Because Warner might be under the impression that, say, a video game with the same rules as Joust or Klax infringes Warner's copyright in Joust or Klax.
Ooh, videogame "clone" lawsuits! Ding-dong! That'll be the 1980s on the front porch, they want their... well everything actually... back.
I fully expect Warner Brothers to plead "not guilty by reason of corporate insanity" - they have strong supporting evidence!
Defense: Your Honour, I ask for an adjournment on the grounds that the prosecution's lawyer is a cartoon rabbit. Judge: I say, I say, I say, I say, that rabbit is a member in good standing of this bar! Prosecution: [holds up sign saying "Duck Season"] Defense: OBJECTION!
And yet, the ongoing real world persistence of privately reported array out-of-bounds errors in critical security-dependent code continues to show that apparently, even the best programmers objectively can't write secure code even if their professional reputations depended on it.
At least, they may be occasionally capable of writing secure code, but they're not capable of never writing any insecure code, or even testing for the existence of insecure code in the code they have released. Third parties have that priviledge. We don't know how many of the third parties who find these bugs are black hats, because we only hear from the white hats. But a 50/50 split between white and black security researchers seems like a good wild-ass guess. So figure one zero-day for every reported monthly security bug. Are you scared yet? You should be.
Is this ongoing security massacre the fault of the language programmers are using? Absolutely yes. The point of security is that 99% correct isn't good enough when that 1% of errors your toolchain didn't automatically detect can get your entire customer base simultaneously rooted. And array out-of-bounds errors have been a solved problem in some languages since 1970.
In 2011, insisting on using a language, or any other tool, which doesn't solve a forty-one year old already solved problem is simply an error.
Nobody expected Bush jr. to be anything but the incompetent warmongering buffoon he proved himself.
Well, presumably the people who voted for him expected him to be something else. Possibly many of them still believe that he achieved exactly what they put him in office to do.
Which I personally find pretty darn scary, but there you go, that's democracy for you.
When everyone has something, it becomes irrelevant... easily replaceable and less respected. When you don't have that Lamborghini, you want it.
Right, especially if your local supermarket only sells you potatoes if you pay in Lamborghinis, and you can't grow your own potatoes because all the potatoes are grown on huge commercial factory farms using Roundup-Ready(tm) genetically engineered non-reproducing potato cuttings from the Monsanto lab, which also only accepts Lamborghinis as payment, but your local bank will happily loan you a Lamborghini if you agree to sell yourself into servitude at the iPod factory for 20 years.
According to Marx, that's about when you get a revolution. Unfortunately real history suggests that revolutions just change the name of the currency from "money" to "political favours", and the process restarts.
It's becoming less important because its becoming less ubiquitous and less abundant. More concentrated.
I think you have that exactly backward. Money becomes more important (and more dangerous) as a power differential as it becomes more concentrated. This has always been the Marxist analysis of capitalism.
Money is the same way, more or less. When only one guy has all the funny papers with ink on them, they cease to be useful as a medium of exchange and something else springs up for exchange.
Who said money had to have anything to do with being a popular medium of exchange? As it concentrates, it becomes a medium of command and control. This is what capital does, because it's what we've baked into the system.
When one guy owns the only factory and supermarket in town, as well as the police force and 99% of the money, you get to do exactly what that guy tells you to do, or you starve. But such a scenario is perfectly compatible with money. This is what happens when gangs or monopolies gain power, and in fact it's the designed for end state of "free market" capitalism: there's a brief bout of competition, then you get one "winner" who has all the money, and everyone else becomes their slaves.
If capitalism were magically reversing its nature and diffusing downwards instead of concentrating upwards - and we'd readily be able to verify if this were the case by examining a measure like the Gini coefficient over time - then it would become less and less important the more everyone had the same amount. But what we see happening on a global scale is the reverse.
We're making lots more stuff, yes. But we're also burning oil and felling trees and changing climate to make that stuff, so the stuff isn't magically appearing out of nowhere, so it's not clear that we are actually increasing the absolute level of wealth in the world by turning billets of aluminium into iPods + pollution. But then, we're financing this new "wealth" by creating debt and selling the debt to more people than receive interest payments from that debt.
I know companies like Google offer bug bounties, but what if they gave awards and more public recognition?
Shouldn't we be more worried about what it says about our industrial quality control processes for software engineering that huge companies like Google and Microsoft apparently can't find the bugs in their own software before they ship, while organised criminal gangs can?
Yes, one solution might be to just let criminals write security-critical software, since they apparently are a lot smarter at doing this than big business. But, um. How about if we invested in ways of actually detecting whether software we write is meeting its specifications rather than relying on accidental discovery?
I know it's a radical, insane, ridiculous idea and a one in a million shot - but it's so crazy it might just work!
The internal motivation, to make better things is where capitalism finds success.
What kind of hippie socialist peacenik talk is that? Capitalism is all about selling more things, not making better things. If we built appliances that didn't fall apart in three years, who would ever buy replacements? If we checked our software for zero-day exploits before we shipped it, the terrorists would have already won!
Beyond that, there is room for quadrillions of humans in space habitats
We don't actually know this. We've never got anywhere close to scientifically testing that proposition.
and we've been able to build them (in theory) since the 1970s
No, we really haven't.
We've had space advocacy groups in the 1970s claiming that space habitats will solve all our problems, but so far the only attempt we've made at actually building closed ecological life support systems has failed miserably and there's apparently been little interest in replicating the experiment since 1995.
In theory we might be able to mine a bunch of barren rock from the Moon, form it into cylinders, and toss it into orbit. Will that come anywhere near close to providing a viable habitat for humans? Not unless we possess the means for instantaneously converting desert sand into a self-sustaining ecologically balanced garden, and if we had that we'd already be using it in Somalia.
In my opinion, we should be committing Apollo-level resources to doing Biospheres 3, 4, 5 and so on. The knowledge of sustainable ecology gained from this would be immense and practically valuable, and could be applied to save lives almost immediately. And once we've got the sealed-greenhouse thing working on earth, after a hundred years or so, then we could look at the huge extra challenges of attempting it in space, where gravity is wonky and there's radiation and vacuum and shipping resources like fresh water up the well is hugely expensive.
But to claim we could do this in the 1970s? No. We were able to dream it in the 1970s. But those dreams weren't necessarily realistic.
events outside of our light cone are NOT well-defined from physical point of view.
That's a correct description of our current physical models, yes. But I'm not sure that non-well-definedness in our physical models is a thing we should be celebrating as a great achievement. In mathematics, that usually means we've done something wrong. And the universe seems to exist just fine whether or not we model it, so perhaps our models aren't 100% complete?
With light it's different. We have NO other faster channel.
Are we so sure we don't? Or did we just decide that since we hadn't measured any such channel in 1905, then there isn't?
It seems to me that Einstein arbitrarily decided to assume that there exists no faster channel than light in order to redefine the Lorentz contraction as a spacetime effect. Which was a clever hack and made the maths simple, but isn't much of an explanation because it then leaves us with not only no answer to "so what is the physical mechanism which causes space and time between events to appear to dilate as relative motion approaches C", but also makes it impossible to find an answer because it disallows asking the question - it shoves "why" under the carpet of kinematics, not dynamics. And assuming C is the maximum speed of signal propagation causes no end of trouble when you attempt to reconcile relativity with quantum mechanics.
So how come something happens to the photon rather than nothing? How come the emission of that photon from the supernova comes "before" its absorption in the CCD detector in our telescope? There's no time for anything to happen to it, it's travelling infinitely fast in a zero-dimensional world according to the Lorentz contraction, so why should it even interact with the rest of the universe at all?
I wouldn't use Windows on a home computer even if it was free.
I used to say that, because to some extent I still really do value the FLOSS ideals of liberty and consider it's worth making sacrifices to keep.
Sadly I've taken to using the Windows half of my dual-boot Win7/Ubuntu box more and more. Mostly because of 1) iTunes, 2) Steam and 3) Windows Media Center for TV watching, but also because Ubuntu's UI shenanigans are making me feel less and less welcome in Linux (and I've been using a Linux distro in some form as my primary home PC since 1998). If I wanted a Mac OSX ripoff done badly, well, that's exactly what Windows 7 is, and it works better than Ubuntu Unity - plus, I get to play indie games.
I wouldn't say I've quite ragequit the Linux world yet, but between Mark Shuttleworth and Asa Dotzler, I'm coming so, so close. There was a time not so long ago when the FLOSS alternatives weren't quite as good as the commercial ones, but were getting visibly better every release. A couple years ago, though, we hit the top of the curve; now, for some reason, every release the Free/Open world gets not only worse in terms of performance, but less free and open.
They tremble in fear that the mob could actual organize on the fly.
Well, either that or they're doing their job to preserve public order and they noticed that idiots organised not peaceful hippie protests but riots using Facebook, and the evil lazy conservative middle-class population have a funny habit of disliking riots. Very regressive of them, I'm sure.
Just because somebody is against the government doesn't mean they're actually for anything good. Sometimes the enemy of your enemy is just a jerk.
Where are the times governments were afraid of their people?
They are afraid, that's why they're freaking out.
Possibly what you actually want is a government that isn't afraid of its people, but enjoys a courteous and respectful two-way relationship based on mutal trust and honesty?
Slashdot Mirror
Because Warner might be under the impression that, say, a video game with the same rules as Joust or Klax infringes Warner's copyright in Joust or Klax.
Ooh, videogame "clone" lawsuits! Ding-dong! That'll be the 1980s on the front porch, they want their... well everything actually... back.
But they say we can keep Lady Gaga.
I fully expect Warner Brothers to plead "not guilty by reason of corporate insanity" - they have strong supporting evidence!
Defense: Your Honour, I ask for an adjournment on the grounds that the prosecution's lawyer is a cartoon rabbit.
Judge: I say, I say, I say, I say, that rabbit is a member in good standing of this bar!
Prosecution: [holds up sign saying "Duck Season"]
Defense: OBJECTION!
I think you misunderestimated the parent poster's refudiation.
You can write secure code in almost any language.
Perhaps you want to believe that claim.
And yet, the ongoing real world persistence of privately reported array out-of-bounds errors in critical security-dependent code continues to show that apparently, even the best programmers objectively can't write secure code even if their professional reputations depended on it.
At least, they may be occasionally capable of writing secure code, but they're not capable of never writing any insecure code, or even testing for the existence of insecure code in the code they have released. Third parties have that priviledge. We don't know how many of the third parties who find these bugs are black hats, because we only hear from the white hats. But a 50/50 split between white and black security researchers seems like a good wild-ass guess. So figure one zero-day for every reported monthly security bug. Are you scared yet? You should be.
Is this ongoing security massacre the fault of the language programmers are using? Absolutely yes. The point of security is that 99% correct isn't good enough when that 1% of errors your toolchain didn't automatically detect can get your entire customer base simultaneously rooted. And array out-of-bounds errors have been a solved problem in some languages since 1970.
In 2011, insisting on using a language, or any other tool, which doesn't solve a forty-one year old already solved problem is simply an error.
It's called a concrete jungle for a reason.
Because there are concrete monkeys swinging from the power cables and concrete hippos in the sewer system?
It follows the way we say it in speech.
Remember, remember November fifth...ember!
Still, better than my 401K. How to I transfer funds?
Take a finite subset of your monthly paycheck and divide it by zero.
is what it's going to do if it comes across a turtle lying on its back.
The Koopa Troopa is lying on its back, belly baking in the hot sun, but you're not helping. You're jumping up and down on it. Why is that, Mario?
Describe, in single words, only the good things that come to mind about... Princess Peach.
What do you think I feel about how many slashdot users can pass the same Turing test?
The belief in an absolute right and wrong, appropriate for all people in all places at all times, is completely laughable.
If you truly believe that, then I wish you luck in your future studies of science and mathematics.
Nobody expected Bush jr. to be anything but the incompetent warmongering buffoon he proved himself.
Well, presumably the people who voted for him expected him to be something else. Possibly many of them still believe that he achieved exactly what they put him in office to do.
Which I personally find pretty darn scary, but there you go, that's democracy for you.
Do images of the Titanic at the bottom of the sea paint enough of a picture?
As they say, sometimes failure isn't an option - it's mandatory.
When everyone has something, it becomes irrelevant... easily replaceable and less respected. When you don't have that Lamborghini, you want it.
Right, especially if your local supermarket only sells you potatoes if you pay in Lamborghinis, and you can't grow your own potatoes because all the potatoes are grown on huge commercial factory farms using Roundup-Ready(tm) genetically engineered non-reproducing potato cuttings from the Monsanto lab, which also only accepts Lamborghinis as payment, but your local bank will happily loan you a Lamborghini if you agree to sell yourself into servitude at the iPod factory for 20 years.
According to Marx, that's about when you get a revolution. Unfortunately real history suggests that revolutions just change the name of the currency from "money" to "political favours", and the process restarts.
It's becoming less important because its becoming less ubiquitous and less abundant. More concentrated.
I think you have that exactly backward. Money becomes more important (and more dangerous) as a power differential as it becomes more concentrated. This has always been the Marxist analysis of capitalism.
Money is the same way, more or less. When only one guy has all the funny papers with ink on them, they cease to be useful as a medium of exchange and something else springs up for exchange.
Who said money had to have anything to do with being a popular medium of exchange? As it concentrates, it becomes a medium of command and control. This is what capital does, because it's what we've baked into the system.
When one guy owns the only factory and supermarket in town, as well as the police force and 99% of the money, you get to do exactly what that guy tells you to do, or you starve. But such a scenario is perfectly compatible with money. This is what happens when gangs or monopolies gain power, and in fact it's the designed for end state of "free market" capitalism: there's a brief bout of competition, then you get one "winner" who has all the money, and everyone else becomes their slaves.
If capitalism were magically reversing its nature and diffusing downwards instead of concentrating upwards - and we'd readily be able to verify if this were the case by examining a measure like the Gini coefficient over time - then it would become less and less important the more everyone had the same amount. But what we see happening on a global scale is the reverse.
We're making lots more stuff, yes. But we're also burning oil and felling trees and changing climate to make that stuff, so the stuff isn't magically appearing out of nowhere, so it's not clear that we are actually increasing the absolute level of wealth in the world by turning billets of aluminium into iPods + pollution. But then, we're financing this new "wealth" by creating debt and selling the debt to more people than receive interest payments from that debt.
This is not, in the long run, sustainable.
How DOES one become a trusted CA? Shouldn't there at least be some sort of procedure to check that they can be trusted?
I think the procedure is "have a quiet chat with the head of the NSA/CIA/MI6, in the queue right after Colonel Gaddafi".
I know companies like Google offer bug bounties, but what if they gave awards and more public recognition?
Shouldn't we be more worried about what it says about our industrial quality control processes for software engineering that huge companies like Google and Microsoft apparently can't find the bugs in their own software before they ship, while organised criminal gangs can?
Yes, one solution might be to just let criminals write security-critical software, since they apparently are a lot smarter at doing this than big business. But, um. How about if we invested in ways of actually detecting whether software we write is meeting its specifications rather than relying on accidental discovery?
I know it's a radical, insane, ridiculous idea and a one in a million shot - but it's so crazy it might just work!
The internal motivation, to make better things is where capitalism finds success.
What kind of hippie socialist peacenik talk is that? Capitalism is all about selling more things, not making better things. If we built appliances that didn't fall apart in three years, who would ever buy replacements? If we checked our software for zero-day exploits before we shipped it, the terrorists would have already won!
Yes, it means more people, especially in africa, will probably starve to death. That's another problem we can solve if we bother to.
With regards to Africa, I'm not sure who the "we" is. Al-Shabaab? I guess they figure they're solving it just fine as it is?
Beyond that, there is room for quadrillions of humans in space habitats
We don't actually know this. We've never got anywhere close to scientifically testing that proposition.
and we've been able to build them (in theory) since the 1970s
No, we really haven't.
We've had space advocacy groups in the 1970s claiming that space habitats will solve all our problems, but so far the only attempt we've made at actually building closed ecological life support systems has failed miserably and there's apparently been little interest in replicating the experiment since 1995.
In theory we might be able to mine a bunch of barren rock from the Moon, form it into cylinders, and toss it into orbit. Will that come anywhere near close to providing a viable habitat for humans? Not unless we possess the means for instantaneously converting desert sand into a self-sustaining ecologically balanced garden, and if we had that we'd already be using it in Somalia.
In my opinion, we should be committing Apollo-level resources to doing Biospheres 3, 4, 5 and so on. The knowledge of sustainable ecology gained from this would be immense and practically valuable, and could be applied to save lives almost immediately. And once we've got the sealed-greenhouse thing working on earth, after a hundred years or so, then we could look at the huge extra challenges of attempting it in space, where gravity is wonky and there's radiation and vacuum and shipping resources like fresh water up the well is hugely expensive.
But to claim we could do this in the 1970s? No. We were able to dream it in the 1970s. But those dreams weren't necessarily realistic.
events outside of our light cone are NOT well-defined from physical point of view.
That's a correct description of our current physical models, yes. But I'm not sure that non-well-definedness in our physical models is a thing we should be celebrating as a great achievement. In mathematics, that usually means we've done something wrong. And the universe seems to exist just fine whether or not we model it, so perhaps our models aren't 100% complete?
With light it's different. We have NO other faster channel.
Are we so sure we don't? Or did we just decide that since we hadn't measured any such channel in 1905, then there isn't?
It seems to me that Einstein arbitrarily decided to assume that there exists no faster channel than light in order to redefine the Lorentz contraction as a spacetime effect. Which was a clever hack and made the maths simple, but isn't much of an explanation because it then leaves us with not only no answer to "so what is the physical mechanism which causes space and time between events to appear to dilate as relative motion approaches C", but also makes it impossible to find an answer because it disallows asking the question - it shoves "why" under the carpet of kinematics, not dynamics. And assuming C is the maximum speed of signal propagation causes no end of trouble when you attempt to reconcile relativity with quantum mechanics.
Yet, no time has passed for the traveling light.
So how come something happens to the photon rather than nothing? How come the emission of that photon from the supernova comes "before" its absorption in the CCD detector in our telescope? There's no time for anything to happen to it, it's travelling infinitely fast in a zero-dimensional world according to the Lorentz contraction, so why should it even interact with the rest of the universe at all?
I wouldn't use Windows on a home computer even if it was free.
I used to say that, because to some extent I still really do value the FLOSS ideals of liberty and consider it's worth making sacrifices to keep.
Sadly I've taken to using the Windows half of my dual-boot Win7/Ubuntu box more and more. Mostly because of 1) iTunes, 2) Steam and 3) Windows Media Center for TV watching, but also because Ubuntu's UI shenanigans are making me feel less and less welcome in Linux (and I've been using a Linux distro in some form as my primary home PC since 1998). If I wanted a Mac OSX ripoff done badly, well, that's exactly what Windows 7 is, and it works better than Ubuntu Unity - plus, I get to play indie games.
I wouldn't say I've quite ragequit the Linux world yet, but between Mark Shuttleworth and Asa Dotzler, I'm coming so, so close. There was a time not so long ago when the FLOSS alternatives weren't quite as good as the commercial ones, but were getting visibly better every release. A couple years ago, though, we hit the top of the curve; now, for some reason, every release the Free/Open world gets not only worse in terms of performance, but less free and open.
It's very frustrating.
They tremble in fear that the mob could actual organize on the fly.
Well, either that or they're doing their job to preserve public order and they noticed that idiots organised not peaceful hippie protests but riots using Facebook, and the evil lazy conservative middle-class population have a funny habit of disliking riots. Very regressive of them, I'm sure.
Just because somebody is against the government doesn't mean they're actually for anything good. Sometimes the enemy of your enemy is just a jerk.
Where are the times governments were afraid of their people?
They are afraid, that's why they're freaking out.
Possibly what you actually want is a government that isn't afraid of its people, but enjoys a courteous and respectful two-way relationship based on mutal trust and honesty?