You can't destroy a wiki with vandalism. A simple script can roll every single page back to a particular date, and then it can all be locked. You can ruin the community aspect of it, and presumably take away a great deal of the value assuming Wikia believe they're buying the community rather than merely the content, but if Wikia think the content is finished and in a state where they can sell it (through advertising) then there's little that can be done.
Except...
The authors of the wiki pages are the owners of their content, and as such they're free to put their content onto the other wiki. They're free to put it onto 1000 other wikis. With some SEO expertise it should be possible to make Wikia's purchase completely worthless because noone would ever see it, so noone would ever view any of their adverts.
There are no valid and legal uses for this information they are hacking the boxes to obtain.
Does there need to be any 'valid' reason? Who decides what's 'valid' and what isn't anyway? If they find it interesting and challenging to hack something that someone else has created isn't that reason enough? To some of us a locked box isn't a sign that you should keep away, we see it more as a challenge thrown down by the lock designer.
The legal aspect should be limited to what we do with the contents of said box once we're in. A law stating that we can't spend our free time doing what we find fun in case we misuse the proceeds of our exploits is ridiculous.
Back when people could actually code..
on
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Coders today are right lazy bastards. 45kb was a lot. You had to think about organising things properly. Today I write code in languages (PHP mostly, some Perl) that hide all manner of management away from you. I'm certain that someone of my Dad's generation who wrote software in the olden days (1960s/70s/80s) would have a fit at some of the stuff I get away with.
We shouldn't laugh at the idea of freeing up 45k, we should thank our lucky stars it's no longer something we have to care about. We have it easy.
Lots of big blockbuster games are terrible. Lots of small scale indie games are fantastic. Take a title like Zee-3's "Naked War" http://www.naked-war.com/ - a play-by-email game similar to Advance Wars on the Nintendo DS - written by a 2 person team (albeit with shedloads of experience), very cheap to create compared to big titles, and insanely good fun to play.
There's absolutely no correlation between the cost of production and how enjoyable a game ends up being.
I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and believe that it's their highly qualified engineers that are saying Cisco products won't be able to cope with the bandwidth requirements of the future. I guess they're telling us to buy elsewhere.
I'm not worried about the data they collect about me, I'm worried about the data they collect full stop. A single company holding a massive data mine containign cross-referenced information about the browsing habits and search terms of loads of people is another step toward a less free internet. That's a bad thing. There are hundreds of millions of internet users out there who are clueless about firewalls, turning off scripting in their browser, and avoiding 'dangerous' sites. I could sit back and scoff at them for being newbies, or I could make a stand from my position of (relative;) ) knowledge. The internet will be better for everyone if we don't just look after ourselves.
Would that mean a Polish person can't legally alter a Wikipedia entry? If I go and deface the entry for some leading Polish politicians could they be arrested if they fixed the page? That's really quite tempting.:twisted:
If the majority of "Web 2.0" sites, or even just some "Web 2.0" sites, were corporation brochure pages, or media portals, or ecommerce sites, the types of sites that have a distinct separation between web team and management, then I'd agree with you. But they're not. The majority of prominent "Web 2.0" sites are personal projects that have gone big. The people in charge are the people who started coding and designing the website. The rest of the "Web 2.0" sites around are experimental sites from the people who wrote them. There aren't many that have a manager sitting behind the designers and developers cracking a whip to make them destroy usability by implementing whatever was featured in this month's Wired; the designers are doing that all by themselves by adding whatever hit the top of Digg this morning.
If the worry is that things can be taken out of context then we have only two options: remember everything so context can be retained, or remember nothing. If computers 'forget' (can't we just say 'delete'?) some things and retain others then we'll have problems contextualising content.
Personally, I'd rather computers stored everything. Human history is only as rich as it is because scholars hundreds, even thousands, of years ago wrote things down. The periods of our past where writing was unusual are only known about through what amounts to educated speculation. How sad would it be that in the next thousand years there's no record of what we did and said because we're fearful of what some mysterious power might do with the archive?
The tin-foiled paranoids should be more worried about what a rogue power would do without any history to look back on. It works both ways: "Where were you on May 10th 1977? You don't remember? You have no record? YOU HAVE NO ALIBI! You must be guilty!".
Perhaps you're right. Personally, I'd rather companies didn't bother innovating if the fruits of their research is a way to leech money from the poor and the sick. We have a thing called 'ethics'. If you ignore the ethics of selling something then people will look for ways around you and your business methods. It's not like the Brazilian government ignored the patent: they tried to negotiate a price they could afford. The only reason they had to resort to this was the company refusing to offer a low enough price. Why did they do that? Greed. Plain and simple. The drug can clearly be made at a low enough price because there's an alternative supply.
Grabbing as much money as possible, at the expensive of your humanity, shouldn't be your life goal. If it is then you should reevaluate your outlook on things.
No, no, no. If they refuse to remove the clause you should still accept the job, and then proceed to do what the contract states: "inform them of any ideas (related to the company or not)". Every single one. Written up in company time with a full explanation. They can have your idea for a hover toilet, or pajamas for sheep*, or a hyperdimensional toothbrush, or.. well you get the idea. Well, they do. I doubt you'd get much work done though.
The best bit is that even if they fire you for doing no real work, you can still bill them for a year afterwards. After all, a contract that requires you to work on their behalf wouldn't be fair if they didn't pay you for your time.
I believe that one day Beryl will prove to be a fantastic option for the casual PC user. However, until it leaves Beta, this is best left to people who have a machine that they can take some risks with.
This is Google's fault. People have come to expect Betaware to be essentially a finished application. It isn't. Final is finished. Beta is for testing. If it's at the point where it works and the devs think they've sorted all the showstoppers then it's a release candidate.
So yes, the author is right, casual users definitely should leave this alone until it's done. That's what "beta" means.
One of the largest barriers to recruiting women to the field is the nerd factor.
If someone, male or female, is put off entering a particular study path because they're concerned about how other people will view them then they simply aren't passionate enough about it. Hell, they're not even interested in it. They're better off leaving the place open to someone a little less vacuous.
Maybe it's just me, but I see no reason why people need to be recruited into compsci. There's plenty of interest in it already. Should there be more men going to beauty school just to balance out the demographics a bit?
Let people decide what they want to do and stuff the perceived lack of equality.
I don't see the relevance of it being a MySpace profile. When I was at school (12 years ago) MySpace didn't exist and yet the head teacher still had cause to gather all the pupils together once or twice to try to ascertain the culprits behind a fake, and horribly libelous, newsletter detailing the fictious activities of some of the teaching staff. It was produced by some malicious students and distributed around the classrooms. Exactly the same thing, just in a less connected world.
This issue is about the discipline of students, dealing with a prank in an appropriate manner, and ultimately finding the reason why some people find it funny to be disrespectful to someone (hopefully) dedicated to improving their future. If MySpace, or even the internet itself, vanished overnight it'd still happen as much as it does now.
Several delegations, including the US, Saudi Arabia, China and India, had asked for the final version to reflect less certainty than the draft.
I agree with that. We can't be certain. We've only got a few decades of really good data, and a few hundred years of approximate data prior to that. That's not enough to be certain to any degree about events that will play out over hundreds of years.
But that doesn't matter. We need to act on this whether (no pun intended) we're certain or not. The very fact we're not sure means we have no choice *in case we're right*. Not being certain works both ways. We're not certain it's a bit disaster, but neither are we certain it isn't. If we don't start taking action now then in 50 years time it may be too late. If we do take action then it might mean we all end up less wealthy, maybe even out of work if we work in a polluting industry, but is that really so bad if the cost of doing nothing is potentially the end of the human race, or even the sum of life on Earth? Sure, I'm a bit of a tree-hugging hippy liberal (lower case 'l') at heart, but I care that my children and children's children don't end up starving to death in a desert wasteland. With no trees. To hug.
[blockquote]Monkey --> Ape --> Gorilla --> Chimpanzee --> Missing Link? --> Man[/blockquote] This is a common misconception. There's no missing link that shows chimpanzees ever evolved into humans. The "missing link", if found, would demonstrate that both species came from a common ancestor millions of years ago before the two evolutionary paths diverged.
It depends on the caves really. Fracture caves or lava tubes would certainly be expected because they're formed by volcanic and tectonic movements. If Mars didn't have that then something very odd would be going on. Solutional cave formations are less of a certainty though. These are the sorts of caves formed by water absorbing CO2 during rainfall, turning to carbonic acid, and dissolving certain sorts of rock. For them to exist you need both water and CO2 obviously, and specific mineral deposits to desolve. Their existence could tell us more about the chemical makeup of the martian surface.
Plus, caves would be a likely place for microbes to continue to thrive. Caves on Earth of full of life.
Good month. Finding lots of bugs, and fixing them, is a good thing. We don't need to pretend it's perfect and rosy and all nicely secure and won't ever need a patch or an update. We're realists on this side of the OSS fence. We know that software is only as good as the people working on it.
I'd like to extend a hearty thank you to this researcher for making Firefox even better.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't destroy a wiki with vandalism. A simple script can roll every single page back to a particular date, and then it can all be locked. You can ruin the community aspect of it, and presumably take away a great deal of the value assuming Wikia believe they're buying the community rather than merely the content, but if Wikia think the content is finished and in a state where they can sell it (through advertising) then there's little that can be done.
Except...
The authors of the wiki pages are the owners of their content, and as such they're free to put their content onto the other wiki. They're free to put it onto 1000 other wikis. With some SEO expertise it should be possible to make Wikia's purchase completely worthless because noone would ever see it, so noone would ever view any of their adverts.
Does there need to be any 'valid' reason? Who decides what's 'valid' and what isn't anyway? If they find it interesting and challenging to hack something that someone else has created isn't that reason enough? To some of us a locked box isn't a sign that you should keep away, we see it more as a challenge thrown down by the lock designer.
The legal aspect should be limited to what we do with the contents of said box once we're in. A law stating that we can't spend our free time doing what we find fun in case we misuse the proceeds of our exploits is ridiculous.
Coders today are right lazy bastards. 45kb was a lot. You had to think about organising things properly. Today I write code in languages (PHP mostly, some Perl) that hide all manner of management away from you. I'm certain that someone of my Dad's generation who wrote software in the olden days (1960s/70s/80s) would have a fit at some of the stuff I get away with.
We shouldn't laugh at the idea of freeing up 45k, we should thank our lucky stars it's no longer something we have to care about. We have it easy.
Presumably to ensure 50,000 votes aren't added in the space of 0.001 seconds. Coz that'd look a little suspect.
Lots of big blockbuster games are terrible. Lots of small scale indie games are fantastic. Take a title like Zee-3's "Naked War" http://www.naked-war.com/ - a play-by-email game similar to Advance Wars on the Nintendo DS - written by a 2 person team (albeit with shedloads of experience), very cheap to create compared to big titles, and insanely good fun to play.
There's absolutely no correlation between the cost of production and how enjoyable a game ends up being.
I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and believe that it's their highly qualified engineers that are saying Cisco products won't be able to cope with the bandwidth requirements of the future. I guess they're telling us to buy elsewhere.
That was the joke. Hence the ;). Slashdot mods didn't get it though.
I've got two older brothers, I don't think that makes me stupid. ;)
I'm not worried about the data they collect about me, I'm worried about the data they collect full stop. A single company holding a massive data mine containign cross-referenced information about the browsing habits and search terms of loads of people is another step toward a less free internet. That's a bad thing. There are hundreds of millions of internet users out there who are clueless about firewalls, turning off scripting in their browser, and avoiding 'dangerous' sites. I could sit back and scoff at them for being newbies, or I could make a stand from my position of (relative ;) ) knowledge. The internet will be better for everyone if we don't just look after ourselves.
Would that mean a Polish person can't legally alter a Wikipedia entry? If I go and deface the entry for some leading Polish politicians could they be arrested if they fixed the page? That's really quite tempting. :twisted:
If the majority of "Web 2.0" sites, or even just some "Web 2.0" sites, were corporation brochure pages, or media portals, or ecommerce sites, the types of sites that have a distinct separation between web team and management, then I'd agree with you. But they're not. The majority of prominent "Web 2.0" sites are personal projects that have gone big. The people in charge are the people who started coding and designing the website. The rest of the "Web 2.0" sites around are experimental sites from the people who wrote them. There aren't many that have a manager sitting behind the designers and developers cracking a whip to make them destroy usability by implementing whatever was featured in this month's Wired; the designers are doing that all by themselves by adding whatever hit the top of Digg this morning.
If the worry is that things can be taken out of context then we have only two options: remember everything so context can be retained, or remember nothing. If computers 'forget' (can't we just say 'delete'?) some things and retain others then we'll have problems contextualising content.
Personally, I'd rather computers stored everything. Human history is only as rich as it is because scholars hundreds, even thousands, of years ago wrote things down. The periods of our past where writing was unusual are only known about through what amounts to educated speculation. How sad would it be that in the next thousand years there's no record of what we did and said because we're fearful of what some mysterious power might do with the archive?
The tin-foiled paranoids should be more worried about what a rogue power would do without any history to look back on. It works both ways: "Where were you on May 10th 1977? You don't remember? You have no record? YOU HAVE NO ALIBI! You must be guilty!".
Perhaps you're right. Personally, I'd rather companies didn't bother innovating if the fruits of their research is a way to leech money from the poor and the sick. We have a thing called 'ethics'. If you ignore the ethics of selling something then people will look for ways around you and your business methods. It's not like the Brazilian government ignored the patent: they tried to negotiate a price they could afford. The only reason they had to resort to this was the company refusing to offer a low enough price. Why did they do that? Greed. Plain and simple. The drug can clearly be made at a low enough price because there's an alternative supply.
Grabbing as much money as possible, at the expensive of your humanity, shouldn't be your life goal. If it is then you should reevaluate your outlook on things.
No, no, no. If they refuse to remove the clause you should still accept the job, and then proceed to do what the contract states: "inform them of any ideas (related to the company or not)". Every single one. Written up in company time with a full explanation. They can have your idea for a hover toilet, or pajamas for sheep*, or a hyperdimensional toothbrush, or .. well you get the idea. Well, they do. I doubt you'd get much work done though.
The best bit is that even if they fire you for doing no real work, you can still bill them for a year afterwards. After all, a contract that requires you to work on their behalf wouldn't be fair if they didn't pay you for your time.
* This one probably exists already. Sorry boss!
Has that already happened to RMS? Or is there a barely recognizable twisted version of him on the horizon?
I'm not sure I can even imagine something like that.
This is Google's fault. People have come to expect Betaware to be essentially a finished application. It isn't. Final is finished. Beta is for testing. If it's at the point where it works and the devs think they've sorted all the showstoppers then it's a release candidate.
So yes, the author is right, casual users definitely should leave this alone until it's done. That's what "beta" means.
If someone, male or female, is put off entering a particular study path because they're concerned about how other people will view them then they simply aren't passionate enough about it. Hell, they're not even interested in it. They're better off leaving the place open to someone a little less vacuous.
Maybe it's just me, but I see no reason why people need to be recruited into compsci. There's plenty of interest in it already. Should there be more men going to beauty school just to balance out the demographics a bit?
Let people decide what they want to do and stuff the perceived lack of equality.
Looks like the old "Joypad vs Mouse+Keyboard" debate might finally be resolved then.
When all of us PC gamers pwn the 360 players to hell, daily, using our superior control mechanism.
Err...yeah...sorry...that was my inner fanboy speaking.
I don't see the relevance of it being a MySpace profile. When I was at school (12 years ago) MySpace didn't exist and yet the head teacher still had cause to gather all the pupils together once or twice to try to ascertain the culprits behind a fake, and horribly libelous, newsletter detailing the fictious activities of some of the teaching staff. It was produced by some malicious students and distributed around the classrooms. Exactly the same thing, just in a less connected world.
This issue is about the discipline of students, dealing with a prank in an appropriate manner, and ultimately finding the reason why some people find it funny to be disrespectful to someone (hopefully) dedicated to improving their future. If MySpace, or even the internet itself, vanished overnight it'd still happen as much as it does now.
I agree with that. We can't be certain. We've only got a few decades of really good data, and a few hundred years of approximate data prior to that. That's not enough to be certain to any degree about events that will play out over hundreds of years.
But that doesn't matter. We need to act on this whether (no pun intended) we're certain or not. The very fact we're not sure means we have no choice *in case we're right*. Not being certain works both ways. We're not certain it's a bit disaster, but neither are we certain it isn't. If we don't start taking action now then in 50 years time it may be too late. If we do take action then it might mean we all end up less wealthy, maybe even out of work if we work in a polluting industry, but is that really so bad if the cost of doing nothing is potentially the end of the human race, or even the sum of life on Earth? Sure, I'm a bit of a tree-hugging hippy liberal (lower case 'l') at heart, but I care that my children and children's children don't end up starving to death in a desert wasteland. With no trees. To hug.
[blockquote]Monkey --> Ape --> Gorilla --> Chimpanzee --> Missing Link? --> Man[/blockquote]
This is a common misconception. There's no missing link that shows chimpanzees ever evolved into humans. The "missing link", if found, would demonstrate that both species came from a common ancestor millions of years ago before the two evolutionary paths diverged.
I've never met anyone who said the brutal violence of GTA is a bad thing.
Well, noone who lived long enough to argue their point anyway.
Why should we believe a woman who thinks her niece's pet goldfish spoke to her from the afterlife?
It depends on the caves really. Fracture caves or lava tubes would certainly be expected because they're formed by volcanic and tectonic movements. If Mars didn't have that then something very odd would be going on. Solutional cave formations are less of a certainty though. These are the sorts of caves formed by water absorbing CO2 during rainfall, turning to carbonic acid, and dissolving certain sorts of rock. For them to exist you need both water and CO2 obviously, and specific mineral deposits to desolve. Their existence could tell us more about the chemical makeup of the martian surface.
Plus, caves would be a likely place for microbes to continue to thrive. Caves on Earth of full of life.
Good month. Finding lots of bugs, and fixing them, is a good thing. We don't need to pretend it's perfect and rosy and all nicely secure and won't ever need a patch or an update. We're realists on this side of the OSS fence. We know that software is only as good as the people working on it.
I'd like to extend a hearty thank you to this researcher for making Firefox even better.