Seems a little unfair to call the guy a 'rogue' or 'absent minded'. He's an intelligent bloke who applied his knowledge and intellect to a problem, spent nearly a decade doing the necessary legwork, and eventually hit the big time when it all paid off. That's not 'rogue' behaviour, that's hard work. I'd have given up. Well done to him. He deserves it.
The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company predicted the judgment will be difficult to collect, but is hoping that its size discourages future abuses at its site.
Except it won't. It's too much. Basic psychology dictates that once you get above a certain risk people will start to ignore it because there's no difference between that and "everything". For people who don't have a great deal to start with losing everything isn't that big a deal. An amount that's a real tangible quantity that someone could conceivably earn is actually a bigger discouragement because people can imagine losing it, and that will put them off because if they can imagine themselves earning it they can envisage themselves losing it.
I'm not suggesting that it should have been any lower of course. I just think we need to be pragmatic about what a punishment is. If we want it to be something that puts other people off doing the same thing then we could think up something better.
Why does research have to have an immediately obvious purpose? I'm sure there have been millions of discoveries made by people just "messing around" with some aspect of science. This sort of thing is great in my opinion. If we only funded research that could be justified as "useful" the world would be a much more boring place.
This joke fails on so many levels. Firstly, I'm English so I can't vote. Secondly, there aren't any cyberdemons standing. Thirdly, even if a cyberdemon were to stand they'd probably be an independent standing for a niche Military/Satanic party so it'd be a bit of a waste. I can't imagine cyberdemons are very interested in environmental or economic policy. And lastly, and perhaps most importantly, cyberdemons aren't real so you can't vote for them anyway. Mind you, nor is Sarah Palin. I don't know who thought her up but that joke has gone way too far already...
A big database, kind of like a 'book', of everyone's face? Maybe with a stack of personal information? And make it really hard to take your details off?
Is "GA" a common abbreviation? I assume it's a contraction of "generally available", but I did think of, and discount, a few other possibilities first given it's used in conjunction with IE8;
God Awful (too obvious) Grizzly Adams (not sure where the bad 80s drama comes into things) Ground to Air (IE could be a Weapon Of Markup Destruction..) Goatse Arse (Ass if you're American) Gabon (.ga is the country code for there..) Standards Non-compliant (using Microsoft Alphabet)
Let's assume the statistics are actually correct. 0.2% don't want DRM, 99.8% don't care, and 0% are in favour. That should be enough of a message to realise it shouldn't be included. Especially when that 0.2% can damage the reputation of the game by giving shocking reviews all over the internet.
6) Ask your techie friend/relative about switching to Linux, and you can almost completely cross 1, 4, and 5 off this list
Err... no. Assuming you're running Linux (or OSX, BSD, whatever) 1, 4 and 5 still apply just as much as they do on Windows.
1) Don't run files whose source you don't trust
Binaries can be dangerous on Linux, especially if you're a newbie user who runs things as root (and we are talking about newbies here remember). Even compiling your own apps can be dangerous if the source of the source isn't trustworthy.
4) Avoid going to domains you aren't familiar with, as they could contain exploits which can bot your machine without any interaction - stick to reputable sources of information
You're not going to be running into self-installing ActiveX malware, but you're in just as much danger from phishing, XSS or browser exploit hacks.
5) Keep your AV and Firewall up to date
The firewall issue is obvious. You need one even on a Linux PC. Maybe moreso even because Linux often comes with a raft of server and daemon stuff that Windows doesn't. AV is more contentious - but if you're using the computer for anything important, eg work related, and you don't want to pass viruses on to clients then AV is still a useful tool. I'm certain that me passing on a virus to a client would do more damage to my business than actually having my computer affected by one itself.
Your operating system is never enough for you to take a liaise faire attitude to security regardless of what you're running.
You aren't important enough for Facebook/Google/the government/anyone to bother invading your privacy in any meaningful way. Very few people are. The companies that gather huge amounts of data about us want exactly that - huge amounts of data. That's when it becomes useful (and more importantly, valuable). Stuff about any one individual is next to useless. You can splatter your entire life history all over the internet and on the whole noone will care, or even notice (with the obvious exception of your bank details - they are useful to the more nefarious members of society).
So yeah, carry on being a "private citizen" and withhold all your data. The 'man' will have as much on you as they do on me; and I have a Facebook page, MySpace page, and accounts on dozens of forums. Because we are completely unremarkable. The only difference is that I have accepted it. Nay, embraced it!
I doubt that actually. They made the equivalent of £3000 by doing 170 hours each... that's £3000/340 hours... so about £9/hour tax free. Not many part time jobs pay that sort of money.
With a product that's been stable for a long time (stable in the development sense, not in the 'not crashing' sense) you shouldn't expect any large changes between major versions, and no changes at all between minors. You don't just throw away decades of work to make it different for the sake of it. If there are any differences they're probably only there because the marketing department demanded something obviously different so people would upgrade for the new eye candy. Or, at a push, because some HCI guru has had a brainwave about how to make things radically easier to work with. That's very rare though.
Frankly, the fact it looks very similar is a good thing. It might mean MSFT aren't just doing some window dressing.
But the idea that the RIAA would say of Ray's blog, "Such vexatious conduct demeans the integrity of these judicial proceedings and warrants this imposition of sanctions." is completely beyond absurd.
Is it absurd? Ignoring, for a moment, that the RIAA are a bunch of slimey underhanded scumbags and Ray seems like a stand-up guy, if they were right that Ray's blogging is aimed at publicising his cases and embarrassing his opposition then they'd be quite right to call it vexatious conduct. I don't believe Ray has anything other than the purest motives for his blog but it's not up to me, or you. The court will decide. If this were being heard where I live (the UK) I don't think there'd be the slightest concern that the right answer would be found. I hope the same is true in the USA.
By doing this Google get a bunch of data that their competitors have no access to meaning search quality stops being about your algorithm design and starts being about the size of your userbase, something Google will win hands down at the moment. It'll be great for removing spam like you suggest, it'll probably improve the rankings for proper results too, but in the long term all it will do is cement Google's position as the number one player unless someone manages to figure out a search algorithm that's better than a bunch of humans - that's a little unlikely.
Perhaps once it's been running for a while Google won't need to improve their algorithms at all. Hell, they could probably abandon them completely and move to a human-moderated index.
I wouldn't want to employ someone who wasn't on at least one social networking site. It's about the only real proof you can have that someone isn't the sort of person who has nothing in their life besides work. I don't want that sort of person on my team. They're horrible to work with. I want people who socialise - not necessarily with me - but with someone.
I can think of a least three possible reasons - cost, size, and maintainance. It's possible that solar would simply cost too much to develop something that can generate enough power for a moonbase. Related to that, it's possible that the size of solar panels you'd need would be too big to get on to the moon. Lastly there's the question of maintainance; moondust would kill the productivity of a panel. Astronauts roaming around, landers delivering things, and meteor strikes could potentially throw up enough dust to affect the power levels to some degree that might damage the moonbase. Going out and sweeping the panels wouldn't really work, you'd have to actually remove the dust properly.
You also have to consider the frequency of lunar eclipses, though a bank of batteries would sort that out.
"In Hampshire, Eastleigh council wants locals to 'monitor local environmental quality' and report 'issues' involving recycling and waste."
If you take the single quotes out and read it without your tin foil hat on there's nothing to object to. It's just the council asking for people to report problems which they'll then look into. Surely every local government in the world does that.
Slash, the code that runs Slashdot, is open source and freely available - http://www.slashcode.com/ - there are lots of sites that bear more than a passing resemblance to Slashdot simply because the codebase is the same.
If there's anything that will swing my vote at an election it's a comment posted on someone's blog. Policies schmolicies, I want to see what the public think!
*goes to look at what the public think*
Ok, I saw what the public think, and now I want the winner of America's Got Talent to be president.
our potential alien visitor would have to travel a very long way towards us (and in that case why not come the last 0.0001% of the journey!)
Space is largely empty so you can turn off most things and just leave your spaceship alone for the majority of the journey. A few microcalibrations along the way will see you right. Taking off is a lot harder but it's the sort of thing you can practise a lot too so you should be ok with that as well.
Doing something in the alien environment at the other end though, such as a solar system or a planet... that's really hard. You have to design your craft to be able to deal with thousands of unknown, or known-at-an-extreme-distance, factors. That could well put a travelling alien off coming the last 0.0001% of the journey.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems a little unfair to call the guy a 'rogue' or 'absent minded'. He's an intelligent bloke who applied his knowledge and intellect to a problem, spent nearly a decade doing the necessary legwork, and eventually hit the big time when it all paid off. That's not 'rogue' behaviour, that's hard work. I'd have given up. Well done to him. He deserves it.
Except it won't. It's too much. Basic psychology dictates that once you get above a certain risk people will start to ignore it because there's no difference between that and "everything". For people who don't have a great deal to start with losing everything isn't that big a deal. An amount that's a real tangible quantity that someone could conceivably earn is actually a bigger discouragement because people can imagine losing it, and that will put them off because if they can imagine themselves earning it they can envisage themselves losing it.
I'm not suggesting that it should have been any lower of course. I just think we need to be pragmatic about what a punishment is. If we want it to be something that puts other people off doing the same thing then we could think up something better.
Why does research have to have an immediately obvious purpose? I'm sure there have been millions of discoveries made by people just "messing around" with some aspect of science. This sort of thing is great in my opinion. If we only funded research that could be justified as "useful" the world would be a much more boring place.
I'm voting for a Cyberdemon to be president!
This joke fails on so many levels. Firstly, I'm English so I can't vote. Secondly, there aren't any cyberdemons standing. Thirdly, even if a cyberdemon were to stand they'd probably be an independent standing for a niche Military/Satanic party so it'd be a bit of a waste. I can't imagine cyberdemons are very interested in environmental or economic policy. And lastly, and perhaps most importantly, cyberdemons aren't real so you can't vote for them anyway. Mind you, nor is Sarah Palin. I don't know who thought her up but that joke has gone way too far already...
The derivation of "ethernet" is quite interesting.
Ether - from the chemical compound Diethyl Ether, an anaesthetic.
Net - meaning 'full of holes'.
I think that's right.
A big database, kind of like a 'book', of everyone's face? Maybe with a stack of personal information? And make it really hard to take your details off?
Like we'd ever fall for that!
Is "GA" a common abbreviation? I assume it's a contraction of "generally available", but I did think of, and discount, a few other possibilities first given it's used in conjunction with IE8;
God Awful (too obvious)
Grizzly Adams (not sure where the bad 80s drama comes into things)
Ground to Air (IE could be a Weapon Of Markup Destruction..)
Goatse Arse (Ass if you're American)
Gabon (.ga is the country code for there..)
Standards Non-compliant (using Microsoft Alphabet)
Let's assume the statistics are actually correct. 0.2% don't want DRM, 99.8% don't care, and 0% are in favour. That should be enough of a message to realise it shouldn't be included. Especially when that 0.2% can damage the reputation of the game by giving shocking reviews all over the internet.
Oh yeah? And which half am I in? ;)
Err... no. Assuming you're running Linux (or OSX, BSD, whatever) 1, 4 and 5 still apply just as much as they do on Windows.
1) Don't run files whose source you don't trust
Binaries can be dangerous on Linux, especially if you're a newbie user who runs things as root (and we are talking about newbies here remember). Even compiling your own apps can be dangerous if the source of the source isn't trustworthy.
4) Avoid going to domains you aren't familiar with, as they could contain exploits which can bot your machine without any interaction - stick to reputable sources of information
You're not going to be running into self-installing ActiveX malware, but you're in just as much danger from phishing, XSS or browser exploit hacks.
5) Keep your AV and Firewall up to date
The firewall issue is obvious. You need one even on a Linux PC. Maybe moreso even because Linux often comes with a raft of server and daemon stuff that Windows doesn't. AV is more contentious - but if you're using the computer for anything important, eg work related, and you don't want to pass viruses on to clients then AV is still a useful tool. I'm certain that me passing on a virus to a client would do more damage to my business than actually having my computer affected by one itself.
Your operating system is never enough for you to take a liaise faire attitude to security regardless of what you're running.
Hamsters only fail self-awareness tests because they refuse to revise.
You aren't important enough for Facebook/Google/the government/anyone to bother invading your privacy in any meaningful way. Very few people are. The companies that gather huge amounts of data about us want exactly that - huge amounts of data. That's when it becomes useful (and more importantly, valuable). Stuff about any one individual is next to useless. You can splatter your entire life history all over the internet and on the whole noone will care, or even notice (with the obvious exception of your bank details - they are useful to the more nefarious members of society).
So yeah, carry on being a "private citizen" and withhold all your data. The 'man' will have as much on you as they do on me; and I have a Facebook page, MySpace page, and accounts on dozens of forums. Because we are completely unremarkable. The only difference is that I have accepted it. Nay, embraced it!
I doubt that actually. They made the equivalent of £3000 by doing 170 hours each ... that's £3000/340 hours ... so about £9/hour tax free. Not many part time jobs pay that sort of money.
Unless people are cheating. Then you think you know the odds, but the reality is something else entirely.
With a product that's been stable for a long time (stable in the development sense, not in the 'not crashing' sense) you shouldn't expect any large changes between major versions, and no changes at all between minors. You don't just throw away decades of work to make it different for the sake of it. If there are any differences they're probably only there because the marketing department demanded something obviously different so people would upgrade for the new eye candy. Or, at a push, because some HCI guru has had a brainwave about how to make things radically easier to work with. That's very rare though.
Frankly, the fact it looks very similar is a good thing. It might mean MSFT aren't just doing some window dressing.
Is it absurd? Ignoring, for a moment, that the RIAA are a bunch of slimey underhanded scumbags and Ray seems like a stand-up guy, if they were right that Ray's blogging is aimed at publicising his cases and embarrassing his opposition then they'd be quite right to call it vexatious conduct. I don't believe Ray has anything other than the purest motives for his blog but it's not up to me, or you. The court will decide. If this were being heard where I live (the UK) I don't think there'd be the slightest concern that the right answer would be found. I hope the same is true in the USA.
I visited foobar.com and it's returning a 403 now. I can only assume it's slashdotted. That says a lot about penis size of slashdotters.
And me, because I went there too.
By doing this Google get a bunch of data that their competitors have no access to meaning search quality stops being about your algorithm design and starts being about the size of your userbase, something Google will win hands down at the moment. It'll be great for removing spam like you suggest, it'll probably improve the rankings for proper results too, but in the long term all it will do is cement Google's position as the number one player unless someone manages to figure out a search algorithm that's better than a bunch of humans - that's a little unlikely.
Perhaps once it's been running for a while Google won't need to improve their algorithms at all. Hell, they could probably abandon them completely and move to a human-moderated index.
I wouldn't want to employ someone who wasn't on at least one social networking site. It's about the only real proof you can have that someone isn't the sort of person who has nothing in their life besides work. I don't want that sort of person on my team. They're horrible to work with. I want people who socialise - not necessarily with me - but with someone.
I can think of a least three possible reasons - cost, size, and maintainance. It's possible that solar would simply cost too much to develop something that can generate enough power for a moonbase. Related to that, it's possible that the size of solar panels you'd need would be too big to get on to the moon. Lastly there's the question of maintainance; moondust would kill the productivity of a panel. Astronauts roaming around, landers delivering things, and meteor strikes could potentially throw up enough dust to affect the power levels to some degree that might damage the moonbase. Going out and sweeping the panels wouldn't really work, you'd have to actually remove the dust properly.
You also have to consider the frequency of lunar eclipses, though a bank of batteries would sort that out.
"In Hampshire, Eastleigh council wants locals to 'monitor local environmental quality' and report 'issues' involving recycling and waste."
If you take the single quotes out and read it without your tin foil hat on there's nothing to object to. It's just the council asking for people to report problems which they'll then look into. Surely every local government in the world does that.
Slash, the code that runs Slashdot, is open source and freely available - http://www.slashcode.com/ - there are lots of sites that bear more than a passing resemblance to Slashdot simply because the codebase is the same.
If there's anything that will swing my vote at an election it's a comment posted on someone's blog. Policies schmolicies, I want to see what the public think!
*goes to look at what the public think*
Ok, I saw what the public think, and now I want the winner of America's Got Talent to be president.
Hey, you already called my fetish "weird", there's no need to rub it in.
That's what the badgers are for.
Space is largely empty so you can turn off most things and just leave your spaceship alone for the majority of the journey. A few microcalibrations along the way will see you right. Taking off is a lot harder but it's the sort of thing you can practise a lot too so you should be ok with that as well.
Doing something in the alien environment at the other end though, such as a solar system or a planet ... that's really hard. You have to design your craft to be able to deal with thousands of unknown, or known-at-an-extreme-distance, factors. That could well put a travelling alien off coming the last 0.0001% of the journey.