I'm very glad to hear they are actually outlawing it. Let me tell you why.
Right now, online gambling and gambling in general is the worst sort of corrupt buisness. It is everywhere, advertised on bilboards, ownable through mutual funds (partygaming), and casinos are never more than 30 minutes from any city.
But not anyone can participate in this market. If the average honest American entrepreneur wants to open a gaming site or a casino, he can't; he needs connections or a personal exception or a willingness to break the law. Many do break it, directly or indirectly, with impunity, but no honest businessman can participate.
The same is true of players. I'm a decent mathematician and programmer and would love to write a poker-playing robot. But if it wins, since online gambling is illegal, I would have two choices: report the true source of the income and be in violation of anti-online-gambling laws, or not report it and be charged with tax evasion. Neither is feasible for a law-abiding person. Yet millions play online poker anyway; as long as you lose, you're ok.
It's a sad, unfair, corrupt, and anti-american state of affairs.
As always, much of this debate ends up being silly, with people arguing like ships passing in the night about whether IT is a high-value field. The problem is that IT, or even Computer Science or Programming is way too broad.
Saying you want to go into IT is a little like saying you want to go into Health Care. Do you want to be a dentist's receptionist? a nurse? A neurosurgeon? A plan administator? An orderly? A professor at a medical school?
Just as there are huge differences in pay, satisfaction, and job description in Health Care, there are huge differences in IT. Many of the wealthiest people in our society started out as programmers; other programmers make a few dollars an hour in Eastern Europe or India. This is like the orderly vs. neurosurgeon situation, but computer science is too new to have good, well known distinctions among roles.
So, assess your level of intelligence and dedication, and think about your path. Are you planning on taking Java classes at the local community college or getting a Ph.D. at Stanford? The required investment, and the returns, will be so vastly different that they can hardly be grouped in the same category. Try to guess what level people are talking about to put there advice in perspective. Are they saying being an orderly is a bad career, or being the CTO of a technology company?
There is no way for anyone but Bill and co. to know what backdoors exist. If you want to control who can see the contents and run programs on your computer, use linux.
As more and more of the reading I do comes from blogs, comments, and other web-based, unedited communications, I find myself making more and more errors. These are spelling and grammar and sound-alike (their vs there) mistakes that I would never have made years ago, when most of my exposure to written language came from carefully vetted print. A downside of the immediacy of the Internet is that there is little time or inclination to edit and double-check. The resulting degeneration of the language is noticeable.
I don't know how to reverse it, but it is pretty embarassing when I make such basic, I-should-know-better mistakes. And I cringe when I see them creeping into more formal communications (signs, etc) as well.
GUess they figure they can protect it with the gazillion software patents they have been churning out, at least in the US. Like the one on organizing photos in chronological order.
Consider the following:
1. Google employees read slashdot
2. Google has a serious search engine couterintelligence team staffed by non-idiots
and conclude that they have probably already implemented ignoring the link-to-posters-crap-website in slashdot posts. I seriously doubt it makes it into pagerank.
they come here for the atmosphere and the attitude. Seriously, when I started reading slashdot (under a different uid), it was often 3 to 6 months ahead of other news sources. These days, with the blogosphere what it is, slashdot is unfortunately more in-line or even following other sites in terms of speed. What people say again and again is that it is the discussion that keeps them coming back, not just the links.
It would follow then, that the thing you should try to protect is the quality of the discussion. Encouraging moderators to keep things on-topic is one way. But it isn't sufficient. I agree with other posters in feeling that it is highly unlikely that "problem submitters" are the only ones aware of and submitting the story, especially when the link appeared first on other tech blogs which I will leave unnamed.
Since timeliness has largely been conceded, but quality of community and discussion most certainly has not, it seems that the only conclusion is to reject the "problem submitters," and let the stories come up elsewhere. People wpn't stick around if they feel slashdot has degenerated into a link farm.
To our fearless leader: I think this is really an issue about responding to disruptive changes in internet news. It isn't that unlike the changes that conventional, dead tree publications faced a few years ago: they were becoming increasingly less competitive in terms of being first, so the quality of their analysis and insight became their source of competitive advantage. Those that realised that and focused appropriately succeeded, and those that didn't did not. Slashdot can't stay static and survive given the pace of change in the interactive media culture it helped pioneer.
A critical tool like bittorrent shouldn't be caught up in all the lawsuit nonsense. It was never intended to, and should not be used to make illegal copies. This just helps protect p2p technologies for legitimate uses, and slow the chilling effect on developing them that Grokster had.
The purpose of DRM is to prevent the customer's computer from functioning properly, and obeying the commands of the computer owner. Thus DRM is inevitably a security violation. Or in the words the RIAA might use, DRM is theft--of the computing resources of another person.
I think some kind of patent pool is necessary, but I want to see it run by the open source types. We should have a foundation which patents methods used in open source software as they come out, then places them in a defensive pool like the ones the corporations use. The licence could be viral: use may use these patents in any project which is open-source, and if you grant the same licence to everyone to use all your software patents.
It's a stopgap, but until we get the laws fixed, we need something to prevent innovations developed by the community from being patented after the fact by big companies. I know that means there would be prior art, but since when has that been any impediment to a patent?
Microsoft knows that many obvious things, like organizing photos in chronological order, are patentable, and will patent them untill open-source software is crushed. We have to fight back both within the existing legal system, and by changing it.
I think there are enoug MIT folks at Google that they felt it necessary to omit any mention of a certain other Cambridge, MA college, though there is a label for its former women's branch, Radcliffe College.
Definitely. LaTeX, the Emacs to edit it, and every other app useful for a mathematician with computational tendencies (singular, macaulay, etc) is native to linux/unix. Plus my enlightened department (which includes the author of xdvi) doesn't touch windows.
I'd call this a thinly veiled PR announcement if it were thinly veiled. Doerr making an investment is news like Bill Gates selling a copy of Windows is news. He does it constantly, it is his job. Moreover this kind of thing has been around since the late 1990s, lots of well-known and less well known companies doing it. I am embarrassed this got parroted on slashdot "products as unique as you are!" sheesh.
Slashdot Mirror
The Nature paper about the guy who can open email, control an arm, etc. just by thinking is available as a free pdf here. Or just the abstract.
I'm very glad to hear they are actually outlawing it. Let me tell you why.
Right now, online gambling and gambling in general is the worst sort of corrupt buisness. It is everywhere, advertised on bilboards, ownable through mutual funds (partygaming), and casinos are never more than 30 minutes from any city.
But not anyone can participate in this market. If the average honest American entrepreneur wants to open a gaming site or a casino, he can't; he needs connections or a personal exception or a willingness to break the law. Many do break it, directly or indirectly, with impunity, but no honest businessman can participate.
The same is true of players. I'm a decent mathematician and programmer and would love to write a poker-playing robot. But if it wins, since online gambling is illegal, I would have two choices: report the true source of the income and be in violation of anti-online-gambling laws, or not report it and be charged with tax evasion. Neither is feasible for a law-abiding person. Yet millions play online poker anyway; as long as you lose, you're ok.
It's a sad, unfair, corrupt, and anti-american state of affairs.
As always, much of this debate ends up being silly, with people arguing like ships passing in the night about whether IT is a high-value field. The problem is that IT, or even Computer Science or Programming is way too broad.
Saying you want to go into IT is a little like saying you want to go into Health Care. Do you want to be a dentist's receptionist? a nurse? A neurosurgeon? A plan administator? An orderly? A professor at a medical school?
Just as there are huge differences in pay, satisfaction, and job description in Health Care, there are huge differences in IT. Many of the wealthiest people in our society started out as programmers; other programmers make a few dollars an hour in Eastern Europe or India. This is like the orderly vs. neurosurgeon situation, but computer science is too new to have good, well known distinctions among roles.
So, assess your level of intelligence and dedication, and think about your path. Are you planning on taking Java classes at the local community college or getting a Ph.D. at Stanford? The required investment, and the returns, will be so vastly different that they can hardly be grouped in the same category. Try to guess what level people are talking about to put there advice in perspective. Are they saying being an orderly is a bad career, or being the CTO of a technology company?
There is no way for anyone but Bill and co. to know what backdoors exist. If you want to control who can see the contents and run programs on your computer, use linux.
I will never use such a thing. Use free software, and if we have to, build our own computers.
As more and more of the reading I do comes from blogs, comments, and other web-based, unedited communications, I find myself making more and more errors. These are spelling and grammar and sound-alike (their vs there) mistakes that I would never have made years ago, when most of my exposure to written language came from carefully vetted print. A downside of the immediacy of the Internet is that there is little time or inclination to edit and double-check. The resulting degeneration of the language is noticeable. I don't know how to reverse it, but it is pretty embarassing when I make such basic, I-should-know-better mistakes. And I cringe when I see them creeping into more formal communications (signs, etc) as well.
Go ahead, get removed from google, and watch your userbase die away
GUess they figure they can protect it with the gazillion software patents they have been churning out, at least in the US. Like the one on organizing photos in chronological order.
Is there a search engine that doesn't do this shit? Let's hasten the rise of the next google, if they can no longer be trusted.
If they aren't game, how about a firefox plugin tied to another website to accomplish the same thing? Not as much of an uptake, but a start.
Consider the following:
1. Google employees read slashdot
2. Google has a serious search engine couterintelligence team staffed by non-idiots
and conclude that they have probably already implemented ignoring the link-to-posters-crap-website in slashdot posts. I seriously doubt it makes it into pagerank.
they come here for the atmosphere and the attitude. Seriously, when I started reading slashdot (under a different uid), it was often 3 to 6 months ahead of other news sources. These days, with the blogosphere what it is, slashdot is unfortunately more in-line or even following other sites in terms of speed. What people say again and again is that it is the discussion that keeps them coming back, not just the links. It would follow then, that the thing you should try to protect is the quality of the discussion. Encouraging moderators to keep things on-topic is one way. But it isn't sufficient. I agree with other posters in feeling that it is highly unlikely that "problem submitters" are the only ones aware of and submitting the story, especially when the link appeared first on other tech blogs which I will leave unnamed. Since timeliness has largely been conceded, but quality of community and discussion most certainly has not, it seems that the only conclusion is to reject the "problem submitters," and let the stories come up elsewhere. People wpn't stick around if they feel slashdot has degenerated into a link farm. To our fearless leader: I think this is really an issue about responding to disruptive changes in internet news. It isn't that unlike the changes that conventional, dead tree publications faced a few years ago: they were becoming increasingly less competitive in terms of being first, so the quality of their analysis and insight became their source of competitive advantage. Those that realised that and focused appropriately succeeded, and those that didn't did not. Slashdot can't stay static and survive given the pace of change in the interactive media culture it helped pioneer.
A critical tool like bittorrent shouldn't be caught up in all the lawsuit nonsense. It was never intended to, and should not be used to make illegal copies. This just helps protect p2p technologies for legitimate uses, and slow the chilling effect on developing them that Grokster had.
The purpose of DRM is to prevent the customer's computer from functioning properly, and obeying the commands of the computer owner. Thus DRM is inevitably a security violation. Or in the words the RIAA might use, DRM is theft--of the computing resources of another person.
little yellow dots, that's what:
http://www.eff.org/Privacy/printers/
I like this. Of course, as a coder, you are free to include this phrase on your own work. Let's start doing it; I will, from today.
I think some kind of patent pool is necessary, but I want to see it run by the open source types. We should have a foundation which patents methods used in open source software as they come out, then places them in a defensive pool like the ones the corporations use. The licence could be viral: use may use these patents in any project which is open-source, and if you grant the same licence to everyone to use all your software patents. It's a stopgap, but until we get the laws fixed, we need something to prevent innovations developed by the community from being patented after the fact by big companies. I know that means there would be prior art, but since when has that been any impediment to a patent? Microsoft knows that many obvious things, like organizing photos in chronological order, are patentable, and will patent them untill open-source software is crushed. We have to fight back both within the existing legal system, and by changing it.
CA antivirus is now removing the DRM. I think this is a violation of the DMCA, right? 5 years in prison and a big fine? Let the fireworks begin. story
I think there are enoug MIT folks at Google that they felt it necessary to omit any mention of a certain other Cambridge, MA college, though there is a label for its former women's branch, Radcliffe College.
Remember who signed the DMCA--Clinton. I think free speech in the slashdot, eff sense is really quite orthogonal to party lines.
Definitely. LaTeX, the Emacs to edit it, and every other app useful for a mathematician with computational tendencies (singular, macaulay, etc) is native to linux/unix. Plus my enlightened department (which includes the author of xdvi) doesn't touch windows.
You can not agree to the Eula, and get a refund, like this guy: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7040 Enjoy!
I'd call this a thinly veiled PR announcement if it were thinly veiled. Doerr making an investment is news like Bill Gates selling a copy of Windows is news. He does it constantly, it is his job. Moreover this kind of thing has been around since the late 1990s, lots of well-known and less well known companies doing it. I am embarrassed this got parroted on slashdot "products as unique as you are!" sheesh.