Don't you just hate it when Insightful gets modded Funny?
I can picture it now. All these lusers whining about their toasted computers... 'But my buddy sent it to me! No, I know about viruses, so I asked if it was for real, and he said it wasn't a virus! It sounded just like him!'
How the hell is this going to be stopped? It's easy to beat the AOL Turing test, because these people use such a warped and simplified form of English that leaves out most of the quirks that give away the lack of any intelligence behind the text. Either we educate AOLusers - in English rather than in computer science - so that they use more complex language that machines can't readily mimic, or we shut down file transfers over IM.
I'm sure that the security minded folks on slashdot will be the first to
support a legal requirement for DRM in all OS'es, so that we can solve this
problem before it becomes really serious.
* applauds *
Bravo! It's been far too long since I've seen a really good troll on/. - too many people think it's sufficient to copy and paste classic trolls of the past, or don't understand trolling and just post obscenities and flamebait, so it's wonderful to see a new, proper troll from time to time.
Good trolling is, to my mind, a legitimate artform closely related to the best forms of satire, and should aim to receive torrents of outraged replies from people who've completely missed the joke. The best of them that I've seen here ended up with both Troll and Funny mods being applied, leading to what may well be the highest accolade Slashdot can grant, the super-rare +5 Troll. Good luck, and may the Force be with you:)
Imagine a version of Windows with no notepad, wordpad, IE, Windows Explorer, Windows Media Player, screensaver, network browser, task manager, disk defragmenter, TCP stack, Instant Messenger, backup tool, cd player, email client, remote desktop, scripting tool, command prompt or shell.
I'm liking it so far.
Imagine an OEM having to supply alternatives to all of these things. Buying the replacements from third parties, or including crippled versions of full products, or using opensource alternatives where they exist.
I usually get moderator points quite frequently - normally, it's when I've just done some metamoderating, a duty I confess I often ignore. However, I don't really use them for anything.
The problem with having modpoints is that, if a discussion is on a topic I know something about, or at least that I care about, then I'd far rather post replies than moderate. So I end up making use of my modpoints by going into discussions I neither know nor care about and shooting down First Posts, GNAAs, goatses and copy-paste trolls...
This may be why we've developed this stereotype of moderators as clueless. If they knew about the stuff being discussed, they'd be discussing, not moderating - so just like I always do, they've gone into a discussion they care little for and are doing the best they can there.
So, does that mean that listening on port 25 constitutes permission to send you spam?
Yes, but:
- it doesn't constitute a promise that the spam will be read by a human. It may very well be read only by spamassassin and forwarded to Dave Null.
- it doesn't constitute a promise that the spam will not also be forwarded to abuse@your.isp. You may well have prior agreements with them to the effect that you will not send spam.
Look at the great pyramids. They have been around for a while and they are in pretty decent condition...we are talking about a construction made of early forms of cement - which was made from straw and mud if I am not mistaken. Super-sky scrapers made of steel and glass - two substances which don't exactly decompose, will last for a while. A city like NY will become the Atlantis. Take places that are less likely to suffer from flooding (Philadelphia, Harrisburg, Chicago) - they will be here for a long time.
The Great Pyramids are some four thousand years old and are not what they were - mainly because people stole the marble mantle and the electrum capstone. They must have been truly amazing in their heyday. The Sphinx is somewhat older, perhaps as much as five or six thousand years.
However, the Pyramids have the advantage of being in the desert. There is little to bother them save the slow weathering of the wind. What threats face our great cities, even if they are away from flood or hurricane or earthquake hazards?
Rain. Slow erosion by rain. And the gradual work of ivy on the concrete, and of rust on the steel. Glass is fluid and will gradually flow down in its frame until a critical point is reached and it shatters.
If civilisation fell but mankind survived, then certainly there would be great relic cities for a long, long time; our surviving descendants might wonder at the mighty works of giants in the terrible lands of stone. If, however, we all were to die in our beds tonight, then by the time a new intelligent species arose to wonder about us there'd be little enough left for them to see.
Well, let's assume someone does find Voyager and explores the records of our civilisation that it carries. They decipher the symbols. The notation. The waveform encoded in a spiral groove on a disc of gold. You know what they'll find? The last song of all human culture to survive intact and playable in the universe?
Deep down Louisiana close to New Orleans, way back up in the woods among the evergreens, there stood a log cabin made of earth and wood where lived a country boy named Johnny B Goode, who never ever learned to read or write so well, but he could play a guitar just like ringing a bell...
Happy now? I think it's very comforting. We may be long extinct, our world evaporated, our sun shrunken and fading, but whatever unimaginable alien intelligence finds our capsules will at least know that, for a while, we were here and we rocked.
Getting the UK Office would require Apple to do a deal with the BBC. And wouldn't *that* be a great day.
Thinking again about this... probably not. The BBC are planning to roll their own online distribution system, and probably wouldn't want to get tied in to a single system like iTunes.
I wish they'd get on with it, though. I want to watch Hartnell-era Doctor Who eps online, dammit!
Second of all, the bug was *not* in Google Desktop, it *is* an IE bug, it just happens that people who use Google Desktop are vulnerable to it since it embeds IE.
Google, of all organisations, should know better than to trust IE for anything.
Would it be so hard for them to include a safer rendering engine? Gecko's good. KHTML's good. Both are free. Couldn't they have used those instead? Then if there were any bugs discovered, Google (having the source code) could fix 'em, rather than having to implement some workaround because Microsoft won't.
With my limited understanding of the GPL (IANAL), I believe that a vendor can charge what he/she wants for the binary version of the software, and is then obligated to provide the source (to that same person) at a nominal additional cost. The GPL only requires providing the source to those parties that receive the binaries.
Very well. The OP was developing an embedded system based on this Linux-derived kernel. He needed the source code. Montevista tried to charge him a great deal of money for a 'source licence'.
Now, as I see it he already has a 'source licence' called the GPL. Montevista are way, way out of order if the story is true. However, a bit of googlework reveals a lot of information about Montevista being all cool and froody and abiding by the GPL and even telling off SCO for being so silly, and no corroboration for the original claim. I suspect the OP ended up on the phone with some clueless idiot at customer service.
but if you read that book, there aren't any acrostics to generate "supposed mystical effects". More like "Smite down your neighbor with boils" or "Create tempests of snow" or whatever.
Um. Let me see, create tempests of snow by writing out acrostic squares? How is that not a supposed mystical effect? The only way I can imagine for it not to be a supposed mystical effect is if it is an actual mystical effect, and I don't see snow here.
NY city will be unburied and it will be easily preserved.
New York is on the coast. It'll only take a few tsunami to shift it, and over millions of years there'll be plenty of those.
Perhaps, 60 million years or so from now, one would find traces of the megacities if one looked carefully in the right place. I suspect our deep earthworks might be longer-lasting; I can't see much that's likely to shift the Channel Tunnel, for instance.
And if the next intelligent race arises when we're as long gone as the last dinosaurs, I'll tell them one place they can look where they'll surely find some of our relics. And a message. 'Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969. We came in peace for all mankind. Signed, Richard Nixon.'
That will last a while, but the meteorites will eventually powder it, and the dying Sun will consume Earth and Moon alike. Will anything of ours last longer still? Thus far, I can think of four candidates. Pioneer 10 and 11, and Voyager 1 and 2. Maybe they'll be found. Maybe someone will come across them and know we were once here, long after the Sun is a dying ember of degenerate carbon. But I doubt it. Space is a big place in which to look for a few tiny, silent, eons-dead robots.
An embedded project I'm on comes with a Montavista runtime license. When I asked for the kernel source, the hardware vendor said they were legally bound by MontaVista not to give out the kernel source and to talk to MV. When I asked MV for the source, the salesperson tried to tell me that required a special source license that I had to pay for.
Um. That sucks. If Montavista is a Linux distribution... someone here's breaking the law. Violating thousands of people's copyrights. They've sold you the binaries, but refuse to also provide the source code? Very, very bad behaviour. I presume you notified the FSF of this blatant GPL breach?
there is more than half a dozen mega-man games, for example
More than? I thought there were exactly half a dozen Megaman games on the NES... Apart from Megaman 1 - 6, what am I missing here? Seriously, if there's more NES Megaman available, IT MUST BE MINE!
... along with that chibi Quickman figure I saw at the local geek store at the weekend... aah, Megaman 2, the nostalgia, but damn was Quickman ever tough to beat. Needed Clashman's grenades, IIRC.
Further in France's defence, consider the first day of the Battle of the Somme. The British got themselves slaughtered. The French, OTOH, did a bloody good job. Had we been up to their military standards that day, there'd be a damn sight fewer names on memorials all over England, and the war might have ended a good deal sooner.
Or does that suggest that bootlegging, not illegal downloading, that is the piracy problem? Because, if people without internet are using pirated software, then they've bootlegged it from black markets/friends most likely.
This is Eastern Europe. Piracy is huge there, and yes, it's largely of the burned-disc variety. This is a problem, because if FYR Macedonia wants to do business seriously with the West - and most importantly with the EU, which is immensely rich and right on its doorstep - then it needs to sort that kind of thing out. And a small, poor, unstable, only recently independent and very vulnerable country like FYR Macedonia has got to do business seriously with the EU, else it's going nowhere.
So. They need to clean up this whole rampant-piracy problem. But the economy's gone all to hell because of all the trouble there's been in the region lately. Can't afford to send huge sums off to Redmond. Solution: Ubuntu.
Did tolkien's ghost roll over in his grave or something to make you people over-excited?
Tolkien's ghost has passed beyond the Circles of the World. All that's in his grave are some bones.
Such is the fate of Mortal Men; their fea are not naturally bound to the Earth like those of the Eldar. Exceptions have been observed only in strange and extreme cases usually involving corrupt magic, such as the Nazgul, the Barrow-wights and the Army of the Dead.
(after all, we couldn't have any of the Beatles' material get into the public domain, could we?)
Since much of the Beatles' catalogue now belongs to Michael Jackson, I wonder if McCartney might, if asked, now support the reduction in length of the copyright cover? He gets to spite Jackson, and simultaneously look really amazingly cool and froody...
I was at a lunch once with Michael Heseltine (centrist Conservative) where he likened many industry bodies to the Trade Unions and said that if Britain was to modernise they had to be defeated just as much as the miners and the print unions had to.
Heseltine, I fear, is among the last of a dying breed. He and Kenneth Clarke are all that remains of the Tories as they once were, the party of old Mr Heath. I wouldn't attach too much hope to him.
Many of the rest are hideous Little Thatchers. Authoritarian, xenophobic, possibly racist, shameless panderers to the Daily Mail. God help us. Fortunately, they're the ones who have failed dismally to bother Blair for the best part of a decade now.
You may be right in hoping for something from Cameron. From what I've read, he has a lot of support among younger Tories of a libertarian persuasion. These are the ones who are keen on things like flat tax rates and so forth. I'm not especially keen on that, but they are at least liberal capitalists, rather than scary authoritarians like Thatcher was. They may well be open to a line of reasoning about over-long copyrights and software patents being unfair government-backed monopolies, and be persuaded to liberalise the regulations in the name of the free market...
Japanese media is full of sex, violence and swearing and it isn't kept away from children, yet the violence rate there is far lower than the US or the UK where I live which suggests to me that there's something else wrong with our culture than media excess.
But then, Japanese culture isn't exactly ideal either. The suicide rate is incredible, nobody has any idea what to do about the whole hikikomori phenomenon, and, well... it's not just the media full of sex. There's something wrong there. Chikan on the Tokyo railways, underwear thieves (or underwear buyers, from vending machines of all things), roricon, and the alarming prevalence of schoolgirl prostitution.
Personally, I wonder if it's connected to the ungodly long hours of the typical salaryman. They have hardly any time for socialisation outside work or for the family... it's small wonder some of them go a bit funny.
And yet, according to the scientifically known rules of the universe stuff 'appears' out of nowhere in the form of the Big Bang.
Pardon me? Who told you that? You seem to have the impression that at some time t there is nothing, and that at some later time t + delta there is something, and that something has therefore appeared out of nothing, and that this is called the Big Bang.
That's not what I've read. As I understand it, at all times t there is the entire constant mass-energy of the Universe, at varying net density and temperature, approaching infinite density and temperature as t tends towards zero (expanding universe, y'see).
Speculation about t 90N, or of temperatures 273.24 C. Even if the geometry of spacetime is such that t 0 is mathematically meaningful, it's far from certain that such a domain is physically meaningful. All known laws of physics run into serious difficulties at very small t, as general relativity and quantum mechanics collide. Even if 'before the Big Bang' exists geometrically, I do not think it at all certain that it is linked causally to the universe we know: that assumes that causality as we know it still holds in that domain, and I don't think we can reasonably claim that in the absence of a working theory of quantum gravity.
I suspect that the outcome of this "review" will be my descendants owning this post long after I am dead.
Things might not actually go so badly.
Gordon Brown has been playing to the people a lot lately. Blair has said he will not be seeking a fourth term, and so will probably step down in a couple of years' time; Brown is the heir apparent, and has been plotting to become Prime Minister for a long time.
So, Brown's been doing popular things wherever possible. He was very big on the whole debt-cancellation move during the summer, for instance. He's trying to look as good as possible to voters. He's not likely to endorse law changes along the lines of 'hey, people I'd like to have vote for me at the next election: you're not allowed to copy CDs to your iPods!'
There's every chance that we might actually get some sane policy out of this. Of course, I'm not holding my breath...
Slashdot Mirror
Don't you just hate it when Insightful gets modded Funny?
I can picture it now. All these lusers whining about their toasted computers... 'But my buddy sent it to me! No, I know about viruses, so I asked if it was for real, and he said it wasn't a virus! It sounded just like him!'
How the hell is this going to be stopped? It's easy to beat the AOL Turing test, because these people use such a warped and simplified form of English that leaves out most of the quirks that give away the lack of any intelligence behind the text. Either we educate AOLusers - in English rather than in computer science - so that they use more complex language that machines can't readily mimic, or we shut down file transfers over IM.
* applauds *
Bravo! It's been far too long since I've seen a really good troll on /. - too many people think it's sufficient to copy and paste classic trolls of the past, or don't understand trolling and just post obscenities and flamebait, so it's wonderful to see a new, proper troll from time to time.
Good trolling is, to my mind, a legitimate artform closely related to the best forms of satire, and should aim to receive torrents of outraged replies from people who've completely missed the joke. The best of them that I've seen here ended up with both Troll and Funny mods being applied, leading to what may well be the highest accolade Slashdot can grant, the super-rare +5 Troll. Good luck, and may the Force be with you :)
I'm liking it so far. Imagine an OEM having to supply alternatives to all of these things. Buying the replacements from third parties, or including crippled versions of full products, or using opensource alternatives where they exist.
How about KDE / GNU / Windows?
I usually get moderator points quite frequently - normally, it's when I've just done some metamoderating, a duty I confess I often ignore. However, I don't really use them for anything.
The problem with having modpoints is that, if a discussion is on a topic I know something about, or at least that I care about, then I'd far rather post replies than moderate. So I end up making use of my modpoints by going into discussions I neither know nor care about and shooting down First Posts, GNAAs, goatses and copy-paste trolls...
This may be why we've developed this stereotype of moderators as clueless. If they knew about the stuff being discussed, they'd be discussing, not moderating - so just like I always do, they've gone into a discussion they care little for and are doing the best they can there.
Yes, but:
- it doesn't constitute a promise that the spam will be read by a human. It may very well be read only by spamassassin and forwarded to Dave Null. - it doesn't constitute a promise that the spam will not also be forwarded to abuse@your.isp. You may well have prior agreements with them to the effect that you will not send spam.
The Great Pyramids are some four thousand years old and are not what they were - mainly because people stole the marble mantle and the electrum capstone. They must have been truly amazing in their heyday. The Sphinx is somewhat older, perhaps as much as five or six thousand years.
However, the Pyramids have the advantage of being in the desert. There is little to bother them save the slow weathering of the wind. What threats face our great cities, even if they are away from flood or hurricane or earthquake hazards?
Rain. Slow erosion by rain. And the gradual work of ivy on the concrete, and of rust on the steel. Glass is fluid and will gradually flow down in its frame until a critical point is reached and it shatters.
If civilisation fell but mankind survived, then certainly there would be great relic cities for a long, long time; our surviving descendants might wonder at the mighty works of giants in the terrible lands of stone. If, however, we all were to die in our beds tonight, then by the time a new intelligent species arose to wonder about us there'd be little enough left for them to see.
Well, let's assume someone does find Voyager and explores the records of our civilisation that it carries. They decipher the symbols. The notation. The waveform encoded in a spiral groove on a disc of gold. You know what they'll find? The last song of all human culture to survive intact and playable in the universe?
Deep down Louisiana close to New Orleans, way back up in the woods among the evergreens, there stood a log cabin made of earth and wood where lived a country boy named Johnny B Goode, who never ever learned to read or write so well, but he could play a guitar just like ringing a bell...
Happy now? I think it's very comforting. We may be long extinct, our world evaporated, our sun shrunken and fading, but whatever unimaginable alien intelligence finds our capsules will at least know that, for a while, we were here and we rocked.
Thinking again about this... probably not. The BBC are planning to roll their own online distribution system, and probably wouldn't want to get tied in to a single system like iTunes.
I wish they'd get on with it, though. I want to watch Hartnell-era Doctor Who eps online, dammit!
WHICH Office?
This is an important issue here! One is a funny show, the other is the funniest show since Basil Fawlty...
Google, of all organisations, should know better than to trust IE for anything.
Would it be so hard for them to include a safer rendering engine? Gecko's good. KHTML's good. Both are free. Couldn't they have used those instead? Then if there were any bugs discovered, Google (having the source code) could fix 'em, rather than having to implement some workaround because Microsoft won't.
Very well. The OP was developing an embedded system based on this Linux-derived kernel. He needed the source code. Montevista tried to charge him a great deal of money for a 'source licence'.
Now, as I see it he already has a 'source licence' called the GPL. Montevista are way, way out of order if the story is true. However, a bit of googlework reveals a lot of information about Montevista being all cool and froody and abiding by the GPL and even telling off SCO for being so silly, and no corroboration for the original claim. I suspect the OP ended up on the phone with some clueless idiot at customer service.
Um. Let me see, create tempests of snow by writing out acrostic squares? How is that not a supposed mystical effect? The only way I can imagine for it not to be a supposed mystical effect is if it is an actual mystical effect, and I don't see snow here.
New York is on the coast. It'll only take a few tsunami to shift it, and over millions of years there'll be plenty of those.
Perhaps, 60 million years or so from now, one would find traces of the megacities if one looked carefully in the right place. I suspect our deep earthworks might be longer-lasting; I can't see much that's likely to shift the Channel Tunnel, for instance.
And if the next intelligent race arises when we're as long gone as the last dinosaurs, I'll tell them one place they can look where they'll surely find some of our relics. And a message. 'Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969. We came in peace for all mankind. Signed, Richard Nixon.'
That will last a while, but the meteorites will eventually powder it, and the dying Sun will consume Earth and Moon alike. Will anything of ours last longer still? Thus far, I can think of four candidates. Pioneer 10 and 11, and Voyager 1 and 2. Maybe they'll be found. Maybe someone will come across them and know we were once here, long after the Sun is a dying ember of degenerate carbon. But I doubt it. Space is a big place in which to look for a few tiny, silent, eons-dead robots.
Um. That sucks. If Montavista is a Linux distribution... someone here's breaking the law. Violating thousands of people's copyrights. They've sold you the binaries, but refuse to also provide the source code? Very, very bad behaviour. I presume you notified the FSF of this blatant GPL breach?
More than? I thought there were exactly half a dozen Megaman games on the NES... Apart from Megaman 1 - 6, what am I missing here? Seriously, if there's more NES Megaman available, IT MUST BE MINE!
... along with that chibi Quickman figure I saw at the local geek store at the weekend... aah, Megaman 2, the nostalgia, but damn was Quickman ever tough to beat. Needed Clashman's grenades, IIRC.
Further in France's defence, consider the first day of the Battle of the Somme. The British got themselves slaughtered. The French, OTOH, did a bloody good job. Had we been up to their military standards that day, there'd be a damn sight fewer names on memorials all over England, and the war might have ended a good deal sooner.
Toto, I think we're in Kansas...
Quite possibly true.
It all puts me in mind of the famous Gorilla Interview... "Wild? I was absolutely livid!"
This is Eastern Europe. Piracy is huge there, and yes, it's largely of the burned-disc variety. This is a problem, because if FYR Macedonia wants to do business seriously with the West - and most importantly with the EU, which is immensely rich and right on its doorstep - then it needs to sort that kind of thing out. And a small, poor, unstable, only recently independent and very vulnerable country like FYR Macedonia has got to do business seriously with the EU, else it's going nowhere.
So. They need to clean up this whole rampant-piracy problem. But the economy's gone all to hell because of all the trouble there's been in the region lately. Can't afford to send huge sums off to Redmond. Solution: Ubuntu.
Tolkien's ghost has passed beyond the Circles of the World. All that's in his grave are some bones.
Such is the fate of Mortal Men; their fea are not naturally bound to the Earth like those of the Eldar. Exceptions have been observed only in strange and extreme cases usually involving corrupt magic, such as the Nazgul, the Barrow-wights and the Army of the Dead.
Since much of the Beatles' catalogue now belongs to Michael Jackson, I wonder if McCartney might, if asked, now support the reduction in length of the copyright cover? He gets to spite Jackson, and simultaneously look really amazingly cool and froody...
Heseltine, I fear, is among the last of a dying breed. He and Kenneth Clarke are all that remains of the Tories as they once were, the party of old Mr Heath. I wouldn't attach too much hope to him.
Many of the rest are hideous Little Thatchers. Authoritarian, xenophobic, possibly racist, shameless panderers to the Daily Mail. God help us. Fortunately, they're the ones who have failed dismally to bother Blair for the best part of a decade now.
You may be right in hoping for something from Cameron. From what I've read, he has a lot of support among younger Tories of a libertarian persuasion. These are the ones who are keen on things like flat tax rates and so forth. I'm not especially keen on that, but they are at least liberal capitalists, rather than scary authoritarians like Thatcher was. They may well be open to a line of reasoning about over-long copyrights and software patents being unfair government-backed monopolies, and be persuaded to liberalise the regulations in the name of the free market...
But then, Japanese culture isn't exactly ideal either. The suicide rate is incredible, nobody has any idea what to do about the whole hikikomori phenomenon, and, well... it's not just the media full of sex. There's something wrong there. Chikan on the Tokyo railways, underwear thieves (or underwear buyers, from vending machines of all things), roricon, and the alarming prevalence of schoolgirl prostitution.
Personally, I wonder if it's connected to the ungodly long hours of the typical salaryman. They have hardly any time for socialisation outside work or for the family... it's small wonder some of them go a bit funny.
Pardon me? Who told you that? You seem to have the impression that at some time t there is nothing, and that at some later time t + delta there is something, and that something has therefore appeared out of nothing, and that this is called the Big Bang.
That's not what I've read. As I understand it, at all times t there is the entire constant mass-energy of the Universe, at varying net density and temperature, approaching infinite density and temperature as t tends towards zero (expanding universe, y'see).
Speculation about t 90N, or of temperatures 273.24 C. Even if the geometry of spacetime is such that t 0 is mathematically meaningful, it's far from certain that such a domain is physically meaningful. All known laws of physics run into serious difficulties at very small t, as general relativity and quantum mechanics collide. Even if 'before the Big Bang' exists geometrically, I do not think it at all certain that it is linked causally to the universe we know: that assumes that causality as we know it still holds in that domain, and I don't think we can reasonably claim that in the absence of a working theory of quantum gravity.
Things might not actually go so badly.
Gordon Brown has been playing to the people a lot lately. Blair has said he will not be seeking a fourth term, and so will probably step down in a couple of years' time; Brown is the heir apparent, and has been plotting to become Prime Minister for a long time.
So, Brown's been doing popular things wherever possible. He was very big on the whole debt-cancellation move during the summer, for instance. He's trying to look as good as possible to voters. He's not likely to endorse law changes along the lines of 'hey, people I'd like to have vote for me at the next election: you're not allowed to copy CDs to your iPods!'
There's every chance that we might actually get some sane policy out of this. Of course, I'm not holding my breath...