Dude. Voice recognition. Have you ever called United Airlines telephone reservation system? The damn thing has you talk and it understands everything! Accents, all sorts of weird stuff... without having to train it for your voice. It's probably done with software learning (their system hears a LOT of voices and accents) and if so, the more people talk to it, the better it gets.
Now imagine this bitchen scenario: You know how Google has a million billion Linux boxes all hooked into a load balancing cluster? And you know how Google has pretty much become the standard for searching for shit on the internet? Ok. Imagine if some people buy a million billion Linux boxes all clustered and load balanced together, like Google, but with 100 times as many computers, just to impress people like me. Ok. Then, put United Airlines' voice recognition software on there (and I guarantee it's not that Dragon Talkspeak or whatever that $39.95 program is called). Ok. Then, invent a really bitchen audio compression technology that works in real time and compresses shit to 1/10 of its original size without losing anything... as a matter of fact, after compression, the quality will even be better than before. Ok. Now invent a friggin protocol. Here's what's gonna happen. Anytime a computer is gonna do voice recognition, it simply compresses the audio in real time and sends it over to this Google-like thing. Let's call it Googtalk. Ok. Then, Googtalk converts the voice into text and sends it back to the computer. The computer gets back text and can do whatever it wants with it (for an editor, it would simply enter the text for you; for menu selection, it would use natural language parsing or whatever). Ok.
Who in the "F" word would pay for something crazy like this? Millions of companies worldwide that want to use voice recognition on their phone systems and internally and shit. They'll pay. And because the whole damn world is gonna be talking shit and this system will be parsing it, it will use software learning to become really friggin good at understanding EVERYTHING, including voices, accents, foreign languages, when people "swallow" their words, slang, cuss words, gangster language, east L.A. slang (like "Orale vato, waas sappening?") and all that shit, homes. Oh well... Ain't nobody's gonna implement that shit, so I'll go ahead and do it and get rich and buy out Microsoft and Bill Gates and all the shareholders at 10 times the share price (because I'll have so much money at this point that I'll use 100 dollar bills as toilet paper for laziness to buy a roll of toilet paper), release ALL source code and trade secrets of that company, make it all GPL, and change the company's mission statement into, "Our goal is to sell off everything we have in order to fund the free software movement." Then, I'll do the same with AOL/TW, CNN, Disney, and all the big companies. In fact, there won't be anything bigger than a mom-and-pop shop anymore, unless it's a loosely knit organization of volunteers who are paid for by the speech recognition thing that do shit kind of like the Linux community does. When you buy a toaster, you'll have to assemble it and configure it for your particular kitchen, which will mean at least two weeks of work. But at least everything in this new world will be free and there won't be a friggin Microsoft anymore, because Windows sucks.
Here is what I think. Forget all the complicated stuff. At the ISP, give every email account a whitelist, containing email addresses to be let through. Each email that is sent is checked against the whitelist. If the sender is not included on the whitelist, the email is automatically rejected. Users can optionally set up their account to accept any emails.
But here's the fun part: As a recipient, each user sets up their account with a "deposit price" for bypassing the whitelist. You can set that price to any amount in your currency of choice. As a sender, you can set the maximum amount that you're willing to pay, so that you don't suddenly get billed/debited/charged some outrageous fee. If someone who is not on your whitelist needs to send you an email, they pay a deposit. When you receive the email, you either accept it or reject it. If you accept it, you do not get paid; the sender keeps the deposit. If you reject it (meaning you've read the email and decided it was spam), the deposit paid by the sender is paid to you. It's enough to set the deposit to something like 50 cents. You'll probably get highly targeted emails at this price. I wouldn't mind risking 50 cents to send someone an email that I think they'll accept. You could set it to a few dollars to reduce the noise even further. But you could set it to any price you want. If you REALLY don't want email from sources not included in your whitelist, you could set the deposit to thousands of dollars. With this system, you'll be HAPPY to receive spam! And spammers either won't be able to afford it, or recipients will start making some money.
I have an even better idea. Let's be liberal ALL THE WAY. Liberals like everything in the world to be "fair" by artificial means, like legislation. (For example, the majority suffering so that the minority can have health care, when the problem could have been solved through charities instead.)
So let's extend this fairness in all directions. There is some small percentage of the population that lives in the gutters. They're the homeless. Many of them are alcoholics, drug addicts, etc., but that is beyond the point. They probably are because they were abused, so that makes it okay. Besides, it's irrelevant that they live in the gutter because they don't want to work, and only beg for money to feed their addictions.
Anyway, it's unfair that while these people live in the dirty gutters outside, other people live in nice houses. For that reason, the liberals should make everything fair by destroying all residential structures and passing legislation that forces everyone to live in the gutter. That way, everybody is equal.
Of course, the liberals who implement this will live in the most beautiful and elaborate palaces that anybody has ever seen. Of course they should live in such beauty and comfort. It's simply mankind's small token of esteem, a pleasant "thank you" for creating the benefit of equality for everyone else.
Think I'm kidding? They implemented high school "exit" exams that students had to pass in order to graduate. When they discovered that many people in some ethnic minority failed the test, they didn't try to fix the broken education system. They didn't try to clean up crime in those kids' (excuse me, age-challenged Americans') gangster-ridden neighborhoods. They simply cancelled the test. It's obviously a racist test, you see. And this example pervades everything those liberals touch.
I sincerely hope that easyCinema appears, enjoys a lot of success, and causes exactly the domino effect that the MPAA fears. I want to see movie prices come down, and more importantly, I want to see this change affect the music industry as well. Finally, I hope that such a powerful domino effect causes laws like the DMCA to get taken out of the books.
Medical care costs a lot because of the folks who think that government needs to provide every service to everybody.
Back in the day (several old geezers I know have told me stories and they are all similar in this respect), if you had to have surgery done or whatever, you could "do business" with the doctor (bargain on price). Once the price was agreed, the service was carried out and you paid the doctor. That was simple. Then, a bunch of liberals came along and said, "Wait a minute. Some people can't afford health care! Let's make it so that everybody can get healthcare, regardless of ability to pay." It sounds like a good idea, right? Sure it does! But it's a pie-in-the-sky. The minute government got involved, everything got expensive. All of a sudden, there are a million billion forms to fill out, all kinds of procedures to go through, etc. The accounting and paperwork became so expensive for doctors that prices had to become sky-high. Suddenly, doctors were spending more time doing this petty crap than helping patients who need help. (In fact, as recently as two weeks ago, a doctor friend of mine told me that now, because of even MORE laws, he has to fill out an ADDITIONAL packet of 25 or so pages for EACH patient. How do you expect prices NOT to be so high?)
Since health care became so expensive, all kinds of insurance companies saw an opportunity to scam people out of good money. They scam you and they scam the doctors. Health insurance became a necessity due to high prices. So now, you pay your insurance company all the time, and if you need to have something done, you pay a deductable and they pay 10% or so of what's left. For example, someone I know had a cat scan at one time because of a mysterious problem he had. He received a bill for $3,000.00, which his insurance was taking care of. According to an insurance statement that he showed me, the insurance company paid $300.00 to the hospital, and that was the entire payment. In other words, 10% of the amount. But it gets better. Another doctor I know told me that because the insurance only pays about 10%, he and every other doctor/clinic/hospital multiplies the price by 10, so that when they get paid 10% by the insurance, they get what they should actually be charging. So now, if you DON'T have insurance, you probably can't afford ANY health care, because for YOU, the prices are ten times as much. So insurance became nearly mandatory for anyone who isn't a millionaire.
That's why health care is expensive. To recap: Government intervention made everything extremely expensive. Insurance companies caused prices to multiply by ten beyond the government-created prices. That is why I am against any sort of government meddling in health care. Let the doctors do what they need to do without all these damn forms and the bullshit. People should pay the doctor directly. If you can't afford to pay the doctor, go to a free clinic or send the bill to a nonprofit organization that pays for people like that through donations. They make the money through marketing. There are millions of people who will see commercials of sick kids and immediately call with their credit card ready. And it'll be tax deductable anyway. This way, the problem is solved. No more paying hundreds in insurance ALL THE TIME when you'll just pay a hundred or so IF SOMETHING HAPPENS. If you get seriously sick, well, the money you saved over your lifetime (if the government would stop taking it all away to fund a healthcare system that costs 1000000 times as much as it should) will pay for that and leave a pretty chunk of change for the kids to inherit after you croak. It's as simple as that. Want insurance? Then get insurance. But don't make 95% of the people suffer through this horrendous shit because 5% of the people (of which maybe 0.1% or less are actually sick) can't afford to pay a damn doctor. Besides, doctors are people, too, and if someone is sick, they'll probably help them out.
Thanks... I was at a loss for words when I wrote that post. The other word I was looking for was aesthetic. I was trying to say that there is something mysteriously aesthetic about text configuration files, scripts and source code, and the algorithms that process them. It probably sounds stupid, but hey... whatever floats your boat.
It's a shame that SGI is slowly going down the tubes. Back in the 80's, this company made some of the most incredible hardware and software there ever was. I remember seeing a few of those computers in action. One of the earlier models, a 32-bit RISC model (at a time when most personal and business computers were 286s) was able to graphically transform the design of automobile parts in ways that I never imagined possible. Heck, 2d side-scrolling video games with 16 colors were, like, high tech! I had the pleasure of using a few of these computers on several occasions, but never had the pleasure of owning one. (There is something very aesthetic about an SGI. I don't know what it is.) Back in the 80's, these computers did what today's PCs are just beginning to do. I deeply hope that Linux will acquire a lot of great graphics technologies, and that the "magic" of SGI will live on, if in another form.
I think this is a good move, but not for reasons that someone (who would mod this Funny) might think.
One of the largest problems in the software business and the computer industry as a whole is an utter lack of knowledge. For some reason, I doubt that a field like, say, structural engineering would contain so many people who don't know jack. Buildings would collapse left and right. They don't, yet in computer jobs, there are hordes of people who make Windows applications by dragging shiny objects onto a pretty grid, fill in some properties, and call it programming. Lots of folks are taking computer science courses at the local community colleges, yet they don't seem "the type" to do this sort of work. (Indeed, I saw one girl studying at the local library... she was highlighting just about every sentence in a text about different types of loops, and she obviously wasn't "getting" it.) Why is this?
There are many programmers who "get by" by writing cheesy code (with as many holes in it as Swiss cheese). The problems caused by this lack of expertise are enormous. Billions of damages are caused to businesses every year because of computer failures. Many of those failures are due to bugs in software. Many are due to security problems. How can the problem be solved? Passing legislation that makes it illegal to discuss security problems won't solve the problem. There would be "underground" discussions of these things, and the crackers would freely share information that law abiding folks won't. Crackers will break into systems more easily than before the legislation and businesses will be slow to react, causing more damages. It would be the computer equivalent of making guns illegal to law abiding citizens. (After all, the criminals are above the law anyway. If someone is so inclined as to murder people, what difference does it make if some silly law says he can't have a gun?)
The unskilled programmers (who don't even like this work) should stop dreaming of getting rich quick. However, the programmers who are skilled should expand their skills in every direction possible. Certainly, each programmer should focus on the things he does best in order to be more effective at those particular skills, but there is nothing like experience in different types of programming to make someone flexible in this field, creating job security and expert authority. Perhaps a game programmer should try a small database job. Or a database programmer should try hacking some small feature into an operating system kernel.
Viruses are a legitimate subject of study. By teaching viruses, universities will give people a lot of power. Some will undoubtedly use it for evil, and we'll get some new viruses out there. But this would happen anyway.
Who, for example, are the best security consultants when it comes to credit fraud, insurance fraud, computer fraud, etc.? The perpetrators! There are examples of folks who committed all kinds of crimes and went to prison. Afterwards, they became "white-hat" consultants in their fields, teaching banks, governments, businesses, etc. how to protect themselves from people just like the consultant. They often make more money by teaching this knowledge for purposes of good than they did by committing the fraud in the first place. In other words, if you have experience with performing some act, then you undoubtedly know more about what makes someone vulnerable or safe from that act than any fool claiming to be a security expert.
The advantage of teaching viruses, which heavily outweighs the disadvantage of misuse by a large degree, is that programmers who have experience with viruses--not just by removing them from friends' clutter-ridden computers but by writing them and finding out what is effective from a virus writer's standpoint--will be more effective at designing systems and writing software that is less prone to the evils of viruses.
I think the field of Computer Science would benefit by teaching SPAM, cracking, and other forms of abuse in order that honest folks (nearly all of us) can protect themselves from the dishonest ones with the very same knowledge that makes the dishonesty so effective.
I often find myself asking very similar questions.
Why am I so fascinated by the old computers of generations gone by?
Why are those old mainframes that can do less than a PDA so fascinating?
Why would I rather save up money to buy a personally crafted writing table as opposed to a $50.00 one made out of particle board by machine?
What is so "magical" about UNIX-like operating systems?
Why is it fun to spend a weekend hiking in the desert, where there is no running water, freezing your butt off, sleeping in a tent with all kinds of weird things crawling on you?
Why is some really complex source code, script, configuration file, etc. so interesting?
Why does code, highly optimized beyond readability (especially assembly) have a "feel" to it?
Why is some PDP-11 with tape for storage so intriguing?
What is so interesting about Lord of the Rings?
Why is it so much fun to play games with words, making up double-meaning phrases and the like?
The answer is a bit complex.
First of all, things that are crafted together by skilled hands have an intrinsic value that doesn't exist in mass-marketed consumer products designed for an excessively consuming society. It all ties together. The way yogurt is made, the way beer is brewed, the way a unique muscle car is built, the way a particularly crafty piece of code is written (whether new or old), the way an oak writing desk is made, the way a 25 year old 4-bit computer can multiply 16-bit integers faster than the newest Pentium 4's, the way the computer on Voyager II can be reconfigured from a million billion miles away without crashing, the way your personally hacked Linux kernel does something nobody else has thought of... it all happens because of craftsmanship. Yeah, those old mainframes probably crashed more often than Windows does today, but there is some kind of value (for which I cannot find a word) that exists in things made by the truly skilled... by the wizards, the gurus, the master craftsmen.
Secondly, there is something in the "hacker culture" (see the Jargon file) that draws people like us to the values that I'm describing in the paragraph above. It doesn't matter what your other hobbies are, whether they involve nature, ham radio, literature, etc. There is something about freedom, quality, beauty (even if it isn't physical beauty), correctness, practicality, craftiness, challenge... It's a way of thinking that people outside the hacker community have apparently forgotten.
WHAT?!?!?!?! This is totally unfair! I don't care if faster speeds step on peoples' toes. I want my faster speed!
Actually, I can understand the reasons for doing this. IIRC, 802.11x works on frequencies that are for "public" use, and as such, producing too much junk in the air could (and probably) will screw up all kinds of other services, seeing how this technology will probably spread to cover all populated areas. I may be confusing this with a different technology, so please excuse me if I am... It's Thursday and I'm already drunk.
Then again, you can compensate for slower speeds by using various forms of compression. I think that ultimately, when speeds start reaching the ceilings of the technologies that carry them, it will all boil down to a lot of compression research that will uncover ways to save increasingly profound amounts of space. This will be one of the more complex areas of computer science in the coming decade or so, IMO.
Don't ask me why that was a blockquote. Just to make the layout interesting, I guess.
Microsoft. Where do you want to go today?
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Hijacking .NET
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· Score: 1
This is great news... for virus writers!
Look at how many opportunities Microsoft gives to virus writers. For the longest time, virus writers could use the scripting capabilities of all Microsoft applications to execute a virus. Now, they have an additional tool in their arsenal: The private member functions that aren't supposed to be accessible. Just wait until some truly innovative virus comes along that is able to bypass all of Microsoft's "patch upon fix forever" security that is supposed to keep script viruses from executing.
Software crashes because: Software is an immature field. Good software takes time. Software is unobvious to business managers who want the job done yesterday.
Businessmen generally do not understand the internal workings of software. They are in a "big-picture" sort of world where software is but one pesky detail that will be taken care of. A computer crash that causes so many thousands of dollars in damages is no different than a truck crash. There is simply a risk to every element of business. If the risk is relatively low, the big shots don't care about it. Grocery stores in earthquake prone areas continue to place glass jars on the edges of shelves. Sure, there will be an earthquake one day, but it's a calculated part of business risk, and the risk is relatively low (the Earth doesn't shake every five minutes).
Software bugs are a similar risk. It needs to look like it works. It needs to crash (and lose data) infrequently enough that the software will still sell. The business is not concerned with stamping out software bugs. It is concerned with releasing the software and making money. If the need arises, the business will improve the software and make more money. More often than not, this means adding features and shiny graphics. Fixing bugs is not very important to companies because customers do not pay for bug fixes. By the consumer, bugs are viewed as defects and their fixes should be free. By the company, bugs are viewed as a minor risk and fixing them would cost too much to justify. So you'll reboot once in a while or lose an hour's work once in a while. If it fries your hard disk, well, you should have backed up your data.
Software is also one of the newest fields of human endeavor. Buildings have been built, ships have sailed and farms were farmed, all for thousands of years. No matter how much progress happens in these fields now, they have come so close to "perfection" that continued improvement serves to lower cost, improve safety and increase convenience. It's not a matter of, "Gee, how can we make buildings that actually stand without falling down three times a week?" It's just a matter of, "How wide, how deep, how tall and what color glass do you want on the outside?" You pay X dollars, wait Y months and voila, there is a building. But programming has been around for how long, 50 years? It's an increasingly important but very immature field.
Buildings, bridges, ships... they're obvious. Everyone knows that if enough lifeboats aren't put on an unsinkable ship, it'll sink on purpose, just to piss you off. Everyone knows that if a 100 story building is going to stand, it has to take 10 years to build it. Everyone knows that a dam has to be pretty damn strong or it'll break and flood half the countryside. The building, shipyard and dam businesses aren't progressing at light speed. It is easy to justify 10 years for an outrageous building design because people KNOW what is involved. But software... Now that's totally unobvious. Software is an idea. It's abstract. It's a bunch of curse words that look like gobbledygook to the uninitiated. A bunch of "noise" characters on a broken terminal. Something done by a bunch of skinny, pimply faced geeks who got beat up in high school, took the ugly girl to prom and didn't have any friends. Why should a manager bother to care that fst_jejcl_reduce() causes a possible NULL pointer in the outer loop if case 32 is activated, which happens if the previous re-sort encountered two items with similar Amount fields, all of which will take a whole day to find and fix and will only happen, say, 2% of the times this particular feature is invoked by the user, which isn't that often? Why should anybody justify spending 2 years to develop some bulletproof program that can be banged out in 3 months, with bugs? What's the problem? Constructor workers are risking their lives, moving heavy things, sweating all day in the hot sun... While geeks are sitting in offices just punching crap on a keyboard. How difficult could it possibly be? To
I'm sick of all these wrong evolution theories so I'm gonna tell what really happened.
Let's set up the scene with some background information (it'll be short, I promise).
So there was Adam and Eve and they chilled in Heaven just minding their own business. (We're skipping the whole "On the first day" story because you already know about that.) So the Lord told Adam, "Don't eat the fruit of this tree or you'll croak. And tell your wife."
So Adam goes and tells his wife, "See that tree over there? Don't eat its fruit. In fact, don't even go near the damn thing; Pappy said if you touch it, you'll croak."
So Eve is chillin' when this serpant comes around and says, "Pssst... See that tree over there? Eat its fruit! It's good!"
So Eve says, "But if I even touch that tree, I'll croak!"
So the serpant says, "Nuh uh! See, I'll touch it... Nothing happens!"
Seeing this, Eve gathers a little bit of courage, goes up and touches the tree... Nothing happened. So she grabs a big juicy naranja off the tree, peels it and takes a taste. Mmmmm! Then Adam comes over and sees what's going on... "What the fsck, Eve, I thought I told you not to touch that tree!"
And Eve says, "But you see, I did touch it and nothing happened!"
So Adam takes a taste. Then, the Lord's voice comes booming over the public address system, "I told you kids not to eat that damn fruit!!!" Adam and Eve grab a leaf or something to cover up their privates, see, because they suddenly realized they were naked, and the Lord drove them out of heaven in his red '64 Chevy II.
So here they are, on Earth now, and they have a couple of kids... One of 'em kills the other and is subsequently punished by being forced to forever roam the Earth with a Windows logo tatooed on his forehead.
Now just so you understand, the Lord created a bunch of animals, like fish and tigers and whatever, and then He created people. The people he created were special... Much more intelligent than animals by a far measure. Much more intelligent than any person alive today. They were "superhumans." Now this hermano with the Windows logo on his forehead walks around and screws every chimp and gorilla and baboon in sight. (Yeah, I know, that's gross.) His superhuman genes mixed with their animal genes and created some "middle-of-the-road" creature.
That's the human being of today... It's why many of our genes are similar to those of the animals. I know all of this for a fact and I have undeniable proof: On separate occasions, two different people, who do not know each other, both told me they heard this somewhere.
Hmmm... It sounds like Microsoft's FUD definition of a "viral" license, but here's what I have to say about that: You're an electrician and you wire light switches in your town. One day, you get a helper and you teach him everything you know. Now he's doing a better job at it than you, so he's getting all the work and you're screwed. Is teaching a "viral" act? After all, the knowledge is now duplicated?
In order to support his family, the electrician needs to wire light switches all day, every day. Electricians don't wire one switch and live off it forever for the virtue that the switch has provided a solution to a problem. However, management at companies like SCO don't realize that software is the same way. At SCO, they made some breakthrough 20 years ago and think that they need to continue getting paid for it forever. I'm sorry to say this, SCO, but like the electrician, you need to continuously make breakthroughs, you need to continuously make new solutions... you have to stay ahead of everyone else through continuously improving good management, continuously improving good project planning, continuously improving good software... continuously improving EVERYTHING. You can't write some "hello world" 20 years ago and charge every Linux user 200 bucks "royalty" for it now. It's yesteryear's news. It's stale. Nobody cares. And quite frankly, your code probably sucks anyway and will be replaced faster than shit going through a tin horn. Try firing your stupid management and putting people in place who will encourage new ideas and new development, and harbor success through good products and good marketing, instead of trying to weasel a profit through litigation, whining like a bunch of babies and making your company look pretty damn stupid. Hell, you people should quit your jobs at SCO and go work for Microsoft. At least over there your actions will fit in better with the mission statement.
What do I have to say about the "viral" GPL? Like any other action that you can make in life, you have to think before you act and you have to be responsible for your actions. At SCO, "Gentlemen, you fucked up." And now you and your all-Godly shareholders will suffer the consequences of those actions... NOT THE LINUX COMMUNITY.
Ignorance is bliss.
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Gentoo Reviewed
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· Score: 3, Informative
If you want to run ntpd at boot time by default, you would issue the command rc-update add ntpd default. This puts a link to the ntpd startup script in the directory/etc/ runlevels/default. Notice also that this is not the traditional Unix SysV path for runlevel scripts (one fewer reason for SCO to think it can sue the Gentoo folks, I guess).
SCO's startup script directories suck, IMHO. I honestly don't see the advantage of filling the filesystem up with all kinds of garbage a la SCO when a simple text file containing a few configuration options will suffice just fine.
Since I will likely get modded down for talking such blasphemy on this screwed up init system anyway, I may as well go ahead and say that FreeBSD's system is really cool. The defaults are read from/etc/defaults/rc.conf and then your overriding settings are read from/etc/rc.conf... As far as all these useless runmodes are concerned... On FreeBSD, the system starts up in Single User mode and then immediately switches to Multi User mode. These are the only two modes that I could ever conceive uses for. I don't understand why all these Linux distros give you 10 different runmodes, of which only one or two are ever used, with five or so of them being used solely for different types of shutdowns and restarts, and in fact, one of the first things I do on any Linux distro is blow all those excessive modes off. Either this machine uses XFree or it doesn't... it's not that hard to start from the command line if you don't ALWAYS use it. Oh, well... Maybe I'm just an ignorant fsck.
I strongly believe that cheating in online games is one of the biggest problems facing humanity today. The only thing that could possibly be worse than drugs and violent crime in urban areas, terrorism, war, disease, hunger... is cheating in online games.
Yeah. It's annoying. Cheating also takes place in casinos and in other physical forms of game play. It's a difficult problem that has been around since games were invented... and it's not going away anytime soon. I don't claim to know the answer. It's just like SPAM, popup ads, and all sorts of other online annoyances. There may not even be a good technological solution... The only thing I can think of is to play with people you know, and if you play with someone else, be wary of what's going on. If they cheat, fuck 'em... There are lots of other people to play with.
"You're a systems admin. On a routine PC repair, you discover a trove of child porn on an employee's PC..."
I save proof of the offending material, along with the IPs from which it was obtained, etc., such that I could prove it in court. At that point, I go to the CEO and demand weekly "protection" payments to commence immediately in the amount of US$2,000.00 (what a good deal), adjusted semi-annually for inflation and/or any arbitrary amount selected by me, whichever is greater.
If someone talks about the blackmail, I produce proof of the offending material, say that the company forced me to accept blackmail payments in exchange for shutting up, and bring down the whole company.
If they refuse to pay, I produce proof of the offending material, say that the company forced me to accept blackmail payments in exchange for shutting up, but that I recently decided to stop accepting payments and to "do the right thing" and bring down the whole company.
If they talk about the porn, I produce proof of the offending material, say that I tried to talk but was silenced because the company wanted to discredit me, that they forced me to accept blackmail payments in exchange for shutting up, and that I am coming forward to prevent further wrongdoing from taking place in the organization, and, obviously, bring down the whole company.
If they do nothing at all, I happily receive all kinds of money.
KIDDING ASIDE I would actually handle this situation legally and ethically: Save the proof I talked about a moment ago for my own protection, but not to bring down the company. Then, I go to the most in-charge people in the company and talk to them about the problem. Let them call the police, fire the guy, or do whatever they think is right. I save proof of these meetings (like, audio tape of talking to the big shots about it). If they fire me for bringing up the subject with them, or try to silence the issue without busting the asshole who is doing it, I then deem the company unethical and call the police, the media, and every customer this company has and tell everyone about it, getting the company busted big time for not only having tons of child porn on their boxes but also for trying to shut me up and discredit me. It'll be on O'Reilly faster than shit going through a tin horn.
Oh yeah... And either way, I'd get the biggest, baddest gangsters in town to kick the ass of whoever is looking at that material. It's immoral and unethical because it wastes bandwidth that should be used for transferring FreeBSD ISOs around instead. Want porn? Buy a magazine, asshole.
This reminds me of the time I was walking down the street, just minding my own business, when some nicely dressed gentlemen on bicycles were going around passing out Morman religious materials. Since I am proud of my religion, I find it somewhat offensive when these guys come up and offer theirs. They always like to ask questions, too. So these two guys come up and ask me if I'd like a Bible. (At least they cut to the chase this time.) Holding up my arms as if presenting a new reality, I say, "This... is the construct." The guys were like, uh, let's get out of here!!! On another occasion, I said, "Do you hear that?" (Hear what?) "That is the sound of inevitability."
If the RIAA, MPAA and other such viral organizations could have their way, I believe that ALL products would become self-destructing versions and you could no longer own anything. Every product you could buy, down to your toaster, would come with a license agreement that tells you what you can and can't do with the thing... And yes, I believe that if things continue this way, then one day, "crimes" against corporations (say, toasting a bagel from a company your toaster manufacturer is trying to crush for bottom line purposes) will result in stronger and longer sentences from the courts than violent crime against people.
The big shots in corporations really do believe that they are rightfully entitled to stay in business forever and to grow and increase profits forever as well. Anything that prevents a multinational from gaining more power over the consumer (whether it is technology, new consumer trends, a new competitor, etc.) should be illegal, in their view, including the little guys who are trying to make a living.
And this is definitely a COMPELLING solution. The way I see it, every product should self destruct after 48 hours. Bought a computer? Well, a $2,000 computer should be the first thing to self destruct after 48 hours. The warranty card would read, "This warranty expires 47 hours and 59 minutes and 59 seconds and 999 milliseconds after you make up your mind to buy a computer, and not even this particular one!"
Bought a new car? They should attach explosives all over the car... don't worry, 48 hours after leaving the dealership, a buzzing sound will alert you and your passengers that you must exit the vehicle, and then the car will drive itself under automated control to a safe part of the desert before exploding. And yes, you still have to pay off the financing for the new vehicle. In fact, dealers will be extra innovative in this respect: You'll simply subscribe to receive a new car every 48 hours and your bank account will simply be debited for the $25,000 or whatever the MSRP is for each occasion. If you don't have that amount of money at the bank, the dealer will provide an alley for you to prostitute yourself in order to earn the money. In fact, it will become federal LAW that you MUST prostitute yourself in order to pay for self-destructing products, as it is the God given right of multinational corporations to enjoy eternal perpetually increasing profits, and it will simultaneously be illegal to prostutute yourself, thus putting you in a situation that you will go to jail no matter what you do, and you will have to subscribe to a new "eMafia" protection service to avoid such arrest. It will obviously be illegal to bypass any devices that make the car blow up after 48 hours, and if you do so, you'll get more time in jail than a murderer or a rapist. In fact, to make the justice system more balanced in light of today's enormous piracy problems, murder charges and rape charges will be reduced to misdemeanors, because those crimes aren't all that bad, but if you God-forbid copy an album so you can perform the horrendous crime against humanity, a thousand times worse than any genocide this world has ever seen, the criminal act of listening to an album that you paid 20 bucks for... you should be beaten nearly to death but simultaneously kept alive, and tortured, and made to suffer the worst of all sufferings of the world combined and then some, because you are the dirtiest, slimiest, shittiest, more horrible criminal this world has ever seen, and shame on you.
Oh yeah... Houses will be made to self destruct in 60 hours, to compensate for the fact that you need to move your belongings in before they self destruct.
Slashdot Mirror
Now imagine this bitchen scenario: You know how Google has a million billion Linux boxes all hooked into a load balancing cluster? And you know how Google has pretty much become the standard for searching for shit on the internet? Ok. Imagine if some people buy a million billion Linux boxes all clustered and load balanced together, like Google, but with 100 times as many computers, just to impress people like me. Ok. Then, put United Airlines' voice recognition software on there (and I guarantee it's not that Dragon Talkspeak or whatever that $39.95 program is called). Ok. Then, invent a really bitchen audio compression technology that works in real time and compresses shit to 1/10 of its original size without losing anything... as a matter of fact, after compression, the quality will even be better than before. Ok. Now invent a friggin protocol. Here's what's gonna happen. Anytime a computer is gonna do voice recognition, it simply compresses the audio in real time and sends it over to this Google-like thing. Let's call it Googtalk. Ok. Then, Googtalk converts the voice into text and sends it back to the computer. The computer gets back text and can do whatever it wants with it (for an editor, it would simply enter the text for you; for menu selection, it would use natural language parsing or whatever). Ok.
Who in the "F" word would pay for something crazy like this? Millions of companies worldwide that want to use voice recognition on their phone systems and internally and shit. They'll pay. And because the whole damn world is gonna be talking shit and this system will be parsing it, it will use software learning to become really friggin good at understanding EVERYTHING, including voices, accents, foreign languages, when people "swallow" their words, slang, cuss words, gangster language, east L.A. slang (like "Orale vato, waas sappening?") and all that shit, homes. Oh well... Ain't nobody's gonna implement that shit, so I'll go ahead and do it and get rich and buy out Microsoft and Bill Gates and all the shareholders at 10 times the share price (because I'll have so much money at this point that I'll use 100 dollar bills as toilet paper for laziness to buy a roll of toilet paper), release ALL source code and trade secrets of that company, make it all GPL, and change the company's mission statement into, "Our goal is to sell off everything we have in order to fund the free software movement." Then, I'll do the same with AOL/TW, CNN, Disney, and all the big companies. In fact, there won't be anything bigger than a mom-and-pop shop anymore, unless it's a loosely knit organization of volunteers who are paid for by the speech recognition thing that do shit kind of like the Linux community does. When you buy a toaster, you'll have to assemble it and configure it for your particular kitchen, which will mean at least two weeks of work. But at least everything in this new world will be free and there won't be a friggin Microsoft anymore, because Windows sucks.
Hmmm... If it's like holding onto some hot girl's knees...
The druggist says, "We have three types of gin: Oxygen, Hydrogen, and Nitrogen."
"Oh, trying to be funny, eh? Well there's three types of turd: Mustard, Custard and YOU you big shit!"
But here's the fun part: As a recipient, each user sets up their account with a "deposit price" for bypassing the whitelist. You can set that price to any amount in your currency of choice. As a sender, you can set the maximum amount that you're willing to pay, so that you don't suddenly get billed/debited/charged some outrageous fee. If someone who is not on your whitelist needs to send you an email, they pay a deposit. When you receive the email, you either accept it or reject it. If you accept it, you do not get paid; the sender keeps the deposit. If you reject it (meaning you've read the email and decided it was spam), the deposit paid by the sender is paid to you. It's enough to set the deposit to something like 50 cents. You'll probably get highly targeted emails at this price. I wouldn't mind risking 50 cents to send someone an email that I think they'll accept. You could set it to a few dollars to reduce the noise even further. But you could set it to any price you want. If you REALLY don't want email from sources not included in your whitelist, you could set the deposit to thousands of dollars. With this system, you'll be HAPPY to receive spam! And spammers either won't be able to afford it, or recipients will start making some money.
Oh well. If they manage to blow up the whole damn planet, that would be one hell of a trip!
So let's extend this fairness in all directions. There is some small percentage of the population that lives in the gutters. They're the homeless. Many of them are alcoholics, drug addicts, etc., but that is beyond the point. They probably are because they were abused, so that makes it okay. Besides, it's irrelevant that they live in the gutter because they don't want to work, and only beg for money to feed their addictions.
Anyway, it's unfair that while these people live in the dirty gutters outside, other people live in nice houses. For that reason, the liberals should make everything fair by destroying all residential structures and passing legislation that forces everyone to live in the gutter. That way, everybody is equal.
Of course, the liberals who implement this will live in the most beautiful and elaborate palaces that anybody has ever seen. Of course they should live in such beauty and comfort. It's simply mankind's small token of esteem, a pleasant "thank you" for creating the benefit of equality for everyone else.
Think I'm kidding? They implemented high school "exit" exams that students had to pass in order to graduate. When they discovered that many people in some ethnic minority failed the test, they didn't try to fix the broken education system. They didn't try to clean up crime in those kids' (excuse me, age-challenged Americans') gangster-ridden neighborhoods. They simply cancelled the test. It's obviously a racist test, you see. And this example pervades everything those liberals touch.
Fair. Yeah, that's fair.
I sincerely hope that easyCinema appears, enjoys a lot of success, and causes exactly the domino effect that the MPAA fears. I want to see movie prices come down, and more importantly, I want to see this change affect the music industry as well. Finally, I hope that such a powerful domino effect causes laws like the DMCA to get taken out of the books.
Back in the day (several old geezers I know have told me stories and they are all similar in this respect), if you had to have surgery done or whatever, you could "do business" with the doctor (bargain on price). Once the price was agreed, the service was carried out and you paid the doctor. That was simple. Then, a bunch of liberals came along and said, "Wait a minute. Some people can't afford health care! Let's make it so that everybody can get healthcare, regardless of ability to pay." It sounds like a good idea, right? Sure it does! But it's a pie-in-the-sky. The minute government got involved, everything got expensive. All of a sudden, there are a million billion forms to fill out, all kinds of procedures to go through, etc. The accounting and paperwork became so expensive for doctors that prices had to become sky-high. Suddenly, doctors were spending more time doing this petty crap than helping patients who need help. (In fact, as recently as two weeks ago, a doctor friend of mine told me that now, because of even MORE laws, he has to fill out an ADDITIONAL packet of 25 or so pages for EACH patient. How do you expect prices NOT to be so high?)
Since health care became so expensive, all kinds of insurance companies saw an opportunity to scam people out of good money. They scam you and they scam the doctors. Health insurance became a necessity due to high prices. So now, you pay your insurance company all the time, and if you need to have something done, you pay a deductable and they pay 10% or so of what's left. For example, someone I know had a cat scan at one time because of a mysterious problem he had. He received a bill for $3,000.00, which his insurance was taking care of. According to an insurance statement that he showed me, the insurance company paid $300.00 to the hospital, and that was the entire payment. In other words, 10% of the amount. But it gets better. Another doctor I know told me that because the insurance only pays about 10%, he and every other doctor/clinic/hospital multiplies the price by 10, so that when they get paid 10% by the insurance, they get what they should actually be charging. So now, if you DON'T have insurance, you probably can't afford ANY health care, because for YOU, the prices are ten times as much. So insurance became nearly mandatory for anyone who isn't a millionaire.
That's why health care is expensive. To recap: Government intervention made everything extremely expensive. Insurance companies caused prices to multiply by ten beyond the government-created prices. That is why I am against any sort of government meddling in health care. Let the doctors do what they need to do without all these damn forms and the bullshit. People should pay the doctor directly. If you can't afford to pay the doctor, go to a free clinic or send the bill to a nonprofit organization that pays for people like that through donations. They make the money through marketing. There are millions of people who will see commercials of sick kids and immediately call with their credit card ready. And it'll be tax deductable anyway. This way, the problem is solved. No more paying hundreds in insurance ALL THE TIME when you'll just pay a hundred or so IF SOMETHING HAPPENS. If you get seriously sick, well, the money you saved over your lifetime (if the government would stop taking it all away to fund a healthcare system that costs 1000000 times as much as it should) will pay for that and leave a pretty chunk of change for the kids to inherit after you croak. It's as simple as that. Want insurance? Then get insurance. But don't make 95% of the people suffer through this horrendous shit because 5% of the people (of which maybe 0.1% or less are actually sick) can't afford to pay a damn doctor. Besides, doctors are people, too, and if someone is sick, they'll probably help them out.
Thanks... I was at a loss for words when I wrote that post. The other word I was looking for was aesthetic. I was trying to say that there is something mysteriously aesthetic about text configuration files, scripts and source code, and the algorithms that process them. It probably sounds stupid, but hey... whatever floats your boat.
It's a shame that SGI is slowly going down the tubes. Back in the 80's, this company made some of the most incredible hardware and software there ever was. I remember seeing a few of those computers in action. One of the earlier models, a 32-bit RISC model (at a time when most personal and business computers were 286s) was able to graphically transform the design of automobile parts in ways that I never imagined possible. Heck, 2d side-scrolling video games with 16 colors were, like, high tech! I had the pleasure of using a few of these computers on several occasions, but never had the pleasure of owning one. (There is something very aesthetic about an SGI. I don't know what it is.) Back in the 80's, these computers did what today's PCs are just beginning to do. I deeply hope that Linux will acquire a lot of great graphics technologies, and that the "magic" of SGI will live on, if in another form.
Thanks for clearing that up for me.
One of the largest problems in the software business and the computer industry as a whole is an utter lack of knowledge. For some reason, I doubt that a field like, say, structural engineering would contain so many people who don't know jack. Buildings would collapse left and right. They don't, yet in computer jobs, there are hordes of people who make Windows applications by dragging shiny objects onto a pretty grid, fill in some properties, and call it programming. Lots of folks are taking computer science courses at the local community colleges, yet they don't seem "the type" to do this sort of work. (Indeed, I saw one girl studying at the local library... she was highlighting just about every sentence in a text about different types of loops, and she obviously wasn't "getting" it.) Why is this?
There are many programmers who "get by" by writing cheesy code (with as many holes in it as Swiss cheese). The problems caused by this lack of expertise are enormous. Billions of damages are caused to businesses every year because of computer failures. Many of those failures are due to bugs in software. Many are due to security problems. How can the problem be solved? Passing legislation that makes it illegal to discuss security problems won't solve the problem. There would be "underground" discussions of these things, and the crackers would freely share information that law abiding folks won't. Crackers will break into systems more easily than before the legislation and businesses will be slow to react, causing more damages. It would be the computer equivalent of making guns illegal to law abiding citizens. (After all, the criminals are above the law anyway. If someone is so inclined as to murder people, what difference does it make if some silly law says he can't have a gun?)
The unskilled programmers (who don't even like this work) should stop dreaming of getting rich quick. However, the programmers who are skilled should expand their skills in every direction possible. Certainly, each programmer should focus on the things he does best in order to be more effective at those particular skills, but there is nothing like experience in different types of programming to make someone flexible in this field, creating job security and expert authority. Perhaps a game programmer should try a small database job. Or a database programmer should try hacking some small feature into an operating system kernel.
Viruses are a legitimate subject of study. By teaching viruses, universities will give people a lot of power. Some will undoubtedly use it for evil, and we'll get some new viruses out there. But this would happen anyway.
Who, for example, are the best security consultants when it comes to credit fraud, insurance fraud, computer fraud, etc.? The perpetrators! There are examples of folks who committed all kinds of crimes and went to prison. Afterwards, they became "white-hat" consultants in their fields, teaching banks, governments, businesses, etc. how to protect themselves from people just like the consultant. They often make more money by teaching this knowledge for purposes of good than they did by committing the fraud in the first place. In other words, if you have experience with performing some act, then you undoubtedly know more about what makes someone vulnerable or safe from that act than any fool claiming to be a security expert.
The advantage of teaching viruses, which heavily outweighs the disadvantage of misuse by a large degree, is that programmers who have experience with viruses--not just by removing them from friends' clutter-ridden computers but by writing them and finding out what is effective from a virus writer's standpoint--will be more effective at designing systems and writing software that is less prone to the evils of viruses.
I think the field of Computer Science would benefit by teaching SPAM, cracking, and other forms of abuse in order that honest folks (nearly all of us) can protect themselves from the dishonest ones with the very same knowledge that makes the dishonesty so effective.
- Why am I so fascinated by the old computers of generations gone by?
- Why are those old mainframes that can do less than a PDA so fascinating?
- Why would I rather save up money to buy a personally crafted writing table as opposed to a $50.00 one made out of particle board by machine?
- What is so "magical" about UNIX-like operating systems?
- Why is it fun to spend a weekend hiking in the desert, where there is no running water, freezing your butt off, sleeping in a tent with all kinds of weird things crawling on you?
- Why is some really complex source code, script, configuration file, etc. so interesting?
- Why does code, highly optimized beyond readability (especially assembly) have a "feel" to it?
- Why is some PDP-11 with tape for storage so intriguing?
- What is so interesting about Lord of the Rings?
- Why is it so much fun to play games with words, making up double-meaning phrases and the like?
The answer is a bit complex.First of all, things that are crafted together by skilled hands have an intrinsic value that doesn't exist in mass-marketed consumer products designed for an excessively consuming society. It all ties together. The way yogurt is made, the way beer is brewed, the way a unique muscle car is built, the way a particularly crafty piece of code is written (whether new or old), the way an oak writing desk is made, the way a 25 year old 4-bit computer can multiply 16-bit integers faster than the newest Pentium 4's, the way the computer on Voyager II can be reconfigured from a million billion miles away without crashing, the way your personally hacked Linux kernel does something nobody else has thought of... it all happens because of craftsmanship. Yeah, those old mainframes probably crashed more often than Windows does today, but there is some kind of value (for which I cannot find a word) that exists in things made by the truly skilled... by the wizards, the gurus, the master craftsmen.
Secondly, there is something in the "hacker culture" (see the Jargon file) that draws people like us to the values that I'm describing in the paragraph above. It doesn't matter what your other hobbies are, whether they involve nature, ham radio, literature, etc. There is something about freedom, quality, beauty (even if it isn't physical beauty), correctness, practicality, craftiness, challenge... It's a way of thinking that people outside the hacker community have apparently forgotten.
Actually, I can understand the reasons for doing this. IIRC, 802.11x works on frequencies that are for "public" use, and as such, producing too much junk in the air could (and probably) will screw up all kinds of other services, seeing how this technology will probably spread to cover all populated areas. I may be confusing this with a different technology, so please excuse me if I am... It's Thursday and I'm already drunk.
Don't ask me why that was a blockquote. Just to make the layout interesting, I guess.Look at how many opportunities Microsoft gives to virus writers. For the longest time, virus writers could use the scripting capabilities of all Microsoft applications to execute a virus. Now, they have an additional tool in their arsenal: The private member functions that aren't supposed to be accessible. Just wait until some truly innovative virus comes along that is able to bypass all of Microsoft's "patch upon fix forever" security that is supposed to keep script viruses from executing.
Microsoft. Where do you want to go today?
Software crashes because: Software is an immature field. Good software takes time. Software is unobvious to business managers who want the job done yesterday.
Businessmen generally do not understand the internal workings of software. They are in a "big-picture" sort of world where software is but one pesky detail that will be taken care of. A computer crash that causes so many thousands of dollars in damages is no different than a truck crash. There is simply a risk to every element of business. If the risk is relatively low, the big shots don't care about it. Grocery stores in earthquake prone areas continue to place glass jars on the edges of shelves. Sure, there will be an earthquake one day, but it's a calculated part of business risk, and the risk is relatively low (the Earth doesn't shake every five minutes).
Software bugs are a similar risk. It needs to look like it works. It needs to crash (and lose data) infrequently enough that the software will still sell. The business is not concerned with stamping out software bugs. It is concerned with releasing the software and making money. If the need arises, the business will improve the software and make more money. More often than not, this means adding features and shiny graphics. Fixing bugs is not very important to companies because customers do not pay for bug fixes. By the consumer, bugs are viewed as defects and their fixes should be free. By the company, bugs are viewed as a minor risk and fixing them would cost too much to justify. So you'll reboot once in a while or lose an hour's work once in a while. If it fries your hard disk, well, you should have backed up your data.
Software is also one of the newest fields of human endeavor. Buildings have been built, ships have sailed and farms were farmed, all for thousands of years. No matter how much progress happens in these fields now, they have come so close to "perfection" that continued improvement serves to lower cost, improve safety and increase convenience. It's not a matter of, "Gee, how can we make buildings that actually stand without falling down three times a week?" It's just a matter of, "How wide, how deep, how tall and what color glass do you want on the outside?" You pay X dollars, wait Y months and voila, there is a building. But programming has been around for how long, 50 years? It's an increasingly important but very immature field.
Buildings, bridges, ships... they're obvious. Everyone knows that if enough lifeboats aren't put on an unsinkable ship, it'll sink on purpose, just to piss you off. Everyone knows that if a 100 story building is going to stand, it has to take 10 years to build it. Everyone knows that a dam has to be pretty damn strong or it'll break and flood half the countryside. The building, shipyard and dam businesses aren't progressing at light speed. It is easy to justify 10 years for an outrageous building design because people KNOW what is involved. But software... Now that's totally unobvious. Software is an idea. It's abstract. It's a bunch of curse words that look like gobbledygook to the uninitiated. A bunch of "noise" characters on a broken terminal. Something done by a bunch of skinny, pimply faced geeks who got beat up in high school, took the ugly girl to prom and didn't have any friends. Why should a manager bother to care that fst_jejcl_reduce() causes a possible NULL pointer in the outer loop if case 32 is activated, which happens if the previous re-sort encountered two items with similar Amount fields, all of which will take a whole day to find and fix and will only happen, say, 2% of the times this particular feature is invoked by the user, which isn't that often? Why should anybody justify spending 2 years to develop some bulletproof program that can be banged out in 3 months, with bugs? What's the problem? Constructor workers are risking their lives, moving heavy things, sweating all day in the hot sun... While geeks are sitting in offices just punching crap on a keyboard. How difficult could it possibly be? To
I'm sick of all these wrong evolution theories so I'm gonna tell what really happened.
Let's set up the scene with some background information (it'll be short, I promise).
So there was Adam and Eve and they chilled in Heaven just minding their own business. (We're skipping the whole "On the first day" story because you already know about that.) So the Lord told Adam, "Don't eat the fruit of this tree or you'll croak. And tell your wife."
So Adam goes and tells his wife, "See that tree over there? Don't eat its fruit. In fact, don't even go near the damn thing; Pappy said if you touch it, you'll croak."
So Eve is chillin' when this serpant comes around and says, "Pssst... See that tree over there? Eat its fruit! It's good!"
So Eve says, "But if I even touch that tree, I'll croak!"
So the serpant says, "Nuh uh! See, I'll touch it... Nothing happens!"
Seeing this, Eve gathers a little bit of courage, goes up and touches the tree... Nothing happened. So she grabs a big juicy naranja off the tree, peels it and takes a taste. Mmmmm! Then Adam comes over and sees what's going on... "What the fsck, Eve, I thought I told you not to touch that tree!"
And Eve says, "But you see, I did touch it and nothing happened!"
So Adam takes a taste. Then, the Lord's voice comes booming over the public address system, "I told you kids not to eat that damn fruit!!!" Adam and Eve grab a leaf or something to cover up their privates, see, because they suddenly realized they were naked, and the Lord drove them out of heaven in his red '64 Chevy II.
So here they are, on Earth now, and they have a couple of kids... One of 'em kills the other and is subsequently punished by being forced to forever roam the Earth with a Windows logo tatooed on his forehead.
Now just so you understand, the Lord created a bunch of animals, like fish and tigers and whatever, and then He created people. The people he created were special... Much more intelligent than animals by a far measure. Much more intelligent than any person alive today. They were "superhumans." Now this hermano with the Windows logo on his forehead walks around and screws every chimp and gorilla and baboon in sight. (Yeah, I know, that's gross.) His superhuman genes mixed with their animal genes and created some "middle-of-the-road" creature.
That's the human being of today... It's why many of our genes are similar to those of the animals. I know all of this for a fact and I have undeniable proof: On separate occasions, two different people, who do not know each other, both told me they heard this somewhere.
In order to support his family, the electrician needs to wire light switches all day, every day. Electricians don't wire one switch and live off it forever for the virtue that the switch has provided a solution to a problem. However, management at companies like SCO don't realize that software is the same way. At SCO, they made some breakthrough 20 years ago and think that they need to continue getting paid for it forever. I'm sorry to say this, SCO, but like the electrician, you need to continuously make breakthroughs, you need to continuously make new solutions... you have to stay ahead of everyone else through continuously improving good management, continuously improving good project planning, continuously improving good software... continuously improving EVERYTHING. You can't write some "hello world" 20 years ago and charge every Linux user 200 bucks "royalty" for it now. It's yesteryear's news. It's stale. Nobody cares. And quite frankly, your code probably sucks anyway and will be replaced faster than shit going through a tin horn. Try firing your stupid management and putting people in place who will encourage new ideas and new development, and harbor success through good products and good marketing, instead of trying to weasel a profit through litigation, whining like a bunch of babies and making your company look pretty damn stupid. Hell, you people should quit your jobs at SCO and go work for Microsoft. At least over there your actions will fit in better with the mission statement.
What do I have to say about the "viral" GPL? Like any other action that you can make in life, you have to think before you act and you have to be responsible for your actions. At SCO, "Gentlemen, you fucked up." And now you and your all-Godly shareholders will suffer the consequences of those actions... NOT THE LINUX COMMUNITY.
SCO's startup script directories suck, IMHO. I honestly don't see the advantage of filling the filesystem up with all kinds of garbage a la SCO when a simple text file containing a few configuration options will suffice just fine.
Since I will likely get modded down for talking such blasphemy on this screwed up init system anyway, I may as well go ahead and say that FreeBSD's system is really cool. The defaults are read from /etc/defaults/rc.conf and then your overriding settings are read from /etc/rc.conf... As far as all these useless runmodes are concerned... On FreeBSD, the system starts up in Single User mode and then immediately switches to Multi User mode. These are the only two modes that I could ever conceive uses for. I don't understand why all these Linux distros give you 10 different runmodes, of which only one or two are ever used, with five or so of them being used solely for different types of shutdowns and restarts, and in fact, one of the first things I do on any Linux distro is blow all those excessive modes off. Either this machine uses XFree or it doesn't... it's not that hard to start from the command line if you don't ALWAYS use it. Oh, well... Maybe I'm just an ignorant fsck.
Yeah. It's annoying. Cheating also takes place in casinos and in other physical forms of game play. It's a difficult problem that has been around since games were invented... and it's not going away anytime soon. I don't claim to know the answer. It's just like SPAM, popup ads, and all sorts of other online annoyances. There may not even be a good technological solution... The only thing I can think of is to play with people you know, and if you play with someone else, be wary of what's going on. If they cheat, fuck 'em... There are lots of other people to play with.
I save proof of the offending material, along with the IPs from which it was obtained, etc., such that I could prove it in court. At that point, I go to the CEO and demand weekly "protection" payments to commence immediately in the amount of US$2,000.00 (what a good deal), adjusted semi-annually for inflation and/or any arbitrary amount selected by me, whichever is greater.
KIDDING ASIDE I would actually handle this situation legally and ethically: Save the proof I talked about a moment ago for my own protection, but not to bring down the company. Then, I go to the most in-charge people in the company and talk to them about the problem. Let them call the police, fire the guy, or do whatever they think is right. I save proof of these meetings (like, audio tape of talking to the big shots about it). If they fire me for bringing up the subject with them, or try to silence the issue without busting the asshole who is doing it, I then deem the company unethical and call the police, the media, and every customer this company has and tell everyone about it, getting the company busted big time for not only having tons of child porn on their boxes but also for trying to shut me up and discredit me. It'll be on O'Reilly faster than shit going through a tin horn.
Oh yeah... And either way, I'd get the biggest, baddest gangsters in town to kick the ass of whoever is looking at that material. It's immoral and unethical because it wastes bandwidth that should be used for transferring FreeBSD ISOs around instead. Want porn? Buy a magazine, asshole.
This reminds me of the time I was walking down the street, just minding my own business, when some nicely dressed gentlemen on bicycles were going around passing out Morman religious materials. Since I am proud of my religion, I find it somewhat offensive when these guys come up and offer theirs. They always like to ask questions, too. So these two guys come up and ask me if I'd like a Bible. (At least they cut to the chase this time.) Holding up my arms as if presenting a new reality, I say, "This... is the construct." The guys were like, uh, let's get out of here!!! On another occasion, I said, "Do you hear that?" (Hear what?) "That is the sound of inevitability."
The big shots in corporations really do believe that they are rightfully entitled to stay in business forever and to grow and increase profits forever as well. Anything that prevents a multinational from gaining more power over the consumer (whether it is technology, new consumer trends, a new competitor, etc.) should be illegal, in their view, including the little guys who are trying to make a living.
What if you could do the reverse, and given a person's name and shit, retrieve their browser cache? Hmmm...
And this is definitely a COMPELLING solution. The way I see it, every product should self destruct after 48 hours. Bought a computer? Well, a $2,000 computer should be the first thing to self destruct after 48 hours. The warranty card would read, "This warranty expires 47 hours and 59 minutes and 59 seconds and 999 milliseconds after you make up your mind to buy a computer, and not even this particular one!"
Bought a new car? They should attach explosives all over the car... don't worry, 48 hours after leaving the dealership, a buzzing sound will alert you and your passengers that you must exit the vehicle, and then the car will drive itself under automated control to a safe part of the desert before exploding. And yes, you still have to pay off the financing for the new vehicle. In fact, dealers will be extra innovative in this respect: You'll simply subscribe to receive a new car every 48 hours and your bank account will simply be debited for the $25,000 or whatever the MSRP is for each occasion. If you don't have that amount of money at the bank, the dealer will provide an alley for you to prostitute yourself in order to earn the money. In fact, it will become federal LAW that you MUST prostitute yourself in order to pay for self-destructing products, as it is the God given right of multinational corporations to enjoy eternal perpetually increasing profits, and it will simultaneously be illegal to prostutute yourself, thus putting you in a situation that you will go to jail no matter what you do, and you will have to subscribe to a new "eMafia" protection service to avoid such arrest. It will obviously be illegal to bypass any devices that make the car blow up after 48 hours, and if you do so, you'll get more time in jail than a murderer or a rapist. In fact, to make the justice system more balanced in light of today's enormous piracy problems, murder charges and rape charges will be reduced to misdemeanors, because those crimes aren't all that bad, but if you God-forbid copy an album so you can perform the horrendous crime against humanity, a thousand times worse than any genocide this world has ever seen, the criminal act of listening to an album that you paid 20 bucks for... you should be beaten nearly to death but simultaneously kept alive, and tortured, and made to suffer the worst of all sufferings of the world combined and then some, because you are the dirtiest, slimiest, shittiest, more horrible criminal this world has ever seen, and shame on you.
Oh yeah... Houses will be made to self destruct in 60 hours, to compensate for the fact that you need to move your belongings in before they self destruct.