I can't wait to see what life is like when we are simultaneously under the rule of law of 190 vastly different countries. Will it be legal in all 190 countries for me to wear shorts as I go down the street to get milk? Wait, let me ask my global lawyer. Oops, in somethefuckwhereistan it's illegal to drink milk. Drat.
I think we should break as many of these idiotic laws as we can. Hey, French Slashdot readers: NAZI PROPAGANDA! There, now you're all in trouble for reading this post and the French government is coming after Rob.
After about 10 years of programming, I burned out and went into teaching. I worked for a local public school system teaching adult literacy and GED for high school dropouts.
My pay cut was about 70%. I loved the work for the first couple of years, but I found I had to keep consulting on the side to keep the mortgage paid. This affected my teaching badly, and the circumstances became a downward spiral - less energy for teaching and time for preparation made me a worse teacher, and that made me enjoy it less (and I'm sure my students weren't thrilled either) - by the time I burned out again I was working three jobs to compensate for the low pay. I taught for about four years, right in the range of the typical 3-5 year burnout rate for teachers.
It didn't take long for me to get back into software after that. If I could have made half to two-thirds of what I was earning as a programmer, I might very well have stuck with teaching, but the economics just weren't there to support it. I have no doubt that my teaching was more important work than my programming, but in the end it was too hard for me to live on the very low pay and the utter absence of benefits (35 hours a week, no contract, considered part-time by the school department and barred from joining the union).
I suppose a real revolutionary would have sold the house and trimmed it all down enough to fit the teacher pay, but I'm not that spiritually evolved yet. Teachers shouldn't have to be revolutionaries, anyway.
Did you read the article, or just get offended that UNIX and NT were mentioned in the same sentence?
Maybe you should read it before you get huffy. It contains generic steps for establishing and reviewing security policies, and then a methodical approach to recovering control. They add this useful link to all of their security advisories dealing with topics relating to the possibility of system compromises.
Michael, how on earth can you justify linking the phrase (the entire internet will) "cease to exist" to the article Washington sounds alarm over "Code Red" worm virus, when the article itself says or implies no such thing?
You might as well link the phrase "alien attack imminent" or "Elvis seen in Redmond" - it has as much to do with the story as your title suggested. Of course, most people won't read the story, they'll just remember the catchy phrase that "the internet might cease to exist" - how exciting! - and that they read it first on slashdot.
Code Red is a pretty serious situation as it stands; we don't need to mislead people while we talk about it.
Courtesy of Apple - I chucked the video on my idisk. It's 1.6 meg Quicktime. Kick Apple's server in the nuts and see how it holds up under the slashdotting, I've always been curious.:)
If you absolutely must send mail with the 'From' being a domain other than your ISP, see if the actual owner of the domain will set up a POPmail server with 'XTEND XMIT' support, allowing you to send out your mail from an authenticated POP session. Note that this is entirely different from the 'pre-authenticating SMTP relay access' technique that was found to be buggy recently.
Do you have any references for XTEND XMIT, or an explanation of the bugs in pre-authenticating SMTP? A google search I just ran didn't turn up very much.
I'm looking in the "Ximian Preview" channel in Red Carpet, and all I see is version 0.11-ximian.2. Is this the beta of 1.0? (It would help if there were dates listed with the items, but there don't appear to be, at least not that I can find.)
Can anybody point me at the right thing to download if this isn't it? I'm dying to see this thing. Thanks.
This would require google to save every image it indexes, shrink it down, reduce color, and save it on their machines so that you can see it
No, it wouldn't require them to save anything; it can be done on the fly by the server with a little coding. The resulting image is transmitted and immediately forgotten, existing only in the user's browser cache. It takes some computation time, so that may be too big a burden for the server to handle on a large scale, but it can be done.
TomatoMan
Very cool, but what about copyrights?
on
images.google.com
·
· Score: 2
This is indeed very cool; I've been starved for clip-art for a Scoop site I'm running, and easily found a lot of images that I could use. But doesn't this technology make it a little too easy to steal copyrighted work? The images are provided out of context with no instructions about appropriate use. People would probably quite naturally think the images were free for the taking, especially when removed from their home pages.
I'd love to use some of the images I found right away, but know that I probably shouldn't, or that at least I should research each one individually and try to find out what its appropriate use/copyright status is. But Most People(tm) won't do that, and I wonder if this is going to lead to some kind of Napster-like backlash.
Maybe we need to develop an XML "copyright_status='public-domain'" attribute for images, and try to get people to use it? (Sure, that'll happen.)
Is this a new MS tactic for avoiding the DOJ? Announce something and see how much public outcry there is before deciding whether to back off it or not? It sure is cheaper than fighting the gov't directly in court and finding out the hard way.
Sorry to hear of Midway's decision; the golden age of the coin-op arcade is indeed over.
Now that we all acknowledge that, wouldn't it be refreshing if Midway took a clear stance on OK'ing the use of its ROM images for MAME and other emulators? It would be nice to see the "abandonware" concept explored a bit more courageously than it has been so far. It would be great for Midway to take the lead on this now that it's decided to leave the business. TomatoMan
The Flick Filosopher, my way-movie-critic-of-choice, wrote a brilliant review of Tomb Raider that will leave you on the floor, laughing and crying at the same time. Here's a quick taste from the beginning:
TOMB RAIDER
You are standing in the lobby of a movie theater. The smell of popcorn and Jujubes is in the air. To the south is the box office. To the east is the concession stand. To the west are the restrooms. To the north is the auditorium.
A studio executive is here.
A lunch is here.
> take lunch
Taken.
Non-geeks will enjoy it too, but this one is really for us. While you're there, check out some of her other reviews and chuck a buck or two in her paypal jar if you like them.
A person does not dress up like a police officer and walk down the street, that's most likely to be illegal where you live (It sure is here).
We're not talking about impersonating police officers, or Maori. We're talking about a doll; a likeness. It's not illegal to make dolls of police officers, and nobody is talking about impersonating Maori.
Ignorance.
Fine; I'm ignorant and you've educated me well. It's been a while since I was last in NZ.
So you're telling me that the Maori have plenty of representation in the government, you're doing fine on the land confiscation issue, and the preservation of your culture through educating ignorant Pakeha like me, both locally and on the other side of the planet, is going well.
Sounds like you're doing great, overall. I'm truly happy to hear that, no sarcasm. Remind me, then, what exactly the problem is with a toy company making dolls and toys with a Polynesian likeness and theme?
I mean, if a song is encoded in such a way that it has a "security bit" turned on (say, uh, bit 1 turned on means "copyrighted") and all the commercial burning software "respects" this convention, then either Nero has to refuse to burn as well or it's "circumventing a technology intended to protect copyright" and becomes illegal.
IANAL, etc, but right now copying all of the bits in a file is not illegal. If someone changes the meaning of bit 1147 at some point, do they suddenly and retroactively take ownership of bit 1147 on all of my own files? What about the 250 CDs of mine that I legally ripped to mp3 for my personal use over the past couple of weeks? Can that retroactively be made a crime?
What I *do* with my copied files might be illegal (if I share them, which I don't), but I don't think you can easily distinguish between the physical act of making a backup copy of something, and making a backup copy you intend to distribute, etc. Squishy territory to be sure, but I think we're still safe as far as the actual backing up of program and data files goes. I would think that as long as copy programs can be used for legal purposes, their use can't be criminalized.
I dunno about you, but if I were a member of an indigenous people which had been decimated in the past couple of centuries by various effects of European contact, I'm not sure I'd want some Danish toy company commodifying my identity either.
I know I feel pretty commodified by the Ken doll.
OK, I'm being facetious, and since I'm at the top of fhe food chain, I can only say so much. But this whole thing is patently ridiculous and I'm not the slightest bit worried about it becoming a reality. Once you start down that slippery slope, where do you stop? Are we allowed to TALK about Maoris without infringing on their culture? Write about them? Where's the line? It's absurd. It's a short step from here to banning black Barbies. Why? What is gained by doing that?
Your identity is not compromised when someone makes a doll that looks like you. Surely Maoris have more important battles to fight than this one. How about seeking more representation in the NZ parliament? How about addressing questions of land confiscation? How about preserving Maori language and culture through sharing and outreach, rather than trying to establish a stamp of unenforceable "ownership" over whatever incredibly vague notion of "likeness" they're trying to tie this thing to?
Wow - 28 mod points spent on this troll already! Taco must have decided that there were too many mod points in the system and set this whole thing up to get people to spend them.
Letting parents track their kids' movements so they'll stay on the straight and narrow - what a great idea! And since parents have their children's welfare at stake, I'm sure they'll have no problem with applying the same principles to themselves and letting their kids track THEIR movements with the same software.
Now, when Johnny comes home to an empty house after school, he can log in to this system and see mommy lingering at the gym counter and daddy stopped at a street corner in a strange part of town, and know just what they're doing instead of spending their time raising him well.
(-1, Angry Former Kid, right? Thank God I'm not trying to grow up in present-day America.)
Presumably, if this device allows folks in the mothership to listen in your audio environment so they can try to figure out what station you're watching/listening to, they are also able to hear anything else that's going on too, like, say, um, your conversations?
The next generation of the watch will include a voice option, allowing wearers to announce which newspapers or magazines they are reading while watching TV or listening to the radio.
Then all we need is a decent speech-to-text algorithm, some storage space, and a search engine, and Real Life can be just like Usenet - everything you say, preserved for eternity, no matter how off-the-cuff or stupid it is.
And just imagine how much the RIAA would salivate over this kind of access - analyze the sounds in your environment, consult your records to see whether your license to hear those sounds is up to date, and send you a bill - or a lawyer - if not.
Can't wait. Sign me up.
TomatoMan
Why I never upgraded my Palm III
on
Palm In Trouble?
·
· Score: 3
I have a Palm III from about 2 years ago. Here's why I'm still using it:
1. It still does everything I need it to
2. I'm not going to spend $500 for a color version, or on any handheld short of one with a small PC's power. At $500 I could almost buy an iMac or a cheap PC; a handheld with 8mb RAM/storage isn't enough of an incentive.
I'm relieved that the "planned obsolescence" thing didn't happen with the Palm I still use. I'm tired of upgrading hardware every 18 months. I don't need to play Quake on my handheld.
I'm sorry Palm is having trouble, because their product is good, but if they were counting on me to pitch my III for a V or a VII when the III still worked fine, then their business model had a fatal flaw, and one that this crisis they're facing will surely correct, one way or the other.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean like Anonymous Cowards?
Anyway, hope Slashdot doesn't have any French mirrors, or you are in trouble. Or I am. Or somebody is.
I can't wait to see what life is like when we are simultaneously under the rule of law of 190 vastly different countries. Will it be legal in all 190 countries for me to wear shorts as I go down the street to get milk? Wait, let me ask my global lawyer. Oops, in somethefuckwhereistan it's illegal to drink milk. Drat.
I think we should break as many of these idiotic laws as we can. Hey, French Slashdot readers: NAZI PROPAGANDA! There, now you're all in trouble for reading this post and the French government is coming after Rob.
Sorry, I really am. It's just that kind of day. (We won't waste a +1 on this one. :P)
After about 10 years of programming, I burned out and went into teaching. I worked for a local public school system teaching adult literacy and GED for high school dropouts.
My pay cut was about 70%. I loved the work for the first couple of years, but I found I had to keep consulting on the side to keep the mortgage paid. This affected my teaching badly, and the circumstances became a downward spiral - less energy for teaching and time for preparation made me a worse teacher, and that made me enjoy it less (and I'm sure my students weren't thrilled either) - by the time I burned out again I was working three jobs to compensate for the low pay. I taught for about four years, right in the range of the typical 3-5 year burnout rate for teachers.
It didn't take long for me to get back into software after that. If I could have made half to two-thirds of what I was earning as a programmer, I might very well have stuck with teaching, but the economics just weren't there to support it. I have no doubt that my teaching was more important work than my programming, but in the end it was too hard for me to live on the very low pay and the utter absence of benefits (35 hours a week, no contract, considered part-time by the school department and barred from joining the union).
I suppose a real revolutionary would have sold the house and trimmed it all down enough to fit the teacher pay, but I'm not that spiritually evolved yet. Teachers shouldn't have to be revolutionaries, anyway.
Disable those voice passwords on your machines, kids. Your pr0n is now exposed.
TomatoMan
Did you read the article, or just get offended that UNIX and NT were mentioned in the same sentence?
Maybe you should read it before you get huffy. It contains generic steps for establishing and reviewing security policies, and then a methodical approach to recovering control. They add this useful link to all of their security advisories dealing with topics relating to the possibility of system compromises.
TomatoMan
Michael, how on earth can you justify linking the phrase (the entire internet will) "cease to exist" to the article Washington sounds alarm over "Code Red" worm virus, when the article itself says or implies no such thing?
You might as well link the phrase "alien attack imminent" or "Elvis seen in Redmond" - it has as much to do with the story as your title suggested. Of course, most people won't read the story, they'll just remember the catchy phrase that "the internet might cease to exist" - how exciting! - and that they read it first on slashdot.
Code Red is a pretty serious situation as it stands; we don't need to mislead people while we talk about it.
TomatoMan
Courtesy of Apple - I chucked the video on my idisk. It's 1.6 meg Quicktime. Kick Apple's server in the nuts and see how it holds up under the slashdotting, I've always been curious. :)
TomatoMan
Do you have any references for XTEND XMIT, or an explanation of the bugs in pre-authenticating SMTP? A google search I just ran didn't turn up very much.
TomatoMan
I'm looking in the "Ximian Preview" channel in Red Carpet, and all I see is version 0.11-ximian.2. Is this the beta of 1.0? (It would help if there were dates listed with the items, but there don't appear to be, at least not that I can find.)
Can anybody point me at the right thing to download if this isn't it? I'm dying to see this thing. Thanks.
TomatoMan
TomatoMan
This is indeed very cool; I've been starved for clip-art for a Scoop site I'm running, and easily found a lot of images that I could use. But doesn't this technology make it a little too easy to steal copyrighted work? The images are provided out of context with no instructions about appropriate use. People would probably quite naturally think the images were free for the taking, especially when removed from their home pages.
I'd love to use some of the images I found right away, but know that I probably shouldn't, or that at least I should research each one individually and try to find out what its appropriate use/copyright status is. But Most People(tm) won't do that, and I wonder if this is going to lead to some kind of Napster-like backlash.
Maybe we need to develop an XML "copyright_status='public-domain'" attribute for images, and try to get people to use it? (Sure, that'll happen.)
TomatoMan
Is this a new MS tactic for avoiding the DOJ? Announce something and see how much public outcry there is before deciding whether to back off it or not? It sure is cheaper than fighting the gov't directly in court and finding out the hard way.
TomatoMan
Sorry to hear of Midway's decision; the golden age of the coin-op arcade is indeed over.
Now that we all acknowledge that, wouldn't it be refreshing if Midway took a clear stance on OK'ing the use of its ROM images for MAME and other emulators? It would be nice to see the "abandonware" concept explored a bit more courageously than it has been so far. It would be great for Midway to take the lead on this now that it's decided to leave the business.
TomatoMan
Non-geeks will enjoy it too, but this one is really for us. While you're there, check out some of her other reviews and chuck a buck or two in her paypal jar if you like them.
TomatoMan
From the linked page (for the goatse paranoid: http://www.c-comsat.com/content/2waydir.htm):
Operating Systems Windows 98 SE Windows ME Windows 2000
The struggle continues.
TomatoMan
A person does not dress up like a police officer and walk down the street, that's most likely to be illegal where you live (It sure is here).
We're not talking about impersonating police officers, or Maori. We're talking about a doll; a likeness. It's not illegal to make dolls of police officers, and nobody is talking about impersonating Maori.
Ignorance.
Fine; I'm ignorant and you've educated me well. It's been a while since I was last in NZ.
So you're telling me that the Maori have plenty of representation in the government, you're doing fine on the land confiscation issue, and the preservation of your culture through educating ignorant Pakeha like me, both locally and on the other side of the planet, is going well.
Sounds like you're doing great, overall. I'm truly happy to hear that, no sarcasm. Remind me, then, what exactly the problem is with a toy company making dolls and toys with a Polynesian likeness and theme?
TomatoMan
I mean, if a song is encoded in such a way that it has a "security bit" turned on (say, uh, bit 1 turned on means "copyrighted") and all the commercial burning software "respects" this convention, then either Nero has to refuse to burn as well or it's "circumventing a technology intended to protect copyright" and becomes illegal.
IANAL, etc, but right now copying all of the bits in a file is not illegal. If someone changes the meaning of bit 1147 at some point, do they suddenly and retroactively take ownership of bit 1147 on all of my own files? What about the 250 CDs of mine that I legally ripped to mp3 for my personal use over the past couple of weeks? Can that retroactively be made a crime?
What I *do* with my copied files might be illegal (if I share them, which I don't), but I don't think you can easily distinguish between the physical act of making a backup copy of something, and making a backup copy you intend to distribute, etc. Squishy territory to be sure, but I think we're still safe as far as the actual backing up of program and data files goes. I would think that as long as copy programs can be used for legal purposes, their use can't be criminalized.
TomatoMan
I dunno about you, but if I were a member of an indigenous people which had been decimated in the past couple of centuries by various effects of European contact, I'm not sure I'd want some Danish toy company commodifying my identity either.
I know I feel pretty commodified by the Ken doll.
OK, I'm being facetious, and since I'm at the top of fhe food chain, I can only say so much. But this whole thing is patently ridiculous and I'm not the slightest bit worried about it becoming a reality. Once you start down that slippery slope, where do you stop? Are we allowed to TALK about Maoris without infringing on their culture? Write about them? Where's the line? It's absurd. It's a short step from here to banning black Barbies. Why? What is gained by doing that?
Your identity is not compromised when someone makes a doll that looks like you. Surely Maoris have more important battles to fight than this one. How about seeking more representation in the NZ parliament? How about addressing questions of land confiscation? How about preserving Maori language and culture through sharing and outreach, rather than trying to establish a stamp of unenforceable "ownership" over whatever incredibly vague notion of "likeness" they're trying to tie this thing to?
TomatoMan
FTC, with lances and shields: "Right. Now don't do it again!"
Sorry. Gut response. You know how it goes.
TomatoMan
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=01/05/22/14182 59&threshold=-1&commentsort=3&mode=thread&cid=11
33 at this point.
TomatoMan
Wow - 28 mod points spent on this troll already! Taco must have decided that there were too many mod points in the system and set this whole thing up to get people to spend them.
TomatoMan
Letting parents track their kids' movements so they'll stay on the straight and narrow - what a great idea! And since parents have their children's welfare at stake, I'm sure they'll have no problem with applying the same principles to themselves and letting their kids track THEIR movements with the same software.
Now, when Johnny comes home to an empty house after school, he can log in to this system and see mommy lingering at the gym counter and daddy stopped at a street corner in a strange part of town, and know just what they're doing instead of spending their time raising him well.
(-1, Angry Former Kid, right? Thank God I'm not trying to grow up in present-day America.)
TomatoMan
Presumably, if this device allows folks in the mothership to listen in your audio environment so they can try to figure out what station you're watching/listening to, they are also able to hear anything else that's going on too, like, say, um, your conversations?
The next generation of the watch will include a voice option, allowing wearers to announce which newspapers or magazines they are reading while watching TV or listening to the radio.
Then all we need is a decent speech-to-text algorithm, some storage space, and a search engine, and Real Life can be just like Usenet - everything you say, preserved for eternity, no matter how off-the-cuff or stupid it is.
And just imagine how much the RIAA would salivate over this kind of access - analyze the sounds in your environment, consult your records to see whether your license to hear those sounds is up to date, and send you a bill - or a lawyer - if not.
Can't wait. Sign me up.
TomatoMan
I have a Palm III from about 2 years ago. Here's why I'm still using it:
1. It still does everything I need it to
2. I'm not going to spend $500 for a color version, or on any handheld short of one with a small PC's power. At $500 I could almost buy an iMac or a cheap PC; a handheld with 8mb RAM/storage isn't enough of an incentive.
I'm relieved that the "planned obsolescence" thing didn't happen with the Palm I still use. I'm tired of upgrading hardware every 18 months. I don't need to play Quake on my handheld.
I'm sorry Palm is having trouble, because their product is good, but if they were counting on me to pitch my III for a V or a VII when the III still worked fine, then their business model had a fatal flaw, and one that this crisis they're facing will surely correct, one way or the other.
TomatoMan