I just got DSL installed. Speakeasy (thru Covad thru Verizon) is my provider. I was getting 60% packet loss, so I called tech support. Immediately after the guy said "Hello my name is Bob", I said, "Hi I'm Dave, and I'm getting packet loss. It could be because the routing is funny - it's going through NYC...". If you do this, the tech will immediately know that you're smart, and will skip the "click start, click settings, click control panel" script.
P.S. Speakeasy tech support is really good, and they give you 30 hrs/month free dialup access to use when you're waiting for your DSL to be installed (or when it goes down). They gave a friend of mine a free month for being the first person to report downtime, and another for being nice about it.
This is addressed to people who like most of Nader's politics (I'm not sure anyone likes/all/ of anyone else's politics), and who are afraid of Bush.
My mom told me not to throw away my vote on Nader, and that even if I don't like Gore, I should fear Bush more. I thought about it, and decided on a compromise, which I will impart to Slashdot:
If you're not in a swing state (look on the net, you'll find a listing), vote for Nader. If you are in a swing state, trade your vote:
Find someone in a non-swing state who is rational, but pro-Gore. Tell them that you will vote Gore if they vote Nader. They will, of course, accept this, since a vote in a swing state is actually worth something. It's also good for Nader, since all he cares about is the popular vote.
Be careful who you pick. This is a classic example of The Prisoner's Dilemma. If you pick someone who is rational, and who knows that you are rational, then you'll be OK - see Metamagical Themas, by Douglas Hofstadter for the reasoning.
ObOnTopic: Why woud Gore appoint people who would be any more anti-IP than Bush? He's owned by the entertainment industry.
No, what about GPL'd games? If they are put onto copy-protected disks for distribution, that's a problem.
Re:Libertarianism the new Republicism bur more evi
on
Should You Vote?
·
· Score: 2
"If I'm a a lower-class worker, the non-flat tax is a disincentive to working harder; I'll only end up having to pay a disproportionately larger amount in taxes."
No. I have *never* heard *anyone* say "Oh, I wish I weren't rich so I didn't have to pay so much in taxes" or "I'm not going to work hard because I'll just have to pay too much in taxes."
Now, Nader's "maximum wage" = 100% tax over a certain amount *would* make some people say that, which is why I don't support it. But I support Nader anyhow, since even were he to be elected, that particular measure would never pass. IOW, his madness is safer than Browne's (or Gore's or Bush's).
>>>I assume "intent" is going to be part of this. How else do you legally distinguish between child porn and pictures of children? FWIW, I recall Britain has a law now against artificial child porn - pictures that have been created via Photoshop. <<<
The US tried this, too. Fortunately, the Supreme Court acquitted the person involved - the reason kiddy pr0n is illegal in the US is because its creation is harmful to children - fake kiddie pr0n isn't.
You are an idiot. You're an idiot because you are too stupid to go to the page listed as my URL and determine that I am, in fact, male, and thus cannot be anyone's girl friend. No, I'm not CT's boy friend, either - and if you weren't a chickenshit AC, you could determine that, too.
Fuck it. Not replying to you fuckers seems to be the logical thing to do, but it hasn't worked. Y'all have made -1 necessary, and made 0 unreadable. Well, no more. I'm going on a quest, starting today, to figure out exactly how to make you go away and stay away. Or, to make it so I don't have to see you. Anyone who sees this and wants to help, send me an e-mail.
Dude, even if it were true, which it's not, Rob wouldn't do that. Why? Because Rob has ethics. Proof: "Hot Grits". Rob believes in Free Speech, and so he hasn't run the spammers off/.. Despite the fact that they make his life hell, that they make low-scored posts essentially unreadable, and that they don't contribute jack shit to the community. Yeah, Rob has ethics. What, you think he runs/. for the money? The dude puts his *soul* into this site, and you have the nerve to impugn his motives? Think before you post!
"Materiality is the definition of real communities, and virtual communities can't replicate real ones."
This is circular. It's not an argument, it's an arbitrary definition. I don't think that materiality has anything to do with community, and it's not fair to redefine words to make an argument.
Also, internet access gets cheaper every day. Many people can use the internet from libraries for free. So, that's bogus, too.......
Not that it matters, because inclusivity is not a measure of a community. (It may be a measure of a utopian community, but they don't call it utopia for nothing).
I'm not so sure about that. From what I could see, Rijndael was very weak even before this. 7 or 8 rounds (out of a recomended 10) could be broken. This doesn't leave a very good safety margin.
Twofish seems to be very resistant to all known attacks, and certainly can't be counted out.
That's not what it says! It says "Hack SDMI.org" Not "Hack hacksdmi.org". They want you to hack their main site - that's why they put up this one... wait...:)
"No, it's not worthless at all. It can still be detected, but only by the people who put it there in the first place.Thus, you can't tell if a given piece of audio is watermarked, but the record companies can scan all the files on your public server and read the watermarks."
OK, but what good is that going to do them? They could already just *listen* to the song and know that it's "Oops, I did it again" (or whatever). It would only help them if it were in players, and then we could reverse-engineer it.
You don't have to take my word - just read my argument. It maybe that Bruce Perens and Donald Becker are closer to the issue. So? Maybe I know more about the law. (IANAL, but I learned a ton from both my parents, who are). Maybe I just had a clever insight that they missed. Read the arguments and make up your own mind.
From the article: "Sun's controversial little kit takes open source Linux drivers and converts them into Solaris binaries. "
OK, here's the deal: The kit itself is just a piece of software - it no more "encourages" licens violations than GCC does. But any product of the kit was originally made from some code. Chances are, that code was under copyright and license. So, distributing the modified binary is distributing a derivative work - this is only allowed under the terms of the license the original code was under (in this case, the GPL). So, Sun must distribute the source to Becker's drivers if it distributes binaries of them (for any system).
"Correctly implemented, there is no way to detect or remove it. "
An implementation that was undetectable is not correct, it is worthless - You can't tell it's there.
If their players can detect the watermark, we can just use whatever technology they use to detect it. Then, we can remove it - if it's just a certain set of frequencies, we can remove those frequencies, etc.
Godel's Theorem (and Turing's halting problem) are not serious limits on the powers of computers. I know I can't make a machine that determines if a computer program halts, but I can't say I've ever wanted to.
Also, I think that proving systems correct is not something we (mostly) want to waste our time with. We don't prove formally that 747s won't fall apart, and yet they don't. While I do agree that good software engineering practices are important, I don't think that we know everything there is to know about software engineering yet.
I don't think that people really worship computers, but rather some idea of what "computers" will be. Like nanotech, which seems to have the potential to eliminate hunger and revolutionize everything. Of course, it also has the power to turn the world into a mass of "gray goo" - it's technology: dangerous and useful. We should fight to see it used well.
What part of "no" in "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech..." did you fail to understand?
I also think it's false to say that the list "puts doctors in clear and present danger." This is because it gives nothing that a telephone book doesn't. It is in some sense the same as the Napster case - people providing an index that could be used for illegal purposes (although non-commmercial copying may not actually be illegal).
I think the list maintainers are evil people - but they have a right to say what they like.
I can tell you what the people who put up billboards have to say about your opinion: "Nuts! It's our land". And they're right - they bought the land, and they can put up any damn thing they like on it.
Would you like it if people told you what flags you could hang on your house? Or what clothing you could wear? Free speech must be for everyone or for no one.
Quoth the poster:
"You may suggest to recompile the drivers. Good idea, unless you've got a binary only driver from a company that got sued into oblivion as happened with Aureal (they won the lawsuit but went broke on expenses for their attorneys)."
Linux Torvalds has in the past expressed no sympathy for your position. His argument is that it's easy to recompile a kernel module to support a new kernel. If you're using a binary-only module, then you have to bug your vendor - that's your "penance" for buying non-open hardware.
I tend to agree with Linus (on this). Windows is a standard that's ossified - it's standard is to suck. Bugs can't be fixed because programs depend on them. The thing about a free OS is that programs that depend on bugs can be fixed when thouse bugs are (pardon the unparsability).
The server creates a random number, so that the browser doesn't cache the image. The browser requests the gif (with random number). The server *ignores* the returned random number, and just sends the gif and counts the hit.
It's all about making the browser think it's got to retrieve the image at every page. -Dave Turner.
I chose that as an example of "incomprehensible" Perl. But it's only incomprehensible if you don't know Perl. In Perl, all regexps are read from left to right.
So if you're trying to read mine, you should first check out the first character: "<". It's not a metacharacter - it's an angle bracket. Why? Because this script dealt with HTML. Next bit: "(?" When you see the '?' after the '(', the manual says "you should stop and \"question\" exactly what is going on."
Then there's a "!" to give meaning to the "(?". Everyone knows that ! means "not". And that should give you a fair idea of what's going on - we're trying not to match something. It's a little more complex than that, but that's because it's got a complex job.
OK, next bit: A variable - containing what we're trying not to match (in this case, the descriptive variable name tells us that we're not matching okay tags. The "<" (earlier) tells us that we're matching some tags, so it must be the not OK tags). If you had the script in front of you, you would see that the variable was in the form foo|bar|baz|fred|barney. So, there are a bunch of okay tags we're trying not to match.
Next bit: ")". Emacs will tell you what it matches (in case you couldn't tell yourself).
Etc. I did the hard part, you do the rest:).
Before I saw this, I assumed that the job (the sub Police_html) would be done with a traditional parser. For an exercise, I tried to write one... My buggy parser (it let <blink> through if <b> was allowed) was around 20 lines, in more-or-less C programming style - no regexps. It was no more readable, and it didn't do the job right.
Perl lets you do things quickly and easily that would be ugly and long with other languages. If you think the above code is ugly, don't compare it to the English "Remove all HTML tags not on a whitelist", but to the equivalent C.
"Cette phrase en francais est difficile a traduire en anglais." (From Douglas Hofstader's "Metamagical Themas")
The point is, it's impossible to read anything until you know the language. I know that the above perl reads "zap all html tags not in the list of ok tags. " (Of course, I have the benefit of knowing what the context for the line was).
So, yeah - perl is ugly unless you know it.... just like any other language. Also, I think C++ uses all the punctiation that perl does, just not as often:)
Slashdot Mirror
I just got DSL installed. Speakeasy (thru Covad thru Verizon) is my provider. I was getting 60% packet loss, so I called tech support. Immediately after the guy said "Hello my name is Bob", I said, "Hi I'm Dave, and I'm getting packet loss. It could be because the routing is funny - it's going through NYC...". If you do this, the tech will immediately know that you're smart, and will skip the "click start, click settings, click control panel" script.
P.S. Speakeasy tech support is really good, and they give you 30 hrs/month free dialup access to use when you're waiting for your DSL to be installed (or when it goes down). They gave a friend of mine a free month for being the first person to report downtime, and another for being nice about it.
This is addressed to people who like most of Nader's politics (I'm not sure anyone likes /all/ of anyone else's politics), and who are afraid of Bush.
My mom told me not to throw away my vote on Nader, and that even if I don't like Gore, I should fear Bush more. I thought about it, and decided on a compromise, which I will impart to Slashdot: If you're not in a swing state (look on the net, you'll find a listing), vote for Nader. If you are in a swing state, trade your vote:
Find someone in a non-swing state who is rational, but pro-Gore. Tell them that you will vote Gore if they vote Nader. They will, of course, accept this, since a vote in a swing state is actually worth something. It's also good for Nader, since all he cares about is the popular vote. Be careful who you pick. This is a classic example of The Prisoner's Dilemma. If you pick someone who is rational, and who knows that you are rational, then you'll be OK - see Metamagical Themas, by Douglas Hofstadter for the reasoning.
ObOnTopic: Why woud Gore appoint people who would be any more anti-IP than Bush? He's owned by the entertainment industry.
Not if it includes GPL stuff from other sources. This is the same problem as occured with Qt.
No, what about GPL'd games? If they are put onto copy-protected disks for distribution, that's a problem.
"If I'm a a lower-class worker, the non-flat tax is a disincentive to working harder; I'll only end up having to pay a disproportionately larger amount in taxes."
No. I have *never* heard *anyone* say "Oh, I wish I weren't rich so I didn't have to pay so much in taxes" or "I'm not going to work hard because I'll just have to pay too much in taxes."
Now, Nader's "maximum wage" = 100% tax over a certain amount *would* make some people say that, which is why I don't support it. But I support Nader anyhow, since even were he to be elected, that particular measure would never pass. IOW, his madness is safer than Browne's (or Gore's or Bush's).
>>>I assume "intent" is going to be part of this. How else do you legally distinguish between child porn and pictures of children? FWIW, I recall Britain has a law now against artificial child porn - pictures that have been created via Photoshop. <<<
The US tried this, too. Fortunately, the Supreme Court acquitted the person involved - the reason kiddy pr0n is illegal in the US is because its creation is harmful to children - fake kiddie pr0n isn't.
You are an idiot. You're an idiot because you are too stupid to go to the page listed as my URL and determine that I am, in fact, male, and thus cannot be anyone's girl friend. No, I'm not CT's boy friend, either - and if you weren't a chickenshit AC, you could determine that, too.
Fuck it. Not replying to you fuckers seems to be the logical thing to do, but it hasn't worked. Y'all have made -1 necessary, and made 0 unreadable. Well, no more. I'm going on a quest, starting today, to figure out exactly how to make you go away and stay away. Or, to make it so I don't have to see you. Anyone who sees this and wants to help, send me an e-mail.
Dude, even if it were true, which it's not, Rob wouldn't do that. Why? Because Rob has ethics. Proof: "Hot Grits". Rob believes in Free Speech, and so he hasn't run the spammers off /.. Despite the fact that they make his life hell, that they make low-scored posts essentially unreadable, and that they don't contribute jack shit to the community. Yeah, Rob has ethics. What, you think he runs /. for the money? The dude puts his *soul* into this site, and you have the nerve to impugn his motives? Think before you post!
"Materiality is the definition of real communities, and virtual communities can't replicate real ones."
This is circular. It's not an argument, it's an arbitrary definition. I don't think that materiality has anything to do with community, and it's not fair to redefine words to make an argument.
Also, internet access gets cheaper every day. Many people can use the internet from libraries for free. So, that's bogus, too.......
Not that it matters, because inclusivity is not a measure of a community. (It may be a measure of a utopian community, but they don't call it utopia for nothing).
I'm not so sure about that. From what I could see, Rijndael was very weak even before this. 7 or 8 rounds (out of a recomended 10) could be broken. This doesn't leave a very good safety margin.
Twofish seems to be very resistant to all known attacks, and certainly can't be counted out.
This would discourage serious posters from using Anonymous Coward instead of their own.
1. It would be hard for serious posters who *need* to be ACs (because they're revealing secret info, or something).
2. Trolls would just create throw-away accounts (JUST LIKE THEY DO NOW)
Maybe AOL should just hire EDS. AOL is having a problem managing their programmers, and EDS has that cat herding ad...
h tml).
Cat herding: (http://www.adcritic.com/content/eds-cat-herders.
That's not what it says! It says "Hack SDMI.org" Not "Hack hacksdmi.org". They want you to hack their main site - that's why they put up this one... wait... :)
-Dave Turner.
"No, it's not worthless at all. It can still be detected, but only by the people who put it there in the first place.Thus, you can't tell if a given piece of audio is watermarked, but the record companies can scan all the files on your public server and read the watermarks."
OK, but what good is that going to do them? They could already just *listen* to the song and know that it's "Oops, I did it again" (or whatever). It would only help them if it were in players, and then we could reverse-engineer it.
-Dave Turner.
You don't have to take my word - just read my argument. It maybe that Bruce Perens and Donald Becker are closer to the issue. So? Maybe I know more about the law. (IANAL, but I learned a ton from both my parents, who are). Maybe I just had a clever insight that they missed. Read the arguments and make up your own mind.
-Dave Turner.
From the article: "Sun's controversial little kit takes open source Linux drivers and converts them into Solaris binaries. "
OK, here's the deal: The kit itself is just a piece of software - it no more "encourages" licens violations than GCC does. But any product of the kit was originally made from some code. Chances are, that code was under copyright and license. So, distributing the modified binary is distributing a derivative work - this is only allowed under the terms of the license the original code was under (in this case, the GPL). So, Sun must distribute the source to Becker's drivers if it distributes binaries of them (for any system).
-Dave Turner.
"Correctly implemented, there is no way to detect or remove it. "
An implementation that was undetectable is not correct, it is worthless - You can't tell it's there.
If their players can detect the watermark, we can just use whatever technology they use to detect it. Then, we can remove it - if it's just a certain set of frequencies, we can remove those frequencies, etc.
-Dave Turner.
Godel's Theorem (and Turing's halting problem) are not serious limits on the powers of computers. I know I can't make a machine that determines if a computer program halts, but I can't say I've ever wanted to.
Also, I think that proving systems correct is not something we (mostly) want to waste our time with. We don't prove formally that 747s won't fall apart, and yet they don't. While I do agree that good software engineering practices are important, I don't think that we know everything there is to know about software engineering yet.
I don't think that people really worship computers, but rather some idea of what "computers" will be. Like nanotech, which seems to have the potential to eliminate hunger and revolutionize everything. Of course, it also has the power to turn the world into a mass of "gray goo" - it's technology: dangerous and useful. We should fight to see it used well.
-Dave Turner.
What part of "no" in "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech..." did you fail to understand?
I also think it's false to say that the list "puts doctors in clear and present danger." This is because it gives nothing that a telephone book doesn't. It is in some sense the same as the Napster case - people providing an index that could be used for illegal purposes (although non-commmercial copying may not actually be illegal).
I think the list maintainers are evil people - but they have a right to say what they like.
-Dave Turner.
I can tell you what the people who put up billboards have to say about your opinion: "Nuts! It's our land". And they're right - they bought the land, and they can put up any damn thing they like on it.
Would you like it if people told you what flags you could hang on your house? Or what clothing you could wear? Free speech must be for everyone or for no one.
-Dave Turner.
Quoth the poster:
"You may suggest to recompile the drivers. Good idea, unless you've got a binary only driver from a company that got sued into oblivion as happened with Aureal (they won the lawsuit but went broke on expenses for their attorneys)."
Linux Torvalds has in the past expressed no sympathy for your position. His argument is that it's easy to recompile a kernel module to support a new kernel. If you're using a binary-only module, then you have to bug your vendor - that's your "penance" for buying non-open hardware.
I tend to agree with Linus (on this). Windows is a standard that's ossified - it's standard is to suck. Bugs can't be fixed because programs depend on them. The thing about a free OS is that programs that depend on bugs can be fixed when thouse bugs are (pardon the unparsability).
-Dave Turner.
s/end at/end at or before/
That is, many cases don't get appealed, and don't get to appeallate court.
-Dave Turner.
No.
The server creates a random number, so that the browser doesn't cache the image. The browser requests the gif (with random number). The server *ignores* the returned random number, and just sends the gif and counts the hit.
It's all about making the browser think it's got to retrieve the image at every page.
-Dave Turner.
I chose that as an example of "incomprehensible" Perl. But it's only incomprehensible if you don't know Perl. In Perl, all regexps are read from left to right.
:).
So if you're trying to read mine, you should first check out the first character: "<". It's not a metacharacter - it's an angle bracket. Why? Because this script dealt with HTML. Next bit: "(?" When you see the '?' after the '(', the manual says "you should stop and \"question\" exactly what is going on."
Then there's a "!" to give meaning to the "(?". Everyone knows that ! means "not". And that should give you a fair idea of what's going on - we're trying not to match something. It's a little more complex than that, but that's because it's got a complex job.
OK, next bit: A variable - containing what we're trying not to match (in this case, the descriptive variable name tells us that we're not matching okay tags. The "<" (earlier) tells us that we're matching some tags, so it must be the not OK tags). If you had the script in front of you, you would see that the variable was in the form foo|bar|baz|fred|barney. So, there are a bunch of okay tags we're trying not to match.
Next bit: ")". Emacs will tell you what it matches (in case you couldn't tell yourself).
Etc. I did the hard part, you do the rest
Before I saw this, I assumed that the job (the sub Police_html) would be done with a traditional parser. For an exercise, I tried to write one... My buggy parser (it let <blink> through if <b> was allowed) was around 20 lines, in more-or-less C programming style - no regexps. It was no more readable, and it didn't do the job right.
Perl lets you do things quickly and easily that would be ugly and long with other languages. If you think the above code is ugly, don't compare it to the English "Remove all HTML tags not on a whitelist", but to the equivalent C.
-Dave Turner.
Here's a regexp I saw in some perl yesterday:
:)
s#<(?!$okay_tags)([^>]*>)##gi;
Think it's unreadable? What about this sentence:
"Cette phrase en francais est difficile a traduire en anglais." (From Douglas Hofstader's "Metamagical Themas")
The point is, it's impossible to read anything until you know the language. I know that the above perl reads "zap all html tags not in the list of ok tags. " (Of course, I have the benefit of knowing what the context for the line was).
So, yeah - perl is ugly unless you know it.... just like any other language. Also, I think C++ uses all the punctiation that perl does, just not as often
-Dave Turner.