"If "reliable" means you can count on it to report news, rather than suppress it to further a political agenda, then that makes the internet more reliable."
I can count on the internet to report many things both true and false, in support of many agendas. It's true that one portion of the internet or other will reliably report every rumor, fabrication, and bit of unsubstantiated gossip as fact. Drudge reports many bits of gossip, and occasionally he's right when other people ignored the story. Does that make him more 'reliable' than the New York Times by any common definition? Please.
I fully agree that getting all your news from one source is dangerous, and the internet makes it much easier to pull together multiple sources, and that's a good thing. That doesn't change the fact that the New York Times is among the most reliable individual sources of news there is. It beats most any other website you could name, and it utterly destroys the Drudge Report.
I'll second another reply to your post -- iTunes on Windows is a gateway drug. My girlfriend accused me of turning her into a Mac person. The reason? I installed iTunes on her PC. Now she uses a Powerbook...
Can someone explain why XML is in the headline? XML is a data format. It's well understood, and I highly doubt these people are using it in a new way -- let me guess, they're sending structured data, right?
This is like a headline saying "New Russian Website In HTML Lets You Download Music". It's an interesting application of technology, but who the hell cares what data format they use to do it?
Every time I start sounding pissed off I end up looking stupid, so please, if I'm missing something, enlighten me.:)
I assumed the same thing as the grandparent when I saw those emails -- that they were trying to get normal words marked as spam words, and make the filters less effective with normal messages. It would appear, though, that they're not very bright yet -- they're not targeting the low-scoring words. I expect that'll change before too long. What'll happen to your filter when all of the lowest scoring words it knows suddenly become the highest-scoring?
I don't actually know -- but I do know that you aren't the only one with access to those percentages.
If you haven't read Salon's coverage from the last couple years, you really should. There's a very good reason that Clear Channel stations play drastically narrower content than independent stations: the music industry collectively pays literally hundreds of millions of dollars a year to decide what gets played.
As far as I'm concerned, this new tactic of announcing up front what they're doing is 100 times better than the system described in the articles I linked. I still find it revolting that they so successfully determine the musical tastes of a nation, but I'm glad they're not hiding it.
(Incidentally, running songs as advertisements isn't a suddenly discovered loophole. It's mentioned in an article from 2002 that paying a radio station to decide what gets played is illegal, "unless they announce the sponsorship on air." What's new is the idea that people might not care.)
"MBSA Version 1.2 includes a graphical and command line interface that can perform local or remote scans of Windows systems."
So Microsoft releases a GUI tool to remotely scan Windows installations for security vulnerabilities, and yet it includes virtually *no way* to automatically exploit those vulnerabilities to provide a remote login?
Typical of them to rush an inferior product out the door and rely on marketing muscle to sell it over superior third party alternatives.
(not trying to win any points here -- I assume you're the only one who will ever read this.:-)
This feels similar to race arguments -- who's responsible for the fate of a poor, uneducated black person, him or the system? Who needs to change?
The answer in many cases is, the system did in fact treat him unfairly, and he can in fact change his situation on his own. When the system asks who's responsible, I would say, you are, and when he asks who's responsible, I would say, you are.
Likewise, I would say to any smoker, you have free will, if you think this stuff is harming you, it's in your power to quit. It's no one's problem but your own.
It's also true, however, that this is the most addictive chemical most people are likely to come in contact with -- harder to quit, I've heard, than most any drug. This suggests that while only your free will is involved when smoking the first cigarette, from there on another powerful force is at work. This chemical is sold to you by the tobacco companies, it serves only to profit the tobacco companies, and when they work to obscure its effects -- as they undeniably have, ever since it was an issue -- they hold responsibility.
" Also similar to the "I didn't know smoking was bad for me" argument... "
The tobacco lawsuits are different. When a company's internal documents show that they knew a product was both chemically addictive and highly carcinogenic, and they continued to sell it for decades while assuring consumers that it was neither addictive nor deadly, they are responsible for damage done to those consumers.
Given full disclosure up front (as cigarettes feature now), I'm more willing to blame the users.
As I see it, our government has been hijacked by a gang of shortsighted evildoers. It was in Newsweek, fer chrissake -- Bush/Rumsfeld asked around for ways to invalidate the Geneva Convention. Colin Powell replied that reversing 50 years of policy in that regard, with the goal of legalizing torture on the people of any country we occupied, was both a stupid and dangerous policy. He was overruled.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4999734/site/newsweek/ We've been betrayed as a people, at the highest level of government, and I sincerely hope we kick their ass this November.... still and all, I'm glad that setting up a website with that goal in mind isn't a crime.
My uncle works in one of those pet cloning biotech deals, and told me several years ago that there was ebola in laboratories in Texas for the very purpose you describe. My memory is hazy, but I believe that ebola was considered the best choice because it modifies the DNA of every cell in the body, instead of only certain ones. With this idea, DNA modification is not very far from practical right now -- turn off the reproducing and killing you parts of ebola, and change the code that it wants to copy into your DNA.
The potential applications, of course, are pretty wacky. Asthma? Gone. Peanut allergies? Gone. You're no longer one of those people who gets cancer from smoking. Change your eye color to match this season's styles -- or your skin color. Hot...
Another poster pointed out that gmail ads most likely won't be in iframes. I just wanted to add that, whether they are or not, it will be trivial for Google to find out exactly how often you load the ads and therefore whether you are blocking them. If I was Google (yeah, right) I would reserve the right to deny service if you are. Viewing the ads is what you give them in exchange for a free service -- don't expect to keep getting the service without contributing your half of the deal.
"I'm not willing to give up rights so they can apply an overzealous solution to a "problem" that might not actually exist"
That's a very good point. The problem is when people complain about that *after* they've bought songs under the iTMS terms, which are very explicit and easy to understand. As far as I'm concerned, once you do that you've voluntarily given up those rights, as well as the right to complain.
(now, ranting, not about you)
This is how I see the transaction with iTMS typically going:
iTMS: I'm going to give you this file for a dollar. You may listen to it with up to 3 copies of iTunes, as many iPods as you like, and you may burn it to a CD. You may not play the file in any other way, though what you do with the CD is up to you.
buyer: sounds like a good deal to me. I agree.
iTMS: here's your file, enjoy it.
buyer: hey! I can only play this on iPods or computers with iTunes, and burn it to CD! you ripped me off!
iTMS: schmuck.
From this perspective, I basically see playfair as a tool to help people break a contract they knowingly entered. That's a far cry from 'fair use', where I buy a CD with the expectation that I can back it up however I like.
"In this age it is becoming possible to precompute the hashes and then look them up, in that case the "strength" of the password becomes less important."
I would love to know how this works -- I thought it was pretty much useless. First because the storable keyspace is so much tinier than the total keyspace, and second because of salts.
IANACrypto person, but the basic idea with salts is that the router would say 'please send me your password hashed with the string "abcdefg".' The client then says, "oh, of course, that's hash('passwordsexgodabcdefg')". The evil sniffer has hash('passwordsexgod') stored in their lookup table, but that's totally useless in discovering what the client used. Since 'abcdefg' is a different string in each transaction, the lookup table becomes irrelevant.
I wasn't being sarcastic above -- I would love to know if this technique has somehow been overcome.
This place is located 'two miles off the tip of Long Island' though, right? It seems possible that wasn't the best place to put it, in terms of contingency plans for the surrounding population. Long Island is a pain to commute from even on a good day. Imagine all 3 million residents in a blind panic to leave? The virus itself would be the least of your worries.
Sorry about my last post, I'm not usually so obnoxious. My only point was that you don't need to look at your monitors to check status, as you said, merely any computer monitor, and that's not usually so hard to find if you're in any office.
You still win, though, instant notification is good stuff.
It allows you to communicate between computers that are even, yes, 600 miles apart. I can think of about 3,000 ways to accomplish the problem you lay out above, using this astonishing new method of communication.
Your server is capable of sending a text message to your cell phone, but not of talking to any other computer? Where do you work?
This is wildly off topic, but do you know anything about the fake-3d morph effect used by Michel Gondry in the Rolling Stones video around that time? I think it was also a siggraph-presented technique used to mimic flyovers of off-limits airspace. I would love love love to be able to play with that software. Is there anything like that that's made it into low budget/open source hands? And have you got any war stories about it?:)
Ayn Rand is great, if you're at a time in your life where you need to hear that standing out is admirable -- the Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged were exactly what I needed in ninth grade, for example.:-) She made a struggle for intellectual and artistic integrity gripping, and that's not easy.
When I got a little more secure, I moved on. But being juvenile doesn't make her worthless, if you happen to be young yourself.
A better comparison would be Earth, by David Brin. In one tiny aspect of a huge book, America's growing retired population reclaims the streets by sitting outside with netcams aimed at anything interesting. Everything from jaywalking and youthful hijinks to car crashes gets recorded and submitted as evidence not by big brother, but by we the people...
The same way I guess that rape videos, or news and movies about murder also hurts people; and since rape and murder is also illegal, like childporno, I guess you are infavor of censoring action movies and the news.
Let's see... child porn, in the sense the grandparent means, consists of asking children to have sex and then filming it. If action movies consisted of asking people to murder and then filming it, and the news consisted of asking people to rape and then filming it, then yes, I would be in favor of making those illegal too.
Once upon a time, people respected the law, and usually obeyed it. They respected police, and thanked them for doing a hard job and protecting the community.
Specifically, that was from 12:30 to 3:45 PM, October 24th, 1955.
Here, of course, you're talking about PAL, the mostly European format. All those posts saying "hey, it's 30 fps, not 60!" are referring to NTSC, the mostly American format.
Interestingly, the only place PAL equipment is common over here is with independent filmmakers -- because it's much much easier to turn 25 frames into 24 than 60 interlaced frames into 24. This creates a demand for cameras that shoot footage that's useless on most of the TVs we have...
Slashdot Mirror
"If "reliable" means you can count on it to report news, rather than suppress it to further a political agenda, then that makes the internet more reliable."
:)
I can count on the internet to report many things both true and false, in support of many agendas. It's true that one portion of the internet or other will reliably report every rumor, fabrication, and bit of unsubstantiated gossip as fact. Drudge reports many bits of gossip, and occasionally he's right when other people ignored the story. Does that make him more 'reliable' than the New York Times by any common definition? Please.
I fully agree that getting all your news from one source is dangerous, and the internet makes it much easier to pull together multiple sources, and that's a good thing. That doesn't change the fact that the New York Times is among the most reliable individual sources of news there is. It beats most any other website you could name, and it utterly destroys the Drudge Report.
That's all. We're cool now.
The Drudge Report proved that the internet is better and more reliable than the New York Times?
An anonymous female intern has informed me that you are almost certainly mistaken.
I'll second another reply to your post -- iTunes on Windows is a gateway drug. My girlfriend accused me of turning her into a Mac person. The reason? I installed iTunes on her PC. Now she uses a Powerbook ...
Can someone explain why XML is in the headline? XML is a data format. It's well understood, and I highly doubt these people are using it in a new way -- let me guess, they're sending structured data, right?
:)
This is like a headline saying "New Russian Website In HTML Lets You Download Music". It's an interesting application of technology, but who the hell cares what data format they use to do it?
Every time I start sounding pissed off I end up looking stupid, so please, if I'm missing something, enlighten me.
You'll never catch me alive ...
I assumed the same thing as the grandparent when I saw those emails -- that they were trying to get normal words marked as spam words, and make the filters less effective with normal messages. It would appear, though, that they're not very bright yet -- they're not targeting the low-scoring words. I expect that'll change before too long. What'll happen to your filter when all of the lowest scoring words it knows suddenly become the highest-scoring?
I don't actually know -- but I do know that you aren't the only one with access to those percentages.
http://www.salon.com/ent/clear_channel/index.html
If you haven't read Salon's coverage from the last couple years, you really should. There's a very good reason that Clear Channel stations play drastically narrower content than independent stations: the music industry collectively pays literally hundreds of millions of dollars a year to decide what gets played.
As far as I'm concerned, this new tactic of announcing up front what they're doing is 100 times better than the system described in the articles I linked. I still find it revolting that they so successfully determine the musical tastes of a nation, but I'm glad they're not hiding it.
(Incidentally, running songs as advertisements isn't a suddenly discovered loophole. It's mentioned in an article from 2002 that paying a radio station to decide what gets played is illegal, "unless they announce the sponsorship on air." What's new is the idea that people might not care.)
From the MBSA site:
"MBSA Version 1.2 includes a graphical and command line interface that can perform local or remote scans of Windows systems."
So Microsoft releases a GUI tool to remotely scan Windows installations for security vulnerabilities, and yet it includes virtually *no way* to automatically exploit those vulnerabilities to provide a remote login?
Typical of them to rush an inferior product out the door and rely on marketing muscle to sell it over superior third party alternatives.
(not trying to win any points here -- I assume you're the only one who will ever read this. :-)
This feels similar to race arguments -- who's responsible for the fate of a poor, uneducated black person, him or the system? Who needs to change?
The answer in many cases is, the system did in fact treat him unfairly, and he can in fact change his situation on his own. When the system asks who's responsible, I would say, you are, and when he asks who's responsible, I would say, you are.
Likewise, I would say to any smoker, you have free will, if you think this stuff is harming you, it's in your power to quit. It's no one's problem but your own.
It's also true, however, that this is the most addictive chemical most people are likely to come in contact with -- harder to quit, I've heard, than most any drug. This suggests that while only your free will is involved when smoking the first cigarette, from there on another powerful force is at work. This chemical is sold to you by the tobacco companies, it serves only to profit the tobacco companies, and when they work to obscure its effects -- as they undeniably have, ever since it was an issue -- they hold responsibility.
" Also similar to the "I didn't know smoking was bad for me" argument ... "
The tobacco lawsuits are different. When a company's internal documents show that they knew a product was both chemically addictive and highly carcinogenic, and they continued to sell it for decades while assuring consumers that it was neither addictive nor deadly, they are responsible for damage done to those consumers.
Given full disclosure up front (as cigarettes feature now), I'm more willing to blame the users.
... like you need another one. :)
... still and all, I'm glad that setting up a website with that goal in mind isn't a crime.
As I see it, our government has been hijacked by a gang of shortsighted evildoers. It was in Newsweek, fer chrissake -- Bush/Rumsfeld asked around for ways to invalidate the Geneva Convention. Colin Powell replied that reversing 50 years of policy in that regard, with the goal of legalizing torture on the people of any country we occupied, was both a stupid and dangerous policy. He was overruled.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4999734/site/newsweek/
We've been betrayed as a people, at the highest level of government, and I sincerely hope we kick their ass this November.
Yes, yes it is.
My uncle works in one of those pet cloning biotech deals, and told me several years ago that there was ebola in laboratories in Texas for the very purpose you describe. My memory is hazy, but I believe that ebola was considered the best choice because it modifies the DNA of every cell in the body, instead of only certain ones. With this idea, DNA modification is not very far from practical right now -- turn off the reproducing and killing you parts of ebola, and change the code that it wants to copy into your DNA.
...
The potential applications, of course, are pretty wacky. Asthma? Gone. Peanut allergies? Gone. You're no longer one of those people who gets cancer from smoking. Change your eye color to match this season's styles -- or your skin color. Hot
Another poster pointed out that gmail ads most likely won't be in iframes. I just wanted to add that, whether they are or not, it will be trivial for Google to find out exactly how often you load the ads and therefore whether you are blocking them. If I was Google (yeah, right) I would reserve the right to deny service if you are. Viewing the ads is what you give them in exchange for a free service -- don't expect to keep getting the service without contributing your half of the deal.
"I'm not willing to give up rights so they can apply an overzealous solution to a "problem" that might not actually exist"
That's a very good point. The problem is when people complain about that *after* they've bought songs under the iTMS terms, which are very explicit and easy to understand. As far as I'm concerned, once you do that you've voluntarily given up those rights, as well as the right to complain.
(now, ranting, not about you)
This is how I see the transaction with iTMS typically going:
iTMS: I'm going to give you this file for a dollar. You may listen to it with up to 3 copies of iTunes, as many iPods as you like, and you may burn it to a CD. You may not play the file in any other way, though what you do with the CD is up to you.
buyer: sounds like a good deal to me. I agree.
iTMS: here's your file, enjoy it.
buyer: hey! I can only play this on iPods or computers with iTunes, and burn it to CD! you ripped me off!
iTMS: schmuck.
From this perspective, I basically see playfair as a tool to help people break a contract they knowingly entered. That's a far cry from 'fair use', where I buy a CD with the expectation that I can back it up however I like.
"In this age it is becoming possible to precompute the hashes and then look them up, in that case the "strength" of the password becomes less important."
I would love to know how this works -- I thought it was pretty much useless. First because the storable keyspace is so much tinier than the total keyspace, and second because of salts.
IANACrypto person, but the basic idea with salts is that the router would say 'please send me your password hashed with the string "abcdefg".' The client then says, "oh, of course, that's hash('passwordsexgodabcdefg')". The evil sniffer has hash('passwordsexgod') stored in their lookup table, but that's totally useless in discovering what the client used. Since 'abcdefg' is a different string in each transaction, the lookup table becomes irrelevant.
I wasn't being sarcastic above -- I would love to know if this technique has somehow been overcome.
This place is located 'two miles off the tip of Long Island' though, right? It seems possible that wasn't the best place to put it, in terms of contingency plans for the surrounding population. Long Island is a pain to commute from even on a good day. Imagine all 3 million residents in a blind panic to leave? The virus itself would be the least of your worries.
Sorry about my last post, I'm not usually so obnoxious. My only point was that you don't need to look at your monitors to check status, as you said, merely any computer monitor, and that's not usually so hard to find if you're in any office.
You still win, though, instant notification is good stuff.
It allows you to communicate between computers that are even, yes, 600 miles apart. I can think of about 3,000 ways to accomplish the problem you lay out above, using this astonishing new method of communication.
Your server is capable of sending a text message to your cell phone, but not of talking to any other computer? Where do you work?
This is wildly off topic, but do you know anything about the fake-3d morph effect used by Michel Gondry in the Rolling Stones video around that time? I think it was also a siggraph-presented technique used to mimic flyovers of off-limits airspace. I would love love love to be able to play with that software. Is there anything like that that's made it into low budget/open source hands? And have you got any war stories about it? :)
Ayn Rand is great, if you're at a time in your life where you need to hear that standing out is admirable -- the Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged were exactly what I needed in ninth grade, for example. :-) She made a struggle for intellectual and artistic integrity gripping, and that's not easy.
When I got a little more secure, I moved on. But being juvenile doesn't make her worthless, if you happen to be young yourself.
A better comparison would be Earth, by David Brin. In one tiny aspect of a huge book, America's growing retired population reclaims the streets by sitting outside with netcams aimed at anything interesting. Everything from jaywalking and youthful hijinks to car crashes gets recorded and submitted as evidence not by big brother, but by we the people ...
The same way I guess that rape videos, or news and movies about murder also hurts people; and since rape and murder is also illegal, like childporno, I guess you are infavor of censoring action movies and the news.
... child porn, in the sense the grandparent means, consists of asking children to have sex and then filming it. If action movies consisted of asking people to murder and then filming it, and the news consisted of asking people to rape and then filming it, then yes, I would be in favor of making those illegal too.
Let's see
Oh, wait -- they already are.
Once upon a time, people respected the law, and usually obeyed it. They respected police, and thanked them for doing a hard job and protecting the community.
Specifically, that was from 12:30 to 3:45 PM, October 24th, 1955.
Just in case anyone was curious.
Here, of course, you're talking about PAL, the mostly European format. All those posts saying "hey, it's 30 fps, not 60!" are referring to NTSC, the mostly American format.
...
Interestingly, the only place PAL equipment is common over here is with independent filmmakers -- because it's much much easier to turn 25 frames into 24 than 60 interlaced frames into 24. This creates a demand for cameras that shoot footage that's useless on most of the TVs we have