While you may be right, I think we're way past the point where such distinctions matter. This country needs to encourage its youth's general critical thinking skills a lot before the distinction between hard science and soft science begins to matter. The anti-intelectual attitude is the primary problem, we can work on any remaining anti-math attitude later. The Gadget Maker does sound like a cool idea for a screenplay though.
What if the post office refused to deliver bulk mail for certain organizations? Same principle.
Not at all the same, bulk snail mailers pay postage, spammers leech off of the university's bandwidth paid for by the students. It's more like "What if the post office refused to deliver bulk mail without postage on it to certain return addresses because they discovered certain organizations were cheating that way?"
But, without their consent, the university is not delivering all of their mail, thus depriving them of service for which they paid.
I didn't get that idea from the article at all. Far from being without the students' consent, the filtering was enacted by the university at the request of students. We also don't know anything about how strict the filtering was. Now it's certainly possible that the filtering was overly strict or was enacted for some users that didn't request it, but we really have no way to know how the filtering was atministered, and that's really not a free speech issue, but more of a quality of service issue and not a very severe one at that. All we know from the article is that the spammer was unhappy that there was filtering being done and filed a lawsuit.
What right does the govt. have to decide for you as a student what e-mail you should read or not. Clearly this is censorship and a 1st amendment violation.
While I agree with your sentiment, it does not seem to fit the facts of this situation. The government is not deciding what email students should or should not read. The students are voluntarily using communications infrastructure owned by the university. If they want unfiltered email accounts, they are free to pay for an external email provider that has the bandwidth to handle the spam. The university, and the government in general, have a respoinsibility to defend the infrastructure that they own and operate. To quote TFA: the university started blocking the e-mail messages saying White Buffalo was part of a larger spam problem that had crashed the computer system, so it is more like the the post office refusing to rent you a p.o. box because there's no more room in the building, rather than like censorship. But you're right in general, the existence of public universities is just asking for the government to limit free speech in one way or another. This just happens to not be an example of it.
Haven't you thought that maybe - just maybe - the goals of people participating in the OSS movement (as opposed to the FSF movement) are just somewhat different from yours?
Umm, that was my whole point. pcmanjon was criticizing people for not working towards his goals. I was pointing out an alternative set of goals. I'm not trying to stop people from working on the oss movement, I just think it's crap. He was telling people to stop working on what they want to work on.
Don't be an ass, turnstyle had a legitimate point. This used to be a problem that a "small number" of black hats could exploit, now it's a problem that a million script kiddies know about. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to claim that cisco was fixing the issue promptly enough, but dissmissing people who point out the problems with full disclosure is just plain irresponsible.
Why do people bother porting this stuff to oddball platforms anyway. Talent like this could be used elsewhere in the OSS community instead of wasting time porting stuff to platforms like Nitendo DS.
This is why the OSS movement is crap. It's all about free software. Using the term OSS makes you forget that this is all about increasing freedom in the first place, not about increasing some arbitrary standard such as the "userbase of the community", especially when said community is ill-defined. Yes the talent of these developers could be used to do more "productive" things, but it's their time to waste, and if they were coerced into doing that then it wouldn't be a very nice community to be a part of, now would it? And remember if you want free software improved in certain ways, you're always free to pay someone to do it.
* theft n. the generic term for all crimes in which a person intentionally and fraudulently takes personal property of another without permission or consent and with the intent to convert it to the taker's use (including potential sale).
They appear quite clear that software piracy is theft.
That is not clear from that definition at all, you conveniently gloss over the fact that "personal property" is a fairly subtle legal term which may or may not be interpreted to include so-called intelectual property. In fact I think this is precisely the reason that the propaganda term "intelectual property" was created, to create exactly this kind of confusion.
These guys seem to use the word "theft" too.
Yeah, they seem like a REAL objective source of information on this topic.
...the likelihood of actual debate on Slashdot is so ridiculously low that it isn't worth the time. All I need to say is this: the "proper conclusion" is that fuckfaces who...
The poster is not thinking logically, for example:
"Even at a price of $10k, we don't expect to sell more than maybe 20-50 licenses. Costs associated with producing this software thus far are approaching $2mil, so we doubt our costs would be recouped. It is thus relatively easy to make the case that we _shouldn't_ sell the software.
The $2mil is a sunk cost. It is irrellevant to whether or not you should try to sell the software. The decision does not depend on how you can recoup all of your losses, it depends solely on how you can minimize your losses. That doesn't mean that selling closed source is the best way to minimize losses, but that's the way you have to think about the problem.
The argument is that GPU's are good for turning polygons into pretty pixels, but not much else. Physics and AI are nice and all but they probably only use only a couple threads each before you can't parallelize it any more. The truly scalable benefits of multi-core design will come from "procedural generation" if your game is running on a 4 core cpu, you can send say 400,000 polygons to the gpu, if your game is running on a 32 core cpu you can send 3,200,000 polys to the gpu, if your game is running on a 1024 core cpu, well you get the idea. It's not quite that simple, but that's the general idea. This makes sense because gpus are inherently parallel and will keep getting more so, to keep the input to the gpu from becomming a bottleneck we need a way for the cpu to scale in the same way.
Just because America is not socialist doesn't mean there's no collective property. Take for example public parks. The public domain is one such collective entity, and all copyrighted works must become part of that collective some day. It is, in fact, the entire justification for copyright given in the Constitution. People who make things have limited rights to their creations, which are nowhere near as encompasing as the rights they have to physical property.
You're absolutely correct, and as the article describes, information can certainly leak throught virtual memory page fault timing attacks. The reason he singles out hyperthreading is that the bandwidth of information leakage is too low to be realistically exploitable for most other multithreading channels. In hyperthreading, the bandwidth of the leakage is actually high enough to allow eavesdropping of about 300 out of 512 rsa private key bits, which makes it relatively easy to optimize your factoring algorithm and obtain the entire private key. Yes hyperthreading is only a little worse than other multitasking, but it happens to be just worse enough to allow for a real exploit, or so he says.
It sounds pretty simple to me. I think the confusion comes in since Apple disagrees with traditional unix about what "one thing" is. In fact the article clearly addresses your point and quotes a similar sentiment from a Solaris 10 user when SMF was introduced. Maybe you could go read it. In summary though, I think lauchd trades simplicity of one kind with simplicity of another kind and in the long run will be very successful.
PS I thought the Xbox was supposed to be the key to Bill's wet dream, convergence. What ever happened with that?
Yeah, I bet they're still building up to that. In fact I'd bet it's the whole reaon they made WindowsXP Media Center Edition, so they can put a half-assed version of it into the Xbox2pi(or whatever) like they did with Windows 2000 and the xbox.
No, he was trolling. He deliberately misrepresnts the position of the linux community on several issues (such as whether linux "is" unix, and whether linux code inspections "prove" that the linux development process is uncontaminated) and then attempts to use these misrepresentations to discredit the community. He's just good enough at it that most people are stupid enough to believe that he's thinking critically. I'm not saying he's wrong, but he's definitely trolling.
I stopped reading after that, because it was quite stupid.
Oh, it gets stupider, towards the bottom he tries to claim that (I'm paraphrasing) the code inspections of Linux don't provide evidence that the development process has been uncontaminated, and to claim that they do provide such evidence is "the kind of outcomes-based circular reasoning that leads to conspiracy theories", but he never describes what he finds circular about it. I never cease to be disgusted by how effective straw-man attacks can be to the masses.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the pentagon, you expect the left pinky finger to know what the left ring finger is doing?
but linguistics is more of a soft science
While you may be right, I think we're way past the point where such distinctions matter. This country needs to encourage its youth's general critical thinking skills a lot before the distinction between hard science and soft science begins to matter. The anti-intelectual attitude is the primary problem, we can work on any remaining anti-math attitude later. The Gadget Maker does sound like a cool idea for a screenplay though.
What if the post office refused to deliver bulk mail for certain organizations? Same principle.
Not at all the same, bulk snail mailers pay postage, spammers leech off of the university's bandwidth paid for by the students. It's more like "What if the post office refused to deliver bulk mail without postage on it to certain return addresses because they discovered certain organizations were cheating that way?"
But, without their consent, the university is not delivering all of their mail, thus depriving them of service for which they paid.
I didn't get that idea from the article at all. Far from being without the students' consent, the filtering was enacted by the university at the request of students. We also don't know anything about how strict the filtering was. Now it's certainly possible that the filtering was overly strict or was enacted for some users that didn't request it, but we really have no way to know how the filtering was atministered, and that's really not a free speech issue, but more of a quality of service issue and not a very severe one at that. All we know from the article is that the spammer was unhappy that there was filtering being done and filed a lawsuit.
What right does the govt. have to decide for you as a student what e-mail you should read or not. Clearly this is censorship and a 1st amendment violation.
While I agree with your sentiment, it does not seem to fit the facts of this situation. The government is not deciding what email students should or should not read. The students are voluntarily using communications infrastructure owned by the university. If they want unfiltered email accounts, they are free to pay for an external email provider that has the bandwidth to handle the spam. The university, and the government in general, have a respoinsibility to defend the infrastructure that they own and operate. To quote TFA: the university started blocking the e-mail messages saying White Buffalo was part of a larger spam problem that had crashed the computer system, so it is more like the the post office refusing to rent you a p.o. box because there's no more room in the building, rather than like censorship. But you're right in general, the existence of public universities is just asking for the government to limit free speech in one way or another. This just happens to not be an example of it.
Haven't you thought that maybe - just maybe - the goals of people participating in the OSS movement (as opposed to the FSF movement) are just somewhat different from yours?
Umm, that was my whole point. pcmanjon was criticizing people for not working towards his goals. I was pointing out an alternative set of goals. I'm not trying to stop people from working on the oss movement, I just think it's crap. He was telling people to stop working on what they want to work on.
Please try to stay with the group.
Don't be an ass, turnstyle had a legitimate point. This used to be a problem that a "small number" of black hats could exploit, now it's a problem that a million script kiddies know about. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to claim that cisco was fixing the issue promptly enough, but dissmissing people who point out the problems with full disclosure is just plain irresponsible.
Why do people bother porting this stuff to oddball platforms anyway. Talent like this could be used elsewhere in the OSS community instead of wasting time porting stuff to platforms like Nitendo DS.
This is why the OSS movement is crap. It's all about free software. Using the term OSS makes you forget that this is all about increasing freedom in the first place, not about increasing some arbitrary standard such as the "userbase of the community", especially when said community is ill-defined. Yes the talent of these developers could be used to do more "productive" things, but it's their time to waste, and if they were coerced into doing that then it wouldn't be a very nice community to be a part of, now would it? And remember if you want free software improved in certain ways, you're always free to pay someone to do it.
The really sad thing is they just recently upgraded to the dc9.... link
* theft n. the generic term for all crimes in which a person intentionally and fraudulently takes personal property of another without permission or consent and with the intent to convert it to the taker's use (including potential sale).
They appear quite clear that software piracy is theft.
That is not clear from that definition at all, you conveniently gloss over the fact that "personal property" is a fairly subtle legal term which may or may not be interpreted to include so-called intelectual property. In fact I think this is precisely the reason that the propaganda term "intelectual property" was created, to create exactly this kind of confusion.
These guys seem to use the word "theft" too.
Yeah, they seem like a REAL objective source of information on this topic.
Personally, I prefer this definition.
Way to pour gasoline on the fire!
which one?
Every distribution distributes a patched version of firefox. Nobody uses the vanilla mozilla.org tarballs. There's a lot of "firefox mods" out there.
The poster is not thinking logically, for example:
"Even at a price of $10k, we don't expect to sell more than maybe 20-50 licenses. Costs associated with producing this software thus far are approaching $2mil, so we doubt our costs would be recouped. It is thus relatively easy to make the case that we _shouldn't_ sell the software.
The $2mil is a sunk cost. It is irrellevant to whether or not you should try to sell the software. The decision does not depend on how you can recoup all of your losses, it depends solely on how you can minimize your losses. That doesn't mean that selling closed source is the best way to minimize losses, but that's the way you have to think about the problem.
The argument is that GPU's are good for turning polygons into pretty pixels, but not much else. Physics and AI are nice and all but they probably only use only a couple threads each before you can't parallelize it any more. The truly scalable benefits of multi-core design will come from "procedural generation" if your game is running on a 4 core cpu, you can send say 400,000 polygons to the gpu, if your game is running on a 32 core cpu you can send 3,200,000 polys to the gpu, if your game is running on a 1024 core cpu, well you get the idea. It's not quite that simple, but that's the general idea. This makes sense because gpus are inherently parallel and will keep getting more so, to keep the input to the gpu from becomming a bottleneck we need a way for the cpu to scale in the same way.
I think he was referring to the fact that God of War had original characters and story, i.e. unlike all of the ideas he was proposing.
Just because America is not socialist doesn't mean there's no collective property. Take for example public parks. The public domain is one such collective entity, and all copyrighted works must become part of that collective some day. It is, in fact, the entire justification for copyright given in the Constitution. People who make things have limited rights to their creations, which are nowhere near as encompasing as the rights they have to physical property.
This will blow 3rd party development wide open for the next gen Playstation.
Just like 3rd party development is wide open for the xbox, just because the cpu is publicly documented. Keep dreaming.
You're absolutely correct, and as the article describes, information can certainly leak throught virtual memory page fault timing attacks. The reason he singles out hyperthreading is that the bandwidth of information leakage is too low to be realistically exploitable for most other multithreading channels. In hyperthreading, the bandwidth of the leakage is actually high enough to allow eavesdropping of about 300 out of 512 rsa private key bits, which makes it relatively easy to optimize your factoring algorithm and obtain the entire private key. Yes hyperthreading is only a little worse than other multitasking, but it happens to be just worse enough to allow for a real exploit, or so he says.
It sounds pretty simple to me. I think the confusion comes in since Apple disagrees with traditional unix about what "one thing" is. In fact the article clearly addresses your point and quotes a similar sentiment from a Solaris 10 user when SMF was introduced. Maybe you could go read it. In summary though, I think lauchd trades simplicity of one kind with simplicity of another kind and in the long run will be very successful.
PS I thought the Xbox was supposed to be the key to Bill's wet dream, convergence. What ever happened with that?
Yeah, I bet they're still building up to that. In fact I'd bet it's the whole reaon they made WindowsXP Media Center Edition, so they can put a half-assed version of it into the Xbox2pi(or whatever) like they did with Windows 2000 and the xbox.
No, he was trolling. He deliberately misrepresnts the position of the linux community on several issues (such as whether linux "is" unix, and whether linux code inspections "prove" that the linux development process is uncontaminated) and then attempts to use these misrepresentations to discredit the community. He's just good enough at it that most people are stupid enough to believe that he's thinking critically. I'm not saying he's wrong, but he's definitely trolling.
I stopped reading after that, because it was quite stupid.
Oh, it gets stupider, towards the bottom he tries to claim that (I'm paraphrasing) the code inspections of Linux don't provide evidence that the development process has been uncontaminated, and to claim that they do provide such evidence is "the kind of outcomes-based circular reasoning that leads to conspiracy theories", but he never describes what he finds circular about it. I never cease to be disgusted by how effective straw-man attacks can be to the masses.
more like too ignorant/incorrect to check now. is optional in the HTML standard and in fact required in the XHTML 1.0 standard.
HOLY SHIT! Someone on slashdot who knows what an ad hominem argument is!! I never thought I'd live to see the day...