I agree with this poster. Let's use the far-too-oft-used 'car' metaphor that we all love to use in the west.
(I assume the person is caught in the following scenarios, btw.)
What happens if you park illegally? A warning, you pay a certain fee, you can repeat offend as much as you like within reason (depends on country blah blah blah).
And.. if you are caught *moderately* speeding? Bigger fine, perhaps a point or two on the licence, bigger warning fits bigger misdemeanour. Repeat offence might work once, but not unlimited times...
And.. running a red light / speeding excessively. OK, now you've crossed the line, say most (all?) countries' jurisdictions. Now you are a criminal and punishments are appropriate. And offence in this area is taken dead seriously, ranging from your licence being taken away, huge fines, through imprisonment as well as other 'criminal' treatments, like psychiatric analysis (like here in Germany). Repeat offence is not an option.
The punishment should fit the crime certes, and here an appropriate punishment would be: abuse your bandwidth, have it restricted/taken away/banned from owning bandwidth.
Trouble is, no-one owns the Internet, and establishing what crime actually is on the Internet is terribly hard. Most people talk about illegally distributing LEGAL material but what about downloading ILLEGAL material for example? If I download bootlegs, exactly what crime am I committing? Or if I download hardcore porn in a country where it's not allowed? One could argue that in both cases I am more exposing a problem with the law as it stands than actually breaking any law.
And as one poster said, no-one can stop the deluge now, it'd be useless to try. You cannot sue 30 million people. For that, you need a unified Internet with controls, exactly like there exists a unified road system with controls in every western country. But, at the moment, no-one can tell me what I can download in Germany FROM England, in exactly the same way as when I go back to England from Germany I can swap a driving licence chock full with penalty points for a shiny new virgin driving licence, since Germany and the UK do not swap offence data.
And this is with insecure P2P. Wait for P2P to become truly anonymous + secure, and the RIAA and others will be finally checkmated.
Just my relatively useless 0.02
Oh, and about hands-chopping-off for shoplifting. OK, they didn't do that in England, but you DID get all all-expenses-paid one-way trip to Australia with a very good chance you'd die of suffocation/dehydration/disease on the way.:)
Blake's 7. Effortlessly original, always witty, and as realistic s they come. Paul Darrow's 'gritty' is a good description. Even the follow-up series after Tarrant and Slave 1 took the helm was fantastic. I can still remember the excitement, waiting as the credits rolled for 'A Question of Sport' and THAT theme music began:
Da da DAH da DAH, da da DAH da DAH. DAH da da, da da DAH da da.
The series managed to convey decent sci-fi without resorting to 'aliens are humans with funny heads'-tactics (hello Babylon 5) and with plotlines which were consistently engaging and original (not the usual Star Trek 'land on planet, shag attractive female of the species and then kill all enemies'.
What I'd like to know, is wtf happened to this 3D web thing that was supposed to be oh-so-easy with the a bit of VRML and a CosmoPlayer and so forth?
Any news on *that* one, dudes -- or should I re-post on "Ask Slashdot":
Dear Slashdot,
I have just seen Johnny Mnemonic, finished
reading Neuromancer for the 83rd time, and am
now ploughing through Tad Williams' Otherland
stuff. I hear that the Web has just had its
tenth birthday, but it remains resolutely flat.
When the fuck is the 3D version gonna come
along?
Instead, we try to 'update' TV so that it can basically do what a browser already does better. Why not the other way around? I don't wanna browser my TV, I wanna 'watch' the web!!
Wow, if one could be modded-up to +6, this post would get it.
One could go further and say Exchange is the *only* reason M$ has so much power in corporate.
*Not* Windows. How much usage do users make of their freakin' OS (Win 2K, etc.) in the workplace? Most of my users have problems when I tell them that they can search through their files using windows explorer. Or that drag-and-drop works in other programs other than Word. Or that double-clicking on URLS in IE is not strictly necessary...
But... ask the same 'lusers' about e-mail and groupware, and they know what they want, how they want it, where they would like a link to their calendar, and *exactly* how many seconds they are prepared to wait before their mail gets sent, with attachments included. One sometimes forgets, in one's tech-arrogance: the guys who use outlook for email and calendaring every day know one hell of a lot more about the program than the average sysadmin, and therefore they are not particularly pleased when said sysadmin whips away Exchange support, only because he would like to try out some cool OpenSource server software -- that does not have calendaring support.
We have floundered around for ages in our firm trying to replace Outlook (email+calendar) and it is next to impossible. Sure, you can use tools like TUTOS (http:://www.tutos.org) for tech-savvy programmers who do task-based programming, but try finding anything the average corp. key account manager sees as a viable alternative to Outlook, and you have a very hard job indeed. Try finding this in OpenSource, and you have an impossible task. (The only thing my key account guys like about Mozilla, which I have forced on them, is that their spam gets blocked:) )
That's why the savviest guys now offer Exchange replacements rather than Outlook replacements. Those will come, but it's early days yet.
Whether you can take 1K or 64K of notes is not going to make much difference when your ability to *understand* those same notes is not developed.
Although I could be accused of generalising across subject boundaries, I would honestly ask, is it really important what *quantity* of notes one can take? If the lecture is that detailed, then why is there no hand-out to aid students in their comprehension of the lecture?
And for those who want a *really* good example of note-taking (pardon the pun) without any recourse to so much as a pencil, check out this.
It may come as something of a shock to you all, but the USA is officially metric.
Here are two key phrases for those who can't be bothered to click on the links:
"In 1893, Congress adopted the metric standards, the official meter and kilogram bars supplied by BIPM, as the standards for all measurement in the U.S. This didn't mean that metric units had to be used, but since that time the customary units have been defined officially in terms of metric standards. Currently, the foot is legally defined to be exactly 0.3048 meter and the pound is legally defined to equal exactly 453.59237 grams."
and
"What the U.S. has failed to do is to restrict or prohibit the use of traditional units in areas touching the ordinary citizen: construction, real estate transactions, retail trade, and education."
Well duh! Officially metric, but the traditional units are used in education. Small wonder things aren't changing.:)
A great point, and one also made by Bruce Schneier (author of *Practical Cryptography* of course). His point that 'security isn't a technical problem, it's a people problem' is one to consider before one charges off down the road to becoming a networking god.
All the networking experience in the world is not going to be of much use if the security *policy* in your company/org. is not well thought-out and implemented, and THAT is another ball game entirely.
Hence the importance of experience: knowing how people work in an environment that is supposed to be secure is just as important as -- no, scratch that, *more* important than -- securing it in the first place.
Right with you there, man. Never seen (and 'seen' here does mean I watched more than a couple of episodes for those who jump on me for judging it after 5 minutes' worth) a crapper show to be honest.
Script is laughable, acting is so wooden I'm surprised that Ms. Gellar & Co. don't sprout leaves (and if you want to see more examples of her so-called talent then I highly recommend the even worse remake of Les Liaisons Dangereuses she 'starred' in), and they borrow the oh-so (oh and here I'm gonna get really flamed) innovative idea from Babylon 5 of making any kind of monster (or alien) simply have a funny-coloured head to indicate its non-human status.
Two things that come to mind (depends on the site and what they currently support technically browser- and serverside):
-- use front-end technologies that prohibit or at least inhibit the workings of server-side scraperbots. examples: flash, javascript.
-- use sessions to control how often a given client can access prices, e.g. 'a 10 and you're out' rule: most 'ordinary' users have no need to view a certain page of prices more than X times in a browser session. here, cookies provide even more protection since some scrapers won't be set up to handle them.
both systems may have their drawbacks (no flash allowed), weaknesses (against sessions i can simply make multiple logins), but i've incorporated similar systems on sites for clients with prices that need a sensible level of protection (i.e. one shouldn't be able to grab the whole damn price list with a one-page GET e.g.). guarding against SQL injection is also something which is often forgotten.
"Why is using a scraper robot so different from, say, walking into Best Buy with a handheld and recording product pricing manually?"
Well duh-to-the-nth! It might be a *teensy* bit faster using a robot as compared to, uh, manual input. Hence the word, uh, 'robot'.
<heavy sarcasm> In other news: "Consumer surprise as Consultant proves buying on the web *can* be faster than going out of your house, taking money from the bank, catching the bus, entering a store, choosing a product, walking to the counter and paying for it, waiting for the bus again..."
"The PAO service module of the Soyuz failed to separate after retrofire. While this had occurred on various Vostok and Voskhod flights, and on one Mercury flight..."
Whoa there -- the Soviets flew to Mercury??!?!!
I knew they had a lot of space experience but that's outtasite.
oh i don't know -- as long as your country doesn't have any obvious terorrist connections or vast natural resources.
bush seems to be doing exactly that kind of 'beta-testing' of late. and with success: i guess "new world order version 2.0" is about ready for public release...
interesting timing: so bush's private war against saddam (for any one of a mutating number of reasons) is also "the last chance of a democracy to effect change upon a corrupt government" by trying to "physically remove them"?
Dude, great point. I had nearly forgotten that crap ever existed. It was, however, a great example of co-ordination of print and digital media. One mistake in the liner notes = no game to play.
Quite a world apart from my copy of Caesar III, which was obviously typeset by some disgruntled summer-holidays wage-slave who managed to slip the immortal phrase 'what is this shit?' into a description of the buildings in the back of the manual.
Just a few extra observations to your excellent post (your comment "There are, of course, a host of other MUA's for Windows. I've tried most of them. Most stink" is DEAD-on), from the perspective of the IT Head of a small online studio (= me, team = 30 people)
Eudora, although relatively customise-friendly (good support for LDAP, signatures, can be installed on networked drives, etc.) is not fantastically stable, and whilst *allegedly* conforming to MBOX standards, actually saves its HTML messages in a format which, e.g. Mozilla cannot interpret. So switching from Eudora to Mozilla is.. fun (conversion path Eudora -> Outlook Express -> Mozilla works, here using OE only as a conversion tool, funnily enough). We have used here however, since it doesn't attract viruses and has the network, LDAP and signature support mentioned above.
Mulberry does not support signatures which can be read from an external file. For someone like myself, who would like to globally set a signature for everyone in the company, this is an instant no-no for Mulberry. Even though Mulberry is very good with IMAP.
The! Bat! has dodgy IMAP support. Maybe better since I last looked.
Plus: all clients cost money, and/or are not available in German, which is the language used in my company. For me, this is an important point: I know Slashdot is no commercial forum, but consider shelling-out 30 x $1200 for The Bat or $900 for Mulberry. With that money I can buy a decent server anti-virus for our Mail Server (RAV for example) and standardise on Outlook Express. OK, one stills takes risks with OE, but it puts it in perspective. And -- one should not forget that some people do NOT speak English as a native language, and being unable to purchase Mulberry with German interface is ALSO, for me, a reason why I wouldn't buy it.
Mozilla, in comparison, costs nothing, supports IMAP OK, is available in German, and what's more, has a fantastic anti-spam tool, which, in daily usage over the last few weeks, traps 95% of all spam I receive.
Which all boils down to: if Minotaur is based on Mozilla and is fast and feature-rich, I'll be the first in line to test it out.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with this poster. Let's use the far-too-oft-used 'car' metaphor that we all love to use in the west.
.. if you are caught *moderately* speeding? Bigger fine, perhaps a point or two on the licence, bigger warning fits bigger misdemeanour. Repeat offence might work once, but not unlimited times...
.. running a red light / speeding excessively. OK, now you've crossed the line, say most (all?) countries' jurisdictions. Now you are a criminal and punishments are appropriate. And offence in this area is taken dead seriously, ranging from your licence being taken away, huge fines, through imprisonment as well as other 'criminal' treatments, like psychiatric analysis (like here in Germany). Repeat offence is not an option.
:)
(I assume the person is caught in the following scenarios, btw.)
What happens if you park illegally? A warning, you pay a certain fee, you can repeat offend as much as you like within reason (depends on country blah blah blah).
And
And
The punishment should fit the crime certes, and here an appropriate punishment would be: abuse your bandwidth, have it restricted/taken away/banned from owning bandwidth.
Trouble is, no-one owns the Internet, and establishing what crime actually is on the Internet is terribly hard. Most people talk about illegally distributing LEGAL material but what about downloading ILLEGAL material for example? If I download bootlegs, exactly what crime am I committing? Or if I download hardcore porn in a country where it's not allowed? One could argue that in both cases I am more exposing a problem with the law as it stands than actually breaking any law.
And as one poster said, no-one can stop the deluge now, it'd be useless to try. You cannot sue 30 million people. For that, you need a unified Internet with controls, exactly like there exists a unified road system with controls in every western country. But, at the moment, no-one can tell me what I can download in Germany FROM England, in exactly the same way as when I go back to England from Germany I can swap a driving licence chock full with penalty points for a shiny new virgin driving licence, since Germany and the UK do not swap offence data.
And this is with insecure P2P. Wait for P2P to become truly anonymous + secure, and the RIAA and others will be finally checkmated.
Just my relatively useless 0.02
Oh, and about hands-chopping-off for shoplifting. OK, they didn't do that in England, but you DID get all all-expenses-paid one-way trip to Australia with a very good chance you'd die of suffocation/dehydration/disease on the way.
Nalfy
Blake's 7. Effortlessly original, always witty, and as realistic s they come. Paul Darrow's 'gritty' is a good description. Even the follow-up series after Tarrant and Slave 1 took the helm was fantastic. I can still remember the excitement, waiting as the credits rolled for 'A Question of Sport' and THAT theme music began:
Da da DAH da DAH, da da DAH da DAH. DAH da da, da da DAH da da.
The series managed to convey decent sci-fi without resorting to 'aliens are humans with funny heads'-tactics (hello Babylon 5) and with plotlines which were consistently engaging and original (not the usual Star Trek 'land on planet, shag attractive female of the species and then kill all enemies'.
And what other series had
Thanx,
Nalfy.
Wow.
Now I not only have another argument against smokers, but one against bottled water drinkers, who I also hold in low regard.
Super!
Thanx,
Nalfy
What I'd like to know, is wtf happened to this 3D web thing that was supposed to be oh-so-easy with the a bit of VRML and a CosmoPlayer and so forth?
Any news on *that* one, dudes -- or should I re-post on "Ask Slashdot":
Dear Slashdot,
I have just seen Johnny Mnemonic, finished
reading Neuromancer for the 83rd time, and am
now ploughing through Tad Williams' Otherland
stuff. I hear that the Web has just had its
tenth birthday, but it remains resolutely flat.
When the fuck is the 3D version gonna come
along?
Instead, we try to 'update' TV so that it can basically do what a browser already does better. Why not the other way around? I don't wanna browser my TV, I wanna 'watch' the web!!
Just my 0.02
Nalfy
P.S. And no, I don't mean crap like Browse3D
But not for us. One cannot *link* anything. How is this supposed to track things efficiently?
Just my 2 -Cents,
Nalfy
Wow, if one could be modded-up to +6, this post would get it.
... ask the same 'lusers' about e-mail and groupware, and they know what they want, how they want it, where they would like a link to their calendar, and *exactly* how many seconds they are prepared to wait before their mail gets sent, with attachments included. One sometimes forgets, in one's tech-arrogance: the guys who use outlook for email and calendaring every day know one hell of a lot more about the program than the average sysadmin, and therefore they are not particularly pleased when said sysadmin whips away Exchange support, only because he would like to try out some cool OpenSource server software -- that does not have calendaring support.
:) )
One could go further and say Exchange is the *only* reason M$ has so much power in corporate.
*Not* Windows. How much usage do users make of their freakin' OS (Win 2K, etc.) in the workplace? Most of my users have problems when I tell them that they can search through their files using windows explorer. Or that drag-and-drop works in other programs other than Word. Or that double-clicking on URLS in IE is not strictly necessary...
But
We have floundered around for ages in our firm trying to replace Outlook (email+calendar) and it is next to impossible. Sure, you can use tools like TUTOS (http:://www.tutos.org) for tech-savvy programmers who do task-based programming, but try finding anything the average corp. key account manager sees as a viable alternative to Outlook, and you have a very hard job indeed. Try finding this in OpenSource, and you have an impossible task. (The only thing my key account guys like about Mozilla, which I have forced on them, is that their spam gets blocked
That's why the savviest guys now offer Exchange replacements rather than Outlook replacements. Those will come, but it's early days yet.
Thanx for listening,
Nalfy
um, the latest flash (well, it's only been out for over a year) can embed video, and from external sources.
so, um, i see no real benefit to this tool.
nalfy
Best advice here.
.
Whether you can take 1K or 64K of notes is not going to make much difference when your ability to *understand* those same notes is not developed.
Although I could be accused of generalising across subject boundaries, I would honestly ask, is it really important what *quantity* of notes one can take? If the lecture is that detailed, then why is there no hand-out to aid students in their comprehension of the lecture?
And for those who want a *really* good example of note-taking (pardon the pun) without any recourse to so much as a pencil, check out this
Thanx,
Nalfy
It may come as something of a shock to you all, but the USA is officially metric.
:)
Here are two key phrases for those who can't be bothered to click on the links:
"In 1893, Congress adopted the metric standards, the official meter and kilogram bars supplied by BIPM, as the standards for all measurement in the U.S. This didn't mean that metric units had to be used, but since that time the customary units have been defined officially in terms of metric standards. Currently, the foot is legally defined to be exactly 0.3048 meter and the pound is legally defined to equal exactly 453.59237 grams."
and
"What the U.S. has failed to do is to restrict or prohibit the use of traditional units in areas touching the ordinary citizen: construction, real estate transactions, retail trade, and education."
Well duh! Officially metric, but the traditional units are used in education. Small wonder things aren't changing.
Nalfy
Please mod parent up, it's worth it for the comment "given sufficiently convenient tools, we will avoid paying for content that you produce."
THAT should be on the next ThinkGeek T-Shirt: in ASCII spelled out in binary, or whatever.
How about it in Latin?
Furunculum adducit commodum.
Thanx,
Nalfy.
P.S. And yes, the Latin is my own. Caveat lector!
A great point, and one also made by Bruce Schneier (author of *Practical Cryptography* of course). His point that 'security isn't a technical problem, it's a people problem' is one to consider before one charges off down the road to becoming a networking god.
All the networking experience in the world is not going to be of much use if the security *policy* in your company/org. is not well thought-out and implemented, and THAT is another ball game entirely.
Hence the importance of experience: knowing how people work in an environment that is supposed to be secure is just as important as -- no, scratch that, *more* important than -- securing it in the first place.
Passwords + Post-It notes, for example!
Cheers,
Nalfy.
Right with you there, man. Never seen (and 'seen' here does mean I watched more than a couple of episodes for those who jump on me for judging it after 5 minutes' worth) a crapper show to be honest.
Script is laughable, acting is so wooden I'm surprised that Ms. Gellar & Co. don't sprout leaves (and if you want to see more examples of her so-called talent then I highly recommend the even worse remake of Les Liaisons Dangereuses she 'starred' in), and they borrow the oh-so (oh and here I'm gonna get really flamed) innovative idea from Babylon 5 of making any kind of monster (or alien) simply have a funny-coloured head to indicate its non-human status.
Long Live the B-Movie, say I.
Nalfy
Two things that come to mind (depends on the site and what they currently support technically browser- and serverside):
-- use front-end technologies that prohibit or at least inhibit the workings of server-side scraperbots. examples: flash, javascript.
-- use sessions to control how often a given client can access prices, e.g. 'a 10 and you're out' rule: most 'ordinary' users have no need to view a certain page of prices more than X times in a browser session. here, cookies provide even more protection since some scrapers won't be set up to handle them.
both systems may have their drawbacks (no flash allowed), weaknesses (against sessions i can simply make multiple logins), but i've incorporated similar systems on sites for clients with prices that need a sensible level of protection (i.e. one shouldn't be able to grab the whole damn price list with a one-page GET e.g.). guarding against SQL injection is also something which is often forgotten.
Cheers,
Nalfy
"Why is using a scraper robot so different from, say, walking into Best Buy with a handheld and recording product pricing manually?"
Well duh-to-the-nth! It might be a *teensy* bit faster using a robot as compared to, uh, manual input. Hence the word, uh, 'robot'.
<heavy sarcasm>
In other news: "Consumer surprise as Consultant proves buying on the web *can* be faster than going out of your house, taking money from the bank, catching the bus, entering a store, choosing a product, walking to the counter and paying for it, waiting for the bus again..."
ok, ok, you get the point.
</heavy sarcasm>
Nalfy.
"The PAO service module of the Soyuz failed to separate after retrofire. While this had occurred on various Vostok and Voskhod flights, and on one Mercury flight..."
Whoa there -- the Soviets flew to Mercury??!?!!
I knew they had a lot of space experience but that's outtasite.
Nalfy
oh i don't know -- as long as your country doesn't have any obvious terorrist connections or vast natural resources.
bush seems to be doing exactly that kind of 'beta-testing' of late. and with success: i guess "new world order version 2.0" is about ready for public release...
nalfy
oh right, so that's been proven, then?
like, the links to al quaieida (however one spells it), the weapons of MD and so forth?
good job, then.
nalfy
"The constitution has set up the finest form of government the world has ever seen"
um, no. that would be a country like canada or sweden, if you *really* mean 'by the people for the people'.
nalfy
interesting timing: so bush's private war against saddam (for any one of a mutating number of reasons) is also "the last chance of a democracy to effect change upon a corrupt government" by trying to "physically remove them"?
nalfy
nope, it was a very good post.
your point about the civil war is rarely mentioned, and is a watertight case against gun ownership as any kind of 'right'.
nalfy.
Because they haven't read Schneier, and they aren't aware that, quote: 'security is a people problem, not a technology problem.'
Nalfy
Dude, great point. I had nearly forgotten that crap ever existed. It was, however, a great example of co-ordination of print and digital media. One mistake in the liner notes = no game to play.
:)
Quite a world apart from my copy of Caesar III, which was obviously typeset by some disgruntled summer-holidays wage-slave who managed to slip the immortal phrase 'what is this shit?' into a description of the buildings in the back of the manual.
Yes, really, I am not making this up.
Nalfy
Just a few extra observations to your excellent post (your comment "There are, of course, a host of other MUA's for Windows. I've tried most of them. Most stink" is DEAD-on), from the perspective of the IT Head of a small online studio (= me, team = 30 people)
.. fun (conversion path Eudora -> Outlook Express -> Mozilla works, here using OE only as a conversion tool, funnily enough). We have used here however, since it doesn't attract viruses and has the network, LDAP and signature support mentioned above.
Eudora, although relatively customise-friendly (good support for LDAP, signatures, can be installed on networked drives, etc.) is not fantastically stable, and whilst *allegedly* conforming to MBOX standards, actually saves its HTML messages in a format which, e.g. Mozilla cannot interpret. So switching from Eudora to Mozilla is
Mulberry does not support signatures which can be read from an external file. For someone like myself, who would like to globally set a signature for everyone in the company, this is an instant no-no for Mulberry. Even though Mulberry is very good with IMAP.
The! Bat! has dodgy IMAP support. Maybe better since I last looked.
Plus: all clients cost money, and/or are not available in German, which is the language used in my company. For me, this is an important point: I know Slashdot is no commercial forum, but consider shelling-out 30 x $1200 for The Bat or $900 for Mulberry. With that money I can buy a decent server anti-virus for our Mail Server (RAV for example) and standardise on Outlook Express. OK, one stills takes risks with OE, but it puts it in perspective. And -- one should not forget that some people do NOT speak English as a native language, and being unable to purchase Mulberry with German interface is ALSO, for me, a reason why I wouldn't buy it.
Mozilla, in comparison, costs nothing, supports IMAP OK, is available in German, and what's more, has a fantastic anti-spam tool, which, in daily usage over the last few weeks, traps 95% of all spam I receive.
Which all boils down to: if Minotaur is based on Mozilla and is fast and feature-rich, I'll be the first in line to test it out.
.. when The Bat actually supports IMAP *and* saves mailboxes in standard format. ;)
Nalfy.
Not all ... seems the convention ran out of Titans (there are only 12). Random link from Google:
"By astronomical convention, Saturn's moons bear the names of Titans and other figures taken from ancient Greek mythology.".
LOL: there being a fair few (6000+) figures in Greek mythology. Even Jupiter won't be able to exhaust them all!
Nalfy.