Trust me - lots of us oppose this on principle. However, there is a massive amount of fatigue regarding this issue - every objection raised to it is either ignored or labelled as "supporting child porn".
As a result, the only way we can see to oppose it is on technical and transparency grounds. It's still being ignored, but at least we're on unassailable technical footing here - the filter is useless for its stated purpose (preventing people inadvertantly finding CP) and is trivial to bypass in any case (as admitted by Optus). And because the blocklist is private, it could be easily expanded to cover anything (for those people not technically-minded or politically-minded enough to change their DNS settings).
I chose my ISP (Internode) for several reasons - one of which being Simon Hackett's oft-stated position that they will not filter anything unless required by law.
I'm a Telstra customer * - over the last few years whenever there's been an outage I've done a little digging and found that most of the time the outage co-incides with Telstra's DNS servers going down. The odd thing is that I haven't used their DNS servers in many years so I've been assuming that Telstra run a transparent proxy for http traffic and that the proxy is configured to use Telstra's DNS - therefore if the DNS goes down so does my ability to surf. I've cross checked this during outages by using other services (eg. ssh) and they've worked fine.
So can someone in the know explain another way for this to happen or is my guess correct and are they running a transparent proxy? If the latter is correct no amount of futzing with your resolver can bypass the filter (without resorting to a VPN). Or am I missing something blindingly obvious?
* I'd love to go with someone else but given that I'm 6km from the phone exchange DSL seems rather pointless when compared to cable.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a city engineer, but I've spent far too much spare time researching these issues.
They take longer for two main reasons: in heavy traffic, a full roundabout is either constantly moving, or dead stopped like a parking lot. In either case, you can't get in because everyone is bumper-to-bumper.
The heavy traffic scenario is where city planners fail hard, because they too easily forget that roundabouts still shuffle the same number of vehicles into the same congested streets. If these get backed up, so does the roundabout.
There are, fundamentally, three solutions to traffic, and nobody wants to implement them:
a. less cars b. more lanes c. less concentration in commercial and industrial sectors
Solution A requires vastly improved public transit, for which no city official wants to shoulder the cost, or more telework which employers are still reluctant to undertake. Solution B requires expropriation to make room, and often leads to complicated entry/exit ramps, and all that costs a shitload of money. Solution C depends on Solution A, so we're doubly screwed.
Agreed, but there is a forth solution, it's not ideal but works well enough: here in Australia (Sydney specifically) we have a number of hybrid roundabouts on major arterial intersections. During peak times they have traffic lights to regulate flow into the roundabout (so it operates like any other intersection with lights). During off-peak times the lights are switched off and the intersection acts like a normal roundabout.
This doesn't fix the congestion of course but it does allow for a fairer flow of traffic during peak than a regular roundabout would and it also means you're not stuck waiting for the lights at 1am.
So what exactly makes this so special? It's a step for one of the many virtualization solutions in the market these days.
I for one wouldn't trust Oracle with any part of my infrastructure if I can help it. Citrix to me still is a company that makes an expensive Xclient for MicroSoft products and a niche product they bought, Xen, with no apparent synergy with their windows products, and who else really cares?
I use Hyper-V at home . I was going to use ESXi (even bought a 'allowed' network card, and machine that was compatible), but after installing it I discovered that ESXi doesnt support dynamic disk images (ie you need to allocate the entire X Gb of space on physical disk), which makes simple backup tricky. Switched over to Hyper-V (using my TechNet license), and its worked perfectly for several years. Ive not managed to crash it once, and it supports dynamic disks, AND dynamic memory (ie, you can tell it to always have 50% free ram in machine A and 25% in machine B), which is great. Its also really nice to be able to RDP in for admin, rather than having to install special software on each client I may use. Of course I can also RDP in from my iPad / iPhone as well. The only major feature that is missing from Hyper-V (for my home/geek use) is USB support / hardware passthrough, although my adventures with Xen trying to get that happening were fruitless...
Are you finding the majority of your code is actually made up of unit tests? How can you be confident that your tested code is safe when delivered into the clients hands?
Introducing Meta-Test(tm) - with this breakthrough in software engineering methodology your drones can increase their coverage numbers without writing a single extra line of application code!!!!
Hurry! Don't miss your spot at our upcoming seminar where you will receive details on how to send your drones to our new training sessions that you can bill back to your clients and put your project even further behind schedule!!!
It's bizarre that the US is trying to fight off the middle ages and loopy religious fundamentalism in Afghanistan, but is so eagerly rushing to it at home!
Thank [insert name of imaginary friend] we didn't have that sort of barking mad fundamentalism in Australia until relatively recently. These days most of the middle class (especially politicians, and a scarily large number of professional scientists) are a bunch of tub-thumping, strychnine drinking snake handlers
If Fox News just lied they would be out of business rather quickly.
Given Fox's demographic it's unlikely to cause them any grief commercially and of course the courts have already decided that lying is not a problem for them legally speaking.
Math isn't really universal. I'm taking courses to teach English abroad, and the one thing that keeps coming up is that math is not a universal language. Most people do not study it anywhere near long enough to get to the point where they can genuinely communicate everything they need to about a situation using mathematical symbols. And many people have a diminished capacity for such reasoning anyways.
Things which one takes for granted such as the order of numbers are hardly universal, there isn't an innate sense that 10 is smaller than 12, and for some students if you want them to turn to page 100, the will flip page by page until they get there. Now, with education, that can be changed, but it's hardly innate.
I think you misunderstood the point behind the phrase "Math is a universal language". The point AFAIK is that once you have an understanding of math you can make a statement which is universally true regardless of the linguistic bias of the reader/listener.
Now I personally would argue that the above isn't strictly true but I do think that the more fundamental the math the more true the phrase becomes. The limiting example of course is that when one makes statement in terms of formal logic then it is true to say that it's meaning is universal.
But UK Transport Minister Norman Baker said it should not be "involved" in individual cities' transport choices.
"We will not be banning cars from city centres anymore than we will be having rectangular bananas," he said.
It's certainly an interesting idea. And it seems, using the example of London's congestion charge, that it wouldn't be a bad thing. I certainly encourage more people to use public transport, and ride bikes.
And for the Yanks who will complain they live in the suburbs, maybe lobby your local government for better public transport? And stop complaining, this is an article from Europe.
If Gates really cared in that way, would he have stepped aside? And left the shop to "the Ballmer monkey"? Hewlett & Packard I'll grant you since they create a great company that was the favorite place to work of all IT guys, and it took Carly Fiorina to undo their work. But Ellison & Gates? I just can't find it in my heart to extend any benefit of any doubt for those two.
Don't get me wrong... I'm no fan of Gates (quite the opposite) but I'm willing to at least acknowledge that he started off as a geek unlike Ballmer. As for Larry Ellison he occasionally has amusing things to say (eg. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13953_3-10052188-80.html) and unlike Jobs, Gates, etc. he seems to actually take the time to enjoy his billions (yaht races) which gives him a couple of brownie points in my book (I get the impression that the others just like to sit at home and count the money). OTOH I think that the following defintion is apt:
Every once in a while I notice that Google hasn't taken their eye off the ball. They have achieved status as some of the most respected players in the industry. Why? Because they actually care a bit about its history. Most everyone else is solely interested in the last quarter, and whether the shareholders will be pleased. M$ couldn't give the slightest sniff about Turing, same with IBM, HP, Oracle, and most of the rest. I like making money, but not necessarily to the exclusion of all else. I can't say the same about those I've mentioned. The hard-core business types will offer "well, there is nothing without money", and that is what separates the pioneers in any industry, the innovators in any industry, and the captains in any industry, from the outsourced, half-baked, half-cooked, humdrum, rest.
Possibly true - but I'd argue that's because Sergey and Larry still run Google. I strongly suspect that if Bill Hewlett and David Packard were still alive they would probably care, (leisure suit) Larry Ellison might also care although since he hasn't given any money in this case who can say for sure, hell even Bill Gates might care but he's no longer running the show and I'm pretty sure the Ballmer monkey wouldn't care.
In short once Sergey and Larry retire I doubt Google will give a flying monkey's arse either.
I got a Mac as well. People always complain how expensive they are, but if you select the same hardware and software options at Dell, Lenovo or HP, you get to within 50 euros usually. It's just that Apple doesn't sell the crappy stuff. And even then a high end Dell Lattitude, isn't going to be as light and thin as an equivalent Macbook Pro. The only brand I've ever used that came close to the Apple build quality was an IBM laptop, I assume that even though it's Lenovo nowadays, that might still hold true.
As far as I'm concerned, I'd buy a Macbook again in a heartbeat, and if it has to be a Windows laptop, then a Lenovo. If you can't afford that, then any cheapo laptop from the local supermarket is just as good as what else is available. And the cheapo laptop saves you a lot of money, so when it breaks, you throw it away and get another one.
I wish people would stop pushing the "Apple build quality is excellent" line... I've purchased 2 iMac's and 3 Apple Branded notebooks over the last 5 years - out of five machines only one has been trouble free. Now with that said I do think the desktop machines are reasonably well made but I will never buy another Apple branded notebook again - the build quality is amongst the worst I've experienced.
This really isn't a drastic change from policy that was already in place within many government agencies in Australia.
As much as our Amercian cousins here on slashdot lament the stupidity of their representatives they are streets ahead of those who inhabit the parliaments of Australia in terms of their tech savvyness - our mob are truly luddites and assume that M$ are the only competent people in the whole IT industry.
It's especially true in the national capital... it's one of the few places in the country where you can get a job in IT with reasonable working conditions. The unfortunate down side is that unless it's defence or foreign affairs no one seems to have heard of any other OS apart from windows.
If the likely net cost of the lawsuit times the likeliness of that lawsuit succeeding is smaller than the expected revenue minus the goodwill hit, then move ahead. If Damages * Likelihood is greater than Revenue, then proceed. Just as simple as that. Just like any other lesson from school. I've been amazed and disgusted at how openly some executives have admitted this to me. And they almost always phrase it precisely like that. After more than a few drinks. Usually then they laugh and look smug. Our executive culture is fundamentally rotten. Fundamentally. Every fucking "premium" MBA program in America should be forced to publish their curricula and have outside experts analyze their lectures. Seriously. Because these days this kind of criminality is quite literally taught in our business schools. You think I'm exaggerating? Get a few drinks into a graduate of a high status MBA program on a day that they're feeling good and ask them.
As much as I hate the whole concept of management school are you sure you're not confusing correlation with causation? It may not be part of the curricula - perhaps only criminal scum of this ilk are attracted to the degree in the first place and don't need to be taught to behave unethically?
I keep seeing people saying that temperatures have not risen since 1998, but nobody ever cites any real data to back up that assertion. Care to step up?
Both sides of this debate _outside_ of the scientific community are disturbingly simplistic. On the one hand we've got the chicken littles who blame _every_ major weather event on global warming. The flooding here in Australia is point-in-case - we are in the grip of a very strong La Nina event, climatologists might argue that it is particularly strong because of an underlying warming trend but the floods themselves are due solely to La Nina. On the other hand we have the "temperatures haven't risen since 1998 crowd", well the graph provided here shows a clear upward _trend_ in temperatures since 2000 and when you take into account the local minima and maxima (Mt. Pinatubo and El Nino) there is an obvious upwards trend over the whole graph. Come on people, this is basic high school math.
They've picked up the US polticians standard line. If we don't do this US jobs will be lost and the economy will suffer. I cannot count how many times that's been used here to justify the most obscene spending bills, creation of absurd laws, etc.
They didn't need to "pick it up" from the US... they've been pulling the same BS here for decades.
Slashdot Mirror
Trust me - lots of us oppose this on principle. However, there is a massive amount of fatigue regarding this issue - every objection raised to it is either ignored or labelled as "supporting child porn".
As a result, the only way we can see to oppose it is on technical and transparency grounds. It's still being ignored, but at least we're on unassailable technical footing here - the filter is useless for its stated purpose (preventing people inadvertantly finding CP) and is trivial to bypass in any case (as admitted by Optus). And because the blocklist is private, it could be easily expanded to cover anything (for those people not technically-minded or politically-minded enough to change their DNS settings).
I chose my ISP (Internode) for several reasons - one of which being Simon Hackett's oft-stated position that they will not filter anything unless required by law.
I'm a Telstra customer * - over the last few years whenever there's been an outage I've done a little digging and found that most of the time the outage co-incides with Telstra's DNS servers going down. The odd thing is that I haven't used their DNS servers in many years so I've been assuming that Telstra run a transparent proxy for http traffic and that the proxy is configured to use Telstra's DNS - therefore if the DNS goes down so does my ability to surf. I've cross checked this during outages by using other services (eg. ssh) and they've worked fine.
So can someone in the know explain another way for this to happen or is my guess correct and are they running a transparent proxy? If the latter is correct no amount of futzing with your resolver can bypass the filter (without resorting to a VPN). Or am I missing something blindingly obvious?
* I'd love to go with someone else but given that I'm 6km from the phone exchange DSL seems rather pointless when compared to cable.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a city engineer, but I've spent far too much spare time researching these issues.
They take longer for two main reasons: in heavy traffic, a full roundabout is either constantly moving, or dead stopped like a parking lot. In either case, you can't get in because everyone is bumper-to-bumper.
The heavy traffic scenario is where city planners fail hard, because they too easily forget that roundabouts still shuffle the same number of vehicles into the same congested streets. If these get backed up, so does the roundabout.
There are, fundamentally, three solutions to traffic, and nobody wants to implement them:
a. less cars
b. more lanes
c. less concentration in commercial and industrial sectors
Solution A requires vastly improved public transit, for which no city official wants to shoulder the cost, or more telework which employers are still reluctant to undertake. Solution B requires expropriation to make room, and often leads to complicated entry/exit ramps, and all that costs a shitload of money. Solution C depends on Solution A, so we're doubly screwed.
Agreed, but there is a forth solution, it's not ideal but works well enough: here in Australia (Sydney specifically) we have a number of hybrid roundabouts on major arterial intersections. During peak times they have traffic lights to regulate flow into the roundabout (so it operates like any other intersection with lights). During off-peak times the lights are switched off and the intersection acts like a normal roundabout.
This doesn't fix the congestion of course but it does allow for a fairer flow of traffic during peak than a regular roundabout would and it also means you're not stuck waiting for the lights at 1am.
So what exactly makes this so special? It's a step for one of the many virtualization solutions in the market these days.
I for one wouldn't trust Oracle with any part of my infrastructure if I can help it. Citrix to me still is a company that makes an expensive Xclient for MicroSoft products and a niche product they bought, Xen, with no apparent synergy with their windows products, and who else really cares?
Bingo!
I use Hyper-V at home . I was going to use ESXi (even bought a 'allowed' network card, and machine that was compatible), but after installing it I discovered that ESXi doesnt support dynamic disk images (ie you need to allocate the entire X Gb of space on physical disk), which makes simple backup tricky.
Switched over to Hyper-V (using my TechNet license), and its worked perfectly for several years. Ive not managed to crash it once, and it supports dynamic disks, AND dynamic memory (ie, you can tell it to always have 50% free ram in machine A and 25% in machine B), which is great.
Its also really nice to be able to RDP in for admin, rather than having to install special software on each client I may use. Of course I can also RDP in from my iPad / iPhone as well.
The only major feature that is missing from Hyper-V (for my home/geek use) is USB support / hardware passthrough, although my adventures with Xen trying to get that happening were fruitless...
Perhaps you should have RTFM first!
Are you finding the majority of your code is actually made up of unit tests?
How can you be confident that your tested code is safe when delivered into the clients hands?
Introducing Meta-Test(tm) - with this breakthrough in software engineering methodology your drones can increase their coverage numbers without writing a single extra line of application code!!!!
Hurry! Don't miss your spot at our upcoming seminar where you will receive details on how to send your drones to our new training sessions that you can bill back to your clients and put your project even further behind schedule!!!
It's bizarre that the US is trying to fight off the middle ages and loopy religious fundamentalism in Afghanistan, but is so eagerly rushing to it at home!
Thank [insert name of imaginary friend] we didn't have that sort of barking mad fundamentalism in Australia until relatively recently. These days most of the middle class (especially politicians, and a scarily large number of professional scientists) are a bunch of tub-thumping, strychnine drinking snake handlers
FTFY!
If Fox News just lied they would be out of business rather quickly.
Given Fox's demographic it's unlikely to cause them any grief commercially and of course the courts have already decided that lying is not a problem for them legally speaking.
Math isn't really universal. I'm taking courses to teach English abroad, and the one thing that keeps coming up is that math is not a universal language. Most people do not study it anywhere near long enough to get to the point where they can genuinely communicate everything they need to about a situation using mathematical symbols. And many people have a diminished capacity for such reasoning anyways.
Things which one takes for granted such as the order of numbers are hardly universal, there isn't an innate sense that 10 is smaller than 12, and for some students if you want them to turn to page 100, the will flip page by page until they get there. Now, with education, that can be changed, but it's hardly innate.
I think you misunderstood the point behind the phrase "Math is a universal language". The point AFAIK is that once you have an understanding of math you can make a statement which is universally true regardless of the linguistic bias of the reader/listener.
Now I personally would argue that the above isn't strictly true but I do think that the more fundamental the math the more true the phrase becomes. The limiting example of course is that when one makes statement in terms of formal logic then it is true to say that it's meaning is universal.
The UK government has already said they don't like the plan. From the BBC UK rejects EU call for city centre ban on petrol cars:
It's certainly an interesting idea. And it seems, using the example of London's congestion charge, that it wouldn't be a bad thing. I certainly encourage more people to use public transport, and ride bikes.
And for the Yanks who will complain they live in the suburbs, maybe lobby your local government for better public transport? And stop complaining, this is an article from Europe.
Well the UK government can always change their mind - they only need to hire some Japanese agricultural experts and they won't have even broken a promise: http://www.google.com.au/search?q=square+watermelon&tbm=isch
Brilliant! Given that whole six-degrees thing we can fry one innocent guy and by the end of the decade we'll be extinct as a species.
They did this on an older model. Unfortunately his Steveness decided it wasn't very good.
If Gates really cared in that way, would he have stepped aside? And left the shop to "the Ballmer monkey"? Hewlett & Packard I'll grant you since they create a great company that was the favorite place to work of all IT guys, and it took Carly Fiorina to undo their work. But Ellison & Gates? I just can't find it in my heart to extend any benefit of any doubt for those two.
Don't get me wrong... I'm no fan of Gates (quite the opposite) but I'm willing to at least acknowledge that he started off as a geek unlike Ballmer. As for Larry Ellison he occasionally has amusing things to say (eg. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13953_3-10052188-80.html) and unlike Jobs, Gates, etc. he seems to actually take the time to enjoy his billions (yaht races) which gives him a couple of brownie points in my book (I get the impression that the others just like to sit at home and count the money). OTOH I think that the following defintion is apt:
ORACLE = One Raving Asshole Called Larry Ellison
Every once in a while I notice that Google hasn't taken their eye off the ball. They have achieved status as some of the most respected players in the industry. Why? Because they actually care a bit about its history. Most everyone else is solely interested in the last quarter, and whether the shareholders will be pleased. M$ couldn't give the slightest sniff about Turing, same with IBM, HP, Oracle, and most of the rest. I like making money, but not necessarily to the exclusion of all else. I can't say the same about those I've mentioned. The hard-core business types will offer "well, there is nothing without money", and that is what separates the pioneers in any industry, the innovators in any industry, and the captains in any industry, from the outsourced, half-baked, half-cooked, humdrum, rest.
Possibly true - but I'd argue that's because Sergey and Larry still run Google. I strongly suspect that if Bill Hewlett and David Packard were still alive they would probably care, (leisure suit) Larry Ellison might also care although since he hasn't given any money in this case who can say for sure, hell even Bill Gates might care but he's no longer running the show and I'm pretty sure the Ballmer monkey wouldn't care.
In short once Sergey and Larry retire I doubt Google will give a flying monkey's arse either.
Actually the installer for OS/2 (warp iirc) would do a virus scan before installing and would come up with the messge
"windows found, remove: (y/y)?"
so someone at IBM shares your sense of humor... or maybe it was you?
We've always been at war with Eastasia.
I got a Mac as well. People always complain how expensive they are, but if you select the same hardware and software options at Dell, Lenovo or HP, you get to within 50 euros usually. It's just that Apple doesn't sell the crappy stuff.
And even then a high end Dell Lattitude, isn't going to be as light and thin as an equivalent Macbook Pro.
The only brand I've ever used that came close to the Apple build quality was an IBM laptop, I assume that even though it's Lenovo nowadays, that might still hold true.
As far as I'm concerned, I'd buy a Macbook again in a heartbeat, and if it has to be a Windows laptop, then a Lenovo. If you can't afford that, then any cheapo laptop from the local supermarket is just as good as what else is available. And the cheapo laptop saves you a lot of money, so when it breaks, you throw it away and get another one.
I wish people would stop pushing the "Apple build quality is excellent" line... I've purchased 2 iMac's and 3 Apple Branded notebooks over the last 5 years - out of five machines only one has been trouble free. Now with that said I do think the desktop machines are reasonably well made but I will never buy another Apple branded notebook again - the build quality is amongst the worst I've experienced.
Apparently you're not allowed to ask those kind of questions here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1882896&cid=34339448
This really isn't a drastic change from policy that was already in place within many government agencies in Australia.
As much as our Amercian cousins here on slashdot lament the stupidity of their representatives they are streets ahead of those who inhabit the parliaments of Australia in terms of their tech savvyness - our mob are truly luddites and assume that M$ are the only competent people in the whole IT industry.
It's especially true in the national capital... it's one of the few places in the country where you can get a job in IT with reasonable working conditions. The unfortunate down side is that unless it's defence or foreign affairs no one seems to have heard of any other OS apart from windows.
I'd always thought of it as a Master of Bullshit Artistry but I think yours fits better.
Papers please!
If the likely net cost of the lawsuit times the likeliness of that lawsuit succeeding is smaller than the expected revenue minus the goodwill hit, then move ahead.
If Damages * Likelihood is greater than Revenue, then proceed.
Just as simple as that. Just like any other lesson from school. I've been amazed and disgusted at how openly some executives have admitted this to me. And they almost always phrase it precisely like that.
After more than a few drinks.
Usually then they laugh and look smug.
Our executive culture is fundamentally rotten. Fundamentally. Every fucking "premium" MBA program in America should be forced to publish their curricula and have outside experts analyze their lectures. Seriously. Because these days this kind of criminality is quite literally taught in our business schools. You think I'm exaggerating? Get a few drinks into a graduate of a high status MBA program on a day that they're feeling good and ask them.
As much as I hate the whole concept of management school are you sure you're not confusing correlation with causation? It may not be part of the curricula - perhaps only criminal scum of this ilk are attracted to the degree in the first place and don't need to be taught to behave unethically?
I keep seeing people saying that temperatures have not risen since 1998, but nobody ever cites any real data to back up that assertion. Care to step up?
http://reason.com/blog/2011/01/06/global-temperature-trend-upate
Both sides of this debate _outside_ of the scientific community are disturbingly simplistic. On the one hand we've got the chicken littles who blame _every_ major weather event on global warming. The flooding here in Australia is point-in-case - we are in the grip of a very strong La Nina event, climatologists might argue that it is particularly strong because of an underlying warming trend but the floods themselves are due solely to La Nina. On the other hand we have the "temperatures haven't risen since 1998 crowd", well the graph provided here shows a clear upward _trend_ in temperatures since 2000 and when you take into account the local minima and maxima (Mt. Pinatubo and El Nino) there is an obvious upwards trend over the whole graph. Come on people, this is basic high school math.
News for nerds... I don't think so.
I'll be giving Steve Jobs a one finger gesture
Six finger gestures - all thumbs?
They've picked up the US polticians standard line. If we don't do this US jobs will be lost and the economy will suffer. I cannot count how many times that's been used here to justify the most obscene spending bills, creation of absurd laws, etc.
They didn't need to "pick it up" from the US... they've been pulling the same BS here for decades.