Because when you get to the "then can execute arbitrary code" part, it becomes a fairly general purpose thing. Why not maximize potential profitability ?
Dino
The code looks more like someone was juggling Swiss Army Chainsaws.
I on the other hand want to be excluded from Microsoft's index until they pay me $1,000,000. No, I'm no where near top 1000, but they just set their rate, and I'll take it. Until then I'll stick with Google for both sides (user and web site.) Oh, and since your site accepted the money, if I do manage to find your site, I expect a discount on whatever you do.
Generally speaking bribery only improves your relationship with the bribed, and significantly reduces your image to everyone else who knows about it. And since it is a bribe, the bribed party will often expect more in the future, particularly if they find you paid someone else more.
No need to crack their skulls, we only need to know they're not doing anything illegal. Installing video cameras in public places isn't the solution, we need to install wires on every lobbyist to make sure they're not engaging in bribery, conspiracy to violate human rights, or other illegal activities. Lobbyist do far more damage to America than copyright violations, and thus we need a more robust solution to fight this blight on America.
Dinog
"If you can't drink a lobbyist's whiskey, take his money, sleep with his women and still vote against him in the morning, you don't belong in politics"
Come on people... this is weird even by science-fiction standards, don't get me wrong - I like to dream as much as the next guy, but get real...nothing so far proves that anything even closely related to this would have any substance to it, whatsoever!
When I was younger, people thought much the same about black holes. The neutrino was theorized, but not yet detected. Nanotechnology was bizarre even by science fiction standards. Using currently "known" facts, we cannot explain why galaxies do not fly apart, so we have to go beyond the known to explain the seen. Weird is only an opinion, and what we believe, or think we know, isn't always the reality.
The question in my mind is why does he call it a door ? It seems that he is speculating on a wormhole with a negative mass, and thus a negative gravity, on the order of a black hole. How does one go through such a door ? It seems to me that we would need to go faster than light to get in, which obviates the need for a wormhole to begin with.
Some investors invest in a company that sells a product that is popular (and thus profitable) because of gratuitious sex and violence, and then they want to sue the company because their games have gratuitious sex and violence ?
No, of course we aren't going to fire you! (If we did, you could sue us, and collect unemployment.) Instead, we will simply tell you that since you are now taking less responsibility and doing less work, there will be an associated reduction in your pay. Let's see, you were making about $20/hour, but now you'll only get $5.35/hour, and of course we'll have to eliminate your health insurance, tuition reimbursement, amd also the company will no longer match your 401k contributions. Your job is safe with us! Oh, and by the way, since you won't be working on anything sensitive, you'll also loose your desk. You can report to work at the maintinance room tomorrow morning to be trained on the mop and broom. Since this is such a sudden change, we'll also have to adjust your hours. How does 10pm - 6am Tuesday through Sunday sound ?
Aside from that, I've always wondered about certain security firms that pay their employees fairly low wages. It doesn't seem like that instills much loyalty, and an unloyal person with the appropriate badge AND insider knowledge is far worse for security than a lost badge.
So if I download and burn some of the alt.politics.* newsgroups to CD to search and research public opinions and altitudes about certain issues, am I guilty of "making hate-speech" ? Am I guilty of making an incitement to murder ? Am I guilty of holocaust denial ?
It seems this decision can set a precedent that has a very chilling effect on many kinds of speech. It may make backing up a newserver into a multiple felony act.
But what about people who have the ability to develop the drug, but choose not to, because they want to avoid this dilemma?
I doubt that this is a real possibility. They can still make quite a bit of money in markets that can afford the drugs. Indeed Taiwan made an effort to license the drug, so Roche would have made some money on the deal. Roche refused.
Should the government be allowed to force them to do the work anyway?
No.
If not, why not?
You may be able to force people to produce something, but it is not as easy to force someone to research something. Production has a definite output, while research is always far more ambiguous.
Isn't it the same as stealing their work? Either way, you're forcing them to work for you against their will. Isn't it still a kind of slavery?
The companies that do this operate primarily in western countries, and slavery is illegal. I simply don't see where you are comming from in this respect. The companies are free to develop and market the drugs, and they do so to make a profit. In cases of emergencies, however, I believe that nations have a right, nay a duty, to do everything they can to save the lives of their people. Lives come before profits, and the companies will continue to develop and make these drugs because it is profitable, even with such intervention. In many other nations, they simply cannot afford these drugs. Roche will not loose any money because some poor African who couldn't afford the drug to begin with was given a cheap generic. Perhaps instead, that African will survive and prosper, and eventually beable to buy another product from these companies.
And why is it that you would rather punish them for doing work, by stealing it from them? If you care about the people who need this work so much, shouldn't you be the first to call for rewarding those who do the work?
Roche is quite profitable. As mentioned above, they will in no way be punished if someone who cannot afford the drug is given a cheaper version. Simply put, they wouldn't make money on the person dying, and they may not make any money on the cheaper version. I say may not because sometimes these drugs are provided by subsidy, and much of that money goes back to the drug company in question.
Ok, I may be wrong about where they are based. Roche may be Swiss, but they still have a large presence in the US,and frequently use US courts to protect their patents.
Roche also has an AIDS drug that they charge nearly twice as much for as other AIDS drugs, which are already expensive to the point of being unafforadable by the vast majority of people with AIDS.
To me this issue is about more than just Roche and Taiwan. Taiwan is fairly wealthy when we compare it to other countries. It took years to get companies that produce AIDS drugs (and this includes Roche, Merck, BMS, and others) to reduce their priced to African countries. 39 of these companies, which included the companies mentioned above, filed a suit to prevent South Africa from producing cheapers AIDS drugs. At that time, 24 million Africans had AIDS, and 6,000 were dying of AIDS each day. Profits were put before lives, even when the companies in question were making large profits.
With a potential epidemic, their tactics seem to be the same. The drug companies will continue to do this until they are pressured to change. Some will say that there is no epidemic, and they are right. By the time there is an epidemic, it will be too late to produce enough of the drugs needed to save many lives.
Meanwhile, at Roche, for the year 2004, global profits were up 41% to 4.34bn Swiss francs. Roche says it expects similar results in 2005.
While I have no doubt that there is also corruption in South African nations, or indeed any nation, that is not the problem. The problem is that there are many people who cannot afford these drugs, and will die because of it.
TO be perfectly honest with you, I would rather see the drug not manufactured than witheld from needy people. Simply put, allowing people to die when we can save easily save them is wrong. It may not be profitable to save them, but it is wrong not to. Whatever happened to business ethics ? It seems that as well as the "faith and goodwill" they taught me about in accounting class has been completely forgotten.
All ofthe arguments that say the patents should not be violated are from people who put money ahead of human life, and if you are one of these people, allow me to say that I despise you. Your plan certainly does benefit the wealthy, but it will not benefit the people who cannot afford the drug, nor the family they will not have after they have died.
This kind of short sightedness will lead to smaller markets, less trust of business, and in the long run, it will not benefit the companies either, as their potential market is gone, dead because they valued their profits in 2005 more than the life of their market for the future. I understand the concept of discounting the future, but there has to be a reason to discount it so much, and I do not see it.
After all this, people wonder why poor foreign people tend to dislike the USA. Hello Roche, you are one of the reasons. You have told too many people that Americans like you care more about money than life. Reap your reward.
Dean G.
We should start putting up options on when this idiotic extravaganza will come to a final end.
2005?
2006?
2007?
2438?
No, 2438 is when SCO wants to schedule the last hearing regarding discovery. Then the actual trial can begin. That is, if they don't file for yet another continuance....
I'm sure you would get better information from the Slashdot readership if you gave a few more details:
First, you don't tell us what distros you are considering. If it is Red Hat, then Red Hat training would be more useful than if you were going to use Suse for example.
Second, you give us no info about what you will be doing, and what your company will be doing on Linux. You say you are an administrator, but administering programmers and techs is a slight bit different that administering general office workers and non-techs. Also, is the system primarily for web, programming, databases, graphical design, or what ? If you need to handle office workers using Open Office, you might want a different distro than if you are running a bank of high volume web servers. You would also want to focus your learning a bit differently in each case.
Given that, I'd go with any distro specific training if it exists. I'd also look into learning the tools you may put on top of Linux. If you are going to use Apache or MySQL, then there a general Linux class will NOT cover the details adequately. You should look into additional training for any such tools and applications you may be using on top of Linux.
Also, the home learning crowd are right to a point. If you have a good home setup, you will have the option to play with the setup without fear of destroying essential data or looking silly when you try things for the first time. Reinstalling Linux because of such a mistake may be a lesson well learned, and perhaps good practice at a reinstall/recovery scenario. Also, it will teach you a little about learning on your own. Every answer is not in a book. If you depend too much on formal training and books, you may not cope well with situations not covered in such material.
Finally, I found in school that the classes were pretty much BS, but a few of the instructors were real gems. The best are often the most difficult, but also are open to debate. They force you to think for yourself, and don't rely much on the books. Often they expect you to know what is in the book, and the class goes forward from there. Instructors who only cover the book(s) are often a waste of your time.
Dean G.
There is something Pagan in me that I cannot shake off. In short, I deny nothing, but doubt everything.--George
Assembly language is considered "cool", and yet talk about baby steps ! Indeed, CS as a whole is mostly finding the simplicity in a seemingly complex task. For large tasks, there is nothing wrong with stepping through a task in a simple, logical, and above all maintainable manner.
We need to require new academic standards for programmers. First, CS majors need to have at least one class where they are required to debug, maintain, update, and add new features to someone else's uncommented 10000 line perl program. The second part of the course would be writing a new program. Students have the choice of commenting or not. If the student turns in a well organized and commented program, they will be given a well organized an commented program to debug and modify on the final. If they turn in an uncommented and/or poorly organized program, they will be given such a program (but not their own) to debug and modify on the final. (Yes, I do maintain code for a living, why do you ask ?)
That said, why don't you like Java ? It has the obtuseness of C, the verbosity of COBOL, and even more compiler restrictions than Pascal. What else could you ask for ?
Feeling fear does not make one a coward. It is when you give into the fear without a good reason that you are a coward. If you were to feel no fear at all, then perhaps the word foolhardy may be appropriate for you, empahasis on the first sylable of course.
Bravery, imho, is when you feel the fear, but act without letting the fear deter you.
Dean G.
The hero and the coward both feel the same thing, but the hero uses his fear, projects it onto his opponent, while the coward runs. It's the same thing, fear, but it's what you do with it that matters.--Cus D'Amato
I was under the apparently idiotic idea that the problems with off chip cache were not so much bandwith, which is relatively easy to increase by adding more lines, but rather the latency, which is (to use a technical term) a BE-otch to decrease.
Dean G.
"I have a great mind to believe in Christianity for the mere pleasure of fancying I may be damned."-- some guy named George
There are several stings which may work. The first is to say the patent is obvious and have the patent nullified. The second is to find any tiny bit of prior art, and again have the patent nullified. A third possibility is to show that they have not defended their patent despite knowing the infringement, in which case the patent may fall into public domain. Another possiblity are the anti-trust laws, in which case the programmers may well be able to sue, without worrying about penalties.
Also note that as open source is often faster at making changes, a counter suit (you're infringing our patent on X) could cause MS and the likes far more trouble than one of their patents would cause open source. Consider a few "recent" browser issues. MS takes a year to fix it, and Mozilla takes a day. Which one would have a bigger problem with a patent suit ? MS may want to get into this kind of a pissing contest, but they could lose everything if things go poorly for them. A preliminary injunction to stop selling Windows or Office would devastate MS. A two week delay would do more harm to them than anything they can do to open source. A year delay may well destroy their monopoly and eventually MS as a whole.
Oh, and IBM has quite a few patents, likes Linux, and doesn't particularly like MS. There are other companies that may also play the "white knight" for Linux and/or open source. There are also certain governments that like open source software, and are considering software patents. If MS (or anyone, really) does something abusive, it may well adversely affect the inclination of these certain governments to pass the patent laws that MS and the likes are interested in.
Dean G.
"There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence."
- Jeremy S. Anderson
Slashdot Mirror
Dino
The code looks more like someone was juggling Swiss Army Chainsaws.
Generally speaking bribery only improves your relationship with the bribed, and significantly reduces your image to everyone else who knows about it. And since it is a bribe, the bribed party will often expect more in the future, particularly if they find you paid someone else more.
Dinog
Richard Nixon
Spiro Agnew
Duke Cunningham
Ted Stevens
John McCain
Say no more, Dino
Dinog
"If you can't drink a lobbyist's whiskey, take his money, sleep with his women and still vote against him in the morning, you don't belong in politics"
When I was younger, people thought much the same about black holes. The neutrino was theorized, but not yet detected. Nanotechnology was bizarre even by science fiction standards. Using currently "known" facts, we cannot explain why galaxies do not fly apart, so we have to go beyond the known to explain the seen. Weird is only an opinion, and what we believe, or think we know, isn't always the reality.
The question in my mind is why does he call it a door ? It seems that he is speculating on a wormhole with a negative mass, and thus a negative gravity, on the order of a black hole. How does one go through such a door ? It seems to me that we would need to go faster than light to get in, which obviates the need for a wormhole to begin with.
Dinog
Bzzt... Aiiiiieeee !
Wait, I remember how to get Republicans to fund science and research.
Bzzt! Ouch !
Dino
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." -- John
For God's sake man, just say it :
The MPAA was pirating a copyrighted work of intellectual property!
Dacelo
Dean G.
Aside from that, I've always wondered about certain security firms that pay their employees fairly low wages. It doesn't seem like that instills much loyalty, and an unloyal person with the appropriate badge AND insider knowledge is far worse for security than a lost badge.
Dean G.
Whatever it is, it has to be better than a Plan Itantium.
Dean G.
It seems this decision can set a precedent that has a very chilling effect on many kinds of speech. It may make backing up a newserver into a multiple felony act.
Dean G.
Does this mean that every time I try to go in, I end up leaving instead ?
Doh !
Dean G.
"What do you mean there's no air in space ? There's an Air in Space Museum !"
I doubt that this is a real possibility. They can still make quite a bit of money in markets that can afford the drugs. Indeed Taiwan made an effort to license the drug, so Roche would have made some money on the deal. Roche refused.
Should the government be allowed to force them to do the work anyway?
No.
If not, why not?
You may be able to force people to produce something, but it is not as easy to force someone to research something. Production has a definite output, while research is always far more ambiguous.
Isn't it the same as stealing their work? Either way, you're forcing them to work for you against their will. Isn't it still a kind of slavery?
The companies that do this operate primarily in western countries, and slavery is illegal. I simply don't see where you are comming from in this respect. The companies are free to develop and market the drugs, and they do so to make a profit. In cases of emergencies, however, I believe that nations have a right, nay a duty, to do everything they can to save the lives of their people. Lives come before profits, and the companies will continue to develop and make these drugs because it is profitable, even with such intervention. In many other nations, they simply cannot afford these drugs. Roche will not loose any money because some poor African who couldn't afford the drug to begin with was given a cheap generic. Perhaps instead, that African will survive and prosper, and eventually beable to buy another product from these companies.
And why is it that you would rather punish them for doing work, by stealing it from them? If you care about the people who need this work so much, shouldn't you be the first to call for rewarding those who do the work?
Roche is quite profitable. As mentioned above, they will in no way be punished if someone who cannot afford the drug is given a cheaper version. Simply put, they wouldn't make money on the person dying, and they may not make any money on the cheaper version. I say may not because sometimes these drugs are provided by subsidy, and much of that money goes back to the drug company in question.
Dean G.
Roche also has an AIDS drug that they charge nearly twice as much for as other AIDS drugs, which are already expensive to the point of being unafforadable by the vast majority of people with AIDS.
To me this issue is about more than just Roche and Taiwan. Taiwan is fairly wealthy when we compare it to other countries. It took years to get companies that produce AIDS drugs (and this includes Roche, Merck, BMS, and others) to reduce their priced to African countries. 39 of these companies, which included the companies mentioned above, filed a suit to prevent South Africa from producing cheapers AIDS drugs. At that time, 24 million Africans had AIDS, and 6,000 were dying of AIDS each day. Profits were put before lives, even when the companies in question were making large profits.
With a potential epidemic, their tactics seem to be the same. The drug companies will continue to do this until they are pressured to change. Some will say that there is no epidemic, and they are right. By the time there is an epidemic, it will be too late to produce enough of the drugs needed to save many lives.
Meanwhile, at Roche, for the year 2004, global profits were up 41% to 4.34bn Swiss francs. Roche says it expects similar results in 2005.
While I have no doubt that there is also corruption in South African nations, or indeed any nation, that is not the problem. The problem is that there are many people who cannot afford these drugs, and will die because of it.
Dean G.
TO be perfectly honest with you, I would rather see the drug not manufactured than witheld from needy people. Simply put, allowing people to die when we can save easily save them is wrong. It may not be profitable to save them, but it is wrong not to. Whatever happened to business ethics ? It seems that as well as the "faith and goodwill" they taught me about in accounting class has been completely forgotten. All ofthe arguments that say the patents should not be violated are from people who put money ahead of human life, and if you are one of these people, allow me to say that I despise you. Your plan certainly does benefit the wealthy, but it will not benefit the people who cannot afford the drug, nor the family they will not have after they have died. This kind of short sightedness will lead to smaller markets, less trust of business, and in the long run, it will not benefit the companies either, as their potential market is gone, dead because they valued their profits in 2005 more than the life of their market for the future. I understand the concept of discounting the future, but there has to be a reason to discount it so much, and I do not see it. After all this, people wonder why poor foreign people tend to dislike the USA. Hello Roche, you are one of the reasons. You have told too many people that Americans like you care more about money than life. Reap your reward. Dean G.
2005? 2006? 2007? 2438?
No, 2438 is when SCO wants to schedule the last hearing regarding discovery. Then the actual trial can begin. That is, if they don't file for yet another continuance....
Dean G.
Dean G.
I have a great mind to believe in Christianity for the mere pleasure of fancying I may be damned.--George
First, you don't tell us what distros you are considering. If it is Red Hat, then Red Hat training would be more useful than if you were going to use Suse for example.
Second, you give us no info about what you will be doing, and what your company will be doing on Linux. You say you are an administrator, but administering programmers and techs is a slight bit different that administering general office workers and non-techs. Also, is the system primarily for web, programming, databases, graphical design, or what ? If you need to handle office workers using Open Office, you might want a different distro than if you are running a bank of high volume web servers. You would also want to focus your learning a bit differently in each case.
Given that, I'd go with any distro specific training if it exists. I'd also look into learning the tools you may put on top of Linux. If you are going to use Apache or MySQL, then there a general Linux class will NOT cover the details adequately. You should look into additional training for any such tools and applications you may be using on top of Linux.
Also, the home learning crowd are right to a point. If you have a good home setup, you will have the option to play with the setup without fear of destroying essential data or looking silly when you try things for the first time. Reinstalling Linux because of such a mistake may be a lesson well learned, and perhaps good practice at a reinstall/recovery scenario. Also, it will teach you a little about learning on your own. Every answer is not in a book. If you depend too much on formal training and books, you may not cope well with situations not covered in such material.
Finally, I found in school that the classes were pretty much BS, but a few of the instructors were real gems. The best are often the most difficult, but also are open to debate. They force you to think for yourself, and don't rely much on the books. Often they expect you to know what is in the book, and the class goes forward from there. Instructors who only cover the book(s) are often a waste of your time.
Dean G.
There is something Pagan in me that I cannot shake off. In short, I deny nothing, but doubt everything.--George
We need to require new academic standards for programmers. First, CS majors need to have at least one class where they are required to debug, maintain, update, and add new features to someone else's uncommented 10000 line perl program. The second part of the course would be writing a new program. Students have the choice of commenting or not. If the student turns in a well organized and commented program, they will be given a well organized an commented program to debug and modify on the final. If they turn in an uncommented and/or poorly organized program, they will be given such a program (but not their own) to debug and modify on the final. (Yes, I do maintain code for a living, why do you ask ?)
That said, why don't you like Java ? It has the obtuseness of C, the verbosity of COBOL, and even more compiler restrictions than Pascal. What else could you ask for ?
Dean G.
Bravery, imho, is when you feel the fear, but act without letting the fear deter you.
Dean G.
The hero and the coward both feel the same thing, but the hero uses his fear, projects it onto his opponent, while the coward runs. It's the same thing, fear, but it's what you do with it that matters.--Cus D'Amato
No ! Not that, anything but that !
Surely this would be considered a cruel and unusual punishment by any standard.
Dean G.
Dean G.
"I have a great mind to believe in Christianity for the mere pleasure of fancying I may be damned."-- some guy named George
Also note that as open source is often faster at making changes, a counter suit (you're infringing our patent on X) could cause MS and the likes far more trouble than one of their patents would cause open source. Consider a few "recent" browser issues. MS takes a year to fix it, and Mozilla takes a day. Which one would have a bigger problem with a patent suit ? MS may want to get into this kind of a pissing contest, but they could lose everything if things go poorly for them. A preliminary injunction to stop selling Windows or Office would devastate MS. A two week delay would do more harm to them than anything they can do to open source. A year delay may well destroy their monopoly and eventually MS as a whole.
Oh, and IBM has quite a few patents, likes Linux, and doesn't particularly like MS. There are other companies that may also play the "white knight" for Linux and/or open source. There are also certain governments that like open source software, and are considering software patents. If MS (or anyone, really) does something abusive, it may well adversely affect the inclination of these certain governments to pass the patent laws that MS and the likes are interested in.
Dean G.
"There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence."
- Jeremy S. Anderson
Yes, all the reliablility of a modern PC, with the syntax of VMS. Someone must really be into S&M.
Dean G.