I told him that in a lot of places in the world these are quite common; he was awe. "'ot in Uganda' he said to me.
Do the editors here ever edit? I realize slashdot has a policy of trying to preserve as much of the original submissions as possible, and yes, there's the argument for content over presentation... but what on earth are slashdot editors drawing down an actual paycheck for? No filtering for duplicate submissions, no correction of spelling and grammar... let alone fact checking (and that's going to get slashdot sued one of these days).
Don't you even have any pride? I guess not, long as people like me continue to post. It's all about those ad impressions, eh?
Re:That's how discovery works in litigation
on
SCOrched Earth
·
· Score: 1
> Say I am a fizzy drinks manufacturer. I want to know what Coca-cola's secret formula is. I start a case against them saying that they've copied my formula, and that they have to give me their formula so I can prove it.
Most of the time, you can't subpoena a trade secret. Period. If you do manage to do so, it would probably have to be turned over to a third party to review the evidence -- you'd never get to see it. You certainly can't get it with a simple discovery motion.
> Have you ever clucked like a chicken? If so, did you scratch backward or frontward?
I remember this question. I thought "frontward or backward, now does that mean put the foot in front or behind me, or does that mean the direction of the scratching? Because one interpretation would use opposite terms to describe the direction than the other. Then there may have been occasions where no scratching was involved either, but rather a flapping of the arms in chickenlike fashion." I asked for another sheet of paper to go into more depth on this question. I didn't get the job.
In all seriousness come to think of it, I've done the chicken dance at parties... I'd have to answer "yes" to the question. But I'm still fuzzy on which way I scratched, or if I even did. Definitely lots of flapping and clucking though.
Even if they corrected that to "appears as a series of 1's and 0's"... I don't think even the most hardcore worked with binary since programming PDP's with the front panel switches.
I mean, technically McBride's genome could appear as a series of 1's and 0's... Why don't they just subpoena "all items containing information"?
Your offer has been accepted. Due to leasing arrangements and other circumstances, the present location of SCO headquarters must be relocated. SCO's assets not written off to depreciation will be transferred to your location. We have procured a late-model hatchback station wagon rental for this purpose.
Additionally, all papers concerning SCO's financial liabilities to stockholders and pending litigation will be transferred to you. Please let us know whether you wish them transferred via cargo freight or whether we will need to arrange a contract with a trucking company for this purpose.
Regards, Darl
Re:Lets all stop bashing AOL....
on
AOL's $299 PC
·
· Score: 1
> AOL scans every email for viruses and doesn't let any through that has one, but rather they notify the sender
Two words: bounce spam. Let's annoy, hm, how about you.
MAIL FROM: <sgk25@nospamherererer.org> RCPT TO: <whocares@aol.com> DATA ...paste virus here... .
Or would you like to show me a virus that actually takes care to insert the proper sender? Anyway, AOL is converting its mail structure to stop bouncing mail for precisely these reasons.
An operating system provides a common name space for both long filenames and short filenames. In this common namespace, a long filename and a short filename are provided for each file.
That would mean VFAT, which is a layer on top of FAT. Plain FAT didn't have long filenames, period.
Plus, if they filed that patent in 1995... I was using Pathworks PCNFS long before then, and it was mangling long filenames to the familiar format we attribute to MICROS~1 today.
Personally I think MS is simply trying to quicken the demise of FAT so they can drop it quicker. About time, too -- there's simply no need for it anymore.
> The German government took this route with Kroupware
Gee, I'm guessing that's a KDE project. Pronounced like "croup" i imagine...
Main Entry: croup Pronunciation: 'krup Function: noun Etymology: Middle English croupe, from Old French, of Germanic origin; akin to Old High German kropf craw -- more at CROP Date: 14th century : the rump of a quadruped
> for a good tool for combining people who want to same software and are willing to pay. Like sourceforge and paypal rolled into one.
Been tried. SourceXchange was one one such attempt. Flopped miserably. On a bigger scale, paying for services delivered by semi-anonymous contributors is alive and well -- it's called outsource contracts. Simply stipulate that you require open source, and you'll still have people beating down your door to bid. It just won't be cheap, regardless of the OSS factor.
There's a saying about another saying, "The customer is always right", and that's "even a whore won't do everything the customer demands."
If you have a fifty customers and your product costs a million bucks a pop, you might want to jump when they say jump. if you have a million customers and your product costs fifty bucks, you better bank on your creative vision, not fickle demands contrary to the design of the product.
There's bugs, there's misfeatures, and there's design. Sometimes they just need to buy another game -- it helps if you also produce that game too. Geez, what if myth added building and resource gathering?
> Since when do authorities really care about child pornography? Last I saw, their favourite passtime is occasionally busting people who download child pornography, always claiming "this is the most horrific child porn I've ever seen",
Here is your official Media Tool badge, proclaiming you a credulous dupe of major media. There are certain requirements for keeping and wearing this badge. Examples include but are not limited to:
1. Ignoring the existence of units dedicated to tracking and busting child porn rings, and assuming that 100% of arrests are televised, and if there wasn't a story today, no one was arrested or investigated.
2. Believing in the rising omnipresent danger of violent crime in every neighborhood in the USA, based on news coverage of said crimes. This belief must be held in spite of the steady decline of violent crime rates in the USA since the 1970's.
Corporate communication guidelines prohibit wearing the Media Tool badge at the same time as any Critical Thinker insignia. If you do not agree to follow either of the above guidelines, you may return the Media Tool badge for a full refund.
As for a url to blacklists, it doesn't get much better than the SBL for prepared evidence and spamcop for raw data, http://www.spamhaus.org and http://www.spamcop.net respectively
s/email/every public commons/ These people can, have, and will spam by email, fax, autodialers, IM, SMS, spyware, and every single method of communication they can get their hands on that makes it cheap to publish.
The feedback loop will certainly end... when there isn't a commons left. When we've all retreated into isolated communities and protocols, and will have to pay for the privelege of connecting with strangers, under the rare circumstance anyone might even treat contact from a stranger as anything but suspicious. Where that contact will be monitored and regulated, ostensibly to reduce spam, but nevertheless we will need the permission of the gatekeepers to push out any decent quantity of content.
FTC Commissioner Orson Swindle (I love that name) has said about spam "what we need are a couple of good hangings". While the government continues to do the one thing it's good at, make harrumphing noises at the problem, nothing whatsoever is being done about this ongoing criminal behavior, let alone unethical hucksterism. I'm not a fan of government intervention, mind you -- it'd just be nice if they just started enforcing the laws they actually have on the books.
Reasonable and balanced discussion on slashdot? Stop the presses! Ok ok... one point I would like to add to this "install is easy/hard under windows" is that software in *nix environments often doesn't require any kind of "workstation install" at all. Licensed software is almost always through a license server, preferences and settings are created in $HOME the first time the app is run, and so forth.
That said, there's nothing quite like the manageability of a well run windows domain, with update status available in a single window, and one-click "bring up to date with the latest policy" managebility. Just that when things go wrong, one typically needs to go reinstalling the whole damn OS, and because of the large amount of local state kept on these windows boxen, productivity is invariably lost. Contrast to the situation I had in an all-unix environment (Solaris) where we would routinely reinstall the entire OS on employees' machines overnight (and let me tell you, jumpstart is so much nicer than the windows equivalent) and they wouldn't even know it had happened.
> Agreed. But fighting the spammers won't prevent that. The only way to prevent that is to secure the majority of on-line PCs so they can't be zombified.
Perhaps 3/4 of the zombies exist because someone ignored every single warning about opening an executable attachment, and ran it anyway. I'm not saying "users are lusers", merely unsophisticated users are going to compromise any system that isn't so locked down it's unusable. Securing the desktop is important, but no matter what, the immediate upstream also has to be secured as well, so when a box is compromised, the damages can be limited.
Think, perhaps, of a power-generation system that would be suitable for a small hobby farm. If I took the patent, built it, and used it on my own land, but did not sell it, am I violating the patent?
From my interpretation of the below, I'd say definitely yes, you're violating the patent. Especially if you used the patent application itself to develop it.
From http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/doc/general/i ndex.html#infringement
Infringement of a patent consists of the unauthorized making, using, offering for sale, or selling any patented invention within the United States or U.S. Territories, or importing into the United States of any patented invention during the term of the patent. If a patent is infringed, the patentee may sue for relief in the appropriate federal court. The patentee may ask the court for an injunction to prevent the continuation of the infringement and may also ask the court for an award of damages because of the infringement. In such an infringement suit, the defendant may raise the question of the validity of the patent, which is then decided by the court. The defendant may also aver that what is being done does not constitute infringement. Infringement is determined primarily by the language of the claims of the patent and, if what the defendant is making does not fall within the language of any of the claims of the patent, there is no literal infringement.
Seth Finkelstein has been posting a few theories lately on what Google is up to. (Also contains links to other articles.) He suspects they are using some sort of Bayesian filtering around the rule "If a simple search has spam-related keywords, penalize high-spam-scoring results" (spam being search-keyword spam on web pages -- not e-mail spam)
Easy to defeat a bayesian filter: use a sentence generator. Feed a few hundred mission statements and "about us" pages into a markov model and let it churn out babble. You're not really concerned with being 100% coherent, since none of your generated spam is actually on the site having its ranking pumped up. You just want uniqueness, the bane of any bayesian filter.
Perhaps "OSS copies desktops" would have been a better characterization, giving strength to the old canard that Linux is just for servers, windows and mac are just for desktops (hey I wouldn't mind so much if windows were just the desktop)
Perl and python are not desktop projects. Apache was named because it was "A patchy httpd", as in patches to CERN httpd. CERN httpd was reasonably original, but alas, not a desktop project.
Emacs is what interface wonks call "usable, but not accessable". I.e. it's usable in that it has 8 million knobs and buttons to tweak, but 90% of them have weird labels and warning signs. Not knocking emacs, I have a 1000 line elisp project (that's a fair bit of code for elisp) that I continue to work on now.
Blogs. BBS's have been around since the 70's
readline (and --color)... been done in DOS, been done in PRIMOS ECL, been done on IBM mainframes, VAXen, countless places before the readline library (which incidentally is GPL'd and not LGPL'd, thus making it wholly unsuitable for a great many projects)
No, that's a big, big disadvantage, and should be avoided at all costs. Results should not be available before the polls close. If they are, all sorts of tricks can be played, in both close and not-so-close races.
Like standing the required X feet away from a polling place and asking people who they voted for? Are you going to require everyone to vote at exactly the same time, and if they miss the hour window or so, then forget it? Exit polls are how the news gets the results.
I'm all for instant tabulation, precincts should all report in at exactly the same time. I just don't see how this really has anything to do with it. I think it has more to do with replacing aging mechanical voting machines than with the integrity of the election process (which if they really cared about, would not be left entirely to an ad hoc patchwork of local laws)
Personally I'm more concerned about the fact that in many states, someone who committed ANY felony at any time in their life can never vote again.
> It's not nice to aim death threats at anybody. But secretaries and customer service people are the official representatives of the company, not innocent bystanders
Official representatives? On what planet, nay, alternate dimension have you been living in? Most secretaries and tier1 customer service folks were called by the temp agency the day before they first showed up to the job, details like knowing what business the company is in might have been part of the conversation, but not always. But hey at least they might not be too late on the rent this month.
But I agree. No one should threaten to do what they're not willing to back up with action, and the action in this case would be really quite reprehensible. Death threats just aren't appropriate at any time.
If this guy has any brains (perhaps not a warranted assumption) then he's going to get a defense lawyer and let the subpoenas start flying. This company's criminal behavior is all going to get laid out in black and white as part of the discovery process. This is why Emarketers America dropped their suit against spamhaus and SPEWS -- you better believe this guy will have discovery under criminal proceedings.
That said, it's really not nice to aim your death threats at secretaries and customer service people.
But there is another challenge, and that's the posts people write. Anybody care about their code? For example, quoting, to do it properly, one should write:
blah, blah
. That's an awful lot of typing.
A page is not going to validate unless the posts are correct.
The balance problem is trivally corrected by actually parsing the HTML in the post, then inserting the proper closing tags at the end. No, the page will still not validate -- but no one is asking for slash pages+posts to validate, merely asking that the templates themselves manage to validate.
Demanding people submit validated HTML is simply going to chase a lot of people away from posting at all. A blog's job is not to make posting difficult.
Slashdot Mirror
I told him that in a lot of places in the world these are quite common; he was awe. "'ot in Uganda' he said to me.
... but what on earth are slashdot editors drawing down an actual paycheck for? No filtering for duplicate submissions, no correction of spelling and grammar ... let alone fact checking (and that's going to get slashdot sued one of these days).
Do the editors here ever edit? I realize slashdot has a policy of trying to preserve as much of the original submissions as possible, and yes, there's the argument for content over presentation
Don't you even have any pride? I guess not, long as people like me continue to post. It's all about those ad impressions, eh?
> Say I am a fizzy drinks manufacturer. I want to know what Coca-cola's secret formula is. I start a case against them saying that they've copied my formula, and that they have to give me their formula so I can prove it.
Most of the time, you can't subpoena a trade secret. Period. If you do manage to do so, it would probably have to be turned over to a third party to review the evidence -- you'd never get to see it. You certainly can't get it with a simple discovery motion.
> Have you ever clucked like a chicken? If so, did you scratch backward or frontward?
... I'd have to answer "yes" to the question. But I'm still fuzzy on which way I scratched, or if I even did. Definitely lots of flapping and clucking though.
I remember this question. I thought "frontward or backward, now does that mean put the foot in front or behind me, or does that mean the direction of the scratching? Because one interpretation would use opposite terms to describe the direction than the other. Then there may have been occasions where no scratching was involved either, but rather a flapping of the arms in chickenlike fashion." I asked for another sheet of paper to go into more depth on this question. I didn't get the job.
In all seriousness come to think of it, I've done the chicken dance at parties
Even if they corrected that to "appears as a series of 1's and 0's" ... I don't think even the most hardcore worked with binary since programming PDP's with the front panel switches.
I mean, technically McBride's genome could appear as a series of 1's and 0's... Why don't they just subpoena "all items containing information"?
Dear Mr Specter,
Your offer has been accepted. Due to leasing arrangements and other circumstances, the present location of SCO headquarters must be relocated. SCO's assets not written off to depreciation will be transferred to your location. We have procured a late-model hatchback station wagon rental for this purpose.
Additionally, all papers concerning SCO's financial liabilities to stockholders and pending litigation will be transferred to you. Please let us know whether you wish them transferred via cargo freight or whether we will need to arrange a contract with a trucking company for this purpose.
Regards,
Darl
Two words: bounce spam. Let's annoy, hm, how about you.Or would you like to show me a virus that actually takes care to insert the proper sender? Anyway, AOL is converting its mail structure to stop bouncing mail for precisely these reasons.
An operating system provides a common name space for both long filenames and short filenames. In this common namespace, a long filename and a short filename are provided for each file.
... I was using Pathworks PCNFS long before then, and it was mangling long filenames to the familiar format we attribute to MICROS~1 today.
That would mean VFAT, which is a layer on top of FAT. Plain FAT didn't have long filenames, period.
Plus, if they filed that patent in 1995
Personally I think MS is simply trying to quicken the demise of FAT so they can drop it quicker. About time, too -- there's simply no need for it anymore.
> The German government took this route with Kroupware
Gee, I'm guessing that's a KDE project. Pronounced like "croup" i imagine...
Main Entry: croup
Pronunciation: 'krup
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English croupe, from Old French, of Germanic origin; akin to Old High German kropf craw -- more at CROP
Date: 14th century
: the rump of a quadruped
> for a good tool for combining people who want to same software and are willing to pay. Like sourceforge and paypal rolled into one.
Been tried. SourceXchange was one one such attempt. Flopped miserably. On a bigger scale, paying for services delivered by semi-anonymous contributors is alive and well -- it's called outsource contracts. Simply stipulate that you require open source, and you'll still have people beating down your door to bid. It just won't be cheap, regardless of the OSS factor.
There's a saying about another saying, "The customer is always right", and that's "even a whore won't do everything the customer demands."
If you have a fifty customers and your product costs a million bucks a pop, you might want to jump when they say jump. if you have a million customers and your product costs fifty bucks, you better bank on your creative vision, not fickle demands contrary to the design of the product.
There's bugs, there's misfeatures, and there's design. Sometimes they just need to buy another game -- it helps if you also produce that game too. Geez, what if myth added building and resource gathering?
> Since when do authorities really care about child pornography? Last I saw, their favourite passtime is occasionally busting people who download child pornography, always claiming "this is the most horrific child porn I've ever seen",
Here is your official Media Tool badge, proclaiming you a credulous dupe of major media. There are certain requirements for keeping and wearing this badge. Examples include but are not limited to:
1. Ignoring the existence of units dedicated to tracking and busting child porn rings, and assuming that 100% of arrests are televised, and if there wasn't a story today, no one was arrested or investigated.
2. Believing in the rising omnipresent danger of violent crime in every neighborhood in the USA, based on news coverage of said crimes. This belief must be held in spite of the steady decline of violent crime rates in the USA since the 1970's.
Corporate communication guidelines prohibit wearing the Media Tool badge at the same time as any Critical Thinker insignia. If you do not agree to follow either of the above guidelines, you may return the Media Tool badge for a full refund.
> Legal action (sadly, no URL...)
Here ya go
As for a url to blacklists, it doesn't get much better than the SBL for prepared evidence and spamcop for raw data, http://www.spamhaus.org and http://www.spamcop.net respectively
> It's absolutely insane. They won't stop 'til they've destroyed email.
... when there isn't a commons left. When we've all retreated into isolated communities and protocols, and will have to pay for the privelege of connecting with strangers, under the rare circumstance anyone might even treat contact from a stranger as anything but suspicious. Where that contact will be monitored and regulated, ostensibly to reduce spam, but nevertheless we will need the permission of the gatekeepers to push out any decent quantity of content.
s/email/every public commons/
These people can, have, and will spam by email, fax, autodialers, IM, SMS, spyware, and every single method of communication they can get their hands on that makes it cheap to publish.
The feedback loop will certainly end
FTC Commissioner Orson Swindle (I love that name) has said about spam "what we need are a couple of good hangings". While the government continues to do the one thing it's good at, make harrumphing noises at the problem, nothing whatsoever is being done about this ongoing criminal behavior, let alone unethical hucksterism. I'm not a fan of government intervention, mind you -- it'd just be nice if they just started enforcing the laws they actually have on the books.
Reasonable and balanced discussion on slashdot? Stop the presses! Ok ok ... one point I would like to add to this "install is easy/hard under windows" is that software in *nix environments often doesn't require any kind of "workstation install" at all. Licensed software is almost always through a license server, preferences and settings are created in $HOME the first time the app is run, and so forth.
That said, there's nothing quite like the manageability of a well run windows domain, with update status available in a single window, and one-click "bring up to date with the latest policy" managebility. Just that when things go wrong, one typically needs to go reinstalling the whole damn OS, and because of the large amount of local state kept on these windows boxen, productivity is invariably lost. Contrast to the situation I had in an all-unix environment (Solaris) where we would routinely reinstall the entire OS on employees' machines overnight (and let me tell you, jumpstart is so much nicer than the windows equivalent) and they wouldn't even know it had happened.
> Agreed. But fighting the spammers won't prevent that. The only way to prevent that is to secure the majority of on-line PCs so they can't be zombified.
Perhaps 3/4 of the zombies exist because someone ignored every single warning about opening an executable attachment, and ran it anyway. I'm not saying "users are lusers", merely unsophisticated users are going to compromise any system that isn't so locked down it's unusable. Securing the desktop is important, but no matter what, the immediate upstream also has to be secured as well, so when a box is compromised, the damages can be limited.
There's also a decent rebuttal with this story as well - worth reading.
Come now, could we perhaps see an editorial addition noting that something isn't worth reading, just once in a while?
From my interpretation of the below, I'd say definitely yes, you're violating the patent. Especially if you used the patent application itself to develop it.
From http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/doc/general/
Seth Finkelstein has been posting a few theories lately on what Google is up to. (Also contains links to other articles.) He suspects they are using some sort of Bayesian filtering around the rule "If a simple search has spam-related keywords, penalize high-spam-scoring results" (spam being search-keyword spam on web pages -- not e-mail spam)
Easy to defeat a bayesian filter: use a sentence generator. Feed a few hundred mission statements and "about us" pages into a markov model and let it churn out babble. You're not really concerned with being 100% coherent, since none of your generated spam is actually on the site having its ranking pumped up. You just want uniqueness, the bane of any bayesian filter.
There's you answer, fishbulb.
Perhaps "OSS copies desktops" would have been a better characterization, giving strength to the old canard that Linux is just for servers, windows and mac are just for desktops (hey I wouldn't mind so much if windows were just the desktop)
... been done in DOS, been done in PRIMOS ECL, been done on IBM mainframes, VAXen, countless places before the readline library (which incidentally is GPL'd and not LGPL'd, thus making it wholly unsuitable for a great many projects)
Perl and python are not desktop projects. Apache was named because it was "A patchy httpd", as in patches to CERN httpd. CERN httpd was reasonably original, but alas, not a desktop project.
Emacs is what interface wonks call "usable, but not accessable". I.e. it's usable in that it has 8 million knobs and buttons to tweak, but 90% of them have weird labels and warning signs. Not knocking emacs, I have a 1000 line elisp project (that's a fair bit of code for elisp) that I continue to work on now.
Blogs. BBS's have been around since the 70's
readline (and --color)
No, that's a big, big disadvantage, and should be avoided at all costs. Results should not be available before the polls close. If they are, all sorts of tricks can be played, in both close and not-so-close races.
Like standing the required X feet away from a polling place and asking people who they voted for? Are you going to require everyone to vote at exactly the same time, and if they miss the hour window or so, then forget it? Exit polls are how the news gets the results.
I'm all for instant tabulation, precincts should all report in at exactly the same time. I just don't see how this really has anything to do with it. I think it has more to do with replacing aging mechanical voting machines than with the integrity of the election process (which if they really cared about, would not be left entirely to an ad hoc patchwork of local laws)
Personally I'm more concerned about the fact that in many states, someone who committed ANY felony at any time in their life can never vote again.
> It's not nice to aim death threats at anybody. But secretaries and customer service people are the official representatives of the company, not innocent bystanders
Official representatives? On what planet, nay, alternate dimension have you been living in? Most secretaries and tier1 customer service folks were called by the temp agency the day before they first showed up to the job, details like knowing what business the company is in might have been part of the conversation, but not always. But hey at least they might not be too late on the rent this month.
But I agree. No one should threaten to do what they're not willing to back up with action, and the action in this case would be really quite reprehensible. Death threats just aren't appropriate at any time.
One word: discovery.
If this guy has any brains (perhaps not a warranted assumption) then he's going to get a defense lawyer and let the subpoenas start flying. This company's criminal behavior is all going to get laid out in black and white as part of the discovery process. This is why Emarketers America dropped their suit against spamhaus and SPEWS -- you better believe this guy will have discovery under criminal proceedings.
That said, it's really not nice to aim your death threats at secretaries and customer service people.
A page is not going to validate unless the posts are correct.
The balance problem is trivally corrected by actually parsing the HTML in the post, then inserting the proper closing tags at the end. No, the page will still not validate -- but no one is asking for slash pages+posts to validate, merely asking that the templates themselves manage to validate.
Demanding people submit validated HTML is simply going to chase a lot of people away from posting at all. A blog's job is not to make posting difficult.
> seems www.fedora.info is using a hat that looks similar to redhats doesnt it?
Well yeah, they're both fedoras. If they were both using bowlers or stetsons, those would probably look similar too.