Thats what law enforcement agents exist for. To enforce the law.
I most heartily agree with nwbvt here. But I would add further points
The police are there to stop activity, collect evidence whilst no further activity is occuring and often press charges. In most of the highly modded posts, I have heard a lot about The Police and nothing about The Courts.
Look at DVD Jon. Arrested, taken to court repeatedly and exonerated.
The US and Finnish governments can not influence the courts decision here. If those groups do not like the outcome of the courts, then they have to legislate.
Note: I do not vouch for the accuracy of this link. I was told this at an interfaith lecture by a leading Christian preacher at my Synagogue. I included a link, because that is the usual/. way of partially backing one's assertion. The preacher was Rev Dr Hans Ucko, who is Head of the Inter-Religious Relations Committee of the World Council of Churches.
There's a good English expression for this: Shitey load of Bollocks
1. Be skeptical of future predictions where they say 'it becomes possible for anyone to publish anything anywhere'
2. They forget ebay, News and Bricks and Mortar Giants who all have too important a part to play
3. The timescale is a little optimistic.
If this stuff happened in the past without modern intervention, scientists must be doubly certain that any climate change is down to industrial abuse.
To raise a question, and put my Fatalistic hat on:
If Act of G-d similar to Jacob and the famine in Egypt is definitely going to occur, why not make Hay while the sun shines, in preparation for the famine??
So the scientists would have to show that any Kyoto-agreement like cut would be beneficial overall, not just putting your finger in a dyke. If we concentrate on trying to avoid it, and fail to make preparations, it could end up worse. This is not to deny that some companies and countries are evil and irresponsible muthafukkas. All this impending doom stuff is still unsubstantiated beyond this guy.
The scientists need more funds to conduct studies.
The Independent yesterday ran an article on a stroke victim who could still perceive facial emotions, even though clinically blind.
His eyes and nerves were fine, but the visual processing part of his brain had been killed. So signals were coming through, just not ones that you and I associate with sight.
What's to stop them using something like Lucene in their payload anyway? This is a close match to what these desktop searches do.
This is a completely useless article. Why blame the Desktop searches??? Once they're in, they have control. If a Sys Admin let the user have enough permissions to index the file with the vital data, surely that is the Sys Admin's fault.
On UNIX the old adage was that once an intruder had a shell access to the box, you had to assume they could escalate their priveleges. This may not be possible in reality, but makes you focus on shoring up the ways in instead.
I'd like to see some of the more painful aspects covered
1. What is the hourly rate of consultants
2. What is the lead time in finding a competent consultant.
3. How many Man hours did it take for the in house people to configure the Big Iron system from its component bits.
4. Once built, how long was spent optimizing the various interconnects.
Most of my horror experience stems from having to find a VAX VMS consultant to help with a Reuters feed. If your client is expecting a certain setup, and you cannot hire an expert, you get some pretty nasty pinch points.
Once you've been sold a big iron system different levels of support are provided, and can become a significant part of the cost.
The original 'smart' agent responding in a semi lifelike manner. There's also the Aibo et alia.
But the first thing people are going to learn about this technology is how to turn it off in the rom.
With ever decreasing margins set aside for innovation, I predict the budget for value-adds that cost a lot of money, like Usability testing and embedded AI agents will shrink. At least they will when the marketting departments figure out that people don't really base their purchasing decisions on those metrics.
The mobile market is still reeling and trying to cope with the lack of interest in 3G Video calling and MMS. People will drop £200 for a Blackberry which deals mostly in Text over GPRS. They only pick a 3G handset because the carriers have slashed their prices to loss making.
Perhaps the Basketball term 'on fire' would have been better, but would have been perhaps a bit misleading.
What I'm getting at is that when a coder is in said Zone, the hours mean nothing to them. Look up and it's 4a.m. and you haven't gone to the toilet in 5 hours, and you can't remember when you last exhaled.
1. You find the work interesting
2. You have most of what you want grokked
The problem as I see it is the same as when I'm due to be somewhere on the other side of London, and I need to catch the Tube. I know that in a perfect world, to make it to Brixton, say, takes 30 minutes. And it can. iff the tube is waiting when I get on the platform and the connections are smooth. This is all possible, and I've done it before.
Problem is using that perfect situation as the constant in the equation over a long period of time. It is not sustainable unless there is a LOT of 1.) and 2.).
Games coders can fall into this trap because they like it, and they grokk it. So their managers get in the habit of using the Zone as the constant, and they're more right than other managers. Still wrong overall though.
TheRegister attracts a different class of readers.
The class I'm referring to is the Datacentre Class.
All those hardworking infrastructure people who've managed not to be outsourced to the Cayman Islands.
All those admins who surf to TheRegister from their Win2k3 Advanced Server terminals IN the datacentre via their KVM.
Some SysAdmins don't, granted, but SOME do. When I was doing Unix work at Level3 and Colt, we did it all the time. It's a per company, per employee based decision as to whether it occurs.
These servers are much more likely to have gone unpatched due to availability/stability concerns.
So here you have important computers left on all the time, with ph@t bandwidth exposed. Not just some home win98 pIII over a 56K link.
The Register editors sacrificed their sacrosanct weekends to post the warning story.
Any regular reader would see that most of the stories abruptly stop at Beer O'Clock on Friday [4 p.m. roughly, depending on British Sunshine].
Due to the regular lack of stories over the weekend, I think the number of readers exposed would have been much less. If it had happened about this time [Monday morning London time] a lot more people would've been exposed.
Aliens? You mean the lame blood-n-guts sequel to Ridley Scott's outstanding suspense/horror flick?
Yes. Aliens.
Alien was good as well.
Geez, you express an opinion here and all you get is Nay Sayers screaming you down.
I hope the people who marked my first post as flaimbait feel happy in their usage of their Mod points. You people are just reinforcing GroupThink. My post may not have been Shakespeare but it was on topic.
I am using Delphion to research Prior Art for an idea I'm thinking of patenting. No, not software.
I'm sorting through 2100 patents and applications that match my keywords. So far nothing that I would infringe. But there are two outcomes:
1. Yes, I'm the first one to this idea.
or a realistic probability that
2: I could infringe on someone's generically worded patent.
Okay, so if that is the playing field, what would you anti-this-idea zealots suggest??
If I infringe, then I have to look at who has the patent and attempt to contact them. I'd have to look up where their office is, and even if they're alive. Then I have to attempt to make contact. Phonecalls and emails out of the blue for them, cold calling for me. Then the lawyers step in and negotiate.
So a lot of ball-ache, and the kicker is that once I call they know that I'm interested, and they can start to probe me to see how much it's worth to me.
With this idea, I can see advantages for having one [or several] known company who unifies the process:
1) Known address
2) Contact details for sales
3) Secretaries to take my inquiries
4) Some corporate information so that I don't have to spend £££ getting my lawyers to translate their lawyers' documents. These are all in slightly different and convoluted Legalese.
5) A range of products so I can see how much they charge for other things
6) A better chance of them not ripping me off when they know I'm interested.
As an organistation who deals with this all the time, they'd know which are the ideas that are worth a lot to someone, rather than a idea that is close to expiry and has a lot of other patents. Single patent holders like to think their ideas are going to earn them £££ x 10^£££ and try to extort you for even the simplest idea.
For those people who bitch and moan in this topic, I have to ask: How many patents have you actually applied for? Did you think through all the avenues, including actually having to license someone elses idea instead of just complaining about You versus The Man??
I agree with einhverfr for the big monolithic packages aimed at the datacentre.
But there are reams and reams of intermediate projects that don't have the critical mass for this type of support.
For instance, a widely used package, which I'm using right now is dom4j. If you look at the News section [at date of this article] you can still see that there are a LOT of bugs being fixed here. This is in a project that is several years old, dealing with XML parsing. XML started being used seriously from 1999.
Now I have made some work arounds to some fairly major flaws, which well, worked. But they were right before a product demonstration and took 16+ hours to figure out. They have subsequently been fixed.
So I took on the risk for using that tool and paid the price. Still I love OSS and it is my living, but there are drawbacks, and these are noticeable. So I think this article is wise to not stick its head in the sand over what is a real issue for business.
Was this backed by in-house council, or was it backed by an external Law Firm.
If it is inhouse council, if the wheels fly off and there is a tide of litigation, Microsoft can only really fire the Council, David Kaefer and staff.
If it is an external law firm it is different. There are apparently only a handful. If they frig it up, microsoft can sue them for giving them the wrong legal advice. These law firms' worth may not add up to the same amount as Micorosfts liability, but it helps
So I think the cream of the Intellectual Property lawyers have advised Microsoft what their exposure to any possible liability is. Law is hard and difficult, but there are a lot of very talented, very experienced lawyers out there, and they work for huge corporates, like M$. If they have mapped out every single current possible legal avenue, then taken into account some possible shifts in Case Law, and possible new laws from government, they could be fairly sure what the exposure could be.
Actuaries do this for insurance all the time, and it makes insurance companies £££ x 10^£££.
Keeping track of the very high frequency of postings of these supercomputer rankings on Slashdot.
Can I vote for a supercomputer thread so that I can elect to have it not displayed in my preference? I wouldn't want to miss out all the other tasty hardware goodness. I don't mind news about new Supercomputer technology, but whoever holds the most teraflops at a certain point in time is not of interest.
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/09/ 0126220&tid=137&tid=126&tid=181&tid=1
November 9th, 2004
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/0 6/2239245&tid=136&tid=137&tid=14
November 7th, 2004
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/03/161424 5&tid=137&tid=139&tid=1
November 3rd, 2004
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/2 7/0147206&tid=137&tid=139&tid=14&tid=106
October 26th, 2004
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/26/ 0636230&tid=137&tid=3
October 26th, 2004
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/2 0/1727255&tid=137&tid=136&tid=14
October 20th, 2004
Europe is not always it's own best advocate there.
If you look at the perception of Europe in Israel, say, you'll find that the Israeli's consider Europe to be Arabist. This is their term. It is born out of the was European members vote against Isreal in the UN.
What would be a more meaningful measure that American voters would be more inclined to listen to is the opinion of their Coalition partners who took part in this survey. Britain and Australia, say. You'll find similar results there, but from people who entirely back America as a nation. So the net result from the public from your Coalition Partners is:
"Love you guys and fight side by side, but Geez, could you pick a better figurehead?"
Of course this is my reading of the poll,not my opinion on the war or the worthiness of GW Bush.
I think everyone in the whole world stands to learn a lot by seeing how Americans dictate their own President and working in response. No point bitching and moaning. Americans are going to elect whomever they deem fit, and the sooner we can work with both outcomes, the better. That is my opinion.
Slashdot Mirror
Then they wouldn't really care whether it hit or not, and they certainly wouldn't leave the couch to call the press about it and get everyone upitty.
The cone of probability that they'd order Pizza delivery instead is 1 E 0.
Caused me more darn trouble than actually just reading and signing the darn things myself. Typical machine.
I most heartily agree with nwbvt here. But I would add further points
The police are there to stop activity, collect evidence whilst no further activity is occuring and often press charges. In most of the highly modded posts, I have heard a lot about The Police and nothing about The Courts.
Look at DVD Jon. Arrested, taken to court repeatedly and exonerated .
The US and Finnish governments can not influence the courts decision here. If those groups do not like the outcome of the courts, then they have to legislate.
So this is why it is so important to have an independent judiciary.
Note: I do not vouch for the accuracy of this link. I was told this at an interfaith lecture by a leading Christian preacher at my Synagogue. I included a link, because that is the usual /. way of partially backing one's assertion. The preacher was Rev Dr Hans Ucko, who is Head of the Inter-Religious Relations Committee of the World Council of Churches.
He said the real day was Jan. 6th.
1. Be skeptical of future predictions where they say 'it becomes possible for anyone to publish anything anywhere'
2. They forget ebay, News and Bricks and Mortar Giants who all have too important a part to play
3. The timescale is a little optimistic.
To raise a question, and put my Fatalistic hat on:
If Act of G-d similar to Jacob and the famine in Egypt is definitely going to occur, why not make Hay while the sun shines, in preparation for the famine??
So the scientists would have to show that any Kyoto-agreement like cut would be beneficial overall, not just putting your finger in a dyke. If we concentrate on trying to avoid it, and fail to make preparations, it could end up worse. This is not to deny that some companies and countries are evil and irresponsible muthafukkas. All this impending doom stuff is still unsubstantiated beyond this guy.
The scientists need more funds to conduct studies.
His eyes and nerves were fine, but the visual processing part of his brain had been killed. So signals were coming through, just not ones that you and I associate with sight.
This is a completely useless article. Why blame the Desktop searches??? Once they're in, they have control. If a Sys Admin let the user have enough permissions to index the file with the vital data, surely that is the Sys Admin's fault.
On UNIX the old adage was that once an intruder had a shell access to the box, you had to assume they could escalate their priveleges. This may not be possible in reality, but makes you focus on shoring up the ways in instead.
Must be all that Rich Content.
1. What is the hourly rate of consultants
2. What is the lead time in finding a competent consultant.
3. How many Man hours did it take for the in house people to configure the Big Iron system from its component bits.
4. Once built, how long was spent optimizing the various interconnects.
Most of my horror experience stems from having to find a VAX VMS consultant to help with a Reuters feed. If your client is expecting a certain setup, and you cannot hire an expert, you get some pretty nasty pinch points.
Once you've been sold a big iron system different levels of support are provided, and can become a significant part of the cost.
Another case of University people being ingenious as they are wont to do.
Not to troll, but vaporware it too concrete a term for this technology. Emperors may be impressed, as well as Marketing people.
The original 'smart' agent responding in a semi lifelike manner. There's also the Aibo et alia.
But the first thing people are going to learn about this technology is how to turn it off in the rom.
With ever decreasing margins set aside for innovation, I predict the budget for value-adds that cost a lot of money, like Usability testing and embedded AI agents will shrink. At least they will when the marketting departments figure out that people don't really base their purchasing decisions on those metrics.
The mobile market is still reeling and trying to cope with the lack of interest in 3G Video calling and MMS. People will drop £200 for a Blackberry which deals mostly in Text over GPRS. They only pick a 3G handset because the carriers have slashed their prices to loss making.
What I'm getting at is that when a coder is in said Zone, the hours mean nothing to them. Look up and it's 4a.m. and you haven't gone to the toilet in 5 hours, and you can't remember when you last exhaled.
But extra special conditions are required to get into this Zone.
1. You find the work interesting
2. You have most of what you want grokked
The problem as I see it is the same as when I'm due to be somewhere on the other side of London, and I need to catch the Tube. I know that in a perfect world, to make it to Brixton, say, takes 30 minutes. And it can. iff the tube is waiting when I get on the platform and the connections are smooth. This is all possible, and I've done it before.
Problem is using that perfect situation as the constant in the equation over a long period of time. It is not sustainable unless there is a LOT of 1.) and 2.).
Games coders can fall into this trap because they like it, and they grokk it. So their managers get in the habit of using the Zone as the constant, and they're more right than other managers. Still wrong overall though.
The class I'm referring to is the Datacentre Class.
All those hardworking infrastructure people who've managed not to be outsourced to the Cayman Islands.
All those admins who surf to TheRegister from their Win2k3 Advanced Server terminals IN the datacentre via their KVM.
Some SysAdmins don't, granted, but SOME do. When I was doing Unix work at Level3 and Colt, we did it all the time. It's a per company, per employee based decision as to whether it occurs.
These servers are much more likely to have gone unpatched due to availability/stability concerns.
So here you have important computers left on all the time, with ph@t bandwidth exposed. Not just some home win98 pIII over a 56K link.
A bit worrying.
The fact that this attack happened
or,
The Register editors sacrificed their sacrosanct weekends to post the warning story.
Any regular reader would see that most of the stories abruptly stop at Beer O'Clock on Friday [4 p.m. roughly, depending on British Sunshine].
Due to the regular lack of stories over the weekend, I think the number of readers exposed would have been much less. If it had happened about this time [Monday morning London time] a lot more people would've been exposed.
Yes. Aliens.
Alien was good as well.
Geez, you express an opinion here and all you get is Nay Sayers screaming you down.
I hope the people who marked my first post as flaimbait feel happy in their usage of their Mod points. You people are just reinforcing GroupThink. My post may not have been Shakespeare but it was on topic.
Terminator is good though.
I'm sorting through 2100 patents and applications that match my keywords. So far nothing that I would infringe. But there are two outcomes:
1. Yes, I'm the first one to this idea.
or a realistic probability that
2: I could infringe on someone's generically worded patent.
Okay, so if that is the playing field, what would you anti-this-idea zealots suggest??
If I infringe, then I have to look at who has the patent and attempt to contact them. I'd have to look up where their office is, and even if they're alive.
Then I have to attempt to make contact. Phonecalls and emails out of the blue for them, cold calling for me. Then the lawyers step in and negotiate.
So a lot of ball-ache, and the kicker is that once I call they know that I'm interested, and they can start to probe me to see how much it's worth to me.
With this idea, I can see advantages for having one [or several] known company who unifies the process:
1) Known address
2) Contact details for sales
3) Secretaries to take my inquiries
4) Some corporate information so that I don't have to spend £££ getting my lawyers to translate their lawyers' documents. These are all in slightly different and convoluted Legalese. 5) A range of products so I can see how much they charge for other things
6) A better chance of them not ripping me off when they know I'm interested.
As an organistation who deals with this all the time, they'd know which are the ideas that are worth a lot to someone, rather than a idea that is close to expiry and has a lot of other patents. Single patent holders like to think their ideas are going to earn them £££ x 10^£££ and try to extort you for even the simplest idea.
For those people who bitch and moan in this topic, I have to ask: How many patents have you actually applied for? Did you think through all the avenues, including actually having to license someone elses idea instead of just complaining about You versus The Man??
But there are reams and reams of intermediate projects that don't have the critical mass for this type of support.
For instance, a widely used package, which I'm using right now is dom4j. If you look at the News section [at date of this article] you can still see that there are a LOT of bugs being fixed here. This is in a project that is several years old, dealing with XML parsing. XML started being used seriously from 1999.
Now I have made some work arounds to some fairly major flaws, which well, worked. But they were right before a product demonstration and took 16+ hours to figure out. They have subsequently been fixed.
So I took on the risk for using that tool and paid the price. Still I love OSS and it is my living, but there are drawbacks, and these are noticeable. So I think this article is wise to not stick its head in the sand over what is a real issue for business.
It then comes down to risk versus cost savings.
Was this backed by in-house council, or was it backed by an external Law Firm.
If it is inhouse council, if the wheels fly off and there is a tide of litigation, Microsoft can only really fire the Council, David Kaefer and staff.
If it is an external law firm it is different. There are apparently only a handful. If they frig it up, microsoft can sue them for giving them the wrong legal advice. These law firms' worth may not add up to the same amount as Micorosfts liability, but it helps
So I think the cream of the Intellectual Property lawyers have advised Microsoft what their exposure to any possible liability is. Law is hard and difficult, but there are a lot of very talented, very experienced lawyers out there, and they work for huge corporates, like M$. If they have mapped out every single current possible legal avenue, then taken into account some possible shifts in Case Law, and possible new laws from government, they could be fairly sure what the exposure could be.
Actuaries do this for insurance all the time, and it makes insurance companies £££ x 10^£££.
Can I vote for a supercomputer thread so that I can elect to have it not displayed in my preference? I wouldn't want to miss out all the other tasty hardware goodness. I don't mind news about new Supercomputer technology, but whoever holds the most teraflops at a certain point in time is not of interest.
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/09/ 0126220&tid=137&tid=126&tid=181&tid=1
0 6/2239245&tid=136&tid=137&tid=14
4 5&tid=137&tid=139&tid=1
2 7/0147206&tid=137&tid=139&tid=14&tid=106
/ 0636230&tid=137&tid=3
2 0/1727255&tid=137&tid=136&tid=14
November 9th, 2004
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/
November 7th, 2004
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/03/16142
November 3rd, 2004
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/
October 26th, 2004
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/26
October 26th, 2004
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/
October 20th, 2004
If you look at the perception of Europe in Israel, say, you'll find that the Israeli's consider Europe to be Arabist. This is their term. It is born out of the was European members vote against Isreal in the UN.
What would be a more meaningful measure that American voters would be more inclined to listen to is the opinion of their Coalition partners who took part in this survey. Britain and Australia, say. You'll find similar results there, but from people who entirely back America as a nation. So the net result from the public from your Coalition Partners is :
"Love you guys and fight side by side, but Geez, could you pick a better figurehead?"
Of course this is my reading of the poll,not my opinion on the war or the worthiness of GW Bush.
I think everyone in the whole world stands to learn a lot by seeing how Americans dictate their own President and working in response. No point bitching and moaning. Americans are going to elect whomever they deem fit, and the sooner we can work with both outcomes, the better. That is my opinion.
But the replacement ink catridges cost £££.
Not trolling, just having a laugh people. Sounds like a nasty situation for the Chinese populace.