If the blue team plans encompass their attacking the computers of Red, and the opposition, have the considered the possibility of non-military forces (called the Light Blue and Pink) trying to be patriotic and aiding their military by arranging their own private attacks in un-planned support?
Imagine: a Light Blue script kiddie attacks an important node in Red's system. Red take this a sign of aggression and retaliate. Blue are then forced to respond to a reponse for a trigger they did not personally pull.
Alternatively, the attack could come from Green, someone who wasn't involved in the Red/Blue conflict, who has no particular favouritism. In the initial stages of an intrusion it can be difficult to tell the source of the damage.
Plus with the US reliance on commercial carriers (in the case of space access) one wonders about their dependence on IP carriers. Can I damage the enemy by destroying or deactivating a HUB (MAE or similar spring to mind)?
Microsoft programmers are not allowed to read this book!
It is well known that this book contains fragments of code coverade under the insidious GNU Public License. If any of this code made it into our products it could force us to make the rest of the source for that product available.
We advise coders wanting to replicate the stability of LInux to look elsewhere. Reading this book can only harm your career at Microsoft!
(Just been re-reading Cryptonomicon, and this reminds me of a passage there. Epiphyte gets sued by Tje Dentist on a pretence, and they make it go away by selling him stock)
This is not Microsoft expecting to win a legal challenge - this is Microsoft banking on the knowledge that their lawyers are bigger and scarier than yours.
This isn't law, this is legal intimidation. This is abuse of a position of power.
This is strangely co-incidental, but I'm wearing what is probably the geekiest shirt I own.
It's a misprinted shirt: the stupid printer in the initial run printed the image on the back instead of the front, so it was printed again on the front.
It's the t-shirt sold as fundraising for a SF convention that has yet to happen (OdysseyCon 2001.) A nice monolith w/stars and sunrise over a planetscape picture.
It just screams geeky to me - even if it's not part of history (yet).
Just me playing join the dots, and finding I don't really have enough dots to play with...
Revolutionary (Jeff Bezos): (ie it goes round and round.)
John Doerr is by no means stupid, but he does fund lots of stuff. He helped Netscape startup, for example...
'an alternative to products that "are dirty, expensive, sometimes dangerous and often frustrating, especially for people in the cities"'
I'm currently theorising that this is transportationally related: In my mind at least this fits all these criteria - and I can certainly sketch in vague conceptual forms technologies that could influence city design.
One thing I'm beginning to wonder, is how can the human genome possibly be patentable ?
You should be able to patent gene-therapies for genetic conditions (ie here's a drug that will fix your genetic red-green colour blindness) but surely not the genes themselves
Even if there is a God, and the earth was created, then there's 6000 years of prior art. My belief (atheism) says different, but then there is even more.
I thought patents had to be simple, elegant, and non-obvious. Genes have two (simple and elegant) but non-obvious is not one of them. If you can sequence genes, and sample large populations intelligently, you can find out what pretty much any gene does. This, to me at least, is obvious (even though the technology for sequencing is something outside my personal expertise, I know people who can do this).
Mind you: genes aren't going to obsolete in a hurry. And patents only have a limited lifespan.
What's the cost of a years subscription, relative to a full license?
Where's the break even point?
If I choose to subscribe to Office 10, do I auto-subscribe to Office 11?
Can I subscribe individual components (say Word and Excel, but not PowerPoint?
Microsoft seem to be hoping that people won't work out how long they'll resubscribe for, and may make additional funding on the difference. You know many people aren't going to do the long term thinking here - they'll just see a lower initial price.
See Rob's comments in Geeks in Space as regards rental of his TiVo - he's coming up against a break-even point of rental vs purchase - he'd hoped that a better version would be available so he could change for less money....
The time to address this is *before*, not *after* the election. The campaign and election were held under the framework of the electorate.
You can't just change the rules now without starting over. And there are bigger problems with that than most people consider. For instance,
where does the money come from? The electoral college is a great
way to give a voice to states with less population. You think little old ladies in Florida are a problem now? Wait until the suggestion that
farmers in Iowa give up some of their political power takes hold. You'll see plowshares beaten into swords before that happens.
Don't get me wrong, the process is broken. It needs to be fixed. But you have to get this election finished first. I feel you shouldn't look at changes until at least end of year 2 of presidential term.
As for mechanisms favouring the group who set it. Not really. They get to make highly generic rules.
A political commentor here noted at the last election "When the All Blacks (the national team for the national sport) lose, the government changes. When they win, the government stays in". Other factors, aside from ballot design, choose rulers. Every little bit counts.
Okay, from a foreigners perspective, the problems I see with the US electoral system
The popular vote vs the electoral college.
I mean, come on! 100Million people vote, one candidate has a majority, and he's facing the distinct possibility of losing by less than 500 votes in a single state?
No universal ballot
Some one tell me again why presidential ballots aren't designed by the federal government, and are allowed to be different everywhere?
Hand vote counting introduces human error
Eh? At least if you hand count ballots you can have them cross checked multiple times. On a polling place basis.
No matching vote to voter
Please. If you had some transient method of connecting votes to voters, than those supposed deluded individuals who spoiled ballots in Palm Beach by voting for two candidates could vote again (although I think political darwinism should take this lot out - if you mess up the process you don't count....)
Not that this would make everything perfect. Perfect is never acheivable, but better is, always.
This isn't a flame - this _is_, at least in terms of population, a low density backwater.And that's the way we like it. Less people, less pollution. And we've got a high rate of per capita technology uptake.
Re:Misc. Mac/Marketing comments.
on
Is UNIX An OS?
·
· Score: 2
Marketing != Advertising .
I can cleary remember, at school as a 15yr old using a Mac and thinking it was wonderful. Admittedly, this was in 1989 or so, and all I'd been previously exposed to was Apple ][e, Commodore 64 and similar era non-PC computers.
Putting computers like this within easy reach of those about to hit the real world, and getting them to form opinions while their minds were still flexible is marketing genius. Their follow-through, however, didn't track me when I moved into tertiary, and started learning about PCs.
Most PCs around this company at least, are local assembled vanilla boxen, bought on cost. Apple never really had a look in.
Misc. Mac/Marketing comments.
on
Is UNIX An OS?
·
· Score: 2
> There are many reasons for the decline of the Mac (proprietary hardware, bad marketing)
Maybe. But think of the alternatives.
Good (includes, but not just)+ open technology, good marketing
Have we really seen this yet? I don't think so.
Good tech, bad marketing
Think of every company that had a brilliant idea and then went under - even lack of VC interest is poor marketing...
Bad Tech, Good Marketing
Don't even try to tell me that Microsoft's Marketing aren't extremely clued-up people - no one gets that much market share without someone knowing how to do their jobs.
Bad Tech, Bad marketing
Just sink like a stone, without trace
Let's face it - Apple's marketing, which was very good at one point (the nature of the market is changing - strong individualism isn't the main part of the market at the moment (just the geek market, and not the overall market)) has failed to adapt. But it was the fact that someone was good, somewhere, that we saw them at all.
You can't really argue that the Mac wasn't/isn't an incredible influence on lots of things....
(For the record, before I get attacked for being a Mac user: My work machine runs Debian/Afterstep, and my home machine runs Win98 and Debian/Enlightenment)
This is a stupid idea, but here's how to get around it.
Encryption and eavesdropping is the name of the game here. First, run SSL or similar between remote and the vendor. Secondly, if they claim commerce happened, accuse them of intercepting your traffic. In my mind, a transaction between me and a retailer is private, and my ISP or their upstream providers have no business on that.
Something just occured to me : maybe the INS is into a little substance abuse - consider the following:
Grumpiness
if asking again and again will make the application take longer, this seems like a given.
Inexplicable decisions
Does anyone understand the decisions this department make? Asking stable migrants with mortgages, houses, and jobs to move just because some arbitrary 6 month period has ended seems strange to me.
Listlessness
Taking up to a year to process immigration requests certainly looks like this!
Maybe the 'War on Drugs' should start attacking rogue government departments?
Something I have to wonder - what's the networking like ?
If they're going to make a device that dials up their provider, I don't even want to know. However, if they're going to build something that has a base station component, so I can attach it to my local LAN, and have wireless internet anywhere in my house without the cost of a laptop, cool.
Applications like
Book replacments:
Recipe An electronic machine I can use to work on while cooking, by moving between work surfaces easily.
Access to support manuals when the computer in question is down
I had a couple of other ideas, but they went away. Think: anything you could do with a slim, A4 size PDA screen?
Hell, for that matter I've had co-workers, one with a Masters Degree in CompSci, that couldn't communicate well enough with her co-workers to really do their jobs properly.
The company I'm with isn't really interested in hiring migrants anymore (as developers) because their experiences in the past hit on people with very poor english skills.
People are just people.... some are good, some are bad - you have to take them all individually.
In my more rash and egotistical moments, I feel I can write. This was triggered by winning a prize for a short story at my local National SF convention (attendence 300 - really high for this region). I haven't had this story professional published outside a local fanzine - it's only 500 words long, it isn't really worth the effort for such a small size (when common rates for small stories are 3 UScents/word)
But there is no way I will post to any web site, or any mailing list (especially if someone on list is archiving to the web), because I don't think the internet community as a unit has any respect for intellectual property. This is my story dammit, as many flaws as it has, and I want it to remain mine - I don't want it to appear somewhere out there marked as someone elses.
I have a suspicion if I was a real author I would treat being published electronically in exactly the same manner - How possible is it for people to rip me off? DeCSS starts to look like an object lesson, in the "Let's avoid this issue altogether, and stay in print media"
Just to correct whichever slashdoteer posted this story:
This is (at least at the moment) a political issue - it can't (unfortunately) be sorted out by the marketplace.
And why not? Because when the opposition (esp. Metallica and the RIAA) bring the judiciary into the fight, it becomes a legal issue. Bad, but there is really no choice.
Be involved - this will become precedent, whatever happens....
This is just my perspective. For the record, I spent 3.5 years working with some (non-human) DNA researchers at my previous job.
This is just a map. At this time we can't say "These genes control eye colour, these genes control hair colour". We have just a long sequence of letters, a series of convenient landmarks on the overall picture of the human genome, for a set of individuals.
Although, given that, for a large part, these entries are largely identical: much of our DNA consists of instructions to build *people*. It's not like C code, where you can swap whole lines around and still work: more like bytecode - if I fiddle with this bit it might work, but it's dicey...
Don't blame science for opening up ethical quandaries: it doesn't care. Science is about tools and techniques. Like with the abortion process, those involved leave the ethics arguments up to others. Science doesn't do right or wrong: it just says "This is the way stuff works. Use it as you will". No one chooses to argue about whether OpenGL is ethical or not: they choose to attack JohnCarmack et.al for what they create with those tools.
Also, if you don't believe in a creationist universe, you are aware that this is a genetic system. It just works. It isn't well structured. It's only here because other variants didn't work.
People can get used to anything: I ran a BBS for 18 months. Sleeping in the same room as a running 386/modem combination is annoying, but you do get used to it. Not that you should have to though..
This problem is getting worse. Computers come with noiser fans, hard disks make more noise, processors run hotter and need their own fans.
Hopefully the crusoe, with it's lower power usage, may just start to reverse this disturbing trend....
Slashdot Mirror
The American Way :
Seriously though, this is the most interesting sign that Microsoft feels badly threatened that they've decided to kill off the opposition lika this...
If the blue team plans encompass their attacking the computers of Red, and the opposition, have the considered the possibility of non-military forces (called the Light Blue and Pink) trying to be patriotic and aiding their military by arranging their own private attacks in un-planned support?
Imagine: a Light Blue script kiddie attacks an important node in Red's system. Red take this a sign of aggression and retaliate. Blue are then forced to respond to a reponse for a trigger they did not personally pull.
Alternatively, the attack could come from Green, someone who wasn't involved in the Red/Blue conflict, who has no particular favouritism. In the initial stages of an intrusion it can be difficult to tell the source of the damage.
Plus with the US reliance on commercial carriers (in the case of space access) one wonders about their dependence on IP carriers. Can I damage the enemy by destroying or deactivating a HUB (MAE or similar spring to mind)?
It is well known that this book contains fragments of code coverade under the insidious GNU Public License. If any of this code made it into our products it could force us to make the rest of the source for that product available.
We advise coders wanting to replicate the stability of LInux to look elsewhere. Reading this book can only harm your career at Microsoft!
This is not Microsoft expecting to win a legal challenge - this is Microsoft banking on the knowledge that their lawyers are bigger and scarier than yours.
This isn't law, this is legal intimidation. This is abuse of a position of power.
Convergence is the coming together of existing objects - not really anything new.
Still, if there's nothing new, at least it isn't patentable :-)
It's a misprinted shirt: the stupid printer in the initial run printed the image on the back instead of the front, so it was printed again on the front.
It's the t-shirt sold as fundraising for a SF convention that has yet to happen (OdysseyCon 2001.) A nice monolith w/stars and sunrise over a planetscape picture.
It just screams geeky to me - even if it's not part of history (yet).
Easily theorised though: have an existing product with low cost of manufacture, and sell for a huge markup, just like Microsoft do.
Especially if it's a device (rather than software) you could license it to others to manufacture and sell.....
- Revolutionary (Jeff Bezos): (ie it goes round and round.)
- John Doerr is by no means stupid, but he does fund lots of stuff. He helped Netscape startup, for example...
- 'an alternative to products that "are dirty, expensive, sometimes dangerous and often frustrating, especially for people in the cities"'
I'm currently theorising that this is transportationally related: In my mind at least this fits all these criteria - and I can certainly sketch in vague conceptual forms technologies that could influence city design.Heinlein Shipstones anyone?
You should be able to patent gene-therapies for genetic conditions (ie here's a drug that will fix your genetic red-green colour blindness) but surely not the genes themselves
Even if there is a God, and the earth was created, then there's 6000 years of prior art. My belief (atheism) says different, but then there is even more.
I thought patents had to be simple, elegant, and non-obvious. Genes have two (simple and elegant) but non-obvious is not one of them. If you can sequence genes, and sample large populations intelligently, you can find out what pretty much any gene does. This, to me at least, is obvious (even though the technology for sequencing is something outside my personal expertise, I know people who can do this).
Mind you: genes aren't going to obsolete in a hurry. And patents only have a limited lifespan.
- When are Microsoft going to ship Office 11?
- What's the cost of a years subscription, relative to a full license?
- Where's the break even point?
- If I choose to subscribe to Office 10, do I auto-subscribe to Office 11?
- Can I subscribe individual components (say Word and Excel, but not PowerPoint?
Microsoft seem to be hoping that people won't work out how long they'll resubscribe for, and may make additional funding on the difference. You know many people aren't going to do the long term thinking here - they'll just see a lower initial price.See Rob's comments in Geeks in Space as regards rental of his TiVo - he's coming up against a break-even point of rental vs purchase - he'd hoped that a better version would be available so he could change for less money....
Don't get me wrong, the process is broken. It needs to be fixed. But you have to get this election finished first. I feel you shouldn't look at changes until at least end of year 2 of presidential term.
As for mechanisms favouring the group who set it. Not really. They get to make highly generic rules.
A political commentor here noted at the last election "When the All Blacks (the national team for the national sport) lose, the government changes. When they win, the government stays in". Other factors, aside from ballot design, choose rulers. Every little bit counts.
- The popular vote vs the electoral college.
- I mean, come on! 100Million people vote, one candidate has a majority, and he's facing the distinct possibility of losing by less than 500 votes in a single state?
- No universal ballot
- Some one tell me again why presidential ballots aren't designed by the federal government, and are allowed to be different everywhere?
- Hand vote counting introduces human error
- Eh? At least if you hand count ballots you can have them cross checked multiple times. On a polling place basis.
- No matching vote to voter
- Please. If you had some transient method of connecting votes to voters, than those supposed deluded individuals who spoiled ballots in Palm Beach by voting for two candidates could vote again (although I think political darwinism should take this lot out - if you mess up the process you don't count....)
Not that this would make everything perfect. Perfect is never acheivable, but better is, always.This isn't a flame - this _is_, at least in terms of population, a low density backwater.And that's the way we like it. Less people, less pollution. And we've got a high rate of per capita technology uptake.
I can cleary remember, at school as a 15yr old using a Mac and thinking it was wonderful. Admittedly, this was in 1989 or so, and all I'd been previously exposed to was Apple ][e, Commodore 64 and similar era non-PC computers.
Putting computers like this within easy reach of those about to hit the real world, and getting them to form opinions while their minds were still flexible is marketing genius. Their follow-through, however, didn't track me when I moved into tertiary, and started learning about PCs.
Most PCs around this company at least, are local assembled vanilla boxen, bought on cost. Apple never really had a look in.
Maybe. But think of the alternatives.
- Good (includes, but not just)+ open technology, good marketing
- Have we really seen this yet? I don't think so.
- Good tech, bad marketing
- Think of every company that had a brilliant idea and then went under - even lack of VC interest is poor marketing...
- Bad Tech, Good Marketing
- Don't even try to tell me that Microsoft's Marketing aren't extremely clued-up people - no one gets that much market share without someone knowing how to do their jobs.
- Bad Tech, Bad marketing
- Just sink like a stone, without trace
Let's face it - Apple's marketing, which was very good at one point (the nature of the market is changing - strong individualism isn't the main part of the market at the moment (just the geek market, and not the overall market)) has failed to adapt. But it was the fact that someone was good, somewhere, that we saw them at all.You can't really argue that the Mac wasn't/isn't an incredible influence on lots of things....
(For the record, before I get attacked for being a Mac user: My work machine runs Debian/Afterstep, and my home machine runs Win98 and Debian/Enlightenment)
Encryption and eavesdropping is the name of the game here. First, run SSL or similar between remote and the vendor. Secondly, if they claim commerce happened, accuse them of intercepting your traffic. In my mind, a transaction between me and a retailer is private, and my ISP or their upstream providers have no business on that.
Diskless workstations from Microsoft? When they put how much code on a hard disk for an OS install?
Maybe the 'War on Drugs' should start attacking rogue government departments?
If they're going to make a device that dials up their provider, I don't even want to know. However, if they're going to build something that has a base station component, so I can attach it to my local LAN, and have wireless internet anywhere in my house without the cost of a laptop, cool.
Applications like
I had a couple of other ideas, but they went away. Think: anything you could do with a slim, A4 size PDA screen?
The company I'm with isn't really interested in hiring migrants anymore (as developers) because their experiences in the past hit on people with very poor english skills.
People are just people.... some are good, some are bad - you have to take them all individually.
Even more, does any Slashdotter agree with any other Slashdotter?
But there is no way I will post to any web site, or any mailing list (especially if someone on list is archiving to the web), because I don't think the internet community as a unit has any respect for intellectual property. This is my story dammit, as many flaws as it has, and I want it to remain mine - I don't want it to appear somewhere out there marked as someone elses.
I have a suspicion if I was a real author I would treat being published electronically in exactly the same manner - How possible is it for people to rip me off? DeCSS starts to look like an object lesson, in the "Let's avoid this issue altogether, and stay in print media"
This is (at least at the moment) a political issue - it can't (unfortunately) be sorted out by the marketplace.
And why not? Because when the opposition (esp. Metallica and the RIAA) bring the judiciary into the fight, it becomes a legal issue. Bad, but there is really no choice.
Be involved - this will become precedent, whatever happens....
- This is just a map. At this time we can't say "These genes control eye colour, these genes control hair colour". We have just a long sequence of letters, a series of convenient landmarks on the overall picture of the human genome, for a set of individuals.
- Although, given that, for a large part, these entries are largely identical: much of our DNA consists of instructions to build *people*. It's not like C code, where you can swap whole lines around and still work: more like bytecode - if I fiddle with this bit it might work, but it's dicey...
- Don't blame science for opening up ethical quandaries: it doesn't care. Science is about tools and techniques. Like with the abortion process, those involved leave the ethics arguments up to others. Science doesn't do right or wrong: it just says "This is the way stuff works. Use it as you will". No one chooses to argue about whether OpenGL is ethical or not: they choose to attack JohnCarmack et.al for what they create with those tools.
- Also, if you don't believe in a creationist universe, you are aware that this is a genetic system. It just works. It isn't well structured. It's only here because other variants didn't work.
Of course, everything I said could be wrong.- People can get used to anything: I ran a BBS for 18 months. Sleeping in the same room as a running 386/modem combination is annoying, but you do get used to it. Not that you should have to though..
- This problem is getting worse. Computers come with noiser fans, hard disks make more noise, processors run hotter and need their own fans.
Hopefully the crusoe, with it's lower power usage, may just start to reverse this disturbing trend....