only $.50? i think we need to bring our gas prices in line with the rest of the world. (1.10 euro/liter last time i was in france. about $5 per gallon with the exchange rate at the time) then we'd really see some progress.
then we could also pay for road maintenance and construction out of the gas taxes, rather than income/property taxes. that way the people who use them the most pay for them the most, and people who take public transportation or find other ways to get where they want to go don't have to.
the reason americans are so attached to their cars is that they are (in economic terms) a free good. every american is paying most of the cost of driving everywhere they go whether or not they drive anywhere or even own a car.
as one of my wifes old co-workers said once, maybe instead of invading iraq we should be invading seattle. we pay $2 for a gallon of gas, but a cup of coffee costs $4... (this was in downtown chicago)
seriously, gas is dirt cheap. it has risen on average about 3% per year since the height of the 70's oil crisis. that's practically nothing- far less than inflation. most countries in the world pay more per liter than americans do per gallon (i guess i am assuming you are an american. my apologies if you are not) if the us would stop artificially depressing the cost of gas, maybe we'd see some real progress in alternative fuels and use of public transportation.
You'd probably save a lot more by just going to a solar thermal system (or maybe a combo PV/solar thermal system) than you would by using PVs to power an electric heater. PVs are still not very efficient, and electric heating isn't very efficient either. The energy loss in going from solar -> electric -> heat would probably outwiegh any gains you would see.
And then you gotta think, will you live there for the next 20 years....personally I do not plan on living in any one spot for a 20 year span EVER in my lifetime. I plan on moving every 10 years (at most)...and I would presume a lot of people are like that...
Even if you do move before the panels pay for themselves, telling the buyer that he can save $20/month on his electric bills for the next 15 years ought to be worth something when you sell the house.
Assuming of course that PV's will ever pay for themselves. While solar thermal (i.e. passive solar heat) can be extremely cost effective in the right climates, the numbers I have seen lead me to believe that current PV's will not pay for themsleves in their lifetime, and may not even regenerate the amount of energy that went into their production.
Really? That surprises me. All of the numbers I've seen indicate that current technology PV panels will not pay for themselves within their service lifetime.
Assuming, of course that electricity prices stay constant, which I wouldn't expect. Also, if you live in an area where you can sell excess power back to the grid, that changes the equation too.
While I don't know the specifics of OGG, many signal processing routines use FFTs (fast fourier transforms) to convert data into a form that is easier to do calculations with and then convert back when they are done. I do know that the vorbis encoder/decoder originally required a floating point processor, but some time ago one of the linux handheld makers put up a bunch of money to get a version developed that used only integer routines.
he may have done some really bad movies, but he definitely has his good moments too. yeah "batman returns" and "planet of the apes" may not have been that great, but he also directed "batman" and "the nightmare before christmas"
They get stuck at every kink in the cable, and someone has to go and clear the blockage by hand.
A couple of my co-workers once convinced somebody in sales that the reason her network connection was slow was because there was a kink in her ethernet cable.
Whoever originally made that statement was just fear-mongering. Microsoft has already released a preview version of Internet Explorer that doesn't violate the patent. The only difference between it and current versions of Internet Explorer is that it prompts you "do you want to run this plugin?" before running it. It wouldn't break any web pages- it would make sites with multiple plugins on every page quite annoying, but I would say that's the fault of the design of their site, not Internet Explorer.
well, this lawsuit has already been going on for something like 4 years i think. add to that the amount of time it takes to go through the patent application and review process (i always wondered why the review takes so long, as it doesn't seem like they actually do any real reviewing.) it's not like this just happened yesterday. i don't think ie was using activex plugins for all that long before this suit was filed. (if indeed the patent applies to activex plugins, and not plugins in general, as another poster suggested.)
they aren't loosing the ability to embed applets, they are loosing the ability to embed them seemlessly. microsoft's proposed solution (which you could download a demo of at one point in time- not sure if you still can) would treat flash and other plugins the same way that mozilla does when you have the click-to-play plugin installed. in place of the plugin it shows a placeholder icon. if you want to play it, you click it on the icon and it goes ahead normally.
i think if this behavior was applied accross all browsers (or even in 80% of browsers) it would help the web as a whole enormously. no more flash ads, no more sites using flash navigation bars, but we could still see all of the flash content that we want. perfect.
of course, i still think that this is a crappy patent, and as desirable as the end result may be, i don't think this is a good way to get there.
in the case of browser plugins, which this fight is about, they can't fracture the web any worse than they already have. as it is, you have to use one method to embed a plugin in IE, and a different completely incompatible method for every other browser. How could they make it any worse?
i am definitely against patents being used like this and would like to see eolas lose for that reason. but, the way i see it, it could be a good thing for the web if they win. (in the short term at least- it still sets a nasty precedent in the long term) i think it would be great if every browser treated flash (and every other plugin) the same way as mozilla does with the "click-to-play" flash extension. (which was the proposed settlement of this case) people could still see all of the flash content that they want, without interference, but we'd be free of nasty flash advertisements, and developers would have to give up using flash (and java) for things like site navigation, etc. that should just be done in html.
He was saying "You have the ability to make the decision to not visit sites that only work in Internet Explorer."
The trick is that you have to realize that the sentence wasn't meant literally. He was taking a common concept and implying that the reader should think about how that concept applies to the world wide web.
i was really a fan of gmail's spam filtering up until about the last three weeks when i've had at least 8 legitimate emails get filtered out.
(in gmail's defense however, i am in the process of buying a house, so i am actually getting legitimate mortgage and insurance quotes and information emailed to me)
i gave up on gmail just today. as much as i like their webmail interface, i don't like the fact that i have no control over the email account.
you are correct, if the spammer is exploiting an open relay, then the relay will generate a bounce to the fraudulent address instead of you.
however, open relays are going out of style as spammer tools, as they are getting much harder to find anymore. most spam now comes from virus or spyware infected pc's.
in order for this to work, you would need a spam filter that processes the message in real time as it comes in, so that when the sender gets to the end of the DATA command, you can reply with a 550 error. if you wait until the initial smtp connection is closed to filter and bounce the email, it's too late, for all of the reasons that several people have already mentioned. only by bouncing the email during the initial smtp session (when you know you are talking to the sending server) will this method help.
are there any high quality spam filters that allow this kind of blocking?
almost any mta out there will queue and resend mail if the destination is down. the chances of you losing any important email by this method are pretty low, as long as you don't leave the server down for more than about 5 days, which is about as long as most mta's will retry before giving up.
been playing too many video games lately? one by one....
aegis missile cruisers are pretty much only good for short range defense. they are meant to protect ships and small battle groups, not large areas of land. and they are limited in how many missiles they can shoot down anyway. roughly speaking, they can probably take out at best a third to a half as many missiles as the number of anti-missile missiles they are carrying in their magazines at any given time. so all china would have to do is a) launch missiles at areas of land not near any aegis cruisers or b) launch more missiles than the cruisers can shoot down or c) both of the above.
patriot missiles are all but useless. in their one large scale military deployment, they had zero onfirmed kills. in fact the only thing more apalling than the performance of the patriot missiles in the gulf war was the performance of the scud missiles they were trying to shoot down.
submarines are only useful so long as they can stay hidden. they have no real defense other than stealth. while they are good for intelligence gathering, covert missile launches, hunting other subs, and picking off surface stragglers, they are almost useless for attacking any decent sized group of surface vessels.
as for the fighter planes, american air superiority isn't what is used to be. although i don't know much about the j-8's, the su-27's could probably dish out about as much as they take. not to mention that operating any significant number of fa-18's and f-14's in the formosa straight would require operating multiple carriers in a very confined space close enough to enemy territory to give any naval strategist kittens. not to mention at any given time you'd probably have to dedicate about a quarter to a third of your air power to watching out for your awacs.
on top of all of this you are talking about fighting a war sometime in the next 30 years with technology that is already 20 years old or more. if it does come to war (and i doubt it is, as you claim, a foregone conclusion) who is to say what technology we or they will be using when the time comes?
West of New Mexico (meaning Arizona, not New Mexico) would exclude Colorado. California would turn to shit without the water rights.
yeah, because colorado is just floating in gallons of extra water these days. half the state, including all of the large population centers, are in a nearly desert climate region. and with the large population boom expected in denver and the surrounding areas over the coming years colorado is rapidly finding itself in the same position southern california found itself in during the 60's and 70's. california is not nearly as dependant on out of state water as it used to be.
anyway, i dont think the parent was suggesting that california could or would go it alone- only that the us might benefit by splitting into several more autonomous regions.
i suspect the culture on the west coast is more like the culture of the (north) east coast than either coast is like the central regions of the country. i can't say this for certain- i've not spent much time east of michigan, but from what i do know the us seems to fall into roughly three cultural regions: the midwest, the south, and the west and northeast coasts. (maybe four- sometimes it seems like the mountain states exist in their own little world...)
as for texas, i've heard in several places now that texas tended to be much more evenly divided before the time w became governor (i've never heard anyone speculate one way or the other whether his election was a cause of that shift or a result). i was in austin over thanksgiving this year, and it was quite amusing how many people in the capitol city of texas couldn't stand their former governor.
i don't remember ever seeing this behavior in mozilla, and i've been using div's to make "windows" off and on since about 0.9.2
not to say this didn't ever happen in mozilla, but if it did, it was a bug, and was fairly short-lived, as opposed to internet explorer, where it is a "feature" of their implementation which can't be changed.
i have never ojected to the use of the word piracy to mean copyright infringement. i merely found it amusing that the parent found it necessary to contrast "old piracy" with "new piracy", especially since the meaning i referred to most likely predates both uses he mentioned.
while you've got your dictionary out, look and see if they had an entry for humor back in 1828.
the draggable DIV doesn't show up on top of certain HTML elements and hence becomes useless (even with an infinitely high z-index).
this is only true for internet explorer. for some reason microsoft saw fit to implement select menus as a "windowed control" (whatever that means) which completely ignores any z-indexing rules. if you're careful about how you use select widgets (i've heard flash plugins can cause this problem too- i've never felt inclined to mix flash and dhtml myself).
this is a problem i've been fighting with off and on for at least four years. thanks for the tip on iframes- not sure why i never thought to try that before. there are of course times when an iframe won't work- it is, for example, extremely difficultto work with the DOM inside an iframefrom outside of the iframe- but still this is a good trick to keep in mind.
A dynamically generated name could possibly defeat this attack, though the attacker could always crawl the DOM for a handle to the pop-up.
I doubt it. If any browser allows you to look at the DOM of a page from a different site, that is a far greater security hole than what they are demonstrating.
Slashdot Mirror
only $.50? i think we need to bring our gas prices in line with the rest of the world. (1.10 euro/liter last time i was in france. about $5 per gallon with the exchange rate at the time) then we'd really see some progress.
then we could also pay for road maintenance and construction out of the gas taxes, rather than income/property taxes. that way the people who use them the most pay for them the most, and people who take public transportation or find other ways to get where they want to go don't have to.
the reason americans are so attached to their cars is that they are (in economic terms) a free good. every american is paying most of the cost of driving everywhere they go whether or not they drive anywhere or even own a car.
as one of my wifes old co-workers said once, maybe instead of invading iraq we should be invading seattle. we pay $2 for a gallon of gas, but a cup of coffee costs $4... (this was in downtown chicago)
seriously, gas is dirt cheap. it has risen on average about 3% per year since the height of the 70's oil crisis. that's practically nothing- far less than inflation. most countries in the world pay more per liter than americans do per gallon (i guess i am assuming you are an american. my apologies if you are not) if the us would stop artificially depressing the cost of gas, maybe we'd see some real progress in alternative fuels and use of public transportation.
You'd probably save a lot more by just going to a solar thermal system (or maybe a combo PV/solar thermal system) than you would by using PVs to power an electric heater. PVs are still not very efficient, and electric heating isn't very efficient either. The energy loss in going from solar -> electric -> heat would probably outwiegh any gains you would see.
And then you gotta think, will you live there for the next 20 years....personally I do not plan on living in any one spot for a 20 year span EVER in my lifetime. I plan on moving every 10 years (at most)...and I would presume a lot of people are like that...
Even if you do move before the panels pay for themselves, telling the buyer that he can save $20/month on his electric bills for the next 15 years ought to be worth something when you sell the house.
Assuming of course that PV's will ever pay for themselves. While solar thermal (i.e. passive solar heat) can be extremely cost effective in the right climates, the numbers I have seen lead me to believe that current PV's will not pay for themsleves in their lifetime, and may not even regenerate the amount of energy that went into their production.
Really? That surprises me. All of the numbers I've seen indicate that current technology PV panels will not pay for themselves within their service lifetime.
Assuming, of course that electricity prices stay constant, which I wouldn't expect. Also, if you live in an area where you can sell excess power back to the grid, that changes the equation too.
While I don't know the specifics of OGG, many signal processing routines use FFTs (fast fourier transforms) to convert data into a form that is easier to do calculations with and then convert back when they are done. I do know that the vorbis encoder/decoder originally required a floating point processor, but some time ago one of the linux handheld makers put up a bunch of money to get a version developed that used only integer routines.
Star Trek: Terms of Service?
he may have done some really bad movies, but he definitely has his good moments too. yeah "batman returns" and "planet of the apes" may not have been that great, but he also directed "batman" and "the nightmare before christmas"
They get stuck at every kink in the cable, and someone has to go and clear the blockage by hand.
A couple of my co-workers once convinced somebody in sales that the reason her network connection was slow was because there was a kink in her ethernet cable.
Whoever originally made that statement was just fear-mongering. Microsoft has already released a preview version of Internet Explorer that doesn't violate the patent. The only difference between it and current versions of Internet Explorer is that it prompts you "do you want to run this plugin?" before running it. It wouldn't break any web pages- it would make sites with multiple plugins on every page quite annoying, but I would say that's the fault of the design of their site, not Internet Explorer.
well, this lawsuit has already been going on for something like 4 years i think. add to that the amount of time it takes to go through the patent application and review process (i always wondered why the review takes so long, as it doesn't seem like they actually do any real reviewing.) it's not like this just happened yesterday. i don't think ie was using activex plugins for all that long before this suit was filed. (if indeed the patent applies to activex plugins, and not plugins in general, as another poster suggested.)
they aren't loosing the ability to embed applets, they are loosing the ability to embed them seemlessly. microsoft's proposed solution (which you could download a demo of at one point in time- not sure if you still can) would treat flash and other plugins the same way that mozilla does when you have the click-to-play plugin installed. in place of the plugin it shows a placeholder icon. if you want to play it, you click it on the icon and it goes ahead normally.
i think if this behavior was applied accross all browsers (or even in 80% of browsers) it would help the web as a whole enormously. no more flash ads, no more sites using flash navigation bars, but we could still see all of the flash content that we want. perfect.
of course, i still think that this is a crappy patent, and as desirable as the end result may be, i don't think this is a good way to get there.
in the case of browser plugins, which this fight is about, they can't fracture the web any worse than they already have. as it is, you have to use one method to embed a plugin in IE, and a different completely incompatible method for every other browser. How could they make it any worse?
i am definitely against patents being used like this and would like to see eolas lose for that reason. but, the way i see it, it could be a good thing for the web if they win. (in the short term at least- it still sets a nasty precedent in the long term) i think it would be great if every browser treated flash (and every other plugin) the same way as mozilla does with the "click-to-play" flash extension. (which was the proposed settlement of this case) people could still see all of the flash content that they want, without interference, but we'd be free of nasty flash advertisements, and developers would have to give up using flash (and java) for things like site navigation, etc. that should just be done in html.
He wasn't saying "don't buy Internet Explorer."
He was saying "You have the ability to make the decision to not visit sites that only work in Internet Explorer."
The trick is that you have to realize that the sentence wasn't meant literally. He was taking a common concept and implying that the reader should think about how that concept applies to the world wide web.
i was really a fan of gmail's spam filtering up until about the last three weeks when i've had at least 8 legitimate emails get filtered out.
(in gmail's defense however, i am in the process of buying a house, so i am actually getting legitimate mortgage and insurance quotes and information emailed to me)
i gave up on gmail just today. as much as i like their webmail interface, i don't like the fact that i have no control over the email account.
you are correct, if the spammer is exploiting an open relay, then the relay will generate a bounce to the fraudulent address instead of you.
however, open relays are going out of style as spammer tools, as they are getting much harder to find anymore. most spam now comes from virus or spyware infected pc's.
in order for this to work, you would need a spam filter that processes the message in real time as it comes in, so that when the sender gets to the end of the DATA command, you can reply with a 550 error. if you wait until the initial smtp connection is closed to filter and bounce the email, it's too late, for all of the reasons that several people have already mentioned. only by bouncing the email during the initial smtp session (when you know you are talking to the sending server) will this method help.
are there any high quality spam filters that allow this kind of blocking?
almost any mta out there will queue and resend mail if the destination is down. the chances of you losing any important email by this method are pretty low, as long as you don't leave the server down for more than about 5 days, which is about as long as most mta's will retry before giving up.
been playing too many video games lately? one by one....
aegis missile cruisers are pretty much only good for short range defense. they are meant to protect ships and small battle groups, not large areas of land. and they are limited in how many missiles they can shoot down anyway. roughly speaking, they can probably take out at best a third to a half as many missiles as the number of anti-missile missiles they are carrying in their magazines at any given time. so all china would have to do is a) launch missiles at areas of land not near any aegis cruisers or b) launch more missiles than the cruisers can shoot down or c) both of the above.
patriot missiles are all but useless. in their one large scale military deployment, they had zero onfirmed kills. in fact the only thing more apalling than the performance of the patriot missiles in the gulf war was the performance of the scud missiles they were trying to shoot down.
submarines are only useful so long as they can stay hidden. they have no real defense other than stealth. while they are good for intelligence gathering, covert missile launches, hunting other subs, and picking off surface stragglers, they are almost useless for attacking any decent sized group of surface vessels.
as for the fighter planes, american air superiority isn't what is used to be. although i don't know much about the j-8's, the su-27's could probably dish out about as much as they take. not to mention that operating any significant number of fa-18's and f-14's in the formosa straight would require operating multiple carriers in a very confined space close enough to enemy territory to give any naval strategist kittens. not to mention at any given time you'd probably have to dedicate about a quarter to a third of your air power to watching out for your awacs.
on top of all of this you are talking about fighting a war sometime in the next 30 years with technology that is already 20 years old or more. if it does come to war (and i doubt it is, as you claim, a foregone conclusion) who is to say what technology we or they will be using when the time comes?
West of New Mexico (meaning Arizona, not New Mexico) would exclude Colorado. California would turn to shit without the water rights.
yeah, because colorado is just floating in gallons of extra water these days. half the state, including all of the large population centers, are in a nearly desert climate region. and with the large population boom expected in denver and the surrounding areas over the coming years colorado is rapidly finding itself in the same position southern california found itself in during the 60's and 70's. california is not nearly as dependant on out of state water as it used to be.
anyway, i dont think the parent was suggesting that california could or would go it alone- only that the us might benefit by splitting into several more autonomous regions.
i suspect the culture on the west coast is more like the culture of the (north) east coast than either coast is like the central regions of the country. i can't say this for certain- i've not spent much time east of michigan, but from what i do know the us seems to fall into roughly three cultural regions: the midwest, the south, and the west and northeast coasts. (maybe four- sometimes it seems like the mountain states exist in their own little world...)
as for texas, i've heard in several places now that texas tended to be much more evenly divided before the time w became governor (i've never heard anyone speculate one way or the other whether his election was a cause of that shift or a result). i was in austin over thanksgiving this year, and it was quite amusing how many people in the capitol city of texas couldn't stand their former governor.
i don't remember ever seeing this behavior in mozilla, and i've been using div's to make "windows" off and on since about 0.9.2
not to say this didn't ever happen in mozilla, but if it did, it was a bug, and was fairly short-lived, as opposed to internet explorer, where it is a "feature" of their implementation which can't be changed.
i have never ojected to the use of the word piracy to mean copyright infringement. i merely found it amusing that the parent found it necessary to contrast "old piracy" with "new piracy", especially since the meaning i referred to most likely predates both uses he mentioned.
while you've got your dictionary out, look and see if they had an entry for humor back in 1828.
the draggable DIV doesn't show up on top of certain HTML elements and hence becomes useless (even with an infinitely high z-index).
this is only true for internet explorer. for some reason microsoft saw fit to implement select menus as a "windowed control" (whatever that means) which completely ignores any z-indexing rules. if you're careful about how you use select widgets (i've heard flash plugins can cause this problem too- i've never felt inclined to mix flash and dhtml myself).
this is a problem i've been fighting with off and on for at least four years. thanks for the tip on iframes- not sure why i never thought to try that before. there are of course times when an iframe won't work- it is, for example, extremely difficultto work with the DOM inside an iframefrom outside of the iframe- but still this is a good trick to keep in mind.
A dynamically generated name could possibly defeat this attack, though the attacker could always crawl the DOM for a handle to the pop-up.
I doubt it. If any browser allows you to look at the DOM of a page from a different site, that is a far greater security hole than what they are demonstrating.