Whoever thought it would be a good idea to make a case that was more fragile than it's contents should be drawn and quartered.
If you had JCs made of something more rigid, you may get cavalier about leaving them where they can get stepped on, and then when they do break, your CD breaks too.
By using fragile JCs, you always put them where they won't get hurt.
One finds the hotbeds of psychedelic activity and the hotbeds of technical activity and finds them rather well seperated in space, and slightly seperated in time.
Yeah, because those mind-freaked hippies at Berkeley never did nuthin'.
There is a problem. I have learned that if you "innovate" for the sake of innovation, your ideas will be only useful to a few, and the good enough solution takes over.
You may want to read Worse is Better, by Richard Gabriel, a prominent Lisp hacker. It discusses this phenomenon with two examples: ITS (better) vs Unix (worse), and Scheme (better) vs Common Lisp (worse). It's part of a paper about Lisp's future (at the time; it's over 11 years old).
One of my favorite quotes from the paper: The good news is that in 1995 we will have a good operating system and programming language; the bad news is that they will be Unix and C++. He was close; it's Linux and Java.
I used to be a Wells Fargo customer in the US, and got fed up enough with their customer service to leave. I have no doubt that any disputed ATM transaction would be held up in so much red tape and department-shifting that the customer would be lucky to get so much as a status report on their claim.
This is, of course, despite the fact that Federal Reserve regulations require banks to give the customer the benefit of the doubt. (I expect that this is why WF has this policy: they have to.)
I have no doubt that, regardless of the public policy of WF, getting them to own up would be like pulling teeth.
As an aside, I anybody interested in ATM security in particular, or large-system security in general, read Why Cryptosystems Fail. It has excellent descriptions of the non-technical problems that ATM security faces. (The author discusses the technical issues in other papers, but I think that we geeks tend to forget the non-technical problems.)
Unfortunately you don't get a copy of who or what you voted for, which is one area they could improve on.
You shouldn't get such a copy. If you can prove your votes to a third party, then said third parties can start employing bribes, extortion, etc. to alter votes.
You cannot bind someone to any agreement without their consent. This is why the SG site has no fear of posting the email even though the text at the bottom says they must not disclose the contents.
This is true (AFAIK, IANAL), although they could get hit with copyright violations. (Look for the copyright FAQ.)
Last year, I used a Dremel to carve my pumpkin, and Sawsall to cut out the head-hole. I don't remember too much splash from the Dremel, but we did this in the garage and had cardboard down, so maybe I just didn't notice.
I used a cutting bit, not the router attachment. A friend used the router, and it had some clogging problems. The Dremel, not surprisingly, was in need of some serious cleaning, as was my shirt... the way I held the Dremel made all the splash fall in a straight line on my shirt. My safety goggles also had a decided orange tint afterwards.
I'm not much of an artist, so I just went with a fairly plain design that could be done with a knife just as well. But with some artistic talent, I'm sure you could do quite a bit with a Dremel. I'd say the cutting bit would be fine for broad lines, but you may need to switch to the router for fine details. I used a grinding bit to make some shading on mine too... I had to go deeper than I'd expected to get light to shine through. The shading didn't turn out very well on mine, but YMMV.
I had fun with it, and will probably use a Dremel for future carvings, but for legal reasons can't advise anybody else to try this.
Reminds me of the MIT college radio. IIRC, they aired commercials for the off-campus broadcasting, but not for the on-campus. So as filler, they had fake commercials for absurd products. And MIT can do that well.
Ah, but if only 't'were so. For the output of a computer, when given garbage, is indeed itself garbage-- but a muchly different garbage. The output often becomes so refined, and organized, and clarified, that it is often mistaken for Infallible Truth that may not be questioned.
Uhm... because the users don't have to be the ones to notice. Only the original author does. And then, bub, you're lookin' at a whole heap of trouble.
For starters, he'd likely haul you into court, where you get raked over the coals. First, they make you cut it out, possibly before they've decided whether you screwed up or not. They also can take away your warehouse stock if FireWolf is a boxed product, along with your hard drive, CD masters, and whatever else. Next, they take your money. If you've gotten rich selling FireWolf, then they take that. If you haven't yet, then they take up to $30,000-- and that's if you can convince the judge that you didn't mean to do it. But you probably can't pull that off too easily, particuarly after scrubbing all the copyright notices off the About page, docs, etc, so instead we're talking willful violation, then that's up to $150,000. Oh, yeah, plus court costs and attorney's fees.
And speaking of willful violation, once the civil court's done with you, Uncle Sam can step up to throw you in the clink. Now we're talking up to five years if it's your first time and you sold $2500 worth of FireWolf boxes, ten years if you've pulled these shenanigans before. Sure, that's not applicable if you didn't sell anything-- but then what's the point of making FireWolf? And oh, yeah, didn't you change that about box? In that case, besides what the Firefox fellas got, Uncle Sam does ya for another $4500!
Now, sure, the figures I named were maximums. You might only get hit with a civil suit for whatever you made off of FireWolf. But even then, you still haven't profited, so what's the point?
Mind you, I'm not a lawyer, and this isn't legal advice. But it'd sure be enough to keep me from wanting to pull these kinds of tricks.
Prolog! Logic languages are well suited to relational data, where a table maps to a predicate. The logic programming community spent a couple decades trying to convert everybody from SQL and nobody listened.
Funny you should mention that. I'm now working on a program that takes user queries (from a Perl program), converts them to Prolog, and finds the solutions against a SQL database.
It seems to work great, so far.
Re:SQL is good for some things, but not for others
on
An Alternative to SQL?
·
· Score: 1
both Postgres and Oracle can easily do what you want with hierarchies;
How would you do that in PostgreSQL? I have a project that needs a hierarchy lookup, but the only way I can think of is to write a recursive function.
I absolutely hate it when I have a user who says, when asking a question, "This should be a FAQ"; usually, they're the first user to ask the question. (They might mean, "This should be documented", and it often already is.)
My responses usually are "No, it's not a Frequently Asked Question; I haven't heard anybody ask that question in the three years since the program was released." (Common followups include things like, "This is specific to your workstation's particularly uncommon configuration", or the like.)
I've had one time when I said something like, "Yes, that should be frequently asked: the fact that the question was asked means that the user is thinking about the system, and the answer gives a good deal of insight into how it works and how to use it more effectively. Unfortunately, nobody else has asked it." (I proceeded to add the topic to the documentation after that.)
But when I hear somebody tell me, "This should be a FAQ", I perceive it as, "My question is one that you should have anticipated me asking, and the fact that you didn't means that your documentation is inadequate." Perhaps my documentation is indeed inadequate, and I'm fine with acknowledging that, but it takes a lot of gall to say that I should have anticipated the user's question.
Don't get me wrong: I respect the users' need for documentation. But for some reason, being told "this should be a FAQ" really gets my hackles up.
A computer is a tool like a car - just because I don't know how
to build a transmission doesn't mean I shouldn't drive.
A car is a tool for one job: driving. A computer is a tool for
lots of different jobs, some of them very complex. If people wanted a
computer to do only simple things, then we wouldn't be in this mess:
ActiveX and JavaScript-enabled email would never have come along, for
instance.
But users constantly demand more capabilities. Not without cause,
mind you, but that's not the point. The users want to be able to send
emails that make a dancing baby go along the bottom of their computer
screen. If John's computer can read the dancing-baby email but Jane's
can't, she'll want to change her software be able to read the
dancing-baby email. We gots to have the dancing baby! And that's a
normal desire for Jane to have, nothing inherently bad about it.
The problem is, it's not clear to Jane that this is unsafe. She
sees John's dancing baby. Maybe she sees that John's computer crashes
more often, but she doesn't link that to the dancing baby. Why should
she?
I'd like to be able to step into my car and tell it, "Take me to
Fry's" and off it goes. I can sit and chat with my friend while we
travel, none of this pesky watching the road. The technology to do
this is around today, but it's unsafe. Since car manufacturers take
on liability, nobody's built this car.
The vendors of computer technology are not like car vendors.
Insecurity on a computer doesn't automatically mean unsafe (that is,
it's uncommon for people to be killed by computer problems). So
technology vendors aren't liable if their products are insecure. That means that technology vendors have the freedom to develop insecure solutions to meet market demands.
Now, Theo the Technology Vendor builds a product that's secure, but
won't show the dancing baby. Bill the Technology Vendor sells a
product that's insecure, and will show the dancing baby. Of course,
Bill doesn't tell people that his product is insecure. He might not
even know it. So who does Jane get her technology from? (Followup:
who now has money to develop and market the next product?)
I'm not saying it's the users' fault. I'm not saying it's the
vendors' fault. That's a losing game: the vendors point the finger at
the users, the users point the finger at the vendors, and all anybody
gets is the finger. I'm simply saying that, as long as users demand
complex capabilities, and vendors provide them without regard to
security, the situation will not be resolved.
I just now went to the web page, entered my zip and email address, and immediately got an email with my senators' names and phone numbers. I called each of them, a staffer answered. I gave them my name, told them that I'm a constituent and that I oppose the INDUCE Act. One of them asked for my zip code. Both were quite polite, and the entire process-- from going to the web page to posting this-- took about 5-10 minutes.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoever thought it would be a good idea to make a case that was more fragile than it's contents should be drawn and quartered.
If you had JCs made of something more rigid, you may get cavalier about leaving them where they can get stepped on, and then when they do break, your CD breaks too.
By using fragile JCs, you always put them where they won't get hurt.
Wow you must be like 12 years old.
Yeah, I was thinking that I remember using a CD-ROM drive that used caddys when I was like 22.
Of course, this has more to do with how long I go between hardware upgrades than anything else.
That would seem to contradict your assertion that the two groups are well-separated in space.
One finds the hotbeds of psychedelic activity and the hotbeds of technical activity and finds them rather well seperated in space, and slightly seperated in time.
Yeah, because those mind-freaked hippies at Berkeley never did nuthin'.
There is a problem. I have learned that if you "innovate" for the sake of innovation, your ideas will be only useful to a few, and the good enough solution takes over.
You may want to read Worse is Better, by Richard Gabriel, a prominent Lisp hacker. It discusses this phenomenon with two examples: ITS (better) vs Unix (worse), and Scheme (better) vs Common Lisp (worse). It's part of a paper about Lisp's future (at the time; it's over 11 years old).
One of my favorite quotes from the paper: The good news is that in 1995 we will have a good operating system and programming language; the bad news is that they will be Unix and C++. He was close; it's Linux and Java.
I used to be a Wells Fargo customer in the US, and got fed up enough with their customer service to leave. I have no doubt that any disputed ATM transaction would be held up in so much red tape and department-shifting that the customer would be lucky to get so much as a status report on their claim.
This is, of course, despite the fact that Federal Reserve regulations require banks to give the customer the benefit of the doubt. (I expect that this is why WF has this policy: they have to.)
I have no doubt that, regardless of the public policy of WF, getting them to own up would be like pulling teeth.
As an aside, I anybody interested in ATM security in particular, or large-system security in general, read Why Cryptosystems Fail. It has excellent descriptions of the non-technical problems that ATM security faces. (The author discusses the technical issues in other papers, but I think that we geeks tend to forget the non-technical problems.)
OTOH, they can't understand how I can work with ratpoison, screen, mutt and vi, either.
I don't either. I mean, come on, why the dependence on the GUI? Ditch that ratpoison and work in console mode under screen.
Unfortunately you don't get a copy of who or what you voted for, which is one area they could improve on.
You shouldn't get such a copy. If you can prove your votes to a third party, then said third parties can start employing bribes, extortion, etc. to alter votes.
Why not just run a Lisp Machine and be done with it?
I don't remember ZetaLisp having call/cc, and I'm sure that ANSI CL doesn't.
Yeah, my last grilf drew a cool caricature of me as a Tolkienesque dwarf.
You cannot bind someone to any agreement without their consent. This is why the SG site has no fear of posting the email even though the text at the bottom says they must not disclose the contents.
This is true (AFAIK, IANAL), although they could get hit with copyright violations. (Look for the copyright FAQ.)
Last year, I used a Dremel to carve my pumpkin, and Sawsall to cut out the head-hole. I don't remember too much splash from the Dremel, but we did this in the garage and had cardboard down, so maybe I just didn't notice.
I used a cutting bit, not the router attachment. A friend used the router, and it had some clogging problems. The Dremel, not surprisingly, was in need of some serious cleaning, as was my shirt... the way I held the Dremel made all the splash fall in a straight line on my shirt. My safety goggles also had a decided orange tint afterwards.
I'm not much of an artist, so I just went with a fairly plain design that could be done with a knife just as well. But with some artistic talent, I'm sure you could do quite a bit with a Dremel. I'd say the cutting bit would be fine for broad lines, but you may need to switch to the router for fine details. I used a grinding bit to make some shading on mine too... I had to go deeper than I'd expected to get light to shine through. The shading didn't turn out very well on mine, but YMMV.
I had fun with it, and will probably use a Dremel for future carvings, but for legal reasons can't advise anybody else to try this.
Pics on my home box, please be kind.
He needs to condition his sound a bit, just a high pass filter. There's a nasty bass hum in it.
What did you expect? I mean, it's lineinterference.com, for pete's sake!
Reminds me of the MIT college radio. IIRC, they aired commercials for the off-campus broadcasting, but not for the on-campus. So as filler, they had fake commercials for absurd products. And MIT can do that well.
garbage in = garbage out
Ah, but if only 't'were so. For the output of a computer, when given garbage, is indeed itself garbage-- but a muchly different garbage. The output often becomes so refined, and organized, and clarified, that it is often mistaken for Infallible Truth that may not be questioned.
Uhm... because the users don't have to be the ones to notice. Only the original author does. And then, bub, you're lookin' at a whole heap of trouble.
For starters, he'd likely haul you into court, where you get raked over the coals. First, they make you cut it out, possibly before they've decided whether you screwed up or not. They also can take away your warehouse stock if FireWolf is a boxed product, along with your hard drive, CD masters, and whatever else. Next, they take your money. If you've gotten rich selling FireWolf, then they take that. If you haven't yet, then they take up to $30,000-- and that's if you can convince the judge that you didn't mean to do it. But you probably can't pull that off too easily, particuarly after scrubbing all the copyright notices off the About page, docs, etc, so instead we're talking willful violation, then that's up to $150,000. Oh, yeah, plus court costs and attorney's fees.
And speaking of willful violation, once the civil court's done with you, Uncle Sam can step up to throw you in the clink. Now we're talking up to five years if it's your first time and you sold $2500 worth of FireWolf boxes, ten years if you've pulled these shenanigans before. Sure, that's not applicable if you didn't sell anything-- but then what's the point of making FireWolf? And oh, yeah, didn't you change that about box? In that case, besides what the Firefox fellas got, Uncle Sam does ya for another $4500!
Now, sure, the figures I named were maximums. You might only get hit with a civil suit for whatever you made off of FireWolf. But even then, you still haven't profited, so what's the point?
Mind you, I'm not a lawyer, and this isn't legal advice. But it'd sure be enough to keep me from wanting to pull these kinds of tricks.
The best-documented federal seizure of HDDs that I know of (it's referred to in many court cases) is the Secret Service's raid on Steve Jackson Games.
IRC the EU "constitution" has a non-binding 4th ammendment clause.
So does the US.
Prolog! Logic languages are well suited to relational data, where a table maps to a predicate. The logic programming community spent a couple decades trying to convert everybody from SQL and nobody listened.
Funny you should mention that. I'm now working on a program that takes user queries (from a Perl program), converts them to Prolog, and finds the solutions against a SQL database.
It seems to work great, so far.
both Postgres and Oracle can easily do what you want with hierarchies;
How would you do that in PostgreSQL? I have a project that needs a hierarchy lookup, but the only way I can think of is to write a recursive function.
How do you volunteer as a sysadmin for a day? Is there some sort of clearing-house for these things, or do you know somebody at the charity, or what?
I think it'd be great to do... using my talents to help charity in an effective manner.
I absolutely hate it when I have a user who says, when asking a question, "This should be a FAQ"; usually, they're the first user to ask the question. (They might mean, "This should be documented", and it often already is.)
My responses usually are "No, it's not a Frequently Asked Question; I haven't heard anybody ask that question in the three years since the program was released." (Common followups include things like, "This is specific to your workstation's particularly uncommon configuration", or the like.)
I've had one time when I said something like, "Yes, that should be frequently asked: the fact that the question was asked means that the user is thinking about the system, and the answer gives a good deal of insight into how it works and how to use it more effectively. Unfortunately, nobody else has asked it." (I proceeded to add the topic to the documentation after that.)
But when I hear somebody tell me, "This should be a FAQ", I perceive it as, "My question is one that you should have anticipated me asking, and the fact that you didn't means that your documentation is inadequate." Perhaps my documentation is indeed inadequate, and I'm fine with acknowledging that, but it takes a lot of gall to say that I should have anticipated the user's question.
Don't get me wrong: I respect the users' need for documentation. But for some reason, being told "this should be a FAQ" really gets my hackles up.
Look at the NANOG archives from around the time of the original SiteFinder debacle. There's a patch. Paul doesn't like it, but he wrote it anyway.
A computer is a tool like a car - just because I don't know how to build a transmission doesn't mean I shouldn't drive.
A car is a tool for one job: driving. A computer is a tool for lots of different jobs, some of them very complex. If people wanted a computer to do only simple things, then we wouldn't be in this mess: ActiveX and JavaScript-enabled email would never have come along, for instance.
But users constantly demand more capabilities. Not without cause, mind you, but that's not the point. The users want to be able to send emails that make a dancing baby go along the bottom of their computer screen. If John's computer can read the dancing-baby email but Jane's can't, she'll want to change her software be able to read the dancing-baby email. We gots to have the dancing baby! And that's a normal desire for Jane to have, nothing inherently bad about it.
The problem is, it's not clear to Jane that this is unsafe. She sees John's dancing baby. Maybe she sees that John's computer crashes more often, but she doesn't link that to the dancing baby. Why should she?
I'd like to be able to step into my car and tell it, "Take me to Fry's" and off it goes. I can sit and chat with my friend while we travel, none of this pesky watching the road. The technology to do this is around today, but it's unsafe. Since car manufacturers take on liability, nobody's built this car.
The vendors of computer technology are not like car vendors. Insecurity on a computer doesn't automatically mean unsafe (that is, it's uncommon for people to be killed by computer problems). So technology vendors aren't liable if their products are insecure. That means that technology vendors have the freedom to develop insecure solutions to meet market demands.
Now, Theo the Technology Vendor builds a product that's secure, but won't show the dancing baby. Bill the Technology Vendor sells a product that's insecure, and will show the dancing baby. Of course, Bill doesn't tell people that his product is insecure. He might not even know it. So who does Jane get her technology from? (Followup: who now has money to develop and market the next product?)
I'm not saying it's the users' fault. I'm not saying it's the vendors' fault. That's a losing game: the vendors point the finger at the users, the users point the finger at the vendors, and all anybody gets is the finger. I'm simply saying that, as long as users demand complex capabilities, and vendors provide them without regard to security, the situation will not be resolved.
I just now went to the web page, entered my zip and email address, and immediately got an email with my senators' names and phone numbers. I called each of them, a staffer answered. I gave them my name, told them that I'm a constituent and that I oppose the INDUCE Act. One of them asked for my zip code. Both were quite polite, and the entire process-- from going to the web page to posting this-- took about 5-10 minutes.