I disagree -- as many posters have pointed out, Microsoft may have violated the Kerberos trademark, and may not have any legitimate claim on trade secrets, but they do control their publication, and I'm afraid slashdot is going to get bent over backwards on that point. (although I hope not)
That said -- I wonder if the/. crew, especially Taco, is happy to have a larger corporation standing behind (over?) them to dish out legal resources?
First: why does it take so long to pass a simple piece of legislation? All they have to do is require "UCE:" or "AD:" at the beginning of every email, and with stiff penalties, that would be the end of spam. And that's a mild remedy -- there are better ways.
Second, I don't think HR 3113 was being referenced in the article. It seems as though the conference participants were suggesting more vicious legislation (the bounty hunter reference). HR 3113 primarily seems to establish one big opt-out list maintained by the FCC (yech), which you can ad yourself to, and UCE people must honor that opt-out.
On the plus, side the bill seems to offer up to $500/violation or $25k/day -- and as I read it, the lay person getting a piece of spam could literally sue for $25k or 75k for a willful violation. Can you say, "ow?"
I'm under the impression the DMCA does not mention reverse engineering as a barred category of action. It prohibits the circumvention of technology designed to protect a copyright, and reverse engineering for compatibility is a category exempted from that prohibition. Ergo, circumventing the encryption on a DVD is illegal, unless done for the purposes of compatibility (or security research, I believe).
So that part doesn't apply -- unless, of course, Sony decides to twist things around so this is somehow technology designed to violate copyright protections. After some of the other charges, would it be a surprise?
There's a big difference between people handling physical security and network security, and the network security people, by and large, are about as far from chimp-dom as you can get.
It occured to me: is there a reason when free/open source projects get started they can't trademark the name of their work? The right license would then prevent Microsoft from co-opting the name. Because, after all, I doubt anyone cares that M$ takes Kerberos and modifies it. Even if they want to make it inoperable with the kerberos standard, fine. But if you're going to break the standard, you should HAVE TO DROP THE NAME. Imagine Microsoft releasing "Microsoft Linux" (win95 with a penguin background). Would Linus stand for it? Or, more realistically, imagine them releasing "Microsoft Napster", with built in monitoring for copyrighted goods, autoreporting, and network non-interoperability. Would Napster let them co-opt the name?
What's in a name? With software anyone can take and change, I'd say quite a lot.
It looks on the surface like it may be good for taking away those exchange users out there. The embedded app functionality is good -- most corporate types are addicted to double clicking icons of attachments in their email, and it will be nice to see that functionality under an OS I actually like.
To say nothing of how the world is ripe for a replacement for exchange solely on the basis of its inability to avoid spreading viruses like wildfire.
I've been a fan of stripping offsite images when desired, as well as blocking offsite cookies. And, of course, stopping javascript evils like popup windows. I've been tempted, whenver I had to look at too many geocities pages, to strip their little DHTML box away from the corner.
In any event, with all these changes, one has to wonder: is the banner ad on the way to "dead"? I'm much fonder of googles less-intrusive context-sensitive ads, and despise pop up windows and DHTML covers on pages. But it leads me to wonder if certain services (geocities?) would remain economically feasible.
That's half the question. The other thing the article shows the average reader (myself included), is that the press and community is quick to jump on corporate intervention in corporate-sponsored open source projects (or whatever term you prefer for Mozilla). All the better that it was a false alarm, but it was interesting to see how they went defensive.
The market does punish people who sell below cost: they lose money, and go out of business.
Seriously, there are many ways to advertise. Several companies that rent and sell DVDs gave me some free -- I originally claimed probably 7 free DVDs from various online vendors. They served as a form of advertising. As an offshoot, I signed up for the "marquee" program at netflix.com, where you pay a flat $16 (roughly) and get unlimited DVD rentals monthly. Due to a hectic job, they make a fortune off me, no doubt - but on the other hand, I get to hold onto the DVDs I rent indefinitely, the packaging is convenient, etc.
In the long run, losing money selling is a big advertising ploy, and it benefits consumers. You are essentially taking that VC money in the form of cheaper purchases.
There IS a place where it goes bad: monopolies. If you permit a company to undercut other companies to the point of their going out of business, then you can jack up the prices and pillage the public. This is generally why Standard Oil was broken up. So long as monopolistic risks are contained, there is no reason to intervene. The market will eventually punish those who overdo the "giveaway" -- because people invest to make money, not give it away.
I'm starting to get the feeling that Jon is becoming such a crusader, he's lost track of what he's really fighting about. Or, more appropriately, his moral compass isn't really guiding his ranting over freedom and privacy.
Slashdot has a proud history that I'm glad to take part in of supporting peoples rights, and I'm so far in agreement over most issues I'm surprised to disagree with Jon so much here. I think the DeCSS lawsuits are garbage, I think the DMCA is a PoS, and overextended copyright law, and more. But here, Jon, you're just way off base.
I've been reading slashdot since the napster debate started, laughing at people suing over a directory service. It's been absurd. All along, my thoughts have been: if you want to get the pirates, you'll have to sue the users. Personally, I'm amazed they're actually doing it. It's obviously going to cost them a ton more to pay the netPD people and the lawyers than it will help save/make them. So they're putting their $$ on the line to save other artists.
Obviously, Napster represents more than a community of music pirates. Lots of people (not me, of course, really!;) use Napster to sample this song or that, because you can't use a listening booth from your computer when you buy all your CDs online (and mp3 sounds better than the garbage protocols that they ARE trying to use to "securely" play music). The music industry needs to recognize the opportunity -- but companies have more ways to lose than win. The artists, however, have more ways to win than lose, and as soon as they recognize that, they'll look for more ways to embrace legitimate electronic distribution. I'm hoping some major stars will sign non-exclusive agreements with record companies that permit them to sell their songs electronically. In any event: Metallica isn't acting in the interests of the professional artists who are often abused on Napster. While it is indeed amazing they are going through the trouble, there's no legitimacy in complaining about their protecting their property. It most certainly should not be required to be free. It DOES take away their incentive to produce music, bit by bit.
Finally, there's a big educational opportunity. With all the press, someone should really analyze (survey says...) what the REAL cost is to the artists. I'd like to see a breakdown of people who got metallica mp3s online, and see what the percentages were of:
People who pirated the music who WOULD have bought it if it wasn't available
People who pirated it first, and bought a CD because of it, who wouldn't have otherwise
People who pirated (technically) the mp3, but own the CD already (for me, its faster to napster a copy down than it is to rip a copy of a CD)
It's often portrayed, either out of ignorance or for PR value, that the users pirating copies of a song are, in fact, costing each artist $16 each time, and obviously that's not nearly true. Such information might help convince artists to get online in a productive way.
And hey, when all is said and done, if people despise the provisions, they'll demand better. Perhaps open source. And that's where this gets interesting -- the software industry UCITA push is more anti-piracy. If people don't like the terms, where will they turn for software?
At least you'll never hear that Alan Cox accidentally turned off every copy of linux in the world -- I wouldn't trust certain companies to not make that mistake.
You should read papers you're going to quote if you don't understand them. Madison's essay (fed #10) is about the structure of government
as a means to cope with factions, not the duty of the government (which I've cited -- provide for the common defense, etc, etc).
I also haven't said self-interest alone is sufficient, because individuals, groups, corporations (or, in a word, everyone) is vulnerable to allowing their self-interest to trample the rights of others. The government exists to enforce the rights of people, including assuring their rights are not trampled on by any faction, corporate or political. (I'd say more damage is done in today's world by rabid social-agenda factions than by any corporation).
While I appreciate Rand's philosophy, I don't think it extrapolates into government. But Rand's philosophy is wholly compatible with the US government. But the author of the original post I replied to seemed to advocate a world where the government "valued" one sort of effort over another and artificially rewarded things like, free software creation. And that sort of change wouldn't be good for anyone, and ignores fundamental tenets of economics.
I think you've read in some absolutely crazed assumptions ("unless, I suppose, you believe we are a superior race") and derogatory "Randroid" comments, but that seems you're picturing some philosophy I don't have and arguing against it, rather than rationally commenting on what I said in my post.
I could literally write a book full of opinion on the issue, but fundamentally speaking, there's always this:
The government can't make anything. It can only take from one person to give to another. Unless this redistribution causes the total wealth/production to be more, they have decreased the total capacity to produce goods and services which people want. It has nothing to do with corporate america not having the "social clue" for creating a society where you can work on free code.
It wasn't "everyone, in the form of government trying to establish an equal basis" that made it possible for you to be so cush with your sysadmin job. It was everyone, in the form of enlightened self-interest fighting for a piece of the pie in the capitalist system, which made it possible. It was that which allowed us to economically evolve to where your intellectual abilities used in system administration allowed you to receive a large reward for what seems like comparatively small work (bit shuffling, as opposed to spending 14 hrs a day for caulking bathrooms at minimum wage). That capitalism at work ultimately results in technology that increases production, as well as motivation to use capital for that purpose and risk-taking for rewards.
It isn't a matter of WHO governs (elected officials, corporations, etc), its a matter of HOW they govern. We live in a democratic republic because our "founding fathers" decided it was the best way to prevent government oppression. That was the idea: provide the benefits of government (national defense, primarily), with the least amount of oppression of the people (having just come from an oppressive system).
"The government" can be attributed very little. Even in the cases where "the government" redistributed wealth, it was the people they TOOK IT FROM who created it, and that is definitely not responsible for your freedoms and economic effectiveness.
Re:Possible Uses of the Gathered Data
on
Linux on the Brain
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· Score: 1
By the time your mind-reading-hat, as you say, is reading your thoughts, I doubt you'll have anything in front of you that you'd identify as "a computer" like you do now. By then, the hat will probably be feeding your desires to your nanite-laden bloodstream.
Should companies donate their profits to any charity? I'd have to say, if there's nothing in it for them, no. People invest in companies to see their money increase in value. It is then THEIR responsibility to be charitable. Having companies donate money under the guise of "social responsibility" is inefficient.
Honeypots can be useful, but you need to maintain control over the system. The ideal honeypot runs its external services in a chrooted cage, and has an administrative access that isn't apparent from the outside (say, ssh on a high filtered port that to most ips will seem like there's no service there). Under such circumstances, crackers can reveal their MO, helping to keep an eye on other machines, or even upload their tools. I've seen cases where this has been incredibly useful. Moreover, it may be possible to track them while connected and distracted, but primarily, powerful logging will give you a much better idea of who's doing the dirty deeds and why. Getting a copy of a modified sshd the intruder is installing on vulnerable boxes, for example, might yield the secret backdoor password and make it easier to check for other compromised boxes, etc. It's irresponsible to give them a box on a platter that isn't in a cage. (even though it may be possible to escape it, history has shown most crackers don't notice until its too late)
His misuse of the term "Cantor's Set", among other things, is annoying, but it is still an ambitious attempt to explain the universe. Maybe this will tide the bored people over until New Scientist recovers from being slashdotted;)
Everyone I know who watches any tv to speak of loves TiVo. After they dominate that market, how long will it be before you can upgrade and get on-demand programming with your bandwidth? Instead of saying, "record at time X", just tell it "download X". If you're fast, watch it live, if not, come back and it will be there.
In 1994, a book entitled The Bell Curve was published, authored by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray (Herrnstein died shortly before publication).
The book had some absolutely jaw-dropping assertions regarding intelligence, intelligence testing, college admissions, social ills, and most of all, race and intelligence. The series in the book went something like this:
There is a single measurable core of intelligence, known as g (as first proposed by a man named Spearman, near the turn of the century)
This g (g == general intelligence) factor is substantially inheiritable, and there are differences found along racial lines in it
g substantially effects how people succeed in life. The authors assert it is a better predictor of adult earnings, college admissions, and so on, than is any other measure (once the subject is 10+ yrs of age, where measuring g stabilizes).
It is a fascinating and controversional book, with a hefty bearing on the subject at hand. Some of the statistics in the book point out the enormous SAT differences in some of the top colleges in the US of students of different races. The Black vs White SAT scores for the top 13 schools varied as much as ~170 points. (this is freshman admission scores) That in itself is not particularly controversial -- you can't argue against a number. But Murray and Herrnstein assert that this difference is caused by inheiritable intelligence differences -- i.e., whites are smarter than blacks, as groups. In fact, they basically state that whites are a full standard deviation smarter -- that the intelligence of the average white person places them in the 86th percentile of the black population. The more PC and traditional way of explaining this is the effects of socio-economic status on the test-takers in question.
With such assertions, its easy to see both why the book sold 500,000 copies, and why it spawned off a half dozen books, a hundred articles, and a storm of discussion. But how does it pertain to Legos? Well, one of Herrnstein and Murray's social policy recommendations was the strong change or removal of affirmative action. They claimed that permitting the disparity in scores gave a view on campuses of blacks and latinos (the "lower intelligence" groups their statistics showed) as incapable, and that it deprived "more capable" students of their chances.
Critics of the book and its science and policy have stated that the statistics methods used (specifically, multiple-regression analysis on the effects of Socio-economic status and iq scores and other factors) were prone to inaccuracy and misinterpretation. Critics also favored an attack against g as a concept -- that is, stating that a single intellectual ability does not exist, preferring measurements by other theories, including 3 or 7 "intelligences". When all was said and done, more people clearly came out against the book that for its premises and conclusions. Some parts met with more controversy than others. (Some of the less mentioned parts mention how, since people of intelligence levels tended to associate due to work, etc, and therefore have children in those circles, that if intelligence is genetic then the smart are getting smarter and the dumb are getting dumber, basically-- compounded by the fact that people of high intelligence (correlated with high education) have less children, and later in life.)
Two viewpoints on the book, for those interested, can be found at this link. For anyone interested in admissions testing, intelligence and its relationship to affirmative action, this is a must read, as are its equally well written and well argued counterarguments.
Note: the views expressed by the Bell Curve are not necessarily MY views, per se. I only recently read the book and a couple of the books with counterarguments or collections of them, and have not formed any solid conclusions yet. But the controversy was large, and the documentation copious, so investigation is worthy regardless of your political or social predisposition. I'm all about comments, but given the inflammatory nature of the material, please keep in mind that I'm not endorsing either side, so leave the flamethrowers at home.
I have a couple questions. Choose whatever you like. * The silicon valley is froth with IPOs. A huge opportunity exists even in Boston, if you were attached to the city. Do you regret not putting more into a commercial enterprise that could have netted you the millions some people are getting? If so, would you trade your fame in this community for it if you could? * L0pht spends an enormous amount of time hacking on other peoples' equipment, cracking and analyzing other peoples' software. Without meaning to denigrate such useful activities, do you ever want to stop it for a while and dedicate yourself to the creation of something innovative and positive? * Somewhere in the future, drowning in gigahertz, manufacturers turn to adding security to their CPUs. CPUs have decryption modules which stop the CPU from running any code not specifically signed and encrypted for your CPU. Your machine (or cpu) would come with a disk or cdrom with a public key you'd provide to vendors (probably on a web page) that would be used to "complete" a build of software that was sold to you, and lock it onto your CPU only. Every piece of software will have a known desination and a known source. Piracy will be a thousand times harder. Viruses will be wiped out by applying this technology to documents and software alike. Is this the future? * I see the patent situation forcing software to inevitably go one way or the other: it will either be written only by corporations with tons of money and patents, and be commercial (and by judgement-proof pauper-programmers who have nothing to sue away from them), or the USPTO will suffer through a massive regulation change, and thousands of software/algorithm/ business-model patents will be swept away, along with more easy way to review a given patent's "nonobvious"-ness. Where do you think this tragedy is headed?
Ugly spammer horror. The "unsolicited" in "Unsolicited Commercial Email" I've always taken to always include, "persons without a previous business relationship with the recipient" -- which certainly isn't any different just because someone else types in your address, instead of them harvesting it.
I love the php3/mySql combination. PHP makes the task of turning your data into web pages almost trivial, and both MySQL and PHP have excellent documentation. As for getting the data out of access, I'd save the data as delimited ascii, and then import it using perl with the DBD/DBI modules. That's also useful later on for various types of database maintenance.
There is a market of untold proportions customizing an OS for a given application -- like use within a certain company. Linux' openness and growing amount of support and administrative expertise will make it a great candidate for customized OS purchases in the future. It's about time everyone stopped having a computer that looked and acted like everyone elses -- instead, let it look and act in a way that best works for the user. How long will it be before companies regularly deploy an all linux setup? (picture the intranet web server, the samba server, then a mess of desktops with the company's enlightenment theme;))
It's an interesting question, when you wonder how to protect free software. I wonder if it would be possible for free code to be released by a nonprofit corporation(s). You could have a situation where free software is developed in an underground, then handed to individuals running nonprofits to "publish". I'd imagine only the corporation has liability, and it has no assets to recover. Additionally, you could look for people who were "judgement proof" to run the corporations. Fundamentally, there's liable to always be legal loopholes that protect people who want to put out something free, since you can't take their profits, etc. The real question is: what's this doing to innovation? The real scare ought to be flimsy patents defending non-innovation. There are a whole host of things that could be done to protect innovation, such as severly limiting how long a patent lasts, forcing licensing or capping license costs, etc. If only there was a good way to protect true innovation while getting rid of all the sharks in the pool...
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree -- as many posters have pointed out, Microsoft may have violated the Kerberos trademark, and may not have any legitimate claim on trade secrets, but they do control their publication, and I'm afraid slashdot is going to get bent over backwards on that point. (although I hope not)
/. crew, especially Taco, is happy to have a larger corporation standing behind (over?) them to dish out legal resources?
That said -- I wonder if the
First: why does it take so long to pass a simple piece of legislation? All they have to do is require "UCE:" or "AD:" at the beginning of every email, and with stiff penalties, that would be the end of spam. And that's a mild remedy -- there are better ways.
Second, I don't think HR 3113 was being referenced in the article. It seems as though the conference participants were suggesting more vicious legislation (the bounty hunter reference). HR 3113 primarily seems to establish one big opt-out list maintained by the FCC (yech), which you can ad yourself to, and UCE people must honor that opt-out.
On the plus, side the bill seems to offer up to $500/violation or $25k/day -- and as I read it, the lay person getting a piece of spam could literally sue for $25k or 75k for a willful violation. Can you say, "ow?"
Here's the link for the bill info:
HR3113.
I'm under the impression the DMCA does not mention reverse engineering as a barred category of action. It prohibits the circumvention of technology designed to protect a copyright, and reverse engineering for compatibility is a category exempted from that prohibition. Ergo, circumventing the encryption on a DVD is illegal, unless done for the purposes of compatibility (or security research, I believe).
So that part doesn't apply -- unless, of course, Sony decides to twist things around so this is somehow technology designed to violate copyright protections. After some of the other charges, would it be a surprise?
Yum, Yum.
Oops, hope no one saw that.
Seriously, though, it would be nice, albeit unexpected, if people had their facts straight.
There's a big difference between people handling physical security and network security, and the network security people, by and large, are about as far from chimp-dom as you can get.
It occured to me: is there a reason when free/open source projects get started they can't trademark the name of their work? The right license would then prevent Microsoft from co-opting the name. Because, after all, I doubt anyone cares that M$ takes Kerberos and modifies it. Even if they want to make it inoperable with the kerberos standard, fine. But if you're going to break the standard, you should HAVE TO DROP THE NAME. Imagine Microsoft releasing "Microsoft Linux" (win95 with a penguin background). Would Linus stand for it? Or, more realistically, imagine them releasing "Microsoft Napster", with built in monitoring for copyrighted goods, autoreporting, and network non-interoperability. Would Napster let them co-opt the name?
What's in a name? With software anyone can take and change, I'd say quite a lot.
It looks on the surface like it may be good for taking away those exchange users out there. The embedded app functionality is good -- most corporate types are addicted to double clicking icons of attachments in their email, and it will be nice to see that functionality under an OS I actually like.
To say nothing of how the world is ripe for a replacement for exchange solely on the basis of its inability to avoid spreading viruses like wildfire.
I've been a fan of stripping offsite images when desired, as well as blocking offsite cookies. And, of course, stopping javascript evils like popup windows. I've been tempted, whenver I had to look at too many geocities pages, to strip their little DHTML box away from the corner.
In any event, with all these changes, one has to wonder: is the banner ad on the way to "dead"? I'm much fonder of googles less-intrusive context-sensitive ads, and despise pop up windows and DHTML covers on pages. But it leads me to wonder if certain services (geocities?) would remain economically feasible.
That's half the question. The other thing the article shows the average reader (myself included), is that the press and community is quick to jump on corporate intervention in corporate-sponsored open source projects (or whatever term you prefer for Mozilla). All the better that it was a false alarm, but it was interesting to see how they went defensive.
The market does punish people who sell below cost: they lose money, and go out of business.
Seriously, there are many ways to advertise. Several companies that rent and sell DVDs gave me some free -- I originally claimed probably 7 free DVDs from various online vendors. They served as a form of advertising. As an offshoot, I signed up for the "marquee" program at netflix.com, where you pay a flat $16 (roughly) and get unlimited DVD rentals monthly. Due to a hectic job, they make a fortune off me, no doubt - but on the other hand, I get to hold onto the DVDs I rent indefinitely, the packaging is convenient, etc.
In the long run, losing money selling is a big advertising ploy, and it benefits consumers. You are essentially taking that VC money in the form of cheaper purchases.
There IS a place where it goes bad: monopolies. If you permit a company to undercut other companies to the point of their going out of business, then you can jack up the prices and pillage the public. This is generally why Standard Oil was broken up. So long as monopolistic risks are contained, there is no reason to intervene. The market will eventually punish those who overdo the "giveaway" -- because people invest to make money, not give it away.
Slashdot has a proud history that I'm glad to take part in of supporting peoples rights, and I'm so far in agreement over most issues I'm surprised to disagree with Jon so much here. I think the DeCSS lawsuits are garbage, I think the DMCA is a PoS, and overextended copyright law, and more. But here, Jon, you're just way off base.
I've been reading slashdot since the napster debate started, laughing at people suing over a directory service. It's been absurd. All along, my thoughts have been: if you want to get the pirates, you'll have to sue the users. Personally, I'm amazed they're actually doing it. It's obviously going to cost them a ton more to pay the netPD people and the lawyers than it will help save/make them. So they're putting their $$ on the line to save other artists.
Obviously, Napster represents more than a community of music pirates. Lots of people (not me, of course, really!
Finally, there's a big educational opportunity. With all the press, someone should really analyze (survey says...) what the REAL cost is to the artists. I'd like to see a breakdown of people who got metallica mp3s online, and see what the percentages were of:
People who pirated the music who WOULD have bought it if it wasn't available
People who pirated it first, and bought a CD because of it, who wouldn't have otherwise
People who pirated (technically) the mp3, but own the CD already (for me, its faster to napster a copy down than it is to rip a copy of a CD)
It's often portrayed, either out of ignorance or for PR value, that the users pirating copies of a song are, in fact, costing each artist $16 each time, and obviously that's not nearly true. Such information might help convince artists to get online in a productive way.
And hey, when all is said and done, if people despise the provisions, they'll demand better. Perhaps open source. And that's where this gets interesting -- the software industry UCITA push is more anti-piracy. If people don't like the terms, where will they turn for software?
At least you'll never hear that Alan Cox accidentally turned off every copy of linux in the world -- I wouldn't trust certain companies to not make that mistake.
You should read papers you're going to quote if you don't understand them. Madison's essay (fed #10) is about the structure of government as a means to cope with factions, not the duty of the government (which I've cited -- provide for the common defense, etc, etc).
I also haven't said self-interest alone is sufficient, because individuals, groups, corporations (or, in a word, everyone) is vulnerable to allowing their self-interest to trample the rights of others. The government exists to enforce the rights of people, including assuring their rights are not trampled on by any faction, corporate or political. (I'd say more damage is done in today's world by rabid social-agenda factions than by any corporation).
While I appreciate Rand's philosophy, I don't think it extrapolates into government. But Rand's philosophy is wholly compatible with the US government. But the author of the original post I replied to seemed to advocate a world where the government "valued" one sort of effort over another and artificially rewarded things like, free software creation. And that sort of change wouldn't be good for anyone, and ignores fundamental tenets of economics.
I think you've read in some absolutely crazed assumptions ("unless, I suppose, you believe we are a superior race") and derogatory "Randroid" comments, but that seems you're picturing some philosophy I don't have and arguing against it, rather than rationally commenting on what I said in my post.
I could literally write a book full of opinion on the issue, but fundamentally speaking, there's always this:
The government can't make anything. It can only take from one person to give to another. Unless this redistribution causes the total wealth/production to be more, they have decreased the total capacity to produce goods and services which people want. It has nothing to do with corporate america not having the "social clue" for creating a society where you can work on free code.
It wasn't "everyone, in the form of government trying to establish an equal basis" that made it possible for you to be so cush with your sysadmin job. It was everyone, in the form of enlightened self-interest fighting for a piece of the pie in the capitalist system, which made it possible. It was that which allowed us to economically evolve to where your intellectual abilities used in system administration allowed you to receive a large reward for what seems like comparatively small work (bit shuffling, as opposed to spending 14 hrs a day for caulking bathrooms at minimum wage). That capitalism at work ultimately results in technology that increases production, as well as motivation to use capital for that purpose and risk-taking for rewards.
It isn't a matter of WHO governs (elected officials, corporations, etc), its a matter of HOW they govern. We live in a democratic republic because our "founding fathers" decided it was the best way to prevent government oppression. That was the idea: provide the benefits of government (national defense, primarily), with the least amount of oppression of the people (having just come from an oppressive system).
"The government" can be attributed very little. Even in the cases where "the government" redistributed wealth, it was the people they TOOK IT FROM who created it, and that is definitely not responsible for your freedoms and economic effectiveness.
By the time your mind-reading-hat, as you say, is reading your thoughts, I doubt you'll have anything in front of you that you'd identify as "a computer" like you do now. By then, the hat will probably be feeding your desires to your nanite-laden bloodstream.
Should companies donate their profits to any charity? I'd have to say, if there's nothing in it for them, no. People invest in companies to see their money increase in value. It is then THEIR responsibility to be charitable. Having companies donate money under the guise of "social responsibility" is inefficient.
Honeypots can be useful, but you need to maintain control over the system. The ideal honeypot runs its external services in a chrooted cage, and has an administrative access that isn't apparent from the outside (say, ssh on a high filtered port that to most ips will seem like there's no service there). Under such circumstances, crackers can reveal their MO, helping to keep an eye on other machines, or even upload their tools. I've seen cases where this has been incredibly useful. Moreover, it may be possible to track them while connected and distracted, but primarily, powerful logging will give you a much better idea of who's doing the dirty deeds and why. Getting a copy of a modified sshd the intruder is installing on vulnerable boxes, for example, might yield the secret backdoor password and make it easier to check for other compromised boxes, etc. It's irresponsible to give them a box on a platter that isn't in a cage. (even though it may be possible to escape it, history has shown most crackers don't notice until its too late)
As someone else mentioned, I was spammed by Paytrust. I was thinking of signing up until that.
The CTMU
His misuse of the term "Cantor's Set", among other things, is annoying, but it is still an ambitious attempt to explain the universe. Maybe this will tide the bored people over until New Scientist recovers from being slashdotted
Everyone I know who watches any tv to speak of loves TiVo. After they dominate that market, how long will it be before you can upgrade and get on-demand programming with your bandwidth? Instead of saying, "record at time X", just tell it "download X". If you're fast, watch it live, if not, come back and it will be there.
The book had some absolutely jaw-dropping assertions regarding intelligence, intelligence testing, college admissions, social ills, and most of all, race and intelligence. The series in the book went something like this:
There is a single measurable core of intelligence, known as g (as first proposed by a man named Spearman, near the turn of the century)
This g (g == general intelligence) factor is substantially inheiritable, and there are differences found along racial lines in it
g substantially effects how people succeed in life. The authors assert it is a better predictor of adult earnings, college admissions, and so on, than is any other measure (once the subject is 10+ yrs of age, where measuring g stabilizes).
It is a fascinating and controversional book, with a hefty bearing on the subject at hand. Some of the statistics in the book point out the enormous SAT differences in some of the top colleges in the US of students of different races. The Black vs White SAT scores for the top 13 schools varied as much as ~170 points. (this is freshman admission scores) That in itself is not particularly controversial -- you can't argue against a number. But Murray and Herrnstein assert that this difference is caused by inheiritable intelligence differences -- i.e., whites are smarter than blacks, as groups. In fact, they basically state that whites are a full standard deviation smarter -- that the intelligence of the average white person places them in the 86th percentile of the black population. The more PC and traditional way of explaining this is the effects of socio-economic status on the test-takers in question.
With such assertions, its easy to see both why the book sold 500,000 copies, and why it spawned off a half dozen books, a hundred articles, and a storm of discussion. But how does it pertain to Legos? Well, one of Herrnstein and Murray's social policy recommendations was the strong change or removal of affirmative action. They claimed that permitting the disparity in scores gave a view on campuses of blacks and latinos (the "lower intelligence" groups their statistics showed) as incapable, and that it deprived "more capable" students of their chances.
Critics of the book and its science and policy have stated that the statistics methods used (specifically, multiple-regression analysis on the effects of Socio-economic status and iq scores and other factors) were prone to inaccuracy and misinterpretation. Critics also favored an attack against g as a concept -- that is, stating that a single intellectual ability does not exist, preferring measurements by other theories, including 3 or 7 "intelligences". When all was said and done, more people clearly came out against the book that for its premises and conclusions. Some parts met with more controversy than others. (Some of the less mentioned parts mention how, since people of intelligence levels tended to associate due to work, etc, and therefore have children in those circles, that if intelligence is genetic then the smart are getting smarter and the dumb are getting dumber, basically-- compounded by the fact that people of high intelligence (correlated with high education) have less children, and later in life.)
Two viewpoints on the book, for those interested, can be found at this link. For anyone interested in admissions testing, intelligence and its relationship to affirmative action, this is a must read, as are its equally well written and well argued counterarguments.
Note: the views expressed by the Bell Curve are not necessarily MY views, per se. I only recently read the book and a couple of the books with counterarguments or collections of them, and have not formed any solid conclusions yet. But the controversy was large, and the documentation copious, so investigation is worthy regardless of your political or social predisposition. I'm all about comments, but given the inflammatory nature of the material, please keep in mind that I'm not endorsing either side, so leave the flamethrowers at home.
I have a couple questions. Choose whatever you like. * The silicon valley is froth with IPOs. A huge opportunity exists even in Boston, if you were attached to the city. Do you regret not putting more into a commercial enterprise that could have netted you the millions some people are getting? If so, would you trade your fame in this community for it if you could? * L0pht spends an enormous amount of time hacking on other peoples' equipment, cracking and analyzing other peoples' software. Without meaning to denigrate such useful activities, do you ever want to stop it for a while and dedicate yourself to the creation of something innovative and positive? * Somewhere in the future, drowning in gigahertz, manufacturers turn to adding security to their CPUs. CPUs have decryption modules which stop the CPU from running any code not specifically signed and encrypted for your CPU. Your machine (or cpu) would come with a disk or cdrom with a public key you'd provide to vendors (probably on a web page) that would be used to "complete" a build of software that was sold to you, and lock it onto your CPU only. Every piece of software will have a known desination and a known source. Piracy will be a thousand times harder. Viruses will be wiped out by applying this technology to documents and software alike. Is this the future? * I see the patent situation forcing software to inevitably go one way or the other: it will either be written only by corporations with tons of money and patents, and be commercial (and by judgement-proof pauper-programmers who have nothing to sue away from them), or the USPTO will suffer through a massive regulation change, and thousands of software/algorithm/ business-model patents will be swept away, along with more easy way to review a given patent's "nonobvious"-ness. Where do you think this tragedy is headed?
Ugly spammer horror. The "unsolicited" in "Unsolicited Commercial Email" I've always taken to always include, "persons without a previous business relationship with the recipient" -- which certainly isn't any different just because someone else types in your address, instead of them harvesting it.
I love the php3/mySql combination. PHP makes the task of turning your data into web pages almost trivial, and both MySQL and PHP have excellent documentation. As for getting the data out of access, I'd save the data as delimited ascii, and then import it using perl with the DBD/DBI modules. That's also useful later on for various types of database maintenance.
There is a market of untold proportions customizing an OS for a given application -- like use within a certain company. Linux' openness and growing amount of support and administrative expertise will make it a great candidate for customized OS purchases in the future. It's about time everyone stopped having a computer that looked and acted like everyone elses -- instead, let it look and act in a way that best works for the user. How long will it be before companies regularly deploy an all linux setup? (picture the intranet web server, the samba server, then a mess of desktops with the company's enlightenment theme ;))
It's an interesting question, when you wonder how to protect free software. I wonder if it would be possible for free code to be released by a nonprofit corporation(s). You could have a situation where free software is developed in an underground, then handed to individuals running nonprofits to "publish". I'd imagine only the corporation has liability, and it has no assets to recover. Additionally, you could look for people who were "judgement proof" to run the corporations. Fundamentally, there's liable to always be legal loopholes that protect people who want to put out something free, since you can't take their profits, etc. The real question is: what's this doing to innovation? The real scare ought to be flimsy patents defending non-innovation. There are a whole host of things that could be done to protect innovation, such as severly limiting how long a patent lasts, forcing licensing or capping license costs, etc. If only there was a good way to protect true innovation while getting rid of all the sharks in the pool...