The correct answer is "Hell, no! " or "Fuck, no!" or "No, and you should be executed for having suggested it!"
You're very kind. I would say they should be tortured for the rest of eternity for having suggested it. They should suffer for it like we will.
Seriously though the crazy thing is that they require flash for those temporary credit card numbers that some credit card companies offer. As if I'm so paranoid that I'm going to take the trouble using this credit card security service, but I won't mind installing this flash software from macromedia who may or may not be trustworthy, and have it embedded into my web browser so that web site operators have yet more potential vulnerabilities to hack my machine and cut into what anonymity I have left, and all this for NO GOOD PURPOSE because html over https would work every bit as well.
And why don't I hear more complaints about the insecurity of running flash? Here on slashdot it is commonly understood that activex is crazy but people don't seem to think much is wrong with flash. Flash lets any old site you visit to run software on your computer. That's crazy. Sure it may be sandboxed but the huge number of javascript vulnerabilities have shown the folly of letting websites run code on your computer.
These temporary credit card numbers are a great improvement to online transaction security. The method that is generally used now of giving the merchant all the info needed for the merchant (or the criminal or employee that gets into the merchants computer) to make unauthorized charges to your card, is even crazier than using flash.
The other thing that amazes me is that banks allow customers to log into the bank with ancient web browsers that have been full of holes for months or years. It seems to me that the bank should never allow a login from any browser that has been unpatched for more than a few weeks or maybe even not allow it unless all the latest patches are installed. It might be a big advantage for them to allow this though because then if your account is hacked then they could pull up their logs that show your web browser was in an insecure state and then blame you for any losses. Still they shouldn't be able to blame you unless they give you a warning that your insecurity will shift the liability to you.
It is obvious from [2]'s use of the phrase "the following conditions" and the fact that [3, 4, 5] are preceded by asterisks and use the phrase "this list of conditions" that [2] is not intended to be part of the list of conditions.
I was thinking the same as jschultz410 that the word "following" is the critical word. Mod parent up.
a third of a light second apart or about 100km I think you mean 100,000 km
Oops.
Ah, whats a few zeros here and there?:)
I was writing in a hurry and the value wasn't very important anyway.
You wouldn't use the phase of the pulsar signal to get a distance reading, but you could use it's frequency as a way of identifying it uniquely, and then you would triangulate your position by getting a bearing on three or four pulsars; this is essentially how the starburst pattern on the Mariner Plaque is supposed to work for aliens trying to find Earth. It gives the frequency of pulsars near the earth and their bearing to Sol relative to the galactic center. The aliens would identify the pulsars by their frequency, and then use their knowledge of the pulsars' absolute locations to work backward and triangulate the position of Sol (assuming these aliens, a million years from now, are able to backtrack the locations of all the pulsars, as they will all have moved relative to Sol and will have slowed down in their spinning, causing an error in our reported frequencies). Interesting point. The pulsars will move and slow down by the time Mariner gets anywhere (or is it Pioneer or Voyager).
However pulsar GPS and the Pioneer plaque are both interesting and clever tricks with pulsars, but the two methods have a totally different purpose and procedure. The Pioneer plaque just uses the time between pulses to tell aliens which pulsar we are giving the distance to. It's just a way of telling one star from another. But pulsar GPS is for when you already know what pulsars you're looking at and where those pulsars are and you want to find your precise location in the solar system(or beyond).
With pulsar GPS you're using changes in the arrival times of the pulses to determine if you're getting closer to the pulsar or getting farther away. The problem is that unlike GPS there is nothing different about the pulses to tell one pulse from a particular pulsar from the next pulse from the same pulsar. Therefore if you measure your times relative to the wrong pulse you might think yourself hundreds of thousands of kilometers closer or farther from the pulsar than you actually are(or much more).
Great idea, we could get a much stronger signal if we went to get some pulsars and brought them back to our solar system. The only question is should the expenditure be budgeted for fiscal year 2008 or 200008?
I think the idea of Pulsar GPS is primarily intended for interplanetary spacecraft. For terrestrial stuff GPS probably works better. One problem with Pulsars is that you would have to know which pulse to measure the time difference relative to the other Pulsars. if a pulsar pulses every 300ms then the pulses will be about a third of a light second apart or about 100km. If you go 100km relative to the pulsar you might get mixed up as to which pulse to lock onto and think you hadn't moved. The problem gets worse as the pulse rate gets higher. GPS doesn't have this problem because the absolute time is encoded within the signal from each satellite so you know the date and time each pulse left the GPS satellite.
One way to deal with the problem is to carefully keep continuous track of your position so you can keep straight which pulse to measure. If you can figure out where you are accurately enough by some other means you can figure out which pulse to measure. You can decrease the uncertainty of which pulse to use by using more than four pulsars. For example if one pulsar pulses every 7ms and another pulses every 11ms you can increase your window to 77ms by watching as they go into and out of sync.
I'm guessing that another problem is that the pulsars probably have a rather faint signal. You may have to have four or more large high gain dish antennas pointed in different directions to pick up the signals. This would be impractical on earth for most applications and would be a lot of extra weight for a spacecraft also. You might be able to have just one dish and point it at each pulsar in turn.
I don't see anything about this on Wikipedia. I think I'll add it one of these days.
The most interesting application of pulsars I've heard of is using them like GPS transmitters. Since pulsars are about the most precise timing devices known, if you time the arrival of the pulse from at least four of them you can use the time differences to triangulate your position precisely anywhere in the solar system.
The key to learning metric is memorize the metric measurements of a lot of familiar objects instead of trying to convert things back to the older units. For example I know that a Piper Cub airplane has a wingspan of roughly 35 feet. If I read about an airplane that has a wingspan of 12m and I want to know which is bigger, then instead of converting 12m into 39.4 feet I would convert 35 feet into 10.7m and memorize that the Cub has a wingspan of about 11m. That way in the future I won't have to do another conversion to know that for example a 10m plane is a little smaller than a Cub. Do this for all kinds of things; the distance to the nearest big city, the distance across the Atlantic, the height and weight of an average person etc.
It also helps a lot to realize that many conversions require very little accuracy. For example I often consider a km to be about half the size of a mile. That's good enough to get a feel for many distances.
Sorry I forgot to preview, let me try again with some formatting.
I like to say that if you want to do your friends a big favor then go over to their house and break all their light bulbs. They might get mad at first but if you show them the numbers then they'll probably forgive you because you'll save them hundreds of dollars. It helps if you take a few CFLs to replace what you break and that'll probably be the best gift you've given them. I like to say this because it's extreme and people are more likely to remember it than if you just say that they'll save a lot of money with CFLs.
Seriously though when you remove your old incandescent bulbs don't just set them aside in case you need them later. The temptation is too great. Break them. It seems terribly wasteful but if you find yourself short on bulbs and put that incandescent back in then you might forget to replace it with a CFL and that could cost you a lot more than you'd save by keeping those old bulbs. Don't think of them as being worth 25cents each, think of them as having negative value. Think of them as being dangerous things that might suck money from your wallet.
When shopping for CFLs keep a few things in mind.
First be sure the bases on the new bulbs aren't too big. Exterior sockets seem especially tight fits.
Also I haven't seen many cheap CFLs over 100watt equivalent so you may need some Y adapters so you can put two in a socket where you need more light.
If you need to leave a light on all the time or even all night every night then it may be worth it to get one of the very low power CFLs that only use 4watts. They cost significantly more but will probably be worth it if you don't need the extra light.
Heat may kill the electronics in CFLs so they may be a bad idea in an enclosure with no ventilation.
Light fixtures that turn on automatically at night usually have circuitry that turns on gradually which wont work with CFLs. When buying light sensing fixtures check for fluorescent compatibility.
I like to say that if you want to do your friends a big favor then go over to their house and break all their light bulbs. They might get mad a first but if you show them the numbers then they'll probably forgive you because you'll save them hundreds of dollars. It helps if you take a few CFLs to replace what you break and that'll probably be the best gift you've given them.
Seriously though when you remove your old incandescent bulbs don't just set them aside in case you need them later. The temptation is too great. Break them. It seems terribly wasteful but if you find yourself short on bulbs and put that incandescent back in then you might forget to replace it with a CFL and that could cost you a lot more than you'd save by keeping those old bulbs. Don't think of them as being worth 25cents each, think of them as having negative value.
When shopping for CFLs keep a few things in mind.
First be sure the bases on the new bulbs aren't too big. Exterior sockets seem especially tight fits.
Also I haven't seen many cheap CFLs over 100watt equivalent so you may need some Y adapters so you can put two in a socket where you need more light.
If you need to leave a light on all the time or even all night every night then it may be worth it to get one of the very low power CFLs that only use 4watts. They cost significantly more but will probably be worth it if you don't need the extra light.
Heat may kill the electronics in CFLs so they may be a bad idea in an enclosure with no ventilation.
Light fixtures that turn on automatically at night usually have circuitry that turns on gradually which wont work with CFLs. When buying light sensing fixtures check for fluorescent compatibility.
I just realized the other day that this Bluray vs HD-DVD competition isn't a bad thing for consumers. It's actually a great thing. With the Beta/VHS competition consumers suffered because there was no cheap way to make a player that could play both formats. But the Bluray and HD-DVD discs are physically identical in shape (I think) and could probably both be easily read by a single player. What this means is that there will be real competition and therefore lower prices. As soon as one format starts to show signs of loosing the competition, it will be licensed to be incorporated into combo players and your movie collection will still be usable. The only problems I can see are that if all the movie studios don't support both formats then your selection of movies may be limited until you get a combo player or buy one of both, and that if you choose the wrong format you may have to buy a combo player to replace the first player you bought. But those costs are probably very small compared to the savings resulting from the competition.
My email often doesn't get through because I made the mistake of setting up a mailbox under my domain for my dad, and I forward his email to his hotmail account. When spam comes into the box I set up for him under my domain, and it's forwarded to his hotmail account, Hotmail thinks the spam is coming from MY domain. Then Hotmail associated the spam with my static IP address, and now no matter what email account I use, my IP address sets off Hotmail's spam filter. What's worse and is inexcusable is that Hotmail just drops my messages before even checking to see if the recipient has put my domain on their white-list. LET ALL WHO HAVE HOTMAIL ACCOUNTS BE WARNED THAT HOTMAIL HAS BEEN TRASHING SOME OF YOUR MAIL EVEN IF THE SENDER IS ON YOUR WHITE-LIST. And let all who have their own domain names be warned not to forward email lest you slander your own domain name.
Oh, I get it now. They're supposedly not giving Novell permission to distribute, they're just giving Novell CUSTOMERS a promise not to sue for patent infringement in exchange for a big payment from Novell to Microsoft. That sounds like a distinction without a difference. If there is a difference and if Microsoft's patents are valid then this sounds kind of dangerous for Novell, since Microsoft can still sue Novell for distributing. Then again maybe it's not dangerous for Novell because if they get sued by Microsoft then they may be able to pull out some evidence that Microsoft did secretly give Novell permission to distribute, and thus blow away Microsoft's patents by showing Microsoft gave permission to Novell to distribute under the GPL.
It seems to me that since Microsoft has given permission to its partner to distribute under the terms of the GPL (the ONLY way Novell can distribute) they can't put the cat back in the bag.
I was thinking that it was an important goal that votes not be verifiable by vote buyers or extortionists like bosses and husbands, but then I realized that the current absentee system has no secrecy anyway. In my area I'm not even allowed to vote any other way but absentee. Absentee balots could ruin the election even for people who don't vote absentee.
By the way, why are so few posts getting modded up the last couple of days? In the article about melting arctic ice only 7 out of 250 posts got modded above the noise of the +2 posts and only 2 got modded to +4 or 5.
Note that in this quote De Icaza doesn't say that mono needed patent protection, maybe it's just that now there can be no doubt that Novell customers need not worry.
So today we have secured a peace of mind for Novell customers that might have been worried about possible patent infringements open source deployments. This matters in particular for Mono, because for a long time its been the favorite conversation starter for folks that find dates on Slashdot. - Miguel de Icaza
Microsoft knows that the ONLY way Novell can legally distribute Linux is under the terms of the GPL. Therefore if Microsoft gives Novell permission to distribute Linux with Microsoft's patents, then Microsoft must be giving permission to distribute under the terms of the GPL. If Microsoft nevertheless claims that it's patented algorithms can only be distributed under a more restricted license like a noncommercial one, then Microsoft is engaged with Novell in a partnership to violate the intellectual property rights of the Linux copyright holders. It seems unlikely that a court will agree to enforce the IP rights of Microsoft even though Microsoft partnered with another company to violate the IP rights of the authors of Linux. It seems more likely that the court will say that Microsoft implicitly gave permission to distribute Linux with Microsoft patents under the GPL, and therefore Microsoft is stuck with the GPL.
I'm not a lawyer but it seems to me that not only is this Microsoft/Suse agreement not a bad thing for Linux, it's fabulously beneficial. If Microsoft makes an agreement to allow Novell to distribute Linux with Microsoft's patents, then MICROSOFT IS GIVING PERMISSION FOR THE USE OF ITS PATENTS UNDER THE TERMS OF THE GPL! They can't claim they are allowing only Novell to use their patents, because they know that if Novell can't distribute under the terms of the GPL then Novell can't legally distribute at all. If they try to bring infringement claims then they will have to go before the court with dirty hands, admitting they engaged in a conspiracy with Novell to distribute copyrighted software (Linux) without a legitimate license.
Microsoft might still be able to claim patent violations for patents they don't know are in Linux. But they would have to convince the court that they didn't know about the patent violations while they allowed Novell to distribute Linux (or other GPL software that Novell distributes, like Wine, SAMBA, or OpenOffice!)
I see no reason why God can't give a computer a soul if he wants to. Perhaps upon the computer's "birth" or awakening of consciousness, God will, metaphorically speaking, infuse it with "the breath of life". Human bodies are just masses of atoms. Is there something special about the atoms in the human body that makes them different than the atoms in a computer? Robots needn't be cold hard machines. Engineers could probably make robots with warm soft bodies if that would help.
The company may deserve what it gets for leaving an open vulnerability like this. But there are a lot of innocent users who may suffer from this. I'm fine with quickly releasing vulnerabilities to the public, but only after warning the company that you're going public. It won't take crackers long to figure out what site you're referring to. Please tell the company that you've made their vulnerability public.
If you don't see that the hole is closed quickly you could be on the receiving end of a lawsuit from any users that are damaged. Even if you win, you will probably loose plenty in lawyers fees and hassle.
Thanks for alerting them to it in the first place though. Even if they ignored you, the rest of us out there appreciate your efforts.
The probability calculation is flawed. Although restricting the choices of passwords reduces the number of possibilities it doesn't reduce them all that much. A three character password with an upper, a lower, and a digit, isn't 10*26*26 possibilities. The first char can be any of 62. The next char can be any of at least 36 but could be any of 52 if the first char was a digit. The last char could be any of at least 10. Thus the correct calculation is at LEAST 62*36*10 but is actually more.
More importantly, as you add more characters to the password you only add factors of 62 and you have just one factor of 36 and one of 10. So for an eight char password with at least one digit and one alternate case, you have at LEAST 62*62*62*62*62*62*36*10 possibilities.
Furthermore, attakers never start with a brute force attack except with trivially short passwords. They start with a dictionary attack. Hacker dictionaries contain not just the dictionary but millions of passwords that other people have used. Before they do a full on brute force attack, they do an all lower case brute force. They also try passwords with a beginning upper and ending in a number. Then chars with one number in between the chars. Combinations that include upper and lower and digits are about the last thing they try even if they resort to a full on brute force.
Since all passwords of just a few chars (maybe 8 or so) can be brute forced no matter what they contain, it would make no sense to require certain characters but not have a minimum password length. Just increase the minimum length by one and you've more than made up for any combinations lost to restrictions, while drastically reducing vulnerability to dictionary attacks.
So all someone has to do now is just squeze the flash drive into the calculator case and make the connections directly to the wires inside and they'll be able to bring a scan of the entire text book with them for the test. Great I guess that's the end of using graphing calcs on tests.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously though the crazy thing is that they require flash for those temporary credit card numbers that some credit card companies offer. As if I'm so paranoid that I'm going to take the trouble using this credit card security service, but I won't mind installing this flash software from macromedia who may or may not be trustworthy, and have it embedded into my web browser so that web site operators have yet more potential vulnerabilities to hack my machine and cut into what anonymity I have left, and all this for NO GOOD PURPOSE because html over https would work every bit as well.
And why don't I hear more complaints about the insecurity of running flash? Here on slashdot it is commonly understood that activex is crazy but people don't seem to think much is wrong with flash. Flash lets any old site you visit to run software on your computer. That's crazy. Sure it may be sandboxed but the huge number of javascript vulnerabilities have shown the folly of letting websites run code on your computer.
These temporary credit card numbers are a great improvement to online transaction security. The method that is generally used now of giving the merchant all the info needed for the merchant (or the criminal or employee that gets into the merchants computer) to make unauthorized charges to your card, is even crazier than using flash.
The other thing that amazes me is that banks allow customers to log into the bank with ancient web browsers that have been full of holes for months or years. It seems to me that the bank should never allow a login from any browser that has been unpatched for more than a few weeks or maybe even not allow it unless all the latest patches are installed. It might be a big advantage for them to allow this though because then if your account is hacked then they could pull up their logs that show your web browser was in an insecure state and then blame you for any losses. Still they shouldn't be able to blame you unless they give you a warning that your insecurity will shift the liability to you.
I was thinking the same as jschultz410 that the word "following" is the critical word. Mod parent up.
Oops.
Ah, whats a few zeros here and there? :)
I was writing in a hurry and the value wasn't very important anyway.
You wouldn't use the phase of the pulsar signal to get a distance reading, but you could use it's frequency as a way of identifying it uniquely, and then you would triangulate your position by getting a bearing on three or four pulsars; this is essentially how the starburst pattern on the Mariner Plaque is supposed to work for aliens trying to find Earth. It gives the frequency of pulsars near the earth and their bearing to Sol relative to the galactic center. The aliens would identify the pulsars by their frequency, and then use their knowledge of the pulsars' absolute locations to work backward and triangulate the position of Sol (assuming these aliens, a million years from now, are able to backtrack the locations of all the pulsars, as they will all have moved relative to Sol and will have slowed down in their spinning, causing an error in our reported frequencies). Interesting point. The pulsars will move and slow down by the time Mariner gets anywhere (or is it Pioneer or Voyager).However pulsar GPS and the Pioneer plaque are both interesting and clever tricks with pulsars, but the two methods have a totally different purpose and procedure. The Pioneer plaque just uses the time between pulses to tell aliens which pulsar we are giving the distance to. It's just a way of telling one star from another. But pulsar GPS is for when you already know what pulsars you're looking at and where those pulsars are and you want to find your precise location in the solar system(or beyond).
With pulsar GPS you're using changes in the arrival times of the pulses to determine if you're getting closer to the pulsar or getting farther away. The problem is that unlike GPS there is nothing different about the pulses to tell one pulse from a particular pulsar from the next pulse from the same pulsar. Therefore if you measure your times relative to the wrong pulse you might think yourself hundreds of thousands of kilometers closer or farther from the pulsar than you actually are(or much more).
Great idea, we could get a much stronger signal if we went to get some pulsars and brought them back to our solar system. The only question is should the expenditure be budgeted for fiscal year 2008 or 200008?
One way to deal with the problem is to carefully keep continuous track of your position so you can keep straight which pulse to measure. If you can figure out where you are accurately enough by some other means you can figure out which pulse to measure. You can decrease the uncertainty of which pulse to use by using more than four pulsars. For example if one pulsar pulses every 7ms and another pulses every 11ms you can increase your window to 77ms by watching as they go into and out of sync.
I'm guessing that another problem is that the pulsars probably have a rather faint signal. You may have to have four or more large high gain dish antennas pointed in different directions to pick up the signals. This would be impractical on earth for most applications and would be a lot of extra weight for a spacecraft also. You might be able to have just one dish and point it at each pulsar in turn.
I don't see anything about this on Wikipedia. I think I'll add it one of these days.
The most interesting application of pulsars I've heard of is using them like GPS transmitters. Since pulsars are about the most precise timing devices known, if you time the arrival of the pulse from at least four of them you can use the time differences to triangulate your position precisely anywhere in the solar system.
It also helps a lot to realize that many conversions require very little accuracy. For example I often consider a km to be about half the size of a mile. That's good enough to get a feel for many distances.
I like to say that if you want to do your friends a big favor then go over to their house and break all their light bulbs. They might get mad at first but if you show them the numbers then they'll probably forgive you because you'll save them hundreds of dollars. It helps if you take a few CFLs to replace what you break and that'll probably be the best gift you've given them. I like to say this because it's extreme and people are more likely to remember it than if you just say that they'll save a lot of money with CFLs.
Seriously though when you remove your old incandescent bulbs don't just set them aside in case you need them later. The temptation is too great. Break them. It seems terribly wasteful but if you find yourself short on bulbs and put that incandescent back in then you might forget to replace it with a CFL and that could cost you a lot more than you'd save by keeping those old bulbs. Don't think of them as being worth 25cents each, think of them as having negative value. Think of them as being dangerous things that might suck money from your wallet.
When shopping for CFLs keep a few things in mind.
First be sure the bases on the new bulbs aren't too big. Exterior sockets seem especially tight fits.
Also I haven't seen many cheap CFLs over 100watt equivalent so you may need some Y adapters so you can put two in a socket where you need more light.
If you need to leave a light on all the time or even all night every night then it may be worth it to get one of the very low power CFLs that only use 4watts. They cost significantly more but will probably be worth it if you don't need the extra light.
Heat may kill the electronics in CFLs so they may be a bad idea in an enclosure with no ventilation.
Light fixtures that turn on automatically at night usually have circuitry that turns on gradually which wont work with CFLs. When buying light sensing fixtures check for fluorescent compatibility.
I like to say that if you want to do your friends a big favor then go over to their house and break all their light bulbs. They might get mad a first but if you show them the numbers then they'll probably forgive you because you'll save them hundreds of dollars. It helps if you take a few CFLs to replace what you break and that'll probably be the best gift you've given them. Seriously though when you remove your old incandescent bulbs don't just set them aside in case you need them later. The temptation is too great. Break them. It seems terribly wasteful but if you find yourself short on bulbs and put that incandescent back in then you might forget to replace it with a CFL and that could cost you a lot more than you'd save by keeping those old bulbs. Don't think of them as being worth 25cents each, think of them as having negative value. When shopping for CFLs keep a few things in mind. First be sure the bases on the new bulbs aren't too big. Exterior sockets seem especially tight fits. Also I haven't seen many cheap CFLs over 100watt equivalent so you may need some Y adapters so you can put two in a socket where you need more light. If you need to leave a light on all the time or even all night every night then it may be worth it to get one of the very low power CFLs that only use 4watts. They cost significantly more but will probably be worth it if you don't need the extra light. Heat may kill the electronics in CFLs so they may be a bad idea in an enclosure with no ventilation. Light fixtures that turn on automatically at night usually have circuitry that turns on gradually which wont work with CFLs. When buying light sensing fixtures check for fluorescent compatibility.
Wouldn't that be an antitrust violation to disallow dual format players?
I just realized the other day that this Bluray vs HD-DVD competition isn't a bad thing for consumers. It's actually a great thing. With the Beta/VHS competition consumers suffered because there was no cheap way to make a player that could play both formats. But the Bluray and HD-DVD discs are physically identical in shape (I think) and could probably both be easily read by a single player. What this means is that there will be real competition and therefore lower prices. As soon as one format starts to show signs of loosing the competition, it will be licensed to be incorporated into combo players and your movie collection will still be usable. The only problems I can see are that if all the movie studios don't support both formats then your selection of movies may be limited until you get a combo player or buy one of both, and that if you choose the wrong format you may have to buy a combo player to replace the first player you bought. But those costs are probably very small compared to the savings resulting from the competition.
My email often doesn't get through because I made the mistake of setting up a mailbox under my domain for my dad, and I forward his email to his hotmail account. When spam comes into the box I set up for him under my domain, and it's forwarded to his hotmail account, Hotmail thinks the spam is coming from MY domain. Then Hotmail associated the spam with my static IP address, and now no matter what email account I use, my IP address sets off Hotmail's spam filter. What's worse and is inexcusable is that Hotmail just drops my messages before even checking to see if the recipient has put my domain on their white-list. LET ALL WHO HAVE HOTMAIL ACCOUNTS BE WARNED THAT HOTMAIL HAS BEEN TRASHING SOME OF YOUR MAIL EVEN IF THE SENDER IS ON YOUR WHITE-LIST. And let all who have their own domain names be warned not to forward email lest you slander your own domain name.
Oh, I get it now. They're supposedly not giving Novell permission to distribute, they're just giving Novell CUSTOMERS a promise not to sue for patent infringement in exchange for a big payment from Novell to Microsoft. That sounds like a distinction without a difference. If there is a difference and if Microsoft's patents are valid then this sounds kind of dangerous for Novell, since Microsoft can still sue Novell for distributing. Then again maybe it's not dangerous for Novell because if they get sued by Microsoft then they may be able to pull out some evidence that Microsoft did secretly give Novell permission to distribute, and thus blow away Microsoft's patents by showing Microsoft gave permission to Novell to distribute under the GPL.
It seems to me that since Microsoft has given permission to its partner to distribute under the terms of the GPL (the ONLY way Novell can distribute) they can't put the cat back in the bag.
I think you're right. I don't see this problem listed in the Bugs list so I'm going to submit a bug report.
By the way, why are so few posts getting modded up the last couple of days? In the article about melting arctic ice only 7 out of 250 posts got modded above the noise of the +2 posts and only 2 got modded to +4 or 5.
Microsoft knows that the ONLY way Novell can legally distribute Linux is under the terms of the GPL. Therefore if Microsoft gives Novell permission to distribute Linux with Microsoft's patents, then Microsoft must be giving permission to distribute under the terms of the GPL. If Microsoft nevertheless claims that it's patented algorithms can only be distributed under a more restricted license like a noncommercial one, then Microsoft is engaged with Novell in a partnership to violate the intellectual property rights of the Linux copyright holders. It seems unlikely that a court will agree to enforce the IP rights of Microsoft even though Microsoft partnered with another company to violate the IP rights of the authors of Linux. It seems more likely that the court will say that Microsoft implicitly gave permission to distribute Linux with Microsoft patents under the GPL, and therefore Microsoft is stuck with the GPL.
I'm not a lawyer but it seems to me that not only is this Microsoft/Suse agreement not a bad thing for Linux, it's fabulously beneficial. If Microsoft makes an agreement to allow Novell to distribute Linux with Microsoft's patents, then MICROSOFT IS GIVING PERMISSION FOR THE USE OF ITS PATENTS UNDER THE TERMS OF THE GPL! They can't claim they are allowing only Novell to use their patents, because they know that if Novell can't distribute under the terms of the GPL then Novell can't legally distribute at all. If they try to bring infringement claims then they will have to go before the court with dirty hands, admitting they engaged in a conspiracy with Novell to distribute copyrighted software (Linux) without a legitimate license.
Microsoft might still be able to claim patent violations for patents they don't know are in Linux. But they would have to convince the court that they didn't know about the patent violations while they allowed Novell to distribute Linux (or other GPL software that Novell distributes, like Wine, SAMBA, or OpenOffice!)
Don't miss the list of previous winners. It's full of hilarious and sometimes interesting stuff.
I see no reason why God can't give a computer a soul if he wants to. Perhaps upon the computer's "birth" or awakening of consciousness, God will, metaphorically speaking, infuse it with "the breath of life". Human bodies are just masses of atoms. Is there something special about the atoms in the human body that makes them different than the atoms in a computer? Robots needn't be cold hard machines. Engineers could probably make robots with warm soft bodies if that would help.
Chess is a timed game. You only need a couple hours of patience.
If you don't see that the hole is closed quickly you could be on the receiving end of a lawsuit from any users that are damaged. Even if you win, you will probably loose plenty in lawyers fees and hassle.
Thanks for alerting them to it in the first place though. Even if they ignored you, the rest of us out there appreciate your efforts.
More importantly, as you add more characters to the password you only add factors of 62 and you have just one factor of 36 and one of 10. So for an eight char password with at least one digit and one alternate case, you have at LEAST 62*62*62*62*62*62*36*10 possibilities.
Furthermore, attakers never start with a brute force attack except with trivially short passwords. They start with a dictionary attack. Hacker dictionaries contain not just the dictionary but millions of passwords that other people have used. Before they do a full on brute force attack, they do an all lower case brute force. They also try passwords with a beginning upper and ending in a number. Then chars with one number in between the chars. Combinations that include upper and lower and digits are about the last thing they try even if they resort to a full on brute force.
Since all passwords of just a few chars (maybe 8 or so) can be brute forced no matter what they contain, it would make no sense to require certain characters but not have a minimum password length. Just increase the minimum length by one and you've more than made up for any combinations lost to restrictions, while drastically reducing vulnerability to dictionary attacks.
So all someone has to do now is just squeze the flash drive into the calculator case and make the connections directly to the wires inside and they'll be able to bring a scan of the entire text book with them for the test. Great I guess that's the end of using graphing calcs on tests.