I'm saying that with a usage-profile like that. (i.e. not terribly many users, but heavy users) they will tend to get a lot less publicity than they would if the same usage was spread over more users. This migth be part of the explanation for why FreeBSD gets so little attention inspite of doing a nice job for a lot of sites.
While we're dealing with the extra load processing validations that used to be client side
Uhm, I hate to tell you this, but if you actually care if the data you get make sense or not, you have to program and run server-side validation anyway.
Just because you have javascript on the client-side to ensure that, say, noone enters a negative age, this does *not* mean that your server-side scripts can safely *ASSUME* that they will never get a negative age handed from the client-side.
The client is not under your control, and cannot be trusted. If you assume *anything* about which stream of bytes the client sends you, or will not send you in a POST or GET, then it's a disaster waiting to happen.
client-side validation is at best a nice user-interface improvement, in that it's usually much quicker to get a popup saying "Age cannot be negative" and correct that, instead of waiting for a potentially slow server to verify, and then hand you a error-page saying the same thing.
It's just a bit strangely formulated. The saying is supposed to say the equivalent of;
"You can't keep your cake for tomorrow, and *also* eat it now."
i.e. given two mutually exclusive choises, you have to choose one of them. It's typically applied when people get unreasonable and, for example, demand to get evidence from the other side electronically while at the same time demanding to be allowed to *deliver* all evidence on paper only.
Also, buyers of console-games expect less bugs, so it's sort of a self-strengthening circle.
Of the maybe two dozen ps2 games I've had, only one had problems which seriously impeded game-play, namely Dark Chronicle 2 which simply hung on me something like 4-5 times.
So, I searched on the net and found out that I wasn't the only one with this experience (i.e. not just a bad disk or something.) and returned it to the store for a full refund.
I can't imagine it's good for profits if too many customers start doing that. Maybe if people started doing that with PC-games, then the quality would improve. Problem is, a lot more often the shop will try to weasel out, claiming that the "real" problem is that you've got crap ram/bad video-drivers/a virus/unsupported hardware or something like that.
With a PS2 that's a lot less likely to happen, especially if you bougth the PS2 in the same shop and it's still under warranty, like I did. If they tried that, I'd simply ask if they really think I should return my PS2 for a replacement, given that it works perfectly with all my other games.
But, as a matter of fact, if you read the netcraft report you yourself are linking to, then you see that indeed, FreeBSD is significant in webservers largely because a few large hosting-providers use it.
Quoting the article; The reason for this is FreeBSD's deployment with the operators of shared hosting systems, where tens and even hundreds of thousands of sites are collectively administered as part of a single system.
Yahoo alone hosts something like a quarter million sites.
Perhaps this also explains the low media-profile to some degree ? 10000 companies running 25 sites each are likely to collectively generate a lot more buzz than a single site running a quarter million sites.
Lots of reasons really, and I'll list some of the major ones, but the most important reason, I guess, is that I've got a OS I'm satisfied with (I didn't say it's perfect, I said I'm satisfied), and that the benefits of Windows are very small compared to the disadvantages of windows.
MS-Windows is only available from, and can only be adequately supported by ONE supplier. This means I can't take my bussiness elsewhere if unhappy. Nor is there competition in features and support between different windows-suppliers, nor do you have any recurse if the plans of the one supplier do not line up with your plans.
It's overpriced, square and simple. I'm not complaining that MS makes "too much" money. They're welcome. What I mean is that for the set of tools I need to use my computer like I wish, the price on Windows is simply too high. Buying XP + Office + SQL-server + IIS + Visual studio would cost orders of mangitude more than what I spend today, even *without* any support whatsoever. And that combo *still* wouldn't be comprehencive at all.
It adheres poorly to standards. I don't accept having *my* data held hostage by a company that can then later use the hostage to force me into buying upgrades or whatever I don't otherwise need. Besides, I want unfettered access to all data also from other programs. Keeping data-formats and network-protocols secret makes them simply uninteresting to me. Changing them on a yearly basis just adds insult to injury.
I support a free, open market with low barriers to entry and a free choise for the customer. I'm convinced that this is better not only for the individual customer, but also for the economy as a whole. It's strange that so many American politicians don't see this point, considering that the free market is generally pretty well-known.
I would hate to see my money be used for lobbying for new laws which I do not wish. I simply don't agree with MS on what I want our future to be.
I don't like it when the OS thinks it knows better than I do what I want to do. It's ok to give warnings about potentially dangerous actions, in moderation, but point blank refusing is simply unacceptable.
As an example; Ever tried creating a rescue-floppy for win98 under win98 and inserting a win98 install-floppy when prompted to insert a floppy ? I have. Windows says something along the lines of: "This floppy contains important files. Please insert a different floppy." That's it. There's no option to say: "I know, do it anyway." or anything like that. Sure, I can work-around, format the floppy first, and then retry, but that's not the point. The point is, I won't tolerate that attitude.
A license gives you the rigth to do something that would be, in the absence said license, illegal.
For example, you can get a concealed weapons license, which will make it legal for you to do something that would otherwise be illegae -- carry a concealed weapon in public.
Similarily, the GPL is a license -- it gives you the rigth to do certain things that would be illegal without a license, such as redistributing the software in original or altered form.
Most EULAs are not licenses. They do not let you do anything that would be illegal without one. Instead they typically attempt to do the reverse; they attempt to prevent you from stuff that are perfectly legal by default, such as for example reselling your property, publishing a test of a product you've purchased, or even using the product for producing a report critical of the producer.
That makes it different. If I want to give you permission for something that would otherwise be illegal, say I want to give you permission to enter my house, I can just do so. One-sided. There's no requirement for you to agree. If I demand something in return, like the GPL does, and say: "you may enter my house at will, provided you put a dollar in this box, and wear orange underpants." you're still not required to agree, though if you don't agree, then entering is unlawful.
EULAs are different. They typically don't offer you anything. And no, the "rigth to use software" doesn't fall in this category, because it's the *default* that you're allowed to use software that you legally bougth. (what a concept !)
The producers typically *claim* that they are not selling you one copy of the software, but rather they're selling you a license to the software. However this claim is pretty dubious. Anyone can go into a shop and say: "I would like to purchase a copy of Microsoft Office". They'll take your money, and hand over a copy of Microsoft Office. A reasonable person would then assume that he had, indeed, bougth one copy of Microsoft Office. It's not very likely that some text inside the box, or even worse, displayed as part of some installation-routine uniliterally can change this.
It's working almost *too* well. Not only are SCO the number one hit for "litigious bastards", but they're also the number one hit for "litigious" or "bastards" alone.
Then again maybe that mostly says something about their popularity.
But then what you've got hardly qualifies as "online banking", at best you've got "online balance".
I've got online banking, trough Skandiabanken. I can see not only balances, but all transactions for the last 13 months, not only for my bank-account, but also for my stocks, my mutual funds and my money-market investments.
Similarily, I can offcourse send money to whomever I want, in Norway or anywhere else in the world where the banks support SWIFT, which means anywhere you'd want to send money, aswell as a lot of places you'd prefer *not* to send money.
Same for the stocks, the mutual funds, the money-market accounts and so on. It's all there, all fully usable, all fully transferable.
It's an online bank. It does everything a normal bank does, only it's online.
That's why real security is needed. That is why you can only connect after installing a client-certificate on your pc. That's why one-time-passwords are needed. That's why you can only download a new client-certificate with a one-time-pin that they'll only send to your registered adress. That's why even when you do that, a warning is sent to my email-adress that someone downloaded a client-certificate. There's more, but you get the point.
I never said they do. I said they *could*. Furthermore, given enough benefit, that is, with a large enough server-base, they'd be idiots *not* to.
The point is moot anyway, because they currently charge $200/month for one serverworth of land, or more than twice that if rented in 512m^2 blocks.
That's $2400 -> $5000 for running a *single* server with one *single* *standardized* server-application on it. That pricing is beyond insane. The hardware costs like a tenthel of that, and one admin should be able to easily admin 100 or more such servers, given that they're all identical and with one single app running on them.
The tricks I mentioned only drives it from insanely expensive into ludicriously expensive territory.
If a normal server today can run one simulator, simulating 655536m^2, pray tell what limitation, exactly, prevents them from doing any of the following:
Running 300 simulators on 100 servers, by load-balancing the simulators so that currently-not-logged-in or currently-not-much-happening simulators get put 2-5 on one server while busy simulators get a full server like today.
Simply buying a more powerful server and run 2 simulators on it. With standard hardware-progress that'll happen at no increased price for them in something like a year or so.
Simply running two simulators on one server. I don't buy your "this would be obvious" for a second. This would certainly be no more obvious than the difference between a busy and a non-busy server already is. Do *you* know *exactly* how busy your server should be, that is, do you know exactly how many scripts and complex items your neighbours have running, and the exact resource-utilisation of each ?
To me, this sounds a lot like a rationalisation for the fact that you're paying $25 or more a month (though you say "only") for the priviledge of "owning" a plot of non-existant land where you can log in and chat with people.
A one-time-pad is in no way the same as a one-time-password. The only thing common between the two is that they're both used only once.
A one-time-pad is a random string as long as the message you want to send, shared between sender and recipient. The sender encrypts the message by xoring with the one-time-pad and the recipient decrypts by doing xoring the ciphertext with his copy of the one-time-pad. The pads must then never be used again, and must be securely destructed to prevent people who have a copy of the ciphertext from getting hold of them. Unconditionally secure, but often impractical due to the key-handling issues.
A one-time-password, like those Banks here in Europe typically either issue to you on a sheet of 50, or in the form of a calculator-like device that generate them from the current time, a secret pin and a cryptographic hash serves a quite different purpose;
The idea is that if you force people to have long, complicated passwords, then they either write them down, use the same password on multiple sites, or both.
By using an additional one-time password, the bank makes sure that there's *two* things identifying the user logging in. One, the user knows the secret pin. (which is typically simple 4-digit or so.) and two, the user is in posession of the sheet-of-codes/calculator-thingie.
Increases security quite a bit, because it's no longer a threat if someone for example hacks the users computer and installs a keylogger or similar device. Sure that attacker will then learn the pin, but the attacker will then *also* need to break into the house of the victim or otherwise acquire the list of one-time-passwords. So at the very least you've eliminated the large group of attackers which have no physical proximity to the victim.
Yeah, but I still think everyone experiences such "double-standards" now and then. It's just that it's hard to agree what is really important.
For example, there's no doubt that a kid is important, infact to most couples that have one, the kid is pretty much the most important thing in their life.
This, however, does *not* prevent me from becoming bored after spending 3 hours looking for the perfect body for our soon-to-be son. Nor does it prevent my wife from becoming bored when I point out car number 11 that day that would be more suitable for a growing family than the current Opel Corsa.
I don't see why that should be a problem though. I married my wife because I love her, and because we get along excellently, and for around a hundred other reasons. Not because I expect her to be identical to me.
Infact it has undeniable advantages to be different. It means, for example, that many of the things I handly poorly, she excels at, and many of the things she *hates* having to deal with is perfectly pleasant to me.
First, when you buy a used game, someone bougth that game originally, so they end up selling one game, even though two players use the game.
Secondly, I imagine it's very common to do like I do. I buy my games something like 50/50 new and used, new games I tend to buy new, but older ones that I never got around to buying at their new price, I may buy used.
That's simply because some games are for me simply not worth the $50 or whatever they demand for them, at that price, I'm simply not going to be a customer at all. Now, if I can pick up the same game used a year later for $15, I migth be willing to give it a try. The producer looses absolutely nothing trough this, and indeed if the game is any good, I'm a lot more likely to buy newer sequels.
Secondly, sometimes you buy a game and decide after a while that it's not really *that* good a game, so you decide to sell it and use the money you gain to atleast partly finance a new game. So, I sold my Unlimited Saga for $35, put in another $10 myself and bougth the newest Arc instead.
Thirdly, welcome to the free market. It's not my job to throw money at developers, in a free market it's *expected* that the customers will seek the best value. Any bussiness-model that doesn't take this into account simply won't survive very long.
Game-developers know all this anyway. That's one of the reasons the typical game starts out at like $50 and fall to maybe half that inside of a year. The lower price attracts the less enthusiastic buyers, and also reduces the reward for selling used games to the point where the majority probably chooses to keep the game. There's a lot of games I'd consider selling if I could still get $40+ for them, but that I'll keep instead because in the meantime they've fallen to like $15 on the used market, and at that price-point I'll rather have the game.
You're rigth that larger pixel-counts, and quicker shots require more storage. But your maths don't add up.
If you've got 20million pixels, and use one byte for each of R,G,B for each pixel (i.e. RAW, completely uncompressed), then you need 60MB for a picture. Large, but not in the ballpark of the GB you claim.
Even if some future camera is so color-accurate that it goes 16bit/channel, you're still only at 40MB/picture. And that the completely uncompressed version, even lossless compression could probably cut this in 2-4 with common pictures.
Now, when you start holding the button down on that 20MP monster, and it does 8pictures/second for 5 seconds, then you've produced around A GB or two in 5 seconds. You'll need *minutes* to get that info into the compactflash though, even provided it can store that much.
I used the rpm for Mandrake 10.0, and the EULA came with a new, and previously atleast for me unseen level of stupidity:
It had a freaking timer in the lower-rigth corner counting down from 15 seconds and being labeled: "Time left until auto-decline"
Offcourse it can easily be proven in a court of law that it is not humanly possible to read, understand and click accept on the eula in such a short time. Thus it's no longer the case, as is typically the case that the user agreed to an eula, *choosing* not to read it.
No, it's *enforced*, to install the program you *have* to accept an eula without being given any possibility of reading it.
It's probably not a stretch that idiocy like this will further weaken the already more than questionable legal force of terms stated in eulas.
Good question. Especially considering that most countries that have abandoned capital punishment have a *lot* lower murder-rates than does USA.
Yes, sure, correlation does not proove causation, we all know that. Still, I'm pretty sure the added deterrent effect of capital punishment over lifetime prison is pretty much unproven.
What is the point of a one person transport? There isn't even room for an appreciable amount of luggage.
The point is that statistics show the average car in USA has something like 1.17 passengers, including the driver, i.e. the large majority of trips are made with only the driver, and little to no luggage.
Many American households now have two cars, the obvious market for such one-person vehicles is as vehicle number two for a two-car household.
I fail to see how using a small ligth energy-efficient one-person vehicle for transporting a single person to and from the office is not an improvement over todays situation, which pretty much is to use a 2 ton SUV for exactly that purpose. (I agree with you though, that modern and efficient mass-transport would probably be even better.)
Bottom line: It's a step in the rigth direction (i.e. away from dragging two tons of metal around just for transporting a single human.)
The problem is, they're at the edge of the atmosphere, there is (and must be) enough air there that the difference between the weigth of that air, and the same volume of helium is the same as the weigth of the blimp+fuel+payload.
That air will also cause friction and prevent you from accelerating at all if your push is not higher than the losses due to friction.
What would happen is that you'd accelerate for a while, until you reach the point where air-drag is the same as your push, at which point you'll stop accelerating and go on at constant speed and altitude until your fuel or patience runs out.
I very much doubt that you can design a blimp that is ligth enough that it'll float at that heigth *and* aerodynamic enough that a minute push will cause it to continue to accelerate until it reaches orbital velocity.
Well, I'm no lawyer, but the way I understand the Norwegian law the results would be like this, more or less;
Sign up confirmation letter with the users account and password.
There's always a chanse that someone else signed the user up, and thus that user complaining is genuinely innocent. This is in any case a) unavoidable with current email-systems, and b) the confirmation-letter wouldn't be classified as "marketing" anyway, atleast aslong as you refrain from "offer of the day" and suchlike therein.
Confirmation of Purchase made.
In that case you're communicating with a current customer, which is explicitly allowed (even if the user explicitly says he does not wish it, you're still allowed to send him anything you wish. He's offcourse free to stop doing bussiness with you if he finds your mailings annoying.)
Notification taht their account is abotu to expire.
Also communication with current customer. Allowed.
Notifcication of a new service sent to a user who opted in.
If he did indeed opt in, it's allowed.
The legislation won't stop some people from complaining. You as a bussiness will however not get into any legal trouble aslong as you stick to a very simple rule: No marketing sent to electronic individually adressable units except for current customers and people who you can show opted in. (the standard of proof is "preponderence of evidence" not "reasonable doubt", so it's not that hard to do.)
You don't need to trust sofware that is in others hands.
The protocols behind freenet are such that you "only" need to trus two things in order to really be anonymous (both in publishing and in browsing)
You need to trust the copy of freenet running on your own computer. And you need to trust that you're connecting to a cluster of nodes which ISN'T 100% controled by a maliscious entity.
If you can indeed trust your own copy of freenet is offcourse a tricky question, sure it's open source, and sure it's been looked at rather closely by rather a large number of very clever people. But that's still no guarantee that some mistake isn't still in there somewhere.
So, 100% sure you can probably never be. But on the other hand, it's the best we've got. And it's atleast not as bad as you seem to think. (in that you do *not* have to trust that noone else has altered their freenet-client. Even if they have, you're still safe, barring errors in *your* freenet offcourse.)
Legsilation like that in Scandinavia, and being introduced inthe rest of the EU is ok.
marketing-material sent to individually-adressable (such as sms, fax, email) electronical devices are only allowed if the recipient has given prior, informed consent, *or* if you have a running business-relationship with the customer.
The burden of proof is on the one sending the marketing-material ofcourse. There's no way anyone could prove that they did *not* in any way give permission.
There *is* the sligth loophole that a company you're doing bussiness with can spam you for other, unrelated services they're offering (they cannot however send you spam on behalf of other companies), but the thing is, in those cases you have leverage: You're a customer. You're free to call them up and say the equivalent of "Stop it, or I'm an ex-customer."
Do you really think that everyone who knows enough english to read slashdot prefers their desktop in english ?
Or even that everyone who speaks and writes english fluently wishes their desktop to be english ? Here's a hint: most educated people in the world speak multiple languages, in the western world english as a second or third (like for me) language is quite common. Doesn't mean I won't put my desktop in Norwegian.
If it had rained, you'd have seen the sense of the gutters. Sometimes it rains a lot.
No seriously, Bergen is nowhere near any kind of records (neither for Norway, nor for Europe, much less for the world) in rainfall, but it does have about twice the rainfall of drier cities like Oslo or Berlin.
You had luck, on the average I think that about half of the days in a year will see 1mm of rainfall or more. Most rainfall is in autumn, and apr-jun is frequently the nicest time.
Sorry. You are still wrong. Well, you're rigth, in a way, but it doesn't mean what you think you mean.
Weather is chaotic. You are correct that this means that predicting it more than a few days in advance is impossible. This is so because chaotic in means "sensitive dependence on initial conditions", the well-known butterfly-effect is an attempt at popularising this idea; that without *perfect* information (which you'll never have, for many reasons, including Heisenberg) you cannot predict what state the system will be in after a certain point.
So far you're rigth. What you are still missing out on is the distinction between weather and climate.
Like I said, climate is sort of the average weather. Climate does *not* fluctuate wildly from day to day or from week to week like weather does.
Especially not global climate, which is what we're talking here. Instead, it's a function of a few things wich though to some degree incompletely understood does *not* typically behave chaotic.
For example, the average temperature on the earths surface is a function of;
Amount of solar-energy hitting the earth (varying by a few percent according to sunspot-activity, but fairly constant)
percentage of that energy that gets reflected in the atmosphere.
percentage of the remaining energy that gets reflected off land/water/icecaps
heat seeping trough from the earths core. (for all practical purposes constant)
Percent of heat-energy that gets reflected in the atmosphere.
None of these, are particularily chaotic. You migth say "clouds are", and that's true if you're counting one individual day. But if you where to ask "what percentage of the earth is covered in clouds averaged over one year", a fairly accurate answer could be given.
Furthermore, short-time variations will be evened out by the enormous heat-storage that is our oceans.
In the end it comes down to this:
How much energy do we get from the sun ? How much energy does the earth send back into space in the form of heat-radiation ?
If the balance between those two change, as for example trough a more pronounce greenhouse-effect, then the average climate on earth *will* be warmer. It's simple physics, nothing chaotic about *that*. Send more energy into a system than goes back out, and that system will become warmer.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm saying that with a usage-profile like that. (i.e. not terribly many users, but heavy users) they will tend to get a lot less publicity than they would if the same usage was spread over more users. This migth be part of the explanation for why FreeBSD gets so little attention inspite of doing a nice job for a lot of sites.
Uhm, I hate to tell you this, but if you actually care if the data you get make sense or not, you have to program and run server-side validation anyway.
Just because you have javascript on the client-side to ensure that, say, noone enters a negative age, this does *not* mean that your server-side scripts can safely *ASSUME* that they will never get a negative age handed from the client-side.
The client is not under your control, and cannot be trusted. If you assume *anything* about which stream of bytes the client sends you, or will not send you in a POST or GET, then it's a disaster waiting to happen.
client-side validation is at best a nice user-interface improvement, in that it's usually much quicker to get a popup saying "Age cannot be negative" and correct that, instead of waiting for a potentially slow server to verify, and then hand you a error-page saying the same thing.
"You can't keep your cake for tomorrow, and *also* eat it now."
i.e. given two mutually exclusive choises, you have to choose one of them. It's typically applied when people get unreasonable and, for example, demand to get evidence from the other side electronically while at the same time demanding to be allowed to *deliver* all evidence on paper only.
Of the maybe two dozen ps2 games I've had, only one had problems which seriously impeded game-play, namely Dark Chronicle 2 which simply hung on me something like 4-5 times.
So, I searched on the net and found out that I wasn't the only one with this experience (i.e. not just a bad disk or something.) and returned it to the store for a full refund.
I can't imagine it's good for profits if too many customers start doing that. Maybe if people started doing that with PC-games, then the quality would improve. Problem is, a lot more often the shop will try to weasel out, claiming that the "real" problem is that you've got crap ram/bad video-drivers/a virus/unsupported hardware or something like that.
With a PS2 that's a lot less likely to happen, especially if you bougth the PS2 in the same shop and it's still under warranty, like I did. If they tried that, I'd simply ask if they really think I should return my PS2 for a replacement, given that it works perfectly with all my other games.
Quoting the article; The reason for this is FreeBSD's deployment with the operators of shared hosting systems, where tens and even hundreds of thousands of sites are collectively administered as part of a single system.
Yahoo alone hosts something like a quarter million sites.
Perhaps this also explains the low media-profile to some degree ? 10000 companies running 25 sites each are likely to collectively generate a lot more buzz than a single site running a quarter million sites.
As an example; Ever tried creating a rescue-floppy for win98 under win98 and inserting a win98 install-floppy when prompted to insert a floppy ? I have. Windows says something along the lines of: "This floppy contains important files. Please insert a different floppy." That's it. There's no option to say: "I know, do it anyway." or anything like that. Sure, I can work-around, format the floppy first, and then retry, but that's not the point. The point is, I won't tolerate that attitude.
A license gives you the rigth to do something that would be, in the absence said license, illegal.
For example, you can get a concealed weapons license, which will make it legal for you to do something that would otherwise be illegae -- carry a concealed weapon in public.
Similarily, the GPL is a license -- it gives you the rigth to do certain things that would be illegal without a license, such as redistributing the software in original or altered form.
Most EULAs are not licenses. They do not let you do anything that would be illegal without one. Instead they typically attempt to do the reverse; they attempt to prevent you from stuff that are perfectly legal by default, such as for example reselling your property, publishing a test of a product you've purchased, or even using the product for producing a report critical of the producer.
That makes it different. If I want to give you permission for something that would otherwise be illegal, say I want to give you permission to enter my house, I can just do so. One-sided. There's no requirement for you to agree. If I demand something in return, like the GPL does, and say: "you may enter my house at will, provided you put a dollar in this box, and wear orange underpants." you're still not required to agree, though if you don't agree, then entering is unlawful.
EULAs are different. They typically don't offer you anything. And no, the "rigth to use software" doesn't fall in this category, because it's the *default* that you're allowed to use software that you legally bougth. (what a concept !)
The producers typically *claim* that they are not selling you one copy of the software, but rather they're selling you a license to the software. However this claim is pretty dubious. Anyone can go into a shop and say: "I would like to purchase a copy of Microsoft Office". They'll take your money, and hand over a copy of Microsoft Office. A reasonable person would then assume that he had, indeed, bougth one copy of Microsoft Office. It's not very likely that some text inside the box, or even worse, displayed as part of some installation-routine uniliterally can change this.
Then again maybe that mostly says something about their popularity.
I've got online banking, trough Skandiabanken. I can see not only balances, but all transactions for the last 13 months, not only for my bank-account, but also for my stocks, my mutual funds and my money-market investments.
Similarily, I can offcourse send money to whomever I want, in Norway or anywhere else in the world where the banks support SWIFT, which means anywhere you'd want to send money, aswell as a lot of places you'd prefer *not* to send money.
Same for the stocks, the mutual funds, the money-market accounts and so on. It's all there, all fully usable, all fully transferable.
It's an online bank. It does everything a normal bank does, only it's online.
That's why real security is needed. That is why you can only connect after installing a client-certificate on your pc. That's why one-time-passwords are needed. That's why you can only download a new client-certificate with a one-time-pin that they'll only send to your registered adress. That's why even when you do that, a warning is sent to my email-adress that someone downloaded a client-certificate. There's more, but you get the point.
I never said they do. I said they *could*. Furthermore, given enough benefit, that is, with a large enough server-base, they'd be idiots *not* to.
The point is moot anyway, because they currently charge $200/month for one serverworth of land, or more than twice that if rented in 512m^2 blocks.
That's $2400 -> $5000 for running a *single* server with one *single* *standardized* server-application on it. That pricing is beyond insane. The hardware costs like a tenthel of that, and one admin should be able to easily admin 100 or more such servers, given that they're all identical and with one single app running on them.
The tricks I mentioned only drives it from insanely expensive into ludicriously expensive territory.
To me, this sounds a lot like a rationalisation for the fact that you're paying $25 or more a month (though you say "only") for the priviledge of "owning" a plot of non-existant land where you can log in and chat with people.
A one-time-pad is in no way the same as a one-time-password. The only thing common between the two is that they're both used only once.
A one-time-pad is a random string as long as the message you want to send, shared between sender and recipient. The sender encrypts the message by xoring with the one-time-pad and the recipient decrypts by doing xoring the ciphertext with his copy of the one-time-pad. The pads must then never be used again, and must be securely destructed to prevent people who have a copy of the ciphertext from getting hold of them. Unconditionally secure, but often impractical due to the key-handling issues.
A one-time-password, like those Banks here in Europe typically either issue to you on a sheet of 50, or in the form of a calculator-like device that generate them from the current time, a secret pin and a cryptographic hash serves a quite different purpose;
The idea is that if you force people to have long, complicated passwords, then they either write them down, use the same password on multiple sites, or both.
By using an additional one-time password, the bank makes sure that there's *two* things identifying the user logging in. One, the user knows the secret pin. (which is typically simple 4-digit or so.) and two, the user is in posession of the sheet-of-codes/calculator-thingie.
Increases security quite a bit, because it's no longer a threat if someone for example hacks the users computer and installs a keylogger or similar device. Sure that attacker will then learn the pin, but the attacker will then *also* need to break into the house of the victim or otherwise acquire the list of one-time-passwords. So at the very least you've eliminated the large group of attackers which have no physical proximity to the victim.
For example, there's no doubt that a kid is important, infact to most couples that have one, the kid is pretty much the most important thing in their life.
This, however, does *not* prevent me from becoming bored after spending 3 hours looking for the perfect body for our soon-to-be son. Nor does it prevent my wife from becoming bored when I point out car number 11 that day that would be more suitable for a growing family than the current Opel Corsa.
I don't see why that should be a problem though. I married my wife because I love her, and because we get along excellently, and for around a hundred other reasons. Not because I expect her to be identical to me.
Infact it has undeniable advantages to be different. It means, for example, that many of the things I handly poorly, she excels at, and many of the things she *hates* having to deal with is perfectly pleasant to me.
First, when you buy a used game, someone bougth that game originally, so they end up selling one game, even though two players use the game.
Secondly, I imagine it's very common to do like I do. I buy my games something like 50/50 new and used, new games I tend to buy new, but older ones that I never got around to buying at their new price, I may buy used.
That's simply because some games are for me simply not worth the $50 or whatever they demand for them, at that price, I'm simply not going to be a customer at all. Now, if I can pick up the same game used a year later for $15, I migth be willing to give it a try. The producer looses absolutely nothing trough this, and indeed if the game is any good, I'm a lot more likely to buy newer sequels.
Secondly, sometimes you buy a game and decide after a while that it's not really *that* good a game, so you decide to sell it and use the money you gain to atleast partly finance a new game. So, I sold my Unlimited Saga for $35, put in another $10 myself and bougth the newest Arc instead.
Thirdly, welcome to the free market. It's not my job to throw money at developers, in a free market it's *expected* that the customers will seek the best value. Any bussiness-model that doesn't take this into account simply won't survive very long.
Game-developers know all this anyway. That's one of the reasons the typical game starts out at like $50 and fall to maybe half that inside of a year. The lower price attracts the less enthusiastic buyers, and also reduces the reward for selling used games to the point where the majority probably chooses to keep the game. There's a lot of games I'd consider selling if I could still get $40+ for them, but that I'll keep instead because in the meantime they've fallen to like $15 on the used market, and at that price-point I'll rather have the game.
If you've got 20million pixels, and use one byte for each of R,G,B for each pixel (i.e. RAW, completely uncompressed), then you need 60MB for a picture. Large, but not in the ballpark of the GB you claim.
Even if some future camera is so color-accurate that it goes 16bit/channel, you're still only at 40MB/picture. And that the completely uncompressed version, even lossless compression could probably cut this in 2-4 with common pictures.
Now, when you start holding the button down on that 20MP monster, and it does 8pictures/second for 5 seconds, then you've produced around A GB or two in 5 seconds. You'll need *minutes* to get that info into the compactflash though, even provided it can store that much.
I used the rpm for Mandrake 10.0, and the EULA came with a new, and previously atleast for me unseen level of stupidity:
It had a freaking timer in the lower-rigth corner counting down from 15 seconds and being labeled: "Time left until auto-decline"
Offcourse it can easily be proven in a court of law that it is not humanly possible to read, understand and click accept on the eula in such a short time. Thus it's no longer the case, as is typically the case that the user agreed to an eula, *choosing* not to read it.
No, it's *enforced*, to install the program you *have* to accept an eula without being given any possibility of reading it.
It's probably not a stretch that idiocy like this will further weaken the already more than questionable legal force of terms stated in eulas.
Yes, sure, correlation does not proove causation, we all know that. Still, I'm pretty sure the added deterrent effect of capital punishment over lifetime prison is pretty much unproven.
The point is that statistics show the average car in USA has something like 1.17 passengers, including the driver, i.e. the large majority of trips are made with only the driver, and little to no luggage.
Many American households now have two cars, the obvious market for such one-person vehicles is as vehicle number two for a two-car household.
I fail to see how using a small ligth energy-efficient one-person vehicle for transporting a single person to and from the office is not an improvement over todays situation, which pretty much is to use a 2 ton SUV for exactly that purpose. (I agree with you though, that modern and efficient mass-transport would probably be even better.)
Bottom line: It's a step in the rigth direction (i.e. away from dragging two tons of metal around just for transporting a single human.)
That air will also cause friction and prevent you from accelerating at all if your push is not higher than the losses due to friction.
What would happen is that you'd accelerate for a while, until you reach the point where air-drag is the same as your push, at which point you'll stop accelerating and go on at constant speed and altitude until your fuel or patience runs out.
I very much doubt that you can design a blimp that is ligth enough that it'll float at that heigth *and* aerodynamic enough that a minute push will cause it to continue to accelerate until it reaches orbital velocity.
Sign up confirmation letter with the users account and password.
There's always a chanse that someone else signed the user up, and thus that user complaining is genuinely innocent. This is in any case a) unavoidable with current email-systems, and b) the confirmation-letter wouldn't be classified as "marketing" anyway, atleast aslong as you refrain from "offer of the day" and suchlike therein.
Confirmation of Purchase made.
In that case you're communicating with a current customer, which is explicitly allowed (even if the user explicitly says he does not wish it, you're still allowed to send him anything you wish. He's offcourse free to stop doing bussiness with you if he finds your mailings annoying.)
Notification taht their account is abotu to expire.
Also communication with current customer. Allowed.
Notifcication of a new service sent to a user who opted in.
If he did indeed opt in, it's allowed.
The legislation won't stop some people from complaining. You as a bussiness will however not get into any legal trouble aslong as you stick to a very simple rule: No marketing sent to electronic individually adressable units except for current customers and people who you can show opted in. (the standard of proof is "preponderence of evidence" not "reasonable doubt", so it's not that hard to do.)
The protocols behind freenet are such that you "only" need to trus two things in order to really be anonymous (both in publishing and in browsing)
You need to trust the copy of freenet running on your own computer. And you need to trust that you're connecting to a cluster of nodes which ISN'T 100% controled by a maliscious entity.
If you can indeed trust your own copy of freenet is offcourse a tricky question, sure it's open source, and sure it's been looked at rather closely by rather a large number of very clever people. But that's still no guarantee that some mistake isn't still in there somewhere.
So, 100% sure you can probably never be. But on the other hand, it's the best we've got. And it's atleast not as bad as you seem to think. (in that you do *not* have to trust that noone else has altered their freenet-client. Even if they have, you're still safe, barring errors in *your* freenet offcourse.)
Legsilation like that in Scandinavia, and being introduced inthe rest of the EU is ok.
marketing-material sent to individually-adressable (such as sms, fax, email) electronical devices are only allowed if the recipient has given prior, informed consent, *or* if you have a running business-relationship with the customer.
The burden of proof is on the one sending the marketing-material ofcourse. There's no way anyone could prove that they did *not* in any way give permission.
There *is* the sligth loophole that a company you're doing bussiness with can spam you for other, unrelated services they're offering (they cannot however send you spam on behalf of other companies), but the thing is, in those cases you have leverage: You're a customer. You're free to call them up and say the equivalent of "Stop it, or I'm an ex-customer."
Do you really think that everyone who knows enough english to read slashdot prefers their desktop in english ?
Or even that everyone who speaks and writes english fluently wishes their desktop to be english ? Here's a hint: most educated people in the world speak multiple languages, in the western world english as a second or third (like for me) language is quite common. Doesn't mean I won't put my desktop in Norwegian.
No seriously, Bergen is nowhere near any kind of records (neither for Norway, nor for Europe, much less for the world) in rainfall, but it does have about twice the rainfall of drier cities like Oslo or Berlin.
You had luck, on the average I think that about half of the days in a year will see 1mm of rainfall or more. Most rainfall is in autumn, and apr-jun is frequently the nicest time.
Weather is chaotic. You are correct that this means that predicting it more than a few days in advance is impossible. This is so because chaotic in means "sensitive dependence on initial conditions", the well-known butterfly-effect is an attempt at popularising this idea; that without *perfect* information (which you'll never have, for many reasons, including Heisenberg) you cannot predict what state the system will be in after a certain point.
So far you're rigth. What you are still missing out on is the distinction between weather and climate.
Like I said, climate is sort of the average weather. Climate does *not* fluctuate wildly from day to day or from week to week like weather does.
Especially not global climate, which is what we're talking here. Instead, it's a function of a few things wich though to some degree incompletely understood does *not* typically behave chaotic.
For example, the average temperature on the earths surface is a function of;
- Amount of solar-energy hitting the earth (varying by a few percent according to sunspot-activity, but fairly constant)
- percentage of that energy that gets reflected in the atmosphere.
- percentage of the remaining energy that gets reflected off land/water/icecaps
- heat seeping trough from the earths core. (for all practical purposes constant)
- Percent of heat-energy that gets reflected in the atmosphere.
None of these, are particularily chaotic. You migth say "clouds are", and that's true if you're counting one individual day. But if you where to ask "what percentage of the earth is covered in clouds averaged over one year", a fairly accurate answer could be given.Furthermore, short-time variations will be evened out by the enormous heat-storage that is our oceans.
In the end it comes down to this:
How much energy do we get from the sun ? How much energy does the earth send back into space in the form of heat-radiation ?
If the balance between those two change, as for example trough a more pronounce greenhouse-effect, then the average climate on earth *will* be warmer. It's simple physics, nothing chaotic about *that*. Send more energy into a system than goes back out, and that system will become warmer.