Does that mean the next january which will occur or the next one after 'this' january. The first seems way too soon (three months!).
God I hate this particular phrase. It confuses me almost every time. I wish we had some clearer system where we would just say a number before the month/day to indicate how many away it was for small numbers. So instead of next january meaning the first january after this we could say 'the first january' and the next one would be 'the second january'.
So could someone please reply and tell me which it is. Also wouldn't hurt to add it in the story.
So I looked through the links and while one of the discoverers made it quite clear that the LAME code is not being used as data (never refereced). However, it was unclear to me if that was true for the DVD Jon code.
I mean the DVD john code seems like exactly the sort of thing one might want to search for on someone's computer to stop pirating. If indeed it is used only to identify the code it may be covered under fair use. It's an interesting legal question that I vaguely remember came up in virus/worm/spyware cases. Namely can a malware writter use some kind of simple code modification method to foul up simple hashes and then insist his copyright prevents anti-virus manufacturers from including large enough parts of the malware code to accurately detect it.
It might not be pleasent but if it's fair for the good guys to use code under fair use for detection then the bad guys get to do it as well.
Which reminds me I don't even remember the legal status of this DVD Jon code in the US. Is it illegal under the DMCA? Does this deny it copyright protection or a different measure.
So what if people don't learn the old classics. Quite frankly they aren't of great relevance to modern life and for most kids being forced to read them encourages a dislike of literature and reading.
High Literature is a type of art that appeals to a certain small class of people. This is great and fine for them but there is little reason to inflict it on those who don't enjoy it.
Ultimately the reasons given for reading literature simply don't apply to forcing great literature on unappreciative audiences. The reason we read literature rather than just essays is that it should entertain as it teaches. If the audience doesn't appreciate it then it fails at this task.
Reading literature under duress just generates resentment and dislike it doesn't encourage a lifelong love of literature. We would be better off choosing books that had action and other aspects the students liked but combined this with sophisticated issues and interesting questions. There is no objective reason Ender's game isn't just as appropriate to teach in class as Shakespeare and the students will like it way more.
Making students remember quotes is just dumb and if literature is taught well the students will *want* to read the books and notes or little helpers won't be relevant. If the book needs outside help or encourages the use of cliff notes then something is wrong with the course or the book isn't appropriate for the audience.
That is actually one of the most heartening things I have heard in a long time. The only thing that will make people sit up and do something about the increasingly troubling grip of corporate intellectual property on our society.
A future where IP eventually stops progress and would ultimately then be reformed sounds far better than one where we are insidiously subject to more and more control with corporations deciding not to give us internet porn and other disruptive and disliked social changes.
Yes, this is exactly my point. It isn't some fanatical demand that the entire stack be open source rather a more modest demand that the entire stack not be built with closed source in mind.
I simply dispute the idea that open source software doesn't get respect unless it is part of a 100% open stack. There seem to be a good number of projects aimed specifically at OS X and apple products despite the fact that large parts of OS X are not open source.
I think what is really going on has less to do with open source vs. non-open source but more with the type of culture the operating system encourages. Quite simply windows does not encourage a hacker friendly culture while OS X and other operating systems do. Of course all open source systems encourages this hacker friendly atmosphere because they are written by hackers and their success depends on attracting new contributers. If MS did everything though open standards and hacker friendly rather than commercially friendly architecture I suspect they would recieve alot more respect from the OSS community even if they kept their underlying kernel and other code closed.
I don't know about anyone else but I think I would prefer to be disembowled rather than pinned with a claw. Sure disembowling is visually shocking and likely doesn't feel to pleasent it sounds a damn sight better than benning held pinned with a sharp claw while being eaten.
I mean have you ever seen a cat play with a mouse? It isn't always a quick death. Also if the example of big cats is any guide it doesn't mean it couldn't take down bigger animals either.
My short summary is as follows. I think the best way to see TLDs is as a division of internet locations into categories so you can have two 'apples' so long as they are in different categories. Just as with any good directory adding too many categories can make things just as confusing as having too few. In the extreme case where you have unlimited categories and no unifying principle about how they are used you might as well not have any categories at all and just look at all the information directly. Thus the problems with adding a tld.gover in addition to.gov is the same as adding a yahoo category govern as well as government. The extra choice gives little benefit and provides much confusion.
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t seems obvious that there are hundreds of other people who use the word "apple" to describe something important enough to have a phone number OR a website, all with equal rights to that word. my point, why should there only be a handful of possible apple websites?.com,.net,.org,.info, etc? there should be hundreds of possibilities as there are hundreds of apples out there. my favorite apple site is not everyone else's.
Sure there should be hundreds of sites about apples in some sense or another. However, it is absolutely necessery that we have some unique way to refer to websites just as it is necessery for buisnesses to have unique phone numbers. It would be a disastor if we had more than one buisness at 555-0101 and the same point applies to domain names. Domain names are more analagous to phone numbers than they are to the phonebook system (though neither is perfect).
Hence it is absolutely necessary that there be exactly one location per fully qualified domain name, i.e., only one company should be at apple.com. Given this restriction I don't see the point of your argument. Whatever you do you can't give someone else another apple.com. You could give them apple.new but they could take fredsapple.com right now. As you observe later people often overestimate the significance of the tld part of the domain name (though it isn't entierly the same). Given this point of view how can you complain there is only one apple.com (or five apple.???) when there are plenty of ?????apple???.
Ultimately though to think the DNS system should help you find buisnesses named apple or apple related products is to misapprehend the point of the DNS system. It is to *remember* and *communicate* this address once found. Search engines are what you use to find the site. If some people can find the site just using DNS that is an extra benefit but hardly the point.
there isn't any "quick and easy" way to find anything within ANY sizable informational database.... obviously, as the size of a database grows, so does the complexity of data retrieval. but it isn't too bad if you have a logical, yet user-friendly method to extract information... we need to be innovative and allow more complexity (unlimited tlds, non-english domain names, ipv6) in order to enrich the internet for everyone. yeah, so you have to remember two or three words instead of one to find your favorite website.
Once again the DNS system is not a method for finding information it is one for remembering and communicating the general location of that information once found. Search enginges do the data retrieval and search.
Still you are right that the complexity of remembering domain names is likely to increase as the number of names increases. Once you have more sites either some sites need to start using more obscure names or you need to remember more categories. Also you are right we need some good system to help us organize this data.
Unlimited tlds are the exact opposite of organization. Having unlimited tlds is really not much different than
As I mentioned in an earlier post I agree with most of what Oram said in his article. I had one quibble about the solution for tlds but aside from that everything he said was correct. However, what he didn't say is even more important.
It isn't just commercial interests that make domain names such a hot topic. DNS is the only possibility for control and management of the internet and that makes governments all excited, especially totalitarian regimes and other countries who aren't big fans of free expression. Sure the internet itself may make complete censorship very difficult but control over the domain name system can make certain types of information practically impossible to access.
For instance imagine a body running the DNS system which decides to crack down on hate speech. They could deny a domain name to every site hosting hate speech (or if they wanted to go really hard core every site linking to hate speech by IP). Search enginge domain names are very valuable and a great deal of pressure could be exerted on google by threatening to take away google.com and give it to someone who promised not to link to offensive material.
While I'm not a big fan of hate speech I do think it is a great mistake to ban it. I think the suppression of racist speech in germany has only given neo-nazis an air of danger and mystery and spread the movement. Since many countries other than the US have laws against hate speech it is quite plausible a UN body might enforce such a scheme if they got control over the internet. Even more disturbingly is that a large number of countries would likely push to expand the definition of hate speech to anything which is sufficently critical of islam.
On the corporate front giving control of DNS to some UN body removes the first ammendment protections for parody and commentary from play. Right now there is some (minimal) legal protection for things like McDonalds-sucks. If it was run by a UN body it would not only remove the legal hurdles preventing the administration in the US (and other countries) from giving in to the corps but also make it so distant from voters that politicians could avoid any serious political harm from giving in (it wasn't me it was the global community).
Most ditrubingly is the fact that many of the biggest pushers for UN control over the internet are also countries with large censorship agenda's like china, iran and others (brazil is an exception). While a full on censorship scheme like I describe above is unlikely to be used against talk about democracy it could be against pornography. More likely, however, is that these countries will push to create a mechanism for per country censorship of domain names, e.g., DNS records will be required to include information about the type of content to allow easier censorship of their populations.
Don't get me wrong ICANN is far from perfect but it is mostly incompetant and a bit corporate influenced which is a lot better than some of the possible alternatives. US record on free speech is also spotted, but then again so are most countries records, and the US has some of the best protections for speech the majority finds disagreeable. Moreover, I think DNS administration is safer in any western democracy than in some intergovernmental body where everyone can deny responsibility. I would rather just give the DNS system to england or germany than share it.
I agree with most things that Oram says in this article. I have one quibble and one major disagreement I will put in another post.
The quibble is that freeing up more tlds won't necessarily solve the scarcity of good domain names. If done incorrectly it could even make the problem worse.
The point of domain names is to provide a quick and easy way to remember and communicate internet locations. So long as tlds categorize sites into content relevant categories they do work to relieve the demand for domain names. For instance if you want to go to fuckedchicks (made up) your favorite porn cite remembering that it is in.xxx (assuming it gets popular) is of no difficulty since it is easily connected with important facts you already remember about the site. On the other hand when tlds don't have much to do with content adding more of them can have a negative effect. If you know your favorite blog is computationaltruth.???/blog/ knowing the content or other facts about the site hardly helps you distingush between net, org and com. Since most people and all corporations want to achieve easy memorability when there is no obvious content (or other already known information) based discrimination more tlds can either just increase the confusion encouraging corporations to buy CORPNAME.* for all possible options. Worse too many tlds means some may fade into obscurity and fads keep the 'good' names just as scarce.
Or to put it another way too many non-content related tlds make all domains harder to remember and hence don't solve the problem but just spread out the pain by making every name slightly worse.
So far it seems that the country codes (and perhaps some even smaller geographic codes) are good (in the sense above) tlds as are the.xxx,.edu and.gov. Org and Com and Net are necessery general purpose names but that model shouldn't be followed with things like.biz which just sow confusion (is that a.com or a.biz)? The important question is whether there are enough good new content related tlds and that is something I don't know.
I think one of the main premises in the story is just outright wrong. The idea that windows requires more sophistication to use than Mac just doesn't cut it. Is it easier to use OS X than windows? Well quite likely if for no other reason than the UI is more consistant.
However, this has nothing to do with any sophistication required. It isn't that one needs more computer sophistication to use windows. It is just harder for everyone to use because the UI isn't as well thought out. Unlike other problems with windows this isn't really MS's fault. OS X started from the ground up quite recently and got to learn from all the problems with windows while windows needed to cater to the huge installed base.
Finally while this question of bias may be an interesting one to look into one shouldn't jump to conclusions. It *could* be that journalists are biased towards apple for cultural reasons. Alternatively if *could* be that apple really is better and it is everyone else who is uninformed. We need more than this to decide the issue.
Yes, you can make a publicly availible document on which each voter can verify their vote is present. Of course you are correct voters cannot verify that other ballots are not falsified but this is no worse than with paper ballets. Heck in a paper system you can't even verify that your ballot was counted. In fact my understanding is that you can design such a system to require the collaboration of many more officials to create fake ballots than in the normal system.
Do a google search on holomorphic encryption and voting I don't remember all the details.
What you do is create an encryption system where each vote is encrypted and then the entire list is published online. With the correct form of encryption (well it is closer to secret sharing) you can make sure that everyone can verify that the end result is indeed the result of counting all the individual votes and each voter can verify that indeed his individual vote is on the list but no voter can figure out how anyone else voted.
Despite the concerns with fraud I think a system like Estonias could be much safer than regular voting. By requiring the use of smart cards and computer readers they avoid much of the problems that people worry about with internet voting. With a good challenge response protocol and a secure smart-card design the system could really verify that whoever was voting did posess the smart card. Of course smart cards can be stolen but if you include a password or other personal question you can make that difficult.
Of course the system is still far from perfect. One lacks the accountability of having paper ballots. However, this can be addressed by using various forms of holomorphic encryption which allow voting systems which can only be faked by the collaboration of very large numbers of individuals. Groups big enough that they could fake a normal election as well.
I think the more interesting question is whether it is good to make voting really easy. Most people naively assume that democracy is better when more people vote. This is not obviously true. By making voting slightly difficult you make sure a vote not only reflects a preference but a preference of a certain minimal strength.
Consider for instance a country where 100% of people vote 49% of voters are strongly liberal 51% are strongly conservative. In such a country the conservative politician has no incentive to take a moderate approach and can be elected by just appealing to the 51% who might vote for him. In this country that 49% of the population has NO INPUT on the presidents policy.
On the other hand suppose that a country has the same political breakdown but usually only 50% of people bother to vote. Now if that same conservative politician takes extreme positions which piss off the liberals he might drive ther turnout rate up and actually lose the race. Counterintuitively lower voter participation could actually make for a more responsive democratic process.
It seems there are certain advantages to making voting minimally difficult. Easy enough that everyone can do it but just hard enough that those who don't really care don't bother. So do we really want internet voting?
No wonder modern society hasn't gotten much happier when we tacitly accept attitudes like this (quoted from the article):
But ordinary people believe they are happier than average (an obvious impossibility) and that they'll be even happier in 10 years' time. If true, it would be good news because research shows that happier people are healthier, more successful, harder-working, caring and more socially engaged. Misery makes people self-obsessed and inactive.
Happiness is supposed to be good because it makes us more succesfull, harder working and engaged? What the hell? That is totally backwards. IWe should only be working harders, and being socially engaged if it makes us happy not the other way around! What the hell is the point of turning out widgets for their own sake?
If only we could get over this puritanical ethic that tells us it is wrong to aim for enjoyment, in general not just selfishly for ourselves, I think we would be alot happier. For instance by focusing government programs on what made people the most satisfied rather than work the hardest and produce the most we could probably make this country alot more of a pleasent place to live but as long as the goal is just making more crap we will likely acheive that goal while making ourselves more miserable.
While in principle the idea that an international body should control an international resource seems to be a good one I am cautious about the pragmatic realities of an international body doing this. In particular I worry about DNS and IP assignment policies being used to suppress certain kinds of free speech.
Even other western democracies have much less protection of free speech. Germany prevents racist speech as do many other countries. Will domain names be denied to people with racist propoganda? If this is a UN controlled organization will the generally assembelly have power over it? Could the many islamic nations ban together to prevent anti-islamic websites being given domain names?
I know some of you will object and say the US isn't perfect in terms of free speech and cite examples like the DMCA and various federal wiretap laws. My response is severalfold, first it is important to distingush privacy concerns from free speech concerns and I think the later are much more important than the other. Secondly while the US doesn't extend free speech rights as far as I would like in terms of copyright type information this is still commercial speech not personal/political speech. I mean can you really deny that it is more important to be able to make political or religious statements than ones about how to hack an xbox? Moreover, the problem with the DMCA type laws is that they are spreading so moving it out of the US gains no benefit.
Ultimately because so much of the infrastructure is already in the US the internet is already at the mercy of the US government and giving another body power only increases the number of people who can censor it. Moreover while the US isn't perfect it does seem to have one of the strongest protections of free speech in the face of majority oppossition.
Alright it is a temporary effect. Well the recent long term studies of MJ use indicate that no effect on IQ is observed after a month of sobriety even for heavy smokers over decades.
Alright, I agree this doesn't make this study good science but that is no reason to promulgate false impressions about weed. I mean this is exactly the sort of dangerously subliminal effect which can create a widespread belief in a falsehood. If slashdot posted a study saying weed caused loss of IQ people would at least critically evaluate it but by introducing it in the background while you debunk another study as false gives the impression of being a generally accepted fact.
Grr...why do people never actually read the snopes discussion and just blindly rely on the 'true/false' distinction. Often that is quite misleading.
If you read the snopes discussion it says that some hotels might do this but they have recieved no evidence this is true. Well this sounds like some evidence to me.
Basically snopes is responding to an over-sensationalized urban legend not taking a position that this is somehow impossible. While they do offer the analysis that they see no reason why the hotel would put personal information on the cards things have changed since then.
As one poster commented on the article it is quite likely that the hotels want to enable purchases with your key cards but don't have a fully integrated IT solution which can access the card database.
Just because some rumor was false once doesn't mean it can't become true!
No, you couldn't wipe out half the computers on the internet. Just like with real viruses there is a trade off between how infectious you can be and how damageing you can be. If you kill the host it can't keep spreading your payload.
Perhaps I wasn't clear on this point. I agree completely that the metaphor works and is probably the best metaphor possible. My point is that for fairly simple (in function not necessarily technology) tools/interfaces a metaphor is merely a way to make adult users of the old technology familiar with the new. Hence my comment that if their goal was mass market adoption or even immediate understanding by adults of the function/usefullness of the item this is the right way to design something. If, on the other hand, their goal is to create new ways and ideas for interacting with technology a metaphor like this merely inhibits the types of applications people think to use the technology with.
I mean the situation really is alot similar to putting reins on early cars. It was a great metaphor. It communicated perfectly to users what this interface was meant to accomplish, namely it steered your means of transportation. However, a car is not a horse and a I/O brush is not a brush and what is the best interface for one is not necessarily the best for the other.
And if you had read the comment instead of just being offended you might have noticed that I do think the project is a good idea created by smart people. I merely think the interface is silly.
Had you cared to even briefly consider my comment you might have noticed that my point is exactly that many intelligent and innovative inventors nevertheless assume new technology will be interacted with in the same was as old technology.
Perhaps had you been interested in responding intelligently instead of just being an ass you would have made sure the academic paper you linked made substantive comments refuting what I said. Yes they provide a good argument that the contact surface should be soft rather than hard like a light pen and I agree. However the only thing even resembeling an argument as to why this means it should *look* or *feel* like a brush is that a brush was that a brush was one of the few (perhaps only) existing tools which we let touch our bodies.
Now perhaps had you cared to think about my argument it would have occured to you that this actually supports my position. Namely that rather than an analysis of what kind of new interface might be appropriate they assume that they must pick from already existing interfaces. Of course I could be wrong and they may have considered this issue and have compelling arguments against it. However, if you are going to be an ass and arrogantly critisize someone for ignoring evidence you ought to at least first make sure you understand what they are saying and aren't posting evidence that supports their position.
I mean couldn't you at least take the 5 minutes to figure out what someone is saying, especially when they make specific disclaimers telling you they aren't disparaging the overall project, before making a nasty response?
Sounds really fucking annoying. Can you imagine any time you need to scan a page or text an alarm sounds. Either it won't be loud enough to alert people across a bookstore (and what will they do if they are alerted?) or it will be loud enough to annoy nearby persons and make even legitamate uses (say in a buisness meeting recording documents passed around) problematic.
How long do you think it will be before a competitor cellphone company comes out with a phone with the feature or just 'oversight' which allows this to be easily disabled?
Besides the entire idea is really stupid. Clicking to get one page of text is hardly the big scary threat that publishing companies need to be wary about. If the magazine is good enough to buy in the first place it will have many interesting articles and that will be too annoying to scan in a bookstore for a couple dollars.
I mean be realistic here plenty of people buy text copies just because they don't like reading online. The real problem that faces paper publishers is the rise of e-readers and the same threat that faces the music industry.
Yes, I agree that if your goal is to make adults feel immediatly comfortable with something and quickly understand what it is good for a brush metaphor is best. However, it is a different thing to say that a metaphor communicates what something does and what it is good for/how to use it. The brush metaphore doesn't communicate what this device does; it would be a bad idea to try to paint your wall with this or dip it in real paint. You still have to explain what the device does explicitly as slashdot did in the story description (though not necessarily as technically). Just as with the computer desktop or any other control metaphor the point is to give people familiar with the old technology an immediate idea what this device is good for and how they should relate to it.
I agree that it takes a long time to develop a good interface (though I think the basic car interface: steering wheel, gas, break is essentially fixed and will only change again when people no longer manually control the car). However, I think this process is only prolonged by developers telling people how they should think of and relate to a device by using a metaphor of some existing technology. Children are certainly more immune to this implied instruction about what you should and shouldn't use this technology for but I don't know if they are completely.
I mean if your goal was to do UI research and figure out how people used the device the last thing you would want to do is prejudge the issue for them by packaging it just like some other technology.
Still, I suppose it is probably a necessery evil to get funding and potentially have the technology picked up by other adults. Trying to explain you made a stick with a camera in it is probably not going to get you anywhere near the immediate understanding of the benefits of your project as making it a paint brush will. Still, even if it isn't the case here I definatly think adults often impede children by supposing they need the same sort of familiar clues adults do.
Well prototype/research versions often need to be much larger than a mass market product as you have to combine general components rather than creating an integrated version through dedicated manufacturing/lithography.
In any case while it does sound like lots of fun, and it could be great for doing studies of real objects (copy the color directly) I don't know (I'm genuienly unsure) if it would really be better at color picking in general. I mean are you really able to find color alot better in the real world than by looking at swatches on the computer (perhaps you are I'm curious).
Slashdot Mirror
Does that mean the next january which will occur or the next one after 'this' january. The first seems way too soon (three months!).
God I hate this particular phrase. It confuses me almost every time. I wish we had some clearer system where we would just say a number before the month/day to indicate how many away it was for small numbers. So instead of next january meaning the first january after this we could say 'the first january' and the next one would be 'the second january'.
So could someone please reply and tell me which it is. Also wouldn't hurt to add it in the story.
So I looked through the links and while one of the discoverers made it quite clear that the LAME code is not being used as data (never refereced). However, it was unclear to me if that was true for the DVD Jon code.
I mean the DVD john code seems like exactly the sort of thing one might want to search for on someone's computer to stop pirating. If indeed it is used only to identify the code it may be covered under fair use. It's an interesting legal question that I vaguely remember came up in virus/worm/spyware cases. Namely can a malware writter use some kind of simple code modification method to foul up simple hashes and then insist his copyright prevents anti-virus manufacturers from including large enough parts of the malware code to accurately detect it.
It might not be pleasent but if it's fair for the good guys to use code under fair use for detection then the bad guys get to do it as well.
Which reminds me I don't even remember the legal status of this DVD Jon code in the US. Is it illegal under the DMCA? Does this deny it copyright protection or a different measure.
So what if people don't learn the old classics. Quite frankly they aren't of great relevance to modern life and for most kids being forced to read them encourages a dislike of literature and reading.
High Literature is a type of art that appeals to a certain small class of people. This is great and fine for them but there is little reason to inflict it on those who don't enjoy it.
Ultimately the reasons given for reading literature simply don't apply to forcing great literature on unappreciative audiences. The reason we read literature rather than just essays is that it should entertain as it teaches. If the audience doesn't appreciate it then it fails at this task.
Reading literature under duress just generates resentment and dislike it doesn't encourage a lifelong love of literature. We would be better off choosing books that had action and other aspects the students liked but combined this with sophisticated issues and interesting questions. There is no objective reason Ender's game isn't just as appropriate to teach in class as Shakespeare and the students will like it way more.
Making students remember quotes is just dumb and if literature is taught well the students will *want* to read the books and notes or little helpers won't be relevant. If the book needs outside help or encourages the use of cliff notes then something is wrong with the course or the book isn't appropriate for the audience.
That is actually one of the most heartening things I have heard in a long time. The only thing that will make people sit up and do something about the increasingly troubling grip of corporate intellectual property on our society.
A future where IP eventually stops progress and would ultimately then be reformed sounds far better than one where we are insidiously subject to more and more control with corporations deciding not to give us internet porn and other disruptive and disliked social changes.
Yes, this is exactly my point. It isn't some fanatical demand that the entire stack be open source rather a more modest demand that the entire stack not be built with closed source in mind.
I simply dispute the idea that open source software doesn't get respect unless it is part of a 100% open stack. There seem to be a good number of projects aimed specifically at OS X and apple products despite the fact that large parts of OS X are not open source.
I think what is really going on has less to do with open source vs. non-open source but more with the type of culture the operating system encourages. Quite simply windows does not encourage a hacker friendly culture while OS X and other operating systems do. Of course all open source systems encourages this hacker friendly atmosphere because they are written by hackers and their success depends on attracting new contributers. If MS did everything though open standards and hacker friendly rather than commercially friendly architecture I suspect they would recieve alot more respect from the OSS community even if they kept their underlying kernel and other code closed.
I don't know about anyone else but I think I would prefer to be disembowled rather than pinned with a claw. Sure disembowling is visually shocking and likely doesn't feel to pleasent it sounds a damn sight better than benning held pinned with a sharp claw while being eaten.
I mean have you ever seen a cat play with a mouse? It isn't always a quick death. Also if the example of big cats is any guide it doesn't mean it couldn't take down bigger animals either.
My short summary is as follows. I think the best way to see TLDs is as a division of internet locations into categories so you can have two 'apples' so long as they are in different categories. Just as with any good directory adding too many categories can make things just as confusing as having too few. In the extreme case where you have unlimited categories and no unifying principle about how they are used you might as well not have any categories at all and just look at all the information directly. Thus the problems with adding a tld
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Sure there should be hundreds of sites about apples in some sense or another. However, it is absolutely necessery that we have some unique way to refer to websites just as it is necessery for buisnesses to have unique phone numbers. It would be a disastor if we had more than one buisness at 555-0101 and the same point applies to domain names. Domain names are more analagous to phone numbers than they are to the phonebook system (though neither is perfect).
Hence it is absolutely necessary that there be exactly one location per fully qualified domain name, i.e., only one company should be at apple.com. Given this restriction I don't see the point of your argument. Whatever you do you can't give someone else another apple.com. You could give them apple.new but they could take fredsapple.com right now. As you observe later people often overestimate the significance of the tld part of the domain name (though it isn't entierly the same). Given this point of view how can you complain there is only one apple.com (or five apple.???) when there are plenty of ?????apple???.
Ultimately though to think the DNS system should help you find buisnesses named apple or apple related products is to misapprehend the point of the DNS system. It is to *remember* and *communicate* this address once found. Search engines are what you use to find the site. If some people can find the site just using DNS that is an extra benefit but hardly the point.
Once again the DNS system is not a method for finding information it is one for remembering and communicating the general location of that information once found. Search enginges do the data retrieval and search.
Still you are right that the complexity of remembering domain names is likely to increase as the number of names increases. Once you have more sites either some sites need to start using more obscure names or you need to remember more categories. Also you are right we need some good system to help us organize this data.
Unlimited tlds are the exact opposite of organization. Having unlimited tlds is really not much different than
I didn't say it wasn't taken just that I made it up, i.e., it isn't a site I actually know and visit.
As I mentioned in an earlier post I agree with most of what Oram said in his article. I had one quibble about the solution for tlds but aside from that everything he said was correct. However, what he didn't say is even more important.
It isn't just commercial interests that make domain names such a hot topic. DNS is the only possibility for control and management of the internet and that makes governments all excited, especially totalitarian regimes and other countries who aren't big fans of free expression. Sure the internet itself may make complete censorship very difficult but control over the domain name system can make certain types of information practically impossible to access.
For instance imagine a body running the DNS system which decides to crack down on hate speech. They could deny a domain name to every site hosting hate speech (or if they wanted to go really hard core every site linking to hate speech by IP). Search enginge domain names are very valuable and a great deal of pressure could be exerted on google by threatening to take away google.com and give it to someone who promised not to link to offensive material.
While I'm not a big fan of hate speech I do think it is a great mistake to ban it. I think the suppression of racist speech in germany has only given neo-nazis an air of danger and mystery and spread the movement. Since many countries other than the US have laws against hate speech it is quite plausible a UN body might enforce such a scheme if they got control over the internet. Even more disturbingly is that a large number of countries would likely push to expand the definition of hate speech to anything which is sufficently critical of islam.
On the corporate front giving control of DNS to some UN body removes the first ammendment protections for parody and commentary from play. Right now there is some (minimal) legal protection for things like McDonalds-sucks. If it was run by a UN body it would not only remove the legal hurdles preventing the administration in the US (and other countries) from giving in to the corps but also make it so distant from voters that politicians could avoid any serious political harm from giving in (it wasn't me it was the global community).
Most ditrubingly is the fact that many of the biggest pushers for UN control over the internet are also countries with large censorship agenda's like china, iran and others (brazil is an exception). While a full on censorship scheme like I describe above is unlikely to be used against talk about democracy it could be against pornography. More likely, however, is that these countries will push to create a mechanism for per country censorship of domain names, e.g., DNS records will be required to include information about the type of content to allow easier censorship of their populations.
You can find analysis on my part and more facts/links .
Don't get me wrong ICANN is far from perfect but it is mostly incompetant and a bit corporate influenced which is a lot better than some of the possible alternatives. US record on free speech is also spotted, but then again so are most countries records, and the US has some of the best protections for speech the majority finds disagreeable. Moreover, I think DNS administration is safer in any western democracy than in some intergovernmental body where everyone can deny responsibility. I would rather just give the DNS system to england or germany than share it.
I agree with most things that Oram says in this article. I have one quibble and one major disagreement I will put in another post.
.xxx (assuming it gets popular) is of no difficulty since it is easily connected with important facts you already remember about the site. On the other hand when tlds don't have much to do with content adding more of them can have a negative effect. If you know your favorite blog is computationaltruth.???/blog/ knowing the content or other facts about the site hardly helps you distingush between net, org and com. Since most people and all corporations want to achieve easy memorability when there is no obvious content (or other already known information) based discrimination more tlds can either just increase the confusion encouraging corporations to buy CORPNAME.* for all possible options. Worse too many tlds means some may fade into obscurity and fads keep the 'good' names just as scarce.
.xxx, .edu and .gov. Org and Com and Net are necessery general purpose names but that model shouldn't be followed with things like .biz which just sow confusion (is that a .com or a .biz)? The important question is whether there are enough good new content related tlds and that is something I don't know.
The quibble is that freeing up more tlds won't necessarily solve the scarcity of good domain names. If done incorrectly it could even make the problem worse.
The point of domain names is to provide a quick and easy way to remember and communicate internet locations. So long as tlds categorize sites into content relevant categories they do work to relieve the demand for domain names. For instance if you want to go to fuckedchicks (made up) your favorite porn cite remembering that it is in
Or to put it another way too many non-content related tlds make all domains harder to remember and hence don't solve the problem but just spread out the pain by making every name slightly worse.
So far it seems that the country codes (and perhaps some even smaller geographic codes) are good (in the sense above) tlds as are the
I think one of the main premises in the story is just outright wrong. The idea that windows requires more sophistication to use than Mac just doesn't cut it. Is it easier to use OS X than windows? Well quite likely if for no other reason than the UI is more consistant.
However, this has nothing to do with any sophistication required. It isn't that one needs more computer sophistication to use windows. It is just harder for everyone to use because the UI isn't as well thought out. Unlike other problems with windows this isn't really MS's fault. OS X started from the ground up quite recently and got to learn from all the problems with windows while windows needed to cater to the huge installed base.
Finally while this question of bias may be an interesting one to look into one shouldn't jump to conclusions. It *could* be that journalists are biased towards apple for cultural reasons. Alternatively if *could* be that apple really is better and it is everyone else who is uninformed. We need more than this to decide the issue.
Yes, you can make a publicly availible document on which each voter can verify their vote is present. Of course you are correct voters cannot verify that other ballots are not falsified but this is no worse than with paper ballets. Heck in a paper system you can't even verify that your ballot was counted. In fact my understanding is that you can design such a system to require the collaboration of many more officials to create fake ballots than in the normal system.
Do a google search on holomorphic encryption and voting I don't remember all the details.
What you do is create an encryption system where each vote is encrypted and then the entire list is published online. With the correct form of encryption (well it is closer to secret sharing) you can make sure that everyone can verify that the end result is indeed the result of counting all the individual votes and each voter can verify that indeed his individual vote is on the list but no voter can figure out how anyone else voted.
Despite the concerns with fraud I think a system like Estonias could be much safer than regular voting. By requiring the use of smart cards and computer readers they avoid much of the problems that people worry about with internet voting. With a good challenge response protocol and a secure smart-card design the system could really verify that whoever was voting did posess the smart card. Of course smart cards can be stolen but if you include a password or other personal question you can make that difficult.
Of course the system is still far from perfect. One lacks the accountability of having paper ballots. However, this can be addressed by using various forms of holomorphic encryption which allow voting systems which can only be faked by the collaboration of very large numbers of individuals. Groups big enough that they could fake a normal election as well.
I think the more interesting question is whether it is good to make voting really easy. Most people naively assume that democracy is better when more people vote. This is not obviously true. By making voting slightly difficult you make sure a vote not only reflects a preference but a preference of a certain minimal strength.
Consider for instance a country where 100% of people vote 49% of voters are strongly liberal 51% are strongly conservative. In such a country the conservative politician has no incentive to take a moderate approach and can be elected by just appealing to the 51% who might vote for him. In this country that 49% of the population has NO INPUT on the presidents policy.
On the other hand suppose that a country has the same political breakdown but usually only 50% of people bother to vote. Now if that same conservative politician takes extreme positions which piss off the liberals he might drive ther turnout rate up and actually lose the race. Counterintuitively lower voter participation could actually make for a more responsive democratic process.
It seems there are certain advantages to making voting minimally difficult. Easy enough that everyone can do it but just hard enough that those who don't really care don't bother. So do we really want internet voting?
Happiness is supposed to be good because it makes us more succesfull, harder working and engaged? What the hell? That is totally backwards. IWe should only be working harders, and being socially engaged if it makes us happy not the other way around! What the hell is the point of turning out widgets for their own sake?
If only we could get over this puritanical ethic that tells us it is wrong to aim for enjoyment, in general not just selfishly for ourselves, I think we would be alot happier. For instance by focusing government programs on what made people the most satisfied rather than work the hardest and produce the most we could probably make this country alot more of a pleasent place to live but as long as the goal is just making more crap we will likely acheive that goal while making ourselves more miserable.
While in principle the idea that an international body should control an international resource seems to be a good one I am cautious about the pragmatic realities of an international body doing this. In particular I worry about DNS and IP assignment policies being used to suppress certain kinds of free speech.
Even other western democracies have much less protection of free speech. Germany prevents racist speech as do many other countries. Will domain names be denied to people with racist propoganda? If this is a UN controlled organization will the generally assembelly have power over it? Could the many islamic nations ban together to prevent anti-islamic websites being given domain names?
I know some of you will object and say the US isn't perfect in terms of free speech and cite examples like the DMCA and various federal wiretap laws. My response is severalfold, first it is important to distingush privacy concerns from free speech concerns and I think the later are much more important than the other. Secondly while the US doesn't extend free speech rights as far as I would like in terms of copyright type information this is still commercial speech not personal/political speech. I mean can you really deny that it is more important to be able to make political or religious statements than ones about how to hack an xbox? Moreover, the problem with the DMCA type laws is that they are spreading so moving it out of the US gains no benefit.
Ultimately because so much of the infrastructure is already in the US the internet is already at the mercy of the US government and giving another body power only increases the number of people who can censor it. Moreover while the US isn't perfect it does seem to have one of the strongest protections of free speech in the face of majority oppossition.
Alright it is a temporary effect. Well the recent long term studies of MJ use indicate that no effect on IQ is observed after a month of sobriety even for heavy smokers over decades.
Alright, I agree this doesn't make this study good science but that is no reason to promulgate false impressions about weed. I mean this is exactly the sort of dangerously subliminal effect which can create a widespread belief in a falsehood. If slashdot posted a study saying weed caused loss of IQ people would at least critically evaluate it but by introducing it in the background while you debunk another study as false gives the impression of being a generally accepted fact.
Grr...why do people never actually read the snopes discussion and just blindly rely on the 'true/false' distinction. Often that is quite misleading.
If you read the snopes discussion it says that some hotels might do this but they have recieved no evidence this is true. Well this sounds like some evidence to me.
Basically snopes is responding to an over-sensationalized urban legend not taking a position that this is somehow impossible. While they do offer the analysis that they see no reason why the hotel would put personal information on the cards things have changed since then.
As one poster commented on the article it is quite likely that the hotels want to enable purchases with your key cards but don't have a fully integrated IT solution which can access the card database.
Just because some rumor was false once doesn't mean it can't become true!
No, you couldn't wipe out half the computers on the internet. Just like with real viruses there is a trade off between how infectious you can be and how damageing you can be. If you kill the host it can't keep spreading your payload.
Perhaps I wasn't clear on this point. I agree completely that the metaphor works and is probably the best metaphor possible. My point is that for fairly simple (in function not necessarily technology) tools/interfaces a metaphor is merely a way to make adult users of the old technology familiar with the new. Hence my comment that if their goal was mass market adoption or even immediate understanding by adults of the function/usefullness of the item this is the right way to design something. If, on the other hand, their goal is to create new ways and ideas for interacting with technology a metaphor like this merely inhibits the types of applications people think to use the technology with.
I mean the situation really is alot similar to putting reins on early cars. It was a great metaphor. It communicated perfectly to users what this interface was meant to accomplish, namely it steered your means of transportation. However, a car is not a horse and a I/O brush is not a brush and what is the best interface for one is not necessarily the best for the other.
And if you had read the comment instead of just being offended you might have noticed that I do think the project is a good idea created by smart people. I merely think the interface is silly.
Had you cared to even briefly consider my comment you might have noticed that my point is exactly that many intelligent and innovative inventors nevertheless assume new technology will be interacted with in the same was as old technology.
Perhaps had you been interested in responding intelligently instead of just being an ass you would have made sure the academic paper you linked made substantive comments refuting what I said. Yes they provide a good argument that the contact surface should be soft rather than hard like a light pen and I agree. However the only thing even resembeling an argument as to why this means it should *look* or *feel* like a brush is that a brush was that a brush was one of the few (perhaps only) existing tools which we let touch our bodies.
Now perhaps had you cared to think about my argument it would have occured to you that this actually supports my position. Namely that rather than an analysis of what kind of new interface might be appropriate they assume that they must pick from already existing interfaces. Of course I could be wrong and they may have considered this issue and have compelling arguments against it. However, if you are going to be an ass and arrogantly critisize someone for ignoring evidence you ought to at least first make sure you understand what they are saying and aren't posting evidence that supports their position.
I mean couldn't you at least take the 5 minutes to figure out what someone is saying, especially when they make specific disclaimers telling you they aren't disparaging the overall project, before making a nasty response?
Sounds really fucking annoying. Can you imagine any time you need to scan a page or text an alarm sounds. Either it won't be loud enough to alert people across a bookstore (and what will they do if they are alerted?) or it will be loud enough to annoy nearby persons and make even legitamate uses (say in a buisness meeting recording documents passed around) problematic.
How long do you think it will be before a competitor cellphone company comes out with a phone with the feature or just 'oversight' which allows this to be easily disabled?
Besides the entire idea is really stupid. Clicking to get one page of text is hardly the big scary threat that publishing companies need to be wary about. If the magazine is good enough to buy in the first place it will have many interesting articles and that will be too annoying to scan in a bookstore for a couple dollars.
I mean be realistic here plenty of people buy text copies just because they don't like reading online. The real problem that faces paper publishers is the rise of e-readers and the same threat that faces the music industry.
Yes, I agree that if your goal is to make adults feel immediatly comfortable with something and quickly understand what it is good for a brush metaphor is best. However, it is a different thing to say that a metaphor communicates what something does and what it is good for/how to use it. The brush metaphore doesn't communicate what this device does; it would be a bad idea to try to paint your wall with this or dip it in real paint. You still have to explain what the device does explicitly as slashdot did in the story description (though not necessarily as technically). Just as with the computer desktop or any other control metaphor the point is to give people familiar with the old technology an immediate idea what this device is good for and how they should relate to it.
I agree that it takes a long time to develop a good interface (though I think the basic car interface: steering wheel, gas, break is essentially fixed and will only change again when people no longer manually control the car). However, I think this process is only prolonged by developers telling people how they should think of and relate to a device by using a metaphor of some existing technology. Children are certainly more immune to this implied instruction about what you should and shouldn't use this technology for but I don't know if they are completely.
I mean if your goal was to do UI research and figure out how people used the device the last thing you would want to do is prejudge the issue for them by packaging it just like some other technology.
Still, I suppose it is probably a necessery evil to get funding and potentially have the technology picked up by other adults. Trying to explain you made a stick with a camera in it is probably not going to get you anywhere near the immediate understanding of the benefits of your project as making it a paint brush will. Still, even if it isn't the case here I definatly think adults often impede children by supposing they need the same sort of familiar clues adults do.
Well prototype/research versions often need to be much larger than a mass market product as you have to combine general components rather than creating an integrated version through dedicated manufacturing/lithography.
In any case while it does sound like lots of fun, and it could be great for doing studies of real objects (copy the color directly) I don't know (I'm genuienly unsure) if it would really be better at color picking in general. I mean are you really able to find color alot better in the real world than by looking at swatches on the computer (perhaps you are I'm curious).