"That's hardly an indication of corruption - more like giving a local vendor the business so that the increase in their local economic activity pumps a piece of that company's revenue right back into the local tax base. That's more like recycling than corruption.
It really looks like they are propping up a corpse of a local company. Robbing Peter to pay Paul.
It looks like it was sweetheart deal (local politics here is totally corrupt), and the technology is a failure.
More freedom (e.g. take less taxes, let me spend my money on it if I want to) would only lead to more happiness. As it is, people who pay taxes are forced to support a WIFI system that does not work. And other similar crap, of course.
If anyone but the government did took your money and dumped it into crappy technology, you'd likley call it robbery or something less polite.
As nice as it would be to live in some communitarian utopia, we don't, and less taxation and more private property rights usually lead to a better outcome. At least, here, in this corrupt area (full of corrupt local officials and sweetheart deals), they do.
If the tech was so great, it would happen privately. Same as in the town mentioned in the article.
Although they've provided a useful service, they've made a point of suporting all sorts of liberal issues, which just seems holier-than-thou. Its a goddam e-fleamarket.
I don't care that you want tri-sexuals to be able to get married, government-paid sex-change operations, govt. money for my pet's sex change operation (my cat Felix is really a Felicia) and so on.
Amazon and Google have the sense to keep politics out of their business model.
Also, the article didn't mention Craigslist, which is really killing Ebay -- Craigslist is free.
If Martz wants to use the video game consoles and electricity of people to do his calculations, let him give the people something they want in return, like free games.
That would probably be enough to motivate a lot more people to turn their machines over to SETI.
The idea that people are going to let their machine run their crunching away, for free, for no benefit, is pretty stupid. The first distributed computing project to offer any sort of tschocke is likely to become more help.
Does anyone have any legal pointers to what Yahoo! was obligated to do (if anything)? I've tried looking for info on the relevant US law or case law, but I've not seen anything.
It seems clear that Yahoo! was operating a website in a hands off fashion. Slashdot does the same, right?
I can image a court could hold Yahoo! liable for any bits they serve (ala China or France), but that sounds un-American.
The various articles mention that Yahoo! cannot be held criminally liable. Does anyone have further info?
What about USENET? There's probably tons of illegal stuff floating around on that.
So if I build my own private internet, and don't connect it to the real internet, am I free of the logging requirement?
How about if I have my own virtual internet, running on top of the real internet? Do I become a virtual ISP and then I have to keep logs?
What if I don't use the same physical protocol to move bits? E.g. instead of volatages on a wire, I used morse code or smoke signals -- do I then esacpe the logging requirement?
How big can a LAN/WAN be before it becomes the internet (assuming it isn't connected to the unfree Al Gore created internetwork)?
What if the information is not contained in the protocols, but some side-channel? Do I, as an ISP (virtual or otherwise), have the duty to discover and provide "side-channel" logs?
It sounds like a distributed systems failure, alright.
Here is something about the system that might have broken. I'm wondering if the thing that failed really is the thing mentioned here -- the stuff the stuff Birman did. His new book on distributed systems is out, by the way.
Somone will get flying ninja-kicked in the nuts for this, you can be sure.
M$ now does "sweet deals" for them, to keep poor countries using M$. Apple should just give it away -- it is not like they'll ever sell software to Chinese/Russians/Brazilians anyway.
Giving them a version OSX that works on x86 (with different graphics due to the lack of the coprocessor) would help to displace Bill without costing them much in lost US/Japan/Europe sales.
Here's some inventions of Philip K. Dick (via technovelgy.com).
The technology described by Philip is definitely not in this list; the article's submitter is either lazy or cleverly attempting to sneak the dupe past the editors via his absurd PKD reference.
It seems a lot of interesting science happens at the spatial/topological/geometrical level.
E.g. those bioplaques can be real killers. Models of bacteria that assume they are all evenly distributed in 2-space or 3-space really don't cut it.
Same thing with blood vessels. They aren't solid tubes, like the plumbing in your house. There's all sorts of transverse stuff happening that doctors fail to model and take into consideration.
Or materials science -- all the "edge effects" that people like to ignore, because they are necessarily messy.
If this advance allows them to study different geometries of bacteria cheaply, that will be a big step -- they'll be able to run big batches of simulations of different layouts. Hopefully they'll get their models right and do better work.
Asking the question in terms of "Gates, alive or dead?" in this forum, is engaging in a variant of Reductio Ad Hitlerum.
Clearly most of us would be happy if he didn't exist, right?
Gates eats food. I guess food is bad. He lives in a house. I guess houses (at least, houses that look like giant crappy convention center/shopping malls) are bad too.
Using Gates as the lead-in to an article is likely to lead to a flamefest.
Well, to the extent that there are switching costs, M$ will milk those and figure out how to "extend" things. That's how they got into PDAs and phones anyway.
If customers start demanding that their "next" device work with their previous device's files, that's good for M$.
It is hard to see that there will be a free alternative that works with those files.
To put it another way, if M$ becomes more like Palm, they've got staying power (like Palm).
I think you are right about the 5 year period: with a PC, over time, your configuration gets more and more "brittle", as you add crap to it (increasing switching costs). With the phone, the fact that you don't add so much crap to it means it is more of a commodity.
Cell bandwidth capabilities may eventually ruin them, just as the internet is now: there will be a Google-like company that hosts the apps, and you'll just need one phone (with connectivity) to access your email, calendar, etc. If M$ can't do web services by then as well as whoever does it best, they are gone.
But don't they have a big and growing share of PDA/phones?
Many network appliance run non-Windows (duh!) But thats the area that is the least differentiated and amenable to competition. No wonder they avoid it for now.
But it seems they have some irritating traction in phones/PDAs.
This does matter. There is little network effect in boxes without UIs, but to the extend that M$ is on the phone/PDAs, they've got the user by the nuts again: he enters his data into the thing, he's got to get a compatible device for the upgrade. That gives Micro$oft a continuing stream of revenue for the same old crappy reasons.
I know it is against "not invented here", but why don't they take a decent BSD-licensed web-server, and then "embrace and extend" the thing to do their proprietary extensions?
If they've modularized their stuff, this should be possible. They've done this already with TCP/IP, Kerberos and so on.
The overall product, to the extent that it benefitted from the work of free BSD-licensed improvements, would be good for everybody.
The author misses the point a bit.
MicroSoft is getting into the embedded devices, as much as they can. Just check out this. MicroSoft can and is responding to the threat of cheap appliance hardware, by making sure their stuff winds up on those boxes. I'm horrified that so many phones/PDAs are running windows.
Microsoft made the jump from the 8-bit processors (don't even remember their numbers) to 64-bit processors. If they can move into embedded/Risc stuff, we're stuck with them for the next few decades.
That being said, the big threat to MicroSoft is from stuff like this and this -- these are threats that attack microsoft's franchise, but the only way they can compete is to play by the rules of the other guys: start giving away cheap computers that run Windows (and "just work" -- yeah, right, Billy! Hahahaha!), or start giving away web services that undercut their income-generating software. They have very low odds in these contests, considering that it does not fit with their "play to their strength" strategy to date (obligatory Borg reference).
"... [The authorities] found dozens of FTP servers in Israel and overseas, including the US. Haephrati is suspected of transferring stolen material from other computers to these FTP servers. The police realized the extent of the affair when they examined some of the files..."
If there was ever a time to be using encrypted volumes to store files, that was one of them.
The guy has fileservers full of self-incriminating evidence, but he can't even get his act together enough to strongly encrypt the thing? That's pretty damn sloppy.
If you did it right, all the cops would have was a bunch of bits, not stuff to put you away for a long time. This tells me the guy wasn't really trying hard enough. He needs to do it again, with feeling.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing to see here! Move along.
I think they need to give him a lethal injection of Viagra/Cialis.
"Surprise your girlfriend."
Forcibly lengthen his penis -- the punishment needs to fit the crime.
Thomas, Scalia and Renquist all dissented. It was the liberal/commies on the bench who were for the landgrabbing (Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer).
Hence, to those who say, we need more judges put there by Bush, I'd say, yeah, probably. At least they'd vote like Scalia, Thomas, Renquist, etc.
Even a judge that votes like O'Connor (often swayed by the dark side) would be better: on this one, she was for the citizens.
"That's hardly an indication of corruption - more like giving a local vendor the business so that the increase in their local economic activity pumps a piece of that company's revenue right back into the local tax base. That's more like recycling than corruption.
It really looks like they are propping up a corpse of a local company. Robbing Peter to pay Paul.
It looks like it was sweetheart deal (local politics here is totally corrupt), and the technology is a failure.
More freedom (e.g. take less taxes, let me spend my money on it if I want to) would only lead to more happiness. As it is, people who pay taxes are forced to support a WIFI system that does not work. And other similar crap, of course.
If anyone but the government did took your money and dumped it into crappy technology, you'd likley call it robbery or something less polite.
As nice as it would be to live in some communitarian utopia, we don't, and less taxation and more private property rights usually lead to a better outcome. At least, here, in this corrupt area (full of corrupt local officials and sweetheart deals), they do.
If the tech was so great, it would happen privately. Same as in the town mentioned in the article.
Please just give me money, you can have your government-subsidized WIFI.
We have this crap in my town (one of the first in the country). Word is, it totally sucks.
The company that provides the equipment is local; looks like a typical corrupt local govt. deal.
SF, on the other hand, was WIFI all over the place, due to people just having open APs.
I'm happy to see Ebay taste the sword.
Although they've provided a useful service, they've made a point of suporting all sorts of liberal issues, which just seems holier-than-thou. Its a goddam e-fleamarket.
I don't care that you want tri-sexuals to be able to get married, government-paid sex-change operations, govt. money for my pet's sex change operation (my cat Felix is really a Felicia) and so on.
Amazon and Google have the sense to keep politics out of their business model.
Also, the article didn't mention Craigslist, which is really killing Ebay -- Craigslist is free.
Wow. That's really something.
As an OpenBSD user, I think it is now time for me to crap in my pants, get a new pair, and then crap into my pants one more time.
Just look at Noyce, who had the same idea at the same time. It seems clear the time was ripe for the idea.
This is so often the case. The entire human race wasn't sitting still, waiting for the guy to make the transistor -- just 99.999999% of us.
If Martz wants to use the video game consoles and electricity of people to do his calculations, let him give the people something they want in return, like free games.
That would probably be enough to motivate a lot more people to turn their machines over to SETI.
The idea that people are going to let their machine run their crunching away, for free, for no benefit, is pretty stupid. The first distributed computing project to offer any sort of tschocke is likely to become more help.
Does anyone have any legal pointers to what Yahoo! was obligated to do (if anything)? I've tried looking for info on the relevant US law or case law, but I've not seen anything.
It seems clear that Yahoo! was operating a website in a hands off fashion. Slashdot does the same, right?
I can image a court could hold Yahoo! liable for any bits they serve (ala China or France), but that sounds un-American.
The various articles mention that Yahoo! cannot be held criminally liable. Does anyone have further info?
What about USENET? There's probably tons of illegal stuff floating around on that.
So if I build my own private internet, and don't connect it to the real internet, am I free of the logging requirement?
How about if I have my own virtual internet, running on top of the real internet? Do I become a virtual ISP and then I have to keep logs?
What if I don't use the same physical protocol to move bits? E.g. instead of volatages on a wire, I used morse code or smoke signals -- do I then esacpe the logging requirement?
How big can a LAN/WAN be before it becomes the internet (assuming it isn't connected to the unfree Al Gore created internetwork)?
What if the information is not contained in the protocols, but some side-channel? Do I, as an ISP (virtual or otherwise), have the duty to discover and provide "side-channel" logs?
It sounds like a distributed systems failure, alright.
Here is something about the system that might have broken. I'm wondering if the thing that failed really is the thing mentioned here -- the stuff the stuff Birman did. His new book on distributed systems is out, by the way.
Somone will get flying ninja-kicked in the nuts for this, you can be sure.
Poor countries.
M$ now does "sweet deals" for them, to keep poor countries using M$. Apple should just give it away -- it is not like they'll ever sell software to Chinese/Russians/Brazilians anyway.
Giving them a version OSX that works on x86 (with different graphics due to the lack of the coprocessor) would help to displace Bill without costing them much in lost US/Japan/Europe sales.
Last week it was Earthlink subsidizing Linux boxes. This week its that 16% of all computers out there are really Macs.
Hopefully next month it is that Google has made some M$ cash cow redundant (and universally available with any browser).
If only Apple would announce free (as in beer) software for the developing world (or x86s), and throw another monkeywrench into Billy's plans.
Here's some inventions of Philip K. Dick (via technovelgy.com).
The technology described by Philip is definitely not in this list; the article's submitter is either lazy or cleverly attempting to sneak the dupe past the editors via his absurd PKD reference.
Andy - an artificial human
Autofac (Nanorobots) - a factory that can replicate itself
Bubblehead - big-head brainiacs
Claws (Guard Robot)
Commuter Cooling Unit - portable air conditioning
Dr. Smile - psychiatrist in a suitcase
Electric Sheep - livestock as consumer electronics
Embryonic Robots - early scifi nanobots?
Empathy Box - TV for your emotional brain
Extra-Factual Memory - an implanted memory
Homeopape - news just you can use
Kipple - non-recycled paper.
Mood Organ - play your partner
Nanny - child-care robot with punch
Nexus-6 Brain Unit - meet my friend Roy
Penfield Wave Transmitter - an emotional brain remote control
Perky Pat Microworld - playset for grownups
Precrime Analytical Wing - precogs babble, machines tabulate
Replicant - an artificial human
Robot Cab Driver- everybody's got problems
LOL ROFLMAO!
[sorry -- I really couldn't resist]
Microsoft eats own dogfood, suffers serious indigestion.
I'd love to see Gates have a tantrum over this one. Someone is going to get flying-ninja kicked in the nuts.
From Netcraft:
/ /www.msn.co.kr
Windows Server 2003
Microsoft-IIS/6.0 9-Dec-2004
http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http:
It seems a lot of interesting science happens at the spatial/topological/geometrical level.
E.g. those bioplaques can be real killers. Models of bacteria that assume they are all evenly distributed in 2-space or 3-space really don't cut it.
Same thing with blood vessels. They aren't solid tubes, like the plumbing in your house. There's all sorts of transverse stuff happening that doctors fail to model and take into consideration.
Or materials science -- all the "edge effects" that people like to ignore, because they are necessarily messy.
If this advance allows them to study different geometries of bacteria cheaply, that will be a big step -- they'll be able to run big batches of simulations of different layouts. Hopefully they'll get their models right and do better work.
Asking the question in terms of "Gates, alive or dead?" in this forum, is engaging in a variant of Reductio Ad Hitlerum.
Clearly most of us would be happy if he didn't exist, right?
Gates eats food. I guess food is bad. He lives in a house. I guess houses (at least, houses that look like giant crappy convention center/shopping malls) are bad too.
Using Gates as the lead-in to an article is likely to lead to a flamefest.
Well, to the extent that there are switching costs, M$ will milk those and figure out how to "extend" things. That's how they got into PDAs and phones anyway. If customers start demanding that their "next" device work with their previous device's files, that's good for M$.
It is hard to see that there will be a free alternative that works with those files.
To put it another way, if M$ becomes more like Palm, they've got staying power (like Palm).
I think you are right about the 5 year period: with a PC, over time, your configuration gets more and more "brittle", as you add crap to it (increasing switching costs). With the phone, the fact that you don't add so much crap to it means it is more of a commodity.
Cell bandwidth capabilities may eventually ruin them, just as the internet is now: there will be a Google-like company that hosts the apps, and you'll just need one phone (with connectivity) to access your email, calendar, etc. If M$ can't do web services by then as well as whoever does it best, they are gone.
The one that springs to mind is thttpd.
It is small and fast. If M$ has modularlized things, they should be able to extend thttpd and make it work for them.
Here are some benchmarks.
But don't they have a big and growing share of PDA/phones?
Many network appliance run non-Windows (duh!) But thats the area that is the least differentiated and amenable to competition. No wonder they avoid it for now.
But it seems they have some irritating traction in phones/PDAs.
This does matter. There is little network effect in boxes without UIs, but to the extend that M$ is on the phone/PDAs, they've got the user by the nuts again: he enters his data into the thing, he's got to get a compatible device for the upgrade. That gives Micro$oft a continuing stream of revenue for the same old crappy reasons.
I know it is against "not invented here", but why don't they take a decent BSD-licensed web-server, and then "embrace and extend" the thing to do their proprietary extensions?
If they've modularized their stuff, this should be possible. They've done this already with TCP/IP, Kerberos and so on.
The overall product, to the extent that it benefitted from the work of free BSD-licensed improvements, would be good for everybody.
The author misses the point a bit. MicroSoft is getting into the embedded devices, as much as they can. Just check out this. MicroSoft can and is responding to the threat of cheap appliance hardware, by making sure their stuff winds up on those boxes. I'm horrified that so many phones/PDAs are running windows.
Microsoft made the jump from the 8-bit processors (don't even remember their numbers) to 64-bit processors. If they can move into embedded/Risc stuff, we're stuck with them for the next few decades.
That being said, the big threat to MicroSoft is from stuff like this and this -- these are threats that attack microsoft's franchise, but the only way they can compete is to play by the rules of the other guys: start giving away cheap computers that run Windows (and "just work" -- yeah, right, Billy! Hahahaha!), or start giving away web services that undercut their income-generating software. They have very low odds in these contests, considering that it does not fit with their "play to their strength" strategy to date (obligatory Borg reference).
"... [The authorities] found dozens of FTP servers in Israel and overseas, including the US. Haephrati is suspected of transferring stolen material from other computers to these FTP servers. The police realized the extent of the affair when they examined some of the files..."
If there was ever a time to be using encrypted volumes to store files, that was one of them.
The guy has fileservers full of self-incriminating evidence, but he can't even get his act together enough to strongly encrypt the thing? That's pretty damn sloppy.
If you did it right, all the cops would have was a bunch of bits, not stuff to put you away for a long time. This tells me the guy wasn't really trying hard enough. He needs to do it again, with feeling.