Hardly a day goes by that there isn't a story on/. about some company using the legal system as a legal extortion scheme. This sounds like a step in the right direction, although I want it to cover any lawsuit, not just open source libality. If companies knew that they had a real fight comming, they might not be so sue happy. I'd like to see a $300,000 policy which covers just the litigation costs (not damages if you lose) and has about a $5-10,000 deductible. Oh, and I want the premium to be about $250/year. Why don't organizaions like the FSF or the EFF try to offer a service like this to their members?
Just a side note, but/. must not be too strapped for cash, because when I tried renewing my slashdot subscription, the submit failed. So I dutifully mailed the error message to subscriptions@slashdot.org and asked them what was up. Well, its been over a month, and I still haven't heard from them. Go figure.
good idea -- fine the zombies
on
Gates on Spam
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· Score: 1
Instead of making people pay for email, why don't we just fine the people who are running a compromized open-relay? It would be like a traffic ticket. You wouldn't catch everybody, but people might think twice before opening an attachment, if they knew it could cost them $200. It might not cure the spam problem, but I sure like the idea.
But it not just the folks at the FSF who aren't fond of the new license. OpenBSD is apparently not going to include anything licensed under the APL 2.0. Mr. de Raadt says...
The new apache license is not acceptable. Code written under that
new license will never go into our tree.
Look, I am quite frankly getting sick and tired of this. It is time
for the user community to tell these software developers who have
gotten themselves involved with lawyers to stop it. They are NOT
making their software better, they are NOT protecting anyone, and
they we NOT making their software any more free when they add new
terms.
As of this moment in time, therefore, it looks like the httpd in
OpenBSD has now become a fork. It will continue to be managed
under the existing license.
Hair-dryers? How many minutes a day are you exposed to a hair-dryer? I think the slashdot crowd needs more information on what levels of magnetic fields are given off by their 21" CRT.
I'm not suggesting that we do away with basic arithmetic or variable assignment. You can't do that and still have a programming language.
If you want to see how to program without variable assignments, you might want to check into functional programming languages like haskell,ML, or Erlang and declarative languages like prolog or mercury. And, although not really a programming language, you don't do much arithmetic in hardware description languages like verilog.
Yes, there are awards for creators of free software. Look for an announcement of the 2003 winner of the "FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software" at FOSDEM, Feb 21-22.
...If programming is so complex, then why don't we try something new. You want a program without state? Try Haskell. You want to be able to prove something about your program? Try ML. But don't despair, I think the reason for crummy software is that it hasn't been around for that long. Civil engineers have had the hindsight of building roads, and aqueducts, and buildings for thousands of years. Software been around for what, 2 generations?
The big gorillas have long ago figured out it is not smart to sue each other over patents which aren't vital to their core business. So instead, they just cross-license each other's patent pools. When this is prohibited by anti-trust type laws, then it still occurs, but just on a wink-wink nod-nod basis. So that's why most patent lawsuits are of the David v. Goliath variety. Either tiny David wants a piece of Goliaths very large pie, or Goliath wants to crush any would-be upstart competitors.
Now the burden of proof is on TVi, to prove that they invented it and the patent is valid.
Close. But the courts assume that the patent is valid, since, of course, it was granted by the PTO. All TVi has to do is show that the MS autoplay feature is described in the patent claims. Microsoft probably doesn't dispute this, since they are apparently trying to bust the patent. So now the burden of proof has shifted MS to show that the patent is bogus.
OK, 4% of the apparent mass of the universe is normal baryonic stuff (i.e. protons, neutrons, etc.) Can anyone give a back-of-the-envelope calculation to the equivalent amount of mass it would take to create the gravity produced by all of the photons in the universe? Stated another way, of all the mass-energy in the universe, what percent is photons?
Excellent point. I'd wager that the same people who whine about ANKOS are also the ones who pooh-pooh Godel, Escher, Bach. They may not contain a college education between their pages, but they're both interesting reads.
How come we don't have more white-hat viruses? You know, the kind that once it infects a machine, it applies a patch and installs a firewall. In fact it almost seems like MS should be writing these viruses as soon as a vunerability is discovered.
Subjective? I think we can all agree that the best job is Cheif Hammock Tester, in charge of long-term reliability studies. With an emphasis on finding out how those hammocks handle the Costa Rica beach environment.
Here's my checklist to determine whether or not you should buy the book.
Do not buy if any of the following apply to you...
You have a Ph.D. in Computer Science, Mathematics, or Physics.
You're Masters Thesis was about cellular automata.
You've lived a sheltered life and are likely to be deeply and personally offended by a shamless self promoter.
For everyone else, if you've got any interest in computers and math, I'd say you wouldn't consider it a waste of time. In fact, I'd question your geek quotient if you could read the book and resist the urge to sit down and write some of your own programs to experiment with celluar automata.
...when you can contribute to a project like Verified-L4. Where they're applying formal verification to a 2nd generation microkernel. I'd say that pretty much covers the territory from bare-metal up throught theoretical math.
Wow. After a little googling, I found a Peter Henderson, who wrote a paper...
Peter Henderson. Purely functional operating systems. In J. Darlington, P. Henderson, and D. A. Turner, editors, Functional programming and its applications, pages 177--192. Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Which seems to cited by a lot of other papers, although I can't seem to find out more about it.
I also found this list and this thread interesting. And there's also a paper on an OS written in ML
Interesting. So the next step would be to have one-time port knock sequences
a-la one-time passwords (to defeat adversaries who are grabbing a copy of
all your packets). But it seems like there is a race condition between the delay
after the knock and the actual connection. Anyone have a solution to this?
Slashdot Mirror
Hardly a day goes by that there isn't a story on /. about some company using the legal system as a legal extortion scheme. This sounds like a step in the right direction, although I want it to cover any lawsuit, not just open source libality. If companies knew that they had a real fight comming, they might not be so sue happy. I'd like to see a $300,000 policy which covers just the litigation costs (not damages if you lose) and has about a $5-10,000 deductible. Oh, and I want the premium to be about $250/year. Why don't organizaions like the FSF or the EFF try to offer a service like this to their members?
Just a side note, but /. must not be too strapped for cash, because when I tried renewing my slashdot subscription, the submit failed. So I dutifully mailed the error message to subscriptions@slashdot.org and asked them what was up. Well, its been over a month, and I still haven't heard from them. Go figure.
Instead of making people pay for email, why don't we just fine the people who are running a compromized open-relay? It would be like a traffic ticket. You wouldn't catch everybody, but people might think twice before opening an attachment, if they knew it could cost them $200. It might not cure the spam problem, but I sure like the idea.
And for those looking for the true minimalist window manager (and not some fancy graphical pretender), they should look at ratpoison.
IBM doesn't needs Sun's help/permission. Why don't they start to contribute to the already existing free java stuff like gjc and GNU Classpath?
Hair-dryers? How many minutes a day are you exposed to a hair-dryer? I think the slashdot crowd needs more information on what levels of magnetic fields are given off by their 21" CRT.
Yes. Mr. Jones needs to read up on why governments actually prefer open source.
Yes, there are awards for creators of free software. Look for an announcement of the 2003 winner of the "FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software" at FOSDEM, Feb 21-22.
...If programming is so complex, then why don't we try something new. You want a program without state? Try Haskell. You want to be able to prove something about your program? Try ML. But don't despair, I think the reason for crummy software is that it hasn't been around for that long. Civil engineers have had the hindsight of building roads, and aqueducts, and buildings for thousands of years. Software been around for what, 2 generations?
Shouldn't the slot car go slower whith the higher load average?
The big gorillas have long ago figured out it is not smart to sue each other over patents which aren't vital to their core business. So instead, they just cross-license each other's patent pools. When this is prohibited by anti-trust type laws, then it still occurs, but just on a wink-wink nod-nod basis. So that's why most patent lawsuits are of the David v. Goliath variety. Either tiny David wants a piece of Goliaths very large pie, or Goliath wants to crush any would-be upstart competitors.
OK, 4% of the apparent mass of the universe is normal baryonic stuff (i.e. protons, neutrons, etc.) Can anyone give a back-of-the-envelope calculation to the equivalent amount of mass it would take to create the gravity produced by all of the photons in the universe? Stated another way, of all the mass-energy in the universe, what percent is photons?
Excellent point. I'd wager that the same people who whine about ANKOS are also the ones who pooh-pooh Godel, Escher, Bach. They may not contain a college education between their pages, but they're both interesting reads.
How come we don't have more white-hat viruses? You know, the kind that once it infects a machine, it applies a patch and installs a firewall. In fact it almost seems like MS should be writing these viruses as soon as a vunerability is discovered.
Subjective? I think we can all agree that the best job is Cheif Hammock Tester, in charge of long-term reliability studies. With an emphasis on finding out how those hammocks handle the Costa Rica beach environment.
Do not buy if any of the following apply to you...
- You have a Ph.D. in Computer Science, Mathematics, or Physics.
- You're Masters Thesis was about cellular automata.
- You've lived a sheltered life and are likely to be deeply and personally offended by a shamless self promoter.
For everyone else, if you've got any interest in computers and math, I'd say you wouldn't consider it a waste of time. In fact, I'd question your geek quotient if you could read the book and resist the urge to sit down and write some of your own programs to experiment with celluar automata.Real men go to the beach and grab a bucket of sand which they refine into silicon.
...when you can contribute to a project like Verified-L4. Where they're applying formal verification to a 2nd generation microkernel. I'd say that pretty much covers the territory from bare-metal up throught theoretical math.
Interesting. So the next step would be to have one-time port knock sequences a-la one-time passwords (to defeat adversaries who are grabbing a copy of all your packets). But it seems like there is a race condition between the delay after the knock and the actual connection. Anyone have a solution to this?