most of the sites covering it seem a bit wacko-ish
I wouldn't go that far. I've found several copies of the original article, and it looks like it did appear as an op-ed in the NYT and other mainstream newspapers. But it does appear to always be the same article by the same two authors, never backed up by another article from an independant source. The references in the article also seem to be mostly made up or misquoted.
The BBC website has an interesting poll of people's opinions about the Iraq situation. As expected, the public of Baghdad universally have a very warped view of the world. Something I found surprising was that even people in Beijing seem to be well informed about the issues involved and have opinions that have obviously been formed by evaluating for themselves what they are being told. What is really scary is when people come out with things like this:
We have to get rid of terrorism. We support the president, who is trying to do what's right and is a man of God.
Ever since the UN starting proposing splitting the land into two states, one jewish, one arab, each new map has created a larger and larger arab state and smaller and smaller jewish state. Every single time, the jews were willing to accept this, and every single time the arabs refused.
If the UN were to propose splitting California into two states, one Hispanic, one American, how big would the American part need to get before the Americans were prepared to accept it?
Do you have a reference for this? A friend in Norway stated the same thing, I thought he was just being xenophobic.
All the areas in the world where this has happened (he gave Bosnia and Kosovo as examples of where the Muslims had successfully "taken over"), have had corrupt governments to begin with, and it is hardly surprising that people wanted to govern themselves.
Apart from the odd nutter though, there doesn't seem to be much call for it in modern democracies, even though the Islamic population is approaching double figures in many European countries now.
Well, they do have a top-level domain registered, but noone much seems to use it. I guess they're just some backward third world country that hasn't discovered the internet yet.
I agree. The ones that weren't slimeballs (eg amazon) only bought the domains to stop some slimeball from passing themselves off as the real thing. The uk.co domain and others like it only exist to make the owners rich. The internet bubble burst 2 years ago, and they should go away with it.
The PIN will be stored on the card and kept synchronised to the online PIN.
You're joking? Time to read my contract carefully and make sure the bank is taking full responsibility for the smart card being cracked by someone who is able to work on a pile of cards completely free of any chance of detection.
As posted above, credit and debit cards have used PIN at POS in New Zealand for years (about 15 years IIRC, maybe even 20). This is old technology, and the way it is done is to encrypt the PIN in the keypad and send it directly to the bank for verification. Real-time transaction approval was reality 15 years ago in New Zealand and Australia, I cannot beleive that the rest of the world is still coming up with schemes to avoid it.
You can beleive all you want, the HTTP protocol is what defines GET and POST methods, and URL encoding.
CGI on the other hand defines how that information can be passed to external programs by the server (using environment variables and standard in), and how the external program passes information back to the server to be sent to the browser (via standard out).
Unfortunately, your rant is wrong. CGI is not an interface between a server and a browser at all. That interface is called HTTP.
CGI is an interface between a webserver and external subprocesses that has been in decline since faster alternatives started appearing in about 1995. While it is technically possible to write CGI programs in Java, PHP or Perl, it is not common. Servlets, PHP, mod_perl and other modern ways of generating dynamic content do not use the CGI interface, instead they have their own more efficient interfaces.
Like I said, real world situations. You can think up as many hypothetical situations as you like, but there is no need for anonymous email in the real world. Anonymous tipoffs have been around a lot longer than the internet, and AFAIK the Real IRA still used old fashioned telephone calls to tip off the police about the bombs in Birmingham and Ealing in 2001. I doubt they'd ever use email, since even going via anonymizing remailers email is inherently tracable, as the Scientologists
have already proven.
But quite often the problem is people not caring that thier resources are being hijacked.
I think you are ascribing to apathy what is more often caused by ignorance. The suppliers of SMTP servers need to toughen up the default installations (all the popular GNU/Linux distros already have, I'm not sure about MS and proprietary Unix systems). Someone who installs a mail server (or has it installed behind their back as a side effect of installing something else) should not have to configure it to prevent unauthorized relaying.
I cannot think of any real world situations where anonymity of email is important. If someone sent me anonymous email, it would end up in the spam bitbucket where it belongs. Sorry, but my right to know who is sending me mail is more important than your right to anonymity.
a per-email fee intended to hinder junkmail could also pinch a lot of people I wish it wouldn't.
It seemed to me that they were being careful not to pinch those people, by proposing tokens which get cancelled by the recipient if the email is genuine. They also talked about whitelists in the article, which I suppose is a method of automating the token cancelling.
I don't think the scenario you're describing is a problem. All you need to do is to redefine 'sender' to be the originator of the email, and NOT the first MTA the email hits.
Indeed. Being able to authenticate the real sender is key to any attempt to deal with spam at the source. Personally, I think that once the authentication is universally in place, that alone will disuade most spammers, and elaborate charging schemes will not be needed.
Since spammers most often hijack the resources of others to send their spam, making the "sender" pay directly will often hit the wrong person in the pocket. The real solution is to prevent the hijacking of resources in the first place. It does look like some of the Microsoft Research proposals (the Turing test idea in particular) might address this problem to some degree too, it will be interesting to see some more details once the research has progressed.
North Greenwich is hardly central though. I live a block away from a zone 3 station just off one of the other major roads into London (nameless, because I don't want my street crowded with commuters who can't be bothered taking public transport all the way to work), and the parking in my street is free.
As the AoA author would probably say, you are "severely misinformed".
I agree with you up to that point, but the example you provided does not demonstrate anything that cannot be done in a HLL. It only demonstrates that some (most even) things can be done faster. But as the "severely misinformed" correctly said, doing something in a few less clock cycles is no longer important enough in most applications to justify it.
Apart from the odd loop that needed tuning, the only places I have had cause to use assembler since moving up to 32 bit processors has been interfacing to hardware in device drivers, and initializing interrupt vectors etc in startup code.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe they saw the publicity Sun got from the 3 year old internal memo, and thought they'd try for some of that too.
I wouldn't go that far. I've found several copies of the original article, and it looks like it did appear as an op-ed in the NYT and other mainstream newspapers. But it does appear to always be the same article by the same two authors, never backed up by another article from an independant source. The references in the article also seem to be mostly made up or misquoted.
Ignorance is nothing to be jealous of.
The BBC website has an interesting poll of people's opinions about the Iraq situation. As expected, the public of Baghdad universally have a very warped view of the world. Something I found surprising was that even people in Beijing seem to be well informed about the issues involved and have opinions that have obviously been formed by evaluating for themselves what they are being told. What is really scary is when people come out with things like this:
If the UN were to propose splitting California into two states, one Hispanic, one American, how big would the American part need to get before the Americans were prepared to accept it?
All the areas in the world where this has happened (he gave Bosnia and Kosovo as examples of where the Muslims had successfully "taken over"), have had corrupt governments to begin with, and it is hardly surprising that people wanted to govern themselves. Apart from the odd nutter though, there doesn't seem to be much call for it in modern democracies, even though the Islamic population is approaching double figures in many European countries now.
This seems to be official US policy these days. And they wonder why the rest of the world hates them.
Well, they do have a top-level domain registered, but noone much seems to use it. I guess they're just some backward third world country that hasn't discovered the internet yet.
I imagine dealer.co could do quite nicely though.
I agree. The ones that weren't slimeballs (eg amazon) only bought the domains to stop some slimeball from passing themselves off as the real thing. The uk.co domain and others like it only exist to make the owners rich. The internet bubble burst 2 years ago, and they should go away with it.
You're joking? Time to read my contract carefully and make sure the bank is taking full responsibility for the smart card being cracked by someone who is able to work on a pile of cards completely free of any chance of detection.
As posted above, credit and debit cards have used PIN at POS in New Zealand for years (about 15 years IIRC, maybe even 20). This is old technology, and the way it is done is to encrypt the PIN in the keypad and send it directly to the bank for verification. Real-time transaction approval was reality 15 years ago in New Zealand and Australia, I cannot beleive that the rest of the world is still coming up with schemes to avoid it.
CGI on the other hand defines how that information can be passed to external programs by the server (using environment variables and standard in), and how the external program passes information back to the server to be sent to the browser (via standard out).
A full specification is available from NCSA
CGI is an interface between a webserver and external subprocesses that has been in decline since faster alternatives started appearing in about 1995. While it is technically possible to write CGI programs in Java, PHP or Perl, it is not common. Servlets, PHP, mod_perl and other modern ways of generating dynamic content do not use the CGI interface, instead they have their own more efficient interfaces.
Take a look at the org.apache.catalina.session.JDBCStore class sometime. There is a lot more to Tomcat than what is on the surface.
Like I said, real world situations. You can think up as many hypothetical situations as you like, but there is no need for anonymous email in the real world. Anonymous tipoffs have been around a lot longer than the internet, and AFAIK the Real IRA still used old fashioned telephone calls to tip off the police about the bombs in Birmingham and Ealing in 2001. I doubt they'd ever use email, since even going via anonymizing remailers email is inherently tracable, as the Scientologists have already proven.
I think you are ascribing to apathy what is more often caused by ignorance. The suppliers of SMTP servers need to toughen up the default installations (all the popular GNU/Linux distros already have, I'm not sure about MS and proprietary Unix systems). Someone who installs a mail server (or has it installed behind their back as a side effect of installing something else) should not have to configure it to prevent unauthorized relaying.
I cannot think of any real world situations where anonymity of email is important. If someone sent me anonymous email, it would end up in the spam bitbucket where it belongs. Sorry, but my right to know who is sending me mail is more important than your right to anonymity.
It seemed to me that they were being careful not to pinch those people, by proposing tokens which get cancelled by the recipient if the email is genuine. They also talked about whitelists in the article, which I suppose is a method of automating the token cancelling.
Indeed. Being able to authenticate the real sender is key to any attempt to deal with spam at the source. Personally, I think that once the authentication is universally in place, that alone will disuade most spammers, and elaborate charging schemes will not be needed.
I imagine they mean a bloody .NET "call".
Since spammers most often hijack the resources of others to send their spam, making the "sender" pay directly will often hit the wrong person in the pocket. The real solution is to prevent the hijacking of resources in the first place. It does look like some of the Microsoft Research proposals (the Turing test idea in particular) might address this problem to some degree too, it will be interesting to see some more details once the research has progressed.
I can't wait to read MSN in Swedish chef on my P800!
North Greenwich is hardly central though. I live a block away from a zone 3 station just off one of the other major roads into London (nameless, because I don't want my street crowded with commuters who can't be bothered taking public transport all the way to work), and the parking in my street is free.
I agree with you up to that point, but the example you provided does not demonstrate anything that cannot be done in a HLL. It only demonstrates that some (most even) things can be done faster. But as the "severely misinformed" correctly said, doing something in a few less clock cycles is no longer important enough in most applications to justify it.
Apart from the odd loop that needed tuning, the only places I have had cause to use assembler since moving up to 32 bit processors has been interfacing to hardware in device drivers, and initializing interrupt vectors etc in startup code.
Harrods is outside the zone, but yeah you get the general idea.