One problem is, the US is not at war with Pakistan, or with Al Qaida (because they're not a state). I don't think the Geneva convention says anything about how to deal with terrorists.
I don't want any web page to be allowed to read all my files!
My browser is allowed to read my files, but code from a third-party (Flash, Javascript, Java, or anything else) should always go through a trusted dialog to let me select with files it can read. If the Flash plugin actually allows third party code to manipulate files, I'm going to remove it right away...
I've always thought it rather obvious that Science is a Faith. If a word cannot be used to define itself, than how can Science ever be used to prove itself?
A smart guy called Auguste Comte developed the idea that a scientific theory should be able to make predictions that are contrary to previous knowledge, and that it is should only be trusted when those prediction happen to be true. That's quite the opposite of Faith in my book.
For instance, some crazy dude a long time ago got the idea that the earth should be round, which is obviously in contraction with our everyday observation of a flat earth. Then some other crazy dude decided to go straight to the west, and ended up back home from the east. That confirmed that idea that the Earth was indeed round.
Another famous example is the discovery of Neptune. Some dude observed the orbit of Uranus, and found that it did not quite follow Newton's law. Therefore he predicted that another body was perturbing it's trajectory. The discovery of that other body confirmed that Newton's law is indeed quite good.
That could be a very good news, given that Linux/AMD64, a relatively popular platform still has no official support for the flash plugin (yes, I know, there is a beta available, but remeber how it was temporarly killed a few months ago, leaving Linux/AMD64 users with either a gaping security hole — bigger than usual, anyway — or without flash?)
If you're looking for some kind of hybrid that can both fit in your pocket and be used with a real keyboard and screen and run desktop programs, you might be interested in the SmartBook. Unfortunately it doesn't have a phone feature, but it looks like a really great product...
Maildir comes with it's own problems when you have lots of mail... You need a file system that is good at having lots of small files (if it needs linear time to look through a directory, that might be a serious issue), and you're going to kill the inode cache everytime you scan your mailbox.
That's why most serious email systems use some kind of indexing, together with either mbox or maildir. Indexing solves most of the porblems of mbox, and also most of the problems of maildir, if all the programs that touch the mails (the LDA and the IMAP server or the MUA) are both aware of the indexing. By the way, dovecot offers a good compromise between maildir and mbox, with several files per mailbox, but several mails per file.
And now we have phones that are basically computers that can make phone calls. Nokia understood the phones that can do other stuff model, but it doesn't get computers that can make phone calls, and RIM is in the same boat. MS, Apple and Google all get it, it's a matter of how well they can execute and any number of other factors for them.
I beg to differ. The only device I would actually call a "computer that can make phone calls" is the Nokia N900.
Worse, Apple had been rumored to be designing a mobile phone as early as late 2002. For the industry (Nokia et al) to not have made any plans to circumvent this (shut them out with some exclusive contracts, start development of a touch screen phone themselves, etc.) was another example of "falling asleep at the switch."
You are aware that several touch-screensphones were released around the same time as the iPhone, are you?
he couldn't format it to the peculiar formatting rules in his office (A bizarre format not compatible with any of the standardized Business Letter styles[1]), and requires you to fumble around with the bulleting, tabbing and rulers. And those things didn't behave like they did in his Office 97 or whatever.
The interesting question is: if he had to migrate to the next version of Microsoft Office, would he have been to do this fumbling around by himself? I don't use any office suite myself, but I guess that the interface can change a bit from one version to the other, even if you keep using the "standardised proprietary client solutions".
Actually, MS will allow governments to inspect the source code. It's not much good for spotting bugs, as with Open Source's "thousand eyes", but it is useful in allowing governments to check for deliberate sabotage.
You can only avoid deliberate sabotage if you can compile this code with a third party compiler, and run the version you compiled yourself -- but I guess that's not allowed or probably even not possible. Otherwise, Microsoft could easily give you a sane source code and a sabotaged binary. I'm not saying they do it, but if you need the source code to be convinced that there is no backdoor, you also need to compile it yourself.
If the license is the GPL; does the right to redistribute contain an implicit license to use any trademarked or copyrighted names and art, etc?
No it most certainly does not. The Firefox/Iceweasel case is well known example of software that is distributed under the GPL licence but does not allow you to use the trademark on derivative work.
You end up with #ofOS times #ofBrowser different implementations of EACH major codec.
No, you don't. You only have #ofBrowser different implementations, because the same code can be used on Linux and an Windows is you do all the decoding internally and you only use to OS to display the result. That's probably the main reason why they do the decoding inside the browser: they have to include an implementation of each codec, but they don't need to implement the video decoding API of each OS.
I agree that from a technical point of view, it would be better to use the OS API for video decoding, but that actually requires more work. And by the way, what is the standard video API under Linux these days?
AFAIK, VLC does not use the codecs installed on the OS, so it would be basically equivalent to what Chrome and Firefox are doing today. VLC does support H.264, but that's probably just because they're not big enough to be a target for a lawsuit.
So they will run some piece of code your machine in order to detect whether you are running some modified software.
But we now have full control over the machine, so we can just sandbox Sony's code, and give it a view of the machine that looks like an original unmodified one. the code will sent the right answer to Sony's server and we can still run modified software. What they're trying to do is just logically impossible! (just like any working DRM system)
Hey, I see you are currently using the publicly available air for you own purpose by breathing. That may or may not be illegal, be I'd like to get a court preventing you to breath until someone find out.
Seriously, America, what happened to the presumption of innocence?
The spec says it has 3G support, so this thing can probably be used as a phone and do most of the stuff you would do with a smartphone. It only lacks Linux support and a keyboard to be perfect:-)
I think the whole point of the study is to see exactly how absurd and/or impossible that task would be. In the end, I am really impressed that current technology could realistically allow us to reach a relativistic speed. I would have assumed that to be impossible and it turns out to be just absurdly expensive. I think that's a very important result.
That makes it nothing more than a battery technology.
Given that the huge majority of the weight of any spacecraft is taken up by the fuel, an efficient "battery technology" would be a major breakthrough. If your fuel has a high energy density, it means your spacecraft will be lighter, and therefore require less energy.
Most browsers give you a very big and mean looking error message when certs mismatch. The kind that make people unversed in security call their computer geek friends before doing anything; I suspect that this won't be too huge a problem.
Since Firefox gives me the same alarming message every time I go to a website with a self-signed certificate, I just click through the warning without reading it (self-signed certificates are quite common, and pretty inoffensive). I guess many people do the same.
Sadly enough, SSL certificates aren't so much about security as they are about money...
Alternatively, one could say that the terrorists have won a lot in Russia, and that’s why it’s not too big of a deal... I don't know for sure, but I'm not going to be so quick to jump to conclusions.
Supposedly, the aim of the terrorists is to terrorize people. If nobody cares when they blow up an airport, they didn't win, they clearly lose.
In the US, even failed stupid terrorist plots are enough to terrorize the people and to prompt liberty-reducing responses...
Slashdot Mirror
One problem is, the US is not at war with Pakistan, or with Al Qaida (because they're not a state). I don't think the Geneva convention says anything about how to deal with terrorists.
I don't want any web page to be allowed to read all my files!
My browser is allowed to read my files, but code from a third-party (Flash, Javascript, Java, or anything else) should always go through a trusted dialog to let me select with files it can read. If the Flash plugin actually allows third party code to manipulate files, I'm going to remove it right away...
Pure .NET apps should work though, which will assist Microsoft in eliminating non-managed languages.
They should also works on other OSes with mono.
I've always thought it rather obvious that Science is a Faith. If a word cannot be used to define itself, than how can Science ever be used to prove itself?
A smart guy called Auguste Comte developed the idea that a scientific theory should be able to make predictions that are contrary to previous knowledge, and that it is should only be trusted when those prediction happen to be true. That's quite the opposite of Faith in my book.
For instance, some crazy dude a long time ago got the idea that the earth should be round, which is obviously in contraction with our everyday observation of a flat earth. Then some other crazy dude decided to go straight to the west, and ended up back home from the east. That confirmed that idea that the Earth was indeed round.
Another famous example is the discovery of Neptune. Some dude observed the orbit of Uranus, and found that it did not quite follow Newton's law. Therefore he predicted that another body was perturbing it's trajectory. The discovery of that other body confirmed that Newton's law is indeed quite good.
That could be a very good news, given that Linux/AMD64, a relatively popular platform still has no official support for the flash plugin (yes, I know, there is a beta available, but remeber how it was temporarly killed a few months ago, leaving Linux/AMD64 users with either a gaping security hole — bigger than usual, anyway — or without flash?)
On a related topic, notability standards for scientists are pretty high, while any second zone sportsman will get an article for him.
As an illustration, Wikipedia seems to know about 600 current NFL players, while if you take this list of Computer Science researchers, only the top hundred or so seem to have a Wikipedia page.
Actually, you should be glad to be on the list: it means that have not yet surrendered all your freedom to the big entertainment industry.
If you're looking for some kind of hybrid that can both fit in your pocket and be used with a real keyboard and screen and run desktop programs, you might be interested in the SmartBook. Unfortunately it doesn't have a phone feature, but it looks like a really great product...
Maildir comes with it's own problems when you have lots of mail... You need a file system that is good at having lots of small files (if it needs linear time to look through a directory, that might be a serious issue), and you're going to kill the inode cache everytime you scan your mailbox.
That's why most serious email systems use some kind of indexing, together with either mbox or maildir. Indexing solves most of the porblems of mbox, and also most of the problems of maildir, if all the programs that touch the mails (the LDA and the IMAP server or the MUA) are both aware of the indexing. By the way, dovecot offers a good compromise between maildir and mbox, with several files per mailbox, but several mails per file.
And now we have phones that are basically computers that can make phone calls. Nokia understood the phones that can do other stuff model, but it doesn't get computers that can make phone calls, and RIM is in the same boat. MS, Apple and Google all get it, it's a matter of how well they can execute and any number of other factors for them.
I beg to differ. The only device I would actually call a "computer that can make phone calls" is the Nokia N900.
Worse, Apple had been rumored to be designing a mobile phone as early as late 2002. For the industry (Nokia et al) to not have made any plans to circumvent this (shut them out with some exclusive contracts, start development of a touch screen phone themselves, etc.) was another example of "falling asleep at the switch."
You are aware that several touch-screens phones were released around the same time as the iPhone, are you?
he couldn't format it to the peculiar formatting rules in his office (A bizarre format not compatible with any of the standardized Business Letter styles[1]), and requires you to fumble around with the bulleting, tabbing and rulers. And those things didn't behave like they did in his Office 97 or whatever.
The interesting question is: if he had to migrate to the next version of Microsoft Office, would he have been to do this fumbling around by himself? I don't use any office suite myself, but I guess that the interface can change a bit from one version to the other, even if you keep using the "standardised proprietary client solutions".
Actually, MS will allow governments to inspect the source code. It's not much good for spotting bugs, as with Open Source's "thousand eyes", but it is useful in allowing governments to check for deliberate sabotage.
You can only avoid deliberate sabotage if you can compile this code with a third party compiler, and run the version you compiled yourself -- but I guess that's not allowed or probably even not possible. Otherwise, Microsoft could easily give you a sane source code and a sabotaged binary. I'm not saying they do it, but if you need the source code to be convinced that there is no backdoor, you also need to compile it yourself.
If the license is the GPL; does the right to redistribute contain an implicit license to use any trademarked or copyrighted names and art, etc?
No it most certainly does not. The Firefox/Iceweasel case is well known example of software that is distributed under the GPL licence but does not allow you to use the trademark on derivative work.
You end up with #ofOS times #ofBrowser different implementations of EACH major codec.
No, you don't. You only have #ofBrowser different implementations, because the same code can be used on Linux and an Windows is you do all the decoding internally and you only use to OS to display the result. That's probably the main reason why they do the decoding inside the browser: they have to include an implementation of each codec, but they don't need to implement the video decoding API of each OS.
I agree that from a technical point of view, it would be better to use the OS API for video decoding, but that actually requires more work. And by the way, what is the standard video API under Linux these days?
AFAIK, VLC does not use the codecs installed on the OS, so it would be basically equivalent to what Chrome and Firefox are doing today. VLC does support H.264, but that's probably just because they're not big enough to be a target for a lawsuit.
The HTML demo is here.
In other new, /. editors still fail the Turing test.
So they will run some piece of code your machine in order to detect whether you are running some modified software.
But we now have full control over the machine, so we can just sandbox Sony's code, and give it a view of the machine that looks like an original unmodified one. the code will sent the right answer to Sony's server and we can still run modified software. What they're trying to do is just logically impossible! (just like any working DRM system)
Would he be allowed to sell a t-shirt similar to this one?
Hey, I see you are currently using the publicly available air for you own purpose by breathing. That may or may not be illegal, be I'd like to get a court preventing you to breath until someone find out.
Seriously, America, what happened to the presumption of innocence?
The spec says it has 3G support, so this thing can probably be used as a phone and do most of the stuff you would do with a smartphone. It only lacks Linux support and a keyboard to be perfect :-)
I think the whole point of the study is to see exactly how absurd and/or impossible that task would be. In the end, I am really impressed that current technology could realistically allow us to reach a relativistic speed. I would have assumed that to be impossible and it turns out to be just absurdly expensive. I think that's a very important result.
That makes it nothing more than a battery technology.
Given that the huge majority of the weight of any spacecraft is taken up by the fuel, an efficient "battery technology" would be a major breakthrough. If your fuel has a high energy density, it means your spacecraft will be lighter, and therefore require less energy.
Most browsers give you a very big and mean looking error message when certs mismatch. The kind that make people unversed in security call their computer geek friends before doing anything; I suspect that this won't be too huge a problem.
Since Firefox gives me the same alarming message every time I go to a website with a self-signed certificate, I just click through the warning without reading it (self-signed certificates are quite common, and pretty inoffensive). I guess many people do the same.
Sadly enough, SSL certificates aren't so much about security as they are about money...
Alternatively, one could say that the terrorists have won a lot in Russia, and that’s why it’s not too big of a deal... I don't know for sure, but I'm not going to be so quick to jump to conclusions.
Supposedly, the aim of the terrorists is to terrorize people. If nobody cares when they blow up an airport, they didn't win, they clearly lose.
In the US, even failed stupid terrorist plots are enough to terrorize the people and to prompt liberty-reducing responses...