I agree they did some impressive things, but to the best of my knowledge, none of them have ever solved any unsolved problems such as the student in the article.
My computers used to be named Cholera, Anthrax, Rabies, and Smallpox.
Anthrax was a file server running OpenBSD.
Because of minor concerns that someone might think those names had some kind of significance beyond just being computer names, I finally changed them to Frodo, Bilbo, Gandalf, and Hobbit.
The problem is that all the best names are already taken.
Yeah. It's probably too late for a Jolly Green Giant Linux distribution.
Considering some of the more or less common interests of many geeks, why don't we have something like Elvish Linux? I'd bet a Linux distribution named Elvish Linux would be remembered more easily by far more geeks.
On the other hand, some of the non-geeks might think it is some new kind of cookie.
They had better have downloaded every song they allege to be infringing to verify that it is in fact infringing.
I'm surprised we don't have thousands of people out there taping themselves strumming on a guitar and sharing it under various names and titles.
Or maybe there are thousands of people doing just that.
I heard the other day that the RIAA recently complained about someone putting a 1930's or 1940's Bing Crosby radio show on their web site and had his service provider remove it for copyright infringements.
I think there is often quite a bit of doubt about just who owns many of the old radio shows.
Evan Brown used to work for DSC Communications and ran into the same problem.
Except in Evan's case, he had his idea before he ever went to work for DSC and until ordered by the judge, it remained an idea, not an invention. The judge ordered him to develop it for DSC without pay.
There are even reports that Billy the Kid died in Texas and was buried in Hico, Texas.
Ask anyone from Hico about it and you're likely to get a long explanation about Pat Garrett allowed Billy the Kid to get out of state on the quiet as long as he didn't reveal his true identity.
So, he went to Hico.
Hico is on Highway 6 about 60 miles or so west of Waco.
A friend of mine spent 30 days in jail once back in the late 70s.
When his father needed him to drive a tractor, the sheriff would turn him loose for the day in the custody of his father. At the end of the day, his father would take him back.
They'd also let him out to rake the leaves of the courthouse lawn or to run down to the drugstore for a hamburger or a book to read.
One Saturday night, someone booked for drinking and driving, public intoxication, or something like that broke his tv set. He was a bit ticked off that the sheriff wouldn't let him out for a little while on Monday to go buy another tv set.
Something like that would make an interesting contest.
Imagine an informal contest to reliably store the most information on a single piece of paper (both sides) with a normal commercial laser printer and then read it with a normal commercial scanner after the paper has been handled to where it is no longer in a pristine condition, but not too badly damaged.
Bragging rights would go to the team attaining the best compression and ability to read it back with 100% reliability.
For example, some contestants could store the data in trinary by using a foward slash, a backward slash, and either a space or maybe a square box for the three characters.
Accept only entries published as Open Source. Then do another a year later with contestants able to use anything of the previous year's entries as starting points to improve upon.
I didn't know about the audit until they said they needed the A/R report. So it might easily have been a few months between the audit and the collection.
I only averaged about 4 hours a month there with sometimes as much as 3 or 4 months between visits. So, I'd hear everything for a month or more the same day and so things usually seemed as if they happened in a much shorter timeframe.
One of my old consulting customers in the 80s was a company that provided services for lawyers.
They would do depositions, private detective work, pick up and deliver evidence,..., and bill the legal firm.
Many of the lawyers and legal firms were of the opinion that they didn't have to pay any of the bills for this until the cases were settled.
So that company got into a serious cash flow problem at one point. They had hundreds of thousands of receivables, but not enough cash coming in on them.
At some point, they couldn't make their quarterly tax payments because of the problem. They were audited and the IRS found several thousand more in taxes they owed.
But the company just didn't have the money.
The president/owner of the company told the IRS that he wished he could turn over that much of his receivables to the IRS. The IRS agent replied that they could.
So he spent the weekend pouring over the receivables and identified enough to cover the tax debt of the oldest, most difficult to collect receivables that they never thought they had much of a chance to collect.
The following Monday, he gave the list to the IRS.
The IRS agent started calling the lawyers and law firms.
"Hello. I'd like to confirm that you own XYZ company (some dollar amount). Can you confirm this?"
Lawyers know that if you admit the debt and say you are going to pay it later, you can often put off paying it for years, but if you deny the debt, it becomes a legal matter and they can drag you into court real fast and get a judgement against you. I saw one lawyer who was very wealthy but got ticked off at someone over very late delivery of a $50,000 computer take years to pay the debt just to teach them a lesson.
So they all admitted that they owed the debt.
The IRS agent then said, "I'm Agent (insert name) of the IRS and we've been assigned this debt. I expect you to have the check in the mail by tomorrow morning."
He collected every single penny of every one of those ancient receivables.
Maybe they are trying to get the sympathy of the jury when they go to trial.
I knew one woman who was on a jury at a criminal trial where the defendant was represented by a lawyer that has got to be one of the most incompetent criminal lawyers in any major city in the U.S.
According to her, the entire jury felt sorry for the defendant for being stuck with that lawyer to represent him.
I always have to pay shipping for the books I borrow by interlibrary loan.
The only time I asked for a book that had just been published, Geometry and topology of configuration spaces by Edward R. Fadell and Sufian Y. Husseini, I had no troubled getting it.
Slashdot Mirror
No.
I would rather just switch off the carrier completely.
Get rid of the telephone and never have another.
The only reason I can see to have a telephone is in case of emergencies. Like calling for the ambulance.
So, I suppose I'll always be stuck with a telephone. But I sure hate that idea.
The one I thought was interesting was one guy who usually ran into trouble the first time he met his date's parents.
He had never been in trouble with the law, but he did some work doing crime reenactments for a local tv station.
While the girls he dated didn't watch the news enough to recognize him, their parents sure did.
Someone wrote some software to write poetry back in the 60s or early 70s.
The only line I remember from it was "All God's chillun, got algorithm." I always thought that was a bit interesting for a computer.
I agree they did some impressive things, but to the best of my knowledge, none of them have ever solved any unsolved problems such as the student in the article.
But I could be wrong.
So just what unsolved problems did they solve?
It was also been included in its entirity in a number of news stories about that time.
I was rather suprised to see it surface again almost as a fresh issue.
Just what major unsolved problems did Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Steve Wozniak solve?
My computers used to be named Cholera, Anthrax, Rabies, and Smallpox.
Anthrax was a file server running OpenBSD.
Because of minor concerns that someone might think those names had some kind of significance beyond just being computer names, I finally changed them to Frodo, Bilbo, Gandalf, and Hobbit.
If there was a Big Tit Linux, it might gain popularity real quick.
Yeah. It's probably too late for a Jolly Green Giant Linux distribution.
Considering some of the more or less common interests of many geeks, why don't we have something like Elvish Linux? I'd bet a Linux distribution named Elvish Linux would be remembered more easily by far more geeks.
On the other hand, some of the non-geeks might think it is some new kind of cookie.
They had better have downloaded every song they allege to be infringing to verify that it is in fact infringing.
I'm surprised we don't have thousands of people out there taping themselves strumming on a guitar and sharing it under various names and titles.
Or maybe there are thousands of people doing just that.
I heard the other day that the RIAA recently complained about someone putting a 1930's or 1940's Bing Crosby radio show on their web site and had his service provider remove it for copyright infringements.
I think there is often quite a bit of doubt about just who owns many of the old radio shows.
Evan Brown used to work for DSC Communications and ran into the same problem.
Except in Evan's case, he had his idea before he ever went to work for DSC and until ordered by the judge, it remained an idea, not an invention. The judge ordered him to develop it for DSC without pay.
Check out Evan's web site on the issue
Maybe some of them.
But they're going to have a tough time underbidding allofmp3.com.
There are even reports that Billy the Kid died in Texas and was buried in Hico, Texas. Ask anyone from Hico about it and you're likely to get a long explanation about Pat Garrett allowed Billy the Kid to get out of state on the quiet as long as he didn't reveal his true identity. So, he went to Hico. Hico is on Highway 6 about 60 miles or so west of Waco.
That depends where you are in Texas.
In my county, you might be the only inmate.
A friend of mine spent 30 days in jail once back in the late 70s.
When his father needed him to drive a tractor, the sheriff would turn him loose for the day in the custody of his father. At the end of the day, his father would take him back.
They'd also let him out to rake the leaves of the courthouse lawn or to run down to the drugstore for a hamburger or a book to read.
One Saturday night, someone booked for drinking and driving, public intoxication, or something like that broke his tv set. He was a bit ticked off that the sheriff wouldn't let him out for a little while on Monday to go buy another tv set.
It's 1:55 am and I just finished supper.
Four or five hours of work and it will be time for a nap.
Something like that would make an interesting contest.
Imagine an informal contest to reliably store the most information on a single piece of paper (both sides) with a normal commercial laser printer and then read it with a normal commercial scanner after the paper has been handled to where it is no longer in a pristine condition, but not too badly damaged.
Bragging rights would go to the team attaining the best compression and ability to read it back with 100% reliability.
For example, some contestants could store the data in trinary by using a foward slash, a backward slash, and either a space or maybe a square box for the three characters.
Accept only entries published as Open Source. Then do another a year later with contestants able to use anything of the previous year's entries as starting points to improve upon.
You could use paper tape. Even if the paper tape gets brittle, you should still be able to make a duplicate paper tape with some effort.
I have some software on paper tape and it appears to be just as reasonable today as when I wrote it 26 years ago.
On the other hand, I haven't seen a paper tape reader in nearly that many years.
Here's an idea for encoding your music. Build your house with two colors of bricks. Arrange the bricks in a pattern to digitally represent your data.
The obvious problem is that anyone driving by could read the patter. So maybe you'd better encrypt it with GPG first.
Another probem is, of course, just how big a house you need to build to digitally encode your entire music collection in the bricks?
I didn't know about the audit until they said they needed the A/R report. So it might easily have been a few months between the audit and the collection.
I only averaged about 4 hours a month there with sometimes as much as 3 or 4 months between visits. So, I'd hear everything for a month or more the same day and so things usually seemed as if they happened in a much shorter timeframe.
One of my old consulting customers in the 80s was a company that provided services for lawyers.
..., and bill the legal firm.
They would do depositions, private detective work, pick up and deliver evidence,
Many of the lawyers and legal firms were of the opinion that they didn't have to pay any of the bills for this until the cases were settled.
So that company got into a serious cash flow problem at one point. They had hundreds of thousands of receivables, but not enough cash coming in on them.
At some point, they couldn't make their quarterly tax payments because of the problem. They were audited and the IRS found several thousand more in taxes they owed.
But the company just didn't have the money.
The president/owner of the company told the IRS that he wished he could turn over that much of his receivables to the IRS. The IRS agent replied that they could.
So he spent the weekend pouring over the receivables and identified enough to cover the tax debt of the oldest, most difficult to collect receivables that they never thought they had much of a chance to collect.
The following Monday, he gave the list to the IRS.
The IRS agent started calling the lawyers and law firms.
"Hello. I'd like to confirm that you own XYZ company (some dollar amount). Can you confirm this?"
Lawyers know that if you admit the debt and say you are going to pay it later, you can often put off paying it for years, but if you deny the debt, it becomes a legal matter and they can drag you into court real fast and get a judgement against you. I saw one lawyer who was very wealthy but got ticked off at someone over very late delivery of a $50,000 computer take years to pay the debt just to teach them a lesson.
So they all admitted that they owed the debt.
The IRS agent then said, "I'm Agent (insert name) of the IRS and we've been assigned this debt. I expect you to have the check in the mail by tomorrow morning."
He collected every single penny of every one of those ancient receivables.
By the way, a few years ago, a reporter went out to see Edward Abbey for an interview and was surprised to see him driving a gas-guzzler.
The reporter asked him why he was driving it.
He replied that the faster we used up the gasoline, the faster we'd be back to horse and buggy.
It looks to me more like just a general list of items to discourage the robots from indexing everything.
I don't see anything about the list that would make me think there was any malicious intent.
Maybe they are trying to get the sympathy of the jury when they go to trial.
I knew one woman who was on a jury at a criminal trial where the defendant was represented by a lawyer that has got to be one of the most incompetent criminal lawyers in any major city in the U.S.
According to her, the entire jury felt sorry for the defendant for being stuck with that lawyer to represent him.
But they still found him guilty.
It kind of reminds me of The Prisoner, a very 60's tv show where nothing was ever on the level.
I always have to pay shipping for the books I borrow by interlibrary loan.
The only time I asked for a book that had just been published, Geometry and topology of configuration spaces by Edward R. Fadell and Sufian Y. Husseini, I had no troubled getting it.