Setting up a sting operation to find and plug a leak is not a crime. If I knew there was a leak in my boardroom, or anywhere else in the company, I'd plant attractive data where suspects could find it, each plant different than the other, and see which one showed up in the Wall Street Journal the next day. And I'd start looking for "@wsj.com" in the To: heading of their outgoing mail, because when I hired them they acknowledged that any mail sent from their work account was property of the company. Says so in their hire letter and at the bottom of each outgoing e-mail.
That said, everything else HP's CEO did stinks to high heaven of criminality. Compromising computers, stalking reporters, and fraudulently obtaining phone records should send a perpetrator to jail.
In some cases a developer can't or shouldn't have access to production data. Our production data contains confidential client information -- including information about our own employees. There are federal laws in place regarding access to it, and our developers and QA people must not have unfettered access to it, and it should never be placed on a system that is not access-restricted with the utmost diligence and paranoia.
We do take a QA snapshot of the production server about once a week. Its confidential information gets stripped and obfuscated in a hundred different ways before it's brought online. It's good for testing new code, and for some debugging, but often it's useless for reproducing a specific client's problem. If a developer or QA needs to look at a particular client's data, he first gets the customer's permission. Then he submits a logged request for it (CC'd to the customer). Then he gets a tiny instance of his own, which will be taken down in 8 business hours unless he re-subscribes to it. We have tools and scripts that automate a lot of the process -- test instances usually come up within ten minutes for smaller clients.
I agree that there are plenty of old machines that won't run newer software, but there are mainstream and semi-mainstream distros that will run on older hardware. I'm running Ubuntu on my old Pentium II/300 laptop. The install was a no-brainer, and aside from a long boot time it's pretty snappy. Under Win98 this machine was good for basic web browsing and word processing, but dog slow if I ever tried to do anything modern like look at a website that had some Flash animation on it. Best way to make the fan come on.
I thought I'd seen the last of this machine more than a year ago, but now that I live in a larger household and there's a line of people waiting to use my "real" computer, I've dragged this little pony out and now my primary computer is a fifth the speed, with a tenth the memory, and a twentieth the diskspace, of the one I used to have. And wouldn't you know it? For actual, productive work it's just fine. All that extra horsepower, it turns out, was really only needed so my wife could play Chuzzle on MSN Games -- and I could watch my pr0n.
BTW, Microsoft claims that XP will run on a 300 MHz machine with 64MB of memory. I respectfully submit that anyone attempting to do so is out of his goddamned mind.
In licensing the UNIX brand a vendor warrants and represents that every certified product:
Conforms to the specification.
Meets The Open Group's test and certification requirements.
Will continue to conform to the specification.
Will be rectified within an agreed time should it be found to be non-conformant.
That's from The Open Group, who own the trademark. So if you want to call it Unix, your product must meet their standards of what Unix actually is. Presumably you have to pay to get it certified. Only companies like IBM, Sun, HP and Fujitsu are on the certified list, so I'm guessing it's not cheap to obtain or maintain.
Linux flavors are mostly conformant only standards specified by their own vendor. Considering that Windows XP only complies to its vendor's specification, this isn't necessarily a marketing black eye.
The biggest problem with getting certified as a "real" Unix is that every new release must be recertified. This gets expensive and time-consuming, making fast release cycles all but impossible. Red Hat could certify RHEL, which they've given a long release cycle. It might be worth it, though, if they could say "We meet the same Unix standards as IBM, HP and Sun, have over half the total Unix market, and do it at a fraction of their boutique OS prices."
We don't yet have details of the accident, except that it was a bike-car collision and the car left the scene. This is not to exhonerate the driver, of course. For all we know a bored psychopath crossed three lanes to do him in. But most likely this was a simple and tragic traffic accident.
I was in a bus once when a bicycle plowed into us. If it handn't happened right below my window, I never would have known it happened. I'm almost positive we had the right-of-way and he somehow failed to comprehend that he was overtaking a bus that was braking, signaling a right turn and approaching a bus station on the right.
If a bike strikes your SUV's blind spot or rear end, the car won't move at all and all you'll hear is a thump, easily drowned out by the stereo. In an especially tall vehicle (like the bus I was riding) the entire accident will happen completely out of view.
One possible scenario: A fast-moving cyclist on a downhill run is rapidly catching up with a slow-moving SUV. As the cyclist starts overtaking on the right, the SUV suddenly turns right. The cyclist is unable to stop or swerve and his front tire hits the car's right rear tire. The bicycle is snapped violently to the side, slamming the rider's unhelmeted skull into the curb. The driver, meanwhile, has only heard a thumping sound and attributes the slight lurch of his car to irregular pavement at the edge of the road. The only damage to the SUV is a scuff on the sidewall. Or the driver later finds damage on the right side of the car and assumes some coward did hit-and-run on them in a parking lot.
Who's at fault, the driver who failed to signal, or the cyclist who was following too closely? In my home state, leaving the scene of a fatal accident is itself a felony and is pretty damning evidence of at-fault driving. Almost certainly there were a number of contributing factors that we don't know about. That doesn't make lilo any less dead or urban cycling any less a risk.
Well, maybe what YouTube should argue is that they have no special liability beyond any hosting service -- that if Universal and or any other copyright thug has a problem, they can submit a takedown notice, same as any other copyright holder. Maybe YouTube could offer Universal a mechanism to do it easily, like maybe e-mail.
So when YouTube has received one of these notices, they can replace the video with one that's basically just a banner:
This video has been banned by the alleged copyright owner, Universal Music. click here to see the takedown notice. Click here to purchase an authorized copy of the video for $14.95. You will be asked to provide them with your name, address, and a credit card number.
Actually, the banner should show up about fifteen seconds into the video, when the viewer is starting to get into it. Oh, and every time Universal submits a bogus takedown notice, YouTube should issue a press release.
Sometimes the cruelest thing you can do to somebody is give them what they ask for.
Re:What happens when complexity gets out of contro
on
Why Johnny Can't Code
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· Score: 1
You're absolutely right. My first computer was an Atari 400 and at the age of 12 or so I was able to learn almost the entire computer, and certainly was able to examine the entire computer. Want cyan letters? Put a 3 in this memory location. Want to read the joystick? Its output is at this memory location. Want to design your own character set? Here's the layout and here's how to make it point to your charset. Here's how to link a pair of eight-bit sound channels into a single sixteen-bit channel. Here's how to make it play Bach's Toccata and Fugue. My first real programming project was a little joystick game where my dot could chase my brother's dot all around the TV screen. I rigged it so my dot could cheat.
No operating system, no system calls, no object-oriented API -- just a BASIC cartridge, three books and a magazine subscription. I picked up some awful habits learning how make my code run faster.
Being able to examine and manipulate every single component of a system, being able to see how the entire thing worked, was an invaluable experience. I'm saddened that my boy may not have a chance for that level of intimacy and control over a computer. OTOH all the things I spent years learning are a natural part of his world, and in a few years he'll be doing things so far beyond my comprehension that not having a prehistoric computer is probably a much smaller loss than I'm taking it for.
I suspect that crossword-solving techniques might apply very closely. As an example, you know a U-boat just sent a message about a place whose name is eight letters, the last letter is an P and the fourth letter is either probably a G or an M.
Also the seas are R _ _ G H. Once you've figured out what those two letter are, maybe they will offer cues about what other letters are, or best of all, what they rotor and plugboard settings were.
The example is not historically accurate and glosses over zillions of details, but I think the principles apply.
Yeah, this debate is totally taking up space we could be devoting to SCO.
Seriously, though, knowing what Vista has to offer in advance is important to anyone who has to plan in advance. My employer will be buying fifty or so desktop PCs next Spring. Do we get XP or Vista? Can we get XP? If Vista is inevitable or presents compelling needs, do we wait for pre-installed Vista or do we buy XP machines early and upgrade later? What if we don't have a choice? How long will MS continue to sell XP? To support it? What will be the interoperability issues? Do we need to bite the bullet and upgrade absolutely everything to Vista at once?
We have a lot of knowledge and technology already invested in XP and we have to know what's going to happen with its replacement before we sink, ultimately, hundreds of thousands of dollars into a new generation of technology.
So that's why a lot of people want to know whether this thing is worth a damn.
I think they do roll the dice every time, but the odds aren't absolutely flat across the entire pool of travellers. And I think what pushes the odds closer to one are profiles of behavior. Age and gender probably figure in as well.
Here's how to almost certainly get selected:
Be male
Be under 35
Fly one way
Take a flight to, from or over New York or D.C.
Buy your ticket shortly before travel
Use a relatively new credit card
Have a third party buy the ticket
Request a seat towards the front of the plane
Check no bags
Travel on a Tuesday or other "off" day
Travel on a day or route that matches up with something Homeland Security knows but they aren't letting on
Undoubtedly there are counterexamples abound and there's some dude here who bought his ticket months in advance and still got searched. Also undoubtedly there are mechanisms which are not documented. Perhaps they know a lot of stuff about you that you forgot, or wish you could forget. Or never knew in the first place---like how every other Monday for two months last year you bought lunch for at this little diner down from your office, and the Mondays you weren't there a Known Operative was there having lunch for two. So now a profoundly complex piece of data mining software thinks maybe you and Mr. Operative were taking turns picking up the tab while you planned Activities. Now here you are, flying from Boston to Atlanta and not checking any bags...
And maybe enough of the checks are random-with-quotation-marks because TSA and airline staff are instructed to "trust their instincts" if anything "seems out of place," only it turns out the staff in question are still a teensy bit jumpy and to them, hell, what's more out of place than a Muslim looking dude at an airport?
At least I don't live in West Virginia though. I hear they are blocking out Comedy central shows like south park and the daily show.
Sigh. Yes, yes, and I'm sure you also heard they all live in trailer parks, work in coal mines and marry their cousins. Don't let your prejudices do your thinking for you: It's a sloppy habit that weakens your ability to think for yourself. Enough of that and you might find yourself hosting an AM radio talk show.
One of the strange things about watching a re-CGI'd Star Wars was looking for the things they didn't fix. For example, the quick jerk Luke did when they closed the door to the prison control room. My favorite is the original computer graphics for the targeting computers: It looked like a cheap 1970s arcade game.
In that vein I'd like to know what will happen to the supercheesy effects like Sulu's dashboard clock looking like the odometer from a 1963 Ford Galaxy. There's a certain comfort in things like that, which excuse the rest of the series' transgressions. When Kirk goes and pats Yeoman Rand on the ass, my brain goes "Oh, it's TV from the sixties." If they scrub everything until it looks brand spanking modern, I'll probably react to it with modern sensibilities and wonder when they were packing Sunny Jim off to sensitivity training.
The locks on most house doors are utterly pointless, no matter how sophisticated: Most thieves simply kick the door hard enough to splinter the frame around the bolt. I learned this from two detectives in two cities, having been burglarized twice.
The typical burglar's biggest needs are to avoid detection and to take things that are easily converted to cash. Method: Shake hands with the house's doorknobs, try the ground floor windows, and if nothing is unlocked, kick in a door not visible from the street. Get in and out in under five minutes. Go straight to the bedroom and start tossing: Look under the bed, under the mattress, in the nightstand, through the dresser drawers, in the jewel box, on the top shelf of the closet. The priority items are money, guns and jewelry. Don't bother with anything else, just put it all in your pockets and get the hell out.
That covers most bases. The first time I was robbed, the idiot took my VCR, but the remote to my stereo. For months I actually had to walk across the room to press "play". It was like being in hell.
This is just plain old harassment, and the punishment sounds fine.
Or it's making terroristic threats, if it's an election year and the DA is trailing in the polls.
"Go to your room" isn't much of a punishment for an introvert. Never worked on me, anyway. So Mom threatened to take all my books away for a month instead. That scared me straight, believe me.
The judge should have made him go do something outdoors instead.
Yah, it's the "Not necessarily the same place as the crop was grown" that interested me the most. It's why I was wondering if this could be done with sea water or at least brackish water -- nearly 100% of water taken out of the ocean will wind up back in the ocean. I also have no idea how efficient desalinization plants can get these days.
Plants coverts water and carbon dioxide into hydrocarbons.
Humans extract fuel-grade hydrocarbons from plants.
Other humans burn the fuel, converting it back into water and carbon dioxide.
So what am I missing? To me this seems to have ahuge advantage over petroleum, because the carbon dioxide from biofuels was in the atmosphere only a year or so ago, as opposed to millions of years ago as with conventional oil.
Plants consume water from two places; the ground and the atmosphere. Likewise, they store it in two ways: as absorbed liquid and conveted to hydrocarbons. We want the hydrocarbons as fuel, but the absorbed liquid gets extracted during the fuelmaking process. Why can't we reuse it to irrigate the next crop? As for irrigation, can't we use (or design) plants that (a) don't require as much groundwater, (b) can tolerate a much lower quality of groundwater, such as high-salinity water that can be found in and near the oceans, and (c) maximize the ratio of usable fuel to used water?
It seems to me that this is, overall, a win. My only concern is a blurb I heard on the news last night but haven't had time to investigate on my own: That the food value of a tank of biofuel could feed a human for six months. Offhand, this sounds sensationalistic, like they're using a very inefficient biofuel source as the exclusive diet of somebody even an American would think is fat. But I'd be much more pissed off if SUVs == starving babies than if SUVs == Los Angelenos finally admit they live in a desert.
TeX is not a word processor -- it is a typesetting language. A word processor is a tool which combines editing and typesetting into a single package.
The first PC word processors -- software running on non-dedicated hardware -- were tools like WordStar that allowed users to cut and paste blocks of text, write and manage files, and do some rudimentary formatting. You could set text to bold, underline, or italic, possibly handle full justification or maybe even proportional fonts, if your printer could handle it.
Printers available at the time were incredibly primitive by today's standards. Most offices viewed the word processor as a typewriter that remembered stuff, so a single fixed pitch font with only underlining or bold for highlighting were the norm for some time. That's all that was available, so that's what early word processors accomodated.
the intention of the law for caching is for otherwise legal copies
The "legality" of the cache's contents are irrelevant, and you really should just read the part of Section 512 the PP has so kindly linked to. You can argue intent until you're blue in the face, but all you're doing is second-guessing, because the law itself -- not its intent -- is what has force.
That said, should the MPAA/RIAA trusts decide to argue about this, their claim will probably be that this is not a cache. They'll say something like, "This isn't a cache, it's a piece of software," and hope the judge and jury think a cache is like a galvanized lunch pail or something. Or they'll try to spin the "Everybody knows file sharing is illegal, so they're doing something illegal" approach, A.K.A. the Chewbacca Defense.
I'd like to take a look the protocol: If it's set up to identify blocks by their signature alone, then the ISP really is turning a blind eye to content, as it should.
Imagine that random access memory is accessible immediately, like turning on room lights
I stopped reading at that point -- the second sentence of the first paragraph. If it took as long to energize RAM as it did to turn on room lights, computing would still be a matter of turning on the room lights so you could see your slide rule.
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That said, everything else HP's CEO did stinks to high heaven of criminality. Compromising computers, stalking reporters, and fraudulently obtaining phone records should send a perpetrator to jail.
Good point. We do have test clients and such for regression testing that get merged into the QA database during the weekly munge.
We do take a QA snapshot of the production server about once a week. Its confidential information gets stripped and obfuscated in a hundred different ways before it's brought online. It's good for testing new code, and for some debugging, but often it's useless for reproducing a specific client's problem. If a developer or QA needs to look at a particular client's data, he first gets the customer's permission. Then he submits a logged request for it (CC'd to the customer). Then he gets a tiny instance of his own, which will be taken down in 8 business hours unless he re-subscribes to it. We have tools and scripts that automate a lot of the process -- test instances usually come up within ten minutes for smaller clients.
I thought I'd seen the last of this machine more than a year ago, but now that I live in a larger household and there's a line of people waiting to use my "real" computer, I've dragged this little pony out and now my primary computer is a fifth the speed, with a tenth the memory, and a twentieth the diskspace, of the one I used to have. And wouldn't you know it? For actual, productive work it's just fine. All that extra horsepower, it turns out, was really only needed so my wife could play Chuzzle on MSN Games -- and I could watch my pr0n.
BTW, Microsoft claims that XP will run on a 300 MHz machine with 64MB of memory. I respectfully submit that anyone attempting to do so is out of his goddamned mind.
Linux flavors are mostly conformant only standards specified by their own vendor. Considering that Windows XP only complies to its vendor's specification, this isn't necessarily a marketing black eye.
The biggest problem with getting certified as a "real" Unix is that every new release must be recertified. This gets expensive and time-consuming, making fast release cycles all but impossible. Red Hat could certify RHEL, which they've given a long release cycle. It might be worth it, though, if they could say "We meet the same Unix standards as IBM, HP and Sun, have over half the total Unix market, and do it at a fraction of their boutique OS prices."
I was in a bus once when a bicycle plowed into us. If it handn't happened right below my window, I never would have known it happened. I'm almost positive we had the right-of-way and he somehow failed to comprehend that he was overtaking a bus that was braking, signaling a right turn and approaching a bus station on the right.
If a bike strikes your SUV's blind spot or rear end, the car won't move at all and all you'll hear is a thump, easily drowned out by the stereo. In an especially tall vehicle (like the bus I was riding) the entire accident will happen completely out of view.
One possible scenario: A fast-moving cyclist on a downhill run is rapidly catching up with a slow-moving SUV. As the cyclist starts overtaking on the right, the SUV suddenly turns right. The cyclist is unable to stop or swerve and his front tire hits the car's right rear tire. The bicycle is snapped violently to the side, slamming the rider's unhelmeted skull into the curb. The driver, meanwhile, has only heard a thumping sound and attributes the slight lurch of his car to irregular pavement at the edge of the road. The only damage to the SUV is a scuff on the sidewall. Or the driver later finds damage on the right side of the car and assumes some coward did hit-and-run on them in a parking lot.
Who's at fault, the driver who failed to signal, or the cyclist who was following too closely? In my home state, leaving the scene of a fatal accident is itself a felony and is pretty damning evidence of at-fault driving. Almost certainly there were a number of contributing factors that we don't know about. That doesn't make lilo any less dead or urban cycling any less a risk.
So when YouTube has received one of these notices, they can replace the video with one that's basically just a banner:
Actually, the banner should show up about fifteen seconds into the video, when the viewer is starting to get into it. Oh, and every time Universal submits a bogus takedown notice, YouTube should issue a press release.
Sometimes the cruelest thing you can do to somebody is give them what they ask for.
No operating system, no system calls, no object-oriented API -- just a BASIC cartridge, three books and a magazine subscription. I picked up some awful habits learning how make my code run faster.
Being able to examine and manipulate every single component of a system, being able to see how the entire thing worked, was an invaluable experience. I'm saddened that my boy may not have a chance for that level of intimacy and control over a computer. OTOH all the things I spent years learning are a natural part of his world, and in a few years he'll be doing things so far beyond my comprehension that not having a prehistoric computer is probably a much smaller loss than I'm taking it for.
The example is not historically accurate and glosses over zillions of details, but I think the principles apply.
Seriously, though, knowing what Vista has to offer in advance is important to anyone who has to plan in advance. My employer will be buying fifty or so desktop PCs next Spring. Do we get XP or Vista? Can we get XP? If Vista is inevitable or presents compelling needs, do we wait for pre-installed Vista or do we buy XP machines early and upgrade later? What if we don't have a choice? How long will MS continue to sell XP? To support it? What will be the interoperability issues? Do we need to bite the bullet and upgrade absolutely everything to Vista at once?
We have a lot of knowledge and technology already invested in XP and we have to know what's going to happen with its replacement before we sink, ultimately, hundreds of thousands of dollars into a new generation of technology.
So that's why a lot of people want to know whether this thing is worth a damn.
Here's how to almost certainly get selected:
Undoubtedly there are counterexamples abound and there's some dude here who bought his ticket months in advance and still got searched. Also undoubtedly there are mechanisms which are not documented. Perhaps they know a lot of stuff about you that you forgot, or wish you could forget. Or never knew in the first place---like how every other Monday for two months last year you bought lunch for at this little diner down from your office, and the Mondays you weren't there a Known Operative was there having lunch for two. So now a profoundly complex piece of data mining software thinks maybe you and Mr. Operative were taking turns picking up the tab while you planned Activities. Now here you are, flying from Boston to Atlanta and not checking any bags...
And maybe enough of the checks are random-with-quotation-marks because TSA and airline staff are instructed to "trust their instincts" if anything "seems out of place," only it turns out the staff in question are still a teensy bit jumpy and to them, hell, what's more out of place than a Muslim looking dude at an airport?
Ah, well. Fuck flying.
In that vein I'd like to know what will happen to the supercheesy effects like Sulu's dashboard clock looking like the odometer from a 1963 Ford Galaxy. There's a certain comfort in things like that, which excuse the rest of the series' transgressions. When Kirk goes and pats Yeoman Rand on the ass, my brain goes "Oh, it's TV from the sixties." If they scrub everything until it looks brand spanking modern, I'll probably react to it with modern sensibilities and wonder when they were packing Sunny Jim off to sensitivity training.
The typical burglar's biggest needs are to avoid detection and to take things that are easily converted to cash. Method: Shake hands with the house's doorknobs, try the ground floor windows, and if nothing is unlocked, kick in a door not visible from the street. Get in and out in under five minutes. Go straight to the bedroom and start tossing: Look under the bed, under the mattress, in the nightstand, through the dresser drawers, in the jewel box, on the top shelf of the closet. The priority items are money, guns and jewelry. Don't bother with anything else, just put it all in your pockets and get the hell out.
That covers most bases. The first time I was robbed, the idiot took my VCR, but the remote to my stereo. For months I actually had to walk across the room to press "play". It was like being in hell.
"Go to your room" isn't much of a punishment for an introvert. Never worked on me, anyway. So Mom threatened to take all my books away for a month instead. That scared me straight, believe me.
The judge should have made him go do something outdoors instead.
That said, this is probably the best incentive a teen ever had to get a job, save money, and buy his own damn car.
Yah, it's the "Not necessarily the same place as the crop was grown" that interested me the most. It's why I was wondering if this could be done with sea water or at least brackish water -- nearly 100% of water taken out of the ocean will wind up back in the ocean. I also have no idea how efficient desalinization plants can get these days.
- Plants coverts water and carbon dioxide into hydrocarbons.
- Humans extract fuel-grade hydrocarbons from plants.
- Other humans burn the fuel, converting it back into water and carbon dioxide.
So what am I missing? To me this seems to have ahuge advantage over petroleum, because the carbon dioxide from biofuels was in the atmosphere only a year or so ago, as opposed to millions of years ago as with conventional oil.Plants consume water from two places; the ground and the atmosphere. Likewise, they store it in two ways: as absorbed liquid and conveted to hydrocarbons. We want the hydrocarbons as fuel, but the absorbed liquid gets extracted during the fuelmaking process. Why can't we reuse it to irrigate the next crop? As for irrigation, can't we use (or design) plants that (a) don't require as much groundwater, (b) can tolerate a much lower quality of groundwater, such as high-salinity water that can be found in and near the oceans, and (c) maximize the ratio of usable fuel to used water?
It seems to me that this is, overall, a win. My only concern is a blurb I heard on the news last night but haven't had time to investigate on my own: That the food value of a tank of biofuel could feed a human for six months. Offhand, this sounds sensationalistic, like they're using a very inefficient biofuel source as the exclusive diet of somebody even an American would think is fat. But I'd be much more pissed off if SUVs == starving babies than if SUVs == Los Angelenos finally admit they live in a desert.
The first PC word processors -- software running on non-dedicated hardware -- were tools like WordStar that allowed users to cut and paste blocks of text, write and manage files, and do some rudimentary formatting. You could set text to bold, underline, or italic, possibly handle full justification or maybe even proportional fonts, if your printer could handle it.
Printers available at the time were incredibly primitive by today's standards. Most offices viewed the word processor as a typewriter that remembered stuff, so a single fixed pitch font with only underlining or bold for highlighting were the norm for some time. That's all that was available, so that's what early word processors accomodated.
Well there's your problem right there.
Looks like you already did that, Sparky.
Sweet Jesus, not while I was searching for porn!
The "legality" of the cache's contents are irrelevant, and you really should just read the part of Section 512 the PP has so kindly linked to. You can argue intent until you're blue in the face, but all you're doing is second-guessing, because the law itself -- not its intent -- is what has force.
That said, should the MPAA/RIAA trusts decide to argue about this, their claim will probably be that this is not a cache. They'll say something like, "This isn't a cache, it's a piece of software," and hope the judge and jury think a cache is like a galvanized lunch pail or something. Or they'll try to spin the "Everybody knows file sharing is illegal, so they're doing something illegal" approach, A.K.A. the Chewbacca Defense.
I'd like to take a look the protocol: If it's set up to identify blocks by their signature alone, then the ISP really is turning a blind eye to content, as it should.