Funny that if I personally were to turn the tables on Comcast and send them a bill for services I didn't perform, they'd have the authorities on me in an instant, and try and have me sent to jail.
No they wouldn't. They simply wouldn't pay the bill.
We went a similar but different direction in Canada, rather than killing the phone there's a list of IMEIs for stolen phones, and all carriers will honour not allowing phones in the database on to their networks. Which this solution sounds little less onerous than re-engineering every handset OS to have this kill ability.
I agree that this would be a great solution, but even just this will meet great resistance from the companies that profit from activating stolen phones. Cricket is one example. After having my phone stolen, I was happy that Sprint blacklisted the phone... then I did a little research and discovered that thieves need only "flash it to Cricket" and then they can use it on Sprint's network. I have a feeling that a large portion of Cricket's business comes from activating stolen phones. Expect push back on this type of law from Cricket and other similar companies.
The US government spends billions of dollars on research each year and much of it requires software development to some degree. Much of this money goes to the big guys like Boeing or Lockheed Martin, but a non-trivial portion of it is reserved for small companies as well. In any case, there are lots of programming jobs out there doing research, either directly or indirectly, for the government.
I happen to work for a small company that does contract research and software development for the gov't. We pride ourselves on writing solid, maintainable scientific software. To accomplish this goal, we need programmers and scientists, but most of all we need programmer-scientists. We are hiring (message me if you want more info), but I'm sure there are other companies out there as well.
They charged you to be a member? Neither credit union I've joined had membership fees. Generally, maintaining membership involved keeping a low balance of around $25 in my savings account with them. The two credit unions I joined were:
Kirtland Federal Credit Union (military only) San Diego County Credit Union
If I understand the article correctly, banks are not worried about these transactions because it's traceable and can easily be reversed. If your girlfriend said the transfer was fraudulent, then the bank would simply take the money back from your account (yes, they can still do that even though it's with a different bank). If you had already withdrawn the money from your account, then you'd be looking at a negative balance and probably lots of fees and charges on top of that.
Now, if you could initiate a western union transfer from your girlfriend's account, then it would become a serious risk.
I think this is the key, right here. Once you pay $3.99 and get the source code, you can do whatever you want with it. You could make it freely available to everyone, or you could even compile it and sell the identical app for $3.98. If you really feel strongly about making this code freely available, you should be glad that you can make that happen for less than $4.
Good point. And I'd also like to know how many flowers we are talking about. Solving the traveling salesman problem for 5 flowers isn't really the same as solving it for 100 cities.
Does anybody know if Windows 7 will be restricted to running applications bought through their official marketplace (like iPhones are)? I hadn't heard much about this issue until I read a blog, a couple of weeks ago, that implied that they might go the way of the iPhone on this issue. That broke my heart because I love my windows mobile phone but would be unwilling to tolerate this.
(In case anyone cares, PdaNet is why I'm so passionate about this issue. It's a very useful app that would never survive in a restricted marketplace setup).
Though they were presented as one idea, really either of the two suggestions should help:
1) Pre-cool your office in the morning when energy is more available (and cheaper) 2) Tolerate a higher temperature in the afternoon
Note that even though they didn't emphasize it, they were proposing #2 as well when they said to turn up the thermostat up to 78 degrees (from 74). So, when the precooling runs out you let the temperature rise past where you'd really want it to be.
I once went to a strip club that gave you all your change in 2 dollar bills... the thought was that you'd be forced to tip twice as much... turns out I did give bigger tips but I gave out half as many. Go figure.
also wrote a short story called "Welcome to the Monkey House" which is contained in a similarly named anthology. It deals with exactly these issues of immortality with typical Vonnegut sarcasm. Definately worth reading.
A bored nurse at a hospital is browsing through patient files, sees "John F. Kennedy", and for shits and giggles, opens the record to see if he had a gunshot wound to the head.
I don't see this as a false alarm at all. Nobody is allowed to access a patient's records "for shits and giggles." Doing so is a violation and this person would be caught and rightfully so. Hopefully, they would lose their job, and be forced into a life of crime to support their family.
Here is what I think I can say about the code I saw. The code is fairly trivial--the kind of stuff I wrote in school. The similar portions of the code were some 80 lines or so. Looking around the Net, I found close variants of the code, with the same comments and variable names, in sources other than Linux distributions. The code is not in a central part of the Linux kernel. The code does not appear to have been contributed to Linux by SCO or Caldera. The code exists in current versions of the Linux kernel.
It sure doesn't seem that the alleged violations are very agregious.
Bad Assumption
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Shallit assumed that every amount of change between 0 and 99 cents is equally likely.
I understand that an assumption like this is necessary to even begin an anaylysis using our western logic system, but this assumption makes the study useless.
There's no way that the distibution curve is flat. People spend a lot of time and money price setting as described here and you better believe they know how to price their goods to maximize profit.
This study also doesn't take into account people like me, who make a game out of minimizing the number of coins in my wallet/pocket. If I can prevent getting 94 cents in change by carrying and relinquishing a penny and a nickle, I'll do it.
What whould happen to slashdot if all those problems were fixed? We would have nothing to preach about and the forum would slowly fade away into oblivion. Then I may actually feel obliged to get some work done. That's no fun.
but do I really want/need the ability to access gigabytes of it no matter where I travel? What happened to the power of imagination. When I take a trip longer than three nights, I'll throw a pr0n0 mag in my suitcase. For shorter trips I just visualize while spanking the monkey.
Harm to society. We don't want our best and brightest to believe that the easiest way to get ahead is to steal or hurt other people. We would like them to go into productive activities that generate new wealth, not unethical and deceptive practices that siphon off wealth from others.
Well said. The Slashdot community obviously understands the problem. From other slashdot readings, I've concluded that the community also has the know-how to do something about it vigilante style (ie. take out the servers these people own). Yet we (yes, me included) do nothing about it. What a bunch of pathetic pussies we are.
Don't waste my time talking about pursuing legal means, becasue pretty much no one here does that either. Besides, the number of cases similar to this proves that our capitalist system is broken in such a way that it cannot be fixed without drastic measures. The government is a gigantic, inertia driven machine that is not capable of drastic measures.
It's funny to listen to this guy talking about how he's contributing to socient. From the article:
Ralsky, meanwhile, is looking at new technology. Recently he's been talking to two computer programmers in Romania who have developed what could be called stealth spam.
It is intricate computer software, said Ralsky, that can detect computers that are online and then be programmed to flash them a pop-up ad, much like the kind that display whenever a particular Web site is opened.
"This is even better," he said. "You don't have to be on a Web site at all. You can just have your computer on, connected to the Internet, reading e-mail or just idling and, bam, this program detects your presence and up pops the message on your screen, past firewalls, past anti-spam programs, past anything.
"Isn't technology great?"
Would you want a reference to this on your tombstone?
I said this somewhere else in this message tree, but I want to say it near the top where you will definately see it. If switching to gcc on all platforms isn't feasible for any reason, then qmake is definately the answer to your building nightmares. qmake is a meta-make system that creates makefiles for many-many platform/compiler combinations (including all the ones you mentioned).
qmake allows you to write one project (.pro) file for all platforms. qmake then creates makefiles for any of its supported platforms for you. It takes some getting used to, but it is very powerful and I couldn't imagine working on a cross-platform project without it.
qmake comes with Qt, so you'll have to pay to use if for commercial use, but developer liscenses are reasonable (probably less than $20k for all seven of you). Actually, you may be able to use qmake for free, but other portions of Qt would definately come in handy for you as well -- especially if your application has a large GUI component.
Trolltech's (Qt) Qmake is a verypowerful meta-make system that does this very well for all platforms/compilers mentioned and many, many more. I couldn't imagine doing a crossplatform C++ project without qmake.
What about listing the "terrorist's" URL, and not providing a link to it? Is that also interpretted as supporting terrorism under the patriot act? It promotes the site almost as much as a link would (given the ease with which one could cut and paste it into their address bar), so it seems as if the university would have to ban that as well.
Oh, and it would also have to expel any hypothetical students that silkscreened the website onto a t-shirt as well right?
What about anyone who tells someone else about the site?
On another note, is the "terrorist" site under attack (via the Patriot Act)? If it isn't, then it's rediculous that one could get in trouble for linking to it.
I believe that was a major part of Aristotle's philosophy. Err... not the self proclaimed Aristotle that plays for the Lakers, but the student of Socrates.
The abstracts associated with the two patents are below. I got them from PanIP's website. They don't appear to be nearly as vague as using "text and images as a method of business on the Internet" or using "form[s] to enter customer information." Maybe they are bogus and maybe the company is too, but I sense a bit of exageration on the part of the poster.
Automated sales and services system
A system for composing individualized sales presentations created from various textual and graphical information data sources to match customer profiles. The information search and retrieval paths sift through a hierarchy of data sources under multiple operating programs. The system provides the means for synergistically creating and displaying customized presentations in a convenient manner for both the customer and salesperson to achieve a more accurate, efficient and comprehensive marketing presentation. Organizational hierarchies of data sources are arranged so that an infinite number of sales presentation configurations can be created. Multiple micro-programs automatically compose the sales presentations initiated by determinants derived from customer profile information, sales agent assessment data and operator's entries including the retrieval of interrelated textual and graphical information from local and remote storage sources. A similar system can be used for filing applications with an institution from a plurality of remote sites, and for automatically processing applications in response to each applicant's qualifications. Each multimedia terminal comprises a video screen and a video memory which holds co-related image-and-sound-generating information arranged to simulate the aspect and speech of an application loan officer on the video screen. The simulated loan officer is used to acquire personal loan data from the applicant by guiding him through an interactive sequence of inquiries and answers.
Automatic business and financial transaction processing system
A system for filing applications with an institution from a plurality of remote sites, and for automatically processing said applications in response to each applicant's credit rating obtained from a credit reporting service comprising a series of self-service terminals remotely linked via a telephone line to a first computer at the institution and to a second computer at the credit reporting service headquarters. Each remote terminal comprises a video screen and a video memory which holds image-and-sound-generating information arranged to simulate the aspect and speech of an application loan officer on the video screen. The simulated loan officer is used to acquire loan request data from the applicant by guiding him through an interactive sequence of inquiries and answers. The terminal is programmed to acquire credit rating data relating to the applicant from the credit rating service, and to use the data to compute the credit worthiness of the applicant and the amount which may be loaned to him. The approved loan information is then transmitted to the first computer for further processing by the financial institution.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny that if I personally were to turn the tables on Comcast and send them a bill for services I didn't perform, they'd have the authorities on me in an instant, and try and have me sent to jail.
No they wouldn't. They simply wouldn't pay the bill.
We went a similar but different direction in Canada, rather than killing the phone there's a list of IMEIs for stolen phones, and all carriers will honour not allowing phones in the database on to their networks. Which this solution sounds little less onerous than re-engineering every handset OS to have this kill ability.
I agree that this would be a great solution, but even just this will meet great resistance from the companies that profit from activating stolen phones. Cricket is one example. After having my phone stolen, I was happy that Sprint blacklisted the phone... then I did a little research and discovered that thieves need only "flash it to Cricket" and then they can use it on Sprint's network. I have a feeling that a large portion of Cricket's business comes from activating stolen phones. Expect push back on this type of law from Cricket and other similar companies.
The US government spends billions of dollars on research each year and much of it requires software development to some degree. Much of this money goes to the big guys like Boeing or Lockheed Martin, but a non-trivial portion of it is reserved for small companies as well. In any case, there are lots of programming jobs out there doing research, either directly or indirectly, for the government.
I happen to work for a small company that does contract research and software development for the gov't. We pride ourselves on writing solid, maintainable scientific software. To accomplish this goal, we need programmers and scientists, but most of all we need programmer-scientists. We are hiring (message me if you want more info), but I'm sure there are other companies out there as well.
They charged you to be a member? Neither credit union I've joined had membership fees. Generally, maintaining membership involved keeping a low balance of around $25 in my savings account with them. The two credit unions I joined were:
Kirtland Federal Credit Union (military only)
San Diego County Credit Union
If I understand the article correctly, banks are not worried about these transactions because it's traceable and can easily be reversed. If your girlfriend said the transfer was fraudulent, then the bank would simply take the money back from your account (yes, they can still do that even though it's with a different bank). If you had already withdrawn the money from your account, then you'd be looking at a negative balance and probably lots of fees and charges on top of that.
Now, if you could initiate a western union transfer from your girlfriend's account, then it would become a serious risk.
I think this is the key, right here. Once you pay $3.99 and get the source code, you can do whatever you want with it. You could make it freely available to everyone, or you could even compile it and sell the identical app for $3.98. If you really feel strongly about making this code freely available, you should be glad that you can make that happen for less than $4.
Good point. And I'd also like to know how many flowers we are talking about. Solving the traveling salesman problem for 5 flowers isn't really the same as solving it for 100 cities.
Does anybody know if Windows 7 will be restricted to running applications bought through their official marketplace (like iPhones are)? I hadn't heard much about this issue until I read a blog, a couple of weeks ago, that implied that they might go the way of the iPhone on this issue. That broke my heart because I love my windows mobile phone but would be unwilling to tolerate this.
(In case anyone cares, PdaNet is why I'm so passionate about this issue. It's a very useful app that would never survive in a restricted marketplace setup).
Though they were presented as one idea, really either of the two suggestions should help:
1) Pre-cool your office in the morning when energy is more available (and cheaper)
2) Tolerate a higher temperature in the afternoon
Note that even though they didn't emphasize it, they were proposing #2 as well when they said to turn up the thermostat up to 78 degrees (from 74). So, when the precooling runs out you let the temperature rise past where you'd really want it to be.
I once went to a strip club that gave you all your change in 2 dollar bills... the thought was that you'd be forced to tip twice as much... turns out I did give bigger tips but I gave out half as many. Go figure.
also wrote a short story called "Welcome to the Monkey House" which is contained in a similarly named anthology. It deals with exactly these issues of immortality with typical Vonnegut sarcasm. Definately worth reading.
Because the SCO license authorizes run-time use only, customers also comply with the General Public License, under which Linux is distributed.
I don't see this as a false alarm at all. Nobody is allowed to access a patient's records "for shits and giggles." Doing so is a violation and this person would be caught and rightfully so. Hopefully, they would lose their job, and be forced into a life of crime to support their family.
It sure doesn't seem that the alleged violations are very agregious.
I understand that an assumption like this is necessary to even begin an anaylysis using our western logic system, but this assumption makes the study useless.
There's no way that the distibution curve is flat. People spend a lot of time and money price setting as described here and you better believe they know how to price their goods to maximize profit.
This study also doesn't take into account people like me, who make a game out of minimizing the number of coins in my wallet/pocket. If I can prevent getting 94 cents in change by carrying and relinquishing a penny and a nickle, I'll do it.
What whould happen to slashdot if all those problems were fixed? We would have nothing to preach about and the forum would slowly fade away into oblivion. Then I may actually feel obliged to get some work done. That's no fun.
but do I really want/need the ability to access gigabytes of it no matter where I travel? What happened to the power of imagination. When I take a trip longer than three nights, I'll throw a pr0n0 mag in my suitcase. For shorter trips I just visualize while spanking the monkey.
Harm to society. We don't want our best and brightest to believe that the easiest way to get ahead is to steal or hurt other people. We would like them to go into productive activities that generate new wealth, not unethical and deceptive practices that siphon off wealth from others.
Well said. The Slashdot community obviously understands the problem. From other slashdot readings, I've concluded that the community also has the know-how to do something about it vigilante style (ie. take out the servers these people own). Yet we (yes, me included) do nothing about it. What a bunch of pathetic pussies we are.
Don't waste my time talking about pursuing legal means, becasue pretty much no one here does that either. Besides, the number of cases similar to this proves that our capitalist system is broken in such a way that it cannot be fixed without drastic measures. The government is a gigantic, inertia driven machine that is not capable of drastic measures.
Ralsky, meanwhile, is looking at new technology. Recently he's been talking to two computer programmers in Romania who have developed what could be called stealth spam.
It is intricate computer software, said Ralsky, that can detect computers that are online and then be programmed to flash them a pop-up ad, much like the kind that display whenever a particular Web site is opened.
"This is even better," he said. "You don't have to be on a Web site at all. You can just have your computer on, connected to the Internet, reading e-mail or just idling and, bam, this program detects your presence and up pops the message on your screen, past firewalls, past anti-spam programs, past anything.
"Isn't technology great?"
Would you want a reference to this on your tombstone?
I said this somewhere else in this message tree, but I want to say it near the top where you will definately see it. If switching to gcc on all platforms isn't feasible for any reason, then qmake is definately the answer to your building nightmares. qmake is a meta-make system that creates makefiles for many-many platform/compiler combinations (including all the ones you mentioned).
qmake allows you to write one project (.pro) file for all platforms. qmake then creates makefiles for any of its supported platforms for you. It takes some getting used to, but it is very powerful and I couldn't imagine working on a cross-platform project without it.
qmake comes with Qt, so you'll have to pay to use if for commercial use, but developer liscenses are reasonable (probably less than $20k for all seven of you). Actually, you may be able to use qmake for free, but other portions of Qt would definately come in handy for you as well -- especially if your application has a large GUI component.
Trolltech's (Qt) Qmake is a verypowerful meta-make system that does this very well for all platforms/compilers mentioned and many, many more. I couldn't imagine doing a crossplatform C++ project without qmake.
Oh, and it would also have to expel any hypothetical students that silkscreened the website onto a t-shirt as well right?
What about anyone who tells someone else about the site?
On another note, is the "terrorist" site under attack (via the Patriot Act)? If it isn't, then it's rediculous that one could get in trouble for linking to it.
What will they think of next? Disposable condoms? Nah -- not practicle.
I believe that was a major part of Aristotle's philosophy. Err... not the self proclaimed Aristotle that plays for the Lakers, but the student of Socrates.
Automated sales and services system
A system for composing individualized sales presentations created from various textual and graphical information data sources to match customer profiles. The information search and retrieval paths sift through a hierarchy of data sources under multiple operating programs. The system provides the means for synergistically creating and displaying customized presentations in a convenient manner for both the customer and salesperson to achieve a more accurate, efficient and comprehensive marketing presentation. Organizational hierarchies of data sources are arranged so that an infinite number of sales presentation configurations can be created. Multiple micro-programs automatically compose the sales presentations initiated by determinants derived from customer profile information, sales agent assessment data and operator's entries including the retrieval of interrelated textual and graphical information from local and remote storage sources. A similar system can be used for filing applications with an institution from a plurality of remote sites, and for automatically processing applications in response to each applicant's qualifications. Each multimedia terminal comprises a video screen and a video memory which holds co-related image-and-sound-generating information arranged to simulate the aspect and speech of an application loan officer on the video screen. The simulated loan officer is used to acquire personal loan data from the applicant by guiding him through an interactive sequence of inquiries and answers.
Automatic business and financial transaction processing system
A system for filing applications with an institution from a plurality of remote sites, and for automatically processing said applications in response to each applicant's credit rating obtained from a credit reporting service comprising a series of self-service terminals remotely linked via a telephone line to a first computer at the institution and to a second computer at the credit reporting service headquarters. Each remote terminal comprises a video screen and a video memory which holds image-and-sound-generating information arranged to simulate the aspect and speech of an application loan officer on the video screen. The simulated loan officer is used to acquire loan request data from the applicant by guiding him through an interactive sequence of inquiries and answers. The terminal is programmed to acquire credit rating data relating to the applicant from the credit rating service, and to use the data to compute the credit worthiness of the applicant and the amount which may be loaned to him. The approved loan information is then transmitted to the first computer for further processing by the financial institution.