[...] the hagfish, which can when under duress turn the five gallons of water around it into utterly impenetrable sludge -- instantaneously."
Is this similar to the way an MPAA or a RIAA lobbyist can when under Congress, turn the brains of the five legislators around it into utterly impenetrable sludge -- instantaneously?
Of course, this would give the enemy an all-around ability to frag your puny body into a mist of blood and gore that settled slowly into the bubbling lava surrounding the narrow pathway on which you foolishly ventured, but hey. It'll look cool!:)
I must be a moron. I can't get NetSol to change my contact information, delete a domain, or change the technical contact info on a domain.
I've had to do updates at "NetSOL" several times, and these people are scary. I swear they purposely make their site and procedures nearly impossible to decipher. For what it's worth, I stopped having excessive trouble with their automated email-verification scripts (this was a while ago) after realizing (after much hair-tearing) that it is extremely important to be sure that the lines are not wrapped by your email client, in the "template" forms that you email back to them. Also, there must be a space between the colon at the end of each record-descriptor, and the content following on that line (if any). Or, is it must not be a space? Geez, emulate whatever is on the other lines, you know?
It's been a while and this may be obsolete, or slightly mangled in exact detail. I've never had to resort to the infamous fax procedure, and can offer no useful advice on that except to keep on hand a bottle of Aleve, or "other" measures to relieve pain and suffering.
I've since snuck out the back way to a more friendly (OpenSRSreseller) registrar with password protection and decent security, not to mention immeasurably more useable automated scripts for Web-access account management.
After an extensive search in Usenet and on the Web for a low-cost but still good site hosting service, I settled upon Your-Site. It's a "build your own plan" service at which you can accept a pretty decent set of services for $60 per year prepaid or $7 per month non-prepaid (50M disk space with a charge of $0.10 per month for each extra megabyte, 6G transfer exclusive of FTP and email with a charge of $3 per extra gigabyte in any month you exceed the limit, 25 POP3 accounts with a charge of $0.50 per extra POP3 account, PHP/Perl/C/Python CGI-BIN functionality).
I've been a tad busy and haven't been paying close attention per se to the three sites I'm building there as time permits, but haven't noticed especial problems. People who made comments about Your-Site in Usenet (that I saw) seemed happy with the service when I did the heavy research a couple of months ago, and I didn't see any negative comments about Your-Site (which is mildly significant all by itself, probably). The folks at Your-Site have been responsive to my concerns as well, and I have no worries about them.
To judge from an absurd amount of looking into alternatives, I'd hazard a firm guess that Your-Site is offering about the best deal you'll get from a low-cost site hosting service without running into problems from bottom-feeders out to make a buck without bothering to actually deliver on their promises, or problems with all sorts of limits on what you can do. I haven't tried the site hosting service mentioned by another poster here, "PHP Web Hosting", but that was another place on my very short list of top candidates at the end just before making a final decision. They do charge more at $9.95 per month, but more features are included up-front in the basket, and it may be a better deal for your needs, depending on what exactly you wish to do. This would be my next choice after Your-Site, and very probably my first choice if I needed "unlimited" disk space or POP3 accounts.
Check the context: it's not about patents, it's trademarking domain names he's speaking about. After all, patents would be a little offtopic in ICANN meetings, wouldn't it?
I did notice that odd discrepancy, and decided to respond to the original quoted comment literally because it seemed specifically to attack all "intellectual property" rather than to be confined to what one might presuppose to be this limited context that you mentioned. I'm doing a great of work on the entire field of Web communications and presentation (yes, I know very well that this task of even a broad and shallow overview is rather too large for any one individual to do decently without bringing in a team at some point), and am aware of the ICAAN and also peripherally aware of the nasty game-playing going on behind the scenes, not that I even want to know much about it. Ick, unproductive.
In a recent article for the major German daily FAZ, Andy Mueller-Maguhn, newly elected ICANN board member for Europe, declares "What lawyers call 'intellectual property' is -- as every Latin student knows -- no more than theft from the public domain.
Oh, brother.
If the situation with truly scary patents weren't so bad, if land-sharks (corrupt lawyers) weren't already stealing public domain intellectual fruit wholesale, I'd give this fellow the hairy eyeball, and a verbal pineapple to boot.
As it is, I do remark that there is a huge difference between an idea that would have occurred to someone else about ten minutes later or which is really obvious to any fifth-grader, and an idea which would not have occurred to anyone else for at least several more months, let alone years or centuries. Patents have their place, although not nearly so much place as they've been made to take by frighteningly greedy corporate masters. Many recent patents, particularly so-called "business method" patents, look these days like the 600-pound fellow who waddles into the all-you-can-eat pizza shop with the fixed intention of eating everything in the place, even to grabbing food from everyone else already there, to be sure they have nothing and he has everything.
This isn't even getting into works of literature and art. Just because a man understands and appreciates Shakespeare or Madonna, doesn't mean he has any talent or other ability to produce works of that quality. Works that couldn't or wouldn't be produced by anyone else, very much deserve legal and social protection. I don't advocate initiation of force, though -- the corporate thugs who crash violently into homes and private businesses to "seize stolen property" aren't seizing stolen property at all, but rather stealing someone else's CD-ROM's and printed materials and computers at gunpoint with force and fear, and these thugs deserve to be clubbed into submission, forcibly lined up against a wall, and shot like mad dogs.
Ah, well. Enough of this. Back I go to producing my own "intellectual property" that no doubt will be pirated, much of which piracy will be egged on by yours truly as part of a certain enlightened business method (no, I won't patent the business method, even though it could be patented in today's creepy, nightmarish patent environment 8^(.
This is very interesting. One can envision an inexpensive desktop unit that consists of a clear, heavy plastic or glass dome settled upon a flat base containing the coolant and other freezer innards, and through which clear, heavy plastic or glass dome, can be seen a solid mass of ice containing within itself an intricately layered ice sculpture, all carefully constructed from very pure water and dense colorants to maximize clarity and sharpness, and in which are delicate, often beautiful figurines and other three-dimensional features, such as entire miniature forests or seascapes, as well as highly-detailed clouds and flocks of birds.
This combination of a relative ease of manufacture of such internally complex but quite durable ice sculptures and the availability of quiet, inexpensive freezer mechanisms, might very well prove to be a popular art form, much in the way of those old "Lava Lamps" from the 1960's, but not nearly as tacky... uh, I meant to say, "but even groovier" 8^].
(No, I will not speculate upon what the pornography industry would do with this, nor will I remark upon what might be done with a Beowulf cluster of such devices).
The Federales are getting antsy about the possibility that the USA will be merged next into the Times-Warner-AOL colossus, and then they'll all be demoted to customer support with pimply-faced "1337 #4}{0r5" as their bosses.
To log on to the Coast Resorts Web site, Nevada residents must physically go to a Coast Resort-owned casino and go through a similar procedure as if they were interested in phone wagering, such as showing proof of age and proof of residency.
On top of that, Merati said online betters will receive a proprietary dial-up connection and floppy disk to launch the system on their home computers. In the future, people will be able to download the program on the Internet. The Web-based system being built for Coast Resorts makes sure the dial-up access cannot be forwarded from any other location, further ensuring that bets are being placed only within the state, Merati added.
This is the first point of attack. Given the money in gambling, it'll be approximately two to four seconds after this on-line gambling goes live, before someone uses a "fake identity" purchased and downloaded over the Web from someone else who actually visited Nevada with a suite of fake sets of physical identification, to gamble through a Web-based redialler that came on-line about a day or so before the on-line gambling went live.
couple the high speed cam with something that auto-detects microscopic changes in the facial expression and you have a super lie detector.... scary.
That wouldn't work very well with politicians. You'd need about two to three orders of magnitude more memory than a mere 1G, and have to design a filter that could repeatedly dump at high speed the more subtle lies to leave enough room for all the others.
Have you ever noticed subliminally very fleeting expressions on the faces of people who've just been surprised? For instance, consider the expression on the face of a guy who is suddenly surprised with the news that his expensive imported sports car has just been towed and accidentally sent to the crusher, where large bags of white powder spurted out their contents just before the huge metal lid crashed down on the car once and for all. A camera like this could get that expression.
It could also get the fleeting expression on the face of a man who comes home late and is suddenly shocked by his suspicious wife who has just returned early from a business trip, and who abruptly asks him where's he's been. A camera like this could capture a very brief, but weird expression that could upon later, leisurely (but not loving, no indeed) attention prove to be very incriminating.
Personally, I'd like to see this used to capture really cool candid expressions on the faces of political candidates, when they think they're off camera. Heh-heh....
Non-disclosure agreements would be discouraged. Companies would have to prove their own copyrights and prepare to subject their intellectual property to the rules of standards bodies.
"This is like an unincorporated trade association," Nied said. "We want something very simple."
"Simple" to "Corporate-Think" is a contract that can be handled in an afternoon by two lawyers who went to school together. "Simple" to "Free-Think" is "stay the hell out of my living room, and me and my buddy will write something that'll knock off your socks".
The culture gap in what is increasingly the United Corporations of America, is almost out of the Twilight Zone by now. With something as... well, personal as "person to person", this attitude at Intel will fly just about as far as a dead pigeon with lead weights tied to its feet.
We can credit W3C for being forward-looking, but I expect that CSSMP will go the way of WAP.
Perhaps not. I believe the point of this newly crafted subset of CSS2 is to provide a stable reference for useful functions that ought to be in mobile devices (meaning ultra-portable devices with limited display capabilities, and not meaning laptops which might have better display capabilities than many quite old desktop computer layouts with small VGA monitors which are still in use throughout the world).
This area is of keen interest to me, and after the long agony with simple HTML 3.2/4.0[1]+ and with CSS1 through the still not-quite-totally-there CSS2, any way to avoid any more standards wrangling will come as a great relief to those of us who have to actually do this stuff for a living. I'd imagine that XSLT 1.0+engines will do much of the actual work, and it really helps to be able to more or less reuse all that existing work with a near-exact subset of CSS2.
Anyways, I'm back (in a few minutes, after a little more procrastination) to figuring out how to most efficiently split up parts of (simple for now) XML documents for later Java/PythonXML/XSLT processing, while allowing simpler, more immediate PHP 4.0+ XML processing. Argh....
Dancy Banging at Casino!
on
Watch Camera
·
· Score: 2
I can just see bouncing around a Las Vegas casino with one of these babies twisting around every which way on my wrist, listening to Beethoven in snatches at the same time as I take pictures of everything.
That article is interesting! It seems as if the best approach to data security if possible, is to carefully section off on a new hard drive with which to begin, a partition meant to be used only for encrypted data, then rigorously avoid ever writing plaintext onto that partition. (This probably would work fine as well for a "neutral" used hard drive, unless you managed to buy such a used hard drive on eBay from a child molester with extensive photographic and scanning facilities, or from an Iraqi nuclear-secrets spy with sloppy security habits).
Is there a good program (preferably open-source) available to do as much scrubbing as possible of a "tainted" hard drive or portion thereof, given the physical limits of a typical hard drive writing mechanism as described in the aforementioned article?
(I took the liberty of cleaning up the spelling, and other nits...:).
I guess that would be amusing, wearing computers with "touch" connectivity, then forming a human chain around an inner circle of cubicles around Christmas, singing, "O! Holy Quake, Nailgun Blight" while the wireless components shake Aibo robots about the office flashing their eyes red and green. (Can they do that? Would these folks have any input on this question?)
If anyone does this, please do make an MPEG2/4 of that and post an URL to it on Slashdot! I'd like to see that! 8^]
"People are having an increasingly difficult time dealing with their email, their instant messages and voicemail, their faxes and FedEx's, and the constant demands to understand technology that seemingly changes every day at the same time that they are expected to produce better things faster," Abel said.
This is very much in essence a subtle exhibition of the cruelty seen in the famous "Pavlov's Dog" experiment. The build-up (in the real-life phenomenon on which is reported in the above article) is slow, the pressure indirect, but the (perception of the) impossibility of going forward or retreating is still inescapable.
Rooted deeply in any living being is the urgent need to feel as if its own life is within its own control. People have enough intelligence that they can suffer greatly from subtleties of loss of control that would be beyond the perceptual horizon of a box turtle, say, or a dog. It's psychological torture, no less real for being "low-grade", and it can go on and on for years, eventually causing odd mental breakdowns that may be very difficult to accurately trace to this perceived lack of fundamental control over one's own life. This phenomenon will grow even worse as even more apparently relevant information pours over us all, demanding immediate attention and ever-more complex responses with often subtle penalties for fuzzily defined multiple partial failures.
This is a major concern, and a greatly underrated one, I think. It's in my opinion solvable by the same technologies that cause the problem with which to begin, but it will take time to develop and deploy alternative methodologies of channeling and automating the handling of much of this relevant information so it becomes a very controllable, if loud, background roar.
I'd really like to see widespread deployment of organ cloning, which would make much more routine the entire field and therefore lead rapidly (the pace of everything related to information analysis is fast these days) to more complex organ cloning such as of whole arms and legs, which would be a great mercy to millions of victims of "ad-hoc torture" (land-mine victims, victims of war of all kinds, such as the thousands of sad African victims of purposeful, deliberate amputation), as well as victims of purposefully and deliberately destructive torture of all kinds. No, I have no links to post. I'd had enough of even looking at this crap for a while.
A particularly great development would be effective and permanent replacement skin, for those victims of that frightening torturer called fire.
This is one of those rare cases in which I find myself simply unwilling to criticize the runaway patenting of cloning of human characteristics. I'm going to watch these people carefully to see if they try to selfishly prevent other people from going forward with mercy work (using patented technology), or use their patents to make this work go forward, particularly in poorer countries.
I'd post general links, but they depress the hell out of me every time I look at them. It's better to get very rich (got plans), then use the money to massively fund effective humanitarian enterprises that bluntly tell the corrupt bribe-takers to eat shit and die. Geez....
Obviously, once this sort of testing starts, people with genetic risk factors for serious disease (meaning expensive to treat) will end up paying more for their health insurance, if they can get it at all. An interesting side effect will naturally enough be a huge upswing in abortions of "defective" (that is, expensive to maintain) embryos that would have been born as babies unable to get health insurance after a certain age (when many genetically-related diseases begin to manifest symptoms).
As other posters have pointed out, insurers can easily implement this sort of vicious health insurance discrimination by simply adjusting the base rates ever upwards while offering "discounts" to more and more people who "volunteer" to allow genetic tests "for planning purposes" and yet steeper discounts for "low-risk" individuals (meaning super-healthy). In this way, I've no doubt that the practice of "stealth" health insurance discrimination will spread fairly fast to the United States, and for just about every genetically related disease.
This nightmare scenario of "genetic outcasts" who can't get affordable or any health insurance, or even employment because employers don't want (for instance) to be sued for "negligence against the financial interests of the stockholders" has been well enough covered in many science fiction novels, although I leave it to the reader to find these novels (sorry, it's been years since I've had time to read anything much but technical or business material, and I've forgotten the names of even the ones I vaguely recall).
It might be interesting to see t-shirts with woven screen shots from Game Boy games. Of course, the pornographers would jump on that. Ho-ho-ho, what will Nintendo think of that?
Unleash this team on the CueCat encryption! No, no, it's not that easy. They'd have to fight off shark-toothed lawyers with code books, while simultaneously engaging the vicious mind games of money-hungry legislators who pass laws such as the DCMA -- this is no walk in the park!
Slashdot Mirror
"[...] Here's your chance to tell the FTC what you think of UCITA (be nice :-)."
Hang the bastards!
What? What? I am being nice! I really want to have them dropped into a real-life Quake Arena III and taken out with plasma guns!
... geez, don't look at me like that ....
Especially of note as the surface temp temperatures hover around minus 288 degrees Fahrenheit.
I guess that means the weather-girl on the Daily Titanic News broadcast really would be a frozen bitch.
(Aw ... geez, I'm really politically incorrect today. Even Pooh Bear is hiding from the fallout ...).
[...] the hagfish, which can when under duress turn the five gallons of water around it into utterly impenetrable sludge -- instantaneously."
Is this similar to the way an MPAA or a RIAA lobbyist can when under Congress, turn the brains of the five legislators around it into utterly impenetrable sludge -- instantaneously?
Well, naturally!
Of course, this would give the enemy an all-around ability to frag your puny body into a mist of blood and gore that settled slowly into the bubbling lava surrounding the narrow pathway on which you foolishly ventured, but hey. It'll look cool! :)
I must be a moron. I can't get NetSol to change my contact information, delete a domain, or change the technical contact info on a domain.
I've had to do updates at "NetSOL" several times, and these people are scary. I swear they purposely make their site and procedures nearly impossible to decipher. For what it's worth, I stopped having excessive trouble with their automated email-verification scripts (this was a while ago) after realizing (after much hair-tearing) that it is extremely important to be sure that the lines are not wrapped by your email client, in the "template" forms that you email back to them. Also, there must be a space between the colon at the end of each record-descriptor, and the content following on that line (if any). Or, is it must not be a space? Geez, emulate whatever is on the other lines, you know?
It's been a while and this may be obsolete, or slightly mangled in exact detail. I've never had to resort to the infamous fax procedure, and can offer no useful advice on that except to keep on hand a bottle of Aleve, or "other" measures to relieve pain and suffering.
I've since snuck out the back way to a more friendly (OpenSRS reseller) registrar with password protection and decent security, not to mention immeasurably more useable automated scripts for Web-access account management.
After an extensive search in Usenet and on the Web for a low-cost but still good site hosting service, I settled upon Your-Site. It's a "build your own plan" service at which you can accept a pretty decent set of services for $60 per year prepaid or $7 per month non-prepaid (50M disk space with a charge of $0.10 per month for each extra megabyte, 6G transfer exclusive of FTP and email with a charge of $3 per extra gigabyte in any month you exceed the limit, 25 POP3 accounts with a charge of $0.50 per extra POP3 account, PHP/Perl/C/Python CGI-BIN functionality).
I've been a tad busy and haven't been paying close attention per se to the three sites I'm building there as time permits, but haven't noticed especial problems. People who made comments about Your-Site in Usenet (that I saw) seemed happy with the service when I did the heavy research a couple of months ago, and I didn't see any negative comments about Your-Site (which is mildly significant all by itself, probably). The folks at Your-Site have been responsive to my concerns as well, and I have no worries about them.
To judge from an absurd amount of looking into alternatives, I'd hazard a firm guess that Your-Site is offering about the best deal you'll get from a low-cost site hosting service without running into problems from bottom-feeders out to make a buck without bothering to actually deliver on their promises, or problems with all sorts of limits on what you can do. I haven't tried the site hosting service mentioned by another poster here, "PHP Web Hosting", but that was another place on my very short list of top candidates at the end just before making a final decision. They do charge more at $9.95 per month, but more features are included up-front in the basket, and it may be a better deal for your needs, depending on what exactly you wish to do. This would be my next choice after Your-Site, and very probably my first choice if I needed "unlimited" disk space or POP3 accounts.
YMMV, naturally. :)
Jeff Bezos and Tim O'Reilly? Together? No fur flying and blood gouting?
Okey-doke. Lemme make a quote for ya. "You know runaway patents have gotten really scary when even rich men oppose them."
Check the context: it's not about patents, it's trademarking domain names he's speaking about. After all, patents would be a little offtopic in ICANN meetings, wouldn't it?
I did notice that odd discrepancy, and decided to respond to the original quoted comment literally because it seemed specifically to attack all "intellectual property" rather than to be confined to what one might presuppose to be this limited context that you mentioned. I'm doing a great of work on the entire field of Web communications and presentation (yes, I know very well that this task of even a broad and shallow overview is rather too large for any one individual to do decently without bringing in a team at some point), and am aware of the ICAAN and also peripherally aware of the nasty game-playing going on behind the scenes, not that I even want to know much about it. Ick, unproductive.
In a recent article for the major German daily FAZ, Andy Mueller-Maguhn, newly elected ICANN board member for Europe, declares "What lawyers call 'intellectual property' is -- as every Latin student knows -- no more than theft from the public domain.
Oh, brother.
If the situation with truly scary patents weren't so bad, if land-sharks (corrupt lawyers) weren't already stealing public domain intellectual fruit wholesale, I'd give this fellow the hairy eyeball, and a verbal pineapple to boot.
As it is, I do remark that there is a huge difference between an idea that would have occurred to someone else about ten minutes later or which is really obvious to any fifth-grader, and an idea which would not have occurred to anyone else for at least several more months, let alone years or centuries. Patents have their place, although not nearly so much place as they've been made to take by frighteningly greedy corporate masters. Many recent patents, particularly so-called "business method" patents, look these days like the 600-pound fellow who waddles into the all-you-can-eat pizza shop with the fixed intention of eating everything in the place, even to grabbing food from everyone else already there, to be sure they have nothing and he has everything.
This isn't even getting into works of literature and art. Just because a man understands and appreciates Shakespeare or Madonna, doesn't mean he has any talent or other ability to produce works of that quality. Works that couldn't or wouldn't be produced by anyone else, very much deserve legal and social protection. I don't advocate initiation of force, though -- the corporate thugs who crash violently into homes and private businesses to "seize stolen property" aren't seizing stolen property at all, but rather stealing someone else's CD-ROM's and printed materials and computers at gunpoint with force and fear, and these thugs deserve to be clubbed into submission, forcibly lined up against a wall, and shot like mad dogs.
Ah, well. Enough of this. Back I go to producing my own "intellectual property" that no doubt will be pirated, much of which piracy will be egged on by yours truly as part of a certain enlightened business method (no, I won't patent the business method, even though it could be patented in today's creepy, nightmarish patent environment 8^(.
This is very interesting. One can envision an inexpensive desktop unit that consists of a clear, heavy plastic or glass dome settled upon a flat base containing the coolant and other freezer innards, and through which clear, heavy plastic or glass dome, can be seen a solid mass of ice containing within itself an intricately layered ice sculpture, all carefully constructed from very pure water and dense colorants to maximize clarity and sharpness, and in which are delicate, often beautiful figurines and other three-dimensional features, such as entire miniature forests or seascapes, as well as highly-detailed clouds and flocks of birds.
This combination of a relative ease of manufacture of such internally complex but quite durable ice sculptures and the availability of quiet, inexpensive freezer mechanisms, might very well prove to be a popular art form, much in the way of those old "Lava Lamps" from the 1960's, but not nearly as tacky ... uh, I meant to say, "but even groovier" 8^].
(No, I will not speculate upon what the pornography industry would do with this, nor will I remark upon what might be done with a Beowulf cluster of such devices).
[...] the group's web site claims that it will have photographs online of the students with Valenti "soon"."
What the pictures won't include is the scenes afterwards with Valenti grinningly dragging a few screaming students all the way back with him to Hell.
The Federales are getting antsy about the possibility that the USA will be merged next into the Times-Warner-AOL colossus, and then they'll all be demoted to customer support with pimply-faced "1337 #4}{0r5" as their bosses.
To log on to the Coast Resorts Web site, Nevada residents must physically go to a Coast Resort-owned casino and go through a similar procedure as if they were interested in phone wagering, such as showing proof of age and proof of residency.
On top of that, Merati said online betters will receive a proprietary dial-up connection and floppy disk to launch the system on their home computers. In the future, people will be able to download the program on the Internet. The Web-based system being built for Coast Resorts makes sure the dial-up access cannot be forwarded from any other location, further ensuring that bets are being placed only within the state, Merati added.
This is the first point of attack. Given the money in gambling, it'll be approximately two to four seconds after this on-line gambling goes live, before someone uses a "fake identity" purchased and downloaded over the Web from someone else who actually visited Nevada with a suite of fake sets of physical identification, to gamble through a Web-based redialler that came on-line about a day or so before the on-line gambling went live.
couple the high speed cam with something that auto-detects microscopic changes in the facial expression and you have a super lie detector.... scary.
That wouldn't work very well with politicians. You'd need about two to three orders of magnitude more memory than a mere 1G, and have to design a filter that could repeatedly dump at high speed the more subtle lies to leave enough room for all the others.
Have you ever noticed subliminally very fleeting expressions on the faces of people who've just been surprised? For instance, consider the expression on the face of a guy who is suddenly surprised with the news that his expensive imported sports car has just been towed and accidentally sent to the crusher, where large bags of white powder spurted out their contents just before the huge metal lid crashed down on the car once and for all. A camera like this could get that expression.
It could also get the fleeting expression on the face of a man who comes home late and is suddenly shocked by his suspicious wife who has just returned early from a business trip, and who abruptly asks him where's he's been. A camera like this could capture a very brief, but weird expression that could upon later, leisurely (but not loving, no indeed) attention prove to be very incriminating.
Personally, I'd like to see this used to capture really cool candid expressions on the faces of political candidates, when they think they're off camera. Heh-heh ....
Non-disclosure agreements would be discouraged. Companies would have to prove their own copyrights and prepare to subject their intellectual property to the rules of standards bodies.
"This is like an unincorporated trade association," Nied said. "We want something very simple."
"Simple" to "Corporate-Think" is a contract that can be handled in an afternoon by two lawyers who went to school together. "Simple" to "Free-Think" is "stay the hell out of my living room, and me and my buddy will write something that'll knock off your socks".
The culture gap in what is increasingly the United Corporations of America, is almost out of the Twilight Zone by now. With something as ... well, personal as "person to person", this attitude at Intel will fly just about as far as a dead pigeon with lead weights tied to its feet.
We can credit W3C for being forward-looking, but I expect that CSSMP will go the way of WAP.
Perhaps not. I believe the point of this newly crafted subset of CSS2 is to provide a stable reference for useful functions that ought to be in mobile devices (meaning ultra-portable devices with limited display capabilities, and not meaning laptops which might have better display capabilities than many quite old desktop computer layouts with small VGA monitors which are still in use throughout the world).
This area is of keen interest to me, and after the long agony with simple HTML 3.2/4.0[1]+ and with CSS1 through the still not-quite-totally-there CSS2, any way to avoid any more standards wrangling will come as a great relief to those of us who have to actually do this stuff for a living. I'd imagine that XSLT 1.0+ engines will do much of the actual work, and it really helps to be able to more or less reuse all that existing work with a near-exact subset of CSS2.
Anyways, I'm back (in a few minutes, after a little more procrastination) to figuring out how to most efficiently split up parts of (simple for now) XML documents for later Java/Python XML/XSLT processing, while allowing simpler, more immediate PHP 4.0+ XML processing. Argh ....
I can just see bouncing around a Las Vegas casino with one of these babies twisting around every which way on my wrist, listening to Beethoven in snatches at the same time as I take pictures of everything.
They'd probably kick me out in an instant.
That article is interesting! It seems as if the best approach to data security if possible, is to carefully section off on a new hard drive with which to begin, a partition meant to be used only for encrypted data, then rigorously avoid ever writing plaintext onto that partition. (This probably would work fine as well for a "neutral" used hard drive, unless you managed to buy such a used hard drive on eBay from a child molester with extensive photographic and scanning facilities, or from an Iraqi nuclear-secrets spy with sloppy security habits).
Is there a good program (preferably open-source) available to do as much scrubbing as possible of a "tainted" hard drive or portion thereof, given the physical limits of a typical hard drive writing mechanism as described in the aforementioned article?
(I took the liberty of cleaning up the spelling, and other nits ... :).
I guess that would be amusing, wearing computers with "touch" connectivity, then forming a human chain around an inner circle of cubicles around Christmas, singing, "O! Holy Quake, Nailgun Blight" while the wireless components shake Aibo robots about the office flashing their eyes red and green. (Can they do that? Would these folks have any input on this question?)
If anyone does this, please do make an MPEG2/4 of that and post an URL to it on Slashdot! I'd like to see that! 8^]
"People are having an increasingly difficult time dealing with their email, their instant messages and voicemail, their faxes and FedEx's, and the constant demands to understand technology that seemingly changes every day at the same time that they are expected to produce better things faster," Abel said.
This is very much in essence a subtle exhibition of the cruelty seen in the famous "Pavlov's Dog" experiment. The build-up (in the real-life phenomenon on which is reported in the above article) is slow, the pressure indirect, but the (perception of the) impossibility of going forward or retreating is still inescapable.
Rooted deeply in any living being is the urgent need to feel as if its own life is within its own control. People have enough intelligence that they can suffer greatly from subtleties of loss of control that would be beyond the perceptual horizon of a box turtle, say, or a dog. It's psychological torture, no less real for being "low-grade", and it can go on and on for years, eventually causing odd mental breakdowns that may be very difficult to accurately trace to this perceived lack of fundamental control over one's own life. This phenomenon will grow even worse as even more apparently relevant information pours over us all, demanding immediate attention and ever-more complex responses with often subtle penalties for fuzzily defined multiple partial failures.
This is a major concern, and a greatly underrated one, I think. It's in my opinion solvable by the same technologies that cause the problem with which to begin, but it will take time to develop and deploy alternative methodologies of channeling and automating the handling of much of this relevant information so it becomes a very controllable, if loud, background roar.
I'd really like to see widespread deployment of organ cloning, which would make much more routine the entire field and therefore lead rapidly (the pace of everything related to information analysis is fast these days) to more complex organ cloning such as of whole arms and legs, which would be a great mercy to millions of victims of "ad-hoc torture" (land-mine victims, victims of war of all kinds, such as the thousands of sad African victims of purposeful, deliberate amputation), as well as victims of purposefully and deliberately destructive torture of all kinds. No, I have no links to post. I'd had enough of even looking at this crap for a while.
A particularly great development would be effective and permanent replacement skin, for those victims of that frightening torturer called fire.
This is one of those rare cases in which I find myself simply unwilling to criticize the runaway patenting of cloning of human characteristics. I'm going to watch these people carefully to see if they try to selfishly prevent other people from going forward with mercy work (using patented technology), or use their patents to make this work go forward, particularly in poorer countries.
I'd post general links, but they depress the hell out of me every time I look at them. It's better to get very rich (got plans), then use the money to massively fund effective humanitarian enterprises that bluntly tell the corrupt bribe-takers to eat shit and die. Geez ....
Obviously, once this sort of testing starts, people with genetic risk factors for serious disease (meaning expensive to treat) will end up paying more for their health insurance, if they can get it at all. An interesting side effect will naturally enough be a huge upswing in abortions of "defective" (that is, expensive to maintain) embryos that would have been born as babies unable to get health insurance after a certain age (when many genetically-related diseases begin to manifest symptoms).
As other posters have pointed out, insurers can easily implement this sort of vicious health insurance discrimination by simply adjusting the base rates ever upwards while offering "discounts" to more and more people who "volunteer" to allow genetic tests "for planning purposes" and yet steeper discounts for "low-risk" individuals (meaning super-healthy). In this way, I've no doubt that the practice of "stealth" health insurance discrimination will spread fairly fast to the United States, and for just about every genetically related disease.
This nightmare scenario of "genetic outcasts" who can't get affordable or any health insurance, or even employment because employers don't want (for instance) to be sued for "negligence against the financial interests of the stockholders" has been well enough covered in many science fiction novels, although I leave it to the reader to find these novels (sorry, it's been years since I've had time to read anything much but technical or business material, and I've forgotten the names of even the ones I vaguely recall).
It might be interesting to see t-shirts with woven screen shots from Game Boy games. Of course, the pornographers would jump on that. Ho-ho-ho, what will Nintendo think of that?
Unleash this team on the CueCat encryption! No, no, it's not that easy. They'd have to fight off shark-toothed lawyers with code books, while simultaneously engaging the vicious mind games of money-hungry legislators who pass laws such as the DCMA -- this is no walk in the park!