Could be, but my guess is that the implicit stuff is coming anyways.
The first product-placement in movies I ever heard about was "Tootsie", in 1982. Who was blocking movie ads then? What were they trying to get around? Nothing. They just wanted more.
It's true that they make lots of cars, but that's not where their money is. GM's automotive division actually loses money, and did so even before the current troubles. GM's profitable division is the GMAC financing arm. Operationally speaking, GM is actually a bank.
> However, analog outputs will be soon be illegal on all television devices. Thus, this is about locking down ALL content.
That's going to make TV awfully hard to watch...
OK, I know what you meant, but seriously, ultimately people have to watch it or listen to it, so the analog hole can never really be closed, only made more inconvenient.
Eventually, congress will require that loud noises and bright flashing lights happen at the end of all copyright-protected content, so that the people who just watched it won't be able to remember it. Remembering is copying, and copying is theft!
I'm genuinely curious, why a DMCA complaint? Doesn't ordinary copyright law already protect against unauthorized reproduction, which is what he was doing as soon as you withdrew your authorization?
Along similar lines, Tom Jennings has a database of obsolete formats and devices of various kinds, at deadmedia.org.
His site is more focussed on older (nineteenth-century, early twentieth-century) stuff than the EFF site, and of course, not everything dies of regulatory or copyright strangulation.
You may have it now. I've had it for weeks. The installation CDs are on the site, and you can point your apt-list at the "sarge" subtree, and have it on your system.
Of course, what you probably meant was that you want it to be finished with potential breakage from updates. I want that, too.
-- A.
Interweb Changes World, Film at 11
on
The Media in 2014
·
· Score: 1
I am unable to get any of the mirrors to play the flash thing, but the gist of the summary sounds awfully similar to what "they" said would happen to UseNet.
Remember UseNet? The subscription-based, topic-partitioned peer-to-peer automatic mailing list thing? Everybody was going to subscribe to what they wanted, shut out what they didn't, and bring about the balkanization of society, unless the Y2K bug got us first.
The reason this didn't happen was twofold. Firstly, the web came along, and people really like pictures and visual navigation. This needn't have killed the paradigm, though, there could still have been subscription-based topic-partitioned web content. In fact, there was -- people who know the meaning of the word "webring" are familiar with early attempts. The second reason it didn't happen was the rise of portals -- savvy operators realied that the web was hard to navigate, and that by selecting and aggregating content, you could help people out.
But, it turned out, content aggregation wasn't economical unless you could "brand" yourself, and draw a large audience. Then you can pay for your bandwidth with advertising revenue. Then, you find out that you're rewarded not for serving a niche, but for hitting the mass audience. This means user-friendly, family-friendly, culturally mainstream but with many destinations.
Thus did the web become television. People still read UseNet news, of course, but it hasn't balkanized the culture, and neither has the web.
I suppose it's possible that Amazon/Google will go down a different road, and profitably serve lots of niches all at once, but the economic efficiency of delivering uniform content to a mass audience really is hard to beat.
> Signing up will just make you one of the frustrated masses...
It's worse than that -- local rumor has it that, after the frustration overwhelms you and you leave the USPTO to "spend more time with your family", the megacorps will start offering you big bucks to help them navigate their applications through the system you now know so well. Turnover in the USPTO is spectacularly high partially for this reason.
You'll become a patent consultant/lobbyist so your daughter can go to Harvard. Yes, you will.
Also, keep in mind that the 750 folks laid of from AOL in Northern Virginia just got in line ahead of you.
This is slashdot -- we're supposed to know that the tool is not the problem.
Many times in a former life, I was the only one at a remote gate at O'Hare airport, minimal staff, no other passengers, TV blaring away on "CNN Airport" or whatever. In this situation, it would be nice to be able to turn the thing off without distracting the staff from their real jobs.
If there are other people, my posession of this device does not automatically oblige me to discourteously deprive them of their TV. It's a tool. It can be abused. Boo hoo. If that happens, punish the abusers.
Well, part of the interest is that these programmers found a way, within the rules, to get more information, by means of their "secret handshake". The important lesson (to my mind) is that the environment can be manipulated in surprising ways to get a desired result. That's creativity and innovation doing its thing.
Interestingly, this strategy is also fairly "brittle", I think, in that simple rule-changes could foil it. Requiring only one submission per team, for example, or scoring teams according to the total (or average) scores of all their programs, would complicate any strategy of collusion.
> I find it amusing how people feel companies are some nebulous single entity.
<rant>
Incorporation, the act of forming a company, has as its primary effect the creation of a legal entity which has standing, as a single entity, before the law. Of course the main thing this nebulous single entity can do before the law is enter into contracts, but, in some versions, it can shield its participants from personal liability for actions of the corporation, and of course this entity lives in a rather different taxation regime than you and I.
In the very old days, at least within the British sphere of influence, this special status could only be granted by the King, and the companies were politically accountable to the royal court.
In the not quite so old days, this process was streamlined. The economic benefits of incorporation were thought to be self-evidently in the public interest, and so highly simplified legal mechanisms were put in place to allow almost anyone to form a collective entity for a commercial purpose that would be singular before the law.
While more or less unthinkable today, it is nevertheless a legitimate question to ask whether or not these nebulous single entities continue to serve the public interest of the societies and states which grant them their status, and if they do not, to change the nature of their legal status so as to encourage them to serve the public interest better.
Not that we aren't all selfish whiners, of course we are, but if you want to know what checks corporate greed, just look in the, uh, the... hmmm... uh oh...
I know, I know, English is a living language and the spelling error didn't change the meaning, so I should shut up. Pendants like me are domed to definately loose this rediculus fite.
An idiot who noticed that both the power source for the gyros and the gyros themselves were outside the pressure hull. An idiot who remembered the problems with Mir had with cables running through hatches. Possibly an idiot concerned that a failure of a power system might involve fire, so that, where possible, power systems should be outside the habitable area.
Not that I'm saying the ISS doesn't have design flaws, I'm sure it does. But, from software to spaceware, design is compromise, and shit happens.
> Isn't it obvious that the first step to having a free market is having published prices?
Erm, no.
A "free market" is one in which participants exchange goods and services at a mutually agreed-upon price, according to the law of supply and demand, with third parties having no say in the matter.
Price disclosure and other "fairness" requirements are common, but not required for the market to be free.
Maybe you can answer my perennial question about this -- it seems to me that genetic algorithms are conceptually straightforward, and that the really difficult/interesting part is how you map your "genome" to relevant parameters in your problem space. It's important that mutation and, especially, recombination should lead to "organisms" which really do resemble their "parents", otherwise you lose the whole power of the approach.
I'm not active in the field, but I've read some books and papers on the topic, and all of them seem to laboriously describe the genetic process, and then give examples where a good genome-to-problem-space mapping is simply provided without further comment. Those results are then easy to reproduce, but what I want from a book about the technique is the ability to apply the technique to new problems.
What I would very much like to see is the "Genetic Programming Coloring Book" or other simple reference that explains how to tackle this part of the problem.
OK, replying to myself, did some digging on LKML and found this.
Disclaimer: I have not personally tried either fix, but the second one (which modifies the "clear fpu" macro in the i387 header file) looks like a more appropriate fix to me.
The provided patch is for the 2.4.27-pre5 kernel, but my 2.4.26 "i387.h" file was the same, the patch can be applied. (Again, haven't tested it yet, don't know if it works.)
Question for the kernel gurus out there -- I read the article and the patch (so sue me), and it seems to me that the patch just redirects the signal-handler flow if sig==8.
This may well protect against the example exploit, but what happens if you get a floating-point exception in the handler for some other signal?
The provided patch does not look like a real fix, unless the deeper bug really does just involve sig==8.
I suppose in the near term this will be true, but they're the fastest-growing and soon-to-be largest consumer market in the world. If they can stay united, they'll be in a strong position to dictate standards to everyone.
Reminds me of the old joke about British weather headlines -- "Fog shrouds channel, Continent isolated"...
Re:Start by banning plastics for consumables
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Yabbut packing soda in plastic makes the whole package weigh less, which means you can put more of them on the truck, which means the truck can make fewer trips, which means it uses less fuel, or if you're very lucky, that you don't need as many trucks.
If you use and recycle glass, you have to ship it around.
Are you sure you know which method uses the least petroleum?
> (subject to service occupation tax on the value of tangible personal property transferred with the software)
You may have stopped reading a smidgen too soon -- the value referred to is that of the "tangible personal property transferred with the software", as is made clear in the second through eighth words following your added emphasis. This probably refers to the cost of the CD the software is on, or for embedded systems, maybe the value of the widget the software is running on, plus the value of manuals, packaging, etc.
Furthermore, a plausible reading of the article (IANALBIDRTFA) is that the parenthetical remarks refer to the *current* situation in Illinois, so you may already be reeling under the unfair hammer-blows of this provision...
The first is the obvious practical way that others have covered. Geometry is essential for graphics, programs sometimes contain physical models governed by differrential equations whose strengths and weaknesses you need to understand, and so forth.
The second is more subtle. Set theory and graph theory lie at the heart of computer science, and thinking of computers and computer programs abstractly, in a hardware- and language-independent way, as finite state machines with transition rules, can be enormously helpful in attacking problems. To my mind, this is a fairly natural approach to programming, but the advantage of some mathematical training lies in not having to re-invent the tools.
But, isn't "meaning well" the whole point of Linux?
If you "just want a stable system" with application updates, what is stopping you from using a commercial UNIX OS, or Mac OS/X, or even, God forbid, Windows, which I am told is actually getting reasonably stable.
Me, I don't "just want a stable system" -- I want a stable system that won't lock me in to application formats, won't spy on me, and will give me as much control over it as I am willing to take on.
Debian still does this. There's testing and unstable, you can use it with kernels from kernel.org if you want proprietary code in your drivers (I do this, under Debian, for my NVidia cards), you can use backports (I do this, under Debian woody, to run XFree86 4.3.1 on my laptop), and, for leaf nodes of the dependency tree, you can use "stow" to install pre-built binaries (I do this, under Debian woody, with Blackdown Java, and also OpenOffice 1.1, which however is also available as a backport.
It is perfectly possible to be a pragmatic Debian user, and for us, the community effort will continue to succeed.
VRML, as I understand it, is not quite dead yet. There's still an active W3G working group working on "x3d", which is the successor to VRML, and more than a few scientific visualization packages can export to, and read, VRML, including SGI's OpenInventor.
What's bad about VRML was that the VRML '97 spec was too damn complicated (IMHO), and a few years later, the really good free browser (CosmoPlayer) got sold off by SGI, and after changing hands several times, apparently disappeared from the face of the Earth. There are other browsers, but they don't plug in to browsers as easily.
The other problem I heard people complain about (but was not a problem for me) was the "JavaScript" problem -- people on comp.lang.vrml didn't like that their web VRML was human-readable and stealable. CNN used to have the occasional VRML model on their site for interesting things, but switched a while ago to something called Cult3D, which appears to be binary, and to have pricey development tools -- I don't know if the format is actually proprietary, but it wouldn't surprise me.
Of course, the *real* reason it died was because I learned it...
Slashdot Mirror
Could be, but my guess is that the implicit stuff is coming anyways.
The first product-placement in movies I ever heard about was "Tootsie", in 1982. Who was blocking movie ads then? What were they trying to get around? Nothing. They just wanted more.
> GM is showing some interest in making cars.
It's true that they make lots of cars, but that's not where their money is. GM's automotive division actually loses money, and did so even before the current troubles. GM's profitable division is the GMAC financing arm. Operationally speaking, GM is actually a bank.
> However, analog outputs will be soon be illegal on all television devices. Thus, this is about locking down ALL content.
That's going to make TV awfully hard to watch...
OK, I know what you meant, but seriously, ultimately people have to watch it or listen to it, so the analog hole can never really be closed, only made more inconvenient.
Eventually, congress will require that loud noises and bright flashing lights happen at the end of all copyright-protected content, so that the people who just watched it won't be able to remember it. Remembering is copying, and copying is theft!
I'm genuinely curious, why a DMCA complaint? Doesn't ordinary copyright law already protect against unauthorized reproduction, which is what he was doing as soon as you withdrew your authorization?
Along similar lines, Tom Jennings has a database of obsolete formats and devices of various kinds, at deadmedia.org.
His site is more focussed on older (nineteenth-century, early twentieth-century) stuff than the EFF site, and of course, not everything dies of regulatory or copyright strangulation.
You may have it now. I've had it for weeks. The installation CDs are on the site, and you can point your apt-list at the "sarge" subtree, and have it on your system.
Of course, what you probably meant was that you want it to be finished with potential breakage from updates. I want that, too.
-- A.
I am unable to get any of the mirrors to play the flash thing, but the gist of the summary sounds awfully similar to what "they" said would happen to UseNet.
Remember UseNet? The subscription-based, topic-partitioned peer-to-peer automatic mailing list thing? Everybody was going to subscribe to what they wanted, shut out what they didn't, and bring about the balkanization of society, unless the Y2K bug got us first.
The reason this didn't happen was twofold. Firstly, the web came along, and people really like pictures and visual navigation. This needn't have killed the paradigm, though, there could still have been subscription-based topic-partitioned web content. In fact, there was -- people who know the meaning of the word "webring" are familiar with early attempts. The second reason it didn't happen was the rise of portals -- savvy operators realied that the web was hard to navigate, and that by selecting and aggregating content, you could help people out.
But, it turned out, content aggregation wasn't economical unless you could "brand" yourself, and draw a large audience. Then you can pay for your bandwidth with advertising revenue. Then, you find out that you're rewarded not for serving a niche, but for hitting the mass audience. This means user-friendly, family-friendly, culturally mainstream but with many destinations.
Thus did the web become television. People still read UseNet news, of course, but it hasn't balkanized the culture, and neither has the web.
I suppose it's possible that Amazon/Google will go down a different road, and profitably serve lots of niches all at once, but the economic efficiency of delivering uniform content to a mass audience really is hard to beat.
> Signing up will just make you one of the frustrated masses...
It's worse than that -- local rumor has it that, after the frustration overwhelms you and you leave the USPTO to "spend more time with your family", the megacorps will start offering you big bucks to help them navigate their applications through the system you now know so well. Turnover in the USPTO is spectacularly high partially for this reason.
You'll become a patent consultant/lobbyist so your daughter can go to Harvard. Yes, you will.
Also, keep in mind that the 750 folks laid of from AOL in Northern Virginia just got in line ahead of you.
> Oh, I'm sorry, you need to move two steps to the left.
Hmmm...
Ccubu H'yeu]u h,c ]69t'u,cg
Nope, still doesn't make any sense.
This is slashdot -- we're supposed to know that the tool is not the problem.
Many times in a former life, I was the only one at a remote gate at O'Hare airport, minimal staff, no other passengers, TV blaring away on "CNN Airport" or whatever. In this situation, it would be nice to be able to turn the thing off without distracting the staff from their real jobs.
If there are other people, my posession of this device does not automatically oblige me to discourteously deprive them of their TV. It's a tool. It can be abused. Boo hoo. If that happens, punish the abusers.
Well, part of the interest is that these programmers found a way, within the rules, to get more information, by means of their "secret handshake". The important lesson (to my mind) is that the environment can be manipulated in surprising ways to get a desired result. That's creativity and innovation doing its thing.
Interestingly, this strategy is also fairly "brittle", I think, in that simple rule-changes could foil it. Requiring only one submission per team, for example, or scoring teams according to the total (or average) scores of all their programs, would complicate any strategy of collusion.
> I find it amusing how people feel companies are some nebulous single entity.
... hmmm... uh oh...
<rant>
Incorporation, the act of forming a company, has as its primary effect the creation of a legal entity which has standing, as a single entity, before the law. Of course the main thing this nebulous single entity can do before the law is enter into contracts, but, in some versions, it can shield its participants from personal liability for actions of the corporation, and of course this entity lives in a rather different taxation regime than you and I.
In the very old days, at least within the British sphere of influence, this special status could only be granted by the King, and the companies were politically accountable to the royal court.
In the not quite so old days, this process was streamlined. The economic benefits of incorporation were thought to be self-evidently in the public interest, and so highly simplified legal mechanisms were put in place to allow almost anyone to form a collective entity for a commercial purpose that would be singular before the law.
While more or less unthinkable today, it is nevertheless a legitimate question to ask whether or not these nebulous single entities continue to serve the public interest of the societies and states which grant them their status, and if they do not, to change the nature of their legal status so as to encourage them to serve the public interest better.
Not that we aren't all selfish whiners, of course we are, but if you want to know what checks corporate greed, just look in the, uh, the
</rant>
... the same thing.
Satellites which are stationary relative to an observer on Mars should oughta be called "Areostationary", not "Aerostationary".
This is because the Greek name for Mars is Ares, and conventionally, greek names are used for the roots of these sorts of things.
See, e.g., here
I know, I know, English is a living language and the spelling error didn't change the meaning, so I should shut up. Pendants like me are domed to definately loose this rediculus fite.
An idiot who noticed that both the power source for the gyros and the gyros themselves were outside the pressure hull. An idiot who remembered the problems with Mir had with cables running through hatches. Possibly an idiot concerned that a failure of a power system might involve fire, so that, where possible, power systems should be outside the habitable area.
Not that I'm saying the ISS doesn't have design flaws, I'm sure it does. But, from software to spaceware, design is compromise, and shit happens.
> Isn't it obvious that the first step to having a free market is having published prices?
Erm, no.
A "free market" is one in which participants exchange goods and services at a mutually agreed-upon price, according to the law of supply and demand, with third parties having no say in the matter.
Price disclosure and other "fairness" requirements are common, but not required for the market to be free.
Maybe you can answer my perennial question about this -- it seems to me that genetic algorithms are conceptually straightforward, and that the really difficult/interesting part is how you map your "genome" to relevant parameters in your problem space. It's important that mutation and, especially, recombination should lead to "organisms" which really do resemble their "parents", otherwise you lose the whole power of the approach.
I'm not active in the field, but I've read some books and papers on the topic, and all of them seem to laboriously describe the genetic process, and then give examples where a good genome-to-problem-space mapping is simply provided without further comment. Those results are then easy to reproduce, but what I want from a book about the technique is the ability to apply the technique to new problems.
What I would very much like to see is the "Genetic Programming Coloring Book" or other simple reference that explains how to tackle this part of the problem.
OK, replying to myself, did some digging on LKML and found this.
Disclaimer: I have not personally tried either fix, but the second one (which modifies the "clear fpu" macro in the i387 header file) looks like a more appropriate fix to me.
The provided patch is for the 2.4.27-pre5 kernel, but my 2.4.26 "i387.h" file was the same, the patch can be applied. (Again, haven't tested it yet, don't know if it works.)
Question for the kernel gurus out there -- I read the article and the patch (so sue me), and it seems to me that the patch just redirects the signal-handler flow if sig==8.
This may well protect against the example exploit, but what happens if you get a floating-point exception in the handler for some other signal?
The provided patch does not look like a real fix, unless the deeper bug really does just involve sig==8.
I suppose in the near term this will be true, but they're the fastest-growing and soon-to-be largest consumer market in the world. If they can stay united, they'll be in a strong position to dictate standards to everyone.
Reminds me of the old joke about British weather headlines -- "Fog shrouds channel, Continent isolated"...
Yabbut packing soda in plastic makes the whole package weigh less, which means you can put more of them on the truck, which means the truck can make fewer trips, which means it uses less fuel, or if you're very lucky, that you don't need as many trucks.
If you use and recycle glass, you have to ship it around.
Are you sure you know which method uses the least petroleum?
> Here's the dangerous part:
> (subject to service occupation tax on the value of tangible personal property transferred with the software)
You may have stopped reading a smidgen too soon -- the value referred to is that of the "tangible personal property transferred with the software", as is made clear in the second through eighth words following your added emphasis. This probably refers to the cost of the CD the software is on, or for embedded systems, maybe the value of the widget the software is running on, plus the value of manuals, packaging, etc.
Furthermore, a plausible reading of the article (IANALBIDRTFA) is that the parenthetical remarks refer to the *current* situation in Illinois, so you may already be reeling under the unfair hammer-blows of this provision...
Math is useful to CS/programming in two ways.
The first is the obvious practical way that others have covered. Geometry is essential for graphics, programs sometimes contain physical models governed by differrential equations whose strengths and weaknesses you need to understand, and so forth.
The second is more subtle. Set theory and graph theory lie at the heart of computer science, and thinking of computers and computer programs abstractly, in a hardware- and language-independent way, as finite state machines with transition rules, can be enormously helpful in attacking problems. To my mind, this is a fairly natural approach to programming, but the advantage of some mathematical training lies in not having to re-invent the tools.
> That's it... I'm giving up on Debian.
But, isn't "meaning well" the whole point of Linux?
If you "just want a stable system" with application updates, what is stopping you from using a commercial UNIX OS, or Mac OS/X, or even, God forbid, Windows, which I am told is actually getting reasonably stable.
Me, I don't "just want a stable system" -- I want a stable system that won't lock me in to application formats, won't spy on me, and will give me as much control over it as I am willing to take on.
Debian still does this. There's testing and unstable, you can use it with kernels from kernel.org if you want proprietary code in your drivers (I do this, under Debian, for my NVidia cards), you can use backports (I do this, under Debian woody, to run XFree86 4.3.1 on my laptop), and, for leaf nodes of the dependency tree, you can use "stow" to install pre-built binaries (I do this, under Debian woody, with Blackdown Java, and also OpenOffice 1.1, which however is also available as a backport.
It is perfectly possible to be a pragmatic Debian user, and for us, the community effort will continue to succeed.
VRML, as I understand it, is not quite dead yet. There's still an active W3G working group working on "x3d", which is the successor to VRML, and more than a few scientific visualization packages can export to, and read, VRML, including SGI's OpenInventor.
What's bad about VRML was that the VRML '97 spec was too damn complicated (IMHO), and a few years later, the really good free browser (CosmoPlayer) got sold off by SGI, and after changing hands several times, apparently disappeared from the face of the Earth. There are other browsers, but they don't plug in to browsers as easily.
The other problem I heard people complain about (but was not a problem for me) was the "JavaScript" problem -- people on comp.lang.vrml didn't like that their web VRML was human-readable and stealable. CNN used to have the occasional VRML model on their site for interesting things, but switched a while ago to something called Cult3D, which appears to be binary, and to have pricey development tools -- I don't know if the format is actually proprietary, but it wouldn't surprise me.
Of course, the *real* reason it died was because I learned it...