Surely the Sun Pascal syntax differs from the "standard" in a regular manner. In such a case it would be a fairly straightforward problem to write a program that takes Sun-flavored Pascal as its input and spits out Linux-flavored Pascal as its output.
> First the budget estimates were way off, not to mention funtionality.
Yeah, I was expecting to see a Quake benchmark.
Re:Some perspective on the causualties
on
More WTC News
·
· Score: 2
Corrections noted, but I still can't help but wonder whether Tuesday wasn't the bloodiest day in US history since the Civil War.
OTOH, I suspect more of us die in auto wrecks every year. For some reason we consider that an acceptable risk.
Re:An international tragedy
on
More WTC News
·
· Score: 2
> No Saudis, Isrealis, Chinese, or Indians are mentioned in the article
Yes, and assuming that it was in fact an OBL operation, one wonders how many practicing Muslims and/or other persons of Arabic descent were murdered for a cause that supposedly represents them.
Re:There will never again be a good day....
on
More WTC News
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
> Now that planes have been used themselves as weapons, and the passengers with them, I doubt there will be a high-jacking where they're aren't people like Glick and Barret, who are among the few passangers who apparently made sure that flight 93 crashed in PA woods, and not a national landmark.
The telly news this morning gave out a bit more detail about one of those guy's calls to his wife on the cell phone. He actually called her 4 different times. By the third one the WTC had already been hit twice, and his wife said that when she told him about hit he got really thoughtful and asked a lot of probing questions.
The next time he called, it was a simple "Three of us are going to do something."
Re:It is un-Islamic to kill innocent people
on
More WTC News
·
· Score: 1
> "It is un-Islamic to kill innocent people," he said.
IANAIslamicTheologian, but I understand that suicide is also un-Islamic.
Re:Coordinated Efforts
on
More WTC News
·
· Score: 1
> I'm pretty sure he doesn't keep it at home, so it's probably in some bank account. I'd love to see some hackers get into that bank account and not only trace who he's been paying what to (I think we can do it better than the CIA), but maybe just making his money go away.
If anyone decides to do this, please write me off line and I'll give you an account number you can transfer it all to.
Re:The views of a Muslim in NY
on
More WTC News
·
· Score: 5, Informative
> Notably in the fact that Islam was spread initially by military conquest. Christianity was spread by word of mouth and people willing to die for it- but not fight for it with violence.
They probably didn't teach you in Sunday School that most of continental Europe (outside the borders of the Roman Empire) was "Christianized" at swordpoint.
To say nothing of the spread of Christianity beyond Europe during the Colonial Era. (Indeed, there was a doctrine [called repartimenta, IIRC], that essentially justified enslavement of the natives as a way for them to "repay" the Europeans for having troubled themselves to sail across the seas to save their souls.
Don't confuse ideology with history.
Re:The views of a Muslim in NY
on
More WTC News
·
· Score: 2, Flamebait
> > Unfortunately, it seems that Bin Laden and others have taken religion as a vehicle to project their political hatred and motives.
Gee, he and Pat Robertson should get together and compare notes.
BTW, as others have said before me: holding all "Arabs" accountable for something that a few did is about as logical as holding all persons of European descent accountable for what AH did. The Americans shooting up mosques make me sick.
> And I agree, standards in software design & implementation need to improve - particularly in the shrink-wrap world
I own an automobile. There was a minor flaw in the design and/or implementation, namely the "low battery" light for that model did not always come on when it should.
For this, they recalled my car and fixed it at their own expense.
What happens when COTS software ships with a bug of that nature?
The world is full of crappy software because people put up with it.
> All of these articles that I have been reading lately discuss Code Red and Code Red II in the past tense. Its still out there folks and its still attacking systems.
Similarly for SirCam. The Freeciv mailing list had to set up an attachment filter this week, due to the continued bombardment with requests for advice.
> So using the same rule, you can see these adjusters running around asking, "Was this PC infected by a virus last year?", "yes", "Ok, that's one $2000 PC and one $100 Outlook License, plus one hour labor, lets see, that comes to $2220 lost productivity, NEXT!".
> with the ensuing increase in demand for programmers familiar with that OS (us!) in beautiful, inexpensive beach locations with scantily clad people everywhere?
When they see our chair-shaped programmers' figures, they'll doubtless send us packing.
> You make some valid points, but what exactly do you see as the D.W.-II (to use your terminology) equivalent of crack houses, drive-by shootings, and monies spent cleaning up after people whose meth labs go up in flames [cnn.com] and result in the deaths of totally innocent people?
Naturally, my crystal ball may have a bug in it.
But I suspect that time will reaveal the exact analogies you demand, even though I don't know what they will be right now.
My reasoning is thus: Wherever things are banned, there is contraband. Wherever there is contraband, there is organized crime. Wherever there is organized crime, there is war between criminal organizations. Wherever there is war between criminal organizations, innocent and not-so-innocent people get hurt.
States should use extreme caution about banning substances. Those of us with progressive views would offer that as an ethical argument; those with less progressive views should still consider the pragmatic argument. What has DW-I done for the citizens of the USA? What did Prohibition do for them? What is DW-II going to do for them?
If the public good outweighs the bad side effects, then you can justify bans with the pragmatic argument. If the public good outweighs the bad side effects by a very large margin, you might be able to justify bans with an ethical argument. But when the bad side effects outweigh the public good, either argument will stand against the ban.
I do not advocate stealing copyrighted material. However, I'm enough of a realist to know that people, especially young males, are going to keep bootlegging music and warez regardless of what the law says. When citizens ignore laws, governments are usually pinheaded enough to consider only a single response: escalate. And that's what leads to the violence of a Prohibition or a DW-I.
Yeah, it's hard to imagine people getting killed over an MP3. But outside Bizarro World, it's hard to imagine people getting killed over a doobie or a bottle of wine, too.
Welcome to Bizarro World.
Re:Its all about Adobe
on
Sklyarov Indicted
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
> Would Adobe even have grounds for a civil lawsuit against Dmitry? The software facilitated infringing the rights of the copyright holder of the book(s), not the rights of Adobe.
Which points out the real "crime" in this scenario. The "crime" wasn't theft; it was pointing out that Adobe's crapware doesn't prevent theft. And since Adobe's crapware doesn't prevent theft (as advertised), they can't sell it. And since they can't sell it, they take a hit on their bottom line. And since they take a hit on their bottom line, their share prices aren't what they could be.
And that is the one unforgivable sin in the U$A.
Re:I don't care, criminal.
on
Sklyarov Indicted
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
[Ignoring the fact that you're just trooling...]
I'm curious why you call me "criminal". Is it because I disagree with something the government is doing? Is it because I disagree with you?
It certainly isn't because I'm a drug user, because I'm not, and never have been, and wouldn't become one if they legalized it tomorrow.
However, the fact that I'm not a droogie doesn't mean I don't live in fear that the FBI will read my post on Slashdot, take Rob to court and make him give them my meatspace name, kick my door down, throw a baggie on my couch, and haul me off to prison for 30 years. I wouldn't stand the slightest chance of proving my innocence.
The Soviet Union had its gulags; the USA has its drug war.
Re:Wow... this should piss Russia off
on
Sklyarov Indicted
·
· Score: 2
> Consider too that many of the best minds are not from America, and this sort of bullshit will easily dissuade them from ever touching on American soil.
Or how 'bout if America's best minds start emigrating?
I need only say "Goodwin's Law" to point out the historical precedent. It may sound like a stretch, until you consider academic researchers withdrawing conference papers over fear of persecution.
> > I'm willing to sacrifice all my freedoms to win the War on Drugs.
> Then you're a fucking moron. If you are an American, you should be ashamed of yourself.
One might also ask what it means to "win" the War on Drugs. In practice, its supporters are "winning" so long as it is getting bigger, more expensive, and more draconian. If everyone in the USA quit using drugs tomorrow, thousands of careers would be ruined. Legislators would have to find some other drum to beat to scare voters into supporting them. Law enforcement agencies would have to find other drums to beat to scare the public into upping their funding and granting them more arbitrary powers.
And of course, if a politician took a stand against the drug war and looked like he had any chance of putting an end to it, the drug lords themselves would be quickest at the assassination attempt.
No, don't expect the drug war to be "won" anytime soon, no matter how many of your freedoms you give up. Willingly or otherwise.
Welcome to Drug War II.
on
Sklyarov Indicted
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Citizens, attend.
You are seeing the creation of the new drug war. You can expect to see the following features of DW-I in instant replay
criminalization of perfectly ethical behavior that powerful segments of society happen not to approve of,
draconian penalties for these supposed crimes,
justification of this nonsense on the basis of huge ass-pulled numbers purporting to show how much damage the "crime" is doing to the economy,
legislators and public prosecutors fanning the fire to further their careers,
courts that will set aside your traditional freedoms because the wankers in the FBI can't get their convictions in a free society,
ultimately, absolutely no impact on the behavior that Drug War II was supposed to control, and
a new eco-niche for genuine crime, created by the new legal system and exploited by punks who will ultimately be the next generation's Organized Crime (cf. prohibition, Drug War I).
> "Instead of trying to figure out how to restrict access, why don't you focus on how to make money off this new technology?"
That seems to be a facet of a more general problem for internet business wannabes. People (MBAs?) seem to see it as a gold rush instead of a business opportunity. Companies seem more interested in getting that precious domain name and spying on their visitors than they are in obvious things like, say, selling something now and then.
And of course, the reason the internet has turned into a huge IP war zone is because there's no tangible property to be 0wned (beyond the fiber optics and the Cisco routers).
And if there's one thing that MBAs and governments can't stand, it's something that isn't 0wned.
Slashdot Mirror
Surely the Sun Pascal syntax differs from the "standard" in a regular manner. In such a case it would be a fairly straightforward problem to write a program that takes Sun-flavored Pascal as its input and spits out Linux-flavored Pascal as its output.
> First the budget estimates were way off, not to mention funtionality.
Yeah, I was expecting to see a Quake benchmark.
Corrections noted, but I still can't help but wonder whether Tuesday wasn't the bloodiest day in US history since the Civil War.
OTOH, I suspect more of us die in auto wrecks every year. For some reason we consider that an acceptable risk.
> No Saudis, Isrealis, Chinese, or Indians are mentioned in the article
Yes, and assuming that it was in fact an OBL operation, one wonders how many practicing Muslims and/or other persons of Arabic descent were murdered for a cause that supposedly represents them.
> Now that planes have been used themselves as weapons, and the passengers with them, I doubt there will be a high-jacking where they're aren't people like Glick and Barret, who are among the few passangers who apparently made sure that flight 93 crashed in PA woods, and not a national landmark.
The telly news this morning gave out a bit more detail about one of those guy's calls to his wife on the cell phone. He actually called her 4 different times. By the third one the WTC had already been hit twice, and his wife said that when she told him about hit he got really thoughtful and asked a lot of probing questions.
The next time he called, it was a simple "Three of us are going to do something."
> "It is un-Islamic to kill innocent people," he said.
IANAIslamicTheologian, but I understand that suicide is also un-Islamic.
> I'm pretty sure he doesn't keep it at home, so it's probably in some bank account. I'd love to see some hackers get into that bank account and not only trace who he's been paying what to (I think we can do it better than the CIA), but maybe just making his money go away.
If anyone decides to do this, please write me off line and I'll give you an account number you can transfer it all to.
> Notably in the fact that Islam was spread initially by military conquest. Christianity was spread by word of mouth and people willing to die for it- but not fight for it with violence.
They probably didn't teach you in Sunday School that most of continental Europe (outside the borders of the Roman Empire) was "Christianized" at swordpoint.
To say nothing of the spread of Christianity beyond Europe during the Colonial Era. (Indeed, there was a doctrine [called repartimenta, IIRC], that essentially justified enslavement of the natives as a way for them to "repay" the Europeans for having troubled themselves to sail across the seas to save their souls.
Don't confuse ideology with history.
> > Unfortunately, it seems that Bin Laden and others have taken religion as a vehicle to project their political hatred and motives.
Gee, he and Pat Robertson should get together and compare notes.
BTW, as others have said before me: holding all "Arabs" accountable for something that a few did is about as logical as holding all persons of European descent accountable for what AH did. The Americans shooting up mosques make me sick.
...is that the DNA was written in Lisp.
> And I agree, standards in software design & implementation need to improve - particularly in the shrink-wrap world
I own an automobile. There was a minor flaw in the design and/or implementation, namely the "low battery" light for that model did not always come on when it should.
For this, they recalled my car and fixed it at their own expense.
What happens when COTS software ships with a bug of that nature?
The world is full of crappy software because people put up with it.
> All of these articles that I have been reading lately discuss Code Red and Code Red II in the past tense. Its still out there folks and its still attacking systems.
Similarly for SirCam. The Freeciv mailing list had to set up an attachment filter this week, due to the continued bombardment with requests for advice.
> So using the same rule, you can see these adjusters running around asking, "Was this PC infected by a virus last year?", "yes", "Ok, that's one $2000 PC and one $100 Outlook License, plus one hour labor, lets see, that comes to $2220 lost productivity, NEXT!".
Yes, check the third bullet on my Drug War II post.
> > There's plenty of security holes in every stock Linux distro too, you know.
> But, unlike with M$ products, you can plug them, since you have the SOURCE.
And increasingly important, you can talk about them without fear of drawing a Go To Jail card.
> There's plenty of security holes in every stock Linux distro too, you know.
Yeah, on a dual boot machine you can hax0r Linux in one line, by typing msdos at the LILO prompt.
> 3 == 1 ?!
Yes, that equality is important to the theories of 743010g14n5, as well as to 44x0r5.
> with the ensuing increase in demand for programmers familiar with that OS (us!) in beautiful, inexpensive beach locations with scantily clad people everywhere?
When they see our chair-shaped programmers' figures, they'll doubtless send us packing.
> You make some valid points, but what exactly do you see as the D.W.-II (to use your terminology) equivalent of crack houses, drive-by shootings, and monies spent cleaning up after people whose meth labs go up in flames [cnn.com] and result in the deaths of totally innocent people?
Naturally, my crystal ball may have a bug in it.
But I suspect that time will reaveal the exact analogies you demand, even though I don't know what they will be right now.
My reasoning is thus: Wherever things are banned, there is contraband. Wherever there is contraband, there is organized crime. Wherever there is organized crime, there is war between criminal organizations. Wherever there is war between criminal organizations, innocent and not-so-innocent people get hurt.
States should use extreme caution about banning substances. Those of us with progressive views would offer that as an ethical argument; those with less progressive views should still consider the pragmatic argument. What has DW-I done for the citizens of the USA? What did Prohibition do for them? What is DW-II going to do for them?
If the public good outweighs the bad side effects, then you can justify bans with the pragmatic argument. If the public good outweighs the bad side effects by a very large margin, you might be able to justify bans with an ethical argument. But when the bad side effects outweigh the public good, either argument will stand against the ban.
I do not advocate stealing copyrighted material. However, I'm enough of a realist to know that people, especially young males, are going to keep bootlegging music and warez regardless of what the law says. When citizens ignore laws, governments are usually pinheaded enough to consider only a single response: escalate. And that's what leads to the violence of a Prohibition or a DW-I.
Yeah, it's hard to imagine people getting killed over an MP3. But outside Bizarro World, it's hard to imagine people getting killed over a doobie or a bottle of wine, too.
Welcome to Bizarro World.
> Would Adobe even have grounds for a civil lawsuit against Dmitry? The software facilitated infringing the rights of the copyright holder of the book(s), not the rights of Adobe.
Which points out the real "crime" in this scenario. The "crime" wasn't theft; it was pointing out that Adobe's crapware doesn't prevent theft. And since Adobe's crapware doesn't prevent theft (as advertised), they can't sell it. And since they can't sell it, they take a hit on their bottom line. And since they take a hit on their bottom line, their share prices aren't what they could be.
And that is the one unforgivable sin in the U$A.
[Ignoring the fact that you're just trooling...]
I'm curious why you call me "criminal". Is it because I disagree with something the government is doing? Is it because I disagree with you?
It certainly isn't because I'm a drug user, because I'm not, and never have been, and wouldn't become one if they legalized it tomorrow.
However, the fact that I'm not a droogie doesn't mean I don't live in fear that the FBI will read my post on Slashdot, take Rob to court and make him give them my meatspace name, kick my door down, throw a baggie on my couch, and haul me off to prison for 30 years. I wouldn't stand the slightest chance of proving my innocence.
The Soviet Union had its gulags; the USA has its drug war.
> Consider too that many of the best minds are not from America, and this sort of bullshit will easily dissuade them from ever touching on American soil.
Or how 'bout if America's best minds start emigrating?
I need only say "Goodwin's Law" to point out the historical precedent. It may sound like a stretch, until you consider academic researchers withdrawing conference papers over fear of persecution.
> > I'm willing to sacrifice all my freedoms to win the War on Drugs.
> Then you're a fucking moron. If you are an American, you should be ashamed of yourself.
One might also ask what it means to "win" the War on Drugs. In practice, its supporters are "winning" so long as it is getting bigger, more expensive, and more draconian. If everyone in the USA quit using drugs tomorrow, thousands of careers would be ruined. Legislators would have to find some other drum to beat to scare voters into supporting them. Law enforcement agencies would have to find other drums to beat to scare the public into upping their funding and granting them more arbitrary powers.
And of course, if a politician took a stand against the drug war and looked like he had any chance of putting an end to it, the drug lords themselves would be quickest at the assassination attempt.
No, don't expect the drug war to be "won" anytime soon, no matter how many of your freedoms you give up. Willingly or otherwise.
You are seeing the creation of the new drug war. You can expect to see the following features of DW-I in instant replay
- criminalization of perfectly ethical behavior that powerful segments of society happen not to approve of,
- draconian penalties for these supposed crimes,
- justification of this nonsense on the basis of huge ass-pulled numbers purporting to show how much damage the "crime" is doing to the economy,
- legislators and public prosecutors fanning the fire to further their careers,
- courts that will set aside your traditional freedoms because the wankers in the FBI can't get their convictions in a free society,
- ultimately, absolutely no impact on the behavior that Drug War II was supposed to control, and
- a new eco-niche for genuine crime, created by the new legal system and exploited by punks who will ultimately be the next generation's Organized Crime (cf. prohibition, Drug War I).
Fear for your freedoms.> "Instead of trying to figure out how to restrict access, why don't you focus on how to make money off this new technology?"
That seems to be a facet of a more general problem for internet business wannabes. People (MBAs?) seem to see it as a gold rush instead of a business opportunity. Companies seem more interested in getting that precious domain name and spying on their visitors than they are in obvious things like, say, selling something now and then.
And of course, the reason the internet has turned into a huge IP war zone is because there's no tangible property to be 0wned (beyond the fiber optics and the Cisco routers).
And if there's one thing that MBAs and governments can't stand, it's something that isn't 0wned.
> As Microsoft is learning: you can try and try to control everything, but there is one of you and lot of people trying to find ways around you.
<prissy>
The more you tighten your grip, the more computer systems will slip through your fingers!
</prissy>