The Slashdot username is just as anonymizing, as the license plate number. But if someone — say, an ex-spouse — know your nickname (as the bank or police know your license plate number), they can track you down on Slashdot. And subpoena the last-used IP-address...
License plate numbers are publicly visible and thus, really, ought not to be subject to regulation. It is going to get worse — in a few years the same cameras/computers will be able to pick-out and track our faces just as well as they currently read license plates... But there is nothing you can do about it: our privacy is protected solely by the others' ability to notice and remember. Computers remember everything, so try to avoid being noticed...
Legislation will not help you because a) the government (always the main threat to rights) will be inevitably excepted; and b) there will always be loopholes (just look at WikiLeaks). Information wants to be free...
It would be cool if companies involved in open-source development would not have to pay taxes for related activities.
A Linux-powered missile targeting-system? An OpenBSD-based content-filter? A NetBSD-server running identity databases?.. FreeBSD traffic-shaping? Are you sure, you'll approve 0-taxes for all of those — and the "related activities"?
Seriously, as if tax-code is not complicated enough (to the point of harming the economy just by the complexity itself) — exactly by the people like you, who want to give their pet-project some sort of tax advantage... Using an open source software (or whatever else, for which the government is already giving tax-credits) is or ought to be advantageous on its own.
Instead we have hundreds of thousands very bright and highly educated (in both Law and Mathematics) people engaged in not doing anything truly productive, but helping others navigate through the complexities of the multi-volume tax codes... Sure, what's one more exception?
Why aren't you convinced by their argument if I may ask?
First of all, he is advocating pessimization of install on good operating systems (like BSDs or Linux) for the sake of the bad ones (like Windows). Second, and most important, is that the changes need not be so invasive as to change the entire APIs. If one must rely on a 3rd-party packages, one may provide that 3rd-party product — but without bundling it with one's own.
Look, for example, how pidgin installs itself on Windows — the GTK and spell-checker(s) are necessary and usually are installed during the pidgin install. But they aren't forked by the pidgin developers...
The extent, to which Google modifies the bundled 3rd-party stuff is also too great: go through the guy's own list and look for his own "fork severity" ratings...
Not to mention, that things like JPEG, XML, and PNG, probably, didn't have to be installed on Windows at all — such basic building blocks are available from Microsoft themselves...
Google's own approach is to fork everything they use... Sure, they make their changes available, but, apparently, don't try very hard to just stick to the original versions of whatever they pick.
The more famous of recent examples are the forks in Chrome. The changes, that Google made to their own versions, are substantial enough for their forks to be incompatible with the stock versions in too many cases. Was that really necessary?.. Google thinks, it was, but I am not convinced by their argument. At all...
Hard to blame the device-makers for taking a particular snapshot of Android OS, forking it, and not wanting to retest everything for an upgrade six months later...
I always liked Sun's position, prohibiting forks of Java by the very license — for this exact reason. You may think, you need to fix this burning bug with "the fierce urgency of now", but, by creating your own slightly-incompatible fork, you are doing more harm than good. (Such local forks are only excusable, when the upstream project is dead or almost dead...)
Too many programmers, too few software engineers...
If it works (no strange bends inside the walls), then yes, this is preferable — but he should use CAT6, while he is at it...
Cat5 provides many more options than coax
.
Don't discount the bandwidth of coax... A device like this, for example, promises "Up to 4 ethernet runs may be sent through the bridge over a single length of coaxial cable simultaneously"...
Plenty of other coax-to-Ethernet adapters exist too.
Interestingly, the router, that Verizon FiOS gave me, operates over coax... I was puzzled, that they bring fiber all the way to the house, and then "dumb it down" to coax inside the house to connect to the router. But it does give the 35MBps up and down, that I pay for, so I'm not complaining... Verizon's TV set-top boxes also connect to the router (and obtain their IP-addresses) over the coax as well...
For ages our privacy was protected only by the others' ability to remember. A human being can only remember so many faces and facts about other people (and himself, for that matter)...
Written records reduced the privacy immensely. Computers made the next giant leap. The only thing we can do is legislate, what the computers are allowed to memorize, but those would be merely human (as opposed to physical) laws and have serious limitations. Legal pitfalls will abound — an Evil Corporation may lease a server in a foreign locale to keep your data, for example. WikiLeaks has shown the ways around various attempts to close access to information.
If you can neither accept being the statistics (and you seem to admit, that you can't put together a rational explanation for your aversion), nor avoid it, try screwing them up...
I share the same syndrome as you (although, perhaps, to a lesser degree), so this is, what I do:
Whenever asked for an address (except when I am expecting to receive something from the asker), I put in 0 Privacy Drive, MyTown, My State, MYZIP. The credit-card verification, in reality, needs only the ZIP-code, so for "billing address" this is enough. And for the vendors knowing my ZIP-code is enough to know, what they need to know for their stats-gathering efforts, but robs them of the ability to mail me their "exciting new specials" later.
When signing-up for a store "discount card", in addition to the address-trick above (you can use a bogus name too), be sure to either share the same card (the store will give you multiple ones with the same number) with as many relatives/friends as you can. First you (well, the one of you, who gets to the store on the lucky day) will get the bonus-points discounts faster, and second, the stats will be sufficiently skewed by the multiple people and their preferences. This is somewhat bad for the store, so I, instead, just exchange the cards with others. The store still knows, that the same person bought A and B, they just don't know, who that person really was.
When forced to give out e-mail address online, use the VendorName@yourdomain. If the vendor abuses your trust (such as by automatically adding you to their e-mailing list), you can block that single address. If you don't have your own domain (how come?) you could use yourself+Vendorname@gmail.com for the same purpose (it is a shame, Yahoo! Mail does not support the sub-address). Unfortunately, many vendors' sites — including highly prominent ones like the Enom-registrar reject the sub-addressing e-mails as "invalid" — the verifying regular expressions must be too complicated for the dumb programmer wannabees, employed by these companies. This is where having your own domain is very useful.
When asked for personal data in person, ask to explain, why the information is needed. If the clerk says, oh, I just need it for the computer, ask, if it can be avoided, or given later. For example, some companies insist on creating a full record, when you are just asking for a quote... Don't get confrontational — just explain, that you'll give your last name and address, when you pick their bid. If they insist, give the address as described in item 1...
Of course, you would have just doubled the rate of failure as well by doubling the number of components you're dependent on by not providing redundancy.
Against mosquitoes redundancy is, uhm, redundant. But if you must, you can offer an XL-model with, say, 3 lasers such that any two of them together can kill the bug, but any one of them is harmless.
For military application I do talk about redundancy quite a bit — I'm proposing not two, but a large (variable) number of geographically dispersed small lasers. Small enough to be cheap, easy to operate (no dangerously charged batteries, for example) and not dangerous by themselves (you'll even be able to afford for some of them to fall into enemy's hands on occasion).
Let's say, X units of something is required to destroy a target. If you have 50 lasers each producing 1/25th of X, you can afford to lose 50% of them and still be able to do the job. Better yet, as long as you have all 50 operational (or, say, 55), you can kill 2 targets at a time. Different targets may need more or fewer lasers — having many lasers you'll have the flexibility. They can be added to the system at any point, as well as remove for maintenance. You'll be able to perform partial upgrades to your setup. All the while, the enemy will be unable to eliminate the whole system by a single successful attack (such as with a suicide bomber, for example).
An improvement in both safety and efficiency would be to use two lasers, each about 60% as strong as the currently used single one.
The targeting computer would aim both lasers at the target frying it even faster than now. But, should one of the "canons" miss, or should an unintended target come into one of the beams, the "collateral damage" will be much smaller, because the other laser will not be aimed at the same spot.
I think, the military lasers should use the similar technique — use multiple weak lasers frying the same target from dispersed locations. An unintended object (such as a civilian airplane) flying into any one of the beams will be safe, and taking out the entire installation will be much harder for the enemy. The set can have a cumulative power twice (or more) than is required to destroy one target, while each individual beam is still (relatively) harmless.
When "healthy", such a setup will be able to destroy multiple targets at a time, and the enemy will only be able to reduce its capacity gradually, rather than all at once.
George W. Bush was born in Connecticut. Although he went to elementary school in Texas, his high-school years were spent in Massachusetts. He then went to study in Yale and, interestingly, had a slightly better GPA, than John Kerry — his opponent during 2004 elections, who kept his academic record hidden, while his followers mocked Bush's.
Boy, this takes me back to the past of the Internet without firewalls and Unix servers running with the regular services, including, finger, enabled. We were at different Universities and often talked using talk...
But she was not online as much as myself, so I had to know, when to start the talk... The solution is obvious: execute finger every minute. If "on since" is detected in the output, write out a log-entry to a file. A separate instance of xbiff was running to alert me, when that file was modified.
Nowadays various instant-messaging clients do this all for you, and even on Slashdot I have to provide Wikipedia links to describe things I'm talking about...
If the routers are just as good as the "genuine" except that Cisco didn't get paid for the use of their name, then is not this another case, when the imaginary property (on "trademark") rears its ugly (if imaginary) head?
Yes, the buyers were lead to believe, they are buying the "real" thing, but that's between them and the seller.
But the US government is involved — on behalf of a fat corporation, which means, Cisco ought now to be frowned upon, just as the mafiAA members are.
And yet, kdawson seems to be giving Cisco a much easier time in his write-up, than usual in such cases... The New York Country Lawyer and the "I don't believe in Imaginary Property", who denounce entertainment-owners for trying to enforce their (imaginary) property rights, and fight them on any technicality imaginable, aren't anywhere in sight either... Is this because these people only want freedom to steal for the stuff, they might be interested in themselves?
If, for whatever reason, it will ever begins to matter to me, who delivers the news, rather than what the news is, I'll pick the Naked News over anything "animated", thank you very much.
Moon/Mars is a learning step towards greater exploration.
You don't need to live on the Moon or Mars to work on developing faster-than-light travel — and you are going to need that in order to reach a different star in meaningful time.
If you wish to be able to thrive in interstellar space, you don't need to live on Moon/Mars either.
Quite the contrary — the harsh conditions on those two bodies will likely be the impediment to any scientific projects... Azimov's works, where he argues for the opposite (the Earth-bound people abandoning space research, while the Mars colonists advance it) are a nice read, but not entirely convincing...
A total extinction-level event would mean the end of everything - the overpopulated areas AND the barren deserts.
Except no such event has ever happened... Even if whatever wiped the dinosaurs out occurs again, there will be more left alive on the planet, than there will be living on Mars in 1000 years — even if we drop everything and work on colonizing that planet.
Every single stanza of that refers to electronic mail. I'm not certain how this law could be used to bootstrap a general attack upon the citizens nor upon free speech.
It does refer to electronic mail and makes it a crime for people engaged in commerce to hide their identity. But there is a chicken-and-egg problem here (as with the "terrorist" example I gave): sometimes, unmasking their identity may be required to prove, that they are, indeed, engaging in commerce and thus have no right to hide.
In other words, it is/may be possible to claim, someone is a spammer to break through their privacy guard. Similarly, by claiming someone is an "enemy combatant" the government may find a way to try them in a court, where it will have easier time proving its case.
The solution to moving humanity forward is to move off our planet. Every year we delay is one more that brings us closer to extinction.
Why??! There are vast regions on Earth, that remain unsettled — from American Midwest, to swathes of Canada, to Siberia, to Australia's "bush". The populations of these countries can increase 4-20 times before they reach the saturation of China. Iceland and Greenland are rather sparsely populated too, as is Alaska.
And after those, there are immense territories of the deserts hot/dry (Sahara - 8.6 million square kilometers, Gobi 1.3 million square kilometers) and wet/cold (Antarctica — an entire continent). Sure, these aren't very hospitable, but they are incredibly more hospitable and easier/cheaper to get to than anything reachable outside Earth.
Heck, it is far easier to build a city on the ocean floor on Earth, than on the best spot on Mars — and visiting the in-laws for the weekend will forever be far easier for the inhabitants of such a city, than for those living extraterrestrially.
The sky has been falling on people predicting "overpopulation crisis" for decades. It will take centuries more for the population to increase to dangerous levels — and most likely it will never happen, because, as people's lives improve, they tend to have fewer children. Already many "first-world" populations are shrinking, and even America's would've stopped growing, if it weren't for immigration.
There is ample value in space travel, but "getting humanity off the Earth" is not part of it.
XENIX ran on 286. Ironically, it was a Microsoft product.
They licensed it from AT&T... But 286 was a special port, and I don't think, it was capable of the features discussed: memory protection and pre-emptive multi-tasking...
I tried it on my shiny new 486/33DX (yes, with the numeric co-processor!), but there were no applications, so I went with Win-3.1. A year later I put in FreeBSD-1.1.5.1, if memory serves, and that was it... But neither Linux nor BSD would work on 286 due to hardware issues, so Xenix too could only emulate those features...
Slashdot Mirror
The Slashdot username is just as anonymizing, as the license plate number. But if someone — say, an ex-spouse — know your nickname (as the bank or police know your license plate number), they can track you down on Slashdot. And subpoena the last-used IP-address...
License plate numbers are publicly visible and thus, really, ought not to be subject to regulation. It is going to get worse — in a few years the same cameras/computers will be able to pick-out and track our faces just as well as they currently read license plates... But there is nothing you can do about it: our privacy is protected solely by the others' ability to notice and remember . Computers remember everything, so try to avoid being noticed...
Legislation will not help you because a) the government (always the main threat to rights) will be inevitably excepted; and b) there will always be loopholes (just look at WikiLeaks). Information wants to be free...
Two Ukrainians talking:
A Linux-powered missile targeting-system? An OpenBSD-based content-filter? A NetBSD-server running identity databases?.. FreeBSD traffic-shaping? Are you sure, you'll approve 0-taxes for all of those — and the "related activities"?
Seriously, as if tax-code is not complicated enough (to the point of harming the economy just by the complexity itself) — exactly by the people like you, who want to give their pet-project some sort of tax advantage... Using an open source software (or whatever else, for which the government is already giving tax-credits) is or ought to be advantageous on its own.
Instead we have hundreds of thousands very bright and highly educated (in both Law and Mathematics) people engaged in not doing anything truly productive, but helping others navigate through the complexities of the multi-volume tax codes... Sure, what's one more exception?
But where exactly is a lie? A doctor (or homeopath) say: "Take this, it is likely to help you feel better."
That is a perfectly truthful statement, considering placebos (unexplained) efficacy...
First of all, he is advocating pessimization of install on good operating systems (like BSDs or Linux) for the sake of the bad ones (like Windows). Second, and most important, is that the changes need not be so invasive as to change the entire APIs. If one must rely on a 3rd-party packages, one may provide that 3rd-party product — but without bundling it with one's own.
Look, for example, how pidgin installs itself on Windows — the GTK and spell-checker(s) are necessary and usually are installed during the pidgin install. But they aren't forked by the pidgin developers...
The extent, to which Google modifies the bundled 3rd-party stuff is also too great: go through the guy's own list and look for his own "fork severity" ratings...
Not to mention, that things like JPEG, XML, and PNG, probably, didn't have to be installed on Windows at all — such basic building blocks are available from Microsoft themselves...
But if it does help, how is it "deceptive"? How is it a "lie", if it does help a non-trivial number of people?
Google's own approach is to fork everything they use... Sure, they make their changes available, but, apparently, don't try very hard to just stick to the original versions of whatever they pick.
The more famous of recent examples are the forks in Chrome. The changes, that Google made to their own versions, are substantial enough for their forks to be incompatible with the stock versions in too many cases. Was that really necessary?.. Google thinks, it was, but I am not convinced by their argument. At all...
Hard to blame the device-makers for taking a particular snapshot of Android OS, forking it, and not wanting to retest everything for an upgrade six months later...
I always liked Sun's position, prohibiting forks of Java by the very license — for this exact reason. You may think, you need to fix this burning bug with "the fierce urgency of now", but, by creating your own slightly-incompatible fork, you are doing more harm than good. (Such local forks are only excusable, when the upstream project is dead or almost dead...)
Too many programmers, too few software engineers...
I'm glad, he is finally making money hand over fist from Wikipedia — a business success like no other.
Oh, wait...
If it works (no strange bends inside the walls), then yes, this is preferable — but he should use CAT6, while he is at it...
.
Don't discount the bandwidth of coax... A device like this, for example, promises "Up to 4 ethernet runs may be sent through the bridge over a single length of coaxial cable simultaneously"...
Plenty of other coax-to-Ethernet adapters exist too.
Interestingly, the router, that Verizon FiOS gave me, operates over coax... I was puzzled, that they bring fiber all the way to the house, and then "dumb it down" to coax inside the house to connect to the router. But it does give the 35MBps up and down, that I pay for, so I'm not complaining... Verizon's TV set-top boxes also connect to the router (and obtain their IP-addresses) over the coax as well...
For ages our privacy was protected only by the others' ability to remember. A human being can only remember so many faces and facts about other people (and himself, for that matter)...
Written records reduced the privacy immensely. Computers made the next giant leap. The only thing we can do is legislate, what the computers are allowed to memorize, but those would be merely human (as opposed to physical) laws and have serious limitations. Legal pitfalls will abound — an Evil Corporation may lease a server in a foreign locale to keep your data, for example. WikiLeaks has shown the ways around various attempts to close access to information.
Information wants to be free. Does not it?
If you can neither accept being the statistics (and you seem to admit, that you can't put together a rational explanation for your aversion), nor avoid it, try screwing them up...
I share the same syndrome as you (although, perhaps, to a lesser degree), so this is, what I do:
Against mosquitoes redundancy is, uhm, redundant. But if you must, you can offer an XL-model with, say, 3 lasers such that any two of them together can kill the bug, but any one of them is harmless.
For military application I do talk about redundancy quite a bit — I'm proposing not two, but a large (variable) number of geographically dispersed small lasers. Small enough to be cheap, easy to operate (no dangerously charged batteries, for example) and not dangerous by themselves (you'll even be able to afford for some of them to fall into enemy's hands on occasion).
Let's say, X units of something is required to destroy a target. If you have 50 lasers each producing 1/25th of X, you can afford to lose 50% of them and still be able to do the job. Better yet, as long as you have all 50 operational (or, say, 55), you can kill 2 targets at a time. Different targets may need more or fewer lasers — having many lasers you'll have the flexibility. They can be added to the system at any point, as well as remove for maintenance. You'll be able to perform partial upgrades to your setup. All the while, the enemy will be unable to eliminate the whole system by a single successful attack (such as with a suicide bomber, for example).
An improvement in both safety and efficiency would be to use two lasers, each about 60% as strong as the currently used single one.
The targeting computer would aim both lasers at the target frying it even faster than now. But, should one of the "canons" miss, or should an unintended target come into one of the beams, the "collateral damage" will be much smaller, because the other laser will not be aimed at the same spot.
I think, the military lasers should use the similar technique — use multiple weak lasers frying the same target from dispersed locations. An unintended object (such as a civilian airplane) flying into any one of the beams will be safe, and taking out the entire installation will be much harder for the enemy. The set can have a cumulative power twice (or more) than is required to destroy one target, while each individual beam is still (relatively) harmless.
When "healthy", such a setup will be able to destroy multiple targets at a time, and the enemy will only be able to reduce its capacity gradually, rather than all at once.
Well, the person starting this thread called Bush "a poorly-educated man from Texas". Yet, he was neither "poorly educated" nor "from Texas"...
So, my response to him was legitimate and on-topic, and yours to me — is not.
George W. Bush was born in Connecticut. Although he went to elementary school in Texas, his high-school years were spent in Massachusetts. He then went to study in Yale and, interestingly, had a slightly better GPA, than John Kerry — his opponent during 2004 elections, who kept his academic record hidden, while his followers mocked Bush's.
Yes, both of us originally came from the USSR... Because of that fact, the second-meaning of the term "fingering" was not known to me at the time...
Boy, this takes me back to the past of the Internet without firewalls and Unix servers running with the regular services, including, finger, enabled. We were at different Universities and often talked using talk...
But she was not online as much as myself, so I had to know, when to start the talk... The solution is obvious: execute finger every minute. If "on since" is detected in the output, write out a log-entry to a file. A separate instance of xbiff was running to alert me, when that file was modified.
Nowadays various instant-messaging clients do this all for you, and even on Slashdot I have to provide Wikipedia links to describe things I'm talking about...
If the routers are just as good as the "genuine" except that Cisco didn't get paid for the use of their name, then is not this another case, when the imaginary property (on "trademark") rears its ugly (if imaginary) head?
Yes, the buyers were lead to believe, they are buying the "real" thing, but that's between them and the seller.
But the US government is involved — on behalf of a fat corporation, which means, Cisco ought now to be frowned upon, just as the mafiAA members are.
And yet, kdawson seems to be giving Cisco a much easier time in his write-up, than usual in such cases... The New York Country Lawyer and the "I don't believe in Imaginary Property", who denounce entertainment-owners for trying to enforce their (imaginary) property rights, and fight them on any technicality imaginable, aren't anywhere in sight either... Is this because these people only want freedom to steal for the stuff, they might be interested in themselves?
If, for whatever reason, it will ever begins to matter to me, who delivers the news, rather than what the news is, I'll pick the Naked News over anything "animated", thank you very much.
You don't need to live on the Moon or Mars to work on developing faster-than-light travel — and you are going to need that in order to reach a different star in meaningful time.
If you wish to be able to thrive in interstellar space, you don't need to live on Moon/Mars either.
Quite the contrary — the harsh conditions on those two bodies will likely be the impediment to any scientific projects... Azimov's works, where he argues for the opposite (the Earth-bound people abandoning space research, while the Mars colonists advance it) are a nice read, but not entirely convincing...
Real estate on Moon and Mars is going to experience the same problems, as that on Earth.
Except no such event has ever happened... Even if whatever wiped the dinosaurs out occurs again, there will be more left alive on the planet, than there will be living on Mars in 1000 years — even if we drop everything and work on colonizing that planet.
It does refer to electronic mail and makes it a crime for people engaged in commerce to hide their identity. But there is a chicken-and-egg problem here (as with the "terrorist" example I gave): sometimes, unmasking their identity may be required to prove, that they are, indeed, engaging in commerce and thus have no right to hide.
In other words, it is/may be possible to claim, someone is a spammer to break through their privacy guard. Similarly, by claiming someone is an "enemy combatant" the government may find a way to try them in a court, where it will have easier time proving its case.
Why??! There are vast regions on Earth, that remain unsettled — from American Midwest, to swathes of Canada, to Siberia, to Australia's "bush". The populations of these countries can increase 4-20 times before they reach the saturation of China. Iceland and Greenland are rather sparsely populated too, as is Alaska.
And after those, there are immense territories of the deserts hot/dry (Sahara - 8.6 million square kilometers, Gobi 1.3 million square kilometers) and wet/cold (Antarctica — an entire continent). Sure, these aren't very hospitable, but they are incredibly more hospitable and easier/cheaper to get to than anything reachable outside Earth.
Heck, it is far easier to build a city on the ocean floor on Earth, than on the best spot on Mars — and visiting the in-laws for the weekend will forever be far easier for the inhabitants of such a city, than for those living extraterrestrially.
The sky has been falling on people predicting "overpopulation crisis" for decades. It will take centuries more for the population to increase to dangerous levels — and most likely it will never happen, because, as people's lives improve, they tend to have fewer children. Already many "first-world" populations are shrinking, and even America's would've stopped growing, if it weren't for immigration.
There is ample value in space travel, but "getting humanity off the Earth" is not part of it.
They licensed it from AT&T... But 286 was a special port, and I don't think, it was capable of the features discussed: memory protection and pre-emptive multi-tasking...
I tried it on my shiny new 486/33DX (yes, with the numeric co-processor!), but there were no applications, so I went with Win-3.1. A year later I put in FreeBSD-1.1.5.1, if memory serves, and that was it... But neither Linux nor BSD would work on 286 due to hardware issues, so Xenix too could only emulate those features...