Wow! You payed $10.00 for a course-pack? At MSU, some course-packs were as much as $50.00; one in particular was for an "environmental issues" class, and consisted of about 20-30 articles culled from various journals and newspapers and retyped by the department secratary. It seems like I only got two free handouts the whole time I was there:
A one-page biography of Martin Luther King's life, in Arabic, from my Arabic professor;
A chapter from a 25-year-old old book on compiler design, in an advanced CS class.
I was able to beat the system a few times; for instance, I got through two semesters of Physics using the previous edition of the textboox. However, most of the time I didn't have much chance to try alternate sources because my dad would visit me and help buy books. Obviously, my dad doesn't want his son to be at any academic disadvantage, even if it means paying 20% to 30% of tuition as "extra" cost for books. (At a community college, things are worse; cost-of-books can approach 100% of tuition.)
I just noticed something interesting on the page of an old class I took, too: "Following the advice of earlier students, we have decided to make the textbook for {...} recommended rather than required." Woohoo! Someone finally sees the light!
As pointed out in the one article, SCO stock has gone up from under a dollar a share to over $15.00 (see for yourself). Sooner or later, either SCO will lose in court, or the hype from the spin-doctors will dry up, or both. Now would be an excellent time to sell SCO stock short and make a killing.
...a bible that some guy allegedly dictated from behind a wall?
On the contrary, the story about Samuel the Lamanite is that he preached from the top of a wall while while the irreligious capitalists threw stones at him (Helaman 16:2).
There are open-source people and closed-source people in the church, just like there are Republicans, Democrats, and Libertarians, or like the bishop might be an engineer, a lawyer or a carpenter. "Devout" is ambigous, too. Mr. McBride might go to church every Sunday and want to stay in Utah so he can be with his friends and family, but even so he might (not) "get it" the way he (doesn't) "get" the open-source principle. Can a recovering alchoholic be a "devout" Christian, even if he goes out and gets smashed the next day? I've met men who claim to be such; for my own part, I don't claim to be "devout" anything.
A search of the Ensign (the church's primary magazine) over the past 30 years turns no references to Mr. McBride, which means that he never contributed an article and probably has never held responsibility in any church unit higher than a stake (on the order of 2.5e3 people make up a stake), nor been stake president. Mr. McBride doesn't speak for me any more than I speak for him, and I won't call him "Brother" until I have personal interaction with him.
"The American continent has had its share of repression, but nowhere is there as much a lack of freedom as I believe there is in China,..."
Based on what do you make this statement, have you been to every country in the world to make the comparison? Have you been to Myanmar? Hong Kong is part of China, and I assure you people there are freer than those in Singapore (half kidding). Not to mention various theocracies in the world.
Urk... I meant to say "nowhere in the Americas". Admittedly, I've never been to any part of southeast asia. There are probably other places less safe than the average Chinese city, too.
It's also possible that many of the abortions in the USA are "forced", in a sense, by economic conditions or by parents who don't want the family to look bad. In fact, my brother (jpl29@email.byu.edu) claims that the most-active pro-abortion NGO in this country has been accused of racism because of where it builds its clinics and what people it recommends abortions to.
Capitalism Freedom; any Communist thinker will tell you that easily. Consumerism Freedom, either. If you feel up to it, try any of the folowing and see what happens:
1. Get a Chinese bible, stand on a street corner, and start reading from it out loud.
2. Carry a campaign sign for a non-Communist candidate for some public office.
3. Tell someone you want to have three children.
4. Offer to buy a piece of land in the countryside.
The American continent has had its share of repression, but nowhere is there as much a lack of freedom as I believe there is in China, except possibly in Cuba (and it's almost possible to get off that island by swimming).
It seems like the stated purposes of the fund would qualify as "charitable (relief of the opressed)" INCLUSIVE-OR "scientific". However, RedHat would have to organize the fund as a nonprofit corporation and make an application to the IRS. It seems to me they should do that ASAP if they're serious about this.
While it is possible to criminally infringe copyright under the current law, posting a single song on KaZaa the way many people do doesn't seem like it would infringe, since they don't get any commercial gain form it, and the retail value of the song is at most $10.00 or so (in the case of a single; tracks from albums must be worth less).
Other problems start when you have people using hotmail and yahoo, etc, to send out spam. They're authenticating correctly, they're just using the accounts to send the spam.
Hotmail and Yahoo have been used for spamming in the past, and they've already added controls to make it hard, like limiting the number of recipients for a single message.
I think the really big e-mail providers should set up a way that other organizations can verify that mail is really coming from them (mabey just publising their servers' IP addresses); then I could cut out some spam that has a "From:.*@yahoo.com" header but wasn't sent from there.
It depends. There are only 60_466_176 distinct five-character codes taken from the letters and digits. If it was a truly random string longer than that, a dictionary attack would be unlikely but not impossible.
Also, was her address a combination of name + number where the first part was based on her real name and the number was given to her by the system because someone else with a similar name had already signed up? If a spammer is targeting msn.com specificaly, they may have cracked the collision-resolution already; that is, if they have bob12@msn.com they know they'll probably get a hit with bob13@msn.com. If not, they go looking for other names. Incidentally, the U.S. Census has lists of common first and last names posted online; spammers could concievably use these to optimize dictionary attacks.
This was a hoax. In fact, the C code given does not compile, and I don't see how it would compile under any reasonable compiler that would ever have been built. Even after wrapping the code in a main() function and adding appropriate functions, gcc still chokes on R=; (empty Rvalue) and the second for loop (no increment step). The comma-operator, the and-operator, the bitwise operators, hex constants: any language that gives you a lot of control over your data-structures and how you access them needs these one way or another. Sure, Ada is perhaps more readable. In fact, perl can be made a lot more readable than C, even though it, like about a dozen other languages, borrows its operators straight out of K&R, precedent included.
it also might give more opportunity for censorship. After all, Lunar society is likely to be a small population in day-to-day fear of terrorism for some time. For an example of censorship today on Earth, first do a search at Chinese Yahoo for "al quaida is cooler than linux" here. Do you connect? Good. Now see what happens when you search for falun gong. Strange attitude toward something that isn't any deeper than the first day of a Tae Kwon Do class...
A few months ago I was sharing an apartment with a guy who had AT&T broadband. Their policy is a $4.95/mo. charge for extra dynamic IP addresses. Their AUP has a clause about having multiple computers hooked up, so my roommate called them and asked how to pay for an extra IP address for the other computer (mine; I actually had two) he was about to put behind his router. The tech support people told him it didn't matter, and he could go ahead. I guess tech suport there is more sensible about these things than the people who originally wrote the contract.
If you read the article carefully, you'll see that the system would always be under the ISP's control (or whoever owns the router). It sounds like standardized, streamlined version of running the logfiles through grep to make them small enough to fit on a floppy.
I followed one of these links and looked at the MSDN article. It's full of generalizations taken from 20-year-old UNIX textbooks, although Linux and X windows are mentioned here and there. Apparently recent versions of some level of Windows have an "Interix" subsystem. I've used Cygwin32 on Win95, WinME, Win2k and WinNT, and Borland C++, and Visual C++.NET, but I don't think I've ever used the Microsoft native POSIX layer. The article gives a lot of questions that should be asked before starting a migration like this. One possible reason to migrate is to decrease the Total Cost of Ownership; another is to increase hardware options and move away from proprietary systems!
Another quote I like is, "Windows operating systems do not provide X Windows. For X Windows connectivity, developers need a third-party X Windows server.". Of course Microsoft would never be anticompetitive by competing with third-party suppliers of implementations of an open standard, right?
Re:How about selling CDs for a dollar?
on
Time to Face the Music
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Sure, I've had roommates who downloaded a lot, but the real problem in the music industry is there's so much music out there already, and owned already (high-quality, low-quality, any genre...) that consumers don't want to spend more money on it, especially in crippled post-CD formats. When my wife and I got married, we found that we had more than a cubic metre of music between us. Some of it we acquired at garage-sales, was given to us, etc... but even if we just stook to the better half, we could listen to a new CD every day for the next year and not get bored. My parents have a similar amount of classical recordings, and my dad only listens to music on Sunday if ever.
Incidentally, it is possible to buy CDs in the $1.00-$2.50 price range on the streets of Mexico City. They tend to be an odd green or gold color, though... once I saw a scene in a mexican soap-opera where the villain was supervising his "Fábrica de discos piratados". A bunch of Asian-looking people sitting in front of computers with CD burners, and he said "Faster! Faster! Before the police come..."
Perhaps we should not blame the users, but instead accept that passwords are themselves a poor design.
I would aggree that passwords by themselves are not a good design. Passwords are made very long non-words so that automated cracking-attempts don't work; a better solution is to use a 'shadow' file and institute a finite minimum time between seperate verification-attempts. Users have to change their passwords on a regular basis in order to minimize the damage if the password is stolen or logged somewhere (I assume); however, the principle behind a password is that it should be a secret for as long as it's in use. Good user-accessible logs (such as UNIX systems that report "Last login at <date> from <host>...") are probably a better solution. If I see that some dude just logged into my account from Iraq, I'm not going to wait to change my password!
True story: I made up a password by rolling RPG dice and making an 8-character string of characters chosen from a table of letters and digits. I memorized it and destroyed or hid the scrap-paper I had written it on. I went to use it in a computer-system, and the 'passwd' program complained that it wasn't "random" enough.:-| Huh?
I have three computers and no TV. A couple months ago I put a DVD player in the fast Windows box, so I can watch movies, but I don't forsee acquiring a TV within the next six months, if ever.
Police have been known to sieze computers that simply had data that might be used as evidence, even when the owners hadn't done anything wrong. Is there any legal defense against this, like "I have my website, my financial records, and tomorrow's homework on that fileserver... you can't take it away from me!"? Or does this come under the heading of "why you should always have multiple good backups"?
2.... NEVER put it in unadulterated form (i.e. user@domain.com) in a Usenet posting or in a publicly-accessible HTML page-- even in the comments or other places that it won't appear on the final, rendered web page. If you do, it WILL get picked up and you WILL get an assload of spam.
3. If you MUST provide your address on a web page or Usenet posting, slightly obfuscating it (i.e. "user at domain dot com") is, for now, 100% effective against fooling the spambots. Which frankly I find amazing, because that trick has been around for years.
While this might have been a wise thing to do at some time in the past, it wouldn't be anywhere near 100% effective at the moment: my website has been up for years with my primary e-mail address on it, and I've made Usenet postings from time to time. I can't change my address either, because my primary e-mail address is based on the ID issued by my university for their computer-systems. For my own part, I have a simple procmail-based filter, and from time to time I decide to react to a particularly egregious or vulnerable piece of spam.
Just yesterday I got an advertisement with
To: AOL.Users@pilot.msu.edu
in the header. The funny thing is that I can't find any webpages (either with Google or by scanning my web directories) that refer to my address '@pilot.msu.edu', even though it still works; I might have publically used such an address more that a year ago, but not since.
MSU has also changed their primary mailserver to be the cluster sysXX.mail.msu.edu, and this message went there first. I don't use AOL, either, except to open up a SecSH session from my parent's house.
If I remember rightly, Intel hasn't said they'll use this for consumer chips yet; all they've done is get a patent on the technology. For all we know, Sun might want to use this first.
Probably one reason he dislikes java is because it's so wordy. It's certainly true that java has many of the features (like extreme wastefulness and lack of types that some consider "fundamental") that he predicts will be in the 100-year language.
No need to clutter up the ASCII table with more special-purpose characters... languages 100 years from now will almost certainly use Unicode caracters for some identifiers and operators. No more confusion about '!=' versus '' in different languages. In fact, someone will probably add this to C++ and perl within the next ten years.
Some possibilities:
\u2200 and \u2203: "For All" and "For Every" operators
\u2263: "Is Identical With" (like java's '=' versus 'equals()' distinction)
\u2264 and \u2265: less-than-or-equals, greater-than-or-equals
Of course, programmers will still have to type using QWERTY keyboards for a while, so there will be shortcuts, escape-sequences, etc. just as at present...
I was thinking of taking my soon-to-be-printed CS diploma to Iraq and start an ISP or something. In fact, I even wrote e-mail to the Iraqi embassy a few weeks ago and asked how to get a Visa. Funny thing: they never answered me.
I found an interesting article about the real significance of the calls-from-the-air on 9-11. I'm not sure that I buy it yet - I can see some possible holes in the argument - but it's an interesting theory, and it could explain Mr. bin Laden's cowarldy disappearance better than as yet.
I always thought cell-phones were banned because they might interfere with navigation-systems, but I am not an expert. If they only didn't work, people should see that after trying to turn them on and give up.
Slashdot Mirror
- A one-page biography of Martin Luther King's life, in Arabic, from my Arabic professor;
- A chapter from a 25-year-old old book on compiler design, in an advanced CS class.
I was able to beat the system a few times; for instance, I got through two semesters of Physics using the previous edition of the textboox. However, most of the time I didn't have much chance to try alternate sources because my dad would visit me and help buy books. Obviously, my dad doesn't want his son to be at any academic disadvantage, even if it means paying 20% to 30% of tuition as "extra" cost for books. (At a community college, things are worse; cost-of-books can approach 100% of tuition.)I just noticed something interesting on the page of an old class I took, too: "Following the advice of earlier students, we have decided to make the textbook for {...} recommended rather than required." Woohoo! Someone finally sees the light!
As pointed out in the one article, SCO stock has gone up from under a dollar a share to over $15.00 (see for yourself). Sooner or later, either SCO will lose in court, or the hype from the spin-doctors will dry up, or both. Now would be an excellent time to sell SCO stock short and make a killing.
On the contrary, the story about Samuel the Lamanite is that he preached from the top of a wall while while the irreligious capitalists threw stones at him (Helaman 16:2).
There are open-source people and closed-source people in the church, just like there are Republicans, Democrats, and Libertarians, or like the bishop might be an engineer, a lawyer or a carpenter. "Devout" is ambigous, too. Mr. McBride might go to church every Sunday and want to stay in Utah so he can be with his friends and family, but even so he might (not) "get it" the way he (doesn't) "get" the open-source principle. Can a recovering alchoholic be a "devout" Christian, even if he goes out and gets smashed the next day? I've met men who claim to be such; for my own part, I don't claim to be "devout" anything.
A search of the Ensign (the church's primary magazine) over the past 30 years turns no references to Mr. McBride, which means that he never contributed an article and probably has never held responsibility in any church unit higher than a stake (on the order of 2.5e3 people make up a stake), nor been stake president. Mr. McBride doesn't speak for me any more than I speak for him, and I won't call him "Brother" until I have personal interaction with him.
Based on what do you make this statement, have you been to every country in the world to make the comparison? Have you been to Myanmar? Hong Kong is part of China, and I assure you people there are freer than those in Singapore (half kidding). Not to mention various theocracies in the world.
Urk... I meant to say "nowhere in the Americas". Admittedly, I've never been to any part of southeast asia. There are probably other places less safe than the average Chinese city, too.
It's also possible that many of the abortions in the USA are "forced", in a sense, by economic conditions or by parents who don't want the family to look bad. In fact, my brother (jpl29@email.byu.edu) claims that the most-active pro-abortion NGO in this country has been accused of racism because of where it builds its clinics and what people it recommends abortions to.
Capitalism Freedom; any Communist thinker will tell you that easily. Consumerism Freedom, either. If you feel up to it, try any of the folowing and see what happens:
1. Get a Chinese bible, stand on a street corner, and start reading from it out loud.
2. Carry a campaign sign for a non-Communist candidate for some public office.
3. Tell someone you want to have three children.
4. Offer to buy a piece of land in the countryside.
The American continent has had its share of repression, but nowhere is there as much a lack of freedom as I believe there is in China, except possibly in Cuba (and it's almost possible to get off that island by swimming).
It seems like the stated purposes of the fund would qualify as "charitable (relief of the opressed)" INCLUSIVE-OR "scientific". However, RedHat would have to organize the fund as a nonprofit corporation and make an application to the IRS. It seems to me they should do that ASAP if they're serious about this.
While it is possible to criminally infringe copyright under the current law, posting a single song on KaZaa the way many people do doesn't seem like it would infringe, since they don't get any commercial gain form it, and the retail value of the song is at most $10.00 or so (in the case of a single; tracks from albums must be worth less).
Hotmail and Yahoo have been used for spamming in the past, and they've already added controls to make it hard, like limiting the number of recipients for a single message.
I think the really big e-mail providers should set up a way that other organizations can verify that mail is really coming from them (mabey just publising their servers' IP addresses); then I could cut out some spam that has a "From:.*@yahoo.com" header but wasn't sent from there.
3m1n3m
pot
money
big_high
Or mabey the encryption was by financial insiders, but they wrote their passwords on notepads by their desks...
Also, was her address a combination of name + number where the first part was based on her real name and the number was given to her by the system because someone else with a similar name had already signed up? If a spammer is targeting msn.com specificaly, they may have cracked the collision-resolution already; that is, if they have bob12@msn.com they know they'll probably get a hit with bob13@msn.com. If not, they go looking for other names. Incidentally, the U.S. Census has lists of common first and last names posted online; spammers could concievably use these to optimize dictionary attacks.
This was a hoax. In fact, the C code given does not compile, and I don't see how it would compile under any reasonable compiler that would ever have been built. Even after wrapping the code in a main() function and adding appropriate functions, gcc still chokes on R=; (empty Rvalue) and the second for loop (no increment step). The comma-operator, the and-operator, the bitwise operators, hex constants: any language that gives you a lot of control over your data-structures and how you access them needs these one way or another. Sure, Ada is perhaps more readable. In fact, perl can be made a lot more readable than C, even though it, like about a dozen other languages, borrows its operators straight out of K&R, precedent included.
it also might give more opportunity for censorship. After all, Lunar society is likely to be a small population in day-to-day fear of terrorism for some time. For an example of censorship today on Earth, first do a search at Chinese Yahoo for "al quaida is cooler than linux" here. Do you connect? Good. Now see what happens when you search for falun gong. Strange attitude toward something that isn't any deeper than the first day of a Tae Kwon Do class...
A few months ago I was sharing an apartment with a guy who had AT&T broadband. Their policy is a $4.95/mo. charge for extra dynamic IP addresses. Their AUP has a clause about having multiple computers hooked up, so my roommate called them and asked how to pay for an extra IP address for the other computer (mine; I actually had two) he was about to put behind his router. The tech support people told him it didn't matter, and he could go ahead. I guess tech suport there is more sensible about these things than the people who originally wrote the contract.
If you read the article carefully, you'll see that the system would always be under the ISP's control (or whoever owns the router). It sounds like standardized, streamlined version of running the logfiles through grep to make them small enough to fit on a floppy.
Another quote I like is, "Windows operating systems do not provide X Windows. For X Windows connectivity, developers need a third-party X Windows server.". Of course Microsoft would never be anticompetitive by competing with third-party suppliers of implementations of an open standard, right?
Incidentally, it is possible to buy CDs in the $1.00-$2.50 price range on the streets of Mexico City. They tend to be an odd green or gold color, though... once I saw a scene in a mexican soap-opera where the villain was supervising his "Fábrica de discos piratados". A bunch of Asian-looking people sitting in front of computers with CD burners, and he said "Faster! Faster! Before the police come..."
I would aggree that passwords by themselves are not a good design. Passwords are made very long non-words so that automated cracking-attempts don't work; a better solution is to use a 'shadow' file and institute a finite minimum time between seperate verification-attempts. Users have to change their passwords on a regular basis in order to minimize the damage if the password is stolen or logged somewhere (I assume); however, the principle behind a password is that it should be a secret for as long as it's in use. Good user-accessible logs (such as UNIX systems that report "Last login at <date> from <host>...") are probably a better solution. If I see that some dude just logged into my account from Iraq, I'm not going to wait to change my password!
True story: I made up a password by rolling RPG dice and making an 8-character string of characters chosen from a table of letters and digits. I memorized it and destroyed or hid the scrap-paper I had written it on. I went to use it in a computer-system, and the 'passwd' program complained that it wasn't "random" enough. :-| Huh?
I have three computers and no TV. A couple months ago I put a DVD player in the fast Windows box, so I can watch movies, but I don't forsee acquiring a TV within the next six months, if ever.
Police have been known to sieze computers that simply had data that might be used as evidence, even when the owners hadn't done anything wrong. Is there any legal defense against this, like "I have my website, my financial records, and tomorrow's homework on that fileserver... you can't take it away from me!"? Or does this come under the heading of "why you should always have multiple good backups"?
3. If you MUST provide your address on a web page or Usenet posting, slightly obfuscating it (i.e. "user at domain dot com") is, for now, 100% effective against fooling the spambots. Which frankly I find amazing, because that trick has been around for years.
While this might have been a wise thing to do at some time in the past, it wouldn't be anywhere near 100% effective at the moment: my website has been up for years with my primary e-mail address on it, and I've made Usenet postings from time to time. I can't change my address either, because my primary e-mail address is based on the ID issued by my university for their computer-systems. For my own part, I have a simple procmail-based filter, and from time to time I decide to react to a particularly egregious or vulnerable piece of spam.
Just yesterday I got an advertisement with
To: AOL.Users@pilot.msu.edu
in the header. The funny thing is that I can't find any webpages (either with Google or by scanning my web directories) that refer to my address '@pilot.msu.edu', even though it still works; I might have publically used such an address more that a year ago, but not since. MSU has also changed their primary mailserver to be the cluster sysXX.mail.msu.edu, and this message went there first. I don't use AOL, either, except to open up a SecSH session from my parent's house.
If I remember rightly, Intel hasn't said they'll use this for consumer chips yet; all they've done is get a patent on the technology. For all we know, Sun might want to use this first.
Probably one reason he dislikes java is because it's so wordy. It's certainly true that java has many of the features (like extreme wastefulness and lack of types that some consider "fundamental") that he predicts will be in the 100-year language.
Some possibilities:
Of course, programmers will still have to type using QWERTY keyboards for a while, so there will be shortcuts, escape-sequences, etc. just as at present...
I was thinking of taking my soon-to-be-printed CS diploma to Iraq and start an ISP or something. In fact, I even wrote e-mail to the Iraqi embassy a few weeks ago and asked how to get a Visa. Funny thing: they never answered me.
I always thought cell-phones were banned because they might interfere with navigation-systems, but I am not an expert. If they only didn't work, people should see that after trying to turn them on and give up.