The 100% effective defense against a libel or slander suit is (1) The statements are true Provably true, I might add. If you can't prove it, in a way that a court will understand, then it's not quite 100% effective.
(2) it is clear you are stating your personal opinion. That isn't quite sufficient, actually. If I were to say `It is my opinion that you are a convicted child molestor', I could still be successfully sued for libel or slander even though I said this was my opinion.
Only 268 or so years left until Voyager comes back.
Well, I'm not sure which one it is, but one of them is coming back. But we've got some time to deal with the carbon lifeform infestation...
If nothing else, at least they have the opportunity to get rid of Mialee Ok, who's Mialee? I assume that this is her, but what's so bad about her that she needs to be gotten rid of? I don't care for the artwork on this page, but that's all up to the artist anyway...
The replacement for LiPos will not be NiCd batteries. ... or maybe I'm wrong. I'm familiar with the
sealed NiCd batteries, but not really with the flooded variety which appear to be as good a fit for this sort of thing as Lead-acid batteries are. (The sealed ones don't appear to be quite as good of a fit.)
These sorts of problems generally aren't specific to NiCd batteries.
In any event, the problem with LiPos is that the batteries themselves are flammable. With NiCds, they can turn into hot steamers, or can cause fires by getting so hot that they cause whatever is next to them to burn, or can fuel a fire by feeding a short circuit somewhere else, but they themselves don't burn. They can vent so violently that they sort of explode, but there's no fire involved. Note that the chemistry of NiMH cells is similar enough to NiCd cells that they generally behave pretty much the same way.
But either way, if you abuse your batteries, bad things happen. And as a general rule of thumb, the higher the energy density, the worse the bad things are.
The replacement for LiPos will not be NiCd batteries.
NiCds have a much lower energy density than LiPos -- which is exactly why people use LiPos rather than NiCds. The self discharge rate for NiCds is higher as well, and they need a little care taken when charging them to prevent voltage depression (well, many people call it memory, but that's another thing entirely.)
If LiPos are to be replaced, A123 batteries are a more likely replacement, though for things like this where weight and size shouldn't really be a premium, I'm surprised they're not just sticking with the tried, true, reliable and relatively inexpensive lead-acid or gel-cell batteries.
Another problem NiCds have is that they're made with chemicals that are toxic to the environment. NiMH also have a higher energy density, and these two things have made NiMH more popular than NiCd batteries. But NiMH cells do have some disadvantages over NiCd -- higher self discharge rate and higher internal resistances come to mind.
... except that it should have no difference in doing a simple ls on a directory. The only entry you're directly accessing (and therefore updating it's atime) is the directory itself. Even `ls -l' does have to stat() everything in a directory, but stat() by itself does not update atimes.
Now, under cygwin, ls -l *does* open each file, because it's attempting to find out if it's executable or not, but I hope you're not talking about ls under cygwin.
The performance increase you're seeing is probably due to caching somehow rather than anything related to atime.
but your Nintendo DOES have copyrighted software on it, even without a disk in the drive.
No sir! I now have an open source custom bootloader flashed on it. The first instructions the ARM processors... Yes sir! Have you changed the microcode on those ARM processors... ?
I don't see why it would be a FEDERAL offense for someone to write their own software. I don't either. I'm just saying that your Nintendo *still* includes copyrighted software. I'm also not arguing that this actually matters.
Actually, your bootloader is probably still copyrighted. Most open source software is still copyrighted.
Good counter-argument, except that the only "contract" agreement you make when buying a Nintendo
I wasn't talking about buying a Nintendo. I was talking to the analogy given of buying a house.
Actually an HOA can only dictate what you do with your house within the confines of the neighborhood
My house isn't movable. To move it would destroy it, unless we spent more on moving the house than I did on buying it. So, like it or not, the HOA gets to say what I do with my house. (And no, I don't like it.) I can't reasonably avoid it by moving my house.
In any event, HOAs were only given as an example of where this is done in real life, something people were familiar with. I never claimed it was analagous to Nintendo sales -- that was somebody else's analogy to make. And in the case of home sales, there's nothing preventing a seller of fine mobile homes to include a clause that you agree not to put pink flamingos in front of it, no matter where you decide to put it. Perhaps such a clause would be found to be unenforcible later, but that would be for a court to decide.
Back to Nintendos. Currently you don't sign an explicit contract when you buy one. This could change in the future, and the manufacturers/vendors could make it happen if they felt it was cost-effective to do so. And people would blindly sign without even reading it. If shrink wrap licenses are found to be weaker in the future, we'll probably find more consumer electronics devices require the explicit signing of a contract at purchase, or you'll have to explicitly agree to a EULA when putting it online for the first time, and it won't work until put online and you agree to this.
As for the strength of shrink wrap licenses, the jury is still out. Court cases have found them to be un-enforcible, and court cases have found them to be enforcible. It depends on the specifics. We may not like the idea, but that won't stop laws and courts from doing things that we don't like.
and can't add further restrictions
Some contracts are written in such a way that they can be amended in the future, usually only by one party. They have to send you notice, and you can either cancel the service or do nothing, and doing nothing means you agree to the terms. This is very popular for credit card contracts, for example. It sucks for the consumer, as most don't bother to even read the new terms, and even if you do there's little you can do about it except leave, but it's the way things are.
I'm not saying that Nintendo is doing this, or that they should do this -- but it's possible.
to something they don't own.
... and they can get around this by stating that they still own it. You just bought a long-term lease on it, that's all. Assuming that it actually matters who owns it, of course.
You seem to be forgetting these things called `contracts'.
and i must be having some kind of amnesia as i don't remember ever signing any contract to buy a DS. Indeed, amnesia would explain it. I was referring to the analogy given of buying a house, not a DS.
Key words there, "sales contract". Most (all?) consumer electronics do not come with a sales contract
Yes, but the example given was about selling a house. When you buy a house, you sign page after page after page of contracts. Perhaps it wasn't a good choice of analogy after all.
As for consumer electronics, they often have an EULA. Is it enforcible? Should it be enforcible? Should they even have EULAa? I don't know, though I'm inclined to say `no' on the last one. I certainly don't approve of the idea, but to just blindly say that they don't count would be foolish.
(and if it's anything substantial better let a lawyer look it over for you, imagine the lines at the store for that!)
Uh-huh. [Stupid] people don't even read contracts they sign, actual contracts -- why would they pay a lawyer?
People would blindly sign their contracts, especially if they got a free cookie for doing so. Only a few would insist on reading it carefully. I wonder if the iPhone was sold with a contract to be signed? I know that at least for a while, when you bought a Tivo you explicitly signed a contract and agreed to sign up for service for X amount of time when you bought it. You signed right on the sales form, just like you would for a credit card purchase.
Contracts could also be put in with a rebate form -- you get $200 back, but only if you agree to this contract.
Don't delude yourself into thinking they can't make consumers explicitly sign contracts because it's too hard/slow. If they think there's a buck in it, they'll find a way to make it happen.
Simply writing on the box "By purchasing this item you agree to..." does not cut it as a legal contract.
In your opinion. According to Wikipedia's EULA page, the enforceability of shrink-wrap licenses is still unclear.
I believe the parent was claiming that if you *buy* the house, then *you* should have the right to decide if you have pets, not the seller. Once you sell somebody a house, you no longer have the rights to dictate what they can and cannot do with the house, because you sold the rights to them. Why shouldn't the same common sense apply to electronics? You seem to be forgetting these things called `contracts'. You most certainly can sell a house that includes certain conditions that are part of the sales contract. I could sell you a house with the conditions that you not have any pets or leave the house unattended, and once you signed the contract, you'd be bound to those restrictions. If you didn't like it, you would walk away, or negotiate with me about the clause.
And this sort of thing happens all the time with house sales. One big example? HOAs, and you tend to agree to their rules when you buy the house. If you don't, you can't buy the house. (HOAs are evil, yes, but they are real too.)
Why shouldn't the same common sense apply to electronics?
Probably because the sellers think they'll make more money if they try to bind you in contracts. And they spend more money lobbying the government to get laws to assist with this sort of thing.
Why should a blank device with NO COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL have a license agreement? ...
Why should my Nintendo that I want to put MY OWN DAMNED SOFTWARE on it have a license agreement?
I agree with your sentiment, but your Nintendo DOES have copyrighted software on it, even without a disk in the drive.
In any event, I'm not sure that actually having mod chips is a criminal act, though the DMCA may have made it so under many conditions. And if you're merely violating a EULA, that's generally a civil matter anyways -- not something that the police usually bust your door down for, though the RIAA seems to have gotten them to do that a few times lately. But selling mod chips as a way to run pirated games, that would be illegal.
I'm pretty sure the raids were done on those selling mod chips, not end users. But maybe you're next, you criminal Linux users you!
IMO there's nothing wrong with sending tapes home with people. Agreed -- it's the poor man version of offsite backups, though if they have sensitive information they should be encrypted at the very least. Still, while it probably makes sense for a five man office, it's probably not the best way of doing things for a big operation.
The biggest problem with moving tapes around is that you have to make sure they're not moved in a car with a great big stereo. Subwoofers can play havoc on magnetic media. Actually, the strongest magnet you have in your house probably isn't strong enough to do anything to modern data tapes. It takes a strong honking magnet to affect modern data tape media in the slightest. You could wrap your DLT/LTO/whatever tape up with a big woofer for a month and it would still be readable -- wouldn't be affected at all, actually. There's a minimum magnetic strength required to change things on the tape, and if you can't reach that, it doesn't matter how long your magnet is nearby.
The heat is probably a bigger danger.
As for the big woofers, they might attract thieves and cause problems that way:)
Re:meanwhile, the evidence is missing
on
GCC 4.2.1 Released
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· Score: 1
Having actual sources removes the Uncertainty and Doubt from FUD. In theory, perhaps. Not in practice.
gcc 2.96 was just under a million lines of code -- I've no idea how big gcc 4.2.1 is. In any event, if Microsoft (or whomever) were to claim that gcc 4.2.1 had a back door (here's a famous hypothetical (?) example) but not give any details, then it would be difficult (i.e. very time consuming) for somebody (knowledgeable) to go over all million+ lines of code to certify that it does not exist.
Having source helps take the bite out of FUD, yes, but it doesn't remove it completely. Merely having the code is not enough -- you need to have the skills to understand the code, and the time to properly analyze it. Either that, or you need to trust somebody else to do this for you.
So, yes, I have the source code for gcc. I believe that it has been eyeballed by dozens (hundreds?) of people way smarter than I am, looking for problems. Most of these people probably report their problems to the maintainers, who I assume fix them when they're serious enough. A few are bad guys, looking for holes to exploit. (Well, gcc probably isn't nearly as exploitable as some daemon like Apache, but there are ways it can be abused.) In any event, merely having the source isn't enough to prove to you that it's good (efficient, secure, reliable, not patent encumbered, not copyright infringing, etc.) code. You have to actually look, and know what you're looking at -- and very few users actually do this.
Anything goes on the Eris Free Network. OK, it's nice that you know what EF stands for in EFnet, but what you may have missed is that when the IRC network (it didn't have a name back then -- it was just `IRC') split, it split into AnarchyNet (or just Anet) and Efnet. There was no need for names before that, but after that, those are the names that were chosen.
Anet was the one where `anything goes', and yes, it did have a server called eris. The big thing that went on Anet that didn't go on Efnet was that new servers didn't need a password to connect to the existing network (well, the server `eris' was like this anyways -- I don't know if others were too) -- anybody could bring up a server. Which sounds fine, this also means that these people can make themselves IRCops on their new server and can abuse that, and it's also simple to kill anybody off on the existing network just by pretending to be a server via some simple telnet commands. Anarchy. Anet died off pretty quickly.
You know... this is one reason why I don't store ANY of my passwords for webpages anywhere but my head. ... which probably means that your your webpage passwords are probably all the same, or many are the same, or you just don't use many web sites that make you log in. Or you have superhuman memory, of course.
Which is worse? Keeping the same password everywhere, or risking that there might be a hole in your browser at some point? (Or that somebody might hack into your box and copy the entire password file.) I'll have to say the first.
Still, keeping your bank password (and other passwords that really matter) in your head is a good plan. But using the same password for systems that are controlled/administerred separately? Bad idea.
And it should depend on industry/medium. Some pop songs or software isn't worth anything after 2 years, and some things last half a century I like the idea, but two years is awfully extreme. Even the most bubblegummy pop or novelty song is valuable for far more than two years (`He did the Mash, he did the Monster Mash!'), and the only commercial software I can think of that really has that short of a useful lifetime is income tax preparation software.
Maybe you didn't get it the first time: he originated the "Open Source" phrase. No, he didn't. I found people using the term in Usenet as we use it today as early as 1990, and references to earlier uses as well. More details.
Very few people even heard of the term "open source" until Linux was in version 2.0. People like Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds and the folks at Red Hat created the buzz around open source Yes, they created buzz, but people were giving away software and it's source code even before RMS, Linus and RedHat came on the scene.
Even the term `open source' is older than Linux. (The FSF and GNU are older than Linux, of course.) Usenet searches are often useful in determining when a term came into vogue. For example, This post from 1990 says that the NSA used the term `open source' pretty much like it's meant today in 1987. This post in 1990 talks about BSD's open source policy. Or This post from 1985 talks about an open source work, though it's not specifically about computers.
As I see it, the OSI's grip on the term `open source' seems awfully tenuous, and so I'll define the term as I see fit, and as I see it, it means that the source code is readily available. Freedoms are a nice bonus, but they're not part of the term `open source'.
Does the FSF often do video streaming? Are there any video streaming methods/codecs/packages that are are sufficiently `free' for the FSF's tastes, and are installed already on enough systems that somebody might be able to view it?
Until that time, I'm all about the gallows humor. As am I. But only if it's funny. And in that case, it wasn't funny. Poor taste, not funny... pick one, not both.
The code fragments throughout the article were dumb and really added nothing but something to skip over.
But overall, the article was informative... it had a lot of information about the case I wasn't aware of. I twas even reasonably well written, though more as a story than a new article.
...I've met 10 year-olds that could code circles around some "professionals" I know. It's the way the world's getting. Smart kids? Not really a new phenomena -- we've had kids who could beat the adults at things for as long as we've had kids and adults.
Why do they keep on making movies based off video games. Has there ever been a single one that wasn't completely crap? Sure they generate a few bucks, but it's not like any of the actors/directors/writers actually gain any prestige by working on these movies. Why even bother creating such crappy movies. Well, let's look at the list...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_based_o n_video_games...
They weren't all complete crap (and a few were OK), but a none of them are real winners.
Slashdot Mirror
Only 268 or so years left until Voyager comes back. Well, I'm not sure which one it is, but one of them is coming back. But we've got some time to deal with the carbon lifeform infestation ...
Don't go criticizing things you've never even used before just based on their Wikipedia page.
In any event, the problem with LiPos is that the batteries themselves are flammable. With NiCds, they can turn into hot steamers, or can cause fires by getting so hot that they cause whatever is next to them to burn, or can fuel a fire by feeding a short circuit somewhere else, but they themselves don't burn. They can vent so violently that they sort of explode, but there's no fire involved. Note that the chemistry of NiMH cells is similar enough to NiCd cells that they generally behave pretty much the same way.
But either way, if you abuse your batteries, bad things happen. And as a general rule of thumb, the higher the energy density, the worse the bad things are.
NiCds have a much lower energy density than LiPos -- which is exactly why people use LiPos rather than NiCds. The self discharge rate for NiCds is higher as well, and they need a little care taken when charging them to prevent voltage depression (well, many people call it memory, but that's another thing entirely.)
If LiPos are to be replaced, A123 batteries are a more likely replacement, though for things like this where weight and size shouldn't really be a premium, I'm surprised they're not just sticking with the tried, true, reliable and relatively inexpensive lead-acid or gel-cell batteries.
Another problem NiCds have is that they're made with chemicals that are toxic to the environment. NiMH also have a higher energy density, and these two things have made NiMH more popular than NiCd batteries. But NiMH cells do have some disadvantages over NiCd -- higher self discharge rate and higher internal resistances come to mind.
Now, under cygwin, ls -l *does* open each file, because it's attempting to find out if it's executable or not, but I hope you're not talking about ls under cygwin.
The performance increase you're seeing is probably due to caching somehow rather than anything related to atime.
No sir! I now have an open source custom bootloader flashed on it. The first instructions the ARM processors
Actually, your bootloader is probably still copyrighted. Most open source software is still copyrighted.
In any event, HOAs were only given as an example of where this is done in real life, something people were familiar with. I never claimed it was analagous to Nintendo sales -- that was somebody else's analogy to make. And in the case of home sales, there's nothing preventing a seller of fine mobile homes to include a clause that you agree not to put pink flamingos in front of it, no matter where you decide to put it. Perhaps such a clause would be found to be unenforcible later, but that would be for a court to decide.
Back to Nintendos. Currently you don't sign an explicit contract when you buy one. This could change in the future, and the manufacturers/vendors could make it happen if they felt it was cost-effective to do so. And people would blindly sign without even reading it. If shrink wrap licenses are found to be weaker in the future, we'll probably find more consumer electronics devices require the explicit signing of a contract at purchase, or you'll have to explicitly agree to a EULA when putting it online for the first time, and it won't work until put online and you agree to this.
As for the strength of shrink wrap licenses, the jury is still out. Court cases have found them to be un-enforcible, and court cases have found them to be enforcible. It depends on the specifics. We may not like the idea, but that won't stop laws and courts from doing things that we don't like.
Some contracts are written in such a way that they can be amended in the future, usually only by one party. They have to send you notice, and you can either cancel the service or do nothing, and doing nothing means you agree to the terms. This is very popular for credit card contracts, for example. It sucks for the consumer, as most don't bother to even read the new terms, and even if you do there's little you can do about it except leave, but it's the way things are.I'm not saying that Nintendo is doing this, or that they should do this -- but it's possible.
and i must be having some kind of amnesia as i don't remember ever signing any contract to buy a DS. Indeed, amnesia would explain it. I was referring to the analogy given of buying a house, not a DS.
Uh-huh. [Stupid] people don't even read contracts they sign, actual contracts -- why would they pay a lawyer?As for consumer electronics, they often have an EULA. Is it enforcible? Should it be enforcible? Should they even have EULAa? I don't know, though I'm inclined to say `no' on the last one. I certainly don't approve of the idea, but to just blindly say that they don't count would be foolish.
People would blindly sign their contracts, especially if they got a free cookie for doing so. Only a few would insist on reading it carefully. I wonder if the iPhone was sold with a contract to be signed? I know that at least for a while, when you bought a Tivo you explicitly signed a contract and agreed to sign up for service for X amount of time when you bought it. You signed right on the sales form, just like you would for a credit card purchase.
Contracts could also be put in with a rebate form -- you get $200 back, but only if you agree to this contract.
Don't delude yourself into thinking they can't make consumers explicitly sign contracts because it's too hard/slow. If they think there's a buck in it, they'll find a way to make it happen.
In your opinion. According to Wikipedia's EULA page, the enforceability of shrink-wrap licenses is still unclear.
Probably because the sellers think they'll make more money if they try to bind you in contracts. And they spend more money lobbying the government to get laws to assist with this sort of thing.And this sort of thing happens all the time with house sales. One big example? HOAs, and you tend to agree to their rules when you buy the house. If you don't, you can't buy the house. (HOAs are evil, yes, but they are real too.)
In any event, I'm not sure that actually having mod chips is a criminal act, though the DMCA may have made it so under many conditions. And if you're merely violating a EULA, that's generally a civil matter anyways -- not something that the police usually bust your door down for, though the RIAA seems to have gotten them to do that a few times lately. But selling mod chips as a way to run pirated games, that would be illegal.
I'm pretty sure the raids were done on those selling mod chips, not end users. But maybe you're next, you criminal Linux users you!
The heat is probably a bigger danger.
As for the big woofers, they might attract thieves and cause problems that way :)
gcc 2.96 was just under a million lines of code -- I've no idea how big gcc 4.2.1 is. In any event, if Microsoft (or whomever) were to claim that gcc 4.2.1 had a back door (here's a famous hypothetical (?) example) but not give any details, then it would be difficult (i.e. very time consuming) for somebody (knowledgeable) to go over all million+ lines of code to certify that it does not exist.
Having source helps take the bite out of FUD, yes, but it doesn't remove it completely. Merely having the code is not enough -- you need to have the skills to understand the code, and the time to properly analyze it. Either that, or you need to trust somebody else to do this for you.
So, yes, I have the source code for gcc. I believe that it has been eyeballed by dozens (hundreds?) of people way smarter than I am, looking for problems. Most of these people probably report their problems to the maintainers, who I assume fix them when they're serious enough. A few are bad guys, looking for holes to exploit. (Well, gcc probably isn't nearly as exploitable as some daemon like Apache, but there are ways it can be abused.) In any event, merely having the source isn't enough to prove to you that it's good (efficient, secure, reliable, not patent encumbered, not copyright infringing, etc.) code. You have to actually look, and know what you're looking at -- and very few users actually do this.
Anet was the one where `anything goes', and yes, it did have a server called eris. The big thing that went on Anet that didn't go on Efnet was that new servers didn't need a password to connect to the existing network (well, the server `eris' was like this anyways -- I don't know if others were too) -- anybody could bring up a server. Which sounds fine, this also means that these people can make themselves IRCops on their new server and can abuse that, and it's also simple to kill anybody off on the existing network just by pretending to be a server via some simple telnet commands. Anarchy. Anet died off pretty quickly.
This page is pretty informative.
Which is worse? Keeping the same password everywhere, or risking that there might be a hole in your browser at some point? (Or that somebody might hack into your box and copy the entire password file.) I'll have to say the first.
Still, keeping your bank password (and other passwords that really matter) in your head is a good plan. But using the same password for systems that are controlled/administerred separately? Bad idea.
Even the term `open source' is older than Linux. (The FSF and GNU are older than Linux, of course.) Usenet searches are often useful in determining when a term came into vogue. For example, This post from 1990 says that the NSA used the term `open source' pretty much like it's meant today in 1987. This post in 1990 talks about BSD's open source policy. Or This post from 1985 talks about an open source work, though it's not specifically about computers.
As I see it, the OSI's grip on the term `open source' seems awfully tenuous, and so I'll define the term as I see fit, and as I see it, it means that the source code is readily available. Freedoms are a nice bonus, but they're not part of the term `open source'.
Does the FSF often do video streaming? Are there any video streaming methods/codecs/packages that are are sufficiently `free' for the FSF's tastes, and are installed already on enough systems that somebody might be able to view it?
The code fragments throughout the article were dumb and really added nothing but something to skip over.
But overall, the article was informative ... it had a lot of information about the case I wasn't aware of. I twas even reasonably well written, though more as a story than a new article.
...I've met 10 year-olds that could code circles around some "professionals" I know. It's the way the world's getting. Smart kids? Not really a new phenomena -- we've had kids who could beat the adults at things for as long as we've had kids and adults.But computers do often make it more obvious.