After I left the Finnish church (in Helsinki) some 15 years ago, nobody came to see me or anything. I have had the occasional Jehova's Witness ring my doorbell, but no-one from the state church.
But then you get a phone call every time they do want to install something. Better is to install sysresccd on a USB hard drive, configure the system just that once the way the users want it and use partimage to store an image of the computer's hard drive on the USB drive. When they get to trouble, restore the image and you've got a working system again - you could even set up a script to do this. In case of security updates, you of course need to restore the image, do the installation and create a new image, but this is much easier than hunting down all the spyware and whatever garbage the users have installed on the computer.
Some of the MacBook Pros have a faulty motherboard causing kernel panics when using a wireless connection. See this thread for details, but the upshot is that if you buy a MBP, it might be a good idea to download some big files over wireless immediately, so if you have this problem you can get a replacement computer immediately. There is some short window (one or two weeks?) within which you can get the computer declared DOA, and if you find out about the problem after that you will have to send the computer to be repaired, which might take a long time.
The following two problems appeared in IMOs 1993 and 1994 (you can find the answers using Google, but I won't give a direct link).
A solitaire game is played on an infinite square grid. Initially, there are n^2 pieces in an n*n square formation. On each move, the player moves a piece either horizontally or vertically over an immediately adjacent piece into the square beyond, which must be unoccupied, and removes the piece that was jumped over. The objective is to end up with only one piece on the board. For which values of n is this possible?
Show that there exists a set A of positive integers with the following property: given any infinite set S of prime numbers, there are positive integers k>=2, n and m such that both n and m are the product of k primes in S, n is in the set A and m is not in the set A.
Are you referring to the lack of a king in Finland? While I'm no legalese expert, I do believe that "high treason" denotes not only serious crimes against a sovereign but also ones against a country. So, one way for a Finnish citizen to commit it would be to co-operate with the enemy at a time of war in order to overthrow the government. (But perhaps my translation of "maanpetos" was wrong?)
If you know about illegal activity and don't report it, you're alredy over the line.
This is only true for the crimes listed in Ch. 15, Sec. 10 of the Finnish Criminal Code. These are serious crimes such as murder, rape, robbery, high treason, terrorism. Copyright infringement is definitely not one of them.
Another list of bottom-200 movies can be found at Everyone's a Critic (free registration required), select Movie Rankings from the menu. The current bottom-5 is Battlefield Earth, Spice World, Freddy Got Fingered, Glitter and Leonard Part 6.
I think this is a really bad move from OIRB, in the long run.
If you're an ISP that's providing connectivity to a spammer, you will get on a number of centralized blacklists, like SpamCop's list. Once this starts to affect your business, you kick the spammers out, and get off these lists. That's how the lists are supposed to work.
However, if the centralized lists are prohibited from blocking you, people will start adding you on their own blacklists. Eventually, you will be on thousands of different lists that are updated manually and that you don't know about... and no matter how hard you kick out the spammers, you will remain on these lists practically forever, since there is no central authority that you can ask to remove you.
Would there have been a Linux if the Government of Finland stepped in
In fact, the Government of Finland, via the University of Helsinki, funded the beginnings of Linux by keeping Linus employed and not bothering him. Of course, nowadays the university is, shall we say, much more proactive about IPR issues, so it won't probably happen again.
In most traffic lights in Helsinki, the button does seem to affect the cycle, but not here. I timed it once with a stopwatch (I used to work near there, and walked across the intersection every lunch break), and the cycle length does not depend on whether you push the button or not. And as another poster said about some other intersection, pedestrians always have to wait, unless someone else was there earlier to push the button at the right time.
There is an intersection in the outskirts of Helsinki, Finland, where the push button works even worse. This is an intersection between two pretty big roads with major traffic, and there's a standard traffic light cycle going from "green for road A" to "green for road B", etc. If you are a pedestrian walking in the direction of either road, you need to push the button, and will eventually get a green light at the same time as the drivers on the same road. Now, guess what: the only way the button affects the lights is that you get a green light the next time it's possible -- if you don't push the button, the cycle is exactly the same except that the pedestrian light is red all the time. So the button does nothing but you need to push it to cross legally.
Here's an interesting article on spam filtering:
Boykin and Roychowdhury: Personal Email Networks: An Effective Anti-Spam Tool.
They describe an automatic system that can look at your emails and find out who your friends are. Its classification accuracy is supposed to be perfect (i.e., no false positives or negatives), but it will leave some email unclassified (i.e., "don't know"s), so it does need to be combined with another filter.
If you charged.01 cents an email, I don't think anyone would mind paying a cent for a hundred emails we sent out
To make this work, you will have to make it simple for naive users (think Outlook) to create email stamps. Then the next Outlook worm will hijack the mechanism and create millions of stamps for spam, and it will be the worm victims and not the spammer who pays for the spam.
To prevent this, you'd have to have a cumbersome system such as purchasing stamps in batches of 100 from a centralized server; then the damages caused by worms would be limited to the number of unused stamps currently on your system. But anything that is this complicated for the end user will not be very likely to catch on.
We do. As the body of the Financial Times article says, Rytsölä was fined for driving 70km/hour in a 40km/hour zone. (Now, if we really used the metric system, shouldn't it be in meters per second?)
Many countries name their science competitions "olympiads" or something like that. Here's a smallish list. By the way, the 41st International Mathematical Olympiad is being held in South Korea right now.
The Government's proposal is available on the Parliament's WWW site: click here. The URL is monstrous, and I'm afraid it may not be valid forever. However, if you speak Finnish, you should be able to find it by the code "HE 4/1999", or simply by searching for the text "virus".
Since Finnish is not yet one of the major languages of the world, here's my translation of the relevant section of the new law. I'm not a lawyer or a professional translator, and I'm especially ignorant of English legalese--my apologies for the inevitable errors here. Also, this is only the version proposed by the Government, and the law that was actually approved may be different.
Endangering data processing
Who, with intent to harm data processing or the functioning of a data or telecommunications system,
1) produces or makes available a computer program or a series of program commands designed to endanger data processing or the functioning of a data or telecommunications system or to damage the data or programs included in such a system, or distributes such a computer program or series of program commands, or
2) makes available instructions to produce a computer program or a series of program commands that paragraph 1 applies to, or distributes such instructions,
must be sentenced, unless the act is punishable more or equally severely by other law, of endangering data processing to a fine or at most two years of imprisonment.
Malicious intent is the most important point; the program can be anything harmful, not just a virus in the technical sense. Also, a guide to writing viruses will qualify.
There are several problems with Numerical Recipes. Don't take my word for it; see what the people at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab have to say: http://math.jpl.nasa.gov/nr/ They also list several alternatives.
Of course, after ESR's paper, marking a piece of open source code "please test" is equivalent to asking the author to have lots of people try it out.:)
Judging from the Java applet, the system is good once you get the hang of it. As a Finn, I'm slightly concerned about whether they will remember to allow us and other non-Americans to type our funny characters (such as åäö). You would either need another shift or two, or the kind of "accent characters" that the Palm devices use.
Slashdot Mirror
See also: http://www.nokiaplanc.com/ , http://www.nokiapland.com/ , etc (listed at http://www.nokiaplans.com/ ).
After I left the Finnish church (in Helsinki) some 15 years ago, nobody came to see me or anything. I have had the occasional Jehova's Witness ring my doorbell, but no-one from the state church.
But then you get a phone call every time they do want to install something. Better is to install sysresccd on a USB hard drive, configure the system just that once the way the users want it and use partimage to store an image of the computer's hard drive on the USB drive. When they get to trouble, restore the image and you've got a working system again - you could even set up a script to do this. In case of security updates, you of course need to restore the image, do the installation and create a new image, but this is much easier than hunting down all the spyware and whatever garbage the users have installed on the computer.
Some of the MacBook Pros have a faulty motherboard causing kernel panics when using a wireless connection. See this thread for details, but the upshot is that if you buy a MBP, it might be a good idea to download some big files over wireless immediately, so if you have this problem you can get a replacement computer immediately. There is some short window (one or two weeks?) within which you can get the computer declared DOA, and if you find out about the problem after that you will have to send the computer to be repaired, which might take a long time.
The following two problems appeared in IMOs 1993 and 1994 (you can find the answers using Google, but I won't give a direct link).
A solitaire game is played on an infinite square grid. Initially, there are n^2 pieces in an n*n square formation. On each move, the player moves a piece either horizontally or vertically over an immediately adjacent piece into the square beyond, which must be unoccupied, and removes the piece that was jumped over. The objective is to end up with only one piece on the board. For which values of n is this possible?
Show that there exists a set A of positive integers with the following property: given any infinite set S of prime numbers, there are positive integers k>=2, n and m such that both n and m are the product of k primes in S, n is in the set A and m is not in the set A.
Are you referring to the lack of a king in Finland? While I'm no legalese expert, I do believe that "high treason" denotes not only serious crimes against a sovereign but also ones against a country. So, one way for a Finnish citizen to commit it would be to co-operate with the enemy at a time of war in order to overthrow the government. (But perhaps my translation of "maanpetos" was wrong?)
This is only true for the crimes listed in Ch. 15, Sec. 10 of the Finnish Criminal Code. These are serious crimes such as murder, rape, robbery, high treason, terrorism. Copyright infringement is definitely not one of them.
For many questions like that, http://www.foodsubs.com/ is an invaluable help.
Another list of bottom-200 movies can be found at Everyone's a Critic (free registration required), select Movie Rankings from the menu. The current bottom-5 is Battlefield Earth, Spice World, Freddy Got Fingered, Glitter and Leonard Part 6.
See also a pretty photo, along with some explanations of the term "blue moon".
I think this is a really bad move from OIRB, in the long run.
If you're an ISP that's providing connectivity to a spammer, you will get on a number of centralized blacklists, like SpamCop's list. Once this starts to affect your business, you kick the spammers out, and get off these lists. That's how the lists are supposed to work.
However, if the centralized lists are prohibited from blocking you, people will start adding you on their own blacklists. Eventually, you will be on thousands of different lists that are updated manually and that you don't know about... and no matter how hard you kick out the spammers, you will remain on these lists practically forever, since there is no central authority that you can ask to remove you.
In fact, the Government of Finland, via the University of Helsinki, funded the beginnings of Linux by keeping Linus employed and not bothering him. Of course, nowadays the university is, shall we say, much more proactive about IPR issues, so it won't probably happen again.
In most traffic lights in Helsinki, the button does seem to affect the cycle, but not here. I timed it once with a stopwatch (I used to work near there, and walked across the intersection every lunch break), and the cycle length does not depend on whether you push the button or not. And as another poster said about some other intersection, pedestrians always have to wait, unless someone else was there earlier to push the button at the right time.
There is an intersection in the outskirts of Helsinki, Finland, where the push button works even worse. This is an intersection between two pretty big roads with major traffic, and there's a standard traffic light cycle going from "green for road A" to "green for road B", etc. If you are a pedestrian walking in the direction of either road, you need to push the button, and will eventually get a green light at the same time as the drivers on the same road. Now, guess what: the only way the button affects the lights is that you get a green light the next time it's possible -- if you don't push the button, the cycle is exactly the same except that the pedestrian light is red all the time. So the button does nothing but you need to push it to cross legally.
Here's an interesting article on spam filtering: Boykin and Roychowdhury: Personal Email Networks: An Effective Anti-Spam Tool. They describe an automatic system that can look at your emails and find out who your friends are. Its classification accuracy is supposed to be perfect (i.e., no false positives or negatives), but it will leave some email unclassified (i.e., "don't know"s), so it does need to be combined with another filter.
To make this work, you will have to make it simple for naive users (think Outlook) to create email stamps. Then the next Outlook worm will hijack the mechanism and create millions of stamps for spam, and it will be the worm victims and not the spammer who pays for the spam.
To prevent this, you'd have to have a cumbersome system such as purchasing stamps in batches of 100 from a centralized server; then the damages caused by worms would be limited to the number of unused stamps currently on your system. But anything that is this complicated for the end user will not be very likely to catch on.
Well, yeah, that's because it's an OS, i.e., software.
According to their anti-spam page, you can report spammers that offer Symantec products to spamwatch@symantec.com.
We do. As the body of the Financial Times article says, Rytsölä was fined for driving 70km/hour in a 40km/hour zone. (Now, if we really used the metric system, shouldn't it be in meters per second?)
Many countries name their science competitions "olympiads" or something like that. Here's a smallish list. By the way, the 41st International Mathematical Olympiad is being held in South Korea right now.
Since Finnish is not yet one of the major languages of the world, here's my translation of the relevant section of the new law. I'm not a lawyer or a professional translator, and I'm especially ignorant of English legalese--my apologies for the inevitable errors here. Also, this is only the version proposed by the Government, and the law that was actually approved may be different.
Malicious intent is the most important point; the program can be anything harmful, not just a virus in the technical sense. Also, a guide to writing viruses will qualify.There are several problems with Numerical Recipes. Don't take my word for it; see what the people at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab have to say: http://math.jpl.nasa.gov/nr/ They also list several alternatives.
Of course, after ESR's paper, marking a piece of open source code "please test" is equivalent to asking the author to have lots of people try it out. :)
Judging from the Java applet, the system is good once you get the hang of it. As a Finn, I'm slightly concerned about whether they will remember to allow us and other non-Americans to type our funny characters (such as åäö). You would either need another shift or two, or the kind of "accent characters" that the Palm devices use.