OK, mea culpa. It's certainly the case in the UK and France (obviously) and I'm pretty sure the EU as a whole. It's been a few years since I've been the US and I can recall an advert (it was very funny) that used the "leading brand" line, so I was assuming something similar was true. I must say, given the legal situation with patents, I'm somewhat taken aback that the other responsibility of the USPTO is so... lax. Oh well, the word's out now, I expect trademark lawyers in the US are looking for opportunities to catch up with their patent brethren at this very moment...
Would it be okay if a TV station let an advertiser infringe upon a trademark?
No. That's why when you see adverts comparing products they always say "a leading brand" or words to that effect. Even when it's pretty obvious who "the leading brand" must be, such as in Pepsi adverts for example, you still don't see or hear a mention of any competitor's trademarks.
Given that there are a couple of known vulnerabilities in XP even with SP2 installed (with DEP and IE), we can only hope that it is relevant if you have SP2 installed. However, given that the DEP vulnerability is quite recent I suspect that Microsoft might bump that patch until next month at least to allow for more testing. Just hope that a real cracker doesn't give the script kiddies a new toy to play with in the meantime...
While I largely agree that Microsoft is making an effort, they are still well short of where they ideally need to be. For instance, take a look at this, which is a remote exploit in a default Windows 2000 install allowing an attacker to gain full control over the system. That has to rate as a "Critical" on Microsoft's scale, and yet we are now six months and counting since eEye notified Microsoft of the problem and still no patch.
Perhaps they need to make that idea they had of spending a month just squashing bugs an annual occurrance instead of the one off PR exercise that it appears to have been. In fact, why stop at Microsoft; there are plenty of vendors that could do with adopting this kind of practice and not all of them are closed source either.
Mostly because not every one might appreciate having to download a huge patch for something they don't have installed. Also because the patches are covering multiple Windows versions, and EDS can tell you all about what happens when you apply a patch for one Windows varient over another...
A legitimate, non-tinfoil-hat use? OK, how about plugging it into a search engine's website spider? If the AI engine is smart enough, then it should be able to correctly determine whether a given page really is about a given subject, or if it is merely an attempt to increase its search engine ranking through hidden text and META tag spam.
I can't wait for real AI tough. I soooo want a Teddy like in A.I. (the movie)!
Yeah, but the rest of us Slashdotters are a little more mature than that. We want something more akin to a Marilyn Monroe-bot like in Futurama (the cartoon)!
The Pretec brandname has been around for a while and their products are often found at the leading edge of memory technology rather than the mainstream. I guess there is money to be made in targetting the niche sector that *really* needs high capacities in single cards like the 12GB CompactFlash card that they make. As the linked article says, you could get the same amount of storage in three cards for a tenth of the price, but if you have no choice...
CompactFlash is still very much around and unlikely to go anywhere soon because of its dominance in the high end digital camera sector. As far as I am aware it's still the smallest removable media format that you can get a Microdrive in. Secondly, it has consistently offered the highest available storage capacity in a single card - up to 12GB (so far) if you have the cash. Even if you could afford it, whether you would actually want to trust 12GB of data to a single card is another matter of course.
I'm sure that comment will get me flamed by all the patent-lawyers reading this.
Actually, since you singled out the USPTO, probably not as other patent offices look down upon the USPTO as something of a joke. The biggest problem with the USPTO is that its staff get paid a bonus for approving a patent application instead of finding prior art which would render it invalid. Yup, you read that right. Is it any wonder that they seem to approve just about every patent they see, and then leave it to the IP lawyers to resolve any disputes in court?
I don't think that there is anything wrong with the idea of patents in general, provided that they are only granted when there is due cause. The current situation is absurd, as is clearly illusatrated by this report at The Economist in which they conclude that over 30% of patents are duplicates of other works, and thus invalid. They don't see it getting any better as the Chinese, Indians and others become more active in western markets either.
"Less vulnerable" is right; I've seen several citation of this quote as an example that Linux code has fewer holes, which is not what it's saying at all. It's just about the fact that Linux software is more secure than Windows, but that the distro vendors have taken a page out of Theo's book. To be specific, more distros are now locking down their bundled services by default; instead of running a server straight after install it's either disabled or at the very least limited to localhost access. Other improvements like configuring IPTables, chroots for daemons and better security policies obviously help too. The actual daemons may still have vulnerabilities in them, but when the exploits come along they have nothing to exploit.
If Microsoft would adopt these policies with Windows, then I would expect them to see similar gains in this situation. Keep in mind that these are systems that are installed, connected to the Internet and left alone, so luser activity is not a factor. Well over 90% of the traffic I drop at my firewall are probes for MS-DCOM and MS-RPC, neither of which are needed on many networks, let alone standalone PCs. Add NetBIOS and the some of the services that Microsoft enables by default onto the list and a huge number of worms targetting Windows will have nowhere to go.
That was my understanding from reading the articles, in which case we have a precedent for Torrent sites that are merely linking to other sites providing the actually.torrent files.
This is really dealing with a similar legal quagmire to that the BSA got involved in some years back. The BSA tried (and largely failed) to use the law to shutdown certain sites linking to serials and keygens, but not providing the actual files themselves. In that case though, there was an extra step required; you still needed to acquire the actual software you are going to be using the serial or keygen with. This really combines the two into one, so while it's still a grey area in my book, it's definitely a darker shade.
I've come across several fellow photographers that came up with an appropriate pronunciation for such a fishy product name: "Starkist". Which just serves Pentax right for trying to be so pretentious if you ask me...
Yes, but Sweden's government paid for most of the installation of a fibre network. If you get taxed 60% of course you are going to get cheap broadband.
Actually, we could have had that kind of infrastructure in the UK too. Back in the 1980s BT wanted to replace the existing copper network with fibre across the board at its own expense. The catch was that it wanted the government remove the restrictions that were preventing it from becoming a content provider. Basically, their plan was to recoup the costs through competing with cable and satellite providers, but the government (Thatcher's) nixed the idea.
Yeah, I'd come across that formula before which is where my reference to trying other numeric bases came from. Similarly the reference to the message from God in Pi was from "Contact" by Carl Sagan (the book, rather than the film, as well as a nice link back to the Bible Code. And that's where I have a problem; the usual approach is more akin to looking for a hidden message rather than finding a reason *why*.
My own personal view is that few, if any, of these universal constants, whether mathematical like Pi and e, or physical like the speed of light and Plank's constant, are entirely arbitrary. There is a *reason* why Pi is 3.14159... instead of some other constant value, a reason why light travels at the speed that it does in a vacuum, and so on. While some of those reaons may be quite mundane, I think there are some profound insights into the nature and underlying structure of the universe hidden behind all those digits. Whether you would want to see that as pure science or looking for God's signature is entirely up to you.
Interesting, and a step beyond just using Pi (or e, or...) as a source of sequences of random numbers but I can't help but feel that there is an element of "Bible Code Syndrome" here. There seems to be a similar obsession with finding a pattern in Pi as some have with finding messages from God in the Bible. What happens if we do a statistical analysis of every nth digit? What happens if we do an analysis of all the odd digits? Or even digits? What if we reverse the sequence and try again? Try again in other number bases?
It's an infinite data set; apply an infinite number of methods of analysis and the odds are good that some of them will give results that might be considered meaningful. Even if you do find something, whether it's a something profound about the structure of the universe or even a message from God, you then have another problem. How are you then supposed to prove that it's not a statistical fluke keeping in mind that an infinite random data string will contain within itself every possible sequence?
Folks will just start distributing these patches through other arenas (torrent, newsgroups, web sites, etc.), or will develop methods (as they always have) to work around the system checks.
Let's re-write that shall we?
Spammers and Ad-ware vendors will just start distributing these trojans and malware pretending to be official MS patches through other arenas (torrent, newsgroups, web sites, etc.), or will develop methods (as they always have) to work around the system checks.
Can anyone see the problem for the rest of the Internet in Microsoft's plan yet? At least some of the people with dodgy copies of Windows would have been secure beforehand, but not once this scheme is launched. Now they are not only vulnerable to the next remote compromise but must pick their way through a minefield of malware too. The normal way around this is to publish checksums, but Microsoft can't do that without enabling the distribution of patches to users of unlicensed copies of Windows.
Better get used to those trojan probes bouncing off our firewalls I guess, because we're likely to be seeing a lot more of them in future...
I couldn't agree more with your sentiment about enabling the *optional* blocking of entire countries and character sets en-masse; I do it myself on my home mailserver via my own DNSBL and SpamAssassin. Verizon has apparently decided that it knows best however and its customers will just have to deal with it as best they can, which makes them fair game for being used as the poster child for my point. To paraphrase Spiderman; ISPs potentially have a great power to wield against spam, but with that power comes great responsibility. By all accounts Verizon needs a healthy infusion of the latter, and failing that a hefty whack with a clue-by-four.
Or, to turn that on its head, when your RFC breaking "spamblocker-challenge" doesn't work (because it's an ill thought out hack) would you want to cut your customers off from receiving email from Europe and Asia just so you have less spam to deal with? Further more, despite numerous complaints from both your own customers, people trying to communicate them and the threat of a class action lawsuit, would you continue that practice for more than a month?
If you answered "yes" to those questions, then a career at Verizon is waiting for you, because that is exactly what they are doing. If ISPs are going to take responsibility for blocking spam and the prevention of the creation of BotNets that originate most of it then they need to take more care than these idiots.
You could try growing Kudzu, that seems like it fends for itself pretty well. Also, you are not going to be hassled by your fellow cubicle mates asking for cuttings; they'll get them whether they want them or not. If they've got their own plants already, well that's just too bad... Best of all, if you are running Red Hat it will even configure your hardware for you, so there's a definite geek connection too...;)
Interesting that you should mention DTrace, because according to The Register it's getting open sourced under Sun's CDDL license. OSI approved the CDDL license a couple of weeks ago and it's basically a revamped version of the Mozilla Public License. If DTrace (or a reasonable facsimilie) can be made to work with Linux or other FOSS opererating systems then it's just a matter of time...
Why has it better getting progressively colder over the past 20 years in places like Russia and China?
Because, like many others, you are equating Global Warming to mean a literal rise in temperature across the globe. While Global Warming would indeed cause temperature rises, you need to take the step and think about what warming means to a substance being heated at a molecular level. Think about what happens to a pan of water as it is brought to boiling point and the increasingly extreme motion instilled in the water by the heat. Now apply that to the Earth's oceans and atmosphere, maybe even the planet's molten core too, although studies on this are *very* light on the ground.
All that extra molecular activity has to go somewhere, so we get increased extremes of climate in *both* directions. Because gasses are more susceptible to this than liquids, we are noticing these changes more in our weather than ocean current patterns, but it's there. All that adds up to hotter summers, colder winters, more energetic storms and all the other abnormal weather we are seeing.
All of the characters on the ciphertext side of Kryptos have been solved, except for 97 characters at the very bottom. There is also a question mark between parts 3 and 4. Some say the question mark is part of part 3 (since it ends with the question, "Can you see anything q"). However, it's possible that the question mark is part of part 4.
So, there you go. Having a question mark at the beginning is a little odd, unless it's a hint that you are meant to read it backwards like some of the other Kryptos puzzles.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, mea culpa. It's certainly the case in the UK and France (obviously) and I'm pretty sure the EU as a whole. It's been a few years since I've been the US and I can recall an advert (it was very funny) that used the "leading brand" line, so I was assuming something similar was true. I must say, given the legal situation with patents, I'm somewhat taken aback that the other responsibility of the USPTO is so... lax. Oh well, the word's out now, I expect trademark lawyers in the US are looking for opportunities to catch up with their patent brethren at this very moment...
No. That's why when you see adverts comparing products they always say "a leading brand" or words to that effect. Even when it's pretty obvious who "the leading brand" must be, such as in Pepsi adverts for example, you still don't see or hear a mention of any competitor's trademarks.
Given that there are a couple of known vulnerabilities in XP even with SP2 installed (with DEP and IE), we can only hope that it is relevant if you have SP2 installed. However, given that the DEP vulnerability is quite recent I suspect that Microsoft might bump that patch until next month at least to allow for more testing. Just hope that a real cracker doesn't give the script kiddies a new toy to play with in the meantime...
Perhaps they need to make that idea they had of spending a month just squashing bugs an annual occurrance instead of the one off PR exercise that it appears to have been. In fact, why stop at Microsoft; there are plenty of vendors that could do with adopting this kind of practice and not all of them are closed source either.
Mostly because not every one might appreciate having to download a huge patch for something they don't have installed. Also because the patches are covering multiple Windows versions, and EDS can tell you all about what happens when you apply a patch for one Windows varient over another...
A legitimate, non-tinfoil-hat use? OK, how about plugging it into a search engine's website spider? If the AI engine is smart enough, then it should be able to correctly determine whether a given page really is about a given subject, or if it is merely an attempt to increase its search engine ranking through hidden text and META tag spam.
Yeah, but the rest of us Slashdotters are a little more mature than that. We want something more akin to a Marilyn Monroe-bot like in Futurama (the cartoon)!
The Pretec brandname has been around for a while and their products are often found at the leading edge of memory technology rather than the mainstream. I guess there is money to be made in targetting the niche sector that *really* needs high capacities in single cards like the 12GB CompactFlash card that they make. As the linked article says, you could get the same amount of storage in three cards for a tenth of the price, but if you have no choice...
CompactFlash is still very much around and unlikely to go anywhere soon because of its dominance in the high end digital camera sector. As far as I am aware it's still the smallest removable media format that you can get a Microdrive in. Secondly, it has consistently offered the highest available storage capacity in a single card - up to 12GB (so far) if you have the cash. Even if you could afford it, whether you would actually want to trust 12GB of data to a single card is another matter of course.
Actually, since you singled out the USPTO, probably not as other patent offices look down upon the USPTO as something of a joke. The biggest problem with the USPTO is that its staff get paid a bonus for approving a patent application instead of finding prior art which would render it invalid. Yup, you read that right. Is it any wonder that they seem to approve just about every patent they see, and then leave it to the IP lawyers to resolve any disputes in court?
I don't think that there is anything wrong with the idea of patents in general, provided that they are only granted when there is due cause. The current situation is absurd, as is clearly illusatrated by this report at The Economist in which they conclude that over 30% of patents are duplicates of other works, and thus invalid. They don't see it getting any better as the Chinese, Indians and others become more active in western markets either.
If Microsoft would adopt these policies with Windows, then I would expect them to see similar gains in this situation. Keep in mind that these are systems that are installed, connected to the Internet and left alone, so luser activity is not a factor. Well over 90% of the traffic I drop at my firewall are probes for MS-DCOM and MS-RPC, neither of which are needed on many networks, let alone standalone PCs. Add NetBIOS and the some of the services that Microsoft enables by default onto the list and a huge number of worms targetting Windows will have nowhere to go.
This is really dealing with a similar legal quagmire to that the BSA got involved in some years back. The BSA tried (and largely failed) to use the law to shutdown certain sites linking to serials and keygens, but not providing the actual files themselves. In that case though, there was an extra step required; you still needed to acquire the actual software you are going to be using the serial or keygen with. This really combines the two into one, so while it's still a grey area in my book, it's definitely a darker shade.
- Free as in beer, but not as in speech - ie. some copyright infringement was likely to be occurring?
- Free as is speech?
- Free as in speech *and* beer?
The articles *seem* to be implying #1, but there's obviously a big difference and serious implications if it's one of the latter options.I've come across several fellow photographers that came up with an appropriate pronunciation for such a fishy product name: "Starkist". Which just serves Pentax right for trying to be so pretentious if you ask me...
Actually, we could have had that kind of infrastructure in the UK too. Back in the 1980s BT wanted to replace the existing copper network with fibre across the board at its own expense. The catch was that it wanted the government remove the restrictions that were preventing it from becoming a content provider. Basically, their plan was to recoup the costs through competing with cable and satellite providers, but the government (Thatcher's) nixed the idea.
My own personal view is that few, if any, of these universal constants, whether mathematical like Pi and e, or physical like the speed of light and Plank's constant, are entirely arbitrary. There is a *reason* why Pi is 3.14159... instead of some other constant value, a reason why light travels at the speed that it does in a vacuum, and so on. While some of those reaons may be quite mundane, I think there are some profound insights into the nature and underlying structure of the universe hidden behind all those digits. Whether you would want to see that as pure science or looking for God's signature is entirely up to you.
It's an infinite data set; apply an infinite number of methods of analysis and the odds are good that some of them will give results that might be considered meaningful. Even if you do find something, whether it's a something profound about the structure of the universe or even a message from God, you then have another problem. How are you then supposed to prove that it's not a statistical fluke keeping in mind that an infinite random data string will contain within itself every possible sequence?
Let's re-write that shall we?
Spammers and Ad-ware vendors will just start distributing these trojans and malware pretending to be official MS patches through other arenas (torrent, newsgroups, web sites, etc.), or will develop methods (as they always have) to work around the system checks.
Can anyone see the problem for the rest of the Internet in Microsoft's plan yet? At least some of the people with dodgy copies of Windows would have been secure beforehand, but not once this scheme is launched. Now they are not only vulnerable to the next remote compromise but must pick their way through a minefield of malware too. The normal way around this is to publish checksums, but Microsoft can't do that without enabling the distribution of patches to users of unlicensed copies of Windows.
Better get used to those trojan probes bouncing off our firewalls I guess, because we're likely to be seeing a lot more of them in future...
I couldn't agree more with your sentiment about enabling the *optional* blocking of entire countries and character sets en-masse; I do it myself on my home mailserver via my own DNSBL and SpamAssassin. Verizon has apparently decided that it knows best however and its customers will just have to deal with it as best they can, which makes them fair game for being used as the poster child for my point. To paraphrase Spiderman; ISPs potentially have a great power to wield against spam, but with that power comes great responsibility. By all accounts Verizon needs a healthy infusion of the latter, and failing that a hefty whack with a clue-by-four.
If you answered "yes" to those questions, then a career at Verizon is waiting for you, because that is exactly what they are doing. If ISPs are going to take responsibility for blocking spam and the prevention of the creation of BotNets that originate most of it then they need to take more care than these idiots.
You could try growing Kudzu, that seems like it fends for itself pretty well. Also, you are not going to be hassled by your fellow cubicle mates asking for cuttings; they'll get them whether they want them or not. If they've got their own plants already, well that's just too bad... Best of all, if you are running Red Hat it will even configure your hardware for you, so there's a definite geek connection too... ;)
Interesting that you should mention DTrace, because according to The Register it's getting open sourced under Sun's CDDL license. OSI approved the CDDL license a couple of weeks ago and it's basically a revamped version of the Mozilla Public License. If DTrace (or a reasonable facsimilie) can be made to work with Linux or other FOSS opererating systems then it's just a matter of time...
Because, like many others, you are equating Global Warming to mean a literal rise in temperature across the globe. While Global Warming would indeed cause temperature rises, you need to take the step and think about what warming means to a substance being heated at a molecular level. Think about what happens to a pan of water as it is brought to boiling point and the increasingly extreme motion instilled in the water by the heat. Now apply that to the Earth's oceans and atmosphere, maybe even the planet's molten core too, although studies on this are *very* light on the ground.
All that extra molecular activity has to go somewhere, so we get increased extremes of climate in *both* directions. Because gasses are more susceptible to this than liquids, we are noticing these changes more in our weather than ocean current patterns, but it's there. All that adds up to hotter summers, colder winters, more energetic storms and all the other abnormal weather we are seeing.
All of the characters on the ciphertext side of Kryptos have been solved, except for 97 characters at the very bottom. There is also a question mark between parts 3 and 4. Some say the question mark is part of part 3 (since it ends with the question, "Can you see anything q"). However, it's possible that the question mark is part of part 4.
So, there you go. Having a question mark at the beginning is a little odd, unless it's a hint that you are meant to read it backwards like some of the other Kryptos puzzles.