But if you are already experiencing the symptoms leading up to acute psychosis, you might be more likely to try what ever drug you can get to alleviate those symptoms.
It's got nothing to do with swine flu. You're running a fever. You're sick with something.
Yup, so sick with something that I obviously am a threat to the people next to me. You know, the last two times I've been on an airplane, I've had a fever. The first occasion, the flight attendants actually accused me of giving everyone on the flight the flu, since I got air sick. She got a quick chewing out that, one, I get air sick when my allergies were acting up, and two, I had a sinus infection from staying in a house with dogs. And all that while getting food poisoning from the rotten airline food. Didn't even know I was allergic to dogs that trip. More recently, knowingly staying in an apartment with cats.
So yes, a fever does mean I'm sick. But a fever does not make a person contagious. Last I heard, certain infections simply were not contagious unless I happened to spit in my neighbors drink, or worse. So if you want me to stay off a plane every day that I happen to have a slight temperature irregularity, expect me to demand compensation for the time wasted when it's proven that I am not the threat to your precious health that the over abundance of hand-sanitizer and anti-bacterial soaps make every germ out to be.
The only course I remember "Last years code is forbidden" was in Operating Systems, which were all group projects. Since you were not working with the same group (one would hope since that group failed) you could not share that code with the new group. I suspect the other group project classes operated the same. Code that just I wrote could be reused from year to year, and you were expected to, otherwise recreating a linked list each and every semester would be a pain.
In both of the cases you cited, the police were acting under the impression that they were within the law in conducting the search.
But, they weren't. And yet, the evidence was allowed in court. Meaning that you no longer have protection against illegal searches. I don't know how much simpler I can make this for you.
The exclusionary rule is not that old. Federally, it only goes back to 1961. According to this article three of the justices who started weakening the rule were once young lawyers working in the 80s to have it repealed flat out.
You still have your protection from an illegal search. You don't have protection from a presumed legal search. There is a difference. You don't like that difference, fine. I'm not arguing that it's good or bad, just that there is a difference and you have the same rights you had before 1961 apparently. There is such a thing as the 'wrong time' to bring a case before the Supreme Court, and this case happened to come at the wrong time. You are lucky, though, that the justices didn't clarify the law in either of those cases and form a formal opinion on how it should be used in the future. They left the rule in place for a future case to decide. One with, perhaps, justices whose opinions you feel better protect the constitution.
In the USA, my university did the same thing. The contract signed before enrolling for the first course, remember that? It stated that I agree that most of my work is derivative of the work that the professors had put into developing the course. Any work turned in for a grade was therefore owned by the university and not the student. Not copyrighted, just that it was derivative work and not mine to redistribute. Also, I agreed that any future work as a hired student was work-for-hire, and the copyright belonged to the school.
Legally enforceable? The second part is, but the first is questionable. But 10 years later, I still don't have the money to go up against a university budget of lawyers, do you?
I had a professor who did something similar. He stored the last ten years of code and test answers, same as some of the frats do. Policy allowed looking at old projects, tests, and answers for practice, but using answers or code directly from them was a violation. He then hired grad students to automate the entire process of checking code against old projects. Same for current semesters, it would compare folks from all sections of a class that might be doing the same project. We all heard, going through the courses, tales of people who copied one line and the comment with it, changed the whitespace a bit, maybe changed a noun to plural, and still got caught.
It is* supposedly configurable on the back end, since first year projects all look the same but senior level stuff usually has tell-tale traits in variable naming. And the system doesn't flag and fail you, so you don't get busted for copying your own code from a year before. But, since copying your own code from the time you failed the class is not allowed, that does get checked.
In both of the cases you cited, the police were acting under the impression that they were within the law in conducting the search. It would be great if every officer could know every clause of the state law book, so that the first case wouldn't happen. And it would be great if every clerk never made a mistake and let an out-of-date warrant be sent out-of-state, and that the cops in the field would recognize it as being out-dated. That's not going to happen, though.
The Fourth Amendment is still there. It still protects you from the over-reaching state just like it always has. It just doesn't protect you from inept police work.
You can use a toroidal transformer, with a split core, and treat one of the spark wires as the primary winding. Then detect the voltage off the secondary. Just be careful about how much voltage the secondary is getting, since the spark wires run between 10k and 100k volts on some vehicles. Save your controller, and have that trigger a flip-flop. Or filter the signal enough to have it trip an interrupt on the uC.
Or you could just check if the OBD-II port has a signal for RPM.
Given the naive and rather stupid rulings that the courts have made regarding computer viruses, I'd say that would make a virus like this a fun thing to watch. Take any of the cases that/. has discussed, like the school teacher who's computer was rather obviously infected. The courts never believe that could be the reason. They would never believe that a trojan, like the one I suggested, was not intentionally installed. Which would make the accidental installations look intentional. Real or fake virus, it wouldn't matter.
I'm not suggesting it be done, I'm guessing that someone was already at work on it. Or they could be cause the lawyers to infringe on copyright by donating 2 SEK and 1 SEK amounts (or 1 and 0 if they issue charge backs) in a pattern that happens to be the base 2 representation of a certain decryption key. Or any other number of ways that this "donation" could be used to mock the system.
How do you make the mental leap that connects "baby monitor" = "trusted solution against death"?
Um, I didn't make that mental leap, the post I replied to did. To wit:
Like a neighbor installing the same brand of baby monitor (and HIS child is doing well, while yours is dying)
I thought about making some longer post with some insight into parent's I've seen and heard about never leaving a kids side in hospitals, not even for 1 minute on bathroom breaks, and making sure there is always someone there, awake, in addition to medical heartbeat monitors and such. However, I actually thought that/. readers would be diligent enough to read into context.
Perhaps I read arth1's post in a different light than you, but I was not suggesting the things you would like to assign. In that case, the misunderstanding is understandable.
Maybe it's because I'm not a parent, but I can't see myself trusting a wireless baby monitor if my kid is in circumstances where they stand a high chance of dying.
I'm not sure how applicable this is seeing how the amount of money is so small, but i guess it might still be valid.
Well, I don't really see how they're going to argue credibly that thousands of people "accidentally" transferred tiny sums of money to the same law firm just after the public request to do so from the TPB guys, so I don't really see how it's going to be applicable at all.
I would expect to see a virus by the end of the week doing exactly what they have suggested, donating 1 SEK at a time at several minute intervals. It might even be so kind as to ask for a credit card number, before doing it, or offer a maximum number of transfers. Maybe put this virus up on TPB, labeled as "Windows 7 Keygen".
This way, next week when this "virus" is picked up on, anyone using it can claim that it infected their computers and stole their credit card information.
How is a FOOS developer putting food on the table if the software they develop is not sold?
The same way they are now. Not every scrap of FOSS code floating around was written for payment. Some was written and published as 'see if this works for someone else.' and I would hope would not be covered by this new law. Other was written for some reward and, still available for free to everyone else, may or may not be similar to a "commercial product" because of the intended audience. And all of that combined probably covers only 2% of the FOSS code written.
Herein lies Apple's advantage over Microsoft. Apple creates it's software to run on the hardware it also creates. They are able to make sure it "just works". MS on the other hand can not control what hardware their software will run on.
They could, all that's stopping them is the fact that they would have to give up some of their market share to Linux, or step up their support of older OS+hardware combinations.
I haven't tried to suggest that FOSS should be held to the fire via this new law, except where it is marketed as a replacement for software that it does not replace. My initial post was on the topic of selling software, not giving it away, and certainly not the development of new software.
You said you would feel no moral responsibility for damage caused by your code. I don't disagree if that code never moves past beta. But once you put it out there as available to 'end users', I think you have some duty to make sure it is usable for what it purports.
And as for software never blowing up a computer, I direct your attention to various file system bugs that cause data corruption, and windows drivers that don't actually work on the hardware they claim. The Microsoft bluetooth stack, so useful you can do . . . something with it, I'm sure. The fsync and ext4 issue that has recently been talked about here and elsewhere. It's not just an "hold open source accountable" thing, it's a way to hold all software makers accountable for what they advertise their software can do, and what they avoid fixing when they know the risks involved.
How does it become more murky? For over a decade, we've had Microsoft proudly proclaiming that it works with all hardware. Everyone makes a driver for Windows. Every computer can come preloaded with it, regardless of what hardware is in it. And then the OS can't handle certain combinations of hardware. Athlon + Matrox G400 (I think it was) + Win2k, for an old example.
I am concerned about how this law would play out for small developers, but not as much as everyone else it would seem. Licenses now days, even for 'commercial' software all basically amount to "We own this, you don't, and it's good for nothing. Monetary value of software is 0.00, and you can't sue us if things break." They should be held accountable for the price of the software at least, and more so for the false claims made daily in Windows commercials.
And if I am criminally negligent in handing out GPL software that wipes a computer of all data, kills your dog, and spray paints your sofa, then I should be sued too.
However, if I give you a disk labeled 'data destruction', a bag of onions, and a can of spray paint, then you are on your own with what you do with them.
Software has bugs. In the real world, products have bugs, that's what recalls are about. Sueing over every one is not going to save the consumer. Being able to sue over the major ones would be useful.
I have a bad feeling that, as people start poking around, even more stories like this are going to be uncovered. Sure, Elsevier is admitting to six fake journals. What's the over/under for it being 20?
Now, I wonder if Merck makes a drug to get rid of bad feelings like this. I'll have to check an Elsevier journal to find out.
For years, newspapers have operated on both a subscription and advertisement based revenue stream. And I don't buy the monopoly angle either, the little small town I grew up in had at least three different papers: The small county paper that covered local interest, the big-city an hour away paper that ran AP, and a national paper like USA Today. Each one had a niche monopoly, but they were never the only paper in town.
So why, when the papers moved online, did they think "Let's be a free news source, with no ads and no subscriptions."? Where did they think the money was going to come from, magic internet pandas? Then came the whole "We are losing money because google is linking to our stories!" episodes. Well, robots.txt can control that, you know. But if you don't get people to link to your stories; how, exactly, are you going to get people to read them? How many readers go to a newspaper's website via the front page?
Now, they figure out that being online costs money, and they worry if people will pay. Of course people will pay for the news, they have done it for years in paper subscriptions. But they won't pay for it twice! The papers have to offer something unique from what other papers are offering if they want this new online subscription system to work. If every News Corp paper is parroting the same story, people are going to notice. So bundle the papers as a single subscription, or give up now. Like I said, local niche papers survived because they covered local stories that wouldn't get even a small 1 inch tall column of text in the state paper. Same for the state stories in the national paper.
There is one other way for the papers to make money online, and that's to offer people what they offered in the actual paper versions. The echo-chamber that Fox News mimics so well, the editorial page. Give the fanatical readers a place to voice their opinions, and they will stick around. Comments are a start, look at the self-regulating voice that moderation even on/. causes, where we know which comments will get modded up and down before it happens. Open it up, and suddenly you have a system that can generate it's own news stories.
But I have doubts they will pursue that. It would 'muddy the line between reader and journalist' or some crap. That all-sacred line that has only existed since newspapers switched from being a source of news to treating their readers as the commodity being sold to advertisers.
To compliment Gray's Anatomy, the Merck Manual might be a good choice. Gray's shows you what the inside looks like, and Merck Manual tells you how to pick a name for that disorder.
For other branches of sciences, and leaning towards engineering, I would recommend the Merck Index of chemicals, and Machinery's Handbook. An older version of the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics will explain the, then recent, changes in scientific theory.
So do the doctors, so do the drug companies, so does everyone else who can afford it. It's one of the rational choices to make once the system devolves to the point where only lobbies get anything accomplished. Even religions have lobbying groups.
As individuals, each person in these groups may agree that the system is broken, but as a group it is not in their best interest to change anything. I don't blame the companies as an entity, but the individuals who lack the backbone to acknowledge the problems they are exploiting.
If the system is as corrupt as others, telling them you are willing to pay more is just telling them to sell you the counterfeit medicine at a higher price.
Slashdot Mirror
But if you are already experiencing the symptoms leading up to acute psychosis, you might be more likely to try what ever drug you can get to alleviate those symptoms.
Nah, Curator. Same principle though.
It's got nothing to do with swine flu. You're running a fever. You're sick with something.
Yup, so sick with something that I obviously am a threat to the people next to me. You know, the last two times I've been on an airplane, I've had a fever. The first occasion, the flight attendants actually accused me of giving everyone on the flight the flu, since I got air sick. She got a quick chewing out that, one, I get air sick when my allergies were acting up, and two, I had a sinus infection from staying in a house with dogs. And all that while getting food poisoning from the rotten airline food. Didn't even know I was allergic to dogs that trip. More recently, knowingly staying in an apartment with cats.
So yes, a fever does mean I'm sick. But a fever does not make a person contagious. Last I heard, certain infections simply were not contagious unless I happened to spit in my neighbors drink, or worse. So if you want me to stay off a plane every day that I happen to have a slight temperature irregularity, expect me to demand compensation for the time wasted when it's proven that I am not the threat to your precious health that the over abundance of hand-sanitizer and anti-bacterial soaps make every germ out to be.
The only course I remember "Last years code is forbidden" was in Operating Systems, which were all group projects. Since you were not working with the same group (one would hope since that group failed) you could not share that code with the new group. I suspect the other group project classes operated the same. Code that just I wrote could be reused from year to year, and you were expected to, otherwise recreating a linked list each and every semester would be a pain.
In both of the cases you cited, the police were acting under the impression that they were within the law in conducting the search.
But, they weren't. And yet, the evidence was allowed in court. Meaning that you no longer have protection against illegal searches. I don't know how much simpler I can make this for you.
The exclusionary rule is not that old. Federally, it only goes back to 1961. According to this article three of the justices who started weakening the rule were once young lawyers working in the 80s to have it repealed flat out.
You still have your protection from an illegal search. You don't have protection from a presumed legal search. There is a difference. You don't like that difference, fine. I'm not arguing that it's good or bad, just that there is a difference and you have the same rights you had before 1961 apparently. There is such a thing as the 'wrong time' to bring a case before the Supreme Court, and this case happened to come at the wrong time. You are lucky, though, that the justices didn't clarify the law in either of those cases and form a formal opinion on how it should be used in the future. They left the rule in place for a future case to decide. One with, perhaps, justices whose opinions you feel better protect the constitution.
In the USA, my university did the same thing. The contract signed before enrolling for the first course, remember that? It stated that I agree that most of my work is derivative of the work that the professors had put into developing the course. Any work turned in for a grade was therefore owned by the university and not the student. Not copyrighted, just that it was derivative work and not mine to redistribute. Also, I agreed that any future work as a hired student was work-for-hire, and the copyright belonged to the school.
Legally enforceable? The second part is, but the first is questionable. But 10 years later, I still don't have the money to go up against a university budget of lawyers, do you?
I had a professor who did something similar. He stored the last ten years of code and test answers, same as some of the frats do. Policy allowed looking at old projects, tests, and answers for practice, but using answers or code directly from them was a violation. He then hired grad students to automate the entire process of checking code against old projects. Same for current semesters, it would compare folks from all sections of a class that might be doing the same project. We all heard, going through the courses, tales of people who copied one line and the comment with it, changed the whitespace a bit, maybe changed a noun to plural, and still got caught.
It is* supposedly configurable on the back end, since first year projects all look the same but senior level stuff usually has tell-tale traits in variable naming. And the system doesn't flag and fail you, so you don't get busted for copying your own code from a year before. But, since copying your own code from the time you failed the class is not allowed, that does get checked.
*It's still being used and developed, it appears.
In both of the cases you cited, the police were acting under the impression that they were within the law in conducting the search. It would be great if every officer could know every clause of the state law book, so that the first case wouldn't happen. And it would be great if every clerk never made a mistake and let an out-of-date warrant be sent out-of-state, and that the cops in the field would recognize it as being out-dated. That's not going to happen, though.
The Fourth Amendment is still there. It still protects you from the over-reaching state just like it always has. It just doesn't protect you from inept police work.
You can use a toroidal transformer, with a split core, and treat one of the spark wires as the primary winding. Then detect the voltage off the secondary. Just be careful about how much voltage the secondary is getting, since the spark wires run between 10k and 100k volts on some vehicles. Save your controller, and have that trigger a flip-flop. Or filter the signal enough to have it trip an interrupt on the uC.
Or you could just check if the OBD-II port has a signal for RPM.
Given the naive and rather stupid rulings that the courts have made regarding computer viruses, I'd say that would make a virus like this a fun thing to watch. Take any of the cases that /. has discussed, like the school teacher who's computer was rather obviously infected. The courts never believe that could be the reason. They would never believe that a trojan, like the one I suggested, was not intentionally installed. Which would make the accidental installations look intentional. Real or fake virus, it wouldn't matter.
I'm not suggesting it be done, I'm guessing that someone was already at work on it. Or they could be cause the lawyers to infringe on copyright by donating 2 SEK and 1 SEK amounts (or 1 and 0 if they issue charge backs) in a pattern that happens to be the base 2 representation of a certain decryption key. Or any other number of ways that this "donation" could be used to mock the system.
How do you make the mental leap that connects "baby monitor" = "trusted solution against death"?
Um, I didn't make that mental leap, the post I replied to did. To wit:
Like a neighbor installing the same brand of baby monitor (and HIS child is doing well, while yours is dying)
I thought about making some longer post with some insight into parent's I've seen and heard about never leaving a kids side in hospitals, not even for 1 minute on bathroom breaks, and making sure there is always someone there, awake, in addition to medical heartbeat monitors and such. However, I actually thought that /. readers would be diligent enough to read into context.
Perhaps I read arth1's post in a different light than you, but I was not suggesting the things you would like to assign. In that case, the misunderstanding is understandable.
Maybe it's because I'm not a parent, but I can't see myself trusting a wireless baby monitor if my kid is in circumstances where they stand a high chance of dying.
I'm not sure how applicable this is seeing how the amount of money is so small, but i guess it might still be valid.
Well, I don't really see how they're going to argue credibly that thousands of people "accidentally" transferred tiny sums of money to the same law firm just after the public request to do so from the TPB guys, so I don't really see how it's going to be applicable at all.
I would expect to see a virus by the end of the week doing exactly what they have suggested, donating 1 SEK at a time at several minute intervals. It might even be so kind as to ask for a credit card number, before doing it, or offer a maximum number of transfers. Maybe put this virus up on TPB, labeled as "Windows 7 Keygen".
This way, next week when this "virus" is picked up on, anyone using it can claim that it infected their computers and stole their credit card information.
How is a FOOS developer putting food on the table if the software they develop is not sold?
The same way they are now.
Not every scrap of FOSS code floating around was written for payment. Some was written and published as 'see if this works for someone else.' and I would hope would not be covered by this new law. Other was written for some reward and, still available for free to everyone else, may or may not be similar to a "commercial product" because of the intended audience. And all of that combined probably covers only 2% of the FOSS code written.
Herein lies Apple's advantage over Microsoft. Apple creates it's software to run on the hardware it also creates. They are able to make sure it "just works". MS on the other hand can not control what hardware their software will run on.
They could, all that's stopping them is the fact that they would have to give up some of their market share to Linux, or step up their support of older OS+hardware combinations.
I haven't tried to suggest that FOSS should be held to the fire via this new law, except where it is marketed as a replacement for software that it does not replace. My initial post was on the topic of selling software, not giving it away, and certainly not the development of new software.
You said you would feel no moral responsibility for damage caused by your code. I don't disagree if that code never moves past beta. But once you put it out there as available to 'end users', I think you have some duty to make sure it is usable for what it purports.
And as for software never blowing up a computer, I direct your attention to various file system bugs that cause data corruption, and windows drivers that don't actually work on the hardware they claim. The Microsoft bluetooth stack, so useful you can do . . . something with it, I'm sure. The fsync and ext4 issue that has recently been talked about here and elsewhere. It's not just an "hold open source accountable" thing, it's a way to hold all software makers accountable for what they advertise their software can do, and what they avoid fixing when they know the risks involved.
If you market it to people who can not understand the risk involved, I think the minimal is that you owe them a replacement car for any that blow up.
If you offer it to car junkies, tuners, gear heads, who accept that it is experimental and know the risk, that is a completely different story.
How does it become more murky? For over a decade, we've had Microsoft proudly proclaiming that it works with all hardware. Everyone makes a driver for Windows. Every computer can come preloaded with it, regardless of what hardware is in it. And then the OS can't handle certain combinations of hardware. Athlon + Matrox G400 (I think it was) + Win2k, for an old example.
I am concerned about how this law would play out for small developers, but not as much as everyone else it would seem. Licenses now days, even for 'commercial' software all basically amount to "We own this, you don't, and it's good for nothing. Monetary value of software is 0.00, and you can't sue us if things break." They should be held accountable for the price of the software at least, and more so for the false claims made daily in Windows commercials.
If you sell motor oil, someone puts it in their car and the car blows up, you would be responsible.
Now that I've used the mandatory car analogy, how is this different from selling well labeled software with major flaws in it?
And if I am criminally negligent in handing out GPL software that wipes a computer of all data, kills your dog, and spray paints your sofa, then I should be sued too.
However, if I give you a disk labeled 'data destruction', a bag of onions, and a can of spray paint, then you are on your own with what you do with them.
Software has bugs. In the real world, products have bugs, that's what recalls are about. Sueing over every one is not going to save the consumer. Being able to sue over the major ones would be useful.
I have a bad feeling that, as people start poking around, even more stories like this are going to be uncovered. Sure, Elsevier is admitting to six fake journals. What's the over/under for it being 20?
Now, I wonder if Merck makes a drug to get rid of bad feelings like this. I'll have to check an Elsevier journal to find out.
You don't necessarily need to be working on the classified system to have access to the computer. Someone has to clean up the computer labs.
For years, newspapers have operated on both a subscription and advertisement based revenue stream. And I don't buy the monopoly angle either, the little small town I grew up in had at least three different papers: The small county paper that covered local interest, the big-city an hour away paper that ran AP, and a national paper like USA Today. Each one had a niche monopoly, but they were never the only paper in town.
So why, when the papers moved online, did they think "Let's be a free news source, with no ads and no subscriptions."? Where did they think the money was going to come from, magic internet pandas? Then came the whole "We are losing money because google is linking to our stories!" episodes. Well, robots.txt can control that, you know. But if you don't get people to link to your stories; how, exactly, are you going to get people to read them? How many readers go to a newspaper's website via the front page?
Now, they figure out that being online costs money, and they worry if people will pay. Of course people will pay for the news, they have done it for years in paper subscriptions. But they won't pay for it twice! The papers have to offer something unique from what other papers are offering if they want this new online subscription system to work. If every News Corp paper is parroting the same story, people are going to notice. So bundle the papers as a single subscription, or give up now. Like I said, local niche papers survived because they covered local stories that wouldn't get even a small 1 inch tall column of text in the state paper. Same for the state stories in the national paper.
There is one other way for the papers to make money online, and that's to offer people what they offered in the actual paper versions. The echo-chamber that Fox News mimics so well, the editorial page. Give the fanatical readers a place to voice their opinions, and they will stick around. Comments are a start, look at the self-regulating voice that moderation even on /. causes, where we know which comments will get modded up and down before it happens. Open it up, and suddenly you have a system that can generate it's own news stories.
But I have doubts they will pursue that. It would 'muddy the line between reader and journalist' or some crap. That all-sacred line that has only existed since newspapers switched from being a source of news to treating their readers as the commodity being sold to advertisers.
To compliment Gray's Anatomy, the Merck Manual might be a good choice. Gray's shows you what the inside looks like, and Merck Manual tells you how to pick a name for that disorder.
For other branches of sciences, and leaning towards engineering, I would recommend the Merck Index of chemicals, and Machinery's Handbook. An older version of the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics will explain the, then recent, changes in scientific theory.
So do the doctors, so do the drug companies, so does everyone else who can afford it. It's one of the rational choices to make once the system devolves to the point where only lobbies get anything accomplished. Even religions have lobbying groups.
As individuals, each person in these groups may agree that the system is broken, but as a group it is not in their best interest to change anything. I don't blame the companies as an entity, but the individuals who lack the backbone to acknowledge the problems they are exploiting.
If the system is as corrupt as others, telling them you are willing to pay more is just telling them to sell you the counterfeit medicine at a higher price.