In the end, porn really is what drives technology forward. You can believe that when we have fully tactile 3d VR, we'll have it because the porn industry invented it.
But can microsoft keep up with the rate of mutation in the spyware/worm/virus category?
Microsoft certainly has a head start in heuristically detecting things (after all, they're the only people who know what all the random gibberish in the registry means, or whether mswin03.dll really belongs in 2003 server's windows directory), but I suspect that their heuristics are only going to get them so far, and that the people who wrote spyware that worked so hard to keep the other players from finding it are going to figure out how MS found them and "fix" it.
The interesting thing is that there's a checkbox already for "I want the IRS to calculate my taxes". From there, its a tiny step from mailing out a copy of my forms blank (received my 1040A yesterday, I guess they send you whatever you used the previous year) to mailing out a copy of my forms already filled in and waiting for a signature, along with a bill for however much I owe. (Or if I'm getting a refund, the IRS could just deposit it in my account. The IRS probably knows it without me having to fill in the direct deposit form.)
Of course, this doesn't take deductions into account, but if there was a process in place to report donations, expenses, losses, etc. through the year, that wouldn't be such a problem.
It means that it is ok for your employer to stop paying you because, since you don't have the money yet, you aren't "losing" anything.
Thats brilliant, Sherlock. You must have rubbed together both of your last two neurons to work that out.
If my employer quits paying me, I'm not "losing" any money. Guess what, if an employer stops paying me, its not called "theft" its called either 1) "You're fired/laid off" 2) "Breach of Contract" (if I was a contract worker with a specified rate) or 3) "Breach of minimum wage laws". (Optionally, add 4) Slavery, which is also illegal in our country)
Try harder next time. You can at least state the truth, you just need a little work in understanding what it is you're saying.
the artist gets nothing. Now please explain how this is not taking somethign from someone else.
Please explain how me sitting here at work and not buying anything is causing every single musician, author, programmer, and RIAA executive to starve to death.
Because thats what that argument amounts to. If I'm not going to buy or listen to a Metallica CD ever again (I'm in the "Reload and Up sucks" group.) you're saying that I'm taking something from Metallica.
I want to walk into a bank and walk out with a million dollars of someone else's money. I want to be able to walk into a grocery store, fill up my cart, and leave without paying. I want the house three doors up from mine. I also want their car.
As the anti-copyright people here have pointed out again and again, every single one of those involves taking something from someone else, who then must do without or obtain a new material good to replace it, as opposed to copying a song, which takes it from nobody unless you steal the master then beat the lyric writer, singer, and musicians dead.
Not that I think copyright infringement is an appropriate way to combat a law that has gone far beyond what was intended, but you might as well come up with a decent argument against it if you want to think you're doing any good.
No, its like saying the cop has no idea what the age of consent is (or what people that age look like), and who thinks that marijuana comes in vials you inject.
The cops then come in, walk right past the people smoking dope and drag the kid with the playboy out.
The problem here is that its not just someone creating IP and profitting off of it.
Instead, we have the "publishers". These people buy the IP from its creators (and all rights attached. Thanks to the RIAA and MPAA, even works done on contract and NOT as an employee are now Works For Hire and belong to them). The publishers work together as a collusive entity (RIAA, MPAA, etc) to both set a barrier for entry to independents ("Sorry, sir, but we here at Walmart already sold every last foot of shelfspace to the RIAA. We'd sell you some if we had it though, we certainly haven't been bribed to not sell shelfspace to anyone else, no siree.") as well as to enforce pricing on the end sales outlet ("Of course it's legal, you agreed to it in your contract! You can always sell things for whatever price you want, but good luck getting anything to mark down when we stop shipping you any product at all!")
You will find in nearly EVERY case, that it is the publishers who are pushing for increased copyright controls, increased price controls, and reduced creator and consumer rights. They want to create a society and economy where the Middle Man rules, requiring as much trade as possible to flow through them while they skim whatever they can get away with from the top.
I guess they are, after all, nobody really wants to know the real truth, they just want whatever truth they get fed through the media or through their religious leader or through their president (often then filtered through the media too!)
Reminds me of the Republican ads being shown before the election, talking about how the Republicans were the "value" party, and listing all sorts of values they claimed to hold (gee, I'm glad you're courageous!). I guess those "liberal" tv channels must have cut the ad short, since not once was "truth", "justice", or "honesty" listed.
So, if The Truth is bashing the US, then maybe its deserved. US spoonfed Saddam (who wouldn't have been able to hold Iraq together himself) to have a secular friend against Iran taking over the region. Once Saddam was armed, he started misbehaving and killing people but the US chose to "overlook" that small flaw in his character for the continued security against Iran, until finally he invaded another country. Then Bush Sr. beat him down just enough to teach him that if he wants to slaughter people, he can do it within his own country.
Later, we invade Iraq, kill a lot of people, discover halfway through that we had no plans for an exit, no plans for a democracy (are we even going to pull off the hastily arranged election this month?), no weapons of mass destruction (and members of the government knew this, but failed to communicate it to anyone who could do anything about it other than fire them from the CIA, even after weeks of hunting in Iraq) making this an elective war which means that we could have waited in order to properly equip troops, rather than "going to war with the army we have".
I also find it highly amusing that you believe we are the sole source of freedom on this planet. I can see how people could say "we saved Europe" in WW2, but I'd like to hear how crushing Japan or Germany saved South Africa or Mexico. Not to mention that our own freedom was largely conferred to us with French support.
I suppose though that what America giveth, it taketh away, as the Bush Administration did when it tried to imprison our own Citizens without charge or trial, until the Supreme Court schooled Bush on the bill of rights (Jose Padilla was "detained" in 2002, and finally has a trial scheduled for this month thanks to the SCOTUS decision, however he STILL has not been charged with a crime). Though maybe you're right about the source of freedom spiel, just last month Britain saw the light and their indefinite imprisonment law got busted too.
Therefore, a person who believes in nothing is likely to be closer to the truth than someone who randomly chooses an arbitrary faith.
How did you arrive at that conclusion without first declaring that none of the "nearly infinite" possible faiths were actually valid?
Otherwise, in the absense of any other information, choosing no faith at all would have a similar infintesimal chance of being the "right" choice as any one religion, though it might lead to having more fun in life.
Even bad stuff happens to good people (and under a certain religious ideaology it happens for a good reason).
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Yeah, that kind of stuff is expected when you worship an elder god. Perform all the rituals, make all the sacrifices, and when they finally appear, they consume your soul. How's that for gratitude?
Here in the US they do that too, except I saw one light here in Houston that was flashing the red and green lights at the same time instead of just red. People figured it out and nobody died.
Yeah, its kind of sad to see that these days the money really is in being one of the pure-IP companies we all hate.
At least Transmeta is doing this all above board with actual public licensing of their technologies instead of just sinking unsuspecting companies with lawsuits fired by submarine patents years after the technology has settled into use.
Hm, I could duplicate his behavior but only if I copied and pasted the cell itself, which is probably why it behaves the way it does (it pastes the whole cell in and moves the other cell out of the way).
If I highlighted the content of a cell and copied that, I could paste that into the inside of another cell with no problem at all.
BUT lets say we're talking about powering cars with Hydrogen. Now you've moved the pollution from hundreds of thousands of cars to several dozen power plants/watercrackers.
Now, tell me you can afford a $5k exhaust scrubber for your car's exhaust? No? Well, a powerplant running 500k cars should be able to afford a larger $100k scrubber.
By bringing pollution to a single point, that pollution becomes easier to measure as well as manage.
What killed powerpoint in our company was the total lack of an export feature for anything not resembling a PC.
After trying 3 different companies' variations of "ppt2dvd", and discovering that all three basically served as a low-framerate screengrab of the running presentation (one wouldn't even work in a dual head setup with ppt running the presentation on the second head), we gave up and used keynote's ability to convert the thing into a video file which we then turned into a dvd.
A common user seeing one single glitch (glitch defined as something different from how it works in Office)
Not that "Works like Office" is exactly a great thing. I had a document open and minimized and was going through a set of emails in Outlook looking for a matching document. Every time I opened a document, Office thought that it should re-maximize the background document, raise it to the top, then open the new document on top of that, meaning that every time I'd have to close the document, then re-minimize the background document so I could open the next document in office. This is "how it should work?"
I agree that if it doesn't open documents exactly like Office, and doesn't support the same features as Office I'm not going to use it.
Re:Linux Drivers: The Real Problem
on
Does Linux Have Game?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
upstart company could potentially reverse engineer all their hard work
The only thing is that some upstart company willing to work this way to make what is essentially an nVidia clone would have the resources and the guts to reverse engineer it from the existing nvidia driver.
As it is, either way you're not going to figure out the "magic" within the card whether or not they publish specs, the worst that would happen is that CopycatCorp would sell a video card that would be run by nVidia's drivers, cutting the cost of writing a driver for their card.
By whose system? Morality is generally accepted to be dictated by religion, so I can see if you're not a member of a mainstream religion that frowns upon causing harm to others that the various vices cited here would not be immoral to you.
However, ethics is dictated by society. They are codified in laws, written and unwritten, and in social contracts like professional codes of honor. Selling beer during prohibition WAS illegal and was therefore unethical.
So can the histrionics and accept that the people who drugged others senseless were immoral to a majority of the public, and the people selling beer when it was illegal to do so were acting unethically. And Bill Gates was just lucky with QDOS, his company's crimes came later (such as the doublespace fiasco and others)
anyone who is high enough on this "dark pyramid" is going to be watched, and eventually caught.
I suspect the opposite is true.
Lets take a perfectly-organized hiearchy example: Each person on the pyramid gives their files to exactly 10 people below them. The person at the top got there because they have contacts, and the 10 people below that person are best buds and know what they're doing (encryption, etc). Now, 4 or 5 levels down the pyramid, you've got one guy who's just there because someone on IRC told him about the scheme, and he's running his encrypted client. And chatting on IRC about the latest releases to trickle down to him. And running kazaa to see what else he can get. Oops.
The MPAA shows up, kicks in his door and seizes his computer. They find the pyramid client and note the IP address it last connected to. Nobody notices this guy disappear. Repeat up the pyramid until they get close enough to the top that someone notices the disappearance and the group dissolves, and the trail ends (assuming whoever they got last is unwilling to point fingers to continue the witch hunt).
Ok, I'm full of crap;) I was reciting that off the top of my head, its been 3 years and hell, I didn't know how far it was then. Its hard to count streets when the only difference between a street and an alley is that sometimes the streets have names.
I really did pay ~$70/night for it. I'm sure it wasn't the cheapest place in the city to stay, but it sure beat the $200/night place my company paid for the first trip, so I was plenty proud of myself at the time.
Where was that? I'd love to go back some day and see more of Tokyo, and a cheap place to spend the night would be great. Last time, I left Tokyo to go to Izukogen but I couldn't figure out much to do except look at museums there;)
Finding inexpensive places to stay there is an artform. There are a lot of cheap (by cheap I mean you go out to use public toilets elsewhere) places in Tokyo you can get for less than $70 a night, assuming you're back before lock you out at night.
There are places there that cater specifically to foreigners that are more on the "inexpensive" side, though sometimes these have restrictions too (book well in advance and don't expect a private room unless you pay extra. Good way to meet new friends though).
The best way to go though is to buy time shares in some resort condo here and bank them (say, with RCI to trade for a week in a nice condo you'd never be able to afford there.
As for spending $1500, don't go to Akihabara, its not as cool as people make it sound like it is, the game stores resist selling games to people who are obviously American, (if you're not able to fluently talk your way out of it, you're not going to get that latest PS2 game labelled For Japan Only on the back), and while you can get cool electronics you can't get anywhere else, if you don't already know exactly what you're looking for, you're going to be ripped off. (Especially at the "duty free" stores there aimed at foreigners... 95% of their stock is stuff you can already buy outside of Japan for far cheaper than they carry it). If you're desparate to spend money, take a ride from Tokyo to Kyoto on the shinkansen (bullet train). Far more memorable than picking up a PDA that comes out in the US for half the price in 6 months, but not cheap (IIRC, $400 for a round trip ticket) and don't wait until the end of your trip to go (the bullet train lines get shut down for earthquakes and other events, when I was there the first time, I was put off by the price tag, which was lucky because I would have missed my flight after being stranded in Kyoto when an earthquake hit the next morning)
Slashdot Mirror
In the end, porn really is what drives technology forward. You can believe that when we have fully tactile 3d VR, we'll have it because the porn industry invented it.
But can microsoft keep up with the rate of mutation in the spyware/worm/virus category?
Microsoft certainly has a head start in heuristically detecting things (after all, they're the only people who know what all the random gibberish in the registry means, or whether mswin03.dll really belongs in 2003 server's windows directory), but I suspect that their heuristics are only going to get them so far, and that the people who wrote spyware that worked so hard to keep the other players from finding it are going to figure out how MS found them and "fix" it.
The interesting thing is that there's a checkbox already for "I want the IRS to calculate my taxes". From there, its a tiny step from mailing out a copy of my forms blank (received my 1040A yesterday, I guess they send you whatever you used the previous year) to mailing out a copy of my forms already filled in and waiting for a signature, along with a bill for however much I owe. (Or if I'm getting a refund, the IRS could just deposit it in my account. The IRS probably knows it without me having to fill in the direct deposit form.)
Of course, this doesn't take deductions into account, but if there was a process in place to report donations, expenses, losses, etc. through the year, that wouldn't be such a problem.
And the Antartic freezes back up.
6000 years later everyone will be standing around a block of ice that washes ashore gawking at the well preserved specimen of prehistoric man.
It means that it is ok for your employer to stop paying you because, since you don't have the money yet, you aren't "losing" anything.
Thats brilliant, Sherlock. You must have rubbed together both of your last two neurons to work that out.
If my employer quits paying me, I'm not "losing" any money. Guess what, if an employer stops paying me, its not called "theft" its called either
1) "You're fired/laid off"
2) "Breach of Contract" (if I was a contract worker with a specified rate) or
3) "Breach of minimum wage laws".
(Optionally, add 4) Slavery, which is also illegal in our country)
Try harder next time. You can at least state the truth, you just need a little work in understanding what it is you're saying.
the artist gets nothing. Now please explain how this is not taking somethign from someone else.
Please explain how me sitting here at work and not buying anything is causing every single musician, author, programmer, and RIAA executive to starve to death.
Because thats what that argument amounts to. If I'm not going to buy or listen to a Metallica CD ever again (I'm in the "Reload and Up sucks" group.) you're saying that I'm taking something from Metallica.
I want to walk into a bank and walk out with a million dollars of someone else's money. I want to be able to walk into a grocery store, fill up my cart, and leave without paying. I want the house three doors up from mine. I also want their car.
As the anti-copyright people here have pointed out again and again, every single one of those involves taking something from someone else, who then must do without or obtain a new material good to replace it, as opposed to copying a song, which takes it from nobody unless you steal the master then beat the lyric writer, singer, and musicians dead.
Not that I think copyright infringement is an appropriate way to combat a law that has gone far beyond what was intended, but you might as well come up with a decent argument against it if you want to think you're doing any good.
Religion hasn't killed anyone. I've never heard of someone deciding to follow a religion, then promptly falling dead because religion killed them.
You're just begging for it.
No, its like saying the cop has no idea what the age of consent is (or what people that age look like), and who thinks that marijuana comes in vials you inject.
The cops then come in, walk right past the people smoking dope and drag the kid with the playboy out.
The problem here is that its not just someone creating IP and profitting off of it.
Instead, we have the "publishers". These people buy the IP from its creators (and all rights attached. Thanks to the RIAA and MPAA, even works done on contract and NOT as an employee are now Works For Hire and belong to them). The publishers work together as a collusive entity (RIAA, MPAA, etc) to both set a barrier for entry to independents ("Sorry, sir, but we here at Walmart already sold every last foot of shelfspace to the RIAA. We'd sell you some if we had it though, we certainly haven't been bribed to not sell shelfspace to anyone else, no siree.") as well as to enforce pricing on the end sales outlet ("Of course it's legal, you agreed to it in your contract! You can always sell things for whatever price you want, but good luck getting anything to mark down when we stop shipping you any product at all!")
You will find in nearly EVERY case, that it is the publishers who are pushing for increased copyright controls, increased price controls, and reduced creator and consumer rights. They want to create a society and economy where the Middle Man rules, requiring as much trade as possible to flow through them while they skim whatever they can get away with from the top.
US Bashers are hypocrites?
I guess they are, after all, nobody really wants to know the real truth, they just want whatever truth they get fed through the media or through their religious leader or through their president (often then filtered through the media too!)
Reminds me of the Republican ads being shown before the election, talking about how the Republicans were the "value" party, and listing all sorts of values they claimed to hold (gee, I'm glad you're courageous!). I guess those "liberal" tv channels must have cut the ad short, since not once was "truth", "justice", or "honesty" listed.
So, if The Truth is bashing the US, then maybe its deserved. US spoonfed Saddam (who wouldn't have been able to hold Iraq together himself) to have a secular friend against Iran taking over the region. Once Saddam was armed, he started misbehaving and killing people but the US chose to "overlook" that small flaw in his character for the continued security against Iran, until finally he invaded another country. Then Bush Sr. beat him down just enough to teach him that if he wants to slaughter people, he can do it within his own country.
Later, we invade Iraq, kill a lot of people, discover halfway through that we had no plans for an exit, no plans for a democracy (are we even going to pull off the hastily arranged election this month?), no weapons of mass destruction (and members of the government knew this, but failed to communicate it to anyone who could do anything about it other than fire them from the CIA, even after weeks of hunting in Iraq) making this an elective war which means that we could have waited in order to properly equip troops, rather than "going to war with the army we have".
I also find it highly amusing that you believe we are the sole source of freedom on this planet. I can see how people could say "we saved Europe" in WW2, but I'd like to hear how crushing Japan or Germany saved South Africa or Mexico. Not to mention that our own freedom was largely conferred to us with French support.
I suppose though that what America giveth, it taketh away, as the Bush Administration did when it tried to imprison our own Citizens without charge or trial, until the Supreme Court schooled Bush on the bill of rights (Jose Padilla was "detained" in 2002, and finally has a trial scheduled for this month thanks to the SCOTUS decision, however he STILL has not been charged with a crime). Though maybe you're right about the source of freedom spiel, just last month Britain saw the light and their indefinite imprisonment law got busted too.
Therefore, a person who believes in nothing is likely to be closer to the truth than someone who randomly chooses an arbitrary faith.
How did you arrive at that conclusion without first declaring that none of the "nearly infinite" possible faiths were actually valid?
Otherwise, in the absense of any other information, choosing no faith at all would have a similar infintesimal chance of being the "right" choice as any one religion, though it might lead to having more fun in life.
Even bad stuff happens to good people (and under a certain religious ideaology it happens for a good reason).
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Yeah, that kind of stuff is expected when you worship an elder god. Perform all the rituals, make all the sacrifices, and when they finally appear, they consume your soul. How's that for gratitude?
Here in the US they do that too, except I saw one light here in Houston that was flashing the red and green lights at the same time instead of just red. People figured it out and nobody died.
Yeah, its kind of sad to see that these days the money really is in being one of the pure-IP companies we all hate.
At least Transmeta is doing this all above board with actual public licensing of their technologies instead of just sinking unsuspecting companies with lawsuits fired by submarine patents years after the technology has settled into use.
Hm, I could duplicate his behavior but only if I copied and pasted the cell itself, which is probably why it behaves the way it does (it pastes the whole cell in and moves the other cell out of the way).
If I highlighted the content of a cell and copied that, I could paste that into the inside of another cell with no problem at all.
Exactly.
BUT lets say we're talking about powering cars with Hydrogen. Now you've moved the pollution from hundreds of thousands of cars to several dozen power plants/watercrackers.
Now, tell me you can afford a $5k exhaust scrubber for your car's exhaust? No? Well, a powerplant running 500k cars should be able to afford a larger $100k scrubber.
By bringing pollution to a single point, that pollution becomes easier to measure as well as manage.
it's not quite a Powerpoint killer.
For you, maybe.
What killed powerpoint in our company was the total lack of an export feature for anything not resembling a PC.
After trying 3 different companies' variations of "ppt2dvd", and discovering that all three basically served as a low-framerate screengrab of the running presentation (one wouldn't even work in a dual head setup with ppt running the presentation on the second head), we gave up and used keynote's ability to convert the thing into a video file which we then turned into a dvd.
A common user seeing one single glitch (glitch defined as something different from how it works in Office)
Not that "Works like Office" is exactly a great thing. I had a document open and minimized and was going through a set of emails in Outlook looking for a matching document. Every time I opened a document, Office thought that it should re-maximize the background document, raise it to the top, then open the new document on top of that, meaning that every time I'd have to close the document, then re-minimize the background document so I could open the next document in office. This is "how it should work?"
I agree that if it doesn't open documents exactly like Office, and doesn't support the same features as Office I'm not going to use it.
upstart company could potentially reverse engineer all their hard work
The only thing is that some upstart company willing to work this way to make what is essentially an nVidia clone would have the resources and the guts to reverse engineer it from the existing nvidia driver.
As it is, either way you're not going to figure out the "magic" within the card whether or not they publish specs, the worst that would happen is that CopycatCorp would sell a video card that would be run by nVidia's drivers, cutting the cost of writing a driver for their card.
Not amoral or unethical.
By whose system? Morality is generally accepted to be dictated by religion, so I can see if you're not a member of a mainstream religion that frowns upon causing harm to others that the various vices cited here would not be immoral to you.
However, ethics is dictated by society. They are codified in laws, written and unwritten, and in social contracts like professional codes of honor. Selling beer during prohibition WAS illegal and was therefore unethical.
So can the histrionics and accept that the people who drugged others senseless were immoral to a majority of the public, and the people selling beer when it was illegal to do so were acting unethically. And Bill Gates was just lucky with QDOS, his company's crimes came later (such as the doublespace fiasco and others)
anyone who is high enough on this "dark pyramid" is going to be watched, and eventually caught.
I suspect the opposite is true.
Lets take a perfectly-organized hiearchy example: Each person on the pyramid gives their files to exactly 10 people below them. The person at the top got there because they have contacts, and the 10 people below that person are best buds and know what they're doing (encryption, etc). Now, 4 or 5 levels down the pyramid, you've got one guy who's just there because someone on IRC told him about the scheme, and he's running his encrypted client. And chatting on IRC about the latest releases to trickle down to him. And running kazaa to see what else he can get. Oops.
The MPAA shows up, kicks in his door and seizes his computer. They find the pyramid client and note the IP address it last connected to. Nobody notices this guy disappear. Repeat up the pyramid until they get close enough to the top that someone notices the disappearance and the group dissolves, and the trail ends (assuming whoever they got last is unwilling to point fingers to continue the witch hunt).
Ok, I'm full of crap ;) I was reciting that off the top of my head, its been 3 years and hell, I didn't know how far it was then. Its hard to count streets when the only difference between a street and an alley is that sometimes the streets have names.
I really did pay ~$70/night for it. I'm sure it wasn't the cheapest place in the city to stay, but it sure beat the $200/night place my company paid for the first trip, so I was plenty proud of myself at the time.
Where was that? I'd love to go back some day and see more of Tokyo, and a cheap place to spend the night would be great. Last time, I left Tokyo to go to Izukogen but I couldn't figure out much to do except look at museums there ;)
Finding inexpensive places to stay there is an artform. There are a lot of cheap (by cheap I mean you go out to use public toilets elsewhere) places in Tokyo you can get for less than $70 a night, assuming you're back before lock you out at night.
There are places there that cater specifically to foreigners that are more on the "inexpensive" side, though sometimes these have restrictions too (book well in advance and don't expect a private room unless you pay extra. Good way to meet new friends though).
The best way to go though is to buy time shares in some resort condo here and bank them (say, with RCI to trade for a week in a nice condo you'd never be able to afford there.
As for spending $1500, don't go to Akihabara, its not as cool as people make it sound like it is, the game stores resist selling games to people who are obviously American, (if you're not able to fluently talk your way out of it, you're not going to get that latest PS2 game labelled For Japan Only on the back), and while you can get cool electronics you can't get anywhere else, if you don't already know exactly what you're looking for, you're going to be ripped off. (Especially at the "duty free" stores there aimed at foreigners... 95% of their stock is stuff you can already buy outside of Japan for far cheaper than they carry it). If you're desparate to spend money, take a ride from Tokyo to Kyoto on the shinkansen (bullet train). Far more memorable than picking up a PDA that comes out in the US for half the price in 6 months, but not cheap (IIRC, $400 for a round trip ticket) and don't wait until the end of your trip to go (the bullet train lines get shut down for earthquakes and other events, when I was there the first time, I was put off by the price tag, which was lucky because I would have missed my flight after being stranded in Kyoto when an earthquake hit the next morning)