You mean a website like Ebay? Where a mix of legitimate and stolen goods is for sale? Hmmm. Not all ISOs are illegal. There really are people making ISOs that are demos, new games, etc. They are not all cracks.
I'm tweaking my personal copy of the Linux source code right now to give me even more powerful-looking text when it starts up. Whatever impresses the chicks...
Computing speed is relative. You can buy a faster computer, or make your mind go slower. Bring out the beer!
The quote says that if the server strips the TNEF from messages then the client still receives a plaintext version of the message. What's the problem again?
I totally agree. The model you suggest for software is the way people expect things to work. If you want the latest and greatest, you pay for it. Older stuff that gets the job done is cheaper, and truly out of date stuff is nearly free. I wouldn't mind paying $30 for the Matrix when it came out on DVD. But in 5 years, I would expect to pay $5. Why shouldn't it be like that? Why shouldn't software be like that?
I agree. The plethora of buffer overruns that allow arbitrary code to execute is a fault in Linux (and Unix). The i386 allows separate code, data, and stack segments. This means that the operating system can set up hardware locking to prevent execution of arbitrary code, or stack smashing. I'm sure there are other ways to cause unexpected behavior in programs, but if you remove buffer overruns and stack smashing that allow execution of arbitrary code, you've removed more than half of all security bugs. (I don't know if other chips have that feature).
I think the solution to script-kiddy wankerism is a revival of the demo scene. Everyone uses GUIs now, so it's harder to program to the metal to make cool demos that cut the edge of technology. That's what these dumb kids should be doing, actually improving their skills and learning something, rather than being destructive and 31337. I'm gonna wager than many Slashdotters know at least a couple kids that are probably warez dudes or 31337-haxors at night. Be a force for good in their lives; show them how they can create with a computer as well as cause problems.
Um, the Constitution explicitly says that the government can't give people titles like Lord or Duke. What crack are you smoking?
Re:It's still a democracy.....use it!
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Lawsuits Suck
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Senator Orin Hatch is the only politician I truly respect. He isn't afraid to do research and then vote for and support the side he thinks is right. Every time I see him on CSPAN or read his views on a topic, I am always amazed at how clear and well-grounded his opinions are. I don't always agree with his conclusions. I agree with the parent post, it's truly a shame that more computer-savvy people don't give him a chance.
You're right, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Saying that there is a significant Linux "desktop" market is not that extraordinary. Over the last 5 years Linux has been growing exponentially in popularity. I think a good measure of the current number of "desktop" users (as opposed to development or server environments) is the number of shrink-wrapped Linux distributions sold. Is this number insignificant? No, it's not. Claim proven.
I think everyone's missing the obvious solution for this problem. Just take the red pill, sign the NDA, then post away all you want to Slashdot as Anonymous Coward. Simple, really.
That situation you describe would be adding additional restrictions to the GPL, which the GPL does not permit. So if you bought one of those boxes, you could demand the source code even though you supposedly "agreed" not to. The agreement to not ask for the source code is not allowed under the GPL, so does not apply.
There was a situation like this with some guy modifying Doom GPL code (or something like that, I forget the exact situation).
Here's another analogy. A young couple buys a new house. The manufacturer gives them the keys and a manual. The couple tries the keys, the keys work, so after they've moved in they lock up their house and go to a movie. They come back to find their house robbed. They read the manual and it turns out the keys they were given were standard manufacturers keys, the same for all the houses in the lot.
So who's to blame? The manufacturer for handing out generic keys? The couple for not reading the manual? I think it's pretty clear that the manufacturer should be to blame for not telling the couple the keys were generic when he handed them out.
Yes, this is true. Electoral systems give more power to individual voters. The analogy he gives of the electoral college is the World Series. The winner isn't the team that gets the most points in seven games. The winner is the team that wins the most games. How important is one player on the team if it only matters which team gets the most points, and the score is 20-7? Not very. But in real life baseball has game-winning homeruns. A single player wins the game, and thus can affect the Series outcome in a substantive way.
In sports they do this because it makes gameplay more exciting. With a straight points system, most of the time each point is boring. Only sometimes is it close, and then every point is exciting. With a series, or electoral college type system, there are many more exciting points. Translated into politics, exiciting points means votes that can turn the election, which means more power to the voters.
In some areas of research the internet has become the primary distribution channel. I remember reading some study that asked scientists and researchers what their primary source of research results was, and in some areas preprints of papers available over the internet came out ahead of published papers. It might have been high-energy physics, with papers available at xxx.lanl.gov (I'm not sure though).
I second this. Contentville or whatever has legally acquired distribution rights for the theses, so there's no problem there. Most universities don't steal the copyright away when you turn in a thesis; they just require a royalty-free right to distribute the thesis (which is perfectly reasonable). So I would urge everyone to first contact the author of a thesis and ask for a copy (which the author can legally supply) before resorting to other methods of getting a copy of a thesis.
In case you don't believe me, take a look at
UIUC Policy Guidelines. Pay special attention to Section 4.a.4.
Basically the policy says that "traditional academic copyrightable works" belong to the author (unless commissioned by the university). But they make a special exception for work that may also be patentable, and explicitly say that software may be patentable and so is an exception. The result is that the university owns all the software you write in the lab. This was an issue with the local chapter of SigOps when different members wrote operating systems. We had to be careful and only use the ACM machines, not university machines.
Here's another little-known university fact. When you turn in an assignment, you hand over the copyright of the assignment to the university. Even though you did all the work yourself, on your own time, with your own resources, they claim they own the copyright when you give it to them to be graded.
One reason I've heard for this is that it prevents a student from submitting a single piece of work to multiple classes. I.e. if I write an essay about "Quantum Computing" I can't turn it in for a grade to my physics class and my comp.sci. class without permission from the instructors. It is perfectly reasonable for the university to try to prevent that type of thing, but it is not reasonable for the university to claim copyright over things I write as a student. I'm paying them, they're not paying me!
Another thing I think this is trying to stop is students selling good essays to be used by other students. I don't think that type of thing is very good, but the problem isn't the person selling the essay, it's the people fraudulently claiming they wrote the essay they bought. Why shouldn't I be able to publish my good essays that I wrote for class? They're mine.
You can't be too surprised that universities get jealous when they see their ideas make people multi-millionaires and they don't get a penny. There was a project here at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign called Mosaic a little while ago. The project leader graduated and then founded a new company designed on the project, which became Netscape. The university now keeps tighter reign of their "intellectual property". According to their policies, if a student uses university computers for a personal project, the university owns the rights to all the work done. Something to think about.
Most books and movies are out of print. If you look at the combined total of all books and movies ever made, most of them are not being sold anymore. So how do you read them or watch them? You go to used book stores, or the library. How do you get old software that isn't being published? They don't have software in the library, and it's hard to find good sources of used software. This sort of abandonment library is tremendously useful for society. It really is a public service. I think it's more than fair that they remove any software that the publisher complains about.
The more I think about it, the more I like this idea: have software for checkout in the library. The purpose of libraries is to provide free temporary access to copyrighted works. Why shouldn't they have software? Software publishers could produce special versions that require the CD to run (so people can't keep using the program when they return the CD). This would be really cool. Imagine going down to the library to check out the latest Redhat CD. Or checking out Diablo for the weekend. There's the danger of people abusing the system and copying the programs, but there is that danger with audio CD's as well and libraries still carry those.
I think his point still stands, though. If you can declare some objects as not needing to be considered for garbage collection, you can't help but make the garbage collection faster.
I've found that nailpolish works well for painting on computer cases (for small detail work). It's cheap and comes with it's own brush, too. Just don't put it on too thick or it won't dry.
Maybe I have a skewed perception. I haven't used Windows much in years, and no Slashdot readers I know use Windows for anything other than games. It would be fun to see what the actual stats are: what percentage of Slashdot readers use IE vs. Netscape (on Unix), what percentage of users with accounts use IE vs. Netscape, the average karma of IE users vs. Netscape users. Wouldn't that cause a flame war, no matter what the results were!
If I used Windows, I would use IE. It's a good little program. But I use Linux, BeOS, and Solaris. I really don't care about new releases and features of IE, but I do care about Mozilla, simply because Mozilla runs on all the platforms I use. A news story about new features of IE is at the same interest level as a news story about new features of NetPositive (the default BeOS browser).
Without getting into the actual mathematics, let me say that the system of having n shares and you need k of them to reconstruct the message has been worked out. This isn't pie-in-the-sky stuff, this actually works. And it's cool.
Here's a simple example. Suppose we have three servers that store information (n=3). We want to store a number on the servers such that each server individually doesn't know the number, but any two servers taken together are enough to reconstruct the number (k=2). The system we can use is to encode the number as an angle. Draw a line at that angle to horizontal, and choose three random points on the line. Send a single point to each server. Each server knows one point, but it can't figure out the angle of the line. But if you put the information from two servers together, you get two points which lets you draw the original line (and hence figure out the angle and get the information). Of course with bigger n and k you need real cryptographic systems (and not just lines).
Slashdot Mirror
You mean a website like Ebay? Where a mix of legitimate and stolen goods is for sale? Hmmm. Not all ISOs are illegal. There really are people making ISOs that are demos, new games, etc. They are not all cracks.
Computing speed is relative. You can buy a faster computer, or make your mind go slower. Bring out the beer!
The quote says that if the server strips the TNEF from messages then the client still receives a plaintext version of the message. What's the problem again?
I totally agree. The model you suggest for software is the way people expect things to work. If you want the latest and greatest, you pay for it. Older stuff that gets the job done is cheaper, and truly out of date stuff is nearly free. I wouldn't mind paying $30 for the Matrix when it came out on DVD. But in 5 years, I would expect to pay $5. Why shouldn't it be like that? Why shouldn't software be like that?
I agree. The plethora of buffer overruns that allow arbitrary code to execute is a fault in Linux (and Unix). The i386 allows separate code, data, and stack segments. This means that the operating system can set up hardware locking to prevent execution of arbitrary code, or stack smashing. I'm sure there are other ways to cause unexpected behavior in programs, but if you remove buffer overruns and stack smashing that allow execution of arbitrary code, you've removed more than half of all security bugs. (I don't know if other chips have that feature).
I think the solution to script-kiddy wankerism is a revival of the demo scene. Everyone uses GUIs now, so it's harder to program to the metal to make cool demos that cut the edge of technology. That's what these dumb kids should be doing, actually improving their skills and learning something, rather than being destructive and 31337. I'm gonna wager than many Slashdotters know at least a couple kids that are probably warez dudes or 31337-haxors at night. Be a force for good in their lives; show them how they can create with a computer as well as cause problems.
Um, the Constitution explicitly says that the government can't give people titles like Lord or Duke. What crack are you smoking?
Senator Orin Hatch is the only politician I truly respect. He isn't afraid to do research and then vote for and support the side he thinks is right. Every time I see him on CSPAN or read his views on a topic, I am always amazed at how clear and well-grounded his opinions are. I don't always agree with his conclusions. I agree with the parent post, it's truly a shame that more computer-savvy people don't give him a chance.
You're right, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Saying that there is a significant Linux "desktop" market is not that extraordinary. Over the last 5 years Linux has been growing exponentially in popularity. I think a good measure of the current number of "desktop" users (as opposed to development or server environments) is the number of shrink-wrapped Linux distributions sold. Is this number insignificant? No, it's not. Claim proven.
I think everyone's missing the obvious solution for this problem. Just take the red pill, sign the NDA, then post away all you want to Slashdot as Anonymous Coward. Simple, really.
There was a situation like this with some guy modifying Doom GPL code (or something like that, I forget the exact situation).
So who's to blame? The manufacturer for handing out generic keys? The couple for not reading the manual? I think it's pretty clear that the manufacturer should be to blame for not telling the couple the keys were generic when he handed them out.
In sports they do this because it makes gameplay more exciting. With a straight points system, most of the time each point is boring. Only sometimes is it close, and then every point is exciting. With a series, or electoral college type system, there are many more exciting points. Translated into politics, exiciting points means votes that can turn the election, which means more power to the voters.
In some areas of research the internet has become the primary distribution channel. I remember reading some study that asked scientists and researchers what their primary source of research results was, and in some areas preprints of papers available over the internet came out ahead of published papers. It might have been high-energy physics, with papers available at xxx.lanl.gov (I'm not sure though).
I second this. Contentville or whatever has legally acquired distribution rights for the theses, so there's no problem there. Most universities don't steal the copyright away when you turn in a thesis; they just require a royalty-free right to distribute the thesis (which is perfectly reasonable). So I would urge everyone to first contact the author of a thesis and ask for a copy (which the author can legally supply) before resorting to other methods of getting a copy of a thesis.
Basically the policy says that "traditional academic copyrightable works" belong to the author (unless commissioned by the university). But they make a special exception for work that may also be patentable, and explicitly say that software may be patentable and so is an exception. The result is that the university owns all the software you write in the lab. This was an issue with the local chapter of SigOps when different members wrote operating systems. We had to be careful and only use the ACM machines, not university machines.
One reason I've heard for this is that it prevents a student from submitting a single piece of work to multiple classes. I.e. if I write an essay about "Quantum Computing" I can't turn it in for a grade to my physics class and my comp.sci. class without permission from the instructors. It is perfectly reasonable for the university to try to prevent that type of thing, but it is not reasonable for the university to claim copyright over things I write as a student. I'm paying them, they're not paying me!
Another thing I think this is trying to stop is students selling good essays to be used by other students. I don't think that type of thing is very good, but the problem isn't the person selling the essay, it's the people fraudulently claiming they wrote the essay they bought. Why shouldn't I be able to publish my good essays that I wrote for class? They're mine.
We need to speak out against this abuse.
You can't be too surprised that universities get jealous when they see their ideas make people multi-millionaires and they don't get a penny. There was a project here at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign called Mosaic a little while ago. The project leader graduated and then founded a new company designed on the project, which became Netscape. The university now keeps tighter reign of their "intellectual property". According to their policies, if a student uses university computers for a personal project, the university owns the rights to all the work done. Something to think about.
Does your library have games? Or Office95? I've only seen libraries carry software when it comes in the jacket of a book.
The more I think about it, the more I like this idea: have software for checkout in the library. The purpose of libraries is to provide free temporary access to copyrighted works. Why shouldn't they have software? Software publishers could produce special versions that require the CD to run (so people can't keep using the program when they return the CD). This would be really cool. Imagine going down to the library to check out the latest Redhat CD. Or checking out Diablo for the weekend. There's the danger of people abusing the system and copying the programs, but there is that danger with audio CD's as well and libraries still carry those.
Check out gcj, the Java frontend for gcc. It compiles Java to executable form. The problem is all the extra Java libraries and stuff.
I think his point still stands, though. If you can declare some objects as not needing to be considered for garbage collection, you can't help but make the garbage collection faster.
I've found that nailpolish works well for painting on computer cases (for small detail work). It's cheap and comes with it's own brush, too. Just don't put it on too thick or it won't dry.
If I used Windows, I would use IE. It's a good little program. But I use Linux, BeOS, and Solaris. I really don't care about new releases and features of IE, but I do care about Mozilla, simply because Mozilla runs on all the platforms I use. A news story about new features of IE is at the same interest level as a news story about new features of NetPositive (the default BeOS browser).
Here's a simple example. Suppose we have three servers that store information (n=3). We want to store a number on the servers such that each server individually doesn't know the number, but any two servers taken together are enough to reconstruct the number (k=2). The system we can use is to encode the number as an angle. Draw a line at that angle to horizontal, and choose three random points on the line. Send a single point to each server. Each server knows one point, but it can't figure out the angle of the line. But if you put the information from two servers together, you get two points which lets you draw the original line (and hence figure out the angle and get the information). Of course with bigger n and k you need real cryptographic systems (and not just lines).