AIUI based on the OP it refers to adding additional methods to the built-in types (or changing their behaviour), something that you can achieve in both ruby and javascript but not most other languages.
Contract with someone like OpenDNS to use their filtered DNS service for your customers and transparently redirect all DNS queries to that service. It won't do anything about using raw IP addresses or services which aren't as heavily dependent on DNS as web browsing, but that's practically nobody these days. I'd think it's certainly enough to shut up your average MP.
There's an awful lot of porn that shares domains with non-porn content. You can't effectively filter based on DNS without getting a *lot* of false positives.
Also: practically nobody using non-DNS based services? I don't know about other people here, but I get most of my porn from file sharing networks. Prior to that, Usenet. Both of these are not dependent on DNS in anything more than trivial ways.
Transparently proxy anything you don't like. Most ISPs are already operating a transparent proxy, and in the UK they're already blocking child porn. Again, only really effective against plain HTTP.
And you still come back to the fact that you need a huge list. Yes, it's a more realistic idea than putting it on a home router as the OP suggested, but it comes back to the original problem that the filtering is then out of the control of the subscriber and in the ISP's hands, which is I suspect what the OP wanted to avoid.
Wouldn't it be simple to put out an update on your average home router with a list of porn sites that parents can switch on and off
No. There are perhaps somewhere in the region of 4 million porn sites out there (source, possibly biased, but probably somewhere in the right ballpark). Assuming an average site age of 5 years (which is probably way too high), that's about 2,000 new sites per day to maintain that level. You'd need to update the list very frequently to keep it up to date, and even then, who's going to compile it?
Also: a typical home router has between 16MB and 64MB of flash for its firmware. To block those 4 million porn sites without collaterally blocking other sites hosted on the same servers, you'll need to encode exact addresses, at probably around 20 bytes or so each (once compressed), so you simply can't fit that list into the memory of existing home routers. I mean, this is one of the best you can get, and only comes with 24MB of flash by default. You can expand it to 56MB if you need it, but even that wouldn't be enough.
This will be a double lie: lie that you can do it effectively (nobody can) and lie that will cost anyone an arm and a leg.
You can do it *almost* effectively. Give me around one employee for every 5 subscribers, and I can set up an ISP where any porn image/movie not downloaded over an encrypted connection will only ever be seen once. I reckon subscription costs would only be something like £1000 a month.
Allow a filter for kiddie porn and it won't be long before someone suggests since you can filter X you can also filter Y.
Of course, this isn't actually true. The only reason any progress has been made on child porn filtering is because there's a rather large group of people who are willing to report it when they find it, so you can easily build up a list of those sites that have been around for a while (of course this doesn't help with usenet/file sharing/image boards/anything else that changes quickly, and filtering has largely failed in these areas) and block them. One can only assume that, in order to be finding child porn, the people reporting it are probably searching for ordinary porn, and might be somewhat less enthusiastic about reporting that, so I don't suspect you'd get the volunteers. Which means you'd have to pay for it. Which would be very expensive.
Anyone with any experience developing significant software systems knows that [duck typing is] among the stupidest things you can do, and [it does] adversely affect the quality of the software system.
Meh. I've seen programmers much more experienced than me and (I'm going to guess) you argue it both ways. this one's an interesting discussion, but there are plenty more out there.
I'd rather have CPAN's thousands of modules, most of which are extremely high quality and reliable, versus a larger number of shitty Ruby "gems".
Well, I've never looked through the ruby "gems" collection, but my experience with CPAN has been that Sturgeon's Law most definitely applies. Maybe it's improved since I last used it (I stopped being a Perl programmer the best part of 10 years ago), but there's definitely a lot of crap in there.
In the end, I don't think either Perl or Ruby are the way forward, and that's not because of typing issues but because both languages seem aimed at people who think that cute syntax and being able to do everything in 50 different ways is beneficial. It isn't. Conditionals written after the statements they effect? That's a much worse idea than duck typing, because it can completely change how you parse the code you're reading *after* you read it. Worst case: the condition is scrolled off the right hand edge of the page and you don't notice it (yes, I've seen this happen).
I do agree about "monkey patching" though (hadn't come across the term before, but I hate it when it's done in javascript, and I don't imagine it's much better in ruby).
Mohammed was a pedophile even by the standards of his day (marrying and deflowering a 9 year old was considered deviant even back then, as 9 was not a common marriage age for girls).
Somewhat offtopic, but: you should be aware that the truth of this statement is disputed; some scholars suggest that she was 9 when she was betrothed to him, and approximately 14 when the marriage was consummated, which was considered perfectly acceptable at the time. That said, the majority of older sources do agree with the way you put it, so we could just be looking at a movement to whitewash his history.
Government interference reduces the amount of money flowing to Google
Does it? To be honest, the most likely government regulations to be passed would probably actually benefit google: limitations on how much (and, indeed, whether) online service providers can be charged by access providers for traffic to their customers; regulations about how other people's data can be handled that would restrict competition from small startups that can't afford expensive compliance procedures; data flow restrictions creating a fractured internet whereby companies who have a presence in a large number of countries are at a substantial advantage over those with presence only in one or two. I honestly can't think of a regulation that's likely to be passed that would be bad for google and better for its competitors.
Wrong, they are giving back tons. Speaking personally, I know for a fact they have contributed to Hadoop. Their blog site claims they've contributed to lots of others.
Even if they hadn't, I'll contend they're doing open source a big enough favour just by letting everyone know that such a high profile site runs on these technologies. It improves the image of such systems in other large companies, and paves the way for even more open source adoption in future. And why do we write this stuff if we don't want people to use it?
With the exception of the Space Shuttle, pretty much everything born of the 80s is "awesomely bad."
Whereas the Space Shuttle, being born of the 70s (the funding was authorised in 69; most development took place in the 70s; by 1981 an orbiter had been built and the first flights conducted) is amazingly bad.
I don't have a Kindle and haven't read the TOS. Do they state any sort of responsibility on Amazon's part to continue providing re-download service for a period of time?
Not explicitly, but it is implied.
1. Digital Content
Use of Digital Content. Upon your download of Digital Content and payment of any applicable fees (including applicable taxes), the Content Provider grants you a non-exclusive right to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Kindle or a Reading Application or as otherwise permitted as part of the Service, solely on the number of Kindles or Other Devices specified in the Kindle Store, and solely for your personal, non-commercial use.
(Highlighting mine)
What this appears to mean is that if you have only downloaded the Kindle copy, as most people have, you still have a right to download the 'reading application' copy (i.e. a copy for Kindle for PC).
Also note that the T&Cs aren't allowed to take away what the bold text in the marketing material promises:
All Kindle content, including books and Kindle active content, that you've purchased from the Kindle Store is stored in your Kindle library on Amazon.co.uk. You can see the items in your Kindle library and wirelessly send downloads to your registered Kindles or Kindle applications from the "Your Orders" section of the Manage Your Kindle page.
Surely there's a sunset clause of some sort, anyway. Does anyone expect them to continue serving files to Kindle users 10-20 years from now?
The only thing approximating such a clause is this:
Termination. Your rights under this Agreement will automatically terminate if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement. In case of such termination, you must cease all use of the Software, and Amazon may immediately revoke your access to the Service or to Digital Content without refund of any fees. Amazons failure to insist upon or enforce your strict compliance with this Agreement will not constitute a waiver of any of its rights.
There's also this:
Amendment. We may amend any of the terms of this Agreement in our sole discretion by posting the revised terms on the Kindle Store or the Amazon.co.uk website.
but at least here in the UK courts have often held in the past that customers are entitled to refunds for services they've already paid for if they don't agree to the amended terms.
TFA doesn't even state that books were removed from devices. It states they were removed from the customers' archive; i.e. they couldn't redownload the book for a new device if they chose to.
why I use open file formats (clear-text ascii, epub, pdf files) for my ebooks, non-networked ebook readers even if they are more expensive than their Amazon- or B&N-sponsored brethren, and ebook management software that I'm fairly sure doesn't call home to "manage" my digital rights.
You can turn off the wireless on a kindle, and use calibre to load DRM-free files onto it. Why pay more for a device from somebody else?
Kindle DRM has been broken for some time now. It's trivial to liberate your books.
Not if Amazon have removed them from their archive it isn't; you need to install (an older version of) Kindle for PC on your machine and redownload a version that's encrypted for that device. You used to be able to decrypt using a key that you can retrieve from your Kindle, but the latest firmware versions use a per-book key that AIUI can't be derived directly. When I bought a book from them in November, I could strip the DRM using my Kindle's PID. One I bought yesterday, I couldn't. Don't know when the change occurred.
Didn't Amazon say that they would no longer remove books remotely?
Yes. And from the research I did into this story yesterday, they haven't in this case. What they have done is removed the files from their servers, so you can no longer redownload them for a new device (and as this service is included in the price of an amazon e-book, you are therefore entitled to a refund if you bought any of the books that have been removed).
Please fix the title of this article, typos are annoying. Thank you.
Actually, please fix the whole article. Blatantly misleading information is even more annoying.
(For reference: this is not a patent on any button in a browser. It's a patent on a server-side function for highlighting search terms in documents based on proxying the request for the user. Totally different.)
Slashdot Mirror
1 volt is enough if you can source enough current....
remember folks, VOLTAGE != POWER
No, but P=V^2/R. In this situation, R is fixed.
there is a fixed and easily definable limit to the amount of lossless compression a dataset can withstand.
Um. Okay. How many bits are there in the optimal coding for this post?
Turns out it isn't *that* easy to define.
AIUI based on the OP it refers to adding additional methods to the built-in types (or changing their behaviour), something that you can achieve in both ruby and javascript but not most other languages.
Contract with someone like OpenDNS to use their filtered DNS service for your customers and transparently redirect all DNS queries to that service. It won't do anything about using raw IP addresses or services which aren't as heavily dependent on DNS as web browsing, but that's practically nobody these days. I'd think it's certainly enough to shut up your average MP.
There's an awful lot of porn that shares domains with non-porn content. You can't effectively filter based on DNS without getting a *lot* of false positives.
Also: practically nobody using non-DNS based services? I don't know about other people here, but I get most of my porn from file sharing networks. Prior to that, Usenet. Both of these are not dependent on DNS in anything more than trivial ways.
Transparently proxy anything you don't like. Most ISPs are already operating a transparent proxy, and in the UK they're already blocking child porn. Again, only really effective against plain HTTP.
And you still come back to the fact that you need a huge list. Yes, it's a more realistic idea than putting it on a home router as the OP suggested, but it comes back to the original problem that the filtering is then out of the control of the subscriber and in the ISP's hands, which is I suspect what the OP wanted to avoid.
Wouldn't it be simple to put out an update on your average home router with a list of porn sites that parents can switch on and off
No. There are perhaps somewhere in the region of 4 million porn sites out there (source, possibly biased, but probably somewhere in the right ballpark). Assuming an average site age of 5 years (which is probably way too high), that's about 2,000 new sites per day to maintain that level. You'd need to update the list very frequently to keep it up to date, and even then, who's going to compile it?
Also: a typical home router has between 16MB and 64MB of flash for its firmware. To block those 4 million porn sites without collaterally blocking other sites hosted on the same servers, you'll need to encode exact addresses, at probably around 20 bytes or so each (once compressed), so you simply can't fit that list into the memory of existing home routers. I mean, this is one of the best you can get, and only comes with 24MB of flash by default. You can expand it to 56MB if you need it, but even that wouldn't be enough.
This will be a double lie: lie that you can do it effectively (nobody can) and lie that will cost anyone an arm and a leg.
You can do it *almost* effectively. Give me around one employee for every 5 subscribers, and I can set up an ISP where any porn image/movie not downloaded over an encrypted connection will only ever be seen once. I reckon subscription costs would only be something like £1000 a month.
Allow a filter for kiddie porn and it won't be long before someone suggests since you can filter X you can also filter Y.
Of course, this isn't actually true. The only reason any progress has been made on child porn filtering is because there's a rather large group of people who are willing to report it when they find it, so you can easily build up a list of those sites that have been around for a while (of course this doesn't help with usenet/file sharing/image boards/anything else that changes quickly, and filtering has largely failed in these areas) and block them. One can only assume that, in order to be finding child porn, the people reporting it are probably searching for ordinary porn, and might be somewhat less enthusiastic about reporting that, so I don't suspect you'd get the volunteers. Which means you'd have to pay for it. Which would be very expensive.
Anyone with any experience developing significant software systems knows that [duck typing is] among the stupidest things you can do, and [it does] adversely affect the quality of the software system.
Meh. I've seen programmers much more experienced than me and (I'm going to guess) you argue it both ways. this one's an interesting discussion, but there are plenty more out there.
I'd rather have CPAN's thousands of modules, most of which are extremely high quality and reliable, versus a larger number of shitty Ruby "gems".
Well, I've never looked through the ruby "gems" collection, but my experience with CPAN has been that Sturgeon's Law most definitely applies. Maybe it's improved since I last used it (I stopped being a Perl programmer the best part of 10 years ago), but there's definitely a lot of crap in there.
In the end, I don't think either Perl or Ruby are the way forward, and that's not because of typing issues but because both languages seem aimed at people who think that cute syntax and being able to do everything in 50 different ways is beneficial. It isn't. Conditionals written after the statements they effect? That's a much worse idea than duck typing, because it can completely change how you parse the code you're reading *after* you read it. Worst case: the condition is scrolled off the right hand edge of the page and you don't notice it (yes, I've seen this happen).
I do agree about "monkey patching" though (hadn't come across the term before, but I hate it when it's done in javascript, and I don't imagine it's much better in ruby).
Mohammed was a pedophile even by the standards of his day (marrying and deflowering a 9 year old was considered deviant even back then, as 9 was not a common marriage age for girls).
Somewhat offtopic, but: you should be aware that the truth of this statement is disputed; some scholars suggest that she was 9 when she was betrothed to him, and approximately 14 when the marriage was consummated, which was considered perfectly acceptable at the time. That said, the majority of older sources do agree with the way you put it, so we could just be looking at a movement to whitewash his history.
Government interference reduces the amount of money flowing to Google
Does it? To be honest, the most likely government regulations to be passed would probably actually benefit google: limitations on how much (and, indeed, whether) online service providers can be charged by access providers for traffic to their customers; regulations about how other people's data can be handled that would restrict competition from small startups that can't afford expensive compliance procedures; data flow restrictions creating a fractured internet whereby companies who have a presence in a large number of countries are at a substantial advantage over those with presence only in one or two. I honestly can't think of a regulation that's likely to be passed that would be bad for google and better for its competitors.
I'm not aware of any quantum solution to breaking any modern popular symmetric algorithms.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/u4877618u916720g/
3DES is still quite popular, you know.
wire tap him in hopes that he'd say some dumb, incriminating shit to people.
Don't most members of Anonymous do that publicly, in the open, on 4chan.org?
"... and a fanatical devotion to Bill Gates?"
and since the co-founder is on Microsoft's board, no surprise there. Conflict-of-interest, anyone? I think that needs to be illegal
It is. It's called a breach of fiduciary responsibility. If you're a shareholder and think they've lost money, you can sue.
Wrong, they are giving back tons. Speaking personally, I know for a fact they have contributed to Hadoop. Their blog site claims they've contributed to lots of others.
Even if they hadn't, I'll contend they're doing open source a big enough favour just by letting everyone know that such a high profile site runs on these technologies. It improves the image of such systems in other large companies, and paves the way for even more open source adoption in future. And why do we write this stuff if we don't want people to use it?
And since they don't redistribute Apache or the like, they're not actually obliged under OSS licences to contribute code back.
They wouldn't anyway; most (if not all) of the projects mentioned are under the Apache license, which is BSD-like, not copyleft.
With the exception of the Space Shuttle, pretty much everything born of the 80s is "awesomely bad."
Whereas the Space Shuttle, being born of the 70s (the funding was authorised in 69; most development took place in the 70s; by 1981 an orbiter had been built and the first flights conducted) is amazingly bad.
I don't have a Kindle and haven't read the TOS. Do they state any sort of responsibility on Amazon's part to continue providing re-download service for a period of time?
Not explicitly, but it is implied.
(Highlighting mine)
What this appears to mean is that if you have only downloaded the Kindle copy, as most people have, you still have a right to download the 'reading application' copy (i.e. a copy for Kindle for PC).
Also note that the T&Cs aren't allowed to take away what the bold text in the marketing material promises:
Surely there's a sunset clause of some sort, anyway. Does anyone expect them to continue serving files to Kindle users 10-20 years from now?
The only thing approximating such a clause is this:
There's also this:
but at least here in the UK courts have often held in the past that customers are entitled to refunds for services they've already paid for if they don't agree to the amended terms.
TFA doesn't even state that books were removed from devices. It states they were removed from the customers' archive; i.e. they couldn't redownload the book for a new device if they chose to.
why I use open file formats (clear-text ascii, epub, pdf files) for my ebooks, non-networked ebook readers even if they are more expensive than their Amazon- or B&N-sponsored brethren, and ebook management software that I'm fairly sure doesn't call home to "manage" my digital rights.
You can turn off the wireless on a kindle, and use calibre to load DRM-free files onto it. Why pay more for a device from somebody else?
I was literally just looking at buying a Kindle for myself for Xmas...and then read this...
I really really don't like the idea of Amazon being able to reach in to my library and burn my books.
Don't let this put you off. It's trivial to download them to your PC and strip the DRM, at which point Amazon can't do a thing to them.
Kindle DRM has been broken for some time now. It's trivial to liberate your books.
Not if Amazon have removed them from their archive it isn't; you need to install (an older version of) Kindle for PC on your machine and redownload a version that's encrypted for that device. You used to be able to decrypt using a key that you can retrieve from your Kindle, but the latest firmware versions use a per-book key that AIUI can't be derived directly. When I bought a book from them in November, I could strip the DRM using my Kindle's PID. One I bought yesterday, I couldn't. Don't know when the change occurred.
Didn't Amazon say that they would no longer remove books remotely?
Yes. And from the research I did into this story yesterday, they haven't in this case. What they have done is removed the files from their servers, so you can no longer redownload them for a new device (and as this service is included in the price of an amazon e-book, you are therefore entitled to a refund if you bought any of the books that have been removed).
Please fix the title of this article, typos are annoying. Thank you.
Actually, please fix the whole article. Blatantly misleading information is even more annoying.
(For reference: this is not a patent on any button in a browser. It's a patent on a server-side function for highlighting search terms in documents based on proxying the request for the user. Totally different.)
I'd think the irrational factor of pi would be more of a problem than the 231 inch^3/gallon, or the factor of 12 for feet to inches.
I know pi to enough accuracy for the task at hand. I'd have had to look up the conversion factor between cubic inches and gallons.