It would be a stretch to go into court and claim that, as a result of visiting some malicious store, someone who you don't know was able to slip something into your pocket that taught your dog to kill on command from a remote control.
The ownership of a car might be more apt.
If my car runs over someone, I'm liable. But what if someone deliberately puts something in the road that causes my tires to blow out, thereby causing my car to veer out of control and hit someone?
I'm sure that I'd still bear some liability (at least in a U. S. court), but I'd be able to skate on part of it because control of my vehicle was taken away from me by persons unknown.
You seem to be going by a set of very narrow definitions. But corporations are predisposed to interpret such laws according to their own convienience, and they are the ones that will be sending law enforcement after "violators".
You might want to think about the text of this law in relation to the DMCA and the Lexmark printer cartridge situation. See also "Scientology".
(1) I would take this to mean that an ISP could have you arrested for mearly possessing a router/switch which allows you to connect more than the one computer that your TOS allows.
(4) This would mean that posting a recommendation to use the same router, mentioned above, on/. would also land you in jail.
Ha! I got you there! Bill Clinton: 1) Signed the No Electronic Theft (NET) Act. 2) Signed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. 3) Signed the DMCA.
There you have it - Proof that Clinton was working against the corporate interests, for the little guy, and for a more free and open society.
Congratulations. You have just created a new acronym for us to use: IWIMBY - "It Wasn't In My Back Yard".
Spread it around.
I was thinking about this story last night, along with the ones about the DEA and DOJ seizing websites.
I have come to the conclusion that history will one day show (if the government doesn't censor it) that, in the late 1990's to early 2000's, mankind stood at the edge of an great evolutionary step in society that would have rivaled the creation of the automobile, gunpowder, steel, and the printing press: complete freedom of information and culture. And then mankind turned away and ran like frightened rabbits, not wanting to endure the pain that often comes with revolutionary changes.
I'm convinced that most western nations will adopt some form of the DMCA soon. The EU will fall to it. Then the task will be convincing the far east. Any rogue countries will be brought into line on some other pretext, even if it means toppling their governments.
Yes. Phil Zimmerman was charged (google for details) for releasing PGP to the wild.
I also recall a story a few years ago about some guy who did his PhD or master's thesis about designing a nuclear bomb using unclassified literature. He was successful in rounding up all the necessary info, and finished his thesis, only to have it seized and classified by the US gov.
For all the complaints about "cruft" and MS's failure to innovate, techies seem to want the same UI's and the same OS API's that they used 20 to 30 years ago.
I agree that the time has come to drop the desktop metaphor. It was OK when we were weaning office workers from typewriters, but maybe it's time to move on.
I'll throw in an idea that I've toyed with, because I'm not sure that I'll ever get around to doing anything with it. Maybe you or someone else can do something with it.
I've never actually used a pie menu, but I've toyed with it on paper, and noticed a problem with menu realestate and the number of menu entries. These deficiencies were pointed out in the original article on them (in Dr. Dobbs? Computer Language? - I forget which).
My observation: try a six pointed star (aka "Star of David" - yeah, this idea won't go down well in Arab countries:-).
The advantage is that: you've got an area (a hexagon) in the middle which you can use as special buttons (cancel and/or OK), or as a title box for the menu, or divide it into 6 smaller triangles for menu items. The pattern of the 6 pointed star allows you to get 12 items into a circle, with more predictable geometries, whereas the normal pie menu (IIRC - I read the article on pie menus a *long* time ago) they found the limit to be about eight. And the pattern lends itself to nesting concentrically (again, with predictable geometry) if more than 12 items are needed in the menu.
It seems like it provides a good compromise between the easy to read grid layout of conventional menus and the direction oriented pie menus.
BIOS provides an important feature: hardware abstraction.
Originally, the BIOS provided the same functionality that is now provided by the manufacturers on a floppy disk/CD. The BIOS contained the drivers for the hardware.
How many times do we see questions about the timeframe for Linux drivers for new hardware, or complaints about the inability to write a driver because a manufacturer won't release detailed specs?
If we returned to a BIOS like arrangement, then we would be able to install the OS's of our choice without having to write hardware drivers specific to those OS's.
I say we need more BIOS, not less. We need to come up with a new spec that brings the BIOS up to date, and takes the new kinds of devices into account (sound cards, superduper video cards, etc.).
And just to take it one step further, devices that connect via the various new bus structures (USB, Firewire, etc.) should be able to yield a driver on demand by the host. That driver should be in some virtual machine format that can be JIT compiled/interpreted by the host.
Gee, it's nice to hear stuff like this once in a while.
I wrote the software that ran WD's servo-track writers (the last step in manufacturing HD's) at that time.
At the time, our field tech said that WD was using crappy media (platters), but very smart electronics. Apparently the media is the more expensive part to manufacture. Hence they were able to make hard drives cheaper than others.
I've been thinking of writing docs using HTML/XML/what-have-you, and then printing out the raw text, in an easily OCR-able font, as a document archive medium. Include some kind of error detection code that allows the OCR software to detect a misread. If all else failed, the unformatted document text could still be read and hand entered by a typist.
Now if I can just come up with an efficient, non-lossy, way of storing pictures and sound on paper (which is really where the exercise started).
If you're a startup looking selling something like MP3's online, however, then you will most likely start with a small customer base. Should you just hope for the best on those first few hundred transactions?
Ahh, remember the dot-com bubble?
New CEO: "We estimate that we will lose money on 95% of our transactions." Venture Capitalist: "Then how will you make money?" New CEO: "We'll make it up in volume!"
Simple - the first thing you'd get is a bunch of calls to tech support complaining "I pressed the 'B' key and the program went ahead and did it anyway!"
Slashdot Mirror
It would be a stretch to go into court and claim that, as a result of visiting some malicious store, someone who you don't know was able to slip something into your pocket that taught your dog to kill on command from a remote control.
The ownership of a car might be more apt.
If my car runs over someone, I'm liable. But what if someone deliberately puts something in the road that causes my tires to blow out, thereby causing my car to veer out of control and hit someone?
I'm sure that I'd still bear some liability (at least in a U. S. court), but I'd be able to skate on part of it because control of my vehicle was taken away from me by persons unknown.
You seem to be going by a set of very narrow definitions. But corporations are predisposed to interpret such laws according to their own convienience, and they are the ones that will be sending law enforcement after "violators".
/. would also land you in jail.
You might want to think about the text of this law in relation to the DMCA and the Lexmark printer cartridge situation. See also "Scientology".
(1) I would take this to mean that an ISP could have you arrested for mearly possessing a router/switch which allows you to connect more than the one computer that your TOS allows.
(4) This would mean that posting a recommendation to use the same router, mentioned above, on
We're working on them.
They're getting better and better all the time, but we have a hard time finding beta testers.
kids should recite the first amendment, every morning...
Almost. Everyone just needs to recite the first 5 words of the first ammendment. Then we'd be far better off.
Ha! I got you there! Bill Clinton:
1) Signed the No Electronic Theft (NET) Act.
2) Signed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.
3) Signed the DMCA.
There you have it - Proof that Clinton was working against the corporate interests, for the little guy, and for a more free and open society.
You mean that you just don't know whether your computer has tried to murder you yet.
;-)
For all you know, it's made several unsuccessful attempts, and done a good job of concealing the evidence.
You're pretty much correct - Hint: there are two kinds of hard drives: those that have failed and those that will fail.
Oh. So I assume that you would like to argue against the fact that any HDA will fail eventually? :-D
The answer is yes. If you write all 1's to one side of a drive, and all 0's to the other side, the drive will eventually fail.
You could do that. The good thing is you would need to buy any green leds.
Rather than just mining asteroids and all the trouble of people working in zero-G, and so forth, I propose that we bring the asteroids to Earth.
All we need to do is give them a little shove toward Earth. To make access easy, I'd propose that they be brought down near large population centers.
Yeah, and pick nice, big asteroids. We gotta make sure the trip is worth it.
Public key crypto is asymmetric. That is, different keys are used to encrypt and decrypt.
It's still vulnerable to man in the middle, unless the "web of trust" (which doesn't work as well as was originally thought) comes into it.
Congratulations. You have just created a new acronym for us to use: IWIMBY - "It Wasn't In My Back Yard".
Spread it around.
I was thinking about this story last night, along with the ones about the DEA and DOJ seizing websites.
I have come to the conclusion that history will one day show (if the government doesn't censor it) that, in the late 1990's to early 2000's, mankind stood at the edge of an great evolutionary step in society that would have rivaled the creation of the automobile, gunpowder, steel, and the printing press: complete freedom of information and culture. And then mankind turned away and ran like frightened rabbits, not wanting to endure the pain that often comes with revolutionary changes.
I'm convinced that most western nations will adopt some form of the DMCA soon. The EU will fall to it. Then the task will be convincing the far east. Any rogue countries will be brought into line on some other pretext, even if it means toppling their governments.
A shame.
(Yeah, I'm in a black mood today.)
Not to mention "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band".
Yes. Phil Zimmerman was charged (google for details) for releasing PGP to the wild.
I also recall a story a few years ago about some guy who did his PhD or master's thesis about designing a nuclear bomb using unclassified literature. He was successful in rounding up all the necessary info, and finished his thesis, only to have it seized and classified by the US gov.
Yeah, put me on. I'd love to see it. (Hey, maybe we can get you slashdotted! :-D )
Did Word Spy get slashdotted over google?
Any screenshots?
:-).
For all the complaints about "cruft" and MS's failure to innovate, techies seem to want the same UI's and the same OS API's that they used 20 to 30 years ago.
I agree that the time has come to drop the desktop metaphor. It was OK when we were weaning office workers from typewriters, but maybe it's time to move on.
I'll throw in an idea that I've toyed with, because I'm not sure that I'll ever get around to doing anything with it. Maybe you or someone else can do something with it.
I've never actually used a pie menu, but I've toyed with it on paper, and noticed a problem with menu realestate and the number of menu entries. These deficiencies were pointed out in the original article on them (in Dr. Dobbs? Computer Language? - I forget which).
My observation: try a six pointed star (aka "Star of David" - yeah, this idea won't go down well in Arab countries
The advantage is that: you've got an area (a hexagon) in the middle which you can use as special buttons (cancel and/or OK), or as a title box for the menu, or divide it into 6 smaller triangles for menu items. The pattern of the 6 pointed star allows you to get 12 items into a circle, with more predictable geometries, whereas the normal pie menu (IIRC - I read the article on pie menus a *long* time ago) they found the limit to be about eight. And the pattern lends itself to nesting concentrically (again, with predictable geometry) if more than 12 items are needed in the menu.
It seems like it provides a good compromise between the easy to read grid layout of conventional menus and the direction oriented pie menus.
Hear! Hear!
BIOS provides an important feature: hardware abstraction.
Originally, the BIOS provided the same functionality that is now provided by the manufacturers on a floppy disk/CD. The BIOS contained the drivers for the hardware.
How many times do we see questions about the timeframe for Linux drivers for new hardware, or complaints about the inability to write a driver because a manufacturer won't release detailed specs?
If we returned to a BIOS like arrangement, then we would be able to install the OS's of our choice without having to write hardware drivers specific to those OS's.
I say we need more BIOS, not less. We need to come up with a new spec that brings the BIOS up to date, and takes the new kinds of devices into account (sound cards, superduper video cards, etc.).
And just to take it one step further, devices that connect via the various new bus structures (USB, Firewire, etc.) should be able to yield a driver on demand by the host. That driver should be in some virtual machine format that can be JIT compiled/interpreted by the host.
Gee, it's nice to hear stuff like this once in a while.
I wrote the software that ran WD's servo-track writers (the last step in manufacturing HD's) at that time.
At the time, our field tech said that WD was using crappy media (platters), but very smart electronics. Apparently the media is the more expensive part to manufacture. Hence they were able to make hard drives cheaper than others.
You may not be that far off base.
I've been thinking of writing docs using HTML/XML/what-have-you, and then printing out the raw text, in an easily OCR-able font, as a document archive medium. Include some kind of error detection code that allows the OCR software to detect a misread. If all else failed, the unformatted document text could still be read and hand entered by a typist.
Now if I can just come up with an efficient, non-lossy, way of storing pictures and sound on paper (which is really where the exercise started).
Ahh, remember the dot-com bubble?
New CEO: "We estimate that we will lose money on 95% of our transactions."
Venture Capitalist: "Then how will you make money?"
New CEO: "We'll make it up in volume!"
It's been 30 minutes, and no one's mentioned "Pi"?
Simple - the first thing you'd get is a bunch of calls to tech support complaining "I pressed the 'B' key and the program went ahead and did it anyway!"
It gets better.
My house was built in 1957 and still has most of the original light switches in it (at around one dollar apiece).
Compare that to the life expectancy of a Pocket PC (running the OS of your choice), at $400 a pop.