244. Any person who willfully and maliciously places or throws, or causes to be placed or thrown, upon the person of another, any vitriol, corrosive acid, flammable substance, or caustic chemical of any nature, with the intent to injure the flesh or disfigure the body of that person, is punishable by imprisonment in the state prison for two, three or four years.
OK, let's see, what if I attack someone with a knife?
245. (a) (1) Any person who commits an assault upon the person of another with a deadly weapon or instrument other than a firearm or by any means of force likely to produce great bodily injury shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for two, three, or four years
Hell, given that Arnie is now governator of California what happens if I start spraying machinegun fire around?
(3) Any person who commits an assault upon the person of another with a machinegun, as defined in Section 12200, or an assault weapon, as defined in Section 12276 or 12276.1, shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for 4, 8, or 12 years.
So, four years in jail for permanently disfiguring someone, four years for cutting somebody up with a knife, twelve for machinegunning people and... 471 years for spoofing a From: email header.
How does using a scarce resource (bandwidth) to create an abundant resource (disk space) make any economic sense?
Economics have nothing to do with it. At all.
First and foremost, this is a cool hack. Second, it's an interesting way to hide information and/or make its recovery quite difficult, as well as to achieve some degree of plausible deniability.
Rather than fining the people (victims?) of poorly written software and OSes, why not have a class-action suit against the corporations that make the worms & viruses possible in the first place?
A wonderful idea.
You understand, of course, that such corporations as RedHat, SuSE, etc. will be among those sued..?
And there is really no reason to limit this to corporations only. A buffer overflow in some Linux code? Look into the source for the copyright notice and sue the hell out of the poor schmuck who wrote it!
I appreciate it when Slashdot informs me of a patch I need to apply, but really, I'd rather hear about it once the exploit is actually understood and the patch is available.
Really?
How about hearing about it when you find your machines rooted?
Even though there is no patch available (yet), this heads-up is extremely valuable, as it allows people who cannot afford to be compromised to shut down or appropriately filter SSH on their systems.
Re:I'm not sure how accurate this statement is.
on
MRAM in 2004?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I would think most of the people who keep their PCs on 24/7 do it for P2P or [Seti|Folding]@home or possibly to prevent wear and tear on the hard drive (spinning up the hard drive wears it down faster than anything).
All of my many boxes (with the exception of laptops) are on 24/7. The main reason is to save wear and tear on components. For solid-state devices the main killer is thermal stress. Thermal stress occurs when the device either warms up or cools down and not shutting the machine down avoids it. Not completely -- an idle chip generates significantly less heat than a busy one -- but it helps a great deal. Not having to spin up and down the hard drive is also in the same category.
Besides a lot of my boxes are micro-servers: a shared directory here, a shared printer there...
Not having to wait for the machines to boot is just a free bonus.
Re:direct democracy not necessarily better
on
Public Net-work
·
· Score: 2, Funny
...your representative has a team of highly specialized and highly dedicated aides whose job it is to know the entire issue.
We call them "lobbyists" for short:-) Yep, highly specialized and highly dedicated.
Actually SPEWS is very effective. It makes people DO something about spammers they are harbouring or sharing space with. Naturally, that's why you hate them.
You know what? I am sure there's crime in the city where you live. How about we put everyone in city under house arrest? I am sure it will make people DO something about criminals they are sharing space with...
Really? A RIGHT to make money? How do I get one of those?
Hollywood (just like everybody else) has a right to TRY to make money. It goes hand-in-hand with the right to fail miserably.
Yes, it's illegal to publish copyrighted material on P2P networks if you don't have proper license/permission. So what? Jaywalking is illegal, too. So is speeding. So is not paying state's sales tax on stuff bought mail-order. And your point is?
It saddens me as a developer that you can't even deign to write a P2P add without the assumption that it will be used for sharing copyrighted materials and thus shut down by the RIAA/MPAA.
Sure you can. Grokster and Morpheus won their court case, remember?
The xmule situation is very unclear. There are three not necessarily related things happening:
(1) The guy got a subpoena. That's basically a court order saying "come talk to us". He is not under arrest and so far hasn't been charged with anything. Hysterics about federal jails and moving to Mexico seem to be quite uncalled for.
(2) His ISP cut him off for "unacceptable use". Looking at cable providers' Terms of Service, it seems you can't do anything but browse the web anyway, so I am sure he broke some clause there. Likely he's been running a server on his connection which most ToSes prohibit. Tough luck. Dump the cable and get a DSL line instead.
(3) He is getting close to his bandwidth limit. Well, that's the consequence of popularity. Nothing earthshattering there.
For fairly techincal and highly illuminating discussion look here.
The consensus of *photographers* (as opposed to pixel-counters) is that 6Mp semi-pro cameras (such as Canon D60 or 10D) are equal to 35mm film and 11Mp pro cameras (such as Canon 1Ds) surpass what 35mm film can offer.
Note that not all pixels are equal: a 6Mp consumer point-and-shoot will produce a noticeably worse image than, say, a Canon 10D. For reasons why follow the link above.
Any man with motivation can buy a RFIDs reprogrammer on EBay, walk into Walmart, and effectively make all boxes of whole wheat cheerios identify as gold-pressed latinum.
(a) I would assume the great majority of RFIDs (and certainly the ones on the cereal boxes) will be read-only. No point at all in making them rw.
(b) How much are you willing to bet we won't get a law saying reprogramming a RFID is to be considered a terrorist act..?
(c) It should be trivial to detect a RFID reprogrammer in operation -- it's an emitting device, after all. Any store with reprogrammable RFIDs will *have* to have reprogrammer detectors installed (no, cashier, I have no idea why this TV scans at $5.99...)
The interesting part is that it should be possible to burn out RFIDs quickly and easily. And from the system's point of view an item without a RFID does not exist....
The Postal Service estimates that it delivers about 670 million pieces of mail to more than 138 million addresses daily, leading to concerns among law enforcement and government officials that it is too easy to use the system for criminal or terrorist activity.
Boggle.
I am waiting for the moment when it occurs to these people that it's too easy to use the USA road system for criminal or terrorist activity. Or just sidewalks, for that matter.
Thank god that they don't have any idea that computer networks exist. If they are that apprehensive about a postal system, just imagine the hysterics they'll have when they discover the Internet...
It's just technology. The technology is inevitable.
That's not "just technology". That's a specific application of technology and there's nothing inevitable about it.
It's quite easy, technologically, to fit everyone in the country with an electronic bracelet (or anklet) which transmits to law enforcement data center that person's location in real time. It might not be so easy to do this politically.
Or take an even simpler example. Until recently there were no public roads in the USA where it was legal to go faster than, say, 70 mph. Why weren't all cars fitted with governors that would limit the speed to 70 mph? From the technology point of view it's trivial to do...
Yeah what is capitalism? From what I understand a simplified definition of capitalism would be a system where investors put money in and expect a return on investment.
Basically, capitalism is a system where individuals are personally free (as opposed to feudalism) and can own means of productions, e.g. factories (as opposed to socialism/communism).
Investors were putting money into ventures and expecting a return long time before capitalism.
That's mostly due to the anglo-saxon neurosis that makes them believe that everything coming from the State is bad. This has the unfortunate effect of painting State workers (civil servants) in a bad light, assuming by default that they are incompetent.
The Anglo-Saxon neurosis about the state has ample historical evidence to back it up.
It's been said that the main lesson of the XX century is the failure of governments. I would tend to agree.
As to civil servants, I don't *assume* they are incompetent. I *know* they are incompetent through long-term regular personal experience:-)
The more people use the daypass, the more valuable that sponsorship, and the more we can charge for it. (emphasis added)
Err... and why exactly should we care about Salon's advertising rates?
I find myself in the same position as another poster in this thread -- I used to occasionally read Salon in the days when it was free. Now I don't read it because the content is not worth the hassle needed to get to it.
May I suggest that this is Salon's basic problem -- not having something that people are ready to pay money (or their time/attention) for..?
In any case I suspect that free publicity that Salon gets by being mentioned on Slashdot is worth more than a copied-and-pasted text of article somewhere in comments.
Re:Knuth is only one foundation that won't be lost
on
Software Archaeology
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The most fundamental concept in computer science is logic, not algorithms (or worse programming languages). If a 'programmer' hasn't written a program in a low level language like C or assembler, the hiring manager should beware. Without hands-on experience with the fundamentals of computer science that person is lacking at the most basic level, regardless of whether he knows 1 language or 50 languages. He is handicapped.
Bullshit.
"Computer science is about computers in the same way astronomy is about telescopes" --Edsgar Dijkstra
Programming isn't about knowing how to twiddle bits in registers or even how to leverage strengths of a particular processor.
Programming is about dealing with complex problems which can be solved by manipulation of information. I would say the the quality a programmer needs most of all is not logic or math, but just the ability to hold and manipulate large and complicated structures inside his head. And no, it doesn't have anything to do with assembler, low-level languages, ALUs, bits, etc. etc.
Re:full article text, no pass required
on
Software Archaeology
·
· Score: 2, Funny
You know, it really isn't fair-use to repost an entire article from another website site
I truly believe that if you don't vote (or in an Australian citizen's case cast a blank ballot) you have no place to criticize politics or the actions of politicians until you do so.
Yet again... Why in the world my freedom-of-speech rights to criticize the government depend on having gone to some place and dropping a piece of paper in some box?
Besides, consider a highly realistic scenario. An election is coming up. Candidate #1 (say, a Demolican) is a hysterical idiot who advocates doing some very stupid things. Candidate #2 (say, a Repucrat) is a drooling moron who also advocates doing some very stupid things (but different from the first candidate's). Candidate #3 (say, an independent) is clearly a deranged lunatic but is expected to get around 0.9% of the vote or something like that.
Given these choices why should I go and vote? And why not voting means I don't get to express my opinion about one of these guys later on?
Most of the brands of rechargeable batteries have about the same performance.
Bullshit. First, there are different kinds of rechargeables -- NiCd, NiMh, Lithium, to name a few most widespread. Their characteristics are quite different. Second, as usual you typically get what you pay for.
But not buying batteries from an electronics store is good advice. They are horribly overpriced there, any brand...
Rechargeable batteries, like toothpaste, is a commodity product.
Toothpaste? You mean you alway buy the cheapest toothpaste you can find??:-)
When you buy a product, you indirectly support the value system in the country of origin.
I do? How interesting... Is it one of those "if you do drugs you support terrorism" rants?
"Made in USA", "Made in Japan", or similar Western-country label is usually a safe bet in terms of (1) the quality of the product and (2) the value system in the country of origin.
Thanks for a good laugh... To start with, Japan is not a Western country. To continue, US produces large amounts of very shoddy products. "Made in USA" is definitely not a guarantee of quality. And what was it about value system again?
Slashdot Mirror
Let's look at California penal code.
How about throwing acid in someone's face?
OK, let's see, what if I attack someone with a knife?
Hell, given that Arnie is now governator of California what happens if I start spraying machinegun fire around?
So, four years in jail for permanently disfiguring someone, four years for cutting somebody up with a knife, twelve for machinegunning people and... 471 years for spoofing a From: email header.
Ah, yes, justice...
How does using a scarce resource (bandwidth) to create an abundant resource (disk space) make any economic sense?
Economics have nothing to do with it. At all.
First and foremost, this is a cool hack. Second, it's an interesting way to hide information and/or make its recovery quite difficult, as well as to achieve some degree of plausible deniability.
Rather than fining the people (victims?) of poorly written software and OSes, why not have a class-action suit against the corporations that make the worms & viruses possible in the first place?
A wonderful idea.
You understand, of course, that such corporations as RedHat, SuSE, etc. will be among those sued..?
And there is really no reason to limit this to corporations only. A buffer overflow in some Linux code? Look into the source for the copyright notice and sue the hell out of the poor schmuck who wrote it!
Yeah, as I've said, a great idea.
I appreciate it when Slashdot informs me of a patch I need to apply, but really, I'd rather hear about it once the exploit is actually understood and the patch is available.
Really?
How about hearing about it when you find your machines rooted?
Even though there is no patch available (yet), this heads-up is extremely valuable, as it allows people who cannot afford to be compromised to shut down or appropriately filter SSH on their systems.
I would think most of the people who keep their PCs on 24/7 do it for P2P or [Seti|Folding]@home or possibly to prevent wear and tear on the hard drive (spinning up the hard drive wears it down faster than anything).
All of my many boxes (with the exception of laptops) are on 24/7. The main reason is to save wear and tear on components. For solid-state devices the main killer is thermal stress. Thermal stress occurs when the device either warms up or cools down and not shutting the machine down avoids it. Not completely -- an idle chip generates significantly less heat than a busy one -- but it helps a great deal. Not having to spin up and down the hard drive is also in the same category.
Besides a lot of my boxes are micro-servers: a shared directory here, a shared printer there...
Not having to wait for the machines to boot is just a free bonus.
...your representative has a team of highly specialized and highly dedicated aides whose job it is to know the entire issue.
:-) Yep, highly specialized and highly dedicated.
We call them "lobbyists" for short
Many people will just buy whatever version they get their hands on first, only to find out later there's no multiplayer.
So they'll have to go and buy ANOTHER box with multiplayer included -- doesn't that look nice from Valve's point of view?
Are you saying that dorks is just a game's way of making another game?
Morrowind.
Actually SPEWS is very effective. It makes people DO something about spammers they are harbouring or sharing space with. Naturally, that's why you hate them.
You know what? I am sure there's crime in the city where you live. How about we put everyone in city under house arrest? I am sure it will make people DO something about criminals they are sharing space with...
Anyone here works at a place that actually got one of these "invoices" from SCO?
Yes, Hollywood DOES have the right to make money.
Really? A RIGHT to make money? How do I get one of those?
Hollywood (just like everybody else) has a right to TRY to make money. It goes hand-in-hand with the right to fail miserably.
Yes, it's illegal to publish copyrighted material on P2P networks if you don't have proper license/permission. So what? Jaywalking is illegal, too. So is speeding. So is not paying state's sales tax on stuff bought mail-order. And your point is?
It saddens me as a developer that you can't even deign to write a P2P add without the assumption that it will be used for sharing copyrighted materials and thus shut down by the RIAA/MPAA.
Sure you can. Grokster and Morpheus won their court case, remember?
The xmule situation is very unclear. There are three not necessarily related things happening:
(1) The guy got a subpoena. That's basically a court order saying "come talk to us". He is not under arrest and so far hasn't been charged with anything. Hysterics about federal jails and moving to Mexico seem to be quite uncalled for.
(2) His ISP cut him off for "unacceptable use". Looking at cable providers' Terms of Service, it seems you can't do anything but browse the web anyway, so I am sure he broke some clause there. Likely he's been running a server on his connection which most ToSes prohibit. Tough luck. Dump the cable and get a DSL line instead.
(3) He is getting close to his bandwidth limit. Well, that's the consequence of popularity. Nothing earthshattering there.
For fairly techincal and highly illuminating discussion look here.
The consensus of *photographers* (as opposed to pixel-counters) is that 6Mp semi-pro cameras (such as Canon D60 or 10D) are equal to 35mm film and 11Mp pro cameras (such as Canon 1Ds) surpass what 35mm film can offer.
Note that not all pixels are equal: a 6Mp consumer point-and-shoot will produce a noticeably worse image than, say, a Canon 10D. For reasons why follow the link above.
Any man with motivation can buy a RFIDs reprogrammer on EBay, walk into Walmart, and effectively make all boxes of whole wheat cheerios identify as gold-pressed latinum.
(a) I would assume the great majority of RFIDs (and certainly the ones on the cereal boxes) will be read-only. No point at all in making them rw.
(b) How much are you willing to bet we won't get a law saying reprogramming a RFID is to be considered a terrorist act..?
(c) It should be trivial to detect a RFID reprogrammer in operation -- it's an emitting device, after all. Any store with reprogrammable RFIDs will *have* to have reprogrammer detectors installed (no, cashier, I have no idea why this TV scans at $5.99...)
The interesting part is that it should be possible to burn out RFIDs quickly and easily. And from the system's point of view an item without a RFID does not exist....
Boggle.
I am waiting for the moment when it occurs to these people that it's too easy to use the USA road system for criminal or terrorist activity. Or just sidewalks, for that matter.
Thank god that they don't have any idea that computer networks exist. If they are that apprehensive about a postal system, just imagine the hysterics they'll have when they discover the Internet...
It's just technology. The technology is inevitable.
That's not "just technology". That's a specific application of technology and there's nothing inevitable about it.
It's quite easy, technologically, to fit everyone in the country with an electronic bracelet (or anklet) which transmits to law enforcement data center that person's location in real time. It might not be so easy to do this politically.
Or take an even simpler example. Until recently there were no public roads in the USA where it was legal to go faster than, say, 70 mph. Why weren't all cars fitted with governors that would limit the speed to 70 mph? From the technology point of view it's trivial to do...
Yeah what is capitalism? From what I understand a simplified definition of capitalism would be a system where investors put money in and expect a return on investment.
Basically, capitalism is a system where individuals are personally free (as opposed to feudalism) and can own means of productions, e.g. factories (as opposed to socialism/communism).
Investors were putting money into ventures and expecting a return long time before capitalism.
You are giving money to an ISP that is spam friendly.
You are directly at fault for them being in business still.
You are not at all innocent
Riiiight.
You are smoking a joint, so you support terrorism, correct? "Directly at fault" I would say...
So, dissy, tell me, do you take upon yourself all the sins of corporations the products of which you use?
That's mostly due to the anglo-saxon neurosis that makes them believe that everything coming from the State is bad. This has the unfortunate effect of painting State workers (civil servants) in a bad light, assuming by default that they are incompetent.
:-)
The Anglo-Saxon neurosis about the state has ample historical evidence to back it up.
It's been said that the main lesson of the XX century is the failure of governments. I would tend to agree.
As to civil servants, I don't *assume* they are incompetent. I *know* they are incompetent through long-term regular personal experience
The more people use the daypass, the more valuable that sponsorship, and the more we can charge for it. (emphasis added)
Err... and why exactly should we care about Salon's advertising rates?
I find myself in the same position as another poster in this thread -- I used to occasionally read Salon in the days when it was free. Now I don't read it because the content is not worth the hassle needed to get to it.
May I suggest that this is Salon's basic problem -- not having something that people are ready to pay money (or their time/attention) for..?
In any case I suspect that free publicity that Salon gets by being mentioned on Slashdot is worth more than a copied-and-pasted text of article somewhere in comments.
The most fundamental concept in computer science is logic, not algorithms (or worse programming languages). If a 'programmer' hasn't written a program in a low level language like C or assembler, the hiring manager should beware. Without hands-on experience with the fundamentals of computer science that person is lacking at the most basic level, regardless of whether he knows 1 language or 50 languages. He is handicapped.
Bullshit.
"Computer science is about computers in the same way astronomy is about telescopes" --Edsgar Dijkstra
Programming isn't about knowing how to twiddle bits in registers or even how to leverage strengths of a particular processor.
Programming is about dealing with complex problems which can be solved by manipulation of information. I would say the the quality a programmer needs most of all is not logic or math, but just the ability to hold and manipulate large and complicated structures inside his head. And no, it doesn't have anything to do with assembler, low-level languages, ALUs, bits, etc. etc.
You know, it really isn't fair-use to repost an entire article from another website site
Yes, and jaywalking is illegal, too.
I truly believe that if you don't vote (or in an Australian citizen's case cast a blank ballot) you have no place to criticize politics or the actions of politicians until you do so.
Yet again... Why in the world my freedom-of-speech rights to criticize the government depend on having gone to some place and dropping a piece of paper in some box?
Besides, consider a highly realistic scenario. An election is coming up. Candidate #1 (say, a Demolican) is a hysterical idiot who advocates doing some very stupid things. Candidate #2 (say, a Repucrat) is a drooling moron who also advocates doing some very stupid things (but different from the first candidate's). Candidate #3 (say, an independent) is clearly a deranged lunatic but is expected to get around 0.9% of the vote or something like that.
Given these choices why should I go and vote? And why not voting means I don't get to express my opinion about one of these guys later on?
Most of the brands of rechargeable batteries have about the same performance.
:-)
Bullshit. First, there are different kinds of rechargeables -- NiCd, NiMh, Lithium, to name a few most widespread. Their characteristics are quite different. Second, as usual you typically get what you pay for.
But not buying batteries from an electronics store is good advice. They are horribly overpriced there, any brand...
Rechargeable batteries, like toothpaste, is a commodity product.
Toothpaste? You mean you alway buy the cheapest toothpaste you can find??
When you buy a product, you indirectly support the value system in the country of origin.
I do? How interesting... Is it one of those "if you do drugs you support terrorism" rants?
"Made in USA", "Made in Japan", or similar Western-country label is usually a safe bet in terms of (1) the quality of the product and (2) the value system in the country of origin.
Thanks for a good laugh... To start with, Japan is not a Western country. To continue, US produces large amounts of very shoddy products. "Made in USA" is definitely not a guarantee of quality. And what was it about value system again?