Theatetus's law states that once two people have disagreed on the Israel/Palestine situation, no amount of argument by one will ever convince the other, so it's time to stop. Thank you
In "Medal of Honor: Allied Assault" you have to kill Waffen SS members who, as an army of occupation, were law enforcement officials. I wonder if kids can buy it?
How about Caesar III where the Emperor sends his praetorians after you if you don't pay your tribute fast enough and you have to send your legions to fight them? They're law enforcement officials. Can kids buy Caesar III now? Maybe that doesn't count since it's your army fighting them, not your own character.
How about the Star Wars games? You have to kill stormtroopers who, after all, are only enforcing the wise and just edicts of the emperor. I guess kids shouldn't want to be Jedis anymore.
If the music industry becomes obsolete, you will have no new music to download.
What utter crap. Of my rather large CD collection, I'd say about 15% was produced by a large record label, and only about half was produced by a label at all. I don't infringe copyrights because the music spewed out by labels is almost completely crap, and the few bright spots I'm more than willing to pay for.
I get most of my CDs by going to shows and getting them (usually for free) from bands I like, or downloading the tunes from their websites.
Sure, anyone can put up a web page for marketing or distibution, but people still need to know that the web site exists.
Ever heard of marketing? Mailing lists? Salesmanship? Good old-fashioned pressing the flesh? I know lots of bands that do that to get people interested in their work. Oh wait... you mean you want musicians not to have to work at it?
Also, because just about anybody record songs in their basements and put them on the internet, they lack credibility. ANYONE can do it. Under this model, we will end up with an increased supply, but the product won't be nearly as good.
Hello! Earth to Eminor! The music being spit out ALREADY lacks credibility. The quality ALREADY is no good. In fact, the only decent music I can find with a very few exceptions comes from people that RIAA members wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole.
Hey, if you feel you need some suit to decide what music you should choose from, go for it. But don't act like they're doing the rest of us a favor, OK?
I mentioned this once here on/. and got smacked around for my ignorance. So, I looked it up and, lo, there is a POSIX-conformance API for Windows NT. Write a program, include the right.h's and link with the right DLL's, and things like/dev and/bin get mapped to the correct part of the computer (but remember not all of those things are "files" natively).
If a car manual instructed people how to get military gps coordinates or pick up restricted broadcasts, you can bet it wouldn't be on store shelves.
Oh come on, he didn't write a book about how to hack a PRC-90 to pick up secure broadcasts. He wrote a book about how to mod a PC thinly disguised as a game platform in order to run software other than that supplied by the platform vendor.
That said, Wiley & Sons has every right to refuse to publish anything it doesn't want to (that's part of "free speech" too), and Huang seems to have done OK publishing it himself. No blood, no foul.
Still, the fact that you were so willing to compare a mod that can allow you to put Linux (or pirated games) on an XBox to a mod that can allow you to actually threaten national security says a lot about how the public conceives of corporate vs. personal interests.
One critical flaw is that routers are Layer 3 ("Network") devices while emails are Layer 7 ("Application") data.
The lowest level you could block an email at is Session (and that's being optimistic), which means it has to be done in software.
Routers have a simple job: encapsulate frames into packets, and forward those packets between networks (that's what the "Inter" in "Internet" refers to) to be assembled into segments. The router itself has no idea what the contents of a given message are; that is verified by Session-level software on the sending and receiving hosts.
Imagine it from the router's point of view: all it knows is that this packet is coming from 100.101.102.103 and going to 65.66.67.68, and that it has a few bytes of data -- the rest of the message may well be forwarded by completely different routers.
In summary, the Network layer is an inappropriate level to attempt to detect spam.
are you trying to tell me that John McCarthy wrote LISP in a language which wasn't even going to be devised for another twenty three years?
Not at all. I'm saying that Bruno Haible, et al, wrote CLISP (the LISP I use) in C. McCarthy's LISP (which was like a programming language, OS, hardware spec, etc. all in one) bears little more than a superficial relation to a modern LISP interpreter running on a modern OS on a modern PC. Or so it seems to me.
Didn't he violate some copyright holder's right to not have their stuff stolen?
How do you know? If he owned the albums, he violated no law. I own about 70 CDs; pretty small collection by a lot of people's standards. At an average of 10 tracks / CD, that's 700 tracks. That means I can download those 700 tracks without violating any law -- and guess what? I can send any of those tracks to a friend and say "check out this recording of Missa Solemnis" (or whatever). Why do you assume this guy was downloading illegally?
More disturbingly, why should RIAA be able to assume they were downloaded illegally? It seems they should have to prove that this guy didn't own the recordings he downloaded.
Bashing goto is so tired. It's a great construct for a procedural language. As someone above pointed out, most languages (even the LISP I championed earlier) are written in C. Well, C is "written" in assembly, and all assembly has is goto. Not to mention the performance advantages goto can offer over more structured control flow (for evidence, grep -r goto/usr/src/linux ).
Maybe goto is counter to the spirit of object-orientation, but then again "OO" and "Procedural" are orthogonal when you get right down to it: C++ is OO and procedural and Haskell can be OO but is not procedural.
So which language(s) do you propose should replace C?
Forth for low-level stuff, LISP for high-level stuff, and Scheme for scripting. I use them. I still write plenty of bugs, but I can always prove to myself what they are and where they came from.
The United States National Association of Broadcasters, which assisted in the IcraveTV case and filed comments with the Canadian Commission, welcomed the decision.
"We regard this decision as a major victory for consumers in the protection of free, over-the-air television signals and programming," the group said in a statement.
Free? Since when is broadcast TV free? I pay for it every time I buy something that is advertised on television, since product sales are how those companies make back ad costs.
So, currently, every time I buy something I'm paying for broadcast TV which, except for PBS and some of the few remaining local stations, is absolute unmitigated crap. I also pay for basic cable, and then pay again for the stuff that's advertised on basic cable; I'm paying to watch ads.
OTOH, in practice I applaud anything that will stop the gradual slide of the Internet towards a broadcast-like, producer/consumer relationship.
I think this is why crimes like murder and assault are not federal crimes at all. You are violating no US Federal law if you kill someone, except for certain homicides made illegal by Congress (federal employees doing their duties, murder on a military installation, etc.).
The fact of an assault or murder is not the key issue of a civil rights violation charge; what is "illegal" is denying, under color of state law, a person his or her rights as guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.
is there a good document on figuring out what all the headers mean? I've always wondered where my spam comes from.
Try this one. There are tons of others, just search for "read full email headers" or some similar phrase in your search engine du jour.
There are tons of howto-type documents out there, though IMO the best advice is to take a week or so and get to know SMTP somewhat; once you do that the headers make a lot of sense.
I dunno... most of the time the OS just talks to the BIOS, which in turn provides access to the hardware. Why not say that only the BIOS is "really" an operating system.
The first result is "buy Linux software on Amazon." The second is "Alternatives to Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP" on Microsoft.com. Linux.org is down in the double digits.
Of course, we would expect someone's Internet search engine to reflect their preferences, so this is neither shocking nor bad. It would only be a problem if MS somehow tied IE to their search engine and their search engine only.
so how determines which OSes are "trusted" (and how much of a kick back do "they" get)?
Well, under this proposal, you (or your sysadmin) get to decide which OSes are "trusted". And I doubt you would get much of a kickback.
... and what happens if you try to boot a "non trusted" OS... is it like an ATM and does it eat your hard drive?
It boots into untrusted mode; you don't get the "features" of "Trusted Computing" (tm)
What is the point of this???
As I understand it, to have hardware-level enforcement of "safe" memory management to make sure that a signed application can only have its data affected by another signed application. I don't see why people want that in hardware, but that is, at least, the supposed reason.
Hate to break it to you, but if y^1/2 is implemented as a true function with a single return value, it is not the reverse of x^2.
Say you have y = 9. Was the x that was squared to produce that 3, or was it -3?
Similarly with sin. You know that y received the value of 0 after assignment from sin(x). But was x 0, pi, 2*pi, 3*pi, etc.?
That's just the theoretical problem; there's a bigger practical one involving floating point values. When an operation or cast causes precision loss there's no way to get that precision back. Let's say y is a float and you shift it to the right by 3 bits. Those 3 LSbs are gone forever, and there's no operation that can reverse that unless you log the value of every variable that undergoes an irreversible change.
When it comes to that, users just need full text indexing of their documents so they can do full text searches more quickly. Iduno about windows, but we've definitely got that in mac os.
Great for writers, not so good for graphic artists. I sysadmined for a few years in a graphics/video shop that had tens of thousands of images on the various fileservers. I essentially wrote a very simple version of this "DB on top of FS" idea because I was tired of helping people find their TIFFs.
Yes,/home/projects/DOJ/annual_report/masters is just one piece of metadata, and some people find that easier to remember than several keywords. OTOH, suppose two years later you want to reuse that image of the hispanic male using a computer. Was that in/home/projects/DOJ/annual_report/masters or/home/projects/USDA/website/images ?
My solution (and, it would seem, the article's, though I'm sure that one is a lot more robust), was to keep the users away from the FS completely. Just let them bring up all the images tagged with "hispanic male computer." Most graphics shops I've seen either built a DB file manager or bought one.
Honestly, I think the idea of computers holding a lot of "files" organized into "directories" is a little old. It was great in 1970 but maybe (like this guy is doing) we should rethink it a little. Why not say a computer has certain knowledge ("files") and certain capabilities ("executables")? Rather than naming files, describe the data you want the computer to retain, and retreive it later from that description.
As somebody pointed out, Office2K/XP and W2K/XP have something like this already, but people don't use it because they still have to name files. That's the crucial step, I think, and that's why I took that power out of my users' hands. They never named files; the app did it for them. Instead, they described files and versions. Abstraction and all that...
Anyways, this idea may not help everybody, but it sounds like my old users would have liked it (they, btw, were very good about using specific and accurate keywords... no QWERTY effect here; they just didn't think in terms of files and directories). Plus, it's nice to see somebody trying to move past the "files and directories" mindset we've had for the past 3 decades.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's my thought: 1) mathematical expressions are not patentable (on the assumption that math exists "out there" somewhere and we just discover it).
2) any program in a Turing complete language is identical to some other program in every other Turing complete language.
3) Haskell is a Turing complete language.
4) any program in Haskell is also an expression in the Lambda calculus.
5) But any expression in the Lambda calculus is a mathematical expression.
6) So, any program is a mathematical expression, and not patentable. QED
Just what I think.
Theatetus's law states that once two people have disagreed on the Israel/Palestine situation, no amount of argument by one will ever convince the other, so it's time to stop. Thank you
In "Medal of Honor: Allied Assault" you have to kill Waffen SS members who, as an army of occupation, were law enforcement officials. I wonder if kids can buy it?
How about Caesar III where the Emperor sends his praetorians after you if you don't pay your tribute fast enough and you have to send your legions to fight them? They're law enforcement officials. Can kids buy Caesar III now? Maybe that doesn't count since it's your army fighting them, not your own character.
How about the Star Wars games? You have to kill stormtroopers who, after all, are only enforcing the wise and just edicts of the emperor. I guess kids shouldn't want to be Jedis anymore.
What did blind people ever do to you?
What utter crap. Of my rather large CD collection, I'd say about 15% was produced by a large record label, and only about half was produced by a label at all. I don't infringe copyrights because the music spewed out by labels is almost completely crap, and the few bright spots I'm more than willing to pay for.
I get most of my CDs by going to shows and getting them (usually for free) from bands I like, or downloading the tunes from their websites.
Ever heard of marketing? Mailing lists? Salesmanship? Good old-fashioned pressing the flesh? I know lots of bands that do that to get people interested in their work. Oh wait... you mean you want musicians not to have to work at it?
Hello! Earth to Eminor! The music being spit out ALREADY lacks credibility. The quality ALREADY is no good. In fact, the only decent music I can find with a very few exceptions comes from people that RIAA members wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole.
Hey, if you feel you need some suit to decide what music you should choose from, go for it. But don't act like they're doing the rest of us a favor, OK?
I mentioned this once here on /. and got smacked around for my ignorance. So, I looked it up and, lo, there is a POSIX-conformance API for Windows NT. Write a program, include the right .h's and link with the right DLL's, and things like /dev and /bin get mapped to the correct part of the computer (but remember not all of those things are "files" natively).
But kudos for grasping the difference between declension and conjugation.
Oh come on, he didn't write a book about how to hack a PRC-90 to pick up secure broadcasts. He wrote a book about how to mod a PC thinly disguised as a game platform in order to run software other than that supplied by the platform vendor.
That said, Wiley & Sons has every right to refuse to publish anything it doesn't want to (that's part of "free speech" too), and Huang seems to have done OK publishing it himself. No blood, no foul.
Still, the fact that you were so willing to compare a mod that can allow you to put Linux (or pirated games) on an XBox to a mod that can allow you to actually threaten national security says a lot about how the public conceives of corporate vs. personal interests.
*ducks*
One critical flaw is that routers are Layer 3 ("Network") devices while emails are Layer 7 ("Application") data.
The lowest level you could block an email at is Session (and that's being optimistic), which means it has to be done in software.
Routers have a simple job: encapsulate frames into packets, and forward those packets between networks (that's what the "Inter" in "Internet" refers to) to be assembled into segments. The router itself has no idea what the contents of a given message are; that is verified by Session-level software on the sending and receiving hosts.
Imagine it from the router's point of view: all it knows is that this packet is coming from 100.101.102.103 and going to 65.66.67.68, and that it has a few bytes of data -- the rest of the message may well be forwarded by completely different routers.
In summary, the Network layer is an inappropriate level to attempt to detect spam.
Yeah, it means rather than sending him to Cuba without a trial, the CIA will blow him up from a UAV without a trial
Not at all. I'm saying that Bruno Haible, et al, wrote CLISP (the LISP I use) in C. McCarthy's LISP (which was like a programming language, OS, hardware spec, etc. all in one) bears little more than a superficial relation to a modern LISP interpreter running on a modern OS on a modern PC. Or so it seems to me.
Ummm... "call" is just "push ESP; goto $ADDRESS_OF_SUBROUTINE"
"jne" is just "if !(flags ~ 0x0010) goto $ADDRESS_OF_THEN_CLAUSE"
How do you know? If he owned the albums, he violated no law. I own about 70 CDs; pretty small collection by a lot of people's standards. At an average of 10 tracks / CD, that's 700 tracks. That means I can download those 700 tracks without violating any law -- and guess what? I can send any of those tracks to a friend and say "check out this recording of Missa Solemnis" (or whatever). Why do you assume this guy was downloading illegally?
More disturbingly, why should RIAA be able to assume they were downloaded illegally? It seems they should have to prove that this guy didn't own the recordings he downloaded.
Bashing goto is so tired. It's a great construct for a procedural language. As someone above pointed out, most languages (even the LISP I championed earlier) are written in C. Well, C is "written" in assembly, and all assembly has is goto. Not to mention the performance advantages goto can offer over more structured control flow (for evidence, grep -r goto /usr/src/linux ).
Maybe goto is counter to the spirit of object-orientation, but then again "OO" and "Procedural" are orthogonal when you get right down to it: C++ is OO and procedural and Haskell can be OO but is not procedural.
Goto is not the enemy!
Forth for low-level stuff, LISP for high-level stuff, and Scheme for scripting. I use them. I still write plenty of bugs, but I can always prove to myself what they are and where they came from.
Free? Since when is broadcast TV free? I pay for it every time I buy something that is advertised on television, since product sales are how those companies make back ad costs.
So, currently, every time I buy something I'm paying for broadcast TV which, except for PBS and some of the few remaining local stations, is absolute unmitigated crap. I also pay for basic cable, and then pay again for the stuff that's advertised on basic cable; I'm paying to watch ads.
OTOH, in practice I applaud anything that will stop the gradual slide of the Internet towards a broadcast-like, producer/consumer relationship.
#include <obIANAL.h>
I think this is why crimes like murder and assault are not federal crimes at all. You are violating no US Federal law if you kill someone, except for certain homicides made illegal by Congress (federal employees doing their duties, murder on a military installation, etc.).
The fact of an assault or murder is not the key issue of a civil rights violation charge; what is "illegal" is denying, under color of state law, a person his or her rights as guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.
Try this one. There are tons of others, just search for "read full email headers" or some similar phrase in your search engine du jour.
There are tons of howto-type documents out there, though IMO the best advice is to take a week or so and get to know SMTP somewhat; once you do that the headers make a lot of sense.
Cheers
I dunno... most of the time the OS just talks to the BIOS, which in turn provides access to the hardware. Why not say that only the BIOS is "really" an operating system.
Search on Google for "Altavista"
The first result is altavista.com
Search on search.msn.com for "Linux"
The first result is "buy Linux software on Amazon." The second is "Alternatives to Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP" on Microsoft.com. Linux.org is down in the double digits.
Of course, we would expect someone's Internet search engine to reflect their preferences, so this is neither shocking nor bad. It would only be a problem if MS somehow tied IE to their search engine and their search engine only.
Well, under this proposal, you (or your sysadmin) get to decide which OSes are "trusted". And I doubt you would get much of a kickback.
It boots into untrusted mode; you don't get the "features" of "Trusted Computing" (tm)
As I understand it, to have hardware-level enforcement of "safe" memory management to make sure that a signed application can only have its data affected by another signed application. I don't see why people want that in hardware, but that is, at least, the supposed reason.
Hate to break it to you, but if y^1/2 is implemented as a true function with a single return value, it is not the reverse of x^2.
Say you have y = 9. Was the x that was squared to produce that 3, or was it -3?
Similarly with sin. You know that y received the value of 0 after assignment from sin(x). But was x 0, pi, 2*pi, 3*pi, etc.?
That's just the theoretical problem; there's a bigger practical one involving floating point values. When an operation or cast causes precision loss there's no way to get that precision back. Let's say y is a float and you shift it to the right by 3 bits. Those 3 LSbs are gone forever, and there's no operation that can reverse that unless you log the value of every variable that undergoes an irreversible change.
For that matter, why not have one farm of computers sieving out all the primes 2^2048 and another farm trying the resulting primes as key solutions?
Great for writers, not so good for graphic artists. I sysadmined for a few years in a graphics/video shop that had tens of thousands of images on the various fileservers. I essentially wrote a very simple version of this "DB on top of FS" idea because I was tired of helping people find their TIFFs.
Yes, /home/projects/DOJ/annual_report/masters is just one piece of metadata, and some people find that easier to remember than several keywords. OTOH, suppose two years later you want to reuse that image of the hispanic male using a computer. Was that in /home/projects/DOJ/annual_report/masters or /home/projects/USDA/website/images ?
My solution (and, it would seem, the article's, though I'm sure that one is a lot more robust), was to keep the users away from the FS completely. Just let them bring up all the images tagged with "hispanic male computer." Most graphics shops I've seen either built a DB file manager or bought one.
Honestly, I think the idea of computers holding a lot of "files" organized into "directories" is a little old. It was great in 1970 but maybe (like this guy is doing) we should rethink it a little. Why not say a computer has certain knowledge ("files") and certain capabilities ("executables")? Rather than naming files, describe the data you want the computer to retain, and retreive it later from that description.
As somebody pointed out, Office2K/XP and W2K/XP have something like this already, but people don't use it because they still have to name files. That's the crucial step, I think, and that's why I took that power out of my users' hands. They never named files; the app did it for them. Instead, they described files and versions. Abstraction and all that...
Anyways, this idea may not help everybody, but it sounds like my old users would have liked it (they, btw, were very good about using specific and accurate keywords... no QWERTY effect here; they just didn't think in terms of files and directories). Plus, it's nice to see somebody trying to move past the "files and directories" mindset we've had for the past 3 decades.