Honestly though, I'd want to keep any of those developers the hell out of my FOSS projects.
They've seen MS source code. Just asking for legal issues due to IP infringement (real or not).
This is also why I think some people consider MS's "shared source" initiatives to be a trap.
I guess they could always work on the Mono project and infect it with (more) legal problems/burdens...:)
Many of the Slashdotters actually pay for the opportunity to, among other things, answer questions like that.
[Citation Needed]
As a proud BOFH (of which I would presume there are equally as many that would "pay to answer [stupid] questions"), I would immediately direct him to MS Word (which does have such brain-dead change tracking) in order to make the suffering more enjoyable for me to watch...*devilish grin*
For example, suppose I sit on the curb and give away free lemons. A kid next door might get the bright idea to get my lemons, make lemonade, and sell it. The lemonade is clearly a "derived work," since it is made from my lemons, but it is absurd to suggest I have any right to tell him what price to put on his lemonade or how much sugar he can use in it. By the laws of private property in the real world, my ownership was relinquished at the time when I handed him my lemons. Just as I do not own his lemonade, neither do I own the derived works he makes from my BSD-licensed software.
What is to stop them from "conquering" the very machines composing the adversarial botnet. Think zero sum game. If the machines were compromised in the first place, its possible that the vulnerability is still open to be "re-hijacked". Think Core Wars (adversarial programs in the same memory space that try get the other to execute garbage instructions by writing in the path of their executing program).
Once compromised, the machines can then be overtaken and hardened for use against the rest of the adversary's botnet.
Also, given a call to good, patriotic Americans like myself (ha!), we could run things akin to SETI@home (albeit with a bit more bite), to do our part in the good fight. (Hoping of course, it is indeed good, and not this ridiculous madness of late.)
.....on second thought, I wouldn't touch that program with a 3.048 meter pole.
One can literally generate electricity from the rate at which Aldous Huxley is spinning in his grave.
In Brave New World, the Bokanovsky Process was the means by which one clone could easily be multiplied many times.
[...] By which time the original egg was in a fair way to becoming anything from eight to ninety-six embryos- a prodigious improvement, you will agree, on nature. Identical twins-but not in piddling twos and threes as in the old viviparous days, when an egg would sometimes accidentally divide; actually by dozens, by scores at a time.
*shudder*
My understanding is that it can be proven mathematically that chess has a finite series of moves. If this is correct, then at some point computers will be powerful enough to be able win every game because they'll be able to analyze every possible opening all the way to the end and only pick the moves that will win. No human will ever be able to duplicate this feat.
Hate to break it to you, but "No [anything computational] will ever be able to duplicate this feat.", Machines or otherwise. This is due to the fact that the complete tree of moves (i.e. all possible plies of the entire game from starting position) has on the order of 10^120 nodes to evaluate, which is slightly bigger than the number of atoms in the known universe.
"It has been estimated that the total number of possible moves in chess is on the order of 10^120, or a 'one' with 120 zeros after it. . . .
A supercomputer a thousand times faster than your PC, making a billion calculations a second, would need approximately 3x10^103 years to check out all of these moves" (Dixit and Skeath, 1999: 66).
When a modern chess-playing program does its evaluations it plays out a certain ply depth bounded by the fact that each ply is exponentially larger. I believe 12 ply is about what Deep Blue played at (I might be wrong on that). The program at no times attempts to play the game to a completion state, but rather finds the move that maximizes the minimum loss (as per a minimax algorithm presumably.)
In short, the situation you propose above would take more time than our Sol has left to burn while utilizing more memory than the universe has in atoms.
P.S. to nitpickers: If you find mistakes above, please correct them. I do think this is pretty much on target though...
I tried to write a cube-based time machine in LISP, but all I could get was a bug-ridden half-implementation of a hyper-cube-based time machine hacked together in Python...:)
This is a real quick, detailess explanation, but explanation nonetheless... Essentially there are several options for "storage engine", each with its own set of features... The vanilla engine w/ MySQL is MyISAM, which among other things doesn't support transactions. In lieu of these shortcomings there is also the InnoDB engine, which does do transactions, etc.
The Falcon engine is from a renowned database developer, and as such has all sorts of neat features.
I completely agree with you.,, In this case, there are the FISA courts available to quickly allow the eavesdropping in such a situation. Unfortunately, the current administration not only got caught red-handed doing datamining on millions of domestic americans, and admitted it with great pride as if they were doing anyone a favor.
I guess I wouldn't have so much of a problem with warranted eavesdropping (as a "necessary evil") if they didn't constantly use the most bullshit reasons that no one can argue against without looking like a fool (i.e. Child Porn and Terrorism) wrapped up in terrible amounts of double-speak. "Patriot Act", for instance, is perhaps one of the worst of all... Fighting for civil liberties is every American's duty, and yet to oppose the attacks on our freedoms posed by the Patriot Act, one must be an "Anti-Patriot"? Wow. The terrorists have won, but not the one's you are thinking. These terrorists operate out of a "white building". When one must constantly look over one's shoulder in fear of being devoured by one's own protector, that is terror. Quo custodiet ipsos custodiet? ("Who shall watch the watchers"?)
I guess my point is, How trustworthy is a administration that must continually lie to its own people and use doublespeak to remain in power and get its way?
Slashdot often doesn't seem to understand[...] Who? Over-generalize a bit much? I have seen plenty of ass-hats with opinions on here, but they almost never run the same direction for long....
[...] it's also an excellent engine for cheap, easy, and secure plotting of criminal activities. Right, so lets void the common-carrier clauses and start eavesdropping on all conversations, snail mail, internet-communications, tele-communications. Let's void all reasonable expectations of privacy and essentially bring about "ThoughtCrime" as a punishable offense. The publication of the AOL search terms earlier this year is a perfect example. I heard/read tons of comments regarding the individual who was searching for means of offing his wife, ranging from getting warrants based on his searches to immediate police action. Funny if they broke down the door to find it was Stephen King doing research for his latest murder novel... Attempting to pre-empt crime via a panopticon borders on "Minority Report"-style dystopias.
I AM in favor of abridging the fantasy of the Internet as an anything-goes medium that magically turns criminal shit into human rights gold. What you are essentially in favor of is censorship of the internet by one means or another. Making decisions about what should be on the net and what shouldn't be is censorship no matter the benevolence of the censor. Hell, the whole Net-Neutrality issue is a matter of censorship, though one of "means" more than "content" (i.e. you have to be able to afford to pay the tax on certain types of bandwidth (based on the content) to get your information out there...) This not only violates the spirit of the internet in general, but is a nasty slippery slope to be on. Furthermore, I am in favor of "abridging the fantasy" that the U.S. owns the internet or is in someway the de facto policeman of it.
Panoptic surveillance will never totally prevent terrorism/crime. Better foreign and domestic policy is probably a much better place to spend the time/energy/money/effort, at least in my opinion anyhow...
</rant>
Geez... with the way this is being "headlined" on CNN's site, one has to wonder how much M$ had to shell out for this little op.ed.'ish piece to boost dismal Zune sales (kidding)...
I mean, really though: "iPod flaw helps stalkers track your every move", and "Tracked through your iPod - Some researchers say that your iPod could double as a tracking device."... Neither mention Nike's role in this issue, and both make it sound like an iPod is diddling your sister or something...
This also seems to imply someone wants to stalk your sweaty, running ass to begin with... I mean, seriously, if someone wanted to track you, there has to be a better way than sprinkling "Gumstix" PCs in the damn bushes to listen to your ugly ass sneakers.
SoundJam != iTunes. SoundJam may have provided the core software around which it was written at first, but I am pretty sure what it is these days is less SoundJam all the time (pretty sure they had to recode large sections for the Linux and Windows ports, but I'm speculating here). Secondly, SoundJam never looked anything remotely like iTunes. In fact, their "skinning" mechanism was much closer to other run-o-the-mill mp3 apps in the day (WinAmp, XMMS, etc.) There is something regarding "value-add" to an existing product that is innovative. What exactly did MS add to Halo again? Oh yeah... nothing but problems.
Now, if the example you gave were the crown jewels of Apple or something, or were being touted by an apologist as an example of innovation (as ass-hat in article did with Halo), you have have better ground. In fact, playing devil's advocate from your position, I would have cited *BSD + NeXT. This is a little different though, mostly cause 1) BSD is BSD licensed, and 2) NeXT was a product of Mr. Jobs' company (IMVHO the spirit of Apple has always been with Steve, and I am more in favor of considering NeXT as Apple than Apple as Apple during those years, especially since OS X is basically lickable-NeXT and OS 9 (Classic Mac OS) has had the last nail driven into it with the Intel switch.:)
This last election was all about fear mongering. The dems gained seats in the legislature entirely by talking about how people should be afraid of the other party being in control. Hmmm... this may be the case, BUT, the reality of the situation is that the GOP was selling "fake fear", and the dems were arguably pointing out the reality of the GOP's shortcomings and that the results of these shortcomings in governing are instigating REAL things to be scared about. I really feel like the GOP was really playing the "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" card as the country has gone down the tubes (at least in its position on the world stage as being a bastion of personal freedom.)
I really think the icing on the cake recently was Gingrich telling a group of Free Speech Advocates that free speech needs to be less free because ass-hat terrorists are getting on the net and collaborating. I mean, really, restricting internet access will certainly solve the problem.......sheesh...What an ignorant ass...
Wow... Where do I begin...
And the viruses and malware problem is significantly less since Windows XP Service Pack 2. Huh... I seem to remember seeing an article purporting that at least half of the spam-zombies perpetuating these stock pump-and-dump schemes are Win XP SP2 boxen...
Apple will come out with iTV next year, after Microsoft has been doing Media Center for more than two years. I bet Apple will get credit for their "innovation" first, though, cause it's not fun to give Microsoft credit for innovation. Maybe that's because Apple did more than cobble together a rank-ass Media Center version of Windows and slap a nice TV-video card in a tower enclosure. I mean seriously, where the hell are you supposed to put M$'s media center PC that will make it suitable as a Media Center AND a workstation? They completely missed the boat. Apple will most likely do it better, smaller, cheaper, faster, and with more quality. (I'm not a Mac fanboi so much as a MS Loather...)
[Winer]: You have to create things they don't teach in school. If you can take a college class about it, it ain't innovation. True dat, BUT they really should be teaching security more these days. I can't say it really ever came up in my classes way back when, but then, it was a different day and age. PC's didn't get "mugged" the minute they stepped onto the internet then either.
Ahh, have you ever played Halo? That's from Microsoft too. And here we have the crux of the problem... I believe Bungie had been working on Halo before Microsoft devoured them... In fact, it was Bungie who made many wonderful games for the Mac. Pathways out of Darkness? Marathon? Hello? Then suddenly, MS pwned them, and now they make crappy back ports to their "original" OS... *sigh* More importantly though, how is Bungie's Halo a Microsoft innovation again?
Yes, and there's always room for a company that innovates through acquisitions. Forgive me, but being innovative does not involve buying other people's work and calling it your own, and furthermore not giving credit where credit's due, as above. That's called evil.
Would YouTube have gotten purchased for more than a billion if Microsoft wasn't threatening Google? I doubt it. Isn't that the other way around? I mean, MS is kinda king-of-the-hill. Seems like Google poses more of a threat to MS... Where is Microsoft's innovative "video site"? Oh yeah, they are playing catch-up trying to cobble together their own...
No... most of MS's innovation is sadly in their relatively nasty and harmful business practices like "Embrace and Extend". Honestly, this is the kind of innovation we wish they would just shelve somewhere....
Slashdot Mirror
But think how much heavier the Earth will be when they start making lots of this stuff. Won't that affect our solar orbit? Or the tide?
It's like how sponges can hold 25 times their weight in water. Imagine how high the water levels would be if they became extinct!
I don't know how people can sleep...
...man... that whole post was completely Dr. Steve Brule. For your health!
Honestly though, I'd want to keep any of those developers the hell out of my FOSS projects. They've seen MS source code. Just asking for legal issues due to IP infringement (real or not). This is also why I think some people consider MS's "shared source" initiatives to be a trap. I guess they could always work on the Mono project and infect it with (more) legal problems/burdens... :)
Many of the Slashdotters actually pay for the opportunity to, among other things, answer questions like that.
[Citation Needed]
As a proud BOFH (of which I would presume there are equally as many that would "pay to answer [stupid] questions"), I would immediately direct him to MS Word (which does have such brain-dead change tracking) in order to make the suffering more enjoyable for me to watch...*devilish grin*
...and a t-shirt! I'm Made of Meat!
For example, suppose I sit on the curb and give away free lemons. A kid next door might get the bright idea to get my lemons, make lemonade, and sell it. The lemonade is clearly a "derived work," since it is made from my lemons, but it is absurd to suggest I have any right to tell him what price to put on his lemonade or how much sugar he can use in it. By the laws of private property in the real world, my ownership was relinquished at the time when I handed him my lemons. Just as I do not own his lemonade, neither do I own the derived works he makes from my BSD-licensed software.
I drink your lemonade! I DRINK IT UP! *SLUURRP*
What is to stop them from "conquering" the very machines composing the adversarial botnet. Think zero sum game. If the machines were compromised in the first place, its possible that the vulnerability is still open to be "re-hijacked". Think Core Wars (adversarial programs in the same memory space that try get the other to execute garbage instructions by writing in the path of their executing program).
Once compromised, the machines can then be overtaken and hardened for use against the rest of the adversary's botnet.
Also, given a call to good, patriotic Americans like myself (ha!), we could run things akin to SETI@home (albeit with a bit more bite), to do our part in the good fight. (Hoping of course, it is indeed good, and not this ridiculous madness of late.)
.....on second thought, I wouldn't touch that program with a 3.048 meter pole.
Come now, give credit: Mahatma Gandhi...
Reporter: "Mr. Gandhi, What do you think of western civilization?"
Gandhi: "I think it would be a good idea!"
Phony McRing-Ring: "...scientists have discovered that even monkeys can memorize 10 numbers! Are you stupider than a monkey?"
Chief Wiggum: "Mmmmeh, How big of a monkey?"
Try this on for size :)
I have THREE PS3s.Good stuff...
In Brave New World , the Bokanovsky Process was the means by which one clone could easily be multiplied many times.
[...] By which time the original egg was in a fair way to becoming anything from eight to ninety-six embryos- a prodigious improvement, you will agree, on nature. Identical twins-but not in piddling twos and threes as in the old viviparous days, when an egg would sometimes accidentally divide; actually by dozens, by scores at a time.
*shudder*
ack yes... I moreso meant maximizes the minimum gain! Made my mistake by not putting the min and the max in the right order!
Hate to break it to you, but "No [anything computational] will ever be able to duplicate this feat.", Machines or otherwise. This is due to the fact that the complete tree of moves (i.e. all possible plies of the entire game from starting position) has on the order of 10^120 nodes to evaluate, which is slightly bigger than the number of atoms in the known universe.
When a modern chess-playing program does its evaluations it plays out a certain ply depth bounded by the fact that each ply is exponentially larger. I believe 12 ply is about what Deep Blue played at (I might be wrong on that). The program at no times attempts to play the game to a completion state, but rather finds the move that maximizes the minimum loss (as per a minimax algorithm presumably.)
In short, the situation you propose above would take more time than our Sol has left to burn while utilizing more memory than the universe has in atoms.
P.S. to nitpickers: If you find mistakes above, please correct them. I do think this is pretty much on target though...
I tried to write a cube-based time machine in LISP, but all I could get was a bug-ridden half-implementation of a hyper-cube-based time machine hacked together in Python... :)
I've known about this since elementary school!
A Wind in the Door (Madeleine L'Engle)
I'll be flamed for sure (espec. by the usual Ruby suspects), BUT... I was once where you are now, and I ain't lookin back. ;)
My 2 cents anyhow, for what they're worth (...wait...2 cents?)
Karma whoring, but couldn't resist linking to my fav web-comic which seems very appropriate here...
CD Tray Fight!
They make really cryptic, bad commercials involving guys in Kubrickesque spacesuits wandering around data-centers.
*rolls eyes*Same with Ohio, at least in the case of Davis-Besse near Sandusky.
Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Plant
This is a real quick, detailess explanation, but explanation nonetheless... Essentially there are several options for "storage engine", each with its own set of features... The vanilla engine w/ MySQL is MyISAM, which among other things doesn't support transactions. In lieu of these shortcomings there is also the InnoDB engine, which does do transactions, etc.
The Falcon engine is from a renowned database developer, and as such has all sorts of neat features.
I completely agree with you.,, In this case, there are the FISA courts available to quickly allow the eavesdropping in such a situation. Unfortunately, the current administration not only got caught red-handed doing datamining on millions of domestic americans, and admitted it with great pride as if they were doing anyone a favor.
I guess I wouldn't have so much of a problem with warranted eavesdropping (as a "necessary evil") if they didn't constantly use the most bullshit reasons that no one can argue against without looking like a fool (i.e. Child Porn and Terrorism) wrapped up in terrible amounts of double-speak. "Patriot Act", for instance, is perhaps one of the worst of all... Fighting for civil liberties is every American's duty, and yet to oppose the attacks on our freedoms posed by the Patriot Act, one must be an "Anti-Patriot"? Wow. The terrorists have won, but not the one's you are thinking. These terrorists operate out of a "white building". When one must constantly look over one's shoulder in fear of being devoured by one's own protector, that is terror. Quo custodiet ipsos custodiet? ("Who shall watch the watchers"?)
I guess my point is, How trustworthy is a administration that must continually lie to its own people and use doublespeak to remain in power and get its way?
[...] it's also an excellent engine for cheap, easy, and secure plotting of criminal activities. Right, so lets void the common-carrier clauses and start eavesdropping on all conversations, snail mail, internet-communications, tele-communications. Let's void all reasonable expectations of privacy and essentially bring about "ThoughtCrime" as a punishable offense. The publication of the AOL search terms earlier this year is a perfect example. I heard/read tons of comments regarding the individual who was searching for means of offing his wife, ranging from getting warrants based on his searches to immediate police action. Funny if they broke down the door to find it was Stephen King doing research for his latest murder novel... Attempting to pre-empt crime via a panopticon borders on "Minority Report"-style dystopias.
I AM in favor of abridging the fantasy of the Internet as an anything-goes medium that magically turns criminal shit into human rights gold. What you are essentially in favor of is censorship of the internet by one means or another. Making decisions about what should be on the net and what shouldn't be is censorship no matter the benevolence of the censor. Hell, the whole Net-Neutrality issue is a matter of censorship, though one of "means" more than "content" (i.e. you have to be able to afford to pay the tax on certain types of bandwidth (based on the content) to get your information out there...) This not only violates the spirit of the internet in general, but is a nasty slippery slope to be on. Furthermore, I am in favor of "abridging the fantasy" that the U.S. owns the internet or is in someway the de facto policeman of it.
Panoptic surveillance will never totally prevent terrorism/crime. Better foreign and domestic policy is probably a much better place to spend the time/energy/money/effort, at least in my opinion anyhow...
</rant>
Geez... with the way this is being "headlined" on CNN's site, one has to wonder how much M$ had to shell out for this little op.ed.'ish piece to boost dismal Zune sales (kidding)...
I mean, really though: "iPod flaw helps stalkers track your every move", and "Tracked through your iPod - Some researchers say that your iPod could double as a tracking device."... Neither mention Nike's role in this issue, and both make it sound like an iPod is diddling your sister or something...
This also seems to imply someone wants to stalk your sweaty, running ass to begin with... I mean, seriously, if someone wanted to track you, there has to be a better way than sprinkling "Gumstix" PCs in the damn bushes to listen to your ugly ass sneakers.
SoundJam != iTunes. SoundJam may have provided the core software around which it was written at first, but I am pretty sure what it is these days is less SoundJam all the time (pretty sure they had to recode large sections for the Linux and Windows ports, but I'm speculating here). Secondly, SoundJam never looked anything remotely like iTunes. In fact, their "skinning" mechanism was much closer to other run-o-the-mill mp3 apps in the day (WinAmp, XMMS, etc.) There is something regarding "value-add" to an existing product that is innovative. What exactly did MS add to Halo again? Oh yeah... nothing but problems.
:)
Now, if the example you gave were the crown jewels of Apple or something, or were being touted by an apologist as an example of innovation (as ass-hat in article did with Halo), you have have better ground. In fact, playing devil's advocate from your position, I would have cited *BSD + NeXT. This is a little different though, mostly cause 1) BSD is BSD licensed, and 2) NeXT was a product of Mr. Jobs' company (IMVHO the spirit of Apple has always been with Steve, and I am more in favor of considering NeXT as Apple than Apple as Apple during those years, especially since OS X is basically lickable-NeXT and OS 9 (Classic Mac OS) has had the last nail driven into it with the Intel switch.
I really think the icing on the cake recently was Gingrich telling a group of Free Speech Advocates that free speech needs to be less free because ass-hat terrorists are getting on the net and collaborating. I mean, really, restricting internet access will certainly solve the problem.......sheesh...What an ignorant ass...
And the viruses and malware problem is significantly less since Windows XP Service Pack 2. Huh... I seem to remember seeing an article purporting that at least half of the spam-zombies perpetuating these stock pump-and-dump schemes are Win XP SP2 boxen...
Apple will come out with iTV next year, after Microsoft has been doing Media Center for more than two years. I bet Apple will get credit for their "innovation" first, though, cause it's not fun to give Microsoft credit for innovation. Maybe that's because Apple did more than cobble together a rank-ass Media Center version of Windows and slap a nice TV-video card in a tower enclosure. I mean seriously, where the hell are you supposed to put M$'s media center PC that will make it suitable as a Media Center AND a workstation? They completely missed the boat. Apple will most likely do it better, smaller, cheaper, faster, and with more quality. (I'm not a Mac fanboi so much as a MS Loather...)
[Winer]: You have to create things they don't teach in school. If you can take a college class about it, it ain't innovation. True dat, BUT they really should be teaching security more these days. I can't say it really ever came up in my classes way back when, but then, it was a different day and age. PC's didn't get "mugged" the minute they stepped onto the internet then either.
Ahh, have you ever played Halo? That's from Microsoft too. And here we have the crux of the problem... I believe Bungie had been working on Halo before Microsoft devoured them... In fact, it was Bungie who made many wonderful games for the Mac. Pathways out of Darkness? Marathon? Hello? Then suddenly, MS pwned them, and now they make crappy back ports to their "original" OS... *sigh* More importantly though, how is Bungie's Halo a Microsoft innovation again?
Yes, and there's always room for a company that innovates through acquisitions. Forgive me, but being innovative does not involve buying other people's work and calling it your own, and furthermore not giving credit where credit's due, as above. That's called evil.
Would YouTube have gotten purchased for more than a billion if Microsoft wasn't threatening Google? I doubt it. Isn't that the other way around? I mean, MS is kinda king-of-the-hill. Seems like Google poses more of a threat to MS... Where is Microsoft's innovative "video site"? Oh yeah, they are playing catch-up trying to cobble together their own...
No... most of MS's innovation is sadly in their relatively nasty and harmful business practices like "Embrace and Extend". Honestly, this is the kind of innovation we wish they would just shelve somewhere....