Well, I have heard this sort of thing being used to explain why you should leave your wireless access point wide open. The argument goes that, if you secure it, evidence in packets coming from it can be used against you. But if you don't secure it, those packets could have come from any passerby.
Wasn't this argued here on/. sometime recently? But I'm not sure I want to be a test case.
That's like looking at a key eye witness who saw you stab Nicole Brown Simpson and saying "How do I know you weren't on LSD and just imagining me there?"
Funny, yes. But I have a story that's not too far off from that sort of thing. About 10 years ago I was working on a project at a big corporation whose name isn't relevant here. I had a row of machines with different OSs for doing portability testing. Someone sent me email pointing to a bit of humor on some web site, and by chance I happened to read it on the NT box. It was cute, I sent back a message saying that I'd laughed, and went about the day's work.
When I came in the next morning, the NT machine was sitting there displaying a whole lot of pornographic images. "Well, that's interesting..." They had come from another machine in the same domain as the funny page. I erased them, checked occasionally, and they didn't reappear.
But the next morning, they were there on the screen again. So I really investigated. I found the "deleted" email, fetched the funny page again, and examined its source. It had some truly bizarre javascript that I didn't quite understand, but I did find the routine that fired off a download just after midnight. I called a few coworkers over and showed them the original page, the code, and the results. Nobody could quite explain the code, other than that it did something just after midnight. We found that when we disabled JS, the porn downloads stopped.
We tried it on a number of other machines. It only worked on MS Windows boxes, not on Solaris or linux or FreeBSD or any of the others. We had lots of Windows boxes, each with a different release installed, so after a while, we had lots of machines that were all downloading porn every night just after midnight.
We did discuss the implications if the higher-ups got wind of this. We had this scenario of them trying to figure out how we were sneaking in every night at midnight without the security guys seeing us, downloading a lot of porn, and then sneaking out without being seen. We were sure that the porn downloads were going into our permanent records.
Actually, we thought it was funny, as did our bosses. And these were all "crash and burn" test machines, so eventually we wiped each one clean, reinstalled the OS, and the porn went away.
But the legal system doesn't have our sense of humor. It's easy to imagine, in the light of TFA, that we could have been charged with a repeated pattern of downloading porn on company machines. In some companies, this could have easily got us fired. Luckily for us, our bosses just considered us crazy software developers.
I did learn enough that, some time later, I wrote up a little demo of how to make an innocent-looking web page download files that the user never sees, but which leaves incriminating downloads in the browser cache and the firewall logs, which could convict them as happened to this guy. I use the demo to convince people that I'm not being paranoid when the first thing I do with a new browser is to turn off java, JS and any other "scripting" tool. We're reaching the stage where you can be convicted for what you computer does behind your back. Stories like this are good for explaining why everyone really needs to learn enough about how their software works that you can block things like this that can plant evidence on your machine.
Of course, you really can't know about every automated thing that might be hidden in that box. And I should probably add this news story to my demo's docs, as an extra motivator.
Repeat after me: Email is not a File Transfer Protocol.
Huh? How do you think your email gets from one machine to another, if not via a file transfer protocol? That's exactly what email is. If it weren't, you'd never be able to get a message.
And furthermore, your email is stored in a file system, either on your machine or on the server. If it's not in a file system, there's no way your computer could remember it after a reboot.
Of course, storing email on a server controlled by an outsider is an invitation to disaster, if you have any information there that you don't want competitors to see. ISPs are in business to make money, as is google. If they see profit in selling your email to someone, they'll do it.
(Jeez; what are they teaching the newbs these days?;-)
Indeed. This is why people keep reminding us that "Correlation is not causation", and scientific papers so often end with the statement that "Further research is needed".
But there have been a great many studies of the health effects of alcohol and alcoholic beverages, and most have tried to take into account other medical problems by comparing people who were otherwise in good health. Pretty much all of them support the idea that, unless there's a specific reason to avoid alcohol, moderate amounts of alcohol have moderate but measurable health effects.
The major reason to avoid alcohol is if you are among the 10% or so of the population that becomes addicted to the stuff and overuses it. Such people are probably better off just avoiding it altogether. But that's not anything special to alcohol. Here in the US, there are a lot of people who are allergic to peanuts. That doesn't mean that nobody should eat peanuts, of course, since they're a fairly nutricious bean. It just means that if you have a problem with them, you should avoid them.
A number of the alcohol studies have concluded that part of the benefit from alcohol comes from the B vitamins produced by yeast. This explains why beer and wine seem to be better for you than distilled beverages, which lack the vitamins. But there are apparently benefits from ethanol itself, in low doses; it's just not as good for you alone as when combined with the other stuff in beer and wine.
That big UK study in the 70s also said that mixed drinks that used fruit juices seemed to have the same long-term benefits as beer an wine, supporting the idea that it partly the vitamins. But they did say that people who drank mostly distilled beverages also lived longer than teetotallers, though the correlation was less than with beer, wine, and mixed fruit+alcohol drinks. And they did emphasize that they had just done a giant multiple-regression analysis; their main recommendation was that "Further research is needed".
One of the main problems with discussions like this is that biological processes are generally complex, and can't be reduced to simple "bumper sticker" recommendations. Many things in our diet that are beneficial in small quantities become dangerous in large quantities. Ethanol seems to be a prime example of this, along with most of the things called "vitamins".
To read about a recent study looking for explanation of the benefits of red wines, google for "endothelin-1". Actually, that gets far too many hits, so add "wine" to the list. Some (but not all) red wines contain inhibitors of this vasoconstrictor, which has undesirable effects on the circulatory system when it's overexpressed. So people with too much of it benefit from the red wines that contain the inhibitors. It's yet another example of the complexity of the story, with a benefit coming not from the ethanol but rather from another compound produced during the fermentation process.
Well, if you google for "business slander libel disparagement" right now, you get just under 40,000 hits. About half seem to be lawyers advertising their services, implying that a lot of lawyers are finding this a lucrative business. Another 1/3 seems to be articles about the laws on the topic. Scattered among them are references to court cases.
Of course, there's a good chance that most of them are settled out of court. But a lot of legal folks seem to take the subject quite seriously.
There are plenty of studies which reach this conclusion - a bit of red whine is actually good for your health. IMO, what they miss is that it has to be real red wine,...
Actually, studies like this go back at least 30 years, and their results are a bit more complex.
The first big one I remember reading about was in the mid 70's, in the UK. It was a massive "data dredging" study of medical records, looking for things correlated (negatively or positively) with long life.
They reported that the strongest correlation was with "moderate alcohol consumption", which was about the same as in this study - 3 or 4 drinks per day, where "drink" was somewhat fuzzily defined as whatever the records listed as a "glass". They reported that drunkards didn't do so well, but teetotalers didn't do a lot better, and the ones who lived longest were those who regularly consumed moderate amounts of alcohol.
They did have a few more details. Those who drank only distilled booze didn't benefit as much as those who drank beer or wine (but they did benefit). They had weak data showing that red wines and dark beers were somewhat better for health than the lighter-colored varieties. They said that drinking with meals was better for you than just drinking, and they didn't recommend having all four of your drinks all at once.
Since then, quite a lot of research has given us a lot more information. Recently, studies have uncovered some of the reasons for the benefits of red wines, including the fact that not all red wines show the benefits. But again, further research is needed.
My wife works with medical data a lot, and is constantly finding more studies of the effects of alcohol. She rather likes telling people about the latest benefits that have been discovered. And she comments that we just don't drink enough around our house. A few years back, she worked with a researcher who liked to tell people that his studies had been unable to find an upper bound to the amount of alcohol that was beneficial. He would add that he was just studying the effect of ethanol on the circulatory system, which is apparently not at all damaged by heavy drinking. He would also say that he couldn't comment on the effect on other parts of the body such as the liver; that was other people's research.
Anyway, it's a complex subject, biologically, and the research isn't nearly done. But there have been a lot of studies, and we can fairly firmly recommend a glass or two of beer or wine with every meal. Well, maybe not with breakfast, as you might just decide to go back to sleep, so have that one later in the evening instead. Dark wines and beers are somewhat better than light, but if you don't like them, drink something you do like and don't worry about it.
I definitely like how a complete and completely functional program (however ugly it may LOOK), can be embedded in a Web page.
Well, that's why I keep both java and javascript turned off, except for short-term enabling when they're needed. If a browser won't let me do this, I simply don't use it for anything other than testing my own pages.
I have plenty of respect for JS. I've written a fair amount of code for it. That's why I understand that it's a Bad Idea to enable anything that lets a remote stranger download code to my machine and run it.
(I also have a few demos of some nasty things that can be done via JS, for the benefit of people who don't understand or believe the potential problems. But this is a geek/nerd form, so surely I don't need to provide links and risk a slashdotting.;-)
Microsoft's scope is anywhere that they see a need and people are willing to pay for. If I choose to believe that Microsoft's whitelist really represents reputable sites, I should be allowed to do so.
Sure, you're free to believe whatever you like. But in most jurisdictions, there are laws about things like libel and slander. I'd think that such laws might be easily used in this case.
If I were to start up my own business that published ratings of other businesses' honesty based on whether they've paid me for a rating, I'd be in court real fast. In some jurisdictions, I'd might be in jail, too.
It'll be interesting to see whether Microsoft is powerful enough to get away with such public libel without any punishment.
All this "protection" in IE7 is there to try and limit which software you run. MS has decided that before they can beat open source they need to winnow the list of companies that deal with it and this is a good first step to do that with. If this same applet was signed by novell I am sure it would run in IE.
Well, my prediction would be that MS will also have a setup like their "partnering", by which you pay them to be treated as a safe site. This will be understood by the more knowledgeable users, of course, and they will treat the color-coded security level as meaningless. The other 99% of the MS user community won't understand that the ratings are bought and paid for, but they also won't understand the color codes, so they'll be as likely to treat white as safe as green or pink or whatever. The end result will be that the system's sole function will be to restrict what will run on your machine, but it won't have any effect on safety.
Even better is the/bin/true copyright notice, preserved at many places on the Net in total violation of AT&T's claimed copyright on a blank line.
In addition to the above link to this "copyrighted" program that comes with every unix system, I've on several occasions "published" the entire program, as does the netfunny.com archive. Note that the program linked to is not a fair-use excerpt, it is the entire program, which consists of a blank line. If you use blank lines in your programs, you are in violation of AT&T's claimed copyright. It is sorta interesting that I've never heard from AT&T's lawyers (or is it SCO's now?) about this infringement.
But maybe some readers in Australia can include the above link on their web site, and we can finally have a decent court test of such violations. Wouldn't it be fun to be able to tell people that you were sent to jail for infringing a copyright by linking to a document that contained a blank line?
(Actually, I've long thought that it could be a lot of fun to find a prosecutor who was willing to take someone to court on this. Why is it that none of them are willing to do their job right.;-)
Next stop - close down the local library - everyone there is either infringing copyright or contributing to it...
This isn't a joke or something hypothetical. If you pay attention to discussions in the publishing industry, one of the statistics you'll see bandied about is that each book sold is read on the average by four people. This is invariably used to show that there's a huge missed "marketing" opportunity. 3/4 of readers are getting their books without paying for them.
Now, if you look at the books you have at home, you'll probably have trouble finding even one that was read by more than two people, right? So where does this average of four come from? Right - libraries. Publishers have long considered public libraries a major cause of lost income. If they could shut them down, they would, and they're starting to see how this might be done.
Publishers have been heartened by recent "advances" in copyright law and the advent of electronic publishing. They see these as tools to end the practice of lending books to others, by moving to a system where every reader must pay for what they read. It has worked for the software industry, except for the ongoing problem of piracy. The music recording industry is slowly succeeding at making illegal the sort of sharing that used to be common when music only came on physical recording media like records and tapes. There's a good chance that sharing of what used to be printed material can also be stopped in the forseeable future.
So don't take libraries as some sort of God-given exception that will always be with us. Libraries were created by reformers who wanted to make information available to everyone despite the desires of publishers, and the publishing industry is looking forward to the day that libraries can be eliminated.
1. The military brought you the internet, it wasn't the telco and media industry. DARPAnet anyone?
We need to keep hammering on this history. Both the corporate world and their ideological apologists are trying to convince us that it was "business" that created the Internet. This is, of course, a complete lie; all the original funding came from a US government agency (now called DARPA) that was part of the Army. The business world became interested only after the Internet was a proven success.
There are many reasons to be very suspicious of government and military agencies. But this suspicion shouldn't extend to lying about their actual accomplishments. We should give credit (and blame) where it is due, not to someone who sits on the sidelines and then claims credit for someone else's work.
Actually, I think that the funniest thing about someone bringing the military into a discussion of copyright is that the military generally doesn't get involved in copyright. If they want some information, they just take it and use it. And if you get ahold of some information that they don't want you to use, they don't charge you with copyright violation. "National Security" is a much more effective tool for punishing people who get their hands on military secrets. Copyright is irrelevant to them.
And that is generally because the broken HTML is written in a broken manner specifically in order to work in IE.
Actually, in the work I've done to make various web tools (not browsers) extract info from web pages, most of the broken HTML wasn't obviously done to accomodate IE. In fact, it usually doesn't work sensibly in IE, either. Rather, most of the junk HTML was produced by Microsoft HTML-generating tools. MS has lots of software that produces syntactically incorrect HTML, and since the software was generally used by people who have no idea what HTML might be, there's really no way to get it fixed.
I have implemented a number of kludges to recognize and correct bogus Microsoft HTML. I do wish there were some practical way to get them to clean up their act. But I suppose if you're the market leader, you can just thumb your nose at anyone with an order of magnitude less money that you have.
Recently, I "fixed" a bit of code that wasn't recognizing tags, and it turned out to be because they had no matching . The pages' owners didn't know they had this problem. They had just told Word to output a doc as HTML, and put the result online. There was no way they could fix their own HTML, because they're not competent to edit HTML (especially the garbage produced by Word;-) themselves. I wasn't too happy with all this, but we had to extract those links to build our own (valid XHTML;-) web pages.
You're assuming that intelligence, in and of itself, is enough to formulate a moral system.
Actually, no; behavior indistinguishable from a "moral system" seems to exist in a lot of species with little or no intelligence.... you're picking an answer in the nature vs. nurture debate, and assuming that being raised in a country based on Protestant principles had absolutely nothing to do with it.
Nope again. Consider Buddhism, which has no particular gods (though you're not forbidden to believe in one). It has a strong, well-developed moral system that has no ancestry in common with Protestantism. Other such examples abound in other societies. Many people have argued that a moral system is the main benefit of most religions. Others have argued that this is the only known benefit of religions, which are rather damaging to society otherwise. The latter have often argued that we need such an authority to impose a moral system, because in fact many people wouldn't behave morally otherwise. (And others counter that people still behave immorally despite the fear of an omniscient authority.;-)
I'm curious to see some links to some of the behavioral biology you've mentioned.
Google for "altruism biology" and you'll find lots of links to aspects of the discussion. It's been going on for a few decades now, and a lot of it is rather interesting (if you're into debates like that). One of the long-standing criticism of evolutionary theory has been the difficulty of explaining altruism, which is observed all over the place in nature, and seems to violate at least the naive understanding of "survival of the fittest". But biologists have tackled the problem, and have a pretty good understanding of why an animal might do something that benefits (or at least doesn't injure) another without any obvious short-term payoff.
Various people have pointed out that the most important rule in many moral and ethical systems is "Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you|. Biologist can now explain why this is actually a survival strategy, in the evolutionary sense.
It does take a bit of reading to get the flavor of this debate and an understanding of where biologists know and don't know about it.
'I think the malware industry is making more money than the anti-malware industry,' Genes said.
Malware is a profit-making industry. Anti-malware is aimed at eliminating profits, not making them. It doesn't take an economic genius to understand the implications.
How many times have/. readers been reminded that companies exist to generate profit for their owners?
It does say "dont do this", but it says that about a lot of other things as well.
Some years ago, I heard a fun radio interview with a gay activist. The interviewer brought up some of the biblical passages condemning homosexuality. The gay fellow had a bible along, and read some of the other nearby passages, such as those that condemn growing mixed crops in a field, shaving your beard, and eating invertebrates. He told the interviewer "I can see that you shave your beard; do you eat shrimp, too?" The interviewer admitted that he did. The gay guy then pointed out that he was committing two sinful acts that the bible condemns in the same terms as homosexuality.
As I recall, the interviewer's reply was along the lines of "Well, I guess we're all sinners." You could practically hear the grins through the radio.
(I've always like the couple of biblical passages that give three explicit exceptions to the no-invertebrates rule: It's OK to eat grasshoppers, locusts and crickets. If you don't have a bible with a concordance, google for it.;-)
Christians who take a message of peace and love out of it may be good people, but they're just cherry-picking passages and ignoring the ones they don't agree with. If you're going to do that, why do you need some archaic forgery to shape your morals in the first place?
I know that's a rhetorical question, but it does have a straightforward answer.
Many people need an authority that imposes a moral system because they aren't sufficiently intelligent to have a moral system otherwise.
You can see this all the time in a standard argument for why you need a God: If you don't have God enforcing the rules, you don't have any rules, and you can commit any crimes you like. They intend this as a claim that atheists and agnostics are all immoral, of course. But if you think about it a bit, you realize that it's actually a self-condemnation. The argument really means "I don't understand how anyone could have a moral system without fear of a powerful God that enforces it."
Now, various atheists and agnostics (and libertarians and behavioral biologists;-) have explained in great detail why an intelligent person would follow a moral system even without an enforcer like God. But many religious people apparently either can't understand the reasoning, or they choose to disbelieve it for reasons that I haven't yet read. All I've ever seen is the unsupported assertion that, without God, you have no moral system. If they have reasons to ignore the obvious evidence otherwise, they don't seem to be telling the rest of us. I'd conclude that they probably don't have such reasons, and are making the "no God == no morality" claim due to an inability to understand the reasons that it's wrong.
Such people do need a powerful authority figure, or they probably will go out and start committing crimes against the rest of us. Come to think of it, looking at the history of religious groups give one strong grounds to expect this. Even that "Thou shalt not kill" commandment, as clear as it might be, hasn't prevented a lot of religious wars, not to mention government executions. People who accept the Bible but commit such acts clearly don't yet have a strong-enough authority figure to make them follow God's commandments.
(Lessee, will this get moderated "funny" or "flamebait"?;-)
"It's good to learn a programming language, but it's a far better thing to learn to write programs in that language.
And more important than either of these is to be able to successfully modify programs in that language.
Very few of the jobs I've had in several decades of working as a programmer involved writing programs. Far more of the jobs in the real world consist of modifying a program that already exists, either to correct bugs or to add new features. This requires a very different set of tools and talents than developing the software from scratch.
Another way of expressing it is that we rarely actually write programs. Rather, we usually modify programs. And we do this with code that wasn't designed or developed to make modifications easy.
Let's face it; designing is easy. At least, the sort of design that typically comes out of all the methodological fads is easy. That's why people write so many books about it. But they hardly ever tackle the difficult part of programming, which is taking the results of a design and making it actually do what is now needed, which is slightly different from what was needed back then.
And java is one of the languages where the implementation of the design isn't usually done well. As with C++, designers think that their good design will make it all work. When it doesn't, perhaps because the task has changed, and the designers have moved on, the programmers are stuck with trying to make sense of what is often write-only code. It isn't documented, because you don't need that with a good design, right? And code in these languages usually have the property that no line can be understood by itself, because of all the things that are defined elsewhere. And those definitions can't be understood by themselves, because they use things defined elsewhere. Making even the simplest change usually requires a full understanding of every line of the program, because everything depends on everything else.
Maybe some day someone will write a good book on how to modify existing code successfully, without introducing more bugs than were there when you started. This is the really major technical advance that still seems over the horizon, even after decades of mostly bad experience with hacking other people's code.
(One of the most successful techniques I've stumbled across consists of constantly asking myself "What would I like this to look like when I come across it N years from now and want to make a few small changes?" You might be surprised by some of the common mistakes that this helps you avoid. And I've often been happy that I did that, N years after I wrote something.;-)
I was thinking for some dumb reason that the ice cap would be frozen salt water.
Well, taken literally, that is true. The problem is that when salt water freezes, most of the salt is left behind. The explanation is fairly simple: The water starts forming crystals, and the salt (mostly Na and Cl ions) don't fit into the crystal structure very well. So at the surface, the water molecules slowly join the growing crystal, while the dissolved salt ions don't. You do get some salt in the ice, because ice usually consists of a lot of crystals that grew together, trapping salt in the pores. But usually there's not enough salt for the ice to taste salty.
This phenomenon is used sometimes. It's often called "freeze distillation". One way it has been used is to concentrate wine. For instance, people used to leave jugs of apple cider out on below-freezing nights. In the morning, they'd remove the layer of ice at the top. The liquid left would be thicker, and would contain most of the alcohol, because ethanol also doesn't join into ice crystals. The resulting concentration is more like alcoholic syrup than brandy, but due to the high alcohol content, it doesn't spoil.
Speaking more intellectually; one of my rights as a human is to do what I wish with what I own.
That is very clearly not true in a long number of circumstances. For one, you are not allowed to take a gun and shoot someone else, no matter how much you own the gun and the bullet. Yes, it is an extreme example,
Heh. My immediate thought on reading that sentence was that I just got home after driving my car for half an hour. If that guy was right, then one of my "rights" would be to drive my car (that I own) anywhere and in any manner that I like. I could drive across people's lawns, run down dogs and children and old ladies, etc.
But in fact, I can't even drive down the freeway at 120 mph. Jeez, my rights to use my own property are so restricted by this fascistic government...
Where do people come up with "rights" like the right to do what you wish with what you own? That's so outragious that you'd think anyone capable of typing the sentence would be smart enough to see the problems.
| As to whether that's a good thing, consider the fact that if copyright had always | been indefinite then most of the literature, software, music around now wouldn't exist.
Fact? This is speculative at best....
Well, it's hardly speculative in at least one modern example: Most of Disney's best-known works are openly and obviously based on previous works. But Disney routinely uses their copyright to block similar work by others.
Just try making your own version of "Snow White" and see how long before you get nasty letters from Disney's lawyers.
Fact is that a copyrighted work based on early public-domain works can very easily be used to block further work derived from those same public-domain works. This is especially easy if the more recent copyrighted work is a commercial success, in which case a court will easily believe that you copied the modern work rather than the public-domain works.
Actually, I just did a quick google on the topic. One hit started with "Disney threatened to sue a British stonemason for copyright infringement over a plan to carve Winnie the Pooh into the headstone of a stillborn infant...." Interesting and informative.
> You always can do with your ideas whatever you want: you can keep them in your head, you can publish them, > you can tell your kids about them.
This is not true if copyright is taken away. You then cannot make money from your creations, because anyone else can make copies of them for free.
It's not true under our current copyright laws, either. Yes, you can write your "creations" down, and you can tell your kids and friends about them. But to make a living from them, you have to distribute them to interested people. And with the distribution channels controlled by a very small number of corporations, the only way you can distribute your creations is to sign your rights to your creations over to those corporations.
At least that's how it was during most of the 20th century. We now have a new distribution mechanism for "intellectual" (i.e., non-physical) creations: the Internet. But there is a battle going on to prevent you and me from using this distribution method. One of the current name for it is "network neutrality", which is an attempt to fix the laws so that the owners of the communication channels can control in detail what is easily distributed via the Internet.
Another method of restriction our distribution ability is the common practice of most ISPs of having a "no servers" rule for retail customers. This prevents you from creating your own web site to show your creations to the world. Instead, you must upload your creations to a commercial web site (preferably the ISP's), and they'll put it online for you. But this gives them control.
And in some cases, the fine print gives them ownership of your creations. Thus, several years ago there was a bit of a fuss when people using msn.com as their ISP found that msn.com was taking material (mostly photos) from customers' web sites and email, and using them in advertising. When challenged, they pointed to the clause in the contract saying that anything stored on their servers belonged to msn.com. They backed down, at least until the fuss died down. But most ISP contracts still contain language like this. If you store your creations on a commercial web site (or even an email server), there's a good chance that you have legally handed the rights to the server's owner.
Another legal problem right now is that the companies that own the Internet's wires can legally restrict the distribution of copyrighted material. In most of the world, everything you create is copyrighted automatically at the time of creation. If the corporations that control the Internet's backbone lines can find a good way to detect copyrighted content, they can control distribution based on that. Right now, this is a difficult AI problem, so it isn't much in effect. The only serious use of this so far is that some ISPs have successfully blocked material coming from competitors. But this is a big sword hanging over our use of the Internet. When the corporations develop good tools for recognizing and classifying copyrighted material, they will be able to institute strict controls similar to how the recording industry has blocked individual access in the past. Then they can demand control of distribution rights for your creations.
We do have an example of this sort of blocking in the software biz: Try buying a computer with a non-MS OS in a retail computer store. So-called "independent" software developers have mostly written for DOS/Windows, because that has been the only way they could sell to retail customers. This happened because the retail channels were mostly blocked to any software running on any OS other than Microsoft's (and Apple's, as a concession to "prove" that it wasn't a monopoly). Right now, if you're a software developer, your software must run on Windows, or most of your potential customers won't be able to run it. And MS does have a history of demanding that successful developers "partner" with them, or there's a good chance that your software will mysteriously stop working at random times, and yo
I just got done finishing CS homework and the answer came in my mind as:
lightbulb(lightbulb())
Must not have been a course on Object-Oriented programming, because then the answere would have appeared as:
lightbulb.change()
In other words, if the question is "How many OO programmers does it take to change a lightbulb?", the answer would be "None, because OO lightbulbs change themselves."
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I have heard this sort of thing being used to explain why you should leave your wireless access point wide open. The argument goes that, if you secure it, evidence in packets coming from it can be used against you. But if you don't secure it, those packets could have come from any passerby.
/. sometime recently? But I'm not sure I want to be a test case.
Wasn't this argued here on
That's like looking at a key eye witness who saw you stab Nicole Brown Simpson and saying "How do I know you weren't on LSD and just imagining me there?"
..." They had come from another machine in the same domain as the funny page. I erased them, checked occasionally, and they didn't reappear.
Funny, yes. But I have a story that's not too far off from that sort of thing. About 10 years ago I was working on a project at a big corporation whose name isn't relevant here. I had a row of machines with different OSs for doing portability testing. Someone sent me email pointing to a bit of humor on some web site, and by chance I happened to read it on the NT box. It was cute, I sent back a message saying that I'd laughed, and went about the day's work.
When I came in the next morning, the NT machine was sitting there displaying a whole lot of pornographic images. "Well, that's interesting
But the next morning, they were there on the screen again. So I really investigated. I found the "deleted" email, fetched the funny page again, and examined its source. It had some truly bizarre javascript that I didn't quite understand, but I did find the routine that fired off a download just after midnight. I called a few coworkers over and showed them the original page, the code, and the results. Nobody could quite explain the code, other than that it did something just after midnight. We found that when we disabled JS, the porn downloads stopped.
We tried it on a number of other machines. It only worked on MS Windows boxes, not on Solaris or linux or FreeBSD or any of the others. We had lots of Windows boxes, each with a different release installed, so after a while, we had lots of machines that were all downloading porn every night just after midnight.
We did discuss the implications if the higher-ups got wind of this. We had this scenario of them trying to figure out how we were sneaking in every night at midnight without the security guys seeing us, downloading a lot of porn, and then sneaking out without being seen. We were sure that the porn downloads were going into our permanent records.
Actually, we thought it was funny, as did our bosses. And these were all "crash and burn" test machines, so eventually we wiped each one clean, reinstalled the OS, and the porn went away.
But the legal system doesn't have our sense of humor. It's easy to imagine, in the light of TFA, that we could have been charged with a repeated pattern of downloading porn on company machines. In some companies, this could have easily got us fired. Luckily for us, our bosses just considered us crazy software developers.
I did learn enough that, some time later, I wrote up a little demo of how to make an innocent-looking web page download files that the user never sees, but which leaves incriminating downloads in the browser cache and the firewall logs, which could convict them as happened to this guy. I use the demo to convince people that I'm not being paranoid when the first thing I do with a new browser is to turn off java, JS and any other "scripting" tool. We're reaching the stage where you can be convicted for what you computer does behind your back. Stories like this are good for explaining why everyone really needs to learn enough about how their software works that you can block things like this that can plant evidence on your machine.
Of course, you really can't know about every automated thing that might be hidden in that box. And I should probably add this news story to my demo's docs, as an extra motivator.
Repeat after me: Email is not a File Transfer Protocol.
;-)
Huh? How do you think your email gets from one machine to another, if not via a file transfer protocol? That's exactly what email is. If it weren't, you'd never be able to get a message.
And furthermore, your email is stored in a file system, either on your machine or on the server. If it's not in a file system, there's no way your computer could remember it after a reboot.
Of course, storing email on a server controlled by an outsider is an invitation to disaster, if you have any information there that you don't want competitors to see. ISPs are in business to make money, as is google. If they see profit in selling your email to someone, they'll do it.
(Jeez; what are they teaching the newbs these days?
Indeed. This is why people keep reminding us that "Correlation is not causation", and scientific papers so often end with the statement that "Further research is needed".
But there have been a great many studies of the health effects of alcohol and alcoholic beverages, and most have tried to take into account other medical problems by comparing people who were otherwise in good health. Pretty much all of them support the idea that, unless there's a specific reason to avoid alcohol, moderate amounts of alcohol have moderate but measurable health effects.
The major reason to avoid alcohol is if you are among the 10% or so of the population that becomes addicted to the stuff and overuses it. Such people are probably better off just avoiding it altogether. But that's not anything special to alcohol. Here in the US, there are a lot of people who are allergic to peanuts. That doesn't mean that nobody should eat peanuts, of course, since they're a fairly nutricious bean. It just means that if you have a problem with them, you should avoid them.
A number of the alcohol studies have concluded that part of the benefit from alcohol comes from the B vitamins produced by yeast. This explains why beer and wine seem to be better for you than distilled beverages, which lack the vitamins. But there are apparently benefits from ethanol itself, in low doses; it's just not as good for you alone as when combined with the other stuff in beer and wine.
That big UK study in the 70s also said that mixed drinks that used fruit juices seemed to have the same long-term benefits as beer an wine, supporting the idea that it partly the vitamins. But they did say that people who drank mostly distilled beverages also lived longer than teetotallers, though the correlation was less than with beer, wine, and mixed fruit+alcohol drinks. And they did emphasize that they had just done a giant multiple-regression analysis; their main recommendation was that "Further research is needed".
One of the main problems with discussions like this is that biological processes are generally complex, and can't be reduced to simple "bumper sticker" recommendations. Many things in our diet that are beneficial in small quantities become dangerous in large quantities. Ethanol seems to be a prime example of this, along with most of the things called "vitamins".
To read about a recent study looking for explanation of the benefits of red wines, google for "endothelin-1". Actually, that gets far too many hits, so add "wine" to the list. Some (but not all) red wines contain inhibitors of this vasoconstrictor, which has undesirable effects on the circulatory system when it's overexpressed. So people with too much of it benefit from the red wines that contain the inhibitors. It's yet another example of the complexity of the story, with a benefit coming not from the ethanol but rather from another compound produced during the fermentation process.
Well, if you google for "business slander libel disparagement" right now, you get just under 40,000 hits. About half seem to be lawyers advertising their services, implying that a lot of lawyers are finding this a lucrative business. Another 1/3 seems to be articles about the laws on the topic. Scattered among them are references to court cases.
Of course, there's a good chance that most of them are settled out of court. But a lot of legal folks seem to take the subject quite seriously.
Soon they'll release their EDS (Emotional Doll System) mobile accessory units, and it'll need every bit of the PS3's capabilities.
/. readers. ;-]
[This shouldn't be an obscure literary reference to at least some
There are plenty of studies which reach this conclusion - a bit of red whine is actually good for your health. IMO, what they miss is that it has to be real red wine, ...
Actually, studies like this go back at least 30 years, and their results are a bit more complex.
The first big one I remember reading about was in the mid 70's, in the UK. It was a massive "data dredging" study of medical records, looking for things correlated (negatively or positively) with long life.
They reported that the strongest correlation was with "moderate alcohol consumption", which was about the same as in this study - 3 or 4 drinks per day, where "drink" was somewhat fuzzily defined as whatever the records listed as a "glass". They reported that drunkards didn't do so well, but teetotalers didn't do a lot better, and the ones who lived longest were those who regularly consumed moderate amounts of alcohol.
They did have a few more details. Those who drank only distilled booze didn't benefit as much as those who drank beer or wine (but they did benefit). They had weak data showing that red wines and dark beers were somewhat better for health than the lighter-colored varieties. They said that drinking with meals was better for you than just drinking, and they didn't recommend having all four of your drinks all at once.
Since then, quite a lot of research has given us a lot more information. Recently, studies have uncovered some of the reasons for the benefits of red wines, including the fact that not all red wines show the benefits. But again, further research is needed.
My wife works with medical data a lot, and is constantly finding more studies of the effects of alcohol. She rather likes telling people about the latest benefits that have been discovered. And she comments that we just don't drink enough around our house. A few years back, she worked with a researcher who liked to tell people that his studies had been unable to find an upper bound to the amount of alcohol that was beneficial. He would add that he was just studying the effect of ethanol on the circulatory system, which is apparently not at all damaged by heavy drinking. He would also say that he couldn't comment on the effect on other parts of the body such as the liver; that was other people's research.
Anyway, it's a complex subject, biologically, and the research isn't nearly done. But there have been a lot of studies, and we can fairly firmly recommend a glass or two of beer or wine with every meal. Well, maybe not with breakfast, as you might just decide to go back to sleep, so have that one later in the evening instead. Dark wines and beers are somewhat better than light, but if you don't like them, drink something you do like and don't worry about it.
I definitely like how a complete and completely functional program (however ugly it may LOOK), can be embedded in a Web page.
;-)
Well, that's why I keep both java and javascript turned off, except for short-term enabling when they're needed. If a browser won't let me do this, I simply don't use it for anything other than testing my own pages.
I have plenty of respect for JS. I've written a fair amount of code for it. That's why I understand that it's a Bad Idea to enable anything that lets a remote stranger download code to my machine and run it.
(I also have a few demos of some nasty things that can be done via JS, for the benefit of people who don't understand or believe the potential problems. But this is a geek/nerd form, so surely I don't need to provide links and risk a slashdotting.
Microsoft's scope is anywhere that they see a need and people are willing to pay for. If I choose to believe that Microsoft's whitelist really represents reputable sites, I should be allowed to do so.
Sure, you're free to believe whatever you like. But in most jurisdictions, there are laws about things like libel and slander. I'd think that such laws might be easily used in this case.
If I were to start up my own business that published ratings of other businesses' honesty based on whether they've paid me for a rating, I'd be in court real fast. In some jurisdictions, I'd might be in jail, too.
It'll be interesting to see whether Microsoft is powerful enough to get away with such public libel without any punishment.
All this "protection" in IE7 is there to try and limit which software you run. MS has decided that before they can beat open source they need to winnow the list of companies that deal with it and this is a good first step to do that with. If this same applet was signed by novell I am sure it would run in IE.
Well, my prediction would be that MS will also have a setup like their "partnering", by which you pay them to be treated as a safe site. This will be understood by the more knowledgeable users, of course, and they will treat the color-coded security level as meaningless. The other 99% of the MS user community won't understand that the ratings are bought and paid for, but they also won't understand the color codes, so they'll be as likely to treat white as safe as green or pink or whatever. The end result will be that the system's sole function will be to restrict what will run on your machine, but it won't have any effect on safety.
Even better is the /bin/true copyright notice, preserved at many places on the Net in total violation of AT&T's claimed copyright on a blank line.
;-)
In addition to the above link to this "copyrighted" program that comes with every unix system, I've on several occasions "published" the entire program, as does the netfunny.com archive. Note that the program linked to is not a fair-use excerpt, it is the entire program, which consists of a blank line. If you use blank lines in your programs, you are in violation of AT&T's claimed copyright. It is sorta interesting that I've never heard from AT&T's lawyers (or is it SCO's now?) about this infringement.
But maybe some readers in Australia can include the above link on their web site, and we can finally have a decent court test of such violations. Wouldn't it be fun to be able to tell people that you were sent to jail for infringing a copyright by linking to a document that contained a blank line?
(Actually, I've long thought that it could be a lot of fun to find a prosecutor who was willing to take someone to court on this. Why is it that none of them are willing to do their job right.
Next stop - close down the local library - everyone there is either infringing copyright or contributing to it ...
This isn't a joke or something hypothetical. If you pay attention to discussions in the publishing industry, one of the statistics you'll see bandied about is that each book sold is read on the average by four people. This is invariably used to show that there's a huge missed "marketing" opportunity. 3/4 of readers are getting their books without paying for them.
Now, if you look at the books you have at home, you'll probably have trouble finding even one that was read by more than two people, right? So where does this average of four come from? Right - libraries. Publishers have long considered public libraries a major cause of lost income. If they could shut them down, they would, and they're starting to see how this might be done.
Publishers have been heartened by recent "advances" in copyright law and the advent of electronic publishing. They see these as tools to end the practice of lending books to others, by moving to a system where every reader must pay for what they read. It has worked for the software industry, except for the ongoing problem of piracy. The music recording industry is slowly succeeding at making illegal the sort of sharing that used to be common when music only came on physical recording media like records and tapes. There's a good chance that sharing of what used to be printed material can also be stopped in the forseeable future.
So don't take libraries as some sort of God-given exception that will always be with us. Libraries were created by reformers who wanted to make information available to everyone despite the desires of publishers, and the publishing industry is looking forward to the day that libraries can be eliminated.
1. The military brought you the internet, it wasn't the telco and media industry. DARPAnet anyone?
We need to keep hammering on this history. Both the corporate world and their ideological apologists are trying to convince us that it was "business" that created the Internet. This is, of course, a complete lie; all the original funding came from a US government agency (now called DARPA) that was part of the Army. The business world became interested only after the Internet was a proven success.
There are many reasons to be very suspicious of government and military agencies. But this suspicion shouldn't extend to lying about their actual accomplishments. We should give credit (and blame) where it is due, not to someone who sits on the sidelines and then claims credit for someone else's work.
Actually, I think that the funniest thing about someone bringing the military into a discussion of copyright is that the military generally doesn't get involved in copyright. If they want some information, they just take it and use it. And if you get ahold of some information that they don't want you to use, they don't charge you with copyright violation. "National Security" is a much more effective tool for punishing people who get their hands on military secrets. Copyright is irrelevant to them.
And that is generally because the broken HTML is written in a broken manner specifically in order to work in IE.
;-) themselves. I wasn't too happy with all this, but we had to extract those links to build our own (valid XHTML ;-) web pages.
Actually, in the work I've done to make various web tools (not browsers) extract info from web pages, most of the broken HTML wasn't obviously done to accomodate IE. In fact, it usually doesn't work sensibly in IE, either. Rather, most of the junk HTML was produced by Microsoft HTML-generating tools. MS has lots of software that produces syntactically incorrect HTML, and since the software was generally used by people who have no idea what HTML might be, there's really no way to get it fixed.
I have implemented a number of kludges to recognize and correct bogus Microsoft HTML. I do wish there were some practical way to get them to clean up their act. But I suppose if you're the market leader, you can just thumb your nose at anyone with an order of magnitude less money that you have.
Recently, I "fixed" a bit of code that wasn't recognizing tags, and it turned out to be because they had no matching . The pages' owners didn't know they had this problem. They had just told Word to output a doc as HTML, and put the result online. There was no way they could fix their own HTML, because they're not competent to edit HTML (especially the garbage produced by Word
You're assuming that intelligence, in and of itself, is enough to formulate a moral system.
... you're picking an answer in the nature vs. nurture debate, and assuming that being raised in a country based on Protestant principles had absolutely nothing to do with it.
;-)
Actually, no; behavior indistinguishable from a "moral system" seems to exist in a lot of species with little or no intelligence.
Nope again. Consider Buddhism, which has no particular gods (though you're not forbidden to believe in one). It has a strong, well-developed moral system that has no ancestry in common with Protestantism. Other such examples abound in other societies. Many people have argued that a moral system is the main benefit of most religions. Others have argued that this is the only known benefit of religions, which are rather damaging to society otherwise. The latter have often argued that we need such an authority to impose a moral system, because in fact many people wouldn't behave morally otherwise. (And others counter that people still behave immorally despite the fear of an omniscient authority.
I'm curious to see some links to some of the behavioral biology you've mentioned.
Google for "altruism biology" and you'll find lots of links to aspects of the discussion. It's been going on for a few decades now, and a lot of it is rather interesting (if you're into debates like that). One of the long-standing criticism of evolutionary theory has been the difficulty of explaining altruism, which is observed all over the place in nature, and seems to violate at least the naive understanding of "survival of the fittest". But biologists have tackled the problem, and have a pretty good understanding of why an animal might do something that benefits (or at least doesn't injure) another without any obvious short-term payoff.
Various people have pointed out that the most important rule in many moral and ethical systems is "Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you|. Biologist can now explain why this is actually a survival strategy, in the evolutionary sense.
It does take a bit of reading to get the flavor of this debate and an understanding of where biologists know and don't know about it.
'I think the malware industry is making more money than the anti-malware industry,' Genes said.
/. readers been reminded that companies exist to generate profit for their owners?
Malware is a profit-making industry. Anti-malware is aimed at eliminating profits, not making them. It doesn't take an economic genius to understand the implications.
How many times have
Ie there is NOTHING bad about piping cats
PETA would disagree.
Oh? Just imagine the cacophony of a bunch of cats playing bagpipes while "singing" along.
It does say "dont do this", but it says that about a lot of other things as well.
;-)
Some years ago, I heard a fun radio interview with a gay activist. The interviewer brought up some of the biblical passages condemning homosexuality. The gay fellow had a bible along, and read some of the other nearby passages, such as those that condemn growing mixed crops in a field, shaving your beard, and eating invertebrates. He told the interviewer "I can see that you shave your beard; do you eat shrimp, too?" The interviewer admitted that he did. The gay guy then pointed out that he was committing two sinful acts that the bible condemns in the same terms as homosexuality.
As I recall, the interviewer's reply was along the lines of "Well, I guess we're all sinners." You could practically hear the grins through the radio.
(I've always like the couple of biblical passages that give three explicit exceptions to the no-invertebrates rule: It's OK to eat grasshoppers, locusts and crickets. If you don't have a bible with a concordance, google for it.
Christians who take a message of peace and love out of it may be good people, but they're just cherry-picking passages and ignoring the ones they don't agree with. If you're going to do that, why do you need some archaic forgery to shape your morals in the first place?
;-) have explained in great detail why an intelligent person would follow a moral system even without an enforcer like God. But many religious people apparently either can't understand the reasoning, or they choose to disbelieve it for reasons that I haven't yet read. All I've ever seen is the unsupported assertion that, without God, you have no moral system. If they have reasons to ignore the obvious evidence otherwise, they don't seem to be telling the rest of us. I'd conclude that they probably don't have such reasons, and are making the "no God == no morality" claim due to an inability to understand the reasons that it's wrong.
;-)
I know that's a rhetorical question, but it does have a straightforward answer.
Many people need an authority that imposes a moral system because they aren't sufficiently intelligent to have a moral system otherwise.
You can see this all the time in a standard argument for why you need a God: If you don't have God enforcing the rules, you don't have any rules, and you can commit any crimes you like. They intend this as a claim that atheists and agnostics are all immoral, of course. But if you think about it a bit, you realize that it's actually a self-condemnation. The argument really means "I don't understand how anyone could have a moral system without fear of a powerful God that enforces it."
Now, various atheists and agnostics (and libertarians and behavioral biologists
Such people do need a powerful authority figure, or they probably will go out and start committing crimes against the rest of us. Come to think of it, looking at the history of religious groups give one strong grounds to expect this. Even that "Thou shalt not kill" commandment, as clear as it might be, hasn't prevented a lot of religious wars, not to mention government executions. People who accept the Bible but commit such acts clearly don't yet have a strong-enough authority figure to make them follow God's commandments.
(Lessee, will this get moderated "funny" or "flamebait"?
"It's good to learn a programming language, but it's a far better thing to learn to write programs in that language.
;-)
And more important than either of these is to be able to successfully modify programs in that language.
Very few of the jobs I've had in several decades of working as a programmer involved writing programs. Far more of the jobs in the real world consist of modifying a program that already exists, either to correct bugs or to add new features. This requires a very different set of tools and talents than developing the software from scratch.
Another way of expressing it is that we rarely actually write programs. Rather, we usually modify programs. And we do this with code that wasn't designed or developed to make modifications easy.
Let's face it; designing is easy. At least, the sort of design that typically comes out of all the methodological fads is easy. That's why people write so many books about it. But they hardly ever tackle the difficult part of programming, which is taking the results of a design and making it actually do what is now needed, which is slightly different from what was needed back then.
And java is one of the languages where the implementation of the design isn't usually done well. As with C++, designers think that their good design will make it all work. When it doesn't, perhaps because the task has changed, and the designers have moved on, the programmers are stuck with trying to make sense of what is often write-only code. It isn't documented, because you don't need that with a good design, right? And code in these languages usually have the property that no line can be understood by itself, because of all the things that are defined elsewhere. And those definitions can't be understood by themselves, because they use things defined elsewhere. Making even the simplest change usually requires a full understanding of every line of the program, because everything depends on everything else.
Maybe some day someone will write a good book on how to modify existing code successfully, without introducing more bugs than were there when you started. This is the really major technical advance that still seems over the horizon, even after decades of mostly bad experience with hacking other people's code.
(One of the most successful techniques I've stumbled across consists of constantly asking myself "What would I like this to look like when I come across it N years from now and want to make a few small changes?" You might be surprised by some of the common mistakes that this helps you avoid. And I've often been happy that I did that, N years after I wrote something.
I was thinking for some dumb reason that the ice cap would be frozen salt water.
Well, taken literally, that is true. The problem is that when salt water freezes, most of the salt is left behind. The explanation is fairly simple: The water starts forming crystals, and the salt (mostly Na and Cl ions) don't fit into the crystal structure very well. So at the surface, the water molecules slowly join the growing crystal, while the dissolved salt ions don't. You do get some salt in the ice, because ice usually consists of a lot of crystals that grew together, trapping salt in the pores. But usually there's not enough salt for the ice to taste salty.
This phenomenon is used sometimes. It's often called "freeze distillation". One way it has been used is to concentrate wine. For instance, people used to leave jugs of apple cider out on below-freezing nights. In the morning, they'd remove the layer of ice at the top. The liquid left would be thicker, and would contain most of the alcohol, because ethanol also doesn't join into ice crystals. The resulting concentration is more like alcoholic syrup than brandy, but due to the high alcohol content, it doesn't spoil.
Speaking more intellectually; one of my rights as a human is to do what I wish with what I own.
...
That is very clearly not true in a long number of circumstances. For one, you are not allowed to take a gun and shoot someone else, no matter how much you own the gun and the bullet. Yes, it is an extreme example,
Heh. My immediate thought on reading that sentence was that I just got home after driving my car for half an hour. If that guy was right, then one of my "rights" would be to drive my car (that I own) anywhere and in any manner that I like. I could drive across people's lawns, run down dogs and children and old ladies, etc.
But in fact, I can't even drive down the freeway at 120 mph. Jeez, my rights to use my own property are so restricted by this fascistic government
Where do people come up with "rights" like the right to do what you wish with what you own? That's so outragious that you'd think anyone capable of typing the sentence would be smart enough to see the problems.
| As to whether that's a good thing, consider the fact that if copyright had always
...
..." Interesting and informative.
| been indefinite then most of the literature, software, music around now wouldn't exist.
Fact? This is speculative at best.
Well, it's hardly speculative in at least one modern example: Most of Disney's best-known works are openly and obviously based on previous works. But Disney routinely uses their copyright to block similar work by others.
Just try making your own version of "Snow White" and see how long before you get nasty letters from Disney's lawyers.
Fact is that a copyrighted work based on early public-domain works can very easily be used to block further work derived from those same public-domain works. This is especially easy if the more recent copyrighted work is a commercial success, in which case a court will easily believe that you copied the modern work rather than the public-domain works.
Actually, I just did a quick google on the topic. One hit started with "Disney threatened to sue a British stonemason for copyright infringement over a plan to carve Winnie the Pooh into the headstone of a stillborn infant.
> You always can do with your ideas whatever you want: you can keep them in your head, you can publish them,
> you can tell your kids about them.
This is not true if copyright is taken away. You then cannot make money from your creations, because anyone else can make copies of them for free.
It's not true under our current copyright laws, either. Yes, you can write your "creations" down, and you can tell your kids and friends about them. But to make a living from them, you have to distribute them to interested people. And with the distribution channels controlled by a very small number of corporations, the only way you can distribute your creations is to sign your rights to your creations over to those corporations.
At least that's how it was during most of the 20th century. We now have a new distribution mechanism for "intellectual" (i.e., non-physical) creations: the Internet. But there is a battle going on to prevent you and me from using this distribution method. One of the current name for it is "network neutrality", which is an attempt to fix the laws so that the owners of the communication channels can control in detail what is easily distributed via the Internet.
Another method of restriction our distribution ability is the common practice of most ISPs of having a "no servers" rule for retail customers. This prevents you from creating your own web site to show your creations to the world. Instead, you must upload your creations to a commercial web site (preferably the ISP's), and they'll put it online for you. But this gives them control.
And in some cases, the fine print gives them ownership of your creations. Thus, several years ago there was a bit of a fuss when people using msn.com as their ISP found that msn.com was taking material (mostly photos) from customers' web sites and email, and using them in advertising. When challenged, they pointed to the clause in the contract saying that anything stored on their servers belonged to msn.com. They backed down, at least until the fuss died down. But most ISP contracts still contain language like this. If you store your creations on a commercial web site (or even an email server), there's a good chance that you have legally handed the rights to the server's owner.
Another legal problem right now is that the companies that own the Internet's wires can legally restrict the distribution of copyrighted material. In most of the world, everything you create is copyrighted automatically at the time of creation. If the corporations that control the Internet's backbone lines can find a good way to detect copyrighted content, they can control distribution based on that. Right now, this is a difficult AI problem, so it isn't much in effect. The only serious use of this so far is that some ISPs have successfully blocked material coming from competitors. But this is a big sword hanging over our use of the Internet. When the corporations develop good tools for recognizing and classifying copyrighted material, they will be able to institute strict controls similar to how the recording industry has blocked individual access in the past. Then they can demand control of distribution rights for your creations.
We do have an example of this sort of blocking in the software biz: Try buying a computer with a non-MS OS in a retail computer store. So-called "independent" software developers have mostly written for DOS/Windows, because that has been the only way they could sell to retail customers. This happened because the retail channels were mostly blocked to any software running on any OS other than Microsoft's (and Apple's, as a concession to "prove" that it wasn't a monopoly). Right now, if you're a software developer, your software must run on Windows, or most of your potential customers won't be able to run it. And MS does have a history of demanding that successful developers "partner" with them, or there's a good chance that your software will mysteriously stop working at random times, and yo
I just got done finishing CS homework and the answer came in my mind as:
lightbulb(lightbulb())
Must not have been a course on Object-Oriented programming, because then the answere would have appeared as:
lightbulb.change()
In other words, if the question is "How many OO programmers does it take to change a lightbulb?", the answer would be "None, because OO lightbulbs change themselves."