I wonder, do you consider FDR to be the "jackass" who failed to stop Pearl Harbor?
Now that you mention it, FDR, along with General Marshall, General Gerow, Admiral Stark and Admiral Turner, did fail to stop the attack. It was strategically obvious that Pearl Harbor would be the target when (and if!) the Japanese attacked... On December 5, 1941 FDR received the decrypted Japanese declaration of war, and he did nothing about it. The message was never sent to Admiral Kimmel and General Short, the commander in chief & commanding general, respectively, of the pacific fleet. Our jackass-in-chief FDR wanted to go to war on the 'moral high ground,' in the eyes of the public.
But that'll never make it into high school history books. History is written by the winners, and it's common knowledge that we were taken by surprise, and that FDR was (overall) a really swell guy.
From: webmaster@straightdope.com Message-ID: <LISTMANAGER-3819143-1550980-2006.02.10-04.00.03-- a.wyatt.m#gmail.com@lyris.jokeaday.com> Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2006 04:00:00 -0500 Subject: The Straight Dope 02/10/2006 To: "The Straight Dope" <straightdope-list@lyris.jokeaday.com>
These fields do seem to contain at least some (albeit very basic) information about the source and destination. Are you saying that they only contain that information by convention, and it's technically optional? Or are you referring to some trait of the actual data packets?
I haven't RTA yet, but isn't the purpose of the EU's request to promote interoperability? If that's the case, the issue is that anyone trying to write code that talks to Windows has only the (possibly cryptic or even obfuscated) source code to go on, and even that is subject to change.
What I want to know is this: how do the EU's requirements differ from Window's APIs that are already out there? What exactly are they asking for?
Thank you for explaining the situation so lucidly!
I must confess that, especially upon reading that NTP is a company without employees, I'm guilty of taking a premature stance against the lone-lawyer. Now this is beginning to sound a lot like the rare type of example I mentioned in another comment.
Unfortunately I don't have a flawless answer to that problem, but if I did I'd certainly try to do something with it. I do not believe, however, that the answer is having thousands and thousands of pages of code so thick that it takes a professional to tell what's legal and what isn't.
stripped of its aspirant verbiage, that argument is the moral equivalent of being told "no" and subsequently throwing a tantrum.
Yes, I do feel helplessly enraged by The System. When enough adults throw a tantrum at once, it's called revolution.
It also shows a lack of understanding of the judge's role in our legal system.
A judge in our legal system is supposed to take the role of [a] an interpreter who [b] applies the law fairly. Because of the aforementioned problem of the law being as complex as it is, in practice a judge must be a lawyer first, and [a] may hinder his ability to do [b].
in response to our attempt to keep people from weaseling out of what "justice" would dictate... we have promoted the development of smarter weasels.
The judge's role, IMHO, should be to sniff out those weasels and provide a ruling based on the clear intent of a much (by several orders of magnitude) simpler code of law. By requiring a judge to apply the law literally (a law characterized with definitions upon unintuitive definitions), we encourage the weasels.
Patents exist not to protect inventors, but to give them a monetary incentive to innovate... Now there are different ways a patent-holding inventor can make money off his monopoly...
You raise some insightful and well thought-out points. I applaud your hypothetical venture capitalist for having the ethics to support an inventor with a legitimate claim, and to contribute to society in general by using his resources to help said inventor's idea materialize.
I believe what frustrates me personally about the patent system is not that it is flawed in principle (which it may or may not be), but that the dense system which surrounds it (of law, lawyers, malicious venture-capitalists and non-inventors without the spine to make their idea (which may or may not be unique and innovative) happen) is pieced together in such a way that heinous abuses are rampant and profitable.
I love your example, but examples of such a benevolently creative use of the system are scarce (if they indeed exist) whereas examples of corporate entities using the system to ruin inventors abound... The story of Philo Farnsworth and the scanning tube comes to mind, not to mention the relatively recent problems with patenting software in general.
It seems that when we complain about the patent system we're really complaining about The System, and when we complain about that we're really complaining about human nature.
Our system of law allows and even encourages this.
on
Supreme Court spurns RIM
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Since I know practically zip about this litigation and these patent issues, the first place I went after reading the headline was to google for a briefing. Here, I found the following:
NTP, which has no employees, convinced a jury in Spencer's Richmond, Virginia, courtroom in 2002 that Research In Motion had infringed patents related to wireless e-mail.
I know the assininity (is that a word?) of this has been phrased and rephrased many times in many discussions, but... WTF?!? Aren't patents supposed to protect inventors/innovators? I may be jumping to conclusions about NTP, but how can a company that exists solely to litigate patent-infringers get away with what it does?
I envision a land where there are "justices" appointed because they are "just", and "judge" based on the heart behind a simpler code of "justice," rather than human turing machines stripped of the power to truly judge, trying to apply an ugly and endless stream of spaghetti-legislation to human, nonlinear situations?
Did such an idealized system of law ever exist? May it yet? I don't know, but the more I learn about politics and legislation the more similarities I see between the modern process of developing laws and the process of developing software... I don't doubt that there are some legislators who would, if given a machine with the ability, replace human judges altogether in favor of a more predictible expert system.
Tangent? Yes. Rant? Yes. Tinfoil hat? Maybe. Relevant? You decide.
But pattern recognition is exactly what's so incredible about our predilection for geometry! It's only recently (with the rise of fast and powerful computing machines) that we've been able to define iterative equations that model the natural world with any kind of precision, and yet we've modeled objects around us with simple polygons & polyhedra for ages.
It seems obvious to us because we're the beings who are "hardwired" for it, but one of our most profound abilities is that of simplification. Isn't it fascinating that we can look at a pine tree, then at a rhinoceros's horn, and think "cone" about each? Truly regular polygons and polyhedra don't occur in nature, but we can look at something that's pretty close and identify it with one.
Geometry relies on our ability to think in symbols, but symbols are useless, even meaningless without the patterns they represent. The two are inextricably tied, and while I did RTFA and I agree that the study itself leaves a lot to be desired, you touched on what I believe is an important insight on how we are able to do geometry at all.
The mentality of the telcos, now that their monopolies are being rapidly deregulated, is to get as much revenue as possible from their infrastructure. Now that voice is virtualized and becoming removed from their revenue models, they feel they have to make money some way to compete with cable, BPL, fiber, and other broadband providers to survive.
What exactly is "their" infrastructure? I'm aware that all the details of this question aren't really within the scope of the discussion, but how much of the internet's backbone is owned and run by the telcos? Who do they buy their bandwidth from? Correspondingly, how much power do they really have?
I believe I have a decent grasp of the technical workings of the internet, but the economics of it completely baffle me. I'd google it but I'm not quite sure what I'm looking for.
No system is 100% secure. Even if you do assume their security is state-of-the-art, there's still a margin of vulnerability. In this case, a security professional who was responsible for those systems abused his knowledge and former access to gain entry. Once he's in, there's no telling how many hacks, exploits, and sneaky tricks (not to mention previously-installed backdoors) he knows and can use to his advantage.
No matter what their level of security and how much money they spent hardening everything in the past, they simply cannot be positive he hasn't found a way to sneak around their logs, sniffers, and monitors and install a rootkit. 50 man-days to recover doesn't sound so bad when you consider that one successful intrusion (however difficult it was to achieve) can result in an invisible-yet-gaping orifice that leaves all that hard-earned security worthless to future penetration.
I agree that what Mr. Millot did is pretty stupid and stinks of 'amateur,' but IBM is operating in paranoia mode (and rightly so!). What if this guy is a pansy who knows just enough to get himself caught, but he was hired by a shady individual to plant a stealthy something and deleted the account as an afterthought? How does IBM know that their system isn't still compromised by something like that? Because they spent 50 man-days wiping and re-imaging systems or poring over md5 signatures or whatever it is they do in a situation like this.
Actually, they still can't be 100% positive, but at least they were (to paraphrase the parent) duly diligent.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder, do you consider FDR to be the "jackass" who failed to stop Pearl Harbor?
Now that you mention it, FDR, along with General Marshall, General Gerow, Admiral Stark and Admiral Turner, did fail to stop the attack. It was strategically obvious that Pearl Harbor would be the target when (and if!) the Japanese attacked... On December 5, 1941 FDR received the decrypted Japanese declaration of war, and he did nothing about it. The message was never sent to Admiral Kimmel and General Short, the commander in chief & commanding general, respectively, of the pacific fleet. Our jackass-in-chief FDR wanted to go to war on the 'moral high ground,' in the eyes of the public.
But that'll never make it into high school history books. History is written by the winners, and it's common knowledge that we were taken by surprise, and that FDR was (overall) a really swell guy.
From an e-mail I got today:
These fields do seem to contain at least some (albeit very basic) information about the source and destination. Are you saying that they only contain that information by convention, and it's technically optional? Or are you referring to some trait of the actual data packets?
Inquiring minds want to know...
"I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace."
George W. Bush
June 18, 2002
Ewww! That subject should have read "Source Code (Not Equals) Interoperability Spec" How do I make symbols like that show in slashdot comments?
I haven't RTA yet, but isn't the purpose of the EU's request to promote interoperability? If that's the case, the issue is that anyone trying to write code that talks to Windows has only the (possibly cryptic or even obfuscated) source code to go on, and even that is subject to change.
What I want to know is this: how do the EU's requirements differ from Window's APIs that are already out there? What exactly are they asking for?
Thank you for explaining the situation so lucidly!
I must confess that, especially upon reading that NTP is a company without employees, I'm guilty of taking a premature stance against the lone-lawyer. Now this is beginning to sound a lot like the rare type of example I mentioned in another comment.
So what is your "just" standard of behavior?
... we have promoted the development of smarter weasels.
Unfortunately I don't have a flawless answer to that problem, but if I did I'd certainly try to do something with it. I do not believe, however, that the answer is having thousands and thousands of pages of code so thick that it takes a professional to tell what's legal and what isn't.
stripped of its aspirant verbiage, that argument is the moral equivalent of being told "no" and subsequently throwing a tantrum.
Yes, I do feel helplessly enraged by The System. When enough adults throw a tantrum at once, it's called revolution.
It also shows a lack of understanding of the judge's role in our legal system.
A judge in our legal system is supposed to take the role of [a] an interpreter who [b] applies the law fairly. Because of the aforementioned problem of the law being as complex as it is, in practice a judge must be a lawyer first, and [a] may hinder his ability to do [b].
in response to our attempt to keep people from weaseling out of what "justice" would dictate
The judge's role, IMHO, should be to sniff out those weasels and provide a ruling based on the clear intent of a much (by several orders of magnitude) simpler code of law. By requiring a judge to apply the law literally (a law characterized with definitions upon unintuitive definitions), we encourage the weasels.
Patents exist not to protect inventors, but to give them a monetary incentive to innovate ... Now there are different ways a patent-holding inventor can make money off his monopoly...
You raise some insightful and well thought-out points. I applaud your hypothetical venture capitalist for having the ethics to support an inventor with a legitimate claim, and to contribute to society in general by using his resources to help said inventor's idea materialize.
I believe what frustrates me personally about the patent system is not that it is flawed in principle (which it may or may not be), but that the dense system which surrounds it (of law, lawyers, malicious venture-capitalists and non-inventors without the spine to make their idea (which may or may not be unique and innovative) happen) is pieced together in such a way that heinous abuses are rampant and profitable.
I love your example, but examples of such a benevolently creative use of the system are scarce (if they indeed exist) whereas examples of corporate entities using the system to ruin inventors abound... The story of Philo Farnsworth and the scanning tube comes to mind, not to mention the relatively recent problems with patenting software in general.
It seems that when we complain about the patent system we're really complaining about The System, and when we complain about that we're really complaining about human nature.
Since I know practically zip about this litigation and these patent issues, the first place I went after reading the headline was to google for a briefing. Here, I found the following:
NTP, which has no employees, convinced a jury in Spencer's Richmond, Virginia, courtroom in 2002 that Research In Motion had infringed patents related to wireless e-mail.
I know the assininity (is that a word?) of this has been phrased and rephrased many times in many discussions, but... WTF?!? Aren't patents supposed to protect inventors/innovators? I may be jumping to conclusions about NTP, but how can a company that exists solely to litigate patent-infringers get away with what it does?
I envision a land where there are "justices" appointed because they are "just", and "judge" based on the heart behind a simpler code of "justice," rather than human turing machines stripped of the power to truly judge, trying to apply an ugly and endless stream of spaghetti-legislation to human, nonlinear situations?
Did such an idealized system of law ever exist? May it yet? I don't know, but the more I learn about politics and legislation the more similarities I see between the modern process of developing laws and the process of developing software... I don't doubt that there are some legislators who would, if given a machine with the ability, replace human judges altogether in favor of a more predictible expert system.
Tangent? Yes. Rant? Yes. Tinfoil hat? Maybe. Relevant? You decide.
But pattern recognition is exactly what's so incredible about our predilection for geometry! It's only recently (with the rise of fast and powerful computing machines) that we've been able to define iterative equations that model the natural world with any kind of precision, and yet we've modeled objects around us with simple polygons & polyhedra for ages.
It seems obvious to us because we're the beings who are "hardwired" for it, but one of our most profound abilities is that of simplification. Isn't it fascinating that we can look at a pine tree, then at a rhinoceros's horn, and think "cone" about each? Truly regular polygons and polyhedra don't occur in nature, but we can look at something that's pretty close and identify it with one.
Geometry relies on our ability to think in symbols, but symbols are useless, even meaningless without the patterns they represent. The two are inextricably tied, and while I did RTFA and I agree that the study itself leaves a lot to be desired, you touched on what I believe is an important insight on how we are able to do geometry at all.
The mentality of the telcos, now that their monopolies are being rapidly deregulated, is to get as much revenue as possible from their infrastructure. Now that voice is virtualized and becoming removed from their revenue models, they feel they have to make money some way to compete with cable, BPL, fiber, and other broadband providers to survive.
What exactly is "their" infrastructure? I'm aware that all the details of this question aren't really within the scope of the discussion, but how much of the internet's backbone is owned and run by the telcos? Who do they buy their bandwidth from? Correspondingly, how much power do they really have?
I believe I have a decent grasp of the technical workings of the internet, but the economics of it completely baffle me. I'd google it but I'm not quite sure what I'm looking for.
IANA security professional, but here goes:
No system is 100% secure. Even if you do assume their security is state-of-the-art, there's still a margin of vulnerability. In this case, a security professional who was responsible for those systems abused his knowledge and former access to gain entry. Once he's in, there's no telling how many hacks, exploits, and sneaky tricks (not to mention previously-installed backdoors) he knows and can use to his advantage.
No matter what their level of security and how much money they spent hardening everything in the past, they simply cannot be positive he hasn't found a way to sneak around their logs, sniffers, and monitors and install a rootkit. 50 man-days to recover doesn't sound so bad when you consider that one successful intrusion (however difficult it was to achieve) can result in an invisible-yet-gaping orifice that leaves all that hard-earned security worthless to future penetration.
I agree that what Mr. Millot did is pretty stupid and stinks of 'amateur,' but IBM is operating in paranoia mode (and rightly so!). What if this guy is a pansy who knows just enough to get himself caught, but he was hired by a shady individual to plant a stealthy something and deleted the account as an afterthought? How does IBM know that their system isn't still compromised by something like that? Because they spent 50 man-days wiping and re-imaging systems or poring over md5 signatures or whatever it is they do in a situation like this.
Actually, they still can't be 100% positive, but at least they were (to paraphrase the parent) duly diligent.