I can't speak for everyone, but here we check not only a spider's User Agent string, but also whether the request is coming from Google's IP range or elsewhere. So your results may not be so great.
Then again, I've defeated many registration (er, pr0n) gateways by just seting a Referer header identical to the URL I'm requesting, so some defenses are better than others...
Since I moved my site over to a php bases sytem, nothing beyond my index page gets a second look from google.
Have you considered using mod_rewrite or a similar solution to convert your complex URLS with query string parameters aplenty into something that looks like a vanilla filepath?
For example, using mod_rewrite the URL of the page I'm typing this on
The FUD spreaders rarely mention the fact that exp dates are almost never stored with the numbers themselves.
If by "almost never" you mean "usually", I'd be inclined to agree with you.
We're talking about application designers that are foolish enough to store credit card numbers in a publicly accessible location to begin with. Do you really think any of them have given thought to deliberatily obfuscating the data model enough to store expiration dates somewhere other than right next to the CC numbers and account holder names?
You mean my microwave DOESN'T have a command line interface?
I use a keypad to type in instructions telling the machine what to do, and then with a final keypress the machine executes the instructions. When it's finished, it goes back to its original state and the cycle begins again. Sound familiar?
1) CLIs have state too. If there's a prompt, the computer is waiting for your input. If there isn't a prompt, the computer is busy doing the last thing you told it to do.
2) If you want to explore, RTFM. The idea that a tool and its documentation need to be integrated doesn't make sense to me -- do hammers come with a "how to drive nails" pictorial pasted to the handle?
3) There is certainly motor memory involved with CLIs; you use motor skills in your hands to type, don't ya? After years of CLI usage, frequently-used commands such as `ls -l` flow from my fingers without conscious thought. My fingers have typed that string of characters so many times, it's imprinted in motor memory.
4) Easy reversal requires conscious effort on behalf of the software designer, whether it's a GUI or CLI tool. It's not a design consideration that's endemic to one or the other.
You tell the computer to do something and all that returns (in most cases) is a command prompt.
Part of the Unix philosophy is that getting no visible response from a command is in of itself a response. If you run a properly-written command line program and get no message, you can assume that the program executed correctly.
Though, none of that applies to, say, DOS, or immediate-mode BASIC interpreters, which show the user an OK message after every event.
But this lack of an "undo" is the fault of *nix CLI (it could easily be remedied with automatic file version tracking and journalling).
And indeed, several filesystems for Unix exist that do just this. Probably not as many as the number of GUI applications that DON'T provide clean undo capabilities (I didn't mean to hit the red X! How do I get my window back?), so neither side is perfect here.
I challenge *nix people to build a CLI-only version of Photoshop.
ImageMagick?
At the company where I work, we have to process hundreds of images in a proscribed manner, every single day. We're not going to hire a team of Photoshop jockeys to slave over them all day, when a cronjob that invokes a command-line utility will work better. Perhaps the GUI is superior for interactive use, but it loses handily at scriptability.
So instead of picking among a few easy to distinguish items in a GUI,
"Hmm, do I need to click on the folder icon, the folder icon, or the folder icon?"
I am forced to type in 5 to 20 characters (that's 40 to 160 bits of information) per level in a CLI.
If you name your directories logically (meaningful abbreviations, no spaces or other characters that Unices have to treat specially) and use tab-completion, this isn't even an issue. I can get to virtually any known destination on my filesystem with 20 keystrokes or less. That's 2-3 seconds of typing -- I challenge you to match that kind of speed with a GUI's "double click, wait for window to refresh, double click, wait for window to refresh, double click" behavior.
Most of your points are entirely valid. GUIs excel in some areas, CLUIs in others. If you've found that GUI works best for you, great; myself, I'll continue to use a combination of the two.
Maybe every home doesn't need its own set of encyclopedias anymore. The Internet has pretty much taken over that niche, and even without the 'net CD-ROM encyclopedias (real ones, not info-tainment like Encarta) were on their way there.
But there's still a large market for hardbound encyclopedias: libraries. Any reference room worth a lick MUST have at least one, preferably more, general-purpose encyclopedia sets, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
There are about 55,000 zip codes in the United States. Assuming each of these has one public library branch, and each branch orders a new set of encylopedias only every five years, at let's say $4000 a pop, that's about $44 million in revenue per year. Is that enough to run an encyclopedia publishing company on?
Quite frankly, if I were the babysitter I would have summoned the police when the brats started firing at me with pellet guns, if not sooner. Let Mommy explain her negligent parenting behavior to the man with the badge.
Only the first $86,000 a person makes are subject to Social Security tax, which means that 100% of my income gets hit with Social Security tax, but less than.001% of Bill Gates' income is subject to SS tax.
Check your numbers. I seriously doubt that Bill Gates has an ANNUAL INCOME of over 9 BILLION dollars.
If people had to contribute into Social Security commensurate to their actual income, the system would work. Better yet, if people who had an average income of over $86,000 per year at the time of their retirement were inelegible to receive Social Security benefits, the system would work. As it is now, the system doesn't work; the rich pay less than everyone else, and in return get benefits they don't even need.
There is no double standard. If you make libelous statements about the President of the United States, he can have private lawyers send you a letter demanding that you retract your statements. And if you refuse, he can file suit against you.
Most policitians would not do that, because it would make them look rather petty and mean, and they'd lose votes as a result. Why corporations don't realize that the same kind of behavior will result in them losing customers, I don't know.
Diebold is a lock and security company that happened to buy a terrible, untrustworthy little company for a forray into electronic voting.
You say "just happened" as if it were mere serendipity that the little company became part of the big company.
No, Diebold should have known what they were getting into when they were making the purchase. And even if they didn't know then, they had ample opportunity to not make the product available until the problems had been corrected.
They still have a responsibility for due diligence.
Excuse me, but even listeners to the BBC (British Broadcast Corporation) are assumed to know what "Super Tuesday" means... are Americans more ignorant about the American politcal system than Europeans?
I don't know, but apparently Europeans are more arrogant about their knowledge of the American political system than Americans...
Compared to games like Adventure or Pitfall today's electronic entertainment is a veritable pornography of violence, where vile acts are rendered in detail to a young audience.
I'm sure pinball enthusiasts were saying all the same things about Death Race 25 years ago...
Wait a minute. This guy is trying to determine whether cash has RADIO FREQUENCY ID's embedded in it... by exposing them to MICROWAVE FREQUENCY radiation?
Something tells me he slept through his Physics for Crackpots lectures.
Or do you know of a foolproof way to write music while preventing oneself from accidentally copying a copyrighted work?
What the fuck are you on about? For every song that is found to have been subconsciously copied from another copyrighted work, there are ONE MILLION songs that are taken to be original works.
Show a little more respect for the creative process.
They will work just fine until the mp3 format license requires the DRM add-ons and players start refusing to play music encoded without the DRM support.
So in other words, un-DRM'ed MP3s will continue to work forever.
There's not a single company out there dumb enough to think they can disable support for the terabytes upon terabytes of MP3 files that already exist out there without driving customers away to their more consumer-friendly competitors.
Vanilla MP3 has momentum working in its favor. It's going to take a revolution to change that.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't speak for everyone, but here we check not only a spider's User Agent string, but also whether the request is coming from Google's IP range or elsewhere. So your results may not be so great.
Then again, I've defeated many registration (er, pr0n) gateways by just seting a Referer header identical to the URL I'm requesting, so some defenses are better than others...
Since I moved my site over to a php bases sytem, nothing beyond my index page gets a second look from google.
p ly &threshold=3&commentsort=0&mode=flat&pid=85090 86
3 DR eply/threshold%3D3/commentsort%3D0/mode%3Dflat/pid %3D8509086.html
..
Have you considered using mod_rewrite or a similar solution to convert your complex URLS with query string parameters aplenty into something that looks like a vanilla filepath?
For example, using mod_rewrite the URL of the page I'm typing this on
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=99804&op=Re
could be rewritten to look like
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl/sid%3D99804/op&
to web spiders.
The FUD spreaders rarely mention the fact that exp dates are almost never stored with the numbers themselves.
If by "almost never" you mean "usually", I'd be inclined to agree with you.
We're talking about application designers that are foolish enough to store credit card numbers in a publicly accessible location to begin with. Do you really think any of them have given thought to deliberatily obfuscating the data model enough to store expiration dates somewhere other than right next to the CC numbers and account holder names?
You mean my microwave DOESN'T have a command line interface?
I use a keypad to type in instructions telling the machine what to do, and then with a final keypress the machine executes the instructions. When it's finished, it goes back to its original state and the cycle begins again. Sound familiar?
1) CLIs have state too. If there's a prompt, the computer is waiting for your input. If there isn't a prompt, the computer is busy doing the last thing you told it to do.
2) If you want to explore, RTFM. The idea that a tool and its documentation need to be integrated doesn't make sense to me -- do hammers come with a "how to drive nails" pictorial pasted to the handle?
3) There is certainly motor memory involved with CLIs; you use motor skills in your hands to type, don't ya? After years of CLI usage, frequently-used commands such as `ls -l` flow from my fingers without conscious thought. My fingers have typed that string of characters so many times, it's imprinted in motor memory.
4) Easy reversal requires conscious effort on behalf of the software designer, whether it's a GUI or CLI tool. It's not a design consideration that's endemic to one or the other.
You tell the computer to do something and all that returns (in most cases) is a command prompt.
Part of the Unix philosophy is that getting no visible response from a command is in of itself a response. If you run a properly-written command line program and get no message, you can assume that the program executed correctly.
Though, none of that applies to, say, DOS, or immediate-mode BASIC interpreters, which show the user an OK message after every event.
But this lack of an "undo" is the fault of *nix CLI (it could easily be remedied with automatic file version tracking and journalling).
And indeed, several filesystems for Unix exist that do just this. Probably not as many as the number of GUI applications that DON'T provide clean undo capabilities (I didn't mean to hit the red X! How do I get my window back?), so neither side is perfect here.
I challenge *nix people to build a CLI-only version of Photoshop.
ImageMagick?
At the company where I work, we have to process hundreds of images in a proscribed manner, every single day. We're not going to hire a team of Photoshop jockeys to slave over them all day, when a cronjob that invokes a command-line utility will work better. Perhaps the GUI is superior for interactive use, but it loses handily at scriptability.
So instead of picking among a few easy to distinguish items in a GUI,
"Hmm, do I need to click on the folder icon, the folder icon, or the folder icon?"
I am forced to type in 5 to 20 characters (that's 40 to 160 bits of information) per level in a CLI.
If you name your directories logically (meaningful abbreviations, no spaces or other characters that Unices have to treat specially) and use tab-completion, this isn't even an issue. I can get to virtually any known destination on my filesystem with 20 keystrokes or less. That's 2-3 seconds of typing -- I challenge you to match that kind of speed with a GUI's "double click, wait for window to refresh, double click, wait for window to refresh, double click" behavior.
Most of your points are entirely valid. GUIs excel in some areas, CLUIs in others. If you've found that GUI works best for you, great; myself, I'll continue to use a combination of the two.
Maybe every home doesn't need its own set of encyclopedias anymore. The Internet has pretty much taken over that niche, and even without the 'net CD-ROM encyclopedias (real ones, not info-tainment like Encarta) were on their way there.
But there's still a large market for hardbound encyclopedias: libraries. Any reference room worth a lick MUST have at least one, preferably more, general-purpose encyclopedia sets, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
There are about 55,000 zip codes in the United States. Assuming each of these has one public library branch, and each branch orders a new set of encylopedias only every five years, at let's say $4000 a pop, that's about $44 million in revenue per year. Is that enough to run an encyclopedia publishing company on?
Quite frankly, if I were the babysitter I would have summoned the police when the brats started firing at me with pellet guns, if not sooner. Let Mommy explain her negligent parenting behavior to the man with the badge.
Only the first $86,000 a person makes are subject to Social Security tax, which means that 100% of my income gets hit with Social Security tax, but less than .001% of Bill Gates' income is subject to SS tax.
Check your numbers. I seriously doubt that Bill Gates has an ANNUAL INCOME of over 9 BILLION dollars.
If people had to contribute into Social Security commensurate to their actual income, the system would work. Better yet, if people who had an average income of over $86,000 per year at the time of their retirement were inelegible to receive Social Security benefits, the system would work. As it is now, the system doesn't work; the rich pay less than everyone else, and in return get benefits they don't even need.
Repeated outages that last for days? If I was in your situation I'd just invest in a good gas-powered generator.
So what happens when you run out of gas? You've just replaced an unavailable resource with a (severely?) limited resource.
So now that technology has been shown succesfull in stopping "terrorists"
Were the scare quotes really necessary here?
These al-Qaeda operatives were not "terrorists"; they were TERRORISTS.
To see these assholes betrayed by technology is an unqualified Good Thing.
If I didn't do that, I would have hired a skilled programmer and a scientologist at the same time
So you're admitting that you based your decision not to hire on the person's religious beliefs?
Let's hope no prospective employers ever research YOU on Slashdot.
What they will be forced to do is make nothing but "hit singles."
No matter how you slice it, "hit singles" are better than "filler".
There is no double standard. If you make libelous statements about the President of the United States, he can have private lawyers send you a letter demanding that you retract your statements. And if you refuse, he can file suit against you.
Most policitians would not do that, because it would make them look rather petty and mean, and they'd lose votes as a result. Why corporations don't realize that the same kind of behavior will result in them losing customers, I don't know.
I think it's probably closer to:
1. ???
2. ???
3. ?????
the law is written to be deliberately difficult to understand without a legal education.
Are YOU a lawyer? Why should I lend credence to anything you have to say about this issue?
Yes, there are a lot of people on Slashdot spewing rubbish about the machinations of law, but as far as I can tell, you're just another one of them.
Diebold is a lock and security company that happened to buy a terrible, untrustworthy little company for a forray into electronic voting.
You say "just happened" as if it were mere serendipity that the little company became part of the big company.
No, Diebold should have known what they were getting into when they were making the purchase. And even if they didn't know then, they had ample opportunity to not make the product available until the problems had been corrected.
They still have a responsibility for due diligence.
Excuse me, but even listeners to the BBC (British Broadcast Corporation) are assumed to know what "Super Tuesday" means... are Americans more ignorant about the American politcal system than Europeans?
I don't know, but apparently Europeans are more arrogant about their knowledge of the American political system than Americans...
Contextual information is ALWAYS helpful.
Compared to games like Adventure or Pitfall today's electronic entertainment is a veritable pornography of violence, where vile acts are rendered in detail to a young audience.
I'm sure pinball enthusiasts were saying all the same things about Death Race 25 years ago...
Wait a minute. This guy is trying to determine whether cash has RADIO FREQUENCY ID's embedded in it... by exposing them to MICROWAVE FREQUENCY radiation?
Something tells me he slept through his Physics for Crackpots lectures.
Fast forward 5 years, wait until your cpu chip refuses to play non-DRM mp3 and you WILL care
My CPU chip will do what I damn well tell it to. It's just a stream of opcodes.
Or do you know of a foolproof way to write music while preventing oneself from accidentally copying a copyrighted work?
What the fuck are you on about? For every song that is found to have been subconsciously copied from another copyrighted work, there are ONE MILLION songs that are taken to be original works.
Show a little more respect for the creative process.
They will work just fine until the mp3 format license requires the DRM add-ons and players start refusing to play music encoded without the DRM support.
So in other words, un-DRM'ed MP3s will continue to work forever.
There's not a single company out there dumb enough to think they can disable support for the terabytes upon terabytes of MP3 files that already exist out there without driving customers away to their more consumer-friendly competitors.
Vanilla MP3 has momentum working in its favor. It's going to take a revolution to change that.
It's easier to just automatically move an account over to a spam IP if port 25 traffic gets too much than to pull the account entirely.
If you're going to move a spammer to another IP because they're spamming, might as well just make it 0.0.0.0, no?
No one says the ISP has to remove the violator from their billing system. Just keep sending them bills!
All it will do is bombard some innocent victim [...] with thousands - or millions - of emails that they were not reponsible for.
If the email was sent from a box you own, you are responsible for it.
If you make the conscious decision to connect your computer to a network, you are responsible for it.