Yet another reason to take an old PC (or a new mini-ITX box), throw in a 2nd NIC, and roll your own firewall/router/NAT box/etc. Sometimes plug-n-play is not a good thing.
No, not particularly; I was just surprised by your statement about the fonts... you said:
The worst thing is not that the fonts are small, but that they are not scaleable by adjusting size within the browser.
which surprised me because when I opened the link and saw his page, the first thing I did was Ctrl-+ to kick the font size up, and tap my CSS override bookmarklet to clean up the ugly colors. So I thought maybe it's just one of those things that Mozilla does right while other browsers don't , but no, Konqueror worked just fine too. Beyond that I didn't feel like experimenting; I suppose I could go find a Windows box and see what happens with IE, but I'm not that bored. My quick check showed that your assertion about the fonts didn't apply in at least 1 case, so I posted a statement that maybe the problem wasn't as generic as you implied. Sorry if that got in the way of your sense of indignation.:}
Perhaps it depends on the browser you're using? The fonts on the page scale fine in Mozilla and Konqueror, at least for me. Though I do have to admit that scaling in Lynx would require changing the terminal font size.:)
I think you are mistaken; history suggests that rationality is not always present in battle, and that there are always more people ready to kill without thought for consequences. It is certainly a Nobel thought, though.
Don't confuse the number of torpedo tubes loaded with the number of available torps. Remember history - when IBM decides to nail someone for n patent violations, they don't care if a particular shot misses, they'll just reload and fire again until the hit count reaches n.
It's unfortunate that obscuring code has taken on the negative connotation of "hiding bugs." That's not always the case.
True, but the more power/money involved, the greater the temptation to cheat (from simply cutting corners to intentionally compromising the system). That's why the connotation is there - because history shows that's the way to bet. Thus the need, as you point out, for independent code review. (Of course one of the best ways to insure independence is to allow anyone access, which brings us back to opening up the source.) However, we need to take it a step further; what we need is a system (i.e. the whole thing, including hardware/software/procedures/etc.) that is verifiable. Not an easy task, of course.
Bruce Schneier wrote a good article on the pros and cons of this last year; see Secrecy, Security, and Obscurity in the May 2002 Crypto-Gram.
With respect, you're partially right, but only partially, and the half-accurate stance you suggest is both attractive and dangerous.
From a moral and ethical standpoint, yes, many exploit postings are done for bad reasons - to garner street cred, create havoc, etc. (Of course, some are posted to force an issue, or as a necessary part of getting information to those who need it to fix their systems, but that argument can be found in plenty of other places, so no need to rehash it here.)
The thing to remember: from a practical standpoint,
none of that matters one #$@% bit. Sure, it would be nice if "they" could be restrained by shame or any number of other things; it would also be nice if everyone's intelligence doubled every year. Bets, anyone?
What's important is dealing with the results, not wishing for stuff that would be nice but is highly unlikely to ever happen. When flaw n shows up, we need to fix it or mitigate it as well as we can. Hopefully we can even learn from the flaw, and avoid similar ones in the future. Or, if we can't avoid getting nailed, we go with a fallback plan. ('Course, if things go badly enough, the only backup plan may be "Make your peace with $ENV{DEITY} && die();" but that's a separate issue.:) )
I'm not saying that shaming a malefactor is a bad thing - if it improves the state of the world, great. However, it won't solve the immediate problem unless you can do it for every case, so for purposes of safety you might as well put effort into something that will actually help. When we're defending systems, we need to assume that attackers will do their worst, then plan and act accordingly. Avoiding a hole in our armor, or patching one when we find out about it, is much more logical than trying to get people to keep quiet about it.
Exactly. The lack-of-a-clue is blazingly obvious in the last paragraph:
He has yet to convince the people who fly the planes. "In general, pilots are openly hostile," he says. "Frankly it surprises me, because of all of the options that they are facing right now - including being shot at or commandeered from the ground - this is their best one."
He doesn't seem to realize that in many scenarios activation of his system would amount to a fight between the pilot (on the spot with full human judgement, and theoretically with life-and-death authority over everyone else aboard) and the programmers (present by limited proxy, i.e. the hardware and software involved). Sure, human judgement is fallible, but A) it can adapt in real time, and B) machine "judgement" is usually just a stimulus/response system set up by one or more humans. If the program covers all contingencies, great... but is that really the way to bet?
Roughly half the book is devoted to the negative effects of patents on scientific research
Kind of hard to justify this sort of claim when you consider how
much we have advanced in the last 70-80 years. It might not be a
perfect process but it does seem to work.
Ah, but how much of that progress occurred because of the patent system, and how much in spite of said system?
... how
would you explain to a technically unsavvy judge that the fact that "int i;" appears in both codebases is not theft of IP?
You asked for one; will you settle for a method of finding many?:) Just pick a domain in which complex things are built from simple and standardized parts.
As an example, consider a cookbook; how many times will you find "2 cups milk", or "1 tsp. salt", or "for this recipe, start with the basic mix from page 10, and add the following ingredients" etc.?
And if the judge doesn't like cooking, jump over to architecture (I-beams, trusses, bricks-n-mortar), or car design (nuts, bolts, gaskets, mirrors), or natural language documents (letters, words, phrases), etc., etc.
Assuming a wise judge {oh please, oh please}, clarifying the concept shouldn't take much time. If the fight comes down to copyright, of course. Abuses aside, copyrights should only apply to things that are new and at least partially unique; in terms of code, it's not a question of the individual pieces, 'tis a question of how they are put together. A particular set of pieces connected in a particular (and creative) way can be copyrighted; if SCO is actually stupid enough to try to argue that they can, in effect, copyright indivdual "words" without reference to connecting them together, they'll probably be laughed out of court.
Hmm, something else: if you come right down to it, "technically unsavvy" is curable; take a CS101-using-C text and show what each statement does and how it is commonly used. This is what a "variable" is, and that instruction deals with repeating other instructions, this makes "false" an alias for 0 so that we can make our code more readable, and so on.
Reporter: "After all that you've just gone through, I have to ask you
the same question a lot of people back home are asking about space these
days. Is it worth it? Should we just pull back, forget the whole thing as
a bad idea, and take care of our own problems, at home?" Sinclair: "No. We have to stay here, and there's a simple reason
why. Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population
control, genetics - and you'll get ten different answers. But there's one
thing every scientist on the planet agrees on: whether it happens in a
hundred years, or a thousand years, or a million years, eventually our sun
will grow cold, and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us, it'll
take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-tsu, Einstein, Maruputo, Buddy Holly,
Aristophanes - all of this. All of this was for nothing, unless we go to
the stars."
...
jms speaks
...
Sinclair's final speech there is the simplest truth about space exploration
that I can think of...and the most compelling..and the most overlooked. As
Henry Kissinger once said, "It has the added benefit of being true."
I guess it really comes down to a simple question for each person to consider:
"Should the human race grow, or die out?"
I've been googling, but haven't found anything yet (other than case-mod LED's).
One place to start: The LED Light.com. Fair warning: swallow that mouthful of {beverage} before reading the prices for the 120/240 volt "bulbs", unless you want to review input.
It will be interesting to see how long it takes 'em to start building units using Luxeons.
Also, do you just take these LED's and stick em in your light socket? Is it that easy?
Er, no, unless you count that brief glow as it becomes a friode.
Normally you want to supply just enough power to do the job, which means you have to modify that 120/240V feed down to something the diodes can handle without smoking.
Hmmm. So, what you're saying is, they have no right to ignore you? To ignore their obligations to you?
If that's the case, then please consider this: if you're not paying them, and they haven't otherwise contracted with you to produce the feature/bug fix/etc. you desire, then how exactly are they obligated to you? They aren't forcing you to use the software; if you do, you (usually) don't have to pay for it. Better still, you are able (even welcome!) to grab the whole mess and start playing with it yourself. No need to be limited to "Hey, this could be done better!"; instead, you can show them how to do it better! Or not... except that even if you personally can't code it up, nothing prevents you from hiring someone else to do it.
I wonder if it's easy to disable these things by using a strong magnetic or electric field. Anyone know?
Or perhaps ultrasound? Or an optical fiber connected to a laser? Some of the surgical tech used for destroying stones, plaques, clots, etc. inside the body could probably be adapted at a reasonable cost. For one thing, you wouldn't have to worry as much about harming the surrounding "tissue". Like as not the most you'd have to do would be to take the tire off the rim long enough to zap the tag, assuming it was mounted on the inside of the tire.
One other thought--what happens if you put some metalic chaff around a tag? (Maybe even a tiny little RFID aluminum foil hat....)
I think you might have missed the point. Yes, Brin shows a universe dominated by the hierarchy, but overall he shows it as a Bad Thing(tm). The heroes are mostly upstarts, "wolflings" or their allies who question the status quo. Consider the Library; most Galactics consider it the beginning and end of all knowledge. Humanity and a few others have the gall to say "Thanks, but we'd rather confirm these facts ourselves.". Much of the conflict is between the entrenched powers and the, ahem, Seekers of new knowledge.
This may be outside the range you're looking for, but in the "life imitating art" dept., there's Fritz Lang's 1928 movie "Woman in the Moon" which gave us the countdown.
No; IBM is looking to do both AIX and Linux - they want to sell hardware running Linux, with the option of moving up to AIX 5L. The marketing is along the lines of "If Linux will handle your needs, we'll give you that; when you need the high end features only available (for now) in AIX, we'll sell you that!". Smart thinking - give people a choice, let 'em mix and match as they please.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah, Microsoft just wants the most lucrative bits - good or bad is secondary. SCO is the group that wants to own all the bits.
Yet another reason to take an old PC (or a new mini-ITX box), throw in a 2nd NIC, and roll your own firewall/router/NAT box/etc. Sometimes plug-n-play is not a good thing.
No, not particularly; I was just surprised by your statement about the fonts... you said:
which surprised me because when I opened the link and saw his page, the first thing I did was Ctrl-+ to kick the font size up, and tap my CSS override bookmarklet to clean up the ugly colors. So I thought maybe it's just one of those things that Mozilla does right while other browsers don't , but no, Konqueror worked just fine too. Beyond that I didn't feel like experimenting; I suppose I could go find a Windows box and see what happens with IE, but I'm not that bored. My quick check showed that your assertion about the fonts didn't apply in at least 1 case, so I posted a statement that maybe the problem wasn't as generic as you implied. Sorry if that got in the way of your sense of indignation. :}
Perhaps it depends on the browser you're using? The fonts on the page scale fine in Mozilla and Konqueror, at least for me. Though I do have to admit that scaling in Lynx would require changing the terminal font size. :)
I think you are mistaken; history suggests that rationality is not always present in battle, and that there are always more people ready to kill without thought for consequences. It is certainly a Nobel thought, though.
Don't confuse the number of torpedo tubes loaded with the number of available torps. Remember history - when IBM decides to nail someone for n patent violations, they don't care if a particular shot misses, they'll just reload and fire again until the hit count reaches n.
True, but the more power/money involved, the greater the temptation to cheat (from simply cutting corners to intentionally compromising the system). That's why the connotation is there - because history shows that's the way to bet. Thus the need, as you point out, for independent code review. (Of course one of the best ways to insure independence is to allow anyone access, which brings us back to opening up the source.) However, we need to take it a step further; what we need is a system (i.e. the whole thing, including hardware/software/procedures/etc.) that is verifiable. Not an easy task, of course.
Bruce Schneier wrote a good article on the pros and cons of this last year; see Secrecy, Security, and Obscurity in the May 2002 Crypto-Gram.
With respect, you're partially right, but only partially, and the half-accurate stance you suggest is both attractive and dangerous.
From a moral and ethical standpoint, yes, many exploit postings are done for bad reasons - to garner street cred, create havoc, etc. (Of course, some are posted to force an issue, or as a necessary part of getting information to those who need it to fix their systems, but that argument can be found in plenty of other places, so no need to rehash it here.)
The thing to remember: from a practical standpoint, none of that matters one #$@% bit. Sure, it would be nice if "they" could be restrained by shame or any number of other things; it would also be nice if everyone's intelligence doubled every year. Bets, anyone?
What's important is dealing with the results, not wishing for stuff that would be nice but is highly unlikely to ever happen. When flaw n shows up, we need to fix it or mitigate it as well as we can. Hopefully we can even learn from the flaw, and avoid similar ones in the future. Or, if we can't avoid getting nailed, we go with a fallback plan. ('Course, if things go badly enough, the only backup plan may be "Make your peace with $ENV{DEITY} && die();" but that's a separate issue. :) )
I'm not saying that shaming a malefactor is a bad thing - if it improves the state of the world, great. However, it won't solve the immediate problem unless you can do it for every case, so for purposes of safety you might as well put effort into something that will actually help. When we're defending systems, we need to assume that attackers will do their worst, then plan and act accordingly. Avoiding a hole in our armor, or patching one when we find out about it, is much more logical than trying to get people to keep quiet about it.
Exactly. The lack-of-a-clue is blazingly obvious in the last paragraph:
He doesn't seem to realize that in many scenarios activation of his system would amount to a fight between the pilot (on the spot with full human judgement, and theoretically with life-and-death authority over everyone else aboard) and the programmers (present by limited proxy, i.e. the hardware and software involved). Sure, human judgement is fallible, but A) it can adapt in real time, and B) machine "judgement" is usually just a stimulus/response system set up by one or more humans. If the program covers all contingencies, great... but is that really the way to bet?
Ah, but how much of that progress occurred because of the patent system, and how much in spite of said system?
You asked for one; will you settle for a method of finding many? :) Just pick a domain in which complex things are built from simple and standardized parts.
As an example, consider a cookbook; how many times will you find "2 cups milk", or "1 tsp. salt", or "for this recipe, start with the basic mix from page 10, and add the following ingredients" etc.? And if the judge doesn't like cooking, jump over to architecture (I-beams, trusses, bricks-n-mortar), or car design (nuts, bolts, gaskets, mirrors), or natural language documents (letters, words, phrases), etc., etc.
Assuming a wise judge {oh please, oh please}, clarifying the concept shouldn't take much time. If the fight comes down to copyright, of course. Abuses aside, copyrights should only apply to things that are new and at least partially unique; in terms of code, it's not a question of the individual pieces, 'tis a question of how they are put together. A particular set of pieces connected in a particular (and creative) way can be copyrighted; if SCO is actually stupid enough to try to argue that they can, in effect, copyright indivdual "words" without reference to connecting them together, they'll probably be laughed out of court.
Hmm, something else: if you come right down to it, "technically unsavvy" is curable; take a CS101-using-C text and show what each statement does and how it is commonly used. This is what a "variable" is, and that instruction deals with repeating other instructions, this makes "false" an alias for 0 so that we can make our code more readable, and so on.
If people don't like Star Trek references, then how 'bout B5/JMS? Quoting from The Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5:
I guess it really comes down to a simple question for each person to consider: "Should the human race grow, or die out?"
Presented, for your consideration, one word: galgenhumor.
One place to start: The LED Light.com. Fair warning: swallow that mouthful of {beverage} before reading the prices for the 120/240 volt "bulbs", unless you want to review input.
It will be interesting to see how long it takes 'em to start building units using Luxeons.
Er, no, unless you count that brief glow as it becomes a friode. Normally you want to supply just enough power to do the job, which means you have to modify that 120/240V feed down to something the diodes can handle without smoking.
Hmmm. So, what you're saying is, they have no right to ignore you? To ignore their obligations to you?
If that's the case, then please consider this: if you're not paying them, and they haven't otherwise contracted with you to produce the feature/bug fix/etc. you desire, then how exactly are they obligated to you? They aren't forcing you to use the software; if you do, you (usually) don't have to pay for it. Better still, you are able (even welcome!) to grab the whole mess and start playing with it yourself. No need to be limited to "Hey, this could be done better!"; instead, you can show them how to do it better! Or not... except that even if you personally can't code it up, nothing prevents you from hiring someone else to do it.
Or perhaps ultrasound? Or an optical fiber connected to a laser? Some of the surgical tech used for destroying stones, plaques, clots, etc. inside the body could probably be adapted at a reasonable cost. For one thing, you wouldn't have to worry as much about harming the surrounding "tissue". Like as not the most you'd have to do would be to take the tire off the rim long enough to zap the tag, assuming it was mounted on the inside of the tire.
One other thought--what happens if you put some metalic chaff around a tag? (Maybe even a tiny little RFID aluminum foil hat....)
I think you might have missed the point. Yes, Brin shows a universe dominated by the hierarchy, but overall he shows it as a Bad Thing(tm). The heroes are mostly upstarts, "wolflings" or their allies who question the status quo. Consider the Library; most Galactics consider it the beginning and end of all knowledge. Humanity and a few others have the gall to say "Thanks, but we'd rather confirm these facts ourselves.". Much of the conflict is between the entrenched powers and the, ahem, Seekers of new knowledge.
[ring!]
Hello?
Can you hear me now?
Uh, yeah, who is th-
Good! Can we spam^H^H^H^Hsell something to you now?
No thanks, I'm not inter-
Good! We're currently running a special on the following items-
I said NO, #$@% it!
But that was then! You might have changed your mind between then and now! Our other specials include-
[growling] I see. In that case, go have a gasoline enema and sit on a lit welding torch. Goodbye, and don't ever call me again! [click]
Jeeze, the nerve of those fscking bast-
[ring!]
Hello?
Can we spam you now? Good! As I was sayi-
[sound of a phone being hurled to the floor and then stomped on]
[voiceover] At Verizon, we're doing our part to annoy you until you explode!
And M$ says: "Certainly sir! Just sign this NDA form and then we can show you the EULA for the Microsoft (tm) Code Of Behavior(tm)."
Are you thinking of Tuf Voyaging, perhaps? FWIW, he gave the Suthlamese a lot more than meat beasts - he also gave 'em Just Desserts. :)
Quick Google search results:
Cisco rolls out Long Reach Ethernet products, 02/19/01Cisco: Service Provider: Long-Reach Ethernet
This may be outside the range you're looking for, but in the "life imitating art" dept., there's Fritz Lang's 1928 movie "Woman in the Moon" which gave us the countdown.
No; IBM is looking to do both AIX and Linux - they want to sell hardware running Linux, with the option of moving up to AIX 5L. The marketing is along the lines of "If Linux will handle your needs, we'll give you that; when you need the high end features only available (for now) in AIX, we'll sell you that!". Smart thinking - give people a choice, let 'em mix and match as they please.