The best thing that could happen would be for our governments to come to their senses, actually listen to what the developer community is saying, and realize that software patents are ridiculous and will either be totally unenforcable or lead to the total stagnation of true innovation.
I'd take that a little futher and say the only way software patents are enforcable is through stagnation of true innovation.
Who says it has gone unchanged? These are the descendents that just happen to be most similar to their ancestors. Its a branch that has not died out, a testament to the strength of this particular evolutionary adaptation. Or the creatures' luck in not having their habitat significantly altered. Other descendents, those forced to adapt to localized environmental changes, have likely been adapted through natural selection with different features. As far as the species in TFA, their appear to be known variations. Anyone know of variations of Coelacanth that have either died out (as far as we know) or still exist?
I just recently got into Ruby, but I wish I would have started learning programing with it. Its got the OOP learning curve to get over, but the way that nearly everything is an object in Ruby gets you over that pretty quick. Besides, its best to get the whole OOP thing done with so you can learn good programming. Ruby has been useful to me in the common areas I deal with - shell scripts for sysadmin tasks, graphical applications using various toolkits, and web application development.
Ruby also gives some great tools for beginners to the language, or programming in general. Irb, the interactive ruby shell, gives you instant feedback while trying out new(-to-you) features of the language. Erb, embedded ruby, is great for the web, but also allows you to create templates for non-web files. All without needing to learn another templating language. And while we're on it, Erb allows you to move your programming skills onto the web. Most newbie programmers who ask me about programming either don't understand the difference between classic applications and web-apps, and are mostly interested in the latter. By giving them a way to immediately see the results of their programming efforts in a familiar way gets them deeply interested in expanding their knowledge.
While there isn't a flood of books and online resources for Ruby, there is one coming. The current market is thankfully filled by such excellent texts as the Pragmatic Programmer's Guide (maybe if I pimp them enough they'll hook me up with some free books) and the entertaining Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby.
Ruby provides the perfect mix of logical syntax and language features to make it a great beginners language. Starting with Ruby will give an up-and-coming programmer the skills needed to work with OOP and create clean, beautiful code.
I haven't even talked about Rails yet... and I won't. It rocks, thats all I'll say.
For sometime now, its been a running gag for the online drug-kids to inform neophites that cat piss is a highly psychoactive drug. I've seen all sorts of preperations listed for it on various sites.
Sorry, but I have to call bullshit on the barcode/666 thing. We'll let this article on Snopes take care of that.
Contrary to popular myth, no bar code includes the number 666. This belief arose because the number six is represented by a pattern similar to that of the guard bars used to mark the beginning, middle, and end of every bar code. Since the guard bars always appear three times in a given bar code, people who mistakenly read them as sixes claimed that the pattern 6-6-6 was embedded in every bar code. However, if you look closely at the '6' in a bar code, you will see that there is a wide white bar either to the left or the right of its pattern (depending upon where within the bar code the number is positioned), which is not the case with the guard bars.
Not only are the guard bars not used as digits, if they were they would not be proper 6's anyway. The whitespace in barcodes is not insignficant.
On a side note: always wondered about making a program to compute all the possible combinations of the Jewish alphabet that adds up to 666 (filtering out all the nonsense ones of course). Someone must have done this somewhere already.
Why the Jewish alphabet? The Revelation was written in Greek.
Um, is that $117,500 of tax money? That's a lot of chicken nuggets and little milk cartons...
This always comes up with cases about the First Amendment. Yes, of course that is $117,500 of tax money.
Look, the First Amendment protects the freedom of speech from government censorship. Only government censorship; the First Amendment does not prevent private entities from censoring your speech. In any First Amendment case where restitution is found to be due to the plaintiff, said restitiution will be derived from tax monies.
You might want to argue, then, that monetary reward is not the appropriate restitution for violation of First Amendment rights. I will leave it to you to define a better way to right the harm of such violation. Serious government censorship is usually immediately effective in its aims, if not violently so. By time the courts have decided that censorship was unfounded, it is often too late for the censor speech to have its intended effect. In the business world, such 'irreparable harm' results in monetary rewards.
I like to think of it this way:
You are being fined because the school improperly violated this student's rights. Your tax dollars are going into his pockets. This is the price you pay for not being involved enough with the local governance. Not to say that you are not active enough in your local politics, but the Government is of the people, by the people. We, the People, are ultimately, collectively responsible. The collective has been found guilty in the Court and must pay restitution. Hopefully, we have learned our lesson and will ensure that our schools follow the laws of our land. Hopefully...
This does not solve the problem of pedophiles on the Internet. The kids will go somewhere else and the sickos will follow. Wouldn't it be better for Yahoo! to provide a safe environment for vulnerable youth?
You simply can't decide that you don't have to follow the law because you 1) don't like the law and 2) that technology allows you to violate the law easily.
I hate this line of reasoning. You absolute can violate a law because you don't like it and/or have an easy time doing it. The fact that you can do something doesn't make it morally or legally right, but you can still do it. When a large number of people loose respect for a law, the will of these people being what gives the law validity in the first place, it is time for the law to be reconsidered. When the people want to repel a law, or decide how that law be applied, it is the government's job to accommodate to the extent that the Constitution allows. If the Constitution does not adequately fulfill the needs of its people then it is up to the people to work within their government to modify it.
Laws can be broken. Perhaps laws should be broken. I think everyone should intentionally break a law once and a while, just to remind yourself how thin the line is between order and chaos. And how thin a line order is within the surrounding chaos. Society lacking structure opens itself to rule of the strongest, but the government that too firmly restricts its citizens will fall at their hands.
A balance must be struck. The people must be secure in their ability to control their government, and a government must depend on her citizens to behave in a civilized fashion. For either to overstep their place would be disastrous.
A part of me wonders what events happened in your past to make you believe that S-E-X is such a bad word that it cannot be written in whole, even on a place such as the Internet.
It would be easier to include a generation counter within the virus code itself. Start it at a high number and have it decrement for each generation. You could also limit the number of times a particular instance of the virus could replicate.
After all, viruses that don't [exploit software vulnerablities] can only make victims those who give the viruses privilege to their computer.
While many of the 'brand-name' viruses use such exploits to replicate themselves, the vast majority of viruses still depend on some sort of user interaction to infect systems; like vampires, they must be invited in.
For the most part, when one talks of a "virus that exploits a software vulnerability to propagate itself", they usually are discussing a worm. The difference between worm and virus is narrow but distinct - a virus infects other files, usually of an executable format, in order to spread while a worm is self-contained. Worms may corrupt or modify files, but they generally do not duplicate themselves into these files.
To bring this back to the topic at hand, while the Mondad scripts are not worms, they are examples of viral code. Is it a big deal? No, as has been pointed out any scripting engine worth its weight would allow such viral scripts. Is it dangerous? Hell yeah, it would be trivial to add a payload to the proof of concepts to automatically format a hard disk on a specific day or after a certain number of generations.
This is just another vector by which uninformed users can be attacked. Unfortunatly, Microsoft has a history of incorporating their scripting engines into their products. Viral Monad scripts will become a major issue when Outlook will run scripts embedded in emails. No one thought that a macro programming lanuage in a word processor could cause any problems. They were just happy to learn that someone loved them.
No software hole is exploited; the viruses are no more dangerous than any arbitrary piece of code running on your system.
Since when do viruses need to exploit software holes or gain elevated privileges? Remeber the old COM and EXE infectors? All that was required - all that is required - for them to be 'viruses' is to replicate. Some do so in a destructive fashion; the better ones leave the host file completely functional. They only thing they exploit is the design of the executable file format. Viruses aren't even required to be 'harmful', beyond the harm of unauthorized code executing and replicating on your systems.
...the so-called "viruses" are nothing more than malicious scripts.
COM and EXE infectors are nothing more than malicious executable files.
They're the same as any other executable file. Exactly!
How about this one:
I am a.sig virus. Copy me to your.sig file to help me spread!
The issue here is a contract. If we all get so worked up in a lather when the GPL is violated, we should be no less lathered up when an employee of Microsoft violates his or her contract to work for a competitor.
There is a difference. Microsoft wants users to write articles that Microsoft will sell for a profit to Microsoft. Wikipedia wants users to write articles for the users themselves. Wikipedia is not trying to sell the improvements made by users back to them.
Slashdot is about to be declared an enemy combatant in cyber-warfare. DDoSing.gov sites...
Re:No matter how careful you are, you aren't enoug
on
ID Theft Made Easy
·
· Score: 1
Alright, alright, this is getting kinda heated.
I'll just state my position one last time and let it die. I was a clerk, these things were not my idea, just following procedures. Saying that this is an attempt to steal your identity is insulting because there are (at least quazi)legitimate reasons to write down your information.
Honestly, the police in this area will take no action without a plate number, and they get upset when you call. If you have a plate number, they contact the person for the store and give them 24hrs to pay up. If they refuse, then the license plate can be suspended and a fine assessed. Yes, on the word of a gas station clerk. If the clerk wanted to be an asshole, they could quite easily.
When I was a clerk, I had this exact same conversation with customers. They would get upset about us writing down their plates. We would explain why, and they would get offended, swearing never to return. We would explain that if we didn't do things this way they would be inconvienenced when the local city passed a prepay only law. They got enraged about that. This is from personal experience. YMMV. And by the way, they always came back the next day.
I agree, having YAL sucks. However, this is one situation where having a law would solve the problem. If everyone had to prepay, then it would be damn hard to steal gas. They would have to break into the tanks. More and more cities will make this law. It sucks but thats the way it is.
I never assumed all the customers were theives. Please don't assume all gas station clerks are out to steal your identity. This was the one way that I could help reduce the losses to the store that paid my wages (and gave me a damn nice profit sharing check for Christmas, a whole month's pay). If you are so paranoid about the clerk stealing your info off of a PUBLICLY VIEWABLE license plate and matching to your credit card that you hand to them, then use alterative methods to prevent this from happening.
Many websites keep logs of all the PUBLICALY VIEWABLE IP addresses that access them, for limited periods of time. Your IP is logged when you make a purchase online. This is for your protection, as well as the website. It keeps costs down for you by preventing abuse. Same thing with license plates at a gas station.
Keeping your personal information personal is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY. There are easy steps (it is easier to pay at the pump then it is to walk in to pay!) that you can take to keep this information private. If you don't want to do those things, then you need to exchange privacy for service. Thats the way the world works.
Re:No matter how careful you are, you aren't enoug
on
ID Theft Made Easy
·
· Score: 1
The simple fact is, I can not remember 15 license plates at a time. The police will not even take a report if you do not have a plate number. There is nothing stopping a dishonest employee from stealing your credit card number. You, as a customer, are allowing them to take possession of it. Thats a choice you make.
The links where just to show that cities are starting to legislate this. It doesn't bother customers in urban centers because they are used to it, but out in the suburbs they get offended. If you don't mind prepaying, do so and the clerk will have no need to write down your plate. Same if you pay at the pump. Either uses these solutions available to you, or expect to see them forced upon you by lawmakers.
Pear: Those are my strings, bitch!
Cherry: Nuha, this is straight up Mac language. /Pear grabs Cherry's hair
Cherry: You don't know me. You don't know me. It's my code, I do what I want. /Steve jumps in to break up the fight
Jerry: As we have seen today, if you're gonna steal someone else's source code, make sure you change the constants.
Slashdot Mirror
there is consensus that child porn distribution on the internet is a much more severe crime than copyright infringement of anything.
What about copyright infringment of child porn?
Who says it has gone unchanged? These are the descendents that just happen to be most similar to their ancestors. Its a branch that has not died out, a testament to the strength of this particular evolutionary adaptation. Or the creatures' luck in not having their habitat significantly altered. Other descendents, those forced to adapt to localized environmental changes, have likely been adapted through natural selection with different features. As far as the species in TFA, their appear to be known variations. Anyone know of variations of Coelacanth that have either died out (as far as we know) or still exist?
I just recently got into Ruby, but I wish I would have started learning programing with it. Its got the OOP learning curve to get over, but the way that nearly everything is an object in Ruby gets you over that pretty quick. Besides, its best to get the whole OOP thing done with so you can learn good programming. Ruby has been useful to me in the common areas I deal with - shell scripts for sysadmin tasks, graphical applications using various toolkits, and web application development.
Ruby also gives some great tools for beginners to the language, or programming in general. Irb, the interactive ruby shell, gives you instant feedback while trying out new(-to-you) features of the language. Erb, embedded ruby, is great for the web, but also allows you to create templates for non-web files. All without needing to learn another templating language. And while we're on it, Erb allows you to move your programming skills onto the web. Most newbie programmers who ask me about programming either don't understand the difference between classic applications and web-apps, and are mostly interested in the latter. By giving them a way to immediately see the results of their programming efforts in a familiar way gets them deeply interested in expanding their knowledge.
While there isn't a flood of books and online resources for Ruby, there is one coming. The current market is thankfully filled by such excellent texts as the Pragmatic Programmer's Guide (maybe if I pimp them enough they'll hook me up with some free books) and the entertaining Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby.
Ruby provides the perfect mix of logical syntax and language features to make it a great beginners language. Starting with Ruby will give an up-and-coming programmer the skills needed to work with OOP and create clean, beautiful code.
I haven't even talked about Rails yet... and I won't. It rocks, thats all I'll say.
For sometime now, its been a running gag for the online drug-kids to inform neophites that cat piss is a highly psychoactive drug. I've seen all sorts of preperations listed for it on various sites.
Sorry, but I have to call bullshit on the barcode/666 thing. We'll let this article on Snopes take care of that.
Contrary to popular myth, no bar code includes the number 666. This belief arose because the number six is represented by a pattern similar to that of the guard bars used to mark the beginning, middle, and end of every bar code. Since the guard bars always appear three times in a given bar code, people who mistakenly read them as sixes claimed that the pattern 6-6-6 was embedded in every bar code. However, if you look closely at the '6' in a bar code, you will see that there is a wide white bar either to the left or the right of its pattern (depending upon where within the bar code the number is positioned), which is not the case with the guard bars.
Not only are the guard bars not used as digits, if they were they would not be proper 6's anyway. The whitespace in barcodes is not insignficant.
On a side note: always wondered about making a program to compute all the possible combinations of the Jewish alphabet that adds up to 666 (filtering out all the nonsense ones of course). Someone must have done this somewhere already.
Why the Jewish alphabet? The Revelation was written in Greek.
Say anything you want and I bet I can come up with a contridictory statement.
Any group of people will have contridictions in their collective beliefs. That doesn't make an individual's beliefs less valid.Yeah, just like the women walking down the street looking too hot to resist, this guy was asking for it.
Um, is that $117,500 of tax money? That's a lot of chicken nuggets and little milk cartons...
This always comes up with cases about the First Amendment. Yes, of course that is $117,500 of tax money.
Look, the First Amendment protects the freedom of speech from government censorship. Only government censorship; the First Amendment does not prevent private entities from censoring your speech. In any First Amendment case where restitution is found to be due to the plaintiff, said restitiution will be derived from tax monies.
You might want to argue, then, that monetary reward is not the appropriate restitution for violation of First Amendment rights. I will leave it to you to define a better way to right the harm of such violation. Serious government censorship is usually immediately effective in its aims, if not violently so. By time the courts have decided that censorship was unfounded, it is often too late for the censor speech to have its intended effect. In the business world, such 'irreparable harm' results in monetary rewards.
I like to think of it this way:
You are being fined because the school improperly violated this student's rights. Your tax dollars are going into his pockets. This is the price you pay for not being involved enough with the local governance. Not to say that you are not active enough in your local politics, but the Government is of the people, by the people. We, the People, are ultimately, collectively responsible. The collective has been found guilty in the Court and must pay restitution. Hopefully, we have learned our lesson and will ensure that our schools follow the laws of our land. Hopefully...
This does not solve the problem of pedophiles on the Internet. The kids will go somewhere else and the sickos will follow. Wouldn't it be better for Yahoo! to provide a safe environment for vulnerable youth?
You simply can't decide that you don't have to follow the law because you 1) don't like the law and 2) that technology allows you to violate the law easily.
I hate this line of reasoning. You absolute can violate a law because you don't like it and/or have an easy time doing it. The fact that you can do something doesn't make it morally or legally right, but you can still do it. When a large number of people loose respect for a law, the will of these people being what gives the law validity in the first place, it is time for the law to be reconsidered. When the people want to repel a law, or decide how that law be applied, it is the government's job to accommodate to the extent that the Constitution allows. If the Constitution does not adequately fulfill the needs of its people then it is up to the people to work within their government to modify it.
Laws can be broken. Perhaps laws should be broken. I think everyone should intentionally break a law once and a while, just to remind yourself how thin the line is between order and chaos. And how thin a line order is within the surrounding chaos. Society lacking structure opens itself to rule of the strongest, but the government that too firmly restricts its citizens will fall at their hands.
A balance must be struck. The people must be secure in their ability to control their government, and a government must depend on her citizens to behave in a civilized fashion. For either to overstep their place would be disastrous.
Doomsaying, like s*x, sells...
A part of me wonders what events happened in your past to make you believe that S-E-X is such a bad word that it cannot be written in whole, even on a place such as the Internet.
It would be easier to include a generation counter within the virus code itself. Start it at a high number and have it decrement for each generation. You could also limit the number of times a particular instance of the virus could replicate.
After all, viruses that don't [exploit software vulnerablities] can only make victims those who give the viruses privilege to their computer.
While many of the 'brand-name' viruses use such exploits to replicate themselves, the vast majority of viruses still depend on some sort of user interaction to infect systems; like vampires, they must be invited in.
For the most part, when one talks of a "virus that exploits a software vulnerability to propagate itself", they usually are discussing a worm. The difference between worm and virus is narrow but distinct - a virus infects other files, usually of an executable format, in order to spread while a worm is self-contained. Worms may corrupt or modify files, but they generally do not duplicate themselves into these files.
To bring this back to the topic at hand, while the Mondad scripts are not worms, they are examples of viral code. Is it a big deal? No, as has been pointed out any scripting engine worth its weight would allow such viral scripts. Is it dangerous? Hell yeah, it would be trivial to add a payload to the proof of concepts to automatically format a hard disk on a specific day or after a certain number of generations.
This is just another vector by which uninformed users can be attacked. Unfortunatly, Microsoft has a history of incorporating their scripting engines into their products. Viral Monad scripts will become a major issue when Outlook will run scripts embedded in emails. No one thought that a macro programming lanuage in a word processor could cause any problems. They were just happy to learn that someone loved them.
No software hole is exploited; the viruses are no more dangerous than any arbitrary piece of code running on your system.
Since when do viruses need to exploit software holes or gain elevated privileges? Remeber the old COM and EXE infectors? All that was required - all that is required - for them to be 'viruses' is to replicate. Some do so in a destructive fashion; the better ones leave the host file completely functional. They only thing they exploit is the design of the executable file format. Viruses aren't even required to be 'harmful', beyond the harm of unauthorized code executing and replicating on your systems.
...the so-called "viruses" are nothing more than malicious scripts.
COM and EXE infectors are nothing more than malicious executable files.
They're the same as any other executable file.
Exactly!
How about this one: .sig virus. Copy me to your .sig file to help me spread!
I am a
The issue here is a contract. If we all get so worked up in a lather when the GPL is violated, we should be no less lathered up when an employee of Microsoft violates his or her contract to work for a competitor.
A license is not a contract.
Super Troopers, now give me a hard one.
Also known as Greeking, ironically resembling Latin.
English saying: Better the devil you know than the devil you don't.
There is a difference. Microsoft wants users to write articles that Microsoft will sell for a profit to Microsoft. Wikipedia wants users to write articles for the users themselves. Wikipedia is not trying to sell the improvements made by users back to them.
Slashdot is about to be declared an enemy combatant in cyber-warfare. DDoSing .gov sites...
I'll just state my position one last time and let it die. I was a clerk, these things were not my idea, just following procedures. Saying that this is an attempt to steal your identity is insulting because there are (at least quazi)legitimate reasons to write down your information.
Honestly, the police in this area will take no action without a plate number, and they get upset when you call. If you have a plate number, they contact the person for the store and give them 24hrs to pay up. If they refuse, then the license plate can be suspended and a fine assessed. Yes, on the word of a gas station clerk. If the clerk wanted to be an asshole, they could quite easily.
When I was a clerk, I had this exact same conversation with customers. They would get upset about us writing down their plates. We would explain why, and they would get offended, swearing never to return. We would explain that if we didn't do things this way they would be inconvienenced when the local city passed a prepay only law. They got enraged about that. This is from personal experience. YMMV. And by the way, they always came back the next day.
I agree, having YAL sucks. However, this is one situation where having a law would solve the problem. If everyone had to prepay, then it would be damn hard to steal gas. They would have to break into the tanks. More and more cities will make this law. It sucks but thats the way it is.
I never assumed all the customers were theives. Please don't assume all gas station clerks are out to steal your identity. This was the one way that I could help reduce the losses to the store that paid my wages (and gave me a damn nice profit sharing check for Christmas, a whole month's pay). If you are so paranoid about the clerk stealing your info off of a PUBLICLY VIEWABLE license plate and matching to your credit card that you hand to them, then use alterative methods to prevent this from happening.
Many websites keep logs of all the PUBLICALY VIEWABLE IP addresses that access them, for limited periods of time. Your IP is logged when you make a purchase online. This is for your protection, as well as the website. It keeps costs down for you by preventing abuse. Same thing with license plates at a gas station.
Keeping your personal information personal is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY. There are easy steps (it is easier to pay at the pump then it is to walk in to pay!) that you can take to keep this information private. If you don't want to do those things, then you need to exchange privacy for service. Thats the way the world works.
The simple fact is, I can not remember 15 license plates at a time. The police will not even take a report if you do not have a plate number. There is nothing stopping a dishonest employee from stealing your credit card number. You, as a customer, are allowing them to take possession of it. Thats a choice you make.
The links where just to show that cities are starting to legislate this. It doesn't bother customers in urban centers because they are used to it, but out in the suburbs they get offended. If you don't mind prepaying, do so and the clerk will have no need to write down your plate. Same if you pay at the pump. Either uses these solutions available to you, or expect to see them forced upon you by lawmakers.
It sounds like a Jerry Springer episode:
/Pear grabs Cherry's hair
/Steve jumps in to break up the fight
Pear: Those are my strings, bitch!
Cherry: Nuha, this is straight up Mac language.
Cherry: You don't know me. You don't know me. It's my code, I do what I want.
Jerry: As we have seen today, if you're gonna steal someone else's source code, make sure you change the constants.