I always figured the first thing I'd do when I bought my own home was to run ethernet cable everywhere. About a year and a half ago I moved into a mobile home and finally got to do it...although in a mobile home "everywhere" doesn't include very many places.
The first task was to clear out the spider webs from under the home, so I spent a fair bit of time crawling around with the vacuum. A big tarp, safety glasses, and a filter to cover the mouth are nice assets while doing that.
Then, I pulled some of the wood paneling off the walls (not sure what I would have done if I'd had drywall), drilled a hole down through the floor in the middle of the wall (NOTE: if your wall runs parallel to the floor studs, it will almost surely be right on top of one, so aim to the side a little as you go down--if the wall is perpendicular to the studs, make sure not to start on top of a stud), stuck a piece of PVC pipe through it and ran CAT5 cable and 3 A/V lines between the front room and the bedroom (along with an extra phone jack in the front room and a TV antenna splitter connecting the antenna to both rooms).
To reduce airflow through the PVC and into the walls, I stuck a piece of foam in each end after all the wire was in.
Now the time has come to move so I'm selling the place--hopefully the improvements will help to entice some tech-savvy person to move in!
Well, I guess I made the mistake of waiting to be able to read the article before posting anything, so it's probably too late to have anyone read this, but...
(The only method by which this approximation can be perfected is the scientific one, as compared to religious belief, which is basically guessing.)
Look at it this way: which scientist do you think has the more perfect model of how things work in the universe--the guy in the lab who, smart as he is, isn't quite sure whether to reject Einstein in favor of some new theory, and who hopes that computers will soon be powerful enough to help him complete his ideas on superstrings, or the scientist who's created worlds, populated them with all sorts of living things, knows out how to bring dead people back to life, etc? Which scientist do you think is closer to "basically guessing"?
I don't expect you to take my word for it that there is a God, and that he's a better scientist than any of our fellow mortals, but that's the way I see it. Each of us has to choose who to believe when they tell us they've got things figured out. I may not be able to apply the scientific method to the experiments I do to decide who to believe (since the results are influenced by God's choices--not just immutable physical laws), but I've got my evidence, and I think my choice to believe in God has as good a basis as anyone's choice to believe someone else.
Personally, I don't see any conflict between faith and science--I'm just willing to believe what the better scientist tells me if he tells me I did my experiment wrong, and hope that I'll be able to find out where my mistake was.
Hmm, I guess that would be "passive terrorism"--I'm not threatening to do anything, just asking him to terrorize himself. Will I get expelled from Slashdot for that?
Seriously though, although there is a valid issue here, I think about half of what you're saying is absurd. The problem isn't informing, it's how the schools respond to tips. To say that asking people to be informants threatens first amendment rights is like saying that newspapers publishing what people say threatens first amendment rights--both are exercizes of freedom of speech, and both make it easier for the authorities to catch people expressing opinions they don't like. The first amendment was intended to ensure that the authorities (whether it be the principal or the police) couldn't a) surpress the right of free speech, and b) prosecute someone for simply expressing an opinion.
The schools would be stupid and irresponsible if they didn't watch for warning signs in the free expressions of the students and act appropriately. The problem is that they are reacting inappropriately--THAT is what the first ammendment was intended to stop.
Hmm, so is Jon really just yelling "fire" in a crowded movie theater here? Taking a position he knows is partially incorrect in order to stir up some entertaining activity? Provoking others to riot?
I'm not going to say "Jon, please die." I enjoy too many of your columns to do that. But I will say "please talk about the real problem."
If your phone has a removable antenna, the technology is available today. You just need to buy the Sprint PCS Radio Telescope Antenna option. Of course, you'll need a couple dozen semi trucks to carry it around in. And it cuts your battery life down to about 0.0027 seconds, so you'll need the optional Sprint PCS Hydroelectric Generator too.
Back on December 13, I got a message from SETI@Home (which I too USED TO be running) talking about expanding their search. As I remember it, that was a day or two after California had had a stage 3 energy alert--where reserves had dropped below 1.5% of capacity, and they were about to start rolling blackouts, cutting peoples' power off for 90 minutes at a time. They were also talking about (or did?) requiring some big energy consumers like Intel to turn their lights down to half their normal brightness or something. So you can understand that I was less than impressed to hear that the project that's already burning through how many trees a day? (I heard it once a long time ago) was expanding its efforts. Don't let the rhetoric about "spare cycles" fool you--a lot of the computers running this thing would be off or in low power mode if they weren't. I know, I once had 3 computers running it that would have been off.
Yes, if we found a signal proving there was intelligent life out there, it would be significant (though as others have mentioned, probably not exactly USEFUL since it would take so long to send a message back), but keeping the lights on and the environment clean are useful too.
Anyway, on December 13, inspired by the email from SETI@Home, I wrote up a little "message received from outer space" news story and posted it to one of my web sites.
Here's a suggestion: Talk to whoever owns the domain sucks.com and get them to do DNS for subdomains like www.guiness.sucks.com. Who knows, you may not even have to pay to register your domain name.
I think that merely "accessing" a system illegally should not be a criminal offense, and should incur only minor civil damages. I am verydisturbed by the trend towards legislation that allows people to collect damages that were never actually incurred.
Unless a sysadmin is 100% irresponsible, there are damages, even when someone "merely accesses" a system illegally. If somebody hacks your system, can you just say "well, they didn't deface my web pages, so there was no damage"? How can you be sure they didn't steal some information? How can you be sure they didn't leave a root kit? How can you be sure they're not using your system to attack other systems? To be responsible, you pretty much have to do a complete reinstall of your system. You also have to be sure that when you restore your data, you don't restore their backdoor. I'd call that damages.
Also, I woudn't go too far in claiming that the person who doesn't make their system 100% secure is totally responsible. You may have good locks on the doors and windows in your house, motion detection systems in place, prickly plants under the windows, and guard dogs. But that's not going to do you much good when somebody starts firing a howitzer at your door. It won't even keep a kid with a bb-gun from being able to shoot a window out.
I don't think the vendors should be held completely responsible either. Software isn't perfect. That's just the way it is. If all software had to be perfect before being released, the only thing you'd be able to buy (or download) would be "hello world". Unless the manufacturer of your front door claims that it will protect you against cruise missles, don't expect it to survive a cruise missle attack. Pick your software carefully. Choose a vendor who has a good track record. Set it up correctly. Keep on top of bug fixes. Then hope for the best. Unless the vendor is criminally negligent, give it a rest.
According to one of the speakers at a tech session at the Sundance Film Festival this year, special effects for the big screen are often (95% of the time) rendered at only 2000 x... ? (something less). If there's lots of motion in the special effects, then they'll render them at 4000 x 3000 instead to keep things clearer. The resolution of this thing is a little higher than that.
If the next Star Wars is being shot all-digital, it may be at slightly lower resolution than this.
If you haven't watched the movie "Gandhi" lately (or ever), I highly recommend checking it out. There are ways to fight against the barrel of a gun. As Gandhi states (paraphrasing), the goal of civil resistance is to make injustice visible. Once it's clear that the resisters are acting morally and those in power are not, it is possible to amass enough support from people at large to win victories over the power of force.
As has been stated during some of the discussions here of the protests at such events as the Republican convention, one of the reasons why protesters these days have been unsuccessful in enlisting the sympathy of the masses is that their protest methods don't fulfill this goal--violent protests only serve to justify the use of force in the eyes of people not already converted to the cause.
It's worth citing another quote (or paraphrase) from the movie: When asked whether he thought non-violence could be used against someone like Hitler, Gandhi replied, "Not without deafeats and much pain. But are there no defeats in this war? No pain?" Don't mistake the fact that in a war of civil resitance, the resisters receive injustice while the other side doesn't for ineffectiveness. Part of being a civil resister (paraphrasing from the movie yet again) is the willingness to accept injustice without responding in kind, in order to make injustice visible.
As the dominant states today (USA, USSR/Russia, China..) have absoule power (specifically, advanced nuclear weapons & guidance systems, and really, really horrible biological weapons that make nukes look like candy) they will be around forever.
These kinds of weapons may be effective for combatting external threats, but I have a hard time imagining them being used internally. If they were, I suspect it would only take a few seconds for the vast majority of the citizens to realize that their government had become an unbearably corrupt enemy of the people, resulting in (at best) total non-cooperation or (at worst) bloody revolution.
Linux in a wristwatch by IBM
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Linux In A Box
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· Score: 3
Here is a story on Yahoo's daily news about IBM prototyping a wristwatch running Linux. It uses some wireless technology to communicate with other computers (no, there's not a dinky little 101 key keyboard with keys so small that philosophers can argue about how many angels can dance on them). The article says they're not planning on commecializing it though...
NOTE: This is just a question, and is not intended to be an expression of opinion one way or the other about what should or should not be legal.
I've heard a number of people state that person to person sharing of copyrighted materials is legal as long as it's not done for profit--that you can make copies for family members, friends, etc. One of the arguments I've heard in favor of Napster is that it's person to person sharing so it's legal, and one of the arguments against is that you're sharing with people you don't know, so it's not legal.
My question is, is there a U.S. statute or judicial ruling stating that person to person sharing is legal? I've looked around a little, and all I can find is the section of the copyright law describing "fair use", which is pretty vague, but in my opinion, would be impossible to interpret as allowing this kind of person to person sharing. Could someone tell me a URL pointing to a statute or judicial ruling to the contrary?
NOTE: This is just a question, and is not intended to be an expression of opinion one way or the other about what should or should not be legal.
I've heard a number of people state that person to person sharing of copyrighted materials is legal as long as it's not done for profit--that you can make copies for family members, friends, etc. One of the arguments I've heard in favor of Napster is that it's person to person sharing so it's legal, and one of the arguments against is that you're sharing with people you don't know, so it's not legal.
My question is, is there a U.S. statute or judicial ruling stating that person to person sharing is legal? I've looked around a little, and all I can find is the section of the copyright law describing "fair use", which is pretty vague, but in my opinion, would be impossible to interpret as allowing this kind of person to person sharing. Could someone tell me a URL pointing to a statute or judicial ruling to the contrary?
Basically, you're dealing with three sets of items:
The actual code which drives the back end of your application (Enzyme's PHP, and raw bits of static HTML), which is protected by the GPL.
The data that you're archiving using Enzyme, protected by Copyright (or not, depending on who is collecting the information and the terms under which they acquired it).
The confluence of the code and database, which produces the actual site with published information.
I agree with what you're saying, but I think it should be broken down into 4 sets of items:
The applications serving up the web pages (the web server, the PHP parser/interpreter/whatever you call it, the database software...), at least some of which is protected by the GPL.
Your PHP code, and raw bits of static HTML, which is owned by you or whoever paid you to write it.
The data that you're archiving using Enzyme, protected by Copyright (or not, depending on who is collecting the information and the terms under which they acquired it).
The confluence of the applications, your code, and the database, which produces the actual site with published information.
The separation between the PHP parser and the code it parses is important. The code in the PHP parser has not been integrated into the PHP scripts, it has operated on them--it has executed them. It's basically the same issue as saying that you can use an open source compiler to compile closed source applications. Certainly that's how I read the GPL, and I've never heard that questioned.
Your house is yours. You paid for it. But you may not have more than 3 people at the same time in it...
A few points:
If the person who sold you the house wanted to, they could include a clause like this in the contract. Of course it would be stupid for them to do so, because they'd probably lose the sale.
Restrictions like this do exist for apartments, mobile homes where the space the home is on is rented, etc. I've lived in many places where there were limits on how many days in a month a guest could stay. To stay longer, they'd have to be added to the lease and I'd have to pay more.
Contracts are negotiable. Sellers who sell large quantities at low prices may be unlikely to negotiate, because they don't mind so much losing the business of people who won't accept their terms. The real risk to them is that another big seller will come along with more buyer-friendly terms and take away their business. If you don't like the way the big boys do business, a few things to do are:
Complain vocally to them. Let them know what you want and that you'll support whoever gives it to you.
Complain to other people and try to get them to join your efforts.
Complain (logically, coherently) to government against bad laws.
Boycott.
Support the competition (as long as the competition is preferable!)
Will you get the results you want? Who knows. The big boys have more power that each of the little people. That's the real world. But all the little people together also have more power than the big boys. Big companies may be able to abuse government to get laws passed that give them illigitemate power, but if nobody buys their products, they'll be dead, laws or no laws. And when they're weaker or gone, the laws can be fixed.
This article and the responses to it are a perfect example of the "Freedom, freedom freedom! For me, Me, ME!" attitude that is so common on/.. I'm all for "Freedom, freedom, freedom", but what I think is often missing are the "for everybody, everybody, everybody" and "responsibility, responsibility, responsibility" parts.
Now, I'm not saying that I think the DMCA is a good idea. From what I know about it (admittedly not that much), it sounds flawed. But I'm talking about this article and the responses to it, not the DMCA.
So what do I mean by "for me, Me ME!"? The attitude of "I have the right to do anything I want." Fortunately, at least some people add the caveat of "as long as I'm not actively injuring someone else," but even those who do generally seem to ignore indirect or passive "injuries" to others.
Let's say I'm a musician. I write a song. I want to sell it. Do I, or do I not have the right to choose how to sell my work? Do I have the right to give it away for free? As long as I haven't (freely) made a contract with someone which restricts my right to do so, yes. Do I have the right to sell hard copies without placing any copying restriction on the purchaser? Same answer (though I don't think this is very common). Do I have the right to sell copies that do include restrictions on copying? It sounds like most of the people posting here want to take away the freedom to choose this business model. Is it a smart business model? Would the artist be better off choosing a different model? I don't know. As far as laws are concerned, I don't care. The artist (and whoever else has acquired a legal interest in their music) should have the right to choose whatever sales model they want, even if it's a stupid, selfish model.
Despite what a few people have said here, capitalism is not simply a question of material supply and demand. Just because digital copying is essentially free, that doesn't mean that a person has no right to charge for digital copying. A person has the right to sell the product of their work however they want (not caveat below). The consumer has the right to refuse to do business with a person who chooses to sell in a way they don't like.
Has anyone here read "Atlas Shrugged"? While I certainly disagree with certain aspects of Ayn Rand's philosophy, one thing I do agree with is the idea that no one has the right to take the product of someone else's work without the free consent of the producer. No one has the right to dictate the terms by which others may be allowed to do business (except to prevent harm to unrelated parties--for example, it is legitimate to restrict a person's right to hire a hit man to kill someone).
Getting back to my ill-informed opinion of DMCA, I agree that people should have the right to make their own archival copies and personalized collections of things they've paid for, and that they should be able to copy them to other media for their own use. I suppose the producer COULD legitimately restrict all copying in their license agreements, but I personally would be tempted to boycott anyone who did.
Anyway, the main point I want to make is, while you're campaigning for freedom, remember to take others' freedom into account, and take into account how the policies you're advocating will affect the freedom of others.
Cool idea, though the quality of the results varies a bit (some very funny). Kinda reminds me of something I recently set up on my Doodle web site: Add-on Stories. They can either be based on one of my Doodles, or based on the writer's own idea. Each story can have mutliple threads branching at any level, and you can always click a link that will show you the full story along one thread, or multiple alternatives at a particular level.
It's pretty new, so there's not much there yet. Perhaps you could change that...
The ads say "Windows 2000 is coming. Online or off, a standard in reliability." Well, we all know how Microsoft sets standards:
$Win2KDocumentation =~ s/bug/feature/g;
"Online or off" is a particularly interesting choice of words. "My computer is offline right now, but MS says that's standard behavior...What? your Linux machine is still on line? Those Open Source hackers are dangerous, the way they reject industry standard behavior."
Having done QA for a major software vendor, I'm sure that lots of the "bugs" are trivial, and a count of "potential issues" doesn't say much about the stability of a product. Forget the "potential issue" count. I'm basing my expectations for Win2K on past experience with MS products...and sticking with my Mac and Linux machines.
1. They prefer electronic form The Copyright Office will be placing all comments and reply comments that are submitted in electronic form on its Website (http://lcweb.loc.gov/copyright/1201). Because of this, the Office prefers that comments and reply comments be submitted in electronic form, in one of the following formats...
Plus, as you can see by the quote below, your comments are more likely to get posted to their web site if you submit them electronically.
2. If you send it via snail mail... Anyone who is unable to submit a comment in electronic form should submit an original and fifteen paper copies by hand or by mail to the appropriate address listed above. It may not be feasible for the Office to place these comments on its website.
Yep, 15 copies. You'd probably better do this unless you want somebody who doesn't feel like making copies h(im|er)self to set your comments aside and forget about them.
I agree--their contribution is not insignificant. The same could be said of anyone who develops apps that run on Linux.
I remember one of the issues the tabloids, er, I mean "computer industry press", made a lot of hoopla about in the "Mac is dead" years was that they were losing developer support, and less apps meant less users meant less chance that the platform will continue to exist.
Of course the situation isn't quite the same with OSS, because development is done largely by people who aren't asking to get paid for their work by 5 million users, but on the other hand, more developer support (more apps) => more users => more developer support => more apps for all of us to use on our preferred OS (okay, so I use my Mac more than my Linux machine--but I DEFINITELY prefer Linux to M$'s junk).
Of course, OS/2 did have one major problem with its multitasking--it only had one input queue shared by all programs (at least for the keyboard, I don't remember whether this was true of the mouse). So if one program stalled with input waiting in the queue, nobody got their input. As much as I wanted OS/2 to kick M$'s tukus, I remember running into that one a few times and being fairly disenchanted.
Actually, it was more of a comment than a question. Yes, you are right. It is their own fear that enslaves them. The points I would make are:
1) Do we really have so little consideration for other people that we value our freedom to express our own hostility so highly that we'll push them into slavery (sure, it's to themselves, but it's still slavery, and the hostility still helps contribute to it). Wouldn't it be better to contribute to an environment where such people can test the outside of their comfort zones a little, and perhaps overcome their fear?
If Slashdot is so much about freedom, it would be ironic if that meant only "freedom for ME", without caring about helping others to become more free also.
2) If (okay, I'm making an assumption that may not be true for some people) our goal is to have a stimulating discussion, would the discussion not be more enhanced by the inclusion of a wider variety of opinions than it is by the... "intensity" of the opinions of those who express themselves through hostility?
There's a term called "poisoning the well", which means shutting out differing opinions by expressing one opinion in a way that attempts to make anyone who disagrees look like a fool. While that doesn't actually take away someone's freedom to disagree, in reality, it is clearly the case that it reduces the number of differing opinions that are expressed.
> Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who > cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves. > -George Gordon Noel Byron (1788-1824), [Lord Byron]
Interesting quote you have appearing with your posts. So are you saying that the bigots and fools whose mindless hostility scares off the more timid Slashdot readers are enslaving them?
WHY ON EARTH ARE THEY MSWORD FILES?! For gods sake, put those things in HTML and post them on your internal web. They're much more accessible that way.
Amen to that. A few reasons why I agree with this so strongly:
If I have to install Office 2000 to read the document, it's not gonna get read.
If I have to search through 10 different servers to figure out where the design document is, it's not gonna get read.
If I have to search through 100 different files to find the chapter I'm looking for, I may decide to guess what it says rather than keep looking.
Even if you don't go with HTML, be sure to have a standard document format which DOESN'T require the lastest version of some piece of software that that company doesn't have a site licence for (assuming it's not free). If each person uses their own favorite program to generate their documents, you'll need a second hard drive to hold all the applications you need to read everything.
Do it in HTML, and hyperlink like crazy--the more paths I can follow to get to the info I want, the better. If I know from the start that I'm 3 clicks away from the information I want, I'll go looking for it. If I have to log on to server X, navigate through a million subdirectories, maybe install a program to two, look through a bunch of files, and only then find out that nobody ever documented the thing I'm llooking for, I may not bother to look at all.
Of course if those documents aren't reliably maintained, or there isn't a way to mark them as "out of date", or whatever, then they may not be very much good for knowledge transfer; they should still be of some "design review" benefit though.
I would definitely vote for maintaining the documents, even if the English isn't perfect. Speaking of specs for application behavior, which aren't quite the same as programmer's design documents, I don't know how many times I've been trying to figure out whether something was a bug or not, or how to systematically go about testing it, only to find that the spec doesn't cover the area in question, or that the spec has changed since the document was written. What a waste of time. Do I have to hunt through the company to find the one person who MIGHT be able to describe the expected behavior of the program?
Even worse is the case where perhaps a few months back, there were a series of meetings (only slightly more civilized that brawls) where a spec was decided on, but nobody wrote it down and posted it where everyone could look at it (easily, as in in HTML on the internal web server) and correct any mistakes made by the documentor. So now everybody thinks the consensus was to make it work the way THEY wanted it to work in the first place. What happens next is another series of meetings not much different than the first, only this time, deadlines are coming up, so you have to scale back the feature set to a bare minimum. I've seen this wort of problem waste FAR more time than is used wirting and maintaining documentation.
For me, this was probably the best programming book I've ever read. But whether it's good for you or not depends largely on how you like to learn.
>It tries to cover way too much in too small of a space. This is exactly why I loved it. It explained a huge number of points clearly and concisely, gave a brief code example, and then moved on without making me wade through another hundred pages on a topic I already knew all I wanted to know about. It's an ideal book for someone who likes to grab a book, read it cover to cover to cram a bumch of concepts in their head, have a reference in which it's easy to find exactly the piece of information that they're looking for, and then when they try it themself and it doesn't quite work, they're happy to bring up the man pages to get the rest of the details.
But if you want to have all of the details in the book, if you want a comprehensive treatment of each topic, if you don't need a book to enlighten you about what's possible, but prefer a book where you can look up exactly how to do everything that's possible, then perhaps this isn't what you're looking for.
Slashdot Mirror
The first task was to clear out the spider webs from under the home, so I spent a fair bit of time crawling around with the vacuum. A big tarp, safety glasses, and a filter to cover the mouth are nice assets while doing that.
Then, I pulled some of the wood paneling off the walls (not sure what I would have done if I'd had drywall), drilled a hole down through the floor in the middle of the wall (NOTE: if your wall runs parallel to the floor studs, it will almost surely be right on top of one, so aim to the side a little as you go down--if the wall is perpendicular to the studs, make sure not to start on top of a stud), stuck a piece of PVC pipe through it and ran CAT5 cable and 3 A/V lines between the front room and the bedroom (along with an extra phone jack in the front room and a TV antenna splitter connecting the antenna to both rooms).
To reduce airflow through the PVC and into the walls, I stuck a piece of foam in each end after all the wire was in.
Now the time has come to move so I'm selling the place--hopefully the improvements will help to entice some tech-savvy person to move in!
(The only method by which this approximation can be perfected is the scientific one, as compared to religious belief, which is basically guessing.)
Look at it this way: which scientist do you think has the more perfect model of how things work in the universe--the guy in the lab who, smart as he is, isn't quite sure whether to reject Einstein in favor of some new theory, and who hopes that computers will soon be powerful enough to help him complete his ideas on superstrings, or the scientist who's created worlds, populated them with all sorts of living things, knows out how to bring dead people back to life, etc? Which scientist do you think is closer to "basically guessing"?
I don't expect you to take my word for it that there is a God, and that he's a better scientist than any of our fellow mortals, but that's the way I see it. Each of us has to choose who to believe when they tell us they've got things figured out. I may not be able to apply the scientific method to the experiments I do to decide who to believe (since the results are influenced by God's choices--not just immutable physical laws), but I've got my evidence, and I think my choice to believe in God has as good a basis as anyone's choice to believe someone else.
Personally, I don't see any conflict between faith and science--I'm just willing to believe what the better scientist tells me if he tells me I did my experiment wrong, and hope that I'll be able to find out where my mistake was.
Seriously though, although there is a valid issue here, I think about half of what you're saying is absurd. The problem isn't informing, it's how the schools respond to tips. To say that asking people to be informants threatens first amendment rights is like saying that newspapers publishing what people say threatens first amendment rights--both are exercizes of freedom of speech, and both make it easier for the authorities to catch people expressing opinions they don't like. The first amendment was intended to ensure that the authorities (whether it be the principal or the police) couldn't a) surpress the right of free speech, and b) prosecute someone for simply expressing an opinion.
The schools would be stupid and irresponsible if they didn't watch for warning signs in the free expressions of the students and act appropriately. The problem is that they are reacting inappropriately--THAT is what the first ammendment was intended to stop.
Hmm, so is Jon really just yelling "fire" in a crowded movie theater here? Taking a position he knows is partially incorrect in order to stir up some entertaining activity? Provoking others to riot?
I'm not going to say "Jon, please die." I enjoy too many of your columns to do that. But I will say "please talk about the real problem."
If your phone has a removable antenna, the technology is available today. You just need to buy the Sprint PCS Radio Telescope Antenna option. Of course, you'll need a couple dozen semi trucks to carry it around in. And it cuts your battery life down to about 0.0027 seconds, so you'll need the optional Sprint PCS Hydroelectric Generator too.
Back on December 13, I got a message from SETI@Home (which I too USED TO be running) talking about expanding their search. As I remember it, that was a day or two after California had had a stage 3 energy alert--where reserves had dropped below 1.5% of capacity, and they were about to start rolling blackouts, cutting peoples' power off for 90 minutes at a time. They were also talking about (or did?) requiring some big energy consumers like Intel to turn their lights down to half their normal brightness or something. So you can understand that I was less than impressed to hear that the project that's already burning through how many trees a day? (I heard it once a long time ago) was expanding its efforts. Don't let the rhetoric about "spare cycles" fool you--a lot of the computers running this thing would be off or in low power mode if they weren't. I know, I once had 3 computers running it that would have been off.
Yes, if we found a signal proving there was intelligent life out there, it would be significant (though as others have mentioned, probably not exactly USEFUL since it would take so long to send a message back), but keeping the lights on and the environment clean are useful too.
Anyway, on December 13, inspired by the email from SETI@Home, I wrote up a little "message received from outer space" news story and posted it to one of my web sites.
Here's a suggestion: Talk to whoever owns the domain sucks.com and get them to do DNS for subdomains like www.guiness.sucks.com. Who knows, you may not even have to pay to register your domain name.
It will be called "Kiraibo" ("Ai" means "love" in Japanese, "kirai" means "hate").
"It will be a friend of Aibo's"
Oh, maybe not then.
Unless a sysadmin is 100% irresponsible, there are damages, even when someone "merely accesses" a system illegally. If somebody hacks your system, can you just say "well, they didn't deface my web pages, so there was no damage"? How can you be sure they didn't steal some information? How can you be sure they didn't leave a root kit? How can you be sure they're not using your system to attack other systems? To be responsible, you pretty much have to do a complete reinstall of your system. You also have to be sure that when you restore your data, you don't restore their backdoor. I'd call that damages.
Also, I woudn't go too far in claiming that the person who doesn't make their system 100% secure is totally responsible. You may have good locks on the doors and windows in your house, motion detection systems in place, prickly plants under the windows, and guard dogs. But that's not going to do you much good when somebody starts firing a howitzer at your door. It won't even keep a kid with a bb-gun from being able to shoot a window out.
I don't think the vendors should be held completely responsible either. Software isn't perfect. That's just the way it is. If all software had to be perfect before being released, the only thing you'd be able to buy (or download) would be "hello world". Unless the manufacturer of your front door claims that it will protect you against cruise missles, don't expect it to survive a cruise missle attack. Pick your software carefully. Choose a vendor who has a good track record. Set it up correctly. Keep on top of bug fixes. Then hope for the best. Unless the vendor is criminally negligent, give it a rest.
If the next Star Wars is being shot all-digital, it may be at slightly lower resolution than this.
If you haven't watched the movie "Gandhi" lately (or ever), I highly recommend checking it out. There are ways to fight against the barrel of a gun. As Gandhi states (paraphrasing), the goal of civil resistance is to make injustice visible. Once it's clear that the resisters are acting morally and those in power are not, it is possible to amass enough support from people at large to win victories over the power of force.
As has been stated during some of the discussions here of the protests at such events as the Republican convention, one of the reasons why protesters these days have been unsuccessful in enlisting the sympathy of the masses is that their protest methods don't fulfill this goal--violent protests only serve to justify the use of force in the eyes of people not already converted to the cause.
It's worth citing another quote (or paraphrase) from the movie: When asked whether he thought non-violence could be used against someone like Hitler, Gandhi replied, "Not without deafeats and much pain. But are there no defeats in this war? No pain?" Don't mistake the fact that in a war of civil resitance, the resisters receive injustice while the other side doesn't for ineffectiveness. Part of being a civil resister (paraphrasing from the movie yet again) is the willingness to accept injustice without responding in kind, in order to make injustice visible.
As the dominant states today (USA, USSR/Russia, China..) have absoule power (specifically, advanced nuclear weapons & guidance systems, and really, really horrible biological weapons that make nukes look like candy) they will be around forever.
These kinds of weapons may be effective for combatting external threats, but I have a hard time imagining them being used internally. If they were, I suspect it would only take a few seconds for the vast majority of the citizens to realize that their government had become an unbearably corrupt enemy of the people, resulting in (at best) total non-cooperation or (at worst) bloody revolution.
Here is a story on Yahoo's daily news about IBM prototyping a wristwatch running Linux. It uses some wireless technology to communicate with other computers (no, there's not a dinky little 101 key keyboard with keys so small that philosophers can argue about how many angels can dance on them). The article says they're not planning on commecializing it though...
I've heard a number of people state that person to person sharing of copyrighted materials is legal as long as it's not done for profit--that you can make copies for family members, friends, etc. One of the arguments I've heard in favor of Napster is that it's person to person sharing so it's legal, and one of the arguments against is that you're sharing with people you don't know, so it's not legal.
My question is, is there a U.S. statute or judicial ruling stating that person to person sharing is legal? I've looked around a little, and all I can find is the section of the copyright law describing "fair use", which is pretty vague, but in my opinion, would be impossible to interpret as allowing this kind of person to person sharing. Could someone tell me a URL pointing to a statute or judicial ruling to the contrary?
Thanks.
I've heard a number of people state that person to person sharing of copyrighted materials is legal as long as it's not done for profit--that you can make copies for family members, friends, etc. One of the arguments I've heard in favor of Napster is that it's person to person sharing so it's legal, and one of the arguments against is that you're sharing with people you don't know, so it's not legal.
My question is, is there a U.S. statute or judicial ruling stating that person to person sharing is legal? I've looked around a little, and all I can find is the section of the copyright law describing "fair use", which is pretty vague, but in my opinion, would be impossible to interpret as allowing this kind of person to person sharing. Could someone tell me a URL pointing to a statute or judicial ruling to the contrary?
Thanks.
- The actual code which drives the back end of your application (Enzyme's PHP, and raw bits of static HTML), which is protected by the GPL.
- The data that you're archiving using Enzyme, protected by Copyright (or not, depending on who is collecting the information and the terms under which they acquired it).
- The confluence of the code and database, which produces the actual site with published information.
I agree with what you're saying, but I think it should be broken down into 4 sets of items:- The applications serving up the web pages (the web server, the PHP parser/interpreter/whatever you call it, the database software...), at least some of which is protected by the GPL.
- Your PHP code, and raw bits of static HTML, which is owned by you or whoever paid you to write it.
- The data that you're archiving using Enzyme, protected by Copyright (or not, depending on who is collecting the information and the terms under which they acquired it).
- The confluence of the applications, your code, and the database, which produces the actual site with published information.
The separation between the PHP parser and the code it parses is important. The code in the PHP parser has not been integrated into the PHP scripts, it has operated on them--it has executed them. It's basically the same issue as saying that you can use an open source compiler to compile closed source applications. Certainly that's how I read the GPL, and I've never heard that questioned.A few points:
- If the person who sold you the house wanted to, they could include a clause like this in the contract. Of course it would be stupid for them to do so, because they'd probably lose the sale.
- Restrictions like this do exist for apartments, mobile homes where the space the home is on is rented, etc. I've lived in many places where there were limits on how many days in a month a guest could stay. To stay longer, they'd have to be added to the lease and I'd have to pay more.
Contracts are negotiable. Sellers who sell large quantities at low prices may be unlikely to negotiate, because they don't mind so much losing the business of people who won't accept their terms. The real risk to them is that another big seller will come along with more buyer-friendly terms and take away their business. If you don't like the way the big boys do business, a few things to do are:- Complain vocally to them. Let them know what you want and that you'll support whoever gives it to you.
- Complain to other people and try to get them to join your efforts.
- Complain (logically, coherently) to government against bad laws.
- Boycott.
- Support the competition (as long as the competition is preferable!)
Will you get the results you want? Who knows. The big boys have more power that each of the little people. That's the real world. But all the little people together also have more power than the big boys. Big companies may be able to abuse government to get laws passed that give them illigitemate power, but if nobody buys their products, they'll be dead, laws or no laws. And when they're weaker or gone, the laws can be fixed.Now, I'm not saying that I think the DMCA is a good idea. From what I know about it (admittedly not that much), it sounds flawed. But I'm talking about this article and the responses to it, not the DMCA.
So what do I mean by "for me, Me ME!"? The attitude of "I have the right to do anything I want." Fortunately, at least some people add the caveat of "as long as I'm not actively injuring someone else," but even those who do generally seem to ignore indirect or passive "injuries" to others.
Let's say I'm a musician. I write a song. I want to sell it. Do I, or do I not have the right to choose how to sell my work? Do I have the right to give it away for free? As long as I haven't (freely) made a contract with someone which restricts my right to do so, yes. Do I have the right to sell hard copies without placing any copying restriction on the purchaser? Same answer (though I don't think this is very common). Do I have the right to sell copies that do include restrictions on copying? It sounds like most of the people posting here want to take away the freedom to choose this business model. Is it a smart business model? Would the artist be better off choosing a different model? I don't know. As far as laws are concerned, I don't care. The artist (and whoever else has acquired a legal interest in their music) should have the right to choose whatever sales model they want, even if it's a stupid, selfish model.
Despite what a few people have said here, capitalism is not simply a question of material supply and demand. Just because digital copying is essentially free, that doesn't mean that a person has no right to charge for digital copying. A person has the right to sell the product of their work however they want (not caveat below). The consumer has the right to refuse to do business with a person who chooses to sell in a way they don't like.
Has anyone here read "Atlas Shrugged"? While I certainly disagree with certain aspects of Ayn Rand's philosophy, one thing I do agree with is the idea that no one has the right to take the product of someone else's work without the free consent of the producer. No one has the right to dictate the terms by which others may be allowed to do business (except to prevent harm to unrelated parties--for example, it is legitimate to restrict a person's right to hire a hit man to kill someone).
Getting back to my ill-informed opinion of DMCA, I agree that people should have the right to make their own archival copies and personalized collections of things they've paid for, and that they should be able to copy them to other media for their own use. I suppose the producer COULD legitimately restrict all copying in their license agreements, but I personally would be tempted to boycott anyone who did.
Anyway, the main point I want to make is, while you're campaigning for freedom, remember to take others' freedom into account, and take into account how the policies you're advocating will affect the freedom of others.
Cool idea, though the quality of the results varies a bit (some very funny). Kinda reminds me of something I recently set up on my Doodle web site: Add-on Stories. They can either be based on one of my Doodles, or based on the writer's own idea. Each story can have mutliple threads branching at any level, and you can always click a link that will show you the full story along one thread, or multiple alternatives at a particular level.
It's pretty new, so there's not much there yet. Perhaps you could change that...
</shameless self-promotion>
The ads say "Windows 2000 is coming. Online or off, a standard in reliability." Well, we all know how Microsoft sets standards:
$Win2KDocumentation =~ s/bug/feature/g;
"Online or off" is a particularly interesting choice of words. "My computer is offline right now, but MS says that's standard behavior...What? your Linux machine is still on line? Those Open Source hackers are dangerous, the way they reject industry standard behavior."
Having done QA for a major software vendor, I'm sure that lots of the "bugs" are trivial, and a count of "potential issues" doesn't say much about the stability of a product. Forget the "potential issue" count. I'm basing my expectations for Win2K on past experience with MS products...and sticking with my Mac and Linux machines.
1. They prefer electronic form
The Copyright Office will be placing all comments and reply comments that are submitted in electronic form on its Website (http://lcweb.loc.gov/copyright/1201). Because of this, the Office prefers that comments and reply comments be submitted in electronic form, in one of the following formats...
Plus, as you can see by the quote below, your comments are more likely to get posted to their web site if you submit them electronically.
2. If you send it via snail mail...
Anyone who is unable to submit a comment in electronic form should submit an original and fifteen paper copies by hand or by mail to the appropriate address listed above. It may not be feasible for the Office to place these comments on its website.
Yep, 15 copies. You'd probably better do this unless you want somebody who doesn't feel like making copies h(im|er)self to set your comments aside and forget about them.
I agree--their contribution is not insignificant. The same could be said of anyone who develops apps that run on Linux.
I remember one of the issues the tabloids, er, I mean "computer industry press", made a lot of hoopla about in the "Mac is dead" years was that they were losing developer support, and less apps meant less users meant less chance that the platform will continue to exist.
Of course the situation isn't quite the same with OSS, because development is done largely by people who aren't asking to get paid for their work by 5 million users, but on the other hand, more developer support (more apps) => more users => more developer support => more apps for all of us to use on our preferred OS (okay, so I use my Mac more than my Linux machine--but I DEFINITELY prefer Linux to M$'s junk).
Of course, OS/2 did have one major problem with its multitasking--it only had one input queue shared by all programs (at least for the keyboard, I don't remember whether this was true of the mouse). So if one program stalled with input waiting in the queue, nobody got their input. As much as I wanted OS/2 to kick M$'s tukus, I remember running into that one a few times and being fairly disenchanted.
Actually, it was more of a comment than a question. Yes, you are right. It is their own fear that enslaves them. The points I would make are:
... "intensity" of the opinions of those who express themselves through hostility?
1) Do we really have so little consideration for other people that we value our freedom to express our own hostility so highly that we'll push them into slavery (sure, it's to themselves, but it's still slavery, and the hostility still helps contribute to it). Wouldn't it be better to contribute to an environment where such people can test the outside of their comfort zones a little, and perhaps overcome their fear?
If Slashdot is so much about freedom, it would be ironic if that meant only "freedom for ME", without caring about helping others to become more free also.
2) If (okay, I'm making an assumption that may not be true for some people) our goal is to have a stimulating discussion, would the discussion not be more enhanced by the inclusion of a wider variety of opinions than it is by the
There's a term called "poisoning the well", which means shutting out differing opinions by expressing one opinion in a way that attempts to make anyone who disagrees look like a fool. While that doesn't actually take away someone's freedom to disagree, in reality, it is clearly the case that it reduces the number of differing opinions that are expressed.
> Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who
> cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.
> -George Gordon Noel Byron (1788-1824), [Lord Byron]
Interesting quote you have appearing with your posts. So are you saying that the bigots and fools whose mindless hostility scares off the more timid Slashdot readers are enslaving them?
Amen to that. A few reasons why I agree with this so strongly:
- If I have to install Office 2000 to read the document, it's not gonna get read.
- If I have to search through 10 different servers to figure out where the design document is, it's not gonna get read.
- If I have to search through 100 different files to find the chapter I'm looking for, I may decide to guess what it says rather than keep looking.
- Even if you don't go with HTML, be sure to have a standard document format which DOESN'T require the lastest version of some piece of software that that company doesn't have a site licence for (assuming it's not free). If each person uses their own favorite program to generate their documents, you'll need a second hard drive to hold all the applications you need to read everything.
Do it in HTML, and hyperlink like crazy--the more paths I can follow to get to the info I want, the better. If I know from the start that I'm 3 clicks away from the information I want, I'll go looking for it. If I have to log on to server X, navigate through a million subdirectories, maybe install a program to two, look through a bunch of files, and only then find out that nobody ever documented the thing I'm llooking for, I may not bother to look at all.Of course if those documents aren't reliably maintained, or there isn't a way to mark them as "out of date", or whatever, then they may not be very much good for knowledge transfer; they should still be of some "design review" benefit though.
I would definitely vote for maintaining the documents, even if the English isn't perfect. Speaking of specs for application behavior, which aren't quite the same as programmer's design documents, I don't know how many times I've been trying to figure out whether something was a bug or not, or how to systematically go about testing it, only to find that the spec doesn't cover the area in question, or that the spec has changed since the document was written. What a waste of time. Do I have to hunt through the company to find the one person who MIGHT be able to describe the expected behavior of the program?
Even worse is the case where perhaps a few months back, there were a series of meetings (only slightly more civilized that brawls) where a spec was decided on, but nobody wrote it down and posted it where everyone could look at it (easily, as in in HTML on the internal web server) and correct any mistakes made by the documentor. So now everybody thinks the consensus was to make it work the way THEY wanted it to work in the first place. What happens next is another series of meetings not much different than the first, only this time, deadlines are coming up, so you have to scale back the feature set to a bare minimum. I've seen this wort of problem waste FAR more time than is used wirting and maintaining documentation.
For me, this was probably the best programming book I've ever read. But whether it's good for you or not depends largely on how you like to learn.
>It tries to cover way too much in too small of a space.
This is exactly why I loved it. It explained a huge number of points clearly and concisely, gave a brief code example, and then moved on without making me wade through another hundred pages on a topic I already knew all I wanted to know about. It's an ideal book for someone who likes to grab a book, read it cover to cover to cram a bumch of concepts in their head, have a reference in which it's easy to find exactly the piece of information that they're looking for, and then when they try it themself and it doesn't quite work, they're happy to bring up the man pages to get the rest of the details.
But if you want to have all of the details in the book, if you want a comprehensive treatment of each topic, if you don't need a book to enlighten you about what's possible, but prefer a book where you can look up exactly how to do everything that's possible, then perhaps this isn't what you're looking for.