Btut you can't say "games" or "Olympics", so that would be "sporting events formerly named after the traditional home of the Gods in the Eastern Mediterranean", right??
For the record, I think it's completely irresponsible for the press to publish such things, but hey! they're allowed and to hell with the federal budget and if the military has to occupy foreign nations for indeterminate amounts of time, that just sells more copy. It's all about ratings and sales...
Anybody who requires javascript for LINKS to work deserves a serious kicking
I'd second that. The worst pages I've seen have used javascript to poke values into form variables during the submit process. How stupid is it when the form has a field called txtUsernameView and a hidden field called txtUsername, and while submitting, it copies the visible field to the hidden field while left-padding with zeroes?? Like that couldn't possibly be handled on the server side... And other forms that have no action set, but make one up on the fly from hidden fields in the form. And instead of using Location headers, jumping to a new page using top.location=http://whatever.thefuck.com or window.href=http://ima.dickhead.programmer.com.
Biological viruses are generally harder to produce. With a software virus, if it goes wrong you just reload your system from CD. If it's not virulent enough, or doesn't work properly, you can mutate it easily. The first mistake with a biological virus could kill you and nobody else.
I think that first and foremost is fulfilling the need in the software world for a patent liability analysis/consulting industry.
No, that's just pandering to the lawyers. What's really needed is to convince the government that it should reform the patent system. It shouldn't be possible for anyone to be granted patents for some of the crap that the USPTO recently granted, and it should be easier for patents to be challenged and revoked.
Unfortunately, that would require a degree of maturity that big business simply doesn't have. As with everything else, the revamped system would be abused by those with deep pockets, to the detriment of those without. A company with a large cash reserve can simply ignore patents because they can afford to drag things out in court until the patent owner runs out of money. Look at the recent EU vs Microsoft case - OK, that wasn't about patents, but the same principle applies - Microsoft was told to pay big fines that amounted to little more than pocket change compared to their $40bn cash reserve.
Perhaps the easiest patent reform would be to disallow corporate ownership of patents. Let the actual inventor own the patents and provide a method to expedite settlement of patent infringement cases.
Publishing is the activity of putting information into the public arena. Traditionally, the term referred to distribution of printed works such as books and newspapers. With the advent of digital information systems and the Internet, the scope of publishing has expanded to include web sites, blogs, and other forms of new media.
I'd say that emacs has definitely been published. Of course, the government or a judge might not recognise that definition, but it gives us a starting point.
what would prevent them from launching an offensive against lesser competitors
Maybe the DOJ?? Congress?? The EU?? If someone, somewhere declares software patents invalid, Microsoft and every idiot company relying on such things to protect their bogus business models will start circling the drain.
I heard a story about that - probably an urban legend, but still interesting. Apparently this guy got hold of a Spitfire engine and mounted it in a car with beefed up suspension and chassis. It would do over 200mph. The police had a pretty good idea who it was, but they could never prove it because; a) they couldn't keep up with him; b) the reaction time the cameras meant they only ever got photos of empty road.
Certainly seem to be around here. The road near my house rises and falls over bumps and dips so that it's near impossible to see more than 1/2 mile ahead. It's dead straight, one lane in each direction, has stop signs every mile and it's posted as 50mph. A little distance south it crosses another road that is flat enough to be able to see a couple of miles ahead. It has two lanes each way, no stop signs, and it's posted as 45mph. The wider, better road doesn't even have more houses on it...
I seem to recall hearing about someone who got off a "failure to stop" ticket like that. This was probably in the UK, where the Highway Code has a chart on the back that shows safe stopping distances for certain speeds. The formula is something like, speed in mph multiplied by 1.5 equals stopping distance in feet. Anyway, the guy timed the lights as they changed and proved that *any* vehicle travelling at or near the posted speed limit could not possibly stop within the safe stopping distance.
Sure, you could slam on the brakes and probably stop anyway, but if the interval is too short you'll likely stop somewhere in the intersection, and there's a better than average chance you'll do so going sideways.
On all three occasions I called 911 while the attempted break-in was in progress
If there's no response, just call them back and tell them not to bother because you've just shot the burglar. Bet you a box of donuts there'll be cops screeching to a halt outside your house within five minutes...
I'll risk being flamed by saying Sun was doing this back in the 80's - booting off the net, that is. I set up some Sun 3/50 workstations (68030 cpu, 4Mb memory, no disks) to boot off a Sun 3/250 (rackmount) server. It wasn't truly "all in ram", because each client workstation had its own root and swap partitions on the server, with/usr and/home partitions shared via NFS. I even managed to compile X11R3 on one, though it took all weekend...
Heh, actually screwed up a job interview over that - the interviewer saw it on my resume and asked what I'd had to do to get X11 to work. I told him, nothing special, just unpacked it, compiled it and ran it. He'd tried the exact same thing and couldn't make it work at all...
In my case, it's most convenient to have the PC in the living room on a desk against the wall, which puts the user with their back to the room. Any other orientation screws up the whole room. Right now my daughter's using it to IM her friends. She actually has the font size cranked up so I can read it from about 10 feet away, not that it's worth reading. That was her choice, by the way.
I didn't make a big deal about it, just installed it that way, and so far as I know they've never cared one way or the other. The desktops in the school computer lab are all around the wall too, so as far as they're concerned, it's normal. None of my kids will get a PC in their own room until they're old enough to buy one for themselves, because that's a luxury we simply don't need. One's enough for playing games and getting homework done, and my daughter would *much* rather we saved up and bought her a horse...
That's how we're going to do it - my older daughter (now 22) bought her own laptop when she could afford it. My younger daughter (14) wants a laptop, but she won't be getting one anytime soon. We got her a cellphone last year, after a few months it went missing. Turned up in the washing machine. Amazingly, the thing still mostly works after going through a complete wash/spin cycle, just no backlight anymore and some of the keys need to be pressed hard to make them work. She lost the phone again shortly after school was out this year and we can't find it anywhere. I think if she'd had to pay for it, she would value it more, and look after it.
Besides which, it'll be at least 4 years before she goes to college, and anything we get now would be obsolete. We looked around a local college for our older son (24) a few years back - they had a spec sheet for the recommended laptop, which was available at a local store along with maintenance plans that would take care of most ways a laptop could be trashed by a student. They showed us the current spec but suggested waiting to buy one until just before he started because the spec would likely change.
You don't even really need a direct link end-to-end. Record a message, encrypt it, upload it somewhere. Your buddy downloads and decrypts it, plays it back, then records a reply, to upload somewhere different according to a one-time pad or note in the previous message. Skype and other VOIP stuff is not really necessary, just use commonly available encryption...
OK, so it would be less convenient than talking over a phone, and the messages could equally well be type in. One reason for uploading recordings would be if the receiver recognised the voice, maybe from a face-to-face meeting, thus being more sure that it was genuine.
Is that still true, now that the FBI has been awarded the right to grant their own wiretap warrants without having to go through the tedious step of convincing a judge to approve it??
Such as Slashdot, presumably?? I mean, everybody here knows that you only need about a softball-sized (6kg?) chunk of uranium to make a fission bomb, right?? I seem to remember actually calculating that in school - the same school where the "official" radiation sources for physics classes were locked away in a lead box under the stairs, and the "unofficial" radiation sources were:
1) worn by the physics teacher on his wrist - radium-dial wristwatch;
2) in a glass bottle on an open shelf in the chemistry lab - uranyl(sp?) acetate, used as a reagent for a specific test.
Guess which radiation sources were the more active??
But does the FCC have the power to prevent "import" of OpenSSH if they don't comply??
OK, I don't see how they *could* prevent import, but if they catch someone using a post-exclusion version, that would be taken as "evidence" of terrorist activity - illegally importing munitions, probably...
Right now, I have openssh-3.9p1 here, and the gzipped tar is around 800Kb. That would fit on a floppy, which isn't quite as cool as the DeCSS t-shirt and the Munitions T-shirt (google for them)... If OpenSSH became illegal, would it also be illegal to import patches to update it??
Sounds like a run-in my son had with Homeland Security. He and a friend were walking through a port terminal shortly before boarding for a cruise. The friend was carrying a video camera with the lens cap on and they were accosted by a Security goon. "Not allowed to video the terminal" he said and wouldn't, absolutely would not, listen to any arguments that they had not done so, that the camera was turned off, that the lens cap was on.
During a half hour or so of "interrogation", any attempt by the boys to prove their innocence was met by "you've got a smart mouth, boy" and "we can put in jail". Suggestions that the goons actually play back the tape, which was blank(!) made no impression whatsoever. The guard was totally power-tripping and really didn't give a damn that these two tall, white, fair-haired boys were innocent and could prove it just by playing the tape. Nope, he was out to terrorise someone.
So, after being allowed to go on their way, they were going up an escalator, talking about the experience, then discovered the same shithead guard was behind them. He pushed them up against a wall again and claimed he had "evidence", that another group of tourists "over there" (with a vague wave to some people in the distance) said they'd seen the boys taping the terminal. Again, "no sir, check the tape" was met with "don't be smart, we've got witnesses, we can lock you up forever".
The guard also spent some time "patting them down", so maybe he was just gay as a Maypole and liked to feel up teenage boys. Or he was a small-minded (or small-dicked?) man trying to compensate by abusing his authority.
Yeah, I get that. But why are the sensor owners making the data public?? Trying to puff up their own importance, maybe?? Should we be accusing them of generating the traffic spikes, just we sometimes accuse anti-virus companies of manufacturing viruses to keep themselves in business??
I wonder if they're reporting all the traffic?? Maybe they're not, in order to funnel attackers into supposedly unwatched areas?? Heh, tinfoil hat time again...:)
Slashdot Mirror
Btut you can't say "games" or "Olympics", so that would be "sporting events formerly named after the traditional home of the Gods in the Eastern Mediterranean", right??
"Publish and be damned!"
"Information wants to be free!"
For the record, I think it's completely irresponsible for the press to publish such things, but hey! they're allowed and to hell with the federal budget and if the military has to occupy foreign nations for indeterminate amounts of time, that just sells more copy. It's all about ratings and sales...
I'd second that. The worst pages I've seen have used javascript to poke values into form variables during the submit process. How stupid is it when the form has a field called txtUsernameView and a hidden field called txtUsername, and while submitting, it copies the visible field to the hidden field while left-padding with zeroes?? Like that couldn't possibly be handled on the server side... And other forms that have no action set, but make one up on the fly from hidden fields in the form. And instead of using Location headers, jumping to a new page using top.location=http://whatever.thefuck.com or window.href=http://ima.dickhead.programmer.com.
Biological viruses are generally harder to produce. With a software virus, if it goes wrong you just reload your system from CD. If it's not virulent enough, or doesn't work properly, you can mutate it easily. The first mistake with a biological virus could kill you and nobody else.
No, that's just pandering to the lawyers. What's really needed is to convince the government that it should reform the patent system. It shouldn't be possible for anyone to be granted patents for some of the crap that the USPTO recently granted, and it should be easier for patents to be challenged and revoked.
Unfortunately, that would require a degree of maturity that big business simply doesn't have. As with everything else, the revamped system would be abused by those with deep pockets, to the detriment of those without. A company with a large cash reserve can simply ignore patents because they can afford to drag things out in court until the patent owner runs out of money. Look at the recent EU vs Microsoft case - OK, that wasn't about patents, but the same principle applies - Microsoft was told to pay big fines that amounted to little more than pocket change compared to their $40bn cash reserve.
Perhaps the easiest patent reform would be to disallow corporate ownership of patents. Let the actual inventor own the patents and provide a method to expedite settlement of patent infringement cases.
I'd say that emacs has definitely been published. Of course, the government or a judge might not recognise that definition, but it gives us a starting point.
Sounds like syntax highlighting in vim would fall foul of this patent, if you wrote a rule to highligh numbers. Oh wait, that's called prior art...
Maybe the DOJ?? Congress?? The EU?? If someone, somewhere declares software patents invalid, Microsoft and every idiot company relying on such things to protect their bogus business models will start circling the drain.
Is that relevant in Australia??
I heard a story about that - probably an urban legend, but still interesting. Apparently this guy got hold of a Spitfire engine and mounted it in a car with beefed up suspension and chassis. It would do over 200mph. The police had a pretty good idea who it was, but they could never prove it because; a) they couldn't keep up with him; b) the reaction time the cameras meant they only ever got photos of empty road.
Certainly seem to be around here. The road near my house rises and falls over bumps and dips so that it's near impossible to see more than 1/2 mile ahead. It's dead straight, one lane in each direction, has stop signs every mile and it's posted as 50mph. A little distance south it crosses another road that is flat enough to be able to see a couple of miles ahead. It has two lanes each way, no stop signs, and it's posted as 45mph. The wider, better road doesn't even have more houses on it...
Sure, you could slam on the brakes and probably stop anyway, but if the interval is too short you'll likely stop somewhere in the intersection, and there's a better than average chance you'll do so going sideways.
If there's no response, just call them back and tell them not to bother because you've just shot the burglar. Bet you a box of donuts there'll be cops screeching to a halt outside your house within five minutes...
Heh, actually screwed up a job interview over that - the interviewer saw it on my resume and asked what I'd had to do to get X11 to work. I told him, nothing special, just unpacked it, compiled it and ran it. He'd tried the exact same thing and couldn't make it work at all...
I didn't make a big deal about it, just installed it that way, and so far as I know they've never cared one way or the other. The desktops in the school computer lab are all around the wall too, so as far as they're concerned, it's normal. None of my kids will get a PC in their own room until they're old enough to buy one for themselves, because that's a luxury we simply don't need. One's enough for playing games and getting homework done, and my daughter would *much* rather we saved up and bought her a horse...
Besides which, it'll be at least 4 years before she goes to college, and anything we get now would be obsolete. We looked around a local college for our older son (24) a few years back - they had a spec sheet for the recommended laptop, which was available at a local store along with maintenance plans that would take care of most ways a laptop could be trashed by a student. They showed us the current spec but suggested waiting to buy one until just before he started because the spec would likely change.
AltaVista: Delivers Internet's first Web index (1995). Search results page generated dynamically, based on input from the user.
You're assuming that Dubya doesn't start in on the calendar next...
Hey! I resemble that remark!!
OK, so it would be less convenient than talking over a phone, and the messages could equally well be type in. One reason for uploading recordings would be if the receiver recognised the voice, maybe from a face-to-face meeting, thus being more sure that it was genuine.
Is that still true, now that the FBI has been awarded the right to grant their own wiretap warrants without having to go through the tedious step of convincing a judge to approve it??
1) worn by the physics teacher on his wrist - radium-dial wristwatch;
2) in a glass bottle on an open shelf in the chemistry lab - uranyl(sp?) acetate, used as a reagent for a specific test.
Guess which radiation sources were the more active??
OK, I don't see how they *could* prevent import, but if they catch someone using a post-exclusion version, that would be taken as "evidence" of terrorist activity - illegally importing munitions, probably...
Right now, I have openssh-3.9p1 here, and the gzipped tar is around 800Kb. That would fit on a floppy, which isn't quite as cool as the DeCSS t-shirt and the Munitions T-shirt (google for them)... If OpenSSH became illegal, would it also be illegal to import patches to update it??
Sounds like a run-in my son had with Homeland Security. He and a friend were walking through a port terminal shortly before boarding for a cruise. The friend was carrying a video camera with the lens cap on and they were accosted by a Security goon. "Not allowed to video the terminal" he said and wouldn't, absolutely would not, listen to any arguments that they had not done so, that the camera was turned off, that the lens cap was on.
During a half hour or so of "interrogation", any attempt by the boys to prove their innocence was met by "you've got a smart mouth, boy" and "we can put in jail". Suggestions that the goons actually play back the tape, which was blank(!) made no impression whatsoever. The guard was totally power-tripping and really didn't give a damn that these two tall, white, fair-haired boys were innocent and could prove it just by playing the tape. Nope, he was out to terrorise someone.
So, after being allowed to go on their way, they were going up an escalator, talking about the experience, then discovered the same shithead guard was behind them. He pushed them up against a wall again and claimed he had "evidence", that another group of tourists "over there" (with a vague wave to some people in the distance) said they'd seen the boys taping the terminal. Again, "no sir, check the tape" was met with "don't be smart, we've got witnesses, we can lock you up forever".
The guard also spent some time "patting them down", so maybe he was just gay as a Maypole and liked to feel up teenage boys. Or he was a small-minded (or small-dicked?) man trying to compensate by abusing his authority.
I wonder if they're reporting all the traffic?? Maybe they're not, in order to funnel attackers into supposedly unwatched areas?? Heh, tinfoil hat time again...:)