Yeah, but what if someone yells "fire" in a crowded theater? Clearly an intelligent person would instantly believe them... [usual scenario deleted]
This has been one of my favorite memes ever since I saw it happen. The place was fairly full, and the movie reached a scene where the Good Guys got the drop on the Bad Guys. As several of the Good Guys lifted their weapons, someone in the audience shouted "Fire!". This was instantly followed by many other voices shouting "Fire!". Then the ruckus died down, and everyone in the audience broke into laughter.
It was pretty obvious what everyone was thinking. They'd all just violate the hoary old meme about shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater. And nobody was injured. It was fairly obvious that nobody was going to be arrested for their actions. Then we all went back to watching the movie.
And ever since then, I've laughed to myself every time someone mentions the yelling-fire-in-a-crowded-theater meme.
Maybe we need a new, more credible example of why the evil old gummint should exercise prior restraint on our speech. When a crowded theater breaks into a communal "Fire!" followed by laughter, you just know that it's not working any more.
Patent litigator harm society and remove incentive for innovation?!!! That goes against everything I've ever heard about the patent process!!! Why would our government allow such a thing to be?
Well, now; it appears that you fell for that old bit of social propaganda.
Anyone who has actually read any of the many histories about patent (and copyright) law understands quite well that the intent from the start has been to block any profits that might be gained from innovation. Or even better, divert the profits to lawyers and government agencies.
Where did people ever get the silly idea that patents encourage innovation? Why would anyone believe such a claim, when all our experience is the opposite? Patent is a legal concept. That's all you need to know, to figure out who it's intended to benefit.
Let's just put everybody on the list; this way, we can be absolutely, 100% certain that we have all the bad people on the list.
This might be easier than most people think. Note that the "list" is a list of names. There have been lots of reports of people blocked from flying because their name was spelled the same (or almost the same) as the name of the person who was put on the list. They don't have to put everyone in America on the list; they only need to put every unique name on the list.
This is an old story with such government lists, whether they're to find commies or drug dealers or terrorists or whatever. They're usually a "name list", with one folder for everyone with the same name.
Some time back, I looked the Census Bureau's site, where there is a list of the most common American names, first and last, with the counts of the number of people with each name. If you type in your first and last name, they'll tell you how many people in the country have the same name. There are about 1800 people with my name, for example, ignoring middle names.
So there's a pretty good chance that I'm on lots of government lists, for all sorts of crimes and other suspicious actions that were done by some of those other people with my name.
Is your name unique? You might want to think about this before you use the "I haven't done anything wrong, so I have nothing to hide" reasoning. It doesn't matter what you do; what matters is what anyone with your name does.
Or a name somewhat like yours. Has anyone ever written your name down wrong, or called you with a name similar to yours but not quite the same? If so, then you might want to do a bit of worrying...
For example, in our solar system, we have a number of planets orbitting the sun at various distances. What happens if the sun suddenly popped out of existence, how long before each of the planets stops following the previous orbital path because there is no longer a massive gravity well at the center of the system?
I'd think that we wouldn't need such a drastic "experiment" to measure the speed of gravity. A simpler approach that should be feasible now is: As two planets pass in their orbits, are the changes in their orbits a function of each other's actual (simultaneous) position, or of the other's position some time in the past. The easiest to measure would probably be a Mars/Jupiter conjunction. They would be several light minutes apart, and should "see" each other at a significantly earlier point in their orbits. Mars' effect on Jupiter may not be measurable, but I'd expect that we can measure Jupiter's effect on Mars. From this, we should be able to calculate where Mars "sees" Jupiter, which would give us the speed of gravity along the path between them.
So far, I haven't read of such measurements being done. Anyone know if it's actually feasible, and so, what the number may be?
Actually, I'd think that similar measurements might be possible with Earth and some of its satellites, such as the GPS satellites. Again, I haven't read of it; I've just seen comments that the GPS software does need to take into account relativistic effects to attain the precision needed. Some of the GPS orbits are quite eccentric, and reach a significant fraction of a light-second from Earth's center of mass, so it seems likely that the software in the GPS system might have to take the speed of gravity between Earth and the satellites into account. Anyone know? If so, that should give us the speed of gravity, to within some error interval.
Yeah; my first thought was along the lines of what others here are saying. Julian and the publishers' people (and their lawyers) probably got together and worked this out as the best publicity stunt ever. The "autobiography" (ghost-written as usual) gets published, Julian gets "plausible deniability" for everything in it, the "scandalous" situation gets lots of free publicity, lots of books get sold, and so on. I'll bet they're reading this and chuckling, while sharing some beers. And it doesn't even matter that the geeks here see through it, because they're a tiny part of the market, and our discussion just adds to the publicity.
I wonder if it'll be worth reading. Anyone know where we can find it on wikileaks?
Buy a car without OnStar. My Touareg doesn't have it.
Are you sure? A previous post explained that the OnStar functionality has been moved into the drive-train computer, and the antenna is now internal. So it could easily be there now, but without the UI.
We've already read a few descriptions of auto "hackers" doing things like turning cars off via a wireless command, overriding the driver. Most new cars now have onboard computers, which are generally very poorly documented. When you inquire, you get a lot of replies that included phrases like "trade secret" and "no user-servicable parts". So the reasonable assumption should be that there are a lot of things hidden in there that they don't want you to know about (until it's too late for you to do anything about it;-).
Any reasonable computer/network hacker would now be awaiting the slowly-growing flock of horror stories about auto-computer misbehavior. The history of auto makers' acknowledgement (and publicity) of hardware bugs is quite instructive here. Their nearly-universal approach has been to threaten or prosecute people who publicize information about hardware bugs, and only release information when those evil government regulators order them to do so. The computer industry has reacted similarly to "security" issues. Why would we expect a different approach to automotive software bugs?
I see that the discussion here seems to only deal with how to buy a machine and install something other than Windows 8 (linux, Windows XP, whatever). But in my experience, most linux boxes started life as a Windows-whatever machine that was "cast off" by the user, and given to someone else who installed linux. I have three machines in my office, one bought recently with Ubuntu installed, and the other two cast-off machine that my wife used to use to run Windows ("for work" of course; she's actually a Mac fan and hates MS;-). One is over 10 years old, and is still doing its job as our gateway/firewall/router system just fine.
The obvious interpretation of this is that a "used" computer couldn't be retargeted to a different task by installing a different OS. Only an OS approved by the original vendor would boot. If this is wrong, and there's a practical way to retarget an old machine that has this "security" feature, it'd be useful to have it documented.
One interpretation is that it's may not be intended solely as a "linux killer"; its primary reason may be a desire to kill any use of old machines, and force everyone to buy a new machine if they want a different OS. After all, the hardware vendor would have a strong motive not to approve such retargeting, and force customers to buy new hardware instead. This would apply to old MS OSs as well as linux or minix or itron or whatever.
Again, if this is wrong, rather than an "OMG, we're fsck'd!!!" rant, it would be useful to explain exactly how one might take an old, cast-off machine, and rebuild it with a new OS (of any sort). If this can't be done easily, then it's time for a rant, lots of publicity, and maybe a few lawsuits.
What I've been expecting for some time is reading of this behavior from a company that turns out to have no registered patents (or copyrights) at all. They just go to various profitable companies, making the claim that those companies are infringing their unspecified IP, and offering to make a deal not to sue for $X per month. If they are exposed, they just close up shop, and the officers form a new company to continue the "business."
It's not clear how this would differ from Microsoft's behavior. True, MS does seem to have a portfolio of patents. But if they won't tell their victims what patents are being infringed, how is their behavior materially different from the above? This is basically the situation with MS's charges against linux. They claim unspecified infringements, and stonewall questions about the specifics.
It's well understood that MS has the legal budget to bankrupt most smaller companies with legal fees, even when MS would otherwise lose the case. If you're bankrupt before the case is settled, it doesn't much matter whether you were right or wrong. So they can get away with this sort of extortion.
Lessee, if I post this, am I aiding and abetting such behavior? I wonder if we'll actually ever know. There's usually a lot of secrecy involved in such dealings.
Also : I've never seen a pizza analogy on slashdot. I'm curious - what are they like?
They're a lot like stone soup analogies.
Actually, the pizza analogy works pretty well with the rat-farming story. That one says that if you offer money for dead rats, you encourage people to produce rats that they sell to you. Similarly, if you buy pizzas from pizza makers, that just encourages them to make more pizzas, which they then sell to people like you.
But I don't think either of these works too well as analogies to software bugs. The explanation probably has to do with the fact that nobody actually buys the bugs themselves; they pay for reports describing the bugs' nature and location. Saying "I saw a brown rat at this place and time" isn't enough to get you the bounty, though, so the analogy sorta fails.
It doesn't say anything more than the Slashdot topic.
It does now. A few sentences have been added that attempt to counteract the idiocy of the original claim implying that the bug "researchers" are introducing bugs into someone else's software to collect the bounty.
It's still a rather crappy analogy. Methinks it's more of an attempt to disparage the bug hunters. This is quite common in the software biz, of course, but this author found an original way to discredit people's attempts to improve software quality.
That's all humbug. I live in South Africa, and there is no way me, my friends or any of my family will hand in dead rats for money,... Rather skewer them over an open fire, it really brings out the flavor. But care must be taken with those who are carrying young, the veal is especially priceless.
Great answer! I've read similar comments from Chinese sources about various pest problems there. Their similar replies are especially effective, because the rest of the world has a stereotype of Chinese that they'll eat any sort of strange animals. The fact that this is semi-true just adds to the effectiveness of the humor. I once had a Chinese friend who liked to tell people that his relatives back home trapped and ate second children. He really enjoyed the responses to this claim.
Of course, if a bounty were offered, there's probably some price at which people would turn in the critters rather than eat them. Thus, if the bounty on a rat is greater than the local market price of a pigeon or other animal about the same size, you'd expect that people would collect the bounty and use it to buy a squab (a cleaned and dressed pigeon, available in food stores in a lot of the world).
But in general, saying "We'd never turn the critters in, because we like to eat them" is a good answer to tweak the prejudices of people in other parts of the world. And in some cases, the critters are good to eat.
(Here in the Boston area, we have a lot of problems with squirrels. My wife and I like to mention our Appalachian families, and claim that we catch the cute critters to make squirrel pie. Yum! Just like grandma made.)
I'd wonder if they've considered the TRON OS. Of course, hardly anyone in the US has ever heard of it, despite its being one of the most-installed OSs in the rest of the world. But the US is no longer an important part of the phone industry, y'know. And 99% of the customers don't know or care what OS the phone is running.
You'd think they'd be attracted to an OS that was designed for small gadgets, and which started life with strong support for all the world's languages, not just English.
FWIW, I mentioned Chinese date notation in another message here, along with a question about what other languages use year-month-day as the normal order. And I don't even speak any of the Chinese languages.;-) I've also occasionally liked to bring up Mayan date notation in discussions, and I'm not Mayan, either.
Someone else mentioned Hungarian, which has used big-endian dates since the earliest writing that we know of. There are probably some others. The reason this is such a common topic these days, of course, is that computers are more and more involved in our communications, and a date that's easy for software to parse has some clear benefits to most of us now. It's really handy to be able to copy-and-paste between email and a date book, and this only works if they both use the same date format. The constant need to retype dates is a PITA and a time waster.
But English now has a serious problem in that we have two common date formats that are ambiguous during a large fraction of the year. This isn't even a tenable situation for human-only communication, since communication is now common with the participants not knowing the local dialect of all the participants. There's a growing probability of people acting on the wrong interpretation of an ambiguous date in English text.
Of course, if you're planning another large-scale terrorist attack or other crime against humanity, you may see an advantage to a date format that's not recognized by software, or understood by other humans who don't know your preferred date format.;-)
You're right. We should choose the notations that's the most practical and useful. So it's yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss for everyone from now on, right?
(That is pretty much what most standards organizations have decided since they started tackling the question a few decades ago. Not that it has had much effect on the general public.;-)
Agreed. 100,000 civilians died already in [the Iraq] war and you NEVER hear the USA mentioning them.
While you have a good point here, there's a much better way to point to the US's attitude toward the rest of the world. We should also bring up the constant American PR claim that 9/11 was an "attack on America", and point out what this phrase means to the rest of the world.
The attack on the World Trade Center resulted in the death of citizens of around 60 nations. Those buildings were truly a World center, and a large fraction of its workers on any given day were from other countries. When US politicians claim this was an "attack on America", they are widely understood to be saying "Only American deaths are important; the death of all those people from other nations isn't worth mentioning". This is one of the main things that people outside the US have heard from US leaders, and nobody should be too surprised if assorted non-Americans react to such a slogan with a "Well, screw you, too!" attitude. You don't make friends or allies by casually dismissing the violent murders of their friends and relatives.
Of course, we might note that this isn't really different from the US ignoring civilian deaths in Iraq. But that's not as galling to most people, because people everywhere know that their leaders and news people routinely do the same thing. It's a "sin of omission", not a blatant dismissal of others' deaths.
Middle-East experts have also point at another problem with this slogan. The bin-Laden crowd is well known to object generally to all of the modern Western World. The US may be the Great Satan in their eyes, but all the rest of us involved in modern society are also targets. The World Trade Center was attacked primarily because it was a major symbol of the modern world, and secondarily because it was physically in the US. Claiming that the attack was on the US ignores this fact, and erects a wall between the US and the rest of that modern world. This isn't a smart thing to do, when the best approach would emphasize improving connections between the US and the rest of the modern world. But this is a more "scholarly" take on the topic. It doesn't have the same impact as a blatant dismissal of everyone else's casualties as beneath our notice.
But in general, dismissing others' lives as unimportant is not a good idea if you want to set up institutions that can prevent similar actions in the future.
So where in the English-speaking parts of the world do you live, that the definite article is required? Here in the US, we hear both of these, but the first (without any article) is by far the most common. They both sound quite ordinary to me, a native of the Seattle area now living in the Boston area.
Start saying "1st of September" like the rest of the world does.
That's about the dumbest thing I've ever heard all day.
Hmmm... You must not be a native speaker of English, or at least not of American English. Here in the US, "the 1st of September" is a totally ordinary way of saying "September 1st". I'd guess that the two are about equally common. (And note the definite article on the former but not the latter.)
I don't know the history of all this, but it seems likely that the common British way of writing dates dd-mm-yy is based on that spoken order, while the American mm-yy-dd order is based on the other spoken order.
There are languages that have adopted the yy-mm-dd big-endian order as the standard notation. This is done in Chinese (all of them;-), though since/. doesn't permit the use of Chinese characters, I can't give an explicit example, which contains chracters for year, month and day between the numbers.
I wonder what other languages have adopted such a standard. And did they do this before or after the advent of computerized communication systems such as email or the Internet?
wouldn't little-endian be SS:MM:HH DD-MM-YYYY?
That would make, for me, right now 44:22:17 11-09-2011
No, that's still mixed-endian; little-endian would be 44:22:71 11:90:1102.
(Are there languages in which numbers are routinely written little-endian? Yes, I know cases like German, in which 37 would be "sieben und dreissig", i.e., seven-and-thirty. But they only do this with 2-digit numbers, and larger numbers still have the nigh-order digits first. But what languages actually espress all numbers in little-endian fashion?)
Dude, you stole my Java rant from 15 years ago and search-and-replaced the language name.
Yeah, yeah; I'd openly admit that my rant is really about a generic problem in much of the software industry. It's easy to find hype about a Marvelous New Tool (MNT). It's difficult to dig out the actual useful information about it. The same problems appear over and over. It's really a complaint about human nature, not about the specific MNT.
But I do think the Web is especially prone to this sort of problem. It's a confused mess, which sorta "just growed" organically, with little visible design. Except, of course, for the "design" crowd who are very concerned with superficial appearance, and not at all concerned with how usable anything actually might be. Their main effect has been to introduce lots of white space, typically decreasing the information that can be presented to even less than what you could fit on an 80x24 text-only screen. As for design of the behind-the-scene development tools, that's mostly handled by decreeing that it should never be seen by users, and thus need not be discussed (or designed).
Meanwhile, as a developer, I keep trying all sorts of MNTs that are supposed to help me build stuff. I always seem to find that a MNT addresses the trivial problems in the first few hours of coding and testing. But pretty soon, I find I've got a bug to diagnose that the MNT builders never considered, and I've reduced to the traditional conditional debug messages to a a logfile. Then people spend time telling me that I shouldn't need that with this MNT; I ask them how the MNT will solve the current specific problem; they change the subject to more hype about the marvels of the MNT; I finally tune them out and use my obsolete techniques to track down the silly library routine that behaves very slightly differently than what I thought the documentation (such as it is) said it would do.
But that's a universal in all programming languages, too, so you can just search-and-replace the MNT's name with any other, and it'll be equally valid.
OTOH, I do have this character flaw, in that I actually enjoy experimenting with MNTs and finding out whether they're really new (and give me some new insight), or they just have a different syntax than the old tools. And sometimes just an interesting new syntax can be fun. For a while.
Corporate languages like.NET, Java, ObjC and now Go are here to create barriers of exit and lockins,...
So someone understands.;-)
Actually, that wasn't really true with Java. The gang at Sun did it first as an internal, embedded-controller language, with the ability to download components the first time they were needed, on-the-fly, from a server. The news got out, others got interested, and Sun's response was a serious effort to make it easily available to everyone. This was especially useful after we realized that Java was a good networking tool. Sun kept legal control, because they were well aware of the chaotic results of languages that had incompatible implementations from different vendors, and wanted Java to be compatible everywhere.
But this is all irrelevant now that Sun has been sold to one of the most notorious walled-garden profit-maximizing vendors in the business. So it now belongs with other walled-garden tools like.NET, ObjC, etc., though it wasn't like that for several decades.
This change of status for Java should be a warning to the rest of us. No matter how good you think Google's intentions may be now, a decade from now they may be controlled by (or turned into) a corporation like Oracle or Microsoft or IBM or....
And when (not if) this happens, what'll you do with the stuff you've built over the years and whose original authors have moved on?
This is the reason there will be no cheap one-time cure-all wonder drug (for whatever ailment). There's no profit in it, and so the research on it doesn't get properly funded,...
I've heard/read any number of explanations from drug-industry representatives, explaining in this way why they don't invest in vaccines. Vaccines aren't profitable. They're expensive to develop, then a patient pays for just one dose (or sometimes two), and is cured for decades or life. There's no way a corporation can make a profit that way. What they do instead is invest in "disease control" (their phrase), which in essence means ongoing drug sales that minimize the symptoms, and provides an ongoing income to the drug manufacturer(s).
If you look into the history of vaccines and other cures, you find that most of them are developed in government-funded research labs, mostly at universities. Very often, the "marketing" is done entirely by a government agency that buys up the vaccine at a price that pays for manufacturing (plus a small profit), and then delivers the vaccine to medical people in clinics and schools.
We've successfully eradicated a few diseases, and have limited others to small areas (generally controlled by religious dictatorships that don't approve of science;-). This has pretty much always been done by governments and non-profit agencies (often run by other religious organizations;-). It's rare for corporations to get involved in disease eradication, except on cost-plus contracts to those government and non-profit organizations. It's just not profitable, unless you can arrange a guaranteed profit beforehand.
It has been pointed out by biologists that successful parasites aren't the ones that kill their hosts; they're the ones that keep a host alive as long as possible. A cynic might observe that the same applies to commercial medical developers. And in fact, spokespeople for various drug makers have said pretty much the same thing, though in somewhat nicer-sounding words.
I'd like to see the old "first to show the damned thing working" system come back.
Sorry, you'll just have to learn to live with the modern implementation of patent law: The corporate patent-law departments will scour the tech literature (including/.;-) looking for ideas. They'll submit patents for those ideas, and then wait until someone else actually develops a working model. Then they'll file infringement lawsuits against the successful developers, and take over the product that's rightly theirs by law.
If you read the history of patent law, you'll find lots of precedent for this. Patent didn't start as a way to protect new ideas. It started as a way for the government (i.e., the monarch) to collect money from "supporters" by selling them a "royal patent" that gave them the exclusive right to market a product. Patents were given for such products as plain salt if you paid the monarch's asking price.
The clause in the US Constitution about "Progress of Science and useful Arts" was intended to prevent such abuses. The current law is will be a major tool to revert to the earlier patent concept of buying a legal monopoly on anything by paying the government enough money.
It'll be interesting to see if the US Supreme Court will uphold this new law. But if recent history is any guide, it'll be at least a decade before we find out, and in the meantime, a lot of damage can be done to American technical leadership (what's left of it;-).
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but what if someone yells "fire" in a crowded theater? Clearly an intelligent person would instantly believe them ... [usual scenario deleted]
This has been one of my favorite memes ever since I saw it happen. The place was fairly full, and the movie reached a scene where the Good Guys got the drop on the Bad Guys. As several of the Good Guys lifted their weapons, someone in the audience shouted "Fire!". This was instantly followed by many other voices shouting "Fire!". Then the ruckus died down, and everyone in the audience broke into laughter.
It was pretty obvious what everyone was thinking. They'd all just violate the hoary old meme about shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater. And nobody was injured. It was fairly obvious that nobody was going to be arrested for their actions. Then we all went back to watching the movie.
And ever since then, I've laughed to myself every time someone mentions the yelling-fire-in-a-crowded-theater meme.
Maybe we need a new, more credible example of why the evil old gummint should exercise prior restraint on our speech. When a crowded theater breaks into a communal "Fire!" followed by laughter, you just know that it's not working any more.
Whomever thought of this obviously did not watch the Battle Star Galactica series that came out last decade.
This isn't really relevant, but I'm kinda curious - why do you think that the subject in that sentence needs to be in the accusative?
Well, it made sense to me, because xclr8r was clearly making an accusation. Wouldn't you expect the subject of an accusation to be in accusitive form?
Patent litigator harm society and remove incentive for innovation?!!! That goes against everything I've ever heard about the patent process!!! Why would our government allow such a thing to be?
Well, now; it appears that you fell for that old bit of social propaganda.
Anyone who has actually read any of the many histories about patent (and copyright) law understands quite well that the intent from the start has been to block any profits that might be gained from innovation. Or even better, divert the profits to lawyers and government agencies.
Where did people ever get the silly idea that patents encourage innovation? Why would anyone believe such a claim, when all our experience is the opposite? Patent is a legal concept. That's all you need to know, to figure out who it's intended to benefit.
Let's just put everybody on the list; this way, we can be absolutely, 100% certain that we have all the bad people on the list.
This might be easier than most people think. Note that the "list" is a list of names. There have been lots of reports of people blocked from flying because their name was spelled the same (or almost the same) as the name of the person who was put on the list. They don't have to put everyone in America on the list; they only need to put every unique name on the list.
This is an old story with such government lists, whether they're to find commies or drug dealers or terrorists or whatever. They're usually a "name list", with one folder for everyone with the same name.
Some time back, I looked the Census Bureau's site, where there is a list of the most common American names, first and last, with the counts of the number of people with each name. If you type in your first and last name, they'll tell you how many people in the country have the same name. There are about 1800 people with my name, for example, ignoring middle names.
So there's a pretty good chance that I'm on lots of government lists, for all sorts of crimes and other suspicious actions that were done by some of those other people with my name.
Is your name unique? You might want to think about this before you use the "I haven't done anything wrong, so I have nothing to hide" reasoning. It doesn't matter what you do; what matters is what anyone with your name does.
Or a name somewhat like yours. Has anyone ever written your name down wrong, or called you with a name similar to yours but not quite the same? If so, then you might want to do a bit of worrying ...
For example, in our solar system, we have a number of planets orbitting the sun at various distances. What happens if the sun suddenly popped out of existence, how long before each of the planets stops following the previous orbital path because there is no longer a massive gravity well at the center of the system?
I'd think that we wouldn't need such a drastic "experiment" to measure the speed of gravity. A simpler approach that should be feasible now is: As two planets pass in their orbits, are the changes in their orbits a function of each other's actual (simultaneous) position, or of the other's position some time in the past. The easiest to measure would probably be a Mars/Jupiter conjunction. They would be several light minutes apart, and should "see" each other at a significantly earlier point in their orbits. Mars' effect on Jupiter may not be measurable, but I'd expect that we can measure Jupiter's effect on Mars. From this, we should be able to calculate where Mars "sees" Jupiter, which would give us the speed of gravity along the path between them.
So far, I haven't read of such measurements being done. Anyone know if it's actually feasible, and so, what the number may be?
Actually, I'd think that similar measurements might be possible with Earth and some of its satellites, such as the GPS satellites. Again, I haven't read of it; I've just seen comments that the GPS software does need to take into account relativistic effects to attain the precision needed. Some of the GPS orbits are quite eccentric, and reach a significant fraction of a light-second from Earth's center of mass, so it seems likely that the software in the GPS system might have to take the speed of gravity between Earth and the satellites into account. Anyone know? If so, that should give us the speed of gravity, to within some error interval.
Yeah; my first thought was along the lines of what others here are saying. Julian and the publishers' people (and their lawyers) probably got together and worked this out as the best publicity stunt ever. The "autobiography" (ghost-written as usual) gets published, Julian gets "plausible deniability" for everything in it, the "scandalous" situation gets lots of free publicity, lots of books get sold, and so on. I'll bet they're reading this and chuckling, while sharing some beers. And it doesn't even matter that the geeks here see through it, because they're a tiny part of the market, and our discussion just adds to the publicity.
I wonder if it'll be worth reading. Anyone know where we can find it on wikileaks?
Buy a car without OnStar. My Touareg doesn't have it.
Are you sure? A previous post explained that the OnStar functionality has been moved into the drive-train computer, and the antenna is now internal. So it could easily be there now, but without the UI.
We've already read a few descriptions of auto "hackers" doing things like turning cars off via a wireless command, overriding the driver. Most new cars now have onboard computers, which are generally very poorly documented. When you inquire, you get a lot of replies that included phrases like "trade secret" and "no user-servicable parts". So the reasonable assumption should be that there are a lot of things hidden in there that they don't want you to know about (until it's too late for you to do anything about it ;-).
Any reasonable computer/network hacker would now be awaiting the slowly-growing flock of horror stories about auto-computer misbehavior. The history of auto makers' acknowledgement (and publicity) of hardware bugs is quite instructive here. Their nearly-universal approach has been to threaten or prosecute people who publicize information about hardware bugs, and only release information when those evil government regulators order them to do so. The computer industry has reacted similarly to "security" issues. Why would we expect a different approach to automotive software bugs?
I see that the discussion here seems to only deal with how to buy a machine and install something other than Windows 8 (linux, Windows XP, whatever). But in my experience, most linux boxes started life as a Windows-whatever machine that was "cast off" by the user, and given to someone else who installed linux. I have three machines in my office, one bought recently with Ubuntu installed, and the other two cast-off machine that my wife used to use to run Windows ("for work" of course; she's actually a Mac fan and hates MS ;-). One is over 10 years old, and is still doing its job as our gateway/firewall/router system just fine.
The obvious interpretation of this is that a "used" computer couldn't be retargeted to a different task by installing a different OS. Only an OS approved by the original vendor would boot. If this is wrong, and there's a practical way to retarget an old machine that has this "security" feature, it'd be useful to have it documented.
One interpretation is that it's may not be intended solely as a "linux killer"; its primary reason may be a desire to kill any use of old machines, and force everyone to buy a new machine if they want a different OS. After all, the hardware vendor would have a strong motive not to approve such retargeting, and force customers to buy new hardware instead. This would apply to old MS OSs as well as linux or minix or itron or whatever.
Again, if this is wrong, rather than an "OMG, we're fsck'd!!!" rant, it would be useful to explain exactly how one might take an old, cast-off machine, and rebuild it with a new OS (of any sort). If this can't be done easily, then it's time for a rant, lots of publicity, and maybe a few lawsuits.
What I've been expecting for some time is reading of this behavior from a company that turns out to have no registered patents (or copyrights) at all. They just go to various profitable companies, making the claim that those companies are infringing their unspecified IP, and offering to make a deal not to sue for $X per month. If they are exposed, they just close up shop, and the officers form a new company to continue the "business."
It's not clear how this would differ from Microsoft's behavior. True, MS does seem to have a portfolio of patents. But if they won't tell their victims what patents are being infringed, how is their behavior materially different from the above? This is basically the situation with MS's charges against linux. They claim unspecified infringements, and stonewall questions about the specifics.
It's well understood that MS has the legal budget to bankrupt most smaller companies with legal fees, even when MS would otherwise lose the case. If you're bankrupt before the case is settled, it doesn't much matter whether you were right or wrong. So they can get away with this sort of extortion.
Lessee, if I post this, am I aiding and abetting such behavior? I wonder if we'll actually ever know. There's usually a lot of secrecy involved in such dealings.
Also : I've never seen a pizza analogy on slashdot. I'm curious - what are they like?
They're a lot like stone soup analogies.
Actually, the pizza analogy works pretty well with the rat-farming story. That one says that if you offer money for dead rats, you encourage people to produce rats that they sell to you. Similarly, if you buy pizzas from pizza makers, that just encourages them to make more pizzas, which they then sell to people like you.
But I don't think either of these works too well as analogies to software bugs. The explanation probably has to do with the fact that nobody actually buys the bugs themselves; they pay for reports describing the bugs' nature and location. Saying "I saw a brown rat at this place and time" isn't enough to get you the bounty, though, so the analogy sorta fails.
It doesn't say anything more than the Slashdot topic.
It does now. A few sentences have been added that attempt to counteract the idiocy of the original claim implying that the bug "researchers" are introducing bugs into someone else's software to collect the bounty.
It's still a rather crappy analogy. Methinks it's more of an attempt to disparage the bug hunters. This is quite common in the software biz, of course, but this author found an original way to discredit people's attempts to improve software quality.
That's all humbug. I live in South Africa, and there is no way me, my friends or any of my family will hand in dead rats for money, ... Rather skewer them over an open fire, it really brings out the flavor. But care must be taken with those who are carrying young, the veal is especially priceless.
Great answer! I've read similar comments from Chinese sources about various pest problems there. Their similar replies are especially effective, because the rest of the world has a stereotype of Chinese that they'll eat any sort of strange animals. The fact that this is semi-true just adds to the effectiveness of the humor. I once had a Chinese friend who liked to tell people that his relatives back home trapped and ate second children. He really enjoyed the responses to this claim.
Of course, if a bounty were offered, there's probably some price at which people would turn in the critters rather than eat them. Thus, if the bounty on a rat is greater than the local market price of a pigeon or other animal about the same size, you'd expect that people would collect the bounty and use it to buy a squab (a cleaned and dressed pigeon, available in food stores in a lot of the world).
But in general, saying "We'd never turn the critters in, because we like to eat them" is a good answer to tweak the prejudices of people in other parts of the world. And in some cases, the critters are good to eat.
(Here in the Boston area, we have a lot of problems with squirrels. My wife and I like to mention our Appalachian families, and claim that we catch the cute critters to make squirrel pie. Yum! Just like grandma made.)
I'd wonder if they've considered the TRON OS. Of course, hardly anyone in the US has ever heard of it, despite its being one of the most-installed OSs in the rest of the world. But the US is no longer an important part of the phone industry, y'know. And 99% of the customers don't know or care what OS the phone is running.
You'd think they'd be attracted to an OS that was designed for small gadgets, and which started life with strong support for all the world's languages, not just English.
FWIW, I mentioned Chinese date notation in another message here, along with a question about what other languages use year-month-day as the normal order. And I don't even speak any of the Chinese languages. ;-) I've also occasionally liked to bring up Mayan date notation in discussions, and I'm not Mayan, either.
Someone else mentioned Hungarian, which has used big-endian dates since the earliest writing that we know of. There are probably some others. The reason this is such a common topic these days, of course, is that computers are more and more involved in our communications, and a date that's easy for software to parse has some clear benefits to most of us now. It's really handy to be able to copy-and-paste between email and a date book, and this only works if they both use the same date format. The constant need to retype dates is a PITA and a time waster.
But English now has a serious problem in that we have two common date formats that are ambiguous during a large fraction of the year. This isn't even a tenable situation for human-only communication, since communication is now common with the participants not knowing the local dialect of all the participants. There's a growing probability of people acting on the wrong interpretation of an ambiguous date in English text.
Of course, if you're planning another large-scale terrorist attack or other crime against humanity, you may see an advantage to a date format that's not recognized by software, or understood by other humans who don't know your preferred date format. ;-)
You're right. We should choose the notations that's the most practical and useful. So it's yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss for everyone from now on, right?
(That is pretty much what most standards organizations have decided since they started tackling the question a few decades ago. Not that it has had much effect on the general public. ;-)
Nah, the terrorists didn't win, they got smashed in large numbers, by a completely disproportionate but necessary response.
So it's like most wars: Everyone lost; some just lost more than others.
Agreed. 100,000 civilians died already in [the Iraq] war and you NEVER hear the USA mentioning them.
While you have a good point here, there's a much better way to point to the US's attitude toward the rest of the world. We should also bring up the constant American PR claim that 9/11 was an "attack on America", and point out what this phrase means to the rest of the world.
The attack on the World Trade Center resulted in the death of citizens of around 60 nations. Those buildings were truly a World center, and a large fraction of its workers on any given day were from other countries. When US politicians claim this was an "attack on America", they are widely understood to be saying "Only American deaths are important; the death of all those people from other nations isn't worth mentioning". This is one of the main things that people outside the US have heard from US leaders, and nobody should be too surprised if assorted non-Americans react to such a slogan with a "Well, screw you, too!" attitude. You don't make friends or allies by casually dismissing the violent murders of their friends and relatives.
Of course, we might note that this isn't really different from the US ignoring civilian deaths in Iraq. But that's not as galling to most people, because people everywhere know that their leaders and news people routinely do the same thing. It's a "sin of omission", not a blatant dismissal of others' deaths.
Middle-East experts have also point at another problem with this slogan. The bin-Laden crowd is well known to object generally to all of the modern Western World. The US may be the Great Satan in their eyes, but all the rest of us involved in modern society are also targets. The World Trade Center was attacked primarily because it was a major symbol of the modern world, and secondarily because it was physically in the US. Claiming that the attack was on the US ignores this fact, and erects a wall between the US and the rest of that modern world. This isn't a smart thing to do, when the best approach would emphasize improving connections between the US and the rest of the modern world. But this is a more "scholarly" take on the topic. It doesn't have the same impact as a blatant dismissal of everyone else's casualties as beneath our notice. But in general, dismissing others' lives as unimportant is not a good idea if you want to set up institutions that can prevent similar actions in the future.
September 11th WTF? Should be September THE 11th
So where in the English-speaking parts of the world do you live, that the definite article is required? Here in the US, we hear both of these, but the first (without any article) is by far the most common. They both sound quite ordinary to me, a native of the Seattle area now living in the Boston area.
Start saying "1st of September" like the rest of the world does.
That's about the dumbest thing I've ever heard all day.
Hmmm ... You must not be a native speaker of English, or at least not of American English. Here in the US, "the 1st of September" is a totally ordinary way of saying "September 1st". I'd guess that the two are about equally common. (And note the definite article on the former but not the latter.)
I don't know the history of all this, but it seems likely that the common British way of writing dates dd-mm-yy is based on that spoken order, while the American mm-yy-dd order is based on the other spoken order.
There are languages that have adopted the yy-mm-dd big-endian order as the standard notation. This is done in Chinese (all of them ;-), though since /. doesn't permit the use of Chinese characters, I can't give an explicit example, which contains chracters for year, month and day between the numbers.
I wonder what other languages have adopted such a standard. And did they do this before or after the advent of computerized communication systems such as email or the Internet?
wouldn't little-endian be SS:MM:HH DD-MM-YYYY? That would make, for me, right now 44:22:17 11-09-2011
No, that's still mixed-endian; little-endian would be 44:22:71 11:90:1102.
(Are there languages in which numbers are routinely written little-endian? Yes, I know cases like German, in which 37 would be "sieben und dreissig", i.e., seven-and-thirty. But they only do this with 2-digit numbers, and larger numbers still have the nigh-order digits first. But what languages actually espress all numbers in little-endian fashion?)
I can't imagine the website will be of much use after its been encoded into a single 160 character text message packet.
Apparently Smozzy has a very effective compression scheme.
Dude, you stole my Java rant from 15 years ago and search-and-replaced the language name.
Yeah, yeah; I'd openly admit that my rant is really about a generic problem in much of the software industry. It's easy to find hype about a Marvelous New Tool (MNT). It's difficult to dig out the actual useful information about it. The same problems appear over and over. It's really a complaint about human nature, not about the specific MNT.
But I do think the Web is especially prone to this sort of problem. It's a confused mess, which sorta "just growed" organically, with little visible design. Except, of course, for the "design" crowd who are very concerned with superficial appearance, and not at all concerned with how usable anything actually might be. Their main effect has been to introduce lots of white space, typically decreasing the information that can be presented to even less than what you could fit on an 80x24 text-only screen. As for design of the behind-the-scene development tools, that's mostly handled by decreeing that it should never be seen by users, and thus need not be discussed (or designed).
Meanwhile, as a developer, I keep trying all sorts of MNTs that are supposed to help me build stuff. I always seem to find that a MNT addresses the trivial problems in the first few hours of coding and testing. But pretty soon, I find I've got a bug to diagnose that the MNT builders never considered, and I've reduced to the traditional conditional debug messages to a a logfile. Then people spend time telling me that I shouldn't need that with this MNT; I ask them how the MNT will solve the current specific problem; they change the subject to more hype about the marvels of the MNT; I finally tune them out and use my obsolete techniques to track down the silly library routine that behaves very slightly differently than what I thought the documentation (such as it is) said it would do.
But that's a universal in all programming languages, too, so you can just search-and-replace the MNT's name with any other, and it'll be equally valid.
OTOH, I do have this character flaw, in that I actually enjoy experimenting with MNTs and finding out whether they're really new (and give me some new insight), or they just have a different syntax than the old tools. And sometimes just an interesting new syntax can be fun. For a while.
Corporate languages like .NET, Java, ObjC and now Go are here to create barriers of exit and lockins, ...
So someone understands. ;-)
Actually, that wasn't really true with Java. The gang at Sun did it first as an internal, embedded-controller language, with the ability to download components the first time they were needed, on-the-fly, from a server. The news got out, others got interested, and Sun's response was a serious effort to make it easily available to everyone. This was especially useful after we realized that Java was a good networking tool. Sun kept legal control, because they were well aware of the chaotic results of languages that had incompatible implementations from different vendors, and wanted Java to be compatible everywhere.
But this is all irrelevant now that Sun has been sold to one of the most notorious walled-garden profit-maximizing vendors in the business. So it now belongs with other walled-garden tools like .NET, ObjC, etc., though it wasn't like that for several decades.
This change of status for Java should be a warning to the rest of us. No matter how good you think Google's intentions may be now, a decade from now they may be controlled by (or turned into) a corporation like Oracle or Microsoft or IBM or ....
And when (not if) this happens, what'll you do with the stuff you've built over the years and whose original authors have moved on?
This is the reason there will be no cheap one-time cure-all wonder drug (for whatever ailment). There's no profit in it, and so the research on it doesn't get properly funded, ...
I've heard/read any number of explanations from drug-industry representatives, explaining in this way why they don't invest in vaccines. Vaccines aren't profitable. They're expensive to develop, then a patient pays for just one dose (or sometimes two), and is cured for decades or life. There's no way a corporation can make a profit that way. What they do instead is invest in "disease control" (their phrase), which in essence means ongoing drug sales that minimize the symptoms, and provides an ongoing income to the drug manufacturer(s).
If you look into the history of vaccines and other cures, you find that most of them are developed in government-funded research labs, mostly at universities. Very often, the "marketing" is done entirely by a government agency that buys up the vaccine at a price that pays for manufacturing (plus a small profit), and then delivers the vaccine to medical people in clinics and schools.
We've successfully eradicated a few diseases, and have limited others to small areas (generally controlled by religious dictatorships that don't approve of science ;-). This has pretty much always been done by governments and non-profit agencies (often run by other religious organizations ;-). It's rare for corporations to get involved in disease eradication, except on cost-plus contracts to those government and non-profit organizations. It's just not profitable, unless you can arrange a guaranteed profit beforehand.
It has been pointed out by biologists that successful parasites aren't the ones that kill their hosts; they're the ones that keep a host alive as long as possible. A cynic might observe that the same applies to commercial medical developers. And in fact, spokespeople for various drug makers have said pretty much the same thing, though in somewhat nicer-sounding words.
I'd like to see the old "first to show the damned thing working" system come back.
Sorry, you'll just have to learn to live with the modern implementation of patent law: The corporate patent-law departments will scour the tech literature (including /. ;-) looking for ideas. They'll submit patents for those ideas, and then wait until someone else actually develops a working model. Then they'll file infringement lawsuits against the successful developers, and take over the product that's rightly theirs by law.
If you read the history of patent law, you'll find lots of precedent for this. Patent didn't start as a way to protect new ideas. It started as a way for the government (i.e., the monarch) to collect money from "supporters" by selling them a "royal patent" that gave them the exclusive right to market a product. Patents were given for such products as plain salt if you paid the monarch's asking price.
The clause in the US Constitution about "Progress of Science and useful Arts" was intended to prevent such abuses. The current law is will be a major tool to revert to the earlier patent concept of buying a legal monopoly on anything by paying the government enough money.
It'll be interesting to see if the US Supreme Court will uphold this new law. But if recent history is any guide, it'll be at least a decade before we find out, and in the meantime, a lot of damage can be done to American technical leadership (what's left of it ;-).