Yes, I do have a problem with names. Usually I just can't remember them, but I also mix them up a lot-- makes reading Russian novels really painful, too.
Interesting to hear that there's a school out there that has a bit of an odd grade-point system-- I certainly wasn't meaning to sound as though I were insulting your sister. And I really wasn't trying to insult you either, I was just trying to be funny... and it would have worked if it weren't those damn kids (and their names that sound like other names)! My original theory was that you had made a typo... under a normal grade-point system a 3.79 is still nothing to sneeze at.
Uh, like, your sister has a 4.79 GPA? Have you been into Heidi's Benadryl or what? Even when I got straight A's they only gave me a 4.0, so you might want to investigate this one a bit.
Roads don't make money, except for certain tolls roads and bridges. I never disputed that people using roads make money. But that's a big difference, since in this case the public transit system was expected to pay for itself -- an expectation no one has for roads.
Not nearly as many as there are people coding or doing something fairly similar to coding for places that do not sell software. If the code to these drivers from nVidia is going to get written and subsidized by sales of hardware, then what difference does it make if they give out the code? Are they afraid I'm going to use their drivers to soup up the embedded video chip on my old PII desktops and not have to buy their latest video card or what? What exactly does nVidia gain by keeping this code close their chest?
So what do you do when your binary driver doesn't work right or doesn't work at all with your specific kernel or architecture? Nothing. RMS may be a commie, but software freedom is about freedom to tinker, not a centralized economy.
Any real zealot would tell you that software freedom is more important than having the latest shiny toy. So I'm not sure what contradiction you're talking about... other than the one where you seem very interested in using a lot of good open source software, except the video drivers.
Thanks. I kind of figured that it was one of those local crackdowns. First major metro I've been to where I noticed this behavior that it wasn't a survival technique (as in San Francisco). Here in Minneapolis jaywalking seems to be nearly universal.
He may not be an asshole, but he is an idiot. His rant about public transportation not making money is a lot of hogwash. Public roads don't make any money either. What does make money is selling people vehicles (and status symbols) that they can use on those public roads. In my town, Minneapolis, we had "light rail" for a long time, then it was taken out as the streetcars were replaced with buses manufactured by GM and apparently several managers of the transit system were getting kickbacks GM as well. Nothing like a little corruption to destroy valuable rail-based infrastructure. Bravo to Seattle for looking at mass transit solutions. I was just in Seattle and found their bus system to be fairly friendly-- wish I'd taken some time to check out the local train situation a little better.
Totally off-topic question to Seattle residents: what the heck is up with pedestrians in downtown Seattle standing on the corner waiting for the light? I felt a little weird jaywalking all the time, but I'll be danged if I'm going to stand around like a dolt when it's obvious there's no traffic.
It sounds legit from the whois info, but so what? It's stupid and I'll tell you why:
It is easy to obtain spam without a central database, even so there are repositories out there already, no?
Filtering spam based on matching-style filters is just an arms race with spammers. Proper filtering requires a trainable filter. One man's spam is another man's dearly loved invitation to invest in shaky African government.
They aren't collecting enough to build proper tests if all they are collecting is spam. I can already avoid 100% of my spam by simply throwing every email I receive into a bit-bucket. Sure, I may get a few false positives, but so what-- my filter works great with their spam corpus, right? I can improve my filter by adding a whitelist capability, but that's still less than ideal since I want strangers to be able to send me mail (closed eBay auctions would be a good example of a case where whitelisting is a total PITA). So unless this test corpus also includes valid emails that should not get caught by the spam filter, my tests are guaranteed to be incomplete. And again, one man's valid mail is another's hated spam.
So, it's not important to look at spam and try to outsmart spammers. That is a losing proposition. It's more important to work on "smart" and easily configured clients. Stock match-based filters just don't work, not for spam, not as nannies for children surfing the web, and not here on Slashdot (witness the problems posting URLs or samples of Perl code).
Yeah, because indymedia.org, thenation.com, www.theregister.co.uk, www.politechbot.com, www.alternet.org are all just non-entities. Not to mention high-quality foreign journalism like the Guardian or the BBC.
Of course they're not going into the technical details on that one, since it would be over the heads of most of their audience. But if I want to imitate the crime, it's easy, I've been told how: "get one of those types of boxes that can read a mag-stripe". In this case, you can tell me that you've found a way to reformat my hard drive with a little JavaScript, but I'm not going to believe you without some code or a demonstration... otherwise we'd be flooded with false warnings about security hazards (witness the success of various virus hoaxes).
You're right, of course. I probably should have stayed with the dual assertion that the original analogy was both flawed and superfluous. Instead it looks like I'm proposing a counter-analogy, which I really wasn't interested in doing. I guess I wanted to mix it up a bit on the actual topic at hand.
Actually, the public's welfare was enhanced, because without a demonstration of how the Club doesn't work, this is just "Channel 5 says the Club sucks" vs. "The Club says the Club rocks". Now maybe the average consumer is willing to trust Channel 5 over every business they might report on, but personally I demand evidence when presented with an assertion as bold as "this device which is supposed to keep your car from getting stolen doesn't actually work at all".
Furthermore, there may be a good way to enhance the Club's effectiveness, but I wouldn't be able to figure that out if I didn't know what was wrong with it in the first place. BTW, turns out that many steering wheels are not that sturdy and a good saw will turn your Club into a useless piece of pipe in about 10 seconds. Knowing that the Club is useless saves me the cost of buying one and the time wasted putting it on the wheel and taking it off. Also, typically a good expose of this nature (and this is where the rubber meets the road) will at least provide tips for dealing with the situation now that we've debunked the false sense of security provided by various gadgets and doodads.
In this case, if there is no fix forthcoming, it's very good that I know about the vulnerability and have some evidence that it's real-- that gives me a solid reason to investigate an alternate browser (and maybe by looking at the exploit I can figure out what to have a proxy filter out, so that I can make my users safer without having to replace their browsers).
Your analogy is totally off. Publishing a how-to isn't "committing a crime", it's journalism. A few years ago I saw a TV news spot on car break-in/theft in which they showed a car thief disabling several anti-theft devices. Was the TV news breaking the law or simply alerting people to how false their sense of security really was?
This is why, in these cases, I think the argument would be well-served if people avoided analogies altogether. It's difficult enough to attempt to clarify the assumptions and facts so that symbolic logic can be applied to reach sensible conclusions without muddying the waters with literary devices.
MS is recklessly endangering your computer and your data with their shoddy attention to security prior to release. I think BugTraq is doing us all a favor by pointing it out.
Huh. Works for me. The problems you are going to have with spam are going to happen anywhere. The same solutions that will work for email spam (like the so-called Bayesian technique proposed by Paul Graham, and apparently picked up by Apple for the Mail program in Jaguar) will work just as well for USENET. Those of us with the software development skills need to be about making more intelligent agents, not just flashier versions of the same old mess.
You aren't, but your tattoo artist is probably liable since he was not licensed to reproduce the image. And yes, most of his work is still protected since it was produced in the 1900's and he died less than 70 years ago (however, the Supreme Court decision on Eldred v. Ashcroft may have an effect on that). As to how you might cease & desist, tattoo removal is fairly easily done (especially for black ink), but it's very painful-- much worse than getting the tattoo.
Um, DRM may be a fine idea for private enterprise, but the concern is not that it exists, but that it will be mandatory-- as in illegal to produce devices which do not honor various DRM tags. This is the next logical extension of the DMCA and there are plenty of politicians working on handing this one to the corporate media.
Well, the question I have is whether the decaf drinkers thought they were drinking decaf. If not, this points more to psychosomatic effects than anything. While giving one group decaf (which doesn't remove all caffeine, I'm given to understand) makes a decent control for the caffeine, what's really needed are four groups: one given real coffee/told it's real coffee, one given decaf/told it's real coffee, one given decaf/told it's decaf, and one given real coffee/told it's decaf. And it seems to me that their study population (of fifteen) is way too small to have confidence in the results... plus these were 15 healthy volunteers... what's needed is a much larger group that is more randomly selected.
GW? Is that you, calling out to us from the "dark dungeons of the internet"? The internet is not dangerous, unless you count electrocution or eye-strain. The internet is a computer network (actually a network of networks, but who's counting). Your IP (assuming you mean address and not the nebulous "intellectshul propetty") is not private info. It's absolutely essential to the functioning of the network... yes, the bad guys took note that you were poking around... because they figured you were either an easy mark or someone to keep an eye on. Yes, be careful what you do, because you don't want to attract the wrong kind of attention to yourself. That could get you in trouble, both online and off.
As to people being punished for cybercrimes, take a look at someone like Randal Schwartz or Keven Mitnick or Jan Johansen or Dmitry Sklyarov and tell me that people aren't being punished... some of the people I've mentioned probably didn't even commit any real crimes, and the list of people arrested, tried, and convicted for various computer-related crimes is pretty long.
Um, a simple legal letter from a lawyer isn't worth the paper it's written on, unless the receiving party is easily scared by lawyers. And Slashdot has taken down posts when they have been deemed to put Slashdot at rish-- witness the hoo-ha over a Crutch of Scientology document posted by an AC.
And there is a huge legal loophole that allows for posting fairly "private" information on the net without someone's permission. It's called the First Amendment to the Constitution-- and people (and governments) are using that to do things like harrass abortion providers and their clients, harrass prostitutes and exotic dancers and their clients, harrass unapproved pharmaceutical dealers and their clients, and, in the case, of government, find criminals (FBI most wanted list) or harrass convicted felons after their release from prison (via sex offender registries posted to the net).
I'm curious... do you live in the U.S. and, if so, which laws are you talking about?
Whitelisting is not a good solution. Not even remotely-- unless you figure out a way to authenticate unknown users that you do want to hear from (which I think is likely to lead to a proliferation of methods for doing this and create a lot of confusion). What is a good solution is Paul Graham's solution using probabilities. Now I don't know if you can hook it into MS Outlook/Exchange easily, but every sensible email solution I've seen would easily allow for this kind of filtering... maybe a selling point for moving people away from the one email client that causes more problems than it ever seems to solve.
To me, the best part about moving to Free Software is not the economics of it, but the freedom. While you may not want them rewriting the OS, you might be able to introduce them to programming more easily since GNU/Linux usually comes with a ton of programming languages (C, C++, Ruby, Perl, Python, to name a few-- and at least Ruby should be fairly easy for your kids to learn/use).
I'd also say that if you can move them off the Windows games, the sooner the better-- mostly to get rid of the dual-boot headache... there are lots of pretty okay games for GNU/Linux that force the kids to think (puzzle games, traditional board games like chess, go, etc)... I'd kind of like to see a kids-only chess server somewhere. We've used Xboard to play games against relatives in other cities (and of course, Kit and Kaim and Gaim to chat at the same time), it would be great to find a place where kids could play other kids (maybe it exists and we just don't know about it). In fact, it's games like chess that never get old over time, but video games usually get pretty dull (either after you've solved them or given up in frustration).
As to some of your worries about filtering and whatnot. You raised the kids, you know them. Tell them what's okay and what's not-- they sound like decent kids. I'm sure they'll break the rules in minor and uninteresting ways, which is okay (in my book). Beyond that, I wouldn't look for technical solutions to non-problems at this point.
He's 13. Make him figure it out if he wants it so bad. When I was 13 I wrote an adventure game and reprogrammed my dot-matrix printer to print an Old English typeface. And we didn't have any package management systems back then-- unless you count typing hex code in from the back pages of Byte magazine (or whatever it was).
Humph. You're probably right (about everything except Aragorn's story being the central tale in the trilogy). Well, back to science fiction where the stories are more likely humanistic and divine intervention is so much less likely.
Slashdot Mirror
Warning. Link is actually to a pretty nasty scat photo, using a redirect via buy.com.
Yes, I do have a problem with names. Usually I just can't remember them, but I also mix them up a lot-- makes reading Russian novels really painful, too.
Interesting to hear that there's a school out there that has a bit of an odd grade-point system-- I certainly wasn't meaning to sound as though I were insulting your sister. And I really wasn't trying to insult you either, I was just trying to be funny... and it would have worked if it weren't those damn kids (and their names that sound like other names)! My original theory was that you had made a typo... under a normal grade-point system a 3.79 is still nothing to sneeze at.
Uh, like, your sister has a 4.79 GPA? Have you been into Heidi's Benadryl or what? Even when I got straight A's they only gave me a 4.0, so you might want to investigate this one a bit.
Roads don't make money, except for certain tolls roads and bridges. I never disputed that people using roads make money. But that's a big difference, since in this case the public transit system was expected to pay for itself -- an expectation no one has for roads.
Not nearly as many as there are people coding or doing something fairly similar to coding for places that do not sell software. If the code to these drivers from nVidia is going to get written and subsidized by sales of hardware, then what difference does it make if they give out the code? Are they afraid I'm going to use their drivers to soup up the embedded video chip on my old PII desktops and not have to buy their latest video card or what? What exactly does nVidia gain by keeping this code close their chest?
So what do you do when your binary driver doesn't work right or doesn't work at all with your specific kernel or architecture? Nothing. RMS may be a commie, but software freedom is about freedom to tinker, not a centralized economy.
Any real zealot would tell you that software freedom is more important than having the latest shiny toy. So I'm not sure what contradiction you're talking about... other than the one where you seem very interested in using a lot of good open source software, except the video drivers.
Thanks. I kind of figured that it was one of those local crackdowns. First major metro I've been to where I noticed this behavior that it wasn't a survival technique (as in San Francisco). Here in Minneapolis jaywalking seems to be nearly universal.
He may not be an asshole, but he is an idiot. His rant about public transportation not making money is a lot of hogwash. Public roads don't make any money either. What does make money is selling people vehicles (and status symbols) that they can use on those public roads. In my town, Minneapolis, we had "light rail" for a long time, then it was taken out as the streetcars were replaced with buses manufactured by GM and apparently several managers of the transit system were getting kickbacks GM as well. Nothing like a little corruption to destroy valuable rail-based infrastructure. Bravo to Seattle for looking at mass transit solutions. I was just in Seattle and found their bus system to be fairly friendly-- wish I'd taken some time to check out the local train situation a little better.
Totally off-topic question to Seattle residents: what the heck is up with pedestrians in downtown Seattle standing on the corner waiting for the light? I felt a little weird jaywalking all the time, but I'll be danged if I'm going to stand around like a dolt when it's obvious there's no traffic.
Let's hope the US Government gets it. There is cause for concern (article titled "Microsoft seeks government partnership").
- It is easy to obtain spam without a central database, even so there are repositories out there already, no?
- Filtering spam based on matching-style filters is just an arms race with spammers. Proper filtering requires a trainable filter. One man's spam is another man's dearly loved invitation to invest in shaky African government.
- They aren't collecting enough to build proper tests if all they are collecting is spam. I can already avoid 100% of my spam by simply throwing every email I receive into a bit-bucket. Sure, I may get a few false positives, but so what-- my filter works great with their spam corpus, right? I can improve my filter by adding a whitelist capability, but that's still less than ideal since I want strangers to be able to send me mail (closed eBay auctions would be a good example of a case where whitelisting is a total PITA). So unless this test corpus also includes valid emails that should not get caught by the spam filter, my tests are guaranteed to be incomplete. And again, one man's valid mail is another's hated spam.
So, it's not important to look at spam and try to outsmart spammers. That is a losing proposition. It's more important to work on "smart" and easily configured clients. Stock match-based filters just don't work, not for spam, not as nannies for children surfing the web, and not here on Slashdot (witness the problems posting URLs or samples of Perl code).Yeah, because indymedia.org, thenation.com, www.theregister.co.uk, www.politechbot.com, www.alternet.org are all just non-entities. Not to mention high-quality foreign journalism like the Guardian or the BBC.
Of course they're not going into the technical details on that one, since it would be over the heads of most of their audience. But if I want to imitate the crime, it's easy, I've been told how: "get one of those types of boxes that can read a mag-stripe". In this case, you can tell me that you've found a way to reformat my hard drive with a little JavaScript, but I'm not going to believe you without some code or a demonstration... otherwise we'd be flooded with false warnings about security hazards (witness the success of various virus hoaxes).
You're right, of course. I probably should have stayed with the dual assertion that the original analogy was both flawed and superfluous. Instead it looks like I'm proposing a counter-analogy, which I really wasn't interested in doing. I guess I wanted to mix it up a bit on the actual topic at hand.
Actually, the public's welfare was enhanced, because without a demonstration of how the Club doesn't work, this is just "Channel 5 says the Club sucks" vs. "The Club says the Club rocks". Now maybe the average consumer is willing to trust Channel 5 over every business they might report on, but personally I demand evidence when presented with an assertion as bold as "this device which is supposed to keep your car from getting stolen doesn't actually work at all".
Furthermore, there may be a good way to enhance the Club's effectiveness, but I wouldn't be able to figure that out if I didn't know what was wrong with it in the first place. BTW, turns out that many steering wheels are not that sturdy and a good saw will turn your Club into a useless piece of pipe in about 10 seconds. Knowing that the Club is useless saves me the cost of buying one and the time wasted putting it on the wheel and taking it off. Also, typically a good expose of this nature (and this is where the rubber meets the road) will at least provide tips for dealing with the situation now that we've debunked the false sense of security provided by various gadgets and doodads.
In this case, if there is no fix forthcoming, it's very good that I know about the vulnerability and have some evidence that it's real-- that gives me a solid reason to investigate an alternate browser (and maybe by looking at the exploit I can figure out what to have a proxy filter out, so that I can make my users safer without having to replace their browsers).
Your analogy is totally off. Publishing a how-to isn't "committing a crime", it's journalism. A few years ago I saw a TV news spot on car break-in/theft in which they showed a car thief disabling several anti-theft devices. Was the TV news breaking the law or simply alerting people to how false their sense of security really was?
This is why, in these cases, I think the argument would be well-served if people avoided analogies altogether. It's difficult enough to attempt to clarify the assumptions and facts so that symbolic logic can be applied to reach sensible conclusions without muddying the waters with literary devices.
MS is recklessly endangering your computer and your data with their shoddy attention to security prior to release. I think BugTraq is doing us all a favor by pointing it out.
Huh. Works for me. The problems you are going to have with spam are going to happen anywhere. The same solutions that will work for email spam (like the so-called Bayesian technique proposed by Paul Graham, and apparently picked up by Apple for the Mail program in Jaguar) will work just as well for USENET. Those of us with the software development skills need to be about making more intelligent agents, not just flashier versions of the same old mess.
You aren't, but your tattoo artist is probably liable since he was not licensed to reproduce the image. And yes, most of his work is still protected since it was produced in the 1900's and he died less than 70 years ago (however, the Supreme Court decision on Eldred v. Ashcroft may have an effect on that). As to how you might cease & desist, tattoo removal is fairly easily done (especially for black ink), but it's very painful-- much worse than getting the tattoo.
Um, DRM may be a fine idea for private enterprise, but the concern is not that it exists, but that it will be mandatory-- as in illegal to produce devices which do not honor various DRM tags. This is the next logical extension of the DMCA and there are plenty of politicians working on handing this one to the corporate media.
Well, the question I have is whether the decaf drinkers thought they were drinking decaf. If not, this points more to psychosomatic effects than anything. While giving one group decaf (which doesn't remove all caffeine, I'm given to understand) makes a decent control for the caffeine, what's really needed are four groups: one given real coffee/told it's real coffee, one given decaf/told it's real coffee, one given decaf/told it's decaf, and one given real coffee/told it's decaf. And it seems to me that their study population (of fifteen) is way too small to have confidence in the results... plus these were 15 healthy volunteers... what's needed is a much larger group that is more randomly selected.
The internet being the dangerous place that it is
GW? Is that you, calling out to us from the "dark dungeons of the internet"? The internet is not dangerous, unless you count electrocution or eye-strain. The internet is a computer network (actually a network of networks, but who's counting). Your IP (assuming you mean address and not the nebulous "intellectshul propetty") is not private info. It's absolutely essential to the functioning of the network... yes, the bad guys took note that you were poking around... because they figured you were either an easy mark or someone to keep an eye on. Yes, be careful what you do, because you don't want to attract the wrong kind of attention to yourself. That could get you in trouble, both online and off.
As to people being punished for cybercrimes, take a look at someone like Randal Schwartz or Keven Mitnick or Jan Johansen or Dmitry Sklyarov and tell me that people aren't being punished... some of the people I've mentioned probably didn't even commit any real crimes, and the list of people arrested, tried, and convicted for various computer-related crimes is pretty long.
Um, a simple legal letter from a lawyer isn't worth the paper it's written on, unless the receiving party is easily scared by lawyers. And Slashdot has taken down posts when they have been deemed to put Slashdot at rish-- witness the hoo-ha over a Crutch of Scientology document posted by an AC.
And there is a huge legal loophole that allows for posting fairly "private" information on the net without someone's permission. It's called the First Amendment to the Constitution-- and people (and governments) are using that to do things like harrass abortion providers and their clients, harrass prostitutes and exotic dancers and their clients, harrass unapproved pharmaceutical dealers and their clients, and, in the case, of government, find criminals (FBI most wanted list) or harrass convicted felons after their release from prison (via sex offender registries posted to the net).
I'm curious... do you live in the U.S. and, if so, which laws are you talking about?
Whitelisting is not a good solution. Not even remotely-- unless you figure out a way to authenticate unknown users that you do want to hear from (which I think is likely to lead to a proliferation of methods for doing this and create a lot of confusion). What is a good solution is Paul Graham's solution using probabilities. Now I don't know if you can hook it into MS Outlook/Exchange easily, but every sensible email solution I've seen would easily allow for this kind of filtering... maybe a selling point for moving people away from the one email client that causes more problems than it ever seems to solve.
To me, the best part about moving to Free Software is not the economics of it, but the freedom. While you may not want them rewriting the OS, you might be able to introduce them to programming more easily since GNU/Linux usually comes with a ton of programming languages (C, C++, Ruby, Perl, Python, to name a few-- and at least Ruby should be fairly easy for your kids to learn/use).
I'd also say that if you can move them off the Windows games, the sooner the better-- mostly to get rid of the dual-boot headache... there are lots of pretty okay games for GNU/Linux that force the kids to think (puzzle games, traditional board games like chess, go, etc)... I'd kind of like to see a kids-only chess server somewhere. We've used Xboard to play games against relatives in other cities (and of course, Kit and Kaim and Gaim to chat at the same time), it would be great to find a place where kids could play other kids (maybe it exists and we just don't know about it). In fact, it's games like chess that never get old over time, but video games usually get pretty dull (either after you've solved them or given up in frustration).
As to some of your worries about filtering and whatnot. You raised the kids, you know them. Tell them what's okay and what's not-- they sound like decent kids. I'm sure they'll break the rules in minor and uninteresting ways, which is okay (in my book). Beyond that, I wouldn't look for technical solutions to non-problems at this point.
He's 13. Make him figure it out if he wants it so bad. When I was 13 I wrote an adventure game and reprogrammed my dot-matrix printer to print an Old English typeface. And we didn't have any package management systems back then-- unless you count typing hex code in from the back pages of Byte magazine (or whatever it was).
Humph. You're probably right (about everything except Aragorn's story being the central tale in the trilogy). Well, back to science fiction where the stories are more likely humanistic and divine intervention is so much less likely.