So that's an interesting question. Let's say there is no penalty for accidentally claiming that you own the copyright for something and demanding that someone take it down. If that's the case, can I send a note to the RIAA demanding they take down their website because I believe they're using a graphic I created?
How sure do I have to be? Do I have to be absolutely certain that it's mine by examining it carefully? What if a friend said "Hey, your graphic is being used on the RIAA site, did you authorize that?" -- if I trust him and don't bother to look, can I still demand they take it down? What if I just think the RIAA are evil, evil bastards and because I saw the letters "riaa" at some point in my web server logs that I can assume somewhere on their site they've got a stolen image of mine?
If I don't do it in a public way, they can't accuse me of slander or libel, right?
My understanding is that the burden of proof seems to be with the accused to show they're not infringing... So can I force the RIAA to prove that they own the copyright to all their images? If I sent the takedown message to their upstream connectivity provider and demanded they be cut off for violating my copyright, would their bandwidth provider have to comply to avoid a DMCA violation, no matter how absurd the claim?
Uh, yeah our physical dexterity is important, but more important is the goo between our ears.
Humans are adaptable, and it will be a long time before robots get there. Sure the El Salvadorian cleaning woman might miss a few corners, but at least she won't get stuck in them when her program can't adapt to the shadows being different.
Sure, it might not be too hard to build in a trigger that says "WHEN {human goes for a run} DO {30 minute cleaning job}" but properly detecting when someone is going for a run is a hard problem. Do you use RFID tags on their running shoes? What if they're just going outside for a minute to clean the mud off the shoes? Do you do it based on a schedule? What if someone feels lazy? Or what if they come back early because they pull a muscle, are tired, or something?
Now cleaning isn't a big deal, it's something that you can probably abort gracefully, but I can still see all kinds of problems with relying on a robot's judgement. For example, would a robot know enough not to disturb someone who's meditating? Would they be able to distinguish that from sleeping, or from having a heart attack?
Don't get me wrong, having a robot to do some menial chores would be nice, but I think that it's more than just the dexterity of the people being replaced that's at issue.
My mom uses OS X, which does make her life easier, but means things like this don't help much. *shrug* Think I should introduce her to the Terminal??;)
Anyhow, I agree that NAT/Firewall is a good solution for many things, but I think that the emphasis should be on firewall rather than NAT. My personal opinion is that a machine which needs 2 way communication with the Internet (which really is most of them) should by default be given a routable IP and then protected by a firewall. That opinion is scary for most network admins, but it just means that they can't be lazy about the firewall.
Regarding my mother: she's good enough to use IE to upload a file using FTP (if I walk her through it). I'd be the one setting up port-forwarding so she can upload the file to me. She would not be able to do SFTP or SCP because there's no friendly GUI for doing it already loaded onto her computer.
I'm not sure what you mean about a single point of reference for networks. If you mean all traffic should flow through a small number of routers, sure. If you mean that most machines should be behind a NAT box, I don't agree. I think they should be behind a firewall, but NAT shouldn't be used instead of a firewall.
The workarounds for many of these problems exist, but they're not solutions, they're workarounds.
Which is easier to type? "ssh box1.mydomain.com" or "ssh nat.mydomain.com -p 10022"? Using a default port for various services is a very handy thing. Most programs assume the default port for a given service, and when they do offer an alternative sometimes you have to dig around in the "advanced" menu to choose it. For a while in Mozilla there was no obvious way to choose a non-standard mail port, for example. If I want to let my mom use a mail server i'd rather just give her a machine name rather than have to make it complicated.
The "use sftp/scp" solution fails the mom test too. If I want to allow my mom to upload pictures of the latest trick the dog learned, I'd like to be able to say "Ok mom, open up Safari. Ok, now type: ftp, colon, double forward slash (the ones that lean to the right mom), then ftp dot mydomain dot com..."
Aside from those difficulties, NAT is just a hella-inelegant solution. The way the TCP/IP and UDP/IP were designed, machines are distinguished by an address, services are distinguished by a port. It's simple, clean, easy to use... NAT breaks that model.
Do most off-the-shelf routers use IPTABLES? If so, that's great, but kinda useless. The configuration interface they offer doesn't let me do what I want to do with IPTABLES. If I can't tweak the settings the way I like then it's essentially not running a firewall as far as I'm concerned.
As for getting hacked through the NAT box, it's easy. Someone port-forwards mail, web and filesharing through the box to their desktop machine. Suddenly any mail exploit is available to the Internet. The user feels comfortable because they've got a firewall, but the "firewall" just forwards all malicious traffic right to the target machine.
The only firewall-like capability that the off-the-shelf NAT routers offer is that ports are not explicitly open like they are on Windows machines. But that's a pretty weak form of protection.
The no-NAT model of communication is so much more straightforward. If I want to get a packet from machine A to machine B, I fill in the appropriate headers, and voila. NAT adds complexity that really doesn't need to be there. It also severely reduces the flexibility of the whole system.
NAT has its places, but it is not the solution to every problem. It is good for allowing web browsing from a non-routable IP address, Anything more complicated than that becomes a bigger and bigger headache. Why bother with the headache, just use a real firewall and make all the address routable!
One big reason they can get away with charging $5 a month for another IP is that there is some scarcity to IP addresses. Once IPV6 comes out I'm 100% sure they won't do this. It would just be absurd for them to pretend that with 6 x 10^23 per square meter of the Earth's surface, they can't provide you with more than 1 address.
Instead, they'll have to come up with a sane way of billing people, based on the amount of bandwidth they use, the frequency with which they use high-priority traffic, or something similar.
I can't believe how many people have commented that there is no need for IPV6 because of NAT. Are you really willing to put up with the limits of NAT when you could give every computer its own routable address?
NAT does a decent job of allowing you to surf the web using a non-routable IP address. For anything more advanced it starts working less and less well.
I, personally have had many troubles with NAT:. Games which don't work properly unless they have huge ranges of ports exposed to the net. Instant messenger apps which fail in subtle ways. Brain-dead DHCP servers which don't properly pass on DNS settings, etc. Add to that the fact that the DHCP/NAT combination in most consumer boxes (like Liksys routers) is awful. You can port-forward from the router to a fixed IP address, but if you're using DHCP, you never know what machine will get that IP address! Even when it does work, there are far too many programs that don't work right when something is on a non-standard port.
In fact, I don't just want each of my machines to have its own routable IP address, I want some machines to have multiple addresses. That way I can host multiple domains on a single machine and truly administer them differently. Right now HTTP sends a host neader so that you can have multiple domains on a single IP and things just work. On the other hand, HTTPS doesn't work like this, so you need a work-around if you want to use HTTPS. The simple truth is that today if you want to have multiple domains using anything other than straight HTTP on a single machine you really do need multiple IPs.
For many people, NAT is a comfort thing. They think they don't have to worry about patching their systems because they're behind a dinky broadband router. Hint: that's security through obscurity. The devices you're buying aren't meant as firewalls, they're meant to let joe-consumer connect two computers to the Internet easily.
The main reason I want IPV6 now is so that my damn Internet provider can't get away with charging extra for extra IP addresses. At the moment they can because they're relatively scarce, but I can't see them getting away with that with IPV6.
If you're content with your buggy whip, that's great. But I personally have a use for at least 20 IPs that NAT won't solve. So don't make a blanket statement that IPV6 isn't necessary. Maybe not for you, but some of us can't wait to have it.
Say you have 5 servers behind a NAT box, all running SSHD. How are you going to set them all up so that they can have incoming connections? Sure, if your NAT box is a good one you can manually set up port forwarding, but that's a pain.
What about strange services like FTP that require 2 different connections? They're always a pain when using NAT, so you need to find some means of dealing with them.
What about games? Say 3 people behind one NAT box want to play the same online game at the same time? What about filesharing applications that want to allow incoming connections?
NAT != firewall. If you're using it like it is, expect to get hacked anyhow. Besides, if you don't want a particular device to be exposed to the IPV6 world, you are free to put it behind a NAT box or a firewall, it just means that the machines that you want to have routable addresses can have them.
I already want more IP addresses. I have a server which hosts websites for various domains, but only uses 1 IP address. That works for HTTP because it sends the hostname as part of the request, but nearly every other protocol doesn't. That means that I can't deal with HTTPS easily, and makes configuration of things like mail much harder. If each host could have its own IP then it would make management and configuration much easier. It would also make it possible to have much more fine-grained control over services and access to various IPs.
I can just picture you when they finally start selling flying cars: "Hello? I already have transportation, it's called a car. In many ways it's better to move slowly in gridlock. At least that way if you have an accident you're only moving 4 miles per hour!"
Granted, there are places like Vancouver which are miserable and soggy, but not Damn Cold in the winter, but the rest of the place is frigid. Even down in Toronto which is North of parts of the US, in the winter it often gets Damn Cold.
Really? That's like this thing I saw once, but it was about bases!
How'd it go... All of your bases do belong to them... Something like that. Anyhow, it was really funny. I wish I knew where I saw that, but it was some obscure site a long time ago. I'm sure nobody remembers it. The strange thing is that I coulda sworn I saw someone wearing a T-shirt with that very same wording on it just the other day! I mean, talk about your coincidences. First someone screws up the translation on a game, and then later someone independantly screws up the translation for something on a T-shirt?
It's really funny how badly these Japanese people mess up our
English.
I recently moved into a house with an odd design which made connecting remote computers to the central router difficult using wires. My (iBook) laptop had no problems because it was able to go wireless, so I decided to go with a wireless solution for my Linux desktop. I had no idea what I was getting into.
I figured the easiest solution would be a USB based device, so I looked around and found
a table of USB 802.11b driver support under Linux. At first, I went to a local store and bought a device that the table said was supported. I got it home and ugh, it barely worked. Under Linux the driver was awful. To see if it was maybe the card itself I tried it under Windows. It barely worked there, hanging the machine when I tried a throughput test.
So I sent that back and ordered an SMC card which was supposed to have vendor-supplied drivers. I got it home, plugged it in, and tried to install the drivers. No luck. It turns out they were binary-only drivers for specific old RedHat kernels. So I emailed SMC for support. A week later someone got back to me to say that my issue had been escalated. A week after that I got a tar file in the mail. It turns out what I received was simply a forked and slightly modified version of the code on a
Sourceforge project. But, surprise, surprise, it didn't work either.
More investigations led me to an
alternate driver. Using the mailing list associated with this project, thanks to Joerg Albert I was able to determine that my device has a hardware configuration which is apparently very rare and needs special firmware. Once I got that, after about 3 weeks of effort, I had working 802.11b access under Linux.
At the end of this I'm annoyed with SMC. I am glad that they acknowledge that Linux exists, on the other hand, they were completely useless when it came to actually supporting their product.
In the end I guess I voted well with my dollars, supporting a company that provided minimal efforts to support Linux rather than one that refuses to even admit it exists. But I also provided $$ to a company that is deceptive about their hardware being truly supported under Linux. It was also pretty annoying that to get the thing to work required taking some random firmware file (in the form of a C header file with a massive data array) and randomly trying it to see if it would work.
It's sad when voting with your dollars is like other kinds of voting, where you vote against somebody because they're worse than the person you're voting for.
What's more frightening is that in a month or so I'm scheduled to find a way to get a mini-PCI 802.11b card working for an embedded Linux system running on an ARM processor. If getting a system with a fairly standard connector was this difficult on a desktop machine, I'm dreading trying to get a card with an obscure interface working on non-i386 CPU. Wish me luck.
I think the bigger issue is like the magician's trick of a
card force, or the equivalent
mental trick. Say you show someone an image that looks vaguely like the McDonalds arches. It's such a huge part of western culture that it's pretty well drilled into people's heads.
I like the concept of choosing a password based on a pattern, but I don't think I'd trust someone else to come up with the pattern.
You know, the whole seeing thing? And there are probably more blind people than there are people with prosopagnosia.
On the other hand, just because a small segment of the population has an odd disorder that prevents them from recognizing faces doesn't mean the system is worthless.
I still think it's a good idea, so long as it isn't the *only* solution.
Your right! Its awful! Their isn't even a verb in they're sentince! There english teacher's must be turning in there grave's! You're's must be proud tho, you right real good.
The question really is how many levels of indirection do you have to be away before you're safe? The people who are the ones making the copyrighted material available are obviously breaking the law. Is the site to which they can post links breaking it? Probably not, unless they are making money off the downloads, or are promoting the site as a means to get illegal stuff, or are involved in choosing what gets posted and what doesn't.
Now what about a news organization that posts a link to the site, saying "... BitTorrent has also come under fire for the amount of material illegally traded using the system. Some sites such as <a href="">ByteMonsoon</a> seem to have almost exclusively illegal.torrent links..."
To me the issue here is that it seems more and more like the decision about whether or not a site stays up isn't about whether it's actually breaking any laws, but rather the relative economic power of the company it pisses off and the person running the site.
Last time the Freenet topic came up on Slashdot I asked about alternative platforms. I was told that the Java implementation is the reference implementation, but that other ones were possible. If 60% of the code is workarounds for JVM bugs, then is it really any use as a reference??
Knows best, maybe. Is objective about the differences? Definitely not. While Java isn't what the creator of C++ might have done to clean up C++ it's pretty clear that the people who designed Java based it on C++. Sadly, that FAQ entry sounds like a grumpy old man who's tired of hearing about the newfangled thing all the kids are talking about.
Java ain't really OO
on
Head First Java
·
· Score: -1, Troll
Try
Ruby. I started serious programming with Java too, and I thought it was OO, but then I found how wrong I was. Now there are probably langauges even more OO than Ruby like maybe Smalltalk, but from what I hear Ruby is much easier to get started with than Smalltalk.
Java is really just a cleaned-up version of C++ with the glaringly obvious non-OO aspects removed, the preprocessor thrown out, and pointers hidden. As a compiled language it's not bad at all. As an implementation, it's, er... not much fun.
Just wanted to save a few newbies before they start with Java thinking it is the height of OO.
Evidently you're not a very advanced browser user. I don't mean this as an insult, if Safari does everything you need, great. For me, and many others, despite the bloat, Mozilla has necessary features that other browsers lack.
Let's start with cookie handling. There are a handful of websites that I want to accept cookies from. With Mozilla I can have it prompt me every time a site wants to set a cookie and if the cookies really are necessary I'll accept, otherwise I'll reject. With Safari you don't have that degree of fine-grained control.
Keyword bookmarks. Sure, Safari has the "Google" bar at the top. In mozilla I get the same feature by typing "g Search Terms" in the address bar, and mozilla knows to expand "g" to the full google search URL, placing the search terms in the appropriate place. But I also have keyword searches for IMDB, dictionary.cambridge.edu, google groups, google images, amazon, a w3 validator... In Safari there doesn't appear to be a way to do that.
More complete proxy control: I can say I don't want a proxy for 10.0.0.1/8 and have my entire internal network unproxied. There simply doesn't seem to be a way to do that in Safari.
Anyhow, I could go on and on about the features that Mozilla has that Safari doesn't, but I think I've made my point.
And also, what is the barrier after which sharing a file becomes criminal? For instance, Apple's iTunes allows you to play music that someone else is sharing through their copy of iTunes. Presumably a big, established company like Apple wouldn't release software that is designed to illegally share files so that's on the safe side of the line. How much farther are you allowed to go before the sharing becomes illegal?
Is there any connection between the DoJ and the USPTO? Is the frequency with which they grant patents, and the fact that a lot of those patents end up being challenged in court adding to the workload of the DoJ? Do you think that patent examiners have enough knowledge and training to handle the work they're being asked to perform?
What is the DOJ's position about damages companies claim for copyright infringement? Are they taken as-is, or does somebody verify claims?
For example, say Joan Filetrader has a Metallica MP3 in her shared directory and is eventually prosecuted for copyright violation. It seems like it is standard practice for Metallica's copyright holders to do math like "Well the connection was up for 1 month, and her bandwidth is 8Mb/s, that means that she could have transferred 2,500,000 MB that month, and since the MP3 is 5MB she cost us $10,000,000 in sales."
Does the DOJ review that math and do things like verify what the likely impact on the company's bottom line was?
A semi-automatic rifle can be a hunting rifle, but is a hunting rifle, by definition semi-automatic?
People thought like me in Canada, and Canada became a country without a war. Same with many other former colonies like Australia, and even Hong Kong. None of these places has nowhere near the level of gun violence that the US has. By using violent methods the US became a country a few years faster and has suffered from a much higher level of violence since those days. On the other hand, many other former British colonies gained independence through peaceful means and are much safer places to live these days.
As for shooting at paper targets, isn't that more like training for the real use of a gun? Guns are meant as devices which are shot at a living thing in order to kill it. What fraction of rounds fired at living things was used in a "proper way", and I'll include both hunting and self-defence in this category, but I'll say suicide and accidents are misuse. Oh, and I also notice you mentioned the number of people *killed* by guns, but not the number of people wounded by guns. If you only consider the case where a gun is fired at a living thing, then what are the fraction of "proper uses" vs. misuses?
As for the 100 pound potential rape victim, I agree she should have a means to defend herself, I'm just not convinced guns are the right defence. Afterall, according to stats I've seen, 1 in 6 police officers killed by a gun is shot by their own gun. If highly trained police officers are mostly shot with their own weapons, what are the odds that a marginally-trained potential rape victim will find the gun helpful rather than having it turned against them?
So, in the 1700s, the colonists in what became the US successfully fought off the British because they owned what were, at the time, the most powerful military hardware in the world? Does that mean that today you think that private citizens should own a heavy machine gun or a air-to-surface missile or a tank or an anti-tank-helicopter or even a destroyer?
If someone armed with a knife flips out and decides to kill as many people as he can, he may get a dozen at the most. Running away is enough to keep you safe from a maniac like that. If he's armed with a fully-automatic assault rifle, then he may get a hundred. Even hiding behind a solid object isn't guaranteed protection from that kind of a weapon. Now what if this person has a tank?
I think the average person can be trusted with a handgun. I think only about 1 in 100 will ever do something stupid with it, and most of those "doing something stupid" incidents will either be treatening someone without following through, or something unintentional like not properly locking it up. On the other hand, when someone does misuse a handgun the potential damage is pretty serious. Now replace that handgun with a fully automatic assault rifle with a 30 round clip and JHP ammunition. Even if only 1 in 10,000 people ever misuses that, do you want to be anywhere near them when they do? Or do you think that everyone should walk around with an M-16 strapped to their backs?
I can just picture the world now. Downtown anycity, everybody walks around with an M-16 in their hands. A car cuts off a biker in traffic and the biker starts screaming at the driver for doing something so stupid. The driver gets mad and starts waving his M-16 around. The biker grabs his and points it at the driver. A few bystanders run for cover, but most are so used to confrontations like this they just sigh. Another few people pull out their M-16s and point them at the biker and the driver and say "ok guys, calm down or I'll have to fill you full of lead".
No, until humanity evolves enough so that people don't lose their tempers and make bad decisions, I don't think guns in the hands of marginally-trained people is a good idea.
Oh, and as for that bigoted comment... have you ever been to Alaska? Do you really think that people there need semi-automatic or fully-automatic weapons because bears are constantly trying to attack them?
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So that's an interesting question. Let's say there is no penalty for accidentally claiming that you own the copyright for something and demanding that someone take it down. If that's the case, can I send a note to the RIAA demanding they take down their website because I believe they're using a graphic I created?
How sure do I have to be? Do I have to be absolutely certain that it's mine by examining it carefully? What if a friend said "Hey, your graphic is being used on the RIAA site, did you authorize that?" -- if I trust him and don't bother to look, can I still demand they take it down? What if I just think the RIAA are evil, evil bastards and because I saw the letters "riaa" at some point in my web server logs that I can assume somewhere on their site they've got a stolen image of mine?
If I don't do it in a public way, they can't accuse me of slander or libel, right?
My understanding is that the burden of proof seems to be with the accused to show they're not infringing... So can I force the RIAA to prove that they own the copyright to all their images? If I sent the takedown message to their upstream connectivity provider and demanded they be cut off for violating my copyright, would their bandwidth provider have to comply to avoid a DMCA violation, no matter how absurd the claim?
Uh, yeah our physical dexterity is important, but more important is the goo between our ears.
Humans are adaptable, and it will be a long time before robots get there. Sure the El Salvadorian cleaning woman might miss a few corners, but at least she won't get stuck in them when her program can't adapt to the shadows being different.
Sure, it might not be too hard to build in a trigger that says "WHEN {human goes for a run} DO {30 minute cleaning job}" but properly detecting when someone is going for a run is a hard problem. Do you use RFID tags on their running shoes? What if they're just going outside for a minute to clean the mud off the shoes? Do you do it based on a schedule? What if someone feels lazy? Or what if they come back early because they pull a muscle, are tired, or something?
Now cleaning isn't a big deal, it's something that you can probably abort gracefully, but I can still see all kinds of problems with relying on a robot's judgement. For example, would a robot know enough not to disturb someone who's meditating? Would they be able to distinguish that from sleeping, or from having a heart attack?
Don't get me wrong, having a robot to do some menial chores would be nice, but I think that it's more than just the dexterity of the people being replaced that's at issue.
My mom uses OS X, which does make her life easier, but means things like this don't help much. *shrug* Think I should introduce her to the Terminal?? ;)
Anyhow, I agree that NAT/Firewall is a good solution for many things, but I think that the emphasis should be on firewall rather than NAT. My personal opinion is that a machine which needs 2 way communication with the Internet (which really is most of them) should by default be given a routable IP and then protected by a firewall. That opinion is scary for most network admins, but it just means that they can't be lazy about the firewall.
Regarding my mother: she's good enough to use IE to upload a file using FTP (if I walk her through it). I'd be the one setting up port-forwarding so she can upload the file to me. She would not be able to do SFTP or SCP because there's no friendly GUI for doing it already loaded onto her computer.
I'm not sure what you mean about a single point of reference for networks. If you mean all traffic should flow through a small number of routers, sure. If you mean that most machines should be behind a NAT box, I don't agree. I think they should be behind a firewall, but NAT shouldn't be used instead of a firewall.
The workarounds for many of these problems exist, but they're not solutions, they're workarounds.
Which is easier to type? "ssh box1.mydomain.com" or "ssh nat.mydomain.com -p 10022"? Using a default port for various services is a very handy thing. Most programs assume the default port for a given service, and when they do offer an alternative sometimes you have to dig around in the "advanced" menu to choose it. For a while in Mozilla there was no obvious way to choose a non-standard mail port, for example. If I want to let my mom use a mail server i'd rather just give her a machine name rather than have to make it complicated.
The "use sftp/scp" solution fails the mom test too. If I want to allow my mom to upload pictures of the latest trick the dog learned, I'd like to be able to say "Ok mom, open up Safari. Ok, now type: ftp, colon, double forward slash (the ones that lean to the right mom), then ftp dot mydomain dot com..."
Aside from those difficulties, NAT is just a hella-inelegant solution. The way the TCP/IP and UDP/IP were designed, machines are distinguished by an address, services are distinguished by a port. It's simple, clean, easy to use... NAT breaks that model.
Do most off-the-shelf routers use IPTABLES? If so, that's great, but kinda useless. The configuration interface they offer doesn't let me do what I want to do with IPTABLES. If I can't tweak the settings the way I like then it's essentially not running a firewall as far as I'm concerned.
As for getting hacked through the NAT box, it's easy. Someone port-forwards mail, web and filesharing through the box to their desktop machine. Suddenly any mail exploit is available to the Internet. The user feels comfortable because they've got a firewall, but the "firewall" just forwards all malicious traffic right to the target machine.
The only firewall-like capability that the off-the-shelf NAT routers offer is that ports are not explicitly open like they are on Windows machines. But that's a pretty weak form of protection.
The no-NAT model of communication is so much more straightforward. If I want to get a packet from machine A to machine B, I fill in the appropriate headers, and voila. NAT adds complexity that really doesn't need to be there. It also severely reduces the flexibility of the whole system.
NAT has its places, but it is not the solution to every problem. It is good for allowing web browsing from a non-routable IP address, Anything more complicated than that becomes a bigger and bigger headache. Why bother with the headache, just use a real firewall and make all the address routable!
One big reason they can get away with charging $5 a month for another IP is that there is some scarcity to IP addresses. Once IPV6 comes out I'm 100% sure they won't do this. It would just be absurd for them to pretend that with 6 x 10^23 per square meter of the Earth's surface, they can't provide you with more than 1 address.
Instead, they'll have to come up with a sane way of billing people, based on the amount of bandwidth they use, the frequency with which they use high-priority traffic, or something similar.
I can't believe how many people have commented that there is no need for IPV6 because of NAT. Are you really willing to put up with the limits of NAT when you could give every computer its own routable address?
NAT does a decent job of allowing you to surf the web using a non-routable IP address. For anything more advanced it starts working less and less well.
I, personally have had many troubles with NAT:. Games which don't work properly unless they have huge ranges of ports exposed to the net. Instant messenger apps which fail in subtle ways. Brain-dead DHCP servers which don't properly pass on DNS settings, etc. Add to that the fact that the DHCP/NAT combination in most consumer boxes (like Liksys routers) is awful. You can port-forward from the router to a fixed IP address, but if you're using DHCP, you never know what machine will get that IP address! Even when it does work, there are far too many programs that don't work right when something is on a non-standard port.
In fact, I don't just want each of my machines to have its own routable IP address, I want some machines to have multiple addresses. That way I can host multiple domains on a single machine and truly administer them differently. Right now HTTP sends a host neader so that you can have multiple domains on a single IP and things just work. On the other hand, HTTPS doesn't work like this, so you need a work-around if you want to use HTTPS. The simple truth is that today if you want to have multiple domains using anything other than straight HTTP on a single machine you really do need multiple IPs.
For many people, NAT is a comfort thing. They think they don't have to worry about patching their systems because they're behind a dinky broadband router. Hint: that's security through obscurity. The devices you're buying aren't meant as firewalls, they're meant to let joe-consumer connect two computers to the Internet easily.
The main reason I want IPV6 now is so that my damn Internet provider can't get away with charging extra for extra IP addresses. At the moment they can because they're relatively scarce, but I can't see them getting away with that with IPV6.
If you're content with your buggy whip, that's great. But I personally have a use for at least 20 IPs that NAT won't solve. So don't make a blanket statement that IPV6 isn't necessary. Maybe not for you, but some of us can't wait to have it.
Say you have 5 servers behind a NAT box, all running SSHD. How are you going to set them all up so that they can have incoming connections? Sure, if your NAT box is a good one you can manually set up port forwarding, but that's a pain.
What about strange services like FTP that require 2 different connections? They're always a pain when using NAT, so you need to find some means of dealing with them.
What about games? Say 3 people behind one NAT box want to play the same online game at the same time? What about filesharing applications that want to allow incoming connections?
NAT != firewall. If you're using it like it is, expect to get hacked anyhow. Besides, if you don't want a particular device to be exposed to the IPV6 world, you are free to put it behind a NAT box or a firewall, it just means that the machines that you want to have routable addresses can have them.
I already want more IP addresses. I have a server which hosts websites for various domains, but only uses 1 IP address. That works for HTTP because it sends the hostname as part of the request, but nearly every other protocol doesn't. That means that I can't deal with HTTPS easily, and makes configuration of things like mail much harder. If each host could have its own IP then it would make management and configuration much easier. It would also make it possible to have much more fine-grained control over services and access to various IPs.
I can just picture you when they finally start selling flying cars: "Hello? I already have transportation, it's called a car. In many ways it's better to move slowly in gridlock. At least that way if you have an accident you're only moving 4 miles per hour!"
I blame the cold. ;)
It's Damn Cold.
Granted, there are places like Vancouver which are miserable and soggy, but not Damn Cold in the winter, but the rest of the place is frigid. Even down in Toronto which is North of parts of the US, in the winter it often gets Damn Cold.
Really? That's like this thing I saw once, but it was about bases!
How'd it go... All of your bases do belong to them... Something like that. Anyhow, it was really funny. I wish I knew where I saw that, but it was some obscure site a long time ago. I'm sure nobody remembers it. The strange thing is that I coulda sworn I saw someone wearing a T-shirt with that very same wording on it just the other day! I mean, talk about your coincidences. First someone screws up the translation on a game, and then later someone independantly screws up the translation for something on a T-shirt?
It's really funny how badly these Japanese people mess up our English.
I recently moved into a house with an odd design which made connecting remote computers to the central router difficult using wires. My (iBook) laptop had no problems because it was able to go wireless, so I decided to go with a wireless solution for my Linux desktop. I had no idea what I was getting into.
I figured the easiest solution would be a USB based device, so I looked around and found a table of USB 802.11b driver support under Linux. At first, I went to a local store and bought a device that the table said was supported. I got it home and ugh, it barely worked. Under Linux the driver was awful. To see if it was maybe the card itself I tried it under Windows. It barely worked there, hanging the machine when I tried a throughput test.
So I sent that back and ordered an SMC card which was supposed to have vendor-supplied drivers. I got it home, plugged it in, and tried to install the drivers. No luck. It turns out they were binary-only drivers for specific old RedHat kernels. So I emailed SMC for support. A week later someone got back to me to say that my issue had been escalated. A week after that I got a tar file in the mail. It turns out what I received was simply a forked and slightly modified version of the code on a Sourceforge project. But, surprise, surprise, it didn't work either.
More investigations led me to an alternate driver. Using the mailing list associated with this project, thanks to Joerg Albert I was able to determine that my device has a hardware configuration which is apparently very rare and needs special firmware. Once I got that, after about 3 weeks of effort, I had working 802.11b access under Linux.
At the end of this I'm annoyed with SMC. I am glad that they acknowledge that Linux exists, on the other hand, they were completely useless when it came to actually supporting their product.
In the end I guess I voted well with my dollars, supporting a company that provided minimal efforts to support Linux rather than one that refuses to even admit it exists. But I also provided $$ to a company that is deceptive about their hardware being truly supported under Linux. It was also pretty annoying that to get the thing to work required taking some random firmware file (in the form of a C header file with a massive data array) and randomly trying it to see if it would work.
It's sad when voting with your dollars is like other kinds of voting, where you vote against somebody because they're worse than the person you're voting for.
What's more frightening is that in a month or so I'm scheduled to find a way to get a mini-PCI 802.11b card working for an embedded Linux system running on an ARM processor. If getting a system with a fairly standard connector was this difficult on a desktop machine, I'm dreading trying to get a card with an obscure interface working on non-i386 CPU. Wish me luck.
I think the bigger issue is like the magician's trick of a card force, or the equivalent mental trick. Say you show someone an image that looks vaguely like the McDonalds arches. It's such a huge part of western culture that it's pretty well drilled into people's heads.
I like the concept of choosing a password based on a pattern, but I don't think I'd trust someone else to come up with the pattern.
You know, the whole seeing thing? And there are probably more blind people than there are people with prosopagnosia.
On the other hand, just because a small segment of the population has an odd disorder that prevents them from recognizing faces doesn't mean the system is worthless.
I still think it's a good idea, so long as it isn't the *only* solution.
Your right! Its awful! Their isn't even a verb in they're sentince! There english teacher's must be turning in there grave's! You're's must be proud tho, you right real good.
The question really is how many levels of indirection do you have to be away before you're safe? The people who are the ones making the copyrighted material available are obviously breaking the law. Is the site to which they can post links breaking it? Probably not, unless they are making money off the downloads, or are promoting the site as a means to get illegal stuff, or are involved in choosing what gets posted and what doesn't.
Now what about a news organization that posts a link to the site, saying "... BitTorrent has also come under fire for the amount of material illegally traded using the system. Some sites such as <a href="">ByteMonsoon</a> seem to have almost exclusively illegal .torrent links..."
To me the issue here is that it seems more and more like the decision about whether or not a site stays up isn't about whether it's actually breaking any laws, but rather the relative economic power of the company it pisses off and the person running the site.
Last time the Freenet topic came up on Slashdot I asked about alternative platforms. I was told that the Java implementation is the reference implementation, but that other ones were possible. If 60% of the code is workarounds for JVM bugs, then is it really any use as a reference??
Waitasec, C has objects??
Knows best, maybe. Is objective about the differences? Definitely not. While Java isn't what the creator of C++ might have done to clean up C++ it's pretty clear that the people who designed Java based it on C++. Sadly, that FAQ entry sounds like a grumpy old man who's tired of hearing about the newfangled thing all the kids are talking about.
Try Ruby. I started serious programming with Java too, and I thought it was OO, but then I found how wrong I was. Now there are probably langauges even more OO than Ruby like maybe Smalltalk, but from what I hear Ruby is much easier to get started with than Smalltalk.
Java is really just a cleaned-up version of C++ with the glaringly obvious non-OO aspects removed, the preprocessor thrown out, and pointers hidden. As a compiled language it's not bad at all. As an implementation, it's, er... not much fun.
Just wanted to save a few newbies before they start with Java thinking it is the height of OO.
Evidently you're not a very advanced browser user. I don't mean this as an insult, if Safari does everything you need, great. For me, and many others, despite the bloat, Mozilla has necessary features that other browsers lack.
Let's start with cookie handling. There are a handful of websites that I want to accept cookies from. With Mozilla I can have it prompt me every time a site wants to set a cookie and if the cookies really are necessary I'll accept, otherwise I'll reject. With Safari you don't have that degree of fine-grained control.
Keyword bookmarks. Sure, Safari has the "Google" bar at the top. In mozilla I get the same feature by typing "g Search Terms" in the address bar, and mozilla knows to expand "g" to the full google search URL, placing the search terms in the appropriate place. But I also have keyword searches for IMDB, dictionary.cambridge.edu, google groups, google images, amazon, a w3 validator... In Safari there doesn't appear to be a way to do that.
More complete proxy control: I can say I don't want a proxy for 10.0.0.1/8 and have my entire internal network unproxied. There simply doesn't seem to be a way to do that in Safari.
Anyhow, I could go on and on about the features that Mozilla has that Safari doesn't, but I think I've made my point.
And also, what is the barrier after which sharing a file becomes criminal? For instance, Apple's iTunes allows you to play music that someone else is sharing through their copy of iTunes. Presumably a big, established company like Apple wouldn't release software that is designed to illegally share files so that's on the safe side of the line. How much farther are you allowed to go before the sharing becomes illegal?
Is there any connection between the DoJ and the USPTO? Is the frequency with which they grant patents, and the fact that a lot of those patents end up being challenged in court adding to the workload of the DoJ? Do you think that patent examiners have enough knowledge and training to handle the work they're being asked to perform?
What is the DOJ's position about damages companies claim for copyright infringement? Are they taken as-is, or does somebody verify claims?
For example, say Joan Filetrader has a Metallica MP3 in her shared directory and is eventually prosecuted for copyright violation. It seems like it is standard practice for Metallica's copyright holders to do math like "Well the connection was up for 1 month, and her bandwidth is 8Mb/s, that means that she could have transferred 2,500,000 MB that month, and since the MP3 is 5MB she cost us $10,000,000 in sales."
Does the DOJ review that math and do things like verify what the likely impact on the company's bottom line was?
A semi-automatic rifle can be a hunting rifle, but is a hunting rifle, by definition semi-automatic?
People thought like me in Canada, and Canada became a country without a war. Same with many other former colonies like Australia, and even Hong Kong. None of these places has nowhere near the level of gun violence that the US has. By using violent methods the US became a country a few years faster and has suffered from a much higher level of violence since those days. On the other hand, many other former British colonies gained independence through peaceful means and are much safer places to live these days.
As for shooting at paper targets, isn't that more like training for the real use of a gun? Guns are meant as devices which are shot at a living thing in order to kill it. What fraction of rounds fired at living things was used in a "proper way", and I'll include both hunting and self-defence in this category, but I'll say suicide and accidents are misuse. Oh, and I also notice you mentioned the number of people *killed* by guns, but not the number of people wounded by guns. If you only consider the case where a gun is fired at a living thing, then what are the fraction of "proper uses" vs. misuses?
As for the 100 pound potential rape victim, I agree she should have a means to defend herself, I'm just not convinced guns are the right defence. Afterall, according to stats I've seen, 1 in 6 police officers killed by a gun is shot by their own gun. If highly trained police officers are mostly shot with their own weapons, what are the odds that a marginally-trained potential rape victim will find the gun helpful rather than having it turned against them?
So, in the 1700s, the colonists in what became the US successfully fought off the British because they owned what were, at the time, the most powerful military hardware in the world? Does that mean that today you think that private citizens should own a heavy machine gun or a air-to-surface missile or a tank or an anti-tank-helicopter or even a destroyer?
If someone armed with a knife flips out and decides to kill as many people as he can, he may get a dozen at the most. Running away is enough to keep you safe from a maniac like that. If he's armed with a fully-automatic assault rifle, then he may get a hundred. Even hiding behind a solid object isn't guaranteed protection from that kind of a weapon. Now what if this person has a tank?
I think the average person can be trusted with a handgun. I think only about 1 in 100 will ever do something stupid with it, and most of those "doing something stupid" incidents will either be treatening someone without following through, or something unintentional like not properly locking it up. On the other hand, when someone does misuse a handgun the potential damage is pretty serious. Now replace that handgun with a fully automatic assault rifle with a 30 round clip and JHP ammunition. Even if only 1 in 10,000 people ever misuses that, do you want to be anywhere near them when they do? Or do you think that everyone should walk around with an M-16 strapped to their backs?
I can just picture the world now. Downtown anycity, everybody walks around with an M-16 in their hands. A car cuts off a biker in traffic and the biker starts screaming at the driver for doing something so stupid. The driver gets mad and starts waving his M-16 around. The biker grabs his and points it at the driver. A few bystanders run for cover, but most are so used to confrontations like this they just sigh. Another few people pull out their M-16s and point them at the biker and the driver and say "ok guys, calm down or I'll have to fill you full of lead".
No, until humanity evolves enough so that people don't lose their tempers and make bad decisions, I don't think guns in the hands of marginally-trained people is a good idea.
Oh, and as for that bigoted comment... have you ever been to Alaska? Do you really think that people there need semi-automatic or fully-automatic weapons because bears are constantly trying to attack them?