Gnutella, Freenet, and other file sharing networks are rampant with child pornography. I have yet to see any outrage in particular over this.
Then you haven't been looking very hard. Most file sharing discussion boards have frequent "what can we do to stop all the child porn... nothing, it's technically impossible to stop this kind of thing" threads. (E.g., this one).
Looks to me like they're claiming rights to the circuit that's used to generate the internal processor clock signal from the FSB clock signal.
From they phrasing, they originally designed this circuit for use in "daughterboards" that let you put a fast CPU onto a slow motherboard, which was common back around the 486 days.
But you can copyright a number. The RIAA is one the most famous for fighting the infringement.
Only if its unlikely to be derived independently. Therefore, a number as simple as 10^100 couldn't be copyrighted. I would say any number that can be expressed with less than about ten words of description using only common number (like 2, 8, 10, 16, one or two digit primes) probably couldn't be copyrighted.
I don't know too many people with more than 1GB of memory in a system they ordinarily use, and a 32 bit system can successfully address 4GB. Of course not all of that can be system memory, but the point is, we're a ways away from needing 64 bit on the desktop.
That's only 3 years away at Moore 1.
(I hereby define "Moore" to be the scale upon which the growth of computation power can be measured. Moore 1 represents a doubling every 18 months, Moore 2 a doubling every 9 months, Moore 0.5 a doubling every 36 months, etc.)
PHP still doesn't provide connection pooling; pconnect doesn't count, btw
OK -- why not?
(Note, I know next to nothing about how Java's connection pooling works, and only a little about PHP's, but I'm really interested to find out).
no buffer overflow b/c of java
I'm fairly sure buffer overflows are impossible in PHP code too. Although of course some PHP internal functions may have buffer overflows. But the same might be true of native Java functions. You have to trust in both cases that such potential problems have been caught by your server vendor.
The register_globals problem isn't likely to go away any time soon. The problem is this:
1. There are lots of PHP scripts that require register_globals on, as until relatively recently that was the default setting. 2. Because ISPs need to offer compatibility, most ISPs have register_globals on, so that the scripts mentioned in (1) can be used. 3. Because most ISPs have register_globals on, there is little point in programmers not using the facility it provides. The insecurity is inherent in it being switched on, not in actually using the variables that are created. 4. Thus, more scripts are still being written that require register_globals, and the cycle perpetuates itself.
My PHP site is on a shared host. I do my level best to write secure code, but it's very possible the people who share my server don't. The server gets exploited through one of those, my site gets rmed or defaced, and suddenly I don't look so clever.
There are plenty of shared hosts that provide server processes running under separate UIDs, chrooted services, etc. which mean that as well as exploting a PHP script hole, the attacker would have to break the OS kernel protection as well in order to get at your site.
this just means that 80% of terrestrial life and 95% of marine life are completely useless
I could have told you _that_. It's a simple corollary of Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap, there's 4 times as much life in the sea as there is on land, so 80% of terrestrial life and 95% of marine life are completely useless.
Not all religious people are creationists (in the sense of the word I think you mean). While almost all the major religions have a creation myth, most believers accept those as largely allegorical, and reduce it to simply 'god caused the universe to exist, somehow; then stuff happened which agrees with major scientific theories, the way it's written in this book is just a story told to man to help him understand before he had science'.
Specifically - the Catholic church (being the subject of this story) does not insist that the world was created in seven days. It does not ascribe any particular age to the world, or even to the universe. In fact, I believe it does not specifically endorse any belief that has been, or even could be, scientifically disproven.
What if they DON'T share any of our religions? Then ALL of ours must be wrong.
I read a very interesting story once, an SF first contact based one. In this particular story, the aliens were highly culturally advanced, incredibly peaceful, generous, kind, etc., and had no religion whatsoever. The church attempted to prevent all contact with them, on the basis that they must be a test put there by god to test our faith, and we'd likely fail.
I'm not so sure. Remember that 90%+ of PCs sold have an OEM copy of Windows sold with them. Of course, a lot of people upgrade that copy illegally, but I think _most_ just stick with what was on their PC when they bought it.
You are approaching, in my mind, a responsibility among all software makers for all bugs
For standard negligence definitions to apply, the vendor either (a) would have to know about the bug and have not taken steps to fix it, or (b) should have known about the bug and fixed the bug if they had behaved in a reasonably competent fashion.
I think this covers most scenarios. I would expect the following additional checks to apply:
1. If software is sold for a particular use, and the bug in question is only a problem when the software is used in a different way, no liability should exist. To extend the parent^n post's analogy, if you put your road car on a racing track and its brakes failed during a race, that's your fault, not the manufacturers. This shouldn't allow vendors to evade responsibility; e.g., if MS put a notice on their EULAs saying 'Windows is not designed for Internet-connected use' or similar, a judge should take one look at the product, say 'this has features that are clearly designed for Internet-connected use, that term's just there to evade responsibility' and dismiss that defense.
2. Software provided and clearly labelled as for testing purposes only should be excluded, except perhaps from really serious errors. Only people who know what they're doing should be using such software, and part of knowing what you're doing (for example) is monitoring your network for suspicious activity and disconnecting your machine from the network if you think you've been infected by a worm.
I mean it must be comforting to know you can just blacklist the compromised install keys that pirates use and be done with it right?
What I don't get is what do they do if you genuinely have a copy with a compromised key (e.g. you didn't realise that letting anybody know your key was such a big problem and posted it on a tech support bbs system when you were having installation related problems, or your company keys were copied by an unscrupulous employee)?
I thought the latest version of DX it supported was 3 anyway? Either way, you ain't going to be able to play any game which requires even version 7. Any new game requires v9!
3 is what comes installed by default; you can upgrade as far as 6. Yes, it's useless for games, or anything else that does highly graphical work. But many people here don't do those things.
Gnutella, Freenet, and other file sharing networks are rampant with child pornography. I have yet to see any outrage in particular over this.
Then you haven't been looking very hard. Most file sharing discussion boards have frequent "what can we do to stop all the child porn... nothing, it's technically impossible to stop this kind of thing" threads. (E.g., this one).
Looks to me like they're claiming rights to the circuit that's used to generate the internal processor clock signal from the FSB clock signal.
From they phrasing, they originally designed this circuit for use in "daughterboards" that let you put a fast CPU onto a slow motherboard, which was common back around the 486 days.
If I want to surf with every plug in fuctionality/programming language enabled, I'd use IE
Do you mean 'spyware-installing security hole'?
Well, yeah, but I think "insightful" might be even more dubious. :)
But you can copyright a number. The RIAA is one the most famous for fighting the infringement.
Only if its unlikely to be derived independently. Therefore, a number as simple as 10^100 couldn't be copyrighted. I would say any number that can be expressed with less than about ten words of description using only common number (like 2, 8, 10, 16, one or two digit primes) probably couldn't be copyrighted.
Just my impression, not legal advice.
Thanks for the explanation, that makes a lot of sense.
:)
I get really annoyed when my CD ROM sounds like its about to take off while I play MP3s from it. It ought to be able to do it at like 0.2x
I don't know too many people with more than 1GB of memory in a system they ordinarily use, and a 32 bit system can successfully address 4GB. Of course not all of that can be system memory, but the point is, we're a ways away from needing 64 bit on the desktop.
That's only 3 years away at Moore 1.
(I hereby define "Moore" to be the scale upon which the growth of computation power can be measured. Moore 1 represents a doubling every 18 months, Moore 2 a doubling every 9 months, Moore 0.5 a doubling every 36 months, etc.)
There are many Windows APIs that [...] are depreciated
How can Windows APIs depreciate? I thought they were worthless to start with.
PHP still doesn't provide connection pooling; pconnect doesn't count, btw
OK -- why not?
(Note, I know next to nothing about how Java's connection pooling works, and only a little about PHP's, but I'm really interested to find out).
no buffer overflow b/c of java
I'm fairly sure buffer overflows are impossible in PHP code too. Although of course some PHP internal functions may have buffer overflows. But the same might be true of native Java functions. You have to trust in both cases that such potential problems have been caught by your server vendor.
The register_globals problem isn't likely to go away any time soon. The problem is this:
1. There are lots of PHP scripts that require register_globals on, as until relatively recently that was the default setting.
2. Because ISPs need to offer compatibility, most ISPs have register_globals on, so that the scripts mentioned in (1) can be used.
3. Because most ISPs have register_globals on, there is little point in programmers not using the facility it provides. The insecurity is inherent in it being switched on, not in actually using the variables that are created.
4. Thus, more scripts are still being written that require register_globals, and the cycle perpetuates itself.
My PHP site is on a shared host. I do my level best to write secure code, but it's very possible the people who share my server don't. The server gets exploited through one of those, my site gets rmed or defaced, and suddenly I don't look so clever.
There are plenty of shared hosts that provide server processes running under separate UIDs, chrooted services, etc. which mean that as well as exploting a PHP script hole, the attacker would have to break the OS kernel protection as well in order to get at your site.
I suggest you change to one of those.
All British universities pay traffic charges for anything that goes outside of the country.
this just means that 80% of terrestrial life and 95% of marine life are completely useless
I could have told you _that_. It's a simple corollary of Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap, there's 4 times as much life in the sea as there is on land, so 80% of terrestrial life and 95% of marine life are completely useless.
Don't blame the poster -- it looks as though the Guardian's editor made the mistake when writing the headline for the piece.
(8 may need to be adjusted up or down depending on your country's definition of billion...)
:)
Which, given that the article in question appeared in the Grauniad, a UK paper, means that the the figure should be more like 8,000.
Not all religious people are creationists (in the sense of the word I think you mean). While almost all the major religions have a creation myth, most believers accept those as largely allegorical, and reduce it to simply 'god caused the universe to exist, somehow; then stuff happened which agrees with major scientific theories, the way it's written in this book is just a story told to man to help him understand before he had science'.
Specifically - the Catholic church (being the subject of this story) does not insist that the world was created in seven days. It does not ascribe any particular age to the world, or even to the universe. In fact, I believe it does not specifically endorse any belief that has been, or even could be, scientifically disproven.
What if they DON'T share any of our religions? Then ALL of ours must be wrong.
I read a very interesting story once, an SF first contact based one. In this particular story, the aliens were highly culturally advanced, incredibly peaceful, generous, kind, etc., and had no religion whatsoever. The church attempted to prevent all contact with them, on the basis that they must be a test put there by god to test our faith, and we'd likely fail.
Knowing our luck they'll probably be scientoligists.
Looking at it from the point of view of someone who is a Christian, it is hard to see how Aliens would be like us.
IANAC, but I have spent a lot of time discussing matters like this with christians, and find your outlook on this more than a little unusual.
Most christians see the bible as largely allegorical, and therefore are very cautious about drawing conclusions like this from its text.
vengeance:~/Mail/IMAP# grep '[^c]ei'
324
There's a whole load of exceptions to that rule.
Doesn't most of the world pirate MS Windows?
I'm not so sure. Remember that 90%+ of PCs sold have an OEM copy of Windows sold with them. Of course, a lot of people upgrade that copy illegally, but I think _most_ just stick with what was on their PC when they bought it.
You are approaching, in my mind, a responsibility among all software makers for all bugs
For standard negligence definitions to apply, the vendor either (a) would have to know about the bug and have not taken steps to fix it, or (b) should have known about the bug and fixed the bug if they had behaved in a reasonably competent fashion.
I think this covers most scenarios. I would expect the following additional checks to apply:
1. If software is sold for a particular use, and the bug in question is only a problem when the software is used in a different way, no liability should exist. To extend the parent^n post's analogy, if you put your road car on a racing track and its brakes failed during a race, that's your fault, not the manufacturers. This shouldn't allow vendors to evade responsibility; e.g., if MS put a notice on their EULAs saying 'Windows is not designed for Internet-connected use' or similar, a judge should take one look at the product, say 'this has features that are clearly designed for Internet-connected use, that term's just there to evade responsibility' and dismiss that defense.
2. Software provided and clearly labelled as for testing purposes only should be excluded, except perhaps from really serious errors. Only people who know what they're doing should be using such software, and part of knowing what you're doing (for example) is monitoring your network for suspicious activity and disconnecting your machine from the network if you think you've been infected by a worm.
plaintiff oriented product liability attorneys
When you mean ambulance chasers, why don't you just say it?
I mean it must be comforting to know you can just blacklist the compromised install keys that pirates use and be done with it right?
What I don't get is what do they do if you genuinely have a copy with a compromised key (e.g. you didn't realise that letting anybody know your key was such a big problem and posted it on a tech support bbs system when you were having installation related problems, or your company keys were copied by an unscrupulous employee)?
I thought the latest version of DX it supported was 3 anyway? Either way, you ain't going to be able to play any game which requires even version 7. Any new game requires v9!
3 is what comes installed by default; you can upgrade as far as 6. Yes, it's useless for games, or anything else that does highly graphical work. But many people here don't do those things.