From the ICANN page:
The DNS was originally deployed in the mid-1980s as an improved means of mapping easy-to-remember names (e.g., "example.com") to the IP addresses (e.g., "128.9.176.32") by which packets are routed on the Internet.
From the article: These decisions of the alternate-root operators have been made without any apparent regard for the fundamental public-interest concern of Internet stability.
ICANN has the best interests of the public in mind?
Next you'll be telling me the RIAA has the best interests of the artists in mind.
My prediction: global warming will become the first issue of science and politics that captures the imagination of large numbers of American voters and becomes a national political issue (one on which the President definitely seems to have taken the unpopular side.) Why? Because it's a tactile phenomenon; people can feel that the weather is changing. They can see pictures of penguins dying in Antarctica. They read that skin cancer rates are rising.
Global warming may come to the forefront of american politics, but not for the reasons specified. Maybe the weather has changed, but it's different year to year, and individuals are not very good at noticing slight changes in weather patterns. Penguins may be dying, but even the near extinction of the Bald Eagle never really caught the attention of Joe America (especially not enough to influence a presidential race). Melanoma is already the leading killer of young adults (23-39) in America, and every day people run to the beach to get a tan.
Presidential elections are influenced much more by the media and by taxes, and a news anchor running around spouting a doomsday theory (especially one that almost everyone has already heard) isn't going to draw much ratings. Even more than that, the average person has already heard so much about the greenhouse effect that many are resigned to a "there's not much I can do about it" position.
By the time American voters realize first hand that this is an issue, it's going to be too late. Subtle changes in the weather can have drastic effects. It certainly isn't going to take a 20 degree F change to melt the polar ice caps, and by the time the changes are significant for the average person to observe, it's going to be too late to reverse the effect in time to save Venice... or Manhattan, but that might be a good thing;).
From the press release:
We aim both to target the "low hanging fruit" in Open Source system security, and also to prepare for longer-term research aimed at fundamental security improvements for Open Source software.
That sounds a lot like "we're going to work on the easy problems and start writing proposals for more grants."
I've worked on some DARPA grants. "Researchers" seem to expend at least as much effort catering to their project managers and trying to line up their next grant as they do actually taking on the project.
1.2M / 7people / 1.5 years = ~114K per person per year.
It looks like they paid paid their salaries (congrats). I hope they spend more time working on security problems than trying to figure out where the next big DOD grant is.
I go to/. and 90% of the time, I see a banner ad at the top for ThinkGeek or VALinux. I go to ESPN, and I see banners for the MLB team store and new movies coming out. I go pretty much anywhere and I get a pop up window offering me and X10 camera that I can use to spy on the babysitter.
People won't pay for content because we're already trading eyetime for it. Advertising has always run the (non-book) publishing world. Do you think fifty cents a day covers the cost of a home-delivered New York Times? Three bucks for your newsstand copy of Playboy? Not even close.
All those ads for cars, cigarettes, beer and allergy medications... those are the things paying for your paper subscriptions.
Now bravo to the "online community" for filtering spam and coming up with banner-blocking proxys, but these is the same small percentage of people who tell telemarketers they wish to be added to the "no call" list and file to stop junk mail.
Just like in the print world, most consumers just live with the inconvenience of banners and spam, ignoring and discarding most of what they see. That's why nobody wants to pay for online content.
As for electronic books, I won't pay for them because I want my novels in print. Once the interface gets good, I might... then again, if MasterCard puts its logo at the beginning of each chapter, I'd be just as happy to let them pay.
This opnion has been paid for by an unintentional donation by my company, which shall remain nameless so that I may keep my job. Don't pay for it.
It's one thing to be an acadamian at the school installing software on a bunch of computers you have access to, it's quite another to be paid to configure computers for the institution and go about installing something you don't have permission to.
The post is kind of vague as to how specific his job duties were, and if he was just doing a bad job at his position, or whether he was in violation of his described duties. I would imagine a state agency hiring a sysadmin/IT person, would put some clause in regarding malicious or unapproved software.
.5M and 15y seems excessive, but it also looks like a criminal prosecution, so those are probably the maximum penalties for what he's been charged with. If convicted, I would imagine the real sentence would be much less.
Featuring elimination challenges such as "Repair the tumbling satellite," "Race to the moon," and "Decode signals from the space aliens!"
Every 10 orbits, the remaining contestants will get together and vote one of their ISS co-inhabitants jettisoned into space. In the final episode, a committee of heads-in-jars will vote on who the winner is.
This is great! In the first film, Indy went looking for the Ark, fought Nazis and killed a bunch of them. In the second film, Indy went looking for a magic potato, fought the Thuggees and killed almost all of them. In the third film, Indy went looking for the holy grail and killed Nazis again.
Now, in the fourth film, Indy can go find a lost underground continent and kill all the... Gungans!
Casinos often use this information to track and discover "undesirables." When they find someone they *THINK* is not good for their establishment (card counters, cheaters, sports book arbitrage professionals), they take that information and send it to a detective agency that keeps track of these people for casinos all over the world.
One of the casinos had larger than expected losses on their table games last year. They got some consultants (with loose lips) to run some statistical analysis on their database to find people who won an improbable amount. They had information on some of their big money customers down to a bet-by-bet record.
The consultants identified more than a few "lucky" individuals. I'm not sure what happened to them, but I'd bet that they're not welcome in that establishment anymore.
The truly troubling result of this is that those people, who were not conclusively found breaking any rules, are probably now indexed around the world as undesirable gamblers. Can you imagine having a string of good luck at the Taj and then walking into some casino in Paris and being asked to leave the premises?
A law is only broken if a law enforcement offical decides that one is.
This is clearly not true. A driver exceeding the speed limit is in violation of the law. If a cop decides not to pull the driver over, the violation goes untried and unpenalized.
Legal statutes exist exactly for the purpose of removing as much "decision" from the responsibility of the law enforcement official. If it was a judgement call, you'd see a lot more people showing up in traffic court with the defense "officers are human; a resonable officer wouldn't have pulled me over," with a (paid) expert witness in tow.
Way back in high school they taught us that government was three pronged:
Legislators make the laws, including setting the speed limits (not the cops, as you inadvertantly suggest)
The executive branch (law officers) are responsible for identifying, with probable cause (like a radar gun) are breaking those laws
and
The Judicial System to decide whether or not those identified by the cops are actually guilty of the crime they've been accused of.
The way I see it, regardless of whether or not they "inform" renters, the problem with a rental car company charging (or any other company, for that matter) unilaterally fining consumers are twofold:
First, a company can't arbitrarily fine a customer. If there is no damage to the automobile, the rental car company has suffered no loss. If they don't incur a loss, they don't have grounds to claim a customer owes them money.
Secondly, there is no due process. If Acme was allowed to just charge consumers under the claim that they broke the law, it would leave drivers' recourse in civil court. No longer would the burden of criminal proof be on the prosecution; it would be the drivers' responsibility, as plaintiffs to prove that they had been wronged (most speeding violators the cops get abdicate this right anyway by signing off on the ticket and paying the fine instead of excercising their right to due process and contesting the ticket in court, but that's another issue).
Acme also can't really amend the contract to charge a fee for "fast driving." That would expose them to a slew of lawsuits as a conspirator to speeding or contributor to any accidents that resulted because of it.
It's obvious this was an attempt to generate revenue. If the actual goal of this stunt was to prevent speeding, the company should have just notified police of speeding infractions while they were happening. As anyone who has ever driven in CT knows, the state itself uses speeding tickets for revenue. There are plenty of troopers, and they're more than willing to write the most expensive tickets in the US to fast drivers.
...but nobody wants to shop where the merchant tries to get them in trouble using their product. I hope the publicity from this fiasco causes Acme significant losses
I've been using a Motorola Timeport phone (P8767). It comes with a serial cable packaged with it, and you can use startalk to sync your phone numbers with linux.
Many of the other Sprint phones require you to buy a $100 internet connection kit, and some of them need special software. Not sure the exact capabilities of the phones, but I'm pretty sure the software is all for windows.
Thermally conductive cold plates transfer the heat generated by the hard drive inside SilentDrive's enclosure to the ambient air within
the PC chassis.
Couldn't they just say "heat sink" ?
I think this is what happens when you hire buzzword enabled language proficients into your external-company-image division as media notification generators....er, I'm sorry, that should be "non technical PR people."
I recently had the opportunity to play with one of the new TabletPCs being released next year by the Evil Empire. While I usually avoid MS products at all costs (I haven't fired up VMware now in nearly 2 months), this thing was very impressive.
8 1/2 x 11 with very good hand writing rec, and a decent interface to insert text into non-reco enabled programs. It seems like an ideal machine for a bunch of the most common computer uses I have at home. It's also got PCMCIA, USB, Firewire and VGA out, so you can dock it if you get the itch.
Unfortunately, at $1500-2500 (US), it's going to be a bit price-heavy as a PDA replacement, but I see people sinking all kinds of moolah into their PDAs. What's the actual cost of a new m-series Pilot, or iPaq once you get a keyboard and 802.11 and microdrive and... ?
Now, if someone can get Linux with decent handwriting reco running on the TabletPC hardware (TabLinuxPC?), I'm all over it.
So I was interested in reading a review of the new Myst game. I see the article and follow the link and find a bunch of crap about how someone can't install the game and then a critique of his own review. What a wasted mouse click.
I wouldn't be so annoyed if, in the summary you had written "So I pre-ordered Myst 3 and I couldn't install it and these are the difficulties I had..."
For others that think this was a helpful review, I've got some similar contributions:
I had trouble with this game. It wouldn't run because, oops, I boot Linux on my machine(s).
The ordering process for this game was intensely difficult. I'm using lynx on a souped up 286 with no SSL and, for some reason, I can't connect to any e-commerce sites that will give me free shipping.
Once I finally got this game and installed it (and Windows), my machine started locking up and giving me a blue screen with some cryptic codes at least once a week. Has anyone else had this problem?
The CDs this game comes with aren't nearly as cool as those original black playstation CDs. I think it's of cardinal importance that people are aware, as far as it's physical presentation, this game is aesthetically nonsatisfying.
I think bugs in code are bad.
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely believe issues like those presented in the above article are important, but it's irritating finding a bug list where one expects a review of the product. The replies section is where bad parodies should go.
I certainly hope an educator didn't come up with this one. This solution merely serves to heighten the problem that most developmentally disabled students have, namely that of missing out on day-to-day interaction with children their own age.
Because of the resource expense and the distraction in the classroom, many schools separate "special" students from mainstream education, which, for purposes of instruction, makes the education process easier.
The problem is that this impairs these students' abilities to functionally interact with other people. Teaching adults that have been separated all their lives to function in "normal" society is nearly impossible, so some of these people become more of a burden than they would have been if schooling were looked at as an experience instead of just an instructional process.
Given the durability (and cost) issues,
I decided to go with a CD/MP3 CDR player.
You can find them around for less than $100 nowadays, and it'll give you ~10hrs of mp3 playback. The interfaces aren't great, but it's an economic alternative to $500 bucks for a jukebox you still can't run with.
The only real issue I have is that you have to fill CDRs with music, but for the same space that I used to be able to carry 10 albums, I can now carry 100... and put the thing on "random" to get a decent mix out of it.
For sale cheap:
One (slightly used) glow-in-the-dark water heater, near-mint condition. Still operates with the efficiency and safety it did when it was new.
Currently listed as item number #102934613 on ebay.
Buyer assumes all liability for maintenence, disposal and heating costs. Buy now and I'll throw in free shipping!
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, you mean like this:
These decisions of the alternate-root operators have been made without any apparent regard for the fundamental public-interest concern of Internet stability.
ICANN has the best interests of the public in mind?
Next you'll be telling me the RIAA has the best interests of the artists in mind.
Global warming may come to the forefront of american politics, but not for the reasons specified. Maybe the weather has changed, but it's different year to year, and individuals are not very good at noticing slight changes in weather patterns. Penguins may be dying, but even the near extinction of the Bald Eagle never really caught the attention of Joe America (especially not enough to influence a presidential race). Melanoma is already the leading killer of young adults (23-39) in America, and every day people run to the beach to get a tan.
Presidential elections are influenced much more by the media and by taxes, and a news anchor running around spouting a doomsday theory (especially one that almost everyone has already heard) isn't going to draw much ratings. Even more than that, the average person has already heard so much about the greenhouse effect that many are resigned to a "there's not much I can do about it" position.
By the time American voters realize first hand that this is an issue, it's going to be too late. Subtle changes in the weather can have drastic effects. It certainly isn't going to take a 20 degree F change to melt the polar ice caps, and by the time the changes are significant for the average person to observe, it's going to be too late to reverse the effect in time to save Venice... or Manhattan, but that might be a good thing ;).
That sounds a lot like "we're going to work on the easy problems and start writing proposals for more grants."
I've worked on some DARPA grants. "Researchers" seem to expend at least as much effort catering to their project managers and trying to line up their next grant as they do actually taking on the project.
1.2M / 7people / 1.5 years = ~114K per person per year.
It looks like they paid paid their salaries (congrats). I hope they spend more time working on security problems than trying to figure out where the next big DOD grant is.
People won't pay for content because we're already trading eyetime for it. Advertising has always run the (non-book) publishing world. Do you think fifty cents a day covers the cost of a home-delivered New York Times? Three bucks for your newsstand copy of Playboy? Not even close.
All those ads for cars, cigarettes, beer and allergy medications... those are the things paying for your paper subscriptions.
Now bravo to the "online community" for filtering spam and coming up with banner-blocking proxys, but these is the same small percentage of people who tell telemarketers they wish to be added to the "no call" list and file to stop junk mail.
Just like in the print world, most consumers just live with the inconvenience of banners and spam, ignoring and discarding most of what they see. That's why nobody wants to pay for online content.
As for electronic books, I won't pay for them because I want my novels in print. Once the interface gets good, I might... then again, if MasterCard puts its logo at the beginning of each chapter, I'd be just as happy to let them pay.
This opnion has been paid for by an unintentional donation by my company, which shall remain nameless so that I may keep my job. Don't pay for it.
The post is kind of vague as to how specific his job duties were, and if he was just doing a bad job at his position, or whether he was in violation of his described duties. I would imagine a state agency hiring a sysadmin/IT person, would put some clause in regarding malicious or unapproved software.
Featuring elimination challenges such as "Repair the tumbling satellite," "Race to the moon," and "Decode signals from the space aliens!"
Every 10 orbits, the remaining contestants will get together and vote one of their ISS co-inhabitants jettisoned into space. In the final episode, a committee of heads-in-jars will vote on who the winner is.
In the second film, Indy went looking for a magic potato, fought the Thuggees and killed almost all of them.
In the third film, Indy went looking for the holy grail and killed Nazis again.
Now, in the fourth film, Indy can go find a lost underground continent and kill all the... Gungans!
One of the casinos had larger than expected losses on their table games last year. They got some consultants (with loose lips) to run some statistical analysis on their database to find people who won an improbable amount. They had information on some of their big money customers down to a bet-by-bet record.
The consultants identified more than a few "lucky" individuals. I'm not sure what happened to them, but I'd bet that they're not welcome in that establishment anymore.
The truly troubling result of this is that those people, who were not conclusively found breaking any rules, are probably now indexed around the world as undesirable gamblers. Can you imagine having a string of good luck at the Taj and then walking into some casino in Paris and being asked to leave the premises?
- A law is only broken if a law enforcement offical decides that one is.
This is clearly not true. A driver exceeding the speed limit is in violation of the law. If a cop decides not to pull the driver over, the violation goes untried and unpenalized.Legal statutes exist exactly for the purpose of removing as much "decision" from the responsibility of the law enforcement official. If it was a judgement call, you'd see a lot more people showing up in traffic court with the defense "officers are human; a resonable officer wouldn't have pulled me over," with a (paid) expert witness in tow.
Way back in high school they taught us that government was three pronged:
- Legislators make the laws, including setting the speed limits (not the cops, as you inadvertantly suggest)
- The executive branch (law officers) are responsible for identifying, with probable cause (like a radar gun) are breaking those laws
- and
- The Judicial System to decide whether or not those identified by the cops are actually guilty of the crime they've been accused of.
Excercise your rights. Go to traffic court.First, a company can't arbitrarily fine a customer. If there is no damage to the automobile, the rental car company has suffered no loss. If they don't incur a loss, they don't have grounds to claim a customer owes them money.
Secondly, there is no due process. If Acme was allowed to just charge consumers under the claim that they broke the law, it would leave drivers' recourse in civil court. No longer would the burden of criminal proof be on the prosecution; it would be the drivers' responsibility, as plaintiffs to prove that they had been wronged (most speeding violators the cops get abdicate this right anyway by signing off on the ticket and paying the fine instead of excercising their right to due process and contesting the ticket in court, but that's another issue).
Acme also can't really amend the contract to charge a fee for "fast driving." That would expose them to a slew of lawsuits as a conspirator to speeding or contributor to any accidents that resulted because of it.
It's obvious this was an attempt to generate revenue. If the actual goal of this stunt was to prevent speeding, the company should have just notified police of speeding infractions while they were happening. As anyone who has ever driven in CT knows, the state itself uses speeding tickets for revenue. There are plenty of troopers, and they're more than willing to write the most expensive tickets in the US to fast drivers.
Oh, yeah IANAL.
Many of the other Sprint phones require you to buy a $100 internet connection kit, and some of them need special software. Not sure the exact capabilities of the phones, but I'm pretty sure the software is all for windows.
It's not as fast as ricochet, but better than trying to check mail using a "wireless web" browser.
I read the patent. It doesn't say anything about brakes.
Couldn't they just say "heat sink" ?
I think this is what happens when you hire buzzword enabled language proficients into your external-company-image division as media notification generators. ...er, I'm sorry, that should be "non technical PR people."
8 1/2 x 11 with very good hand writing rec, and a decent interface to insert text into non-reco enabled programs. It seems like an ideal machine for a bunch of the most common computer uses I have at home. It's also got PCMCIA, USB, Firewire and VGA out, so you can dock it if you get the itch.
Unfortunately, at $1500-2500 (US), it's going to be a bit price-heavy as a PDA replacement, but I see people sinking all kinds of moolah into their PDAs. What's the actual cost of a new m-series Pilot, or iPaq once you get a keyboard and 802.11 and microdrive and... ?
Now, if someone can get Linux with decent handwriting reco running on the TabletPC hardware (TabLinuxPC?), I'm all over it.
That is all.
Go see it in Boston (one of the 'lucky' cities getting the early release) and wait until you can actually hear the film.
With a couple hundred MIT übergeeks reciting every line, they're gonna drown out the original soundtrack.
Sadly, they work in the "Borglab." Check out the caption in the photo.
I wouldn't be so annoyed if, in the summary you had written "So I pre-ordered Myst 3 and I couldn't install it and these are the difficulties I had..."
For others that think this was a helpful review, I've got some similar contributions:
- I had trouble with this game. It wouldn't run because, oops, I boot Linux on my machine(s).
- The ordering process for this game was intensely difficult. I'm using lynx on a souped up 286 with no SSL and, for some reason, I can't connect to any e-commerce sites that will give me free shipping.
- Once I finally got this game and installed it (and Windows), my machine started locking up and giving me a blue screen with some cryptic codes at least once a week. Has anyone else had this problem?
- The CDs this game comes with aren't nearly as cool as those original black playstation CDs. I think it's of cardinal importance that people are aware, as far as it's physical presentation, this game is aesthetically nonsatisfying.
- I think bugs in code are bad.
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely believe issues like those presented in the above article are important, but it's irritating finding a bug list where one expects a review of the product. The replies section is where bad parodies should go.It may finally be possible to designate "Weekend at Bernie's" a 'view never' program.
This is a great program. Unfortunately, the article fails to mention Bernie Krisher, who started the program.
Because of the resource expense and the distraction in the classroom, many schools separate "special" students from mainstream education, which, for purposes of instruction, makes the education process easier.
The problem is that this impairs these students' abilities to functionally interact with other people. Teaching adults that have been separated all their lives to function in "normal" society is nearly impossible, so some of these people become more of a burden than they would have been if schooling were looked at as an experience instead of just an instructional process.
You can find them around for less than $100 nowadays, and it'll give you ~10hrs of mp3 playback. The interfaces aren't great, but it's an economic alternative to $500 bucks for a jukebox you still can't run with.
The only real issue I have is that you have to fill CDRs with music, but for the same space that I used to be able to carry 10 albums, I can now carry 100... and put the thing on "random" to get a decent mix out of it.
Next week on the Micro$oft website, William Gates himself reading from the M$ End User License Agreement...
One (slightly used) glow-in-the-dark water heater, near-mint condition. Still operates with the efficiency and safety it did when it was new.
Currently listed as item number #102934613 on ebay.
Buyer assumes all liability for maintenence, disposal and heating costs. Buy now and I'll throw in free shipping!