fight until death instead of surrender when a few thousand armed Nazis invade your capital city.
A few *thousand*? Better bring more than that if you plan on taking us on. Only France falls to that weak a force. Hell, the Polish put up a better defense than you did, even though most of their army got confused when the Germans put them in a round room and told them to piss in the corner.
Sad thing is, last time I was in Paris, the locals heard some guy with a German accent and started running.
Oh, you want bravery against the Germans, go meet the Russians. France should have had the glory of a Stalingrad.
You pathetic Americans need a real war IN YOUR OWN FUCKING COUNTRY again.
You're welcome to come try. Notice I don't see any takers. You want pathetic? We're more willing to defend you than you are to defend yourselves. We're the only reason your last post wasn't auf Deutsch.
BTW, wasn't Texas (the home of the super-brave cowboys) among the states that LOST the American civil war? So I guess I can call them surrender monkeys then?
Among being the key word. Texas didn't have much of a population then. But they still whipped some Mexican ass on their own. And the US was the ones who beat them - now, Texas could take Frogland on their own. And hey, I'm glad you candyasses finally got used to that "surrender monkey" nickname. You should try fighting back next time.
by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 21, @08:57PM
Anyone surprised a Frog surrender monkey posted as an AC?
In the context of whether the headline and summary of the original slashdot article is or is not correct (i.e., whether this is a patent on web advertsing), then what I said is correct...I only read the first claim, nothing else. It may well be a method of selling advertising. But it is not a claim on web advertising.
Sure as hell hope you are a little more thorough on the job, but even from the first claim you were wrong. Oh, and trusting slashdot headlines...not a good idea. Given your user ID, you've been here long enough to know *that* for sure.
I have read the abstract, and everyone who has their nipples in a twist should actually read the abstract. He's not patenting web advertising per se, but advertising relating to bids in auctions.
I love this shit. So far, we've had three types of posts:
1. They're patenting banner ads! Bastards! So much prior art!
2. You dipshit, read the article! They're not patenting banner ads, only ads relating to auctions. Sheesh, the morons on this site. But this is still prior-art-ed by ebay...
3. Jesus, everyone on here lacks reading comprehension skills. The auction is FOR the advertising. Now who should be reading the damned article, moron?
The truly sad thing is that there have been about 30 types of each post so far. People, please, READ the article...then, if it's complicated, READ IT AGAIN. Then, read the posts above yours to make sure you aren't saying the same goddamned thing as 25 other people.
If you think losing your job to a foreigner with an H1B is nothing to get upset over - try doing it yourself sometime.
I think that's the point - I wouldn't look at it any differently than losing my job to an American, as I'm not an uber-nationalist or racist. I work with many people with H1B's, and I don't feel threatened by them. I don't want to lose my job to someone else, but if I do, it's likely because I'm underskilled or overpaid, and I'm not the type of person to look for someone to blame for my problems.
Most people in this thread are missing the point. It's not about racism. It's not about losing our jobs to the "damn foreigners". It's about protecting private citizens from corporate greed. That's one of our government's jobs, and they're sucking at it.
Yeah, I want to see where the Constitution says that part of its job is to keep "damned foreigners" from taking our jobs. OK, so it's not racism, it's xenophobia. Good job. And by the way, whose job is it to protect the foreigners from angry and irrational private citizens?
The justifications for these arguments are laughable, because it's the same crap the Turks face in Germany (the Gastarbeiter), and the Jews faced everywhere they've ever been. "It's not that we hate you - we just don't want you taking our jobs." Right. Same old bullshit.
It doesn't matter where the people come from - my job is to make sure I'm simply better-qualified than them. And that's all there is to it. If you can't, it may be time to go back to ITT Tech and update your meager skills.
bye bye US jobs and hello nice fat contract for Sun India.
I don't see this as being so evil. I have always been of the opinion that if someone else (or a machine) can do your job better and cheaper, have fun at the unemployment line. If this is the case, then, sorry for the unemployed, but I doubt they would have taken a pay cut. Hell, they're lucky that Sun took so long to figure out that there are a lot of highly trained Indian coders.
Then again, maybe Sun will regret firing such a huge experience base. That may be.
I will say one thing - I don't hear people complaining about when overpaid middle-management types get canned for a new batch of college grads (from this country). I hope we're not indicating that we're bitter about foreigners taking American jobs? Because that would be a bit silly.
"18. SCO is the present owner of all software code and licensing rights to System V Technology."
Pretty much summarises what they are saying.
Ah, but a distinction - it seems the SCO people are willfully blurring the patent/copyright issue. Yes, they have patents on Unix. No, it doesn't extend to EVERYTHING about Unix. And I bet they don't have a patent, say, System V startup script formats.
At this point, they only have copyright, which they accidentally (or incompetently, let's not assume anything) allude to when they say they own the System V "software code." Which is exactly right - and when Linux implemented System V style startup scripts, they did it cleanroom, without access to the code. At that point, I believe their System V argument goes byebye, because Linux clearly didn't break copyright.
So now it will come down to whether IBM improperly used knowledge from the Unix tech they licensed to improve their own Unix flavors, and that this then got leaked into Linux. Based on how vague and, ah, ambitious the original brief was, I imagine this is a go-for-broke fishing expedition.
There is a fundamental distinction between programmatically scraping someone else's site and posting it as your own and an individual drawing down the website via a browser: fair use.
To illustrate, it is fair use for me to go to the library and photocopy an article out of a journal and use it as source material for a paper. It is NOT fair use for me to photocopy the article and put it in my own magazine, publishing it as if it was mine, copyright and all.
First, as already mentioned, airline fares aren't copyrightable (common facts clause in copyright code, yadda yadda). So that's out the window. Now we have to ask ourselves if they are in some other way violating the law (trade secrets or whatnot).
Consider a non-internet example. If these guys are breaking copyright, then so is every store that runs a newspaper ad with a competitor's price. Does it matter if the scraping is done by bot or by hand? Am I in violation if I sit there and write the prices down? No, of course not, because when it is published it becomes a fact, which isn't protected.
For it to be a violation of ANYTHING, it has to not be commonly known - hence, sites that published Best Buy's black friday prices before they were published got in trouble (I think it was best buy). But once you publish it, you can't claim secrecy.
Ultimately, this will not have to do with copyright law, but whether their no-scraping user agreement is enforceable. We shall see.
First, a fundamental problem: There IS NO COMMUNICATION between your mail client and a sender. Therefore, you have no way of submitting the hash problem TO the sender, he can only return an answer. Therefore, if this even happens, it HAS to be server-based. Re-read the site you quoted, nowhere do they talk about mail clients. There's a reason.
I wasn't thinking of the cost to the SMTP server but of the human cost of spam - wasted time in deleting it and the fact that people are turned off email altogether because of it. This, IMHO, is a much more serious problem than wasted bandwidth.
What, you think bandwidth pays for itself? So eventually your ISP costs go up, not so good. Besides, it's easier to stop spam at the choke point (server) than trying to track it down later. And for people paying to d/l spam on, say, a mobile device, having to d/l it IS the problem.
Also, note that if payment for messages (whether real cash or hash cash) becomes widely adopted, spam will stop because there won't be any money in it any longer. So the problem of costs to the ISP is also dealt with.
Yes, but GETTING it widely adopted is the big problem here. You have to mandate it, probably, and it's easier to get webmasters to switch than, say, my mom, who has no idea what a mail client is. And, for ISP's, the problem is in the voluntary-adoption period. Who takes the hit first? Who starts off with this, when it will increase CPU load even for the sender, while all the spammers are still out there? And how will you get wide-scale participation? It's all well and good to talk about this stuff, but there has to be some method of implementation, where you get from here to total adoption. And voluntary adoption wouldn't work, actually, because the sender's client probably won't understand what the receiving server wants when it asks for the hash, unless they also upgraded to the hash deal. So, in the voluntary phase, do you drop these emails? Do you let them through, defeating the point?
The recipient just has to look at the message body, the To: header and the postage, and verify that the postage is a correct answer (which can be done quickly).
I can look at the header and the body NOW and tell it's spam. Really, I didn't think it was ACTUALLY president Mugabe trying to send me money when I got that email. If you have to d/l the message, look at the message, and look at the header, then there is no advantage over the status quo.
The most popular free mail clients could start including hash-cash postage with each sent message, and then in a couple of years' time start to drop incoming messages that don't have postage paid.
By that point the damage is done to the ISP, and besides, your email client doesn't communicate with the spammer - your ISP's SMTP server does. The site you cite (ha!) mentions this. So you have to do it at the server level.
There is one problem tho - Unless I'm missing something, the way it works is a possible "sender" requests to send an email. The server then sends him a hash problem. But, then they BOTH have to generate the answer (because the server has to have something to compare to). So, the server has just as much work load as the sender.
For spam, that's OK - it has the end result of stopping spam IF this plan becomes MANDATORY. However, if it's backward-compatible, it will take spammers a while to catch on, at which point some poor ISP doesn't have the processing power to do all the computations, and they quit doing the hash. So it almost has to be mandatory, to ensure that everyone takes the hit equally.
Now, this has a further problem. Even if it stops spam completely, can you say DDoS? All I have to do is write a virus or whatever that keeps emailing a target server from wherever. In fact, it might not even have to be distributed - what if I keep requesting to send an email, but never calculate the hash? Does the server calculte the "answer" before I submit it? If so, I can crash a big mail server with my desktop. If not, I'll distribute it, same effect.
I think this is a great idea, but it will need a lot of work before it becomes effective. If I can figure out how to exploit it in 2 minutes (and I ain't an 3!33t h4x0r, either), it will be quickly rendered ineffective.
You have to have no sense of irony at all (or outrage) to actually buy a pop-up blocker from the asshole who keep spamming you. Might as well buy anti-spam software from a popup.
Of course if there actually _are_ aliens out there and they're close enough for us to communicate with in a reasonable timescale, they might be able to tell us how to solve all those problems and many more. Not to mention that finding a sentient alien species would have a far greater impact on humanity than curing a few diseases.
Every star within even remote communication distance has been checked for the slightlest possibility of life. Doesn't exist. So best case scenario is we find one 1000 light years away. Great. So ask them all your insightful questions, and, after they learn English (or whatever you ask them in), they'll get back to you. See you in a few millennia.
I mean, shit, even if there were intelligent life on alpha centauri, it would take an 8-year turnaround...and there isn't life there.
I'm all for optimism and all, but at some point ya have to actually think about this shit. Chances of finding life is slim, chances of knowing it when you find it is slimmer, chances of them explaining all of life's mysteries to us is nonexistent. So yeah, I think Folding@home is a helluva lot better as a project, because SETI isn't anything but a replacement religion for those who like believing in benevolent, omniscient aliens rather than a God.
I know there are a few entities that would pay for unused cycles, but I think they are few and far between. I will bet that the numbers of potential "sellers" of cycles will far outstrip the buyers very quickly.
So, let me see if as a fourth-year pre-law undergrad I can translate this from legalese into something resembling English...
As a 4th-year pre-law undergrad, you have as much legal training as my cat. And the last time I took my cat's legal advice, I ended up pleading manslaughter to a parking ticket.
"SCO is also party to the GPL, which invalidates their patent portfolio for any of their patents that happen to have been used in a Linux system that they distributed. Under the GPL terms, if you distribute your patented practice in GPL software, you must grant a license to everyone to make use of that patent in any GPL software, for any field of use."
Maybe. But, from their complaint, it seems that what they're complaining about is the possibility that IBM may GPL the AIX code in the future. Unless I misread the complaint, IBM hasn't done that yet, meaning no AIX in Linux, meaning no AIX released by SCO.
That would mean two things: 1) Linux distros aren't in danger if they don't accept IBM's unwitting potential AIX trojan, and 2) SCO hasn't unwittingly GPL'd their own patents.
Am I missing something? Has AIX/Monterey code been incorporated into Linux distros already? Because if SCO does shoot themselves in the foot by GPLing themselves out of a lawsuit, that would be pretty damned funny.
Its like any other product! If you are only going to make a half-assed attempt then you may as well not bother.
Yes and no. I tbink the guy makes a compelling argument that a small shop can do a good job on a tightly written, possibly smallish, well-executed game. That won't work here. The point is that 1), marketing MMORPG's is quite different than marketing other shrink-wrap games, and 2) You can't make a small MMORPG at all (obviously).
Surely the brightest minds in game development dont need someone standing up there telling them that massive online multiplayer games aren't as easy as single player ones?!
No, but the dumbest game company exec in charge of development sure as hell does. Like he says, even the best MMORPG's have gotten a lot of core issues wrong at the start. Most of them suck at the beginning and only get better after constant tweaking, hopefully with consideration of player input. I think that says that game companies don't know how to make a MMORPG by ship date. The best ones are from the companies that are responsive enough to make the game better, and to care enough to fix it, after the ship date.
Life here on Earth exists in some VERY harsh environments.
True - but can life originate in such an environment? I believe life at least started in a more hospitable temperature/environment, then spread out to these tougher areas. It's kind of like how your engine runs in 4th gear, but you can't start it there, or it'll stall. Life can tolerate tough conditions once it gets a head start, but that might be asking a bit to start there.
Of course, given what little we know of the early days of life...?
``At least, according to the RIAA, CD sales around Cornell should now skyrocket''
Why? Is there going to be a sudden rise in the amount of cash in college students' bank accounts when this policy takes effect?
No, it's a simple supply and demand argument. Students before had an alternative, now they won't. Students DO have the money for CD's, they just often spend it on other things because they can theoretically get the music for free. Under Cornell's plan, they'll theoretically less. So maybe a few more CD's get bought and a little less beer. Personally, I think it's bullshit, but theoretically it could happen, if the bandwidth restriction were tight enough.
Now it has been a while since I've worked in a college town, but I didn't exactly see the local businesses lowering their prices to accomodate the relative lack of buying power that many (if not most) college students have.
You kidding? We had local businesses give a ton of student discounts. I have seen few businesses that don't. And ultimately, that's because we're poor, relatively.
Read the article again. The ~4000 km value is the value used to calculate the needed strength of the material, normalized to earth surface gravity. The actual height of the wire, just to reach geosynchronous orbit, is about 35,000 km.
Doh! . My bad. Earth's circumference is about 40,000 km, so it's almost once.
The height of a space elevator would be greater than the circumference of Earth. If it fell, it would wrap itself around the planet. Anything or anyone near the equator would be in jeopardy.
The article sez a height of 4000km. That's about 2500 miles, or roughly the width of the US. I'm not saying I want that falling on my house, but it's a far cry from wrapping itself around the world.
Second, the earth has an atmosphere (really! I swear!;>). Assuming the thing has a center of gravity roughly near the geosynchronus orbit point, when it snaps the part above the break will go flying off, never to return. The bottom will fall. However, it's a ribbon, therefore having a high surface area/volume ratio. Three things effectively determine whether a meteorite burns up before it hits the ground - density, SA/V ratio, and vaporization temperature of the material (roughly). Nanotubes should be less thermally stable than rock, it's more dense (meaning it has a higher terminal velocity for a given shape/size, and spends less time in the atmosphere "burning", though granted at a higher temperature), and they have an incredible SA/V ratio.
Long story short, I expect that most of it will burn up long before it hits the ground. It's far lower TV also means it will be moving very slowly when it hits, and its size should mean that it will not hit all at once, dissipating its energy somewhat gradually.
Thats a pretty good idea. I would still think the/. effect would be better suppressed if slashdot would mirror stories, especially if its running off of somebody's mother's DSL connection.
Nah. How often is the site slashdotted before some karmawhore has pre-emptively de-slashdotted the site sometime in the first 5 posts? Pretty much always? So the/. effect doesn't really affect us that much - only the poor non-/. bastards trying to reach a site.
And this new deal is lame. Other than beating the/. effect, (which I obviously believe to be minimal), what do you get? You get to self-edit the site? Yeah, that's great - you can see firsthand just how half-assed half these editors are by which stories make it through and which don't. You can see *just how* outdated the site is from lag. And let me guess - they'll now make absolutely NO effort to post stories in a timely fashion, in an effort to drum up more "subscriptions." Sounds like a mob protection racket.
I'd even go so far as to maybe allow a subscriber another +1 bonus to karma, or maybe allow a subscriber a higher karma cap, or even let a subscribers post get modded to +6
Yep. Just in case the moderation system didn't quite suck enough already with people modding by opinion. Send Taco $10, get a permanant +2 - now *that* is the ultimate in karmawhoring! Yay!
All in all, I would have had more respect for a plea of, "I have no bandwidth, this site is about to/. ITSELF." That would have gotten me to cough up some ca$h. But don't give me this "pay money to get avoid having the version of the site that goes to shit" stuff. And how long until "subscriber-only" stories Taco?
Seems Lindows can't ship the portables it advertised
Yeah, just after the story was posted on slashdot and all you freaks sprinted (well, waddled) to your boxen to order a shiny new Lindows laptop. Except you slashdotted their frikkin supply chain. Damn nice job.
Just wondering, but is there anything that *can't* be slashdotted? Well, anything that doesn't require social skills, anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
A few *thousand*? Better bring more than that if you plan on taking us on. Only France falls to that weak a force. Hell, the Polish put up a better defense than you did, even though most of their army got confused when the Germans put them in a round room and told them to piss in the corner.
Sad thing is, last time I was in Paris, the locals heard some guy with a German accent and started running.
Oh, you want bravery against the Germans, go meet the Russians. France should have had the glory of a Stalingrad.
You pathetic Americans need a real war IN YOUR OWN FUCKING COUNTRY again.
You're welcome to come try. Notice I don't see any takers. You want pathetic? We're more willing to defend you than you are to defend yourselves. We're the only reason your last post wasn't auf Deutsch.
BTW, wasn't Texas (the home of the super-brave cowboys) among the states that LOST the American civil war? So I guess I can call them surrender monkeys then?
Among being the key word. Texas didn't have much of a population then. But they still whipped some Mexican ass on their own. And the US was the ones who beat them - now, Texas could take Frogland on their own. And hey, I'm glad you candyasses finally got used to that "surrender monkey" nickname. You should try fighting back next time.
by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 21, @08:57PM
Anyone surprised a Frog surrender monkey posted as an AC?
Sure as hell hope you are a little more thorough on the job, but even from the first claim you were wrong. Oh, and trusting slashdot headlines...not a good idea. Given your user ID, you've been here long enough to know *that* for sure.
I love this shit. So far, we've had three types of posts:
1. They're patenting banner ads! Bastards! So much prior art!
2. You dipshit, read the article! They're not patenting banner ads, only ads relating to auctions. Sheesh, the morons on this site. But this is still prior-art-ed by ebay...
3. Jesus, everyone on here lacks reading comprehension skills. The auction is FOR the advertising. Now who should be reading the damned article, moron?
The truly sad thing is that there have been about 30 types of each post so far. People, please, READ the article...then, if it's complicated, READ IT AGAIN. Then, read the posts above yours to make sure you aren't saying the same goddamned thing as 25 other people.
Oh, and moderators? Stop modding WRONG SHIT up!
Please God, let this be a troll, or we really ARE fucked.
Pre-emptive Disclaimer: Yes, I know this will put informative sites with low revenue out of business. It's a joke.
I think that's the point - I wouldn't look at it any differently than losing my job to an American, as I'm not an uber-nationalist or racist. I work with many people with H1B's, and I don't feel threatened by them. I don't want to lose my job to someone else, but if I do, it's likely because I'm underskilled or overpaid, and I'm not the type of person to look for someone to blame for my problems.
Most people in this thread are missing the point. It's not about racism. It's not about losing our jobs to the "damn foreigners". It's about protecting private citizens from corporate greed. That's one of our government's jobs, and they're sucking at it.
Yeah, I want to see where the Constitution says that part of its job is to keep "damned foreigners" from taking our jobs. OK, so it's not racism, it's xenophobia. Good job. And by the way, whose job is it to protect the foreigners from angry and irrational private citizens?
The justifications for these arguments are laughable, because it's the same crap the Turks face in Germany (the Gastarbeiter), and the Jews faced everywhere they've ever been. "It's not that we hate you - we just don't want you taking our jobs." Right. Same old bullshit.
It doesn't matter where the people come from - my job is to make sure I'm simply better-qualified than them. And that's all there is to it. If you can't, it may be time to go back to ITT Tech and update your meager skills.
I don't see this as being so evil. I have always been of the opinion that if someone else (or a machine) can do your job better and cheaper, have fun at the unemployment line. If this is the case, then, sorry for the unemployed, but I doubt they would have taken a pay cut. Hell, they're lucky that Sun took so long to figure out that there are a lot of highly trained Indian coders.
Then again, maybe Sun will regret firing such a huge experience base. That may be.
I will say one thing - I don't hear people complaining about when overpaid middle-management types get canned for a new batch of college grads (from this country). I hope we're not indicating that we're bitter about foreigners taking American jobs? Because that would be a bit silly.
"18. SCO is the present owner of all software code and licensing rights to System V Technology."
Pretty much summarises what they are saying.
Ah, but a distinction - it seems the SCO people are willfully blurring the patent/copyright issue. Yes, they have patents on Unix. No, it doesn't extend to EVERYTHING about Unix. And I bet they don't have a patent, say, System V startup script formats.
At this point, they only have copyright, which they accidentally (or incompetently, let's not assume anything) allude to when they say they own the System V "software code." Which is exactly right - and when Linux implemented System V style startup scripts, they did it cleanroom, without access to the code. At that point, I believe their System V argument goes byebye, because Linux clearly didn't break copyright.
So now it will come down to whether IBM improperly used knowledge from the Unix tech they licensed to improve their own Unix flavors, and that this then got leaked into Linux. Based on how vague and, ah, ambitious the original brief was, I imagine this is a go-for-broke fishing expedition.
To illustrate, it is fair use for me to go to the library and photocopy an article out of a journal and use it as source material for a paper. It is NOT fair use for me to photocopy the article and put it in my own magazine, publishing it as if it was mine, copyright and all.
First, as already mentioned, airline fares aren't copyrightable (common facts clause in copyright code, yadda yadda). So that's out the window. Now we have to ask ourselves if they are in some other way violating the law (trade secrets or whatnot).
Consider a non-internet example. If these guys are breaking copyright, then so is every store that runs a newspaper ad with a competitor's price. Does it matter if the scraping is done by bot or by hand? Am I in violation if I sit there and write the prices down? No, of course not, because when it is published it becomes a fact, which isn't protected.
For it to be a violation of ANYTHING, it has to not be commonly known - hence, sites that published Best Buy's black friday prices before they were published got in trouble (I think it was best buy). But once you publish it, you can't claim secrecy.
Ultimately, this will not have to do with copyright law, but whether their no-scraping user agreement is enforceable. We shall see.
First, a fundamental problem: There IS NO COMMUNICATION between your mail client and a sender. Therefore, you have no way of submitting the hash problem TO the sender, he can only return an answer. Therefore, if this even happens, it HAS to be server-based. Re-read the site you quoted, nowhere do they talk about mail clients. There's a reason.
I wasn't thinking of the cost to the SMTP server but of the human cost of spam - wasted time in deleting it and the fact that people are turned off email altogether because of it. This, IMHO, is a much more serious problem than wasted bandwidth.
What, you think bandwidth pays for itself? So eventually your ISP costs go up, not so good. Besides, it's easier to stop spam at the choke point (server) than trying to track it down later. And for people paying to d/l spam on, say, a mobile device, having to d/l it IS the problem.
Also, note that if payment for messages (whether real cash or hash cash) becomes widely adopted, spam will stop because there won't be any money in it any longer. So the problem of costs to the ISP is also dealt with.
Yes, but GETTING it widely adopted is the big problem here. You have to mandate it, probably, and it's easier to get webmasters to switch than, say, my mom, who has no idea what a mail client is. And, for ISP's, the problem is in the voluntary-adoption period. Who takes the hit first? Who starts off with this, when it will increase CPU load even for the sender, while all the spammers are still out there? And how will you get wide-scale participation? It's all well and good to talk about this stuff, but there has to be some method of implementation, where you get from here to total adoption. And voluntary adoption wouldn't work, actually, because the sender's client probably won't understand what the receiving server wants when it asks for the hash, unless they also upgraded to the hash deal. So, in the voluntary phase, do you drop these emails? Do you let them through, defeating the point?
The recipient just has to look at the message body, the To: header and the postage, and verify that the postage is a correct answer (which can be done quickly).
I can look at the header and the body NOW and tell it's spam. Really, I didn't think it was ACTUALLY president Mugabe trying to send me money when I got that email. If you have to d/l the message, look at the message, and look at the header, then there is no advantage over the status quo.
By that point the damage is done to the ISP, and besides, your email client doesn't communicate with the spammer - your ISP's SMTP server does. The site you cite (ha!) mentions this. So you have to do it at the server level.
There is one problem tho - Unless I'm missing something, the way it works is a possible "sender" requests to send an email. The server then sends him a hash problem. But, then they BOTH have to generate the answer (because the server has to have something to compare to). So, the server has just as much work load as the sender.
For spam, that's OK - it has the end result of stopping spam IF this plan becomes MANDATORY. However, if it's backward-compatible, it will take spammers a while to catch on, at which point some poor ISP doesn't have the processing power to do all the computations, and they quit doing the hash. So it almost has to be mandatory, to ensure that everyone takes the hit equally.
Now, this has a further problem. Even if it stops spam completely, can you say DDoS? All I have to do is write a virus or whatever that keeps emailing a target server from wherever. In fact, it might not even have to be distributed - what if I keep requesting to send an email, but never calculate the hash? Does the server calculte the "answer" before I submit it? If so, I can crash a big mail server with my desktop. If not, I'll distribute it, same effect.
I think this is a great idea, but it will need a lot of work before it becomes effective. If I can figure out how to exploit it in 2 minutes (and I ain't an 3!33t h4x0r, either), it will be quickly rendered ineffective.
You have to have no sense of irony at all (or outrage) to actually buy a pop-up blocker from the asshole who keep spamming you. Might as well buy anti-spam software from a popup.
Every star within even remote communication distance has been checked for the slightlest possibility of life. Doesn't exist. So best case scenario is we find one 1000 light years away. Great. So ask them all your insightful questions, and, after they learn English (or whatever you ask them in), they'll get back to you. See you in a few millennia.
I mean, shit, even if there were intelligent life on alpha centauri, it would take an 8-year turnaround...and there isn't life there.
I'm all for optimism and all, but at some point ya have to actually think about this shit. Chances of finding life is slim, chances of knowing it when you find it is slimmer, chances of them explaining all of life's mysteries to us is nonexistent. So yeah, I think Folding@home is a helluva lot better as a project, because SETI isn't anything but a replacement religion for those who like believing in benevolent, omniscient aliens rather than a God.
I know there are a few entities that would pay for unused cycles, but I think they are few and far between. I will bet that the numbers of potential "sellers" of cycles will far outstrip the buyers very quickly.
As a 4th-year pre-law undergrad, you have as much legal training as my cat. And the last time I took my cat's legal advice, I ended up pleading manslaughter to a parking ticket.
Or how about Intel's shitty (for now) chip design based on a great (for then) 1970's design?
"SCO is also party to the GPL, which invalidates their patent portfolio for any of their patents that happen to have been used in a Linux system that they distributed. Under the GPL terms, if you distribute your patented practice in GPL software, you must grant a license to everyone to make use of that patent in any GPL software, for any field of use."
Maybe. But, from their complaint, it seems that what they're complaining about is the possibility that IBM may GPL the AIX code in the future. Unless I misread the complaint, IBM hasn't done that yet, meaning no AIX in Linux, meaning no AIX released by SCO.
That would mean two things: 1) Linux distros aren't in danger if they don't accept IBM's unwitting potential AIX trojan, and 2) SCO hasn't unwittingly GPL'd their own patents.
Am I missing something? Has AIX/Monterey code been incorporated into Linux distros already? Because if SCO does shoot themselves in the foot by GPLing themselves out of a lawsuit, that would be pretty damned funny.
Yes and no. I tbink the guy makes a compelling argument that a small shop can do a good job on a tightly written, possibly smallish, well-executed game. That won't work here. The point is that 1), marketing MMORPG's is quite different than marketing other shrink-wrap games, and 2) You can't make a small MMORPG at all (obviously).
Surely the brightest minds in game development dont need someone standing up there telling them that massive online multiplayer games aren't as easy as single player ones?!
No, but the dumbest game company exec in charge of development sure as hell does. Like he says, even the best MMORPG's have gotten a lot of core issues wrong at the start. Most of them suck at the beginning and only get better after constant tweaking, hopefully with consideration of player input. I think that says that game companies don't know how to make a MMORPG by ship date. The best ones are from the companies that are responsive enough to make the game better, and to care enough to fix it, after the ship date.
True - but can life originate in such an environment? I believe life at least started in a more hospitable temperature/environment, then spread out to these tougher areas. It's kind of like how your engine runs in 4th gear, but you can't start it there, or it'll stall. Life can tolerate tough conditions once it gets a head start, but that might be asking a bit to start there.
Of course, given what little we know of the early days of life...?
``At least, according to the RIAA, CD sales around Cornell should now skyrocket''
Why? Is there going to be a sudden rise in the amount of cash in college students' bank accounts when this policy takes effect?
No, it's a simple supply and demand argument. Students before had an alternative, now they won't. Students DO have the money for CD's, they just often spend it on other things because they can theoretically get the music for free. Under Cornell's plan, they'll theoretically less. So maybe a few more CD's get bought and a little less beer. Personally, I think it's bullshit, but theoretically it could happen, if the bandwidth restriction were tight enough.
Now it has been a while since I've worked in a college town, but I didn't exactly see the local businesses lowering their prices to accomodate the relative lack of buying power that many (if not most) college students have.
You kidding? We had local businesses give a ton of student discounts. I have seen few businesses that don't. And ultimately, that's because we're poor, relatively.
Doh! . My bad. Earth's circumference is about 40,000 km, so it's almost once.
The article sez a height of 4000km. That's about 2500 miles, or roughly the width of the US. I'm not saying I want that falling on my house, but it's a far cry from wrapping itself around the world.
Second, the earth has an atmosphere (really! I swear! ;>). Assuming the thing has a center of gravity roughly near the geosynchronus orbit point, when it snaps the part above the break will go flying off, never to return. The bottom will fall. However, it's a ribbon, therefore having a high surface area/volume ratio. Three things effectively determine whether a meteorite burns up before it hits the ground - density, SA/V ratio, and vaporization temperature of the material (roughly). Nanotubes should be less thermally stable than rock, it's more dense (meaning it has a higher terminal velocity for a given shape/size, and spends less time in the atmosphere "burning", though granted at a higher temperature), and they have an incredible SA/V ratio.
Long story short, I expect that most of it will burn up long before it hits the ground. It's far lower TV also means it will be moving very slowly when it hits, and its size should mean that it will not hit all at once, dissipating its energy somewhat gradually.
But I'm just guessing. ;)
...that's the very definition of underemployed. ;)
Nah. How often is the site slashdotted before some karmawhore has pre-emptively de-slashdotted the site sometime in the first 5 posts? Pretty much always? So the /. effect doesn't really affect us that much - only the poor non-/. bastards trying to reach a site.
And this new deal is lame. Other than beating the /. effect, (which I obviously believe to be minimal), what do you get? You get to self-edit the site? Yeah, that's great - you can see firsthand just how half-assed half these editors are by which stories make it through and which don't. You can see *just how* outdated the site is from lag. And let me guess - they'll now make absolutely NO effort to post stories in a timely fashion, in an effort to drum up more "subscriptions." Sounds like a mob protection racket.
I'd even go so far as to maybe allow a subscriber another +1 bonus to karma, or maybe allow a subscriber a higher karma cap, or even let a subscribers post get modded to +6
Yep. Just in case the moderation system didn't quite suck enough already with people modding by opinion. Send Taco $10, get a permanant +2 - now *that* is the ultimate in karmawhoring! Yay!
All in all, I would have had more respect for a plea of, "I have no bandwidth, this site is about to /. ITSELF." That would have gotten me to cough up some ca$h. But don't give me this "pay money to get avoid having the version of the site that goes to shit" stuff. And how long until "subscriber-only" stories Taco?
Yeah, just after the story was posted on slashdot and all you freaks sprinted (well, waddled) to your boxen to order a shiny new Lindows laptop. Except you slashdotted their frikkin supply chain. Damn nice job.
Just wondering, but is there anything that *can't* be slashdotted? Well, anything that doesn't require social skills, anyway.