Nielsen boxes don't work with DVR, do they? You'd think the Nielsen people would be up in arms over this, as it takes their relevance away, if people could watch any TV show any time they wanted. Their whole system of rating TV shows would be in jeopardy, taken over by the cable companies, who could give the networks more detailed demographic data and true stats on which shows were being recorded and when they are being watched
...it's due to the Sun's motion through the galaxy, perhaps extrasolar winds which remain undetected, or the bubble is variable like the solar wind itself, or maybe even gravitational tides due to the orbiting planets are influencing its shape. While I'm impressed that both Voyagers (and Pioneers for that matter) are still out there sending back this kind of data, there's so little to go on that a lot of rank speculation is required. Perhaps a series of probes need to be sent out to the region of the Kuiper Belt to study the phenomenon more closely.
yahoo.mobi? Idiots who fell for a salesguy with even less brains, and neither of them understand what a hierarchy is supposed to be for.
mobi.yahoo.com - now, was that so difficult? Google gets it - it's "maps.google.com" and not "google.maps". And that's exactly the way the DNS hierarchy is supposed to work - go from the most general towards the more specific. TLD: Generic type, domain name: Owner/Company, subdomain: Purpose.
Agreed. This constant need to develop new TLDs is eventually going to choke the DNS system. People have to take a simple, elegant concept, and butcher it; it's the new way of IT.
Frankly, the whole idea of the browser on a mobile phone is pretty over-rated -- it's a phone! Most of the mobile providers have services you can dial up if you want information. Screens on phones are just too small to make the browsing experince any more enjoyable than root canal. We're going to be a society of squinters before long and the only people to benefit from.mobi are going to be optometrists and opthamologists.
There's was the bible for learning Unix and still is as far as I can tell. That's how I taught myself Unix in college; my copy is now almost twenty years old but it's still relevant and helps me with the brain farts I still get while working in Unix and Linux.
If you needed a reason, there's a big one. Why deal with them if you don't have to?
The CIA and Special Forces need to sharpen their skills if they're going to find Osama Bin Laden; set them loose on these bastards. Black ops are the way to go. Even better, mercenaries. I'll start a collection. Let's see their hacking skills save them from a bullet between the eyes.
From the article: Calveley wrote on his blog that his crusade is revenge for an "annoyingly slow" book delivery from Amazon. He used the blog to raise the $2,520 reexamination fee.
Ok, while I agree the Amazon patent is suspect, I think this guy is in it more for the free publicity. He's an actor! I have things I ordered from all sorts of online places get to me annoyingly slow, which for me is any time interval less than instantaneous, but I haven't gone to court to have a patent re-examined over it!
Does New Zealand have a small claims court, because that's where I would have sued them for the amount I spent on the book, plus some damages to keep them honest. Hell, it probably would have gone unopposed; you think Amazon is goijng to waste a couple thousand bucks on lawyers fees when they might settle it for a couple of hundred? No, this guy's in it to boost his profile, not because he's doing anyone a favor.
Good. Do the world a favor. Or at least go live in a cave somewhere, since it's clear that you hate other people.
Tsk, tsk -- apparently contrary opinions aren't allowed? Good thought about the cave though, as long as it has Internet access. I can just imagine calling Comcast and ordering service...
I'm sick of people bitching about things other people do that cause no harm to others whatsoever. If somebody talking on a cell phone bothers you more than somebody talking to the person across the isle from you on a train (which is damned noisy to begin with, so it's not like they're making it much worse), you have serious issues.
Then why do you read Slashdot? Actually I'm sick of other people bitching about my bitching. Free country, what? Anywho, anybody talking loudly on the train annoys me, as much as anyone with their iPod cranked so high I can hear stuff leaking from their earbuds, and people with offensive body odor. Perhaps it's not doing me physical harm, but since I am pretty much trapped, being I have a long commute on crowded trains, is it it too much to ask for people to be courteous, keep the conversation short and quiet, and give others a chance at some peace? I guess so, according to your view. You are no doubt not on Emily Post's Christmas card list.
And I say that as somebody that doesn't yak on his cell phone in public.
Well, perhaps you have a higher tolerance for this kind of crap than I do, and you are cetainly entitled to your opinion, but my suggestion is that society is hard enough to deal with given the amount of technology that is causing people to be alienated from one another, isolated in their own little worlds, without having to deal with overt rudeness. Personal conversations belong in personal space and don't have to be at the highest volumen possible if they are to be conducted in public.
I'm also the fan of saving energy! Thumbs up for technologies like this!:)
Pointless really; they already sell solar rechargers, which may be a hassle to carry, but with the extended talk time of most phones now, you pretty much only have to charge them once a day.
...phone nuts will now be able to talk incessantly about their mother's bout of constipation, their lack of a love life, how crappy their company is, and so on, extending the suffering I must endure on the train. And I hear JetBlue is thinking of addign wireless access to their planes, so you could use them in flight. Brilliant!
Let's face it, only the hardware makers and pipe providers stand to gain for a non-neutral(?) Internet. Of course the price of service will go higher, because they'll start charging you based on what sites you visit, so for example, going to Google might cost you a nickel, but going to Yahoo! or MSN might only cost 3 cents. Mind you, if you do enough searches, check your Gmail regularly, or spend a lot of time downloading high bandwidth stuff, the charges are going to get astronomical. It would appear that the telecoms are trying to charge for services which they don't provide, rather than letting the service charge you. Google's free, but what if it cost 5 cents to use? Now Verizon says, we're going to charge you a nickel to access Google -- aren't they cutting into Google's right to charge for the service, or even not charge for it? It sounds like there's a case here for stifling Interstate commerce or something like that, but IANAL.
Four intelligence officials knowledgeable about the program agreed to discuss it with The Sun only if granted anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.
"It is premature to attempt to enact some sort of network neutrality principles into law now," says the letter, which was signed by 34 companies and sent to House Majority Leader Dennis Hastert and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. "Legislating in the absence of real understanding of the issue risks both solving the wrong problem and hobbling the rapidly developing new technologies and business models of the Internet with rigid, potentially stultifying rules."
So the hardware manufacturers are of course siding with the people they can't afford to displease: their customers. All aboard the Anti-Net Neutrality bandwagon!
That's what it boils down to: the people who run the infrastructure of the Internet vs the people who provide the content. So one has to wonder when it will dawn on the telecoms and their lackeys that if there's no content, who needs the Internet. Even now, at Google, plans are being set in motion... I suspect they will start to build their own network, to bypass the current providers. Scoff if you will, but their stock is still strong, they have loads of capital and they are a ubiquitous name in conjunction with the Internet. If they build a netowrk to support their systems, people will come.
It's the job of critics and engineers to say things like that constantly and then land a newspaper deal when (if) it happens.
Did you happen to read those quotes? It points out the disconnect between the engineers who design the system and build, and know what it is and isn't capable of, and the PHB management that is bowing to pressure from above in rushing things into production without adequate regard to safety or overlooking the safety objects of the engineers. Columbia and Challenger were direct results of management looking at something pointed out by engineers and blatantly ignoring the facts, under pressure to keep the shuttle running.
BTW, this isn't the 1920's, so anybody getting a "newspaper deal" is in for a rude shock when they get the check.
"The odds are quite good that we will be aggressively supporting the work that Ubuntu is doing," Schwartz told reporters. "In the hardware we ship, I don't want to be Solaris only, because then I will just define my market to be smaller than the opportunity...I think you should expect to see more of the relationship, and stay tuned."
So if Ubuntu is going to bed with Sun, does this leave Oracle out in the cold? Will they now be forced to look to Red Hat (which is clearly not interested) or Novell (which is probably not the best fit) instead? The Linux-go-round continues to spin.
Hell, the idea of flooding the spammers network is older then a reasonably aged Armagnac and was discounted even when it came up.
I believe in the Cold War it was called Mutual Assured Destruction - MAD. And if you think about it, it is mad, save for the fact that I'd be hesitant to attack you if I knew that you'd unleash the full fury of your WMDs on me, thereby wiping me out in the process. It's like the standoff of two guys in a knife fight and they each get the knife at the other's throat -- it becomes a blinking contest.
Blue Security failed only because they were not strong enough to withstand the blows. It doesn't come down to their network or anything like that; string enough load-balanced servers together and build strong enough firewalls, and you can withstand this kind of thing. They needed to do this on the grand scale, ala the botnets that spammers and hackers use. It would take a company with massive resources... to build a system so powerful, that any spammer that tried to take it on would watch their servers boild under the onslaught.
In the end, the problem is, you cut the head off the Hydra and three more pop up.
The attack was probably large, but then why wouldn't they seek out help from law enforcement?
Because these "spam kings" (ok, let's find a new, more acceptable phrase, like "spam dorks") tend to hide out in countries that either have a) no formalized relations with the US or other countries or b) countries that might be allies but will not let us simply go tromping through their country on the hunt for spammers.
They hide in the shadows, collect money from the stupid and unwary, and then go after anyone who tries to stop them. If you think DDoS attacke are their only weapon, think again. It really is going to take a campaign of Internet espionage followed by vigilantism to get at most of these people. I can see it now... Merc for Hire -- specializing in SPAM and the removal of the source with extreme prejudice!
But doesn't the ruling also hurt bona fide inventors, not to mention the many universities that fund their research and own the patents? To be sure, it plainly erodes the power that has been typically bestowed by a patent. Patent law unambiguously grants owners of intellectual property the same rights as regular property holders, including the right to exclude others from using their property. But the law also clearly states that injunctions "may"--not "shall"--be issued "in accordance with the principles of equity."
The interpretation of one word does not necessarily hurt a patent owner. It simply means the court has discretion to order an injuction, not that it is required to. If you're a legitimate inventor and you have a clear-cut case of infringement then this does not apply to you, but if you're a patent troll, only in it to bilk companies out of money enforcing patents you'd left mouldering in a drawer, then you may be out of luck unless you can prove your case. Frankly, this is the best thing to happen to the patent system in a while.
The Windows Trojan/Erazer-A Trojan looks at default folders for downloading MP3, AVI, MPEG, WMV, Gif, Zip graphic and video files, and wipes anything it finds with these extensions in the target locations.
The assumption is that because the Trojan is only deleting certain file types in specific download directories used by P2P programs -- one of the main sources of inadvertent malware infection -- it is attempting to protect those it manages to infect.
Can somebody buy these people a clue? This is malevolent; it is making its way onto your friendly neighborhood computer and deleting files, any files with those extensions, not just porn. In my book, this is a bad thing!!!
It's bad enough there's a set of people out there with programming skills and ill intent, without lauding them in any way, shape, or form. Do we have to encourage these people? Don't they do enough damage already? Track the person who wrote this down and haull their ass into court and let them pay restitution for all the files they destroyed. Do that with every virus writer/hacker who decides your PC is their playground and maybe, just maybe, the word will go out that doing this is a BAD IDEA! Rant over. Move along, nothing to see here.
Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.
Come on. Brian Ross, big time investigative journalist for ABC News, didn't realize that this was an issue until now? Even before the revelations about the NSA it would have been prudent to avoid using the samephone to contact informants or have them contact you. Pay phones, throwaway cell phones, heck even courtesy phones in hotel lobbies -- I could see them using all sorts of phones to get in touch with people, so as not to leave a visible trail. After all, phone records are accessible legally by the cops, and they could certainly pull phone records for a reporter if they thought the reporter was involved in something nefarious, though I believe they require a warrant (IANAL).
And for those of you naive enough to believe that because all the NSA is getting is phone numbers, perhaps the phrase "reverse lookup" has not passed your ear recently, but nowadays you can even do it through Google. Privacy is tissue-paper compared to what it used to be. I suspect an unlisted number isn't even really unlisted anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
Nielsen boxes don't work with DVR, do they? You'd think the Nielsen people would be up in arms over this, as it takes their relevance away, if people could watch any TV show any time they wanted. Their whole system of rating TV shows would be in jeopardy, taken over by the cable companies, who could give the networks more detailed demographic data and true stats on which shows were being recorded and when they are being watched
...it's due to the Sun's motion through the galaxy, perhaps extrasolar winds which remain undetected, or the bubble is variable like the solar wind itself, or maybe even gravitational tides due to the orbiting planets are influencing its shape. While I'm impressed that both Voyagers (and Pioneers for that matter) are still out there sending back this kind of data, there's so little to go on that a lot of rank speculation is required. Perhaps a series of probes need to be sent out to the region of the Kuiper Belt to study the phenomenon more closely.
yahoo.mobi? Idiots who fell for a salesguy with even less brains, and neither of them understand what a hierarchy is supposed to be for.
mobi.yahoo.com - now, was that so difficult? Google gets it - it's "maps.google.com" and not "google.maps". And that's exactly the way the DNS hierarchy is supposed to work - go from the most general towards the more specific. TLD: Generic type, domain name: Owner/Company, subdomain: Purpose.
Agreed. This constant need to develop new TLDs is eventually going to choke the DNS system. People have to take a simple, elegant concept, and butcher it; it's the new way of IT.
Frankly, the whole idea of the browser on a mobile phone is pretty over-rated -- it's a phone! Most of the mobile providers have services you can dial up if you want information. Screens on phones are just too small to make the browsing experince any more enjoyable than root canal. We're going to be a society of squinters before long and the only people to benefit from .mobi are going to be optometrists and opthamologists.
There's was the bible for learning Unix and still is as far as I can tell. That's how I taught myself Unix in college; my copy is now almost twenty years old but it's still relevant and helps me with the brain farts I still get while working in Unix and Linux.
...so he certainly knows about things that are not reliable or dependable.
The CIA and Special Forces need to sharpen their skills if they're going to find Osama Bin Laden; set them loose on these bastards. Black ops are the way to go. Even better, mercenaries. I'll start a collection. Let's see their hacking skills save them from a bullet between the eyes.
From the article: Calveley wrote on his blog that his crusade is revenge for an "annoyingly slow" book delivery from Amazon. He used the blog to raise the $2,520 reexamination fee.
Ok, while I agree the Amazon patent is suspect, I think this guy is in it more for the free publicity. He's an actor! I have things I ordered from all sorts of online places get to me annoyingly slow, which for me is any time interval less than instantaneous, but I haven't gone to court to have a patent re-examined over it!
Does New Zealand have a small claims court, because that's where I would have sued them for the amount I spent on the book, plus some damages to keep them honest. Hell, it probably would have gone unopposed; you think Amazon is goijng to waste a couple thousand bucks on lawyers fees when they might settle it for a couple of hundred? No, this guy's in it to boost his profile, not because he's doing anyone a favor.
You forgot one:
- Air is used by criminals, paedophiles, and terrorists - we need you to stop breathing for a while.
Tsk, tsk -- apparently contrary opinions aren't allowed? Good thought about the cave though, as long as it has Internet access. I can just imagine calling Comcast and ordering service...
I'm sick of people bitching about things other people do that cause no harm to others whatsoever. If somebody talking on a cell phone bothers you more than somebody talking to the person across the isle from you on a train (which is damned noisy to begin with, so it's not like they're making it much worse), you have serious issues.
Then why do you read Slashdot? Actually I'm sick of other people bitching about my bitching. Free country, what? Anywho, anybody talking loudly on the train annoys me, as much as anyone with their iPod cranked so high I can hear stuff leaking from their earbuds, and people with offensive body odor. Perhaps it's not doing me physical harm, but since I am pretty much trapped, being I have a long commute on crowded trains, is it it too much to ask for people to be courteous, keep the conversation short and quiet, and give others a chance at some peace? I guess so, according to your view. You are no doubt not on Emily Post's Christmas card list.
And I say that as somebody that doesn't yak on his cell phone in public.
Well, perhaps you have a higher tolerance for this kind of crap than I do, and you are cetainly entitled to your opinion, but my suggestion is that society is hard enough to deal with given the amount of technology that is causing people to be alienated from one another, isolated in their own little worlds, without having to deal with overt rudeness. Personal conversations belong in personal space and don't have to be at the highest volumen possible if they are to be conducted in public.
I'm also the fan of saving energy! Thumbs up for technologies like this! :)
Pointless really; they already sell solar rechargers, which may be a hassle to carry, but with the extended talk time of most phones now, you pretty much only have to charge them once a day.
...phone nuts will now be able to talk incessantly about their mother's bout of constipation, their lack of a love life, how crappy their company is, and so on, extending the suffering I must endure on the train. And I hear JetBlue is thinking of addign wireless access to their planes, so you could use them in flight. Brilliant!
I'll just nip off and shoot meself...
Let's face it, only the hardware makers and pipe providers stand to gain for a non-neutral(?) Internet. Of course the price of service will go higher, because they'll start charging you based on what sites you visit, so for example, going to Google might cost you a nickel, but going to Yahoo! or MSN might only cost 3 cents. Mind you, if you do enough searches, check your Gmail regularly, or spend a lot of time downloading high bandwidth stuff, the charges are going to get astronomical. It would appear that the telecoms are trying to charge for services which they don't provide, rather than letting the service charge you. Google's free, but what if it cost 5 cents to use? Now Verizon says, we're going to charge you a nickel to access Google -- aren't they cutting into Google's right to charge for the service, or even not charge for it? It sounds like there's a case here for stifling Interstate commerce or something like that, but IANAL.
Let's hope they didn't talk on the phone...
So the hardware manufacturers are of course siding with the people they can't afford to displease: their customers. All aboard the Anti-Net Neutrality bandwagon!
That's what it boils down to: the people who run the infrastructure of the Internet vs the people who provide the content. So one has to wonder when it will dawn on the telecoms and their lackeys that if there's no content, who needs the Internet. Even now, at Google, plans are being set in motion... I suspect they will start to build their own network, to bypass the current providers. Scoff if you will, but their stock is still strong, they have loads of capital and they are a ubiquitous name in conjunction with the Internet. If they build a netowrk to support their systems, people will come.
Did you happen to read those quotes? It points out the disconnect between the engineers who design the system and build, and know what it is and isn't capable of, and the PHB management that is bowing to pressure from above in rushing things into production without adequate regard to safety or overlooking the safety objects of the engineers. Columbia and Challenger were direct results of management looking at something pointed out by engineers and blatantly ignoring the facts, under pressure to keep the shuttle running.
BTW, this isn't the 1920's, so anybody getting a "newspaper deal" is in for a rude shock when they get the check.
Yes, and is easily distinguishable from the Werecanary, which is a canary with a wolf's body.
Damn! Now the NSA knows that I've clicked on the link! Cat's out of the bag!
This is one of those time you wish it were a Microsoft product...
So if Ubuntu is going to bed with Sun, does this leave Oracle out in the cold? Will they now be forced to look to Red Hat (which is clearly not interested) or Novell (which is probably not the best fit) instead? The Linux-go-round continues to spin.
I believe in the Cold War it was called Mutual Assured Destruction - MAD. And if you think about it, it is mad, save for the fact that I'd be hesitant to attack you if I knew that you'd unleash the full fury of your WMDs on me, thereby wiping me out in the process. It's like the standoff of two guys in a knife fight and they each get the knife at the other's throat -- it becomes a blinking contest.
Blue Security failed only because they were not strong enough to withstand the blows. It doesn't come down to their network or anything like that; string enough load-balanced servers together and build strong enough firewalls, and you can withstand this kind of thing. They needed to do this on the grand scale, ala the botnets that spammers and hackers use. It would take a company with massive resources... to build a system so powerful, that any spammer that tried to take it on would watch their servers boild under the onslaught.
In the end, the problem is, you cut the head off the Hydra and three more pop up.
Because these "spam kings" (ok, let's find a new, more acceptable phrase, like "spam dorks") tend to hide out in countries that either have a) no formalized relations with the US or other countries or b) countries that might be allies but will not let us simply go tromping through their country on the hunt for spammers.
They hide in the shadows, collect money from the stupid and unwary, and then go after anyone who tries to stop them. If you think DDoS attacke are their only weapon, think again. It really is going to take a campaign of Internet espionage followed by vigilantism to get at most of these people. I can see it now... Merc for Hire -- specializing in SPAM and the removal of the source with extreme prejudice!
Beaten to the punch... I so wanted to use that...
But doesn't the ruling also hurt bona fide inventors, not to mention the many universities that fund their research and own the patents? To be sure, it plainly erodes the power that has been typically bestowed by a patent. Patent law unambiguously grants owners of intellectual property the same rights as regular property holders, including the right to exclude others from using their property. But the law also clearly states that injunctions "may"--not "shall"--be issued "in accordance with the principles of equity."
The interpretation of one word does not necessarily hurt a patent owner. It simply means the court has discretion to order an injuction, not that it is required to. If you're a legitimate inventor and you have a clear-cut case of infringement then this does not apply to you, but if you're a patent troll, only in it to bilk companies out of money enforcing patents you'd left mouldering in a drawer, then you may be out of luck unless you can prove your case. Frankly, this is the best thing to happen to the patent system in a while.
The Windows Trojan/Erazer-A Trojan looks at default folders for downloading MP3, AVI, MPEG, WMV, Gif, Zip graphic and video files, and wipes anything it finds with these extensions in the target locations.
The assumption is that because the Trojan is only deleting certain file types in specific download directories used by P2P programs -- one of the main sources of inadvertent malware infection -- it is attempting to protect those it manages to infect.
Can somebody buy these people a clue? This is malevolent; it is making its way onto your friendly neighborhood computer and deleting files, any files with those extensions, not just porn. In my book, this is a bad thing!!!
It's bad enough there's a set of people out there with programming skills and ill intent, without lauding them in any way, shape, or form. Do we have to encourage these people? Don't they do enough damage already? Track the person who wrote this down and haull their ass into court and let them pay restitution for all the files they destroyed. Do that with every virus writer/hacker who decides your PC is their playground and maybe, just maybe, the word will go out that doing this is a BAD IDEA! Rant over. Move along, nothing to see here.
Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.
Come on. Brian Ross, big time investigative journalist for ABC News, didn't realize that this was an issue until now? Even before the revelations about the NSA it would have been prudent to avoid using the samephone to contact informants or have them contact you. Pay phones, throwaway cell phones, heck even courtesy phones in hotel lobbies -- I could see them using all sorts of phones to get in touch with people, so as not to leave a visible trail. After all, phone records are accessible legally by the cops, and they could certainly pull phone records for a reporter if they thought the reporter was involved in something nefarious, though I believe they require a warrant (IANAL).
And for those of you naive enough to believe that because all the NSA is getting is phone numbers, perhaps the phrase "reverse lookup" has not passed your ear recently, but nowadays you can even do it through Google. Privacy is tissue-paper compared to what it used to be. I suspect an unlisted number isn't even really unlisted anymore.