It's organized crime that's going to get him. Revenge.
I see evidence that this guy is pretty lame - he's dumb enough to screw up a good scam his first time out by shooting for the moon. We can't assume that a novice is the first person to find this scam, but AutoTote indicates he's the first to be caught.
I'll wager dollars to doughnuts that he's just closed the loop on a lucrative betting system being utilized by any number of "organized" gamblers, and will be hearing from a guy named Vito in the near future.
Had to read through that submission twice to make sure I wasn't just drunk and had misread it the first time.
Yeah, I guess it really said that.
Congratulations to the submitter - aside from the proper name "Cartoon Network", I have no idea what you're talking about.
And yes, now I'm frustrated.
Just because my bathroom window's open doesn't mean you have the option of crossing the street, sticking your head in, and seeing what I'm doing in there. Sure, I screwed up -- I left my window open. But it's assumed that it wasn't my intent to display my wares to passers-by.
Intentia screwed up. It posted private data to a public network. Reuters knew that it wasn't Intentia's intent to release that information (yet) but still persisted in obtaining and releasing it to the general public. You could argue that Reuters was displaying savvy journalism.
I argue that Reuters displayed journalistic irresponsibility. Quarterly financial results can (and often do) change at the last minute. That's why companies set a release date, and publish earnings not before that release date. (Sometimes they'll even delay the release a few days, to straighten out something particularly hairy.)
Did Reuters break any laws? That's for a court to decide. Did they abandon their journalistic integrity? I think so.
DANGER! Google is sucking us in!
on
Google Does the News
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Google is getting *way* to slick and useful. We've all seen it happen, and get hurt by it before (the "Original" Hotmail, dotMac, etc.) that a free service has wide appeal, and offers a truly valuable service. They make the competition irrelevant. They suck you in.
And then they start charging. Or they start advertising. Or they start offering paid placements.
Note: This is an honest question, as I'm confused.
In his letter, Robertson (CEO of Lindows) comments on their legal battle against Microsoft over the trade name, and asks all of us out in userland to chime in, as they'd
"like to hear from anyone who had personal experience in the industry during those early years and can recall the history of the early windowing products such as Xerox's Star, VisiCorp's VisiOn, Apple's Lisa, Digital Research's GEM, Quarterdeck's DesQ, IBM's TopView, and others. "
This strikes me as odd - shouldn't it be pretty easy to get copies of not only the documentation, but even the software to which he refers? Is this a real request for information, or merely a request for sympathy?
Your proposal, while certainly fair, points out the pointlessness in measuring which is OS is more easily installed. To wit:
Assume for the moment that for the totally clueless users (picture your grandmother) the Linux installation was judged by them to be the easier of the two. It's now ten minutes later, and the box is up and running, and grandma knows nothing about her computer, or what it can do.
I'd rather have her sitting in front of the XP machine at this point -- she stands a lot better chance of figuring out how to do something useful or entertaining herself under XP, knowing nothing at all about computers, than she would under any Linux distro I've seen.
So what did we learn, now knowing that Linux is easier for the clueless to install? Nothing.
For the record, given a choice between Linux, Windows XP, and Mac OS X, I'd choose OS X any day of the week for my clueless grandmother to install and use effectively on her own. But that wasn't the question...
Sad to say it, but I think that Jon's article leads to the conclusion that in a free market economy, where the news media exist solely to make a profit, news coverage will follow the form most demanded by the consumers, and modern consumers have indicated, over and over again, that they would rather be titilated than informed.
Mass media caters to the *masses*, who demand very little in the way of information, and read at the 8th grade level.
More specialized media can tailor their message to specific groups, who demand more than the superficial feeling of enlightenment in their entertaining "news". It does no good to complain about the quality or the bias in popular media. If a larger proportion of Americans (for example) cared enough about abandoning sensationalism and liberal bias in their daily paper, subscriptions to the WSJ would skyrocket, and local papers would change format to compete.
But this will never happen. Deep down, the masses don't want to know what's really going on. They want to be entertained.
In a preamble to the preamble, which would very nearly fit into the aforementioned 3" by 1" box:
Before the preamble, state:
Through the GPL, this software is licensed with certain freedoms.
You have the freedom to view and change the source code to this software.
You have the freedom to freely copy and distribute this software, and to demand payment for its distribution.
In exchange for these freedoms, you agree, again through the GPL, that these freedoms will be present in any modifications of or distributions of this software. In addition, you agree to provide the source code for any modifications or distributions you may make.
Please read below for the full text of the GPL.
Or is that too simplistic?
Note that this does not accomplish one important end, in that it does not clearly distinguish itself from other EULAe, except that it devotes the first few sentences to "freedoms" rather than "limitations".
Madnick argued that perfect interoperability, which would allow products to be substituted for each other with no performance degradation, was a theoretical impossibility. "It would be surprising if two different products behaved exactly alike," he told the court Wednesday.
Perhaps if Microsoft started releasing/developing/participating in some standards or specifications, or if they further opened up their API, interoperability would be possible.
The sheet of ice in question is 200m thick and 3250 sq km in area. That's 650 cubic km. One cc of H20 is a gram, 1 cubic meter is a tonne, one cubic kilometer is 10^9 tonnes. So 650 cubic km of water is 650 x 10^9 (Billion, in America) tonnes.
I don't know what the density of ice is, but if we assume that it's 77% that of water, the math works out and the ice would mass 500 "Billion Tonnes".
For Geeks With Too Much Time On Their Hands
(not that this is a bad thing)
Paraphrase of the FAQ:
"This distro is new and different. It will take a lot of tinkering to get it running. Be prepared to blow a rainy weekend before you even see a decent window manager. You'll have to learn to cast spells. But when you finally succeed, rest assured that you'll have the very latest software, all compiled on your machine. Cool, huh?"
Seriously -- reading through the FAQ, I got the impression that it was BRAGGING about the complex, time-intensive, processor-intensive, memory intensive nature of the installation and maintenance procedures.
Diff'rent Strokes for Diff'rent Folks, I guess.
Re:Software stability in the public opinion?
on
A Linux User At MacWorld
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I've been using OS X since mid-November (two months). The machine has been up 24/7 since then except for a couple of upgrade reboots.
I experienced my first crash last night. "Kernel (panic)" totally freaked me out.
Point is - my expectations had changed. I expected Mac OS 8 & 9 to crash periodically. I expected Win 95 & Win 98 to crash daily at work, if I was doing any intense spreadsheet work.
Expecting the crash altered my user behavior; I tended to minimize the number of apps open at once, and I would consistently save work before toggling over to or launching another app. I'd gotten out of the habit while using OS X. They were good habits to drop; I think that my productivity increased significantly when I stopped worrying about how the OS would react to my workflow.
How anonymous can Crowds be? At the end of the Crowds page you read "Users who keep their Crowds servers alive all the time will be identified and rewarded with a free Crowds t-shirt "
Seven Crowds members have thus far been awarded a tshirt, and are listed by name!
At the Minnesota State Fair, the regional Dairy Princesses have their likenesses carved into a 90 lb block of butter. It's one of the big attractions every year at the Fair.
if the data is only moving at 250kB/s. At that rate, it would take over an hour to move 1 GB from networked storage back onto the TiVo - and foget about trying to play video directly from network storage at that data rate.
Brin says, "Still, his blatant campaign to give a few trillion dollars to those who need it least bothers me deeply. "
I'm sick and tired of hearing this, and I wish that Bush would have nipped it in the bud while he had the chance. To say that a tax cut "gives" someone money is predicated on the philosophy that all of our money belongs to the government first, and they decide how much of it we get to keep. "Nothing's certain but death and taxes" has been beated into our brains to the point where some actually accept as reasonable the premise that the money I earn belongs to the IRS first, and me second.
Perhaps Brin would prefer a new societal shape - flat line - we just chop off all assets above a certain dollar amount, and give them to the lower half of the pyramid. We'll all have more than enough, and no one has more than anyone else. And good news! There's no longer any need for charitable giving -- the government takes care of all of our needs.
Until it runs out of resources because those who actually DO something productive have lost all incentive to continue innovating, producing, and growing.
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." It's been tried before, and it didn't work.
It's been a while since I read it, but this sounds very similar to (the opening to) the Andromeda Strain :
Satellite falls to Earth, having picked up a virulent virus/fungus (or did the virus/fungus ride up with the satellite and mutate under radiation?) and infects a desert town. The US Government captures it and takes it to a lab to study it, whereupon it promptly eats through rubber seals and escapes from the lab. Further mutations ensue, yada yada, and in the end it mutates into something mostly harmles. Whew... disaster averted.
Isn't MIR going to have to come down soon? What are we going to do to make sure that this (possibly) mutated fungus doesn't escape?
Here in the US, even copyrighted material may be reproduced, following "fair use" guidelines, which allow (any lawyers, please correct me here):
1. Reproduction of a portion of the copyrighted material, where
2. commentary or opinion is stated of the copyrighted material, such that the substantive "message" is not in the copyrighted material reproduced, but in the opinion.
Therefore...
1. Break DeCSS into 10 (50? 100?) code snippets, and hand the snippets to individuals for their commentary. These snippets, along with the commentary, may be posted, broadcast, spoken, or sung freely in the US.
2. Write and distribute a Perl script which hunts down the snippets, contcatenates them, and (optionally, though I don't know why anyone would want to do so) parses out all of the commentary, leaving only the code.
This is going on right now (more or less) in Everything. I can't see that it would take a work to revise the code to allow the editing/appending of one topic, rather than thousands of interconnected topics.
Slashdot Mirror
You know what I'm talking about. At 3.3 MB/s, that's 2,422 hours of DV capture. That's a lot of The Cartoon Network, my friend.
It's organized crime that's going to get him. Revenge.
I see evidence that this guy is pretty lame - he's dumb enough to screw up a good scam his first time out by shooting for the moon. We can't assume that a novice is the first person to find this scam, but AutoTote indicates he's the first to be caught.
I'll wager dollars to doughnuts that he's just closed the loop on a lucrative betting system being utilized by any number of "organized" gamblers, and will be hearing from a guy named Vito in the near future.
Had to read through that submission twice to make sure I wasn't just drunk and had misread it the first time.
Yeah, I guess it really said that.
Congratulations to the submitter - aside from the proper name "Cartoon Network", I have no idea what you're talking about.
And yes, now I'm frustrated.
Just because my bathroom window's open doesn't mean you have the option of crossing the street, sticking your head in, and seeing what I'm doing in there. Sure, I screwed up -- I left my window open. But it's assumed that it wasn't my intent to display my wares to passers-by.
Intentia screwed up. It posted private data to a public network. Reuters knew that it wasn't Intentia's intent to release that information (yet) but still persisted in obtaining and releasing it to the general public. You could argue that Reuters was displaying savvy journalism.
I argue that Reuters displayed journalistic irresponsibility. Quarterly financial results can (and often do) change at the last minute. That's why companies set a release date, and publish earnings not before that release date. (Sometimes they'll even delay the release a few days, to straighten out something particularly hairy.)
Did Reuters break any laws? That's for a court to decide. Did they abandon their journalistic integrity? I think so.
Google is getting *way* to slick and useful. We've all seen it happen, and get hurt by it before (the "Original" Hotmail, dotMac, etc.) that a free service has wide appeal, and offers a truly valuable service. They make the competition irrelevant. They suck you in.
And then they start charging. Or they start advertising. Or they start offering paid placements.
Beware the free service.
In his letter, Robertson (CEO of Lindows) comments on their legal battle against Microsoft over the trade name, and asks all of us out in userland to chime in, as they'd
This strikes me as odd - shouldn't it be pretty easy to get copies of not only the documentation, but even the software to which he refers? Is this a real request for information, or merely a request for sympathy?
Your proposal, while certainly fair, points out the pointlessness in measuring which is OS is more easily installed. To wit:
Assume for the moment that for the totally clueless users (picture your grandmother) the Linux installation was judged by them to be the easier of the two. It's now ten minutes later, and the box is up and running, and grandma knows nothing about her computer, or what it can do.
I'd rather have her sitting in front of the XP machine at this point -- she stands a lot better chance of figuring out how to do something useful or entertaining herself under XP, knowing nothing at all about computers, than she would under any Linux distro I've seen.
So what did we learn, now knowing that Linux is easier for the clueless to install? Nothing.
For the record, given a choice between Linux, Windows XP, and Mac OS X, I'd choose OS X any day of the week for my clueless grandmother to install and use effectively on her own. But that wasn't the question...
Remove this drill from my presence! All I ask for is a frick'n "Laser."
It's times like these that I become a more firm believer in Heinlein's "The Crazy Years."
It's going to get much worse before it gets better. That, and a lot of lawyers are gonna die.
Sad to say it, but I think that Jon's article leads to the conclusion that in a free market economy, where the news media exist solely to make a profit, news coverage will follow the form most demanded by the consumers, and modern consumers have indicated, over and over again, that they would rather be titilated than informed.
Mass media caters to the *masses*, who demand very little in the way of information, and read at the 8th grade level.
More specialized media can tailor their message to specific groups, who demand more than the superficial feeling of enlightenment in their entertaining "news". It does no good to complain about the quality or the bias in popular media. If a larger proportion of Americans (for example) cared enough about abandoning sensationalism and liberal bias in their daily paper, subscriptions to the WSJ would skyrocket, and local papers would change format to compete.
But this will never happen. Deep down, the masses don't want to know what's really going on. They want to be entertained.
Before the preamble, state:
Or is that too simplistic?
Note that this does not accomplish one important end, in that it does not clearly distinguish itself from other EULAe, except that it devotes the first few sentences to "freedoms" rather than "limitations".
Perhaps if Microsoft started releasing/developing/participating in some standards or specifications, or if they further opened up their API, interoperability would be possible.
Is your father Johnny Cash?
A classic song. Find the lyrics here.
The article MEANT to say 500 Billion Tonnes:
The sheet of ice in question is 200m thick and 3250 sq km in area. That's 650 cubic km. One cc of H20 is a gram, 1 cubic meter is a tonne, one cubic kilometer is 10^9 tonnes. So 650 cubic km of water is 650 x 10^9 (Billion, in America) tonnes.
I don't know what the density of ice is, but if we assume that it's 77% that of water, the math works out and the ice would mass 500 "Billion Tonnes".
For Geeks With Too Much Time On Their Hands
(not that this is a bad thing)
Paraphrase of the FAQ:
"This distro is new and different. It will take a lot of tinkering to get it running. Be prepared to blow a rainy weekend before you even see a decent window manager. You'll have to learn to cast spells. But when you finally succeed, rest assured that you'll have the very latest software, all compiled on your machine. Cool, huh?"
Seriously -- reading through the FAQ, I got the impression that it was BRAGGING about the complex, time-intensive, processor-intensive, memory intensive nature of the installation and maintenance procedures.
Diff'rent Strokes for Diff'rent Folks, I guess.
I've been using OS X since mid-November (two months). The machine has been up 24/7 since then except for a couple of upgrade reboots.
I experienced my first crash last night. "Kernel (panic)" totally freaked me out.
Point is - my expectations had changed. I expected Mac OS 8 & 9 to crash periodically. I expected Win 95 & Win 98 to crash daily at work, if I was doing any intense spreadsheet work.
Expecting the crash altered my user behavior; I tended to minimize the number of apps open at once, and I would consistently save work before toggling over to or launching another app. I'd gotten out of the habit while using OS X. They were good habits to drop; I think that my productivity increased significantly when I stopped worrying about how the OS would react to my workflow.
How anonymous can Crowds be? At the end of the Crowds page you read "Users who keep their Crowds servers alive all the time will be identified and rewarded with a free Crowds t-shirt "
Seven Crowds members have thus far been awarded a tshirt, and are listed by name!
At the Minnesota State Fair, the regional Dairy Princesses have their likenesses carved into a 90 lb block of butter. It's one of the big attractions every year at the Fair.
if the data is only moving at 250kB/s. At that rate, it would take over an hour to move 1 GB from networked storage back onto the TiVo - and foget about trying to play video directly from network storage at that data rate.
Brin says, "Still, his blatant campaign to give a few trillion dollars to those who need it least bothers me deeply. "
I'm sick and tired of hearing this, and I wish that Bush would have nipped it in the bud while he had the chance. To say that a tax cut "gives" someone money is predicated on the philosophy that all of our money belongs to the government first, and they decide how much of it we get to keep. "Nothing's certain but death and taxes" has been beated into our brains to the point where some actually accept as reasonable the premise that the money I earn belongs to the IRS first, and me second.
Perhaps Brin would prefer a new societal shape - flat line - we just chop off all assets above a certain dollar amount, and give them to the lower half of the pyramid. We'll all have more than enough, and no one has more than anyone else. And good news! There's no longer any need for charitable giving -- the government takes care of all of our needs.
Until it runs out of resources because those who actually DO something productive have lost all incentive to continue innovating, producing, and growing.
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." It's been tried before, and it didn't work.
It's been a while since I read it, but this sounds very similar to (the opening to) the Andromeda Strain :
Satellite falls to Earth, having picked up a virulent virus/fungus (or did the virus/fungus ride up with the satellite and mutate under radiation?) and infects a desert town. The US Government captures it and takes it to a lab to study it, whereupon it promptly eats through rubber seals and escapes from the lab. Further mutations ensue, yada yada, and in the end it mutates into something mostly harmles. Whew... disaster averted.
Isn't MIR going to have to come down soon? What are we going to do to make sure that this (possibly) mutated fungus doesn't escape?
Here in the US, even copyrighted material may be reproduced, following "fair use" guidelines, which allow (any lawyers, please correct me here):
1. Reproduction of a portion of the copyrighted material, where
2. commentary or opinion is stated of the copyrighted material, such that the substantive "message" is not in the copyrighted material reproduced, but in the opinion.
Therefore...
1. Break DeCSS into 10 (50? 100?) code snippets, and hand the snippets to individuals for their commentary. These snippets, along with the commentary, may be posted, broadcast, spoken, or sung freely in the US.
2. Write and distribute a Perl script which hunts down the snippets, contcatenates them, and (optionally, though I don't know why anyone would want to do so) parses out all of the commentary, leaving only the code.
This is going on right now (more or less) in Everything. I can't see that it would take a work to revise the code to allow the editing/appending of one topic, rather than thousands of interconnected topics.
I agree, it would be interesting...