I don't know if something like this is possible, but if I had the source code I'd try these a) Modify it so that sends private/public keys, passwords and other such info to my site somewhere on the net b) Add a backdoor or two
When timing is right, I'd upload it to a bunch of 2nd hand Cisco switches and resell them at slight loss on eBay. Or perhaps work with a disgruntled employee of some networking h/w reseller to get my switch installed at some attractive site such as bank.
There's no reason to keep bicycles on the streets - they're too cheap and "useless". Imagine how many people car manufacturers employ and how much money the industry makes for the government (sales tax, upstream/downstream industries, etc.).
You're safe for now because I believe most people can't figure out what it is that you're saying.
>Programming is the act of automating complexity... creating further automations of complexity...
You've been fairly successful in encoding the ultimate compexity in your posting, therefore you're King of Complexity and Hero of Open Source! Check your code for looping bugs, though!
It's not entirely useless since the use of stolen passports would indeed become virtually impossible, on which you didn't comment, so you shouldn't call the whole thing "useless".
As for "known terrorists" - I'm sure it means known to the government, not to the terrorists themselves, which is a big difference.
A fresh terrorist on his first trip to the US may not consider himself/herself a known terrorist, but the government may have him listed as known terrorist due to the fact that s/he was identified as such by intelligence sources or otherwise.
>We're effectively saying "We're willing to risk breaking the law...
You made a typo - you're not risking breaking the law, you ARE breaking the law.
Well I say you're effectively saying "I don't give a damn about property rights as long as I can steal anonymously".
>until you wake up and provide a product that is reasonable."
That's just, like, your opinion, Dude.
The problem is that there will always be thugs who will find any price but free unreasonable.
For example, you've got Apple's downloads at $0.99/song and Wall Mart's even cheaper (80c or something). And even though these have been available for a while now, you're still bitching about unreasonable prices, which I find anything but insightful and which makes me suspect nothing short of free will make you happy.
And like someone mentioned in other postings, the fact that artists don't make money (or make much less money) lowers quantity and quality of film and music publishing. Perhaps it's different with software but I simply cannot believe Madonna would be able to create the same set of records if she had to work part-time at McDonalds and use her free time to do music. Or like having a local Linux User Group get together over the weekend to shoot Matrix.
The whole thing with music and movie "sharing" devastated music publishing in some countries. Yes, I've seen the news that claim the contrary and I don't believe them because I've checked music sales figures for some European and Asian markets and they've declined a lot.
I don't even want to say that downloading music is bad - it's currently illegal, that's true. But at least, for Christ's sake, stop justifying what you do by pulling lame pro-freedom/anti-corporate explanations for what you do - even if prices were "unreasonable", this still wouldn't mean people should engage in illegal downloading).
I think income tax is too high, but I still pay it while at the same time I act thru a political organization to bring about change to the injust tax system.
Re:And I hate to point this out...
on
Metal Velcro
·
· Score: 1
>That's all this is, is using an electron-beam welder to slide a little metal around, instead of a finger to move a little clay around.
Exactly, that's all there is to it, which means there's nothing to prevent others from using some other sculpting technology, such as finger movement, to create the same effect. Or, if they want to save development time and money, they can use the same technology but compensate the inventor via patent royalties.
>My university pays quite a lot for transatlantic bandwidth
Really? I thought most universities don't pay such charges. For example the place where I'm from has country-wide academic network that's connected to major ISPs via peering agreements so it doesn't have to pay any traffic charges.
Why? Who cares - it's just another FTP or whatever site.
>That's going to have quite a knock-on effect to all of the software hosted there, particularly a lot of the free stuff
Actually this is a good example of "free" - someone was actually paying for this so it actually wasn't free, it was more like a social service. Still, like I said above, who cares - the very fact that the whole thing is a _mirror_ means the files hosted there exist somewhere else on the Net. And that being (largely?) free software, I'm sure the "customers" will adjust their downloading habits accordingly. It's not like they've got a right to complain about anything.
Why would anyone feel upset about this - someone was shelling out a few bucks for this thing and now they can't/don't want any more - that happens to thousands of people/projects every day. No big deal.
>This is the same as computer security. It's worse than that. Instead of users with system accounts, democratic countries have this: # useradd -g root terrorist And permissions are lax; maybe not everyone can execute malicious shell script, but they can read all scripts used by the sys admin.
>It's a real-life game of chess.
On the country level, it's chess, but for people/victims it's jackpot - if it hits you, you're going out forever.
It's hard to restrict flow of information when on the one side people enjoy certain freedoms and on the other the media and others are constantly looking for bad publicity and bad news. One of most effective ways to prevent possible terrorist attacks is involvement and alertness by ordinary citizens.
I read an article somewhere how Toyota figured that using both fuel and electricity for acceleration is excellent for sports cars.
I think the article mentioned how there will be a Lexus sports car that will use this technology for insanely fast acceleration.
Also the article mentioned that using per-wheel electric motors makes 4WD much more efficient because of low friction compared to fuel-powered 4WD, or something like that...
>If you're going to do it, do it right. Using GIFs is half-assed.
Uhm.. No, use GIF. Using PNGs is stupid unless twhen done for no good reason.
Focus on what matters, such as: o Web site accessibility (use image type supported by all major browsers) o Bandwidth conservation (use GIFs 'cause they're very small but still of good-enough quality, just as the original poster said)
>The larger the company the more time they generally spend {wasting money, wasting time, shuffling deckchairs, etc} by changing direction
Oftentimes it's not even "changing direction", it's just fscking around thinking they're very busy while nothing's being improved...
The whole idea of Fedora is somehow hard to understand (its neccessity) - what IS it - a community project or Red Hat project or neither (both). I am fairly dilligent in submitting bug reports for OSS apps and OS that I use, but because of this ambiguity, I am not so enthusiastic about donating work to Fedora (I've never been to the Web site...)
Yeah, like millions of users of pirated Win XP are reading Slashdot, spinning Red Hat Linux CD-ROM #1 on their left index finger and impatently waiting to get in action! Hilarious!
If they cared they would have switched before. Also most of them have their WinXP up to date 'cause anyone with half brain has downloaded a keygen that makes illegal copies work with Windows Updates.
>The basic solution I can see for this is that the OS should not allow any network connections (except to microsoft.com) to download any necessary security updates.
Well you could do that on your own - disconnect your network connection until you've installed OS, configured firewall in network connections, closed unneccessary services and setup MS IE security to highest level. Then connect network connection and go straight to windowsupdate.microsoft.com until you're up to date...
Then start services you may need and relax a bit MS IE security settings (or install Firebird for browsing filthy sites and use MS IE for trustworthy sites)....
There are several how-to's and a book on surviving "the first 15 minutes" on the Net...
Not everyone is like you. As a matter of fact, probably some 90% of people are unlike you and they prefer to use Excel. Personally I always uncheck gnumeric RPM during installation because I find it extremely annoying. I have Oo installed on both my Windows laptop and Linux desktop ("just in case, 'cause it's free") but I haven't used it more than twice this year.
>Plus is has so many functions
Who cares? I get Excel files from my customers and they expect to get Excel files back. For most businesses the cost of using Excel (and Windows OS) is miniscule compared to hassle of fscking with a different program and slight formatting incompatibilities. As long as things remain that way, businesses will stick with MS Office.
>I've always been annoyed by the fact that SuSE has never made regular full-install ISOs available.
A (stereo)typical injusted Slashdot revolutionary...
I don't get it how this can be modded as interesting. We hear it every day - Windows security updates should be distributed for free, SuSE should give away ISOs, blah blah blah.
Get a life, download a copy of Debian and shut up.
>Patents should only be given when I can drop the product on my foot.
The reason being....? In any case, that's a ridiculous assumption.
Firstly, division based on whether the object is tangible or not is arbitrary. (How about allowing patents only if they're invented by married people?).
Secondly, many innovations can be implemented in either software or hardware (is ASIC chip hardware or software?). Just think of a NAS appliances - you can patent a NAS appliance, or you can patent a line of code that does opportunistic locking. Ban on software patents would just create more environmentally damaging waste and increase energy/oil consumption.
>Firstly, Slashdot has never pretended to be a balanced reporting site: it's a news aggregating site and pretty obviously an OSS advocacy site.
I agree with you. I just think balanced advocacy is more effective than unbalanced (propaganda).
>Secondly, if you want to run a server OS but not pay for updates, you can run Debian instead of RHEL. There's choice with Linux. With Windows, you only have MS.
Or with MS you only have Windows:-) I agree and that's my point - people don't really _have to_ use illegal copy of either Windows or Red Hat Enterprise Linux, there's Debian and Gentoo and Mac and Solaris... The same applies to both OS - people who don't like it the way it is can buy something else.
Every month I run into customers who ask for a copy of RH EL 3 while spending tens of thousands of dollars on SAN storage, backup software and such. It's really hard to believe they can't afford to buy it. I don't encounter many Windows users but I'm sure the situation is pretty much the same.
(On my server I use Debian Linux, although I a friend made me a copy of RH EL 3, I chose not to use it because not having access to RHN makes much less useful.)
In the past 12 months I've never got close to having my Windows system infected (didn't open weird email attachments and I get few MS Office documents which get scanned before being open anyway) but I've been having constant problems with spyware.
I have Search and Destroy, AdAware and usually a commercial spyware program on a 30 day trial. I set S & D to protect my system files and control programs that start automatically and I run a system scan using each of the three packages at least once a week.
Goddamn spyware scum. I wish it was possible to attack, not only to defend myself.
Yeah infected computers hurt others but most themselves. I don't give a damn if my neighbor's Windows XP is falling apart because a) He either doesn't give a damn about security and hasn't updated OR uses an illegal copy which can't be updated b) My own systems are well protected (or perhaps run Linux, etc.).
Microsoft has no obligation whatsoever to provide any freebies to folks with illegally copied (the P word - "pirated" - seems to be politically incorrect here at Slashdot) versions of Windows. People are not _supposed_ to use such software anyway - Linux and Mac have been viable long before 2001 (Windows XP), I don't see how anyone could have been "locked" into using an illegal copy of Windows XP.
I propose that Slashdotters who care buy Windows licenses for the underprivileged, the stingy, or the lazy (lazy to learn Linux). Or provide them with free migration (Win->Lin) service.
(Speaking of updates - if Windows updates should be free, why aren't Red Hat Enterprise Linux security updates free? That's even more critical because it's mostly servers than run this OS. So much for balanced reporting on Slashdot).
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know if something like this is possible, but if I had the source code I'd try these
a) Modify it so that sends private/public keys, passwords and other such info to my site somewhere on the net
b) Add a backdoor or two
When timing is right, I'd upload it to a bunch of 2nd hand Cisco switches and resell them at slight loss on eBay.
Or perhaps work with a disgruntled employee of some networking h/w reseller to get my switch installed at some attractive site such as bank.
There's no reason to keep bicycles on the streets - they're too cheap and "useless".
Imagine how many people car manufacturers employ and how much money the industry makes for the government (sales tax, upstream/downstream industries, etc.).
>Title: Germany to Vote Against Software Patents in the EU ..Germany has decided to vote against all changes....
>Text:
Which one is it - against patents or against changes?
You're safe for now because I believe most people can't figure out what it is that you're saying.
... creating further automations of complexity...
>Programming is the act of automating complexity
You've been fairly successful in encoding the ultimate compexity in your posting, therefore you're King of Complexity and Hero of Open Source!
Check your code for looping bugs, though!
It's not entirely useless since the use of stolen passports would indeed become virtually impossible, on which you didn't comment, so you shouldn't call the whole thing "useless".
As for "known terrorists" - I'm sure it means known to the government, not to the terrorists themselves, which is a big difference.
A fresh terrorist on his first trip to the US may not consider himself/herself a known terrorist, but the government may have him listed as known terrorist due to the fact that s/he was identified as such by intelligence sources or otherwise.
>We're effectively saying "We're willing to risk breaking the law ...
You made a typo - you're not risking breaking the law, you ARE breaking the law.
Well I say you're effectively saying "I don't give a damn about property rights as long as I can steal anonymously".
>until you wake up and provide a product that is reasonable."
That's just, like, your opinion, Dude.
The problem is that there will always be thugs who will find any price but free unreasonable.
For example, you've got Apple's downloads at $0.99/song and Wall Mart's even cheaper (80c or something). And even though these have been available for a while now, you're still bitching about unreasonable prices, which I find anything but insightful and which makes me suspect nothing short of free will make you happy.
And like someone mentioned in other postings, the fact that artists don't make money (or make much less money) lowers quantity and quality of film and music publishing.
Perhaps it's different with software but I simply cannot believe Madonna would be able to create the same set of records if she had to work part-time at McDonalds and use her free time to do music. Or like having a local Linux User Group get together over the weekend to shoot Matrix.
The whole thing with music and movie "sharing" devastated music publishing in some countries. Yes, I've seen the news that claim the contrary and I don't believe them because I've checked music sales figures for some European and Asian markets and they've declined a lot.
I don't even want to say that downloading music is bad - it's currently illegal, that's true. But at least, for Christ's sake, stop justifying what you do by pulling lame pro-freedom/anti-corporate explanations for what you do - even if prices were "unreasonable", this still wouldn't mean people should engage in illegal downloading).
I think income tax is too high, but I still pay it while at the same time I act thru a political organization to bring about change to the injust tax system.
>That's all this is, is using an electron-beam welder to slide a little metal around, instead of a finger to move a little clay around.
Exactly, that's all there is to it, which means there's nothing to prevent others from using some other sculpting technology, such as finger movement, to create the same effect.
Or, if they want to save development time and money, they can use the same technology but compensate the inventor via patent royalties.
Seems quite reasonable to me.
>whether or not this actually makes it into production
The article said couple of years.
>My university pays quite a lot for transatlantic bandwidth
Really? I thought most universities don't pay such charges. For example the place where I'm from has country-wide academic network that's connected to major ISPs via peering agreements so it doesn't have to pay any traffic charges.
>See, that's just irritating.
Why? Who cares - it's just another FTP or whatever site.
>That's going to have quite a knock-on effect to all of the software hosted there, particularly a lot of the free stuff
Actually this is a good example of "free" - someone was actually paying for this so it actually wasn't free, it was more like a social service.
Still, like I said above, who cares - the very fact that the whole thing is a _mirror_ means the files hosted there exist somewhere else on the Net.
And that being (largely?) free software, I'm sure the "customers" will adjust their downloading habits accordingly. It's not like they've got a right to complain about anything.
Why would anyone feel upset about this - someone was shelling out a few bucks for this thing and now they can't/don't want any more - that happens to thousands of people/projects every day. No big deal.
You're right about that.
I was referring to watter supplies, hospitals and most public infrastructure.
>This is the same as computer security.
It's worse than that. Instead of users with system accounts, democratic countries have this:
# useradd -g root terrorist
And permissions are lax; maybe not everyone can execute malicious shell script, but they can read all scripts used by the sys admin.
>It's a real-life game of chess.
On the country level, it's chess, but for people/victims it's jackpot - if it hits you, you're going out forever.
It's hard to restrict flow of information when on the one side people enjoy certain freedoms and on the other the media and others are constantly looking for bad publicity and bad news.
One of most effective ways to prevent possible terrorist attacks is involvement and alertness by ordinary citizens.
I read an article somewhere how Toyota figured that using both fuel and electricity for acceleration is excellent for sports cars.
I think the article mentioned how there will be a Lexus sports car that will use this technology for insanely fast acceleration.
Also the article mentioned that using per-wheel electric motors makes 4WD much more efficient because of low friction compared to fuel-powered 4WD, or something like that...
>>Use gif for images such as this.
>No, use PNG.
>If you're going to do it, do it right. Using GIFs is half-assed.
Uhm.. No, use GIF. Using PNGs is stupid unless twhen done for no good reason.
Focus on what matters, such as:
o Web site accessibility (use image type supported by all major browsers)
o Bandwidth conservation (use GIFs 'cause they're very small but still of good-enough quality, just as the original poster said)
>Free billion bytes of storage. What more do you need to know?
The cost of billion bytes of storage is next to nothing. So, as the grandparent post said, why bother?
>The larger the company the more time they generally spend {wasting money, wasting time, shuffling deckchairs, etc} by changing direction
Oftentimes it's not even "changing direction", it's just fscking around thinking they're very busy while nothing's being improved...
The whole idea of Fedora is somehow hard to understand (its neccessity) - what IS it - a community project or Red Hat project or neither (both).
I am fairly dilligent in submitting bug reports for OSS apps and OS that I use, but because of this ambiguity, I am not so enthusiastic about donating work to Fedora (I've never been to the Web site...)
Why are they supposed to care about people who steal their products?
Yeah, like millions of users of pirated Win XP are reading Slashdot, spinning Red Hat Linux CD-ROM #1 on their left index finger and impatently waiting to get in action!
Hilarious!
If they cared they would have switched before.
Also most of them have their WinXP up to date 'cause anyone with half brain has downloaded a keygen that makes illegal copies work with Windows Updates.
>The basic solution I can see for this is that the OS should not allow any network connections (except to microsoft.com) to download any necessary security updates.
Well you could do that on your own - disconnect your network connection until you've installed OS, configured firewall in network connections, closed unneccessary services and setup MS IE security to highest level. Then connect network connection and go straight to windowsupdate.microsoft.com until you're up to date...
Then start services you may need and relax a bit MS IE security settings (or install Firebird for browsing filthy sites and use MS IE for trustworthy sites)....
There are several how-to's and a book on surviving "the first 15 minutes" on the Net...
>I'm not sure I'd use a different spreadsheet.
Not everyone is like you. As a matter of fact, probably some 90% of people are unlike you and they prefer to use Excel.
Personally I always uncheck gnumeric RPM during installation because I find it extremely annoying. I have Oo installed on both my Windows laptop and Linux desktop ("just in case, 'cause it's free") but I haven't used it more than twice this year.
>Plus is has so many functions
Who cares?
I get Excel files from my customers and they expect to get Excel files back. For most businesses the cost of using Excel (and Windows OS) is miniscule compared to hassle of fscking with a different program and slight formatting incompatibilities. As long as things remain that way, businesses will stick with MS Office.
>I've always been annoyed by the fact that SuSE has never made regular full-install ISOs available.
A (stereo)typical injusted Slashdot revolutionary...
I don't get it how this can be modded as interesting. We hear it every day - Windows security updates should be distributed for free, SuSE should give away ISOs, blah blah blah.
Get a life, download a copy of Debian and shut up.
>Patents should only be given when I can drop the product on my foot.
....?
The reason being
In any case, that's a ridiculous assumption.
Firstly, division based on whether the object is tangible or not is arbitrary. (How about allowing patents only if they're invented by married people?).
Secondly, many innovations can be implemented in either software or hardware (is ASIC chip hardware or software?). Just think of a NAS appliances - you can patent a NAS appliance, or you can patent a line of code that does opportunistic locking. Ban on software patents would just create more environmentally damaging waste and increase energy/oil consumption.
>Firstly, Slashdot has never pretended to be a balanced reporting site: it's a news aggregating site and pretty obviously an OSS advocacy site.
:-)
I agree with you. I just think balanced advocacy is more effective than unbalanced (propaganda).
>Secondly, if you want to run a server OS but not pay for updates, you can run Debian instead of RHEL. There's choice with Linux. With Windows, you only have MS.
Or with MS you only have Windows
I agree and that's my point - people don't really _have to_ use illegal copy of either Windows or Red Hat Enterprise Linux, there's Debian and Gentoo and Mac and Solaris...
The same applies to both OS - people who don't like it the way it is can buy something else.
Every month I run into customers who ask for a copy of RH EL 3 while spending tens of thousands of dollars on SAN storage, backup software and such. It's really hard to believe they can't afford to buy it. I don't encounter many Windows users but I'm sure the situation is pretty much the same.
(On my server I use Debian Linux, although I a friend made me a copy of RH EL 3, I chose not to use it because not having access to RHN makes much less useful.)
Yeah, I also thought about that many times.
In the past 12 months I've never got close to having my Windows system infected (didn't open weird email attachments and I get few MS Office documents which get scanned before being open anyway) but I've been having constant problems with spyware.
I have Search and Destroy, AdAware and usually a commercial spyware program on a 30 day trial. I set S & D to protect my system files and control programs that start automatically and I run a system scan using each of the three packages at least once a week.
Goddamn spyware scum. I wish it was possible to attack, not only to defend myself.
Yeah infected computers hurt others but most themselves. I don't give a damn if my neighbor's Windows XP is falling apart because
a) He either doesn't give a damn about security and hasn't updated OR uses an illegal copy which can't be updated
b) My own systems are well protected (or perhaps run Linux, etc.).
Microsoft has no obligation whatsoever to provide any freebies to folks with illegally copied (the P word - "pirated" - seems to be politically incorrect here at Slashdot) versions of Windows. People are not _supposed_ to use such software anyway - Linux and Mac have been viable long before 2001 (Windows XP), I don't see how anyone could have been "locked" into using an illegal copy of Windows XP.
I propose that Slashdotters who care buy Windows licenses for the underprivileged, the stingy, or the lazy (lazy to learn Linux). Or provide them with free migration (Win->Lin) service.
(Speaking of updates - if Windows updates should be free, why aren't Red Hat Enterprise Linux security updates free? That's even more critical because it's mostly servers than run this OS. So much for balanced reporting on Slashdot).