So, how do you do you prevent vandalism with technology? If people often have trouble agreeing on what's correct or notable enough to be included in an article, how would a computer make a useful decision on it? There isn't even software that can understand the meaning of the articles, let alone decide if edits are valid. Wikipedia is supposed to be democratic within certain guidelines like notability. Democracy often isn't the most efficient way to make decisions. In fact, it may be one of the least efficient ways, but that is the nature of a wiki.
ATSC pictures can be either 4:3 or 16:9. Any TV that receives ATSC should give the user a choice of how to display a picture that doesn't match the shape of the TV, since there are no TVs that are both 4:3 and 16:9. I don't know if most TVs do give the user a choice, but similar functionality seems to be common in DVD players.
I don't often think about the limitations of standalone hardware, since I've been watching movies and shows using software players for quite a while, whether it's a DVD, downloaded video file, or ATSC broadcast recorded by MythTV. MythTV's player (SVN trunk version) has two levels of zoom activated by hitting a single remote button that do everything I need to display ATSC broadcasts on my 16:9 TV. Implementing that simple feature in a TV would make a lot of sense.
If 16:9 TVs that cannot display more detail than traditional NTSC TVs are being sold as "HD ready," that's pure fraud. The TVs I've seen for sale that are "HD ready", including the LCD one I bought, are capable of displaying an image of at least 1280x720 pixels, which the FCC considers high definition. When I bought my TV a couple of years ago, it had an NTSC tuner, but not an ATSC one. I found that odd, but unimportant, since I planned to connect it to my PVR's DVI output anyway.
I've had the impression from reading various descriptions of ATSC that 1080i was specified because of limitations of CRT displays at the time rather than cameras or broadcast equipment. Of course the irony is that today, most HDTVs use display technologies that are inherently progressive and must do extra work to display the interlaced signals. I'm not sure if we should blame the lack of forsight of the ATSC or the constant delays in mandating the switch. In either case, it was a dumb idea to specify interlacing for HD image formats. It does seem ATSC was stuck in a 70-year-old analog way of thinking that caused them to link the video format to the display technology.
It probably was a good idea to specify the 480i@59.94 format for backward compatibility. Assuming it was easier and less expensive to implement that format than an HD one, the FCC could have forced the switch to all digital broadcast even before it was cost effective to broadcast, receive or display HD pictures. Every digital broadcaster I can receive always has a 480i@59.94 stream, though I don't know if that's mandated by the FCC.
I sympathize very much. I don't want to pay for any subscription TV, so I built a MythTV PVR with a couple of digital ATSC receiver cards in it connected to an amplified antenna attached to a tree in my back yard. The initial costs were significant, but the only recurring one is for the program listings, which is a couple of dollars a month. I get lots of beautiful HD programs and since I can watch them anytime, I can avoid all the crap. When so many people say that TV is dying or useless, I assume they mean "live" TV. If I can choose what and when to watch, it's only the total amount of watchable programming that matters, rather than the fraction. There's plenty of good PBS and broadcast network programming, even if it's a small percentage of the total.
It sounds like if you all you want is to continue watching broadcast TV with your old NTSC TV, you can spend about $50 once and then get better reception. Of course, an alternative is to just get a new HDTV, which is a big one-time cost, but will probably cost less in the long run than paying for cable or satellite and give you a much better picture.
Schneier seems to be saying that the backdoor definitely exists, but he doesn't know who, if anyone, has the key to it. Even if no one currently has the key, if it were somehow discovered, everyone using the standard would be wide open.
Iraq has some democratic tradition too. Thought it's very different from the Axis powers after WWII, a successful democratic government isn't impossible.
This certainly happens, but do you have support for it being a majority or teachers? In any case, the Chinese students and governments are getting the knowledge they want. Maybe Americans should be concerned about Chinese influence on our culture now that so many of them can communicate directly with us.
So, why have societal attitudes about attractive shapes changed so much throughout history? It wasn't that long ago that it was desirable to have excess weight. I think it still is in some cultures which are often short of food. If you look at ancient Greek ideals of beauty in statues and paintings, the people are not as skinny as today's ideal supermodel. Ideal shapes and weights seem to be shifting fashions like so many other human attitudes.
OK, I can see there is some value to requiring a user to be in wheel to su to root. However, I again point out that there are probably very few GNU and Linux based systems that actually use GNU su, though other GNU coreutils are ubiquitous. It looks like you can configure wheel requirements via PAM, which is used on most GNU/Linux systems. I use passwordless SSH on my Ubuntu systems and sudo, which is also very configurable in required authentication.
Regardless of why GNU su was designed the way it is, I think most GNU/Linux systems actually use the su command supplied by the shadow password package. It also does not seem to care about the wheel group. In addition, why is requiring a user to be in the wheel group in order to su to root a big security improvement, since it still requires the user to enter the root password, just as the login command does? Restrictions like being in the wheel group are great for the sudo command, which requires users to supply their own passwords, but I don't really see the point for su.
There might be something to that, as internal PC temperature sure isn't stable, especially if the machine isn't always on or off. That would be an interesting theory to test. I could buy three identical cheap watches, then wear one, put one in the freezer, and one on my desk.
The RTC chip runs independently of the CPU, powered by a battery, which is why it keeps time at all when the system is powered down. However, I have wondered if the CPU's access of the RTC might somehow skew it slightly.
I'm sure you're right about the low cost of the PC RTC components. However, I still don't understand why I've long been able to buy a watch for $2-$15 that keeps better time than any PC I've had.
Yeah, Putty provides the decent terminal emulator Windows should have come with. It's easy to switch out terminal emulators on X11, but it doesn't seem to be as easy on Windows. If it were, I'd just use Putty to run local commands.
This is perhaps the most important point in this whole discussion. I'm bothered every time I hear or read "Web 2.0" because there's no widely agreed-upon definition. Some people seem to think it means AJAX. Some seem to think it means a web site with user-generated content. Others seem to think it means specific entities on the web displaying those properties such as Facebook. So, like so many other arguments, it's pointless to argue for or against Web 2.0 if it could mean any of those things or something slightly different.
While using AJAX can make a site more responsive and user-friendly, I can understand resistance to it if it is harder to develop in a secure, cross-browser fashion or wouldn't add a lot of value to a particular site. I certainly wouldn't expect a company to rely on an external entity like Facebook to store and control their own data, but that doesn't seem to be what TFA is talking about anyway. I'm sure there are many valid uses of user-edited sites at corporations, but whether a wiki, blog, forum, or something else is most appropriate would depend on details of the company and what kind of communication they're trying to facilitate.
So, you're convinced that most children have long had access to printed books with the same type of content easily available on the web today? Unless I'm mistaken, porn magazines have not been and are not as easily accessible to children even today. Was there a time when photos of nude people and dismemberment was common to see in books, magazines, movies, or television with no age restrictions?
There certainly have been books whose text contain those things for a long time, but that's not quite the same as a photo. I think it's very difficult to support the position that children have always had the same access to images they do today. The access to various things people have considered objectional, whether images, words, or ideas, is not constant. Sometimes there's a trend toward more restriction, and sometimes the opposite.
To me, it doesn't make any more sense to allow children at school unrestricted web access than to allow them to come and go from class any time they please. The primary reason for them to be at school is to learn, so restricting activities that don't help learning and may impede it is definitely a responsibility of the administration and teachers. I'm not sure what the best approach is, since we all know well filtering software and services work.
Maybe the best approach is just active teacher monitoring and clearly stated guidelines about what types of activities and content isn't allowed. Of course, different classes and projects would probably need different standards. In many contexts, students would probably only need access to a few specific sites related to the class activity, while others might require unrestricted access. The school should also seek input from parents. Maybe you would let your kids see and read anything they came across, but I would have some boundaries, as I know many parents do. My parents did often take an interest in what I read when I was growing up.
I don't think I made a strong argument. I'm trying to understand what your argument is. Are you saying that it would be better to make no attempt to control what the kids access on the Internet in any way?
You're probably right. That's a more plausible explanation than a conspiracy. I think that ignorant or otherwise abusive cops need to be challenged to keep them in line, so I think that Michael Righi was doing the public a service by asserting his rights.
I think that Michael Righy was trying to force the issue because he considers it abusive for stores to demand to see your receipt and search your bag after you've paid for the merchandise. I do see his position, but I don't know how important of an issue it is yet. What I am convinced of is that the police officer wasn't doing his job and illegally arrested him when he didn't provide a driver's license. I'm not sure I'd be willing to go through the hassle Michael is, but I do think he's doing the rest of us a service by challenging abusive police authority.
I'm certain that Fry's doesn't search carts to help customers. However, how would an item on a receipt that doesn't appear in the cart be involved with shoplifting? Something that was stolen wouldn't show up on the receipt.
That's the essential point. I did grow up in several third-world countries, though I wouldn't have described any of them as totalitarian. In those places, one didn't generally expect police to be honest or bureaucratic policies to be easily determined, let alone logical. Living in the US now, I fully realize that the government institutions here aren't perfect, but I have a much greater expectation that they are valuable to me. I do think this story raises important issues, especially about police requiring drivers' licenses without good reason, which I think is a violation of civil rights. However, I think abuses like this are still the exception, while they'd be considered normal in some places I've been.
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So, how do you do you prevent vandalism with technology? If people often have trouble agreeing on what's correct or notable enough to be included in an article, how would a computer make a useful decision on it? There isn't even software that can understand the meaning of the articles, let alone decide if edits are valid. Wikipedia is supposed to be democratic within certain guidelines like notability. Democracy often isn't the most efficient way to make decisions. In fact, it may be one of the least efficient ways, but that is the nature of a wiki.
ATSC pictures can be either 4:3 or 16:9. Any TV that receives ATSC should give the user a choice of how to display a picture that doesn't match the shape of the TV, since there are no TVs that are both 4:3 and 16:9. I don't know if most TVs do give the user a choice, but similar functionality seems to be common in DVD players.
I don't often think about the limitations of standalone hardware, since I've been watching movies and shows using software players for quite a while, whether it's a DVD, downloaded video file, or ATSC broadcast recorded by MythTV. MythTV's player (SVN trunk version) has two levels of zoom activated by hitting a single remote button that do everything I need to display ATSC broadcasts on my 16:9 TV. Implementing that simple feature in a TV would make a lot of sense.
If 16:9 TVs that cannot display more detail than traditional NTSC TVs are being sold as "HD ready," that's pure fraud. The TVs I've seen for sale that are "HD ready", including the LCD one I bought, are capable of displaying an image of at least 1280x720 pixels, which the FCC considers high definition. When I bought my TV a couple of years ago, it had an NTSC tuner, but not an ATSC one. I found that odd, but unimportant, since I planned to connect it to my PVR's DVI output anyway.
I've had the impression from reading various descriptions of ATSC that 1080i was specified because of limitations of CRT displays at the time rather than cameras or broadcast equipment. Of course the irony is that today, most HDTVs use display technologies that are inherently progressive and must do extra work to display the interlaced signals. I'm not sure if we should blame the lack of forsight of the ATSC or the constant delays in mandating the switch. In either case, it was a dumb idea to specify interlacing for HD image formats. It does seem ATSC was stuck in a 70-year-old analog way of thinking that caused them to link the video format to the display technology.
It probably was a good idea to specify the 480i@59.94 format for backward compatibility. Assuming it was easier and less expensive to implement that format than an HD one, the FCC could have forced the switch to all digital broadcast even before it was cost effective to broadcast, receive or display HD pictures. Every digital broadcaster I can receive always has a 480i@59.94 stream, though I don't know if that's mandated by the FCC.
I sympathize very much. I don't want to pay for any subscription TV, so I built a MythTV PVR with a couple of digital ATSC receiver cards in it connected to an amplified antenna attached to a tree in my back yard. The initial costs were significant, but the only recurring one is for the program listings, which is a couple of dollars a month. I get lots of beautiful HD programs and since I can watch them anytime, I can avoid all the crap. When so many people say that TV is dying or useless, I assume they mean "live" TV. If I can choose what and when to watch, it's only the total amount of watchable programming that matters, rather than the fraction. There's plenty of good PBS and broadcast network programming, even if it's a small percentage of the total.
It sounds like if you all you want is to continue watching broadcast TV with your old NTSC TV, you can spend about $50 once and then get better reception. Of course, an alternative is to just get a new HDTV, which is a big one-time cost, but will probably cost less in the long run than paying for cable or satellite and give you a much better picture.
Schneier seems to be saying that the backdoor definitely exists, but he doesn't know who, if anyone, has the key to it. Even if no one currently has the key, if it were somehow discovered, everyone using the standard would be wide open.
You do realize that you can write use .Net apps using Mono on GNU/Linux, other Free platforms, and even Windows, right?
The cake is a lie!
Iraq has some democratic tradition too. Thought it's very different from the Axis powers after WWII, a successful democratic government isn't impossible.
This certainly happens, but do you have support for it being a majority or teachers? In any case, the Chinese students and governments are getting the knowledge they want. Maybe Americans should be concerned about Chinese influence on our culture now that so many of them can communicate directly with us.
So, why have societal attitudes about attractive shapes changed so much throughout history? It wasn't that long ago that it was desirable to have excess weight. I think it still is in some cultures which are often short of food. If you look at ancient Greek ideals of beauty in statues and paintings, the people are not as skinny as today's ideal supermodel. Ideal shapes and weights seem to be shifting fashions like so many other human attitudes.
OK, I can see there is some value to requiring a user to be in wheel to su to root. However, I again point out that there are probably very few GNU and Linux based systems that actually use GNU su, though other GNU coreutils are ubiquitous. It looks like you can configure wheel requirements via PAM, which is used on most GNU/Linux systems. I use passwordless SSH on my Ubuntu systems and sudo, which is also very configurable in required authentication.
Regardless of why GNU su was designed the way it is, I think most GNU/Linux systems actually use the su command supplied by the shadow password package. It also does not seem to care about the wheel group. In addition, why is requiring a user to be in the wheel group in order to su to root a big security improvement, since it still requires the user to enter the root password, just as the login command does? Restrictions like being in the wheel group are great for the sudo command, which requires users to supply their own passwords, but I don't really see the point for su.
There might be something to that, as internal PC temperature sure isn't stable, especially if the machine isn't always on or off. That would be an interesting theory to test. I could buy three identical cheap watches, then wear one, put one in the freezer, and one on my desk.
The RTC chip runs independently of the CPU, powered by a battery, which is why it keeps time at all when the system is powered down. However, I have wondered if the CPU's access of the RTC might somehow skew it slightly.
I'm sure you're right about the low cost of the PC RTC components. However, I still don't understand why I've long been able to buy a watch for $2-$15 that keeps better time than any PC I've had.
Yeah, Putty provides the decent terminal emulator Windows should have come with. It's easy to switch out terminal emulators on X11, but it doesn't seem to be as easy on Windows. If it were, I'd just use Putty to run local commands.
This is perhaps the most important point in this whole discussion. I'm bothered every time I hear or read "Web 2.0" because there's no widely agreed-upon definition. Some people seem to think it means AJAX. Some seem to think it means a web site with user-generated content. Others seem to think it means specific entities on the web displaying those properties such as Facebook. So, like so many other arguments, it's pointless to argue for or against Web 2.0 if it could mean any of those things or something slightly different.
While using AJAX can make a site more responsive and user-friendly, I can understand resistance to it if it is harder to develop in a secure, cross-browser fashion or wouldn't add a lot of value to a particular site. I certainly wouldn't expect a company to rely on an external entity like Facebook to store and control their own data, but that doesn't seem to be what TFA is talking about anyway. I'm sure there are many valid uses of user-edited sites at corporations, but whether a wiki, blog, forum, or something else is most appropriate would depend on details of the company and what kind of communication they're trying to facilitate.
So, you're convinced that most children have long had access to printed books with the same type of content easily available on the web today? Unless I'm mistaken, porn magazines have not been and are not as easily accessible to children even today. Was there a time when photos of nude people and dismemberment was common to see in books, magazines, movies, or television with no age restrictions?
There certainly have been books whose text contain those things for a long time, but that's not quite the same as a photo. I think it's very difficult to support the position that children have always had the same access to images they do today. The access to various things people have considered objectional, whether images, words, or ideas, is not constant. Sometimes there's a trend toward more restriction, and sometimes the opposite.
To me, it doesn't make any more sense to allow children at school unrestricted web access than to allow them to come and go from class any time they please. The primary reason for them to be at school is to learn, so restricting activities that don't help learning and may impede it is definitely a responsibility of the administration and teachers. I'm not sure what the best approach is, since we all know well filtering software and services work.
Maybe the best approach is just active teacher monitoring and clearly stated guidelines about what types of activities and content isn't allowed. Of course, different classes and projects would probably need different standards. In many contexts, students would probably only need access to a few specific sites related to the class activity, while others might require unrestricted access. The school should also seek input from parents. Maybe you would let your kids see and read anything they came across, but I would have some boundaries, as I know many parents do. My parents did often take an interest in what I read when I was growing up.
I don't think I made a strong argument. I'm trying to understand what your argument is. Are you saying that it would be better to make no attempt to control what the kids access on the Internet in any way?
You're probably right. That's a more plausible explanation than a conspiracy. I think that ignorant or otherwise abusive cops need to be challenged to keep them in line, so I think that Michael Righi was doing the public a service by asserting his rights.
I think that Michael Righy was trying to force the issue because he considers it abusive for stores to demand to see your receipt and search your bag after you've paid for the merchandise. I do see his position, but I don't know how important of an issue it is yet. What I am convinced of is that the police officer wasn't doing his job and illegally arrested him when he didn't provide a driver's license. I'm not sure I'd be willing to go through the hassle Michael is, but I do think he's doing the rest of us a service by challenging abusive police authority.
I'm certain that Fry's doesn't search carts to help customers. However, how would an item on a receipt that doesn't appear in the cart be involved with shoplifting? Something that was stolen wouldn't show up on the receipt.
That's the essential point. I did grow up in several third-world countries, though I wouldn't have described any of them as totalitarian. In those places, one didn't generally expect police to be honest or bureaucratic policies to be easily determined, let alone logical. Living in the US now, I fully realize that the government institutions here aren't perfect, but I have a much greater expectation that they are valuable to me. I do think this story raises important issues, especially about police requiring drivers' licenses without good reason, which I think is a violation of civil rights. However, I think abuses like this are still the exception, while they'd be considered normal in some places I've been.
So what about all the violent images on the web? I suppose there's no point in trying to protect kids from that either?