The wording of the DMCA is very sneaky here. They only have to make sure they represent the owner of the work that they claim the target work is infringing upon. So of I make a video of a flower, then my lawyer can send take down requests to any video, even if that video has no flowers in it, as long as my lawyer only claims that he is representing me and thinks the target video infringes my video. Only if another lawyer, that is not my lawyer, claims he is representing me and thinks that the target video is infringing my video, then the perjury bit comes into action.
Of course IANAL and I might have misunderstood the law because I don't speak legalese.
1) The ribbon layout decreases search time. Finding a function in the old menu takes time O(m*n*p) where m is the number of menus, n is the number of items in the menus, and p is the number of flyouts. Finding a function in the ribbon takes time O(m*n) where m is the number of tabs and n is the number of items in the tabs.
If the total number of items is the same, then the search time would be the same. But lots of options are not IN the ribbon, and for those the search time is a lot higher.
3)The ribbon uses icons and words to represent functions, which makes them not only easier to remember but easier to scan quickly. In a menu system you have to read each of the words, one after another to find the one you want.
Menus also have icons. Thus the menu has both the icon AND the word. In the ribbon I have put my mouse over each icon, wait for the tooltip to pop up and then quickly read the text, hoping it doesn't disappear before I've read it. That takes a LOT more time than scanning menus with text+icons.
Logical grouping is not specific to menus or the ribbon and thus irrelevant.
Context specific ribbons are horrible because they make the structure change meaning I keep having to search. On top of that, I can not discover what is not there. With a greyed-out item I can at least find the item, and it being greyed-out is a good indication my context is wrong.
You completely miss the single most important aspect of a voting system that makes it fundamentally different from a banking system: It must be impossible for anyone to see or prove what vote a voter has cast.
If that single requirement is not met, then the whole system, regardless of how secure it is in all other aspects, is useless.
A banking system does not have that requirement, since your bank is allowed to know who you transferred money to and from whom you got money.
You're still stuck in the "winner takes all" mentality. When the winner has only 22% that means he has to negotiate with other parties to form a coalition that has 51%. That means the winner can still not impose anything but has to negotiate with his coalition partners. This will lead to at least 51% of the population being represented.
Once those negotiations are done the coalition can rule, as long as they don't do stupid stuff that makes the coalition fall apart. There is no problem of a "cacophony of voices" since the coalition speaks with one voice.
The most important thing is that parties will actually have to listen to the people, since new parties can spring up very easily, and thus their 22% can evaporate in no time. New parties are not without a chance, since the winner is not big enough to rule and needs to form a coalition.
This combined makes a system with proper proportional representation much, much more democratic than what the USA has now. And that also makes that the USA will never change system, since it is not in the interest of the ruling two parties. The two ruling parties don't want democracy, they want power.
I have my tasks distributed over different virtual desktops. One desktop per task. When I click a program icon it always means: Open a new window for that program on the current desktop. I never want it to switch to the window that is on another desktop, because that window belongs to a different task, and I'm not working on that task. If I where working on that task I would be on the desktop of that task.
Programs that do not want multiple instances of itself started already have that covered in their start scripts, they already open a new window in the existing instance instead. (firefox, chrome, netbeans, etc)
I think many desktop environment designers have lost track of what a task is. Multi tasking does not refer to a computer doing multiple things, but to a human doing multiple things. This means it is very important to group windows belonging to the same task, not windows belonging to the same program.
Each task uses multiple windows. One program can have windows in more than one task, but windows are generally not shared between tasks. Many of my tasks involve a terminal window and a browser window, but each task gets its own browser window(s) and its own terminal window on its own desktop.
That means that it is easy to switch between windows in the same task with alt-tab, because there are only a few windows on the desktop for that task. It also means it is easy to switch between tasks, since that is just a switch to a different desktop.
In a situation with multiple monitors, each monitor gets its own panel and window-list. That makes it easy to switch to "the browser window on the right monitor".
Both gnome and XFCE support multiple panels, and you can set a panel to be on a specific display. Right now I'm using XFCE so I can describe how to do that there (my laptop has only one screen right now, so I can't describe the exact details):
1. Right-click an existing panel and choose: Panel / Panel Preferences 2. Click the + at the top of the dialog, that adds a panel. The new panel is selected in the dropdown so you are editing the new panel. 3. In this dialog you can also select the monitor the panel should appear on, or set the panel to span two monitors. Make it apear on the second monitor. Maybe you can also just drag the panel there. 4. To this panel, add a "window buttons" item. 5. Go to the properties of the "window buttons" item and de-select the toggle "Show windows from all monitors" and de-select "show windows from all workspaces"
Voilla, a taskbar on your second monitor, showing only the stuff of that monitor and virtual desktop.
In gnome 2 it goes similar, I think you can just drag a new panel to the second monitor.
Exactly! I don't switch to a window, I switch to a different task. That task has a whole set of windows. By using multiple desktops the windows of the current task are all nicely listed in alt-tab, and on the taskbar. No window hunting at all.
Even worse is if there is only 1 taskbar even if you have two windows. I know I want the browser window of the current task that is on the right monitor. And I know it is the only browser window on the right monitor that belongs to the current task, but I still have to search it between all browser windows, because there is nothing that only lists the windows of the right monitor:(
Re:Netbooks still have their uses...
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Dell Ditches Netbooks
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That's a bad interface because it forces you to wait. When I'm typing a text I do not want to wait for some slow popup menu to come up, I just want to type the required key combo with my normal fast typing speed.
That interface would be nice if they also listed the key combo you can use, so you can learn it so next time you can type your character without waiting.
My biggest problem with many of the new desktop environments is that they use the wrong definition of multitasking, or to be more precise, the wrong definition of "task".
It seems the DEs see any use of multiple windows as multitasking.
For me, a task can use multiple windows of different programs. Different tasks can use different windows of the same program. For example:
When I'm programming I need to be able to quickly switch between the windows belonging to the programming task. That switching should require as little cognitive load as possible, so I do not lose momentum in what I'm doing. Programming mosty only uses 1 browser window, so when I'm programming and my mind goes "get browser" it should be easy to get to that one window associated with that task.
Gnome 2 did this perfectly. I could put all windows of a task on the same virtual desktop and the taskbar would only show those windows, Alt-Tab would priorise those windows and show nice big clear icons. As a result I could switch windows within the task with little tought. Switching between tasks was just a matter of switching to a different desktop.
When I want to switch to a different window within a task I do not want to see a list of all windows of all tasks. Identifying the correct window in that list is a heavy cognitive task since for instance all terminal windows look the same. Grouping windows of the same program is equally bad for the same reason.
Alt-Tab should show icons, not windows. When my mind goes "get browser" it can easily pick the colorfull chrome icon out of the list, but since windows tend to look all the same, picking the right one out of an alt-tab list of window shots is hard work for the mind.
Windows 7 is also horrible in this respect. It not only has no multiple desktops, it even groups windows of the same program (instead of the same task) and has only one taskbar for multiple monitors, meaning you can't even switch to "that browser window on the right monitor" because all browser windows are in the same list and that list is on the other monitor.
Proper multitasking support might not be beginner friendly, but no-one is a beginner for long.
You're looking at the wrong scale of tings. Yes, one tree will grow until it dies and take up more carbon the older it gets. But that one tree will also need more space the bigger it gets, so to let that one tree grow that big, the trees surrounding it will either have to die, or be chopped down.
When you look at it on a forest scale, you'll see that a mature forest is not a carbon sink anymore. It's a natural cycle. It releases about as much as it takes up.
To make a forest a carbon sink, you have to constantly cut down trees and remove those from the forest. That gives the remaining trees the room to grow and capture more carbon. The question then is, what do you do with the wood that you removed from the forest. Any destination that is not a kilometer underground in an old oil field will mean that the carbon in that wood will eventually be released back into the atmosphere. If the wood is used for burning in a power plant it's released directly. If it's used in a building it might take 50 years (unless the building replaces an existing one, then it's effectively direct again). Eventually the carbon will go back into the air.
"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours" Stephen Roberts
Birds may be reasonably effective in spreading viruses and bacteria from animals to animals, but I don't think they would spread bacteria from farm animals to crops in amount sufficient to infect large numbers of humans that eat the crops. Especially since the bacteria don't really grow all that well on crops.
Salmonella grows great in birds, so one cell is potentially enough to infect a whole stable of chickens. But E. Coli is a bacteria that mainly lives in intestines. Since cucumbers don't have intestines, E. Coli merely "survives" on them.
As far as I know none of the sequestering projects actually put carbon back into the ground, except for the CO2 storage in gas fields. The oil came from the ground, and the only way to fix the problem is to put the C back into the ground. Planting trees is not a long term solution, since we all know what will happen to the tree once it's fully grown.
I'm not from the UK nor the USA, but I do prefer English spelling over American;)
As far as I know there is no such law here, but I'm not an expert.
The point was not tyre pressure of course, but that even if mechanical failure happens, it might still be caused by human error. And that a computer is more likely to respond correctly than a human.
And even a pressure monitoring system can malfunction... After the incident a friend of mine told me his car had a pressure monitoring system. I looked at his car and though that tyre was a bit soft, so I checked it with my hand gauge... And indeed it was quite a bit below what it should be.
I've had a back tyre run on of the flange in a sharp turn. The valve was leaking and the low pressure in the tyre combined with the sideways forces due to the sharp turn caused the tyre to run off. This caused me to lose control over the vehicle and swerve over the other lane. I didn't hit anything fortunately, and due to the relatively low speeds involved it probably would not have resulted in a fatal accident if I had hit oncoming traffic.
It was definitely caused by mechanical failure. but at the same time I probably should have spotted the low pressure in the tyre (though I don't know how fast the valve was leaking). At the same time, a computer might have been better at controlling the vehicle than me.
All in all I would love to be able to drive to the nearest highway and give control over from that point on.
I was about to ask... What happens when your behavioural patterns are stolen? Do you suddenly start to behave differently because you no longer have them?
The real total cost for putting out a fire is the total yearly cost for running the entire fire department divided by the average number of fires per year. I think that that comes out a lot higher than 7500 dollars. Of course I don't do accounting for a fire department, so I'm not sure.
Where your misconception, and that of the original poster lies, is in believing that you can somehow present the pattern directly. You can't. You need to present the room.
But you don't need to represent an exact copy of the room, or the eye in this case. You only need to present a copy that results in the same signature. Eye scanning is not anything like putting a bunch of sensors in a room. It's more like putting a bunch of sensors on the other side of town, while the room is racing around on the back of a truck, with a drunken driver. And the room is made of organic matter and constantly changing. And the room only has a tiny window through witch you need to do your measurements.
I think the point is that your eye is being scanned by lots of different parties, with equipment that you don't have control over. You can't be sure they're only "md5 hashing" the resulting data, for all you know they might store it so they can "duplicate" your eye... Just like what happens with bank cards.
You shouldn't be using webmail for anything that requires security in the first place. So if you insist on using Gmail for that, use imap. That makes using encryption a lot easier, no need to develop anything new, just use the current tools.
Ehm, no, you use encryption because email servers are not under your control. Google reads your email, and apparently so do the Chinese. Encryption makes that email just a blob of binary.
Spam being send from your account is unfortunate, but not really your problem. You did tell all your important contacts to only open emails with a proper PGP signature, so said spam will just be junked.
And since all your important email is encrypted, your passwords are safe. Well, since the Chinese got access to your account your passwords are probably already out there, but them accessing your account won't make that problem worse...
Slashdot Mirror
The wording of the DMCA is very sneaky here. They only have to make sure they represent the owner of the work that they claim the target work is infringing upon.
So of I make a video of a flower, then my lawyer can send take down requests to any video, even if that video has no flowers in it, as long as my lawyer only claims that he is representing me and thinks the target video infringes my video.
Only if another lawyer, that is not my lawyer, claims he is representing me and thinks that the target video is infringing my video, then the perjury bit comes into action.
Of course IANAL and I might have misunderstood the law because I don't speak legalese.
If the total number of items is the same, then the search time would be the same. But lots of options are not IN the ribbon, and for those the search time is a lot higher.
Menus also have icons. Thus the menu has both the icon AND the word. In the ribbon I have put my mouse over each icon, wait for the tooltip to pop up and then quickly read the text, hoping it doesn't disappear before I've read it. That takes a LOT more time than scanning menus with text+icons.
Logical grouping is not specific to menus or the ribbon and thus irrelevant.
Context specific ribbons are horrible because they make the structure change meaning I keep having to search. On top of that, I can not discover what is not there. With a greyed-out item I can at least find the item, and it being greyed-out is a good indication my context is wrong.
9. The mimeograph mix:
Wow, the things that count as music nowadays...
Give me your voting password or you're fired.
Your proposed system fails to deal with the problem.
You completely miss the single most important aspect of a voting system that makes it fundamentally different from a banking system:
It must be impossible for anyone to see or prove what vote a voter has cast.
If that single requirement is not met, then the whole system, regardless of how secure it is in all other aspects, is useless.
A banking system does not have that requirement, since your bank is allowed to know who you transferred money to and from whom you got money.
You're still stuck in the "winner takes all" mentality. When the winner has only 22% that means he has to negotiate with other parties to form a coalition that has 51%. That means the winner can still not impose anything but has to negotiate with his coalition partners. This will lead to at least 51% of the population being represented.
Once those negotiations are done the coalition can rule, as long as they don't do stupid stuff that makes the coalition fall apart. There is no problem of a "cacophony of voices" since the coalition speaks with one voice.
The most important thing is that parties will actually have to listen to the people, since new parties can spring up very easily, and thus their 22% can evaporate in no time. New parties are not without a chance, since the winner is not big enough to rule and needs to form a coalition.
This combined makes a system with proper proportional representation much, much more democratic than what the USA has now. And that also makes that the USA will never change system, since it is not in the interest of the ruling two parties. The two ruling parties don't want democracy, they want power.
I have my tasks distributed over different virtual desktops. One desktop per task. When I click a program icon it always means: Open a new window for that program on the current desktop. I never want it to switch to the window that is on another desktop, because that window belongs to a different task, and I'm not working on that task. If I where working on that task I would be on the desktop of that task.
Programs that do not want multiple instances of itself started already have that covered in their start scripts, they already open a new window in the existing instance instead. (firefox, chrome, netbeans, etc)
So I switched to xfce.
Exactly, each task gets its own virtual desktop.
I think many desktop environment designers have lost track of what a task is. Multi tasking does not refer to a computer doing multiple things, but to a human doing multiple things. This means it is very important to group windows belonging to the same task, not windows belonging to the same program.
Each task uses multiple windows. One program can have windows in more than one task, but windows are generally not shared between tasks. Many of my tasks involve a terminal window and a browser window, but each task gets its own browser window(s) and its own terminal window on its own desktop.
That means that it is easy to switch between windows in the same task with alt-tab, because there are only a few windows on the desktop for that task. It also means it is easy to switch between tasks, since that is just a switch to a different desktop.
In a situation with multiple monitors, each monitor gets its own panel and window-list. That makes it easy to switch to "the browser window on the right monitor".
Both gnome and XFCE support multiple panels, and you can set a panel to be on a specific display. Right now I'm using XFCE so I can describe how to do that there (my laptop has only one screen right now, so I can't describe the exact details):
1. Right-click an existing panel and choose: Panel / Panel Preferences
2. Click the + at the top of the dialog, that adds a panel. The new panel is selected in the dropdown so you are editing the new panel.
3. In this dialog you can also select the monitor the panel should appear on, or set the panel to span two monitors. Make it apear on the second monitor. Maybe you can also just drag the panel there.
4. To this panel, add a "window buttons" item.
5. Go to the properties of the "window buttons" item and de-select the toggle "Show windows from all monitors" and de-select "show windows from all workspaces"
Voilla, a taskbar on your second monitor, showing only the stuff of that monitor and virtual desktop.
In gnome 2 it goes similar, I think you can just drag a new panel to the second monitor.
Exactly!
I don't switch to a window, I switch to a different task. That task has a whole set of windows. By using multiple desktops the windows of the current task are all nicely listed in alt-tab, and on the taskbar. No window hunting at all.
Even worse is if there is only 1 taskbar even if you have two windows. I know I want the browser window of the current task that is on the right monitor. And I know it is the only browser window on the right monitor that belongs to the current task, but I still have to search it between all browser windows, because there is nothing that only lists the windows of the right monitor :(
That's a bad interface because it forces you to wait. When I'm typing a text I do not want to wait for some slow popup menu to come up, I just want to type the required key combo with my normal fast typing speed.
That interface would be nice if they also listed the key combo you can use, so you can learn it so next time you can type your character without waiting.
My biggest problem with many of the new desktop environments is that they use the wrong definition of multitasking, or to be more precise, the wrong definition of "task".
It seems the DEs see any use of multiple windows as multitasking.
For me, a task can use multiple windows of different programs. Different tasks can use different windows of the same program. For example:
Task: Programming.
Windows:
* Netbeans
* Browser (for documentation)
* Terminal
* File manager
Task: Photo managing
Windows:
* Browser
* File manager
* Gimp
* Terminal
When I'm programming I need to be able to quickly switch between the windows belonging to the programming task. That switching should require as little cognitive load as possible, so I do not lose momentum in what I'm doing. Programming mosty only uses 1 browser window, so when I'm programming and my mind goes "get browser" it should be easy to get to that one window associated with that task.
Gnome 2 did this perfectly. I could put all windows of a task on the same virtual desktop and the taskbar would only show those windows, Alt-Tab would priorise those windows and show nice big clear icons. As a result I could switch windows within the task with little tought. Switching between tasks was just a matter of switching to a different desktop.
When I want to switch to a different window within a task I do not want to see a list of all windows of all tasks. Identifying the correct window in that list is a heavy cognitive task since for instance all terminal windows look the same. Grouping windows of the same program is equally bad for the same reason.
Alt-Tab should show icons, not windows. When my mind goes "get browser" it can easily pick the colorfull chrome icon out of the list, but since windows tend to look all the same, picking the right one out of an alt-tab list of window shots is hard work for the mind.
Windows 7 is also horrible in this respect. It not only has no multiple desktops, it even groups windows of the same program (instead of the same task) and has only one taskbar for multiple monitors, meaning you can't even switch to "that browser window on the right monitor" because all browser windows are in the same list and that list is on the other monitor.
Proper multitasking support might not be beginner friendly, but no-one is a beginner for long.
You're looking at the wrong scale of tings. Yes, one tree will grow until it dies and take up more carbon the older it gets. But that one tree will also need more space the bigger it gets, so to let that one tree grow that big, the trees surrounding it will either have to die, or be chopped down.
When you look at it on a forest scale, you'll see that a mature forest is not a carbon sink anymore. It's a natural cycle. It releases about as much as it takes up.
To make a forest a carbon sink, you have to constantly cut down trees and remove those from the forest. That gives the remaining trees the room to grow and capture more carbon. The question then is, what do you do with the wood that you removed from the forest. Any destination that is not a kilometer underground in an old oil field will mean that the carbon in that wood will eventually be released back into the atmosphere. If the wood is used for burning in a power plant it's released directly. If it's used in a building it might take 50 years (unless the building replaces an existing one, then it's effectively direct again).
Eventually the carbon will go back into the air.
It's a modification of the quote:
"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours"
Stephen Roberts
Birds may be reasonably effective in spreading viruses and bacteria from animals to animals, but I don't think they would spread bacteria from farm animals to crops in amount sufficient to infect large numbers of humans that eat the crops. Especially since the bacteria don't really grow all that well on crops.
Salmonella grows great in birds, so one cell is potentially enough to infect a whole stable of chickens. But E. Coli is a bacteria that mainly lives in intestines. Since cucumbers don't have intestines, E. Coli merely "survives" on them.
As far as I know none of the sequestering projects actually put carbon back into the ground, except for the CO2 storage in gas fields. The oil came from the ground, and the only way to fix the problem is to put the C back into the ground. Planting trees is not a long term solution, since we all know what will happen to the tree once it's fully grown.
I'm not from the UK nor the USA, but I do prefer English spelling over American ;)
As far as I know there is no such law here, but I'm not an expert.
The point was not tyre pressure of course, but that even if mechanical failure happens, it might still be caused by human error. And that a computer is more likely to respond correctly than a human.
And even a pressure monitoring system can malfunction... After the incident a friend of mine told me his car had a pressure monitoring system. I looked at his car and though that tyre was a bit soft, so I checked it with my hand gauge... And indeed it was quite a bit below what it should be.
I've had a back tyre run on of the flange in a sharp turn. The valve was leaking and the low pressure in the tyre combined with the sideways forces due to the sharp turn caused the tyre to run off. This caused me to lose control over the vehicle and swerve over the other lane. I didn't hit anything fortunately, and due to the relatively low speeds involved it probably would not have resulted in a fatal accident if I had hit oncoming traffic.
It was definitely caused by mechanical failure. but at the same time I probably should have spotted the low pressure in the tyre (though I don't know how fast the valve was leaking).
At the same time, a computer might have been better at controlling the vehicle than me.
All in all I would love to be able to drive to the nearest highway and give control over from that point on.
I was about to ask...
What happens when your behavioural patterns are stolen? Do you suddenly start to behave differently because you no longer have them?
The real total cost for putting out a fire is the total yearly cost for running the entire fire department divided by the average number of fires per year.
I think that that comes out a lot higher than 7500 dollars. Of course I don't do accounting for a fire department, so I'm not sure.
But you don't need to represent an exact copy of the room, or the eye in this case. You only need to present a copy that results in the same signature. Eye scanning is not anything like putting a bunch of sensors in a room. It's more like putting a bunch of sensors on the other side of town, while the room is racing around on the back of a truck, with a drunken driver. And the room is made of organic matter and constantly changing. And the room only has a tiny window through witch you need to do your measurements.
I think the point is that your eye is being scanned by lots of different parties, with equipment that you don't have control over. You can't be sure they're only "md5 hashing" the resulting data, for all you know they might store it so they can "duplicate" your eye... Just like what happens with bank cards.
You shouldn't be using webmail for anything that requires security in the first place. So if you insist on using Gmail for that, use imap. That makes using encryption a lot easier, no need to develop anything new, just use the current tools.
Ehm, no, you use encryption because email servers are not under your control. Google reads your email, and apparently so do the Chinese. Encryption makes that email just a blob of binary.
Spam being send from your account is unfortunate, but not really your problem. You did tell all your important contacts to only open emails with a proper PGP signature, so said spam will just be junked.
And since all your important email is encrypted, your passwords are safe. Well, since the Chinese got access to your account your passwords are probably already out there, but them accessing your account won't make that problem worse...
If someone creates these I'd be happy to seed the torrents :)