Well, we can siphon off money through punitive damages. Even if litigation takes years, a couple hundred megabucks are always welcome.
Also, there's still the tiny problem of pissing off some of the world's leading industry nations, which might be counterproductive if you intend to sell them your products at the same time. If the EU decides that OpenXML won't be accepted for document exchange with/within governmental organizations Microsoft Office would lose in value.
Maybe the German software for electronic tax returns might even get ported to systems besides Win32... although that's utopic.
Actually, that's a pretty good graph for Graphviz. Graphviz just takes the relationships between the nodes and tries to automatically generate a good graph. It esssentially turns something like this...
...into a pretty decent graph. However, getting an optimal graph is pretty difficult. The graph provided here is pretty decent - trying to recreate it at home gave me something less readable, which is probably because I haven't optimized the order of my edge definitions.
By the way, can you prove that there is a hierarchical graph with no intersecting edges? The graph being hierarchical is one of the points of the whole thing because it clearly shows the levels of references SCO's lawyers have used, something not easily possible with other graphs.
Successful attacks on poorly secured systems are easy and thus cheap. Attacks on brand-new, supposed-to-be-secure systems are harder (= less common) and more actual, thus you can sell them for more, thus there is a higher incentive. Also, when users hear about how their system is so secure that its mere existence causes bugs to be rated down, they might become less vigilant in securing and patching their systems.
In any case, saying "Vista is so secure that we should care less about those bugs" sends all the wrong signals.
Candidate A: "I propose going to war against all our export markets!" Candidate B: "I propose building a Great Firewall, which is much cheaper." The People: "Well, we don't know..." Candidate A: "But the foreign guys are evil! Think of their children!" Candidate B: "But I will use the money I saved to buy everyone free T-shirts!" The People: "Hooray for candidate B!"
"Ladies and gentlemen, we present to you our design for the new internet. Its main feature is that it's incompatible with anything we have had before, requiring everyone to replace all of their hard- and software. Also, it's expensive and proprietary, which makes it even more expensive. By ensuring that vital components are covered by extremely broad patents we have managed to make it even more expensive, up to the point of making it economically infeasible for most small countries. Finally, we made it so fundamentally different that everyone doing anything remotely network-related will have to be retrained from scratch, adding even more to an already gargantuan pile of costs and expenses.
The "EU patent directive" and the fight over software patents that's covered now and then on/. is about a EU proposal to do away with all this and replace it by a single EU system, and about whether software patents should be part of that.
Actually, it's an attempt of the European Patent Organisation (EPO) to legitimize software patents.
The European Commission (EC) drafted a proposal for a common directive that allowed patents. The European Parliament (EP) discussed the proposal and (due to the efforts of the anti-software patent lobby) rejected it, ordering the EC to rewrite the draft. One of the parts criticized was the legitimization of software patents.
What the EC came up with was a draft that went even farther than the first one, completely ignoring the EP's demands. At the second examination the EP summarily rejected it (IIRC with about 95% of the votes against the draft), ending the entire process. If the EC wants to make a patent directive again they'll have to draft a new one and start the process over.
There were more schenanigans (like the EC trying to add software patents to an agriculture bill that wasn't subject to EP scrutiny), but this is the gist of it.
Leaving aside the fact that going up against any western country would incite the wrath of all other NATO countries and that the USA can't quite win a war against the entire world (which also still has quite a number of nukes) - do you really think the American people would back a war over a top-level domain? They're unhappy enough about the losses incurred in GWB's vendetta against Saddam Hussein; the prospect of going up against much stronger nations over how to properly mark pornography on the internet would probably make them make use of the Second Amendment.
How would "properly enforcing" domains help anything? First of all, actually getting there is not easy as not everyone is of the opinion that porn is so bad it needs to be separated from everything else. (And if we have.xxx, why not.software,.art and.sport? And once we have those, why not.oss,.linux and.quake? After a while the TLD namespace starts resembling a one-level web ontology.)
Also, it's impossible to group things "properly" because they don't always neatly fit into one category. Example one, the.com, net and.org TLDs. We could enforce these, but what about websites that are both commercial in nature (making.com mandtory) and for a certain country (making the ccTLD mandatory)? Should.com only be used for multinational corporations who aren't tied to one country? What about organizations (.org) that provide informations (.info)?
Second example,.xxx. What about online sex shops? They sell (.com) porn (.xxx). What about those who only carry relatively few porn articles? Is fetish clothing porn? If it's not, does it become porn when you add a dildo? If it is, is all clothing made of, say, PVC porn? Are gas masks porn? Is a garden gnome with his pants down porn?
And what about websites showing stuff which is considered pornographic in one legislation but non-pornographic in another? Who decides? ICANN? The US DoC? The UN? Why should one country care about what another declares to be porn?
What about art communities like deviantART? Do they have to split their website into a.com* part for child-safe material and a.xxx one for anything which shows naked buttocks? Maybe dynamically decided based on the visitors' IP blocks? Once we start dynamically reassigining TLDs we have turned the domain name system into a crude tagging mechanism - TLD 2.0.
Strict separation at the TLD level is unenforcable because not everything can be easily categorized - and in some cases it's even impossible without putting the whole internet under the legislation of one nation, which is unenforcable as well. (Hello, country-specific namespaces...)
* deviantART is neither fully commercial nor a network nor an organisation and their community is international, thus the.int TLD should be the logical TLD to enforce - unfortunately they're not established by international treaty, either. I went with.com since they do have a commercial component and there is no.community TLD yet.
We clearly need IPv7, which will raise the number of network ports available to Unix systems to 2^256. Then we will divide those port ranges in a meaningful way - for example one half of the ports will be allocated to various American universities.
Of course we will not be able to remember those long port numbers, which is why we will use convenient hierarchical ASCII names, which are then resolved to port numbers by a network of servers known as the Port Name System (PNS). Then people can filter out all traffic to http://playboy.com/ connecting on port pns://porn.playboy.us. Except for those in the UK, who will block port pns://pornography.playboy.co.uk. Of course, there will be ways to circumvent that - like people setting up ad-hoc port names like pns://totally-not-porn.cs.stanford.edu, but maybe we can filter those out by mandating that all porn will be forwarded by routers only at certain intervals, where home users can then block it.
To that end, I propose a hierarchical naming scheme for intervals...
Actually,.xxx was a horrible idea. First of all, is.xxx a US domain like.edu or.mil or it it international? Does "XXX" even make sense to most people? Should the movement of porn-related domains to.xxx be mandatory, recommended, volontary? What about countries who don't care about having their TLD behind a porn site? Etc. etc. etc.
The idea with the meta tag is much better - indeed it's pretty close to what ICRA does. The ICRA tag is essentially a small approximation of what the semantic web would have done, had it actually worked out: You upload a file that rates the site on various topics (e.g. "contains pictures of naked breasts"), add <link> and <meta> tags and the whole filtering part happens client-side. Granted, their choices of categories aren't perfect, but they pretty much do the job.
ICRA even offers a watermmark you can put on images to mark them as NSFW (and for children), but I doubt that there is a significant number of browsers with support for it.
One major obstacle is that school is no longer day care. A parent might actually have to be available to, well... Be a parent more than a few hours a day.
That is a problem. Both parents are suppored to work eight hours a day and probably spend some time at home preparing for the next day. Raising their child is uneconomical.
Seriously, school isn't the only thing in our society that needs to be rethought. With everyone who can work being expected to have a job, raising a child is becoming problematic for more than one reason. We really need to find a way for people to have both time for their children and a job... Maybe more telecommuting?
Re:Explaintions. (Yes, I spelled it wrong on purpo
on
Schools Banning Homework?
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
Well, normally homework is supposed to work like this:
1. The teacher spends N lessons teaching the kids something new (N usually is between 1 and 5)
2. The students get homework repeating what was done in class (It is known that repetition is an important part of learning)
3. The teacher spends N lessons exploring the deeper areas of the current topic (N between 1 and 3)
4. The students get homework that either repeats the new stuff and/or requires them to apply their knowledge to problems that don't follow the scheme seen so far
5. UNTIL test GOTO 3
Some teachers, however, do it like bad university professors:
1. The teacher spends one lesson talking about the subject, boring the students to death
2. The students get a ton of homework where they do the actual learning
3. UNTIL test GOTO 1 ...at least the professor has tutors to back him up.
Maybe it isnt "homework" but the straight from school to the factory education model we use to teach children today.
Let's first try criticizing something that doesn't give us as many cheap laborers. I mean, you're threatening someone's bottom line there, you communist.
Note for the humor-impaired: The above post was satire pointed at the legal system being systematically fucked over to increase corporate profits.
I personally want a Borg invasion of the alpha quadrant but that's just me.
Are we talking about the TNG Borg (aka "Oh shit, Borg. We're so dead") or the Voyager Borg (aka "Look, it's the Borg. They'll die if we make really mean faces")? I mean, really, from TNG to Voyager the Borg have been so massively gimped that one single Federation ship managed to destroy the collective while using its transport infrastructure at the same time. The post-Voyager Borg would be about as much of a threat to the Federation as a bar brawl at Quark's.
- Scotty has wry humor and uses the sentence "I'm an engineer, Jim, not a *" all the time.
- McCoy maintains that logic is the answer to everything.
- Spock has slept with every female on the planet.
- Uhura can fix any machine in half the time she should be able to.
- Kirk is rarely seen without a metal dongle in his ear. And a mini skirt. Starfleet Academy wasn't his most glorious time, you see.
Also, every character who wears any kind of red uniform cannot be killed by any means whatsoever. Indeed, Starfleet is experimenting with ship plating made of redshirts.
Depends on the distro. Ubuntu is Debian-based and Debian takes pride in being free software only. Other distros don't make you jump through hoops just to install a binary driver. Then again, other distros aren't Ubuntu so yes, we're screwed.
A point upgrade should never reduce crashes as compared to a fully-updated installation of the same major version.
Then why does Windows XP (NT 5.1) behave differently from Windows 2000 (NT 5.0)? Same major version, right?
In Apple's case the steps from 10.3 to 10.4 etc. are more than just point releases; major parts of the OS are being overhauled between releases. They don't want to let go of the version number 10 (which is to classic Mac OS what NT is to classic Windows) as the big X has massive brand recognition, so each new version gets its minor number incremented.
And no, in some cases fixes can't be backported, for example when kernel extensions are involved, there was no official API for those until 10.4.
Wich Blackcomb they're going for the "Whoa" effect. The bad news is that means they'll replace the user interface with Keanu Reeves. The good news is that it's still a substantial improvement over the Vista UI.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, we can siphon off money through punitive damages. Even if litigation takes years, a couple hundred megabucks are always welcome.
Also, there's still the tiny problem of pissing off some of the world's leading industry nations, which might be counterproductive if you intend to sell them your products at the same time. If the EU decides that OpenXML won't be accepted for document exchange with/within governmental organizations Microsoft Office would lose in value.
Maybe the German software for electronic tax returns might even get ported to systems besides Win32... although that's utopic.
Actually, that's a pretty good graph for Graphviz. Graphviz just takes the relationships between the nodes and tries to automatically generate a good graph. It esssentially turns something like this...
...
...into a pretty decent graph. However, getting an optimal graph is pretty difficult. The graph provided here is pretty decent - trying to recreate it at home gave me something less readable, which is probably because I haven't optimized the order of my edge definitions.
digraph untitled
{
2 -> 1;
2 -> 283;
283 -> 33;
283 -> 98;
}
By the way, can you prove that there is a hierarchical graph with no intersecting edges? The graph being hierarchical is one of the points of the whole thing because it clearly shows the levels of references SCO's lawyers have used, something not easily possible with other graphs.
s/actual/relevant/
A good sign of being tired is when you do click Preview but still only spot obvious errors after posting.
"UberWormz0r.exe has been terminated due to the system being too stoned to understand what an 'msvcrt.dll' is or where to find one. Sorry, dude."
Hey, at least you can't say it's not innovative.
Successful attacks on poorly secured systems are easy and thus cheap. Attacks on brand-new, supposed-to-be-secure systems are harder (= less common) and more actual, thus you can sell them for more, thus there is a higher incentive. Also, when users hear about how their system is so secure that its mere existence causes bugs to be rated down, they might become less vigilant in securing and patching their systems.
In any case, saying "Vista is so secure that we should care less about those bugs" sends all the wrong signals.
Hmm...
Candidate A: "I propose going to war against all our export markets!"
Candidate B: "I propose building a Great Firewall, which is much cheaper."
The People: "Well, we don't know..."
Candidate A: "But the foreign guys are evil! Think of their children!"
Candidate B: "But I will use the money I saved to buy everyone free T-shirts!"
The People: "Hooray for candidate B!"
War: 0
Consumer whores: 1
"Ladies and gentlemen, we present to you our design for the new internet. Its main feature is that it's incompatible with anything we have had before, requiring everyone to replace all of their hard- and software. Also, it's expensive and proprietary, which makes it even more expensive. By ensuring that vital components are covered by extremely broad patents we have managed to make it even more expensive, up to the point of making it economically infeasible for most small countries. Finally, we made it so fundamentally different that everyone doing anything remotely network-related will have to be retrained from scratch, adding even more to an already gargantuan pile of costs and expenses.
Everyone, I think this one's a keeper."
The "EU patent directive" and the fight over software patents that's covered now and then on /. is about a EU proposal to do away with all this and replace it by a single EU system, and about whether software patents should be part of that.
Actually, it's an attempt of the European Patent Organisation (EPO) to legitimize software patents.
The European Commission (EC) drafted a proposal for a common directive that allowed patents. The European Parliament (EP) discussed the proposal and (due to the efforts of the anti-software patent lobby) rejected it, ordering the EC to rewrite the draft. One of the parts criticized was the legitimization of software patents.
What the EC came up with was a draft that went even farther than the first one, completely ignoring the EP's demands. At the second examination the EP summarily rejected it (IIRC with about 95% of the votes against the draft), ending the entire process. If the EC wants to make a patent directive again they'll have to draft a new one and start the process over.
There were more schenanigans (like the EC trying to add software patents to an agriculture bill that wasn't subject to EP scrutiny), but this is the gist of it.
Go home, USA. You see Iraq? Go home.
Leaving aside the fact that going up against any western country would incite the wrath of all other NATO countries and that the USA can't quite win a war against the entire world (which also still has quite a number of nukes) - do you really think the American people would back a war over a top-level domain? They're unhappy enough about the losses incurred in GWB's vendetta against Saddam Hussein; the prospect of going up against much stronger nations over how to properly mark pornography on the internet would probably make them make use of the Second Amendment.
How would "properly enforcing" domains help anything? First of all, actually getting there is not easy as not everyone is of the opinion that porn is so bad it needs to be separated from everything else. (And if we have .xxx, why not .software, .art and .sport? And once we have those, why not .oss, .linux and .quake? After a while the TLD namespace starts resembling a one-level web ontology.)
.com, net and .org TLDs. We could enforce these, but what about websites that are both commercial in nature (making .com mandtory) and for a certain country (making the ccTLD mandatory)? Should .com only be used for multinational corporations who aren't tied to one country? What about organizations (.org) that provide informations (.info)?
.xxx. What about online sex shops? They sell (.com) porn (.xxx). What about those who only carry relatively few porn articles? Is fetish clothing porn? If it's not, does it become porn when you add a dildo? If it is, is all clothing made of, say, PVC porn? Are gas masks porn? Is a garden gnome with his pants down porn?
.com* part for child-safe material and a .xxx one for anything which shows naked buttocks? Maybe dynamically decided based on the visitors' IP blocks? Once we start dynamically reassigining TLDs we have turned the domain name system into a crude tagging mechanism - TLD 2.0.
.int TLD should be the logical TLD to enforce - unfortunately they're not established by international treaty, either. I went with .com since they do have a commercial component and there is no .community TLD yet.
Also, it's impossible to group things "properly" because they don't always neatly fit into one category. Example one, the
Second example,
And what about websites showing stuff which is considered pornographic in one legislation but non-pornographic in another? Who decides? ICANN? The US DoC? The UN? Why should one country care about what another declares to be porn?
What about art communities like deviantART? Do they have to split their website into a
Strict separation at the TLD level is unenforcable because not everything can be easily categorized - and in some cases it's even impossible without putting the whole internet under the legislation of one nation, which is unenforcable as well. (Hello, country-specific namespaces...)
* deviantART is neither fully commercial nor a network nor an organisation and their community is international, thus the
We clearly need IPv7, which will raise the number of network ports available to Unix systems to 2^256. Then we will divide those port ranges in a meaningful way - for example one half of the ports will be allocated to various American universities.
Of course we will not be able to remember those long port numbers, which is why we will use convenient hierarchical ASCII names, which are then resolved to port numbers by a network of servers known as the Port Name System (PNS). Then people can filter out all traffic to http://playboy.com/ connecting on port pns://porn.playboy.us. Except for those in the UK, who will block port pns://pornography.playboy.co.uk. Of course, there will be ways to circumvent that - like people setting up ad-hoc port names like pns://totally-not-porn.cs.stanford.edu, but maybe we can filter those out by mandating that all porn will be forwarded by routers only at certain intervals, where home users can then block it.
To that end, I propose a hierarchical naming scheme for intervals...
[...] Add a new TLD for porn [...]
.xxx was a horrible idea. First of all, is .xxx a US domain like .edu or .mil or it it international? Does "XXX" even make sense to most people? Should the movement of porn-related domains to .xxx be mandatory, recommended, volontary? What about countries who don't care about having their TLD behind a porn site? Etc. etc. etc.
Actually,
The idea with the meta tag is much better - indeed it's pretty close to what ICRA does. The ICRA tag is essentially a small approximation of what the semantic web would have done, had it actually worked out: You upload a file that rates the site on various topics (e.g. "contains pictures of naked breasts"), add <link> and <meta> tags and the whole filtering part happens client-side. Granted, their choices of categories aren't perfect, but they pretty much do the job.
ICRA even offers a watermmark you can put on images to mark them as NSFW (and for children), but I doubt that there is a significant number of browsers with support for it.
One major obstacle is that school is no longer day care. A parent might actually have to be available to, well... Be a parent more than a few hours a day.
That is a problem. Both parents are suppored to work eight hours a day and probably spend some time at home preparing for the next day. Raising their child is uneconomical.
Seriously, school isn't the only thing in our society that needs to be rethought. With everyone who can work being expected to have a job, raising a child is becoming problematic for more than one reason. We really need to find a way for people to have both time for their children and a job... Maybe more telecommuting?
You misspelled "explantions".
Well, normally homework is supposed to work like this:
...at least the professor has tutors to back him up.
1. The teacher spends N lessons teaching the kids something new (N usually is between 1 and 5)
2. The students get homework repeating what was done in class (It is known that repetition is an important part of learning)
3. The teacher spends N lessons exploring the deeper areas of the current topic (N between 1 and 3)
4. The students get homework that either repeats the new stuff and/or requires them to apply their knowledge to problems that don't follow the scheme seen so far
5. UNTIL test GOTO 3
Some teachers, however, do it like bad university professors:
1. The teacher spends one lesson talking about the subject, boring the students to death
2. The students get a ton of homework where they do the actual learning
3. UNTIL test GOTO 1
Maybe it isnt "homework" but the straight from school to the factory education model we use to teach children today.
Let's first try criticizing something that doesn't give us as many cheap laborers. I mean, you're threatening someone's bottom line there, you communist.
Note for the humor-impaired: The above post was satire pointed at the legal system being systematically fucked over to increase corporate profits.
Given how some people are when they finish school it's probably more like 15 sentences.
Or 15 minutes, whichever comes first.
It is.
I personally want a Borg invasion of the alpha quadrant but that's just me.
Are we talking about the TNG Borg (aka "Oh shit, Borg. We're so dead") or the Voyager Borg (aka "Look, it's the Borg. They'll die if we make really mean faces")? I mean, really, from TNG to Voyager the Borg have been so massively gimped that one single Federation ship managed to destroy the collective while using its transport infrastructure at the same time. The post-Voyager Borg would be about as much of a threat to the Federation as a bar brawl at Quark's.
A photon torpedo wants to destroy your port nacelle.
[Cancel] [Allow]
Actually, they have an all-new concept:
- Scotty has wry humor and uses the sentence "I'm an engineer, Jim, not a *" all the time.
- McCoy maintains that logic is the answer to everything.
- Spock has slept with every female on the planet.
- Uhura can fix any machine in half the time she should be able to.
- Kirk is rarely seen without a metal dongle in his ear. And a mini skirt. Starfleet Academy wasn't his most glorious time, you see.
Also, every character who wears any kind of red uniform cannot be killed by any means whatsoever. Indeed, Starfleet is experimenting with ship plating made of redshirts.
Depends on the distro. Ubuntu is Debian-based and Debian takes pride in being free software only. Other distros don't make you jump through hoops just to install a binary driver. Then again, other distros aren't Ubuntu so yes, we're screwed.
A point upgrade should never reduce crashes as compared to a fully-updated installation of the same major version.
Then why does Windows XP (NT 5.1) behave differently from Windows 2000 (NT 5.0)? Same major version, right?
In Apple's case the steps from 10.3 to 10.4 etc. are more than just point releases; major parts of the OS are being overhauled between releases. They don't want to let go of the version number 10 (which is to classic Mac OS what NT is to classic Windows) as the big X has massive brand recognition, so each new version gets its minor number incremented.
And no, in some cases fixes can't be backported, for example when kernel extensions are involved, there was no official API for those until 10.4.
Wich Blackcomb they're going for the "Whoa" effect. The bad news is that means they'll replace the user interface with Keanu Reeves. The good news is that it's still a substantial improvement over the Vista UI.
Ah yes, the Ultimate Edition. Combines all the features from Male Premium and Female Professional.