So I was thinking -- SCO is using these alleged copied lines of source code to spread their FUD. And they are having some success because their claim is currently unverifiable, so some people are unsure -- maybe there is a violation...
Now, if we could get a hold of their evidence we could either expose it as a fraud or, in the unlikely event that there is some truth to their claims, clean up Linux source to be legal. But since they require an NDA to see the evidence, you'd have to break the law to show that Linux isn't breaking any laws.
If only we could see their evidence legally without signing an NDA...
So then I got to thinking. If we knew what compiler and compiler options SCO used when they built their version of unix, we could build linux with that compiler and compiler options and have some pattern matching utility search for potentially duplicate machine code.
Then, we could look at the Linux source for the code in question, and follow the electronic paper trail to find when it was first submitted. If we could have proof that the Linux submitter was the original author, then we have proof that at least some of SCO's alleged pirated code was, in fact, pirated from Linux by SCO. If the code was of questionable origin, then we could clean-room reverse-engineer a replacement.
Anyone know how one might identify the compiler SCO used on a particular release of unix?
I don't know if the overload was due to deregulation, but one of the purposes of regulation is to ensure that the power company can satisfy demand, even relatively unlikely peak demand. It's possible that deregulation led to them running leaner with less margin of error for a big spike in demand.
Add to that an unexpected increase in air-conditioner usage and there you go -- overload and outages. That's one possibility. I suppose we'll find out the facts soon enough, though.
Anyone remember Blip? It was a handheld pong game back when a 3x7 pixel handheld football game was all the rage. It was actually kinda fun, but I remember popping it open to see what kind of computer it had in it:
battery compartment
wires
one red LED
one switch
To play, you would wind it up and a spring would drive plastic gears that would move the "ball" back and forth. It didn't really matter whether it was "turned on" or not since the switch just lit the LED.
Yeah, digital -- either meaning that you had one digital bit (the LED could be on or off) -- or meaning that you play it with your fingers which are also known as "digits".
Once they know what car you're driving you have to ditch it and jack another! It'll be soooo cool! All they need to do is set up some ramps so you can dive out at top speed and launch your car at buildings and cop cars.
Now what I've been envisioning is a setup where you aim a webcam down at a Go board, and it automagically figures out the full board position as you go. After the game is done, you have a record of the game in the digital SGF format so you can step through and analyze the game.
Some more details -- the software would constantly grab images of the board and process them in realtime. It should be able to use the redundancy to correct for errors and also to know when a move is done (since you'll move your hand away from the board for at least a dozen frames or so, even if you play fast). The board is a nice regular rectangle, and pieces are black and white circles -- even at an odd angle, it should be easy to determine the full board position.
I feel confident I could do it, but it would take me tens of hours of coding/testing, and I don't have the time, but I bet someone would love to do this for a senior project and opensource the code... please...:)
Thanks for the info, but I'm looking for a DVD recorder, not just a player. It looks like what I will need to do is buy a region-free DVD player and a separate DVD recorder that is not region-free. All DVD recorders will play DVDs, but I haven't seen one that yet that I can verify as being region-free for playing. The frustrating thing, though, is I haven't seen any definite statement saying that what I want is *not* available.
I'm looking for a set-top DVD recorder that can play DVDs from any region and can play both PAL and NTSC DVDs on my NTSC TV. I also don't want to buy a modded recorder from dodgy website. I want to walk into a store in the U.S. and buy it. And I want to spend no more than $600.
I've tried google, and mostly I just get the sites trying to sell me modded systems, or descriptions of DVD *players* that will do what I want but don't record.
Perfect gift for your dominatrix
on
Shocking Clothing
·
· Score: 4, Funny
They need to put up a video of that woman in high-heal boots holding a whip. The "attacker" stands in front of her and she shouts "kneel!", but he refuses. She then grabs him, sparks fly and he is knocked on the ground, begging for mercy.
Let me get this straight... SCO owns the copyright to Unix source code and therefore has the sole right to grant people a license to use it. SCO claims that Linux contains Unix source code that was released under the GPL without SCO's permission. But SCO itself has released this linux code under the GPL. It would seem to me (IANAL-BIPOOSD) that by distributing their source code under the GPL as a linux distribution would mean that it's legal.
The only out they have would appear to be that they unknowningly released they code under the GPL and that therefore they have the right to revoke the license. That would be like Microsoft accidentally bundling MS Office with Windows XP. And then trying to tell me that even though the proprietary license says I'm entitled to install the software on one machine, that they are revoking the license and I am a software pirate if I don't wipe it from my harddrive. Something tells me they'll have a tough time convincing a judge of that -- especially with IBM's lawyers fighting them.
Sure, men and women are different. Many of the differences are biological, and many more are sociological. For example, in the 19th century, most secretaries were men. In the 20th, most were women. Why the change? Was it a genetic mutation? No. Society changed the way it looked at women and at that job, resulting in a big shift.
A similar thing happened with medicine. It used to be that all doctors in the U.S. were men. In other times and places, all medical experts have been women. My understanding is that currently U.S. med schools are now graduating more women than men, so things are apparently shifting again.
Now how about this for a reason for few women in CS... Most women don't like being surrounded by men. Subcultures filled predominately with men can be very intimidating for a women to enter. Even if it is a subtle effect on individual women, it can create a self-fullfilling feedback loop.
Discussing salaries is protected by U.S. labor law. That doesn't mean that employers won't lie to you about your rights or that they won't illegally fire you, but you do have recourse if they do.
Uh, there's no vaccination or cure for SARS yet, and it is highly contagious. Heart disease and cancer aren't contagious at all, and HIV is very difficult to give to someone. Influenza has vaccines. I'd say that sets SARS out ahead of the rest.
Sure, only 150 people have been killed so far, but the worry is that it will spread out-of-control worldwide, infecting tens or hundreds of millions of people.
So, it sounds like hierarchical finite state machines (HFSMs). I'm not dissing on statecharts, btw -- just from all the descriptions so far, it sounds like "statechart" is a technical term used by one crowd to refer to what my crowd usually refers to as HFSMs.
I'd be curious to hear if I'm mistaken and there's more to it than that.
Ask to see their financial information. Just as they don't want to hire someone who can't manage their own finances, you don't want to work for a company that can't manage it's finances.
CDRs have 3 out of 6. USB keychain things have 3 out of 6. Zip drives have 3 out of 6. How about offer a real replacement before removing functionality?
I rarely use floppies anymore, but once every month or two, a floppy is *the* solution.
And, of course, the trick would be to hack the official gcc server, put the trojan in the source, wait for a new update (hoping nobody finds the trojan), and then silently remove the trojan. Then, wait again for quite a few new updates (so that nobody would have reason to look at the version that has the trojan in source. After that, some versions would have the trojan and some wouldn't -- any binary that has a hacked binary as its "ancestor" would be hacked, but any one that "skipped a generation" would be clean.
Now, the way to prevent this from happening is to use a compiler other than gcc when compiling gcc. Then, the hackers would have to hack both compilers, which would be a much more significant task.
Are there any really paranoid folks out there that build gcc with the Intel compiler or somesuch? Is it possible to build gcc with another compiler?
Btw, when the russian hackers hacked Microsoft, how do you know they didn't do this to VC++?
I remember back in 1990 or so having a script in my.cshrc file that would automatically "finger" all my friends to see if they were logged on, parse the finger output and spit out a simple list of who was on. I could then use "talk" to chat with them. There was no GUI, but it's the same functionality. And of course, it worked over the internet. Not that it was revolutionary or anything to take csh, finger and talk and combine them in this way...
Think about this one... We are talking about giving the U.S. military the ability to spy on U.S. citizens. It might not seem like a big deal -- sure, there are civil-liberties and privacy issues, but a lot of people don't care about that because they feel they have nothing to hide.
But there is a good reason that the military has specifically not been allowed to spy on U.S. citizens. In fact, this is a fundamental property of all civillian governments.
So, what's the problem? All political candidates in the U.S. are going to be included in this wide net. Let's say you have two candidates in a close race, one who is for a larger military budget and less civillian oversight of the military -- the other is for a smaller military budget and more civillian oversight. What is to prevent this program from being used to find dirt on one candidate and giving it to the other, or otherwise using it to create enough of a scandal to tip the election.
But nobody would ever do that! That would be unethical and illegal. We've only had one president in the past 30 years caught for similar behavior. Just because Poindexter was found guilty of covering up a scheme to sell weapons to our enemy (Iran) to fund terrorists that congress specifically outlawed funding to (the contras in Nicargua), that doesn't mean he'd do something as unethical as influencing an election to get more funding and less oversight. Naaah.
Planes crash all the time, many thousands die every year from all sorts of accidents and violence. Civillian governments removing checks on their military is a rare occurance, and ultimately leads to much more death and destruction than Bin Laden could ever dream of.
Or, to really drive it home for the slashdot crowd -- military dictatorships often outlaw pr0n!
It's kinda funny. Linus says he doesn't see what the big deal is about names -- people generally use his name to refer to distributions built around his kernel, and he's happy with that.
But then big bad self-important Richard Stallman comes along and says that given that Linux wouldn't exist if it weren't for the GNU project, and given that much of the software included in Linux distributions is a product of the GNU project, and given that most of the software included uses the GNU license, the system as a whole should share credit with the GNU project and call it GNU/Linux.
Note that there is no suggestion to name things Richarix or Stallix. Anybody else see the irony? I mean I have great respect for both Stallman and Torvalds, and I think they have both made great contributions. I even respect both of their views on the naming of Linux vs. GNU/Linux. But, really, if you're going to whine about self-important people, it seems to me that it would be easier to make a case that Torvalds is being egotistical for insisting that the system be named only after himself, with no other people or projects sharing the credit.
If anything, you could say that Stallman only cares about promoting his pet project, while Torvalds only cares about promoting himself. Of course, you'd be wrong to suggest such a thing, since both of them spend more time creating software than promoting a name for it... (as opposed to many people who post on slashdot)
Trampling on the 1st Ammendment in times of war is long-honored American tradition. Of course, just because censoring the internet is no worse than things done in the past by the U.S. government, that does not mean that the U.S. government will do it. It may be paranoid to think that the U.S. government will do it, but it would be delusional to think that the U.S. government is above doing such things.
There are millions of prisoners in the U.S. In fact, a much higher percentage of the U.S. population is in prison than China. But that is a completely separate issue. I was talking about political repression. Most of the people in Chinese prisons are there for non-political crimes.
My point was that 99.999% (the figure named by the original post) of a population doesn't need to directly experience repression for that repression to have significant effects across the whole population. The percentage of the Chinese population that was killed or imprisoned as part of the political repression that followed the Tiananmen massacre was probably about 0.001%, yet that repression had far-reaching effects for over a billion people.
This example of China would suggest, then, that if only 0.001% of the U.S. population is directly impacted by the current repression in the U.S., then you cannot simply dismiss it as a minor problem affecting a small number of people.
This is Democracy and Human Rights 101... If you allow your goverment to violate the rights of a small number of people, the effects are farreaching.
A large minority of civillians (about a third) were loyal to the British Empire and were against the American revolutionaries. Torture and murder of these civillians was pretty common. A quick search on google came up with
this.
My personal views run almost as far to the libertarian as you can get -- but when someone tries to murder civilians, I say lock him up and throw away the key. There is most likely a very good reason he's being held as he is -- just because you put a terrorist in prison doesn't mean he can't accomplish things if he's allowed to communicate with his cell. I do think he should have a trial, but I also understand that intelligence agencies have to be cautious with when they release information. Other people's lives are at stake as well, and as I said earlier, he forfeited his rights when he took up arms against the American people.
You do realize that this is precisely the logic used by the Iranians when took the hostages in the American Embassy back in 1979? They had evidence that some of the embassy employees were working for or with the CIA to help prop up the Shah and his infamous secret police. At the time, it was an outrage that the alleged CIA agents were being held incommunicado -- Iranian spokesmen publicly spoke of the need for security and that the captives might pass information back to the U.S. that could result in the death of many Iranians. Are you saying that perhaps the Iranians were right? That holding people incommunicado is justified in the name of national security? Or do you have two standards for actions of governments -- one for governments you support, and a different one for governments you are opposed to?
My personal views run almost as far to the libertarian as you can get
From your post here, I'd say you have a long way to go before you could use the word "libertarian" to describe your views. I suggest you do some thinking about what your ideology really is and either change your outlook to be actually libertarian or be honest to yourself and admit that you are far down the authoritarian end of the spectrum.
Well, as dissident in the U.S., I'd say that things have changed quite a bit. I don't know that I would say that the changes are all a result of Sept 11th, though... Sept 11th just oiled the wheels. The Patriot Act is pretty scary stuff, but my impression is that it just legalized existing police practices. Of course, that means that you have less recourse when your rights are violated, and when the police break the law to stifle dissent, they'll probably go further.
Am I afraid of police throwing me in jail without access to a lawyer or a trial? A little bit. In any repressive society, you learn to adapt, and you hope you aren't the one singled out for special treatment. You have to be realistic about risks, though. I'm more likely to be killed in a car accident than tortured by police, and I'm more likely to be tortured by police than killed by a terrorist. If you are an active supporter of Bush's perpetual war and are a white christian, then you're probably more likely to die at the hands of a terrorist than the police, but more likely to drown in your bathtub than either.
But the effects of repression go much further than the direct victims. As long as repression against voting-rights activists in the South was successful, all blacks in the South had suffer the daily minor humilations of being second class citizens, as well as make less money for more work due to discrimination and greater power inbalance at work. The most visible effects of the racist violence during the civil rights movement were the bloody bodies and smouldering buildings, but you can bet that millions of blacks had to suffer inferior schools, longer work hours, less access to health care, etc.
Currently, the repression we are seeing benefits anyone with power. For example, even if there isn't a strike on the west-coast docks, the dock workers will be forced to accept less at the bargaining table due to Bush's threat to replace dock workers with soldiers during a strike. This sort of thing will also have a chilling effect for anyone group of workers daring to stand up for themselves. And if some workers must accept less pay and benefits, it has a way of filtering out to the rest of society, making us all work longer for less.
Think back to the days of the Soviet Union after Stalin. There were some high-profile cases of political prisoners, but it wasn't necessary to imprison millions to keep everyone in check. Or China after the massacre at Tiananmen square -- a few thousand were killed and probably a few thousand imprisoned, and that was enough to seriously impact a social movement that could have improved the lives of over a billion people. Sure, 99.999% weren't affected directly by the Chinese repression, but that's more an explanation of why the Chinese repression was successful than a justification for why it was acceptable.
Take mp3 files, generate a 3D polygonal representation of a record, then do a physics simulation with a virtual needle, also made up of 3D polygons. Take the vibrations of the needle and simulate the conversion from kinetic to analog electrical energy. Then digitize the electrical signal and play it out the sound card. Then you could just swap mp3D files on your P2P net of choice...
obDMCA: rot13 the poly data and call the FBI when the RIAA circumvents it...
Slashdot Mirror
Now, if we could get a hold of their evidence we could either expose it as a fraud or, in the unlikely event that there is some truth to their claims, clean up Linux source to be legal. But since they require an NDA to see the evidence, you'd have to break the law to show that Linux isn't breaking any laws.
If only we could see their evidence legally without signing an NDA...
So then I got to thinking. If we knew what compiler and compiler options SCO used when they built their version of unix, we could build linux with that compiler and compiler options and have some pattern matching utility search for potentially duplicate machine code.
Then, we could look at the Linux source for the code in question, and follow the electronic paper trail to find when it was first submitted. If we could have proof that the Linux submitter was the original author, then we have proof that at least some of SCO's alleged pirated code was, in fact, pirated from Linux by SCO. If the code was of questionable origin, then we could clean-room reverse-engineer a replacement.
Anyone know how one might identify the compiler SCO used on a particular release of unix?
Add to that an unexpected increase in air-conditioner usage and there you go -- overload and outages. That's one possibility. I suppose we'll find out the facts soon enough, though.
- battery compartment
- wires
- one red LED
- one switch
To play, you would wind it up and a spring would drive plastic gears that would move the "ball" back and forth. It didn't really matter whether it was "turned on" or not since the switch just lit the LED.Yeah, digital -- either meaning that you had one digital bit (the LED could be on or off) -- or meaning that you play it with your fingers which are also known as "digits".
Ok, I'll bite. Yes.
Once they know what car you're driving you have to ditch it and jack another! It'll be soooo cool! All they need to do is set up some ramps so you can dive out at top speed and launch your car at buildings and cop cars.
Some more details -- the software would constantly grab images of the board and process them in realtime. It should be able to use the redundancy to correct for errors and also to know when a move is done (since you'll move your hand away from the board for at least a dozen frames or so, even if you play fast). The board is a nice regular rectangle, and pieces are black and white circles -- even at an odd angle, it should be easy to determine the full board position.
I feel confident I could do it, but it would take me tens of hours of coding/testing, and I don't have the time, but I bet someone would love to do this for a senior project and opensource the code... please... :)
Thanks for the info, but I'm looking for a DVD recorder, not just a player. It looks like what I will need to do is buy a region-free DVD player and a separate DVD recorder that is not region-free. All DVD recorders will play DVDs, but I haven't seen one that yet that I can verify as being region-free for playing. The frustrating thing, though, is I haven't seen any definite statement saying that what I want is *not* available.
I've tried google, and mostly I just get the sites trying to sell me modded systems, or descriptions of DVD *players* that will do what I want but don't record.
Come on, admit it. You pictured that too...
The only out they have would appear to be that they unknowningly released they code under the GPL and that therefore they have the right to revoke the license. That would be like Microsoft accidentally bundling MS Office with Windows XP. And then trying to tell me that even though the proprietary license says I'm entitled to install the software on one machine, that they are revoking the license and I am a software pirate if I don't wipe it from my harddrive. Something tells me they'll have a tough time convincing a judge of that -- especially with IBM's lawyers fighting them.
A similar thing happened with medicine. It used to be that all doctors in the U.S. were men. In other times and places, all medical experts have been women. My understanding is that currently U.S. med schools are now graduating more women than men, so things are apparently shifting again.
Now how about this for a reason for few women in CS... Most women don't like being surrounded by men. Subcultures filled predominately with men can be very intimidating for a women to enter. Even if it is a subtle effect on individual women, it can create a self-fullfilling feedback loop.
Here are the details.
And, btw, U.S. labor law protects concerted activity even if you aren't actively organizing a union.
Sure, only 150 people have been killed so far, but the worry is that it will spread out-of-control worldwide, infecting tens or hundreds of millions of people.
I'd be curious to hear if I'm mistaken and there's more to it than that.
Ask to see their financial information. Just as they don't want to hire someone who can't manage their own finances, you don't want to work for a company that can't manage it's finances.
- cheap drive
- cheap media
- fully read-write
- small, easy to carry media
- readable in nearly all machines
- writeable in nearly all machines
CDRs have 3 out of 6. USB keychain things have 3 out of 6. Zip drives have 3 out of 6. How about offer a real replacement before removing functionality?I rarely use floppies anymore, but once every month or two, a floppy is *the* solution.
Now, the way to prevent this from happening is to use a compiler other than gcc when compiling gcc. Then, the hackers would have to hack both compilers, which would be a much more significant task.
Are there any really paranoid folks out there that build gcc with the Intel compiler or somesuch? Is it possible to build gcc with another compiler?
Btw, when the russian hackers hacked Microsoft, how do you know they didn't do this to VC++?
I remember back in 1990 or so having a script in my .cshrc file that would automatically "finger" all my friends to see if they were logged on, parse the finger output and spit out a simple list of who was on. I could then use "talk" to chat with them. There was no GUI, but it's the same functionality. And of course, it worked over the internet. Not that it was revolutionary or anything to take csh, finger and talk and combine them in this way...
But there is a good reason that the military has specifically not been allowed to spy on U.S. citizens. In fact, this is a fundamental property of all civillian governments.
So, what's the problem? All political candidates in the U.S. are going to be included in this wide net. Let's say you have two candidates in a close race, one who is for a larger military budget and less civillian oversight of the military -- the other is for a smaller military budget and more civillian oversight. What is to prevent this program from being used to find dirt on one candidate and giving it to the other, or otherwise using it to create enough of a scandal to tip the election.
But nobody would ever do that! That would be unethical and illegal. We've only had one president in the past 30 years caught for similar behavior. Just because Poindexter was found guilty of covering up a scheme to sell weapons to our enemy (Iran) to fund terrorists that congress specifically outlawed funding to (the contras in Nicargua), that doesn't mean he'd do something as unethical as influencing an election to get more funding and less oversight. Naaah.
Planes crash all the time, many thousands die every year from all sorts of accidents and violence. Civillian governments removing checks on their military is a rare occurance, and ultimately leads to much more death and destruction than Bin Laden could ever dream of.
Or, to really drive it home for the slashdot crowd -- military dictatorships often outlaw pr0n!
But then big bad self-important Richard Stallman comes along and says that given that Linux wouldn't exist if it weren't for the GNU project, and given that much of the software included in Linux distributions is a product of the GNU project, and given that most of the software included uses the GNU license, the system as a whole should share credit with the GNU project and call it GNU/Linux.
Note that there is no suggestion to name things Richarix or Stallix. Anybody else see the irony? I mean I have great respect for both Stallman and Torvalds, and I think they have both made great contributions. I even respect both of their views on the naming of Linux vs. GNU/Linux. But, really, if you're going to whine about self-important people, it seems to me that it would be easier to make a case that Torvalds is being egotistical for insisting that the system be named only after himself, with no other people or projects sharing the credit.
If anything, you could say that Stallman only cares about promoting his pet project, while Torvalds only cares about promoting himself. Of course, you'd be wrong to suggest such a thing, since both of them spend more time creating software than promoting a name for it... (as opposed to many people who post on slashdot)
- The Sedition Act of 1798
- The Espionage Act of 1917
- Executive Order 9066
Trampling on the 1st Ammendment in times of war is long-honored American tradition. Of course, just because censoring the internet is no worse than things done in the past by the U.S. government, that does not mean that the U.S. government will do it. It may be paranoid to think that the U.S. government will do it, but it would be delusional to think that the U.S. government is above doing such things.My point was that 99.999% (the figure named by the original post) of a population doesn't need to directly experience repression for that repression to have significant effects across the whole population. The percentage of the Chinese population that was killed or imprisoned as part of the political repression that followed the Tiananmen massacre was probably about 0.001%, yet that repression had far-reaching effects for over a billion people.
This example of China would suggest, then, that if only 0.001% of the U.S. population is directly impacted by the current repression in the U.S., then you cannot simply dismiss it as a minor problem affecting a small number of people.
This is Democracy and Human Rights 101... If you allow your goverment to violate the rights of a small number of people, the effects are farreaching.
Am I afraid of police throwing me in jail without access to a lawyer or a trial? A little bit. In any repressive society, you learn to adapt, and you hope you aren't the one singled out for special treatment. You have to be realistic about risks, though. I'm more likely to be killed in a car accident than tortured by police, and I'm more likely to be tortured by police than killed by a terrorist. If you are an active supporter of Bush's perpetual war and are a white christian, then you're probably more likely to die at the hands of a terrorist than the police, but more likely to drown in your bathtub than either.
But the effects of repression go much further than the direct victims. As long as repression against voting-rights activists in the South was successful, all blacks in the South had suffer the daily minor humilations of being second class citizens, as well as make less money for more work due to discrimination and greater power inbalance at work. The most visible effects of the racist violence during the civil rights movement were the bloody bodies and smouldering buildings, but you can bet that millions of blacks had to suffer inferior schools, longer work hours, less access to health care, etc.
Currently, the repression we are seeing benefits anyone with power. For example, even if there isn't a strike on the west-coast docks, the dock workers will be forced to accept less at the bargaining table due to Bush's threat to replace dock workers with soldiers during a strike. This sort of thing will also have a chilling effect for anyone group of workers daring to stand up for themselves. And if some workers must accept less pay and benefits, it has a way of filtering out to the rest of society, making us all work longer for less.
Think back to the days of the Soviet Union after Stalin. There were some high-profile cases of political prisoners, but it wasn't necessary to imprison millions to keep everyone in check. Or China after the massacre at Tiananmen square -- a few thousand were killed and probably a few thousand imprisoned, and that was enough to seriously impact a social movement that could have improved the lives of over a billion people. Sure, 99.999% weren't affected directly by the Chinese repression, but that's more an explanation of why the Chinese repression was successful than a justification for why it was acceptable.
obDMCA: rot13 the poly data and call the FBI when the RIAA circumvents it...