still, ^S would only save a copy to the drafts folder. you need to press ALT-S to actually send it.
Nitpick. So what if the program overheard Alt-S in a conversation? Say, sb is speaking about Son Altesse Royale, le Grand-Duc Henri, and the program, not accustomed to French, hears Altesse as Alt-S... This actually makes the thing more prone to error than Control-S, which would be somewhat harder to find in a natural conversation...
Actually the article talks not only about "random" words being inserted, but also toolbars and dialog box appearing and being activated. So, I presume that, yes, the speech can also perform other actions than just inserting text.
Think about it. If the feature works as expected, and really does insert the words spoken in the room (rather than trying to interpret words into the random static of a disconnected mike), the privacy implication becomes pretty clear:
guy types up e-mail
just as he is almost ready to send, a coworker enter the office
lively discussion about public and not so public subjects
Windows XP & Outlook dutifully puts transcript of conversation into e-mail (or at least those snippets it understands).
Windows XP misunderstands one of the sentences as "Control ess!", and sends off the missive. Maybe to a customer, a supplier, or even a competitor.
Yes, I see the irony), how the fuck would a disconnected mic pick up sound?
Random static, due to poor sound card quality, to interference or whatever. Hey, some people manage to hear voices of the deceased when listening to static, so why wouldn't the computer be able to interpret words into the white noise? It's Micro$oft, after all!
Mandrake must be the must bug-infested distro in existence. Rather than seriously testing their stuff before release, they make a point of including alpha and pre-alpha stuff, even where stabler (but slightly older) versions exist. Some time ago, I stumbled accross a Mandrake mkisofs that was burning empty (or zero-filled ) files. Just looking at the directory, you thought you had everything, but alas, no.
And if no sufficiently buggy version of a package is available, they make it themselves (... the kde and that menudrake stuff).
It does have its advantages (newby friendliness), but even newbies should consider ditching it in favor of another distro once they become comfortable enough with Linux that they start having important data on their Linux box.
So I'd say: if they're in trouble; good riddance. And don't you dare pay your membership dues!
...are actually a good thing. They clearly highlight the fact that the US do not strive for three trade at all, but only for the selfish little interests of their own industry. Thus, they will now have a much harder time pushing their new idiotic copyright laws abroad, "in the name of free trade".
Of course, CWA doesn't like these new H1B workers, because their presence would endanger the success of their May 11th strike. Just as intended by AT&T, by the way.
The security argument is just a gimmick to win other people over to their side. But their real motive for this racist missive is their planned strike.
Re:Source code = preferred form for modification
on
Abusing the GPL?
·
· Score: 2
However - his company can take the gpl code, add hooks to it which are lgpl'd, and write their code to use those hooks, allowing them a legal, clean alternative to providing source at all.
Would that actually be legally ok? Think about it. Why differentiate between GPL and LGPL at all, if anybody can trivially transform a GPL'ed piece of code into an LGPL'ed one by creating a derivative work of it and slap the LGPL on it? Remember: the "derivation" may be as trivial as adding the comment/* Yippie, this is now LGPL'ed */ to one of the source files...
What your suggesting may be ok if you keep the executables separate... i.e. have the open code and the proprietary code exchange information via a pipe, socket or whatever, rather than linking them into a same binary. But in that case, the LGPL would not enter the picture at all.
Hmm. You shake hands with your right hand. And you wear your watch on your left hand. Thus shaking hands will not bring your watch any closer to the other guy's watch than simply standing behind him in a queue. So where's the problem?
Ok, but you're still missing the point. Say you want to do business in Hong Kong. When you're located there you have a certain number of choices for ISPs and if the scheme works anything like it does in the USA you have to sign a multiyear contract.
Ok, so before signing a multi-year contract, first make sure whether it is in your best interest to tie yourself into such a long-running agreement or not. Computers are a fast-moving business, and what is a good deal today, may not be a good deal tomorrow. Keeping the option to move makes good business sense.
Then, companies come and go all the time. Especially, in such a fast moving industry such as internet connectivity, you can never know whether your supplier will still be around in five years. Something to consider before doing an advance payment for five years.
Say a year into your 5 year contract the spam crowd decides the whole class b of your upstream ISP is evil and shouldn't be able to email.
Ok, so you have a contract with your ISP. In that contract, they guaranteed you connectivity. If they cannot follow up with their end of the deal for whatever reason, sue them. And if you didn't actually pay for the five years of service in advance, just move over to some better connected supplier. A little spine can go a long way.
And please, have you ever used a hotmail account?
Not really, except when I wanted to say something in an anonymous and untracable way. You have to use it together with an open proxy though, or else your browser's IP will give you away. But hotmail is just one example, which I picked because of its well-knowness. Zillions of other free e-mail services, such as yahoo.com exist though. Take your pick.
First, I don't like the interface, second, it is a spam magnet.
Starting to like the taste of your own medicine?
Antispam blocking has too much collateral damage.
Life isn't fair. But we know that. If you notice that your mail can no longer reach its intended destinations, complain to your ISP. You are their customer. You have a contract with them. They need your money. And, what's best, you speak their language, so they can't just pull an "ethikul biznizman" on you.
For every one spammer you hit you're hitting a hundred people who don't even comprehend the reason they're being blocked.
Ok, in that case, these hundred people will do the logical thing to do in such a situation: complain to their ISP. And if their complaints are not followed up to, they take their business elsewhere.
I don't understand why SO much time has been devoted to kludging the current system instead of redesigning the email system to prevent spam in the first place.
If that was actually done, your e-mail connectivity problems would still not be solved: your backwater ISP wouldn't notice that the world around it had switched e-mail delivery protocols, and your mails would bump into a taller wall than ever before...
I think most of you people who can nonchalantly talk about spam blocking not being a problem have never had the occasion to be in the collateral damage.
I think most people who nonchalantly talk about spam not being a problem never had the occasion to be in the collateral damage. Like receiving over thousand bounced mails per day, because some moron sino-spammer thought it smart to use your e-mail in his forged From field of his missives, so you, not him would get all the bounces and remove messages.
Have never had the antispam community thumb their nose at you.
Have never had spam-friendly ISP's thumb their nose at you? I tell you what: as long as you are not a paying customer of an ISP, they owe you nothing, and some do not hesitate to tell you so. It's an unfortunate fact of life that in our world of fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders, companies only start listening when you hit them in their pocketbook. Now, starting to understand why causing collateral damage among the paying customers of rogue ISPs makes so much sense?
And, some of those wonderful block lists you support are just as shady as spammers. Take a look at how SPEWS works. They don't even give a real contact point.
That's probably done just to keep the lame whiners away. If you have a real issue with SPEWS, just post to news.admin.net-abuse.mail, and you will either be told why the block is still justified, or they'll eventually take it away.
All web based email is banned. You just can't go to the sites.
So, if you're fed up of China based spam, just set up a public webmail service. Or just a proxy tunnel to yahoo.com. After that, the Chinese government will just firewall your netblock, and presto, no more sino-spam!
You mean people should all just move out of Hong Kong or China Just to send email?
The house-moving metaphor was just that: a metaphor. Translated to 'net terms, this means: move your internet persona out of China/Hongkong, i.e. get a damn hotmail address. (My gawd, even hotmail earns more respect than.cn or.hk...)
...that as much as you might joke that spammers should be lined up and shot, that gets a lot less funny when you're dealing with the Chinese government.
Actually, it is quite easy to make it happen: if you get a spam from a Chinese open relay, first warn the admin. Give them a week. If the spam still continues, start sending mass-mailed anticommunist propaganda to random Chinese addresses through the same open relay. This will get that open relay shut down real quick.
Not always. I've had a problem with a joe-jobbing spammer that was sending spam with my name in the From line, and was spamvertising sites in China. Complaining (via e-mail) to the abuse@ and whois addresses of the various involved providers did yield exactly no response. So I called. The phone got picked up by a person whose only reaction was to say "hooee! hooee! hooee!" into the phone every now and then (this went on for a couple of minutes... yes, this was a pay call...). He did not even have the sense to ask around in his office whether there was any English speaking colleague around. A company running an international business (which an ISP is, by definition) should at least take care to list phone numbers of English speaking personnel into the relevant contact databases (whois).
However, after I started forwarding all the joe-job bounces back to the abuse and whois addresses (over a thousand per day...), suddenly I started getting back responses written in a very adequate English;-)
Would that would make spikes a circumvention device?
Those shoes are also quite nice to step on any policeman that happens to have fallen over (should not be that rare, if they stepped on the goo themselves in the heat of the moment...)
None of the Asian countries above have responded to spam complaints. It's not just a language problem either. I get (or used to get before my spam filters went up) technical requests (in English) from Asia as the result of USENET postings and FAQs I wrote.
This phenomenon is known as the "ethikul biznisman" problem. Buy a PC in a shop in China, and the salesman's English will be quite adequate, and he will also understand what you are saying. But bring it back one week later because of a defect, and he no longer understands a word of what you say, and his accent goes to hell.
As long as they want something from you, or they want to sell something, no language barriers exists. But as soon as you want sth from them, or have a complaint, then all bets are off.
Best include a link to the above-mentioned People's daily article (translation) in your complaint mail. They do understand your language, but they might not (yet) do understand the consequences of their (non)acts.
Thus escrow services make it easy for fraudulent buyers to take advantage of legit sellers.
But wouldn't the amount stay in escrow in that case? That's the point of escrow, isn't it? Else buyer and seller could just agree that buyer would only pay after receipt of merchandise. With escrow, the money stays in escrow until the matter is resolved to both the buyer and seller's satisfaction, removing all incentive of the buyer to play foul.
Yes, they created the anti-atoms - but they didn't have to create the regular ones, they are already there.
Nope. There are a number of constants which need to be conserved in every particle reaction. The most obvious is electric charge, but there are others which are little less known: leptonic number, baryonic number, etc.
Conservation of these quantities implies that, yes, they had to create a same amount of regular matter along with their antimatter.
So the combination of the two could release double the energy that was put into their creation.
Even if this were true, twice the energy needed to heat a small cup of coffee would still not have sufficed to inflict any serious damage;-)
Yup. But there's a big difference between releasing a big amount of energy, and releasing a big amount of energy in a small space in very short time.
True enough. But in this case, the amounts of energy were so ridiculously small (equivalent to what is needed to heat a small cup of coffee) that a worst they might have wrecked the enclosure, or maybe the room where it stood, but in no case the whole CERN facility.
Explosives don't come out of nowhere, but they are quite more dangerous than the work that was put into their creation.
Much more energy has been put into the creation of (a useful quantity of) explosives than into the creation of these mere 100 atoms of antimatter.
Explosives may have been "created" but from materials which were already quite loaded with (chemical) energy to begin with.
Nuclear bombs have been created (directly or indirectly) from Uranium, which is already quite loaded with energy in its natural state. However, in the case of anitmatter, the particle/antiparticles pairs were created from pure energy (kinetic energy by colliding other particles, or gamma rays). So, I'd think it is a safe bet to say that in this case, no more energy was released than was needed for their creation.
Actually, the damage caused by 100 anti-atoms annihilating themselves with 100 atoms would be far less than the damage caused by the accidental installation of an XP CD on my computer...
These were only some hundred atoms, nothing more. Even if they did collide with matter, the damage would not be any worse than if you put a Windows XP CD-Rom into your nuker. Remember, they created those anti-atoms, and conservation of energy dictates that the annihilation of said anti-atoms cannot release any more energy than was needed to create them in the first place.
The Georgia Tech article mentions that clocks actually get into antiphase synchronization (when one pendulum swings to the right, the other goes to the left, and vice-versa).
Strangely enough, it didn't occur to them to test what happens if they put three clocks side by side... Antiphase synchronization seems somewhat hard with an odd number of clocks...
Slashdot Mirror
Just search for mouse, please leave now, or better: mouse, please get the hell out of here
Nitpick. So what if the program overheard Alt-S in a conversation? Say, sb is speaking about Son Altesse Royale, le Grand-Duc Henri, and the program, not accustomed to French, hears Altesse as Alt-S... This actually makes the thing more prone to error than Control-S, which would be somewhat harder to find in a natural conversation...
Actually the article talks not only about "random" words being inserted, but also toolbars and dialog box appearing and being activated. So, I presume that, yes, the speech can also perform other actions than just inserting text.
Think about it. If the feature works as expected, and really does insert the words spoken in the room (rather than trying to interpret words into the random static of a disconnected mike), the privacy implication becomes pretty clear:
Random static, due to poor sound card quality, to interference or whatever. Hey, some people manage to hear voices of the deceased when listening to static, so why wouldn't the computer be able to interpret words into the white noise? It's Micro$oft, after all!
Nope. Actually it fell 9th of November 1989. Which the Americans write 11/9, and the Europeans 9/11 (Europeans write the day before the month).
And if no sufficiently buggy version of a package is available, they make it themselves (... the kde and that menudrake stuff).
It does have its advantages (newby friendliness), but even newbies should consider ditching it in favor of another distro once they become comfortable enough with Linux that they start having important data on their Linux box.
So I'd say: if they're in trouble; good riddance. And don't you dare pay your membership dues!
...are actually a good thing. They clearly highlight the fact that the US do not strive for three trade at all, but only for the selfish little interests of their own industry. Thus, they will now have a much harder time pushing their new idiotic copyright laws abroad, "in the name of free trade".
The security argument is just a gimmick to win other people over to their side. But their real motive for this racist missive is their planned strike.
Would that actually be legally ok? Think about it. Why differentiate between GPL and LGPL at all, if anybody can trivially transform a GPL'ed piece of code into an LGPL'ed one by creating a derivative work of it and slap the LGPL on it? Remember: the "derivation" may be as trivial as adding the comment /* Yippie, this is now LGPL'ed */ to one of the source files...
What your suggesting may be ok if you keep the executables separate... i.e. have the open code and the proprietary code exchange information via a pipe, socket or whatever, rather than linking them into a same binary. But in that case, the LGPL would not enter the picture at all.
Hmm. You shake hands with your right hand. And you wear your watch on your left hand. Thus shaking hands will not bring your watch any closer to the other guy's watch than simply standing behind him in a queue. So where's the problem?
Ok, so before signing a multi-year contract, first make sure whether it is in your best interest to tie yourself into such a long-running agreement or not. Computers are a fast-moving business, and what is a good deal today, may not be a good deal tomorrow. Keeping the option to move makes good business sense.
Then, companies come and go all the time. Especially, in such a fast moving industry such as internet connectivity, you can never know whether your supplier will still be around in five years. Something to consider before doing an advance payment for five years.
Say a year into your 5 year contract the spam crowd decides the whole class b of your upstream ISP is evil and shouldn't be able to email.
Ok, so you have a contract with your ISP. In that contract, they guaranteed you connectivity. If they cannot follow up with their end of the deal for whatever reason, sue them. And if you didn't actually pay for the five years of service in advance, just move over to some better connected supplier. A little spine can go a long way.
And please, have you ever used a hotmail account?
Not really, except when I wanted to say something in an anonymous and untracable way. You have to use it together with an open proxy though, or else your browser's IP will give you away. But hotmail is just one example, which I picked because of its well-knowness. Zillions of other free e-mail services, such as yahoo.com exist though. Take your pick.
First, I don't like the interface, second, it is a spam magnet.
Starting to like the taste of your own medicine?
Antispam blocking has too much collateral damage.
Life isn't fair. But we know that. If you notice that your mail can no longer reach its intended destinations, complain to your ISP. You are their customer. You have a contract with them. They need your money. And, what's best, you speak their language, so they can't just pull an "ethikul biznizman" on you.
For every one spammer you hit you're hitting a hundred people who don't even comprehend the reason they're being blocked.
Ok, in that case, these hundred people will do the logical thing to do in such a situation: complain to their ISP. And if their complaints are not followed up to, they take their business elsewhere.
I don't understand why SO much time has been devoted to kludging the current system instead of redesigning the email system to prevent spam in the first place.
If that was actually done, your e-mail connectivity problems would still not be solved: your backwater ISP wouldn't notice that the world around it had switched e-mail delivery protocols, and your mails would bump into a taller wall than ever before...
I think most of you people who can nonchalantly talk about spam blocking not being a problem have never had the occasion to be in the collateral damage.
I think most people who nonchalantly talk about spam not being a problem never had the occasion to be in the collateral damage. Like receiving over thousand bounced mails per day, because some moron sino-spammer thought it smart to use your e-mail in his forged From field of his missives, so you, not him would get all the bounces and remove messages.
Have never had the antispam community thumb their nose at you.
Have never had spam-friendly ISP's thumb their nose at you? I tell you what: as long as you are not a paying customer of an ISP, they owe you nothing, and some do not hesitate to tell you so. It's an unfortunate fact of life that in our world of fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders, companies only start listening when you hit them in their pocketbook. Now, starting to understand why causing collateral damage among the paying customers of rogue ISPs makes so much sense?
And, some of those wonderful block lists you support are just as shady as spammers. Take a look at how SPEWS works. They don't even give a real contact point.
That's probably done just to keep the lame whiners away. If you have a real issue with SPEWS, just post to news.admin.net-abuse.mail, and you will either be told why the block is still justified, or they'll eventually take it away.
I know. But it's the ethical thing to do before having them hauled off to the firing range ;-)
So, if you're fed up of China based spam, just set up a public webmail service. Or just a proxy tunnel to yahoo.com. After that, the Chinese government will just firewall your netblock, and presto, no more sino-spam!
The house-moving metaphor was just that: a metaphor. Translated to 'net terms, this means: move your internet persona out of China/Hongkong, i.e. get a damn hotmail address. (My gawd, even hotmail earns more respect than .cn or .hk...)
Actually, it is quite easy to make it happen: if you get a spam from a Chinese open relay, first warn the admin. Give them a week. If the spam still continues, start sending mass-mailed anticommunist propaganda to random Chinese addresses through the same open relay. This will get that open relay shut down real quick.
Not always. I've had a problem with a joe-jobbing spammer that was sending spam with my name in the From line, and was spamvertising sites in China. Complaining (via e-mail) to the abuse@ and whois addresses of the various involved providers did yield exactly no response. So I called. The phone got picked up by a person whose only reaction was to say "hooee! hooee! hooee!" into the phone every now and then (this went on for a couple of minutes... yes, this was a pay call...). He did not even have the sense to ask around in his office whether there was any English speaking colleague around. A company running an international business (which an ISP is, by definition) should at least take care to list phone numbers of English speaking personnel into the relevant contact databases (whois).
However, after I started forwarding all the joe-job bounces back to the abuse and whois addresses (over a thousand per day...), suddenly I started getting back responses written in a very adequate English ;-)
Those shoes are also quite nice to step on any policeman that happens to have fallen over (should not be that rare, if they stepped on the goo themselves in the heat of the moment...)
This phenomenon is known as the "ethikul biznisman" problem. Buy a PC in a shop in China, and the salesman's English will be quite adequate, and he will also understand what you are saying. But bring it back one week later because of a defect, and he no longer understands a word of what you say, and his accent goes to hell.
As long as they want something from you, or they want to sell something, no language barriers exists. But as soon as you want sth from them, or have a complaint, then all bets are off.
Best include a link to the above-mentioned People's daily article (translation) in your complaint mail. They do understand your language, but they might not (yet) do understand the consequences of their (non)acts.
But wouldn't the amount stay in escrow in that case? That's the point of escrow, isn't it? Else buyer and seller could just agree that buyer would only pay after receipt of merchandise. With escrow, the money stays in escrow until the matter is resolved to both the buyer and seller's satisfaction, removing all incentive of the buyer to play foul.
Nope. There are a number of constants which need to be conserved in every particle reaction. The most obvious is electric charge, but there are others which are little less known: leptonic number, baryonic number, etc.
Conservation of these quantities implies that, yes, they had to create a same amount of regular matter along with their antimatter.
So the combination of the two could release double the energy that was put into their creation.
Even if this were true, twice the energy needed to heat a small cup of coffee would still not have sufficed to inflict any serious damage ;-)
True enough. But in this case, the amounts of energy were so ridiculously small (equivalent to what is needed to heat a small cup of coffee) that a worst they might have wrecked the enclosure, or maybe the room where it stood, but in no case the whole CERN facility.
Explosives don't come out of nowhere, but they are quite more dangerous than the work that was put into their creation.
Actually, the damage caused by 100 anti-atoms annihilating themselves with 100 atoms would be far less than the damage caused by the accidental installation of an XP CD on my computer...
These were only some hundred atoms, nothing more. Even if they did collide with matter, the damage would not be any worse than if you put a Windows XP CD-Rom into your nuker. Remember, they created those anti-atoms, and conservation of energy dictates that the annihilation of said anti-atoms cannot release any more energy than was needed to create them in the first place.
Strangely enough, it didn't occur to them to test what happens if they put three clocks side by side... Antiphase synchronization seems somewhat hard with an odd number of clocks...