I started work on this, and have an Internet-Draft discussing a possible extension to do this: draft-church-dns-mail-sender-02.txt. Unfortunately, I've been too busy/tired lately to take it any farther, so if anyone wants to use it as a starting point, feel free.
I must say, that might be a *good* thing about this whole data transfer cap. People are going to get damn pissed when they start getting billed for receiving spam.
Actually, this has already happened in Japan, with respect to E-mail on mobile phones. Mobile phone spam started to get really big a couple years ago (a statistic I heard said that something like 90% of all phone mail is spam), and NTT DoCoMo, the largest mobile phone provider here, now includes 400 packets free per month because of complaints about paying for receiving spam. DoCoMo has actually been quite proactive in fighting spam as well; they allow you to reject mail from all but selected domains, and to block all mail containing "ADVERTISEMENT" (well, the Japanese equivalent: "-'øL¦") in the subject--a requirement placed on spam by a national law passed earlier this year.
So how exactly do these billboards figure out what radio stations people are listening to? Do radios emit EM signals that can be used to determine what they're tuned to (it's been a long time since I took a physics class, somebody help me out here)?
Sheesh... the outrage here over SOP (on behalf of people clearly guilty of theft of services). Bandwidth costs $$$ and I hope they get in a nice amount of trouble for what they did.
So how would you feel about FBI agents storming into your house, arresting you, and taking all your clothes for jaywalking across a street? I'd have had no complaints if the users had just been disconnected, or even if the ISP had billed them for damages, but this kind of action is so out of proportion to the offense it's absurd (and frightening).
Once a foreign word has been in the language long enough, say 300 years, it becomes like a native word and you use hiragana, but even this is rare and somewhat debatable. I've heard that this is the case with the word for 'Thank You', 'Arigato', which is always spelled out in hiragana, even though it probably came from the Portugese word 'Obrigato' (spelling?).
This is so far wrong . . . The word "arigato" (ããSãOEãã) is derived from the adjective "arigatai" (æoeãSé£ã), which literally means "unlikely/difficult to exist" (aru "to be, to exist" + -gatai "difficult to X") but has the connotation of "appreciated, thankful" (is "thankful" a word in English? I forget, but you get the idea). In fact, you can even write it using kanji (æoeé£ã), and many people do so in formal letters and the like. 100% Japanese, since before the Japanese even know Portugal existed.
Data should all be Stored Dynamically. I need a 10t store at "Yahoo" (pick your flavor) for $5 amonth with a data access rate in the 5ms range accessable from any spot on earth, by me and anyone else I so desire.
Hey, sounds good. Now what were you going to do about the speed of light?
I could fire up some diagnositic firmware on the drive, and watch the drive detect and fix errors as I tapped it with a pencil.
Out of curiosity, is there any way for end users to get at the error information (like what sectors have gone bad) on IDE drives? SCSI drives don't automatically remap bad sectors, so I can catch a failing drive before it dies hard, but when my 40GB IDE (coincidentally, a Fujitsu) kicked the bucket this past summer, it was a pretty major mess--it would have been nice to know ahead of time that it was starting to go bad.
Troll, n.: "A comment, deliberately overstating facts or including misleading information, intended to provoke heated responses." (paraphrased from vague recollection of a/. post a few years back)
You asked why this incident should be considered any different than current IP laws. I answered, explaining that this incident has nothing to do with information of any kind, much less IP laws (which should have been obvious from reading the article). I happen to agree with you that there are problems with the way knowledge is handled in our society, but regardless, this case has nothing to do with them (nor is this story the proper place to argue about them); that's why I called your post a "troll".
The original 1-st edition book may contain clues regarding ancient math publishing, formats, or other chemical or physical evidence. It could even hold DNA from the readers or publishers.
As others have said, this isn't the only first-edition book--there are more. I don't disagree with the value of the information, but I don't think it too likely that there's something that could be learned from this particular copy of Principia that couldn't be learned from the other.
Why do people view some sets of information as too valuable for one person to own (eg, the thief or the person who hired them) yet still back the very concept of Intellecual Property?
In case you somehow missed it, nothing at all has happened to the information. The robbers stole a physical object. This particular physical object happens to contain valuable information, yes, but that information is still available from many other sources. This also has nothing to do with either the information itself or the physical object containing it being "too valuable for one person to own"; the issue is that the physical object was taken from its owner without permission. This is, quite simply, a case of theft in the most basic sense of the word.
Storing the year as a +- offset from 1970 would allow a range from 1842 to 2097 and would only take up ONE BYTE of storage compared to storing two characters (taking up two bytes) giving a range of 1900 - 1999.
At considerable cost in the work required to perform certain operations (such as displaying) on the year. Remember that data size was not the only consideration in those days; code size and processing time were also major issues. Granted, many of the Y2K problems were probably due to laziness ("nobody will still be using this stuff in 30 years, let's just leave the 19 as constant"), but the two-digit year was probably the best compromise between data size and processing complexity at the time many of those programs were written.
And how do you know that the computers in question used 8 bits per character? (I don't, either, but there are some coding systems, such as EBCDIC, that use other numbers of bits, and some systems, like the PDP-8, that had e.g. 12 bits per memory unit; in fact, the PDP-8 FAQ mentions that many PDP-8 programs packed two 6-bit characters into one 12-bit word.)
I can use the referrer to limit the damage done by only allowing the images to be referred by pages from my own site.
And this is, of course, broken behaviour.
So do you have an alternative proposal to prevent resource (i.e. bandwidth) theft? That is a very real problem, and no amount of arguing that the current solution is "broken" will get people to change unless you provide them an alternative.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I remember having read that in Japan there's a police cabin every two or three streets.
There are police boxes, yes, but even in the densest parts of Tokyo there are no more than one or two per kilometer. They're mostly located adjacent to train stations, and they serve as much as street guides ("where's the nearest ramen shop?") as anything else. I certainly don't feel oppressed by them; if anything, it's good to know that in an emergency the police can arrive quickly from the police box, rather than having to come all the way from the station which may be on the other side of town. (Plus, there's recently been a spate of police impropriety, and people are watching the police pretty closely.)
Furthermore, if guns were not freely available, then I'd say its more likely that a criminal would have a gun than a law abiding, sedentary female.
Here in Japan, guns are illegal. And yet the number of people (outside of gang members) who get shot a year is on the order of 20-25. In the whole country.
Sight is not a prerequisite for normal function in society.
In that case, would you kindly tell me how blind people:
Use visual-oriented web sites?
Determine the color of a traffic light?
Watch a sunset?
Or do you think the world would be better off without all those?
Your statement has the distinct odor of eugenics on it.
I never said anything about eliminating people with disabilities (or whatever the politically-correct term of the day is). I only said that they should recognize and accept their differences from other members of society, or else find ways to remove/overcome those differences. I don't, however, think the entire world should sink to a lowest-common-denominator standard just because a small proportion of the population lacks certain abilities that the rest have.
Let's try something else: if blind people cannot function normally, what about color-blind people?
I have a friend who's red-green color-blind. He's commented occasionally on the frustration of dealing with images that rely on those colors; I remember one particular case in a video game where the screen went red, and he said it looked black and couldn't see anything. Not as severe a handicap as blindness, granted, but I wouldn't exactly call that "functioning normally", would you?
(quoting myself:) People with disabilities ought to realize that they can't participate fully in society, and accept that.
On rereading my message, it looks like it could easily be understood as saying "accessibility is bad". That wasn't my intention, and isn't my belief; I have no problems with--and support--accessibility, to the extent that it doesn't reduce the quality or usefulness of the thing in question for everyone else (and certainly making websites usable by text-only browsers doesn't have such problems if done properly). I do, however, disagree with such measures being required by law, at least for private organizations--and especially in this case, where the guy who filed the suit could have just made his reservation by phone. Even assuming it would be proper to force Southwest to allow blind people to ride on its airplanes, I don't see the logic in forcing them to allow blind people to use a particular method of reservation, especially when an equivalent alternative is available.
So what, in your mind, makes a blind person "capable" of using a (visual-oriented) web site?
The simple fact that they can use the web.
Last I checked, "a (visual-oriented) web site" and "the web" are two different things. Perhaps I shouldn't have put "visual-oriented" in parentheses, but my point is that this particular web site was designed with visual aspects in mind, and regardless of whether that's a good idea or not, the fact remains that people without vision are incapable of using such sites.
IMO, requiring businesses to provide accesibility measures for the disabled is a justified restriction to place on the non-disabled. Consider that without the accesibility laws, businesses don't provide them on their own good will, and the disabled are unable to function even if they are capable. [emphasis added]
So what, in your mind, makes a blind person "capable" of using a (visual-oriented) web site?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but I suspect it fills the hearts of the jellyfish with fear.
Come to think of it, this could be an excellent tool to bring along on a beach trip . . .
I started work on this, and have an Internet-Draft discussing a possible extension to do this: draft-church-dns-mail-sender-02.txt. Unfortunately, I've been too busy/tired lately to take it any farther, so if anyone wants to use it as a starting point, feel free.
Here's a patch to put it back.
Now, mind you, it's an extremely customized version of Slackware 2.1, but . . . (:
I must say, that might be a *good* thing about this whole data transfer cap. People are going to get damn pissed when they start getting billed for receiving spam.
Actually, this has already happened in Japan, with respect to E-mail on mobile phones. Mobile phone spam started to get really big a couple years ago (a statistic I heard said that something like 90% of all phone mail is spam), and NTT DoCoMo, the largest mobile phone provider here, now includes 400 packets free per month because of complaints about paying for receiving spam. DoCoMo has actually been quite proactive in fighting spam as well; they allow you to reject mail from all but selected domains, and to block all mail containing "ADVERTISEMENT" (well, the Japanese equivalent: "-'øL¦") in the subject--a requirement placed on spam by a national law passed earlier this year.
So how exactly do these billboards figure out what radio stations people are listening to? Do radios emit EM signals that can be used to determine what they're tuned to (it's been a long time since I took a physics class, somebody help me out here)?
Sheesh... the outrage here over SOP (on behalf of people clearly guilty of theft of services). Bandwidth costs $$$ and I hope they get in a nice amount of trouble for what they did.
So how would you feel about FBI agents storming into your house, arresting you, and taking all your clothes for jaywalking across a street? I'd have had no complaints if the users had just been disconnected, or even if the ISP had billed them for damages, but this kind of action is so out of proportion to the offense it's absurd (and frightening).
Once a foreign word has been in the language long enough, say 300 years, it becomes like a native word and you use hiragana, but even this is rare and somewhat debatable. I've heard that this is the case with the word for 'Thank You', 'Arigato', which is always spelled out in hiragana, even though it probably came from the Portugese word 'Obrigato' (spelling?).
This is so far wrong . . . The word "arigato" (ããSãOEãã) is derived from the adjective "arigatai" (æoeãSé£ã), which literally means "unlikely/difficult to exist" (aru "to be, to exist" + -gatai "difficult to X") but has the connotation of "appreciated, thankful" (is "thankful" a word in English? I forget, but you get the idea). In fact, you can even write it using kanji (æoeé£ã), and many people do so in formal letters and the like. 100% Japanese, since before the Japanese even know Portugal existed.
Data should all be Stored Dynamically. I need a 10t store at "Yahoo" (pick your flavor) for $5 amonth with a data access rate in the 5ms range accessable from any spot on earth, by me and anyone else I so desire.
Hey, sounds good. Now what were you going to do about the speed of light?
I could fire up some diagnositic firmware on the drive, and watch the drive detect and fix errors as I tapped it with a pencil.
Out of curiosity, is there any way for end users to get at the error information (like what sectors have gone bad) on IDE drives? SCSI drives don't automatically remap bad sectors, so I can catch a failing drive before it dies hard, but when my 40GB IDE (coincidentally, a Fujitsu) kicked the bucket this past summer, it was a pretty major mess--it would have been nice to know ahead of time that it was starting to go bad.
Troll, n.: "A comment, deliberately overstating facts or including misleading information, intended to provoke heated responses." (paraphrased from vague recollection of a /. post a few years back)
You asked why this incident should be considered any different than current IP laws. I answered, explaining that this incident has nothing to do with information of any kind, much less IP laws (which should have been obvious from reading the article). I happen to agree with you that there are problems with the way knowledge is handled in our society, but regardless, this case has nothing to do with them (nor is this story the proper place to argue about them); that's why I called your post a "troll".
The original 1-st edition book may contain clues regarding ancient math publishing, formats, or other chemical or physical evidence. It could even hold DNA from the readers or publishers.
As others have said, this isn't the only first-edition book--there are more. I don't disagree with the value of the information, but I don't think it too likely that there's something that could be learned from this particular copy of Principia that couldn't be learned from the other.
Why do people view some sets of information as too valuable for one person to own (eg, the thief or the person who hired them) yet still back the very concept of Intellecual Property?
In case you somehow missed it, nothing at all has happened to the information. The robbers stole a physical object. This particular physical object happens to contain valuable information, yes, but that information is still available from many other sources. This also has nothing to do with either the information itself or the physical object containing it being "too valuable for one person to own"; the issue is that the physical object was taken from its owner without permission. This is, quite simply, a case of theft in the most basic sense of the word.
If the Y2k bugs hadn't been fixed, things would have broken left and right, and we would have been blamed for not fixing them ahead of time.
Since the Y2k bugs were fixed, very few things broke, and we got blamed for wasting tons of money to no effect.
C'est la vie, I guess.
Storing the year as a +- offset from 1970 would allow a range from 1842 to 2097 and would only take up ONE BYTE of storage compared to storing two characters (taking up two bytes) giving a range of 1900 - 1999.
At considerable cost in the work required to perform certain operations (such as displaying) on the year. Remember that data size was not the only consideration in those days; code size and processing time were also major issues. Granted, many of the Y2K problems were probably due to laziness ("nobody will still be using this stuff in 30 years, let's just leave the 19 as constant"), but the two-digit year was probably the best compromise between data size and processing complexity at the time many of those programs were written.
And how do you know that the computers in question used 8 bits per character? (I don't, either, but there are some coding systems, such as EBCDIC, that use other numbers of bits, and some systems, like the PDP-8, that had e.g. 12 bits per memory unit; in fact, the PDP-8 FAQ mentions that many PDP-8 programs packed two 6-bit characters into one 12-bit word.)
And this is, of course, broken behaviour.
So do you have an alternative proposal to prevent resource (i.e. bandwidth) theft? That is a very real problem, and no amount of arguing that the current solution is "broken" will get people to change unless you provide them an alternative.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I remember having read that in Japan there's a police cabin every two or three streets.
There are police boxes, yes, but even in the densest parts of Tokyo there are no more than one or two per kilometer. They're mostly located adjacent to train stations, and they serve as much as street guides ("where's the nearest ramen shop?") as anything else. I certainly don't feel oppressed by them; if anything, it's good to know that in an emergency the police can arrive quickly from the police box, rather than having to come all the way from the station which may be on the other side of town. (Plus, there's recently been a spate of police impropriety, and people are watching the police pretty closely.)
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but . . .
Yeah, and you are all free. Living in your box homes,
Some of us don't need 15-room mansions to live comfortably.
with outrageous inflation,
Of right around zero, at most. (Or have you missed all the news on how Japan is teetering on the brink of deflation?)
unemployment,
5.4% in August. By comparison, the US was at 5.7% in the same period.
Maybe if you people had guns you could actually rebel against the unbelieveably corrupt government that rules Japan.
Pot, kettle . . .
Furthermore, if guns were not freely available, then I'd say its more likely that a criminal would have a gun than a law abiding, sedentary female.
Here in Japan, guns are illegal. And yet the number of people (outside of gang members) who get shot a year is on the order of 20-25. In the whole country.
Hmm.
When there is a heavy fog to drive through you could project images of the road in front of the driver.
You could also project images of ghosts and goblins in front of the driver. As long as it's not me.
They could have named it "Ogg Quaoar".
Sight is not a prerequisite for normal function in society.
In that case, would you kindly tell me how blind people:
Or do you think the world would be better off without all those?
Your statement has the distinct odor of eugenics on it.
I never said anything about eliminating people with disabilities (or whatever the politically-correct term of the day is). I only said that they should recognize and accept their differences from other members of society, or else find ways to remove/overcome those differences. I don't, however, think the entire world should sink to a lowest-common-denominator standard just because a small proportion of the population lacks certain abilities that the rest have.
Let's try something else: if blind people cannot function normally, what about color-blind people?
I have a friend who's red-green color-blind. He's commented occasionally on the frustration of dealing with images that rely on those colors; I remember one particular case in a video game where the screen went red, and he said it looked black and couldn't see anything. Not as severe a handicap as blindness, granted, but I wouldn't exactly call that "functioning normally", would you?
(quoting myself:) People with disabilities ought to realize that they can't participate fully in society, and accept that.
On rereading my message, it looks like it could easily be understood as saying "accessibility is bad". That wasn't my intention, and isn't my belief; I have no problems with--and support--accessibility, to the extent that it doesn't reduce the quality or usefulness of the thing in question for everyone else (and certainly making websites usable by text-only browsers doesn't have such problems if done properly). I do, however, disagree with such measures being required by law, at least for private organizations--and especially in this case, where the guy who filed the suit could have just made his reservation by phone. Even assuming it would be proper to force Southwest to allow blind people to ride on its airplanes, I don't see the logic in forcing them to allow blind people to use a particular method of reservation, especially when an equivalent alternative is available.
The simple fact that they can use the web.
Last I checked, "a (visual-oriented) web site" and "the web" are two different things. Perhaps I shouldn't have put "visual-oriented" in parentheses, but my point is that this particular web site was designed with visual aspects in mind, and regardless of whether that's a good idea or not, the fact remains that people without vision are incapable of using such sites.
IMO, requiring businesses to provide accesibility measures for the disabled is a justified restriction to place on the non-disabled. Consider that without the accesibility laws, businesses don't provide them on their own good will, and the disabled are unable to function even if they are capable. [emphasis added]
So what, in your mind, makes a blind person "capable" of using a (visual-oriented) web site?