Not really. Try this instead: "The only way to fight gun control is to reduce gun fatalities."
Whether that means trigger locks, better ethics amongst dealers, or something else. The government doesn't try to ban something unless there's a problem. And billions of dollars of losses for one of Congress' biggest "sponsors" is a Big Problem(tm).
The time for reform is now. The time to blow defiant raspberries at The Man has passed. Don't pick a fight with a cop if you've got something to hide.
The DMCA has made it more difficult for me to share and download media files.
The DMCA has made it more difficult for me to get a decent DVD player on Linux for the few DVDs that are actually worth paying for.
The DMCA has made me more concerned that any security related coding I do in the future might actually be illegal.
I would be willing to stop sharing and downloading pirated software and media files forever in exchange for the repeal of the DMCA. It is a grave threat to free speech and it's worth some sacrifice to see it end.
~wally
Time to stop the madness
on
DMCA 2, Freedom 0
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· Score: 2, Flamebait
This entire DMCA debacle makes me physically ill. I find it hard to believe that in America, the land of the "free", the courts and the legislature uphold laws that obviously fly in the face of free speech and everything that the Bill of Rights stands for.
The only way to fight this very disturbing trend is to grow up and stop hacking. Our programmers need to concentrate on good old fashioned programming projects: improving KDE and Mozilla. Adding more big iron support, filesystems, and other features to the Linux kernel. Making the system more user-friendly. Improving security. These things help everybody and will allow us to overthrow the Microsoft monopoly.
What we don't need right now is more hacking software. We don't need new versions of nmap and SATAN every week. We don't need any more 'sploits published on BUGTRAQ and we don't need any more software to remove content protection. We don't need any new PTP clients. We need to stop the government from passing these Draconian laws and the only way they're going to listen to us is if we can show them that we can behave without regulation.
Face it folks - we are a bunch of powerless individuals, not a large corporation. The EFF's budget is about 1/100th of the smallest RIAA member's lobbying budget. We can't fight them on their own terms so the only way we have to preserve our freedoms is to stop abusing them.
But what you're forgetting is that while it may be easy to get a couple dozen card numbers off of alt.2600.hackerz, it's pretty hard to forge an actual card unless you're in cahoots with the cashier. (which leaves a trail that somebody will eventually follow if you card enough stuff.) Ever wonder why the register asks you for the last 4 digits of the account number? It's so that scammers can't rewrite the magstripe on an existing card with a "custom" account number.
So you can sniff Disney's 802.11b network and get a bunch of (account, expiration date) tuples that you can't use anywhere, or you can pick pockets to steal cards that you can use offline. The former is scalable but unprofitable. The latter is profitable but not scalable.
Banks learn from their mistakes pretty quickly. Don't be surprised if POS terminals start getting retrofitted so that a PIN is required for credit purchases as well as debit purchases, in the next few years.
Credit card numbers alone are not as useful as they used to be for scam artists. Nowadays, in order to do anything useful with a CC#, a thief will need:
The billing address of the card to do any sort of mail order / online purchase.
The cardholder's signature. Often merchants will want a faxed copy of the sig (and maybe a xerox of the card) for ordering laptops and other valuables. And that's when they're shipping to the cardholder's home address.
The 3-digit validation code from the back of the card. Paypal, C2IT, and most "online cash" places demand it now; many merchants do as well.
The cardholder's SSN, MMN, and DOB. In order to make any changes to the account (like adding extra addresses), they will need to authenticate themselves.
Credit card fraud is substantially less profitable now than it was 15 years ago when I did it. Back then, you could buy a new computer over the phone with a number that Credit Master spit out. Merchants have wised up now. (The thing I wonder about is why the banks' interest rates have gone up since then. No offense intended, but it's probably just a greedy jew thing.) Nowadays it's easier to steal money by hijacking PayPal accounts from Sircam-0wned machines and defrauding other online payment systems.
As somebody who has worked on a few commercially available embedded devices, I would like to comment on this:
The LGPL gives your users quite a few freedoms that they would not ordinarily have under the GPL. To take advantage of this, you will need to change your business plan so that it is based on selling or giving away support, not selling or giving away a scarce product. If the codec is superior and the source code is available, there is no reason why anybody would balk at it being LGPLed.
You should also ask yourself: who would potentially object to an LGPL code base rather than one licensed under the BSD license? My guess is that the only people who would benefit from you using the BSD license in this case are parasites who seek to sell your hard work for their own personal profit. I don't think they're the ones you want to please; your users are more important.
Just my 2c.
~wally
O'Reilley : RMS :: Libertarianism : Socialism
on
Freedom or Power Redux
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· Score: 3, Insightful
In the Free Software world, we are all forced to make hard decisions. One of the most difficult is deciding which license to use. And I applaud these two men to even consider broaching the topic in such a public way.
Unfortunately, the two viewpoints are irreconcilable. One values the rights of the individual over the needs of the Free Software world, and one values the needs of the Free Software world over the rights of the individual. RMS promises that everyone will have the right to see the code they're running, and that right will be enforced by a society who accepts the GPL. O'Reilley promises that everyone will have the right of self-determination as an author, as long as the GPL is not mainstream. The problem here is that the realization of both visions is mutually exclusive.
So, to these men, I say: drop it. Let the chips fall where they may. Let the people decide which license should govern them. It's nothing short of a vi vs. emacs or Christianity vs. Islam battle, and neither side stands a chance at winning. Let the users decide.
I used to work at a company that wanted desperately to create an online community. But it's not a simple thing to do and they failed miserably. Why? Because the market just doesn't demand it. Online communities are necessarily small niches, and niches are things that big companies just can't seem to handle well. And trying to make a niche community into something bigger usually fails miserably and alienates the people who made the site popular in the first place.
This book is obviously intended to be read by managers who still think they can put up a simple web site and make millions of dollars catering to the needs of individuals on the Internet. (I know because I borrowed and skimmed it.) Well, the reality of the matter is that it's just not possible. Online communities just happen. If you try to intentionally build one, you are wasting your time.
One of my drinking buddies worked on a project similar to this. He told me that the heat problems mentioned in the article were the single biggest obstacle to making a successful mini-turban. Apparently researchers have been working for years on these devices, but they have watched as battery technology has advanced and their heat problems remained. Basically the main problem is that the intense heat generated by combustion places an upper bound on the lifetime of these devices, and that upper bound is substantially lower than the upper bound on a Li-Ion battery's lifetime. Back in the days of NiCd, shoddy "Renewal" cells, and expensive alkalines, this might have provided some much-needed competition. But for now it is just behind the time, despite the fact that it is so small.
As much as you may love harassing people and crapflooding, there is really no place for your immature behavior on Slashdot. Perhaps anothersite would be more able to cater to your perverse needs.
My post was a bit short on details because I didn't want to get the details wrong. That's something that mature people need to be concerned about when they're passing on secondhand information. But vague secondhand information is better than no information at all, as long as it's not misleading. And I understand computers well enough to tell you that my information was accurate.
If I were you, I would just lie low and hope the editors don't cut off your hijacked account.
One of my friends has an e570 and he has been running Linux on it for a few days. He told me he has had a mixed experience with it:
He has not been able to get it to use the CompactFlash slot, but he said there is a kernel patch that addresses the issue (which he hasn't had time to test yet)
Support for power management on these devices is quite a bit different from standard PCs, and is a bit quirky.
The StrongArm chip is blazingly fast, and the system is considerably more responsive with Linux on it.
He tried NetBSD on it a few days back, but wasn't able to get GGI to work properly.
His next big project is to get ext3 or JFS running on it, to avoid corrupting flash memory cards.
Lowering the barrier to entry to web publishing has had a few benefits. Families can share photographs and news in a cheap, efficient manner. Novices can publish information for the benefit of their employees or others easily. However, problems like this do arise quite often, and at their source one can see that the widespread ability of people to publish documents to the web does not coexist well with existing security systems and models.
At any other time in the past few years, this would not ordinarily be a societal problem. Sure, a few peoples' passwords and credit card numbers will leak out. Hopefully they would have to pay for the charges to punish them for their own stupidity. (After all, as a customer of several banks, I don't want my rates to go up because somebody posted his account numbers for the entire world to see.) But now, this is a national security problem, because we are being attacked by a foreign force who might abuse leaked passwords to access critical systems and cause chaos in this country. President Bush and his staff are very concerned about a cyberwar, because it can be waged without physically having Arabs in the States to commit the terrorism. That is very dangerous indeed.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but a good first step is for companies to raise the barrier to entry to publishing web pages. Geocities and Angelfire should force users to demonstrate their competence before uploading their first page. Perhaps requiring an A+ certification number would help? And Microsoft should take away the parts of FrontPage that allow users to generate documents without writing in HTML. That would help ease the problem, I reckon.
In conclusion - if everybody does their part to help solve this problem and stop information leakage, we will be a safer, more secure society without giving up any more civil liberties.
It's pretty easy to stand on the sidelines and call names, but the truth of the matter is that OBL has sacrificed a great deal of his personal time (as well as his Saudi citizenship and millions of dollars that have been spent or frozen) fighting for his fellow Muslims, and working to get the concept of a free Islamic world across to people who otherwise would be totally clueless that most of the Muslim world considers itself oppressed by the West.
Comparing OBL's actions with those of an academic who has never put his life on the line for what he believes is extremely offensive to me.
~wally
That's been the trend in recent years
on
Virtual Astronomy
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· Score: 1, Troll
As a NASA employee, I have seen a pronounced shift in the focus of the organization, from data collection to data distillation and mining. As it turns out, we have tens of years of work ahead of us in processing the data that we collected from space in the 1980s and 1990s alone. In fact, we have not yet developed software to mine the information out of this data that we need - the bottleneck is 95% manpower and 5% CPU cycles. And that is in spite of the budget shifting substantially toward processing and away from missions (which are expensive, misunderstood, and often goofed up).
I fully expect that by 2010 or so, we probably will not be doing launches more than once every few years. Indeed, it is rumored that the recent space shuttle launch was intended only to intimidate third-world nations in the Middle East and make them realize our superior technology - not for any scientific purpose. I do not believe that that launch would have taken place in the absence of the 9/11 events. When I checked the calendar several months ago, it did not show any major launches until late 2002.
After all, the government doesn't really expect a terrorist to carry a tracking device at the critical time, does it?
Most governmental "crime fighting measures" are so poorly designed that they intrude on honest citizens' lives, and do little to fight crime. Consider:
Mandatory ID cards. As if terrorists with millions of dollars can't fake them?
Taking guns away. As if street criminals don't already buy them on the black market?
Carnivore. As if a terrorist with half a brain can't use PGP?
Key escrow. As if terrorists won't be able to find an old copy of PGP to use?
Stopping curbside checkin. As if that will help stop hijackings?
The only good Congress is a Congress that isn't passing laws (except laws that benefit techies).
Unfortunately, it seems as though your contract job hasn't given you the experience it takes to realize that different agencies in the government actually have different setups, needs, and "corporate" cultures.
Your post is tantamount to saying that because the Navy standardized on WinNT, it's obvious that nobody at NASA runs Linux.
Please check your arrogance at the door before you post again.
Before 9/11, I would have been thrilled to see something like this which could be used to improve existing security systems. (For instance, I'll be the first one to buy a SecurID-style setup that uses these things in authenticators the size and thickness of business cards - kiss replayable passwords goodbye.) However, with the ever-present push to implement a national ID card system, this technology is just another facilitator to making the USA even more of a police state.
With traditional smart card systems, the government could force us (through "voluntary measures" of course, which would be required in airports and to drive) to carry a card that contained our biometric IDs, medical records, and discipline records from grade school. These are horribly intrusive devices, but they pale in comparison to an active, powered smartcard. Think of the possibilities: GPS tracking and reporting, for starters. How about making these cards transmit an "I'm here" signal every few seconds, so that the government knows when you're in the area? Forget tracking and triangulation on cell phones (you can turn them off) - they could force us to carry a card around with us that tells businesses and government agencies where we are, what we are doing and saying, and everything about our past.
Think I'm paranoid? Listen to a few of Ashcroft's speeches on CNN and think again. They'd do it in a heartbeat if they could get popular support. And that won't be hard to do if we lose a couple more tall buildings.
How, exactly, would you propose measuring the success of a musician to find out whose CDs are worth pressing by the million, and whose to throw in the dumpster?
Obviously the consumers are voting with their pocketbooks, and buying 16M of the CDs that you consider to "suck." Perhaps the problem is that a large percentage of people are not good judges of music quality. But how do you solve that?
As another example - Sanyo probably sells millions of their relatively inexpensive CD players. To an audiophile, they probably sound like crap next to a high-end Harmon Kardon box. But Harmon Kardon only sells a handful, and Sanyo sells millions. How do you get all of the peons who buy from Sanyo to switch? You can't, because the Sanyo equipment is good enough to do the job. Maybe music is the same way - not perfect, but sufficient for most people.
We have found that having a small web services team that is directly accountable to a high level manager is important. In fact, our web site is currently down because of a reorganization in that area.
We had similar problems in the past few years. In fact, our web services used to be run by the IS department, who used our web site to try out "new and cool" technologies. That is one reason why we were, until recently, running web servers on HURD, BeOS, and AtheOS platforms, with little coordination amongst them. We also had trouble keeping up to date on patches, and nobody seemed to want to learn enough about the novelty OSs to support them properly. In effect, our web site became a toy for bored administrators to tweak. Not a good idea when we've got millions of dollars in funding riding on the public and the Congress being able to measure our progress as an organization.
So, in a business, it would probably make sense to have a dedicated VP who oversees the web site, along with several senior technical people who approve changes. Although everybody hates red tape, it's simply not a good idea to trust a couple of recent CS grads not to mess up the company's image by goofing up the web site. Changes should all require approval, and unapproved changes should be grounds for dismissal. That is how we are doing it, so stay tuned to see how well it works when the site comes back up...
The record companies certainly get a bad rap on this site (and in many other circles as well). However, we need to separate the facts from the emotion here. Record companies run a risky, speculative business, and it is a well-known fact that most of the artists they sponsor do not succeed. It is a testament to their ingenuity that they are able to make such huge profits by developing a successful formula to minimize losses on crappy bands (the 95%) and maximize profits on good bands (the 5%). How many speculators in other industries (such as real estate) can you name who are able to achieve such a high return on such risky investments?
My personal argument is not with the record companies on the basis of profit. They should be allowed to sell their wares and make money; after all, this is a capitalist world. My beef with the RIAA members is that in their zeal to increase profits, they advocate the loss of basic freedoms for U.S. citizens, in the name of "stopping piracy." The DMCA and SSSCA, as well as their continued attempts to squash fair use, spy on computer users, and shut down BearShare users are an affront to freedom and do nothing but mobilize public opinion against the entire industry. It's unnecessary, relatively unprofitable, and the public won't stand for it for long. The Ford Motor Company used to have a lot of popular support in this country before "Unsafe at any Speed" came along. And it took them years to recover from it.
If the RIAA companies would just focus a bit more on producing quality music instead of trying to control every aspect of their products' use, they will get a lot farther and probably make a lot more money. Which is fine with me.
There's nothing dishonest about targeted advertising. Why do you think you get coupons in the mail for Wonder bread after you've bought a loaf of Butternut with your supermarket discount card? (Although the practice can sometimes raise privacy concerns, it doesn't in the "victor mousetrap" case.)
Why would anyone want to pay for their bandwidth if they could easily get commercial sponsors to pay for it?
Well, the video card does have TV out, so I'm guessing that it produces NTSC and VGA concurrently rather than sequentially?
I have experimented with outputting text. It is surprisingly clear, as long as I stick to (say) 30x10. But that wasn't my concern - the big hurdle was getting svgalib to work on an inactive vidcard. I figured I could put up some snazzy graphs that would offset the fuzzy text.
But I probably am going to have to go the character LCD route. I have an old 4x20 HD44780 based LCD that I can hook up to an EDE702 and then to a serial port. Same as a Matrix Orbital but half the cost. Color and graphics would have been nice tho..
My only big problem with that is that the EL backlight burned out. Any ideas on how to replace those suckers?
When I first read this, it seemed like a good idea. However, it quickly dawned on me that this is a solution in search of a problem. How many people are actually complaining about too many hits to their web site?
Please forgive me for mentioning capitalism on Slashdot, but a website that receives many misdirected hits is perfect for targeted marketing. Think of the possibilities: if your web site is getting mistaken hits for "victor mousetraps," sell banner ads for "Revenge" brand traps and make a killing on the click-throughs. With a little clever Perl scripting, determine which banner ad to show based on which set of "wrong keywords" show up in the referer. Companies will pay a lot of money for accurately targeted advertisements. Selling these ads would undoubtedly pay the whole bandwidth bill and probably make a profit to boot.
So no, unwords are not necessary. Unless you're running a website off a freebie.edu connection and aren't allowed to make a profit off of it. Otherwise you're just throwing money away.
Disregarding the fact that Java and C# are both "closed" languages controlled by large corporate entities with their own self-interests in mind, they both do an admirable job of bridging the gap between general purpose scripting languages and C++. Having used C# and Java on Win32 extensively in the past year, I have become accustomed to the automatic garbage collection, quick execution speed, and logically consistent design of both languages. The Windows compilers / runtime engines for both languages are quite amazing, and something for the fledgling gcj to aspire to.
Although C# does deliver superior integration with Windows and.net (which is good for MS-only developers and bad for multiplatform programmers like myself), I'd have to pick Java if it was up to me just because of its sheer elegance. It seems like Sun did a better job designing a general-purpose language (applet "security" extensions aside), and Microsoft just tried to copy Java but add in proprietary extensions to hook C# into Windows. Thus, some of the C# features seem to be "bolted on", whereas most of Java came across as being very natural to me.
Slashdot Mirror
"The only way to fight gags is to shut up"
Not really. Try this instead: "The only way to fight gun control is to reduce gun fatalities."
Whether that means trigger locks, better ethics amongst dealers, or something else. The government doesn't try to ban something unless there's a problem. And billions of dollars of losses for one of Congress' biggest "sponsors" is a Big Problem(tm).
The time for reform is now. The time to blow defiant raspberries at The Man has passed. Don't pick a fight with a cop if you've got something to hide.
~wally
The DMCA has made it more difficult for me to share and download media files.
The DMCA has made it more difficult for me to get a decent DVD player on Linux for the few DVDs that are actually worth paying for.
The DMCA has made me more concerned that any security related coding I do in the future might actually be illegal.
I would be willing to stop sharing and downloading pirated software and media files forever in exchange for the repeal of the DMCA. It is a grave threat to free speech and it's worth some sacrifice to see it end.
~wally
This entire DMCA debacle makes me physically ill. I find it hard to believe that in America, the land of the "free", the courts and the legislature uphold laws that obviously fly in the face of free speech and everything that the Bill of Rights stands for.
The only way to fight this very disturbing trend is to grow up and stop hacking. Our programmers need to concentrate on good old fashioned programming projects: improving KDE and Mozilla. Adding more big iron support, filesystems, and other features to the Linux kernel. Making the system more user-friendly. Improving security. These things help everybody and will allow us to overthrow the Microsoft monopoly.
What we don't need right now is more hacking software. We don't need new versions of nmap and SATAN every week. We don't need any more 'sploits published on BUGTRAQ and we don't need any more software to remove content protection. We don't need any new PTP clients. We need to stop the government from passing these Draconian laws and the only way they're going to listen to us is if we can show them that we can behave without regulation.
Face it folks - we are a bunch of powerless individuals, not a large corporation. The EFF's budget is about 1/100th of the smallest RIAA member's lobbying budget. We can't fight them on their own terms so the only way we have to preserve our freedoms is to stop abusing them.
~wally
But what you're forgetting is that while it may be easy to get a couple dozen card numbers off of alt.2600.hackerz, it's pretty hard to forge an actual card unless you're in cahoots with the cashier. (which leaves a trail that somebody will eventually follow if you card enough stuff.) Ever wonder why the register asks you for the last 4 digits of the account number? It's so that scammers can't rewrite the magstripe on an existing card with a "custom" account number.
So you can sniff Disney's 802.11b network and get a bunch of (account, expiration date) tuples that you can't use anywhere, or you can pick pockets to steal cards that you can use offline. The former is scalable but unprofitable. The latter is profitable but not scalable.
Banks learn from their mistakes pretty quickly. Don't be surprised if POS terminals start getting retrofitted so that a PIN is required for credit purchases as well as debit purchases, in the next few years.
~wally
Credit card fraud is substantially less profitable now than it was 15 years ago when I did it. Back then, you could buy a new computer over the phone with a number that Credit Master spit out. Merchants have wised up now. (The thing I wonder about is why the banks' interest rates have gone up since then. No offense intended, but it's probably just a greedy jew thing.) Nowadays it's easier to steal money by hijacking PayPal accounts from Sircam-0wned machines and defrauding other online payment systems.
~wally
As somebody who has worked on a few commercially available embedded devices, I would like to comment on this:
The LGPL gives your users quite a few freedoms that they would not ordinarily have under the GPL. To take advantage of this, you will need to change your business plan so that it is based on selling or giving away support, not selling or giving away a scarce product. If the codec is superior and the source code is available, there is no reason why anybody would balk at it being LGPLed.
You should also ask yourself: who would potentially object to an LGPL code base rather than one licensed under the BSD license? My guess is that the only people who would benefit from you using the BSD license in this case are parasites who seek to sell your hard work for their own personal profit. I don't think they're the ones you want to please; your users are more important.
Just my 2c.
~wally
In the Free Software world, we are all forced to make hard decisions. One of the most difficult is deciding which license to use. And I applaud these two men to even consider broaching the topic in such a public way.
Unfortunately, the two viewpoints are irreconcilable. One values the rights of the individual over the needs of the Free Software world, and one values the needs of the Free Software world over the rights of the individual. RMS promises that everyone will have the right to see the code they're running, and that right will be enforced by a society who accepts the GPL. O'Reilley promises that everyone will have the right of self-determination as an author, as long as the GPL is not mainstream. The problem here is that the realization of both visions is mutually exclusive.
So, to these men, I say: drop it. Let the chips fall where they may. Let the people decide which license should govern them. It's nothing short of a vi vs. emacs or Christianity vs. Islam battle, and neither side stands a chance at winning. Let the users decide.
~wally
I used to work at a company that wanted desperately to create an online community. But it's not a simple thing to do and they failed miserably. Why? Because the market just doesn't demand it. Online communities are necessarily small niches, and niches are things that big companies just can't seem to handle well. And trying to make a niche community into something bigger usually fails miserably and alienates the people who made the site popular in the first place.
This book is obviously intended to be read by managers who still think they can put up a simple web site and make millions of dollars catering to the needs of individuals on the Internet. (I know because I borrowed and skimmed it.) Well, the reality of the matter is that it's just not possible. Online communities just happen. If you try to intentionally build one, you are wasting your time.
Just my 2c.
~wally
One of my drinking buddies worked on a project similar to this. He told me that the heat problems mentioned in the article were the single biggest obstacle to making a successful mini-turban. Apparently researchers have been working for years on these devices, but they have watched as battery technology has advanced and their heat problems remained. Basically the main problem is that the intense heat generated by combustion places an upper bound on the lifetime of these devices, and that upper bound is substantially lower than the upper bound on a Li-Ion battery's lifetime. Back in the days of NiCd, shoddy "Renewal" cells, and expensive alkalines, this might have provided some much-needed competition. But for now it is just behind the time, despite the fact that it is so small.
~wally
As much as you may love harassing people and crapflooding, there is really no place for your immature behavior on Slashdot. Perhaps another site would be more able to cater to your perverse needs.
My post was a bit short on details because I didn't want to get the details wrong. That's something that mature people need to be concerned about when they're passing on secondhand information. But vague secondhand information is better than no information at all, as long as it's not misleading. And I understand computers well enough to tell you that my information was accurate.
If I were you, I would just lie low and hope the editors don't cut off your hijacked account.
~wally
~wally
Lowering the barrier to entry to web publishing has had a few benefits. Families can share photographs and news in a cheap, efficient manner. Novices can publish information for the benefit of their employees or others easily. However, problems like this do arise quite often, and at their source one can see that the widespread ability of people to publish documents to the web does not coexist well with existing security systems and models.
At any other time in the past few years, this would not ordinarily be a societal problem. Sure, a few peoples' passwords and credit card numbers will leak out. Hopefully they would have to pay for the charges to punish them for their own stupidity. (After all, as a customer of several banks, I don't want my rates to go up because somebody posted his account numbers for the entire world to see.) But now, this is a national security problem, because we are being attacked by a foreign force who might abuse leaked passwords to access critical systems and cause chaos in this country. President Bush and his staff are very concerned about a cyberwar, because it can be waged without physically having Arabs in the States to commit the terrorism. That is very dangerous indeed.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but a good first step is for companies to raise the barrier to entry to publishing web pages. Geocities and Angelfire should force users to demonstrate their competence before uploading their first page. Perhaps requiring an A+ certification number would help? And Microsoft should take away the parts of FrontPage that allow users to generate documents without writing in HTML. That would help ease the problem, I reckon.
In conclusion - if everybody does their part to help solve this problem and stop information leakage, we will be a safer, more secure society without giving up any more civil liberties.
~wally
The parallels are obvious:
It's pretty easy to stand on the sidelines and call names, but the truth of the matter is that OBL has sacrificed a great deal of his personal time (as well as his Saudi citizenship and millions of dollars that have been spent or frozen) fighting for his fellow Muslims, and working to get the concept of a free Islamic world across to people who otherwise would be totally clueless that most of the Muslim world considers itself oppressed by the West.
Comparing OBL's actions with those of an academic who has never put his life on the line for what he believes is extremely offensive to me.
~wally
As a NASA employee, I have seen a pronounced shift in the focus of the organization, from data collection to data distillation and mining. As it turns out, we have tens of years of work ahead of us in processing the data that we collected from space in the 1980s and 1990s alone. In fact, we have not yet developed software to mine the information out of this data that we need - the bottleneck is 95% manpower and 5% CPU cycles. And that is in spite of the budget shifting substantially toward processing and away from missions (which are expensive, misunderstood, and often goofed up).
I fully expect that by 2010 or so, we probably will not be doing launches more than once every few years. Indeed, it is rumored that the recent space shuttle launch was intended only to intimidate third-world nations in the Middle East and make them realize our superior technology - not for any scientific purpose. I do not believe that that launch would have taken place in the absence of the 9/11 events. When I checked the calendar several months ago, it did not show any major launches until late 2002.
~wally
Most governmental "crime fighting measures" are so poorly designed that they intrude on honest citizens' lives, and do little to fight crime. Consider:
- Mandatory ID cards. As if terrorists with millions of dollars can't fake them?
- Taking guns away. As if street criminals don't already buy them on the black market?
- Carnivore. As if a terrorist with half a brain can't use PGP?
- Key escrow. As if terrorists won't be able to find an old copy of PGP to use?
- Stopping curbside checkin. As if that will help stop hijackings?
The only good Congress is a Congress that isn't passing laws (except laws that benefit techies).~wally
Unfortunately, it seems as though your contract job hasn't given you the experience it takes to realize that different agencies in the government actually have different setups, needs, and "corporate" cultures.
Your post is tantamount to saying that because the Navy standardized on WinNT, it's obvious that nobody at NASA runs Linux.
Please check your arrogance at the door before you post again.
~wally
Before 9/11, I would have been thrilled to see something like this which could be used to improve existing security systems. (For instance, I'll be the first one to buy a SecurID-style setup that uses these things in authenticators the size and thickness of business cards - kiss replayable passwords goodbye.) However, with the ever-present push to implement a national ID card system, this technology is just another facilitator to making the USA even more of a police state.
With traditional smart card systems, the government could force us (through "voluntary measures" of course, which would be required in airports and to drive) to carry a card that contained our biometric IDs, medical records, and discipline records from grade school. These are horribly intrusive devices, but they pale in comparison to an active, powered smartcard. Think of the possibilities: GPS tracking and reporting, for starters. How about making these cards transmit an "I'm here" signal every few seconds, so that the government knows when you're in the area? Forget tracking and triangulation on cell phones (you can turn them off) - they could force us to carry a card around with us that tells businesses and government agencies where we are, what we are doing and saying, and everything about our past.
Think I'm paranoid? Listen to a few of Ashcroft's speeches on CNN and think again. They'd do it in a heartbeat if they could get popular support. And that won't be hard to do if we lose a couple more tall buildings.
~wally
How, exactly, would you propose measuring the success of a musician to find out whose CDs are worth pressing by the million, and whose to throw in the dumpster?
Obviously the consumers are voting with their pocketbooks, and buying 16M of the CDs that you consider to "suck." Perhaps the problem is that a large percentage of people are not good judges of music quality. But how do you solve that?
As another example - Sanyo probably sells millions of their relatively inexpensive CD players. To an audiophile, they probably sound like crap next to a high-end Harmon Kardon box. But Harmon Kardon only sells a handful, and Sanyo sells millions. How do you get all of the peons who buy from Sanyo to switch? You can't, because the Sanyo equipment is good enough to do the job. Maybe music is the same way - not perfect, but sufficient for most people.
~wally
We have found that having a small web services team that is directly accountable to a high level manager is important. In fact, our web site is currently down because of a reorganization in that area.
We had similar problems in the past few years. In fact, our web services used to be run by the IS department, who used our web site to try out "new and cool" technologies. That is one reason why we were, until recently, running web servers on HURD, BeOS, and AtheOS platforms, with little coordination amongst them. We also had trouble keeping up to date on patches, and nobody seemed to want to learn enough about the novelty OSs to support them properly. In effect, our web site became a toy for bored administrators to tweak. Not a good idea when we've got millions of dollars in funding riding on the public and the Congress being able to measure our progress as an organization.
So, in a business, it would probably make sense to have a dedicated VP who oversees the web site, along with several senior technical people who approve changes. Although everybody hates red tape, it's simply not a good idea to trust a couple of recent CS grads not to mess up the company's image by goofing up the web site. Changes should all require approval, and unapproved changes should be grounds for dismissal. That is how we are doing it, so stay tuned to see how well it works when the site comes back up...
~wally
I stand corrected. s/Ford/GM/g. Thanks.
~wally
The record companies certainly get a bad rap on this site (and in many other circles as well). However, we need to separate the facts from the emotion here. Record companies run a risky, speculative business, and it is a well-known fact that most of the artists they sponsor do not succeed. It is a testament to their ingenuity that they are able to make such huge profits by developing a successful formula to minimize losses on crappy bands (the 95%) and maximize profits on good bands (the 5%). How many speculators in other industries (such as real estate) can you name who are able to achieve such a high return on such risky investments?
My personal argument is not with the record companies on the basis of profit. They should be allowed to sell their wares and make money; after all, this is a capitalist world. My beef with the RIAA members is that in their zeal to increase profits, they advocate the loss of basic freedoms for U.S. citizens, in the name of "stopping piracy." The DMCA and SSSCA, as well as their continued attempts to squash fair use, spy on computer users, and shut down BearShare users are an affront to freedom and do nothing but mobilize public opinion against the entire industry. It's unnecessary, relatively unprofitable, and the public won't stand for it for long. The Ford Motor Company used to have a lot of popular support in this country before "Unsafe at any Speed" came along. And it took them years to recover from it.
If the RIAA companies would just focus a bit more on producing quality music instead of trying to control every aspect of their products' use, they will get a lot farther and probably make a lot more money. Which is fine with me.
~wally
There's nothing dishonest about targeted advertising. Why do you think you get coupons in the mail for Wonder bread after you've bought a loaf of Butternut with your supermarket discount card? (Although the practice can sometimes raise privacy concerns, it doesn't in the "victor mousetrap" case.)
Why would anyone want to pay for their bandwidth if they could easily get commercial sponsors to pay for it?
~wally
Well, the video card does have TV out, so I'm guessing that it produces NTSC and VGA concurrently rather than sequentially?
I have experimented with outputting text. It is surprisingly clear, as long as I stick to (say) 30x10. But that wasn't my concern - the big hurdle was getting svgalib to work on an inactive vidcard. I figured I could put up some snazzy graphs that would offset the fuzzy text.
But I probably am going to have to go the character LCD route. I have an old 4x20 HD44780 based LCD that I can hook up to an EDE702 and then to a serial port. Same as a Matrix Orbital but half the cost. Color and graphics would have been nice tho..
My only big problem with that is that the EL backlight burned out. Any ideas on how to replace those suckers?
~wally
When I first read this, it seemed like a good idea. However, it quickly dawned on me that this is a solution in search of a problem. How many people are actually complaining about too many hits to their web site?
.edu connection and aren't allowed to make a profit off of it. Otherwise you're just throwing money away.
Please forgive me for mentioning capitalism on Slashdot, but a website that receives many misdirected hits is perfect for targeted marketing. Think of the possibilities: if your web site is getting mistaken hits for "victor mousetraps," sell banner ads for "Revenge" brand traps and make a killing on the click-throughs. With a little clever Perl scripting, determine which banner ad to show based on which set of "wrong keywords" show up in the referer. Companies will pay a lot of money for accurately targeted advertisements. Selling these ads would undoubtedly pay the whole bandwidth bill and probably make a profit to boot.
So no, unwords are not necessary. Unless you're running a website off a freebie
~wally
Disregarding the fact that Java and C# are both "closed" languages controlled by large corporate entities with their own self-interests in mind, they both do an admirable job of bridging the gap between general purpose scripting languages and C++. Having used C# and Java on Win32 extensively in the past year, I have become accustomed to the automatic garbage collection, quick execution speed, and logically consistent design of both languages. The Windows compilers / runtime engines for both languages are quite amazing, and something for the fledgling gcj to aspire to.
.net (which is good for MS-only developers and bad for multiplatform programmers like myself), I'd have to pick Java if it was up to me just because of its sheer elegance. It seems like Sun did a better job designing a general-purpose language (applet "security" extensions aside), and Microsoft just tried to copy Java but add in proprietary extensions to hook C# into Windows. Thus, some of the C# features seem to be "bolted on", whereas most of Java came across as being very natural to me.
Although C# does deliver superior integration with Windows and
Just my 2c...
~wally