If it's defective when it ships, it's as good as useless. Who bothers to waits weeks or months for unresponsive developers to decide their sales curve is trending downward and it's safe to remove copy protection now.
Fuck em. Ship a working product and we'll talk. Or, at least one where the bug was a mistake, not intentional.
The lobbying in question was health nuts not wanting people to get Segway's because they might get fat.
The safety questions are perfectly valid, and relevant. Unfortunately, that's not where it stopped. People were bringing up issues that aren't their business, ones that government has no right to consider.
There is also the whole pro-walking thing which lobbied pretty hard against it. They believe this device would cause everyone to get fat.
That's unreasonable. It's like me telling you what you should have for dinner.
The topic here is the restriction of which vehicles can be used on public property - because people think the users need more exercise.
That's like me deciding to try to restrict Porsche ownership because they're really just dick extensions. That may be true, but it's none of my fucking business. Not everything that happens on public land is public business.
Opposing the Segway, and everyone's access to it, for your own lifestyle reasons, is ridiculous and it's just the kind of shit that California is famous for. Letting simpering idiots dictate insane political policy without concern for its viability or how reasonable it is.
I realize I come across like a libertarian here, but they have a point. If something I do doesn't affect you, you *don't have the right* to comment! If you oppose my Segway because I might run you down, that's fine. If you oppose my Segway because you don't like me riding something, tough.
So much modern fiction these days seems pretentious. As if the author has just heard of some new literary device he wants to try out. Many seem like class assignments (Use device X...) rather than finished works.
"Write every chapter in the mind of a different characters and not bother to identify them. Brilliant idea!"
I don't consider Heinlein the epitome of writing or anything, but he at least understood that he was being paid to entertain. That's the difference between a novel and a text book. He tried to pick topics that he cared about, and to educate, but he knew he had to make it something you'd want to read.
Some of science fiction falls into this, but I think the fact that they'll never get listed on the NYT best-seller list means they tend to skip critic-pleasing nonscense and write for their readers and themselves.
Actually, twas the parent poster who is right. What other people do, if it doesn't harm you, is none of your business. You have the right to explain your views, but not to dictate them. If people really cared about public health risk (from Segways) from a medical-cost point of view, they'd advocate increased premiums for people in risk categories, they wouldn't try to make those activities illegal.
If you have nothing better to do than decide what I should be doing, then you need to get a life.
There are protocols that are intended to let you cast a vote while being watched and even be able to "verify" that vote, yet override it with another.
These system will easily cope with the "Union Boss" scenario, but they won't cope with the "Violent Husband" scenario. You need to be able to do *one* thing in secret, select if this is a real, or dummy vote. If you have time to stop on the way home from work and do this, you're set. If you're an abused wife who never gets to use a phone or computer, or leave the house, without her abuser watching, well, you're hosed.
All you can do is put voting booths into convenience stores, maybe doubled with ATMs, so that you can stop at a common location and cast a vote without risking being seen going to a voting station which your union boss would of course know, was to change the vote he saw you cast.
But, the current system of absentee ballots means that a couple merely have to claim to be traveling (or actually travel) for a week every four years and they get absentee ballots, which the abuser can watch the abused while they fill out.
As someone else said, we don't need a perfect system, we just need something as good or better than what we have now.
But, I'll want to see them come up with voting booths which don't screw up for a few years before I trust them to properly implement a complex cryptographic protocol.
You can download (or buy, or be given) a GPLed program, and use it in any way you want, without the GPL being involved at all. You can even sell your copy if you wish.
But, if you want to take the source code (which is available because the program is GPLed) then you can do as much with it as copyright law allows. Read it. You can't use it, you can't base your program on it. Normally you'd have to write to the developer asking for permission, but here they've anticipated your letter and they're saying "If what you want to do is use the source, and you're willing to do so in these ways and with these limitations, go for it, accept this contract and go for it."
An EULA is supposed to affect how you use the program, and if you're even allowed to use it. The GPL isn't relevant to that at all, it's only a way around you having to write to the developers asking for permission to use their source code in a new project. And then, only if you want to release it.
We could abolish EULAs (I wish) and it wouldn't impact the GPL at all.
The problem is that while TCPA is a tool, it's one only wanted by the "bad guys". Imagine if your local Thugs and Vandals Association put in an order for hammers and spray-paint. The police would be right to suspect mayhem.
Similarly, if consumers were pressing for this because GPG ran slowly (which it doesn't, nor does SSH. SSH can saturate 100Mbps networks on a P2-600 easily) then we'd trust it. But with the main movers behind this being the MPAA/RIAA, Microsoft, and the Bush Administration, we're justifiably nervous.
TCPA/Etc are supposed to allow user protection by code signing, etc. Even if these worked perfectly it still wouldn't stop the attacks that hurt most people. Buffer overflows masquerade as legit data so you don't check them for a certificate before accidentally executing them. Similarly, programs can be fed bad data and through a lack of error-checking, do bad things.
Take an example like Outlook. In a secure system you'd give outlook write permission to it's own files and read access to things you may want to send as attachments. Unless you want to okay everything it does seperately, you'll have a blanket permission policy. Now, someone sends you email with a buffer overflow and runs their own code. The OS won't let them write to any useful files, but your email. That's gone... After it signals your IMAP server to delete it as well. And any personal files it has access to, it'll send those out to everyone in your address book, and a few mailing lists too.
But, you're protected right. I mean, that trusted architecture made sure that if the email virus tried to copy your precious copies of those "Hollywood Movies" that it wouldn't be able to. I bet you feel much better.
Meanwhile, the same guy who wrote the email virus is sitting back, watching a very high quality bootleg of that movie that was made by someone in another country, with studio-quality analog gear and then dumped, sans watermark, onto the p2p networks.
But yeah, I'm sure there are good applications for this technology... As long as you're looking at it from the point of view of controlling what legitimate users, those without the facilities to find bugs and backdoors, can do.
But yes, it is unfair to pick on you. And thank you for at least letting us know what's going on. We'll try not to shoot the messenger, but pardon us for not believing in the benign intentions of those in charge of this.
The problem is that you can have all the code signing in the world and crap OSes and crap mail-readers will still let shit happen.
It's not like there's a "Mail my private documents to everyone under the sun" feature in Outlook that people just forgot the password. The problem is that an email client needs to do certain things to function, access files in a read-only mode, and create/receive email. A virus will still be able to cause a stack-overflow, or something similar, and cause outlook to do something you didn't want, using only allowed resources.
It helps that Outlook (maybe) won't have write access to files, but that doesn't help people whose files have been copied to everyone else.
And applications that have write access will still be vulnerable. If you use Kazaa to download legit MP3s (sure) and someone tricks it into overwriting them all with "hahaha RIAA 0wn3r3d you!" you still lost your collection of Greatful Dead concert recordings.
It's like how a Unix person says "Unix can't get viruses - if you run a malicious program, the most it can do is wipe your user files." That's good, except that user files are the only things of value on the average, end-user computer.
Similarly, TCPA/Palladium/Whatever will make sure that while some buggy program destroys your personal data, it won't be able to copy the precious hollywood movies you're "renting".
There's no security for the user in this. There's security *against* the user here. That's great for me, if I'm a government or corp, and I don't trust the user. But if I'm a home user, I don't really want to buy a computer that won't do what I want it to do.
Lawyers can be paid to draft non-threatening letters, or to look at a letter someone else wrote. All you need to do is make sure you're not doing something a court will interpret as an offer, and you're fine.
Really, the PCI-SIG doesn't have much of a leg to stand on. Their trademark could be called generic, and he is discussing something related to just their product, where using their specific name is required. This isn't like he's discussing facial tissue, calling it Kleenex.
At most he might be required to say "PCI is a trademark of..." and "This site isn't related to the PCI..."
But they could have easily sent him a friendly letter, one that didn't have any legallese in it, asking him to change it so they'd have an easier time of proving vigilance later on if they needed to take some hostile company to court. And they could have sent a lollipop with it, to show there were no hard feelings. And the letter would be just as valid legally, as starting with a cease and desist.
Do you remember the case five or so years ago where Disney sent a C&D letter to a daycare center that had Mickey and friends painted on their inside walls? It blew up in the news and hurt Disney incredibly when Universal Studios sent a mural artist there to get rid of the Disney characters and paint the Tiny Toons on the walls, for free, and of course with a herd of TV reporters and cameras. Disney started saying "But, we had to," as a defense. It was BS. They could have had the lawyer call up, not introduce himself as "the lawyer" and say that "for legal reasons beyond their control, they can't allow unauthorized use of their trademarks like this. So how about you pay us $50 and we'll send out a guy in a Mickey suit to play with the kids when we sign the deal authorized it"... This way they'd come across as friends, forced to jump through hoops by a silly law, instead of bullies who immediately resort to threats.
I think companies need to learn that while they're used to tossing back and forth legal grenades amongst themselves, a person who can't afford their own lawyer is going to treat it like an attack, without stopping to check if the pin is in.
Yes, [sic] is used when you want to preserve someone's grammar while quoting them.
But, you'll find it frequently used to highlight a ton of nitpicking mistakes in a seemingly reasonably worded sentence, as a way of saying that the person quoted is an imbecile. Otherwise, most publications leave these errors alone because they're pretty obviously assumed to be direct quotations. It's not considered necessary to [sic] spelling because editorial "rules" allow this to be fixed silently, as spelling is rarely necessary to the meaning. (The exception perhaps being l33tspeak or something bizarre, then you [sic] the whole sentence and let it be.)
That said, anyone who nitpicks the grammar or spelling on a website like Slashdot is unloved, for a reason. It's so pathetically unimportant, and often written by people for whom English is a second language.
(The funniest thing I've seen in years is when someone tore into some guy for mistaking is/are, making many errors himself while doing so. The person who made the original mistake came back with an impeccable post acknowledging the error and explaining that he'd only picked up English in university with German and French. Chuckle.)
Google for WTO, WIPO, and perhaps DMCA or Copyright.
Basically though, part of some treaty pretty well everyone signed says that they have to implement a DMCA, though only some of the clauses are required, and they're allowed to have various loopholes, so it doesn't need to be quite as bad as the US's law.
You should check out Approval Voting and the Borda Count, they both satisfy the desire to vote for third parties (and potentially have them win) that you want, but without the problems in IRV. And you need proportional representation, or it's just an exercise in futility.
With standard (in the US, Canada, and Britain) first-past-the-post system the only thing that matters is having 50% or more of the vote. Third-parties are irrelevant, except potentially as how their run-off plays out with the larger parties. Even with IRV, you aren't totally safe voting for a third party.
Let's say you vote for D, C, B, in that order. A and B are the big parties, the party lines are that A and D are alike, B and C are alike. There's no clear winner, so D goes away, and the majority of those votes goes to A, pushing A over the line because your vote is still with C...
You need Approval Voting where you simultaneously vote for all the parties you approve of. There's no run-off, no weird corner cases, or anything. You support the third party right until the end, while putting in that safe vote to keep Dubya out of office, for instance. The Borda Count is another option, though it's slightly more complex and has a few odd results.
Then you take the results of the popular vote for the congress/house of commons/etc and start handing out seats based on the results of the voting. If 35% is Rep, 37% Dem, and 28% Other, you go through, taking enough Republicans to make 35%, in order of their popularity in their riding, so you get the ones who were most wanted, and states that wanted a Republican will get theirs. Ditto with the Dems, and Others.
The corner case is where a riding was polarized between two parties, such that both got higher results there than elsewhere. Say the big two got about 48% each which is over the aprox 35% they got elsewhere. When it comes to handing it out, if both parties have enough support to get down to this riding, you decide who gets it based on absolute number of votes.
When you've given every party their representatives, you've covered every riding, and everyone has a local representative who ran in their area, but the country also has the exact number of each party that the people wanted. You may end up with a Libertarian in your area, who only 10% of the locals votes for, but only if your area wasn't strongly one way or the other, and only if that 10% was one of the best wins the Libertarians had.
A trait of this, which I consider a feature, but others differ over, is that rarely is one party large enough to dominate so there's a lot more discussion of the issues because you need to come up with something acceptable by more people. To me it seems like the point of government.
I think the obvious answer is to make it fun, then you have to kick people off the bikes and they've burned slightly less calories, but for longer, and are dying to do it again.
I don't think Faramir expressed great ring lust this time. The scene with him and the sword seemed more like intimidation, trying to make Frodo talk. It replaces long dialog between Frodo and Faramir, where the details come out slowly.
Faramir never, even after seeing it, makes a personal grab for the ring, as he would if overcome by it. I think they just felt that with the screen time given, for him to see it (something they have shown repeatedly is very seductive) and then turn it down, is unreasonable. Even in the book this action is taken only after a fair bit of time. His decision was to take the hobbits, leaving them with the object - a very smart move if he even guessed at it's seductive power, and take them home where a better decision could be made. It's not until he realizes the urgency of the situation, and how ultimately important the ring is to the dark lord, via the (overdone) nazgul scene, that he decides he needs to make an immediate decision.
And really, to say that Faramir was immune to the call of the ring in the book is a little misguided. He never handled it, or had it offered to him. He was smart enough to know to stay away from it, but that doesn't imply he could have turned it down. He also had the benefit of knowing Boromir was dead, and that he had to be more careful now.
The battle scenes were my peeve with the movie. Particularly Aragorn going over the edge. Also, the split-second timing saving Aragorn (and Helm's Deep) from the hordes of Orcs by Gandalf. But, I realize that this last bit is in the book and it's pretty much standard, nobody believes you can have tension without everything coming down to the last second.
You're a nut. I was pointing out that ranting on about things makes you less credible, you then immediately attribute a whole bunch of straw-man positions to me and take off. "You guys"?
All I need to do, to immediately be classes with whale-loving, tree-hugging Californians is to imply that working conditions in some third-world factories are poor.
There're examples of factories with locked doors, whose workers burned to death trying to escape. That strikes me as fairly poor working conditions.
It's reasonable to take work to the third world, they could really use the foreign currency, but that doesn't mean we have to lock them in factories.
Implying that I mean anything else by this post will be construed as proof of being a freak.
It's reasonable, their (Australia) court system decided they could sue Americans for defamation even for something that was legal in the location in was done. So, yeah, why not sue them for this.
I'm hoping lawsuits go nuts in the next few years. To get the public motivated against something you've got to make it incredibly disgusting. Hopefully it'll go crazy for a few years and there'll be a backlash against this kind of thing.
You're bringing up a red herring with your "we want poor people to always be poor" line. You can easily be against dangerous working conditions and exploitive monopolistic situations and support lowering of trade barriers and the idea (in general, if not all specifics) of giving poor countries work.
That way you suggest otherwise makes you less credible.
The problem with multiple symlinks to the same file is that I can't tell which ones I've viewed already.
I've already renamed a bunch (8k or so), so if I go to unique names I have to do it with either a counter, or the date, because they're already unique inside a date. It's not a requirement, but a totally unique name would be handy for toss in a directory (like on a CD for the relatives). That way I wouldn't need to preserve directory structure.
As for beta testing, if you're interested in the MP3 renamer we're close to alpha-test stage...
You should check out perl, it's probably not for huge projects, where OO or the lack of it becomes important. It's nice for quick projects, or even one-liners where grep and sed just can't cut it. It's also just so common. And I can't program shell script to save my life, it's so nasty and inconsistent.:)
Science is a set of methods used to examine the world, logic and mathematics are tools used, but it's also a mindset of looking for answers without prejudice.
> First, science is often anti-religious. Just read some of the other comments in this thread.
Science, or some people who may be scientists?
> Second, religion is often not anti-religious. [anti-scientific] I assume.
Here I disagree. There is little in any holy book that is testable, yet there are claims which fly in the face of observed reality. In a rational field extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
> Third, science and religion can co-exist quite nicely. > Bulldookey. Certainly there are religions like that, but that mentality is not a necessary part of religion.
I think if you actually examine religion scientifically you'll find them incompatible. In every religion there are certain "truths" that you aren't supposed to question.
> Try reading [...] Various religious traditions are ripe full of the application of science to religion.
Various religious people have been scientists, and applied science to examine some questions, but that doesn't mean that science and religion are compatible. It simply means that these people are able to avoid examining their faith critically.
In a scientific theory, inconsistency is fatal. In religion, it's common. A few people have tried to prove religion scientifically but any attempt I've ever seen has been peppered with falacies and eventually comes down to circular reasoning, testing the bible with proof, from the bible, for instance.
The only problem is in keeping the symlink names consistent so you know what you've seen in one directory.
For example, you've got a picture of mom, and dad, in florida, at Busch Gardens.
You've got it in the Mom directory, and Dad, and Florida Vacation, and Theme Parks, etc. And it belongs in all of those, it *is* a picture of mom, and she was in Florida, etc.
But it doesn't work as well for browsing them.
My next step (10 lines of perl away) is to take the date from the directory name and append it to the pictures. I've currently got "Mom - 01.jpg" in six directories, it's not unique and without the directory name I can't use it as a DB key. But, if I append (or prepend) the date, I'm back to having unique filenames that are still meaningful. Then I don't symlink "Mom at Busch Gardens.jpg" to "img_2391.jpg" and try to keep that right for all future symlinks. I can symlink the files from directory to directory and keep the same names, so you'll recognize them.
Then, in the magical world where I actually get around to things, I'll write a web front-end for a db backed search engine based on keywords, at first simply taken from the directory and filename.
Mozilla makes opening a thumbnail so easy, that this would be almost as handy as gqview, except for a lack of zooming capability.
btw, do you print out any of your pictures? I've printed maybe ten, and then thirty copies of another for thank-you cards after our wedding, but the collection is pretty much all on the HD (and CDs).
I emailed you, asking for the code you mentioned. I'd be interested in seeing what you wrote but Slashdot mangles code badly, and perl worse than others.
Science: "The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena."
Science isn't anti-religion, but religion is anti-science. There's no rule about science that says it can't be used to determine religious truth, but there is usually a rule in religion that you can't use science. You aren't supposed to examine religion closely, it requires faith, which from a religious person basically boils down to not peeking behind the curtain to see how things run, or even trying to find out without peeking.
Once, again, science isn't anti-religion, except that science is all about learning via examining and testing. If religion can't stand up to that, well...
They'd also clean up their act pretty quickly if you'd testify that they damaged the computer and encourage your customer to sue them. Small claims court is quick and easy, but enough of that will cause them to re-think their policy.
Even a written deposition would probably be enough for small-claims court.
This is why I bought a Canon. Not only did the model I got (and all their $100+ models) have seperate cartridges for each color, but third-party ink was less than half the price of refills for other brands, and they had the simplest refill procedure. Just peel off a sticker, dump in ink, and tape it back up.
I bought it because I want to freedom of choice. Now, if I buy Canon ink it's because I think it's better, or just worth the ease, not because I have to.
Slashdot Mirror
If it's defective when it ships, it's as good as useless. Who bothers to waits weeks or months for unresponsive developers to decide their sales curve is trending downward and it's safe to remove copy protection now.
Fuck em. Ship a working product and we'll talk. Or, at least one where the bug was a mistake, not intentional.
Try doing anything useful with Windows like web serving. Certainly takes a lot more than 1 step. Every system has its strengths.
The safety questions are perfectly valid, and relevant. Unfortunately, that's not where it stopped. People were bringing up issues that aren't their business, ones that government has no right to consider.
That's unreasonable. It's like me telling you what you should have for dinner.
The topic here is the restriction of which vehicles can be used on public property - because people think the users need more exercise.
That's like me deciding to try to restrict Porsche ownership because they're really just dick extensions. That may be true, but it's none of my fucking business. Not everything that happens on public land is public business.
Opposing the Segway, and everyone's access to it, for your own lifestyle reasons, is ridiculous and it's just the kind of shit that California is famous for. Letting simpering idiots dictate insane political policy without concern for its viability or how reasonable it is.
I realize I come across like a libertarian here, but they have a point. If something I do doesn't affect you, you *don't have the right* to comment! If you oppose my Segway because I might run you down, that's fine. If you oppose my Segway because you don't like me riding something, tough.
So much modern fiction these days seems pretentious. As if the author has just heard of some new literary device he wants to try out. Many seem like class assignments (Use device X...) rather than finished works.
"Write every chapter in the mind of a different characters and not bother to identify them. Brilliant idea!"
I don't consider Heinlein the epitome of writing or anything, but he at least understood that he was being paid to entertain. That's the difference between a novel and a text book. He tried to pick topics that he cared about, and to educate, but he knew he had to make it something you'd want to read.
Some of science fiction falls into this, but I think the fact that they'll never get listed on the NYT best-seller list means they tend to skip critic-pleasing nonscense and write for their readers and themselves.
Actually, twas the parent poster who is right. What other people do, if it doesn't harm you, is none of your business. You have the right to explain your views, but not to dictate them. If people really cared about public health risk (from Segways) from a medical-cost point of view, they'd advocate increased premiums for people in risk categories, they wouldn't try to make those activities illegal.
If you have nothing better to do than decide what I should be doing, then you need to get a life.
There are protocols that are intended to let you cast a vote while being watched and even be able to "verify" that vote, yet override it with another.
These system will easily cope with the "Union Boss" scenario, but they won't cope with the "Violent Husband" scenario. You need to be able to do *one* thing in secret, select if this is a real, or dummy vote. If you have time to stop on the way home from work and do this, you're set. If you're an abused wife who never gets to use a phone or computer, or leave the house, without her abuser watching, well, you're hosed.
All you can do is put voting booths into convenience stores, maybe doubled with ATMs, so that you can stop at a common location and cast a vote without risking being seen going to a voting station which your union boss would of course know, was to change the vote he saw you cast.
But, the current system of absentee ballots means that a couple merely have to claim to be traveling (or actually travel) for a week every four years and they get absentee ballots, which the abuser can watch the abused while they fill out.
As someone else said, we don't need a perfect system, we just need something as good or better than what we have now.
But, I'll want to see them come up with voting booths which don't screw up for a few years before I trust them to properly implement a complex cryptographic protocol.
Not really. The GPL isn't a shrink-wrap license.
You can download (or buy, or be given) a GPLed program, and use it in any way you want, without the GPL being involved at all. You can even sell your copy if you wish.
But, if you want to take the source code (which is available because the program is GPLed) then you can do as much with it as copyright law allows. Read it. You can't use it, you can't base your program on it. Normally you'd have to write to the developer asking for permission, but here they've anticipated your letter and they're saying "If what you want to do is use the source, and you're willing to do so in these ways and with these limitations, go for it, accept this contract and go for it."
An EULA is supposed to affect how you use the program, and if you're even allowed to use it. The GPL isn't relevant to that at all, it's only a way around you having to write to the developers asking for permission to use their source code in a new project. And then, only if you want to release it.
We could abolish EULAs (I wish) and it wouldn't impact the GPL at all.
The problem is that while TCPA is a tool, it's one only wanted by the "bad guys". Imagine if your local Thugs and Vandals Association put in an order for hammers and spray-paint. The police would be right to suspect mayhem.
Similarly, if consumers were pressing for this because GPG ran slowly (which it doesn't, nor does SSH. SSH can saturate 100Mbps networks on a P2-600 easily) then we'd trust it. But with the main movers behind this being the MPAA/RIAA, Microsoft, and the Bush Administration, we're justifiably nervous.
TCPA/Etc are supposed to allow user protection by code signing, etc. Even if these worked perfectly it still wouldn't stop the attacks that hurt most people. Buffer overflows masquerade as legit data so you don't check them for a certificate before accidentally executing them. Similarly, programs can be fed bad data and through a lack of error-checking, do bad things.
Take an example like Outlook. In a secure system you'd give outlook write permission to it's own files and read access to things you may want to send as attachments. Unless you want to okay everything it does seperately, you'll have a blanket permission policy. Now, someone sends you email with a buffer overflow and runs their own code. The OS won't let them write to any useful files, but your email. That's gone... After it signals your IMAP server to delete it as well. And any personal files it has access to, it'll send those out to everyone in your address book, and a few mailing lists too.
But, you're protected right. I mean, that trusted architecture made sure that if the email virus tried to copy your precious copies of those "Hollywood Movies" that it wouldn't be able to. I bet you feel much better.
Meanwhile, the same guy who wrote the email virus is sitting back, watching a very high quality bootleg of that movie that was made by someone in another country, with studio-quality analog gear and then dumped, sans watermark, onto the p2p networks.
But yeah, I'm sure there are good applications for this technology... As long as you're looking at it from the point of view of controlling what legitimate users, those without the facilities to find bugs and backdoors, can do.
But yes, it is unfair to pick on you. And thank you for at least letting us know what's going on. We'll try not to shoot the messenger, but pardon us for not believing in the benign intentions of those in charge of this.
The problem is that you can have all the code signing in the world and crap OSes and crap mail-readers will still let shit happen.
It's not like there's a "Mail my private documents to everyone under the sun" feature in Outlook that people just forgot the password. The problem is that an email client needs to do certain things to function, access files in a read-only mode, and create/receive email. A virus will still be able to cause a stack-overflow, or something similar, and cause outlook to do something you didn't want, using only allowed resources.
It helps that Outlook (maybe) won't have write access to files, but that doesn't help people whose files have been copied to everyone else.
And applications that have write access will still be vulnerable. If you use Kazaa to download legit MP3s (sure) and someone tricks it into overwriting them all with "hahaha RIAA 0wn3r3d you!" you still lost your collection of Greatful Dead concert recordings.
It's like how a Unix person says "Unix can't get viruses - if you run a malicious program, the most it can do is wipe your user files." That's good, except that user files are the only things of value on the average, end-user computer.
Similarly, TCPA/Palladium/Whatever will make sure that while some buggy program destroys your personal data, it won't be able to copy the precious hollywood movies you're "renting".
There's no security for the user in this. There's security *against* the user here. That's great for me, if I'm a government or corp, and I don't trust the user. But if I'm a home user, I don't really want to buy a computer that won't do what I want it to do.
Lawyers can be paid to draft non-threatening letters, or to look at a letter someone else wrote. All you need to do is make sure you're not doing something a court will interpret as an offer, and you're fine.
..." and "This site isn't related to the PCI ..."
Really, the PCI-SIG doesn't have much of a leg to stand on. Their trademark could be called generic, and he is discussing something related to just their product, where using their specific name is required. This isn't like he's discussing facial tissue, calling it Kleenex.
At most he might be required to say "PCI is a trademark of
But they could have easily sent him a friendly letter, one that didn't have any legallese in it, asking him to change it so they'd have an easier time of proving vigilance later on if they needed to take some hostile company to court. And they could have sent a lollipop with it, to show there were no hard feelings. And the letter would be just as valid legally, as starting with a cease and desist.
Do you remember the case five or so years ago where Disney sent a C&D letter to a daycare center that had Mickey and friends painted on their inside walls? It blew up in the news and hurt Disney incredibly when Universal Studios sent a mural artist there to get rid of the Disney characters and paint the Tiny Toons on the walls, for free, and of course with a herd of TV reporters and cameras. Disney started saying "But, we had to," as a defense. It was BS. They could have had the lawyer call up, not introduce himself as "the lawyer" and say that "for legal reasons beyond their control, they can't allow unauthorized use of their trademarks like this. So how about you pay us $50 and we'll send out a guy in a Mickey suit to play with the kids when we sign the deal authorized it"... This way they'd come across as friends, forced to jump through hoops by a silly law, instead of bullies who immediately resort to threats.
I think companies need to learn that while they're used to tossing back and forth legal grenades amongst themselves, a person who can't afford their own lawyer is going to treat it like an attack, without stopping to check if the pin is in.
Yes, [sic] is used when you want to preserve someone's grammar while quoting them.
But, you'll find it frequently used to highlight a ton of nitpicking mistakes in a seemingly reasonably worded sentence, as a way of saying that the person quoted is an imbecile. Otherwise, most publications leave these errors alone because they're pretty obviously assumed to be direct quotations. It's not considered necessary to [sic] spelling because editorial "rules" allow this to be fixed silently, as spelling is rarely necessary to the meaning. (The exception perhaps being l33tspeak or something bizarre, then you [sic] the whole sentence and let it be.)
That said, anyone who nitpicks the grammar or spelling on a website like Slashdot is unloved, for a reason. It's so pathetically unimportant, and often written by people for whom English is a second language.
(The funniest thing I've seen in years is when someone tore into some guy for mistaking is/are, making many errors himself while doing so. The person who made the original mistake came back with an impeccable post acknowledging the error and explaining that he'd only picked up English in university with German and French. Chuckle.)
Google for WTO, WIPO, and perhaps DMCA or Copyright.
Basically though, part of some treaty pretty well everyone signed says that they have to implement a DMCA, though only some of the clauses are required, and they're allowed to have various loopholes, so it doesn't need to be quite as bad as the US's law.
You should check out Approval Voting and the Borda Count, they both satisfy the desire to vote for third parties (and potentially have them win) that you want, but without the problems in IRV. And you need proportional representation, or it's just an exercise in futility.
With standard (in the US, Canada, and Britain) first-past-the-post system the only thing that matters is having 50% or more of the vote. Third-parties are irrelevant, except potentially as how their run-off plays out with the larger parties. Even with IRV, you aren't totally safe voting for a third party.
Let's say you vote for D, C, B, in that order. A and B are the big parties, the party lines are that A and D are alike, B and C are alike. There's no clear winner, so D goes away, and the majority of those votes goes to A, pushing A over the line because your vote is still with C...
You need Approval Voting where you simultaneously vote for all the parties you approve of. There's no run-off, no weird corner cases, or anything. You support the third party right until the end, while putting in that safe vote to keep Dubya out of office, for instance. The Borda Count is another option, though it's slightly more complex and has a few odd results.
Then you take the results of the popular vote for the congress/house of commons/etc and start handing out seats based on the results of the voting. If 35% is Rep, 37% Dem, and 28% Other, you go through, taking enough Republicans to make 35%, in order of their popularity in their riding, so you get the ones who were most wanted, and states that wanted a Republican will get theirs. Ditto with the Dems, and Others.
The corner case is where a riding was polarized between two parties, such that both got higher results there than elsewhere. Say the big two got about 48% each which is over the aprox 35% they got elsewhere. When it comes to handing it out, if both parties have enough support to get down to this riding, you decide who gets it based on absolute number of votes.
When you've given every party their representatives, you've covered every riding, and everyone has a local representative who ran in their area, but the country also has the exact number of each party that the people wanted. You may end up with a Libertarian in your area, who only 10% of the locals votes for, but only if your area wasn't strongly one way or the other, and only if that 10% was one of the best wins the Libertarians had.
A trait of this, which I consider a feature, but others differ over, is that rarely is one party large enough to dominate so there's a lot more discussion of the issues because you need to come up with something acceptable by more people. To me it seems like the point of government.
I think the obvious answer is to make it fun, then you have to kick people off the bikes and they've burned slightly less calories, but for longer, and are dying to do it again.
Make it exercise and you've defeated the point.
But, I assume that was largely your point.
I don't think Faramir expressed great ring lust this time. The scene with him and the sword seemed more like intimidation, trying to make Frodo talk. It replaces long dialog between Frodo and Faramir, where the details come out slowly.
Faramir never, even after seeing it, makes a personal grab for the ring, as he would if overcome by it. I think they just felt that with the screen time given, for him to see it (something they have shown repeatedly is very seductive) and then turn it down, is unreasonable. Even in the book this action is taken only after a fair bit of time. His decision was to take the hobbits, leaving them with the object - a very smart move if he even guessed at it's seductive power, and take them home where a better decision could be made. It's not until he realizes the urgency of the situation, and how ultimately important the ring is to the dark lord, via the (overdone) nazgul scene, that he decides he needs to make an immediate decision.
And really, to say that Faramir was immune to the call of the ring in the book is a little misguided. He never handled it, or had it offered to him. He was smart enough to know to stay away from it, but that doesn't imply he could have turned it down. He also had the benefit of knowing Boromir was dead, and that he had to be more careful now.
The battle scenes were my peeve with the movie. Particularly Aragorn going over the edge. Also, the split-second timing saving Aragorn (and Helm's Deep) from the hordes of Orcs by Gandalf. But, I realize that this last bit is in the book and it's pretty much standard, nobody believes you can have tension without everything coming down to the last second.
You're a nut. I was pointing out that ranting on about things makes you less credible, you then immediately attribute a whole bunch of straw-man positions to me and take off. "You guys"?
All I need to do, to immediately be classes with whale-loving, tree-hugging Californians is to imply that working conditions in some third-world factories are poor.
There're examples of factories with locked doors, whose workers burned to death trying to escape. That strikes me as fairly poor working conditions.
It's reasonable to take work to the third world, they could really use the foreign currency, but that doesn't mean we have to lock them in factories.
Implying that I mean anything else by this post will be construed as proof of being a freak.
It's reasonable, their (Australia) court system decided they could sue Americans for defamation even for something that was legal in the location in was done. So, yeah, why not sue them for this.
I'm hoping lawsuits go nuts in the next few years. To get the public motivated against something you've got to make it incredibly disgusting. Hopefully it'll go crazy for a few years and there'll be a backlash against this kind of thing.
You're bringing up a red herring with your "we want poor people to always be poor" line. You can easily be against dangerous working conditions and exploitive monopolistic situations and support lowering of trade barriers and the idea (in general, if not all specifics) of giving poor countries work.
That way you suggest otherwise makes you less credible.
The problem with multiple symlinks to the same file is that I can't tell which ones I've viewed already.
:)
I've already renamed a bunch (8k or so), so if I go to unique names I have to do it with either a counter, or the date, because they're already unique inside a date. It's not a requirement, but a totally unique name would be handy for toss in a directory (like on a CD for the relatives). That way I wouldn't need to preserve directory structure.
As for beta testing, if you're interested in the MP3 renamer we're close to alpha-test stage...
You should check out perl, it's probably not for huge projects, where OO or the lack of it becomes important. It's nice for quick projects, or even one-liners where grep and sed just can't cut it. It's also just so common. And I can't program shell script to save my life, it's so nasty and inconsistent.
Science is a set of methods used to examine the world, logic and mathematics are tools used, but it's also a mindset of looking for answers without prejudice.
> First, science is often anti-religious. Just read some of the other comments in this thread.
Science, or some people who may be scientists?
> Second, religion is often not anti-religious. [anti-scientific] I assume.
Here I disagree. There is little in any holy book that is testable, yet there are claims which fly in the face of observed reality. In a rational field extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
> Third, science and religion can co-exist quite nicely.
> Bulldookey. Certainly there are religions like that, but that mentality is not a necessary part of religion.
I think if you actually examine religion scientifically you'll find them incompatible. In every religion there are certain "truths" that you aren't supposed to question.
> Try reading [...] Various religious traditions are ripe full of the application of science to religion.
Various religious people have been scientists, and applied science to examine some questions, but that doesn't mean that science and religion are compatible. It simply means that these people are able to avoid examining their faith critically.
In a scientific theory, inconsistency is fatal. In religion, it's common. A few people have tried to prove religion scientifically but any attempt I've ever seen has been peppered with falacies and eventually comes down to circular reasoning, testing the bible with proof, from the bible, for instance.
The only problem is in keeping the symlink names consistent so you know what you've seen in one directory.
For example, you've got a picture of mom, and dad, in florida, at Busch Gardens.
You've got it in the Mom directory, and Dad, and Florida Vacation, and Theme Parks, etc. And it belongs in all of those, it *is* a picture of mom, and she was in Florida, etc.
But it doesn't work as well for browsing them.
My next step (10 lines of perl away) is to take the date from the directory name and append it to the pictures. I've currently got "Mom - 01.jpg" in six directories, it's not unique and without the directory name I can't use it as a DB key. But, if I append (or prepend) the date, I'm back to having unique filenames that are still meaningful. Then I don't symlink "Mom at Busch Gardens.jpg" to "img_2391.jpg" and try to keep that right for all future symlinks. I can symlink the files from directory to directory and keep the same names, so you'll recognize them.
Then, in the magical world where I actually get around to things, I'll write a web front-end for a db backed search engine based on keywords, at first simply taken from the directory and filename.
Mozilla makes opening a thumbnail so easy, that this would be almost as handy as gqview, except for a lack of zooming capability.
btw, do you print out any of your pictures? I've printed maybe ten, and then thirty copies of another for thank-you cards after our wedding, but the collection is pretty much all on the HD (and CDs).
I emailed you, asking for the code you mentioned. I'd be interested in seeing what you wrote but Slashdot mangles code badly, and perl worse than others.
Science is the end-all, be-all of human reason.
Science: "The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena."
Science isn't anti-religion, but religion is anti-science. There's no rule about science that says it can't be used to determine religious truth, but there is usually a rule in religion that you can't use science. You aren't supposed to examine religion closely, it requires faith, which from a religious person basically boils down to not peeking behind the curtain to see how things run, or even trying to find out without peeking.
Once, again, science isn't anti-religion, except that science is all about learning via examining and testing. If religion can't stand up to that, well...
They'd also clean up their act pretty quickly if you'd testify that they damaged the computer and encourage your customer to sue them. Small claims court is quick and easy, but enough of that will cause them to re-think their policy.
Even a written deposition would probably be enough for small-claims court.
This is why I bought a Canon. Not only did the model I got (and all their $100+ models) have seperate cartridges for each color, but third-party ink was less than half the price of refills for other brands, and they had the simplest refill procedure. Just peel off a sticker, dump in ink, and tape it back up.
I bought it because I want to freedom of choice. Now, if I buy Canon ink it's because I think it's better, or just worth the ease, not because I have to.