DNA databases are very bad, unless they are very complete (they may still be bad, but not for the reason I am about to give).
The problem is that DNA analysis as used to identify people does not do a complete analysis of the DNA. They basically only look at a few parts of the DNA. That is not enough to uniquely identify a person. For a given DNA sample, there will be dozens or more people in the country who match.
When used with other evidence, DNA is great. For example, if without using DNA evidence, you have narrowed it down to 3 suspects, and then you take DNA samples and compare to DNA from the criminal, and you get a match, you have, to a very high probability, got the right person. There might be dozens of people in the country who would match that DNA sample, but the chances that one of those dozens just happened to be one of your suspects is very small.
However, if you start with the DNA, and that is all you have, the chances are good that your match from the database is not the right person. As I said in the previous paragraph, there are dozens or people that match a given DNA sample. That chances are low that someone picked up just for the DNA match is the criminal.
Next time, the terrorists will make sure to take all phones and other communications devices from the passengers.
It is too bad that the role of cell phones was given so much attention. It would have been better for that to have been kept quite. Eventually, terrorists would have figured it out on the own, of course, so in the long run it makes no difference, but in the short run, it could mean a few hundred lives saved.
Uhm...that is not an example of monopoly leverage. Leveraging is using your monopoly to expand into a different market. Here, they are using their OS monopoly to protect the OS monopoly.
OK, let's see if we can put this in terms the average/. reader might better understand. Why is it cool to study the weather of Mars?
Answer: because the people who study weather don't get to do experiments ("Hey, Bob...let's bump up the rainfall in Kansas 5 cm this winter, and see if that affects tornado formation next summer"). So, it helps a lot to be able to look at different examples, like other planets.
Economics is like that. There are experimental scientists doing economics, but they generally only get to study microeconomics.
Game economies give economists a chance to look at something large, yet different from the "real world" economy. It's like looking at Martian weather.
Verizon is NOT preventing spam. The address restrictions are totally ineffective for that.(Their FAQ even implies this).
Verizon's email address restrictions are there for exactly one purpose: to get people who need to use their own domain to switch to Verizon to host the domain. It is purely a way to extract another few dollars a month from some customers.
I think that it is not so much multitasking that is bad for productivity, but rather preemption.
I'm pretty sure I work best when I have three or four tasks on my queue, that I decide when to switch among. I only switch tasks when I'm stuck on one, and need to give it a chance to bounce around my subconscious for a while. This puts the context switch overhead in what would otherwise by dead time, so is efficient.
The problem is not PPPoE. The problem is that SBC is trying to force ISPs to stop using static IP addresses.
Here's how DSL works. The phone company provides a line, a DSL modem, and some equipment in the central office. Using whatever protocol they want, they establish a connection between your modem and their equipment. It looks like an ethernet connection to your computer.
The phone company equipment in the central office is connected to your ISP, typically over the phone company's ATM network. The packets to and from your DSL modem are encapsulated and sent via ATM.
Note that is is all happening at a lower level than IP. Your IP address comes from your ISP. The phone company is not involved at the IP level, any more than they are when you use you regular modem over your phone line.
What SBC is doing is telling the ISP that they must use PPPoE, and they must not provide static IP addresses.
To put this in pre-DSL terms, this would be like the phone company telling your ISP that your ISP was not allowed to support SLIP...all dialup customers must be on PPP.
If you are using SBC as your ISP, this is fine. If, however, you are using some other ISP, and SBC is just providing the below-IP-level connection, it is none of their damn business what protocol you and the ISP agree to use over that connection, and it is certainly none of their business how your ISP allocates IP addresses.
Or, how about taking it from the other direction? That is, the users get together, rather than the websites.
E.g., suppose 300 users with a common interest (let's use Everquest for this example) get together and agree to each donate $1.50 a month. That's $450/month. That's enough for a dedicated server with 10 GB/month bandwidth from rackspace.com.
These 300 users then find Everquest sites that they like, and offer to give those sites free hosting on their server, in exchange for premium access (e.g., no ads for the server owners).
OK, here's the point. I live in an apartment. I want a Linux box I can put on my LAN and have it be my mail server and firewall and NAT server for my Windows machine and my other machine that alternates between Windows (when I want to play both my Everquest accounts at the same time) and Linux.
Here are the requirements for my server/firewall/NAT box:
1. It should be relatively inexpensive.
2. It should not generate much noise. I do not want to be able to hear it running during quiet parts of movies I'm watching (Remember...apartment...my home theatre is in my home datacenter)
3. It should be small.
A PS2 with Linux fits these requirements. (So would a hacked Tivo, which is another possibility, but I'd like to avoid hardware hacking)
The problem with this is that it accomplishes zero to reduce spam. There are two possible reasons why Verizon could be doing this:
1. They think it will reduce spam. If so, they are completely clueless. This is bad because it is bad in general to have large ISPs that have no idea how to run a network, and also they might become less responsive to spam because they think they have solved the problem.
2. They want to make people use an @verizon address, so it will be harder for people to run their own domains, thus tying people to Verizon. Email has become widespread enough to make it very painful to change email addresses. Spend a year or two using an @verizon.com address, and you'll be very reluctant to switch providers, even if the new provider offers much better service.
Wrong. Almost no other ISP does this. What you are probably thinking of is that most ISP's check the IP address of the sender, and won't relay if the sender is not one of their customers.
Checking the IP address is good. Checking the "From" line is increadibly stupid, and won't close any holes.
This does nothing to stop relaying, since they obviously can't require the "From" address to be a Verizon address on incoming mail from outside their network, or no one from outside would be able to mail to Verizon customers!:-)
You stop relaying by configuring your SMTP server to not accept outside mail unless it is addresses to your customers.
All this does is annoy their own customers who have their own domains.
Sealand is in international waters (that's the whole point...when you try to declare soverignity inside someone else's territory, it doesn't work very well...you've got to get outside to have a chance). You can get close enough to them to blast them out of existence without going through anyone's waters.
Surely he can't be arrested for publishing a tool to do this, as he did it outside the States and he's not an American citizen?
Uhm...generally, when you do something that is a crime in country X but you do it in country Y, where it is not a crime, the reason you don't get arrested by X is that you are not in X. X asks Y to extradite you, and if Y doesn't think it is a crime, Y says no.
However, if you actually go to X, you are subject to arrest. When travelling to another country, this is something you should consider.
The problem I see with hosting a site on Sealand is physical security. If I host my site at, say, rackspace.com, and someone else hosts a site there that pisses someone off (e.g., the official Salmon Rushdie fan club is on the next server in the rack), no one is going to lob a missile at rackspace.com to take out the site they don't like, because it would cause a hell of a lot of diplomatic or military problems from them.
Sealand, on the other hand...if China doesn't like a dissident site there, what's to stop their navy from having a little "accident" while passing by?
Yes, I realize the place is built on a gun platform designed to withstand some serious force, but that was serious WWII force.
It just doesn't seem wise to me to put things that might become targets out in international waters if you don't have a good military backing you up.
What right to make a backup? You can't think of the relevant copyright provisions because there are none.
Fair use does NOT give you any rights. Rather, it makes it so certain things are not copyright violations, so if you do them, you can't be sued for copyright violation.
Nothing in there says the copyright owner has to help you do them, or can't take steps to stop you from doing them (or can't refuse to sell you the copy unless you contractually agree not to do them, although this generally won't happen for music CDs).
I wonder what obscure.org thinks?
on
MySQL & Nusphere
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· Score: 2
The original press release from MySQL AB mentions the thread from an "obscure.ORG" site. I don't see how obscure.org is a threat to them. I'm puzzled.
and without napster I have no way of finding new music that I might be interested in.
I find that rather hard to believe, since Napstar is not a particularly good medium for finding new music.
Don't they have radio where you live? MTV? VH1? How about internet radio? These are much more effective than Napster in exposing one to new music one might like.
Uhm...think about it. You are building a machine that is going to cost $175k and will have small total sales. Do you
(a) pick the processor that supports OSes and tools you are familiar with and can easily get and that will let you do all your initial software development on your existing computers, or
(b) try to save $200 per unit by going with a cheaper processor that requires tools you aren't familiar with, and new development systems?
Slashdot Mirror
The flaw in your argument is that for most informational web sites (e.g., slashdot), there is no such thing as a "customer".
The problem is that DNA analysis as used to identify people does not do a complete analysis of the DNA. They basically only look at a few parts of the DNA. That is not enough to uniquely identify a person. For a given DNA sample, there will be dozens or more people in the country who match.
When used with other evidence, DNA is great. For example, if without using DNA evidence, you have narrowed it down to 3 suspects, and then you take DNA samples and compare to DNA from the criminal, and you get a match, you have, to a very high probability, got the right person. There might be dozens of people in the country who would match that DNA sample, but the chances that one of those dozens just happened to be one of your suspects is very small.
However, if you start with the DNA, and that is all you have, the chances are good that your match from the database is not the right person. As I said in the previous paragraph, there are dozens or people that match a given DNA sample. That chances are low that someone picked up just for the DNA match is the criminal.
It is too bad that the role of cell phones was given so much attention. It would have been better for that to have been kept quite. Eventually, terrorists would have figured it out on the own, of course, so in the long run it makes no difference, but in the short run, it could mean a few hundred lives saved.
Note also that many of the $100 stand-alone boxes include 4 or 8 port switches, so you save the cost of a switch.
Uhm...that is not an example of monopoly leverage. Leveraging is using your monopoly to expand into a different market. Here, they are using their OS monopoly to protect the OS monopoly.
Answer: because the people who study weather don't get to do experiments ("Hey, Bob...let's bump up the rainfall in Kansas 5 cm this winter, and see if that affects tornado formation next summer"). So, it helps a lot to be able to look at different examples, like other planets.
Economics is like that. There are experimental scientists doing economics, but they generally only get to study microeconomics.
Game economies give economists a chance to look at something large, yet different from the "real world" economy. It's like looking at Martian weather.
Here's a tip. When using the phrase "What part of X is hard...", it is a good idea to know something about X yourself.
"Fair use" grants you absolutely no rights to anything. All it does is say that certain things are not copyright violations.
Verizon's email address restrictions are there for exactly one purpose: to get people who need to use their own domain to switch to Verizon to host the domain. It is purely a way to extract another few dollars a month from some customers.
I'm pretty sure I work best when I have three or four tasks on my queue, that I decide when to switch among. I only switch tasks when I'm stuck on one, and need to give it a chance to bounce around my subconscious for a while. This puts the context switch overhead in what would otherwise by dead time, so is efficient.
I have no idea if they are any good. I merely saw their ad in Computer Shopper.
Here's how DSL works. The phone company provides a line, a DSL modem, and some equipment in the central office. Using whatever protocol they want, they establish a connection between your modem and their equipment. It looks like an ethernet connection to your computer.
The phone company equipment in the central office is connected to your ISP, typically over the phone company's ATM network. The packets to and from your DSL modem are encapsulated and sent via ATM.
Note that is is all happening at a lower level than IP. Your IP address comes from your ISP. The phone company is not involved at the IP level, any more than they are when you use you regular modem over your phone line.
What SBC is doing is telling the ISP that they must use PPPoE, and they must not provide static IP addresses.
To put this in pre-DSL terms, this would be like the phone company telling your ISP that your ISP was not allowed to support SLIP...all dialup customers must be on PPP.
If you are using SBC as your ISP, this is fine. If, however, you are using some other ISP, and SBC is just providing the below-IP-level connection, it is none of their damn business what protocol you and the ISP agree to use over that connection, and it is certainly none of their business how your ISP allocates IP addresses.
Uhm...PPPoE is not necessary for dynamic IP addresses. Many DSL providers provided dynamic addresses long before PPPoE.
E.g., suppose 300 users with a common interest (let's use Everquest for this example) get together and agree to each donate $1.50 a month. That's $450/month. That's enough for a dedicated server with 10 GB/month bandwidth from rackspace.com.
These 300 users then find Everquest sites that they like, and offer to give those sites free hosting on their server, in exchange for premium access (e.g., no ads for the server owners).
Here are the requirements for my server/firewall/NAT box:
1. It should be relatively inexpensive.
2. It should not generate much noise. I do not want to be able to hear it running during quiet parts of movies I'm watching (Remember...apartment...my home theatre is in my home datacenter)
3. It should be small.
A PS2 with Linux fits these requirements. (So would a hacked Tivo, which is another possibility, but I'd like to avoid hardware hacking)
1. They think it will reduce spam. If so, they are completely clueless. This is bad because it is bad in general to have large ISPs that have no idea how to run a network, and also they might become less responsive to spam because they think they have solved the problem.
2. They want to make people use an @verizon address, so it will be harder for people to run their own domains, thus tying people to Verizon. Email has become widespread enough to make it very painful to change email addresses. Spend a year or two using an @verizon.com address, and you'll be very reluctant to switch providers, even if the new provider offers much better service.
Either of these is worth a "real" battle.
Checking the IP address is good. Checking the "From" line is increadibly stupid, and won't close any holes.
And what happens when they start blocking outbound port 25 access except to their server?
You stop relaying by configuring your SMTP server to not accept outside mail unless it is addresses to your customers.
All this does is annoy their own customers who have their own domains.
Basically, Verizon is clueless about spam.
Sealand is in international waters (that's the whole point...when you try to declare soverignity inside someone else's territory, it doesn't work very well...you've got to get outside to have a chance). You can get close enough to them to blast them out of existence without going through anyone's waters.
Uhm...generally, when you do something that is a crime in country X but you do it in country Y, where it is not a crime, the reason you don't get arrested by X is that you are not in X. X asks Y to extradite you, and if Y doesn't think it is a crime, Y says no.
However, if you actually go to X, you are subject to arrest. When travelling to another country, this is something you should consider.
Sealand, on the other hand...if China doesn't like a dissident site there, what's to stop their navy from having a little "accident" while passing by?
Yes, I realize the place is built on a gun platform designed to withstand some serious force, but that was serious WWII force.
It just doesn't seem wise to me to put things that might become targets out in international waters if you don't have a good military backing you up.
Fair use does NOT give you any rights. Rather, it makes it so certain things are not copyright violations, so if you do them, you can't be sued for copyright violation.
Nothing in there says the copyright owner has to help you do them, or can't take steps to stop you from doing them (or can't refuse to sell you the copy unless you contractually agree not to do them, although this generally won't happen for music CDs).
The original press release from MySQL AB mentions the thread from an "obscure .ORG" site. I don't see how obscure.org is a threat to them. I'm puzzled.
I find that rather hard to believe, since Napstar is not a particularly good medium for finding new music.
Don't they have radio where you live? MTV? VH1? How about internet radio? These are much more effective than Napster in exposing one to new music one might like.
(a) pick the processor that supports OSes and tools you are familiar with and can easily get and that will let you do all your initial software development on your existing computers, or
(b) try to save $200 per unit by going with a cheaper processor that requires tools you aren't familiar with, and new development systems?