I'm a bit worried about the 12 year old. But mostly I'm worried about the 10 year old, the 9 year old, and the 6 year old. And the one that's almost 2 years old will probably be wanting her own email by 5 (when the 6 year old did).
Parental control is needed for the youngest. I'm willing to step back for the teens. But the youngest do not yet know enough to always follow directions. And they sometimes just forget to do that. So they do need supervision. But it would be nicer for them to be able to do some things unsupervised.
The kind of email service I would want is one where the accounts have separate child access and parent access, where when the parents login, they can see the controls for all the child at once. And these controls need to not only include extensive anti-spam and anti-porn settings, but also a strict whitelist of email addresses that are allowed both ways (who they can receive from, and send to). Those email addresses would be limited to the parents, siblings, other relatives (grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins), and their school teachers. The parent account can also reset the child's password, and restrict access times (no reading email during homework time, except that from teachers, and nothing from 10PM to 6AM).
I do not go along with the Darwin principle of raising children. I don't let the youngest ones cross the highway, for example. Children are not born with a knowledge of all the dangerous things society has created. That needs to be learned in childhood, and children need special protection before that is learned. It is a gradual process and most of it is learned by teen years.
Oh, and such a service needs to work with private domains (I just point the MX at the provider's designated MX host and configure the domain name in the parent control panel).
... buy music, download it to my unencumbered computer system using open source software I compiled myself, play it directly using open source software I compiled myself, or transfer it to my portable player (and have it play there) using open source software I compiled myself... then it's truly DRM free.
I don't want the ads. I am willing to pay for music. I'm even willing to pay the greedy fat cat businessmen a part of that for their effort at spewing other junk music all over the TV and radio. But it has to work on my computer if they are considering me to be a part of their market. Otherwise I stick with Magnatune.
I've seen situations that otherwise look like benign layout bugs, where two or more hyperlinks or other clickable objects end up being overlayed on each other. It's not clear which one would be activated until you click. If someone intentionally did this AND obscured the object they wanted the victim to click, and made the other object more attractive, people might be doing such clicking. This could be easily done with CSS on one page, but there's not advantage since both links are just part of the same page. I don't think frames would do this. However, IFRAMES might do this on a cross "page" basis. The perp makes an attractive link that overlays over an iframe that is loaded from another page, so the act of clicking gets the victim to effective click on the other page. This loads something else in the iframe, but from the perpective of that other web site, it was a click on their page (based on the referer value). The simple exploit would get people to click on an ad, and it would not be visible to the ad vendor which page was doing the exploit.
It looks like the distance from the old tower to the new tower is more like just 30 miles (not 60 miles). That can still be a significant problem for many people who were using indoor antennas. So now you might have to do like people further away and put up an outside antenna. But it would have been nice to have made this known to people up front. It's still worth a complaint letter to the FCC in reference to their widespread failure to ensure that equal coverage was maintained.
... DNS servers, using the reliable, secure, high performing, authoritative-only, name server software called NSD. Generate your zone files from a script in your favorite language, and be done with the issues.
Exactly what I was gonna say (but you beat me to it). $65 cables just to transfer to my PC? No thanks! And picture mail at $$$$/apiece? What's the point? I would actually like it if I had a phone with a decent camera that I could transfer via USB, but the cell companies see the extras as a profit center so they lock down everything and charge for it. Sad...
And this is why we need some kind of intervention. If you were a business CEO and had a (mostly) captive market, you'd see the gleaming $$$$ and do the same lock down to drive more profits to your business. The intervention options vary from the extreme of outlawing this, to the simpler and more desirable increase of competition. I prefer the latter solution (more competition) because it leaves things more flexible for everyone, while providing the incentive to do things consumers want. Some smaller competitor would try to get a bigger share by offering phones that include free ways to transfer to your own computer using standardized USB cable, or an extra memory card slot for something like a micro-SD card.
Another intervention I would support is a requirement that all phone manufacturers must make all phone models available on a full-price totally-unlocked basis through the retailers willing to sell that way. There obviously are such retailers, as the subset of models that are available this way have quite many retailers selling them (even big retailers like Amazon). Then the discounting that phone service providers offer can still be offered for those that prefer to not pay the full price up front, and even a reduced price overall, for using their service.
The phone should be able to store the photos and transfer them directly (for example a USB port plugging into a home computer just like a regular camera does). Transferring them immediately should be an option, of course. But wise people would do that only when they need to (urgency of sending the photo, or they have filled up their flash memory and need more space back).
FYI, I've yet to take even one photo with my phone. I use a digital SLR for photos.
A better solution that several teachers I've had have used is this. They simply discard the highest and lowest score.
There were variations on this. A couple teachers did it if it improved the grade. One of them repeated removing the highest and lowest test score if it further improved it. Another teacher had a bit of complex formula for deciding how much of the top and bottom to remove.
The basic idea was that it compensated for a bad day. One teacher removed only the lowest score and didn't remove any high scores. This involved cases where there were at least a few scores to work with. If they are talking about the scores on semester exams only, the sampling is poor.
I'd like to know why the HTML in my posts on IDLE don't work (it works in other Slashdot sections).
For example, it needs 2 layers of control. One layer should be minimal and not subject to any possible reprogramming. It might even be implemented in pure hardware (not firmware). But if it is implemented in firmware, it needs to be in "read ONLY not physically possible to write" memory (e.g. legacy ROM). This layer is the one that implements the function to write the flash that controls the next layer of the device. And this first layer needs to function even if the next layer is hosed or doing strange stuff. Or alternatively, the first layer would have functions to stop, reset, and restart the next layer. This would allow the flash to be reloaded even if it is completely fouled up now. It should not be necessary to have a JTAG port for this.
I don't have any stock in EBAY, anymore. I already sold it years ago in disgust. Now I guess it's time to short their stock and profit from their misery.
But will these other companies handle grievances any better? For example, uBid's HTML is broken and displays badly on a major web browser. Would they fix it if I report the problem? Would it be good enough to report it to their webmaster? Or would I have to report it to the CEO?
The buyers you get are the ones that don't mind what EBAY is doing. But you are getting fewer buyers (e.g. fewer bids) than you might have, otherwise. I can assure you I have not bid on any of your items because I don't use EBAY anymore. As this drives away even more people from EBAY, you'll be getting fewer bids and selling at a lower price in many cases.
I'm a very paranoid person, and I use ROT104 encryption on all my important data. Yeah, it may be overkill, but my computer does it so quickly I barely notice it happening.
The best theoretic solution is to change the email distribution model, but this may never happen. Right now, email is a "push" technology where the sender has most of the control, and where the receiver bears most of the cost. The alternative is to use a "pull" model, where the sender keeps the email message on their own server until the receiver downloads it. For example, when my bank wants to send me email, they would send a short message with an URL to view their mail, and my email software would download the message for me. This assumes of course that my email software recognizes my bank's email digital signature and their Web site's SSL certificate, otherwise we would have a phishing problem. Legacy mail software would tell the user that they have email at their bank, and leave it up to the user to download their email.
The "pull" model would change the economics of email. It would move the bulk of the cost from the receivers where it is now, to the senders where it belongs. No-one would read email if its sender doesn't provide a service where recipients can download it from.
We could go ahead and establish a standard for this pull model. We don't have to suddenly change everything over to the pull model all at once since the asynchronous notification of a message being available would be sent via email. But with such a standard in place, this allows more legitimate senders to start using it, as well as mail agent/client to recognize it. It can be a gradual migration. The notifications would just look like an enclosed URL to an email agent/client that doesn't implement the detection of the notification.
Of course, spammers will use this method. But it forces them to have a server running somewhere to accomplish this. This issue would be addressed by performing certain validations on the notification that would normally not be doable on just any URL included in a message. Among the validations is that the URL must have a relationship to the server sending the notification (if it's the very same machine, that's a quick positive, but at the very least it might need to be the same domain name). Mere IP addresses as URL hosts would be rejected. And a specific port number might be specified by the standard for the pull server (notifications with a different port can be rejected). These validations would, among other things, make sure that botnet machines are not accessed to pull messages.
My point is, we can start doing this "now" (as soon as a standard is established). The transition can be a gradual process. And it can be one where we verify the correctness and make changes to the standard if necessary on a smaller scale.
Still, I have some concerns about the pull model. It does give the sender more information about the recipient (for example, what time of day that read mail). Some of that can be avoided with auto-pulling. And spammers can still cut their costs by not actually having duplicate messages on the pull servers, even though the URLs to access them would all be different (to avoid notifications being detected as duplications).
Certainly where programming is more difficult, those doing the programming can make more mistakes. But this rise in mistakes is not in proportion to increase in difficulty for the top programmers that would remain. The real serious impact of increased difficulty is that less programming would get done. The difficulty referred to is more about the entry barrier to programming, rather than the work itself. But anything that would slow down the programmer and make them think about what they were doing is a good thing in general.
We might well have a lot fewer programs. But that would be a good thing considering some of the junk out there.
I did some contract work for a company over the Y2k transition evaluating the bugs that happened leading up to, and following, the big year changeover. Only one such bug was found in a program in C, and it was found months ahead in some testing. Of about 50 bugs found, the vast majority were in "quicky" programs done in languages like Perl and shell scripts. Programmers used shortcuts that were easy to do in these languages (concatenating "19" to converted values of years since 1900, more often getting "19100" instead of "1900").
Good programmers were doing things the right way with respect to Y2k years before the transition. Of those bugs I could determine when they were coded, I ranked them by date and found that the median was in late 1998. That means half of the bugs were coded within less than 2 years of 2000. Programmers were simply not paying attention to what they were doing and how they were doing it.
"Overall technology employment is up in America and the wages associated with it are up," said John McCarthy, a vice president with Forrester Research.
This is an example of the confusion. This is employment levels at technology companies. A job as a salesperson for Cisco would be counted towards an uptick of the "Overall technology employment".
We have the smart people. We just need to find a way to encourage them to go to school, if they haven't already. But when people look at their older more experienced peers losing jobs, and salary levels staying flat or going down, they look for other career paths when they are at that age where the choices are easy. If over the next N years, all those older peers were hired back and a true shortage of people came to exist (as opposed to the fake ones being promoted by certain big companies to sway Congress to allow them to hire cheaper workers from overseas), then younger people would be seeing technology as a rewarding career path. It's all about confidence in the future, and businesses are not putting that in IT right now.
Just because technology companies are not hit as hard by this economic downturn, that does not mean technology workers (programmers, engineers, network admins, system admins) are equivalently immune. One problem here is the Labor department is classifying things badly. When the payroll of a technology company goes up, they interpret it as benefiting technology workers. It could be they are just hiring more sales people (I've seen it done). And a huge amount of IT is done in non-technology companies, including financial companies. And even if these companies consider their data centers to be of value, the IT workers own none of it, and few of them would be considered vital employees.
These things are censored in movies in UK, right? I mean, some of what gets put on YouTube are skits and plays and short "film" that wanna-be movie producers and actors create (as opposed to real life events).
And what if someone got a video of a Policeman using a gun to intimidate someone? Oh wait, it's the UK way to leave their Policemen defenseless.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a bit worried about the 12 year old. But mostly I'm worried about the 10 year old, the 9 year old, and the 6 year old. And the one that's almost 2 years old will probably be wanting her own email by 5 (when the 6 year old did).
Parental control is needed for the youngest. I'm willing to step back for the teens. But the youngest do not yet know enough to always follow directions. And they sometimes just forget to do that. So they do need supervision. But it would be nicer for them to be able to do some things unsupervised.
The kind of email service I would want is one where the accounts have separate child access and parent access, where when the parents login, they can see the controls for all the child at once. And these controls need to not only include extensive anti-spam and anti-porn settings, but also a strict whitelist of email addresses that are allowed both ways (who they can receive from, and send to). Those email addresses would be limited to the parents, siblings, other relatives (grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins), and their school teachers. The parent account can also reset the child's password, and restrict access times (no reading email during homework time, except that from teachers, and nothing from 10PM to 6AM).
I do not go along with the Darwin principle of raising children. I don't let the youngest ones cross the highway, for example. Children are not born with a knowledge of all the dangerous things society has created. That needs to be learned in childhood, and children need special protection before that is learned. It is a gradual process and most of it is learned by teen years.
Oh, and such a service needs to work with private domains (I just point the MX at the provider's designated MX host and configure the domain name in the parent control panel).
... buy music, download it to my unencumbered computer system using open source software I compiled myself, play it directly using open source software I compiled myself, or transfer it to my portable player (and have it play there) using open source software I compiled myself ... then it's truly DRM free.
I don't want the ads. I am willing to pay for music. I'm even willing to pay the greedy fat cat businessmen a part of that for their effort at spewing other junk music all over the TV and radio. But it has to work on my computer if they are considering me to be a part of their market. Otherwise I stick with Magnatune.
I've seen situations that otherwise look like benign layout bugs, where two or more hyperlinks or other clickable objects end up being overlayed on each other. It's not clear which one would be activated until you click. If someone intentionally did this AND obscured the object they wanted the victim to click, and made the other object more attractive, people might be doing such clicking. This could be easily done with CSS on one page, but there's not advantage since both links are just part of the same page. I don't think frames would do this. However, IFRAMES might do this on a cross "page" basis. The perp makes an attractive link that overlays over an iframe that is loaded from another page, so the act of clicking gets the victim to effective click on the other page. This loads something else in the iframe, but from the perpective of that other web site, it was a click on their page (based on the referer value). The simple exploit would get people to click on an ad, and it would not be visible to the ad vendor which page was doing the exploit.
It looks like the distance from the old tower to the new tower is more like just 30 miles (not 60 miles). That can still be a significant problem for many people who were using indoor antennas. So now you might have to do like people further away and put up an outside antenna. But it would have been nice to have made this known to people up front. It's still worth a complaint letter to the FCC in reference to their widespread failure to ensure that equal coverage was maintained.
Does the programming that calls the API actually run on their server?
... DNS servers, using the reliable, secure, high performing, authoritative-only, name server software called NSD. Generate your zone files from a script in your favorite language, and be done with the issues.
Exactly what I was gonna say (but you beat me to it). $65 cables just to transfer to my PC? No thanks! And picture mail at $$$$/apiece? What's the point? I would actually like it if I had a phone with a decent camera that I could transfer via USB, but the cell companies see the extras as a profit center so they lock down everything and charge for it. Sad...
And this is why we need some kind of intervention. If you were a business CEO and had a (mostly) captive market, you'd see the gleaming $$$$ and do the same lock down to drive more profits to your business. The intervention options vary from the extreme of outlawing this, to the simpler and more desirable increase of competition. I prefer the latter solution (more competition) because it leaves things more flexible for everyone, while providing the incentive to do things consumers want. Some smaller competitor would try to get a bigger share by offering phones that include free ways to transfer to your own computer using standardized USB cable, or an extra memory card slot for something like a micro-SD card.
Another intervention I would support is a requirement that all phone manufacturers must make all phone models available on a full-price totally-unlocked basis through the retailers willing to sell that way. There obviously are such retailers, as the subset of models that are available this way have quite many retailers selling them (even big retailers like Amazon). Then the discounting that phone service providers offer can still be offered for those that prefer to not pay the full price up front, and even a reduced price overall, for using their service.
The phone should be able to store the photos and transfer them directly (for example a USB port plugging into a home computer just like a regular camera does). Transferring them immediately should be an option, of course. But wise people would do that only when they need to (urgency of sending the photo, or they have filled up their flash memory and need more space back).
FYI, I've yet to take even one photo with my phone. I use a digital SLR for photos.
... lawyers tend to be the most confused about anything new and/or involving high tech.
A better solution that several teachers I've had have used is this. They simply discard the highest and lowest score.
There were variations on this. A couple teachers did it if it improved the grade. One of them repeated removing the highest and lowest test score if it further improved it. Another teacher had a bit of complex formula for deciding how much of the top and bottom to remove.
The basic idea was that it compensated for a bad day. One teacher removed only the lowest score and didn't remove any high scores. This involved cases where there were at least a few scores to work with. If they are talking about the scores on semester exams only, the sampling is poor.
I'd like to know why the HTML in my posts on IDLE don't work (it works in other Slashdot sections).
For example, it needs 2 layers of control. One layer should be minimal and not subject to any possible reprogramming. It might even be implemented in pure hardware (not firmware). But if it is implemented in firmware, it needs to be in "read ONLY not physically possible to write" memory (e.g. legacy ROM). This layer is the one that implements the function to write the flash that controls the next layer of the device. And this first layer needs to function even if the next layer is hosed or doing strange stuff. Or alternatively, the first layer would have functions to stop, reset, and restart the next layer. This would allow the flash to be reloaded even if it is completely fouled up now. It should not be necessary to have a JTAG port for this.
So why didn't you post a link to your item so Slashdotters could drive up the price?
I don't have any stock in EBAY, anymore. I already sold it years ago in disgust. Now I guess it's time to short their stock and profit from their misery.
But will these other companies handle grievances any better? For example, uBid's HTML is broken and displays badly on a major web browser. Would they fix it if I report the problem? Would it be good enough to report it to their webmaster? Or would I have to report it to the CEO?
Us Vikings are insulted by your attempt to associate us with those scumbags.
The buyers you get are the ones that don't mind what EBAY is doing. But you are getting fewer buyers (e.g. fewer bids) than you might have, otherwise. I can assure you I have not bid on any of your items because I don't use EBAY anymore. As this drives away even more people from EBAY, you'll be getting fewer bids and selling at a lower price in many cases.
... I already started boycotting EBAY when they bought PayPal.
I'm a very paranoid person, and I use ROT104 encryption on all my important data. Yeah, it may be overkill, but my computer does it so quickly I barely notice it happening.
I think you need to upgrade to triple-ROT104.
The best theoretic solution is to change the email distribution model, but this may never happen. Right now, email is a "push" technology where the sender has most of the control, and where the receiver bears most of the cost. The alternative is to use a "pull" model, where the sender keeps the email message on their own server until the receiver downloads it. For example, when my bank wants to send me email, they would send a short message with an URL to view their mail, and my email software would download the message for me. This assumes of course that my email software recognizes my bank's email digital signature and their Web site's SSL certificate, otherwise we would have a phishing problem. Legacy mail software would tell the user that they have email at their bank, and leave it up to the user to download their email.
The "pull" model would change the economics of email. It would move the bulk of the cost from the receivers where it is now, to the senders where it belongs. No-one would read email if its sender doesn't provide a service where recipients can download it from.
We could go ahead and establish a standard for this pull model. We don't have to suddenly change everything over to the pull model all at once since the asynchronous notification of a message being available would be sent via email. But with such a standard in place, this allows more legitimate senders to start using it, as well as mail agent/client to recognize it. It can be a gradual migration. The notifications would just look like an enclosed URL to an email agent/client that doesn't implement the detection of the notification.
Of course, spammers will use this method. But it forces them to have a server running somewhere to accomplish this. This issue would be addressed by performing certain validations on the notification that would normally not be doable on just any URL included in a message. Among the validations is that the URL must have a relationship to the server sending the notification (if it's the very same machine, that's a quick positive, but at the very least it might need to be the same domain name). Mere IP addresses as URL hosts would be rejected. And a specific port number might be specified by the standard for the pull server (notifications with a different port can be rejected). These validations would, among other things, make sure that botnet machines are not accessed to pull messages.
My point is, we can start doing this "now" (as soon as a standard is established). The transition can be a gradual process. And it can be one where we verify the correctness and make changes to the standard if necessary on a smaller scale.
Still, I have some concerns about the pull model. It does give the sender more information about the recipient (for example, what time of day that read mail). Some of that can be avoided with auto-pulling. And spammers can still cut their costs by not actually having duplicate messages on the pull servers, even though the URLs to access them would all be different (to avoid notifications being detected as duplications).
Certainly where programming is more difficult, those doing the programming can make more mistakes. But this rise in mistakes is not in proportion to increase in difficulty for the top programmers that would remain. The real serious impact of increased difficulty is that less programming would get done. The difficulty referred to is more about the entry barrier to programming, rather than the work itself. But anything that would slow down the programmer and make them think about what they were doing is a good thing in general.
We might well have a lot fewer programs. But that would be a good thing considering some of the junk out there.
I did some contract work for a company over the Y2k transition evaluating the bugs that happened leading up to, and following, the big year changeover. Only one such bug was found in a program in C, and it was found months ahead in some testing. Of about 50 bugs found, the vast majority were in "quicky" programs done in languages like Perl and shell scripts. Programmers used shortcuts that were easy to do in these languages (concatenating "19" to converted values of years since 1900, more often getting "19100" instead of "1900").
Good programmers were doing things the right way with respect to Y2k years before the transition. Of those bugs I could determine when they were coded, I ranked them by date and found that the median was in late 1998. That means half of the bugs were coded within less than 2 years of 2000. Programmers were simply not paying attention to what they were doing and how they were doing it.
From the article:
This is an example of the confusion. This is employment levels at technology companies. A job as a salesperson for Cisco would be counted towards an uptick of the "Overall technology employment".
We have the smart people. We just need to find a way to encourage them to go to school, if they haven't already. But when people look at their older more experienced peers losing jobs, and salary levels staying flat or going down, they look for other career paths when they are at that age where the choices are easy. If over the next N years, all those older peers were hired back and a true shortage of people came to exist (as opposed to the fake ones being promoted by certain big companies to sway Congress to allow them to hire cheaper workers from overseas), then younger people would be seeing technology as a rewarding career path. It's all about confidence in the future, and businesses are not putting that in IT right now.
Just because technology companies are not hit as hard by this economic downturn, that does not mean technology workers (programmers, engineers, network admins, system admins) are equivalently immune. One problem here is the Labor department is classifying things badly. When the payroll of a technology company goes up, they interpret it as benefiting technology workers. It could be they are just hiring more sales people (I've seen it done). And a huge amount of IT is done in non-technology companies, including financial companies. And even if these companies consider their data centers to be of value, the IT workers own none of it, and few of them would be considered vital employees.
...my weapon of choice.
These things are censored in movies in UK, right? I mean, some of what gets put on YouTube are skits and plays and short "film" that wanna-be movie producers and actors create (as opposed to real life events).
And what if someone got a video of a Policeman using a gun to intimidate someone? Oh wait, it's the UK way to leave their Policemen defenseless.