I didn't mean to imply that's the reason I was using Freenet. I think that the ability to spread files of any sort without consequence is a major advantage.
Large media files are not my primary downloads on BitTorrent either, but it's nice that it's ABLE to handle that as well. I mean, I think I downloaded small video clips, documents, etc from BT over the years just because that's how people chose to post them rather than kill their bandwidth. The Jon Stewart on Crossfire/.'ed torrent is the most recent example I can think of.
I think freenet would be a great medium for distribution of both types of files - no reason to limit something this potentially powerful just based on the original intent.
My immediate concern is the fskers who live in my apartment complex. We use a shared internet connection (300 of us on a dual T-1, ouch) for the entire complex. Now, I can't be the only person who knows that an un-administered network (no kidding) will be rife with people screwing around.
I know that my email travels through routers and ISPs in the clear, but they probably don't know me personally. I'm more worried about my roommates sniffing the traffic coming from my computer to the gateway and reading my email. Or the shithead upstairs who I've called the cops on. You get my point.
Important stuff, duh you've got to be encrypting it from sender-to-receiver. Semi-private stuff, I'd at least like to know my neighbors aren't reading. https://gmail.google.com/gmail is very helpful to me for that purpose. Thanks for pointing that out.
I tried Freenet about 6 months ago and was kind of confused. It seemed incredibly slow and didn't have hardly any content available. Now, has is recently "caught-on" such that more content is available, or are we still talking about the REALLY SLOW and low content network that it was in the past? I agree that the concept is probably the way that p2p will travel in the future. Are there links to files/sites available on Freenet which don't have to be found by searching through Freenet? While I realize an unencrypted list of files might defeat the purpose of the network, it was hard to find content when I used it. I genuinely like the model for p2p that Freenet represents, but definitely would need a concrete reson to switch over from BT.
What Lucas did was to abandon the laws of physics in favor of entertaining the audience. True that sound won't travel through empty or very sparse space, but you could STILL have interesting sound effects. Every time something blows up, as the shock-wave passes the viewer you would expect to hear *something* in real life.
Now, yes it's much more interesting to hear the explosion as it happens, even though in real life you'd certainly have to deal with the shock-wave carried sound or (assuming space in this far-off galaxy is full of air) a huge delay between the time you see the explosion and the time it takes for the sound of that explosion to reach you.
The physics of movies has, i fear, spoiled the expectations of all future space travelers. Sound in outer space? Blasters? Deflector shields? And my biggest peeve: 2-D shock waves (a la praxis)? That's some FUNKY distribution of mass there.
One thing I've noticed is that southerners, in general, tend to have a much higher "emotional IQ" so to speak than people from a lot of other areas in the US. It goes with the thank you's, simple courtesies, politeness, etc. The code of conduct which allows many southerners to get by just perfectly is to be honest, polite, and easy-going until confronted.
The problem may be that that code just isn't practiced *in the same way* by people in other parts of the country, let alone the world. Additionally, all the stereotypes we have about southerners color everything that you do. Being polite? What a bumpkin. Holding the door? What a hick. Some of the nicest people I have ever met in my life are Southerners, and the the way they get along with other people (and me) is a big part of my perceptions. To a person from Paris or NYC, however, the same politeness could be perceived as bucolic as a result of their own stereotypes.
Can't argue with your book, diffusion in sparse fluids like our atmosphere can indeed occur quite rapidly even for large volumes of gas. Thousands of years should be plenty of time. It's diffusion in a denser fluid such as water that I'd worry about. True that ocean currents, etc, could circulate molecules in addition to the diffusion you'd otherwise only see, but I think equating the "wavy-hand" math for air to a model in water is a bit of a stretch.
You're absolutely correct. There would be nothing to stop you from writing a similar application. How many of us have cron jobs to update the slocate db nightly/weekly? I know it makes my life easier. And to find a file I don't have to be logged in as root, as locate can be run by my main account.
Clearly, both slocate and google's desktop search can provide access to information that's already on your computer, but on a single-user or family system (the target of this piece of software) it comes in very useful.
Security? Intelligence? No! I'm waiting for California's dumbass legislature to protect me by passing a law making it illegal to search my computer using an application!
As far as I know, it's not a holiday for most people (nor for us college students), but your employer is legally obligated to give you a chance to go and vote if your work shift would otherwise prevent it.
One of the unexpected results of elections is that (at least in my state), you can't buy alcohol while the polls are open. I guess the temperance movement made a lot of headway in my state back in the day.
If we're talking about emergency service access, I think that the way e911 was mandated for new cellular telephones might be the way to go. Your service must connect you with an emergency operator, and you pay a monthly tax to support that service which is small compared to the overall bill.
Now, clearly that requires some regulation, but perhaps just as a requirement of a feature/service rather than as overarching regulation of VOIP. I doubt if the government will be able to stop with just that one regulation, though.
It could be argued that the election in 1984 had high gain?... hehe. Look at the popular votes, though. Across ~50 (?) presidential elections, it's atypical for the votes to be ~45% for both candidates.
If you look at the history of presidential elections, I think you'll find that this recent unpleasantness (VERY close percentages) has not characterized past elections. Reagan won all but 1 (yes, that's right, ONE) state's electoral votes when he was up for re-election.
Don't take my word for it. BBCNews has a nice little applet which lets you look at all of the past electoral college breakdowns for our past elections.
Now, the election counting definitely worries me, and I agree with a past poster that the more you know about computers, the more you worry that they control the receipt, storage, and counting of our votes. If you ask me, democracy is already easy enough to steal with money. Why we're making it easier to steal with simple computer hacking is beyond me. At least we all know politicians are dishonest. Until now, we probably had SOME faith in the voting system, as such.
Well, certainly it's useful to switch workspaces, but I agree that a button on the desktop is a klunky way to do it. Gimme a shortcut key! Oh wait, there is? Why is there a stupid paperclip then? As a sidenote, I did try out fluxbox, and I've got to say that it seems just about as good as wmaker. In any event, let's give new switchers a windows-like touchy-feely desktop, but let us change our desktop to non-windows conceptualized GUIs when we like. Windowmaker and Fluxbox goes a long way.
Certainly you have a point - the world does not consist of black and white issues, but Bush sometimes gives the impression he thinks it does. At the same time, you have to limit yourself somewhat. You don't need to understand 16million colored positions in a country that has a clustering of people around the light grey and another group of people clustered around the dark grey. I think Kerry does a better job of understanding the issues, and I think Bush does a better job of blindly recycling speeches.
If I remember how to do this correctly, anyway. You'll have your very own mirror of images. Of course, you'll also have an intensive task running every 5 minutes which takes a fair amount of disk space...
You're totally correct. What I meant to say (but my parent poster screwed it up) was that I wish there was an EastAsia out there we could be at war with. The US is definitely the epitome of Oceania.
Why do we have to follow the conceptual desktop UI that MS has laid out? Linux should follow the path to what makes using it easier. A single button under which everything is nested seems unnecessary - there have to be better ideas out there.
In the meantime, I've dropped Gnome on my FC2 box in favor of Windowmaker. It's much much faster, eats many fewer resources, and completely avoids the whole "taskbar" concept. And on the plus-side, my roommates are no longer able to use my computer to do anything because they don't know how to work windowmaker. It's just a blank screen with some funky icons and a paperclip!
You cannot have a war on an inanimate object. Let me say that again: You cannot have a war on an inanimate object. That goes for drugs. Additionally: You cannot have a war against a tactic. "Terrorism" (of the sort seen in Iraq today) is a tactic which would have previously been covered by the adjective "guerilla" fighting.
Great how we let 3,000 people dying in a country of 260,000,000 eliminate some of our liberty that we're certain to never get back.
The concentration of power has been a society-destroying force in every major historic society. Think Roman Empire.
I think i'd prefer it if there WAS some "oceania" out there we could be at perpetual war with: at least it has borders which are easily defined. Terror is an excuse to use the military worldwide without checks and then to come after the citizens of your own country when they question the government's efforts to fight the terror.
It wasn't in my whitelist by default - I clicked the XPI download in the article summary ("update" didn't work). (linux, x386, 1.0PR.tar.gz release).
Anyway, all I'm saying is why isn't there a better method for download verification than just the server of origin? I can spoof DNS replies that my computer is mozilla.org, send the file, etc.
Yes, it would be hard to do, but not for a skilled attacker with a specific opponent.
XPI's should require some sort of signature for install. (As far as I know, they do not). It wouldn't limit XPI installs to mozilla.org exclusively, but it would let you know that the file you're installing was in fact approved by the website you're installing from and hasn't been tampered with (e.g. by a person spoofing DNS requests on your own network).
I can spoof mozilla.org on my local network. Adding an entire domain to a whitelist for software installation would be a dumb dumb idea. I like what certain linux distros do for updates: accept GNUPG signatures for official updates. Firefox should have signed updates from known "releasers" at mozilla.org.
I wonder why that's not the default mechanism for updates in Firefox. Is there some obvious reason that I'm overlooking?
Key word: "informed" foreigners. We don't even have informed people in the USA about our own system (Jay-walking on the Tonight Show gives good examples of this near election-time). I didn't mean to limit that criticism of people not understanding the system to only people outside the USA. There are ignorant people everywhere.
Now, to reiterate, our voting system is flawed (and on its way to becoming more so), but it mostly works (especially at the local level) and has worked reasonably well for 200 years.
Is it broken in many ways? Yes. Corruption, spending, party-systems, etc are all serious problems. Eventually with some help from "forners" like the OSCE and UN, hopefully our citizens will demand change in the way we run things.
For now, I think the world needs to understand that to a lot of Americans, vote monitoring from abroad is insulting and may postpone just the changes we need.
They're not saying the OSCE (or whatever the hell they call themselves) would be required to "certify" the results, it's just the world reacting in a certain way to the 2000 presidential election.
A previous poster made a good point. All those who were surprised about the way the 2000 election went never really understood our election process in the beginning. Most other countries don't even bother trying to understand WHY we do things the way we do. There are lots of good reasons for keeping the electoral college, for example.
To the rest of the world: The USA is not a democracy. Shocker, huh? We're a democratic republic.
My main point: We'll still run our own elections, our own monitoring groups will still be in charge of spotting irregularities (Dead folks on voter rolls in Chicago, etc), but this is Europe trying to embarass the USA. It's popular right now with such anti-American sentiment worldwide. Don't get your knickers in a twist about this.
Moderators, the parent isn't flamebait. Moderate on content, not your personal ideology. It'll attract attention and comments, but in the same way discussions about copyrights do. Come on.
Clearly the poster was talking about Paris, Texas! Leave it to a world-centric poster such as yourself to assume he was talking about the Paris in frog-land!
I'd mod you up, as I've noticed the same thing, except I decided to post in this forum in multiple places instead.
I think moderation would be a good thing to enable and disable on a per-article basis. Clearly politics.slashdot.org is a mess because the Right can't handle not controlling a media outlet (Ok, I'm joking, don't mod me down AGAIN!!)
A lot of my friends tend to be college students who are mostly liberal or left-leaning. Interestingly, the only college students I know who are more conservative and support Bush are self-described hicks and rednecks. I swear, my conservative friends ALL use those same adjectives to describe themselves. Now, I'm sure there are plenty of conservative college students out there, but the first-hand experience is sometimes englightening also.
As for no work on slashcode, I agree. I think there needs to be, though. Slashdot has more readers than the software was designed to conceptually deal with, hence moderation abuse. Why not an approval rating system of some sort (meta-mod with teeth) that can un-do a moderator's work, perhaps for a more select very very high karma group of slashdotters? True, real Karma would have to come back instead of this "Excellent" shit, but would that be so bad?
For the moment, can we just turn moderation off in Politics.Slashdot.Org? Or at least promise us that the category will disappear after the elections?
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't mean to imply that's the reason I was using Freenet. I think that the ability to spread files of any sort without consequence is a major advantage.
/.'ed torrent is the most recent example I can think of.
Large media files are not my primary downloads on BitTorrent either, but it's nice that it's ABLE to handle that as well. I mean, I think I downloaded small video clips, documents, etc from BT over the years just because that's how people chose to post them rather than kill their bandwidth. The Jon Stewart on Crossfire
I think freenet would be a great medium for distribution of both types of files - no reason to limit something this potentially powerful just based on the original intent.
My immediate concern is the fskers who live in my apartment complex. We use a shared internet connection (300 of us on a dual T-1, ouch) for the entire complex. Now, I can't be the only person who knows that an un-administered network (no kidding) will be rife with people screwing around.
I know that my email travels through routers and ISPs in the clear, but they probably don't know me personally. I'm more worried about my roommates sniffing the traffic coming from my computer to the gateway and reading my email. Or the shithead upstairs who I've called the cops on. You get my point.
Important stuff, duh you've got to be encrypting it from sender-to-receiver. Semi-private stuff, I'd at least like to know my neighbors aren't reading. https://gmail.google.com/gmail is very helpful to me for that purpose. Thanks for pointing that out.
I tried Freenet about 6 months ago and was kind of confused. It seemed incredibly slow and didn't have hardly any content available. Now, has is recently "caught-on" such that more content is available, or are we still talking about the REALLY SLOW and low content network that it was in the past?
I agree that the concept is probably the way that p2p will travel in the future.
Are there links to files/sites available on Freenet which don't have to be found by searching through Freenet? While I realize an unencrypted list of files might defeat the purpose of the network, it was hard to find content when I used it.
I genuinely like the model for p2p that Freenet represents, but definitely would need a concrete reson to switch over from BT.
What Lucas did was to abandon the laws of physics in favor of entertaining the audience. True that sound won't travel through empty or very sparse space, but you could STILL have interesting sound effects. Every time something blows up, as the shock-wave passes the viewer you would expect to hear *something* in real life.
Now, yes it's much more interesting to hear the explosion as it happens, even though in real life you'd certainly have to deal with the shock-wave carried sound or (assuming space in this far-off galaxy is full of air) a huge delay between the time you see the explosion and the time it takes for the sound of that explosion to reach you.
The physics of movies has, i fear, spoiled the expectations of all future space travelers. Sound in outer space? Blasters? Deflector shields? And my biggest peeve: 2-D shock waves (a la praxis)? That's some FUNKY distribution of mass there.
One thing I've noticed is that southerners, in general, tend to have a much higher "emotional IQ" so to speak than people from a lot of other areas in the US. It goes with the thank you's, simple courtesies, politeness, etc. The code of conduct which allows many southerners to get by just perfectly is to be honest, polite, and easy-going until confronted.
The problem may be that that code just isn't practiced *in the same way* by people in other parts of the country, let alone the world. Additionally, all the stereotypes we have about southerners color everything that you do. Being polite? What a bumpkin. Holding the door? What a hick. Some of the nicest people I have ever met in my life are Southerners, and the the way they get along with other people (and me) is a big part of my perceptions. To a person from Paris or NYC, however, the same politeness could be perceived as bucolic as a result of their own stereotypes.
Can't argue with your book, diffusion in sparse fluids like our atmosphere can indeed occur quite rapidly even for large volumes of gas. Thousands of years should be plenty of time. It's diffusion in a denser fluid such as water that I'd worry about. True that ocean currents, etc, could circulate molecules in addition to the diffusion you'd otherwise only see, but I think equating the "wavy-hand" math for air to a model in water is a bit of a stretch.
You're absolutely correct. There would be nothing to stop you from writing a similar application. How many of us have cron jobs to update the slocate db nightly/weekly? I know it makes my life easier. And to find a file I don't have to be logged in as root, as locate can be run by my main account.
Clearly, both slocate and google's desktop search can provide access to information that's already on your computer, but on a single-user or family system (the target of this piece of software) it comes in very useful.
Security? Intelligence? No! I'm waiting for California's dumbass legislature to protect me by passing a law making it illegal to search my computer using an application!
As far as I know, it's not a holiday for most people (nor for us college students), but your employer is legally obligated to give you a chance to go and vote if your work shift would otherwise prevent it.
One of the unexpected results of elections is that (at least in my state), you can't buy alcohol while the polls are open. I guess the temperance movement made a lot of headway in my state back in the day.
If we're talking about emergency service access, I think that the way e911 was mandated for new cellular telephones might be the way to go. Your service must connect you with an emergency operator, and you pay a monthly tax to support that service which is small compared to the overall bill.
Now, clearly that requires some regulation, but perhaps just as a requirement of a feature/service rather than as overarching regulation of VOIP. I doubt if the government will be able to stop with just that one regulation, though.
It could be argued that the election in 1984 had high gain?... hehe.
Look at the popular votes, though. Across ~50 (?) presidential elections, it's atypical for the votes to be ~45% for both candidates.
If you look at the history of presidential elections, I think you'll find that this recent unpleasantness (VERY close percentages) has not characterized past elections. Reagan won all but 1 (yes, that's right, ONE) state's electoral votes when he was up for re-election.
Don't take my word for it. BBCNews has a nice little applet which lets you look at all of the past electoral college breakdowns for our past elections.
Now, the election counting definitely worries me, and I agree with a past poster that the more you know about computers, the more you worry that they control the receipt, storage, and counting of our votes. If you ask me, democracy is already easy enough to steal with money. Why we're making it easier to steal with simple computer hacking is beyond me. At least we all know politicians are dishonest. Until now, we probably had SOME faith in the voting system, as such.
Well, certainly it's useful to switch workspaces, but I agree that a button on the desktop is a klunky way to do it. Gimme a shortcut key! Oh wait, there is? Why is there a stupid paperclip then?
As a sidenote, I did try out fluxbox, and I've got to say that it seems just about as good as wmaker. In any event, let's give new switchers a windows-like touchy-feely desktop, but let us change our desktop to non-windows conceptualized GUIs when we like. Windowmaker and Fluxbox goes a long way.
Certainly you have a point - the world does not consist of black and white issues, but Bush sometimes gives the impression he thinks it does. At the same time, you have to limit yourself somewhat. You don't need to understand 16million colored positions in a country that has a clustering of people around the light grey and another group of people clustered around the dark grey. I think Kerry does a better job of understanding the issues, and I think Bush does a better job of blindly recycling speeches.
You'll have your very own mirror of images. Of course, you'll also have an intensive task running every 5 minutes which takes a fair amount of disk space...
You're totally correct. What I meant to say (but my parent poster screwed it up) was that I wish there was an EastAsia out there we could be at war with. The US is definitely the epitome of Oceania.
Why do we have to follow the conceptual desktop UI that MS has laid out? Linux should follow the path to what makes using it easier. A single button under which everything is nested seems unnecessary - there have to be better ideas out there.
In the meantime, I've dropped Gnome on my FC2 box in favor of Windowmaker. It's much much faster, eats many fewer resources, and completely avoids the whole "taskbar" concept. And on the plus-side, my roommates are no longer able to use my computer to do anything because they don't know how to work windowmaker. It's just a blank screen with some funky icons and a paperclip!
You cannot have a war on an inanimate object. Let me say that again: You cannot have a war on an inanimate object. That goes for drugs. Additionally: You cannot have a war against a tactic. "Terrorism" (of the sort seen in Iraq today) is a tactic which would have previously been covered by the adjective "guerilla" fighting.
Great how we let 3,000 people dying in a country of 260,000,000 eliminate some of our liberty that we're certain to never get back.
The concentration of power has been a society-destroying force in every major historic society. Think Roman Empire.
I think i'd prefer it if there WAS some "oceania" out there we could be at perpetual war with: at least it has borders which are easily defined. Terror is an excuse to use the military worldwide without checks and then to come after the citizens of your own country when they question the government's efforts to fight the terror.
It wasn't in my whitelist by default - I clicked the XPI download in the article summary ("update" didn't work). (linux, x386, 1.0PR .tar.gz release).
Anyway, all I'm saying is why isn't there a better method for download verification than just the server of origin? I can spoof DNS replies that my computer is mozilla.org, send the file, etc.
Yes, it would be hard to do, but not for a skilled attacker with a specific opponent.
XPI's should require some sort of signature for install. (As far as I know, they do not). It wouldn't limit XPI installs to mozilla.org exclusively, but it would let you know that the file you're installing was in fact approved by the website you're installing from and hasn't been tampered with (e.g. by a person spoofing DNS requests on your own network).
I can spoof mozilla.org on my local network. Adding an entire domain to a whitelist for software installation would be a dumb dumb idea. I like what certain linux distros do for updates: accept GNUPG signatures for official updates. Firefox should have signed updates from known "releasers" at mozilla.org.
I wonder why that's not the default mechanism for updates in Firefox. Is there some obvious reason that I'm overlooking?
Key word: "informed" foreigners. We don't even have informed people in the USA about our own system (Jay-walking on the Tonight Show gives good examples of this near election-time). I didn't mean to limit that criticism of people not understanding the system to only people outside the USA. There are ignorant people everywhere.
Now, to reiterate, our voting system is flawed (and on its way to becoming more so), but it mostly works (especially at the local level) and has worked reasonably well for 200 years.
Is it broken in many ways? Yes. Corruption, spending, party-systems, etc are all serious problems. Eventually with some help from "forners" like the OSCE and UN, hopefully our citizens will demand change in the way we run things.
For now, I think the world needs to understand that to a lot of Americans, vote monitoring from abroad is insulting and may postpone just the changes we need.
They're not saying the OSCE (or whatever the hell they call themselves) would be required to "certify" the results, it's just the world reacting in a certain way to the 2000 presidential election.
A previous poster made a good point. All those who were surprised about the way the 2000 election went never really understood our election process in the beginning. Most other countries don't even bother trying to understand WHY we do things the way we do. There are lots of good reasons for keeping the electoral college, for example.
To the rest of the world: The USA is not a democracy. Shocker, huh? We're a democratic republic.
My main point: We'll still run our own elections, our own monitoring groups will still be in charge of spotting irregularities (Dead folks on voter rolls in Chicago, etc), but this is Europe trying to embarass the USA. It's popular right now with such anti-American sentiment worldwide. Don't get your knickers in a twist about this.
Moderators, the parent isn't flamebait. Moderate on content, not your personal ideology. It'll attract attention and comments, but in the same way discussions about copyrights do. Come on.
Clearly the poster was talking about Paris, Texas! Leave it to a world-centric poster such as yourself to assume he was talking about the Paris in frog-land!
I'd mod you up, as I've noticed the same thing, except I decided to post in this forum in multiple places instead.
I think moderation would be a good thing to enable and disable on a per-article basis. Clearly politics.slashdot.org is a mess because the Right can't handle not controlling a media outlet (Ok, I'm joking, don't mod me down AGAIN!!)
A lot of my friends tend to be college students who are mostly liberal or left-leaning. Interestingly, the only college students I know who are more conservative and support Bush are self-described hicks and rednecks. I swear, my conservative friends ALL use those same adjectives to describe themselves. Now, I'm sure there are plenty of conservative college students out there, but the first-hand experience is sometimes englightening also.
As for no work on slashcode, I agree. I think there needs to be, though. Slashdot has more readers than the software was designed to conceptually deal with, hence moderation abuse. Why not an approval rating system of some sort (meta-mod with teeth) that can un-do a moderator's work, perhaps for a more select very very high karma group of slashdotters? True, real Karma would have to come back instead of this "Excellent" shit, but would that be so bad?
For the moment, can we just turn moderation off in Politics.Slashdot.Org? Or at least promise us that the category will disappear after the elections?
Bishop: "Give him head?"
Whistler: "Be a beacon?"