Hmm... I should clear up that last sentence of mine. It wasn't meant to be sarcastic - it seemed like a logical step for Bush to ask his own citizens to keep an eye out. I was not condemning the move, just surprised that the original poster hadn't heard of it and seemed offended by the suggestion...
Unless we can take back the Net from the libertarians, constitutional lawyers and rapacious corporations currently recreating the worst excesses of US political and commercial culture online
I thought the blame rested with penis enlargement devices, Work From Home companies and the American Dream... If the culture wasn't so obsessed with consumerism, these people wouldn't exist to recreate the worst (and only?) aspects of it.
Yep - I read this story in a Canadian newspaper. In one of Bush's speeches a few months ago he called on trade workers to keep their eyes open while they went about their daily business.
While I can't remember much about it, it was called operation TIPS.... here's the first article I found on it:
You mean I'm not the only one that had to *shudder* use Fortran?
Last summer I worked for a computer modeller who took vast amounts of matrix data and performed hundreds of operations on it. The application was to calculate crustal rebound from glacial retreat based on dozens of lithospheric parameters, and the data was anywhere from a 100km to 100m cell resolution.
Because the jobs took so long, I experimented with it in between jobs. I took a subset of the program, (two routines + main) and rewrote it in C and Perl and ran it on an UltraSparc 10. C was about 1.5 times slower and Perl was 1.65 times slower.
When you're talking 24 hour jobs, a 33% (from C to Fortran) speed gain is measured in hours. On a shared supercomputing facilitie, all the other eggheads appreciate it if you take the least amount of time possible!
P.S. > Fortran is simple to learn. Takes about 3 days if you know C. That being said, I did spend 2 full days debugging a program only to discover that my vast overflow errors were because I had tab characters at the start of my line instead of 5 space characters!
For such a good programmer it would be worthwhile to invest in some technical writing courses. This paper was the most un-professional thing I've ever seen. While his points are good, it is better to make an impact professionally if you want the discovery to be taken seriously.
Employer: Can I see some examples of your writing?
Chris: Uh...no.
Employer: Why?
Chris: Well someone just recently told me that arrogance was bad, and you shouldn't use sentences like Fun, huh? and Silly, silly, silly..., and (Hell, overwrite the heap. Who's gonna care?)
Employer: Hmm...I can see now why you're a freelancer.
My House, Universe of Highly Probable Parallels: In a recent twist on the discovery of a way of hijacking your MS Windows computer using simple API calls, it was revealed today that there is an undocumented API function called RIAATakeOverComputer() that can also be used to fully exploit Windows. Microsoft VP Jim Allchin could not be reached for comment as he was in security talks with RIAA executives...
"We welcome this statement," said Clyde Ensslin, a spokesman for the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration. "The issues addressed in the letter are very significant,"
So what are the issues? It's nice to see both sides being blasted here;), but it's pretty difficult to judge who is screwing who. The only thing I got from that newspost was that ICANN instituted a price cap. Okaaayyy... so. What else, fellas?
I think that they're all of cunning, childish and foolish - for they've declared both a hacker war and a war on all hackers. But the way they're playing it is to make everything backfire on the hackers, no matter what they do. And they have the advantage, as the hackers are on both shaky legal ground and shaky public perception.
Whether they expected the attack or not, you can be sure that their spin doctors will play this in every way to make the hackers look the children & fools. It's the second salvo in what is sure to be a war against arrogance!
Somehow I doubt this would extend to anyone else who found their stuff on the internet. If I program something and there are copies of it out there, can I bring them down? What if I program an internet agent that moves from place to place? Can it take down people's computers because it's residing there? What a ridiculous bunch of crap! Why don't they just authorize Mafia-style hits and save the bandwidth?
Yes, that would be great. Then all those extremely intelligent Windows users out there can manage their own linux systems and can leave all their unconfigured daemons running, for a well secured internet.
Interestingly, Apple squashed a good chance at cheap hardware when they bought back all the companies that were using the license to produce clones. I started with a Mac Plus, moved on to a IIvi and finally a PowerPC. (I got to OS 8). The PowerPC was $800 when I bought it, w/o monitor, and was really fast (it was also one of the first Apple based machines that could run linux, and I tried RedHat on it. Not too stable at that time). But when I first tried a Windows machine I was amazed at the speed of the multitasking. Apple always claimed to have 'true' multitasking, but the machine was unresponsive to other tasks almost 90% of the time, taking literally seconds to share the CPU. And multiple mouse buttons! What shortcuts you could use!
Being a previous mac owner, it's funny sometimes to watch the offense taken by mac users defending their OS. Macs definitely have their share of disadvantages, and small things like "no disk drive" and single button mice are often the biggest hurdle to people thinking about switching.
Yeah, but just because the dollar VALUE is relied upon, doesn't mean that everyone in the world is changing their paper currency for American paper currency. The idea of "relied-upon" is a market notion - a measure of economic stability. Intrinsically, it's the value and the backing, and not the actual pieces of paper.
While you may mock the foreigners, I still love Americans who come to Canada and get mad because they receive Canadian change when they pay for things....
P.S. can you throw in some totem pole seeds with that?
I completely disagree. I buy stuff from NCIX in Vancouver, and they've got a great feature on their website that lets you take a system package and then reconfigure it if you want to.
Their prices are already waaaay lower than someplace like Future Shop, and they also handily beat out all the local dealers. I have no experience with Dell, so maybe their prices are good, but with NCIX's system packages there is no "mix-and-match" parts - they have these systems ready to go. Configure them if you want. I was on there the other day and to put together a bare bones, 850 Duron system was $400 CDN (minus monitor/keyboard). That's about $250 US!
It cost me less to get them to ship a samsung stick of ram (that's with an $11 CDN shipping charge) to where I live than it did to get it through local dealers.
Thus you have it all - prebuilt or configurability, good components that you want, and best of all cheap price. Oh, and they also have minimum 1 Year warranty (you can buy more). "Building" it yourself is definitely the way to go if you can find the right dealer.
Hence the purpose of archiving. Essentially, every time a web site is updated, it is a new publication (or an updated version of a previous publication). Think of it as a new book to be archived in a library. As long as Wayback Machine isn't altering or selling their archived information, they are essentially acting as a public library.
Would you sue a public library for having a copy of a novel you wrote, even though they didn't ask?
Uh, I think KillerCow is the only person here who apparently understands the difference between "publicly available" and "copyright". These are not exclusive of each other - just because something is public does not mean it's free for anyone to do whatever they want with. I can't go to the library and copy entire books - that is violation of the copyright act. Yet I can go and read them because they are publicly available.
Same with magazines - I can buy one and read it because it is published (published comes from same root as public, I'd bet). But that doesn't give me the right to go reprint articles and hand them out. So no, the magazine company can't opt out of you archiving in your bathroom, but they CAN hit you with a lawsuit if you try to reprint them. That's why libraries aren't sued for archiving books - they aren't reprinting them, just storing them.
The issue here is whether the Machine is reprinting stuff or not. Is it? If the content is exactly the same, is it a reprint or just a stored copy? If I made something publicly available, I don't see why someone can't archive it - just as long as they don't reprint it. So if they're not the exact same bits and bytes that I made, it's a violation. But if it is.....
Very interesting distinction.
Slashdot Mirror
Until they get 3D pr0n, the volume of anything but pr0n on the web will remain well under 1%.
Hmm... I should clear up that last sentence of mine. It wasn't meant to be sarcastic - it seemed like a logical step for Bush to ask his own citizens to keep an eye out. I was not condemning the move, just surprised that the original poster hadn't heard of it and seemed offended by the suggestion...
I thought the blame rested with penis enlargement devices, Work From Home companies and the American Dream... If the culture wasn't so obsessed with consumerism, these people wouldn't exist to recreate the worst (and only?) aspects of it.
P.S. CowboyNeal is innocent
While I can't remember much about it, it was called operation TIPS.... here's the first article I found on it:
http://www.motherjones.com/web_exclusives/features /news/tips.html
Are you really surprised that Bush would call for something like that?
Last summer I worked for a computer modeller who took vast amounts of matrix data and performed hundreds of operations on it. The application was to calculate crustal rebound from glacial retreat based on dozens of lithospheric parameters, and the data was anywhere from a 100km to 100m cell resolution.
Because the jobs took so long, I experimented with it in between jobs. I took a subset of the program, (two routines + main) and rewrote it in C and Perl and ran it on an UltraSparc 10. C was about 1.5 times slower and Perl was 1.65 times slower.
When you're talking 24 hour jobs, a 33% (from C to Fortran) speed gain is measured in hours. On a shared supercomputing facilitie, all the other eggheads appreciate it if you take the least amount of time possible!
P.S. > Fortran is simple to learn. Takes about 3 days if you know C. That being said, I did spend 2 full days debugging a program only to discover that my vast overflow errors were because I had tab characters at the start of my line instead of 5 space characters!
*cough* Alt-F4 *cough* *cough*
Employer: Can I see some examples of your writing?
Chris: Uh...no.
Employer: Why?
Chris: Well someone just recently told me that arrogance was bad, and you shouldn't use sentences like Fun, huh? and Silly, silly, silly..., and (Hell, overwrite the heap. Who's gonna care?)
Employer: Hmm...I can see now why you're a freelancer.
My House, Universe of Highly Probable Parallels: In a recent twist on the discovery of a way of hijacking your MS Windows computer using simple API calls, it was revealed today that there is an undocumented API function called RIAATakeOverComputer() that can also be used to fully exploit Windows. Microsoft VP Jim Allchin could not be reached for comment as he was in security talks with RIAA executives...
So what are the issues? It's nice to see both sides being blasted here ;), but it's pretty difficult to judge who is screwing who. The only thing I got from that newspost was that ICANN instituted a price cap. Okaaayyy... so. What else, fellas?
Whether they expected the attack or not, you can be sure that their spin doctors will play this in every way to make the hackers look the children & fools. It's the second salvo in what is sure to be a war against arrogance!
Somehow I doubt this would extend to anyone else who found their stuff on the internet. If I program something and there are copies of it out there, can I bring them down? What if I program an internet agent that moves from place to place? Can it take down people's computers because it's residing there? What a ridiculous bunch of crap! Why don't they just authorize Mafia-style hits and save the bandwidth?
Either that was a joke about Americans in general, or you need to look up "right-wing" in the dictionary....
Yes! Reverse brain drain! But we'll only take the Democrats, they're the only ones that meet our strict politeness standards.
Yes, that would be great. Then all those extremely intelligent Windows users out there can manage their own linux systems and can leave all their unconfigured daemons running, for a well secured internet.
Interestingly, Apple squashed a good chance at cheap hardware when they bought back all the companies that were using the license to produce clones. I started with a Mac Plus, moved on to a IIvi and finally a PowerPC. (I got to OS 8). The PowerPC was $800 when I bought it, w/o monitor, and was really fast (it was also one of the first Apple based machines that could run linux, and I tried RedHat on it. Not too stable at that time). But when I first tried a Windows machine I was amazed at the speed of the multitasking. Apple always claimed to have 'true' multitasking, but the machine was unresponsive to other tasks almost 90% of the time, taking literally seconds to share the CPU. And multiple mouse buttons! What shortcuts you could use!
Being a previous mac owner, it's funny sometimes to watch the offense taken by mac users defending their OS. Macs definitely have their share of disadvantages, and small things like "no disk drive" and single button mice are often the biggest hurdle to people thinking about switching.
Yeah, but just because the dollar VALUE is relied upon, doesn't mean that everyone in the world is changing their paper currency for American paper currency. The idea of "relied-upon" is a market notion - a measure of economic stability. Intrinsically, it's the value and the backing, and not the actual pieces of paper.
P.S. can you throw in some totem pole seeds with that?
Their prices are already waaaay lower than someplace like Future Shop, and they also handily beat out all the local dealers. I have no experience with Dell, so maybe their prices are good, but with NCIX's system packages there is no "mix-and-match" parts - they have these systems ready to go. Configure them if you want. I was on there the other day and to put together a bare bones, 850 Duron system was $400 CDN (minus monitor/keyboard). That's about $250 US!
It cost me less to get them to ship a samsung stick of ram (that's with an $11 CDN shipping charge) to where I live than it did to get it through local dealers.
Thus you have it all - prebuilt or configurability, good components that you want, and best of all cheap price. Oh, and they also have minimum 1 Year warranty (you can buy more). "Building" it yourself is definitely the way to go if you can find the right dealer.
Would you sue a public library for having a copy of a novel you wrote, even though they didn't ask?
Same with magazines - I can buy one and read it because it is published (published comes from same root as public, I'd bet). But that doesn't give me the right to go reprint articles and hand them out. So no, the magazine company can't opt out of you archiving in your bathroom, but they CAN hit you with a lawsuit if you try to reprint them. That's why libraries aren't sued for archiving books - they aren't reprinting them, just storing them.
The issue here is whether the Machine is reprinting stuff or not. Is it? If the content is exactly the same, is it a reprint or just a stored copy? If I made something publicly available, I don't see why someone can't archive it - just as long as they don't reprint it. So if they're not the exact same bits and bytes that I made, it's a violation. But if it is..... Very interesting distinction.