Put some 7-Up or other lemon-lime soda in a styrofoam cup. Take a few sips and you'll notice the styrofoam is etched at the original level of the soda by the citrus oil film on the surface.
So if you do your part and drink lots of lemon-lime soda, there will be that much less styrofoam left to harm the environment.
A couple of years ago...
on
The Virus Squad
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I received a few emails with attachments which just smelled like worms, although neither the AV checker I had on my Linux system nor one of the online AV checkers identified them as infected. Curious about this, I saved them in a directory and rechecked them from time to time. It wasn't until 3 or 4 months later that the AV checkers fingered them as worms, and worms that had been floating around for almost a year. (I assume a virus writer must have tweaked the code on an existing virus just enough to make its signature unidentifiable as the original worm.)
Third-party diagnostic software is usually insufficient because many hardware details are kept proprietary by the manufacturer.
Manufacturers' diagnostic software is always suspect. When there is a somewhat obscure design bug, manufacturers have been known to remove a test which points out the bug. (Then they can point the finger at the user's software as the culprit rather than their hardware).
I disagree, specific approval to contribute was not necessary, the company should have known, and any other persons within the OS community had no reason to suspect otherwise. The fact that a manager although supposedly junior knew about it makes them look as though they agreed. The company was engaged in Linux activities at that time.
"Contributing" without official corporate approval constitutes misappropriation of company property, which therefore remains company property regardless of what the employees believed. Whether or not there was official corporate approval is an issue which will probably have to be decided by the courts.
The more important question about this, is when did they first learn that their employees had acted without authority, and what steps were taken to remedy the situation.
They _obviously_ just found this out, and were horrified.:-) Their steps to remedy the situation include sending out lots of threatening and/or dunning letters.
As this is all BS they cannot answer!
Of course! But they don't have to - all they need do is drag it out in court for 5 to 10 years. In the meanwhile, a certain 800 pound gorilla in the background will be eating Linux's lunch.
So the official public statements of Executive Director Love don't constitute valid grounds for the management to believe him?
Was this individual an officer of the corporation or authorized by the corporation to make decisions of this nature? If so, his statements will probably be found to be binding on the corporation. Otherwise he's just another employee, and what other employees believe or don't believe has no bearing on the issue.
Also, I think that your legal theories are a bit incorrect. Someone acting in the name of an organization, i.e. as an agent of the corporation, can, I believe, comit the corporation to a contract.
True, if authorized by the corporation in that agency, as I said. If not, the corporation is not bound. Whether or not an individual is in fact duly authorized may be a fuzzy issue of course, and may have to be decided by a court.
If the agency was fradulent, then the corporation can extract payment from the false agent, but I don't believe that it can usually take back the goods that were, e.g., sold.
If the agency was fraudulent, then there was no e.g., sale, to begin with. In any event, the goods can be repossessed if not paid for.
It's a lot murkier than that, but I think that that's the gist. And people definitely had grounds for believing that the Caldera employees were acting as agents for the corp., and so did the employees (they had not only their manager's approval, but also the public statements of the executive director).
Insofar as ownership of company property is concerned, it makes no difference what they believed, if what they believed was false.
Were this not true, nobody would sell paperclips to a corp. without the signature of the board on the purchase order.
Or the signature of the Purchasing Agent, who is the one normally authorized by the corporation to make purchases (within some dollar range) and commit the corporation to paying for them.
You're overlooking one thing: Although it might be your network, the personal and financial information I am asked to submit as a customer of your business is my property, and I have the right to at least minimal assurance that it is being handled securely. While looking under your doormat may be illegal, the fact that I find a key there that compromises the security of my property is sufficient defense for my action.
"Ironic that at least two Caldera employees have, with Caldera's blessing, contributed code to Linux. End of case, you can all go home now."
It would have had Caldera's blessing only if the contribution had been approved by an officer of the corporation, or by someone officially designated by the corporation to approve such contributions.
As I understand the situation, it was only the immediate manager of the two employees who gave the go-ahead, and without corporate approval that's the equivalent of _me_ saying it was OK.
The first Swen.A infected email arrived on my server at about 10:00 UTC0 on Thurs 18 Sept. About 4 hours later, F-prot released an updated AV database which included a signature for this virus, by which time another half-dozen instances had been received. The volume steadily increased with time, and by Thursday evening had reached about 60/hour. By Friday evening, the volume had peaked at around 120-150/hour.
I'm surprised that this story has not appeared on Slashdot until now, however as far as I can tell the main victims of this email-bombing (who were not necessarily infected by the virus) have been active posters to various Usenet newsgroups.
I cut my teeth in computing 40 years ago on FORTRAN and used it for general engineering/scientific calculations until switching over to C language about 15 years ago. From my perspective, C seemed to offer everything that FORTRAN had, plus a lot more.
What advantages are there to using FORTAN over something like C for scientific/math/engineering calculations? Is it mainly just maintenance of legacy code? Or maintenance of legacy coders?:-)
Just because "evolving grammar" may be "accepted" doesn't mean that the reader won't subconciously consider the writer an ignoramus, or totally confuse the meaning of the communication.
I once received a technical query by email written in this "new grammar" - no punctuation, no capitalization, no obvious sentence breaks. After several readings I found that I could reasonably interpret the question in at least three entirely different ways. When I asked the writer to clarify, I received another similarly ambiguous message. Not having any more time to waste, I was forced to reply: "Sorry, I'm afraid I can't help you."
If you have a bunch of words for which the letters of each are totally scrambled (like the popular JUMBLE game published daily in many newspapers), it's not a challenging task to write a computer program to decipher the words by rearranging the letters in alphabetic order and comparing with a dictionary word list which is similarly arranged, and not any more challenging to do something similar when the first and last letters of each word are fixed. Anyone thinking that scrambling letters will confuse automated searches of web content for very long is in for a rude awakening.
Considering the relatively short life expectancy of digital media, the DMCA, and the extensions to copyright term over the past few decades, imagine the Dark Age our children and grandchildren will be facing 50-100 years from now. Only the memories of old men and women and the loot of "pirates" will be available to help fill in the great blank space in our cultural history.
Consider this: If U-Haul had prevailed in this case, it's quite likely that the next defendants in a lawsuit would be companies and individuals who provide ad blocking or pop-up blocking software, or even spyware removal software.
I don't remember what game it was. The banner did not use those words but as I recall her rant, it had very insultingly accused her of being a low-life person of some sort.
The big problem of course is when the spyware screws up and makes a false report, resulting in the ISP taking some action against the user, which could be cause for a lawsuit.
Some years ago I knew a highly ethical woman who wouldn't even think of running copied software on her PC, which was not 100% IBM compatible. She was absolutely livid with rage when a game program she purchased popped up a big banner saying in effect "YOU ARE A PIRATE". (She bad-mouthed that game program to her acquaintances for weeks afterward.)
Most Windows firewall software, like Zone Alarm, requires specific permission from the user before allowing any program to connect to the Internet (and MD5 checksums programs thus allowed). It would appear that only naive "pirates" would be caught by this type of spyware unless the spyware managed to somehow subvert the firewall (or the spyware publisher managed to buy off the firewall publisher).
If you had actually _read_ the article, you'd have discovered that he was specifically NOT charged with a DOS attack and in fact DIDN'T run a DOS attack. He was convicted on a charge of doing what you in effect say would have been fine, and not even charged with something you say justified his conviction.
I pity the poor slob who comes before a jury with _you_ on it.
There's big money involved here...
on
Open Source Law
·
· Score: 1
when all the copyrighted materials incorporated by reference into federal, state, and local laws are considered. Look for a major lobbying effort to persuade Congress to nullify this court decision by appropriate legislation. Hmmm... think "secret laws".
It's your choice to install the "free" program which includes Gator. If you read the EULA instead of blindly clicking on the "I agree" button, you'll know there is something sneaky going on. (If there's no indication whatsoever in the EULA, then you have cause for complaint.)
Exactly so! But Gator and WhenU argue that they've given you the glasses for free and it's your choice whether or not to wear them.
Be careful what you wish for - you might get it. Denying the user the right to fiddle with ads on webpages he/she views leads directly to denying the user the right to fast-forward through commercials and similar activity, which has been likened to "theft" by some media folks.
Aggregate vs Individual data makes no difference.
on
TiVo To Sell Customer Data
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
While I have no objection to Tivo selling aggregate data to marketers by ZIP code (at least as long as it's only the 5-digit code), the fact that they can collect the data at all is problematic. All it takes now under the US Patriot Act is a simple request by a government agency for a surreptitious record of an individual's viewing habits. Under the proposed Total Information Awareness program, the viewing habits of every Tivo subscriber would automatically be transmitted to the government.
They probably would have had a good chance of prevailing in court had they only hosted the search engines. But according to the news articles, at least some of them shared copyrighted files on their own PCs, and that alone would have been their downfall.
If this guy is stripping the copyright and license information from the eBooks he's shipping to his buyers, it would appear he's in violation of both copyright and license. But if he's merely omitting this information from his sales pitch, it's not quite so obvious, to me at least. Please clarify the actual situation.
If he is in fact violating your copyright and/or license, I understand eBay will bar him from selling these items on their site once they are notified of the violation. So perhaps your first complaint should be to eBay.
Slashdot Mirror
Put some 7-Up or other lemon-lime soda in a styrofoam cup. Take a few sips and you'll notice the styrofoam is etched at the original level of the soda by the citrus oil film on the surface.
So if you do your part and drink lots of lemon-lime soda, there will be that much less styrofoam left to harm the environment.
I received a few emails with attachments which just smelled like worms, although neither the AV checker I had on my Linux system nor one of the online AV checkers identified them as infected. Curious about this, I saved them in a directory and rechecked them from time to time. It wasn't until 3 or 4 months later that the AV checkers fingered them as worms, and worms that had been floating around for almost a year. (I assume a virus writer must have tweaked the code on an existing virus just enough to make its signature unidentifiable as the original worm.)
when I'm in the parking lot of a sizeable medical practise here which has a bunch of X-Ray machines and other diagnostic equipment.
When it comes to detailed hardware diagnostics:
Third-party diagnostic software is usually insufficient because many hardware details are kept proprietary by the manufacturer.
Manufacturers' diagnostic software is always suspect. When there is a somewhat obscure design bug, manufacturers have been known to remove a test which points out the bug. (Then they can point the finger at the user's software as the culprit rather than their hardware).
I disagree, specific approval to contribute was not necessary, the company should have known, and any other persons within the OS community had no reason to suspect otherwise. The fact that a manager although supposedly junior knew about it makes them look as though they agreed. The company was engaged in Linux activities at that time.
:-) Their steps to remedy the situation include sending out lots of threatening and/or dunning letters.
"Contributing" without official corporate approval constitutes misappropriation of company property, which therefore remains company property regardless of what the employees believed. Whether or not there was official corporate approval is an issue which will probably have to be decided by the courts.
The more important question about this, is when did they first learn that their employees had acted without authority, and what steps were taken to remedy the situation.
They _obviously_ just found this out, and were horrified.
As this is all BS they cannot answer!
Of course! But they don't have to - all they need do is drag it out in court for 5 to 10 years. In the meanwhile, a certain 800 pound gorilla in the background will be eating Linux's lunch.
So the official public statements of Executive Director Love don't constitute valid grounds for the management to believe him?
Was this individual an officer of the corporation or authorized by the corporation to make decisions of this nature? If so, his statements will probably be found to be binding on the corporation. Otherwise he's just another employee, and what other employees believe or don't believe has no bearing on the issue.
Also, I think that your legal theories are a bit incorrect. Someone acting in the name of an organization, i.e. as an agent of the corporation, can, I believe, comit the corporation to a contract.
True, if authorized by the corporation in that agency, as I said. If not, the corporation is not bound. Whether or not an individual is in fact duly authorized may be a fuzzy issue of course, and may have to be decided by a court.
If the agency was fradulent, then the corporation can extract payment from the false agent, but I don't believe that it can usually take back the goods that were, e.g., sold.
If the agency was fraudulent, then there was no e.g., sale, to begin with. In any event, the goods can be repossessed if not paid for.
It's a lot murkier than that, but I think that that's the gist. And people definitely had grounds for believing that the Caldera employees were acting as agents for the corp., and so did the employees (they had not only their manager's approval, but also the public statements of the executive director).
Insofar as ownership of company property is concerned, it makes no difference what they believed, if what they believed was false.
Were this not true, nobody would sell paperclips to a corp. without the signature of the board on the purchase order.
Or the signature of the Purchasing Agent, who is the one normally authorized by the corporation to make purchases (within some dollar range) and commit the corporation to paying for them.
You're overlooking one thing: Although it might be your network, the personal and financial information I am asked to submit as a customer of your business is my property, and I have the right to at least minimal assurance that it is being handled securely. While looking under your doormat may be illegal, the fact that I find a key there that compromises the security of my property is sufficient defense for my action.
"Ironic that at least two Caldera employees have, with Caldera's blessing, contributed code to Linux. End of case, you can all go home now."
It would have had Caldera's blessing only if the contribution had been approved by an officer of the corporation, or by someone officially designated by the corporation to approve such contributions.
As I understand the situation, it was only the immediate manager of the two employees who gave the go-ahead, and without corporate approval that's the equivalent of _me_ saying it was OK.
The first Swen.A infected email arrived on my server at about 10:00 UTC0 on Thurs 18 Sept. About 4 hours later, F-prot released an updated AV database which included a signature for this virus, by which time another half-dozen instances had been received. The volume steadily increased with time, and by Thursday evening had reached about 60/hour. By Friday evening, the volume had peaked at around 120-150/hour.
I'm surprised that this story has not appeared on Slashdot until now, however as far as I can tell the main victims of this email-bombing (who were not necessarily infected by the virus) have been active posters to various Usenet newsgroups.
PC ad:
"Special: Upgrade to 1 Gigabyte RAM today and get an extra 7% more memory absolutely FREE!!!:
I cut my teeth in computing 40 years ago on FORTRAN and used it for general engineering/scientific calculations until switching over to C language about 15 years ago. From my perspective, C seemed to offer everything that FORTRAN had, plus a lot more.
:-)
What advantages are there to using FORTAN over something like C for scientific/math/engineering calculations? Is it mainly just maintenance of legacy code? Or maintenance of legacy coders?
Just because "evolving grammar" may be "accepted" doesn't mean that the reader won't subconciously consider the writer an ignoramus, or totally confuse the meaning of the communication.
I once received a technical query by email written in this "new grammar" - no punctuation, no capitalization, no obvious sentence breaks. After several readings I found that I could reasonably interpret the question in at least three entirely different ways. When I asked the writer to clarify, I received another similarly ambiguous message. Not having any more time to waste, I was forced to reply: "Sorry, I'm afraid I can't help you."
If you have a bunch of words for which the letters of each are totally scrambled (like the popular JUMBLE game published daily in many newspapers), it's not a challenging task to write a computer program to decipher the words by rearranging the letters in alphabetic order and comparing with a dictionary word list which is similarly arranged, and not any more challenging to do something similar when the first and last letters of each word are fixed. Anyone thinking that scrambling letters will confuse automated searches of web content for very long is in for a rude awakening.
Considering the relatively short life expectancy of digital media, the DMCA, and the extensions to copyright term over the past few decades, imagine the Dark Age our children and grandchildren will be facing 50-100 years from now. Only the memories of old men and women and the loot of "pirates" will be available to help fill in the great blank space in our cultural history.
Consider this: If U-Haul had prevailed in this case, it's quite likely that the next defendants in a lawsuit would be companies and individuals who provide ad blocking or pop-up blocking software, or even spyware removal software.
Maybe we should just completely shut down the Internet. ...".
Listen for the cry of "... if it will save one child
I don't remember what game it was. The banner did not use those words but as I recall her rant, it had very insultingly accused her of being a low-life person of some sort.
The big problem of course is when the spyware screws up and makes a false report, resulting in the ISP taking some action against the user, which could be cause for a lawsuit.
Some years ago I knew a highly ethical woman who wouldn't even think of running copied software on her PC, which was not 100% IBM compatible. She was absolutely livid with rage when a game program she purchased popped up a big banner saying in effect "YOU ARE A PIRATE". (She bad-mouthed that game program to her acquaintances for weeks afterward.)
Most Windows firewall software, like Zone Alarm, requires specific permission from the user before allowing any program to connect to the Internet (and MD5 checksums programs thus allowed). It would appear that only naive "pirates" would be caught by this type of spyware unless the spyware managed to somehow subvert the firewall (or the spyware publisher managed to buy off the firewall publisher).
If you had actually _read_ the article, you'd have discovered that he was specifically NOT charged with a DOS attack and in fact DIDN'T run a DOS attack. He was convicted on a charge of doing what you in effect say would have been fine, and not even charged with something you say justified his conviction.
I pity the poor slob who comes before a jury with _you_ on it.
when all the copyrighted materials incorporated by reference into federal, state, and local laws are considered.
Look for a major lobbying effort to persuade Congress to nullify this court decision by appropriate legislation.
Hmmm... think "secret laws".
It's your choice to install the "free" program which includes Gator. If you read the EULA instead of blindly clicking on the "I agree" button, you'll know there is something sneaky going on. (If there's no indication whatsoever in the EULA, then you have cause for complaint.)
Exactly so! But Gator and WhenU argue that they've given you the glasses for free and it's your choice whether or not to wear them.
Be careful what you wish for - you might get it. Denying the user the right to fiddle with ads on webpages he/she views leads directly to denying the user the right to fast-forward through commercials and similar activity, which has been likened to "theft" by some media folks.
While I have no objection to Tivo selling aggregate data to marketers by ZIP code (at least as long as it's only the 5-digit code), the fact that they can collect the data at all is problematic. All it takes now under the US Patriot Act is a simple request by a government agency for a surreptitious record of an individual's viewing habits. Under the proposed Total Information Awareness program, the viewing habits of every Tivo subscriber would automatically be transmitted to the government.
They probably would have had a good chance of prevailing in court had they only hosted the search engines. But according to the news articles, at least some of them shared copyrighted files on their own PCs, and that alone would have been their downfall.
If this guy is stripping the copyright and license information from the eBooks he's shipping to his buyers, it would appear he's in violation of both copyright and license. But if he's merely omitting this information from his sales pitch, it's not quite so obvious, to me at least. Please clarify the actual situation.
If he is in fact violating your copyright and/or license, I understand eBay will bar him from selling these items on their site once they are notified of the violation. So perhaps your first complaint should be to eBay.