Stealing a loaf of bread is an unorganized, 1-party transaction with one victim.
Stealing music is organized and has two parties, a seller [rich pirate] and a buyer [poor pirate]. The perception of legitimacy, the buyer's excuse that he is poor, is all it takes to do economic harm to some absent third part [record compay/victim] that you would not at all want done to yourself. The existance of mass of these self-absolving "poor" slobs create a market and thereby enable the existance of the rich pirates.
I don't buy it!
these things go in cycles: cost drives producers to automate but when that trend has wrung all the excess effort and any trace of individual human attention out of the product, consumers start paying for product variations that are more authentic and at least seem less mechanized. Detroit now produces cars almost "on demand" with a high degree of customization because that is the next stop along the progressive dance of consumption and automation. In food, people are even more picky, hating the machine pickable tomatoes for instance ["pink tennis balls"] and prefering more expensive organic greenhouse tomatoes.
I guess we can all have some sympathy for the poor starving Russians who need to get their share of current movies and songs and what else, Rolex watches and Gucci handbags. Buyer and Seller are really inseperable parts of the piracy problem. If we could just bump off the RICH PIRATES [sellers, and people for whom we have little sympathy], since assination is fairly standard business practice in.ru, would we solve the problem? Hell no! Its the demand for stollen goods that makes them worth stealing in the first place.
2004.10.20: UN predicts much wider use of robots
An
Associated Press report [via yahoo] of United Nations Study on robots is predicting robust increases in the use of robots both for both domestic and industrial uses. If you
googled for this news
you would find similar reports each year going back a ways. Here is the
PDF straight from the UN. What makes this news is that its the UN talking, not some manufacturer's press release and that the numbers are more sanguine than ever:
"There are now some 21,000 "service robots" in use, carrying out tasks such as milking cows, handling toxic waste, ferrying medicine around hospitals and assisting surgeons. The number is set to reach a total of 75,000 by 2007, the study says."
and then buy HW when you know just what is going
to work. Although dated by its dependence on an older version of JMF, Lindley's book [at the top of the list of this page of audio books] , gives a set of audio widgets [well, beans, actually] on its CD that you can mix, modify, and mate in various combinations for all kinds of audio effects. Not a tool for the timid but a rewarding exercise for the software/audio geek.
tv's that are being used as monitors, say with
flight info, traffic reports etc.
OR, if you have a really strong death wish, turn off the Red Sox/ Yankees game at you local bar?
better hide that little sucker in IR-transparent hiding place and keep you cellphone handy with 1-button 911 service programmed into it if you are going around turning off tvs that other people are watching. I was always warned not to get between a dog and its dinner but I think that goes for humans and there TV's too.
The dig is just desserts. IE sitll can't rid itself of backdoor connections to the OS that do not plague other browsers. These came about in part because of Microsoft naivete [as its programming culture arose in the protected world of standalone office products] and partly from its attempt to defend against DOJ litigation [ aimed at its monopolistic moves to kill Netscape] by claiming that "browsers are naturally part of the OS". Serves 'em right!
after all, I love to bash poor Microsoft, but exhaustion is rapidly setting in here. I am what passes for a careful user: I don't use IE, I run the latest Mozilla, I use a firewall and anti-spyware and when its all said and done...not much gets done because I am fretting over yet another patch or vulenrability. I have sympathetic talks with my sysadmins but my family thinks I am the the Home Network Nazi.
I feel like a small town policeman burried under a barrage of "sky-is-falling-alert-level-puce" faxes from the HomelandSecurity to be dealt with on zero budget. The color codes provided by Secunia are,despite seeming like imitations of the nation's goofy alert color codes, a step in right direction. But what I want is an alert level made meaningful by contrasting it with risks I do understand: Since we perceive risk as a product of CHANCE_OF_OCCURANCE X COST_OF_OCCURANCE, I want a system where I can set a threshold for ignoring the drivel. The basis could be a chance_of_occurance = to my chances of a serious car accident on the way to work for instance [say its 1 in 5000] and the cost is monitarized in the range from 0$ to the 1.7million [or what ever it is] that the insurance industry pays out on average for a loss of life....if I am fithy rich, a vulnerability that opens my brokerage account could be > than loss of life but that is for me to set. All the stuff that falls below the threshold, I don't want to hear about, at least not more than once a year in a round-up batch of patches. Enough already!
the feat reported is certainly valid news and the techniques of remote control surgery will have application beyond medical emergencies in space BUT PLEASE: saying something is a reality when it has only been simulated is misleading! How much would you pay the doctor who says "I have simulated removal of your tumor"? Reality is billable.
when the link in the/. article puts a "please register" page in my face?
I offered
this story to/. and put more links in it becuase I found some relevant background that amplifies the story. For instance, have you heard of using neural net programming to uncover buying patterns from analysis of "shopping cart" contents? you can bet Amazon has.
but what has vulcan eugenics got to do with ANYTHING?
that was the title for the story I submitted to/.
call me a grouser but check out some of the other
links too http://science.slashdot.org/~museumpeace/journal/
I saw this in TR yesteday and, given my dismal batting average with the/. eds, just let it slide.
A better TR article
blasts "hydrogen hype" but in fact H2 would be about the best fuel for these little buzzers:
a fuel spill will dissapate very rapidly
the byproduct, in answer to the questions posted re pollution is just water.
A set of bearings however will be an awsome thing to handle the gyroscopic reaction torques as you
wave your jet powered cellphone about. You turn
the corner, the phone does not. I don't have my old physics books handy but the linear velocity of a point on the tip of a blade is
1000000*60*2*pi*0.6/(12*5280) = 3570 mile/hour
and is changing direction 180 degrees about 2000000 times a minute. The F=MA to pull this constant direction change will be staggering unless M is damn near zero. And aren't you just all breathless, when the "batteries die", to take your cellphone to the out-of-work airline mechanic who got re-trained at a watch factory ?
It has brief bios of many of my heroes [Edison was a nerd, right?] with interesting insights into how they wrestled their ideas into realities, who they fought, what they did differently from contemporaries. In my 30 years of programming, many of them at startups, I know of nothing to compare to the myriad drained lives, burnt hopes and stolen thunder that bob and sink in the wake of Mr. Gates. Larry Ellison may be a runner up to Gates in this grim category but that is usually how those two fare in their competition. For every millionaire Gates made, there was a company out there that had a good idea and smart people who still couldn't grow in the shade of Microsoft. To name names would rub salt in the wounds of some good friends...lets just say having a great idea and a willingness to work hard are not enough to insure success. The lucky ones were assimilated.
The posts here have been very infomative, a good read and/. at its best but they leave me wondering...
All most all the posts concern MS OS'es and the ways to administer MS networks. Even at home, I run a mix of Mac [OS X 10.2] XP pro, Win2K and, when the lap top comes home, ME. Uniform policy administration and enforcement is not an option now and wait until I plug my Linux or BSD box into the hub. When I run PestPatrol on the ms boxes for the first time, I find all kinds of crap...literally hundreds of corruptions from registry settings to exe's. After a clean-out and set up of the PP monitors, things stay pretty clean. All this talk of "stupid users" and how to protect them from their own carelessness has validity in a business environment but a home network with kids who like avatars and blinking shortcuts and drag in downloads to install without so much as asking me "I found this rabid kitten, can I keep it, Please!" leaves no room for rigor: you just HAVE to approach the problem from the "cure" direction rather than the "prevention" direction.
And BTW, are there any cheap, reliable spyware cleaners for Linux [or are any needed;^]
...after it crashes does it hand the keys over to a malicious outsider or does it just stop working?
On my older [less mem, win2k] machine I could get Mozilla 1.5 throug 1.7 to hang by just visiting a lot of pages without using the BACK key. But the mozzie browsers don't have all those hooks into the OS that make backdoor control schemes possible. Mozzie failure modes would make for nuisance DOS, not subjigation of your system. If you accept the results claimed in the blog then its clear that MS did a better job of putting "containment" around their rendering context but the long list of vulnerabilities against IE also means MS has been too feature-happy or naive to avoid control hooks between the container and the OS.
but they got bought by ComputerAssociates so wait
and see if CA jacks up the price or screws up the product. I actually pay money for anti spyware
and firewalls....the update services get to my cmputer before most new and variant infections do.
it effectively removes exe's, reg settings and BHO's. But then I quit using IE a year ago so I
don't know if there is much need for all that
protection.
I would like that feature but I am not so sure it
would be a great help...some of the phishing spam
that comes my way certainly has odd origins if you
look in the header but a lot of it is just from
a domain like yahoo. Some phishing is much more
subtle too. I got one where the link I was supposed to click on really was to CitiBank, as the e-mail
purported to originate from there but examining the e-mail in x-ray mode [i.e. don't play it in HTML] you could see that the link would run an encrypted bit of code or virus...it was not the URL desitnation that was going to get me: it was the act of clicking on it. I try to send these nastier attempts to my state attorney general's fraud office but they basically respond that If I haven't lost money or otherwise have a basis for a criminal complaint, they can't do much. The Can-Spam penalties are federal and its way too much trouble to run these bums to ground by back tracking through the zombies that actaully pass on the e-mails. a lot of what might be evidence for a prosecution just goes in the trash because nobody is set up to collect, analyze and form the larger investigative picture even when a user is careful enough to see that he is basically being
hustled by a criminal and has the headers to prove it.
all of the +5 insighfull material from the/. archives. If/. comments were counted in the "cannon of work" for an author, some of us have truely extensive output. As for "famous", well, I got my 15 minutes of fame on slashdot....5 seconds at a time and so did you.
thanks to 1,2 and 3, every society more complicated than hunter-gatherer has had an engineering role, whatever they called it.
Assuming we have a future at all, 4 means we will continue to need engineers. So I gotta see if this art. is one of those pipe dreams about low level coding going away because, comes the revoluttion, your spoken wish turns into requirements, specifications, identificaiton of applicable standards and components, ERD+UML and a little black MDA box poops out your software. even wishes need engineering
write code with subtle errors in it, you might want to study the methodology used in
Prof. Mann's paper proving global warming The paper has been gospel for about a decade...but its bad code and it took a couple of Canadians to notice it. Once you master that example, you are sure to wind the prize for bad voting software.
Slashdot Mirror
Stealing a loaf of bread is an unorganized, 1-party transaction with one victim. Stealing music is organized and has two parties, a seller [rich pirate] and a buyer [poor pirate]. The perception of legitimacy, the buyer's excuse that he is poor, is all it takes to do economic harm to some absent third part [record compay/victim] that you would not at all want done to yourself. The existance of mass of these self-absolving "poor" slobs create a market and thereby enable the existance of the rich pirates. I don't buy it!
these things go in cycles: cost drives producers to automate but when that trend has wrung all the excess effort and any trace of individual human attention out of the product, consumers start paying for product variations that are more authentic and at least seem less mechanized. Detroit now produces cars almost "on demand" with a high degree of customization because that is the next stop along the progressive dance of consumption and automation. In food, people are even more picky, hating the machine pickable tomatoes for instance ["pink tennis balls"] and prefering more expensive organic greenhouse tomatoes.
I should have titled it "with other links" because the posted article has more links.
I guess we can all have some sympathy for the poor starving Russians who need to get their share of current movies and songs and what else, Rolex watches and Gucci handbags. Buyer and Seller are really inseperable parts of the piracy problem. If we could just bump off the RICH PIRATES [sellers, and people for whom we have little sympathy], since assination is fairly standard business practice in .ru, would we solve the problem? Hell no! Its the demand for stollen goods that makes them worth stealing in the first place.
2004.10.20: UN predicts much wider use of robots
An Associated Press report [via yahoo] of United Nations Study on robots is predicting robust increases in the use of robots both for both domestic and industrial uses. If you googled for this news you would find similar reports each year going back a ways. Here is the PDF straight from the UN. What makes this news is that its the UN talking, not some manufacturer's press release and that the numbers are more sanguine than ever: But is there a job in this "boom" for any of us?
For comparison here is last year's report, tidied up by your favorite submitter, Roland Click-appeal [hey, at least he RTFA!].
and then buy HW when you know just what is going to work. Although dated by its dependence on an older version of JMF, Lindley's book [at the top of the list of this page of audio books] , gives a set of audio widgets [well, beans, actually] on its CD that you can mix, modify, and mate in various combinations for all kinds of audio effects. Not a tool for the timid but a rewarding exercise for the software/audio geek.
tv's that are being used as monitors, say with flight info, traffic reports etc.
OR, if you have a really strong death wish, turn off the Red Sox/ Yankees game at you local bar?
better hide that little sucker in IR-transparent hiding place and keep you cellphone handy with 1-button 911 service programmed into it if you are going around turning off tvs that other people are watching. I was always warned not to get between a dog and its dinner but I think that goes for humans and there TV's too.
The dig is just desserts. IE sitll can't rid itself of backdoor connections to the OS that do not plague other browsers. These came about in part because of Microsoft naivete [as its programming culture arose in the protected world of standalone office products] and partly from its attempt to defend against DOJ litigation [ aimed at its monopolistic moves to kill Netscape] by claiming that "browsers are naturally part of the OS". Serves 'em right!
after all, I love to bash poor Microsoft, but exhaustion is rapidly setting in here. I am what passes for a careful user: I don't use IE, I run the latest Mozilla, I use a firewall and anti-spyware and when its all said and done...not much gets done because I am fretting over yet another patch or vulenrability. I have sympathetic talks with my sysadmins but my family thinks I am the the Home Network Nazi. ,despite seeming like imitations of the nation's goofy alert color codes, a step in right direction. But what I want is an alert level made meaningful by contrasting it with risks I do understand: Since we perceive risk as a product of CHANCE_OF_OCCURANCE X COST_OF_OCCURANCE, I want a system where I can set a threshold for ignoring the drivel. The basis could be a chance_of_occurance = to my chances of a serious car accident on the way to work for instance [say its 1 in 5000] and the cost is monitarized in the range from 0$ to the 1.7million [or what ever it is] that the insurance industry pays out on average for a loss of life. ...if I am fithy rich, a vulnerability that opens my brokerage account could be > than loss of life but that is for me to set. All the stuff that falls below the threshold, I don't want to hear about, at least not more than once a year in a round-up batch of patches. Enough already!
I feel like a small town policeman burried under a barrage of "sky-is-falling-alert-level-puce" faxes from the HomelandSecurity to be dealt with on zero budget.
The color codes provided by Secunia are
the feat reported is certainly valid news and the techniques of remote control surgery will have application beyond medical emergencies in space
BUT PLEASE: saying something is a reality when it has only been simulated is misleading! How much would you pay the doctor who says "I have simulated removal of your tumor"? Reality is billable.
when the link in the /. article puts a "please register" page in my face? /. and put more links in it becuase I found some relevant background that amplifies the story. For instance, have you heard of using neural net programming to uncover buying patterns from analysis of "shopping cart" contents? you can bet Amazon has.
I offered this story to
but what has vulcan eugenics got to do with ANYTHING?
that was the title for the story I submitted to /.
call me a grouser but check out some of the other links too http://science.slashdot.org/~museumpeace/journal/
A better TR article blasts "hydrogen hype" but in fact H2 would be about the best fuel for these little buzzers:
- a fuel spill will dissapate very rapidly
- the byproduct, in answer to the questions posted re pollution is just water.
A set of bearings however will be an awsome thing to handle the gyroscopic reaction torques as you wave your jet powered cellphone about. You turn the corner, the phone does not. I don't have my old physics books handy but the linear velocity of a point on the tip of a blade isand is changing direction 180 degrees about 2000000 times a minute. The F=MA to pull this constant direction change will be staggering unless M is damn near zero.And aren't you just all breathless, when the "batteries die", to take your cellphone to the out-of-work airline mechanic who got re-trained at a watch factory ?
It has brief bios of many of my heroes [Edison was a nerd, right?] with interesting insights into how they wrestled their ideas into realities, who they fought, what they did differently from contemporaries.
In my 30 years of programming, many of them at startups, I know of nothing to compare to the myriad drained lives, burnt hopes and stolen thunder that bob and sink in the wake of Mr. Gates. Larry Ellison may be a runner up to Gates in this grim category but that is usually how those two fare in their competition. For every millionaire Gates made, there was a company out there that had a good idea and smart people who still couldn't grow in the shade of Microsoft. To name names would rub salt in the wounds of some good friends...lets just say having a great idea and a willingness to work hard are not enough to insure success. The lucky ones were assimilated.
The posts here have been very infomative, a good read and /. at its best but they leave me wondering...
All most all the posts concern MS OS'es and the ways to administer MS networks. Even at home, I run a mix of Mac [OS X 10.2] XP pro, Win2K and, when the lap top comes home, ME. Uniform policy administration and enforcement is not an option now and wait until I plug my Linux or BSD box into the hub. When I run PestPatrol on the ms boxes for the first time, I find all kinds of crap...literally hundreds of corruptions from registry settings to exe's. After a clean-out and set up of the PP monitors, things stay pretty clean. All this talk of "stupid users" and how to protect them from their own carelessness has validity in a business environment but a home network with kids who like avatars and blinking shortcuts and drag in downloads to install without so much as asking me "I found this rabid kitten, can I keep it, Please!" leaves no room for rigor: you just HAVE to approach the problem from the "cure" direction rather than the "prevention" direction.
And BTW, are there any cheap, reliable spyware cleaners for Linux [or are any needed;^]
...after it crashes does it hand the keys over to a malicious outsider or does it just stop working?
On my older [less mem, win2k] machine I could get Mozilla 1.5 throug 1.7 to hang by just visiting a lot of pages without using the BACK key. But the mozzie browsers don't have all those hooks into the OS that make backdoor control schemes possible. Mozzie failure modes would make for nuisance DOS, not subjigation of your system. If you accept the results claimed in the blog then its clear that MS did a better job of putting "containment" around their rendering context but the long list of vulnerabilities against IE also means MS has been too feature-happy or naive to avoid control hooks between the container and the OS.
but they got bought by ComputerAssociates so wait and see if CA jacks up the price or screws up the product. I actually pay money for anti spyware and firewalls....the update services get to my cmputer before most new and variant infections do. it effectively removes exe's, reg settings and BHO's. But then I quit using IE a year ago so I don't know if there is much need for all that protection.
I would like that feature but I am not so sure it would be a great help...some of the phishing spam that comes my way certainly has odd origins if you look in the header but a lot of it is just from a domain like yahoo. Some phishing is much more subtle too. I got one where the link I was supposed to click on really was to CitiBank, as the e-mail purported to originate from there but examining the e-mail in x-ray mode [i.e. don't play it in HTML] you could see that the link would run an encrypted bit of code or virus...it was not the URL desitnation that was going to get me: it was the act of clicking on it.
I try to send these nastier attempts to my state attorney general's fraud office but they basically respond that If I haven't lost money or otherwise have a basis for a criminal complaint, they can't do much. The Can-Spam penalties are federal and its way too much trouble to run these bums to ground by back tracking through the zombies that actaully pass on the e-mails. a lot of what might be evidence for a prosecution just goes in the trash because nobody is set up to collect, analyze and form the larger investigative picture even when a user is careful enough to see that he is basically being hustled by a criminal and has the headers to prove it.
for excess traffic. /. just hit him so hard I can't
get anything but "500" errors. Somebody should a warned him.
Their products do have something in common
all of the +5 insighfull material from the /. archives. If /. comments were counted in the "cannon of work" for an author, some of us have truely extensive output. As for "famous", well, I got my 15 minutes of fame on slashdot....5 seconds at a time and so did you.
news.com reports that Dell is supporting spyware education program or would the CNET story explain the article?
- programmers are engineers.
-
engineers solve problems.
-
there always have been problems
-
there always will be problems
thanks to 1,2 and 3, every society more complicated than hunter-gatherer has had an engineering role, whatever they called it. Assuming we have a future at all, 4 means we will continue to need engineers. So I gotta see if this art. is one of those pipe dreams about low level coding going away because, comes the revoluttion, your spoken wish turns into requirements, specifications, identificaiton of applicable standards and components, ERD+UML and a little black MDA box poops out your software.even wishes need engineering
write code with subtle errors in it, you might want to study the methodology used in Prof. Mann's paper proving global warming The paper has been gospel for about a decade...but its bad code and it took a couple of Canadians to notice it. Once you master that example, you are sure to wind the prize for bad voting software.
well, actually "break;"