True, but computer languages are not just the bits you learn in the language reference. There is also a culture surrounding each computer language, because eventually much code has to be seen by another geek versed in the language. And the culture surrounding Perl is the computer language equivalent of an island of cannibals. There are some wonderful pieces of native art if you can get past that whole spear-you-and-eat-your-brains thing. Perl programmers seem to take a perverse enjoyment in making the reader of their code suffer because the ability to do that is a mark of status in the perl community. Compare it to the way that C++ programmers are obsessive about speed/memory constraints even when its not warranted by the task at hand or the way you can't talk to a Java programmer without him immediately starting to see visions of a class hierarchy.
It was probably about the price... TO HIS OWN MANAGER. Come on, this is a tech site, think this through. He just happened to have a walkie talkie tuned on to a special Indians only frequency? When they have an effective range of, what, a couple hundred *feet* for the consumer models? And The Vast Indian Conspiracy uses a network of walkie talkies to maintain market control over a city? No, he used walkie talkies like every other minimum wage know-nothing in the retail industry uses them: to talk to his boss for a price check. And why bother using English if his boss speaks his language better? I work in a Japanese office and you can be for darned sure that I don't take calls from America and then say "Oh, pardon me, people might get suspicious. My side of the conversation is going to be in Japanese from this point out. Try to keep up."
I wonder if Wikipedia holds articles where people complain of being modded down on Slashdot... That would be interesting, in a delightfully pointless post-modern sort of way.
>>Yeah, it might look like nitpicking, but standards and interoperability are crucial to an info-age society.>>
Its a proprietary console. Did you buy a game thinking it was going to run on your DVD player? I'm all for standards and interoperability, but if I insert a CD-R into my toaster on the theory that one burner is basically the same as another I don't expect my toaster to fix my mistake.
Raise your hand if your slashdot password would flunk any "best practice" ever invented and is also used on at least 100 other internet sites for a similar login. Guilty here, and been guilty since high school. I only bother with strong passwords for email and anything that has enough access to my data to cost me money.
Obviously, any website that lets users specify javascript in, e.g, a forum or blog post is going to be a cross-site-scripting nightmare. However, and while I'm not entirely sure of this, it would seem that an overly long HTML title would cause this bug itself, correct? A lot of the bulletin board software I've seen uses the thread title as the page title. Assuming that somewhere out there there is some similar blog/forum software which doesn't impose a size limit on the title ("Duh, people wouldn't be able to read it all, why would someone use more than 30 characters or so", you know the drill), this could potentially be pretty nasty. Go to a forum you've been going to for years, click on a post whose title scrolls off the right side of your screen, and watch as the next time you try to open a browser session it refuses to start. How many people would, without reading this article, connect the trusted forum to the bug, or think of eliminating history.dat, of all things?
This assumes that you can actually force the exploit without javascript. If Firefox clips HTML titles then the vulnerability would be much less severe. Of course, as soon as someone figures out a way to turn the buffer overrun into an arbitrary code execution this jumps to the top of the pile... remind me, why are we still using unchecked buffers in a zero-trust application like a web browser?
I'm all for new features but can't really see a use case for this one. You can already switch between emails at the touch of a button, and unlike modern internet browsing you're almost working with multiple mail windows at once (and with email I presume you'd never tab over to another screen while waiting for a page to render, which is one of the main attractions of tabs for me). There also isn't a compelling need to auto-launch your favorite twelve emails when you open Thunderbird so you can, uh, re-read them again, like you would add your news sites to a tab-group in a browser.
I live in Japan and had a business trip last week which required about 6 hours of trainrides, so I went to a local game chain to pick up a new DS game for the ride (ended up getting Naruto RPG 2 -- good game, by the way, if you're a fan of the manga/anime and like a fairly conventional console RPG its well worth your $30 if it comes out in the US). While I was there, I asked the manager when the new Microsoft console was coming out. He said, and I quote, "There is a new Microsoft console coming out?!", then one of the clerks said "Yes sir, XBox something or other." They then checked the big book of incoming inventory (its a chain store), and found out that they would get a shipment of two of them sometime in January or so, which were classified as "XBox Accessories". This is the newest, largest video game store in the second largest city in my prefecture.
I'm not optimistic for this console rocking Japan's world.
... on installation of Windows XP: Korean edition I'd pop up a message that said "The functionality of the operating system you just purchased has been crippled on the orders of the Korean legal system. You are still allowed to freely upgrade to a non-crippled version of the operating system by clicking the link placed on your desktop entitled 'Completing Installation' and following the onscreen instructions, or by clicking on the web link entitled 'How To Replicate the Full Functionality of A Western Windows Installation Using Third Party Software To Fill Holes Mandated By the Legal System'. We apologize for the inconvinence."
The point here is currently only one entity can decide.
Roll your own Linux distro and the default is whatever you want it to be. Or use Windows and go to through the unending torture of installing application software on a Windows system -- since you gave me the links I counted and it took a grand total of tenmouse clicks to get Classic Media Player installed (try it: 3 to download, one to minimize firefox*, two to unzip the download using XP's default behavior, two to open Mediaplayer, two to open the file types preferences, one to mass-check all the boxes and one to hit apply). I'm lucky enough to live in Japan, land of the ungoldy fast Internet, so the entire process probably took about as long as it took you to write your post.
* Handy Windows tip I learned last week that might be useful for people: windows key + M auto-minimizes all open application windows, so I could technically have saved a click here.
People can go to jail, and there are heavy penalties.
Unless you worked for Bill Clinton. Then if you go into the archives, stuff material (relevant to a congressional investigation, no less) you wrote into your pants legs to get it out of the building, and shred half of it, you get your wrist slapped for being a very naughty, naughty boy. But yes, in theory, they're strict SOBs:)
The chances of becoming a victim of terrorism are less than the chances of being hit by falling space debris.
Falling space debris doesn't kill 5 Israeli civilians and several dozen Iraqis on a quiet week, and several hundred to thousands on a bad day. Falling space debris also isn't actively trying to fall more frequently and harder.
how can we possibly believe that terrorism is capable of any more than the few isolated incidents that have befallen the world in the last dozen years?
Terrorism has been going on for significantly longer than the last dozen years, and the "few isolated incidents" model is exactly the *wrong* way to understand the threat. Ask Brits or Israelis if the IRA or Hamas incidents were either few or isolated. No, they were part of long-term campaigns which occurred (and, in Israel, occur, this morning in fact) precisely to make life so unlivable as to force a desired political goal. And when terrorists are comparitively ignored or treated as a minor nuisance like particularly nasty street-crime (see, for example, Al Qaeda before their second, successful attempt to take down the World Trade Centers -- everyone forgets about the first one, which was an isolated incident like their attack on the USS Cole was an isolated incident and their embassy bombings in Africa were isolated incidents and...) the frequency and severity of their "isolated incidents" tends to rise.
This makes me glad for things like Amazon, which stacks both wide and deep. I've always kicked around the idea of writing a book (doesn't everybody?). My sister will actually be published within a couple of years. She's certainly good at it but I don't have any illusions that she's the second coming of JK Rowling (no mega-million-multimedia-marketing campaign getting launched for her book, either). With Amazon, people who would enjoy her book (and every book has an audience, Long Tail anyone?) can find it through their search, through "customers who liked this book also liked", through reader recommendations, etc. One thing I find particularly interesting about Amazon is that it has an amazing synergy with blogs. I've bought, oh, five books or so because one of the blogs on my daily list said "I'm currently reading X. Its great. Here's my mini-review" and, given that my bloggers share my interests or I wouldn't read them, thats generally a fairly good indication that I'll like the book (wouldn't you rather have a review from someone who shares your tastes than from some person whose only qualification is they're in an editor's Rolodex at the New York Times Review of Books?). There are now a bunch of authors blogging, which makes excellent sense as a promotional tool both for your current book and for establishing a fan community for your next one (if you're in a genre where that makes sense).
Sounds great for a jailhouse lawyer but remember the distinguishing feature of jailhouse lawyers is that they're in jail. If you try that in an actual court you'll be laughed out of the room. You'll also find that using any device to cause a cash-register to undercharge an item is, in itself, a crime in many states (Illinois being one of them). The crime is theft, incidentally ("A person commits the offense of retail theft when he or she knowingly:... Alters, transfers, or removes any label, price tag, marking, indicia of value or any other markings which aid in determining value affixed to any merchandise displayed, held, stored or offered for sale, in a retail mercantile establishment and attempts to purchase such merchandise personally or in consort with another at less than the full retail value with the intention of depriving the merchant of the full retail value of such merchandise;..." -- See the details here, sec 16A-3.b).
Slashdot has, in a fit of anti-RIAA zealotry, decided that there is a right to steal electronic merchandise when it only hurts a Big Retail Establishment, much like there is a right to steal music when it only hurts a Big Multinational Music Cartel.
Cue "its not stealing, its *copyright infringement*" trolls.
A bit wrong on taxes. You have to charge taxes on an item shipped to state X if your business has a "locus" in state X. For example, if you have a fulfilment center, brick and mortar store, or customer service call center there, then *boom* taxes. You can look this up in Quill Corporation v Virginia (its definately Quill, might not be Virginia though, been a while since I saw it and I only remember because I used to work for Quill). So, as a customer, you're always a bit better doing business with someone from out of state as long as they're going to be shipping it to you anyhow.
This is NOT tax or legal advice. Don't trust Slashdot. I would bet on this being closed off by legislation in a few years -- there are already states trying to nibble around the edges of the Internet tax moratorium. And its a minefield, too -- read the story of how some states end up taxing WoW while others do not, its nuts (Wisconsin says you pay tax on a video game subscription if the subscription includes patches but not if its just fee-for-service, Illinois taxes regardless, etc).
i agree that grammar and all the rules that they taught me in high school and also in fourth-through-7th grade are really unnecessary after all i can get my point across just as well even if i dont follow the so called book and who appointed english teachers to be the gods of punctuations anyway its not like they have never put a single period out of place in their entire lives even my old teacher mrs smith who was kind of nice except for being a total bastard when it came to the proper use of the semicolon once ended a sentence with a comma instead of a period or at least i think that might have been a comma but i suppose it could always have been a mustard stain on the paper now i am an english teacher myself except when i am doing my real job as an engineer and i teach two types of students foreign students and american students and sometimes i wonder if the foreign students are ever going to give up the pointless drive to stifle their creativity by conforming to the rules and start writing like my american students whose papers have much more of their own authentic voice not suppressed by trifling concerns like including proper punctuation as if such a thing existed
It is a live saver however because the one thing that killed windows/IE for me years ago was that just as you found the site with the real free porn, eh I mean real usefull bit of info IE or windows or both crashed forcing you to start searching from the start again.
A pity IE has no feature which will show you the history of sites visited today. Then you could just press some key combination (maybe Ctrl-H to make it easy to remember, we're talking about IE users after all), press the button for "sites visited today", and just pick the one you wanted with a single click. Maybe even make it searchable.
Haha, thats funny. I'm an AI researcher and have worked on, well, call it a related field with a related government agency. You think the DOD would actually need or desire "self aware" for any application? Or one of the generalized Data-type "its just like a human, except it has no physical brain" sci-fi AIs? Heck no. They'd want an algorithm which was the electronic equivalent of a blood hound -- doing one thing, very very well. The Holy Grail of military-application AI would be Google Search raised to the nth power -- something that could take raw, unprocessed data in an arbitrary format (e.g. here's a list of all the international bank transfers coming from Europe in the last six weeks) and exectute arbitrary queries on the data ("Bloodhound, we think there is a terrorist ring compromised of about twelve to twenty Muslim professionals with connections in Bonne, known sitings in Paris at the riots, and they're partly financed by someone with shadowy connections to the Saudi royal family. GO GET HIM, BOY!" and then, two hours later Bloodhound would say "The following 423 bank transfers are consistent with the supplied hypothesis. The cell's main locus of operations appears to be Lisbon. Analysis indicates that the Saudi connection is unlikely; the main source identifiable source of funding seems to be an Oil-For-Food slushfund which the UN monitors have missed." (It should be pointed out that this example is pretty darn sci-fi itself, but it is a heck of a lot more plausible sci-fi than any "self-aware" BS.)
Another potential field would be simple image processing. "Is that smudge a tank or a school bus?" Neural net spits out "School bus, p=.62, tank, p=.23, 1996 Mazda, p=.04"
Slashdot Mirror
True, but computer languages are not just the bits you learn in the language reference. There is also a culture surrounding each computer language, because eventually much code has to be seen by another geek versed in the language. And the culture surrounding Perl is the computer language equivalent of an island of cannibals. There are some wonderful pieces of native art if you can get past that whole spear-you-and-eat-your-brains thing. Perl programmers seem to take a perverse enjoyment in making the reader of their code suffer because the ability to do that is a mark of status in the perl community. Compare it to the way that C++ programmers are obsessive about speed/memory constraints even when its not warranted by the task at hand or the way you can't talk to a Java programmer without him immediately starting to see visions of a class hierarchy.
It was probably about the price... TO HIS OWN MANAGER. Come on, this is a tech site, think this through. He just happened to have a walkie talkie tuned on to a special Indians only frequency? When they have an effective range of, what, a couple hundred *feet* for the consumer models? And The Vast Indian Conspiracy uses a network of walkie talkies to maintain market control over a city? No, he used walkie talkies like every other minimum wage know-nothing in the retail industry uses them: to talk to his boss for a price check. And why bother using English if his boss speaks his language better? I work in a Japanese office and you can be for darned sure that I don't take calls from America and then say "Oh, pardon me, people might get suspicious. My side of the conversation is going to be in Japanese from this point out. Try to keep up."
I wonder if Wikipedia holds articles where people complain of being modded down on Slashdot... That would be interesting, in a delightfully pointless post-modern sort of way.
100% of the time, eventually, once. A more useful question might be "What is the median time before failure?"
The number of private trackers that share legal content can be counted on the fingers of Captain Hook's bad hand.
>>Yeah, it might look like nitpicking, but standards and interoperability are crucial to an info-age society.>> Its a proprietary console. Did you buy a game thinking it was going to run on your DVD player? I'm all for standards and interoperability, but if I insert a CD-R into my toaster on the theory that one burner is basically the same as another I don't expect my toaster to fix my mistake.
Raise your hand if your slashdot password would flunk any "best practice" ever invented and is also used on at least 100 other internet sites for a similar login. Guilty here, and been guilty since high school. I only bother with strong passwords for email and anything that has enough access to my data to cost me money.
This assumes that you can actually force the exploit without javascript. If Firefox clips HTML titles then the vulnerability would be much less severe. Of course, as soon as someone figures out a way to turn the buffer overrun into an arbitrary code execution this jumps to the top of the pile... remind me, why are we still using unchecked buffers in a zero-trust application like a web browser?
I'm all for new features but can't really see a use case for this one. You can already switch between emails at the touch of a button, and unlike modern internet browsing you're almost working with multiple mail windows at once (and with email I presume you'd never tab over to another screen while waiting for a page to render, which is one of the main attractions of tabs for me). There also isn't a compelling need to auto-launch your favorite twelve emails when you open Thunderbird so you can, uh, re-read them again, like you would add your news sites to a tab-group in a browser.
Fairly certain they are indeed region encoded.
I'm not optimistic for this console rocking Japan's world.
... on installation of Windows XP: Korean edition I'd pop up a message that said "The functionality of the operating system you just purchased has been crippled on the orders of the Korean legal system. You are still allowed to freely upgrade to a non-crippled version of the operating system by clicking the link placed on your desktop entitled 'Completing Installation' and following the onscreen instructions, or by clicking on the web link entitled 'How To Replicate the Full Functionality of A Western Windows Installation Using Third Party Software To Fill Holes Mandated By the Legal System'. We apologize for the inconvinence."
Roll your own Linux distro and the default is whatever you want it to be. Or use Windows and go to through the unending torture of installing application software on a Windows system -- since you gave me the links I counted and it took a grand total of tenmouse clicks to get Classic Media Player installed (try it: 3 to download, one to minimize firefox*, two to unzip the download using XP's default behavior, two to open Mediaplayer, two to open the file types preferences, one to mass-check all the boxes and one to hit apply). I'm lucky enough to live in Japan, land of the ungoldy fast Internet, so the entire process probably took about as long as it took you to write your post.
* Handy Windows tip I learned last week that might be useful for people: windows key + M auto-minimizes all open application windows, so I could technically have saved a click here.
lol no were not stoopid
Unless you worked for Bill Clinton. Then if you go into the archives, stuff material (relevant to a congressional investigation, no less) you wrote into your pants legs to get it out of the building, and shred half of it, you get your wrist slapped for being a very naughty, naughty boy. But yes, in theory, they're strict SOBs :)
http://www.slate.com/id/2104138/
Falling space debris doesn't kill 5 Israeli civilians and several dozen Iraqis on a quiet week, and several hundred to thousands on a bad day. Falling space debris also isn't actively trying to fall more frequently and harder.
how can we possibly believe that terrorism is capable of any more than the few isolated incidents that have befallen the world in the last dozen years?
Terrorism has been going on for significantly longer than the last dozen years, and the "few isolated incidents" model is exactly the *wrong* way to understand the threat. Ask Brits or Israelis if the IRA or Hamas incidents were either few or isolated. No, they were part of long-term campaigns which occurred (and, in Israel, occur, this morning in fact) precisely to make life so unlivable as to force a desired political goal. And when terrorists are comparitively ignored or treated as a minor nuisance like particularly nasty street-crime (see, for example, Al Qaeda before their second, successful attempt to take down the World Trade Centers -- everyone forgets about the first one, which was an isolated incident like their attack on the USS Cole was an isolated incident and their embassy bombings in Africa were isolated incidents and...) the frequency and severity of their "isolated incidents" tends to rise.
This makes me glad for things like Amazon, which stacks both wide and deep. I've always kicked around the idea of writing a book (doesn't everybody?). My sister will actually be published within a couple of years. She's certainly good at it but I don't have any illusions that she's the second coming of JK Rowling (no mega-million-multimedia-marketing campaign getting launched for her book, either). With Amazon, people who would enjoy her book (and every book has an audience, Long Tail anyone?) can find it through their search, through "customers who liked this book also liked", through reader recommendations, etc. One thing I find particularly interesting about Amazon is that it has an amazing synergy with blogs. I've bought, oh, five books or so because one of the blogs on my daily list said "I'm currently reading X. Its great. Here's my mini-review" and, given that my bloggers share my interests or I wouldn't read them, thats generally a fairly good indication that I'll like the book (wouldn't you rather have a review from someone who shares your tastes than from some person whose only qualification is they're in an editor's Rolodex at the New York Times Review of Books?). There are now a bunch of authors blogging, which makes excellent sense as a promotional tool both for your current book and for establishing a fan community for your next one (if you're in a genre where that makes sense).
And look at all those great open source Linux games. Like TuxRacer! And TuxRacer!
#insert
Cue "its not stealing, its *copyright infringement*" trolls.
This is NOT tax or legal advice. Don't trust Slashdot. I would bet on this being closed off by legislation in a few years -- there are already states trying to nibble around the edges of the Internet tax moratorium. And its a minefield, too -- read the story of how some states end up taxing WoW while others do not, its nuts (Wisconsin says you pay tax on a video game subscription if the subscription includes patches but not if its just fee-for-service, Illinois taxes regardless, etc).
i know but even typing like this gives me a headache if i had to make spelling errors too i would slit my own wrists
i agree that grammar and all the rules that they taught me in high school and also in fourth-through-7th grade are really unnecessary after all i can get my point across just as well even if i dont follow the so called book and who appointed english teachers to be the gods of punctuations anyway its not like they have never put a single period out of place in their entire lives even my old teacher mrs smith who was kind of nice except for being a total bastard when it came to the proper use of the semicolon once ended a sentence with a comma instead of a period or at least i think that might have been a comma but i suppose it could always have been a mustard stain on the paper now i am an english teacher myself except when i am doing my real job as an engineer and i teach two types of students foreign students and american students and sometimes i wonder if the foreign students are ever going to give up the pointless drive to stifle their creativity by conforming to the rules and start writing like my american students whose papers have much more of their own authentic voice not suppressed by trifling concerns like including proper punctuation as if such a thing existed
A pity IE has no feature which will show you the history of sites visited today. Then you could just press some key combination (maybe Ctrl-H to make it easy to remember, we're talking about IE users after all), press the button for "sites visited today", and just pick the one you wanted with a single click. Maybe even make it searchable.
Another potential field would be simple image processing. "Is that smudge a tank or a school bus?" Neural net spits out "School bus, p=.62, tank, p=.23, 1996 Mazda, p=.04"