What people tend to forget is that abuse goes both ways. If it's hackable, then it can be abused by the bad guys. Imagine non-government entities that can watch your every move. At least with the government, you have a thin veil of protection, at least there are SOME people who are anal enough to Do The Right Thing. But just lest some 15 year old get ahold of it and watch out...
However, if it was that hard, then they wouldn't dare outsource it to another company, let alone another country.
You don't understand how incredibly cheap these people are to get. For the price of one programmer in the US, who will more than likely do the job correctly, you could hire nearly 10 very poor code-monkies in India. Sure, the code they produce will suck, but the chance is that at leats ONE of the ten will come up with something reasonable. If computers were even faster than they are today, you could model the same approach by writing nothing but customer tests and a genetic algorithm to find the program that matches what you want to accomplish...
You people enjoy the fruits of offshoring in poor quality, buggy programming, unknowledgable customer service who can barely understand your language, general unemployment amost your most intelligent and most dangerous when pissed off population.
Not quite. Because of market collusion its possible to lower the quality of goods across the board and pay no price for it in the marketplace. THAT's why outsourcing to India works. If you are one of five widget makers, and you all subtly agree not to compete on quality, then it's easy to fire 90% of your customer service center, hire shoddy brute-force armies of programmers and end up paying far less than you would need to if your customers actually got a real choice of widget to buy. If one of your competitors hired real programmers who were worth thier salt (and paid them for it) they would eat you alive as droves of customers left you for them. But as long as you all agree to keep the status quo or less, then caring about your customers doesn't really matter.
Don't believe me, go do some comparison shopping on cell phone in the US and Japan. When the market colludes, and competition is scarce, the playing field is not level.
And I don't think that "the height of its popularity" was ever that high. It's a big hit with geeks, but most of the non-geeks I know aren't interested or don't seem to "get it".
Unfortunately nobody ever took a couse in economics or marketing over there. Who has lots of disposable income and is more than willing to spend it on expensive new toys? Geeks! But do they get advertised to? Never. This shouw could have been a perfect opportunity to sell expensive commercials to people who rarely buy commercials, like mp3 player manufaturers, think-geek type places, etc.
The Supreme Court of Canada says that you're liable if a plant with a patented gene infects your property.
It seems to me, after this decision, that the best way to answer this is by charging storage fees. If I drop my car off at Public Storage for a year without paying, they can demand the storage costs or put the car up for auction. If Monsanto wants to use your fields to store thier seed, I think the $50,000 per day storage fee should apply...
So, the question arises--what is the correct way to deal with this?
No doubt, prepare to go to jail now. The theft of the numbers causes VISA no ill effect. At worst, if they are used to purchase things, the stores themselves will have to eat the cost. VISA, on the other hand, has MUCH to lose if you let the world know how shoddy thier security is. You did sign up for fraud protection with a valid number, something that will probably add some small annual fee to the guy's card, so you are probably now guilty of credit card fraud. It seems to me in Corporate America these days, the correct way to handle the situation will be to shut you up by having charges filed as soon as possible and sealing the court records.
If the digits of pi are infinite and don't repeat, does that mean that any string of digits can be found somewhere in pi? It seems like it must mean that, on first thought. Which means that somewhere in pi, there is a sequence of numbers that when translated to ascii, exactly describes every event in my life. Whoah.
Dude, pass the bong!
Yes, that is indeed true... INCLUDING the things that haven't happened yet... translated into in every languange on Earth... and even copies backwards... and written in pig latin. Infinity rocks.
Would you therefore use the argument that just because a digitally reprsentable work can be represented as a number from 1 to infintity (and hence exists a priori) that it therefore belongs in the public domain?
I like that idea...
What are you talking about pirated music!?! mp3 is short for "my pi 3.14..." and it just represents a string of digits found somehwere in PI.
Re:Spyware and others
on
A Worm's Worm
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Just thought about this... With the huge number of machines out there "infected" by spyware, adware and similar programs (and many of them without their users even knowing), how long will it be until a worm is written that exploits a vulnerability in one of these programs?
I went to one of those real expensive accredited schools, but I was essentially a retard for four years and scraped by just enough to get my piece of paper without a shred of new knowledge (in class, that is... Oh boy did I learn a lot of new extra curricular knowledge) that I didn't already possess when I went in.
How is my degree more valid than a $99 WalMart degree? Because I paid more money for it?
Let's imagine you made a perl script that would send a mail with my song as attachment to every email addresses ever created on the net. By doing so, you reduced the marketable value of my song dramatically, as demand will have certainly dropped quite a bit.
Yes, but by the same token, I could reveal to the world that, dispite your sappy Christian lyrics, you are a card carrying Satanist. Again, the demand for your songs will drop dramatically. Does that mean I now owe you money for all the songs that would have been purchased but aren't after I reveal your true nature?
Fine, there may have been some Nigerian tribesmen sitting on $4.5 million dollars who were willing to give it to me as long and nobody replied. I mean, it COULD happen, right? Great, now you *owe* me $4.5 million bucks.
Just because I cost you "potential" money, does that mean you have lost "real" money. If you price your songs at $1,000,000 each, and I mail it to all of the six billion people of the world, does that mean you have "lost" $6,000,000,000,000,000? You have "lost" more money than exists in all the world...
Or does it only count when I send it to someone who WOULD HAVE paid the million dollar price, but doesn't once they get the free version? If that's the case then it's perfectly ok to share music among people who would never have bought the CD anyway... Right?
For example, I decide I want to watch TV. But I could have spent my time selling subscriptions to slashdot. There is an opportunity cost of the money I could have made with the time I had.
Or you could have found a simple pill-form cure for cancer and made trillions. What the fuck!? You just lost a cool fifty trillion by watching American Idol! Those assholes OWE you, big time.
What about the time and effort of the people who created that file that you just downloaded. Did they not lose anything ?
Ok, I just copied a song, how much did they "lose"? Let's say all they lost is a penny. Ok, fine. I just wrote a perl script to constantly copy that one song over and over again for the rest of eternity, now how much are they losing? Well, a penny multiplied by infinity.... WHOAH, these song writers are the richest people on the damn planet, in the universe even! Are they paying thier taxes on that infinite money they just lost?
What about songwriters who don't perform, Mr. Arbiter-of-who-should-get-paid-for-what? They only get paid from royalties from music sales and on-air performances. How do you intend to compensate them?
I'm curious what those songwriters paid ME a US Citizen, for use of those airwaves that I collectivly with my fellow citizens, own?
Chimps, and the other primates, have evolved a very complex system of dominance that usually--usually!--obviates the need for murder. A chimp when challenged by a more dominant member of the species will cringe and retreat.
Human beings, ironically, generally seem to lack this trait. People, when challenged, tend to return the challenge rather than accepting a subservient social role.
You either don't understand how chimp dominace works or else you have never spent any time in a public high school.
So, wait. Let me get this straight. Human beings need to get along because we need somebody to pick up our garbage for us?
And be our doctors, engineers, train conductors, tailors, etc. Unless you are some godlike being capable of understanding and mastering all of the specilized professions that humanity has devised to survive in the world, you can't do it alone.
The natural state of being is for me to be trying as hard as possible to kill you all the time, and vice-versa. We choose not to do this because we've convinced ourselves that it's the right thing to do, not because of some exterior compulsion.
Humans are social animals. You would not survive very long in the "natural" world without your fellow clans members. Chimps don't hunt each other to extinction for the very same reason. It has nothing to do with morality and everything to do with survival. You can survive in this world because of the other 6 billion people who make it livable for you. Killing them off may sound reasonable until you do it and only then discover that the festering, disease-inviting garbage that you left on the sidewalk doesn't empty itself in the landfill.
Microsoft, nor does any other company, have a civic duty - their only duty is to make the shareholders money.
By that logic, Microsoft should build a bioweapon that can wipe out humanity and give the antidote only to the shareholders. Once all the rest of the people are gone, the shareholders will control all the weath of the entire planet. Is that how it's really supposed to work?
Any analog variable has an INFINITE number of states. A wave could have a frequency of 1Hz, 1.1Hz, 1.00057Hz, 1.2399327772883786682676376627676367267Hz, etc. If "computation" is defined as "the act or process of evaluating with numerical or mathematical methods" then there is no physical limit to computation when using analog data storage...
The googleplex, a number that CANNOT be represented digitally (not enough atoms in the universe) can be easily represented by a particularly intelligent shade of the color blue.
Long before 600 years are passed, this capacity will effectively reach "infinite", being the point where no-one can use more capacity or power, no matter what the application.
You simply do not understand the power that the porn industy posesses.
but what prevents someone/some company with low moral standards heading over there, getting ideas and patenting them/slightly changing them and pretending they came out of the R+D department?
One would think the date on the submittions would be a big $$ka-ching$$ for the inventor when it came to trial.
Slashdot Mirror
What people tend to forget is that abuse goes both ways. If it's hackable, then it can be abused by the bad guys. Imagine non-government entities that can watch your every move. At least with the government, you have a thin veil of protection, at least there are SOME people who are anal enough to Do The Right Thing. But just lest some 15 year old get ahold of it and watch out...
However, if it was that hard, then they wouldn't dare outsource it to another company, let alone another country.
You don't understand how incredibly cheap these people are to get. For the price of one programmer in the US, who will more than likely do the job correctly, you could hire nearly 10 very poor code-monkies in India. Sure, the code they produce will suck, but the chance is that at leats ONE of the ten will come up with something reasonable. If computers were even faster than they are today, you could model the same approach by writing nothing but customer tests and a genetic algorithm to find the program that matches what you want to accomplish...
You people enjoy the fruits of offshoring in poor quality, buggy programming, unknowledgable customer service who can barely understand your language, general unemployment amost your most intelligent and most dangerous when pissed off population.
It -is- a level playing field
Not quite. Because of market collusion its possible to lower the quality of goods across the board and pay no price for it in the marketplace. THAT's why outsourcing to India works. If you are one of five widget makers, and you all subtly agree not to compete on quality, then it's easy to fire 90% of your customer service center, hire shoddy brute-force armies of programmers and end up paying far less than you would need to if your customers actually got a real choice of widget to buy. If one of your competitors hired real programmers who were worth thier salt (and paid them for it) they would eat you alive as droves of customers left you for them. But as long as you all agree to keep the status quo or less, then caring about your customers doesn't really matter.
Don't believe me, go do some comparison shopping on cell phone in the US and Japan. When the market colludes, and competition is scarce, the playing field is not level.
And I don't think that "the height of its popularity" was ever that high. It's a big hit with geeks, but most of the non-geeks I know aren't interested or don't seem to "get it".
Unfortunately nobody ever took a couse in economics or marketing over there. Who has lots of disposable income and is more than willing to spend it on expensive new toys? Geeks! But do they get advertised to? Never. This shouw could have been a perfect opportunity to sell expensive commercials to people who rarely buy commercials, like mp3 player manufaturers, think-geek type places, etc.
Are there ways film adaptions can break free of these constraints?
Here is a zany idea, just throwing it out here, how about you don't make them absolutly suck?
The Supreme Court of Canada says that you're liable if a plant with a patented gene infects your property.
It seems to me, after this decision, that the best way to answer this is by charging storage fees. If I drop my car off at Public Storage for a year without paying, they can demand the storage costs or put the car up for auction. If Monsanto wants to use your fields to store thier seed, I think the $50,000 per day storage fee should apply...
is it real flying if it is not a function of lift versus gravity? You can't have lift in the vacum
You missed the episodes with 7 of 9... plenty of lift going on there.
So, the question arises--what is the correct way to deal with this?
No doubt, prepare to go to jail now. The theft of the numbers causes VISA no ill effect. At worst, if they are used to purchase things, the stores themselves will have to eat the cost. VISA, on the other hand, has MUCH to lose if you let the world know how shoddy thier security is. You did sign up for fraud protection with a valid number, something that will probably add some small annual fee to the guy's card, so you are probably now guilty of credit card fraud. It seems to me in Corporate America these days, the correct way to handle the situation will be to shut you up by having charges filed as soon as possible and sealing the court records.
If the digits of pi are infinite and don't repeat, does that mean that any string of digits can be found somewhere in pi? It seems like it must mean that, on first thought. Which means that somewhere in pi, there is a sequence of numbers that when translated to ascii, exactly describes every event in my life. Whoah.
Dude, pass the bong!
Yes, that is indeed true... INCLUDING the things that haven't happened yet... translated into in every languange on Earth... and even copies backwards... and written in pig latin. Infinity rocks.
Would you therefore use the argument that just because a digitally reprsentable work can be represented as a number from 1 to infintity (and hence exists a priori) that it therefore belongs in the public domain?
I like that idea...
What are you talking about pirated music!?! mp3 is short for "my pi 3.14..." and it just represents a string of digits found somehwere in PI.
Just thought about this... With the huge number of machines out there "infected" by spyware, adware and similar programs (and many of them without their users even knowing), how long will it be until a worm is written that exploits a vulnerability in one of these programs?
Gimme a sec.
I went to one of those real expensive accredited schools, but I was essentially a retard for four years and scraped by just enough to get my piece of paper without a shred of new knowledge (in class, that is... Oh boy did I learn a lot of new extra curricular knowledge) that I didn't already possess when I went in.
How is my degree more valid than a $99 WalMart degree? Because I paid more money for it?
Let's imagine you made a perl script that would send a mail with my song as attachment to every email addresses ever created on the net. By doing so, you reduced the marketable value of my song dramatically, as demand will have certainly dropped quite a bit.
Yes, but by the same token, I could reveal to the world that, dispite your sappy Christian lyrics, you are a card carrying Satanist. Again, the demand for your songs will drop dramatically. Does that mean I now owe you money for all the songs that would have been purchased but aren't after I reveal your true nature?
Fine, there may have been some Nigerian tribesmen sitting on $4.5 million dollars who were willing to give it to me as long and nobody replied. I mean, it COULD happen, right? Great, now you *owe* me $4.5 million bucks.
Just because I cost you "potential" money, does that mean you have lost "real" money. If you price your songs at $1,000,000 each, and I mail it to all of the six billion people of the world, does that mean you have "lost" $6,000,000,000,000,000? You have "lost" more money than exists in all the world...
Or does it only count when I send it to someone who WOULD HAVE paid the million dollar price, but doesn't once they get the free version? If that's the case then it's perfectly ok to share music among people who would never have bought the CD anyway... Right?
For example, I decide I want to watch TV. But I could have spent my time selling subscriptions to slashdot. There is an opportunity cost of the money I could have made with the time I had.
Or you could have found a simple pill-form cure for cancer and made trillions. What the fuck!? You just lost a cool fifty trillion by watching American Idol! Those assholes OWE you, big time.
What about the time and effort of the people who created that file that you just downloaded. Did they not lose anything ?
Ok, I just copied a song, how much did they "lose"? Let's say all they lost is a penny. Ok, fine. I just wrote a perl script to constantly copy that one song over and over again for the rest of eternity, now how much are they losing? Well, a penny multiplied by infinity.... WHOAH, these song writers are the richest people on the damn planet, in the universe even! Are they paying thier taxes on that infinite money they just lost?
What about songwriters who don't perform, Mr. Arbiter-of-who-should-get-paid-for-what? They only get paid from royalties from music sales and on-air performances. How do you intend to compensate them?
I'm curious what those songwriters paid ME a US Citizen, for use of those airwaves that I collectivly with my fellow citizens, own?
Chimps, and the other primates, have evolved a very complex system of dominance that usually--usually!--obviates the need for murder. A chimp when challenged by a more dominant member of the species will cringe and retreat.
Human beings, ironically, generally seem to lack this trait. People, when challenged, tend to return the challenge rather than accepting a subservient social role.
You either don't understand how chimp dominace works or else you have never spent any time in a public high school.
So, wait. Let me get this straight. Human beings need to get along because we need somebody to pick up our garbage for us?
And be our doctors, engineers, train conductors, tailors, etc. Unless you are some godlike being capable of understanding and mastering all of the specilized professions that humanity has devised to survive in the world, you can't do it alone.
The natural state of being is for me to be trying as hard as possible to kill you all the time, and vice-versa. We choose not to do this because we've convinced ourselves that it's the right thing to do, not because of some exterior compulsion.
Humans are social animals. You would not survive very long in the "natural" world without your fellow clans members. Chimps don't hunt each other to extinction for the very same reason. It has nothing to do with morality and everything to do with survival. You can survive in this world because of the other 6 billion people who make it livable for you. Killing them off may sound reasonable until you do it and only then discover that the festering, disease-inviting garbage that you left on the sidewalk doesn't empty itself in the landfill.
Why? I, for one, would be a lot better off if about seven-tenths of the world's population were killed right this minute.
Not if that included all the women.
Microsoft, nor does any other company, have a civic duty - their only duty is to make the shareholders money.
By that logic, Microsoft should build a bioweapon that can wipe out humanity and give the antidote only to the shareholders. Once all the rest of the people are gone, the shareholders will control all the weath of the entire planet. Is that how it's really supposed to work?
Any analog variable has an INFINITE number of states. A wave could have a frequency of 1Hz, 1.1Hz, 1.00057Hz, 1.2399327772883786682676376627676367267Hz, etc. If "computation" is defined as "the act or process of evaluating with numerical or mathematical methods" then there is no physical limit to computation when using analog data storage...
The googleplex, a number that CANNOT be represented digitally (not enough atoms in the universe) can be easily represented by a particularly intelligent shade of the color blue.
Long before 600 years are passed, this capacity will effectively reach "infinite", being the point where no-one can use more capacity or power, no matter what the application.
You simply do not understand the power that the porn industy posesses.
Since I don't see anyone else popping up with it: What's the correct pronunciation of G/Jigawatt? Discuss. Go.
but what prevents someone/some company with low moral standards heading over there, getting ideas and patenting them/slightly changing them and pretending they came out of the R+D department?
One would think the date on the submittions would be a big $$ka-ching$$ for the inventor when it came to trial.