Where sites have actually implemented this new directive, the implementations often suck just as much as the law, which is not particularly surprising given how poorly it's worded. If you have cookies disabled through your default browser policies the end result on many sites where is a permanantly visible prompt to "Click here to read and accept our cookie policy". Yep, that's right. You have to enable cookies to let them set a cookie that says they will not use cookies to track you.
I'm fairly sure that some of these sites realise that you could set a cookie, immediately try to read it back and if that fails assume cookies are blocked skipping the display of the prompt, and either way you remove the cookie. But no, this law is so poorly written it's not totally clear whether even this would be a breach of the legislation or not and clarification has still not been provided, so as usual for the EU the intention might be good, but the implementation leaves a hell of a lot to be desired. In this case, I can see a number of people are going to end up re-enabling cookies just to get rid of the prompts and end up getting tracked by all those sites who don't implement the law because they are outside the EU's jurisdiction and/or just don't care - completely the opposite of the desired effect.
Clearly the small time investors that didn't do their due diligence or were blinded by the (pipe) dream of a short term investment with a huge payout didn't know about it. You can't help but laugh at their lack of financial accumen really, first they throw money at an fairly obviously over-valued and over-hyped IPO, now they are going to throw even more money down the pit at lawyers on what looks very much like a fruitless case. The best result I suspect that they are going to get is that Facebook will have spend a small fraction of the money that they raised through the IPO at another bunch of lawyers to defend themselves. Frankly, with the Telegraph article as Exhibit A, Facebook could probably go with the most lame of public defenders and still get the case thrown out on day one.
Wide spread use of ad-blocking for one. A vast reduction in the amount of time spent on social networks and aimlessly surfing YouTube for another. Less impulsive downloads of media and apps from the likes of iTunes/app stores for a third. I can think of several others, but the gist is the same; savaging the profits of other markets to boost the flagging fortunes of another.
Let's not forget that, like certain other industries, the ISPs and carriers only have themselves to blame for getting into this mess in the first place. Be honest; connectivity costs have been unsustainably low for at least a decade now. Being overly competetive with each other and sacrificing upgrades necessary for future growth in order to cut another few bucks off the monthly fee has ultimately helped remove most of the smaller players. What's left is looking more like a cartel in all but name every day, and you know what happens with cartels and pricing, right?
The problem isn't the use of the phrase "drop table students" so much as programmers under pressure, or just being lazy, having to code for the use of characters like semi-colons, brackets, braces, pipes and all those other symbols that tend to cause problems if not correctly handled when returned in a variable. It's an even more tricky situation if the person coding the password input routine is not the same one coding the authentication routine, which happens quite a lot on large projects. It's much easier to code a simple "if password contains {list of symbols} then reject password" than it is to escape each of those symbols and then liaise with everyone else who is using the password variable to make sure they can deal with the escaped characters.
Of course, if it were understood that the password input routine was going to immediately hash the password into a suitably safe string and that was what would be returned in the password variable, then most of these problems simply go away.
Well, you can probably blame Little Bobby Tables for that. Depending on the programming language there are plenty of "control characters" in the ASCII 32-126 range, and it's much easier when deadlines are pressing to just restrict input to alphanumerics than try and sanitize against passwords that contain some variant of "'); drop table students;"
We're not talking about a typical cross-section of users here, remember? Apple might not have responded in a prompt manner with a fix, but the AV vendors etc. had detection routines in place very quickly indeed and yet they still got infected, so we can reasonably expect a higher than average proportion of users that are either not keeping up to date with security tools and their updates, or are not running any at all. If they don't grasp that concept, then why should they know that clicking on ads and links in emails can sometimes result in bad things happening?
Apple's sudden popularity has put its head well and truly above the parapet, so it's only natural that the malware peddlers started to target it, and why not? It's going to be a while before AV tools become as ubiquitous on OSX as they are on Windows, and if Apple responds to the next vulnerability with a similarly huge window of opportunity then the potential payback cited in the article is huge; millions of dollars a year. It's not just Apple either; there's another suddenly popular OS in a similar situation. It's almost certainly just a matter of time before someone finds a similar exploit in Android, and while Google might be on the ball getting it patched, I'm not confident that get that patch downstream and out onto third party devices is going to happen quickly either given how tardy some vendors have been pushing their ICS updates out.
That's the bet alright. Facebook has mountains of data, no denying that. The gamble is, can they extract some kind of meaning from it that enables them to make money, whether that is through adverts (which looks like a shaky proposition, based on data so far) or some other means; pay-for widgets, games, page promotions, buying Zynga, or whatever, being largely immaterial. If the market thinks they can, and do so big time, then their stock price should have gone up. If the market thinks it can't, then the stock price should have gone down.
What's happened is that it's pretty much unchanged which, if anything, is even more interesting. Especially so, given that there are almost cetainly a fair number of initial buyers who were hoping to see an explosive growth and cash out on a high that hasn't happened and who may be making a tough hold/sell decision in the next few days. As I read it, the current situation mean that Facebook's underwriters managed to nail the company's market value to within a couple of percentage points of the actual market value, which is quite an achievement in itself. Or it could indicate any one of a number of theories about what the markets consider Facebook's prospects to be, which will no doubt be speculated on at length and indepth in all of tomorrow's financial news columns and editorials. I said my theory in my post above; it's a long game and a fairly stable stock (for now at least); either Facebook finds a way to extract money from its mountain of data or it slowly slides into mediocrity, and based on the stock price's trajectory, I'd say it's 50:50 which way it all ends up.
If it sinks, you can always get your certificate framed alongside a burst balloon and mount it proudly on your wall as a statement and talking piece. It'd make a good companion to a share of SCOX carefully mounted with an almost depleted toilet roll too - I'd suggest using an Andrex because, like the court case, it's very, very long...:)
Right, because Facebook did such a sterling job of finding people whose profile made it appear like they had with the cash to spend on a General Motors car. OK, maybe a bad example given the current state of global finances, but when was the last time you heard mention of a successful Facebook marketing campaign? I don't even think Zynga has done that, and they are about as linked at the hip to Facebook as you can get.
I think that's the crux between Google and Facebook, really, and probably why Zuckerberg seems so interested in integrating search into Facebook all of a sudden. I'll bet plenty of people post things to Facebook about how much they like some expensive trinket, but it's Google that gets to see which ones are actually looking into making the purchases. My long term prediction; neither company is going to go away anytime soon, but Google is going to see the growth while Facebook is going to start a slow slide into mediocrity with the next few years unless it can find a major source of revenue in all those terabytes of data it has.
That horse has long since bolted. The ISPs were notified, and it's also possible for them to check their IP space for infected hosts at the DNS Changer Working Group's website. The sad fact is that the ISPs in question have done the math and come to the conclusion that they can either:
Notify their infected customers, at a cost of $x per customer, probably only to have most of their users either ignore the warning or contact the ISP's support line, potentially at additional cost to the ISP (unless they have a premium rate support service).
Ignore the problem until the FBI's DNS servers are switched off, at which point, hopefully, many of the users will figure out the solution at no cost to the ISP reducing the burden on the ISP's support desk and costs. Hey, everyone has to keeps costs down, right?
Bonus douchebag points for any ISPs that have a large number of infected customers and have, purely coincidentally of course, moved support calls to a premium rate number in the last few months.
Interesting. I've never noticed that, and I have/had several components and devices from Asus over the years. I'll have to use that in the future to help make the point about legit uses for BitTorrent and encourage Asus to continue to use it. So, we have:
Blizzard's WoW updates (that was who I was thinking off - a big "Doh!" with hindsight, but in my defence WoW never appealed to me.
Diablo 3's digital distribution, probably the bulk of recent legitimate BitTorrent traffic.
Linux/BSD distros, probably the bulk of legitimate BitTorrent traffic overall.
Creative Commons and similar free to share, but rarely mainstream, media content via sites like ClearBits
Asus' updates for large files
If that's it, then it's not exactly a ringing endorsement as to why BitTorrent as a protocol shouldn't be "managed" when set against the huge quantity of commercial software, non-free movies (incl. porn) and TV shows being torrented, is it? I was hoping for some major academic/scientific use like distributing vast amounts of data between institutions, or one of the MegaUpload type file lockers to offer a torrent option for downloading content uploaded to their service for distribution.
OK, perhaps someone here can provide some suitable legitmate and mainstream examples that we can cite then, because I have to admit I'm struggling with your criteria. I use BitTorrent to download a lot of legit stuff, but if Ubuntu (and, by implication of its popularity, all other Linux distros) and presumably niche/word-of-mouth Internet series like Pioneer One are not suitable, then what is? ISTR that one of the larger game vendors uses BT to push updates and patches, but can't for the life of me remember which one, and there have been a few similar experiments here and there, but most of those seem to have died a death.
Yeah, I noticed the same thing. I would have thought that with 1km resolution you might be able to pick out a vague smudge where some some of the larger cities in India and China that were visible from the satellite, but no, just massive amounts of chromatic aberation from the imaging method used. Clearly roads are going to be out, so I tried again with the 1080p video clip - thought that maybe Mumbai or Shanghai would show up as a brighter spot in the darkness - after all you can see city lights on much lower resolution NASA images, right? No such luck. Clearly we are not visible from outerspace in the wavelengths scanned by Elektro-L No.1, or the lights didn't survive the image processing technique.
No way we're going to attract the attention of any passing aliens at this rate. Whether that's a good thing or bad, is entirely up to the reader...
Spam, with a dubious download awaiting if you should happen to visit one of the many links to the site in the post. "MyCleanPC.com", along with sister site "DoubleMySpeed.com" were exposed ages ago as a scam, despite a veneer of legitimacy provided by some TV adverts. Just another one of those so called "security tools" which then proceeds to find a lot of problems with your PC and then requires you to "register" to fix the so called problems.
On the whole, I found this latest work to be somewhat lacking in comparison to earlier works such as "Oh freddled gruntbuggly", but fortunately I don't currently have a poetry appreciation chair available for the full experience.
True, there are several other types of "bank", but the one most people think of first is the financial type, and so far at least they are the ones mostly being targetted by phishers, although a 419 email phishing a sperm bank would be an "interesting" read, I'm sure. Still, why not? A bank's a bank, so why not allow "vlads.blood.bank" if you were running a hypothetical ".bank" domain? Or maybe apply ".finance" instead, since not all financial targets of phishing are banks, either; EFTS, building societies and co-ops for instance. (Yes, I know there is already a ".coop" gTLD, but that's just for the birds.)
Yes, I have, and said so in the post, along with that the statement that they were not exactly widely used. For what it's worth, I've come across several museums with a site within the ".museum" gTLD since I travel a lot and like to find out something about the local culture while I'm there, for which museums are often a good place to start. I've also come across a couple of ".aero" domains and have an email address at a ".int". All that kind of proves my point though; gTLDs more than three letters are certainly out there and have been, but hardly used.
I don't think that's down to them being a pain in the ass to use because most people are going to use them via a search engine result, email or some other linking method that doesn't involve them typing in the URL, but because of the utter sewer that ".biz" and, to a slightly lesser extent, ".info" became. That, combined with the squabbling over ".xxx" and latest ICANN license to print money scheme, has probably tainted the opinion of most of the people who actually still notice or care about domain names in the first place. If there's a demonstrable need (a high bar, admittedly), or a problem that can be alleviated (i.e. something like my suggestion of ".bank" to help counter phishing) with a new gTLD then I'm all for it. Otherwise, we're just going to end up with another ".biz" or worse.
Two or three characters like ".museum" and ".travel", the former of which at least tries to enforce some verification of its domain applicants. It's hardly a new concept, if hardly widely adopted; I've only come a across a handful of ".musuem" sites and can't recall any ".travel" domains, although I'm sure there are some.
What really frustrates is that we keep getting schemes like this that just look to be a pure money grab instead of things that might actually help solve a problem. Where's the accredited applicants only ".bank" gTLD to help prevent phishing of financial institutions, for instance?
I detect a slight "whoosh". OK, I was kind of joking since the practicalities of interplanetary tesla coil transmission render the idea moot, but not so much about the illumination aspect. Tesla coils give off quite a lot of it - here's a clip of a 1MV one. If you were to stick a bunch of these out on the former windfarm towers, scaled up to receive from Pluto, I doubt the residents of Cape Cod would be having much in the way of nighttime while they were active. Or most of the other inhabitants of New England for that matter...
Easy. Great big Tesla coils. You could put them right on top of the windmills on Pluto, and I believe there would be some upcoming vacant lots where windfarms used to be on Cape Cod that would make a perfect spot for the receiving towers. As a bonus, they'll get full time security lighting for their McMansions, so what's not to like!
Perhaps because many non-ebook documents are formatted to either an A4 or US Letter page size and the formatting tends to screw up if you try to change the paper size or re-flow it on the fly like you can easily do with a plain text ebook, assuming it's even possible to do so - ever tried to change the papersize of a PDF and reflow the text? For embedded graphics with text, poor scaling algorithms can often render the text illegible and fine detail (cross hatching for instance) in a diagram doesn't scale all that well either. Also, for complicated layouts (magazines with sidebars and some textbooks for instance) fiddling with the page layout can be a serious inconvenience as it can bump relevent illustations and sidebars off the screen - and don't even get me started on the ones that blindly replicate images than span pages in their print versions into their digital versions!
Scaling the whole page might work, but isn't an option if you haven't got the resolution to keep the text from degenerating into an unreadable blur, and scrolling back and forth, page after page will soon have you pulling your hair out. For people that want to read books, the smaller paperback-esque size of the Kindle's are much more natural and intuitive, for people that want digital magazines that intuitive form factor is something more like an A4 page, and ideally with sufficient resolution to display two pages side by side and still have text remain readable. For me, that means something like the Apple's iPad with Retina display, or at a pinch the 1920x1200 of the upcoming Asus Transformer Infinity.
Firstly, remember that mass != weight. Mass is all to do with energy (as in e=mc^2), and bottom quarks have lots of energy - just over 4GeV compared to the ~2.5MeV (up) and ~5MeV (down) of the quarks that protons and neutrons consist of.
Which rebuts my point about this being a money making scheme for ICANN how, exactly? Verisign is no doubt charging a sizeable consultancy fee for each of the 200 or so new gTLDs that it isn't registering for itself, presumably including what is necessary to operate a gTLD since it's not quite the same as a regular domain. Verisign does deserve some kudos for finding a way to make some cash off this, but each of the actual originators of those 200 domains, and Verisign themselves for their dozen gTLDs, are still going to have to pay ICANN a combined total that is north of $20 million for the priviledge of actually getting the gTLD into the root zone. And all for what ultimately boils down to adding a few hundred lines to a text file.
And what do ICANN's customers get for this? The ability for customers to use a domain like "www.coke" instead of "www.coke.com", send emails to "mickey.mouse@disney" instead of "mickey.mouse@disney.com" and so on. Outside of people in IT, I suspect you are going to get more people confused by this than anything else; I think it far more likely that the response for Joe Public is going to be "Do you mean disney.com?" as opposed to "Oh, wow! You're on one of those cool new gTLDs I've been hearing about!" All this scam has done for me is reinforce the idea that plenty of people in marketing are really, really dumb, and in a few months time we'll have a pretty good idea of 200 or so companies where they've managed to get themselves into senior positions.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but on the scale of things this is a very small nitpick. Positively microscopic, one might say.
Where sites have actually implemented this new directive, the implementations often suck just as much as the law, which is not particularly surprising given how poorly it's worded. If you have cookies disabled through your default browser policies the end result on many sites where is a permanantly visible prompt to "Click here to read and accept our cookie policy". Yep, that's right. You have to enable cookies to let them set a cookie that says they will not use cookies to track you.
I'm fairly sure that some of these sites realise that you could set a cookie, immediately try to read it back and if that fails assume cookies are blocked skipping the display of the prompt, and either way you remove the cookie. But no, this law is so poorly written it's not totally clear whether even this would be a breach of the legislation or not and clarification has still not been provided, so as usual for the EU the intention might be good, but the implementation leaves a hell of a lot to be desired. In this case, I can see a number of people are going to end up re-enabling cookies just to get rid of the prompts and end up getting tracked by all those sites who don't implement the law because they are outside the EU's jurisdiction and/or just don't care - completely the opposite of the desired effect.
Clearly the small time investors that didn't do their due diligence or were blinded by the (pipe) dream of a short term investment with a huge payout didn't know about it. You can't help but laugh at their lack of financial accumen really, first they throw money at an fairly obviously over-valued and over-hyped IPO, now they are going to throw even more money down the pit at lawyers on what looks very much like a fruitless case. The best result I suspect that they are going to get is that Facebook will have spend a small fraction of the money that they raised through the IPO at another bunch of lawyers to defend themselves. Frankly, with the Telegraph article as Exhibit A, Facebook could probably go with the most lame of public defenders and still get the case thrown out on day one.
Wide spread use of ad-blocking for one. A vast reduction in the amount of time spent on social networks and aimlessly surfing YouTube for another. Less impulsive downloads of media and apps from the likes of iTunes/app stores for a third. I can think of several others, but the gist is the same; savaging the profits of other markets to boost the flagging fortunes of another.
Let's not forget that, like certain other industries, the ISPs and carriers only have themselves to blame for getting into this mess in the first place. Be honest; connectivity costs have been unsustainably low for at least a decade now. Being overly competetive with each other and sacrificing upgrades necessary for future growth in order to cut another few bucks off the monthly fee has ultimately helped remove most of the smaller players. What's left is looking more like a cartel in all but name every day, and you know what happens with cartels and pricing, right?
The problem isn't the use of the phrase "drop table students" so much as programmers under pressure, or just being lazy, having to code for the use of characters like semi-colons, brackets, braces, pipes and all those other symbols that tend to cause problems if not correctly handled when returned in a variable. It's an even more tricky situation if the person coding the password input routine is not the same one coding the authentication routine, which happens quite a lot on large projects. It's much easier to code a simple "if password contains {list of symbols} then reject password" than it is to escape each of those symbols and then liaise with everyone else who is using the password variable to make sure they can deal with the escaped characters.
Of course, if it were understood that the password input routine was going to immediately hash the password into a suitably safe string and that was what would be returned in the password variable, then most of these problems simply go away.
Well, you can probably blame Little Bobby Tables for that. Depending on the programming language there are plenty of "control characters" in the ASCII 32-126 range, and it's much easier when deadlines are pressing to just restrict input to alphanumerics than try and sanitize against passwords that contain some variant of "'); drop table students;"
We're not talking about a typical cross-section of users here, remember? Apple might not have responded in a prompt manner with a fix, but the AV vendors etc. had detection routines in place very quickly indeed and yet they still got infected, so we can reasonably expect a higher than average proportion of users that are either not keeping up to date with security tools and their updates, or are not running any at all. If they don't grasp that concept, then why should they know that clicking on ads and links in emails can sometimes result in bad things happening?
Apple's sudden popularity has put its head well and truly above the parapet, so it's only natural that the malware peddlers started to target it, and why not? It's going to be a while before AV tools become as ubiquitous on OSX as they are on Windows, and if Apple responds to the next vulnerability with a similarly huge window of opportunity then the potential payback cited in the article is huge; millions of dollars a year. It's not just Apple either; there's another suddenly popular OS in a similar situation. It's almost certainly just a matter of time before someone finds a similar exploit in Android, and while Google might be on the ball getting it patched, I'm not confident that get that patch downstream and out onto third party devices is going to happen quickly either given how tardy some vendors have been pushing their ICS updates out.
That's the bet alright. Facebook has mountains of data, no denying that. The gamble is, can they extract some kind of meaning from it that enables them to make money, whether that is through adverts (which looks like a shaky proposition, based on data so far) or some other means; pay-for widgets, games, page promotions, buying Zynga, or whatever, being largely immaterial. If the market thinks they can, and do so big time, then their stock price should have gone up. If the market thinks it can't, then the stock price should have gone down.
What's happened is that it's pretty much unchanged which, if anything, is even more interesting. Especially so, given that there are almost cetainly a fair number of initial buyers who were hoping to see an explosive growth and cash out on a high that hasn't happened and who may be making a tough hold/sell decision in the next few days. As I read it, the current situation mean that Facebook's underwriters managed to nail the company's market value to within a couple of percentage points of the actual market value, which is quite an achievement in itself. Or it could indicate any one of a number of theories about what the markets consider Facebook's prospects to be, which will no doubt be speculated on at length and indepth in all of tomorrow's financial news columns and editorials. I said my theory in my post above; it's a long game and a fairly stable stock (for now at least); either Facebook finds a way to extract money from its mountain of data or it slowly slides into mediocrity, and based on the stock price's trajectory, I'd say it's 50:50 which way it all ends up.
If it sinks, you can always get your certificate framed alongside a burst balloon and mount it proudly on your wall as a statement and talking piece. It'd make a good companion to a share of SCOX carefully mounted with an almost depleted toilet roll too - I'd suggest using an Andrex because, like the court case, it's very, very long... :)
Right, because Facebook did such a sterling job of finding people whose profile made it appear like they had with the cash to spend on a General Motors car. OK, maybe a bad example given the current state of global finances, but when was the last time you heard mention of a successful Facebook marketing campaign? I don't even think Zynga has done that, and they are about as linked at the hip to Facebook as you can get.
I think that's the crux between Google and Facebook, really, and probably why Zuckerberg seems so interested in integrating search into Facebook all of a sudden. I'll bet plenty of people post things to Facebook about how much they like some expensive trinket, but it's Google that gets to see which ones are actually looking into making the purchases. My long term prediction; neither company is going to go away anytime soon, but Google is going to see the growth while Facebook is going to start a slow slide into mediocrity with the next few years unless it can find a major source of revenue in all those terabytes of data it has.
Bonus douchebag points for any ISPs that have a large number of infected customers and have, purely coincidentally of course, moved support calls to a premium rate number in the last few months.
If that's it, then it's not exactly a ringing endorsement as to why BitTorrent as a protocol shouldn't be "managed" when set against the huge quantity of commercial software, non-free movies (incl. porn) and TV shows being torrented, is it? I was hoping for some major academic/scientific use like distributing vast amounts of data between institutions, or one of the MegaUpload type file lockers to offer a torrent option for downloading content uploaded to their service for distribution.
OK, perhaps someone here can provide some suitable legitmate and mainstream examples that we can cite then, because I have to admit I'm struggling with your criteria. I use BitTorrent to download a lot of legit stuff, but if Ubuntu (and, by implication of its popularity, all other Linux distros) and presumably niche/word-of-mouth Internet series like Pioneer One are not suitable, then what is? ISTR that one of the larger game vendors uses BT to push updates and patches, but can't for the life of me remember which one, and there have been a few similar experiments here and there, but most of those seem to have died a death.
Surely there's something? Right?
Possibly, but given how quick many programmers are to get into a fruitless pissing match over their favourite language it's quite apropos, no?
Yeah, I noticed the same thing. I would have thought that with 1km resolution you might be able to pick out a vague smudge where some some of the larger cities in India and China that were visible from the satellite, but no, just massive amounts of chromatic aberation from the imaging method used. Clearly roads are going to be out, so I tried again with the 1080p video clip - thought that maybe Mumbai or Shanghai would show up as a brighter spot in the darkness - after all you can see city lights on much lower resolution NASA images, right? No such luck. Clearly we are not visible from outerspace in the wavelengths scanned by Elektro-L No.1, or the lights didn't survive the image processing technique. No way we're going to attract the attention of any passing aliens at this rate. Whether that's a good thing or bad, is entirely up to the reader...
Spam, with a dubious download awaiting if you should happen to visit one of the many links to the site in the post. "MyCleanPC.com", along with sister site "DoubleMySpeed.com" were exposed ages ago as a scam, despite a veneer of legitimacy provided by some TV adverts. Just another one of those so called "security tools" which then proceeds to find a lot of problems with your PC and then requires you to "register" to fix the so called problems.
On the whole, I found this latest work to be somewhat lacking in comparison to earlier works such as "Oh freddled gruntbuggly", but fortunately I don't currently have a poetry appreciation chair available for the full experience.
True, there are several other types of "bank", but the one most people think of first is the financial type, and so far at least they are the ones mostly being targetted by phishers, although a 419 email phishing a sperm bank would be an "interesting" read, I'm sure. Still, why not? A bank's a bank, so why not allow "vlads.blood.bank" if you were running a hypothetical ".bank" domain? Or maybe apply ".finance" instead, since not all financial targets of phishing are banks, either; EFTS, building societies and co-ops for instance. (Yes, I know there is already a ".coop" gTLD, but that's just for the birds.)
Yes, I have, and said so in the post, along with that the statement that they were not exactly widely used. For what it's worth, I've come across several museums with a site within the ".museum" gTLD since I travel a lot and like to find out something about the local culture while I'm there, for which museums are often a good place to start. I've also come across a couple of ".aero" domains and have an email address at a ".int". All that kind of proves my point though; gTLDs more than three letters are certainly out there and have been, but hardly used.
I don't think that's down to them being a pain in the ass to use because most people are going to use them via a search engine result, email or some other linking method that doesn't involve them typing in the URL, but because of the utter sewer that ".biz" and, to a slightly lesser extent, ".info" became. That, combined with the squabbling over ".xxx" and latest ICANN license to print money scheme, has probably tainted the opinion of most of the people who actually still notice or care about domain names in the first place. If there's a demonstrable need (a high bar, admittedly), or a problem that can be alleviated (i.e. something like my suggestion of ".bank" to help counter phishing) with a new gTLD then I'm all for it. Otherwise, we're just going to end up with another ".biz" or worse.
Two or three characters like ".museum" and ".travel", the former of which at least tries to enforce some verification of its domain applicants. It's hardly a new concept, if hardly widely adopted; I've only come a across a handful of ".musuem" sites and can't recall any ".travel" domains, although I'm sure there are some.
What really frustrates is that we keep getting schemes like this that just look to be a pure money grab instead of things that might actually help solve a problem. Where's the accredited applicants only ".bank" gTLD to help prevent phishing of financial institutions, for instance?
I detect a slight "whoosh". OK, I was kind of joking since the practicalities of interplanetary tesla coil transmission render the idea moot, but not so much about the illumination aspect. Tesla coils give off quite a lot of it - here's a clip of a 1MV one. If you were to stick a bunch of these out on the former windfarm towers, scaled up to receive from Pluto, I doubt the residents of Cape Cod would be having much in the way of nighttime while they were active. Or most of the other inhabitants of New England for that matter...
Easy. Great big Tesla coils. You could put them right on top of the windmills on Pluto, and I believe there would be some upcoming vacant lots where windfarms used to be on Cape Cod that would make a perfect spot for the receiving towers. As a bonus, they'll get full time security lighting for their McMansions, so what's not to like!
Perhaps because many non-ebook documents are formatted to either an A4 or US Letter page size and the formatting tends to screw up if you try to change the paper size or re-flow it on the fly like you can easily do with a plain text ebook, assuming it's even possible to do so - ever tried to change the papersize of a PDF and reflow the text? For embedded graphics with text, poor scaling algorithms can often render the text illegible and fine detail (cross hatching for instance) in a diagram doesn't scale all that well either. Also, for complicated layouts (magazines with sidebars and some textbooks for instance) fiddling with the page layout can be a serious inconvenience as it can bump relevent illustations and sidebars off the screen - and don't even get me started on the ones that blindly replicate images than span pages in their print versions into their digital versions!
Scaling the whole page might work, but isn't an option if you haven't got the resolution to keep the text from degenerating into an unreadable blur, and scrolling back and forth, page after page will soon have you pulling your hair out. For people that want to read books, the smaller paperback-esque size of the Kindle's are much more natural and intuitive, for people that want digital magazines that intuitive form factor is something more like an A4 page, and ideally with sufficient resolution to display two pages side by side and still have text remain readable. For me, that means something like the Apple's iPad with Retina display, or at a pinch the 1920x1200 of the upcoming Asus Transformer Infinity.
Firstly, remember that mass != weight. Mass is all to do with energy (as in e=mc^2), and bottom quarks have lots of energy - just over 4GeV compared to the ~2.5MeV (up) and ~5MeV (down) of the quarks that protons and neutrons consist of.
Which rebuts my point about this being a money making scheme for ICANN how, exactly? Verisign is no doubt charging a sizeable consultancy fee for each of the 200 or so new gTLDs that it isn't registering for itself, presumably including what is necessary to operate a gTLD since it's not quite the same as a regular domain. Verisign does deserve some kudos for finding a way to make some cash off this, but each of the actual originators of those 200 domains, and Verisign themselves for their dozen gTLDs, are still going to have to pay ICANN a combined total that is north of $20 million for the priviledge of actually getting the gTLD into the root zone. And all for what ultimately boils down to adding a few hundred lines to a text file.
And what do ICANN's customers get for this? The ability for customers to use a domain like "www.coke" instead of "www.coke.com", send emails to "mickey.mouse@disney" instead of "mickey.mouse@disney.com" and so on. Outside of people in IT, I suspect you are going to get more people confused by this than anything else; I think it far more likely that the response for Joe Public is going to be "Do you mean disney.com?" as opposed to "Oh, wow! You're on one of those cool new gTLDs I've been hearing about!" All this scam has done for me is reinforce the idea that plenty of people in marketing are really, really dumb, and in a few months time we'll have a pretty good idea of 200 or so companies where they've managed to get themselves into senior positions.