users shouldn't be required to learn any command to eject a CD
This is a good point. If I press the eject button while in [common windowing environment] and the CD cannot be ejected because some file is in use, I really ought to get a popup window and warning ding explaining that an application is currently using a file on the CD, a list of what files are in use by what applications, and an option to kill thoses apps, with a warning that that can cause data loss, and etc. and that I should try closing the applications first. Or the apps using the files should pop up and ask if you want to stop doing whatever it was that had the files open.
Hmm, now consider heroin. You don't have to expect to be able to trade it for anything in the future! Its the perfect currency!
Re:New place for libertopia?
on
HavenCo In Trouble?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
So if land is unclaimed and not in the territorial boundaries of an existing recongnized country, can anyone claim it?
What if its underwater? If I had the money and the technology, could I go find an undersea mount in the pacific where the seafloor comes up near the surface and build an underwater 'city', claiming that land as my own country?
Making this relevant to Sealand as a man-made object, what if I built large towers in my city that extended out of the water? They would have to be part of my territory too. Seems to me that Sealand is actually a submerged country with a couple of large towers to make living there a bit more convienant for regular humans.
I'm really curious what would be a recognized claim as a soverin nation.
Actually, if you read the article, it describes how they take a standard film based hologram and mount it on a piece of clear plastic and then put what amounts to an IR grid above it to detect finger placement.
This is NOT real-time holography, or 'floating in mid-air with no box behind it' holography (as the images on the website show). There is one image of they guys laptop with the device attached.
Its still a cool idea because it would be completely spill proof and have no mechanical wear. I can see something like this being popular in industrial applications where component wear or material spills could be an issue. And it should be reasonably cheap too, because its basicly a piece of plexiglass with some IR LEDs and sensors.
You can give the paranoid people the option of preparing their own ballot and dropping it directly in the box, but that won't help, for two reasons. First, most people won't use it, so it provides no security, rigged machines will still produce a significant skew in the vote. Second, it eliminates the usefulness of an electronic vote because all the paper ballots have to be counted (unless the difference between manually deposited ballots and total ballots is too small to swing the vote, but that gets complicated, better to just count everything).
Better would be to provide an ATM-like interface where the screen displays the options and there are one or two physical buttons on either side of the screen (more than two could cause alignment problems we often see with ATMs that have 4 buttons on either side). After the selections have been made, print a paper ballot behind a glass screen and have the user read and verify, entering a simple code (match a glyph on the ballot to the screen) to confirm or cancel the ballot. Cancels drop into a reject box, confirms into the ballot box.
The computer should record the vote and any desired metadata on write-once, fuse-type memory (which cannot be modifed once written), possibly with a GUID that matches up to the paper ballot so verification can be done later if desired.
After the voting is done the officals can collect the paper ballots and memory chips (which contain the electronic count) and turn them in, possibly entering the preliminary totals by reading the chips.
Vote machines could be connected to provide instant data, but they should of course work without that feature, and all data from that feature should be considered untrusted.
Failure points are user comprehension of the screen, printers running out of ink, paper handling problems (could give the confirmed ballot to the user to drop in the ballot box, but never the canceled ones so they can't vote multiple times), problems with bad memory (triple redundant memory modules should take care of that), and corrupt officials (all memory chips could be inialized with a serial number and hash of a secret value that can be verifed by whoever does the master count, only way to fake would be to obtain uninited chips or get into the master DB).
Well, the fact is that freenet is a bitch to use right now.
Plus its god-awful slow, so most traders wouldn't be interested anyway.
But when these problems get sorted out, and there are enough users to make subverting the network difficult, freenet will be pretty safe.
Of course, the next step for RIAA will be to secretly fund several groups to independantly develop their own totally kick ass open-source freenet clients, the binary downloads for which are very cleverly trojaned so that they can easily track who is doing what.
Since windows users almost never compile their own apps even when the source is available, the trojan will go unnoticed, and people will be baffled as to how the RIAA is finding out that they are sharing.
you know, thats actually an interesting point. What would be the implication of p2p software that deletes the source file as it is transfered? Naturally you could restore from backups, but the bounty hunters could not automaticly list you has infringing if you are simply giving away copies. They would have to show that you allowed multiple downloads of the file.
If one had a large collection one could just cycle through over a period of several months, and be sure the systems IP changes a few times in the process.
Of course it is an obvious scheme to avoid copyright violation scanners, but it would be much more difficult to actually prove that infringment occured.
It seems like most people who have not taken care to hide their social security numbers should be pretty easy to get, unless they have a very common name.
A particularly smart and resourceful bounty hunter would dump a bunch of money into developing an opensource p2p client to add lots of good features, and a little bit of code that makes it easier for them to identify people (like it responds in a certain way to searches for a particular subset of file hashes). Naturally they would provide binaries for the windows users and the source code would not have the naughty bits in it.
I expect that if they released the code in such a way as to make it difficult to compile, or so that it had enough options that builds would frequenly result in slightly different binaries it would take a very long time for anyone to notice.
Too bad we can't all keep meticlious logs of exactly which files we upload and how many times they are accessed.
When charged by the RIAA we could provide an exact figure of how much monitary damage was done and offer to settle for that amount, or do our utmost to drag the legal proceedings out as much as possible (including, for those able, not showing up for court, and evading capture).
The idea is that if we can convince the courts that sueing for hundreds of thousands of dollars when only $200 worth of potential sales were harmed is silly, and we can get the fines down to reasonable levels, people will be more likely to risk staying online, and sharing their collections.
Also, since they are gunning for big collections, p2p clients should be designed to only display subsets of their available data at any given time.
I think people would be more likely to share if they had a 1 in 5000 chance of paying a few hundred bucks instead of 1 in 5000 of paying half a million.
It'll never happen though, because most people just turn around, drop their drawers and let the RIAA/MPAA do as they wish.
If they based CD popularity on the number of search matches they returned, no doubt the Red Hot Chili Peppers album 'Blood Sugar Sex Magic' would be right near the top of all time most searched for music.
Heres a question. If they take you to court and win a multi-thousand dollar judgement against you, how do they get your money?
I know the state can arrage for your employer to send the money directly to them (like child support payments), but the RIAA is not a state agency, can they force your employer or the state to make you pay?
What if I'm a freelance programmer and I don't have an employer?
What if I'm a lazy git and I make enough doing lawnwork for cash to get by but I don't report any income?
I seem to recall reading something about that. Something like the memories are there, but difficult to access because of how heavily we depend on language to aid recall. I'd have to look it up.
What I want is for all these companies to quit making these stupid fixed-function boxes that I have to stack up and connect together. I have a 3Ghz processor, a gig of RAM and 300Gb of storage for god's sake! Give me a PCI card to interface with your media (cable, dish input, internet broadcast, whatever) and provide some software to control it. I do NOT need yet another fixed-function box to generate heat and tangle cables in my AV corral!
Yikes! First, you'd need a very smart device to be able to form ethernet and TCP/IP packets, deal with error checking, addressing, and everything else ethernet and TCP/IP (or UDP/IP) have to do.
Implimenting TCP is pretty trivial really, you can get everything you need on one chip, or just dump the commonly available code onto a microprocessor.
I'd rather see it set up on ethernet because it makes it easier to integrate with my home network and I can make it wireless with common equipment, but if it works well and isn't full of DRM roadblocks, I'm ok with firewire.
And of course, if you have complete control over the grain of the material, it would be very likely that you could come up with much better nano-structures for the properties that you need. Instead of being limited to adjusting the gross structure of the item by heating, pounding and etc, you'd just put bits with the properties you want where you need them. Microscopic nets of hardened material embedded in a more flexible grain structure of the same material for instance. Materials that fail in extremely specific ways without requiring special folds like we have in crumple zones in cars. The possibilities are endless.
Its easy to think that (no pun intended), but consider that small children function before they learn language. Also there is the case of that autistic woman who thinks entirely in pictures (or at least that is the best way for us to think of it), in order to speak to us, she must first translate her thoughts into words.
We like to link thought and language very closely since most people tend to subvocalize, talking to themselves in their head, but that is certainly not the only way to think.
This is a well covered philosophical area if you care to look up some references.
I'd suggest perhaps another couple inches of suspension lift too, or AWD, because the first time I hit one of those 'speed humps' in a residential area (they are about 3 feet wide and 6 inches tall) that thing is going to high center with the rear wheels off the ground.
If this goes into production, I hope someone will design some nice after-market skid-bars for the sides. It would be a shame to scratch up the paint while splitting lanes.
And for what gain ? To be able to have final result at 8 PM, instead of 4AM the next day ?
No, no, so Big Media can post realtime results in each state, and run commentary about how voting will go in the next timezone over. This way when the polls close in the Mountain timezone (GMT+7 IICC), all the people in the Pacific timezone will know if they actually need to go to the polls and vote.
Preferably all the machines will dump each vote to a website so that we can see the actual numbers at each precinct in near realtime.
Slashdot Mirror
users shouldn't be required to learn any command to eject a CD
This is a good point. If I press the eject button while in [common windowing environment] and the CD cannot be ejected because some file is in use, I really ought to get a popup window and warning ding explaining that an application is currently using a file on the CD, a list of what files are in use by what applications, and an option to kill thoses apps, with a warning that that can cause data loss, and etc. and that I should try closing the applications first. Or the apps using the files should pop up and ask if you want to stop doing whatever it was that had the files open.
Hmm, now consider heroin. You don't have to expect to be able to trade it for anything in the future! Its the perfect currency!
So if land is unclaimed and not in the territorial boundaries of an existing recongnized country, can anyone claim it?
What if its underwater? If I had the money and the technology, could I go find an undersea mount in the pacific where the seafloor comes up near the surface and build an underwater 'city', claiming that land as my own country?
Making this relevant to Sealand as a man-made object, what if I built large towers in my city that extended out of the water? They would have to be part of my territory too. Seems to me that Sealand is actually a submerged country with a couple of large towers to make living there a bit more convienant for regular humans.
I'm really curious what would be a recognized claim as a soverin nation.
Actually, if you read the article, it describes how they take a standard film based hologram and mount it on a piece of clear plastic and then put what amounts to an IR grid above it to detect finger placement.
This is NOT real-time holography, or 'floating in mid-air with no box behind it' holography (as the images on the website show). There is one image of they guys laptop with the device attached.
Its still a cool idea because it would be completely spill proof and have no mechanical wear. I can see something like this being popular in industrial applications where component wear or material spills could be an issue. And it should be reasonably cheap too, because its basicly a piece of plexiglass with some IR LEDs and sensors.
the UI for NetWare was the worst case in the whole industry
You've never used an AS/400 have you?
You can give the paranoid people the option of preparing their own ballot and dropping it directly in the box, but that won't help, for two reasons. First, most people won't use it, so it provides no security, rigged machines will still produce a significant skew in the vote. Second, it eliminates the usefulness of an electronic vote because all the paper ballots have to be counted (unless the difference between manually deposited ballots and total ballots is too small to swing the vote, but that gets complicated, better to just count everything).
Better would be to provide an ATM-like interface where the screen displays the options and there are one or two physical buttons on either side of the screen (more than two could cause alignment problems we often see with ATMs that have 4 buttons on either side). After the selections have been made, print a paper ballot behind a glass screen and have the user read and verify, entering a simple code (match a glyph on the ballot to the screen) to confirm or cancel the ballot. Cancels drop into a reject box, confirms into the ballot box.
The computer should record the vote and any desired metadata on write-once, fuse-type memory (which cannot be modifed once written), possibly with a GUID that matches up to the paper ballot so verification can be done later if desired.
After the voting is done the officals can collect the paper ballots and memory chips (which contain the electronic count) and turn them in, possibly entering the preliminary totals by reading the chips.
Vote machines could be connected to provide instant data, but they should of course work without that feature, and all data from that feature should be considered untrusted.
Failure points are user comprehension of the screen, printers running out of ink, paper handling problems (could give the confirmed ballot to the user to drop in the ballot box, but never the canceled ones so they can't vote multiple times), problems with bad memory (triple redundant memory modules should take care of that), and corrupt officials (all memory chips could be inialized with a serial number and hash of a secret value that can be verifed by whoever does the master count, only way to fake would be to obtain uninited chips or get into the master DB).
Well, the fact is that freenet is a bitch to use right now.
Plus its god-awful slow, so most traders wouldn't be interested anyway.
But when these problems get sorted out, and there are enough users to make subverting the network difficult, freenet will be pretty safe.
Of course, the next step for RIAA will be to secretly fund several groups to independantly develop their own totally kick ass open-source freenet clients, the binary downloads for which are very cleverly trojaned so that they can easily track who is doing what.
Since windows users almost never compile their own apps even when the source is available, the trojan will go unnoticed, and people will be baffled as to how the RIAA is finding out that they are sharing.
you know, thats actually an interesting point. What would be the implication of p2p software that deletes the source file as it is transfered? Naturally you could restore from backups, but the bounty hunters could not automaticly list you has infringing if you are simply giving away copies. They would have to show that you allowed multiple downloads of the file.
If one had a large collection one could just cycle through over a period of several months, and be sure the systems IP changes a few times in the process.
Of course it is an obvious scheme to avoid copyright violation scanners, but it would be much more difficult to actually prove that infringment occured.
It seems like most people who have not taken care to hide their social security numbers should be pretty easy to get, unless they have a very common name.
I'll have to do some research.
A particularly smart and resourceful bounty hunter would dump a bunch of money into developing an opensource p2p client to add lots of good features, and a little bit of code that makes it easier for them to identify people (like it responds in a certain way to searches for a particular subset of file hashes). Naturally they would provide binaries for the windows users and the source code would not have the naughty bits in it.
I expect that if they released the code in such a way as to make it difficult to compile, or so that it had enough options that builds would frequenly result in slightly different binaries it would take a very long time for anyone to notice.
Too bad we can't all keep meticlious logs of exactly which files we upload and how many times they are accessed.
When charged by the RIAA we could provide an exact figure of how much monitary damage was done and offer to settle for that amount, or do our utmost to drag the legal proceedings out as much as possible (including, for those able, not showing up for court, and evading capture).
The idea is that if we can convince the courts that sueing for hundreds of thousands of dollars when only $200 worth of potential sales were harmed is silly, and we can get the fines down to reasonable levels, people will be more likely to risk staying online, and sharing their collections.
Also, since they are gunning for big collections, p2p clients should be designed to only display subsets of their available data at any given time.
I think people would be more likely to share if they had a 1 in 5000 chance of paying a few hundred bucks instead of 1 in 5000 of paying half a million.
It'll never happen though, because most people just turn around, drop their drawers and let the RIAA/MPAA do as they wish.
They could also provide a nice terabyte freenet node for their users.
If they based CD popularity on the number of search matches they returned, no doubt the Red Hot Chili Peppers album 'Blood Sugar Sex Magic' would be right near the top of all time most searched for music.
Heres a question. If they take you to court and win a multi-thousand dollar judgement against you, how do they get your money?
I know the state can arrage for your employer to send the money directly to them (like child support payments), but the RIAA is not a state agency, can they force your employer or the state to make you pay?
What if I'm a freelance programmer and I don't have an employer?
What if I'm a lazy git and I make enough doing lawnwork for cash to get by but I don't report any income?
I seem to recall reading something about that. Something like the memories are there, but difficult to access because of how heavily we depend on language to aid recall. I'd have to look it up.
$200 VCRs?
Who pays 200 bux for a VCR? I won't pay over 90, and I only pay that much so I can get stereo sound output.
What I want is for all these companies to quit making these stupid fixed-function boxes that I have to stack up and connect together. I have a 3Ghz processor, a gig of RAM and 300Gb of storage for god's sake! Give me a PCI card to interface with your media (cable, dish input, internet broadcast, whatever) and provide some software to control it. I do NOT need yet another fixed-function box to generate heat and tangle cables in my AV corral!
Yikes! First, you'd need a very smart device to be able to form ethernet and TCP/IP packets, deal with error checking, addressing, and everything else ethernet and TCP/IP (or UDP/IP) have to do.
Implimenting TCP is pretty trivial really, you can get everything you need on one chip, or just dump the commonly available code onto a microprocessor.
I'd rather see it set up on ethernet because it makes it easier to integrate with my home network and I can make it wireless with common equipment, but if it works well and isn't full of DRM roadblocks, I'm ok with firewire.
And of course, if you have complete control over the grain of the material, it would be very likely that you could come up with much better nano-structures for the properties that you need. Instead of being limited to adjusting the gross structure of the item by heating, pounding and etc, you'd just put bits with the properties you want where you need them. Microscopic nets of hardened material embedded in a more flexible grain structure of the same material for instance. Materials that fail in extremely specific ways without requiring special folds like we have in crumple zones in cars. The possibilities are endless.
language is the building block of thought.
Its easy to think that (no pun intended), but consider that small children function before they learn language. Also there is the case of that autistic woman who thinks entirely in pictures (or at least that is the best way for us to think of it), in order to speak to us, she must first translate her thoughts into words.
We like to link thought and language very closely since most people tend to subvocalize, talking to themselves in their head, but that is certainly not the only way to think.
This is a well covered philosophical area if you care to look up some references.
Here ya go
I'd suggest perhaps another couple inches of suspension lift too, or AWD, because the first time I hit one of those 'speed humps' in a residential area (they are about 3 feet wide and 6 inches tall) that thing is going to high center with the rear wheels off the ground.
Well, with a ground clearance of 4 inches it better be AWD too, or it will high center when we take it out armadillo hunting.
If this goes into production, I hope someone will design some nice after-market skid-bars for the sides. It would be a shame to scratch up the paint while splitting lanes.
And for what gain ? To be able to have final result at 8 PM, instead of 4AM the next day ?
No, no, so Big Media can post realtime results in each state, and run commentary about how voting will go in the next timezone over. This way when the polls close in the Mountain timezone (GMT+7 IICC), all the people in the Pacific timezone will know if they actually need to go to the polls and vote.
Preferably all the machines will dump each vote to a website so that we can see the actual numbers at each precinct in near realtime.