I agree. When I got my current account (on Digital UNIX boxes) a few years ago, CDE was the default, but after using it for a week, I went back to fvwm, and I'm still here..... I think I'll try KDE when I graduate and get my own box.
Actually, I have no idea....:-) There is some https involved, and I do some typing on the keyboard... Anyway, I may have described something wrongly here, it is not a smart card as in credit card, it is a device, looks like a small calculator, that I type a PIN code on, it gives back a 8-digit code, that I have to type on the keyboard to log in and to complete transactions, a new code each time. I don't know how this works, really... I submit a form, that is transfered using https. Somebody once called it a "smart card", though.
Be careful here.
Thanks for the word of caution! It always helps to know what's going on when managing risks.
I feel that there are so many things that are way more insecure so that I'm really not worried about e-banking. It may be easier to attack a large number of accounts, but that's SEP (somebody else's problem), since the bank is legally responsible for my money.
Just take dead tree checks. They are so incredibly easy to forge. Very few shops in Norway accept them anymore, and those who do only accepts checks from senior citizens, an 8-year old with a check is assumed to have made it on his father's color printer and alarms would ring... A few years ago, when I lived with my parents, my mother had a deal with the bank that she could transfer money to my account by sending a fax (she is an old trusted client of that bank). Of course, I did the sending of those faxes... They would reject the fax if it wasn't a signature on it, but of course my mother never signed any of those faxes, it was a TIFF-file that I attached when sending it... Naturally, this was the deal that I had with my mother, she knew everything about it, but what was interesting to note is that this signature that really meant nothing whatsoever about authorization of the money transfer meant so much to the bank....
There was a problem in a Norwegian bank recently, that seems to be similar to this one:
Somebody discovered that once logged into an account on the server, your account number was encoded in the URL, and you could just change the account number in the URL to get access to the account of any other customer in the bank. It was fixed pretty fast, but it is incredible that the hole could have been created in the first place.
I attempted to crack my own bank in the same way after this became known. It certainly does not share the vulnarability, but I do not feel entirely confident that it doesn't have related holes that can be exploited by a specialized user agent, but I haven't time to check it out. I feel safe though, as it is a law giving the bank full responsibility for my money, and they use a smart card that is disconnected from the computer to generate 8-digit access codes, no PINs or password is stored on the computer.
I have been thinking about this since/. posted a story on the ethics of free software, where the author makes a big point about that it may be more ethical if a company provides software for $50 that never crashes and comes with a money-back guarantee than free software with no warranty.
It occured to me that I can't see anything stopping anybody from selling GPL software with a warranty, a warranty provided by the company that sells the software, not the developers.
The no-warranty is there to make sure the developers will not get sued for failings, but businesses selling free software should be able to provide a warranty, in connection with e.g. a support program.
I don't know if this allready exists, but I think it would benefit the OSS community, as such a company is likely to do extensive and formalized tests of OSS software, and come back with patches if they find bugs.
Also, it may impress the suites that a software company offers warranty for a product others develop, out of their strict control.
The ovious solution to the "huge amount of data" produced is the same type of distributed
computing project as SETI@home operates except funded by the gov.
Nah, that's the solution to reduce data for a particular purpose. Yes, it is a good idea for purpose.
Now the problem with the huge amount of data is that we're talking that each of the telescopes would produce about a terrabyte a day of raw data, and if you have a few hundred of them. Don't take my word for that number, though it is a few years since I did the math. Anyway, storage and transportation of that data is a bit costly... How much data is Seti@home shipping a day? 20 gigs or something? (I'm just guessing, I stopped processing long ago, they obviously doesn't need my CPU).
It is rather unlikely that it will be far out of the plane of the solar system, so you will only need to scan a small part of the sky. It is a big job anyway.
Yep, these are real concerns, and I know that the groups working on LMTs are taking them seriously. One thing I know is that the evaporation doesn't pose significant health risks, that was the first thing they researched. Also, the construction would have to be such that if a spill occurs, you can't spill outside the telescope building.
I haven't done any LMT research myself, but I have had a good time on a couple of occasions making a 30 cm LMT using an old turntable and engine oil. It's really great!:-)
Uh, what's keeping all the mercury from flying off into space?
Yeah, I don't think it is feasible. However, having one on the moon would be great.
Btw, LMTs (on Earth) (*can*) track objects by means of a movable mirror.
Yep, that's right, but since the effect of seeing smears the image so when you tilt the mirror, you'll have a Point Spread Function that depends on the pixel position and time. I'm not doing a lot of reductions, but something tells me that would be nasty....:-)
Of course, you follow an object on the CCD as at moves across the field, but I don't know if that can be refered to as "tracking"...:-)
I distinctly remember one article pointing out that if you actually work
out the probabilities, you are more likely to be killed by an asteroid [0] than in a plane crash.
Yep, Clark R. Chapman is pushing that. The reference is: C.R. Chapman & D. Morrison, 1994, Nature 367, 33-40. He has also testified that before congress.
He also lectured about that on a skeptics conference in Germany a few years ago. Our (Norwegian Skeptics Society) guy there (who is a historian of religion) wrote in his trip report that he had never felt so safe on the plane home before....:-) Anyway, you should read it and make up your mind.
Well, building a largish dedicated telescope is one thing, but I would rather start researching a possibility that would be much more useful, namely building a network of Liquid Mirror Telescopes. A liquid mirror telescope has a mirror of mercury that is rotating, forming a near-perfect paraboloid as it rotates. Obviously, you can't tilt the telescope, so you can't track objects like conventional telescopes, and you can't look wherever you like, you can only look straight up. The field is also pretty small, but if you put a lot of LMTs on different longitudes and latitudes, you will be able to scan most of the sky. And since LMTs come at the prize of 1/100 of the cost of a similar size of a conventional telescope, you can build a lot of them. So, say we start mass manufacturing (several hundred) 8 meter LMTs and place them all over the place.
This should be done by international agreements, and the data should be put in public domain. It would not only be useful in looking for NEOs, but all kinds of monitoring projects, e.g. Gravitional Lens monitoring (which is my research area), Gamma Ray Burst follow-ups, the list is long. Of course, short exposure times is a problem with LMTs too (90 secs), but that can be fixed by combining nights.
There are substancial technical problems connected with a global network of LMTs, first, we don't know how the mercury will behave (turbulence in the atmosphere is a problem, now you might get turbulence in the mirror as well...:-) And, you won't see adaptive optics like you see on e.g. VLT on an LMT). Another problem is the huge amount of data produced, and how to treat it and give every potential user access to it. These are problems that must be overcome, but I believe that it should be possible to do, and definitively more worthwhile than building dedicated instruments for NEO search.
I don't think it was very well written, but it has some interesting points. The part about history was Insightful. In fact, there are historians who are allready very worried about the current development, it was recently a long coloumn by a historian in a Norwegian newspaper who wrote that much of our recent history has been erased, not because it would violate somebody's IP rights, but nobody thinks anybody would be interested.
If, in addition, historians will have problems with IP regulation, it is a significan risk. And, if nothing is static, it's even worse, if historians has to rent, then, yes, our history is erased.
Around here, for dead tree magazines, there is a law requiring everybody to send a copy to a public archive for a nominal compensation. I know there has been discussions about things like that for digital media as well (at least I know they have been recording USENET for years), but they have to get publishers consent on the web. For historians, that's probably a Bad Thing. BTW, I have been dumping all my stuff to a tape once a year lately, with the intention of keeping it there for the future. In 20 years I can look back on it....:-)
I never liked HTML (though I insist that if you write HTML, you write it properly, that is, structure only), it has a few serious flaws, one of them is the insistence on the big difference block-level vs. inline-level elements.
XML is the only ML you need. XHTML is a XML application (HTML is dead, in the sense that 4.01 is likely to be the last HTML Recommendation), so is WML, and tons of others MLs. They are also just XML applications.
Me too, but the point is that I don't want my mobile phone to be any bigger than it currently is (I've got a Nokia 3210), in fact, I would like it to shrink even further, but I still like it to be able to read web pages, and the fact is that HTML is suited for the purpose. It's called graceful degradation, and it is all very nicely put in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. When you can have both, why settle for less?
The only device I will find usable will be one that has enough color depth and pixel resolution to
display normal HTML pages.
I disagree. I would really love to be able to browse web pages at 50x60 pixel display. In fact, I have hacked up something to enable me to retrieve web pages using e-mail and SMS to my mobile phone. It sucks, but the reason it sucks is the extremely poor coding of HTML people do. If people had coded good HTML, seperated style from content, we would never have seen this WAP rubbish and we would have had full access to the web on mobile phones by now. We wouldn't have gotten all the images, but while a picture may say as much as a thousand words, it certainly takes up a whole lot more space... (somebody smart once said):-)
Yep, that's OK, but, what if the filtering is required by law? Then, I might not allow my kids to access sites that I do not find objectionable (or that I might even find educational), but you might find objectionable.
My conclusion is that the software must not be required by law, it must be up to each individual to decide what their kids would be allowed to access. And the software must not suck (BTW, I've put PICS labels for all the rating systems I could find on one of my sites, including RSACi (which sucks badly), so as to ensure accessibility for kids).
All they'd have to do is try a list of sites against it. Then they'd sue you for taking money for a
product which works 0% of the time,
Nah, you'll just say that "the (tiny) subset that you sampled has not yet been included, thanks for the update, I'll include it in the next release." They still can't prove that it doesn't block anything, because they would have to test all pr0n sites on the net to prove it. All they could prove is that your software sucks, but then, if that was illegal....:-)
Hm, come to think of it, if you block playboy or something in the first release, well, yeah, this is a business opportunity. Don't we love UCITA?
What kind of irreparable
harm is possibly caused by catching a casual glimpse of the human reproductive system?
Yeah, you know what the really strange thing is: That for something as important as sex in people's lives, every generation has to learn everything from scratch. I would bet that if that wasn't the case, sexually related problems would have been much smaller. A masturbation how-to should be on the curriculum! Really. It's just teaching it that would feel a bit strange for a couple of generations...:-)
Yeah, I think you point to the core of the problem here. Censorware today sucks so badly it should not be in use, and must certainly not be made mandatory.
However, I recognize the need for some automated rating criteria, and that is not just about pr0n, but all kinds of information. I think that rating technologies are not inherently good or bad. Take RDF for example. It can be used to check out enormous amounts of information for you, and you may decide whether or not you want to see it. Since you have a finite life, you can't wade through all the information, so you'll be happy that somebody or something has done a lot of things for you. So the opposition to RDF or (even) PICS is a bit wrong, I feel.
Now, the same technology can be used to vlock sites for kids. Well, that could be good or bad, I would for example have no objections to let kids explore AllAboutSex without me hanging over them, but there are certain sites I would want to guide them through... So, you need rating schemes that are able to make a clear distinction somewhere here, that's the important thing. Opposition to any technology that can do this is counterproductive.
What one should oppose in this case is not the technology, but rather any laws that makes any rating scheme or technology mandatory. That's the scary thing, if any of this is mandatory, that's wrong, as long as it is voluntary, it's OK.
I've been an editor at dmoz for two years, but I've given up. Dmoz has collapsed under it's own weight and nowadays, it sucks.
The primary reason why it sucks is exactly that it doesn't have moderation...:-) They have a problem that in some categories lots of spammers sign up only for self promotion, and their response is to reject 90% or so of those signing up. Instead, what they should do is to make sure that no individual has too much power, including the meta editors (who are not always awfully clued).
The reason why it never gets corrected is that writing a comment like I do now is considered "illoyal" to the directory.
Well, as long as one is aware that WAP sucks, and that if it hadn't been for the sucky HTML code everybody writes we would have had full web on our cell phones by now, I can't see any big reason why it shouldn't be implemented. Implementing it is just saying to the world: "geeks can do anything, we have implemented this, but we still think it sucks."
Slashdot Mirror
He's wrong. This has been researched extensively, and you would have to sit in the dome for the entire operational time to go maaaad.
I agree. When I got my current account (on Digital UNIX boxes) a few years ago, CDE was the default, but after using it for a week, I went back to fvwm, and I'm still here..... I think I'll try KDE when I graduate and get my own box.
Actually, I have no idea.... :-) There is some https involved, and I do some typing on the keyboard... Anyway, I may have described something wrongly here, it is not a smart card as in credit card, it is a device, looks like a small calculator, that I type a PIN code on, it gives back a 8-digit code, that I have to type on the keyboard to log in and to complete transactions, a new code each time. I don't know how this works, really... I submit a form, that is transfered using https. Somebody once called it a "smart card", though.
Thanks for the word of caution! It always helps to know what's going on when managing risks. I feel that there are so many things that are way more insecure so that I'm really not worried about e-banking. It may be easier to attack a large number of accounts, but that's SEP (somebody else's problem), since the bank is legally responsible for my money.
Just take dead tree checks. They are so incredibly easy to forge. Very few shops in Norway accept them anymore, and those who do only accepts checks from senior citizens, an 8-year old with a check is assumed to have made it on his father's color printer and alarms would ring... A few years ago, when I lived with my parents, my mother had a deal with the bank that she could transfer money to my account by sending a fax (she is an old trusted client of that bank). Of course, I did the sending of those faxes... They would reject the fax if it wasn't a signature on it, but of course my mother never signed any of those faxes, it was a TIFF-file that I attached when sending it... Naturally, this was the deal that I had with my mother, she knew everything about it, but what was interesting to note is that this signature that really meant nothing whatsoever about authorization of the money transfer meant so much to the bank....
Somebody discovered that once logged into an account on the server, your account number was encoded in the URL, and you could just change the account number in the URL to get access to the account of any other customer in the bank. It was fixed pretty fast, but it is incredible that the hole could have been created in the first place.
I attempted to crack my own bank in the same way after this became known. It certainly does not share the vulnarability, but I do not feel entirely confident that it doesn't have related holes that can be exploited by a specialized user agent, but I haven't time to check it out. I feel safe though, as it is a law giving the bank full responsibility for my money, and they use a smart card that is disconnected from the computer to generate 8-digit access codes, no PINs or password is stored on the computer.
It occured to me that I can't see anything stopping anybody from selling GPL software with a warranty, a warranty provided by the company that sells the software, not the developers. The no-warranty is there to make sure the developers will not get sued for failings, but businesses selling free software should be able to provide a warranty, in connection with e.g. a support program.
I don't know if this allready exists, but I think it would benefit the OSS community, as such a company is likely to do extensive and formalized tests of OSS software, and come back with patches if they find bugs.
Also, it may impress the suites that a software company offers warranty for a product others develop, out of their strict control.
Nah, that's the solution to reduce data for a particular purpose. Yes, it is a good idea for purpose.
Now the problem with the huge amount of data is that we're talking that each of the telescopes would produce about a terrabyte a day of raw data, and if you have a few hundred of them. Don't take my word for that number, though it is a few years since I did the math. Anyway, storage and transportation of that data is a bit costly... How much data is Seti@home shipping a day? 20 gigs or something? (I'm just guessing, I stopped processing long ago, they obviously doesn't need my CPU).
It is rather unlikely that it will be far out of the plane of the solar system, so you will only need to scan a small part of the sky. It is a big job anyway.
I haven't done any LMT research myself, but I have had a good time on a couple of occasions making a 30 cm LMT using an old turntable and engine oil. It's really great! :-)
Yeah, I don't think it is feasible. However, having one on the moon would be great.
Yep, that's right, but since the effect of seeing smears the image so when you tilt the mirror, you'll have a Point Spread Function that depends on the pixel position and time. I'm not doing a lot of reductions, but something tells me that would be nasty.... :-)
Of course, you follow an object on the CCD as at moves across the field, but I don't know if that can be refered to as "tracking"... :-)
Yep, Clark R. Chapman is pushing that. The reference is: C.R. Chapman & D. Morrison, 1994, Nature 367, 33-40. He has also testified that before congress.
He also lectured about that on a skeptics conference in Germany a few years ago. Our (Norwegian Skeptics Society) guy there (who is a historian of religion) wrote in his trip report that he had never felt so safe on the plane home before.... :-) Anyway, you should read it and make up your mind.
This should be done by international agreements, and the data should be put in public domain. It would not only be useful in looking for NEOs, but all kinds of monitoring projects, e.g. Gravitional Lens monitoring (which is my research area), Gamma Ray Burst follow-ups, the list is long. Of course, short exposure times is a problem with LMTs too (90 secs), but that can be fixed by combining nights.
There are substancial technical problems connected with a global network of LMTs, first, we don't know how the mercury will behave (turbulence in the atmosphere is a problem, now you might get turbulence in the mirror as well... :-) And, you won't see adaptive optics like you see on e.g. VLT on an LMT). Another problem is the huge amount of data produced, and how to treat it and give every potential user access to it. These are problems that must be overcome, but I believe that it should be possible to do, and definitively more worthwhile than building dedicated instruments for NEO search.
Yep. Funny, isn't it? Anyway, what we could have built for the money Hollywood made from those movies....?
If, in addition, historians will have problems with IP regulation, it is a significan risk. And, if nothing is static, it's even worse, if historians has to rent, then, yes, our history is erased.
Around here, for dead tree magazines, there is a law requiring everybody to send a copy to a public archive for a nominal compensation. I know there has been discussions about things like that for digital media as well (at least I know they have been recording USENET for years), but they have to get publishers consent on the web. For historians, that's probably a Bad Thing. BTW, I have been dumping all my stuff to a tape once a year lately, with the intention of keeping it there for the future. In 20 years I can look back on it.... :-)
Me too, but the point is that I don't want my mobile phone to be any bigger than it currently is (I've got a Nokia 3210), in fact, I would like it to shrink even further, but I still like it to be able to read web pages, and the fact is that HTML is suited for the purpose. It's called graceful degradation, and it is all very nicely put in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. When you can have both, why settle for less?
I disagree. I would really love to be able to browse web pages at 50x60 pixel display. In fact, I have hacked up something to enable me to retrieve web pages using e-mail and SMS to my mobile phone. It sucks, but the reason it sucks is the extremely poor coding of HTML people do. If people had coded good HTML, seperated style from content, we would never have seen this WAP rubbish and we would have had full access to the web on mobile phones by now. We wouldn't have gotten all the images, but while a picture may say as much as a thousand words, it certainly takes up a whole lot more space... (somebody smart once said) :-)
AFAIK, W3C has got a "TM" on XHTML, I don't know if that should ensure it.
My conclusion is that the software must not be required by law, it must be up to each individual to decide what their kids would be allowed to access. And the software must not suck (BTW, I've put PICS labels for all the rating systems I could find on one of my sites, including RSACi (which sucks badly), so as to ensure accessibility for kids).
Nah, you'll just say that "the (tiny) subset that you sampled has not yet been included, thanks for the update, I'll include it in the next release." They still can't prove that it doesn't block anything, because they would have to test all pr0n sites on the net to prove it. All they could prove is that your software sucks, but then, if that was illegal.... :-)
Hm, come to think of it, if you block playboy or something in the first release, well, yeah, this is a business opportunity. Don't we love UCITA?
Yeah, you know what the really strange thing is: That for something as important as sex in people's lives, every generation has to learn everything from scratch. I would bet that if that wasn't the case, sexually related problems would have been much smaller. A masturbation how-to should be on the curriculum! Really. It's just teaching it that would feel a bit strange for a couple of generations... :-)
However, I recognize the need for some automated rating criteria, and that is not just about pr0n, but all kinds of information. I think that rating technologies are not inherently good or bad. Take RDF for example. It can be used to check out enormous amounts of information for you, and you may decide whether or not you want to see it. Since you have a finite life, you can't wade through all the information, so you'll be happy that somebody or something has done a lot of things for you. So the opposition to RDF or (even) PICS is a bit wrong, I feel.
Now, the same technology can be used to vlock sites for kids. Well, that could be good or bad, I would for example have no objections to let kids explore AllAboutSex without me hanging over them, but there are certain sites I would want to guide them through... So, you need rating schemes that are able to make a clear distinction somewhere here, that's the important thing. Opposition to any technology that can do this is counterproductive.
What one should oppose in this case is not the technology, but rather any laws that makes any rating scheme or technology mandatory. That's the scary thing, if any of this is mandatory, that's wrong, as long as it is voluntary, it's OK.
I'm Norwegian too, my local library had adult/kid sections too, but kids didn't need supervision to enter the adult section.
The primary reason why it sucks is exactly that it doesn't have moderation... :-) They have a problem that in some categories lots of spammers sign up only for self promotion, and their response is to reject 90% or so of those signing up. Instead, what they should do is to make sure that no individual has too much power, including the meta editors (who are not always awfully clued).
The reason why it never gets corrected is that writing a comment like I do now is considered "illoyal" to the directory.
I have a bunch of ideas for a better web directory. In the meantime, I'm thinking about a classification for skeptical resources.
Well, as long as one is aware that WAP sucks, and that if it hadn't been for the sucky HTML code everybody writes we would have had full web on our cell phones by now, I can't see any big reason why it shouldn't be implemented. Implementing it is just saying to the world: "geeks can do anything, we have implemented this, but we still think it sucks."
It's not different now. It's called Fair Use and anybody trying to take away that right should figure out whats more important in life.