having a way to identify the source of a potential spam would create serious privacy concerns - what's to stop that method from being used to identify the source of any email?
Note that the article itself has an answer to that:
The one thing we know about the vast majority of spammers is that they are in business to make money. And the only way to get money from the sap who received the spam is to provide a simple way for the sap to link back to the spammer. If there's a way to buy something from the spammer, there's a way to charge the spammer if you catch him.
"Should a closed source vendor be able to look over GPLd software code to see how something was done with the intention of using it in their products?"
No of course not and neither should anyone else be able to steal code. But this is about reverse engineering. And yes closed source vendors should have the right to reverse engineer any feature in any piece of software they see
Yes and needless to say this is done routinely, using unforgiving black box and clean room protocols. IIS, for instance, was engineered by subjecting a Red Hat CD to beams of accelerated electrons and studying the diffraction patterns created by Apache. (Now I have it on good authority that the same facility is at work on Mozilla's tab-browsing feature.)
Re:Good.. we need Ideas, not just complaints
on
"Squishy" DRM?
·
· Score: 2
I dont know how it would work but it must be possible.
Isn't this exactly the discourse of those lobbyists who want laws to say that the problems must be solved -- with absolutely no regard for the feasability of it?
It's not just Egypt, it's any place with no flat local phone rates, i.e. basically everywhere except North America. Example: it's the standard in Switzerland.
since once upon a time only important people had cell phones in public, they figured the best way to look important is to talk on their cell phone in public. AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE.
I remember reading a sociological study (sorry no URL, not even sure if it was on he web...?) which found a definite correlation, in public places populated by males, between
look at DVDs of classic movies; they're all region coded.
Not all of them. Just yesterday my spouse picked up a bunch of classics at $5 a piece -- The 39 Steps, another Hitchcock, an Orson Welles, a Boris Karloff flick and a few Bela Lugosi. (All from "Alpha Video", all carrying a pointer to www.oldies.com.) I was struck because none of them carry the usual "Region 1" in the logo -- quite the opposite, the small print says "This DVD is formatted for worldwide distribution." Right there I wondered if we might, indeed, be seeing the end of this system.
As to "why", an element I don't see mentioned much is protectionism, pure and simple. France, for instance, is one of the last European countries with a movie industry that hasn't been completely killed by Hollywood -- yet. (Italian, Spanish, Polish directors are still making movies but in recent years, a large part were produced by the French. Cinecittà is all but gone.)
No matter how hard they try (they used to try and promote them every year with a festival in Sarasota that I bet almost nobody ever heard of outside of France -- it was thoroughly ignored by the U.S. media), these movies never make it into the North American distribution.
Now with DVD, they might have had a way in, right? English subtitles or overdubbing can be (often are) included, and anyone could buy that from Amazon.fr. Oops, that won't work, because people here have region 1 players, and for some reason these films are region 2. Who ordered that? Who benefits from that?
You seem to have given serious thought (beyond the hype of false solutions anyway) to this question, which I'm also trying to come to grips with. What are some good/bad strategies when you're designing a language and trying to make it extensible? I got some empirical feel for it by looking at some choice BNF/yacc grammars, TeX sources, how perl or html moved from version to version, even C -> Obj-C or C++ (and I should probably take a look at this book), but if you have pointers at hand to any organized thoughts or references on the subject (books, courses, web, usenet, whatever), I'd be most interested. TIA!
In the world of business, there is no right and wrong in the moral sense, only "right" as in following the law and making money.
The problem with this is that there are other worlds besides that of business. Why should those of us who feel they have better things to do than watch stock tickers in the task bar, constantly have to live by your ideology and endure such deadly dull lectures about the `truth' of `money talks' and `welcome to the real world'?
That, and their large portion of the US economy has made the Government skittish about confronting their obviously Monopolistic tactics. (...) Personally, in a world where M$ can do this, I think drunk is a preferred state.
From what I hear, people in the white house have drawn the same conclusion.
Just yesterday I was making an innocent post on usenet, and noticed that comcast is now adding a humongous X-Trace in the headers, plus this (see for yourself):
X-DMCA-Complaints-To: dmca@comcast.net
X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers
X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly
Linux, NetBSD, Darwin, either would be great. (Or would the need for open firmware / bootX / yaboot prevent such a thing?)
Re:When will we get a proper packaging system?
on
RPM Dependency Graph
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Secondly, no elegant way to integrate software that hasn't committed to one of the packaging systems into an architecture. Both RedHat and Debian both work great when you stick to rpms and debs, but just try installing the latest version of a piece of software that doesn't have an rpm or deb yet, and you run into a world of pain.
builds your choice of a.deb or.rpm or Slackware package,
installs it,
saves it in (e.g.)/usr/src/packages/RPMS/<arch>,
saves a.tgz of the sources in (e.g.)/usr/src/packages/SOURCES/.
It has served me quite well -- except the version I'm using (1.5.1) makes empty.tgzs. Not a big deal, and hopefully fixed by now.
(*) or else 'checkinstall your-install-script'
Re:Computer 'Science'?
on
Think Python
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Those are hard things to tell an Caltech Alumnus:-)
No doubt, Feynman was a very, very good physicist. But he was also a genius at self-promotion, and his cult has gone way overboard as a result. It's well-established by now that some of the ideas he's famous for were first published by others.
(Not that he wasn't honest about it sometimes. I think he's on record, for instance, crediting Stueckelberg for the renormalizion of electrodynamics, and for the idea that positons are electrons travelling backwards in time. See e.g. this timeline, or the last chapter of this book.)
Well I'm glad to hear that telling the world was (indeed) deliberate on your part.
Then again, doesn't this completely undermine the sensational point made up by the journalist -- that somehow we're all being trapped, surreptiously, to such an extent that nothing short of a name change will release the "Google grasp"?
Indeed, a generic name is what Beth Roberts, 29, was seeking when she changed back from her married name, Werbick, after a divorce. A Google search on "Beth Werbick" returns results only about her. But a search for "Beth Roberts" returns thousands upon thousands of Web pages. "I would have plausible deniability if someone wanted to attribute something to me," said Ms. Roberts, who lives in Austin, Tex.
Now, of course, the next thing lil' Beth does is trumpet her clever change of personality in the NEW YORK TIMES.
Sadly, it is not this way in the US because of the DMCA.
Well in this case i guess it doesn't hurt THAT much because all the hollywood movies come out much earlier in the US than in the rest of the world.
Well, there are movies being produced elsewhere than in Hollywood. The whole Region code trick certainly helps Hollywood keep that competition out of the country, doesn't it?
You can't just buy French movies from FNAC over the internet and play them on an US player. (Yes, last time I was in Paris I did check that it wouldn't work because of the region codes, and it did prevent me from buying a few TV show DVDs.) How's that for unfairly rigging the market?
The whole Marconi fiasco once elicited a Financial Times reader's comment which (I feel) summed those kind of things up rather well:
reading between lines by tom Guest
I remember during the lunacy in 1999 coming across a random US discussion board mentioning Fore Systems, one of the companies that Marconi bought to accelerate themselves into the Cisco etc. space.
It was from a former employee and shareholder who said, essentially, that underneath the hype the company was basically pretty average and had management quality that was dubious at best, and that he was very glad to cash in his shares at the daft price Marconi paid - 10 times sales or thereabouts!
At the time Marconi's share price was heading through the stratosphere but I made a mental note to avoid this one like the plague, despite the herd.
However as someone has already said, the analysts in the City (who are supposed to do things like actually find out what the heck companies actually DO) were applauding the strategic move into telecoms, and these are the same idiots that are now criticing the company's management. I see they all slashed their forecasts and downgraded the stock from their usual absurd 'outperform' etc. ratings.
Well they are shutting the stable door after the horse has not just bolted, but in fact galloped off into the next county.
One of the few good things about the whole sorry boom and bust episode is that the mask of Wall St and the City has slipped and analysts are revealed as the clueless, overpaid snake oil merchants who contribute absolutely nothing to society whatsoever.
At at a time when London can't get enough teachers, doctors, policemen (you know - real jobs) because city people have priced them out of the housing market, this has come at a good time, and may even provoke a wider and much-needed debate of the absurdities and iniquities of modern capitalism.
If the open source community wants to know how break into the desktop market, look no further than Mac OS X. Whether you like the system or not, in OS X is a *nix system that has a highly user friendly interface, excellent graphic-based package management, and all the other bells and whistles that the mass desktop market craves.
The unbelievable truth is that there is a project doing just that, and that's GNUstep. (See also LinuxSTEP, and the overview at GNUstep.net.)
I fully agree... To go beyond command line Unix, NeXT and its stepchild OS X set a alternative standard to the (unnamed) platform which (unnamed) others have been busy cloning (with great success, too). Here is hoping that observations like yours will finally create enough of a synergy...
check out his other books,Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About [amazon.com], and 3: 16: Bible Texts Illuminated [amazon.com], for explanations of why not every christian is a fool.
Be sure to check out also (Eiffel creator) Bertrand Meyer's review...
Everyone stands on the shoulders of other giants. Let's give Marc and Eric some credit;
You're right. But I disagree when you write that Berners-Lee's browser had "no GUI controls beyond a scroll bar"... In fact it was not only a GUI browser but even a GUI html editor, and the page you're commenting on explains how to make a link using the NeXT menus on the left. Or see this page:
"WorldWideWeb was a graphical point-and-click browser with mode-free editing and link creation. It used style sheets, and multiple fonts, sizes, and justification styles. It would download and display linked images, diagrams, sounds animations and movies from anything in the large NeXTStep standard repertoire."
He continues with a link to the original source code, BTW. I wonder if anyone has been able to compile this lately. Could it be patched to run on GNUstep (or even Mac OS X -- compare this)? Now that'd be fun.
his browser (which he did not invent, but merely polished the creation of Tim Berners-Lee) (...)
Out of curiosity, were you around on the Internet in 1993-1994? Marc was the lead developer who came up with this incredibly addictive toy (...) It was really the first piece of software that blended three elements: hypertext information retrieval, GUI ease-of-use, and layering that on the worldwide Internet infrastructure (...) Don't underestimate that GUI component, which was Marc's main contribution (...)
You may have been around, but I guess you weren't using Berners-Lee's original, graphical browser.
Slashdot Mirror
De Niro's gonna play Dick Feynman and it'll be a festival of dyspeptic grimaces.
I dont know how it would work but it must be possible. Isn't this exactly the discourse of those lobbyists who want laws to say that the problems must be solved -- with absolutely no regard for the feasability of it?
It's not just Egypt, it's any place with no flat local phone rates, i.e. basically everywhere except North America . Example: it's the standard in Switzerland.
(See also Estonia, Brazil, Portugal, India, Ireland, Argentina, Guatemala, England, Poland, ...)
Slashdot editors need to get out more.
I remember reading a sociological study (sorry no URL, not even sure if it was on he web...?) which found a definite correlation, in public places populated by males, between
Not all of them. Just yesterday my spouse picked up a bunch of classics at $5 a piece -- The 39 Steps, another Hitchcock, an Orson Welles, a Boris Karloff flick and a few Bela Lugosi. (All from "Alpha Video", all carrying a pointer to www.oldies.com.) I was struck because none of them carry the usual "Region 1" in the logo -- quite the opposite, the small print says "This DVD is formatted for worldwide distribution." Right there I wondered if we might, indeed, be seeing the end of this system.
As to "why", an element I don't see mentioned much is protectionism, pure and simple. France, for instance, is one of the last European countries with a movie industry that hasn't been completely killed by Hollywood -- yet. (Italian, Spanish, Polish directors are still making movies but in recent years, a large part were produced by the French. Cinecittà is all but gone.)
No matter how hard they try (they used to try and promote them every year with a festival in Sarasota that I bet almost nobody ever heard of outside of France -- it was thoroughly ignored by the U.S. media), these movies never make it into the North American distribution.
Now with DVD, they might have had a way in, right? English subtitles or overdubbing can be (often are) included, and anyone could buy that from Amazon.fr. Oops, that won't work, because people here have region 1 players, and for some reason these films are region 2. Who ordered that? Who benefits from that?
You seem to have given serious thought (beyond the hype of false solutions anyway) to this question, which I'm also trying to come to grips with. What are some good/bad strategies when you're designing a language and trying to make it extensible? I got some empirical feel for it by looking at some choice BNF/yacc grammars, TeX sources, how perl or html moved from version to version, even C -> Obj-C or C++ (and I should probably take a look at this book), but if you have pointers at hand to any organized thoughts or references on the subject (books, courses, web, usenet, whatever), I'd be most interested. TIA!
moc.cam@noiretsyh
X-DMCA-Complaints-To: dmca@comcast.net
Chilling...X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers
X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly
Linux, NetBSD, Darwin, either would be great. (Or would the need for open firmware / bootX / yaboot prevent such a thing?)
- builds your choice of a
.deb or .rpm or Slackware package, - installs it,
- saves it in (e.g.)
/usr/src/packages/RPMS/<arch>, - saves a
.tgz of the sources in (e.g.) /usr/src/packages/SOURCES/.
It has served me quite well -- except the version I'm using (1.5.1) makes empty(*) or else 'checkinstall your-install-script'
No doubt, Feynman was a very, very good physicist. But he was also a genius at self-promotion, and his cult has gone way overboard as a result. It's well-established by now that some of the ideas he's famous for were first published by others.
(Not that he wasn't honest about it sometimes. I think he's on record, for instance, crediting Stueckelberg for the renormalizion of electrodynamics, and for the idea that positons are electrons travelling backwards in time. See e.g. this timeline, or the last chapter of this book.)
Then again, doesn't this completely undermine the sensational point made up by the journalist -- that somehow we're all being trapped, surreptiously, to such an extent that nothing short of a name change will release the "Google grasp"?
Sometimes you gotta wonder, really...
You can't just buy French movies from FNAC over the internet and play them on an US player. (Yes, last time I was in Paris I did check that it wouldn't work because of the region codes, and it did prevent me from buying a few TV show DVDs.) How's that for unfairly rigging the market?
which (I feel) summed those kind of things up rather well: (my emphasis)
I fully agree... To go beyond command line Unix, NeXT and its stepchild OS X set a alternative standard to the (unnamed) platform which (unnamed) others have been busy cloning (with great success, too). Here is hoping that observations like yours will finally create enough of a synergy...
Ever heard of context-free languages? yacc grammars? parsing ?
Thought so.
Alltheweb's claims are not unfounded, and I find it always worth checking when google fails.
Here is one of several real life cases where it found software for me that google didn't.
(It still does, and google still doesn't.)
You may have been around, but I guess you weren't using Berners-Lee's original, graphical browser.