Ruthenium is an extremely rare element, moreso than platinum. It's not valued as expensively as
platinum only because it lacks a lot of the useful properties that platinum does have (eg very high melting temperature, chemical resistence), and is usually a byproduct of platinum mining in the first place. I've heard through word of mouth that there is probably no more than ~ 1,000 gallons worth of pure atomic ruthenium known in the world and not currently in use. (Fortunately for us, Ru was considered at one point as a major component in the catalytic converter for cars, but other, more abundent but more expensive materials were found instead.) While each drive that might use Ru in this way would only use a tiny tiny fraction of that 1,000 gallons, a run of drives in the millions could easy make a marked depletion in the supply.
First,.info is supposed to be a catchall domain, for those sites that don't fit into anywhere else (eg, this would be where slashdot would go if it had to up and move from.com/.org). So why should *trademark* owners be allowed to get into this? Sure, I can think of a few trademark owners that aren't a commercial, network, or non-profit, but people are expecting that Coca-Cola will just up and grab both coke.biz and coke.info.
Second, the purpose of.biz was to alleaviate the conjestion in the.com domain, yet the trademark owners will go first. Do you think that Apple Moving and Storage, or McDonald's Hardware will get first shot over Apple Computers or McDonald's Resturants? Of course not. The preregistration for biz should only be allowed if you don't already own a 'reasonable' name in the.com arena, and if you already do, well, get in line with the rest of us. And domain names that are not in line with the company name should be disallowed at this time; eg Verizon should not be able to register Verizonsucks.biz, unless they legally change their name to that.
Email addresses are ubiquitous as your normal snail mail addresses when it comes to people contacting you, and with people moving in and out of workplaces, ISPs, and schools with much more frequency, email addresses could change at a drop of the hat. Fortunately, it's very easy for most standard mail servers to alias ex-employees or students to point at some other site of the person's wishes. All they need is to edit a line in a alias file (assuming you're dealing with standard mail servers). Yet most places don't offer this; once you are gone, your mail account is gone, and if you had used it for any significant correspodence, you're screwed. Sure, most of us on/. will have our own private mailbox that we use for our correspodence and use the work/school provided one only for that purpose, but 99% of computer users aren't like us.
USENET was one of the first 'email havens' to be spam-harvested; as soon as people realized this (c. 1994-6), the email munging began. I remember a book published in the early 90s, something like "All the email addresses in the World"; I recognized 7 of mine, and it was obvious that without a web, the only way they could get them was via USENET posting. Harvesting from USENET became passe in favor of going through the web at that point.
Re:It will affect the wrong people
on
Hash Cash
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· Score: 2
The way I read the article (again, USN&WR vaguity abounds), was that the *first* time a@b.com sent x@y.com an email, y.com would challenge b.com's SMTP's server with the math problem; when b.com's replies with the right answer, y.com happily accepts the message, and notes that "a@b.com" has now sent "x@y.com" a message. The next time that happens, y.com's SMTP sees that there's already been a correspondence, and therefore does not challenge it.
If you didn't store this, that meant for *every* email message sent, you'd have this hash calculation before the email can be sent. I would fear that this alone would bog down most major email providers more so than spam efforts due to the volume of legitimate email alone. So there's still a problem in implementation.
It will affect the wrong people
on
Hash Cash
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· Score: 2
Ok, sure, there are servers out there that definitely cater to spam, and certainly something like this is going to hurt them. But the bulk of spammers today use throwaway accounts. From when I read this, it suggests that they are talking about the SMTP to SMTP servers (I cannot see it operating on the user-to-user level, since it would require that the end user's computer be active and running an email client such that you can send mail to him at *any* time). So if I was a spammer, I'd simply toss my 10,000,000 addresses at the open relay STMP server; that server would talk with other servers and it would be the item boggled down with those excess calculations. And, as suggested by the article, it's not just this handshake for server to server, but it's the handshake for mailbox to mailbox, which means that effectively, we'd need something like a bit array on the order of N^2 to store the fact the handshake has passed, N being the total number of email addresses in existence. If N starts bordering on 1 billion (we're close to that, easily), you are talking about a roughly 100,000 terabyte storage unit. Sure, this would be distributed among all mail servers, but this is highly impractical.
Of course, given the terseness of US News & WR, I'm sure there are some key details missing from the article. It's a nice idea, but when you look at the habits of the worst spammers, it won't work.
"Hi, we're Microsoft. Office 2005 will be sold only as rentable software. Since it has feature X which every one of your competitors is using, you'll have to use it too."
Software renting puts too much power in the hands of a monopoly (which aren't illegal in and of themselves!), and as proven by the MS trial, if such a company did do this, say in 2004, and were charged under anti-trust act, they could continue to do that deed for several more years, up to at least 2009, collecting rent from their customers.
I believe that if renting software comes to pass, there must be a law to allow rent-to-own or outright purchasing provisions to prevent a monopoly from maintain their position.
It was at Michigan State after their basketball team lost at NCAA about 2 years ago. Similar situation, and couple with the fact that rumors stated that the riots were planning well in advanced (It's very hard to believe that several people would toss flaming matteresses out onto the state within the same time period). In addition, the cameras were very visible, some were personal, some were news crews. To continue acting in such a manner that does not promote the idea of 'civil disobedience' generally is going to get you busted.
To be truthful, someone generally easily finds a bug in the regex engine about twice a month. Yes, they tend to be on the most complex of regexes, but they are still there and still need to be fixed. Plus memory issues and the typical details you get into with any program.
SGI is suing the universe for abusing their trademark on "OpenGL". "We feel that consumers will be confused between OpenGL and Open Universe, since the universe encompasses everything and therefore must compete with at least one of our products", SGI spokesmen said at a press conference.
Unlike Northpoint, which served customers over a large number of different ISPs (which themselves had different DSL providers depending on region), a majority of Rhythms users are with Telocity, and a majority of Telocity's users are on Rhythms network. If Rhythms should have to sell out, I would suspect that Telocity would be there immediately to buy them out, possibly getting other ISPs invovled to help out.
Surprisingly, it's not that they don't charge enough to cover costs (Which is what they actually charge the ISP to cover operating experience, leasing the copper from the baby bells, and making the small profit); it's that with all the smaller ISPs going out of business, disappear, or otherwise being deliquent in their payments that is hurting the DSL line people, rather than the actual consumers. Rhythms, which might run their own ISP business but are primarily into the line operations, rarely deal directly with the consumer save at install time; I, for example, cannot call up Rhythms for support if I know it's a line problem, I have to place the ticket through my ISP (it's part of the AUP).
I've been on the net longer than most, and I know what *good* Internet-based 4/1 jokes used to be like. Unlike your typical practical joke approach that one takes in the physical world, the virtual April Fool's gag is meant to be subtle and a surprise. For example, when the Simpsons used to be good, a few of the more predominate members would put together a fake episode list for the upcoming season. Thing is, the fakes were usually never outlandish, but just had a hint of "Wow, would they take the show that far...?", so many people believed them, though the skilled reader would always be able to recognize it. The fake RFCs as well, tended to be more subtle than an obvious gag. A few years ago, all the Gamespy Planet's sites were rendered in ASCII 'due to some technical glitch', they claimed. A lot of fake but nearly-realistic news bites that spread along USENET as well.
This year was weak; Slashdot's attempts fell flat because, well, most were way too obvious (eg the Dalnet being bought by X has been done *every* year somewhere on the net). The online cartoonists didn't appear to band together this year to do much as they did in the prior two. Usenet posts that were in the 4/1 flavor were also too obvious.
I think that like how USENET and other parts of the web have suffered from the masses being introduced to it, so has the internet tradition of 4/1's. It's not some jokes were well planned, but the majority of what I saw was certainly not in the flavor of how it was done years ago.
This actually introduces a new party into the mix over SSH. The previous todo was with OpenSSH, and now that the IETF (the people that work on networking standards) have said that they refuse to change SSH to anything else means that there's now two parties involved if a court case could result (And I suspect there will be, though we know who's going to lose it from the start...)
But see, it's not required to RUN it. It might be installed, and it might be preconfigured to be run out of the box, but this can be disabled, as the bill stands, and therefore, no one is forced to run it. Not even CIPA is advocating 'censoring', though some might consider it blackmail to require filter installation as tied to federal dollars.
Censoring has to happen at the source of the material, before it has a chance for rebroadcast in any medium. If, for example,/. installed something that basically prevented the display of any messages containing "foobar" in them, dispite the context, that's censoring. Because it is censored, only those at the source have access to it, and therefore whatever what blocked will never see the light of day.
Filtering happens at any point along the broadcasting line, after the source sent it out. *You* may not be able to see or read it, but it does not mean that information is not available elsewhere and that others can view it. *You* might have to jump through a lot of hoops (time, financal, patience) to see that information, but it certainly available. And that's exactly what filterware does. Just because some corp has decided that some sites will be on their 'hitlist' and be blocked for no good reason, does not mean those sites are inaccessable anywhere else.
Now, mind you, it's a slippery slope from filtering to censoring, as I've stated before. CIPA is close to going down that, but since it mearly ties getting federal dollars to install this, and not a requirement punishable by law, it's not censoring, yet. But change a few words, and it could easily be a chilling censorship issue, which is why ACLU and the other groups are chasing after it.
But as in the TX case, the only requirement is that the computers have to have filterware available and possibly installed. Save for the problems with OSes that have no filterware available (though I wonder if an appropriate junkbuster blockfile would meet their requirements), there's no real problems with this law assuming that the end cost to the consumers is negliable. (Going off a different post here, an additional $10 on a computer is not going to be a burden, compared to the MS 'tax'). An adult without children is free to remove it, and those with children can be a bit more secure that their family PC is filtering. But it should be strongly educated to the TX population if this bill passes that filterware is not a placebo for monitoring your children's activities on the internet; it only helps with such.
(First, it's not 'censorware', it's 'filterware'. Until everyone is required to RUN it (not just have it), it's still filtering and not censoring).
But instead of forcing OEMs to install this on computers, why not simply have the gov't subsidize free copies on CD Roms that come with the computer, making sure that the installation instructions are as simply as "follow on screen instructions"? Yes, if you assume that there's about 10 million computers in TX, that means that it would be $300-$500 million in software costs, but I betcha that you could easily persuade the filterware companies to take a bulk sum per year, say, $50-$100 million, for an unlimited 'state' licence.
I don't think there's a problem in trying to enable any parent to have a easy way to include filtering software on a family PC, and if you put that cost into the cost of a computer or for free, and include software with the computer, all the better. But I do agree you need to distiquish between corporate sales and personal or educational sales, and it should not be preinstalled unless the person requests for it to be.
As others have stated, it's not really a uniqueid, your connecting IP is giving away more information that this. But why do they need all this data?
The only thing that it would seem to me is that it is because Earthlink has poor web page design (not browser, their internal web pages!) that they require to know 1) what speed you can handle , as to adjust A/V content as to suit your connection speed, 2) what your screen layout is as to probably used fixed width tables effectively in the HTML layout, and 3) where you are located in the country (via the POP bank info). Neither of which is even necessary if you follow HTML 4 specs, with effective use of the OBJECT tag, relative table sizes, and use of the standard HTTP header and/or cookies, respectively.
In other words, their customized browser appears to be covering up for lame web page designers.
I'll also point out that Nvidia's latest driver offering, 0.9-767, does now support RENDER, thus, you can have 3D *and* anti-aliased fonts, woo!
(GTK developers, get your butt in gear!:D)
Given all the available distributions, I can think of only two things that are important in how the various distributions vary...package management method and Default security installation. The former is probably the biggest one, distinguishing Slackware from Redhat/Mandrake/etc from Debian, and is probably where people have the most 'religious' conviction to their preferred distro. The latter is basically a more 'personal' touch, using one's opinion on what is 'secure' to set up how the box is initially installed. Given that this can vary from person to person, there is definitely potental for an infinite number of linux distros out there; and unless apt and rpm combine into one tool, there will never be a consolidation of distros.
Why is choice in school bad while choice in OS, CPU, and car are all wonderful? Why is it a bad thing to be allowd to find a school that teaches the way you want?
Yeah, yeah, this is a troll, probably, but here's my take: Choice is good only if everyone has the opportunity to make that choice. For cars and CPUs, that's certainly possible; your choice range might be limited in both cases due to income, but that limitation can still leave you with a wide range of choices from different manufactures. (OS, I'll leave out, because of the Microsoft Tax, but ignoring this, you do have a choice in OS as well).
Vouchers do offer choices for education, but only to a subset of the population. Nearly every implementation of vouchers that I read about would give, no questions asked, about $2500/yr per student. Most private schools, however, are asking for at least $5000/yr, if not up to $10,000/yr for tuition. Those that can afford this will do so, but for struggling families not-necessary-poverty-but-only-just-above-it, that's very much out of the question, and they're stuck with the public school allocated to them by districting lines. Thus, they have no choice. Vouchers only give choices to the rich. That $2500/yr is better spent on a whole improving all public schools particularly those in inner cities, and paying better salaries for teachers, than to allow a few more select few students the choice of an education.
A court in Hawaii ruled in a case for disgruntled pilots against their ex-employers that if a web site has sufficient access protection (eg requiring a username and password is sufficient), then by attempted to view that site without obtaining the appropriate access is a violation of the law. In this case, the ex-exployer airline had used passwords of other employees who volunteed their passwords, 'raided' the site (which contained a LOT of critique on the company but wasn't considered libelous since it wasn't a public forum), and fired the people in charge of the site, even though the web site was run on a private server not operated by the company.
The case above has many parallels, but alas, it's most likely a different jurisdiction, so if it was followed through legally , it would require just the same burdon of proof.
Slashdot Mirror
Ruthenium is an extremely rare element, moreso than platinum. It's not valued as expensively as platinum only because it lacks a lot of the useful properties that platinum does have (eg very high melting temperature, chemical resistence), and is usually a byproduct of platinum mining in the first place. I've heard through word of mouth that there is probably no more than ~ 1,000 gallons worth of pure atomic ruthenium known in the world and not currently in use. (Fortunately for us, Ru was considered at one point as a major component in the catalytic converter for cars, but other, more abundent but more expensive materials were found instead.) While each drive that might use Ru in this way would only use a tiny tiny fraction of that 1,000 gallons, a run of drives in the millions could easy make a marked depletion in the supply.
Second, the purpose of .biz was to alleaviate the conjestion in the .com domain, yet the trademark owners will go first. Do you think that Apple Moving and Storage, or McDonald's Hardware will get first shot over Apple Computers or McDonald's Resturants? Of course not. The preregistration for biz should only be allowed if you don't already own a 'reasonable' name in the .com arena, and if you already do, well, get in line with the rest of us. And domain names that are not in line with the company name should be disallowed at this time; eg Verizon should not be able to register Verizonsucks.biz, unless they legally change their name to that.
Hmmm: "all your base are belong to us", hey, there's a nice 7 word common phrase...
So Yoda was a Lisp Master!
If you didn't store this, that meant for *every* email message sent, you'd have this hash calculation before the email can be sent. I would fear that this alone would bog down most major email providers more so than spam efforts due to the volume of legitimate email alone. So there's still a problem in implementation.
Of course, given the terseness of US News & WR, I'm sure there are some key details missing from the article. It's a nice idea, but when you look at the habits of the worst spammers, it won't work.
I can't attribute to this, but I've heard that "ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife" isn't ironic, it's moronic!
Software renting puts too much power in the hands of a monopoly (which aren't illegal in and of themselves!), and as proven by the MS trial, if such a company did do this, say in 2004, and were charged under anti-trust act, they could continue to do that deed for several more years, up to at least 2009, collecting rent from their customers.
I believe that if renting software comes to pass, there must be a law to allow rent-to-own or outright purchasing provisions to prevent a monopoly from maintain their position.
It was at Michigan State after their basketball team lost at NCAA about 2 years ago. Similar situation, and couple with the fact that rumors stated that the riots were planning well in advanced (It's very hard to believe that several people would toss flaming matteresses out onto the state within the same time period). In addition, the cameras were very visible, some were personal, some were news crews. To continue acting in such a manner that does not promote the idea of 'civil disobedience' generally is going to get you busted.
To be truthful, someone generally easily finds a bug in the regex engine about twice a month. Yes, they tend to be on the most complex of regexes, but they are still there and still need to be fixed. Plus memory issues and the typical details you get into with any program.
(Yes, this is very revelent...)
Unlike Northpoint, which served customers over a large number of different ISPs (which themselves had different DSL providers depending on region), a majority of Rhythms users are with Telocity, and a majority of Telocity's users are on Rhythms network. If Rhythms should have to sell out, I would suspect that Telocity would be there immediately to buy them out, possibly getting other ISPs invovled to help out.
This year was weak; Slashdot's attempts fell flat because, well, most were way too obvious (eg the Dalnet being bought by X has been done *every* year somewhere on the net). The online cartoonists didn't appear to band together this year to do much as they did in the prior two. Usenet posts that were in the 4/1 flavor were also too obvious.
I think that like how USENET and other parts of the web have suffered from the masses being introduced to it, so has the internet tradition of 4/1's. It's not some jokes were well planned, but the majority of what I saw was certainly not in the flavor of how it was done years ago.
This actually introduces a new party into the mix over SSH. The previous todo was with OpenSSH, and now that the IETF (the people that work on networking standards) have said that they refuse to change SSH to anything else means that there's now two parties involved if a court case could result (And I suspect there will be, though we know who's going to lose it from the start...)
Censoring has to happen at the source of the material, before it has a chance for rebroadcast in any medium. If, for example, /. installed something that basically prevented the display of any messages containing "foobar" in them, dispite the context, that's censoring. Because it is censored, only those at the source have access to it, and therefore whatever what blocked will never see the light of day.
Filtering happens at any point along the broadcasting line, after the source sent it out. *You* may not be able to see or read it, but it does not mean that information is not available elsewhere and that others can view it. *You* might have to jump through a lot of hoops (time, financal, patience) to see that information, but it certainly available. And that's exactly what filterware does. Just because some corp has decided that some sites will be on their 'hitlist' and be blocked for no good reason, does not mean those sites are inaccessable anywhere else.
Now, mind you, it's a slippery slope from filtering to censoring, as I've stated before. CIPA is close to going down that, but since it mearly ties getting federal dollars to install this, and not a requirement punishable by law, it's not censoring, yet. But change a few words, and it could easily be a chilling censorship issue, which is why ACLU and the other groups are chasing after it.
But as in the TX case, the only requirement is that the computers have to have filterware available and possibly installed. Save for the problems with OSes that have no filterware available (though I wonder if an appropriate junkbuster blockfile would meet their requirements), there's no real problems with this law assuming that the end cost to the consumers is negliable. (Going off a different post here, an additional $10 on a computer is not going to be a burden, compared to the MS 'tax'). An adult without children is free to remove it, and those with children can be a bit more secure that their family PC is filtering. But it should be strongly educated to the TX population if this bill passes that filterware is not a placebo for monitoring your children's activities on the internet; it only helps with such.
But instead of forcing OEMs to install this on computers, why not simply have the gov't subsidize free copies on CD Roms that come with the computer, making sure that the installation instructions are as simply as "follow on screen instructions"? Yes, if you assume that there's about 10 million computers in TX, that means that it would be $300-$500 million in software costs, but I betcha that you could easily persuade the filterware companies to take a bulk sum per year, say, $50-$100 million, for an unlimited 'state' licence.
I don't think there's a problem in trying to enable any parent to have a easy way to include filtering software on a family PC, and if you put that cost into the cost of a computer or for free, and include software with the computer, all the better. But I do agree you need to distiquish between corporate sales and personal or educational sales, and it should not be preinstalled unless the person requests for it to be.
The only thing that it would seem to me is that it is because Earthlink has poor web page design (not browser, their internal web pages!) that they require to know 1) what speed you can handle , as to adjust A/V content as to suit your connection speed, 2) what your screen layout is as to probably used fixed width tables effectively in the HTML layout, and 3) where you are located in the country (via the POP bank info). Neither of which is even necessary if you follow HTML 4 specs, with effective use of the OBJECT tag, relative table sizes, and use of the standard HTTP header and/or cookies, respectively.
In other words, their customized browser appears to be covering up for lame web page designers.
I'll also point out that Nvidia's latest driver offering, 0.9-767, does now support RENDER, thus, you can have 3D *and* anti-aliased fonts, woo! (GTK developers, get your butt in gear! :D)
Given all the available distributions, I can think of only two things that are important in how the various distributions vary...package management method and Default security installation. The former is probably the biggest one, distinguishing Slackware from Redhat/Mandrake/etc from Debian, and is probably where people have the most 'religious' conviction to their preferred distro. The latter is basically a more 'personal' touch, using one's opinion on what is 'secure' to set up how the box is initially installed. Given that this can vary from person to person, there is definitely potental for an infinite number of linux distros out there; and unless apt and rpm combine into one tool, there will never be a consolidation of distros.
Vouchers do offer choices for education, but only to a subset of the population. Nearly every implementation of vouchers that I read about would give, no questions asked, about $2500/yr per student. Most private schools, however, are asking for at least $5000/yr, if not up to $10,000/yr for tuition. Those that can afford this will do so, but for struggling families not-necessary-poverty-but-only-just-above-it, that's very much out of the question, and they're stuck with the public school allocated to them by districting lines. Thus, they have no choice. Vouchers only give choices to the rich. That $2500/yr is better spent on a whole improving all public schools particularly those in inner cities, and paying better salaries for teachers, than to allow a few more select few students the choice of an education.
The case above has many parallels, but alas, it's most likely a different jurisdiction, so if it was followed through legally , it would require just the same burdon of proof.