Old fashioned Applesoft Basic, GW/MSBasic, Chipmunk Basic and similar are much better than VBxxx as languages to learn programming. They are interpretive, easily accessible even at the elementary school level, and don't cover up the act of programming with lots of eye-candy or compiler options.
Most importantly plain old-fashioned Basic doesn't hide too much of how a real CPU works from the beginning programmer. Real CPU's access RAM, similar to global variable and arrays; and use jmp/jsr instructions to memory locations, similar to goto's with line numbers. Peek and poke even allow one to shoot oneself in the foot like a stray memory write.) This might damage the minds of computer scientists and purist software engineers, as Dijkstra suggested, but might lead to more kids becoming hardware engineers and tinkerers, which we seem to have more of a shortage of these days.
It's very simple, and I don't think it'd be that dangerous: repeal the ruling making corporations people (because they aren't), and repeal the ruling declaring money as speech (because it isn't). See? That wasn't so hard, and it fits in so nicely with reality!
OK, let's plan how to do this. We need to elect a lot of legislators who will confirm judges leaning towards the repeals you suggest. The best way to do that is to form some political action corporation to help elect those candidates by giving them lots of money to help finance their election campaigns.
Just like DMCA-takedown notices that Google uses to highlight the fact that you are missing content (and additionally direct you to the content you are missing), simply put a banner on the search results for any Verizon customer that says something
But you'd never see this banner after Verizon redirects your search request to yahoo or msn...
but that's $90/year, money I'll have to come up with
You don't have to come up with anything. Nobody will show up at your door with a warrant or a gun if you don't pay. Your subscribers will have to find a way to whitelist or pay, perhaps thru you, if they want to continue to receive email from your list. Just notify them once, and stick something like a paypal or credit card button next to your (re)subscribe link (or have some service, I'm sure some will pop up for a %, do that for you).
Yes, we do have an internal way to know which items are correct representations of the real world. It's an epistomological philosophy called science, and though it is a slow process requiring rigor and mental discipline, it works quite well.
Except that the way that even science sometimes progresses is not by changing minds, but by waiting for the old guard to retire or die, and then training a new generation of scientists who never had the earlier preconceptions.
In the case of nuclear weapons, all you need to do is make sure your enemy thinks the code is bug free.
Depends on the failure mode. You might not want to reside on the same continent/planet as the device the code controls for the other failure mode caused by some bug.
... or possibly, there just aren't that many programmers over 40. Most educations aimed at programming started approximately 15-20 years ago or less. If you were programming before that, it wasn't very likely that you had been educated for programming, but for something else...
There were lots of colleges and universities that offered computer science degrees in the 1960's and '70's. Berkeley offered both EECS and CS degrees in the early 70's. All those graduates are 50 or even 60 years old now.
Why not a robot.txt that tells whay you DO want to be indexed. No robot.txt, no addition to any searchengine.
Done. No web page can be indexed unless you upload it to an web server which responds to the HTTP requests of spiders. You don't want it visible, don't upload the page to an accessable web server. You want it visible to a select subset of viewers? Put it on a private server, password protect it, or use robots.txt, etc.
The record industry should hire a few economists. This is a great idea, but they've got the pricing completely backwards. The more popular songs shold get cheaper and the less popular more expensive. Why? That's easy.
The stock market works the way it does because supply is fixed and demand is the only variable. With digital music, the supply is infinite, and the demand is variable.
While the supply of reproductions is nearly infinite, the supply of new creative content is limited by production cost, time and talent; and the demand for any given resulting song is often unknown at the time of the songs composition, performance or production.
What no one seems to have pointed out yet is the the record industry serves as a risk arbitrage, sort of like a venture capitalist. If only one in ten songs produces any reasonable revenue (and the odds are probably far worse), then the good songs have to be priced for at least a 10X profit over production costs in order to barely cover the risk of investing time and money in their creation. Very few smart people gamble on the future unless the payoff ratio exceeds the odds against success.
The democratic system and the First Amendment to the US Constitution require that power be given to non-scientific views, if indeed those views are present in citizens who wish to vote, and exercise their freedom of religion, speech and thought.
Normally, laws about things which must actually work (aviation safety regulations, etc.) are based on science, because science is about ideas with can be independantly observed, tested and falsified as to whether they actually work in practice, and people want the airlines they fly on to work (as in not crash).
However, much of what people do is about what they think are right right, good or just plain fun, which may or may not have anything to do with that which "works", or is in some sense "true". Democracy works (to a sufficient degree compared to the tested alternatives). Scientific oligarchy hasn't been well tested.
As I understand the DMCA (IANAL) it is a violation to either create or distribute information about a way to circumvent the copy protection feature. This says NOTHING about who owns the copyrights.
How can it be circumvention if Sony owns the copyright and thus defines what is permitted decoding versus circumvention?
Work for yourself; or start a company with those whom you respect, both for their talent and people skills. Pick a product area where your talents and skill set give you a good chance of success, and where you will be happy to provide some benefit to your chosen customer base in exchange for suitable renumeration.
I'm not a scientist, and it seems weird to me that they would stop spending money on something that still works and gone someplace nothing else has. It just seems wasteful. And it's not like they can justify it by saying they'll have a replacement there tomorrow, either, since they won't.
Every dollar you spend on some older spacecraft is a few seconds (milliseconds?) of some really really huge radio telescope's time (plus analysis of the resulting data, etc.) when it's not pointed at some newer space exploration vehicle which might be capable of returning an even greater quantity/quality of data about some equally interesting space phenomena.
On the plus side, the exploit is released under the GPL. This just goes to show the superiority of open-source over proprietary exploits!
Doesn't that mean that the released exploit's copyright holder can go after every owner of every PC which tries to infect other systems using the exploit, since that's distribution of the infection without source code (and thus a violation of the GPL)?!
Risk is risk.
The problem is that most money men don't know how to handle risk.
Actually, money people have been doing risk arbitrage for centuries. It's one of the reasons for the existance of futures and options markets.
Patents which can legally enforce massive profits go hand-in-hand with risk. The bigger the possible payoff, the better that funding highly risky R&D looks to the money people. Take away the lotto chance for a massive payola, and the money people go for a much less risky (and interesting) portfolio of R&D.
Neither is the query that the author suggests... and I will point out that as fast as it executed it would have been much faster had results been cached.
Not necessarily, especially after adding the costs of the locks required to maintain cache and data coherancy in an MP transaction system, the additional scheduling and accounting software needed to handle the variability in transaction time due to the cache effects, and all the additional overhead needed to maintain an audit trail sufficient for performance analysis, and full rollback and recovery.
So Apple has a large portion of the premium market captured because high-end buyers like their pretty boxen and will pay for supported hardware. But how to capture a lot of mindshare by getting OS X into the hands of lots of low-end users without the massive driver development required for it to run on lots of crufty low-end PC's, and the related support costs?
Easy...
1) Put some DRM (but nothing tooo hard to crack) into OS X to rile up the hacking community, and let them do all the "porting" to brand X boxen because "it's a challange". 2) Obviously refuse to support this unlicensed usage. 3) Profit (from the huge user base of people who wouldn't have paid for OS X any way, and the resulting increased mindshare).
That might actually apply to humans as well. I mean take Conservatives and Liberals. They engage in different physiclal activities and (mostly) breed within their own groups. So will the two eventually evolve into seperate species, Homo Conservativis and Homo Liberalis?
Unlikely to happen, because even though people seem to mate like kinds, the trait doesn't seem to be inherited. Lots of liberals have conservative parents, and vice-versa. In fact, in a lot of families, there seems to be a generational flip-flop, where the kids choose a political/religious schema differentiated from that of the previous generation, but more similar to that of their grand-parents. Maybe forever, half the parents will be thumping their children on the head with some unappreciated political/religious tract.
Or if political speciation does happen, humans will end up all Homo Conservativis, since that subgroup seem to have the higher differential breeding rate.
DoS attacks are very effective against phishing sites. Most phishing scams utilize a CGI that e-mails the captured data to an e-mail address somewhere. By using a script which generates random data (see my sig), you can quickly render a phisher's data collection. Several factors can contribute to this. First, the flood of fake data can obscure the data that was captured from actual victims
The better way to do this is to get cooperation of the major ISP's and banks. If a phishing site is flooded with fake (or even dangerous to use, provided with permission by the bank) data sent from, say, Earthlink or AOL's entire IP space, they'll have to start ignoring that data, thus masking any actual data sent by stupid bank and ISP customers.
I believe that poisoning the input is the best bet since if they have 10,000 emails with data, and only 25 are legit, it's pretty much useless. The only downside is that I need to figure out how to implement IP spoofing so that all the bogus inputs cannot be filtered using the IP address of the requesting computer.
I'd be quite surprised if the large banks in conjunction with large ISP's (and other owners of very big dynamically assigned IP address blocks) aren't doing this already. If nothing else, the phishers might start preferentially ignoring submissions from those IP blocks because of the likelyhood they contained poisoned data which would lite up a law enforcement alarms if ever used.
Slashdot Mirror
Most importantly plain old-fashioned Basic doesn't hide too much of how a real CPU works from the beginning programmer. Real CPU's access RAM, similar to global variable and arrays; and use jmp/jsr instructions to memory locations, similar to goto's with line numbers. Peek and poke even allow one to shoot oneself in the foot like a stray memory write.) This might damage the minds of computer scientists and purist software engineers, as Dijkstra suggested, but might lead to more kids becoming hardware engineers and tinkerers, which we seem to have more of a shortage of these days.
Most small inventors have enough trouble saving money for a new car, much less funding a new manufacturing company, tooling a factory, etc.
OK, let's plan how to do this. We need to elect a lot of legislators who will confirm judges leaning towards the repeals you suggest. The best way to do that is to form some political action corporation to help elect those candidates by giving them lots of money to help finance their election campaigns.
Oh wait...
But you'd never see this banner after Verizon redirects your search request to yahoo or msn...
You don't have to come up with anything. Nobody will show up at your door with a warrant or a gun if you don't pay. Your subscribers will have to find a way to whitelist or pay, perhaps thru you, if they want to continue to receive email from your list. Just notify them once, and stick something like a paypal or credit card button next to your (re)subscribe link (or have some service, I'm sure some will pop up for a %, do that for you).
Except that the way that even science sometimes progresses is not by changing minds, but by waiting for the old guard to retire or die, and then training a new generation of scientists who never had the earlier preconceptions.
Yet it has displaced more people than any other power source.
You might want to look up how many people are being displaced those large hydropower dam projects in China.
Depends on the failure mode. You might not want to reside on the same continent/planet as the device the code controls for the other failure mode caused by some bug.
There were lots of colleges and universities that offered computer science degrees in the 1960's and '70's. Berkeley offered both EECS and CS degrees in the early 70's. All those graduates are 50 or even 60 years old now.
Done. No web page can be indexed unless you upload it to an web server which responds to the HTTP requests of spiders. You don't want it visible, don't upload the page to an accessable web server. You want it visible to a select subset of viewers? Put it on a private server, password protect it, or use robots.txt, etc.
The stock market works the way it does because supply is fixed and demand is the only variable. With digital music, the supply is infinite, and the demand is variable.
While the supply of reproductions is nearly infinite, the supply of new creative content is limited by production cost, time and talent; and the demand for any given resulting song is often unknown at the time of the songs composition, performance or production.
What no one seems to have pointed out yet is the the record industry serves as a risk arbitrage, sort of like a venture capitalist. If only one in ten songs produces any reasonable revenue (and the odds are probably far worse), then the good songs have to be priced for at least a 10X profit over production costs in order to barely cover the risk of investing time and money in their creation. Very few smart people gamble on the future unless the payoff ratio exceeds the odds against success.
Normally, laws about things which must actually work (aviation safety regulations, etc.) are based on science, because science is about ideas with can be independantly observed, tested and falsified as to whether they actually work in practice, and people want the airlines they fly on to work (as in not crash).
However, much of what people do is about what they think are right right, good or just plain fun, which may or may not have anything to do with that which "works", or is in some sense "true". Democracy works (to a sufficient degree compared to the tested alternatives). Scientific oligarchy hasn't been well tested.
Yes, and then DNS was invented.
But you or your organization gets to choose which DNS servers, in which order, you use. You can even maintain your own /etc/hosts file.
No kidding...
Years in NBA - 0
Minimum salary - $349,458
And home many players does AA baseball employ? Average those salaries in please.
How can it be circumvention if Sony owns the copyright and thus defines what is permitted decoding versus circumvention?
Then, if you boss doesn't treat you right...
...unplug the monitor...
...many of them are highly reflective.
Every dollar you spend on some older spacecraft is a few seconds (milliseconds?) of some really really huge radio telescope's time (plus analysis of the resulting data, etc.) when it's not pointed at some newer space exploration vehicle which might be capable of returning an even greater quantity/quality of data about some equally interesting space phenomena.
Doesn't that mean that the released exploit's copyright holder can go after every owner of every PC which tries to infect other systems using the exploit, since that's distribution of the infection without source code (and thus a violation of the GPL)?!
Actually, money people have been doing risk arbitrage for centuries. It's one of the reasons for the existance of futures and options markets.
Patents which can legally enforce massive profits go hand-in-hand with risk. The bigger the possible payoff, the better that funding highly risky R&D looks to the money people. Take away the lotto chance for a massive payola, and the money people go for a much less risky (and interesting) portfolio of R&D.
Not necessarily, especially after adding the costs of the locks required to maintain cache and data coherancy in an MP transaction system, the additional scheduling and accounting software needed to handle the variability in transaction time due to the cache effects, and all the additional overhead needed to maintain an audit trail sufficient for performance analysis, and full rollback and recovery.
Easy...
1) Put some DRM (but nothing tooo hard to crack) into OS X to rile up the hacking community, and let them do all the "porting" to brand X boxen because "it's a challange".
2) Obviously refuse to support this unlicensed usage.
3) Profit (from the huge user base of people who wouldn't have paid for OS X any way, and the resulting increased mindshare).
Unlikely to happen, because even though people seem to mate like kinds, the trait doesn't seem to be inherited. Lots of liberals have conservative parents, and vice-versa. In fact, in a lot of families, there seems to be a generational flip-flop, where the kids choose a political/religious schema differentiated from that of the previous generation, but more similar to that of their grand-parents. Maybe forever, half the parents will be thumping their children on the head with some unappreciated political/religious tract.
Or if political speciation does happen, humans will end up all Homo Conservativis, since that subgroup seem to have the higher differential breeding rate.
The better way to do this is to get cooperation of the major ISP's and banks. If a phishing site is flooded with fake (or even dangerous to use, provided with permission by the bank) data sent from, say, Earthlink or AOL's entire IP space, they'll have to start ignoring that data, thus masking any actual data sent by stupid bank and ISP customers.
I'd be quite surprised if the large banks in conjunction with large ISP's (and other owners of very big dynamically assigned IP address blocks) aren't doing this already. If nothing else, the phishers might start preferentially ignoring submissions from those IP blocks because of the likelyhood they contained poisoned data which would lite up a law enforcement alarms if ever used.
Are there any webmail servers which use one-time passwords? (and you could carry an encrypted list or an OTP generator on a PalmPilot...)