Well, then they can rewrite it. Entities with profit motives (the corporations) shouldnt even be getting involved in public works, unless they expect their contributions to be put into the public domain. A parallel example is legislation: the legal code is in the public domain.* Corporations cannot contribute copyrighted material to the legislature and get it published into the legal code, then claim copy rights over the legal code. Anything and everything that goes into there comes out as public domain.
* Theres actually one example I know of where this is not true; it was reported on Slashdot a while back. The building codes in some states are in fact owned by the organizations that created them (their reasoning being that these laws are highly technical and needed to be written by these specialists, not congressmen or their staff). This was being challenged in court last I heard, on the grounds I spoke of above, that all public works belong in the public domain.
As for retroactively open-sourcing publicly-funded works, anything with proprietary software intermingled with it would have to be handled with the cooperation of the owners of said proprietary components (i.e., something would have to be worked out). Maybe Eminent Domain laws would apply here?
But, if it were regulated from now forward that any publicly-funded projects must be 100% open-sourced. If a University involves their proprietary works in there, thats their loss. (Being profit-driven corporations, obviously, they wouldnt.)
Actually, like most other government-created/publicly-funded works (e.g., the legal code, etc.), the software should be released into the public domain. All software licenses, including the GPL, place restrictions upon code whether or not you believe the GPL is a good restriction or not, its still a restriction.
-----Original Message-----
From: cliff@slashdot.org
Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2002 06:45:01 +0000
Subject: Quoting in Emails?
Shanes asks: "I want to know how slashdot readers feel about the IMO
ever worse quoting habits of people writing mails. When I started writing
emails to friends and colleagues over 10 years ago I and everyone else
quickly learned how to quote. These days most of the bytes in my inbox are
"Original Message" quotes that Outlook people always include at the end of
every mail. Doesn't anyone care about sending well edited mails
anymore?" I have a simple rule, if I can't read it without editing it
first, it's probably not worth my time. Do any of you get frustrated by
the formatting of email in your inbox?
Well, it does have its purposes, other than seeing who likes whom, and so on. You can use it like a Usenet killfile; automatically apply a 6 rating to anyone in your foes list and their comments will not be visible to you unless you browse at 1. Unfortunately there is a hard threshold of 1 i.e., a +2 comment with a 6 weight applied becomes 1, not 4. Welcome to Slashdot math. I suppose this is intentional so comments dont drop off the map completely (since you cannot browse below 1), but I actually want comments to do that. Occasionally Ill browse at 1 to see the troll posts but would very much like idiots like this to not show up at all, there or anywhere.
What would be a Good Idea is a security-oriented filesystem that automatically wiped blocks in some manner upon freeing them, and if the data being (re)written to a block on a write() was shorter than the old data (to make sure there is nothing visible dangling off the end of the block).
Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend.
But isnt that a bit short-sighted? What happens when were overrun by lizards?
No problem. We simply release wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. Theyll wipe out the lizards.
But arent the snakes even worse?
Yes, but were prepared for that. Weve lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
But then were stuck with gorillas!
No, thats the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
No, they were just upset someone wasnt obeying one of their rules: that time it was their labelling standards. Now its something else. Then, it just happened that their objection happened to coincide with ours. This time it doesnt.
I know of their paranoia, and am glad they dont allow PRE tags; the spate of MMMMM floods last time there was a hole in their linebreaking routines was bad enough. But the Q tag is an ignored tag in most older browsers, takes no parameters, does no reformatting (like indentation) except adding a " or a or a or whatnot. Completely harmless, but good HTML. (Now that I think of it, if you read Slashdots HTML, is probably why they dont implement it.;)
Even deleting swapfiles is not enough, you need to wipe the free space on the drive. When you truncate a file, the remainder gets left in now-free blocks. When you expand a file, depending on the filesystem, it could actually pick the whole file up and move it to a larger set of contiguous blocks to avoid fragmentation. I dont know what, if any, filesystems do this in practice, but it is one possibility to consider. Then theres the fragments journaling filesystems leave all over the place.
And, the most obnoxious behaviour: some editing processes actually unlink() and write() the file to a new location in its entirety when you save. Ive witnessed vim change the inode value upon a save, so I could guess it has physically moved the file, also. When RCS checks out a file, it actually unlink()s the current checked-in version and proceeds to re-write() the checked-out copy. Im sure there are more examples.
Good reason to keep/var,/home,/tmp, and swap on separate partitions (or the first three symlinked to directories on one separate partition, if youre into symlinks). Wipe them clean without harming the OS. Even keep / and/usr mounted read-only to make sure nothing gets accidentally written there without your knowledge.
A couple subsequent dd runs couldnt hurt to obscure the signature better, either.
Of course, if Slash supported the <q> tag, half of this wouldnt be an issue I could use those tags to delimit quotations and then the display (straight, 66 99, or even the French guillements) would be handled by the readers language selection.
Thats the list of people he has selected as friends, i.e., he hasnt selected anyone. The list of people who like him is here; the fans listing, and there are plenty of them. Conversely, the people who do not like him are listed as freaks. (There are more, heh.) And, the people he does not like are his foes, which is also empty.
Eh, no problem. Actually on Macintosh (but WinNT/5.0 at work). You should see what the old Netscape does to those codes: it just vomits them out as plain text. (IMO doesn?t looks better than does’t... at least the former is easily readable.)
The government also requires us to ride on/in motor vehicles when we use the highways, regardless of the fact your bike will get you from Point A to Point B.
Expecting one to use Microsoft Word files in email is more akin to expecting one to drive a specific brand of motor vehicle, and guess what the government doest do that. You think its acceptable for certain government agencies to require communications in MSWord format? Would you therefore think it would be okay for the DOT to require you to buy a Ford next time you want to use their highways?
Infomercials are labelled in listings (TVGuide, the heads-up display that AT&T Cable uses, etc.) as infomercials or commercial programming. Ive never seen a magazine ad that wasnt obvious, usually they have a small bit of text in the margin marking it as an advertisement. Some websites also do that, for example, TheRegister (the little ad GIF can be seen here).
What are you talking about? Fission is a process on the atomic scale (breaking an atom into smaller atoms, e.g., Uranium-235 down into Barium-144 and Krypton-90), not breaking chemical molecules into their constituent atoms. You cannot break a water molecule into anything via fission, however the individual oxygen atoms within could be theoretically broken down into something else, even though oxygen is not typically considered fissionable (that is, most atoms do not have an affinity to split apart like Uranium or Plutonium do).
Some time ago, late September or early October, FARK.com linked to one of their polls which said that a fairly large percentage of Americans (not majoritive but still a disturbingly large amount) actually favored putting Arabs in internment camps in light of the terrorist events in September.
Yeah, that would be the optimum way of doing it (bad credit in a technological geek sense) but you just know if something like AT&T or AOL/Time-Warner/kitchen-sink started doing that it would be bad credit in a good consumer sense.
Dyanmic IPs? That would stop people from running servers (unless theyve heard of DynDNS), but how would it stop people from trading on filesharing programs? Portblocking is the next-best-answer (best being in their opinion), but even that can be thwarted by a lot of filesharing programs.
There usually is a clause allowing an ISP to disconnect a user for causing a significant detriment to the network or other customers use of it. I just think they dont enforce it much unless it actually caused them to lose large (or at least quantifyable) amounts of money to keep the user on.
The credit report thing sounds like a good idea until you get bad credit for using filesharing programs or trying to run a webserver on your machine. I think your/our idea of what should be bad credit would be quite different than the ISPs. (Ever actually read their entire AUP/TOS?)
Because if I block it in/etc/hosts its gone forever, to everything. Blocking it in Mozilla will not block it if, say, you download some filesharing program that has banner ads on it, or any other program for that matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, then they can rewrite it. Entities with profit motives (the corporations) shouldnt even be getting involved in public works, unless they expect their contributions to be put into the public domain. A parallel example is legislation: the legal code is in the public domain.* Corporations cannot contribute copyrighted material to the legislature and get it published into the legal code, then claim copy rights over the legal code. Anything and everything that goes into there comes out as public domain.
* Theres actually one example I know of where this is not true; it was reported on Slashdot a while back. The building codes in some states are in fact owned by the organizations that created them (their reasoning being that these laws are highly technical and needed to be written by these specialists, not congressmen or their staff). This was being challenged in court last I heard, on the grounds I spoke of above, that all public works belong in the public domain.
As for retroactively open-sourcing publicly-funded works, anything with proprietary software intermingled with it would have to be handled with the cooperation of the owners of said proprietary components (i.e., something would have to be worked out). Maybe Eminent Domain laws would apply here?
But, if it were regulated from now forward that any publicly-funded projects must be 100% open-sourced. If a University involves their proprietary works in there, thats their loss. (Being profit-driven corporations, obviously, they wouldnt.)
Actually, like most other government-created/publicly-funded works (e.g., the legal code, etc.), the software should be released into the public domain. All software licenses, including the GPL, place restrictions upon code whether or not you believe the GPL is a good restriction or not, its still a restriction.
Me too!
-----Original Message-----
From: cliff@slashdot.org
Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2002 06:45:01 +0000
Subject: Quoting in Emails?
Shanes asks: "I want to know how slashdot readers feel about the IMO
ever worse quoting habits of people writing mails. When I started writing
emails to friends and colleagues over 10 years ago I and everyone else
quickly learned how to quote. These days most of the bytes in my inbox are
"Original Message" quotes that Outlook people always include at the end of
every mail. Doesn't anyone care about sending well edited mails
anymore?" I have a simple rule, if I can't read it without editing it
first, it's probably not worth my time. Do any of you get frustrated by
the formatting of email in your inbox?
Well, it does have its purposes, other than seeing who likes whom, and so on. You can use it like a Usenet killfile; automatically apply a 6 rating to anyone in your foes list and their comments will not be visible to you unless you browse at 1. Unfortunately there is a hard threshold of 1 i.e., a +2 comment with a 6 weight applied becomes 1, not 4. Welcome to Slashdot math. I suppose this is intentional so comments dont drop off the map completely (since you cannot browse below 1), but I actually want comments to do that. Occasionally Ill browse at 1 to see the troll posts but would very much like idiots like this to not show up at all, there or anywhere.
What would be a Good Idea is a security-oriented filesystem that automatically wiped blocks in some manner upon freeing them, and if the data being (re)written to a block on a write() was shorter than the old data (to make sure there is nothing visible dangling off the end of the block).
That means its time to invest in a thicker tin foil hat.
Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend.
But isnt that a bit short-sighted? What happens when were overrun by lizards?
No problem. We simply release wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. Theyll wipe out the lizards.
But arent the snakes even worse?
Yes, but were prepared for that. Weve lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
But then were stuck with gorillas!
No, thats the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
(The Simpsons, of course.)
No, they were just upset someone wasnt obeying one of their rules: that time it was their labelling standards. Now its something else. Then, it just happened that their objection happened to coincide with ours. This time it doesnt.
I know of their paranoia, and am glad they dont allow PRE tags; the spate of MMMMM floods last time there was a hole in their linebreaking routines was bad enough. But the Q tag is an ignored tag in most older browsers, takes no parameters, does no reformatting (like indentation) except adding a " or a or a or whatnot. Completely harmless, but good HTML. (Now that I think of it, if you read Slashdots HTML, is probably why they dont implement it. ;)
Even deleting swapfiles is not enough, you need to wipe the free space on the drive. When you truncate a file, the remainder gets left in now-free blocks. When you expand a file, depending on the filesystem, it could actually pick the whole file up and move it to a larger set of contiguous blocks to avoid fragmentation. I dont know what, if any, filesystems do this in practice, but it is one possibility to consider. Then theres the fragments journaling filesystems leave all over the place.
And, the most obnoxious behaviour: some editing processes actually unlink() and write() the file to a new location in its entirety when you save. Ive witnessed vim change the inode value upon a save, so I could guess it has physically moved the file, also. When RCS checks out a file, it actually unlink()s the current checked-in version and proceeds to re-write() the checked-out copy. Im sure there are more examples.
Good reason to keep /var, /home, /tmp, and swap on separate partitions (or the first three symlinked to directories on one separate partition, if youre into symlinks). Wipe them clean without harming the OS. Even keep / and /usr mounted read-only to make sure nothing gets accidentally written there without your knowledge.
A couple subsequent dd runs couldnt hurt to obscure the signature better, either.
Ah, yes, the semicolon-less ’ entities.
Of course, if Slash supported the <q> tag, half of this wouldnt be an issue I could use those tags to delimit quotations and then the display (straight, 66 99, or even the French guillements) would be handled by the readers language selection.
Thats the list of people he has selected as friends, i.e., he hasnt selected anyone. The list of people who like him is here; the fans listing, and there are plenty of them. Conversely, the people who do not like him are listed as freaks. (There are more, heh.) And, the people he does not like are his foes, which is also empty.
Eh, no problem. Actually on Macintosh (but WinNT/5.0 at work). You should see what the old Netscape does to those codes: it just vomits them out as plain text. (IMO doesn?t looks better than does’t ... at least the former is easily readable.)
I type those curly-quotes intentionally. :)
Infomercials are labelled in listings (TVGuide, the heads-up display that AT&T Cable uses, etc.) as infomercials or commercial programming. Ive never seen a magazine ad that wasnt obvious, usually they have a small bit of text in the margin marking it as an advertisement. Some websites also do that, for example, TheRegister (the little ad GIF can be seen here).
What are you talking about? Fission is a process on the atomic scale (breaking an atom into smaller atoms, e.g., Uranium-235 down into Barium-144 and Krypton-90), not breaking chemical molecules into their constituent atoms. You cannot break a water molecule into anything via fission, however the individual oxygen atoms within could be theoretically broken down into something else, even though oxygen is not typically considered fissionable (that is, most atoms do not have an affinity to split apart like Uranium or Plutonium do).
Some time ago, late September or early October, FARK.com linked to one of their polls which said that a fairly large percentage of Americans (not majoritive but still a disturbingly large amount) actually favored putting Arabs in internment camps in light of the terrorist events in September.
Yeah, that would be the optimum way of doing it (bad credit in a technological geek sense) but you just know if something like AT&T or AOL/Time-Warner/kitchen-sink started doing that it would be bad credit in a good consumer sense.
No, I was implying that Mozillas config file only affects Mozillas settings.
Dyanmic IPs? That would stop people from running servers (unless theyve heard of DynDNS), but how would it stop people from trading on filesharing programs? Portblocking is the next-best-answer (best being in their opinion), but even that can be thwarted by a lot of filesharing programs.
The document-sending worm is SirCam.
There usually is a clause allowing an ISP to disconnect a user for causing a significant detriment to the network or other customers use of it. I just think they dont enforce it much unless it actually caused them to lose large (or at least quantifyable) amounts of money to keep the user on.
The credit report thing sounds like a good idea until you get bad credit for using filesharing programs or trying to run a webserver on your machine. I think your/our idea of what should be bad credit would be quite different than the ISPs. (Ever actually read their entire AUP/TOS?)
Because if I block it in /etc/hosts its gone forever, to everything. Blocking it in Mozilla will not block it if, say, you download some filesharing program that has banner ads on it, or any other program for that matter.