Fine. A real problem causer would then put it on schoolbusses filled with children. Or maybe in hospitals.
Doing so would be a war crime, NOT bombing the schoolbus, but putting military assets on the schoolbus. The person responsible for those innocent deaths as a matter of international law (and as a matter of fact IMO) is the person who put the jammer there. Our military is unlikely to bomb a schoolbus (if they *know* it's a schoolbus) even under those circumstance where it would be perfectly legal to do so and not doing so puts them & their fellow soldiers at risk. It is a sad commentary on such regimes that our military shows greater concern for the well being of their civilians population than they do. Unfortunatly there are regimes out there that are perfectly capable of such contempt for their own people and those are precisely the regimes we are likely to find ourselves in conflict with.
It costs $20m to restructure? Jeez -I can't even imagine that kind of money.
It's all a matter of scale - $20m seems like a lot to me (a relatively underemployed individual) but it i doesn't seem so much to a company with revenues of 1.7 billion in the same quarter. $2m of that $29m was from some change in accounting methods. It wouldn't take a very large number of lay-offs (in percentage of their total work force) to add up to $17m in severence packages etc.
Am I misunderstanding this completely? To me it says that you are punishable under Title 18 as a terrorist if you compromise a system worth more than $5000.
Yes, a little - Title 18 of the code has nothing to do with terrorism per se but has to do with computer fraud and abuse. You can't just read the "Patriot Act" which just makes changes to the original law without reading the original law as well. The original law outlines various "hacking" type crimes uses the term "damage" without defining it. The Patriot act (unless I'm missing something) is basically adding a clause that defines the word "damage" - mostly to include all sorts of terrorist type things (causing public health or safety risks, crashing medical systems, etc.) BUT remember section 18 is NOT about terrorism it is about computer fraud or abuse. If they had added definitions of damage covering physical harm but didn't also add a definition covering monetary damage the federal computer FRAUD law would appear not to cover monetary damages.
As for Kevin Mitnicks crimes I really don't know. The whole point of computers is to multiply our effort - to make things that would otherwise be very difficult, very easy. So it is quite possible that an easy (for somebody with the right access & skills) prank can cost somebody else many millions of dollars. This is the flaw in the "defacing a website is merely graffiti" argument. Sure it's merely graffiti - but if it's a popular site it's not just the online equivalent of graffiti on a single storefront, but on thousands of them. The damage, and thus the crime is proportionally more significant.
but to me detention for no reason is not deportation.
I'm not saying it is, I think it should be the individuals choice. You can go home any time you like, If you want to remain our guest - well we don't trust you so you have to stay locked up. As long as it is the detainees choice and they are free to go HOME at any time I don't see how it would be a violation of their rights.
I tried as hard as I could but I couldn't find that clause in the link you posted, could you point it out for me? They ammended the law defining computer fraud but nowhere "defined hackers as terrorist" I'll grant you they used the word "cyberterrorism" in the name of the act but that has no particular legal signiciance. And to be fair much of the "cyberterrorism" ammendments to "computer fraud & abuse" law were adding to it definitions of "damage" distinctly terrorist type activities (damaging medical systems, causing physical injuries, causing public health or safety threats etc. etc.) - they also seemed to increase (or perhaps clarify) what was legal regarding monitoring computer activity specifically saying that if you are accessing a computer you don't own or have authority to access you don't have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" In other words if you are cracking the FBI's database they don't need a court order to monitor what you are doing in there. But nowhere are they ammending the law to call such acts "terrorist" or "enemy combatants" or waiving the right to a trial or setting up concentration camps for Linux users.
...It's not a big stretch to see that this could be used to put hackers in concentration camps.
No, I'm sorry it is.
BUT, since we are ensconced here in a sub-thread which took the bait I'll take the bait as well;) The INS situation is very troubling. We have no right to imprison presumably innocent people indefinitely. BUT, by the same token for a non-citizen residency is a privilege not a right. Deportation is NOT a punishment nor an abridgment of anyones rights in any way. If we want to take a hard line (which in light of the gaping hole & thousands killed in downtown manhattan is not unreasonable) we should give these detainees a choice - You may stay in custody while we check you out or at any time you may go back home to the country you came from.
As for Gitmo there are troubling aspects there as well. Perhaps the most troubling is that it seems to me the administration could get almost exactly the same situation we have now in a perfectly legitimate manner. Imprisoning enemy combatants from a war zone is perfectly fine & legal- no trial is necessary so imprisoning them at Gitmo is not a problem. BUT POW's are accorded certain privileges we have very good reason to suspect this particular group would abuse in ways that would get our guys killed. So we are affording them most but not all of those privileges - we are severly bending (OK breaking) the Geneva convention. I think we have a couple of perfectly legitimate and legal options. 1) For the real hard cases a military tribunal tries them for a war crime - if only of fighting without uniforms which for very good reasons IS a war crime. The Geneva convention REQUIRES a military rather than civilian court and the Uniform Code of Military Justice generally allows for tribunals other than courts martial and even specifically references them regarding such crimes such as espionage & sabotage - exactly the types of military laws under which you would likely prosecute a terrorist. For those found guilty of such crimes the niceties of the Geneva convention no longer apply.
Another option is to declare the Afghan portion of the war over and as REQUIRED by the Geneva convention send them back - to the tender mercies and somewhat more, umm.. *agressive* criminal justice systems and interogation techniques employed by their respective homelands. Were I an Egyptian, Saudi or Gulf Arab at Gitmo I'd by fervently praying to Allah that my unjust imprisonment last for as long as possible. The mere threat of being handed over to the Egyptian authorieis (again, as REQUIRED by the Geneva convention if the war is over) is alleged to have loosened a few tongues.
Cyber-crime is no different to ordinary crime. If the 15 year old 'cracker' writes his name all over a site (i.e. graffiti) he should get the same as a 15 year-old who scrawls all over his local shopping mall
To an extent I agree, but as someone else pointed out above if it was an ecommerce site the hacker* has done more than mere graffiti - he has locked and barred the door.
I would add that I agree with the general principle that "cyber" crime should be treated the same as it's offline equivalents - in most cases I don't think new laws are necessary and when they are (if only for clarification) I think they should be modeled on the laws covereing other crimes that are the nearest equivalents. However I think that might end up being more severe than one might think. Even that case of "mere graffiti" is more extensive than real graffiti - the hacker has graced not just one outlet with his art but every storefront in the entire "chain". Whether I visit walmart.com in Des Moines, Boston, LA, Paris or Bankok I will see the same defacement - the damage to walmart is proportionaly greater and so IMO is the severity of the crime. Maybe it's "only graffiti" but to get a punishment proportionate to the damage Walmart should pursue the charge in each and every jurisdiction in which the crime "occured" - all 10,000 of them. The fines & hours of community service would start to add up to a rather exorbinant total - though I'm sure having the hacker extradited to Singapore for his caning would be the most gratifying to Walmart.
* I refuse to be politically correct and use the term "thin crisp biscuit". "Hacker" has multiple meanings, hacker has *always* had multiple meanings - get over it.
You too, YOU just reprinted, republished & used the part of SearchKing's page that contained the bit that says you can't do that. You didn't even post anonymously - boy are you in trouble now.
It won't change nothing if it's proprietary and doesn't play nice with other OS's (Windows included).
Fortunately it ISN'T PROPRIETARY! It is an open standard that is also called zeroconf. Apple has also released source code.
Why isn't there an open source package that just makes it easy to share folders/files/printers across all platforms? Like Samba, but without being a cloned MS tech?
We ALSO need to maintain the Unix philosphy of SMALL TOOLS THAT DO ONE THING WELL that you can combine - and perhaps develop a GUI paradigm for that, not throw the kitchen sink into every package.
Note prior to my comment - I am an "end user" (for the most part) not a developer. As such my comment may be ignorant about how things are working behind the scenes, whats possible with the existing techniques (but not actually showing up in the software...) etc. etc. etc. Anyway, on with the comment...
Amen! It seems once you start using a GUI there is a tendancy to build monolithic programs that do *everything* themselves even though all the other programs also do many of those same things. But I don't see why this has to be that way. It seems you could have some standards that organise and identify independent components (plug-ins?) by function. Perhpas something like mime types that has both a general and specific classification - like "text/spelling" for a spell checker/dictionary or "text/search" for a gui for grep etc.) Application developers would figure out which classes of plug-ins make sense to load into their program and where the particular classes and sub-classes show up in their gui (rather than putting them all under "services" like OS X).
From an end-users perspective it is *bad* that there are slightly different tools with slightly different capablities doing much the same thing from app to app to app. Every word processor or text editor needs/has a "search" function - why don't they all use the same one implemented in the same way and why can't that way be determined by me, the user, by installing the search utility of my choice that would be used by every program that needs one. For that matter lots of applications need text-editting (or word-processing, or image editing etc.) themselves - why don't they all use the same full featured application as a component rather than having their own lame version of that functionality or forcing me to launch another application; do what I need to do; copy or save the result and import/paste it into where I need it. If you really did this right there would even really be distinct "apps" you'd open a document and the components for any type(s) of data in that doc would load so you could do whatever needed to be done with whatever was in the document.
It never became a reality (at least for the end user) but it seems that Apple was working on something like this with OpenDoc.
Or maybe you could look at the political views of the owners of the media. Murdoch makes no secret of the fact he sells the editorial line in his newspapers and TV to whatever political faction matches his personal interests.
Umm... Murdock, uh... Fox News which I specifically mentioned as one of the few explictly conservative media outlets. And one can certainly come up with eqaully liberal counter examples like Katherine Graham at the Washington Post. For the most part though the corporate owners of media outlets don't have anywhere near the control over the tilt of the reporting as the editors do. One could argue that the most they generally do is hire the editors who then set the tone. The bias of the editors (by and large) is known and I already dealt with it in my initial post - it is generally liberal. The one exception would be very new media outlets - like Fox news, or the Washington times where the owner set up the outlet sometimes with an explicit ideological purpose - but again for the most part these are the very same explictly conservative examples I've already cited.
The only sense in which there is a 'liberal bias' in the media is on social issues where racist opinions like those that got Lott the boot recently are pretty much rejected by almost everyone in the mainstream media, as is anti-gay bigottry, sexism, anti-semitism, anti-catholic etc.
I will agree that "liberal bias" is more pronounced on social issues but would not confine it to racism where there is a national consensus (heck, the National Review was more strident in calling for Lott's ouster than many liberal journals *- see note below) It also extends to more controversial issues where there is no concensus - like the precise policies to combat racism & it's effects (racism like Lott's is universally condemned - whether affirmative action is a valid or appropriate policy is a much more controversial and debatable matter), or abortion where opinion is evenly divided.
* It should be noted though that National Review has been working successfuly to purge the conservative movement of racists for decades starting with their successful campaign to marginalise groups like the John Birch Society. Think back to the letter Correta Scott King wrote to William F. Buckley thanking him for his contribution to purging society of racism. While it is tempting to go the route the NAACP seems content with recently that ANY opposition to their policy REGARDLESS OF IT'S REASONING is prima facia proof of racism. The world is more complex than that and there are good arguments, explictly anti-racialist/anti-racist arguments to be made against government policies that explictly note your race in order to grant favors to one race or another. It is ironic that Lott was asked (and seemed willing) to repudiate his belief that one race should be elevated over another in government policy by simply switching which race received the benefit. One could argue he was being asked to exchanging a bitter, hateful racism for a condescenging "white man's burden" version of the same.
I don't know that this is really fair. Being forced to read and study something in school can usually suck the joy out of ANY book. I think this is especially true for a book that has a great deal of "importance" from a scholarly point of view - for a long time Beawulf was the property of scholars that studied, & studied it but had little interest in it as a story or even a work of art. Their translations tend to reflect that.
One of the reasons that this new translation is potentially so exciting is that Tolkien (in his essay Beowulf and the Critics) opposed this kind of dead scholaticism and wanted to approach Beawulf as a poem and a work of art to be enjoyed, NOT as an "important" historical artifact to be dissected. Seamus Heaney mentioned this essay as "epoch making" and one of the inspirations for his well regarded (and enjoyable) translations. I'm really looking forward to how Tolkien who was both one of the foremost scholars on Beawulf and perhaps the only one that simply enjoyed it as a story handles the translation.
Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, the Washington times have a new version of Gobbel's 'big lie' it is the myth of the 'liberal media'. By repeating this myth often enough they aim to immunize themselves against criticism for their packs of lies.
Well, just saying it is a "lie" doesn't cut it. There must be some way to evaluate the "liberal media" claim objectively. Perhaps one could look at the voting patterns and party identification of members of the media (reporters, producers, industry executives) just to find out if there is a tilt one way or the other. That doesn't necessarily prove that their personal biases influence their reporting but it could suggest whether or not they *have* those biases. From there one might evaluate major media treatment of politicians and policies from either side of the ideological divide. On could evaluate the use of adjectives to describe partisans or their positions. One could evaluate whether individuals from one side or the other are more often identified by ideology or party (and thus implied to be biased) or not (and thus implied to be impartial). One could measure the amount of time each side of a controversy is given to make their case, etc.
As it turns out such polls & studies *have* been done and while some of the analysis of those studies have been themselves biased the studies themselves seem reasonable and the results are unambiguous. As a demographic group media professionals overwhelmingly self-identify themselves as liberal whereas a signficant majority of the population self-identifies as conservative. Polls of reporters, producers, editors etc. reveal voting patterns that are almost as solidly Democratic as the Black vote. This much is incontrovertible and not even controversial. What remains is whether these acknowledged private biases result in reporting that is actually biased. It is hard to believe that such uniformity of opinion in the newsroom wouldn't result in those uniformly held opinions finding their way into the reporting. However, it would be harder to prove such bias and to be fair some of the individual reporters most closely associated with the Democratic party are widely held to be among the most fair (former Democratic congressional staffers Tim Russert & Chris Matthews come to mind). that being said using such metrics as the use of pejorative adjectives, time given to differing arguments in a controversy etc. *suggest* that the private liberal biases of reporters DO find their way into the reporting.
That unselfconscious bias is pronounced enough that some media outlets have arisen that are self-concscously, more transparently and more distinctly conservative - Fox News being the prime example. The Washington Times is another example though they are balanced by liberal papers that are just as tranparent in their ideological tilt like the Boston Globe (or conservatives would argue the old Gray Lady herself - the New York Times) - On the whole though the great bulk of the mainstream media has a subtle liberal bias while a few newer media outlets have a more pronounced conservative bias.
I still have little sympathy because that is part of the game he played and now he has seen "whether he could do it. The answer was "until I got caught." He was "testing the system" but aside from the intitial security that system is also includes a little "social engineering" of it's own - laws, police, courts, prisons. Kevin Mitnick is JUST NOW completing his "test of the system". I would imagine his curiosity is sated.
I have a hard time believing that the experts would sit by not doing it because people are afraid.
Given the high failure rate (over 99% don't even make it to term) and the *very* high incidence of extreme abnormalities and health problems in the very few "successes" I would tend to hope that you are wrong. Some of the abnormalities are even a risk to the health of the surrogate mother. In fact the ratio of dead mothers to live clones isn't all that encouraging. Some mothers have problems with rather obvious problems - like the common (with clones) problem of massively oversized placentas, others die from more mysterious ailments presumed to be metabolic abnormalities induced by the abnormalities of the fetus's they carry. Of the very few clones that survive and lack any obvious gross anatomical deformaties we have no idea whether or not they are suffering from subtler defects - it's very hard to judge whether a cloned mouse is suffering psychological & behavioural problems as a result of brain abnormalities.
This is a *very* immature science, right now our method of cloning ammounts to just jamming a bunch DNA into a cell and hoping for the best when we *know* that gene order and position is important. We know that in a normal pregnancy whether a particlar gene is from the mother or father is used to decide whether (or when) it is turned "on" or "off" - a mechanism that is problematic with a clone for obvious reasons. Obviously some scientists are willing for the subjects of their experiments to run these risks but it's fair to comment that at this point there is more than a little whiff of Dr. Mengele or the Tuskegee syphilis study to such endevours.
I believe you are mistaken on this "fact" 1) As has already been pointed out, they didn't choose Quicktime, they chose MPEG-4.
They chose *both* they chose Quicktime as the player software. Apple is actually working with them to write the mobile phone version of the software - AND they are going to be using MPEG-4 as the codec.
QuickTime would be okayish (still controlled by Apple) if it always used open codecs, but in practice, it never does.
Two points - 1) Quicktime 6 uses MPEG 4 as the default/preferred codec rather than Sorensen (the proprietary codec everyone loves to hate)
And 2) While it's Apples fault that Sorensen *was* the former default codec it's not *entirely* Apples fault that everybody used it rather than the open alternatives that were available. Using something else was just a matter of selecting it from the pulldown or in the worst case scenario installing the codec and then selecting it from the pulldown. Unfortunately Sorensen was for the most part just plain better. Content creators are interested in file size and image quality, very few are interested in the politics of open source or the fact that the.1% of their visitors running linux couldn't see it. In fact I doubt those linux users are as concerned about the politics as about the simple fact that they can't view the content.
Amazon.com has lists of gifts for different types of people including: Gifts for Brainiacs (mostly books & brain-teaser party games) and Gifts for Gadget Lovers (uh... gadgets). Their
Impossible to shop for list is also worth looking at (all sorts of weird stuff).
the trip to the moon was a bit cheaper then Christopher Columbus's trip to the new world.Exploration of new boundries has always costs about the same percentage of a nations wealth since the time of the Romans. If we can not foot the bill for even NASA of it's current size what does that say about us as a nation-state? Commercial interests are not always the best ones to partake in dangerous endevors with unforseen profits. Indeed capatalism is by nature risk averse,
That's not necessarily so and the very examples of exploration we are talking about are the proof. It was not so much the government of Spain funding Columbus' research project as the king and queen of spain investing venture capital in his high-risk/high-return start-up. Columbus was out to find a new, cheaper trading route to India that he and his investors hoped to profit from. ALL the exploration of that golden age of exploration was done for similar reasons sometimes funded by nation-states but always for economic or military gain. As often as not exploration was even by private companies - the Dutch East India *company*, the British East India *company*, the Hudson Bay *company* etc. etc. etc. I don't think we will see another golden age of exploration until we have modern equivalents of these private ventures. Things haven't changed - the early age of space exploration was mostly about military applications (ICBM's, spy satelites) and it was funded by nation states seeking to secure their own defenses and gain an advantage over their enemies and as an added bonus the national pride of flaunting that advantage. The only real hope for *serious* funding from government remains with that kind of military (or at best dual-use) applications (SDI). Without any compelling government interest the next best hope is private industry - if NASA is serious about encouraging space exploration they will seek out those private concerns & interests that can profit from it.
At the top of this and every page on/. right below the logo it says "news for nerds" I think that is sufficient to explain why anything about TTT (no matter how trivial) is front page news that matters (to nerds).
Slashdot Mirror
Fine. A real problem causer would then put it on schoolbusses filled with children. Or maybe in hospitals.
Doing so would be a war crime, NOT bombing the schoolbus, but putting military assets on the schoolbus. The person responsible for those innocent deaths as a matter of international law (and as a matter of fact IMO) is the person who put the jammer there. Our military is unlikely to bomb a schoolbus (if they *know* it's a schoolbus) even under those circumstance where it would be perfectly legal to do so and not doing so puts them & their fellow soldiers at risk. It is a sad commentary on such regimes that our military shows greater concern for the well being of their civilians population than they do. Unfortunatly there are regimes out there that are perfectly capable of such contempt for their own people and those are precisely the regimes we are likely to find ourselves in conflict with.
It costs $20m to restructure? Jeez -I can't even imagine that kind of money.
It's all a matter of scale - $20m seems like a lot to me (a relatively underemployed individual) but it i doesn't seem so much to a company with revenues of 1.7 billion in the same quarter. $2m of that $29m was from some change in accounting methods. It wouldn't take a very large number of lay-offs (in percentage of their total work force) to add up to $17m in severence packages etc.
Am I misunderstanding this completely? To me it says that you are punishable under Title 18 as a terrorist if you compromise a system worth more than $5000.
Yes, a little - Title 18 of the code has nothing to do with terrorism per se but has to do with computer fraud and abuse. You can't just read the "Patriot Act" which just makes changes to the original law without reading the original law as well. The original law outlines various "hacking" type crimes uses the term "damage" without defining it. The Patriot act (unless I'm missing something) is basically adding a clause that defines the word "damage" - mostly to include all sorts of terrorist type things (causing public health or safety risks, crashing medical systems, etc.) BUT remember section 18 is NOT about terrorism it is about computer fraud or abuse. If they had added definitions of damage covering physical harm but didn't also add a definition covering monetary damage the federal computer FRAUD law would appear not to cover monetary damages.
As for Kevin Mitnicks crimes I really don't know. The whole point of computers is to multiply our effort - to make things that would otherwise be very difficult, very easy. So it is quite possible that an easy (for somebody with the right access & skills) prank can cost somebody else many millions of dollars. This is the flaw in the "defacing a website is merely graffiti" argument. Sure it's merely graffiti - but if it's a popular site it's not just the online equivalent of graffiti on a single storefront, but on thousands of them. The damage, and thus the crime is proportionally more significant.
but to me detention for no reason is not deportation.
I'm not saying it is, I think it should be the individuals choice. You can go home any time you like, If you want to remain our guest - well we don't trust you so you have to stay locked up. As long as it is the detainees choice and they are free to go HOME at any time I don't see how it would be a violation of their rights.
...that define hacking as terrorism.
...It's not a big stretch to see that this could be used to put hackers in concentration camps.
;) The INS situation is very troubling. We have no right to imprison presumably innocent people indefinitely. BUT, by the same token for a non-citizen residency is a privilege not a right. Deportation is NOT a punishment nor an abridgment of anyones rights in any way. If we want to take a hard line (which in light of the gaping hole & thousands killed in downtown manhattan is not unreasonable) we should give these detainees a choice - You may stay in custody while we check you out or at any time you may go back home to the country you came from.
I tried as hard as I could but I couldn't find that clause in the link you posted, could you point it out for me? They ammended the law defining computer fraud but nowhere "defined hackers as terrorist" I'll grant you they used the word "cyberterrorism" in the name of the act but that has no particular legal signiciance. And to be fair much of the "cyberterrorism" ammendments to "computer fraud & abuse" law were adding to it definitions of "damage" distinctly terrorist type activities (damaging medical systems, causing physical injuries, causing public health or safety threats etc. etc.) - they also seemed to increase (or perhaps clarify) what was legal regarding monitoring computer activity specifically saying that if you are accessing a computer you don't own or have authority to access you don't have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" In other words if you are cracking the FBI's database they don't need a court order to monitor what you are doing in there. But nowhere are they ammending the law to call such acts "terrorist" or "enemy combatants" or waiving the right to a trial or setting up concentration camps for Linux users.
No, I'm sorry it is.
BUT, since we are ensconced here in a sub-thread which took the bait I'll take the bait as well
As for Gitmo there are troubling aspects there as well. Perhaps the most troubling is that it seems to me the administration could get almost exactly the same situation we have now in a perfectly legitimate manner. Imprisoning enemy combatants from a war zone is perfectly fine & legal- no trial is necessary so imprisoning them at Gitmo is not a problem. BUT POW's are accorded certain privileges we have very good reason to suspect this particular group would abuse in ways that would get our guys killed. So we are affording them most but not all of those privileges - we are severly bending (OK breaking) the Geneva convention. I think we have a couple of perfectly legitimate and legal options. 1) For the real hard cases a military tribunal tries them for a war crime - if only of fighting without uniforms which for very good reasons IS a war crime. The Geneva convention REQUIRES a military rather than civilian court and the Uniform Code of Military Justice generally allows for tribunals other than courts martial and even specifically references them regarding such crimes such as espionage & sabotage - exactly the types of military laws under which you would likely prosecute a terrorist. For those found guilty of such crimes the niceties of the Geneva convention no longer apply.
Another option is to declare the Afghan portion of the war over and as REQUIRED by the Geneva convention send them back - to the tender mercies and somewhat more, umm.. *agressive* criminal justice systems and interogation techniques employed by their respective homelands. Were I an Egyptian, Saudi or Gulf Arab at Gitmo I'd by fervently praying to Allah that my unjust imprisonment last for as long as possible. The mere threat of being handed over to the Egyptian authorieis (again, as REQUIRED by the Geneva convention if the war is over) is alleged to have loosened a few tongues.
Cyber-crime is no different to ordinary crime. If the 15 year old 'cracker' writes his name all over a site (i.e. graffiti) he should get the same as a 15 year-old who scrawls all over his local shopping mall
To an extent I agree, but as someone else pointed out above if it was an ecommerce site the hacker* has done more than mere graffiti - he has locked and barred the door.
I would add that I agree with the general principle that "cyber" crime should be treated the same as it's offline equivalents - in most cases I don't think new laws are necessary and when they are (if only for clarification) I think they should be modeled on the laws covereing other crimes that are the nearest equivalents. However I think that might end up being more severe than one might think. Even that case of "mere graffiti" is more extensive than real graffiti - the hacker has graced not just one outlet with his art but every storefront in the entire "chain". Whether I visit walmart.com in Des Moines, Boston, LA, Paris or Bankok I will see the same defacement - the damage to walmart is proportionaly greater and so IMO is the severity of the crime. Maybe it's "only graffiti" but to get a punishment proportionate to the damage Walmart should pursue the charge in each and every jurisdiction in which the crime "occured" - all 10,000 of them. The fines & hours of community service would start to add up to a rather exorbinant total - though I'm sure having the hacker extradited to Singapore for his caning would be the most gratifying to Walmart.
* I refuse to be politically correct and use the term "thin crisp biscuit". "Hacker" has multiple meanings, hacker has *always* had multiple meanings - get over it.
You too, YOU just reprinted, republished & used the part of SearchKing's page that contained the bit that says you can't do that. You didn't even post anonymously - boy are you in trouble now.
It won't change nothing if it's proprietary and doesn't play nice with other OS's (Windows included).
;)
Fortunately it ISN'T PROPRIETARY! It is an open standard that is also called zeroconf. Apple has also released source code.
Why isn't there an open source package that just makes it easy to share folders/files/printers across all platforms? Like Samba, but without being a cloned MS tech?
Grab Apple's code and get working
We ALSO need to maintain the Unix philosphy of SMALL TOOLS THAT DO ONE THING WELL that you can combine - and perhaps develop a GUI paradigm for that, not throw the kitchen sink into every package.
Note prior to my comment - I am an "end user" (for the most part) not a developer. As such my comment may be ignorant about how things are working behind the scenes, whats possible with the existing techniques (but not actually showing up in the software...) etc. etc. etc. Anyway, on with the comment...
Amen! It seems once you start using a GUI there is a tendancy to build monolithic programs that do *everything* themselves even though all the other programs also do many of those same things. But I don't see why this has to be that way. It seems you could have some standards that organise and identify independent components (plug-ins?) by function. Perhpas something like mime types that has both a general and specific classification - like "text/spelling" for a spell checker/dictionary or "text/search" for a gui for grep etc.) Application developers would figure out which classes of plug-ins make sense to load into their program and where the particular classes and sub-classes show up in their gui (rather than putting them all under "services" like OS X).
From an end-users perspective it is *bad* that there are slightly different tools with slightly different capablities doing much the same thing from app to app to app. Every word processor or text editor needs/has a "search" function - why don't they all use the same one implemented in the same way and why can't that way be determined by me, the user, by installing the search utility of my choice that would be used by every program that needs one. For that matter lots of applications need text-editting (or word-processing, or image editing etc.) themselves - why don't they all use the same full featured application as a component rather than having their own lame version of that functionality or forcing me to launch another application; do what I need to do; copy or save the result and import/paste it into where I need it. If you really did this right there would even really be distinct "apps" you'd open a document and the components for any type(s) of data in that doc would load so you could do whatever needed to be done with whatever was in the document.
It never became a reality (at least for the end user) but it seems that Apple was working on something like this with OpenDoc.
It would make every case-modder out there green with envy.
Only if they already have some form of this technology.
Or maybe you could look at the political views of the owners of the media. Murdoch makes no secret of the fact he sells the editorial line in his newspapers and TV to whatever political faction matches his personal interests.
Umm... Murdock, uh... Fox News which I specifically mentioned as one of the few explictly conservative media outlets. And one can certainly come up with eqaully liberal counter examples like Katherine Graham at the Washington Post. For the most part though the corporate owners of media outlets don't have anywhere near the control over the tilt of the reporting as the editors do. One could argue that the most they generally do is hire the editors who then set the tone. The bias of the editors (by and large) is known and I already dealt with it in my initial post - it is generally liberal. The one exception would be very new media outlets - like Fox news, or the Washington times where the owner set up the outlet sometimes with an explicit ideological purpose - but again for the most part these are the very same explictly conservative examples I've already cited.
The only sense in which there is a 'liberal bias' in the media is on social issues where racist opinions like those that got Lott the boot recently are pretty much rejected by almost everyone in the mainstream media, as is anti-gay bigottry, sexism, anti-semitism, anti-catholic etc.
I will agree that "liberal bias" is more pronounced on social issues but would not confine it to racism where there is a national consensus (heck, the National Review was more strident in calling for Lott's ouster than many liberal journals *- see note below) It also extends to more controversial issues where there is no concensus - like the precise policies to combat racism & it's effects (racism like Lott's is universally condemned - whether affirmative action is a valid or appropriate policy is a much more controversial and debatable matter), or abortion where opinion is evenly divided.
* It should be noted though that National Review has been working successfuly to purge the conservative movement of racists for decades starting with their successful campaign to marginalise groups like the John Birch Society. Think back to the letter Correta Scott King wrote to William F. Buckley thanking him for his contribution to purging society of racism. While it is tempting to go the route the NAACP seems content with recently that ANY opposition to their policy REGARDLESS OF IT'S REASONING is prima facia proof of racism. The world is more complex than that and there are good arguments, explictly anti-racialist/anti-racist arguments to be made against government policies that explictly note your race in order to grant favors to one race or another. It is ironic that Lott was asked (and seemed willing) to repudiate his belief that one race should be elevated over another in government policy by simply switching which race received the benefit. One could argue he was being asked to exchanging a bitter, hateful racism for a condescenging "white man's burden" version of the same.
You can get it at Amazon
Another book of his that might be of interest is Beowulf and the Critics an essay by Tolkien.
I don't know that this is really fair. Being forced to read and study something in school can usually suck the joy out of ANY book. I think this is especially true for a book that has a great deal of "importance" from a scholarly point of view - for a long time Beawulf was the property of scholars that studied, & studied it but had little interest in it as a story or even a work of art. Their translations tend to reflect that.
One of the reasons that this new translation is potentially so exciting is that Tolkien (in his essay Beowulf and the Critics) opposed this kind of dead scholaticism and wanted to approach Beawulf as a poem and a work of art to be enjoyed, NOT as an "important" historical artifact to be dissected. Seamus Heaney mentioned this essay as "epoch making" and one of the inspirations for his well regarded (and enjoyable) translations. I'm really looking forward to how Tolkien who was both one of the foremost scholars on Beawulf and perhaps the only one that simply enjoyed it as a story handles the translation.
Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, the Washington times have a new version of Gobbel's 'big lie' it is the myth of the 'liberal media'. By repeating this myth often enough they aim to immunize themselves against criticism for their packs of lies.
Well, just saying it is a "lie" doesn't cut it. There must be some way to evaluate the "liberal media" claim objectively. Perhaps one could look at the voting patterns and party identification of members of the media (reporters, producers, industry executives) just to find out if there is a tilt one way or the other. That doesn't necessarily prove that their personal biases influence their reporting but it could suggest whether or not they *have* those biases. From there one might evaluate major media treatment of politicians and policies from either side of the ideological divide. On could evaluate the use of adjectives to describe partisans or their positions. One could evaluate whether individuals from one side or the other are more often identified by ideology or party (and thus implied to be biased) or not (and thus implied to be impartial). One could measure the amount of time each side of a controversy is given to make their case, etc.
As it turns out such polls & studies *have* been done and while some of the analysis of those studies have been themselves biased the studies themselves seem reasonable and the results are unambiguous. As a demographic group media professionals overwhelmingly self-identify themselves as liberal whereas a signficant majority of the population self-identifies as conservative. Polls of reporters, producers, editors etc. reveal voting patterns that are almost as solidly Democratic as the Black vote. This much is incontrovertible and not even controversial. What remains is whether these acknowledged private biases result in reporting that is actually biased. It is hard to believe that such uniformity of opinion in the newsroom wouldn't result in those uniformly held opinions finding their way into the reporting. However, it would be harder to prove such bias and to be fair some of the individual reporters most closely associated with the Democratic party are widely held to be among the most fair (former Democratic congressional staffers Tim Russert & Chris Matthews come to mind). that being said using such metrics as the use of pejorative adjectives, time given to differing arguments in a controversy etc. *suggest* that the private liberal biases of reporters DO find their way into the reporting.
That unselfconscious bias is pronounced enough that some media outlets have arisen that are self-concscously, more transparently and more distinctly conservative - Fox News being the prime example. The Washington Times is another example though they are balanced by liberal papers that are just as tranparent in their ideological tilt like the Boston Globe (or conservatives would argue the old Gray Lady herself - the New York Times) - On the whole though the great bulk of the mainstream media has a subtle liberal bias while a few newer media outlets have a more pronounced conservative bias.
Someone pushing for high affiliate earnings this quarter...? That was so clearly a SPAM.
/. somehow ;) . So far I've made enough for a pack of gum.
I have to justify all the time I spend on
So what are those two MP3 files, both featuring classical music arranged for guitar, doing in iPhoto? :)
Open iPhoto =>click on "share" => click on "slideshow" => look through the "music" pulldown.
Mitnicks own book
The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security by Kevin Mitnick, William Simon & "the Woz" Steve Wozniak.
And a bunch about the case:
The Fugitive Game: Online With Kevin Mitnick by Jonathan Littman
Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of Kevin Mitnick, America's Most Wanted Computer Outlaw-By the Man Who Did It by Tsutomu Shimomura, John Markoff
and The Cyberthief and the Samurai: The True Story of Kevin Mitnick-And the Man Who Hunted Him Down
He just stole them to see if he could do it.
I still have little sympathy because that is part of the game he played and now he has seen "whether he could do it. The answer was "until I got caught." He was "testing the system" but aside from the intitial security that system is also includes a little "social engineering" of it's own - laws, police, courts, prisons. Kevin Mitnick is JUST NOW completing his "test of the system". I would imagine his curiosity is sated.
I have a hard time believing that the experts would sit by not doing it because people are afraid.
Given the high failure rate (over 99% don't even make it to term) and the *very* high incidence of extreme abnormalities and health problems in the very few "successes" I would tend to hope that you are wrong. Some of the abnormalities are even a risk to the health of the surrogate mother. In fact the ratio of dead mothers to live clones isn't all that encouraging. Some mothers have problems with rather obvious problems - like the common (with clones) problem of massively oversized placentas, others die from more mysterious ailments presumed to be metabolic abnormalities induced by the abnormalities of the fetus's they carry. Of the very few clones that survive and lack any obvious gross anatomical deformaties we have no idea whether or not they are suffering from subtler defects - it's very hard to judge whether a cloned mouse is suffering psychological & behavioural problems as a result of brain abnormalities.
This is a *very* immature science, right now our method of cloning ammounts to just jamming a bunch DNA into a cell and hoping for the best when we *know* that gene order and position is important. We know that in a normal pregnancy whether a particlar gene is from the mother or father is used to decide whether (or when) it is turned "on" or "off" - a mechanism that is problematic with a clone for obvious reasons. Obviously some scientists are willing for the subjects of their experiments to run these risks but it's fair to comment that at this point there is more than a little whiff of Dr. Mengele or the Tuskegee syphilis study to such endevours.
Still, I don't see how they could have missed the Segway
I believe you are mistaken on this "fact" 1) As has already been pointed out, they didn't choose Quicktime, they chose MPEG-4.
They chose *both* they chose Quicktime as the player software. Apple is actually working with them to write the mobile phone version of the software - AND they are going to be using MPEG-4 as the codec.
QuickTime would be okayish (still controlled by Apple) if it always used open codecs, but in practice, it never does.
.1% of their visitors running linux couldn't see it. In fact I doubt those linux users are as concerned about the politics as about the simple fact that they can't view the content.
Two points - 1) Quicktime 6 uses MPEG 4 as the default/preferred codec rather than Sorensen (the proprietary codec everyone loves to hate)
And 2) While it's Apples fault that Sorensen *was* the former default codec it's not *entirely* Apples fault that everybody used it rather than the open alternatives that were available. Using something else was just a matter of selecting it from the pulldown or in the worst case scenario installing the codec and then selecting it from the pulldown. Unfortunately Sorensen was for the most part just plain better. Content creators are interested in file size and image quality, very few are interested in the politics of open source or the fact that the
Amazon.com has lists of gifts for different types of people including:
Gifts for Brainiacs (mostly books & brain-teaser party games) and
Gifts for Gadget Lovers (uh... gadgets).
Their Impossible to shop for list is also worth looking at (all sorts of weird stuff).
For your non-geek kith and kin here are all the other Gift lists by recipient
I've been wanting to see the Lupin III TV series for years, so that ought to be great fun as well.
Well you can get Lupin III on DVD, as well as Trigun and Reign
the trip to the moon was a bit cheaper then Christopher Columbus's trip to the new world.Exploration of new boundries has always costs about the same percentage of a nations wealth since the time of the Romans. If we can not foot the bill for even NASA of it's current size what does that say about us as a nation-state? Commercial interests are not always the best ones to partake in dangerous endevors with unforseen profits. Indeed capatalism is by nature risk averse,
That's not necessarily so and the very examples of exploration we are talking about are the proof. It was not so much the government of Spain funding Columbus' research project as the king and queen of spain investing venture capital in his high-risk/high-return start-up. Columbus was out to find a new, cheaper trading route to India that he and his investors hoped to profit from. ALL the exploration of that golden age of exploration was done for similar reasons sometimes funded by nation-states but always for economic or military gain. As often as not exploration was even by private companies - the Dutch East India *company*, the British East India *company*, the Hudson Bay *company* etc. etc. etc. I don't think we will see another golden age of exploration until we have modern equivalents of these private ventures. Things haven't changed - the early age of space exploration was mostly about military applications (ICBM's, spy satelites) and it was funded by nation states seeking to secure their own defenses and gain an advantage over their enemies and as an added bonus the national pride of flaunting that advantage. The only real hope for *serious* funding from government remains with that kind of military (or at best dual-use) applications (SDI). Without any compelling government interest the next best hope is private industry - if NASA is serious about encouraging space exploration they will seek out those private concerns & interests that can profit from it.
At the top of this and every page on /. right below the logo it says "news for nerds" I think that is sufficient to explain why anything about TTT (no matter how trivial) is front page news that matters (to nerds).
It's a nerd thing, you wouldn't understand.