I've read that a fair number of Americans who had emigrated from Poland return there when they retire.
Not only is it their original home, but their social security and retirement checks allow them a much better standard of living than they would have here on the same money.
My oldest brother and I were talking about that at noon while eating. He asked me where I'd retire if I were to move somewhere less expensive and the only places I could think of were places like Argentina, Chile, or Bolivia.
Some place like Tristan da Cunha (sp?) would be interesting, but I don't think they'd let you stay there. How about Pitcairn Island?
Capping at 1 or 2 percent of any judgement award would make it notoriously difficult to sue anyone.
If they did it in progressive stages so that it worked out to be 1 or 2 percent cap for really large awards, it might work.
One doctor wrote up his views on Proposition 12 and made copies to hand out to customers, friendsr, and neighbors. He received an intimidating lette from a lawyer telling him that if he spent more than some set amount of money, he was an illegal (unregistered) political action committee and would be prosecuted.
I expect a turnout of about 20 to 25 in my precinct. In nearly every election of any type, that's generally about how many show up to vote. Of course, there are only about 30 voters in the entire precinct.
I remember one time when everyone showed up to vote by about 1 or 2 in the afternoon except for one voter who was away on a long trip. The poll workers knew he was out of town, but they had to keep the polls open in case he showed up. The only way they could close the polls early is if every voter in the precinct had already voted. It didn't matter if the only voter left was about 1500 miles away at the time.
On the surface, using a database type file system where files are just objects stored in the database along with other things seems like a great idea.
But I think that the result will probably be less resilient to damage and result in an increased possibilty of losing your data or finding them corrupted.
Spammers would just duplicate the tokens. You'd have a hundred thousand people claiming payment for the same token.
There would be ways to prevent or reduce that practice such as the token itself being a digital signature for the message, but that would be really miserable to do. You'd have to send your e-mail to a bank who would deduct the charge from your account, add the token to the e-mail, and then transmit the e-mail.
It would be a nightmare.
But if someone calls me on the telephone and gives me their credit card number, I'll accept any legal e-mail they send me at a rate of $10 each.
I've always felt that trying to eliminate the undesirable and banal jobs for which you need little skill and intelligence is good for society; of course, I consider myself in the 5%.
I think that society is at its best when everyone has something constructive to do. Some of these undesirable jobs are the only jobs that some people can handle.
Having something constructive to do and being responsible is, for many people, possibly nearly everyone, the only thing that keeps them civil. It's no accident that the value of human life is cheapest in the areas with the greatest unemployement.
Microsoft is acting the same way every business in the USA acts.
Not every business. Many, for sure, but not all.
I think that the large corporations are more likely to engage in such activities.
A few years ago, one company owned some patents for something they manufactured. One of the very large corporations (I don't remember which one in particular) placed a large order with them.
The company didn't have the manufacturing capacity for that large an order, but the large corporation was kind enough to loan them money at good interest rates so they could do it.
All went well until the company was ready to deliver. The big corporation cancelled the order and when the small company couldn't pay, they forced them into bankruptcy.
Then, in the bankruptcy, the big corporation bought all the assets of the small company and ended up owning the technology.
By the way, the very worst I've heard of was a small "venture capital" firm a number of years ago.
They would "invest" a large amount of money in the firm and got control of the board of directors as part of the deal.
In reality, the "venture capital" firm really put in only a few thousand dollars. But they started ordering all the equipment and supplies they could through the business. It was hauled off just as fast as possilble after delivery.
And they weren't worried at all that they might have to go to prison for fraud. They figured that it would take years to get to court and the investors in the business would not want to pour money down the drain paying the lawyers since they would probably never get anything back.
If I were trying to determine versions of the files, I would look at the files both with and without the tags.
If the only hash they use is of the song including the tags, then they are not using the available information very well.
A hash of the song including the tags can help identify a particular subdistribution of the song. For the actual distribution, you're going to have to look at the whole song without the tags.
Wonder if there is a utility for generating files with random content, but with the same hashes as another file?
Perhaps a reverse md5 hash generator which takes a hash and generates a file.
If that were possible, it would destroy the value of an MD5 hash immediately and everyone wouild quit using it faster than you could blink.
The purpose of CRC hashes is entirely different. They are designed to detect a burst of bit errors in a stream of data, the type of error that is most likely to occur in a network transmission. They are not meant for fingerprinting files.
I doubt that anyone with any degree of sophistication in cryptology would attempt to use CRC and MD5 hashes interchangeably.
I wonder if their MD5 hash library uses just the song minus the tags. If they include the tags, the slightest change to the tag would change the hash.
This does bring up a possibility for blowing the MD5 hash library out of the water by writing and using a simple utility. I bet it wouldn't take long to do something like:
1) Remove the tags, or at least remove any identifiable information from the tags.
and
2) Modify an insignificant bit of information at several random points in the song. Chosen properly, the changes should be imperceptible,
and
3) Add a randomized fraction of a second of silence or impercptible background noise to the song.
Just run the utility against any file you download and the MD5 hash would be different from any other other MD5 hash for the same song.
Any challenge response system that issues challenges to mailing lists that are readily discrnible as mailing lists is going to be hated by the people using the mailing lists and whoever designed the system is rightly going to be seen only as a pathetic luser.
I'm not saying that anything that looks like a mailing list should be passed through to the user. Just put it on hold as if a challenge was issued.
Of course, that means that any decent challenge response system must give the users a chance to review what is waiting and allow selected e-mail to be delivered even without a response.
Any challenge response system that sends challenge messages in response to mailing list messages is broken.
Ideally, a well written challenge response system would look for signs of e-mail from a mailing list and put it on hold without issuing a challenge. It should be solely up to the user to accept such e-mail.
Of course, any mailing list that does not adequately identify itself as a mailing list in a way that a good challenge response system can identify is broken as well.
Clearly, white lists need to do more than just whitelist the sender's addresses. They also need to perform a sanity check on the source of the e-mail.
If you receive an e-mail from orders@amazon.com and the IP address of the SMTP server that is sending the e-mail to you is in China, it should fail the sanity check.
Possibly having a key system of public keys and private keys. You put your own private key out there, saying you'll accept mail with anything that signs their mail with the public key. You add any mailing lists you want public key, they sign all outgoing messages with their private key. Thus you'll accep their mail.
Correction. You sign the e-mail with your private key. Others verify it with your public key.
I like the idea behind challenge response systems, even though I'm sure that none have been done properly yet.
What I really hate are the ones requring you to go to a web page. Nobody should have to use a web browser to confirm their identity. The computer I often use for e-mail doesn't even have a browser installed.
For what it's worth, I've considered just rejecting all incoming e-mail unless the from address is white-listed or the message is encrypted with my PGP key.
The white-listing of the from address would either be by the e-mail address and the IP address of the sender's SMTP server or by verifying the digital signature of the sender. Of course, the latter requires people to digitally sign their e-mail.
I think that to be copyrighted, it had to contain a copyright notice including a little c in a circle or a (c) and the proper verbage.
There was some discussion about whether or not a (c) would count the same as the little c in a circle. I think that some attorneys had the opinion that anything marked with a (c) copyright notice said that it was not a valid copyright while others believed that it was okay.
In any event, if it was published without the copyright notice, I don't believe it was considered to be copyrighted.
You can be sure that the Disney people properly copyrighted their materials. Many computer people didn't.
What was funny was to see someone turn in a computer homework assignment that included a copyright notice.
I don't think that the copyright extensions and changes copyrighted old works that had not been copyrighted or that had lost their copyrights.
So the question is whether they were legally copyrighted so that it could be extended.
They claim that the GPL has an out because they didn't know that their code was in Linux.
And they claim that there is about 1,000,000 lines of SCO code in Linux.
What?
If there really was 1,000,000 lines of SCO code in Linux, they would have to know it was there. They simply could not have missed an infringement of that magnitude. It's just not possible.
Slashdot Mirror
My main desktop machine is a Netfinity server.
I tried to apply for a job teaching high school math in Yellowknife.
That was a bit more than 20 years ago.
I never got any kind of response to any of my letters.
Notice that it is only the male animals who receive the stimulation.
It's a sexist world out there.
I've read that a fair number of Americans who had emigrated from Poland return there when they retire.
Not only is it their original home, but their social security and retirement checks allow them a much better standard of living than they would have here on the same money.
My oldest brother and I were talking about that at noon while eating. He asked me where I'd retire if I were to move somewhere less expensive and the only places I could think of were places like Argentina, Chile, or Bolivia.
Some place like Tristan da Cunha (sp?) would be interesting, but I don't think they'd let you stay there. How about Pitcairn Island?
Capping at 1 or 2 percent of any judgement award would make it notoriously difficult to sue anyone.
If they did it in progressive stages so that it worked out to be 1 or 2 percent cap for really large awards, it might work.
One doctor wrote up his views on Proposition 12 and made copies to hand out to customers, friendsr, and neighbors. He received an intimidating lette from a lawyer telling him that if he spent more than some set amount of money, he was an illegal (unregistered) political action committee and would be prosecuted.
I expect a turnout of about 20 to 25 in my precinct. In nearly every election of any type, that's generally about how many show up to vote. Of course, there are only about 30 voters in the entire precinct.
I remember one time when everyone showed up to vote by about 1 or 2 in the afternoon except for one voter who was away on a long trip. The poll workers knew he was out of town, but they had to keep the polls open in case he showed up. The only way they could close the polls early is if every voter in the precinct had already voted. It didn't matter if the only voter left was about 1500 miles away at the time.
They still have jobs.
Now they are preparing a list of all possible MD5 hash codes.
SCO is going to prove once and for all that every single line of Linux was directly copied from UNIX.
I agree completely.
On the surface, using a database type file system where files are just objects stored in the database along with other things seems like a great idea.
But I think that the result will probably be less resilient to damage and result in an increased possibilty of losing your data or finding them corrupted.
Spammers would just duplicate the tokens. You'd have a hundred thousand people claiming payment for the same token.
There would be ways to prevent or reduce that practice such as the token itself being a digital signature for the message, but that would be really miserable to do. You'd have to send your e-mail to a bank who would deduct the charge from your account, add the token to the e-mail, and then transmit the e-mail.
It would be a nightmare.
But if someone calls me on the telephone and gives me their credit card number, I'll accept any legal e-mail they send me at a rate of $10 each.
I think that society is at its best when everyone has something constructive to do. Some of these undesirable jobs are the only jobs that some people can handle.
Having something constructive to do and being responsible is, for many people, possibly nearly everyone, the only thing that keeps them civil. It's no accident that the value of human life is cheapest in the areas with the greatest unemployement.
Not every business. Many, for sure, but not all.
I think that the large corporations are more likely to engage in such activities.
A few years ago, one company owned some patents for something they manufactured. One of the very large corporations (I don't remember which one in particular) placed a large order with them.
The company didn't have the manufacturing capacity for that large an order, but the large corporation was kind enough to loan them money at good interest rates so they could do it.
All went well until the company was ready to deliver. The big corporation cancelled the order and when the small company couldn't pay, they forced them into bankruptcy.
Then, in the bankruptcy, the big corporation bought all the assets of the small company and ended up owning the technology.
By the way, the very worst I've heard of was a small "venture capital" firm a number of years ago.
They would "invest" a large amount of money in the firm and got control of the board of directors as part of the deal.
In reality, the "venture capital" firm really put in only a few thousand dollars. But they started ordering all the equipment and supplies they could through the business. It was hauled off just as fast as possilble after delivery.
And they weren't worried at all that they might have to go to prison for fraud. They figured that it would take years to get to court and the investors in the business would not want to pour money down the drain paying the lawyers since they would probably never get anything back.
If I were trying to determine versions of the files, I would look at the files both with and without the tags.
If the only hash they use is of the song including the tags, then they are not using the available information very well.
A hash of the song including the tags can help identify a particular subdistribution of the song. For the actual distribution, you're going to have to look at the whole song without the tags.
Some of my passwords are between 90 and 100 characters long including upper and lower cases, numeric, and special characters.
It would be trivial to identify the same versions of a song but with different tags.
Just strip the tags before doing the MD5 hash.
If that were possible, it would destroy the value of an MD5 hash immediately and everyone wouild quit using it faster than you could blink.
The purpose of CRC hashes is entirely different. They are designed to detect a burst of bit errors in a stream of data, the type of error that is most likely to occur in a network transmission. They are not meant for fingerprinting files.
I doubt that anyone with any degree of sophistication in cryptology would attempt to use CRC and MD5 hashes interchangeably.
I wonder if their MD5 hash library uses just the song minus the tags. If they include the tags, the slightest change to the tag would change the hash.
This does bring up a possibility for blowing the MD5 hash library out of the water by writing and using a simple utility. I bet it wouldn't take long to do something like:
1) Remove the tags, or at least remove any identifiable information from the tags.
and
2) Modify an insignificant bit of information at several random points in the song. Chosen properly, the changes should be imperceptible,
and
3) Add a randomized fraction of a second of silence or impercptible background noise to the song.
Just run the utility against any file you download and the MD5 hash would be different from any other other MD5 hash for the same song.
Any challenge response system that issues challenges to mailing lists that are readily discrnible as mailing lists is going to be hated by the people using the mailing lists and whoever designed the system is rightly going to be seen only as a pathetic luser.
I'm not saying that anything that looks like a mailing list should be passed through to the user. Just put it on hold as if a challenge was issued.
Of course, that means that any decent challenge response system must give the users a chance to review what is waiting and allow selected e-mail to be delivered even without a response.
Any challenge response system that sends challenge messages in response to mailing list messages is broken.
Ideally, a well written challenge response system would look for signs of e-mail from a mailing list and put it on hold without issuing a challenge. It should be solely up to the user to accept such e-mail.
Of course, any mailing list that does not adequately identify itself as a mailing list in a way that a good challenge response system can identify is broken as well.
Clearly, white lists need to do more than just whitelist the sender's addresses. They also need to perform a sanity check on the source of the e-mail.
If you receive an e-mail from orders@amazon.com and the IP address of the SMTP server that is sending the e-mail to you is in China, it should fail the sanity check.
Correction. You sign the e-mail with your private key. Others verify it with your public key.
I like the idea behind challenge response systems, even though I'm sure that none have been done properly yet.
What I really hate are the ones requring you to go to a web page. Nobody should have to use a web browser to confirm their identity. The computer I often use for e-mail doesn't even have a browser installed.
For what it's worth, I've considered just rejecting all incoming e-mail unless the from address is white-listed or the message is encrypted with my PGP key.
The white-listing of the from address would either be by the e-mail address and the IP address of the sender's SMTP server or by verifying the digital signature of the sender. Of course, the latter requires people to digitally sign their e-mail.
Just wait til we have OpenBSD on an XBox.
I'm an Aggie, too.
A&M would also be in the top 20 for not having cheerleaders.
That's not exactly right, but it is what Boies' Bozos (or should it be "Boizos"?) are arguing.
In fact, it does not limit you to one copy for a backup. It guarantees you the right to make at least one copy for a backup.
In other words, it is saying that if you make only one copy for a backup, the act of making that copy is not an infringement of copyright.
It does not say that you cannot have a license that allows you to make more than one backup copy.
And it does not say that you cannot have a license that allows you to make additional copies for other purposes.
All it does is guarantee that you can make a copy for a backup.
I think that to be copyrighted, it had to contain a copyright notice including a little c in a circle or a (c) and the proper verbage.
There was some discussion about whether or not a (c) would count the same as the little c in a circle. I think that some attorneys had the opinion that anything marked with a (c) copyright notice said that it was not a valid copyright while others believed that it was okay.
In any event, if it was published without the copyright notice, I don't believe it was considered to be copyrighted.
You can be sure that the Disney people properly copyrighted their materials. Many computer people didn't.
What was funny was to see someone turn in a computer homework assignment that included a copyright notice.
I don't think that the copyright extensions and changes copyrighted old works that had not been copyrighted or that had lost their copyrights.
So the question is whether they were legally copyrighted so that it could be extended.
Let's see.
They claim that the GPL has an out because they didn't know that their code was in Linux.
And they claim that there is about 1,000,000 lines of SCO code in Linux.
What?
If there really was 1,000,000 lines of SCO code in Linux, they would have to know it was there. They simply could not have missed an infringement of that magnitude. It's just not possible.