For the love of Jebus, with all the ways JavaScript can be abused, why don't the browsers come with a way to filter out the most obnoxious actions? I'd love to see checkboxes for the following.
Disallow new window creation
Disallow window moving and resizing
Disallow redirection
Disallow shortcut creation
[I nearly blew a gasket the first time I found that a site had placed porn and casino links in my Start menu.]
Disallow access to cookies
There are probably others, I'm no JavaScript whiz.
An ideal browser would let you toggle all that stuff, and then enable it for specific sites of your choosing.
I'll have to look at Web Washer again... maybe it lets you re-enable pops for the sites that need them.
In the end, all we have is another interesting data point. We won't know for sure until we are growing Martian bugs in culture bottles back here, and even then there are concerns of contamination.
The only way we can really be sure is to subject said bugs to a barrage of biochemical tests. We know a great deal about earthly biochemistry, and it should be trivial to prove a new bug is an alien if we could grow enough to assay. Heck, a microscope might even be enough.
As a half-assed biochemist myself I am dying for this to happen. Who knows what kind of weird pathways alien bugs might have evolved? How will their genetic data be encoded? This is going to be huge stuff. For biochem geeks, anyway. It's possible that the stuff will be alien enough not to be dangerous OR useful. Which would be a shame, in a way.
I think the fact that we developed intelligent life on this hunk of rock is proof enough that micro-organisms can exist on other planets.
Have you ever taken a science course? That's pure intellectual laziness. I tend to believe the same thing but I'd never say we have proof.
Just because many of us share a collective "well, no DUH" moment doesn't mean there is proof of jack squat. Proof requires evidence. For further illumination, refer to the dictionary.
Though curiously the natural human circadian rhythm is 24'42". People gravitate to that when removed from external stimuli. Do a search for "circadian cave natural."
Tetrahedron Letters is crazy expensive too... I think I heard $2500+.
I'm in the publishing field, and for the life of me I don't know why it has to be that expensive. For example, I can print 5000 copies of a 64 page book, with a slick color cover, for about $0.85 each. Most of that is the cover. Say you go to a plain cover, but improve the paper quality dramatically, to that archival-quality stuff. Say this increases your overall expenses by three times. (Beats me, but that seems like an outside figure.) OK, you'd need more than 64 pages, too. But still... how much can each freaking copy cost to make? A few bucks at the most.
Anyway, the point is you can print and distribute a journal for a hell of a lot less than is being done. In fact, it is so affordable that I don't know why independent groups of scientists don't do this. Maybe they just don't know how relatively easy it would be. Get a $100 copy of PageMaker and put your grad students on it. Boom, there you go, your university is a publisher. labor is by far the biggest problem... not the cost of the journal.
Why don't the big state school systems do something like this? There should be a University of California Office of Publications that puts out THE UC science journals, and provides free peer review and publication to other qualified university scholars.
As part of their duties, all profs at all universities should be made to participate in peer review or research articles, if they aren't already. (I've been out of higher ed for a while.)
People, on an induhivual basis, can't remember to back up their Great American Novel on a $0.25 floppy disk... so I don't believe for a minute that a LARGE group of people will be any better about backing up responsibly.
Academic environments are especially prone to political infighting and committee-itis. Based on my experience in that scene, all the publications would rot on one unsafe temporary server because the Inter-University Technology Search Committee would spend 8 years evaluating what OS to use for the backup system.
Wish I knew what the solution was. Despite my libertarian leanings I sort of want to get the government involved. They already have stewardship of natural resources; the fruits of our collective research is a national treasure too, of sorts.
Sacrasm aside, I think the FBI is only interested in high-dollar cases. On GRC.com the dude talks about how he couldn't get the FBI interested in the DoS attacks on him -- the damages weren't high enough to matter to them.
I can imagine having this conversation with ATT tech support... the pain! I think I'd rather just buy a new computer. Once a company gets past a certain size, it is like a black hole -- no customer service can escape.
For all intents and purposes, customer service is dead.
start using a hosts file that routes ad servers to 127.0.0.1. I've been doing it for a while and it really helps. Got started with hosts files from some web sites, added new servers as I found them.
Here is my current hosts file. Mac users, you need to reformat the info... Apple just HAD TO BE DIFFERENT.
Anyway, this is no cure-all but it does bust a lot of ads. I've been lazy about keeping it updated but it should help a bit.
I know you can't do a totally scientific test, but all my personal experience tells me that there is no WAY a Palm has as much zap as an '030-based computer.
Opening a big fat text document is the example that comes to mind. When I read a big page in AvantGo, it takes a lot longer to appear than a similarly-sized MacWrite doc took to open.
The Mac could also do games a heck of a lot more quickly than the Palm. That old Mac Star Wars game was cool, but all the action games I have tried on my Palm III are glacial in comparison. As in, don't bother playing them.
I once built an optical hub that would let 5 Mac laptops with IR all "see" each other. All you had to do was point each IR eye at the hub... which was a drinking glass.:)
Since the original Palms were 20 MHz 68030-class computers...
I think that's wildly optimistic. My Palm III isn't nearly as fast as an '030 based computer like a Mac SE/30.
According to this page, the original Palm was a 16MHz Dragonball. If true, performance isn't scaling with clock speed. A Mac SE/30 feels far more than twice as fast as an older Palm.
In what way? I have 2 megs in mine, and I don't think I've ever come close to using all of it. It has some notes and addresses in it, and I've loaded up a few games, and I usually have no more than half of the memory in use.
Good for you. Other people have different needs. I could easily fill up many megabytes with text files of various sorts... references that I would always want to have with me. When I replace my aged Palm III, it will almost undoubtedly be with a WinCE device. Costs a little more... does a lot more. You can keep your 2MB device. I'm fed up with mine.
(C'mon...movies and music on a handheld? Once the novelty wears off, does anybody continue using one of those devices for those purposes?)
Are you serious? You've never seen anyone using a portable music device? Music playback is one of the most compelling features for me.
However, there is no proof that other forms of life, such as silicon-based life, don't exist.
Try getting an organic chemist to say "silicon-based life" with a straight face. And don't give me any crap about being open-minded -- take the classes yourself and you'll see why carbon is IT, baby.
FWIW my mail server kicks back any message with an executable attachment. Only a few clueful friends use it so I don't have a security issue, but it was the Right Thing to Do. I hate attachments of all kinds, especially executables.
D&D and Gamma World was some serious motivation for developing reading and writing skills. I discovered those games at a fairly young age and I give them some credit for boosting those skills.
L5R had to change their card backs because of USOC bullying. The original logo was 5 rings in a, well, ring, and looked nothing like the Olympic symbol. But in such matters the Olympic thugs have total authority, granted by Congress.
RR has different capabilities in different parts of the country. Probably because they absorbed a mess of smaller companies...
I used to use RR in LA and I wanted to get a static IP and a second email address. They couldn't do either -- at any price. Simply not possible. I checked around and saw that RR customers in other parts of the country could buy those services, and finally managed to get an answer from sales on why I couldn't.
Personally I am all in favor of cable company incompetence. My ATT cable connection here in seattle is fast enough, fairly reliable, and doesn't block any ports. I have become totally dependent on my in-house server, if they started blocking ports I'd be shopping for business DSL the same day.
Slashdot Mirror
So what's the meta tag?
Dubya's party isn't the only one caving in to business. Who was president when the DMCA became law?
For the love of Jebus, with all the ways JavaScript can be abused, why don't the browsers come with a way to filter out the most obnoxious actions? I'd love to see checkboxes for the following.
Disallow new window creation
Disallow window moving and resizing
Disallow redirection
Disallow shortcut creation
[I nearly blew a gasket the first time I found that a site had placed porn and casino links in my Start menu.]
Disallow access to cookies
There are probably others, I'm no JavaScript whiz.
An ideal browser would let you toggle all that stuff, and then enable it for specific sites of your choosing.
I'll have to look at Web Washer again... maybe it lets you re-enable pops for the sites that need them.
In the end, all we have is another interesting data point. We won't know for sure until we are growing Martian bugs in culture bottles back here, and even then there are concerns of contamination.
The only way we can really be sure is to subject said bugs to a barrage of biochemical tests. We know a great deal about earthly biochemistry, and it should be trivial to prove a new bug is an alien if we could grow enough to assay. Heck, a microscope might even be enough.
As a half-assed biochemist myself I am dying for this to happen. Who knows what kind of weird pathways alien bugs might have evolved? How will their genetic data be encoded? This is going to be huge stuff. For biochem geeks, anyway. It's possible that the stuff will be alien enough not to be dangerous OR useful. Which would be a shame, in a way.
I get the feeling I am feeding a troll, but...
I think the fact that we developed intelligent life on this hunk of rock is proof enough that micro-organisms can exist on other planets.
Have you ever taken a science course? That's pure intellectual laziness. I tend to believe the same thing but I'd never say we have proof.
Just because many of us share a collective "well, no DUH" moment doesn't mean there is proof of jack squat. Proof requires evidence. For further illumination, refer to the dictionary.
Though curiously the natural human circadian rhythm is 24'42". People gravitate to that when removed from external stimuli. Do a search for "circadian cave natural."
XP's anti-piracy features should also put an end to the "casual piracy" so many of us are guilty of.
That's OK, I have a Win2k corporate installer. Whew.
Tetrahedron Letters is crazy expensive too... I think I heard $2500+.
I'm in the publishing field, and for the life of me I don't know why it has to be that expensive. For example, I can print 5000 copies of a 64 page book, with a slick color cover, for about $0.85 each. Most of that is the cover. Say you go to a plain cover, but improve the paper quality dramatically, to that archival-quality stuff. Say this increases your overall expenses by three times. (Beats me, but that seems like an outside figure.) OK, you'd need more than 64 pages, too. But still... how much can each freaking copy cost to make? A few bucks at the most.
Anyway, the point is you can print and distribute a journal for a hell of a lot less than is being done. In fact, it is so affordable that I don't know why independent groups of scientists don't do this. Maybe they just don't know how relatively easy it would be. Get a $100 copy of PageMaker and put your grad students on it. Boom, there you go, your university is a publisher. labor is by far the biggest problem... not the cost of the journal.
Why don't the big state school systems do something like this? There should be a University of California Office of Publications that puts out THE UC science journals, and provides free peer review and publication to other qualified university scholars.
As part of their duties, all profs at all universities should be made to participate in peer review or research articles, if they aren't already. (I've been out of higher ed for a while.)
People, on an induhivual basis, can't remember to back up their Great American Novel on a $0.25 floppy disk... so I don't believe for a minute that a LARGE group of people will be any better about backing up responsibly.
Academic environments are especially prone to political infighting and committee-itis. Based on my experience in that scene, all the publications would rot on one unsafe temporary server because the Inter-University Technology Search Committee would spend 8 years evaluating what OS to use for the backup system.
Wish I knew what the solution was. Despite my libertarian leanings I sort of want to get the government involved. They already have stewardship of natural resources; the fruits of our collective research is a national treasure too, of sorts.
No no, this thread was about the guy with a stolen computer. The FBI doesn't care about THAT. How did this turn into the DMCA?
This is what I was taking issue with:
Yeah -- just get the full headers to your local police and/or the FBI. I should think they'd be happy to get this kind of slam dunk to clear a case.
Sacrasm aside, I think the FBI is only interested in high-dollar cases. On GRC.com the dude talks about how he couldn't get the FBI interested in the DoS attacks on him -- the damages weren't high enough to matter to them.
I can imagine having this conversation with ATT tech support... the pain! I think I'd rather just buy a new computer. Once a company gets past a certain size, it is like a black hole -- no customer service can escape.
For all intents and purposes, customer service is dead.
That's only funny because it's so true.
I need to get some worthless certifications and cash in on this MS thing as well!
start using a hosts file that routes ad servers to 127.0.0.1. I've been doing it for a while and it really helps. Got started with hosts files from some web sites, added new servers as I found them.
Here is my current hosts file. Mac users, you need to reformat the info... Apple just HAD TO BE DIFFERENT.
Anyway, this is no cure-all but it does bust a lot of ads. I've been lazy about keeping it updated but it should help a bit.
The file type/creator codes are certainly NOT stored in the filename. They are part of the resource fork.
I know you can't do a totally scientific test, but all my personal experience tells me that there is no WAY a Palm has as much zap as an '030-based computer.
Opening a big fat text document is the example that comes to mind. When I read a big page in AvantGo, it takes a lot longer to appear than a similarly-sized MacWrite doc took to open.
The Mac could also do games a heck of a lot more quickly than the Palm. That old Mac Star Wars game was cool, but all the action games I have tried on my Palm III are glacial in comparison. As in, don't bother playing them.
I once built an optical hub that would let 5 Mac laptops with IR all "see" each other. All you had to do was point each IR eye at the hub... which was a drinking glass.
Since the original Palms were 20 MHz 68030-class computers...
I think that's wildly optimistic. My Palm III isn't nearly as fast as an '030 based computer like a Mac SE/30.
According to this page, the original Palm was a 16MHz Dragonball. If true, performance isn't scaling with clock speed. A Mac SE/30 feels far more than twice as fast as an older Palm.
In what way? I have 2 megs in mine, and I don't think I've ever come close to using all of it. It has some notes and addresses in it, and I've loaded up a few games, and I usually have no more than half of the memory in use.
Good for you. Other people have different needs. I could easily fill up many megabytes with text files of various sorts... references that I would always want to have with me. When I replace my aged Palm III, it will almost undoubtedly be with a WinCE device. Costs a little more... does a lot more. You can keep your 2MB device. I'm fed up with mine.
(C'mon...movies and music on a handheld? Once the novelty wears off, does anybody continue using one of those devices for those purposes?)
Are you serious? You've never seen anyone using a portable music device? Music playback is one of the most compelling features for me.
However, there is no proof that other forms of life, such as silicon-based life, don't exist.
Try getting an organic chemist to say "silicon-based life" with a straight face. And don't give me any crap about being open-minded -- take the classes yourself and you'll see why carbon is IT, baby.
FWIW my mail server kicks back any message with an executable attachment. Only a few clueful friends use it so I don't have a security issue, but it was the Right Thing to Do. I hate attachments of all kinds, especially executables.
D&D and Gamma World was some serious motivation for developing reading and writing skills. I discovered those games at a fairly young age and I give them some credit for boosting those skills.
The NSA currently employs only about 18,000 people...
The number is classified, but it is thought to be more like 70,000. Whatever it is, it's a LOT more than 18k.
For more info on the NSA, I suggest you read the very well-researched book The Puzzle Palace.
L5R had to change their card backs because of USOC bullying. The original logo was 5 rings in a, well, ring, and looked nothing like the Olympic symbol. But in such matters the Olympic thugs have total authority, granted by Congress.
RR has different capabilities in different parts of the country. Probably because they absorbed a mess of smaller companies...
I used to use RR in LA and I wanted to get a static IP and a second email address. They couldn't do either -- at any price. Simply not possible. I checked around and saw that RR customers in other parts of the country could buy those services, and finally managed to get an answer from sales on why I couldn't.
Personally I am all in favor of cable company incompetence. My ATT cable connection here in seattle is fast enough, fairly reliable, and doesn't block any ports. I have become totally dependent on my in-house server, if they started blocking ports I'd be shopping for business DSL the same day.