Re:Why couldn't they post this BEFORE the weekend?
on
The Boot Loader Showdown
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· Score: 2, Funny
The software sounds good, but it seems that la reproducción total o parcial is prohibida -- at least sin autorización del autor. And I don't speak enough Spanish to get the autor's autorizacion to reproduccion it.
He was wrong to say "almost guarantee." He would've been correct if he had used the word "average". The mean of a geometric distribution with 1/n chance of success on any trial is n-1.
Not so. What license would grant them the right to do that? Certainly not the GPL, since once something is GPL, it's always GPL -- that's its strongest point, its ultimate protection.
That's exactly what I'm saying. You can't hold it as GPL for only one day - it's GPL forever. And same with MIT. You can't add the restriction that it's GPL only on Tuesdays, and MIT only on Saturdays, because neither license allows that.
Especially considering: 3.) We've gotten hints that the revolutionary aspect is simple and has been done before, but hasn't really been used in games. 4.) Nintendo's really turned net friendly this time around. It is likely they want the Rev to have an interface that is net friendly so something like an OSK is possible.
but also considering the other three axioms, I think I have a good guess: it's a keyboard. PC gamers have been telling the consolers for years that a keyboard's a superior interface for games - and they've been proven in many many video games, just never in the console field. Lots of games have been ported from consoles to PCs, so a keyboard interface won't be difficult for new sequels. And especially, from the first emulator onwards, people have been using keyboards on Nintendo games.
It doesn't have to be a full keyboard. It can be something like that 20-key gamepad I saw somewhere. But it will be a revolution.
You can make it GPL on Tuesdays and MIT on Saturdays.
You could, but someone can relicense it as GPL on Saturdays and MIT on Tuesdays, since GPL and MIT by themselves don't have restrictions.
You can always grant extra rights. You can't easily add extra conditions, though, unless you say that "This app is almost licensed under the GPL, except that you may not do foo, and when you redistribute the program, you must redistribute it under the terms of the GPL with this fooless clause." And even so, I'm not sure if that would work, because other sections in the GPL may cancel that. You're better off writing your own license (possibly taking the GPL as inspiration, but that may not even be legal since AFAIK the GPL is copyrighted and not freely changeable).
Besides, adding clauses prevents you from grafting it with standard GPL programs. All this is moot for the submitter's purposes, though...all you want is the GPL with an extra permission for nonFree plugins.
However, when the operating system deliberately makes it difficult to tell which is which and when people routinely send legitimate data packaged in executables (e.g. self-displaying pictures), that advice stops being quite so useful.
Who needs a self-displaying picture? The picture and its viewer (or a "projector" in the lingo of old Macromedia Director) should be separated, and the viewer digitally signed and available for separate download.
Probably the best way to solve this problem is to provide a way to deliberately mark a file as being of suspect origin (via some file attribute, for example) and make all of the main Windows apps honour it.
SP2 does that. If you download a file via Internet Explorer, save it to disk, and click on it 5 days later, it says "Files from the Internet may contain viruses. Ar you sure you want to open this?" Of course, that dialog has the same uncurable problem as all Windows "Are you sure?" dialogs: everyone instinctively clicks yes.
I would have to believe that if downloading from their site was indeed illegal, that information would be simple to find with a simple search.
Who would say that? AllOfMP3 themselves?
Consider their statement: "Users are responsible for any usage and distribution of all materials received from AllOFMP3.com. This responsibility depends on the local legislation of each user's country of residence. AllOFMP3.com's Administration does not keep up with the laws of different countries and is not responsible the actions of non-Russian users."
which they put mainly as a disclaimer, but it serves for our purposes... Combine it with US copyright law, and presto, there's your answer.
Does HTTP, etc. offer anyway for a web page to check if sound is even on?
Yes, via Accept-Encoding. You can set it up so that audio types (audio/* for the most part) rank below, say, a blank text file (text/plain). Then use MultiViews (content negotiation) on your server, and set up BackgroundSound.wav and BackgroundSound.txt (empty), and just do <embed src="BackgroundSound"^gt; with no extension.
The mechanism is in place on the protocol level. Server admins have to start setting up the double-file trick, and browsers have to start detecting if sound is muted and accepting-encoding based on that.
I could easily craft a unix worm in the form of a shell script, with instructions in the email that would trick grandma into running it
What instructions? Grandma doesn't know how to use chmod. She knows how to use property sheets to change permissions, but she knows that execute permission is one of those dangerous things that you don't touch.
Grandma's POSIX account does not need to open any listening sockets. Period. If she needs something, let it be started at bootup by root. This can be enforced by the OS or by a personal firewall (what makes you think you'd find an open port, btw?)
Speaking of root, you wouldn't get root access.
And as far as installing software, allow trusted cool people in the community (use an Advogato-style mechanism, I guess) to sign the MD5 of the binary with their private key and upload it to a secure whitelist. If the developer himself is trusted enough, he can sign his software. Otherwise, he can submit the code (OSS only, remember?:-) to this site, and someone else can sign off on it. Or the user can manually set the execute bit after 15 billion "Are you sure? No you're not. Don't click OK." popups.
Start with: $ chmod a-x * $ chmod a+x *.exe on all directories. New files by default are umask 111. To make it executable, you have to go to the property window and change the permissions yourself.
Our C++ professor mentioned this a couple of days ago in class - that Windows' biggest vulnerability is that executability is determined by filename. I always thought it was vulnerable because of leaving RPC on or something. But chmod is more important - even if someone hacks your computer, they can't e.g. plant a rootkit or keylogger without chmodding it +x. And then you can just block chmods that aren't done from the physical console.
Oh, and if you want, you can add the whitelist to automatically +x approved EXEs, but that's optional. This system lets whoever does the installing (admins or clueful users) take care of the permission bits.
Actually, when you're using short words like that, the proper method is to use the apostrophe as a plural. No-nos looks weird (but is understandable). Nos is even worse. And the plural of the lowercase letter i cannot be written is.
No-no's, no's, and i's are the proper ways. (Of course, yeses and longer words do not use this rule.)
On the subject of eBooks, and on the subject of libraries getting rid of books (as discussed elsewhere)...
Three hundred pages of digital ink, bound together as a book. And four hundred together, and two hundred, and so forth. When a patron requests a book, plug in the digital ink book of the appropriate size, download the pages (a la Amazon.com's scans), and give him the book.
Digital ink doesn't require power or other messing with so long as the pages are constant. And if you want, you can have a small watch battery enforcing check-out limits -- blank the book after three weeks. And if the patron wants multiple books, download them all and have them switchable by buttons -- so long as the eBinding can handle them all. You won't, of course, be loading War and Peace on the same eBinding as its Cliff Notes.
This will allow you to get rid of shelves of books (as the other library wanted), while still maintaining a workable checkout system, and -- if you can work out licensing contracts -- allow you to change the book supply to match the demand. The week after Harry Potter comes out, you can use most of the eBindings on that, and you won't have to worry about the fifty copies of last year's Harry Potters that are just gathering dust.
Woo, I'm going to oppose conformism, so I'm going to join everyone who uses the term "sheeple" -- without even defending the usage! We're all different! We're all individuals, just like everyone else!
Why does noone EVER mention in the media that by playing global corporate cop around the world we PISS people off?
Of course we do. But then what do you do now? Suppose...right now...you become president/dictator/whatever of the US. How do you...un-piss-off the world? Withdraw the troops? You're going to have a few people in some locations (areas of Africa and Eastern Europe come to mind) mad at you for taking away the peacekeeping forces. And then you're going to have the people who're already pissed off, take advantage of the opportunity and attack.
There ain't much you can do. To use another analogy...even if you have an abortion, you've still lost your virginity. The US has been acting like world police for long enough that you can't expect anyone to be nice if we just stop it today.
Oh, and I don't think security cameras are quite "chains and slavery". If you like quotes, how about this:
"Now I make it my earnest prayer that God would...incline the hearts of the citizens to cultivate a spirit of subordination and obedience to government...." -George Washington (the original version, actually, not the modified misquote.)
And do you even know what a republic is? It's a system of government that isn't a monarchy and rules by the right of the people to form a government (as opposed to, say, the divine right of kings and such nonsense). It does not have to be a democracy. Even Iran is a republic - a theocratic one, granted, but definitely a republic and not a monarchy.
there are quite a few modifications. Unfair for those who can't compare with the real one. Here's the real article in full.
Hypocrite.
You: a paper Albert Einstein published in 1926...titled "Quantum theory of the diatomic ideal gas" was dated December 1925...High-resolution photographs of the 160-page, German-language manuscript
The Slashdot summary (!): vinlud writes "The original manuscript of a paper Albert Einstein published in 1925 has been found in the archives of Leiden University's Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics. The German-language manuscript is titled "Quantum theory of the monatomic ideal gas," and is dated December 1924. It is considered one of Einstein's last great breakthroughs. High-resolution photographs of the 16-page manuscript are posted on the institute's web site."
You: who was Jewish and part Gypsy and near absolute zero - around 560 degrees below zero
Yeah. Considering -459.67 F is absolute zero.
I would post my own copy here, but a) it's not Slashdotted yet, as far as I see, and b) I wouldn't be able to resist putting my own errors.
Slashdot Mirror
The software sounds good, but it seems that la reproducción total o parcial is prohibida -- at least sin autorización del autor. And I don't speak enough Spanish to get the autor's autorizacion to reproduccion it.
Yo quiero Taco ^G!
it's because they wear old clothes and have cheap haircuts.
Ha ha ha! Old clothes...cheap haircuts...and a Slashdot troll for a dad! I can't stop laughing! That's so funny!
Hehe...this guy believes "Christian rock" to be religious! That's even funnier!
And he won't even try to emulate that bookstore across the street he says is doing well! He's clinging to a dying industry...I can't stop laughing...
He was wrong to say "almost guarantee." He would've been correct if he had used the word "average". The mean of a geometric distribution with 1/n chance of success on any trial is n-1.
Geometric Distribution
I'm sitting here in Louisiana - in the path of the storm - and I'm perfectly happy to talk about boot loaders instead of caving to terrorism.
Not so. What license would grant them the right to do that? Certainly not the GPL, since once something is GPL, it's always GPL -- that's its strongest point, its ultimate protection.
That's exactly what I'm saying. You can't hold it as GPL for only one day - it's GPL forever. And same with MIT. You can't add the restriction that it's GPL only on Tuesdays, and MIT only on Saturdays, because neither license allows that.
Especially considering:
3.) We've gotten hints that the revolutionary aspect is simple and has been done before, but hasn't really been used in games.
4.) Nintendo's really turned net friendly this time around. It is likely they want the Rev to have an interface that is net friendly so something like an OSK is possible.
but also considering the other three axioms, I think I have a good guess: it's a keyboard. PC gamers have been telling the consolers for years that a keyboard's a superior interface for games - and they've been proven in many many video games, just never in the console field. Lots of games have been ported from consoles to PCs, so a keyboard interface won't be difficult for new sequels. And especially, from the first emulator onwards, people have been using keyboards on Nintendo games.
It doesn't have to be a full keyboard. It can be something like that 20-key gamepad I saw somewhere. But it will be a revolution.
You can make it GPL on Tuesdays and MIT on Saturdays.
You could, but someone can relicense it as GPL on Saturdays and MIT on Tuesdays, since GPL and MIT by themselves don't have restrictions.
You can always grant extra rights. You can't easily add extra conditions, though, unless you say that "This app is almost licensed under the GPL, except that you may not do foo, and when you redistribute the program, you must redistribute it under the terms of the GPL with this fooless clause." And even so, I'm not sure if that would work, because other sections in the GPL may cancel that. You're better off writing your own license (possibly taking the GPL as inspiration, but that may not even be legal since AFAIK the GPL is copyrighted and not freely changeable).
Besides, adding clauses prevents you from grafting it with standard GPL programs. All this is moot for the submitter's purposes, though...all you want is the GPL with an extra permission for nonFree plugins.
However, when the operating system deliberately makes it difficult to tell which is which and when people routinely send legitimate data packaged in executables (e.g. self-displaying pictures), that advice stops being quite so useful.
Who needs a self-displaying picture? The picture and its viewer (or a "projector" in the lingo of old Macromedia Director) should be separated, and the viewer digitally signed and available for separate download.
Probably the best way to solve this problem is to provide a way to deliberately mark a file as being of suspect origin (via some file attribute, for example) and make all of the main Windows apps honour it.
SP2 does that. If you download a file via Internet Explorer, save it to disk, and click on it 5 days later, it says "Files from the Internet may contain viruses. Ar you sure you want to open this?" Of course, that dialog has the same uncurable problem as all Windows "Are you sure?" dialogs: everyone instinctively clicks yes.
I would have to believe that if downloading from their site was indeed illegal, that information would be simple to find with a simple search.
Who would say that? AllOfMP3 themselves?
Consider their statement:
"Users are responsible for any usage and distribution of all materials received from AllOFMP3.com. This responsibility depends on the local legislation of each user's country of residence. AllOFMP3.com's Administration does not keep up with the laws of different countries and is not responsible the actions of non-Russian users."
which they put mainly as a disclaimer, but it serves for our purposes... Combine it with US copyright law, and presto, there's your answer.
Does HTTP, etc. offer anyway for a web page to check if sound is even on?
Yes, via Accept-Encoding. You can set it up so that audio types (audio/* for the most part) rank below, say, a blank text file (text/plain). Then use MultiViews (content negotiation) on your server, and set up BackgroundSound.wav and BackgroundSound.txt (empty), and just do <embed src="BackgroundSound"^gt; with no extension.
The mechanism is in place on the protocol level. Server admins have to start setting up the double-file trick, and browsers have to start detecting if sound is muted and accepting-encoding based on that.
tomorrow's story: desktop publishing program used to fake documents!
I thought that was last year's story. You know, the entire Dan Rather reports and Microsoft Word margins fiasco....
I could easily craft a unix worm in the form of a shell script, with instructions in the email that would trick grandma into running it
:-) to this site, and someone else can sign off on it. Or the user can manually set the execute bit after 15 billion "Are you sure? No you're not. Don't click OK." popups.
What instructions? Grandma doesn't know how to use chmod. She knows how to use property sheets to change permissions, but she knows that execute permission is one of those dangerous things that you don't touch.
Grandma's POSIX account does not need to open any listening sockets. Period. If she needs something, let it be started at bootup by root. This can be enforced by the OS or by a personal firewall (what makes you think you'd find an open port, btw?)
Speaking of root, you wouldn't get root access.
And as far as installing software, allow trusted cool people in the community (use an Advogato-style mechanism, I guess) to sign the MD5 of the binary with their private key and upload it to a secure whitelist. If the developer himself is trusted enough, he can sign his software. Otherwise, he can submit the code (OSS only, remember?
Just do the Unix-style thing.
Start with:
$ chmod a-x *
$ chmod a+x *.exe
on all directories. New files by default are umask 111. To make it executable, you have to go to the property window and change the permissions yourself.
Our C++ professor mentioned this a couple of days ago in class - that Windows' biggest vulnerability is that executability is determined by filename. I always thought it was vulnerable because of leaving RPC on or something. But chmod is more important - even if someone hacks your computer, they can't e.g. plant a rootkit or keylogger without chmodding it +x. And then you can just block chmods that aren't done from the physical console.
Oh, and if you want, you can add the whitelist to automatically +x approved EXEs, but that's optional. This system lets whoever does the installing (admins or clueful users) take care of the permission bits.
it tests for the memory segment it is run in
How does it find that out honestly? It's running in a sandbox.
Unless it's running in a really crappy sandbox. The point of this protection mechanism is to dupe the virus into running normally....
Actually, when you're using short words like that, the proper method is to use the apostrophe as a plural. No-nos looks weird (but is understandable). Nos is even worse. And the plural of the lowercase letter i cannot be written is.
No-no's, no's, and i's are the proper ways. (Of course, yeses and longer words do not use this rule.)
On the subject of eBooks, and on the subject of libraries getting rid of books (as discussed elsewhere)...
Three hundred pages of digital ink, bound together as a book. And four hundred together, and two hundred, and so forth. When a patron requests a book, plug in the digital ink book of the appropriate size, download the pages (a la Amazon.com's scans), and give him the book.
Digital ink doesn't require power or other messing with so long as the pages are constant. And if you want, you can have a small watch battery enforcing check-out limits -- blank the book after three weeks. And if the patron wants multiple books, download them all and have them switchable by buttons -- so long as the eBinding can handle them all. You won't, of course, be loading War and Peace on the same eBinding as its Cliff Notes.
This will allow you to get rid of shelves of books (as the other library wanted), while still maintaining a workable checkout system, and -- if you can work out licensing contracts -- allow you to change the book supply to match the demand. The week after Harry Potter comes out, you can use most of the eBindings on that, and you won't have to worry about the fifty copies of last year's Harry Potters that are just gathering dust.
This is where library technology should go.
char name[]="Jonathan Zdziarski";
cout 18
To the SHEEPLE we have today.
Woo, I'm going to oppose conformism, so I'm going to join everyone who uses the term "sheeple" -- without even defending the usage! We're all different! We're all individuals, just like everyone else!
Why does noone EVER mention in the media that by playing global corporate cop around the world we PISS people off?
Of course we do. But then what do you do now? Suppose...right now...you become president/dictator/whatever of the US. How do you...un-piss-off the world? Withdraw the troops? You're going to have a few people in some locations (areas of Africa and Eastern Europe come to mind) mad at you for taking away the peacekeeping forces. And then you're going to have the people who're already pissed off, take advantage of the opportunity and attack.
There ain't much you can do. To use another analogy...even if you have an abortion, you've still lost your virginity. The US has been acting like world police for long enough that you can't expect anyone to be nice if we just stop it today.
Oh, and I don't think security cameras are quite "chains and slavery". If you like quotes, how about this:
"Now I make it my earnest prayer that God would...incline the hearts of the citizens to cultivate a spirit of subordination and obedience to government...." -George Washington (the original version, actually, not the modified misquote.)
And do you even know what a republic is? It's a system of government that isn't a monarchy and rules by the right of the people to form a government (as opposed to, say, the divine right of kings and such nonsense). It does not have to be a democracy. Even Iran is a republic - a theocratic one, granted, but definitely a republic and not a monarchy.
This is why it's not a good idea to humiliate people who have more power than you if you have something to lose.
The what? Just say "Hey, the computer system has a bug that doesn't properly encrypt the passwords. They're even visible to anyone who looks."
Don't put the blame on them, because truly it's the system's fault for not salting the passwords.
I do like the way the entire page has a slant to the right though.
Just like the US government.
there are quite a few modifications. Unfair for those who can't compare with the real one. Here's the real article in full.
Hypocrite.
You: a paper Albert Einstein published in 1926...titled "Quantum theory of the diatomic ideal gas" was dated December 1925...High-resolution photographs of the 160-page, German-language manuscript
The Slashdot summary (!): vinlud writes "The original manuscript of a paper Albert Einstein published in 1925 has been found in the archives of Leiden University's Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics. The German-language manuscript is titled "Quantum theory of the monatomic ideal gas," and is dated December 1924. It is considered one of Einstein's last great breakthroughs. High-resolution photographs of the 16-page manuscript are posted on the institute's web site."
You: who was Jewish and part Gypsy and near absolute zero - around 560 degrees below zero
Yeah. Considering -459.67 F is absolute zero.
I would post my own copy here, but a) it's not Slashdotted yet, as far as I see, and b) I wouldn't be able to resist putting my own errors.
Good grief, have you ever bothered to read history?
Nah, I figure I might as well help it repeat itself. More fun that way.
Ha! You're right. At first I thought it was fine, but then I finally got through to the real article
You had to wait until you saw the real article? The fourth and sixth paragraphs didn't tip you off!!??
Well, if we're going to castrate the original name off it, we might as well go with Eunux.
We screen police officers, teachers. Why not people who are going to handle billions of dollars?
Two words: private sector.