Demonstrate you can use a computer responsibly and you can get an SSL-like certificate from any number of private companies and other organizations saying so.
That's like University degrees though. It doesn't prevent some company from selling cheap degrees over the Internet. One of those private companies would start selling certificates with really low standards, and they'd be tremendously successful, because there's a huge market of people out there who didn't meet the other companies' standards.
Now you could start discriminating between different certificate authorities, just like Human Resources will discriminate between a B.S. from MIT and one from "Bob's Online Unarversity". This isn't really a new thing, a lot of places used to block stuff coming from aol.com or hotmail.com, 'cause they wanted to keep out the newbies and lamers, but that's not much of a solution for most people.
If I apply for a job somewhere, and the hiring manager doesn't know about spyware or locking down services, I can't afford to block his emails just because he's not leet. The problem is that when you start putting up barriers on a system that was designed to connect people, you start limiting its usefulness. There is no easy solution to that problem.
It's "News for Nerds" because Amazon is practically the icon of the dotcom era, and most nerds I know still shop there frequently. The cost and convenience of shipping from major online stores is one of the most important factors in "eBusiness", which is in turn responsible for a lot of the jobs, technology, and awareness of the IT people who read Slashdot.
However, both the original poster and you assume that other fellow's lawyers' right to read anything that you've written is natural and obvious.
No, the original poster isn't even addressing rights.
The advice to "Never write anything in a letter, e-mail, diary, memo or any other quotable medium that you don't want the other guys lawyer holding up in court." is more like the advice to lock your doors, or for young girls not to walk alone in bad neighborhoods at night. It's not that we assume others have the right to victimize us, but we live in an imperfect world, where people do things we don't feel they have a right to do. If you wish to do well in this imperfect world, you should take some precautions.
Selmer Bringsjord, the RPI professor leading this project, is previously known for having created a program, "Brutus", which composes and writes original stories on the subject of betrayal.
Calling someone a jackass for inserting a political jab into a programming language article isn't censorship.
"We need to be able to talk about issues, in any manner we like, without fear of reprisal."
Reprisal from who? If I go into a movie theater and start ranting about Microsoft business policies in the middle of a movie, there will probably be angry reprisals from the audience and the theater management. If I say something tremendously insulting to someone I care about, I will probably see "reprisals" from it.
This isn't about free speech being censored by the evil forces of political correctness. This is one citizen doing something crass and dumb, and another citizen calling him on it.
"The program does not distinguish between legal and illegal copies, as it is up to the user to determine whether the files found by the program have been acquired legally, or whether the material should be deleted."
Oh, hey, I already have that program!
It's called "dir"
My friend has a Unix version called "ls"
Slashdot comments tend towards anecdotal evidence. "I hate Windows, I only run Linux on my servers, and the people I know hate Windows, therefore Windows is declining" rather than "The following link is to surveys showing a decline in IT spending on Microsoft products"
and when you hear enough of the former, you start to get the impression that everyone thinks that way.
Given when these numbers are from, most people who paid Microsoft a dime didn't have a choice.. because it came pre-loaded on the machine
Those people didn't pay Microsoft, they paid Dell. They did that willingly, because they wanted that computer for that price. Dell then paid Microsoft, willingly, because selling computers with Microsoft Windows on them is a far more profitable business than selling computers without Microsoft Windows on them. In both cases the money is given willingly, which is not the case with taxes.
I know it's a joke, but binary can't be inputed with only one button (well, you couldn't do it well. it's binary not Morse code).
Yes, it was a joke, but just to clear this up, there are many different ways to enter binary with only one button.
Morse code is binary, since it is a system that encodes values in digits that have only two possible values. You could call dot "0" and dash "1" or vise versa, but "binary" doesn't require that the two values be named "0" and "1", it just requires that each digit have only two possible values.
As another poster mentions, you could provide a clock pulse, either through sound (think metronome), the monitor, or force-feedback.
You could also interpret a "click" as "zero", and a "double-click" as a "one" (think the "blink once for no, twice for yes" system)
So that's three types of ways to do it, just off the top of my head.
Re:Could see more like this in the future
on
SBC Might Buy AT&T
·
· Score: 1
First of all, Skype isn't a serious competitor with the traditional telcos. Vonage steals way more business than Skype does, and even that is probably a small blip on the radar.
Secondly, Skype and Vonage both rely on you having a broadband Internet connection, which half the people are paying the telcos for anyway. Comcast and Time Warner cable modems are a much bigger threat to telco profits than Skype and Vonage.
And finally, the bulk of the people who are giving up landlines are giving them up in favor of their cell phones. Most of the wireless companies are branches of the traditional telcos, and require traditional telco infrastructure to connect the zillion cell towers.
No, the sky isn't falling on "traditional phone companies".
I don't see why anyone needs more than one button. I don't even use a keyboard. The computer is in binary anyway, I just tap the data in with my one-button. It's a much simpler interface, really.
Sony isn't a single entity that makes decisions, it's multiple businesses with sometimes conflicting goals. This article isn't the Sony that brought you ATRAC saying "I made a mistake." This is other divisions from Sony, who were against ATRAC from the start, continuing to complain about it.
See, Sony has a huge content-producing media business, and they also have a huge media-device business. The former wants all media-devices in the world equipped with DRM and copyright-protection mechanisms, while the latter wants to make devices that do exactly what the customer wants, easily and openly. But the media divisions got to force their restrictions on the device divisions, via what the article refers to as "management".
Read the article again. It's not a guy saying "I'm sorry, I made a mistake." It's a guy saying "My stupid bosses made me do something I didn't like."
Yes, but "who should run the TLD?" isn't a pure math/science question like "what is 17 squared?" which can be "impartially" investigated. If the largest providers of IT in the world support [company X], that actually makes [company X] a better contender. In the real world with real markets, corporate relationships aren't "biases", they're important factors to consider.
Ask yourself: how many people in the world still have milk delivered to their front doors?
Pffft, front door. The FreshDirect guy brings the boxes into my kitchen.
How many people still have their gas pumped by an attendant?
Well, everyone in New Jersey...
How many people in the world will continue to pay for TiVo?
I will. It beats the pants of the cable company provided DVRs. And if you consider time spent working on it as a cost, then TiVo is way cheaper than a MythTV box. Admittedly, many people will just get the DVR from their cable company, thinking (as so many do) that they're crafty consumers who have found the same product for a much lower price, since they haven't used a real TiVo and don't know what they're missing. But TiVo was always a luxury item. Hopefully their business model doesn't depend on every home in America paying for their service...
Re:Ivy is still a big bonus! (big deal)
on
Who Needs Harvard?
·
· Score: 1
Of course, all this is meaningless drivel since they Ivy League is a *football* league
Yeah, I had a co-worker who once tried to convince me that the college I went to (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) was an Ivy League school, since we play Hockey in the same league as the Ivy schools.
Quote from the article you linked: I never spoke to any average prospective users who really understood what Divx was, why they should pay $50 more for a Divx system than for a DVD system (the encryption and modem circuitry did add cost), or why our industry was trying to make their lives more complicated.
That's why. Not because the hardcore nerds wanted to rip DVDs, but because:
the average person never even heard of it
it cost more
it was more complicated
In case your memory is hazy, DVD itself failed the "extract the content to a non-encrypted format that I can play using non-proprietary software on stock hardware" test. Before DeCSS came out, DVD's were only playable by properly licensed DVD players. DVD seems to have done okay.
And unless you're willing to pay them what they're asking for the product that they're selling, YOU can go to hell (as far as they're concerned).
If it comes down to MPAA vs. [the set of people who are unwilling to use closed, propreitary DRM systems], MPAA is gonna win.
They can live without the 3% of their market that's made up of hardcore nerds, but the nerds probably won't live without the 25% or more of their entertainment that comes from mainstream media distributors.
I want the same thing you want, but if you think you can just write them off, you're sadly mistaken.
If by "getting royally screwed" you mean "making a conscious, unforced decision to purchase something, knowing fully ahead of time what they're purchasing, then getting it", then yes.
Re:LOGIC PROBLEMS DO NOT WORK!!!
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I think the part where you have the pirates "promising" stuff to each other is where you go off track. There's no reason to assume they'll trust Pirate 2, especially since he's about to get zero. Pirate 4 will surely vote with him, but Pirate 3 will expect to get zero if Pirate 4 doesn't stick to the "promise".
You're trying to introduce emotional factors like trust into a problem that's about logic. Sure, you can say that real live humans don't work like the problem assumes, but computers do. Someone who can accept the set of rules presented to them and find the mathematically optimal solution to the problem without bitching about its realism will be well suited to work with computers.
Slashdot Mirror
Demonstrate you can use a computer responsibly and you can get an SSL-like certificate from any number of private companies and other organizations saying so.
That's like University degrees though. It doesn't prevent some company from selling cheap degrees over the Internet. One of those private companies would start selling certificates with really low standards, and they'd be tremendously successful, because there's a huge market of people out there who didn't meet the other companies' standards.
Now you could start discriminating between different certificate authorities, just like Human Resources will discriminate between a B.S. from MIT and one from "Bob's Online Unarversity". This isn't really a new thing, a lot of places used to block stuff coming from aol.com or hotmail.com, 'cause they wanted to keep out the newbies and lamers, but that's not much of a solution for most people.
If I apply for a job somewhere, and the hiring manager doesn't know about spyware or locking down services, I can't afford to block his emails just because he's not leet. The problem is that when you start putting up barriers on a system that was designed to connect people, you start limiting its usefulness. There is no easy solution to that problem.
It's "News for Nerds" because Amazon is practically the icon of the dotcom era, and most nerds I know still shop there frequently. The cost and convenience of shipping from major online stores is one of the most important factors in "eBusiness", which is in turn responsible for a lot of the jobs, technology, and awareness of the IT people who read Slashdot.
However, both the original poster and you assume that other fellow's lawyers' right to read anything that you've written is natural and obvious.
No, the original poster isn't even addressing rights.
The advice to "Never write anything in a letter, e-mail, diary, memo or any other quotable medium that you don't want the other guys lawyer holding up in court." is more like the advice to lock your doors, or for young girls not to walk alone in bad neighborhoods at night. It's not that we assume others have the right to victimize us, but we live in an imperfect world, where people do things we don't feel they have a right to do. If you wish to do well in this imperfect world, you should take some precautions.
Selmer Bringsjord, the RPI professor leading this project, is previously known for having created a program, "Brutus", which composes and writes original stories on the subject of betrayal.
He's definitely the man for this job.
No need for sledgehammers!
A pair of tin cans and a string make an excellent low-cost audio repeater system!
Calling someone a jackass for inserting a political jab into a programming language article isn't censorship.
"We need to be able to talk about issues, in any manner we like, without fear of reprisal."
Reprisal from who? If I go into a movie theater and start ranting about Microsoft business policies in the middle of a movie, there will probably be angry reprisals from the audience and the theater management. If I say something tremendously insulting to someone I care about, I will probably see "reprisals" from it.
This isn't about free speech being censored by the evil forces of political correctness. This is one citizen doing something crass and dumb, and another citizen calling him on it.
"The program does not distinguish between legal and illegal copies, as it is up to the user to determine whether the files found by the program have been acquired legally, or whether the material should be deleted."
Oh, hey, I already have that program!
It's called "dir"
My friend has a Unix version called "ls"
Slashdot comments tend towards anecdotal evidence.
"I hate Windows, I only run Linux on my servers, and the people I know hate Windows, therefore Windows is declining"
rather than
"The following link is to surveys showing a decline in IT spending on Microsoft products"
and when you hear enough of the former, you start to get the impression that everyone thinks that way.
Given when these numbers are from, most people who paid Microsoft a dime didn't have a choice.. because it came pre-loaded on the machine
Those people didn't pay Microsoft, they paid Dell. They did that willingly, because they wanted that computer for that price. Dell then paid Microsoft, willingly, because selling computers with Microsoft Windows on them is a far more profitable business than selling computers without Microsoft Windows on them. In both cases the money is given willingly, which is not the case with taxes.
So this is what you get when you hire A+ grads from 'prestigeous' institutions.
Yeah!
If you want competent sysadmins, you should obviously hire people who failed out of notoriously bad institutions!
I know it's a joke, but binary can't be inputed with only one button (well, you couldn't do it well. it's binary not Morse code).
Yes, it was a joke, but just to clear this up, there are many different ways to enter binary with only one button.
Morse code is binary, since it is a system that encodes values in digits that have only two possible values. You could call dot "0" and dash "1" or vise versa, but "binary" doesn't require that the two values be named "0" and "1", it just requires that each digit have only two possible values.
As another poster mentions, you could provide a clock pulse, either through sound (think metronome), the monitor, or force-feedback.
You could also interpret a "click" as "zero", and a "double-click" as a "one" (think the "blink once for no, twice for yes" system)
So that's three types of ways to do it, just off the top of my head.
First of all, Skype isn't a serious competitor with the traditional telcos. Vonage steals way more business than Skype does, and even that is probably a small blip on the radar.
Secondly, Skype and Vonage both rely on you having a broadband Internet connection, which half the people are paying the telcos for anyway. Comcast and Time Warner cable modems are a much bigger threat to telco profits than Skype and Vonage.
And finally, the bulk of the people who are giving up landlines are giving them up in favor of their cell phones. Most of the wireless companies are branches of the traditional telcos, and require traditional telco infrastructure to connect the zillion cell towers.
No, the sky isn't falling on "traditional phone companies".
I don't see why anyone needs more than one button. I don't even use a keyboard. The computer is in binary anyway, I just tap the data in with my one-button. It's a much simpler interface, really.
To be fair, the PS2 does deliver real-time movie*-quality graphics.
* - see "Tron"
Yes, and while you're at it, they could have played roulette and put it all on black. Then it would be 26 billion!
Sony isn't a single entity that makes decisions, it's multiple businesses with sometimes conflicting goals. This article isn't the Sony that brought you ATRAC saying "I made a mistake." This is other divisions from Sony, who were against ATRAC from the start, continuing to complain about it.
See, Sony has a huge content-producing media business, and they also have a huge media-device business. The former wants all media-devices in the world equipped with DRM and copyright-protection mechanisms, while the latter wants to make devices that do exactly what the customer wants, easily and openly. But the media divisions got to force their restrictions on the device divisions, via what the article refers to as "management".
Read the article again. It's not a guy saying "I'm sorry, I made a mistake." It's a guy saying "My stupid bosses made me do something I didn't like."
Yes, but "who should run the TLD?" isn't a pure math/science question like "what is 17 squared?" which can be "impartially" investigated. If the largest providers of IT in the world support [company X], that actually makes [company X] a better contender. In the real world with real markets, corporate relationships aren't "biases", they're important factors to consider.
Ask yourself: how many people in the world still have milk delivered to their front doors?
Pffft, front door. The FreshDirect guy brings the boxes into my kitchen.
How many people still have their gas pumped by an attendant?
Well, everyone in New Jersey...
How many people in the world will continue to pay for TiVo?
I will. It beats the pants of the cable company provided DVRs. And if you consider time spent working on it as a cost, then TiVo is way cheaper than a MythTV box. Admittedly, many people will just get the DVR from their cable company, thinking (as so many do) that they're crafty consumers who have found the same product for a much lower price, since they haven't used a real TiVo and don't know what they're missing. But TiVo was always a luxury item. Hopefully their business model doesn't depend on every home in America paying for their service...
Of course, all this is meaningless drivel since they Ivy League is a *football* league
Yeah, I had a co-worker who once tried to convince me that the college I went to (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) was an Ivy League school, since we play Hockey in the same league as the Ivy schools.
yeah, that's one of the hardest ones to uninstall.
I think the removal tool requires a Linux bootable-CD...
Yes, because if I hacked slashdot, the first thing I'd do with my newly acquired access is...
post mediocre duplicate stories?
Maybe if you start seeing stories like "samzenpus 0wn5 j00" or "Slashdot launches DoS attack on samzenpus' high school website"
THEN it's time to cry "hacked"
Quote from the article you linked:
I never spoke to any average prospective users who really understood what Divx was, why they should pay $50 more for a Divx system than for a DVD system (the encryption and modem circuitry did add cost), or why our industry was trying to make their lives more complicated.
That's why. Not because the hardcore nerds wanted to rip DVDs, but because:
the average person never even heard of it
it cost more
it was more complicated
In case your memory is hazy, DVD itself failed the "extract the content to a non-encrypted format that I can play using non-proprietary software on stock hardware" test. Before DeCSS came out, DVD's were only playable by properly licensed DVD players. DVD seems to have done okay.
And unless you're willing to pay them what they're asking for the product that they're selling, YOU can go to hell (as far as they're concerned).
If it comes down to MPAA vs. [the set of people who are unwilling to use closed, propreitary DRM systems], MPAA is gonna win.
They can live without the 3% of their market that's made up of hardcore nerds, but the nerds probably won't live without the 25% or more of their entertainment that comes from mainstream media distributors.
I want the same thing you want, but if you think you can just write them off, you're sadly mistaken.
If by "getting royally screwed" you mean "making a conscious, unforced decision to purchase something, knowing fully ahead of time what they're purchasing, then getting it", then yes.
I think the part where you have the pirates "promising" stuff to each other is where you go off track. There's no reason to assume they'll trust Pirate 2, especially since he's about to get zero. Pirate 4 will surely vote with him, but Pirate 3 will expect to get zero if Pirate 4 doesn't stick to the "promise".
You're trying to introduce emotional factors like trust into a problem that's about logic. Sure, you can say that real live humans don't work like the problem assumes, but computers do. Someone who can accept the set of rules presented to them and find the mathematically optimal solution to the problem without bitching about its realism will be well suited to work with computers.