The reporting on the UK suggestions tended to take on a somewhat hysterical tone. A lot of the suggestions were perfectly sensible things.
"If you smoke, this treatment will not work. Therefore, we need you to stop before we give you the treatment."
"If you're double the weight you should be, your replacement knees will only last three years and you'll have serious trouble with getting back in shape after the operation. This knocks the equation of health detriment/health benefit for your knee operations into the net detriment column. Lose weight first."
Neither of these examples is especially controversial, in my view. Sadly, that's not the way they were reported.
If you typo an address, the receiving mail server should be able to reject it during the SMTP conversation. This should result in an NDR for you from the sending mail server.
That's what they own. They lease a bunch more, for a total of 600 planes. In terms of fleet size, they're behind American, Northwest and Southwest (and FedEx - those packages don't fly themselves, you know...). They're just ahead of United. If you regularly fly with one of the majors, it's not unlikely you'll meet the same planes repeatedly. Counting just major domestic carriers, you come out at ~3500 planes. But this excludes the foreign carriers you'll see at US airports (most of whom will be tending toward the 747/767/777 end of things and away from the CRJs), excludes freight and perhaps most importantly, excludes the code-share partners you see flying regional jets from small airports to major hubs. These latter are usually flying with the livery of the associated major, but don't have much more to do with them. They're external and just flying those routes under contract.
A plane's registration number is unique. You can generally see it somewhere around the rearmost door of the plane. You might find airliners.net interesting.
...the decision to remove the Palast Der Republik in favour of a rebuilt Schloss [is] giving the extreme right more power
I'm more or less familiar with the arguments about this decision and I think the decision's both wrong and wasteful, but how do you figure it empowers the extreme right?
Then you really need to check out JML and ESC/Java2, and Spec#, because you would be interested. Thanks - I'll check out JML and ESC/Java2 (we're using Java throughout, both client and server-side).
I took a glance at Eiffel a while ago - but mainly with the intent of answering one question: is it checking these contracts compile-time or runtime? It turns out (on page 68 or so of their manual) that it's at runtime.
I don't want my software to fail in the field (at my day job, we write stock trading software - reliability is key because lack of availability can quickly become very expensive). If I could define a number of pre- and post-conditions for each function and have the compiler check these for me, I'd be happy. (Yes, I realise that this is quite a tricky problem of static or dynamic analysis, depending on how far you want to take it.) If the conditions are only going to be checked at runtime, then I'm going to have to write unit tests anyway - otherwise, the failure's going to be beautifully detected and localised and so forth, but crucially, it's going to be one of my customers that detects it. If I'm writing unit tests anyway, why bother with DbC?
When there's a DbC language or add-on that checks the contracts at compile time, I'll be interested.
I develop shareware software in my spare time. My software doesn't do this, or anything even slightly like it. Quite aside from any legal or moral qualms (which of course play their own role), I don't do this for a business reason: I'd rather have people using a pirated copy of my software than a legal copy (whether free or bought) from some competitor. At some point, it's possible that the person in question will be working for a company who will have a policy about buying software. If they've been using my software the whole time, the chances are that that's the software they'll buy. It's the same strategy that MS used to great effect (until recent years, WGA, etc. - at which point, they effectively had the market wrapped up and nothing more to win...).
I'm no fan of the content mafia, but all they're talking about at the moment is disabling certain software players which the publishers could easily offer free updates for. The current crack isn't applicable to hardware players.
Re:Downloads page still stupid
on
Java SE 6 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
www.java.com -> first link you read, "Download now". Two clicks, no NetBeans. java.sun.com is for developers, it's reasonable that they angle it towards them.
The Germans are certainly prepared to watch enough English language content (mainly from the US, some from the UK), dubbed into German. Presumably, other non-English-speaking TV markets are too. Let's say Spain is also prepared to watch English-language content dubbed into Spanish. There's no real difference for them whether the content was originally English or German - it's now in Spanish. There's no language-based reason for these markets that German TV couldn't be selling as much content as others do. The only market that's significantly more tricky for them is the US, which might have more of a problem with dubbed content since so much non-dubbed stuff is available. Granted, the US watches lots of TV and has lots of money, but the amount of TV they import is surely not a majority of the overall international market.
The reasoning is that without the ads, the fee would probably be 600/yr instead of 200/yr.
So how do the BBC charge a lower fee, provide more channels of higher quality, run Europe's most popular content-based website and make more original programming, whilst not having advertising on any of their (license-fee-supported) channels?
It's definitely better (the commercial broadcasters are categorically awful), while still not being very good at all. I've been living in Germany for six years now, having come from England. I don't pay GEZ fees for a number of reasons:
- They want money, but they still show (on the radio, play) ads. One or the other. If I'm going to pay a fee, I don't want ads. It's the ads that end up dragging state TV/radio down toward the lowest common denominator that the private broadcasters serve - they're competing for the same ad money.
- Their enforcement methods stink. Sending threat letters warning of "serious consequences", visiting people at home and pretending they have some right to come in and look for TVs (they don't), ringing people's door intercoms and pretending to be the postman/mailman so that people let them in. If you're trying to be the "civilised" state broadcaster, act like it.
- The lack of relation between the price and the quality. For a radio and TV, the GEZ wants EUR204.36 (GBP136.91, USD257.81). A colour TV license in the UK costs GBP131.50 (EUR196.28, USD247.62. There are no additional charges for radio). For my GEZ money, I get a few poor TV channels (with ads), a few (mostly poor) radio channels (with ads) and little original programme-making of any consequence. Were I still in England, I'd be getting from the BBC (at the last count) eight TV channels, eleven national radio channels and numerous local radio channels along with programme-making of international repute. (When was the last time you saw something from the BBC on TV, wherever you are? And when did you last see something from German TV?) The GEZ wants more money than the BBC, but provides significantly less service.
- This latest silliness. If you want money from people who use PCs to watch your service, issue each person who pays the GEZ with a subscription number, have them type it in before providing access.
As it stands, I'll keep ignoring the German state TV/Radio offerings and listening to the BBC services online and via longwave radio. If the BBC offers me an option to subscribe to receive a fuller range of their services via internet, I'll be happy to do so. (In case anyone gets the wrong impression, there are lots of things I like about Germany - their state TV and Radio just happen to be one of those that I very much dislike.)
Re:I posted this idea to Usenet back in 1992
on
Hypoallergenic Cats
·
· Score: 1
Good work on the cat-breeding foresight, but how do you feel now about your support for Perot?:-)
As a seller, I definitely won't leave feedback until the buyer does. If you leave feedback before they do, some buyers will try to use feedback as a way to blackmail the seller into reducing his price or S&H.
Obviously, even in the modified system, you wouldn't be leaving feedback until the buyer's side of the transaction is completed. Once the buyer pays (the full price including the S&H), you leave positive feedback. If he doesn't pay, you leave negative feedback. The buyer doesn't find out what feedback you left until he leaves his feedback.
Feedback staying on the system from booted buyers is an entirely separate issue from the game-of-chicken which results from buyers and sellers seeing each others' feedback and has a different (similarly-obvious-seeming) solution.
The feedback system is definitely flawed. My solution to this: neither side sees the other side's feedback until both sides have left feedback. Nobody will currently leave negative feedback for a seller because the seller will then leave negative feedback for them. If the seller doesn't see what you've left before he leaves his feedback, a more honest feedback climate should prevail.
One potential disadvantage I could see to this system: sellers might find it convenient not to leave feedback if they fear that the buyer's feedback could be negative. This could easily be worked around by automatically turning "no feedback left by seller within 30 days" into "seller left positive feedback", with no comment (and vice-versa if the buyer's not left feedback).
A system for both sides to leave their view of a failed transaction might also be useful.
Even better is put a really big pointy spike in the steering wheel.
I'm in favour of this idea - so long as the motorcyclists also get something similar (or are compulsed not to wear helmets, something like that). I've had a couple of instances with motorcyclists driving 1-2m behind me while we're both doing 180-200km/h and I'm legitimately overtaking in the lane I'm in. One of them even decided he couldn't wait for me to finish overtaking and overtook me in the spare 80cm of lane to my left. (I'm in Germany, incidentally - doing 200km/h is legal.)
Just because lots of car drivers are morons, doesn't mean some motorcyclists aren't dangerous maniacs too...
We're also happy OptimizeIt users. It seems to do almost everything we could want from it and mostly satisfies our needs. That said, its GUI is *awful*. If you're looking for functionality, I don't know of any reason not to choose it. But if prettiness is a requirement, give it a miss.
No one in this world, so far as I know... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. (H.L. Mencken, 1926)
OK, if you're going to start insulting me, I'll make this my last reply. It's not my fault your scheme includes a fatal DoS, nor is it my fault that you're too arrogant to deal with someone pointing it out. You could have just accepted it and ended this thread by modifying your scheme to not have the bolt wait 20 minutes after an invalid code. There are so many codes, it really doesn't matter if the bolt is immediately prepared to accept new input. Still worried about the codes,
1. Send address of bolt A [8 bytes] 2. Send unlock code [I'll be generous and say 1 byte] 3. Send invalid key [16 bytes in your scheme] 4. Repeat steps 1-3 for bolts B, C, D, etc. Let's say you have 100 bolts. 5. Sleep 10 minutes. The bolts are now not accepting input, not from me, not from anyone. (Your original post: If you give it a bad key, it locks up for, say, an hour, ten minutes, whatever, ignoring all input.) 6. Go to 1
Total amount I transmit: 8+1+16=25 bytes/bolt. 100 bolts -> 2,500 bytes. Let's assume some horribly slow transmission rate: 1k/s. I transmit for 2.5s, I disabled your 100 bolts. So yeah, 0.4% of the time, I'm transmitting. Assuming I don't bother taking some simple precaution, like using X different transmitters to throw off direction-finding stuff, someone could probably find me (or rather, my transmitter - I'm long gone) and get back control of his bolts inside a couple of days.
Jamming: no, I'm not jamming anyone.
Caging: the whole point of these things is that they're for inaccessible (or, not easily accessible) places.
Slashdot Mirror
The reporting on the UK suggestions tended to take on a somewhat hysterical tone. A lot of the suggestions were perfectly sensible things.
"If you smoke, this treatment will not work. Therefore, we need you to stop before we give you the treatment."
"If you're double the weight you should be, your replacement knees will only last three years and you'll have serious trouble with getting back in shape after the operation. This knocks the equation of health detriment/health benefit for your knee operations into the net detriment column. Lose weight first."
Neither of these examples is especially controversial, in my view. Sadly, that's not the way they were reported.
Coincidence that this month was when they intended to release a new version?
The new version has actually been live since 1st September.
If you typo an address, the receiving mail server should be able to reject it during the SMTP conversation. This should result in an NDR for you from the sending mail server.
That's what they own. They lease a bunch more, for a total of 600 planes. In terms of fleet size, they're behind American, Northwest and Southwest (and FedEx - those packages don't fly themselves, you know...). They're just ahead of United. If you regularly fly with one of the majors, it's not unlikely you'll meet the same planes repeatedly. Counting just major domestic carriers, you come out at ~3500 planes. But this excludes the foreign carriers you'll see at US airports (most of whom will be tending toward the 747/767/777 end of things and away from the CRJs), excludes freight and perhaps most importantly, excludes the code-share partners you see flying regional jets from small airports to major hubs. These latter are usually flying with the livery of the associated major, but don't have much more to do with them. They're external and just flying those routes under contract.
A plane's registration number is unique. You can generally see it somewhere around the rearmost door of the plane. You might find airliners.net interesting.
£8 is US$16.14 at current rates. Or $193.68/year.
I'm more or less familiar with the arguments about this decision and I think the decision's both wrong and wasteful, but how do you figure it empowers the extreme right?
I took a glance at Eiffel a while ago - but mainly with the intent of answering one question: is it checking these contracts compile-time or runtime? It turns out (on page 68 or so of their manual) that it's at runtime.
I don't want my software to fail in the field (at my day job, we write stock trading software - reliability is key because lack of availability can quickly become very expensive). If I could define a number of pre- and post-conditions for each function and have the compiler check these for me, I'd be happy. (Yes, I realise that this is quite a tricky problem of static or dynamic analysis, depending on how far you want to take it.) If the conditions are only going to be checked at runtime, then I'm going to have to write unit tests anyway - otherwise, the failure's going to be beautifully detected and localised and so forth, but crucially, it's going to be one of my customers that detects it. If I'm writing unit tests anyway, why bother with DbC?
When there's a DbC language or add-on that checks the contracts at compile time, I'll be interested.
I develop shareware software in my spare time. My software doesn't do this, or anything even slightly like it. Quite aside from any legal or moral qualms (which of course play their own role), I don't do this for a business reason: I'd rather have people using a pirated copy of my software than a legal copy (whether free or bought) from some competitor. At some point, it's possible that the person in question will be working for a company who will have a policy about buying software. If they've been using my software the whole time, the chances are that that's the software they'll buy. It's the same strategy that MS used to great effect (until recent years, WGA, etc. - at which point, they effectively had the market wrapped up and nothing more to win...).
I'm no fan of the content mafia, but all they're talking about at the moment is disabling certain software players which the publishers could easily offer free updates for. The current crack isn't applicable to hardware players.
www.java.com -> first link you read, "Download now". Two clicks, no NetBeans. java.sun.com is for developers, it's reasonable that they angle it towards them.
The Germans are certainly prepared to watch enough English language content (mainly from the US, some from the UK), dubbed into German. Presumably, other non-English-speaking TV markets are too. Let's say Spain is also prepared to watch English-language content dubbed into Spanish. There's no real difference for them whether the content was originally English or German - it's now in Spanish. There's no language-based reason for these markets that German TV couldn't be selling as much content as others do. The only market that's significantly more tricky for them is the US, which might have more of a problem with dubbed content since so much non-dubbed stuff is available. Granted, the US watches lots of TV and has lots of money, but the amount of TV they import is surely not a majority of the overall international market.
Reference for that "most popular" claim: http://www.bbc.co.uk/commissioning/newmedia/websit es.shtml
The reasoning is that without the ads, the fee would probably be 600/yr instead of 200/yr.
So how do the BBC charge a lower fee, provide more channels of higher quality, run Europe's most popular content-based website and make more original programming, whilst not having advertising on any of their (license-fee-supported) channels?
It's definitely better (the commercial broadcasters are categorically awful), while still not being very good at all. I've been living in Germany for six years now, having come from England. I don't pay GEZ fees for a number of reasons:
- They want money, but they still show (on the radio, play) ads. One or the other. If I'm going to pay a fee, I don't want ads. It's the ads that end up dragging state TV/radio down toward the lowest common denominator that the private broadcasters serve - they're competing for the same ad money.
- Their enforcement methods stink. Sending threat letters warning of "serious consequences", visiting people at home and pretending they have some right to come in and look for TVs (they don't), ringing people's door intercoms and pretending to be the postman/mailman so that people let them in. If you're trying to be the "civilised" state broadcaster, act like it.
- The lack of relation between the price and the quality. For a radio and TV, the GEZ wants EUR204.36 (GBP136.91, USD257.81). A colour TV license in the UK costs GBP131.50 (EUR196.28, USD247.62. There are no additional charges for radio). For my GEZ money, I get a few poor TV channels (with ads), a few (mostly poor) radio channels (with ads) and little original programme-making of any consequence. Were I still in England, I'd be getting from the BBC (at the last count) eight TV channels, eleven national radio channels and numerous local radio channels along with programme-making of international repute. (When was the last time you saw something from the BBC on TV, wherever you are? And when did you last see something from German TV?) The GEZ wants more money than the BBC, but provides significantly less service.
- This latest silliness. If you want money from people who use PCs to watch your service, issue each person who pays the GEZ with a subscription number, have them type it in before providing access.
As it stands, I'll keep ignoring the German state TV/Radio offerings and listening to the BBC services online and via longwave radio. If the BBC offers me an option to subscribe to receive a fuller range of their services via internet, I'll be happy to do so. (In case anyone gets the wrong impression, there are lots of things I like about Germany - their state TV and Radio just happen to be one of those that I very much dislike.)
Good work on the cat-breeding foresight, but how do you feel now about your support for Perot? :-)
Excellent point... I guess I'll have to think about it a bit more.
As a seller, I definitely won't leave feedback until the buyer does. If you leave feedback before they do, some buyers will try to use feedback as a way to blackmail the seller into reducing his price or S&H.
Obviously, even in the modified system, you wouldn't be leaving feedback until the buyer's side of the transaction is completed. Once the buyer pays (the full price including the S&H), you leave positive feedback. If he doesn't pay, you leave negative feedback. The buyer doesn't find out what feedback you left until he leaves his feedback.
Feedback staying on the system from booted buyers is an entirely separate issue from the game-of-chicken which results from buyers and sellers seeing each others' feedback and has a different (similarly-obvious-seeming) solution.
The feedback system is definitely flawed. My solution to this: neither side sees the other side's feedback until both sides have left feedback. Nobody will currently leave negative feedback for a seller because the seller will then leave negative feedback for them. If the seller doesn't see what you've left before he leaves his feedback, a more honest feedback climate should prevail.
One potential disadvantage I could see to this system: sellers might find it convenient not to leave feedback if they fear that the buyer's feedback could be negative. This could easily be worked around by automatically turning "no feedback left by seller within 30 days" into "seller left positive feedback", with no comment (and vice-versa if the buyer's not left feedback).
A system for both sides to leave their view of a failed transaction might also be useful.
Even better is put a really big pointy spike in the steering wheel.
I'm in favour of this idea - so long as the motorcyclists also get something similar (or are compulsed not to wear helmets, something like that). I've had a couple of instances with motorcyclists driving 1-2m behind me while we're both doing 180-200km/h and I'm legitimately overtaking in the lane I'm in. One of them even decided he couldn't wait for me to finish overtaking and overtook me in the spare 80cm of lane to my left. (I'm in Germany, incidentally - doing 200km/h is legal.)
Just because lots of car drivers are morons, doesn't mean some motorcyclists aren't dangerous maniacs too...
We're also happy OptimizeIt users. It seems to do almost everything we could want from it and mostly satisfies our needs. That said, its GUI is *awful*. If you're looking for functionality, I don't know of any reason not to choose it. But if prettiness is a requirement, give it a miss.
Ok... people are stupid, but not THAT stupid.
... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. (H.L. Mencken, 1926)
No one in this world, so far as I know
Still worried about the codes,
should have read:
Still worried about the codes, increase the length of the key.
OK, if you're going to start insulting me, I'll make this my last reply. It's not my fault your scheme includes a fatal DoS, nor is it my fault that you're too arrogant to deal with someone pointing it out. You could have just accepted it and ended this thread by modifying your scheme to not have the bolt wait 20 minutes after an invalid code. There are so many codes, it really doesn't matter if the bolt is immediately prepared to accept new input. Still worried about the codes,
1. Send address of bolt A [8 bytes]
2. Send unlock code [I'll be generous and say 1 byte]
3. Send invalid key [16 bytes in your scheme]
4. Repeat steps 1-3 for bolts B, C, D, etc. Let's say you have 100 bolts.
5. Sleep 10 minutes. The bolts are now not accepting input, not from me, not from anyone. (Your original post: If you give it a bad key, it locks up for, say, an hour, ten minutes, whatever, ignoring all input.)
6. Go to 1
Total amount I transmit: 8+1+16=25 bytes/bolt. 100 bolts -> 2,500 bytes. Let's assume some horribly slow transmission rate: 1k/s. I transmit for 2.5s, I disabled your 100 bolts. So yeah, 0.4% of the time, I'm transmitting. Assuming I don't bother taking some simple precaution, like using X different transmitters to throw off direction-finding stuff, someone could probably find me (or rather, my transmitter - I'm long gone) and get back control of his bolts inside a couple of days.
Jamming: no, I'm not jamming anyone.
Caging: the whole point of these things is that they're for inaccessible (or, not easily accessible) places.