(written by Dr. Goldstine) is an excellent book about the history of early computers. It's an academic history book, not a mass market popularization, but it's readable. ISTR that about half of it is about the pre-electronic era and the other half is about ENIAC, EDVAC, and so forth. Goldstine became pretty good buddies with von Neumann and a lot of the familiar stories about von Neumann come from this book.
Goldstine was also related in some way to the German 19th century poet Heinrich Heine, FWIW.
You have to wonder how the "whistleblower" got his/her copy of that message. Maybe different versions with different program-generated typos went out to different potential whistleblowers, so they could internally identify the culprit. Stuff like that has been done before.
MoFo is an affectionate name given to Morrison and Forrester, a huge firm and one of the best in the country. They have over 1000 lawyers and have done a lot of kick-ass pro bono litigation for environmental law and even against the Church of Scientology, in addition to the usual corporate stuff. Believe me, everyone in the legal business knows exactly who they are, just like geeks know who HP is. They don't have to worry one bit about their domain name messing up their reputation.
California does, so if this suit had happened there, HardOCP would be in a position to collect money damages, from what I understand. (SLAPP = Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, when someone exercises First Amendment rights and you sue them to intimidate them into shutting up).
Please tell me more about Baby Bells not having exclusive rights to place cable. I'd like to run cable under the street from my apartment building to my office downtown. Think the city will do anything but laugh at me if I ask for that?
Yes, if the govt gave me the exclusive right to drive a car on the street and said nobody else was allowed to drive a car there, I'd expect to also be assigned some responsibilities about driving other people around. Hitchhikers are allowed to drive their own cars instead of hitchhiking, if they want. But as far as I've seen, telcos, power utilities, and cable TV companies get exclusive rights from the cities to lay cable under the street. It's not generally the case that every Joe Schmoe willing to fill in the right forms and pay the applicable fees can run cable under the street. There's only a limited amount of cable space down there and access to it is carefully controlled.
getting qwest off our backs has been a pain, they demand that we give them access to our network even though we own it
What precisely is it that you think you own? The wire you put under the street between CO's and people's houses? OK, maybe you own that. What about the street itself, and the tunnels under them? I don't know about the case where you're a municipality, but you certainly don't own the street if you're a regional phone company. And yet, you've been given some kind of monopoly access to under-street cable tunnels and for that matter, residential termination points. If you claim I'm wrong about that, well, say I run an ISP with a downtown office--I'd like to run my own fiber through your city's streets and then up your city's utility poles just like the phone companies do, so I can drop Ethernet cable to the homes of my subscribers, and give them moby bandwidth without having to pay an RBOC to transport data for me. Where do I sign up to do that? I can't? Didn't think so--there's a monopoly like I said.
Given that the RBOC's are getting exclusive access to a public resource, I don't see any reason why they shouldn't have to share that access for the public's benefit. If they want to own their own network, let them build their own streets to run the cables under. If they want exclusive rights to put cabling under public streets, they better be willing to give the public access to the bandwidth.
Maybe there's some part of this that I'm missing, since I generally assume that anything Michael Powell's FCC does is bad, and when the courts smack the FCC it's a good thing. But this seems to me like a case where if the FCC has mandated more access to last-mile wiring, it's done the right thing.
I don't see any official xft builds on mozilla.org. I see some contributed builds based on 1.5a and 1.6a alpha releases. I don't want to run an alpha release and I don't want to run an unofficial distribution. Am I not looking in the right place?
I'm not trying to flame, but I figure someone on this thread might understand this issue better than I do.
I run Mozilla 1.2.1, which came with Red Hat 9 and which works mostly ok, but of course is now old and buggy. I tried upgrading to 1.5 and then to 1.6, and they're newer and better, except their fonts look like crap. A little research indicates that unlike the 1.2.1 that I'm running, the default 1.5 and 1.6 builds don't have Xft enabled. I ended up rolling back to 1.2.1 just because the fonts look so much better. 1.2.1 as shipped from Redhat has font selections in the appearance menu called "System Default" which gives good looking fonts. The Mozilla builds don't have that choice. You have to pick from a bunch of specific fonts which all look bad.
Any idea why Xft and good fonts aren't enabled by default in Mozilla? What do I have to do to enable them in 1.5 or 1.6? I'd sure like to be able to quit using 1.2.1 but feel stuck with it until I find the time to make some big project of figuring out what's going on. Blecch.
Bill Gates is a heavy Republican contributor. Suppose it turns out that the fake photo was circulated by some Republican operative, say Karl Rove. If Bill owns Corbis, don't you think the investigation would stop awfully fast, before the public got informed?
I don't know of any laptops made today that I'd call robust. Laptops today are built for performance which means pushing their components to their limits, which means early failure. But $800 laptops tend to be pretty stripped down. So if you want a more capable model, the best way to deal with the failures is get one with a 3 year warranty, or buy an extended warranty.
Thinkpads still seem to be about the best laptops out there, but they do fail if used heavily the way I use mine. I've had four of them and have had a 100% failure rate so far. I keep buying them though, because everything else seems even worse (i.e. fail even faster).
Free speech includes the right to speak anonymously (McIntyre vs Ohio Board of Elections), so people can express opinions without fear of reprisals, whether from the government or from non-government parties.
BATF invited people to exercise their right of anonymous speech: they asked citizens for their opinions, said please give your contact info so we can get back to you with followup questions, but we won't publish your info, so random loons won't see it and bother you. Then they decided to publish the info anyway, opening the senders to reprisals, i.e. punishing people for exercising the right of anonymous speech.
Think about what happens if you know about an ongoing crime (e.g. your mayor is taking weekly payoffs from the Mafia) and you tell the FBI on condition of anonymity (i.e. you can't testify as a witness, but you give them info to help them organize their own investigation). You might be fine giving the FBI your name and phone number so you can keep assisting them, but you definitely don't want them to notify the Mafia of where the info is coming from. The people you're concerned about reprisals from are not necessarily the government.
That's the one about publishing all the upgrades and fixes. The most disturbing thing I've heard (but not confirmed) about Red Hat is that they require RHEL customers to keep the service bulletins confidential. That seems directly opposite of the free software spirit to me, and it makes me angry if it's true. Anyone know?
In 1979, The Progressive publishes an article on how to build H-bombs, and our courts hold that our right to free speech is so strong that the government can't do anything to stop the article. Barely 20 years later, Dimitri Sklyarov is arrested for publishing a program that reads copy-protected PDF files. Clearly, copyright infringement is a greater threat to humanity--or at least to politicians' campaign contributions--than H-bombs are.
One thing that's always annoyed me is the difficulty of finding power strips with lots of outlets, like 10 or more. Six-outlet strips are everywhere, 8-outlet ones are available at CompUSA for 20 bucks or so. I know a guy with a 12-outlet one in his workshop and I'd dearly like to get one like it, but he doesn't know where it came from. I end up using several 6-outlet ones plugged together, which is a big mess.
Running out of power really isn't an issue, since most of the devices I want to plug in are low powered (dsl router, cell phone charger, etc). On the other hand, many of them are powered by wall warts, which means the power strip needs to have some space between the outlets so the wall wart doesn't cover two outlets.
In fact only a few percent of the samples brought back from the moon have been studied at all. The rest, many hundreds of pounds, is sitting in NASA vaults. Maybe a few ounces get used for research every year. I would like to hope that by the time a serious dent is made in NASA's existing supply, we'll have a revitalized space program bringing back moon rocks and asteroid rocks by the ton, and the Apollo samples won't be so precious any more. Meanwhile, yeah, I agree with the principle of not taking the stuff private (or else letting the government auction some off like they do public spectrum). But we're talking about a unique and very small sample and I can't get too worked up about what happens to it as long as it doesn't happen all the time.
It's worse than that. Suppose I have an intentionally open wifi hotspot (say I run a cyber cafe). Does that make me liable if someone downloads porn? I should hope I'd be no more liable than if I had a public telephone in my cafe and someone used it to download porn by modem. I cannot monitor the contents of someone else's surfing.
I wish they didn't say "receipt". A receipt is a piece of paper that memorializes a done deal, and that you take home with you. The thing these machines are required to print out is a ballot. It gets dropped in a ballot box and is the authoritative record of how you voted, if the electronic count is suspect in some way.
How do you know it says the right thing? Well, uh, you look at it before you drop it in the ballot box. That's why it's called a "voter-verifiable" paper audit trail. If Alice is running against Bob and you want to vote for her, the machine gives you a piece of paper and you make sure it says "I vote for Alice" and not one that says "I vote for Bob".
Besides requiring a manual ballot count in the event of a close election, the HAVA bill also requires a manual count for a random small sample (I think 0.5%) of [i]all[/i] computerized elections. That should make deliberate fraud pretty scary.
from that Canadian legal point of view. Effort of acquisition has nothing to do with it.
Suppose your Guy A spends years collecting those 1000 CD's and compressing them to his hard drive (they make about 60 GB of Ogg files). Now he invites me to his house. His computer is powered off. With his permission, I sit in front of his computer, power it up, and use his DVD burner to copy those 60 GB of Ogg files to a handful of DVD-R media that I brought with me. I power his computer back down and take the DVD-R copies back to my own home.
Is there some bizarre stretch of the imagination through which it can be claimed that he rather than I made those DVD copies? If not, what I've done is legal in Canada since I made the copies for myself, even though it was 1000 CD's with very little effort.
So I don't think effort has anything to do with the legality.
Um, I don't get that, if I let someone else use my cassette deck to record one of my cd's, how is it that I'm the one doing the copying? And if I let them use my computer to do the same thing, what's different? Why does it matter if the computer is remotely operated over the net?
or some other cracker conference. Sort of like electing the King and Queen of the County Fair. Just announce that at Defcon you're going to elect the Evil Overlord of All The Crackers, and you're going to use Diebold machines to count the votes. That should lead to some amazing exploits:).
The machine is in the Smithsonian. You can go look at it, but can't run it. Hsu bought the rights to the design when he left IBM. He tried to get a rematch with Kasparov in order to help commercialize the technology, but Kasparov wasn't willing to play. This stuff is all in the book. My copy isn't handy so I can't check the exact quotes, but I believe Hsu specifically says the news reports saying the machine was dismantled are in error.
It's in the Smithsonian and the hardware is more or less intact. It's in the typical condition of a decommissioned computer, i.e. you can't just flip a switch and start using it, but there's some chance that the folks who built it could get it working again sometime. This is described in
the book "Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer That Defeated the World Chess Champion" by Deep Blue's designer F.-H. Hsu. Hsu later got interested in building a Shogi (Japanese chess) machine using FPGA's. He says with today's custom VLSI, the equivalent of Deep Thought could be built on one chip and mounted in a compact flash card. You'd put the card into your Zaurus or Ipaq PDA and have a grandmaster-strength pocket chess machine. He put some effort into commercializing such a device but couldn't get enough backing so he went off to greener pastures.
Slashdot Mirror
Goldstine was also related in some way to the German 19th century poet Heinrich Heine, FWIW.
You have to wonder how the "whistleblower" got his/her copy of that message. Maybe different versions with different program-generated typos went out to different potential whistleblowers, so they could internally identify the culprit. Stuff like that has been done before.
MoFo is an affectionate name given to Morrison and Forrester, a huge firm and one of the best in the country. They have over 1000 lawyers and have done a lot of kick-ass pro bono litigation for environmental law and even against the Church of Scientology, in addition to the usual corporate stuff. Believe me, everyone in the legal business knows exactly who they are, just like geeks know who HP is. They don't have to worry one bit about their domain name messing up their reputation.
California Anti-SLAPP Project
Please tell me more about Baby Bells not having exclusive rights to place cable. I'd like to run cable under the street from my apartment building to my office downtown. Think the city will do anything but laugh at me if I ask for that?
Yes, if the govt gave me the exclusive right to drive a car on the street and said nobody else was allowed to drive a car there, I'd expect to also be assigned some responsibilities about driving other people around. Hitchhikers are allowed to drive their own cars instead of hitchhiking, if they want. But as far as I've seen, telcos, power utilities, and cable TV companies get exclusive rights from the cities to lay cable under the street. It's not generally the case that every Joe Schmoe willing to fill in the right forms and pay the applicable fees can run cable under the street. There's only a limited amount of cable space down there and access to it is carefully controlled.
What precisely is it that you think you own? The wire you put under the street between CO's and people's houses? OK, maybe you own that. What about the street itself, and the tunnels under them? I don't know about the case where you're a municipality, but you certainly don't own the street if you're a regional phone company. And yet, you've been given some kind of monopoly access to under-street cable tunnels and for that matter, residential termination points. If you claim I'm wrong about that, well, say I run an ISP with a downtown office--I'd like to run my own fiber through your city's streets and then up your city's utility poles just like the phone companies do, so I can drop Ethernet cable to the homes of my subscribers, and give them moby bandwidth without having to pay an RBOC to transport data for me. Where do I sign up to do that? I can't? Didn't think so--there's a monopoly like I said.
Given that the RBOC's are getting exclusive access to a public resource, I don't see any reason why they shouldn't have to share that access for the public's benefit. If they want to own their own network, let them build their own streets to run the cables under. If they want exclusive rights to put cabling under public streets, they better be willing to give the public access to the bandwidth.
Maybe there's some part of this that I'm missing, since I generally assume that anything Michael Powell's FCC does is bad, and when the courts smack the FCC it's a good thing. But this seems to me like a case where if the FCC has mandated more access to last-mile wiring, it's done the right thing.
I don't see any official xft builds on mozilla.org. I see some contributed builds based on 1.5a and 1.6a alpha releases. I don't want to run an alpha release and I don't want to run an unofficial distribution. Am I not looking in the right place?
I run Mozilla 1.2.1, which came with Red Hat 9 and which works mostly ok, but of course is now old and buggy. I tried upgrading to 1.5 and then to 1.6, and they're newer and better, except their fonts look like crap. A little research indicates that unlike the 1.2.1 that I'm running, the default 1.5 and 1.6 builds don't have Xft enabled. I ended up rolling back to 1.2.1 just because the fonts look so much better. 1.2.1 as shipped from Redhat has font selections in the appearance menu called "System Default" which gives good looking fonts. The Mozilla builds don't have that choice. You have to pick from a bunch of specific fonts which all look bad.
Any idea why Xft and good fonts aren't enabled by default in Mozilla? What do I have to do to enable them in 1.5 or 1.6? I'd sure like to be able to quit using 1.2.1 but feel stuck with it until I find the time to make some big project of figuring out what's going on. Blecch.
Bill Gates is a heavy Republican contributor. Suppose it turns out that the fake photo was circulated by some Republican operative, say Karl Rove. If Bill owns Corbis, don't you think the investigation would stop awfully fast, before the public got informed?
Thinkpads still seem to be about the best laptops out there, but they do fail if used heavily the way I use mine. I've had four of them and have had a 100% failure rate so far. I keep buying them though, because everything else seems even worse (i.e. fail even faster).
Free speech includes the right to speak anonymously (McIntyre vs Ohio Board of Elections), so people can express opinions without fear of reprisals, whether from the government or from non-government parties.
BATF invited people to exercise their right of anonymous speech: they asked citizens for their opinions, said please give your contact info so we can get back to you with followup questions, but we won't publish your info, so random loons won't see it and bother you. Then they decided to publish the info anyway, opening the senders to reprisals, i.e. punishing people for exercising the right of anonymous speech.
Think about what happens if you know about an ongoing crime (e.g. your mayor is taking weekly payoffs from the Mafia) and you tell the FBI on condition of anonymity (i.e. you can't testify as a witness, but you give them info to help them organize their own investigation). You might be fine giving the FBI your name and phone number so you can keep assisting them, but you definitely don't want them to notify the Mafia of where the info is coming from. The people you're concerned about reprisals from are not necessarily the government.
That's the one about publishing all the upgrades and fixes. The most disturbing thing I've heard (but not confirmed) about Red Hat is that they require RHEL customers to keep the service bulletins confidential. That seems directly opposite of the free software spirit to me, and it makes me angry if it's true. Anyone know?
In 1979, The Progressive publishes an article on how to build H-bombs, and our courts hold that our right to free speech is so strong that the government can't do anything to stop the article. Barely 20 years later, Dimitri Sklyarov is arrested for publishing a program that reads copy-protected PDF files. Clearly, copyright infringement is a greater threat to humanity--or at least to politicians' campaign contributions--than H-bombs are.
Running out of power really isn't an issue, since most of the devices I want to plug in are low powered (dsl router, cell phone charger, etc). On the other hand, many of them are powered by wall warts, which means the power strip needs to have some space between the outlets so the wall wart doesn't cover two outlets.
Any suggestions?
In fact only a few percent of the samples brought back from the moon have been studied at all. The rest, many hundreds of pounds, is sitting in NASA vaults. Maybe a few ounces get used for research every year. I would like to hope that by the time a serious dent is made in NASA's existing supply, we'll have a revitalized space program bringing back moon rocks and asteroid rocks by the ton, and the Apollo samples won't be so precious any more. Meanwhile, yeah, I agree with the principle of not taking the stuff private (or else letting the government auction some off like they do public spectrum). But we're talking about a unique and very small sample and I can't get too worked up about what happens to it as long as it doesn't happen all the time.
It's worse than that. Suppose I have an intentionally open wifi hotspot (say I run a cyber cafe). Does that make me liable if someone downloads porn? I should hope I'd be no more liable than if I had a public telephone in my cafe and someone used it to download porn by modem.
I cannot monitor the contents of someone else's surfing.
How do you know it says the right thing? Well, uh, you look at it before you drop it in the ballot box. That's why it's called a "voter-verifiable" paper audit trail. If Alice is running against Bob and you want to vote for her, the machine gives you a piece of paper and you make sure it says "I vote for Alice" and not one that says "I vote for Bob".
Besides requiring a manual ballot count in the event of a close election, the HAVA bill also requires a manual count for a random small sample (I think 0.5%) of [i]all[/i] computerized elections. That should make deliberate fraud pretty scary.
Suppose your Guy A spends years collecting those 1000 CD's and compressing them to his hard drive (they make about 60 GB of Ogg files). Now he invites me to his house. His computer is powered off. With his permission, I sit in front of his computer, power it up, and use his DVD burner to copy those 60 GB of Ogg files to a handful of DVD-R media that I brought with me. I power his computer back down and take the DVD-R copies back to my own home.
Is there some bizarre stretch of the imagination through which it can be claimed that he rather than I made those DVD copies? If not, what I've done is legal in Canada since I made the copies for myself, even though it was 1000 CD's with very little effort.
So I don't think effort has anything to do with the legality.
Um, I don't get that, if I let someone else use my cassette deck to record one of my cd's, how is it that I'm the one doing the copying? And if I let them use my computer to do the same thing, what's different? Why does it matter if the computer is remotely operated over the net?
or some other cracker conference. Sort of like electing the King and Queen of the County Fair. Just announce that at Defcon you're going to elect the Evil Overlord of All The Crackers, and you're going to use Diebold machines to count the votes. That should lead to some amazing exploits :).
And the Internet means two companies, AOL and MSN, nobody else.
The machine is in the Smithsonian. You can go look at it, but can't run it. Hsu bought the rights to the design when he left IBM. He tried to get a rematch with Kasparov in order to help commercialize the technology, but Kasparov wasn't willing to play. This stuff is all in the book. My copy isn't handy so I can't check the exact quotes, but I believe Hsu specifically says the news reports saying the machine was dismantled are in error.
It's in the Smithsonian and the hardware is more or less intact. It's in the typical condition of a decommissioned computer, i.e. you can't just flip a switch and start using it, but there's some chance that the folks who built it could get it working again sometime. This is described in the book "Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer That Defeated the World Chess Champion" by Deep Blue's designer F.-H. Hsu. Hsu later got interested in building a Shogi (Japanese chess) machine using FPGA's. He says with today's custom VLSI, the equivalent of Deep Thought could be built on one chip and mounted in a compact flash card. You'd put the card into your Zaurus or Ipaq PDA and have a grandmaster-strength pocket chess machine. He put some effort into commercializing such a device but couldn't get enough backing so he went off to greener pastures.