Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Sweden? (Score 1) 366

Don't be lazy. By being lazy you reducing the quality of the language, which (obviously!) is bad. Perhaps you should be liable for damages for unauthorized copying of the judgement text? With "reduction of quality" making it even worse!??

Joking aside...

I read and speak Swedish, and the google translation is not bad at all. Basically, the damage to the reputation of the movie(s) was valued at 300K SEK. The reasoning for this does not appear to be explained futher in the judgement, but I suspect the judge is not familiar with torrent download sites and believes that all torrent users expect perfect quality.

And it smacks of being punished for the same thing twice.... If I have a bad viewing of a movie because my TV set is wonky and add my review accordingly, I'm damaging the reputation too, right? ANYBODY who submits a bad review are in the same boat.

But this is only ~7% of the total judgement...

Comment Infinite recursion here? (Score 1) 128

So: This assumes that something, somewhere knows which transistors are unreliable. This data needs to be stored somewhere - on the "good" transistors. How is this data obtained? is there a trustworthy "map" of "unreliable transistors" ? And the code that determines the probability has to run on the "good" transistors too. Will those transistors stay good?

I cannot see any way of allowing *any* transistor being unreliable... And based on my (admittedly incomplete) understanding of chip production, *any one* of the transistors on the sillicon can be faulty, so there still is a chicken-and-egg problem in here somewhere.

Surely, such "suspect" transistors can only be used for storing the final end result of a calculation: If you were to use it for intermediate values on which you base "if" statements (or any sort of branch), your code will end up unreliable as a result. Unfortunately, 99% of the time the "end result" of one calculation is used as input to another calculation, so the problem spreads like rings in the water.

What if humans want to rely on the output of the computer? Does that pixel on the screen matter? If you are playing Angry Birds, fine. But the pixels may be important if you're a doctor looking at a scan. Or you're a flight controller scanning the screen for planes. The graphics routines do not know the context in which they run. So the actual usability of this ends up being radically diminished....

What use is a computer where you cannot trust the result? We already have logic bugs, race conditions, usability issues etc confusing everybody - I don't think we need to make the computers even more unreliable...

Comment Re:Spam filter? (Score 1) 159

That's no good! Terrorists will just disguise their emails as spam by sending it out to millions, and things will go unnoticed by the NSA: Too many dots to connect, which will (as usual) only be discovered by hindsight.

Obviously the intended terrorist agent on the receiving end will have a similar problem... Which means that the NSA can recognise the terrorists, because they're the ones reading everything in their Junk folder!

Oooh - the arms race will never end :-)

Nice to see that spammers are useful for something though: Keeping both the NSA and (some) terrorists busy at the same time!

Comment Re:Revision control systems are not installation s (Score 1) 211

Development race conditions. Ever done svn up on the production server, just to find that someone had committed broken code between your test run and the deployment

If this happens, then you are doing things wrong.

You should know that YourApp version X is what QA tested. Because the developers tagged it before giving it to the QA guys.

You should know that upgrading your live environment to YouApp version X is not the same as "Upgrade live to latest commit". This race condition is easily solved by proper understanding of how people use your version control system.

In other words: Use the tags, Luke!

Arguably, using "svn update" (or whatver equivalent in your chosen VCS is) is only useful for projects that require no compilation or installation other than "just copy files about". Most are more complex than that.

Comment Re:Encryption (Score 1) 157

Agreements with Verisign (or other CAs) would not help here: Verisign will NOT get the website's private key when somebody ask for a certificate.

It is possible (but unlikely) that the CSR (Certficate Signing Request) may be of use to NSA though. It does NOT contain the private key.

It is MUCH easier to strong-arm a CA to sign NSAs newly-generated key for e.g. "facebook.com" and play man-in-the-middle on whatever traffic they're listening in on - isn't that what Iran did with google traffic? (My memory is vague here...)

Comment Re:Another false dichotomy (Score 1) 434

He is so reliable that we can create formulas based upon it

The formulas do not demonstrate the presense of any deities. They show the relationship between cause and effect; not a sign of a divine intelligence, love, hate, desire to be worshipped or any other attributes generally associated with deities. Basing a belief in a deity upon the laws of the universe as we understand them is non-sensical. So you need some other basis for bringing a deity into the picture.

If you argue that a deity created the universe to perfectly fit human believers then you fall foul of the Anthropic principle. Even more so if any the multiverse theories are true.

Comment Re:And then they posted the complaint.. (Score 1) 135

Go ahead. Download Tears of Steel. From wherever. You're allowed to - it is licensed under the Creative Commons Attributions 3.0 license, so you're allowed to! Be sure to read the license before re-sharing though - you'll have to give credit where credit is due.

See http://mango.blender.org/sharing/ for details.

Submission + - Want to claim benefits in the UK online? Downgrade your computer first

Jorgensen writes: A colleague pointed me to this little gem: http://dwp.gov.uk/eservice/need.asp — so if there is anybody out there still using XP and IE6: Your backwardness and unwillingness to upgrade has finally paid off! If you're entitled to UK government benefits, you can actually claim online!

But if you're entitled to benefits and do *not* have an windows box of sufficient age: tough.

Although I'm not completely surprised by the level of standards-support in the UK, how do things look in the rest of the world? Are other nations equally out-of-touch? crazy? funny? or just weird?

Comment Re:Not dogmatic? (Score 1) 123

Ahem... Good analogy, bad conclusion...

A good analogy is if the UK government mandated that fleet vehicles have their design and manufacturing processes laid bare, or they wouldn't buy the vehicles. I really don't care about the processes documentation - buy the best car at the best price.

If the government did this, it would be in trouble as soon as the vehicle needs maintenance. Or if you wanted to modify the vehicle later. If you MUST go back to the vendor for this, you have just accepted the fate of a captive customer - good luck in the negotiations.

Slashdot Top Deals

If all else fails, lower your standards.

Working...