I wonder how people would react if all the car manufacturers would unite and decide that from now on, all the cars aren't sold, they are rented. That there is no warranty, not even if the car came defective from the factory or even missing vital parts such as the engine or wheels. That the car manufacturer could at his will take away your car without having to justify himself or reimburse you for it. That you may only take your car to several garages that have been approved by the car manufacturing consortium. That you are not allowed to touch any of the internal pats of the car, or even open the hood to look at the engine.
With minor differences, this is a standard lease agreement. It turned the car industry upside-down, for a period of a couple years. Now, it's about equal to the purchase-outright agreement. The benefits and problems are a personal decision to the buyor/lessor.
If offered a choice, some people WILL choose the option that YOU wouldn't.
Re:"Reasonable Expectation" and "How to Snoop IRC"
on
ChatScan Search Engine
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· Score: 2
Your examples include snooping (1) a professional commercial telephone system, and (2) a government delivery agent.
Nearly all IRC networks are run on donated CPU time, donated CPU bandwidth, by volunteer effort, and with massive "who-knows-who" cadres of IRCops, few of whom have even seen photos of each other, nevermind gotten strict legal assurances of conduct.
If someone believes that such grassroots organizations are 100% trustable down to the last individual, then I suppose that they're asking for their secrets to be exposed.
I, however, assume that anything I say on BBSs, IRC, Slashdot, and anything else published or broadcast without physical seal or secure transmission, may be used in court or on the front cover of a tabloid someday.
Re:"Reasonable Expectation" and "How to Snoop IRC"
on
ChatScan Search Engine
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· Score: 1
An op has set #JoesBackRoom as mode +s (unlisted), +i (invite), +k (passkey entry), all those in #JoesTavern hear you.
should read
An op has set #JoesBackRoom as mode +s (unlisted), +i (invite), +k (passkey entry), all those in #JoesBackRoom hear you.
Several comments discuss the "reasonable expectation of privacy" angle of such a tool. Also, several comments discuss the problems with flyby (/join,/part) and annoyance issues of the petty snoop.
There are four basic kinds of communication on the typical IRC system,
unsecured channel 1-to-N, or "say" You say something in #JoesTavern, all those in #JoesTavern hear you. Anyone can join or part at any time. Laughable to suggest you have reasonable expectation of privacy here, though most would assume they can see a definitive list of who else are in the same channel.
secured channel 1-to-N, or "say" An op has set #JoesBackRoom as mode +s (unlisted), +i (invite), +k (passkey entry), all those in #JoesTavern hear you. If you don't know how to get in, you can't get in. Still, it's a personal-trust-web fanning out from the ops and participants. They may copy or log what's said inside, and who KNOWS who gets that.
/msg channel 1-to-1, or "msg" Any chatter can talk directly to any other chatter on the same network, without forming a separate channel to do so. The messages still go through one or more servers to get routed from Betty to Frank. This has a very weak but plausible expectation of privacy, since there are no 'broadcasts' done to a channel, and the assumption is that only one target may get it. If two people were to coordinate a/nick change without telling Betty, then she could be talking to a different Frank and not realize it until she looks at/whois or other host information. (One person could attack Frank and assume the nick when Frank disappeared.) Some networks try to protect nicks as a sort of property, but identity authentication is still mostly up to the user.
/ctcp dcc 1-to-1, or "dcc chat" After a handshake through the network, the TCP/IP addresses of Betty and Frank can establish a direct computer connection (dcc), and a "genuinely private" 1-to-1 chat channel is formed. Many IRC clients support this handshake, and many users use them to escape the intermediary latencies of the network's servers. Again, it's a trust situation: if Betty doesn't know Frank well, then giving him her network address or any other secrets may be rash on her part.
You can only have a reasonable expectation of privacy if no intermediary servers, or explicit destinations, are compromised with listening agents.
If you alter the IRC server code, you could listen to any of the first three forms of communication, and you can log the TCP/IP addresses of those who try to establish the fourth. Some IRC servers already have completely hint-free snoops like this in place.
If a compromised server then attaches itself as a member of a larger network, by force or by guile, then you have Echelon/Carnivore proportion snooping possible, without one shred of "annoying flyby" behavior detected by the visitors to the network, or even to the other servers on the network.
In short, you HAVE no reasonable expectation of privacy if you use IRC.
The movie that spent US$0.5M on space advertisements was "Last Action Hero" (Arnold Schwarzenegger, 1993), not "Judge Dredd" (Sylvester Stallone, 1995).
See the NASA page that explores other avenues for space commercialization.
3.10.3.3.3 Market Assessment Although it is extremely unlikely that advertisements could fund an entire mission, they may provide significant supplementary revenue. Advertisements may be purchased on their own, but they are generally integrated into overall promotional campaigns. As such, they have the potential to generate additional revenues on the order of $3 million to $5 million or more per mission. For example, Columbia Pictures was willing to pay $500,000 for space on the side of the first Comet launch to promote the release of "The Last Action Hero." This was split between Westinghouse (Conestoga) and Space Marketing, Inc.
You gotta keep your action-oriented-box-office-bombs-starring-bulky-br utes straight.:)
The Freedom of Information requests don't return something useless like,
Carnivore, general term for any animal that subsists mainly on the flesh of other animals. More specifically, it refers to any member of the mammal order Carnivora. The carnivores are at the top of the food chains that make up the food web of the earth's life forms. They feed on herbivores, or planteaters, which in turn feed on the plants or dinoflagellates, at the bottom of the food chains, that absorb and store energy directly from the sun. Carnivores live mainly alone or in small groups and are not preyed upon except by other carnivores.
However, they often return something just as useful, in that the government redacts the information returned "for security purposes." While redact means edit, in such cases it is effectively, black out with a wide felt-tip marker.
If SlashDot were redacted the way most "important" data received through FoI requests, it would appear like this:
***** Files For Carnivore Info Posted by ***** on ***** from the ***** dept. ***** writes: "A press release from the ***** says they are using the Freedom of Information Act to seek all of the ***** related to the *****" The ***** is saying '*****,' said *****, ***** of the ***** . "*****""
So the next time that you pump your gas or drive down the freeway to work, ask yourself whether you really need to do this. Public transportation is usually powered by much safer power sources, so maybe these kind of accidents won't happen anymore.
I agree that humans and their feigned needs for fossil fuels at low costs led to this sort of tragedy. I don't agree that public transportation uses safer power sources. They use either (1) electricity created at central fossil-fuel burning facilities, or (2) fossil-fuels in other forms.
Not to mention the mode of transportation itself. Cars crashing on the highway are the number one dangerous mode. But think of the number of San Francisco Muni bus accidents, New York subway derailments, airline disasters, AMTRACK derailments, freight trains with toxic chemicals spilling, train derailments in Turkey and Germany and everywhere else.
Diesel smoke from public buses also cause more pollution per person, in areas where ridership is too low to amortize the damage. Sure, if the route runs half-full, then say thirty people use twenty times the fuel of cars. During off-peak and mis-arranged routes, then four people use fifteen times the fuel.
Diesel truck lobbying groups and the engine producers don't let you into the dirty secrets: tests are rigged to measure idle-power emissions instead of typical loads. Diesel engine improvements far outweigh the efficiencies demanded by the solo car driver; a car in 1998 emitted 4% of the toxins that a car in 1978 did, while diesel has hardly budged.
Yep, people's priorities are skewed pretty badly.
Rainforests burn daily for farming acreage, eradicating dozens of species of primates, countless other animal and vegetation species, and we devote to the cause of some penguins caught in a one-time disaster.
More money was spent on the making of Jurassic Park than had ever been spent in the history of dinosaur paleontological research. The USPTO has a few hundred million dollars siphoned off in appropriations committees, since they don't really need those patent fee proceeds; announced the same day that NASDAQ:MSFT nears its 52week low, representing a drop of over a hundred billion equity because of uncertainty in a single massive litigation.
And while I'm off-topic,
When is O'Reilly going to create a wildlife fund for all the cute animals featured on the covers of *nix utility references?
mav[LAG] thinks it's possible that anyone with a good enough grasp of the latest kernel and how it works is more than likely writing code rather than writing docs
I've known a lot of technical writers who have decided to focus their energies on English, and not C. They can understand how something works, and not be compelled to write more code on top of something that few people understand.
I've also known a few of these gifted technical writers who also have the knack of talking at length with programmers, asking the right questions and rephrasing things and asking again, thus forming a translator from "arrogant coder who expects everyone to read source code" speak into "interested technophile who wants to understand algorithms" speak.
As a matter of teaching people to program, I always insist that a person write out their algorithm in English, as comments, then each comment becomes a statement or two of real code. Then, importantly, leave the original comments in. It's all about the algorithms, people, not the reserved tokens and the use of operators. I wish more "advanced" programmers did this design-in-comments technique, because it (1) makes cleaner algorithms, (2) makes documentation for later readers, (3) makes it easier to port later.
Lastly, I know a LOT of programmers who would be a lot better if there were definitive 'state of the art' examples of source code, along with carefully written English discussions of what the source code is doing. If you don't know C, you don't know what while (*s) *d++ = *s++; does. If you're just learning C, it helps to see /* copy to the end of the source */ nearby.
It's amazing how many people are rushing to condemn the man who published the un-redacted file, and how many people are screaming to investigate the New York Times because they published the redacted file without understanding the file format, and how many people are crying foul because the CIA leaked the document in the first place.
Isn't this SLASHDOT?!
People here don't holler if Microsoft leaks proprietary technical specs... they laugh. People here don't whine if DeCSS circumvents runtime-redaction, they propagate the utility. People here don't find it immoral to expose CyberPatrol blacklists... they find it immoral to blacklist at all.
"Information wants to be free," they chime.
Given this strange behavior to this story, I have to ask. Is it "information wants to be free, except when lives are at stake"? Is it "information wants to be free, especially since beer isn't free"? Is it "information wants to be free, because I can't afford to pay programmers"? Or is it "information wants to be free, because Courtney Love teaches us how we gotta stick it to the man"?
Principles are principles.
If you don't believe "information wants to be free", then get off the pot and stop crusading. If you do believe it, then why are we worried here? The guy who finally published this unredacted form basically said he had two reasons,
force the hand of the State Department, letting these families know they may be in danger
force the review of critical information management within our own intelligence community
Both of these reasons focus on exposing more information than just this document. His tactics also demonstrate that information wants to be free. He also showed that releasing information was a powerful proactive strategy, not a secret reactive strategy. Releasing information doesn't mean giving up all your control. He took control when he showed his hand.
blacklist advertisement company domains. You think that the ISPs can make better decisions than individuals, about who to block and who to pass. You suggest that this will protect the little ones who use your service.
Now... replace advertising companies with any other concept.
Tell ISPs to
blacklist reverse-engineering enthusiast domains. You think that the ISPs can make better decisions than individuals, about who to block and who to pass. You suggest that this will protect the little ones who use your service.
Tell ISPs to
blacklist communist propaganda domains. You think that the ISPs can make better decisions than individuals, about who to block and who to pass. You suggest that this will protect the little ones who use your service.
Tell ISPs to
blacklist immoral wicked pornographic domains. You think that the ISPs can make better decisions than individuals, about who to block and who to pass. You suggest that this will protect the little ones who use your service.
The average Slashdotter would scream bloody murder if somebody else made blacklists, unilateral decisions, and "protect the users" arguments. This is what they rally against, when Mattel/CyberPatrol does things like this. This is what gets people up-in-arms when governments like China do things like this.
Get a clue. If you have the power to make decisions for other people, repeat the mantra: Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Teach the government how to lead you, by setting a good example.
The JVM was created to support the Java language, but there's no reason that you must use Java to write for the JVM.
In fact, many other languages have been written, compilers to target the JVM bytecode format. Also, the JNI (Java Native Interface) grew out of Netscape's support for C APIs to call into, and be called by, JVM bytecode.
I wonder if Csharp/Dflat/Chash/Cpound/Coctothorpe might be targeting Microsoft's JVM implementation, which has gotten good grades on speed, or if it really is a whole new virtual machine.
Microsoft doesn't appear to be claiming that the new language is free from entanglements with the operating system. In fact, if their "C#VM" were to make it easy to use COM/VBA automation, and to use native C# programs as clients and as services, it could be a win for them.
I think they're missing the mark, though. Sun's reluctance to allow their JVM to be managed by an outside standards group, and Microsoft's reluctance to follow outside de facto standards, both played to this announcement.
I can appreciate the importance of the questions you raised.
Suits probably cannot, and you need to speak to them using their language. Calmly, coolly, civilly, and with facts and figures of research.
I am guessing you were more civil in that design meeting than you were in the posting ("I told them again and again", "People hate", "I don't want", "java crap", "marketing nitwit", "stared blankly"). If someone was invited to a design meeting spoke so brusquely, then they probably wouldn't be invited to another.
Introducing new concepts to people who don't have your experience and background takes patience, clarity and civility. Often, people reject others' ideas, simply because they're not very familiar with the concept. Be a politician to get a politician to listen to you. Be a suit to get a suit to listen to you. Arrogance is a valuable tool, but only if skillfully applied.:)
THE US CONSTITUTION DOES NOT SAY WHAT A CORPORATION CAN OR CANNOT DO, IN OR OUT OF COURT.
The US Constitution ensures that a criminal infraction (action against state or federal law) won't be prosecuted twice under the same charge and same evidence.
The US Constitution ensures that the government won't forcibly compel testimony from someone.
The US Constitution ensures that the government won't consider any tangible expression to be a violation of state or federal law, with few exceptions.
The US Constitution does not apply to civil judgements, because the plaintiff is not the government. That's how O J Simpson was found guilty on essentially the same charge in a second trial: it was a civil trial raised by victims' families. Corporations are not the government.
THE US CONSTITUTION DOES NOT SAY WHAT A CORPORATION CAN OR CANNOT DO, IN OR OUT OF COURT.
Re:No, hacking is not a good thing
on
Hacking The Tivo
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· Score: 4
Most of the replies to this are of the form, "Oh, you're thinking of cracking, and yeah, that's a bad thing. We're talking about hacking, and that's a good thing."
The poster has a good point: the distinction between 'good hack' and 'bad hack' is lost on the crowd, especially in the world of suits. None of the mainstream dictionaries describe this difference, or define 'cracking' in a computer context.
I think reverse-engineering and adaptation of things is very cool, and the inventor/tinkerer ethic is quite well-received in the world as a whole. However, that's not what 90% of the public thinks about when they hear the word 'hacker'.
Reality is perception. If 90% of the people don't see a distinction, then for all intents and purposes, there is no distinction. Even if the remaining 10% scream, whine, bitch, complain and sneer whenever the word is used.
One, what are the "agreed upon" values for each variable in Drake's Equation?
Two, since our "communicative" span may be about 100 years from first radio transmissions to adoption of less leaky cable/internet/laser stuff, how low is the fb (fraction of time the society is using broadcasting technologies)?
Three, if we DO hear something, do we assume that we'll hear someone out there, during their 100 year burst of transmissions, and then be able to visit them, given that time/space curvature puts their race far ahead of ours?
www.dot.[yourstate].us [YourState] Department of Transportation Please fill out this form completely and accurately. At a four-way stop, with three people arriving at the same time, who has the right of way? Have you ever had an accident? Stand across the room, and read the fifth line of letters. Did you get them right? Do you want to be an organ donor? Click here, and your driver's license will be mailed to you.
www.hud.[yourstate].us [YourState] Department of Housing and Urban Development To qualify for housing subsidies, you must demonstrate that your income and/or education is lower than established poverty guidelines. Click one: ( ) I am using hotmail to save money on email services. ( ) I'm at a library kiosk, since I can't afford my own computer. (*) Kiosk, what's a kiosk?
www.usps.gov United States Post Office Weigh your package on a scale, such as your bathroom scale. Press here to print airmail postage. Press here to digitize your package. Press here to certify that your package is not illegal contraband, including explosives, weaponry, narcotics, nuclear secrets or crptography source code. Press here to FTP: your package to Honduras.
www.hhs.gov Department of Health and Human Services The Center for Disease Control and the Department of Health and Human Services are cooperating to reduce influenza in the community. Click here for a flu shot.
(end of giggle) I'm not a Luddite, and I hope that technology can be used to overcome as many issues as possible. However, our government is BY the PEOPLE, FOR the PEOPLE, and most of the people who end up in government lines are not savvy or interested in using computers.
We're elitist if we forget about "the lower half" of humanity, or even if we think of the computer have-nots as "the lower half."
I use Photoshop every day. It's a critical application for me, for pretty much any and all art tasks, both for fun and profit.
I pose the following as questions. Perhaps all of these are possible today in the open-source world.
Can Enlightenment or X deal with more than one device controlling the onscreen pointer? In Windows and on Macs, if you leave the mouse alone, you can use the pen or puck to click. If you leave the pen or puck idle, you can move the mouse to click and drag around the filesystem quickly. You don't have to select anything to switch. (Some Windows laptops get confused between plugged mouse and touchpad, but pen tablets and mice have mastered this co-existance long ago.) You can't draw freehand with a mouse anywhere near as well as you can with a pen, and conversely, a pen is unwieldy when double-clicking small gui elements.
Does Linux or GIMP support extended information from the pointing device? Pressure sensitivity is only the tip of the iceberg here, but it is a WORLD of difference over a fixed stroke. Press lightly, thin hairline. Press heavily, bold swath. All in one stroke. Modern pen tablets understand many variables and can forward them to any interested software: pressure, tilt, roll, and even a second round tip on the back of the pen for "erasing."
Not a flame. If Linux and GIMP cannot handle these (as well as the CMYK/halftoning/separation features needed by page printers), then the GIMP is sadly relegated to web banners, stock photography edits, and other simplistic work. ART needs an expressive tool set.
Ferrari and all of the other high-performance engine producers has been doing race analysis for many years now.
The CAN (car area network) is one of many automotive technologies that's gone from race-course to shopping mall. Sensors all over the car send back their data to a central computer.
Telemetry (from both accelerometers and gps/loran-like triangulators) can assist dead-reckoning analysis. "Did I take that corner too wide?" And temperatures and revolutions can be measured at many critical points, including tires, brakes, oil, engine block, tranny, etc.
I had always thought it was an urban legend, but the Sea ttle Times and other sites briefly mention singer John Denver's attempt to do the same thing in the early 1990s. He was quite the space fan.
John Denver: Singer/songwriter John Denver, a longtime member of the National Space Society's Board of Governors, died in a light plane crash in California October 12. Although best known for his hit songs in the 1970s, he was a founding governing member of the National Space Institute in 1976, along with Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Bob Hope, Alan Shepard and others. He stayed on the board after the 1987 merger of the NSI with the L-5 Society, which created the National Space Society. "He personified the deep desire of many of our Society's members to someday travel in space," said Board of Governors chairman Hugh Downs. "We will miss his vision, his talent, his perseverance and his unique ability, through his words and music, to help others understand the fragility and beauty of this planet we call home."
As I recall, he asked NASA, who refused him. Not to be spurned, he then asked the Soviets in the same year, which didn't go over too well with American patriots. The jokes were talking about a real "Rocky Mountain High."
If you work in the number of centimeters the tourist would move while in orbit (relative to his surface launch point), the price per centimeter becomes MUCH more reasonable.
Slashdot Mirror
With minor differences, this is a standard lease agreement. It turned the car industry upside-down, for a period of a couple years. Now, it's about equal to the purchase-outright agreement. The benefits and problems are a personal decision to the buyor/lessor.
If offered a choice, some people WILL choose the option that YOU wouldn't.
Your examples include snooping (1) a professional commercial telephone system, and (2) a government delivery agent.
Nearly all IRC networks are run on donated CPU time, donated CPU bandwidth, by volunteer effort, and with massive "who-knows-who" cadres of IRCops, few of whom have even seen photos of each other, nevermind gotten strict legal assurances of conduct.
If someone believes that such grassroots organizations are 100% trustable down to the last individual, then I suppose that they're asking for their secrets to be exposed.
I, however, assume that anything I say on BBSs, IRC, Slashdot, and anything else published or broadcast without physical seal or secure transmission, may be used in court or on the front cover of a tabloid someday.
should read
An op has set #JoesBackRoom as mode +s (unlisted), +i (invite), +k (passkey entry), all those in #JoesBackRoom hear you.Several comments discuss the "reasonable expectation of privacy" angle of such a tool. Also, several comments discuss the problems with flyby (/join,/part) and annoyance issues of the petty snoop.
There are four basic kinds of communication on the typical IRC system,
unsecured channel 1-to-N, or "say"
You say something in #JoesTavern, all those in #JoesTavern hear you. Anyone can join or part at any time. Laughable to suggest you have reasonable expectation of privacy here, though most would assume they can see a definitive list of who else are in the same channel.
secured channel 1-to-N, or "say"
An op has set #JoesBackRoom as mode +s (unlisted), +i (invite), +k (passkey entry), all those in #JoesTavern hear you. If you don't know how to get in, you can't get in. Still, it's a personal-trust-web fanning out from the ops and participants. They may copy or log what's said inside, and who KNOWS who gets that.
Any chatter can talk directly to any other chatter on the same network, without forming a separate channel to do so. The messages still go through one or more servers to get routed from Betty to Frank. This has a very weak but plausible expectation of privacy, since there are no 'broadcasts' done to a channel, and the assumption is that only one target may get it. If two people were to coordinate a
After a handshake through the network, the TCP/IP addresses of Betty and Frank can establish a direct computer connection (dcc), and a "genuinely private" 1-to-1 chat channel is formed. Many IRC clients support this handshake, and many users use them to escape the intermediary latencies of the network's servers. Again, it's a trust situation: if Betty doesn't know Frank well, then giving him her network address or any other secrets may be rash on her part.
You can only have a reasonable expectation of privacy if no intermediary servers, or explicit destinations, are compromised with listening agents.
If you alter the IRC server code, you could listen to any of the first three forms of communication, and you can log the TCP/IP addresses of those who try to establish the fourth. Some IRC servers already have completely hint-free snoops like this in place.
If a compromised server then attaches itself as a member of a larger network, by force or by guile, then you have Echelon/Carnivore proportion snooping possible, without one shred of "annoying flyby" behavior detected by the visitors to the network, or even to the other servers on the network.
In short, you HAVE no reasonable expectation of privacy if you use IRC.
See the NASA page that explores other avenues for space commercialization.
Although it is extremely unlikely that advertisements could fund an entire mission, they may provide significant supplementary revenue. Advertisements may be purchased on their own, but they are generally integrated into overall promotional campaigns. As such, they have the potential to generate additional revenues on the order of $3 million to $5 million or more per mission. For example, Columbia Pictures was willing to pay $500,000 for space on the side of the first Comet launch to promote the release of "The Last Action Hero." This was split between Westinghouse (Conestoga) and Space Marketing, Inc.
You gotta keep your action-oriented-box-office-bombs-starring-bulky-br utes straight. :)
However, they often return something just as useful, in that the government redacts the information returned "for security purposes." While redact means edit, in such cases it is effectively, black out with a wide felt-tip marker.
If SlashDot were redacted the way most "important" data received through FoI requests, it would appear like this:
Posted by ***** on *****
from the ***** dept.
***** writes: "A press release from the ***** says they are using the Freedom of Information Act to seek all of the ***** related to the ***** " The ***** is saying ' *****
So the next time that you pump your gas or drive down the freeway to work, ask yourself whether you really need to do this. Public transportation is usually powered by much safer power sources, so maybe these kind of accidents won't happen anymore.
I agree that humans and their feigned needs for fossil fuels at low costs led to this sort of tragedy. I don't agree that public transportation uses safer power sources. They use either (1) electricity created at central fossil-fuel burning facilities, or (2) fossil-fuels in other forms.
Not to mention the mode of transportation itself. Cars crashing on the highway are the number one dangerous mode. But think of the number of San Francisco Muni bus accidents, New York subway derailments, airline disasters, AMTRACK derailments, freight trains with toxic chemicals spilling, train derailments in Turkey and Germany and everywhere else.
Diesel smoke from public buses also cause more pollution per person, in areas where ridership is too low to amortize the damage. Sure, if the route runs half-full, then say thirty people use twenty times the fuel of cars. During off-peak and mis-arranged routes, then four people use fifteen times the fuel.
Diesel truck lobbying groups and the engine producers don't let you into the dirty secrets: tests are rigged to measure idle-power emissions instead of typical loads. Diesel engine improvements far outweigh the efficiencies demanded by the solo car driver; a car in 1998 emitted 4% of the toxins that a car in 1978 did, while diesel has hardly budged.
Yep, people's priorities are skewed pretty badly.
Rainforests burn daily for farming acreage, eradicating dozens of species of primates, countless other animal and vegetation species, and we devote to the cause of some penguins caught in a one-time disaster.
More money was spent on the making of Jurassic Park than had ever been spent in the history of dinosaur paleontological research. The USPTO has a few hundred million dollars siphoned off in appropriations committees, since they don't really need those patent fee proceeds; announced the same day that NASDAQ:MSFT nears its 52week low, representing a drop of over a hundred billion equity because of uncertainty in a single massive litigation.
And while I'm off-topic,
When is O'Reilly going to create a wildlife fund for all the cute animals featured on the covers of *nix utility references?
Not a flame.
mav[LAG] thinks it's possible that anyone with a good enough grasp of the latest kernel and how it works is more than likely writing code rather than writing docs
I've known a lot of technical writers who have decided to focus their energies on English, and not C. They can understand how something works, and not be compelled to write more code on top of something that few people understand.
I've also known a few of these gifted technical writers who also have the knack of talking at length with programmers, asking the right questions and rephrasing things and asking again, thus forming a translator from "arrogant coder who expects everyone to read source code" speak into "interested technophile who wants to understand algorithms" speak.
As a matter of teaching people to program, I always insist that a person write out their algorithm in English, as comments, then each comment becomes a statement or two of real code. Then, importantly, leave the original comments in. It's all about the algorithms, people, not the reserved tokens and the use of operators. I wish more "advanced" programmers did this design-in-comments technique, because it (1) makes cleaner algorithms, (2) makes documentation for later readers, (3) makes it easier to port later.
Lastly, I know a LOT of programmers who would be a lot better if there were definitive 'state of the art' examples of source code, along with carefully written English discussions of what the source code is doing. If you don't know C, you don't know what while (*s) *d++ = *s++; does. If you're just learning C, it helps to see /* copy to the end of the source */ nearby.
This is not a flame.
It's amazing how many people are rushing to condemn the man who published the un-redacted file, and how many people are screaming to investigate the New York Times because they published the redacted file without understanding the file format, and how many people are crying foul because the CIA leaked the document in the first place.
Isn't this SLASHDOT?!
People here don't holler if Microsoft leaks proprietary technical specs... they laugh. People here don't whine if DeCSS circumvents runtime-redaction, they propagate the utility. People here don't find it immoral to expose CyberPatrol blacklists... they find it immoral to blacklist at all.
"Information wants to be free," they chime.
Given this strange behavior to this story, I have to ask. Is it "information wants to be free, except when lives are at stake"? Is it "information wants to be free, especially since beer isn't free"? Is it "information wants to be free, because I can't afford to pay programmers"? Or is it "information wants to be free, because Courtney Love teaches us how we gotta stick it to the man"?
Principles are principles.
If you don't believe "information wants to be free", then get off the pot and stop crusading. If you do believe it, then why are we worried here? The guy who finally published this unredacted form basically said he had two reasons,
force the hand of the State Department, letting these families know they may be in danger
force the review of critical information management within our own intelligence community
Both of these reasons focus on exposing more information than just this document. His tactics also demonstrate that information wants to be free. He also showed that releasing information was a powerful proactive strategy, not a secret reactive strategy. Releasing information doesn't mean giving up all your control. He took control when he showed his hand.
He was doing you a favor.
Let me get this straight. You say,
Now... replace advertising companies with any other concept.
The average Slashdotter would scream bloody murder if somebody else made blacklists, unilateral decisions, and "protect the users" arguments. This is what they rally against, when Mattel/CyberPatrol does things like this. This is what gets people up-in-arms when governments like China do things like this.
Get a clue. If you have the power to make decisions for other people, repeat the mantra: Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Teach the government how to lead you, by setting a good example.
A footnote mark that is shaped like a Christian cross is called a "dagger," "thorn," or "thorpe."
A footnote mark that looks like two daggers, laid atop each other, one hilt up, one hilt down, is a duothorpe, or a double-dagger.
Lay eight daggers, with the hilts all arranged like a tic-tac-toe, and thus, you get the name "octothorpe."
AT&T apparently used it for the "pound" key on touch-tones, and PostScript uses that name for the symbol in their glyph libraries.
The JVM was created to support the Java language, but there's no reason that you must use Java to write for the JVM.
In fact, many other languages have been written, compilers to target the JVM bytecode format. Also, the JNI (Java Native Interface) grew out of Netscape's support for C APIs to call into, and be called by, JVM bytecode.
I wonder if Csharp/Dflat/Chash/Cpound/Coctothorpe might be targeting Microsoft's JVM implementation, which has gotten good grades on speed, or if it really is a whole new virtual machine.
Microsoft doesn't appear to be claiming that the new language is free from entanglements with the operating system. In fact, if their "C#VM" were to make it easy to use COM/VBA automation, and to use native C# programs as clients and as services, it could be a win for them.
I think they're missing the mark, though. Sun's reluctance to allow their JVM to be managed by an outside standards group, and Microsoft's reluctance to follow outside de facto standards, both played to this announcement.
Any number of names come to mind.
"What is in a name? Arrows by any other name would kill just as swift."
disclaimer: not a flame
I can appreciate the importance of the questions you raised.
Suits probably cannot, and you need to speak to them using their language. Calmly, coolly, civilly, and with facts and figures of research.
I am guessing you were more civil in that design meeting than you were in the posting ("I told them again and again", "People hate", "I don't want", "java crap", "marketing nitwit", "stared blankly"). If someone was invited to a design meeting spoke so brusquely, then they probably wouldn't be invited to another.
Introducing new concepts to people who don't have your experience and background takes patience, clarity and civility. Often, people reject others' ideas, simply because they're not very familiar with the concept. Be a politician to get a politician to listen to you. Be a suit to get a suit to listen to you. Arrogance is a valuable tool, but only if skillfully applied. :)
In the US Legal system, not knowing the law is not a defense against your committing the infraction.
"Officer, I didn't know it was a 25MPH zone, I didn't see the sign because I was looking in the rear-view mirror at your blinking lights."
Let's sing along,
THE US CONSTITUTION DOES NOT SAY WHAT A CORPORATION CAN OR CANNOT DO, IN OR OUT OF COURT.
The US Constitution ensures that a criminal infraction (action against state or federal law) won't be prosecuted twice under the same charge and same evidence.
The US Constitution ensures that the government won't forcibly compel testimony from someone.
The US Constitution ensures that the government won't consider any tangible expression to be a violation of state or federal law, with few exceptions.
The US Constitution does not apply to civil judgements, because the plaintiff is not the government. That's how O J Simpson was found guilty on essentially the same charge in a second trial: it was a civil trial raised by victims' families. Corporations are not the government.
THE US CONSTITUTION DOES NOT SAY WHAT A CORPORATION CAN OR CANNOT DO, IN OR OUT OF COURT.
Most of the replies to this are of the form, "Oh, you're thinking of cracking, and yeah, that's a bad thing. We're talking about hacking, and that's a good thing."
The poster has a good point: the distinction between 'good hack' and 'bad hack' is lost on the crowd, especially in the world of suits. None of the mainstream dictionaries describe this difference, or define 'cracking' in a computer context.
I think reverse-engineering and adaptation of things is very cool, and the inventor/tinkerer ethic is quite well-received in the world as a whole. However, that's not what 90% of the public thinks about when they hear the word 'hacker'.
Reality is perception. If 90% of the people don't see a distinction, then for all intents and purposes, there is no distinction. Even if the remaining 10% scream, whine, bitch, complain and sneer whenever the word is used.
One, what are the "agreed upon" values for each variable in Drake's Equation?
Two, since our "communicative" span may be about 100 years from first radio transmissions to adoption of less leaky cable/internet/laser stuff, how low is the fb (fraction of time the society is using broadcasting technologies)?
Three, if we DO hear something, do we assume that we'll hear someone out there, during their 100 year burst of transmissions, and then be able to visit them, given that time/space curvature puts their race far ahead of ours?
www.dot.[yourstate].us
[YourState] Department of Transportation
Please fill out this form completely and accurately. At a four-way stop, with three people arriving at the same time, who has the right of way? Have you ever had an accident? Stand across the room, and read the fifth line of letters. Did you get them right? Do you want to be an organ donor? Click here, and your driver's license will be mailed to you.
www.hud.[yourstate].us
[YourState] Department of Housing and Urban Development
To qualify for housing subsidies, you must demonstrate that your income and/or education is lower than established poverty guidelines. Click one:
( ) I am using hotmail to save money on email services.
( ) I'm at a library kiosk, since I can't afford my own computer.
(*) Kiosk, what's a kiosk?
www.usps.gov
United States Post Office
Weigh your package on a scale, such as your bathroom scale. Press here to print airmail postage. Press here to digitize your package. Press here to certify that your package is not illegal contraband, including explosives, weaponry, narcotics, nuclear secrets or crptography source code. Press here to FTP: your package to Honduras.
www.hhs.gov
Department of Health and Human Services
The Center for Disease Control and the Department of Health and Human Services are cooperating to reduce influenza in the community. Click here for a flu shot.
(end of giggle) I'm not a Luddite, and I hope that technology can be used to overcome as many issues as possible. However, our government is BY the PEOPLE, FOR the PEOPLE, and most of the people who end up in government lines are not savvy or interested in using computers.
We're elitist if we forget about "the lower half" of humanity, or even if we think of the computer have-nots as "the lower half."
I use Photoshop every day. It's a critical application for me, for pretty much any and all art tasks, both for fun and profit.
I pose the following as questions. Perhaps all of these are possible today in the open-source world.
In Windows and on Macs, if you leave the mouse alone, you can use the pen or puck to click. If you leave the pen or puck idle, you can move the mouse to click and drag around the filesystem quickly. You don't have to select anything to switch. (Some Windows laptops get confused between plugged mouse and touchpad, but pen tablets and mice have mastered this co-existance long ago.) You can't draw freehand with a mouse anywhere near as well as you can with a pen, and conversely, a pen is unwieldy when double-clicking small gui elements.
Pressure sensitivity is only the tip of the iceberg here, but it is a WORLD of difference over a fixed stroke. Press lightly, thin hairline. Press heavily, bold swath. All in one stroke. Modern pen tablets understand many variables and can forward them to any interested software: pressure, tilt, roll, and even a second round tip on the back of the pen for "erasing."
Not a flame. If Linux and GIMP cannot handle these (as well as the CMYK/halftoning/separation features needed by page printers), then the GIMP is sadly relegated to web banners, stock photography edits, and other simplistic work. ART needs an expressive tool set.
Ferrari and all of the other high-performance engine producers has been doing race analysis for many years now.
The CAN (car area network) is one of many automotive technologies that's gone from race-course to shopping mall. Sensors all over the car send back their data to a central computer.
Telemetry (from both accelerometers and gps/loran-like triangulators) can assist dead-reckoning analysis. "Did I take that corner too wide?" And temperatures and revolutions can be measured at many critical points, including tires, brakes, oil, engine block, tranny, etc.
Boris: Did you get the secret plans?
Natasha: Of course, comrade.
Boris: Let me see!
[Natasha hands a sheaf of splotchy blackened xerox paper to Boris.]
Boris: What is this?!
Natasha: I copied secret data from computer parts. They won't know.
Boris: Ayiiii! We burned the hillsides for THIS?!
I had always thought it was an urban legend, but the Sea ttle Times and other sites briefly mention singer John Denver's attempt to do the same thing in the early 1990s. He was quite the space fan.
From SPACEVIEWS UPDATE, 1997:
As I recall, he asked NASA, who refused him. Not to be spurned, he then asked the Soviets in the same year, which didn't go over too well with American patriots. The jokes were talking about a real "Rocky Mountain High."
If you work in the number of centimeters the tourist would move while in orbit (relative to his surface launch point), the price per centimeter becomes MUCH more reasonable.
For those of you who think spelling things with up to four presses of a digit, see www.tegic.com. They use dictionary and probability data to shorten,
into,
I thought it was clever, and the website has a scenario demonstration.
Still not quite the way I would play Spellbreaker, though. "Frotz me!"