I loved my Speccy! It was a clone, as I grew up in an Eastern European country, but boy, I found it really hard to sell it even 10 years after I bought it (I sold it to a relative when I left the country). The author comments were "which came with a paltry 1 kilobyte of memory", but that's biased. All the computers listed came with hardware that is "paltry" by today's standards, but you could do 1000X more with that platform in 1KB of RAM than you can in 64MB of RAM with Windows today! I keep an emulator (ZX32) on my PC and still play NetherEarth, AtticATTACK or Chuckie Egg! And when I'm really melancholic, I program BASIC using a keyboard map:)
Articles from msn.com should be posted in the thread. That's because if you have msid.msn.com blocked in your hosts file (by making it point to localhost), you cannot see msnbc.com articles. One might suggest that I could just comment it out - which is what I did to see this article - but still, a host named "msid" is not something I want my browser to go to.
One aspect that nobody seems to be considering is conflict of interest. Perhaps the people in charge of OCW reasoned that some students may not feel too good about making courses for which they pay quite a lot to be made available for free to anybody with an Internet connection. Indian programmers may be very interested in precisely this development.
Please note that I am not inferring that students feel that way, but rather that management may have considered this possibility in their decision making.
sooooooooooo...
If the only way to protect your info is to incorporate and compile it with significant money/time investment, then perhaps the result of this law would be a "rush to compile" as many DBs as possible. Now, who would have to gain from having more and more DBs?
This development was long overdue. Still, it seems to have a destiny as impotent and sterile as the talk about a "new world economic order" that seems to dominate the agenda at the UN. What surprised me is that it comes from Rockefeller Foundation sponsorship. How times have changed!
...if it's not passed already. In this story, it's reported that "Finland, the home of the mobile phone, is considering legislation that would allow parents to track the moves of their children on an internet page at home, using a system which locates their child's phone. If the bill is passed, Finland would become one of the first European countries to allow individuals to track others without their consent and could serve as an EU benchmark."
There is even a diagram showing how the system works.
gotta love this duality!
blu-ray vs hd dvd, republican vs democrat, etc. it reminds me of that george carlin rant about how when it comes to cereals, you have almost unlimited choices, but for the important things, your choice is rather limited...
Celine Dion is from Quebec (sorry!). And, according to this MSN biography, JH was born in Brooklyn. Why would an association supposedly protecting the rights of French publishers/copyrightholders/creators/performers/wh atever - and collecting money from the French taxpayer - pay North Americans? Perhaps there's a reason why you're modded down:)
The Economist has an article on Internet Security. Very insightful yet brief, as usual. It even has the obligatory quotes from Bruce:). Quoting:
Ask, for instance, Dan Geer, an expert on software security and a top executive of @Stake, a security consulting firm. In September, he led a group that wrote a report blaming Microsoft's virtual "monoculture" in operating systems for the internet's frailty. No sooner was the report published than he found himself out of a job. @Stake, which counts Microsoft among its customers, "fired me by press release, retroactively and in public," he says.
The gist of Mr Geer's argument is that Microsoft has over the years created "unacceptable levels of complexity" in its computer code. It has done so because its main objective has been to lock users into its software by tying the Windows operating system together with applications such as Word, Explorer and Outlook. Complexity is "the enemy of security", says Mr Geer's report, since "the defender has to counter all possible attacks; the attacker only has to find one unblocked means of attack." Moreover, complexity feeds on itself since "fixing a known flaw is likely to introduce a new, unknown flaw."
In the private sector, those dealing with IP or competition sensitive issues are usually required to sign non-competition agreements, whereby they promise not to join a competitor after termination of their contract. Yet, as the article has shown, there's nothing stopping a public official from joining a private business he was auditing while serving the taxpayer...
One may argue that the public has only to gain if the public official brings his expertise into the private sector. My concern is, however, that the public official will use his expertise in side-stepping regulations or choosing the way of minimal resistance, to maximize profits at the expense of following rules and regulations.
Kind of like a hardware vendor optimizing their wares for benchmarks as opposed to real life situations!
Good point. I actually wondered why they haven't simply called it EuNetPol, but I guess that would've been too simple and obvious. Or, maybe simplicity in an public organization's name it's a sign of accountability which is why it needs 2 b obfuscated:)
The problem I have with internet/touchtone elections for public office is that no matter how well thought out the "plan" is, evil private interests will be able to hijack it. The same applies to any public initiative that conflicts at some level with one's ability to profit (except, perhaps, in Scandinavia).
Private elections are another matter. In the same Canada, Mountain Co-op has been running these elections for a while. Whenever you buy some mountain gear (or anything for that matter) from them, you become a member of the co-op. As such, you have a say in how the system is run and you get to elect the board of directors. Election implementation is overseen by PWC or E&Y, and you get a package in the mail containg the election information.
A couple of months ago, I had to go to the Hamilton Court (45 Main St. E) in Ontario for a speeding ticket. Following Mapquest directions, I ended up in St. Catherines, was late, convicted in absentia, had to file for a reopening, etc. etc. and what should've been a 30 min deal ended up costing me 6 hours.
Hamilton court is probably the busiest in Ontario, as Hamilton City Police is very large and they produce a lot of speeding tickets (in Ontario there aren't a lot of toll roads, speed limits are kept artificially low and governments use speed tickets as a source of revenue).
I thought about trying to contact Mapquest about it, but then I thought this is probably on purpose so that lost & guilty souls (or their hacker/cracker skilled paralegals) can adjourn trials:)
This may be OT, but I guess it all boils down to how you define popular. If you consider popular as "regarded with great favor, approval, or affection especially by the general public", then this rather obscure OS is not the answer, but neither is Windoze, 'cause most people don't usually make this choice, it just comes with their computers, by default. If, however, you take Webster's 6th definition ("Prevailing among the people; epidemic; as, a popular disease. [Obs.] --Johnson."), then...:)
I live in Canada, and yet seeing how they are dead-on on so many issues of interest to me, I still contributed. And, to my surprise, shortly after my contribution, I even received a 6-months subscription to Anonymizer proxy service!!!
so they did sitefinder thingie only to get more exposure. even dumb and controversial decisions will play well with their stock price as long as they bring the press spotlight on them. just look at sco...
if i'm not mistaken, in similar fashion BSA sent C&D orders to ftp sites hosting openoffice, after confusing them with distros for ms office...
IANAL, but it seems to me that this will only make it easier for someone to defend herself using the argument that lawsuits en masse using poorly written algorithms are prone to failure.
is it not really easy to defend a photo radar speeding ticket received by snail mail for the same reason?
The same argument was not long ago used by US car makers. They built crappy cars, that required many visits to the mechanic, buying parts, getting to know your car "intimately", etc. (Didn't they invent the term "planned obsolescence"?).
Then the Japanese came with cheaper and much better quality cars, bringing the US auto industry to near collapse. They survived only through protectionism and government bailouts.
according to YRO (http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/16/1 844222) a doubleclick CEO was hired by the dept. of homeland security to be a privacy czar. where's the difference?
or dick cheney & gw bush establishing the energy policy (& other policies) of the US in the interest of US citizens...
This dude can be seen as a modern day Robin Hood, fighting da powe with its own tools. Perhaps if more frivolous lawsuits such as this one would be brought against big firms, corporate America might take notice, laws would be re-written (or simply the existing ones better applied) and stupid patents would stop being awarded.
I'm not so sure that's clearly the right way to do things. Wasn't "Ignorantia legum excusat neminem" (i.e., not knowing the law excuses nobody) a Roman principle of law?
IANAL, but I think that in common law, this (using the "I didn't know" defense) works better than in systems based on the Napoleonic code.
What I don't understand is why did the other 3 settle? Just how big do you have to be to dispute the validity of a patent?
Perhaps patents are becoming the scare factors that derivatives used to be (and still are), where even professionals working in the field can claim in court that they don't understand what's going on and get away with it...
That's some very good info. In my own search I looked at O3 as one of the many treatments deviating from mainstream. A search on Quackwatch.org turned out this page, which is worth a read: http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/ Cancer/oxygen.html
Otto Warburg professed that the cancer problem could be solved if one could identify a biochemical difference between the energy-producing systems of normal cells (controlled growth) and cancer cells (uncontrolled growth.) His research with tissue slices led to the discovery of oxygen-transferring enzymes in cellular respiration, and for this he won a Nobel Prize (1931). In 1944 he won a second Nobel Prize for identifying the enzymes that transfer hydrogen in metabolism. But his research never showed that oxygen use by normal and cancer cells was different. What he did find was that cancer cells produced lactate from glucose in the presence of oxygen whereas normal cells only produced lactate from glucose in the absence of oxygen. This observation led him to conclude that energy metabolism in cancer cells was defective.
Over the next three decades research identified nearly all energy-producing metabolic pathways in both normal and cancer cells and showed that energy-producing systems in normal cells were the same as those found in cancer cells [7]. Despite this, Warburg insisted until his death in 1970 that the cause of cancer was "inferior" energy of anaerobic metabolism.
Oxygenation proponents follow the lines of Koch and of Warburg. They claim that toxins that adulterate processed foods, the environment, and medications damage the oxidative metabolism of normal cells which then regress into anaerobic metabolism in which an inferior energy is produced, resulting in cancer. Normal functions such as digestion, elimination, and immune function are also claimed to benefit from treatment with pure, all-natural, poison-free nutrients, vitamin and mineral supplements, and oxygen-yielding substances that restore and replenish the oxygen needed by tissues for burning off toxins. Hydrogen peroxide and ozone are the substances recommended.
The conclusion (which, NB, does not really respond to the issues raised by Warburg, but rather goes sideways) is:
Oxygenation therapists proposed that disease is caused by absence of oxygen and loss of cellular ability to use oxygen for "good energy" metabolism, detoxification, and immune system function. Oxygen therapies are proposed in order to restore the body's ability to produce "good" energy, to "detoxify" metabolic poisons, and to kill invading organisms. However, over the five decades that have passed since this concept was proposed, scientists have shown that:
Anerobic energy metabolism (fermentation) is not the cause of cancer
Koch's glyoxylide does not exist
Ingestion, infusion, or injection of hydrogen peroxide cannot re-oxygenate the tissues of the body
Ozone-treated blood infused during autohemotherapy does not kill AIDS virus in vivo.
However, quackwatch.org (Stephen Barrett, M.D.) position has more to do with a desire to neutralize exaggerated and unethical claims rather than presenting unbiased information. For instance, his position regarding organic food & organic certification is that it's a waste of resources and the government shouldn't be involved at all even if the public wants it (http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/organic.html):
From now on, if you want to pay extra for your food, the U.S. Government will help you do so. [...] Instead of legitimizing health nonsense, our government should do more to attack its spread.
This very militantism makes me take the medical establishment counterclaims re: ozone with a grain of salt. On the other hand, I have to admit that the medical establishment claims seem more believable than the miracles professed by the proponents of O3 therapy.
Slashdot Mirror
I loved my Speccy! It was a clone, as I grew up in an Eastern European country, but boy, I found it really hard to sell it even 10 years after I bought it (I sold it to a relative when I left the country). The author comments were "which came with a paltry 1 kilobyte of memory", but that's biased. All the computers listed came with hardware that is "paltry" by today's standards, but you could do 1000X more with that platform in 1KB of RAM than you can in 64MB of RAM with Windows today! I keep an emulator (ZX32) on my PC and still play NetherEarth, AtticATTACK or Chuckie Egg! And when I'm really melancholic, I program BASIC using a keyboard map :)
Articles from msn.com should be posted in the thread. That's because if you have msid.msn.com blocked in your hosts file (by making it point to localhost), you cannot see msnbc.com articles. One might suggest that I could just comment it out - which is what I did to see this article - but still, a host named "msid" is not something I want my browser to go to.
Please note that I am not inferring that students feel that way, but rather that management may have considered this possibility in their decision making.
sooooooooooo... If the only way to protect your info is to incorporate and compile it with significant money/time investment, then perhaps the result of this law would be a "rush to compile" as many DBs as possible. Now, who would have to gain from having more and more DBs?
This development was long overdue. Still, it seems to have a destiny as impotent and sterile as the talk about a "new world economic order" that seems to dominate the agenda at the UN. What surprised me is that it comes from Rockefeller Foundation sponsorship. How times have changed!
If the bill is passed, Finland would become one of the first European countries to allow individuals to track others without their consent and could serve as an EU benchmark."
There is even a diagram showing how the system works.
Welcum 2 the MATRIX!
gotta love this duality! blu-ray vs hd dvd, republican vs democrat, etc. it reminds me of that george carlin rant about how when it comes to cereals, you have almost unlimited choices, but for the important things, your choice is rather limited...
Celine Dion is from Quebec (sorry!). And, according to this MSN biography, JH was born in Brooklyn. Why would an association supposedly protecting the rights of French publishers/copyrightholders/creators/performers/wh atever - and collecting money from the French taxpayer - pay North Americans? Perhaps there's a reason why you're modded down :)
Ask, for instance, Dan Geer, an expert on software security and a top executive of @Stake, a security consulting firm. In September, he led a group that wrote a report blaming Microsoft's virtual "monoculture" in operating systems for the internet's frailty. No sooner was the report published than he found himself out of a job. @Stake, which counts Microsoft among its customers, "fired me by press release, retroactively and in public," he says.
The gist of Mr Geer's argument is that Microsoft has over the years created "unacceptable levels of complexity" in its computer code. It has done so because its main objective has been to lock users into its software by tying the Windows operating system together with applications such as Word, Explorer and Outlook. Complexity is "the enemy of security", says Mr Geer's report, since "the defender has to counter all possible attacks; the attacker only has to find one unblocked means of attack." Moreover, complexity feeds on itself since "fixing a known flaw is likely to introduce a new, unknown flaw."
One may argue that the public has only to gain if the public official brings his expertise into the private sector. My concern is, however, that the public official will use his expertise in side-stepping regulations or choosing the way of minimal resistance, to maximize profits at the expense of following rules and regulations.
Kind of like a hardware vendor optimizing their wares for benchmarks as opposed to real life situations!
Good point. I actually wondered why they haven't simply called it EuNetPol, but I guess that would've been too simple and obvious. Or, maybe simplicity in an public organization's name it's a sign of accountability which is why it needs 2 b obfuscated :)
Private elections are another matter. In the same Canada, Mountain Co-op has been running these elections for a while. Whenever you buy some mountain gear (or anything for that matter) from them, you become a member of the co-op. As such, you have a say in how the system is run and you get to elect the board of directors. Election implementation is overseen by PWC or E&Y, and you get a package in the mail containg the election information.
Hamilton court is probably the busiest in Ontario, as Hamilton City Police is very large and they produce a lot of speeding tickets (in Ontario there aren't a lot of toll roads, speed limits are kept artificially low and governments use speed tickets as a source of revenue).
I thought about trying to contact Mapquest about it, but then I thought this is probably on purpose so that lost & guilty souls (or their hacker/cracker skilled paralegals) can adjourn trials :)
This may be OT, but I guess it all boils down to how you define popular. If you consider popular as "regarded with great favor, approval, or affection especially by the general public", then this rather obscure OS is not the answer, but neither is Windoze, 'cause most people don't usually make this choice, it just comes with their computers, by default. If, however, you take Webster's 6th definition ("Prevailing among the people; epidemic; as, a popular disease. [Obs.] --Johnson."), then... :)
...as unintended a consequence as Ashcroft's re-interpretation / extension of the Patriot Act...
I live in Canada, and yet seeing how they are dead-on on so many issues of interest to me, I still contributed. And, to my surprise, shortly after my contribution, I even received a 6-months subscription to Anonymizer proxy service!!!
so they did sitefinder thingie only to get more exposure. even dumb and controversial decisions will play well with their stock price as long as they bring the press spotlight on them. just look at sco...
if i'm not mistaken, in similar fashion BSA sent C&D orders to ftp sites hosting openoffice, after confusing them with distros for ms office... IANAL, but it seems to me that this will only make it easier for someone to defend herself using the argument that lawsuits en masse using poorly written algorithms are prone to failure. is it not really easy to defend a photo radar speeding ticket received by snail mail for the same reason?
actually, if you were going to use that defense, using linux might be detrimental :)
The same argument was not long ago used by US car makers. They built crappy cars, that required many visits to the mechanic, buying parts, getting to know your car "intimately", etc. (Didn't they invent the term "planned obsolescence"?). Then the Japanese came with cheaper and much better quality cars, bringing the US auto industry to near collapse. They survived only through protectionism and government bailouts.
according to YRO (http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/16/1 844222) a doubleclick CEO was hired by the dept. of homeland security to be a privacy czar. where's the difference?
or dick cheney & gw bush establishing the energy policy (& other policies) of the US in the interest of US citizens...
This dude can be seen as a modern day Robin Hood, fighting da powe with its own tools. Perhaps if more frivolous lawsuits such as this one would be brought against big firms, corporate America might take notice, laws would be re-written (or simply the existing ones better applied) and stupid patents would stop being awarded.
IANAL, but I think that in common law, this (using the "I didn't know" defense) works better than in systems based on the Napoleonic code.
Perhaps patents are becoming the scare factors that derivatives used to be (and still are), where even professionals working in the field can claim in court that they don't understand what's going on and get away with it...
However, quackwatch.org (Stephen Barrett, M.D.) position has more to do with a desire to neutralize exaggerated and unethical claims rather than presenting unbiased information. For instance, his position regarding organic food & organic certification is that it's a waste of resources and the government shouldn't be involved at all even if the public wants it (http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics /organic.html):
This very militantism makes me take the medical establishment counterclaims re: ozone with a grain of salt. On the other hand, I have to admit that the medical establishment claims seem more believable than the miracles professed by the proponents of O3 therapy.