Rats are surprisingly smart creatures. They've been living close to humans for a few thousand years, and the humans have constantly been trying to kill them. They've managed to thrive (not just survive) because they are highly adapted to humans trying to catch and kil them.
They do better on some problems than dogs -- e.g. they don't fall for bait. They are terribly suspicious (paranoid) of any changes in their environment. Supposedly they have "culture" in the sense that a colony of rats (and their descendants down many generations) can learn to avoid certain types of food that they have reason (e.g. humans poisoning them) to avoid.
So it isn't at all surprising that the rat was able to best the humans! I'm surprised they caught the thing at all.
MicroSoft shareholders (the owners -- including Billy Gates) don't care if Ballmer throws chairs. I just want that stock price, up up UP!!!! UP !!! UP!!!
I don't care going google, froogle, joogle or shitoogle. I just want the stock price up.
Clearly the chair story is driving him nuts, or he'd have ignored it, the way he should have.
How about S-expressions? Those are from 1959 or so -- the birth of lisp.
That stuff is just based on the Lambda Calculus -- from the 30s.
And then there's just plain old "mathematical notation" -- I just don't see how this stuff, if it is as abstract as XML, isn't going to just be mathematical notation. Which goes back to what -- Ancient China? The Assyrians?
Sorry: I screwed up my formatting and punctuation. Here it is again, this time with feeling.
There are laws that say that the employer assumes the liability for the employees -- unless the employee is acting so bad (e.g. going out of his way to kill someone) that you then say the employee is acting badly.
This is why, for example, Domino's contracts with drivers to provide pizza delivery services: Domino's doesn't want the liability for auto accidents.
I guess the law could be changed, but that's basically how it goes now. I don't see how it could go any other way: e.g. Billy Gates tells you to ship Windows Clusterfuck Edition now, or you are fired.
You then say, "But Billy, there's 10,000 bugs in Windows CFE -- people will suffer damages if we ship now?" Or do you say, "Yes master," slink away and ship what you know is a bunch of crap.
There are laws that say that the employer assumes the liability for the employees -- unless the employee is acting so bad (e.g. going out of his way to kill someone) that you then say the employee is acting badly.
This is why, for example, Domino's contracts with drivers to provide pizza delivery services: Domino's doesn't want the liability for auto accidents.
I guess the law could be changed, but that's basically how it goes now. I don't see how it could go any other way: e.g. Billy Gates tells you to ship, or you are fired. You then say, "But Billy, there's 10,000 bugs in windows -- people will suffer damages if we ship now?" Or do you say, "yes master, slink away and ship what you know is a bunch of crap?"
You can't expect much in the way of security improvements at Microsoft -- MicroSoft does things to make money. If security costs money for them, or causes the support desks of their customers to take a lot of bullshit calls, they won't do it.
Furthermore, if they were to start prioritizing security (or just plain old "quality") over the task of "making money", their shareholders would be very unhappy.
I think the only thing that could cause them to take it seriously would be some sort of PC-aids: a worm that would linger, damaging business data and hardware -- such that customers would decide to finally junk Windows.
This is very different from other businesses. E.g. if Paypal screws up their security, they will go out of business. So Paypal probably has some awesome security.
I submitted it on the 29th, with more info about Adaptec's RAID b.s. and the wireless cards.
http://openbsd/ 3.8 and RAID Thursday September 29, @12:00AM Rejected
Slashdot takes a long time to cover things -- e.g. days or weeks. Other news sources ARE more up to date. Yet people still seem to come here, if only to complain about Zonk's dupes, rejected news stories that pop up later, and so on.
I call the continuing popularity of Slashdot, in spite of its mediocrity, the "Slashdot Paradox".
Friday, October 7, 2005 at 05:00 JST
NAGOYA -- Toyota Motor Corp said Thursday it has developed a new
species of the Cherry Sage shrub family that effectively absorbs
harmful substances in the air.
The new species, called Kirsch Pink, will be sold for 380 yen per pot
through Toyota Roof Garden Co, a Toyota Motor subsidiary, from March
next year. While Cherry Sage plants are known to absorb nitrogen
oxide, sulfur dioxide and other harmful substances in the air, the new
species does so 1.3 times more effectively, the automaker said.
One neat thing about making it open source is that it will continue to live on forever, even if there is some big hiatus where nobody works on it.
That's the case with BSD -- although the market share is small, it simply can't be killed off (unless all the BSD guys die off). Even RMS admits as much -- as much as it would be nice if the developers all worked on one thing for the common good, there's just no way to kil off BSD and force people to bow down to the Penguin.
Same thing with Dragonfly -- I'd be happy if they could somehow work with the NetBSD folks -- but instead, there is the Dragonfly version of BSD, and there's nothing that I, RMS or Billy Gates can do about it.
I didn't see that in my quick research on that case. I can imagine the pro-Percy folks want to keep a big fucking lid on that, because it makes him look like a sneaky bastard.
But there's still a general problem with Monsanto's tech (as opposed to music downloads) -- it is possible for someone like Percy to just "find" it on his property, because the pollen blows around. Bootlegged music doesn't just find its way on to my harddrive, and settle in amongst the legally copyrighted stuff.
So someone who doesn't even want that stuff gets it.
In the case of the humans, suppose a guy gets some gene therapy. He impregnates an unsuspecting woman. Then the gene company sues the woman or woman's kid, because the kid has the patented genes.
You mentioned farmers/seeds, so I didn't get that you were still talking about humans. I figure a lot don't know about Percy Schmeiser. From that article:
"In my case, I never had anything to do with Monsanto, outside of buying chemicals. I never signed a contract," Schmeiser says. At the end of the first suit, Schmeiser says he will pursue a second lawsuit he filed last fall against Monsanto for contaminating his seed.
One way the human patented genes thing could play out is if some company did gene therapy on you -- giving you patented genes, perhaps to cure an illness. Suppose the "fix" even gets into your sperm. Then you have kids, and pass on the patented genes -- well, it is time to pay up for your infringement.
I don't think such patents should be allowed. It's like a company owning a piece of me -- and I wasn't even paid for it!"
Actually, you should just be glad that they won't be like the parasires from the RIAA and sue you for patent infringement. Trillions of acts of patent infringement -- one for each act of transcription. It all adds up.
A release of Windows doesn't interest me; running Windows is against my security policy.
I would be happier if the source leaked so that the worm writers can cook up some nice worm releases.
On this topic, have any super worms been created as a result of the leaked windows code? There was lots of talk about how the leaking of windows would allow bad guys to find and exploit flaws that otherwise would remain unexploited.
This issue -- MS moving into the security market -- has always struck me as a non-issue.
If MS just did their job and made a secure OS, like OpenBSD (or the other BSDs), there wouldn't be a huge market for security band-aids.
E.g. suppose MS began to apply formal methods, semi-formal methods, code reviews and so on in an effort to eliminate sources of insecurity -- yet did not sell a single "security" product. Not even a Snort.
Would the EU then claim that MS was taking away their oxygen supply of the "security" band-aid selling companies?
EBay doesn't hope that the new purchase will offset the loss from their bad purchase. That wouldn't make sense -- that's done, and it is in the past.
If it is good to by Verisign, they'd buy Verisign, whether or not they bought Skype. Unless buying Skype (and paying too much) was the very thing that allowed them to buy a chunk of Verisign.
The purchase of Skype is what's called a "sunk cost".
When you buy enough of the chips, you are essentially paying for the raw materials only, plus whatever wear and tear you've got on the factory. This is because another way to get the same thing would be to rent a factory for the time period, buy the raw materials, and run the equipment to produce the finished goods. If the price asked for diverges much from the alternative, you'd take the alternative -- e.g. you'd see Apple renting a factory for a few years, and renting staff and IP in order to produce the goods.
However, I can't for the life of me figure out why the Korean FTC would have a problem with Samsung. I have to figure that Samsung peeved someone in the Korean govt. (or US govt.) and someone with a political beef with Samsung is making up some ridiculous charges. Because it boggles the mind why Samsung would do something so awful for business like selling crap below market.
The only scenario like this that I can see is that having a guarantee of massive volume from Apple allowed Samsung to invest even more heavily into their production, putting them ahead of their competitors. So they figured, "even if we lose a bit on Apple, we'll get our costs per item lower so we'll survive the coming price war."
There's nothing magical about USB, or even a local disk.
The key issue isn't that the data is on a USB disk, but that it is easy enough for you to carry around all your data (including OS and apps). E.g. compact flash would suffice. Or serial flash.
Furthermore, just having secure access to the data (perhaps over the internet) would suffice. Imagine a system where to boot up, the PC fetches your data off the web. Perhaps you use a kind of use-once key to access some of the data, with which the PC computes.
The thing I've not been satisfied with yet is the idea that the PC itself would engage in a man-in-the-middle attack. E.g. it stores a copy of whatever data you've accessed (off your USB, compact flash or network storage) -- and the bad guy gets that stuff later. There's no defense against this attack, because the PC is doing the processing.
E.g. imagine a compromised PC running something like bochs. It emulates a real PC, but gives away your secrets.
The music people are greedy and clever -- like this guy, Bronfman -- he's descended from Jewish bootleggers (organized criminals).
These people are very smart, and they want their money. E.g. they want that Google should pay them a cut of search-related ads.
You might think it is the height of chutzpah, but really, these are just greedy, Talmudic entertainment bosses who are used to living off the creative efforts of others. E.g. first the jazzmen, then rock n' rollers, and now "urban" musicians.
The author went on to make a very fast GC that set speed records.
If you are looking for factual arguments, with performance measurements and so on, just look at his work over the last few decades -- you'll see he did a lot of work in these very practical areas.
When you see how productive guys like him can be, it makes me wish that some people would just stay alive, and keep working, for a few hundred years more, instead of our typical mortal lifespans.
Why are people so illogical about the RIAA?
on
RIAA Sues a Child
·
· Score: 1
I don't understand why folks think this is so surprising:
The RIAA knew the Chan's computer did some downloading. Momma waited until the last minute to claim it wasn't she who did the downloading. Momma refused to take responsibility for her daughter. Now the RIAA has to go after the daughter.
If they just drop the case, where does it end? If they don't smash this smartass momma and her kid, they might as well go out of business. Their job now is to make momma Chan rue the day she ever let her kid do this. The bit about the legal guardian has to do with momma Chan refusing to take responsibility for daughter Chan.
The world is full of folks like the momma who will try to screw over the RIAA. That's what Napster showed -- people want free music, and don't care about paying for it. So the RIAA has to get tough.
At least the RIAA didn't send in the cops and their own thugs to bust the family, and then have a pizza party in her livingroom, like they did recently at Kim's video -- this one is really out there:
My journal (http://yro.slashdot.org/~putko/journal/) has more on this topic; this one is a watershed event, as the RIAA is going after mixtapes -- the viral marketing method favored by "urban" musicians.
Re:If everyone has to re-write the fix ...
on
Sun Eyes PostgreSQL
·
· Score: 1
My point is that without being forced to by any license, people normally contribute their work for free.
E.g. I fix a bug in NetBSD. I'm quite likely to contribute the fix back, if only so I can avoid work when I get a new release. Most BSD people are perfectly happy to share fixes. So it happens anyway.
The GPL also doesn't require one to distribute fixes. E.g. I've fixed bugs in GPL code, and not been required by the license to give them to anyone -- I didn't distribute my program.
There are licenses that require that if you fix something, you give others the fix, even if you don't distribute the code.
Perhaps that's the sort of license you really want. That's neither GPL or BSD though.
Slashdot Mirror
Rats are surprisingly smart creatures. They've been living close to humans for a few thousand years, and the humans have constantly been trying to kill them. They've managed to thrive (not just survive) because they are highly adapted to humans trying to catch and kil them.
They do better on some problems than dogs -- e.g. they don't fall for bait. They are terribly suspicious (paranoid) of any changes in their environment. Supposedly they have "culture" in the sense that a colony of rats (and their descendants down many generations) can learn to avoid certain types of food that they have reason (e.g. humans poisoning them) to avoid.
So it isn't at all surprising that the rat was able to best the humans! I'm surprised they caught the thing at all.
MicroSoft shareholders (the owners -- including Billy Gates) don't care if Ballmer throws chairs. I just want that stock price, up up UP!!!! UP !!! UP!!!
I don't care going google, froogle, joogle or shitoogle. I just want the stock price up.
Clearly the chair story is driving him nuts, or he'd have ignored it, the way he should have.
How about S-expressions? Those are from 1959 or so -- the birth of lisp.
That stuff is just based on the Lambda Calculus -- from the 30s.
And then there's just plain old "mathematical notation" -- I just don't see how this stuff, if it is as abstract as XML, isn't going to just be mathematical notation. Which goes back to what -- Ancient China? The Assyrians?
Sorry: I screwed up my formatting and punctuation. Here it is again, this time with feeling.
There are laws that say that the employer assumes the liability for the employees -- unless the employee is acting so bad (e.g. going out of his way to kill someone) that you then say the employee is acting badly.
This is why, for example, Domino's contracts with drivers to provide pizza delivery services: Domino's doesn't want the liability for auto accidents.
I guess the law could be changed, but that's basically how it goes now. I don't see how it could go any other way: e.g. Billy Gates tells you to ship Windows Clusterfuck Edition now, or you are fired.
You then say, "But Billy, there's 10,000 bugs in Windows CFE -- people will suffer damages if we ship now?" Or do you say, "Yes master," slink away and ship what you know is a bunch of crap.
There are laws that say that the employer assumes the liability for the employees -- unless the employee is acting so bad (e.g. going out of his way to kill someone) that you then say the employee is acting badly. This is why, for example, Domino's contracts with drivers to provide pizza delivery services: Domino's doesn't want the liability for auto accidents. I guess the law could be changed, but that's basically how it goes now. I don't see how it could go any other way: e.g. Billy Gates tells you to ship, or you are fired. You then say, "But Billy, there's 10,000 bugs in windows -- people will suffer damages if we ship now?" Or do you say, "yes master, slink away and ship what you know is a bunch of crap?"
You can't expect much in the way of security improvements at Microsoft -- MicroSoft does things to make money. If security costs money for them, or causes the support desks of their customers to take a lot of bullshit calls, they won't do it.
Furthermore, if they were to start prioritizing security (or just plain old "quality") over the task of "making money", their shareholders would be very unhappy.
I think the only thing that could cause them to take it seriously would be some sort of PC-aids: a worm that would linger, damaging business data and hardware -- such that customers would decide to finally junk Windows.
This is very different from other businesses. E.g. if Paypal screws up their security, they will go out of business. So Paypal probably has some awesome security.
Slashdot takes a long time to cover things -- e.g. days or weeks. Other news sources ARE more up to date. Yet people still seem to come here, if only to complain about Zonk's dupes, rejected news stories that pop up later, and so on.
I call the continuing popularity of Slashdot, in spite of its mediocrity, the "Slashdot Paradox".
Any ideas as to what is going wrong?
Toyota devises shrub to purify, cool air
Friday, October 7, 2005 at 05:00 JST
NAGOYA -- Toyota Motor Corp said Thursday it has developed a new
species of the Cherry Sage shrub family that effectively absorbs
harmful substances in the air.
The new species, called Kirsch Pink, will be sold for 380 yen per pot
through Toyota Roof Garden Co, a Toyota Motor subsidiary, from March
next year. While Cherry Sage plants are known to absorb nitrogen
oxide, sulfur dioxide and other harmful substances in the air, the new
species does so 1.3 times more effectively, the automaker said.
One neat thing about making it open source is that it will continue to live on forever, even if there is some big hiatus where nobody works on it.
That's the case with BSD -- although the market share is small, it simply can't be killed off (unless all the BSD guys die off). Even RMS admits as much -- as much as it would be nice if the developers all worked on one thing for the common good, there's just no way to kil off BSD and force people to bow down to the Penguin.
Same thing with Dragonfly -- I'd be happy if they could somehow work with the NetBSD folks -- but instead, there is the Dragonfly version of BSD, and there's nothing that I, RMS or Billy Gates can do about it.
Thanks for that info!
I didn't see that in my quick research on that case. I can imagine the pro-Percy folks want to keep a big fucking lid on that, because it makes him look like a sneaky bastard.
But there's still a general problem with Monsanto's tech (as opposed to music downloads) -- it is possible for someone like Percy to just "find" it on his property, because the pollen blows around. Bootlegged music doesn't just find its way on to my harddrive, and settle in amongst the legally copyrighted stuff.
So someone who doesn't even want that stuff gets it.
In the case of the humans, suppose a guy gets some gene therapy. He impregnates an unsuspecting woman. Then the gene company sues the woman or woman's kid, because the kid has the patented genes.
I was thinking of this: http://www.percyschmeiser.com/conflict.htm
You mentioned farmers/seeds, so I didn't get that you were still talking about humans. I figure a lot don't know about Percy Schmeiser. From that article:
"In my case, I never had anything to do with Monsanto, outside of buying chemicals. I never signed a contract," Schmeiser says. At the end of the first suit, Schmeiser says he will pursue a second lawsuit he filed last fall against Monsanto for contaminating his seed.
One way the human patented genes thing could play out is if some company did gene therapy on you -- giving you patented genes, perhaps to cure an illness. Suppose the "fix" even gets into your sperm. Then you have kids, and pass on the patented genes -- well, it is time to pay up for your infringement.
Here's a nice review of the application of this legal doctrine to cyperspace disputes. It includes bulk email and so on.
You use the future tense, but that's already happened, right?
I don't think such patents should be allowed. It's like a company owning a piece of me -- and I wasn't even paid for it!"
Actually, you should just be glad that they won't be like the parasires from the RIAA and sue you for patent infringement. Trillions of acts of patent infringement -- one for each act of transcription. It all adds up.
Here is his explanation -- it goes over the transformations he had to make to the program to smuggle it past Myspace's filters.
And here is his version of the story.
He comes off as a sweet practical joker. But maybe that's just b.s. that he cooked up after he realized he might have some 'splainin' to do.
Also, his site really is "namb.la" -- he's making some sort of joke at NAMBDLA's expense, which is pretty suspect, I think.
A release of Windows doesn't interest me; running Windows is against my security policy.
I would be happier if the source leaked so that the worm writers can cook up some nice worm releases.
On this topic, have any super worms been created as a result of the leaked windows code? There was lots of talk about how the leaking of windows would allow bad guys to find and exploit flaws that otherwise would remain unexploited.
Has that happened?
This issue -- MS moving into the security market -- has always struck me as a non-issue.
If MS just did their job and made a secure OS, like OpenBSD (or the other BSDs), there wouldn't be a huge market for security band-aids.
E.g. suppose MS began to apply formal methods, semi-formal methods, code reviews and so on in an effort to eliminate sources of insecurity -- yet did not sell a single "security" product. Not even a Snort.
Would the EU then claim that MS was taking away their oxygen supply of the "security" band-aid selling companies?
EBay doesn't hope that the new purchase will offset the loss from their bad purchase. That wouldn't make sense -- that's done, and it is in the past.
If it is good to by Verisign, they'd buy Verisign, whether or not they bought Skype. Unless buying Skype (and paying too much) was the very thing that allowed them to buy a chunk of Verisign.
The purchase of Skype is what's called a "sunk cost".
When you buy enough of the chips, you are essentially paying for the raw materials only, plus whatever wear and tear you've got on the factory. This is because another way to get the same thing would be to rent a factory for the time period, buy the raw materials, and run the equipment to produce the finished goods. If the price asked for diverges much from the alternative, you'd take the alternative -- e.g. you'd see Apple renting a factory for a few years, and renting staff and IP in order to produce the goods.
However, I can't for the life of me figure out why the Korean FTC would have a problem with Samsung. I have to figure that Samsung peeved someone in the Korean govt. (or US govt.) and someone with a political beef with Samsung is making up some ridiculous charges. Because it boggles the mind why Samsung would do something so awful for business like selling crap below market.
The only scenario like this that I can see is that having a guarantee of massive volume from Apple allowed Samsung to invest even more heavily into their production, putting them ahead of their competitors. So they figured, "even if we lose a bit on Apple, we'll get our costs per item lower so we'll survive the coming price war."
There's nothing magical about USB, or even a local disk.
The key issue isn't that the data is on a USB disk, but that it is easy enough for you to carry around all your data (including OS and apps). E.g. compact flash would suffice. Or serial flash.
Furthermore, just having secure access to the data (perhaps over the internet) would suffice. Imagine a system where to boot up, the PC fetches your data off the web. Perhaps you use a kind of use-once key to access some of the data, with which the PC computes.
The thing I've not been satisfied with yet is the idea that the PC itself would engage in a man-in-the-middle attack. E.g. it stores a copy of whatever data you've accessed (off your USB, compact flash or network storage) -- and the bad guy gets that stuff later. There's no defense against this attack, because the PC is doing the processing.
E.g. imagine a compromised PC running something like bochs. It emulates a real PC, but gives away your secrets.
The music people are greedy and clever -- like this guy, Bronfman -- he's descended from Jewish bootleggers (organized criminals).
These people are very smart, and they want their money. E.g. they want that Google should pay them a cut of search-related ads.
You might think it is the height of chutzpah, but really, these are just greedy, Talmudic entertainment bosses who are used to living off the creative efforts of others. E.g. first the jazzmen, then rock n' rollers, and now "urban" musicians.
Here is a paper (PostScript) from 1987 on the topic of GC being faster than manual allocation.
The author went on to make a very fast GC that set speed records.
If you are looking for factual arguments, with performance measurements and so on, just look at his work over the last few decades -- you'll see he did a lot of work in these very practical areas.
When you see how productive guys like him can be, it makes me wish that some people would just stay alive, and keep working, for a few hundred years more, instead of our typical mortal lifespans.
I don't understand why folks think this is so surprising:
a id_on_mondo_k.html
The RIAA knew the Chan's computer did some downloading.
Momma waited until the last minute to claim it wasn't she who did the downloading.
Momma refused to take responsibility for her daughter.
Now the RIAA has to go after the daughter.
If they just drop the case, where does it end? If they don't smash this smartass momma and her kid, they might as well go out of business. Their job now is to make momma Chan rue the day she ever let her kid do this. The bit about the legal guardian has to do with momma Chan refusing to take responsibility for daughter Chan.
The world is full of folks like the momma who will try to screw over the RIAA. That's what Napster showed -- people want free music, and don't care about paying for it. So the RIAA has to get tough.
At least the RIAA didn't send in the cops and their own thugs to bust the family, and then have a pizza party in her livingroom, like they did recently at Kim's video -- this one is really out there:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2005/06/r
My journal (http://yro.slashdot.org/~putko/journal/) has more on this topic; this one is a watershed event, as the RIAA is going after mixtapes -- the viral marketing method favored by "urban" musicians.
My point is that without being forced to by any license, people normally contribute their work for free.
E.g. I fix a bug in NetBSD. I'm quite likely to contribute the fix back, if only so I can avoid work when I get a new release. Most BSD people are perfectly happy to share fixes. So it happens anyway.
The GPL also doesn't require one to distribute fixes. E.g. I've fixed bugs in GPL code, and not been required by the license to give them to anyone -- I didn't distribute my program.
There are licenses that require that if you fix something, you give others the fix, even if you don't distribute the code.
Perhaps that's the sort of license you really want. That's neither GPL or BSD though.