It's an object lesson on the pitfalls of trying extortion on Big Blue.
It's also an object lesson on the pitfalls of lying one's ass off about everything. Sure, IBM had the lawyers, but SCO's case never had merit to begin with.
I have to disagree that the engineering is simple. Especially when you take wrapping the choices in a good UI (a _critical_ aspect of making the functionality useful) into the equation.
The hooks into the protocol stack are easy (I say this having been a protocol stack engineer for Apple back in the day). As for UI, I think ZoneAlarm is a reasonable baseline, nothing complicated.
If it were simple, it would have been done a long time ago.
The classic "dollar on the sidewalk" fallacy. Someone walks along the street, sees a dollar bill fluttering in the gutter, and thinks, "there can't be a dollar there, because somebody would surely have picked it up." Walks on.
I would like to humbly thank you for properly nesting your parentheses.
Here's a tough problem I agonize over, and wonder if you'd have an opinion. Let's say you write something in parens and it's funny enough to warrant a smiley face. Can/should the paren for the smiley's mouth count as the closing paren? In other words, is it better to do "(that was funny:)" or "(that was funny:))"?
Not true. Remember Fritz Hollingsworth? He, with Dianne Feinstein, authored some bill a few years back that was just a big sloppy blowjob to the RIAA and related companies. I don't remember exactly what the bill was about now, someone can probably find it easily enough... it was some kind of enormous concession to recording companies, at the direct expense of the populace and the common good.
I've paid attention, and noticed that the democrats have in most cases been *worse* than the repubs in the specific domain of kowtowing to the copyright cartel. I don't know why that would be in terms of party platforms... maybe thinking it needs to correlate with part of any platform is naive on my part.
Corporations are supposed to be sociopathic. They are supposed to put profit above all else.
If you work for one, you are obliged to understand this. Indeed, you are even compensated for working for a sociopath: you get a variety of benefits that are not given to employees of smaller companies. And it's remarkably easy to terminate this arrangement and never again have any dealings with them.
Not clear on what you intend by that last line, so I'll ask: are you claiming it's easy to find a way to never work for a corporation? If you're claiming that, I'd like to hear more details about what you mean. If you're not claiming that, what is it that you're claiming?
I think you meant to say "at which point you just click allow like you did the ten times beforehand so the damn thing will work".
Actually I did *not* mean to say that, I meant what I wrote... but I won't niggle, as I do get your point.
I'm perfectly fine with the idea that such software should be easily disabled if any given user finds it annoying or confusing, and I'm even fine with the idea that its default setting be "OFF". But clearly there are users who find the described functionality useful, and on that basis I agree with the idea that OS makers (e.g. Apple, Microsoft) should make it a priority to include such functionality as native to the OS's they distribute. Given a default setting of OFF and/or an easy way to turn it off, there's no reason not to include it; the engineering is simple, so the cost is not a reasonable deterrent to Apple or Microsoft. It's highly needed in the battleground that the internet has become. And I think you'd be surprised how many users who -- despite their finding it confusing at first -- would nontheless want the opportunnity to educate themselves by exploring such functionality. And again, they could always turn it off.
Relying on user education is #5 on the Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security
But the end result of not relying on user education is to deny users their choices... which leads to monstrosities like Microsoft's vision of Treacherous Computing.
if I was prompted about (and had to subsequently approve) every outbound network connection on my PC, my productivity would probably halve
It's really not that big an impact. A product like ZoneAlarm (a windows product) produces exactly the situation where outbound connections require user approval... but the user has the option to approve them permanently, i.e. "ALWAYS let MyNiftyEmailClient open connections on port 25". About ten approvals after installation of zonealarm, you never get bugged again, until some virus tries to do something nasty, at which point you're REALLY HAPPY you have this information coming your way.
If it's they're own language, dismiss the suit on grounds that if the suit were found in the indians' favor, the decision by its own logic couldn't legally be rendered into their language.
If the indians are filing in some other language, lodge a countersuit that they're violating whatever language they're filing in in the same manner they allege their language has been violated.
If I did any spelling or grammar error, excuse me, I'n not a native English speaker.
Um... yes, THAT must be why I was unable to follow what you wrote. All the atrocious spelling and grammar errors. Yes, that's the problem, I'm sure of it.
In what surely comes as a complete and utter surprise to everyone here, a new calculation shows that only one percent of web pages contain pornography.
Doesn't surprise me. Less than 1% of my house's floor space is occupied by dining room chairs, yet somehow I manage to spend nearly 10% of my time in these chairs daily. Likewise, the percent of waking time spent by our household watching the 0.1% of our wallspace occupied by the television is a (disproportionate) 10%.
Seriously - it's much easier to wire-up a nation with less square mileage, no? It's a question of logistics.
Now someone like, say, China or Russia having incredibly high broadband penetration? That would be damned impressive.
How the hell can you afford to stand in a line for over a week??
Exactly. And who the hell would want these machines so badly? This thing smells like a fictitious promo piece, in exactly the same vein as previous "reporting" on "toothing" (the alleged practice of hooking up with strangers for sex using bluetooth phones), or that BS about strangers in places like Central Park just walking up to each other, not saying a word, and jacking into each others' ipods (oooh, the sensuality of not talking!). bah.
(a) Did Humans Get Their Big Brains From Neanderthals?
Article says:
(b) The gene microcephalin (MCPH1) regulates brain size during development
(emphasis mine). Doesn't look like the article claims bigger brains for any group overall. Article further says:
(c) it is not yet clear what advantage the D allele gives the human brain
And both the slashdot summary and the article highlight the notion that the genetic difference in question is prevalent in Europe and not in Africa. So just to put this all out on the line here: do Europeans have bigger brains than Africans? Slashdot headline implies this, but article does not say this. Do Europeans have bigger brains during temporary stages of development? Article implies this with (b), but does not actually say this. Does this gene confer an advantage? It's implied by all of this coverage, but (c) disavows any evidence of such.
So this whole angle (from the slashdot header) of "modern day eugenicists might all too eagerly read into these findings to draw their own politically biased conclusions" would seem to be just a baseless, inflammatory statement injected for sensationalism... or am I missing something here?
So, I think most of us can agree, porn at work == bad
I don't agree to that.
If the statement is expanded to something like "many workplaces have policies in place prohibiting the download of porn", then I'd think it a true statement. I'd even accept "porn is a controversial thing, and many people don't want exposure to it". But stated as is, it too easily implies an immoral component to the act of downloading per se, which I feel obligated to reject.
How ironic that the./ editor's comments for an article about the bindingness of a login code of conduct end up including the presumption of such a thing.
Drug testing is pretty clear profit for most businesses.
Not at all clear. Numerous way-brighter-than-average people will not work for any place that performs drug testing. It could be argued that the invasive drug testing companies are suffering more from loss of talent than they're gaining from keeping someone who smokes weed from entering the building.
Due to unrelated contractual disputes, former GIMP developer Ovind Kolas has changed his name to an unpronouncable series of symbols "Øvind Kolås", and is now widely referred to in the media as "the GIMP developer formerly known as Ovind Kolas".
Many people seem to bring out this "won't bring back the dead" viewpoint as justification for letting go of rage.
I see it as exactly the opposite. Let it sink in: *nothing* will ever bring back this person who was killed. They will *never* experience a joyful day again. Their friends and loved ones will *never* get to see them smile again.
And people are just supposed to go, well, to heck with it?
I'm not advocating the deliberate retention of anger. But genuine loss and anger and the desire for retribution are the products of much more than Ghandi-like hand clasping can be counted on to address. A person who can lose a loved one to murder and can walk away and live a happy life is a wonderful and beautiful thing to behold. A person who cannot is entirely understandable.
so let me get this straight. You want to murder someone for commiting a murder? That makes you (or the state, rather) just as bad.
A death sentence is arguably the fairest compensation for murder, and the fairest deterrent to others considering the act. If someone considers any death -- no matter what the motivation or circumstances -- to be unwarranted, well, what can one say?
An infinite series of a set must contain any finite series of that set, by simple definition.
In terms of defintion, "infinite" means "never ending", and includes no further assertions about content. "Randomness" is the concept that begins making assertions about content, and it contains no provisos that would prevent a binary stream (all ones and zeros) from being just as certifiably random as a decimal stream.
But thanks for all the name-calling, what with the "absurds" and the "muddled" and the decrying of how undeserved the mod points are. That's more compelling than structured discussions could ever be. You win!
If the digits of pi are in fact random, as they seem to be, then all finite sequences appear with equal probability in that stream.
Suppose we have an infinitely long stream of decimal digits S1 that we agree is (truly) random. We now produce a second stream S2 by expressing S1 in binary, resulting in only ones and zeros. Despite never having digits 2 through 9, it would seem that S2 is still truly random like its predecessor S1... unless we adopt as the very definition of randomness that "all finite sequences of decimal digits eventually appear in an infinitely long random sequence", which is notably different from the GGP's criteria of "infinitely long and never repeats". S2 fits the GGP's criteria, but violates the assertion that therefore all finite sequences will appear.
Also notable is that S2's digits will still fit a probability distribution, as is commonly expected of random sequences... just not a probability distribution defined to necessarily include the digits 2 through 9.
Slashdot Mirror
It's also an object lesson on the pitfalls of lying one's ass off about everything. Sure, IBM had the lawyers, but SCO's case never had merit to begin with.
Speaking in tautologies is one of the surest indicators that what's being said is dogma/indoctrination rather than reason.
(obligatory slashdot rant) Well, Keyring is open source, so why don't you download the source code and give it more love yourself!
The hooks into the protocol stack are easy (I say this having been a protocol stack engineer for Apple back in the day). As for UI, I think ZoneAlarm is a reasonable baseline, nothing complicated.
If it were simple, it would have been done a long time ago.
The classic "dollar on the sidewalk" fallacy. Someone walks along the street, sees a dollar bill fluttering in the gutter, and thinks, "there can't be a dollar there, because somebody would surely have picked it up." Walks on.
Here's a tough problem I agonize over, and wonder if you'd have an opinion. Let's say you write something in parens and it's funny enough to warrant a smiley face. Can/should the paren for the smiley's mouth count as the closing paren? In other words, is it better to do "(that was funny:)" or "(that was funny:))"?
Not true. Remember Fritz Hollingsworth? He, with Dianne Feinstein, authored some bill a few years back that was just a big sloppy blowjob to the RIAA and related companies. I don't remember exactly what the bill was about now, someone can probably find it easily enough... it was some kind of enormous concession to recording companies, at the direct expense of the populace and the common good.
I've paid attention, and noticed that the democrats have in most cases been *worse* than the repubs in the specific domain of kowtowing to the copyright cartel. I don't know why that would be in terms of party platforms... maybe thinking it needs to correlate with part of any platform is naive on my part.
Not clear on what you intend by that last line, so I'll ask: are you claiming it's easy to find a way to never work for a corporation? If you're claiming that, I'd like to hear more details about what you mean. If you're not claiming that, what is it that you're claiming?
Actually I did *not* mean to say that, I meant what I wrote... but I won't niggle, as I do get your point.
I'm perfectly fine with the idea that such software should be easily disabled if any given user finds it annoying or confusing, and I'm even fine with the idea that its default setting be "OFF". But clearly there are users who find the described functionality useful, and on that basis I agree with the idea that OS makers (e.g. Apple, Microsoft) should make it a priority to include such functionality as native to the OS's they distribute. Given a default setting of OFF and/or an easy way to turn it off, there's no reason not to include it; the engineering is simple, so the cost is not a reasonable deterrent to Apple or Microsoft. It's highly needed in the battleground that the internet has become. And I think you'd be surprised how many users who -- despite their finding it confusing at first -- would nontheless want the opportunnity to educate themselves by exploring such functionality. And again, they could always turn it off.
But the end result of not relying on user education is to deny users their choices... which leads to monstrosities like Microsoft's vision of Treacherous Computing.
It's really not that big an impact. A product like ZoneAlarm (a windows product) produces exactly the situation where outbound connections require user approval... but the user has the option to approve them permanently, i.e. "ALWAYS let MyNiftyEmailClient open connections on port 25". About ten approvals after installation of zonealarm, you never get bugged again, until some virus tries to do something nasty, at which point you're REALLY HAPPY you have this information coming your way.
If it's they're own language, dismiss the suit on grounds that if the suit were found in the indians' favor, the decision by its own logic couldn't legally be rendered into their language.
If the indians are filing in some other language, lodge a countersuit that they're violating whatever language they're filing in in the same manner they allege their language has been violated.
Um... yes, THAT must be why I was unable to follow what you wrote. All the atrocious spelling and grammar errors. Yes, that's the problem, I'm sure of it.
Doesn't surprise me. Less than 1% of my house's floor space is occupied by dining room chairs, yet somehow I manage to spend nearly 10% of my time in these chairs daily. Likewise, the percent of waking time spent by our household watching the 0.1% of our wallspace occupied by the television is a (disproportionate) 10%.
Emphasis mine (though the mis-spelling is not mine). I'd say this is a typo, but the 'a' key is quite a distance from the 'u' key... :)
Here's the chart. Agreed that they should have included it in the article.
Looks like they're saying it about China.
Exactly. And who the hell would want these machines so badly? This thing smells like a fictitious promo piece, in exactly the same vein as previous "reporting" on "toothing" (the alleged practice of hooking up with strangers for sex using bluetooth phones), or that BS about strangers in places like Central Park just walking up to each other, not saying a word, and jacking into each others' ipods (oooh, the sensuality of not talking!). bah.
(a) Did Humans Get Their Big Brains From Neanderthals?
Article says:
(b) The gene microcephalin (MCPH1) regulates brain size during development
(emphasis mine). Doesn't look like the article claims bigger brains for any group overall. Article further says:
(c) it is not yet clear what advantage the D allele gives the human brain
And both the slashdot summary and the article highlight the notion that the genetic difference in question is prevalent in Europe and not in Africa. So just to put this all out on the line here: do Europeans have bigger brains than Africans? Slashdot headline implies this, but article does not say this. Do Europeans have bigger brains during temporary stages of development? Article implies this with (b), but does not actually say this. Does this gene confer an advantage? It's implied by all of this coverage, but (c) disavows any evidence of such.
So this whole angle (from the slashdot header) of "modern day eugenicists might all too eagerly read into these findings to draw their own politically biased conclusions" would seem to be just a baseless, inflammatory statement injected for sensationalism... or am I missing something here?
I don't agree to that.
If the statement is expanded to something like "many workplaces have policies in place prohibiting the download of porn", then I'd think it a true statement. I'd even accept "porn is a controversial thing, and many people don't want exposure to it". But stated as is, it too easily implies an immoral component to the act of downloading per se, which I feel obligated to reject.
How ironic that the ./ editor's comments for an article about the bindingness of a login code of conduct end up including the presumption of such a thing.
Not at all clear. Numerous way-brighter-than-average people will not work for any place that performs drug testing. It could be argued that the invasive drug testing companies are suffering more from loss of talent than they're gaining from keeping someone who smokes weed from entering the building.
Interesting background from the news wire:
Many people seem to bring out this "won't bring back the dead" viewpoint as justification for letting go of rage.
I see it as exactly the opposite. Let it sink in: *nothing* will ever bring back this person who was killed. They will *never* experience a joyful day again. Their friends and loved ones will *never* get to see them smile again.
And people are just supposed to go, well, to heck with it?
I'm not advocating the deliberate retention of anger. But genuine loss and anger and the desire for retribution are the products of much more than Ghandi-like hand clasping can be counted on to address. A person who can lose a loved one to murder and can walk away and live a happy life is a wonderful and beautiful thing to behold. A person who cannot is entirely understandable.
A death sentence is arguably the fairest compensation for murder, and the fairest deterrent to others considering the act. If someone considers any death -- no matter what the motivation or circumstances -- to be unwarranted, well, what can one say?
In terms of defintion, "infinite" means "never ending", and includes no further assertions about content. "Randomness" is the concept that begins making assertions about content, and it contains no provisos that would prevent a binary stream (all ones and zeros) from being just as certifiably random as a decimal stream.
But thanks for all the name-calling, what with the "absurds" and the "muddled" and the decrying of how undeserved the mod points are. That's more compelling than structured discussions could ever be. You win!
Suppose we have an infinitely long stream of decimal digits S1 that we agree is (truly) random. We now produce a second stream S2 by expressing S1 in binary, resulting in only ones and zeros. Despite never having digits 2 through 9, it would seem that S2 is still truly random like its predecessor S1... unless we adopt as the very definition of randomness that "all finite sequences of decimal digits eventually appear in an infinitely long random sequence", which is notably different from the GGP's criteria of "infinitely long and never repeats". S2 fits the GGP's criteria, but violates the assertion that therefore all finite sequences will appear.
Also notable is that S2's digits will still fit a probability distribution, as is commonly expected of random sequences... just not a probability distribution defined to necessarily include the digits 2 through 9.