hand, the guidelines were very cleverly written so as not to say what ethical was. Everything that mattered was left to the judgement of the member.
The idea was not to impose any specific rules on members, but to simply require them to use good judgement and common sense in what they consider ethical, and abide by it. If, on the other hand, a member did something that they clearly should have known was wrong and couldn't offer a reasonable argument against it, there would be grounds to have them thrown out of the society.
Even looking at it now though, I think it would be possible to argue that it's written in the same form. Consider section 1.5 where it says "Copies of software should be made only with proper authorization. Unauthorized duplication of materials must not be condoned."
Nowhere does it define what "proper authorization" actually is. This is left up to the member to decide, and it's feasible that under some circumstances someone might argue that proper authorization doesn't require consent of the copyright holder.
Section 2.3 specifically says "ACM members must obey existing local, state,province, national, and international laws unless there is a compelling ethical basis not to do so. Policies and procedures of the organizations in which one participates must also be obeyed. But compliance must be balanced with the recognition that sometimes existing laws and rules may be immoral or inappropriate and, therefore, must be challenged. Violation of a law or regulation may be ethical when that law or rule has inadequate moral basis or when it conflicts with another law judged to be more important. If one decides to violate a law or rule because it is viewed as unethical, or for any other reason, one must fully accept responsibility for one's actions and for the consequences."
This is a complete let-off by the ACM if you want to protest against the DMCA with civil disobedience. It's saying that you shouldn't drag other people (eg. employer) down with you unless they consent. But if you seriously disagree with the ethics of the law then go ahead and protest.
Whether it was in 1966 or 2001 and regardless of how many words there are, the ACM code of ethics has been very cleverly written. In so many words, it basically tells people to trust their common sense and don't do anything stupid. That's exactly what ethics are, and the ACM isn't telling you otherwise. I think you should consider rejoining.
If you're in a public place, information about everything you do is public property, right? Or alternatively if you're on private property then the property owner can elect to make it public.
As long as the price is affordable, what's to stop some company from setting up several thousand cameras around the place tracking people's movements? There's no privacy in a public place - it's completely public information.
Then what's to stop such a company from on-selling specific information about any given person?
You have a right to privacy, not to obscurity. To date, obscurity is the only thing that's been protecting people in public places. When there's thousands or millions of people, tracking one person is hard.
Obviously you're not doing anything wrong, so there's no reason to worry about it. Never mind the fact that losing the obscurity that everyone's had before technology took it away could completely destroy your life. Consider all the things that might go wrong if your employer, your spouse, your children/parents, or your stalker decide to purchace information about where you've been and what you've been doing in public places.
This is why I get tired and sick to death of people who keep stating that you're safe and there's no point in worrying as long as you're not doing anything wrong. Losing privacy isn't the problem because in 9 times out of 10 the privacy people had hasn't been lost. The obscurity that nobody had an official right to but everyone took for granted has been lost.
It doesn't even take a corrupt judicial system to argue against it.
I think the main difference is that a corporation will have a 4000 word click through licence allowing it, that 99% of people don't bother to read.
That's why I always at least flick through licences before installing anything. The main sections to watch out for are about the collecting of any information, what they do with any information they collect, and the installation of any software.
I haven't thought it through properly, but "short" and "fat" don't seem to describe physical characteristics much to me anyway. They're relative terms, because you can't know what short is without having a baseline average height to measure it against.
Maybe you'd have objective attributes or elements like height and waist diameter.
The only confirmed life on other planets far away will be from "Intellegent Life" (Meaning they have access to radios).
This isn't true at all, although I guess you can seriously restrict your definition of confirm to make it true.
If you can examine the atmosphere of a planet, you can tell how much of what elements are present. From this it's possible to make a good judgement if life was needed to generate it.
Examining the atmosphere from this distance isn't exactly easy, but it's possible under the right circumstances. You might watch changes to a light spectrum as the planet occults a background star, or compare refracted light from the star that it's orbiting.
Don't underestimate the amount of information that data-starved astronomers can get out of what's available, though.
If this is a 2+ player competition and they're the right sorts of games (like the rock-paper-scissors game that it mentioned), whoever wins it might have to figure out a way to consistently beat the tit-for-tat algorithm.
Tit-for-tat is one of the dead simplest game playing algorithms, and collectively it's one of the most successful.
It's based on the rule of "always do what the other player did last move". Under most circumstances it's impossible for it to actually win a game because the other player is always one step ahead. But its strength is in winning tournaments.
While it always loses, it never loses by much. This is different from other algorithms which usually have about as many weaknesses as they have strengths and will usually flunk out in at least some trials.
If someone can beat it consistently in a tournament situation, they really will have accomplished something in AI. Of course, this whole thing depends on exactly how the rules are structured, the scoring system and the information available to the program.
I more or less agree with you that on it's own a protest won't have much effect, and mostly for the reasons you've given too.
To make a difference to the general public, the media is one of the most important channels. Getting the media to understand what the issue is is (IMHO) one of the keys to getting the point through to everyone.
A protest doesn't do this by itself, if at all. But if everyone would just write a polite letter to their local newspaper it could make a really big difference. Getting published isn't necessarily that important. Just writing to the editors and the journalists and actually telling them what the problem is in a brief and concise way could easily result in a lot more attention from them in the future.
Fit the main points inside the first 200 words, then elaborate if needed.
For the record, there's a section in the New Zealand review titled New Exceptions or Permitted Uses. At least they're thinking about the rights of the user not being trampled on.
We escaped Code Red (if you can call it 'escaping' when the security and network admins of half the world spend 12 hours on Friday working on it) largely because eEye reversed the worm , giving the Whitehouse.gov people enough time to blackhole the IP the worm author had hard-coded.
For the record, I'd like to point out that not everyone did escape Code Red lightly. The contractor in the office next to ours came back from a holiday this morning to find a $US1500 ISP bill on his desk, which would usually have been about $US50 max for a month.
This bill might seem unusual to people in the states but in lots of non-US places, international traffic isn't cheap.
The irony is that he wasn't even running a web server. His Win2k install had put it on the system and set it up idle by default. Pretty silly if you ask me.
There are lots of arguments against using computers, or other technology for that matter, for voting. I agree with pretty much all of it, but I also think that a lot of people overlook one of the very important reasons that ticking a ballot is better than using computers.
To put it simply, everyone can understand the process - barring the very challenged. The process of indicating a candidate on paper, putting it in a box and having it counted by people reading it is an almost 100% manual process. Virtually anyone can understand it, and therefore trust it based on their own judgement.
Compare this with a computer voting system, or even a mechanical voting system. Show even a simple computer program to the masses and 99%+ of the general population won't understand it. Up this exponentially for something based on a distributed system.
Nearly everyone has to rely on and trust a minority of the population to verify that their vote is actually being recorded correctly. Even for those who understand it, actually formerly proving that it works is one total bastard of a job. Then there's verifying the proof over and over, verifying the compilers, making sure the hardware is 100% accurate, and there's always room for lawsuits when there's big corporate money sponsoring government involved.
Alongside arguments of people having guns stuck to their heads in secret and so on, this is one of the big reasons that I think I'll always support cumpulsory anonymous polling booths run in a very manual, and very understandable way.
In my experience to date, a lot of the people who want net voting are people who don't have a clue about the risks or problems involved with the software development process, and are simply more interested in convenience. It makes sense for things like internal corporation votes, but general public elections shouldn't change, IMHO.
I also mis-read it the first time and was thinking the same thing, but if you check it a bit closer, it says "information" in material objects. That's a lot more relevant.
I think the key point to this patent without having taken legal advice, is that it's talking about point of sale. As usual all the initial modded-up comments are uninformed and ranting about how they were downloading before 1985. (The slashdot writeup doesn't help.)
But it's really only relevant to people and companies who are selling downloads. So if you require payment before someone can download some information, this patent might (or might not) be relevant.
I'm wondering how easy it might be to get around simply by changing the system slightly, like checking for authorisation code twice instead of once for example. I'm sure I remember an audio clip of that patent office guy stating that Barnes & Noble could quite feasibly run a 2-click ordering system to avoid infringing on Amazon's 1-click, and that would seem like the same sort of thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for highlighting it. I'm flattered but I'm glad the moron isn't getting credit.
No, it's not me. Some people are just dorks I guess. I'm sort of flattered, though.
Forgot about that problem. I think the first time I tried this I made sure it was a cheap torch. I don't know what sort of torch you were using, but the one I had was big enough that the cellophane wasn't too close to the light bulb. If you want to be really cheap, you can get the same sort of effect from a red plastic shopping bag. (I used the one that the torch came in.)
Woohoo! IAAAA (I Am An Amateur Astronomer). =) Anyway, I have two main things to say. The first is a rant about the media blowing things out of proportion, and the second is some tips on how to look for a meteor shower.
I hope it is really great this year, but please nobody assume that it's going to happen just because it's in a newspaper or on the news.
Astronomy's one of those cost-benefit things where 99 out of 100 times there's a warning and you get up at 3 in the morning and nothing happens. The other time you see something and it's either average, or spectacular and a life-long memory.
In 1966, everyone assumed that the Leonids had died, because they hadn't shown up at all in the 30's. A relatively small number of people went out at the time that they were predicted, and they saw a really awesome display.
The Leonids were again predicted to be really big in 1999, to the point where CNN was showing Japanese people in downtown Tokyo setting up deck chairs on the roof of office blocks. The whole thing fizzled, and immediately afterwards lots of the editorial media started complaining that nothing had happened. The same thing was predicted again for last year, and nothing really happened on the spectacular scale of what was expected.
This year, someone else has predicted that it'll happen by using a slightly different system. Like I said I hope it's right. I'll definitely be up in the morning watching with friends from my local club, and if nothing happens we'll drag out the telescopes nad look at other stuff in the sky.
We never bother bringing the media in on possibly "big" events anymore, though, because they just blow the entire general public's expectations out of proportion and then blame astronomers for being wrong when it doesn't come off. If something happens then we all get to see it and tell the media after it's happened - if we're lucky, someone got a good photograph.
So don't get your hopes up. Anyway, for everyone who does go out and look, here's some pointers:
Have fun. =P And if you're still interested, go and find a local astronomical society. Local ones are usually better than big ones because you get to actually go out and do stuff.
I can remember when shareware programs were very prominent, which was especially during the time when dial-up computer bulletin boards were around.
I'm not sure if there was any "official" standard licence, but nearly every shareware author included a licence stating that you could charge for distribution costs of the program, but not for the program itself. Usually this was placed on a shareware version of the program, and anyone wanting the full version would send money to the author or (on the later days) a publishing company.
The thing is that even with this licence, there were still companies that made money - completely legitimately - through distributing shareware programs. Simtel and various others made CD's full of thousands of shareware programs, an application gold mine at the time, that people could buy in shops for $30. They were really popular for BBS system operators.
There was at least one other company near where I am that was packaging up shareware programs into sleek plastic satchels, and marketing them under their distribution brand in all the computer shops for about $10 each. It was completely legal because they were charging for the the time and effort they'd put into the packaging and distribution.
So in answer to your question about whether that clause in the OTSL prevents programs being available for commercial re-selling, the answer is no it doesn't. It's completely possible for commercial entities to re-sell it. Of course, companies could use it commercially anyway without trying to sell it, and the clause you've highlighted doesn't talk about that at all. I'm not sure how you think any inability to sell the code prevents it from being used commercially. Just because they're not allowed to sell someone's effort doesn't mean they can't use it for their business to make money.
I disagree. There are at least two ways to provide content for web browsers that don't support the latest standards. The first is to detect the browser and display for it, and the other is to design degradable pages - which is the proper way to do it, and what the w3c has been continuously trying to encourage people to do for the last ten years. (Except for a couple of looney years when HTML 3.2 was around.)
Right back since HTML 2.0, which was the first stable formal release of an HTML spec, the w3c has requested that user agents ignore what they don't understand.
If you look properly at the HTML 4.01 or even better the XHTML 1.0 strict spec (which is basically the same thing except with an XML syntax enforced), the whole thing is rigged around building a page using only basic markup like headings, paragraphs, lists, and so on. Nearly everything to do with formatting has been deprecated, except for what was more or less available in HTML originally.
The HTML syntax has been reduced to the one for providing the actual information - or that's what the intention is, at least. All of the cool looking stuff has been moved to other specs like CSS (which is approaching version 3), that are defined externally and linked to the HTML file. With the most modern standards, it's possible to take a very basic HTML web page of marked up information, and turn it into a flashy, presentational marvel. That is for people who choose to use browsers that display those extentions. At the same time however, it doesn't prevent blind people from getting directly to the information. It doesn't prevent people using lynx.
IMHO, good web design should always put the information part on the HTML and build the presentation around it. The alternative is serving browser-specific content, but that's really ugly because your server needs to know about all the different browsers, and it needs more server hardware for the extra processing.
The time where it is useful is for web browsers that think they support a certain standard and act like they support a certain standard, but then completely screw it up. Netscape 4 does this with CSS. Some of the earlier browsers do it with javascript, and so on.
It's not just legacy browsers that don't support modern standards, it's modern browsers that don't work in visual media. For example, tell me how a speech browser would support the tabbed menu selector at the top of MSN in a way that would convey "The Microsoft Network Experience". And yet you can be sure it supports all the standards that are relevant to its media.
The thing is that it's always supposed to have been up to the user agent on the user end to decide how to present the content. That's why web servers serve up markup instead of images. I wish more managers out there would understand that. Incidently, does anyone know if Microsoft was letting in MSIE clients who had CSS and/or Javascript disabled? I forgot to check.
My feeling now is that Microsoft has just recently used some hypocritical doublespeak and screwed over a general management view of how web standards are supposed to work, stating some of the facts but ignoring the most important ideals that they're there for.
I wish /. posters and moderators would just sit and think for a couple of minutes.. (I guess I shouldn't expect more from slashdot.) Try going for something that's actually insightful or interesting or informative instead of knee-jerk anti-Microsoft.
This can be brought back to the locked door argument that comes up over and over again. Just because someone's lock is faulty doesn't mean that it's okay to break into their home. Same with writing a virus.
Whether it's industrial terrorism or not should depend on the intent of the person who released the virus, and whether or not they believed or intended it would attack an industry rather than just a specific person - which would be a more ordinary crime instead.
It's the same as if someone broke into a company's building and spiked their water supply so they all got too sick to work. That's also industrial terrorism, and I don't see how it's so different from crippling a company by breaking their network.
It'd be quite hard for a person who released any of the recent anti-Microsoft worms or viruses to admit that they weren't in some way of malicious intent and didn't realise they could do serious industrial damage. That's industrial terrorism. Just because you don't have to step outside your home doesn't make it okay.
Irrespective of Microsoft's attitude toward security, which incidently is one that I wouldn't trust or use personally for anything important, I don't think you can easily claim that all viruses aren't industrial terrorism.
And yes, I do think that Microsoft should fix their own problems and no legislation they're trying to push through should let them off. I don't like Microsoft's tactics, I just agree with what they're arguing.
If ISP's were owned and operated by governments for the purpose of delivering email, I'd agree with you. But because they're commercial entities who have an independent agreement with a user, I don't personally have a problem with blocking email.
ISP's provide Internet connectivity. If and when they provide a pop3 server (or something else) to relay people's mail, it's an added bonus.
I don't know if MAPS is the way to go or not, but IMHO anything criminal should come from the ISP breaking an agreement with the user - not just automatic determined by a government. There are lots of reasons why an ISP might not want to agree to deliver all email in the first place, and governments shouldn't require them to because of their business category. If there's an arrangement with users that says the ISP should deliver a person's email, and they don't carry that out, then there's a problem.
Hopefully that's a normal part of most ISP agreements, but I don't know for sure. I don't like it that lots of ISP's use MAPS without properly informing their users what's going on so people can decide.
Where I'm living (New Zealand) it's a legal requirement for businesses to accept cash as payment if that is what the customer wants to pay with.
I'm not sure exactly how it's worked out, but I think it applies specifically if you accept bank deposits for something (which is the only other type of money by definition), you have to accept an equal amount of cash as an alternative. It probably doesn't apply with barter systems.
The main reason for this is partly what you've just talked about. People need the option to pay for something without the risk of being tracked.
The other reason is that by keeping cash money relevant the government can be aware of how much legitimate money is out there, since bank deposits are just an abstraction of real cash. Even though they can inflate it lots of times by being loaned and re-loaned, they can't exist without it.
Thanks for confirming it. One thing about this that I'm not sure I understand is where you say it emits radiation.
One definitive concept about black holes is that nothing can escape from past the event horizon including light and other radiation. Do you mean radiation from other things that come near it without getting too close?
Black holes have a reputation for being mass-gobbling irreversible singularities, and they are. But this doesn't mean a black hole where the Sun is would swallow the Earth. I'm not an expert so someone can correct me if they know it better or more accurately.
Any amount of mass can be turned into a black hole - you just have to crush it into a small enough space. This is because every bit of matter has an event horizon, including the Sun (or the Earth for that matter). The difference with the Sun and most things is that the event horizon for the amount of matter in the sun is smaller than the Sun. If you crushed all of Sun's matter into a sufficiently tiny space that it was all inside, then everything else that moved inside would collapse and not return.
What most people don't realise is that if the Sun spontaneously turned into a black hole, we wouldn't die from being sucked in. We'd die from lack of solar energy. Because the Sun-black-hole would have the same mass, everything orbiting it would continue to orbit it the same way it is at the moment. The only big difference would be when something happened to wander inside the event horizon at which point it wouldn't leave, if you ignore all the wierd relativity things that go on at that point at least.
So I guess the point is that just because someone says they might be able to make a black hole, it doesn't mean you'll be instantly sucked in tommorrow without any warning.
Meta information isn't restrictive. It's descriptive.
If you chose to ignore an author's copyright notices then that's completely up to you, and this wouldn't stop you from copying it.
The main problem I have with the "information wants to be free" crowd is when someone takes my work and starts showing it off and taking credit for it as their own. Giving it away is one thing, but if it goes into the public domain I'd lose most of my incentive to create anything new.
I'm not in favour of totalitarian restrictive measures like CSS that work like a broadsword in blocking people's rights to fair use. But allowing authors to hold copyrights on their work is perfectly okay the way I see it.
I know that there are arguments about how if you place information on the web then it's practically public domain, and there's some merit to that I guess. After all, how can you stop people from downloading it?
At the same time though, I think it's silly not to allow people to put their stories and their artwork and what is essentially their copyrighted material on the web where people can access it without the ability to tell people not to copy it.
The napster-like thing with many image search engines is a problem. Even when image search engines including google can give a good indication of where an image is coming from, they often show complete versions of them (even if reduced size) that people can download without seeing any copyright information, and save without going through the source. For text searches there's a fair use issue because most search engines only display a couple of lines, except I've heard some people complain about the google cache. Also it's possible to put meta information on pages saying you don't want them indexed. With image searches it's much more difficult.
When Babylon 5 was around, and probably still, there was a policy that fan websites could use as many promotional images as they wanted to as long as they explicitly stated that they were copyright to the studio, and required everyone grabbing it to say the same.
Image search engines can't do this because they can't read things like watermarks. What we could do though is have a standard allowing for publishers to associate copyright information with files so that search engines know when and how they should be able to index and display other people's copyrighted work.
It would be a voluntary thing and if search engines want to make legal judgements about whether copyright claims are going too far, it would be completely up to them. But it would allow for image search engines to operate cleanly and make sure they don't go futher than the copyright holder wants them to, at least with reason of a good legal argument.
Make it a text file in the same directory, or something. Requiring it to be at the top level directory of a domain would mean that some publishers without access to that dir won't easily be able to set meta information for their own stuff.
Are you sure you've read the code properly? Just because you don't agree with the executives of the society doesn't mean you can't argue against them. That what scientific debate is for, and from what I can tell having just checked, those executives haven't influenced the idea behind the code of ethics at all.
As it should be with any good society, the ACM does not dictate to its members. On the contrary, the members define the ACM and what it stands for. This isn't rhetoric, it's realtime definition generation and the ACM's code of ethics demonstrates it perfectly.
In the past couple of weeks I've been looking around for papers crossing ethics and databases for some postgraduate work I'm doing. The presence of papers in the ACM digital library was strangely vacuuous, but I did find one paper by Donn B. Parker titled Rules of Ethics in Information Processing. It was published in 1968 in the Communications of the ACM. You can see the abstract here, but you might need an ACM login for the abstract and probably a member to download the pdf.
When he wrote it, Donn Parker was the Secretary of the ACM as well as the Chairman of the ACM Professional Standards and Practices Committee. He was arguing in favour of the first ever edition of the ethical rules of conduct for ACM members that was adopted in 1966.
One of the major points of his argument was that it was important to have guidelines to effectively say that "members must be ethical". On the other hand, the guidelines were very cleverly written so as not to say what ethical was. Everything that mattered was left to the judgement of the member.
The idea was not to impose any specific rules on members, but to simply require them to use good judgement and common sense in what they consider ethical, and abide by it. If, on the other hand, a member did something that they clearly should have known was wrong and couldn't offer a reasonable argument against it, there would be grounds to have them thrown out of the society.
Even looking at it now though, I think it would be possible to argue that it's written in the same form. Consider section 1.5 where it says "Copies of software should be made only with proper authorization. Unauthorized duplication of materials must not be condoned."
Nowhere does it define what "proper authorization" actually is. This is left up to the member to decide, and it's feasible that under some circumstances someone might argue that proper authorization doesn't require consent of the copyright holder.
Section 2.3 specifically says "ACM members must obey existing local, state,province, national, and international laws unless there is a compelling ethical basis not to do so. Policies and procedures of the organizations in which one participates must also be obeyed. But compliance must be balanced with the recognition that sometimes existing laws and rules may be immoral or inappropriate and, therefore, must be challenged. Violation of a law or regulation may be ethical when that law or rule has inadequate moral basis or when it conflicts with another law judged to be more important. If one decides to violate a law or rule because it is viewed as unethical, or for any other reason, one must fully accept responsibility for one's actions and for the consequences."
This is a complete let-off by the ACM if you want to protest against the DMCA with civil disobedience. It's saying that you shouldn't drag other people (eg. employer) down with you unless they consent. But if you seriously disagree with the ethics of the law then go ahead and protest.
Whether it was in 1966 or 2001 and regardless of how many words there are, the ACM code of ethics has been very cleverly written. In so many words, it basically tells people to trust their common sense and don't do anything stupid. That's exactly what ethics are, and the ACM isn't telling you otherwise. I think you should consider rejoining.
If you're in a public place, information about everything you do is public property, right? Or alternatively if you're on private property then the property owner can elect to make it public.
As long as the price is affordable, what's to stop some company from setting up several thousand cameras around the place tracking people's movements? There's no privacy in a public place - it's completely public information.
Then what's to stop such a company from on-selling specific information about any given person?
You have a right to privacy, not to obscurity. To date, obscurity is the only thing that's been protecting people in public places. When there's thousands or millions of people, tracking one person is hard.
Obviously you're not doing anything wrong, so there's no reason to worry about it. Never mind the fact that losing the obscurity that everyone's had before technology took it away could completely destroy your life. Consider all the things that might go wrong if your employer, your spouse, your children/parents, or your stalker decide to purchace information about where you've been and what you've been doing in public places.
This is why I get tired and sick to death of people who keep stating that you're safe and there's no point in worrying as long as you're not doing anything wrong. Losing privacy isn't the problem because in 9 times out of 10 the privacy people had hasn't been lost. The obscurity that nobody had an official right to but everyone took for granted has been lost.
It doesn't even take a corrupt judicial system to argue against it.
I think the main difference is that a corporation will have a 4000 word click through licence allowing it, that 99% of people don't bother to read.
That's why I always at least flick through licences before installing anything. The main sections to watch out for are about the collecting of any information, what they do with any information they collect, and the installation of any software.
I haven't thought it through properly, but "short" and "fat" don't seem to describe physical characteristics much to me anyway. They're relative terms, because you can't know what short is without having a baseline average height to measure it against.
Maybe you'd have objective attributes or elements like height and waist diameter.
Otherwise it beats me, though.
This isn't true at all, although I guess you can seriously restrict your definition of confirm to make it true.
If you can examine the atmosphere of a planet, you can tell how much of what elements are present. From this it's possible to make a good judgement if life was needed to generate it.
Examining the atmosphere from this distance isn't exactly easy, but it's possible under the right circumstances. You might watch changes to a light spectrum as the planet occults a background star, or compare refracted light from the star that it's orbiting.
Don't underestimate the amount of information that data-starved astronomers can get out of what's available, though.
If this is a 2+ player competition and they're the right sorts of games (like the rock-paper-scissors game that it mentioned), whoever wins it might have to figure out a way to consistently beat the tit-for-tat algorithm.
Tit-for-tat is one of the dead simplest game playing algorithms, and collectively it's one of the most successful.
It's based on the rule of "always do what the other player did last move". Under most circumstances it's impossible for it to actually win a game because the other player is always one step ahead. But its strength is in winning tournaments.
While it always loses, it never loses by much. This is different from other algorithms which usually have about as many weaknesses as they have strengths and will usually flunk out in at least some trials.
If someone can beat it consistently in a tournament situation, they really will have accomplished something in AI. Of course, this whole thing depends on exactly how the rules are structured, the scoring system and the information available to the program.
I more or less agree with you that on it's own a protest won't have much effect, and mostly for the reasons you've given too.
To make a difference to the general public, the media is one of the most important channels. Getting the media to understand what the issue is is (IMHO) one of the keys to getting the point through to everyone.
A protest doesn't do this by itself, if at all. But if everyone would just write a polite letter to their local newspaper it could make a really big difference. Getting published isn't necessarily that important. Just writing to the editors and the journalists and actually telling them what the problem is in a brief and concise way could easily result in a lot more attention from them in the future.
Fit the main points inside the first 200 words, then elaborate if needed.
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For the record, there's a section in the New Zealand review titled New Exceptions or Permitted Uses. At least they're thinking about the rights of the user not being trampled on.
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For the record, I'd like to point out that not everyone did escape Code Red lightly. The contractor in the office next to ours came back from a holiday this morning to find a $US1500 ISP bill on his desk, which would usually have been about $US50 max for a month.
This bill might seem unusual to people in the states but in lots of non-US places, international traffic isn't cheap.
The irony is that he wasn't even running a web server. His Win2k install had put it on the system and set it up idle by default. Pretty silly if you ask me.
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There are lots of arguments against using computers, or other technology for that matter, for voting. I agree with pretty much all of it, but I also think that a lot of people overlook one of the very important reasons that ticking a ballot is better than using computers.
To put it simply, everyone can understand the process - barring the very challenged. The process of indicating a candidate on paper, putting it in a box and having it counted by people reading it is an almost 100% manual process. Virtually anyone can understand it, and therefore trust it based on their own judgement.
Compare this with a computer voting system, or even a mechanical voting system. Show even a simple computer program to the masses and 99%+ of the general population won't understand it. Up this exponentially for something based on a distributed system.
Nearly everyone has to rely on and trust a minority of the population to verify that their vote is actually being recorded correctly. Even for those who understand it, actually formerly proving that it works is one total bastard of a job. Then there's verifying the proof over and over, verifying the compilers, making sure the hardware is 100% accurate, and there's always room for lawsuits when there's big corporate money sponsoring government involved.
Alongside arguments of people having guns stuck to their heads in secret and so on, this is one of the big reasons that I think I'll always support cumpulsory anonymous polling booths run in a very manual, and very understandable way.
In my experience to date, a lot of the people who want net voting are people who don't have a clue about the risks or problems involved with the software development process, and are simply more interested in convenience. It makes sense for things like internal corporation votes, but general public elections shouldn't change, IMHO.
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I also mis-read it the first time and was thinking the same thing, but if you check it a bit closer, it says "information" in material objects. That's a lot more relevant.
I think the key point to this patent without having taken legal advice, is that it's talking about point of sale. As usual all the initial modded-up comments are uninformed and ranting about how they were downloading before 1985. (The slashdot writeup doesn't help.)
But it's really only relevant to people and companies who are selling downloads. So if you require payment before someone can download some information, this patent might (or might not) be relevant.
I'm wondering how easy it might be to get around simply by changing the system slightly, like checking for authorisation code twice instead of once for example. I'm sure I remember an audio clip of that patent office guy stating that Barnes & Noble could quite feasibly run a 2-click ordering system to avoid infringing on Amazon's 1-click, and that would seem like the same sort of thing.
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