I completely agree. It is great to hear that SCO is losing their court battles but it is tough to hear people getting laid off. Now all those people have SCO as their last place of employment, that has gotta hurt.
Yeah, but you know what I would ask if I was interviewing them, "Why didn't you leave sooner?"
I doubt would for SCO would be that much of a black mark on your resume, if you were actually smart enough to leave when they started drinking kool-aid. What looks bad is that you continued to work for a company that had no long term business plan, or even a respectable short term one.
Would you really want an employee who either:
A) couldn't tell he was on a sinking ship?
or
B) knew the company was doomed and sat there anyways?
The guy's either got a poor understanding or the market or questionable ethics. Neither is good. I would hope the person could at least say, "I was looking for another job but unable to find one."
Just sitting there one you hands while on a sinking ship isn't good.
So, again, go educate yourself on the basics of economics before spouting off on/.
Maybe you should go educate yourself on some basic timekeeping. The page you linked to contains figures from 2001, it is currently 2004. A lot has happened in three years. I suggest you go find some CURRENT facts.
I have a pockettop/?microinnovations? folding IR keyboard that I use with my Zaurus SL-5500 and it works great. These keyboards are good quality, the software that has been developed for them is excellent, and they're also fairly cheap and easily availible.
One of the nice things about that setup is that you can use the zaurus in landscape mode while using the keyboard or leave the keyboard behind when you don't need it.
You get a device that you can operate while walking down the street (unlike a laptop), but when you sit down at a table, you can take out your folding keyboard.
As far as #1 goes, it depends on what you want. You *can* really develop on a Zaurus, but you would probably want to do it in a typical GNU environment. I mean sure you can't get MS visual studio for Zaurus, but that doesn't mean you *can't* develop on it, it just means you can't develop in visual studio on it.
Personally, I would want to go beyond anything simple given the screen size, CPU limitations, etc, but you would be really suprised what you can pull off on a Zaurus. If you don't need to be highly mobile (college student for ex.) then a laptop is probably a better choice, as small for the sake of small ins't often that great fo an idea, but if your feet are your primary mode of transportation, the Zaurus becmes very appealing.
Hrm. I dropped about $850 on my SL-C860. And is sure isn't because I have the money (as I am currently paying my way through school with a part time job and many many loans). The functionality of this device approaches that of a laptop, but its form factor is what most strongly influenced my purchase.
This is so true. I used the heck out of my Zaurus SL-5500 when I was in college. It was my:
MP3 player
Calclator
Web browser (anywhere on campus)
IM client (anywhere on campus)
email client (anywhere on campus)
File storage
Phone book
Watch
Videogame system
text editor (I have a fold up keyboard)
etc, etc
I'd say I got about 90-95% of the functionality of a laptop out of my Zaurus, out of a device that actually fit in my jacket pocket.
Now that I'm out of college, it just gathers dust since I now drive as opposed to walk, and my employer provides a laptop. But when you're on a college campus with wifi, these devices kick some serious ass.
Planner
That's probably what they were thinking -- since they can't really refund the money from super-large purchases, it's not really fair for everyone else.
Sure they can. It's the very nature of an escrow service.
An escrow service holds the buyer's money until the buyer gets the goods and is satisfied. If I bought a house, I would send the escrow service $100,000, and they would hold my money until I said "the house was delivered as advertised". Once I do that, the escrow service turns over my money to the seller.
I think you have the concept of an escrow service confused with insurance.
The escrow concept works for an arbitraily large amount of money. There's no fundamental limit on how big the transaction can be, and an (honest) escrow service will ALWAYS have the money to pay the seller or refund they buyer, because the buyer gives it to them at the beginning.
Seriously - what can ebay do about problem buyers and sellers?
Well, for starters they could offer an escrow service.
Seriously, I am amazed that they don't. When I first heard about ebay and its popularity I thought: "Hmmm, they must have some sort of escrow service set up.....there's no way people would be stupid enough to send money to a random, semi-anonymous person on the internet and HOPE they get somthing back."
Turns out I was wrong and both ebay and paypal prove it.
On any given day you can go on ebay and find more fraudulent auctions than you can shake a stick at, and paypal, being expempt from banking regulations is a VERY risky place to keep or transfer money. By not being a bank they are exempt from rules about how much cash they must keep on hand to cover the "balances" in their accounts, making them the perfect target for a bank run the minute there is significant doubt about their stability.
If you want to be better than ebay, here's what you need to do:
Screen ALL autions and actually enforce your rules. At a minimum, there should be a clearly labeled button for "Report this aution to an administrator" and when I press it, someone should actually do something.
Offer an optional escrow service that the buyer pays for, and the seller CANNOT opt out of.
Provide real support in the event of a problem
I haven't touched on #1 before, but it's really important. Try going on ebay right now and searching for "RX-7" (the car I own). See all the keyword spamming that goes on? That makes it a real bitch for me to try and find ACTUAL PARTS FOR AN RX-7. Combine that with the lack of protection when I actually DO find something, and I just say "fuck it, I'll get my stuff elsewhere". So far, I have yet to buy a single thing off ebay.
What I would like to see, is a human moderated electronic aution site, with a built-in escrow service.
Yes, that would cost more, but I'd be willing to pay. Especially for an escrow service.
Here's how you do the escrow service:
There is a box I can check when I bid. When I check this box, you charge me an extra $5 for the service. If something goes wrong, you get an ACTUAL HUMAN involved and resolve things quickly.
Yeah dude, totally...just like someone who makes a biological weapon to expose the weakness in the current national security infrastructure. They could just leave it out on the street marked "use me to fuck up the entire city."
They haven't done anything wrong, right? I mean, they didn't RELEASE the poison, and their aim is noble since they really only expose all the country's physical security holes.
First off, your example is ridiculously extreme and doesn't really match the discussion at hand.
Second, you add in the irresponsible action of placing the "biological weapon" somewhere without fully disclosing what it is. (Which is more akin to RELEASING a virus rather than WRITING one.)
See your example is more like building a bomb and leaving it in a public place. Obviously that's bad and you're knowingly trying to hurt people.
But on the other end of the spectrum, there are those who fuck around with things like explosives for fun, and sometimes end up doing really good things as a result.
Someone like you would have had Alfred Nobel jailed as a "terrorist threat". That's stupid.
Their rhetoric is a fucking smokescreen, they're slimebag criminals and they deserve to be punished just like a CEO who jacks down stock prices. They're both doing MONETARY damage.
This is an absurd leap here. So if you build a car with shitty brakes (or door locks) and I publicize that fact, I'm the bad person for costing you money by exposing your negligence?
See, the problem I have with all of this is that if I write a virus, keep it to myself, and never release it, it's still illegal. I wouldn't be hurting you, or costing you money, but I would be guilty of some sort of "intellectual transgression" because people like you as so terrifed of nasty viruses.
Say you build a car with shitty door locks and I find out they can be opened with a screwdriver....
Should we make screwdrivers illegal?
Fuck no.
Me using a screwdriver to break into your car is ALREADY illegal, and if you're that terrified that someone's going to do it, get better locks.
By all means, go after people who actually ARE going around breaking into cars, but the knowedge and ability to commit a crime should not constitute a crime by itself.
In order to be guilty of a crime, you should actually be guilty of harming someone else. RELEASING the virus is what does that harm, not writing it.
If you buy a full version, you have all these rights. What people fail to realize is they get an OEM copy of the OS with a new system. It is much cheaper than a full version, but also has 1 added restriction, it can only be (legally) run on that machine. If you want the full version, pay for the full version.
Hmmm, make he doesn't realize he has that restriction because he never signed a legal contract with Microsoft agreeing to that restricition?
Seriously, if I buy a new house, walk into the bathroom and find a sticker that says "before using this toilet, you must agree to the following conditions...." do you think that sticker actually means anything? The realtor said it came with a toilet. I bought the house, therefore the toilet is mine. If they wanted the place conditions on my use of the toilet, they needed to add them as a condition of the sale.
Unless these "conditions" were presented BEFORE money changed hands, I wouldn't be so confident that his rights are as limited as you think they are.
The segway is a neat device, but I just thought I share a thought that another slashdotter brought up a while ago.
While the segway is a really neat idea, an electric bicycle would be much more senisble.
See, even when you're standing still, the segway has to burn energy just to keep you upright. Same thing when you're "coasting" down a hill.
This means that the design of a device like the segway is going to be fundamentally energy inefficient compared to a electric bicycle/motorcycle.
Just something interesting I though I'd bring up, since we can't RTFA anyways.
Does anybody know of any electric bikes that even beging to approach the coolness factor of a segway?
Both lockpicks and functional viruses have very little legitamite use unless one is in a very narrow band of professions.
Same thing with fire axes, tow trucks, arc welders, and all sorts of other things.
Outlawing something becuase it has "little legitimate use unless one is in a very narrow band of professions" is bad law. For example, how am I going to enter that profession? What constitutes little? Does a coathangar count as a "lockpick"? What about a car antenna (I used my own to break into my car a couple times)? How is someone supposed to come up with the latest and greatest lock design when they can't try to pick it?
We shouldn't be in the habit of punishing someone because they MIGHT do something wrong. We should wait until they actually do something wrong and THEN punish them.
Sure, that makes more work for the police since they have to catch you doing something that hurts another person, but that's their fucking job.
It's like convicting someone of murder becuase they have a gun in their house, without needing to establish that it was their gun that was actually used, or that they fired it, or that a specfic person was actually murdered.
So far the majority of comments seem to be negative and describe the unit as junk, but despite my having no interest in owning any gameboy unit, this combo inrigues me
People aren't really saying that it's junk, as much as that it's pointless.
A handheld GPS unit goes for $90. This thing goes for $200. Even if you want a color screen, etc, etc you can get that for about the same price AND you don't need a gameboy.
If this thing was $50 it would be cool, but for $200, it's just not worth it. It's like building an attachment that will turn your GBA into an electric drill for ONLY the cost of two electric drills.
It's neat for the hack value, but I wouldn't run out and buy stock.
Just because the code is not secure, does that give another person a right to cause harm? It is like saying that if I leave my back door unlocked at night, I am to blame if someone breaks in. I say that is bullshit. I say I have a gun, and if someone breaks in, they are getting shot. And that is how this guy should be treated, as a criminal thug.
I don't have a problem with locking up those who distribute worms and viruses, but I do have a problem with locking up someone just because you can show that they wrote it. It's more like locking up someone just for *OWNING* lockpicks. What should be illegal is using the lockpicks to break into someone's house, not owning them in the first place. Many of the early DOS/Windows viruses contain examples of extremely clever programming with all sorts of alternate applications: crypto programs, AV programs, copyprotection/anti-reverse engineering schemes, etc.
Maybe if it was not for the virus writers, the cost of Windows would be cheaper. Maybe beacuse of the virus writers Microsoft has to spend more money?
No, this is kind of a basic econ 101 thing. When a company has a monopoly, they start charging the "monopoly price" and opposed to the fair market price. While the fair market price is tied to supply and demand, cost of production, etc, the monopoly price is dictated strictly by DEMAND. The monopolist looks at the demand curve for their product and choose the point the maximizes their revenue. Since the windows is a software product as opposed to a car, there is little incremental cost between producing 100,000 copies as opposed to 50,000. These means that the production cost aspect of the monopoly price is pretty much fixed, and the price is dictated almost entirely by demand.
It's so good to hear someone who protested the war finally not make an ass of themself.
It seems so many of those against the war were unrealistic idiots who thought we could just have some sort of "group hug to save iraq." They protested the concept of fighting itself rather than the disturbing politics involved.
What I would have loved to hear was "We're not protesting the removal of Saddam, we're protesting the Bush administration's financial conflict of interest in the matter."
The longer this war lasts, the more money Halliburton and Cheney make. Unfortunately, I think the war was handed to them because idiots did things that made it very hard to take them seriously, like not admitting that the removal of Saddam was necessary, at least from a human rights standpoint. The things to complain about should have been the financial conflict of interest, the war being about WMDs instead of human rights, lack of a clear exit strategy, etc. I'd like to say lack of UN involvement as well, but I think the Saddam has proven the UN to be absolutely dickless.
I think that the US should be ashamed of the leadership and goals of this war, and the rest of the world should be ashamed that they didn't do anything sooner. The US was ready to go back into Iraq years ago, but Kofi Anan said "Wait Saddam will negotiate with me!" and allowed Saddam to jerk him around. The UN made it clear that they were going to do nothing to solve the problem,
Given the context is the written word, and that documents will (hopefully) persist beyond one week - the reader probably won't know that the document was written in 2004 unless the document says so.
I was explaining why the year is LAST in the date format, not why you never use it at all.
Ngggg! Why can't people use ISO date format? That is the silly month/day/year format.
Because our date format was designed for humans, not computers.
Seriously, people know what year it is, so saying "Two-thousand four, May fifth" is a big fat waste of time. By the time you're done telling what year it is, a normal, non-ISO date using person would havegiven me all the info I needed to know.
If I ask you, "What's the date?" and you start in telling me what year it is, I'm going to think "Asshole! I know what year it is, get to the useful info."
What's wrong with software conforming to humans rather than humans conforming to software?
This is not going to be a discussion about semantics, is it? If I can push the probability below mere guessing, many people would call it "secure". Not in a mathematical sense, of course.
See, but I am talking in a mathematical sense. QC is neat, but I too often hear: "Unlike conventional crypto, QC in unbreakable/provably secure/etc."
The reality is, there a trade off between probability of undetected intercept, probability of false alarm, and message size. If the message is say, normal english prose, I don't need to get 100% of it to figure out what you're saying. As I understand it, you counter this problem by using privacy amplification.
So what? If you intercept one photon you cannot derive the message. If you grab enough photons to derive the message you are detected.
QC is not unsafe just because "statistics" is involved. You can push the probability for undetected eavesdropping to a point where it doesn't matter anymore.
I never said QC was "unsafe", my point is that it's not "prefectly secure". See if I can get even a single bit and get away with it, technically, I'm eavesdropping without detection (which you said was impossible).
In the end the claims one has to make about QC's security sound remarkably similar to those you hear regarding normal crypto. Like this one:
I can guess any message with a probability of 2^-bitlength. If the probability of eavesdropping is lower, it's just a moot point.
You end up relying of the knowedge that the probability of an undetected interception of a significant amount of information is very low , as opposed to of the probablility of someone guessing your RSA key which is also very low.
Anyways, it's seems like you actually read the post you replied to and realized that it's not the "total nonsense" you claimed it was. The are legitimate issues that make QC NOT PERFECT, as much as people would like to claim that it is.
This is total nonsense. Are you a cryptographer afraid to loose your job, with no physical background? Then please read the article before you respond.
Please read my post and understand the topic before responding. It wouldn't seem like nonsense to you if you did.
I agree that the text and title posted to Slashdot is kind of misleading. All this QC does is making a channel on which eavesdropping impossible, without detection. Point. And it is.
No it's not. That's what I was explaining.
In order to be perfectly secure, you would need to be able to transmit one and only one photon, every time. This does not happen. Because this does not happen, you can't say "uh-oh I didn't get my photon, someone's listening". You cannot detect an eavsedropper until he causes a statistically significant change in the way you're receiving photons.
This has actually nothing to do with crypto (you can breathe again, your salary is safe)
I know that, I was making a frickin analogy. While schemes like RSA rely on the difficulty of factoring a product of large primes, QC relies on statistics and privacy amplification. You try to make is so that in oder to receive a significant portion of the message, the person would noticably affect the statistics and therefore be detected.
but the transmission cannot be listened to undetected.
Yes it can. If I receive a single photon from the transmission line and then stop listening, you aren't going to be able to tell if the transmitter actually emitted that photon or not. The only way go can tell I'm grabbing your photons is if I start grabbing enough of them so that I start messing up the statistics.
You should get a better understanding of this subject before flaming people.
If that were not enough, those students who are actually prone to creative and/or intelligent thought are often stifled by a system that looks more like the Special Olympics with the every student is equal approach that prevents them from advancing at the proper pace.
That is absolutely dead on.
In highschool, got perfect scores on every state math test. Only in retrospect do I realize that this means I should have been taking more advanced classes.
But there was no option to. I was already in "honors" math, but I was still not being challenged. Sure it sounds impressive to have a 95+% average in a course, but really I should have been doing something harder.
The way the school system is set up, there was no way for me to work at a faster pace and reach more advanced topics.
And I took some normal "regents" levels course in other topics. These were miserable. They seemed full of students who didn't care and were determined to ruin it for everyone else. The teachers *WANTED* to teach us well, but they couldn't because they were too busy dealing with jerkoffs.
I think the real soultion is a major change in the way we organize and manage our schools. Doubling my school's budget or privitizing it wouldn't solve either problem. Right now private schools are typically good places to be because if you're at a private school, it means the parents (typically) care so you're less likely to have a class full of jerkoffs. Start handing out vouchers, and watch how fast that changes.
I don't believe it's where the funding goes that's the big problem.
I agree with this as well. Most schools could use a little bit more money, but if you were to double the school system's budget, you wouldn't solve half their problems.
There is also an increase in laziness in the US. Kids today don't want to work hard for anything. Just take the easy road. I know because they are my friends. They think I am nuts for reading and working hard at things.
No, there have always been lazy people. The problem is that, these days, we let the people who don't give a crap about their education mess it up for everyone else. You said it yourself: The kids who actually do well get teased. It's not that they're lazy, they just don't want to get beat up. Combine that with all the PC nonsense about how "honors classes make the other kids feel bad" and everyone is learning to the lowest common denominator. The problem isn't the money or the kids, it's the organization and management of our school system.
Example: in college engineering 4 of the top 5 students were foreign. Either Arabic or Asian.
Yeesh. What a terrbile example:
Have you ever considered, that this is representitive of the world's population in general?
As someone who just graduated from a top engineering school, I can tell you that the asians weren't any smarter than us white guys.
Blah, blah, blah. Haven't we gotten tired of these trolls? In the context of the transmission itself, it is, actually, totally secure. It's obvious to anyone without an icepick in their frontal lobe that there are other potential weaknesses. However, in this important respect, QC is provably secure in a way that classical crypto cannot be.
Actually, quantum crypto is not "provably secure" anymore than standard cryptography.
QC relies on the ability to emit photons, and to known probability distribution of those photon emissions. The problem is, there is no hardware out there than can emit one and only one photon 100% of the time. I wouldn't be suprised if it turns out to be totally impossible to build hardware that does. (Like building hardware to perfectly measure a particle's position and speed is impossible.)
This means that an "undetectable" attack is totally possible. What needs to be done is the use of statistical methods and "privacy amplification" to make the probability of a significant undetected attack as low as possible. (Sort of like trying to make your keyspace really big with normal crypto.)
Except that the WRX is a flat-4 which makes it much more shallow, that could help in getting it out of the way of the water, or more room to fold up the wheels. Not to mention being lighter than the LS motors.
Can you provide a link on that? (not the flat 4, the wieght) My understanding is that the LS1 is a VERY light engine for its displacement , and the comparison should really be between an LS1 and a subaru flat 4 WITH turbo and intercooler.
You might be right, or you might be wrong, but I bet it's a lot closer than you thought.
Slashdot Mirror
I completely agree. It is great to hear that SCO is losing their court battles but it is tough to hear people getting laid off. Now all those people have SCO as their last place of employment, that has gotta hurt.
Yeah, but you know what I would ask if I was interviewing them, "Why didn't you leave sooner?"
I doubt would for SCO would be that much of a black mark on your resume, if you were actually smart enough to leave when they started drinking kool-aid. What looks bad is that you continued to work for a company that had no long term business plan, or even a respectable short term one.
Would you really want an employee who either:
A) couldn't tell he was on a sinking ship?
or
B) knew the company was doomed and sat there anyways?
The guy's either got a poor understanding or the market or questionable ethics. Neither is good. I would hope the person could at least say, "I was looking for another job but unable to find one."
Just sitting there one you hands while on a sinking ship isn't good.
So, again, go educate yourself on the basics of economics before spouting off on /.
Maybe you should go educate yourself on some basic timekeeping. The page you linked to contains figures from 2001, it is currently 2004. A lot has happened in three years. I suggest you go find some CURRENT facts.
WRT #2:
I have a pockettop/?microinnovations? folding IR keyboard that I use with my Zaurus SL-5500 and it works great. These keyboards are good quality, the software that has been developed for them is excellent, and they're also fairly cheap and easily availible.
One of the nice things about that setup is that you can use the zaurus in landscape mode while using the keyboard or leave the keyboard behind when you don't need it.
You get a device that you can operate while walking down the street (unlike a laptop), but when you sit down at a table, you can take out your folding keyboard.
As far as #1 goes, it depends on what you want. You *can* really develop on a Zaurus, but you would probably want to do it in a typical GNU environment. I mean sure you can't get MS visual studio for Zaurus, but that doesn't mean you *can't* develop on it, it just means you can't develop in visual studio on it.
Personally, I would want to go beyond anything simple given the screen size, CPU limitations, etc, but you would be really suprised what you can pull off on a Zaurus. If you don't need to be highly mobile (college student for ex.) then a laptop is probably a better choice, as small for the sake of small ins't often that great fo an idea, but if your feet are your primary mode of transportation, the Zaurus becmes very appealing.
This is so true. I used the heck out of my Zaurus SL-5500 when I was in college. It was my:
I'd say I got about 90-95% of the functionality of a laptop out of my Zaurus, out of a device that actually fit in my jacket pocket.
Now that I'm out of college, it just gathers dust since I now drive as opposed to walk, and my employer provides a laptop. But when you're on a college campus with wifi, these devices kick some serious ass. Planner
That's probably what they were thinking -- since they can't really refund the money from super-large purchases, it's not really fair for everyone else.
Sure they can. It's the very nature of an escrow service.
An escrow service holds the buyer's money until the buyer gets the goods and is satisfied. If I bought a house, I would send the escrow service $100,000, and they would hold my money until I said "the house was delivered as advertised". Once I do that, the escrow service turns over my money to the seller.
I think you have the concept of an escrow service confused with insurance.
The escrow concept works for an arbitraily large amount of money. There's no fundamental limit on how big the transaction can be, and an (honest) escrow service will ALWAYS have the money to pay the seller or refund they buyer, because the buyer gives it to them at the beginning.
Seriously - what can ebay do about problem buyers and sellers?
Well, for starters they could offer an escrow service.
Seriously, I am amazed that they don't. When I first heard about ebay and its popularity I thought:
"Hmmm, they must have some sort of escrow service set up.....there's no way people would be stupid enough to send money to a random, semi-anonymous person on the internet and HOPE they get somthing back."
Turns out I was wrong and both ebay and paypal prove it.
On any given day you can go on ebay and find more fraudulent auctions than you can shake a stick at, and paypal, being expempt from banking regulations is a VERY risky place to keep or transfer money. By not being a bank they are exempt from rules about how much cash they must keep on hand to cover the "balances" in their accounts, making them the perfect target for a bank run the minute there is significant doubt about their stability.
If you want to be better than ebay, here's what you need to do:
I haven't touched on #1 before, but it's really important. Try going on ebay right now and searching for "RX-7" (the car I own). See all the keyword spamming that goes on? That makes it a real bitch for me to try and find ACTUAL PARTS FOR AN RX-7. Combine that with the lack of protection when I actually DO find something, and I just say "fuck it, I'll get my stuff elsewhere". So far, I have yet to buy a single thing off ebay.
What I would like to see, is a human moderated electronic aution site, with a built-in escrow service.
Yes, that would cost more, but I'd be willing to pay. Especially for an escrow service.
Here's how you do the escrow service:
There is a box I can check when I bid. When I check this box, you charge me an extra $5 for the service. If something goes wrong, you get an ACTUAL HUMAN involved and resolve things quickly.
See, the difference between you and the so-called "idiots" that you refer to (I guess I would be one :) ) is that you support the war and they don't.
I don't necessarily support the CURRENT war, I'm just not so naive as to believe that we NEVER should go to war.
Do you honestly believe we should never go to war?
Yeah dude, totally...just like someone who makes a biological weapon to expose the weakness in the current national security infrastructure. They could just leave it out on the street marked "use me to fuck up the entire city."
They haven't done anything wrong, right? I mean, they didn't RELEASE the poison, and their aim is noble since they really only expose all the country's physical security holes.
First off, your example is ridiculously extreme and doesn't really match the discussion at hand.
Second, you add in the irresponsible action of placing the "biological weapon" somewhere without fully disclosing what it is. (Which is more akin to RELEASING a virus rather than WRITING one.)
See your example is more like building a bomb and leaving it in a public place. Obviously that's bad and you're knowingly trying to hurt people.
But on the other end of the spectrum, there are those who fuck around with things like explosives for fun, and sometimes end up doing really good things as a result.
Someone like you would have had Alfred Nobel jailed as a "terrorist threat". That's stupid.
Their rhetoric is a fucking smokescreen, they're slimebag criminals and they deserve to be punished just like a CEO who jacks down stock prices. They're both doing MONETARY damage.
This is an absurd leap here. So if you build a car with shitty brakes (or door locks) and I publicize that fact, I'm the bad person for costing you money by exposing your negligence?
See, the problem I have with all of this is that if I write a virus, keep it to myself, and never release it, it's still illegal. I wouldn't be hurting you, or costing you money, but I would be guilty of some sort of "intellectual transgression" because people like you as so terrifed of nasty viruses.
Say you build a car with shitty door locks and I find out they can be opened with a screwdriver....
Should we make screwdrivers illegal?
Fuck no.
Me using a screwdriver to break into your car is ALREADY illegal, and if you're that terrified that someone's going to do it, get better locks.
By all means, go after people who actually ARE going around breaking into cars, but the knowedge and ability to commit a crime should not constitute a crime by itself.
In order to be guilty of a crime, you should actually be guilty of harming someone else. RELEASING the virus is what does that harm, not writing it.
If you buy a full version, you have all these rights. What people fail to realize is they get an OEM copy of the OS with a new system. It is much cheaper than a full version, but also has 1 added restriction, it can only be (legally) run on that machine. If you want the full version, pay for the full version.
Hmmm, make he doesn't realize he has that restriction because he never signed a legal contract with Microsoft agreeing to that restricition?
Seriously, if I buy a new house, walk into the bathroom and find a sticker that says "before using this toilet, you must agree to the following conditions...." do you think that sticker actually means anything? The realtor said it came with a toilet. I bought the house, therefore the toilet is mine. If they wanted the place conditions on my use of the toilet, they needed to add them as a condition of the sale.
Unless these "conditions" were presented BEFORE money changed hands, I wouldn't be so confident that his rights are as limited as you think they are.
The segway is a neat device, but I just thought I share a thought that another slashdotter brought up a while ago.
While the segway is a really neat idea, an electric bicycle would be much more senisble.
See, even when you're standing still, the segway has to burn energy just to keep you upright. Same thing when you're "coasting" down a hill.
This means that the design of a device like the segway is going to be fundamentally energy inefficient compared to a electric bicycle/motorcycle.
Just something interesting I though I'd bring up, since we can't RTFA anyways.
Does anybody know of any electric bikes that even beging to approach the coolness factor of a segway?
Both lockpicks and functional viruses have very little legitamite use unless one is in a very narrow band of professions.
Same thing with fire axes, tow trucks, arc welders, and all sorts of other things.
Outlawing something becuase it has "little legitimate use unless one is in a very narrow band of professions" is bad law. For example, how am I going to enter that profession? What constitutes little? Does a coathangar count as a "lockpick"? What about a car antenna (I used my own to break into my car a couple times)? How is someone supposed to come up with the latest and greatest lock design when they can't try to pick it?
We shouldn't be in the habit of punishing someone because they MIGHT do something wrong. We should wait until they actually do something wrong and THEN punish them.
Sure, that makes more work for the police since they have to catch you doing something that hurts another person, but that's their fucking job.
It's like convicting someone of murder becuase they have a gun in their house, without needing to establish that it was their gun that was actually used, or that they fired it, or that a specfic person was actually murdered.
So far the majority of comments seem to be negative and describe the unit as junk, but despite my having no interest in owning any gameboy unit, this combo inrigues me
People aren't really saying that it's junk, as much as that it's pointless.
A handheld GPS unit goes for $90. This thing goes for $200. Even if you want a color screen, etc, etc you can get that for about the same price AND you don't need a gameboy.
If this thing was $50 it would be cool, but for $200, it's just not worth it. It's like building an attachment that will turn your GBA into an electric drill for ONLY the cost of two electric drills.
It's neat for the hack value, but I wouldn't run out and buy stock.
Just because the code is not secure, does that give another person a right to cause harm? It is like saying that if I leave my back door unlocked at night, I am to blame if someone breaks in. I say that is bullshit. I say I have a gun, and if someone breaks in, they are getting shot. And that is how this guy should be treated, as a criminal thug.
I don't have a problem with locking up those who distribute worms and viruses, but I do have a problem with locking up someone just because you can show that they wrote it. It's more like locking up someone just for *OWNING* lockpicks. What should be illegal is using the lockpicks to break into someone's house, not owning them in the first place. Many of the early DOS/Windows viruses contain examples of extremely clever programming with all sorts of alternate applications: crypto programs, AV programs, copyprotection/anti-reverse engineering schemes, etc.
Maybe if it was not for the virus writers, the cost of Windows would be cheaper. Maybe beacuse of the virus writers Microsoft has to spend more money?
No, this is kind of a basic econ 101 thing. When a company has a monopoly, they start charging the "monopoly price" and opposed to the fair market price. While the fair market price is tied to supply and demand, cost of production, etc, the monopoly price is dictated strictly by DEMAND. The monopolist looks at the demand curve for their product and choose the point the maximizes their revenue. Since the windows is a software product as opposed to a car, there is little incremental cost between producing 100,000 copies as opposed to 50,000. These means that the production cost aspect of the monopoly price is pretty much fixed, and the price is dictated almost entirely by demand.
It's so good to hear someone who protested the war finally not make an ass of themself.
It seems so many of those against the war were unrealistic idiots who thought we could just have some sort of "group hug to save iraq." They protested the concept of fighting itself rather than the disturbing politics involved.
What I would have loved to hear was "We're not protesting the removal of Saddam, we're protesting the Bush administration's financial conflict of interest in the matter."
The longer this war lasts, the more money Halliburton and Cheney make. Unfortunately, I think the war was handed to them because idiots did things that made it very hard to take them seriously, like not admitting that the removal of Saddam was necessary, at least from a human rights standpoint. The things to complain about should have been the financial conflict of interest, the war being about WMDs instead of human rights, lack of a clear exit strategy, etc. I'd like to say lack of UN involvement as well, but I think the Saddam has proven the UN to be absolutely dickless.
I think that the US should be ashamed of the leadership and goals of this war, and the rest of the world should be ashamed that they didn't do anything sooner. The US was ready to go back into Iraq years ago, but Kofi Anan said "Wait Saddam will negotiate with me!" and allowed Saddam to jerk him around. The UN made it clear that they were going to do nothing to solve the problem,
Given the context is the written word, and that documents will (hopefully) persist beyond one week - the reader probably won't know that the document was written in 2004 unless the document says so.
I was explaining why the year is LAST in the date format, not why you never use it at all.
Ngggg! Why can't people use ISO date format? That is the silly month/day/year format.
Because our date format was designed for humans, not computers.
Seriously, people know what year it is, so saying "Two-thousand four, May fifth" is a big fat waste of time. By the time you're done telling what year it is, a normal, non-ISO date using person would havegiven me all the info I needed to know.
If I ask you, "What's the date?" and you start in telling me what year it is, I'm going to think "Asshole! I know what year it is, get to the useful info."
What's wrong with software conforming to humans rather than humans conforming to software?
I did not.
My bad. Though you were the other guy, sorry.
This is not going to be a discussion about semantics, is it? If I can push the probability below mere guessing, many people would call it "secure". Not in a mathematical sense, of course.
See, but I am talking in a mathematical sense. QC is neat, but I too often hear: "Unlike conventional crypto, QC in unbreakable/provably secure/etc."
The reality is, there a trade off between probability of undetected intercept, probability of false alarm, and message size. If the message is say, normal english prose, I don't need to get 100% of it to figure out what you're saying. As I understand it, you counter this problem by using privacy amplification.
So what? If you intercept one photon you cannot derive the message. If you grab enough photons to derive the message you are detected. QC is not unsafe just because "statistics" is involved. You can push the probability for undetected eavesdropping to a point where it doesn't matter anymore.
I never said QC was "unsafe", my point is that it's not "prefectly secure". See if I can get even a single bit and get away with it, technically, I'm eavesdropping without detection (which you said was impossible).
In the end the claims one has to make about QC's security sound remarkably similar to those you hear regarding normal crypto. Like this one:
I can guess any message with a probability of 2^-bitlength. If the probability of eavesdropping is lower, it's just a moot point.
You end up relying of the knowedge that the probability of an undetected interception of a significant amount of information is very low , as opposed to of the probablility of someone guessing your RSA key which is also very low.
Anyways, it's seems like you actually read the post you replied to and realized that it's not the "total nonsense" you claimed it was. The are legitimate issues that make QC NOT PERFECT, as much as people would like to claim that it is.
check this: laser can be used as source of entangled photons
That's neat, but it talks about using lasers as a source for pairs or photons and it gives no mention of the controllability of the transmission.
Such hardware exist for decades ago and called laser. Laser emits photons in the same quantum state, that in some sence "single" photon.
No, a laser emits a beam of coherent light. It does NOT allow you to transmit one and ONLY one photon with 100% reliability.
If you have a piece of hardware that solves this problem I imagine a lot of physicists would like to talk to you.
This is total nonsense. Are you a cryptographer afraid to loose your job, with no physical background? Then please read the article before you respond.
Please read my post and understand the topic before responding. It wouldn't seem like nonsense to you if you did.
I agree that the text and title posted to Slashdot is kind of misleading. All this QC does is making a channel on which eavesdropping impossible, without detection. Point. And it is.
No it's not. That's what I was explaining.
In order to be perfectly secure, you would need to be able to transmit one and only one photon, every time. This does not happen. Because this does not happen, you can't say "uh-oh I didn't get my photon, someone's listening". You cannot detect an eavsedropper until he causes a statistically significant change in the way you're receiving photons.
This has actually nothing to do with crypto (you can breathe again, your salary is safe)
I know that, I was making a frickin analogy. While schemes like RSA rely on the difficulty of factoring a product of large primes, QC relies on statistics and privacy amplification. You try to make is so that in oder to receive a significant portion of the message, the person would noticably affect the statistics and therefore be detected.
but the transmission cannot be listened to undetected.
Yes it can. If I receive a single photon from the transmission line and then stop listening, you aren't going to be able to tell if the transmitter actually emitted that photon or not. The only way go can tell I'm grabbing your photons is if I start grabbing enough of them so that I start messing up the statistics.
You should get a better understanding of this subject before flaming people.
If that were not enough, those students who are actually prone to creative and/or intelligent thought are often stifled by a system that looks more like the Special Olympics with the every student is equal approach that prevents them from advancing at the proper pace.
That is absolutely dead on.
In highschool, got perfect scores on every state math test.
Only in retrospect do I realize that this means I should have been taking more advanced classes.
But there was no option to. I was already in "honors" math, but I was still not being challenged. Sure it sounds impressive to have a 95+% average in a course, but really I should have been doing something harder.
The way the school system is set up, there was no way for me to work at a faster pace and reach more advanced topics.
And I took some normal "regents" levels course in other topics. These were miserable. They seemed full of students who didn't care and were determined to ruin it for everyone else. The teachers *WANTED* to teach us well, but they couldn't because they were too busy dealing with jerkoffs.
I think the real soultion is a major change in the way we organize and manage our schools. Doubling my school's budget or privitizing it wouldn't solve either problem. Right now private schools are typically good places to be because if you're at a private school, it means the parents (typically) care so you're less likely to have a class full of jerkoffs. Start handing out vouchers, and watch how fast that changes.
I don't believe it's where the funding goes that's the big problem.
I agree with this as well. Most schools could use a little bit more money, but if you were to double the school system's budget, you wouldn't solve half their problems.
There is also an increase in laziness in the US. Kids today don't want to work hard for anything. Just take the easy road. I know because they are my friends. They think I am nuts for reading and working hard at things.
No, there have always been lazy people. The problem is that, these days, we let the people who don't give a crap about their education mess it up for everyone else. You said it yourself: The kids who actually do well get teased. It's not that they're lazy, they just don't want to get beat up. Combine that with all the PC nonsense about how "honors classes make the other kids feel bad" and everyone is learning to the lowest common denominator. The problem isn't the money or the kids, it's the organization and management of our school system.
Example: in college engineering 4 of the top 5 students were foreign. Either Arabic or Asian.
Yeesh. What a terrbile example:
Have you ever considered, that this is representitive of the world's population in general?
As someone who just graduated from a top engineering school, I can tell you that the asians weren't any smarter than us white guys.
Blah, blah, blah. Haven't we gotten tired of these trolls? In the context of the transmission itself, it is, actually, totally secure. It's obvious to anyone without an icepick in their frontal lobe that there are other potential weaknesses. However, in this important respect, QC is provably secure in a way that classical crypto cannot be.
Actually, quantum crypto is not "provably secure" anymore than standard cryptography.
QC relies on the ability to emit photons, and to known probability distribution of those photon emissions. The problem is, there is no hardware out there than can emit one and only one photon 100% of the time. I wouldn't be suprised if it turns out to be totally impossible to build hardware that does. (Like building hardware to perfectly measure a particle's position and speed is impossible.)
This means that an "undetectable" attack is totally possible. What needs to be done is the use of statistical methods and "privacy amplification" to make the probability of a significant undetected attack as low as possible. (Sort of like trying to make your keyspace really big with normal crypto.)
Except that the WRX is a flat-4 which makes it much more shallow, that could help in getting it out of the way of the water, or more room to fold up the wheels. Not to mention being lighter than the LS motors.
Can you provide a link on that? (not the flat 4, the wieght) My understanding is that the LS1 is a VERY light engine for its displacement , and the comparison should really be between an LS1 and a subaru flat 4 WITH turbo and intercooler.
You might be right, or you might be wrong, but I bet it's a lot closer than you thought.