Right, all those individual developers who have enough money to hire a BMW-driving patent attorney or have law degrees and write their own patent applications. It costs thousands and thousands of dollars to get a thorough patent application done by a good attorney, several thousand for the USPTO fee, and for what, so that they can sue Microsoft and get their ass handed to them?
This whole software-patent thing has nothing at all to do with protecting ideas. Right now, anyone can get a degree, download the java sdk and eclipse and write good software. By screwing everything up so that you need a legal department to write code, the big software companies hope to make it so that little guys are excluded.
The goal is to create what economists call 'barriers to entry' into the software development industry. Because barriers to entry make it expensive to enter the industry, firms can increase prices farther than they otherwise could because competition will only enter the market if their potential profits exceed the start-up cost. Creating a menace to FLOSS is icing on the cake.
I know, I know, IHBT IHL and I'll HAND. I just wanted to explain this to the people who modded the parent up or read it.
Methanol from coal.
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
This talk about not enough turkey guts and McFood runoff is somewhat too alarmist. When gas really does start to run out and prices start to skyrocket, we'll probably start using either pure methanol or an 85% methanol/15% gas mixture as a replacement. Methanol can be produced from biomass, but more likely we'll make it from coal or natural gas. The germans used methanol from coal in their cars during WWII, and there is no reason we can't do it again.
Coal is in the long run a better choice because we have so much of it--about four trillion tons in the US alone which translates roughly to 8 trillion barrels (global oil reserves are estimated at about 1 trillion barrels). One problem is that coal conversion plants are relatively expensive to build, and since there's little demand right now we don't have the capacity to start producing huge quantities immediately if there is a sudden spike in gas prices.
Methanol has about half the energy density of gas (so you'd have to refill more often) but it also has lower emissions. On the other hand the lower emissions are offset by the environmental damage from coal recovery, i.e. strip mining.
I'm seeing a lot of theories about the motivations behind this press release--that they want to smear Linus personally, that they are trying to provoke a response, and so on. I think it's much less ambitious than that, but I also think they were successful at their goal. Let's look at the very first paragraph:
"Popular but controversial 'open source' computer software, generally contributed on a volunteer basis, is often taken or adapted from material owned by other companies and individuals, a study by the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution finds."
I think the whole point of this was to get out the adjective "but controversial". The adjective was repeated verbatim in the Yahoo article without a quote attribution. That means that everyone who read it on Yahoo thinks that the reporter is making that characterization.
I think MS wants to put this word-association strategy to work for itself. By getting attack dog think-tanks to put out press releases connecting Linux with words like 'controversial' or 'unscrupulous' in the first paragraph, MS would be able to damage Linux's credibility without having to put forth an actual argument. If they can get their blurbs read often enough, it might even stick.
Yes you are missing something, it says 65 dBa at 500 feet! That means everyone within a 500 foot radius (an area of about 785000 sq feet) will experience a sound nearly as loud as a vacuum cleaner.
How bad is it for the driver then? Applying the inverse square law to go from 500 feet to 5 feet (roughly the interior of the flying car) and we get 100^2 = 10^4, multiply by 65 dBa and we have a painful 105 dBa for the person flying the car.
If they actually did mean 165 dBa, then the interior would be 205 dBa, which is about the same experience as pressing your ear against the main gun of a battleship as it fires, i.e. pop go the eardrums.
I disagree. By gaming the system you're only giving yourself the illusion of protection--the power that was able to take your privacy in the first place still defeated you, and gained ground. Instead of expending energy renewing your passport, why not write your congresscritters and donate money to the ACLU and EFF instead?
And it's sad people have strong reasons not to trust the government enough to willingly provide it with their personal data....or, maybe, are there so many wannabe criminals?;)
Yes, actually. The US gov't (and Canada and EU for that matter) have shown a shocking willingness to criminalize reasonable behavior at the behest of campaign-donating big money corporations. Just look at the Skylarov case.
When the bar for criminal behavior can drop from 'robbed a bank' to 'possession of a prohibited organism' to 'wrote prohibited code' we all have to fear for our privacy because it may incriminate us.
this is for the freakin' OS, not for gaming or anything!!!
That's what you think. The normal-use specs are much lower, the specs cited in TFA are for playing the flight-combat simulator and MMORPG easter eggs in wincalc and notepad (respectively).
Actually, you have been watching too many movies. Gas tanks can't blow up. Gasoline itself is not explosive, only gasoline vapor that has mixed with air is explosive. What this means is that the gas has to first leak all over the place to create sufficient surface area for it to evaporate quickly, and then it has to be ignited. It unfortunately happens, but it's not nearly as easy as most people think. Battery acid also has to evaporate in order to be explosive, and off the top of my head it probably has lower vapor pressure than gasoline.
Someone actually has written this, but when he was putting it on sourceforge he couldn't pick a name. He tried kiosK, Kiosk, KiosK, but each variation came out the same. Confused and frightened by his failure to apply the affix-K rule, he began a downward spiral into cocaine, heroin, and eventually wound up as a crack-addicted male prostitute on the mean streets of SF. He ultimately killed himself and the code, which he had kept with him on a jaz disk all that time, was lost. This is a true story.
Is that the "gang members have a right to carry guns because their job is dangerous" argument? Like a gang member, Microsoft has no motive to stop at merely protecting itself, and therefore it won't.
And the poster forgot the obvious difference here between Iran and the US is that you can go home to your own computer if you want porn!
Ironically, many Iranians actually have more porn access than Americans do. TV in Iran is heavily censored, and it's goddamn boring too. As a result every Irani who can afford one has a satellite dish, and although the gov't at one point managed to block the politically sensitive Farsi-language NITV from LA (apparently from Cuba), they have no hope of shutting down the many many porno channels that share TELSTAR 12 with it. As a result of this odd coincidence, there are hardcore and even gay porn feeds available in many Irani households.
"Hi I'm Troy McLure and this is LightWeight DRM: Content delivered your way. You may remember me from such brand resuscitation films as How Asbestos saves YOUR CHILDREN from burning to death or Firestone Tires: Now with 33% less explosive power"
"400 A.D. - Oh no, Atilla the Hun will destroy us!
1204 A.D. - Oh no, the Venetians will destroy us!
1261 A.D. - Oh no, the Nicaeans will destroy us!
1453 A.D. - Oh no, the Turks will destroy us!
We have been hearing the same stuff since the beginning of history. These Turks are just a flash in the pan, the Holy Roman Empire will live on for eternity!
Im sure we will be JUST FINE."
-- 30xgreat grandfather of the parent poster, from the Slashdot parchment archives
When systems like this are intentionally exposed to public scrutiny, there will always be a mollifying language included in it. Their goal is to make the average person feel not certain enough that they're threatened to get off their couch and take action.
Once the spooks have gotten the consent they need from politicians, the political reality is that they can throw out the promises they made and they can even stretch their goals beyond considerably beyond what was agreed to.
The current fight over surveillance in public areas is huge. It is at least as big as DRM. They will retain the data forever. The first few times these systems are used, it will be to
convict a dangerous criminal--maybe they'll mine the data to disprove a serial killer's alibi.
A few years later, they'll have real-time tracking of every car. This will be used to find unusual patterns such as the vehicles of multiple "persons of interest" (muslims, anti-globalization activists, etc), heading toward a particular site for a meeting. Then others who went to the same area will be flagged too. Pretty soon we may as well be living in North Korea.
Nope, the black box stops recording when the air bags deploy, not when you shift into park or turn it off. To overwrite it you'd have to drive around for 20-30 seconds, and then slam your car into a wall. If the cops can't convict you after pulling a stunt like that, the black box wouldn't have helped them anyway.
If you are concerned about the NYT's registration then why did you cite their version of the story? You people do realize that NYT and TWP just base their science stories on press releases right? I assure you that there is not a single person at NYT who has a degree in neuroscience, and I doubt there are many more than a half-dozen who even have BSes.
Why therefore do people submit science stories with a link to NYT when they could just link to the source material? This is the frigging internet. You can do just as much research as the press-release-editing typewriter monkey at NYT can.
For instance, the facts in this story were
reported six months ago on ScienceDaily , three months ago on Wired and dozens of other places that could be found in 20-30 seconds on googlage.
In summary, if you don't like NYT's registration, don't link to it. You are advertising for them.
</rant>
Try the Procmail Sanitizer. It works by redirecting suspicious-looking mail to a "quarantine" mailbox so the admin can scan over it and make sure nothing important was lost. It's fast (it manages a pretty heavy email load on a k6/300) and rarely makes mistakes.
I've been using it since about May 2002 and my users are barely even aware of the whole wave of email viruses. Better yet, there have only been IIRC two cases (in two years!) where attachments were incorrectly quarantined, due to legitimate use of MS word macros.
Did you even read the article? It doesn't say you can't install spyware on your computer, it says you can't install in on someone elses's computer. It says you can't distribute spyware that screws up people's browsers by replacing the advertisements based on context triggering.
Basically the law says you can't sell Drain-O at a lemonade stand, not that you can't drink it on your own if you want to.
Yep... this is an interesting problem. The bill says (1) A person may not:...
(c) use a context based triggering mechanism to display an advertisement that partially or wholly covers or obscures paid avertising or other content on an Internet website in a way that interferes with a user's ability to view the Internet website.
That could be read to say program that removes any part of the website from the user's view and replaces it with either something else or even plain nothingness is prohibited. So many non-spyware user-friendly uses of technology could get caught in the crossfire...
No it doesn't, it says replacing it with an advertisement is prohibited. It's very specific. It sounds like a great law to me.
I read an interview with the screenwriter and apparently it's going to incorporate elements from Asimov's I, Robot along with ideas from several bankable mainstream flicks.
For instance they tweaked Asimov's three laws a bit to make them more accessible and relevant to modern moviegoers, they are now:
Law 1: A robot must not talk about injuring human beings in Fight Club.
Law 2: A robot must not talk about injuring Robots in Fight Club.
Law 3: A robot must protect itself from injury using a minigun and rocket launchers.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, it's much harder for nmap to fingerprint your server if it can't find at least 1 open and 1 closed port.
This whole software-patent thing has nothing at all to do with protecting ideas. Right now, anyone can get a degree, download the java sdk and eclipse and write good software. By screwing everything up so that you need a legal department to write code, the big software companies hope to make it so that little guys are excluded.
The goal is to create what economists call 'barriers to entry' into the software development industry. Because barriers to entry make it expensive to enter the industry, firms can increase prices farther than they otherwise could because competition will only enter the market if their potential profits exceed the start-up cost. Creating a menace to FLOSS is icing on the cake.
I know, I know, IHBT IHL and I'll HAND. I just wanted to explain this to the people who modded the parent up or read it.
Coal is in the long run a better choice because we have so much of it--about four trillion tons in the US alone which translates roughly to 8 trillion barrels (global oil reserves are estimated at about 1 trillion barrels). One problem is that coal conversion plants are relatively expensive to build, and since there's little demand right now we don't have the capacity to start producing huge quantities immediately if there is a sudden spike in gas prices.
Methanol has about half the energy density of gas (so you'd have to refill more often) but it also has lower emissions. On the other hand the lower emissions are offset by the environmental damage from coal recovery, i.e. strip mining.
"Popular but controversial 'open source' computer software, generally contributed on a volunteer basis, is often taken or adapted from material owned by other companies and individuals, a study by the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution finds."
I think the whole point of this was to get out the adjective "but controversial". The adjective was repeated verbatim in the Yahoo article without a quote attribution. That means that everyone who read it on Yahoo thinks that the reporter is making that characterization.
I think MS has a new strategy, one borrowed from the Bush administration: In the run-up to the Iraq war Bush and his cronies would answer every question about Iraq using the words 'war on terrorism' and 'september 11th'. Even though they never once claimed that Iraq was involved in 9-11, just from word association 53% of Americans believe Hussein was personally involved in it and 44% believe that most or some of the hijackers were Iraqis.
I think MS wants to put this word-association strategy to work for itself. By getting attack dog think-tanks to put out press releases connecting Linux with words like 'controversial' or 'unscrupulous' in the first paragraph, MS would be able to damage Linux's credibility without having to put forth an actual argument. If they can get their blurbs read often enough, it might even stick.
How bad is it for the driver then? Applying the inverse square law to go from 500 feet to 5 feet (roughly the interior of the flying car) and we get 100^2 = 10^4, multiply by 65 dBa and we have a painful 105 dBa for the person flying the car.
If they actually did mean 165 dBa, then the interior would be 205 dBa, which is about the same experience as pressing your ear against the main gun of a battleship as it fires, i.e. pop go the eardrums.
I disagree. By gaming the system you're only giving yourself the illusion of protection--the power that was able to take your privacy in the first place still defeated you, and gained ground. Instead of expending energy renewing your passport, why not write your congresscritters and donate money to the ACLU and EFF instead?
Yes, actually. The US gov't (and Canada and EU for that matter) have shown a shocking willingness to criminalize reasonable behavior at the behest of campaign-donating big money corporations. Just look at the Skylarov case.
When the bar for criminal behavior can drop from 'robbed a bank' to 'possession of a prohibited organism' to 'wrote prohibited code' we all have to fear for our privacy because it may incriminate us.
Just one problem; how are they going to get the cable viewers to write all the content for them like we do here?
That's what you think. The normal-use specs are much lower, the specs cited in TFA are for playing the flight-combat simulator and MMORPG easter eggs in wincalc and notepad (respectively).
Actually, you have been watching too many movies. Gas tanks can't blow up. Gasoline itself is not explosive, only gasoline vapor that has mixed with air is explosive. What this means is that the gas has to first leak all over the place to create sufficient surface area for it to evaporate quickly, and then it has to be ignited. It unfortunately happens, but it's not nearly as easy as most people think. Battery acid also has to evaporate in order to be explosive, and off the top of my head it probably has lower vapor pressure than gasoline.
Someone actually has written this, but when he was putting it on sourceforge he couldn't pick a name. He tried kiosK, Kiosk, KiosK, but each variation came out the same. Confused and frightened by his failure to apply the affix-K rule, he began a downward spiral into cocaine, heroin, and eventually wound up as a crack-addicted male prostitute on the mean streets of SF. He ultimately killed himself and the code, which he had kept with him on a jaz disk all that time, was lost. This is a true story.
Is that the "gang members have a right to carry guns because their job is dangerous" argument? Like a gang member, Microsoft has no motive to stop at merely protecting itself, and therefore it won't.
Ironically, many Iranians actually have more porn access than Americans do. TV in Iran is heavily censored, and it's goddamn boring too. As a result every Irani who can afford one has a satellite dish, and although the gov't at one point managed to block the politically sensitive Farsi-language NITV from LA (apparently from Cuba), they have no hope of shutting down the many many porno channels that share TELSTAR 12 with it. As a result of this odd coincidence, there are hardcore and even gay porn feeds available in many Irani households.
"Hi I'm Troy McLure and this is LightWeight DRM: Content delivered your way. You may remember me from such brand resuscitation films as How Asbestos saves YOUR CHILDREN from burning to death or Firestone Tires: Now with 33% less explosive power"
1204 A.D. - Oh no, the Venetians will destroy us!
1261 A.D. - Oh no, the Nicaeans will destroy us!
1453 A.D. - Oh no, the Turks will destroy us!
We have been hearing the same stuff since the beginning of history. These Turks are just a flash in the pan, the Holy Roman Empire will live on for eternity!
Im sure we will be JUST FINE."
-- 30xgreat grandfather of the parent poster, from the Slashdot parchment archives
When systems like this are intentionally exposed to public scrutiny, there will always be a mollifying language included in it. Their goal is to make the average person feel not certain enough that they're threatened to get off their couch and take action.
Once the spooks have gotten the consent they need from politicians, the political reality is that they can throw out the promises they made and they can even stretch their goals beyond considerably beyond what was agreed to.
The current fight over surveillance in public areas is huge. It is at least as big as DRM. They will retain the data forever. The first few times these systems are used, it will be to convict a dangerous criminal--maybe they'll mine the data to disprove a serial killer's alibi.
A few years later, they'll have real-time tracking of every car. This will be used to find unusual patterns such as the vehicles of multiple "persons of interest" (muslims, anti-globalization activists, etc), heading toward a particular site for a meeting. Then others who went to the same area will be flagged too. Pretty soon we may as well be living in North Korea.
Nope, the black box stops recording when the air bags deploy, not when you shift into park or turn it off. To overwrite it you'd have to drive around for 20-30 seconds, and then slam your car into a wall. If the cops can't convict you after pulling a stunt like that, the black box wouldn't have helped them anyway.
Why therefore do people submit science stories with a link to NYT when they could just link to the source material? This is the frigging internet. You can do just as much research as the press-release-editing typewriter monkey at NYT can.
For instance, the facts in this story were reported six months ago on ScienceDaily , three months ago on Wired and dozens of other places that could be found in 20-30 seconds on googlage.
In summary, if you don't like NYT's registration, don't link to it. You are advertising for them.
</rant>
"Abandon all hope ye who use Outlook Express"
Also, you can block referer on a per-tab basis within the gui if you install the snazzy Tabbrowser Extensions xpi.
...is like a dog without a brick tied to its head.
I've been using it since about May 2002 and my users are barely even aware of the whole wave of email viruses. Better yet, there have only been IIRC two cases (in two years!) where attachments were incorrectly quarantined, due to legitimate use of MS word macros.
Basically the law says you can't sell Drain-O at a lemonade stand, not that you can't drink it on your own if you want to.
(c) use a context based triggering mechanism to display an advertisement that partially or wholly covers or obscures paid avertising or other content on an Internet website in a way that interferes with a user's ability to view the Internet website.
That could be read to say program that removes any part of the website from the user's view and replaces it with either something else or even plain nothingness is prohibited. So many non-spyware user-friendly uses of technology could get caught in the crossfire...
No it doesn't, it says replacing it with an advertisement is prohibited. It's very specific. It sounds like a great law to me.
For instance they tweaked Asimov's three laws a bit to make them more accessible and relevant to modern moviegoers, they are now:
Law 1: A robot must not talk about injuring human beings in Fight Club.
Law 2: A robot must not talk about injuring Robots in Fight Club.
Law 3: A robot must protect itself from injury using a minigun and rocket launchers.