The question is:
Who profits when users become more unskilled in using computers ?
Obviously, Microsoft.
Supporting Microsoft is a bad choice for those in search of knowledge. It also means to eventually turn computing science into something akin to black magic. Even now, being a hacker already has a bad connotation.
As support for this argument, look at how un-obvious it is to see the header/source of an email message in Outlook. What has this to do with "Options" ? And why do registry keys for classes have this strange numeric code instead of a plain name ? If you upgrade DirectX 7 to DirectX 8, and look at the changed registry keys, you will see what I mean.
P.S.: could someone translate the "Who profits?" into latin ? I forget the latin original, meant to be said at the location of a crime.
So some guy passes around a dirty video because he thinks it is funny. No money changed hands.
So he was a little stupid, and he shouldn't have done that because of his office as a government censor.
I cannot see why this is interesting news. I don't see either how it merits the headline. The headline might just as well read the other way "Poor internet worker gets his salary docked because of writing email. What happens to our rights of free expression ?".
And anyway, did you know that the dirty email contained de-css source in the lower bits ?;-)
Russia would have to give up Mir in any case.
This space-fungus was having a negative effect on the health of the occupants, and Mir had displayed a string of accidents, making it more likely ever day that Mir would be remembered as a disaster.
The real question was whether russia would send up its own new space station. It wouldn't do that, neither would the Europeans, and whether NASA would have been able to receive stable funding is up in the stars.
Tito pays for the trip, and is even willing to accept tasks and training, it seems. If you challenge the assumption that if he got the money, he deserves going - you are a communist(TM by McCarthy).
You are right, notepad recognizes the unicode - it was my spiffy textpad program that did not. Neither could xemacs or GNU diff handle it, while wordpad did fine.
That if it is unicode, then it should be no problem to provide an editor that lets you look at the saved registries just as easy as the NT4 registries.
This applies to unix tools like bash, diff and less as well.
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As reported by CNN, among others, the IETF is likely to revamp its current plan for the introduction of international domain names.
One alternative plan is to just use Unicode (UTF-?). I would think that using unicode would be a very neat solution - although transfer could be eased by prepending some unusual ascii-character or sequence in front of the unicode domain name. Unicode has also been developed in cooperation with China, so this would avoid conflicts with China about who administrates chinese character domain names.
Every one talks about Unicode - even the seemingly obscure "new" registry format for Windows is Unicode - of cours Microsoft as usually prefers to leave it's users in the dark, to make them feel incompetent and relying on the clutches of windows - and fails to provide a file extension for unicode text files.
But who is actually daring enough to "Go Unicode"(TM)(2001 RedLaggedTeut) ?
I expect the usual answers from my fellow Slashdot readers - that the patent is really trivial, that it is "a bad thing"(TM) to patent protocols, but what interests me is this question: what are the obstacles to go straight unicode, and is the patented kludge the only solution ?
In addition, I would like to bring to attention to/, another point brought to me by a fellow T. - what is the use of having multiple top level domains when due to trademark laws, the owner of the domain www.DOMAINNAME.com can sue you if you set up any domain named www.DOMAINNAME.ANYTOPLEVELDOMAIN. Wouldn't it be better to explicitely state and propagate the knowlegde that a domain name in any other non-.com and non.countrycode domain is orthogonal to trademarks ? For example, isn't it pointless that you cannot reserve a domain name like your lastname, Smith, simply because some company is sitting on this name somewhere ?
To summarize, how do you think will or should the problem of unicode names that resemble exisiting domain names be handled ?
Woman gives birth to boy.
Woman lets boy be cloned. The clone is modified to have not much brain in order to provide spare body parts.
Meanwhile, CR groups campaign against this.
This results in the "spare boy" to be re-instated as a human being with rights.
Boy gets sick and dies. Woman "adopts" spare boy and sues the scientists who modified the genes of "spare boy".
Analyzing this sequence of events, one might suggest that "spare boy" should have been equipped with a normal brain. However, this would result in the creation of a class of sub-humans with no difference to other humans but their humans status. This is brutal, and will not be very acceptable, although it could make sense under certain circumstances.
Now it seems to me, if you are cracking systems as a form of art, the treaty asks its parties to not treat this as criminal.
The Explanatory Report should clarify that the terms "without right" do not exclude legal defenses, excuses or similar relevant principles that relieve a person of responsibility under specific circumstances. Therefore, conduct undertaken with artistic, medical or similar scientific purposes would not be "without right".
I believe you are correct that when trying to match a curve/distribution, statisticians will be more comfortable to assign a person a high IQ if they have a large sample of people.
Where you are wrong is in simply discounting the achievement and mental discipline needed, since if there was a large sample of persons the test was calibrated on, this means the girl scored above all these sampled. But see it another way: If the girl had been in the sample used to calibrate the test before, we all would be considered to be less intelligent:-)
Still remember, the IQ is just a number which is assigned by a mathematical, but not necessarily scientific model. For example, isn't the IQ distribution supposed to be a gauss curve ? If so, it should to be symmetric about the mean.
That it is not suggests that the tests have been refined in a way that makes it easier to detect smart persons(IQ 100-300), while neglecting dumb persons(IQ 0-100). (ObPC: Excuses if you scored less than 100, you might still be disciplined enough or a mad enough scientist to be cool ).
While the xMach kernel has a BSD license, it is not a BSD Unix OS. It is a kernel. Ideally this kernel could be used inside any OS; in a way, it is already - there are daemons for linux similar to mach or hurd.
While a unix would be easier to do for the mach kernel than, say, make windows run on it, the OS of choice for mach is the GNU hurd.
Some would consider darwin to be the reverse-engineering of a dead operating system, while mach is supposed to be a well-thought-thru design.
In addition, the apple open license 244C2.
For example open or free source discloses invention I, which is improved by Corporation C, and then is patented by C as invention J.
Unfortunately, invention J is the next logical step for invention I. But the open source project cannot work on it, since it will get sued. They might win in court, but they cannot be sure.
If open source had filed a patent for I, they would able to trade patent I with Company C to get access to patent J - ideally forcing company C to open or freesource J as well.
This shows the flaw - the way someone else formulated it, why can you acquire rights to an invention by patenting it, instead of earning the rights to the patent if you can prove in any way that you had the idea first ( - and that it wouldn't be an obvious idea, considering the timespan till the patent expires ).
Did you read about the Indian who patented smell-o-vision - TV with a stench ?
Now, I could easily imagine the Slashdot crowd whining over the patent if it was an IT patent, but the fact is, that nobody has yet has success in bringing smell-o-vision to the public.
I think this patent is definitely an example of a patent that has been granted in the spirit of a license, much like tax farmers or governorships in the republic of rome, or like the deal between the big two railroads that linked the US East to US West.
In the spirit of competition, patent owners should be forced to license out their patents at a predetermined fee(or less).
Why ? It is kind of pointless to pursue Microsoft for monopolism (and bad habits of course), while fostering monopolies with the patent system.
Speaking on an entirely hypothetic level, I am not sure whether it is a good idea to crash it into jupiter - how do we know there isn't some kind of solaris-style intelligence on jupiter which takes this as an assault ?
I was about to propose to send it off outside of the system, maybe towards alpha centauri, when I realized it doesn't probably have that much fuel left to do that.
And your point is, that it is ok for math to write down equations, but solving them is a process that is better left to engineers amd the patent office ?!?
And software patents should then be as automatic as copyright. It is completely non-obvious why you should own a patent on an obvious idea simply because you went to the patent office, while if you do not patent the idea, someone can describe inventions which incorporate the idea, and patent that.
This is exactly what the one-click patent does: the makers of cookies did not patent the idea, and Amazon did a single trivial step and patented the combination.
While a formula like y= a*x*x + b*x + c might seem like pure math, the process of applying solving the equation for x can be called an algorithm.
Unfortunately, lots of dumb-ass patents are granted of the form "apply mathematical method a to problem b". This gives people a license to sue you if you apply method b to problem c, because the scope of a patent is not really defined well.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a good overview of older discoveries: jtwinc
(instant karma)
Who profits when users become more unskilled in using computers ?
Obviously, Microsoft.
Supporting Microsoft is a bad choice for those in search of knowledge. It also means to eventually turn computing science into something akin to black magic. Even now, being a hacker already has a bad connotation.
As support for this argument, look at how un-obvious it is to see the header/source of an email message in Outlook. What has this to do with "Options" ? And why do registry keys for classes have this strange numeric code instead of a plain name ? If you upgrade DirectX 7 to DirectX 8, and look at the changed registry keys, you will see what I mean.
P.S.: could someone translate the "Who profits?" into latin ? I forget the latin original, meant to be said at the location of a crime.
So he was a little stupid, and he shouldn't have done that because of his office as a government censor.
I cannot see why this is interesting news. I don't see either how it merits the headline. The headline might just as well read the other way "Poor internet worker gets his salary docked because of writing email. What happens to our rights of free expression ?".
And anyway, did you know that the dirty email contained de-css source in the lower bits ? ;-)
The real question was whether russia would send up its own new space station. It wouldn't do that, neither would the Europeans, and whether NASA would have been able to receive stable funding is up in the stars.
Tito pays for the trip, and is even willing to accept tasks and training, it seems. If you challenge the assumption that if he got the money, he deserves going - you are a communist(TM by McCarthy).
You are right, notepad recognizes the unicode - it was my spiffy textpad program that did not. Neither could xemacs or GNU diff handle it, while wordpad did fine.
That if it is unicode, then it should be no problem to provide an editor that lets you look at the saved registries just as easy as the NT4 registries.
This applies to unix tools like bash, diff and less as well.
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As usually, the patent is also available at US Patent office
One alternative plan is to just use Unicode (UTF-?). I would think that using unicode would be a very neat solution - although transfer could be eased by prepending some unusual ascii-character or sequence in front of the unicode domain name.
Unicode has also been developed in cooperation with China, so this would avoid conflicts with China about who administrates chinese character domain names.
Every one talks about Unicode - even the seemingly obscure "new" registry format for Windows is Unicode - of cours Microsoft as usually prefers to leave it's users in the dark, to make them feel incompetent and relying on the clutches of windows - and fails to provide a file extension for unicode text files.
But who is actually daring enough to "Go Unicode"(TM)(2001 RedLaggedTeut) ?
I expect the usual answers from my fellow Slashdot readers - that the patent is really trivial, that it is "a bad thing"(TM) to patent protocols, but what interests me is this question: what are the obstacles to go straight unicode, and is the patented kludge the only solution ?
In addition, I would like to bring to attention to /, another point brought to me by a fellow T. - what is the use of having multiple top level domains when due to trademark laws, the owner of the domain www.DOMAINNAME.com can sue you if you set up any domain named www.DOMAINNAME.ANYTOPLEVELDOMAIN. .countrycode domain is orthogonal to trademarks ? For example, isn't it pointless that you cannot reserve a domain name like your lastname, Smith, simply because some company is sitting on this name somewhere ?
Wouldn't it be better to explicitely state and propagate the knowlegde that a domain name in any other non-.com and non
To summarize, how do you think will or should the problem of unicode names that resemble exisiting domain names be handled ?
Woman gives birth to boy. Woman lets boy be cloned. The clone is modified to have not much brain in order to provide spare body parts. Meanwhile, CR groups campaign against this. This results in the "spare boy" to be re-instated as a human being with rights. Boy gets sick and dies. Woman "adopts" spare boy and sues the scientists who modified the genes of "spare boy". Analyzing this sequence of events, one might suggest that "spare boy" should have been equipped with a normal brain. However, this would result in the creation of a class of sub-humans with no difference to other humans but their humans status. This is brutal, and will not be very acceptable, although it could make sense under certain circumstances.
The Explanatory Report should clarify that the terms "without right" do not exclude legal defenses, excuses or similar relevant principles that relieve a person of responsibility under specific circumstances. Therefore, conduct undertaken with artistic, medical or similar scientific purposes would not be "without right".
If you sponsor an open software development project, or expose parts of your research effort to open source, you wil lbe able to attract people.
Where you are wrong is in simply discounting the achievement and mental discipline needed, since if there was a large sample of persons the test was calibrated on, this means the girl scored above all these sampled. :-)
But see it another way: If the girl had been in the sample used to calibrate the test before, we all would be considered to be less intelligent
Still remember, the IQ is just a number which is assigned by a mathematical, but not necessarily scientific model. For example, isn't the IQ distribution supposed to be a gauss curve ? If so, it should to be symmetric about the mean.
That it is not suggests that the tests have been refined in a way that makes it easier to detect smart persons(IQ 100-300), while neglecting dumb persons(IQ 0-100). (ObPC: Excuses if you scored less than 100, you might still be disciplined enough or a mad enough scientist to be cool ).
Before you mod this down, remember, visitors are supposed to be good for a web-site.
(Issues a buy recommendation, if you are willing not to sell immediately after it goes public, but wait for market recovery.)
While the xMach kernel has a BSD license, it is not a BSD Unix OS. It is a kernel. Ideally this kernel could be used inside any OS; in a way, it is already - there are daemons for linux similar to mach or hurd.
While a unix would be easier to do for the mach kernel than, say, make windows run on it, the OS of choice for mach is the GNU hurd.
Some would consider darwin to be the reverse-engineering of a dead operating system, while mach is supposed to be a well-thought-thru design.
In addition, the apple open license 244C2.
See also: http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/
Unfortunately, invention J is the next logical step for invention I. But the open source project cannot work on it, since it will get sued. They might win in court, but they cannot be sure.
If open source had filed a patent for I, they would able to trade patent I with Company C to get access to patent J - ideally forcing company C to open or freesource J as well.
This shows the flaw - the way someone else formulated it, why can you acquire rights to an invention by patenting it, instead of earning the rights to the patent if you can prove in any way that you had the idea first ( - and that it wouldn't be an obvious idea, considering the timespan till the patent expires ).
Now, I could easily imagine the Slashdot crowd whining over the patent if it was an IT patent, but the fact is, that nobody has yet has success in bringing smell-o-vision to the public.
I think this patent is definitely an example of a patent that has been granted in the spirit of a license, much like tax farmers or governorships in the republic of rome, or like the deal between the big two railroads that linked the US East to US West.
In the spirit of competition, patent owners should be forced to license out their patents at a predetermined fee(or less).
Why ? It is kind of pointless to pursue Microsoft for monopolism (and bad habits of course), while fostering monopolies with the patent system.
I was about to propose to send it off outside of the system, maybe towards alpha centauri, when I realized it doesn't probably have that much fuel left to do that.
And your point is, that it is ok for math to write down equations, but solving them is a process that is better left to engineers amd the patent office ?!?
However, in the DeCss Case, people took great care to show that they learned about the working of the algorithm by themselves.
In the case of normal goods, you would have to show that you acquired the goods in good faith. I am not sure that this applies to knowledge.
I would have thought an NDA is mostly legal bs that allows you to retain copyright/gain patents on the code while still showing it to people.
And software patents should then be as automatic as copyright. It is completely non-obvious why you should own a patent on an obvious idea simply because you went to the patent office, while if you do not patent the idea, someone can describe inventions which incorporate the idea, and patent that.
This is exactly what the one-click patent does: the makers of cookies did not patent the idea, and Amazon did a single trivial step and patented the combination.
Unfortunately, lots of dumb-ass patents are granted of the form "apply mathematical method a to problem b". This gives people a license to sue you if you apply method b to problem c, because the scope of a patent is not really defined well.
Well wouldn't this need some kind of identification system to identify the cheaters ? Or maybe it is automagical ..
Good idea anyway.