On/. a reference to 'tarpit' usually means something other than the type that holds oil, or at least petrochemicals.
Accept for a moment, the premise that hummers (and other gas-guzzlers) are generally undesirable, and then put that together with 'tarpit' in the normal/. sense.
We need to replace a stretch of road with a tarpit that'll look like a road, and be sufficiently stiff to support lighter vehicles, but swallow hummers and SUVs - like a/. tarpit swallows evil packets. If that fine a selection on stiffness/surface tension is too hard, how about making it the road to a gas station, "Cheap Gas - $1.50/gal - minimum purchase 20 gallons!"
A friend just had a Prius as a loaner, and another friend just bought the Honda Civic hybrid.
Being new and eco-geeky, both cars have extra instrumentation to let you know how/what the hybrid gear is doing, including instantaneous mpg readings. I haven't talked with the friend with the Civic since shortly after she bought it, but the friend with the Prius mentioned that the readings on the mgp meter tended to modify his driving habits. I wonder how much mileage on regular cars could be improved just by this type of feedback.
As a counter-example, back in the late 70's a college friend's Chrysler had a simple form of this - a yellow light that would come on when you were driving 'too aggressively' for good mileage. So of course there were efforts to keep the light on as much as possible.
Florida pulled a really fast one on the entire nation. While everyone was talking about hanging chads, dimpled chads, and killer-ninja chads, we missed the real point. The chads made a few thousand votes indeterminate.
But we got so caught up in them that we missed the 10's of thousands of black voters who were erroneously classified as felons and denied their right to vote. It's a simple search on Google to see some things about it, and the classification was done in what appeared to be a deliberately incompetent manner.
So maybe the electronic voting machines will be used to throw the election. Or maybe the electronic voting machines will be a smokescreen for some other shenanigans. Or maybe we're all seeing conspiracies where there are none.
Then that's a different reason for spending the dollar. It's from the 'fun' budget instead of the 'investment' budget.
A few years back, I took my son to visit my sister in Utah. There was a stopover of a few hours in Vegas, so I budgeted some 'fun' money to play the one-arm bandits at the airport, with the anticipated result of losing it all. I was disappointed in the machines, because there was no feel to the lever, no inertia, no clutch engaging a flywheel, nothing. So after a few minutes of play I was up $10 and bored, so I decided to quit. It took me a few minutes and some loss to figure out how to quit, but I was still ahead when I finally cashed out. Sometimes fun can pay, I guess. I still like the fact that I beat the odds in Vegas.
I knew that one existed. But can you imagine the amount of money it would take to administer such a beast. Can you also imagine when the Press put out that it was just to protect Microsoft's profits from competition? Sure, Microsoft literally gets away with Corporate Murder now, and the government fumbles idly by, but that's a little different than active complicity.
Actually, IMHO when the government publishes data in a MS encumbered format, such as the Windows Media Player stuff on NASA, they're aiding and abetting a convicted criminal. They shouldn't put out public data in ANY encumbered format or protocol, but Microsoft has EARNED a special place with their conduct.
What's needed is legal recognition of when something has become "standard". It needs to be the kind of law that recognizes 'de-facto' instead of or in addition to 'de-jur'. As long as you're not a legally recognizable "standard" in this fashion, you can keep things as secret as you want. As soon as you pass the test, you MUST open the formats/protocols.
Another type of "standard" that could be forced open: Any communications between the government and its agencies and the general public will be in formats that are free, openly, publicly documented, and free of patent encumbrance. That means, for instance, any data available from a government-operated system (including, but not limited to websites) without some form of specific access control such as login. It excludes things like contractor communications.
It's pretty clear that MS Office format, SMB, and a few others would pass the litmus test for "standard" by these definitions. So would pdf and ps, for that matter. Word Perfect might, too. (common in legal usage)
Many government detractors think it's bad for the federal government to meddle in business, tamper with the marketplace, and otherwise get in the way of Business doing what it does, best.
They're right, it's bad.
But there's something worse - when the opposite happens, when business meddles in the business of government, which despite all detractors, Government does governing better than business does.
are those where nobody, even the victim, realizes that a crime has been committed. Brings to mind the old (urban?) legend about a programmer at a bank who had fractional pennies skimmed from everyone's interest payments and added to a special account he'd set up. They caught him because he'd made the special account a nonsense name that would come up last in sort order - dump all fractional interest in the final account. One day, for whatever reason (contest?) they happened to look at the name on that last account, and the suspicion started.
The 'guy in a room' is a metaphor, not a physical description. It's someone who isolates himself for an extended portion of the schedule, interacting only at the end to deliver the results.
Maybe Linux is a guy in a room, but that's only the physical side. Linux works and advances because he's extensively and intensively in contact with kernel developers.
More than just that... He said he wanted portability out of 'systems software' - and not to do it himself. He went on to define 'systems software' as the software he needs to do his job.
So in other words, he considers portability important - for others - but doesn't want to be burdened with it, himself.
As others have said, and I'll agree, portability can help flush out subtle bugs, sooner.
has violated this patent. Plus the old experiment in school, where the whole class holds hands in a string, and the person on each end each touches one lobe of a Van Der Graff generator. Everyone's hair rises, and whoever breaks the circuit gets the shock - but there was a circuit and power was being delivered, it was even doing work.
Here's the problem:
Patents are being awarded for spending a little time thinking. For having the luxury of free time to think, and company lawyers to file, companies are able to establish themselves as a gatekeeper.
Patents should be the product of effort - they were meant to reward that effort, and incent you to expend that amount of effort again in the future.
IMHO, these 'few hours of thought' patents are diametrically opposed to the concept of patents as enumerated in the Constitution.
Perhaps what we really need here is EULA reform. When I see a click-through EULA, I TRY to do one of three things: 1: Trust it based on prior reading, trust of issuers, or trust of others who trust this license. 2: Read the silly thing through. 3: Decline.
Every now and then I do the bad thing, skim and accept. But I try not to.
But realistically, these are thousands of words of not-normal English. (or other appropriate colloquial language) They are akin to contract law, and no company exec will sign a contract without a company lawyer reading it through, first. Do we all really need lawyers in order to install software on our PCs?
I would propose a few simple ideas. (Pick one or more.) For one, imagine that each clause require a 5-word simple summary, or the word 'COMPLEX' if it can't be summarized in 5 words. Scan for things like 'PandaSoft owns, you lease', 'One computer only', 'Not responsible for damage', and the like. Watch out for 'Data collection', 'Deactivation', and similar. Keep a really close eye out for 'COMPLEX'. Another idea might be to get the industry to condense to a few basic licenses or possibly a few dozen clauses. The idea is for people to understand licenses without taking a course on Law.
Next, let's imagine a lawsuit between WhenU and its ilk against AdAware or SpyBot and their ilk. Or how about getting RegEdit declared a 'circumvention tool'.
That second example is meant to be silly, but now imagine 'HKEY_DMCA_...' and keep in mind that scanners are now recognizing currency. It's not hard to think that there will be a new RegEdit that refuses to display or change HKEY_DMCA... values, and the old RegEdit does become a circumvention tool.
Actually, 'very hard and continuous manual labor' is one thing very likely NOT required in any space situation. So far, we haven't been effectively able to cool the space suits. Every time I've heard of a mission that has involved significant EVA, especially active EVA, cooling and internal humidity have been the limiting factors. The astronauts have had to slow down to the cooling and dehumidification limits of the space suits.
The problem extends, and is more general. Every time I hear of electronics in space, radiation is a concern. But that's typically solved at the base technology level. The problem that really dogs the designers is temperature - cooling the electronics are when active and warming them when they're not, plus accomodating varying amounts of solar heating.
When we think of this giant sea of atmosphere around us, and then contrast it with the vacuum of space, we normally only think of breathing it. We don't think of the massive convective heat-and-humidity sink it also comprises.
Depends on the asteroid's spin. There might even be a morning every hour. Too fast a spin might make working an asteroid impractical. (Coriolis, effective surface gravity, dizziness, etc.)
It's those oil companies. Just when we REALLY start screaming over gas prices, the Secret Government (on which the oil companies have a seat) will change the US over to metric.
Then we'll buy gasoline by the litre, and the pump price per unit will drop by almost a factor of 4. (The units will be litres instead of gallons.) But the average US citizen won't realize that we're also getting shaved to the right of the decimal point in the gallons/litre conversion.
But are there mail service outfits that support OpenVPN. F'rinstance, DynDNS.org will relay mail for you - either direction. To get around ISP blocking on the incoming side, they give a list of ports they'll support.
But that's still an incoming SYN packet, and how long until ISPs block ALL incoming SYNs? It's against my cable ISPs TOS to run ANY services on the Internet, so they're well within their rights to do this. (Can't get DSL, can't even get V.90, 28 or 32 is IT.)
While technically possible to pretend the UDP used by OpenVPN has state, as IPTable does, and use that to block it, it would be harder to manage for the entire userbase. Forwarding email over OpenVPN would be useful, and by definition protected from relaying.
It would also be no effort to block port 25 outbound, but moving that to a different port is trivial, and they're not going to block THAT without something much smarter, and much more expensive.
TV just doesn't have that high a priority in my life. I miss episodes. I try to make it up during reruns.
But DS9 (and season-3 Enterprise) is one long multi-part story. Miss one episode and don't get the tape (pre-Tivo, sorry) watched before the next one, and you've lost some continuity. Do it too often, and you lose the thread, and episodes become less enjoyable - making it more likely to de-prioritize another episode. Or watching the tape, I still have 2 or 3 season-3 Enterprise shows that my son and I haven't watched, yet.
How bad would it be for the router to be tracking state on EVERY packet for EVERY internal customer?
An alternative would be to go stateless, and just block incoming SYN packets. That would leave UDP open. How big an exposure would that be, or how big a burden would it be to go pseudo-stateful on UDP, blocking incoming SYN on TCP?
But then again, I don't want to solve ISP problems like this, because I'd like to have remote access to MY systems at home.
Slashdot Mirror
It's full of stars...
I would normally call it a humvee, but it looked like the more normal /. term was hummer, so I used that. A friend of mine at work has a humvee.
On /. a reference to 'tarpit' usually means something other than the type that holds oil, or at least petrochemicals.
/. sense.
/. tarpit swallows evil packets. If that fine a selection on stiffness/surface tension is too hard, how about making it the road to a gas station, "Cheap Gas - $1.50/gal - minimum purchase 20 gallons!"
Accept for a moment, the premise that hummers (and other gas-guzzlers) are generally undesirable, and then put that together with 'tarpit' in the normal
We need to replace a stretch of road with a tarpit that'll look like a road, and be sufficiently stiff to support lighter vehicles, but swallow hummers and SUVs - like a
A friend just had a Prius as a loaner, and another friend just bought the Honda Civic hybrid.
Being new and eco-geeky, both cars have extra instrumentation to let you know how/what the hybrid gear is doing, including instantaneous mpg readings. I haven't talked with the friend with the Civic since shortly after she bought it, but the friend with the Prius mentioned that the readings on the mgp meter tended to modify his driving habits. I wonder how much mileage on regular cars could be improved just by this type of feedback.
As a counter-example, back in the late 70's a college friend's Chrysler had a simple form of this - a yellow light that would come on when you were driving 'too aggressively' for good mileage. So of course there were efforts to keep the light on as much as possible.
Florida pulled a really fast one on the entire nation. While everyone was talking about hanging chads, dimpled chads, and killer-ninja chads, we missed the real point. The chads made a few thousand votes indeterminate.
But we got so caught up in them that we missed the 10's of thousands of black voters who were erroneously classified as felons and denied their right to vote. It's a simple search on Google to see some things about it, and the classification was done in what appeared to be a deliberately incompetent manner.
So maybe the electronic voting machines will be used to throw the election.
Or maybe the electronic voting machines will be a smokescreen for some other shenanigans.
Or maybe we're all seeing conspiracies where there are none.
In America, TEXAS messes with YOU!
Then that's a different reason for spending the dollar. It's from the 'fun' budget instead of the 'investment' budget.
A few years back, I took my son to visit my sister in Utah. There was a stopover of a few hours in Vegas, so I budgeted some 'fun' money to play the one-arm bandits at the airport, with the anticipated result of losing it all. I was disappointed in the machines, because there was no feel to the lever, no inertia, no clutch engaging a flywheel, nothing. So after a few minutes of play I was up $10 and bored, so I decided to quit. It took me a few minutes and some loss to figure out how to quit, but I was still ahead when I finally cashed out. Sometimes fun can pay, I guess. I still like the fact that I beat the odds in Vegas.
I heard the (urban?) legend long before that bomb thudded on the American cinemascape.
I knew that one existed. But can you imagine the amount of money it would take to administer such a beast. Can you also imagine when the Press put out that it was just to protect Microsoft's profits from competition? Sure, Microsoft literally gets away with Corporate Murder now, and the government fumbles idly by, but that's a little different than active complicity.
Actually, IMHO when the government publishes data in a MS encumbered format, such as the Windows Media Player stuff on NASA, they're aiding and abetting a convicted criminal. They shouldn't put out public data in ANY encumbered format or protocol, but Microsoft has EARNED a special place with their conduct.
What's needed is legal recognition of when something has become "standard". It needs to be the kind of law that recognizes 'de-facto' instead of or in addition to 'de-jur'. As long as you're not a legally recognizable "standard" in this fashion, you can keep things as secret as you want. As soon as you pass the test, you MUST open the formats/protocols.
Another type of "standard" that could be forced open: Any communications between the government and its agencies and the general public will be in formats that are free, openly, publicly documented, and free of patent encumbrance. That means, for instance, any data available from a government-operated system (including, but not limited to websites) without some form of specific access control such as login. It excludes things like contractor communications.
It's pretty clear that MS Office format, SMB, and a few others would pass the litmus test for "standard" by these definitions. So would pdf and ps, for that matter. Word Perfect might, too. (common in legal usage)
Many government detractors think it's bad for the federal government to meddle in business, tamper with the marketplace, and otherwise get in the way of Business doing what it does, best.
They're right, it's bad.
But there's something worse - when the opposite happens, when business meddles in the business of government, which despite all detractors, Government does governing better than business does.
are those where nobody, even the victim, realizes that a crime has been committed. Brings to mind the old (urban?) legend about a programmer at a bank who had fractional pennies skimmed from everyone's interest payments and added to a special account he'd set up. They caught him because he'd made the special account a nonsense name that would come up last in sort order - dump all fractional interest in the final account. One day, for whatever reason (contest?) they happened to look at the name on that last account, and the suspicion started.
I beg to differ.
The 'guy in a room' is a metaphor, not a physical description. It's someone who isolates himself for an extended portion of the schedule, interacting only at the end to deliver the results.
Maybe Linux is a guy in a room, but that's only the physical side. Linux works and advances because he's extensively and intensively in contact with kernel developers.
More than just that... He said he wanted portability out of 'systems software' - and not to do it himself. He went on to define 'systems software' as the software he needs to do his job.
So in other words, he considers portability important - for others - but doesn't want to be burdened with it, himself.
As others have said, and I'll agree, portability can help flush out subtle bugs, sooner.
Something like that. But there should also be some control on license length. Sheer length can be daunting to comprehension.
Or:
WHY SHOULD THE STUPID LICENSE HAVE MORE BYTES THAN THE STUPID PROGRAM! (perhaps a slight exaggeration)
I have no problem with sickness when I play FPS.
But I can only watch someone else play one for a few minutes, then I have to turn away.
has violated this patent. Plus the old experiment in school, where the whole class holds hands in a string, and the person on each end each touches one lobe of a Van Der Graff generator. Everyone's hair rises, and whoever breaks the circuit gets the shock - but there was a circuit and power was being delivered, it was even doing work.
Here's the problem:
Patents are being awarded for spending a little time thinking. For having the luxury of free time to think, and company lawyers to file, companies are able to establish themselves as a gatekeeper.
Patents should be the product of effort - they were meant to reward that effort, and incent you to expend that amount of effort again in the future.
IMHO, these 'few hours of thought' patents are diametrically opposed to the concept of patents as enumerated in the Constitution.
Perhaps what we really need here is EULA reform. When I see a click-through EULA, I TRY to do one of three things:
1: Trust it based on prior reading, trust of issuers, or trust of others who trust this license.
2: Read the silly thing through.
3: Decline.
Every now and then I do the bad thing, skim and accept. But I try not to.
But realistically, these are thousands of words of not-normal English. (or other appropriate colloquial language) They are akin to contract law, and no company exec will sign a contract without a company lawyer reading it through, first. Do we all really need lawyers in order to install software on our PCs?
I would propose a few simple ideas. (Pick one or more.) For one, imagine that each clause require a 5-word simple summary, or the word 'COMPLEX' if it can't be summarized in 5 words. Scan for things like 'PandaSoft owns, you lease', 'One computer only', 'Not responsible for damage', and the like. Watch out for 'Data collection', 'Deactivation', and similar. Keep a really close eye out for 'COMPLEX'. Another idea might be to get the industry to condense to a few basic licenses or possibly a few dozen clauses. The idea is for people to understand licenses without taking a course on Law.
Next, let's imagine a lawsuit between WhenU and its ilk against AdAware or SpyBot and their ilk. Or how about getting RegEdit declared a 'circumvention tool'.
That second example is meant to be silly, but now imagine 'HKEY_DMCA_...' and keep in mind that scanners are now recognizing currency. It's not hard to think that there will be a new RegEdit that refuses to display or change HKEY_DMCA... values, and the old RegEdit does become a circumvention tool.
Actually, 'very hard and continuous manual labor' is one thing very likely NOT required in any space situation. So far, we haven't been effectively able to cool the space suits. Every time I've heard of a mission that has involved significant EVA, especially active EVA, cooling and internal humidity have been the limiting factors. The astronauts have had to slow down to the cooling and dehumidification limits of the space suits.
The problem extends, and is more general. Every time I hear of electronics in space, radiation is a concern. But that's typically solved at the base technology level. The problem that really dogs the designers is temperature - cooling the electronics are when active and warming them when they're not, plus accomodating varying amounts of solar heating.
When we think of this giant sea of atmosphere around us, and then contrast it with the vacuum of space, we normally only think of breathing it. We don't think of the massive convective heat-and-humidity sink it also comprises.
Depends on the asteroid's spin. There might even be a morning every hour. Too fast a spin might make working an asteroid impractical. (Coriolis, effective surface gravity, dizziness, etc.)
It's those oil companies. Just when we REALLY start screaming over gas prices, the Secret Government (on which the oil companies have a seat) will change the US over to metric.
Then we'll buy gasoline by the litre, and the pump price per unit will drop by almost a factor of 4. (The units will be litres instead of gallons.) But the average US citizen won't realize that we're also getting shaved to the right of the decimal point in the gallons/litre conversion.
(insert humor emoticon here)
But are there mail service outfits that support OpenVPN. F'rinstance, DynDNS.org will relay mail for you - either direction. To get around ISP blocking on the incoming side, they give a list of ports they'll support.
But that's still an incoming SYN packet, and how long until ISPs block ALL incoming SYNs? It's against my cable ISPs TOS to run ANY services on the Internet, so they're well within their rights to do this. (Can't get DSL, can't even get V.90, 28 or 32 is IT.)
While technically possible to pretend the UDP used by OpenVPN has state, as IPTable does, and use that to block it, it would be harder to manage for the entire userbase. Forwarding email over OpenVPN would be useful, and by definition protected from relaying.
It would also be no effort to block port 25 outbound, but moving that to a different port is trivial, and they're not going to block THAT without something much smarter, and much more expensive.
TV just doesn't have that high a priority in my life. I miss episodes. I try to make it up during reruns.
But DS9 (and season-3 Enterprise) is one long multi-part story. Miss one episode and don't get the tape (pre-Tivo, sorry) watched before the next one, and you've lost some continuity. Do it too often, and you lose the thread, and episodes become less enjoyable - making it more likely to de-prioritize another episode. Or watching the tape, I still have 2 or 3 season-3 Enterprise shows that my son and I haven't watched, yet.
How bad would it be for the router to be tracking state on EVERY packet for EVERY internal customer?
An alternative would be to go stateless, and just block incoming SYN packets. That would leave UDP open. How big an exposure would that be, or how big a burden would it be to go pseudo-stateful on UDP, blocking incoming SYN on TCP?
But then again, I don't want to solve ISP problems like this, because I'd like to have remote access to MY systems at home.