This is not like those stupid email trojans that are inexcusable because Microsoft intentionally opened the door (with scriptable email, etc.)
I wouldn't say that. Yes, it was a buffer-overflow, but if MS hadn't set Windows up so that its RPC mechanism is running by default, when most home users wouldn't need it, and is open by default to the whole wide world (instead of just to the local network, which would be sensible), then we wouldn't be in this mess.
Half of the services Windows XP has running by default are not necessary for the majority of users. Microsoft is ignoring one of the basic rules for security. Disable everything by default, enable what is needed.
If this little blighter is thriving at 121C, how high can it actually survive. The article mentions that temperatures in this guy's home top out at about 400C. How much heat can these guys actually take before cooking?
you should probably think about spending a few billion on making products that don't cost your customers insane amounts of money and lost productivity due to down time because of pathetic security and coding practices.
Yeah right, how are you going to get them to buy Windows ZP 2005 then?
They do, but last time I checked they were reserved for vision-impaired people, as were large-print books.
I look forward to audiobooks becoming popular, but I don't think it'll be very swift. Audiobooks are, in general, far too long to satisfy popular taste. I still hear complains about movies that go over 2 hours. People want to take their entertainment in single sessions and then move on, it seems.
One day I was in a public park, reading "C++ For Dummies" when someone came up and asked me what I was reading. I told him I was reading a book about C++. He responded, "Oh, HTML kicks C++'s @$$."
He may have been a poor coder, but he was a linguistic genius. I have never met anyone who was able to actually pronounce '@$$'.
Recorded books just aren't really viable for many people, due mainly, as you mentioned, to the economy of scale. Motion pictures cost many, many times more than an audiobook to produce. Yet I can buy The Matrix for $30(AUD) on DVD, but "The Lord Of The Rings" (A fairly popular title, I would have thought) comes up at $180 (AUD) for the trilogy.
Unless audiobooks suddenly become incredibly popular (and even Harry Potter audiobooks haven't reached anywhere near the level of movies), prices are going to remain incredibly high, out of reach for anyone except those with special requirements (Blind people, for example) or those with a very high disposable income.
...for someone to turn on their stereo while playing his favorite MMORPG, only to find the RIAA busting the entire player population of Everquest for listening to pirated music.
As I said, I don't know much about the state of things in America, but the only instances of children left in cars in such I remember here are of parents doing the leaving, usually outside casinos.
I'm not talking about belting kids when I talk about discipline. Under Australian law, any physical contact not initiated by the child can be taken as abuse. This includes things like pulling children apart when they're fighting, holding on to a child's hand so they don't run away or touching a child on their shoulder to get get their attention. As children grow up, they do pick up on this sort of thing, and they begin to realize that, at a daycare, they can get away with anything. That would be my reasoning as to why children who are habitually in daycare are more agressive; because they are never taught to be accountable for their actions.
All this is not to convince you to put your kids in a daycare. I probably wouldn't put my kids in there either. All I'm saying is that the faults in the system aren't due to the workers.
shacked up in some daycare with minimum wage trolls who don't interact with him
I take objection to that statement. I know quite a few people who work in the childcare industry, and its shortcomings are, by and large, not their fault.
I'm writing from an Australian perspective, so I'm not entirely sure if it equates with the US. But here, the legal maximum ratio is 15 children to 1 carer. Because thats the maximum, thats what centres use (anything else impacts profits). There is no chance of indiviudal interaction, not because the workers don't care, but because they're overworked.
The child-care syllabus taught at Australian universities is quite extensive. It goes into child psychology, physical development, planning activites to physically and mentally stimulate children of various ages, and a whole host of other things. However, when a graduate gets on the job, they find it's all pointless, because they're employer only hires enough workers to facillitate "crowd-control", and planning stimulating lessons goes out the window.
Couple that with the fact that childcare personnel are unable to discipline a child in any way for fear of legal repercussions (You are now, for instance, not allowed to give a child "Time Out" away from their friends, as this may damage their self-esteem and social skills), and you find that the only thing child-care does is ensure your child survives the day. A child care centre has the capacity to be a positive influence on your child, if these problems could be corrected.
That's not to say it can replace parenting, of course, but just because some parents use child care services in that way does not mean it's the ideal way to use them.
Sorry for the rant, but statements like that irritate the hell out of me. I know people in the industry, and they are just as intelligent as people in any other sector.
1) Running cars is expensive, what with registration, insurance, fuel, etc. Segways have no registration, little call for insurance and the "fuel" is cheaper. I know a number of people who only use their cars for driving to and from work and the local store, a 5 minute trip. Segways would be much cheaper in this instance.
2) For people whose work involves a lot of urban/suburban walking, like the poor old postman, the Segway would be much better.
That's a bloody stupid analogy. To extrapolate from the baker, you could say if you go to an all-you-can-eat buffet, anything less than every edible item in the world delivered on your dinner plate would be ripping you off.
What an ISP is selling is not 30 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 512 kb of download. What they are selling is a pipe that can handle 512kbps. This is sold on the understanding (usually defined in an AUP), that excessive use of that pipe will result in them cutting your access to their bandwidth pool.
If you read their fricken AUP before you buy their product, you know what your buying. If you don't, you're stupid, and deserve what you get.
I run a whole tonne of servers (FTP, HTTP, SMTP, POP, and others). None of these net me any commercial gain whatsoever. They are soley for convenience, or for my own edification.
On the-the-fly compression already exists, but there are other ways HTTP could be significantly improved. One thing that gives me the irrits about HTTP is that it was originally a stripped-down version of FTP, but Berners-Lee decided to rip out all the state-handling stuff (and fair enough too, he couldnt tell what directions HTTP would go in).
But if he had just left it in, we wouldn't have to bother with all the stupid kludge of cookie-based sessions, or URL-rewriting, or anything like that. It would be really nice if that sort of stuff was stuck back into HTTP again. I think that'd be a whole lot more useful than the internationalization stuff they're sticking in recently. I don't think I've ever seen a webpage yet that uses HTTP to determine which locale a user is from.
Its exactly the same as what happens today. The only thing different is the time scale. A lot of things are adapted to screen or stage just after copyright expires. The adapters get money, the original creator doesn't.
If your work was good enough to warrant an adaptation, you should have made a decent amount of money of it in the first 14 years of copyright. Copyright was never intended to give the creator of a work the right to every cent ever generated from their work.
Tell your favorite author what you want to do to their work
Many probably wouldn't care. In fact, a number of authors already offer their copyrighted works free to the public here, including some not-too insignificant ones (Larry Niven, Mercedes Lackey).
The way print publishing of novels work is this. When a publisher agrees to print your work, what you are agreeing on (apart from payment) is the print run. You agree on a number of copies of your book they will print off and sell. If your book sells well, they well run off more copies, according to your agreement. The sad fact is, many works do not ever sell well enough to make it past that first print run. Money from that run on average dries up after about 6 months. Trust me, most of these authors couldn't give a stuff your getting their work free after 14 years; it'll have been out of print for 13.5 years by then.
Of course, the most popular authors' books will outlast this 14 year time frame. And they will miss out on some profit. But, quite simply, that's too bad. Copyright was not designed for a creator too squeeze every penny out of their creation. It was designed to allow them to make a decent living out of writing. If the writers of books that have a staying power of greater than 14 years cannot make decent money out of them, they sure as hell should fire their agent.
You're right, it cannot be patented. Provided the USPTO browses through all slashdot posts before granting their patents. Assuming they don't, it'll be granted anyway, and it will take a rather expensive lawsuit to invalidate it once it's been given away.
Just cause that's the way the system's supposed to work doesn't mean that's the way the system works.
Yes, we need a list that includes do not mail, do not e-mail, do not phone and do not send carrier pigeons. This list shall be known as that STFU List.
Re:South Park episode display classic irony
on
Isn't It Ironic?
·
· Score: 1
I finally realized I was an utter, irredeemable nerd when I read your sig and immediatly, without any conscious thought, started thinking about how such a device would determine it's angle in the mouth, in order to deploy its bolts in the proper directions.
Thank you for bringing my life to this turning point.
Slashdot Mirror
It's already the sixteenth down here in the merry old land of Aus. We have computers too.
This is not like those stupid email trojans that are inexcusable because Microsoft intentionally opened the door (with scriptable email, etc.)
I wouldn't say that. Yes, it was a buffer-overflow, but if MS hadn't set Windows up so that its RPC mechanism is running by default, when most home users wouldn't need it, and is open by default to the whole wide world (instead of just to the local network, which would be sensible), then we wouldn't be in this mess.
Half of the services Windows XP has running by default are not necessary for the majority of users. Microsoft is ignoring one of the basic rules for security. Disable everything by default, enable what is needed.
If this little blighter is thriving at 121C, how high can it actually survive. The article mentions that temperatures in this guy's home top out at about 400C. How much heat can these guys actually take before cooking?
That's right, Microsoft nuked the power station to offset the bad worm publicity.
Damn, Slashdot needs a "+1 Paranoid" mod
you should probably think about spending a few billion on making products that don't cost your customers insane amounts of money and lost productivity due to down time because of pathetic security and coding practices.
Yeah right, how are you going to get them to buy Windows ZP 2005 then?
The better analogy to this sort of activity, seeing as hacking them to fabricate false goods is generally seens as very naughty, would be smuggling.
They do, but last time I checked they were reserved for vision-impaired people, as were large-print books.
I look forward to audiobooks becoming popular, but I don't think it'll be very swift. Audiobooks are, in general, far too long to satisfy popular taste. I still hear complains about movies that go over 2 hours. People want to take their entertainment in single sessions and then move on, it seems.
One day I was in a public park, reading "C++ For Dummies" when someone came up and asked me what I was reading. I told him I was reading a book about C++. He responded, "Oh, HTML kicks C++'s @$$."
He may have been a poor coder, but he was a linguistic genius. I have never met anyone who was able to actually pronounce '@$$'.
Recorded books just aren't really viable for many people, due mainly, as you mentioned, to the economy of scale. Motion pictures cost many, many times more than an audiobook to produce. Yet I can buy The Matrix for $30(AUD) on DVD, but "The Lord Of The Rings" (A fairly popular title, I would have thought) comes up at $180 (AUD) for the trilogy.
Unless audiobooks suddenly become incredibly popular (and even Harry Potter audiobooks haven't reached anywhere near the level of movies), prices are going to remain incredibly high, out of reach for anyone except those with special requirements (Blind people, for example) or those with a very high disposable income.
...for someone to turn on their stereo while playing his favorite MMORPG, only to find the RIAA busting the entire player population of Everquest for listening to pirated music.
As I said, I don't know much about the state of things in America, but the only instances of children left in cars in such I remember here are of parents doing the leaving, usually outside casinos.
I'm not talking about belting kids when I talk about discipline. Under Australian law, any physical contact not initiated by the child can be taken as abuse. This includes things like pulling children apart when they're fighting, holding on to a child's hand so they don't run away or touching a child on their shoulder to get get their attention. As children grow up, they do pick up on this sort of thing, and they begin to realize that, at a daycare, they can get away with anything. That would be my reasoning as to why children who are habitually in daycare are more agressive; because they are never taught to be accountable for their actions.
All this is not to convince you to put your kids in a daycare. I probably wouldn't put my kids in there either. All I'm saying is that the faults in the system aren't due to the workers.
shacked up in some daycare with minimum wage trolls who don't interact with him
I take objection to that statement. I know quite a few people who work in the childcare industry, and its shortcomings are, by and large, not their fault.
I'm writing from an Australian perspective, so I'm not entirely sure if it equates with the US. But here, the legal maximum ratio is 15 children to 1 carer. Because thats the maximum, thats what centres use (anything else impacts profits). There is no chance of indiviudal interaction, not because the workers don't care, but because they're overworked.
The child-care syllabus taught at Australian universities is quite extensive. It goes into child psychology, physical development, planning activites to physically and mentally stimulate children of various ages, and a whole host of other things. However, when a graduate gets on the job, they find it's all pointless, because they're employer only hires enough workers to facillitate "crowd-control", and planning stimulating lessons goes out the window.
Couple that with the fact that childcare personnel are unable to discipline a child in any way for fear of legal repercussions (You are now, for instance, not allowed to give a child "Time Out" away from their friends, as this may damage their self-esteem and social skills), and you find that the only thing child-care does is ensure your child survives the day. A child care centre has the capacity to be a positive influence on your child, if these problems could be corrected.
That's not to say it can replace parenting, of course, but just because some parents use child care services in that way does not mean it's the ideal way to use them.
Sorry for the rant, but statements like that irritate the hell out of me. I know people in the industry, and they are just as intelligent as people in any other sector.
A couple of reasons:
1) Running cars is expensive, what with registration, insurance, fuel, etc. Segways have no registration, little call for insurance and the "fuel" is cheaper. I know a number of people who only use their cars for driving to and from work and the local store, a 5 minute trip. Segways would be much cheaper in this instance.
2) For people whose work involves a lot of urban/suburban walking, like the poor old postman, the Segway would be much better.
2 reasons off the top of my head.
They must appeal to lazy-ass people who would rather get around in a wheelchair than walk
Yeah, just like all them dicks who buy cars.
That puts SCO in a very tough position then, doesn't it?
I'm sure there's quite a number of people ready to do it gratis.
"If your intent was to go from the least important people on this planet to the most"
Maybe it's just in order of people or organisations whom most slashdotters care about.
That's a bloody stupid analogy. To extrapolate from the baker, you could say if you go to an all-you-can-eat buffet, anything less than every edible item in the world delivered on your dinner plate would be ripping you off.
What an ISP is selling is not 30 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 512 kb of download. What they are selling is a pipe that can handle 512kbps. This is sold on the understanding (usually defined in an AUP), that excessive use of that pipe will result in them cutting your access to their bandwidth pool.
If you read their fricken AUP before you buy their product, you know what your buying. If you don't, you're stupid, and deserve what you get.
How do you equate "server" with "commercial"?
I run a whole tonne of servers (FTP, HTTP, SMTP, POP, and others). None of these net me any commercial gain whatsoever. They are soley for convenience, or for my own edification.
On the-the-fly compression already exists, but there are other ways HTTP could be significantly improved. One thing that gives me the irrits about HTTP is that it was originally a stripped-down version of FTP, but Berners-Lee decided to rip out all the state-handling stuff (and fair enough too, he couldnt tell what directions HTTP would go in).
But if he had just left it in, we wouldn't have to bother with all the stupid kludge of cookie-based sessions, or URL-rewriting, or anything like that. It would be really nice if that sort of stuff was stuck back into HTTP again. I think that'd be a whole lot more useful than the internationalization stuff they're sticking in recently. I don't think I've ever seen a webpage yet that uses HTTP to determine which locale a user is from.
Its exactly the same as what happens today. The only thing different is the time scale. A lot of things are adapted to screen or stage just after copyright expires. The adapters get money, the original creator doesn't.
If your work was good enough to warrant an adaptation, you should have made a decent amount of money of it in the first 14 years of copyright. Copyright was never intended to give the creator of a work the right to every cent ever generated from their work.
Tell your favorite author what you want to do to their work
Many probably wouldn't care. In fact, a number of authors already offer their copyrighted works free to the public here, including some not-too insignificant ones (Larry Niven, Mercedes Lackey).
The way print publishing of novels work is this. When a publisher agrees to print your work, what you are agreeing on (apart from payment) is the print run. You agree on a number of copies of your book they will print off and sell. If your book sells well, they well run off more copies, according to your agreement. The sad fact is, many works do not ever sell well enough to make it past that first print run. Money from that run on average dries up after about 6 months. Trust me, most of these authors couldn't give a stuff your getting their work free after 14 years; it'll have been out of print for 13.5 years by then.
Of course, the most popular authors' books will outlast this 14 year time frame. And they will miss out on some profit. But, quite simply, that's too bad. Copyright was not designed for a creator too squeeze every penny out of their creation. It was designed to allow them to make a decent living out of writing. If the writers of books that have a staying power of greater than 14 years cannot make decent money out of them, they sure as hell should fire their agent.
That should be:
"It's not what you say, it's how many voices you pay to say it for you."
It may be a rule of the majority, but when money buys voices, the dollar wins the day.
You're right, it cannot be patented. Provided the USPTO browses through all slashdot posts before granting their patents. Assuming they don't, it'll be granted anyway, and it will take a rather expensive lawsuit to invalidate it once it's been given away.
Just cause that's the way the system's supposed to work doesn't mean that's the way the system works.
Yes, we need a list that includes do not mail, do not e-mail, do not phone and do not send carrier pigeons. This list shall be known as that STFU List.
I finally realized I was an utter, irredeemable nerd when I read your sig and immediatly, without any conscious thought, started thinking about how such a device would determine it's angle in the mouth, in order to deploy its bolts in the proper directions.
Thank you for bringing my life to this turning point.