The whitelist tactic is like making people leave a message even though you're sitting right by the phone. It's rude, and it will annoy anyone who is trying to email you for the first time, regardless of whether they're selling penis-enlargent pills or offering you a job. People whose first email to you is bounced or ignored probably won't try again.
Whitelists are great for stopping *all* unsolicited email, not just the commercial kind. It's just as good at blocking email from people who just read your resume, people who you gave your email address to at a party, etc. If you already have a good job, are already married, and have as many friends as you want, by all means go for the whitelist, but if you intend to expand your circle of acquainences, or try to get a job or a date, it's a bad idea.
flaming debian-legal list=legal issues?
on
Knoppix 3.3 Is Out
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Mplayer has too many legal issues, but Xine is OK? *rolling eyes*
If that's Xnoppix's reason, they've been reading debian-legal too much and comparing the code too little. If Mplayer has "legal issues", then so does Xine. Both players can decrypt DVDs, both can use borrowed win32 codecs, both use algorithms that are subject to patents (in the US). Where's the difference? The Mplayer devs got into a nasty flamewar with debian-legal people, and the Xine team didn't.
I'm curious, how did Microsoft drop the ball with respect to other XML-based Office suites?
A few months ago there was an posted article here about the upcoming Word2k3 xml file format. According to that, the XML-based format did not have all the information normally present in a Word2k.doc. There was either information lost when saving to XML, or some of it was still in a proprietary binary format. (I don't remember which, and I can't find the link right now, sorry...) If either of those is true of the release version, I would say the MS has dropped the ball on XML, or at least missed the point. XML is (well, should be) about making exchanging information between different platforms easy, not just another buzzword to get the PHBs to pony up $500/license for the latest version of Office!
Disclaimer: I work on the XML team at Microsoft but not directly with Microsoft Office. Hint: Never ever tell anyone on slashdot you work for Microsoft.:D
Anyone else see why this is stupid? Ok, here's a hint: you don't have three processors. Items 2, 3, and 4 will have to compete for CPU time.
Most of that time isn't spent thrashing the CPU, it's waiting for data to be read from the disk, or for phenominally slow bits of hardware to report that they are configured and running. Items 2, 3, and 4 likely only need 5 seconds of CPU time total, all the rest is wasted waiting for i/o.
Anyone else see why this is stupid? Ok, here's a hint: you don't have three processors. Items 2, 3, and 4 will have to compete for CPU time.
Bah. If you think the point of gentoo is tweaking for that last bit of speed, you're mistaken. The point is to have the most current software, fine-grained control over what packeges get intalled, and the best package dependency handling around. <distro trolling mode=on> It's like having all the good parts of Debian, but with up-to-date software and without all the license zealotry.
I can think of a few... 1: Network unification: IM has AOL, Yahoo, ICQ, MSN, and Jabber. IRC has more networks than I can count. The odds of your friends all being on the right IM network are much better than all being on the same IRC net. 2: The buddy list. On IRC it's harder to track people coming and going (if they're not in your channel). IM makes it easy to tell who is online no matter who they're talking to. 3: Fewer opportunites for lamers to ruin/take over your chat. IRC channels are taken over by script kiddies all the time. My IM session has never been owned. 4: Simplicity. IRC takes a little skill and experience to use successfully (memorizing/commands, etc.) My grandmother can use IM just by clicking the pretty buttons.
The bottom line, I think, is convenience. IRC could be made to do almost everything that IMs can do, it would just take a lot more effort to set it up.
Fear that the next 12-year-old girl the RIAA sues is going to be the daughter of some wealthy, aggressive, New York lawyer instead of a single mother from the projects?
To most users, it *is* UNIX. Just like the box of generic store brand paper nose-wiping things on the corner of my desk is a "box of kleenex" to 99% of the people who see it, Linux (or anything else that has/bin/ls) is UNIX.
I realize that irritates people who paid money for the UNIX trademark, license zealots, and anyone who has been using UNIX since the 1970s, but that's the way it is now.
The "truck bomb at the pentagon" theory doesn't hold up to Occam's razor.
The US government would have no reason to go along with the fake plane-strike account of the incident, unless some agency of the government were behind the attack. If some agency faked the plane-strike on the pentagon, it stands to reason that they were *also* behind the other plane strikes on the WTC. If said agency was already hijacking planes to crash into the WTC, why would it hijack another plane, disappear it somehow, fake crashing it into the pentagon and use a truck bomb instead? It would be much easier to just use their trained suicide hijackers to crash the last plane into the pentagon.
I didn't answer this question the first time I saw it because I knew that as soon as I mentioned centrifugal force, some/. physics pedant would point out that it isn't really a force, it's just a ridiculous liberal myth. (which is technically true, but I digress...)
The cable would be attached at the top to something massive, like a space station or an asteroid, and the centrifugal force generated by swinging that weight around the earth keeps the cable under tension. As long as the weight of the elevator pulling down on the cable is less than the force of the space station pulling up, the cable stays under tension, and the station doesn't move a centimeter closer to earth.
I never shared that guy's interest in the sand though, I was more concerned about the whole "how do you hit the front of a 2 stories building with a plane and nothing else?"
You miss. You aim the plane down at the outer ring of the pentagon and accidentally undershoot by a few feet. The plane hits low on the wall of the building and most of the energy goes into the ground instead of the structure.
My question for the tinfoil beanie brigade: If the pentagon was hit with a truck bomb, and not a plane, then where the hell did the plane go?
Bonus question: Why bother faking a plane strike with a truck bomb instead of just hijacking another plane?
Am I missing something here? Like annother way to parse "NRA"? I just don't see the contradiction between using linux and being a member of the national rifle association...
How about: Apple - "*nix on the desktop will never work out. Use OSX instead" MPAA - "Install an unlicensed DVD player on this system and we'll sue you!" Sun Adobe - "The poor font rendering in this version of Linux was brought to you by our patent on truetype hinting, an army of litigious lawyers, and the letter "Q"
Nokia already is in the business of launching cooler and cooler phones
I don't know what you're talking about. From my point of view the last 4 years of Nokia phones have been re-treads of the old 51xx design, just in smaller boxes. Only in the last few months have they come out with anything that doesn't look like a squished 5100. Maybe they've been selling progressively "cooler and cooler" phones in europe, but in the US, Nokia has been lagging *way* behind Motorola, Samsung, LG, and Ericsson in the cool department. The 51xxs had user-replaceable custom faceplates, something nobody else has done before or since. That was the high point of Nokia's coolness IMHO. For about 2 years, every college student and a lot of teenagers had them. Now those customers have largely moved on to sexier Asian designs (Samsung, LG, etc.)
Ah yes, the dreaded "one slashdot member boycott". That's the tactic that brought Microsoft, the RIAA and the MPAA to their knees, ended the SCO lawsuit and the war in Iraq, made Blizzard stop abusing the DMCA, freed Dmitry, and got Half-Life 2 ported to linux! Fear the wrath of the slashdot! I think I can hear Damage Studios trembling in terror already.
If one still had to either work for one of a handful of high-tech defense contractors or a major university comp sci/engineering department to get connected to the internet, would YOU be posting on/.? Would there even BE a/. for us to post on?
I suspect the answer to both is no.
Yeah, I know, when *you* first got on the internet, you had to get up at 4:30 AM to carry your bits to the internet in a leaky bucket, through the 10-foot-deep snow, uphill both ways, barefoot, and you liked it.
Who the fuck gave this a +1 informative? Someone has apparently never heard of the right of first sale or even been to a used music store.
If I own a CD or a tape, I can sell it later. While I don't own the copyright to the music, that copy of the music is my property, and I have a legal right to sell it. This right has been upheld in US courts over and over again.
Except that Microsoft's legal history follows them (note the way they referenced a prior Microsoft legal battle to show that Microsoft really hadn't lost their e-mail), which will only make it easier and easier to successfully get concessions from Microsoft.
That's only true for the high-profile cases (Sun, Netscape, etc.) that were decided in court. There are many many more lawsuits brought by small companies that were settled out of court and sealed as a condition of that settlement. Those cases can never be brought out as evidence against MS in a later suit. So no, the majority of their legal history is not following them.
With tactics like this, while the settlements may be small, what happens when fines from being found in contempt of court start to rack up?
Yawn. MS has $40,000,000,000 in the bank. They can pay fines till the cows come home and not suffer much because of it. Now if judges had the authority to fine them in patents or copyrights, then you can bet MS would pay attention.
I am afraid that NASA has outlasted its usefulness. It should be sized down and concentrate on science missions, while leaving commercial launches to commercial enterprises. The US public should clamor for it while it's still time.
I hope that's a joke. U.S. corporations (probably everywhere else too) live and die by next quarter's earnings report. There is no incentive for long-term research right now, everything is focused on short-term profit. If you want our presence in space to remain at about the same (pathetically low) level for the next 20-50 years, by all means, follow your advice. If you ever want to see humanity get off this wretched rock, we need to increase NASA's budget, give it concrete goals to work towards, and light a fire under it's collective ass!
Pour water into approx. 1L glass or plastic container. Add blue food dye to taste. Float kerosene on top. (pouring it over the back of a spoon may help here) Seal container tightly, and shake gently to simulate rolling ocean waves.
Why should the rest of the world care? The patent is only in the US. I could happily use the manners described in Europe of Asia since the patent doesn't apply there...
You only have about 2 weeks left in Europe. Better get busy enjoying your patent-infringing plugins now...
One entry found for balkanize. Main Entry: balkanize Pronunciation: 'bol-k&-"nIz Function: transitive verb Inflected Form(s): -ized; -izing Usage: often capitalized Etymology: Balkan Peninsula Date: 1919 : to break up (as a region or group) into smaller and often hostile units
It looks like your hand-wringing over this particular politically incorrect expression is about 85 years too late. Maybe you need to get out more...
I believe you're right. IIRC after the first key was exposed, everyone realized how weak the encryption was and that they could crack the other keys easily.
This case is about the source code to decss.exe in specific, not about open-source CSS decoders in general. DeCSS is *not* what lets you watch DVDs in Linux. That's done by libdvdread and libdvdcss, which (so far) have not been sued, harassed, or even mentioned by the big bad MPAA! DeCSS is a *Windows-only* utility that decrypts DVD images copied to a hard drive. That might be fair use, but it's certainly not a DVD player for Linux.
So go on, expend all your political energy whining about DeCSS and your God-given right to watch DVDs on your Linux box, and ignore Ashcroft, the TIA, the PATRIOT act, and a hundred DMCA cases you've never heard of that are the real threats to your freedom.
Flame away, I'll be watching The Two Towers DVD with xine on my Gentoo box...
Natural gas in a pipeline traveling from one side of the country to the other has veritably no loss in comparison.
Gas pipelines are not as efficient as you think. Friction and turbulence in the pipes slow down flowing gas, so you need compressor stations every so often to keep the flow rate (and pressure) up. The energy to power those compressors comes from burning some of the gas. Over long distances that can easily add up to more than the 10-12% loss in electricity transmission.
Slashdot Mirror
The whitelist tactic is like making people leave a message even though you're sitting right by the phone. It's rude, and it will annoy anyone who is trying to email you for the first time, regardless of whether they're selling penis-enlargent pills or offering you a job. People whose first email to you is bounced or ignored probably won't try again.
Whitelists are great for stopping *all* unsolicited email, not just the commercial kind. It's just as good at blocking email from people who just read your resume, people who you gave your email address to at a party, etc. If you already have a good job, are already married, and have as many friends as you want, by all means go for the whitelist, but if you intend to expand your circle of acquainences, or try to get a job or a date, it's a bad idea.
Mplayer has too many legal issues, but Xine is OK?
*rolling eyes*
If that's Xnoppix's reason, they've been reading debian-legal too much and comparing the code too little. If Mplayer has "legal issues", then so does Xine. Both players can decrypt DVDs, both can use borrowed win32 codecs, both use algorithms that are subject to patents (in the US). Where's the difference? The Mplayer devs got into a nasty flamewar with debian-legal people, and the Xine team didn't.
I'm curious, how did Microsoft drop the ball with respect to other XML-based Office suites?
.doc. There was either information lost when saving to XML, or some of it was still in a proprietary binary format. (I don't remember which, and I can't find the link right now, sorry...) If either of those is true of the release version, I would say the MS has dropped the ball on XML, or at least missed the point. XML is (well, should be) about making exchanging information between different platforms easy, not just another buzzword to get the PHBs to pony up $500/license for the latest version of Office!
:D
A few months ago there was an posted article here about the upcoming Word2k3 xml file format. According to that, the XML-based format did not have all the information normally present in a Word2k
Disclaimer: I work on the XML team at Microsoft but not directly with Microsoft Office.
Hint: Never ever tell anyone on slashdot you work for Microsoft.
Anyone else see why this is stupid? Ok, here's a hint: you don't have three processors. Items 2, 3, and 4 will have to compete for CPU time.
Most of that time isn't spent thrashing the CPU, it's waiting for data to be read from the disk, or for phenominally slow bits of hardware to report that they are configured and running. Items 2, 3, and 4 likely only need 5 seconds of CPU time total, all the rest is wasted waiting for i/o.
Anyone else see why this is stupid? Ok, here's a hint: you don't have three processors. Items 2, 3, and 4 will have to compete for CPU time.
Bah. If you think the point of gentoo is tweaking for that last bit of speed, you're mistaken. The point is to have the most current software, fine-grained control over what packeges get intalled, and the best package dependency handling around. <distro trolling mode=on> It's like having all the good parts of Debian, but with up-to-date software and without all the license zealotry.
I can think of a few... /commands, etc.) My grandmother can use IM just by clicking the pretty buttons.
1: Network unification: IM has AOL, Yahoo, ICQ, MSN, and Jabber. IRC has more networks than I can count. The odds of your friends all being on the right IM network are much better than all being on the same IRC net.
2: The buddy list. On IRC it's harder to track people coming and going (if they're not in your channel). IM makes it easy to tell who is online no matter who they're talking to.
3: Fewer opportunites for lamers to ruin/take over your chat. IRC channels are taken over by script kiddies all the time. My IM session has never been owned.
4: Simplicity. IRC takes a little skill and experience to use successfully (memorizing
The bottom line, I think, is convenience. IRC could be made to do almost everything that IMs can do, it would just take a lot more effort to set it up.
What is the REAL reason SBC is holding out?
Fear that the next 12-year-old girl the RIAA sues is going to be the daughter of some wealthy, aggressive, New York lawyer instead of a single mother from the projects?
To most users, it *is* UNIX. Just like the box of generic store brand paper nose-wiping things on the corner of my desk is a "box of kleenex" to 99% of the people who see it, Linux (or anything else that has /bin/ls) is UNIX.
I realize that irritates people who paid money for the UNIX trademark, license zealots, and anyone who has been using UNIX since the 1970s, but that's the way it is now.
Let me spell it out a little more clearly.
The "truck bomb at the pentagon" theory doesn't hold up to Occam's razor.
The US government would have no reason to go along with the fake plane-strike account of the incident, unless some agency of the government were behind the attack. If some agency faked the plane-strike on the pentagon, it stands to reason that they were *also* behind the other plane strikes on the WTC. If said agency was already hijacking planes to crash into the WTC, why would it hijack another plane, disappear it somehow, fake crashing it into the pentagon and use a truck bomb instead? It would be much easier to just use their trained suicide hijackers to crash the last plane into the pentagon.
Centrifugal force.
/. physics pedant would point out that it isn't really a force, it's just a ridiculous liberal myth. (which is technically true, but I digress...)
I didn't answer this question the first time I saw it because I knew that as soon as I mentioned centrifugal force, some
The cable would be attached at the top to something massive, like a space station or an asteroid, and the centrifugal force generated by swinging that weight around the earth keeps the cable under tension. As long as the weight of the elevator pulling down on the cable is less than the force of the space station pulling up, the cable stays under tension, and the station doesn't move a centimeter closer to earth.
I never shared that guy's interest in the sand though, I was more concerned about the whole "how do you hit the front of a 2 stories building with a plane and nothing else?"
You miss. You aim the plane down at the outer ring of the pentagon and accidentally undershoot by a few feet. The plane hits low on the wall of the building and most of the energy goes into the ground instead of the structure.
My question for the tinfoil beanie brigade: If the pentagon was hit with a truck bomb, and not a plane, then where the hell did the plane go?
Bonus question: Why bother faking a plane strike with a truck bomb instead of just hijacking another plane?
NRA
Am I missing something here? Like annother way to parse "NRA"? I just don't see the contradiction between using linux and being a member of the national rifle association...
How about:
Apple - "*nix on the desktop will never work out. Use OSX instead"
MPAA - "Install an unlicensed DVD player on this system and we'll sue you!"
Sun
Adobe - "The poor font rendering in this version of Linux was brought to you by our patent on truetype hinting, an army of litigious lawyers, and the letter "Q"
Nokia already is in the business of launching cooler and cooler phones
I don't know what you're talking about. From my point of view the last 4 years of Nokia phones have been re-treads of the old 51xx design, just in smaller boxes. Only in the last few months have they come out with anything that doesn't look like a squished 5100. Maybe they've been selling progressively "cooler and cooler" phones in europe, but in the US, Nokia has been lagging *way* behind Motorola, Samsung, LG, and Ericsson in the cool department. The 51xxs had user-replaceable custom faceplates, something nobody else has done before or since. That was the high point of Nokia's coolness IMHO. For about 2 years, every college student and a lot of teenagers had them. Now those customers have largely moved on to sexier Asian designs (Samsung, LG, etc.)
Ah yes, the dreaded "one slashdot member boycott". That's the tactic that brought Microsoft, the RIAA and the MPAA to their knees, ended the SCO lawsuit and the war in Iraq, made Blizzard stop abusing the DMCA, freed Dmitry, and got Half-Life 2 ported to linux! Fear the wrath of the slashdot! I think I can hear Damage Studios trembling in terror already.
If one still had to either work for one of a handful of high-tech defense contractors or a major university comp sci/engineering department to get connected to the internet, would YOU be posting on /.? Would there even BE a /. for us to post on?
I suspect the answer to both is no.
Yeah, I know, when *you* first got on the internet, you had to get up at 4:30 AM to carry your bits to the internet in a leaky bucket, through the 10-foot-deep snow, uphill both ways, barefoot, and you liked it.
Who the fuck gave this a +1 informative? Someone has apparently never heard of the right of first sale or even been to a used music store.
If I own a CD or a tape, I can sell it later. While I don't own the copyright to the music, that copy of the music is my property, and I have a legal right to sell it. This right has been upheld in US courts over and over again.
Except that Microsoft's legal history follows them (note the way they referenced a prior Microsoft legal battle to show that Microsoft really hadn't lost their e-mail), which will only make it easier and easier to successfully get concessions from Microsoft.
That's only true for the high-profile cases (Sun, Netscape, etc.) that were decided in court. There are many many more lawsuits brought by small companies that were settled out of court and sealed as a condition of that settlement. Those cases can never be brought out as evidence against MS in a later suit. So no, the majority of their legal history is not following them.
With tactics like this, while the settlements may be small, what happens when fines from being found in contempt of court start to rack up?
Yawn. MS has $40,000,000,000 in the bank. They can pay fines till the cows come home and not suffer much because of it. Now if judges had the authority to fine them in patents or copyrights, then you can bet MS would pay attention.
I am afraid that NASA has outlasted its usefulness. It should be sized down and concentrate on science missions, while leaving commercial launches to commercial enterprises. The US public should clamor for it while it's still time.
I hope that's a joke. U.S. corporations (probably everywhere else too) live and die by next quarter's earnings report. There is no incentive for long-term research right now, everything is focused on short-term profit. If you want our presence in space to remain at about the same (pathetically low) level for the next 20-50 years, by all means, follow your advice. If you ever want to see humanity get off this wretched rock, we need to increase NASA's budget, give it concrete goals to work towards, and light a fire under it's collective ass!
1/2L Kerosene
1/2L Water
Blue food dye
Pour water into approx. 1L glass or plastic container. Add blue food dye to taste. Float kerosene on top. (pouring it over the back of a spoon may help here) Seal container tightly, and shake gently to simulate rolling ocean waves.
Why should the rest of the world care? The patent is only in the US. I could happily use the manners described in Europe of Asia since the patent doesn't apply there...
You only have about 2 weeks left in Europe. Better get busy enjoying your patent-infringing plugins now...
My mistake, that was meant as a reply to a different comment on how insensitive we are to use the word "balkanize". Sorry...
From Merriam-Webster (www.m-w.com)
One entry found for balkanize.
Main Entry: balkanize
Pronunciation: 'bol-k&-"nIz
Function: transitive verb
Inflected Form(s): -ized; -izing
Usage: often capitalized
Etymology: Balkan Peninsula
Date: 1919
: to break up (as a region or group) into smaller and often hostile units
It looks like your hand-wringing over this particular politically incorrect expression is about 85 years too late. Maybe you need to get out more...
I believe you're right. IIRC after the first key was exposed, everyone realized how weak the encryption was and that they could crack the other keys easily.
This case is about the source code to decss.exe in specific, not about open-source CSS decoders in general. DeCSS is *not* what lets you watch DVDs in Linux. That's done by libdvdread and libdvdcss, which (so far) have not been sued, harassed, or even mentioned by the big bad MPAA! DeCSS is a *Windows-only* utility that decrypts DVD images copied to a hard drive. That might be fair use, but it's certainly not a DVD player for Linux.
So go on, expend all your political energy whining about DeCSS and your God-given right to watch DVDs on your Linux box, and ignore Ashcroft, the TIA, the PATRIOT act, and a hundred DMCA cases you've never heard of that are the real threats to your freedom.
Flame away, I'll be watching The Two Towers DVD with xine on my Gentoo box...
Natural gas in a pipeline traveling from one side of the country .
to the other has veritably no loss in comparison
Gas pipelines are not as efficient as you think. Friction and turbulence in the pipes slow down flowing gas, so you need compressor stations every so often to keep the flow rate (and pressure) up. The energy to power those compressors comes from burning some of the gas. Over long distances that can easily add up to more than the 10-12% loss in electricity transmission.
they have much better uses for the money
Like what? A massive government spending program that will generate high-paying engineering jobs? Oh wait...