So do we support the MPAA today, or are we against them?
This is a re-post from memory. I haven't seen this scam discussed on slashdot recently, but it is a clever hack and it does work -- at least in most MultiHyperMegaPlex theatres:
Step 1: Rock up to the MegaHyperPlex showing both the film you wish to see AND another small-budget independent film.
Step 2: Buy your ticket to the small-budget film.
Step 3: Show your ticket to the bored pimply ticket-inspector who stands at the barrier between the cinemas and the food area. Listen attentively to his instructions and ignore them.
Step 4: Walk through the doors of the cinema showing the film you really came to see.
Of course, then the wonderful director and highly paid actors won't get their share of your €6.50 either, so make sure you understand the consequences of your actions.
... there might be water close enough to the surface to be extracted. However this particular data is completely irrelevant unless there are plans to actually go there and extract water.
I don't understand your lack of understanding. I'll try to put it into simple terms:
A: Water on Mars makes Mars more interesting to visit, because where there's water there is/was life. B: Water is to rockets what petroleum is to cars.
Therefore, these discoveries make Mars easier to return from, and make it a more interesting place to visit. Therefore it is more likely that one or more countries (probably the Chinese at this rate) will want to pay to send people there.
First Law: A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
How would we go about enforcing such a law?
In the Asimov stories, the First Law was somehow deeply ingrained in the mind of every robot's "positronic pathways" for the peace of mind of the human race. The fear was that the first robot to kill a human being would result in a mass destruction of the world's robots, due to what Asimov called the "Frankenstein complex".
But, welcome to the 21st century. In Japan alone, so far 11 workers have been killed by production line robots, resulting in precisely zero anti-robot pogroms.
We know, as technicians of the modern world, that the fastest, cheapest and easiest way to build something will almost always win. Our solution is not to write complex programs to give robot workers some sort of respect for human life, but to give the human workers around the robots a respect for the power and arbitrary nature of their mechanical colleages. Large yellow stripes are marked out within the working area of all robots, within which humans shall not go, and outside of which the robot (hopefully) cannot reach.
Of course, when you start giving robots wheels and independent goal-seeking behaviour, things get interesting.
There's nothing like a laser pointer for adding that little touch of frustration to tired and emotional lecturers.
However, USE SPARINGLY and only when you cannot be spotted. A little subliminal flash across the board when he/she is writing, and he or she will not know whether to get angry or dismis it as an acid flashback.
... those of us who don't hate the _existance_ of a military, but do hate it's self perpetuating nature and do hate it's use to kill innocents in countries far away...
I have a very simple moral pendulum which I use (and freely license you to use) to judge the rightness and wrongness of faraway wars.
Soldiers killing civilians - always bad. Soldiers killing soldiers - excellent! Always good to see fewer professional killers in the world.
What I was saying is that the MCSE program has way better brand recognition than anything Linux has to offer. Everybody's heard of it and frankly, outside of slashdot, it's rarely something to be ridiculed for.
I've been writing software in PHP for an employment agency for the last year. I have had to work closely with our employment consultants to see how they work, what they think is important to know about candidates, vacancies and companies. None of them read/.
When our IT staff hear about someone with an MCSE their immediate reaction is "Get to the back of the queue with all the others."
MCSE may have incredible brand recognition, but that works against it being useful to employers. Everyone knows about it, it's marketed as the must-have qualification, so a candidate spends the money, spends some time, and as long as they have a certain IQ level, an MCSE comes out of the 'certification' slot on the Microsoft machine. Result - millions of MCSEs.
The first thing employers care about is work experience. They can call your last employer and ask how good you were. In 30 seconds they can make a decision. The second most important facto they consider is your real tertiary qualifications.
Last and least are the one-day courses, the part-time courses, and the MCSEs.
No, the DMCA in section 1201(E) stipulates that the devices are banned if they are (a) designed to circumvent, or (b) have limited commercial purpose other than to circumvent, or (c) are marketed as circumventing a "technological measure that effectively controls access to a work".
The third part is important and reads "No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person's knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."
Cut out the guff not related to marker pens, and we get: "No person shall...provide... any... device... that is marketed by that person... for use in circumventing [encrypted content access]." So my guess is, can tell you a marker pen can be used to defeat access controls on non-redbook CDs, but then I am not allowed to give you a marker pen.
So which is it kids? Is there a $situation1, in which case $conclusion1, or is $situation2, in which case $conclusion2?
The readership of slashdot? Inconsistent?
This may come as a complete surprise to you, but slashdot readers have independent ideas. Unlike television, or newspapers, or other forms of mass-media you may be familiar with, on slashdot you will find more than one conclusion drawn from a set of information. Even more shocking is the fact that the people drawing these conclusions are willing to express them, openly discuss alternatives and even (occasionally) change their minds when given more information.
So either go back to your cosy little BBC/ABC/MSNBC/TimeWarner world where all things are safe, sure and certain, or read through the conflicting opinions, grow a brain, and join the discussion.
I wrote the article. you're almost right about never being able to see the comets again. about 10 percent of the comets found in SOHO images do not appear to be on a collision course with the sun. So there is a chance they'll make it around again.
Thanks for the informed reply! I guess I should have done my research a little better.
I do have a question however: Can we predict the orbits of the 10% of comets that SOHO finds but the sun doesn't eat?
I would guess that many of these close-encounter small objects would evaporate so much that they would soon become invisible, and the unknown amount of acceleration due to the solar wind at perihelion would make their orbits hard to predict.
If a dark comet heading out from the direction of the sun did collide with the Earth, I'm guessing the chances of a web-astronomer predicting the collision are still very low.
Sure, you get your fifteen minutes of fame, but it's only 15 minutes. All these comets are either sungrazers or sundivers.
"Nearly all the comets they find are tiny shards of rock and ice, doomed to evaporate in the sun's atmosphere days after they are spotted. "
It's not like any of these people can point up in the sky in fifty years time and say "Look Jimmy, you see that fuzzy patch of light in the sky that is about to destroy civilisation? Well I discovered it! That's Anarchofascist-Limo-Taco-9...
/* > I remember a version of DeCSS in a few hundred bytes. How short can you make this one?:-)
How about 597 bytes? */
#include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> FILE *F; int c() {return fgetc(F);} void s(unsigned long t) {fseek(F,t,0);} int main(int argc, char **argv) { int a,x; char *want="OS/2", *p; F=fopen(argv[1],"rb+"); s(12); for (;;) { p = want; while (*p && c()==*p++); if (!*p) { unsigned long cs,l=0,t=0,sum=0; cs=ftell(F); s(cs+4); for (x=4;x--;) t|=c()<<(8*x); for (x=4;x--;) l|=c()<<(8*x); s(t+8); fputc(0,F); fputc(0,F); s(t); for (x=l;x--;) sum+=c(); s(cs); for (x=4;x--;) fputc(0xff&(sum>>(x*8)),F); exit(0); } while (*p++) c(); for (x=12;x--;) c(); } }
For each bit in x, Flip y's identical bit Where x's bit is one.
If he wins, the legal precedent could be : "If the algorythm is simple enough to express as a haiku, it is protected speech and not a computer process."
My (not quite as brainless) web site marketing guru had the bright idea of creating a "links" page and then inviting the linkees (without obligation) to return the favour. Nice idea, I thought - our link to their site costs us nothing, it helps move them up the google ratings, and if they are nice people, they will link to us. If not, who cares.
All went well, until we received one nasty email reply saying that under no circumstances would the company allow us to create a link to their site! Not their deep pages, but their home page!
(In case you are wondering, no, there were no complaints about us sending junk email, and yes, we got several return links.)
Do you think that the whole concept of dark matter is in a lot more danger now that billions of new galaxy's will come to light?
It's the density of matter in the universe that requires the existence of dark matter, not how many galaxies there are. Discovering more galaxies doesn't make any difference - we already know the visible-matter density of the universe.
Far more interesting is going to be using these pictures to work out whether the universe is full of "dark energy" which is causing the universe's expansion to accelerate.
We can't see dark energy (duuuh cos it's dark) but we can work out whether the universe is accelerating or not. It's all rather complicated, and relies on an accurate survey of the distances and speeds of very distant galaxies.
Speed is easy, that's measured from spectral red-shift. Distance is hard. Walmart don't make a tape measure 2 billion light years long, so we need a different method.
Recently, someone worked out a trick to measure the distance. Type 1 supernovae are all about the same brightness, and can be identified by their spectrum. So all we have to do is search for galaxies containing type 1 supernovae. Trouble is, you need to look at a lot of galaxies before you find a single supernova that happens to be going off at the time the photo is taken, and you need to look at a lot of supernovae before you can build up a good statistical picture.
In short, people have done this from Earth. Now they can do it from space with Hubble, looking at galaxies much further away and look at lots of them at once. Expect the controversy over whether or not the universe's expansion is accelerating to be resolved within the next 2 years.
The scum-wad(s) who wrote the virus are responsible for its actions. Microsoft should do a better job of writing secure software, but the primary responsibility lies with the virus writer.
Who should bear responsibility, the architect who designs and builds 95% of houses in the world pre-installed with piles of oily rags, kindling and soaked in kerosene, or the pissy little vandal who finally threw one match?
Shared responsibility between Microsoft and the vandals. Obviously. But Microsoft methodically lies about how secure their products are. At least the vandal's motives are plain and honest.
"If the user doesn't accept the terms of the GPL, the default is for copying and redistribution to be forbidden under copyright law. I had never looked at it that way before. .."
You've never read the GPL then.
I recommend that everyone who uses GPL software read the GPL. It's not hard. It is a legal document, but it is written in plain and simple language because the authors intended it to be understood (shock! horror!). The section in question is an absolute bloody work of genius. I quote:
"You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License."
...the high rates providers are charging in the United States. For instance, VoiceStream's highest-use consumer GPRS plan charges $39.95 a month for 10 megabytes of data transmission, plus $4.00 for each additional megabyte. This is in addition to the monthly service plan for voice calls. Cingular GPRS rates are similar.
Holey moley! You guys may have the cheapest ADSL rates in the known universe, but Europe is the place to go for GPRS. The GPRS network is already in place here, and here are the O2 rates:
US: 10 meg per month $39.95 + $4 per meg over 10
O2 Europe: 0 meg per month $2.55 + $3.50 per meg over 0 10 meg per month $17.60 + $1.8 per meg over 10
Slashdot Mirror
So do we support the MPAA today, or are we against them?
This is a re-post from memory. I haven't seen this scam discussed on slashdot recently, but it is a clever hack and it does work -- at least in most MultiHyperMegaPlex theatres:
Step 1: Rock up to the MegaHyperPlex showing both the film you wish to see AND another small-budget independent film.
Step 2: Buy your ticket to the small-budget film.
Step 3: Show your ticket to the bored pimply ticket-inspector who stands at the barrier between the cinemas and the food area. Listen attentively to his instructions and ignore them.
Step 4: Walk through the doors of the cinema showing the film you really came to see.
Of course, then the wonderful director and highly paid actors won't get their share of your €6.50 either, so make sure you understand the consequences of your actions.
... there might be water close enough to the surface to be extracted. However this particular data is completely irrelevant unless there are plans to actually go there and extract water.
I don't understand your lack of understanding. I'll try to put it into simple terms:
A: Water on Mars makes Mars more interesting to visit, because where there's water there is/was life.
B: Water is to rockets what petroleum is to cars.
Therefore, these discoveries make Mars easier to return from, and make it a more interesting place to visit. Therefore it is more likely that one or more countries (probably the Chinese at this rate) will want to pay to send people there.
First Law:
A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
How would we go about enforcing such a law?
In the Asimov stories, the First Law was somehow deeply ingrained in the mind of every robot's "positronic pathways" for the peace of mind of the human race. The fear was that the first robot to kill a human being would result in a mass destruction of the world's robots, due to what Asimov called the "Frankenstein complex".
But, welcome to the 21st century. In Japan alone, so far 11 workers have been killed by production line robots, resulting in precisely zero anti-robot pogroms.
We know, as technicians of the modern world, that the fastest, cheapest and easiest way to build something will almost always win. Our solution is not to write complex programs to give robot workers some sort of respect for human life, but to give the human workers around the robots a respect for the power and arbitrary nature of their mechanical colleages. Large yellow stripes are marked out within the working area of all robots, within which humans shall not go, and outside of which the robot (hopefully) cannot reach.
Of course, when you start giving robots wheels and independent goal-seeking behaviour, things get interesting.
There's nothing like a laser pointer for adding that little touch of frustration to tired and emotional lecturers.
However, USE SPARINGLY and only when you cannot be spotted. A little subliminal flash across the board when he/she is writing, and he or she will not know whether to get angry or dismis it as an acid flashback.
... those of us who don't hate the _existance_ of a military, but do hate it's self perpetuating nature and do hate it's use to kill innocents in countries far away ...
I have a very simple moral pendulum which I use (and freely license you to use) to judge the rightness and wrongness of faraway wars.
Soldiers killing civilians - always bad.
Soldiers killing soldiers - excellent! Always good to see fewer professional killers in the world.
What I was saying is that the MCSE program has way better brand recognition than anything Linux has to offer. Everybody's heard of it and frankly, outside of slashdot, it's rarely something to be ridiculed for.
/.
I've been writing software in PHP for an employment agency for the last year. I have had to work closely with our employment consultants to see how they work, what they think is important to know about candidates, vacancies and companies. None of them read
When our IT staff hear about someone with an MCSE their immediate reaction is "Get to the back of the queue with all the others."
MCSE may have incredible brand recognition, but that works against it being useful to employers. Everyone knows about it, it's marketed as the must-have qualification, so a candidate spends the money, spends some time, and as long as they have a certain IQ level, an MCSE comes out of the 'certification' slot on the Microsoft machine. Result - millions of MCSEs.
The first thing employers care about is work experience. They can call your last employer and ask how good you were. In 30 seconds they can make a decision. The second most important facto they consider is your real tertiary qualifications.
Last and least are the one-day courses, the part-time courses, and the MCSEs.
No, the DMCA in section 1201(E) stipulates that the devices are banned if they are (a) designed to circumvent, or (b) have limited commercial purpose other than to circumvent, or (c) are marketed as circumventing a "technological measure that effectively controls access to a work".
...provide ... any ... device ... that is marketed by that person ... for use in circumventing [encrypted content access]." So my guess is, can tell you a marker pen can be used to defeat access controls on non-redbook CDs, but then I am not allowed to give you a marker pen.
The third part is important and reads "No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person's knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."
Cut out the guff not related to marker pens, and we get: "No person shall
In California I can't keep pet snails, molest butterflies or ride a bicycle in a swimming pool either.
So which is it kids? Is there a $situation1, in which case $conclusion1, or is $situation2, in which case $conclusion2?
The readership of slashdot? Inconsistent?
This may come as a complete surprise to you, but slashdot readers have independent ideas. Unlike television, or newspapers, or other forms of mass-media you may be familiar with, on slashdot you will find more than one conclusion drawn from a set of information. Even more shocking is the fact that the people drawing these conclusions are willing to express them, openly discuss alternatives and even (occasionally) change their minds when given more information.
So either go back to your cosy little BBC/ABC/MSNBC/TimeWarner world where all things are safe, sure and certain, or read through the conflicting opinions, grow a brain, and join the discussion.
https://www.panip.com/index.htm
Check it out! Quick, before they take it down.
Very weird, very confusing...
On-topic, yes, but
1. Old.
2. Out of date. Six of the OSes are not even supported anymore.
3. Unoriginal.
4. MODDED UP TO +5 FUNNY? What were you moderators thinking?
[feckin kids]
Ah, they've fixed www.bmw.com: Now I get
g .NullPointerException
JRun Servlet Error
com.livesoftware.jsp.JSPServlet:
java.lan
"....frequent security flaws in Linux and Apache. To continue the analogy, there are so many holes, it looks like a golf course."
I'd rather have a golf course (18 holes per 40 hectares) than swiss cheese (18 holes per pound).
"...Microsoft doesn't even have the concept of Root."
No, not quite true. Microsoft (Win9x at least) doesn't have the concept of any user type except root.
I wrote the article. you're almost right about never being able to see the comets again. about 10 percent of the comets found in SOHO images do not appear to be on a collision course with the sun. So there is a chance they'll make it around again.
Thanks for the informed reply! I guess I should have done my research a little better.
I do have a question however: Can we predict the orbits of the 10% of comets that SOHO finds but the sun doesn't eat?
I would guess that many of these close-encounter small objects would evaporate so much that they would soon become invisible, and the unknown amount of acceleration due to the solar wind at perihelion would make their orbits hard to predict.
If a dark comet heading out from the direction of the sun did collide with the Earth, I'm guessing the chances of a web-astronomer predicting the collision are still very low.
Sure, you get your fifteen minutes of fame, but it's only 15 minutes. All these comets are either sungrazers or sundivers.
"Nearly all the comets they find are tiny shards of rock and ice, doomed to evaporate in the sun's atmosphere days after they are spotted. "
It's not like any of these people can point up in the sky in fifty years time and say "Look Jimmy, you see that fuzzy patch of light in the sky that is about to destroy civilisation? Well I discovered it! That's Anarchofascist-Limo-Taco-9...
#include <stdio.h>r (;;){p=want;while( *p&&c()==*p++);- ;)t|=c()<<(8*x);for(x=4;x--;)l|=c ()<<(8*x);( x=l;x--;)sum +=c();; }}
FILE *F; int c(){return fgetc(F);}void s(unsigned long t){fseek(F,t,0);}
int main(int argc, char **argv){int a,x;char *want="OS/2",*p;
F=fopen(argv[1],"rb+");s(12);fo
if(!*p){unsigned long cs,l=0,t=0,sum=0;cs=ftell(F);s(cs+4);
for(x=4;x-
s(t+8);fputc(0,F);fputc(0,F);s(t);for
s(cs);for(x=4;x--;)fputc(0xff&(sum>>(x*8 )),F);exit(0);
}while(*p++)c();for(x=12;x--;)c()
/* :-)
;
> I remember a version of DeCSS in a few hundred bytes. How short can you make this one?
How about 597 bytes?
*/
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
FILE *F;
int c() {return fgetc(F);}
void s(unsigned long t) {fseek(F,t,0);}
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
int a,x;
char *want="OS/2", *p;
F=fopen(argv[1],"rb+");
s(12);
for (;;) {
p = want;
while (*p && c()==*p++)
if (!*p) {
unsigned long cs,l=0,t=0,sum=0;
cs=ftell(F); s(cs+4);
for (x=4;x--;) t|=c()<<(8*x);
for (x=4;x--;) l|=c()<<(8*x);
s(t+8); fputc(0,F); fputc(0,F);
s(t); for (x=l;x--;) sum+=c();
s(cs); for (x=4;x--;) fputc(0xff&(sum>>(x*8)),F);
exit(0);
}
while (*p++) c();
for (x=12;x--;) c();
}
}
For each bit in x,
Flip y's identical bit
Where x's bit is one.
If he wins, the legal precedent could be : "If the algorythm is simple enough to express as a haiku, it is protected speech and not a computer process."
I ran across a truly brainless website recently.
My (not quite as brainless) web site marketing guru had the bright idea of creating a "links" page and then inviting the linkees (without obligation) to return the favour. Nice idea, I thought - our link to their site costs us nothing, it helps move them up the google ratings, and if they are nice people, they will link to us. If not, who cares.
All went well, until we received one nasty email reply saying that under no circumstances would the company allow us to create a link to their site! Not their deep pages, but their home page!
(In case you are wondering, no, there were no complaints about us sending junk email, and yes, we got several return links.)
Do you think that the whole concept of dark matter is in a lot more danger now that billions of new galaxy's will come to light?
It's the density of matter in the universe that requires the existence of dark matter, not how many galaxies there are. Discovering more galaxies doesn't make any difference - we already know the visible-matter density of the universe.
Far more interesting is going to be using these pictures to work out whether the universe is full of "dark energy" which is causing the universe's expansion to accelerate.
We can't see dark energy (duuuh cos it's dark) but we can work out whether the universe is accelerating or not. It's all rather complicated, and relies on an accurate survey of the distances and speeds of very distant galaxies.
Speed is easy, that's measured from spectral red-shift. Distance is hard. Walmart don't make a tape measure 2 billion light years long, so we need a different method.
Recently, someone worked out a trick to measure the distance. Type 1 supernovae are all about the same brightness, and can be identified by their spectrum. So all we have to do is search for galaxies containing type 1 supernovae. Trouble is, you need to look at a lot of galaxies before you find a single supernova that happens to be going off at the time the photo is taken, and you need to look at a lot of supernovae before you can build up a good statistical picture.
In short, people have done this from Earth. Now they can do it from space with Hubble, looking at galaxies much further away and look at lots of them at once. Expect the controversy over whether or not the universe's expansion is accelerating to be resolved within the next 2 years.
Why, why, WHY do unoriginal direct quotes get modded up?
The scum-wad(s) who wrote the virus are responsible for its actions. Microsoft should do a better job of writing secure software, but the primary responsibility lies with the virus writer.
Who should bear responsibility, the architect who designs and builds 95% of houses in the world pre-installed with piles of oily rags, kindling and soaked in kerosene, or the pissy little vandal who finally threw one match?
Shared responsibility between Microsoft and the vandals. Obviously. But Microsoft methodically lies about how secure their products are. At least the vandal's motives are plain and honest.
can be found here
"If the user doesn't accept the terms of the GPL, the default is for copying and redistribution to be forbidden under copyright law. I had never looked at it that way before. . ."
You've never read the GPL then.
I recommend that everyone who uses GPL software read the GPL. It's not hard. It is a legal document, but it is written in plain and simple language because the authors intended it to be understood (shock! horror!). The section in question is an absolute bloody work of genius. I quote:
"You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License."
It's so beautiful, I may just cry openly.
...the high rates providers are charging in the United States. For instance, VoiceStream's highest-use consumer GPRS plan charges $39.95 a month for 10 megabytes of data transmission, plus $4.00 for each additional megabyte. This is in addition to the monthly service plan for voice calls. Cingular GPRS rates are similar.
Holey moley! You guys may have the cheapest ADSL rates in the known universe, but Europe is the place to go for GPRS. The GPRS network is already in place here, and here are the O2 rates:
US:
10 meg per month $39.95 + $4 per meg over 10
O2 Europe:
0 meg per month $2.55 + $3.50 per meg over 0
10 meg per month $17.60 + $1.8 per meg over 10
And if you really want to go mad:
50 meg per month $44.00 + $1.32 per meg over 50
That's the plan for me!