"What the hell are "regular responsibilities" if they don't include helping users get rid of viruses."
If regular responsibilities include helping users get rid of viruses, then it follows that part of the cost of maintaining a regular staff is attributable to virus damages. Every hour we spend eliminating viruses at work, is an hour we could spend reading slashdot.
my refrig should 'read' the goods I place into the refrig and allow me to instantly generate a grocery list or track the age of foods
Now I'm not going to say this is impossible. But how would a refrigerator know what was in the fridge? Scanning bar codes would be a pain in the ass and it would be difficult to distinguish between two items of the same product. How would it know the expiration date? How do you determine things like low on milk or almost out of cheese. The only accurate solutions I can think of involve a lot more effort than required normally.
IANAL
Someone may have mentioned this before, but after reading the charges in the indictment, and referencing the applicable law (Title 17, Section(b)(1)(A)), it appears that inumerable people are guilty of this crime.
"No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that
effectively protects a right of a copyright owner..."
To me there are a coupe details that leap out at me here. First the use of the words component and part. Software design is filled with reused parts and components. Does this mean the author of Tree.h commited a crime when his component object was used in the decryption software?
Secondly, the phrase "effectively protects a right of a copyright owner" is unclear. If a person like Dmitri breaks an encryption scheme then that encryption scheme did not effectively protect the rights of the copy right owner.
Finally, Fair Use (Title 17 Section 107) allows for the copy of copyrighted works for specific purposes. Since the Exclusive Rights (Title 17, Section 106) are "subject to Subject to section(s) 107", I don't see how his software violates any right. Under Fair Use Copyright owners do not have the right to prevent their work from being copied.
Am I making some colossal error in my interpretation of these laws?
Dude, sorry to rock your boat, but you just bought a bunch of lawyers a nice dinner... Laywers can't fix this problem (DMCA). Legislators can.
Legislators created the problem, it is up to the judicial system to correct it, it is lawyers who will argue the cases that will win or lose the battle. Would my adopt-a-lawyer like dessert with his 4 star meal?
In the movie, Alanis' character was just one form that God took, the other being that of a skeeball playing old homeless guy (the john doe).
Second, I think the point in having Alanis play God was to help dismiss the stereotypical/dogmatic view of God. The idea viewers are supposed to come away with from this aspect of the movie is not that God is like Alanis, but that he/she/it is not necessarily what people/humans have built up their expectations for him to be.
Finally, in a movie created to present an alternate perspective to religious dogma, think about who can play God? Is Alanis such a bad choice?
Slashdot's current interface is pretty damn good. I like the fact that the site is simple, consistent, and reasonably intuitive. Why would you want to change it?
If you would like to see something in particular changed then suggest it. Otherwise there's not much point in a complaint like this. It's kind of sad that after all the work people have put into this, the first comment is a complaint.
Personally, I think it looks great so far.
Re:Believe it or not...
on
Dorm Storm?
·
· Score: 1
I was condemned to this for a while, but then I wisened up...
"Help! Help! My computer turned into a blue fungus and ate my room-mate!"
"Gosh, I don't know what could be wrong, maybe so and so knows how to fix it (intense glare from so and so). He's much better at this sort of thing than I am."
Oh God, I know all the companies I've worked for are pure Saints incapable of creating or doing something unfavorable in the eyes of the public. My managers work themselves into a fervor night and day trying to give cute little pink bunnies to every boy and girl in the world. [sarcasm]
Besides, isn't part of the big complaint about the DMCA based on protection through broad legislation. You wanna do the same thing with spam? I'm sure that wouldn't result in selective enforcement, rights violations, or anything else.
(Kidding)
Factor Submission Form
Submitter Nam(s): Joe Bob
Contact Email Address: joebob@fake.com
RSA Challenge Number:RSA-2048
First Factor: 38927598246791283709823572098375983275987358927598 738750187350...
Second Factor: 37498278736897245097604376029847602834760982734607 2306987308763087039476092834760298374609827346908...
Description of Effort: Looked at the yellow post-its stuck to the competition organizer's monitor.
The what constitution?
OH, you mean that thing that Congress has been wiping its ass with for the last century
That might not be a bad idea... if all the toilet paper in the US had the Bill of Rights on it, then everyone (including congress) would have a much better idea of what rights they were supposed to have. It might be more difficult to pass things like the DMCA with a more informed public.
Interesting... in a sense reverse engineering/breaking an encryption system advertised to be of a certain strength to determine if it actually is that strong is a way for third parties to guard against fraud or false advertisement... effectively enforcing the law.
From this perspective, arresting Dmitry is like arresting a witness to a burglary for being too nosy.
Is it possible this chap deliberately hard coded the ip address? It almost looks like someone is trying to draw public and government attention to Microsoft's problems without taking anything down too hard. I would think that anyone that could write this worm would realize that whitehouse.gov could easily sidestep the affected ip.
In summary, they ran out of shampoo, some russian stuff is incompatible with American stuff, they ran out of shampoo, their tv is too small, and one of their computers crashed at least once in a 5 month period. On the bright side they have plenty of chili sauce.
Last week I ran out of shampoo, my math teacher only seems to speak Russian, I have no tv, my win98 computer crashed twice today. On the bright side, I have plenty of chili sauce.
First, I must say that I AM a Telocity customer. I have been using Telocity for just over 7 months now.
I too can say I never had to sign any sort of contract or agreement... and the only contract I had was a conversation with a lady over the phone. I would later joke about how that meant they weren't actually obligated to provide any sort of service.
Back to the story... our first month of DSL service was absolutely flawless without a single outage.
Then something happend.
Our service became incredibly unreliable. There were lots of what we came to call micro-outages where the net would go out for five minutes at a time every half hour or so (sometimes we could still get to the telocity mail server so it wasn't our end). Sometimes the net would go out for days at a time.
I must have initiated 3 or 4 trouble tickets with them from which I basically never heard back from. They'd always say "we don't see anything wrong." Five minutes later the evil green lights on the modem would start blinking again.
After a while I figured maybe if I fed them a record of our problems they'd do something about it. At the peak of the problems, the net was down about 10%-15% of the time and that's a lot more than it sounds like.
In Telocity's defence, my service has improved substantially (strangely since the DirectTV takeover)... although I still had to take an online final (test) using a dial up modem.
Speaking as a guy whose done a little maintenance programming, developers really need to at least try to make the rest of the software's life cycle tolerable. A company should attempt to restrict itself to as few technologies as are necessary both for its budget and for the sanity of the IT/programming staff.
Secondly, not all programming languages are the same. Some are radically different lisp . When I first looked at LISP and scheme it looked like gibberish. Now it looks like very clever gibberish. At any rate its not easy to transfer to an entirely different programming style.
Sure a good programmer ought to be able to learn a new language at an intermediate level in a month or two, but what if you've got to work with 15 different languages and you only know 8?
Finally, even if good programmer's could pick up languages quickly in a day and if it were worth their time to do so... we come across the problem that not everyone out there is a good programmer. A good programmer knows that and codes appropriately.
A few days after moving into the Univeristy Dorms, my room-mate was sitting at his computer browsing the shares on the building's student network of PCs. All of a sudden a group of 3 or 4 very agitated guys show up and threaten to beat the crap out of him.
Apparently whatever software they were using had alerted them that jondoe.23 (University username = room-mate computer name) was connected to their machine on port whatever. They perceived this as a Cracking attempt and rounded up a lynch mob to find and stop this malcontent danger to society.
I must say, listening to him try to explain to them that he had only been browsing information that the fellow had been sharing on the network, had to have been one of the most amusing events of my college career. They ended up leaving with their tails between their legs carrying instructions about how to figure out what they were sharing and remove it from the network if they wanted to.
The robot is cruising along the coridors at 35 kph when suddendly it slips on a puddle of spilled coffee, crashes into a wall, and falls over on its (back?).
Its rangefinder and camera, now staring at the unfamiliar ceiling cause the robot to initiate a series of intruder alerts to local and national security.
MSG: Intruder Alert! Marvin Incapacitated, Intruder considered armed and dangerous. Last seen wearing offwhite tiles and several flourescent lighting fixtures.
I'm not too up on my phone line technology, but if this is from Pinkerton...
What is to prevent them from tracing the calls, cross-referencing that information with their massive database (looking for a phone # match), and then identifying the household from which the call was made?
You would think information about people who repeatedly ratted out others might be just as beneficial to their psychological profiling....
Slashdot Mirror
"What the hell are "regular responsibilities" if they don't include helping users get rid of viruses."
If regular responsibilities include helping users get rid of viruses, then it follows that part of the cost of maintaining a regular staff is attributable to virus damages. Every hour we spend eliminating viruses at work, is an hour we could spend reading slashdot.
my refrig should 'read' the goods I place into the refrig and allow me to instantly generate a grocery list or track the age of foods
Now I'm not going to say this is impossible. But how would a refrigerator know what was in the fridge? Scanning bar codes would be a pain in the ass and it would be difficult to distinguish between two items of the same product. How would it know the expiration date? How do you determine things like low on milk or almost out of cheese. The only accurate solutions I can think of involve a lot more effort than required normally.
IANAL
Someone may have mentioned this before, but after reading the charges in the indictment, and referencing the applicable law (Title 17, Section(b)(1)(A)), it appears that inumerable people are guilty of this crime.
"No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner..."
To me there are a coupe details that leap out at me here. First the use of the words component and part. Software design is filled with reused parts and components. Does this mean the author of Tree.h commited a crime when his component object was used in the decryption software?
Secondly, the phrase "effectively protects a right of a copyright owner" is unclear. If a person like Dmitri breaks an encryption scheme then that encryption scheme did not effectively protect the rights of the copy right owner.
Finally, Fair Use (Title 17 Section 107) allows for the copy of copyrighted works for specific purposes. Since the Exclusive Rights (Title 17, Section 106) are "subject to Subject to section(s) 107", I don't see how his software violates any right. Under Fair Use Copyright owners do not have the right to prevent their work from being copied.
Am I making some colossal error in my interpretation of these laws?
Indictment: PDF
Copy Right Law: Cornel / US Code
Lawmakers sound an awful lot like Bayesian Networks using polls for training, possibly with some sort of Markov chain model for creating new laws.
Dude, sorry to rock your boat, but you just bought a bunch of lawyers a nice dinner... Laywers can't fix this problem (DMCA). Legislators can.
Legislators created the problem, it is up to the judicial system to correct it, it is lawyers who will argue the cases that will win or lose the battle. Would my adopt-a-lawyer like dessert with his 4 star meal?
In the movie, Alanis' character was just one form that God took, the other being that of a skeeball playing old homeless guy (the john doe).
Second, I think the point in having Alanis play God was to help dismiss the stereotypical/dogmatic view of God. The idea viewers are supposed to come away with from this aspect of the movie is not that God is like Alanis, but that he/she/it is not necessarily what people/humans have built up their expectations for him to be.
Finally, in a movie created to present an alternate perspective to religious dogma, think about who can play God? Is Alanis such a bad choice?
Slashdot's current interface is pretty damn good. I like the fact that the site is simple, consistent, and reasonably intuitive. Why would you want to change it?
If you would like to see something in particular changed then suggest it. Otherwise there's not much point in a complaint like this. It's kind of sad that after all the work people have put into this, the first comment is a complaint.
Personally, I think it looks great so far.
I was condemned to this for a while, but then I wisened up... "Help! Help! My computer turned into a blue fungus and ate my room-mate!" "Gosh, I don't know what could be wrong, maybe so and so knows how to fix it (intense glare from so and so). He's much better at this sort of thing than I am."
Oh God, I know all the companies I've worked for are pure Saints incapable of creating or doing something unfavorable in the eyes of the public. My managers work themselves into a fervor night and day trying to give cute little pink bunnies to every boy and girl in the world. [sarcasm]
Besides, isn't part of the big complaint about the DMCA based on protection through broad legislation. You wanna do the same thing with spam? I'm sure that wouldn't result in selective enforcement, rights violations, or anything else.
(Kidding)8 738750187350... 7 2306987308763087039476092834760298374609827346908. ..
Factor Submission Form
Submitter Nam(s): Joe Bob
Contact Email Address: joebob@fake.com
RSA Challenge Number:RSA-2048
First Factor: 3892759824679128370982357209837598327598735892759
Second Factor: 3749827873689724509760437602984760283476098273460
Description of Effort: Looked at the yellow post-its stuck to the competition organizer's monitor.
Interesting, looks like a birth of unix time. Probably the first second of 1970.
The what constitution? OH, you mean that thing that Congress has been wiping its ass with for the last century
That might not be a bad idea... if all the toilet paper in the US had the Bill of Rights on it, then everyone (including congress) would have a much better idea of what rights they were supposed to have. It might be more difficult to pass things like the DMCA with a more informed public.
Interesting... in a sense reverse engineering/breaking an encryption system advertised to be of a certain strength to determine if it actually is that strong is a way for third parties to guard against fraud or false advertisement... effectively enforcing the law.
From this perspective, arresting Dmitry is like arresting a witness to a burglary for being too nosy.
Is it possible this chap deliberately hard coded the ip address? It almost looks like someone is trying to draw public and government attention to Microsoft's problems without taking anything down too hard. I would think that anyone that could write this worm would realize that whitehouse.gov could easily sidestep the affected ip.
Great, you bring the cookies. I'll bring plenty of chilli sauce!
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM Targets, Owner WHERE Targets.NuclearTarget='NewYork' AND Owner.Type='Terrorist'
Yes Sir it returns a 0.
just noticed, Ran out of shampoo ... ran out of shampoo... Brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department
In summary, they ran out of shampoo, some russian stuff is incompatible with American stuff, they ran out of shampoo, their tv is too small, and one of their computers crashed at least once in a 5 month period. On the bright side they have plenty of chili sauce.
Last week I ran out of shampoo, my math teacher only seems to speak Russian, I have no tv, my win98 computer crashed twice today. On the bright side, I have plenty of chili sauce.
Conclusion: Life on Earth sucks.
First, I must say that I AM a Telocity customer. I have been using Telocity for just over 7 months now.
I too can say I never had to sign any sort of contract or agreement... and the only contract I had was a conversation with a lady over the phone. I would later joke about how that meant they weren't actually obligated to provide any sort of service.
Back to the story... our first month of DSL service was absolutely flawless without a single outage.
Then something happend.
Our service became incredibly unreliable. There were lots of what we came to call micro-outages where the net would go out for five minutes at a time every half hour or so (sometimes we could still get to the telocity mail server so it wasn't our end). Sometimes the net would go out for days at a time.
I must have initiated 3 or 4 trouble tickets with them from which I basically never heard back from. They'd always say "we don't see anything wrong." Five minutes later the evil green lights on the modem would start blinking again.
After a while I figured maybe if I fed them a record of our problems they'd do something about it. At the peak of the problems, the net was down about 10%-15% of the time and that's a lot more than it sounds like.
In Telocity's defence, my service has improved substantially (strangely since the DirectTV takeover)... although I still had to take an online final (test) using a dial up modem.
Um, no.
Speaking as a guy whose done a little maintenance programming, developers really need to at least try to make the rest of the software's life cycle tolerable. A company should attempt to restrict itself to as few technologies as are necessary both for its budget and for the sanity of the IT/programming staff.
Secondly, not all programming languages are the same. Some are radically different lisp . When I first looked at LISP and scheme it looked like gibberish. Now it looks like very clever gibberish. At any rate its not easy to transfer to an entirely different programming style.
Sure a good programmer ought to be able to learn a new language at an intermediate level in a month or two, but what if you've got to work with 15 different languages and you only know 8?
Finally, even if good programmer's could pick up languages quickly in a day and if it were worth their time to do so... we come across the problem that not everyone out there is a good programmer. A good programmer knows that and codes appropriately.
A few days after moving into the Univeristy Dorms, my room-mate was sitting at his computer browsing the shares on the building's student network of PCs. All of a sudden a group of 3 or 4 very agitated guys show up and threaten to beat the crap out of him.
Apparently whatever software they were using had alerted them that jondoe.23 (University username = room-mate computer name) was connected to their machine on port whatever. They perceived this as a Cracking attempt and rounded up a lynch mob to find and stop this malcontent danger to society.
I must say, listening to him try to explain to them that he had only been browsing information that the fellow had been sharing on the network, had to have been one of the most amusing events of my college career. They ended up leaving with their tails between their legs carrying instructions about how to figure out what they were sharing and remove it from the network if they wanted to.
The robot is cruising along the coridors at 35 kph when suddendly it slips on a puddle of spilled coffee, crashes into a wall, and falls over on its (back?). Its rangefinder and camera, now staring at the unfamiliar ceiling cause the robot to initiate a series of intruder alerts to local and national security. MSG: Intruder Alert! Marvin Incapacitated, Intruder considered armed and dangerous. Last seen wearing offwhite tiles and several flourescent lighting fixtures.
I'm not too up on my phone line technology, but if this is from Pinkerton... What is to prevent them from tracing the calls, cross-referencing that information with their massive database (looking for a phone # match), and then identifying the household from which the call was made? You would think information about people who repeatedly ratted out others might be just as beneficial to their psychological profiling....