This issue is HUGE, to say the least. If this is true, and LA is indeed able to collect I see several things falling out from this:
1) Satellite companies remove themselves from California, and every other state which taxes "moveable personal property" to avoid the taxes.
and
2) the prices for directTV, and other digital cable services go THROUGH THE ROOF. Up until now, the costs they have been recouping have been from the LAUNCH of the satellite, if they have to pay yearly property taxes on it, that's an extra couple hundred million dollars we're talking about.
California - This is a BAD IDEA. It could cripple more companies than you think. Unless of course they're thinking of selectively enforcing the rule, which is even worse.....
Let us not forget that Hormel was also VERY upset with Muppet Treasure Island (I believe) for using their name for the head of the tribe of wild boars in the movie...
They're not all soft and squishy, like their meat, they just know when to cut their losses.
If car manufactureres let you just walk up to their factory and take the components and assemble themselves, we might be closer to what mandrake, and all other linux operating systems distributions do. THEY LET YOU DOWNLOAD THEIR PRODUCT FOR FREE. Let us not forget this. I think that of the possible methods to ask for some cash back for all those people who just sample mandrake, or who download the ISO of every new distro, just to play with it, asking for donations is a much less onerous version than some other distro's who have started charging for ANY acquistion of their product.
It's like buying software without the licence. And I'm all for it.
Someone modifies this one to do some other useful stuff, like say turn off and remove telnet, and vulnerable apps.
I had thought about this when the first linux worms this year started getting announced. I can see it now on securityfocus:
The worm installs itself on the macine, checks for the instalation version, logs into the bug report homepage for that distribution, and updates all of your packages or binaries from a set list of servers...
This isn't genetic manipulation. Period. End of story. This "technique" is not applicable except to the other 150 women in the world who have the SAME infertility problem, and want a child badly enough to actually go through this media hell that the uninformed press (and some people on slashdot, unfortunately) put them through.
--Begin Knowledge Base--
The reason the "genome" is different is because the eggs have someone else's mitochondria in them. This goes back to an old item of evolutionary interest, mitochondria are almost symbiotic bacteria. The theory held by many (I'm not sure about the "most", but at least many) is that mitochondria were orginally separate organisms which existed as symbiots. The cells kept them fed, and gave them food, the mitochondria allowed cells to perform respation/oxidative reduction to produce more energy per molecule of sugar, which is the basis of all "breathing" life. The idea is that the mitochondria slowly lost their autonomy, and became "organelles". But here's the kicker:
They reproduce by themselves, only importing a couple of things from the cell around it. This means that you could trade mitochondria with someone and your "genome" would change, but the only thing that really happened is that you traded one set of mitochondria for another.
--End Knowledge Base--
So, when you have defective mitochondria in your eggs, they can't produce enough energy to keep a fetus alive. To fix that, scientists added some that worked, and they replicated themselves and the eggs were healty. That's it. It really is a dead end of research. Nothing more will come of it. Really. End of story.
I think there's a serious point that should be raised here. DeCSS is NOT the motion picture. It's a DECODING algorithm. So the issue becomes what does MPAA have to do with encoding/decoding of their media? Since it is possible to copy - in its entirety - a movie w/o knowing how to decode it, and then use it in a machine which does know how to decode it, there is no real form of complaint here.
If they procecute people for the ABILITY to copy a form of media to another, then I might as well go home and burn my tape recording deck, unplug my CD-RW, and turn myself in to the police, because any and all of these things fall under the same jurisdiction. At issue is not only the ability of code to be distributed (and why they're procecuting this, but not servers who distribute 1337 scr1p7s - which arguably cause more fiscal damage - might be worth questioning) but MORE IMPORTANTLY - what jurisdiction these sorts of things fall under.
This is not an issue of DCMA, but one of either - copyright law, or whatever laws govern reverse engineering and theft of poorly protected secrets.
Aren't they right? Really, The communists and the environmentalists are right about coal power plants. Nuclear power is less immediatly damaging, and many environmenatlists do not protest them. (the problem with nuclear power is mainly one of public oppinion, not of "environmentalist" concerns).
Secondly:
Really? Just because Americans are too PROFIT oriented to make any real attempts to work on/fund projects to find alternative sources of energy, does not mean that they do not exist. Look around at the research being done in Germany. If people were willing to take the long road, and make a couple of sacrifices now, it is possible to develop the technology, as it exists, into a viable source of energy.
Also, back on the topic. Tidal energy plants would also change the general tidal levels, which is yet another problem with them...
Since I'm too late to get noticed and moderated up, I'll just put this one in because I think it's important.
For a LONG time now, I have been considering the lack of distributed education for our children. Thanks to the kind folks at the US Senate, and Reagan, Bush, and Baby Bush's Ideas about "trickle down economics" and "local control and _accountability" Our children have been deprived of most funding to teach them anything about the arts.
"But wait," you say "this is SLASHDOT, the arts have no place here" and you're right. But, Katz brought it up, so here it is. Our children, since the inception of educational cutbacks, and adminstrational overhead increases, have been the victims of a continual "re-organization" of schools away from funding those educational departments which do not lead to high salaries, or at least good job fields. While English, Math, and Sciences barely maintain their tenous grasp on funds for their classrooms, Drama, Art, Music, Dance and any other "frivoulous" classes are ignored.
So what? That's the next logical question, and I say that these classes are the _only_ pathway these children have to direct expression of their ideas, desires, and frustrations. They are also the only classes in which there is no right or wrong answer, and as such are the only classes in which the student him/herself has absolute control over. When you take away a child's right/ability to express him/herself, and all of their control, they will try to get it back, the only way they know how.
Everything we do impacts the weather. Asking whether or not increasing the surface area of land covered by seawater by even ten thousand square miles (which would take a VERY long time) would have no effect on the global climate. Locally, this design in particular seems to be a manmade river flowing back into the ocean. The overall effect would only be to possibly increase the humidity, which is hardly the end of the world...
If this is adopted widely (and I hope it is) there are two major effects I can see coming out of it:
1) Programmers will have to have flowcharts for the little projects they're working on. It may cut down on the number of submissions to freshmeat, but the code will be better.
2(and more interesting) A new website could come out of this: I am working on this, contact me for more information, a flowchart, and an area to work on....Basically a software development site for free software, with project managers and everything.
Look, people, The ISP was TOLD that a PARTICULAR newsgroup was peddling child pornography. They ignored it. Bad ISP, bad. The legal precedent here is that ISP's are responsible for removing content (IE offending newsgroups) from its servers if informed that it is illegal.
Students (I am one) are required to pay a fee for information services, eg networking, computer labs on campus, etc. We are given rights, and restrictions. But here's my issue. The university takes ultimate responsibility for maintenance, upgrading, and upkeep of the system. Doesn't that mean that they have the right to make sure that the same system is not being abused by the 1337, (read freshmen) the unaware, and the malicious?
People nowadays seem to view electronic media as theirs and theirs alone. It's not! We as tax-payers, may have helped build the thing, but we do not maintain it. Until and unless there is a standardardized code of behavior for networked traffic, an individual system administrator, even one the size of a major university, should have the RIGHT to ensure that their equipment is not being abused.
If you don't like it, buy your own equipment, and set it up in the basement of a major NAP.
And I don't think we should view this as any sort of analogy to federal mail. The USPS is protected by a series of laws, E-mail is not. Besides, if it were, anyone who set up a sniffer, for ANY reason would be breaking the law.
So, openSSH has the word SSH in it, OK, that might even be a trademark infringment, I'm not sure about it, but I'll bear with him for the time being.
The claim is product confusion. OK, interesting, but here's the problem, openSSH performs the same functions as SSH, right? The command line is inherently similar, right? There's no support problem, because if anyone calls SSH.com and says: My ssh isn't working, there's not really a confusion, it's the same protocol. (that's assuming that people would call them and say that) But in any case, The issue is mostly the fact that SSH is losing money. That really is a bad thing. The innovator of what is now a standard in the *nix community is going belly up.
Lets call a spade a spade. The underlying current here is: He's trying to change the way we do things, to make it more difficult to get free stuff that does the same thing as his expensive stuff. I agree, but there's no real harm in changing the name, as long as it goes on freshmeat, slashdot, and rootprompt. And then when SSH goes chapter 11, or whatnot, it won't be "the fault of the free software movement"
I am tired of reactionary bullshit! The FBI is required, by law, to investigate this. It falls under the same category as teachers being REQUIRED to report any suspicions of child abuse to authorities, etc. So get off the FBI's back, at least about trying to get enough information to make a well considered opinion.
That said: I am still tired of reactionary bullshit! Talking about stuffing kitties into non-existant jars, and selling them for profit is LEGAL. Not only that, but it does not hurt anyone. I am sick and tired of hearing this same old slippery slope argument: "If someone writes down, performs, sings, or says something that suggests doing something bad, then they must be punished, because other people might actually DO that something bad." Does this remind anyone of anything? Say the slippery slope argument used to start, and subsequently lose the Vietnam Police Action? People, we live in a free country (at least it says so in all the textbooks) not a comfortable one.
To be free, you must be able to express yourself, and must be exposed to other people expressing themselves. Even, no especially, if their ideas are uncomfortable to you. That's the basis of freedom. It's a joke, you might not think it's funny, but others do, and if some sick fuck actually thinks it's funny enough to try themselves, then they, and only they, should be punished. ACTION can be punished, not words. You cannot persecute heresy anymore, it doesn't work with multiple ideals.
Really? I was sure I knew exactly what one was WAY before the 7th of January last year... But maybe that was just me.
In related news: RedHat's new Beta release has something that I've been bitching about for years: a NETWORK SECURE client install!!! At last, someone who doesn't know what they're doing won't have RPC, statd, named, telnet, ftpd, and all the others running on their machine for some 1337 moron to crack into to use as a dDOS tool. Took them long enough.
This article doesn't seem to go into any real new detail. The only interesting data is that they seem to be trying to expand their search by adding a new telescope. While this is a great idea, the SETI@home project can only do so much crunching.
The problem to date, to my mind has been that the processing is too front end intensive. This project should do rough curve fitting first (ie do quick calculations on client computers, to find a general idea of the curve) and then select areas of interest to farm out more signifigant data to client computers. But that's just my opinion.
who knows, with 10 gHz possibly on the way, this discussion may be a moot point as I send it.
This is a wonderful first step. The limiting factor is the fact that the conversion from releasing electrons to charging a battery is a) slow and b) inefficient. What the robot is doing is essentially interupting the formation of ATP in a biological cell, and taking the electrons that would be used to charge a battery. In the near future, I would imagine that the battery can be dispensed with, and instead the "stomach" itself could be used as the battery. The concept would work something like this:
a) when cells digest carbohydrates, they eventually transport electrons outside of the cell membrane. This can be extended to transport them outside a larger, non-ionic membrane. This creates a charge difference.
b) A circuit could be constructed with the + end outside the cell, the - end inside, and voila, a working circuit which runs directly from the electron transport chain.
A bit heavy in Biology/Chemistry, but there you go (I'm a chemist at heart)
Since most movies, nowadays, are all into "corporate sponsorship" (read: Selling Out), I was just wondering if someone from the linux community actually paid to have a linux based X-client as part of the movie?
As most everyone has noticed pointed out by now, abandonware is still the company's property. I agree with that. I even think that they should be allowed to decide what should be done with the software that they PAID their developers to work on. That's well within their perogative.
I just think that no-one has approached these people right. Thus far I have seen a lot of sites that say "write letters to the company to tell them to (release the source code)/(re-release the program)" This will never work. If someone is really interested in re-releasing these programs, it has to:
a) be profitable for the company (eg: you must pay them for the source code)
b) Not involve a loss of intelectual property (eg you must sign a non-disclosure agreement)
c) Be able to be re-released, and updated(eg you must be a GOOd programer, and most likely have an entire team of developers behind you)
All of these things point to the Idea I've had for a while (but since I hate programming, I've never really seriously considered it):
Start a company, make a few deals with microprose, id (especially id, if they won't port Q3, maybe they'll let somebody else do it, and handle the headache), etc, and start programming away.
The overhead is lower, because you already have an engine in place, you just have to upgrade/update it.
Now don't get me wrong, this is a HUGE gamble, but I'm willing to bet that people would be willing to pay for an upgraded/updated version of things like DARKLANDS, KINGSQUEST, hell even ULTIMA....
BTW: I really loved Darklands, by microprose software, and while I can buy a cd for 20 bucks or so, it runs on dos, and requires lots of memory swapping, so I nominate that for the first project of the above idea.
It seems to me that this is not really a CD project yet. Sure they can make it in the shape of a CD, but until they can make the thing spit out of a front loaded CD changer, or make a CD-ROM read it at all (as it seems they still have not from the article) this is just a pretty circle that you can read with their own special drive...
Soon, however, I hope to see guys doing good work like this make some money, and then I can play frisbee with something that doesn't hurt my hands quite as much as those AOL coasters I use now...
Do any of you READ the articles, or do you simply trust that the blurb is an accurate assessment of the article?
Do your research people! The virus is not blankly advertising "hey, I f***ed your computer, now switch to linux." The author was most likely French, since it started in Paris, his english grammar is horrible, and he sends an e-mail to somwhere that says "got another idiot".
Of most importance, I don't think anyone is stupid enough to actually think "well the person who changed all my jpeg, and.zip files liked linux, so linux must suck" (note how these are the files that they changed? Trojans are funny sometimes). This virus is yet another way of pointing out that windows executable/file permissions are not wise to endow the typical user with...
Read the article again, and think about it... It would take a sysadmin 10 minutes to write a script to read the file, and undo the damage. As it is, unless the corporations which were infected regularly used JPEGs or Zipped files for regular business stuff, I think our hacker has actually managed to improve productivity...
On "first glance" at the comments, the top two comments I see are:
1) Logs can be forged
2) They're showing the @home portscanners, and reserved netblocks on their top ten (bwuhahaha, look at them, they're so stupid)
in response to 1) there are hundreds of ways any reasonably intelligent coder could check the submitted data, to make sure the logs make logical sense.
On top of that, the whole POINT of this service is to identify people scanning whole netblocks, and then submit that report to some other agency (who would then, what? Automatically say, "well, this site said so, let's unplug the little fucker" without doing their own background check? I think not). This is all about COMPILING data, to try to learn some really interesting things about who and how many netscans there are in a given day.
In my personal opinion, this is a far more useful and important security measure, than anything security focus, or any of the other SUBMISSION based security alert services give, because they're collecting TONS of data.
Think about it for a minute, if everyone starts submitting their logs, the minor forged log every now and again will be ignored by virtue of the immense amount of legitimate information streaming in...
on the second complaint: Get over yourselves! Just because you weren't ambitious enough to start a project like this, doesn't mean that you're smarter than they are. Don't you think they'll start to make corrections once they start analysing their data? It takes time, and submissions, people.
Just think about the potential security gain if this is successful. This is a user driven ORBS database, which could, with a little HELPFUL nudging be very useful for the security minded.
Proposal: A user driven technology news site, Run under the name Slashdot.org
Abstract: I propose to patent the idea of using a website to inform the technologically minded people of the world about news of interest to them. (eg: News for Nerds[tm]) This news must be important, of some value to the constituants of said website (Stuff that matters.[tm]), and will be therefore monitored by other users and valued by a _Completely_ new and inovative process titled "Scoring". This process of "Scoring" will be valued by using my own system of "Karma"(tm) which will entitle "Karma Whores"(tm) to decide who is allowed to post and who is not.
Thank you for your time, and a quick and painless Patent Approval Process (PAP[tm])
Just clicking around, I found thisarticle: Apparently, They have stopped serving up their program because of the Whole HooHa with Napster/Metallica/NetPD (the stupid company). Interesting, especially in light of the article from yesterday about the For Dummies(tm) bit. Do you think a lawsuit could be filed???
Not that it would change anything, it would serve them right though.
I seem to recall a thread, or series of postings recently right here on/. commenting on the general lack of a single configuration tool for linux.
What are we looking for here? It really all comes down to the fact that as more and more people come into the Linux world (myself included) fewer and fewer of them are willing, or able to spend the time configuring their machine using someone else's idiosyncratic text interface.
It's not a matter of making stuff that "geeks" can use, its a matter of making stuff that "geeks" can use w/o reading all of the source, or most of the Man page...
Slashdot Mirror
This issue is HUGE, to say the least. If this is true, and LA is indeed able to collect I see several things falling out from this:
1) Satellite companies remove themselves from California, and every other state which taxes "moveable personal property" to avoid the taxes.
and
2) the prices for directTV, and other digital cable services go THROUGH THE ROOF. Up until now, the costs they have been recouping have been from the LAUNCH of the satellite, if they have to pay yearly property taxes on it, that's an extra couple hundred million dollars we're talking about.
California - This is a BAD IDEA. It could cripple more companies than you think. Unless of course they're thinking of selectively enforcing the rule, which is even worse.....
just my $.02
Let us not forget that Hormel was also VERY upset with Muppet Treasure Island (I believe) for using their name for the head of the tribe of wild boars in the movie...
They're not all soft and squishy, like their meat, they just know when to cut their losses.
In light of your analogy to car manufacturing:
If car manufactureres let you just walk up to their factory and take the components and assemble themselves, we might be closer to what mandrake, and all other linux operating systems distributions do. THEY LET YOU DOWNLOAD THEIR PRODUCT FOR FREE. Let us not forget this. I think that of the possible methods to ask for some cash back for all those people who just sample mandrake, or who download the ISO of every new distro, just to play with it, asking for donations is a much less onerous version than some other distro's who have started charging for ANY acquistion of their product.
It's like buying software without the licence. And I'm all for it.
Someone modifies this one to do some other useful stuff, like say turn off and remove telnet, and vulnerable apps.
I had thought about this when the first linux worms this year started getting announced. I can see it now on securityfocus:
The worm installs itself on the macine, checks for the instalation version, logs into the bug report homepage for that distribution, and updates all of your packages or binaries from a set list of servers...
OK people, here's the deal.
This isn't genetic manipulation. Period. End of story. This "technique" is not applicable except to the other 150 women in the world who have the SAME infertility problem, and want a child badly enough to actually go through this media hell that the uninformed press (and some people on slashdot, unfortunately) put them through.
--Begin Knowledge Base--
The reason the "genome" is different is because the eggs have someone else's mitochondria in them. This goes back to an old item of evolutionary interest, mitochondria are almost symbiotic bacteria. The theory held by many (I'm not sure about the "most", but at least many) is that mitochondria were orginally separate organisms which existed as symbiots. The cells kept them fed, and gave them food, the mitochondria allowed cells to perform respation/oxidative reduction to produce more energy per molecule of sugar, which is the basis of all "breathing" life. The idea is that the mitochondria slowly lost their autonomy, and became "organelles". But here's the kicker:
They reproduce by themselves, only importing a couple of things from the cell around it. This means that you could trade mitochondria with someone and your "genome" would change, but the only thing that really happened is that you traded one set of mitochondria for another.
--End Knowledge Base--
So, when you have defective mitochondria in your eggs, they can't produce enough energy to keep a fetus alive. To fix that, scientists added some that worked, and they replicated themselves and the eggs were healty. That's it. It really is a dead end of research. Nothing more will come of it. Really. End of story.
Go read an important article.
I think there's a serious point that should be raised here. DeCSS is NOT the motion picture. It's a DECODING algorithm. So the issue becomes what does MPAA have to do with encoding/decoding of their media? Since it is possible to copy - in its entirety - a movie w/o knowing how to decode it, and then use it in a machine which does know how to decode it, there is no real form of complaint here.
If they procecute people for the ABILITY to copy a form of media to another, then I might as well go home and burn my tape recording deck, unplug my CD-RW, and turn myself in to the police, because any and all of these things fall under the same jurisdiction. At issue is not only the ability of code to be distributed (and why they're procecuting this, but not servers who distribute 1337 scr1p7s - which arguably cause more fiscal damage - might be worth questioning) but MORE IMPORTANTLY - what jurisdiction these sorts of things fall under.
This is not an issue of DCMA, but one of either - copyright law, or whatever laws govern reverse engineering and theft of poorly protected secrets.
I'm done
just a moment...
Aren't they right? Really, The communists and the environmentalists are right about coal power plants. Nuclear power is less immediatly damaging, and many environmenatlists do not protest them. (the problem with nuclear power is mainly one of public oppinion, not of "environmentalist" concerns).
Secondly:
Really? Just because Americans are too PROFIT oriented to make any real attempts to work on/fund projects to find alternative sources of energy, does not mean that they do not exist. Look around at the research being done in Germany. If people were willing to take the long road, and make a couple of sacrifices now, it is possible to develop the technology, as it exists, into a viable source of energy.
Also, back on the topic. Tidal energy plants would also change the general tidal levels, which is yet another problem with them...
just my $.022
Since I'm too late to get noticed and moderated up, I'll just put this one in because I think it's important.
For a LONG time now, I have been considering the lack of distributed education for our children. Thanks to the kind folks at the US Senate, and Reagan, Bush, and Baby Bush's Ideas about "trickle down economics" and "local control and _accountability" Our children have been deprived of most funding to teach them anything about the arts.
"But wait," you say "this is SLASHDOT, the arts have no place here" and you're right. But, Katz brought it up, so here it is. Our children, since the inception of educational cutbacks, and adminstrational overhead increases, have been the victims of a continual "re-organization" of schools away from funding those educational departments which do not lead to high salaries, or at least good job fields. While English, Math, and Sciences barely maintain their tenous grasp on funds for their classrooms, Drama, Art, Music, Dance and any other "frivoulous" classes are ignored.
So what? That's the next logical question, and I say that these classes are the _only_ pathway these children have to direct expression of their ideas, desires, and frustrations. They are also the only classes in which there is no right or wrong answer, and as such are the only classes in which the student him/herself has absolute control over. When you take away a child's right/ability to express him/herself, and all of their control, they will try to get it back, the only way they know how.
just my $.02
In terms of "impacting" the weather...
Everything we do impacts the weather. Asking whether or not increasing the surface area of land covered by seawater by even ten thousand square miles (which would take a VERY long time) would have no effect on the global climate. Locally, this design in particular seems to be a manmade river flowing back into the ocean. The overall effect would only be to possibly increase the humidity, which is hardly the end of the world...
If this is adopted widely (and I hope it is) there are two major effects I can see coming out of it:
1) Programmers will have to have flowcharts for the little projects they're working on. It may cut down on the number of submissions to freshmeat, but the code will be better.
2(and more interesting) A new website could come out of this: I am working on this, contact me for more information, a flowchart, and an area to work on....Basically a software development site for free software, with project managers and everything.
AWESOME!!
Look, people, The ISP was TOLD that a PARTICULAR newsgroup was peddling child pornography. They ignored it. Bad ISP, bad. The legal precedent here is that ISP's are responsible for removing content (IE offending newsgroups) from its servers if informed that it is illegal.
Sounds kinda like common sense to me
Here's my question/rant:
Students (I am one) are required to pay a fee for information services, eg networking, computer labs on campus, etc. We are given rights, and restrictions. But here's my issue. The university takes ultimate responsibility for maintenance, upgrading, and upkeep of the system. Doesn't that mean that they have the right to make sure that the same system is not being abused by the 1337, (read freshmen) the unaware, and the malicious?
People nowadays seem to view electronic media as theirs and theirs alone. It's not! We as tax-payers, may have helped build the thing, but we do not maintain it. Until and unless there is a standardardized code of behavior for networked traffic, an individual system administrator, even one the size of a major university, should have the RIGHT to ensure that their equipment is not being abused.
If you don't like it, buy your own equipment, and set it up in the basement of a major NAP.
And I don't think we should view this as any sort of analogy to federal mail. The USPS is protected by a series of laws, E-mail is not. Besides, if it were, anyone who set up a sniffer, for ANY reason would be breaking the law.
Any responses?
So, openSSH has the word SSH in it, OK, that might even be a trademark infringment, I'm not sure about it, but I'll bear with him for the time being.
The claim is product confusion. OK, interesting, but here's the problem, openSSH performs the same functions as SSH, right? The command line is inherently similar, right? There's no support problem, because if anyone calls SSH.com and says: My ssh isn't working, there's not really a confusion, it's the same protocol. (that's assuming that people would call them and say that) But in any case, The issue is mostly the fact that SSH is losing money. That really is a bad thing. The innovator of what is now a standard in the *nix community is going belly up.
Lets call a spade a spade. The underlying current here is: He's trying to change the way we do things, to make it more difficult to get free stuff that does the same thing as his expensive stuff. I agree, but there's no real harm in changing the name, as long as it goes on freshmeat, slashdot, and rootprompt. And then when SSH goes chapter 11, or whatnot, it won't be "the fault of the free software movement"
I am tired of reactionary bullshit! The FBI is required, by law, to investigate this. It falls under the same category as teachers being REQUIRED to report any suspicions of child abuse to authorities, etc. So get off the FBI's back, at least about trying to get enough information to make a well considered opinion.
That said: I am still tired of reactionary bullshit! Talking about stuffing kitties into non-existant jars, and selling them for profit is LEGAL. Not only that, but it does not hurt anyone. I am sick and tired of hearing this same old slippery slope argument: "If someone writes down, performs, sings, or says something that suggests doing something bad, then they must be punished, because other people might actually DO that something bad." Does this remind anyone of anything? Say the slippery slope argument used to start, and subsequently lose the Vietnam Police Action? People, we live in a free country (at least it says so in all the textbooks) not a comfortable one.
To be free, you must be able to express yourself, and must be exposed to other people expressing themselves. Even, no especially, if their ideas are uncomfortable to you. That's the basis of freedom. It's a joke, you might not think it's funny, but others do, and if some sick fuck actually thinks it's funny enough to try themselves, then they, and only they, should be punished. ACTION can be punished, not words. You cannot persecute heresy anymore, it doesn't work with multiple ideals.
Really? I was sure I knew exactly what one was WAY before the 7th of January last year... But maybe that was just me. In related news: RedHat's new Beta release has something that I've been bitching about for years: a NETWORK SECURE client install!!! At last, someone who doesn't know what they're doing won't have RPC, statd, named, telnet, ftpd, and all the others running on their machine for some 1337 moron to crack into to use as a dDOS tool. Took them long enough.
This article doesn't seem to go into any real new detail. The only interesting data is that they seem to be trying to expand their search by adding a new telescope. While this is a great idea, the SETI@home project can only do so much crunching.
The problem to date, to my mind has been that the processing is too front end intensive. This project should do rough curve fitting first (ie do quick calculations on client computers, to find a general idea of the curve) and then select areas of interest to farm out more signifigant data to client computers. But that's just my opinion.
who knows, with 10 gHz possibly on the way, this discussion may be a moot point as I send it.
This is a wonderful first step. The limiting factor is the fact that the conversion from releasing electrons to charging a battery is a) slow and b) inefficient. What the robot is doing is essentially interupting the formation of ATP in a biological cell, and taking the electrons that would be used to charge a battery. In the near future, I would imagine that the battery can be dispensed with, and instead the "stomach" itself could be used as the battery. The concept would work something like this:
a) when cells digest carbohydrates, they eventually transport electrons outside of the cell membrane. This can be extended to transport them outside a larger, non-ionic membrane. This creates a charge difference.
b) A circuit could be constructed with the + end outside the cell, the - end inside, and voila, a working circuit which runs directly from the electron transport chain.
A bit heavy in Biology/Chemistry, but there you go (I'm a chemist at heart)
Since most movies, nowadays, are all into "corporate sponsorship" (read: Selling Out), I was just wondering if someone from the linux community actually paid to have a linux based X-client as part of the movie?
As most everyone has noticed pointed out by now, abandonware is still the company's property. I agree with that. I even think that they should be allowed to decide what should be done with the software that they PAID their developers to work on. That's well within their perogative.
I just think that no-one has approached these people right. Thus far I have seen a lot of sites that say "write letters to the company to tell them to (release the source code)/(re-release the program)" This will never work. If someone is really interested in re-releasing these programs, it has to:
a) be profitable for the company (eg: you must pay them for the source code)
b) Not involve a loss of intelectual property (eg you must sign a non-disclosure agreement)
c) Be able to be re-released, and updated(eg you must be a GOOd programer, and most likely have an entire team of developers behind you)
All of these things point to the Idea I've had for a while (but since I hate programming, I've never really seriously considered it):
Start a company, make a few deals with microprose, id (especially id, if they won't port Q3, maybe they'll let somebody else do it, and handle the headache), etc, and start programming away.
The overhead is lower, because you already have an engine in place, you just have to upgrade/update it.
Now don't get me wrong, this is a HUGE gamble, but I'm willing to bet that people would be willing to pay for an upgraded/updated version of things like DARKLANDS, KINGSQUEST, hell even ULTIMA....
BTW: I really loved Darklands, by microprose software, and while I can buy a cd for 20 bucks or so, it runs on dos, and requires lots of memory swapping, so I nominate that for the first project of the above idea.
It seems to me that this is not really a CD project yet. Sure they can make it in the shape of a CD, but until they can make the thing spit out of a front loaded CD changer, or make a CD-ROM read it at all (as it seems they still have not from the article) this is just a pretty circle that you can read with their own special drive...
Soon, however, I hope to see guys doing good work like this make some money, and then I can play frisbee with something that doesn't hurt my hands quite as much as those AOL coasters I use now...
Do any of you READ the articles, or do you simply trust that the blurb is an accurate assessment of the article?
.zip files liked linux, so linux must suck" (note how these are the files that they changed? Trojans are funny sometimes). This virus is yet another way of pointing out that windows executable/file permissions are not wise to endow the typical user with...
Do your research people! The virus is not blankly advertising "hey, I f***ed your computer, now switch to linux." The author was most likely French, since it started in Paris, his english grammar is horrible, and he sends an e-mail to somwhere that says "got another idiot".
Of most importance, I don't think anyone is stupid enough to actually think "well the person who changed all my jpeg, and
Read the article again, and think about it... It would take a sysadmin 10 minutes to write a script to read the file, and undo the damage. As it is, unless the corporations which were infected regularly used JPEGs or Zipped files for regular business stuff, I think our hacker has actually managed to improve productivity...
"A mind is a terrible thing"
-anonymous
On "first glance" at the comments, the top two comments I see are:
1) Logs can be forged
2) They're showing the @home portscanners, and reserved netblocks on their top ten (bwuhahaha, look at them, they're so stupid)
in response to 1) there are hundreds of ways any reasonably intelligent coder could check the submitted data, to make sure the logs make logical sense.
On top of that, the whole POINT of this service is to identify people scanning whole netblocks, and then submit that report to some other agency (who would then, what? Automatically say, "well, this site said so, let's unplug the little fucker" without doing their own background check? I think not). This is all about COMPILING data, to try to learn some really interesting things about who and how many netscans there are in a given day.
In my personal opinion, this is a far more useful and important security measure, than anything security focus, or any of the other SUBMISSION based security alert services give, because they're collecting TONS of data.
Think about it for a minute, if everyone starts submitting their logs, the minor forged log every now and again will be ignored by virtue of the immense amount of legitimate information streaming in...
on the second complaint: Get over yourselves! Just because you weren't ambitious enough to start a project like this, doesn't mean that you're smarter than they are. Don't you think they'll start to make corrections once they start analysing their data? It takes time, and submissions, people.
Just think about the potential security gain if this is successful. This is a user driven ORBS database, which could, with a little HELPFUL nudging be very useful for the security minded.
Proposal: A user driven technology news site, Run under the name Slashdot.org
Abstract: I propose to patent the idea of using a website to inform the technologically minded people of the world about news of interest to them. (eg: News for Nerds[tm]) This news must be important, of some value to the constituants of said website (Stuff that matters.[tm]), and will be therefore monitored by other users and valued by a _Completely_ new and inovative process titled "Scoring". This process of "Scoring" will be valued by using my own system of "Karma"(tm) which will entitle "Karma Whores"(tm) to decide who is allowed to post and who is not.
Thank you for your time, and a quick and painless Patent Approval Process (PAP[tm])
-Bill Gates
Just clicking around, I found thisarticle:
Apparently, They have stopped serving up their program because of the Whole HooHa with Napster/Metallica/NetPD (the stupid company). Interesting, especially in light of the article from yesterday about the For Dummies(tm) bit. Do you think a lawsuit could be filed???
Not that it would change anything, it would serve them right though.
I seem to recall a thread, or series of postings recently right here on /. commenting on the general lack of a single configuration tool for linux.
What are we looking for here? It really all comes down to the fact that as more and more people come into the Linux world (myself included) fewer and fewer of them are willing, or able to spend the time configuring their machine using someone else's idiosyncratic text interface.
It's not a matter of making stuff that "geeks" can use, its a matter of making stuff that "geeks" can use w/o reading all of the source, or most of the Man page...