Cough* www.upcdatabase.com *cough
Cough* www.rnrcomputing.com/upc/ *Cough Yeah what a waste... a perfectly good google search unused....
If you'd like to have a civilized discourse, kindly refrain from statements such as the above, which imply that you're talking to someone who doesn't do the slightest research and has never heard of critical thinking. To suggest that you would be lowering yourself to my level by resorting to ad-hominem (not namecalling, which neither of us had done) is somewhere between disingenuous and troll-like.
Now, on with the show.
If you don't want to use the translation database, fine, don't use it. My point was, that's the only thing of real value the company ever had to offer. Your pointers to other databases that already have catalogs of UPC/ISBN codes just reinforces that.
I didn't ask, "Who's going to maintain a database of UPC codes," I asked, "Who's going to maintain the database of translations of UPC codes, ISBN codes, and specially paid-for:CueCat codes into URLs?" There's a major difference there.
Care to rub those two brain cells together again and try to come up with another spark of enlightenment?
Mmmmmmm . . . close, but no. The copyright would in most cases remain with the author. Pick up a book, and you'll see that. Many publishers, though, get a contractual clause when they publish that prohibits publication anywhere else without their permission for some length of time.
Even in the presence of such a clause or even an outright assignment of copyright (as in a work-for-hire), it wouldn't be plagiarism, because plagiarism is specifically the claim of another's work as your own. It would be a copyright violation, which is really unrelated.
The only thing it was ever going to be useful for to the general public was so they didn't have to *gasp* type in a URL printed on a product. Just scan the UPC / ISBN barcode and go to a website. I even used it once, on a pharmaceutical product that my fiancee couldn't find in stores any more that didn't have an obviously named or easy to find website. Once is the important thing here.
On your different note, that question is answered in the story.
No, even if DC goes under, its copyrights and patents may be assigned first. You'd be, ethically and legally, in the same position if you hacked the Cat now, the day after the company folds, or the day it came out. The only thing that would make it "freely hackable" would be if DC released all of its interests into the public domain.
Now, that would be an interesting thing to consider. Sure, all that tech would now be freely hackable. Who's going to maintain the database? That's the expense that probably is the biggest drain on the company aside from manufacturing, and it'd be one hell of a thing to try to open-source. It's the kind of thing that would only get done if some big company felt like paying a Linus Torvalds or Larry Wall to "do what you want with the corpse of DC."
Here's a question: what's going to happen to the user info of all the registered users who happily told DC their names and addresses and then went and scanned the barcodes of various commercial products?
The program still isn't an integral part of the hardware. It's a set of instructions or sequence of actions performed by the hardware. Consider:
I could build a device (let's say it's similar to a slide rule) that mechanically represents Euclid's algorithm. By using, say, sliders to represent two integers, this device will divide them. I could patent the device, but I still couldn't patent Euclid's algorithm.
Why would I do that? My pet crusade is the systematic undereducation and/or misinformation of the American people by so-called "mainstream media" who present lopsided reports of "scientific research" without even enough information to enable critical thinking to be a meaningful concept. CNN on the net doesn't even have the dubious excuse they have on television that "we have to distill all the relevant details into 10 seconds so the average short-attention-span-trained viewer will watch to the end without being distracted by a piece of lint or something."
That's right, how about you getting a clue? I'm not commenting on the quality of the science, I'm commenting on the quality (or lack thereof) of the coverage.
So . . . this Alroy fellow was able to create a computer simulation to tell him pretty closely what he already knew. That's the problem when you already know what the outcome is. There's no chance of being certain that you haven't let your foreknowledge of the results taint the process of creating the model. Useful results come from predicting things you didn't already know.
But University of Melbourne geochronologist Richard Roberts and colleagues used advanced new techniques to get the answer. They found that the mass extinction occurred around 46,400 years ago, give or take 3,000 years.
Precisely what advanced techniques are these? Good enough to tell us that humans came and the animals died, in that order, rather than the animals died, and then the humans came because there weren't any large animals to scare them off?
how many 1337 h@><0r doods will be 0w3n1ng other passenger's machines
I don't think the juvenile attitude prerequisite to such activity is all that common among frequent fliers with laptops.
As far as how this will work with regulations against the use of computers in-flight, that is a good question. "You can bring your laptop to hook up to our network connection, but it's against the law to turn it on." Yeah.
I don't envision this working with wireless cards, though. I'd guess we'll see jets with ethernet jacks in the armrests.
*wishing one could be modded up for "info bait"*:)
Alright. I get it. So, if you start a process with a given set of permissions, and you lose some or all of those permissions, then the ones you lost should be removed from the target process. If you start a process with any given set of permissions and lose the permission to start processes, any process you started should stop.
Making sure that policies can be tracked in such a manner that they are revokable is the most difficult part (e.g. if I lose permissions to connect on a certain port or write to a certain file, then every process or file that I've created should lose those permissions as well).
Color me confused. Wouldn't it be fairly simple to force any process or file to have only the permissions of its creator? I thought that in standard-flavor Linux it was impossible for any user to give a file or process permissions beyond the user's own?
Okay, ignoring the ad-hominem "blatantly false and jingoistic" . . .
I am a rank newbie into the world of Linux/Unix/POSIX/etc. Please treat what you see as deceit and jingoism as pure, unabashed ignorance. It may not be an excuse for breaking the law, but from what I've seen it's a good enough excuse to post on/.;)
I'm posting from a Win98 machine at the moment because, quite frankly, I'm more comfortable with it. I'm not particularly an OS bigot either. I just plain didn't (and still don't) know anything about any of those other projects.
On the one hand, thank you for pointing out to me the factual errors in my assumptions and suppositions, but on the other, I guess I'd appreciate if you'd not attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity. Perhaps it's a rarity to find someone who readily admits to it, but I'm much more interested in learning new things than mud-slinging and name-calling.
Now . . . you're saying, if I understand, that the NSA's SE Linux is just hacking the Linux kernel to put in some stuff that's been talked about and even done in other OSes for years? And stuff that isn't even all that novel for Linux?
Okay, posting before investigating the link is lame. So I know I'm lame.
However, I went and checked the link. They didn't "fork the kernel to get it secure enough for them." They performed some research and experimentation in secure treatment of sensitive data being integrated into an operating system. This is vastly different from the kind of security being discussed in the referenced info on Win2k.
Now, I've worked with security-clearance-required data before. I think it's absolutely fascinating to consider encoding the clearance level and need-to-know requirements into the filesystem. As others have noted, Linux is the only OS extant they could have done this kind of work with.
I don't think anything they might have added would necessarily outright interfere with the main tree, but it would almost certainly create completely unnecessary overhead for most desktop users. OTOH, it might be a big bonus for corporations concerned about industrial espionage to have such features available.
Bit of a reflex, that, and I had to stop and think before reflexively posting the exact same reply. Instead, I have to ask, did they return that code to the community? Did they attempt to prevent forking the kernel by offering the improvement for inclusion in the "standard" kernel?
Oh, I know they're free not to under the GPL and the Free Software philosophy. I'm just curious.
Only open digitally signed Word documents received from trusted individuals via trusted paths. This is Microsoft's preferred security solution. While this can guarantee the source of the document, it does not guarantee that the trusted source was free of infection when
the document was sent.
Not to be a knee-jerk basher, but does it really surprise anyone that MS's preferred solution is inadequate?
Macro viruses pose a serious threat to Microsoft Office users. The best defense is to be alert to the danger, and to trust no document that was externally created.
Okay . . . and this the NSA spent years researching and deciding on? I mean . . . okay. I don't suppose they've got a bunch of chimps randomly banging on keyboards over there, but . . . well, it would seem that perhaps the Great and Powerful NSA could come up with something a little better than "Look both ways before crossing the street and don't talk to strangers."
Hm. My big complaint is that it's not possible for everybody to be intelligent. I'd be all for encouraging stupid people not to vote. That wouldn't be democratic, though.
My argument is, we're never going to have government by the best-qualified in the system we've got. We're going to have government by those best able to manipulate the opinions of others. We're going to have government by those best able to control what information is given to the electorate, and put the best spin on it. We're going to have government by those best able to play the game of getting elected, which is very cut-throat and very "what's in it for me."
Democracy has a tendency to decay into either tyranny of the majority or outright tyranny. In our country, it's perilously close to tyranny by committee already, as Congress holds states hostage with funding and the FBI, ATF, and DEA operate with no real concern for jurisdiction.
Maybe I come across as an extremist, or paranoid, or a crackpot, or any number of other adjectives that come to mind. That's okay. It's enough for me that I believe it and am doing what I can to alert people to the potential danger I see.
. . . teach his grandfather to shoot. What's necessary isn't to make programming easier, it's to raise programmers. To make automobile construction other than a cottage industry, we didn't make engineering easier, we raised engineers. Likewise software.
Education is the bottom line. If we want everyone to be able to program computers in at least a basic way, we need to introduce our children to them at an early age as something other than toys and media outlets. Programming will never be "easy" until compilers are as ubiquitous as web browsers, and as often used.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice to see someone got it. I mean, c'mon, what crack-smokin' mod said I was "Informative" for makin' shit up?!
If you'd like to have a civilized discourse, kindly refrain from statements such as the above, which imply that you're talking to someone who doesn't do the slightest research and has never heard of critical thinking. To suggest that you would be lowering yourself to my level by resorting to ad-hominem (not namecalling, which neither of us had done) is somewhere between disingenuous and troll-like.
Now, on with the show.
If you don't want to use the translation database, fine, don't use it. My point was, that's the only thing of real value the company ever had to offer. Your pointers to other databases that already have catalogs of UPC/ISBN codes just reinforces that.
I didn't ask, "Who's going to maintain a database of UPC codes," I asked, "Who's going to maintain the database of translations of UPC codes, ISBN codes, and specially paid-for :CueCat codes into URLs?" There's a major difference there.
Care to rub those two brain cells together again and try to come up with another spark of enlightenment?
Mmmmmmm . . . close, but no. The copyright would in most cases remain with the author. Pick up a book, and you'll see that. Many publishers, though, get a contractual clause when they publish that prohibits publication anywhere else without their permission for some length of time.
Even in the presence of such a clause or even an outright assignment of copyright (as in a work-for-hire), it wouldn't be plagiarism, because plagiarism is specifically the claim of another's work as your own. It would be a copyright violation, which is really unrelated.
They're not hiring, but that hasn't been updated on the website yet because they just sacked the webmaster.
The only thing it was ever going to be useful for to the general public was so they didn't have to *gasp* type in a URL printed on a product. Just scan the UPC / ISBN barcode and go to a website. I even used it once, on a pharmaceutical product that my fiancee couldn't find in stores any more that didn't have an obviously named or easy to find website. Once is the important thing here.
On your different note, that question is answered in the story.
No, even if DC goes under, its copyrights and patents may be assigned first. You'd be, ethically and legally, in the same position if you hacked the Cat now, the day after the company folds, or the day it came out. The only thing that would make it "freely hackable" would be if DC released all of its interests into the public domain.
Now, that would be an interesting thing to consider. Sure, all that tech would now be freely hackable. Who's going to maintain the database? That's the expense that probably is the biggest drain on the company aside from manufacturing, and it'd be one hell of a thing to try to open-source. It's the kind of thing that would only get done if some big company felt like paying a Linus Torvalds or Larry Wall to "do what you want with the corpse of DC."
Here's a question: what's going to happen to the user info of all the registered users who happily told DC their names and addresses and then went and scanned the barcodes of various commercial products?
Ummmm . . . no, it doesn't look similar much at all unless you're so illiterate that all you can see is it has lots of the same letters in it.
Besides, what proof do you have that katz isn't the author of the imdb user review? Then it wouldn't be plagiarism, now would it?
The program still isn't an integral part of the hardware. It's a set of instructions or sequence of actions performed by the hardware. Consider:
I could build a device (let's say it's similar to a slide rule) that mechanically represents Euclid's algorithm. By using, say, sliders to represent two integers, this device will divide them. I could patent the device, but I still couldn't patent Euclid's algorithm.
Nonononono.
Somebody set up us the bunny.
Approximate meter counts more heavily than anything else, except maybe initial consonant or similar sound.
Why would I do that? My pet crusade is the systematic undereducation and/or misinformation of the American people by so-called "mainstream media" who present lopsided reports of "scientific research" without even enough information to enable critical thinking to be a meaningful concept. CNN on the net doesn't even have the dubious excuse they have on television that "we have to distill all the relevant details into 10 seconds so the average short-attention-span-trained viewer will watch to the end without being distracted by a piece of lint or something."
That's right, how about you getting a clue? I'm not commenting on the quality of the science, I'm commenting on the quality (or lack thereof) of the coverage.
Somewhere, there's a rock that misses the warmth of you underneath it.
So . . . this Alroy fellow was able to create a computer simulation to tell him pretty closely what he already knew. That's the problem when you already know what the outcome is. There's no chance of being certain that you haven't let your foreknowledge of the results taint the process of creating the model. Useful results come from predicting things you didn't already know.
You'd think that spelling would've been a giveaway, but no. You have been soooooo trolled.
Precisely what advanced techniques are these? Good enough to tell us that humans came and the animals died, in that order, rather than the animals died, and then the humans came because there weren't any large animals to scare them off?
Heh. I just got a job in tech support, first-timer, and I'd love that one. Hey, maybe I should submit a resume now?
I don't think the juvenile attitude prerequisite to such activity is all that common among frequent fliers with laptops.
As far as how this will work with regulations against the use of computers in-flight, that is a good question. "You can bring your laptop to hook up to our network connection, but it's against the law to turn it on." Yeah.
I don't envision this working with wireless cards, though. I'd guess we'll see jets with ethernet jacks in the armrests.
*wishing one could be modded up for "info bait"* :)
Alright. I get it. So, if you start a process with a given set of permissions, and you lose some or all of those permissions, then the ones you lost should be removed from the target process. If you start a process with any given set of permissions and lose the permission to start processes, any process you started should stop.
Color me confused. Wouldn't it be fairly simple to force any process or file to have only the permissions of its creator? I thought that in standard-flavor Linux it was impossible for any user to give a file or process permissions beyond the user's own?
Okay, ignoring the ad-hominem "blatantly false and jingoistic" . . .
I am a rank newbie into the world of Linux/Unix/POSIX/etc. Please treat what you see as deceit and jingoism as pure, unabashed ignorance. It may not be an excuse for breaking the law, but from what I've seen it's a good enough excuse to post on /. ;)
I'm posting from a Win98 machine at the moment because, quite frankly, I'm more comfortable with it. I'm not particularly an OS bigot either. I just plain didn't (and still don't) know anything about any of those other projects.
On the one hand, thank you for pointing out to me the factual errors in my assumptions and suppositions, but on the other, I guess I'd appreciate if you'd not attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity. Perhaps it's a rarity to find someone who readily admits to it, but I'm much more interested in learning new things than mud-slinging and name-calling.
Now . . . you're saying, if I understand, that the NSA's SE Linux is just hacking the Linux kernel to put in some stuff that's been talked about and even done in other OSes for years? And stuff that isn't even all that novel for Linux?
Okay, posting before investigating the link is lame. So I know I'm lame.
However, I went and checked the link. They didn't "fork the kernel to get it secure enough for them." They performed some research and experimentation in secure treatment of sensitive data being integrated into an operating system. This is vastly different from the kind of security being discussed in the referenced info on Win2k.
Now, I've worked with security-clearance-required data before. I think it's absolutely fascinating to consider encoding the clearance level and need-to-know requirements into the filesystem. As others have noted, Linux is the only OS extant they could have done this kind of work with.
I don't think anything they might have added would necessarily outright interfere with the main tree, but it would almost certainly create completely unnecessary overhead for most desktop users. OTOH, it might be a big bonus for corporations concerned about industrial espionage to have such features available.
Bit of a reflex, that, and I had to stop and think before reflexively posting the exact same reply. Instead, I have to ask, did they return that code to the community? Did they attempt to prevent forking the kernel by offering the improvement for inclusion in the "standard" kernel?
Oh, I know they're free not to under the GPL and the Free Software philosophy. I'm just curious.
Not to be a knee-jerk basher, but does it really surprise anyone that MS's preferred solution is inadequate?
Okay . . . and this the NSA spent years researching and deciding on? I mean . . . okay. I don't suppose they've got a bunch of chimps randomly banging on keyboards over there, but . . . well, it would seem that perhaps the Great and Powerful NSA could come up with something a little better than "Look both ways before crossing the street and don't talk to strangers."
Hm. My big complaint is that it's not possible for everybody to be intelligent. I'd be all for encouraging stupid people not to vote. That wouldn't be democratic, though.
My argument is, we're never going to have government by the best-qualified in the system we've got. We're going to have government by those best able to manipulate the opinions of others. We're going to have government by those best able to control what information is given to the electorate, and put the best spin on it. We're going to have government by those best able to play the game of getting elected, which is very cut-throat and very "what's in it for me."
Democracy has a tendency to decay into either tyranny of the majority or outright tyranny. In our country, it's perilously close to tyranny by committee already, as Congress holds states hostage with funding and the FBI, ATF, and DEA operate with no real concern for jurisdiction.
Maybe I come across as an extremist, or paranoid, or a crackpot, or any number of other adjectives that come to mind. That's okay. It's enough for me that I believe it and am doing what I can to alert people to the potential danger I see.
. . . teach his grandfather to shoot. What's necessary isn't to make programming easier, it's to raise programmers. To make automobile construction other than a cottage industry, we didn't make engineering easier, we raised engineers. Likewise software.
Education is the bottom line. If we want everyone to be able to program computers in at least a basic way, we need to introduce our children to them at an early age as something other than toys and media outlets. Programming will never be "easy" until compilers are as ubiquitous as web browsers, and as often used.