In the EE and CE fields, the main journal publisher is the IEEE. I'm pretty sure that they do not claim exclusive rights to publish research, or if they do, everyone in the field ignores it. The result is that many researchers (myself included) post all their publications on their web pages, which increases access and exposure to important works in the field. Furthermore, it permits free document search engines based on these web posts, such as
Citeseer.
The net result is, if you take any IEEE publication, and type the title in your favourite search engine, you will find a link to a free copy of the paper about 30-40% of the time (and this proportion is growing).
I can't imagine a scientific discipline in which this wasn't done.
Most slashdotters would accept the following axioms:
Axiom 1: Corporations and nations need geeks to run their information technology systems, which are vital to national economies.
Axiom 2: Geeks have better understanding of the socio-technological implications of technically-related laws than most lawmakers.
Axiom 3: Virtually no non-technical people have adequate skills to replace geeks if the geeks removed their services.
Accepting these axioms, we find that the most logical method of applying pressure on the government is for geeks to embark on a general strike, such as withholding services over a 48-hour period, or suchlike.
Of course this would require monumental organization and a good PR campaign, but I'll leave that for someone else. I'm just an idea rat.
What about licensing? Here I mean "license" in in the governmental-regulation sense (like a driver's license), not in the GPL sense.
People own cars; cars are valuable tools. Yet it is in the public interest to ensure that cars are in good repair. Licensing a vehicle implies a small penalty in terms of privacy, but one that most people acknowledge is necessary.
As the damaging potential of computers increases, I can forsee a future in which computers have a "license plate", and the owner is required to maintain basic security provisions, or face the equivalent of a traffic ticket - or even a more serious criminal offense if the negligence was deliberate.
It was the sheer stupidity of
the worm's creator and the skill of some network admins which limited
the worms attack and DoS potential.
Once again, evil is thwarted because, just as on television, the villans are incompetent while the virtuous are strong and intelligent.
I wonder if the virus author also committed any of the following classic villan errors:
Brought the heros to his/her secret mountain lair to kill them personally rather than letting a henchman do it at great distance
Explained his/her dastardly plan in detail to the heros before killing them
Arranged for a dramatic but overly-complicated and easily escapable death for the heros
Once the heros escape, get a squad of elite ninjas to track them down, but have the ninjas attack one at a time so as to ensure defeat in spite of superior numbers
So, the world is safe again... but... for how long?
PDF is really a good, open standard (like almost any technology that
came out of Adobe). We should try to have complete, free implementations of the PDF format... so that nobody would have to buy the Adobe products
I don't mean to troll, but I find the above statement curious. It seems to (inadvertently) support the position of some companies that open standards are bad for business. If this is the case, what's the incentive for Adobe, or any other company, to develop a good, transparent standard?
Tempting as it might be to go after the virus writers when something like this happens, the real
problem is the buggy insecure code which lets it happen in the first place.
Right! Attack the problem at its source, and kill all programmers. That'll solve both problems, since virus authors are programmers by definition.
The charge shouldn't be "kill the virus writers", it should
be "stop buying unsecure software".
So since (as you yourself argued) all software is prone to security holes, we should stop using all software. Then destroy all computers and return the world to an agrarian utopia. Then I'll solve all my security problems with the customs devised under the feudal system -- with a mace to the head.
Less funny than you think. Appropriately one of the
first Beowulf clusters
was called the Stone Soupercomputer. Not that they built it out of stone; it was named after the parable of the Stone Soup.
There's an article about it in this month's Scientific American.
The navy encases any electronics that may contact seawater in resin.
In a similar vein, I don't see why you couldn't cover the insides with plastic and then pour the concrete. The electronics don't care if they're encased in something, as long as that something is not conductive. Plastic should afford a decent barrier between the boards and the concrete, as long as you were careful to ensure that the electronics were completely sealed.
On second thought, there would be the obvious risk of overheating. But the thing would work for a few minutes at a time.
Up here in the great frozen north, it's still legal to crack encryption, AFAIK. Canada also has a history of helping out good American folks when their government does something idiotic. Take the thousands of Americans who avoided the Vietnam war by emigrating to Canada.
Just so long as you don't mind the crushing taxes and paternalistic government...
I thought IBM _did_ attempt to sue the companies that cloned BIOS. Not a criminal charge, but basically equivalent from a corporate standpoint. Looks like the world turned out just fine anyway.
It may be possible that this decision will return to haunt free suites such as KDE. When I installed KDE 2 with RedHat7.1, it automatically installed its Konqueror browser. Personally, I prefer Netscape (just because it's familiar), and it took some effort to figure out how to disable Konqueror as the default browser (e.g., when I highlighted a URL it would insist on launching Konqueror to view it). Even so, Konqueror still comes up as the default file manager (which is OK for me, but what if I preferred MC or something similar?).
I can imagine this decision going against MS, and MS demanding that open source software follow suit and disable similar features, arguing unfair competetive advantage. It wouldn't be a complete argument, but might be enough to convince some judges (especially considering the amount of money an open source project could spend on lawyers).
I've often thought that co-mingling is not the issue; in fact as KDE and others have shown it's often desirable and convenient to bundle software. The issue to me is an open interface for these applications to use, and a straightforward method of swapping in and out, so that I can easily choose the suite of applications that I want. I view this decision as a case of being careful what you wish for, because you might just get your wish.
if we can play it on a computer why can't we write a driver that captures the data going into the
sound card, (like a screenshot or in this case a "SOUND SHOT")?
It's because the audio is already analog by the time it hits your sound card - your system never sees the bits. The cd-rom drive contains the hardware to act as a player, and outputs analog audio on a separate wire to the sound card, which plays the analog audio directly. Whatever cd-playing software you use merely acts as an interface to the cd-rom drive, and doesn't manipulate the signal at all.
Dude, before you go flaming the editors, check the byline. That's not timothy, that's michael. Nice try.
Are you sure this is a good idea?
on
IANAL
·
· Score: 5
"How did you do that?!?" we asked her. Her reply: "I made-believe I was one of the big kids."
An engineer comes in to work in the morning to find his Boss, screwdriver in hand, rooting around in one of the server boxes. Cables and cards are strewn haphazardly on the floor.
Somehow succeeding in suppressing his shock and horror, the engineer manages to keep his grip on his coffee cup and stammers, "What are you doing?... How did you do that?!?"
The Boss says, "I read this book about 'borrowed genius'. I made-believe I was one of the engineers."
Some time ago,
like, say 1997, copyright holders were reactive. That is to say, they waited until Napster was in
use, and was allowing people to trade songs. Now, they seem to be going after parties that they
suspect may one day plan to engage in something less than total protection of their copyrighted
material. In other words, they're on the offensive.
Can you blame them? Let's abstract the situation somewhat: a multi-billion-dollar industry has operated in a particular way for decades. Law exists to protect them against a type of theft that is particular to their industry. Suddenly, technology exists to make it incredibly easy to accomplish this type of theft, potentially threatening their industry's existence. Would you expect the people involved to do anything less than vigorously defend themselves by applying the related law, and even sharpening the law?
I also remark that if these content-based industries failed to defend themselves, and collapsed, the content they provide would likely dry up as well - because there wouldn't be any money in providing it. This is what I've never understood about the Napster debate; the pro-Napster arguments do not seem internally consistent.
If you find this to be a troll, I encourage you to refute my claims.
If you want astronauts to be famous... send famous people into space. When John Glenn went up, the launch received its highest ratings in recent memory. Press coverage would increase, too.
Personally, I'd be perfectly happy to launch any number of irritating teen-band icons into solar orbit, never to return. Say... this gives me an idea for a Slashdot poll...
Slashdot Mirror
In the EE and CE fields, the main journal publisher is the IEEE. I'm pretty sure that they do not claim exclusive rights to publish research, or if they do, everyone in the field ignores it. The result is that many researchers (myself included) post all their publications on their web pages, which increases access and exposure to important works in the field. Furthermore, it permits free document search engines based on these web posts, such as Citeseer. The net result is, if you take any IEEE publication, and type the title in your favourite search engine, you will find a link to a free copy of the paper about 30-40% of the time (and this proportion is growing). I can't imagine a scientific discipline in which this wasn't done.
Most slashdotters would accept the following axioms:
Axiom 1: Corporations and nations need geeks to run their information technology systems, which are vital to national economies.
Axiom 2: Geeks have better understanding of the socio-technological implications of technically-related laws than most lawmakers.
Axiom 3: Virtually no non-technical people have adequate skills to replace geeks if the geeks removed their services.
Accepting these axioms, we find that the most logical method of applying pressure on the government is for geeks to embark on a general strike, such as withholding services over a 48-hour period, or suchlike.
Of course this would require monumental organization and a good PR campaign, but I'll leave that for someone else. I'm just an idea rat.
What about licensing? Here I mean "license" in in the governmental-regulation sense (like a driver's license), not in the GPL sense.
People own cars; cars are valuable tools. Yet it is in the public interest to ensure that cars are in good repair. Licensing a vehicle implies a small penalty in terms of privacy, but one that most people acknowledge is necessary.
As the damaging potential of computers increases, I can forsee a future in which computers have a "license plate", and the owner is required to maintain basic security provisions, or face the equivalent of a traffic ticket - or even a more serious criminal offense if the negligence was deliberate.
It was the sheer stupidity of the worm's creator and the skill of some network admins which limited the worms attack and DoS potential.
Once again, evil is thwarted because, just as on television, the villans are incompetent while the virtuous are strong and intelligent.
I wonder if the virus author also committed any of the following classic villan errors:
So, the world is safe again ... but ... for how long?
PDF is really a good, open standard (like almost any technology that came out of Adobe). We should try to have complete, free implementations of the PDF format ... so that nobody would have to buy the Adobe products
I don't mean to troll, but I find the above statement curious. It seems to (inadvertently) support the position of some companies that open standards are bad for business. If this is the case, what's the incentive for Adobe, or any other company, to develop a good, transparent standard?
Tempting as it might be to go after the virus writers when something like this happens, the real problem is the buggy insecure code which lets it happen in the first place.
Right! Attack the problem at its source, and kill all programmers. That'll solve both problems, since virus authors are programmers by definition.
The charge shouldn't be "kill the virus writers", it should be "stop buying unsecure software".
So since (as you yourself argued) all software is prone to security holes, we should stop using all software. Then destroy all computers and return the world to an agrarian utopia. Then I'll solve all my security problems with the customs devised under the feudal system -- with a mace to the head.Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
Less funny than you think. Appropriately one of the first Beowulf clusters was called the Stone Soupercomputer. Not that they built it out of stone; it was named after the parable of the Stone Soup.
There's an article about it in this month's Scientific American.
The navy encases any electronics that may contact seawater in resin. In a similar vein, I don't see why you couldn't cover the insides with plastic and then pour the concrete. The electronics don't care if they're encased in something, as long as that something is not conductive. Plastic should afford a decent barrier between the boards and the concrete, as long as you were careful to ensure that the electronics were completely sealed.
On second thought, there would be the obvious risk of overheating. But the thing would work for a few minutes at a time.
2. Move somewhere that doesn't subscribe to DMCA or whatever idiotic agreement Adobe is using to justify this to the Federal Government.
Let me be the first to suggest ... Canada !
Up here in the great frozen north, it's still legal to crack encryption, AFAIK. Canada also has a history of helping out good American folks when their government does something idiotic. Take the thousands of Americans who avoided the Vietnam war by emigrating to Canada.
Just so long as you don't mind the crushing taxes and paternalistic government ...
I thought IBM _did_ attempt to sue the companies that cloned BIOS. Not a criminal charge, but basically equivalent from a corporate standpoint. Looks like the world turned out just fine anyway.
where the fun really starts: DOS the withehouse [sic]
Actually I think it would be fun to Linux the whitehouse.
Whoops, too late: The site www.whitehouse.gov is running unknown on Linux.
OK, I'll stop now.
Ever heard of a Pine virus? Exactly.
Lexx sucks, as does all Canadian-produced television. All the talented Canadians move to the States where they are slowly taking over.
I've transferred all my domain to them.
What you say !!!
For great justice.
It may be possible that this decision will return to haunt free suites such as KDE. When I installed KDE 2 with RedHat7.1, it automatically installed its Konqueror browser. Personally, I prefer Netscape (just because it's familiar), and it took some effort to figure out how to disable Konqueror as the default browser (e.g., when I highlighted a URL it would insist on launching Konqueror to view it). Even so, Konqueror still comes up as the default file manager (which is OK for me, but what if I preferred MC or something similar?).
I can imagine this decision going against MS, and MS demanding that open source software follow suit and disable similar features, arguing unfair competetive advantage. It wouldn't be a complete argument, but might be enough to convince some judges (especially considering the amount of money an open source project could spend on lawyers).
I've often thought that co-mingling is not the issue; in fact as KDE and others have shown it's often desirable and convenient to bundle software. The issue to me is an open interface for these applications to use, and a straightforward method of swapping in and out, so that I can easily choose the suite of applications that I want. I view this decision as a case of being careful what you wish for, because you might just get your wish.
How awful! This further promotes the evil monopoly of Microsoft. Someone should develop an Open Source park bench. And so on.
First you get the patents. Then you get the power. Then you get ... the women.
if we can play it on a computer why can't we write a driver that captures the data going into the sound card, (like a screenshot or in this case a "SOUND SHOT")?
It's because the audio is already analog by the time it hits your sound card - your system never sees the bits. The cd-rom drive contains the hardware to act as a player, and outputs analog audio on a separate wire to the sound card, which plays the analog audio directly. Whatever cd-playing software you use merely acts as an interface to the cd-rom drive, and doesn't manipulate the signal at all.Microsoft to provide technical assistance on Open Source project
VP Mundie's head 'just exploded', say witnesses
Slashdot readers condemn Microsoft
Open Source move seen as 'sinister plot'
World ends, film at 11
Televangelists express surprise
Weather forecast for Hell: Scattered flurries, high -2
Dude, before you go flaming the editors, check the byline. That's not timothy, that's michael. Nice try.
"How did you do that?!?" we asked her. Her reply: "I made-believe I was one of the big kids."
An engineer comes in to work in the morning to find his Boss, screwdriver in hand, rooting around in one of the server boxes. Cables and cards are strewn haphazardly on the floor.
Somehow succeeding in suppressing his shock and horror, the engineer manages to keep his grip on his coffee cup and stammers, "What are you doing? ... How did you do that?!?"
The Boss says, "I read this book about 'borrowed genius'. I made-believe I was one of the engineers."
Does this guy look 15?
I dunno ... does this guy?
Your Honour, I move for a ... bad court thingy. ... law talkin' guy.
- You mean a mistrial?
Yeah! That's why you're the judge and I'm the
Some time ago, like, say 1997, copyright holders were reactive. That is to say, they waited until Napster was in use, and was allowing people to trade songs. Now, they seem to be going after parties that they suspect may one day plan to engage in something less than total protection of their copyrighted material. In other words, they're on the offensive.
Can you blame them? Let's abstract the situation somewhat: a multi-billion-dollar industry has operated in a particular way for decades. Law exists to protect them against a type of theft that is particular to their industry. Suddenly, technology exists to make it incredibly easy to accomplish this type of theft, potentially threatening their industry's existence. Would you expect the people involved to do anything less than vigorously defend themselves by applying the related law, and even sharpening the law?
I also remark that if these content-based industries failed to defend themselves, and collapsed, the content they provide would likely dry up as well - because there wouldn't be any money in providing it. This is what I've never understood about the Napster debate; the pro-Napster arguments do not seem internally consistent.
If you find this to be a troll, I encourage you to refute my claims.
They would probably have a problem anyway, but they would have much less legal standing.
If you want astronauts to be famous ... send famous people into space. When John Glenn went up, the launch received its highest ratings in recent memory. Press coverage would increase, too.
Personally, I'd be perfectly happy to launch any number of irritating teen-band icons into solar orbit, never to return. Say ... this gives me an idea for a Slashdot poll ...