Kim Stanley Robinson wrote an excellent series of fiction books on the colonization, terraforming, and evolution of Mars. They were, interestingly enough, named Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars. I would strongly recommend them to anyone interested in the subject, as they take a look at some of the basic tennets of thought that arise from the idea of people living on Mars.
Something that the open source community is sure to appreciate is the fact that the Mars community in the books throughs out much of the traditional wisdom on how systems such as the economy should work, and produces somewhat convincing alternatives. In fact, many of the protagonists exhibit the "hacker ethic" of just doing things that work without getting bogged down in rules.
Here is the patent application:
The Zero-Knowledge shopping system (known hereafter as "God") is a customer-(known here after as "peon") oriented system designed to simplify the tricky process of buying products (known hereafter as "crap") online. God tracks His peons online, and He decides what crap they need. When the peons give God their credit card numbers, He bills them for the crap and sends it to their address (which, of course, He knows).
Prior art: None. God is so original that nobody could have ever had the sheer genius necessary to think of something like this.
One step further than zero click shopping, and in honor of a product to prevent this, I'll be patenting "Zero-Knowledge" shopping (ZKS). It works like this:
"Customer" browses various, seemlingly unconnected web sites, all of which have innocent looking.gifs that track every page they look through harmless cookies.
The customer buys something at one of these sites, authorizing their credit card for use in future purchases. Don't worry, the customer is told this in the jargonfied fine print.
ZKS kicks in: according to the web pages that the new ZKS customer has visited recently, they are "sold" things that ZKS decides they need. Been visiting sites that review video cards? ZKS saves you the trouble of finding a site to sell you one!
This is one step better than targeted advertising. Targeted advertising only tells you what you should want to buy, but ZKS buys it for you! After ZKS has your credit card number, you'll never have to visit an annoying e-commerce web site again.
Who stands to gain the most from the case going to the apellate courts? DOES Microsoft really have that sort of good vibe coming from the possible next administration, or will someone try to block the DoJ from dropping this?
I have a feeling that Microsoft just wants to delay the whole process, hoping that by the time the courts force them to split off the OS side of the company, the OS side won't matter anymore.
IANAL, so I'm hoping one of the readers is: if you drop a case during the appeal, does the other side automatically 'win'? Is it possible to drop in mid-appeal?
Well, I'm not quite sure exactly what happens, but I think both sides are quite vested in this case now and it seems extremely unlikely that either side will drop. The Justice Department won't drop it because they've already won at one level, and Microsoft won't drop it because of the above.
Come to think of it, it's most likely that instead of just "dropping" the case, if for some reason one side decided that they were "giving up", they'd likely just go through the settlement process.
Will the educational process that was in the first case be allowed in the appeal? That is, both sides educated the judge on the issues, which resulted in an informed opinion.
You mean so that both sides get to try to push their worldview on the judge? To be perfectly honest, it seems to me that the entire process is educational due to expert witnesses that give their ideas on how the facts of the case should be interpreted. Besides, do you really think that anyone could be taught all the background needed to understand this case in any reasonable length of time?
What's the track record on monopoly remedies being reversed on appeal?
No clue there. I do know that appelate courts try to avoid overturning a ruling unless new evidence can be shown or a lower court is shown to have made significant errors. Considering the attitude of the Judge Jackson towards Microsoft at the end of the last case, there is probably good reason to overturn the ruling if any of the appelate courts so desire.
Isn't this essentially the same news that was posted yesterday? I realize that few people read any articles that aren't on the front page (including me for the most part) but I'd hope the/. editors do. The date seems more firm in the MaximumPC article, but that seems likely to just be an omission on their part, rather than a change in the set date.
The funny part is that the first post in the other article comments that the lack of posts implies that/. readers don't care about Napster anymore *grin*.
As a friend of mine once showed me with a buggy program he wrote, you have to be careful how you define "success" in evolutionary programming. He wrote an ant simulator that kept a score for how well the ant did at foraging for food. Only thing was, the program had a slight bug, so at the end of the evolutionary phase, the "best" ant was the one that had figured out how to edit it's score directly. The problem was that the real goal was to increase the score, not find food.
In a more real world example, evolutionary mining robots would have two ways to reach the defined objective of keeping reported numbers high: learning how to mine really well, or killing the humans and sending in fake reports themselves.
BTW, a computer making robot offspring because it was told to design them isn't nearly as disturbing as the inevitable computer making robot offspring on it's own accord.
Actually, I made the unstated assumption that the article mentioned--your old program disks go bad, etc. Sure, this would require you to be rather foolish (running an old program off of your one copy of the disk) but it isn't entirely impossible.
Also, I'm not sure that it's a valid excuse to break the law--I just think that it's not immediately obvious that retrieving data through abandonware should be illegal.
Abandonware is a tricky subject. A couple of points the article failed to bring up:
1. In some cases, people _need_ older copies of programs. There are some document formats that, for one reason or another, are no longer supported--even through modern conversion software. If that old document happens to contain password-protected tax data, and no modern software will read it, where does the user turn to but to abandonware?
2. On the other hand, compilations of old games are a relatively popular low-budget option for game publishers. They're almost guaranteed to make money for the company (since they're dirt-cheap to make). I for one jumped at the chance to purchase Interplay's compilation of the SSI Gold Box games. However, if these games are freely available on popular abandonware sites, then it makes it difficult for a publisher to convince anyone to buy it.
3. Here's the real sticking point (which I'm also the most out-of-my-league about): if it can be proved that a copyright holder knowingly allowed someone to infringe on that copyright and did not take action to prevent it, then the rights to that material can be permanently lost. This prevents selective enforcement, but at the same time obligates the companies to go after abandonware sites if they want rights to a future version of the game.
It seems that this whole area is in a kind of legal void, with the two sides of the argument brought up in the article both having valid points. It will be interesting to see if this ever gets brought to court--doubtable, though, since people running abandonware sites will probably never be able to afford a lawyer for a case like that.
Poor fougasse. Nice to see someone trying to defend against the FUD being passed around on Slashdot--it really is a shame when the educated Slashdot users take hearsay as fact. Not that I think that MS couldn't have some sort of prevention for this kind of bug--instead of warning you about _every_ e-mail attachment equally, it could have the decency to not warn you that the.txt file you're opening could contain a virus, while warning you extensively when you're opening a danger filled.exe,.vbs, or the like. That aside, like I said--it's good to see someone sticking up for MS against made-up security holes.
~=Keelor
Re:Um... this is a computer virus?
on
Sim Plague
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· Score: 1
Actually, that was just a lack of clarity on my part. The article implies that this is a virus in two respects--the "simulated virus" that the Sims can catch, which is most definitely a virus, and a "computer virus", because it was installed without the user's knowledge. It's the second part that has me griping.
There's plenty of amusing Sims stories right at the official site, www.thesims.com. Not only do they tend to kill off large numbers of people, but they do it with a storyline! Lot's of fun;)
~=Keelor
Um... this is a computer virus?
on
Sim Plague
·
· Score: 5
This seems to lack one of the essential aspects of a computer virus--it completely lacks any way to replicate itself. It's basically just an undocumented feature in a patch that a lot of people downloaded--but the only way to get the feature is to download the patch, so it doesn't act like a virus. So kudos to the NYT for making the connection to Snow Crash, but next time try to make the analogy correct.
From what I've read, it looks like the Geforce's FSAA support will be slightly less stellar than 3dfx's--which is why I didn't mention it. To be perfectly honest, I could be entirely wrong. I'll wait for both before buying one.
As for Glide, being as Glide is now open-source, I don't think that 3dfx could really say that have that up on nVidia.
Actually, I entirely agree with you. Both of their PR machines spew out whatever seems to be most appropriate for the moment--with extremely limited memories. It just seems like nVidia's shifts have been slightly less dramatic then the possible impending 3dfx shift.
I'm sure that if somehow 3dfx's Voodoo 5 6000 became really cheap and much faster than the Geforce GTS, we'd see all over the place how speed/FSAA doesn't matter unless you have T&L.
Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if the asthetics of the card itself didn't become a last-resort PR tactic soon.
Okay, other posters have pointed out the fact that the Geforce 2 seems to be going the right direction (with respect to power consumption, at least). However, I'd like to take a moment to agree with you--and point out the best part. Last I heard, the Voodoo 5 6000 (the one with four VSA-100 chips) won't have "a hard drive power cable plugged into it." Nope, instead, it will just have an external 110 power supply that will plug into the back. How's that for power consumption?
It ought to be interesting to see the 3dfx PR machine at work now. The true irony will be when they take the inevitable road of, "Sure, the Geforce GTS has a couple more FPS, but we have anti-aliasing, which improves the way games that are out now look!"
Compare this to about a year and a half ago, when the TNT came out. "Sure, they support 32-bit color and higher texture sizes, but we have more FPS! No true gamer cares about how good their games look, they just want more FPS!"
The sad thing is, I think 3dfx knew this would happen--that's why they've been pulling away from emphasizing the performance of the Voodoo 5, and instead hyping the full-screen anti-aliasing.
On a side note, it now seems that the Voodoo 4 (the single VSA-100 chip) has no hope of seeing the light of the retail market. Some OEMs _might_ pick it up, but considering that the Voodoo 5 5500, it might be a bit of an embarrassment to release the Voodoo 4.
When I read the article on pandas taking Viagra I could help but notice the following paragraph.
The male panda can only mate for 10 to 20 seconds at a time, and hence the chances of getting the female pregnant are very low. With Viagra, the male could mate for up to 20 minutes.
Despite looking throughout the entire article, I failed to see the typical disclaimer.
* Results not typical. Please consult your doctor before you begin using Viagra.
That's odd... I guess Microsoft is willing to admit that Expedia has the Earth rotating the wrong way. I would figured that they would have just lobbied Congress to develop a nuke large enough to make the Earth spin the "correct" direction.
The site was slow to respond for me, but if you're patient you should get through.
Okay, Hemos. You've been around long enough to know the./ effect inside out. If the site is slow for you _before_ you post it, what do you think will happen once us masses start attacking it?;)
Admittedly, corporations have a significant impact on governmental decisions. I'd have to be a complete fool to disagree with that. However, governments still listen to people--and corporations listen to people, also (think of DoubleClick). Jessica Litman gave an interesting speech at one of the lunches at the conference about "The Demonization of Piracy." One interesting point she made was that some of the blame for recent court rulings fall to some of the very people that populate these boards. For example, calling legitamite, unauthorized copying "pirating" condemns someone before they've even had a chance to make their case (it's not "pirating" to copy one of your own CDs to MP3 format for your own use). Also, she mentioned that about the only evidence used to convince the judge in the DeCSS case that the software would be used for pirating were quotes from/. posts.
Not to condemn everyone, but just remember that it's easy to fall into the trap of blaiming everything that goes wrong on the corpocracy.
Slashdot Mirror
Something that the open source community is sure to appreciate is the fact that the Mars community in the books throughs out much of the traditional wisdom on how systems such as the economy should work, and produces somewhat convincing alternatives. In fact, many of the protagonists exhibit the "hacker ethic" of just doing things that work without getting bogged down in rules.
~=Keelor
The Zero-Knowledge shopping system (known hereafter as "God") is a customer-(known here after as "peon") oriented system designed to simplify the tricky process of buying products (known hereafter as "crap") online. God tracks His peons online, and He decides what crap they need. When the peons give God their credit card numbers, He bills them for the crap and sends it to their address (which, of course, He knows).
Prior art:
None. God is so original that nobody could have ever had the sheer genius necessary to think of something like this.
~=Keelor
- "Customer" browses various, seemlingly unconnected web sites, all of which have innocent looking
.gifs that track every page they look through harmless cookies.
- The customer buys something at one of these sites, authorizing their credit card for use in future purchases. Don't worry, the customer is told this in the jargonfied fine print.
- ZKS kicks in: according to the web pages that the new ZKS customer has visited recently, they are "sold" things that ZKS decides they need. Been visiting sites that review video cards? ZKS saves you the trouble of finding a site to sell you one!
This is one step better than targeted advertising. Targeted advertising only tells you what you should want to buy, but ZKS buys it for you! After ZKS has your credit card number, you'll never have to visit an annoying e-commerce web site again.~=Keelor
~=Keelor
Of course, the dog will be the one to carry out the punishment.
~=Keelor
~=Keelor
I have a feeling that Microsoft just wants to delay the whole process, hoping that by the time the courts force them to split off the OS side of the company, the OS side won't matter anymore.
IANAL, so I'm hoping one of the readers is: if you drop a case during the appeal, does the other side automatically 'win'? Is it possible to drop in mid-appeal?
Well, I'm not quite sure exactly what happens, but I think both sides are quite vested in this case now and it seems extremely unlikely that either side will drop. The Justice Department won't drop it because they've already won at one level, and Microsoft won't drop it because of the above.
Come to think of it, it's most likely that instead of just "dropping" the case, if for some reason one side decided that they were "giving up", they'd likely just go through the settlement process.
Will the educational process that was in the first case be allowed in the appeal? That is, both sides educated the judge on the issues, which resulted in an informed opinion.
You mean so that both sides get to try to push their worldview on the judge? To be perfectly honest, it seems to me that the entire process is educational due to expert witnesses that give their ideas on how the facts of the case should be interpreted. Besides, do you really think that anyone could be taught all the background needed to understand this case in any reasonable length of time?
What's the track record on monopoly remedies being reversed on appeal?
No clue there. I do know that appelate courts try to avoid overturning a ruling unless new evidence can be shown or a lower court is shown to have made significant errors. Considering the attitude of the Judge Jackson towards Microsoft at the end of the last case, there is probably good reason to overturn the ruling if any of the appelate courts so desire.
~=Keelor
The funny part is that the first post in the other article comments that the lack of posts implies that /. readers don't care about Napster anymore *grin*.
~=Keelor
In a more real world example, evolutionary mining robots would have two ways to reach the defined objective of keeping reported numbers high: learning how to mine really well, or killing the humans and sending in fake reports themselves.
BTW, a computer making robot offspring because it was told to design them isn't nearly as disturbing as the inevitable computer making robot offspring on it's own accord.
~=Keelor
~=Keelor
Also, I'm not sure that it's a valid excuse to break the law--I just think that it's not immediately obvious that retrieving data through abandonware should be illegal.
~=Keelor
1. In some cases, people _need_ older copies of programs. There are some document formats that, for one reason or another, are no longer supported--even through modern conversion software. If that old document happens to contain password-protected tax data, and no modern software will read it, where does the user turn to but to abandonware?
2. On the other hand, compilations of old games are a relatively popular low-budget option for game publishers. They're almost guaranteed to make money for the company (since they're dirt-cheap to make). I for one jumped at the chance to purchase Interplay's compilation of the SSI Gold Box games. However, if these games are freely available on popular abandonware sites, then it makes it difficult for a publisher to convince anyone to buy it.
3. Here's the real sticking point (which I'm also the most out-of-my-league about): if it can be proved that a copyright holder knowingly allowed someone to infringe on that copyright and did not take action to prevent it, then the rights to that material can be permanently lost. This prevents selective enforcement, but at the same time obligates the companies to go after abandonware sites if they want rights to a future version of the game.
It seems that this whole area is in a kind of legal void, with the two sides of the argument brought up in the article both having valid points. It will be interesting to see if this ever gets brought to court--doubtable, though, since people running abandonware sites will probably never be able to afford a lawyer for a case like that.
~=Keelor
Not that I think that MS couldn't have some sort of prevention for this kind of bug--instead of warning you about _every_ e-mail attachment equally, it could have the decency to not warn you that the
That aside, like I said--it's good to see someone sticking up for MS against made-up security holes.
~=Keelor
~=Keelor
~=Keelor
~=Keelor
As for Glide, being as Glide is now open-source, I don't think that 3dfx could really say that have that up on nVidia.
~=Keelor
I'm sure that if somehow 3dfx's Voodoo 5 6000 became really cheap and much faster than the Geforce GTS, we'd see all over the place how speed/FSAA doesn't matter unless you have T&L.
Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if the asthetics of the card itself didn't become a last-resort PR tactic soon.
~=Keelor
~=Keelor
Compare this to about a year and a half ago, when the TNT came out. "Sure, they support 32-bit color and higher texture sizes, but we have more FPS! No true gamer cares about how good their games look, they just want more FPS!"
The sad thing is, I think 3dfx knew this would happen--that's why they've been pulling away from emphasizing the performance of the Voodoo 5, and instead hyping the full-screen anti-aliasing.
On a side note, it now seems that the Voodoo 4 (the single VSA-100 chip) has no hope of seeing the light of the retail market. Some OEMs _might_ pick it up, but considering that the Voodoo 5 5500, it might be a bit of an embarrassment to release the Voodoo 4.
~=Keelor
* Results not typical. Please consult your doctor before you begin using Viagra.
~=Keelor
~=Keelor
~=Keelor
Okay, Hemos. You've been around long enough to know the ./ effect inside out. If the site is slow for you _before_ you post it, what do you think will happen once us masses start attacking it? ;)
~=Keelor
Not to condemn everyone, but just remember that it's easy to fall into the trap of blaiming everything that goes wrong on the corpocracy.
~=Keelor