Unless he is supporting the theory I have heard from various sources, that 1% of programmers do 100 times the work of the other 99%, a large proportion of whom are pretty much incompetent. I can't back that one up myself, apart from to mention that the people who interview where I work toss out 2/3 of their applicants "with experience" as being terrible, including someone with 3 years of C who is claimed to have said "I'm not sure what the funny star things are for".
It is reasonable to suppose that no matter how good the code, an incompetent programmer will have difficulty understanding it.
We have two of these in the office which boot from CF cards, but as far as I know this model was/is only available in Germany.
Re:So "open" and "free" are only good sometimes ?
on
Carnivore Demo Report
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· Score: 2
Because people have rights, and logically following from that is that governments have no rights. If you are going to assume the responsibility of telling people what to do, and punishing people for not doing it, you must be as open and accountable about that process as humanly possible. I am entitled to personal privacy under the European Human Rights Act. My government isn't.
The article is specifically talking about using IP6 to talk to mobile devices. That is what I was discussing. I said "phones" because those are the most common mobile device, and I can't imagine that there will never ever be a mobile phone with an IP stack of some sort. In fact I would be surprised if at least one doesn't already exist. But if not, just substitute for "phone" whatever sort of mobile device _you_ think the article was talking about, and the point stands.
I was made to write an essay a couple of years ago about the proposals for mobility within IP6, and then I'm fairly sure that, although IP6 could be used by tunneling through a known "home base" router, the suggestions for making IP6 reliable and sane on mobile devices were not yet part of the official IP6 standard. If you can only get your packets through one guy on the other side of the world who you keep updated with your position, you are entirely dependent on that guy, and your packets are also likely to be going well out of their way.
To be reliable on mobile devices, IP6 would need built in support for informing the other side of each connection when your location changes. This is in an RFC which I dug up here, but does anyone know whether that is commonly implemented in IP6 stacks? Or how usable the tunnelling thing would (or wouldn't) be once everyone and his dog has an internet enabled mobile phone?
You just can't do that. Perhaps you could stop say 25% of porn that comes from the US. But any search for porn will still come up with fifty million sites: nobody looking for porn would even notice the difference!
What I want to know is, what is so intrinsically terrible about children looking at porn while they are at school? If they are doing it while they should be doing work, it is only as bad as them browsing Disney.com while they should be doing work. If they are eating bandwidth, it is only as bad as them burning Red Hat CDs. And if their parents think they should be prevented from seeing naked people, are we going to filter ankles from the Muslim students, and gay rights information from students with homophobe parents? What about sex education from students whose parents don't agree with it?
In fact, given the quality of sex education in some schools, it might be good for the students to check out some porn just so they learn which bits go where!
I can certainly see that any individual school might make the decision to block porn if it has a problem with it, the same as my primary school banned yoyos one time when there was a craze for them. But I see no obvious reason why all schools should be automatically required to ban porn, no matter how excellent the filters might be. To what extent are schools required to shelter their students from the outside world according to each set of parents' beliefs?
So... If British health care is adequate, nobody should need health insurance, or at least, if they cannot get it for whatever reason, it isn't a problem. If the health care is _not_ adequate, then my argument still stands.
Is that insurance is a badly thought out way of caring for the sick.
Plenty of people have high insurance premiums because of factors that are discoverable _without_ technology. We don't prevent the insurance companies from demanding to know about those factors, do we? It would be unfair to mandate that insurance companies not ask people about their family history, or their past health, just because the company might raise the premium or refuse the insurance. What has technology got to do with it?
Surely the point is that insurance is a crap way to care for the sick. The people who are sick from birth can't get insurance, or if they can, they can't afford it. People at high risk of ill health for _any_ reason are in the same boat. In a society that agrees that the sick should be cared for if they cannot care for themselves, there needs to be another way to pay for it besides insurance.
The best one around here was from someone with "three years of C" who was asked to describe what a certain piece of code did, and said something like "I think I know what it does, but I'm not sure what the funny star things are for".
...and the disadvantage of a library, is that the stuff is selected by a librarian, according to a view of what is interesting that is specific to the age in which he is living and the culture to which he belongs. (Or she, or it). Thus I believe there is a good deal of value in the idea of a library which is not filtered at the time of collection, but which can be filtered at the time of reading according to the interests of the reader.
For example: In three hundred years, pornography is viewed as a valuable cultural resource. A historian wishes to study the subject of pornography over the ages and relate it to the prevailing attitudes in those ages. The historian will be stuffed, because to a librarian now, pornography is clearly not suitable for inclusion.
The history we have is much more a history of the rich and powerful, and not a history of the poor, because nobody wrote anything about the poor. Today, big scientific tomes are kept, but Joe Blogg's Geocities page (with exciting photos of him and his family and his cat) gets binned. In three hundred years this might be interesting historical evidence, the same as Joe Chimney Sweep's diary from 1800 or something.
The technology to do this effectively might not really be here yet, but it will probably arrive in those three hundred years. (Unless we're all too busy looking at porn instead;) )
The ramifications of that are clearly over the border of common sense
And in my opinion, installing equipment with which it is entirely possible to monitor anyone's traffic, with no warrant and no reason, is not just over the border of common sense but over the border of human rights.
And, you'd be surprised how many criminals DO use the net to plan their crimes...
I doubt it. Nevertheless, if we can't stop them without an enormous and fundamental breach of everyone else's rights, then we can't and shouldn't stop them. Like, we could stop criminals that plan crimes by conversing in the middle of public parks, by bugging all the public parks. Should we?
A. The governent has the ability to catch all the paedophiles, terrorists and so on by means of black boxes which read all their email. Since the boxes are black, you have to take it on Government say-so that they operate legally and only under warrant. The government therefore has the capability to silently upgrade the box to spy at any time on the private communication of all its law-abiding citizens, and send the men in balaclavas round to fetch anyone that seems subversive. Meanwhile all terrorists and paedophiles with two brain cells to rub together are not using the internet to discuss their evil plans.
B. The black box is not in place, or an open solution is used instead, and a few people use the internet to plan crimes.
I would suggest that under the US constitution option B is the only viable one. Ditto the European Human Rights laws. And personally I would certainly prefer option B.
To put it a different way: If a relative of yours was blown up after two men in trench coats planted a bomb, and this could have been prevented had all policemen had orders to shoot on sight all people wearing trench coats, would this have been the right thing to do? Sometimes we have to choose the lesser of two evils.
Things like instructions for making drugs, race hate literature and pornography are not "speech", and should not benefit from the protections built into Freenet
Freenet is meant to be international. There isn't any international agreement on what is "rubbish". In the US the things you mention are constitutionally protected. In Holland not only is cannabis growing information legal, but so is growing the cannabis and smoking it. In England (and, I would have thought, most countries) a lot of pornography is legal, and is used by happy consenting adults to enhance beautiful relationships. In some countries pictures of women's legs are immoral.
The usual way of handling your personal values is that if you are homophobic, you avoid gay bars, if you don't like pornography, don't buy any, and if you don't want your children making drugs, teach them about why you think it is bad. You do not have to impose your values on everyone else on the entire planet, with a multitude of diverse cultures and value systems, most of which are unlikely to be anything like yours. I wouldn't suggest that the whole world bans sprouts, just because I don't like them.
You should probably try to program in Java first before you make statements like that! Java is compiled, just like C++, and always has been. Anyway, the web page you pointed to only mentions Java _on web pages_. By far the largest use of Java these days is server-side, and nothing to do with graphics at all. I'd agree that gaudy web pages are pants, but that has more to do with the designers than the language they write in!
Re:And how is that money obtained?
on
Lawsuits Suck
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· Score: 1
You seem to be saying that anything I do which makes myself more money must be moral, because God gave me brains to make money.
But clearly you would not say that robbing a bank is moral, even if I were to make lots of money. So there remains the fact that one should use some kind of moral guidelines to define how one can earn money.
And by my morals, a lot of the lawyers and politicians you mention should be grouped in with the bank robbers.
Re:And how is that money obtained?
on
Lawsuits Suck
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· Score: 1
I would love to see the data with which you back up that statement. Is it true in the US that only hard working righteous people have any money?
I thought most of the money in the US belongs to corporations, which have no religion and do not do any hard work. Their power seems to be directed more to making themselves lots of money than to any Good Christian kind of ethical influence. I don't know what shocks you so much about the idea of putting the power in the hands of people and not large corporate entities.
How does "lengthy subscriber contract" affect my cell phone? I mean, I go to the shop, buy a new phone and put in my SIM-card..Voila, changed phone and kept subscription.
I paid about £10 for my phone and maybe £200 over a year for the contract. To buy the same phone with no contract (and therefore no subsidy) would have cost me about £200. Then I would have to pay for a contract ON TOP of that. Few people are going to like that idea.
all of this can be handled via X10, which is fairly inexpensive
...unless you live in the UK, where it costs an absolute fortune...
anyway I was looking into getting some X10 stuff for when we go on holiday, so the inlaws don't have to come over and draw the curtains all the time. The protocol is really only designed for use with a remote control, or a switch, where you are present at the time. There is no way of checking that your commands are correctly received by a device, or querying the state of a device. One burst of noise over your mains when your PC is trying to shut the curtains, and for the rest of your holiday the curtains will be shut all day and open at night;) Or something like that.
If I could find devices using a better protocol with some ACKs and NACKs in there somewhere, I'd be a lot happier about internetting my house with them. In particular I _really_ want to be emailed when my burglar alarm goes off so I can have a look at my house web cam and if necessary phone the police. I also want central locking for my house, including my shed and my back gate. And I want to be able to turn on my oven when I'm leaving work.
$ cat houselog
24.8.00
07:00 Preprogrammed request
Curtains open
11:23 Movement detected at front gate
Gardencam on
Radio on
11:24 Doorbell rung
HARRI alerted
20:43 Dusk detected
Curtains shut, lights on
21:00 Preprogrammed request
Hot water on, oven on, front door light on
21:15 Householder return
House to manual control
I'd say that individual rights are pretty important here in Canada, just as they are in the USA. For example, IIRC there is a court case currently underway to prevent a citizens' group from distributing a list of names and addresses of known sex offenders. The rationale? These pervs^H^H^H^H^H people could be attacked, their houses burned etc. If that's not "individual rights over the collective" I don't know what is.
That's not the only rationale. A stronger one is that sex offenders whose names are on the list, and who are monitored at their address by the social services and the police and everyone, will be moving out quick sharp. Then not only will the list be useless for its intended purpose, but even the police won't know where the offenders are to keep an eye on them. This is more the collective right than the individual.
I suppose that you could use all of this excess crap to provide that, but why?
What "excess crap" are you talking about exactly? I doubt they are going to put a full install of RH on these phones, with Gnome installed and Star Office and drivers for a million different kinds of hardware. Half the point of using Linux on small devices is how easy it is to cut out anything which you find to be "excess crap".
Most users will never make good use of all of it though, and quite frankly, some of this stuff is better suited to other devices.
Other devices than what? Than their screen phone thing? I think an email/web pad type gadget with an address book in and a diary would be the one technological thing that Grandma might actually use, if you made the interface simple enough. If you think about it, a gadget like that plus a playstation would provide all the functionality that the average family uses a PC for, with much less complexity and at half the price.
From Ericsson's webpage about one of their mobiles that they are bringing out soon (the R380):
It's powered by Symbian's EPOC based operating system and has a complete range of PDA-like tools including address book, calendar, notepad and support for synchronization with industry-leading PC applications. It has voice dialling / answering, vibrating alert, voice memo, an in-built modem and a full graphic display with touch screen.
They also make DECT phones, and it seems they want to get into the home wireless networking game too (web pads and stuff I guess). I can see plenty plenty of applications there.
... but (unlike ethernet) it's intended for use over very small distances between mobile devices, replacing IrDA. For example, to allow your mobile phone to act as a modem for your organiser or your laptop. It doesn't require line-of-sight, it isn't designed to be very high-bandwidth, and it intentionally doesn't have enough range to be a substitute for wireless ethernet. As for why you should be interested: absolutely no reason. If you aren't, don't read the article.
Suppose someone is told by their doctor that their children had a 50% chance of having a certain painful disease which eventually results in an early death. Bringing up a child with this disease would cost more money than they have, and the child would have a terrible quality of life while the parents struggle to earn enough for basic treatment for the condition.
Could you fault this person for choosing not to have children?
To put it differently, if your parents had chosen not to conceive you, perhaps for career reasons, or whatever, would that really be so callous? Would it be murder, akin to abortion or to abandoning you on a hillside once born? Is it wrong for anyone to choose not to have as many children as they possibly can, since they are denying life to the ones who could have been conceived?
There is a mighty difference between saying "I choose not to have children" and saying "I wish I had never had my children".
They're still free, the ISP isn't getting the money that the call costs, the telco is.
Yes, the ISP is. That's the point. BT sell them the call time cheap. They sell it on to you (effectively) for the usual rate. The ISP usually sees 1p/minute or so while you stay online, I believe.
Slashdot Mirror
It is reasonable to suppose that no matter how good the code, an incompetent programmer will have difficulty understanding it.
We have two of these in the office which boot from CF cards, but as far as I know this model was/is only available in Germany.
Because people have rights, and logically following from that is that governments have no rights. If you are going to assume the responsibility of telling people what to do, and punishing people for not doing it, you must be as open and accountable about that process as humanly possible. I am entitled to personal privacy under the European Human Rights Act. My government isn't.
The article is specifically talking about using IP6 to talk to mobile devices. That is what I was discussing. I said "phones" because those are the most common mobile device, and I can't imagine that there will never ever be a mobile phone with an IP stack of some sort. In fact I would be surprised if at least one doesn't already exist. But if not, just substitute for "phone" whatever sort of mobile device _you_ think the article was talking about, and the point stands.
To be reliable on mobile devices, IP6 would need built in support for informing the other side of each connection when your location changes. This is in an RFC which I dug up here, but does anyone know whether that is commonly implemented in IP6 stacks? Or how usable the tunnelling thing would (or wouldn't) be once everyone and his dog has an internet enabled mobile phone?
What I want to know is, what is so intrinsically terrible about children looking at porn while they are at school? If they are doing it while they should be doing work, it is only as bad as them browsing Disney.com while they should be doing work. If they are eating bandwidth, it is only as bad as them burning Red Hat CDs. And if their parents think they should be prevented from seeing naked people, are we going to filter ankles from the Muslim students, and gay rights information from students with homophobe parents? What about sex education from students whose parents don't agree with it?
In fact, given the quality of sex education in some schools, it might be good for the students to check out some porn just so they learn which bits go where!
I can certainly see that any individual school might make the decision to block porn if it has a problem with it, the same as my primary school banned yoyos one time when there was a craze for them. But I see no obvious reason why all schools should be automatically required to ban porn, no matter how excellent the filters might be. To what extent are schools required to shelter their students from the outside world according to each set of parents' beliefs?
So... If British health care is adequate, nobody should need health insurance, or at least, if they cannot get it for whatever reason, it isn't a problem. If the health care is _not_ adequate, then my argument still stands.
Plenty of people have high insurance premiums because of factors that are discoverable _without_ technology. We don't prevent the insurance companies from demanding to know about those factors, do we? It would be unfair to mandate that insurance companies not ask people about their family history, or their past health, just because the company might raise the premium or refuse the insurance. What has technology got to do with it?
Surely the point is that insurance is a crap way to care for the sick. The people who are sick from birth can't get insurance, or if they can, they can't afford it. People at high risk of ill health for _any_ reason are in the same boat. In a society that agrees that the sick should be cared for if they cannot care for themselves, there needs to be another way to pay for it besides insurance.
The best one around here was from someone with "three years of C" who was asked to describe what a certain piece of code did, and said something like "I think I know what it does, but I'm not sure what the funny star things are for".
For example: In three hundred years, pornography is viewed as a valuable cultural resource. A historian wishes to study the subject of pornography over the ages and relate it to the prevailing attitudes in those ages. The historian will be stuffed, because to a librarian now, pornography is clearly not suitable for inclusion.
The history we have is much more a history of the rich and powerful, and not a history of the poor, because nobody wrote anything about the poor. Today, big scientific tomes are kept, but Joe Blogg's Geocities page (with exciting photos of him and his family and his cat) gets binned. In three hundred years this might be interesting historical evidence, the same as Joe Chimney Sweep's diary from 1800 or something.
The technology to do this effectively might not really be here yet, but it will probably arrive in those three hundred years. (Unless we're all too busy looking at porn instead ;) )
And in my opinion, installing equipment with which it is entirely possible to monitor anyone's traffic, with no warrant and no reason, is not just over the border of common sense but over the border of human rights.
And, you'd be surprised how many criminals DO use the net to plan their crimes...
I doubt it. Nevertheless, if we can't stop them without an enormous and fundamental breach of everyone else's rights, then we can't and shouldn't stop them. Like, we could stop criminals that plan crimes by conversing in the middle of public parks, by bugging all the public parks. Should we?
A. The governent has the ability to catch all the paedophiles, terrorists and so on by means of black boxes which read all their email. Since the boxes are black, you have to take it on Government say-so that they operate legally and only under warrant. The government therefore has the capability to silently upgrade the box to spy at any time on the private communication of all its law-abiding citizens, and send the men in balaclavas round to fetch anyone that seems subversive. Meanwhile all terrorists and paedophiles with two brain cells to rub together are not using the internet to discuss their evil plans.
B. The black box is not in place, or an open solution is used instead, and a few people use the internet to plan crimes.
I would suggest that under the US constitution option B is the only viable one. Ditto the European Human Rights laws. And personally I would certainly prefer option B.
To put it a different way: If a relative of yours was blown up after two men in trench coats planted a bomb, and this could have been prevented had all policemen had orders to shoot on sight all people wearing trench coats, would this have been the right thing to do? Sometimes we have to choose the lesser of two evils.
Freenet is meant to be international. There isn't any international agreement on what is "rubbish". In the US the things you mention are constitutionally protected. In Holland not only is cannabis growing information legal, but so is growing the cannabis and smoking it. In England (and, I would have thought, most countries) a lot of pornography is legal, and is used by happy consenting adults to enhance beautiful relationships. In some countries pictures of women's legs are immoral.
The usual way of handling your personal values is that if you are homophobic, you avoid gay bars, if you don't like pornography, don't buy any, and if you don't want your children making drugs, teach them about why you think it is bad. You do not have to impose your values on everyone else on the entire planet, with a multitude of diverse cultures and value systems, most of which are unlikely to be anything like yours. I wouldn't suggest that the whole world bans sprouts, just because I don't like them.
You should probably try to program in Java first before you make statements like that! Java is compiled, just like C++, and always has been. Anyway, the web page you pointed to only mentions Java _on web pages_. By far the largest use of Java these days is server-side, and nothing to do with graphics at all. I'd agree that gaudy web pages are pants, but that has more to do with the designers than the language they write in!
But clearly you would not say that robbing a bank is moral, even if I were to make lots of money. So there remains the fact that one should use some kind of moral guidelines to define how one can earn money.
And by my morals, a lot of the lawyers and politicians you mention should be grouped in with the bank robbers.
I thought most of the money in the US belongs to corporations, which have no religion and do not do any hard work. Their power seems to be directed more to making themselves lots of money than to any Good Christian kind of ethical influence. I don't know what shocks you so much about the idea of putting the power in the hands of people and not large corporate entities.
And just to help confused people, "handy" is the English word for "mobile phone", but not in English-speaking countries.
I paid about £10 for my phone and maybe £200 over a year for the contract. To buy the same phone with no contract (and therefore no subsidy) would have cost me about £200. Then I would have to pay for a contract ON TOP of that. Few people are going to like that idea.
anyway I was looking into getting some X10 stuff for when we go on holiday, so the inlaws don't have to come over and draw the curtains all the time. The protocol is really only designed for use with a remote control, or a switch, where you are present at the time. There is no way of checking that your commands are correctly received by a device, or querying the state of a device. One burst of noise over your mains when your PC is trying to shut the curtains, and for the rest of your holiday the curtains will be shut all day and open at night ;) Or something like that.
If I could find devices using a better protocol with some ACKs and NACKs in there somewhere, I'd be a lot happier about internetting my house with them. In particular I _really_ want to be emailed when my burglar alarm goes off so I can have a look at my house web cam and if necessary phone the police. I also want central locking for my house, including my shed and my back gate. And I want to be able to turn on my oven when I'm leaving work.
$ cat houselog
24.8.00
07:00 Preprogrammed request
Curtains open
11:23 Movement detected at front gate
Gardencam on
Radio on
11:24 Doorbell rung
HARRI alerted
20:43 Dusk detected
Curtains shut, lights on
21:00 Preprogrammed request
Hot water on, oven on, front door light on
21:15 Householder return
House to manual control
$
That's not the only rationale. A stronger one is that sex offenders whose names are on the list, and who are monitored at their address by the social services and the police and everyone, will be moving out quick sharp. Then not only will the list be useless for its intended purpose, but even the police won't know where the offenders are to keep an eye on them. This is more the collective right than the individual.
What "excess crap" are you talking about exactly? I doubt they are going to put a full install of RH on these phones, with Gnome installed and Star Office and drivers for a million different kinds of hardware. Half the point of using Linux on small devices is how easy it is to cut out anything which you find to be "excess crap".
Most users will never make good use of all of it though, and quite frankly, some of this stuff is better suited to other devices.
Other devices than what? Than their screen phone thing? I think an email/web pad type gadget with an address book in and a diary would be the one technological thing that Grandma might actually use, if you made the interface simple enough. If you think about it, a gadget like that plus a playstation would provide all the functionality that the average family uses a PC for, with much less complexity and at half the price.
It's powered by Symbian's EPOC based operating system and has a complete range of PDA-like tools including address book, calendar, notepad and support for synchronization with industry-leading PC applications. It has voice dialling / answering, vibrating alert, voice memo, an in-built modem and a full graphic display with touch screen.
They also make DECT phones, and it seems they want to get into the home wireless networking game too (web pads and stuff I guess). I can see plenty plenty of applications there.
... but (unlike ethernet) it's intended for use over very small distances between mobile devices, replacing IrDA. For example, to allow your mobile phone to act as a modem for your organiser or your laptop. It doesn't require line-of-sight, it isn't designed to be very high-bandwidth, and it intentionally doesn't have enough range to be a substitute for wireless ethernet. As for why you should be interested: absolutely no reason. If you aren't, don't read the article.
Could you fault this person for choosing not to have children?
To put it differently, if your parents had chosen not to conceive you, perhaps for career reasons, or whatever, would that really be so callous? Would it be murder, akin to abortion or to abandoning you on a hillside once born? Is it wrong for anyone to choose not to have as many children as they possibly can, since they are denying life to the ones who could have been conceived?
There is a mighty difference between saying "I choose not to have children" and saying "I wish I had never had my children".
Yes, the ISP is. That's the point. BT sell them the call time cheap. They sell it on to you (effectively) for the usual rate. The ISP usually sees 1p/minute or so while you stay online, I believe.