It means nothing. Anyone can create any username, and and IP's can be filtered, masqueraded; ports can be forwarded, and tunneled over in many different ways. Routers can be misconfigured even without bring down the traffic. What would that IP/username mean?
Since he says he doesn't know jack-shit about all that technology in court, and yet opines in NYT about it, the only conclusion we can draw is that Jack Valenti must be an ignoramous ranting his head off. In other words, he should be treated in exactly the same manner a a loony spouting crap - ignored.
The difference is just the time! If you used to bid for some government contract by submitting forms, now you click the website. The queueing issues still exist, only you can't see it. It has been pushed down to the microsecond regime - where it is essentially beyond your control.
Now about transparency: The transparency is in the queuing process itself and I obviously cannot pass any judgement about what happens after that. That depends on the type of government service you are queuing for. If you want to pay for some license, the only issue is how long you have to wait. But what about say, government auctions of state-land? which might very well be first-come-first-served! That is a good and fine principle as long as the queueing process is open and other people can see that they are being treated fairly. If there isn't, people will complain, sooner or later.
This is an interesting issue. Online transactions reduce the need for actual physical queueing. But really, who says there isn't queueing in the net?
Any kind of buffering is a queue. The webserver could maintain a queue of incoming connections and serve them in order. This is done becuase of limitations in bandwidth, just like you queue at the bank becuase of the limited number of tellers around! THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE!
But the issue of fairplay comes in. It is somehow fair or just to serve queues in a First-In-First-Out operation. Go to a bank queue and try jumping it. You will get hostile stares. But use a technological means to jump queues on the internet, and nobody is the wiser. Software can be set up to prefer to serve women over men for example. Since you don't read the source, nobody would know if this was fair or not. Why did your online application fail because "the quota was exceeded"? Is it becuase you have a slow 56k modem while the other guy is behind a T1?
So putting such transactions online make lower the transparency of government. This is a problem that deserves to be looked at.
color index remapping. Write a trivial piece of program that swaps color indexes around. Even a simple color inversion would do.
rename jpg files to something else.
FFT's the images.
uuencode/decode into ASCII files.
encryption/steganography.
In other words, the software only catches stupid people viewing porn. It drives the smart people who view these things into inventing all sorts technologically interesting stuff. Thanks!!
No flames here. But Gnucash is written in such a way that the transaction engine is independent of the front end. In this way, it would be a relatively straightforward task to write the front-end for KDE, Windows or a console. The flexibility is all there, just waiting for some someone to write it.
Why should they have to make it easier for you not to use their products?
This the exact kind of attitude that should turn people away from MS. Why ? Because it is Bill Gate's explicit goal (and he goes to TV to say this) that MS wants to bring computing to the masses.
Pretend you are him, and you want to achieve this goal. By what means should you use? Closed file formats with lousy specifications? How does that bring computing to the masses when they are prevented from speaking to the Unix Priesthood?
If you, as a MS lackey and worshipper, believe that this is not MS's responsibiilty, then please go take it up with Bill, your prophet. He has stated publicly and many times that this is his goal. Remind him that MS's duty is to the stockholders and they should make as much money as possible. Please tell him that, and also tell him to STOP LYING to the American public.
So there is nothing in the specification about whether it should render according to screen, printer or font design metrics? The specification is thus INCOMPLETE, since users rely upon it to paginate, so that they can submit under _publisher_ standards of page counts. If the software gives users the illusion (WYSIWYG) that this can be done, when it cannot, it is an INCOMPLETE, and BUGGY implementation.
Because of this I maintain that MS has a joke of a document specification.
Well if you work in an environment where people keep sending you that MS document in their emails, how much choice do you have?
So because MS wants to keep out competitors, it is entitled to make you find another job simply because you wanted to exercise your choice in software. In my book, hurting innocent people is EVIL!
Well I remember trying to write a 6 page research paper during my college days using Word 6.0. I spent a lot of time tweaking the format, making sur that it would stay on 6 pages and not more. Then I brought that file to school to print, and when Word 7.0 opened it, BINGO, all the formatting was destroyed and it now took 6 pages and 2-3 lines! I tweaked it there and when it got sent to the HP laserjet, it came out as 6 pages and 2-3 lines again! Truly MS word is WYSIWYG!
Can you please explain why MS can read the document graphics, but can't maintain format consistency? They seem to have improved a lot in this regard, but so what? All the other guys trying to write a compatible editor are exactly in the position MS itself was a few years ago.
The point is that MS's.doc is a joke specification, if it ever was at all. Sure you could read the files, but the specification is NOT COMPLETE. That is why many people are having a hard time converting.
is that there are no real specifications for it! Sure there is documentation. But a documentation is not a specification. Documentation is the label on your VCR that says record, play, fast-forward, etc. But specification is more than that. Specifications detail the size of the VCR. It says that there should a readonly tab that the VCR should respect if it tries a record, etc.
The problem with MS Word is that the way to see how a command or comment would work is to try it on the screen. Will inserting this graphic cause the rest on the page to lose alignment? Not sure? Try it out!
This is fine for people using the software, but a nightmare for other people trying to write compatible software. Try it! Take out your old copy of MS 5.0 and write a fairly complex document (a 5-6 page research paper with graphs and annotation is a good example). Take that and use MS 6.0 to read it. Even MS themselves can't maintain consistency of conversion. That's becuase they basically made the document format up as they went along - no formal software engineering specs were ever written. If they were, then they obviously weren't detailed enough.
Contrast that to TeX. You don't have to copy a single line of TeX source to create your own teX compiler. All you have to do is to examine the picky formatting tests, and ensure that you write your code to reproduce the desired tests. And the specs were designed sensibly, if a little idiosyncratically.
The binary format of the.doc file is hardly the issue!!
So if you lose your fingers in some accident, not only will you lose a lot of money, you suddenly can't listen to your own, legally bought, collection of music anymore.
And to people like Stephen Hawking, they can forget about listening to music this way.
And if I want to play a huge collection of songs, legally bought by myself, I must authenticate each and every time the song advances.
Do the companies that think of this "innovative" stuff even bother to think about what they are doing? Are these people morons for thinking that such a thing would work?
Not true at all. Files cannot contain themselves. Such a recursive loop is an indication of a corrupt filesystem. It is a tree-like structure. HTML documents can refer to themselves without any problem at all.
Hypertext links are more like the "soft" symbolic of a Unix filesystem. The inability to distinguish files and links is a real confusion that MS has perpetuated upon users.
Putting it another way, I can design a webpage to look exactly like a file browser, so that the IE user is fooled into thinking he is in filebrowsing mode. But, as soon as he tries to do something like rename a file, the reality of what he is doing manifests itself. Files and hypertext links have different properties, and should not be the same!
Captain: Don't just sit there. Download it and decrypt it.
Comms Officer: Already on it sir. Hmmm... it appears that to be some kind of frequency-shifted, time-compressed code.
Captain: What does it say?
Comms Officer: LONELY BOTTLENOSE SEEKS MATE. Repeated over and over again sir.
Captain: It's a code, I tell you. LONELY == damaged. BOTTLENOSE == warship. MATE == out of fuel. Give me the coordinates of the source and let's blast them out of the water!
I think they just use plain ol' radio silence to avoid detection. Don't transmit while in enemy territory! Of course, when and if they do transmit, any other conventional military technique - frequency hopping, highly directional burst of radio waves using military grade encryption, and so on.
Because I seem to have implemented all the first 8 algorithms before, either in CS class or in the course of working as a research intern - all except the Fortran compiler. I find it silly that a particulat language compiler is considered to be a top ten algorithm. I have no quarrels with the choices except for this one. Seems to me that the list is heavily biased towards scientific and numerical applications, and therefore the Fortran compiler. What about operation research and say (as an example) algorithms for solving the Travelling Salesman Problem? Or what about innovative (eeks - hate that word) data-structures such as, say, kd-trees that facilitate and suggest the development of a whole class of extremely fast algorithms in geometry?
The difficulty of prime factoring is not the only, and should not be the only algorithms to implement digital signatures. Maybe we need one based on the knapsack problem or something else.
Pardon my ignorance, but how can digital signatures be that secure? I may store my private key in my account, but if some hacker gains root on my system, he would have my private keys. Can I then deny that I ordered that plastic dildo from sextoys.com?
Of course, this is not to say that traditional signatures aren't that secure. That's even more easy to fake, if you think about it.
So what gives? Are we saying that both signatures are equally valid? One is more valid than the other? Whatever the case, we should recognize that the authenticity of the two are different, and treat with differing degrees of authenticity. Exactly how, I don't know. I would like to hear from the experts though, on how we should handle our digital signatures.
Is the current infrastructure (i.e. none) on the net adequate? Do we need escrow services?
Imagine a Beowulf culture of these guys! I wonder if it will catch on? How will the idea farm out? Will it catalyse new strands of thuoght, new memes? Will computing power rise to epidemic proportions? Or is it endemic to this particular field that applications of these ideas will never evolve to the heights expected, but instead take the path of extinction?
Slashdot Mirror
It means nothing. Anyone can create any username, and and IP's can be filtered, masqueraded; ports can be forwarded, and tunneled over in many different ways. Routers can be misconfigured even without bring down the traffic. What would that IP/username mean?
What a great job that is. Being paid to rant, piss, moan, and call people names. Sounds like a job lots of USENET (f)lamers would love.
So lets move on. There nothing to see here.
Hmm. You've not had much experience with declarative languages, I see. :-)
Now about transparency: The transparency is in the queuing process itself and I obviously cannot pass any judgement about what happens after that. That depends on the type of government service you are queuing for. If you want to pay for some license, the only issue is how long you have to wait. But what about say, government auctions of state-land? which might very well be first-come-first-served! That is a good and fine principle as long as the queueing process is open and other people can see that they are being treated fairly. If there isn't, people will complain, sooner or later.
- Who's afraid of Unix?
- Who's afraid of Relativity?
- Who's afraid of Motorcycle Maintanence?
- Who's afraid of Sex?
Yes, let the money roll!Any kind of buffering is a queue. The webserver could maintain a queue of incoming connections and serve them in order. This is done becuase of limitations in bandwidth, just like you queue at the bank becuase of the limited number of tellers around! THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE!
But the issue of fairplay comes in. It is somehow fair or just to serve queues in a First-In-First-Out operation. Go to a bank queue and try jumping it. You will get hostile stares. But use a technological means to jump queues on the internet, and nobody is the wiser. Software can be set up to prefer to serve women over men for example. Since you don't read the source, nobody would know if this was fair or not. Why did your online application fail because "the quota was exceeded"? Is it becuase you have a slow 56k modem while the other guy is behind a T1?
So putting such transactions online make lower the transparency of government. This is a problem that deserves to be looked at.
- color index remapping. Write a trivial piece of program that swaps color indexes around. Even a simple color inversion would do.
- rename jpg files to something else.
- FFT's the images.
- uuencode/decode into ASCII files.
- encryption/steganography.
In other words, the software only catches stupid people viewing porn. It drives the smart people who view these things into inventing all sorts technologically interesting stuff. Thanks!!No flames here. But Gnucash is written in such a way that the transaction engine is independent of the front end. In this way, it would be a relatively straightforward task to write the front-end for KDE, Windows or a console. The flexibility is all there, just waiting for some someone to write it.
This the exact kind of attitude that should turn people away from MS. Why ? Because it is Bill Gate's explicit goal (and he goes to TV to say this) that MS wants to bring computing to the masses.
Pretend you are him, and you want to achieve this goal. By what means should you use? Closed file formats with lousy specifications? How does that bring computing to the masses when they are prevented from speaking to the Unix Priesthood?
If you, as a MS lackey and worshipper, believe that this is not MS's responsibiilty, then please go take it up with Bill, your prophet. He has stated publicly and many times that this is his goal. Remind him that MS's duty is to the stockholders and they should make as much money as possible. Please tell him that, and also tell him to STOP LYING to the American public.
Because of this I maintain that MS has a joke of a document specification.
So because MS wants to keep out competitors, it is entitled to make you find another job simply because you wanted to exercise your choice in software. In my book, hurting innocent people is EVIL!
Can you please explain why MS can read the document graphics, but can't maintain format consistency? They seem to have improved a lot in this regard, but so what? All the other guys trying to write a compatible editor are exactly in the position MS itself was a few years ago.
The point is that MS's .doc is a joke specification, if it ever was at all. Sure you could read the files, but the specification is NOT COMPLETE. That is why many people are having a hard time converting.
The problem with MS Word is that the way to see how a command or comment would work is to try it on the screen. Will inserting this graphic cause the rest on the page to lose alignment? Not sure? Try it out!
This is fine for people using the software, but a nightmare for other people trying to write compatible software. Try it! Take out your old copy of MS 5.0 and write a fairly complex document (a 5-6 page research paper with graphs and annotation is a good example). Take that and use MS 6.0 to read it. Even MS themselves can't maintain consistency of conversion. That's becuase they basically made the document format up as they went along - no formal software engineering specs were ever written. If they were, then they obviously weren't detailed enough.
Contrast that to TeX. You don't have to copy a single line of TeX source to create your own teX compiler. All you have to do is to examine the picky formatting tests, and ensure that you write your code to reproduce the desired tests. And the specs were designed sensibly, if a little idiosyncratically.
The binary format of the .doc file is hardly the issue!!
Oh MOZART you say! I thought you meant Lars!
Haiku poet can be made by
Two people fucking?
(Is crudity allowed in Haiku? :-) )
And to people like Stephen Hawking, they can forget about listening to music this way.
And if I want to play a huge collection of songs, legally bought by myself, I must authenticate each and every time the song advances.
Do the companies that think of this "innovative" stuff even bother to think about what they are doing? Are these people morons for thinking that such a thing would work?
Hypertext links are more like the "soft" symbolic of a Unix filesystem. The inability to distinguish files and links is a real confusion that MS has perpetuated upon users.
Putting it another way, I can design a webpage to look exactly like a file browser, so that the IE user is fooled into thinking he is in filebrowsing mode. But, as soon as he tries to do something like rename a file, the reality of what he is doing manifests itself. Files and hypertext links have different properties, and should not be the same!
Captain: Don't just sit there. Download it and decrypt it.
Comms Officer: Already on it sir. Hmmm ... it appears that to be some kind of frequency-shifted, time-compressed code.
Captain: What does it say?
Comms Officer: LONELY BOTTLENOSE SEEKS MATE. Repeated over and over again sir.
Captain: It's a code, I tell you. LONELY == damaged. BOTTLENOSE == warship. MATE == out of fuel. Give me the coordinates of the source and let's blast them out of the water!
Comms Officer: Aye aye, captain!
I think they just use plain ol' radio silence to avoid detection. Don't transmit while in enemy territory! Of course, when and if they do transmit, any other conventional military technique - frequency hopping, highly directional burst of radio waves using military grade encryption, and so on.
Because I seem to have implemented all the first 8 algorithms before, either in CS class or in the course of working as a research intern - all except the Fortran compiler. I find it silly that a particulat language compiler is considered to be a top ten algorithm. I have no quarrels with the choices except for this one. Seems to me that the list is heavily biased towards scientific and numerical applications, and therefore the Fortran compiler. What about operation research and say (as an example) algorithms for solving the Travelling Salesman Problem? Or what about innovative (eeks - hate that word) data-structures such as, say, kd-trees that facilitate and suggest the development of a whole class of extremely fast algorithms in geometry?
Were those electronic documents even digitally signed in the first place? I think not.
Any good promising candidates around?
Of course, this is not to say that traditional signatures aren't that secure. That's even more easy to fake, if you think about it.
So what gives? Are we saying that both signatures are equally valid? One is more valid than the other? Whatever the case, we should recognize that the authenticity of the two are different, and treat with differing degrees of authenticity. Exactly how, I don't know. I would like to hear from the experts though, on how we should handle our digital signatures.
Is the current infrastructure (i.e. none) on the net adequate? Do we need escrow services?
At-choo!