If the zombie box has username/password on a legit account (or whatever the authentication is) then no protocol will help. It might, however, stop email faking and sending from the zombie box itself, which would give a better point of control (because at the moment anyone can send emails that purport to be from Yahoo.com from their own box, if it is set up right, but a protocol that could fail connections claiming to be Yahoo.com emails that don't come from an approved Yahoo.com server would reduce the problem). I don't think anything can solve the "spammer signs up for asdfghjkl.com and starts sending email through that server" spam.
I don't see how this'll help, though.
1) The people who fall for this won't actually learn until they're actually stung, not just an email that says it is from a government agency 2) Chances are they'll probably be more suspicious of the 'Government Agency' email than the "get stuff cheap" email because they're interested in getting stuff cheap, but why would they get an email from the Government 3) Spam is spam is spam 4) Spammers/phishers will piggyback the Government emails, clone them and send out similar emails saying they'd been caught by one of these traps, so go to [insert site] 5) Despite what I said in 1), some of these people will never learn (see the people who get conned out of thousands of £/$/etc)
You mean a bit more like the Creative Commons site does for things like the GPL, LGPL and others? Yeah, that'd be extremely useful. While it's not so legally strict, it means you can actually understand what people can and can't do, which is more than a legal document does for most people!
I think it's SAP that the company I work for just bought that we now have to book hours, leave and claim expenses through. Given how horribly it works on a corporate Windows machine (as opposed to my Linux dev machine) in WinXP with IE then I'd be glad if there wasn't a Linux version! All of us in the office have yet to work out why anyone could ever be convinced it was good software.
That depends what they use. My wife now uses OpenOffice and Firefox (unfortunately I've not convinced her to move to Thunderbird yet) so her apps are still there if she wants to move to Linux or Mac. Ditto at work - we use Firefox, Thunderbird, IM client of our choice and Eclipse, plus OpenOffice for almost all documents (all internal and most external) so we're quite happy on Linux with all the apps we need.
Exactly. Watching ITV, Channel 4, Five or even Sky news is like watching a televised 'Red Top'/Tabloid. The BBC news is watchable and a bit more like one of the old Broadsheets (even if they have gone compact recently).
The amount of advertising is more obvious when you compare the TV show to the DVD version. Watching Bones on DVD and each episode is 42 minutes long. Watching it on Sky and it's in an hour long slot. That's ~50% of its length that they add on in adverts!
And before anyone points out that shows like Bones aren't made by the BBC, they're not made by any of the other channels I can get either, they're bought in to the UK from US producers. The BBC used to show Star Trek (TOS, TNG, DS9 and possibly Voyager, although I'm not sure on the last one) and put it in a 45 minute slot, but the commercial channel version is an hour long because of ads. I know which I prefer!
The BBC were saying that the government wanted everyone to have access to enough bandwidth to watch streaming TV. IIRC they quoted around 6Mb/s.
The second point does ring true, though. I don't pirate anything at the moment (not got the bandwidth, I've got all the apps I need on Linux, and I've got enough of a collection of music, plus I prefer buying the CD then ripping the MP3s so that I've still got a physical copy) but if I'm getting taxed to pay for unauthorised downloads then why shouldn't I?
Good old crime, "terrorism" and government stupidity.
The difference is that the TV License has a benefit (it lets you have a TV, it funds an organisation that provides the only watchable TV channel, and it funds some decent UK shows that aren't complete drivel* and which are an hour long if they are scheduled for an hour, rather than being 40 minutes long in an hour long slot) while the broadband tax will be levied on people to cover the illegal actions of others even if the person being taxed isn't doing anything illegal themselves.
.
* Channel 4 has "Big Brother", BBC produces things like QI. If I had to specifically decide which my license fee went to and which producers had to be locked away for eternity for crimes against TV and sanity, the Big Brother people would definitely have to be the ones locked in the Big Brother house along with the mindless contestants of each series they've made so far.
So that'd be "do it the sensible and easy way and just do what you did in Oblivion" then? I did wonder whether the Games for Windows Live would actually add anything or whether it'd just cause problems (ditto for Dawn of War 2).
How ever can you say such things? Don't you know that saving one child from a single nude photograph that involved no physical contact is far more important than preventing murder, rape and even genocide of entire populations. It's one of the few things that is more serious than pirating DVDs!
Really? I know disabling scripts normally fixes those things, but given the animation on the front page and the fact that the content loads in bit by bit I'd have thought the whole site would just fall over in an unworkable heap!
I've got more of an idea of what I said than you, given that the first quote (which you attribute to me) wasn't me and the second quote (which you attribute to someone else) was me;)
I just checked Britannica.com and I can see another reason why people avoid it - it's terrible for access, where as Wikipedia is a nice and simple browsable site, much closer to a reference book with cross-reference links.
You hit the front page of Brittanica.com and you get two Flash movies (which I don't see because I use Gnash and have it set to pause on load and not play) and the side panel animates itself open. I decide to try and browse and I can't because the Flash is rendered above the "browse" pop-up layer. I do a search and there's no obvious search button, you just have to hit the Enter key and assume it'll work. Rather than giving you results or the page you want it gave me a quick "light box" animation before popping up another layer. Once I do get to the article it takes ages to load because of the adverts and a slow caching site (ironically) and then it proceeds to plaster its "pay for premium" advert over what I was just about to read! When you close the "pay for premium" layer it won't even go away - apparently details about "encyclopedia" are a premium topic and so it keeps popping back every few seconds!
With an interface like that there's no wonder people prefer Wikipedia given that it's "accurate enough" for most people's needs.
Because a) the law makers don't understand the Internet and think it is somehow a completely different entity where existing rules don't fit*, b) they want to look like they're doing something and c) a good proportion of the general populace are in the same boat on point a) and demand or fall for point b).
.
* This is the same for parents who treat the Internet as some big nasty that'll cause their children to become drug-addicted psychopaths who get molested when the real-world rules of "avoid the bad bits" and "don't give personal details to strangers" would solve most of the problems, just like they would in the non-Internet world.
I didn't say there was no violent content, I said that nothing was terribly violent in that there's violence but nothing is excessively described. As other people pointed out, there's a difference between "X stabbed Y" and an animation of it complete with images of how to do it and the blood, guts, etc involved. That's probably the main difference between film/games and books.
Most kids are bright enough to tell fiction from reality, and the ones who aren't are likely to get into trouble anyway.
Exactly. The ones who have problems with video games are the ones who have problems anyway. I played 18 rated games in my early teens and I worked out okay because I knew that there was a difference between reality and fiction. If you don't know that then films, books and even childhood "role playing" games like "Cowboys and Indians" can have pretty much the same effect and cause you to think it is acceptable to do things you shouldn't.
There is a slight difference that puts games more in line with films - graphics and the removal of the need for an imagination.
Give someone a book containing a sexual or violent scene and they require some imagination to make an image of it. For some people the same words can provoke lesser or greater images. For games and films you get it laid out in front of you with full colour and everything, so there's less ambiguity to the detail.
Books tend to self-regulate based on vocabulary as well - put complex words in your books and you're not likely to get many kids reading them, but put it in a film and it's accessible to loads of people who wouldn't have read a text version. Lord of the Rings is a great example - how many pre-teen kids would manage to read LotR and how many like the film? There's nothing terrible in LotR for sexual/violent content (there's violence, but nothing excessively described) but it still aims itself at an audience based on the vocabulary it uses.
Granted you still get books that are sexual or violent to greater and lesser degrees, but they've never been regulated and since most books are probably PG on content but for older readers based on vocabulary then there'd be a backlash from those used to books not being regulated/age rated.
Okay, maybe "breaks any level of consistency you might have had" was a bit too much. "tends to break any level of consistency you might have had" might be a bit more accurate.
You're right, it's not the toolkits per se, but if you give people a toolkit that lets them restyle anything (including anything that lets people put arbitrary imagery or even gradients in there) then you're bound to get otherwise good apps that are completely hideous or inconsistent.
I've got nothing against Google Reader and the like for what they are, but consistent is one thing they most certainly aren't.
Ignoring any technical issues I can see two main issues with that:
1) ISPs would have to put in effort and money to combat these things 2) By actively trying to combat them they would then be more responsible for the ones they didn't catch
It's good in theory (just like stopping the spammers with measures ISPs could take) but the practice never seems to make sense to the corporates.
Or they are interested in them but they a) don't have enough monthly transfer (starter broadband in the UK is a couple of GB per month) b) don't want to get kicked off their connection (now that Sarkozy got the "three strikes" rule through) c) don't have the technical know-how to find decent sites that aren't filled with junk or d) don't want to go on the sites they do know of because of the other content that is there.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean it'll make people salivate for food at the sound of a bell if they get a tax audit? Now that's some crazy conditioning!
If the zombie box has username/password on a legit account (or whatever the authentication is) then no protocol will help. It might, however, stop email faking and sending from the zombie box itself, which would give a better point of control (because at the moment anyone can send emails that purport to be from Yahoo.com from their own box, if it is set up right, but a protocol that could fail connections claiming to be Yahoo.com emails that don't come from an approved Yahoo.com server would reduce the problem). I don't think anything can solve the "spammer signs up for asdfghjkl.com and starts sending email through that server" spam.
I don't see how this'll help, though.
1) The people who fall for this won't actually learn until they're actually stung, not just an email that says it is from a government agency
2) Chances are they'll probably be more suspicious of the 'Government Agency' email than the "get stuff cheap" email because they're interested in getting stuff cheap, but why would they get an email from the Government
3) Spam is spam is spam
4) Spammers/phishers will piggyback the Government emails, clone them and send out similar emails saying they'd been caught by one of these traps, so go to [insert site]
5) Despite what I said in 1), some of these people will never learn (see the people who get conned out of thousands of £/$/etc)
You mean a bit more like the Creative Commons site does for things like the GPL, LGPL and others? Yeah, that'd be extremely useful. While it's not so legally strict, it means you can actually understand what people can and can't do, which is more than a legal document does for most people!
I think it's SAP that the company I work for just bought that we now have to book hours, leave and claim expenses through. Given how horribly it works on a corporate Windows machine (as opposed to my Linux dev machine) in WinXP with IE then I'd be glad if there wasn't a Linux version! All of us in the office have yet to work out why anyone could ever be convinced it was good software.
Off-topic, but rather insightful there :D I hadn't thought of it that way. From dictionary.com:
Back to the GP, I apologies for missing out the other government stupidity/blanket excuse.
That depends what they use. My wife now uses OpenOffice and Firefox (unfortunately I've not convinced her to move to Thunderbird yet) so her apps are still there if she wants to move to Linux or Mac. Ditto at work - we use Firefox, Thunderbird, IM client of our choice and Eclipse, plus OpenOffice for almost all documents (all internal and most external) so we're quite happy on Linux with all the apps we need.
Exactly. Watching ITV, Channel 4, Five or even Sky news is like watching a televised 'Red Top'/Tabloid. The BBC news is watchable and a bit more like one of the old Broadsheets (even if they have gone compact recently).
The amount of advertising is more obvious when you compare the TV show to the DVD version. Watching Bones on DVD and each episode is 42 minutes long. Watching it on Sky and it's in an hour long slot. That's ~50% of its length that they add on in adverts!
And before anyone points out that shows like Bones aren't made by the BBC, they're not made by any of the other channels I can get either, they're bought in to the UK from US producers. The BBC used to show Star Trek (TOS, TNG, DS9 and possibly Voyager, although I'm not sure on the last one) and put it in a 45 minute slot, but the commercial channel version is an hour long because of ads. I know which I prefer!
The BBC were saying that the government wanted everyone to have access to enough bandwidth to watch streaming TV. IIRC they quoted around 6Mb/s.
The second point does ring true, though. I don't pirate anything at the moment (not got the bandwidth, I've got all the apps I need on Linux, and I've got enough of a collection of music, plus I prefer buying the CD then ripping the MP3s so that I've still got a physical copy) but if I'm getting taxed to pay for unauthorised downloads then why shouldn't I?
Good old crime, "terrorism" and government stupidity.
No, the BBC is funded by taxing everyone in the UK who has a equipment that they use to watches or records TV signals as they are shown.
The difference is that the TV License has a benefit (it lets you have a TV, it funds an organisation that provides the only watchable TV channel, and it funds some decent UK shows that aren't complete drivel* and which are an hour long if they are scheduled for an hour, rather than being 40 minutes long in an hour long slot) while the broadband tax will be levied on people to cover the illegal actions of others even if the person being taxed isn't doing anything illegal themselves.
.
* Channel 4 has "Big Brother", BBC produces things like QI. If I had to specifically decide which my license fee went to and which producers had to be locked away for eternity for crimes against TV and sanity, the Big Brother people would definitely have to be the ones locked in the Big Brother house along with the mindless contestants of each series they've made so far.
So that'd be "do it the sensible and easy way and just do what you did in Oblivion" then? I did wonder whether the Games for Windows Live would actually add anything or whether it'd just cause problems (ditto for Dawn of War 2).
How ever can you say such things? Don't you know that saving one child from a single nude photograph that involved no physical contact is far more important than preventing murder, rape and even genocide of entire populations. It's one of the few things that is more serious than pirating DVDs!
(Yes, that's sarcasm in there ;) )
Really? I know disabling scripts normally fixes those things, but given the animation on the front page and the fact that the content loads in bit by bit I'd have thought the whole site would just fall over in an unworkable heap!
Maybe that's a better way of describing what I meant about "books need some imagination" :)
I've got more of an idea of what I said than you, given that the first quote (which you attribute to me) wasn't me and the second quote (which you attribute to someone else) was me ;)
I just checked Britannica.com and I can see another reason why people avoid it - it's terrible for access, where as Wikipedia is a nice and simple browsable site, much closer to a reference book with cross-reference links.
You hit the front page of Brittanica.com and you get two Flash movies (which I don't see because I use Gnash and have it set to pause on load and not play) and the side panel animates itself open. I decide to try and browse and I can't because the Flash is rendered above the "browse" pop-up layer. I do a search and there's no obvious search button, you just have to hit the Enter key and assume it'll work. Rather than giving you results or the page you want it gave me a quick "light box" animation before popping up another layer. Once I do get to the article it takes ages to load because of the adverts and a slow caching site (ironically) and then it proceeds to plaster its "pay for premium" advert over what I was just about to read! When you close the "pay for premium" layer it won't even go away - apparently details about "encyclopedia" are a premium topic and so it keeps popping back every few seconds!
With an interface like that there's no wonder people prefer Wikipedia given that it's "accurate enough" for most people's needs.
Because a) the law makers don't understand the Internet and think it is somehow a completely different entity where existing rules don't fit*, b) they want to look like they're doing something and c) a good proportion of the general populace are in the same boat on point a) and demand or fall for point b).
.
* This is the same for parents who treat the Internet as some big nasty that'll cause their children to become drug-addicted psychopaths who get molested when the real-world rules of "avoid the bad bits" and "don't give personal details to strangers" would solve most of the problems, just like they would in the non-Internet world.
I didn't say there was no violent content, I said that nothing was terribly violent in that there's violence but nothing is excessively described. As other people pointed out, there's a difference between "X stabbed Y" and an animation of it complete with images of how to do it and the blood, guts, etc involved. That's probably the main difference between film/games and books.
Exactly. The ones who have problems with video games are the ones who have problems anyway. I played 18 rated games in my early teens and I worked out okay because I knew that there was a difference between reality and fiction. If you don't know that then films, books and even childhood "role playing" games like "Cowboys and Indians" can have pretty much the same effect and cause you to think it is acceptable to do things you shouldn't.
There is a slight difference that puts games more in line with films - graphics and the removal of the need for an imagination.
Give someone a book containing a sexual or violent scene and they require some imagination to make an image of it. For some people the same words can provoke lesser or greater images. For games and films you get it laid out in front of you with full colour and everything, so there's less ambiguity to the detail.
Books tend to self-regulate based on vocabulary as well - put complex words in your books and you're not likely to get many kids reading them, but put it in a film and it's accessible to loads of people who wouldn't have read a text version. Lord of the Rings is a great example - how many pre-teen kids would manage to read LotR and how many like the film? There's nothing terrible in LotR for sexual/violent content (there's violence, but nothing excessively described) but it still aims itself at an audience based on the vocabulary it uses.
Granted you still get books that are sexual or violent to greater and lesser degrees, but they've never been regulated and since most books are probably PG on content but for older readers based on vocabulary then there'd be a backlash from those used to books not being regulated/age rated.
They did pretty much literally coat their in-game drugs with in-game sugar, so it's in-game literal in this case :)
Shafted?
Okay, maybe "breaks any level of consistency you might have had" was a bit too much. "tends to break any level of consistency you might have had" might be a bit more accurate.
You're right, it's not the toolkits per se, but if you give people a toolkit that lets them restyle anything (including anything that lets people put arbitrary imagery or even gradients in there) then you're bound to get otherwise good apps that are completely hideous or inconsistent.
I've got nothing against Google Reader and the like for what they are, but consistent is one thing they most certainly aren't.
It might, but that assumes that the ISP puts in the effort and money to investigate whether it is worth it or not in the first place ;)
Ignoring any technical issues I can see two main issues with that:
1) ISPs would have to put in effort and money to combat these things
2) By actively trying to combat them they would then be more responsible for the ones they didn't catch
It's good in theory (just like stopping the spammers with measures ISPs could take) but the practice never seems to make sense to the corporates.
Or they are interested in them but they a) don't have enough monthly transfer (starter broadband in the UK is a couple of GB per month) b) don't want to get kicked off their connection (now that Sarkozy got the "three strikes" rule through) c) don't have the technical know-how to find decent sites that aren't filled with junk or d) don't want to go on the sites they do know of because of the other content that is there.