It isn't so much that there's a bug that concerns me, it's that it took this long for anyone to pick it up. The bug has been in every version of Outlook, and that's been around for quite a long time now.
In the end it was discovered by an independent entity, and considering that Microsoft doesn't traditionally open their development to outsiders, they have no control (directly or through probability) of who that entity might be. If it wasn't a security firm that discovered this first, it could have been anyone.
IMHO, they should instead have an internal infrastructure to find these things for them before anyone else can. People trust Microsoft to provide them with secure products, yet Microsoft is at least partly relying on the users to find the security holes.
While on the topic, what's the likelihood that someone with enough intent could work out the technology by reverse engineering the closed source driver, anyway?
I'm not suggesting it would necessarily be feasible since it's not really my area. Can someone comment?
Imagine for a second that we wrote 100 million lines of code to control a nuclear reactor, and that nobody ever checked any of it. We just put the code into the computers and took over control of an actual working reactor without testing.
I was having a discussion with someone a few months ago about how lawmakers could potentially learn a lot from computer science types of theory. Obviously not for everything, but there are parts where it makes sense. Particularly with simplification through effective re-use of effort.
Put simply, the language that law is written in needs variables. Laws should state the reasoning behind them instead of what they are, and what they are should be derived every time they're interpreted.
Without being a lawyer, my impression is that there are a lot of legal documents that get written incredibly specifically, and then sit on a shelf for 100 years until someone (who matters) notices that they need updating.
The best example I can think of is a committee that I'm on. We recently had a revamp of our society constitution, typed up by a chap in his 60's (actually he had his secretary to type it for him). I complained about an update to some wording to now include that notification can be by "email or fax".
Honestly he would have to be kidding. Constitutions of any sort take years to change once they're noticed meaning that 50 years from now we'll be stuck with the words "facsimile" and "email" in our constitution. There's no telling how the definitions of these words could change over time or even if they'll still exist, and the actual point was supposed to be "reliable communication". We could have easily said this and then had more dynamic external specifications stating what reliable communication was.
The irritating thing is that I lost, because he was the lawyer (well.. judge, actually) and I'm a young computer geek meaning I definitively don't know anything about it. I put it down to the legal profession being so pedantically paranoid about being specific because they don't have a clue how to write anything dynamically and keep it reliable.
I know we're still continually learning how to effectively do this ourselves, but to me it seems we're well in front of the legal profession - which isn't showing any signs of progress at all.
We require drivers to pass a proficiency test, why not computer buyers?
Well I for one consider car drivers licenses a good thing. As long as I know everyone's up to a set standard of driving, I can be reasonably confident that the driver coming head on towards me at 100kph won't swerve accross the centreline.
I don't agree with computer buyers needing licenses. For the most part, it would only add inconvenience to the millions who just want computers. Owning a computer and not knowing how to use it is mostly a danger to yourself more than anyone else. If buyers decide not to learn about what they're doing with them, it's their own decision. As long as I know what I'm doing, it won't effect me one way or the other.
If and when businesses need someone reliable, they can look for someone with a proper qualification. I think the biggest problem is that either businesses and organisations don't do this properly, or the qualifications aren't reliable qualifications. In the latter case, it's the education system that would need to be controlled - not the users and buyers.
Yes but how many competent HTML authors do you know of? The idea is for authors to be encouraged to write good HTML code by having the browser their testing it in report problems properly. Anyway, I should have been more specific.
The problem I have with validators isn't with the validators themselves, it's with the environment that they expect authors to use them in.
I can easily design a page of perfect HTML that will run perfectly through any validator. The problem is that as soon as I correct for the frailties of both Netscape, MSIE, and whatever other browsers it needs to be visible in, any decent validator will come up with hundreds of errors.
Hence most "competent" authors who design so that the page is properly viewable would find validators mostly useless with anything other than a very simple page.
If browsers could be set to work the way they're supposed to (along with an option of being lenient on bad HTML for backward compatibility), it would go a long way to helping solve this problem.
Firstly let me say that I agree entirely with what MAPS does.
That said, I think it would be ethically right for ISP's that use MAPS to announce to users in an agreement or contract that they might block some incoming email in accordance with the list supplied by MAPS.
As long as they do this, MAPS can strengthen it's case even more because it can argue that the users themselves have agreed with their ISP's that they don't want to receive email that MAPS considers annoying.
And incidently we invented it, they are licensing the idea:)
Yes but the American version added drama (and American accents). Well they probably did. I admit I haven't seen the Scandanavian version, but I have seen snippets of the American one. They started playing it here after the New Zealand version of the show finished. (We're a couple of weeks behind I think.)
One of the problems, IMHO, is that Netscape and Mozilla - even for when they are consistent with standards - are too tolerant of mistakes. All this does is encourage people to design bad pages because it's not always obvious when there's a mistake.
For obvious reasons browsers can't reverse this outright, because then half the web would suddenly stop working and nobody would use the browser. What I would like to see however is for browsers like Netscape and MSIE to have a 'strict HTML' mode where they'll conform to the exact standards like they're supposed to. This would make it a million times easier for developers.
I don't know if there's much anyone can really do about how Microsoft designs their browser except let the justice system do whatever it does.
On the other hand though, what happens if people go after the businesses who make everything Microsoft only? Corporations are Microsoft's main customer base after all, and personally I see them as (stereotypically) at least as dumb and irritating as Microsoft itself in this area.
Unlike internally used applications, websites are where businesses have to interact externally with their customers, so the choice of how they do it should be an important decision for most of them. What sort of impact does it have if and when businesses get flame mail about their propriety-based websites?
Are there any IT people out there who can comment on this? Maybe getting enough negative (but constructive) correspondence could help convince some management people that cross-platform standards design is a good thing - irrespective of Microsoft's market share.
Call me crazy but I trust W3 standards development more than Microsoft standards development, and the last thing I'd want to see right now is Mozilla to have to implement a "Microsoft mode", because then there would be no going back.
So how does one regulate streaming media originating from outside Australia?
Well I'm not really trying to suggest that it would be successful, and I'm not suggesting I think it would be incredibly beneficial to require licences for streaming if anyone there actually thinks it through. But it wouldn't surprise me still if local content promotion is the reason why they're trying to do it.
Local content quotas on existing broadcasters inside Australia have had a positive impact on the whole industry (except for the broadcasters who have to uphold the quota). It's not like the US or Europe where the economy is big enough that the entertainment industry fuels and pays for itself.
Producing local entertainment is a luxury, so in smaller economies if there aren't local content quotas, it takes a back seat. Cheap TV, music etc just gets imported from bigger countries instead.
Someone in the Australian government might just be panicing that the local industry is going to fall over if the media slowly moves to something that the government doesn't have control over. Unless there's something other than a quota to make up for it (like subsidies), they wouldn't be far from wrong either.
I don't agree with what they're doing at all, but I think one of the main reasons behind this would be so the Australian government can help "encourage" local content.
The media in Australia has some very strict local content quotas and although I don't live there at the moment (I'm from New Zealand), it's been very successful in making sure that Australians get some decent good quality local productions. It's also been great for the local music industry because, for example, the radio stations have to play a certain amount of "new" local content meaning they have to keep scouting for it.
What they're probably doing for better or worse, is trying to grasp control of internet streaming before it gets away from them so they can control it in the same way. It's no secret that sooner or later, internet types of media will eventually replace analogue transmissions. If the Australian government is not in control of it by that time, it would be much harder to transfer the quotas.
Strangely enough, a lot of people who are concerned about their privacy on line seem to only care about it online. For years, Supermarkets have been correlating and cross referencing our buying habits, for more carefully targetted advertising, using loyalty cards.
I mostly agree with you but I think if anywhere, the biggest difference is that people are at least aware of when it's possible for information to be collected about them in the real world. It's not a big secret that when purchasing something with a credit card, the transaction will be recorded by the credit company.
What scares me about online privacy is that through things like cookies - that most people don't know about, you can be tracked almost completely invisibly without asking for it and without having any indication that it's happening. So often it relies on what's built into browsers and other apps by default and won't be turned off until someone knows about the risk. Even then, it depends on the application being bug-free and how often does that happen? (It definitely happens a lot in closed source, which like it or not most people use.)
If the risk is known, the motivation isn't always there. Cookies and javascript can be turned off, but there's a cost because the privacy features that half the web is abusing are the same features that are essential to properly use the other half.
Most people won't even have heard about non-obvious privacy issues like packet sniffing. If they have it's often useless because so many sites don't make any allowance for encrypted sessions unless there's obviously personal information involved. (Who they might sell it to afterwards is another issue entirely.) This is even more of a problem when home users are starting to move away from dialup connections to fixed IP addresses.
I guess my point is that in the real world people can decide not to use a loyalty card or a credit card or they can refuse to store their money in a bank because at least they know that their actions might be recorded. But we've moved so fast that most people are either completely ignorant or otherwise incapable of doing anything serious about their online privacy except stay completely offline. I think this ignorance (and reliance on bad quality software and services) is the biggest difference.
I might be remembering wrong. There was something that's now used lots for packing material. I was quite sure it was invented for the space program, but it might have been some other massive budget thing.
The major established launch contractors have no incentive to invest in lower space launch costs, beyond minor investments aimed at minor cost reductions that show up in higher profits on existing traffic. Large investments aimed at major cost reductions would tend to have the effect of significantly reducing their launch business cashflow, as their largest single customer, the government, would insist on having the savings passed along.
I take it this means that if they get the costs down, the government would insist that they charge less so they wouldn't make any money anyway. It's a fair comment, but I don't completely agree with this.
When polystyrene was invented as part of the space program ages ago, it cost millions of dollars per cubic meter. (Sorry I don't speak imperial well, but that's something like a cube with 3.3 foot edges.) It wouldn't have cost anything to produce, but that didn't mean they made a huge loss on development. It was completely justified to put that price on it until the research and development was paid off.
In any case, even if it costs the government some sort of reward or bonus to the launch companies to make this investment, it would pay off big time for all sorts of business that it would generate when the launch costs come down (eventually) as a result.
===
on-selling and squatting on domain names
on
Pirate DNS?
·
· Score: 1
If something like this went ahead, could I suggest having a usage licence that defines a maximum price that anyone is allowed to on-sell their domain. (Maybe to be reviewed every so often for chanegs in inflation, etc.)
One of the big motivations for squatting on domain names is the money that people expect to make out of selling a name at the end. Naturally you could always choose not to sell it to someone who wanted it, but wouldn't be able to make hoardes of money from it either.
It wouldn't solve everything but as long as such a licence is tested in court successfully, it would help avoid lots of other legal problems.
I listened to about half of the samples they have (the RealAudio ones) and there didn't seem to be much on them that you wouldn't get through analog radio anyway. (Lack of commercials aside.)
If anything like this ever becomes popular, I hope it's because it tries new ideas and doesn't just keep playing the same big label stuff repeatedly but through a different medium.
So given this, how does taking a snapshot of the web give a view of how society is at the moment?
I don't know about you, but I've seen lots of First World War propaganda that had absolutely nothing to do with what was really going on, but it gave me an excellent impression of what society was like about then.
The key thing is that I know it was propaganda, just as the key thing with this is that historians (and others) will know that today's web doesn't represent everyone.
It really would depend on how it's done. Can you be any more specific?
If you mean to store the domain names in a distributed net (a gnutella type of thing) then every second porn site would be spamming it so yahoo.com and slashdot.org pointed to them - at least to the point where the same search went to different places depending on mostly random variables...
Otherwise just storing search keys pointing directly to the site on a distributed network would probably end up with exactly the same sort of problem, wouldn't it?
We have SMS in New Zealand and it's okay to a point. There are some people though who I just wish I hadn't given my phone number to.
There's one person in particular who normally is a heck of a nice person, but stuck in a boring receptionist job. A minimum of three times a day I get that annoying beep beep -- beep beep, only to get the same boring "what are u up to?" message. It wouldn't be so bad if she just called and asked, but replying means stopping everything I'm doing to punch in an answer through a stupid 9 key keypad.
This is worse than instant messaging where you can at least pretend to be invisible and if not, there's a decent keyboard. Switching your phone off is possible but then it defies the point of having the phone in the first place.
In my second year of High School, my maths teacher told the class that there wasn't really any need to learn most of the formulas at that time because normally you could just use a calculator. At tertiary level this is completely true. Nobody bothers working out simple stuff when it'll easily plug into a calculator/computer. But that didn't stop us from learning how to do it in High School, and it's something I'm glad of.
I think that making computers available to children through school is important, but to me it would seem silly to base education around them to the point where children rely on them.
Computers are great, but they're also really antisocial. Any children who want to get deeply involved in them can do it in their own time, or maybe through some separate program in schools.
Really I don't think having them available can cause much problem as long as it's in a way not to distract children from what they're there to be learning.
Here in New Zealand the general attitude is very paranoid (or cautious, depending on who you are) towards genetic engineering, and at least on paper it's quite heavily regulated.
Anyway, there was recently a government probe that found that a full 18% of the genetic engineering experiments were completely unauthorised. (Followup scientist reaction here.) I'm inclined to go with the scientists, if for no other reason because from where I am the whole public attitude seems more like an ignorant vigilante mob.
Does anyone have any ideas on how this could or should be regulated (if at all) if for no other reason, to prevent potentially dangerous results accidently (or deliberately) seeping into the environment?
I wonder how it might work in combination with Jim Willard's paper computer that was discussed here back in December.
From memory the paper computer thing didn't offer any serious visual feedback, but combined the whole thing might be quite cool.
I guess processing power might be a problem, but maybe if people started carrying around portable processors to plug their paper into it could.. okay I've almost lost it, but maybe.:)
Slashdot Mirror
It isn't so much that there's a bug that concerns me, it's that it took this long for anyone to pick it up. The bug has been in every version of Outlook, and that's been around for quite a long time now.
In the end it was discovered by an independent entity, and considering that Microsoft doesn't traditionally open their development to outsiders, they have no control (directly or through probability) of who that entity might be. If it wasn't a security firm that discovered this first, it could have been anyone.
IMHO, they should instead have an internal infrastructure to find these things for them before anyone else can. People trust Microsoft to provide them with secure products, yet Microsoft is at least partly relying on the users to find the security holes.
===
While on the topic, what's the likelihood that someone with enough intent could work out the technology by reverse engineering the closed source driver, anyway?
I'm not suggesting it would necessarily be feasible since it's not really my area. Can someone comment?
===
Imagine for a second that we wrote 100 million lines of code to control a nuclear reactor, and that nobody ever checked any of it. We just put the code into the computers and took over control of an actual working reactor without testing.
I was having a discussion with someone a few months ago about how lawmakers could potentially learn a lot from computer science types of theory. Obviously not for everything, but there are parts where it makes sense. Particularly with simplification through effective re-use of effort.
Put simply, the language that law is written in needs variables. Laws should state the reasoning behind them instead of what they are, and what they are should be derived every time they're interpreted.
Without being a lawyer, my impression is that there are a lot of legal documents that get written incredibly specifically, and then sit on a shelf for 100 years until someone (who matters) notices that they need updating.
The best example I can think of is a committee that I'm on. We recently had a revamp of our society constitution, typed up by a chap in his 60's (actually he had his secretary to type it for him). I complained about an update to some wording to now include that notification can be by "email or fax".
Honestly he would have to be kidding. Constitutions of any sort take years to change once they're noticed meaning that 50 years from now we'll be stuck with the words "facsimile" and "email" in our constitution. There's no telling how the definitions of these words could change over time or even if they'll still exist, and the actual point was supposed to be "reliable communication". We could have easily said this and then had more dynamic external specifications stating what reliable communication was.
The irritating thing is that I lost, because he was the lawyer (well.. judge, actually) and I'm a young computer geek meaning I definitively don't know anything about it. I put it down to the legal profession being so pedantically paranoid about being specific because they don't have a clue how to write anything dynamically and keep it reliable.
I know we're still continually learning how to effectively do this ourselves, but to me it seems we're well in front of the legal profession - which isn't showing any signs of progress at all.
===
Well I for one consider car drivers licenses a good thing. As long as I know everyone's up to a set standard of driving, I can be reasonably confident that the driver coming head on towards me at 100kph won't swerve accross the centreline.
I don't agree with computer buyers needing licenses. For the most part, it would only add inconvenience to the millions who just want computers. Owning a computer and not knowing how to use it is mostly a danger to yourself more than anyone else. If buyers decide not to learn about what they're doing with them, it's their own decision. As long as I know what I'm doing, it won't effect me one way or the other.
If and when businesses need someone reliable, they can look for someone with a proper qualification. I think the biggest problem is that either businesses and organisations don't do this properly, or the qualifications aren't reliable qualifications. In the latter case, it's the education system that would need to be controlled - not the users and buyers.
===
Yes but how many competent HTML authors do you know of? The idea is for authors to be encouraged to write good HTML code by having the browser their testing it in report problems properly. Anyway, I should have been more specific.
The problem I have with validators isn't with the validators themselves, it's with the environment that they expect authors to use them in.
I can easily design a page of perfect HTML that will run perfectly through any validator. The problem is that as soon as I correct for the frailties of both Netscape, MSIE, and whatever other browsers it needs to be visible in, any decent validator will come up with hundreds of errors.
Hence most "competent" authors who design so that the page is properly viewable would find validators mostly useless with anything other than a very simple page.
If browsers could be set to work the way they're supposed to (along with an option of being lenient on bad HTML for backward compatibility), it would go a long way to helping solve this problem.
===
Firstly let me say that I agree entirely with what MAPS does.
That said, I think it would be ethically right for ISP's that use MAPS to announce to users in an agreement or contract that they might block some incoming email in accordance with the list supplied by MAPS.
As long as they do this, MAPS can strengthen it's case even more because it can argue that the users themselves have agreed with their ISP's that they don't want to receive email that MAPS considers annoying.
===
More specifically, does anyone know of any similar projects based on gecko that have a Windows build?
===
Yes but the American version added drama (and American accents). Well they probably did. I admit I haven't seen the Scandanavian version, but I have seen snippets of the American one. They started playing it here after the New Zealand version of the show finished. (We're a couple of weeks behind I think.)
===
One of the problems, IMHO, is that Netscape and Mozilla - even for when they are consistent with standards - are too tolerant of mistakes. All this does is encourage people to design bad pages because it's not always obvious when there's a mistake.
For obvious reasons browsers can't reverse this outright, because then half the web would suddenly stop working and nobody would use the browser. What I would like to see however is for browsers like Netscape and MSIE to have a 'strict HTML' mode where they'll conform to the exact standards like they're supposed to. This would make it a million times easier for developers.
===
I don't know if there's much anyone can really do about how Microsoft designs their browser except let the justice system do whatever it does.
On the other hand though, what happens if people go after the businesses who make everything Microsoft only? Corporations are Microsoft's main customer base after all, and personally I see them as (stereotypically) at least as dumb and irritating as Microsoft itself in this area.
Unlike internally used applications, websites are where businesses have to interact externally with their customers, so the choice of how they do it should be an important decision for most of them. What sort of impact does it have if and when businesses get flame mail about their propriety-based websites?
Are there any IT people out there who can comment on this? Maybe getting enough negative (but constructive) correspondence could help convince some management people that cross-platform standards design is a good thing - irrespective of Microsoft's market share.
Call me crazy but I trust W3 standards development more than Microsoft standards development, and the last thing I'd want to see right now is Mozilla to have to implement a "Microsoft mode", because then there would be no going back.
===
So how does one regulate streaming media originating from outside Australia?
Well I'm not really trying to suggest that it would be successful, and I'm not suggesting I think it would be incredibly beneficial to require licences for streaming if anyone there actually thinks it through. But it wouldn't surprise me still if local content promotion is the reason why they're trying to do it.
Local content quotas on existing broadcasters inside Australia have had a positive impact on the whole industry (except for the broadcasters who have to uphold the quota). It's not like the US or Europe where the economy is big enough that the entertainment industry fuels and pays for itself.
Producing local entertainment is a luxury, so in smaller economies if there aren't local content quotas, it takes a back seat. Cheap TV, music etc just gets imported from bigger countries instead.
Someone in the Australian government might just be panicing that the local industry is going to fall over if the media slowly moves to something that the government doesn't have control over. Unless there's something other than a quota to make up for it (like subsidies), they wouldn't be far from wrong either.
===
that'll teach me to delete everything and write something else. :)
===
I don't agree with what they're doing at all, but I think one of the main reasons behind this would be so the Australian government can help "encourage" local content.
The media in Australia has some very strict local content quotas and although I don't live there at the moment (I'm from New Zealand), it's been very successful in making sure that Australians get some decent good quality local productions. It's also been great for the local music industry because, for example, the radio stations have to play a certain amount of "new" local content meaning they have to keep scouting for it.
What they're probably doing for better or worse, is trying to grasp control of internet streaming before it gets away from them so they can control it in the same way. It's no secret that sooner or later, internet types of media will eventually replace analogue transmissions. If the Australian government is not in control of it by that time, it would be much harder to transfer the quotas.
===
kill -9 -1
===
Strangely enough, a lot of people who are concerned about their privacy on line seem to only care about it online. For years, Supermarkets have been correlating and cross referencing our buying habits, for more carefully targetted advertising, using loyalty cards.
I mostly agree with you but I think if anywhere, the biggest difference is that people are at least aware of when it's possible for information to be collected about them in the real world. It's not a big secret that when purchasing something with a credit card, the transaction will be recorded by the credit company.
What scares me about online privacy is that through things like cookies - that most people don't know about, you can be tracked almost completely invisibly without asking for it and without having any indication that it's happening. So often it relies on what's built into browsers and other apps by default and won't be turned off until someone knows about the risk. Even then, it depends on the application being bug-free and how often does that happen? (It definitely happens a lot in closed source, which like it or not most people use.)
If the risk is known, the motivation isn't always there. Cookies and javascript can be turned off, but there's a cost because the privacy features that half the web is abusing are the same features that are essential to properly use the other half.
Most people won't even have heard about non-obvious privacy issues like packet sniffing. If they have it's often useless because so many sites don't make any allowance for encrypted sessions unless there's obviously personal information involved. (Who they might sell it to afterwards is another issue entirely.) This is even more of a problem when home users are starting to move away from dialup connections to fixed IP addresses.
I guess my point is that in the real world people can decide not to use a loyalty card or a credit card or they can refuse to store their money in a bank because at least they know that their actions might be recorded. But we've moved so fast that most people are either completely ignorant or otherwise incapable of doing anything serious about their online privacy except stay completely offline. I think this ignorance (and reliance on bad quality software and services) is the biggest difference.
===
I might be remembering wrong. There was something that's now used lots for packing material. I was quite sure it was invented for the space program, but it might have been some other massive budget thing.
So what's the story of polystyrene?
===
The major established launch contractors have no incentive to invest in lower space launch costs, beyond minor investments aimed at minor cost reductions that show up in higher profits on existing traffic. Large investments aimed at major cost reductions would tend to have the effect of significantly reducing their launch business cashflow, as their largest single customer, the government, would insist on having the savings passed along.
I take it this means that if they get the costs down, the government would insist that they charge less so they wouldn't make any money anyway. It's a fair comment, but I don't completely agree with this.
When polystyrene was invented as part of the space program ages ago, it cost millions of dollars per cubic meter. (Sorry I don't speak imperial well, but that's something like a cube with 3.3 foot edges.) It wouldn't have cost anything to produce, but that didn't mean they made a huge loss on development. It was completely justified to put that price on it until the research and development was paid off.
In any case, even if it costs the government some sort of reward or bonus to the launch companies to make this investment, it would pay off big time for all sorts of business that it would generate when the launch costs come down (eventually) as a result.
===
If something like this went ahead, could I suggest having a usage licence that defines a maximum price that anyone is allowed to on-sell their domain. (Maybe to be reviewed every so often for chanegs in inflation, etc.)
One of the big motivations for squatting on domain names is the money that people expect to make out of selling a name at the end. Naturally you could always choose not to sell it to someone who wanted it, but wouldn't be able to make hoardes of money from it either.
It wouldn't solve everything but as long as such a licence is tested in court successfully, it would help avoid lots of other legal problems.
===
I listened to about half of the samples they have (the RealAudio ones) and there didn't seem to be much on them that you wouldn't get through analog radio anyway. (Lack of commercials aside.)
If anything like this ever becomes popular, I hope it's because it tries new ideas and doesn't just keep playing the same big label stuff repeatedly but through a different medium.
===
So given this, how does taking a snapshot of the web give a view of how society is at the moment?
I don't know about you, but I've seen lots of First World War propaganda that had absolutely nothing to do with what was really going on, but it gave me an excellent impression of what society was like about then.
The key thing is that I know it was propaganda, just as the key thing with this is that historians (and others) will know that today's web doesn't represent everyone.
===
It really would depend on how it's done. Can you be any more specific?
If you mean to store the domain names in a distributed net (a gnutella type of thing) then every second porn site would be spamming it so yahoo.com and slashdot.org pointed to them - at least to the point where the same search went to different places depending on mostly random variables...
Otherwise just storing search keys pointing directly to the site on a distributed network would probably end up with exactly the same sort of problem, wouldn't it?
===
We have SMS in New Zealand and it's okay to a point. There are some people though who I just wish I hadn't given my phone number to.
There's one person in particular who normally is a heck of a nice person, but stuck in a boring receptionist job. A minimum of three times a day I get that annoying beep beep -- beep beep, only to get the same boring "what are u up to?" message. It wouldn't be so bad if she just called and asked, but replying means stopping everything I'm doing to punch in an answer through a stupid 9 key keypad.
This is worse than instant messaging where you can at least pretend to be invisible and if not, there's a decent keyboard. Switching your phone off is possible but then it defies the point of having the phone in the first place.
===
In my second year of High School, my maths teacher told the class that there wasn't really any need to learn most of the formulas at that time because normally you could just use a calculator. At tertiary level this is completely true. Nobody bothers working out simple stuff when it'll easily plug into a calculator/computer. But that didn't stop us from learning how to do it in High School, and it's something I'm glad of.
I think that making computers available to children through school is important, but to me it would seem silly to base education around them to the point where children rely on them.
Computers are great, but they're also really antisocial. Any children who want to get deeply involved in them can do it in their own time, or maybe through some separate program in schools.
Really I don't think having them available can cause much problem as long as it's in a way not to distract children from what they're there to be learning.
===
Here in New Zealand the general attitude is very paranoid (or cautious, depending on who you are) towards genetic engineering, and at least on paper it's quite heavily regulated.
Anyway, there was recently a government probe that found that a full 18% of the genetic engineering experiments were completely unauthorised. (Followup scientist reaction here.) I'm inclined to go with the scientists, if for no other reason because from where I am the whole public attitude seems more like an ignorant vigilante mob.
Does anyone have any ideas on how this could or should be regulated (if at all) if for no other reason, to prevent potentially dangerous results accidently (or deliberately) seeping into the environment?
===
It looks interesting.
I wonder how it might work in combination with Jim Willard's paper computer that was discussed here back in December.
From memory the paper computer thing didn't offer any serious visual feedback, but combined the whole thing might be quite cool.
I guess processing power might be a problem, but maybe if people started carrying around portable processors to plug their paper into it could.. okay I've almost lost it, but maybe. :)
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