The patent claim makes interesting reading. Specifically:
2. The system of claim 1, wherein the compiler is a BASIC-derived programming language compiler. 3. The system of claim 1, wherein the operator is IsNot.
Most of the other claims simply describe how a compiler goes about producing executable code.
IANAL, but does this mean that any language which wasn't BASIC derived would be free to implement this? Similarly, you could work around it simply by calling the operator Isnt.
Re:Unix is banned in the US Air Force
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Sun-isms Debunked
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but if sweeper teams find unix, you're in for it.
This leaves...? VMS? Windows? zOS?
I can understand the military being strict about what's running, but I'm surprised that they've yet to meet a Unix they like. I thought C2 clearance became obsolete years ago, anyhow?
Re:Unix is banned in the US Air Force
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Sun-isms Debunked
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· Score: 1
Is this actually true, or is it just British banks being difficult?
It's true. I used to work for an insurance company, and we had to go through that as part of the training.
Basically, any company which handles financial products which could be used for money laundering has to implement a whole bunch of procedures to make this harder - this includes "knowing your client" - ie. get as many details about them as you can.
I'm not sure who enforces this. If it's the FSA, they (theoretically, though they never use) have the power to stop a company - any company of any size - trading immediately until such time as the company complies with the rules.
That's not the issue. The issues are complicated, but can be boiled down to a few simple ones:
1. Can you guarantee the country will never have a government which would systematically abuse the system? If you can't, do you want to make the such abuses easier?
2. Can you guarantee that the government does not employ one single person who might be tempted to abuse the system? That neighbour of yours who works in the local health authority who you had an argument with last week, for instance... If you can't, do you want to make the such abuses easier?
3. Is the government there for your benefit or are you there for your government's benefit? If the former, shouldn't the onus be on the government to demonstrate their uses rather than wave a few hand gestures vaguely and say "why not?"
As far as I'm concerned, it's not a privacy issue unless they fuck it up.
Bzzt! Game over! This is the UK government. It's an information system. Their record with IT systems is in the region of 90% screwups - including:
- Child Support Agency - their £500million system doesn't work. - National Health Service - locked themselves into Microsoft for the next 7 (count 'em!) years. Many health professionals are concerned that it's a screwup in the making. - Air Traffic Control systems - the system was fine, but the text was so small as to be unreadable. Bit of a problem when you're controlling many tons of flying metal with a few hundred lives at stake.
And this information is to be shared amongst police, fire, ambulance, your local doctor, the local council, the inland revenue - basically. any organisation which is either part of the government or comes into regular contact with part of the government.
Adjust your tinfoil hat. Printing the cheque does matter - you could then pass all cheques through an OCR system to read before you pass them to the bank.
This is trivial if they're printed rather than written, then you read the name, bank account and sort code from the MICR characters at the bottom. You could even encode a transaction ID on there using whitespace to marry it up with a specific transaction.
Now, after that super-paranoid outburst, let me save the mods the trouble.
Fortunately, in the UK there is this little thing called the "Data Protection Act", which (amongst other things) states that:
Data may only be used for the purpose for which it was collected.
IOW, they can't tie the two together. The debit/credit card info was taken for payment and only for payment.
Whether or not a shop could latch on to this and state that "as a condition of sale, we reserve the right to link any payment cards you use to your loyalty card" is another issue altogether... but if it wasn't stated, it would be illegal.
How can this guy promote national ID cards over supermarket cards.
Very easily. A few months ago I wrote to my local MP complaining about this ridiculous scheme. One of the points I made was "making this compulsory will not reduce crime, because criminals (by definition) do not obey the law".
Some weeks later I got a letter back from Blunkett's office which essentially said "Yes, we know criminals don't obey the law. Anyone who has any ideas about how to get around that problem is invited to write to us."
Hint: the ones to look for are job shops that use PCs as basically dumb terminalt + email and internet... that describes 50% of small businsees out there... they don't need MS latest & greatest... they need what's free done right!
You're right, but I'm not sure that I explained what I consider the issues to be very well. Let me explain how I perceive what a lot of small businesses have done. I may welll be wrong. If I am, this is a Good Thing....
It's 2004 now. 10-15 years ago many of these small businesses were investing in computer systems for the first time, and got something small based on Unix or VMS, using dumb terminals. 5-10 years ago, they started investing in PC's - though generally as glorified dumb terminals.
Since then, many (not all) of these businesses have grown rather used to their PCs. The accounts person (department's probably too strong a word) rather likes Excel, and indeed has a large proportion of the company accounts managed through a couple of somewhat hairy spreadsheets which frankly other versions of Excel have trouble with, let alone OpenOffice.
The sales manager discovered this thing called "Access" on his desktop a couple of years ago. He doesn't really understand it, but it came with a few wizards which he used to create a customer database. Much to his surprise, the database seems to work quite well - it allows him to keep track of his customers easily. It's appallingly produced and any computer scientist would take one look at it and quake with terror in the corner. It's probably a two week full time job to port it to something reasonably sane with a web-based frontend. But for now, it works. And there isn't an easy drop-in replacement for Access.
Repeat this across, say, 4 or 5 employees, and before you know it the small business has a list of "things which need to be somehow brought across to a new system" which has blown out of all proportion with the size of the business.
Don't get me wrong - I am convinced that a suite such as OpenOffice will eventually overcome these issues. But for now, I suspect you'd find that there would be perhaps 3 or 4 sticking points which could potentially scupper the whole idea.
Nobody wants to spend months getting everything necessary up from the "90% done" state it's in now to the "98-100% done" state necessary for such a project. There's still a lot of work involved, and no guarantee that any business would want it.
At the same time, a lot of businesses don't want a Linux plug n play desktop because they don't perceive it as being sufficiently mature.
Red Hat, SuSE et al are doing a lot to correct the first problem. Various organisations with well-publicised rollouts (think Munich) will help with the second problem. But I don't think there will ever be a year of "Linux on the Desktop" - simply because it will take more than a year to get there.
A mouse-sized alien could construct a similarly scaled transmitter with considerable power output.
A mouse-sized alien in a planet-sized habitat might well take rather longer to exhaust the exploration possibilities of his own planet (and thus start to consider anything big enough to be detectable from space) than mankind...
Isn't it a bit of a rash assumption that extra-terrestrial intelligence has technology anything like our own (regardless of how advanced or not it may be)?
For that matter, isn't there also an assumption regarding the size of intelligent extra terrestrial beings? Seriously - they could be the size of mice, have correspondingly small means of transport and communication and thus be a lot harder for us to find.
Hate to say it, but this is exactly the kind of logic the **AA have been using for the last few years.
It breaks down because, as any businessman will tell you, the number of people prepared to pay £X for a product is a subset of the number of people prepared to pay £(X-N). How much they want the product is of secondary importance.
When N actually hits X (ie. the product is free), the number of people prepared to give the product a try is huge. However, that doesn't mean that the number of people prepared to buy the product at full price has gone up. In fact, if there's any competition in the market, a lousy product may actually be harmed by this because it's easy for the customer to see that the product is a con at full price.
Sun aren't a software provider. They're a solution provider.
Sun provide excellent hardware and software support and will work with you to reach a solution - but it's not cheap. Like most unixen, Solaris tends to be popular with companies which need the system to work (as in: the system doesn't work, the company ceases to exist in very short order) and are prepared to pay a lot of money for it.
A few thousand $ for OS licenses fades into insignificance when compared with a few million $ for 24/7/4 hour support across an enterprise, while at the same time making a decent evaluation of the system much cheaper (and thus easier to justify).
And it helps a lot that any camera lens they're worried about is always going to be pointed directly at the screen. That constrains the geometry and makes it simple to locate the source of the reflection.
My g/f wears glasses. They're essentially just lenses in a frame. She'd be looking at the screen. Does their system account for this?
If it accounts for it simply by not reporting two reflections close to each other, couldn't you fool it by sticky-taping a lens to the side of your camcorder?
It's even worse than that. The IF statement will always evaluate to true, and if those variables aren't used anywhere else, they're not needed. I could rewrite that in a line:
10 PRINT "HA HA STEVE IM COOL, LOVE BILL" : GOTO 10
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The patent claim makes interesting reading. Specifically:
2. The system of claim 1, wherein the compiler is a BASIC-derived programming language compiler.
3. The system of claim 1, wherein the operator is IsNot.
Most of the other claims simply describe how a compiler goes about producing executable code.
IANAL, but does this mean that any language which wasn't BASIC derived would be free to implement this? Similarly, you could work around it simply by calling the operator Isnt.
but if sweeper teams find unix, you're in for it.
This leaves...? VMS? Windows? zOS?
I can understand the military being strict about what's running, but I'm surprised that they've yet to meet a Unix they like. I thought C2 clearance became obsolete years ago, anyhow?
Did they give a reason?
Dear Bush,
That's what you think.
MPAA
PS: Remind us, how much have we given you in campaign contributions?
Is this actually true, or is it just British banks being difficult?
It's true. I used to work for an insurance company, and we had to go through that as part of the training.
Basically, any company which handles financial products which could be used for money laundering has to implement a whole bunch of procedures to make this harder - this includes "knowing your client" - ie. get as many details about them as you can.
I'm not sure who enforces this. If it's the FSA, they (theoretically, though they never use) have the power to stop a company - any company of any size - trading immediately until such time as the company complies with the rules.
That's not the issue. The issues are complicated, but can be boiled down to a few simple ones:
1. Can you guarantee the country will never have a government which would systematically abuse the system? If you can't, do you want to make the such abuses easier?
2. Can you guarantee that the government does not employ one single person who might be tempted to abuse the system? That neighbour of yours who works in the local health authority who you had an argument with last week, for instance... If you can't, do you want to make the such abuses easier?
3. Is the government there for your benefit or are you there for your government's benefit? If the former, shouldn't the onus be on the government to demonstrate their uses rather than wave a few hand gestures vaguely and say "why not?"
As far as I'm concerned, it's not a privacy issue unless they fuck it up.
Bzzt! Game over! This is the UK government. It's an information system. Their record with IT systems is in the region of 90% screwups - including:
- Child Support Agency - their £500million system doesn't work.
- National Health Service - locked themselves into Microsoft for the next 7 (count 'em!) years. Many health professionals are concerned that it's a screwup in the making.
- Air Traffic Control systems - the system was fine, but the text was so small as to be unreadable. Bit of a problem when you're controlling many tons of flying metal with a few hundred lives at stake.
And this information is to be shared amongst police, fire, ambulance, your local doctor, the local council, the inland revenue - basically. any organisation which is either part of the government or comes into regular contact with part of the government.
Now do you see why people are a tad concerned?
Adjust your tinfoil hat. Printing the cheque does matter - you could then pass all cheques through an OCR system to read before you pass them to the bank.
This is trivial if they're printed rather than written, then you read the name, bank account and sort code from the MICR characters at the bottom. You could even encode a transaction ID on there using whitespace to marry it up with a specific transaction.
Now, after that super-paranoid outburst, let me save the mods the trouble.
(-2, overratted)
Fortunately, in the UK there is this little thing called the "Data Protection Act", which (amongst other things) states that:
Data may only be used for the purpose for which it was collected.
IOW, they can't tie the two together. The debit/credit card info was taken for payment and only for payment.
Whether or not a shop could latch on to this and state that "as a condition of sale, we reserve the right to link any payment cards you use to your loyalty card" is another issue altogether... but if it wasn't stated, it would be illegal.
The difference between using the card and not using the card can be anywhere from 25% - 40% depending on what's on sale
Where's that? I only know of one UK supermarket which does that (Somerfield), and they only do it on a small number of items at any one time.
How can this guy promote national ID cards over supermarket cards.
Very easily. A few months ago I wrote to my local MP complaining about this ridiculous scheme. One of the points I made was "making this compulsory will not reduce crime, because criminals (by definition) do not obey the law".
Some weeks later I got a letter back from Blunkett's office which essentially said "Yes, we know criminals don't obey the law. Anyone who has any ideas about how to get around that problem is invited to write to us."
Sainsbury's don't - they give you money off at the checkout.
Asda - Do they have such a scheme?
Somerfields - The card gives you discounts at the checkout.
Morrisons - No idea.
Hint: the ones to look for are job shops that use PCs as basically dumb terminalt + email and internet... that describes 50% of small businsees out there... they don't need MS latest & greatest... they need what's free done right!
You're right, but I'm not sure that I explained what I consider the issues to be very well. Let me explain how I perceive what a lot of small businesses have done. I may welll be wrong. If I am, this is a Good Thing....
It's 2004 now. 10-15 years ago many of these small businesses were investing in computer systems for the first time, and got something small based on Unix or VMS, using dumb terminals. 5-10 years ago, they started investing in PC's - though generally as glorified dumb terminals.
Since then, many (not all) of these businesses have grown rather used to their PCs. The accounts person (department's probably too strong a word) rather likes Excel, and indeed has a large proportion of the company accounts managed through a couple of somewhat hairy spreadsheets which frankly other versions of Excel have trouble with, let alone OpenOffice.
The sales manager discovered this thing called "Access" on his desktop a couple of years ago. He doesn't really understand it, but it came with a few wizards which he used to create a customer database. Much to his surprise, the database seems to work quite well - it allows him to keep track of his customers easily. It's appallingly produced and any computer scientist would take one look at it and quake with terror in the corner. It's probably a two week full time job to port it to something reasonably sane with a web-based frontend. But for now, it works. And there isn't an easy drop-in replacement for Access.
Repeat this across, say, 4 or 5 employees, and before you know it the small business has a list of "things which need to be somehow brought across to a new system" which has blown out of all proportion with the size of the business.
Don't get me wrong - I am convinced that a suite such as OpenOffice will eventually overcome these issues. But for now, I suspect you'd find that there would be perhaps 3 or 4 sticking points which could potentially scupper the whole idea.
Sound "protection"
Search for cut_a_wire_on_the_speaker_(RELOADED).torrent
Yeah, I tried that. But now I can't hear it when my phone rings...
Nobody wants to spend months getting everything necessary up from the "90% done" state it's in now to the "98-100% done" state necessary for such a project. There's still a lot of work involved, and no guarantee that any business would want it.
At the same time, a lot of businesses don't want a Linux plug n play desktop because they don't perceive it as being sufficiently mature.
Red Hat, SuSE et al are doing a lot to correct the first problem. Various organisations with well-publicised rollouts (think Munich) will help with the second problem. But I don't think there will ever be a year of "Linux on the Desktop" - simply because it will take more than a year to get there.
Now now, adjust your tinfoil hat. I won't hear a word said against the MPAA - a fine body of men and women, the lot of them.
(Is that it? Am I excused my $100,000 fine now?)
A mouse-sized alien could construct a similarly scaled transmitter with considerable power output.
A mouse-sized alien in a planet-sized habitat might well take rather longer to exhaust the exploration possibilities of his own planet (and thus start to consider anything big enough to be detectable from space) than mankind...
Isn't it a bit of a rash assumption that extra-terrestrial intelligence has technology anything like our own (regardless of how advanced or not it may be)?
For that matter, isn't there also an assumption regarding the size of intelligent extra terrestrial beings? Seriously - they could be the size of mice, have correspondingly small means of transport and communication and thus be a lot harder for us to find.
Hate to say it, but this is exactly the kind of logic the **AA have been using for the last few years.
It breaks down because, as any businessman will tell you, the number of people prepared to pay £X for a product is a subset of the number of people prepared to pay £(X-N). How much they want the product is of secondary importance.
When N actually hits X (ie. the product is free), the number of people prepared to give the product a try is huge. However, that doesn't mean that the number of people prepared to buy the product at full price has gone up. In fact, if there's any competition in the market, a lousy product may actually be harmed by this because it's easy for the customer to see that the product is a con at full price.
Sun aren't a software provider. They're a solution provider.
Sun provide excellent hardware and software support and will work with you to reach a solution - but it's not cheap. Like most unixen, Solaris tends to be popular with companies which need the system to work (as in: the system doesn't work, the company ceases to exist in very short order) and are prepared to pay a lot of money for it.
A few thousand $ for OS licenses fades into insignificance when compared with a few million $ for 24/7/4 hour support across an enterprise, while at the same time making a decent evaluation of the system much cheaper (and thus easier to justify).
And it helps a lot that any camera lens they're worried about is always going to be pointed directly at the screen. That constrains the geometry and makes it simple to locate the source of the reflection.
My g/f wears glasses. They're essentially just lenses in a frame. She'd be looking at the screen. Does their system account for this?
If it accounts for it simply by not reporting two reflections close to each other, couldn't you fool it by sticky-taping a lens to the side of your camcorder?
And if any "detections" are made
Speaking of detections - the one thing which can be pretty much guaranteed to be common to all camcorders is a lens on the front.
Does their system account for people wearing glasses?
I'm in the EU. Most of this tale would be so blatantly illegal over here that an industrial tribunal would last all of about 3 minutes.
Particularly when the mob doesn't know the difference between a paediatrician and a paedophile.