You mentioned Burt Rutan's works as an example for NASA to follow. Well, First off, Burt did not go high. He went 60 miles. Well, now he needs to go to 300 miles. My understanding is that it gets exponentially harder as you go higher. There are no off-the-shelf stuff for this.
agree with most of what you said before this. But you should not dismiss what Scaled Composites was able to do. Nor was their craft merely "off-the-shelf"
Rightly people are pointing to the way in which the Rutans and Scaled Composites approached the engineering problems. For what they did, they did it in a very practical and inventive way and got it done.
NASA would have spent triple the resources on just the administrative overhead for a project like that.
E-mail is certainly a very useful means of getting a message from A to B, but it is nowhere near as convenient as an IM, especially to teenage users who value swift feedback. It's quicker and easier to send a message to someone over Yahoo, or MSN Messenger, than it is to e-mail them, plus you can hold a conversation in almost-real time. While obviously not perfect, IM is definitely useful to many.?
The delay is largely a matter of server performance and interface design. email clients assume delays either in message transit or that the user may not be there to receive the message. But there is nothing inherent in the SMTP protocol that means delay. Think of IM as a threaded email discussion like gmail. In fact since IM is blocked where I work, I use gmail in place of IM.
The only real addition that IM provides over email is a notification when the person is online and away messages and such, conceptually this is a compeltely different protocol from the protocol for transmitting and routing messages.
I've said it before, I'll say it again. Build an email client with threaded discussions like gmail has and then integrate a notification client where people can set their status and have it transmitted to their friends.
Even if you don't like the protocol or the client server architecture, just use the email addresses for unique global addressability.
A simple illustration of the point is to just put in some random phone numbers into google and see how many different area codes have the same phone number. The web works because of referential integrity.
If all of a sudden you have to provide different URLs on your web page based upon some notion of where the request originated then you have just increased your complexity and likelyhood of failure quite a bit. That is the problem the Internet and URLs were created to solve.
But Universal and Uniform have the same meaning in this context. You can't have area codes on the web. Universal addressibility is key or else you cannot share information as effectively. Regional addressibility might be good for the politicians, but it won't be good for the rest of us.
Rather than just humbly serving the specific need for centralized universality of the name and address space, ICANN is getting greedy. And seeing all this money being collected, the Europeans and others can't just come out and say they want a cut of the action, but that is really what they want. It isn't about national security or freedom of speech or competitiveness... It is about getting a piece of the action. Their "fair" share.
Governments always want a cut of every transaction, thats how they get the cash to garner the political support of their authoritarian structures. Imagine how many cushy, redundant, full pension jobs would be created at the UN or some other International Body if they had the resources of $2 for every domain on the Internet every year. That is how politics is made, in any Country.
However, this is all academic. It's easy enough to set up your own root servers and just peer into the ICANN ones, append all.com,.net,.org,.info,.biz,.etc entries found there with.us, and go from there. Anyone outside the US then just uses slashdot.org.us instead of slashdot.org, and life goes on as normal. Just like with telephone country codes.
Sure it is easy enough to throw out the "Universal" part of URL (Universal Resource Locator)...
As a former journalist (defined by my 5 years of employment as a writer/photograhper at a daily newspaper in the Los Angeles metropolitan area with a circulation of over 100K)
So, your criteria for "journalist" is being paid, printing on paper or some minimum readership? Or all three?
But we'd also develop some backbone. We'd mandate full use-cases, real automated testing, input validation, edge cases - and it would ship when it was ready. Any CEO ramrodding out shoddy software would be in the same position as a CEO at a pharmaceutical company doing the same, subject to having the whistle blown on them.
despite the headlines, please don't mistake this for a test for anxiety disorder.
This is a test for the chemical indicators of anxiety itself, a positive test would indicate anxiety not the disorder. Anxiety itself is a natural response to certain perceived situations. A disorder would still have to be identified by careful observation and a history of anxiety in situations most people aren't anxious about or anxiety levels that don't diminish in normal period of time after a perceived threat. So, you would need to test over a period of time and perhaps before, during and after exposing a person to some situation that would normally cause anxiety.
Of course, if needles make you anxious, then the test won't tell you anything except who doesn't like needles.
Do you really think that $30 a month is really paying for the "asset" of connecting to the rest of the world with its millions of users. By your example, the person paying the most would be the end user because they have the most unequal relationship and bring the least to the table. But I don't pay 100 million dollars per month to connect to Comcast.
I think it is far closer to my example, We merely pay for the cost of our connection to the network and the cost of maintaining long haul backbone networks which connect to other networks.
And while the pay may be more per hour often you get fewer hours, or spend huge amounts of time marketing yourself and doing research to setting up contracts.
There are plentiful middlemen that are happy to do this work for a cut of the money. They run the gammut from companies that will hire you out as a W2 employee, to ones that will contract you out and pay your cut after they get paid. Sure this often makes you a bit less independent as you won't develop as many direct contacts with decision makers at companies, but it also can give you more opportunities and you can always turn down a job if it is not the right fit. Though with them taking anywhere from 15-40% ongoing cut depending on the arrangement, it can make you feel like you aren't getting a fair share especially on longer term contracts.
The RIAA thinks they have a right here because they are making a case that web radio and satalite radio use buffers and there for copy the music, which real radio dosnt.
Isn't that settled law from the betamax decision? I thought time shifting was considered fair use.
The only time peering should involve an ongoing exchange of money for bandwidth should be when a network is primarily serving as an intermediary between other networks, such as long haul or backbone networks.
But if most of the traffic from other networks is going to customers that are connected and already paying for your network's service then it makes no sense and is simply wrong for a network to start charging other network providers. It breaks the end to end communication model and is providing your customers with less than the service they are paying for. People pay for internet connectivity so they can transfer data between other users on the internet, not just the ones on your company's network.
If money exchanging hands is at all appropriate in this case it might be for the actual installation of routing equipment which establishes the physical connection between networks.
Yes, most of us have been getting along with Flash just fine for many years, but the open standard for Scalable Vector Graphics promises some really good graphical and animation capabilities without being under macromedia's control and offering an easier ways to integrate dynamic database driven content.
Firefox 1.5 will offer integrated support for at least a subset of the SVG standard. So, no longer will you have to download a plugin to see svg content and it will be viewable inline with html content on a web page. To me this is an often unheralded addition to Firefox 1.5 which could really be a market differentiator. So in this case, being one of the first to adopt an open standard that has the potential to add so much functionality can be of real benefit to both the product and user.
What choices and freedoms do you feel you are lacking that are directly attributable to Microsoft ?
Microsoft has spent the last 20 years creating a monopoly and using that monopoly to limit our choices of software and document formats to the effect that it has hampered freedom of expression and our ability to communicate.
Come on, what did Microsoft ever do to deserve our hate? I mean working for the last 20 years at reducing choice and freedom is a type of "innovation" isn't it?? Heck if you could, wouldn't you want to make one of the greatest technologies ever created by mankind into your own personal playground?
Have you considered that it probably does cost $30 to Dell? I remember hearing that dell pays $15 per license for plain XP, so this isn't an unreasonable price.
But will Dell really be supporting the likely installs of Linux or BSD? Seems they are offering less than just no Windows, they are really saying they will be providing less support for nearly the same price. Of course that is a no brainer for Dell, but it isn't a compelling product offering.
My last 4 computers have all been Dells, with 3 out of the 4 originally having windows and then installing linux onto, but I am always looking for a competitor that will offer Linux by default at equivalent prices. Until you can configure main stream lowest cost Dell Desktops with other OSs preinstalled on the default product configuration pages, then Dell doesn't really support Desktop Linux.
Not at all, gmails servers are probably thousands of miles away from me, so in many cases the communication distances between email servers is trivial compared to the thousands of kilometers between me and gmail.google.com over which email content served via the web would be enrypted with https. In the case of emails between gmail accounts, the last "little bit" between gmails servers and your web browser is the only exposure for intercept outside of google's network. And in that case, https would encrypt your content over every bit of network outside of google providing you with a good level of protection.
So, it is really not accurate to say that just the last mile is what would get encrypted with https, but I'd still say that the last mile is where you will find many more ways to intercept packets without as much effort and risk of discovery as would be required on the internet backbone and long haul networks.
I took Professor Glauber's "Waves Particles and the Structure of Matter" through the Harvard Extension School as a high school senior over a decade ago.
It was probably the best course I have ever taken in any subject, but certainly out of my physics classes I will always remember it very fondly for how he was able to combine very illustrative descriptions of theory with very good physical demonstrations.
Somewhat sadly, I eventually took up work in the computer field rather than stick with physics. So I cannot say that it laid the foundation for a career in physics for me, but I never looked at physical reality the same way since then and I have always tried to look more carefully whatever the subject.
Very happy to see him recognized today for his achievements, he is a good person and a great teacher.
Hmm, but what difference does it make? The mail was sent to you in plain text over thousands of kilometers of unprotected internet wiring. Why bother encrypting the last little bit?
You mean just the few thousand kilometers between your web browser and google's gmail server? Yes, hardly seems worth the effort of typing the "s" to prevent people from reading your email over such a paltry distance, I mean we all know that it is really the core switches on long haul networks that are the security vulnerability and that corporate and home wireless networks are not much of a problem.
Now, if individuals are doing wiretaps... could be different
There is no such thing as "they".
Everything that is done in our names through government is done by individuals who sometimes act in concert but always act alone. Individuals act and pursue their own values sometimes righteous, sometimes not. Referring to a "government" as doing anything is always just a generalized abstraction for the individuals who are bestowed with power and responsibilities.
Individuals are vindictive, self absorbed, self righteous, ignorant and petty. Nobody is perfect, and certainly nobody is perfect enough to be trusted to act with such arbitrary and summary powers as is being assumed necessary to prevent criminal acts. I don't worry about the beaurocrat or high agent of government that is given the power to order a wiretap of my communications, I worry about the random guy that I accidentally cut off on the road that is the low level technician that actually has the access to tap my communications and decides to do so for petty reasons of spite and decides to meddle with my life by rerouting a pesonal email or intercepting it before it gets someplace important.
Now let's get back on topic. It's wrong for people to make excuses for bugs in code which expose my personal information to hackers, stalkers and marketers. I'd just as soon see the industry grind to a halt until they find a way to nip these miscreants in the bud. And no, I can't opt out of this dangerous system unless I stop driving (so much for being able to get food), close my bank account (yeah, hide my money under my bed so a thief has a reason to physically rob me and then kill my whole family to get rid of witnesses), declare myself dead (to retire my SSN - whoops, that's illegal, welcome to Club Fed! - or at least, welcome to joblessness) and practically move out of the country (well, actually that's a good idea if Canada is my destination).
and again
I'd just as soon see the industry grind to a halt
So, you'd like to see everyone just stop until it is completely safe, but you can't see how it is you could live without the systems that are in place. By the industry grinding to a halt, you mean your just going to stay home and eat your scrambled eggs until the world is without risk. Until your fluffy little world is just right to you.
Well, the world ain't perfect and you do have choice. And people should be free to assume whatever level of responsibility they feel comfortable with as long as there is no fraud. Doctors should be able to make patients sign legally enforceable waivers of complete responsibility from even claims of malpractice. And so too should manufacturers of software and hardware. If that car manufacturer want to make you sign a contract that says that their cars may explode upon key insertion and they are not liable for damages beyond the cost of the car, then that should be the way it is. Then let some decide to indemnify and other not and see if the price difference is worth it to customers.
Perfection costs time and money and is most often illusory, so to mandate it is a fools errand.
Slashdot Mirror
You mentioned Burt Rutan's works as an example for NASA to follow. Well, First off, Burt did not go high. He went 60 miles. Well, now he needs to go to 300 miles. My understanding is that it gets exponentially harder as you go higher. There are no off-the-shelf stuff for this.
agree with most of what you said before this. But you should not dismiss what Scaled Composites was able to do. Nor was their craft merely "off-the-shelf"
Rightly people are pointing to the way in which the Rutans and Scaled Composites approached the engineering problems. For what they did, they did it in a very practical and inventive way and got it done.
NASA would have spent triple the resources on just the administrative overhead for a project like that.
E-mail is certainly a very useful means of getting a message from A to B, but it is nowhere near as convenient as an IM, especially to teenage users who value swift feedback. It's quicker and easier to send a message to someone over Yahoo, or MSN Messenger, than it is to e-mail them, plus you can hold a conversation in almost-real time. While obviously not perfect, IM is definitely useful to many.?
The delay is largely a matter of server performance and interface design. email clients assume delays either in message transit or that the user may not be there to receive the message. But there is nothing inherent in the SMTP protocol that means delay. Think of IM as a threaded email discussion like gmail. In fact since IM is blocked where I work, I use gmail in place of IM.
The only real addition that IM provides over email is a notification when the person is online and away messages and such, conceptually this is a compeltely different protocol from the protocol for transmitting and routing messages.
I've said it before, I'll say it again. Build an email client with threaded discussions like gmail has and then integrate a notification client where people can set their status and have it transmitted to their friends.
Even if you don't like the protocol or the client server architecture, just use the email addresses for unique global addressability.
A simple illustration of the point is to just put in some random phone numbers into google and see how many different area codes have the same phone number. The web works because of referential integrity.
If all of a sudden you have to provide different URLs on your web page based upon some notion of where the request originated then you have just increased your complexity and likelyhood of failure quite a bit. That is the problem the Internet and URLs were created to solve.
I stand corrected.
But Universal and Uniform have the same meaning in this context. You can't have area codes on the web. Universal addressibility is key or else you cannot share information as effectively. Regional addressibility might be good for the politicians, but it won't be good for the rest of us.
Follow the money.
c k_fee/
You are right, this is more about a reaction to ICANN trying to make more money.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/03/31/icann_2bu
Rather than just humbly serving the specific need for centralized universality of the name and address space, ICANN is getting greedy. And seeing all this money being collected, the Europeans and others can't just come out and say they want a cut of the action, but that is really what they want. It isn't about national security or freedom of speech or competitiveness... It is about getting a piece of the action. Their "fair" share.
Governments always want a cut of every transaction, thats how they get the cash to garner the political support of their authoritarian structures. Imagine how many cushy, redundant, full pension jobs would be created at the UN or some other International Body if they had the resources of $2 for every domain on the Internet every year. That is how politics is made, in any Country.
However, this is all academic. It's easy enough to set up your own root servers and just peer into the ICANN ones, append all .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz, .etc entries found there with .us, and go from there. Anyone outside the US then just uses slashdot.org.us instead of slashdot.org, and life goes on as normal. Just like with telephone country codes.
Sure it is easy enough to throw out the "Universal" part of URL (Universal Resource Locator)...
That's pretty much the nature of any news organization.
Except here on Slashdot, editors don't choose stories based on how much discussion it will generate!
As a former journalist (defined by my 5 years of employment as a writer/photograhper at a daily newspaper in the Los Angeles metropolitan area with a circulation of over 100K)
So, your criteria for "journalist" is being paid, printing on paper or some minimum readership? Or all three?
But we'd also develop some backbone. We'd mandate full use-cases, real automated testing, input validation, edge cases - and it would ship when it was ready. Any CEO ramrodding out shoddy software would be in the same position as a CEO at a pharmaceutical company doing the same, subject to having the whistle blown on them.
Seems like a lot of overhead for Frogger.
despite the headlines, please don't mistake this for a test for anxiety disorder.
This is a test for the chemical indicators of anxiety itself, a positive test would indicate anxiety not the disorder. Anxiety itself is a natural response to certain perceived situations. A disorder would still have to be identified by careful observation and a history of anxiety in situations most people aren't anxious about or anxiety levels that don't diminish in normal period of time after a perceived threat. So, you would need to test over a period of time and perhaps before, during and after exposing a person to some situation that would normally cause anxiety.
Of course, if needles make you anxious, then the test won't tell you anything except who doesn't like needles.
Lets take your example of a home.
Do you really think that $30 a month is really paying for the "asset" of connecting to the rest of the world with its millions of users. By your example, the person paying the most would be the end user because they have the most unequal relationship and bring the least to the table. But I don't pay 100 million dollars per month to connect to Comcast.
I think it is far closer to my example, We merely pay for the cost of our connection to the network and the cost of maintaining long haul backbone networks which connect to other networks.
And while the pay may be more per hour often you get fewer hours, or spend huge amounts of time marketing yourself and doing research to setting up contracts.
There are plentiful middlemen that are happy to do this work for a cut of the money. They run the gammut from companies that will hire you out as a W2 employee, to ones that will contract you out and pay your cut after they get paid. Sure this often makes you a bit less independent as you won't develop as many direct contacts with decision makers at companies, but it also can give you more opportunities and you can always turn down a job if it is not the right fit. Though with them taking anywhere from 15-40% ongoing cut depending on the arrangement, it can make you feel like you aren't getting a fair share especially on longer term contracts.
The RIAA thinks they have a right here because they are making a case that web radio and satalite radio use buffers and there for copy the music, which real radio dosnt.
Isn't that settled law from the betamax decision? I thought time shifting was considered fair use.
I think it all comes down to this: Who cares about innovation if people will not be legally allowed to make fair use of it?
TPM or DRM prevents fair use of copyrighted material and the law should provide no punishment merely for its circumvention.
The only time peering should involve an ongoing exchange of money for bandwidth should be when a network is primarily serving as an intermediary between other networks, such as long haul or backbone networks.
But if most of the traffic from other networks is going to customers that are connected and already paying for your network's service then it makes no sense and is simply wrong for a network to start charging other network providers. It breaks the end to end communication model and is providing your customers with less than the service they are paying for. People pay for internet connectivity so they can transfer data between other users on the internet, not just the ones on your company's network.
If money exchanging hands is at all appropriate in this case it might be for the actual installation of routing equipment which establishes the physical connection between networks.
Yes, most of us have been getting along with Flash just fine for many years, but the open standard for Scalable Vector Graphics promises some really good graphical and animation capabilities without being under macromedia's control and offering an easier ways to integrate dynamic database driven content.
Firefox 1.5 will offer integrated support for at least a subset of the SVG standard. So, no longer will you have to download a plugin to see svg content and it will be viewable inline with html content on a web page. To me this is an often unheralded addition to Firefox 1.5 which could really be a market differentiator. So in this case, being one of the first to adopt an open standard that has the potential to add so much functionality can be of real benefit to both the product and user.
nice speech, but the truth is not democratically accountable.
So Yahweh Doesn't Exist, let me guess you would have written this entry a little bit differently?
What choices and freedoms do you feel you are lacking that are directly attributable to Microsoft ?
Microsoft has spent the last 20 years creating a monopoly and using that monopoly to limit our choices of software and document formats to the effect that it has hampered freedom of expression and our ability to communicate.
(This is one war I think protesters will be null)
Come on, what did Microsoft ever do to deserve our hate? I mean working for the last 20 years at reducing choice and freedom is a type of "innovation" isn't it?? Heck if you could, wouldn't you want to make one of the greatest technologies ever created by mankind into your own personal playground?
Have you considered that it probably does cost $30 to Dell? I remember hearing that dell pays $15 per license for plain XP, so this isn't an unreasonable price.
But will Dell really be supporting the likely installs of Linux or BSD? Seems they are offering less than just no Windows, they are really saying they will be providing less support for nearly the same price. Of course that is a no brainer for Dell, but it isn't a compelling product offering.
My last 4 computers have all been Dells, with 3 out of the 4 originally having windows and then installing linux onto, but I am always looking for a competitor that will offer Linux by default at equivalent prices. Until you can configure main stream lowest cost Dell Desktops with other OSs preinstalled on the default product configuration pages, then Dell doesn't really support Desktop Linux.
Not at all, gmails servers are probably thousands of miles away from me, so in many cases the communication distances between email servers is trivial compared to the thousands of kilometers between me and gmail.google.com over which email content served via the web would be enrypted with https. In the case of emails between gmail accounts, the last "little bit" between gmails servers and your web browser is the only exposure for intercept outside of google's network. And in that case, https would encrypt your content over every bit of network outside of google providing you with a good level of protection.
So, it is really not accurate to say that just the last mile is what would get encrypted with https, but I'd still say that the last mile is where you will find many more ways to intercept packets without as much effort and risk of discovery as would be required on the internet backbone and long haul networks.
I took Professor Glauber's "Waves Particles and the Structure of Matter" through the Harvard Extension School as a high school senior over a decade ago.
It was probably the best course I have ever taken in any subject, but certainly out of my physics classes I will always remember it very fondly for how he was able to combine very illustrative descriptions of theory with very good physical demonstrations.
Somewhat sadly, I eventually took up work in the computer field rather than stick with physics. So I cannot say that it laid the foundation for a career in physics for me, but I never looked at physical reality the same way since then and I have always tried to look more carefully whatever the subject.
Very happy to see him recognized today for his achievements, he is a good person and a great teacher.
Hmm, but what difference does it make? The mail was sent to you in plain text over thousands of kilometers of unprotected internet wiring. Why bother encrypting the last little bit?
You mean just the few thousand kilometers between your web browser and google's gmail server? Yes, hardly seems worth the effort of typing the "s" to prevent people from reading your email over such a paltry distance, I mean we all know that it is really the core switches on long haul networks that are the security vulnerability and that corporate and home wireless networks are not much of a problem.
Now, if individuals are doing wiretaps... could be different
There is no such thing as "they".
Everything that is done in our names through government is done by individuals who sometimes act in concert but always act alone. Individuals act and pursue their own values sometimes righteous, sometimes not. Referring to a "government" as doing anything is always just a generalized abstraction for the individuals who are bestowed with power and responsibilities.
Individuals are vindictive, self absorbed, self righteous, ignorant and petty. Nobody is perfect, and certainly nobody is perfect enough to be trusted to act with such arbitrary and summary powers as is being assumed necessary to prevent criminal acts. I don't worry about the beaurocrat or high agent of government that is given the power to order a wiretap of my communications, I worry about the random guy that I accidentally cut off on the road that is the low level technician that actually has the access to tap my communications and decides to do so for petty reasons of spite and decides to meddle with my life by rerouting a pesonal email or intercepting it before it gets someplace important.
Now let's get back on topic. It's wrong for people to make excuses for bugs in code which expose my personal information to hackers, stalkers and marketers. I'd just as soon see the industry grind to a halt until they find a way to nip these miscreants in the bud. And no, I can't opt out of this dangerous system unless I stop driving (so much for being able to get food), close my bank account (yeah, hide my money under my bed so a thief has a reason to physically rob me and then kill my whole family to get rid of witnesses), declare myself dead (to retire my SSN - whoops, that's illegal, welcome to Club Fed! - or at least, welcome to joblessness) and practically move out of the country (well, actually that's a good idea if Canada is my destination).
and again
I'd just as soon see the industry grind to a halt
So, you'd like to see everyone just stop until it is completely safe, but you can't see how it is you could live without the systems that are in place. By the industry grinding to a halt, you mean your just going to stay home and eat your scrambled eggs until the world is without risk. Until your fluffy little world is just right to you.
Well, the world ain't perfect and you do have choice. And people should be free to assume whatever level of responsibility they feel comfortable with as long as there is no fraud. Doctors should be able to make patients sign legally enforceable waivers of complete responsibility from even claims of malpractice. And so too should manufacturers of software and hardware. If that car manufacturer want to make you sign a contract that says that their cars may explode upon key insertion and they are not liable for damages beyond the cost of the car, then that should be the way it is. Then let some decide to indemnify and other not and see if the price difference is worth it to customers.
Perfection costs time and money and is most often illusory, so to mandate it is a fools errand.