> wrong... if the average user of a piece of software is expected to read compatibility lists. >... > if you buy a car, should you be expected to know its internals?
Big difference. The proper analogy to checking a compatibility list is checking that the car will fit into your garage. I don't see how the manufacturer is supposed to help you there.
Paying for an expert witness is what RIAA is good at, and presumably what this lawyer wants to avoid, in order to save money for his client. Ergo, this Slashdot thread...
I'm still waiting for Linksys to post an updated driver (without the buffer-overflow vulnerability) for a PC-card WiFi adapter I inherited (wouldn't have bought it myself, I'm pretty particular about Linux compatibility).
In the meantime I tried to use the open-source Linux driver from Berlios but it's not quite there yet, at least for the BCM4318. Can't complain, tho, wouldn't want to be in their shoes considering that Broadcom is totally uncooperative, from what I've heard.
After the herculean effort to control your laughter, tell them that if they send you $5 + shipping, you will send them a wondrous CDROM called "Knoppix".
Not so much as you may think. How large a percent of the windows market will buy a given game, seeing as there are so many windows games? Now think that the linux/bsd markets have near zero competition for anyone who sells to them. Big difference between people who use an OS and people who will buy games for that OS.
You assume that most users of Linux who are interested in gaming do not own a second PC running Windows for that purpose. That's probably wrong (the assumption --- as to the behavior, everyone needs to judge for themselves). History has unfortunately already provided one counterexample to your argument. Of course, times have changed, since then, but I don't know by how much...
> There are other problems with the idea, of course.
Let me guess that one of them is the following movie-plot weakness: the Mafia could start to use blind people as unknowing couriers for large sums of money by punching extra holes in the bills that are being transported.
Yes, I know it's not very probable.
Re:Look at the "revolutionary" technology
on
The Wii Disassembled
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
And if you opened the case of your next (working) computer and only found a few LED's I suppose you would be equally dismissive, eh?
Sometimes the revolution is about what isn't there, not what is there.
They seem pretty reasonable, maybe if you suggest an alternative pricing scheme they will actually implement it for you.
OTOH, it seems like overkill to me to use that service. Just generate 100 of your own CAPTCHA's and write your own code to select one randomly from this static pool. Change the code and the CAPTCHA's whenever the spammers have broken your scheme. Only by making individual, orthogonal efforts to make it more expensive for the spammers to spam us will we overcome this problem (and then, of course, only for ourselves).
> Broadcom users on Linux should really be using the bcm43xx kernel module by now.
Out of the table of ten global "chip family id's" listed here, only 3 are currently listed as supported, the others are at best "unstable".
And personally, I didn't manage to get a BCM4318 "Air Force One"-based card (no, I didn't buy it, it was "inherited") working with the native module (Ubuntu Dapper). Sigh. Guess it's time to fish out the long cables until the Windows drivers get patched.
> The roll printer idea, where the people see their votes printed, but don't actually
> get to touch the printout is fine.
Well, only if the printed roll is cut up into discrete pieces before being deposited in the
printout collection box, so that the order of the votes cannot be determined easily upon
collection.
Voting systems are hard to do because their requirements are almost self-contradictory: you
want the voter to be able to confirm that his vote is counted correctly, but at the same time
you don't want him to be able to prove to a third party how he voted, nor enable anyone else
to determine how he voted (assuming the result of the aggregated votes is not unanimous).
> This bug can be exploited both locally or remotely
As could be guessed from its nature.
This means that your "security advice" is a bit off. As long as he is not the only person with physical access to the machines in his lab (and I don't see why he'd need a whole lab of machines
just for one person), this exploit almost certainly makes it easier to root his machines.
OTOH, being familiar with the average level of security in most academic settings, I rather doubt his machines are currently secured properly against an attacker with physical access, so you might have a point. But both of us are just guessing about that.
A site about murder is far less likely to inspire murderous actions than a porn site is to incite pornographic actions.
Probably true, if what you meant was "sexual actions". However, since the controversy is about not being able to have the domain name porn.ie, not about
what kind of content the web site can have or what actions the content of the web site might
inspire, I find your comment totally off-topic.
There must be ooodles of.ie web sites with pornography. Also, I rather doubt you'd have a lot of luck registering killcatholics.ie (or other variations with
Protestants, Jews, etc.), either. So your argument would seem to have nothing to do with this.
The registrar's TOS are designed for CYA --- so it can arbitrarily pull offensive domain names
to not get sued. The controversy is that many people don't feel that porn.ie would be a big liability
exposure to them, so they appear to be overstepping their authority into sexual censorship.
> If that's what's necessary to keep their children under control
Children who are "under control" to the extent that they cannot misbehave do not have the opportunity to learn to behave responsibly.
This means that "good" parents are always going to have a certain amount of liability exposure for what their kids do. The courts should take this into consideration when judging the amount of liability of the parents for the actions of their children.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but from where I sit, the major things a record label can get you that you can't get yourself are: (1) radio play, (2) on (M)TV, and (3) other exclusive and expensive advertising. None of which strike me as really major for The Boston Pops.
Recording a symphony orchestra or other large ensemble is for sure more complicated and expensive than recording a garage band, but I find it hard to believe it's so complicated that they couldn't independently produce their own records. And make more profit.
Of course, God only knows what kind of contract they already have been locked into.
I guess that means I break Swedish law every time I browse a Swedish website, since my browser copies its copyrighted content to its disk cache before getting legal permission.
Guess I'm lucky not to live in Sweden. And here I thought you guys were all-in-all freer about this kind of stuff. I wonder if Sweden also has the fairly ubiquitous "have you committed a crime" questions on its border entry form, and what would happen if everyone entering declared themselves as copyright criminals under Swedish law?
After the split I exchanged an email or two with Horar about licensing problems he might be getting into, even though,
thank God, IANAL.
The legalities of applying the GFDL or GPL to a database like the one managed by freedb.org are unclear. If you
are interested and have deep pockets, you can try to get the courts to clear this up for us (although you might
have to secretly agree to pay for Horar's lawyer, also, otherwise he might just shut down instead of waiting for a clear
decision).
AFAIK, the data that the original CDDB developers made off with, to found what has become Gracenote, is not protected legally by
any license in any way, since it was donated without any declared licensing, and it would seem to be hard to prove to the courts that those that donated somehow expected their contributions to be licensed in a particular manner.
I have my own personal opinion about what the original CDDB developers did, but they are almost certainly in
the clear legally. Horar is on much less certain ground, but I'd be surprised if anyone bothers to take it to court.
> Wargames does not deserve to be on this list.
>...
> Their biggest nitpick is that computer voice.
FA is slashdotted so sorry if this is redundant...
The thing which really made me cringe in Wargames was the fact that he realistically dials in, starts a countdown timer running which you see tick off time, and then logs off, but the countdown timer continues to count down.
At the time it really bothered me (I liked the movie, otherwise). But now I have
a new inspiration about this!
Maybe we can use that as prior art against patents for client-side web-apps?
Wow, ScuttleMonkey, I just loved the disclaimer that you added saying this device is solely marketed by ThinkGeek which is affiliated with OSTG/Slashdot. Great editing standards! </sarcasm>
Have you ever tried to hold a conscious squirrel even using two hands?
If we're talking about a fully grown gray squirrel, this looks to me to be wayyyy into urban legend territory.
Tell the guy who thought this up to change it to "lighting the tail of a flying squirrel and then launching it by catapult". Seems more reasonable to me.
[[Yes, I know the details can be changed to make the story more reasonable, but then this post would be boring, no?]]
Slashdot Mirror
> I've never understood all the fuss about the chicken and egg problem - they both taste great.
...
Yeah, kind of like snake. Or maybe iguana. Or
> wrong... if the average user of a piece of software is expected to read compatibility lists. ...
>
> if you buy a car, should you be expected to know its internals?
Big difference. The proper analogy to checking a compatibility list is checking that the car will fit into your garage. I don't see how the manufacturer is supposed to help you there.
> "simply hire an expert witness"
Paying for an expert witness is what RIAA is good at, and presumably what this lawyer wants to avoid, in order to save money for his client. Ergo, this Slashdot thread...
I'm still waiting for Linksys to post an updated driver (without the buffer-overflow vulnerability) for a PC-card WiFi adapter I inherited (wouldn't have bought it myself, I'm pretty particular about Linux compatibility).
In the meantime I tried to use the open-source Linux driver from Berlios but it's not quite there yet, at least for the BCM4318. Can't complain, tho, wouldn't want to be in their shoes considering that Broadcom is totally uncooperative, from what I've heard.
After the herculean effort to control your laughter, tell them that if they send you $5 + shipping, you will send them a wondrous CDROM called "Knoppix".
You could get richer than spammers!
> Hammer away on Google's servers and they will cut you off
It'd be hard for them to defend against a bandwidth-limited, widely distributed effort.
Anyone want a crack at writing "UnfoldingClassics@Home" ?
> There are other problems with the idea, of course.
Let me guess that one of them is the following movie-plot weakness: the Mafia could start to use blind people as unknowing couriers for large sums of money by punching extra holes in the bills that are being transported.
Yes, I know it's not very probable.
And if you opened the case of your next (working) computer and only found a few LED's I suppose you would be equally dismissive, eh?
Sometimes the revolution is about what isn't there, not what is there.
They seem pretty reasonable, maybe if you suggest an alternative pricing scheme they will actually implement it for you.
OTOH, it seems like overkill to me to use that service. Just generate 100 of your own CAPTCHA's and write your own code to select one randomly from this static pool. Change the code and the CAPTCHA's whenever the spammers have broken your scheme. Only by making individual, orthogonal efforts to make it more expensive for the spammers to spam us will we overcome this problem (and then, of course, only for ourselves).
> Broadcom users on Linux should really be using the bcm43xx kernel module by now.
Out of the table of ten global "chip family id's" listed here, only 3 are currently listed as supported, the others are at best "unstable".
And personally, I didn't manage to get a BCM4318 "Air Force One"-based card (no, I didn't buy it, it was "inherited") working with the native module (Ubuntu Dapper). Sigh. Guess it's time to fish out the long cables until the Windows drivers get patched.
> The roll printer idea, where the people see their votes printed, but don't actually
> get to touch the printout is fine.
Well, only if the printed roll is cut up into discrete pieces before being deposited in the printout collection box, so that the order of the votes cannot be determined easily upon collection.
Voting systems are hard to do because their requirements are almost self-contradictory: you want the voter to be able to confirm that his vote is counted correctly, but at the same time you don't want him to be able to prove to a third party how he voted, nor enable anyone else to determine how he voted (assuming the result of the aggregated votes is not unanimous).
See: http://www.net-security.org/vulnerability.php?id=2 6768
Any complex enough system will have vulnerabilities. Live with it.
> This bug can be exploited both locally or remotely
As could be guessed from its nature.
This means that your "security advice" is a bit off. As long as he is not the only person with physical access to the machines in his lab (and I don't see why he'd need a whole lab of machines just for one person), this exploit almost certainly makes it easier to root his machines.
OTOH, being familiar with the average level of security in most academic settings, I rather doubt his machines are currently secured properly against an attacker with physical access, so you might have a point. But both of us are just guessing about that.
Probably true, if what you meant was "sexual actions". However, since the controversy is about not being able to have the domain name porn.ie, not about what kind of content the web site can have or what actions the content of the web site might inspire, I find your comment totally off-topic.
There must be ooodles of .ie web sites with pornography. Also, I rather doubt you'd have a lot of luck registering killcatholics.ie (or other variations with
Protestants, Jews, etc.), either. So your argument would seem to have nothing to do with this.
The registrar's TOS are designed for CYA --- so it can arbitrarily pull offensive domain names to not get sued. The controversy is that many people don't feel that porn.ie would be a big liability exposure to them, so they appear to be overstepping their authority into sexual censorship.
> If that's what's necessary to keep their children under control
Children who are "under control" to the extent that they cannot misbehave do not have the opportunity to learn to behave responsibly.
This means that "good" parents are always going to have a certain amount of liability exposure for what their kids do. The courts should take this into consideration when judging the amount of liability of the parents for the actions of their children.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but from where I sit, the major things a record label can get you that you can't get yourself are: (1) radio play, (2) on (M)TV, and (3) other exclusive and expensive advertising. None of which strike me as really major for The Boston Pops.
Recording a symphony orchestra or other large ensemble is for sure more complicated and expensive than recording a garage band, but I find it hard to believe it's so complicated that they couldn't independently produce their own records. And make more profit.
Of course, God only knows what kind of contract they already have been locked into.
> And watch, I bet I get bad karma for just trying to point out
> that it seems (to the untrained eye) that he might have bad karma.
No one ever gets bad karma for betting they'll get bad karma, here...
The Slashdot Heisenkarma Principle!
Oh, no!
I guess that means I break Swedish law every time I browse a Swedish website, since my browser copies its copyrighted content to its disk cache before getting legal permission.
Guess I'm lucky not to live in Sweden. And here I thought you guys were all-in-all freer about this kind of stuff. I wonder if Sweden also has the fairly ubiquitous "have you committed a crime" questions on its border entry form, and what would happen if everyone entering declared themselves as copyright criminals under Swedish law?
After the split I exchanged an email or two with Horar about licensing problems he might be getting into, even though, thank God, IANAL.
The legalities of applying the GFDL or GPL to a database like the one managed by freedb.org are unclear. If you are interested and have deep pockets, you can try to get the courts to clear this up for us (although you might have to secretly agree to pay for Horar's lawyer, also, otherwise he might just shut down instead of waiting for a clear decision).
AFAIK, the data that the original CDDB developers made off with, to found what has become Gracenote, is not protected legally by any license in any way, since it was donated without any declared licensing, and it would seem to be hard to prove to the courts that those that donated somehow expected their contributions to be licensed in a particular manner.
I have my own personal opinion about what the original CDDB developers did, but they are almost certainly in the clear legally. Horar is on much less certain ground, but I'd be surprised if anyone bothers to take it to court.
FA is slashdotted so sorry if this is redundant...
The thing which really made me cringe in Wargames was the fact that he realistically dials in, starts a countdown timer running which you see tick off time, and then logs off, but the countdown timer continues to count down.
At the time it really bothered me (I liked the movie, otherwise). But now I have a new inspiration about this! Maybe we can use that as prior art against patents for client-side web-apps?
I've read all the posts up to now, and most are overlooking what I think is an important fact.
The Clay Institute has put up a bounty of one million US dollars for a proof of this conjecture.
There seems to be a good chance that Perelman will decline it (or his share of it), given his behavior.
This may be a factor in Yau's rush to get a share of the credit. He's famous enough that he doesn't really need to do this to improve reputation.
Just the opportunity for some of us less social Slashdotters to pick up new friends!
(Not recommended for those of us who used to cry when the snowman melted...)
Wow, ScuttleMonkey, I just loved the disclaimer that you added saying this device is solely marketed by ThinkGeek which is affiliated with OSTG/Slashdot. Great editing standards!
</sarcasm>
Have you ever tried to hold a conscious squirrel even using two hands?
If we're talking about a fully grown gray squirrel, this looks to me to be wayyyy into urban legend territory.
Tell the guy who thought this up to change it to "lighting the tail of a flying squirrel and then launching it by catapult". Seems more reasonable to me.
[[Yes, I know the details can be changed to make the story more reasonable, but then this post would be boring, no?]]