Imagine that someone saw the domain bank.barclays-bank.offshore.com? Devoted slashdot readers may be able to parse it and recognize that it is only a subdomain of offshore.com but what about the fools? I would suggest that it's impossible for something like this to be foolproof by definition. Why? Anyone who could be fooled would be labeled a fool and thus easily fooled. And nothing can stop them from being separated from their money by phishing schemes like this.
Why not label it something like, " A nice plan to help smart people save some time thinking."
Does that cute housewife count if she's staying home to raise the kids while her husband goes off to war? He couldn't fight if she didn't take care of the home front. And what about that farmer who sells organic tomatoes to a wholesaler who turns around and sells them to an Army staff sargeant who just wants the troops to eat organic? Is that farmer part of the war effort? An army moves on its stomach they say.
This is almost as dumb as someone who adds a clause that stipulates it must be used for martial purposes. Shoot, some of the weapons produced by the beltway bandits don't even serve a martial purpose.
when you do things which adversely affect someone else
When you make unauthorized copies without paying royalties, you hurt the original creator. But I guess those folks don't fall into the category of "someone else."
I'm often amazed how often DRM-haters view the creators as a different class of beings, living in another world from the average joe. But the copyright laws help the average joe too if and when the average joe takes advantage of teh cool technology to create something. There are a number of interesting best sellers at lulu.com and I bet few of them would have been published without the new technology. I'm glad these authors get the protection of copyright because according to the arguments of some folks here, they've turned into evil copyright-wielding monsters by putting out their books.
Just for the record, there are a number of songs and books that have changed my life. I almost wish I could pay the author/singer/writer more than the stated price.
I wore scruffy clothes and thought mind blowing thoughts. I ended up with some great stories and nothing of any value for my resume. This happened to 90% of the folks who entered with me. All of us had to go reinvent themselves and take jobs that they could have gotten without a PhD. All of us work alongside people with bachelor's degrees and one even works for a man who dropped out of his undergraduate college to study calligraphy.
Unless you have a real desire to study one particular subject, I think you should run as fast as you can away from graduate school. It's great fun if you're already sure of what you want to study. But if you're going to tread water, do it in an office where they pay you a real salary. The universities are filled with professors who make $200k/year, presidents who make $1m and grad students who make $10k.
Plus, it's a terrible ponzi scheme. Remember that the professors need warm bodies to do the work that brings in the grants. They don't get paid until you get there. But once you graduate, you become competition. So they want you to check in and never leave to be a success.
A perfect put down from the mainstream media school of putdowns. "You should not be posting..." Yeah, the MSM hates it when others have an opinion and they can't even bother to attack my posting on its merits. Are your four layers of editors not around to help you craft a perfect repartee?
Gotta love the clueless mainstream press. If Dell didn't use virtual servers, they would have had to move to new offices. This special technology squeezes ten boxes into one. Yeah, that's the ticket. But that one box doesn't do the work of ten. Nope. It still does the work of one. I guess no one wants to tell the guy at Dell that he didn't need 100 servers after all. 10 would have done the work. Not that the author would or could explain that bad news to the potential victims of the hype fest.
The real problem is that no one can build a secure OS that really isolates the various programs. And since it's too hard for people to install and configure a server to share nicely, it's just easier to build "virtual servers'. But knowing computers the way I do, I wonder whether anyone can ever stop one virtual machine from bringing down the others. Maybe the hardware level protections are great enough, but I wonder...
The universities love to talk about the "science gap" because they hope to tap into Washington's money faucet. Congress fell for the missile gap during the Cold War and the PhD-granting institutions figured out that they could use the same logic to get more cash. But the cash isn't spread out evenly. Tons of it goes to create new PhDs but little goes to employ them. That's why less than 5% of the PhDs get jobs in academia practicing their specialty. There just aren't that many jobs.
To get rid of the PhD gap, they should stop flushing newly minted PhDs out of the system. Create a sustainable system where 50-80% of the PhDs can use the knowledge they have. Too many have to go out and get a new career. It's just a rip off of the US taxpayer.
So whenever big science comes along talking about a shortage of funding, I laugh. They're terrible liars.
NP-complete problems are pretty easy (i.e. linear) when you encode them in unary. (Base 1). The size of the encodings become exponetially large so the computation time to solve the problem is now linearly related to input size. It's all a question of finding the right language.
I like the GPL and use it for software, but it's just not right for things like text. For instance, I can use my GPL-given right to revise and extend Richard Stallman's text to read:
I love the Creative Commons. I think the Creative Commons is great as a whole, because some of its licenses are not unacceptable. In fact, I want Larry Lessig to have my baby. Wait that's not feasible. (Changes in bold.)
What's right for software is not right for matters of opinion or fact. The distinction between sources and binaries don't matter here and actually confuse the right decisions. Nor is there any reason to believe that someone would get anything out of the ability to revise and extend anyone else's words. Okay, it might make sense for a collaborative manual, but I think there are many cases where the right leads to the trouble we're seeing with the clever editors of the Wikipedia.
The main reason I like MySQL is it works five minutes after I finish downloading it. And it's much smaller than Oracle so I can download it quickly. I spent two days trying to make Oracle work on an Linux box and it never did. The price ain't the only reason I like open source.:-)
Is Indexing the Root Password to Infringement?
on
The Point of Google Print
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
It argues that you can copy anything you want-- as long as you promise to index it and put the index on the web. Then you can keep the text around and do what you will. If anyone gives you a hard time, come up with some inane opt-out policy with a real nasty bureaucracy and blame them for being uncool.
I hate to say it, but this satire convinced me that Google is pretty sleezy. The creators are getting nothing and a bunch of guys who happen to build a few automated indexers are multibillionaires. I'm happy to reward innovation, but this is nutty.
Last week Howard Schmidt, the former White House cybersecurity adviser, argued at a seminar in London that programmers should be held responsible for flaws in code they write."
And why not make the folks in Homeland Security responsible for the flaws in the infrastructure? At a recent congressional hearing for the FEMA folks, a congresswoman asked whether the folks at FEMA should be prosecuted for negligent homicide. She pointed out that a bus driver was being prosecuted. Perhaps it made sense to go farther up the chain.
Seriously, it's hard to hang individual coders for the same reason it's hard to hang cybersecurity advisors. Most coders work in teams and failures are often systemic. They're literally no one's fault. Well, perhaps the fault of the person who designed the system. But I can tell you that it's very hard if not impossible to anticipate everything that can go wrong.
I don't know about state or local agencies like the transit authorities, but it would seem to make sense that they shouldn't be allowed to copyright their materials either. The same principle is at stake. The taxpayers pay for the creation of the work so the taxpayers should share ownership.
I have no problem being against abortion and for the death penalty. In one case, the person had a chance to make the most of their life and failed. In the other case, the person was usually just an inconvenience for some irresponsible folks who would rather live a carefree life like the characters in "Sex In the City." (Yes, I realize there are exceptions like a very bad jury system and rape, but these reasons hold for most cases.)
I hate to rain on the free parade. Lord knows I've used free wifi a lot. I even leave my home access point open to help anyone in the neighborhood.
But I think free wifi has ruined my favorite coffee shop. It turned everyone into a bunch of droids with their eyes glued to the screen. The place is like a branch office for telecommuters, not a hip, fun place to relax.
And I can see why the management is a bit peeved. Many folks don't consume much more than one cup of coffee every few hours. (And it's a good thing too. People would be overweight and overcaffeinated.)
I would rather have a place with reasonable prices for food and beverage. We don't need that many calories in the day. It's silly to tie calorie/caffeine consumption to WiFi.
Keep the world Orthogonal!!!
I like to thank the sys admins in my private email to my wife. That way, they're sure to read it. Lord knows they ignore my emails with requests for a brand new, dual-core workstation with 2gig of RAM and dual monitors. It doesn't make sense to put the love in those messages!
I think giving away a book at publication gets plenty of attention today, but I wonder whether it will help much when it's not news any longer. When hundreds of authors follow his lead, as they will, it won't be Slashdot-grade news. Does anyone believe that they'll all sell tens of thousands of books just because it's free?
Oh, I'm sure it will lure some people in. Perhaps the sales lost to the free loaders will always be cheaper than paying for ads. Lord knows that good advertising isn't cheap. So maybe it's still a viable strategy. But the 104th person to do this won't have the same success as the first.
Are they still flogging that "Joe Millionaire" show? Or is it "Survivor 22, Special Victims Unit" now?
Good riddance to bad rubbish. Maybe we can use the spectrum for something cool like unlicensed super-duper wifi.
While I agree with everyone that it would be very neat to own a lightsaber like the one used in Star Wars, I'm a bit worried about the dangers. What if you turn it on by mistake while sitting in the window seat of an airplane? You could punch a hole in the fuselage and all of the air would go rushing out? And what if your kids picked it up by mistake? The thing could be much more dangerous than, say, an Uzi. There are only about 30 shots in an Uzi clip, but the lightsaber keeps on blasting.
And how do we know the bidders won't be members of al Queda? Or what if Jedi-gone-to-the-dark-side guys buy it? I would feel much better if the light saber went to a museum where it could be protected from bad people.
Gomes is well known for slow and very casual reporting. Lindows and a number of Linux makers have been under this price for some time. But the WSJ, which can't seem to recognize this marketplace. Typical major media blindness.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine that someone saw the domain bank.barclays-bank.offshore.com? Devoted slashdot readers may be able to parse it and recognize that it is only a subdomain of offshore.com but what about the fools? I would suggest that it's impossible for something like this to be foolproof by definition. Why? Anyone who could be fooled would be labeled a fool and thus easily fooled. And nothing can stop them from being separated from their money by phishing schemes like this.
Why not label it something like, " A nice plan to help smart people save some time thinking."
I'm glad for the update. I first picked up on them in a Slashdot article linked to a in 2003. It's good to see where they're going.
Does that cute housewife count if she's staying home to raise the kids while her husband goes off to war? He couldn't fight if she didn't take care of the home front. And what about that farmer who sells organic tomatoes to a wholesaler who turns around and sells them to an Army staff sargeant who just wants the troops to eat organic? Is that farmer part of the war effort? An army moves on its stomach they say. This is almost as dumb as someone who adds a clause that stipulates it must be used for martial purposes. Shoot, some of the weapons produced by the beltway bandits don't even serve a martial purpose.
when you do things which adversely affect someone else
When you make unauthorized copies without paying royalties, you hurt the original creator. But I guess those folks don't fall into the category of "someone else."
I'm often amazed how often DRM-haters view the creators as a different class of beings, living in another world from the average joe. But the copyright laws help the average joe too if and when the average joe takes advantage of teh cool technology to create something. There are a number of interesting best sellers at lulu.com and I bet few of them would have been published without the new technology. I'm glad these authors get the protection of copyright because according to the arguments of some folks here, they've turned into evil copyright-wielding monsters by putting out their books.
Just for the record, there are a number of songs and books that have changed my life. I almost wish I could pay the author/singer/writer more than the stated price.
I wore scruffy clothes and thought mind blowing thoughts. I ended up with some great stories and nothing of any value for my resume. This happened to 90% of the folks who entered with me. All of us had to go reinvent themselves and take jobs that they could have gotten without a PhD. All of us work alongside people with bachelor's degrees and one even works for a man who dropped out of his undergraduate college to study calligraphy. Unless you have a real desire to study one particular subject, I think you should run as fast as you can away from graduate school. It's great fun if you're already sure of what you want to study. But if you're going to tread water, do it in an office where they pay you a real salary. The universities are filled with professors who make $200k/year, presidents who make $1m and grad students who make $10k. Plus, it's a terrible ponzi scheme. Remember that the professors need warm bodies to do the work that brings in the grants. They don't get paid until you get there. But once you graduate, you become competition. So they want you to check in and never leave to be a success.
It looks like several are doing this. The NYT has a story about Lulu.tv today. And it mentions revver.com is doing something similar.
A perfect put down from the mainstream media school of putdowns. "You should not be posting..." Yeah, the MSM hates it when others have an opinion and they can't even bother to attack my posting on its merits. Are your four layers of editors not around to help you craft a perfect repartee?
Gotta love the clueless mainstream press. If Dell didn't use virtual servers, they would have had to move to new offices. This special technology squeezes ten boxes into one. Yeah, that's the ticket. But that one box doesn't do the work of ten. Nope. It still does the work of one. I guess no one wants to tell the guy at Dell that he didn't need 100 servers after all. 10 would have done the work. Not that the author would or could explain that bad news to the potential victims of the hype fest. The real problem is that no one can build a secure OS that really isolates the various programs. And since it's too hard for people to install and configure a server to share nicely, it's just easier to build "virtual servers'. But knowing computers the way I do, I wonder whether anyone can ever stop one virtual machine from bringing down the others. Maybe the hardware level protections are great enough, but I wonder...
The universities love to talk about the "science gap" because they hope to tap into Washington's money faucet. Congress fell for the missile gap during the Cold War and the PhD-granting institutions figured out that they could use the same logic to get more cash. But the cash isn't spread out evenly. Tons of it goes to create new PhDs but little goes to employ them. That's why less than 5% of the PhDs get jobs in academia practicing their specialty. There just aren't that many jobs.
To get rid of the PhD gap, they should stop flushing newly minted PhDs out of the system. Create a sustainable system where 50-80% of the PhDs can use the knowledge they have. Too many have to go out and get a new career. It's just a rip off of the US taxpayer.
So whenever big science comes along talking about a shortage of funding, I laugh. They're terrible liars.
NP-complete problems are pretty easy (i.e. linear) when you encode them in unary. (Base 1). The size of the encodings become exponetially large so the computation time to solve the problem is now linearly related to input size. It's all a question of finding the right language.
I like the GPL and use it for software, but it's just not right for things like text. For instance, I can use my GPL-given right to revise and extend Richard Stallman's text to read:
.)
I love the Creative Commons. I think the Creative Commons is great as a whole, because some of its licenses are not unacceptable. In fact, I want Larry Lessig to have my baby. Wait that's not feasible.
(Changes in bold
What's right for software is not right for matters of opinion or fact. The distinction between sources and binaries don't matter here and actually confuse the right decisions. Nor is there any reason to believe that someone would get anything out of the ability to revise and extend anyone else's words. Okay, it might make sense for a collaborative manual, but I think there are many cases where the right leads to the trouble we're seeing with the clever editors of the Wikipedia.
Can't the C/C++ folks write a decent indexing package? Or does Java really rule?
Mod this up! How do we know whether we're on the list?????
The main reason I like MySQL is it works five minutes after I finish downloading it. And it's much smaller than Oracle so I can download it quickly. I spent two days trying to make Oracle work on an Linux box and it never did. The price ain't the only reason I like open source. :-)
Here's a fairly funny satire about Google Print:
http://www.vortex.com/reality/2005-10-23
It argues that you can copy anything you want-- as long as you promise to index it and put the index on the web. Then you can keep the text around and do what you will. If anyone gives you a hard time, come up with some inane opt-out policy with a real nasty bureaucracy and blame them for being uncool.
I hate to say it, but this satire convinced me that Google is pretty sleezy. The creators are getting nothing and a bunch of guys who happen to build a few automated indexers are multibillionaires. I'm happy to reward innovation, but this is nutty.
Last week Howard Schmidt, the former White House cybersecurity adviser, argued at a seminar in London that programmers should be held responsible for flaws in code they write."
And why not make the folks in Homeland Security responsible for the flaws in the infrastructure? At a recent congressional hearing for the FEMA folks, a congresswoman asked whether the folks at FEMA should be prosecuted for negligent homicide. She pointed out that a bus driver was being prosecuted. Perhaps it made sense to go farther up the chain.
Seriously, it's hard to hang individual coders for the same reason it's hard to hang cybersecurity advisors. Most coders work in teams and failures are often systemic. They're literally no one's fault. Well, perhaps the fault of the person who designed the system. But I can tell you that it's very hard if not impossible to anticipate everything that can go wrong.
Any work produced by the US Government can't be copyrighted:t ml#toc30
http://www.cendi.gov/publications/04-8copyright.h
I don't know about state or local agencies like the transit authorities, but it would seem to make sense that they shouldn't be allowed to copyright their materials either. The same principle is at stake. The taxpayers pay for the creation of the work so the taxpayers should share ownership.
Apple's iPod Interface Patent in Jeopardy
Oh no!!!! Scramble the jets. Alert the minute men. Something must be done to save the patent!!!!!
I have no problem being against abortion and for the death penalty. In one case, the person had a chance to make the most of their life and failed. In the other case, the person was usually just an inconvenience for some irresponsible folks who would rather live a carefree life like the characters in "Sex In the City." (Yes, I realize there are exceptions like a very bad jury system and rape, but these reasons hold for most cases.)
I hate to rain on the free parade. Lord knows I've used free wifi a lot. I even leave my home access point open to help anyone in the neighborhood. But I think free wifi has ruined my favorite coffee shop. It turned everyone into a bunch of droids with their eyes glued to the screen. The place is like a branch office for telecommuters, not a hip, fun place to relax. And I can see why the management is a bit peeved. Many folks don't consume much more than one cup of coffee every few hours. (And it's a good thing too. People would be overweight and overcaffeinated.) I would rather have a place with reasonable prices for food and beverage. We don't need that many calories in the day. It's silly to tie calorie/caffeine consumption to WiFi. Keep the world Orthogonal!!!
I like to thank the sys admins in my private email to my wife. That way, they're sure to read it. Lord knows they ignore my emails with requests for a brand new, dual-core workstation with 2gig of RAM and dual monitors. It doesn't make sense to put the love in those messages!
I think giving away a book at publication gets plenty of attention today, but I wonder whether it will help much when it's not news any longer. When hundreds of authors follow his lead, as they will, it won't be Slashdot-grade news. Does anyone believe that they'll all sell tens of thousands of books just because it's free? Oh, I'm sure it will lure some people in. Perhaps the sales lost to the free loaders will always be cheaper than paying for ads. Lord knows that good advertising isn't cheap. So maybe it's still a viable strategy. But the 104th person to do this won't have the same success as the first.
Are they still flogging that "Joe Millionaire" show? Or is it "Survivor 22, Special Victims Unit" now? Good riddance to bad rubbish. Maybe we can use the spectrum for something cool like unlicensed super-duper wifi.
While I agree with everyone that it would be very neat to own a lightsaber like the one used in Star Wars, I'm a bit worried about the dangers. What if you turn it on by mistake while sitting in the window seat of an airplane? You could punch a hole in the fuselage and all of the air would go rushing out? And what if your kids picked it up by mistake? The thing could be much more dangerous than, say, an Uzi. There are only about 30 shots in an Uzi clip, but the lightsaber keeps on blasting.
And how do we know the bidders won't be members of al Queda? Or what if Jedi-gone-to-the-dark-side guys buy it? I would feel much better if the light saber went to a museum where it could be protected from bad people.
Gomes is well known for slow and very casual reporting. Lindows and a number of Linux makers have been under this price for some time. But the WSJ, which can't seem to recognize this marketplace. Typical major media blindness.