Well, according to some of the early posts, this is somehow Apple's fault, and they should be fined
Well, it was only possible for Google to exploit this security hole because the security hole existed, and that was Apple's fault. If you check back in the archives, you'll see a lot of people suggesting that Microsoft should be held liable for security holes in Windows, Internet Explorer, and so on. The reason this is unlikely to happen is that making developers liable for every bug (and almost any bug is a potential security hole when you're talking about a browser) would push development costs to such a high level that only governments would be able to afford software. Companies writing software for aerospace are often held to this sort of level, and their development costs are hundreds of times higher than for commodity software - and even then they still have bugs, just not as many.
While I don't totally disagree that this is a good idea, I can think of quite a lot of companies that should be higher up the list for this kind of intervention. For example, almost every telecoms or energy company...
With terrorists, it's not such a good idea to wait until they've actually committed the physical crime. That tends to cost a lot of lives.
There are steps in between thinking about something and doing it. For example, I could write a description of the orbital corrections required how to fly an asteroid into London during the Olympics. I could hate the Olympics enough to want to do it. Unfortunately, since I lack a space program, I can't actually do it. Arresting me for doing it would make no sense. On the other hand, if I'm threatening to set off a car bomb and I'm sitting at home with a van full of fertiliser and home-made detonators, the security services would be negligent if I were allowed to go for a drive.
Interestingly, the BBC article calls CERN "Cern" as though it were a person. To whom do we address our complaints?
I've made this complaint in the past. They also write PC as Pc (which is an initialism, not an acronym - the other poster claiming that they only did this idiocy for acronyms is wrong). Their reply was that it is their house style to only capitalise the first letter of initialisms. This is not in any way standard English, but they decided to do it just to be special.
Firing someone for not being good at their job requires some objective metric that they can't dispute in an unfair dismissal suit. It also typically requires a verbal followed by a written warning and all sorts of HR interaction. Firing someone for lying on their CV is a lot easier.
The news here for me was that Windows used to support DVDs out of the box. The last version I used regularly was 2000, which couldn't, and I thought XP couldn't either. I'd always told people to install VLC if they wanted to play DVDs on Windows - when did this stop being necessary?
No, there's no such requirement and one would not make sense. A patent covers a specific (method of) implementation. If you had to show that you could implement the same thing in a different way when you filed a patent then there would be no point in the patent (unless, I suppose, you patented both approaches).
Aren't people supposed to provide a copy of their degrees when they get a job in USA?
Not sure about the USA, but I've only ever been asked to prove my qualifications once, and that was when I got a short-term job at my old university. Apparently the data protection act means that they need my explicit permission for the HR department to ask academic records for a copy of my degree certificate. Everywhere else has just accepted it without any evidence. Presumably if I lied and then couldn't do the job, they'd check and prosecute me for fraud and then use that as an excuse for firing me.
Shame you posted that as AC: it's exactly correct. The issue with instruction sets is that there are often very few sensible ways of implementing a specific instruction in hardware. The canonical example of this is the MIPS unaligned load / store patent. If you can figure out a way of implementing an unaligned load that doesn't involve the mechanisms covered in the MIPS patent, then you are free to do so. If you can't, then you need to license the patent from MIPS to be able to implement the instruction. The x86 instruction set is quite baroque, and is completely full of patents, especially newer parts like SSE. It's basically impossible to create a moderately efficient implementation without stepping on a load of patents.
It also displays a stunning lack of knowledge of programming languages. Most of the ideas that the grandparent attributes to C++ are from either Simula or Smalltalk (Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls would have a lot of fun suing Stroustrup, I'm sure). Given that C++ is a member of the Simula family and Java a member of the Smalltalk family, calling one a poor man's version of the other is just bizarre. It's like calling ML a poor man's version of Algol.
You don't need to hit refresh, you just buy a subscription and see the story turn up with a red banner half an hour before comments are permitted. Of course, if he'd done that then I'd expect a relevant post, rather than the obligatory barely-on-topic rant about Google that seems to crop up in every story about Google. I'm not exactly a fan of Google (or any other major tech company at the moment), but can we try to keep the criticisms on topic please?
If this is true, then why is libdvdcss still not able to be incorporated in Linux distributions originating from the US?
Reverse engineering for interoperability is protected by the DMCA. Distributing the knowledge you acquired is protected by the first amendment. Distributing the tools you created using this knowledge is prohibited by the DMCA.
Why do you think it's going to be expensive? The amount journals pay reviewers now is typically a token sum, and usually goes into some kind of general budget so there's no direct financial incentive to do reviews - you do them because being asked to review papers for a respected journal is an indication of status. I've submitted a paper to an open access journal. The reviews were not paid for. The editor was someone at the top of the field, as are the others involved in running the journal, and if one of them asks you to review a paper you're very unlikely to say no. The published papers are available online on a web server hosted by a university. I think you can also get printed copies of editions via some print-on-demand service if you want to pay for a bound copy.
The cost of running the journal is just that researchers don't get paid to do reviews.
There's a simple rule. Either you came up with an idea yourself, in which case you need to show all reasoning steps and all experimental tests you performed, or you didn't, in which case you need to cite it. If you can remember enough to reproduce every step of someone else's work without referring to the original paper, but can't remember the paper you read it in, then you've got a very unusual mind.
That describes most genuine suicide bombers as well.
I'm not sure why you're moderated funny - that's quite true. The problem is the FBI going after the relatively large number of people who can, with sufficient inducement, be persuaded to become terrorists, and not the much smaller number who are planning to organise terrorist activities.
The people blowing themselves up are not the problem. There are lots of people around who are emotionally vulnerable, depressed, or suicidal and can be persuaded to die for something that they are convinced is the greater good. There was a case near where I grew up a couple of years ago where a suicide bomber killed himself (and no one else, fortunately, although he did cause some serious damage to the toilet he blew up in and some moderate damage to the surrounding restaurant). He was mentally ill, and was undergoing treatment that was working right up until someone convinced him to stop taking his antipsychotics. The problem is the people who prey on people like him and are perfectly willing to let other people die for their cause.
OpenBSD installs almost nothing by default, to the point that many systems don't even have man pages or a compiler.
The standard install includes everything required by the Single UNIX Specification, including man pages and a compiler. You can choose not to install them, but that typically only happens on small embedded systems with 16-64MB of Flash.
Fewer things installed = few things to break = fewer attack vectors = fewer things to maintain
It also means you don't get the situation like Ubuntu where every time I turn on the system I have running Ubuntu it wants to install 200+MB of updates for stuff I never use and don't want installed.
The proposals for closures in Java 8 are very similar to the proposals for closures in Java 7. These, in turn, were strikingly similar to proposals for closures in Java 6. There have been proof-of-concept implementations around for years and several other languages running on the JVM have had closures for as long, so I'm not really holding my breath...
Slashdot Mirror
The license for the last version of OS X was about $25. The dongle, however, was a lot more expensive.
Well, according to some of the early posts, this is somehow Apple's fault, and they should be fined
Well, it was only possible for Google to exploit this security hole because the security hole existed, and that was Apple's fault. If you check back in the archives, you'll see a lot of people suggesting that Microsoft should be held liable for security holes in Windows, Internet Explorer, and so on. The reason this is unlikely to happen is that making developers liable for every bug (and almost any bug is a potential security hole when you're talking about a browser) would push development costs to such a high level that only governments would be able to afford software. Companies writing software for aerospace are often held to this sort of level, and their development costs are hundreds of times higher than for commodity software - and even then they still have bugs, just not as many.
While I don't totally disagree that this is a good idea, I can think of quite a lot of companies that should be higher up the list for this kind of intervention. For example, almost every telecoms or energy company...
With terrorists, it's not such a good idea to wait until they've actually committed the physical crime. That tends to cost a lot of lives.
There are steps in between thinking about something and doing it. For example, I could write a description of the orbital corrections required how to fly an asteroid into London during the Olympics. I could hate the Olympics enough to want to do it. Unfortunately, since I lack a space program, I can't actually do it. Arresting me for doing it would make no sense. On the other hand, if I'm threatening to set off a car bomb and I'm sitting at home with a van full of fertiliser and home-made detonators, the security services would be negligent if I were allowed to go for a drive.
Interestingly, the BBC article calls CERN "Cern" as though it were a person. To whom do we address our complaints?
I've made this complaint in the past. They also write PC as Pc (which is an initialism, not an acronym - the other poster claiming that they only did this idiocy for acronyms is wrong). Their reply was that it is their house style to only capitalise the first letter of initialisms. This is not in any way standard English, but they decided to do it just to be special.
Firing someone for not being good at their job requires some objective metric that they can't dispute in an unfair dismissal suit. It also typically requires a verbal followed by a written warning and all sorts of HR interaction. Firing someone for lying on their CV is a lot easier.
Rand is the newer clone off the same production line.
The news here for me was that Windows used to support DVDs out of the box. The last version I used regularly was 2000, which couldn't, and I thought XP couldn't either. I'd always told people to install VLC if they wanted to play DVDs on Windows - when did this stop being necessary?
No, there's no such requirement and one would not make sense. A patent covers a specific (method of) implementation. If you had to show that you could implement the same thing in a different way when you filed a patent then there would be no point in the patent (unless, I suppose, you patented both approaches).
Good luck arguing that in court. Even if you win, you're probably down about a million dollars in legal fees...
Good thing you didn't go with English...
Aren't people supposed to provide a copy of their degrees when they get a job in USA?
Not sure about the USA, but I've only ever been asked to prove my qualifications once, and that was when I got a short-term job at my old university. Apparently the data protection act means that they need my explicit permission for the HR department to ask academic records for a copy of my degree certificate. Everywhere else has just accepted it without any evidence. Presumably if I lied and then couldn't do the job, they'd check and prosecute me for fraud and then use that as an excuse for firing me.
Shame you posted that as AC: it's exactly correct. The issue with instruction sets is that there are often very few sensible ways of implementing a specific instruction in hardware. The canonical example of this is the MIPS unaligned load / store patent. If you can figure out a way of implementing an unaligned load that doesn't involve the mechanisms covered in the MIPS patent, then you are free to do so. If you can't, then you need to license the patent from MIPS to be able to implement the instruction. The x86 instruction set is quite baroque, and is completely full of patents, especially newer parts like SSE. It's basically impossible to create a moderately efficient implementation without stepping on a load of patents.
It also displays a stunning lack of knowledge of programming languages. Most of the ideas that the grandparent attributes to C++ are from either Simula or Smalltalk (Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls would have a lot of fun suing Stroustrup, I'm sure). Given that C++ is a member of the Simula family and Java a member of the Smalltalk family, calling one a poor man's version of the other is just bizarre. It's like calling ML a poor man's version of Algol.
You don't need to hit refresh, you just buy a subscription and see the story turn up with a red banner half an hour before comments are permitted. Of course, if he'd done that then I'd expect a relevant post, rather than the obligatory barely-on-topic rant about Google that seems to crop up in every story about Google. I'm not exactly a fan of Google (or any other major tech company at the moment), but can we try to keep the criticisms on topic please?
If this is true, then why is libdvdcss still not able to be incorporated in Linux distributions originating from the US?
Reverse engineering for interoperability is protected by the DMCA. Distributing the knowledge you acquired is protected by the first amendment. Distributing the tools you created using this knowledge is prohibited by the DMCA.
Why do you think it's going to be expensive? The amount journals pay reviewers now is typically a token sum, and usually goes into some kind of general budget so there's no direct financial incentive to do reviews - you do them because being asked to review papers for a respected journal is an indication of status. I've submitted a paper to an open access journal. The reviews were not paid for. The editor was someone at the top of the field, as are the others involved in running the journal, and if one of them asks you to review a paper you're very unlikely to say no. The published papers are available online on a web server hosted by a university. I think you can also get printed copies of editions via some print-on-demand service if you want to pay for a bound copy.
The cost of running the journal is just that researchers don't get paid to do reviews.
There's a simple rule. Either you came up with an idea yourself, in which case you need to show all reasoning steps and all experimental tests you performed, or you didn't, in which case you need to cite it. If you can remember enough to reproduce every step of someone else's work without referring to the original paper, but can't remember the paper you read it in, then you've got a very unusual mind.
That describes most genuine suicide bombers as well.
I'm not sure why you're moderated funny - that's quite true. The problem is the FBI going after the relatively large number of people who can, with sufficient inducement, be persuaded to become terrorists, and not the much smaller number who are planning to organise terrorist activities.
The people blowing themselves up are not the problem. There are lots of people around who are emotionally vulnerable, depressed, or suicidal and can be persuaded to die for something that they are convinced is the greater good. There was a case near where I grew up a couple of years ago where a suicide bomber killed himself (and no one else, fortunately, although he did cause some serious damage to the toilet he blew up in and some moderate damage to the surrounding restaurant). He was mentally ill, and was undergoing treatment that was working right up until someone convinced him to stop taking his antipsychotics. The problem is the people who prey on people like him and are perfectly willing to let other people die for their cause.
So then we get shills posting off-topic replies to the first post. It doesn't really solve much.
OpenBSD installs almost nothing by default, to the point that many systems don't even have man pages or a compiler.
The standard install includes everything required by the Single UNIX Specification, including man pages and a compiler. You can choose not to install them, but that typically only happens on small embedded systems with 16-64MB of Flash.
Fewer things installed = few things to break = fewer attack vectors = fewer things to maintain
It also means you don't get the situation like Ubuntu where every time I turn on the system I have running Ubuntu it wants to install 200+MB of updates for stuff I never use and don't want installed.
Your UID is 666, troll.
The proposals for closures in Java 8 are very similar to the proposals for closures in Java 7. These, in turn, were strikingly similar to proposals for closures in Java 6. There have been proof-of-concept implementations around for years and several other languages running on the JVM have had closures for as long, so I'm not really holding my breath...
Maybe if Google ships this Microsoft and Oracle will fight to the death over who gets to sue Google...