Rioters were buying baseball bats? Sounds like a lame riot to me. Lol! Classic case of the police helping the criminals by preventing the law-abiding people from protecting themselves.
Is there even a legitimate use for that? To find out if your own network is vulnerable.
No matter what kind of bullshit laws get put into place to restrict 'cracking tools' - criminals will have them. Legally sticking your head in the sand will not make you any safer. Far better that tools like this are spread far and wide so that countermeasures, or at least recognition of the problems, are also spread far and wide.
For quite some time now (10.3 Panther I think) there has been a case-sensitive variant of HFS+. Honestly, case-sensitivity sucks in general. MS got it right for once - case-preserving but not case-sensitive is the way to go. It is just never a good idea to have too files in the same directory that differ only in the casing of the letters in the filename - it isn't natural to the normal way of human thinking and can only lead to problems.
If Linux and Open Source REALLY want to beat Microsoft, then Open Source folks should STOP BEING DAMM CHEAPSKATES! Hallelujah! Let us all join together in shedding self-interest. Sorry, the Free software world does not need communism.
If that law places protection of property higher than protection of people, don't blame the police for it. Yeah, police are well known for enforcing all laws equally.
I've spent once about 2 months blindfolded after I got by a powerful search floodlight (we were sailing in canoe down the river and accidentally came too close to a military base). They locked you up and tortured you with light deprivation just for canoing too close to a military base? Damn!
This is a non-convincing argument. Pro-war people say the same thing "Oh how many people get murdered each year?" Rapists say "at least I didnt kill anyone." Murders say "at least I'm not a pedophile." This is moral relativism and a slippery slope. Oh grow up. You are comparing someone making a morbid joke with murders and rapists. Get off your high horse. Moral relativism, my ass.
And I'm someone who's first action on reading the headlines (before slashdot even noticed them) was to call a friend who has been closely involved with the x-prize and scaled composites to make sure she wasn't one of the ones hurt.
Generations of PEOPLE. Nobody cross-breeds an entire field at a time. They do a handful of specimens, let them grow to maturation and hope the right characteristics "stuck" they may repeat that for 10-15 plant generations until they are satisfied with the end result. Then they take the seeds, numbering at most in the hundreds and grow them for a few more generations until they've got enough seed crop for even just a single field.
The entire point of GM is to radically speed up that cycle. If it were not - and GM really was "just" equivalent to cross-breeding, then there would be no reason to do GM in the first place.
This takes place in one generation just as with GM food. And involves a single, or at most, a handful of specimens. Whereas GM food involves millions of specimens and can be all over the globe in one generation.
Genetic engineering isn't "natural", but then again agriculture itself isn't "natural". Don't be naive. The whole "genetic engineering is just another form of selective breeding" argument is pure bunk.
Genetic engineering enables changes that would take multiple generations to create and then even more generations to attain wide-spread use to happen in the span of a single generation.
So if a particular inbred line of "walking udders" were to product deficient milk, the damage would be very localized before it was noticed and corrected. But a particular line of genetically engineered corn might make it into every box of breakfast cereal in the country for a couple of years running before people notice that it is shrinking the pensis of our youth.
Monopolies are at best bad for the market The whole point of a patents system is limited monopolies to help the market. Thanks for telling us all what we learned in high-school. However, the OP's point was that what we learned in high-school is often not necessarily the case in the real world.
Without such a system, there's nothing stopping me from spending 10 years in a shed developing a revolutionary new vacuum cleaner, bringing it to market - and then you waltzing into a shop, buying one, copying it and selling it for half the price I do. What you are describing is one particular market scenario, one that requires very strong government intervention in order to function. You should not assume that in any way shape or form said scenario is the only possible market scenario. For example - without patents, people would be forced to recoup their "10 years in the shed" during that limited market window between when their product makes it to market and when the competition shows up.
Surely some inventions would be impractical in that scenario, but on the other hand, the incentive to continuing inventing at a pace rapid enough to stay ahead of the competition would be much increased over the current patent-based one. Also the incentive to compete secondary attributes like manufacturing quality would be increased. In addition, the current patent system clearly retards the development of certain inventions too, so it would be foolish to argue that the current system is at all "perfect" even if there were no 'abuse.'
In reality, there are a lot of directors of IT and CIOs who believe that Linux is a science project, and not a suitable server platform for important tasks. Sometimes it just takes a generational change to get new ideas accepted by the mainstream. It took about 20 years for the PC to almost completely replace the mainframe -- roughly 1977 (TRS-80) to 1996 (WinNT4.0). We may be in for another 8-10 years before Linux completely replaces MS Windows regardless of marketing tactics.
And see here for a rebuttal. That guy makes the same error that he accuses the original article's author of, except in reverse.
Assuming his guess that a 64GB SSD will have a block size (smallest erasable unit) of 128KB he goes on to posit a worst case scenario of merely writing one byte to every 128KB-size block. But just as he accuses the article of ignoring flash SSD block sizes, his analysis ignores filesystem block-sizes which are the smallest writeable unit. You can't just write one byte and move on, you have to write an entire filesystem-block, just like you have to erase an entire flash-block.
If we assume a reasonable filesystem block-size of 16KB that brings the worst-case analysis up from ~7 hours to ~13 years at a full 80MB/s throughput. Even with only a 4KB filesystem block size, you are still looking at roughly 3 years absolute worst case.
Not long underwater. Don't ask. Just about everyone I know has a story about how their USB flash drive went through the washing machine (and often the dryer too) because they forget it in their pocket. Universally the stories end with the drive working just fine once it has fully dried out.
Anywhere between 100,000 and 5,000,000 write cycles, depending on the quality of the flash media.
This may or may not be a lot more than a conventional hard drive depending on abuse; in a perfect world, a conventional harddrive would last much longer, but in a laptop, with all the bouncing, the odds are closer to even. No, it is pretty much many, many years longer than a spinning disk of equivalent size. In summary, at the absolute worst case of continuous streaming writes at maximum throughput it will take roughly 25 years to fail.
Another benefit that flash has over spinning disk is that almost all failure modes are at write time, so the hardware can detect the error and write to a spare flash cell without the user experiencing any problems. Error detection on rotating media is almost always at read-time, usually long after it is too late to recover from.
If you call delete twice on the same record, the second time will have a failure result, rather than a success result like the first. You are msinterpreting "result" as "return value" -- idempotent is a mathematical term, and in math there are no "return values" just end results. Deleting always produces the same end result.
They are afraid that by providing documentation on interfaces, it may tip-off a patent holder to start looking for infringement where they might not otherwise have done so.
After all, when the prevailing legal advice is to actively not look for pre-existing patents, it is inevitable that companies will independently create infringing hardware. It's like we get the worst of both worlds - patents might as well be trade-secrets since reading them is a legal mine-field if you are working in the same area, but we also get government enforced monopolies that stifle competition.
At least the lawyers get paid for their contributions, and that's all that should really matter in the end. Right?
Hey buddy, it's called having an opinion. Get a grip. Lol! What you have sir, is a guess. Having an opinion requires you at least know something about the subject.
As for MGM and Fox, it's called websites, not blogs. Precisely my point. Just as the mgm and fox websites are not blogs, neither are the myspace pages for Film Movement, M.I.A., nor Twisted Records.
That's why I said "I don't think", "all I know" and especially "then again I've never even visited myspace.com, so what do I know." Which was precisely my point - if you know enough to say that you don't know WTF you are talking about, why are you talking in the first place?
And your comment only re-enforces what I thought: MySpace is only blogs and stuff. It doesn't matter if there's talented people putting their work online, it's still only blogs. You only hear what you want to. If these arejustblogs then so are http://www.mgm.com/ and http://www.fox.com/ and most other 'corporate' media sites.
I don't think of MySpace has a competitor to anything. Of course, all I know about MySpace is that's it's for personal blogs and such. It's only used by people who want to put their lives on the web, and mostly teens. Then again I've never even visited myspace.com, so what do I know. You really ought to learn about something before pontificating in public about it.
Just myself, I've found 3 new-to-me musicians and downloaded their music from myspace.
While myspace has all those boring blogs on it, it has also managed to become a central location for all kinds of artists. Musicians, painters, even music/movie/book/etc publishers who aren't otherwise part of the murdoch empire, have made myspace pages central to their online presence.
I don't know why the OLPC project is giving internet access anyway. If I were them I'd create a closed network with educational sites alone. They don't need access to the internet universe. They could get Time-Warner in on it and call it the "One AOL Per Child" project!
If you read the follow-up threads (and there are an interminable number of posts in them with lots of bickering so I can understand why you wouldn't) Amazon has resorted to all kinds of shady things - they've made up brand new invoices for the merchandise on the original order, made up brand new invoices with brand new merchandise, new charges for new dates, new charges on the old dates, etc.
From the variety of reports they seem to have tried almost every conceivable trick in the book, including charging any charge number they could find that might be associated with the original purchaser (I believe they even did a demand-draft to one guy's checking account, which bounced but then Amazon put a collection agency on his ass with a couple of days).
It is really an amazing lesson in just how crazy anti-customer amazon can get when they feel like it.
Slashdot Mirror
No matter what kind of bullshit laws get put into place to restrict 'cracking tools' - criminals will have them. Legally sticking your head in the sand will not make you any safer. Far better that tools like this are spread far and wide so that countermeasures, or at least recognition of the problems, are also spread far and wide.
Sorry, the Free software world does not need communism.
Get off your high horse. Moral relativism, my ass.
And I'm someone who's first action on reading the headlines (before slashdot even noticed them) was to call a friend who has been closely involved with the x-prize and scaled composites to make sure she wasn't one of the ones hurt.
Generations of PEOPLE. Nobody cross-breeds an entire field at a time. They do a handful of specimens, let them grow to maturation and hope the right characteristics "stuck" they may repeat that for 10-15 plant generations until they are satisfied with the end result. Then they take the seeds, numbering at most in the hundreds and grow them for a few more generations until they've got enough seed crop for even just a single field.
The entire point of GM is to radically speed up that cycle. If it were not - and GM really was "just" equivalent to cross-breeding, then there would be no reason to do GM in the first place.
"Several years" does not equal "several generations"
Genetic engineering enables changes that would take multiple generations to create and then even more generations to attain wide-spread use to happen in the span of a single generation.
So if a particular inbred line of "walking udders" were to product deficient milk, the damage would be very localized before it was noticed and corrected. But a particular line of genetically engineered corn might make it into every box of breakfast cereal in the country for a couple of years running before people notice that it is shrinking the pensis of our youth.
Surely some inventions would be impractical in that scenario, but on the other hand, the incentive to continuing inventing at a pace rapid enough to stay ahead of the competition would be much increased over the current patent-based one. Also the incentive to compete secondary attributes like manufacturing quality would be increased. In addition, the current patent system clearly retards the development of certain inventions too, so it would be foolish to argue that the current system is at all "perfect" even if there were no 'abuse.'
Assuming his guess that a 64GB SSD will have a block size (smallest erasable unit) of 128KB he goes on to posit a worst case scenario of merely writing one byte to every 128KB-size block. But just as he accuses the article of ignoring flash SSD block sizes, his analysis ignores filesystem block-sizes which are the smallest writeable unit. You can't just write one byte and move on, you have to write an entire filesystem-block, just like you have to erase an entire flash-block.
If we assume a reasonable filesystem block-size of 16KB that brings the worst-case analysis up from ~7 hours to ~13 years at a full 80MB/s throughput. Even with only a 4KB filesystem block size, you are still looking at roughly 3 years absolute worst case.
http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd.html
This may or may not be a lot more than a conventional hard drive depending on abuse; in a perfect world, a conventional harddrive would last much longer, but in a laptop, with all the bouncing, the odds are closer to even. No, it is pretty much many, many years longer than a spinning disk of equivalent size. In summary, at the absolute worst case of continuous streaming writes at maximum throughput it will take roughly 25 years to fail.
Another benefit that flash has over spinning disk is that almost all failure modes are at write time, so the hardware can detect the error and write to a spare flash cell without the user experiencing any problems. Error detection on rotating media is almost always at read-time, usually long after it is too late to recover from.
See here for the gory details.
Here's what the W3C says about it, although they also talk about a specific DELETE request on the same level in the http protocol as GET - http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec9.
They are afraid that by providing documentation on interfaces, it may tip-off a patent holder to start looking for infringement where they might not otherwise have done so.
After all, when the prevailing legal advice is to actively not look for pre-existing patents, it is inevitable that companies will independently create infringing hardware. It's like we get the worst of both worlds - patents might as well be trade-secrets since reading them is a legal mine-field if you are working in the same area, but we also get government enforced monopolies that stifle competition.
At least the lawyers get paid for their contributions,
and that's all that should really matter in the end. Right?
Having an opinion requires you at least know something about the subject. As for MGM and Fox, it's called websites, not blogs. Precisely my point. Just as the mgm and fox websites are not blogs,
neither are the myspace pages for Film Movement, M.I.A., nor Twisted Records.
If you can stream it, you can download it.
Check out the DownloadHelper extension for firefox.
I use it on myspace, youtube, etc. Very easy to use.
Just myself, I've found 3 new-to-me musicians and downloaded their music from myspace.
While myspace has all those boring blogs on it, it has also managed to become a central location for all kinds of artists. Musicians, painters, even music/movie/book/etc publishers who aren't otherwise part of the murdoch empire, have made myspace pages central to their online presence.
If you read the follow-up threads (and there are an interminable number of posts in them with lots of bickering so I can understand why you wouldn't) Amazon has resorted to all kinds of shady things - they've made up brand new invoices for the merchandise on the original order, made up brand new invoices with brand new merchandise, new charges for new dates, new charges on the old dates, etc.
From the variety of reports they seem to have tried almost every conceivable trick in the book, including charging any charge number they could find that might be associated with the original purchaser (I believe they even did a demand-draft to one guy's checking account, which bounced but then Amazon put a collection agency on his ass with a couple of days).
It is really an amazing lesson in just how crazy anti-customer amazon can get when they feel like it.