A perfect example which illustrates what I am trying to say. If K-Mart could be 100% certain that Joe Customer who bought cutlery was going to commit a crime with the cutlery, then K-Mart should shoulder some of the responsibility. However, K-Mart can't know this, therefore K-Mart can't be responsible.
If a university could be 100% certain that Joe Student is trading illegal files via its network, then the university should shoulder some of the resposibility for stopping him. But the university can't know this, the technology is not there. Therefore the university can't be responsible.
Actually, there are cases before the courts (in Canada anyway) that are challenging this. If a person gets into an acident when drinking and driving, it is being argued that the place that provided the drinks is at fault. That is, it becomes the responsibility of the bar, the restaurant, the host of a private party, whatever, to take away your keys.
So, by extension, if you provide the means to make illegal file sharing possible, you also have the responsibility to make sure it doesn't happen.
Frankly, I don't have a problem with this except for the fact that it can't be done. The whole debate around illegal file sharing (note the word "illegal") isn't whether or not it should be legal, but how to stop it. I can't look at an mp3 file and tell whether or not it is a legal copy. I don't expect universities can either.
Why is everyone making fun of this article? Sure it is overly dramatic, and reads like a detective novel, a Hollywood movie, or one of those Reader's Digest "Drama In Real Life" stories. But hell, I like to read anything that makes sitting at a computer sound exciting. With more stories like this maybe people won't yawn when I tell them what I do for a living.
Please read the following license agreement (hereafter referred to as "AGREEMENT"). You must accept the terms (hereafter referred to as "TERMS") of this license to bear the Ruling Ring (hereafter referred to as "RING") to the Crack of Doom in the land of Mordor (hereafter referred to as "DOOM").
GRANT OF LICENSE: This license grants you the right to bear RING to DOOM. You may bear RING only to DOOM, and any other land that is required to pass through in order to reach DOOM. Once you have reached DOOM, you agree forthwith to toss RING into the Crack that are found at DOOM. Any hesitation or deviation may be interpreted as a breach of TERMS, causing immediate and irrevocable termination of AGREEMENT.
LIMITATIONS OF LICENSE: This AGREEMENT does NOT grant you permission to allow others to bear RING, except where circumstances make such a transfer desirable. Such circumstance will be interpreted as a transfer of license, and the new bearer shall be bound by the TERMS put forth in AGREEMENT. You are further discouraged from wearing RING, except in circumstances where the protection and insight provided by RING are deemed useful in reaching DOOM. Under no circumstances are you permitted to transfer RING to one Sauron (hereafter referred to as "ENEMY") or any employees or representatives of ENEMY.
TERMINATION OF LICENSE: This AGREEMENT shall be deemed terminated under the following circumstances: (1) RING is tossed into the Crack found at DOOM; (2) Your death, and the death of all your companions; (3) Major deviation from the path to DOOM; or (4) RING is transferred, voluntarily or involuntarily, to ENEMY or an employee or representative of ENEMY. In the case of (4) with voluntary transfer, the Valar in the Undying Lands would like to have a word with you.
I've had my share of OS/2 install nightmares too. Compared to Win95 when it first came out, the installation and configuration (config.sys anyone?) for OS/2 sucked.
I also fondly remember the time when, restarting the computer after a power failure, I watched OS/2 cheerfully delete itself from the hard drive during the startup scandisk operation.
ACC *proposed* the idea of geosynchronous satellites, in a paper title "Extra-Terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations Give World-wide Radio Coverage?", published in "Wireless World", October 1945.
In May, 1945, he also produced a paper "The Space Station: Its Radio Applications", of which 6 copies were privately circulated (it was not published). The first copy is now in the hands of the Smithsonian.
Of course time stamps are not to be trusted. That is not the point I am trying to make.
I am actually asking a question: how long was this trojan released before it was discovered? I, personally, do not know. I was hoping somebody else could tell me the answer.
Easily detected? I wonder about this. If you look at the date stamp on the trojaned configure script, it is December 10th, 2001.
Does that mean that this trojan has been around for almost a year before anybody noticed? If that's true, it does not meet my definition of "easily detected".
I think this is the attitude that is the basis of all the troubles.
You talk about irrigating the desert. Where, exacty, is the water to irrigate the desert going to come from? What about the resources to build your "multi-level greenhouses"? Where are they going to come from?
Resources *are* limited. You are correct that technology help to fill in the gaps, but the required technology is not always available. Often it becomes a race between technology and the dwindling of resources. And more often than not the technology gets ignored because of greed and corruption.
I strongly believe that the Earth us going to hit an environmental catastrophe within 100 years.
And I'll say it again. I *love* the idea of a space elevator. But I do not see how it will reduce the cost of going to space as much as some people claim. The maintenance costs for the tower will be tremendous.
I am seeing posts along the lines of "Waterloo has finally seen MS's dark side", or "Victory over Greed" etc etc...
But if you read another story on the same page (MS Canada President Frank Clegg responds to top ten questions), Clegg states quite frankly that it was Waterloo who first proposed the idea of C# as a teaching language. So this initiative did not come from MS.
Man, if I had this pent up I'd be releasing prematurely too!
I don't buy it
on
Going Up?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I LOVE the idea of a space elevator. Reading "Fountain's of Paradise" is what got me into the engineering field in the first place.
However, I still do not buy the argument that getting into space will cost virtually nothing once a space elevator is built. Sure, in pure energy, the costs are low. But what about the entire support infrastructure?
Right not it would cost me about $100 to take the train from Ottawa to Toronto, a 4 hour trip. With a space elevator we are talking about a trip 100 times farther and 50 times longer. Applying some hand waving math, we would be looking at $10K to $20K for a trip up the elevator. Maintenance costs for the elevator are going to be a *lot* more than those for a strip of train track, so it would not be unreasonable to multiple this estimate by a factor of 10.
Yes, that is a lot less than $1,000,000 but also far from virtually nothing.
I think you have missed one of the points of the article. All the people in the article have started their own businesses and are their own boss. Being your own boss beats being an faceless corporate employee most days of the week.
This is not to be confused with flipping burgers for McD's. Working for McD's you are still not your own boss, you still have to put up with potentially stupid bosses sometimes idiot coworkers.
I've worked retail. It is hard. You have to be nice and on your feet for an entire day. You often miss lunch, and you can't have an off minute. However, it is very satisfying to see a happy satisfied customer and know that *you* are responsible. That's the pleasure that the people in this article have discovered.
At my work they have installed the commercial type where pushing down on the emtpy roll drops the next roll into place.
Alas, invariably the next roll gets dropped into place before the first roll is complete. You end up with two touching rolls, one on to of the other, both of which are hard to turn.
As for the "over or under" question that is not addressed in the article but many people seem to be discussing, most people with cats would prefer the under approach. The over approach is far too easy for my cats to unravel, leading to the bathroom being turned into a toilet paper playhouse while I am away. At least the under approach makes them think a little (something they prefer to avoid).
What are these modern language features you are looking for?
FORTRAN is almost perfect for what it is used for: massive number crunching. Very little bells and whistles, which allows the programmer to concentrate on the numerics of the problem at hand and not the picky little programming details.
But that cotton candy still contains all the energy that was stored in the flywheel, and that energy has to go somewhere.
A flywheel's mode of failure is catastrophic. A failure in a set of flywheels that stored a *megawatt* of power is going to kill a lot of people unless it is properly contained.
Pacemakers are already controlled by computer. It allows doctors to make tweaks to the operating parameters of the pacemaker without requiring invasive surgery.
So, given the (currently slow) trend towards telemedicine, it is only a matter of time before a person an consult a doctor online, and that doctor can ask the patient to plug in his pacemaker so that it can be updated remotely.
Is this a good idea? Hell yes, it might save lives. But there is much infrastructure work to do to make it safe. The Internet as it exists today is not have the required reliability, let alone security.
I disagree. VW's "Milky Way" is the second-best commercial ever. The best is VW's "Synchronicity" commercial which, unfortunately, does not appear to be available on the VW site.
If anybody's knows where I can get a copy, I'd be grateful.
There is already a service like this at www.lasoo.com
This service lets you enter an address and a business type, and will find all instances of that business within a certain radius of the address.
Last time I used Lasoo was on Mother's Day, to find the closet florist to my mom's house.
I interpreted to author to be stating that big corporations are the best place to grow inventions and bring them to fruition. But not the best place to actually do the inventing.
As stated in the article, Farnsworth got his big idea while working in a potato field. After forming his idea, the article states he should have gone to work for RCA.
To me, this makes sense. Yes it is possible to grow your inventions on your own (go it alone), but it is really really hard.
There are successes. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos (tbd), to name a few. But the combination of inventive genius and business talent is very rare indeed.
The corporate world is littered with dead companies which have tried to do just that.
Netscape? Dead and mostly gone.
Napster? Swallowed by the big boys.
Linux? Do you think it would be going anywhere without Red Hat, Caldera and other like corporations.
Sounds like the experience I had cancelling by Rogers cable service. For about 8 months I had both cable (Rogers) and DSL (Bell), so I could compare the two. DSL won on reliability, so I had to cancel Rogers. Fortunately, I found a number to call for cancellations.
Now Rogers had *never* answered their phone for me in less than 30 minutes, and this time was no different. What made it excrutiatingly awful was that the on-hold music was some old-time country and western yodelling music (I kid you not).
When a human finally picked up the other end, the first question he asked was why I wanted to cancel my service. Did I give him an earful!
After that he went on auto-pilot. Confirming my name, address, account number, etc. He was so much on auto-pilot, that he ended the phone call with
Slashdot Mirror
A perfect example which illustrates what I am trying to say. If K-Mart could be 100% certain that Joe Customer who bought cutlery was going to commit a crime with the cutlery, then K-Mart should shoulder some of the responsibility. However, K-Mart can't know this, therefore K-Mart can't be responsible.
If a university could be 100% certain that Joe Student is trading illegal files via its network, then the university should shoulder some of the resposibility for stopping him. But the university can't know this, the technology is not there. Therefore the university can't be responsible.
Actually, there are cases before the courts (in Canada anyway) that are challenging this. If a person gets into an acident when drinking and driving, it is being argued that the place that provided the drinks is at fault. That is, it becomes the responsibility of the bar, the restaurant, the host of a private party, whatever, to take away your keys.
So, by extension, if you provide the means to make illegal file sharing possible, you also have the responsibility to make sure it doesn't happen.
Frankly, I don't have a problem with this except for the fact that it can't be done. The whole debate around illegal file sharing (note the word "illegal") isn't whether or not it should be legal, but how to stop it. I can't look at an mp3 file and tell whether or not it is a legal copy. I don't expect universities can either.
Why is everyone making fun of this article? Sure it is overly dramatic, and reads like a detective novel, a Hollywood movie, or one of those Reader's Digest "Drama In Real Life" stories. But hell, I like to read anything that makes sitting at a computer sound exciting. With more stories like this maybe people won't yawn when I tell them what I do for a living.
Somebody asked for a legalese LotR:
Ring Bearer's License Agreement
Please read the following license agreement (hereafter referred to as "AGREEMENT"). You must accept the terms (hereafter referred to as "TERMS") of this license to bear the Ruling Ring (hereafter referred to as "RING") to the Crack of Doom in the land of Mordor (hereafter referred to as "DOOM").
GRANT OF LICENSE: This license grants you the right to bear RING to DOOM. You may bear RING only to DOOM, and any other land that is required to pass through in order to reach DOOM. Once you have reached DOOM, you agree forthwith to toss RING into the Crack that are found at DOOM. Any hesitation or deviation may be interpreted as a breach of TERMS, causing immediate and irrevocable termination of AGREEMENT.
LIMITATIONS OF LICENSE: This AGREEMENT does NOT grant you permission to allow others to bear RING, except where circumstances make such a transfer desirable. Such circumstance will be interpreted as a transfer of license, and the new bearer shall be bound by the TERMS put forth in AGREEMENT. You are further discouraged from wearing RING, except in circumstances where the protection and insight provided by RING are deemed useful in reaching DOOM. Under no circumstances are you permitted to transfer RING to one Sauron (hereafter referred to as "ENEMY") or any employees or representatives of ENEMY.
TERMINATION OF LICENSE: This AGREEMENT shall be deemed terminated under the following circumstances: (1) RING is tossed into the Crack found at DOOM; (2) Your death, and the death of all your companions; (3) Major deviation from the path to DOOM; or (4) RING is transferred, voluntarily or involuntarily, to ENEMY or an employee or representative of ENEMY. In the case of (4) with voluntary transfer, the Valar in the Undying Lands would like to have a word with you.
I've had my share of OS/2 install nightmares too. Compared to Win95 when it first came out, the installation and configuration (config.sys anyone?) for OS/2 sucked.
I also fondly remember the time when, restarting the computer after a power failure, I watched OS/2 cheerfully delete itself from the hard drive during the startup scandisk operation.
ACC *proposed* the idea of geosynchronous satellites, in a paper title "Extra-Terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations Give World-wide Radio Coverage?", published in "Wireless World", October 1945.
In May, 1945, he also produced a paper "The Space Station: Its Radio Applications", of which 6 copies were privately circulated (it was not published). The first copy is now in the hands of the Smithsonian.
Of course time stamps are not to be trusted. That is not the point I am trying to make.
I am actually asking a question: how long was this trojan released before it was discovered? I, personally, do not know. I was hoping somebody else could tell me the answer.
Easily detected? I wonder about this. If you look at the date stamp on the trojaned configure script, it is December 10th, 2001.
Does that mean that this trojan has been around for almost a year before anybody noticed? If that's true, it does not meet my definition of "easily detected".
Tell that to all the doctors, lawyers, engineers, and accountants that must pay for licensing fees every year in order to continue their practice.
No no no. Clarke envisioned Amalthea (a.k.a Jupiter V) as great big a spaceship, used by an extinct alien race to move to our solar system. See here.
I think this is the attitude that is the basis of all the troubles.
You talk about irrigating the desert. Where, exacty, is the water to irrigate the desert going to come from? What about the resources to build your "multi-level greenhouses"? Where are they going to come from?
Resources *are* limited. You are correct that technology help to fill in the gaps, but the required technology is not always available. Often it becomes a race between technology and the dwindling of resources. And more often than not the technology gets ignored because of greed and corruption.
I strongly believe that the Earth us going to hit an environmental catastrophe within 100 years.
And I'll say it again. I *love* the idea of a space elevator. But I do not see how it will reduce the cost of going to space as much as some people claim. The maintenance costs for the tower will be tremendous.
I am seeing posts along the lines of "Waterloo has finally seen MS's dark side", or "Victory over Greed" etc etc...
But if you read another story on the same page (MS Canada President Frank Clegg responds to top ten questions), Clegg states quite frankly that it was Waterloo who first proposed the idea of C# as a teaching language. So this initiative did not come from MS.
Man, if I had this pent up I'd be releasing prematurely too!
I LOVE the idea of a space elevator. Reading "Fountain's of Paradise" is what got me into the engineering field in the first place.
However, I still do not buy the argument that getting into space will cost virtually nothing once a space elevator is built. Sure, in pure energy, the costs are low. But what about the entire support infrastructure?
Right not it would cost me about $100 to take the train from Ottawa to Toronto, a 4 hour trip. With a space elevator we are talking about a trip 100 times farther and 50 times longer. Applying some hand waving math, we would be looking at $10K to $20K for a trip up the elevator. Maintenance costs for the elevator are going to be a *lot* more than those for a strip of train track, so it would not be unreasonable to multiple this estimate by a factor of 10.
Yes, that is a lot less than $1,000,000 but also far from virtually nothing.
I think you have missed one of the points of the article. All the people in the article have started their own businesses and are their own boss. Being your own boss beats being an faceless corporate employee most days of the week.
This is not to be confused with flipping burgers for McD's. Working for McD's you are still not your own boss, you still have to put up with potentially stupid bosses sometimes idiot coworkers.
I've worked retail. It is hard. You have to be nice and on your feet for an entire day. You often miss lunch, and you can't have an off minute. However, it is very satisfying to see a happy satisfied customer and know that *you* are responsible. That's the pleasure that the people in this article have discovered.
At my work they have installed the commercial type where pushing down on the emtpy roll drops the next roll into place.
Alas, invariably the next roll gets dropped into place before the first roll is complete. You end up with two touching rolls, one on to of the other, both of which are hard to turn.
As for the "over or under" question that is not addressed in the article but many people seem to be discussing, most people with cats would prefer the under approach. The over approach is far too easy for my cats to unravel, leading to the bathroom being turned into a toilet paper playhouse while I am away. At least the under approach makes them think a little (something they prefer to avoid).
What are these modern language features you are looking for?
FORTRAN is almost perfect for what it is used for: massive number crunching. Very little bells and whistles, which allows the programmer to concentrate on the numerics of the problem at hand and not the picky little programming details.
But that cotton candy still contains all the energy that was stored in the flywheel, and that energy has to go somewhere.
A flywheel's mode of failure is catastrophic. A failure in a set of flywheels that stored a *megawatt* of power is going to kill a lot of people unless it is properly contained.
Pacemakers are already controlled by computer. It allows doctors to make tweaks to the operating parameters of the pacemaker without requiring invasive surgery.
So, given the (currently slow) trend towards telemedicine, it is only a matter of time before a person an consult a doctor online, and that doctor can ask the patient to plug in his pacemaker so that it can be updated remotely.
Is this a good idea? Hell yes, it might save lives. But there is much infrastructure work to do to make it safe. The Internet as it exists today is not have the required reliability, let alone security.
I disagree. VW's "Milky Way" is the second-best commercial ever. The best is VW's "Synchronicity" commercial which, unfortunately, does not appear to be available on the VW site.
If anybody's knows where I can get a copy, I'd be grateful.
I usually play "Blood from a Stone" when I am up at 3 a.m. on a Sunday morning, working towards an impossible deadline.
Last time I used Lasoo was on Mother's Day, to find the closet florist to my mom's house.
I interpreted to author to be stating that big corporations are the best place to grow inventions and bring them to fruition. But not the best place to actually do the inventing.
As stated in the article, Farnsworth got his big idea while working in a potato field. After forming his idea, the article states he should have gone to work for RCA.
To me, this makes sense. Yes it is possible to grow your inventions on your own (go it alone), but it is really really hard.
There are successes. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos (tbd), to name a few. But the combination of inventive genius and business talent is very rare indeed.
The corporate world is littered with dead companies which have tried to do just that.
Netscape? Dead and mostly gone.
Napster? Swallowed by the big boys.
Linux? Do you think it would be going anywhere without Red Hat, Caldera and other like corporations.
Now Rogers had *never* answered their phone for me in less than 30 minutes, and this time was no different. What made it excrutiatingly awful was that the on-hold music was some old-time country and western yodelling music (I kid you not).
When a human finally picked up the other end, the first question he asked was why I wanted to cancel my service. Did I give him an earful!
After that he went on auto-pilot. Confirming my name, address, account number, etc. He was so much on auto-pilot, that he ended the phone call with
"Thank you for choosing Rogers!"
I laughed and hung up.