If it's in a jewel case that looks like a CD, and is on the shelf in HMV, and costs the same as other CDs, and is on the shelf beside other CDs, do you think that most consumers would stop to look if it has the Philips CD logo on it?
They will if there's a mass TV campaign with little Intel-like guys in Day-glo colored space suits telling you to look for the "CD inside" logo...
As of the time I'm reading this, the score of the parent post reads "(Score:5, Troll)". How is this possible?? I've seen "(Score:4, Troll)" before, and assumed that the word after the score was simply the last moderation that was done to it, (it was modded up to 5 and then someone modded back down 1 point as Troll). But now we have a (Score:5, Troll), which means... what??
Is it now possible to mod something as "Troll" and have it go UP in score?? What's going on?
I'm gonna sue for punitive damages. Sue you, and the people you work with... I wanna sue you, and sue EVERYBODY! All these punitive damages I've had...
(awwww I don't see so good. I'll bring my shoes and my glasses so I have them...)
At least it does as long as a photon has no mass... but even then I could imagine that if it's somehow transmutable from one form to another that it all works as well.
That's the whole point, Energy and Mass are the same thing. Mass is just the appearance to us of a whole lot of energy bundled up in one place. Our perceived distinction between the two breaks down when you start dealing with very small amounts of energy, so that when they (photons) make very slight phase changes between travelling through space and being part of a more energetic electron, our definitions of what is matter and what is energy break down. Photons are thought of as both particles and waves concurrently, and which one you use to describe it depends on the situation and what it is interacting with. Photons really are just little packets of energy. They don't have any "mass" as far as weight is concerned, but since mass and energy are the same thing, technically an atom that absorbs a photon has slightly more mass than it did before. (Think about the proposed "solar sail" space travel ship designs.) They don't have mass, but they have momentum. It is in this little gray area that we realized that our typical terminology and concepts of 'matter' and 'energy' were incomplete and slightly misleading, and led to Einstein's widely repeated but rarely explained equation: E=mc^2
(Energy released/gained) = (change in mass)*(speed of light in a vacuum squared)
The speed of light in this equation is used as a numerical constant and doesn't actually have anything to do with the distance the matter or energy is travelling.
Bzzzzzzt. Sorry Bob, that answer is not correct
on
LotR Cleans Up at AFI
·
· Score: 1
Well the LOTR drone will mod this post down to -5, but this won't change the truth anyway.
No, hopefully you'll be modded down because you don't know what you're talking about.
a little bit cryptohomosexual ?
Let's look at the facts:
There are only a few women in the whole movie
and those who are play just minor roles.
This is rather strange because 50 percent of
middle earth's population should be female.
The same thing could be said about today's world. There's been semi-effective crusades to get women more involved in the work force and promoted to higher positions in corporations and government for at least the last hundred years. Before that it was rather "obvious" that women should be staying at home and taking care of the children and other 'at home' activities. A tale set in the time of 'long ago' about people (and hobbits, elves, etc.) who are setting off on a trek to escape armies of a dark lord and save the world would obviously not have too many women involved since their roles in life did not include such things. Following your logic would mean that all men prior to the 20th century were "cryptohomosexual".
When the movie was created the character "Sam" should be initially women.
But the fan crowd protested, so that this minor change of Tolkins original story wasn't made.
So the fans didn't want the filmmakers changing the gender of a fairly major character, just to artificially add some women to the cast. You'd see a lot of pissed people too if you had millions of people reading "Harry Potter" books, and the filmmakers decided a little girl named "Harriet Potter" was more to their liking. This does not support a "gay" Tolkein theory in any way.
The initial actors for the female roles were attractive very feminine looking women. But the fan crowd protested again and the actresses are no rather ugly and with a male appearance.
Yeah that Liv Tyler and Cate Blanchett are pretty homely looking butch women... That's just what I was thinking too when I watched the movie...
There are many strange names/ vocables which could be interpreted as references to homosexual terms and practices like "dark king", "ring", "elv" and "modor" (backwards: rodom).
Well if there had been lots of "fairies" who described their mood as very "gay" while they went around collecting "faggots" in the forest, you might have a point there. But there isn't any of that. And if you're going to technically analyze a word as an example of something, at least spell it right ('elf', 'mordor'). And what the fuck is a "rodom" anyway??
It looks to me like there's more of Freud working here in this guy's post than a gay Tolkein... Excellent troll butt-boy!
I don't know about that... LotR:FotR is slightly under 3 hours. Titanic was like 3 hours and 15 minutes and it was the highest box office grossing movie ever. Your point about maximum short term gross is valid, however, that only means that it has to be in theaters for a longer period of time. Which I think it will be.
As you can see, even if it makes the projected estimates for this weekend, it will only be up to #34 in the rankings. However, it's also only been out for 2 weeks...:)
Guess it's time for me to go see it again and help bump it up one more notch...
Can someone please explain to me the moral or ethical mandate that supports/justifies this sort of vigilante thinking? Consider the following off-line scenarios, which to me seem equivalent (someone correct my thinking):
...
You can still have the best of both worlds... When people discover vulnerabilities like this, they should:
- Announce publicly that they discovered a vulnerability with a specific program (or module or whatever). Do NOT give enough details to allow others to relatively easily find it for themselves. Along with this notification, post the date on which the full disclosure of the details will happen.
- Alert the vendor who made the software, and give them all of the technical details with which to identify and fix the problem. (As well as the public posting date.) Allow the vendor a reasonably long enough time to fix their software and strongly promote the downloading of patches by their customers. This is a grey area, because a "reasonable" amount of time could easily vary depending on the size of the company, the number of users of the software, how many different versions of the software are in use, how severe of a bug it is, etc. I don't know what a good default guideline would be, but I can't imagine it being less than a week.
- On the disclosure date promised in the original announcement, disclose all of the details of your findings.
Each of these steps are vital and cannot be skipped over, nor are they likely to work out of sequence. People/groups who research things like this thrive on the fame and notoriety of being the ones who found the vulnerability. They are not likely to be willing to give the vendor notice without publicly announcing that they've found something, because the vendor might fix the bug without giving credit to the finders. While this would be fine for the rest of us, it would not please the finders, so they would not be willing to stick to this model, which would defeat the whole purpose.
It is also imperative that the details ARE disclosed to the public at some point. Without the threat of the details being publicly known and mass embarrassment for the vendor (or possible legal action, depending on the nature of the bug and the degree of negligence), there will be very little incentive for the vendor to fix the holes and encourage downloads of the patches. The solution is NOT to disallow scrutiny of software by third parties. If large vendors come to rely on this type of legal protection rather than technical integrity, then the only people who will end up discovering such vulnerabilities are those who are knowingly attempting to break the law. When they gain their "illegal" knowledge, they are likely to use it anonymously for illegal purposes, since any legal use of it would trace it back to "How did they find this out in the first place?", and thus their illegal "hacking".
It is imperative that the "good" hackers be allowed to claim credit for their discoveries and to have a legal way to disclose them to the vendors, and to put pressure on them to be fixed. This is how progress is made. By outlawing 'beneficial hacking', you will force all of these active minds into the underground, eliminating thousands of basically free quality-control research hours. The desire to analyze, to explore, to hack, will always be there. If you outlaw it, you are guaranteeing that the results of these desires will always be illegal, and probably negative (counter-productive to society).
Within the sun there is a finite number of particles, which are made up of a finite number of subatomic particles... and the movement of each particle can be measured exactly if we take in account of all the number of forces acting upon it (which is... you guessed it... finite). Essentially, you would have to make a great deal of computations (...again, finite), but it is possible. The only problems you would get into would be continual motion... if there is such a thing...
Not unless our understanding of atomic and sub-atomic particles is completely wrong. You can NOT measure "the movement of each particle... exactly", as explained by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. There is a limit to the precision to which you can measure the particle's 'movement'. If you somehow measured the velocity of the particle exactly, you would have a very uncertain idea of its exact location, which would also be a major factor in determining that particle's effects on its surrounding particles. Which is of course necessary if your goal is to be able to calculate the movements of every particle in the Sun.
It would not be possible, and not necessary or useful either, to build a complete model that calculates the exact movement of every part of the Sun. We will just keep creating slightly more accurate models over time, until we have one that is "good enough".
I simply assumed that people on Slashdot are above those biases. We are (mostly) computer and science enthusiasts, and, generally, those types are able to make well-informed decisions about things.
Right. Just like Emacs is a clearly superior text editor to "vi", which is why there's never any discussion about it. Such issues are easily settled in a timely manner by us well-informed geeks!
"640K ought to be enough for anybody"
-- Some guy, I don't remember who...
Same thing happened here in this area of Florida, on smaller scale though. 3 companies all started providing wireless internet access using the free airspace Breezecom equipment. One company spent millions of dollars building a new building, setting up the best networking equipment, paying for prime real estate in tower space, hiring a medium-sized but highly trained (and highly paid) staff, and setting up multiple T3's for their backbone.
The second company consisted of 3 guys going around setting up deals with owners of buildings to provide free wireless access in exchange for letting them put a tower on top of their building, and most of their electrical wiring looked like it was made with metal coat hangers and duct tape. They too are run by a couple kids who only partially understand the technology they're using, just enough to set it up and get it working, but not enough to prevent constant network problems, which are of course always blamed on the local telco. The 3rd company was somewhere in between these two, but more towards the expensive end.
Now, about a year and half later, only the cheap podunks are still in business. The other two went bankrupt and sold their assests for chump change. The little guys are now picking up their former competitors clients easily, since they already have the equipment needed, just need a new ISP to connect to. All 3 of these companies overestimated the market demand and reasonable profits that could be made from it, and so the ones who spent the least money ended up winning. And so it seems that business will still remain an Art as well as a Science...
That's fine and all, and I usually don't go on such long rants about corrrect grammar. But when someone tries to "correct" someone else's grammar incorrectly, they've opened themselves up for a verbal ass-beating.
If you want to say "it's" where "its" should be used, fine. But if you try to instruct someone that "it's" SHOULD BE what's used in that same sentence, then your misinformation needs to be countered.
P.S. I too started messing around with BBS's (BBSs? No one could ever agree on the plural of BBS either, but in this case there was no well defined precendent) around 1990, and the internet as it became more popular around '94. And through all of that time it has become quite obvious (to me, at least) that people who post messages with blantant spelling and grammatical errors are taken less seriously and are less trusted than those that don't. Do you find this bias in your own readings? Although most people won't heed the call, don't you think that trying to improve someone's grammar is in fact providing a service to them?
that's because they are seperate words that already MEAN possesive. its is NOT a seperate word from it, it just has an affix stuck on. and in case you hadn't noticed, it's the ONLY word where the possesive affix "can't" have the appostraphe.
No dick cheese, "its" IS a separate word that means possesive, that's the whole fucking point! It is exactly the same as "his" and "hers" which is why I made the comparison. The pronoun is "he", and the possessive form of that pronoun is "his". The pronoun is "she", and the possessive form of that pronoun is "hers". The pronoun is "it", the possessive form of that pronoun is "its". But for some reason you and a million other lemmings insist on putting an apostrophe in the middle of it. "its" and "it's" are are two different words and they mean entirely different things!
There is a very simple rule to follow: If you ever consider using "it's" in a sentence, replace "it's" with "it is" or "it has". If the sentence still makes sense, then "it's" is correct.
Example: "I have a cat. It's brown." Now for the test: "I have a cat. It is brown." That makes sense, so "it's" is OK. Now for another: "I have a cat. It's paws are dirty." And the test: "I have a cat. It is paws are dirty." Doesn't make sense does it, so "it's" cannot be used.
Make sure you do your research before bashing someone about the correctness of something that is easily verified. It's as simple as going to Dictionary.com: Usage Note: Its is the possessive form of the pronoun it and is correctly written without an apostrophe. It should not be confused with the contraction it's (for it is or it has), which should always have an apostrophe.
If it's too hard a concept for you to grasp that maybe it should work just like every other word out there, and make things easier for us, then I fully expect yopu to be using whom wherever it is called for, as well as quite using conjunctions in written speech, as those are equally "incorrect".
The difficulting in grasping is with you and the other morons that can't understand that "its" and "it's" DO work just like every other word out there! By "easier for us" you mean "let us use whichever one we feel like typing, in whatever context and have it not be wrong." "Who" and "whom" is another elementary difference that should be easily understandable, as well as the relationship between "I" and "me". And contractions gained acceptance in the 1500s, and are easily recognized and understandable by everyone (when used correctly), so they ARE 'correct'.
The answer is not to allow every dipshit that doesn't want to learn the basic fundamentals of the most common words of his language to "change the rules" of that language to a dummer version. You would just keep dumbing down other words, but since there isn't any logic behind it, everyone won't be able to follow it equally. So you'll end up with the speech that 14 year old web site hackers currently use as "official English" while other equally corrupted versions are also "official English", and you start getting dialects within a language that other people can't understand, and prevent people from communicating with each other.
Yes, languages change. Yes, add new words to the language to describe a technology or idea that has not existed before. Yes, if an existing word's definition has been universally been altered to something significantly different from its old meaning, add that new meaning to the dictionary. But do NOT throw out the rules of grammar; that is not progress.
Linux distributions need to band together and find a trusted individual who will be responsible for signing all packages and verifying that they do not contain backdoors. That is the only way to solve this issue. Personally, I nominate Eric Raymond, because of his widespread respect from the community and business leaders alike....
You can NOT bind the entire Linux integrity verification to the existance of a single individual! All it takes is one car accident or plane crash and *poof* there goes Linux. NOT an acceptable solution.
you know what's funny? read that cartoon... see case #2? possesive? "the cat's feet are out of the bag" - correct. well just as the cat posesses it's feet, magic lantern posesses it's existence. so basically angry flower says: you're wrong! and to that bitch who said "you should always be able to replace the apostrophe with "it is"" - well, you're wrong too, fuckwad.
Do you put an apostrophe after other possesive pronouns? Have you EVER seen "his' cat" or "her' cat" or "his's cat"?? No of course not, and you don't use an apostrophe with "its" when showing possession either. Fuckwad. hehehe
Anonymous flaming on the internet... it's FANTASTIC!
Sometimes I think Babelfish was worth doing, simply for the entertainment value. Let's have a look at a couple doozies from today's article:
The introduction of a " positive Ratings for harmless supplies " is suggested, which rejects the economy as " vorzensur ".
OK, that wasn't that funny. Here's a better one:
" the youth medium protection is already monastery suited compared with other countries almost in Germany "
I think this one sums up the whole article:
It is too simply, itself after land woman manners " bigott over the dirt "...
Of COURSE it is! And possibly the most interesting:
the SPD wants to put " dinosaur discussions over transmitting time delimitations and license obligations " for for Internet forward a latch plate
Dinosaur discussions! Fantastic!!
But my favorites are the conversion of people's names into common words... Some of today's quotes are provided by: "franc walter stone Meier", "peace man Schindler"!
I think the next "All your base..." wave won't come from some Chinese game company's pathetic attempt to translate to English, it will come from Slashdot funneling a million people through the fish... any day now the golden nugget of automated translation will be found!
But I guess I shouldn't make fun of Altavista, since at least they have survived this long... in an industry that rarely "writes black numbers". Heeheee I kill me!
This is such a self-centered proposal, assuming that they can tell everyone everywhere what they can and cannot put on their web site, based on what time it is in Germany! There is no reason to support such legislation in other countries, especially those across the Atlantic, because those hours here don't mean anything.
If for some reason these types of laws DO take off, you'll end up with a situation where everybody's porn servers go down during the daytime hours of the country they're hosted in, and everyone gets used to looking at foreign porn sites. That, or there'll be a new-found interest in the soveriegnty struggle of "Sealand"...:)
his passion for accuracy and precision led to his teaming up with Edward W. Morley, in 1878 to prove the existence of the cosmic "ether", through the.... Michelson-Morley Experiment. Michelson's career had been golden, and he was widely regarded as the best physicist of the 19th century. So, everyone "knew" that he would successfully prove the existence of the cosmic "ether", which would be the finally block in the edifice of Classical Newtonian physics...
instead, the experiment went completeley wrong, conclusively proved the lack of the cosmic ether, and Newton was kicked to the gutter (as an explanation for sub-macroscopic events)...
Is the "ether" theory so far off the mark? Everyone says 'ahhh yes, it was totally wrong. It's all a complete vacuum out there.' Yet we now accept that electromagnetic waves are ripples in the "fabric of space-time", that massive bodies cause distortions in space-time (gravity), that subatomic particles can pop in and out of existance in the midst of the "vacuum"... Could it be that the old people had a couple of misconceptions about some of the properties this 'ether' could have, but it's not in fact the "empty space" that we seem to think of it as?
I was under the impression that the moon had no atmosphere.
I could be wrong, but wouldn't that pretty much mean the sucking of any and all forms of water out into space?
Yes, but there's this little thing called gravity. Any atmosphere that is generated on the moon (by impacts by tiny meteors) quickly drifts off into space, because the "atmosphere" particles are so small and rest of the moon's gravity is insufficient to keep them in orbit.
There would be no sucking of stuff into space, because obviously the processing of the ice would involve heating it by some kind of machines, and these machines would keep the resulting water contained in tanks or tubes or whatever. This is not the difficult part of the proposed project.
It should have been this way right from the start. Every country should have its country code as its top level domain, and that should be subdivided as best convenient for that country. In the U.S., each state would be assigned a 2-letter name under.us, and that state would be responsible for subdividing further. A big state like California might subdivide further by counties.
yadda yadda yadda
In short, by using rules that make sense to KNOWLEDGEABLE computer folks, a very large mess wouldn't exist now. Huge technical problems would be reduced to nothing. Legal problems would nearly go away too--we wouldn't have people fighting over domain names and stupid stuff like that. (If there was a fight, it could only happen between people in the same city (or state in the worst case) and there would be no authority to handle it--all names are first-come-first-serve.
Yes, this is all very clear in hindsight, but you're completely forgetting that the internet had to be created from nothing. This is not some obvious flaw that no one has contemplated until you, our resident genius, brought it to our attention.
As with anything that eventually develops into something vastly different from what it was originally intended to do, the internet naming system was NOT developed in the most efficient way to handle the problems that crept up 30+ years later. When the Department of Defense personnel were first starting to design ARPAnet, they didn't say to themselves "Gee, this secret military project we're making... it's supposed to be a communications network for Defense stations throughout the country that can survive a nuclear assault that destroys certain parts of the country... What if someday in the distant future it expands into a worldwide network of mostly civilians and is used by hundreds of millions of people from all over the world who want to be able to categorize their businesses according the city,state, and country? Maybe we should take that into account!". No, they didn't say that. Which is why we have the awkward system we have now. It originated in the U.S., so the U.S. names are going to be a little bit different until they are slowly revised. Stepwise refinement! Look it up!
All you people who cry out "Duh!" at things like this don't stop to consider that great things are not created instantly and perfectly. (It's like saying "Why didn't the Wright brothers invent a 747 instead of that dinky single propeller plane? Everyone KNOWS that a jet engine is far superior to a prop motor!")
A project (DARPAnet) was morphed into something very different (the Internet), which suited a new need (worldwide interconnectivity of businesses and individuals) that didn't exist when the project was started. Naturally everything did not work perfectly. There is a problem with the naming conventions. So the naming convention system is being tweaked (ie. news post of today). This is not some drastic change due to a grand revelation, but is the slow, natural progression of all things.
For.com.us, I was thinking of a company registered with that exact name. Company names have to be unique, right?
No, they don't. And even if they did, they're registered at the State level, NOT the national level, so you could have 50 different businesses, all 'properly registered' with the same name, and each with a valid claim on the domain name. And that wouldn't prevent individuals from starting a "company" to register the domain name. Corporations have to be incorporated at a state level, but it is even simpler to start a sole proprietorship or partnership and register a "fictious name" (not in the sense of a 'scam') for a company with whatever company name you want. Although, it would be more difficult than the current system of "register whatever you want".
I do agree though that adding a layer of beuracracy would only slow things down and would not help solve anything. (see: patent office)
I dunno, I thought their little side note (with picture) that: "Jenna Bush's federally protected wetlands now open for public drilling." was pretty fucking funny myself. I'd like to see a machine come up with THAT.
Slashdot Mirror
If it's in a jewel case that looks like a CD, and is on the shelf in HMV, and costs the same as other CDs, and is on the shelf beside other CDs, do you think that most consumers would stop to look if it has the Philips CD logo on it?
They will if there's a mass TV campaign with little Intel-like guys in Day-glo colored space suits telling you to look for the "CD inside" logo...
Apparently putting "( Score: 5, Troll)" as the subject results in the subject being truncated to "(". Weird.
As of the time I'm reading this, the score of the parent post reads "(Score:5, Troll)". How is this possible?? I've seen "(Score:4, Troll)" before, and assumed that the word after the score was simply the last moderation that was done to it, (it was modded up to 5 and then someone modded back down 1 point as Troll). But now we have a (Score:5, Troll), which means... what??
Is it now possible to mod something as "Troll" and have it go UP in score?? What's going on?
I'm gonna sue for punitive damages. Sue you, and the people you work with... I wanna sue you, and sue EVERYBODY! All these punitive damages I've had...
(awwww I don't see so good. I'll bring my shoes and my glasses so I have them...)
At least it does as long as a photon has no mass... but even then I could imagine that if it's somehow transmutable from one form to another that it all works as well.
That's the whole point, Energy and Mass are the same thing. Mass is just the appearance to us of a whole lot of energy bundled up in one place. Our perceived distinction between the two breaks down when you start dealing with very small amounts of energy, so that when they (photons) make very slight phase changes between travelling through space and being part of a more energetic electron, our definitions of what is matter and what is energy break down. Photons are thought of as both particles and waves concurrently, and which one you use to describe it depends on the situation and what it is interacting with. Photons really are just little packets of energy. They don't have any "mass" as far as weight is concerned, but since mass and energy are the same thing, technically an atom that absorbs a photon has slightly more mass than it did before. (Think about the proposed "solar sail" space travel ship designs.) They don't have mass, but they have momentum. It is in this little gray area that we realized that our typical terminology and concepts of 'matter' and 'energy' were incomplete and slightly misleading, and led to Einstein's widely repeated but rarely explained equation: E=mc^2
(Energy released/gained) = (change in mass)*(speed of light in a vacuum squared)
The speed of light in this equation is used as a numerical constant and doesn't actually have anything to do with the distance the matter or energy is travelling.
It looks so much like English... only not.
Well the LOTR drone will mod this post down to -5, but this won't change the truth anyway.
No, hopefully you'll be modded down because you don't know what you're talking about.
a little bit cryptohomosexual ?
Let's look at the facts:
The same thing could be said about today's world. There's been semi-effective crusades to get women more involved in the work force and promoted to higher positions in corporations and government for at least the last hundred years. Before that it was rather "obvious" that women should be staying at home and taking care of the children and other 'at home' activities. A tale set in the time of 'long ago' about people (and hobbits, elves, etc.) who are setting off on a trek to escape armies of a dark lord and save the world would obviously not have too many women involved since their roles in life did not include such things. Following your logic would mean that all men prior to the 20th century were "cryptohomosexual".
So the fans didn't want the filmmakers changing the gender of a fairly major character, just to artificially add some women to the cast. You'd see a lot of pissed people too if you had millions of people reading "Harry Potter" books, and the filmmakers decided a little girl named "Harriet Potter" was more to their liking. This does not support a "gay" Tolkein theory in any way.
Yeah that Liv Tyler and Cate Blanchett are pretty homely looking butch women... That's just what I was thinking too when I watched the movie...
Well if there had been lots of "fairies" who described their mood as very "gay" while they went around collecting "faggots" in the forest, you might have a point there. But there isn't any of that. And if you're going to technically analyze a word as an example of something, at least spell it right ('elf', 'mordor'). And what the fuck is a "rodom" anyway??
It looks to me like there's more of Freud working here in this guy's post than a gay Tolkein... Excellent troll butt-boy!
I don't know about that... LotR:FotR is slightly under 3 hours. Titanic was like 3 hours and 15 minutes and it was the highest box office grossing movie ever. Your point about maximum short term gross is valid, however, that only means that it has to be in theaters for a longer period of time. Which I think it will be.
Check out the gross income of movies that are currently in theaters here:l
http://movies.yahoo.com/boxoffice/latest/rank.htm
You can compare these totals to the totals of the Top 100 biggest ranking movies of all time here:m l
http://movies.yahoo.com/boxoffice-alltime/rank.ht
As you can see, even if it makes the projected estimates for this weekend, it will only be up to #34 in the rankings. However, it's also only been out for 2 weeks... :)
Guess it's time for me to go see it again and help bump it up one more notch...
Can someone please explain to me the moral or ethical mandate that supports/justifies this sort of vigilante thinking? Consider the following off-line scenarios, which to me seem equivalent (someone correct my thinking):
...
You can still have the best of both worlds... When people discover vulnerabilities like this, they should:
- Announce publicly that they discovered a vulnerability with a specific program (or module or whatever). Do NOT give enough details to allow others to relatively easily find it for themselves. Along with this notification, post the date on which the full disclosure of the details will happen.
- Alert the vendor who made the software, and give them all of the technical details with which to identify and fix the problem. (As well as the public posting date.) Allow the vendor a reasonably long enough time to fix their software and strongly promote the downloading of patches by their customers. This is a grey area, because a "reasonable" amount of time could easily vary depending on the size of the company, the number of users of the software, how many different versions of the software are in use, how severe of a bug it is, etc. I don't know what a good default guideline would be, but I can't imagine it being less than a week.
- On the disclosure date promised in the original announcement, disclose all of the details of your findings.
Each of these steps are vital and cannot be skipped over, nor are they likely to work out of sequence. People/groups who research things like this thrive on the fame and notoriety of being the ones who found the vulnerability. They are not likely to be willing to give the vendor notice without publicly announcing that they've found something, because the vendor might fix the bug without giving credit to the finders. While this would be fine for the rest of us, it would not please the finders, so they would not be willing to stick to this model, which would defeat the whole purpose.
It is also imperative that the details ARE disclosed to the public at some point. Without the threat of the details being publicly known and mass embarrassment for the vendor (or possible legal action, depending on the nature of the bug and the degree of negligence), there will be very little incentive for the vendor to fix the holes and encourage downloads of the patches. The solution is NOT to disallow scrutiny of software by third parties. If large vendors come to rely on this type of legal protection rather than technical integrity, then the only people who will end up discovering such vulnerabilities are those who are knowingly attempting to break the law. When they gain their "illegal" knowledge, they are likely to use it anonymously for illegal purposes, since any legal use of it would trace it back to "How did they find this out in the first place?", and thus their illegal "hacking".
It is imperative that the "good" hackers be allowed to claim credit for their discoveries and to have a legal way to disclose them to the vendors, and to put pressure on them to be fixed. This is how progress is made. By outlawing 'beneficial hacking', you will force all of these active minds into the underground, eliminating thousands of basically free quality-control research hours. The desire to analyze, to explore, to hack, will always be there. If you outlaw it, you are guaranteeing that the results of these desires will always be illegal, and probably negative (counter-productive to society).
Within the sun there is a finite number of particles, which are made up of a finite number of subatomic particles... and the movement of each particle can be measured exactly if we take in account of all the number of forces acting upon it (which is... you guessed it... finite). Essentially, you would have to make a great deal of computations (...again, finite), but it is possible. The only problems you would get into would be continual motion... if there is such a thing...
Not unless our understanding of atomic and sub-atomic particles is completely wrong. You can NOT measure "the movement of each particle ... exactly", as explained by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. There is a limit to the precision to which you can measure the particle's 'movement'. If you somehow measured the velocity of the particle exactly, you would have a very uncertain idea of its exact location, which would also be a major factor in determining that particle's effects on its surrounding particles. Which is of course necessary if your goal is to be able to calculate the movements of every particle in the Sun.
It would not be possible, and not necessary or useful either, to build a complete model that calculates the exact movement of every part of the Sun. We will just keep creating slightly more accurate models over time, until we have one that is "good enough".
I simply assumed that people on Slashdot are above those biases. We are (mostly) computer and science enthusiasts, and, generally, those types are able to make well-informed decisions about things.
Right. Just like Emacs is a clearly superior text editor to "vi", which is why there's never any discussion about it. Such issues are easily settled in a timely manner by us well-informed geeks!
"640K ought to be enough for anybody"
-- Some guy, I don't remember who...
Same thing happened here in this area of Florida, on smaller scale though. 3 companies all started providing wireless internet access using the free airspace Breezecom equipment. One company spent millions of dollars building a new building, setting up the best networking equipment, paying for prime real estate in tower space, hiring a medium-sized but highly trained (and highly paid) staff, and setting up multiple T3's for their backbone.
The second company consisted of 3 guys going around setting up deals with owners of buildings to provide free wireless access in exchange for letting them put a tower on top of their building, and most of their electrical wiring looked like it was made with metal coat hangers and duct tape. They too are run by a couple kids who only partially understand the technology they're using, just enough to set it up and get it working, but not enough to prevent constant network problems, which are of course always blamed on the local telco. The 3rd company was somewhere in between these two, but more towards the expensive end.
Now, about a year and half later, only the cheap podunks are still in business. The other two went bankrupt and sold their assests for chump change. The little guys are now picking up their former competitors clients easily, since they already have the equipment needed, just need a new ISP to connect to. All 3 of these companies overestimated the market demand and reasonable profits that could be made from it, and so the ones who spent the least money ended up winning. And so it seems that business will still remain an Art as well as a Science...
That's fine and all, and I usually don't go on such long rants about corrrect grammar. But when someone tries to "correct" someone else's grammar incorrectly, they've opened themselves up for a verbal ass-beating.
If you want to say "it's" where "its" should be used, fine. But if you try to instruct someone that "it's" SHOULD BE what's used in that same sentence, then your misinformation needs to be countered.
P.S. I too started messing around with BBS's (BBSs? No one could ever agree on the plural of BBS either, but in this case there was no well defined precendent) around 1990, and the internet as it became more popular around '94. And through all of that time it has become quite obvious (to me, at least) that people who post messages with blantant spelling and grammatical errors are taken less seriously and are less trusted than those that don't. Do you find this bias in your own readings? Although most people won't heed the call, don't you think that trying to improve someone's grammar is in fact providing a service to them?
that's because they are seperate words that already MEAN possesive. its is NOT a seperate word from it, it just has an affix stuck on. and in case you hadn't noticed, it's the ONLY word where the possesive affix "can't" have the appostraphe.
No dick cheese, "its" IS a separate word that means possesive, that's the whole fucking point! It is exactly the same as "his" and "hers" which is why I made the comparison. The pronoun is "he", and the possessive form of that pronoun is "his". The pronoun is "she", and the possessive form of that pronoun is "hers". The pronoun is "it", the possessive form of that pronoun is "its". But for some reason you and a million other lemmings insist on putting an apostrophe in the middle of it. "its" and "it's" are are two different words and they mean entirely different things!
There is a very simple rule to follow: If you ever consider using "it's" in a sentence, replace "it's" with "it is" or "it has". If the sentence still makes sense, then "it's" is correct.
Example: "I have a cat. It's brown." Now for the test: "I have a cat. It is brown." That makes sense, so "it's" is OK.
Now for another: "I have a cat. It's paws are dirty." And the test: "I have a cat. It is paws are dirty." Doesn't make sense does it, so "it's" cannot be used.
Make sure you do your research before bashing someone about the correctness of something that is easily verified. It's as simple as going to Dictionary.com:
Usage Note: Its is the possessive form of the pronoun it and is correctly written without an apostrophe. It should not be confused with the contraction it's (for it is or it has), which should always have an apostrophe.
If it's too hard a concept for you to grasp that maybe it should work just like every other word out there, and make things easier for us, then I fully expect yopu to be using whom wherever it is called for, as well as quite using conjunctions in written speech, as those are equally "incorrect".
The difficulting in grasping is with you and the other morons that can't understand that "its" and "it's" DO work just like every other word out there! By "easier for us" you mean "let us use whichever one we feel like typing, in whatever context and have it not be wrong." "Who" and "whom" is another elementary difference that should be easily understandable, as well as the relationship between "I" and "me". And contractions gained acceptance in the 1500s, and are easily recognized and understandable by everyone (when used correctly), so they ARE 'correct'.
The answer is not to allow every dipshit that doesn't want to learn the basic fundamentals of the most common words of his language to "change the rules" of that language to a dummer version. You would just keep dumbing down other words, but since there isn't any logic behind it, everyone won't be able to follow it equally. So you'll end up with the speech that 14 year old web site hackers currently use as "official English" while other equally corrupted versions are also "official English", and you start getting dialects within a language that other people can't understand, and prevent people from communicating with each other.
Yes, languages change. Yes, add new words to the language to describe a technology or idea that has not existed before. Yes, if an existing word's definition has been universally been altered to something significantly different from its old meaning, add that new meaning to the dictionary. But do NOT throw out the rules of grammar; that is not progress.
Linux distributions need to band together and find a trusted individual who will be responsible for signing all packages and verifying that they do not contain backdoors. That is the only way to solve this issue. Personally, I nominate Eric Raymond, because of his widespread respect from the community and business leaders alike. ...
You can NOT bind the entire Linux integrity verification to the existance of a single individual! All it takes is one car accident or plane crash and *poof* there goes Linux. NOT an acceptable solution.
you know what's funny? read that cartoon... see case #2? possesive? "the cat's feet are out of the bag" - correct. well just as the cat posesses it's feet, magic lantern posesses it's existence. so basically angry flower says: you're wrong! and to that bitch who said "you should always be able to replace the apostrophe with "it is"" - well, you're wrong too, fuckwad.
Do you put an apostrophe after other possesive pronouns? Have you EVER seen "his' cat" or "her' cat" or "his's cat"?? No of course not, and you don't use an apostrophe with "its" when showing possession either. Fuckwad. hehehe
Anonymous flaming on the internet... it's FANTASTIC!
Sometimes I think Babelfish was worth doing, simply for the entertainment value. Let's have a look at a couple doozies from today's article:
OK, that wasn't that funny. Here's a better one:
I think this one sums up the whole article:
Of COURSE it is! And possibly the most interesting:
Dinosaur discussions! Fantastic!!
But my favorites are the conversion of people's names into common words... Some of today's quotes are provided by: "franc walter stone Meier", "peace man Schindler"!
I think the next "All your base..." wave won't come from some Chinese game company's pathetic attempt to translate to English, it will come from Slashdot funneling a million people through the fish... any day now the golden nugget of automated translation will be found!
But I guess I shouldn't make fun of Altavista, since at least they have survived this long... in an industry that rarely "writes black numbers". Heeheee I kill me!
This is such a self-centered proposal, assuming that they can tell everyone everywhere what they can and cannot put on their web site, based on what time it is in Germany! There is no reason to support such legislation in other countries, especially those across the Atlantic, because those hours here don't mean anything.
:)
If for some reason these types of laws DO take off, you'll end up with a situation where everybody's porn servers go down during the daytime hours of the country they're hosted in, and everyone gets used to looking at foreign porn sites. That, or there'll be a new-found interest in the soveriegnty struggle of "Sealand"...
Dennis Quaid??
It's not a tumor man!
his passion for accuracy and precision led to his teaming up with Edward W. Morley, in 1878 to prove the existence of the cosmic "ether", through the.... Michelson-Morley Experiment. Michelson's career had been golden, and he was widely regarded as the best physicist of the 19th century. So, everyone "knew" that he would successfully prove the existence of the cosmic "ether", which would be the finally block in the edifice of Classical Newtonian physics...
instead, the experiment went completeley wrong, conclusively proved the lack of the cosmic ether, and Newton was kicked to the gutter (as an explanation for sub-macroscopic events)...
Is the "ether" theory so far off the mark? Everyone says 'ahhh yes, it was totally wrong. It's all a complete vacuum out there.' Yet we now accept that electromagnetic waves are ripples in the "fabric of space-time", that massive bodies cause distortions in space-time (gravity), that subatomic particles can pop in and out of existance in the midst of the "vacuum"... Could it be that the old people had a couple of misconceptions about some of the properties this 'ether' could have, but it's not in fact the "empty space" that we seem to think of it as?
I was under the impression that the moon had no atmosphere.
I could be wrong, but wouldn't that pretty much mean the sucking of any and all forms of water out into space?
Yes, but there's this little thing called gravity. Any atmosphere that is generated on the moon (by impacts by tiny meteors) quickly drifts off into space, because the "atmosphere" particles are so small and rest of the moon's gravity is insufficient to keep them in orbit.
There would be no sucking of stuff into space, because obviously the processing of the ice would involve heating it by some kind of machines, and these machines would keep the resulting water contained in tanks or tubes or whatever. This is not the difficult part of the proposed project.
It should have been this way right from the start. Every country should have its country code as its top level domain, and that should be subdivided as best convenient for that country. In the U.S., each state would be assigned a 2-letter name under .us, and that state would be responsible for subdividing further. A big state like California might subdivide further by counties.
yadda yadda yadda
In short, by using rules that make sense to KNOWLEDGEABLE computer folks, a very large mess wouldn't exist now. Huge technical problems would be reduced to nothing. Legal problems would nearly go away too--we wouldn't have people fighting over domain names and stupid stuff like that. (If there was a fight, it could only happen between people in the same city (or state in the worst case) and there would be no authority to handle it--all names are first-come-first-serve.
Yes, this is all very clear in hindsight, but you're completely forgetting that the internet had to be created from nothing. This is not some obvious flaw that no one has contemplated until you, our resident genius, brought it to our attention.
As with anything that eventually develops into something vastly different from what it was originally intended to do, the internet naming system was NOT developed in the most efficient way to handle the problems that crept up 30+ years later. When the Department of Defense personnel were first starting to design ARPAnet, they didn't say to themselves "Gee, this secret military project we're making... it's supposed to be a communications network for Defense stations throughout the country that can survive a nuclear assault that destroys certain parts of the country... What if someday in the distant future it expands into a worldwide network of mostly civilians and is used by hundreds of millions of people from all over the world who want to be able to categorize their businesses according the city,state, and country? Maybe we should take that into account!". No, they didn't say that. Which is why we have the awkward system we have now. It originated in the U.S., so the U.S. names are going to be a little bit different until they are slowly revised. Stepwise refinement! Look it up!
All you people who cry out "Duh!" at things like this don't stop to consider that great things are not created instantly and perfectly. (It's like saying "Why didn't the Wright brothers invent a 747 instead of that dinky single propeller plane? Everyone KNOWS that a jet engine is far superior to a prop motor!")
A project (DARPAnet) was morphed into something very different (the Internet), which suited a new need (worldwide interconnectivity of businesses and individuals) that didn't exist when the project was started. Naturally everything did not work perfectly. There is a problem with the naming conventions. So the naming convention system is being tweaked (ie. news post of today). This is not some drastic change due to a grand revelation, but is the slow, natural progression of all things.
For .com.us, I was thinking of a company registered with that exact name. Company names have to be unique, right?
No, they don't. And even if they did, they're registered at the State level, NOT the national level, so you could have 50 different businesses, all 'properly registered' with the same name, and each with a valid claim on the domain name. And that wouldn't prevent individuals from starting a "company" to register the domain name. Corporations have to be incorporated at a state level, but it is even simpler to start a sole proprietorship or partnership and register a "fictious name" (not in the sense of a 'scam') for a company with whatever company name you want. Although, it would be more difficult than the current system of "register whatever you want".
I do agree though that adding a layer of beuracracy would only slow things down and would not help solve anything. (see: patent office)
I dunno, I thought their little side note (with picture) that: "Jenna Bush's federally protected wetlands now open for public drilling." was pretty fucking funny myself. I'd like to see a machine come up with THAT.