> I'm not sure I understand what your beef is here.
My beef was that you were attempting to misrepresent your own background: This could have happened to ?us?,, where us was supposed to meant the Linux/Unix community. However, your question marks gave you away, and in a rather spectacular way at that. Think about a Frenchman, saying, in a very thick French accent "I am prored to bee an Americanne". Funnily the question marks appeared around that very word that was the lie. Mind this little detail next time you try to impersonate the moderate Linux proponent.
> Back then, the word ?user? was virtually an insult
I would consider ?user? an insult too. But I have no beef with being called a user. My rant has nothing to do with user vs developer vs designer vs master architect vs whatever. I only used the words Linux user, as I could have used any other number of words such as Linux fan, Linux afficinado, penguinista or Linux proponent, etc. It's interesting that you feel more insulted by being called a user than being called a lier.
ROTFL... While you may have a point (Unix had had its fair share of buffer overruns too...), you somewhat blew your credibility by your faux "educated Linux user who admits that MS is not all bad" attitude.
you can't deny that the US is a significant portion of the west.
However, lately, Europe has rediscovered its self esteem, and doesn't hesitate to occasionnally give the finger to the US (see recent Echelon investigation, and some recent crypto decisions).
I imagine that many copies of DeCSS will be deleted voluntary if the court so orders
Only those copies that reside in the US. Unless the MPAA can get a judgment in all the other countries where DeCSS is hosted as well.
Librarians looking to do a fair use compilation won't dare use DeCSS-based decoding software.
Only those that have no spine.
The philosophy aside, the law does greatly impact things and should not be treated so lightly; we should be working within the system rather than ignoring it.
It's hard to take US law seriously when the judges themselves don't treat it with due respect.
As much as I hate to agree with a C-hating bigot and Microsoft lapdog such as Bertrand Meyer, I have to point out that the error would still have been hard to find without a rigorous formalism, even if the team had more time.
At my previous job, we had a similar situation: we were implementing a unique distributed timestamp generator which would generate timestamps which would fit in a very low number of bits (80, or sth even lower than that). Given that it was distributed, we had to include IP address and PID in the stamp. Suddenly we were noticing that we had so few bits left that we had to tradeoff lifetime of the project and number of timestamps that we could generate in a given lapse of time It was important to not make this too small, because that would limit the number of new objects that we could create in said lapse of time.
Eventually, we settled for a lifetime of 30 years. Which seemed quite low to me, so I inquired whether we had any logbook in house where we could mark the need for scheduled maintainance at a given date in the future (say 25 years from now, which would leave them 5 years to clean that thing away). There was no such procedure... We could still put the warning in our usual documentation, but who would look at that in 25 years? So now, we're in a situation where some poor Anderson Consultant will be scratching his head 30 years from now at a mysterious bug which had been identified from the start, but knowledge about which will have been lost because there was no formal way to write it down in a way that people will be alerted in time... The situation will be actually worse than for Y2K: for Y2K we at least knew we had to be careful, whereas this thing will strike out of the blue.
...did this lamer chose to write his web site as dark red text on a black background? Didn't he find any more unreadable combination? Quick tip: Select the text with the cursor; the yellow background makes it more readable (...hope this trick doesn't violate the DMCA...).
It later occured to me that the "vote buying" problem is actually an instrinsic problem with any "voting in your pajamas" system, no matter what the underlying technology is. Indeed, what's to stop you from "inviting" the person who bought your votes to your place, and casting your votes in front of him. No technical fuss such as transferring tokens needed. And works also for mail-in votes too. So even if we get the whole thing hackproof, it's still problematic.
The reason why those shenanigans don't work in a polling station is obviously that the clerk would object if two persons tried to sneak into the same voting booth...
> The final category of posts that I have witnessed is fear for anonymity. Again, the internet has much more ability to be anonymous. A system where you authenticate to one system, then vote to another, or where your id is converted into a hash value, then input into a hash table, which is then tallied at the end, or any number of other solutions can guarantee anonymnity a lot more than the guy sitting at the polling place
Actually, for this application you need higher anonimity standards than usual. For most applications, you do not need to be concerned about the user willfully giving up his anonymity. However, for voting, we must guarantee that the user cannot prove to a third party for which candidate he voted, even if we wanted. Indeed, if he could prove how he cast his vote, he could sell it, or cede to "mild" coercion.
With computer voting, proving how you voted is trivial: just let your buyer look over your shoulder as you cast your vote...or just give him your smartcard
> This could actually be quite neat: because individuals could even 'give away' their votes to a representative
Actually, that's more an argument against that system than in favor of it. Just replace give with sell and you've made possible the second most popular vote fraud (after death men voting): buying votes.
Indeed, protection from government pressure is not the only reason for anonymity. The other reason is that the voter cannot prove how he voted, and thus cannot sell his vote (because the buyer could never be sure whether the "goods" were delivered). In a digi-cash like system, buying votes becomes trivial: you just buy the unused tickets, and that's it.
They would simply reply "screw you". Well, actually they would word it more politely, but it would just that. Don't believe me? Just look at this story. And, never forget that it's somewhat hard to hand out your log files if your disk has just crashed...
Certain window coatings that are designed to block the sun's UV rays also have the unintended side effect of weakening the airwaves used by cellphones. Couldn't this be used to block cellphone usage in certain areas (operas, concerts, restaurants etc.)? Advantage: only the owner of the place can impose the restriction, rather than some random stranger who just happens to walk by and has a beef with cellphones. What's the matter about cellphone usage on a bus? It's a noisy place anyways. And what's the difference about learning about somebody's private life by overhearing a phone conversation, rather than by overhearing a conversation with their seat-neighbour?
... about how long it'll take until 205.177.226.233 becomes a DeCSS mirror? Or worse: until sysadmins will actually have a very good reason for getting their panties in a knot about packets from 205.177.226.233 . Oh gawd, and to make matters even worse, it's Friday!
... we specifically block their IP in our firewalls. I think that the beef that most people would have with this company is that it is secretive, they don't tell us what they're doing with this info. On the other hand, Google's and Netcraft's motives are entirely clear: search engine and OS surveys, so nobody objects.
Btw, does anybody know Quova's IP address range, so that we know what to block?
Shouldn't this story bear the "foot" icon?
on
Gas-Powered Shoes?
·
· Score: 2
And the fact that this is foodwear would only be one of the reasons...
going downhill, or otherwise slowing down. They switch their motors into "generator" mode, and recharge their batteries. Thus, the only energy spent would be to overcome friction, drag or losses in the circuitry. Doing this, the overall energy consumption could actually be less than from gasoline-powered cars which just transform their excess energy into heat.
Moreover, producing energy from fossile fuels always produces heat in addition to the useful mechanical (or electrical) energy (this is a consequence of the 2nd thermodynamical principle). In a car, this heat is basically lost energy. In a stationary plant it can actually be reused for useful purposes ("cogeneration plants": they provide heating for nearby towns or industries in addition to electricity). Not to mention that it is easyer to finetune energy efficiency in a plant where you have basically no space constraints than in a car.
Or thanks to the wonders of corruption, lobbying and other palm greasings: Shouldn't we rather speak about a mongol horde under the command of a mugger?
... as long as it fits into their recipe? British MacDonalds use British beef (at least until it was widely known that this was a mad idea...), French MacDonalds use French potatoes for their fries etc. However, French cheese is the "wrong" variant (did you ever see a Roquefort Burger?), and so they have to import it from the US (or more likely from the Netherlands, as it is closer, and as they have some rather insipid cheese variants there as well...).
Wouldn't the bribery in and of itself be illegal? As far as I understood, the previous rulings were about cops going through the dumpsters which was located on public premises, never about bribing cleaning personnel.
> why is there anything "illegal" about a private citizen, or a service agency hired by one of the victims, doing the trash picking?
The victim hired the service agency for the express purpose of cleaning, and he should be able to expect that the agency should stick to that task while on the victim's premises. To take a computer analogy, it's akin to a program that describes itself as a disk defragmenter, but that in reality also mails the contents of your Trash folder to Oracle. That's usually called a trojan horse.
... it's fairly easy for the FAA to come knocking at his door and just confiscate the whole mess. If you want to pull sth like this off without the proper paperwork, you keep it secret until D-day. And you keep a good excuse ready to tell neightbors and passers-by when they ask you what this rocket-shaped thing in your backyard is...
Slashdot Mirror
... so I had to read it using Lynx. These reposts are more convenient, though
The writing on the t-shirt is so small it's unreadable. I guess, that'd be enough to protect them against any claim of posting the code...
astroturfing too. Moderate everything down that criticizes them too harshly...
My beef was that you were attempting to misrepresent your own background: This could have happened to ?us?,, where us was supposed to meant the Linux/Unix community. However, your question marks gave you away, and in a rather spectacular way at that. Think about a Frenchman, saying, in a very thick French accent "I am prored to bee an Americanne". Funnily the question marks appeared around that very word that was the lie. Mind this little detail next time you try to impersonate the moderate Linux proponent.
> Back then, the word ?user? was virtually an insult
I would consider ?user? an insult too. But I have no beef with being called a user. My rant has nothing to do with user vs developer vs designer vs master architect vs whatever. I only used the words Linux user, as I could have used any other number of words such as Linux fan, Linux afficinado, penguinista or Linux proponent, etc. It's interesting that you feel more insulted by being called a user than being called a lier.
ROTFL... While you may have a point (Unix had had its fair share of buffer overruns too...), you somewhat blew your credibility by your faux "educated Linux user who admits that MS is not all bad" attitude.
Who talked about Zimbabwe? There are other countries besides the US and Zimbabwe: Austria, the Christmas Islands, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israrel, Italy, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, Nieu, Norway, Poland, Russia, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, Tonga, The United Kingdom, just to name a few
you can't deny that the US is a significant portion of the west.
However, lately, Europe has rediscovered its self esteem, and doesn't hesitate to occasionnally give the finger to the US (see recent Echelon investigation, and some recent crypto decisions).
Only those copies that reside in the US. Unless the MPAA can get a judgment in all the other countries where DeCSS is hosted as well.
Librarians looking to do a fair use compilation won't dare use DeCSS-based decoding software.
Only those that have no spine.
The philosophy aside, the law does greatly impact things and should not be treated so lightly; we should be working within the system rather than ignoring it.
It's hard to take US law seriously when the judges themselves don't treat it with due respect.
Tux, the penguin has got a new mate. His name is Lewis. Oh, isn't he cute!
At my previous job, we had a similar situation: we were implementing a unique distributed timestamp generator which would generate timestamps which would fit in a very low number of bits (80, or sth even lower than that). Given that it was distributed, we had to include IP address and PID in the stamp. Suddenly we were noticing that we had so few bits left that we had to tradeoff lifetime of the project and number of timestamps that we could generate in a given lapse of time It was important to not make this too small, because that would limit the number of new objects that we could create in said lapse of time.
Eventually, we settled for a lifetime of 30 years. Which seemed quite low to me, so I inquired whether we had any logbook in house where we could mark the need for scheduled maintainance at a given date in the future (say 25 years from now, which would leave them 5 years to clean that thing away). There was no such procedure... We could still put the warning in our usual documentation, but who would look at that in 25 years? So now, we're in a situation where some poor Anderson Consultant will be scratching his head 30 years from now at a mysterious bug which had been identified from the start, but knowledge about which will have been lost because there was no formal way to write it down in a way that people will be alerted in time... The situation will be actually worse than for Y2K: for Y2K we at least knew we had to be careful, whereas this thing will strike out of the blue.
...did this lamer chose to write his web site as dark red text on a black background? Didn't he find any more unreadable combination? Quick tip: Select the text with the cursor; the yellow background makes it more readable (...hope this trick doesn't violate the DMCA...).
The reason why those shenanigans don't work in a polling station is obviously that the clerk would object if two persons tried to sneak into the same voting booth...
Actually, for this application you need higher anonimity standards than usual. For most applications, you do not need to be concerned about the user willfully giving up his anonymity. However, for voting, we must guarantee that the user cannot prove to a third party for which candidate he voted, even if we wanted. Indeed, if he could prove how he cast his vote, he could sell it, or cede to "mild" coercion.
With computer voting, proving how you voted is trivial: just let your buyer look over your shoulder as you cast your vote...or just give him your smartcard
Actually, that's more an argument against that system than in favor of it. Just replace give with sell and you've made possible the second most popular vote fraud (after death men voting): buying votes.
Indeed, protection from government pressure is not the only reason for anonymity. The other reason is that the voter cannot prove how he voted, and thus cannot sell his vote (because the buyer could never be sure whether the "goods" were delivered). In a digi-cash like system, buying votes becomes trivial: you just buy the unused tickets, and that's it.
They would simply reply "screw you". Well, actually they would word it more politely, but it would just that. Don't believe me? Just look at this story. And, never forget that it's somewhat hard to hand out your log files if your disk has just crashed...
It would be fun to compare it to the other organ...
Certain window coatings that are designed to block the sun's UV rays also have the unintended side effect of weakening the airwaves used by cellphones. Couldn't this be used to block cellphone usage in certain areas (operas, concerts, restaurants etc.)? Advantage: only the owner of the place can impose the restriction, rather than some random stranger who just happens to walk by and has a beef with cellphones. What's the matter about cellphone usage on a bus? It's a noisy place anyways. And what's the difference about learning about somebody's private life by overhearing a phone conversation, rather than by overhearing a conversation with their seat-neighbour?
... about how long it'll take until 205.177.226.233 becomes a DeCSS mirror? Or worse: until sysadmins will actually have a very good reason for getting their panties in a knot about packets from 205.177.226.233 . Oh gawd, and to make matters even worse, it's Friday!
Btw, does anybody know Quova's IP address range, so that we know what to block?
And the fact that this is foodwear would only be one of the reasons...
Moreover, producing energy from fossile fuels always produces heat in addition to the useful mechanical (or electrical) energy (this is a consequence of the 2nd thermodynamical principle). In a car, this heat is basically lost energy. In a stationary plant it can actually be reused for useful purposes ("cogeneration plants": they provide heating for nearby towns or industries in addition to electricity). Not to mention that it is easyer to finetune energy efficiency in a plant where you have basically no space constraints than in a car.
Or thanks to the wonders of corruption, lobbying and other palm greasings: Shouldn't we rather speak about a mongol horde under the command of a mugger?
... as long as it fits into their recipe? British MacDonalds use British beef (at least until it was widely known that this was a mad idea...), French MacDonalds use French potatoes for their fries etc. However, French cheese is the "wrong" variant (did you ever see a Roquefort Burger?), and so they have to import it from the US (or more likely from the Netherlands, as it is closer, and as they have some rather insipid cheese variants there as well...).
> why is there anything "illegal" about a private citizen, or a service agency hired by one of the victims, doing the trash picking?
The victim hired the service agency for the express purpose of cleaning, and he should be able to expect that the agency should stick to that task while on the victim's premises. To take a computer analogy, it's akin to a program that describes itself as a disk defragmenter, but that in reality also mails the contents of your Trash folder to Oracle. That's usually called a trojan horse.
... it's fairly easy for the FAA to come knocking at his door and just confiscate the whole mess. If you want to pull sth like this off without the proper paperwork, you keep it secret until D-day. And you keep a good excuse ready to tell neightbors and passers-by when they ask you what this rocket-shaped thing in your backyard is...
But they could always launch one from Sealand... if they solve the small technical problem of not exploding the island during the launch.