Some historical and political thinkers see a parallel between the current capitalist philosophy of 'right to make a profit' and the philosophy of 'king as god', which began to erode in 1215 C.E. with the signing of the Magna Carter. This right was and is often taken to the extreme as to justify the destruction of people and nature. Indeed, even capitalist thinkers have taken this viewpoint with books such as Elizabeth I, CEO, by Alan Axelrod, Prentice Hall. If we take this metaphor to the limit, capitalism will enslave all people in a life of mediocrity and filth until such a point that we peasant rise and overthrow the oppressors. That such a comparison is valid I will leave as a Gadanken exercise for the reader.
Free markets are not good for economies. In general most counties and companies want well-regulated predictable economies that allow significant amounts of flexibility. We see the need for such regulated freedom in the current problems of Russia and Japan. The only companies that want free markets are ones that are already monopolies. Most other companies want certain regulations lifted, while leaving the basic structure in place.
Most things are double-edged swords. Back in the 80's, it was not uncommon for us, as protestors of global domination, to go to a McDonalds for food. We knew better, Diet for a Small Planet was over 10 years old but it was fast and easy. We see the same thing today with current protestors wearing Nike and Gap. There are no complete answers.
In the end, we get the government we deserve. There are plenty of independent coffee houses around, but people still get the crap from Starbucks. There are plenty of independent bagels shops around, but people still buy the crap from Einstein's. As long as parents drive their SUV's to McDonald's and feed their kids slop, it will remain profitable and necessary to provide such service, no matter who or what is destroyed.
As far being free, as in speech, one could argue that we are only free if everyone is free. Therefore, much like not being satisfied unless our neighbors are as free as us, we may wish to insist that the OS used to run our "open software" be just as open. I see this as an acceptable restriction, especially since a closed version is available. Various levels of licensing are quite common and seem to be good for software.
The interesting item is what they consider an open system. In the faq they specifically state their intent is to insist the kernel be open source as defined by The Open Group and reprinted in the license. If we take this statement in the most liberal light, and count OS X as open, this seems a rather weak restriction. In fact, the only major operating systems affected is Windows and Unix variants like Solaris.
In the end, this seems to an effort to keep Open Motif off Windows machines, which I think, in light of the behavior of Microsoft and some Windows developers, is a rather intelligent restriction to impose. The best case scenario is that all major OSes use open Kernels.
Ultimately, films, books, games, whatever are about exploring our fantasies. Sometime those fantasies are what the prudish would call "good clean fun." Often, however, they involve attainining the apparently ultimate goals of being beautiful or having a beautiful person. There are of course problems when people confuse fantasy with reality, as might happen if a person believes that being thin or have a beautiful person on ones arm actually makes one a better person. There are also issues about safety and distress, but those are outside the realm of the article.
The issue, to me, is separating fantasy from reality, and encouraging mutual respect for each other. If we are raised to be afraid of our fantasies, then we may wish to express those fantasies as reality. There was an interesting article in the Times concerning divorce rates in the bible belt. This article states that divorce rates in Oklahoma run above the national average. Could this be caused by unrealistic expectations for marriage, or perhaps the Baptist men take the fanciful notion of a dutiful wife seriously?
Likewise we must respect each other. If we are raised to disrespect other people, or more specificaly the opposite sex, then naturally we will look at the objectified persons in the media and presume that they are nothing more that packages to be exploited. Likewise if we cannot be civil to the waitress who needs 30 more seconds to get our order, what hope to we have with the foldout in playboy?
It would be pretty to think that banning soft porn would solve whatever problems are bothering us. In fact, what may be bothering us is all the bother over the so-called soft porn.
It amuses me when the media tries to compare clock speeds between the PPC and x86 family. We have all seen how silly such comparisons are even within the same chip family. Benchmarks routine show that the 'fastest chip' is not necessarily the best for any particular application. In particular, one generally needs an x86 to run 10-40% faster to get equivalent performance, not to mention quite a bit more cooling.
The x86 is the commodity chip, and therefore will be the cost effective solution for general applications. For operating systems like Linux that wants to be the commodity operating system, it makes sense that the x86 is the chip of choice. That does not imply, however, that it makes any sense to compare other processors using such a simplistic method as clock speed.
The ultimate loss may be the reduction of damages to 350K. This sum is likely too low to keep other companies from filing frivolous and possibly fraudulent patents and then conducting frivolous court action to protect the questionable patents.
It costs a lot of money to defends oneself against a suit, and it has become quite popular of late to file suit merely to discourage certain activities of certain individuals. Capping punitive awards encourages such waste of the courts time by limiting the exposure to a counter-suit.
The notion that the best chess player should inherently beat the best computer program seems quite quaint. Such a concept belongs in the world of mid 20th century science fiction, in which house cleaning and nursing was automated but trajectories were still calculated with slide rules and triangles, rather that the real 21st century.
Chess is a complex game of strategy requiring great knowledge and instinct. Chess is also a wellunderstood finite state situation with well known attacks and counterattacks. It is no more surprising that a person can write a program to better play chess than it is that we write a program to better fly a jet. In the later case a human is needed only because we are in a near infinite state situation.
The lesson learned from the cold-fusion fiasco is that science only works when scientists are working toward the null hypothesis. When the scientists abandon this principle, he or she becomes no better than the physic. Something is not proven just because it happens once. Like a secure system, a hypothesis is only proven because it deflects every attack we can think of. And even then, it is only proven until someone thinks of a better attack.
The so-called cold-fusion thing set science back a decade, at lease in the mind of the average person. The sad thing is that when we almost get the debacle behind us, some nitwit writes a book evidently claiming that it is the fault of a few evil scientists that we do not have an unending supply of energy.
People present at the time know what the issues are. The principles did not act like scientists but like salespersons. They did not explain their concerns, emphasize the possible errors in their experiments, or even release their full results. In fact, the only copy of the paper was an unofficial document sent around to various university email accounts. That document did not lend any credence to the validity of the claims. They deserved the beating they received.
The lesson learned in this case is that all subsystems must be tested. As is stated in the article the reset subsystem was not adequately tested. An emerging feature of the reset system is that when activated it changes the pitch of the rotor. One would think this would be expected, as he pitch or the rotor is controlled by wire and the computer controls the wire, but obviously no one thought of it. Because the system was not tested, this feature manifested itself as a bug, and lives were lost. I suspect someone wanted to save a hour in development, or five in testing.
Testing is a part of software development. I do not do enough testing, and it is painfully obvious that the well-paid professionals also do not. I would hope that before any more of these aircrafts are produced the managers are tied to chair and forced to read a good book on producing quality software.
Napster mobilized about 500 of its users to converge on the hearing and show support by wearing pro-Napster T-shirts. About 70 of the users, mostly teen-agers, were allowed inside.
I wonder why the article specified that most of the support was from teenagers. Is it because most of them are not allowed to vote and therefore are routinely ignored by the legislature? I recall trying to express my opinions in such peaceful ways, and getting totally dised by the media. It is little wonder that some (desperate) youth are resorting to more lethal means.
I am sure nothing would have been said if the group consisted mostly of middle age white men in bad suits with mismatched ties.
The DMCA has little to do with this problem. The problem is one of money and documentation. The problem is not new. Engineers and inventors have been defending and losing their designs for a very long time. I believe several years ago Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar had an issue on this very topic.
To be specific, most companies and patent lawyers have years of experience in circumventing copyrights. The large companies routinely use two attacks to destroy the copyright. First, they throw money at it and hope the developer is too poor to fight. Second, they assume that small developers do not keep good documentation.
There is not much that can be done about the money. Lawyers must be hired; expert witnesses paid; bonds must be negotiated. In a more cynical world, congressmen and judges must be bought.
There are things that developers can do for documentation. For instance, in olden times developers snail mailed themselves copies of their designs. The postmark dates a design until the seal is broken. On a more sophisticated level, laboratory notebooks can be kept that have approval space and perforated copies. (Of course, I am not a lawyer, so I say this only as an example of why we would expect the DMCA to be ineffective and how I have seen people deal with it in the past.) Look at it this way. If I published a book remarkably similar to the "Confederacy of Dunces" a few years before Toole's mother allegedly 'found' the manuscript, who would own the copyright?
Although I don't exactly agree with sending John Glen, I do not think the situations are comparable. John Glen is, in a very significant sense, a hero. As a reward, we grounded him. Many years later we did what many people think was the right thing by allowing him one last trip. It was not the Moon, but it was the best we could do. Comparing a financier with no space experience to John Glen is stupid.
On a less emotional note, John Glen was sent up on a relatively routine shuttle mission. We understand the problems, we have lost only one craft, and we have been training these folks for many years. OTOH, Tito is going to be sent up to a new station, with unknown problems. To make matters worse, he is going to be in the Professionals hair for two weeks. Again, anyone who has worked in a lab, or even a production environment, knows the worst thing is visitors or the boss interrupting the project.
I wish Mir could have stayed up for another year or two. It was a known quantity with known problems. Russia could have sent up a couple tourists a month. If I had the money, I would pay to go. The fact that they crashed Mir shows their real commitment to tourism and the real value of this venture.
Though this article is more fluff than the useful information it would indicate to a search engine, it does ask a good question. Are technological advances reducing the ability of search engines? I would say no. Rather it is incompetent and malicious web page designers that are the problem.
Although technologies such as frames, ASP and JSP, cold fusion, or Flash may make it harder to design a crawler friendly web page, such pages need not be crawler hostile. As the article points out, the issue is how the site handles requests that contain no parameters. The incompetent designer will treat such a request as an error. The more thoughtful designer will display a useful page with appropriate meta tags.
The second issue is intellectual property and the true number of pages on the web. Suppose we create a site on the history of widgets. This site contains 10 base pages backed by a database of 100,000 widgets. Is the true size of the site 10 or 1 million pages? I would say that their size is 10 pages and indexing 0.001% of the possible pages in a complete index. The problem is how to make these 10 pages representative of the site. It may be reasonble that a search of '1145 crusade keepsake widget' might fail, but our design should allow the more general search 'history widgets' to succeed.
Anyone who has done library research in the pre-computer age knows that is takes skill and determination to find citations. The fact that we have replaced 1 million tiny cards and 1 thousand volumes of indexes with an online database does not mean that search and design skills are no longer necessary. Unfortunately, we cannot assume that user will have the proper search skills, so we, as designers, must learn better design skills.
Ultimately, it is an American bird that will transport the tourist and American sensibilities that must determine the fate.
The obvious issues are money and safety. The money offered seems hardly relevant. If we assume the cost of a shuttle mission is 500 million, then the purported 20 million is a mere 4% of mission cost, which is a pittance. The safety issue is very relevant. Astronauts/cosmonauts are generally extremely physically fit and highly trained, both technically and to handle crisis. A person without these qualities could critically endanger many lives.
The not obvious issue is political. If we allow this person to buy his way onto the shuttle, we will have little recourse when many others want on. We also must be concerned with the possibility of a catastrophic accident. NASA has a knack for bad luck, as Challenger illustrated, and we must consider the repercussions of losing one of these people in a preventable accident.
We also must consider the effect of the tourist in an environment where they do not belong. Most workers can tolerate an outsider for a short amount of time. We all have had to endure the journalist or manager interfering with our work for a few hours. I do not think we could tolerate the interference for days on end. This point was well illustrated with the submarine accident a few weeks ago. Few people are giving the sailors a break for being force to entertain dignitaries. The sailors are being held responsible for their actions, even if they were not given full opportunity to conduct the necessary operations.
A fake fan site is no sleazier or inherently evil than cartoons marketing a lottery to children, actors equating products to love, or companies pushing drugs on TV. I know people who wish these things would go away and perhaps do not allow themselves or their children to participate in the grand conversation that is our current mass media circus. This is too bad. As we have learned on slashdot the important thing is encourage critical conversation, or at least critical analysis of presented information. If people are look for random entertainment and factoids, it matter little where these items originate. If a person communicates critically, the wheat and chaff can be identified quickly.
First, the ad model is not dead, just fatally flawed. We all deal with ads in our normal life, and we will have to deal with them on the web. Making the web fit the traditional media is not the solution. The web must be realized as unique.
The problem is that the web is not taken seriously as a media outlet. Consequently the ads are not up to the standards of sophisticated consumers. This is a direct result of the inexperience and incompetence of the ad agencies that insist of directly translating ads from other media rather than creating appropriate new content. Also, click through rates are bogus. For other media, demographics are developed and rates are based upon those numbers. The same standards should apply
That said, the issue then becomes when would micropayments and subscriptions be appropriate. Micropayments would only be needed when no ads are present or specialized material is to be accessed. Subscriptions would broadly follow the print media model, but would also require that the have content created for the web. Repackaged traditional content is not likely to be worth the money. Newspapers may be the exception, but the New York Times and Financial Times are not going to be able charge large amounts of money until they improve thier usability.
The company I work for recently changed a product link from a graphic to a text link. We immediately had a significant increase in the number of users that accessed this free service.
I am becoming increasingly convinced that users habitually ignore any graphic. If these graphics get bigger, users may in fact abandon sites. The thing that web designers do not realize is that a web page is not a traditional product. For instance, Microsoft can fill Windows Explorer or the area around the browser window in IE with advertising, and the user can do nothing about it. They have bought Windows and are stuck with it. On the other hand, if the advertising become too annoying on a website, the user can invest a little time to find a less annoying site.
We need a creative revenue solution, not more of the same unworkable ideas.
I try very hard to live in areas where repression is minimal and proximity to good food and entertainment is high. I often have to drive to less desirable areas to work, but that is a tolerable compromise.
My last run in with silly liquor laws was in New Hampshire. I still do not understand why, but I was not able to get a scotch at a motel bar/restaurant. Now, I am not a person who drinks a lot, nor am I a person who cannot have fun without incapacitating myself with alcohol. On the other hand, when I want a Chivas with my Guinness, I want it. This, along with the lack of adequate food means that I would never live in New Hampshire. I realize that New Hampshire is a small place, most people only live there to avoid taxes and go to Massachusetts for fun, but I am just not willing to go very far to dine and drink. To me driving more than a few miles to party is a waste of time.
You know, things like this really irks me, not because of the technology, but because the consumer will get charged for something that is of absolutely no use to her.
For instance, I recently thought about purchasing a TV and discovered every TV had a V-Chip. I understand that there is some federal legislation that may requires this, but it still is annoying. Of course, the cost is past to the end user. Doesn't this fall under the unfunded mandate thing that the Republicans have been whining about for the past 5 years or so.
This new chip is the same thing. It will be forced upon the consumer, and, even if there is no cost increase, I doubt if the additional revenue generated will result in a decrease in end user cost. In other words, the end user will have to pay the same price for a product of arguably less value.
There is nothing wrong with menial work. Someone has to test the software; someone has to sweep the floor. It is a waste of time only if you do not engage the other staff in conversation. I recall a scene from Dr. Who, the Horror of Fang Rock, I believe, in which Lela chides the young keeper for talking to the seals instead of his elders. You must talk to you elders, she says, for how else will you learn.
In college I worked for a research lab. I swept the floors, painted the pipes, and ran errands. Two years later, after proving my reliability, responsibility, and willingness and ability to learn on my own time, I was working on the multi-million dollar machines creating state of the art devices. I may have wished they let me play with the machines the first day, but it wasn't gonna happen.
As an aside, I accepted this menial job, at cut in pay, after I quit a computer development job at a small company. I got the computer job because I had volunteered at a non-profit to help create and maintain a membership database. It starting helping the more experienced volunteers, but soon I was allowed to work alone.
I know it is frustrating. I know the feeling that you are not fully utilizing your skills. Many years later I still feel that way about half the time. All I can say is that it will get better. Believe it or not, you have been given an opportunity that many people would kill for, and it is yours to use as you please.
On the other hand, all this could be crap and maybe you are being used with no meaningful compensation. Who knows?
The fact that/. is criticizing this work is not hubris, but a realization that there is a difference between a cryptographic design and cryptographic implementation. Those how have read Applied Cryptography know that we have secure protocols. Those that have even peripherally tried to implement those protocols know that the devil is in the details.
The details are what stink about this plan. For instance, if we use publicly transmitted random numbers, which is about the only way we can make sure that we have random numbers, there must exist a secure and trusted machine. This in itself is far from a trivial proof.
Furthermore, the idea that these numbers cannot be stored is poppycock. At realistic transmission rates, we are only talking about a terabyte a week. This is not beyond the means of dedicated cracker, especially since that person is not limited to local and legal resources. The pratical transmission speed will increase, but the cost of storage will also decrease.
The situation is worse. Alice must send Bob a message detailing when the sequence will start. This message is subject to all the normal attacks. Also, we cannot even guarantee that Alice and Bob receive the random numbers at the exact same time. This implies we must have synch information in the random data flow, which implies segmentation of the random data flow.
Finally, the actual encrypted message cannot be received instantaneously. We must allow for time for encryption, transmission, dropped packet, storage, etc. This implies that, in contradiction to the basic premise, the random numbers must be stored on the computer in anticipation of the message!
It seems that age is popularly correlated with experience, maturity and wisdom, and will continue to be so. The goal should be to make this correlation as weak as possible. We can take a lesson from the women of 20 and 30 years ago. At that time gender was still correlated with ability and wisdom. Women broke that correlation by showing the world that it was very weak. Some people still think that women are inferior, but they are in the minority.
Adolescents and young adults must conduct a similar proof. In the past such young people were considered as cheap labor and relegated to the mailroom or some other such position to 'work their way up'. Today it is perhaps not necessary to force people to start from such an analogous menial jobs. Certainly many young people would rather be making the big bucks than learning a company that they may fire them tommorow. Perhaps technical skill is sufficient.
This is true to a degree. There is still a level of maturity and knowledge integration that must exist. These are important attributes, which are somewhat correlated with age. If I am allowed to be a bit ageist, I will say that there are few teenagers I would trust to on a high-risk project. This is not because they are not technically capable of handling the job, but because they have not lived long enough to understand the fragility of life or develop appropriate stress dissipation mechanisms. In other words, a mature person understands that life is not a party, that other peoples jobs depends on their performance, and that a two day delay does matter.
We must be open to the fact that our metrics are imperfect, but there is no reason to a priori decide that they are usually wrong.
It seems that such a scheme treats security issues a public relations problem and not a technical problem. Although such a PR approach does have merit, as when the mayor of a large city asks the new agencies not to put every murder front page, computer security would not seem to qualify.
I have just finished reading Secrets and Lies. This book talks about how security problems used to be handled through an organization that would keep the problems from the public until the manufacturer created a patch. The upshot was that manufacturers often did not take the problem seriously. The book also talks about how software and hardware manufactures have no significant liabilities for security faults. This leads to a bad situation in which the only tool the cosumer can use to effect a fix is the publicity attack.
Additionally, by limiting the distribution of information, one is implicitly limiting the amount of brainpower available to solve the problem. One cannot assume that all of these qualified security experts are going to belong to every closed list. Although open sourcing the code does allow such people the opportunity to look at the code, hiding a problem may not make best use of the available resources.
Having a secure mailing list for product security defect does not make the product more secure. Have a closed mailing list does not make the loss of personal data any less harmful. A closed list of security defects merely allows security products manufacturers to exaggerate the security of the product to an uneducated populous.
Slashdot Mirror
Some historical and political thinkers see a parallel between the current capitalist philosophy of 'right to make a profit' and the philosophy of 'king as god', which began to erode in 1215 C.E. with the signing of the Magna Carter. This right was and is often taken to the extreme as to justify the destruction of people and nature. Indeed, even capitalist thinkers have taken this viewpoint with books such as Elizabeth I, CEO, by Alan Axelrod, Prentice Hall. If we take this metaphor to the limit, capitalism will enslave all people in a life of mediocrity and filth until such a point that we peasant rise and overthrow the oppressors. That such a comparison is valid I will leave as a Gadanken exercise for the reader.
Free markets are not good for economies. In general most counties and companies want well-regulated predictable economies that allow significant amounts of flexibility. We see the need for such regulated freedom in the current problems of Russia and Japan. The only companies that want free markets are ones that are already monopolies. Most other companies want certain regulations lifted, while leaving the basic structure in place.
Most things are double-edged swords. Back in the 80's, it was not uncommon for us, as protestors of global domination, to go to a McDonalds for food. We knew better, Diet for a Small Planet was over 10 years old but it was fast and easy. We see the same thing today with current protestors wearing Nike and Gap. There are no complete answers.
In the end, we get the government we deserve. There are plenty of independent coffee houses around, but people still get the crap from Starbucks. There are plenty of independent bagels shops around, but people still buy the crap from Einstein's. As long as parents drive their SUV's to McDonald's and feed their kids slop, it will remain profitable and necessary to provide such service, no matter who or what is destroyed.
The interesting item is what they consider an open system. In the faq they specifically state their intent is to insist the kernel be open source as defined by The Open Group and reprinted in the license. If we take this statement in the most liberal light, and count OS X as open, this seems a rather weak restriction. In fact, the only major operating systems affected is Windows and Unix variants like Solaris.
In the end, this seems to an effort to keep Open Motif off Windows machines, which I think, in light of the behavior of Microsoft and some Windows developers, is a rather intelligent restriction to impose. The best case scenario is that all major OSes use open Kernels.
The issue, to me, is separating fantasy from reality, and encouraging mutual respect for each other. If we are raised to be afraid of our fantasies, then we may wish to express those fantasies as reality. There was an interesting article in the Times concerning divorce rates in the bible belt. This article states that divorce rates in Oklahoma run above the national average. Could this be caused by unrealistic expectations for marriage, or perhaps the Baptist men take the fanciful notion of a dutiful wife seriously?
Likewise we must respect each other. If we are raised to disrespect other people, or more specificaly the opposite sex, then naturally we will look at the objectified persons in the media and presume that they are nothing more that packages to be exploited. Likewise if we cannot be civil to the waitress who needs 30 more seconds to get our order, what hope to we have with the foldout in playboy?
It would be pretty to think that banning soft porn would solve whatever problems are bothering us. In fact, what may be bothering us is all the bother over the so-called soft porn.
The x86 is the commodity chip, and therefore will be the cost effective solution for general applications. For operating systems like Linux that wants to be the commodity operating system, it makes sense that the x86 is the chip of choice. That does not imply, however, that it makes any sense to compare other processors using such a simplistic method as clock speed.
It costs a lot of money to defends oneself against a suit, and it has become quite popular of late to file suit merely to discourage certain activities of certain individuals. Capping punitive awards encourages such waste of the courts time by limiting the exposure to a counter-suit.
Chess is a complex game of strategy requiring great knowledge and instinct. Chess is also a wellunderstood finite state situation with well known attacks and counterattacks. It is no more surprising that a person can write a program to better play chess than it is that we write a program to better fly a jet. In the later case a human is needed only because we are in a near infinite state situation.
The so-called cold-fusion thing set science back a decade, at lease in the mind of the average person. The sad thing is that when we almost get the debacle behind us, some nitwit writes a book evidently claiming that it is the fault of a few evil scientists that we do not have an unending supply of energy.
People present at the time know what the issues are. The principles did not act like scientists but like salespersons. They did not explain their concerns, emphasize the possible errors in their experiments, or even release their full results. In fact, the only copy of the paper was an unofficial document sent around to various university email accounts. That document did not lend any credence to the validity of the claims. They deserved the beating they received.
Testing is a part of software development. I do not do enough testing, and it is painfully obvious that the well-paid professionals also do not. I would hope that before any more of these aircrafts are produced the managers are tied to chair and forced to read a good book on producing quality software.
I wonder why the article specified that most of the support was from teenagers. Is it because most of them are not allowed to vote and therefore are routinely ignored by the legislature? I recall trying to express my opinions in such peaceful ways, and getting totally dised by the media. It is little wonder that some (desperate) youth are resorting to more lethal means.
I am sure nothing would have been said if the group consisted mostly of middle age white men in bad suits with mismatched ties.
Although this is absolutely misrepresentation, it is unclear whether it deserves the beating.
To be specific, most companies and patent lawyers have years of experience in circumventing copyrights. The large companies routinely use two attacks to destroy the copyright. First, they throw money at it and hope the developer is too poor to fight. Second, they assume that small developers do not keep good documentation.
There is not much that can be done about the money. Lawyers must be hired; expert witnesses paid; bonds must be negotiated. In a more cynical world, congressmen and judges must be bought.
There are things that developers can do for documentation. For instance, in olden times developers snail mailed themselves copies of their designs. The postmark dates a design until the seal is broken. On a more sophisticated level, laboratory notebooks can be kept that have approval space and perforated copies. (Of course, I am not a lawyer, so I say this only as an example of why we would expect the DMCA to be ineffective and how I have seen people deal with it in the past.) Look at it this way. If I published a book remarkably similar to the "Confederacy of Dunces" a few years before Toole's mother allegedly 'found' the manuscript, who would own the copyright?
On a less emotional note, John Glen was sent up on a relatively routine shuttle mission. We understand the problems, we have lost only one craft, and we have been training these folks for many years. OTOH, Tito is going to be sent up to a new station, with unknown problems. To make matters worse, he is going to be in the Professionals hair for two weeks. Again, anyone who has worked in a lab, or even a production environment, knows the worst thing is visitors or the boss interrupting the project.
I wish Mir could have stayed up for another year or two. It was a known quantity with known problems. Russia could have sent up a couple tourists a month. If I had the money, I would pay to go. The fact that they crashed Mir shows their real commitment to tourism and the real value of this venture.
Although technologies such as frames, ASP and JSP, cold fusion, or Flash may make it harder to design a crawler friendly web page, such pages need not be crawler hostile. As the article points out, the issue is how the site handles requests that contain no parameters. The incompetent designer will treat such a request as an error. The more thoughtful designer will display a useful page with appropriate meta tags.
The second issue is intellectual property and the true number of pages on the web. Suppose we create a site on the history of widgets. This site contains 10 base pages backed by a database of 100,000 widgets. Is the true size of the site 10 or 1 million pages? I would say that their size is 10 pages and indexing 0.001% of the possible pages in a complete index. The problem is how to make these 10 pages representative of the site. It may be reasonble that a search of '1145 crusade keepsake widget' might fail, but our design should allow the more general search 'history widgets' to succeed.
Anyone who has done library research in the pre-computer age knows that is takes skill and determination to find citations. The fact that we have replaced 1 million tiny cards and 1 thousand volumes of indexes with an online database does not mean that search and design skills are no longer necessary. Unfortunately, we cannot assume that user will have the proper search skills, so we, as designers, must learn better design skills.
The obvious issues are money and safety. The money offered seems hardly relevant. If we assume the cost of a shuttle mission is 500 million, then the purported 20 million is a mere 4% of mission cost, which is a pittance. The safety issue is very relevant. Astronauts/cosmonauts are generally extremely physically fit and highly trained, both technically and to handle crisis. A person without these qualities could critically endanger many lives.
The not obvious issue is political. If we allow this person to buy his way onto the shuttle, we will have little recourse when many others want on. We also must be concerned with the possibility of a catastrophic accident. NASA has a knack for bad luck, as Challenger illustrated, and we must consider the repercussions of losing one of these people in a preventable accident.
We also must consider the effect of the tourist in an environment where they do not belong. Most workers can tolerate an outsider for a short amount of time. We all have had to endure the journalist or manager interfering with our work for a few hours. I do not think we could tolerate the interference for days on end. This point was well illustrated with the submarine accident a few weeks ago. Few people are giving the sailors a break for being force to entertain dignitaries. The sailors are being held responsible for their actions, even if they were not given full opportunity to conduct the necessary operations.
A fake fan site is no sleazier or inherently evil than cartoons marketing a lottery to children, actors equating products to love, or companies pushing drugs on TV. I know people who wish these things would go away and perhaps do not allow themselves or their children to participate in the grand conversation that is our current mass media circus. This is too bad. As we have learned on slashdot the important thing is encourage critical conversation, or at least critical analysis of presented information. If people are look for random entertainment and factoids, it matter little where these items originate. If a person communicates critically, the wheat and chaff can be identified quickly.
The problem is that the web is not taken seriously as a media outlet. Consequently the ads are not up to the standards of sophisticated consumers. This is a direct result of the inexperience and incompetence of the ad agencies that insist of directly translating ads from other media rather than creating appropriate new content. Also, click through rates are bogus. For other media, demographics are developed and rates are based upon those numbers. The same standards should apply
That said, the issue then becomes when would micropayments and subscriptions be appropriate. Micropayments would only be needed when no ads are present or specialized material is to be accessed. Subscriptions would broadly follow the print media model, but would also require that the have content created for the web. Repackaged traditional content is not likely to be worth the money. Newspapers may be the exception, but the New York Times and Financial Times are not going to be able charge large amounts of money until they improve thier usability.
Isn't that supposed to be "Chairface"?
I am becoming increasingly convinced that users habitually ignore any graphic. If these graphics get bigger, users may in fact abandon sites. The thing that web designers do not realize is that a web page is not a traditional product. For instance, Microsoft can fill Windows Explorer or the area around the browser window in IE with advertising, and the user can do nothing about it. They have bought Windows and are stuck with it. On the other hand, if the advertising become too annoying on a website, the user can invest a little time to find a less annoying site.
We need a creative revenue solution, not more of the same unworkable ideas.
My last run in with silly liquor laws was in New Hampshire. I still do not understand why, but I was not able to get a scotch at a motel bar/restaurant. Now, I am not a person who drinks a lot, nor am I a person who cannot have fun without incapacitating myself with alcohol. On the other hand, when I want a Chivas with my Guinness, I want it. This, along with the lack of adequate food means that I would never live in New Hampshire. I realize that New Hampshire is a small place, most people only live there to avoid taxes and go to Massachusetts for fun, but I am just not willing to go very far to dine and drink. To me driving more than a few miles to party is a waste of time.
A curry eating bum, a megalomaniac hologram and a feline humanoid were watching a robot fish, when...
For instance, I recently thought about purchasing a TV and discovered every TV had a V-Chip. I understand that there is some federal legislation that may requires this, but it still is annoying. Of course, the cost is past to the end user. Doesn't this fall under the unfunded mandate thing that the Republicans have been whining about for the past 5 years or so.
This new chip is the same thing. It will be forced upon the consumer, and, even if there is no cost increase, I doubt if the additional revenue generated will result in a decrease in end user cost. In other words, the end user will have to pay the same price for a product of arguably less value.
In college I worked for a research lab. I swept the floors, painted the pipes, and ran errands. Two years later, after proving my reliability, responsibility, and willingness and ability to learn on my own time, I was working on the multi-million dollar machines creating state of the art devices. I may have wished they let me play with the machines the first day, but it wasn't gonna happen.
As an aside, I accepted this menial job, at cut in pay, after I quit a computer development job at a small company. I got the computer job because I had volunteered at a non-profit to help create and maintain a membership database. It starting helping the more experienced volunteers, but soon I was allowed to work alone.
I know it is frustrating. I know the feeling that you are not fully utilizing your skills. Many years later I still feel that way about half the time. All I can say is that it will get better. Believe it or not, you have been given an opportunity that many people would kill for, and it is yours to use as you please.
On the other hand, all this could be crap and maybe you are being used with no meaningful compensation. Who knows?
The details are what stink about this plan. For instance, if we use publicly transmitted random numbers, which is about the only way we can make sure that we have random numbers, there must exist a secure and trusted machine. This in itself is far from a trivial proof.
Furthermore, the idea that these numbers cannot be stored is poppycock. At realistic transmission rates, we are only talking about a terabyte a week. This is not beyond the means of dedicated cracker, especially since that person is not limited to local and legal resources. The pratical transmission speed will increase, but the cost of storage will also decrease.
The situation is worse. Alice must send Bob a message detailing when the sequence will start. This message is subject to all the normal attacks. Also, we cannot even guarantee that Alice and Bob receive the random numbers at the exact same time. This implies we must have synch information in the random data flow, which implies segmentation of the random data flow.
Finally, the actual encrypted message cannot be received instantaneously. We must allow for time for encryption, transmission, dropped packet, storage, etc. This implies that, in contradiction to the basic premise, the random numbers must be stored on the computer in anticipation of the message!
Adolescents and young adults must conduct a similar proof. In the past such young people were considered as cheap labor and relegated to the mailroom or some other such position to 'work their way up'. Today it is perhaps not necessary to force people to start from such an analogous menial jobs. Certainly many young people would rather be making the big bucks than learning a company that they may fire them tommorow. Perhaps technical skill is sufficient.
This is true to a degree. There is still a level of maturity and knowledge integration that must exist. These are important attributes, which are somewhat correlated with age. If I am allowed to be a bit ageist, I will say that there are few teenagers I would trust to on a high-risk project. This is not because they are not technically capable of handling the job, but because they have not lived long enough to understand the fragility of life or develop appropriate stress dissipation mechanisms. In other words, a mature person understands that life is not a party, that other peoples jobs depends on their performance, and that a two day delay does matter.
We must be open to the fact that our metrics are imperfect, but there is no reason to a priori decide that they are usually wrong.
I have just finished reading Secrets and Lies. This book talks about how security problems used to be handled through an organization that would keep the problems from the public until the manufacturer created a patch. The upshot was that manufacturers often did not take the problem seriously. The book also talks about how software and hardware manufactures have no significant liabilities for security faults. This leads to a bad situation in which the only tool the cosumer can use to effect a fix is the publicity attack.
Additionally, by limiting the distribution of information, one is implicitly limiting the amount of brainpower available to solve the problem. One cannot assume that all of these qualified security experts are going to belong to every closed list. Although open sourcing the code does allow such people the opportunity to look at the code, hiding a problem may not make best use of the available resources.
Having a secure mailing list for product security defect does not make the product more secure. Have a closed mailing list does not make the loss of personal data any less harmful. A closed list of security defects merely allows security products manufacturers to exaggerate the security of the product to an uneducated populous.