You should obviously change the game to take advantage of the hardware. Imagine it! Three dimensional chess where each piece has weapons, or magical attacks, deformable terrain, and lots of special effects to make use of the latest video cards! I can't wait!
Been there, done that. See The Chess Variant Pages. It lists about a hundred chess variants, some of which are three dimensional, and has links to places where you can download software to play variants (commercial and otherwise). The site has an applet that you can play different variants on (although it plays a horrible game).
Actually caffeine has been known to cause erectile dysfunction, or simply put; "Staying Up Problem". If you really want to stay up all night (not coding!), then don't touch caffeine!
Bah. This effect only lasts during the actual caffeine buzz (approx. 5 hours after you drink the coffee). At least that's been my experience.
It's just hard to concentrate on stuff like that when you keep thinking about the code you're going to write once you're finished.
Methinks someone was not paying attention to their site links....
And how much do you want to bet that right now Hatch is fuming in his office and typing up a bill to outlaw link rot? He's probably got the president of MediaDefender on the phone right now asking if it's possible to somehow cause large floppy bare breasts to explode over the Internet.
Yeah, it was an idiotic comment by Hatch. The problem here is that people can't handle politicians speaking unless their statements have been filtered by their PR staff. It's people like you (including much of/.) that turn our political system into the bland wasteland of nonsensical terms it is today. If you want to rally against Sen. Hatch, more power to you. But go look at his voting record and platform before making your decision.
HOUSE-PASSAGE OF THE DIGITAL MILLENNIUM COPYRIGHT ACT CONFERENCE REPORT
(Senate - October 12, 1998)
[Page: S12376]
Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, the DMCA is a remarkable bill that is the result of a remarkable process. By enacting this legislation in a timely fashion, the United States has set the marker for the rest of the world with respect to the implementation of the new WIPO treaties. As a result, the United States can look forward to stronger world-wide protection of our intellectual property and a stronger balance of trade as inbound revenues from foreign uses of our intellectual property continue to increase. I am pleased to have been a part of this great effort, and I look forward to the President's signing of H.R. 2281.
"Only copyright holders should have this, because the feds doing it would be illegal" I'm sorry, did I miss that somewhere in the article? Where does it remotely imply this? Where does anything? Did I miss the part in the BOR that says "No person may be deprived of life, liberty, or property by the federal government without due process of law"? Or are you just a complete fucking moron adding your own stupid and completely false comments to submissions so that you can brag to other morons "HUR HUR HUR I GOT ON SLASHDOT I AM SO FUCKING HOMOSEXUAL IT HURTS MY ANUS"?
Ummm... did you even bother to read the article before writing your troll?
The senator, a composer who earned $18,000 last year in song writing royalties, acknowledged Congress would have to enact an exemption for copyright owners from liability for damaging computers. He endorsed technology that would twice warn a computer user about illegal online behavior, "then destroy their computer."
The senator acknowledged Congress would have to enact an exemption for copyright owners from liability for damaging computers. He endorsed technology that would twice warn a computer user about illegal online behavior, "then destroy their computer."
United States Patent Application 732980759-32754321
User interface for remotely enforcing copyright
Abstract
A user interface and corresponding application program interface (API) and hardware device providing a set of functions for remotely enforcing copyright legislation.
Inventors: Hatch, Orrin (R-Utah), MillionthMonkey
Serial No.: 053243653216 Series Code: 10 Filed: June 17, 2003
Claims
1. A software architecture for a distributed computing system comprising: a pissed off copyright holder, a hardware device capable of being remotely destroyed over a network; and an application program interface to present two dialog boxes to a user who is sharing files to present functions of the application to access and destroy his hardware.
2. A software architecture as recited in claim 1, wherein the distributed computing system comprises client devices and peer-to-peer devices that handle requests from other peer-to-peer devices, the remote devices having been hardwired with explosives by the manufacturer.
3. A software architecture as recited in claim 1, wherein the distributed computing system comprises client devices and peer-to-peer devices that handle requests from other peer-to-peer devices, the remote devices having been sharing files with other peer-to-peer devices as outlined in section 1.
4. A software architecture as recited in claim 1, wherein the application program interface comprises: a first group of services related to discovery of file sharing activity, a second group of services related to displaying two dialog boxes to the user, and a third group of services related to remotely detonating a device as outlined in section 1.
5. An application program interface as recited in claim 4, wherein the first group of services comprises: first functions that enable copyright holder to scour remote device for peer-to-peer activity relating to copyrighted content; a second group of services related to displaying two threatening messages to the user, and a third group of services related to reception of the kill signal and subsequent detonation.
CONCLUSION
Although the invention has been described in language specific to structural features and/or methodological acts, it is to be understood that the invention defined in the appended claims is not necessarily limited to the specific features or acts described. Rather, the specific features and acts are disclosed as exemplary forms of implementing the claimed invention.
If you want safety, buy treasuries. The government can just print up more money if they need to pay you.
And they're going to have to do it, too, which will accelerate inflation- the #1 enemy of the bondholder. It swallows your interest earnings. If they just turn on the printing press to pay you, it wasn't such a good investment, was it?
If you want safety, buy Euros. The dollar is going to crash sooner or later once they start printing money to pay for these tax cuts and the baby boomer retirements. As a share of federal budget outlays, interest payments on the debt have already almost caught up to what we spend on the military.
Almost makes you wonder why the government even bothers to borrow money instead of just printing it in the first place. It wouldn't be any more irresponsible than what it's doing now.
Re:Gen-X people are the best coders out there
on
Ageism in IT?
·
· Score: 1
Anyone who was into computers when they were still developing and the systems were still simple will have an advantage.
The people who are at a loss are the younger ones. Computers are so good now that they suck. There's virtually no incentive for a kid to write a program.
Gen-X people are the best coders out there
on
Ageism in IT?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Didn't we just see a story about how hard it is for a kid to get into programming nowadays? Gen-X kids grew up in the eighties with simple computers that were ideally suited for learning programming. Turn the thing on, there's the BASIC prompt. Learning to program in your formative years helps you a lot. You learn how to think (even if you have to unlearn a few things that BASIC teaches you).
My first computer was a ZX81 I built from a kit when I was 12. Which meant that my first language was BASIC and my second was Z80 assembler (since BASIC was so atrociously slow even for 1982). I would POKE the machine codes into memory, and that got so tedious I wrote a BASIC program to help me do it. It started with 10 REM AAAAAAA.... You would type the assembler instruction into a field, hit a key, and it would poke the correct values into memory starting at address 16514 (where the A's started). A bunch of my friends in school did similar stuff. The occasional kid might be into that sort of thing now, but there isn't much of an incentive to learn programming now because computers are much better now and so much good software has been written already.
I bet the stream of really good programmers entering their 20s will continue for a while and then dwindle. If you spent your time as a kid playing with a GameBoy, your mind has already calcified a bit by the time you start programming.
Rabies is a commonly used vector in gene therapy research. Since it targets brain tissue, it is a good way to introduce a therapeutic gene into mammalian neurons to treat diseases like ALS and spinal muscular atrophy.
what is there even to ask? why should secret goverment agencies at once become good, just because they go against something the most of you dont like?
Oh geez... "(Score:5, Insightful)" too... where to begin?
First of all, the FTC is not a secret government agency.
Second, saying it's merely "something that most of us don't like" isn't being quite honest. This will mark a long overdue attempt to stop wholesale destruction of a public resource. Unlike the sillier things we declare "wars" on (e.g. drugs, terrorism), law enforcement activity here may actually accomplish something. It may even increase my quality of life. Lord knows nothing else has worked so far, and we're clearly becoming desperate for anybody to do something. This problem is getting exponentially ridiculous with time.
Third, cops do stuff like this all the time to stop non-Internet-related crimes. You can't pick up a hooker or buy drugs without having to worry that you might be talking to a cop. Small time con artists in real life have to worry about undercover cops all the time. Why should crimes involving the Internet be any different? How does involving SMTP at some point in your criminal activities magically exempt you from having to worry about this? It makes no sense.
Mention law enforcement and the Internet in the same breath and everyone gets all defensive, as if this is the same network as it was in the 80s and early 90s, with only scientists and researchers having access. I remember when it was like that, and it was great. But it isn't like that anymore. Now it sucks. It's full of people who can't fucking behave themselves. I say let the damn cops in already. It's not like they're not already here pestering people who don't deserve it. Christ, you can't even buy a bong online anymore! Wouldn't you rather they spent their time chasing down spammers?
N. If you are offering a rebate, you must honor the rebate. You cannot require a UPC from the box that the previous version of the software came in several years ago. The rebate form cannot exceed the complexity of a 1040EZ. The fact that someone in the same household has received a similar rebate cannot be used as an excuse to deny the rebate. You cannot impose unreasonable deadlines to get the rebate forms in. The rebate check must arrive within a month and remain valid for at least 90 days. The use of rebates is always to remain a gimmick and cannot be misused as a tool to ensure your company's profitability. No more than 10% of your products should be encombered with rebates or you will have to start paying interest to your customers.
After rereading the securityfocus link (the article itself is nonsensical), it's clear the mechanism I described only has a tangential relationship with this vulnerability.
You start from the hacker's page X. You click on a link that goes to trusted site Y. Browser loads security policy for Y, before the page X has disappeared from the screen. During those few seconds, any clicks on links in X will execute their onClick() handlers with the privileges of trusted site Y. Where does Java come in? Well, it's hard to write an HTTP server and list directories with JavaScript! So you get an applet to do it for you- which can be done by calling an applet method from onClick(). (Or in other ways, like a popup containing the applet. In fact, onExit() would presumably be an excellent place to put this code.) The incorrect security policy (for Y) is propagated to the Java runtime from JavaScript when the method call is made.
The bug is in JavaScript, and the timing of the browser's interaction with it. Java is merely brought in to do the dirty work once the malicious JavaScript code has fooled the browser into giving it the security permissions it needs.
There are many, many more issues than I have discussed. The minimal release is for giving the blackhats time to play.
I suspect the "minimal release" is because he doesn't understand what he's talking about.
Yeah, but it's trivial to figure out that a cube has been messed with this way. In solving a cube, you would solve the bottom layer (easy), edge pieces of the middle layer, and then the top layer, which was the hardest. In solving the top layer you had to do three things- get the corner pieces in the right places, rotate the corner pieces to be in the correct orientation, and then move the edge pieces. For doing all these things, there is a predefined operation you perform on the cube. There is one that rotates one corner cube clockwise and an adjacent corner cube counterclockwise. There is one that moves three top corner cubes clockwise. These are things you need to do a lot, and when I was solving Rubik's cubes for ten cents during class in sixth grade, I applied these operations to cubes all the time. In my entire career of Rubik's cube solving, I never once saw a cube that had a single corner cube twisted. There is simply no way to get there from a solved cube. Likewise, there is no way you can twist a solved cube around to accomplish a single edge flip. If you see either of those things, you know that someone has been screwing with your cube.
Peeling the stickers can make completely illegal things, like edge pieces with two red squares. But if you take a solved cube apart and randomly put the pieces back together, the result will be in one of nine possible symmetry groups. If a position is a member of a group, you can turn the cube to reach any other position in that group. So there are a maximum of 8 different types of screwed-up cubes.
WHAT, exactly does the Java security model have to do with JavaScript--an unfortunately named, but totally different, animal?!
I'm sure you are aware of the recent marketing fiasco at Microsoft, where the company shot itself in the foot by severly diluting its new.NET trademark. Every marketer in the company wanted in on the.NET thing, and soon all product literature from Microsoft was yapping about.NET this,.NET that. Customers were confused as hell. But the.NET trademark dilution wasn't quite invented at Microsoft. Ironically, like most aspects of.NET, it had a previously existing counterpart in the world of Java.
When JavaScript was originally invented, it was "LiveScript". There was a client version that ran in the browser, and a server version that ran on Netscape servers (and went nowhere). But it was released during the Java applet hype, and marketers at Netscape forced the name change to "JavaScript". Netscape also implemented interfaces between Java and JavaScript so that JavaScript would be more tightly coupled with the crappy JVM that was shipping in Netscape browsers back then. They were actually trying to turn JavaScript into something that would merit the horrible name they gave it.
Specifically, you could invoke Java methods from JavaScript, and vice versa. For example, assuming you had an applet in the document using the standard <APPLET CODE="AppletClassName"></APPLET> syntax, you could (from JavaScript) call methods on the applet straightforwardly: var javaString = document.AppletClassName.toString(); var javaScriptString = javaString + "";
The javaString variable was a java.lang.String. You first had to turn it into an ordinary JavaScript string by appending "" to it. Java objects that weren't strings kept their type information in the world of JavaScript, and you could presumably call methods on them. Like, you could get a java.util.Vector, add JavaScript strings to it using addElement(), and then (back in Java) iterate through the Vector. Inside the JVM, the JavaScript strings were objects of type javascript.string or something like that. There were entire javascript.* packages containing Java mappings of JavaScript objects. An applet could acquire JavaScript references to the document, browser, etc. and manipulate JavaScript variables. (This was a long time ago during the boom, when people would actually pay you for knowing stupid stuff like this, so I may be getting the details wrong.)
Once the browser war heated up, you simply couldn't use any of this crap since Microsoft left it only half implemented in IE. I think that invocations from JavaScript to Java worked in IE, but not the other way around (there was no way to access JavaScript from Java).
Anyway, the article is vague, my memory of such things is old, and I never really used it more than once or twice. But if there is a hole to speak of, it looks to me like this interface I've described might have something to do with it.
>>Terrorists don't have "careers" anymore. >Particularly suicide terrorists.
That was my point. It used to be that these people would take over a plane, force the pilot to land somewhere, maybe off a passenger or two, demand transportation for their escape, and maybe even put hoods over their heads and give a little press conference before leaving- presumably to hijack again some day. Afterwards we would figure out who they were, put their names on lists, and maybe even look out for them.
Now we have rookie terrorists committing suicide and mass murder with no explanation, and everyone is simply left to assume that it has something to do with Israel and Palestine. Our lists are useless. We seem to be looking for retired terrorists and punk rockers from the seventies, and if your name sounds like a name on the list you can't fly. The terrorists won!
We should go back to the system we had in 1965. You want to fly somewhere, you buy a ticket.
Personally I would prefer that this bizarre security not be applied to all air travelers- it should be considered an amenity. If you want to ride on a "terror-free flight" (and you're innumerate and stupid), you pay an extra $50-100, get there a few hours earlier, eat your in-flight meal with those plastic butter knives, and rest comfortably with the knowledge that punk rocker Johnny Rotten Lydon (rhymes with "Laden"?) is not on the plane with you. Also nobody from Priceline.
The system relies on a false premise. Terrorists don't have "careers" anymore. If you were planning a terrorist attack, you could easily find 20 guys with no records whose names appear on no lists in any form. Recruiting people for suicide terrorist activities has become very easy as of late. (I can't say why or I'll be attracting a bunch of AC replies from dittoheads.)
This is a system designed to give you a false sense of security. It bothers and harasses people so much that they feel safe when they get on the plane (if the plane doesn't leave before they get through the bullshit). It will not stop the next hijacking at all- although it strongly discourages discretionary air travel, and is rapidly destroying the airline industry.
We should go back to the system we had before 9/11, that served us well for many years. Terrorists may still be able to crash airplanes, but they will no longer succeed in crashing airplanes into buildings. Now that everyone knows how that type of attack works, it is unlikely to succeed again. Note how it didn't even succeed once they got wind of it via cellphone during that flight over Pennsylvania.
But since the public has it in their head that terrorism can be magically prevented at the airport somehow, we should put up some sort of pretense for them at the security checkpoint and the gate. I'm thinking about some sort of prop that you would see Scotty using on Star Trek- a sort of stick with colored lights inside that you wave over a person. If they're a terrorist, the lights turn red and the stick makes a funny sort of buzzing noise. That way we could wave people through, and have them convinced that they've been inconvenienced enough to be safe.
I live and work in Redwood City, which is at the midpoint between SF and San Jose.
There is nothing going on in Pleasanton besides PeopleSoft. In fact, during the boom, people working here were buying homes in Pleasanton because they were cheap. It is within commuting distance. When people would say there's nothing going on in Pleasanton, they would reply "PeopleSoft!".
If Larry succeeds in destroying it, the laid off workers will be sending their resumes to firms in the East Bay and here. And I guess those houses in Pleasanton will become even cheaper.
Obviously, Maine has a lot of issues, and feels inferior to Texas. If someone ever wants to build a 40-mile radius solar system that has room to orbit the planets, many Texans could loan out their back yards.
True... but then if you wanted to see it, you'd be forced to visit Texas.
Oracle is using its cash on hand to cannibalize another company, steal its customer list, terminate development of its products, lay off 8000 tech workers, and turn Silicon Valley into even more of a smoking crater than they have already by outsourcing so much of their own development work to the Third World.
But they support Linux, so that's all OK! Oracle deserves our support!
there is even a "roaming" cache type where one person who finds it moves it to a new location and posts the new coordinates.
You can move the balloons and whatnot to a new location, and leave a note in the cache at the old location specifying the GPS coordinates of the new location. After a while this makes it harder for a geocacher to eventually find the balloons, because he has to traverse all the nodes. But park rangers love it because if a cache turns out to be in an environmentally sensitive area that is sensitive to foot traffic, insertion and deletion is a very fast process.
You're right, but that's what I meant to say (I worded it wrong). In general if you burn a cross on someone's lawn, the First Amendment concerns aren't even an issue. Such actions usually fall under criminal trespass. The gray area comes in when you burn a cross in a public square. There, the issue becomes whether or not the action is a "threat". In reality, local fire codes usually render the whole issue a moot point.
Slashdot Mirror
You should obviously change the game to take advantage of the hardware. Imagine it! Three dimensional chess where each piece has weapons, or magical attacks, deformable terrain, and lots of special effects to make use of the latest video cards! I can't wait!
Been there, done that. See The Chess Variant Pages. It lists about a hundred chess variants, some of which are three dimensional, and has links to places where you can download software to play variants (commercial and otherwise). The site has an applet that you can play different variants on (although it plays a horrible game).
Interactive Digital Software Association
1211 Connecticut Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20036 USA
Attention: Piracy Enforcement DMCA Officer
E-mail: dmca@idsa.com
Sunday, June 22, 2003
Dear Spammers and Email Address Harvesters,
I am an authorized representative of the Interactive Digital Software Association ("IDSA"), which represents the intellectual property interests of over thirty companies that publish interactive games for video game consoles, personal computers, handheld devices and the Internet.
In an effort to increase our billable hours we spend sifting through our inboxes, and under penalty of perjury, we hereby affirm that the IDSA is authorized to act on behalf of the IDSA members whose desire it is to OPT-IN to your mailing lists to receive tons of incredible and money-saving offers!
Please send us copious amounts of injket refill offers, no-prescription diazepam offers, and ESPECIALLY penis enlargement offers to dmca@isda.com.
Should you have questions, please contact the IDSA by replying to this email: dmca@isda.com
We thank you for your cooperation in this matter. Your prompt response is appreciated.
Regards,
Interactive Digital Software Association
Note: The information transmitted in this Notice is intended only for the person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain confidential and/or privileged material. Any review, reproduction, retransmission, dissemination or other use of, or taking of any action in reliance upon, this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited. If you received this in error, please contact the sender and delete the material from all computers.
Actually caffeine has been known to cause erectile dysfunction, or simply put; "Staying Up Problem". If you really want to stay up all night (not coding!), then don't touch caffeine!
Bah. This effect only lasts during the actual caffeine buzz (approx. 5 hours after you drink the coffee). At least that's been my experience.
It's just hard to concentrate on stuff like that when you keep thinking about the code you're going to write once you're finished.
Methinks someone was not paying attention to their site links....
And how much do you want to bet that right now Hatch is fuming in his office and typing up a bill to outlaw link rot? He's probably got the president of MediaDefender on the phone right now asking if it's possible to somehow cause large floppy bare breasts to explode over the Internet.
Guess he didn't filter that through his PR staff.
"Only copyright holders should have this, because the feds doing it would be illegal"
I'm sorry, did I miss that somewhere in the article? Where does it remotely imply this?
Where does anything?
Did I miss the part in the BOR that says "No person may be deprived of life, liberty, or property by the federal government without due process of law"? Or are you just a complete fucking moron adding your own stupid and completely false comments to submissions so that you can brag to other morons "HUR HUR HUR I GOT ON SLASHDOT I AM SO FUCKING HOMOSEXUAL IT HURTS MY ANUS"?
Ummm... did you even bother to read the article before writing your troll?
The senator, a composer who earned $18,000 last year in song writing royalties, acknowledged Congress would have to enact an exemption for copyright owners from liability for damaging computers. He endorsed technology that would twice warn a computer user about illegal online behavior, "then destroy their computer."
The senator acknowledged Congress would have to enact an exemption for copyright owners from liability for damaging computers. He endorsed technology that would twice warn a computer user about illegal online behavior, "then destroy their computer."
United States Patent Application 732980759-32754321
User interface for remotely enforcing copyright
Abstract
A user interface and corresponding application program interface (API) and hardware device providing a set of functions for remotely enforcing copyright legislation.
Inventors: Hatch, Orrin (R-Utah), MillionthMonkey
Serial No.: 053243653216
Series Code: 10
Filed: June 17, 2003
Claims
1. A software architecture for a distributed computing system comprising: a pissed off copyright holder, a hardware device capable of being remotely destroyed over a network; and an application program interface to present two dialog boxes to a user who is sharing files to present functions of the application to access and destroy his hardware.
2. A software architecture as recited in claim 1, wherein the distributed computing system comprises client devices and peer-to-peer devices that handle requests from other peer-to-peer devices, the remote devices having been hardwired with explosives by the manufacturer.
3. A software architecture as recited in claim 1, wherein the distributed computing system comprises client devices and peer-to-peer devices that handle requests from other peer-to-peer devices, the remote devices having been sharing files with other peer-to-peer devices as outlined in section 1.
4. A software architecture as recited in claim 1, wherein the application program interface comprises: a first group of services related to discovery of file sharing activity, a second group of services related to displaying two dialog boxes to the user, and a third group of services related to remotely detonating a device as outlined in section 1.
5. An application program interface as recited in claim 4, wherein the first group of services comprises: first functions that enable copyright holder to scour remote device for peer-to-peer activity relating to copyrighted content; a second group of services related to displaying two threatening messages to the user, and a third group of services related to reception of the kill signal and subsequent detonation.
CONCLUSION
Although the invention has been described in language specific to structural features and/or methodological acts, it is to be understood that the invention defined in the appended claims is not necessarily limited to the specific features or acts described. Rather, the specific features and acts are disclosed as exemplary forms of implementing the claimed invention.
And I'm off to the patent office! Later, suckas!
If you want safety, buy treasuries. The government can just print up more money if they need to pay you.
And they're going to have to do it, too, which will accelerate inflation- the #1 enemy of the bondholder. It swallows your interest earnings. If they just turn on the printing press to pay you, it wasn't such a good investment, was it?
If you want safety, buy Euros. The dollar is going to crash sooner or later once they start printing money to pay for these tax cuts and the baby boomer retirements. As a share of federal budget outlays, interest payments on the debt have already almost caught up to what we spend on the military.
Almost makes you wonder why the government even bothers to borrow money instead of just printing it in the first place. It wouldn't be any more irresponsible than what it's doing now.
Anyone who was into computers when they were still developing and the systems were still simple will have an advantage.
The people who are at a loss are the younger ones. Computers are so good now that they suck. There's virtually no incentive for a kid to write a program.
Didn't we just see a story about how hard it is for a kid to get into programming nowadays? Gen-X kids grew up in the eighties with simple computers that were ideally suited for learning programming. Turn the thing on, there's the BASIC prompt. Learning to program in your formative years helps you a lot. You learn how to think (even if you have to unlearn a few things that BASIC teaches you).
My first computer was a ZX81 I built from a kit when I was 12. Which meant that my first language was BASIC and my second was Z80 assembler (since BASIC was so atrociously slow even for 1982). I would POKE the machine codes into memory, and that got so tedious I wrote a BASIC program to help me do it. It started with 10 REM AAAAAAA.... You would type the assembler instruction into a field, hit a key, and it would poke the correct values into memory starting at address 16514 (where the A's started). A bunch of my friends in school did similar stuff. The occasional kid might be into that sort of thing now, but there isn't much of an incentive to learn programming now because computers are much better now and so much good software has been written already.
I bet the stream of really good programmers entering their 20s will continue for a while and then dwindle. If you spent your time as a kid playing with a GameBoy, your mind has already calcified a bit by the time you start programming.
For once, tobacco is saving lives!
Ironically, so is the rabies virus.
Rabies is a commonly used vector in gene therapy research. Since it targets brain tissue, it is a good way to introduce a therapeutic gene into mammalian neurons to treat diseases like ALS and spinal muscular atrophy.
what is there even to ask? why should secret goverment agencies at once become good, just because they go against something the most of you dont like?
Oh geez... "(Score:5, Insightful)" too... where to begin?
First of all, the FTC is not a secret government agency.
Second, saying it's merely "something that most of us don't like" isn't being quite honest. This will mark a long overdue attempt to stop wholesale destruction of a public resource. Unlike the sillier things we declare "wars" on (e.g. drugs, terrorism), law enforcement activity here may actually accomplish something. It may even increase my quality of life. Lord knows nothing else has worked so far, and we're clearly becoming desperate for anybody to do something. This problem is getting exponentially ridiculous with time.
Third, cops do stuff like this all the time to stop non-Internet-related crimes. You can't pick up a hooker or buy drugs without having to worry that you might be talking to a cop. Small time con artists in real life have to worry about undercover cops all the time. Why should crimes involving the Internet be any different? How does involving SMTP at some point in your criminal activities magically exempt you from having to worry about this? It makes no sense.
Mention law enforcement and the Internet in the same breath and everyone gets all defensive, as if this is the same network as it was in the 80s and early 90s, with only scientists and researchers having access. I remember when it was like that, and it was great. But it isn't like that anymore. Now it sucks. It's full of people who can't fucking behave themselves. I say let the damn cops in already. It's not like they're not already here pestering people who don't deserve it. Christ, you can't even buy a bong online anymore! Wouldn't you rather they spent their time chasing down spammers?
Part 11. You must provide me with an army of lawyers to enforce this agreement.
There! Problem solved.
N. If you are offering a rebate, you must honor the rebate. You cannot require a UPC from the box that the previous version of the software came in several years ago. The rebate form cannot exceed the complexity of a 1040EZ. The fact that someone in the same household has received a similar rebate cannot be used as an excuse to deny the rebate. You cannot impose unreasonable deadlines to get the rebate forms in. The rebate check must arrive within a month and remain valid for at least 90 days. The use of rebates is always to remain a gimmick and cannot be misused as a tool to ensure your company's profitability. No more than 10% of your products should be encombered with rebates or you will have to start paying interest to your customers.
After rereading the securityfocus link (the article itself is nonsensical), it's clear the mechanism I described only has a tangential relationship with this vulnerability.
You start from the hacker's page X. You click on a link that goes to trusted site Y. Browser loads security policy for Y, before the page X has disappeared from the screen. During those few seconds, any clicks on links in X will execute their onClick() handlers with the privileges of trusted site Y. Where does Java come in? Well, it's hard to write an HTTP server and list directories with JavaScript! So you get an applet to do it for you- which can be done by calling an applet method from onClick(). (Or in other ways, like a popup containing the applet. In fact, onExit() would presumably be an excellent place to put this code.) The incorrect security policy (for Y) is propagated to the Java runtime from JavaScript when the method call is made.
The bug is in JavaScript, and the timing of the browser's interaction with it. Java is merely brought in to do the dirty work once the malicious JavaScript code has fooled the browser into giving it the security permissions it needs.
There are many, many more issues than I have discussed. The minimal release is for giving the blackhats time to play.
I suspect the "minimal release" is because he doesn't understand what he's talking about.
Yeah, but it's trivial to figure out that a cube has been messed with this way. In solving a cube, you would solve the bottom layer (easy), edge pieces of the middle layer, and then the top layer, which was the hardest. In solving the top layer you had to do three things- get the corner pieces in the right places, rotate the corner pieces to be in the correct orientation, and then move the edge pieces.
For doing all these things, there is a predefined operation you perform on the cube. There is one that rotates one corner cube clockwise and an adjacent corner cube counterclockwise. There is one that moves three top corner cubes clockwise. These are things you need to do a lot, and when I was solving Rubik's cubes for ten cents during class in sixth grade, I applied these operations to cubes all the time. In my entire career of Rubik's cube solving, I never once saw a cube that had a single corner cube twisted. There is simply no way to get there from a solved cube. Likewise, there is no way you can twist a solved cube around to accomplish a single edge flip. If you see either of those things, you know that someone has been screwing with your cube.
Peeling the stickers can make completely illegal things, like edge pieces with two red squares. But if you take a solved cube apart and randomly put the pieces back together, the result will be in one of nine possible symmetry groups. If a position is a member of a group, you can turn the cube to reach any other position in that group. So there are a maximum of 8 different types of screwed-up cubes.
WHAT, exactly does the Java security model have to do with JavaScript--an unfortunately named, but totally different, animal?!
.NET trademark. Every marketer in the company wanted in on the .NET thing, and soon all product literature from Microsoft was yapping about .NET this, .NET that. Customers were confused as hell. But the .NET trademark dilution wasn't quite invented at Microsoft. Ironically, like most aspects of .NET, it had a previously existing counterpart in the world of Java.
I'm sure you are aware of the recent marketing fiasco at Microsoft, where the company shot itself in the foot by severly diluting its new
When JavaScript was originally invented, it was "LiveScript". There was a client version that ran in the browser, and a server version that ran on Netscape servers (and went nowhere). But it was released during the Java applet hype, and marketers at Netscape forced the name change to "JavaScript". Netscape also implemented interfaces between Java and JavaScript so that JavaScript would be more tightly coupled with the crappy JVM that was shipping in Netscape browsers back then. They were actually trying to turn JavaScript into something that would merit the horrible name they gave it.
Specifically, you could invoke Java methods from JavaScript, and vice versa. For example, assuming you had an applet in the document using the standard <APPLET CODE="AppletClassName"></APPLET> syntax, you could (from JavaScript) call methods on the applet straightforwardly:
var javaString = document.AppletClassName.toString();
var javaScriptString = javaString + "";
The javaString variable was a java.lang.String. You first had to turn it into an ordinary JavaScript string by appending "" to it. Java objects that weren't strings kept their type information in the world of JavaScript, and you could presumably call methods on them. Like, you could get a java.util.Vector, add JavaScript strings to it using addElement(), and then (back in Java) iterate through the Vector. Inside the JVM, the JavaScript strings were objects of type javascript.string or something like that. There were entire javascript.* packages containing Java mappings of JavaScript objects. An applet could acquire JavaScript references to the document, browser, etc. and manipulate JavaScript variables. (This was a long time ago during the boom, when people would actually pay you for knowing stupid stuff like this, so I may be getting the details wrong.)
Once the browser war heated up, you simply couldn't use any of this crap since Microsoft left it only half implemented in IE. I think that invocations from JavaScript to Java worked in IE, but not the other way around (there was no way to access JavaScript from Java).
Anyway, the article is vague, my memory of such things is old, and I never really used it more than once or twice. But if there is a hole to speak of, it looks to me like this interface I've described might have something to do with it.
>>Terrorists don't have "careers" anymore.
>Particularly suicide terrorists.
That was my point. It used to be that these people would take over a plane, force the pilot to land somewhere, maybe off a passenger or two, demand transportation for their escape, and maybe even put hoods over their heads and give a little press conference before leaving- presumably to hijack again some day. Afterwards we would figure out who they were, put their names on lists, and maybe even look out for them.
Now we have rookie terrorists committing suicide and mass murder with no explanation, and everyone is simply left to assume that it has something to do with Israel and Palestine. Our lists are useless. We seem to be looking for retired terrorists and punk rockers from the seventies, and if your name sounds like a name on the list you can't fly. The terrorists won!
We should go back to the system we had in 1965. You want to fly somewhere, you buy a ticket.
Personally I would prefer that this bizarre security not be applied to all air travelers- it should be considered an amenity. If you want to ride on a "terror-free flight" (and you're innumerate and stupid), you pay an extra $50-100, get there a few hours earlier, eat your in-flight meal with those plastic butter knives, and rest comfortably with the knowledge that punk rocker Johnny Rotten Lydon (rhymes with "Laden"?) is not on the plane with you. Also nobody from Priceline.
The system relies on a false premise. Terrorists don't have "careers" anymore. If you were planning a terrorist attack, you could easily find 20 guys with no records whose names appear on no lists in any form. Recruiting people for suicide terrorist activities has become very easy as of late. (I can't say why or I'll be attracting a bunch of AC replies from dittoheads.)
This is a system designed to give you a false sense of security. It bothers and harasses people so much that they feel safe when they get on the plane (if the plane doesn't leave before they get through the bullshit). It will not stop the next hijacking at all- although it strongly discourages discretionary air travel, and is rapidly destroying the airline industry.
We should go back to the system we had before 9/11, that served us well for many years. Terrorists may still be able to crash airplanes, but they will no longer succeed in crashing airplanes into buildings. Now that everyone knows how that type of attack works, it is unlikely to succeed again. Note how it didn't even succeed once they got wind of it via cellphone during that flight over Pennsylvania.
But since the public has it in their head that terrorism can be magically prevented at the airport somehow, we should put up some sort of pretense for them at the security checkpoint and the gate. I'm thinking about some sort of prop that you would see Scotty using on Star Trek- a sort of stick with colored lights inside that you wave over a person. If they're a terrorist, the lights turn red and the stick makes a funny sort of buzzing noise. That way we could wave people through, and have them convinced that they've been inconvenienced enough to be safe.
I live and work in Redwood City, which is at the midpoint between SF and San Jose.
There is nothing going on in Pleasanton besides PeopleSoft. In fact, during the boom, people working here were buying homes in Pleasanton because they were cheap. It is within commuting distance. When people would say there's nothing going on in Pleasanton, they would reply "PeopleSoft!".
If Larry succeeds in destroying it, the laid off workers will be sending their resumes to firms in the East Bay and here. And I guess those houses in Pleasanton will become even cheaper.
Obviously, Maine has a lot of issues, and feels inferior to Texas.
If someone ever wants to build a 40-mile radius solar system that has room to orbit the planets, many Texans could loan out their back yards.
True... but then if you wanted to see it, you'd be forced to visit Texas.
Wow, talk about a severe lack of perspective.
Oracle is using its cash on hand to cannibalize another company, steal its customer list, terminate development of its products, lay off 8000 tech workers, and turn Silicon Valley into even more of a smoking crater than they have already by outsourcing so much of their own development work to the Third World.
But they support Linux, so that's all OK! Oracle deserves our support!
Or pictures, or photos or whatever. I've never been to a geocache.
there is even a "roaming" cache type where one person who finds it moves it to a new location and posts the new coordinates.
You can move the balloons and whatnot to a new location, and leave a note in the cache at the old location specifying the GPS coordinates of the new location. After a while this makes it harder for a geocacher to eventually find the balloons, because he has to traverse all the nodes. But park rangers love it because if a cache turns out to be in an environmentally sensitive area that is sensitive to foot traffic, insertion and deletion is a very fast process.
You're right, but that's what I meant to say (I worded it wrong).
In general if you burn a cross on someone's lawn, the First Amendment concerns aren't even an issue. Such actions usually fall under criminal trespass. The gray area comes in when you burn a cross in a public square. There, the issue becomes whether or not the action is a "threat".
In reality, local fire codes usually render the whole issue a moot point.