Plato said it 2500 years ago already, humans are not be trusted with voting because they are too stupid (paraphrasing here).
This seems to be still true in the US (and much of the western world).
Democracy is a great and so far the best system we found, but it only really works well with an informed and educated (and rational) populous.
Let me just go ahead and call this bullshit.
I am a committer to Apache HBase, and we see (and encourage) drive by patches all the time. The only folks who have to sign a CLA are the committers themselves, which seems reasonable to me.
how many units of time somebody works? When you hand out a contract you don't buy time, you buy a result.
Some people work fast and think about a problem even when "off work", and some people sit in front the computer all day long.
This hole project is misguided and I would never give out a contract to somebody who measures his work this way.
"Among the emails is one where Mark Zuckerberg agrees to split Facebook with Ceglia 50/50. If the emails are proven legitimate, Ceglia may own 50% of Facebook."
That might be so. Zuckerberg may also have written an email where he talk about eating babies alive.
Unless Ceglia has a signed contract he is standing on thin ice.
90mph (=144kph) is not actually very fast.
On a semi-empty highway 160kph (=100mph) is a good cruising speed. And when in a hurry you'd go much faster... sometimes 220 kph or faster (~140 mph)
This reminds of car chasing scenes in American movies I watched as a kid, where folks would force their car to its limits... and a closeup of the speedometer would show the needle laboring somewhere between 90 and 100 mph. We always had a good laugh from that.
Personally I hate multiplayer online games. I have enough competition in my real world life and really do not need to add more of that during my spare time.
I play very occasionally I do not want to invest time to acquire skill to be a worthy contender in whatever game I want to play.
If a game is multiplayer only, I usually avoid it.
Furthermore sometimes it seems companies just want to avoid the cost and effort to develop a good AI and then sell this as a feature.
This is nonsense. Warm air carries more moisture than cold air. When taking a cold device into a warm room, the air will enter the device, cool down and water will start to condensate inside the device. Water from condensation is just as bad as water from a spill.
The liquid sensor is right to go off, as it should since many electronic gadgets/laptops were destroyed this way.
is to require reciprocity. That goes for access to financial data as well as travelling/airline data.
It seems to me the US is quick to access other countries' data, but it far less willing to provide equal access to internal data as well.
Hence this would either level the playing ground or put a stop to US demands.
> You can tell ZFS to do full byte comparisons rather than relying on the hash if you want full security against hash duplicates:
I once did similar a project with web content caching that replaced some data with a hash of said data with a way to get to the actual data.
All sorts of people were worried about hash conflicts, etc. People are always worried about collisions.
It took a lot of convincing that that risk is lower than a nuclear strike on the data center(s).
What finally did convince my team mates was that 2^256 (~10^77) is by some estimates is close to the number of elementary particles in the visible universe (without a few orders of magnitudes at least).
So assuming the hash function is good (there's no evidence to prove otherwise), we'd have to try almost as many inputs as there are particles in the universe.
The chances of hitting duplicates are so astronomically small that doing byte comparisons is most certainly useless, and just check mark feature for those types who worry about these things. AFAIK there are no known SHA256 duplicates.
"Piracy" is a clever term coined by the music and file industry to associate file copying directly with stealing.
Existing information is replicated or copied nothing more and nothing less.
That may not be legal by current law, and there might be an "opportunity loss" for the content owner,
but that is not "piracy" nor is it "stealing".
"Illegal content replication" just doesn't sound as snazzy and dirty as "piracy".
Of course the excuse mentioned in the article had to be the good and tried child porn excuse.
While I find sexual acts on children despicable and inexcusable, I am sick and tired of seeing my civil liberties eroded away by the same excuse over and over again.
It does not even help! One can put any questionable content on a memory stick and mail it across countries. If the content is encrypted one doesn't even have to worry about it being intercepted. If it is intercepted, just send another one.
In fact that is probably what I am going to do with private photographs/movies from now on (my parents and I live in different countries). The border agents then can nose around on my laptop all the want, without invading my private life. The point is that I should not have to do that.
Any terrorist actually caught during a border search is likely too stupid to carry out said terrorist act anyway.
Don't take out a database lock (also referred to as pessimistic lock sometimes). Web transactions tend to be long lived and there's typically no easy way to know when the user just abandoned the edit (and hence you would not really know when it save to release the lock, unless it is by timeout or explicit release by the user).
Instead do optimistic locking... Assume there are no conflicting edits (or that they are at least rare). Then version each row (with a monotonically increasing number for example). At the beginning of the transaction also retrieve the version, and upon save verify that the version did not change - if it has changed there was a conflicting edit in the meanwhile and the current save should be prevented (you could then get fancy and retrieve the current version of the row from the database and show it to the user, etc).
One can actually show that if the rate of collisions is low optimistic locking even performs better, whereas in scenarios where the contention is high (a significant fraction of transaction result in a conflict) pessimistic database locks performs better.
I recently got a Kindle 2. The hardware is great, the free wireless is cool.
But I will never ever purchase a $9 (or so) DRM controlled e-book. That is ridiculous. For $0.20 I might. Anything more is theft and I'd rather get the paper version.
However, there is a lot of free stuff to be found sites gutenberg.org, scientific articles, philosphical texts, etc. Basically all the stuff that glues you the computer screen to read it. Now I just read all whenever/whereever I want on the Kindle.
The Kindle will read.mobi files directly, and you can convert PDF and HTML to a format that works on the Kindle for free (but you need an Amazon account to do the conversion, and I do not know whether the result of the conversion is DRM crippled or not).
I recently recycled a bunch old computers. I considered wiping the harddrive electronically, but then I didn't feel like the hassle.
I just removed the drives and smashed them with hammer. It was fun and the recycling center took them anyway.
I am forever grateful to my professor (at a German university) to have started all of us with Scheme to learn the basic principles of programming, complexity, computability, etc.
She even taught object oriented programming using Scheme (yes, you can implement encapsulation and message passing using lambda calculus quite easily).
Later we applied those principles to other languages (the most popular choices at that point were Modula-2, C, and of course C++).
I have never used Scheme in a professional environment since, but the lessons learned then still stick with me almost 20 years later.
Patents are here to stay, and the only way a business can currently ensure a profit from their research.
That is only true - and only makes sense - if there was a significant cost to the research, which these days usually is not the case. The profits should go to whoever creates what the consumer wants (i.e. whoever makes the best product), and not to whoever managed to get to the patent office first.
Simple ideas and business processes or software patents do not represent a significant investment ("Distributing Email via a wireless network", "One-Click-Shopping" "Buy-Now-Auctions", "Double clicking on limited set of buttons", and all the other nonsense patents out there).
Maybe filing a patent application should require proof of a significant investment (maybe a percentage of the company's revenue or whatever).
The problem appears to be fact that intermediaries in the network have to decrypt and reencrypt the PIN and related information.
It is generally considered safer to do end-to-end encryption. The first ATM encrypts all the information and the intermediaries just pass through a collection of bytes (without needing to know what the bytes mean), once the bytes reach the target bank, the information is decrypted, verified and the response is send back (possibly encrypted as well). This way all tempering at intermediary hops is eleminated (assuming the encrytion has no flaws).
The court took a different view, focusing instead on how the GPL fosters new development.
Why does it even matter what the court thinks about beneficial or detrimental effects to the software business? There are some folks who work on software in their own time and release it for free. Who will deny them their right to release whatever they own for free?
What's next? A writer releasing short stories or books for free... Will we also need a court musing about whether this is violates antitrust law?
This case should have been thrown out in the beginning.
Please think of this the next time when a court from another country tries to tell you what a US bases company can do. Maybe US citizen should fly to Iran to defend themselves in trial there?
Spamhaus is in the UK. The court in the US. End of story.
I hope ICANN pulls the DNS records; that will be the final sign for the EU and other parties to take control over their own domains.
If Spamhaus is not liked here, have the US build a huge firewall around the country to "protect" itself.
MPAA: Look here we have $20bn in lost revenue. Lawmaker: Wow, we have to act. What do you need. Consumer: I believe that number is a flawed estimate. MPAA: Ok, let's meet at $19bn Consumer: But that would still be almost $1900/consuming-citizen/year. That seems implausible. Lawmaker:... MPAA: We have another study that says our losses are $100 trillion. So $19bn is already a compromise, in fact losses are much higher. Lawmaker: Wow! Consumer:... MPAA: Lawmaker, what are we going to do about this? The future of the country hinges on this. Lawmaker:... MPAA: And think about the children and how piracy supports terrorists. Lawmaker: Oh my God. What are we going to do? Consumer: What do children and terrorists have to do with this? MPAA: Lawmaker, think about your campaign contributions! Lawmaker: Crap, I had no idea it's so God damn serious. MPAA: See. This planet is in jeopardy because of piracy. Consumer:... Consumer: But what about fair use? My rights? Freedom? MPAA:... Lawmaker:... MPAA: Hey Lawmaker, meet me in the other room.
Slashdot Mirror
Plato said it 2500 years ago already, humans are not be trusted with voting because they are too stupid (paraphrasing here). This seems to be still true in the US (and much of the western world). Democracy is a great and so far the best system we found, but it only really works well with an informed and educated (and rational) populous.
Let me just go ahead and call this bullshit. I am a committer to Apache HBase, and we see (and encourage) drive by patches all the time. The only folks who have to sign a CLA are the committers themselves, which seems reasonable to me.
Some people work fast and think about a problem even when "off work", and some people sit in front the computer all day long. This hole project is misguided and I would never give out a contract to somebody who measures his work this way.
Just my $0.02
That might be so. Zuckerberg may also have written an email where he talk about eating babies alive. Unless Ceglia has a signed contract he is standing on thin ice.
Not that I am fan of FaceBook.
that my tax money is used to launch secret surveillance technology. And of course it is "in my best interest".
On a semi-empty highway 160kph (=100mph) is a good cruising speed. And when in a hurry you'd go much faster... sometimes 220 kph or faster (~140 mph)
This reminds of car chasing scenes in American movies I watched as a kid, where folks would force their car to its limits... and a closeup of the speedometer would show the needle laboring somewhere between 90 and 100 mph. We always had a good laugh from that.
You make a bad movie and then you blame somebody else (file sharers in this case) for it. Pathetic.
If a game is multiplayer only, I usually avoid it.
Furthermore sometimes it seems companies just want to avoid the cost and effort to develop a good AI and then sell this as a feature.
I know there are always black sheep, but a basic trust relationship between management and the employees is very important and better for the morale.
If security is an issue, some security awareness training may be money better spent.
The liquid sensor is right to go off, as it should since many electronic gadgets/laptops were destroyed this way.
It seems to me the US is quick to access other countries' data, but it far less willing to provide equal access to internal data as well.
Hence this would either level the playing ground or put a stop to US demands.
> You can tell ZFS to do full byte comparisons rather than relying on the hash if you want full security against hash duplicates:
I once did similar a project with web content caching that replaced some data with a hash of said data with a way to get to the actual data. All sorts of people were worried about hash conflicts, etc. People are always worried about collisions.
It took a lot of convincing that that risk is lower than a nuclear strike on the data center(s).
What finally did convince my team mates was that 2^256 (~10^77) is by some estimates is close to the number of elementary particles in the visible universe (without a few orders of magnitudes at least).
So assuming the hash function is good (there's no evidence to prove otherwise), we'd have to try almost as many inputs as there are particles in the universe. The chances of hitting duplicates are so astronomically small that doing byte comparisons is most certainly useless, and just check mark feature for those types who worry about these things. AFAIK there are no known SHA256 duplicates.
Flamebait?! I was merely clarifying terms, and pointing out the clever naming scheme chosen by the industry. Oh well...
Existing information is replicated or copied nothing more and nothing less.
That may not be legal by current law, and there might be an "opportunity loss" for the content owner, but that is not "piracy" nor is it "stealing".
"Illegal content replication" just doesn't sound as snazzy and dirty as "piracy".
While I find sexual acts on children despicable and inexcusable, I am sick and tired of seeing my civil liberties eroded away by the same excuse over and over again.
It does not even help! One can put any questionable content on a memory stick and mail it across countries. If the content is encrypted one doesn't even have to worry about it being intercepted. If it is intercepted, just send another one.
In fact that is probably what I am going to do with private photographs/movies from now on (my parents and I live in different countries). The border agents then can nose around on my laptop all the want, without invading my private life. The point is that I should not have to do that.
Any terrorist actually caught during a border search is likely too stupid to carry out said terrorist act anyway.
Instead do optimistic locking... Assume there are no conflicting edits (or that they are at least rare). Then version each row (with a monotonically increasing number for example). At the beginning of the transaction also retrieve the version, and upon save verify that the version did not change - if it has changed there was a conflicting edit in the meanwhile and the current save should be prevented (you could then get fancy and retrieve the current version of the row from the database and show it to the user, etc).
One can actually show that if the rate of collisions is low optimistic locking even performs better, whereas in scenarios where the contention is high (a significant fraction of transaction result in a conflict) pessimistic database locks performs better.
But I will never ever purchase a $9 (or so) DRM controlled e-book. That is ridiculous. For $0.20 I might. Anything more is theft and I'd rather get the paper version.
However, there is a lot of free stuff to be found sites gutenberg.org, scientific articles, philosphical texts, etc. Basically all the stuff that glues you the computer screen to read it. Now I just read all whenever/whereever I want on the Kindle.
The Kindle will read .mobi files directly, and you can convert PDF and HTML to a format that works on the Kindle for free (but you need an Amazon account to do the conversion, and I do not know whether the result of the conversion is DRM crippled or not).
I recently recycled a bunch old computers. I considered wiping the harddrive electronically, but then I didn't feel like the hassle. I just removed the drives and smashed them with hammer. It was fun and the recycling center took them anyway.
She even taught object oriented programming using Scheme (yes, you can implement encapsulation and message passing using lambda calculus quite easily).
Later we applied those principles to other languages (the most popular choices at that point were Modula-2, C, and of course C++).
I have never used Scheme in a professional environment since, but the lessons learned then still stick with me almost 20 years later.
That is only true - and only makes sense - if there was a significant cost to the research, which these days usually is not the case. The profits should go to whoever creates what the consumer wants (i.e. whoever makes the best product), and not to whoever managed to get to the patent office first.
Simple ideas and business processes or software patents do not represent a significant investment ("Distributing Email via a wireless network", "One-Click-Shopping" "Buy-Now-Auctions", "Double clicking on limited set of buttons", and all the other nonsense patents out there).
Maybe filing a patent application should require proof of a significant investment (maybe a percentage of the company's revenue or whatever).
The problem appears to be fact that intermediaries in the network have to decrypt and reencrypt the PIN and related information.
It is generally considered safer to do end-to-end encryption. The first ATM encrypts all the information and the intermediaries just pass through a collection of bytes (without needing to know what the bytes mean), once the bytes reach the target bank, the information is decrypted, verified and the response is send back (possibly encrypted as well). This way all tempering at intermediary hops is eleminated (assuming the encrytion has no flaws).
Why does it even matter what the court thinks about beneficial or detrimental effects to the software business? There are some folks who work on software in their own time and release it for free. Who will deny them their right to release whatever they own for free?
What's next? A writer releasing short stories or books for free... Will we also need a court musing about whether this is violates antitrust law?
This case should have been thrown out in the beginning.
Please think of this the next time when a court from another country tries to tell you what a US bases company can do. Maybe US citizen should fly to Iran to defend themselves in trial there?
Spamhaus is in the UK. The court in the US. End of story.
I hope ICANN pulls the DNS records; that will be the final sign for the EU and other parties to take control over their own domains.
If Spamhaus is not liked here, have the US build a huge firewall around the country to "protect" itself.
MPAA: Look here we have $20bn in lost revenue. ... ... ... ... ... ...
Lawmaker: Wow, we have to act. What do you need.
Consumer: I believe that number is a flawed estimate.
MPAA: Ok, let's meet at $19bn
Consumer: But that would still be almost $1900/consuming-citizen/year. That seems implausible.
Lawmaker:
MPAA: We have another study that says our losses are $100 trillion. So $19bn is already a compromise, in fact losses are much higher.
Lawmaker: Wow!
Consumer:
MPAA: Lawmaker, what are we going to do about this? The future of the country hinges on this.
Lawmaker:
MPAA: And think about the children and how piracy supports terrorists.
Lawmaker: Oh my God. What are we going to do?
Consumer: What do children and terrorists have to do with this?
MPAA: Lawmaker, think about your campaign contributions!
Lawmaker: Crap, I had no idea it's so God damn serious.
MPAA: See. This planet is in jeopardy because of piracy.
Consumer:
Consumer: But what about fair use? My rights? Freedom?
MPAA:
Lawmaker:
MPAA: Hey Lawmaker, meet me in the other room.
Laptops? Desktops? Servers?
My next computer will be one of those.