Seems that any way the political winds turn, they always lead back to totalitarianism (and eventually to total xenophobia, because of point two below). And it's always sold under the same pretexts:
Security - be it against counterrevolutionaries (aka revisionists), criminals or terrorists.
Patriotism - if you're not for this, you are Anti-[insert your nationality here].
Orwell just got the year wrong. Otherwise he was eerily prophetic. Advances in computer science will make meaningful analyzing of data and collecting them in central databases possible in much larger scale than what is done today. Makes me want to go offline for good and start a subsistence-living only farm. Then again, encrypting most of our communications will postpone the advent of the final dystopia.
"Anything you do, anything you say, I'll be watching you..."
But wait. Everything that can be used to do good can be used to do evil. Potential is potential. We determine the direction it takes. Sure, it will make society more complex, but we'll need a lot of safeguards against unreasonable invasions. We just have to determine unreasonable. And that is a political back-and-forth, that is ongoing, and lasts forever.
So what happens if you buy and activate a prepaid cellphone in the US or Guatemala, then use it in Mexico??
Simple: Your prepaid phone will work only as long as it has a connection with a carrier that has a roaming contract with yours. Many, if not most, prepaids don't work internationally unless you register them (often for a fee), because international calls are hard to charge on prepaids (at least, where receiving one is charged to your account). Sure, you can use a fake ID, but pretty soon that will be considered a premeditated action to conceal illegal/terrorist activity.
Remove prohibition and even the most powerfull and influential drug lords will disappear into the dustbin of history.
Uhh.. Not quite. The Capone argument is a fallacy, since although his organization took some serious hits, organized crime never went anywhere. It just changed its face. It's not your Italian-American bookie now. It's the tagger in the 'hood, that sells you pot, coke and rock, plus a trick with his favorite hooked-up girl, who does it to get high.
Some very good points... even if I don't completely agree with them all. The main argument is, that you still suppose, in the end, that people function logically. So many of our important decisions are gut reactions, and education only goes so far in a generation.
Even if you're an anonymoys coward, I have to agree with you. On both counts.
If we legalize Mary Jane and Nose Candy now, the "hip, with it" people will move to something else that is way too dangerous to be legal (crystal meth, anyone?). That will create a lucrative market for it.
The real solution would be to have a new kind of culture, that doesn't glorify delinquency and criminality. That'll be the day...
By keeping Marijuana illegal we make teens think they're living on the edge when they toke a joint. The fans of rock stars (if not the stars themselves) think they're out there, when they get busted for coke. They could be dealing with much more dangerous substances, and there is absolutely no way of completely blocking a supply for something that has such high-dollar demand.
It all comes back to how much freedom we can allow ourselves.
And not to be completely offtopic, a word about the phone deal: It is where we are going everywhere. ISPs forced to keep an IP log forever and other Patriot Act features that are now permanent. UK tracking all internet traffic (if not being able to analyze it all yet). China (among others) controlling what regular surfers see on the 'Net.
This are not alarmist FUD, they're today's reality. Increasing capacity of PCs will enable ever more complete tracking of everything we do online - and eventually analyzing and compiling relevant data to central databases; your whole life is an open book to the Big Brother). Orwell was eerily correct in his predictions. What he got wrong were the year and who would be behind it. It turns out that it was the most conservative Congress and President, who sold the whole thing, because we are afraid. Very, very afraid. Besides, you never know when seemingly benign activities turn out to be preparation for terrorism, so we'll have to keep track of everybody all the time. (Google Panopticon.)
When I was a kid, I heard a joke:
Q: What is the difference between capitalism and communism? A: In capitalism some people exploit others; in communism it's the other way.
Either way, taken to the extreme, you end up in totalitarianism.
I gotta put my oar in. My uncle (dead for some years by now) was a cop. He was a smart one - his bosses didn't like him much, because he was, like my dad and me, prone to insubordination, but they couldn't argue with his solve rate. He made captain-equivalent in our provincial detective department before he opted for a lower-stress job and transferred to his home town's fraud investigations dept.
Anyhow, I remember him talking about stuff - in his cups, of course, otherwise he was just making stupid jokes with me and my friends - and the obvious thing coming out was: You have to pretend to be stupid. Never let on what you think is going on, never tell anybody everything you know. That is inviting trouble. If the bad guy thinks you're stupid, he's more likely to talk out of turn. And if you tell your partner everything you know (or more likely think you know), you're going to bias him, so you usually just share the relevant facts.
Furthermore, there is this fictional stereotype of a highly intelligent arch criminal, whom the ultra-smart cop foils by deductive logic and clever banter (plus these days, the ultra-high-tech lab that sees things that aren't there). The reality is, that most criminals are stupid and commit stupid crimes. Most of the time it doesn't take a very smart cop to bust those slimebuckets.
Oh, but then there is a problem with the cop version of researcher bias. I was suckered into a scam by two "friends", who were, it turned out, planning to make me take the fall for that (a corporate law thing; I had a position where responsibility for everything was implicit). When the sh!t hit the fan, the cops had been interviewing those two guys first (they were the primary actors) when they invited me for an interview. I'm honest to the point of stupidity, so I told them exactly what happened. Their response was to lock me up for the night to see if that would soften me up. They had formed a picture in their mind about what had happened, and they held to it. Even when it turned out, that the other guys had been pulling off scams like that left and right, and I had no history apart from one frivolous complaint.
"A "loose coalition of Internet denizens",[9] the group is banded together by the internet, through sites such as 4chan,[7][9], 711chan,[7] 420chan, Something Awful, Fark, Encyclopedia Dramatica,[10] Slashdot, IRC channels,[7] and YouTube".
Apparently, reading Wikipedia is now "intelligence gathering" or "threat assessment". I mean just insert a couple of words so it would make more sense when yanked from its original context on the Wikipedia page.
Of course, it is true that you have to try to educate the dinosaurs above you in the food chain...
Now that we're talking about car thieves; Once my car's fuel pump was busted, and I had been working with it since I tried in vain to start it.
I accidentally left the keys in the ignition at night when I went in, and in the morning we had a visitor, who asked, "what happened to your car?" "Something happened?" says me, only then spotting the empty bay in front of the garage door (not really visible from inside).
You imagine I was a little puzzled. There was no fuel pump in the car. How in heck had they driven off with it? Without really knowing what I was doing I started walking around the neighborhood, thinking they can't have gotten too far...
About 150 yards out, around the corner, there was the car, complete with the keys in the ignition (including my house keys - how's that for stupid?), the hood still unlatched, with no other sign of tampering but a dirty palm print on the white hood.
Turned out somebody had been waiting for us to go to bed. We had been sitting up till 2 AM right above the car bay, talking by an open window in the balmy summer weather. Whoever it was, had waited under the neighbor's shelter, smoking a crapload of cigarettes (~100 butts) - and taken a crap - to pass the time, then pushing the car out far enough so we wouldn't hear the starter grind.
Big fat reward there. I hope they had a sense of humor! (I kind of figure if they didn't have one, they would have vandalized the car to "get back".)
A bit offtopic, but I think it makes a good story.
Most of this discussion has been about downloading or streaming video (or playing games), which naturally is a big bandwidth consumer.
How about the people, whose computers are running spambots and send huge amounts of spam email? Within the last week, we were told, that spam is up to 94% of all 'net traffic. I wonder, which world we really live in...
It's natural in a way, that cable companies try to protect their soon-to-be obsolete business models. What this is a lesson in is, that monopolies are bad for consumers. In the end, they are bad for the monopoly owners, too, because they end up destroying their business by relying on their ability to charge over the top without giving customer satisfaction.
Bandwidth is obviously not an unlimited resource, it's a bit like rail or road networks - you have certain expensive infra to permit a certain level of service, but using the service itself doesn't cost that much. TWC obviously wants to avoid having to invest in their infra for the foreseeable future (for corporate jockeys that's narrowing from the next quarter to the next 6 weeks).
My ISP promises me 10MBps (fiber optic in the building basement, with VDSL up from there - they say they could easily give me 100MBps, but I don't want to fork over the cash), and usually delivers at least that. But then I have a choice of many different ISPs with different pricing plans. Nobody has even mentioned caps in broadband connections.
If I recall correctly from my graduate-level psychology of language course, children can't learn a language from TV. They need to interact with speakers, in the language in question, to learn it.
It depends what you define as learning a language. I learned enough of English from subtitled American TV-shows to earn me straight A's (for English as a second language) in school for a while without making any effort. (The shows were more like Batman and The Untouchables and such.) Of course, it took me a little while as a youngster in Canada and US before I was able to be fluent.
First of all, let me clarify a source of possible confusion. Not that it matters much, but alhtough Linus is a Finn, as most Linux hobbyists know, his native language happens to be Swedish. About 5% of Finns are Swedish-speaking (depends on what counts, but according to Wikipedia, at the end of 2007, that's how many self-identify as such), although practically all of them are fairly fluent in Finnish. Unlike Finnish-speakers (full disclosure: my mother tongue is Finnish - as if anyone cares), of whom only the civilized ones speak Swedish, although we're supposed to learn it in school.
To make a distantly relative point: I speak English, Finnish, Swedish and German somewhat fluently, can carry on a semi-intelligent discussion in French and Spanish in addition to Norwegian and Danish, read enough Italian, Portuguese and Dutch to find my way around if I have to. I also "speak" some programming languages enough to produce code, some to read code by others. Just saying this so you know I have no vested interests.
I think English is absolutely essential to communicating internationally. Trying to code and comment your way around without English is like trying to get by in physics without metrics (you can use imperial, but you have to know what metrics mean). I don't really care much what the language is, as long as there is a lingua franca for tech community, that basically everyone is expected to be able to use enough to find their way around code, comments and other documentation. Translation - especially technical - is an arduous task (I have translated enough handbooks to know), and creating documentation in several languages is a resource hog that's not worth it. Let alone trying to accommodate national notation systems inside compilers. How your system internally codes "Ã" (here is what I typed: ä), for example, depends on your OS (even if it's nominally Unicode, like newer Wins claim) and about 1,000 different user settings. Unicode URLs are a big enough headache (that should be done away with, IMHO).
All in all, I'm glad at least someone agrees with me (as TFA suggests).
So many of the posters here have reacted as if the problem that TFA talks about is users receiving spam. That is yesterday's problem, for the most part - as so many here, I, too, get spam in my inbox hardly ever, as it gets filtered out on several levels. The problem is, that bandwith is not a finite resource, and with this level of traffic getting routinely filtered out, we should go to the source.
At the risk of making a fool of myself, I'll try to suggest a couple of low-tech approaches:
Before designing a new protocol to replace SMTP, how about having ISP's block any source of SMTP requests from an IP that's sending above X mails per day until they have verified, that the mails are legit. The X could be a fairly low figure without affecting 99% of legit users. Wouldn't that eliminate a huge proportion of spambots?
The profitability of spamming is much harder to tackle. I often wonder who buys all these products, that are supposed to make a superman out of me? Businesses buy these spam services, or they wouldn't be such a problem, and presumably they wouldn't, if people didn't fall for them. Education would be a partial answer, but Barnum was right about a sucker being born every minute -except it's more like every ms.
As for phishing sites, I have a locked hosts file on several boxes in use by several people, that directs a huge number of common spoof sites to 127.0.0.1 - if someone clicks a link, they'll get a message telling them, that they have clicked a forged link. Have the browser updates install and update that on Windows boxes. It doesn't eliminate spam per se, but reduces its profitability.
I have had a bunch of emails blocked by receivers, who have done it on a domain basis. Everyone from that domain (my ISP) gets blocked, because some blockheads have let spambots run on their boxes. Some news sites have done the same with HTTP requests. That is a pretty blunt tool.
I know what you want to say, but it ain't necessarily so. It's all about money for enterprises.
What the power companies are concerned about is to produce the capacity to deliver on peak demand as cheaply as possible.
For example: Our local power company has long been talking about peak capacity and incentivizing moving demand off-peak. For bigger units, it's considerably cheaper to run power-intensive operations during off-peak hours.
Do you have a solution for a MW class unit that can be online quickly? If you don't, powering down some PCs is not going to put a dent in the amount of wasted resources. Besides, we won't have an intelligent power grid for a while. All that doesn't mean we shouldn't be looking for solutions.
BTW, it's much faster to turn a coal power station off and on, if you omit those useless CO2 capture units, particle filters etc. so you do have a point...
Dude, you can shut down a PC at night, and get it running in the morning.
You can not, however, do the same thing with a power plant. It takes much longer to cycle up.
Anyhow, what we would need is a lot of high-efficiency photovoltaic panels, that would create the most power exactly when you have peak demand in the areas where solar is viable to begin with.
Some programming language can be popular, because it's useful; that is not necessarily always the case, though. Java may be popular because of its portability, for example. Java as a language may or may not be as good as its popularity could indicate - although you certainly can do plenty of stuff with it. Not write a gadget driver, though.
One can compare programming languages with human languages. If you learn one Indo-European language, it's easier to learn another, and the learning curve is less steep with each new language. The same seems to be true with programming languages. On a side note vis-Ã-vis human language, remember that for certain NATO-affiliated services, Arabic speakers are in huge demand. True, they don't get rich and work in an awful environment, but employment prospects are good.
I bring up the human language comparison, because it seems people become emotionally attached to their "own" languages in programming, too. But after all, what is important, is that you can perform tasks that need to be done, while keeping costs manageable. Your boss won't necessarily care which tool you use, as long as it isn't too expensive in licensing cost or labor.
It could be helpful to consider the implications of the economy. Organizations may not be able to upgrade hardware and proprietary licenses as frequently as they're used to, so in the near future demand for people, who can do more with existing resources, will probably increase. I could see FOSS becoming stronger in this environment.
Whenever I run into a cert mismatch, I check the site IP (fairly straightforward in FF). Then I do a search on the IP against whois databases (ARIN, RIPE). If I see, that the IP is registered to the organization that is supposed to be serving me (and not just an IP reseller), I grant a temp exception and send an email to the staff of the service provider (the whois databases usually have that info) and tell them they've screwed up.
For online banking, I have one-time passwords, issued by the bank (it's a two-phase process). But I've never run into a cert mismatch on a banking service yet.
This would be worth a long blog post instead of a quick forum reply, but here goes:
TFA was too indefinite about its methods and analysis to know about the cause and effect here - and besides, most people's publicly professed faith is different than the one they live. Faith is what you live, not so much what you think and say, although a living faith does indeed affect one's patterns of thought and expression.
Most people with religious cultural background and/or upbringing become more religious as they approach the inevitability of their demise, regardless of their earlier professed agnosticism/atheism. I've witnessed that in many people I have known well.
Furthermore, insofar as religion is a "crutch" - as many atheists say it is - it can indeed be, for people, who fear death, something they cling to with a desperate hope, that faith and its outward manifestations will postpone their expiration date. Thus, they also cling to gestures they associate with religiosity, including prayer as just one example. For them, it logically follows, that they also use up all the chances medicine can offer to prolong their life.
I myself don't consider myself "pious", although I'm religious, but I do pray, read the Scriptures, go to church and many other things associated with religion. While I am by no means in a hurry to die (too many interesting things around, and my family!), I have given unequivocal instructions to my family and my ecclesiastical leaders, that I am not to be kept alive for years on artificial life support. And if I found out tomorrow, that I have Alzheimer's (which I know about from seeing my mother go that way - all the way) or an extremely painful untreatable cancer (again something I have seen close to me), I certainly would try to choose the path that would be easiest for my family. Thus far, it's just theoretical in my mind, but it may some day be an issue to solve. I'd like to be able to solve it with a clear mind. As of now, I think I'm not afraid to die. I have also had a medical situation, where I did prepare myself for it, although it wasn't extremely risky.
The fact that most Christian sects teach, that unbaptized people go to hell (or Limbo - same difference - see that Wikipedia article), was what drove me away from our state church and then further and further away from organized religion in all its forms, until I had a paradigm shift 30 years ago.
We have to remember also, that Protestants are generally big on predestination. They don't quite know how to reconcile it with the idea of the unbaptized going to Hell (and many other ideas).
I try to live up to pretty high standards, that I believe in, without wanting to impose them on others. That may put me in a minority among outwardly religious people. Anyhow, this is not a religion forum, so I'll be a good boy and shut up now. If you want to, you can check up my my blog on Wordpress.com for sources about this stuff. I'm new to blogging, and have only just started it; having been otherwise occupied. One day I may be serving it up from my own server, if it hods my interest...
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Seems that any way the political winds turn, they always lead back to totalitarianism (and eventually to total xenophobia, because of point two below). And it's always sold under the same pretexts:
Orwell just got the year wrong. Otherwise he was eerily prophetic. Advances in computer science will make meaningful analyzing of data and collecting them in central databases possible in much larger scale than what is done today. Makes me want to go offline for good and start a subsistence-living only farm. Then again, encrypting most of our communications will postpone the advent of the final dystopia.
"Anything you do, anything you say, I'll be watching you..."
But wait. Everything that can be used to do good can be used to do evil. Potential is potential. We determine the direction it takes. Sure, it will make society more complex, but we'll need a lot of safeguards against unreasonable invasions. We just have to determine unreasonable. And that is a political back-and-forth, that is ongoing, and lasts forever.
So what happens if you buy and activate a prepaid cellphone in the US or Guatemala, then use it in Mexico??
Simple: Your prepaid phone will work only as long as it has a connection with a carrier that has a roaming contract with yours. Many, if not most, prepaids don't work internationally unless you register them (often for a fee), because international calls are hard to charge on prepaids (at least, where receiving one is charged to your account). Sure, you can use a fake ID, but pretty soon that will be considered a premeditated action to conceal illegal/terrorist activity.
Slam goes the door!
Remove prohibition and even the most powerfull and influential drug lords will disappear into the dustbin of history.
Uhh.. Not quite. The Capone argument is a fallacy, since although his organization took some serious hits, organized crime never went anywhere. It just changed its face. It's not your Italian-American bookie now. It's the tagger in the 'hood, that sells you pot, coke and rock, plus a trick with his favorite hooked-up girl, who does it to get high.
Again, contraband will always be in demand.
Some very good points... even if I don't completely agree with them all. The main argument is, that you still suppose, in the end, that people function logically. So many of our important decisions are gut reactions, and education only goes so far in a generation.
Even if you're an anonymoys coward, I have to agree with you. On both counts.
If we legalize Mary Jane and Nose Candy now, the "hip, with it" people will move to something else that is way too dangerous to be legal (crystal meth, anyone?). That will create a lucrative market for it.
The real solution would be to have a new kind of culture, that doesn't glorify delinquency and criminality. That'll be the day...
By keeping Marijuana illegal we make teens think they're living on the edge when they toke a joint. The fans of rock stars (if not the stars themselves) think they're out there, when they get busted for coke. They could be dealing with much more dangerous substances, and there is absolutely no way of completely blocking a supply for something that has such high-dollar demand.
It all comes back to how much freedom we can allow ourselves.
And not to be completely offtopic, a word about the phone deal: It is where we are going everywhere. ISPs forced to keep an IP log forever and other Patriot Act features that are now permanent. UK tracking all internet traffic (if not being able to analyze it all yet). China (among others) controlling what regular surfers see on the 'Net.
This are not alarmist FUD, they're today's reality. Increasing capacity of PCs will enable ever more complete tracking of everything we do online - and eventually analyzing and compiling relevant data to central databases; your whole life is an open book to the Big Brother). Orwell was eerily correct in his predictions. What he got wrong were the year and who would be behind it. It turns out that it was the most conservative Congress and President, who sold the whole thing, because we are afraid. Very, very afraid. Besides, you never know when seemingly benign activities turn out to be preparation for terrorism, so we'll have to keep track of everybody all the time. (Google Panopticon.)
When I was a kid, I heard a joke:
Q: What is the difference between capitalism and communism?
A: In capitalism some people exploit others; in communism it's the other way.
Either way, taken to the extreme, you end up in totalitarianism.
I gotta put my oar in. My uncle (dead for some years by now) was a cop. He was a smart one - his bosses didn't like him much, because he was, like my dad and me, prone to insubordination, but they couldn't argue with his solve rate. He made captain-equivalent in our provincial detective department before he opted for a lower-stress job and transferred to his home town's fraud investigations dept.
Anyhow, I remember him talking about stuff - in his cups, of course, otherwise he was just making stupid jokes with me and my friends - and the obvious thing coming out was: You have to pretend to be stupid. Never let on what you think is going on, never tell anybody everything you know. That is inviting trouble. If the bad guy thinks you're stupid, he's more likely to talk out of turn. And if you tell your partner everything you know (or more likely think you know), you're going to bias him, so you usually just share the relevant facts.
Furthermore, there is this fictional stereotype of a highly intelligent arch criminal, whom the ultra-smart cop foils by deductive logic and clever banter (plus these days, the ultra-high-tech lab that sees things that aren't there). The reality is, that most criminals are stupid and commit stupid crimes. Most of the time it doesn't take a very smart cop to bust those slimebuckets.
Oh, but then there is a problem with the cop version of researcher bias. I was suckered into a scam by two "friends", who were, it turned out, planning to make me take the fall for that (a corporate law thing; I had a position where responsibility for everything was implicit). When the sh!t hit the fan, the cops had been interviewing those two guys first (they were the primary actors) when they invited me for an interview. I'm honest to the point of stupidity, so I told them exactly what happened. Their response was to lock me up for the night to see if that would soften me up. They had formed a picture in their mind about what had happened, and they held to it. Even when it turned out, that the other guys had been pulling off scams like that left and right, and I had no history apart from one frivolous complaint.
This line is lifted directly from Wikipedia (as of Apr 10, GMT 20:20)in the article about Anonymous(group) under subtitle "Composition":
"A "loose coalition of Internet denizens",[9] the group is banded together by the internet, through sites such as 4chan,[7][9], 711chan,[7] 420chan, Something Awful, Fark, Encyclopedia Dramatica,[10] Slashdot, IRC channels,[7] and YouTube".
Apparently, reading Wikipedia is now "intelligence gathering" or "threat assessment". I mean just insert a couple of words so it would make more sense when yanked from its original context on the Wikipedia page.
Of course, it is true that you have to try to educate the dinosaurs above you in the food chain...
Now that we're talking about car thieves;
Once my car's fuel pump was busted, and I had been working with it since I tried in vain to start it.
I accidentally left the keys in the ignition at night when I went in, and in the morning we had a visitor, who asked, "what happened to your car?" "Something happened?" says me, only then spotting the empty bay in front of the garage door (not really visible from inside).
You imagine I was a little puzzled. There was no fuel pump in the car. How in heck had they driven off with it? Without really knowing what I was doing I started walking around the neighborhood, thinking they can't have gotten too far...
About 150 yards out, around the corner, there was the car, complete with the keys in the ignition (including my house keys - how's that for stupid?), the hood still unlatched, with no other sign of tampering but a dirty palm print on the white hood.
Turned out somebody had been waiting for us to go to bed. We had been sitting up till 2 AM right above the car bay, talking by an open window in the balmy summer weather. Whoever it was, had waited under the neighbor's shelter, smoking a crapload of cigarettes (~100 butts) - and taken a crap - to pass the time, then pushing the car out far enough so we wouldn't hear the starter grind.
Big fat reward there. I hope they had a sense of humor! (I kind of figure if they didn't have one, they would have vandalized the car to "get back".)
A bit offtopic, but I think it makes a good story.
You obviously have not pulled a big trailer, driven a box truck or a jam-packed van?
Most of this discussion has been about downloading or streaming video (or playing games), which naturally is a big bandwidth consumer.
How about the people, whose computers are running spambots and send huge amounts of spam email? Within the last week, we were told, that spam is up to 94% of all 'net traffic. I wonder, which world we really live in...
It's natural in a way, that cable companies try to protect their soon-to-be obsolete business models. What this is a lesson in is, that monopolies are bad for consumers. In the end, they are bad for the monopoly owners, too, because they end up destroying their business by relying on their ability to charge over the top without giving customer satisfaction.
Bandwidth is obviously not an unlimited resource, it's a bit like rail or road networks - you have certain expensive infra to permit a certain level of service, but using the service itself doesn't cost that much. TWC obviously wants to avoid having to invest in their infra for the foreseeable future (for corporate jockeys that's narrowing from the next quarter to the next 6 weeks).
My ISP promises me 10MBps (fiber optic in the building basement, with VDSL up from there - they say they could easily give me 100MBps, but I don't want to fork over the cash), and usually delivers at least that. But then I have a choice of many different ISPs with different pricing plans. Nobody has even mentioned caps in broadband connections.
Seriously, somebody make some of the more useful sites switch to ASCII captchas.
I vote for the I-Phone butt-scanner...
That could be THE ONE.
I don't have a single useless human language...
Do you use accented letters and circonflex (sp?)?
English is the real choice of Indian programmers to communicate with many, many other Indian programmers.
If I recall correctly from my graduate-level psychology of language course, children can't learn a language from TV. They need to interact with speakers, in the language in question, to learn it.
It depends what you define as learning a language. I learned enough of English from subtitled American TV-shows to earn me straight A's (for English as a second language) in school for a while without making any effort. (The shows were more like Batman and The Untouchables and such.) Of course, it took me a little while as a youngster in Canada and US before I was able to be fluent.
First of all, let me clarify a source of possible confusion. Not that it matters much, but alhtough Linus is a Finn, as most Linux hobbyists know, his native language happens to be Swedish. About 5% of Finns are Swedish-speaking (depends on what counts, but according to Wikipedia, at the end of 2007, that's how many self-identify as such), although practically all of them are fairly fluent in Finnish. Unlike Finnish-speakers (full disclosure: my mother tongue is Finnish - as if anyone cares), of whom only the civilized ones speak Swedish, although we're supposed to learn it in school.
To make a distantly relative point: I speak English, Finnish, Swedish and German somewhat fluently, can carry on a semi-intelligent discussion in French and Spanish in addition to Norwegian and Danish, read enough Italian, Portuguese and Dutch to find my way around if I have to. I also "speak" some programming languages enough to produce code, some to read code by others. Just saying this so you know I have no vested interests.
I think English is absolutely essential to communicating internationally. Trying to code and comment your way around without English is like trying to get by in physics without metrics (you can use imperial, but you have to know what metrics mean). I don't really care much what the language is, as long as there is a lingua franca for tech community, that basically everyone is expected to be able to use enough to find their way around code, comments and other documentation. Translation - especially technical - is an arduous task (I have translated enough handbooks to know), and creating documentation in several languages is a resource hog that's not worth it. Let alone trying to accommodate national notation systems inside compilers. How your system internally codes "Ã" (here is what I typed: ä), for example, depends on your OS (even if it's nominally Unicode, like newer Wins claim) and about 1,000 different user settings. Unicode URLs are a big enough headache (that should be done away with, IMHO).
All in all, I'm glad at least someone agrees with me (as TFA suggests).
So many of the posters here have reacted as if the problem that TFA talks about is users receiving spam. That is yesterday's problem, for the most part - as so many here, I, too, get spam in my inbox hardly ever, as it gets filtered out on several levels. The problem is, that bandwith is not a finite resource, and with this level of traffic getting routinely filtered out, we should go to the source.
At the risk of making a fool of myself, I'll try to suggest a couple of low-tech approaches:
Before designing a new protocol to replace SMTP, how about having ISP's block any source of SMTP requests from an IP that's sending above X mails per day until they have verified, that the mails are legit. The X could be a fairly low figure without affecting 99% of legit users. Wouldn't that eliminate a huge proportion of spambots?
The profitability of spamming is much harder to tackle. I often wonder who buys all these products, that are supposed to make a superman out of me? Businesses buy these spam services, or they wouldn't be such a problem, and presumably they wouldn't, if people didn't fall for them. Education would be a partial answer, but Barnum was right about a sucker being born every minute -except it's more like every ms.
As for phishing sites, I have a locked hosts file on several boxes in use by several people, that directs a huge number of common spoof sites to 127.0.0.1 - if someone clicks a link, they'll get a message telling them, that they have clicked a forged link. Have the browser updates install and update that on Windows boxes. It doesn't eliminate spam per se, but reduces its profitability.
I have had a bunch of emails blocked by receivers, who have done it on a domain basis. Everyone from that domain (my ISP) gets blocked, because some blockheads have let spambots run on their boxes. Some news sites have done the same with HTTP requests. That is a pretty blunt tool.
I know what you want to say, but it ain't necessarily so. It's all about money for enterprises.
What the power companies are concerned about is to produce the capacity to deliver on peak demand as cheaply as possible.
For example: Our local power company has long been talking about peak capacity and incentivizing moving demand off-peak. For bigger units, it's considerably cheaper to run power-intensive operations during off-peak hours.
Do you have a solution for a MW class unit that can be online quickly? If you don't, powering down some PCs is not going to put a dent in the amount of wasted resources. Besides, we won't have an intelligent power grid for a while. All that doesn't mean we shouldn't be looking for solutions.
BTW, it's much faster to turn a coal power station off and on, if you omit those useless CO2 capture units, particle filters etc. so you do have a point...
Dude, you can shut down a PC at night, and get it running in the morning.
You can not, however, do the same thing with a power plant. It takes much longer to cycle up.
Anyhow, what we would need is a lot of high-efficiency photovoltaic panels, that would create the most power exactly when you have peak demand in the areas where solar is viable to begin with.
Some programming language can be popular, because it's useful; that is not necessarily always the case, though. Java may be popular because of its portability, for example. Java as a language may or may not be as good as its popularity could indicate - although you certainly can do plenty of stuff with it. Not write a gadget driver, though.
One can compare programming languages with human languages. If you learn one Indo-European language, it's easier to learn another, and the learning curve is less steep with each new language. The same seems to be true with programming languages. On a side note vis-Ã-vis human language, remember that for certain NATO-affiliated services, Arabic speakers are in huge demand. True, they don't get rich and work in an awful environment, but employment prospects are good.
I bring up the human language comparison, because it seems people become emotionally attached to their "own" languages in programming, too. But after all, what is important, is that you can perform tasks that need to be done, while keeping costs manageable. Your boss won't necessarily care which tool you use, as long as it isn't too expensive in licensing cost or labor.
It could be helpful to consider the implications of the economy. Organizations may not be able to upgrade hardware and proprietary licenses as frequently as they're used to, so in the near future demand for people, who can do more with existing resources, will probably increase. I could see FOSS becoming stronger in this environment.
Whenever I run into a cert mismatch, I check the site IP (fairly straightforward in FF). Then I do a search on the IP against whois databases (ARIN, RIPE). If I see, that the IP is registered to the organization that is supposed to be serving me (and not just an IP reseller), I grant a temp exception and send an email to the staff of the service provider (the whois databases usually have that info) and tell them they've screwed up.
For online banking, I have one-time passwords, issued by the bank (it's a two-phase process). But I've never run into a cert mismatch on a banking service yet.
This would be worth a long blog post instead of a quick forum reply, but here goes:
TFA was too indefinite about its methods and analysis to know about the cause and effect here - and besides, most people's publicly professed faith is different than the one they live. Faith is what you live, not so much what you think and say, although a living faith does indeed affect one's patterns of thought and expression.
Most people with religious cultural background and/or upbringing become more religious as they approach the inevitability of their demise, regardless of their earlier professed agnosticism/atheism. I've witnessed that in many people I have known well.
Furthermore, insofar as religion is a "crutch" - as many atheists say it is - it can indeed be, for people, who fear death, something they cling to with a desperate hope, that faith and its outward manifestations will postpone their expiration date. Thus, they also cling to gestures they associate with religiosity, including prayer as just one example. For them, it logically follows, that they also use up all the chances medicine can offer to prolong their life.
I myself don't consider myself "pious", although I'm religious, but I do pray, read the Scriptures, go to church and many other things associated with religion. While I am by no means in a hurry to die (too many interesting things around, and my family!), I have given unequivocal instructions to my family and my ecclesiastical leaders, that I am not to be kept alive for years on artificial life support. And if I found out tomorrow, that I have Alzheimer's (which I know about from seeing my mother go that way - all the way) or an extremely painful untreatable cancer (again something I have seen close to me), I certainly would try to choose the path that would be easiest for my family. Thus far, it's just theoretical in my mind, but it may some day be an issue to solve. I'd like to be able to solve it with a clear mind. As of now, I think I'm not afraid to die. I have also had a medical situation, where I did prepare myself for it, although it wasn't extremely risky.
The fact that most Christian sects teach, that unbaptized people go to hell (or Limbo - same difference - see that Wikipedia article), was what drove me away from our state church and then further and further away from organized religion in all its forms, until I had a paradigm shift 30 years ago.
We have to remember also, that Protestants are generally big on predestination. They don't quite know how to reconcile it with the idea of the unbaptized going to Hell (and many other ideas).
I try to live up to pretty high standards, that I believe in, without wanting to impose them on others. That may put me in a minority among outwardly religious people. Anyhow, this is not a religion forum, so I'll be a good boy and shut up now. If you want to, you can check up my my blog on Wordpress.com for sources about this stuff. I'm new to blogging, and have only just started it; having been otherwise occupied. One day I may be serving it up from my own server, if it hods my interest...
I meant...
2. The Gods Themselves
I guess I proved the point: Nobody can save me from my own stupidity...
Makes me think about Isaac Asimov's Sci-Fi piece The Gods Themselves. For those of you, who have not read it, it has three parts.
They are:
1. Against Stupidity
2. The Golds Themselves
3. Fight in vain.