There aren't enough of us geeks to hold the hand of every user in the world.
Perhaps there are enough of us geeks to code up the proper secure behavior for the various email clients that people use, make it the default behavior, and make it easy enough to use that people won't bother to try and disable it?
Then it's just a matter of waiting for everybody to update their email client (i.e. 5-10 years, but that's better than never), and we're done:^)
I am not calling for anyone to be imprisoned for merely expressing deranged opinions. I simply recommend that they obtain psychiatric treatment and maybe some anti-psychotic medications.
Are you a psychiatrist? Are you also clairvoyant? If not, how are you able to make medical diagnoses based solely on somebody's Slashdot postings?
What you are is somebody who likes to throw around medical terms as a way to try and discredit people you disagree with. Since you don't have any power, you're not as dangerous as the Russian state, but your motivations are the same.
Re:Boot and Nuke
on
Online Revenge
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You can use something like Darik's Boot and Nuke http://dban.sourceforge.net/ for deleting the content permanently.
I noticed that the Disk Utility in recent releases of MacOS/X also has a paranoia-erase setting: you can tell it to overwrite a disk with zeroes once, seven times, or (for the tinfoil hat crowd) 35 times(!). It's a pretty slow process, though -- doing the 7x option took my G5 about 4 hours. I can almost see now why the military prefers to physically destroy the drives.
Loads of enterprises are run on VB apps. I would go so far as to claim most, although I can't be bothered to find out. Loads of enterprises also run on Excel and Word documents so what does that tell you?
That the world is run on duct tape and bubble gum, and the only way to keep any peace of mind is to try not to think about it too much.
How this would affect anyone's free speech rights baffles me. As long as it's written speech
... but all speech is not written speech. There is also audio and video content. It's quite likely that in the future more and more content will be delivered in audio and video form, simply because that is what a lot of people prefer to consume. And we know what a system is like where only large, rich, well-connected companies can afford to distribute audio and video content: it's called commercial television and radio, and it sucks.
I'd like to see the Internet remain a many-to-many medium, even for video and audio content.
By comparing the savage inequalities of power and wealth in communist nations such as Cuba and North Korea with "income inequality" non-issues of freer nations, I can only conclude that you're mentally ill.
Funny coincidence, there's an article in the L.A. Times today about how Russia is going back to its old trick of declaring political opponents to be "mentally ill" and throwing them into sanitariums whenever they want them out of the way. A barbaric practice to be sure, but how many Slashdotters would do the same if they were given the chance?
People are inherently stupid. There's no point trying to educate them with the facts of nuclear power. They aren't interested. In fact, most are not capable of being interested.
People will become interested in power generation when they start to really feel the effects of the current methods' shortcomings.
That said, I still think higher efficiency and large-scale deployment of renewable power (wind/solar/tidal/geothermal) and possibly nuclear fusion are the real solutions we need to work towards -- nuclear fission is at best an ugly stopgap measure (as demonstrated by how ansy it makes everyone when Iran talks about wanting to get some of it -- if Iran had started talking about building a national solar power program, the West wouldn't mind a bit)
And Osama Bin Laden will give us the first widescale demonstration of its "usefulness"
Why isn't that guy dead or in jail? Didn't Bush promise five years ago that he would get him, "dead or alive"?
Australia, how about we give you $100 billion to make sure this all disappears, OK? Yes, I do know how much would have to come from each taxpayer, but I'd gladly pay it to make the world a safer place.
Are you sure that limiting the world's access to clean energy sources will make it on the whole a safer place? Keep in mind that most wars are fought over access to scarce resources, and imagine what the world might be like in 50 years, when oil scarcity and/or global warming make today's gas prices seem like a pleasant memory...
Ah, you're one of those people saying "as long as there is no direct (nuclear) threat to myself, I don't care about public profiling and second class treatment of others". (Jews, but also Christians, gays and women
And presumably you're one of those people that equates "caring" with "military attacks"?
Here's a hint: it's possible to care about something, without also thinking that violence is the solution.
Right now the cheapest way to come up with fuel for a nuclear power plant is not laser enrichment or even centrifuge enrichment. It's diluting old Russian warheads, all 30,000 of them, down from 93% enriched uranium back to 3% uranium.
Okay, you're a non-conformist. And the problem with you non-comformists is, most of you are only doing it because you think not conforming will make you "cool".
"that retains the image even when turned off." and "Practical applications would include watches" That would be very useful for watches. It would always be 5 oclock PM friday as long as it is turned off. Practical
It would be useful for watches because you'd only have to provide power to the display once a minute (when you needed to update it). The benefit would be much longer battery life.
How is it good for the consumer, if an irrelevant amazon ad shows up (because it costs less for amazon even though the click-rate for that particular word is very poor), and not the actual equation editor?
Doesn't it depend on the consumer? i.e. some consumers might be more interested in the ads that most exactly match their keywords (regardless of who posted them), whereas other customers might be more interested only in ads from relatively "trusted" advertisers (so as to avoid the spammers and the scammers).
Clearly Google has made a judgement in this regard, and implemented a trade-off of advertiser-reputation vs. ad-relevance. You can agree with that decision, or disagree, or ask for a user-preference on the Google page... but in the end it's Google's web site, Google's search engine, and Google's business model that will either best serve the needs of their customers, or get driven out by someone else who does.
I'm not so sure about that... by doing this, Google hurt the market for web-filter-evasion software: people who would have had to circumvent the censors to get good search results now just take the easier path: use google.cn, and get good, censored search results. The effects of this are:
The filter-evading software gets less use, and less development
Anyone still using the filter-evading software no longer has the excuse of "I had to do it, it was the only way to get decent search results". Now the Chinese authorities can assume that they did it specifically to view restricted information, because there is no other plausible reason anymore when you can use google.cn for all "non-forbidden" material
Perhaps it's not the search engine that has peaked so much as the corpus that it is searching. Ten years ago, the bulk of the Internet was pages hand-written by real people, with (arguably) useful information on most of them. It sounds like recently large amounts of "noise" pages that are deliberately designed to do nothing but fool search engines have been added, reducing the signal-to-noise ratio of the Internet considerably.
True, Google (and/or other search engines) may be indirectly responsible for the generation of these noise-pages... but the fact is, picking the "good content" out of a sea of clever decoys is always going to be harder than picking it out of a pool of mostly genuine information. Gogle may be having problems doing that, but I'd be surprised if other search engines don't have the same problems.
the problems is that the 'clickthru' model of advertising is fundamentally flawed. if you're company X with so many billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of employees, and some competitor is advertising on google and yit's costing your company money, you just pay a few minimum wage flunkies to just click competitors ads so they 'go away' with television etc, the cost is all based on how many people are going to see the ad.
If you're going to argue that, you might as well argue that retail is fundamentally flawed too, since people can abuse that system simply by shoplifting. But in both cases the solution is the same: make the abusive activity illegal (which will stop the law-abiding people from doing it), and develop anti-abuse technology to make it harder for the scofflaws to do it.
Is click-fraud illegal now? If not, it should be. And as with many Internet fraud problems, this one can be largely solved by solving the root problem: insecure PCs that allow people to create bot-nots. What we really need is a push towards making the vast majority of PCs secure.
The largest problem would not come through the weight of the ribbon, but rather through its tension. So, it's neither falling like bricks, nor like newspaper, but rather snapping like a taut rope giving everything in its path some megaboss whipping.
I don't think the elevator would be made of such elastic material that a "whip" effect would occur. I won't claim to understand the physics, so I'll just quote the FAQ:
What happens if it breaks?
The short answer is that (much like the string-and-weight example) the portion of the elevator above the break point flies outwards, whereas the portion below the break point falls down to earth. We have to remember that the whole ribbon weighs only about 1000 tons (about the same as a Saturn V rocket) and has the density and consistency of Saran Wrap, so if it falls, instead of crashing down in one place it is distributed evenly around the entire planet, with each square mile getting about an ounce of debris. The overall effect will be like a very disappointing global ticker-tape parade - hardly a ground-shattering event.
After all, the claims have bankrupted every country that has tested nuclear weapons, right?
Above-ground nuclear tests have been effectively banned. And nuclear weapons fall under the area of "national security", so nations have a lot more political and strategic motivation to develop them than they do to promote space travel, which is frankly a luxury item with no clear short-term or medium-term benefits.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps there are enough of us geeks to code up the proper secure behavior for the various email clients that people use, make it the default behavior, and make it easy enough to use that people won't bother to try and disable it?
Then it's just a matter of waiting for everybody to update their email client (i.e. 5-10 years, but that's better than never), and we're done
Are you a psychiatrist? Are you also clairvoyant? If not, how are you able to make medical diagnoses based solely on somebody's Slashdot postings?
What you are is somebody who likes to throw around medical terms as a way to try and discredit people you disagree with. Since you don't have any power, you're not as dangerous as the Russian state, but your motivations are the same.
I noticed that the Disk Utility in recent releases of MacOS/X also has a paranoia-erase setting: you can tell it to overwrite a disk with zeroes once, seven times, or (for the tinfoil hat crowd) 35 times(!). It's a pretty slow process, though -- doing the 7x option took my G5 about 4 hours. I can almost see now why the military prefers to physically destroy the drives.
That the world is run on duct tape and bubble gum, and the only way to keep any peace of mind is to try not to think about it too much.
What is this "might"? As far as I can tell, they all do...
I'd like to see the Internet remain a many-to-many medium, even for video and audio content.
It's not just an elevator, it's also a metaphor for all things Apple (both good and bad). Certainly that was the intention of its builders.
So they can create more, some of which we can then eat.
Funny coincidence, there's an article in the L.A. Times today about how Russia is going back to its old trick of declaring political opponents to be "mentally ill" and throwing them into sanitariums whenever they want them out of the way. A barbaric practice to be sure, but how many Slashdotters would do the same if they were given the chance?
People will become interested in power generation when they start to really feel the effects of the current methods' shortcomings.
That said, I still think higher efficiency and large-scale deployment of renewable power (wind/solar/tidal/geothermal) and possibly nuclear fusion are the real solutions we need to work towards -- nuclear fission is at best an ugly stopgap measure (as demonstrated by how ansy it makes everyone when Iran talks about wanting to get some of it -- if Iran had started talking about building a national solar power program, the West wouldn't mind a bit)
Per song it was more expensive -- you get one tenth the number of songs for half the price.
(Compare with iTunes, where you can buy a "single" for 99 cents -- one tenth the number of songs for one tenth of the price)
Why isn't that guy dead or in jail? Didn't Bush promise five years ago that he would get him, "dead or alive"?
Australia, how about we give you $100 billion to make sure this all disappears, OK? Yes, I do know how much would have to come from each taxpayer, but I'd gladly pay it to make the world a safer place.
Are you sure that limiting the world's access to clean energy sources will make it on the whole a safer place? Keep in mind that most wars are fought over access to scarce resources, and imagine what the world might be like in 50 years, when oil scarcity and/or global warming make today's gas prices seem like a pleasant memory...
And presumably you're one of those people that equates "caring" with "military attacks"?
Here's a hint: it's possible to care about something, without also thinking that violence is the solution.
Don't forget the inevitable guy who claims to have extensive knowledge of both the real and purported histories of conversation participants...
And when we're done with that, maybe we ought to dilute some old American warheads as well...
Okay, you're a non-conformist. And the problem with you non-comformists is, most of you are only doing it because you think not conforming will make you "cool".
Too bad they never thought up the "sell it for less money" part....
It would be useful for watches because you'd only have to provide power to the display once a minute (when you needed to update it). The benefit would be much longer battery life.
Doesn't it depend on the consumer? i.e. some consumers might be more interested in the ads that most exactly match their keywords (regardless of who posted them), whereas other customers might be more interested only in ads from relatively "trusted" advertisers (so as to avoid the spammers and the scammers).
Clearly Google has made a judgement in this regard, and implemented a trade-off of advertiser-reputation vs. ad-relevance. You can agree with that decision, or disagree, or ask for a user-preference on the Google page... but in the end it's Google's web site, Google's search engine, and Google's business model that will either best serve the needs of their customers, or get driven out by someone else who does.
I'm not so sure about that... by doing this, Google hurt the market for web-filter-evasion software: people who would have had to circumvent the censors to get good search results now just take the easier path: use google.cn, and get good, censored search results. The effects of this are:
True, Google (and/or other search engines) may be indirectly responsible for the generation of these noise-pages... but the fact is, picking the "good content" out of a sea of clever decoys is always going to be harder than picking it out of a pool of mostly genuine information. Gogle may be having problems doing that, but I'd be surprised if other search engines don't have the same problems.
If you're going to argue that, you might as well argue that retail is fundamentally flawed too, since people can abuse that system simply by shoplifting. But in both cases the solution is the same: make the abusive activity illegal (which will stop the law-abiding people from doing it), and develop anti-abuse technology to make it harder for the scofflaws to do it.
Is click-fraud illegal now? If not, it should be. And as with many Internet fraud problems, this one can be largely solved by solving the root problem: insecure PCs that allow people to create bot-nots. What we really need is a push towards making the vast majority of PCs secure.
I don't think the elevator would be made of such elastic material that a "whip" effect would occur. I won't claim to understand the physics, so I'll just quote the FAQ:
What happens if it breaks?
The short answer is that (much like the string-and-weight example) the portion of the elevator above the break point flies outwards, whereas the portion below the break point falls down to earth. We have to remember that the whole ribbon weighs only about 1000 tons (about the same as a Saturn V rocket) and has the density and consistency of Saran Wrap, so if it falls, instead of crashing down in one place it is distributed evenly around the entire planet, with each square mile getting about an ounce of debris. The overall effect will be like a very disappointing global ticker-tape parade - hardly a ground-shattering event.
Christ, no! It would only increase the amount of white ink the printer has to slather on to every page....
Above-ground nuclear tests have been effectively banned. And nuclear weapons fall under the area of "national security", so nations have a lot more political and strategic motivation to develop them than they do to promote space travel, which is frankly a luxury item with no clear short-term or medium-term benefits.