There are specific legal requirements that determines whether a document is a valid check or not, and size certainly isn't one of them in the US. If the bank is unaware that you have a habit of issuing weird sized checks, they might end up rejecting it, but if so that's because they're being careful, not because it isn't legally a valid check (assuming of course that it satisfies the criteria).
Hmmm. New potential revenue source for Adobe: Recognize watermarks in images and direct you to a website where you can buy a licensed copy of the image...
I'd hardly say the variablenames are meaningless. Their meaning may be obscure, but looking at it, most of them don't exactly look like randomly chosen strings. They are made worse by partial hungarian notation, though.
As for all the bit manipulation, what do you expect? It's crypto code.
The magic numbers are likely various keys hardcoded into the algorithm, and wouldn't be a problem.
This doesn't mean the code can't be problematic, but I don't think it's in any way obvious that he is treading on a slippery slope here.
Perhaps because this ISN'T against the law in Norway, and he is a Norwegian resident, located in Norway, and can even point to successfully getting off in the DeCSS case? If anything the public prosecutors in Norway are unlikely to be stupid enough to try to go after him again for doing something the court has explicitly made clear is legal.
Remember Altavista? It used to be "the" hot search engine. So did Lycos before that. The only reason Google seems bigger is that the audience is bigger. Search is such an integral part of peoples net experience that a new engine has the potential to rice to the top VERY quickly if the competitors don't manage to copy it and do what it does better almost instantly.
Your logic doesn't hold. Yes, laws can't be passed to make past distribution and use of DeCSS illegal, however laws can certainly be passed to make distributing or using DeCSS illegal from the effective date of the law onwards. (ObDisclaimer: I am not a lawyer...). The point being that in a civilized society the legislative shouldn't be able to pass laws that make a criminal of someone for something that was legal when they did whatever is being made illegal.
I believe he was referring to a specific Indian hosting company used by the spammer mentioned in the article, not generic spam friendly hosting companies.
Yeah, because finding this information is so incredibly hard, and would have taken the spammers a whole hour or two of intense work, so of course that's why they haven't done it.
If you think this will make a difference in the quality of the lists, think again. These people are more interested in volume than quality, or they wouldn't have spent time on spam in the first place.
The more unsophisticated spammers don't really care about the list quality, as they'll just keep accumulating addresses since sending out the mails cost them next to nothing anyway. The sophisticated spammers are more likely collecting their own lists.
And the people selling these lists have every interest in inflating the number of addresses as much as they can get away with from their prospective customer base.
Sure, that's why the US installed countless puppet regimes over the last 50 years or so, and why the CIA had no problems backing the Indonesian coup in the 60's that overthrew a democractically elected regime, and resulted in more than 30 years of military dictatorship and the genocide of more than half a million East Timorese.
The US is just as much empire building as Europe was, it's just acting the way the European colonial powers did when they tried to retain some semblance of power: By installing local puppet regimes instead of direct rule.
No, they can't keep attacking you. They can appeal twice, the second appeal is to the supreme court and is very limited in scope: Usually the supreme court will pick only a very limited number of cases for review, and the ones picked will usually be reviewed only on a basis of application of law or procedural issues, while evidence and findings of facts from the lower courts are likely to stand more or less unchallenged unless grave errors are uncovered.
The closest I believe would be cases involving violence where the victim(s) may have a "bistandsadvokat" ("assistance lawyer", don't know if there really is an equivalent English term) involved to represent their interests. However those lawyers do not prosecute the case, even though they may participate in some ways to ensure the victims interests are covered as well as the governments general interest in convicting a criminal.
According to Marx, they are the same. He used both terms interchangably.
Bullshit. Go read the Communist Manifesto, where Marx and Engels devoted a whole chapter to denouncing various forms of socialism, some he explicitly connected to reactionary or utopian movements, making it very clear that these forms of communism in Marx' and Engels' eyes were the wrong direction and would not lead to a communist society.
The terms socialism and communism are used in a few different ways in Marx' works depending on whether he is writing about economic, politics or philosophy, but the general difference is that Marxist socialism denote a political and economical system in which you have the dicatorship of the proletariat (where the working classes use the power given by their numbers to oppress the capitalist classes, with the goal of gradually taking away the means of production from the capitalists, forcing them to join the proletariat - or working classes - by virtue of no longer being able to survive by living of the works of others), whereas communism is a society where the nationstate has lost all political power, and "withered away" to become purely an administrative extension of the communes, and thus not exist in the capitalist sense of "state".
In terms of politics, the terms socialism and communism were frequently used by Marx' as expressions of the policies required to bring forth socialist and communist societies.
Socialism was by Marx' seen as a necessary precursor to communism.
I'd love to see how you think you can justify claiming that Marx' used the terms interchangably.
I assume that with "binders" you are referring to the paper clip, which was indeed a Norwegian invention, not binders (for non-Norwegian speaking people, "binders" is the Norwegian word for paper clip).
It wouldn't help you at all. UTC is derived from TAI by the use of leap seconds. Computer clocks aren't exact enough to follow TAI continuously (if you notice, they don't even trust a single atomic clock, but calculate it from accumulated data from more than 200), the result being that the computer clocks would also end up being adjusted by adding or temporarily slowing down the clock (even worse than UTC...) to keep in sync with TAI.
There's no point in taking the cost of making a regular PC measure time that exactly - it would add to the cost for no preceptible benefit for almost anyone using them.
Everywhere beyond the "moderate left", that is, Democrats in the US and social democrats and "socialists" in Europe you'll find the left complaining about government power. Remember that most marxists see current governments as oppressive tools of the capitalists, and many of them even wants to do away with national governments alltogether.
There has been for a couple of years, along with Guile, Python, Javascript, Ch (interpreted C/C++), Perl, Pike, PHP, Ruby, Scheme, S-Lang, Smalltalk and TCL, to mention a few typically interpreted languages with complete or partial bindings (a lot of compiled languages are obviously supported as well, including C/C++, Objective-C, C#, Java, Haskell, Erlang, Eiffel etc.. For some of these languages there are even several alternative bindings.
I've no idea about the quality of the various bindings, though. The official ones are Ada, C, C++ and Python, the rest are various third party efforts.
You're conveniently listing large corporate and government users for which the QT license fee is peanuts.
And pointing out that the FSF prefers the GPL is hardly a good argument for why one should choose a GPL'd toolkit for a distro intended for enterpise users... The FSF is hardly a bastion of support for corporations.
Last I heard people weren't being forced to use UserLinux. KDE is available, for free, to anyone who care to install it. So a Linux distro chose not to include multiple versions of everything, big deal. If you have a problem with it, make your own alternative (based on UserLinux if you so choose) distro with KDE only and people will have even more choice.
I'd love a distro that only provide a trimmed down set of apps, as it would save me the hassle of going through the guesswork of what I should remove or add to get a usable install, and let me focus on installing just whichever of the apps I commonly use were missing.
Obviously, with the number of apps available for Linux, you can assemble a usable, consistent desktop in a large number of ways, and I'm sure there's more than enough space for multiple distro's trying to do it right. I for one would stear clear of any KDE only ones, just as expect KDE fans to stear clear of Gnome only distros, or take the trouble of packaging and installing KDE on it.
The KDE and Gnome teams ARE working on interoperability issues, and have been for years. It's the users that are bitching and thumbing their noses at eachother.
The shortlist of what I still miss from my Amiga using days:
Datatypes - Amiga had a generalized system for basic handling of file types that allowed you to drop in a library to handle a data type (an image format for instance) and all programs that used datatypes and could handle the particular type of data (image, sound etc.) would instantly be able to load and save and manipulate the new format in various ways.
Assigns. Almost like symlinks, but volatile and not visible in the filesystem. Almost like shell aliases, but visible in file selectors
A usable file selector... I to this day have not seen any other one that I've been as satisfied with as the file selectors used on the Amiga (plural, because most people would use slightly enhanced onces, from the asl or arq libraries)
Workbench... There was much discussion about spatial finders here earlier. Amiga's Workbench had the basics, and was lightweight enough to be usable even on very slow machines. Back then I did manage my files graphically - I've not seen a graphical file manager that's been good enough since, though Nautilus is slowly approaching a usable state at least on CPU's a few hundred times faster than the Amigas
AREXX, or at least the automation it gave. I hate the language, but love the level of automation offered and having a standard API for doing it. DCOP, DBUS etc. seem to be slowly getting there, but it's still nowwhere near what the Amiga had 15 years ago. The beauty of it was simplicity - Arexx only passed arrays of strings around and got arrays of strings back, and how apps dealt with what they got was up to the apps. For most automation tasks that's all that's needed... Most newer attempts are severely over-engineered.
Some of the apps, that I've not yet found replacements for that I'm happy with: Diskmaster II (I've seen a few DOpus clones, and they might do the trick, haven't tried them though), Cygnus ED (combined with Arexx it was a great development environment), Deluxe Paint IV and Digipaint (Gimp may have more features, but Deluxe Paint and Digipaint are still miles ahead in terms of usability for basic freehand or pixel work)
Screens, and having app menus on top of the screen... MDI was a kludge. Menu bars in each app window each screen realestate. Screens were a nice clean solution, and I DID regularly use the ability to drag them. Enlightenment have or had support for draggable screens, but without app support for it you're only halfway there.
A standard way of handling command line options that also provided option overviews in a standard format that could easily be parsed by a program
Given that the A2000 had a 16bit data bus it would have made very little sense to use a 8088 on the PC card. 8086 was used in quite a few PC models including a t least one IBM manufactured PC (the PS/2 Model 30 I think). I believe Compaq was the first to use an 8086 instead of 8088.
Remember though that the main reason the 8088 was used by anyone at all was that there were plenty of cheap 8bit parts available but very few 16bit parts compatible with the 8086 at the time the IBM PC was introduced. The Amiga PC expansion cards arrived quite a few years later (the 286 came out in '82, the first Amiga's started coming out in '85 and I think the A2000 first arrived in '87) and 8086's were already used in low end PC's. Besides, the CPU on the PC expansion card needed very little support circuitry and it was more important to have a CPU that interfaced easily with the 16 bit data bus.
Actually the Amiga had it's own keyboard CPU too. It was a 6502 compatible chip with on board PROM and RAM clocked at somewhere above 1MHz.
I once had a really bastardized Amiga 2000, with a total of 6 general purpose CPU's in it (of which two were not in use): A 68000 on the motherboard, a 68020 acellerator card, a PC card with an 8086 (let you run DOS apps in a window on your Amiga desktop) upgraded with a 286 accelerator card, the 6502 compatible CPU on the keyboard and a Z80 controlled SCSI controller...
If you're doing it only for the money, then probably not. But if you'd like to spend time porting Mozilla anyway it's certainly a good added incentive to spend a few extra hours on it here and there.
Slashdot Mirror
There are specific legal requirements that determines whether a document is a valid check or not, and size certainly isn't one of them in the US. If the bank is unaware that you have a habit of issuing weird sized checks, they might end up rejecting it, but if so that's because they're being careful, not because it isn't legally a valid check (assuming of course that it satisfies the criteria).
Hmmm. New potential revenue source for Adobe: Recognize watermarks in images and direct you to a website where you can buy a licensed copy of the image...
As for all the bit manipulation, what do you expect? It's crypto code.
The magic numbers are likely various keys hardcoded into the algorithm, and wouldn't be a problem.
This doesn't mean the code can't be problematic, but I don't think it's in any way obvious that he is treading on a slippery slope here.
Perhaps because this ISN'T against the law in Norway, and he is a Norwegian resident, located in Norway, and can even point to successfully getting off in the DeCSS case? If anything the public prosecutors in Norway are unlikely to be stupid enough to try to go after him again for doing something the court has explicitly made clear is legal.
Remember Altavista? It used to be "the" hot search engine. So did Lycos before that. The only reason Google seems bigger is that the audience is bigger. Search is such an integral part of peoples net experience that a new engine has the potential to rice to the top VERY quickly if the competitors don't manage to copy it and do what it does better almost instantly.
Your logic doesn't hold. Yes, laws can't be passed to make past distribution and use of DeCSS illegal, however laws can certainly be passed to make distributing or using DeCSS illegal from the effective date of the law onwards. (ObDisclaimer: I am not a lawyer...). The point being that in a civilized society the legislative shouldn't be able to pass laws that make a criminal of someone for something that was legal when they did whatever is being made illegal.
I believe he was referring to a specific Indian hosting company used by the spammer mentioned in the article, not generic spam friendly hosting companies.
If you think this will make a difference in the quality of the lists, think again. These people are more interested in volume than quality, or they wouldn't have spent time on spam in the first place.
The more unsophisticated spammers don't really care about the list quality, as they'll just keep accumulating addresses since sending out the mails cost them next to nothing anyway. The sophisticated spammers are more likely collecting their own lists.
And the people selling these lists have every interest in inflating the number of addresses as much as they can get away with from their prospective customer base.
Except the spammers WON'T pay for bounces via bandwidth charges as they will most likely use a bogus from/reply-to address.
The US is just as much empire building as Europe was, it's just acting the way the European colonial powers did when they tried to retain some semblance of power: By installing local puppet regimes instead of direct rule.
Or try reading some Marx. It's hardly a new idea.
No, they can't keep attacking you. They can appeal twice, the second appeal is to the supreme court and is very limited in scope: Usually the supreme court will pick only a very limited number of cases for review, and the ones picked will usually be reviewed only on a basis of application of law or procedural issues, while evidence and findings of facts from the lower courts are likely to stand more or less unchallenged unless grave errors are uncovered.
The closest I believe would be cases involving violence where the victim(s) may have a "bistandsadvokat" ("assistance lawyer", don't know if there really is an equivalent English term) involved to represent their interests. However those lawyers do not prosecute the case, even though they may participate in some ways to ensure the victims interests are covered as well as the governments general interest in convicting a criminal.
Bullshit. Go read the Communist Manifesto, where Marx and Engels devoted a whole chapter to denouncing various forms of socialism, some he explicitly connected to reactionary or utopian movements, making it very clear that these forms of communism in Marx' and Engels' eyes were the wrong direction and would not lead to a communist society.
The terms socialism and communism are used in a few different ways in Marx' works depending on whether he is writing about economic, politics or philosophy, but the general difference is that Marxist socialism denote a political and economical system in which you have the dicatorship of the proletariat (where the working classes use the power given by their numbers to oppress the capitalist classes, with the goal of gradually taking away the means of production from the capitalists, forcing them to join the proletariat - or working classes - by virtue of no longer being able to survive by living of the works of others), whereas communism is a society where the nationstate has lost all political power, and "withered away" to become purely an administrative extension of the communes, and thus not exist in the capitalist sense of "state".
In terms of politics, the terms socialism and communism were frequently used by Marx' as expressions of the policies required to bring forth socialist and communist societies.
Socialism was by Marx' seen as a necessary precursor to communism.
I'd love to see how you think you can justify claiming that Marx' used the terms interchangably.
I assume that with "binders" you are referring to the paper clip, which was indeed a Norwegian invention, not binders (for non-Norwegian speaking people, "binders" is the Norwegian word for paper clip).
There's no point in taking the cost of making a regular PC measure time that exactly - it would add to the cost for no preceptible benefit for almost anyone using them.
Everywhere beyond the "moderate left", that is, Democrats in the US and social democrats and "socialists" in Europe you'll find the left complaining about government power. Remember that most marxists see current governments as oppressive tools of the capitalists, and many of them even wants to do away with national governments alltogether.
I've no idea about the quality of the various bindings, though. The official ones are Ada, C, C++ and Python, the rest are various third party efforts.
I'm sure there are more languages as well.
And pointing out that the FSF prefers the GPL is hardly a good argument for why one should choose a GPL'd toolkit for a distro intended for enterpise users... The FSF is hardly a bastion of support for corporations.
I'd love a distro that only provide a trimmed down set of apps, as it would save me the hassle of going through the guesswork of what I should remove or add to get a usable install, and let me focus on installing just whichever of the apps I commonly use were missing.
Obviously, with the number of apps available for Linux, you can assemble a usable, consistent desktop in a large number of ways, and I'm sure there's more than enough space for multiple distro's trying to do it right. I for one would stear clear of any KDE only ones, just as expect KDE fans to stear clear of Gnome only distros, or take the trouble of packaging and installing KDE on it.
The KDE and Gnome teams ARE working on interoperability issues, and have been for years. It's the users that are bitching and thumbing their noses at eachother.
Remember though that the main reason the 8088 was used by anyone at all was that there were plenty of cheap 8bit parts available but very few 16bit parts compatible with the 8086 at the time the IBM PC was introduced. The Amiga PC expansion cards arrived quite a few years later (the 286 came out in '82, the first Amiga's started coming out in '85 and I think the A2000 first arrived in '87) and 8086's were already used in low end PC's. Besides, the CPU on the PC expansion card needed very little support circuitry and it was more important to have a CPU that interfaced easily with the 16 bit data bus.
I once had a really bastardized Amiga 2000, with a total of 6 general purpose CPU's in it (of which two were not in use): A 68000 on the motherboard, a 68020 acellerator card, a PC card with an 8086 (let you run DOS apps in a window on your Amiga desktop) upgraded with a 286 accelerator card, the 6502 compatible CPU on the keyboard and a Z80 controlled SCSI controller...
Those were the days :-)
If you're doing it only for the money, then probably not. But if you'd like to spend time porting Mozilla anyway it's certainly a good added incentive to spend a few extra hours on it here and there.