Our good old Groklaw had a rather extensive discussion of the differences between MPL1.1 and CDDL. The short story is that more than the one word was changed. The medium story is that the changes may actually contain a trap around patents.
It does, overall, seem like a silly stunt to get attention for HP (who hardly uses GPL universally--or even widely--themselves).
However, the devil is in the details. I agree that Sun's CDDL is a mess, and replacing it with GPL would be great. Or with BSD. Or with MPL or IBM's PL. But IBM's license is quite good--in fact, probably better than GPL at this point, since it deals with patents, requiring non-discriminatory treatment by patent holders. IBM's PL is most certainly a Free Software license, as well as being OSI approved.
I'm aware that GPL 3.x will probably have some long-needed patent coverage. And it's quite possible that Eben Moglen and friends will even (someday) come up with something I like better than IBM's language. But the last I heard is that we're talking about 2007 before GPL 3 actually exists. IBM should hardly throw away a perfectly good licensing approach today under the hope that GPL 3 might give them something better in 2007.
Admittedly, IBM does not license ALL its software as IBM PL. But it's a lot farther along the right road than HP is.
Gee, the quality of articles (this one an "Ask Slashdot", I guess) is ever declining.
The "paradoxes" the pos(t)er claims are completely bogus. Even as wrong-headed as the pro-death (penalty) Republicans are, their position is not a logical contradiction. Under their warped way of thinking, "an eye for an eye" and all that. That is, it's good to kill people who did something bad; but the innocent zygotes never did something bad (since, after all, they don't have brains, intelligence, or even motility for that matter). But if you can go along with the fantasy that a few cells with human DNA (and a "soul", no doubt) are human, the whole crazy belief system is self-consistent.
Likewise, the information that wants to be free is the broader discourse of human knowledge. And the information that wants to be private is purely individual, confidential content. The distinction is clear in the legal forms around it: the bad stuff is copyright, patents, trade-secrets, and to an extent trademarks. I don't protect my sex life and credit history by copyrighting it, but by NOT PUBLISHING it. The anti-freedom types want to publish information (a book, a song, an algorithm), and yet retain control after that publication. If I were to (voluntarily, deliberately) publish a book "All about my sex life", I would not expect the information to be private (say, via copyright)... it's the fact I don't publish it that makes it merit privacy.
Actually, you find quite a lot of fundies who claim to endorse the proposition that "everything in the bible should be taken literally." But when it comes to practice, they are EXTREMELY selective about the parts they read.
As a start, these so-called Christians almost entirely ignore the whole sentiment of the New Testament--all that icky stuff about forgiveness, tolerance and kindness, y'know. But past that, they find some short passage (often in Leviticus or Deuteronomy) promoting homophobia or misogyny, and swear by it as the literal inspired truth. How dare anyone argue with the revealed truth of the bible, after all!
Meanwhile, they preach the condemnatory messages in their nice cotton-poly blends, because, y'know, it's not like THESE passages are meant literally:
Leviticus 19:19 Ye shall keep my statutes. Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind: thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed: neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woolen come upon thee.
Deuteronomy 22:11 Thou shalt not wear a garment of divers sorts, as of woolen and linen together.
And likewise for lots of parts the pseudo-Christian fundies don't want to follow, of course. After all, a lot of that Leviticus stuff is just plain loopy, and no one could possibly follow most of the nonsense in real life.
The sequence in the article is all wrong. MS didn't sabotage Lotus 123 until they were pushing Excel (initially for DOS); that's a bit later than the initial compatibility period.
But the pattern by MS is pretty overwhelmingly clear. For example, who remembers Windows 3.12? This version literally added *NO* feature to 3.11 except breaking compatibility with "OS/2 for Windows" (the version of OS/2 that would use an existing Windows installation as a compatibility runtime environment). There was quite literally not one single bug fix or feature added--it consisted solely of a useless call outside the memory space managed by OS/2's environment.
Or the version of Windows (I forget Windows 2.??) that did nothing except sniff memory for DR-DOS, then refuse to run if it was found. DR-DOS was, in fact, completely compatible functionally (and even managed memory better), but MS wanted users to buy their DOS.
And, and, and... it's dishonest dissimulation to pretend MS hasn't done this throughout their entire history.
Unfortunately, in the USA laws are not nearly so rational outside of computer usage either. For example, police and congresscritters with little respect for civil liberties have imposed draconian arrest and imprisonment of organizers of "rave" dances; with "facilitation" charges against, e.g. people who sell or give away glow sticks (i.e. under topsy-turvy fascistic thinking, drug paraphenelia).
Busts have included charges under the 'Ecstasy Awareness Act' (2003 H.R. 2962), or even RICO charges. Mind you, these aren't busts of people selling drugs, but simply of people who, e.g. rent spaces and audio equipment for dances where "drugs *might be* sold" by others.
So yeah, find a local DA or police chief who wants to run for statewide office, and it's not at all unlikely that a coffee shop gets raided for having a public telephone on which "drugs might be sold."
Seriously. I'm not the only one in the thread who points this out. But maybe with enough voices (hah) it will get through the minds of the editors.
NOTHING by Dvorak has any place in a/. article. It is uniformly garbage, and has been since about 1991 (he did some adequate writing before that; though nothing spectacular). Don't feed the trolls by giving such tripe frontpage billing! Just don't do it.
I think the only reasonably successful "new" religion that has arisen in recent times is the Latter Day Saints, and even that was over 150 years ago and it's only a variation of Christianity.
Bahai is about the same age as Mormonism, and is also quite successful (relatively speaking: neither has edged out Catholicism, Hinduism or Islam; but both have millions of members). Bahai seems a little bit less cultish than Mormonism (and certainly much less so than Scientology or the also new Unification Church); but then, I have no real taste for any religion, so this may be splitting hairs.
Linux runs on x86 boxes from Dell, Gateway, HP, etc;
Linux runs on PPC boxes from Apple (and PegasOS, etc);
Linux runs on a zillion less common architectures also;
OSX runs on PPC boxes from Apple.
Windows runs on x86 boxes from Dell, Gateway, HP, etc;
In 2008:
Linux runs on x86 boxes from Dell, Gateway, HP, etc;
Linux runs on x86 boxes from Apple;
Linux runs on a zillion less common architectures also;
OSX runs on x86 boxes from Apple.
Windows runs on x86 boxes from Dell, Gateway, HP, etc;
What exactly is the big change for Linux? Or for Apple or MS, for that matter?! The reasons for running Linux (or for running OSX, or even for running Windows [bleagh!] don't seem affected whatsoever).
I happened to be a bit disappointed by Apple's plans. the PPC architecture is quite elegant and well-planned, while Intel's x86 is hacked together and ad hoc. And Altivec really is a brilliant extension to PPC chips that SSE2 falls far short of. But I also recognize that IBM isn't spending the money to reduce the power usage of G5s, where Intel is for Pentium M's--and you need the low power for laptops. So the switch is a bit disappointing, but not without some good supporting arguments. For the most part, big deal!
I remember this silly stuff popping up a few years back. Almost exactly the same conclusion, based on almost the same pseudo-reasoning. Unfortunately, I don't remember if it was the same authors pushing the pseudo-science.
I do remember that it was when Stephen J Gould was alive to debunk it (one of my favorite, and one of the smartest contemporary, Ashkenazi Jews in the biological sciences, FWIW). So I guess at least prior to 2002.
The problems with this semi-research are several:
While intelligence without question does evolve--people are smarter than chimps, for example--evolutionary time scales are a heck of a lot longer than a couple hundred years. When was our divergence from chimps, something like 20 million years? That may be more than a human isolate would need to get smarter, but we're at least talking tens of thousands of years.
Despite a prevalent mythology among both pro-Jewish racialists and certain anti-semites, Ashkenazi Jews simply were not a particularly isolated breeding group during the years at issue. Lots of anti-semitic laws and customs during the middle ages did things to prohibit intermarriage; those no doubt reduces the overall gene flow. But it did not reduce it to within an order of magnitude of what is needed for isolation of breeding groups for trait acquisition. By analogy: despite a vicious history of anti-miscengenation laws during the 350 years of American slavery, "blacks" in the USA sure don't look like non-diasporal Africans.
Intelligence is simply not so mono-haplotypic as to be subject to such simplistic evolutionary pressure. Of course multiple gene sites can evolve in population isolates (which, per above, this ain't), that's way too messy for this simplistic hypothesis. Of course no one completely understands the genetic factors in intelligence, but no one seriously doubts it's a lot more complicated picture than e.g. skin tone (which also involves much more than a single gene).
The Pinker-esque "everything is genetic" nonsense throws out the window the rather plain fact that European Jews (Ashkenazis) really have had a comparatively strong cultural selection of education and intellectual pursuits. Anti-semitism and in-group values have indeed pushed a relatively large percentage of Jews into more intellectual occupations (doctors, lawyers, scientists, etc., even bureaucrats are more "intellectual" as an occupation than, say farmers--no slight to farmers intended here, nor is that intellect free work).
This really ought to just be a categorical principle. Nothing by or about Dvorak goes on the front page. He's a slight step above O'Gara, but only a slight one. He *does not* deserve or warrant extra readers.
His argument is: (1) Sure O'Gara tried to instigate stalkers to commit violence against PJ and/or her family. (2) Sure O'Gara violated privacy rights and trespassed. (3) Those hysterical "Linux fanatics" get worked up over the silliest things.
This matter is *not* about merely bad journalism, which O'Gara (and Dvorak) have been doing for a long time. OK, fine, publish another "study" that proves Linux will irradiate your brain, and Windows will bring you inner peace. Whatever. It's propoganda and fluff, but ultimately within free speech rights.
What O'Gara did is criminal incitement of violence, and probable RICO violations.
While it would be entirely inappropriate (and just weird) to judge PJ based on being 61 y.o., a Jehovah's witness, driving a Toyota, or living at the addresses alleged (or the other miscellaneous tripe), I think all those purported facts are probably untrue anyway. PJ mentioned on Groklaw that she contacted the police "in the state where she actually lives." So to me, that suggests that MOG found some other Pamela Jones--or simply fabricated the whole thing--and our PJ is of a different age, religion, appearance, car-ownership, etc. than suggested.
As nefarious as the actual purposes are, I rather like the new definition of science:
"Continuing investigation that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena."
Well, I think it needs a Harvard comma in there for clarification of the disjoins, but overall it seems almost Kuhnian.
Of course, a definition won't magically act in isolation when the real subtext and agenda are to replace science with religion through a pretext of "golly, we just don't know."
"Paul Murphy" is an odd sort. His real name--or so he says in email--is "Rudy de Haas". Dunno why the pseudonym; but in fairness to him, I must confess that my birth certificate also didn't list me as "Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters."
In any case, as near as I can tell, Paul Murphy is a sock puppet for Sun Microsystems. He chimed in a couple times on the voter verifiable voting issues that I am active in; while he kinda-sorta advocated sensible positions, the punch line was always, "Buy Sun systems"... even though that conclusion was pretty well unrelated to anything else in the article. Likewise, when I followed his writing on other things, it always had the same non-sequitor promoting Sun.
So I guess this is some general subterranean effort to promote his home team over Linux and IBM. Sun ain't SCO, but they're a bit close to the Mormon hordes.
Hindi is not the principle language of Karnakata, the state where Bangalore is located; Kannada is its official and largest language. Of course, in practice, tech workers in Bangalore come from different regions of India--or indeed, the world--so probably English is even more common in technical workplaces.
For readers who don't follow the link to my resumes, here's the scoop. Some years ago I got sick of some headhunters changing my resume w/o my permission (and sending them along to potential customers). Mostly they did that to emphasize certain points over others, but in some cases they invented skills I did not have (or at least suggested that). I certainly don't want to answer for some resume I've never seen if it gets to an interview.
So I created a number of versions of my resume that "self-verify". For example, this one at uses Javascript to check itself. Or the one called resume.txt has the following (abridged):
--- RUN 'perl -x resume.txt' TO CHECK RESUME AUTHENTICITY --*-- DAVID MERTZ, Ph.D. [...] --*---------- #!/usr/bin/perl open (ME,$0); read ME, $_, 9999;/--\*--.*--\*--/s; if (5242 != length $&) {print q/Some ne'er-do-well has altered this resume/,"\n" } else {print q/This resume seems to be healthy and intact/,"\n" } __END__ THIS RESUME DOES NOT WISH TO BE IN A PROPRIETARY FORMAT, DON'T ASK!
(it won't verify as abridged, of course... but you can get the full one easily enough).
Some of them start with a #! line so they are actually executable. Most of them use an actual cryptographic hash (MD5 or SHA) of the body of the resume (but not of the whole thing plus its own hash as the parent suggests; but is not feasible minus $20M code breaking machines). The Python one is nice looking (again abridged):
# RUN 'python resume.py' TO CHECK RESUME AUTHENTICITY _="""___ DAVID MERTZ, Ph.D. Gnosis Software, Inc. [...] _________""" from md5 import *; from base64 import * if encodestring(new(_).digest()) <> 'eNvjEie0HX1fsdw8xoH7Ww==\n': print "Some ne'er-do-well has altered this resume" else: print "This resume seems to be healthy and intact" # THIS RESUME DOES NOT WISH TO BE IN A PROPRIETARY FORMAT, DON'T ASK!
Now obviously, a sufficiently savvy headhunter could change this, and attach new self-verification. But I think I can program better than any headhunter can... so the self-verification trick is also a self-exemplification of my programming skill.
I haven't updated my resume in a long time, actually... but when I do, a script (in REXX, actually) takes the raw text, and attaches the various programming language wrappers around the body... each in a manner that looks quite inconspicuous if you just want to read the text.
Don't jab at us Christmas Island domain holders just because someone once posted a dirty picture on the same CCTLD. It's a fine CC domain--in my case, my company name was available as 'gnosis.cx', but not as 'gnosis.com' at the time I registered.
And yeah... I have some jpg's there. Mostly screenshots or technical graphs. A few personal snaptshots in other directories. In any case, definitely nothing rated more than PG-13. And I'm sure the same is true of 99% of.cx domains.
Wheelbarrow posts a response with a similar sentiment, so in a way this is a "me too." But I think it's important to note. The best thing about college is not its narrow vocational training to do one specific thing; nor should we try or hope to make it this. College, at its best, expands the world view of students, and makes them generally knowledgeable people.
Literature, philosophy and other humanities are certainly important for everyone to study--even those folks who want careers in scientific or technical subjects. But so, for that matter, are comparative scientific areas. Linguists should have a smattering of physics. And Chemist aren't hurt by knowing something about sociology. And so on. Not because the one science will directly inform work in the other, but just because the best *humans* know many ideas.
This isn't to say, of course, that every college course is any good for anyone. Some teachers, frankly, suck (I've been a college professor too; I believe one of those who didn't suck). And some curricula are backwards, misguided, or just badly designed. But that applies equally across all fields. Paying for a bad class isn't fun, it is true. But the merit of a class shouldn't be judged on narrow technocratic grounds... how much of a better trained monkey can it make you.
I was surprised to find that my iPod 20G transfers data from my TiBook MUCH faster using the Firewire cable than the USB one. Don't really know why, I expected them to be pretty close. But once I tried both, I found the Firewire to be something like 5x faster. I didn't benchmark or otherwise diagnose the matter, I just use the Firewire cable.
But if anyone knows why the difference is so dramatic, I'm curious. Could the TiBook for some reason only use USB1?
The grandparent was speaking more generally of assessing risks, not conflating cryptographic hashes with encryption.
But even so, there are several plausible paths by which a "break" in SHA-1 could lead to compromise of very valuable information (e.g. the $10B merger).
(1) Another respondent pointed out the substitution of a good message for a bad message, where both share a hash. E.g. confidential instructions to a bank manager are guarded by a hash: Only follow these instructions if the hash shows the message has not been altered... but the hash doesn't show that, because the hash algorithm is compromised.
(2) Substitution of public keys in systems using hash components (i.e. all of them). I can forge a message that appears to be signed by someone authorized to have the valuable information. When recipient responds, using MY public key (because it passes for the authorized person's public key), they send me the confidential information.
(3) Monkey wrenching: You know certain messages are being sent concerning the details of the transaction (i.e. the merger). These are encrypted, and you (the attacker) cannot read them. However, knowing the general form of the messages, you flood the channel with one or more false messages, each of them apparently legitimate based on hashes. Participants in the transaction cannot distinguish real from fake messages, and the transaction is complicated, delayed, or cancelled (and you make all the money off your puts/gets/shorts/etc. on the merging companies).
There seems to be much less to this story than the slashdot submission seems to insinuate.
The court didn't find that software simulation was categorically disallowed as evidence. It didn't even find that the PC-CRASH application was inadmissible in general. It just found that this particular software in modeling this particular event had not been shown to satisfy expert consensus.
Maybe PC-CRASH will in the future be shown reliable for this type of modeling. Maybe it will be shown to be inaccurate. Maybe the makers will enhance the software to demonstrably cover this type of event. None of these are anything terribly profound, and none have any great moral for the intersection of law and software.
Slashdot Mirror
Our good old Groklaw had a rather extensive discussion of the differences between MPL1.1 and CDDL. The short story is that more than the one word was changed. The medium story is that the changes may actually contain a trap around patents.
0 23636236
For the full story, take a look at:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20041205
It does, overall, seem like a silly stunt to get attention for HP (who hardly uses GPL universally--or even widely--themselves).
However, the devil is in the details. I agree that Sun's CDDL is a mess, and replacing it with GPL would be great. Or with BSD. Or with MPL or IBM's PL. But IBM's license is quite good--in fact, probably better than GPL at this point, since it deals with patents, requiring non-discriminatory treatment by patent holders. IBM's PL is most certainly a Free Software license, as well as being OSI approved.
I'm aware that GPL 3.x will probably have some long-needed patent coverage. And it's quite possible that Eben Moglen and friends will even (someday) come up with something I like better than IBM's language. But the last I heard is that we're talking about 2007 before GPL 3 actually exists. IBM should hardly throw away a perfectly good licensing approach today under the hope that GPL 3 might give them something better in 2007.
Admittedly, IBM does not license ALL its software as IBM PL. But it's a lot farther along the right road than HP is.
Gee, the quality of articles (this one an "Ask Slashdot", I guess) is ever declining.
The "paradoxes" the pos(t)er claims are completely bogus. Even as wrong-headed as the pro-death (penalty) Republicans are, their position is not a logical contradiction. Under their warped way of thinking, "an eye for an eye" and all that. That is, it's good to kill people who did something bad; but the innocent zygotes never did something bad (since, after all, they don't have brains, intelligence, or even motility for that matter). But if you can go along with the fantasy that a few cells with human DNA (and a "soul", no doubt) are human, the whole crazy belief system is self-consistent.
Likewise, the information that wants to be free is the broader discourse of human knowledge. And the information that wants to be private is purely individual, confidential content. The distinction is clear in the legal forms around it: the bad stuff is copyright, patents, trade-secrets, and to an extent trademarks. I don't protect my sex life and credit history by copyrighting it, but by NOT PUBLISHING it. The anti-freedom types want to publish information (a book, a song, an algorithm), and yet retain control after that publication. If I were to (voluntarily, deliberately) publish a book "All about my sex life", I would not expect the information to be private (say, via copyright)... it's the fact I don't publish it that makes it merit privacy.
Actually, you find quite a lot of fundies who claim to endorse the proposition that "everything in the bible should be taken literally." But when it comes to practice, they are EXTREMELY selective about the parts they read.
As a start, these so-called Christians almost entirely ignore the whole sentiment of the New Testament--all that icky stuff about forgiveness, tolerance and kindness, y'know. But past that, they find some short passage (often in Leviticus or Deuteronomy) promoting homophobia or misogyny, and swear by it as the literal inspired truth. How dare anyone argue with the revealed truth of the bible, after all!
Meanwhile, they preach the condemnatory messages in their nice cotton-poly blends, because, y'know, it's not like THESE passages are meant literally:
Leviticus 19:19 Ye shall keep my statutes. Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind: thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed: neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woolen come upon thee.
Deuteronomy 22:11 Thou shalt not wear a garment of divers sorts, as of woolen and linen together.
And likewise for lots of parts the pseudo-Christian fundies don't want to follow, of course. After all, a lot of that Leviticus stuff is just plain loopy, and no one could possibly follow most of the nonsense in real life.
The sequence in the article is all wrong. MS didn't sabotage Lotus 123 until they were pushing Excel (initially for DOS); that's a bit later than the initial compatibility period.
But the pattern by MS is pretty overwhelmingly clear. For example, who remembers Windows 3.12? This version literally added *NO* feature to 3.11 except breaking compatibility with "OS/2 for Windows" (the version of OS/2 that would use an existing Windows installation as a compatibility runtime environment). There was quite literally not one single bug fix or feature added--it consisted solely of a useless call outside the memory space managed by OS/2's environment.
Or the version of Windows (I forget Windows 2.??) that did nothing except sniff memory for DR-DOS, then refuse to run if it was found. DR-DOS was, in fact, completely compatible functionally (and even managed memory better), but MS wanted users to buy their DOS.
And, and, and... it's dishonest dissimulation to pretend MS hasn't done this throughout their entire history.
Unfortunately, in the USA laws are not nearly so rational outside of computer usage either. For example, police and congresscritters with little respect for civil liberties have imposed draconian arrest and imprisonment of organizers of "rave" dances; with "facilitation" charges against, e.g. people who sell or give away glow sticks (i.e. under topsy-turvy fascistic thinking, drug paraphenelia).
Busts have included charges under the 'Ecstasy Awareness Act' (2003 H.R. 2962), or even RICO charges. Mind you, these aren't busts of people selling drugs, but simply of people who, e.g. rent spaces and audio equipment for dances where "drugs *might be* sold" by others.
So yeah, find a local DA or police chief who wants to run for statewide office, and it's not at all unlikely that a coffee shop gets raided for having a public telephone on which "drugs might be sold."
Seriously. I'm not the only one in the thread who points this out. But maybe with enough voices (hah) it will get through the minds of the editors.
/. article. It is uniformly garbage, and has been since about 1991 (he did some adequate writing before that; though nothing spectacular). Don't feed the trolls by giving such tripe frontpage billing! Just don't do it.
NOTHING by Dvorak has any place in a
Bahai is about the same age as Mormonism, and is also quite successful (relatively speaking: neither has edged out Catholicism, Hinduism or Islam; but both have millions of members). Bahai seems a little bit less cultish than Mormonism (and certainly much less so than Scientology or the also new Unification Church); but then, I have no real taste for any religion, so this may be splitting hairs.
'Nuff said.
(I guess the Phrenology posts were all filled)
In 2008:
What exactly is the big change for Linux? Or for Apple or MS, for that matter?! The reasons for running Linux (or for running OSX, or even for running Windows [bleagh!] don't seem affected whatsoever).
I happened to be a bit disappointed by Apple's plans. the PPC architecture is quite elegant and well-planned, while Intel's x86 is hacked together and ad hoc. And Altivec really is a brilliant extension to PPC chips that SSE2 falls far short of. But I also recognize that IBM isn't spending the money to reduce the power usage of G5s, where Intel is for Pentium M's--and you need the low power for laptops. So the switch is a bit disappointing, but not without some good supporting arguments. For the most part, big deal!
I remember this silly stuff popping up a few years back. Almost exactly the same conclusion, based on almost the same pseudo-reasoning. Unfortunately, I don't remember if it was the same authors pushing the pseudo-science.
I do remember that it was when Stephen J Gould was alive to debunk it (one of my favorite, and one of the smartest contemporary, Ashkenazi Jews in the biological sciences, FWIW). So I guess at least prior to 2002.
The problems with this semi-research are several:
This really ought to just be a categorical principle. Nothing by or about Dvorak goes on the front page. He's a slight step above O'Gara, but only a slight one. He *does not* deserve or warrant extra readers.
His argument is:
(1) Sure O'Gara tried to instigate stalkers to commit violence against PJ and/or her family.
(2) Sure O'Gara violated privacy rights and trespassed.
(3) Those hysterical "Linux fanatics" get worked up over the silliest things.
This matter is *not* about merely bad journalism, which O'Gara (and Dvorak) have been doing for a long time. OK, fine, publish another "study" that proves Linux will irradiate your brain, and Windows will bring you inner peace. Whatever. It's propoganda and fluff, but ultimately within free speech rights.
What O'Gara did is criminal incitement of violence, and probable RICO violations.
While it would be entirely inappropriate (and just weird) to judge PJ based on being 61 y.o., a Jehovah's witness, driving a Toyota, or living at the addresses alleged (or the other miscellaneous tripe), I think all those purported facts are probably untrue anyway. PJ mentioned on Groklaw that she contacted the police "in the state where she actually lives." So to me, that suggests that MOG found some other Pamela Jones--or simply fabricated the whole thing--and our PJ is of a different age, religion, appearance, car-ownership, etc. than suggested.
As nefarious as the actual purposes are, I rather like the new definition of science:
"Continuing investigation that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena."
Well, I think it needs a Harvard comma in there for clarification of the disjoins, but overall it seems almost Kuhnian.
Of course, a definition won't magically act in isolation when the real subtext and agenda are to replace science with religion through a pretext of "golly, we just don't know."
"Paul Murphy" is an odd sort. His real name--or so he says in email--is "Rudy de Haas". Dunno why the pseudonym; but in fairness to him, I must confess that my birth certificate also didn't list me as "Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters."
In any case, as near as I can tell, Paul Murphy is a sock puppet for Sun Microsystems. He chimed in a couple times on the voter verifiable voting issues that I am active in; while he kinda-sorta advocated sensible positions, the punch line was always, "Buy Sun systems"... even though that conclusion was pretty well unrelated to anything else in the article. Likewise, when I followed his writing on other things, it always had the same non-sequitor promoting Sun.
So I guess this is some general subterranean effort to promote his home team over Linux and IBM. Sun ain't SCO, but they're a bit close to the Mormon hordes.
I tried it in Firefox and Safari. Works fine in both. (I might have installed SVG plugins previously though, but if so they're freely available).
Hindi is not the principle language of Karnakata, the state where Bangalore is located; Kannada is its official and largest language. Of course, in practice, tech workers in Bangalore come from different regions of India--or indeed, the world--so probably English is even more common in technical workplaces.
So I created a number of versions of my resume that "self-verify". For example, this one at uses Javascript to check itself. Or the one called resume.txt has the following (abridged):
(it won't verify as abridged, of course... but you can get the full one easily enough).
Some of them start with a #! line so they are actually executable. Most of them use an actual cryptographic hash (MD5 or SHA) of the body of the resume (but not of the whole thing plus its own hash as the parent suggests; but is not feasible minus $20M code breaking machines). The Python one is nice looking (again abridged):
Now obviously, a sufficiently savvy headhunter could change this, and attach new self-verification. But I think I can program better than any headhunter can... so the self-verification trick is also a self-exemplification of my programming skill.
I haven't updated my resume in a long time, actually... but when I do, a script (in REXX, actually) takes the raw text, and attaches the various programming language wrappers around the body... each in a manner that looks quite inconspicuous if you just want to read the text.
Don't jab at us Christmas Island domain holders just because someone once posted a dirty picture on the same CCTLD. It's a fine CC domain--in my case, my company name was available as 'gnosis.cx', but not as 'gnosis.com' at the time I registered.
.cx domains.
And yeah... I have some jpg's there. Mostly screenshots or technical graphs. A few personal snaptshots in other directories. In any case, definitely nothing rated more than PG-13. And I'm sure the same is true of 99% of
Wheelbarrow posts a response with a similar sentiment, so in a way this is a "me too." But I think it's important to note. The best thing about college is not its narrow vocational training to do one specific thing; nor should we try or hope to make it this. College, at its best, expands the world view of students, and makes them generally knowledgeable people.
Literature, philosophy and other humanities are certainly important for everyone to study--even those folks who want careers in scientific or technical subjects. But so, for that matter, are comparative scientific areas. Linguists should have a smattering of physics. And Chemist aren't hurt by knowing something about sociology. And so on. Not because the one science will directly inform work in the other, but just because the best *humans* know many ideas.
This isn't to say, of course, that every college course is any good for anyone. Some teachers, frankly, suck (I've been a college professor too; I believe one of those who didn't suck). And some curricula are backwards, misguided, or just badly designed. But that applies equally across all fields. Paying for a bad class isn't fun, it is true. But the merit of a class shouldn't be judged on narrow technocratic grounds... how much of a better trained monkey can it make you.
Ok, fine /.'ers can't spell that well. But can't they at least learn to spell the word 'site' when they use it in every other post?!
A typo in 'septuagenarian' or 'conciliatory' every once in a while is understandable. But a four letter word that is used habitually. C'mon!
I was surprised to find that my iPod 20G transfers data from my TiBook MUCH faster using the Firewire cable than the USB one. Don't really know why, I expected them to be pretty close. But once I tried both, I found the Firewire to be something like 5x faster. I didn't benchmark or otherwise diagnose the matter, I just use the Firewire cable.
But if anyone knows why the difference is so dramatic, I'm curious. Could the TiBook for some reason only use USB1?
The grandparent was speaking more generally of assessing risks, not conflating cryptographic hashes with encryption.
But even so, there are several plausible paths by which a "break" in SHA-1 could lead to compromise of very valuable information (e.g. the $10B merger).
(1) Another respondent pointed out the substitution of a good message for a bad message, where both share a hash. E.g. confidential instructions to a bank manager are guarded by a hash: Only follow these instructions if the hash shows the message has not been altered... but the hash doesn't show that, because the hash algorithm is compromised.
(2) Substitution of public keys in systems using hash components (i.e. all of them). I can forge a message that appears to be signed by someone authorized to have the valuable information. When recipient responds, using MY public key (because it passes for the authorized person's public key), they send me the confidential information.
(3) Monkey wrenching: You know certain messages are being sent concerning the details of the transaction (i.e. the merger). These are encrypted, and you (the attacker) cannot read them. However, knowing the general form of the messages, you flood the channel with one or more false messages, each of them apparently legitimate based on hashes. Participants in the transaction cannot distinguish real from fake messages, and the transaction is complicated, delayed, or cancelled (and you make all the money off your puts/gets/shorts/etc. on the merging companies).
There seems to be much less to this story than the slashdot submission seems to insinuate.
The court didn't find that software simulation was categorically disallowed as evidence. It didn't even find that the PC-CRASH application was inadmissible in general. It just found that this particular software in modeling this particular event had not been shown to satisfy expert consensus.
Maybe PC-CRASH will in the future be shown reliable for this type of modeling. Maybe it will be shown to be inaccurate. Maybe the makers will enhance the software to demonstrably cover this type of event. None of these are anything terribly profound, and none have any great moral for the intersection of law and software.
Well... not exactly. MOST players play only MP3 and AAC (and I guess Apple Lossless now)... because most players are iPods.