It needs to have one vulnerability to be a problem.
People say this frequently but it is simply wrong. Imperfect security is not the same thing as bad security.
From some sort of theoretical perspective one vulnerability and many vulnerabilities are equally exploitable. From a practical perspective things are different. What is necessary for there to be a "problem" is for there to be a large quantity of vulnerable systems of a certain sort installed. There are a number of conditions which must be met to go from "a vulnerability exists" to this point. Among them are the range of installed versions of the system, the range of versions which contain vulnerability, the range and nature of individual vulnerabilities that vulnerability represents, the time between the discovery of the vulnerability and the patches, the patches take to be installed by the end user, and in general the likelihood that a potential exploiter of vulnerability may expect that attempts to exploit will be successful.
All of these are effected by the frequency and quantity of bugs, not just "has there been a bug ever". In particular, if major security patches are released on a bimonthly basis because the vulnerabilities are many and frequent, it is much harder to get everyone to upgrade and install all of these patches than if there's one big urgent security patch once. (One might say that hacking on this scale is a social process, not a technical one.)
There is some sort of basic human inability to create a perfectly secure software program. But this does not mean a focus on security cannot be beneficial.
Hmm. But they aren't so much competing with television here exactly, are they? They're competing with HDDVD and Blu-ray. Compared to those, how well does this hold up?
It honestly seems lately like the film industry is trying to do absolutely everything in their power to dissuade me from going to movies. They show me loud and annoying commercials from the moment I walk in the theatre until 10 minutes after the movie is supposed to start, then show MPAA trailers that literally outright insult me mixed in with the previews. I have to go see the movie when they demand it, since anything that hasn't made a bajillion dollars by the end of the first weekend gets pulled from theaters permanently these days. And they've started overlaying on some-- but we don't know which!-- projections a bizarre flickering that is apparently enough to obliterate any attempt to film the movie, but we're for some reason supposed to believe won't consciously or subconsciously effect our enjoyment of the movie.
Now apparently they're going to start showing us nothing more than HDTV on a really big screen. And they're expecting us to pay a premium price for this.
Ever since The Commercials Unending started I've found it increasingly difficult to make myself go to the movies even when there's something out I want to see. Pretty soon I don't think I'm going to be able to make myself go at all.
The BBC and ZDNet are reporting on an RSA poll of 1 about failing confidence in ecommerce among Slashdot user ArsSineArtificio (user 150115). 100% of the respondents were reluctant take legal advice obtained on slashdot.
We want SCO to survive. From SCO's perspective meanwhile it is best to quietly go bankrupt shortly. SCO's case is now entering the area where their lawsuits will soon be over-- but the countersuits against them will just be starting. The longer and more messily these suits can be dragged out, if possible against The Canopy Group in addition to just SCO, the better it will be, since this will generate press about how the company that tried to destroy Linux and its executives are tied up in court and being soundly punished for it.
SCO needs to be kept alive long enough for them to serve as an example to others...
SCO is entirely a PR construct at this point. They have no notable products or future sources of revenue. Their stock is their sole product. They exist to try to convince enough people that they are too a real company that they can attract investors.
When your business is PR, a PR defeat is a defeat to your core business. This means that delisting is a much more serious problem for SCO than it would be for a normal company; if you take the shine of SCO's corporate presence away, what is left?
If the head of the ALA were a publisher, he would know that the overall quality of bloggers' work is no worse than the output of the vast majority of so-called "writers" who submit manuscripts.
But the head of the ALA is not a publisher. He is a librarian. This means that his job is not to evaluate works for publication, his job is to sift through the mess after the publishers are done and try to make some sense of it all. From the perspective of a librarian, publishing is inevitable, whether it's done by a printing press or a web page. The only important question is, what happens next?
Part of answering that question is the issue of how, when and why works are preserved and held up for use by others. This is a question librarians are often concerned with. It also seems to be the issue that the ALA person who wrote this article is mostly concerned with-- or, even more specifically, the question is it useful?
This is a question that is often neglected when discussing blogs. Usually the only question people ask concerning blogs is Will, or should, blogs become successful? This is not the same question as whether they are useful. For a random example, I Love Lucy is popular. One could very definitely call I Love Lucy successful. However one could argue I Love Lucy is not very useful for purposes of engendering an informed populace. Probably it serves some other use. But that does not mean it is informative.
Similarly, blogs may become very popular without being particularly useful as an informative tool. Will this happen? I don't know. But the question of whether and in what capacity, popular or no, that blogs are useful as an informative tool is definitely a question the ALA president seems to want raised. I think it is a fair one.
The basic problem many on the Left have with Fox is that it's not the party line that is CNN/NBC/ABC/CBS.
This indicates whatever the validity your own opinions, you actually don't know what the "left" thinks. While there is nothing wrong with you expressing your views, I would like to request that in future you not attempt to speak for the views of others.
Speaking as a member of the so-called "left":
You would be very very hard pressed to find anyone on the "left" who believes CNN/NBC/ABC/CBS represents their views. Perhaps occasionally such people will find individual instances of reporting on these networks they agree with. However just as often, perhaps more in the last four years, they would find themselves dissatisfied with the slant of the reporting.
This is because traditional journalism sources like CNN/NBC/ABC/CBS attempt at unbiased reporting, but do not succeed-- because unbiased reporting is very, very difficult to do. This results in bias, but not bias directed toward any sort of specific goal. It is possible during the George H.W. Bush administration this bias in the media at large consistently tilted toward "liberal" causes; I wouldn't know, I spent the period between the ages of five and nine. It is certain that during the George W. Bush administration this bias in the media at large has consistently tilted toward "conservative" causes. In any case these biases are regrettable, but they were not being directed.
Fox News meanwhile represents a specific and wilful bias. This is the reason why you will find people on the "Left" object to it; because it represents a party line, and in specific a party line they find anathemic. This is not attempting at unbiased reporting and failing. Fox News was deliberately and specifically put together to create a right wing news network; its owners openly said so at the time it was founded. Meanwhile there are scores of documented instances where a specific political bias was imposed on Fox News's reporting by the owners, and its operators take a day-to-day hand in approving and shaping the slant of the messages the "news" network puts forth. This is unprecedented in modern journalism. It is also very reasonable to find this objectionable.
As for myself, I find the quality of journalism on television in general poor enough I do not watch any of these networks.
The reason why Fox News is KILLING the others is because of the obvious difference in reporting.
Alternate theory: The reason why Fox News is KILLING the others is because bad reporting is inherently more profitable than good reporting.
Fox news presents a coherent worldview, an actual argument. They don't clutter up their message with things that might hurt or detract from that message. They are simply selling a product, the Right Wing World View, and accepting that product makes you feel good about yourself. Other news agencies just report. Sometimes they do a good job, sometimes they don't. Either way this doesn't really do anything to make you feel good about yourself; in fact, the real news can honestly be sometimes downright depressing. Depressing products don't sell well. Overall people would rather spend their viewing time on soothing lies than potentially sticky truths.
but this mocking, snobbish attitude isn't going to win anyone over to his side.
It won me over. At least, upon reading it I found that my personal view of blogs and bloggers was much closer to that of the ALA president than that held by many bloggers themselves, and that the ALA president had expressed his view in a way that both indicated he understood the situation and was in itself well stated.
So it comes down to what, exactly, the goal of this piece was. If the point was to express something, it was a success. If the point was to express something and have readers finding they agreed with it, it was a success in that at least one person (me) was "won over" by it.
If the point was to impress self-identified "bloggers", it probably failed, but then I personally begin to suspect it's impossible to impress anyone who self-identifies as a "blogger" except by directly stoking their ego.
What I am asking about at the moment is the exact process of changing the setting away from the default. If you have to at any point ever type the words "network.IDN_show_punycode" to change a basic preference this is not acceptable UI.
The possibility of that will be probably one of, if not the first thing science would begin looking for an explanation for if life of any kind on mars was discovered. It would probably mostly come down to, is there any resemblance between the xenian and earth life, and could they in any way have shared a common ancestor?
One problem here is that the bids in question were not tied, unless you accept Ebays twisted definition of tied as "closer than the bidding increment".
This is probably ebay's definition of tied because this is probably what the internal definition of "tied" is according to the computer program that runs the site.
From the perspective of a programmer the definition they're using makes perfect and immediate sense, they're just using an internal representation based on the bid increment rather than dollars and cents.
IANAL, but redefining commonly accepted practices in a contract or license almost never stands up in court.
I don't really see that as relevant. Ebay invented the ebay bidding system, they defined how it works, and it's never worked any other way.
I have trouble sympathizing with the accusers in this case at all since the best they can come up with is "but the web page didn't describe the policy as clearly as it could have!" even though eBay's FAQ explains things in more detail.
It seems pretty obvious that the policy is what it is not because ebay's scamming money, but just because their software is written in a certain way. Maybe this isn't "intuitive" but I don't see why ebay is under a legal obligation to be "intuitive".
I for one will not be doing anything to prepare; I'm just not going to buy anything with broadcast flag support in it. Period. If this means not buying any more TVs, maybe it's for the best. All I use my TV for anyway is as a monitor for my video game systems, and with the next generation of those, I'll be able to just use a monitor. Who needs a TV?
If they're this insistent about showing ads to people in a form people have clearly taken specific steps to avoid seeing, people are just going to move to "real" ad-blocking software that actually blocks the ad files themselves, whereas if the advertisers had not gotten greedy and satisfied for just displaying inline ads for these people they wouldn't have done anything at all...
Personally I almost sometimes think ability to use non-basic (like, other than simple form validation and access) javascript should be restricted to a whitelist, or something. It would be interesting to have a firefox plugin or something that displays a button that when a site starts trying to use javascript turns red, and I have to click it before they let the javascript run...
Apple had an API some years before the entire Microsoft "smart tags" mess which allowed programs to sign up to flag certain types of text anywhere in the system and define operations you could do on them. It was an experimental/research thing, like OpenDoc, and I don't believe it ever was allowed into an OS release, you had to download it. The only plugin that this API came with-- and as far as I know the only one that anyone ever bothered making-- was one that recognized URLs and email addresses whenever they were printed anywhere in the system, and turned them into functional hyperlinks. I am afraid I can't remember the exact name, it was something really generic like "Apple Text Activation Services".
The only thing this patented Microsoft system seems to add is the idea of the link being calculated on a remote server rather than locally; this is a truly trivial step from what Apple's system explicitly did, and one that may not even exactly describe the google toolbar system.
Michael Moore's performed done some journalistically shoddy things in the past, for example a few scenes in Bowling for Columbine, but in general and especially in Fahrenheit 9/11, his journalistic integrity is still better than that of anyone currently doing news on television. I'm not sure exactly what standards we're expected to hold this man to, at some point you're going to just have to expect viewers will have to learn to think for themselves in order to get anything meaningful out of journalism. And at least Moore tries very hard to give people the tools to think for themselves about his movies. Practically ever major point on which people objected to F9/11, Michael Moore's website had pages attempting to clarify and expand those points the morning after, and full references for the entire movie are available. I for one would prefer transparency over trying to defend one's reputation to the point of whitewashing mistakes.
Meanwhile I find it extremely difficult to call the "right wing get the facts campaigns" pretty much anything at all, except maybe "successful". From all I saw these campaigns consisted not at all of actually talking about facts or even the film, but just repeating, over and over, to anyone who'll listen, to the press, posting these things over and over and over on internet message boards, that Michael Moore is a poor journalist, or his movies are "good movies but works of fiction". The result is that everyone just knows Michael Moore made stuff up in Fahrenheit 9/11, but very few people can actually tell you what if anything he made up, or why, or exactly what was so bad about what he did, just that whatever it was, it was bad and poor journalism and lying and such. Hm.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not?
It needs to have one vulnerability to be a problem.
People say this frequently but it is simply wrong. Imperfect security is not the same thing as bad security.
From some sort of theoretical perspective one vulnerability and many vulnerabilities are equally exploitable. From a practical perspective things are different. What is necessary for there to be a "problem" is for there to be a large quantity of vulnerable systems of a certain sort installed. There are a number of conditions which must be met to go from "a vulnerability exists" to this point. Among them are the range of installed versions of the system, the range of versions which contain vulnerability, the range and nature of individual vulnerabilities that vulnerability represents, the time between the discovery of the vulnerability and the patches, the patches take to be installed by the end user, and in general the likelihood that a potential exploiter of vulnerability may expect that attempts to exploit will be successful.
All of these are effected by the frequency and quantity of bugs, not just "has there been a bug ever". In particular, if major security patches are released on a bimonthly basis because the vulnerabilities are many and frequent, it is much harder to get everyone to upgrade and install all of these patches than if there's one big urgent security patch once. (One might say that hacking on this scale is a social process, not a technical one.)
There is some sort of basic human inability to create a perfectly secure software program. But this does not mean a focus on security cannot be beneficial.
Hmm. But they aren't so much competing with television here exactly, are they? They're competing with HDDVD and Blu-ray. Compared to those, how well does this hold up?
"Roughly equal to US HDTV"?
Well that's it then, isn't it?
It honestly seems lately like the film industry is trying to do absolutely everything in their power to dissuade me from going to movies. They show me loud and annoying commercials from the moment I walk in the theatre until 10 minutes after the movie is supposed to start, then show MPAA trailers that literally outright insult me mixed in with the previews. I have to go see the movie when they demand it, since anything that hasn't made a bajillion dollars by the end of the first weekend gets pulled from theaters permanently these days. And they've started overlaying on some-- but we don't know which!-- projections a bizarre flickering that is apparently enough to obliterate any attempt to film the movie, but we're for some reason supposed to believe won't consciously or subconsciously effect our enjoyment of the movie.
Now apparently they're going to start showing us nothing more than HDTV on a really big screen. And they're expecting us to pay a premium price for this.
Ever since The Commercials Unending started I've found it increasingly difficult to make myself go to the movies even when there's something out I want to see. Pretty soon I don't think I'm going to be able to make myself go at all.
The BBC and ZDNet are reporting on an RSA poll of 1 about failing confidence in ecommerce among Slashdot user ArsSineArtificio (user 150115). 100% of the respondents were reluctant take legal advice obtained on slashdot.
We want SCO to survive. From SCO's perspective meanwhile it is best to quietly go bankrupt shortly. SCO's case is now entering the area where their lawsuits will soon be over-- but the countersuits against them will just be starting. The longer and more messily these suits can be dragged out, if possible against The Canopy Group in addition to just SCO, the better it will be, since this will generate press about how the company that tried to destroy Linux and its executives are tied up in court and being soundly punished for it.
SCO needs to be kept alive long enough for them to serve as an example to others...
SCO is entirely a PR construct at this point. They have no notable products or future sources of revenue. Their stock is their sole product. They exist to try to convince enough people that they are too a real company that they can attract investors.
When your business is PR, a PR defeat is a defeat to your core business. This means that delisting is a much more serious problem for SCO than it would be for a normal company; if you take the shine of SCO's corporate presence away, what is left?
I don't disagree with this.
If the head of the ALA were a publisher, he would know that the overall quality of bloggers' work is no worse than the output of the vast majority of so-called "writers" who submit manuscripts.
But the head of the ALA is not a publisher. He is a librarian. This means that his job is not to evaluate works for publication, his job is to sift through the mess after the publishers are done and try to make some sense of it all. From the perspective of a librarian, publishing is inevitable, whether it's done by a printing press or a web page. The only important question is, what happens next?
Part of answering that question is the issue of how, when and why works are preserved and held up for use by others. This is a question librarians are often concerned with. It also seems to be the issue that the ALA person who wrote this article is mostly concerned with-- or, even more specifically, the question is it useful?
This is a question that is often neglected when discussing blogs. Usually the only question people ask concerning blogs is Will, or should, blogs become successful? This is not the same question as whether they are useful. For a random example, I Love Lucy is popular. One could very definitely call I Love Lucy successful. However one could argue I Love Lucy is not very useful for purposes of engendering an informed populace. Probably it serves some other use. But that does not mean it is informative.
Similarly, blogs may become very popular without being particularly useful as an informative tool. Will this happen? I don't know. But the question of whether and in what capacity, popular or no, that blogs are useful as an informative tool is definitely a question the ALA president seems to want raised. I think it is a fair one.
The basic problem many on the Left have with Fox is that it's not the party line that is CNN/NBC/ABC/CBS.
This indicates whatever the validity your own opinions, you actually don't know what the "left" thinks. While there is nothing wrong with you expressing your views, I would like to request that in future you not attempt to speak for the views of others.
Speaking as a member of the so-called "left":
You would be very very hard pressed to find anyone on the "left" who believes CNN/NBC/ABC/CBS represents their views. Perhaps occasionally such people will find individual instances of reporting on these networks they agree with. However just as often, perhaps more in the last four years, they would find themselves dissatisfied with the slant of the reporting.
This is because traditional journalism sources like CNN/NBC/ABC/CBS attempt at unbiased reporting, but do not succeed-- because unbiased reporting is very, very difficult to do. This results in bias, but not bias directed toward any sort of specific goal. It is possible during the George H.W. Bush administration this bias in the media at large consistently tilted toward "liberal" causes; I wouldn't know, I spent the period between the ages of five and nine. It is certain that during the George W. Bush administration this bias in the media at large has consistently tilted toward "conservative" causes. In any case these biases are regrettable, but they were not being directed.
Fox News meanwhile represents a specific and wilful bias. This is the reason why you will find people on the "Left" object to it; because it represents a party line, and in specific a party line they find anathemic. This is not attempting at unbiased reporting and failing. Fox News was deliberately and specifically put together to create a right wing news network; its owners openly said so at the time it was founded. Meanwhile there are scores of documented instances where a specific political bias was imposed on Fox News's reporting by the owners, and its operators take a day-to-day hand in approving and shaping the slant of the messages the "news" network puts forth. This is unprecedented in modern journalism. It is also very reasonable to find this objectionable.
As for myself, I find the quality of journalism on television in general poor enough I do not watch any of these networks.
The reason why Fox News is KILLING the others is because of the obvious difference in reporting.
Alternate theory: The reason why Fox News is KILLING the others is because bad reporting is inherently more profitable than good reporting.
Fox news presents a coherent worldview, an actual argument. They don't clutter up their message with things that might hurt or detract from that message. They are simply selling a product, the Right Wing World View, and accepting that product makes you feel good about yourself. Other news agencies just report. Sometimes they do a good job, sometimes they don't. Either way this doesn't really do anything to make you feel good about yourself; in fact, the real news can honestly be sometimes downright depressing. Depressing products don't sell well. Overall people would rather spend their viewing time on soothing lies than potentially sticky truths.
but this mocking, snobbish attitude isn't going to win anyone over to his side.
It won me over. At least, upon reading it I found that my personal view of blogs and bloggers was much closer to that of the ALA president than that held by many bloggers themselves, and that the ALA president had expressed his view in a way that both indicated he understood the situation and was in itself well stated.
So it comes down to what, exactly, the goal of this piece was. If the point was to express something, it was a success. If the point was to express something and have readers finding they agreed with it, it was a success in that at least one person (me) was "won over" by it.
If the point was to impress self-identified "bloggers", it probably failed, but then I personally begin to suspect it's impossible to impress anyone who self-identifies as a "blogger" except by directly stoking their ego.
What I am asking about at the moment is the exact process of changing the setting away from the default. If you have to at any point ever type the words "network.IDN_show_punycode" to change a basic preference this is not acceptable UI.
Right now this story has 182 comments. That's more than any of the three stories before it on the slashdot front page, all of which are hours old.
Apparently a 0.0.1 release is newsworthy enough that people care more about it than at least three other things on the slashdot front page right now.
That's, um, not exactly a popup. That's a picture of a windows popup, in the webpage itself.
Somehow the illusion is less convincing when you use a Macintosh and you find yourself looking at a Windows XP window border...
To show International Domain Names in Unicode, set the "network.IDN_show_punycode" preference to false.
Please tell me to do it there's a more intuitive way to do that in the GUI.
Tuna salad.
The possibility of that will be probably one of, if not the first thing science would begin looking for an explanation for if life of any kind on mars was discovered. It would probably mostly come down to, is there any resemblance between the xenian and earth life, and could they in any way have shared a common ancestor?
What right do they have to that?
Because those are the terms of putting an item up for sale on their website.
One problem here is that the bids in question were not tied, unless you accept Ebays twisted definition of tied as "closer than the bidding increment".
This is probably ebay's definition of tied because this is probably what the internal definition of "tied" is according to the computer program that runs the site.
From the perspective of a programmer the definition they're using makes perfect and immediate sense, they're just using an internal representation based on the bid increment rather than dollars and cents.
IANAL, but redefining commonly accepted practices in a contract or license almost never stands up in court.
I don't really see that as relevant. Ebay invented the ebay bidding system, they defined how it works, and it's never worked any other way.
I have trouble sympathizing with the accusers in this case at all since the best they can come up with is "but the web page didn't describe the policy as clearly as it could have!" even though eBay's FAQ explains things in more detail.
It seems pretty obvious that the policy is what it is not because ebay's scamming money, but just because their software is written in a certain way. Maybe this isn't "intuitive" but I don't see why ebay is under a legal obligation to be "intuitive".
I am unaware of anyone who's reacted in quite that way to rising gas prices, and I don't use Windows.
I for one will not be doing anything to prepare; I'm just not going to buy anything with broadcast flag support in it. Period. If this means not buying any more TVs, maybe it's for the best. All I use my TV for anyway is as a monitor for my video game systems, and with the next generation of those, I'll be able to just use a monitor. Who needs a TV?
Therefore 2x2 chess would start with checkmate and is absurd.
YOU'VE SOLVED IT!
If they're this insistent about showing ads to people in a form people have clearly taken specific steps to avoid seeing, people are just going to move to "real" ad-blocking software that actually blocks the ad files themselves, whereas if the advertisers had not gotten greedy and satisfied for just displaying inline ads for these people they wouldn't have done anything at all...
Personally I almost sometimes think ability to use non-basic (like, other than simple form validation and access) javascript should be restricted to a whitelist, or something. It would be interesting to have a firefox plugin or something that displays a button that when a site starts trying to use javascript turns red, and I have to click it before they let the javascript run...
Apple had an API some years before the entire Microsoft "smart tags" mess which allowed programs to sign up to flag certain types of text anywhere in the system and define operations you could do on them. It was an experimental/research thing, like OpenDoc, and I don't believe it ever was allowed into an OS release, you had to download it. The only plugin that this API came with-- and as far as I know the only one that anyone ever bothered making-- was one that recognized URLs and email addresses whenever they were printed anywhere in the system, and turned them into functional hyperlinks. I am afraid I can't remember the exact name, it was something really generic like "Apple Text Activation Services".
The only thing this patented Microsoft system seems to add is the idea of the link being calculated on a remote server rather than locally; this is a truly trivial step from what Apple's system explicitly did, and one that may not even exactly describe the google toolbar system.
Michael Moore's performed done some journalistically shoddy things in the past, for example a few scenes in Bowling for Columbine, but in general and especially in Fahrenheit 9/11, his journalistic integrity is still better than that of anyone currently doing news on television. I'm not sure exactly what standards we're expected to hold this man to, at some point you're going to just have to expect viewers will have to learn to think for themselves in order to get anything meaningful out of journalism. And at least Moore tries very hard to give people the tools to think for themselves about his movies. Practically ever major point on which people objected to F9/11, Michael Moore's website had pages attempting to clarify and expand those points the morning after, and full references for the entire movie are available. I for one would prefer transparency over trying to defend one's reputation to the point of whitewashing mistakes.
Meanwhile I find it extremely difficult to call the "right wing get the facts campaigns" pretty much anything at all, except maybe "successful". From all I saw these campaigns consisted not at all of actually talking about facts or even the film, but just repeating, over and over, to anyone who'll listen, to the press, posting these things over and over and over on internet message boards, that Michael Moore is a poor journalist, or his movies are "good movies but works of fiction". The result is that everyone just knows Michael Moore made stuff up in Fahrenheit 9/11, but very few people can actually tell you what if anything he made up, or why, or exactly what was so bad about what he did, just that whatever it was, it was bad and poor journalism and lying and such. Hm.