Besides your argument would work against *any* privacy or procedural defense that protects drug dealers or child porn downloaders. The public knows quite well that requiring search warrants is letting lots of drug dealers and child porn viewers get away with it yet they tolerate this.
It is obvious to the public that if they let the phone companies turn over all their records to the police without a court order the police would better be able to arrest drug dealers and child pornographers. If your argument is valid how can these protections still exist? These protections are matters of law not constitutional interpratation (the supreme court has abjured any 4th ammendment protection for phone call meta-info) and could be voted down at any time yet they have not been (they have been ignored by Bush but this is a different matter and if any evidence from them was used in a prosecution it would probably be thrown out).
If all you mean is that this information would be subject to subpeona/search warrant then I agree this will probably happen. However, this makes the situation no worse than it is now. This information is already stored in phone company databases (at least the meta-info) and is already subject to subpeona/search warrant. I don't have a problem with information being used in a prosecution once probable cause has already been established and the equivalent of a search warrant is issued what is problematic is large scale fishing expeditions for crime and I think the US public at large is sucpiscious enough of this to support such a restriction. Pretty much everyone does something illegal and simple self-interest will keep such a bar in place if nothing else.
But the government already has these sorts of information barriers! The government isn't allowed to merely go trolling through tax returns to find out who is making money they shouldn't be (they can probably subpeona the returns once they already have probable cause but this is a different matter) and they really don't. Drug dealers can list on their income tax form income from other sources and pay tax on it without worrying this is going to tip the government off to them.
I believe there are other barriers of this form as well but the point is you are just factually wrong. Also the supreme court would prevent the use of phone call monitoring (not just meta-info) in court if the surveilance violated a reasonable expectation of privacy so their is a pretty hard limit on how far the government can use this information and there is a fruit of the posinous tree principle which would prevent them from using information collected because this sort of surveilance tipped them off as well.
Besides, if you think it is hopeless to believe the government will never abide by such a restriction why would you think they could ever abide by laws which prevent them from looking at the data in the first place? I mean sure there is a good argument to be made that they won't but in that case the situation is just hopeless so my solution is just as good as one that totally bans the government from looking at phone calls, they will both be overturned or ignored.
This is asking the wrong question. I know the rest of the slashdot crowd are big fans of privacy but I don't really care if my phone calls are monitored or who I call placed in a secure governmented database so long as this information is not used for law enforcement purposes. If congress wanted to give the NSA power to do massive pattern analysis on US phone calls I would be all for it if they banned any information collected from being turned over to law enforcement or used for prosecutions (we can stop terrorist attacks even if we can't prosecute the terrorists...though I might even support an exception to prosecute terrorism but I worry about a slippery slope with that).
However, I am absolutely furious with the Bush administration for conducting illegal surveilance in secret. I believe that Bush is probably not using this program for illicit political gain but his blatant disregard for the law creates a precedent that other presidents could use to intimidate political opponents like Hoover used to do and generally engage in lawless behavior. I think Bush ought to be impeached or at least censored for his lawless acts and then the congress ought to write provisions for large scale monitoring with appropriate safegaurds.
So asking if people are okay with the NSA spying on them is just the wrong question. Many people may feel like me that Bush's behavior is totally unacceptable but ultimatly it isn't problematic if the NSA searches phone records with appropriate safegaurds.
The article was pretty confusingly written so I can't be totally sure what is going on but i think this only sounds cool because we confuse the speed the actual photons travel and the speed the wave appears to travel.
It is perfectly possible to get *effects* from light that appear to travel at faster than the speed of light. Just take a flashlight in a super huge room and whip it around really fast. The spot of light on the wall may very well 'travel' faster than light but no actual photons traveled faster than light so this isn't a problem.
While this experiment is somewhat different I believe a similar confusion makes it sound way more interesting than it really is. In particular there are two different speeds one needs to talk about when you are talking about how fast light goes. There is the speed at which a crest of the wave advances and then there is the speed that a photon travels (probably some other ones too than I'm forgetting). I believe all this experiment is doing is making it so the crest of the wave appears to travel faster (or with negative speed?) than light even though all the photons in the light are not moving faster than light.
Thus it is a big analagous to the flashlight case where you have some effect (in this case the crest of the light wave) which appears to move faster than light even though no actual photons or information is really doing so.
To give an idea of how this could happen (though not the mechanism here) imagine a bunch of rods in a row like this:
_____ (time 0)
Now suppose we put activators under these rods to raise them at prearranged times. If we did this right we could get a 'wave' moving like this:
-______ (time 1)
--_____ (time 2)
_--____ (time 3)
__--___ (time 4)
Now if we timed the activators right we could make this 'wave' travel down the line arbitrarily fast (in principle even faster than the speed of light) even though no information or particle is actually being moved that fast.
While clearly the mechanism is different in this case I believe this is all that is happening. Namely the peak of electric field moves faster than light (or negative?) even though no real thing is doing so.
Look their are two possible scenarios we need to worry about.
In the first scenario we continue our impressive technological progress and civilization does not collapse. In this case simple messages in major world languages and records in other places around the country plus the radioactivity itself will be more than enough to pass this information on to a civilization unimagineably more technically adept than we are. Likely this civilization will have found a much better solution for radioactive disposal (or will just want to reprocess the waste) but even if not we can count on them to be better able to solve the problem of warning people away thatn we are.
In short if we expect civilization to continue to progress we don't need to make warnings that will last for more than 500 years and english will accomplish that.
On the other hand if civilization does collapse and humanity returns to primitive existance it seems a bit silly to worry about this radioactive waste. If societal collapse is a serious worry then we should be putting this effort into caching technology and information to help rebuild civilization not making sure future cave-men avoid cancer. The harm from radioactivity is bad and sucks but it doesn't even register compared to the harms and loss of lifespan from global collapse of civilization. Heck, while some people might die discovering the mysterious deadly waves might even help civilization to rediscover scientific knowledge.
Overall I think a lot of this buisness is just silly. Before going and wasting all this time trying to communicate the danger first figure out in what scenarios it will be important to do that and then ask if in those scenarios these sort of warnings really are the most productive thing we can do to help.
It's great people are doing something about battery pollution but it would be unfortunate if the law just said batteries need to be recylced rather than focusing on the problem. In particular the problem is that batteries usually contain toxic chemicals not that it is intrinsicly important to recycle anything that might transform chemical energy into electricity.
Hopefully their law just requires all batteries containing the problematic chemicals be recycled so in the future if someone creates a clean/biodegradable battery it won't be included.
Also they should still let companies make non-removeable batteries but only if these companies agree to take the whole device off the government's hand when the consumer throws it in the battery recycling box. Though perhaps seperating them from other batteries makes this too expensive.
First of all this is a totally bogus argument. It's like posting the text of the DMCA and arguing that google shouldn't be letting cryptographic researchers use adsense on their sites.
The fact that the big companies have influence in congress and can get their notion of IP passed into law doesn't make it right and it certainly doesn't make it google's responsibility to enforce that law.
Moreover, you are radically misinterpreting the text of that act you sited.
All of the conditions detailed in this legislation talk about things that DILUTE the trademark/IP of the person owning the original name or about people who cybersquat (register 'BestBuy.com' before Bestbuy does and try to extort money out of them for the name).
Typo squatters aren't cyber squatters or domain hijackers. The company usually doesn't even want the typo domain anyway (I know of almost no companies who bother to register misspellings..and then it is usually just about stopping typo squatting not because they really want the name). In the case of typo squatting the companies are just complaining because on the way to their site the customer might see an ad for another site and decide to go their instead or they are just being greedily outraged that someone else could be making money on traffic they generated.
Most typo squatters have sites which aren't confusing in the slightest with the real site and hence aren't diluting the trademark or giving the real company a bad rap. Certainly not responsible typo squatters who link to the real site on their page.
On the internet domain names are the equivalent of places in the real world. The better analogy is just putting up a billboard next to the highly trafficed local McDonalds. If the page is obviously not the company/trademark the consumer was looking for it isn't even like naming your home and garden store MacDonald's but more like just advertising for it next to McDonalds.
I agree this is bad but it really has nothing to do with typo squatting. Unless of course you want to host your personal website at BistBuy.com. Sure there will occasionally be some overlap but what you are complaining about is domain hijacking not doing typo squatting.
I mean the people who are responsible for this are the registrars who should (maybe they have) implement a waiting period between when a domain name expires and when it can be bought up unless it is explicitly transfered.
The most responsible thing google could do is let responsible typo squatters use google ads but revoke the accounts of irresponsible ones thus giving an incentive for the typo squatters to be good corporate citizens.
Exactly! Except the part about how xyz.com can direct all the traffic to them if they want. After all the typo squatter does own the typo domains.
Basically big corporations are greedily demanding that people don't run into any other options or ads when trying to go to their site, even if this makes the typo apparent more quickly (takes a long time when the name doesn't resolve) and even if the responsible typo squatter provides a link to the real page.
It's the webbrowser who wins with responsible typo squatting and I can't believe so many people have been taken in by greedy companies PR. I mean lots of typo squatters are bad net citizens and use popups/JS but that is to a great extent BECAUSE so many people have bought into the idea that it is bad to be a typo squatter so the responsible people don't do it.
Uhh cybersquatting is different than typo squatting. Cybersquatting is about buying up domain names that are the names of legitimate companies or their products and then demanding the company buy the name off of them.
Typo squatting is about taking domains that are just typos and serving ads from them.
Since responsible typo squatters actually help me realize faster I typed things in wrong I find they provide a service, especially if they link to the correctly spelled site.
If anything it would be evil not to let responsible typo squatters use google ads as this would just encourage these squatters to use more annoying ads and remove any benefit for being a responsible typo squatter.
> Why is it that common sense and reality go out the window when a computer is involved (patent pending)?
I don't know maybe you could answer that for me. Remember typo squating is NOT about making a fake website to decieve people. That sort of thing is problematic but typo squatting is just about filling an website with ads and no one will confuse the site you meant to visit with the typo site (unless of course you regularly visit sites that look are obviously just front pages filled with ads).
Typo sites are just about capturing eyeballs for people who meant to go to a big name buisness. The real world equivalent to this is if lots of people in your town take the wrong turn on their way to walmart and someone puts up a billboard in the culdesac that many people accidently turn down. In the real world we would think a company that complained about people making money off their name because they put up advertising near their store were horribly greedy and would dismiss them out of hand. I don't understand why this obvious commonsense doesn't apply to the internet world.
Of course if the typo site uses lots of popups or annoying JS it's the real world equivalent of delibrately making it tough for the lost driver to get out of his wrong turn and this is why many typo sites have gotten a bad name. However, some typo sites even link to the real site and this clearly makes them a service.
It's like if you put up a billboard saying, "If you're looking for walmart turn around and take your first left. This helpful message brought to you by so and so the best such and such store you can find."
Yes many typo sites are bad citizens but I suspect this is just because the bad reputation attracts certain sorts of people and any difficulty getting reasonable non-annoying ads only makes this worse. Letting typo squaters use google ads means less horrible popuup/JS typo squaters
But it doesn't waste people's time. If the site doesn't have crazy popups or annoying JS it loads FASTER for me than waiting for the DNS to fail to resolve! Often these sites SAVE me time.
And if you are a good citizen and put a link to the real site on your typo site you DEFINATLY are doing a good service and saving people time.
Even technophobes can tell the difference between the bestbuy website and a website that has ADVERTISEMENTS for electronic stores. If they were actually running an electronics site on that typo name then it might be confusing.
This is like complaining that target shouldn't be able to build it's new store near the local walmart because some people trying to go to walmart might turn into the target parking lot instead and be confused about what store they were at. Maybe this has happened to some really stoned teenagers but it isn't a serious concern.
Sure some people might decide to follow the ad on the typo site instead of going to the real site but so what? Consumers benefit from having alternative options offered to them and it's no worse to put some non-annoying ads for competitors on a typo site than it is to buy a billboard ad on the exit ramp to your competitor's store. In both cases the greedy companies would like to prevent anyone from seeing other options/competitors ads but we shouldn't get taken in by their greed.
We all have issues with those typo sites that have 80 popups and run annoying javascript. But the regular run of the mill typo site that has a bunch of text/visual ads and looks nothing like the regular site really just provides a service. It takes a lot longer for firefox to determine that the domain can't be looked up than it does to display the typo site and this means I get to correct my mistake even faster.
Some typo sites even link to the real site in which case they are clearly providing a service. Just because they make some money on it doesn't make them evil. I would like it if all typo sites did this but even if they don't they are hardly a bad thing.
Typo squating is the internet equivalent of locating your store next to some high profile high traffic store. Sure, if you put your billboard or store next to walmart because you know lots of people are going to go there you are in some sense profiting from walmart's consumer brand but so what? In the physical world we recognize that it is a benefit to consumers to allow advertisements and stores next to popular stores (that way people have more choices and there is more competition) I don't see any difference in the internet world.
We would all recognize that a company which complained about it's competitors building a store nearby and profiting from their name brand was just being excessive and greedy I don't see any reason to think it is different in the internet world
Also the article (assuming it is the one linked from digg) reads like a fucking yahoo PR release. It lacks any attempt at balance as it doesn't even try to find anyone who doesn't think typo squatting is the internet equivalent of selling babies.
It seems the only people who are really in a position to either complain or approve of these changes (morally) are the astronauts themselves. If they think the risk is worth the benefit of getting to fly earlier well who are we to say that they aren't making the right deciscion?
I mean given how many safe flights the shuttle has made without the foam causing a problem, and given the extra in fight safety measures (cameras and stuff) that have been implemented it isn't clear that the foam is the biggest risk the astronauts face. Flying into space is a very risky, unsafe buisness especially on old equitment like the space shuttle. It would be a shame if the publicity of the previous disastor meant that we spent tons of money fixing the foam problem when the total risk could have been reduced more for the same money/time by fixing other safety issues.
It is a general problem that things we have seen cause disastors seem more dangerous than those that have yet to cause any problems. However, we should not let that emotional effect get in the way of making the best safety choices. If the next shuttle blows up because we insisted on reducing the foam risk to 0 rather than doing a cost benefit analysis then the blood of the astronauts is on the hands of everyone who flipped out about the foam but wasn't going to care about other safety issues. On the other hand if fixing the foam really does decrease the risk the most per unit of money/time we than we bad better focus on that. However, as laymen the only thing we can do is trust the experts and second guessing them risks doing more harm than good.
To be clear yes I realize that major responsible enviornmental groups favor wind energy even when it kills birds and will make other small choices like this one.
However, in less clear cut cases they usually choose not to antagonize their members/activists by dismissing concerns about habitat or extinction as less important than those about global warming or even other sorts of habitat.
Or to put it differently there is a fringe group of enviornmental activists who believe that the enviornment is more important than people and that we should entierly give up our modern style of living to save this enviornment. Also there are many small groups of activists who each have their own favorite cause/creature. As one might expect these organizations try to avoid antagonizing these core members by explicitly deprioritizing their concerns or praising projects which harm these causes but help more important goals.
This is a strategy that works great if you want to stay a vocal minority but if you want to go mainstream and convince Americans in general that enviornmentalism is a serious concern and global warming isn't just another fuzzy creature extinction (might be bad but isn't that big a deal) you need to create public confidence that you have similar values and priorities as they do and that means very publicly and explicitly prioritizing in this case.
Enviornmentalists Are Harming The Enviornment
on
Tilting At Windmills
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
This is just another example of a larger trend. Enviornmentalists and Enviornmental groups sabatoging enviornmental progress by insisting on perfection. By refusing to comprimise or to throw their weight behind the less damaging projects/praise those who implement them enviornmentalists sabatoge their own cause.
I mean consider this from the perspective of a company, or even country thinking of implementing some measures to minimize the enviornmental harm of their actions. If they know that they will still get bad press from the enviornmental lobby for the damage/harm they are still doing rather than praise for improving their act they have little incentive to improve. In fact making small steps which will be met with criticisms that they don't go far enough can actually make for worse publicity than doing nothing at all.
This is part of a greater refusal on the part of enviornmentalists to prioritize and to admit that enviornmental values, while important, need to trade off with human values. For instance by refusing to even consider (maybe it won't turn out to be worth it but it should be considered) nuclear power enviornmentalists guarantee that we will continue to use coal fired power plants and risk global warming. Sure it might be possible in theory to acheive this goal by all using our own solar panels and other solutions in practice this has a great deal of problems and people are resistant to this level of change. Only by favoring comprimise and slight improvement where politically possible can we get real progress.
Worse, by refusing to prioritize the enviornmental movement makes sure many people don't take them seriously. Go look at the pages of major enviornmental groups or read their newsletters. You see articles about the extinction of some fuzzy forest creature written in the same alarmist tone and message of impending disastor as the warnings about global warming. No wonder people don't take global warming as seriously as they should when implicitly the enviornmental groups put it at the same level as the sort of species extinction that has been occuring for years with limited impact.
If we want to get anything done the enviornmentalists groups need to buckle down and make some hard choices. They need to stop appearing to favor the enviornment over people and instead tell people why saving the enviornment is in people's best interest. Also they need to clearly prioritize and tell us that globabl warming is far more serious than threats to habitate and wildlife and praise projects that help prevent global warming EVEN IF THEY DESTROY HABITAT OR HARM SOME ANIMALS.
Employ tactics and/or technologies to prevent the full and complete delivery or display of advertisements on LiveJournal pages. These include, but are not limited to, the following:
1. Making journal style changes, customizations, or overrides that effectively block or substantially impair the display of advertisements on a Sponsored+ account's Content or other pages within the Service.
2. Employing and/or providing software programs, browser scripts, or other technologies that serve to block or substantially impair the display of advertisements on LiveJournal pages.
It is clear one thing this rule is aimed at is people changing their journal to block the ads on livejournal. This is perfectly reasonable and even slashdot doesn't let you foil their ads by posting cleverly formated comments on a story (not technically possible here I presume).
What is less clear is if this is intended to apply to people VIEWING livejournal content. After all you aren't even really acting as a livejournal user when you do this you are just reading someone's blog.
I think we just need to wait and see if this actually amounts to any changes or is just overbroad legal wording to cover their ass in unforseen circumstances. Remember there are all sorts of crazy conditions in some EULAs/TOS that don't necessarily amount to anything.
No, it sounds nothing at all like this research. Intel's research (in the paper you link and with the entire Itanium system) has been all about exposing the out of order execution and speculative execution capabilities of the processesers to the compiler. In other words the exact opposite of what AMD is supposedly doing here by hiding the dual core nature of the chip.
For what it's worth I think in the long run intel has the right answer the question is whether AMD can steal lots of market share in the short run before they run into a performance wall.
Isn't this exactly what intel did with the IA64 instruction set, i.e., the Itanium family. Added explicit support for simultaneous instruction execution?
Personally I'm still a big fan of this instruction set/system and feel it's a real shame that backward's compatibility/resistance to change has kept it out of the mainstream. I would dearly love the irony if AMD tried to introduce an Itanium like processor now.
Does anyone know where I can find more info on the sorts of options/features this storage enginge supports?
For that matter can anyone point me somewhere which describes the deliniation of responsibilities between generic MySQL code and the storage engines? In particular is MySQL just an SQL query parser/optimizer stuck on top of storage engines?
Clearly you agree that there was nothing non-obvious about the technical aspects of what TiVO did to someone skilled in the art of computer video. I mean this same technology has been seperatly developed tons of times so it would be pretty tough to argue this.
Thus at a minimum for you to be right it must not have occured to hundreds of EchoStar customers, 'hey wouldn't it be nice if I could record one program while watching another.' EchoStar could have not pursued it for any hundreds of reasons but I have a really hard time believing tons of people didn't think it would be nice to watch at the same time as they recorded.
Slashdot Mirror
Besides your argument would work against *any* privacy or procedural defense that protects drug dealers or child porn downloaders. The public knows quite well that requiring search warrants is letting lots of drug dealers and child porn viewers get away with it yet they tolerate this.
It is obvious to the public that if they let the phone companies turn over all their records to the police without a court order the police would better be able to arrest drug dealers and child pornographers. If your argument is valid how can these protections still exist? These protections are matters of law not constitutional interpratation (the supreme court has abjured any 4th ammendment protection for phone call meta-info) and could be voted down at any time yet they have not been (they have been ignored by Bush but this is a different matter and if any evidence from them was used in a prosecution it would probably be thrown out).
If all you mean is that this information would be subject to subpeona/search warrant then I agree this will probably happen. However, this makes the situation no worse than it is now. This information is already stored in phone company databases (at least the meta-info) and is already subject to subpeona/search warrant. I don't have a problem with information being used in a prosecution once probable cause has already been established and the equivalent of a search warrant is issued what is problematic is large scale fishing expeditions for crime and I think the US public at large is sucpiscious enough of this to support such a restriction. Pretty much everyone does something illegal and simple self-interest will keep such a bar in place if nothing else.
But the government already has these sorts of information barriers! The government isn't allowed to merely go trolling through tax returns to find out who is making money they shouldn't be (they can probably subpeona the returns once they already have probable cause but this is a different matter) and they really don't. Drug dealers can list on their income tax form income from other sources and pay tax on it without worrying this is going to tip the government off to them.
I believe there are other barriers of this form as well but the point is you are just factually wrong. Also the supreme court would prevent the use of phone call monitoring (not just meta-info) in court if the surveilance violated a reasonable expectation of privacy so their is a pretty hard limit on how far the government can use this information and there is a fruit of the posinous tree principle which would prevent them from using information collected because this sort of surveilance tipped them off as well.
Besides, if you think it is hopeless to believe the government will never abide by such a restriction why would you think they could ever abide by laws which prevent them from looking at the data in the first place? I mean sure there is a good argument to be made that they won't but in that case the situation is just hopeless so my solution is just as good as one that totally bans the government from looking at phone calls, they will both be overturned or ignored.
This is asking the wrong question. I know the rest of the slashdot crowd are big fans of privacy but I don't really care if my phone calls are monitored or who I call placed in a secure governmented database so long as this information is not used for law enforcement purposes. If congress wanted to give the NSA power to do massive pattern analysis on US phone calls I would be all for it if they banned any information collected from being turned over to law enforcement or used for prosecutions (we can stop terrorist attacks even if we can't prosecute the terrorists...though I might even support an exception to prosecute terrorism but I worry about a slippery slope with that).
However, I am absolutely furious with the Bush administration for conducting illegal surveilance in secret. I believe that Bush is probably not using this program for illicit political gain but his blatant disregard for the law creates a precedent that other presidents could use to intimidate political opponents like Hoover used to do and generally engage in lawless behavior. I think Bush ought to be impeached or at least censored for his lawless acts and then the congress ought to write provisions for large scale monitoring with appropriate safegaurds.
So asking if people are okay with the NSA spying on them is just the wrong question. Many people may feel like me that Bush's behavior is totally unacceptable but ultimatly it isn't problematic if the NSA searches phone records with appropriate safegaurds.
The article was pretty confusingly written so I can't be totally sure what is going on but i think this only sounds cool because we confuse the speed the actual photons travel and the speed the wave appears to travel.
It is perfectly possible to get *effects* from light that appear to travel at faster than the speed of light. Just take a flashlight in a super huge room and whip it around really fast. The spot of light on the wall may very well 'travel' faster than light but no actual photons traveled faster than light so this isn't a problem.
While this experiment is somewhat different I believe a similar confusion makes it sound way more interesting than it really is. In particular there are two different speeds one needs to talk about when you are talking about how fast light goes. There is the speed at which a crest of the wave advances and then there is the speed that a photon travels (probably some other ones too than I'm forgetting). I believe all this experiment is doing is making it so the crest of the wave appears to travel faster (or with negative speed?) than light even though all the photons in the light are not moving faster than light.
Thus it is a big analagous to the flashlight case where you have some effect (in this case the crest of the light wave) which appears to move faster than light even though no actual photons or information is really doing so.
To give an idea of how this could happen (though not the mechanism here) imagine a bunch of rods in a row like this:
_____ (time 0)
Now suppose we put activators under these rods to raise them at prearranged times. If we did this right we could get a 'wave' moving like this:
-______ (time 1)
--_____ (time 2)
_--____ (time 3)
__--___ (time 4)
Now if we timed the activators right we could make this 'wave' travel down the line arbitrarily fast (in principle even faster than the speed of light) even though no information or particle is actually being moved that fast.
While clearly the mechanism is different in this case I believe this is all that is happening. Namely the peak of electric field moves faster than light (or negative?) even though no real thing is doing so.
Look their are two possible scenarios we need to worry about.
In the first scenario we continue our impressive technological progress and civilization does not collapse. In this case simple messages in major world languages and records in other places around the country plus the radioactivity itself will be more than enough to pass this information on to a civilization unimagineably more technically adept than we are. Likely this civilization will have found a much better solution for radioactive disposal (or will just want to reprocess the waste) but even if not we can count on them to be better able to solve the problem of warning people away thatn we are.
In short if we expect civilization to continue to progress we don't need to make warnings that will last for more than 500 years and english will accomplish that.
On the other hand if civilization does collapse and humanity returns to primitive existance it seems a bit silly to worry about this radioactive waste. If societal collapse is a serious worry then we should be putting this effort into caching technology and information to help rebuild civilization not making sure future cave-men avoid cancer. The harm from radioactivity is bad and sucks but it doesn't even register compared to the harms and loss of lifespan from global collapse of civilization. Heck, while some people might die discovering the mysterious deadly waves might even help civilization to rediscover scientific knowledge.
Overall I think a lot of this buisness is just silly. Before going and wasting all this time trying to communicate the danger first figure out in what scenarios it will be important to do that and then ask if in those scenarios these sort of warnings really are the most productive thing we can do to help.
It's great people are doing something about battery pollution but it would be unfortunate if the law just said batteries need to be recylced rather than focusing on the problem. In particular the problem is that batteries usually contain toxic chemicals not that it is intrinsicly important to recycle anything that might transform chemical energy into electricity.
Hopefully their law just requires all batteries containing the problematic chemicals be recycled so in the future if someone creates a clean/biodegradable battery it won't be included.
Also they should still let companies make non-removeable batteries but only if these companies agree to take the whole device off the government's hand when the consumer throws it in the battery recycling box. Though perhaps seperating them from other batteries makes this too expensive.
First of all this is a totally bogus argument. It's like posting the text of the DMCA and arguing that google shouldn't be letting cryptographic researchers use adsense on their sites.
..and then it is usually just about stopping typo squatting not because they really want the name). In the case of typo squatting the companies are just complaining because on the way to their site the customer might see an ad for another site and decide to go their instead or they are just being greedily outraged that someone else could be making money on traffic they generated.
The fact that the big companies have influence in congress and can get their notion of IP passed into law doesn't make it right and it certainly doesn't make it google's responsibility to enforce that law.
Moreover, you are radically misinterpreting the text of that act you sited.
All of the conditions detailed in this legislation talk about things that DILUTE the trademark/IP of the person owning the original name or about people who cybersquat (register 'BestBuy.com' before Bestbuy does and try to extort money out of them for the name).
Typo squatters aren't cyber squatters or domain hijackers. The company usually doesn't even want the typo domain anyway (I know of almost no companies who bother to register misspellings
Most typo squatters have sites which aren't confusing in the slightest with the real site and hence aren't diluting the trademark or giving the real company a bad rap. Certainly not responsible typo squatters who link to the real site on their page.
On the internet domain names are the equivalent of places in the real world. The better analogy is just putting up a billboard next to the highly trafficed local McDonalds. If the page is obviously not the company/trademark the consumer was looking for it isn't even like naming your home and garden store MacDonald's but more like just advertising for it next to McDonalds.
I agree this is bad but it really has nothing to do with typo squatting. Unless of course you want to host your personal website at BistBuy.com. Sure there will occasionally be some overlap but what you are complaining about is domain hijacking not doing typo squatting.
I mean the people who are responsible for this are the registrars who should (maybe they have) implement a waiting period between when a domain name expires and when it can be bought up unless it is explicitly transfered.
The most responsible thing google could do is let responsible typo squatters use google ads but revoke the accounts of irresponsible ones thus giving an incentive for the typo squatters to be good corporate citizens.
Exactly! Except the part about how xyz.com can direct all the traffic to them if they want. After all the typo squatter does own the typo domains.
Basically big corporations are greedily demanding that people don't run into any other options or ads when trying to go to their site, even if this makes the typo apparent more quickly (takes a long time when the name doesn't resolve) and even if the responsible typo squatter provides a link to the real page.
It's the webbrowser who wins with responsible typo squatting and I can't believe so many people have been taken in by greedy companies PR. I mean lots of typo squatters are bad net citizens and use popups/JS but that is to a great extent BECAUSE so many people have bought into the idea that it is bad to be a typo squatter so the responsible people don't do it.
Uhh cybersquatting is different than typo squatting. Cybersquatting is about buying up domain names that are the names of legitimate companies or their products and then demanding the company buy the name off of them.
Typo squatting is about taking domains that are just typos and serving ads from them.
Since responsible typo squatters actually help me realize faster I typed things in wrong I find they provide a service, especially if they link to the correctly spelled site.
If anything it would be evil not to let responsible typo squatters use google ads as this would just encourage these squatters to use more annoying ads and remove any benefit for being a responsible typo squatter.
> Why is it that common sense and reality go out the window when a computer is involved (patent pending)?
I don't know maybe you could answer that for me. Remember typo squating is NOT about making a fake website to decieve people. That sort of thing is problematic but typo squatting is just about filling an website with ads and no one will confuse the site you meant to visit with the typo site (unless of course you regularly visit sites that look are obviously just front pages filled with ads).
Typo sites are just about capturing eyeballs for people who meant to go to a big name buisness. The real world equivalent to this is if lots of people in your town take the wrong turn on their way to walmart and someone puts up a billboard in the culdesac that many people accidently turn down. In the real world we would think a company that complained about people making money off their name because they put up advertising near their store were horribly greedy and would dismiss them out of hand. I don't understand why this obvious commonsense doesn't apply to the internet world.
Of course if the typo site uses lots of popups or annoying JS it's the real world equivalent of delibrately making it tough for the lost driver to get out of his wrong turn and this is why many typo sites have gotten a bad name. However, some typo sites even link to the real site and this clearly makes them a service.
It's like if you put up a billboard saying, "If you're looking for walmart turn around and take your first left. This helpful message brought to you by so and so the best such and such store you can find."
Yes many typo sites are bad citizens but I suspect this is just because the bad reputation attracts certain sorts of people and any difficulty getting reasonable non-annoying ads only makes this worse. Letting typo squaters use google ads means less horrible popuup/JS typo squaters
But it doesn't waste people's time. If the site doesn't have crazy popups or annoying JS it loads FASTER for me than waiting for the DNS to fail to resolve! Often these sites SAVE me time.
And if you are a good citizen and put a link to the real site on your typo site you DEFINATLY are doing a good service and saving people time.
As someone on digg pointed out bist buy is what happens if you use the wrong hand to type the e in best, same finger and position just different hand.
Uhh, no.
Even technophobes can tell the difference between the bestbuy website and a website that has ADVERTISEMENTS for electronic stores. If they were actually running an electronics site on that typo name then it might be confusing.
This is like complaining that target shouldn't be able to build it's new store near the local walmart because some people trying to go to walmart might turn into the target parking lot instead and be confused about what store they were at. Maybe this has happened to some really stoned teenagers but it isn't a serious concern.
Sure some people might decide to follow the ad on the typo site instead of going to the real site but so what? Consumers benefit from having alternative options offered to them and it's no worse to put some non-annoying ads for competitors on a typo site than it is to buy a billboard ad on the exit ramp to your competitor's store. In both cases the greedy companies would like to prevent anyone from seeing other options/competitors ads but we shouldn't get taken in by their greed.
We all have issues with those typo sites that have 80 popups and run annoying javascript. But the regular run of the mill typo site that has a bunch of text/visual ads and looks nothing like the regular site really just provides a service. It takes a lot longer for firefox to determine that the domain can't be looked up than it does to display the typo site and this means I get to correct my mistake even faster.
Some typo sites even link to the real site in which case they are clearly providing a service. Just because they make some money on it doesn't make them evil. I would like it if all typo sites did this but even if they don't they are hardly a bad thing.
Typo squating is the internet equivalent of locating your store next to some high profile high traffic store. Sure, if you put your billboard or store next to walmart because you know lots of people are going to go there you are in some sense profiting from walmart's consumer brand but so what? In the physical world we recognize that it is a benefit to consumers to allow advertisements and stores next to popular stores (that way people have more choices and there is more competition) I don't see any difference in the internet world.
We would all recognize that a company which complained about it's competitors building a store nearby and profiting from their name brand was just being excessive and greedy I don't see any reason to think it is different in the internet world
Also the article (assuming it is the one linked from digg) reads like a fucking yahoo PR release. It lacks any attempt at balance as it doesn't even try to find anyone who doesn't think typo squatting is the internet equivalent of selling babies.
It seems the only people who are really in a position to either complain or approve of these changes (morally) are the astronauts themselves. If they think the risk is worth the benefit of getting to fly earlier well who are we to say that they aren't making the right deciscion?
I mean given how many safe flights the shuttle has made without the foam causing a problem, and given the extra in fight safety measures (cameras and stuff) that have been implemented it isn't clear that the foam is the biggest risk the astronauts face. Flying into space is a very risky, unsafe buisness especially on old equitment like the space shuttle. It would be a shame if the publicity of the previous disastor meant that we spent tons of money fixing the foam problem when the total risk could have been reduced more for the same money/time by fixing other safety issues.
It is a general problem that things we have seen cause disastors seem more dangerous than those that have yet to cause any problems. However, we should not let that emotional effect get in the way of making the best safety choices. If the next shuttle blows up because we insisted on reducing the foam risk to 0 rather than doing a cost benefit analysis then the blood of the astronauts is on the hands of everyone who flipped out about the foam but wasn't going to care about other safety issues. On the other hand if fixing the foam really does decrease the risk the most per unit of money/time we than we bad better focus on that. However, as laymen the only thing we can do is trust the experts and second guessing them risks doing more harm than good.
To be clear yes I realize that major responsible enviornmental groups favor wind energy even when it kills birds and will make other small choices like this one.
However, in less clear cut cases they usually choose not to antagonize their members/activists by dismissing concerns about habitat or extinction as less important than those about global warming or even other sorts of habitat.
Or to put it differently there is a fringe group of enviornmental activists who believe that the enviornment is more important than people and that we should entierly give up our modern style of living to save this enviornment. Also there are many small groups of activists who each have their own favorite cause/creature. As one might expect these organizations try to avoid antagonizing these core members by explicitly deprioritizing their concerns or praising projects which harm these causes but help more important goals.
This is a strategy that works great if you want to stay a vocal minority but if you want to go mainstream and convince Americans in general that enviornmentalism is a serious concern and global warming isn't just another fuzzy creature extinction (might be bad but isn't that big a deal) you need to create public confidence that you have similar values and priorities as they do and that means very publicly and explicitly prioritizing in this case.
This is just another example of a larger trend. Enviornmentalists and Enviornmental groups sabatoging enviornmental progress by insisting on perfection. By refusing to comprimise or to throw their weight behind the less damaging projects/praise those who implement them enviornmentalists sabatoge their own cause.
I mean consider this from the perspective of a company, or even country thinking of implementing some measures to minimize the enviornmental harm of their actions. If they know that they will still get bad press from the enviornmental lobby for the damage/harm they are still doing rather than praise for improving their act they have little incentive to improve. In fact making small steps which will be met with criticisms that they don't go far enough can actually make for worse publicity than doing nothing at all.
This is part of a greater refusal on the part of enviornmentalists to prioritize and to admit that enviornmental values, while important, need to trade off with human values. For instance by refusing to even consider (maybe it won't turn out to be worth it but it should be considered) nuclear power enviornmentalists guarantee that we will continue to use coal fired power plants and risk global warming. Sure it might be possible in theory to acheive this goal by all using our own solar panels and other solutions in practice this has a great deal of problems and people are resistant to this level of change. Only by favoring comprimise and slight improvement where politically possible can we get real progress.
Worse, by refusing to prioritize the enviornmental movement makes sure many people don't take them seriously. Go look at the pages of major enviornmental groups or read their newsletters. You see articles about the extinction of some fuzzy forest creature written in the same alarmist tone and message of impending disastor as the warnings about global warming. No wonder people don't take global warming as seriously as they should when implicitly the enviornmental groups put it at the same level as the sort of species extinction that has been occuring for years with limited impact.
If we want to get anything done the enviornmentalists groups need to buckle down and make some hard choices. They need to stop appearing to favor the enviornment over people and instead tell people why saving the enviornment is in people's best interest. Also they need to clearly prioritize and tell us that globabl warming is far more serious than threats to habitate and wildlife and praise projects that help prevent global warming EVEN IF THEY DESTROY HABITAT OR HARM SOME ANIMALS.
It is clear one thing this rule is aimed at is people changing their journal to block the ads on livejournal. This is perfectly reasonable and even slashdot doesn't let you foil their ads by posting cleverly formated comments on a story (not technically possible here I presume).
What is less clear is if this is intended to apply to people VIEWING livejournal content. After all you aren't even really acting as a livejournal user when you do this you are just reading someone's blog.
I think we just need to wait and see if this actually amounts to any changes or is just overbroad legal wording to cover their ass in unforseen circumstances. Remember there are all sorts of crazy conditions in some EULAs/TOS that don't necessarily amount to anything.
Mod up!
This is the most plausible explanation offered so far. At least it makes sense.
No, it sounds nothing at all like this research. Intel's research (in the paper you link and with the entire Itanium system) has been all about exposing the out of order execution and speculative execution capabilities of the processesers to the compiler. In other words the exact opposite of what AMD is supposedly doing here by hiding the dual core nature of the chip.
For what it's worth I think in the long run intel has the right answer the question is whether AMD can steal lots of market share in the short run before they run into a performance wall.
Isn't this exactly what intel did with the IA64 instruction set, i.e., the Itanium family. Added explicit support for simultaneous instruction execution?
Personally I'm still a big fan of this instruction set/system and feel it's a real shame that backward's compatibility/resistance to change has kept it out of the mainstream. I would dearly love the irony if AMD tried to introduce an Itanium like processor now.
I meant skip as in FFW. I have a TiVO and wish it could skip but my wording was confusing.
Does anyone know where I can find more info on the sorts of options/features this storage enginge supports?
For that matter can anyone point me somewhere which describes the deliniation of responsibilities between generic MySQL code and the storage engines? In particular is MySQL just an SQL query parser/optimizer stuck on top of storage engines?
Or let me put the argument differntly.
Clearly you agree that there was nothing non-obvious about the technical aspects of what TiVO did to someone skilled in the art of computer video. I mean this same technology has been seperatly developed tons of times so it would be pretty tough to argue this.
Thus at a minimum for you to be right it must not have occured to hundreds of EchoStar customers, 'hey wouldn't it be nice if I could record one program while watching another.' EchoStar could have not pursued it for any hundreds of reasons but I have a really hard time believing tons of people didn't think it would be nice to watch at the same time as they recorded.