I had an idea for something that used a similar technology. You'd have to log not only location and compass orientation, but also altitude and angle of elevation, along with zoom, exposure and other standard camera information.
With all that information in hand, it would be possible to collect, say, thousands of photographs from different sources and stitch together a 3-d Google Earth-esque 3d map of the world from human perspective.
With error correcting techniques, you could eliminate the problems of people, cars, etc. in a shot, and it could even be integrated into satellite-based systems like Google Earth.
Every day, thousands of tourists are taking pictures from all different angles of the Statue of Liberty, and other places in New York. Imagine if, instead of using polygon-based approximations, you could have a photorealistic 3-d rendering of the SoL to include in your artwork, video game or other visual media.
Google is aleady doing something like this by sending laser trucks around to major cities, but if you put this sort of porcessing power into all the cameras in the world, then (a) you don't need laser-toting trucks, and (b) you can get the data from all sorts of locations where such a truck could never go.
Apparently, Qwest--for one--told the NSA to go shag themselves, or to come back with a warrant. The NSA may be scary, but it's not impossible to tell them to buzz off.
Well, we could play games with metaphores all day. If you set your pickup truck to automatically toss out hooks and reel them in as it's passing houses in order to pick up anything that's not tied down, then it is indeed stealing. Just because my bike was unlocked and your truck picked it up without any active participation on your part doesn't mean that bike is yours to use.
Or how about this... I leave my wallet at your house. You know it's not your wallet, because it doesn't look like yours. You open it up, see that it's mine, confirming that it's not yours. You open it up further and find $80.00.
I inadvertently left my wallet at your house, maybe because I did not know there was a hole in my pocket that needed to be sewn up. If you take that money and use it, are you stealing or not?
Of course, people would complain that all these metaphores are wrong because they apply to physical entities that are not representative of something as amorphous as bandwidth. So I'll ammend my last one.
I have two copies of my credit card, one of which is normally hidden away in the back of my wallet, so when it falls out, in your pickup truck, I don't notice. It's got my name on it so you know it's not yours. It's got a high limit, so I don't notice that you're using it, and you only bought one thing--a $10 movie ticket--so I don't notice a problem on my bill.
So the question is, is that $10 movie ticket theft or not?
Trying to defiantly take a stand against people who don't give a crap about you or your morals, by practically handing them what they want but which you don't want them to take (unless it's an emergency), is pretty pointless. They don't care. Actions speak much louder than the silence they're hearing from you.
I absolutely agree, and my wireless network is locked down and encrypted. I just think that people who are doing things that they shouldn't should at least acknowledge that they are using a resource that they do not have permission of the owner to use, and take some personal responsibility for doing so. Remember, this is all in the context of people saying that it was wrong of someone to change his wireless configs to mess with the minds of those trespassing on his network.
People who take advantage of those who don't know better are not smart or clever, they're just taking advantage of those who don't know better. It's one thing to say that it's against your hacker ethos to block access to a wireless network; it's another thing altogether to say that you have permission to use anything that's not locked down.
With regards to your comment about broadcasting into someone else's airspace, I see your point, but I think you're taking the idea to an extreme. These are consumer devices which broadcast a pre-determined distance, are built to avoid interfering with other similar devices, and truly should not impact anyone who is in their reach, except possibly to provide them with free access;-)
Short of lining your walls with tinfoil, there's no real way to limit the range of these devices, short of not using them at all. That sort of trespass is indeed an interesting question--for instance, if your wireless network interferes with a pacemaker, are you responsible?--but for the purposes of this thread, I think you're reaching just a bit.
All that having been said, I appreciate your reasoned approach and your perspective. If you were in my neighborhood, I'd give you my WAP password any day!
No, I really honestly think that one day, Bill Gates woke up, looked into the mirror and noticed a gaping, sucking hole where his soul should have been. In the relentless pursuit of success, he destroyed competitors, crushed dreams and caused well-marketed mediocrity to become king over quieter quality. Suddenly, he couldn't ignore it.
He looked at the amazing innovations happening in the FOSS community and realized that as terrible a beast as it was, it was one of his own creation, because any company--other than Apple, which is the only reason that Microsoft avoids major Sherman Act action--which created a powerful, stable operating system like Linux and sold it--even for a dollar--would have been crushed by the mighty weight and hunger of Microsoft. He may not have actually created FOSS, but he certainly created the environment in which it is growing.
So yes, in a way, you're right; he probably does see the writing on the wall. But that's only part of it. It's not that he doesn't want to be blamed, but rather that he's realized that he's defined by something which is doomed, in the end, to fail, as all things are. As he approaches the sunset of his life, he is looking for something that can still be approaching its apex as the lights are going out, instead of watching the slow, painful death of a dinosaur.
If anyone does not believe that a single act of hubris can sink a major company, look no further than Commodore. They once had the best selling computer, worldwide, in the Commodore 64. They were smart, and while developing the Amiga, they also got into PC-compatibles, since they saw that market as likely to explode. However, they refused to license the technology for VGA displays which they had incorporated into their systems, and as such, they got locked out of the US market (for PCs) in the very early 1990s. The Amiga didn't sell well enough, and Europe wasn't a big enough market for PCs, and so the company, which had grown so much, literally imploded.
I don't think that MS will fall apart quite so quickly, but with the lack of true innovation ("Me too!" seems to be their entire vocabulary), and constant and growing court costs, penalties and fines in the millions of dollars, it's not going to be long before the slope is noticably down-hill for them, unless something major changes.
I don't agree with your analogy. I'm not saying yes when someone hops on my network, just as I'm not saying yes when someone picks up my bike and finds that their feet fit in the toe clips and their butt fits on my seat.
Someone who wants to steal a bike could say that by reflecting light which is assembled into an image in their brains indicating that the bike is unlocked and unsupervised is essentially the same as your "broadcast invitation". Not-no is not the same as yes.
It's similar to the DRM argument. Most people here on/. hate DRM. It seems like many here would see an open network as implied permission to use. Similarly, a lot of people feel like, since CDs aren't copy protected, it's implied permission to copy. The solution to both problems? Lock up your networks, lock up your CDs. How annoying to have to worry about that crap.
My personal feeling on music trading is that it *should* be allowed, and I support bands who permit their users to do so. But if someone chooses not to distribute their music freely, then I won't copy it, because the decision is theirs, not mine.
As far as using other people's networks, I feel like, just like any situation, if there's an emergency that warrants it, go for it. But do it knowing that you are trespassing, that you are potentially causing problems for someone else, and you are opening yourself up to all sorts of potential issues.
Here's another similar situation: a friend of mine noted that after the introduction of a commuter lane in our area, nobody was using it. It sat there empty, and she thought that was stupid. So she started using it. There was nothing physically stopping her from doing so.
She finally got pulled over, and she was totally pissed about the $271 ticket, and when she came complaining to me, I asked her how much time she had saved over the last several weeks, and it worked out to about $20/hour. I told her she should appreciate the great deal she got for as long as she did.
To throw one more thing into the mix, it's like what the mathematician said in Jurassic Park; I'll paraphrase: just because you can doesn't mean you should.
If I leave my bike outside unlocked for 10 minutes, am I giving explicit permission to anyone who sees it that they can take it? No. Am I allowing it to happen through negligence? Sure, but call it what it is; it's still stealing, or at least trespassing.
Even something as amorphous as bandwidth is a limited resource. To paraphrse the head of the commerce committee, an open wireless connection is not a dump truck you can just load up with as much as you like; it's a tube!
Sure, if you want to make sure nobody uses your tube, you should protect it. But just because you don't doesn't mean you're giving explicit permission. If I leave my bike on my front lawn without a lock and someone steals it--even if they give it back before I notice it was gone--it's still theft.
My feeling about the long tail is that it means that books should never go out of print. With self-publishing houses like Lulu.com printing books on demand, there's no reason that I shouldn't be able to print a copy of any book I want, with any kind of binding, etc.
A couple of years back, I was telling a friend about a great book I had as a kid, called "Who Needs Donuts" by Mark Alan Stamaty. My friend had just had a kid, and I was thinking it would be cool to get a copy for him, but it was long out of print. I shelved the idea for a few months, and then decided to try again, and if that didn't work, scan my old copy, which I had saved, and print a new one. In the intervening months, the book came back for a reprint, 30 years after its first printing.
My feeling is that it shouldn't have been that much work, and there's no reason the publisher should have to print up a whole multi-thousand book run. The occasional nostalgia buyer would do really well for publishers and authors who have low-volume books.
So if I want to find old editions of the Book of Knowledge from 1944, where the commentary following the story of "the first men on the moon" indicates that "maybe your children's children's children will walk on the moon", I should be able to.
In short, no more dark ages. No lost wisdom. No lost idiocy, either.
In addition to zombie PCs, which the other poster mentioned, there are zombie proxies. I used to work for one of the original click-through advertising companies, which is now mostly defunct. To protect the annoyed-at-not-being-successful, I won't ssaayy it's name. Anyway, we had a "client" who kept setting up accounts under slightly different names (different combinations of about 6 first and last names), and then those accounts would make 10 times more money than any of our other clients.
We finally found that what they were doing was searching for unprotected proxy servers--specifically, ones running something called SQUID, which is apparently easily scriptable--and they would have different IPs hitting their pages from all over the world. Thousands of times an hour from thousands of IP addresses. Looked totally normal. But with 1-2% click-through rate, they would have made $1000/mo from all their accounts, but we caught on that something funny was happening after the first couple of payments went out. It was easy to see that something was wrong, but just what was difficult. Eventually, we simply stopped showing any paid ads to any requests from SQUID servers. That solved the problem, but unfortunately, while the technology was great, it was a little ahead of itself, and we didn't really have a marketing team, so unfortunately, it went the way of the dodo.
I remember when I got my 1541-compatible MSD SuperDrive for my Commodore 64. Those 5 1/4" floppies held an amazing 170KB of data. That was like the equivalent of 20 5-minute tapes!
Well, I'll do the best that I can. In the system preferences, in the keyboard and mouse preference pane, there's a section called "Trackpad Gestures" in the middle. At the bottom of that section, there's a checkbox for "place two fingers on trackpad and click button for secondary click".
Once it's enabled, you just have two fingers on the trackpad when you click, and it works like a right mouse button.
Pretty cool, I think. It was enabled by default on my MacBook. If your PBG4 allows two-finger scrolling, it should work; however, if you have one that predates two-finger gestures, "just working" might mean that this feature isn't available, so it's not even visible on the preference pane.
yeah, but if you right-click (or control-click or two-finger trackpad-click), it's consistent. Personally, I think that now that they've got the two-finger thing for laptops, they should do away with the click/hold dock thingie.
Yeah, when I was 10, I decided that the question should have been: "which came first, the chicken or the chicken egg?" However, that made the question difficult, so I didn't push it. Instead, the easy answer to the question, as asked, is: the egg.
I just wanted to say I really appreciated your post. Well written, preserving the emotional impact of what you wanted to say without sacrificing factual accuracy. Cheers to you.
Here's a bit of my own experience: at home I use a 5-year old G4 Quicksilver. The original hard drive is long gone, replaced with 2 120 GB drives. RAM is upgraded to 1.25 GB. The video card is upgraded to whatever the fastest card I could get which was backwards compatible with 4xAGP, which is as fast as my slot goes.
Last, but not least, the original (single) 867 MHz G4 CPU has been replaced with a dual 1.6 GHz G4 setup. The CPU upgrade required a firmware change and a screwdriver (to remove the heat sink). The rest was like, pop it open and pop in the upgrade. Doing all that made it go from feeling like a five-year-old computer to feeling almost brand new. Now the slowest part of my home setup is my DSL line. I wish I could get a full 5 Mbps connection!!
All that having been said, I'm still thinking about the new MacBook Pro Core Duo systems. I feel like after waiting 5 years, I deserve to make an upgrade:-)
> You forgot to mention that in 2009, Bush leaves office,
> unlike Hitler who wasn't bothered by electoral process.
You forgot to mention that there are no guarantees. Think:
Bush is the only president to be elected *twice* without winning the popular vote.
The first time, the deciding factor was a state where his brother was governor and his former campaign manager was state controller. There were many, many questions raised about the tactics used.
The second time, the deciding factor was Ohio, where Diebold, the maker of the closed-source-no-audit-trail voting boxes is headquartered. Let's not forget that Diebold's CEO was a major contributor, and essentially promised Bush the victory.
Bush has railed against the two-term limit, and has a history of manipulating presidential powers to get what he wants. Patriot act, war in Iraq over non-existant WMD, suspension of environmental laws, tax breaks for the richest people in the world, the list goes on.
Bush himself has been quoted as saying, "There's nothing wrong with a dictatorship, so long as I'm the dictator." Yes, I'm sure he was joking, but for a president to say that publicly, he's either the world's biggest idiot, or there's a grain of sentimental truth to it.
You read it here first; Bush is going to try to get a 3rd term. Maybe Iran will attack Pearl Harbor. Keep your eye on the remaining "axis of evil" countries... right now, the only thing that would surprize me is if there were no surprizes.
Either that, or they're going to give spammers another forum for screwing things up for the rest of us... *sigh*
Re:And shockingly enough...
on
Vim 7 Released
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· Score: 1
Yes... yours is muuuuuch nicer;-)
My favorite editor
on
Vim 7 Released
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· Score: 4, Funny
When all the other websites were putting badges on saying, "made with dreamweaver", or "made with go-live", or whatever, I made the following for my site: made with vi
Slashdot Mirror
With all that information in hand, it would be possible to collect, say, thousands of photographs from different sources and stitch together a 3-d Google Earth-esque 3d map of the world from human perspective.
With error correcting techniques, you could eliminate the problems of people, cars, etc. in a shot, and it could even be integrated into satellite-based systems like Google Earth.
Every day, thousands of tourists are taking pictures from all different angles of the Statue of Liberty, and other places in New York. Imagine if, instead of using polygon-based approximations, you could have a photorealistic 3-d rendering of the SoL to include in your artwork, video game or other visual media.
Google is aleady doing something like this by sending laser trucks around to major cities, but if you put this sort of porcessing power into all the cameras in the world, then (a) you don't need laser-toting trucks, and (b) you can get the data from all sorts of locations where such a truck could never go.
Anyone notice that the data storage device itself is a mac mini in a bag?
Or how about this... I leave my wallet at your house. You know it's not your wallet, because it doesn't look like yours. You open it up, see that it's mine, confirming that it's not yours. You open it up further and find $80.00.
I inadvertently left my wallet at your house, maybe because I did not know there was a hole in my pocket that needed to be sewn up. If you take that money and use it, are you stealing or not?
Of course, people would complain that all these metaphores are wrong because they apply to physical entities that are not representative of something as amorphous as bandwidth. So I'll ammend my last one.
I have two copies of my credit card, one of which is normally hidden away in the back of my wallet, so when it falls out, in your pickup truck, I don't notice. It's got my name on it so you know it's not yours. It's got a high limit, so I don't notice that you're using it, and you only bought one thing--a $10 movie ticket--so I don't notice a problem on my bill.
So the question is, is that $10 movie ticket theft or not?
I absolutely agree, and my wireless network is locked down and encrypted. I just think that people who are doing things that they shouldn't should at least acknowledge that they are using a resource that they do not have permission of the owner to use, and take some personal responsibility for doing so. Remember, this is all in the context of people saying that it was wrong of someone to change his wireless configs to mess with the minds of those trespassing on his network.
People who take advantage of those who don't know better are not smart or clever, they're just taking advantage of those who don't know better. It's one thing to say that it's against your hacker ethos to block access to a wireless network; it's another thing altogether to say that you have permission to use anything that's not locked down.
With regards to your comment about broadcasting into someone else's airspace, I see your point, but I think you're taking the idea to an extreme. These are consumer devices which broadcast a pre-determined distance, are built to avoid interfering with other similar devices, and truly should not impact anyone who is in their reach, except possibly to provide them with free access ;-)
Short of lining your walls with tinfoil, there's no real way to limit the range of these devices, short of not using them at all. That sort of trespass is indeed an interesting question--for instance, if your wireless network interferes with a pacemaker, are you responsible?--but for the purposes of this thread, I think you're reaching just a bit.
All that having been said, I appreciate your reasoned approach and your perspective. If you were in my neighborhood, I'd give you my WAP password any day!
Business Manager: But Kane, we're losing a million dollars a year!
Kane: Then in 60 years, when I'm out of money, we will close the doors!
He looked at the amazing innovations happening in the FOSS community and realized that as terrible a beast as it was, it was one of his own creation, because any company--other than Apple, which is the only reason that Microsoft avoids major Sherman Act action--which created a powerful, stable operating system like Linux and sold it--even for a dollar--would have been crushed by the mighty weight and hunger of Microsoft. He may not have actually created FOSS, but he certainly created the environment in which it is growing.
So yes, in a way, you're right; he probably does see the writing on the wall. But that's only part of it. It's not that he doesn't want to be blamed, but rather that he's realized that he's defined by something which is doomed, in the end, to fail, as all things are. As he approaches the sunset of his life, he is looking for something that can still be approaching its apex as the lights are going out, instead of watching the slow, painful death of a dinosaur.
If anyone does not believe that a single act of hubris can sink a major company, look no further than Commodore. They once had the best selling computer, worldwide, in the Commodore 64. They were smart, and while developing the Amiga, they also got into PC-compatibles, since they saw that market as likely to explode. However, they refused to license the technology for VGA displays which they had incorporated into their systems, and as such, they got locked out of the US market (for PCs) in the very early 1990s. The Amiga didn't sell well enough, and Europe wasn't a big enough market for PCs, and so the company, which had grown so much, literally imploded.
I don't think that MS will fall apart quite so quickly, but with the lack of true innovation ("Me too!" seems to be their entire vocabulary), and constant and growing court costs, penalties and fines in the millions of dollars, it's not going to be long before the slope is noticably down-hill for them, unless something major changes.
It's not about blame; it's about shame.
Right... Not wearing a chastity belt? That's an invitation! Didn't spray the food on your plate with poison? I think I'll eat it! You get the jist.
Someone who wants to steal a bike could say that by reflecting light which is assembled into an image in their brains indicating that the bike is unlocked and unsupervised is essentially the same as your "broadcast invitation". Not-no is not the same as yes.
It's similar to the DRM argument. Most people here on /. hate DRM. It seems like many here would see an open network as implied permission to use. Similarly, a lot of people feel like, since CDs aren't copy protected, it's implied permission to copy. The solution to both problems? Lock up your networks, lock up your CDs. How annoying to have to worry about that crap.
My personal feeling on music trading is that it *should* be allowed, and I support bands who permit their users to do so. But if someone chooses not to distribute their music freely, then I won't copy it, because the decision is theirs, not mine.
As far as using other people's networks, I feel like, just like any situation, if there's an emergency that warrants it, go for it. But do it knowing that you are trespassing, that you are potentially causing problems for someone else, and you are opening yourself up to all sorts of potential issues.
Here's another similar situation: a friend of mine noted that after the introduction of a commuter lane in our area, nobody was using it. It sat there empty, and she thought that was stupid. So she started using it. There was nothing physically stopping her from doing so.
She finally got pulled over, and she was totally pissed about the $271 ticket, and when she came complaining to me, I asked her how much time she had saved over the last several weeks, and it worked out to about $20/hour. I told her she should appreciate the great deal she got for as long as she did.
To throw one more thing into the mix, it's like what the mathematician said in Jurassic Park; I'll paraphrase: just because you can doesn't mean you should.
Even something as amorphous as bandwidth is a limited resource. To paraphrse the head of the commerce committee, an open wireless connection is not a dump truck you can just load up with as much as you like; it's a tube!
Sure, if you want to make sure nobody uses your tube, you should protect it. But just because you don't doesn't mean you're giving explicit permission. If I leave my bike on my front lawn without a lock and someone steals it--even if they give it back before I notice it was gone--it's still theft.
A couple of years back, I was telling a friend about a great book I had as a kid, called "Who Needs Donuts" by Mark Alan Stamaty. My friend had just had a kid, and I was thinking it would be cool to get a copy for him, but it was long out of print. I shelved the idea for a few months, and then decided to try again, and if that didn't work, scan my old copy, which I had saved, and print a new one. In the intervening months, the book came back for a reprint, 30 years after its first printing.
My feeling is that it shouldn't have been that much work, and there's no reason the publisher should have to print up a whole multi-thousand book run. The occasional nostalgia buyer would do really well for publishers and authors who have low-volume books.
So if I want to find old editions of the Book of Knowledge from 1944, where the commentary following the story of "the first men on the moon" indicates that "maybe your children's children's children will walk on the moon", I should be able to.
In short, no more dark ages. No lost wisdom. No lost idiocy, either.
We finally found that what they were doing was searching for unprotected proxy servers--specifically, ones running something called SQUID, which is apparently easily scriptable--and they would have different IPs hitting their pages from all over the world. Thousands of times an hour from thousands of IP addresses. Looked totally normal. But with 1-2% click-through rate, they would have made $1000/mo from all their accounts, but we caught on that something funny was happening after the first couple of payments went out. It was easy to see that something was wrong, but just what was difficult. Eventually, we simply stopped showing any paid ads to any requests from SQUID servers. That solved the problem, but unfortunately, while the technology was great, it was a little ahead of itself, and we didn't really have a marketing team, so unfortunately, it went the way of the dodo.
Sigh
Once it's enabled, you just have two fingers on the trackpad when you click, and it works like a right mouse button.
Pretty cool, I think. It was enabled by default on my MacBook. If your PBG4 allows two-finger scrolling, it should work; however, if you have one that predates two-finger gestures, "just working" might mean that this feature isn't available, so it's not even visible on the preference pane.
But that's just my $0.02
No great shakes here.
Last, but not least, the original (single) 867 MHz G4 CPU has been replaced with a dual 1.6 GHz G4 setup. The CPU upgrade required a firmware change and a screwdriver (to remove the heat sink). The rest was like, pop it open and pop in the upgrade. Doing all that made it go from feeling like a five-year-old computer to feeling almost brand new. Now the slowest part of my home setup is my DSL line. I wish I could get a full 5 Mbps connection!!
All that having been said, I'm still thinking about the new MacBook Pro Core Duo systems. I feel like after waiting 5 years, I deserve to make an upgrade :-)
> unlike Hitler who wasn't bothered by electoral process.
You forgot to mention that there are no guarantees. Think:
- Bush is the only president to be elected *twice* without winning the popular vote.
- The first time, the deciding factor was a state where his brother was governor and his former campaign manager was state controller. There were many, many questions raised about the tactics used.
- The second time, the deciding factor was Ohio, where Diebold, the maker of the closed-source-no-audit-trail voting boxes is headquartered. Let's not forget that Diebold's CEO was a major contributor, and essentially promised Bush the victory.
- Bush has railed against the two-term limit, and has a history of manipulating presidential powers to get what he wants. Patriot act, war in Iraq over non-existant WMD, suspension of environmental laws, tax breaks for the richest people in the world, the list goes on.
- Bush himself has been quoted as saying, "There's nothing wrong with a dictatorship, so long as I'm the dictator." Yes, I'm sure he was joking, but for a president to say that publicly, he's either the world's biggest idiot, or there's a grain of sentimental truth to it.
You read it here first; Bush is going to try to get a 3rd term. Maybe Iran will attack Pearl Harbor. Keep your eye on the remaining "axis of evil" countries... right now, the only thing that would surprize me is if there were no surprizes.made with vi