To some extent, it's important to certify qualified software as secure. But security largely consists of guarding against that one exploit that hasn't been tried yet, and it's nearly impossible to prove that no such exploit exists. It's important for operating systems to be certified, but it's more important for people to understand what security is (a process) and what it is not (a product).
If karma were so dear to me, then wouldn't I too post this anonymously? But I'm not, so something must be amiss.
You're conflating two different problems, here. Read slashdot's faq, and you'll find that Rob explicitly asks people with the +1 bonus to use it liberally, so that they can continually be judged as worthy or unworthy to maintain its use. A true karmawhore and coward would only use it when hoping to gain karma, while posting at 1 or as AC (such as you have done) when expressing controversial opinions. And I'll kindly remind you that your ad-hominem slanderous attack of 'karmawhore' does nothing to refute my original argument.
Being a respected poster on slashdot isn't about selling your soul for a small incrementing integer (karma). It's about making informed comments, insightful retorts to errors, and interesting analogies to external experiences. At the end of the day, ask yourself whether you've contributed or detracted from slashdot's signal to noise ratio. If only others took as much care as I do, the world would be a better place.
Because it's the only solution that offers embedded developers the benefits of both a true realtime OS and a true platform OS. As a result, it's uniquely positioned to become a premier platform for embedded devices - just as Windows and Linux have become the platforms of choice for desktop and server applications.
Future battles will be waged in the embedded market, not the desktop market. If Linux is to succeed in Linus's quest for World Domination(tm), then QNX must be the first up against the wall.
In this country (I needn't specify which), we elect representatives. We don't directly vote on most issues, even though it would be technologically feasible for us to do so (especially with the advent of the internet). Why? Because we're not just looking for an accurate measure of what people want. We want what they ought to want, and we hope that representatives will better reflect that than their actual choices.
Advertisers don't just want to know what the most visible piece of real estate is in the world so they can erect a billboard on it. They want to know what the next upcoming innovation is so they can be the first to ride the upsurging wave of popularity. It doesn't help that altavista is the most popular search engine in the world today if placing a big banner ad on google tomorrow will catch the as-yet unseen mobs.
Take Netcraft and server operating systems. You don't just want to know what people are actually running. You want to know what they dare to tell you they're running. This is why it's ok for Netcraft to base its statistics on what servers tell each other they're running, rather than on some complicated fingerprint of their tcp/ip stacks.
It comes down to this: Adam Smith had it wrong with his theory of the invisible hand of market forces. It's not just what the markets do that's interesting; for that tells you nothing more than what, imperically, they do. If you pretend otherwise, then you're behaving no differently from all the Linux bandwagoners or Microsoft bandwagoners who base their decisions only on the herd. Herd mentalities are antithetical to proper advertising, and advertisers are finally waking up to this fact.
More important than protecting mere money streams (in which case the IOC may be overstepping its bounds) is protecting the IOC's trademark rights to "the Olympics". I know your knee-jerk reaction to such a statement would be to say "But the IOC has no legitimate trademark on the word 'olympics'", which may be true in general terms (and the IOC is rather heavy-handed in clamping down on diners and other unrelated economic uses of the word, which is unfair and improper). But here, we're talking about olympic athletes using their prominence within the Olympics to make a quick buck by promoting messages contrary to the message the IOC has ordained.
Any other legitimate claim of trademark infringement would be lauded on Slashdot, as you'll remember if you recall the IMac v. IPC nonsense a year back. But somehow, because we're talking about corporations battling individuals and not corporations merely battling each other, this has changed? Think carefully and reflect on your own hyporcrisy, and you may come to the correct view.
You can already get that with PPCs. Why wait for tomorrow to do what you can today?
Are we sure of all the health ramifications?
on
Wearable Computers
·
· Score: 3
Twenty years ago, if you'd thought to complain about potential side-effects of using a cellular phone, you would've been laughed out of the scientific community. Even today, large segments of the population will laugh at you (perhaps even correctly), but several studies have shown that there is a controversy left to be resolved.
Are we so sure, then, of all the potential side-effects of society-wide deployments of wearables? You might point to the amount of shielding around standard electronics (as compared to a broadcasting antenna), but is that adequate for the protection of human tissue and not just other electronics? Do we really want to find out?
One thing is clear: more CDC and NIH studies must be performed, lest this exciting and important field of computing suffer the same fate as DuPont's silicone breast implants, where the social benefit was arguably smaller (+1 funny for anyone who responds, "But breast implants really improved my social life).
(Thankfully, I don't fear that studies won't be conducted. As we all know, the test is whether the device has anything to do with gonads (as where wearables may be strapped in proximity to). Congress collectively cringes at the thought, and funding quickly follows.)
Programming for hire has always been about churning out something "good enough", borrowing heavily (cutting&pasting) from previous work, and perhaps even plagiarizing others. RADs help by doing some of the grunt work, so you can get to the fun part of designing and implementing algorithms.
You remind me of someone who would complain that painting was a purer art when each artist pressed his own papyrus, instead of buying it from a local merchant. Sure, you could do that if you wanted, but why would you want to? Get on with the important details.
Anyone can sell information these days. It's nothing special, anymore -- the internet has lowered the price/datum ratio to all-time levels. To succeed, you have to add value, and what easier value to add is there than verve? It boosts your credibility, and it especially raises your stature in markets that cater to other smug assholes (no offense to 3d gamerz, but that's the generalization).
VA Linux only bundles Matrox and G400 cards. Therefore Slashdot, a subsidiary of Andover.net, itself a subsidiary of VA Linux, is implicitly telling you not to buy 3dfx, politics be damned.
Success generally breeds complacency, and even the most intelligent falter when they've finally reached the top and try to stay there. It takes a leader with a real inferiority complex (like Bill Gates's) to keep up the fight after all the competitors have been slain, and it takes a lot of cahones to squash all future competitors before they can rise to the challenge. Thankfully, many companies can recover after their pointy reckoning; look at IBM of today as compared to IBM of even ten years ago, and you'll see a company who's managed to extricate its head from its nether-regions after falling from the top. Will 3dfx be like IBM or will they follow the likes of Polaroid (and Kodak, at least with their copiers)? That remains to be seen.
Ah, the sweet smell of legitimacy that comes from a tired trade rag and a feeble attempt at eyeball-trolling. The only question is, which members of ZDNET's talkback-audience are simultaneously technically adept enough to be able to put one of these boxes together and not already have explored his options (i.e., need ZDNET to explain it to him)? Let's go to the field and find out:
...
Hmmm, there are only two talkbacks, and one of them is from the webmaster. So there you have it!
The whitehouse is at a state of war. When that single-engine plane crashed across the street a couple years ago, they were caught with their pants down. They've taken steps since not to let the incident repeat.
"Are you sure you included a URL? Didja test them for typos?"
Who knows, indeed. This is typical of Slashdot's cathedral method of story selection, as compared to kuro5hin's bazaar method. Many eyes make all bugs shallow, and all that. I'm surprised ESR hasn't picked up on this yet.
Or heck, make it a remote controlled jet! Imagine a 6-8 foot long jet travelling at 120-150 miles per hour aimed at the white house. It would be unstoppable.
No, it wouldn't be unstoppable. It could be easily shot down. Germany tried precisely this tactic when bombing London back in WWII, and large numbers of these planes were destroyed by ground-based artillery before they could detonate upon impact. Why do you think Germany started switching to its V-2 rocket campaign? Those suckers always reached their targets (though other defenses exist today).
If you're going to do something as rash and stupid as try to blow up the whitehouse, do it with a ground-based tactical nuke (suicide, but effective). 120mph is chickenfeed.
But first you'd have to stop talking out of your ass on slashdot. Need a long antenna on a plane? Run an insulated wire along a hundred-foot long section of the fuselage. You wouldn't have to install it in military planes, as they have better contact with ground installations and don't want to disclose their positions to the enemy.
What you're truly forgetting is that while you're dealing with large expanses of land, you're dealing with fewer actual devices. The number of planes in a region would be easily dwarfed by the number of Bluetooth devices in a considerably smaller region. We don't have to worry about flying cars, yet.
You do know that my nick owes nothing to the French or their filthy language, right? It's a concatination of "Frontovnik Izverzheni'a Derm'ma", pronounced remarkably like the psychoanalyst, whose name was already taken.
Why don't they declare mp3 encoding to be a form of encryption, thereby making all mp3 players (like Sonique) an illegal device whose sole purpose is to circumvent that encryption and decode the RIAA's copyrighted works? Since there are no legal definitions of what a legitimate encryption standard must entail, and since we're all aware that mp3s are entirely effective at preventing people with old Linux boxes from decoding them (less so for PCs and Macs, but the principle holds), it just might work. And more importantly, it would give the RIAA a legal leg to stand on in criminalizing all those copyright violations occurring right now, where non-DMCA law has been slow to act.
It's been so long since Sega was top dog, they've forgotten what it feels like. With PS2 being delayed into oblivion, they have an opportunity to come away with the whole console market, but they've forgotten how to pull it off. Remember back when the Sega Genesis came out and all its hype and commercial air-time play? Has anyone even seen an ad for the DreamCast? Not on network television.
The US isn't Japan. You can't just come out with a new shiny box of electronics (and some Engrish name like "Famicon" or somesuch) and expect 25% of the population to buy one. It takes a whole lotta marketing, and Sega doesn't know how to put out. Sony managed to overcome its Japanese roots, as has Nintendo in some respects (since the days of Virtual Boy -- uggh). I have no hopes for Sega.
So now, instead of improving their products or trying to sell more, they're picking on the little guy. It's too much like the RIAA/MPAA, and like them, Sega is doomed to a slow fiery death. I say, good riddance.
Law is socially constructed, so it's sensible for the system to take social background conditions when passing judgment. In most states, recognizing the principle at common law, it is a crime not to "raise a hue and cry" upon seeing a felony take place. Copyright infringement on this scale is a felony under Federal law, so this principle kicks in and they're held liable, civilly and perhaps criminally.
Civil liability is all about what the hypothetical "reasonable man" would do in that situation. (Women, you'll have to sit this one out, since our legal system doesn't concern itself with you and your needs.) Unfortunately for you, the "reasonable man" has never and will never be a geek, who'd reasonable actions would include violating insipid laws and snubbing illegitimate legal regimes. A reasonable man would not allow others to use his property for committing felonies once he's been apprised of that use. It's that simple.
The universities know it's going on. Prudent (if ultimately in vain) steps exist for them to take. It's their legal responsibility to take those steps. It's that simple.
Slashdot Mirror
To some extent, it's important to certify qualified software as secure. But security largely consists of guarding against that one exploit that hasn't been tried yet, and it's nearly impossible to prove that no such exploit exists. It's important for operating systems to be certified, but it's more important for people to understand what security is (a process) and what it is not (a product).
If karma were so dear to me, then wouldn't I too post this anonymously? But I'm not, so something must be amiss.
You're conflating two different problems, here. Read slashdot's faq, and you'll find that Rob explicitly asks people with the +1 bonus to use it liberally, so that they can continually be judged as worthy or unworthy to maintain its use. A true karmawhore and coward would only use it when hoping to gain karma, while posting at 1 or as AC (such as you have done) when expressing controversial opinions. And I'll kindly remind you that your ad-hominem slanderous attack of 'karmawhore' does nothing to refute my original argument.
Being a respected poster on slashdot isn't about selling your soul for a small incrementing integer (karma). It's about making informed comments, insightful retorts to errors, and interesting analogies to external experiences. At the end of the day, ask yourself whether you've contributed or detracted from slashdot's signal to noise ratio. If only others took as much care as I do, the world would be a better place.
It's just a difference of symantics. The file system can be a single file, like with Linux in those WinLinux distrobutions.
Future battles will be waged in the embedded market, not the desktop market. If Linux is to succeed in Linus's quest for World Domination(tm), then QNX must be the first up against the wall.
In this country (I needn't specify which), we elect representatives. We don't directly vote on most issues, even though it would be technologically feasible for us to do so (especially with the advent of the internet). Why? Because we're not just looking for an accurate measure of what people want. We want what they ought to want, and we hope that representatives will better reflect that than their actual choices.
Advertisers don't just want to know what the most visible piece of real estate is in the world so they can erect a billboard on it. They want to know what the next upcoming innovation is so they can be the first to ride the upsurging wave of popularity. It doesn't help that altavista is the most popular search engine in the world today if placing a big banner ad on google tomorrow will catch the as-yet unseen mobs.
Take Netcraft and server operating systems. You don't just want to know what people are actually running. You want to know what they dare to tell you they're running. This is why it's ok for Netcraft to base its statistics on what servers tell each other they're running, rather than on some complicated fingerprint of their tcp/ip stacks.
It comes down to this: Adam Smith had it wrong with his theory of the invisible hand of market forces. It's not just what the markets do that's interesting; for that tells you nothing more than what, imperically, they do. If you pretend otherwise, then you're behaving no differently from all the Linux bandwagoners or Microsoft bandwagoners who base their decisions only on the herd. Herd mentalities are antithetical to proper advertising, and advertisers are finally waking up to this fact.
Cheers,
Froid
More important than protecting mere money streams (in which case the IOC may be overstepping its bounds) is protecting the IOC's trademark rights to "the Olympics". I know your knee-jerk reaction to such a statement would be to say "But the IOC has no legitimate trademark on the word 'olympics'", which may be true in general terms (and the IOC is rather heavy-handed in clamping down on diners and other unrelated economic uses of the word, which is unfair and improper). But here, we're talking about olympic athletes using their prominence within the Olympics to make a quick buck by promoting messages contrary to the message the IOC has ordained.
Any other legitimate claim of trademark infringement would be lauded on Slashdot, as you'll remember if you recall the IMac v. IPC nonsense a year back. But somehow, because we're talking about corporations battling individuals and not corporations merely battling each other, this has changed? Think carefully and reflect on your own hyporcrisy, and you may come to the correct view.
Cheers,
Froid
You can already get that with PPCs. Why wait for tomorrow to do what you can today?
Twenty years ago, if you'd thought to complain about potential side-effects of using a cellular phone, you would've been laughed out of the scientific community. Even today, large segments of the population will laugh at you (perhaps even correctly), but several studies have shown that there is a controversy left to be resolved.
Are we so sure, then, of all the potential side-effects of society-wide deployments of wearables? You might point to the amount of shielding around standard electronics (as compared to a broadcasting antenna), but is that adequate for the protection of human tissue and not just other electronics? Do we really want to find out?
One thing is clear: more CDC and NIH studies must be performed, lest this exciting and important field of computing suffer the same fate as DuPont's silicone breast implants, where the social benefit was arguably smaller (+1 funny for anyone who responds, "But breast implants really improved my social life).
(Thankfully, I don't fear that studies won't be conducted. As we all know, the test is whether the device has anything to do with gonads (as where wearables may be strapped in proximity to). Congress collectively cringes at the thought, and funding quickly follows.)
I want to write my program this way.
No, you can't write it like that.
But really, my way will work.
No it won't, 'cause I said so.
But who are you to say what works?
I'm the compiler. That's why.
Fuck fuck this. I'll use C instead.
I don't care. This is academia. I've got tenure.
Programming for hire has always been about churning out something "good enough", borrowing heavily (cutting&pasting) from previous work, and perhaps even plagiarizing others. RADs help by doing some of the grunt work, so you can get to the fun part of designing and implementing algorithms.
You remind me of someone who would complain that painting was a purer art when each artist pressed his own papyrus, instead of buying it from a local merchant. Sure, you could do that if you wanted, but why would you want to? Get on with the important details.
Anyone can sell information these days. It's nothing special, anymore -- the internet has lowered the price/datum ratio to all-time levels. To succeed, you have to add value, and what easier value to add is there than verve? It boosts your credibility, and it especially raises your stature in markets that cater to other smug assholes (no offense to 3d gamerz, but that's the generalization).
VA Linux only bundles Matrox and G400 cards. Therefore Slashdot, a subsidiary of Andover.net, itself a subsidiary of VA Linux, is implicitly telling you not to buy 3dfx, politics be damned.
Success generally breeds complacency, and even the most intelligent falter when they've finally reached the top and try to stay there. It takes a leader with a real inferiority complex (like Bill Gates's) to keep up the fight after all the competitors have been slain, and it takes a lot of cahones to squash all future competitors before they can rise to the challenge. Thankfully, many companies can recover after their pointy reckoning; look at IBM of today as compared to IBM of even ten years ago, and you'll see a company who's managed to extricate its head from its nether-regions after falling from the top. Will 3dfx be like IBM or will they follow the likes of Polaroid (and Kodak, at least with their copiers)? That remains to be seen.
Ah, the sweet smell of legitimacy that comes from a tired trade rag and a feeble attempt at eyeball-trolling. The only question is, which members of ZDNET's talkback-audience are simultaneously technically adept enough to be able to put one of these boxes together and not already have explored his options (i.e., need ZDNET to explain it to him)? Let's go to the field and find out:
...
Hmmm, there are only two talkbacks, and one of them is from the webmaster. So there you have it!
The whitehouse is at a state of war. When that single-engine plane crashed across the street a couple years ago, they were caught with their pants down. They've taken steps since not to let the incident repeat.
"Are you sure you included a URL? Didja test them for typos?"
Who knows, indeed. This is typical of Slashdot's cathedral method of story selection, as compared to kuro5hin's bazaar method. Many eyes make all bugs shallow, and all that. I'm surprised ESR hasn't picked up on this yet.
Or heck, make it a remote controlled jet! Imagine a 6-8 foot long jet travelling at 120-150 miles per hour aimed at the white house. It would be unstoppable.
No, it wouldn't be unstoppable. It could be easily shot down. Germany tried precisely this tactic when bombing London back in WWII, and large numbers of these planes were destroyed by ground-based artillery before they could detonate upon impact. Why do you think Germany started switching to its V-2 rocket campaign? Those suckers always reached their targets (though other defenses exist today).
If you're going to do something as rash and stupid as try to blow up the whitehouse, do it with a ground-based tactical nuke (suicide, but effective). 120mph is chickenfeed.
But first you'd have to stop talking out of your ass on slashdot. Need a long antenna on a plane? Run an insulated wire along a hundred-foot long section of the fuselage. You wouldn't have to install it in military planes, as they have better contact with ground installations and don't want to disclose their positions to the enemy.
What you're truly forgetting is that while you're dealing with large expanses of land, you're dealing with fewer actual devices. The number of planes in a region would be easily dwarfed by the number of Bluetooth devices in a considerably smaller region. We don't have to worry about flying cars, yet.
You do know that my nick owes nothing to the French or their filthy language, right? It's a concatination of "Frontovnik Izverzheni'a Derm'ma", pronounced remarkably like the psychoanalyst, whose name was already taken.
Why don't they declare mp3 encoding to be a form of encryption, thereby making all mp3 players (like Sonique) an illegal device whose sole purpose is to circumvent that encryption and decode the RIAA's copyrighted works? Since there are no legal definitions of what a legitimate encryption standard must entail, and since we're all aware that mp3s are entirely effective at preventing people with old Linux boxes from decoding them (less so for PCs and Macs, but the principle holds), it just might work. And more importantly, it would give the RIAA a legal leg to stand on in criminalizing all those copyright violations occurring right now, where non-DMCA law has been slow to act.
Cheers,
Froid
Typos are proof of nothing.
It's been so long since Sega was top dog, they've forgotten what it feels like. With PS2 being delayed into oblivion, they have an opportunity to come away with the whole console market, but they've forgotten how to pull it off. Remember back when the Sega Genesis came out and all its hype and commercial air-time play? Has anyone even seen an ad for the DreamCast? Not on network television.
The US isn't Japan. You can't just come out with a new shiny box of electronics (and some Engrish name like "Famicon" or somesuch) and expect 25% of the population to buy one. It takes a whole lotta marketing, and Sega doesn't know how to put out. Sony managed to overcome its Japanese roots, as has Nintendo in some respects (since the days of Virtual Boy -- uggh). I have no hopes for Sega.
So now, instead of improving their products or trying to sell more, they're picking on the little guy. It's too much like the RIAA/MPAA, and like them, Sega is doomed to a slow fiery death. I say, good riddance.
Russian has five vowel pairs, making for ten total vowels (a & ja, o & jo, etc.).
In modern hebrew, the schva is pronounced at the beginning of words. In many ashkenasic dialects, it's pronounced throughout.
Law is socially constructed, so it's sensible for the system to take social background conditions when passing judgment. In most states, recognizing the principle at common law, it is a crime not to "raise a hue and cry" upon seeing a felony take place. Copyright infringement on this scale is a felony under Federal law, so this principle kicks in and they're held liable, civilly and perhaps criminally.
Civil liability is all about what the hypothetical "reasonable man" would do in that situation. (Women, you'll have to sit this one out, since our legal system doesn't concern itself with you and your needs.) Unfortunately for you, the "reasonable man" has never and will never be a geek, who'd reasonable actions would include violating insipid laws and snubbing illegitimate legal regimes. A reasonable man would not allow others to use his property for committing felonies once he's been apprised of that use. It's that simple.
The universities know it's going on. Prudent (if ultimately in vain) steps exist for them to take. It's their legal responsibility to take those steps. It's that simple.
It's just that simple.