No, but I'm betting the usefulness of Google outweights (if it doesn't now, it will in the future, and people will vote to make that law, and I don't believe it can be challenged on a constitional basis) the legal right of the individual's right to privacy, especially as Google will remove personal information from their cache if you ask them too.
Was it illegal without caching? You come up put in a list of words, it says, here is a list of URL's that you might be interested in?
No copyright violation, they didn't copy any bits (anymore then me downloading a web page is a violation). Why is the automation different then a human doing it? I've don't see the difference, but that's because I'm a tech head. Would it be different for the original Yahoo, when it was done the old fashioned way where each page was viewed and classified by a human (the links we're harvested automatically, but each page was classified by a human into a category)?
They didn't republish it, they merely said, these are the ones you might be the most interested in. They are providing a service, would that be illegal? No content, no context, just the IP address of the server, and the name of the virtual host so you can go crawl the content by hand. Not even a direct URL. Is that illegal? Why is it? What legal princepal is that founded on?
Last time I checked, corporations didn't have a right to privacy (you sound more legally knowledgeable then I am, so educate me). I'm not sure citizens have an iron clad right to privacy (they have the 4th amendment, but I'm not sure that covers anything but the gov't doing the searching), but it's generally considered a personal right by the courts to help ensure saftey and order in society.
There are well established princepals on the internet for saying, you can't come here. They are implemented by the server in any of a variety of ways. Putting up a website implicitly states, you are allowed to be here. The robots.txt is the equivilent of being polite. Anybody who doesn't follow it might get reported to their ISP, sorta like reporting a noisy tenet out to the landlord. If they had some form of authentication, that is a clear sign they don't want me there. If they dropped my packets, they didn't want me there. Posting something on a public site is just like your garbage to me. It's out in the public, I can search it, if you don't like that don't leave it on the curb where anybody can just walk up to it. It's like leaving evidence in plain sight of a cop. It's right there, for any asshole to see, don't be surprised if it shows up in a court of law and it's legal as evidence. In my world websites are a public garbage can.
If a cop showed up in court and said well, I put in his name into google and out popped his web page posted to the web site that has his digital signature on a complete confession, you are saying that might end up being throw out of court? I'd be interested to see that argued in court, not saying I know what will happen, but it'd be interesting to see the legal concepts behind that play out.
I'm playing somewhat devils advocate here. To a degree, I think your right, that privacy as we know it will disappear. Get over it, it's already long past happened. I can virtually gaurantee that the CIA, DoD, and the FBI have a file on you. They have collected where you live, they know where you've worked, they know all kinds of stuff about you. I know for a fact I've had it done. I hang out with a guy whose got enough clearance that they do a background check on everyone he calls. I know they have a file on me. It says, "Mostly harmless", but the did check me out.
I agree with you to an extent, that it should be something that limits and guidelines, but that's different then saying it's completely and utterly illegal, but I believe that a lot of corporations play the game to their own benefit, they are attempting to hide the facts from the customer, and that automation, and getting the right to process the data using tec
Handy to say, I won't give you the full argument, so I won't bother defending my concept. I'll have to remember that in the future as a complete and utter cop out to I can't present an idea, or defend it. (This is me baiting you into a reply...:-).
Using your logic google should be illegal. You can find out a lot about people using google. It's a complete and utter invasion of privacy, it should be closed. I think you'll find people completely disagree with you.
However, I would say that Amazon selling their customer list is different then me assembling lists of information off the web. I give Amazon my information, and they have a privacy policy, I expect them to follow it. I have to give my address to get something shipped to me. I don't have any other choices. Amazon is collecting private personal information from me that I have no alternative other then not do business with them. Information on the web is available to anyone, I'm not attempting to hide it, if I was it wouldn't be on the public web. If someone else posted it about my private life that they shouldn't be, I can send them a C&D letter about invading my privacy.
The screen scrapers however, are collecting publically available information. Just like if someone decided to mail me on the basis of looking up my name in the telephone book, I can't object to that. I can object if I ask them nicely to stop sending me mail, or calling me, but it's not like can I say you can't use the phone book to lookup my number to contact me.
Spammers who collect e-mail addresses I see as more of a nuciense, but I'm very protective of my e-mail address so it's less of a problem for me. However, my e-mail address is google'able, and you can find it out on the web. I'd be supportive of anti-spamming laws, because they are using public information to electronically do the equivilent of stalking, or repetative time wasting phone calls. Just like I can get a court order for some crazy person who follows me, I'd like to be able to get one for spammers to say look, stop it. I can't stop people who access publically available information. Now there are some things no one should be posting on the web, that'd be a personal privacy issue. However, airline tickets isn't one of them.
I've seen a lot of companies intentionally do things, just so the only way to gather information is thru an automated system. They don't present the information in a simple easy to use form, just raise the bar of entry. Just like companies who will only give you a 100 page invoice on paper. They won't give it to you in an electronic format. However, you can lookup individual line items one at a time on the web. In a lot of cases, they are doing that to customers who own the information, but they just don't want the customer to be able to figure it out. Stuff like only telling you the prices one at a time over the phone. They do this to make it impossible for someone to verify they are being billed correctly. I've done work in this area, trust me, companies don't want you to be able to double check them to realize how badly they have screwed up. I firmly believe that technology should be usable in such cases. I some what seem this case in that vein of keeping big companies honest.
Technology solves these problems. It empowers people to optimize problems, and save money, generate more profit, hire more people. Established corporations don't want anyone to do that, so they put up silly rules to govern how you can get the information that is yours from them. It's silly.
I don't know, he was the guy doing all of the coolest research in computer science at the time. He wrote the two books that everyone I know used for Operating Systems (at a variety of Universities), he wrote the Theory one, Design and Implementation one, he also wrote the Distributed OS book was used in senior courses, shit even Linus wanted him to sign a copy of his book. Showed up at his office when he was in Andy Tanenbaum's home country, but alas Andy wasn't there.
In Academic circles at the time, he in fact was one of the leading OS people on the planet. If you'd like to suggest he isn't, besides being just wrong about Micro Kernels (which a lot of people we're wrong about it, however, a lot of very cool, very stable OS's are based on the princepal, including the kind that go in medical equipment like QNX), what else didn't he do that would have made him one? He wrote the books everyone reads to learn about the foundations of OS theory. Okay he might not have been a leading expert, maybe only expert, but he sure as hell was a big name for an undergrad who'd never done shit (at that point) to stand up to, and say your an idiot on Usenet news.
Hmmm, I'm going to assume your being sarcastic, but if you aren't, and you truely believe Linus isn't his own person, and doesn't have his own opinions, you've never read Linus in the middle of his own flame wars. If you want a really good one, just look up the one he had with a Professor Tanenbaum, one of the leading authorities on Operating Systems back in 1990 or 1991. Definitely has is own opinions, not afraid to tell you what he really thinks.
The problem is that, you don't have a signed contract with ISP B. If you are an ISP you have a signed contract with the people who connect you to the rest of the internet, and a signed contract with the customers. Those are the only people whom you can bill. Now you can sue ISP B for damages, but you what if they aren't within a jurisdiction you stand a chance of getting the money from?
Now the people you peer (epecially whoever gives you your upstream feed), are the only ones who can really solve the problem. Even if the ISP drops the packets on the floor at the border router, my guess is their peer will want to charge them for it because they paid for the transit of it all the way across thier network to get it to you, only to have it drop on the floor, it still cost your peer to get it to you, so now they are eating the cost, because they paid their peer for it.
The Internet is a really rough arrangement. Because there's no central authority (which is part of the beauty). The problem with attempting to bill ISP XYZ for originating traffic is, then you create two kinds of networks. Those that have a billing arragements between all the parties, and those that don't. Being the first one onto the billing arragments network is the kiss of death unless your UUNet. That transition would be harder then from IPv4 to IPv6.
About the only way to get this cleared up is to get the bill recinded up the food chain until you hit Tier 1 provider. They'd have to eat the bill, and forward it on to everyone as an amortized tax on everyone to connect to them, because they have to eat the "expense". Which means it'd spread out evenly, but the cost of service would go up because of these idiots. Notice how all this sounds remarkable similar to car insurance, everyone has to pay into the system to cover the costs of the minority that run up huge bills. Same deal.
The other problem is that you talk about ISP B that initiated the attack, from what I can tell, that'd be 150 ISP's if the "attack" is from Slashdot. It could have been from a lot more sites if it was slammer. So ISP B might be hundreds or thousands of different entities.
Yes they are all IBM servers, redundant power supplies all the way, 2 way Xeon processors, but the SCSI subsystem is external cases of off the shelf SCSI LVD drives (mirrored on different controllers, on in different external cases, and redundant power supplied). We had a home made machine, that was more reliable, and caused a lot fewer headaches then this "enterprise class" server we bought from IBM. Just rebooting them causes a series of cascading BIOS errors, which cause the ServeRAID cards to come up, and believe they've lost their configuration, which means if it actually boots, you lose all your mirrors. Followed by the fact that on a top of the line IBM card, you can't get more then 30MB/sec to the platters while resync'ing the mirrors under Linux (I called IBM, they said sounds about right to us). They are nice, very fast machines, and it impresses people to see them. The BIOS, and the tempermental SCSI cards make them a royal pain in the ass every time you reboot. We don't do it often, but just what you want is an hour long problem right after an unexpected reboot. Yeah, makes my day.
We have a pair of redundant ServeRAID 4 cards, that have 64MB of battery backed up RAM. Unfortuantly, I can't specify that control how much of that is used for what. A good RAM Disk that I could tune specifically for my environment would be much better then the caching that the ServeRAID cards do.
Want to know why Oracle is the world's fastest database? Because it gives you an incredible amount of flexibility to tailor your solution to your problem. If I could dedicate 1GB of RAM to the problem, I'd easily triple the speed of my thru put. No problem.
That's true. I felt like giving up on my post before I got to covering that subject. Async I/O is in most (all?) Unices. The other way to handle that case is to use threads if kernel threads are supported on the O/S. Most people I know generally don't use Async I/O, because it's much harder to use, and it's harder to successfully organize your programs so it works out very well for you. Just one of those things.
No I don't believe battery backed up RAM will be the standard RAM in a machine. However, I won't be surprised to see cards come out that have that (any high end SCSI card has it now). I wouldn't be surprised at all to see servers released with 128MB of battery backed up RAM at all. They are what makes high end SAN's and Network Storage work now. It'll migrate to lower end systems.
There was a story about exactly that type of card sold by a company on slashdot. Google for them, they aren't that hard to find.
They will become a standard component in machines when the time is right. I'd pay $1,000 for a 512MB one every day of the week if it had a driver under linux that made it look like a block device that was reliable. No questions asked. Having a pair of those and putting a copy of Oracle's Redo logs on them would probably double the speed of my Oracle database, and I just paid $15K to have 3 guys come in and get me a 20% increase in speed. No questions asked, I'd pay for one. If you could make a pair of highly reliable versions of those, I bet I could sell $1 million dollars at 80% profit of them in less then 3 months as soon as word got out about what they can do for Database and filesystem performance. I don't have the personal capital to do so, or the technical skills to pull it off. I'm a programmer. Just as soon as I figured it out, somebody in Taiwan would put me out of business in a week, because that is the land of faster, better, cheaper for computer components.
High end, permanent storage that has no seek time, will become a standard feature on highend servers just as soon as journalling filesystems become capable of putting them on seperate devices. Right now ext3 can do that. I'm not sure about the others. Right now the only other real use is for Oracle Database. Everyones current opinion is just throw more disks at it. It's cute, but someday they'll figure out that it's highly cost effective to do have filesystems that do lots of fsync's on a SRAM based filesystem. It's just another layer of caching, but the caching is permanent storage.
Eventually, they'll become incredible cheap. Battery backed up ram or SRAM isn't that expensive, and in volumne it would come down. Its a lot more useful then those damn USB drives that hold 64MB of data. Those things sell in volume. I'm not sure they'll be built into the motherboard, but I'd be surprised if they aren't available for sale within 2 years as an expansion card.
A lot of mission critical applications block on writes. Take a look at a mail server, or a database server. They call fsync an a lot. You don't want that fsync call to return until after the data is written to the filesystem. So it's good for thruput on those systems to ensure the system queues writes that are being waited on by fsync get done really soon now. So seeking directly to where they need to go to write is important for performance.
The other problem is that all applications block on reads. So when an application wants to read, it can't do anything else until the blocks are read off disk. So there is contention to get reads done quickly. As a general rule another read is going to happen very soon very near that, it might be earlier, it might be later. Linus proposed an interesting optimization to this at on the LKML suggesting that you create an mmap call that says, I'm interested in this page of this file, please start putting it here. Then go off and do other work, and when you access that page, if it isn't yet loaded from disk, the pointer access blocks until it is available. Then these types of reads are less pressing the reads which are blocking progress of a process.
The reason most people changed the scheduler is because it is faster for a known workload that is important. So they got tweaked out. Buffering a full write cycle is easy, but the fsync means some writes are more important then others. Reads are almost always blocking a process. So seeking is important. Now throw mirrors into the mix. Where having two copies means you can have two independant heads searching the same information. Oh, but they have to sync everytime there is a write.
The other thing is that prior to the Linux 2.5 kernel, Linux had spent all it's time assuming that a disk had no C/H/S, it was a big flat row of sectors. It explicitly ignored the C/H/S for filesystems and disk head algorithms. 2.5 is supposed to introduce the concept of a spindle, and spindles to have C/H/S, and then they can be optimized for.
Now remember that most of write concerns will become unimportant as soon as battery backed up becomes a standard part of every computer. Then what will happen, is everyone will run journaling filesystems where the journal is stored on the battery backed up RAM (so there are no seeks for writes), then you only queue writes when there is pressure on the battery backed up ram, and try and do reads as fast as possible. When the battery backed up ram is nearly full, you start from the inside moving outside, writting every track as you go. Then you can use n-way mirriors to speed up reads.
Let me say that again. Id doesn't sell games any more. They sell game engines. Specifically they sell 3d FPS type game engines. Technically, I suppose you could base a RPG off their engines, but that's not very interesting.
Basically, Id makes a high quality game, releases it, causes an upgrade cycle on hardware. This creates new level of quality that is expected in terms of graphics. The game isn't supposed to be great, grand and glorious as nearly as I can tell. It's supposed to be visually stunning, and cause a commotion in the gaming industry, so people will license the new game engine and do much cooler more innovative things with it. I've lost track of who uses whose gaming engine, but my guess is that Id makes at least as much money off the licensing of the gaming engines as they do off the titles they actually sell any more.
They create games that force upgrades because it establishes a new plateau for games, and creates demand for their true product, game engines. This works because everybody knows that Id has the best engines, that are the most reliable, and after they see the wicked "demo game" Id's come out with, they all to play games like it.
Hmmm, I'm clever enough to know, that every 17 year old that has an opinion doesn't rate a musical genius able to differentiate between wonderful music, and not. If that makes me pretensious, I'll get over it. I'm also clever enough to recognize people refuse to like anything that is popular in pop culture because they have conformed, and it means they are doomed to grow up to be like their parents.
That terrifies them, so no conforming for them. Nothing on the radio could be good, otherwise that means that you might have heard good music. They turn music into an obscurity contest. Well, "I heard this band once, if formed in my basement for 3 hours and broke up at the end of the jam session they made the best music ever". "Yeah well I heard this dinky little band over here that did this". It becomes a contest, and the really funny part is that music is completely subjective. Good music is completely subjective. Completely!
It's the same behaviour I've seen out of people who attempt to map meanings onto poems. My favorite was the class that finally broke down and wrote to R. Frost requesting that he settle the meaning of a poem he wrote. They'd debated it for weeks in class, building up metaphors, allegories, hidden meanings, subtle puns, dualities, and paradoxes. You know what his response was. What I meant was this: (which was followed by a copy of the poem). I think people turn all forms of art into a contests of who can be the better beholder, instead of realizing that the beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
There are a lot of extremely intelligent musically inclined people out there, and I respect their opinion. However, a lot of the people who pass judgement on popular music have never picked up an instrument, have never written music, have never played live in front of people, have never done anything that would give them any insight into what is and isn't good music.
Kirby
Re:Wear & tear is the beauty in this concept
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Barebones Notebook
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Yes, and no. Wear and tear is a lot of why it doesn't achieve critical mass, they break down way to easily. In fact, I'd conjecture that cheap desktops, and fast internet everywhere, are why a lot of people I know don't have laptops. Most of them just spend $300 put a machine together, and put it everywhere they would want a computer. One in the living room. One in the bedroom. One at a friend's house (I have several computers at other peoples houses to make LAN parties easy).
Laptops are nice, but they will never be as cheap as regular desktops due to space, heat and power consumption constraints. The wear and tear, and high replacement parts is what drives people to desktops. They aren't as fast. They can't store as much, you can't put as much RAM in them. They can't do a lot of things a good PC can. Now if they become terminals to bigger faster stationary equipment, now your talking. Then, I'm still not building my own, all I need is one with a good screen, a good video card, and a decent keyboard, nothing else matters on a terminal.
If laptops became extemely common, I could see a vicious cycle of increased sales, which increased production volume, which lowered prices, which increases sales. I don't see a way to transition to there as long as desktop PC's are a cheap as they are. A good laptop is also a lot harder to put together, especially out of commodity parts. Running cabling the right way, and using thin bundled cables instead of ribbon cables is a good idea. Having fans that turn on at the right tempatures, and blow on the right parts is critical. Getting the LCD cable snaked thru is important. Getting the tension right on the hinges. Ensuring that the screen didn't weight too much to put too much stress on the plastic while sitting open. A dozen little things. It'd be simpiler then having DIY car's, but I'm not sure there is that much public interest in it. Most people simply don't need laptops. I've never needed one. I don't travel, and when I want a computer there is one handy. I can't use one in my car while I'm driving, and most other locations I go that don't have a computer, I'm going there to get away from my computers!
If buying in bulk was really all there was to the price, I wouldn't be able to build a machine cheaper then Dell. As a general rule, I normally can (I haven't tried lately so maybe I can't). The difference is in who does the labor. The really big savings is that you get no labor, and you get no replacement parts, you get no support. So build your own can be cheaper if the bulk parts discount, doesn't overcome the labor/support issues.
I wouldn't build my own laptop, just because laptops are touchy little beasties. Heat and airflow are really important. Docking stations, and port replicators are nice. Not to mention the wear and tear due to abuse, and move moving parts (the hinges on the screen), and the various clips that I wouldn't get the right kind for, especailly not if I'm buying on the cheap. Batteries and removable parts are a problem. Power consumption, and LCD quality. Just lots of little issues that I wouldn't get right, that Dell would.
A good spammer isn't in the business of selling pills/porn/stocks or whatever you get spam for (ink refills, Nigerian banking). They are in the business of selling advertizing services. They go find someone who sells stocks/porn/pills, and says, hey look, I can put you in contact with 60 Million people, I'll do that for $25 per 100,000 people, which you should be able to sell 10 units per 100K, and cover the $25 expense. Just let me know how many people you want to get in contact with. They get in contact with the people, and take the sellers money. Notice, that the spammer isn't the same person as the guy who fills the orders. He's just the guy with some servers, and a big ass list of e-mail addresses. He doesn't know anything about how to make your penis longer.
So as long as there is someone out there, who thinks he can make money by utilizing a spammer, especially when they see how successful spammers are. They'll think that everyone who deals with the spammer gets rich. No the spammer gets rich, everybody else gets screwed. Spammers can exist long after spamming stops working, if they convince people with crap to sell, that it still works. People are stupid. Con artists don't believe they can get con'ed. It's a big game. Spammer's will take advantage of anyone who wants to make an easy buck. Just like guys with pills will take advantage of people who want bigger dicks.
Actually that's not true. I'll conjecture that Spam isn't an effective means of advertising right now. For a spammer, all they need to do is convince the people whom they are spamming on behalf of that it is a viable means of advertising.
That is to say, if everyone in the world stopped buying anything off a spam list they've gotten, it might not put a stop to spammers. If the spammer could convince a small business person that getting in contact with 60Million e-mail addresses could sell 5000 units of their product, the spammer wins. Especially, if the spammers deal isn't contigent on the actual units sold.
Now, that being said, I don't believe that everyone has stopped buying off spam lists. It'd certainly help. I'm not sure it'd be the end of the problem.
He did change what he liked to listen to. However, the music he couldn't stand the day it came out, was cool 5 years later. Because 5 years later it wasn't played on the radio. I still say that a lot of people whom say "the stuff they play on the radio is preprocessed crap", are attempting to be rebels, and act condescending to the people they know who listen to the radio. It's my theory, and I'm sticking to it.
Curious, some of the biggest music fans I know didn't like any of U2's new ablums. I've known this guy 10 years. When I first met him he loved all of their older music, but anything that came out that was new was stupid. Now some of the same music that he used to call mainstream sellout crap, is the music he likes from them. I've pointed this out to him, and he's conceded that it's true.
A lot of people don't like anything that gets radio play, because that's the crap that people listen to. I think a lot of people don't like anything that's on the radio, because then they get to act like experts, and play along like they understand the something about music other people don't. For the most part, most people don't have an inner genius that conveys more information about high quality music then the rest of the general public. I stopped listening to the 5 years ago, and I have about 20 CD's that I can happily listen to for extended periods of time. I'm not big into music, but I laugh at the pretensious people who act like they know more about music then the general public, because they've decided they know more.... *grin*
Okay, that falls into the blindness plus other disability category. However, the original questioner has in fact said that these are mearly people who are behind. Because they have chronic absenteeism, got pregnant, or have behavioral problems. They are alternative students for some reason that isn't a disability (okay it might be an undiagnosed disability) from the original posters responses, that's who they are. They aren't people who are dyslexic or blind for the most part from his own description of the target audience.
If he wants it for blind or disabled people I understand. However, this sounds distinctly like a case of, "we should use technology to replace teachers, because technology is the solution to all problems". This sounds like well a computer program that costs $500, plus a $400 computer, and some electricity, and we'll be able to teach all those alternative students without devoting the extra resources to them they need. Most alternative students need actual honest to god real help, from a real person, who'll devote time to them. They don't need to spend more time in front of a frustrating cold unfeeling machine. Teaching is an art. I've done it before at various levels in math and computer science. It absolutely can't be duplicated by a computer under any circumstances.
Child Porn is a serious crime, but state gov'ts are now making it the ISP's job to block it. Here's the link to the slashdot story on the subject. A common carrier is supposed to carry the data from one end to the there, passing no judgement on it (at least that was how it was explained to me). This gives you liability from lawsuits for carring such things.
While I can report that it exists to the FBI, I'm doubting the FBI had jursdiction where it's hosted to pull the plug most of the time.
Not sure that wire tapping laws cover network traffic (some judge will probably extend them to it, because they are analogous to phone lines). I thought the federal regulations on phone companies carried thru from the owner of the phone lines all the way down to last mile, it was just part of the deal about being a common carrier and a phone company. I thought that wire tapping laws are about individuals taping your phone lines, or government agencies, not about the owners of the physical wire monitoring them. I'm not up enough on my legal stuff. Clearly you're better informed then I am.
I thought common carrier status got you a legal get away free card for the content you carried. The liability was carried by the person who put the content on at the other end, not by the actual carrier of the content. All the weirdo local decency standards and suing ISP's for not blocking offensive content led me to believe they aren't common carriers.
Damn, and I've got mod points to mod you up, but alas I've already posted.
ISP's as far as I know, don't have legal precedence for common carrier status. That's why they can be found liable for content at the other end of the wire, and why they have to block kiddy porn if the court rules that they violate local decency standards.
Most Universities have it in the TOS they own everything on the wires, and harddrives period. It's theirs they own it. You might not have signed it, but you implicitly agree to it everytime you log into a machine they own specifying that if you don't like the terms of service posted here, disconnect from the network now. Just like every lab at my school had the rules posted when you walked in so you could read the terms of service. I never lived in the dorms, but as a general rule the guys I know got handed the terms of service, and told that you agreed to it.
Phone companies do have common carrier status, and they are a government regulated monopoly. As a general rule you can only get phone service from one company so the government steps in to offer protection. That's why they can't just willie nilly record your conversations. ISP's as far as I know have no such government oversight, and have no such restrictions (I could easily be wrong on this point).
Uhhh, you didn't read the TOS on your Univeristy Network did you? They should have given you one, they generally include a clause that they have the right to monitor every bit you save on a harddrive they own, and every bit you send over the wires they own.
Now a public phone company doesn't have that right, because it's not in their TOS, and if they put it in their TOS, somebody would fight it as being an illegal invasion of privacy. The Internet, and a University network at large aren't seen as a common enough utility, that is necessary for living in the current society to warrent those kinds of protections yet. At some point the Internet might get that kind of protection. However, given the proliferation of networks, my guess is that it will be a market driven thing. Phone companies are monopolies, so they have a lot more regulation then a University network ever will, because you can always get network access from a dozen other places if you don't like the terms of service the University has. A University is also a lot like a place of business. My company has the right to monitor everything I do on their equipment. All their wires, all their harddrives are fair game for them to search. It's a term of my employment. They also own all of the things I do on their computers that's in my IP agreement. They also can restrict my free speech because I signed an NDA agreeing that as a term of my employment, I can't talk about certain areas of expertise I have to other companies.
Technically, you don't need his permission to do record his conversation, you just have to tell him you are doing it (it's subtle, but there's a difference, he doesn't have to concede it's okay, he merely has to hear you say it's the case). If he continues to use the phone, I don't believe there is anything illegal about it.
Blindness is about the only thing reason I'd accept a person being unable to read within several grade levels of their current age. Unless they have some disability, or physical impairment I don't believe that they should work around the fact that they can't read well.
This isn't like giving a person with no hands an artifical set of hands, this is like someone who lacks motor control to not work at using their hands, and instead teaching them to use their feet in place of their hands.
Schools aren't there to teach you what you have a natural aptitude for, they are there to teach you a specific set of things. If your good at math, you'll pick that up speedily when you can read the book on your own. So you don't need a computer to learn mathematics. No computer can teach you anything that a book can't. A teacher can teach you all sorts of things computers can't. These schools need to realize that teaching the student to read is the path to success. There is no other way to get there. They have to be able to read. Sorry, teaching them more math isn't the answer. Teaching them to read is.
What happens when they reach a level of mathematics they can't find on the web? What happens when they graduate or drop out of school and no longer have access to the computer program they are dependant on to learn? A school that creates a person who is dependant on the verbal form is a bad idea? What is it that makes you think that verbalizing it will make it any easier for them. Most of the reason you can't read at a high enough level is about vocabulary and idioms of the language, and just not enough time spent reading. Do you think speaking them out loud will make them simpiler. No, you have to construct the material so they'd be able to read it anyways. At which point, they can read it, not listen to it so no need for the software. Sorry, but an institution of learning working around the inability to read just is really bad. Reading is so incredibly fundamental to so many things in life that it's irresponsible to spend time and money working around the inability to read, when those resources should be devoted to learning to read.
Hmmm, there is a little part of me that is feeling like Clifford Stoll right now... What the hell are you doing having illiterate kids doing using a computer? Why don't you have them spend time in a remedial 1 on 1 session to teach them to read, instead of pushing them even further into material they can't read?
I know that your only looking to fufil the request of your customers (in this case the schools), I find it incredibly worrisome, that people are worried about how to get around the fact that the student can't read instead of attempting to actually teach the student to read at the appropriate level. Especially since the ability to read is probably more important then absolutely anything they will learn thru the computer system. Learning to read would enable them to learn anything they want later in life on their own, without some damn computer to read to them....
What I'm constructing is the set of all chess configurations that can exist assuming no sanity checking, given that you can have anywhere from 0-64 white queens. 0-64 black queens. 0-64 white kings,...., 0-64 white pawns, 0-64 black pawns, 0-64 empty squares.
For any given square on a chess board, given that you have 64 duplicates of each chess piece (all six pieces in both colors for a total of 12 unique types of pieces), plus you can choose to leave the square empty. That's 13 unique things that can occupy a square. For each square you get to pick on of the thirteen. You get to make that choice 64 times, hence 13^64.
This will generate every single possible unique position you could ever have on a chess set. It's the absolute upper limit for what a chess set could look like given the 12 types of pieces and empty.
Using 32^64 is a mistake. First it should be 33^64, because you don't allow the square to be empty, using 32 you have to place a piece on every single square. Also, it means you could place the Queenside white rook twice which means that number is just completely meaningless. This is why when you want to use 32, you did it as a factorial expression, to avoid recounting. The true number is someplace between the factorial expression you have, and the exponential expression I gave.
Using 13^64, gives every single degenerate case you discuss, plus all the others there could ever be on a 64 square board that has 13 choices for what to place on it. Which precisely describes the chess board, and a set of chess pieces.
Consider the position where you put a white rook on square A1, and choose empty for all other squares. Using 13, that's it. White rook square a1, done. Using 32 means that Queen side white rook on square A1 is different then Kingside white rook on square A1, all the rest empty. I'm saying that positionally, which side the rook came from is irrelavent, it's a white rook, they are identical. You're not going to choose a different move because the rook is kings side versus queens side (okay you might if it means not being able to castle later, but I'm ignoring castling and en passant in this discussion, because you don't have to consider that when building the database). When you get the pawns the situation is just stupid. I didn't want to account for all the various factorials and replacement issues due to identical pieces (because I did all I wanted to by using the number 13), because I don't know enough Go to do the combinatorics on it, I wanted to do crappy combinatorics for both, and I was hoping to avoid precisely what I'm doig which is explaining the math to someone in a damn slashdot post! To be honest, I'm not terribly interested in getting either of games more than big picture correct.
See the difference.... Okay, now I'm being too geeky... I was really hoping not to argue combinatorics tonight, I've too much other shit I need to get done. Thanks for playing...
I'm capable of doing the math to get it highly accurate as long as we avoid considering illegal positions, it's just long and tedious, and if I wanted it that accurate, I'd just look it up in a book, I'm sure it exists someplace. Shit if you want, I'll write it up and send my complete analysis to you, but not in a slashdot forum.
Oh, I wasn't suggesting that Chess was as simple as the formula I suggested. However, my formula is accurate given 64 copies of every piece white and black, and attempting to setup every single setup physically possible (a huge number of these would be absolutely impossible in a real game of chess, for starters a huge number of the setups described wouldn't have any kings on them at all, obviously bad). Using the number 32 instead of 13 is a mistake. Because in that situation your differentiating between each of the eight pawns, lets say you have a pawns at a4 and b4, using 32 you differentiate between if the pawn at a4 started at a2, b2, c2 etc, etc. In terms of position it doesn't make any difference where it started. I'm merely counting game positions, using 32 would count game positions where the different starting positions of identical pieces makes unique. There is absolutely no good reason to use 32, that's even worse the using 13 (which is piss poor in terms of accuracy). The first formula you used if it's doing what I think it is, is the most accurate of all the ones listed by either of us. (Which I could have described, but like I said, it was too geeky to do in a slashdot post *grin*). Plus I get the impression that given the confusion over multiplication versus exponentiation would have been too much for the original poster to follow, and I didn't really care to explain the basics of combinations and permutations with and without repetition to him in a series of tedious slashdot postings... *big grin*.
However, thanks for making me feel lots less of a geek then I did earlier tonight...
Slashdot Mirror
Was it illegal without caching? You come up put in a list of words, it says, here is a list of URL's that you might be interested in?
No copyright violation, they didn't copy any bits (anymore then me downloading a web page is a violation). Why is the automation different then a human doing it? I've don't see the difference, but that's because I'm a tech head. Would it be different for the original Yahoo, when it was done the old fashioned way where each page was viewed and classified by a human (the links we're harvested automatically, but each page was classified by a human into a category)?
They didn't republish it, they merely said, these are the ones you might be the most interested in. They are providing a service, would that be illegal? No content, no context, just the IP address of the server, and the name of the virtual host so you can go crawl the content by hand. Not even a direct URL. Is that illegal? Why is it? What legal princepal is that founded on?
Last time I checked, corporations didn't have a right to privacy (you sound more legally knowledgeable then I am, so educate me). I'm not sure citizens have an iron clad right to privacy (they have the 4th amendment, but I'm not sure that covers anything but the gov't doing the searching), but it's generally considered a personal right by the courts to help ensure saftey and order in society.
There are well established princepals on the internet for saying, you can't come here. They are implemented by the server in any of a variety of ways. Putting up a website implicitly states, you are allowed to be here. The robots.txt is the equivilent of being polite. Anybody who doesn't follow it might get reported to their ISP, sorta like reporting a noisy tenet out to the landlord. If they had some form of authentication, that is a clear sign they don't want me there. If they dropped my packets, they didn't want me there. Posting something on a public site is just like your garbage to me. It's out in the public, I can search it, if you don't like that don't leave it on the curb where anybody can just walk up to it. It's like leaving evidence in plain sight of a cop. It's right there, for any asshole to see, don't be surprised if it shows up in a court of law and it's legal as evidence. In my world websites are a public garbage can.
If a cop showed up in court and said well, I put in his name into google and out popped his web page posted to the web site that has his digital signature on a complete confession, you are saying that might end up being throw out of court? I'd be interested to see that argued in court, not saying I know what will happen, but it'd be interesting to see the legal concepts behind that play out.
I'm playing somewhat devils advocate here. To a degree, I think your right, that privacy as we know it will disappear. Get over it, it's already long past happened. I can virtually gaurantee that the CIA, DoD, and the FBI have a file on you. They have collected where you live, they know where you've worked, they know all kinds of stuff about you. I know for a fact I've had it done. I hang out with a guy whose got enough clearance that they do a background check on everyone he calls. I know they have a file on me. It says, "Mostly harmless", but the did check me out.
I agree with you to an extent, that it should be something that limits and guidelines, but that's different then saying it's completely and utterly illegal, but I believe that a lot of corporations play the game to their own benefit, they are attempting to hide the facts from the customer, and that automation, and getting the right to process the data using tec
Using your logic google should be illegal. You can find out a lot about people using google. It's a complete and utter invasion of privacy, it should be closed. I think you'll find people completely disagree with you.
However, I would say that Amazon selling their customer list is different then me assembling lists of information off the web. I give Amazon my information, and they have a privacy policy, I expect them to follow it. I have to give my address to get something shipped to me. I don't have any other choices. Amazon is collecting private personal information from me that I have no alternative other then not do business with them. Information on the web is available to anyone, I'm not attempting to hide it, if I was it wouldn't be on the public web. If someone else posted it about my private life that they shouldn't be, I can send them a C&D letter about invading my privacy.
The screen scrapers however, are collecting publically available information. Just like if someone decided to mail me on the basis of looking up my name in the telephone book, I can't object to that. I can object if I ask them nicely to stop sending me mail, or calling me, but it's not like can I say you can't use the phone book to lookup my number to contact me.
Spammers who collect e-mail addresses I see as more of a nuciense, but I'm very protective of my e-mail address so it's less of a problem for me. However, my e-mail address is google'able, and you can find it out on the web. I'd be supportive of anti-spamming laws, because they are using public information to electronically do the equivilent of stalking, or repetative time wasting phone calls. Just like I can get a court order for some crazy person who follows me, I'd like to be able to get one for spammers to say look, stop it. I can't stop people who access publically available information. Now there are some things no one should be posting on the web, that'd be a personal privacy issue. However, airline tickets isn't one of them.
I've seen a lot of companies intentionally do things, just so the only way to gather information is thru an automated system. They don't present the information in a simple easy to use form, just raise the bar of entry. Just like companies who will only give you a 100 page invoice on paper. They won't give it to you in an electronic format. However, you can lookup individual line items one at a time on the web. In a lot of cases, they are doing that to customers who own the information, but they just don't want the customer to be able to figure it out. Stuff like only telling you the prices one at a time over the phone. They do this to make it impossible for someone to verify they are being billed correctly. I've done work in this area, trust me, companies don't want you to be able to double check them to realize how badly they have screwed up. I firmly believe that technology should be usable in such cases. I some what seem this case in that vein of keeping big companies honest.
Technology solves these problems. It empowers people to optimize problems, and save money, generate more profit, hire more people. Established corporations don't want anyone to do that, so they put up silly rules to govern how you can get the information that is yours from them. It's silly.
Kirby
In Academic circles at the time, he in fact was one of the leading OS people on the planet. If you'd like to suggest he isn't, besides being just wrong about Micro Kernels (which a lot of people we're wrong about it, however, a lot of very cool, very stable OS's are based on the princepal, including the kind that go in medical equipment like QNX), what else didn't he do that would have made him one? He wrote the books everyone reads to learn about the foundations of OS theory. Okay he might not have been a leading expert, maybe only expert, but he sure as hell was a big name for an undergrad who'd never done shit (at that point) to stand up to, and say your an idiot on Usenet news.
Kirby
Kirby
Now the people you peer (epecially whoever gives you your upstream feed), are the only ones who can really solve the problem. Even if the ISP drops the packets on the floor at the border router, my guess is their peer will want to charge them for it because they paid for the transit of it all the way across thier network to get it to you, only to have it drop on the floor, it still cost your peer to get it to you, so now they are eating the cost, because they paid their peer for it.
The Internet is a really rough arrangement. Because there's no central authority (which is part of the beauty). The problem with attempting to bill ISP XYZ for originating traffic is, then you create two kinds of networks. Those that have a billing arragements between all the parties, and those that don't. Being the first one onto the billing arragments network is the kiss of death unless your UUNet. That transition would be harder then from IPv4 to IPv6.
About the only way to get this cleared up is to get the bill recinded up the food chain until you hit Tier 1 provider. They'd have to eat the bill, and forward it on to everyone as an amortized tax on everyone to connect to them, because they have to eat the "expense". Which means it'd spread out evenly, but the cost of service would go up because of these idiots. Notice how all this sounds remarkable similar to car insurance, everyone has to pay into the system to cover the costs of the minority that run up huge bills. Same deal.
The other problem is that you talk about ISP B that initiated the attack, from what I can tell, that'd be 150 ISP's if the "attack" is from Slashdot. It could have been from a lot more sites if it was slammer. So ISP B might be hundreds or thousands of different entities.
Kirby
We have a pair of redundant ServeRAID 4 cards, that have 64MB of battery backed up RAM. Unfortuantly, I can't specify that control how much of that is used for what. A good RAM Disk that I could tune specifically for my environment would be much better then the caching that the ServeRAID cards do.
Want to know why Oracle is the world's fastest database? Because it gives you an incredible amount of flexibility to tailor your solution to your problem. If I could dedicate 1GB of RAM to the problem, I'd easily triple the speed of my thru put. No problem.
Kirby
Kirby
There was a story about exactly that type of card sold by a company on slashdot. Google for them, they aren't that hard to find.
They will become a standard component in machines when the time is right. I'd pay $1,000 for a 512MB one every day of the week if it had a driver under linux that made it look like a block device that was reliable. No questions asked. Having a pair of those and putting a copy of Oracle's Redo logs on them would probably double the speed of my Oracle database, and I just paid $15K to have 3 guys come in and get me a 20% increase in speed. No questions asked, I'd pay for one. If you could make a pair of highly reliable versions of those, I bet I could sell $1 million dollars at 80% profit of them in less then 3 months as soon as word got out about what they can do for Database and filesystem performance. I don't have the personal capital to do so, or the technical skills to pull it off. I'm a programmer. Just as soon as I figured it out, somebody in Taiwan would put me out of business in a week, because that is the land of faster, better, cheaper for computer components.
High end, permanent storage that has no seek time, will become a standard feature on highend servers just as soon as journalling filesystems become capable of putting them on seperate devices. Right now ext3 can do that. I'm not sure about the others. Right now the only other real use is for Oracle Database. Everyones current opinion is just throw more disks at it. It's cute, but someday they'll figure out that it's highly cost effective to do have filesystems that do lots of fsync's on a SRAM based filesystem. It's just another layer of caching, but the caching is permanent storage.
Eventually, they'll become incredible cheap. Battery backed up ram or SRAM isn't that expensive, and in volumne it would come down. Its a lot more useful then those damn USB drives that hold 64MB of data. Those things sell in volume. I'm not sure they'll be built into the motherboard, but I'd be surprised if they aren't available for sale within 2 years as an expansion card.
Kirby
The other problem is that all applications block on reads. So when an application wants to read, it can't do anything else until the blocks are read off disk. So there is contention to get reads done quickly. As a general rule another read is going to happen very soon very near that, it might be earlier, it might be later. Linus proposed an interesting optimization to this at on the LKML suggesting that you create an mmap call that says, I'm interested in this page of this file, please start putting it here. Then go off and do other work, and when you access that page, if it isn't yet loaded from disk, the pointer access blocks until it is available. Then these types of reads are less pressing the reads which are blocking progress of a process.
The reason most people changed the scheduler is because it is faster for a known workload that is important. So they got tweaked out. Buffering a full write cycle is easy, but the fsync means some writes are more important then others. Reads are almost always blocking a process. So seeking is important. Now throw mirrors into the mix. Where having two copies means you can have two independant heads searching the same information. Oh, but they have to sync everytime there is a write.
The other thing is that prior to the Linux 2.5 kernel, Linux had spent all it's time assuming that a disk had no C/H/S, it was a big flat row of sectors. It explicitly ignored the C/H/S for filesystems and disk head algorithms. 2.5 is supposed to introduce the concept of a spindle, and spindles to have C/H/S, and then they can be optimized for.
Now remember that most of write concerns will become unimportant as soon as battery backed up becomes a standard part of every computer. Then what will happen, is everyone will run journaling filesystems where the journal is stored on the battery backed up RAM (so there are no seeks for writes), then you only queue writes when there is pressure on the battery backed up ram, and try and do reads as fast as possible. When the battery backed up ram is nearly full, you start from the inside moving outside, writting every track as you go. Then you can use n-way mirriors to speed up reads.
Kirby
Let me say that again. Id doesn't sell games any more. They sell game engines. Specifically they sell 3d FPS type game engines. Technically, I suppose you could base a RPG off their engines, but that's not very interesting.
Basically, Id makes a high quality game, releases it, causes an upgrade cycle on hardware. This creates new level of quality that is expected in terms of graphics. The game isn't supposed to be great, grand and glorious as nearly as I can tell. It's supposed to be visually stunning, and cause a commotion in the gaming industry, so people will license the new game engine and do much cooler more innovative things with it. I've lost track of who uses whose gaming engine, but my guess is that Id makes at least as much money off the licensing of the gaming engines as they do off the titles they actually sell any more.
They create games that force upgrades because it establishes a new plateau for games, and creates demand for their true product, game engines. This works because everybody knows that Id has the best engines, that are the most reliable, and after they see the wicked "demo game" Id's come out with, they all to play games like it.
At least that's my theory.
Kirby
That terrifies them, so no conforming for them. Nothing on the radio could be good, otherwise that means that you might have heard good music. They turn music into an obscurity contest. Well, "I heard this band once, if formed in my basement for 3 hours and broke up at the end of the jam session they made the best music ever". "Yeah well I heard this dinky little band over here that did this". It becomes a contest, and the really funny part is that music is completely subjective. Good music is completely subjective. Completely!
It's the same behaviour I've seen out of people who attempt to map meanings onto poems. My favorite was the class that finally broke down and wrote to R. Frost requesting that he settle the meaning of a poem he wrote. They'd debated it for weeks in class, building up metaphors, allegories, hidden meanings, subtle puns, dualities, and paradoxes. You know what his response was. What I meant was this: (which was followed by a copy of the poem). I think people turn all forms of art into a contests of who can be the better beholder, instead of realizing that the beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
There are a lot of extremely intelligent musically inclined people out there, and I respect their opinion. However, a lot of the people who pass judgement on popular music have never picked up an instrument, have never written music, have never played live in front of people, have never done anything that would give them any insight into what is and isn't good music.
Kirby
Laptops are nice, but they will never be as cheap as regular desktops due to space, heat and power consumption constraints. The wear and tear, and high replacement parts is what drives people to desktops. They aren't as fast. They can't store as much, you can't put as much RAM in them. They can't do a lot of things a good PC can. Now if they become terminals to bigger faster stationary equipment, now your talking. Then, I'm still not building my own, all I need is one with a good screen, a good video card, and a decent keyboard, nothing else matters on a terminal.
If laptops became extemely common, I could see a vicious cycle of increased sales, which increased production volume, which lowered prices, which increases sales. I don't see a way to transition to there as long as desktop PC's are a cheap as they are. A good laptop is also a lot harder to put together, especially out of commodity parts. Running cabling the right way, and using thin bundled cables instead of ribbon cables is a good idea. Having fans that turn on at the right tempatures, and blow on the right parts is critical. Getting the LCD cable snaked thru is important. Getting the tension right on the hinges. Ensuring that the screen didn't weight too much to put too much stress on the plastic while sitting open. A dozen little things. It'd be simpiler then having DIY car's, but I'm not sure there is that much public interest in it. Most people simply don't need laptops. I've never needed one. I don't travel, and when I want a computer there is one handy. I can't use one in my car while I'm driving, and most other locations I go that don't have a computer, I'm going there to get away from my computers!
Kirby
I wouldn't build my own laptop, just because laptops are touchy little beasties. Heat and airflow are really important. Docking stations, and port replicators are nice. Not to mention the wear and tear due to abuse, and move moving parts (the hinges on the screen), and the various clips that I wouldn't get the right kind for, especailly not if I'm buying on the cheap. Batteries and removable parts are a problem. Power consumption, and LCD quality. Just lots of little issues that I wouldn't get right, that Dell would.
Kirby
So as long as there is someone out there, who thinks he can make money by utilizing a spammer, especially when they see how successful spammers are. They'll think that everyone who deals with the spammer gets rich. No the spammer gets rich, everybody else gets screwed. Spammers can exist long after spamming stops working, if they convince people with crap to sell, that it still works. People are stupid. Con artists don't believe they can get con'ed. It's a big game. Spammer's will take advantage of anyone who wants to make an easy buck. Just like guys with pills will take advantage of people who want bigger dicks.
Kirby
That is to say, if everyone in the world stopped buying anything off a spam list they've gotten, it might not put a stop to spammers. If the spammer could convince a small business person that getting in contact with 60Million e-mail addresses could sell 5000 units of their product, the spammer wins. Especially, if the spammers deal isn't contigent on the actual units sold.
Now, that being said, I don't believe that everyone has stopped buying off spam lists. It'd certainly help. I'm not sure it'd be the end of the problem.
Kirby
Kirby
A lot of people don't like anything that gets radio play, because that's the crap that people listen to. I think a lot of people don't like anything that's on the radio, because then they get to act like experts, and play along like they understand the something about music other people don't. For the most part, most people don't have an inner genius that conveys more information about high quality music then the rest of the general public. I stopped listening to the 5 years ago, and I have about 20 CD's that I can happily listen to for extended periods of time. I'm not big into music, but I laugh at the pretensious people who act like they know more about music then the general public, because they've decided they know more.... *grin*
Kirby
If he wants it for blind or disabled people I understand. However, this sounds distinctly like a case of, "we should use technology to replace teachers, because technology is the solution to all problems". This sounds like well a computer program that costs $500, plus a $400 computer, and some electricity, and we'll be able to teach all those alternative students without devoting the extra resources to them they need. Most alternative students need actual honest to god real help, from a real person, who'll devote time to them. They don't need to spend more time in front of a frustrating cold unfeeling machine. Teaching is an art. I've done it before at various levels in math and computer science. It absolutely can't be duplicated by a computer under any circumstances.
Kirby
Child Porn is a serious crime, but state gov'ts are now making it the ISP's job to block it. Here's the link to the slashdot story on the subject. A common carrier is supposed to carry the data from one end to the there, passing no judgement on it (at least that was how it was explained to me). This gives you liability from lawsuits for carring such things.
While I can report that it exists to the FBI, I'm doubting the FBI had jursdiction where it's hosted to pull the plug most of the time.
Not sure that wire tapping laws cover network traffic (some judge will probably extend them to it, because they are analogous to phone lines). I thought the federal regulations on phone companies carried thru from the owner of the phone lines all the way down to last mile, it was just part of the deal about being a common carrier and a phone company. I thought that wire tapping laws are about individuals taping your phone lines, or government agencies, not about the owners of the physical wire monitoring them. I'm not up enough on my legal stuff. Clearly you're better informed then I am.
I thought common carrier status got you a legal get away free card for the content you carried. The liability was carried by the person who put the content on at the other end, not by the actual carrier of the content. All the weirdo local decency standards and suing ISP's for not blocking offensive content led me to believe they aren't common carriers.
Damn, and I've got mod points to mod you up, but alas I've already posted.
Kirby
Most Universities have it in the TOS they own everything on the wires, and harddrives period. It's theirs they own it. You might not have signed it, but you implicitly agree to it everytime you log into a machine they own specifying that if you don't like the terms of service posted here, disconnect from the network now. Just like every lab at my school had the rules posted when you walked in so you could read the terms of service. I never lived in the dorms, but as a general rule the guys I know got handed the terms of service, and told that you agreed to it.
Phone companies do have common carrier status, and they are a government regulated monopoly. As a general rule you can only get phone service from one company so the government steps in to offer protection. That's why they can't just willie nilly record your conversations. ISP's as far as I know have no such government oversight, and have no such restrictions (I could easily be wrong on this point).
Kirby
Now a public phone company doesn't have that right, because it's not in their TOS, and if they put it in their TOS, somebody would fight it as being an illegal invasion of privacy. The Internet, and a University network at large aren't seen as a common enough utility, that is necessary for living in the current society to warrent those kinds of protections yet. At some point the Internet might get that kind of protection. However, given the proliferation of networks, my guess is that it will be a market driven thing. Phone companies are monopolies, so they have a lot more regulation then a University network ever will, because you can always get network access from a dozen other places if you don't like the terms of service the University has. A University is also a lot like a place of business. My company has the right to monitor everything I do on their equipment. All their wires, all their harddrives are fair game for them to search. It's a term of my employment. They also own all of the things I do on their computers that's in my IP agreement. They also can restrict my free speech because I signed an NDA agreeing that as a term of my employment, I can't talk about certain areas of expertise I have to other companies.
Technically, you don't need his permission to do record his conversation, you just have to tell him you are doing it (it's subtle, but there's a difference, he doesn't have to concede it's okay, he merely has to hear you say it's the case). If he continues to use the phone, I don't believe there is anything illegal about it.
Kirby
This isn't like giving a person with no hands an artifical set of hands, this is like someone who lacks motor control to not work at using their hands, and instead teaching them to use their feet in place of their hands.
Schools aren't there to teach you what you have a natural aptitude for, they are there to teach you a specific set of things. If your good at math, you'll pick that up speedily when you can read the book on your own. So you don't need a computer to learn mathematics. No computer can teach you anything that a book can't. A teacher can teach you all sorts of things computers can't. These schools need to realize that teaching the student to read is the path to success. There is no other way to get there. They have to be able to read. Sorry, teaching them more math isn't the answer. Teaching them to read is.
What happens when they reach a level of mathematics they can't find on the web? What happens when they graduate or drop out of school and no longer have access to the computer program they are dependant on to learn? A school that creates a person who is dependant on the verbal form is a bad idea? What is it that makes you think that verbalizing it will make it any easier for them. Most of the reason you can't read at a high enough level is about vocabulary and idioms of the language, and just not enough time spent reading. Do you think speaking them out loud will make them simpiler. No, you have to construct the material so they'd be able to read it anyways. At which point, they can read it, not listen to it so no need for the software. Sorry, but an institution of learning working around the inability to read just is really bad. Reading is so incredibly fundamental to so many things in life that it's irresponsible to spend time and money working around the inability to read, when those resources should be devoted to learning to read.
Kirby
I know that your only looking to fufil the request of your customers (in this case the schools), I find it incredibly worrisome, that people are worried about how to get around the fact that the student can't read instead of attempting to actually teach the student to read at the appropriate level. Especially since the ability to read is probably more important then absolutely anything they will learn thru the computer system. Learning to read would enable them to learn anything they want later in life on their own, without some damn computer to read to them....
Kirby
What I'm constructing is the set of all chess configurations that can exist assuming no sanity checking, given that you can have anywhere from 0-64 white queens. 0-64 black queens. 0-64 white kings, ...., 0-64 white pawns, 0-64 black pawns, 0-64 empty squares.
For any given square on a chess board, given that you have 64 duplicates of each chess piece (all six pieces in both colors for a total of 12 unique types of pieces), plus you can choose to leave the square empty. That's 13 unique things that can occupy a square. For each square you get to pick on of the thirteen. You get to make that choice 64 times, hence 13^64.
This will generate every single possible unique position you could ever have on a chess set. It's the absolute upper limit for what a chess set could look like given the 12 types of pieces and empty.
Using 32^64 is a mistake. First it should be 33^64, because you don't allow the square to be empty, using 32 you have to place a piece on every single square. Also, it means you could place the Queenside white rook twice which means that number is just completely meaningless. This is why when you want to use 32, you did it as a factorial expression, to avoid recounting. The true number is someplace between the factorial expression you have, and the exponential expression I gave.
Using 13^64, gives every single degenerate case you discuss, plus all the others there could ever be on a 64 square board that has 13 choices for what to place on it. Which precisely describes the chess board, and a set of chess pieces.
Consider the position where you put a white rook on square A1, and choose empty for all other squares. Using 13, that's it. White rook square a1, done. Using 32 means that Queen side white rook on square A1 is different then Kingside white rook on square A1, all the rest empty. I'm saying that positionally, which side the rook came from is irrelavent, it's a white rook, they are identical. You're not going to choose a different move because the rook is kings side versus queens side (okay you might if it means not being able to castle later, but I'm ignoring castling and en passant in this discussion, because you don't have to consider that when building the database). When you get the pawns the situation is just stupid. I didn't want to account for all the various factorials and replacement issues due to identical pieces (because I did all I wanted to by using the number 13), because I don't know enough Go to do the combinatorics on it, I wanted to do crappy combinatorics for both, and I was hoping to avoid precisely what I'm doig which is explaining the math to someone in a damn slashdot post! To be honest, I'm not terribly interested in getting either of games more than big picture correct.
See the difference.... Okay, now I'm being too geeky... I was really hoping not to argue combinatorics tonight, I've too much other shit I need to get done. Thanks for playing...
I'm capable of doing the math to get it highly accurate as long as we avoid considering illegal positions, it's just long and tedious, and if I wanted it that accurate, I'd just look it up in a book, I'm sure it exists someplace. Shit if you want, I'll write it up and send my complete analysis to you, but not in a slashdot forum.
Kirby
However, thanks for making me feel lots less of a geek then I did earlier tonight...
Kirby