Not a perfect solution, albeit a pretty good one if they don't know a "troll" flag is in use on the board. They can always get another account to see when their posts begin to disappear.
I am not an IT security professional, but from my limited experience, this is 100% on the mark. It's much easier to remember a single 10+ letter/number/symbol password than it is to be forced to change a password once every month with only a six-letter minimum requirement. Some people have devised calendar schemes of changing their secure password, but these people are few and far between.
As an IT security administrator, the smart thing to do would be to require a password that is 10 characters minimum (with numbers or symbols required). Then give plenty of suggestions to users for how they can devise a rather random password (e.g., think of a favorite song, then use the first letters of lyrics from a verse of that song, with numbers or symbols separating sentences). Then force them to change it once a year or so.
My initial thought is that yes, they should bear the costs. Computers have all sorts of nastiness inside of them, and *someone's* gotta take care of it. However, where do you draw the line? Styrofoam? Plastics? Bleach? Can't have the lifetime costs built into everything - that would make just about everything price-prohibitive.
Just about everything, except for that which is made environmentally friendly. I'm not supporting or rejecting this bill yet since I haven't read enough about it, but if it did go through, I predict manufacturers might be more willing to shoulder the burden of making their products better for the environment so as to save on costs of disposal (which raise the cost of the item to prohibitive levels, as you've said).
I could be wrong here...but Ni-Cad? How is that environmentally friendly (reusability aside)? Wouldn't NiMH be a better option both performance-wise and from a disposability standpoint? When a Ni-Cad battery dies on you in India, how many places are there nearby to recycle it, and how much damage would it do if the cadmium leaked into a water supply? I would definitely say a rechargeable power pack is a good decision, I only question the Ni-Cad aspect of it.
Though I haven't used the thinkgeek model before, I've used such rollup keyboards in the past...and they don't give tactile feedback, so I type slower on them. Could be just a problem with my typing style though.
The husband purchases lots of goods on credit, shows them to his wife. The wife says, "But dear, what about those credit interest fees?" Monsters approach menacingly. The husband replies with a smile, "Don't worry, I put it on my Capital One no-hassle card!" Monsters groan. Just then...*THUD* *THUD* *THUD*...and *CHOMP* Mozilla bites his head off, roaring "But your site doesn't work with my browser!!" Or...maybe not.
It works well against those who aren't actively planning violent protest. To those who are actually interested in learning about this kind of stuff, it's not that hard to circumvent it.
"If you plan to continue protesting about future audio media releases that are leaked onto filesharing networks, forget it; peer-to-peer filesharing is a reality, and at this very moment more or less all audio media worldwide are available online. And this is a good thing for the music industry. In order to make this happen...oh wait, it already has -- whether you like it or not."
Unfortunately, this means that when the controller is inevitably tossed in anger, I break the entire console, not just a cheap controller. There was a Penny Arcade about this awhile ago..."breaking controllers since 1985" or something like that.
It's amazing that a billion dollar corporation is so insanely profit driven that they can't even do something out of *good will*. It must become a profit opportunity.
While I know there is a separation between the actions of Microsoft and the actions of Bill Gates, Bill Gates himself has done plenty of things purely out of good will. His charity donations are interesting to me, in that he donates to causes like disease research -- rather than following the tradition of many philanthropists of yesteryear, donating mostly to public works which are subsequently named after them (I'm sure he does this too, but I believe the main focus is on international health). Note that I'm not saying there's anything wrong or selfish about that--I'd rather study in the Kelvin Smith Library than study in my dorm room, but the selflessness Gates has shown with his riches is one thing I do admire (granted, it doesn't make up for Windows ME, but nobody's perfect). Here's a pretty good cache of stories about his charitable donations.
Disclaimer: I'm not Dave, just a very impressed user.
The Google toolbar was a big plus for IE, until I found Dave's quick search deskbar. It's much like the google toolbar, but it is always open on your taskbar, and you can run searches from other sites by typing in a short character sequence--i.e., do a dictionary lookup by typing "phoenix::". Do Yahoo searches with a "yh question", get Merriam-Webster definitions with a "colon:", get Bloomberg stock quotes like this "msft intc csco$", and find Switchboard phone numbers by saying "Lois Lane#". You can search real "news." search "newsgroups," check "weather*", or "comparison shop$$". There's a built in calculator when you need to know "pow(1.0625, 30)" is 6.1640785. Additionally, you don't need to remember these shortcuts--you can select them from a menu, or you can even do a search for the search shortcut for "newsgroups". I've never installed the google toolbar since I found this tool. It's windows only (though it's open source - somebody can port it to Linux in future), but so's the google toolbar.
I don't usually use Pricewatch, because companies often list misleading low prices with expensive shipping, just to get lower in the guide and get more purchases (bait and switch). Anandtech's latest price guide shows a P4 2.53 GHz at $189, and the closest Athlon is a 2400+ at $194. So you're right, at the cutting edge. But for what I just bought, an Athlon 2000+ (1.67 GHz) for $95, a Pentium 4 would be foolish--it costs $160. Yeah, with the newest bleeding edge Athlons, AMD can't compete - like I said, they're not winning the speed war. But for the majority of their chips that have been out (anything 2200+ and older), the prices are much lower. That's why I said they were winning the price war. For those who are willing to pay $200+ for a chip, go Intel by all means.
AMD has been losing the speed war for several months now, but I think they have been winning the price war all along - comparable-speed Athlons have been much cheaper than their Pentium equivalents. As the sig says though, I could be wrong.
Slight semantic fix -- I wrote tic-tac-toe last semester so I thought I'd point this out. The search is "min-max" - the method of speeding the search is "alpha-beta pruning" (or "cutoff", whatever). Here's a brief explanation.
This sounds great, but I really don't think combination devices like these are going to take off until the price comes down a lot (say, about half of what it is now). DVD recordable drives themselves are just beginning to get down to affordable levels.
I anticipate that Hilary Rosen and Jack Valenti will spend the hereafter listening to this, if there is any sense of justice in the afterlife.
Re:Cool...but an old concept
on
Water Computing
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Speaking of logic, here's a October 1989 Scientific American article detailing the tinkertoy tic-tac-toe playing machine. Anybody want to make this out of these water logic components? Didn't think so...;)
Not quite computing yet, just digital logic
on
Water Computing
·
· Score: 1
This is very cool for those of us who recently took digital logic/computer organization courses in college--the scary thing is that for some simple logic devices, provided the "water logic components" didn't leak, I can see this being as easy to use as a breadboard and traditional logic chips.
The goal of steganography is to be one step better than encryption--not only can enemies not read the data, they don't even know there IS data being sent (at least not the data they were looking for). In other words: Encryption: "These are not the droids you are looking for." Steganography: "What droids? Those aren't droids, those are pictures of Britney Spears." (Perhaps this is a bad analogy.)
Thus, adding text to the end of an image, even encrypted, shows that you have something to hide. For dissidents in China, this means prison, until you reveal your passphrase--and then they'll probably kill you.
OK, that didn't come to mind immediately. I guess if that is what they mean by "anti-abortion" sites then it is something that should be removed from google's listings. I suppose I saw conspiracy to block an opinion rather than blocking something for a legitimate reason such as incitement to commit murder, and I was a little ticked at first.
What blows me away is not the racist speech blocking, but the fact that they're blocking anti-abortion websites from google's listings--racist speech could be construed as "hate speech" and thus I can maybe see how they'd not want their children to see it, but anti-abortion (AKA pro-life, depending on whether you support it or not) speech?! How is that worthy of censorship? Oh, does it not agree with what their government believes? Well, we get a chance to see their freedom of the press in action--let's see if any French or German newspapers cover this blatant act of censorship.
Slashdot Mirror
Not a perfect solution, albeit a pretty good one if they don't know a "troll" flag is in use on the board. They can always get another account to see when their posts begin to disappear.
I am not an IT security professional, but from my limited experience, this is 100% on the mark. It's much easier to remember a single 10+ letter/number/symbol password than it is to be forced to change a password once every month with only a six-letter minimum requirement. Some people have devised calendar schemes of changing their secure password, but these people are few and far between.
As an IT security administrator, the smart thing to do would be to require a password that is 10 characters minimum (with numbers or symbols required). Then give plenty of suggestions to users for how they can devise a rather random password (e.g., think of a favorite song, then use the first letters of lyrics from a verse of that song, with numbers or symbols separating sentences). Then force them to change it once a year or so.
It was... ... ...a bummer.
I could be wrong here...but Ni-Cad? How is that environmentally friendly (reusability aside)? Wouldn't NiMH be a better option both performance-wise and from a disposability standpoint? When a Ni-Cad battery dies on you in India, how many places are there nearby to recycle it, and how much damage would it do if the cadmium leaked into a water supply?
I would definitely say a rechargeable power pack is a good decision, I only question the Ni-Cad aspect of it.
Though I haven't used the thinkgeek model before, I've used such rollup keyboards in the past...and they don't give tactile feedback, so I type slower on them. Could be just a problem with my typing style though.
The husband purchases lots of goods on credit, shows them to his wife. The wife says, "But dear, what about those credit interest fees?" Monsters approach menacingly. The husband replies with a smile, "Don't worry, I put it on my Capital One no-hassle card!" Monsters groan. Just then...*THUD* *THUD* *THUD*...and *CHOMP* Mozilla bites his head off, roaring "But your site doesn't work with my browser!!"
Or...maybe not.
Maybe it has something to do with the "view changes" option in Microsoft Word?
It works well against those who aren't actively planning violent protest. To those who are actually interested in learning about this kind of stuff, it's not that hard to circumvent it.
"If you plan to continue protesting about future audio media releases that are leaked onto filesharing networks, forget it; peer-to-peer filesharing is a reality, and at this very moment more or less all audio media worldwide are available online. And this is a good thing for the music industry . In order to make this happen...oh wait, it already has -- whether you like it or not."
Unfortunately, this means that when the controller is inevitably tossed in anger, I break the entire console, not just a cheap controller. There was a Penny Arcade about this awhile ago..."breaking controllers since 1985" or something like that.
Offer a paypal account and some proof that someone's actually going to follow through on the other end, and sure.
While I know there is a separation between the actions of Microsoft and the actions of Bill Gates, Bill Gates himself has done plenty of things purely out of good will. His charity donations are interesting to me, in that he donates to causes like disease research -- rather than following the tradition of many philanthropists of yesteryear, donating mostly to public works which are subsequently named after them (I'm sure he does this too, but I believe the main focus is on international health). Note that I'm not saying there's anything wrong or selfish about that--I'd rather study in the Kelvin Smith Library than study in my dorm room, but the selflessness Gates has shown with his riches is one thing I do admire (granted, it doesn't make up for Windows ME, but nobody's perfect). Here's a pretty good cache of stories about his charitable donations.
Disclaimer: I'm not Dave, just a very impressed user.
The Google toolbar was a big plus for IE, until I found Dave's quick search deskbar. It's much like the google toolbar, but it is always open on your taskbar, and you can run searches from other sites by typing in a short character sequence--i.e., do a dictionary lookup by typing "phoenix::". Do Yahoo searches with a "yh question", get Merriam-Webster definitions with a "colon:", get Bloomberg stock quotes like this "msft intc csco$", and find Switchboard phone numbers by saying "Lois Lane#". You can search real "news." search "newsgroups," check "weather*", or "comparison shop$$". There's a built in calculator when you need to know "pow(1.0625, 30)" is 6.1640785. Additionally, you don't need to remember these shortcuts--you can select them from a menu, or you can even do a search for the search shortcut for "newsgroups". I've never installed the google toolbar since I found this tool. It's windows only (though it's open source - somebody can port it to Linux in future), but so's the google toolbar.
I don't usually use Pricewatch, because companies often list misleading low prices with expensive shipping, just to get lower in the guide and get more purchases (bait and switch). Anandtech's latest price guide shows a P4 2.53 GHz at $189, and the closest Athlon is a 2400+ at $194. So you're right, at the cutting edge. But for what I just bought, an Athlon 2000+ (1.67 GHz) for $95, a Pentium 4 would be foolish--it costs $160. Yeah, with the newest bleeding edge Athlons, AMD can't compete - like I said, they're not winning the speed war. But for the majority of their chips that have been out (anything 2200+ and older), the prices are much lower. That's why I said they were winning the price war. For those who are willing to pay $200+ for a chip, go Intel by all means.
AMD has been losing the speed war for several months now, but I think they have been winning the price war all along - comparable-speed Athlons have been much cheaper than their Pentium equivalents. As the sig says though, I could be wrong.
No, maybe you're right. My mistake--I guess I was just taught one way...it seems people do refer to it as an alpha-beta search.
Slight semantic fix -- I wrote tic-tac-toe last semester so I thought I'd point this out. The search is "min-max" - the method of speeding the search is "alpha-beta pruning" (or "cutoff", whatever). Here's a brief explanation.
This sounds great, but I really don't think combination devices like these are going to take off until the price comes down a lot (say, about half of what it is now). DVD recordable drives themselves are just beginning to get down to affordable levels.
I anticipate that Hilary Rosen and Jack Valenti will spend the hereafter listening to this, if there is any sense of justice in the afterlife.
Speaking of logic, here's a October 1989 Scientific American article detailing the tinkertoy tic-tac-toe playing machine. Anybody want to make this out of these water logic components? Didn't think so... ;)
This is very cool for those of us who recently took digital logic/computer organization courses in college--the scary thing is that for some simple logic devices, provided the "water logic components" didn't leak, I can see this being as easy to use as a breadboard and traditional logic chips.
The goal of steganography is to be one step better than encryption--not only can enemies not read the data, they don't even know there IS data being sent (at least not the data they were looking for). In other words:
Encryption: "These are not the droids you are looking for."
Steganography: "What droids? Those aren't droids, those are pictures of Britney Spears." (Perhaps this is a bad analogy.)
Thus, adding text to the end of an image, even encrypted, shows that you have something to hide. For dissidents in China, this means prison, until you reveal your passphrase--and then they'll probably kill you.
OK, that didn't come to mind immediately. I guess if that is what they mean by "anti-abortion" sites then it is something that should be removed from google's listings. I suppose I saw conspiracy to block an opinion rather than blocking something for a legitimate reason such as incitement to commit murder, and I was a little ticked at first.
What blows me away is not the racist speech blocking, but the fact that they're blocking anti-abortion websites from google's listings--racist speech could be construed as "hate speech" and thus I can maybe see how they'd not want their children to see it, but anti-abortion (AKA pro-life, depending on whether you support it or not) speech?! How is that worthy of censorship? Oh, does it not agree with what their government believes?
Well, we get a chance to see their freedom of the press in action--let's see if any French or German newspapers cover this blatant act of censorship.