There have been some people wondering what counts as a page view.
If you subscribe and go back to the subscriptions page, you have the option of seeing "Ads" or "No Ads" on pages in each of these categories: "Homepage", "Stories (usually with reader comments)" and "Comments". It also tells you how many ad-free views you've used of your total.
From my initial test of a single page view, if you have "Ads" clicked for a category, it doesn't count towards your total. So, if you compusively reload the front page, you can choke down the ads there and not get charged. Loading a page for which you've selected "No Ads" counts as a page view on your subscription total.
There is a note that says: 'Set "No Ads" anywhere, and you'll get ads disabled for free on other pages too.' So, apparently, no ads on the preference, submission, etc pages are "free" if you're a subscriber.
I agree. Cooks Illustrated is a wonderful thing to have around the kitchen. I'm in the process of convincing myself to buy their hardbound collections and indices from the years before I subscribed..
My favourite cookbook, by a long shot is The New Canadian Basics Cookbook. The recipes are uniformly excellent and bulletproof. I don't think Canadian tastes differ that much from American tastes. I would imagine it would be just as useful for those south of the border.
This has already been done, in a way. A guy took a bunch of newspapers, and tallied up the numbers of times each letter occurred.
These results would be valid for any users who sit down at their keyboard and type out newspaper articles day-after-day.
The results for normal use would be skewed depending on the user. For examples, I bet I hit "l" followed by "s" a lot more than standard Engligh texts would suggest. It also only addresses the finished document, not gross keypresses. Using myself as an example again, I bet the backspace key has a shockingly high frequency.
But, it doesn't address the real point of this program at all: to count raw keypresses. I have no idea how many keypresses I make in a day. Whatever it is, I'm sure my estimate would be low.
I have my doubts that many critical systems were built for the Apple II.
I remember once talking to a computer dealer who was one of the last to sell and support Apple II hardware in Canada. He said he had a customer who came in about once a year and bought an Apple II system. He had some system (probable not "critical" in the purest sense, but important anyway) that ran on the Apple. It was cheaper and easier for him to have a good store of backup hardware than port the system up to something else.
You never know where old machines are running in forgotten corners of the world. I do agree that most of them would have been long since ported over to current hardware.
This has been implemented several ways by several people. The best known is MOSS. I've implemented a script myself to do this and it was fairly successful, catching 5 or 6 pairs from a class of 75. Not all of the cheaters probably, but it was the worst of them.
The hard part is turning up the "sensitivity," so you get not just exact copies, but also people who have taken parts of a program or made some trivial modifications.
The problem is that it's hard to find info about these sytems for the very good reason that this is one instance where security by obscurity makes sense. If students know how the systems work, they can re-implement them and check to see if they'll be caught.
This raises some constitutional issues - Do I have the right of freedom of speech ( as code has been found
to be in some cases ) to utter an incorrect program?
But, adveritizing is also speech, and false adveritizing is illegal. (Isn't it? Certainly bait-and-switch is.) I'd say blatantly insecure software is fairly similar to false adveritizing.
The transit levy is a BC thing. BC also has a regulated monopoly on auto insurance.
The transit tax on auto registration is a simple behaviour-modification tax, like taxes on cigarettes. If it's a bad idea (to smoke or drive your single-occupancy SUV), then make it more expensive. The idea is that it will make it less popular. The same effect can be seen in the drop in gas-guzzling-SUV sales when gas prices were high during the summer.
I don't see the logic in the ICBC monopoly, though.
...while you're at it, give the secure machine a private IP address. That way, (most?) packets from the outside to that machine be dropped before you ever see them. One more layer of crap for a would-be intruder to get through.
I have recieved multiple personal, specific replies to emails I have sent to my representatives. These were well written letters, not just a generic form letter about a topic with a fake signature stamp.
I have serious doubts. Ever hear of an Autopen? It's a clever dealie that works like a plotter. It grabs a pen and moves it around the page. It's specific job is to reproduce a handwritten signature that's indistinguishable from an original. The very existence of such a thing strikes me as profound, for a reason I can't quite put my finger on.
The best way for marketing to be effective on me as a consumer is to... wait for it... show me
products I am actually interested in.
My favourite example of this is DVDs. Leaving aside the cruddy DRM stuff that's built-in, the idea is sound.
Any new format has the problem of getting people to actually adopt it. With DVDs, the "bonus materials" are enough to get hardcore movie addicts to switch. Deleted scenes, director's commentary, etc are something you'd want if you were really into movies. Plus, there's quality improvement for those who will pay for it. Thus, the format gets early adopters.
After the early adopters adopt, they start pressuring video stores to rent DVDs, stores to carry players, etc. Once this happens, it's all downhill.
The problem with failed formats (minidiscs and videodiscs come right to mind) is that they had no compelling reason for anyone to switch. It was all marketing. The few that do switch aren't influential enough to build the momentum.
I don't recall seeing any marketing for DVDs until recently, when they were well entrenched in video stores and it was a matter of getting the rest of the public into the DRM trap.
Mr President I wish to help, here are some possible solutions to the problem
Do like the Israeli airlines and put an armed marshall on every plane. A cop with an assault rifle would make me a lot less likely to try to hijack a plane than a rent-a-cop with a metal detector.
Security at airports seems to have a much greater effect on the public's perception of their security than they do on their actual security.
A good example I heard in a TV interview: They take away every sharp object at the gate. What do they give you on the plane? A bottle of wine. I've seen enough westerns to know that the first thing you do in a bar fight is grab a bottle and pop the bottom off to get a weapon. The same thing applies on planes.
Ack, journalists...
on
Taming the Web
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Fallacious agrument #1: "Swaptor Isn't Too International to Be Controlled" == "The Internet Isn't Too International to Be Controlled". Following this kind of argument, 4 is not even because 3 is not even and they're both numbers. As a side note, am I the only one that hasn't heard of Swaptor?
Fallacious agrument #2: "Gnutella uses a bandwidth-inefficient protocol" == "The Internet isn't very interconnected". There's nothing impossible about efficient true P2P. If Gnutella isn't it, that's Gnutella's problem. This is actually the same fallacy type as #1.
Fallacious agrument #3: "Software hackers can't do hardware" == "Nobody can hack hardware". A topical counter example: it's not very hard to buy a DVD player modified to be region-free.
Honestly, do journalists not have to take a critical thinking course at some point? For that matter, do editors no longer edit?
While the main focus of the article (the Internet ain't as free as some people assert) is probably true, the lack of a single cogent argument in a three "page" article is horrifying
The problem with this is that any technical book is pretty much going to be useless in a few years. How many of us have wandered through an aisle with a pile of MS Word 4 books at their local library?
To have some staying power, you really have to look at more general interest books. Some of my favourites: The Code Book (Singh), Weaving the Web (Berners-Lee), Being Digital (Negroponte).
The other books on my shelf that I wouldn't be without will need to be replaced eventaully. Possible exceptions: the TeXbook, K&R C, Stroustrop C++.
Reading the article (and looking at the pictures), it seems like this thing is really just a jumper switch. In one key position, neither jumper is closed, in the other two positions one of the two is closed.
There has to be more interresting things to do with this. Hmmm... It could switch processor speed if your mobo has jumpers to select such things. It could switch IRQs for old ISA cards that conflict differently in Linux and Windows (hey, it could happen).
Any other ideas? Maybe you could short it across two processor pins to provide a "self destruct" switch.:-)
So, if this kid charges $500 per hour, he is suddenly as useful as an a laywer? [...leaving aside the question of how useful laywers are]
The quote from the article "the Internet undermined anyone whose status depended on a privileged access to information" is quite profound. If a 15 year old can provide the same answers as a laywer, what's the difference?
It's sort of like a generalized Turning test. If something can perfectly immitate an x, shouldn't it should be considered equivalent to an x? I'm not sure that's true, but I don't think I have any reason why, either.
Am I the only one that doesn't think this post should be taken at face value?
To believe that this is really the tech in question, you have to believe one of these things:
This VA/Slashdot employee didn't have/couldn't get a/. username and thus needed to post as an AC.
This person had an account, but posted as an AC (on a message that could have come from nobody else) and then signed her name.
Unfortunately, the problem with a government funded Internet infrastructure is that you have to abide by
government rules.
True to a certain extent, but not in the way that Americans might think of it. The Canadian government tends not to tie government money to moral judgements the same way the U.S. government does.
I suspect that a Canadian politician that seriously suggested cutting off money to NGOs that talked about birth control would get some guffaws and bad press, but not much else.
Re:Maybe if they just stopped wasting money...
on
VA Layoff Rumors
·
· Score: 2
Jon has already started "moonlighting" with Shift Magazine. Good magazine, regardless of feelings about Katz.
As a student, I don't see any reason there should be any restrictions on how you deal with the copyright. The creation is yours and you can do what you want with it. I'm pretty sure the policy you've pointed to is intended for faculty and staff.
Even as a grad student, I had to sign a nonexclusive license to the Queen (in Canada, as represented by the National Librarian). The copyright remains in my name and if I want to OPL/GPL it, I can.
Staff and faculty have a more complicated arrangement because their research is technically a "work product" (further complicated by the fact that it's usually funded by the University, a granting agency or two and some private donors). If you ain't getting paid, I wouldn't worry about it.
The disk itself is
unregioned (region 0) but contains a script which checks the player's native
region instead.
I've always wondered what "scripts" in DVDs are like. Is there a little programming language in there for the disc to do setup stuff?
If there is a programming language in there, and it's Turing-complete, doesn't that make creating a truly region-free player equivalent to solving the halting problem? The player would have to determine a set of inputs that would make the initialization script "halt". (Where "halt" is definied as getting to point of actually playing the movie.)
If that's right, it's provably impossible to create a region-free player. Players that can have their region switched should be impossible to defeat, though. (They can provide perfect emulation of a regioned player).
Making kids just surf the
web to buy time didn't go over very well.
I once, at a camp, had students making web pages. They were told some ways to find information, one was to try www.whatever-youre-looking-for.com.
One student was making his site on Friends (the sitcom). At the time www.friends.com was hardcore porn.
Now, we had warned them about looking at "inappropriate" web sites and how we were going to send them back to their parents and tell them why. So the kid freaked. One of the less knowledgable counsellors arrived on the scene first and also freaked.
One of the funniest memories of my life is watching a counsellor cover the screen with his body, yell for me, keep other kids from coming over and try to calm the kid down at the same time.
First thing: get a lawyer if you can. Most Universities (esp those with a law program) have some kind of legal aid for students. There is a certain amount of irony in using University resources against them. You might even find a law prof that is sympathetic and would enjoy sticking it to the University. Your student society would probably provide a laywer if you were a volunteer for them while doing this stuff.
I don't see any reasonable way that the University can claim to own your content. Even University employees have pretty liberal contracts about ownership of the results of "Outside activities". If you're just a student, there should be even less of a connection.
You should be able to find somebody inside the school that will be on your side. If there's one thing that academics hate, it's being told what to think. You'll find someone sympathetic to champion your cause somewhere.
Start with the administration. Your student society should have a good idea of who would be sympathetic. If there's a Dean of Students or something, try that person.
Talk to your school's Faculty association (or union, whatever). Usually, these groups are quite good at realizing "If it's a student now, it could be us next." and might be willing to say a few words on your behalf.
Student newspapers usually tend to swing to the left and will probably adopt a favourable editorial stance if you sound like a reasonable student who just got smoked by the admin.
Keep up the good fight. University administrators, especially those who like to beat up on "academic freedom" (two words you should say every chance you get) tend to learn quickly how much power they actually have, which isn't much. It's too bad you're the one on the receiving end, though.
Slashdot Mirror
There have been some people wondering what counts as a page view.
If you subscribe and go back to the subscriptions page, you have the option of seeing "Ads" or "No Ads" on pages in each of these categories: "Homepage", "Stories (usually with reader comments)" and "Comments". It also tells you how many ad-free views you've used of your total.
From my initial test of a single page view, if you have "Ads" clicked for a category, it doesn't count towards your total. So, if you compusively reload the front page, you can choke down the ads there and not get charged. Loading a page for which you've selected "No Ads" counts as a page view on your subscription total.
There is a note that says: 'Set "No Ads" anywhere, and you'll get ads disabled for free on other pages too.' So, apparently, no ads on the preference, submission, etc pages are "free" if you're a subscriber.
Greg
I agree. Cooks Illustrated is a wonderful thing to have around the kitchen. I'm in the process of convincing myself to buy their hardbound collections and indices from the years before I subscribed..
My favourite cookbook, by a long shot is The New Canadian Basics Cookbook. The recipes are uniformly excellent and bulletproof. I don't think Canadian tastes differ that much from American tastes. I would imagine it would be just as useful for those south of the border.
These results would be valid for any users who sit down at their keyboard and type out newspaper articles day-after-day.
The results for normal use would be skewed depending on the user. For examples, I bet I hit "l" followed by "s" a lot more than standard Engligh texts would suggest. It also only addresses the finished document, not gross keypresses. Using myself as an example again, I bet the backspace key has a shockingly high frequency.
But, it doesn't address the real point of this program at all: to count raw keypresses. I have no idea how many keypresses I make in a day. Whatever it is, I'm sure my estimate would be low.
I remember once talking to a computer dealer who was one of the last to sell and support Apple II hardware in Canada. He said he had a customer who came in about once a year and bought an Apple II system. He had some system (probable not "critical" in the purest sense, but important anyway) that ran on the Apple. It was cheaper and easier for him to have a good store of backup hardware than port the system up to something else.
You never know where old machines are running in forgotten corners of the world. I do agree that most of them would have been long since ported over to current hardware.
The hard part is turning up the "sensitivity," so you get not just exact copies, but also people who have taken parts of a program or made some trivial modifications.
The problem is that it's hard to find info about these sytems for the very good reason that this is one instance where security by obscurity makes sense. If students know how the systems work, they can re-implement them and check to see if they'll be caught.
Greg
But, adveritizing is also speech, and false adveritizing is illegal. (Isn't it? Certainly bait-and-switch is.) I'd say blatantly insecure software is fairly similar to false adveritizing.
The transit levy is a BC thing. BC also has a regulated monopoly on auto insurance.
The transit tax on auto registration is a simple behaviour-modification tax, like taxes on cigarettes. If it's a bad idea (to smoke or drive your single-occupancy SUV), then make it more expensive. The idea is that it will make it less popular. The same effect can be seen in the drop in gas-guzzling-SUV sales when gas prices were high during the summer.
I don't see the logic in the ICBC monopoly, though.
...while you're at it, give the secure machine a private IP address. That way, (most?) packets from the outside to that machine be dropped before you ever see them. One more layer of crap for a would-be intruder to get through.
I have serious doubts. Ever hear of an Autopen? It's a clever dealie that works like a plotter. It grabs a pen and moves it around the page. It's specific job is to reproduce a handwritten signature that's indistinguishable from an original. The very existence of such a thing strikes me as profound, for a reason I can't quite put my finger on.
Perhaps you should look at the Halloween documents. They're an outside critical look at Free/OSS and comparison of different development models.
My favourite example of this is DVDs. Leaving aside the cruddy DRM stuff that's built-in, the idea is sound.
Any new format has the problem of getting people to actually adopt it. With DVDs, the "bonus materials" are enough to get hardcore movie addicts to switch. Deleted scenes, director's commentary, etc are something you'd want if you were really into movies. Plus, there's quality improvement for those who will pay for it. Thus, the format gets early adopters.
After the early adopters adopt, they start pressuring video stores to rent DVDs, stores to carry players, etc. Once this happens, it's all downhill.
The problem with failed formats (minidiscs and videodiscs come right to mind) is that they had no compelling reason for anyone to switch. It was all marketing. The few that do switch aren't influential enough to build the momentum.
I don't recall seeing any marketing for DVDs until recently, when they were well entrenched in video stores and it was a matter of getting the rest of the public into the DRM trap.
Greg
Do like the Israeli airlines and put an armed marshall on every plane. A cop with an assault rifle would make me a lot less likely to try to hijack a plane than a rent-a-cop with a metal detector.
Security at airports seems to have a much greater effect on the public's perception of their security than they do on their actual security.
A good example I heard in a TV interview: They take away every sharp object at the gate. What do they give you on the plane? A bottle of wine. I've seen enough westerns to know that the first thing you do in a bar fight is grab a bottle and pop the bottom off to get a weapon. The same thing applies on planes.
Fallacious agrument #1: "Swaptor Isn't Too International to Be Controlled" == "The Internet Isn't Too International to Be Controlled". Following this kind of argument, 4 is not even because 3 is not even and they're both numbers. As a side note, am I the only one that hasn't heard of Swaptor?
Fallacious agrument #2: "Gnutella uses a bandwidth-inefficient protocol" == "The Internet isn't very interconnected". There's nothing impossible about efficient true P2P. If Gnutella isn't it, that's Gnutella's problem. This is actually the same fallacy type as #1.
Fallacious agrument #3: "Software hackers can't do hardware" == "Nobody can hack hardware". A topical counter example: it's not very hard to buy a DVD player modified to be region-free.
Honestly, do journalists not have to take a critical thinking course at some point? For that matter, do editors no longer edit? While the main focus of the article (the Internet ain't as free as some people assert) is probably true, the lack of a single cogent argument in a three "page" article is horrifying
To have some staying power, you really have to look at more general interest books. Some of my favourites: The Code Book (Singh), Weaving the Web (Berners-Lee), Being Digital (Negroponte).
The other books on my shelf that I wouldn't be without will need to be replaced eventaully. Possible exceptions: the TeXbook, K&R C, Stroustrop C++.
Reading the article (and looking at the pictures), it seems like this thing is really just a jumper switch. In one key position, neither jumper is closed, in the other two positions one of the two is closed.
There has to be more interresting things to do with this. Hmmm... It could switch processor speed if your mobo has jumpers to select such things. It could switch IRQs for old ISA cards that conflict differently in Linux and Windows (hey, it could happen).
Any other ideas? Maybe you could short it across two processor pins to provide a "self destruct" switch. :-)
Greg
So, if this kid charges $500 per hour, he is suddenly as useful as an a laywer? [...leaving aside the question of how useful laywers are]
The quote from the article "the Internet undermined anyone whose status depended on a privileged access to information" is quite profound. If a 15 year old can provide the same answers as a laywer, what's the difference?
It's sort of like a generalized Turning test. If something can perfectly immitate an x, shouldn't it should be considered equivalent to an x? I'm not sure that's true, but I don't think I have any reason why, either.
With appologies for being ever-so slightly off-topic, can someone explain the "Gemini table type"?
Mine fiddles with my Xterm's title bar so it says "Terminal (user@host)". Great so you don't try to "sudo halt" your server by accident.
I was going to post it here, but the /. lameness filter flags it as random characters. It's from the BASH Prompt HOWTO, section 5, slightly modified.
Greg
Am I the only one that doesn't think this post should be taken at face value? To believe that this is really the tech in question, you have to believe one of these things:
Does anyone want to buy some Man Beef or a Bonsai Kitten kit?
Greg
True to a certain extent, but not in the way that Americans might think of it. The Canadian government tends not to tie government money to moral judgements the same way the U.S. government does.
I suspect that a Canadian politician that seriously suggested cutting off money to NGOs that talked about birth control would get some guffaws and bad press, but not much else.
Jon has already started "moonlighting" with Shift Magazine. Good magazine, regardless of feelings about Katz.
As a student, I don't see any reason there should be any restrictions on how you deal with the copyright. The creation is yours and you can do what you want with it. I'm pretty sure the policy you've pointed to is intended for faculty and staff.
Even as a grad student, I had to sign a nonexclusive license to the Queen (in Canada, as represented by the National Librarian). The copyright remains in my name and if I want to OPL/GPL it, I can.
Staff and faculty have a more complicated arrangement because their research is technically a "work product" (further complicated by the fact that it's usually funded by the University, a granting agency or two and some private donors). If you ain't getting paid, I wouldn't worry about it.
Greg
I've always wondered what "scripts" in DVDs are like. Is there a little programming language in there for the disc to do setup stuff?
If there is a programming language in there, and it's Turing-complete, doesn't that make creating a truly region-free player equivalent to solving the halting problem? The player would have to determine a set of inputs that would make the initialization script "halt". (Where "halt" is definied as getting to point of actually playing the movie.)
If that's right, it's provably impossible to create a region-free player. Players that can have their region switched should be impossible to defeat, though. (They can provide perfect emulation of a regioned player).
I once, at a camp, had students making web pages. They were told some ways to find information, one was to try www.whatever-youre-looking-for.com. One student was making his site on Friends (the sitcom). At the time www.friends.com was hardcore porn.
Now, we had warned them about looking at "inappropriate" web sites and how we were going to send them back to their parents and tell them why. So the kid freaked. One of the less knowledgable counsellors arrived on the scene first and also freaked.
One of the funniest memories of my life is watching a counsellor cover the screen with his body, yell for me, keep other kids from coming over and try to calm the kid down at the same time.
You just don't get that kind of fun in an office.
Greg
First thing: get a lawyer if you can. Most Universities (esp those with a law program) have some kind of legal aid for students. There is a certain amount of irony in using University resources against them. You might even find a law prof that is sympathetic and would enjoy sticking it to the University. Your student society would probably provide a laywer if you were a volunteer for them while doing this stuff.
I don't see any reasonable way that the University can claim to own your content. Even University employees have pretty liberal contracts about ownership of the results of "Outside activities". If you're just a student, there should be even less of a connection.
You should be able to find somebody inside the school that will be on your side. If there's one thing that academics hate, it's being told what to think. You'll find someone sympathetic to champion your cause somewhere.
Start with the administration. Your student society should have a good idea of who would be sympathetic. If there's a Dean of Students or something, try that person.
Talk to your school's Faculty association (or union, whatever). Usually, these groups are quite good at realizing "If it's a student now, it could be us next." and might be willing to say a few words on your behalf.
Student newspapers usually tend to swing to the left and will probably adopt a favourable editorial stance if you sound like a reasonable student who just got smoked by the admin.
Keep up the good fight. University administrators, especially those who like to beat up on "academic freedom" (two words you should say every chance you get) tend to learn quickly how much power they actually have, which isn't much. It's too bad you're the one on the receiving end, though.
Greg