Sad to say, while there were many compelling arguments for open sourcing Carnivore so that the public could see if the FBI's boxes could be trusted, there is a major downside.
You've just given Carnivore tools to the Chinese, The Iraqis and all the other oppressive governments of the world. Even though buying a network sniffer and configuring it was within their power before, this makes it easier.
And whatever fears I may have (and they are many) about the U.S. government and its agents abusing their powers, they are nothing compared to the fears I have about those other powers.
What we needed was two things. One was source review of the boxes the goverment uses by a wide range of trusted people, and two was a free as in free beer tool for U.S. ISPs so they can use it as an excuse to refuse a carnovore box on their ISP in the first place.
Copyright is not natural, but rights of creators over creations, from which copyright derives in some views, are another animal.
After all, the relationship between an author and a novel is intrinsic. It exists outside of society or law. It is the child of his brain, and fully under his control until he lets it out to the world.
The law, and social practices, only come into play once it is out in the world, and we decide how far to extend that initial complete control into the realm of use by other people.
This, as it turns out, is even more natural than so-called "real" property, which is entirely a legal fiction if you don't live on it.
Which is the opposite of how people often present it the two forms of property.
However, we're getting off the topic here. This is a good debate, but not for this thread.
Well, I didn't mean that I meant it was universally wrong, but in the common sense that I meant it -- taking recently recorded music that you know the creator wants to be paid for, just so that you can hear it without having to pay -- it's still my opinion that this is wrong.
And of a number of people here, to whom the comment was really addressed. Yes, clearly if you don't buy the concept of copyright at all, you're going to think the cartoon's message is wrong in every way.
But there are many who, like me, have said "what many users are doing with Napster/Gnutella/MusicCity/Freenet/etc. is wrong, but writing file sharing tools is not wrong."
If you don't agree with that, then of course you won't buy what I said. If you do agree with that you may feel, as I wrote, that the right course is to teach our children what's right and wrong, not because of what the law or technology will allow you to do or forbid you to do, but because of a moral system you have.
While many point out that making a copy doesn't physically deprive the creator of anything, they misunderstand what IP is when they say this. IP isn't really about owning particular sets of bits.
IP is about the question of whether a creator can have control over their creation. When you copy, you appropriate that control.
Curiously, the most physical of properties, real estate, is also entirely about control, even in things that don't deprive the landowner of anything physical.
I own land, and I have the power to tell you not to walk on it, even though if you walk on it when I'm not there, you've had insignificant physical effect on me.
Now you might argue that control of creations is bad if it means controlling who can make copies. But that is what IP is, for better or worse.
And we certainly have reasons to suspect the Mouse's motives here, I've often thought this is the right approach.
Wholesale copying of music against the permission of its creators is wrong, and our children should be informed that it's wrong. The complex issues of monopolies and exploitation of musicians are for adults to solve.
In truth, the message we want to send here is not to blame the technology of filesharing, but the people who use it for ill. But because the RIAA and others don't see a way to get at the actual copyright infringers, they attack the filesharing technology itself, and now our PCs themselves.
I say, when they point out that the actual infringements are the problem, we should agree with them. But fight them when they want to punish technologies or the people who aren't infringing.
Indeed, I know why blacklisting is done. The question is a moral one, decided by where you stand on punishing innocents to protect your own mailbox.
Some people do that knowingly, some without much thought. We do feel that when mail is blocked, it should be done publicly, and that there should be a duty (moral if not legal) for those who block ordinary non-spam mail in the cause of fighting spam to inform those whose mail is blocked.
It is though always tough question of ends and means.
Should ISPs act to stop bulk email abuse by their users? Indeed they should. Should Joe Innocent user at an ISP that doesn't do this sufficiently find himself unable to send mail? His only sin was signing up for an ISP without knowing about, to him, a fairly obscure aspect of its email policies.
This is a tough thing. Some feel that there is no other way. However "no other way" is a pretty bold claim. They really mean "no other easy way."
I think there are ways to deal with spam, and even rogue ISPs, that don't block the mail of the innocent. Note that those can even include "blacklists" or "whitelists" that slow mail volumes so that single mails get through but bulk mail is throttled.
I outline such a system on my spam site, thogh I need to give that site some updating.
The EFF has mostly come out against two nmain things. One is SECRET blocking, and the other is the idea that punishing the innocent to get at the guilty is the right approach.
Our system of justice is actually built on the principle that you let 10 murderers go free rather than jail one innocent man. Should we have a stricter standard for spammers?
It sits at the intersection of property rights, free speech and communications rights and privacy rights.
Amazingly, because of this, many of the people writing here with opposite positions may both be right.
I've written extensively on this and have a collection of essays on my web site, though they are not all endorsed by fellow EFF people. As you might expect, with such new and contentious issues, no group, not slashdotters and certainly not the EFF, finds itself of a single mind.
Those who have written that the first amendment applies only to government action are correct. However, the principles of free speech apply universally, if you defend them. Private actors do have their right to block speech, but this does not make such actions immune from criticism by free speech advocates.
Instead, I look to define good principles by which we private actors might govern ourselves. There are many good lessons in the free speech principles to which we have held governments.
Amongst the principles (not just in free speech) is the protection of the innocent. That you don't punish the bystanders to get at the guilty. Private actors usually have the right to do that, but it need not be lauded.
Unfortunately, and I think this sits at the soul of problems with MAPS, blacklists tend to operate that way. I know many are aware of this, but have dedided that blacklists are the only way, and so a few innocents must be punished to stop spam.
This is of particular concern when the area is communication.
People do have the right not to listen to any communication, but this is a very simple statement about a complex issue. There is much to be said about how they should exercise that right.
Ian speaks the truth. As much as we would like there to be a market for services like FN, there isn't one. People won't go out of their way to protect their privacy in the face of vague threats or unease. They need a specific threat before they will spend real money on protecting their privacy.
Which is, of course, what the people who invade privacy want.
I'm not surprised FN died, I'm surprised it lasted this long. ZKS got funded for Freedom Network in the heady days of the dotcom boom, when you could find a few VCs who had read Crytonomicon and get them to fork over money on faith. Their new plan, HIPPA compliance software, is a much sounder business proposition.
To get privacy into the network, you have to get it in with literally zero effort. It needs to be built in to the other tools, and considered a checklist feature. Unfortunately, for now, privacy protection is a feature, not a product
If it's clearly an opinion, it is not defamation. If it could be viewed as a statement of fact, it can be defamation, unless of course, it's true. MAPS wordings have been more like factual statements -- these sites, they say, are known to send [some definition of] spam.
They might have felt at risk for a defamation ruling. Experian's own databases are highly regulated, subject to the Fair Credit Reporting Act, so they won't feel a lot of 1st amendment sympathy. Even with the FCRA, they are often wrong and hurt people getting credit who can't afford to sue.
I don't know the rules, but I could see trouble if you make a statement you claim is opinion, but everybody is treating it as a factual judgement. In this case, Experian claimed they have sent some 40 billion E-mails and MAPS admitted there were less than a dozen spam complaints. That's a lower ratio than just about any site out there, so this may have played a role, though if so, I don't know why they didn't settle earlier.
Whether it's protected by the 1st amendment is an interesting question. Most probably yes, but not certainly. Clearly the court that issued the TRO didn't think so, since prior restraint on protected speech is supposed to be verboten.
However, this is not actually relevant. They used the threat of the courts to make a settlement agreement, and settlement agreements are not affected by the first amendment.
In theory, MAPS could have fought it, and probably (though not certainly) have won on 1st amendment grounds, after a few years and at great expense.
They always said they were willing to test that out but clearly not that willing. They may be more keen to test it on an actual spammer rather than an operator of single opt-in mailing lists.
How might the 1st amendment not protect them? I haven't read the TRO, which will have some reasons. However, they might rule that blacklisting isn't a protected activity, even though it involves speech. I wouldn't agree, but I could see courts ruling that way.
Making this settlement goes against all their principles, so Experian must have made them afraid for their very existence with this.
As noted, unless the agreement is very broad, they can certainly name on their web site the companies they have been compelled not to block, and people configuring their own mail filters could decide case by case whether to include them.
However, if they made an automated list, effectively an alternate blacklist, I could see a court saying they were violating the spirit of the agreement, unless they wrote it carefully to allow them to do this.
However, oddly enough, it could be to experian's detriment to have it happen manually. If site admins manually put in blocking for their domains, it will be almost impossible for them to get that blocking removed except over a very long period of time, since each admin would have to manually reconfig.
Of course, they could change the IP address and domain they send mail from to get around that. Somebody (not MAPS) could provide a service that simply lists mail sending IP addresses used by experian, no other comment made.
Not great for RVs. The 1200 watts isn't enough to run the typical RV air conditioner, which is the main thing people size the generator for. It could run the microwave or the furnace fans, I guess.
And at 1500 hours of life, it will be much more expensive than other forms. Expect it to cost quite a bit. Gas generators tend to be about $2,000 for RVs.
It is less noisy, at least. But the 1500 hour lifetime (2 months) means this is an intermittent thing. Use it to charge batteries, or for short bursts to run a microwave or high power unit. Everything else in the RV except the microwave and AC can usually run off 12v.
Good plan would be solar panel on the roof, with the fuel cell to top off the batteries and run a small AC for one room. Plus switch water heater, stove, fridge and furnace to hydrogen. (As a plus, you could design better such appliances because the exhaust is not dangerous.)
Did we expect that as the mainstream world came online it would totally follow the patterns of the early adopters? The net can't be mainstream without meeting the mainstream world at least half way.
Indeed, perhaps we should be more surprised at how much the non-mainstream web has incolcated itself into everyday life, up from 0.001% a decade ago. That's more amazing than the fact that novelty wears off.
If it has -- the studies reported more time spent online, and more time spent at the major sites. That can still mean an increase, if not as great, at the non-mainstream sites. And many people spend time at "popular" sites like/., which in turn point them off to potentially interesting tidbits.
We should never have expected the ordinary world to be come or remain fascinated with everything that can be published on the web. Sturgeon's law still applies (even if, as my corollary suggests, that 90% of Sturgeon's law is crap.)
I figured it might have been done. Of course, I'm presumign it's done with real time weather, and mapping to simulate the fact you are viewing some parts of the iamge through more atmosphere (with weather) and at a different angle? Work, but surely it can be done. If you have't seen some region for a while (particularly the regions near the terminator where the light is changing rapidly) you could extrapolate from earlier images.
Like I said it should be possible to get one that really shows you what the earth looks like from L1, which is the point, not to actually have a $120M plus launch camera there.
Gore' satellite was stupid
on
Triana Mothballed
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I don't know the value of the other projects they put on this bird, but Gore's picture from space was sentimental but stupid.
I stll think we should do it, but we should never have spent $120M on the satellite and more on the now scrubbed launch.
We already have cameras taking pictures of the earth all the time. The weather sats and other instruments are constantly recording the earth.
As such it would cost a very small amount to develop software to integrate those pictures to generate an image of what the planet would look like from any point, including L1. With enough work you could get it so you could not tell the difference.
Yes, it wouldn't be "real" to some people. But it would be true, and that's real enough for me.
They said that they needed to work to improve the efficiency to make it viable, and that is simply not something that would be true if it were 34%. There's very little improvement even possible at that level of efficiency.
However, cells that can be poured on and installed locally would be a huge boon if they can make that work.
Create a scriptalias on your web server, so that fetches of "default.ida" go to a CGI which responds, very slowly -- just under code red's timeout -- with whatever code red is looking for a the response of a successful penetration.
I know it creates a lot of threads, but assuming it will tolerate a decent timeout, enough of these would slow it down quite a bit, until it dies from people installing fixes.
Anybody taken apart the virus to know what timeout to use and what response it's looking for?
I've added a recent list of points about what turns out to be the main technical point even if you believe in the DMCA. The DMCA crime alleged here is trafficking in the software in the USA. He didn't do this, his employer/publisher did. There is a big difference. If there are to be info-crimes, should employees be put in jail if their employers use their (legal where they did it) work in illegal ways in other lands?
Of course, as chairman of the EFF I may have some bias here.
At the prices cited, they used pretty expensive equipment, but with the equipment going at fire sale prices, it occurs to me that if another serious bidder doesn't step up, one approach might be to get a cooperative of users in a dense area, like the Bay Area, to buy it.
Of course, there are other user cooperative plans that people have brewing, but this one has the equipment installed. It would work even better if the user/owners didn't have to pay monthly fees to use what they bought, of course, but since there are monthly costs, that could be the killer.
I could see corporations buying shares in the network to give all their employees access at a low price, for example, as well as users.
Ok, so what's the payload to orbit for this six foot rocket? Why has nobody built a small payload launch facility at altitude somewhere that there is a mountain range on a tropical east coast? Because while 20 miles is good, 2 miles is still above a lot of the atmosphere, no? Just political reasons?
Well, if the x-prize results in something that can launch a nanosat, I guess I will have to eat my words, but it would still be nice to see people aiming for orbit.
I understand the desire to make a target that can be more easily attained by a private group, but the real problem in getting to space for real -- ie. to orbit, is momentum, not the atmosphere.
So this group has figured that in getting to 120km of altitude, the atmosphere is a big part, so a baloon can make the difference. Great, but what use is it in getting us closer to private space ventures, which is what the X prize was supposed to be about?
But what on earth is a "GPS Beacon?" That's a phrase that makes little sense. The missile would hardly be transmitting GPS timecodes, that is nonsensicial.
Possiby the target had a GPS receiver in it, either to keep it on track, or to transmit telemetry down to the ground so they could replay the results of the tests?
Now clearly, anything transmitting telemetry is easy to home in on if you seek to the frequency of the telemetry, but that's such a complete cheat I wuld need more evidence before believing it.
When you do a test like this, you don't do it just to get the binary answer of "did it hit?" You want complete telemetry on both missiles to find out exactly what happened, what went right, what went wrong. That the seeker missile would get to take advantage of the telemetry would be ridiculous and a grand scandal.
(NOt that it would make it easy. You couldn't hit something just from its GPS coordinates.)
I must say I'm surprised to see that the sites are selling pop-unders for less than other forms like banners and large banners. Because the pop-unders tend to form above, and then go below on linux, they are actually far more obtrusive, and that's part of why people hate them.
So the desperate web sites made a mistake selling a more annoying ad for less, and no wonder X10 wanted to capitalize on it.
Not that anything would stop them. A couple of years ago I bought some X10 stuff from them directly (instead of via stores) and they started bombarding me with special offers at least once a day. Worse, every time I would write to get off, the mailing address I wrote from would get on the list, so soon I was getting 3-4 copies of their mailing each day. It took a while to get off, and of course I have not, and will not buy directly from X10 again.
And I used their 30 day disable flag for the pop-under.
They don't seem to be aware how hated it's made them to do both the mass mailings and the pop-unders, and sites selling them need to know too.
Of course, there are two sides to this. Those who like the "free" web realize that the failure of banner advertising is endangering it, and mass resistance to the other forms (stupid as they may be) and ad blockers will only assure their failure, and the eventual loss of the free web.
But I would rather pay for the content then get the linux pop-unders, which don't start on the bottom. I've noticed that in IE they are not so bothersome. Perhaps the ad sites should consider not providing them to linux netscape?
Slashdot Mirror
Sad to say, while there were many compelling arguments for open sourcing Carnivore so that the public could see if the FBI's boxes could be trusted, there is a major downside.
You've just given Carnivore tools to the Chinese, The Iraqis and all the other oppressive governments of the world. Even though buying a network sniffer and configuring it was within their power before, this makes it easier.
And whatever fears I may have (and they are many) about the U.S. government and its agents abusing their powers, they are nothing compared to the fears I have about those other powers.
What we needed was two things. One was source review of the boxes the goverment uses by a wide range of trusted people, and two was a free as in free beer tool for U.S. ISPs so they can use it as an excuse to refuse a carnovore box on their ISP in the first place.
Copyright is not natural, but rights of creators over creations, from which copyright derives in some views, are another animal.
After all, the relationship between an author and a novel is intrinsic. It exists outside of society or law. It is the child of his brain, and fully under his control until he lets it out to the world.
The law, and social practices, only come into play once it is out in the world, and we decide how far to extend that initial complete control into the realm of use by other people.
This, as it turns out, is even more natural than so-called "real" property, which is entirely a legal fiction if you don't live on it.
Which is the opposite of how people often present it the two forms of property.
However, we're getting off the topic here. This is a good debate, but not for this thread.
Well, I didn't mean that I meant it was universally wrong, but in the common sense that I meant it -- taking recently recorded music that you know the creator wants to be paid for, just so that you can hear it without having to pay -- it's still my opinion that this is wrong.
And of a number of people here, to whom the comment was really addressed. Yes, clearly if you don't buy the concept of copyright at all, you're going to think the cartoon's message is wrong in every way.
But there are many who, like me, have said "what many users are doing with Napster/Gnutella/MusicCity/Freenet/etc. is wrong, but writing file sharing tools is not wrong."
If you don't agree with that, then of course you won't buy what I said. If you do agree with that you may feel, as I wrote, that the right course is to teach our children what's right and wrong, not because of what the law or technology will allow you to do or forbid you to do, but because of a moral system you have.
While many point out that making a copy doesn't physically deprive the creator of anything, they misunderstand what IP is when they say this. IP isn't really about owning particular sets of bits.
IP is about the question of whether a creator can have control over their creation. When you copy, you appropriate that control.
Curiously, the most physical of properties, real estate, is also entirely about control, even in things that don't deprive the landowner of anything physical.
I own land, and I have the power to tell you not to walk on it, even though if you walk on it when I'm not there, you've had insignificant physical effect on me.
Now you might argue that control of creations is bad if it means controlling who can make copies. But that is what IP is, for better or worse.
And we certainly have reasons to suspect the Mouse's motives here, I've often thought this is the right approach.
Wholesale copying of music against the permission of its creators is wrong, and our children should be informed that it's wrong. The complex issues of monopolies and exploitation of musicians are for adults to solve.
In truth, the message we want to send here is not to blame the technology of filesharing, but the people who use it for ill. But because the RIAA and others don't see a way to get at the actual copyright infringers, they attack the filesharing technology itself, and now our PCs themselves.
I say, when they point out that the actual infringements are the problem, we should agree with them. But fight them when they want to punish technologies or the people who aren't infringing.
Indeed, I know why blacklisting is done. The question is a moral one, decided by where you stand on punishing innocents to protect your own mailbox.
Some people do that knowingly, some without much thought. We do feel that when mail is blocked, it should be done publicly, and that there should be a duty (moral if not legal) for those who block ordinary non-spam mail in the cause of fighting spam to inform those whose mail is blocked.
It is though always tough question of ends and means.
Should ISPs act to stop bulk email abuse by their users? Indeed they should. Should Joe Innocent user at an ISP that doesn't do this sufficiently find himself unable to send mail? His only sin was signing up for an ISP without knowing about, to him, a fairly obscure aspect of its email policies.
This is a tough thing. Some feel that there is no other way. However "no other way" is a pretty bold claim. They really mean "no other easy way."
I think there are ways to deal with spam, and even rogue ISPs, that don't block the mail of the innocent. Note that those can even include "blacklists" or "whitelists" that slow mail volumes so that single mails get through but bulk mail is throttled.
I outline such a system on my spam site, thogh I need to give that site some updating.
The EFF has mostly come out against two nmain things. One is SECRET blocking, and the other is the idea that punishing the innocent to get at the guilty is the right approach.
Our system of justice is actually built on the principle that you let 10 murderers go free rather than jail one innocent man. Should we have a stricter standard for spammers?
It sits at the intersection of property rights, free speech and communications rights and privacy rights.
Amazingly, because of this, many of the people writing here with opposite positions may both be right.
I've written extensively on this and have a collection of essays on my web site, though they are not all endorsed by fellow EFF people. As you might expect, with such new and contentious issues, no group, not slashdotters and certainly not the EFF, finds itself of a single mind.
Those who have written that the first amendment applies only to government action are correct. However, the principles of free speech apply universally, if you defend them. Private actors do have their right to block speech, but this does not make such actions immune from criticism by free speech advocates.
Instead, I look to define good principles by which we private actors might govern ourselves. There are many good lessons in the free speech principles to which we have held governments.
Amongst the principles (not just in free speech) is the protection of the innocent. That you don't punish the bystanders to get at the guilty. Private actors usually have the right to do that, but it need not be lauded.
Unfortunately, and I think this sits at the soul of problems with MAPS, blacklists tend to operate that way. I know many are aware of this, but have dedided that blacklists are the only way, and so a few innocents must be punished to stop spam.
This is of particular concern when the area is communication.
People do have the right not to listen to any communication, but this is a very simple statement about a complex issue. There is much to be said about how they should exercise that right.
Click for Larry's Card
If Moore was a pessimist?
Ian speaks the truth. As much as we would like there to be a market for services like FN, there isn't one. People won't go out of their way to protect their privacy in the face of vague threats or unease. They need a specific threat before they will spend real money on protecting their privacy.
Which is, of course, what the people who invade privacy want.
I'm not surprised FN died, I'm surprised it lasted this long. ZKS got funded for Freedom Network in the heady days of the dotcom boom, when you could find a few VCs who had read Crytonomicon and get them to fork over money on faith. Their new plan, HIPPA compliance software, is a much sounder business proposition.
To get privacy into the network, you have to get it in with literally zero effort. It needs to be built in to the other tools, and considered a checklist feature. Unfortunately, for now, privacy protection is a feature, not a product
If it's clearly an opinion, it is not defamation. If it could be viewed as a statement of fact, it can be defamation, unless of course, it's true. MAPS wordings have been more like factual statements -- these sites, they say, are known to send [some definition of] spam.
They might have felt at risk for a defamation ruling. Experian's own databases are highly regulated, subject to the Fair Credit Reporting Act, so they won't feel a lot of 1st amendment sympathy. Even with the FCRA, they are often wrong and hurt people getting credit who can't afford to sue.
I don't know the rules, but I could see trouble if you make a statement you claim is opinion, but everybody is treating it as a factual judgement. In this case, Experian claimed they have sent some 40 billion E-mails and MAPS admitted there were less than a dozen spam complaints. That's a lower ratio than just about any site out there, so this may have played a role, though if so, I don't know why they didn't settle earlier.
Whether it's protected by the 1st amendment is an interesting question. Most probably yes, but not certainly. Clearly the court that issued the TRO didn't think so, since prior restraint on protected speech is supposed to be verboten.
However, this is not actually relevant. They used the threat of the courts to make a settlement agreement, and settlement agreements are not affected by the first amendment.
In theory, MAPS could have fought it, and probably (though not certainly) have won on 1st amendment grounds, after a few years and at great expense.
They always said they were willing to test that out but clearly not that willing. They may be more keen to test it on an actual spammer rather than an operator of single opt-in mailing lists.
How might the 1st amendment not protect them? I haven't read the TRO, which will have some reasons. However, they might rule that blacklisting isn't a protected activity, even though it involves speech. I wouldn't agree, but I could see courts ruling that way.
Making this settlement goes against all their principles, so Experian must have made them afraid for their very existence with this.
As noted, unless the agreement is very broad, they can certainly name on their web site the companies they have been compelled not to block, and people configuring their own mail filters could decide case by case whether to include them.
However, if they made an automated list, effectively an alternate blacklist, I could see a court saying they were violating the spirit of the agreement, unless they wrote it carefully to allow them to do this.
However, oddly enough, it could be to experian's detriment to have it happen manually. If site admins manually put in blocking for their domains, it will be almost impossible for them to get that blocking removed except over a very long period of time, since each admin would have to manually reconfig.
Of course, they could change the IP address and domain they send mail from to get around that. Somebody (not MAPS) could provide a service that simply lists mail sending IP addresses used by experian, no other comment made.
Not great for RVs. The 1200 watts isn't enough to run the typical RV air conditioner, which is the main thing people size the generator for. It could run the microwave or the furnace fans, I guess.
And at 1500 hours of life, it will be much more expensive than other forms. Expect it to cost quite a bit. Gas generators tend to be about $2,000 for RVs.
It is less noisy, at least. But the 1500 hour lifetime (2 months) means this is an intermittent thing. Use it to charge batteries, or for short bursts to run a microwave or high power unit. Everything else in the RV except the microwave and AC can usually run off 12v.
Good plan would be solar panel on the roof, with the fuel cell to top off the batteries and run a small AC for one room. Plus switch water heater, stove, fridge and furnace to hydrogen. (As a plus, you could design better such appliances because the exhaust is not dangerous.)
Did we expect that as the mainstream world came online it would totally follow the patterns of the early adopters? The net can't be mainstream without meeting the mainstream world at least half way.
/., which in turn point them off to potentially interesting tidbits.
Indeed, perhaps we should be more surprised at how much the non-mainstream web has incolcated itself into everyday life, up from 0.001% a decade ago. That's more amazing than the fact that novelty wears off.
If it has -- the studies reported more time spent online, and more time spent at the major sites. That can still mean an increase, if not as great, at the non-mainstream sites. And many people spend time at "popular" sites like
We should never have expected the ordinary world to be come or remain fascinated with everything that can be published on the web. Sturgeon's law still applies (even if, as my corollary suggests, that 90% of Sturgeon's law is crap.)
I figured it might have been done. Of course, I'm presumign it's done with real time weather, and mapping to simulate the fact you are viewing some parts of the iamge through more atmosphere (with weather) and at a different angle? Work, but surely it can be done. If you have't seen some region for a while (particularly the regions near the terminator where the light is changing rapidly) you could extrapolate from earlier images.
Like I said it should be possible to get one that really shows you what the earth looks like from L1, which is the point, not to actually have a $120M plus launch camera there.
I don't know the value of the other projects they put on this bird, but Gore's picture from space was sentimental but stupid.
I stll think we should do it, but we should never have spent $120M on the satellite and more on the now scrubbed launch.
We already have cameras taking pictures of the earth all the time. The weather sats and other instruments are constantly recording the earth.
As such it would cost a very small amount to develop software to integrate those pictures to generate an image of what the planet would look like from any point, including L1. With enough work you could get it so you could not tell the difference.
Yes, it wouldn't be "real" to some people. But it would be true, and that's real enough for me.
They said that they needed to work to improve the efficiency to make it viable, and that is simply not something that would be true if it were 34%. There's very little improvement even possible at that level of efficiency.
However, cells that can be poured on and installed locally would be a huge boon if they can make that work.
Create a scriptalias on your web server, so that fetches of "default.ida" go to a CGI which responds, very slowly -- just under code red's timeout -- with whatever code red is looking for a the response of a successful penetration.
I know it creates a lot of threads, but assuming it will tolerate a decent timeout, enough of these would slow it down quite a bit, until it dies from people installing fixes.
Anybody taken apart the virus to know what timeout to use and what response it's looking for?
Upon leaving the jailhouse in Santa Clara, Dmitry was asked what he would do next. He replied,
"I am prohibited by court order from going to Disneyland. I'm going to Cupertino."
An ebook publisher on why Dmitry should go free
I've added a recent list of points about what turns out to be the main technical point even if you believe in the DMCA. The DMCA crime alleged here is trafficking in the software in the USA. He didn't do this, his employer/publisher did. There is a big difference. If there are to be info-crimes, should employees be put in jail if their employers use their (legal where they did it) work in illegal ways in other lands?
Of course, as chairman of the EFF I may have some bias here.
At the prices cited, they used pretty expensive equipment, but with the equipment going at fire sale prices, it occurs to me that if another serious bidder doesn't step up, one approach might be to get a cooperative of users in a dense area, like the Bay Area, to buy it.
Of course, there are other user cooperative plans that people have brewing, but this one has the equipment installed. It would work even better if the user/owners didn't have to pay monthly fees to use what they bought, of course, but since there are monthly costs, that could be the killer.
I could see corporations buying shares in the network to give all their employees access at a low price, for example, as well as users.
Ok, so what's the payload to orbit for this six foot rocket? Why has nobody built a small payload launch facility at altitude somewhere that there is a mountain range on a tropical east coast? Because while 20 miles is good, 2 miles is still above a lot of the atmosphere, no? Just political reasons?
Well, if the x-prize results in something that can launch a nanosat, I guess I will have to eat my words, but it would still be nice to see people aiming for orbit.
I understand the desire to make a target that can be more easily attained by a private group, but the real problem in getting to space for real -- ie. to orbit, is momentum, not the atmosphere.
So this group has figured that in getting to 120km of altitude, the atmosphere is a big part, so a baloon can make the difference. Great, but what use is it in getting us closer to private space ventures, which is what the X prize was supposed to be about?
Possiby the target had a GPS receiver in it, either to keep it on track, or to transmit telemetry down to the ground so they could replay the results of the tests?
Now clearly, anything transmitting telemetry is easy to home in on if you seek to the frequency of the telemetry, but that's such a complete cheat I wuld need more evidence before believing it.
When you do a test like this, you don't do it just to get the binary answer of "did it hit?" You want complete telemetry on both missiles to find out exactly what happened, what went right, what went wrong. That the seeker missile would get to take advantage of the telemetry would be ridiculous and a grand scandal.
(NOt that it would make it easy. You couldn't hit something just from its GPS coordinates.)
So the desperate web sites made a mistake selling a more annoying ad for less, and no wonder X10 wanted to capitalize on it.
Not that anything would stop them. A couple of years ago I bought some X10 stuff from them directly (instead of via stores) and they started bombarding me with special offers at least once a day. Worse, every time I would write to get off, the mailing address I wrote from would get on the list, so soon I was getting 3-4 copies of their mailing each day. It took a while to get off, and of course I have not, and will not buy directly from X10 again.
And I used their 30 day disable flag for the pop-under.
They don't seem to be aware how hated it's made them to do both the mass mailings and the pop-unders, and sites selling them need to know too.
Of course, there are two sides to this. Those who like the "free" web realize that the failure of banner advertising is endangering it, and mass resistance to the other forms (stupid as they may be) and ad blockers will only assure their failure, and the eventual loss of the free web.
But I would rather pay for the content then get the linux pop-unders, which don't start on the bottom. I've noticed that in IE they are not so bothersome. Perhaps the ad sites should consider not providing them to linux netscape?