What confuses me is that the OLPC association is ADAMANT about not offering their product commercially.
Several of the world's most important tech companies, and lots of talented people, work for free at cost on the OLPC. They do this because OLPC is not competing with their own business operations.
If the OLPC becomes a commercial operation, then they risk cannabalising these firm's own operations, therefore OLPC have to tread very carefully.
OLPC is not a laptop project, it is an educational project, the software and the content and more important than the hardware. Intel seemingly could not get over its short term desire to sell its own processors and kill AMD. Silly because if the OLPC takes off then there will be a bigger market for everyone's processors,
All very well if you don't live in a 'problem area'. Random house searches based on your post code is not nice.
I know it is not nice, and it will disproportionately inconvenience the urban poor and certain ethnic minorities.
However, if you do not let the general population own handguns, then you have to take handguns that people do get (i.e. handguns smuggled in from America or Eastern Europe) away from them. When you randomly find guns, then you can question the occupants of that house and follow back up the supply routes.
Sure agreed, this is why it is good that Judges can overturn rubbish laws.
I think the problem is partly caused by the rapid change in technology. There are some really smart older people into tech, but on the whole, those being born now are far more likely to understand technological issues than the older generations who sit in parliament and the higher ranks of the civil service. It takes time for this stuff to work its way through the population. Aeroplane regulation took a long of iterations before anyone could actually take off in country A and land in country B.
I think it is also a problem when you have politicians who have never worked outside of politics. Those who have worked in industry before they enter politics know about how bad laws affected their business, so are more inclined to thread carefully and are more willing to listen to industry participants.
Ask yourself: would you rather that your girlfriend/wife/daughter explain to the police why she had to shoot someone who attacked her, or that you have to go to the morgue to identify her after she was raped and strangled with her own panty hose?
Assuming we are taking about some one robber or crackhead who breaks into someone's house then opportunistically tries to rape someone, then sure shoot them. The robber's right to life is superseded by the other person's right to health and safety, they after all chose to commit a crime.
However, having easy access to handguns does cause real externalities. That kid that went nuts at Virginia tech had a legally purchased gun. I'm more worried about them rather than some ex-cop or ex-soldier who is given a concealed handgun licence in your example.
I have basic DHCP server that gives out dynamic IP addresses. I also have a couple of machines without monitors which I can connect to via VNC or SSH such as a G4 Mac which I use for running OS 9 applications which never got ported to the Intel OS X world, on boot it starts the VNC server. I can then use nmap to find out the IP address and log into it graphically from my main Linux computer.
Banning things that have legitimate uses is really daft. Well, nmap, perl, baseball bats and hammers, all have legitimate uses.
Making that argument for handguns is a bit harder.
I am all for shooting criminals in self-defense. Go Joe Horn. Hang em all in the city centre and let their bones hang there for months.
However, allowing the population to have handguns causes problems. Not least because, unlike hunting rifles, handguns can be concealed easily. At the moment in England, two drunken idiots get into a fight and someone ends up with a black eye in the morning. Give one of the idiots a handgun then one of them does not wake up. Britain has a very low murder rate because it is much harder to successfully kill someone without a handgun.
Of course, as the saying goes, the problem is that criminals have a habit of breaking laws and getting guns anyhow. However, Britain is a small place, I am in favour of having teams of police searching houses in problem areas with metal detectors and dogs for criminals with handguns. Going house to house in problem areas would not take that long.
I think it is all ridiculous, the whole area is so grey. What is software anyhow? What is a tool? What is an article? If you think about proof of concept code, articles, scripts, approaches written out in English. Where do you draw the line?
The whole thing seems to be rigged against free software/open source and heavily in favour of security through obscurity. Perhaps we should contact them and ask?
Everything below is copied from the guidance.......
Prosecutors should be aware that there is a legitimate industry concerned with the security of computer systems that generates 'articles' (this includes any program or data held in electronic form) to test and/or audit hardware and software. Some articles will therefore have a dual use and prosecutors need to ascertain that the suspect has a criminal intent......
Whilst the facts of each case will be different, the elements to prove the offence will be the same. Prosecutors dealing with dual use articles should consider the following factors in deciding whether to prosecute:
* Does the institution, company or other body have in place robust and up to date contracts, terms and conditions or acceptable use polices? * Are students, customers and others made aware of the CMA and what is lawful and unlawful? * Do students, customers or others have to sign a declaration that they do not intend to contravene the CMA?....
Section 3A (2) CMA covers the supplying or offering to supply an article "likely" to be used to commit, or assist in the commission of an offence contrary to section 1 or 3 CMA. "Likely" is not defined in CMA but, in construing what is "likely", prosecutors should look at the functionality of the article and at what, if any, thought the suspect gave to who would use it; whether for example the article was circulated to a closed and vetted list of IT security professionals or was posted openly. In determining the likelihood of an article being used (or misused) to commit a criminal offence, prosecutors should consider the following:
* Has the article been developed primarily, deliberately and for the sole purpose of committing a CMA offence (i.e. unauthorised access to computer material)? * Is the article widely used for legitimate purposes? * Is the article available on a wide scale commercial basis and sold through legitimate channels? * Does it have a substantial installation base? * What was the context in which the article was used to commit the offence compared with its original intended purpose?
Whilst the law was going through Parliament the Home Office suggested that "likely" would be a 50% test.. Anyway, that guidance is now out -- and there's no mention, surprise, surprise, of "50%"
If over 50% of the laws they make are nonsense, can we ban the politicians?
Interesting that the images in that document are in.png format.
National Standards Bodies
on
RTF Vs. OOXML
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
While making a new standards body like OpenISO sounds like a good idea, I don't want to rain on that parade.
However, I think there is also a problem with the national standards bodies. They can vary from a formal technical committees answerable to democratically elected governments according to what their country needs, through to a ragtag bunch of nobodies who can dictate whatever they want according to their specific corporate interests. I think ISO needs to start with itself and standardise how national bodies work.
Also I think that if you are unhappy with the decision your national body made, then you need to either seek to get on it (or make a group that raises funds to get one of you on it), or setup a competing national standards organisation, get to work, and then try to replace the old one as ISO's National standards body for your country.
Although I think that like formatting, logic should be stored separately from data too. I.e. I don't believe in, nor am I interested in spreadsheets in general, they are really inefficient tools from the 1980s that should die horribly as I have argued elsewhere.
Yeah I tend to have repeat dreams also sometimes in the same night. As a teenager exposed to the Alien movies and to the Doom computer game, I learned how to hack such dreams. If you wake up with a nightmare (e.g. you are running away from some horrible thing), then go to sleep thinking about flamethrowers. Whatever the nightmare is, it can usually be solved the second time around by having a flamethrower.
Though having said that. It scares me that the only way to find this out was by waterboarding rats in plant pots, only the Finns would figure out that. Voi Vittu.
> What struck him the most was how lifelike they were. "I would say to myself, in my dream, 'Oh shit! I've dreamt of this before, but now this is really happening!' " he recalls
I actually get that. And I thought I was like Isaac Mendez, now it just my brain running simulations. the fact my brain gets it rights shows how dull and predicable my life must be....
>The writing style is standard for MS KB entries, i don't really get where the problem is. I've been working with >Windows for a few yours though, and probably got used to it.
Well, I admit I have been on Linux for the whole 21st Century; in the Linux/Unix world the standard of documentation is normally far far higher than this. I.e. one must write in Plain English and explain your own invented terminology the first time you use it.
NUT records what you eat and analyzes your meals for nutrient levels in terms of the "Daily Value" (DV). The program uses the free food composition database from the USDA. By experimenting, you can find the optimal level of the various nutrients and how to implement this with foods available to you.
>now in the.xls format, well that's more of a "SOL"
Not sure what you mean by SOL; but you can save spreadsheet data as.csv. For Excel users it will just open in Excel and they won't notice much difference. For everyone else, CSV is a light text-based format.
Of course, you lose formatting, but I personally believe formatting should be stored separately from data.
>I'm having trouble thinking of a significant and good piece of open-source software that I use that wasn't either commercial-then-freed, or free-then-commercially-sponsored.
Well you are right with all the big headline stuff. But one cool thing about Open Source is that there is a long tail, you will have small specialised applications, made by one person to get something done, then that is then used by a few dozen or a hundred people around the world.
Slashdot Mirror
What confuses me is that the OLPC association is ADAMANT about not offering their product commercially.
Several of the world's most important tech companies, and lots of talented people, work for free at cost on the OLPC. They do this because OLPC is not competing with their own business operations.
If the OLPC becomes a commercial operation, then they risk cannabalising these firm's own operations, therefore OLPC have to tread very carefully.
OLPC is not a laptop project, it is an educational project, the software and the content and more important than the hardware. Intel seemingly could not get over its short term desire to sell its own processors and kill AMD. Silly because if the OLPC takes off then there will be a bigger market for everyone's processors,
All very well if you don't live in a 'problem area'. Random house searches based on your post code is not nice.
I know it is not nice, and it will disproportionately inconvenience the urban poor and certain ethnic minorities.
However, if you do not let the general population own handguns, then you have to take handguns that people do get (i.e. handguns smuggled in from America or Eastern Europe) away from them. When you randomly find guns, then you can question the occupants of that house and follow back up the supply routes.
Sure agreed, this is why it is good that Judges can overturn rubbish laws.
I think the problem is partly caused by the rapid change in technology. There are some really smart older people into tech, but on the whole, those being born now are far more likely to understand technological issues than the older generations who sit in parliament and the higher ranks of the civil service. It takes time for this stuff to work its way through the population. Aeroplane regulation took a long of iterations before anyone could actually take off in country A and land in country B.
I think it is also a problem when you have politicians who have never worked outside of politics. Those who have worked in industry before they enter politics know about how bad laws affected their business, so are more inclined to thread carefully and are more willing to listen to industry participants.
Ask yourself: would you rather that your girlfriend/wife/daughter explain to the police why she had to shoot someone who attacked her, or that you have to go to the morgue to identify her after she was raped and strangled with her own panty hose?
Assuming we are taking about some one robber or crackhead who breaks into someone's house then opportunistically tries to rape someone, then sure shoot them. The robber's right to life is superseded by the other person's right to health and safety, they after all chose to commit a crime.
However, having easy access to handguns does cause real externalities. That kid that went nuts at Virginia tech had a legally purchased gun. I'm more worried about them rather than some ex-cop or ex-soldier who is given a concealed handgun licence in your example.
I do this all the time.
I have basic DHCP server that gives out dynamic IP addresses. I also have a couple of machines without monitors which I can connect to via VNC or SSH such as a G4 Mac which I use for running OS 9 applications which never got ported to the Intel OS X world, on boot it starts the VNC server. I can then use nmap to find out the IP address and log into it graphically from my main Linux computer.
I know, Labour seem to have picked up their view of humanity from the inquisition.
P.S. spaceyhackerlady, are you by any chance Laura C?
Banning things that have legitimate uses is really daft. Well, nmap, perl, baseball bats and hammers, all have legitimate uses.
Making that argument for handguns is a bit harder.
I am all for shooting criminals in self-defense. Go Joe Horn. Hang em all in the city centre and let their bones hang there for months.
However, allowing the population to have handguns causes problems. Not least because, unlike hunting rifles, handguns can be concealed easily. At the moment in England, two drunken idiots get into a fight and someone ends up with a black eye in the morning. Give one of the idiots a handgun then one of them does not wake up. Britain has a very low murder rate because it is much harder to successfully kill someone without a handgun.
Of course, as the saying goes, the problem is that criminals have a habit of breaking laws and getting guns anyhow. However, Britain is a small place, I am in favour of having teams of police searching houses in problem areas with metal detectors and dogs for criminals with handguns. Going house to house in problem areas would not take that long.
I think it is all ridiculous, the whole area is so grey. What is software anyhow? What is a tool? What is an article? If you think about proof of concept code, articles, scripts, approaches written out in English. Where do you draw the line?
I see no reason to go down this track at all.
Some relevant bits follow.
......
.....
....
CMA = Computer Misuse Act
The whole thing seems to be rigged against free software/open source and heavily in favour of security through obscurity. Perhaps we should contact them and ask?
Everything below is copied from the guidance.
Prosecutors should be aware that there is a legitimate industry concerned with the security of computer systems that generates 'articles' (this includes any program or data held in electronic form) to test and/or audit hardware and software. Some articles will therefore have a dual use and prosecutors need to ascertain that the suspect has a criminal intent.
Whilst the facts of each case will be different, the elements to prove the offence will be the same. Prosecutors dealing with dual use articles should consider the following factors in deciding whether to prosecute:
* Does the institution, company or other body have in place robust and up to date contracts, terms and conditions or acceptable use polices?
* Are students, customers and others made aware of the CMA and what is lawful and unlawful?
* Do students, customers or others have to sign a declaration that they do not intend to contravene the CMA?
Section 3A (2) CMA covers the supplying or offering to supply an article "likely" to be used to commit, or assist in the commission of an offence contrary to section 1 or 3 CMA. "Likely" is not defined in CMA but, in construing what is "likely", prosecutors should look at the functionality of the article and at what, if any, thought the suspect gave to who would use it; whether for example the article was circulated to a closed and vetted list of IT security professionals or was posted openly.
In determining the likelihood of an article being used (or misused) to commit a criminal
offence, prosecutors should consider the following:
* Has the article been developed primarily, deliberately and for the sole purpose of committing a CMA offence (i.e. unauthorised access to computer material)?
* Is the article widely used for legitimate purposes?
* Is the article available on a wide scale commercial basis and sold through legitimate channels?
* Does it have a substantial installation base?
* What was the context in which the article was used to commit the offence compared with its original intended purpose?
From TFA behind the TFA:
Whilst the law was going through Parliament the Home Office suggested that "likely" would be a 50% test.. Anyway, that guidance is now out -- and there's no mention, surprise, surprise, of "50%"
If over 50% of the laws they make are nonsense, can we ban the politicians?
Interesting that the images in that document are in .png format.
While making a new standards body like OpenISO sounds like a good idea, I don't want to rain on that parade.
However, I think there is also a problem with the national standards bodies. They can vary from a formal technical committees answerable to democratically elected governments according to what their country needs, through to a ragtag bunch of nobodies who can dictate whatever they want according to their specific corporate interests. I think ISO needs to start with itself and standardise how national bodies work.
Also I think that if you are unhappy with the decision your national body made, then you need to either seek to get on it (or make a group that raises funds to get one of you on it), or setup a competing national standards organisation, get to work, and then try to replace the old one as ISO's National standards body for your country.
True, True.
Although I think that like formatting, logic should be stored separately from data too. I.e. I don't believe in, nor am I interested in spreadsheets in general, they are really inefficient tools from the 1980s that should die horribly as I have argued elsewhere.
Yeah I tend to have repeat dreams also sometimes in the same night. As a teenager exposed to the Alien movies and to the Doom computer game, I learned how to hack such dreams. If you wake up with a nightmare (e.g. you are running away from some horrible thing), then go to sleep thinking about flamethrowers. Whatever the nightmare is, it can usually be solved the second time around by having a flamethrower.
Though having said that. It scares me that the only way to find this out was by waterboarding rats in plant pots, only the Finns would figure out that. Voi Vittu.
> What struck him the most was how lifelike they were. "I would say to myself, in my dream, 'Oh shit! I've dreamt of this before, but now this is really happening!' " he recalls
I actually get that. And I thought I was like Isaac Mendez, now it just my brain running simulations. the fact my brain gets it rights shows how dull and predicable my life must be....
except the article points out it was most likely a fib ... move along, nothing to see here. slow news day?
>That's not terribly useful unless you limit yourself to prepackaged frozen crap.
Not at all. You can still weigh organic ingredients.
If you have a 100g of carrots then you look it up, if you have an 100g bowl of rice you can look it up.
The USDA Table of Nutrient Retention Factors is quite comprehensive. You can enter your own data too.
>The writing style is standard for MS KB entries, i don't really get where the problem is. I've been working with
>Windows for a few yours though, and probably got used to it.
Well, I admit I have been on Linux for the whole 21st Century; in the Linux/Unix world the standard of documentation is normally far far higher than this. I.e. one must write in Plain English and explain your own invented terminology the first time you use it.
yum install nut-nutrition
NUT records what you eat and analyzes your meals for nutrient levels in terms of the "Daily Value" (DV). The
program uses the free food composition database from the USDA. By experimenting, you can find the optimal level
of the various nutrients and how to implement this with foods available to you.
>now in the .xls format, well that's more of a "SOL"
.csv. For Excel users it will just open in Excel and they won't notice much difference. For everyone else, CSV is a light text-based format.
Not sure what you mean by SOL; but you can save spreadsheet data as
Of course, you lose formatting, but I personally believe formatting should be stored separately from data.
Yeah, so annoying. Slashdot should not reward paywalls.
Great post.
>I'm having trouble thinking of a significant and good piece of open-source software that I use that wasn't either commercial-then-freed, or free-then-commercially-sponsored.
Well you are right with all the big headline stuff. But one cool thing about Open Source is that there is a long tail, you will have small specialised applications, made by one person to get something done, then that is then used by a few dozen or a hundred people around the world.
Was the Knowledge base article written by the same people who wrote the OOXML draft?
What the heck does the following mean?
> The following table contains the DWORD names and the corresponding file formats that are blocked by using the FileOpenBlock subkey:
> FilesBeforeVersion All Word files that have an nFib value that is less than the minimum nFib value as set by an administrator