In my opinion SSL mixed two requirements, identification of site owner and secure communication.
You can't have secure communication without identification, or else you will be extremely vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack, making that secure communication no longer secure at all. You can have identification without secure communication, but, as identification (the key management headache) is the hard part of the whole deal, why not take the extra tiny effort to secure the communication as well?
We basically have two ways to verify an identity without doing a direct face-to-face (not literally, as it could be a phone call, for example) verification: you trust someone else to do it (centralized, a CA as it's done with SSL certificates), or you have a line of trust through people you trust, through people they trust, etc., going all the way to the third-party (decentralized, a web of trust as used in PGP). If you want to dump having an expensive signing authority but still secure your communications with new web servers, some kind of web of trust system needs to be designed and implemented.
Notice, the web server in question can't provide contact information (phone number, address) for key verification because you don't know who sent you the contact information! Could be the man-in-the-middle providing his phone number, awaiting your call.
Tampa is pretty safe from all that. I have grandparents that live in St. Petersburg (right next to Tampa) and they have never had any damage or been in danger from the weather. If Tampa had major flooding, then pretty much the whole state of Florida will be submerged too. At that point Wikipedia is low on the list of things to worry about.
I hope I am not being overly pedantic here, but there is nothing non-commercial about the GPL or any other free software licenses. In fact, you can pay money for Free softare games if you like. What they really mean is proprietary. In the article, they do however have a clearer definition,
To be eligible for inclusion in this list each game needed to be:
Released under a proprietary license with a fee required either to purchase the game, or a monthly charge
Not require Wine to run. Wine is a compatibility layer for running Windows software
My only complaint is with the title of the article.
Hasn't this happened before? I thought the idea in Canada was that they propose a DMCA-like law, but even worse, simply so that it gets tossed and nothing even like it can be proposed anymore. Then later, when some copyright-nazi comes around complaining, they just point to the history books and say, "Hey, see! What are you complaining aboot? We tried to make such a law before but no one would pass it, eh."
I might call it the Jack Thompson approach. You make sure the side you oppose has some example in it that is so crazy no one takes them seriously. This law is that example. Imagine the situation, "You think 'obscene' video games should be banned? You are just like Jack Thompson then!" Instant win.
Using credit cards on the Internet is actually extremely safe. If you spend a couple minutes scanning your monthly statements for suspicious charges you won't ever lose a cent. From the FTC website,
Your maximum liability under federal law for unauthorized use of your credit card is $50. If you report the loss before your credit cards are used, the FCBA says the card issuer cannot hold you responsible for any unauthorized charges. If a thief uses your cards before you report them missing, the most you will owe for unauthorized charges is $50 per card. Also, if the loss involves your credit card number, but not the card itself, you have no liability for unauthorized use.
If someone intercepts your credit card number online (or by any means of having only the number), you are not responsible for any charges whatsoever. Unless it is an unusual circumstance, the only thing you really have to deal with is the time to report it and waiting for a new card to arrive in the mail. The credit card company will deal with tracking down whoever is responsible, if they want to.
Not that you should get careless and put your credit card number on your blog or something. Also, as a note, that $50 fee for physically stolen credit cards is almost always waived by the credit card company.
companies have an ethical duty to make GPL drivers
If you look carefully, you will find that virtually no one is claiming that companies should provide GPL drivers for their hardware. What free software hackers want is hardware specs so they can write their own drivers. This is especially true if you go look at the BSD guys who can't/don't want to use GPL drivers (directly).
I did this with Gimp. Just as some sibling posts said, I also do not see any bands. My screen is 20 inches wide and 1920 pixels wide. It's some kind of Dell monitor at work, so I have no idea what exactly it is (no label).
Considering that Tor was originally sponsored by the US Naval Research Laboratory, currently has and is used for important uses for many governments including the US government, and only works well when anyone can use it, I would say it is one of the least likely things to be shut down by government.
Didn't notice all of the signs around the checkpoint....hmmm just like 6 year olds.
If most people are failing to notice/read an important sign, this is most likely a user interface failure than the passender's faults. In fact, according to the U.S. Department of Education's National Adult Literacy Survey, 48% of the U.S. population has low literacy. (Note that this percentage is found in just about all advanced countries, so it's not some kind of "stupid Americans" thing). To quote that page,
Lower literacy is different than illiteracy: people with lower literacy can read, but they have difficulties doing so.
The most notable difference between lower- and higher-literacy users is that lower-literacy users can't understand a text by glancing at it. They must read word for word and often spend considerable time trying to understand multi-syllabic words.
Lower-literacy users focus exclusively on each word and slowly move their eyes across each line of text. In other words, they "plow" the text, line by line.
That means for 48% of the population, reading a detailed sign is a significant chore such that, with balancing with everything they have to worry about in an airport, they simply don't have time to do it. If that sign is really explaining what is going it, it is going to be more than just a few words. That magazine-sized sign completely and automatically fails for about half the population.
Before anyone goes blaming them, people with low literacy are not that way because they are stupid and lazy or whatever else you might immediately blame them for being. That's just how it is, and it is not going to change anytime soon. And just because they are low literacy does not mean that they don't deserve to know what is going on when they proceed through a needless security checkpoint.
Improving the flow of information for low literacy passengers also improves the flow of information to high literacry passengers too. It's better for everyone. The lack of knowledge of what is going on is what allows this ridiculous security theater to get even worse. The more people know the privacy implications involved (that the man behind the curtain gets to see you naked), the less accepted these machines will be. Why do you think they are hiding their implementation in the first place?
Please never, ever insinuate that communism implies atheism again.
The phrase "godless communists" doesn't come out of nowhere. You don't necessarily need to be an atheist to be a communist, but most communist states were officially atheistic, not just simply secular as Western governments are meant to be.
Karl Marx, both athiest and considered the father of communism, said religion was "the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world,...the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people." In particular, Marxism-Leninism communism explicitly stated that religion was a tool used by the bourgeois to control and further exploit the working class.
To look at an example, the Soviet Union, the only communist state to be a world power (I think, right?), was officially atheistic. The ruling party professed atheism, as well as half of the population (figures determined after the fall of the Soviet Union). Even their propaganda went that way. For example, when Yuri Gagarin became the first human being in space, the official Soviet news claimed that he said, "I don't see any God up here!", which is an unlikely quote.
However, in your defense, you won't find much about atheism or religion in The Communist Manifesto. There is a line saying communism "abolishes all religion", but this is more poetic than anything else. Also, lack of religion doesn't imply atheism (most of America's "founding fathers" were not religious, but they were not athiests either).
So, if you meet someone who claimed to be a communist and you had to bet on whether or not s/he was an atheist, I would argue that your money is safest if you bet on the additional adjective "godless" to go in front of "commie". This doesn't work the other way though: I would say (gut feeling again here) it is unlikely that someone claiming to be an atheist is also a communist.
Note: I am an atheist, but I would hate to live in a communist state. So I am not trying to say "one is bad so the other is also bad" or "one is good so the other is good". I am guessing you are either a religious communist or a non-communist athiest and, in both cases, dislike the association.
Well, the hobbyists did something very interesting that uses the Wii remote for more than "press a button by shaking it". Some guy implemented a system that turns a Wii into a sort-of VR display. A video on YouTube demos it.
"Happy Birthday To You" is not in the public domain. The copyright holders make thousands (if not millions) of dollars off the song every year. From the Wikipedia article,
The Summy Company registered for copyright in 1935, [...] Based on the 1935 copyright registration, Warner claims that US copyright won't expire until 2030, and that unauthorized public performances of the song are technically illegal unless royalties are paid to it.
This is one of the really good examples of how messed up our copyright laws are. That's why I used it. An important part of our culture is locked up.
Many are musicians and also realize that copyright infringement is wrong.
Why is copyright infringement wrong? Is it wrong to sing Happy Birthday in a restaurant? There may be laws in place that say you can't do something, but ignoring those laws is not necessarily wrong. Fortunately, laws aren't definitions of right and wrong.
I like to think of Lynx and Links as the Bourne shell and the C shell shell respectively. Some Unix wisdom that I see people around me at work learn the hard way: never use the C shell for scripting. It's just not suited for it. However, the C shell is supposedly superior to Bourne shell for interactive use.
In this same way, I have found that Lynx has better scripting capabilities than Links. With Lynx you can easily automate filling out web forms, or parse and dump web pages to stdout easily and in a more useful format (for say going off to grep or a Perl script or something). Links has much better interactive capabilities than Lynx. Plus it does page layout much more accurately.
Lynx == sh
Links == csh
Notes: I don't know how Elinks compares as I have never used it myself, though I plan to check it out now. Also, even though I said C shell is for interactive use, outside of work I usually use bash (a Bourne shell) as my interactive shell anyway. Also, reading this post aloud to someone verbally would be very confusing.
Slashdot Mirror
Won't they be surprised when they go back to find that all the old Pittsburgh blast furnaces are gone ... replaced by various shopping centers. :-P
You can't have secure communication without identification, or else you will be extremely vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack, making that secure communication no longer secure at all. You can have identification without secure communication, but, as identification (the key management headache) is the hard part of the whole deal, why not take the extra tiny effort to secure the communication as well?
We basically have two ways to verify an identity without doing a direct face-to-face (not literally, as it could be a phone call, for example) verification: you trust someone else to do it (centralized, a CA as it's done with SSL certificates), or you have a line of trust through people you trust, through people they trust, etc., going all the way to the third-party (decentralized, a web of trust as used in PGP). If you want to dump having an expensive signing authority but still secure your communications with new web servers, some kind of web of trust system needs to be designed and implemented.
Notice, the web server in question can't provide contact information (phone number, address) for key verification because you don't know who sent you the contact information! Could be the man-in-the-middle providing his phone number, awaiting your call.
Tampa is pretty safe from all that. I have grandparents that live in St. Petersburg (right next to Tampa) and they have never had any damage or been in danger from the weather. If Tampa had major flooding, then pretty much the whole state of Florida will be submerged too. At that point Wikipedia is low on the list of things to worry about.
A Dijkstra or McCarthy inspirational poster would fit as well. I love the "Quick and Dirty: I would not like that."
Don't you know? It is said that, "XML is like violence: if it doesn't solve your problem, you aren't using enough of it."
I hope I am not being overly pedantic here, but there is nothing non-commercial about the GPL or any other free software licenses. In fact, you can pay money for Free softare games if you like. What they really mean is proprietary. In the article, they do however have a clearer definition,
To be eligible for inclusion in this list each game needed to be:
My only complaint is with the title of the article.
Hasn't this happened before? I thought the idea in Canada was that they propose a DMCA-like law, but even worse, simply so that it gets tossed and nothing even like it can be proposed anymore. Then later, when some copyright-nazi comes around complaining, they just point to the history books and say, "Hey, see! What are you complaining aboot? We tried to make such a law before but no one would pass it, eh."
I might call it the Jack Thompson approach. You make sure the side you oppose has some example in it that is so crazy no one takes them seriously. This law is that example. Imagine the situation, "You think 'obscene' video games should be banned? You are just like Jack Thompson then!" Instant win.
Note: I am not Canadian.
Using credit cards on the Internet is actually extremely safe. If you spend a couple minutes scanning your monthly statements for suspicious charges you won't ever lose a cent. From the FTC website,
Your maximum liability under federal law for unauthorized use of your credit card is $50. If you report the loss before your credit cards are used, the FCBA says the card issuer cannot hold you responsible for any unauthorized charges. If a thief uses your cards before you report them missing, the most you will owe for unauthorized charges is $50 per card. Also, if the loss involves your credit card number, but not the card itself, you have no liability for unauthorized use.If someone intercepts your credit card number online (or by any means of having only the number), you are not responsible for any charges whatsoever. Unless it is an unusual circumstance, the only thing you really have to deal with is the time to report it and waiting for a new card to arrive in the mail. The credit card company will deal with tracking down whoever is responsible, if they want to.
Not that you should get careless and put your credit card number on your blog or something. Also, as a note, that $50 fee for physically stolen credit cards is almost always waived by the credit card company.
All this remembering and you remember the wrong date. :-P
If you look carefully, you will find that virtually no one is claiming that companies should provide GPL drivers for their hardware. What free software hackers want is hardware specs so they can write their own drivers. This is especially true if you go look at the BSD guys who can't/don't want to use GPL drivers (directly).
I did this with Gimp. Just as some sibling posts said, I also do not see any bands. My screen is 20 inches wide and 1920 pixels wide. It's some kind of Dell monitor at work, so I have no idea what exactly it is (no label).
You say that like copyright infringement has something to do with the RIAA lawsuit selection process.
Considering that Tor was originally sponsored by the US Naval Research Laboratory, currently has and is used for important uses for many governments including the US government, and only works well when anyone can use it, I would say it is one of the least likely things to be shut down by government.
If most people are failing to notice/read an important sign, this is most likely a user interface failure than the passender's faults. In fact, according to the U.S. Department of Education's National Adult Literacy Survey, 48% of the U.S. population has low literacy. (Note that this percentage is found in just about all advanced countries, so it's not some kind of "stupid Americans" thing). To quote that page,
Lower literacy is different than illiteracy: people with lower literacy can read, but they have difficulties doing so.
The most notable difference between lower- and higher-literacy users is that lower-literacy users can't understand a text by glancing at it. They must read word for word and often spend considerable time trying to understand multi-syllabic words.
Lower-literacy users focus exclusively on each word and slowly move their eyes across each line of text. In other words, they "plow" the text, line by line.
That means for 48% of the population, reading a detailed sign is a significant chore such that, with balancing with everything they have to worry about in an airport, they simply don't have time to do it. If that sign is really explaining what is going it, it is going to be more than just a few words. That magazine-sized sign completely and automatically fails for about half the population.
Before anyone goes blaming them, people with low literacy are not that way because they are stupid and lazy or whatever else you might immediately blame them for being. That's just how it is, and it is not going to change anytime soon. And just because they are low literacy does not mean that they don't deserve to know what is going on when they proceed through a needless security checkpoint.
Improving the flow of information for low literacy passengers also improves the flow of information to high literacry passengers too. It's better for everyone. The lack of knowledge of what is going on is what allows this ridiculous security theater to get even worse. The more people know the privacy implications involved (that the man behind the curtain gets to see you naked), the less accepted these machines will be. Why do you think they are hiding their implementation in the first place?
Same principle, now you just hold two different photos up instead of one. :-P
The phrase "godless communists" doesn't come out of nowhere. You don't necessarily need to be an atheist to be a communist, but most communist states were officially atheistic, not just simply secular as Western governments are meant to be.
Karl Marx, both athiest and considered the father of communism, said religion was "the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world,...the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people." In particular, Marxism-Leninism communism explicitly stated that religion was a tool used by the bourgeois to control and further exploit the working class.
To look at an example, the Soviet Union, the only communist state to be a world power (I think, right?), was officially atheistic. The ruling party professed atheism, as well as half of the population (figures determined after the fall of the Soviet Union). Even their propaganda went that way. For example, when Yuri Gagarin became the first human being in space, the official Soviet news claimed that he said, "I don't see any God up here!", which is an unlikely quote.
However, in your defense, you won't find much about atheism or religion in The Communist Manifesto. There is a line saying communism "abolishes all religion", but this is more poetic than anything else. Also, lack of religion doesn't imply atheism (most of America's "founding fathers" were not religious, but they were not athiests either).
So, if you meet someone who claimed to be a communist and you had to bet on whether or not s/he was an atheist, I would argue that your money is safest if you bet on the additional adjective "godless" to go in front of "commie". This doesn't work the other way though: I would say (gut feeling again here) it is unlikely that someone claiming to be an atheist is also a communist.
Note: I am an atheist, but I would hate to live in a communist state. So I am not trying to say "one is bad so the other is also bad" or "one is good so the other is good". I am guessing you are either a religious communist or a non-communist athiest and, in both cases, dislike the association.
I heard once that the Emergency Repair Kit is a body bag (or at least the snake bite ones are).
With apologies to Colbert,
Google Health Open Platform: great platform, or greatest platform?
Well, the hobbyists did something very interesting that uses the Wii remote for more than "press a button by shaking it". Some guy implemented a system that turns a Wii into a sort-of VR display. A video on YouTube demos it.
You forgot to stick atheist (or I guess the communist part covered that) and homosexual in there somewhere.
You're right. Bush is the only president to have negative YouTube videos about him while holding office.
"Happy Birthday To You" is not in the public domain. The copyright holders make thousands (if not millions) of dollars off the song every year. From the Wikipedia article,
The Summy Company registered for copyright in 1935, [...] Based on the 1935 copyright registration, Warner claims that US copyright won't expire until 2030, and that unauthorized public performances of the song are technically illegal unless royalties are paid to it.This is one of the really good examples of how messed up our copyright laws are. That's why I used it. An important part of our culture is locked up.
Why is copyright infringement wrong? Is it wrong to sing Happy Birthday in a restaurant? There may be laws in place that say you can't do something, but ignoring those laws is not necessarily wrong. Fortunately, laws aren't definitions of right and wrong.
That's why you should play a game like Progress Quest. You can level your character without clicking your mouse.
I like to think of Lynx and Links as the Bourne shell and the C shell shell respectively. Some Unix wisdom that I see people around me at work learn the hard way: never use the C shell for scripting. It's just not suited for it. However, the C shell is supposedly superior to Bourne shell for interactive use.
In this same way, I have found that Lynx has better scripting capabilities than Links. With Lynx you can easily automate filling out web forms, or parse and dump web pages to stdout easily and in a more useful format (for say going off to grep or a Perl script or something). Links has much better interactive capabilities than Lynx. Plus it does page layout much more accurately.
Lynx == sh
Links == csh
Notes: I don't know how Elinks compares as I have never used it myself, though I plan to check it out now. Also, even though I said C shell is for interactive use, outside of work I usually use bash (a Bourne shell) as my interactive shell anyway. Also, reading this post aloud to someone verbally would be very confusing.